Aperture's Blog, page 199
March 7, 2013
Emily Davidson, Bruce Davidson Book Talk
From the series Brooklyn Gang, 1959 © Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos
In 1959, Bruce Davidson spent eleven months shooting images of the members of a Brooklyn gang that included a young Bobby Powers, producing one of the first full-immersion photo essays about an American youth subculture. Nearly forty years later, in 1998, journalist Emily Davidson began a decade-long correspondence with Powers, former gang leader turned drug-addiction counselor, a project to bring to light Powers’s struggle to overcome his drug-ridden and violent past. Decades of photographic documentation and correspondence has culminated in Bobby’s Book (Seven Stories Press, 2012), authored by Emily Haas Davidson, as told by Bob Powers, with photographs by Bruce Davidson.
Join Bob Powers, Emily Haas Davidson, and Bruce Davidson in New York next Tuesday, March 12, 2013, for a conversation about Bobby’s Book. The event will also feature a slideshow of Bruce Davision’s 1959 photographs.
Bobby’s Book: A conversation with Emily Haas Davidson, Bruce Davidson, and Bob Powers
Tuesday, March 12, 2013, at 7:00 pm
Barnes & Noble (86th and Lexington Avenue)
New York
Related Links:
“With Brass-Knuckled Tales, 50′s Street Gang Looks Back” –
New York Times
Bruce Davidson: Retrospective
at Robert Klein Gallery in Boston through March 30 –
Le Journal
“Leader of the Pack” –
New York Times
Subway
$65.00
Untitled, (Couple on the Platform) from Subway,1980
$1,500.00
Swiping at Pictures
This essay is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s Spring 2013 issue.
Trisha Baga, installation view of The Biggest Circle at Greene Naftali, New York, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photograph: Martha Fleming-Ives.
As smartphones and tablets become enmeshed in our daily activities and everything from the flat-screen TV to the kitchen fridge becomes connected to the cloud, our relationship to technology and to the Internet has changed dramatically. It is no longer a matter of yes or no, Luddite or first adopter, online or off. Rather, life entails a range of interactions that combine direct encounters with information that is pulled from the ether. Everyday experience is a triangulation of three points: first, what is physically in the world; second, what is on the touch screen in one’s hand; and third, how the mind processes it all. It is as common as meeting a friend over coffee while texting another and then checking which celebrity has been spotted where by the Daily Mail. These types of interactions have changed—in big and small ways—how we engage with one another, how we process images and information, and how we regard the world at large.
I do not propose that technology alone has radically reshaped contemporary life, but rather that recent innovations have facilitated tendencies that began with the rise of advertising and media culture in the first half of the twentieth century and continued through the explosion of images in the 1970s and ’80s. Art has always attempted to bring new meaning to the rapid changes caused by technology. Pop Art, which emerged in the late 1950s, and the Pictures Generation of the ’70s and ’80s examined and made use of images that held currency in their respective times. A new generation of artists is now utilizing early-twenty-first-century images and exploring what they mean. Unlike in previous decades, today’s pictures circulate in an increasingly interactive and participatory manner, and the distinction between original and copy has been rendered more and more inconsequential.
Helen Marten fully acknowledges the circuitous life of images. In a 2011 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, she says, “There is a viral mentality that borrows from a mass of known imagery, from accessible and generous vocabularies, but does so understanding that it will become dispersed, boot-legged, pirated.” Her sculptures and videos are populated with logos and brands—known forms that she draws together, alluding to rebus-like meanings—and yet comprise a shorthand that frustrates direct communication. By featuring BMW logos, bottles of Campari, and Oakley sunglasses, Marten takes advantage of the status and desirability companies have tried to impart to their products. Tracing the history of modern advertising in his 2002 BBC documentary The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis notes of this phenomenon, “irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you want to be seen by others.”
Michele Abeles, Publicity Photograph, Artist Michele Abeles, Rob Pruitt 2010 Art Awards, 2011. Courtesy Roger Kirsby.
The circulation of images and a sense of visual literacy is made explicit in the work of Michele Abeles and Lucas Blalock, two artists who are steeped in photographic tradition and attuned to image dissemination. In her recent photographs, Abeles has incorporated details of previous compositions, making explicit the meme-like replication and development of images. In a performative mode, Abeles had actress Paz de la Huerta take her place at Rob Pruitt’s 2010 Art Awards, for which the photographer was nominated as New Artist of the Year. The hot downtown actress stood in for the emerging artist like one stock photo swapped for another. Blalock riffs on commercial images, still lifes, and architectural shots in humorous photographs made with a large-format camera and a computer. He takes pictures of ordinary objects like erasers, fabrics, and drinking glasses to create an archive of images that he later manipulates in Photoshop. One image may be layered onto another, or sections of a picture can be duplicated or erased; each manipulation is blunt and visible, as if the images had gone awry. Adept at moving between various styles of photography—a skill that goes beyond mimicry—his works make apparent the highly constructed nature of images and, at times, offer backhanded compliments to other artists mining similar ground.
Lucas Blalock, installation view of xyz, Ramiken Crucible, New York, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Ramiken Crucible, New York.
Margaret Lee, installation view of New Pictures of Common Objects, MoMA PS1, New York, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Hanley Gallery. Photograph: Joerg Lohse.
Margaret Lee creates lifelike sculptures of fruits and vegetables by casting them in plaster and then hand-painting them with acrylic. Lee aspires for the perfect fruit, one that never rots and appeals both to the eye and camera. Composed like ads, the photographs she takes of these objects often include hand models or decorative elements like ferns and furniture. In exhibitions the photographs may be presented with the sculptures they depict, as well as with furniture and objects reminiscent of those in the images. This is not to suggest a photo shoot, but rather to bring closer together the object and its image. The photograph—through the language of advertising—creates a context for the object that is related to, but different from, the sculpture in the same space. The eggplant’s marble base may differ from the one depicted in the image. The plant in the gallery does not match the photograph. And yet the work and its image seem to serve the same aims, in particular to narrow the gap between objects and images, a divide that is currently bridged by fingertips and touch screens.
Describing an attempt to sculpt clay, artist Mark Leckey says, “it was as if my body, the instinctual part of it, couldn’t grasp why I couldn’t just copy, paste, and flip the other half [of the material].” We are all babies learning when it is appropriate to pinch and swipe. A sense of this familiar but strange space, in which it is difficult to distinguish between the physical world and video images, is evoked in Trisha Baga’s installations. Her works bring together video projections, found objects, paintings, and other elements created by the artist. Video footage—a combination of material she shot herself and culled from pop-culture sources—is projected onto a field of objects to produce an array of shadows that nest themselves within the video images. For Baga, the shadows represent the space between the physical object and video—a gradient of light and dark she taps to treat unwieldy topics like American history.
Another artist who points towards future ways of making is Josh Kline, who has utilized 3-D scanners and printers to create sculptures of the hands and feet of creative workers. By scanning footwear designers wearing their own creations and the hands of tastemakers—writers, artists, and designers—holding bottled drinks of their choice, Kline has made fragmentary portraits that double as product displays. Presented on metal shelves with custom lighting, the metonymic works evoke the seemingly limitless supply of a convenience store; they become a shop that holds the promise of copies tailored for each customer. Additionally, Kline’s titles explicitly identify by name and profession the individuals whose feet and hands were scanned. By doing so he metaphorically point towards the social networks that connect us professionally and personally. Kline has taken the visual language of advertising and commercial display—a language in which he says we are not only literate but fluent—and uses it to do something other than push products.
Similarly playing against expectations, Darren Bader has been known to include the work of other artists, and even non-artists, in his solo exhibitions. Exhibited without attribution or marks of differentiation, Bader fosters a space of equivalence. A framed movie poster can be regarded alongside a French horn filled with guacamole or a live snake improbably accompanied by mittens and a dildo. How Bader’s work is presented in publications is just as surprising. He generally prefers that his images to run without captions; one is never sure if the images he submits are of another artist’s work or sourced elsewhere. Bader does not aim to trick the viewer. Instead, his published images suggest a placeholder or stand-in, an acknowledgement that these have been and will continue to be subjected to what Marten calls acts of dispersion, bootlegging, and piracy.
Within Pop Art, Hal Foster sees a politics “centered on its commitment to what is held in common, including our shared image world understood (perhaps perversely) as a newfangled commons.” The Internet has made manifest our shared image world. Despite the fact that much of it is colonized by corporations, it serves as a digital commons that exerts a force of equivalence. Minority voices like conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers are as easy to find as traditional sources of journalistic information. Because you can Google it does not make it true. In his essay on the role of journalism today, Der Spiegel reporter Ullrich Fichtner writes, “In the ever-chatting grinder of the web, facts can look like just opinions; and opinions can wander around like facts.” Such commingling of fact and fiction allows for notions untethered to reality to grow in popularity and furthers a frame of mind that blends news and entertainment—as seen on twenty-four-hour news channels. It also gives rise to the bizarre scenes in which acting and real life are nearly indistinguishable. How does one parse Sarah Palin’s bid to be vice president from her showdown with her Saturday Night Live impersonator, or Charlie Sheen’s “winning” meltdown and his role on Two and a Half Men? On their own, such incidents may not seem of consequence, but in times of climate change and political upheaval the difference between fact and fiction is one we cannot fail to see.
Josh Kline, Tastemaker’s Choice, 2012. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal. Photograph: Joerg Lohse.
Helen Marten, installation view of Plank Salad, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2012. Courtesy of the artist, Johann König, Berlin, and T293, Rome and Naples.
This essay is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s Spring 2013 issue.
March 6, 2013
Photography at Novartis AG
Cover of Novartis AG Annual Report, 2012. Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark.
Cover of Novartis AG Annual Report, 2011. Photograph by Eugene Richards.
Cover of Novartis AG Annual Report, 2004. Photograph by Cristina Garcia Rodero.
Melissa Harris: Does a specific mission or philosophy guide Novartis? Does that relate to your reason for welcoming artists to work with the company?
Daniel Vasella: Yes, our mission is to always find better medicines for patients, and that implies curing and caring for people. Human beings are at the center of all we do. Art is an essential part of human existence, a very important way to express feelings and thoughts which are not always rational or conscious. Artists have ways of crossing barriers and boundaries, transcending cultures. So, art in companies often builds bridges and touches people and associates.
In choosing specific photographers, you always have to look at a person’s background. I myself am trained as a physician and that influences me.
MH: In what particular area?
DV: I was trained in internal medicine and psychosomatic medicine. That has always remained close to my heart.
MH: What role does art and architecture play at Novartis?
DV: I do believe our “internal” Novartis audience responds to the art collection, and also the excellent and diverse architecture that comprises our campus. We have a highly educated employee base. Our concept was to create a lot of open space, to facilitate interaction inside the buildings, but also between buildings—in the courtyards, the open spaces, and so forth. We aim to integrate these spaces with art.
For example, the first building was conceived as collaboration between a painter and an architect. The painter did the outside facade, the design, and the architect completed the rest. In every building, we have one or more artists—but at least one who makes a major intervention.
MH: So part of the philosophy, then, in terms your sensibility, has to do with collaboration at some level.
DV: Yes, collaboration is essential. Nobody can achieve alone what we can realize collaboratively. Our work is such a complex endeavor. How do you get people to work together not only vertically within one function, but also across functions? How do you make sure that people’s intrinsic motivation for the job they are doing is not constrained, but is appreciated and utilized?
Along these lines, the annual report was at one time just an informational and promotional approach to community building, but did not actively engage people. It was my ambition to have the annual report embrace the high standards we apply in other areas of our business. The photography it contained should be more than simply photography; I felt it should go beyond the text. I am much more of a visual person.
Cover of Novartis AG Annual Report, 2009. Photograph by Steve McCurry.
MH: But how did you get this way?
DV: If only I knew! For my parents, art was important. Probably more for my mother than for my father. We had very little, but it was always appreciated. I grew up in Switzerland. At seventeen, I began to collect Japanese prints. I did not have a very significant budget but all the money I had went into the prints. I loved it. Maybe my brother played a role also. He is ten years older than I am and liked Asian art.
Then I took art history classes. I remember we visited the medieval town in which I grew up, and for the first time I looked at the houses, the architecture. Because I had been taught to look at specifics, and symbolic meanings, and the Gothic style of building, I became very interested.
MH: When did photography come into play?
DV: At the same time; no, in fact, earlier. I started to take pictures myself, and created my own darkroom. I entered competitions, but then I stopped at eighteen. So I had a period during my adolescence when photography was central. It was all I did.
MH: Whose work were you looking at?
DV: Cartier-Bresson for certain things; Newton for others. At the time, there was also a very fashionable Swedish guy who took these nudes of young girls. He created a bit of a dreamy environment, and he photographed these girls in a very romantic setting. It’s completely passé now, but I remember that well, too.
I wanted mostly to make portraits, for example to go and take pictures of people in the street. I hoped to do a book on the homeless, the faces of homeless, across the world …
So now, years later, with the annual reports, I thought I would really like to create something people would rather keep than throw away. Photography is an emotional form of communication. It’s informative, but it’s also very emotional. We have thousands of examples of that.
Then I began to look at different photographers, and then I began to choose.
MH: Did you do this on your own?
DV: Yes. I went to Magnum, and then to VII to begin looking. As I looked through pictures, I said, “This—I like this.” But I was never looking for the name. Only later did I discover the names, the people behind the photographs. Gene Richards, for example, is very intense, with strong feelings and beliefs. In the end, each photographer speaks with his or her own language. They are all so different, but they are all talking through their pictures. Christina Rodero had some pictures that were almost surrealistic, and Jim Nachtwey moved between showing the cruelty of war to the softness of a man who just loves people.
MH: Well, you picked passionate, mission-driven people with strong sensibilities. But tell me more about your process.
DV: This year we will make a big shift, because I want to do a report in color. I have asked Stephanie Sinclair to be the photographer. In years past I had said, “I really want black-and-white,” because many annual reports with flashy colors and glossy stuff look cheap. Now I believe we have achieved an elegance, and what we do with great photography is clear-cut, so it does not matter.
My process, since the beginning, has been to look at a selection of about twenty photographers each year. I look through their works, books, and materials. I leave everything on my table for a while, and I look again, and I look again. Then I eliminate. I like consistently good work. If I see very good work and then I see something that I think is not as good, I eliminate it.
I am generally left with about three people, and it’s very, very hard to decide. I ask my daughter, who is in her twenties and studied art history and psychology, and my wife to look as well. While I’m listening to their responses, I am also looking again.
MH: Are you looking for storytellers? For individually powerful images?
DV: I think all of the work I’ve responded to has a narrative aspect, although I am not looking for it. But I think that’s the part I react well to.
I’m responding to the quality of the picture, and then I wonder, “Why do they take this picture? Why do they show that?” I think they express something about themselves by how they take a picture. The work says something.
Cover of Novartis AG Annual Report, 2011. Photograph by Eugene Richards.
MH: You’ve selected photographers whose work, for the most part, gets under the skin of something, who want to go beyond the surface. They want to ask questions, and they want to go deeper.
DV: What you are saying, “below the surface,” is what I tried to say. “Below the surface” communicates something beyond the cognitive process. It’s more an unconscious understanding of what is being communicated.
MH: What do you tell these photographers? What is the mandate?
DV: I tell them that I would like them to capture patients and caregivers across the globe, and to show the human face. Then we discuss what this might mean; this discussion is different with each photographer.
I try to understand the person also, where we have an overlap, how we can best communicate. As a company we have certain basic needs. For example, we are involved in veterinary medicine, so photographs of animals are part of it. Once I meet the photographers, I trust them.
It doesn’t always work, though. One photographer went to Egypt for us. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a good feeling for cultural limits and boundaries of politeness and was arrested. It would have been a wonderful project, but it didn’t work out.
Another time, we had a problem because we didn’t have all the signed forms. The photographer took a picture of a man with his wife who had an ablation because of breast cancer. She showed it, and that was shocking for people. Some activists asked, “Do you have the release form?” Then, we went searching for the forms …
MH: How much of this has to relate back to Novartis, and how much of it is just about the human condition?
DV: I provide the photographers with the purpose of our business and the aspirations and values we stand for. Equally, they must know our lines of business, our main activities and the outline of the annual report.
I would like to see a representation of the patients and customers we serve. Of course, it is impossible to include all ethnic, age, and social groups, and in addition to that touch on all of our functions. But, at the same time, I leave a lot of leeway. There is so much breadth and possibility.
Once they have completed their yearlong projects, I need to make choices for the actual report. Some may be great pictures, great emotional stories, but for this or that reason I will not use them for the report, which also has to speak directly and clearly to our shareholders. But I may purchase some of these photographs for our collection. Each year, I buy about twenty-five pictures, then I put them on the walls throughout the campus.
Cover of Novartis AG Annual Report, 2004. Photograph by Cristina Garcia Rodero.
MH: How do you contextualize the photographs? Do you explain the relationship between the images and Novartis?
DV: I have a team who has begun to understand my approach to the annual report, so they prepare options for me. I have put in place a process where I select the photographs, then, according to my assessments, the team tries to place them. Then we look at the report together with the photographer. I like to have the photographer in the room so they can have input. Sometimes we debate the picture selection: “Why don’t you take this one?”
MH: Is that interesting for you?
DV: Yes. They sometimes are connected to what they saw and who they met, and that influences their sense of the picture. I only see what I observe. I may eliminate more of the images, and after I look at the text I say, “That fits the story, that doesn’t fit.”
MH: Is anything taboo?
DV: Yes, anything which would unduly intrude into the lives of a subject, or any photographs without clearance for shooting pictures of the subject.
MH: Do you know yet what Stephanie Sinclair will focus on? What made you select her now?
DV: I am very much looking forward to her work. I saw an initial series of pictures that captured birth, life, and death in and around a clinic in Africa. She also has a specific second motive in mind. It is an idea which I will not disclose other than to say that I was skeptical about it at first. However, based on her enthusiasm, I agreed. Time will tell how well it will fit our project.
MH: Do you believe that photography can (or should?) address and/or comment on the human condition?
DV: The photographers I interact with generally have a keen sense of purpose. They do not want just to shoot outstanding pictures, but also to show what others don’t or can’t see. They aim to touch viewers emotionally, to move them. They have the conscious or unconscious desire to influence and even change attitudes.
MH: Along these lines, do you have any advocacy goals with regard to your annual reports?
DV: I don’t believe I am an activist of any sort. For most of us life has moments of joy, sadness, well-being, and suffering. Unfortunately, many people live under difficult conditions. Novartis aspires to help to reduce suffering from disease and to save lives. So, it is also our intention to show aspects of the human condition.
March 5, 2013
Lingua Photographica
Ryan Whittier Hale, Abomination, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Of all the changes the web has undergone since its inception in the early 1990s, the most jarring, of course, is the way in which its related technologies have become enmeshed in almost every avenue of daily life. The Internet (at least in the places on the globe where it’s freely available) is no longer a novelty or pastime; it’s a fundamental aspect of contemporary experience. Millions of users fluidly shuttle between online and off, often functioning in both realms at the same moment.
In this dual reality, photography has taken on an intriguing role. In a virtualized world of constant information intake, the ability to read photographs instantly, to say nothing of the unprecedented ease of taking pictures and disseminating them online, makes photographic imagery the new lingua franca.
But while photography is more pervasive than ever, it is also every day less consciously photographic. Photographs are now pics: the mutable, disposable flotsam of daily life. Beyond even the automated comforts of the point-and-click or the one-time-use disposable camera, a modest telephone can now snap and distribute a quick digital image with ridiculous ease—an image with a richness and clarity that would have been enviable to previous generations of photographers. For artists, these new conditions, and the changing valuation of photographs, present myriad creative opportunities.
This is by no means a new area of investigation. Throughout the history of photography, artists—from John Heartfield to Robert Heinecken to Cindy Sherman—have explored the shifting status of the photographic image: that is, the way photographs are distributed, used, and received. Many artists working in and around the Internet today continue this inquiry, opening up new ways of understanding how photographic imagery functions in contemporary culture, with the new technologies that have now taken hold of our lives.
Katja Novitskova, Earth Calls 2 (Night), 2012
Jeff Baij’s CL Still Life series (2010) explores the aesthetics of banal images uploaded to the classified-ads website Craigslist. His particular focus here is on inexpensive dishes, glassware, and other dull items of home décor. His eye is drawn to low-resolution images, most likely taken with cellphones, almost certainly uploaded without artistic intent. Every once in a while an image will (accidentally) have an interesting composition, or will strike Baij as so supremely boring that it transcends its ostensible function. When he finds such images, he imports them into Photoshop and slaps on a raw filter, making the subjects at once humorously self-important—but also glowing, haunted, memorably strange.
The pursuit of the banal is an amply rewarding endeavor. In their blog Tanner America, artists Aaron Graham and Shawn C. Smith pose as suburban parents Allison and Rob Tanner, who use default web 2.0 blogging tools to “share photos with family and friends.” Photographs found online are collaged together and combined with short captions, satirizing the way many Baby Boomers and other non-digital-natives often awkwardly use the Internet. The result could be a cheap stunt, but the artists are able to strike a David Lynch–like balance of funny, creepy, bland, and surreal. Like Baij, Graham and Smith are mining a particular type of photography familiar to anyone who surfs the Internet on a regular basis—but then playing with the images, making them alien to themselves.
Katja Novitskova’s Earth Calls (2012) presents two images, each featuring an empty landscape (found on Google Earth) combined with an image of a man holding a smartphone (photographs culled from the blog platform Tumblr). In Earth Calls I, a man is seen taking a nude self-portrait by holding the phone up to a mirror. In Earth Calls II, another man, in a baseball cap, looks down in order to manipulate his phone. By themeselves, these images, like the empty Google Earth landscapes, are no more than random Internet finds. Through Novitskova’s simple juxtapositioning, though, the generic landscapes become abstracted planes and the men’s poses are elevated to something almost classical: overall, the work has an air of the elusive and mysterious.
In each of these bodies of work, there is an element of in-between-ness: the photographs seem caught between two polar attractions. There is of course an essential, definitive, inescapable irony in the use of these particular images. But there is another side to them, too: a gentle humor, perhaps a genuine affection for the subjects. And although in some ways the images in these projects are richly colorful and well-composed, there is a decided anti-aesthetic to them as well: they revel in the sort of low-res trashiness that characterizes so much photography on the web.
This disorienting in-between-ness can take other forms as well. Bunny Rogers’s ongoing project 9 Years is made up of screen captures taken from the artist’s experiences in the virtual landscapes of Second Life. Rogers places her avatar, Bunny Winterwolf, in sexually provocative situations with other users’ avatars. She then snaps hundreds of screencaps, trying to get one that strikes the correct intuitive balance. The images she ends up with are lush and evocative, but also odd and dark—sexuality becomes something both erotic and detached, both giddy and nightmarish.
Jeff Baij, CL Still Life 04, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
Allison and Rob Tanner (Aaron Graham and Shawn C. Smith), Rob has this everyday for a snack, 2010, from Tanner America. Courtesy the artists.
Allison and Rob Tanner (Aaron Graham and Shawn C. Smith), Greyson’s Greyhounds got the steaks from the BBQ, 2010, from Tanner America.
Courtesy the artists.
Ryan Whittier Hale, Caress, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Katja Novitskova, Earth Call 1, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Bunny Rogers, Untitled, from the series 9 Years, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
Ryan Whittier Hale, Abomination, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Katja Novitskova, Earth Calls 2 (Night), 2012
With similar affect, in Ryan Whittier Hale’s Null Presence series (2012) android bodies exist in an uncanny space between emotional empathy and antiseptic nothingness. Borrowing compositional strategies from Mannerist paintings and imagery inspired by science fiction, Whittier Hale’s worlds seem on the verge of generating emotion—both between the figures and between the work and the viewer—but that feeling is swallowed into a void of artificiality and surface flatness. Whittier Hale says that with this project, he is “working with the idea of something that simultaneously has a presence and is completely vacant.”
Such dichotomies correspond, I believe, to a larger sensibility evolving on the Internet: the liminal feeling of life in the digital age—perched as it is between the virtual world and the physical, the organic and inorganic, the emotional and the disaffected. Without offering value judgments, these series open up those threshold sensibilities and allow viewers a peek inside.
—
Gene McHugh is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn.
This essay is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s Spring 2013 issue.
March 1, 2013
Aperture Magazine at Sundance Film Festival
Celebrities assembled in Park City, Utah, this past January for the annual Sundance Film Festival. Renowned photographer Henny Garfunkel, who has attended the film festival for the past nineteen years, captured a few famous faces with the freshly relaunched Aperture magazine.
January Jones, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Kate Bosworth, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Andrew Dosunmu, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Michael Cera, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Dakota Fanning, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Emily Browning, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Juno Temple, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Catalina Sandino Moreno, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Boyd Holbrook, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Peter Sarsgard, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Josh Lucas, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Jean-Marc Barr, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Radha Mitchell, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Elizabeth Olsen, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Jason Isaacs, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Thomas Jane, Photograph by Henny Garfunkel at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Have you picked up issue #210? Take a photograph of you and your copy of Spring 2013 Aperture for the chance to win a one-year subscription to the magazine. Use the hashtag #myaperturemag on Instagram or Twitter to take part in our portrait competition! Click for contest details.
February 26, 2013
Jeff Wall and Lucas Blalock: A Conversation on Pictures
Jeff Wall’s photographic work made over four decades has opened up the parameters of the medium to issues long understood to be outside its provenance. At the same time, his prolific writing has been an important factor in the development of a much-needed critical vocabulary. Wall’s contributions in both arenas provide conceptual underpinnings for contemporary artists. He requires photography to do the work of reflecting not only the world, but also the terms of that engagement. And his explicit relationships to both painting and film have opened new paths of understanding photography’s possibilities and place in the world. Wall makes use of a form of “cinematography” to pry photography from the narrow confines of technique and definition. His coinage phantom studio proposes that any given location can be imbued with the intentionality of the studio. These concepts and others have shaped the way we think about photography. In the conversation below, Wall speaks with Lucas Blalock about the current state of the medium, his recent work, and the freedom of the artist.
* * *
Lucas Blalock: Considering the changes that photography has undergone in the past decade, how might we consider it as a “medium” in its current situation? I mean here not the physical support, but the set of conventions or historical uses that act as a ground, making the decisions of the photographer legible.
Jeff Wall: I cling to the notion of photography as a medium insofar as it is an authentic way to achieve what we can call “the picture.” The physical nature of any medium has never been free from the conventional—and therefore historical—manners in which the physical elements have been handled. So I don’t feel there is anything particularly new happening in photography in that regard.
LB: You have written about the idea of “emphatic picture making,” which I think provides a compelling structure for thinking about photography. Could you talk about what you mean by this idea of the “emphatic”?
JW: “Emphatic picture making” is a phrase that I think expresses how photography can be free just to be an art form. Sculpture, painting, drawing, and the other older visual arts freed themselves this way a long time ago, but photography is still tied up with the practicalities of image production, and it’s hard for a lot of people working with it to achieve some sort of distance from that almost overpowering identity.
Still from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola, 1981. United Artists/Photofest
I’ve been criticized over the years for the perceived artificiality of some (or even most) of my pictures, for their apparently unwarranted, overcooked, and roundabout relation to the actualities of life—things that can be addressed much more immediately by remaining “true to the nature of photography.” But I like photographs that don’t look altogether the way photographs are supposed to look. We don’t really know how photographs are “supposed to look.” The existing conventions make it seem that we do, because they are authentic and central to photography, but they cannot predict what the next interesting photograph is going to look like. Nobody claims to be able to predict what the next good painting will look like.
LB: Lately we have seen the reemergence of a more literal “ studio picture,” and the photographer’s studio itself as the site of looking and picturing. The studio is being used by some artists for its particular conventional attributes: as a site with a specific history and the possibility of a kind of play on genre images (still lifes, commercial pictures, and so on). Do you find the work of artists like Christopher Williams, Roe Ethridge, or Michele Abeles to be in dialogue with your own thoughts on making studio pictures in the 1970s, or related to your “phantom studio” work of the past few years?
JW: A studio is a set of relationships, not so much a specific kind of interior—it doesn’t have to be an interior at all. But it can manifest in the kind of workspace that’s traditionally been used as a studio by photographers, or painters, or sculptors. There is no reason to view that kind of workroom as obsolete, as it seemed to be a few years ago, when everyone was excited about “post-studio art.”
Today the studio is not thought of in the binary, polarized sense that tended to prevail in the period when documentarytype photography was the norm, when the studio was defined as an artificial environment somehow not part of the real life that real photographers hunted and captured. That polarity was affected by the cinema of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s—filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ingmar Bergman could move from extreme artifice to moments of apparent documentary immediacy within a few seconds. Now we recognize the studio as a site of actuality no different in principle from any other site.
LB: In your 1993 essay on the Japanese artist On Kawara, you talk about how, in painting, the attraction to “lower”-genre pictures in the early modern era was understood as a movement toward the freest space, that these kinds of pictures are particularly good at “permitting a picture to be seen as a picture.” Can we look at contemporary photographic practice through a parallel lens? Do you think that there is a certain kind of work that these minor-genre pictures are particularly suited for?
JW: As photography becomes more and more familiar with itself as high art, and in some sense begins to be absorbed into the whole idea—the institution—of high art, photographers seem to be able to go through the same sorts of dialectics that painters and sculptors went through in the past century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “lower”-genre pictures were less constrained by the social and cultural ambitions that were woven into the structure of the higher types, so they became a less-delineated space in which a process of experimentation took place. Photographers were aware of this, and to some extent responded to it. But since there were no real “high” genres of photography back then, there wasn’t the intensity of engagement that there was in painting. Maybe now that there are apparently high genres in photography, the situation has evolved to the point at which it is possible to respond to their presence by moving away from them and, to an interesting degree, repeating aspects of what happened in painting a hundred or more years ago.
Jeff Wall, Passerby, 1996. Courtesy the artist.
Roe Ethridge, Pigeon, 2001. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
But it looks like people are trying to extend the sense of what permits a something to be seen as a picture—that is, with an ambition to matter in terms of proposing what a picture is at its most significant level. Younger artists (and some older ones, too) seem to be testing out this dialectic of higher and lower genres. The engagement with what have often been seen as trivial and compromised studio types—like the still life that started out as a commercial product photograph—seem to have to do with finding those little voids in the canon that can still disturb the consensus of what is worth bothering to photograph in the first place. This whole direction is really complex and sophisticated, and has been an undercurrent throughout the history of modernism. It became “ problematic” when product photography had evolved to the point where, vampirically, it almost destroyed the genre of still life, in the 1920s.
LB: Interestingly, the same period saw the rise of commodity culture, which was arguably made possible by the cheap circulation of photographic images. I wonder if this is in part because objects again have a central role in this stage of capitalism, a role that will eventually be subsumed by the abstract strategies of brands and identity marketing. And, in an increasingly digital environment, commodity objecthood—once seen as a tremendous abstraction and mode of distancing from the world—can now be seen instead as a connective possibility.
In the digital age, images are infinitely transferable, editable, and contiguous with their surroundings. They relate as much to the bodiless virtual archive as to the “having-beenseen” of the camera’s subject. To me, this is a new problem for a picture.
JW: That’s interesting—the idea that the network of electronic image traffic has become present in the relation between the photographer and the picture he or she sees in a viewfinder. But I think that that is true if you want it to be, not in itself. Because image traffic has become so heavy and so continuous, it now seems as if these millions of images came into being by themselves, without the agency of a person. And in a certain percentage of them, it’s true, because a lot of images are now made robotically and circulated automatically.
But that is more about the experience of seeing images than of making them. Artists have been fascinated by the notion of imitating a robot since the emergence of machines. But it is a willful imitation, an individual decision, not caused by the nature of the economy or technology. This is a good moment to look once again at the old idea of artistic freedom. In this context, artistic freedom means the awareness that as an artist you can choose your relation to the technologies; none is imposed on you the way it would be if you were an operative in an automated image-generating system of some kind. You cannot point to any institution that requires this or that behavior from you—art can be anything now.
Your own pictures, Lucas, show a sort of angst about this disembodiment—there’s an almost expressionistic aspect to the rough handling of the digital information. That does make them resemble paintings or prints … and you’re aware of this and very into it. You could say that your angst is your take on a social condition, and you’d be right about that. But there’s no social necessity to respond to social conditions artistically this way or that. There are no rules for this, so another artist could just as legitimately respond in a very different manner. All we have to compare between them are the results. And your results can be art of the highest quality, and mine, which could come from a completely different and even dissenting take on the same social material, could also and simultaneously be art of the highest quality, and both could be in touch with some true state of that same social material at the same time, but other to each other. So, to answer your question “Is this disembodiment a new problem for the picture?”—yes, it is a new problem if you need it to be one. If you need to ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening, you might get laughed at socially, but there’s no way to claim that that, probably childish and neurotic, act cannot lead to something artistically significant and first-rate.
LB: I want to ask about a shift I have felt more generally in the last decade from a discussion about photography modeled on cinematic tropes to one that is ostensibly based in painting. I feel like your work has long been a bridge across these two models and am curious to know if you have felt that this realignment has impacted your practice. You have said that some of your recent pictures were made in a “more pronounced” way, and I wonder if that might relate to this discussion.
JW: The relationship of photography to cinema and painting has always been the important thing for me. If it is just painting, then you fall into the situation that’s been so constantly criticized over the decades—that you are betraying this medium in the name of another one. If it’s cinema, you’re relegated to being commentary on the more complex results of another medium that therefore seems more powerful, and predominant, than it really is. It could be that at the moment artists are drifting further in the direction of the painter’s studio and métier, away from either cinematography or the documentary style. But there is a wide band where you’re in touch with all three elements even if you’re tending toward one or another pole.
My take on it has been that photography as art is constituted by this complex interrelationship between the documentary root, the cinematographic, and the kinship with the other, manual, depictive arts. This is a very large and high-energy entity; it’s not swamped by the vast “social” identity of photography—I mean, the aspects that aren’t art. It is almost magnetically attracted to them, because they aren’t art. As we know, art needs non-art in order to recognize itself. So I’m not aware of realignment because I feel that the domain is so large and internally various that one can shift this way and that and not really go anywhere radically different. I spent quite a bit of time over the past ten years or so exploring a kind of “near-documentary” picture, one that resembled snapshots or documentary photos. That was something I really wanted to do consistently, for a lot of reasons—the main one being to find out what that kind of picture actually looked like. And now more recently I’ve felt the need to diverge from that and try to make pictures that are more emphatically pictorial. I’m tired of struggling with a certain kind of problem, but the result of that struggle is that I find myself in a different spot, with a different relation to “near documentary.”
Édouard Manet, Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.
LB: That reminds me of Garry Winogrand’s remark that he made photographs “to see what things looked like photographed.” Although I think that the character of Winogrand’s statement actually has a very different inflection. To make pictures that make a something—the thing pictured—be seen not only as itself but as a picture of itself sets up a certain kind of problem.
JW: A few years ago I wrote a short essay on Édouard Manet’s 1873 painting Masked Ball at the Opera. I noticed it seemed that Manet created a particular amount of space between his own position and the large group of people at the masked ball. That gap could easily have occurred in real life—anything can occur—but, still, what he did was interesting. I thought he insinuated into the social event he was depicting the kind of space that would almost naturally exist between a painter and a model in a studio situation. He created a subtle bracketing of the immediacy of what he was depicting by stepping back ever so slightly. He could not deny himself the excitement of making the most complex event hover with a very slight sense of suspension, in the form of the tableau—that form that can absorb and arrest any and every event once it becomes a picture.
I find this pictorial structure itself so suggestive and rich because it transforms the thing it depicts in the process of depicting it, of recording it. The “motif,” the thing depicted, comes to life not because of its own liveliness—even though it has that, too—but because of the way it almost vanishes into the tableau. The tableau-form, like a magic substance, both records with great fidelity and transforms the thing to which it is being true into another thing: a picture.
LB: You have used the term occultation in connection to similar ideas, and I’d like to get at the relationship between the “occulted” picture and the notion of immediacy. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the immediate here is a presentation of the world that tries to suppress its qualities as a picture. The advertising image or the swimsuit photo might be good examples; an image depicting the seamlessness of technology might be another. I want to press this question of immediacy because it is potentially a defining characteristic of our time. I feel like, from this vantage, the dull, the boring, and the unspectacular have in turn been imbued with a lot of promise.
JW: Occultation was a term used by André Breton, I think in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in 1929. He meant it partly in the sense of getting serious about the turn to myth and esotericism. But there was also a side of it that had to do with moving artistic work away from direct engagement with public matters and with “the public” as such in favor of a radical idea of artistic experiment, but also of artistic seriousness. Art that took into account the expectations of the public and of the existing domain of convention and taste was seen as compromised and kitsch. This attitude originated before Breton, with the Romantic and Symbolist poets, and it carried over into the New York School and the attitude toward seriousness and “high art.” It’s part of a long, and I hope still meaningful, tradition or lineage that expects art to dissent from conventional artistic taste at any given time, for all the well-known reasons, and to dispense with the idea that it is necessary to be popular in any way to be significant and even to be successful.
I have tried to practice photography in intense empathy with that, though not always in the same way. There is no one kind of “ serious” art. Fassbinder’s work is “occultish” to me even though he parodied and pastiched popular genres and styles. It’s the way he did his pastiche that gives his films their occulted feeling. It might not be something you can point to precisely and identify but it is there. On the other hand, Mark Rothko’s paintings are examples of the grand style of occultation. They are “ classic,” where Fassbinder is “mannerist,” but both are great—and they are akin somehow because they are great. In both you are looking at something that never occurred, did not exist, but has been made visible nevertheless. There is therefore a feeling of emanation, of something surfacing; the surface is coming into being, into visibility, not as a response to an existing surface, a social surface. And when a something surfaces as a picture, it can’t be dull or boring—no matter the subject.
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Top image: Photograph of Jeff Wall by Greg Girard, October 2012 (detail).
Jeff Wall’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, and his critical writings have been widely published. The most recent of Wall’s retrospective exhibitions was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007. He has received many prizes, including the Hasselblad Award for photography in 2002. He is based in Vancouver.
Lucas Blalock is a photographer and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles.
Dispatches: Jason Fulford on San Francisco
Jason Fulford, San Francisco, 2012 © Jason Fulford
It’s been a year now since I drove from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to San Francisco and let the air out of the tires. My wife was given a yearlong fellowship here to work for an idealistic nonprofit that creates new technology for city governments. I tagged along, excited to wander the same streets as Henry Wessel. We arrived in October—still summer in San Francisco—to a warm reception. Frish Brandt from the Fraenkel Gallery, Joseph del Pesco from the Kadist Art Foundation, and Chris McCall from Pier 24 introduced themselves as the welcoming committee.
On week two, I received an invitation from Richard Misrach to join a photo-study group. He was starting a new incarnation of an old idea, and explained it like this: “Since the 1970s I have held ‘salons’ … I reach out to a handful of local artists, we generally meet at my studio, or rotate to the other studios, everyone contributes to a potluck meal, we look at work, share readings, and sometimes create collective projects. There’s no set agenda—it evolves democratically. It’s an old-school model, for sure, but I highly recommend it.” The group focuses on one topic each meeting— ethical problems related to shooting documentary portraits, for example—and discusses it from different angles. There is sometimes friction, and often follow-up over email. It’s a sort of spirited continuing-ed class that ends up resonating in the background between meetings.
Misrach’s salon is one small slice of a large photography scene here. In the past twelve months, I’ve made my way from dinner table to dinner table on both sides of San Francisco Bay. I’ve found that there are three generations of local photographers that feel connected, like an extended family.
One figure who is brought up at nearly every dinner is Larry Sultan, whose work tended to comment on community and family. Larry passed away three years ago, but his presence is still felt. On top of his career as a photographer, he was known for his generosity as a teacher. I asked artist Dru Donovan, who worked at his studio for a time, what made Larry so special. “He mixed wisdom with doubt,” she said, “and critical intellect with vulnerability and honesty.” Dru also told me that Sultan insisted on regular “study halls” during the workday: “For about a half hour or so, he and I would drop everything work-related and pick up something to read. Study hall was founded because life is rich, full, and for the making and participating in.”
Communities here are shaped by those who are missing as well as by those who are present. Another important influence, who died last year, was the filmmaker George Kuchar. George inspired his students as much as Larry did, though using very different teaching methods. A professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, he threw his students into the chaotic productions of his own insane films. Artist and curator Jordan Stein fondly recalls Kuchar’s “AC/DC Psychotronic Teleplays” class, during which he was cast in a movie with a script that was “basically one enormously unsavory food pun.”
George Kuchar, 1960′s. Photographer unknown. Photofest.
Sultan and Kuchar both fostered a real sense of community as teachers and mentors. If you attend any of the lectures sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Pier 24, you’re likely to run into some of the working photographers in town. Many of them also teach at SFAI and at the California College of the Arts.
Jim Goldberg studied under Sultan decades ago, and now teaches at CCA. His studio is located above one of the cavernous Mission Street thrift stores (where I imagine Kuchar’s students hunted for props). Talented photographers pass through, and often end up working for Jim: Lindsey White and Eric William Carroll are two who have put in time at the Goldberg studio, and are now making smart and thoughtful work.
The photographic output in the San Francisco community varies wildly—analog, cameraless darkroom experiments; traditional social documentary; conceptual installationbased work; and giant homemade cameras. More than any unifying sensibility or aesthetic, there is a strong network of support between photographers. And—maybe this is a California thing—the support is heavy on positivity, light on criticism.
The diversity of styles is seen in the number of artist-run photobook presses in the Bay Area. Each has its own sensibility and reaches out to a different audience. Paul Schiek publishes TBW Books from an overgrown industrial pier in Oakland. He hires local printers to produce his Subscription series, which features a mix of local photographers (Abner Nolan, Todd Hido, Katy Grannan) and out-of-towners (Mark Steinmetz, Elaine Stocki, Alec Soth). Paul generally gives artists free reign, within a set of restrictions—page count and trim size. Nick Haymes, a recent transplant via London and New York, is publishing a mix of international work under his imprint, Little Big Man. Many of his books bring to light decades-old pictures from photographers’ archives—Surf Riot by Nick Waplington documents a 1986 beach riot; To the Past by Nobuyoshi Araki is a sort of photographic diary going back to 1979; and Kitajima Keizo’s 1991 USSR is a collection of pictures that has been aging in storage like whiskey. On the lighter side, Ray Potes, a.k.a. Hamburger Eyes, pumps out black-and white ’zines and “mega-zines” (more than one hundred) with energy and humor, filled with work from a collective of local photographers.
Nick Waplington, Surf Riot, 1986 © Nick Waplington, courtesy Little Big Man
Regionalism seems to be on the rise in the United States, and I think the trend may have started in San Francisco. Many of the restaurants have long supported local farms. Composting is mandatory. Tech companies open up workshops and lectures to the public (including their competitors). A friend described the local cuisine this way, and I think it’s an astute metaphor for photography: yes, it’s about the way it looks and tastes, but it’s more about the way it makes you feel, once it’s inside your body.
Jason Fulford is a photographer and cofounder of the nonprofit J&L Books. He is a contributing editor to Blind Spot magazine and a frequent lecturer at universities.
Andrew Norman Wilson with Laurel Ptak: ScanOps
Laurel Ptak: Tell us about your recent photographic series ScanOps. How did the project develop?
Andrew Norman Wilson: I have been collecting “anomalies” from Google Books for a couple of years: images in which software distortions, the imaging site, or the hands of the Google employees doing the scanning are visible. The fingers and software distortions obscure the information in the books—which complicates the notion of universally accessible knowledge.
Andrew Norman Wilson, The Inland Printer-164, 2012
LP: Where does the title ScanOps come from?
ANW: It’s the departmental name for Google’s onsite book-scanning operations at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. I’m pretty sure the name “ScanOps” was never public—I found it searching around Google’s Intranet.
In 2011 I made a video called Workers Leaving the Googleplex. I worked for a year in 2007–8 on Google’s campus. While there, I wore a red badge—like most other contracted employees. The fulltime Google employees wore white badges, and interns wore green badges. In the video, these “classes” of employees are seen passing by, entering and exiting buildings at the Googleplex. Some of them ride Google loaner bikes; some are seen getting into a Google limo shuttle headed toward San Francisco. Some of them are leaving work, some may be walking to another building to exercise in one of the Google gyms or pick up their laundry, some may be just arriving at the Google campus to eat a free meal from one of the twenty gourmet cafés after a day of working at home.
But from my office, I noticed a fourth class of workers operating in the building next to where I worked; they wore yellow badges. They stood out on the Google campus because of their races—many are people of color—and their attire, which was not that of the usual tech worker. In the Workers Leaving video, the yellow-badge employees are seen leaving the one building they are allowed access to. They all leave at the same time every day—2:15 pm—because their superiors have asked them to. It is a separate departure time from the other workers, so their exit is its own “movement.”
LP: Can you talk about the films by the Lumière brothers and Harun Farocki that influenced you in putting your film together?
ANW: In Farocki’s 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory, he discusses how in the Lumière brothers’ film, also called Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), the primary aim was to represent motion; in particular to create an image of a work force in motion, organized by the work structure (a temporal construct), the factory gates (a spatial grouping), and the filmmakers’ choreography of this time-space relationship. But of course moving images don’t only represent movement, they can also grasp for concepts. This is what Farocki’s film is about—how signs and symbols are taken from reality, as if “the world itself wanted to tell us something.” He uses a particular motif in film history—that of workers leaving the factory—to interpret what the world is telling us.
The Lumières’ Workers and my own each present the social and technological conditions of their time. Both represent movement—but in my representation of movement, we see clearly defined tiers of workers … so the movement is “scripted” by what class they are in.
LP: ScanOps continues to follow these Google Books workers in another way.
ANW: While I was working as a video editor and videographer at Google, I started to document and talk to the ScanOps employees—but was fired rather quickly. It was intended to be a larger project, but it ended up being quite simple and limited because I wasn’t left with much more than my footage and my account of what happened.
At some point later I heard about the scanning mistakes and accidents that occur in Google’s book-scanning operations and decided to look closer. The work of the ScanOps employees is an interesting hybrid—it is a labor of digitizing informational materials that requires no cognitive involvement with the content of those materials. The labor process is quite Fordist—press button, turn page, repeat.
The workers compose part of the photographic apparatus, which in a broad sense includes not only the machinery but the social systems in which photography operates. The anonymous workers, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the pink “finger condoms,” infrared cameras, the auto-correction software, the capital required to fund the project, the ink on my rag-paper prints, me—we’re all part of it.
LP: Would you discuss the thinking process behind your photographic work?
ANW: Each stop along the way in my work involves machines and humans. I like the idea that my work is part of a living, expanding process, and I am trying to underscore the fact that we are all complicit in and responsible for our social and technological arrangements. I want to dispel any notion that we are passively, subjectively impacted by foreign objects and systems.
LP: Take us through the steps in your work’s production, the logic of each decision in ScanOps.
ANW: Production starts before I get involved. The books are photographed at the libraries where they are stored, or are shipped to the Google Books facilities to be photographed. Software auto-corrects and converts the images and uploads them online. I browse for images that fulfill my criteria, download them, convert the pages I want, and edit out the Google watermark. There’s no resizing or additional editing.
Next I have them inkjet printed to scale, they are mounted and sent to the framers, who make a custom frame for each print. Then I bring the prints to Home Depot, and pick a color from each print for them to match. They mix up the paint in that color and I bring everything to an autobody shop, where the frames are sprayed in their respective colors. It’s a whole production line.
I’m choosing materials and production processes—some of them subcontracted to other people—that allow the materiality of the work to be emphasized. There are also preexisting conditions that communicate that for me, and I let them alone—for instance, leaving the images at their original size keeps them in direct correlation to the printed matter they came from. In a gallery or on the page of a magazine each work occupies a unique volume of space, and so when put together their spatial/sculptural qualities are emphasized.
LP: It’s compelling to think of ScanOps as a kind of update to the tradition of documentary photography, but for the online image.
Andrew Norman Wilson, The Inland Printer-152, 2012
ANW: I do look toward the work of certain documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and so on—whose socially engaged, journalistic photography represents marginalized populations, and in particular their labor.
In addition to the work engaging photography’s materiality and an interest in the abstraction that the anomalies can present, I like to think of each image—whether it contains accidents or not—as a view of the world. They reveal traces of the humans and technology that produced them.
LP: We most often encounter digital recordings of books as scans, but you refer to these as “photographs”—why is that? Who are the photographers here?
ANW: Mass-market books can be sliced open and fed into scanners, but the books I’m looking at come from library collections and can’t be dismantled; they need to be photographed with a camera from above. The fingers we see in some of the images could mistakenly be called the photographers’ hands—but their actions have been dictated by superiors at Google, so really they are the camera operators. The photographers are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who proposed the digitization of all the world’s books when Google was just a fledgling startup. Because the copying of an entire book violates copyright, the photographers have been faced with lawsuits from the Authors’ Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and more.
Google is in the sole possession of the means of search and distribution for most of the books published in the United States in the twentieth century. For the first time, elements of public library collections are offered for sale through a private contractor, with additional revenue coming in from the ad space for sale next to the online books.
Everyone who uses Gmail, Google Docs, Google Books, Blogger, YouTube, etc. becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We’re all performing freelance data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.
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Top image: Andrew Norman Wilson, The Rainbow Girl-9, 2012 (detail)
Andrew Norman Wilson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on a ScanOps book to be published by Art Metropole, and lecturing on ScanOps and Workers Leaving the Googleplex in his Powerpoint performance Movement Materials and What We Can Do.
Laurel Ptak is a New York–based curator. With artist Marysia Lewandowska, she is currently co-editing a book titled Undoing Property, examining relationships among artistic practice, intellectual property, immaterial production, and political economy, to be published this year by Sternberg Press.
Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles – By Charlotte Cotton
It has been nine years since I wrote The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004), my survey of photographic practice over the previous five years. The slow and cumulative battle to validate photography as contemporary art had long been won by the time we went to print. The market for photography as art—at the time this almost invariably meant Lightjet color prints laminated behind sheets of Plexiglas, at least 30 by 40 inches in size—was buoyant. With the final death throes of traditional editorial photography as a means to earn a living, there was a shift of emphasis in the realms of documentary photography and photojournalism, away from the pages of magazines and newspapers and into museums and galleries and the pages of photobooks. Few knew how digital capture or postproduction would impact independent and artistic photography. And I suspect that no one anticipated the extent to which digital dissemination would increase the number of independent photographers and the potential to self-publish. If anything, the schools of and growing market for contemporary art photography seemed content with digital photography mimicking its analog predecessors’ conventions and not particularly interested in deciphering what might be uniquely digital characteristics, in either its aesthetics or its channels of dissemination.
Owen Kidd, Canvas Leaves, Torso, and Lantern, August 2011, 2012. Installation photograph by Michael Underwood. Courtesy Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York
Watching these developments, I’ve oscillated between feeling we are on the cusp of seeing unimaginably brilliant, liberated, and different iterations of photographic ideas in a wholesale digital world and being worried that we may be marking the cynical end of a once-central visual medium that is now being put out to a niche pasture.
My own drama over this problematic cultural paradigm doesn’t stem from a sense of photographic practice per se becoming redundant in its capability for social and cultural awakening. Far from it. Instead, it comes from a genuine concern that the very mechanisms of the medium’s dissemination—publishing houses, museums, commercial galleries, and art schools—that could be seen as having won the good fight to legitimize photography as a contemporary art form with its own medium-specific history are becoming part of the problem. These structures, with their gamut of agendas, unwittingly risk placing a stranglehold upon the evolution of the medium.
It may be stating the obvious to say that no one person—indeed, no institutional matrix—is powerful enough to hold back the momentum of creative change or its full cluster of mitigating factors. The ecosystem of image making continues to evolve, and does not require the validation of art galleries and museums. What is at stake is how the mainstream instruments of “photography as culture” can deal with the arrival of the first wave of independent photographic practice that does not look like or model itself upon the separatist story of photography that institutions have already told.
I have worked as a curator of photography in museums for most of my professional life; perhaps I should be more generous than I feel toward the cultural organizations that have attempted to engage with the newly dominant forms of photography—such as citizen journalism, visual social media, photography as activism and social practice, and collective creativity. Perhaps there is a way to blend some contemporary photography into a seamless continuum of the museological story of the medium, a story that began in the 1840s. But in my own experience, museums’ engagement with contemporary photography—outside the increasingly narrow band of consciously, conventionally, unwaveringly “high art” photography—is littered with misunderstandings and meanings lost in translation, and has accomplished little to expand a cultural understanding of this beautifully complex medium.
Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists’ endeavors. Addressing that multifarious terrain is a hefty challenge for most museums and galleries, and a genuinely impossible task for those who continue to believe photography is best sliced into monographic exhibitions and sometimes into classic genres and themes. (What other medium is still exhibited so regularly in those dreadfully tired categories “landscape,” “portraiture,” and “still life,” as per forty years ago?)
Of course it’s a tough economic moment for museums and nonprofit spaces to rethink both their remit and their mode of operation. It is chancy to change rather than to go into a holding pattern, doing what you have always done for whom you have always done it, but with much less money. It is no wonder that in recessionary times such as these, galleries and museums cling hard to the work and narratives of photographers with watertight authorship, blue-chip track records of collectability, and blatant signature styles, even though the glory days of such an approach seem to be over. This would be sad but fine if it weren’t for the fact that practically everything that surrounds mainstream cultural organizations engaged with photography has changed, and this, by extension, changes the meaning of even an unchanging enterprise.
Our attitudes to authorship, shifted massively by our common use of the Internet, confuse our understanding of where photography will fit in the cultural landscape of the future. Anyone invested in high-art photography (where authorship is king, where influences are conventionally hidden, and where reusing existing imagery is consciously acknowledged as appropriation) sees this intellectual-property amnesia of the age of the “digital native” as a problem, at least on the level of terminology. All photographic imagery circulating on the Internet is the raw material for millions of “unique” stories of (educators, hold your breath) “self-expression”: found illustrations that quasi-communicate millions of people’s homogenized experiences and emotions. The Internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high- versus low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed.
We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers. Some of the new amateurs are pretty noble—like the citizen journalists who put in serious hours of work and comprehend so thoroughly the intelligent capacities of our pervasive image-led technologies. And just as this pro/am (professional/amateur) school of journalism seems to be a counterpoint to the ever-decreasing realm of independent news media, we at least have to think through the groundswell of pro/am photographic artists who self-publish, collectivize, and find their audiences themselves, knowing full well that the professional infrastructure for art photography is never going to accommodate them during their productive lifetimes.
And what really is the difference between a serious amateur who is disciplined enough to use his or her nonprofessional hours to create independent photography (subsidized by first and second jobs) and the economic reality for most artists who are not among the handful of well-known names whose practice is underwritten by sales? On an individual level, I’d guess the main difference is a debt of somewhere in the region of sixty to eighty thousand dollars, built up during the span of an MFA program. Of course there is a handsome number of MFA photography graduates who have made good use of their education to store up a degree of criticality and experience that will nourish them throughout their creative lives. But there is an underlying conservatism that graduates have to wrestle with when considering how such an expensive education will literally pay off. It’s a risk to propose new forms of photographic art to a market that took almost ten years to feel comfortable with the idea of pigment prints. And it is the same pressure for postgraduates entering curatorial work—except they have to deal with curating being a newly fashionable lifestyle choice (see J.Crew’s “curator pants” for starters).
I don’t think it’s good for anyone if the new professionals of curating distinguish themselves from pro/am lifestylers, stylists, picture editors, artist-curators, and even their more enlightened professional predecessors by aligning themselves with photographers who produce splendid, unmistakably “high-art” spectacles. It’s like a generation of photography curators not being allowed to wage their battle to expand the notion of photography as a subject and potentially to win new terrain within cultural discourses for the medium.
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Still, within this mercurial climate, I see something magical beginning to happen: a critical mass of contemporary art photographers whose clarity and sentience to the image-making epoch in which we live transcend all the blockages I’ve outlined. It’s a critical mass rather than a grouping because, mercifully, the ways in which they open up the subject of photography are diverse. Some of these image creators have found their footing in the haptic and social era of photography; they make works that think through how new technologies feed into the analog-framed discourses of photography as contemporary art. Invariably these digital-native photographers experiment across platforms: the gallery context is one of several; there are also online formats, and traditional and e-publishing. This latest generation of practitioners is distinctly high-versus-low agnostic while being meticulous about the meaning and values of photographic language in its different contexts, and cognizant of the variance in the types of engagement that these different sites create with an audience.
Other contemporary art photographers that are giving cause for robust hope began their relationship with photography through analog thinking and processes, marveling at the prospect of photography as an expanding field while perhaps more acutely treasuring the sensory pleasure of traditional photographic prints for their pronounced craftsmanship and authorship. Contemporary art photographers are the only full-time creators of photography who labor over the production of photographic prints destined only for the spaces of art galleries and museums. Photography’s materials (straddling analog and digital technologies) have never been more readily understood by artists or audiences as a series of conscious choices.
At its most literal, contemporary art photography is beautifully dialogical. Photography is the central subject within photography as an artistic medium, an entity best understood in relation to a host of mitigating factors, from its quotidian cousins in social image-making to the elder statesmen of highbrow art—especially painting and sculpture but also installation arts, including video.
For instance, Carter Mull’s floor-based installation of scattered prints Connection (2011–12) offers a deeply visceral experience of photography that combines a heritage of conceptual art references with a very contemporary meditation upon the state of the mediated photographic image. Connection places us in a space that fuses the dissemination and production methods of photographic imagery. The installation takes into account the permeation of imagery on the pages of the declining empires of print media, and our promiscuous capturing of transitory visual experience via mobile devices—specifically the iPhone. Connection encourages us to take stock of both the plethora of contemporary imagery and its impact on our consciousness, while showing our disregard as we tread on its physical detritus. It is an experience that could only be so abstracted and pinpointed in the rarefied context of a contemporary art gallery and through the authorial voice of the artist.
The relationship between photography and sculpture has perhaps been the most imposing signature of contemporary photography of the twenty-first century so far. About a decade ago, Sara VanDerBeek made a significant contribution to the art-world celebration of photography’s materiality with gorgeous photographs of her handmade sculptures. With her recent installations (including her 2011–12 commission for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles) she breaks important new ground. Every element of VanDerBeek’s Hammer installation was clearly an intricate web of finely crafted acts and artistic decisions that rendered a tangible sense of the photographic. Small, framed black-and-white photographs (a portrait, a still life, a lunar image) seemed pronounced in their material perfection; sculptural pieces incorporated found objects, including bird feathers and a beaded curtain. The elements on display prompted the curiosity of looking that has driven the history of observational photography. Each framing device, from the exterior walls of the installation to the sculptural frames and supports within the space, reiterated the construction of classical photographic vantage points.
Much of the production of digital video art by photographers in the past five years does not go beyond an explorative sketching out of ideas, but in some cases we are starting to see important artistic proposals for how the “photographic” can credibly be explored through video. Owen Kydd creates short, fixed-shot video works that are also meditations upon the notion of the photographic. In what he calls “durational photographs,” Kydd sets up a dynamic for the viewer to search in his thirty- or forty-second videos for the photographic moment, anticipating the single, decisive observation. We forget the distinction between our own looking (for a determined length of time, given the seamless looping of the video imagery) and the durational and endlessly repeating video recording of a now-past moment.
We also see a confident use of the photographic frame, holding and condensing an impossibly large amount of visual information. I enjoy the way Matt Lipps literally cuts and pastes imagery, principally from mid-twentieth-century magazines and books, and carefully creates sculptural photomontages. It is so unreconstructed of him! His most ambitious work so far is the six-panel Untitled (Horizon Archive) (2010), in which a huge cast of real-life and art-historical characters are lined up for an imaginary photo-call. With the theatrical use of lighting, Lipps re-animates these orphaned images into his own story construction—in a way that brings to mind the compiling and connecting of the best Tumblr “curators,” but with more gorgeous photographic drama.
Lipps’s work is not unconnected to the mesmerizing strangeness in the composite work of Daniel Gordon and also the videos of Brian Bress. The three share a knowing originality in the ways they physically rework the mass of image production, mediation, and crass default settings to create works that function in high-art settings. For me, this mode of taking the essence, rather than the aesthetic, of default lowbrow photographic imagery into the art world feels like the planting of intellectual incendiary devices that at some point are going to explode the conventional ideas of where photography can be positioned in contemporary art.
The manner in which future generations of image makers will configure the idea of photography as contemporary art can be as seemingly effortless and open to the happenstance of photographic observation as ever. Jason Evans’s recent installations, including the one at the 2012 Krakow Photomonth, set up a joyous binary dance between photography and sculpture by coupling sculptural arrangements of objects on plinths with photographic posters of still-life arrangements pinned to gallery walls. Evans’s photographs of lyrical still lifes are titled Pictures for Looking At (2007–11) and his plinth-based sculptural arrangements of mass-produced, handmade, and found objects are titled Sculptures for Photography (2012), delightfully inviting us to perceive these constructions as photographs just waiting to happen.
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It is clear that we are a million conceptual miles from where we were even nine years ago—when there was a pernicious idea that photography had to adopt the values, traditions, and rhetoric of other art forms and simultaneously deny its own broad lexicon of dynamic and quotidian meaning in order to have credibility. I look at the work of photographers such as Artie Vierkant and Kate Steciw, as well as that of Asha Schechter and Lucas Blalock, for instance, and get a mighty rush of excitement about photography’s bright new future. I find myself struggling to find the words to discuss their work—though I am neither short of opinions nor inexperienced at looking at new photography. My stumbling block is this: for the first time in my professional life, I am seeing independent photography that doesn’t operate in a conventional art-photography way … and I don’t know how to position myself. It is beyond the discourse that I know, and I experience this as a really positive expectation for the field of photography as art. This is why I think that those of us who have a genuine vested interest in the future of photography as contemporary art should open our doors and just let this new life come in.
Charlotte Cotton is a curator and writer. Among the positions she has held are director of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photographs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Cotton is the author of The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004) and founder of Words Without Pictures (2008-9) and Eitherand.org (2012). Words Without Pictures was published as a print and eBook by Aperture in 2010.
February 25, 2013
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