Pieter Hugo Redeemed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)