PRC hires George Slade as new Program Manager/Curator

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

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

In Memoriam: Nick Shank, 1941 to 2010

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Pause, To Begin

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

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

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

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

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

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fictographica004: Carter Cox

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

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

fictographica003: Wilfred Eng

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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)

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

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

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

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.