A City as Once Seen by Stuart Klipper

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

April 3, 2008

April 3, 2008

Headless brides. Do I hear a series?

State of Grace

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

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

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

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.