Aperture's Blog, page 166

When to Hold ’Em and When to Fold ’Em A Conversation with Alec Soth

This interview was originally published in issue 007 of The PhotoBook Review.

In June 2014, I had the opportunity to visit with photographer, publisher, and increasingly multidisciplinary artist Alec Soth at his home base in Minneapolis, courtesy of the McKnight Foundation—a longtime patron of Soth’s work, including his most recent project, the LBM Dispatch. In addition to getting a tour of Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom headquarters, we also talked about the nature of an evolving photographic practice, the challenge to find new forms for his work, and the sustainability of the current pace of photobook publishing. What follows is an edited version of an e-mail conversation that took place after that visit, touching base with Soth as he traveled variously to Georgia, the San Juan Islands, Connecticut, Arkansas, and other places in between. The main topic on my mind: what happens next?

—Lesley A. Martin  

Lesley A. Martin: Mr. Soth, you have shown a true commitment to an evolving public output—even when it was apparent that you would much prefer to be hermitted away someplace. Nevertheless, via books from established publishers, posts on your blog and Instagram, publishing yourself and others via the Little Brown Mushroom imprint, or, most recently, hosting workshops about storytelling for the storytelling-indisposed, you have continued to push beyond prior applauded forms. How do you choose the form for a particular body of work and when do you know it’s time to move on, to leave old forms behind? In other words: how do you know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em?

Alec Soth: It really depends on the projects. I do a lot of smallish side projects: zines, online slideshows, that sort of thing. This sort of activity is analogous to a band playing in the garage: it is meant to be quick, dirty, and a bit out of control. These should be ended fairly abruptly to avoid scrubbing away their essential spirit. My larger projects are more like studio albums. These projects take years. Generally I work on them until I’m sick of them, and then work some more.

LAM: You have had a longstanding relationship with Steidl and now MACK Books—ostensibly exactly where a photographer might want to be. Why, then, did you start your imprint, Little Brown Mushroom, and why, as you have tentatively speculated, do you think that it might be entering a different phase for your own publishing?

AS: Little Brown Mushroom is the garage I’m talking about. Or a sandbox. It is a place to play with others. But it isn’t a business, nor do I want it to be a business. I don’t want to worry too much about spreadsheets and market penetration. But for my larger projects, I want to work with someone who understands that kind of stuff. I want those projects to be seen widely.

LAM: Do you think there is, inherently, a natural and possibly limited lifespan to this current creative boom of the self- or indie-published photobook? What are the downsides to success in this arena—for yourself and for the community at large?

AS: I think there will always be books, but they will become increasingly expensive. I also think there will always be people doing cheap, alternative printing, but my sense is that this will lose some steam over time. Success is always problematic. It is too easy to become comfortable and repetitive. It’s too easy to stop taking chances.

LAM: Right. I’m also going to assume the continued existence of books; but there is a whole other level of the activity that has come to surround the photobook and photobook-making. At the point when we have festivals or fairs in every city, every country has a regional book about photobooks of that country, and there is an actual PhotoBook Museum—then what? How does or can this make sense, moving forward?

AS: There is more than a little irony about our desire to fix the moment permanently. But it’s probably just best to enjoy it for what it is (or was) and not expect it to continue on in the same way. But there will be new, great moments. New communities. I’m particularly excited about what is happening at the intersection between photography and performance, for example. There is so much new, uncharted territory.

LAM: I’d like to also ask you to talk a little bit more about what you’re doing with the LBM Camp for Socially Awkward Storytellers. First, why a summer camp? And second, is this where all that fun in the garage or the sandbox leads? At a certain point, do you pass the keys to the garage to others? Third, this idea of bringing people together and working together is a particularly social way of approaching the act of storytelling. Do you see the future of storytelling—and perhaps of bookmaking—as a collaborative act?

AS: I’ve always been interested in storytelling, but the fact of the matter is I’m a lousy storyteller. I remember having to speak at my brother’s wedding. I was so nervous that I wrote everything out. And then my voice trembled so badly that nobody could understand anything I said. I was attracted to photography and the photobook because it allowed me to approach storytelling in an oblique way. I still love this about the medium. But over the years, I’ve also been pushed and shoved into the role of public speaking. After giving countless slideshow talks about my work, I started to see the creative potential of the form. In order to learn more about it, I created the Camp for Socially Awkward Storytellers. Fifteen artists from around the world came to my studio and essentially taught me about the huge potential of this medium.

Does that mean I see my future as being a collaborative artist? Not at all. I’ve just spent three years working on a project with a writer; it was one of the great experiences of my life, but I’m dying to get back to work alone on something. That said, I have no idea how my new work will eventually be presented. While I invariably first find myself thinking about the pages of a book, I could see myself giving a performance or doing a site-specific installation. I don’t have any definitions just yet, which is part of the fun.

But broadly speaking I’ve been thinking about this by analogy to the world of music. Most photography nowadays functions like most music: free online. I’m a fan of this and have always engaged in things like blogs, Tumblr, and Instagram. But this streaming flow seems to make more physical, tactile experiences all the more important. This, I think, is part of the reason photobooks, like vinyl records, have become more popular of late. People want to touch something. But people also want an experience. This is where traditional exhibitions as well as more temporary installations and performances come into play. A traditional exhibition is like going to the symphony; a pop-up show is like going to a rave.

LAM: Is this also possibly another way in which contemporary practice might be moving away from the photobook as a primary vehicle? I know that anytime you have “Photography Plus” (Photography + Sculpture, Photography + Video, Photography + Painting), it’s hard and probably less appropriate to try to contain it in a book.

AS: I don’t think that the practice is moving away from the photobook—I just think the tent is getting bigger. To use the music analogy again, the fact that people are buying more vinyl records doesn’t mean they’ll download less free digital music or attend fewer concerts. In many ways, the multiplicity of distribution platforms is simply the result of the medium’s success. So stop worrying already!

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Alec Soth’s work has been the subject of many exhibitions, including The Space Between Us, a major retrospective presented at Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 2008; and From Here to There, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2010. Among Soth’s monographs are Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl, 2004) and Broken Manual (Steidl, 2010). In 2008 Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. He is a member of Magnum Photos. alecsoth.com

Jason Polan is an illustrator who has been published in the New Yorker and the New York Times, among others. He is founder of the Taco Bell Drawing Club. jasonpolan.com

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A Conversation with Alec Soth appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Future of Photography

 

 

“We’re held to highly professional expectations, which really means we get the chance to feel the excitement of seeing our contributions play out and impact the foundation’s work.”

— Max Campbell, Digital Media Work Scholar, July 2014–January 2015

Hundreds of young professionals, photographers, editors, scholars, and publishers have gotten their start at Aperture Foundation, including artists Gregory Crewdson and Taryn Simon; curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Corey Keller; and associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Christopher Lew, as well as the publisher of Aperture’s book program, Lesley A. Martin.

Aperture mentors young professionals by giving them substantive work experience both at our Chelsea offices and through other opportunities, such as visits to public and private collections as well as to artists’ studios, and informational luncheons with photographers and scholars.

Click above to hear from 2004–5 Editorial and Development Aperture Work Scholar Christopher Lew, who now champions young and emerging artists at the Whitney Museum.

Your generous end-of-year gift will create a transformative opportunity for a young professional to embark on his or her career!

Click here to make your tax-deductible donation.

Visit aperture.org/join to learn about other ways to get involved.

Sincerely, thank you for your support.

With best wishes,

 

 

 

 

Chris Boot

Executive Director

Download Aperture’s Winter Appeal letter

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Duane Michals at the Carnegie Museum

Duane Michals, This Photograph Is My Proof, 1967. Courtesy the artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals, 'Magritte with Hat,' 1965. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery.

Duane Michals, 'Sting Looking Like a Young Danny Kaye,' 1982. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery and the artist.

Duane Michals, 'I Think about Thinking,' 2000. Courtesy the artist and DC Moore Gallery.

Duane Michals, 'Andy Warhol,' 1972. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Courtesy the artist and DC Moore Gallery.

A new exhibition at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, aptly titled Storyteller, explores the whimsical and innovative photography of Duane Michals. In his fifty-year-long career, Michals has photographed celebrities, artists, writers, and everyday scenes—a stolen kiss, a grandfather’s deathbed—and infused them with a quality of wonder only made possible with the camera. The self-taught photographer’s career in commercial photography informed his sly, narrative style; he is now perhaps best-known for his original use of photo-sequencing to tell short photographic tales, first used in his 1970 book Sequences, as well as for his use of handwritten texts, which intimately adorn his images. His sequences present simple scenes of subtle magic: in unfolding sets of images, a man awakes a sleeping woman with a kiss, or a child watches his grandfather go to heaven (or, rather, an elderly man outfitted with angel wings progressively creeps toward a window, then disappears in the final shot).

In empathetic and often funny photographs, Michals’s portraits reveal his keen eye for both the personality and work of artists ranging from Joseph Cornell to Andy Warhol to René Magritte. His depictions often imagine these figures as they might realize their own artworks, while reflecting Michals’s idiosyncratic style: a smirking Magritte wears a bowler hat, his image overlaid with a double exposure of another hat; Joseph Cornell, hunched over against a window, appears as if he were a strip of paper sliced by light; and a preening, shirtless Sting stands alongside a skeleton (the caption reads, “STING LOOKING LIKE A YOUNG DANNY KAYE”). Michals’s portraiture goes beyond capturing resemblance, offering something more like a glimpse of the spirit of both sitter and subject—with an ample dose of humor and mutual understanding.

Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, through February 16, 2015.

 

 

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Robin Schwartz: Amelia and the Animals (Video)

On Monday, December 1, we joined Robin Schwartz and her daughter, Amelia Paul Forman, for a talk and book signing of Amelia and the Animals, Schwartz’s second monograph featuring the collaborative photographic series dedicated to documenting her adventures with her daughter among animals. Work by Schwartz was also on view for the evening in Aperture’s bookstore.

 

Amelia & The Animals




$39.95

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Office Romance with Kathy Ryan (Video)

Office Romance is Kathy Ryan’s photographic love song to life at her office. Mostly shot on the sixth floor of the landmark Renzo Piano-designed New York Times building, where she works as director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, Ryan captures moments of lumi­nous beauty in her daily routine. She welcomed us there to explore the architecture, the light, and to discuss how Office Romance began, first on her Instagram feed.

Office Romance




$29.95

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At the 2014 FotoFocus Biennial

By Michael Famighetti

Taio Onarato and Nico Krebs, Biggest Cross in Texas, 2005 from The Great Unreal. Courtesy RaebervonStenglin, Zurich and Peter Lav Gallery, Copenhagen

Taiyo Onarato and Nico Krebs, Red Glow, 2006 from The Great Unreal. Courtesy RaebervonStenglin, Zurich and Peter Lav Gallery, Copenhagen

Bruce Conner, REPORT, 1963-67. Courtesy Michael Kohn Gallery and Conner Family Trust

Nicolas Provost, STARDUST, 2010. Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

David Benjamin Sherry, Crown Of The Continent, Montana 2011, 2012. Courtesy of artist and Salon 94, New York

Matthew Porter, Airport Road, 2009. Courtesy of M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

Vivian Maier, Self-portrait, Chicago, July 27, 1971. Photographer's collection stamp signed by John Maloof with date, print date, and edition number in ink
on print verso.

Michael Wolf, Night #20, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Barbara Probst, Exposure #106: N.Y.C., Broome & Crosby Streets, 04.17.13, 2:29 p.m., 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

Jason Evans, Untitled, from the series “NYLPT,” 2008. Courtesy of the photographer

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Head #23, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.

Olivo Barbieri, site specific_Istanbul #4, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

Many buildings in downtown Cincinnati, a bastion of weathered 19th-century architecture, are covered with trompe l’oeil paintings. This provided an apt backdrop for a festival of photography, especially one anchored by an exhibition of the Swiss duo Taio Onarato and Nico Krebs, whose playful mixed-media works play with photographic illusion, perception, and tropes of the American road trip. This second edition of FotoFocus, a biennial founded by photographer and avid photography enthusiast, Thomas Schiff, was organized by New York­–based independent curator Kevin Moore, and took a non-thematic approach to offer a broad range of photography throughout the city.

Vacant storefronts were rented by the Biennial, held from October 1 to November 8, and renovated—or as in Moore’s words “white-cubed”—then transformed into clean exhibition spaces. David Benjamin Sherry, an LA–based photographer, uses a view camera to photograph iconic vistas in the Western landscape, which are then output in intense, psychedelic color (achieved in an analog darkroom). These images were displayed alongside his key references: well-known images by modernist American photographers from Edward Weston to Frederick Sommer to Minor White. Just down the street, a Vivian Maier exhibition had been staged in another quaint storefront. By now Maier’s story is as famous, if not more so, than her images: working in obscurity during her lifetime, she was employed as a nanny in Chicago while actively producing a remarkable body of photographic work. Her work came to widespread recognition around 2007 and is currently embroiled in a legal dispute regarding who holds the rights to her photographs, now posthumously printed, editioned, and sold. (Maier was also the subject of this year’s popular documentary film Finding Vivian Maier.)

Two conversant exhibitions, “Screenings” at Michael Lowe Gallery and “Stills” at Lightborne Studios, explored the relationships between still photography and the moving image, and included a broad range of work presented in two spaces. “Screenings” included classics of experimental film, such as Len Lye’s “Trade Tattoo” (1937); Bruce Conner’s “Report” (1967); and Peter Roeh’s hypnotic films from the 1960s that rewire footage from commercials as well as more recent works by Moyra Davey and Rainer Ganahl.

A series of conversations with artists and curators rounded out the programming: Jeff Rosenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s head of photography, presented his research on Civil War photography with evangelical passion; whereas, the following night, filmmaker John Waters, an avid photography collector, and author of cinema’s best satire of art-world praise heaped on a young talent, Pecker, performed a prurient stand-up routine structured around his back catalog of films. During its brief run, FotoFocus drew over 61,000 visitors, making clear that there is an appetite for photography within the city—one created and sated by the Biennial.

The Cincinnati Museum of Art concurrently opened “Eyes on the Street,” the museum’s first photography exhibition curated by Brian Sholis (a former Aperture editor), which runs through January 5. The smart, tightly executed show meant to expand the often-limited idea of what defines the genre of street photography. Instead of the usual midcentury characters associated with the genre such as Garry Winogrand, “Eyes on the Street” took a more capacious approach to exploring how photography—and the moving image—shapes our experience of public space. Well-known projects like Philip-Lorca DiCorcia’s “Heads” and Paul Graham’s diptychs and triptychs from his series “The Present” refer back to more familiar conventions of the genre, Jill Magid’s video work, made with help of London’s CCTV system, explore the ways in which cameras record and police everyday interactions, raising questions about the balance between public safety and individual privacy. Sholis’s exhibition title is borrowed from Jane Jacobs’s classic 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which argued that the citizen’s own gaze was essential to maintaining urban health.

Some of the work in this exhibition depicts urban spaces that disregard traditional notions of street life: Olivo Barbieri’s series “Site Specific” and Michael Wolf’s images of dizzying high-rises in Asia point to the kind of large-scale, grand-planning that Jacobs famously challenged. However, James Nares’s hypnotic video Street elegantly captures life on New York’s sidewalks unfolding in infinite gestural variety. This is the activity that Jacobs praised—the small interactions of the everyday—and the chaos that classic street photographers like Winogrand sought to organize within their viewfinders. Nares’s film underscores the exhibition’s idea that the street is too rich and complex a location to be reduced to a singular genre of image making.

_____

Michael Famighetti is editor of Aperture magazine.

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Drew Sawyer: Morgan Fisher’s Melancholic Modernism

Morgan Fisher, Lumière Alticolor Lumière du Jour 106 July 1956, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Ilford FP3 120 December 1959, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Gevaert Microgran Panchro 24 x 36 October 1951, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Dufay Ortho Y20 B.S. Size 3 January 1954, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Perutz Peromnia 6 x 9 April 1955, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Agfacolor Negativfilm K 24 x 36 mm August 1955, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Adox R14 120 July 1958, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Production Footage, 1971, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Production Footage, 1971, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Morgan Fisher, Production Footage, 1971, 2014. © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

From his structural films in the 1960s through the 1980s to his monochrome paintings begun in the 1990s, Santa Monica–based artist Morgan Fisher has consistently and intelligently deconstructed the machinery of representation. For a new body of work on view at Maureen Paley in London and his first solo exhibition, titled “Past Present, Present Past,” the artist turns his attention to the dashed hopes of photography at mid-twentieth century. Twelve photographs document unopened boxes of rolls of film by European manufacturers from the 1950s, the decade in which he both grew up and became aware of photography and its history. Also using film, Fisher shot each unused box, with its bold color and graphics, against a gray background that simultaneously recalls the detachment of commercial photography and the cool aesthetics of Pop and Minimalist art. The repetition of subject matter and formal strategies shifts the viewer’s attention away from authorship to consider systems of production and technological obsolescence. The photographs, according to Fisher, “are examples of waste, things that have gone unused and are now useless, specific signs of what more generally we can call oblivion.”

Fisher and the gallery juxtapose the photographs with two early films, Production Footage (1971) and Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves (1980), respectively shot on 16mm film and Polavision. They demonstrate the artist’s early interest in camera equipment and structures as well as his own changing relationship to outmoded technologies. Working as an editor in the commercial film industry led to Fisher’s deep interest in dissecting the systems of cinema, from its physical materials to moviemaking production methods. Production Footage, for example, records the use of two cameras, one an archetypal black-and-white film Hollywood studio camera on a dolly and the other a small handheld camera using color film, in addition to the type of image that each of them produces.

While much of Fisher’s art relies on acts of impersonalization that remove intentional markers and subjectivity, his works often derive from autobiographical sources. In 2013, the artist produced a series of monochrome paintings based on paint chips in Exterior and Interior Color Beauty, a 1935 booklet by General Houses, Inc., a prefabricated house manufacturer founded by his father, Howard T. Fisher. The canvases originate in found materials that at once reference the artist’s childhood, the history of modernism, and the production of images—here, the ideal middle class home. The photographs of expired film boxes similarly memorialize the artist’s childhood and father, also an accomplished photographer, who introduced him to the medium as a boy.

For over a decade Fisher has been producing work that examines now-vanished photographic cultures. In 2011, he produced a similar body of work that documented film boxes produced in the United States in the 1950s. First exhibited at Bortolami Gallery in New York, the photographs were shown alongside a series of pencil rubbings made from 1950’s embossed covers of the conservative British photography annual Photograms of the Year, which his father had in his library. In 2002, Fisher also produced tracings of advertisements in the now long-defunct journal US Camera Annual. The line drawings of the aspirational pictures and slogans heighten and commemorate the naivety of amateur photographic cultures and postwar middle class dreams while also referencing the camera lucida, an optical device that refracted a section of a landscape view on to paper, which photography rendered archaic.

“In the most general sense,” Fisher says, “what underpins these bodies of work is anxiety about what the passing of time will have to say to our ambitions and hopes, earnest and in good faith though we may be. And how quickly and irrevocably what had once been the present becomes the past and with it oblivion.” Fisher’s photographs present relics that reflect on both old and new systems of image production, distribution, and consumption. Ultimately they reveal, as the artist has stated, “the power of obsolescence to disturb.”

“Past Present, Present Past” is on view at Maureen Paley in London through January 25. 

_____

Drew Sawyer, an art historian and curator, is currently Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Erica Baum: Wordplay

The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

Introduction by Nat Trotman

Erica Baum is fascinated by the printed word. Whether scavenging newspaper clippings, vintage paperbacks, or half- cleaned chalkboards, she reveals unexpected poetry in the language that permeates everyday life. She approaches these materials almost scientifically, creating discrete but concurrent series of images that straightforwardly document their sources. Conjuring her objects of study through fragmentary details, shot in close-up and with shallow depth of field, Baum evokes an intimate space in which viewers can decipher the images according to their own associations and memories. Her works accentuate this character by highlighting manifestations of language marked by obsolescence, such as lyrics appearing on player–piano rolls. The Card Catalogue series pictures its eponymous subject in extreme detail, focusing on just a few subject markers amid rows of index cards bearing information related to those topics. In Baum’s hands these headings seem to hover against an abstract visual field, like ghostly relics of a pre-digital era— a point made all the more succinctly in her topic selection for Untitled (Apparitions) (1997).

An admirer of concrete poetry, Baum takes up Brion Gysin’s exhortation that “words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody can make them gush into action.” Photography provides a means for her to combine the chance effects of Gysin’s cut-up method with her own reverence for the materiality of the printed page. In the Dog Ear series she ingeniously fuses these verbal and visual qualities by photographing the folded corners of book pages. Works like Differently (2009) and Enfold (2013) draw attention to the physical layout of margins, page numbers, line spacing, and font design while transforming their found texts into syncopated blocks of signification in potentia. The regular folds that cut diagonals across each square frame recall the formal rigor of Minimalism even as they reference the more subjective act of marking significant passages in old books. Baum draws out the luscious physicality of these common objects: the various textures of woven paper, the yellowing tones of age, the hint of ink bleeding through thin pages.

In the Naked Eye series, Baum photographs old softcovers from the side, choosing to show their pages rather than the spines, and fanning the pages out to create mysterious chance juxtapositions. Words appear sliced or foreshortened, giving way to flattened strips of images—film starlets, clouds, fragments of buildings—that, as in Amnesia (2009), are sandwiched between the rippling and vividly dyed edges of surrounding pages. Bereft of caption and context, these illustrations take over the role of displaced signifier previously held by catalog keywords like daggers and cloaks. Digging through old books on cinema for works like Flint (2009) and Clara (2013), Baum selects anonymous figures who either cast oblique glances off the frame of the page or seem poised for the gaze. Leaving their narratives necessarily unresolved, she spins a web of longing that resonates with her own attraction to the source material. Through these open-ended investigations Baum honors the tradition of print—that textured, tangible objectification of language that inexorably fades with each passing year.

Erica Baum, Untitled (Apparitions), 1997, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Untitled (Daggers Cloaks), 1998, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Word Intention, 2014, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Enfold, 2013, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Differently, 2009, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Clara, 2013, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Amnesia, 2009, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

Erica Baum, Flint, 2009, courtesy Bureau, New York

 

_____

Nat Trotman is an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

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Mary Ellen Mark: Developing Personal Projects

Mary Ellen Mark, “Rat” and Mike with a gun, Seattle, Washington, 1983

Join Mary Ellen Mark for this workshop designed to help photographers develop and sustain individual personal projects. Mark has produced nineteen books, including three (Streetwise, American Odyssey, and Twins) with Aperture, with whom she is currently working on two additional books. Since she started to photograph in the 1960s, the whole process of creating, maintaining, and bringing personal projects to completion has changed enormously. It is much more difficult now, as there are no longer the same support mechanisms there were when Mark began as a photographer. For instance, magazines used to be one of the resources and outlets for her production of personal work; that’s no longer possible. Today, one must be much more resourceful to complete a project and, hopefully, produce a book. In this workshop, Mark will advise how each student might proceed to achieve the highest photographic potential of their work.

    Each student should bring work-in-progress to the workshop—either the beginnings of a project, or work they feel leads to another project they wish to start. Following an open critique, Mark and the class will discuss how each person might best move forward with their projects.

 

Mary Ellen Mark has achieved worldwide visibility through her numerous books, exhibitions, and editorial magazine work. She has published photo-essays and portraits in publications such as the New Yorker, LIFE, and the New York Times Magazine. Mark has received several awards, including the Cornell Capa Award; Infinity Award for Photojournalism; Dr. Erich Salomon Award; Sony World Photography Awards’ Outstanding Contribution to Photography; Victor Hasselblad Cover Award; two Robert F. Kennedy Awards; and the Creative Arts Award Citation for Photography at Brandeis University. She was presented with two honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and is the recipient of the Erna & Victor Hasselblad Foundation Grant, Walter Annenberg Grant, and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She also acted as the associate producer of the major motion picture American Heart (1992), directed by Martin Bell.

 

Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture members at the Dual/Friend level and above)

 

herRegister here

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

General Terms and Conditions

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements.

 

Release and Waiver of Liability

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

 

Lost, Stolen, or Damaged Equipment

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture. We recommend, for instance, that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all electrical appliances.

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Todd Hido: Sources and Influences

#11374-8145, 2014 © Todd Hido courtesy Rose Gallery

 

“Part of being a photographer is noticing surface details and how they represent something larger; it’s like being a detective or psychologist.” —from Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude (Aperture, 2014)

 

Nocturnal illumination, weather phenomena, and differing temperatures of electric light lend an eerie quality to Todd Hido’s unique landscape photographs. Join Hido as he shares his expertise in a weekend workshop for artists and documentarians alike. The course will cover the experiences, strategies, and influences that form and shape a photographer’s career. He will candidly present his own work and provide answers to the elusive questions all photographers ask themselves: Where does my work come from? What does it say? How can I express myself more effectively?

    Included in the workshop will be a portfolio review where each student will receive personalized feedback and tasks for improvement. Students will also study the precedent set by other photographers as a rich source of inspiration. The workshop’s main objective is to provide students with a framework for intuitive self-discovery and the merging of one’s practice and one’s everyday life. Lunch will be served both days.

Todd Hido (born in Kent, Ohio, 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area–based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Metropolis, the Face, I-D, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions. He has published more than a dozen books, including Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013). Hido earned a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California, and is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco.

 

Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture members at the Dual/Friend level and above)

herRegister here

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

General Terms and Conditions

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements.

 

Release and Waiver of Liability

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

Refund/Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshops

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

 

Lost, Stolen, or Damaged Equipment

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture. We recommend, for instance, that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all electrical appliances.

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