re: photographica

My nonpopular year in books

2012-01-01T09:43:00.001-06:00

How did photo-eye know how ill-prepared I was to consider the best books of 2011?

Having written for their year-end summary for two years, I thought I might be asked to contribute again. But as the year in books approached its close, I wondered about what I’d seen and been impressed by, new-book-wise, during the last twelve months. As I am most years I was deeply involved with books, including co-curating Threefold, a show of indie photobooks at the PRC, with Shane Lavalette and Larissa Leclair, and writing several essays for photographers' monographs. But apparently I missed a few new titles.

Scanning the published lists (including photo-eye’s 26, which cite 157 books, and the astounding, labor-of-love compendium from Marc Feustel of eyecurious noting books that appeared on at least two of 52 lists he surveyed--he had to find some way to winnow down the 313 different titles that were highlighted), I realize that my friends in Santa Fe understood something, perhaps unconsciously, about my bandwidth as a reader/reviewer. It is, I am surprised to realize and admit, quite narrow.

Where have I been this year? Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland; I’ve been around the photo circles, but still I saw only a small percentage of the books “everyone” is talking about (52 “best of” photobook lists? That’s a large bandwagon.). I have scarcely enough in-person experience of the “bests,” let alone the entire 2011 crop, to pass judgment. I have 22 of the listed items; some I bought, others I was given (thanks Alec, Jen, Ken, Lydia, Susan), and a few I reviewed. There are ten titles that I was interested in before they were lionized, including one very highly ranked one that I am awaiting for review (Talk about pressure!). And there a few I have coveted, and in more flush years I might have purchased.

I am, in short, woefully incapable of passing judgment on the burgeoning trade in contemporary photobooks. Many of the books on people’s lists were completely unfamiliar to me. I should add that I am also comparably clueless when it comes to year-end rankings of popular movies, video games, music (I’m not always sure which is the name of the group and which is the music they produced), and local bars. I am decidedly not enmeshed in the "popular." But at least in the realm of photography I consider myself more involved than most. Still, I am glad I didn’t have to rely on my fractional awareness of the year in publishing to make my own list. It is so hard to keep up these days.

Yes, I'm still alive.

2011-09-19T07:44:00.000-05:00

Danforth Biennial showcases diverse work of 39 photographers

Recent Acquisitions

2011-03-20T18:10:00.000-05:00

A lot of books cross my desk, at work and at home, and wind up in piles before they can find their way to shelves. Some are given to me by photographers, for which I am grateful and often touched by the individual's generosity--or, rarely, concerned that they've over-committed themselves by sending out expensive materials without properly having vetted their targets. Some are sent by publishers, for which I am sometimes grateful, sometimes embarrassed, sometimes inspired to write. Some are sent expressly for reviewing, in photo-eye and elsewhere, and for these, well, I am thankful that I got to know Darius Himes a number of years ago, for he (and Joel Eisinger, when he was editing Exposure for SPE) got me on the path of reviewing photography books. Larry Frascella, at Photo/Design way back in the eighties, and Christian Peterson, who hooked me up with the Washington Post to review Penelope Niven's biography of Steichen, are also due a credit or two for looping me into the photobook opinion mill.

But there was a time before I went pro, when I bought books, a lot, too often, to my financial detriment and esthetic enrichment. Starting circa 1981, I guess, when I bought a Stieglitz monograph (from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, no less) for Alan Trachtenberg's "Photographer in American Culture" seminar. During that class, researching my paper on Group f.64, I discovered a gorgeous, oversize Weston book in the art library. Gazing into its quarto-scale reproductions, I began to appreciate that the distance between a fine photographic print and a meticulous reproduction was relatively small, a displacement that is far less fictionalizing than that undergone by a painting, drawing, print, or other two-dimensional work (no need to talk about sculpture or cinema) in the translation from real to represented. The Weston reproductions, in fact, had a beauty all their own; since I'd never held a Weston print, or seen one unglazed, the book held me in thrall. Not better than the real thing, but a lot realer than the projected images I'd seen on screen.

I still seek this kind of unique experience in books. Quality standards have risen significantly in most books, and prices haven't risen too terribly much over the past five to ten years due to excellent, affordable printing in China and elsewhere. I am under some severe restrictions these days, in terms of disposable income available for purchases, but I do still acquire books (more than I ought to) and find my appetite getting just a bit pickier. At the same time, of course, the number of new publications has skyrocketed. I didn't know photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, where one could fairly easily acquire all newly released, serious photography publications. When I went to A Photographer's Place bookstore in Soho, I had to be careful and selective. I'm glad I didn't know how much more I could, and perhaps should, have bought there in the 1980s. But my library grew like topsy anyway. Now and then I wished I'd written little capsule reviews of every book I brought into the collection; that would probably qualify me as a bibliomane, or at least kind of a nut.

Today, with a limited acquisition budget, I must be more thoughtful. Which is a good exercise. It means that every book I buy has something special to recommend it, something that causes its punctum to trump its studium (apologies to Roland Barthes). Here's a list of publications, in no particular order, that I've acquired with my own money, not on behalf of any organization other than my own, in the last couple of months:

Candida Hofer, Hamburg Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Koln 2002 - I couldn't resist this tiny (about the size of my hand) book when I saw it, particularly since Hofer and her Dusseldorf colleagues so often go for the grandly oversized when it comes to scale, in print or on the wall.
Peter Fraser, Material Steidl, Gottingen 2002 - Like the Hofer, purchased at Ars Libri in Boston, where I had to resist a half dozen other books on the shelves. This one is about color and stuff, strange inexplicable things, run almost full bleed with minimal text. As the back cover states, "Here are outstanding objects and objects left outstanding." Outstandingly weird.
The Spectacular of Vernacular exh cat org by Darsie Alexander, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2011 - Acquired this one after a too-hurried viewing of the show, which contains Walker Evans, Marina Abramovic's 2005 video Balkan Erotic Epic: Exterior Part 1 (B) (which transfixed 5-year-old Milan), Lorna Simpson, a Christenberry sculpture and Eggleston dye transfers, and Shannon Ebner, among others less notably photographic. The catalogue, only about twice as big as the Hofer noted above, with fewer pages, has an essay by the late J. B. Jackson. How could I resist (though the title really rubs me the wrong way)?
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century exh cat org by Peter Galassi Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010 - Though the show opened last year in Manhattan, it took me until this month to see it in Atlanta, at the High Museum. One can not have too much Cartier-Bresson; though I thought the show could have been edited, I wanted to have the catalogue to learn why I still gain so much looking at HC-B's work.
Whiteout: Poems by Marvin Bell, Photographs by Nathan Lyons Lodima Press, Revere, Pennsylvania 2011 and Balanced Equation: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Lodima Press Portfolio Book no. 14 2010 - Also in Atlanta during the SPE conference, with Arno and Nathan sitting at the Lodima Press booth ready to sign, there's no saying no (for me, at least). These two modest volumes together with all the material I picked up during portfolio reviews during the conference don't equal the Cartier-Bresson catalogue in weight.
Eirik Johnson, Sawdust Mountain Aperture, New York and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 2009 - How can this book have been around since 2009? Anyway, it's a lovely and subtle accumulation of evidence, topographical, socio-economic, and environmental, to describe a certain angle of light and life in the Pacific Northwest.
Jesus and the Cherries Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2005 - Almost bought this one when I was at Ars Libri a couple of weeks ago (see Hofer and Fraser above), and glad I didn't; it was nearly half their price at the Museum of Fine Arts store yesterday, when I picked it up with Eirik's. The plastic cover gives Jessica Backhaus' early publication an odd feel and smell, but the sequence and the images have a beguiling intimacy and mystery.

Well, if I don't spend money on books, I can still spend time.

fictographica007: Maude Coffin Pratt

2011-02-12T10:26:00.001-06:00

It had been Stieglitz who'd refused to exhibit my work in New York--the Provincetown show I had had such hopes for. It seemed to me that Stieglitz in denying me this exposure was trying to thwart me in my courtship of Orlando. Or course, he knew nothing of Orlando, but the fact remained that my sole intention in studying photography was ultimately to persuade my brother that his proper place was with me in my darkroom. Stieglitz had spurned my photographs and in so doing had belittled me as a lover.

If Stieglitz didn't like it, it wasn't photography. Though I considered him of small importance--simply a man who had bamboozled a doting group of people with his lugubrious attentions--I knew that when Stieglitz loaded his camera the world said cheese, or at least his sycophants thought so. He was enthroned in New York in An American Place, his own gallery, and no one could call himself a photographer who had not first wormed some approval from this dubious man. I supposed I could be accused of bias, but I believed the clearest example of his complete lack of judgment and taste was his failure to recognize me as an original.

--Picture Palace

A recent jurying project in Guilford, CT

2011-02-12T07:19:00.000-06:00

Shoreline Arts Alliance announces IMAGES 2011 awards - Entertainment - West Hartford News

Catching Up

2011-01-30T16:58:00.000-06:00

Can a month go by without a new posting here? Almost. Happened last September--no news posts here all month. But please remember that I'm also providing content on the PRC blog, Boston Photography Focus, and I've even tagged it as "re:photographica" there. Almost like an extension of this, isn't it?

One thing pushing me to post is a small collection of open tabs on my Firefox window. It used to be three or four sites or articles I wanted to make mention of, before releasing them to the void again. But now the group has dwindled down, attrition has taken its toll over the last week or two. (Yes, I probably should shut down my computer now and then. Especially when they tell me to on airplanes--anything with an on-off switch, and definitely no wi-fi below 10,000 feet--am I just tempting fate?)

I'm left with Charles Harbutt, writing for Visura magazine on-line (link). And Charlie's piece, titled "The Unconcerned Photographer," was originally delivered as a speech. In 1970.

Whoa. I'm an anachronism.

Gotta run and catch a train to Guilford. More later.

Get 'Em Here, While They Last!

2010-12-23T07:31:00.000-06:00

One of my first book essays, published in 1999 in a collection of works by select members of Moorhead State University's (aka MSU Moorhead) documentary photography class under the guidance of the estimable Wayne Gudmundson. Thanks to the Becker County Historical Society, To the Lakes is available for a sweet and low price ($10, including shipping). Act now! (Link here.) Who knows how many copies they have on hand?

(Obsessive collectors, take note: If memory serves, the renowned Mickey Smith was one of the photographers in that collection, in her earlier incarnation as a "straight" photographer.)

An Immodest Blog-folio Overview

2010-12-09T10:49:00.001-06:00

I was just deriving a certain pleasure from skimming my reviews on photo-eye's blog. I was pleased to see that I'm one of their blog's most productive contributors; I post more stuff there than I do here on my own space (hmmm). Why not, then, give a link? If my entries on the PRC blog can carry re:photographica tags (which they do, see here), why not at photo-eye too? See here.

Old friends: Chris Faust

2010-11-03T19:35:00.000-05:00

Chris has been an inspiration and a friend since I moved back to the Twin Cities from New York. He's one of the hardest-working and most self-effacing people I know; this article in Mpls St. Paul magazine reflects the spirit I've come to appreciate in him over the years. Please take a moment to acquaint yourself with this special artist, who was one of the founders of pARTs Photographic Arts, the organization that evolved into MCP.

Thanks to Martin Berg for forwarding the link to the article. Martin is one of many people who would say they learned a lot from Chris.

I know there are people in Boston who admire and respect Chris, too; he served as a juror for a show about night photography. (See his beautiful book, Nocturnes--signed copies available from photo-eye!)

Lynne Cohen revisited

2010-11-03T19:34:00.000-05:00

Great to read this comment by Lynne on one of her craziest photographs (published on guardian.co.uk in mid-August). I'm intrigued by what she sees, and by what she notices in her own work. She makes me wonder what surprises come her way through the image, and how much she's able to "previsualize" as she works with the 8x10.

I also get inordinate pleasure out of knowing that there's a Slade art school in London. Makes me feel like I have a special place for me over there.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: PRC to give three Lifetime Achievement Awards in Celebration of 35th Anniversary

2010-10-07T11:08:00.001-05:00

Photographic Resource Center
at Boston University

832 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215
www.prcboston.org
617-975-0600

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 7, 2010

Contact: Glenn Ruga, 617-975-0600, gruga@prcboston.org

Photographic Resource Center Celebrates 35 Years with Gala Celebration November 9

Lifetime Achievement Awards to be given to Carl Chiarenza, Chris Enos, and Barbara Hitchcock. Acclaimed photography writer and critic Vicki Goldberg to be keynote speaker.

BOSTON – Thirty-five years ago an idea was afloat in Boston that there needed to be an organization committed to supporting and promoting photography, which at the time was just beginning to gain recognition as a fine art on the level of painting, drawing, printing making, and sculpture.

In 1975, A. D. Coleman, Jeff Weiss, and Chris Enos, with help from the photography community in Boston, got together to create the Photographic Resource Center, with Enos was appointed founding Executive Director in 1976. On the first board of directors were Donald Perrin, Carl Chiarenza, Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, Davis Pratt, and others. The PRC gained official existence in October 1976 as a non-profit organization. The exhibition program began in 1985.

Since the PRC’s founding, photography luminaries from the world over have lectured, exhibited, and given workshops at the PRC. This list includes Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Robert Mapplethorpe, Arnold Newman, Ed Ruscha, John Szarkowski, Aaron Siskind, Joel Meyerowitz, Eliot Porter, Cornell Capa, Emmet Gowin, Jerome Liebling, Lee Friedlander, Wendy Ewald, Barbara Norfleet, Vicki Goldberg, Ansel Adams, Marilyn Bridges, William Wegman, Bruce Davidson, Susan Meiselas, and Mary Ellen Mark.

In celebration of this storied history, the PRC will host a gala celebration on November 9 at the Photonics Center at Boston University, Colloquium Room, 9th Floor, 8 Saint Mary’s Street, from 6–10 pm.

Lifetime Achievement Awards will be presented to Chris Enos and Carl Chiarenza, PRC founders, and to Barbara Hitchcock, former Curator of the Polaroid Collections, for her outstanding service to the photography community. Acclaimed photography critic and author Vicki Goldberg will give the keynote address. Andrea Shea, Arts Reporter for WBUR Morning Edition, will be the emcee for the evening.

This event will include a gallery displaying prints from the PRC Portfolio. The PRC is providing a rare opportunity to purchase these masterful photographs individually. We will also be exhibiting the PRC 35th Anniversary Portfolios, created especially for this occasion.

The PRC will feature an exhibition of recent work by Chris Enos and Carl Chiarenza in its gallery, 832 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston from November 10, 2010 through January 9, 2011.

Tickets for the Gala are $200 and can be purchased online at www.prcboston.org/gala.htm

Biographies of Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients and Keynote Speaker:

Honoree Carl Chiarenza, (b. 1935) a native and current resident of Rochester, New York, is Artist-in-Residence and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Rochester. He has a long history with Boston and Boston University; between 1963 and 1986 he was Chairman, Director of Graduate Studies, and Professor of Art History at BU. He also received two graduate degrees from BU, followed by a PhD from Harvard in 1973. Chiarenza has lectured and taught at institutions across the United States; his photographic work has been seen in more than eighty solo exhibitions and more than 250 group exhibitions since the late 1950s. His critical biography Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors (published 1982) received a 1983 Merit Award from the Photographic Historical Society. He was one of the earliest members of the Society for Photographic Education, and has developed and guided numerous organizations (including the PRC) devoted to photographic arts. Chiarenza was a founding Board member of the PRC.

Honoree Chris Enos received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970. The idea for the PRC first lodged in her imagination in 1975; she enlisted the help of others to push the discussion forward through its official birth in 1976, and served as the fledgling organization’s executive director until 1980, when she turned the reins over to Stan Trecker. Enos is an experienced teacher, and from 1986 to 2004 she was a professor at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH). Her photographs and multi-media artworks are in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, MA), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Since retiring from teaching in 2004 she now works and lives in Santa Fe (NM).

Featured speaker Vicki Goldberg is a photography critic and author based in New York City. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri and earned an MFA from New York University. Goldberg has authored several books and articles on the subjects of photography and art history. Over the course of her career, Goldberg has written for countless publications, including Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, American Photo, Aperture, Art in America, and ArtNews; she has written regular articles on photography for The New York Times for over 14 years. Goldberg’s books include two award-winners, her 1986 biography of Margaret Bourke-White and The Power Of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives, published 1991. Aperture published Light Matters, a selection of her essays, in 2005. Goldberg has also co-written several books with other authors such as A Nation of Strangers: Essays written with Arthur Ollman and American Photography: A Century of Images written with art historian Robert Silberman. She has taught and lectured worldwide, including six years at Rhode Island School of Design, 2002 – 2008.

Honoree Barbara Hitchcock was employed by the Polaroid Corporation for nearly 40 years, the last 19, from 1990 to 2009 as their director of cultural affairs. While working for Polaroid she managed and directed strategic marketing communications and program planning, development, and execution. Among her areas of influence were the Polaroid fine art collections and the 20x24 Studio. Earlier at Polaroid she served as Group Manager, Press and Publicity Worldwide, as Manager of Worldwide Creative Programs, and as Photographic Services Coordinator. Hitchcock has a BA in English from Skidmore College, and additional degrees, certificates, and special recognition from: Simmons College Graduate School of Management; Center for Creative Leadership; and the Center for Corporate Community Relations at Boston College. Hitchcock has also edited and produced books and exhibition catalogues, among them Sanctuary: Anna Tomczak Photography (Fresco Fine Art Publications, 2007), Emerging Bodies: Nudes from the Polaroid Collections (Edition Stemmle, 2000), the Selections From the Polaroid Collection series (Verlag Photographie), Lucas Samaras: Polaroid Photographs, 1969-1983 and Sightseeing: A Space Panorama (Knopf). She has authored essays for a number of publications, most recently Private Views: Barbara Crane (Aperture, 2009), The Polaroid Book (Taschen, 2005), American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2000), Victor Raphael: space fields (William D. Cannon Art Gallery, 2004), Counterclockwise (Galleri Image, 2002), and Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography (Abrams/Friends of Photography, 1999). Hitchcock formerly worked with large format cameras creating photographs that have been exhibited and published worldwide. Hitchcock was president of the PRC Board of Directors 1995 –1998.

On John Mann's Mappings

2010-10-02T06:38:00.000-05:00

I contributed this piece to the tenth issue of Twin Cities-based Quodlibetica. They mentioned an interest in maps, I thought of John Mann. I think the combination turned out well. I hope you agree.

fictographica006: Ophelia, Storyville Diary

2010-08-29T17:43:00.000-05:00

Bellocq - April 1911

There comes a quiet man now to my room--
Papa Bellocq, his camera on his back.
He wants nothing, he says, but to take me
as I would arrange myself, fully clothed--
a brooch at my throat, my white hat angled
just so--or not, the smooth map of my flesh
awash in afternoon light. In my room
everything's a prop for his composition--
brass spittoon in the corner, the silver
mirror, brush and comb of my toilette.
I try to pose as I think he would like--shy
at first, then bolder. I'm not so foolish
that I don't know this photograph we make
will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.

--Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002)

Michal Chelbin: Strangely Familiar starts September 7 at PRC

2010-08-29T17:24:00.000-05:00

Portraits of performers and athletes in Russia, Ukraine, and England.

Exhibition runs September 7–October 31, 2010

Photographic Resource Center

832 Commonwealth Ave., Boston

Reception: Thursday, September 16, 6:30–8 p.m.
Artist lecture & book signing: Tues., Oct. 19, 7 p.m., BU Photonics Building rm. 206, 8 St. Mary's St. Boston

"Because I shoot portraits I can say that people are my first inspiration. They are intriguing, mysterious, and unsolved." —Michal Chelbin (from 9/4/2008 interview on Nymphoto)

Michal Chelbin (born 1974, Haifa, Israel) started making pictures when she was 15, and honed her skills as a photographer during her compulsory service in the Israeli military. Following four years of study in Haifa, Chelbin began pursuing personal photographic projects and traveled in Russia, Ukraine, England, and Israel making the portraits that appear in Strangely Familiar (also the title of her 2008 Aperture monograph; The Black Eye, her new book, is forthcoming from Twin Palms). The body of work on display at the PRC this fall demonstrates Chelbin's search for those displaying a "legendary" quality, which she describes as "a mix between odd and ordinary."

Her photographs depict mostly young people who carry their livelihoods with them, often in the very form or function of their bodies. Her subjects are members of itinerant companies—dancers, acrobats, and carnival attractions—and athletes. Chelbin's work, typically made of individuals in off-stage repose, reflects both the intensity of their pursuits and the fatigue engendered by being constantly on the road and almost always on display. Her photographs are staged, in the sense of being made by arrangement between artists and subject, but not manipulated or otherwise altered post-exposure.

The artist, who again lives in Israel after several years in the United States, will be present for a talk and book signing on October 19 at 7 p.m.

Exhibition organized in collaboration with Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York City.

To read more, please visit www.prcboston.org.

B+W @ Mpls Photo Center

2010-08-17T21:23:00.000-05:00

Clicking on the link above (or here) should get you to a nice little Quicktime slideshow on MPC's site, showing the works I selected* for the Black and White juried exhibition that opens September 10 at Mpls Photo Center. If you're in Minnesota between 9/10 and 10/25, do try and find your way to MPC to see the show. From what I could tell, working with jpg files, it should be good.

They're also publishing a catalogue, with an essay I wrote about the selections. You'll find an order form for it down that page a little. Thanks to MPC for publishing this record of the show.

* Selected from 1,961 entries, a good warm-up for Critical Mass pre-screening, which I just completed this morning. That had over 5,000 photos. Talk about retinal exhaustion...

Pieter Hugo Redeemed

2010-08-14T08:54:00.000-05:00

I was distrustful of his over-close, highly detailed records of light-skinned, Albino African faces that featured in his catalogue of facial portraits from 2005 and 2006. I liked his 2007 book, The Hyena and Other Men, quite a bit. I was put off by Nollywood, as I intimated in my review for photo-eye.

But this portfolio, "A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana," on the New York Times web site brings me back into the Pieter Hugo fold. He's tied people to the post-industrial myth once again, but unlike the "dream machine" and its exemplary spear carriers that I cited in my Nollywood review, the situation in the Agbogbloshie dump in Accra, Ghana, is a waking nightmare, far more insidious and toxic. His photographs in this portfolio address both cause and complication, and veer just far enough from the people to address the dangers--burning computers, keyboards leaching metals into the ground, child laborers supporting distant families at sub-subsistence, scavenger pay.

Bravo, Pieter, and thanks.

Special thanks to Lori Waselchuk for circulating the link.

The Pencil of Nature at the University of Minnesota

2010-08-04T13:33:00.000-05:00

Peter Martin with W. H. F. Talbot's Pencil of Nature in the Special Collections and Rare Books at the University of Minnesota's Andersen Library on the West Bank

My St. Paul friend Peter Martin, above, knew there was a copy. I had seen a copy, too, in a display case in the early 1990s that highlighted the very specialized Mertle Collection on the History of Photomechanics; Pencil, of course, was the first book illustrated with photographs, hence its inclusion in Mertle's unique assemblage. The library's special collections had experience a massive relocation into the caves, the carved-out storage area below Andersen Library, during the late 1990s. Peter wanted to show it to a class he was teaching in the early 2000s, but it was not to be found. AWOL, within the walls or outside, no one quite knew. But Peter kept pushing, kept requesting, kept nudging me and a couple of other photo folk to help pressure the U to locate and serve up this rare volume.

And it finally surfaced; not a complete copy, and in somewhat rough shape. But it included Talbot's well-known images and captions, and a surprise in the form of a paper negative. Peter printed the negative, and I may be able to persuade him to let me show it here. Can you imagine, though, having the chance to handle this masterpiece, this landmark of photographic history, in our hometown library, no less? It was a thrill to see it again, up close and in person, to hear how curator Tim Johnson found it tucked behind other material, and a credit to Peter's persistence that it reappeared.

William Wylie, Route 36

2010-08-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

Bill called me when he was in Minneapolis in the late winter, during the waning weeks of a winter that didn't have much to say for itself in terms of notable Minnesota winters. The upside of global warming is the endurable, even boring, version of the winter season that's been the case the last several years.

Anyway, Bill was in town having a new book project printed by Shapco Printing. I offered to pick him up from the printer and take him to his hotel. I'd hoped to have had time to hang out over beers and a meal, but as it tends to do, time shrank to the point where all I could do is chauffeur him from one spot to another, and pause briefly in the hotel driveway to look at sheets hot off the Shapco presses.

I'd been eager to see Shapco's shop, as I'd been acquainted with their work over some time; my long-time designer for McKnight materials, Mike Lizama, used to do most of our printing there. Shapco is located in the shadow of the new Target Field in downtown Minneapolis; the stands loomed over my car as Bill sat in the front seat. I didn't get time to see inside. But Bill was extremely excited about the production, and mildly surprised to find such excellence in Minnesota. (I had to remind him about Litho Specialties.)

The book, Route 36, came out in June. Published by Flood Editions, a small (about a half-dozen titles per year) non-profit publisher in Chicago, it's a modestly-scaled but beautifully produced volume of photographs resulting from several road trips across Kansas. The light is summer, and fall, mostly light that you can feel, light that bears upon you as an almost physical force in these photographs and in the prairie and town spaces Wylie has captured. Elegant spaces, quiet and calm. Spectacularly unspectacular.

It is good to see such quality in an affordable, and affordably made, volume; accessibility is part of Flood's mission, and while they are publishing photography along with other types of books, they have affirmed, in Wiley's Route 36, a clear commitment to photography engaged in a dialogue about representing place. The promise evinced in the early sheets came through in the final book; thanks again, Bill, for calling.

A friend's gallery goes to the dogs

2010-08-01T07:49:00.003-05:00

Panopticon Gallery: Wegman reception | A smashing success!:

My almost-colleague at the PRC, Jason Landry (he was the program manager just before I arrived to assume the curator role), has assembled a tremendous collection of William Wegman prints for a show in his space, Panopticon Gallery in the Commonwealth Hotel, just a few blocks from the PRC. Really, it's more of Man Ray and Fay Wray's descendants (biological and thematic) than I've seen all together, and it's a tribute to Jason's dedication to photographers and the medium.

Interesting historical background note about Jason and Panopticon. Jason took over the gallery from Tony Decaneas this spring; he left the post at the PRC in order to do this. Tony had run the gallery for years and years. One of the artists he represented at the gallery (and still supervises the estate of) is Ernest Withers. When I became the artistic director of MCP in 2003, the show that was up at the time was of work by Withers, borrowed from Panopticon. The wheel keeps turning...

p.s. There's a snap of me (by PRC intern YoonJoo Kim) and Jason at the last PRC opening on Flickr.

"Forester's Child, 1931" by August Sander, in "Children of Summer," at Bell

2010-07-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

On page 14 in the July 26 issue, The New Yorker runs a darker, browner version of this photograph by August Sander. I'd never seen it before. I find it enchanting, magical even. It points at something I've been mulling about recently--what, truly, are the most compelling photographs about?

This one is, at first level, about the child, the bike, the dog, the hut, and the empty fields and treeline in the background. It's also about Sander, and his typological project; we imagine his checklist of German faces getting one item shorter as we read the caption.

But when I see this photograph, this ink image on paper and its digital corollary on screen, what occurs to me is that it is about balance. It's about the effort to get this child fixed on the crossbar, holding on to the handlebars just so, about placing the dog to obscure a kickstand or other device holding this bicycle upright. Maybe the dog is the device.

Regardless, what I see in this picture, made the year my father was born, is composition, the net effect of all the factors that contribute to its presence. The child's face is dead center in the frame, while the father's occupation, the forest, looms in the background while his best friend's two front paws hold it all erect. Sunlight and relatively shallow depth of field kept the exposure mercifully short; could child, dog, and bicycle have remained still much longer?

Hence, balance is what I see here. Balance, composition, composure, exposure. And a miracle of light that brings the child to us, fresh and amazing.

The group exhibition at Deborah Bell Photographs, on West 25th in Chelsea, runs into August. Link for more info.

fictographica005: Wilfred Eng

2010-06-06T15:23:00.002-05:00

For much of his life he had operated a commercial portrait studio on Grant Street in San Francisco, which he occasionally closed to indulge his famous wanderlust. Among the Aperture images reprinted from the 1870s was a picture made in that studio of a Chinese woman and her son seated on the same divan as the one in the self-portraits. The pattern of the fabric matched. A small tear appeared in one corner. When I bent over the broken plate with a loupe, I saw the same tear and said, "Holy shit," out loud. The five self-portraits had been made in San Francisco and must have been brought here some time later. Eng must have brought them himself. Given that they were cumbersome and easily broken, I wondered why he'd bothered. Vanity, maybe. "This man loves his mirrors," Alfred Stieglitz had observed when the two first met. In 1912 he had invited Eng to show at his 291 Gallery, which had marked the beginning of their prickly friendship. "Wherever we walked, even along busy streets," Stieglitz wrote, "he was forever giving bird-like twitches of his head in order to catch glimpses of himself in shop windows."

--The Lost Glass Plates of Wilfred Eng

PRC hires George Slade as new Program Manager/Curator

2010-06-06T15:05:00.000-05:00

May 5, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

George Slade Hired as New PRC Program Manager/Curator

The Photographic Resource Center is proud to announce that George Slade will join the PRC on May 17 as the new Program Manager/Curator. He will be replacing Jason Landry, who is leaving the PRC to take ownership of the Panopticon Gallery in Boston.

Slade is a Minnesota native and long-time resident. He has curated and juried exhibitions there for over fifteen years, first as an independent curator and consultant, then as the Artistic Director of the Minnesota Center for Photography in Minneapolis from 2003 to 2008. Among his curatorial projects at MCP were "Three Gorges," surveying work by 22 Chinese, European, and North American photographers recording change along China's Yangtze River caused by the Three Gorges Dam Project, and a retrospective of esteemed Amherst-resident photographer Jerome Liebling.

In 2008, as the Adjunct Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, he coordinated the MIA presentation of "Friedlander," the traveling retrospective of Lee Friedlander's photography originally curated by Peter Galassi for its 2005 appearance at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC).

From 1998 to 2008, Slade was the Director for the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photographers Program which makes four $25,000 awards to Minnesota-resident photographers each year

Slade received his B.A from Yale in American Studies. His thesis was on 1960s American photography advised by Alan Trachtenberg, and he studied photographic practice while at Yale with Todd Papageorge.

"The PRC is looking forward to working on our programming and exhibitions with such a knowledgeable and accomplished curator, scholar, and writer," said Glenn Ruga, PRC Executive Director. "His wealth of experience and insights in contemporary photography will be a tremendous asset to the organization."

For more information, contact:
Glenn Ruga
Executive Director
gruga@prcboston.org
617-975-0600 (w)
617-417-5981 (c)

The Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University is an independent non-profit organization that serves as a vital forum for the exploration and interpretation of new work, ideas, and methods in photography and related media.

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Expansion

2010-06-03T14:06:00.000-05:00

I'm expanding my base of operations from Minnesota to Massachusetts. Not that it matters much in the virtual world of blogs, but it's of interest that I'm physically spending quite a bit of time in the East these days. In May I started a new job, as the program manager and curator of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University (PRC), a 35-year-old organization started by Chris Enos, Carl Chiarenza, A. D. Coleman, and others to serve the burgeoning photography community of Boston and the New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut for those of you whose geography has gotten a bit weak).

It's great that I'm in the midst of dozens, if not scores or hundreds, of venues interested in photography; it's almost overwhelming to consider how many photographic artists of note are close at hand. I used to measure the neighborhood of MCP with a 525-mile radius circle around Northeast Minneapolis. That measured how far I'd driven in a day. Here, a same-sized circle extends downshore past Nag's Head into North Carolina, upcoast past Maine and New Brunswick to Nova Scotia, and inland to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and London (Ontario). Not quite to Indianapolis, where my Minnesota-centric circle reached; the two circles don't quite touch.

Since that circle encompasses New York City (among other places), I've got to recalibrate and downsize my appetite and my scope. One thing I'm taking care of, and hoping to invigorate as a space for dialogue and commentary, is the PRC's blog. Check it out via the link below.

PRC
Boston Photography Focus (PRC blog)

I look forward to getting oriented in the new space.

In Memoriam: Nick Shank, 1941 to 2010

2010-04-07T12:23:00.001-05:00

In Memoriam: Nick Shank, 1941 to 2010

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Pause, To Begin

2010-04-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

I was pleased to write a review of this remarkable book, and wish I could have done more to describe my wonder about the whole project. Its founders, David Wright and Ethan Jones, carried out a 10,000 mile journey to interview 15 emerging photographers and publish the results in e-reports during the process and in this compact, lovely volume.

The project's web site.

News about "new" Amy Eckert

2010-03-31T23:05:00.001-05:00

Karen Irvine, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, has singled out Amy Eckert from the applicants for the just-juried Animalia competition at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado. Way to go, Amy!

See my earlier post on Amy here.

William Wylie, Carrara

2010-03-30T14:22:00.000-05:00

My review of William Wylie's book went up on photo-eye today.

Setting foot in the castle: Minneapolis Institute of Arts' 'Door'

2010-03-30T11:53:00.001-05:00

Setting foot in the castle: Minneapolis Institute of Arts' 'Door'

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fictographica004: Carter Cox

2010-03-20T16:01:00.001-05:00

Hearing the Borkhardt Group's account director clear her throat for the third time, you sigh and select a ring-flash to gently flood the girl's upturned face with what you consider to be a softer, more glamorous light. You recall from almost three decades ago your mother's sage advice: "If you pictures aren't interesting enough, honey, then chances are you're not close enough." You raise high the ring-flash and lean forward. But your move leads to louder throat-clearing. You lower the Hasselblad, pinch your nose, and for several seconds pretend to examine the dead grass. The skin of your cheekbones tightens as you feel yourself teeter between embarrassment and anger. Still kneeling, your hooded sweater damp with sweat, you swivel your head and lock eyes with the Borkhardt woman, who stares back at you with a mirthless smile, unblinking, her hands clasped just below her vested bosom, as if entranced by your ineptitude. "More sheen," she commands, albeit quietly, in a raspy voice, directing your yawning assistant to spritz the model's face and shoulders with a plastic water-bottle that appears out of nowhere. "More sheen, less sweetness. This isn't a portrait--it's an attitude. And do you mind if we kill the Caruso?"

--Hungry Ghost

Pieter Hugo, Nollywood

2010-03-16T12:50:00.002-05:00

Click above to read my review in photo-eye's online magazine.

fictographica003: Wilfred Eng

2010-03-13T08:01:00.000-06:00

A certain parity was at work in the world. Disappointment, disguised by years of routine humility, was bound to yield singular, penetrating fantasies: the iris dilated, the raw world flooded back in. For just a moment these were not portraits but self-portraits, and a palpitating certainty would not breathe denial or allow that they had been made by anyone by Wilfred Eng.

Eng, the great landscape photographer.

Then, the moment passed. I let out a breath and thought, No way. Fantasies turned into torture if we took them too seriously. I'd seen later portraits of Eng, and the likeness to the face in this close-up was striking. But the idea was ludicrous. It was true that Eng had lived in Seattle for brief periods, but he hadn't made his first trip here until 1881. By then he was using smaller, 3x5 plates. Most of his larger, older negatives had been destroyed in the 1906 quake and fire in San Francisco, Eng's nominal home. San Francisco was my hometown as well. There, and throughout the world, Eng was revered as one of the the fathers of American photography. Biographies had probed his towering dichotomies. No less a figure than Alfred Stieglitz had called him a genius. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro--the list of his artistic heirs was endless. Even painters such as Thomas Hart Benton acknowledged a debt to Eng. It was crazy to think that the work of this giant might end up where I could find it.

--Thomas Orton, The Lost Glass Plates of Wilfred Eng (1999)

New: Amy Eckert

2010-03-06T16:56:00.002-06:00

Amy Eckert moved to Minneapolis about eight months ago. Amy had several loyal clients for her freelance work and a teaching gig at the School of Visual Arts, plus family ties and a strong sense of belonging in New York. But her husband got a job here, and they shared a sense of doing something adventurous by relocating. Freelancers don't necessarily have to abandon clients, as long as there are airplanes and other modern devices to remain connected. Nonetheless, she was happy to find, through a contact, an assignment before they'd even opened the moving boxes in their apartment. That first assignment was shooting a calendar for "Minnesota Cooks," a project for the Minnesota Farmers Union and Food Alliance Midwest; the agencies liked her work so much they hired her again for next year's calendar.

Thus, she found herself auspiciously situated within the locavorian heart of Minnesota--no doubt many of us would like to be assisting her on these jobs--and she's off and running. Ask her for dining recommendations. And check out her (soon to be updated) web site. She's done some fine commercial work, and is what I'd call solidly early-mid-career as a photographic artist.

But I realized that the work she showed me during our conversation had a lot to do with domesticity, with having your feet on the ground in the place you've chosen. And, with the problems and issues connected to those choices. Relocating from New York to Minnesota is one type of choice, full of issues, that Amy is in the midst of exploring.

One residence-related project, called Manufacturing Home, is ready for publication. Amy's going to FotoFest this month, and she asked me to give her some advice about bringing portfolios there. Is one better, or two? Or more? Old work, or new? She'd taken the book project to the Meeting Place before, and gotten some interest in the early iteration of the sequence. Now, it's much more advanced, and Amy wants to get it situated and show her newer work, entitled Follies.

I'm showing examples of Follies here, because I was greatly intrigued by them. They're wry, smart, and very hand-made. They play with scale and detail. They add humor and texture to some of the very austere, Germanic interiors that have flowed across the screens of late.

They reference works seen before (by Wendel A. White, who I wrote about earlier on this blog, for one; Beate Gutschow, John Baldessari, and Jayna Conkey are others) but strike out in their own direction as statements about figure and ground, landscape, symbolic notions of home as castle, and home as personal space. Click on these reproductions to get them as large as possible; look at the seams, which are actual cuts creating windows or layers in collages that aren't much larger (or smaller, depending) than the screen you're viewing them on.

Here's Amy's statement about the new work:

If houses can be said to have personalities, who’s to say they don’t have longings, imaginations, inner lives? In architecture, a folly is an extravagant, useless, or fanciful building, or one that appears to be something other than what it is. In their book Follies, Grottoes & Garden Buildings, Headley & Meulenkamp define a folly as a “misunderstood building."

In this collage series I combine my own images with pictures from architecture books and manufacturers' catalogues. By removing the house from a picture, I get to fill up that void with my own extravagant, useless, or fanciful ideas. I like to play around with the reliable stability of architectural space and confuse inside with outside, shelter with storm.

Having just written about Jenny Jenkins, an old acquaintance, I thought it'd be good to write about a new one. Welcome to Minnesota, Amy. I hope the midwestern adventure is rewarding.

fictographica002: Maude Coffin Pratt

2010-03-04T13:08:00.002-06:00

The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away and they get self-conscious and sneeze out their souls and put on that numbed guilty expression and act as if you are going to shoot them dead. Or worse, they pose like dummies and show their teeth: even your bare-assed savage knows how to say cheese. As a photographer I was embarrassed to be caught with that contraption in my mitts, like an elderly pervert, a distinguished old lady with my skirt around my neck frightening children at play. Later, I was proud of the way I could conceal my intention and, long before the Japanese produced their tiny instruments, I could disguise my camera--as a shoe box or a handbag or as a ridiculous hat that people gaped at, not knowing that I was recording their curious squints. Orthodox Jewish Boys, a small group of dark-eyed youngsters with beanies and sidecurls--some critics found them a bizarre evocation of alienated Americans ignoring the squalor of downtown Brooklyn and looking skyward toward Jehovah--are just some curious kids looking at my hat.
--Paul Theroux, Picture Palace (1978)

An old friend's work on display

2010-03-03T23:25:00.001-06:00

I happened to drive by the Shoebox Gallery Tuesday morning, and in passing my eye landed on the window-filling installation there of Jenny Jenkins' typology of announcement signs lacking announcements. I knew, from Jenny's emails, that the show was being dismantled soon, and I hadn't taken the time to look at it.

The venue is unusual; two adjoining display windows on the corner of Lake and Chicago in Minneapolis. Local impresario and visual artist Sean Smuda curates the space on what must only be described as a shoestring budget (my kids are groaning now). Sean lives upstairs from Robert's Shoes ("Not a foot we can't fit"), the gallery's host. The late winter snowbanks (more concentrated dirt and gritty ice crystals now than snow) along the curb were coughing up all manner of detritus, including scores of little plastic booze bottles and hundreds of cryogenically-preserved cigarette butts. I was the only person there, at roughly nine a.m., and I was nervous enough to consider leaving my engine running while I got out to look at and document the public display. (I really don't live in NYC any more.)

Jenny showed up, and was as startled to imagine some stranger taking a liking to her installed picture scroll-grids as I was to be accosted standing there snapping phone pics. She was there to make her own documentation of the very fine installation. I've known Jenny for over fifteen years; she was one of the small group of people who worked with me on the pARTs Journal, published in four volumes from 1995 to 1998, with a final issue trailing in 1999 or 2000, by pARTs Photographic Arts (the precursor to Minnesota Center for Photography).

I've always enjoyed Jenny's spirited approach to life, and she's always had a fondness for celebrating and photographing New Orleans, which endears her to me and which prompted me to include her in a 2007 show, Downriver, at MCP, with Dan Beers, Xavier Tavera, Stuart Klipper, and Alec Soth, four other Minnesotans who had captured NOLA's unique blend of civilization, creativity, culture, and chaos in the time prior to Katrina's waves.

Though Jenny may never become an international sensation, she's an example of a working artist who is diligent, resourceful, good-humored, and pragmatic. Communities populated with good souls like Jenny and Sean are well-equipped to thrive. It was my good fortune to coincide with her that morning. And, looking at Shoebox's calendar, I note that the next exhibitor is Vance Gellert, Jenny's and my former colleague at pARTs/MCP. The wheel just keeps turning 'round.

Page for Shoebox Gallery on mnartists.org

Sean Smuda's site

Jenny Jenkins' site

fictographica001: Carter Cox

2010-03-01T13:12:00.004-06:00

You glance across the den at the twin-lens Rolleiflex, your very first camera, given to you as a birthday present by your mother twenty-seven years ago today, collecting dust on the bookshelf next to the unopened UPS package containing an unneeded CD-ROM drive for your new laptop computer. "Don't just capture the thing itself," your mother--an ambitious amateur photographer--had said in a calm, soothing voice, when you showed her your earliest efforts. "Look and find the thing's sum and substance. And be more gentle with natural light," she would encourage, "but more ruthless with your framing. Make art, Carter. You have it in you."

As a young man you aspired to do that--to capture a subject's spirit, its very essence, with the in-breath of a shutter: to wield your camera like a magician's wand. Poof! Another ghost would mysteriously appear in the developer. How marvelous the process seemed to you! You felt like a sorcerer. Your favorite place in the world was in the red-lit stuffiness of a darkroom, with the delicious stink of all those exotic chemicals and the sight of your wet 5" x 7" prints dripping from wooden clothespins above the sink. At first you did portraits, and your best pictures captured, as if with divine help, the pure joy animating your three sisters as they glanced up, giggling, one ofter the other, from their row of coloring books. These early images could hint at the sad narrative of a widower neighbor's alcoholic stare. They gave life to the complicated history behind your father's forlorn smile as he watched, barefoot and alone, those beautiful California sunsets every evening on the back porch. The opening-night reception for your debut show at UCLA--an undergraduate group exhibit in the Union Cafe, earnestly titled "Visions of Time"--is to date perhaps the most glorious three hours of your life. Initially you did make art, you tell yourself. You truly did. And even after your move to New York, your best commercial work (at least in the beginning, you'd like to think), still had some spirit. But $1,800-a-month rent and print-lab fees and health insurance and the computer upgrades and the twice-weekly dinner dates soon transformed your magic wand, by financial necessity, into a cold, gray gun for hire.
--Keith Kachtick, Hungry Ghost (2003)

Monica Haller: Why is this not a book?

2010-02-25T09:51:00.003-06:00

I'm starting up a discussion board about Monica Haller's project Riley and His Story (despite it's highlighted first-sentence disclaimer, it made my photo-eye faves from 2009 list) on the Minnesota Museum of American Art's Facebook page. There are a slew of links there that tie to information about Monica and the project. I encourage you to spend time with this project; it's simultaneously subtle and audacious, and it depends on interaction, the reactions, emotions, and thoughts of its audience, to activate it fully.

In other words, give and take, take and give.

Link here for the discussion (titled "Monica and Riley (and George (and you))" on MMAA's Facebook Pages site.
Link here for Monica's Riley site.

FULL DISCLOSURE FINE PRINT: I'm a board member of MMAA, so I do have a vested interest in promoting its activities. However, it is currently a museum without walls, exploring the virtues of the virtual, and I thought this exchange with Minnesota-based Monica Haller merits placement (and promotion) there as a programmatic entity in the museum's portfolio. Feel free to disagree.

All here now

2010-02-03T14:21:00.003-06:00

I realized that having three different blogs wasn't doing me, or the artists I was writing about, much good. Not that anyone is hanging on my every word, but I also realized that I was betraying my own desire to have "re:photographica" serve as the banner under which I do my work.

Hence, I've imported all of the blog entries from "Curator's Notebook" and "Exile" into this space. I will eventually reconstruct the links that went out from them, too.

If you knew about those two cleverly constructed, intricately designed, seldom-contributed-to blogs, congratulations and thanks for your close attention. I hope you aren't disappointed to learn that they're all here now under one big, easily searchable umbrella.

CURATOR t-shirt (size Large)

2010-01-28T11:14:00.007-06:00

From the Wolfsonian, the self-appointed "museum of Thinkism." Not sure when they created this shirt, sold at their Miami Beach museum, but at least a couple of years ago.

There's text where the garment tag would normally be. Here's the detail:

WOLFSONIAN: THE MUSEUM OF THINKISM
Thinkism [n.] A cultural and intellectual movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, characterized by the belief that the value of an object considers the social, political and historical context in which the object is created. Start with this object, and be the curator of your own private T-Shirtsonian.

The museum produces an arcanely fascinating annual publication called The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. The Thinkist curator can find value in almost any cultural artifact. Well, I suppose I should be grateful that they are object-based.

The Seductions of Linoleum: A Dialogue with Lynne Cohen

2010-01-21T12:35:00.003-06:00

When Andy Adams told me that Flak Photo was running a WEEKEND series in January concentrating on Lynne Cohen's work from her new book Cover, and asked if I'd be willing to “interview” her asynchronously through the web, I leaped at the chance to connect with an artist I've admired from a distance since the 1980s. She was gracious to accommodate my questions while suffering the inconvenience of a bruised or broken rib, which kept her from laughing too much. As I realized, the more I looked at her work and after I had a chance to speak with Lynne and hear a recording of her lecturing, not laughing is a significant encumbrance for her. Her work is profoundly, disturbingly funny. David Byrne wrote an essay for her first book, which tells you something about the role of absurdity and surrealism in her creative mission.

Please link here (or in this post's title) to find our electronic exchanges.

Link to Todd Deutsch's Gamers book

2010-01-08T09:46:00.004-06:00

वही इस माय ब्लॉग फोर्सिंग में तो टाइप इन हिंदी? Because somehow I turned on that function.

Anyway, I was Goog-alerted to a site published by Domenico Quaranta about books in the cyber-gaming realm that he's written for and published. Todd asked me to write for this book, and I'm glad to see it advertised and offered for sale, as I'm not sure it's gotten very wide distribution.

A City as Once Seen by Stuart Klipper

2009-11-02T19:36:00.005-06:00

I am pleased and honored to have been asked to take part in this deluxe presentation about to be released by the Press at Colorado College. Stuart's project evolved out of discussions and editing sessions he and I had en route to five of his photographs appearing at MCP as part of the exhibition Downriver. The five New Orleans authors he solicited to write texts accompanying individual images of his, of New Orleans and environs prior to Katrina and Rita.

There is a Flickr slideshow about the book here. The Press' page for the book is connected through the title link. There are 40 copies of the book, which includes oversize foldout inkjet prints as its plates and recovered wood as its slipcase.

Tim Davis

2009-09-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

Tim Davis, Gold Flecked Web

There's something irresistibly compelling in these photographs. There are some hints of arrangement--note the array of digital cameras all displaying the "same" view, and the haircuts--but on the whole one can only marvel at what Davis finds. His photographs heighten the visual impact of his subject matter; he's got a keen, and what I used to think was merely acerbic, eye for anachronism, a sense which is perfectly suited for this series now up in NYC called "The New Antiquity." The series represents the very modern and insightful Davis at work, finding both willed and unintentional examples of age and the ancient in cities from the U.S. to Europe and Asia. It's so apt a subject for Davis that the irony, verging on cynicism, of much of his earlier work seems to have dissolved in the face of irrefutable, undeniable, non-Photoshopped asychronous anomaly. The show is up until October 24. I wish I could see it in person. I can hardly wait for the book.

Slideshow of Tim Davis' "The New Antiquity" courtesy of Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

Tim Davis, Angel Armor

Chelsea and Soho, not AIPAD

2009-05-06T08:44:00.009-05:00

My quick late winter trip to New York was focused downtown. Stayed in Soho, had breakfast with Hee Jin at the Noho Star, visited the Donald Judd house with the foundation director (thanks, Barbara), did a quick swing through Chelsea on Saturday morning before beating a retreat to LaGuardia to catch up on work for a couple of hours prior to my afternoon flight home.

I thought I'd spend a lot more time at AIPAD, but the abundance of images and ego-tangents was overwhelming; my brain shut down after about an hour. But I did enjoy seeing work by Jan Groover, Gabriele Basilico, and Louviere + Vanessa.

Hee Jin recommended my stops in Chelsea, and I was grateful for her suggestions--Florian Maier-Aichen, P-L diCorcia (installation of his "Thousand" project at Zwirner, above, below, and in this blog's banner), and Barbara Probst.

I thought diCorcia's installation was fascinating and bold, full of the intentional accidents that his work takes on frame by frame. It was the kind of show I'm sure many photographers dream about doing, but very few of them merit this sort of expanded view, a thousand images generated from many years of projects. I'm not buying many books these days, but I ordered a copy of this one as soon as I got home.

Myoung Ho Lee's Avedon-ed trees (the white background done with trees by James Balog, too) inspired me to make my own flora pictures as I snaked through the west 20s. Thank god for the cell phone camera.

I even made a picture that caused someone to call up a literary reference (after seeing it on Facebook, where I'm obsessively posting to the Mobile Uploads feature). My bicycle photo, below, reminded a fellow Minnesota-based writer of William Gibson's book, Virtual Light, which is about post-apocalyptic bike messengers in San Francisco. I was honored, and had to rush out and read the book.

"Proj on!" as Gibson's messengers say.

WIIGF? Insights from veterans.

2009-04-06T12:50:00.000-05:00

Spread from Untitled (Riley's War Images)

Monica Haller worked with a friend who'd been deployed to Abu Ghraib as a nurse to create a book-project offering first-person photographic perspectives on the current war. Haller, the healer-soldier Riley (a college friend of Haller's), and a graphic designer formed a collaboration resulting in the book Untitled (Riley's War Images). A mock-up of the book, one of two displayed at Minneapolis College of Art and Design as part of a Jerome Foundation visual arts fellowship recipients exhibition, was acquired by the International Center of Photography in New York. The photographs in the book were made by Riley during his tour, and they include both gun-sight points-of-view, like the scene above, and images in the mobile surgical units, interspersed with commentary about photography and personal experience in war.

Of note in this vein, too, is Lori Grinker's amazing work in the AFTERWAR project. Published as a book (above) in 2005 by de.MO, the photographs present an astounding range of war's survivors, alongside interviews that explain the personal impact of war on soldiers. The sheer number of global conflicts represented (the earliest is World War I) is sobering testament to the unconscionable reality of our tendency toward violence as a means of resolving differences. Sadly, this is a series of photographs that will never end.

* Alec Soth names Riley and His Story as the book of the year 2009 on LBM
* More about Monica Haller in a profile (City Pages (Minneapolis), 12/22/2008) by Patricia Briggs
* AFTERWAR by Lori Grinker

WIIGF? Portraits of soldiers.

2009-03-20T20:37:00.000-05:00

Ulysses S. Grant helped Mathew Brady usher in an era of candid portraiture, records of soldiers portrayed in moments of composure, of quiet between salvos. Though this is clearly a perilous calm; Grant's poise is tenuous, and his surroundings are as temporary as his glance is fleeting.

There's an extensive discourse on this image, courtesy of Jeff Galipeaux, originally published in 2002 on Salon.com. An excerpt:

In June of 1864, along with nearly 2,000 images of soldiers, fortifications, battlefields and cannons, Brady took the first important casual photograph, the first permanently recorded awkward image of an important man: The image of Ulysses S. Grant. Brady captured the image at the forward command center in City Point, Va. It is a landmark of psychological portraiture, paparazzidom and the creation of a public image -- all at once.

The hat is slightly askew. The brow is scrunched. There is that frown. There is the awkward placing of Grant's feet, the angle of his hip; the left hand clenched in a fist, the fingers of the right brushing against a tree. It's all wrong for the portrait of an illustrious leader in 1864, but disarmingly natural by today's standards.

I have always found this portrait tremendously compelling. The shape of the tent, the line descending to the right like the graph of a falling stock market (the fate of the South, mapped out in the Northern command post?), the bright foreground water, the elegant folding chair, the muck, the tree trunk, the sky, all of these planes of interest and textural details surrounding the nominal subject of the photograph.

Current photographers whose work is of soldiers, without the context:

Suzanne Opton

Suzanne's work in the "Soldier" series has been featured on a series of public art billboards around the country, including in Minnesota:

Ellen Susan

Ellen's photographs are originally done as wet collodion negatives, which gives her a straight-line connection to Brady and Grant (and accounts for the reversed type that appears on these soldiers' name tags). She also makes inkjet prints, which allows her work to reach a larger audience.

Suzanne Opton's "Soldier" web site
Suzanne Opton's personal web site, including her expansions on the "Soldier's Face" theme that use images of citizens who have been bystanders to war
Ellen Susan's "Soldier Portraits" web site

Tom Arndt's Home

2009-01-29T07:13:00.005-06:00

OK, OK. Let the shameless self-promotion begin. No better excuse for it, though, than the fact that an essay I wrote on Tom Arndt's photographs in Minnesota introduces this glorious, newly released monograph from the University of Minnesota Press. It's a book that all involved can be proud of; it reflects Tom's unique qualities as a person and an artist. It's really an all-MN production, too--printed (with intense skill by Shapco--Tom was apparently at every press check, too; it shows) and bound here in the Twin Cities, with a statement by Tom's old friend Garrison Keillor inserted, it is truly a major accomplishment and a long-due tribute to an artist whose vision celebrates us all, Minnesotan or not. Please check it out.

Also note: The book anticipates and supports the February opening of a retrospective of Tom's work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Not an exhibition catalogue per se, but a very compelling adjunct to the show. If I may say so myself.

WAR: WIIGF?

2009-01-24T14:27:00.000-06:00

What is it good for (WIIGF)? And how does photography account for it, or tell the story of war?

Lots of assorted threads come to mind, and I'd like to start a string of posts that deal with war and its intersections with the image world I encounter. I've been mulling this over ever since PhotoNOLA last December, when I asked Bruce Davidson about shooting war, and he said that the Civil Rights Movement, Brooklyn gangs, and the NYC subway had been war-like enough for him, that he'd never felt compelled to go into combat zones despite other great photographers who had and had emerged with some profound photographs (Don McCullin, James Nachtwey, etc.). Apparently the Magnum war bug never bit him. That is, he'd never felt compelled to go into war in search of an image that would capture not just news, not just details, but an image that might summarize man's plight, an image that might cause the end of wars.

Bruce Davidson lecture, Historic New Orleans Collection, December 2008

He was fairly emphatic about it. I was a bit surprised to hear that he hadn't done any war photography, but his humanitarian, pacifist side seems to survive well in his photographs nonetheless. For a New Yorker, he's surprisingly low-key. A survivor, of sorts.

Here's a guiding, or framing, quote to kick off this series of posts:

War isn't a matter of routine. What it involves is the disruption of routine. War "breaks out," it signals its appearance, it demands the declaration of its beginning and end. For an event to be considered a war, it must be relatively isolated, take place within a limited time frame, and express the pretension to victory of at least one of the sides. When events are prolonged beyond a reasonable time frame and appear to be incapable of resolution, we have recourse to the term war of attrition, meaning the mutual attrition by either side of the other side's strength. War is one expression of an economy of violence. It takes place between states, focusing on their armed forces. An armed conflict between at least two sides is a condition for war. Occupation is another expression of the economy of violence. The suppression of the occupied side's power and the negation of its ability to fight (its ability to manifest its power) are conditions for occupation. In war, the physical territory is divided in such a way that the front turns into a stage on which the campaign is enacted. In the case of occupation, the entire territory serves as a stage.

--Ariella Azoulay, Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (MIT Press, 2001), p. 220

Wendel A. White

2009-01-24T12:51:00.000-06:00

Wendel A.White, from the series "Small Towns, Black Lives"

I'd been aware of Wendel A. White for several years before he sat down across the review table from me in New Orleans in December. Some time ago I followed a link to a 2002 New York Times review of his admirable, restrained, and moving web project (solidified into a book by Noyes Museum of Art in 2003), Small Towns, Black Lives, which was the opening chapter in a series of projects investigating concepts of community in African America. Wendel has received a Guggenheim artist fellowship, among many other awards, and he's a professor of art at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, so I was aware of him in the academic world through the Society for Photographic Education; another friend in that context, William E. Williams, had mentioned Wendel to me, and their works are complementary (Willie has done a lot with Civil War battlefields and locations along the Underground Railway). I like what Wendel has brought to a survey of historical and contemporary African American culture in New Jersey; his work has provided important insights for me.

The Times writer described Wendel's images as "restrained rather than theatrical," and they do approach quietly, respectfully, as though aware of their cultural gravitas but relying on a viewer's extended attention and questions to fully animate them. During PhotoNOLA Wendel showed me work from "Schools for the Colored," the third and newest portfolio in the series. Here's an example:

Wendel A. White, from the series "Schools for the Colored"

Sometimes, the buildings themselves are no longer standing:

Wendel A. White, from the series "Schools for the Colored"

Sometimes they've been swallowed up in larger structures:

Wendel A. White, from the series "Schools for the Colored"

The photographs employ a very simple device (masking, using lighter density for the surrounding environment) to memorialize structures that symbolized segregation but also provided shelter, education, and community for children in the "Up-South," the Northern "free" states along the Mason-Dixon line. Wendel ties the visual trope to a memory by W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that when he was growing up he felt "different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil." In Wendel's photographs, the veil dims the world outside the buildings, which take on vividness such as they must have had to those who utilized them in the 19th and 20th centuries--they were oases, distinct from a world that was at best seeing African American lives through a veil, dimly.

Wendel A. White's website

Polaroid a la King

2008-12-14T16:08:00.000-06:00

From "The Sun Dog":

When Kevin loaded the camera, the red light came on. It stayed for a couple of seconds. The family watched in silent fascination as the Sun 660 sniffed for light. Then the red light went out and the green light began to blink rapidly. "It's ready," Kevin said, in the same straining-to-be-offhand-but-not-quite-making-it tone with which Neil Armstrong had reported his first step upon the surface of Luna. "Why don't all you guys stand together?"
...

If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable...and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn't what was wrong with it--that undramatic flatness could hardly be called wrong at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a made-for-television movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only there, like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child's swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting or unique.
...

His eyes hurt, caught between what they should be seeing and what they were seeing, and in the end the only handle he could find was a very small one: it was as if someone had changed the lens on the camera, from the normal one to a fish-eye, so that the dog's forehead with its clots of tangled fur seemed somehow to bulge and recede at the same time, and the dog's murderous eyes seemed to have taken on filthy, barely visible glimmers of red, like the sparks a Polaroid flash sometimes puts in people's eyes.
...

The camera did not moan or whine this time; the sound of its mechanism was a scream, high and drilling, like a woman who is dying in the throes of a breech delivery. The square of paper which shoved and bulled its way out of that slitted opening smoked and fumed. Then the dark delivery-slot itself began to melt, one side drooping downward, the other wrinkling upward, all of it beginning to yawn like a toothless mouth. A bubble was forming upon the shiny surface of the last picture, which still hung in the widening mouth of the channel from which the Polaroid Sun gave birth to its photographs.

From King's prefatory note on the story in the collection Four Past Midnight:

About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-practice. ... In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids, before, of course, but I had never really thought about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time ... and there is something so peculiar about them.

--Stephen King. Four Past Midnight. New York: Viking, 1990.

Bea Nettles

2008-12-12T08:14:00.000-06:00

How many artists have you admired from afar? For much of my time at Minnesota Center for Photography I had in my mind that I wanted Bea Nettles to come and lecture, lead a workshop, run a program with Minnesota Center for Book Arts, meet with local artists, talk with students at MCAD, the UM, and CVA, etc. Colleen Mullins, our gallery director back then, and a fine book artist/photographer in her own right, was a big fan of Bea's. I'd known her through her books, which advocate a very intuitive, organic, hands-on approach to creativity--a cross-disciplinary, craft-oriented approach that probably set her outside mainstream photography. Having produced a survey of alternative printing methods with a title like her 1977 Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook, it was clear, at least to my Ivy-covered eyes, that Nettles was a kind of self-reliant, fashion-be-damned visionary and iconoclast.

Now, I read on her blog that the unique, original tarot deck she created in the early 1970s (with the artist herself posing as the Queen of Stars, above), the first photographically-illustrated tarot (with a Three of Swords image that was acquired by Bruce Springsteen for his album Magic--maybe Boss fans will recognize the shirt, below), has been acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale, where it joins extensive holdings by Stieglitz, Plowden, and other mainstream masters.

Wait long enough, and those you admire will show up in your own backyard, or at least help you reassess your alma mater.

Here's Nettles' note on her web site about the Mountain Dreams Tarot going to Yale, with links to 2 YouTube videos in which she speaks about the project (done "way, way before Photoshop") and the tie to Springsteen.

... and crossing Camp

2008-12-06T20:38:00.009-06:00

From my bed in room 901 of the International House Hotel I can look across Camp Street to the building where the PhotoNOLA reviews take place. It's a quick jaywalk from the hotel across to the annex, and up to the second floor where a score of reviewers have made themselves available to several dozen artists from Louisiana and beyond.

Today, each of us on the receiving side of the table saw 12, and each of the artists presented to four or five of us. I'm not sure who's job is harder, but the day proceeds with unpredictable rhythms. Some photographers are more eager than others for the exchange to be revelatory; some just want a key that will open doors, whether to new opportunities or new self-awareness.

These meetings are like speed dating (or what I imagine of that phenomenon), in that you go away with impressions that may or may not prompt further connections; I tend to dwell on work more than personality. Nonetheless, the chance to add faces, voices, and energies to the images is so valuable; today I met two people whose work I'd seen recently in Critical Mass and IRevelar, and though I'd admired the images in both cases, today I enhanced my appreciation for their personal stakes in our medium.

In an age of electronic reproduction and virtual lives, the face-to-face still holds value. Even established and emerging cyberspace mavens like Joerg Colberg (Conscientious), Andy Adams (Flak), David Bram (Fraction), and Melanie McWhorter (photo-eye) are making analogue connections, in the ballroom across Camp from the International House and in other meeting rooms in the real photo world.

James R. Dean

2008-12-05T15:44:00.000-06:00

James R. Dean, A wild buffalo near Bismarck, ND, Fall, 1978

I sold "Deaner" a Leica M4 a few years ago, and I am sure he's putting it to good use making new pictures. But I also sense he's something of an efficiency nut, and doesn't hesitate to reuse previously published work (of his own). The calendars he's distributing for 2009 are the same ones he made for 1998; he's just run a big red marker x through the earlier year and inscribed the new year besides it. Why not? There were extras left over, the months and days all line up again, and the images haven't spoiled.

James R. Dean, Dip, Avon, MN, October 16, 1999

We've never met face-to-face, though I'd know him in a crowd, having seen many images of him over the years. In 1974 and 1975, the twelve-months when he was 26, he made a photograph of himself every day, and pasted it next to a headline from world events. The chronicle, which Dean published a couple of years ago, is dry, dopey, and entirely fascinating, perhaps because of the glaze of distant decades, perhaps because this sort of self-portraiture has rarely been done by a Red River valley iconoclast and part-time architect--a man, no less--who creates self-portraits in the style of Angelo Rizzuto and whose 98/09 calendar includes notes about Frank Zappa, Charles Bukowski, Robert Doisneau, Bob Dylan, and Elliott Erwitt, along with a cryptic note on Saturday, February 28 that reads "Last Call, 1 AM, 1991"--sobriety thereafter?

His most recent biographic note includes the following itinerary:

Discounting numerous hotels, motels, and floors of friends, he has lived in one house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota; two apartments in Fargo; one VW bus in Europe and northern Africa; another apartment in Fargo; three apartments in Bismarck; two apartments in St. Paul; and one rented cabin in rural Stearns County, Minnesota. He has been arrested twice and married once.

Like this self-narration, Dean's photographs are concise, witty, poignant, and loving, and imply worlds beyond the edges of their frames. Even if I'd had the 2009 calendar a decade ago, I wouldn't mind seeing the photographs again next year. It may not be the big seller that calendars by Michael Kenna or Ansel Adams are, but it, and Dean's photography overall, rings with truth and clear vision.

James R. Dean lives in Avon, Minnesota. See his web page here.

Polaroid terror

2008-12-05T14:59:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not talking about the recent state of the instant photography company, despite the financial and legal perils of its most recent owner, Tom Petters, CEO of Minnetonka, MN-based Petters Group Worldwide ("Petters Arrest Won't Change Polaroid Plans"). I'm talking about the examples I've run across of Polaroid film and cameras being used as plot devices within horror stories.

The title character in Stephen King's short story "The Sun Dog" (from the collection Four Past Midnight) is a rabid canine that is provoked and comes to life within, and ultimately escapes from, the pictures made by a Polaroid Sun 660 camera with a mind's eye of its own, given to a 15-year-old boy as a present then co-opted by an unscrupulous New England antiquities (junk) dealer and loan shark, whose comeuppance is the story's denouement

Episode 4 of the first season of the Showtime series Dexter, in which the Ice Truck killer taunts Dexter, first with Polaroids made to echo, in gruesomely truncated fashion, pictures from Dexter's family album, and then with a picture boldly snapped of Dexter in the company of the man kidnapped by the ITK to serve as the source for the severed limbs in the first pictures (Dexter's burning of that last image gives a good, if massively subdued, visual to illustrate the Sun Dog's escape from its two-dimensional world. Have anyone ever burned a Polaroid? Do they always bubble like that?)

The "Unruhe" episode of The X-Files (season 4, #4), which posits a killer whose use of the instant camera creates pictures of people tormented by "howlers," menacing spirits visible to the killer and his camera but otherwise unseen, whose presence provoke the killer to take action to "ease the pain" -- the disquiet, or unrest, of the episode title translated from German -- of individuals, including Agent Scully, as in the illustration at the top ("Unruhe" was selected as one of the most "nightmare-inducing episodes ever" of this Fox series--see number 6 on this scroll.)

There is something eerie about this material, isn't there? I've got to haul out some of King's verbiage; although the climactic scene is over the top, it doesn't lack for vividness, and he does a good job of articulating the uncanny quality of the self-developing universe within those high tech envelopes. Let me know of other examples of Polaroid terror.

Crossing Lake Pontchartrain

2008-12-05T14:08:00.005-06:00

Flew into New Orleans this morning, low over Lake Pontchartrain, thinking about broken levees and industrial canals and waterlines, the big sucking sound of the lake rushing back into the low-lying areas of the Crescent City after the initial storm surge. Also recalled taking Amtrak's Southern Crescent, across the lake on a track bed so narrow you could only see water out both sides of the car. That was in 1985, after graduation--used travel money from my parents to go from New Haven to New Orleans. Europe without a passport, and a friend's apartment in the French Quarter to make it even more reasonable and attractive. This morning, the big lake sparkled under a clear sky, and a nearly inexplicable line of shadow Xed the railroad tracks; the shadow cast by a jet contrail, seemed unlikely given altitude but as the plane passed under the trail I could see the shadow reach down from the vapor and touch the lake. Magic. Almost as good were the big river's oxbows, first in Memphis then again on the descent in NOLA, the wonder of rechannelled flow and the stilled waters of the old course, and Mark Twain's observations about the shortening of the river.

I'm back in New Orleans for the second year of portfolio reviews run by PhotoNOLA as part of its photographic mois. The city seems brighter this year, and there's an international art festival taking place. But the shuttle driver narrating our way from the airport to the International House Hotel mingled desperation--the litany of "FEMA trailers, wind damage, bad activities, it's gone, they took it out, the abandoned hospital, water lines"--with eternal NOLA spirit, you enjoy your good times and pleasures. Dance in spite of it all, because of it all.

Back at the Napoleon House, a half loaf of muffuletta and a Dixie longneck in front of me, I yearned to recall more about 1985. I'm twice as old now as I was then. I've been to Europe, and China. I've been divorced. My friend in the French Quarter moved to New York to pursue professional goals, forsaking the Big Easy for the Big Apple. I have four children in my life, and emotional complexities and nuances, in a stream both sweet and tart that reaches as far as the Mississippi from the Twin Cities all the way downriver to New Orleans. I am still compelled by photography, and I still find wonder in the streets of the Quarter. The sandwich is still warm and tangy, the beer still as plain and respectable a product of Louisiana as a Grain Belt would be in Minnesota. It's true, you can't step in the same river twice.

David Maisel

2008-11-27T11:33:00.000-06:00

Lake Project 22

The photographer foremost on my mind this Thanksgiving morning is David Maisel. I first connected with David in a very crowded vehicle going to and from the Quaker meeting house in Houston, a structure that is graced with one of James Turrell's "skyspace" installations. As noted on the meeting house site, the view is only available during clement (if that's a word, the opposite of inclement) weather. That morning, and it was an early morning, shortly after sunrise on a March day, was damp, and our ostensible purpose in schlepping out to the House was thwarted--we sat, semi-recumbent on the meeting house benches, and stared at where the sky would have been, a square recess in the ceiling lit indirectly as a kind of replacement view.

During the commute to and from, David and I compared notes. We're about the same age, and were both seasoned by East coast scholar/artists before departing for points west. As it turns out, the experience of (not) seeing Turrell's framed sky was an apt overture to David's work. He was showing the aerial views of poisoned lakes at the time, which resulted in the book The Lake Project (Nazraeli, 2004). The prints were on display in Houston, as part of Fotofest 2004, and I'd seen and marveled at them prior to meeting David; they have a magical combination of attraction, abstraction, and repulsion. I horned in on another reviewer's free-time session with David to get a better sense of the work and the worker. Between that exchange and the Turrell trek I was impressed by David's generosity and his sincere passion for exploring human nature through symbolic means.

Library of Dust 1454

David's newest book, Library of Dust (Chronicle, 2008), turns the tables on The Lake Project and its successor, Oblivion (Nazraeli, 2006). Instead of an unspecified distance, which gives his aerials a woozy, vertiginous ambiguity, this new material puts a premium on intimacy and the (fallacious, ultimately) impression of accuracy. Each of the canisters he depicts, almost life-size on this book's oversized pages, contains the ashes of patients who died and were cremated in a psychiatric hospital, and their remains were unclaimed. Over years, the minerals in the ashes have interacted with the copper urns and created otherworldly patterns that echo the fascinating, inexplicably real imprints David found in the lakes. In the "library," though, the texts are written by orphaned souls, rather than irresponsible industrial waste disposal practices. In these works, conceptual simplicity blends with a surreal sense of life after life, all under an institutional umbrella that leaves us both amazed and appalled.

My Thanksgiving note, the inaugural entry in this new blog venture, goes out to David Maisel, for his elegant provocations and his gorgeous presentations. Not unlike Turrell's work in that Houston meeting house, except that he allows a more rewarding use of one's imagination.

Click for David Maisel's web site and its Library of Dust section.

Troy - my man

2008-04-03T14:45:00.001-05:00

For me, the image of a player. Big guy playing shortstop, hitting well (early in the season).

April 3, 2008

2008-04-03T14:35:00.000-05:00

April 3, 2008

Headless brides. Do I hear a series?

State of Grace

2006-07-25T18:51:00.002-05:00

In the Rake magazine issue of December 2005 I read Jennifer Vogel's exegesis on the religiosity of Eric Enstrom's "Grace" ("That Old-Time Religion," pp. 23-25; one version of the image is reproduced above); it is good for us to have such an abject image of humility in a season--nay, a yearlong culture--of conspicuous consumption. I was disappointed, however, by the omission of the fact that Enstrom's work, or some tinted, altered, photomechanical descendant of it, is the state photograph of Minnesota. Among our state's many symbols--loons, pink-and-white lady slippers, blueberry muffins--is this very image, and we are unique in the nation in having an official state photograph. A copy of it hangs in the Secretary of State's office, by order of state legislation. (Whether it's a gelatin silver print or some non-photographic process is not clear, and deserves further investigation in order to be sure we're not misrepresenting ourselves or mislabeling our symbols.) We are, officially, a "state of Grace," and Enstrom's contested, reconfigured version of it truly does, as Vogel states, "belong to everyone" in the land of 10,000 reflective surfaces. We're also graced with lots of great photographers, though I don't believe our god-fearing leaders meant to celebrate this population in their choice of this symbol.

For further reference--I've written at greater length about the "Grace" issue in a 2002 feature on mnartists.org; you can find it here.

Massive cameras

2006-06-30T05:52:00.001-05:00

The article in PDN, linked above, got me thinking about records. How do you measure a world-record camera? Is the proof in its two-dimensional product, or in its cubic dimensions, or in the linear distance of lens-to-recording medium? There are several orders of magnitude separating the planned hangar-sized "dark room" and the records cited in the article for print scale, which are at most twice my height. Well, to clarify, the image they produce is twice my height, while the hangar will produce a 25 x 100 foot image.

Anyone who's seen Vera Lutter's work knows that large images from airfields have already been secured; I'm not sure if she worked in a darkened hangar, but what other obscurable room would have been available to make the enormous black-and-white prints of airplanes she's exhibited in Chelsea and elsewhere? She made one of the Nabisco box printing factory in Beacon, NY (now the home of Dia:Beacon) that measures about 9 x 14 feet.

British artist Steven Pippin made images using a shipping container transformed into a multi-pinhole camera for "Brilliant!": New Art from London, a mid-1990s Walker Art Center exhibit. The camera recorded images of the space--the museum's Vineland Place lobby--in which it was hung during the show, high enough for people to duck under and view the work from inside out. Here are two views of the installation.

Steven Pippin, Introduction (1995)
Trailer, unique paper negative
Installation: “Brilliant!” New Art from London, October 22, 1995 – January 7, 1996
Outer Lobby, Walker Art Center
Photo Credit: Dan Dennehy for Walker Art Center

Another way to measure the phenomenon is to consider the dimensions of the surface receiving the image. Abe Morell has certainly proven his ability to project and capture image in large spaces, and Aaron Bommarito recently transformed the Minnesota Center for Photography in Minneapolis, 12-foot ceilings and all, into a walk-in camera obscura.

Aaron Bommarito, Interior, Minnesota Center for Photography, May 2006 (copyright 2006 Aaron Bommarito)

I guess records are made to be broken--sometimes by will, sometimes by retrospect, knowing what's come before but has perhaps been unchronicled.

... and moving from an old one

2006-06-01T09:45:00.001-05:00

That's me in the living room of my apartment in St. Paul, which I was in from September 2004 to July 2006, when I left for more spacious digs on Malcolm in Prospect Park, and from there a year later to the house Stephanie and I bought on Cambridge, safely back in St. Paul after my only Minneapolis residence as a grown-up.

Here's Laura in a telling view of the situation:

The flood of books and paper, both mine and my daughters', was a big factor prompting the move. Plus this futon couch, which the girls slept on before the arrival of the Christmas bunk bed, was neglected and begging for a room of its own, or, at least, to unplug itself from the densely-packed living room on Marshall Avenue.

Opening a new space

2006-05-31T16:52:00.000-05:00

I can liken this space to the "professional" journal I used to keep as a distinct space from my "personal" journal. I wanted a book in which to write my thoughts about photography, which I assumed were inconsistent with my thoughts about anything else. Someone once asked me if I was writing something about her in that photo journal, and I brashly answered that no, this is only for ideas about photography. She was perplexed and put out by the reply, and I've mused about it a lot in the intervening years. Now I know that photography is inextricable from my life, and vice versa. I filter so much experience through photography, and encounter so much of the world through the medium and as a result of it, that to segregate it is a vain effort. I have to work to keep photographic currents OUT of the stream of consciousness that flows through my sensorium.