WIIGF? An exhibition in the Bronx

I hope someone can visit and tell me about the Bronx Documentary Center. The show opens tomorrow evening and runs through April 19.

Link here for the full press release. Includes screenings of several films including bio-pic of the late Tim Hetherington on April 20.

photo: ©The Diaries of Lt. Timothy McLaughlin USMC

From the Collection: A photograph by Elaine Mayes

Elaine Mayes (b. 1936)
Pegasus, 1972
Gelatin silver print
7-7/8 x 11-7/8 inches

This is the earliest work in the show, in more ways than one.

When I saw this photograph in the collection of Minnesota Museum of American Art, I knew that despite its gaseous aspect it meant something solid. It signified that my intuition about the collection, my inkling that I would be finding work of merit, was correct. It became the first photograph in Framing the Field, before I had the title, before I even knew what the show was going to be about. It was the buoy, the photograph that enabled the rest of the work now hanging in the C. G. Murphy Gallery to rise to the surface and become visible as I scanned the ranks and files of images in the museum's collection over the last year in preparation for the show.

Organizing a show like this is like three-dimensional chess (remember Star Trek?) plus a fourth dimension, which is knowledge of axes x, y, and z over time.

In this photograph I see hard facts become myths, and myths dissolving. I see a backlit corporate emblem, not quite so recognizable anymore, become a full moon and a backdrop for a misty, mystical winged horse, the spirit of American mobility leaping out of a driver-less convertible. I re-experience cool nights at way stations between somewhere and somewhere else, and the casual, transient comfort of the well-lit counter inside. A chill comes over me again as I imagine the gasoline crises that would set in within a year or two, signaling the beginning of the end of the freeway free-for-all, the automotive imperialism that so many Americans still cherish as a national birthright.

My knowledge of Elaine Mayes and her work predated my engagement to curate a new photography exhibition from the MMAA's permanent collection. I knew that she had spent time in Minnesota, teaching at the University of Minnesota with Jerry Liebling in the late 1960s. I remembered a couple of gorgeous, open-hearted portraits of Haight-Ashbury residents that she made circa 1967, shortly before coming to Minnesota; Ted Hartwell acquired these for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and published them in his book, The Making of a Collection (Aperture, 1985).

And I knew that this photograph, made on I-87, the New York State Thruway, in the early 1970s, was part of a show I'd seen earlier at MMAA, not long after it was acquired in 1990 as part of a portfolio titled American Roads. It was a fortunate acquisition, as far as Framing the Field is concerned; also included were prints by Joel Sternfeld and Steve Fitch that are in the new show.

That's one thing a curator does--shuffles the deck and lays out a new hand. Faces up. Then rearranges, discovering which pictures are most compelling. Here's one.


On Mayes' blog, you'll find Pegasus in the section "Black and White, 1972 - 2009" link

From the Collection: A photograph by Jerry Mathiason

Jerry Mathiason (b. 1947)

Hay Bale/Cedars, 1984

Gelatin silver print

14 x 14 inches

My most recent curatorial project, Framing the Field: Photographic Terrain in the Collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, is on display from February 4 to March 28 at the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. The show includes 39 works by 36 artists. All the photographs were made within the last 40 years, since the time I started junior high school in the Twin Cities.

The show is not about landscape as a visual genre, nor does it consist entirely of photographs of land and nature. Rather, the framing devices of "field" and "terrain" focus attention on the entirety of a collection and the ways in which it maps the contemporary evolution of photographic art.

There are many pieces in this show that I have admired over time. Some of which I owned for a while, then donated to the museum (MMAA for short) in recognition of a former director who was a friend and a great supporter of photography.

This image, by Minneapolis-based photographer Jerry Mathiason, was given to MMAA by Mathiason in 1989. It is full of genius loci, or spirit of place. I don't know exactly where this place is. And I don't really care. The photograph itself, its tones, shapes, textures, the synthesis of its component parts, is the place. A range of grays implying a world. The universe in a grain of sand--or a blade of grass.

I can linger in this place, I can enter it or view it whole. I can reach in and feel the amassed, aging hay. I can hear the grasses, swishing from wind and my boots, yet to be transformed into hay. I can almost smell the cool cedars, see the fibrous bark that, shaved and scraped into cottony wads, makes for excellent fire starter. I can fear the fire that might take this whole scene into another, darker spectrum.

As I stare my vision goes soft and the slouching bale becomes another structure, of Indian derivation, using cedar bark and branches to fashion a structure bulging roundly from mother earth. Whether wigwam, waginogan, or wickiup, I squint my eyes a bit and see it there on the prairie, the dark line of cedars a trail of smoke from the cooking fire inside, an interior further suggested by the dark hole admitting entrance.

The grand scale of this space is evident from both the depth of the focused field and the gradations of light across the dried grasses. The ground makes a screen large enough to capture the variable glow projecting from the sky above.

When my vision sharpens again I revel in the infinite variability of lines drawn on film by both the hewn and uncut foliage. Deepening my focus I consider the energy invested in baling this hay, the attempt to bind and thereby retain the nutrition latent in the grasses. And then, the release, letting that bale soften, lose its focus, return to the soil. A puzzle in that, the invested energy going to waste. Maybe another story about why. And the eternal story of cycles, of will and neglect.

In the show, nearly every photograph has three subjects. First, what it shows--its content. Attached to that are formal issues, which extend to its place within the entirety of the exhibition. And finally, each photograph relates another topic, somewhat theoretical, philosophical, or symbolic in nature; that would be its implications. What does the photograph tell us about what we can't see, what can't be shown? This, to me, is photography's most wondrous terrain.

Link to Jerry Mathiason's site
Link to exhibition on Catherine G. Murphy Gallery/St. Catherine University web site
Link to Minnesota Museum of American Art

GREENER | Carolyn Monastra, The Witness Tree

I'm not sure how I first found Carolyn Monastra's blog, or when. She writes that she started the blog in September 2011 as a component of a new photographic project, The Witness Tree, dedicated to images of landscapes affected by climate change.

One of Monastra's images of felled trees along a beach in Tonga.

Although she maintains a fairly conventional web site, she made a smart decision by chosing the blog format, which allows her to include conversational narratives about her search for these impacted landscapes. (If one wanted to create an itinerary for a global adventure or two, the blog offers a number of tempting suggestions, including local cuisine.) The flora, fauna, and humans of a particular biome, after all, suggest the effects of change, and the stories they tell often lend themselves to words. It is landscape, however, that offers visual evidence, and the way things blend with each other and within the photographic frame create perspective, push us into appreciating, maybe even having, points of view.

Coconut trees being killed by rising sea levels. By Carolyn Monastra

Monastra's photographs are not harangues, nor artificially strident. They are eloquent, honest, and often disturbing testimony to the damages being wrought on ecosystems around the world.

From Monastra's photographs during a trip along Rio Negro and the Amazon rainforest.

She received a MFA from Yale, coming to it after being in social work for a number of years. Not the typical background for a photo-world insider. The combination does, however, make for an interesting blog that is also worth looking at, and has resulted in appealing photographs worth reading about for their implicit meanings as well as their surface pleasures and technical accomplishment.

(I should note, too, that I am strongly affected by trees, and Carolyn's use of trees as symbols of climate change has great resonance for me. I wonder if she's ever seen Jeff Krueger's study of trees that have witnessed historic events? Or Janelle Lynch's "portraits" of tree stumps in her Akna project (in her book Los Jardines de Mexico (Radius, 2011) and soon on display at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL)?)

Carolyn Monastra's blog, The Witness Tree
Monastra's web site

Good Reads - 2012

Out of the box. Chelbin, Casaca, Gaudiani, Briechle, Aftermath, Moukhin, Johansson, Ventura, Steacy, Asnin

In my role as a book reviewer and self-directed photography observer I increasingly gravitate toward publications that don't just please, amuse, or reinforce my preconceptions of what constitutes a good photography book. I don't feel qualified to make up a top ten list; to do so would be to suggest that I've glimpsed a large-enough percentage of the year's releases to judge which are the most accomplished or outstanding compared to the rest of the year's field. I'm not sure how anyone even finds the time to open enough packages to do that these days; how many new titles has the image-publishing world brought to our attention this year? I feel like I saw scarcely enough 2012 releases to retain "browser" status, let alone serve as a year-in-review, photo-bibliophile arbiter.

I think Alec Soth probably has a decent handle on the market, given all the books people send him. I found confirmation, befuddlement (so much I'd not heard of, let alone read), and even inspiration (Juergen Teller, what a hoot!) from his recently released list. I have cavils and quibbles with some of the titles on his list that I have looked through; in the case of Anthony Hernandez' Rodeo Drive, 1984 my feeling was one of disappointment that it wasn't better. I'd carried a fascination with that work since first seeing it in Aperture, circa 1985, and wanted to have a better re-encounter with it.

I'm enthusiastically with Alec in his admiration for Ron Jude's Lick Creek Line and J Carrier's Elementary Calculus; they accrue meaning and implication with every reading. And I do mean reading, or whatever one calls the closest attention one can give to photography's non-linear narratives--glancing through these books (especially from back to front) scarcely scratches their accomplishment.

What I want to do in re:photographica, year-round, is draw attention to books (images, themes, exhibitions, photo-phenomena, etc.) that move me. New slants on the medium that have shown me something either in or within photographs I wasn't sure I needed, or would ever be likely, to see. Images and texts that get under my skin, that won't leave me alone, that claim or alter an enduring chunk of my visual memory. Like Hernandez' views of over-processed, narcissists in the Rodeo Drive consumer ecosystem, with the benefit of hindsight and perspective. And always minding the caveat that great photographs don't necessarily make great books.

Photographs Not Taken  Edited by Will Steacy (Daylight)
Photocritic International A. D. Coleman (Web log)
The absence of realized images in the former and the dominance of considered ethics/politics in the latter characterize these good reads. Although most photographers do better writing with light than with words, there must be something about the "ones that got away" or were decided against that prompt eloquence. Coleman, for anyone who doesn't know, is one of photography's great agonistes. For over forty years he has served as a critic, in the truest sense of that word, on behalf of photography's better angels. His observations will always stir feelings in me, whether my head is nodding in agreement or shaking in opposition.

Deutschland Gerry Johansson (MACK)
A brilliant idea, executed with straightforward precision. An alphabetical list of German cities, each represented by name and one image. Illustrations tipped on to front and back covers. No dustjacket. Gorgeous, clean, and conceptually hefty, Deutschland makes me eager to seek out this Swedish photographer's previous books.

Blue Mud Swamp Filipe Casaca (Self-published)
As lush as the Johansson is austere; jacket-less hard cover with dark blue felt and perspective-bending view of tracked mud glued to the front. Comparable in its muteness, Casaca's book beguiles with surreal, faintly apocalyptic impressions of a modern China. The analogy, and an implied question of accuracy, beckons--Germany : Swedish eyes :: China : Portuguese

War is Only Half the Story, Vol. 5 (The Aftermath Project)
I have reviewed two earlier volumes of this sad chronicle of man's eternal inhumanity to man. I can't sufficiently stress its importance, but I will continue to cite it until its reason for being fades. WIIGF? You know the answer. 

Between Destinations Candace Plummer Gaudiani (Kehrer)
Over several years I have seen Gaudiani's work evolve and expand in four series related to views from moving trains. I was never sure, though, how it could possibly become a book. Guadiani found just the right team in San Francisco; Martin Venezky's Appetite Engineers performed the miracle of replicating the flickering transience of these images while still respecting the case they make for the transformation of American landscape. Brava, Candace.
 
The Automaton Paolo Ventura (Dewi Lewis)
I wrote about this for photo-eye online earlier this year. And I still find it moving, both wondrous and unsettling. It lasts.

My Moscow Igor Moukhin (Schilt)
A sprawling and alluring mess of a book, veering from sublime to repulsive, but rife with the energy of an insider both recording and experiencing the uneasy maturation of a formerly repressive society. There is skill here, though it takes a back seat to testimony and exuberance. To edit this more strictly would be to dilute its compulsive thrust.

Uncle Charlie Marc Asnin (Contrasto)
Like Moukhin, Asnin is emotionally enmeshed with his subject. And like Moukhin's book, Asnin's teems with an overabundance of descriptive wealth, from the 30 years of photographs to the edited and insinuatingly typeset conversations between the photographer and his tough-guy uncle. A remarkable hybrid view into the life of a troubled soul.

Gary Briechle Photographs Gary Briechle (Twin Palms)
From out of the blue this sequence of reproductions of poured emulsions opened on my table; I was unprepared for the impressions they made on me. And continue to make. This is one of those great photo-books that allows you to experience individual images as well as appreciate Twin Palms' typically outstanding editorial work that fashions a page-by-page evolution, one image segueing into the next to create an acutely detailed yet ultimately inconclusive narrative. You couldn't tell a story like this without photographs, and you couldn't tell the story these photographs tell with words.

Sailboats and Swans Michal Chelbin (Twin Palms)
Chelbin showed her work at the PRC in Boston shortly after I arrived there. I had heard about the work in prisons that we weren't able to show. I think that work, which shows up in this new volume, probes into dark areas of juvenile dysfunction that we aren't meant to experience in everyday life. Not to sound paranoid, but I find these imprisoned youth extremely unsettling, and have a hard time grasping what it must have been like to make these unusually tender portraits in such harsh circumstances. Chelbin has a singular purpose, and photographing may make her invincible.

I have two good reads to cover in separate posts. But I needed to get this one done first; all that pressure, time running out, etc etc. Stay tuned for Peckerwood revisited and two books by Lewis Koch.

Happy New Year, everyone.


Link to A. D. Coleman's Photocritic International

Links to photography book lists:

• From the International Center of Photography Library 
• photo-eye: The Best Books of 2012
• Alec Soth's list on the Little Brown Mushroom blog
• TIME Magazine

WIIGF? Exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath

On Veterans Day 2012, the MFAH debuts an unprecedented exhibition exploring the experience of war through the eyes of photographers. The exhibition gathers together nearly 500 objects, including photographs, books, magazines, albums, and photographic equipment.

Images recorded by more than 280 photographers, from 28 nations, span 6 continents and more than 165 years, from the Mexican-American War in the mid-1800s to present-day conflicts. Iconic photographs as well as previously unknown images are featured, taken by military photographers, commercial photographers (portrait and photojournalist), amateurs, and artists.

The exhibition examines the relationship between war and photography, exploring the types of photographs created during wartime, as well as by whom and for whom. Rather than being organized chronologically, or as a survey of 'greatest hits,' the images are arranged to show the progression of war: from the acts that instigate armed conflict to 'the fight,' to victory and defeat, and photos that memorialize a war, its combatants, and its victims. Portraits of servicemen, military and political leaders, and civilians are a consistent presence.

Accompanying the show is a 600-page illustrated catalogue featuring interviews and essays by curators, scholars, and military historians. After the Houston premiere, WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY travels to the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and the Brooklyn Museum.

[From the MFAH web site]

The exhibition, assembled by the MFAH photography team--Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, Will Michels, photographer and Glassell School of Art instructor, and Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant for photography--opens November 11 and runs until February 3.

I was alerted to this exhibition by an electronic news release from FotoFest which points out that MFAH has both the major show and two auxiliary shows, and there's a fourth at Houston Center for Photography (Soldier, At Ease, featuring Louie Palu, Erin Trieb, and the late Tim Hetherington; link to HCP web site). 

Plus, the museum is hosting a massive signing event in conjunction with the opening and the exhibition catalogue; some two dozen photographers, curators, and writers will be at MFAH on Saturday 11/10 to sign both the museum tome and their own publications.

Humans have an appetite for war that photography feeds. At best, collecting images in this omnibus fashion should incite protest and heighten our awareness of enduring injustice in the constant default to violence implied by war. What is war photography good for, if not this, if not to serve as a mnemonic compendium of our most abject failing as humans? Don't the most conscientious war photographers wish themselves out of a job? 

A blogger's license

License to blog

I like using the blog for something purposeful. Sometimes I envision this space as a bulletin board, where I tack up postcards or random items of interest whose only connection is my scattered mentality. Sometimes the blog serves as a spotlight or magnifying glass, to highlight a topic or an individual artist.

But what if the blog could function as a curatorial space? I don't have walls on an on-going basis, or a budget to import, frame, hang, and publicize (or publish, in the quasi-gallery of ink on paper), but I can use the virtual display space to draw images together and present them to the public. I know, I know, this is all so old-hat, you correctly remind me that I needn't bother dwelling on metastructural issues like this. Just bear with me as I  rationalize a new venture. New at least for me.

In my posts tagged "WIIGF" I highlight projects and artists providing an answer to the unanswerable question about war, which is...What Is It Good For? As answered by Edwin Starr in 1970, in lyrics by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong: "Absolutely nothin'." But I'm not so sure that absolutely nothing of value emerges in the wake of war. (Side note: I quoted this emphatic song in a recent photo-eye review of The Aftermath Project's fourth volume of War is Only Half the Story, further tribute to the fact that there are meaningful, albeit at times mournful and anguishing, products of conflict.)

I don't know that the work I point to was specifically intended to answer this question, or that the responsible image-makers even imagine a positive end-product to war. For me, the work is that war-generated entity. Because of war, this work exists. We are blessed by its insightful presence, even though we would prefer to live in a world which does not inspire such work. (Just like war photographers, Jim Nachtwey et al., would prefer to have to do different work.)

GREENER is a similar conceit, though more positivist in its program. What I will do under this banner is present work that celebrates a world recovering its more natural, greener, organic self. Over the years I've been increasingly drawn to work that pushes, nudges, subtly advances an agenda; the agenda I favor is one that has all of us thinking about things we do that can help sustain the planet rather than exploit it.

I will start my GREENER program in the next few days. Take a look, and let me know if there are projects I should know about.


p.s. I know that my Prius is still a car, but as a hybrid it's greener--and stingier with gas--than most. Hence the vanity plate.