September 2006 Archives
There's a great example of deep reading of a single image over at The Space Inbetween. Using a very early and uncharacteristic (to our minds, now) Diane Arbus photograph, it deals with the contextualization of images and how individual images impact our understanding of a larger group.
I'm in London and will miss this, but you may want to check out the panel discussion at the Aperture Foundation on Thursday with three photographers featured in MP3: the Midwest Photographers Publication Project. I've said it before, there is a lot of great photography happening out there in the rest of the country (where I'm from) and don't mean for that to be condescending. I personally find it more difficult to be as inspired to shoot in New York City than I do when I am home in Colorado or Nevada. There just are too damn many photographers here and it makes it nigh impossible to craft something unique. (I did say "nigh".)
Kelli Connell, Justin Newhall, and Brian Ulrich will be taking part in the panel discussion. Check out Brian's blog, it's great.
Midwest Photographers Publication Project
Panel Discussion and Book Signing
Thursday, Sept 28, 6:30pm
Aperture Foundation
547 W 27th St, 4th Flr
On Sept. 11, 2001, I worked about a mile north of the World Trade Center and watched from the middle of 5th Avenue as the north tower collapsed. It seems a small and insensitive thing to call out, but while I always carried a digital camera to work, the batteries were dead and I have no photographs from that day. I remember saying to a colleague after the first plane hit (and we were under the impression it was a small private plane) that I'd have many days to shoot that gaping whole as it'd take months to repair. Now, the camera has become my talisman - leaving home without one is an invitation to disaster.
In the Sept 3 Times, Garrison Keilor review's Watching the World Change, David Friend's meditation on photography's role in recording 9/11 and its aftermath. From the book:
As the morning crept on, New Yorkers poured into the streets, many to help, many in flight, all of them aghast. Out, too, came their cameras. Men and women by the hundreds, then thousands — bystanders with point-and-shoots, TV news teams, photojournalists by the score — felt compelled to snap history, fiery and cruel against the blue.
Keillor, as a writer, plays up the limitations of photography and a bit of disdain for the photographic impulse (and later, the commercial impulse to sell those images) but perhaps this is only a good counterbalance to Friend's cheerleadering for photography and its redemptive effects on memory. Maybe memory alone is not enough, yet there are some things about that day that some found just too much for photography's cold, eternal gaze. In any case, the act of putting the viewfinder to your eye amidst those events still seems an insensitive and self-absorbed response, but it was a necessary and good thing in many other ways. I'm guilty of a fascination with recording the event, too.
Particularly critical to our memory of what happened is the effort by Joel Meyerowitz to record the destruction and recovery efforts that started on Sept. 12th. After discovering that no photography was being allowed in the vicinity of Ground Zero (I ran into this several times over the course of the next few months.) In describing his impetus, Meterowitz says, "To me, no photographs meant no history." Now, putting aside the question of how we can understand history in pre-photographic times, it's a powerful project he undertook to catalog the clean-up effort, recorded in 8X10 negatives under the auspices of the Museum of the City of New York. The Guardian has a review...
Esko Mannikko, Cocktails
From my nearly two years of working on Nokia advertising, I've gotten an affinity for the Finns and their distinctive culture. Minnikko underlines a Finnish coworker's assertion that it's only been 50 years since they crawled out of the forest and joined the rest of Europe. There's a great affinity with rural America here.
Through Oct 21 at Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 W 22nd St, 3rd Flr
(646) 230-9610
Jeff Brouws, Approaching Nowhere
Brouws' previous show at Mann was a sort of typology of pop architecture and multicolored optimism. This show is the reverse, the broken American Dream. Can't help but notice that all photos save one were taken from 2001 onwards, but perhaps that's too neat a bow. Some great night photography.
Exit 24 Off of I-90, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2005, by Jeff Brouws
Through Oct 14 at Robert Mann Gallery
210 11th Ave, btwn 24th and 25th
(212) 989-7600
Reiner Leist, Eleven Septembers
For eleven years Leist made 8x10 photographs from his loft window, capturing the distant World Trade Center between other, nearer buildings. In the volume of photos, strangely absent is an image from Sept. 11 2001, while Leist was in Boston. But, of course, we have enough photos of that.
Through Oct 14 at Julie Saul Gallery
535 W 22 St, 6th Flr
(212) 627-2411
Walter Niedermayr
Neidermayr's deliberately blown out, high contrast ski slopes and hiking scenes, pieced together in multi-photo panoramas, can nearly give the viewer vertigo.
Through Oct 7 at Robert Miller Gallery
524 W 26th St
(212) 366-4774
I missed this interview with Alec Soth a few weeks back. (Joerg's mixture of politics and photography puts me off his site for months at a time.)
Photography is essentially a cliché-making machine... I don't think it is healthy for a photographer to altogether run away from clichés -- just as I don't think it is wise for any kind of artist to try and do something entirely new. We are all working within a language and tradition. To avoid that language is to speak gibberish.
Because of the volume of images we experience in our day to day existence, avoiding cliche seems nearly impossible. Repeition drives meaning out of both subjects and techniques. Sometimes I find that my own attempts to avoid cliche cause me to freeze up, to avoid taking a picture for fear it's been taken too many times already. I suppose I intend for this "discretion" to be a good thing and drive me to see uniquely, but after reading The Ongoing Moment last spring, I've been trying to loosen up that fear and realize that it's unavoidable to make pictures similar to others' and only by recognizing that can a photographer move beyond to put his/her own imprint on the subject/technique/etc.
Oh, and Alec now has a blog.
