Color photography: November 2006 Archives

Over at his blog, Alec Soth has been talking a lot about underrated photographers lately. In his post about Denis Cameron, he quotes Cameron: "Our work is to record our world and history will judge us from what we leave behind. Pictures will be our epitaph.”

Last week's New Yorker featured a profile of Jerry Shore, a photographer unknown to me and a great many other people apparently. Few friends or acquaintances knew of his photography and he sold only one image in his life. Now, 12 years after his death, his prodigious, but unknown, output truly serves as his epitaph.

It is pathetic that, until today, I have not been able to post a review of the excellent Christian Patterson show "Sound Affects" at Yancey Richardson Gallery, closing Nov. 25, i.e. today. I've written about Christian's work before, when he was still based in Memphis. I met Christian about a month before the show started, so it's not like I didn't have fair warning and I saw the show a few weeks back. Sorry, Christian!

That out of the way, mulling over the work since then, a couple of key thoughts came to me: locale and color.

Color

Christian's bold color work sits in contrast to the current trend towards subdued, earthy, nearly washed out coloration. While Gregory Crewdson would be the exception with highly saturated, if dark, images, if you look at photographers as varied as Loretta Lux and Edward Burtynsky, the trend is to tone things down. Christian plays with neon and other artificial lights. In some cases the flash plays up the subject garishly, in others its a subtle, but still strong effect.

It will be interesting to see how this ages. Color seems to be particularly sensitive to age, both in technology (prints/film/digital) and the styles of any particular time period. The color of cars, clothes, signage etc in the 1970s is different from what we are accustomed to now, plus add in a layer of nostalgia and fading prints, and you get a impression that is different when looking at a contemporary print version one set apart by two decades or more.

Locale

A few weeks back, there was a good discussion about parenting and artistic aspiration on Alec Soth's blog. The seed of that post was the question of whether a lot of travel was necessary in order to be a great photographer. (Alec does travel a good deal, apparently.) My view about subject matter is that you have to be intimately knowledgeable to create a true or insightful likeness, whether in portraiture or landscape, and quick trips here and there lead to vacation photos. Stick to what you know.

Christian has made an interior portrait of Memphis, TN. Though the "Skateland" photo shown here is an exterior, all others in the show are interior shots documenting a slightly seedy, ramshackle twilight existence. While these places can be shabby or run down, they're not hopeless. There's a evident comfortableness in these images leaning to a maintenance of tradition.

I live in New York City and this place has been photographed incessantly for over 100 years. My own work in the city would be in competition with hundreds of hipster street photographers, with no wife or kids, shooting millions and millions of mega pixels of work every week. Not to mention thousands of dead photographers, famous and otherwise, whose work has timelessly captured the heartbeat of the city. So, I avoid focusing on New York and find myself more inspired when I touch down at home in Colorado or Nevada. (Which also drives my affinity for Robert Adams rather than than WeeGee.) I find the possibilities in those rural areas greater, even though my brain tells me they have been no less mined for imagery than the Lower East Side.

Memphis, July 2003 (Skateland), by Christian Patterson

Christian also has an excellent blog which I highly recommend adding to your regular reading list.

Christian Patterson, "Sound Affects"
Through Nov 25 at Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 W 22nd St 3rd Flr
(646) 230-9610

More or less in the order I wrote them down, my notes:

childhood, adolesence, innocense, sensuality, suburbia, nature vs artifice, staged, unnatural light, purity, temptation, Crewdson, parents, children, blondes, punishment, fathers, daughters, joy, alienation, Lolita, fourth wall, staring girls, carefree, stalking, nocturnal, cars, cruising, high school, boys, predators, vigilence, Venus, allusion, posession, freedom, independence, trapped, stasis, tender, threat, fear, anxiousness, emotional discomfort, nakedness, getting away with it, perverse attentions

Those thoughts probably are a bigger window on my own mind than Strassheim's perhaps, but the woman does seem to have some disturbing thoughts on the brain, sometimes couched in the most innocent of images.

Untitled (Hoola Hoop), 2006, Angela Strassheim

Angela Strassheim, Pause
Through Dec 2 at Marvelli Gallery
526 W 26th St, 2nd Flr
(212) 627-3363

UPDATE: Artnet weighs in with a more considered (longer) review.