[ The Incoherent Light ]

Uta Barth: The Density of Light

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:11:00 +0000

Photography is shaped to the measure of perception, which means that it fails in many of the same ways as our experience of the world, adding in turn failures of its own, both practical and historical, errors in judgement or expectation. But the medium does not stop at “reading” the brute fact of a particular subject, seen at a particular moment – rather this is merely where it begins and the work of Uta Barth has been concerned with, above all, these material complexities of vision; what she has made of them is at once a poetics and an interrogation. Barth has turned photography against itself, positions are exchanged and (perceptual) certainties undermined. Her most insistent theme has been to question the means by which photography makes the world visible to us, to elegantly probe its limitations. In fact, these are key to its seductive illusion of presence – leaving only the density of light and time.

Although her work is remarkable for its understatement, Barth has never been less than rigorous in her treatment of the visual as a site of engagement, even of instability or outright conflict, however cogently expressed. Most often this seems to happen on the level of perception itself, where our experience of the image is reflected back on to the conditions of that encounter, the very terms by which we deal with a photograph as an object and an experience. Even knowing that a picture is not at all “transparent” we generally treat it as such, but the first objective of Barth’s work is to reject that standard of photographic meaning, its seeming transparency, and to construct instead a material dialogue around the expectation that a given photograph carries with it, the implicit thread of narrative possibility that is, in many ways, an artefact of the process. Barth operates at the threshold of photography, revealing the complex ways in which it can be seen to evoke – and negate – the materiality of perception.

Most clearly beginning with the related projects Figure and Ground, though consistently present in even her earliest work, the embodiment of a perceiving subject emerges as the main focus of Barth’s practice. The effect is to destabilise the photograph itself, which is rendered here not as a static object, but as a point of exchange between different registers, material and perceptual – we see, then, the space within the photograph, its imagined dimensions. Barth shows how the photographic process contains several implicit positions, which she adroitly manipulates in order to expose how they determine the “reading” of a photograph. Barth’s work addresses that fundamental dissonance between the world as it is and the world as we see it, the chasms of perceived experience. This is extended to other areas of the photographic process as well – the main correlate of space being, of course, time, and its fluidity, which seems antithetical to our notion of what photography does.

These more recent works have extended the familiar idea of a singular visual “instant” into a serial approach, where the slightest variations become magnified – photographic time is revealed in all its illusive artificiality. But just as the space of a photograph is the analogue of lived or real space, so too does the notion of “time” in Barth’s work correspond to our (bodily) experience of it, where duration is understood as a continuous flow, yet is also subject to unexpected distortion, moments of ellipsis. Temporal coordinates are undermined in the same way that spatial ones are, their boundaries spreading only to the frame, fragile constructs that, when under pressure, will reveal the fiction that holds them together. Barth’s uses this sequential pacing to show moments before and after – time is seen as any number of interstitial dimensions, in the same way that “space” is determined by the experience of it. Their values are essentially reactive.

In Barth’s work space is porous and time elastic; dimensions interpenetrate and their mutual uncertainties are everywhere apparent. But these categories are not without differentiation either, as the space that she has taken as her subject varies from the public to the domestic and her treatment of them shifts accordingly, between different registers for how they are used or encountered. Her interior photographs posit a more subtle relationship between these variables than an intentionally blunt materialism, whereby the daily rhythms of natural illumination fuse with how we perceive the space they occupy – the observer is not directly seen, but everywhere implied, as the still centre of this drama, written by light in space. Barth is describing forms of perception that move from the liminal, standing right at the edge of visual experience – or even beyond it, to the everyday spaces in which we actually live; the presumption of coherence at their centre is just as unfounded as at the margins where they begin to fray.

The aim of this work has consistently been to elaborate on the apparently stable contours of visual experience, patiently redefining the territory that they cover, but a sort of fundamental anxiety shadows this excavation of the medium and, indeed, may be one of its core values. The speculative character of Barth’s practice depends on how closely the conditions of photographic seeing parallel those of our perceived experience, in so far as we make a whole world from what is, at best, a partial view; seeing through the camera actually creates its subject, just as we are the frame that “creates” the world around us. There is a sense of estrangement that arises from the disconnection of a concrete visibility from the chance to locate meaning in some narrative sustained by the images – instead, we gain an awareness of the optical as a dynamic process or even as a kind of dialogue with the world, not merely a passive encounter.

It is in this way that Barth reveals the deep contingency of vision – her work is at once an expansive restatement of how we ordinarily see and a refusal of the certainties that are said to constitute photography in itself.

Down and Out in LA: Scot Sothern's Lowlife

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:02:00 +0000

The story is, by now, well known. A photographer begins to frequent prostitutes and make pictures of them. His reasons for this were murky, to say the least, but the resultant images are undeniably powerful, permeated by a sad and visceral intensity. The women that Scot Sothern photographed perform their identities as objects of sexual commerce, but the rawness of his portraits – and they are that – comes largely from the fact that this role is so often imperfectly registered upon the person who occupies it. The dissonance between how these women present themselves as desirable and the inherent fragility of their pose, the ways in which it contradicts the visible person, is pure and terrible. So although they appear shorn of artifice, as if these women had – sometimes in a very literal sense – nothing left to hide, the ways in which they are seen to perform becomes all the more revealing; it is the plain mystery of regarding some other person.

As is detailed in his wonderfully evocative and precise writing, Sothern was no reformer and a long way from the scrupulous self-possession of the concerned photographer, but his work is all the more important for the unflattering complexity of Sothern’s own involvement with the people in his pictures, who are not reduced to mere social phenomena. They are seen instead as individuals inhabiting a particular situation, the result of choices made and forced. Here the seemingly benign archetypes of victimhood can only serve as a complacent means to deny the human reality of those we would prefer remain hidden, the assumption being that for lives imprinted with such frantic brutality there is more dignity in sustaining our wilful ignorance. Sothern’s work is not a corrective to this, but he does touch on such unspoken prohibitions in very telling ways. His subjects are never equals in this exchange, but the pictures acknowledge this relative disparity in the very way these women are seen; their intimacy, however short-lived (and financially motivated), is in no way contrived.

Too often we fall back on rote theories to explain away what is most troubling about photography, the whole queasy business of looking and being looked at, but Sothern’s pictures are remarkably specific, without a narrative other than the incomplete one of the subjects themselves and their encounter with the photographer in a single, charged moment of exchange. We see real people, living real lives, so utterly present in these photographs that I can barely look at them – or even be sure that I should look. Sothern’s approach is to push this lack of inflection to the limit, in a way that conceals an obsessively pursued set of intentions, concerned both with otherness and also how it might be negotiated. Yet the fact remains that his reasons for making these pictures and our reactions to them are difficult, perhaps even suspect. I don’t think I’m alone in being disturbed by what they have to say about our society and also the medium itself, its subtle evasions. But then again, why shouldn’t the photographer be implicated in what he photographs?

(Sothern has a website and selection of his writing appears here on American Suburb X. There is also a nice interview with him in the most recent issue of SMBH magazine, which can be downloaded here).

The Dark Room: Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:19:00 +0000

The last word, precisely because it is the last, of course, has a weight of expectation loaded on to it that no mere arrangement of language, no thought, could reasonably be expected to support. Meaning gets lost then, in this struggle to meet the demands of saying what we need to be said under, as it were, the sign of eternity. There is no chance for revision, or for nuance. When Roland Barthes died following a road accident in 1980, his last completed project was Camera Lucida, and it is a work that has entered the canon as being his last word on the subject of photography, perhaps to detriment of how we understand both. It’s not the metaphorical image of Barthes’ untimely death and how it feeds into the tone of his own writing here, the seemingly elegiac contemplation of mortality, that causes the trouble (although that is, in itself, a fairly grisly spectacle). Rather, the style he employs has an odd, speculative voicing, characteristic of Barthes' later work that reads without friction and is in a far more discursive or even “subjective” mode than the theoretical austerity for which he was formerly known.

Indeed, Barthes has to admit as much himself from the outset; this “split” with the expected rigour of critical analysis, favouring instead his own, more eccentric methodology, is dramatised in one of the opening chapters. In this context we can see that his conversational tone is as much a narrative device as anything else. Given the subtle foregrounding of his intentions, then, embodied by the very style of the writing as a self-conscious act, it would be a mistake to take everything that follows on its own terms. But the apparent simplicity of Barthes’ approach is seductive, and he opens warmly to the reader a view of, ostensibly at least, his own thorny encounter with the photographic image. We see several instances of him thinking through the experience of looking at a given picture, some of which are reproduced in the text. But this use of what should be understood as a literary style gives us no reason to believe he is always speaking in his own voice. This was the man, after all, whose best efforts had long been dedicated to opening a gap between the text and its author.

Barthes’ proposes two vaguely oppositional terms and these are what carry the main thrust of his analysis, such as it is. This double structure is reproduced by the book itself, the first part dedicated to his thoughts on photography as a medium and the second to a meditation on a particular image of his adored mother, who had died not long before. This image is the real crux of his argument, but, rather tellingly, it is not shown. He proposes that our encounter with a photograph can be broken into distinct levels, the first of which he calls “studium” and this is one that all photographs enter into; it is the level of their social reality, the fact that they depict certain observable things in the world. This level of photographic attention is, in a sense, the narration of what is visible. It is a common value of photographic images and Barthes’ seems to tire of it quickly. The other term however, is the one that most captures his attention (and indeed that of his subsequent readers). He coins the term “punctum” to describe an effect of certain photographic images quite apart from that of their common, social reality. It is some element (not necessarily an element of the photographic, its apparent subject) that he alone sees, or that shows itself to him and which pierces the airless skin of its social reality; the punctum is in fact a “lacerating” encounter with the reality of an image that actually fails to be made visible at the very moment of its apprehension, because it is not “in” the photograph at all, rather it is something that he must find, a disturbance of the photographic surface.

The punctum is an absence within reality, something more that what it is, but yet absolutely itself. Barthes concludes then the “photographic” is a kind of near visible absence that opens a space in the image to show the disparity between the real which is our experience and the symbolic (representational) order of social reality. It is an absence understood as something that elides the procedures of representation, or, as he would have it, the studium. He defines this as a state that cannot be reduced to the common visibility of a photograph – or any common language at all. The “truth” he proposes is not at all antagonistic to the coded depiction of a given subject, rather these codes depend absolutely on that referential aspect of the medium. Here Barthes is edging closer to his subject, one that becomes somewhat more apparent in the closing half of this inscrutable book, concerning as it does the infamous photograph of his mother, the very one that, as I have said, he chooses not to reproduce. This image, which is referred to as the Winter Garden photograph on account of its setting, then becomes a mythical absence at the heart of the text itself.

Describing the experience of looking through these old photographs he notes a mounting dissatisfaction over the fact that in none of them is he able to recognise the “essence” of his mother’s being. Her image remains fragmentary, and yet what he seeks is the apprehension of her whole self – not as memory, but as fact. The Winter Garden photograph is treated, then, as a revelation; he finds in this image the image of his mother, embodied and yet quite apart from the photographic image itself. The apprehension of her real being pierces the reality of the photograph and the “presence” of his mother (the totality of her image) is constituted by her absence. The “photograph” becomes therefore the perverse signifier of an absence that cannot be represented. His mother, as a child – as he never knew her – is here a kind of spectral entity, forever suspended between the reality of his experience and the common reality of the photograph. Barthes is taking us to the point where our concept of representation begins to fail – here there are things of which we cannot speak or that cannot be seen, but only intuited as an embodiment of something else.

For him this “failure” is implicit in the photographic image and what makes it so significant is the subversive insistence of a referent that can at times escape its container, spilling over the picture, breaking its own representational codes. Bathes’ late work abounds with this sort of covert measure, a frivolous “methodology” that hinges on some personal obsession of his, a detail of taste, which opens out into a labyrinthine reflection. The airy structures of his prose in Camera Lucida and its elaborate doubling of narrative themes have surely to be considered as one of his finest achievements. But then again, he is not writing about photography as such, at least not just as itself. Rather he is using this literary mode of analysis as a rhetorical device by which to address the unspeakable aspect of his own experiences from within; turning the photograph against itself, the immovable assertion of death-in-life: photography becomes death. He takes us to the very limit of what is visible, trying to show all that escapes the “narration” of a cultural discourse, a tangible absence he finds again through the image of his mother. In this sense, then, Barthes’ subject is the reality within these fictions of place and memory, even, or especially, when the picture does not seem able to hold it – every photograph appears to suggest the manifestation of a true reference, breaking the frame.

The “truth” of a photograph then is a kind of permanent contingency. Barthes finds in the Winter Garden photograph the truth of his mother, not as an empirical fact, something discernable through observation, but as an experience – he experiences the truth of his mother and of the image itself. It involves, for him at least, a motivated looking, some investment in the subject, but he has ultimately to consider its presence in every photograph – as a quality of the medium, a truth expressly of and not about, that is, an experiential truth. In this way, Bathes’ position in Camera Lucida can be understood as a radical assertion of an ideal held, even then, to be deeply problematic. But the way in which he navigates this crisis is both typical of his later style and of his ingenuity as a thinker. The narrative opposition of this elusive “punctum” to a social field of photographic meaning, its coded surface, allows him to construct a reading of the photograph as a series of socially grounded codes built on the very presupposition of its “truthful” reference. This is not truth as the mere correspondence of representation and object, but a discursive encounter, burdened by reality.

Ben Cauchi

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:23:00 +0000

In its earliest years photography attracted a curious mix of charlatans and visionaries, each pursuing its innate tendency toward spectacle for very different ends. As the codes that would shape our understanding of the medium were still being determined there was, correspondingly, no definite expectation of what it could do. Ben Cauchi is an artist acutely sensitive to these other histories and his work draws on the same visual rhetoric that was first elaborated in the blatant deceptions of that early photography, recasting its charged aura of truthfulness as a kind a blackly humorous burlesque. Of course, at a time when photographic manipulation is so widely accepted the heritage of Cauchi’s trickery might appear somewhat beside the point. But he aims less at the issue of photographic truth, which is, at any rate, a phantom target, than the question of what constitutes belief as a human principle and how that need might be expressed.

Cauchi uses this historical vocabulary as a framework to address the evolution of certain photographic tropes, all of which centre around the notion of what exactly is visible in an image and how the conditions of that visibility influence our “belief” in the photograph. A key player in this fictional universe is that of the photographer as confidence man, here to work over the rubes with a sincere expression and a marked deck. This role is ably played by Cauchi himself, revealing the photographer as a kind of double-agent, both aware of this deception and, equally, in thrall to it. His universe obviously is not ours – he chooses to inhabit a very different time, but the array of props and gestures he surrounds himself with are more or less in direct reference to the conceptual evolution of photography. Certain values or expectations have defined how we use the medium and in Cauchi’s work there is a tracing of the way those particular values came into being. He recreates the earliest years of photography’s development not in order to vilify its later failures, but rather to understand how they might have been possible.

Even the material presence of this work has some understated element of performance to it, as Cauchi favours the labour intensive method of wet-plate collodion, specialising in the production of ambrotypes, which are essentially unique photographic objects. This dialogue with its own contested history is implicit in how we approach the work, meaning and process bound together in convincing, significant ways. So this preference for a specific affect is not just in the interest of its formal “authenticity” as such, but rather is a way of articulating his deepest concerns, having to do with the ways in which we encounter a photograph, both as an object with a very definite set of properties and also as a kind of “ideological” statement about its given subject. What we “see” in a picture is never just a matter of what is there, and Cauchi deals with those particular qualities of a medium that has always been on the edge of its own visibility.

He has a comprehensive website.

Reading Pictures: Roger Ballen

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:24:00 +0000

Roger Ballen, Wild Child, 2003

The setting is a bare room, of sorts, more like a cell, and it’s hard to make out the size or shape of it – we don’t see very much. In a way these things don’t really matter. Any familiarity with Ballen’s work over the last two decades or so will offer some guide to this otherwise indeterminate place. The exact details of the room, this cell, are not significant – the rooms are all essentially the same, they might appear different, of course, but what sustains them is unchanging. These are the places that occupy the darker margins of life; we associate them with detention, faceless violence and the increasingly absurd machinations of power. There is often an element of amused cruelty to how Ballen employs these settings, as if to show what would be left if we scrapped off the thin veneer of civilisation – all our convenient fictions. He offers then a glimpse of how we spend our days, engaged in futile rituals of containment designed to stave off, just for a while, the full realisation of our abandonment, rearranging the shards of an atomised cultural history, the worth of which we are now permanently unable to grasp. In this sense, one of the most potent and fundamental archetypes of human society, (if we take the “room” as a place-holder for the notion of domesticity as shelter), becomes here pathetically inverted, a parody of what supposedly constitutes it – in the very place where civilisation should be, it is coming undone. This territory is one that Ballen has made his own.

Ultimately though the room is just a stage – if not exactly a neutral one – for this theatre of the mind; several objects and a figure are arrayed with an obviously performative intent, some of these cast in the leading role, the rest with supporting parts, still weighted with all the elaborate possibilities of meaning. Perhaps the first thing we notice though is the child, seemingly involved in some private (and frightening) game, alone in this bare room. Not an infant, we might, in fact, describe him as being of an age that is right on the cusp of social consciousness, where one’s sense of self is being shaped by the realisation that other people exist as wilful, independent entities. His posture is relaxed, but his actions decidedly specific, even to the point of being inscrutable; that raised hand could almost be some kind of declarative motion, beckoning. He is dressed in a way that is only symbolic of “dressing” as such – without being naked, he is not clothed either. The lone sock is especially pathetic, precisely because it is someone else’s sock and not his own, the remnant of another time, another life, now long absent, and so of course it doesn’t actually fit him. Its raggedness also speaks to a certain thrift, a loss of worldly station, but the loss is deeper and more fundamental – the articles of culture itself no longer fit the way they should. It is typical of Ballen’s perverse humour that a dirty sock can do so much in picture (whether or not he intended any such reading is, obviously, a different matter).

Perhaps the most obvious thing to say about this child, however, is the fact that he is wearing a blank mask, an item fundamentally associated with the theatre, with disguise and performance. But convention suggests that the agency of those masks should not be visible, they all hinge on certain ideas about what sort of behaviour is “natural” so that it might then be duplicated as fiction – without revealing how the performance is constructed. As we might expect though, Ballen takes a more aggressive approach here; the mask doesn’t quite fit, or at least is worn in such a way as to displace the whole identity of the child. It does not just conceal the wearer’s face, allowing him to slip into some other role – to “become” the character, but in fact obliterates his specificity as a person. The child is now an archetype of a lost self, and yet it is also worth noting that the mask does not “fit” in some very particular ways. This loss is achieved because the mask disavows any other reading; we can’t see his eyes and so the person beneath it is not really visible to us as an individual; there is, as a result, no synthesis of the mask and its wearer, no interior to the role that he is playing – the mask becomes the face, which then permanently assumes it contours. The conclusion we can draw from this, although it is, again, probably not something intended as such, is that the coherence of personal identity, even as it emerges, can be lost when overwhelmed by the forces of social expectation.

The temptation, though, is to assume that the boy is alone in the room, with his mask and his white rat, the proverbial ball-and-chain (anchored, of course, to nothing at all). But that is just a clever elision of the medium – and Ballen’s astute use of it. It is worth remembering that whatever we see happening here is carefully planned and staged, there are no incidental notes (and should any occur they are wrapped back into the narrative). We are seeing him as the photographer did, seeing what he wants us to see. There is always the possibility then that the “performance” is a double bluff and our expectations are being toyed with in ways that go to the very heart of what photography is about, letting us believe something only in order to prove it’s opposite – presenting truth as fiction, questioning the nature of those terms in themselves. It is this indeterminate state that gives Ballen free reign to upset the conventions of picture-making. He doesn’t use the technology in some radical way, but lets his stylistically austere treatment of these enigmatic objects and poses break the very illusion they otherwise convincingly evoke. The narration is so apparently straight-forward that the only reason we have not to question it the fact that he protests his innocence so assuredly – of course the faceless boy was sitting in that room, like a Christ child with his improvised halo. But the meaning of a photograph will inevitably fall in that deep space between what happened and what we see.

(Ballen's website is here, and the above picture came from here, where you can find many more pictures from the series Shadow Chamber).

Mishka Henner - No Man's Land

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:59:00 +0000

There are places that we just don’t go, and this reluctance has little to do with geography – or at least, not the actual contingencies of landscape. Rather, these distances are specifically cultural; places (and people) are reduced to a state of invisibility rooted in the privilege of being seen, the often unearned right to assume one’s own visibility as a social force, and conversely, of negating the visibility of others. Mishka Henner’s work No Man’s Land deals, at least in part, with these themes. The project centres on the use of images taken from Google Street View presumably showing improvised sites of “commercial” sex along the back-roads and motorways of several European countries. These woman are confined to various non-places, disposable realities captured with near manic blankness. Street View is a monument to our times, a volatile presence, everywhere and nowhere.

This invisibility is a lack of economic as well as cultural agency. People have long been commodities, but it has never been easier for us not to see that fact. The social balance is always tipped in favour of those who control the ability to define it. So when we talk about “privilege” we really mean the assumption that society is an extension of how we see the world. The order of privilege, its stability, depends on that imbalance to somehow validate it. An increasing sense of distance allowed by technology, the ease with which we can hold the world at arm’s length, is just another function of these inherently flawed and alienating structures. The women in Henner’s work remain ciphers; even at the very moment in which they come under scrutiny their identity is lost. This is, of course, a tenant of the Street View project, but it is also a rather piercing metaphorical description of the faceless lives they lead.

Of all the recent projects in this idiom, No Man’s Land seems to me one of the most effective, in so far as it links the new technology with a relevant social context (Doug Rickard’s work is also exemplary for that reason). If the aim of Street View is, in a pseudo-imperial way, to make the world “visible” then surely it also succeeds – as we can see in Henner’s work – at revealing the limits of that visibility, because it occurs under a paradigm of tacit and ultimately, false authority. It is as if we cannot see these things, except at a costly distance from them, a distance that suggests they are not part of “our” world at all. Yet this is the world that has created and now sustains the very lives these women live. The way in which they are seen embodies a social paradox; by incorporating this sense of (social and technological) distance into his work Henner achieves something unique.

You can find more here.

Joachim Schmid: Outside the Frame

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000

From the series Cyberspaces

From the series O Campo

Views of two books from the series Other People's Photographs

The staggering rate at which we now make and consume photographic images is liable to induce a sense of vertigo in anyone who thinks about it for too long. Of course, given that photography is essentially a technological medium, the easy multiplication of images must be understood as a key value of its nature. But this incredible proliferation is in itself something mostly unforeseen, because the shift in the process of actually making a picture is basically very little, a matter of degree only. The implications of this jump from a chemical process to a digital one are significant, however, and still imperfectly understood. That being said, there are artists who have been dealing with the issue of photographic consumption for a number of years, even before the recent explosion in technology, and perhaps chief among them is Joachim Schmid, who is a prescient observer of media culture in general. Granted he began his investigations – and that’s fundamentally what they are – into the social effect of lens-based images long before the internet and digital technology attained their current ubiquity, but there is none the less something about his work that cements an understanding of just what the whole mass of photographic imagery would eventually become, consuming reality one frame at a time.

His central aim has been the remarkably consistent questioning of what is it that we do with photographs and how they shape the way in which we see the world around us, that profound conceptual disparity between representation and experience so often obscured by the multiple roles filled by the photographic image. It is – no doubt rightly – an article of faith in any contemporary discussion about the medium that we cannot in any sense trust what we see in a photograph, that some essential sense of its being in reference to a real event has long since been abandoned. Yet we know that although this has in a fundamental way to do with a new volatility of the photograph and the ease with which it can be manipulated, the other dimensions of this supposed shift in thinking are much harder to quantify, given the fact that images have always been subject to some sleight of hand, or at least an inherent willingness to deceive. The most remarkable insight of Schmid’s practice has been to articulate in a systematic way the far more complex social iterations of photographic meaning and how those values are tied into the imposition of a particular view of the world that is, in fact, only made possible by photography – its “manipulation” belongs to a far more embedded process than the simple detail of changing appearances, then. It is, in fact, the ordering of our collective reality.

As a result of this particular insight, Schmid is explicitly concerned with those wider structures of meaning, the contexts in which pictures occur and are read. He does not specifically “appropriate” the images that form the basis of his work, but uses their presence in a reflexive fashion to describe the ways in which meaning is derived as the function of a particular image in a particular context – and by altering this context, he alters the meaning of the images. It is somewhat ironic that this facility for “ordering” our sense of the world through photography depends on the ordering of the photographic material itself, in so far as the subtext of this action is to reinforce that first connection between the image and its nominal subject. This has to be taken as more than just a tangential reference – the image has to be (or is understood as) the analogue of its subject. In changing the context of the images Schmid is revealing this “double-bind” of photographic reference, the way in which it is definitively anchored to a subject – where the picture is inescapably about something – and yet the meaning of that reference is unstable, given to abrupt changes in implication depending on where we find it. The same “reference” can have an untold number of meanings. What is at stake, then, is the containment of those possibilities, because it is the limit of any discourse (like attaching a particular reading to a photograph) that establishes meaning. But at the same time we cannot think of these “limits” as being in any way neutral or without an agenda. There is often some pre-existing order packaged with the photograph that demands a certain understanding of its subject (and the photograph itself, in turn). Schmid’s work depends, therefore, on the articulation of a singular, if paradoxically ubiquitous, trope – that of the archive.

This is not just a system of ordering information according to certain rules, the particular strategies of an archive, or its incidental style, as much as it is the assumed privilege of controlling the meaning within it, setting the terms of that meaning. It is, in fact, the effect of a super-structure that determines how that content is read, the deeper intent of which is to shape larger narratives – telling us this is how it was, a kind of proof. The archive is not just order then, but the appropriation of meaning beyond the “factual” as a projected image of authority. All of which is not to suggest, of course, that there is some clear intentionality behind such a process, a will to control meaning in itself – and Schmid is not so naive as to imply that in his work. Rather “the archive” is shaped by a gravitational pull between images; the logic imposed on them is subject to a certain kind of irrationality, even in those particular cases where the aim of a collection is to reinforce a specific viewpoint. For example, his series Other People’s Photographs, which involved the process of classifying amateur pictures into thematic groupings is exemplary in that regard; the mass of visual material with which we now live is clearly another sort of archival practice – it has, for want of a better word, gone viral, and Schmid deals with the change in a particularly acute way.

He also has a comprehensive website. (This piece also appeared in Issue 13 of SMBH magazine).

Past Tense: Michael Ackerman's Fiction

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:51:00 +0000

Most often we take our certainties for granted. Places or names appear to us as comprehensible, being exactly what they are and no less. A broader sense of the world is held together by that fundamental assumption, shading the contours of an unchanging landscape where dark still opposes light, but is never equal to it, where there is no likely slippage between who you are and the image you have of yourself. All of this is not exactly a lie, it’s just not the world we fully belong to or are capable of making. The illusions we build our lives on are fragile and grasped with too much force they shatter.

If Fiction is a perfectly apt title for this body of work by Michael Ackerman it is because in refusing one narrative he finds others just as troubling. His is a world of forgetting (and conversely, a world where forgetting is impossible), of questions that cannot be answered, hungers that cannot be satisfied. He charts a near hallucinogenic passage through some blasted, seemingly post-historical nightscape; everything is received at the most piercing frequency, nerves raw, attention pulled in every direction. Here there are no sure coordinates by which to navigate, no anchor save for the act of photography itself – notations on the void.

The images fall into an associative and distinctly non-linear rhythm that carries the momentum of the book forward, a densely rendered stream of consciousness building upon itself, spreading out, revealing layers, currents of meaning. Its structure is actually quite elaborate, a trademark of Ackerman’s that might well be unconvincing in lesser hands. He is all the while unwavering in his determination to cross into (or out of) some desolate territory of the soul, and although not necessarily distant, these are definitely states of awareness on the outer edges of our familiar existence, all those things from which we ordinarily seek shelter, that threaten the comfortable reserve we put between ourselves and the world for fear of being overwhelmed by memories too barbed to handle, or by the fevered pursuit of oblivion, pleasure and despair intertwined, the crashingly sensate. Even the light, when we find it, is a blinding absence, and whatever it touches is scorched beyond recognition, leaving only a trace of some encounter that has been and gone. Everything here exists emphatically in the past tense, now becoming then, and the future never happens, because we can only live it through the lens of the past – and of the camera.

For all its ostensible roughness, there is an insistent purity to Ackerman’s photographic vision, the dark really is dark and the light is just another kind of emptiness, no less cruel. Everything is haunted, tragic – and it is, convincingly so. This happens in the materiality of his pictures, which in this case is not just a stylistic choice, but also a set of values inseparable from their meaning. In many ways, Fiction is an important milestone in Ackerman’s continuing evolution as a photographer. It develops on the immediate observational context of his earlier pictures, but here they are no longer as grounded, either spatially or psychologically. His encounter with the world is shaped by the need he has to articulate it in photographs, leaving a core of determined expressiveness, where the feeling of a picture, its emotional affect, counts for more than anything. The work now depends wholly on the sort of resonant atmosphere he manages to create, a formal consistency that subsumes all of Ackerman’s experiences into a single thread, winding together the events of his life with the particularity of his own response to them – telling the story is a manifestation of the story itself.

There is an inherent creative danger, though, in the sort of landscape that Ackerman has claimed for his own. At any time he might fall into a theatrical despair that makes little more than a fetish of the human struggle, with no reflection at all on what exactly that might be, besides a stagey backdrop for the angst-ridden demimonde – life in the raw. Truthfully, Ackerman’s is hardly a vision broad in scope; some will no doubt even find it hollow romanticism. But his sustained pursuit of a personal ideal is considerably more than the sum of its parts, and the cumulative effect of his photography is one that seems to offer genuine insight about the times in which we live.

More than that, there is a pervasive sense of historical resonance to this work, the way a charged past seeps into our understanding of a place, and it is in this context that Ackerman’s deeply felt style makes the most sense. It was conflict that drew the map of Europe, terrible loss and blood-shed. In his nocturnal wanderings Ackerman uses his own peeled sensibility like a gauge for past tragedy and finds it everywhere, the wind-blown streets, the emptied landscapes and solitary figures blurring into the dark – infected by history. This awareness is what crystallises his own existential drama; the sense of a horizon wider than just his inner turmoil and the always hectic urge to make pictures, the need to connect with what is happening around him.

This is not to say of course that the value of Ackerman’s work is to be found only in tracing the emotional overlap of past and present, because clearly it stands on its own terms as something fully realised. It is actually the world that fits his vision and not the other way around. He shows that our past is nearly always tragic, just because it is past and so far beyond where we can reach. The immediacy of Ackerman’s own feeling is projected from the images; we can share in it or at least occupy a roughly comparable space for the duration of our viewing. He is not just showing a moment, but wants us to exist within it as he did and his willingness to collapse those boundaries is ultimately what makes this work such a rewarding experience.

You'll find more on the Agence Vu website, but really the best thing is try to get a copy of the book.

Edward Mapplethorpe - The Variations

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:10:00 +0000

Skittering, free-form lines splinter into blurs of metallic light; part alchemy, part action painting – this is chaos, barely controlled, and without the burden of photographic appearance these images become a trace of their own creation. Each is an acutely sensitive record of the particular moment in which it was made, crystallised as these singular objects at the conceptual limits of the medium. The Variations is a relatively recent body of work by New York artist Edward Mapplethorpe.

You may well recognise the name; he is the younger brother of Robert, a one-time assistant and collaborator who brought technical polish to what had been a previously rough-hewn vision. This family association left a deep artistic confusion, however, and that, coupled with an addiction to heroin set Mapplethorpe’s creative development back for many years. He has gradually been reasserting his own identity though, with a convincing study of the photograph as a material presence, something approaching the sculptural in its understanding of weight and density. His work belongs to that rare order of photographic experience that stands entirely on its own terms. They are not images of something, not spaces for content, but the naked architecture of a process becoming an image, the fact of its visible existence.

It’s something of a risk even to call this work photography, breaching as he is our (already tenuous) expectation of how pictures function. Of course, it is photographic, almost explicitly so, and not just because of the materials, but because of how they are used. This is what undermines the seemingly inevitable (and not unfounded) comparison of Mapplethorpe’s work with painting. The image is the result of a directed chemical action, there is a knife-edge of chance involved. The differences are important though and revealing, because whereas in painting the action is mostly linear – that is, a decision happens before and after the mark is put down – these are not marks made. Rather they are expressions of an open-ended process, formed by a totally different relationship to the intentionality of the artist. Painting is an accumulation in time; it stands in layers as a kind of sediment. Mapplethorpe’s use of photography (a writing in light) suggests an action that is instantaneous, but expanded outwards – the proliferation of a dizzying optical complexity.

His work exists in a very provocative space, being defiantly abstract in its articulation and yet having an utterly immediate perceptual effect. What he produces is not an image describing the contours of a prior reality, but an encounter that is in itself real, being without reference, a closed realm of forces activated by looking, by the nuance of attention. In this way, they are incomplete, lacking the sufficiency of an image, in exchange for something that is in its way just as commanding, formed by a tension between a set of values that are at once the antithesis of photography and its daring confirmation.

See more of this work here, and try this article for more background on Mapplethorpe.

Diane Arbus: The Problem of Biography

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:20:00 +0000

A Portrait of Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, 1969

It is perhaps a not very surprising irony that Diane Arbus should have come to occupy a position similar to those characters that populate her work, allowing for some discrete titillation under the guise of high art – she was a slumming Jewish princess from a rich family who took pictures of “freaks” and then killed herself. You can even read the autopsy report, one of several lapses into ghoulish hagiography for the otherwise excellent survey of her work, Revelations, published in 2003. Adding to the indignity is a breathlessly tabloid account of her life from Patricia Bosworth, followed by an execrable film “inspired” by Arbus , featuring a performance from Nicole Kidman so elegantly disaffected that it borders on the catatonic and which is also rife with factual inaccuracies.

It seems that we are far happier to let Arbus live on in the popular imagination as a tortured, (irredeemably female) genius than we are to seriously examine the deeper challenge of her work, a situation provoked in no small part by the famously intransigent keepers of her estate, whose defensive attitudes have discouraged many. Their strategies are understandable, given the sensationalism that has come to surround her life, but it remains to be seen if they are really effective, as the more conspicuous exceptions so far have been those biographers determined to tell all, with little or no reference to her major achievement in photography, other than the suitably grotesque encounters with the demimonde it provided.

If we discount an obvious temptation to conflate the sad facts of her life with the kind of pictures she made, the next critical trap is to think of Arbus as just a predatory voyeur, manipulating her vulnerable subjects into revealing the most blatantly damaged part of themselves, especially when those parts are there for all to see, or in fact, to heroically ignore. However, it seems to me that the unique strength of her work is in having the courage to be so nakedly voyeuristic, to stare and to be complicit in her staring with all those people that we are told never to stare at, so as not to make “them” uncomfortable and while Arbus herself might have been predatory (in the way that photographers often are) looking at these pictures we become the prey. It is that moment of awful fission when the stare is returned and we are reminded again of the positions we so carelessly inhabit, the way we can bring the “other” into being just by the tacit assumption of our privilege.

Any reading of her work must inevitably focus on the perceived otherness of those she photographed and this fact is then cited as the clear proof that she exploited her helpless subjects. It is there in the perverse authority of how she makes visible their strangeness, their difference, or somehow projects it onto everyone who appeared before her camera, regardless of who they are or what they look like. But paradoxically it is our willingness to regard these people as other and our denial of agency to them that is truly exploitative. Arbus seems to have regarded them as equals precisely by acknowledging their difference and photographing them anyway, by treating them as individuals worthy of attention. Their otherness rests with us, the conviction – in keeping with the dominant values of our culture – that it is only proper for certain people to be seen at all. If her pictures were of those we deem socially acceptable then there would be no question of whether or not the photographs are “exploitative” in nature. It is only when those boundaries are challenged that such questions arise. In a strange, but none the less pronounced way these are portraits that reveal more about the audience – and the very act of looking itself – as they do about the people in them.

Having just (briefly) examined the perils of biography then, it would clearly be unwise to speculate now on the kind of intention that drove Arbus to make this work, but I think there can be no doubting her deep study into the complexities of photographic portraiture as an act, the extent to which it is tied up with social hierarchies and how the sort of roles we inhabit in turn define those relationships. The transgression that Arbus perpetrates is of a more fundamental sort than a well-brought-up young woman in that time and place keeping outrageously bad company, because although it has proved irresistible to biographers and critics alike (most of whom should know better) even that is not what we would like to think.

The photographic encounter she has with the dwarf or the transvestite seems (and is) on a par with that of the respectable ladies, their hats just so, or the genial pro-war demonstrator. All are seen to have a frighteningly equal vulnerability; her embrace of difference is without boundary, suggesting that we all pretend, that we all play the role we’re given, but actually live inside of them, as something, or someone else – something impossible to ever really see. She addresses herself then precisely to the gap between those two roles. Her “freaks” don’t have a choice in the matter; their difference is an accident of birth and can’t be hidden. It seems the polite thing would be not to stare, or even look, but for Arbus it is necessary to acknowledge the shared otherness of just being human and in her photography no less a thing is at stake.

In the forty years since her suicide it is somewhat tragic that Diane Arbus has been accorded little of the profound empathy that she herself was so capable of – it is, no doubt, a familiar reluctance to let the truth get in the way of a good story, and her life was in that sense almost archetypal. She is the innocent abroad, whose destructive level of identification with others shattered an already fragile sense of self. Given that she was so obviously troubled it seems a fair conclusion that her state of mind influenced in some way the photography she made. Her courageous attempt to penetrate the turbulent surfaces of identity is not as easy to account for though and so is not likely to be found in any biography, no matter how scrupulous. The mistake is in thinking that we can ever really know someone, even when they are completely seen, or perhaps especially then.

Jessica Eaton

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:15:00 +0000

A slight-of-hand, that’s the work of Jessica Eaton, whose lightness of touch belies a range of profound, even disturbing concerns to do with the insistently fictive space of photographic images. Eaton’s elegant, discursive pictures have a wry humour that softens our descent to those other, less comprehensible precincts of meaning. These pictures evoke the complex mesh of perception and visibility that is the latent value of a process implicated in the seemingly “neutral” field of photographic representation. The nominal subject is fatally tangled in the very structure that allows it to be seen, an act of repeated disappearance. Although elaborated with a combined rigour and playfulness Eaton’s work has a deep measure of this uncertainty; her conceptual games reveal the material intersession of photography.

Elements of pictorial structure are disclosed as the subject of these works, their exposition of process becomes another meaning. Within this rhetoric of formal gestures a distinct sort of vocabulary emerges, one that breaks the image down to the slightest degree by which it might still function. Concentrating for the most part on a studio practice, Eaton offers a layered reading of photographic history, qualities specific to its development as a medium. Her manipulation of given forms has an idiosyncratic cast, they become an acutely charged surface for the problem of photography, those uncanny distortions of time and space that we so easily take for granted. In fact, Eaton’s work is driven by a precise use of these two variables, producing structures that exist only in the composite dimension of the photograph itself. Many evoke the particulate duality of light, indeterminate states that seem conclusively frozen, but which are also the product of an accumulation, time flattened and becoming multiple. We see then none of its aspects as decisive, they are all disturbingly real, because our sense of the world as a visually cohesive experience depends of the modes of perception that create and maintain its singular appearance.

Eaton’s photography feels like an engagement with that synthetic process, but there is a refusal to let it become fully transparent, revealing instead its fixed co-ordinates and ellipses – how the illusion is worked, or at least some of the ways. She has moved still deeper into this imagined territory of the photograph, to deal with shapes that are increasingly meticulous and yet more elusive than ever, despite the bristling internal proliferation they depict. The effect is cerebral, but rarely distanced; it is the product of an open, sophisticated formality. Her latest work exists squarely in the presumptive, unstable space between it and the viewer, a challenge to the habits of perception. Both full and empty, these pictures work to define the process of their making, just as they are unmade when we grasp exactly what that is, breaking apart the certainties of photographic time. By taking a late modern fascination with geometric density to these unexpected philosophical depths, Eaton’s work is a glimpse of another future for the medium and a challenge to our understanding of its past.

Find more here.

John Stezaker: Surface Tension

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:15:00 +0000

Photography is a medium that conceals, even as it appears to show us everything and John Stezaker brings that fundamental quality of elusiveness out into the open, making it explicit. He functions covertly in those unconscious pathways that images lay bare, forging connections that trouble and beguile. His practice is a distinctive form of collage that seems at first to be hardly worthy of the name; images merely overlap each other, two or sometimes more, often cut at angles and others straight across. These simple gestures soon reveal themselves to be hugely resonant. The collision of different photographic histories, with a kind of delicately orchestrated violence, is his trademark.

In these works the whole image acts as a surface or a screen and cannot be decomposed into its elements – there is instead a vocabulary of photographic codes, a set of assumptions about how the medium works that we use to negotiate the space of photographs and these are in no way self-evident. Yet there remains an implied certainty as to what a photograph might depict. We don’t actually confuse photographs with reality, but at the same time knowingly permit them to stand in for what we expect to be real. All photography is a kind of abstraction – its codes are not about reality, but in fact are a reality. Stezaker shows them to be fractured and deceptive, psychologically fraught – hierarchies of meaning that open into fault-lines. These breaks are literal, of course, he physically cuts the image, but they are also figurative, to do with the fictive visual space of photographs, a continuity that acts as a real space. These illusions are maybe as much cultural as they are perceptual or material, but Stezaker’s work depends on a deep understanding of how the specific presence of the image shapes our reading of it.

A raw material for his he work draws on a vast amount of photographic ephemera from that precise moment up to and around the mid 20th century when strategies of mass communication had just begun to categorically redefine our social landscape. This is the golden age of picture magazines and movie starlets; new kinds of photographic reality begin shaping the culture – we now definitively lived (and saw ourselves living) in the images that we made. Of course, this is no coincidence. The questions that are most pressing for Stezaker deal with how a given image might fail the experience it depicts, rendering it ineffably strange, and the way in which that strangeness is not just a quality of the medium, but a fundamental disorder implicit in the social structures we inhabit. He quietly interrogates the pervasive assumptions – psychological and political – implied by photographic representation.

Stezaker’s response is not theoretical, however. Instead, it is practical, destroying the coherence of images to open a filmic reach of unrealised desire, the endless blind stream of pictures falling into and out of our lives. He deals with photographs as agents of unexpected complexity; they become fields of engagement. The “abstraction” of a photograph is as much temporal as it is visual, each lost moment receding from an unimaginable future. Meaning adheres in the codes that determine how a photograph is read and not in a causal link of reality and representation.

The specific materiality of an image is broken into a number of discrete elements and then combined in one of several different ways, but his methods are in no way illusionistic. The image is forcibly dematerialised; or rather our reading of the image is driven back to how the qualities of the material determine our understanding of the image as a bearer of content, an unstable system of references. Breaking that surface tension renders it, somewhat perversely, impenetrable, and so beyond whatever expectations we might have concerning a photographic reality, while at the same time being explicitly about that same question. The tense dialogue between individual collaged elements of his work is a chain reaction that negates every pure reading of how an image might work; meaning is not only rendered conditional, here it is actually set adrift.

These gestures that confuse the stable dimensions of photographic reality fall into a number of different categories, all related to the same basic vocabulary and each with its own particular effect on how the “new” image will be read. What they have in common that is that they seek to provoke some failure in the continuity of depicted space, which is both visual and psychological, an unravelling of the photographic code caused either by brining two opposing images together or by cutting into a photograph to expose the image he has placed beneath it, in a literal (but often dazzlingly effective) act of rupture. Cutting into the photograph emphasises its surface, as a perceptual fact (where the image adheres) and a metaphor.

This certainly relates to the repeated use of films stills in the construction of Stezaker’s work. These images already form a surface or a cultural screen for a collective psycho-social dynamic and deconstructing that fictive space is really the core of his work. The projected (or rather, performed) images of cinematic narrative become an interior projection, a dream-life for the society that created them. He systematically excavates anxieties and contradictions having to do with gender roles and political structures, forces that shape the landscape of contemporary life.

It is arguably because cinema is so obviously about how we would like to be seen – or see ourselves – that they have provided such an important resource for Stezaker’s meditations on the complexities of perception, on the images we fashion and, with a kind of recursive density, that in turn fashion how we live. There are a number of specific themes that reoccur, all of which are realised in tandem with (or under the rubric of) Stezaker’s well established repertoire of collage techniques. It is this especially dynamic relationship between the process by which his work is realised and the conceptual heft of its effect that makes Stezaker such a significant artist.

In the series entitled Marriage a diagonal (or sometimes vertical) cut through a standard actor’s head-shot results in a profound and often disturbing blurring of gender lines when the resulting fragment is precisely aligned with an opposing image to form a new hybrid face. These images do not always depend on a male/ female pairing, but in each case a pernicious confusion of identities is suggested, including those having to with gender and how it is socially (or rather, visually) articulated. The point is that changing the image creates a new – if impossible – reality, one our normative expectations of the medium cannot reliably contain. Stezaker’s framing of this work with such an obviously loaded title only serves to further underscore the thematic issues that are in play.

He forcefully suggests that what is real exists right at the edge of our capacity to make it visible, and must instead persist as a deep absence in every attempt to do so. In some cases this absence is a literal one, cut directly out of the photograph, collapsing that space. The excisions form an alternate (and unexpected) narrative from the image, one at odds with how it might have been read before; once again it is a material intervention that reveals an otherwise unseen force in the currency of images, having to do with the exchange of meaning. Stezaker’s title for this series (Tabula Rasa) is no doubt a typically astute reference to everything that he has shown photographic reality not to be – and with such an effortlessly minimal gesture.

This near forensic study of the photographic medium is of consequence partly because these images are an analogue for the assumptions we make about reality itself. Stezaker knows of course that we do not treat photographs as being interchangeable with their subject, but that through a system of representational codes read the image as if it was nothing more than what it is a picture of, as though the image was a screen and not explicitly a kind of material (or cultural) surface.

It is through wilfully complicating that expectation of a screen-like transparency that Stezaker’s work reveals itself as being very much about how those codes might fail, in turn showing the covert architecture that allows them to function, throwing our focus back to that ever-shifting distance between the world and whatever image we might have of it. His forced exchange between the photograph and the act of reference itself is at heart a philosophical question having to do with the reality effect of images, how photographs might exist more to validate appearance than to challenge it. In this way Stezaker’s interventions, his cutting into or across the image, aims to openly provoke a reality that is of an altogether different order than that of the photograph itself, an unstable, often perverse reality that our expectations of the medium will not always permit to become visible.

Richard Prince - Steal This Picture

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:17:00 +0000

Most accounts of Richard Prince’s recent legal trouble have been coloured with more than a hint of venom – as though he had, finally, gotten what he deserved. Of course, this is nothing new for Prince who has long traded (or profited, as many would argue) on the kind of controversy that his work generates. Seen by the old-guard photographic establishment as little more than a thief hiding behind the slick patter of academics, he seems to justify in every way the suspicion that contemporary art is a racket. Indeed, the specious and dismissive way he attempted to rationalise the use of Patrick Cariou’s original photographs will probably do nothing to dissuade many people of the opinion that both Prince is a cheap huckster out to make a buck.

Yet all this attention being given to his methods rather than the content of those images he is so often accused of "stealing" conceals the rather inconvenient fact that his best work issues a daring set of challenges to our understanding of photography as a social currency. In dealing variously with cowboys, girlfriends and celebrities Prince reaches into the most profound archetypes of American culture, seeing how the proliferation of such images, their endless reproduction, effects how we might build a particular vision of ourselves – and how that vision inevitably becomes a commodity understood in photographic terms. He speaks for and to an age that is fully characterised by media saturation; identities are shaped by the images we consume, they perpetuate themselves in this way.

His cowboys are defined by roles of traditional masculinity, which in turn are utilised to encourage the sale of a product because it is so identified with those principles – to use that product (cigarettes, in this case) is then to be cast as synonymous with that “masculine” role. Prince turns the language of advertising against itself, exposing both the thoroughness with which it is concealed and the persistence of its influence. The girlfriends too are an archetype reduced to mere commodity status, the female role defined by a nominal (male) author. Prince undermines the pernicious assumptions of this photographic trope just by showing how the trick is worked, repeating the cultural exchange that allows it to function – and the celebrities don’t even need to be explained. I mean, everyone wants to be “famous” now, right?

It is the perverse insistence on appropriating overtly authored work that most gains the ire of his detractors. By comparison, no one really questions the use of anonymous press photographs in Warhol silk-screens, or even John Baldessari’s film-stills. In both cases found images are presented with minimal alteration, but this draws little comment – it is certainly not regarded as outright theft. The specific nature of an appropriation determines fair use, but the difference is more than just a conceptual one, it is also financial. In making these works Prince significantly reduced the worth of the actual photographs by Patrick Cariou and then, most damningly, tried to refuse his culpability by denigrating them as “genre” pieces of no intrinsic value.

This article offers some useful background on the case.

As far as I'm concerned, appropriation is only a valid strategy when used to purposefully alter the meaning of an image. Prince's cowboys are of value in a way that Canal Zone can never be simply by the fact that he uses those images in a consciously reflexive way. This is not just a matter of changing the function of an image, but of getting inside how it works. He repeats this trick with the girlfriend series, but in many ways it is a game of diminishing returns. Canal Zone falls outside of appropriation (as I've defined it here, at least) not because of how Prince altered Cariou's photographs (considerably more than the cowboys, for example) but because the conceptual distance they travel is so negligible.

Francesca Woodman: Learning to Disappear

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:43:00 +0000

In telling this story we must begin, perhaps reluctantly, at the end. Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from the roof of a New York apartment building. She was 22 years old. The inescapable finality of that act has coloured all subsequent discussion of her work; to some every photograph now seems like a foreshadowing of her suicide. Regardless, there are still enough moments of near breath-taking clarity to suggest the kind of artistic force she might have otherwise become. The precocity of Woodman’s ambition was certainly unusual – indeed, it is a defining part of the mythology. From the age of just 13 we can see her testing boundaries, finding and losing her own image, trying to disappear into photography.

This is more than a youthful fascination. At stake is obviously something quite idiosyncratic, wilder and darker, something that is explicitly of the body – the summoning of some private anguish rather than an exorcism of conventional proportions. These are moments of feverish eroticism and inky nothingness, dazzled by the instability of appearance, its slow dissolve. She is herself at stake, the archetype becoming flesh, striking at the fragile veneer of social coherence attributed to the body. A disturbance uncontained, Woodman inhabits space like a provocation, the interior comes breaking through as a subtle kind of chaos. Her own reality contaminates the airless world she inhabits.

The research that first brought her photography to prominence was largely drawn from a background of feminist theory and that reading has been by far the most pervasive. The fact that she was the preferred subject of her own work gave credence to the view that Woodman was addressing the conflicted relationship that women are said to have with the “image” that is created for them by the treacherously visual desires of men, and specifically the misapprehension that such desires must be satisfied by the formula of woman-as-image. A fuller elaboration of those ideas is obviously beyond the scope of this present discussion, but it should not lessen them in any way to suggest that this work obviously has more do with the failures of representation than how it might otherwise be used to reaffirm a social hierarchy. It is rather the dangerous fluidity with which images operate that seems to have interested her most.

There is also a unique synthesis of elements that come together in the person of Woodman herself. It was perhaps the spark of some insatiable need, and a perverse confidence that allowed her to begin producing these photographs at such an early age. She had a preternatural understanding of the body as a complex manifestation of social agency and personal trauma, a site of discourse. In this respect she is very much on a par with those artists of her generation who would later make such themes the centre of their own work. The foresight to realise that an increasingly volatile performance of identity would soon belong in the medium of photography alone, is what marks the true potential that she would unfortunately never realise as an artist.

Masks are cast aside with sly humour, a certain voluptuous pleasure in the game of revelation, which is, in itself, another kind of mask, a way of losing and of being lost, but with the stark knowledge that we can never really come to the end of our concealments, no slipping cleanly out of the frame. Instead, we find her smeared into the materiality of these images, a rupture in the assumed continuity of space. Hers is a body that refuses every prescriptive formulation of how it might be seen, the way in which it becomes – or is reduced to – an image. The innate aggressiveness in how Woodman pursues a deconstruction of her photographic self belies a conveniently pleasing appearance, is indeed validated by the extent to which our perceptions of the “aestheticised” body depend on the mediation of images. For the most, part her efforts seem to have been directed toward a deep confusion of that expected subject/object relationship, taking it apart. But photography cannot make tangible or even account for the interiority of her bodily experience and so what remains is everywhere haunted by the density of that absence.

It is very possible that had she not chosen to end her life when she did, the photographs on which her reputation now so definitively rests would never have come to light, the first precocious efforts of an artist who developed upon the insights they contain, but ultimately moved beyond adolescent preoccupation into the more nuanced possibilities that these works do indeed suggest. Perhaps the most tantalising thing about them is the fact that we will never actually get to see this mature vision. Conversely, attaching an undue significance to the unfortunate fact of Woodman’s suicide achieves little, save to diminish the raw wound it surely left in the lives of those who actually knew her.

Although we think of the camera as an exclusively visual machine, it is also a temporal one, exposing slippages in the passage of time; now duration is revealed as loss, and it is irrevocable. This body that occupies space, site of a complex subjectivity, does not fill the image – we only get to see where it might have been, an act of displacement, and even when it appears so much like fiction, reality bleeds through, perhaps more forcefully than we imagined. Her theatrical gestures, what seem like games really, have a latent purpose. Woodman becomes a kind of disappearance within the image; we must acknowledge that as much as she is explicitly visible there is a real sense too that these are not so much self-portraits as they are experiments in being photographed. She is provoking certain distortions that reveal how much of what we actually see depends on what we expect from an image.

Spared the corrosive brutality of time and yet apparently tormented by something just as insidious, Woodman never lived to disappoint us. The collective image we now have of her is probably nothing like the person she was, or might have been. Saying that we can know her through the photographs is to admit that we don’t know her at all. To judge her solely by the influence she has subsequently had is to miss the burning ambition and intellectual rigour of what was left behind.

From the Interior: Frank Rodick (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 13:17:00 +0000

(Untitled No. 93 from Liquid City)

There is a gradual, but none the less distinct, shift in your work from early projects that concentrate on the photographic moment (or at least some external reality, however distorted) to what you're doing now, describing closed worlds of visual experience. I wonder if you could describe how this came about?

I think where I am now – wherever that is – is always where I’ve been heading. You’re right, of course, the Liquid City work has a more defined connection to external reality, as you put it. It’s reality passed through the mill of, say, a dream or a vision… Of course, the medium for that transformation is subjective individual consciousness. And that’s what’s really interested me all along. It’s not that realism doesn’t interest me, it’s just that for me this is the most fundamental and by far the most interesting reality of all. (David Shields, among others, puts it nicely in his book Reality Hunger when he says that deep down all artists want to be realists. They just differ as to what they believe that reality consists of).

The starting point for Liquid City was the city street, which was a natural environment for my first real photography project. For one thing, I just loved Robert Frank’s The Americans, that dark poetry, the unsentimental melancholy… And I grew up on city streets, spending lots of time in Montreal’s downtown core, riding subways and buses – my parents never owned a car and sitting on buses was a perfect way to just watch this panoply of human phenomena – and walking the streets was what I liked to do. There was always great stuff to see.

In visual terms the thing was to find a way to make it look the way I felt it, or at least move it in that direction. Like a lot of things, the aesthetic for Liquid City, or whatever you want to call it, came about by accident. I just started taking a lot of pictures (the best single piece of advice I ever got from a photography teacher was from Henry Gordillo who told us to take more pictures than we ever imagined we could) and some were blurred and a few were shot from the hip and eventually I got a better sense of what I wanted to do. I just really began to like the way some of these images took things away from a kind of particularity that located the image in a specific external place; it started to look to me like the location point was internal in a sense, although there were definite and recognizable correspondences to what was going on in the outside world. And that also defined for me part of the urban experience: that miasma of flowing, transient experience, where nothing stops moving, everything’s in play and wonderfully mysterious…

Sub rosa was started later but done concurrently with Liquid City, although in a more compressed time frame, from 1995 to 1997. The human figure is almost always central to my work in some way and again, I wanted to take something that engaged with me personally – in this case, the female body – and work that image into something that pushed it somewhere deeper for me. And again, in sub rosa, there was the good fortune of accident, which started with some long expired Polaroid film that produced some pretty quirky things. I just pushed it from there.

But throughout the period of Liquid City and sub rosa I was collecting videotape, some of it appropriated, some I’d shot myself, not sure what I’d do with it but feeling like eventually it might come together into something…

(No. 5 from sub rosa)

Céline – who, in my opinion, might have written the best novel of the twentieth century, Journey to the Edge of the Night – said this fabulous thing, which I’m paraphrasing here. It was something like “I want to make hallucinations that are more real than real life.” And that was just says it so much better than I could. Real life, traditionally expressed in the photograph (whatever that means, probably not much anymore, which is a good thing) just didn’t do it for me. So I’d say that around 2000 I just stopped making images of what was in front of my eyeballs – I stopped carrying my camera around too, for the most part – and started working on visually extracting what was behind them. And I think that was what Arena was about… Really, that was what I’ve been interested in all along. It’s not that naturalism is boring – well, maybe it is, a little – it’s just that all that tension and chaos and energy and dread and ecstasy – and yes, it’s all tied into sex and death, all really interesting things are, after all – all that stuff was just so much more interesting, so much more beyond just interesting. And that’s what I was looking for, stuff that could really excite me, where I could look at an image coming together and say, simultaneously, I’ve never seen this thing before but it’s as familiar to me as my own life. It was like trying to dredge up the entrails so to speak of your mind, which is the biggest, wildest space of all.

(3 a.m. (engram) from Arena)

I guess one question was how to bend the photographic medium around that holy chore. Some people might say, why use photography, there are other media more suited to it. But so what? Bending something in a direction that maybe it’s not quite as supple is, again, a rather interesting, even exciting, thing to do. It takes you places you didn’t expect, which as you know is a big deal to me.

I think what happened too is that by around 2000 I’ve gotten that business of linking images to external reality pretty well out of my system. Actually I’m still very fond of the early photographs – Untitled, no. 1 from Liquid City is still one of my favorite images – and I had to make them to get to where I went later. But it took me a while to get to the point where the starting point was no longer outside but inside. Of course, this inside-outside business is a little bit specious; every image is a self portrait, which is to say, that it reflects internal realities. It’s just that our internal realities – and, perhaps better put, our internal imperatives – are different enough in each of us that they manifest themselves like different worlds, which is what they are.

Looking at your work, even from the beginning, it seems there is a profound sense of anxiety, particularly concerning the body and the coherence of identity that I would connect (perhaps wrongly?) to the influence of someone like Francis Bacon. But there is also an obvious concern with multiple images and seriality that suggests a broader range of interests. Maybe you could tell me a little about what has helped you arrive at such a unique style?

It’s a tough question to answer. Maybe one way to start is with questions of my own, in this case, a list – in no particular order and by no means exhaustive – of questions that have motivated my work or, or more precisely, that I think have motivated my work:

What are the ways of representing “internal” realities through a visual medium, particularly still photography, which is so effective at evoking a sense of external reality?

How can the still image engage visceral emotions and feelings and sensations that correspond to words such as rage, lust, fear, and ecstasy without reducing these conceptions to the intellectual constructs implied in language itself?

Can you illuminate those things pertaining to the self that reside in shadow while still retaining the shadow itself?

How does one balance a faithful representation of what is inherently unclear with the desire to communicate?

Can you give a sense of auditory volume to a still and silent image?

To what degree is self-reflection and self-examination compatible with what might be called truthfulness?

Can one create something without trace of redemptive purpose?

What does the taking of risks really mean in the creative process?

Perhaps these questions give an idea of at least some of the itches I may have been trying to scratch.

As for influences, yes, of course, you’re right about Bacon although I engaged with his work relatively late. I’d also include Munch, Schiele, Kiefer, Beckmann, Kitaj, even Warhol, among the painters, in no particular order. From film, Tarkovsky, Lynch, Haneke, Renoir, the early Bertolluci, Antionioni, the early Wenders, Dreyer. From literature, Dostoevesky, Kertesz, Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, Camus, Houellebecq, Thomas Mann, Kundera, Coetzee, and, of course, Céline. Probably literature, as a medium, has been the most important precisely because it isn’t visual; I find it spurs me on but leaves me with freer rein in terms of visual imagination. I haven’t listed any photographers because they’ve perhaps been less important to me on the whole, particularly once I started making more images myself. But some of the ones that come to mind include Robert Frank, Arbus, particularly the later work, Witkin, and S.A. Bachman. And no doubt, I’ve left out many others.

In line with that, what I’d say about the matter of influence is that it’s much less about formal elements than it is about a resonant sensibility. What I think all these artists have in common is that each, in their own ways, has done work that cuts to the quick; they’re really quite savage in their ability to cut past the bullshit that people use mainly to distract themselves from the realities that trouble us all. And at times that bullshit can even be reasonably interesting or amusing or seductive, but in the end it falls short in that it evades what matters most. But, to me, these artists don’t turn away from difficult things; those are precisely the things that draw them even when it involves pretty savage self examination. And they don’t try to clear confusion when that confusion is elemental. Rather they stay with that uncertainty and they explore and engage it.

Their vocation isn’t to give the audience relief or catharsis or therapy or well-being. Missions are for missionaries. I think they have the instinct to forswear any sense of moral obligation to their audience. When you do that, your creative parameters increase and so does the relative integrity you bring to the whole enterprise.

Harold Pinter said this about Samuel Beckett:

"He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going, and the more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I am grateful to him. He's not fucking me about, he's not leading me up any garden path, he's not slipping me a wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy — he doesn't give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty."

How great is that? It’s the most extraordinary compliment paid by one artist to another that I’ve ever read or heard.

(Decrement from Faithless Grottoes)

In the end, my feeling is that anyone’s best work comes from one place and that place is the most profound wound you have in your heart. Everyone has one of those... a great, big gaping wound, and, we spend our lifetimes dealing with it, one way or another.

You mentioned the issue of anxiety and the body. I’d say that whatever anxiety comes through from my work is less about the body than expressed through the body. I trust bodies more than I trust minds. There’s a reason for the term mind-fucking and that is that minds are really good at not only getting fucked around but doing the fucking around as well. But the most affecting truths, I think, are inevitably found below the neck... Sex and death, you can engage those two things on a lot of levels, but the one that counts most in terms of being human is the physical. Just ask anyone who’s in the process of getting fucked. Or anyone who really knows and feels they’re dying.

When I watched my father doing that – dying – a few years ago, there were lots of words and ideas to fall back on. To a very large extent, civilization is based on varying collections of these words and conceptions. But what I somehow remember is that just watching him die – and it was a very corporeal event, bits of him seemed to be falling away – seemed to drown out the meaning of all those conceptions and it was like all these supposed meanings were put to rest by an existential hum that had become more like a loud whine or a screech. It was unintelligible but as real as anything. And I don’t think that experience was an expression of something as simple or not so simple as grief; it was much more elemental. And with that sound – if I can call it that, that’s what it felt like – came the kind of anxiety that just settles into bone.

As for the use of multiple images and seriality, what I found after a time was that the single image could only take me so far. Now I really like the still image, precisely for its stillness, which has a kind of otherworldliness that I think is positively terrific. But that just makes combining images that much more interesting to me; it increases the complexity, the ambiguities, the transience of the work, while retaining that mystery of the still image.

(Porneia from Faithless Grottoes)

There are lots of ways of describing the differences between artists. And I think one of those ways is along a kind of “clarity/obscurity continuum.” I know that’s a terribly clumsy way of phrasing it, but I think there are artists, just as there are people in all walks of life, who incline more to making things clearer and those who don’t just revel in but believe in the fundamental reality of a certain kind of intrinsic obscurity. Primo Levi had this great quote in an interview he did in La Stampa, where he compares his work to Kafka:

"In my writings, for better or for worse, knowingly or unknowingly, I have always made an effort to move from dark to clear, like a filtration pump that sucks in cloudy water and expels it clarified, if not sterile. Kafka takes an opposite path; he pours out an endless stream of hallucinations dredged up from levels unbelievably deep, and never filters them. The reader feels them swarming with seeds and spores: they are burning with meaning, but he is never helped to tear down or bypass the veil, so as to see things in the place where they are hidden. Kafka never touches ground, he never deigns to offer you the clue to the maze."

Well, I incline to the Kafka camp – here please insert the requisite disclaimers – because for me that’s where what I feel as reality lies. (W.G. Sebald talked about the fog, as the fundamental metaphor for human experience.) Again, there are lots of formal tools to explore and express complexity/obscurity/vagueness and the multiplicity and fracturing of images is just one of them.

When I think of works that really meant a lot to me, not just as an artist, but as a human being trying to make his way through this whole thing, so much of the stuff that comes to mind – Kafka’s The Castle, Lynch’s Lost Highway, the poems of Paul Celan, as just a few examples – that stuff was infused with multiple meanings. Which is not to say they were a complete mess, although they’re necessarily untidy and they’re certainly uncomfortable. But one of the things about human beings is that we’re creatures that are tend to look for clarity and explanation, but ultimately we live in a world that owes nothing to that inclination, or any of our other inclinations for that matter.

I’m as sure of anything that to get to that place, that place of shadow and fog and roiling emotion, you can’t do it through reliance on ideas. Ideas useful for all kinds of things, but when they become a kind of rigid blueprint for art, you suck the life out of the work. I have to rely on, for want of a better word, instinct, on getting lost in things and letting things come to me and getting frustrated and staying frustrated long enough but also excited long enough that I go someplace that feels “elsewhere”… because comfort means that you think you know something, when the reality is that, as Vico said, what we don’t know is always so much greater than what we do know.

(The Bathers from Revisitations)

Maybe that helped me feel as free as I have – or as compelled as I have, it depends on how you look at it. There’s so much more that could be said here... and I’m not even sure I answered your question.

An excellent catalogue for Frank's recent mid-career retrospective is available from the Deborah Colton Gallery, via their website, or info@deborahcoltongallery.com. It is very well illustrated and has an informative essay by Katherine Ware, curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art. The first part if this interview can be found here, while for further reading try this article by Bob Black.

From the Interior: Frank Rodick (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:28:00 +0000

It begins in the city, in pursuit of some definitive moment, a thread of meaning where all visible elements coalesce and finding only the familiar uncertainty, where everything appears broken. Yet by allowing the medium itself to “fail” in an especially revealing way, finding time and its distortions as something fluid, irrational even, Frank Rodick begins to articulate a particular language within photography, where the present itself becomes unrecognisable, torn apart. It is no coincidence either that these first images concentrate on the movement of people through the city, the figure and its permutations – slippages – are fundamental to Rodick’s work, its real core. Faces become masks, reduced to gesture and outline, perhaps we’re seeing the real face, or at least another of many, the infinite regression of permissible (and impermissible) selves.

He then begins to move even further inward, descending bodily into the labyrinth, but the effect is much the same. Boundaries don’t hold and are subsequently impossible to restore; these changes are material – or even more so, of some deeper substance. Trace the nerves, under the permeable skin, the hungering flesh, to an architecture of bone, all the abrupt transitions of self – to nothing, and the fact of that incomprehensible absence is what animates Frank Rodick’s work, out on the furthest edge of consciousness.

Image and reality bleed together, each finding a way to contaminate the other. The use of language becomes crucial too, though not necessarily validating – it serves only to deepen the mystery, a challenge to whatever expectations we might have about the difference between words and the pictures to which they are so tenuously anchored.There’s also something about the multiple images and series, his purposeful insistence on a fractured perspective that suggests a real frustration with our understanding of what photography can be.

(Fragments of a celestial abattoir and La pucelle from Arena)

A shifting, ambiguous sprawl, resistant to meaning – whatever rises unbidden from the depths, these are fictions interchangeable with truth, a plunge into the chasm of our visual unconscious, connecting memory and trauma in some visceral way. They are fragments of an internal dialogue played over obsessively, messages from the interior. Rodick finds grotesque (but faithful) mirrors for our own tragic profanity, our brokenness and the impossible hope for redemption, this horribly immediate and liquid flesh, with its longings that cannot be fully satisfied, yet never denied. He goes even further to demonstrate its presence; these are dense objects, enclosures for the slaughterhouse tracings of desire.

(Room 36 (Time on earth) from Faithless Grottoes)

So this is how we come apart and what shows through the cracks, the often desolate landscape of our souls. These images reveal the numb confusion in discovering that the most violent extremes of experience and emotion are concealed by stray aspects of everyday life, it’s just a matter of pulling back the curtain a little, or a slip in the habits of seeing for this other world to be laid bare. The brutal and beautiful photographic work of Frank Rodick touches on the darkest themes of our existence, the deepest shadows brought reluctantly into the light.

He has been kind enough to answer a few questions, providing a real insight into his background and the development of his extraordinary work. (Frank's website is here).

What was it that first drew you to photography?

A number of things come to mind. First of all, it was a marriage of relative convenience. My father was an amateur photographer who could be pretty fanatical about it. Apparently there were nights when he wouldn’t sleep at all because he was printing in the basement darkroom. Then he’d just go to work in the morning. So I grew up surrounded by photographs and cameras and darkroom equipment and started using all of it pretty young. If I remember correctly, I knew how to print a photograph before I learned how to ride a bike.

Also my parents owned a bookstore, which was a pretty amazing place to grow up in. It was a true independent, liberal bookstore in Montreal at a time and in a place that actually made this a big deal. Because my father was into photography, they always carried a lot of books and other stuff that was very oriented to the image. Part of the business was used and antiquarian materials, so not only were there photography books, but there were old pamphlets and postcards and magazines. My parents just bought everything they could, selling some of it, keeping the rest. There was tons of this stuff in the house, so the home I grew up in was like some mythological library, with printed materials of all kinds, stacked everywhere, literally up to the ceilings, just waiting to be found. Also, my parents never stopped me from looking at anything I pleased. It didn’t matter what I found; I could look at it. It could be an old magazine about blue movies – I remember a few of those – or World War One pamphlets or children’s books. It didn’t matter.

So I really grew up inundated by photographic images. Maybe because the house – rather like the store too – was quite chaotic and crowded – my parents weren’t hyper organized, to say the least – I think I got pretty used to the idea and the feeling of all kinds of images juxtaposed against each other, regardless of where they came from. I don’t know if I thought that was great or not back then – it sounds pretty great to me right now – but it didn’t feel weird at all. Maybe it was like living in a 3D collage.

So, when I got around to deciding that I wanted to do something along the lines of artistic expression, photography was right there, as both a technical process I was familiar with and as an experience I’d lived with.

There are aspects of this decision that came on another, later, level. Once I decided that I’d make art my vocation – and that decision was, for at least a brief period of time, a pretty painful one because I’d had another career rather neatly mapped out for myself – I seriously considered some kind of filmmaking career. I really loved the medium, and still do – there’s nothing like it, it’s magic when it works – and I did a couple of years of formal study. But I came to the conclusion that the communitarian part of it, the necessity of making teams work, would eventually drive me crazy. I grew up doing a lot of stuff on my own – for what it’s worth, I’m an only child and I spent lots of time by myself – and I just came to feel that photography was a better fit for my character. There was something that felt soothing and romantic and even heroic about working alone for hours in that orange darkroom glow, listening to music, and trying to bring images to life.

Aside from all these things, when I reflect, I think, and still think, that still photography does a particular thing for me better than any other medium, even film, and that is to somehow make things feel “real” to me, more real than they feel in so-called real life. I don’t mean natural, I mean real, in the psychic, experiential sense. Certain photographs can just make me feel like I’m experiencing something for the first time in its most basic and fundamental sense. It’s not just seeing that expression for the first time, for example; it’s really like getting an experiential sense of what an expression actually is, which through words is indescribable. There’s something about photography’s stillness, its special relationship to time, its two dimensional quality, the parameters imposed by the image’s physical limits; they all somehow take me to a deeper and more engaged – and ultimately more satisfying – place in myself. In that sense, a great photograph is like a seductress: it draws you in completely, it excites with its promise of something unfamiliar but still approachable; it takes you someplace you’ve not been to before but still has enough of a lifeline to something you think you know that you’re not completely lost, just lost enough that it’s all exciting and a bit dangerous. And knowing you’re at least a little lost – and maybe more than that – is ultimately always a lot more interesting than thinking you know where you’re going, which is almost always an illusion when it comes to anything more consequential than going around the corner to get a liter of milk.

(Continues here).

In Conversation: Lauren Semivan

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:42:00 +0000

Lauren Semivan’s work draws on a set of private gestures, performances for (and with) the camera, using a vocabulary of elements from European avant-garde art in the 20th Century (Surrealism and the Futurists, especially) but all seen through the filter of a particularly American sensibility, a colonial Gothic perhaps, fusing more “progressive” high-art influences with those of folk tradition and the accidental brilliance of anonymous snapshots. There is something too of the vogue for spirit photography, of chance encounters, with all the baggage that implies.

One thinks of those artists displaced by the Second World War, adrift in New York and elsewhere, their sense of the irrational not ideally suited to neon and chrome, how new everything was – and how much it promised, just then. But America is older than it seems – haunted even; Semivan’s photographs detail those unconscious histories and their implication. If the gestures seem obscure (perhaps wilfully so) or just inscrutably private, it is important to realise that they are essentially puzzles of reference and concealment, talking about what is not seen, a dialogue with presence. She casts herself as the shadowy manipulator of signs, the material and graphic components of the pictures like fragments of an unravelled language she is trying to re-assemble, but failing, as so much is lost and values re-assign themselves endlessly – it is the language of uncertainty.

These private rooms are the collision of self and history, of the old world with the new, just as these they are nowhere at all, though you might still recognise them. The rituals (if I can call them that), discoveries perhaps, are all interior – that is, the confines of one experience, but then again, going in can often lead you to the way back out. Semivan is playing a serious game.

You can find more of this fascinating work online here. Lauren was also kind enough to answer some questions about it. This is the result:

How did you discover photography, what drew you to it?

I first studied the violin during my childhood and throughout college, but when I felt as though I could not take it any further than just the interpretation of other works, I shifted my focus. Through this I learned how to study and translate a language into more of an abstraction, and in a way that meant something to me. I think this links the two media together for me – to think of it in terms of language.

How I discovered photography itself, or came to make photographs (strangely?) doesn’t really stand out in my memory, but once I first thought to put all of my energy into making photographs, I felt obsessed by a sense of mortality (which may sound funny, but it really affected me at the time) that I had to make sure I would have enough time and energy to invest myself in photography, and to do all that I wanted with it.

Both disciplines (visual art and music) continually inform one-another and help me find and make meaning in my life.

It’s funny you mention the relationship between musicality, language and how you approach making your art because when I first saw the graphic lines that often feature in your pictures they suggested an unravelled musical score or the lines bursting off a page. Perhaps this has something to do with wanting to deal with those undefined experiences or states (like a sense of mortality) right at the edge of language?

Absolutely, although I am more interested in crossing or combining interpretations of language than I am in making photographs specifically about music itself. I think the influence of music comes out intuitively in my work, but I would compare the end result within the photographs to lines associated more broadly with gestures or mark making.

Maybe that has more to do with the experience of making music than music itself. Recently I’ve been thinking about how Maya Deren’s films are influenced by her love of dance and choreography, even the smallest decisions that were made in editing her films. The whole of the environment is an instrument for learning or making meaning (in whatever language or system). Maybe the “undefined” states or experiences are what provoke us to continue to ask questions.

Your pictures seem to have a distinct vocabulary of elements or references, is this something intentional or did it develop naturally as you worked?

I think the use of certain types of objects may be what creates this feeling of presenting parts of a vocabulary. Meaning is always contextual, and I definitely gravitate toward objects as symbols, or thematic clues within images. I think this is part of a sensibility in my work that continues to evolve. I would describe it as additive rather than reductive. The more I work this way, the more challenging it becomes for me to work beyond what I already know, which also keeps me going – learning how to ask new questions and how to dissect formal and conceptual relationships in my work. Learning about decisions and their immediate consequences, almost like an equation having to do with logic or linguistics.

Would you consider what you do to be autobiographical, or a kind of self-portraiture? (Maybe the figure in the pictures can't really be thought of as "you" specifically?)

This is the element of my work that I often have radically different feelings about as time passes and I re-visit certain images with critical distance. Mostly I can’t separate myself from a figure in the photograph, and when I photograph friends as a stand-in for a human presence, I often think of those images as equally autobiographical. I really feel that all art functions in a way that is self-affirming, but self-portraiture is definitely a more literal translation of this idea.

How important is the studio to your work, as an enclosed space, a stage almost, where certain kinds of drama can be acted out? It seems to me that the studio is a metaphor for the psychological interior and what happens there.

My studio process ends up requiring equal parts planning (painting, drawing, looking, reacting) and photographing. As I work with an 8x10 view camera, the photographic process itself is much slower, more studied and controlled. I will often work on the space itself for a few days, responding directly to atmospheric conditions, and then introduce a third dimension when something beings to emerge. This aspect then marries itself with plans, preliminary sketches, and the “decisive” moment. I do spend a great deal of time in a studio setting, and while I’m not working in a studio, I’m trying to think through problems having to do with the physical space itself and its limitations. I do agree that working in a studio setting in this way is a good metaphor for the interior or psychological world. The script always comes from within, but is inspired directly by external phenomena, by everything that isn’t planned and what happens off of the stage or in dreams.

Would I be right then in saying then that you work in an intuitive sort of way, like setting an experiment loose in the studio and allowing yourself to have no firm idea about its outcome? Or, to put it another way, is your approach a method for getting at those moments you couldn’t otherwise preconceive?

This is true, and it's really the only way that I can access much of what I feel I'm looking for. But if I can't pre-conceive these moments, then there is no hypothesis, and the experiment is for its own sake. Einstein defined the physical universe as all things that move needles (anything that can be measured with an instrument). If I look at this in relation to my work I can think of the instrument as something that is capable of both precision and abstraction.

So I do work intuitively to some extent, but usually plan with preliminary sketches what is going to happen in a photograph, or I begin with an idea based on an object, story or reference. When a photograph is successful, I admit that I feel more of a sense of purpose while shooting than when it just isn’t working, which seems like a pretty obvious thing to have happen, but it’s subtle. Feeling around in the dark is always necessary, but then I have to consider what to do with what I think I might have found, not necessarily what it is right away.

What about influences? It feels like you work with a particular fusion of 20th century avant-garde and an early American vernacular. (Something like Joseph Cornell perhaps? That goes back to the studio idea again, with his boxes).

I’ve always responded to very specific influences. Like many other artists, I would imagine, this feels more like a chemical or physical affinity, and goes beyond a formal appreciation for certain kinds of imagery. I’ve always been fascinated by the early 20th century avant-garde in Europe, but there is also a point where these influences cross over into symbolism in painting (like Vermeer or Wilhelm Hammershoi, for instance) or even classical mythology. I think most of these influences are pointing me to something larger that can translate conceptually across media, and that is the idea of the unknown. I’ve always felt that questions are more interesting and more revealing than answers.

Influences are translated through individual experiences, and will inevitably reflect this, as well as the artist’s particular moment in history. Joseph Cornell is a really good example of this. His boxes were very studied, carefully rendered “portraits,” but they also reflected his own sensibilities and became part of a language he is remembered for.

Are the “questions” in your work then part of its own private language? I suppose what I’m really asking is how you would like them read, to be analysed or left intact, with all their contradictions and mystery?

Often I am conscious of subverting systems within my work, and maybe the medium of photography is itself a subversion of many systems; of language, of truth, etc. My own "questions" almost always come out of an attempt to linguistically or theoretically subvert systems of knowledge, pre-existing forms of interpretation. I really feel that while I want the work to be interpreted and analysed for many potential meanings, the questions that I am posing in my work cannot exist outside of the images themselves, or they would not fit within any other system. I think that feeling a kind of responsibility to reveal something that would otherwise be hidden is why I make photographs. I would also argue that this is why many artists work at all - the knowledge that they can say something new by intuiting a language of their own. So, I do want the photographs to be "unpacked" - but not in any way that is definitive or conclusive.

Finally, where do you think your work is headed in the future?

I have recently started planning for my 2nd solo exhibition with David Klein Gallery (Detroit, MI) next year. It is difficult to see that work clearly at this point, as the date for the show will be well into 2011. I know that I would like that work to represent a more deliberate departure from my previous series. I often wait for images to dictate what comes next, or speak for themselves, but have been feeling the need for a challenge or conceptual shift as I plan for this exhibition.

Since I began my recent body of work (about four years ago) I have over and over again immediately translated colour into grey in my mind, as I consistently worked only in black and white. As I analyse newer images, I am becoming much more conscious or aware of relationships between colour and metaphor, especially in the history of painting. I had to make enough images in black and white that originally were meant to function based on colour, where colour was conspicuously absent, for that to finally occur to me. So, in the coming months I will likely be working on a series that very deliberately uses colour.

There is a documentary about Sally Mann called "What Remains" in which she claims the thing that most subverts your next body of work is all the work that has come before it, and that each new good image raises the bar. I think this has to be one of the more challenging things about being an artist, the seemingly simple task of carrying on with your work, or taking the next step, and realizing where that step actually fits within the larger picture. I think that idea Sally Mann mentions is also connected to not being afraid of the unknown, which is where everything good lives anyway.

Thanks Lauren!

Until It Does: Sally Mann

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:27:00 +0000

By any conventional measure this is a simple picture, a man (the photographer’s husband, actually) stands in front of a window – it contains little more than a gesture. The coal-dark, utterly physical blackness of his hand, which is the work of hands, of human endeavour and human frailty – of what we build and what falls from our grasp, work in forges, farmlands, the commonality of work, and its violence, breaking open, tearing apart, the violence of creation, contrasted against the sheer, milky expanse of glass filling the picture. It is a borderland of material (and immaterial) realms, between the embodied self and its dissolution, suddenly or by degrees, to where we cannot cross, but so close now that it occupies everything, there can be no other view.

The seeming imprecision of her photographic technique, its material presence like something out of time, or perhaps belonging to a different age – a lost continent, gives the picture in turn a kind of emotional acuity that cuts away any sentimental mask. It’s just a man, alone and whether through a long exposure time or a shallow depth of focus, the figure is blurred, his naked back and the slightest hint of a profile still recognisable, but mostly indistinct. Yet if otherwise ghost-like, the hand is still that of a man, it is the potentiality of touch, and of desire. He looks out, searching for his reflection, but what he might see is not legible, not in the photograph. Arguably though, the picture is not about that, not about what he sees, or what we see – it’s about her seeing him, knowing his fragility, knowing whatever we touch is dust and ash. Sally Mann’s Proud Flesh is arguably one of the most powerful examples of a woman looking at a man in the history of photography, maybe it is even unique, a synthesis of all that has made her work so important and here finding its natural limit.

The hand too, in this picture, is not held in a gesture of resistance; it doesn’t push against the impenetrability of the glass, but is just finding its own margin. He would be divided, the blackened hand, the whiteness of the glass – he can’t touch what is out there, it might as well not exist. Perhaps death is the final intimacy, but not just the last. Nothing ends, in that sense; our most fundamental relationships are never so convenient. Nor should they be, and all of that is resting on the surface of this image – anchor for a diminished physicality, for the inchoate landscape outside, that hand is the still point of two lives. She is fully conscious of his mortality, making us feel it as no doubt she does. That glass has the terrible, whispering finality of whatever divides the living from the dead, looking in and no longer looking out, distances that cannot be crossed. The hand is still then – nothing more to be done, no work, no warmth.

She seems in recent years to have been turning the camera on herself as well, with the same fierce intensity, and the same intimacy, but producing markedly different results, because if the defining quality of a conventional photographic portrait is to assert the reality of how we present ourselves – of how we want to be seen by others and to conceal whatever seams join the pose with the actuality, these go to another extreme, which is a kind of conscious self-erasure. That boundary between the person and how they are photographed is so much a part of the picture that their conflict becomes the picture, the rejection of performance, of portraiture itself, its natural artifice. She forces the very idea of portraiture into a state of near perilous decomposition, revealing its volatile essence. Of course, whatever seems the most assured in its reality – our own sense of self – is often the most precarious, the illusive certainty we have made the foundation of our lives, that nothing falls, ever, until it does, and all in pieces.

By the sheer length of these exposures, their accumulation of time, her appearance is shattered by forces it cannot contain, Mann reveals the margin of a coherent self – she is photographing her own death. It is a challenge, pre-emptively rehearsing the inevitable, as a doomed attempt to conquer it, where the picture becomes a talisman, a kind of sympathetic magic – after all, who can submit to the indifference of time, or even accept it? The view of her own mortality here is the inverse of what we see in the pictures collected as Proud Flesh. It is the photographic process itself that lets her be obliterated, revealing the invisible departure of life, moment by moment, whereas death is written on his body by illness, and the camera is just an observer, distraught but helpless, it does not create his disappearance – it is a measure only. She is brave enough to let her death match his, a gradually diminishing physicality mirrored by the photographic trace of absence.

We don’t really think that the future will happen without us and of course, it does, because there’s only so much we get to see. Time’s arrow will pierce us all, eventually. These pictures find two distinct ways to unravel the implicit codes of our mortality – just as we are unravelled in turn, a slow drift from the centre, everything that moves together and then, apart. She is charting the limits, knowing there are only a finite number of times we will again see the light in someone’s eyes, or even our own – and who knows when will be the last. All we can know is there is a last… Yet if it was only that then these pictures would be almost unbearable, and they certainly are not. The balance between her knowledge of mortality and her endurance is carefully maintained, so that loss might not scrub all pleasure from the surface of the world – now is not forever either, but perhaps it is enough.

Stefan Heyne

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:14:00 +0000

Perhaps we take the seeming continuity of the world and its surfaces for granted. After all, there are certain conventional expectations in how we see, which in practice often means seeing what we expect to and not what we might, if our experience of the world wasn’t so obscured by conventionality. The distinctive photographic work of Stefan Heyne probes the complex tension that occurs between appearance in the flow of human perception and meaning, or what can be understood of the visual reality in which we are immersed. It is the anxiety of living in a world so utterly saturated by images that we can no longer be sure exactly what we are looking at and how this uncertainly in turn bleeds out into the negotiation of lived experience. His work is a challenge to what is often thought of as the rational way we perceive in direct correlation to some external reality. This is what Heyne’s photography takes at its starting point, the moment when the certainties of appearance fail and break apart. We can almost name what he photographs, but not quite. His subject is the familiar, but still mostly unrecognisable – it is perception itself.

How far can we get from the conventional ideas about the medium, from description and from content, but still call an image “photographic” in any sense? Or, put another way, in what sense is an image a photograph? He doesn’t necessarily propose answers to any of these questions, or really need to, but brings a philosophical awareness to photography that is all too often absent. The particular subject matter (if it is even that) Heyne works with has, no doubt, some particular significance in itself. The pictures consistently draw our attention to built structures, often with repeating elements and a restricted colour palette, as opposed to landscapes or the human figure. He doesn’t seem to operate by breaking down the descriptive qualities of the photograph however, but by seeing what survives intact once that “description” has been eliminated. The visual structures that remain relate to the psychological (and, of course, physiological) structures of seeing itself, hard-wired, primary forms of visual perception, along with the conventions that develop around them.

What is increasingly overlooked too is the physical presence of the photograph as an object, a quality obscured by the fact that more often than not we treat it like a surface for the content of an image, a subject or a narrative. Heyne’s work, given its resistance to the norms of photographic description, brings our attention back to the dimensionality of the print. Yet a frame won’t just naturally fall around how we see and Heyne makes that artificiality a central part of the work. Here photography becomes an eloquent way to address the fundamental ways in which perception endlessly mediates our experience of the world and also how our systems of representation are often balanced on a very contingent kind of order, after-images of a moment that will not resolve into something wholly legible, fixed in their uncertainty.

His own website is here.

Marking Time: David Farrell in Conversation (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:16:00 +0000

Innocent Landscapes Revisited, Wilkinstown, February 2010

Innocent Landscapes Revisited, Wilkinstown, September 2009

The story never really ended either, although the searches did – for a time at least, because perhaps no amount of searching could ever be enough. “There was a picture from Wicklow that was made on the last day of the search in 2000, of the bog cut away and I said to myself at the time – how much further do you go? Six inches? Six feet? How far do you go and when do you stop? Anyway, that was supposed to be it. There was a couple of small searches in the intervening years, and except for an accidental recovery nothing was found. I had noticed, again in 2000, that nature was reclaiming these places very quickly, making even the evidence of the searches disappear and I thought that in itself was an interesting metaphor about what the killers had intended, using nature to cover their traces, but it was also about healing and the passage of time.” The landscape itself becomes a surface on to which these larger questions can be projected. “Thinking about it on a fundamental level,” he said “I’ve used the landscape like a studio; the way that some people go to the blank wall is how I’ve used the landscape over the last ten years, in this and other projects.”

So periodically he began returning, to take account of every loss and every frustrated possibility, because despite maps we can never be sure where we stand – here all certainties are provisional. “I started then to do these annual re-visits,” he said “because it was such an unresolved issue, just to keep going back to these places seemed important, particularly as I might be the only one to return. But it became increasingly difficult to do so, which also highlights another theme within in this work, the real difficulty of sustaining a memory. Then literally by chance I came across this team of forensic archaeologists about two years ago while they were searching in Wicklow and it reminded me again of what had drawn me to the subject, that I had been right to keep with it, because other people hadn’t given up. At the same time, their intervention actually ruptured my time-line of a landscape being reclaimed, because in most cases they were going back into the same place and digging it up again, which I suppose is interesting too in that it’s kind of like having a scab and taking it off, in the hope that with time it will heal itself properly. The current landscapes, while they are often the same piece of field or bog, look considerably different, as their approach is so different, the pace is different. With the recent searches I’m seeing something stand still in so many different types of light, where as before you took whatever light was there on the day, because the searches went so quickly the landscape was radically altered between visits. While I’m more or less photographing the same thing from one day to the next, each time something has changed and I’m searching for what I feel is the maximum out of the subject. The sense of their presence (or absence) is much less immediate in the landscape now; the pictures have become more about the searches themselves, though you do remind yourself every so often exactly what you’re dealing with.”

If the searching in his first set of pictures had been a devastatingly accurate metaphor for violence, for the hidden landscapes of memory, and for disappearance itself, meaning the continuity of a place (its lives) irredeemably shattered by something – or rather someone – simply not being there, an absence breaking through the surface of the world, this incredibly sustained approach in how the new searches are being conducted (and images he has made of them) seem more like a way of marking time, as a measure of duration. Perhaps they become instead a way to describe the impossible task of accounting for the loss that they represent, as the observation of some endless of ritual – of not forgetting, and he keeps going back too, trying to refine the logic of this process. “Now you could go in and the first picture you make could be sufficiently strong,” he said “but for me it’s this drive to really get deep into the subject, like I say, you’re “excavating” something. One of the difficulties with photography is that making a picture, the gesture itself, seems so easy that you really have to feel the picture, that it has to be coming through the subject and into you. I’m aware now that certainly the work I’m making with the re-visits is probably slightly more refined in an aesthetic sense, that they have softened a little, though I’m still trying to hold onto that edge of tough beauty.”

Regardless of how persistent the searches are – and have been – it seems as if the ground will keep its final secrets, memory has its unreachable avenues after all, and some wounds might never heal, but it will be a useful comparison if, at some time in the future, these new images are gathered in book form, to see the distance that has been covered during the intervening years. This will undoubtedly be a large body of work and what of it has gradually been appearing seems at once as similar and as different as he says. The “edge” is still there, of course, the hint of some presence endlessly just beyond reach, insisting on the unstable nature of memory, on the spectre of loss, and on what cannot be brought to light – even more so now perhaps than before. Constant too is the quality that defines the whole of Farrell’s work on Innocent Landscapes to date, the tangibility of absence that is never satisfied by recollection, never made whole, or even just accounted for – time has changed too much, or has buried too deep whatever we hope to find, but the searches go on, because they have to, because even if no trace of those disappeared remain, we can still cut to the poisonous root of violence that fractures lives and the places we live.

(Continued from a previous installment. I'd like to thank David for his patience and for his co-operation in putting this article together. A blog charting the development of his latest work can be found here and his own site is here).

Marking Time: David Farrell in Conversation (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Innocent Landscapes, Coolgagh, 1999

Innocent Landscapes, Wilkinstown, 2000

Innocent Landscapes, Balynultagh,1999

David Farrell’s Innocent Landscapes is a monumental work about the search for those who “disappeared” as a result of the political tensions in Northern Ireland, only to be buried anonymously across the border. In 1999, as part of the peace process, the IRA finally admitted the “killing and secret burial” of ten people from a possible list of fifteen missing. At the end of May that year they released a roll call of locations that were said to be the burial places of nine people from the list. Of course, the crucial twist in this inventory was that all the locations were in the South of Ireland. These people had been exiled in death, somehow uniting North and South in relation to the conflict – a dark stain lurking under the “peaceful” landscapes of the South. Searches were carried out in 1999 and 2000, with photographs by Farrell published in a volume entitled Innocent Landscapes in 2001 (a result of winning the European Publishers Award for Photography). It is a work he has found difficult to walk away from. I met with him to discuss this ongoing investigation.

Perhaps like opening the body of time, opening memory, we find our darkest secrets, our unspoken tragedies, all held in layers furthest from the surface. The photographs themselves manage to accommodate all that, and more, reading collectively as a profound dialogue with absence. I asked David about his first visit to one of these search locations: “It was a beautiful summer’s evening,” he said “and I just remember it was this country lane, with a slight hill at the end of it. You went over that and came into this landscape that looked like some force had roared through it. The visual shock when I got there was of this landscape having been violated, with all the trees uprooted, and that somehow being a metaphor from the violence of what had happened to these people, their disappearance. So it was a really powerful sensation to be there, feeling how the mind projects emotion onto something and this landscape was so torn apart, it looked like the search had been quite desperate really, just the nature of it. I made some pictures that first night, but it was purely that I was there and I should make some pictures, because at the time I wasn’t sure, feeling maybe that it was too powerful, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. But there was something about the pictures I made, something in the quality of the colour that convinced me to continue, so it was a simple act then of deciding just to go and look at the other places, seeing what happened, seeing what was there.”

There is a distinct – at times quite uneasy – pull between the aesthetic richness of the images and the violence implied by the searching, these fractured landscapes, that lends a unique power to the work. “In truth I probably didn’t know what I was doing for the first six months, other than simply going there, responding, obviously with my brain, but also in an emotional way, trying to frame images that had a certain tension to them, something that was working off the beauty – I always feel that those pictures have a sort of tough beauty. It was a case of going out and sometimes not really having – or not wanting to have – too much of a direction, because often if you put a box around it before you start, you’re going to miss something. It’s a crude metaphor maybe, but useful in this context, of excavating a subject, digging and digging and digging, until I felt like I’d reached the point of almost having exhausted it, I had to keep going back, photographing the same thing over and over again. It was a momentum of going to make pictures and then thinking about it as you’re making the pictures, as you're working through it, to see is there anything emerging from the dialogue you're having with what your photographing.”

From the buried layers of our collective memory – and of collective forgetting, the landscape seems to contain all the fraught interdependence of place and memory, the forces that shape a culture (its histories), moving restlessly under a charmed surface, present and yet not. There is also a sophisticated narrative thread that draws you into the haunting complexity of these images, with a structure that moves through the broken landscapes – and through the searches themselves – creating a powerful sense of some incipient, but crucially unrealised, discovery. The cumulative structure of the book, a kind of gravitational pull between the images and across them, brings a forceful clarity from this cutting into the landscape’s hidden core that has both a formal and emotional rigour. There is arguably some lingering influence too from his training as a research chemist on how Farrell has subsequently approached making photographs. “When you work in science you have an idea, you set up an experiment to test this idea, you gather all the data, you take it in, you assess it, you formulate something, and you go and test it later on. So I sort of do the same thing now as I’m making pictures. I actually have to go out and make as many pictures as I feel I’m responding to, take them in and then begin this process of editing. So while I’m looking at – and I almost hate to use the word – the “strength” of an individual image on one level, I’m really interested too in the dialogue it has with the preceding image, the facing image, the one after and the next one again – because I’m always thinking of the book. Narrative is very important to the way I make work, certainly between the pictures, but also within each picture.”

(Part 2 can be found here).

Sally Mann: After Life

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:44:00 +0000

Photography seems an ambiguous, immaterial sort of death, just an endless, unchangeable present, and gradually, by degrees, it is endlessly past. In an age otherwise so well documented the fact of our dying, its simple inevitability and its rituals, remain mostly unseen, our last real taboo, pushed to the margins. Perhaps with a medium so particular, so concrete, as photography it is naturally difficult to address states of transition, of departure and convergence, without the result being clumsy or overly literal, jumping at shadows.

Few are more aware of this than Sally Mann, who has so often made a point of seeing what others would prefer not to, of exposing our fundamental uncertainties and what might otherwise fall through the cracks. Much of her work is an attempt to visualise the material qualities of time, the experience of its passing, what changes and what doesn’t – where time as a force intersects with the living world, shaping it. These are pictures that want to collapse time. They are manifestations of photographic death, as both presence and as fact

Of course, Mann is best known – notorious, even – for the series of pictures she made with her young family where they often appeared naked and in poses that displayed a strikingly adult sense of self-awareness. Seeing them on the cusp of losing youth, in dream-like scenes and private worlds she made the domestic a universal trauma, with an acute sensitivity to the kind of minute shifts that signal more profound changes. These pictures brought her acclaim and criticism in equal measure. At the time (and indeed still) such images of children were an especially divisive issue, but if Mann proved anything it is the sustained complexity of familial relationships, that the conventional wisdom describing our experiences won’t follow the same logic as at the borderlands where so often we find ourselves.

Building this work for almost a decade she eventually moved on to other themes, those pale figures swallowed up by a wider landscape. In the series What Remains, beginning with photographs of her dog’s bones and preserved skin, which is seen hanging from the wall like a discarded garment, she makes explicit what has always been an obvious undercurrent in her work – the narrow cord of life strung out across an expanse of unknowable darkness. Even in the earlier pictures of the children they seem menaced by forces that they cannot yet understand, but of which she herself is painfully aware. The development is not so unexpected or abrupt as it might have seemed at first. Rather, as with all of Mann’s work, it is rooted directly in her own experiences. So after a convict had been killed in a shoot out with police on the family farm it was seeing where he had died, seeing his blood on the ground, that seems to have spurred her into photographing what are, quite literally, landscapes of death, in the form of Civil War battlefields.

She is not so much telling the story of these places in any direct sense, or what happened there, (which would probably be impossible anyway), but calling up death out of living, material substance, communicating an uneasy, spectral presence through the pictures. Its unpredictable nature and fragility mean the wet-plate collodion process she uses is perfectly suited to capture the atmosphere of such haunting places, their inner life, finding an ideal emotional register, veiled and secretive. Appropriately enough, the collodion, a sticky, flammable substance, coated on the glass plates to form a photographic emulsion with silver nitrate, had at one time been used to bind open wounds by military doctors in the field – wounds, and the binding of wounds, opening the body of time, its hidden machinery, seeing what moves through its interior, a particular force, a displacement, leading back to the more conventionally grotesque spectre of bodily death, first in the architectural, but none the less poignant, photographs of her dog Eva’s bones, with teeth still embedded in the jaw, nails intact, then in a further series of images made at a forensic research facility run by the University of Tennessee, showing human bodies left to decay in the landscape, displaying an unseemly ripeness, like fallen fruit, splitting open. With brutal candour she reveals to us the absolute factuality of death, its process. In long exposures the furious activity of maggots is seen as a vaporous cloud, mouths gape, skin is drawn taut over bones, fat and organs putrefy, hair clings defiantly to the naked dome of a head – she spares us nothing. As a thief invading this hidden, silent world, she refuses to look away, refuses the dead a last, un-needed, dignity; Mann finds the anonymity of decay to be another kind of life, requiring only the proper understanding for what has been lost and how. She acknowledges the closeness of dying.

Completing this cycle of work are some extremely intimate, demanding portraits of her own children, who once featured so prominently (if controversially) in the pictures she made. These portraits are on the edge of disappearance, a metaphorical, photographic death, implicit in every life and in every image. But their intimacy is obviously of a different sort when compared to what she has done before. Nothing is revealed; the living face becomes just another landscape, a shifting geography of possible selves, brought to rest at the long moment of exposure, but never still, the seemingly impossible intersection of present, past and future. She sees them (as a photographer of course, but as a mother too) growing away from her, growing into death, and absorbed into the broken surface of the images, their faces distorted by the lens, it seems as if no matter how closely we observe we can never get close enough, that something is always lost, something always goes unseen – this is the ruinous agency of time, and of forgetting. Photography is only ever proof, marking the inevitability of its own failure to cure our longing, to close wounds, and whatever else escapes the frame.

Claude Cahun: The Lady Vanishes

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:58:00 +0000

In July of 1944 two middle-age women were arrested on one of the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands – Jersey, to be exact. It seemed that they were the “masterminds” of a resistance propaganda movement that had been operating locally and although they had acted alone, it was just so unlikely that both were strenuously interrogated in order to ascertain the identity of their (non-existent) accomplices. They attempted suicide, probably with a concealed stash of barbiturates, but were eventually revived and had to endure months of further imprisonment, in deplorable conditions. The two were saved from execution only when it became apparent that Allied forces would soon take control of the island, as indeed they did, early in March 1945. These women, whom both the local population and their Nazi captors alike considered to be eccentric spinster sisters, were Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. After the war they returned to their life of quiet isolation, but Cahun’s health had been severely affected by her imprisonment. Worn down by illness, she died in 1954, while Moore took her own life in 1972. Extraordinary as all this undoubtedly is however, the truth is indeed more complicated than it first appears.

Cahun and Moore were, in fact, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe – stepsisters, lovers and artistic collaborators. Together they produced some of the most enigmatic and challenging photographs in the history of the medium, nominally self-portraits by Cahun. Although this work has been little known until recently, enjoying a brief notoriety with the rise of gender studies in art history and academic circles, it traces, at least in part, another linage within photography. So while these works are perhaps too wilful, too hermetic to be regarded as an influence on the development photography in general, the photographs they produced really illuminate, with their own dark radiance, the misunderstood potential that photography has to make the unseen visible, to create new, if uncertain, realities.

Moving in the radical and avant-garde circles of 1930’s Paris they had met André Breton, the architect of Surrealism, and were undoubtedly influenced by his ideas about the irrational and the unconscious in art. Immersed – if never quite at ease – in this heady creative atmosphere Schwob (not yet Cahun, but operating under a host of increasingly ambiguous pseudonyms) dedicated herself to writing and along with Malherbe was deeply involved in cutting-edge theatre productions. But in 1937, tiring of the fevered atmosphere in Paris (along with worrying political changes in Germany) they moved to the island of Jersey, where they had previously spent summers and in this private world began to concentrate entirely on their work, though they by no means lost contact with their old associates, at least until the outbreak of war.

The question of collaboration – and indeed of authorship – remains a thorny one, however. Most of the pictures, and certainly the best of them, feature Cahun in various guises. It is for this reason that the usual definition of the photographs is as self-portraiture, but again, nothing with this work can be as easily defined. In truth, it is difficult to know exactly what their intentions might have been. A lot of the photographs and related material were irretrievably lost or destroyed during the occupation, and what now remains, though not an insubstantial amount, is fragmentary, so whether the pictures were to be understood as artworks in their own right, as studies for a larger project, or as documents for performances even, will probably never be fully known. Since the rediscovery of the work a surprisingly diverse body of critical writing has sprung up, trying to fill the gaps in our knowledge about Cahun and Moore. It seems that in many cases that the attention given to Cahun’s electric presence in the photographs has somewhat obscured the role Moore (an accomplished illustrator in her own right) undoubtedly played in their creation, given that they had already collaborated on a series of collage works titled Aveux non avenus. Regardless of whatever their respective roles may have been, there can be no question that the photographs are “about” Cahun – her face is just another mask and she never comes to the end of them, never exposes what the masks might conceal – supposing it’s anything at all.

In retrospect it’s not hard to see their profound sympathy with the concerns of Surrealism, if not a direct influence, given that they worked in a determined isolation, far removed from the movement’s cosmopolitan centre in Paris. This is perhaps not unsurprising, because for all its radical intent Surrealism was, at heart, a boys club, with women in the role of Muse only and as such, incapable of action. It is worth noting however, that Breton’s insistence on the objective recording of “irrational” interior processes resembles closely the matter-of-fact treatment that Cahun’s transformations receive. Seen on the wall or on the page the images appear at first like snapshots, anonymous and banal, like countless others in fact, interesting perhaps in that they recount the mystery of unknown lives and the passage of time, but too distant otherwise to be meaningful.

Look again though and we see the alchemy of self being played out, using the modest tools of amateur photography – these are snapshots from another reality and this is their fracture; you are not who you were, but someone else – a woman being a man becoming a woman becoming other, in some indeterminable fashion, prey to a confusion of identity in the deepest sense, which endlessly flows back and forth across the space of who you are, a prismatic breaking of those codes that make up an identity, a name, calling into question any firm idea of who “you” might be. That face in the mirror with its established contours and gestures – is that really you? Well, of course it is, and that’s what’s so wrenching, so profound about these photographs, the knowledge that it’s only “you” until it’s not, until the ground shifts and you can’t be sure of anything, the mask is off and even its absence is nameless.

Claude Cahun is the face of the 20th Century.

Masao Yamamoto: Lost Time

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:16:00 +0000

We’re surrounded by photographs; the landscape of contemporary life is saturated with them – in wallets, on desks, piles in drawers, on walls, stored on memory cards and computers, but there remains, in some fundamental sense, a sort of ambiguity about them, something that feels almost like a slight-of-hand, to do with seeing and remembering, to do with what happened and what did not – in short, with all the conditions of our experience, of how we live and see ourselves living. The photographic process, the medium itself, is really a mutant, a shape-shifter, showing you whatever you want on its seemingly guileless surface and never – or only in part, by degrees – can you grasp how the trick is worked, how pictures form a new reality, with its own distinct logic and governed by a conceptual architecture that all photographs, no matter how dissimilar, must share.

Increasingly we don’t really think about photographs being objects – they are more like screens, a liquid medium containing the image itself, its subject and meaning flowing together. But Masao Yamamoto knows better and makes that same knowledge the basis for his art. He knows that photographs have a material weight, a presence, far beyond their actual dimensions. In Yamamoto’s hands they become infinitely charmed objects, bearing some intangible energy, showing how we use pictures like fetishes and like trophies – the very object of memory. His own pictures are feint, inconsistent; there’s something necessarily unreadable about them. Deliberately worn and stained, as though carried in a pocket for some time, as though the images held some burden of reference than needed constant re-affirmation, tokens of the fugitive present, now presented as evidence of some obsession, as proof, finally, that the act of recollection can never touch its subject.

Any collection of pictures is an archive of lost time and Yamamoto gathers up stray moments of loss, fixed in these objects – but they can never break the surface; they are photography’s deepest contradiction. Each has a luminous uncertainty, distorted by the flow of time through it and across its surface, looking down the wrong end of the telescope, because as the experience of time is distorted, fractured even, then so is our sense of space and of scale. Most of Yamamoto’s works could be held in the palm of your hand too; his exploration of size is arguably among the most astute in photography today. While the overwhelming trend has been to create monumental works, the intimacy he develops is not a reactionary critique of a “decadent” age; in fact, what he whispers to you is far more subtle and it is this: there’s so much you haven’t seen you might as well not see at all, that you might as well be blind… and yet there is nothing that feels privileged about the depth of his seeing – whatever assertions he makes are quiet ones, moved by a passionate attention, but not demanding it.

There is also undoubtedly a real connection to aspects of Zen thought, especially in the fierce concentration of how he sees and in terms of the philosophical motivation behind his pictures; the titles he has given to each large series he has worked on are like koans, like riddles, making contradiction meaningful. At the same time it would, of course, be absurd to suggest that the value of what Yamamoto does – to say nothing of his intention – stands as a corrective to the excesses, both formal and philosophical, of much recent art. What seems like self-effacement in his approach, its own particular reserve, is a strategy to draw one in to the space of the photograph; when so many push you further back, Yamamoto’s skill is to create a situation whereby you have to look, you have to understand the presence of the photograph, where its edges are and what it contains. The sum of his work (and it very much reads collectively) is perhaps far more grandiose than the rather unspectacular nature of the individual works might suggest.

In print and in complex installations Yamamoto creates a living, charged network of photographic images, which give the impression of a sustained visual consciousness – of a life. However, they are not arranged in lines or grids, which might suggest some hierarchy of meaning, but rather in loose webs or clouds of imagery that produce associations that would be unforeseeable otherwise. The pictures bleed into the spaces around them, which is jagged, pregnant with meaning – or with its absence, with what pictures cannot show. These “blank” spaces, as the ground for the pictures, whether on the wall or on the page, are really what help to define the object qualities of the photographs he makes. The irregular edges of each diminutive print, seemingly unique in its fragile materiality, ruptures the illusion of the photograph as a contained process, the idea that it might have some discrete way of working – that it is merely a screen for the image. We see instead their dimensions, their shadow.

So, while the effect might well risk being contrived or overly precious, with a particular reliance on the sort of nostalgia that old photographs generally evoke, conjuring up memories never lived, places you’ve never been to – what might seem like a weakness in the work, its perceived sentimentality, is the secretive little glance that opens up a whole world, previously unseen, where you find a vision far more rigorous, more demanding even, than would ever have been expected. Every action, every gesture, no matter how insubstantial or insignificant it might seem, leaves a trace, ephemeral as the stain of breath on a cold windowpane or the ring a wet glass makes on a table top, this is what Yamamoto follows. His desolate landscapes, the odd corners of habitation, the delicate figures and the flashing grace of birds in flight all share in the same insubstantial quality as his own photographic objects, what is seen and then gone – the photograph can never be enough, can never cover the distance, but in Yamamoto’s case it is indeed something you can hold in your hand.

Jessica Dimmock: The Human Stain

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:05:00 +0000

You know that you shouldn’t like it, that it shouldn’t be pleasurable to look, but of course it is, peering into the darkest corners, trying to get under the surface. We see a group of people create a living hell for themselves, from which they may never escape, its boundaries intangible: pain is their medium and the relief from pain – you don’t leave this life behind, it becomes you, becomes who you are. But to see the pictures, suffering brings it own aesthetic thrill – and why deny it, the pleasure of this looking, even if you know its cost? These are secular icons, wearing their hearts outside their chests, weeping blood and this life, these people, are sacrificed by their own will, martyrs to a hunger that is ours collectively.

Addiction is naked humanity; there is no other possible economy than that of the addiction in its ever-present demand for fulfilment, without restraint, without apology, a terrible momentum that gradually obscures everything else. So while I can’t help but wonder, as many do, when or if photo-journalists – especially those working with an obviously aesthetic intent – will ever cast a wider net on life, in the end these issues do not undermine, in any fundamental way, the integrity of this work as a whole, which stands as an incisive, challenging account of addiction, both fact and metaphor, not least in the way that this haunting vision is unafraid to articulate a deep truth in such visually seductive terms. Dimmock combines the acid dispassion of a committed observer with the ability to move through these lives like a trusted confidant, the camera is understood not to be a weapon, thought it does see, at times, with an unflinching candour.

What stands out in these pictures is a particularly abject sensuality, their charged half-light, evoking the actual presence of her subjects and the atmosphere of the place they have made home, a refuge. It is what illuminates the pictures, this nearness of an obvious humanity, without concealment, without the veneer of respectability – addiction strips all that away, and Dimmock uses that exposure to show us how close we all are to the blank hunger she portrays in these pictures.

Though photographers have long had a prurient fascination with the dispossessed, with the spectacle of poverty – which is, after all, the territory that “concerned” photography has made its own, how the other half live, their gutter amusements, these pictures have a kind of immediacy that more obviously belongs to the sphere of private reflection than to the realm of journalism proper and if we can’t forget (or rather should not) that Dimmock is the one telling the story of her time on the ninth floor, it seems clear her presence was as much a part of the place as anything else, she is a performer in this drama too, their Greek chorus – and is the standard of tragedy not, in some essential way, a disaster arising from one’s own choices, either in a moment of weakness or by increments?

There is tragedy here: these pictures are parables of human isolation, from inside the ever-deepening, entropic spirals of addiction, with no release from whatever hell they have made, cages of their own design. But one gets the sense that for Dimmock the drugs are not really the point, that they are not addressed only as a social issue, but as a way of exploring some other, altogether more profound, concern, where addiction itself becomes a metaphor for a particular kind of emotional vulnerability, a need or a desire that cannot be satisfied, that allows no denial, but opens like a void, a wound, in the pattern of a life…

It was a chance encounter that led Jessica Dimmock into this world, Alice through the looking glass, where she found a place for herself, for her camera, as a witness and yes, as a thief. It could not have been otherwise, not really, and what she takes must have been offered, in so much as it can be, as much as the person in front of the camera can understand what is being seen. Looking at these pictures then is to share the same complicity. The story of how she arrived here is arguably no more serendipitous (or prosaic) than might be expected under the circumstances – on the street, still a student, while trying out a new camera she is approached by a man who asks if he would like to photograph him, making it clear at the same time that he was a drug dealer. So it was in the course of photographing this man and his life that she was introduced to the eponymous ninth floor. It is here, however, that her work actually began and Dimmock eventually became a frequent visitor to the sprawling warren of rooms, a narcotic cocoon, pushing oblivion to the point of disappearance.

She never saw the man again, but he led her to the entrance of a maze and once inside she finds that it is a microcosm of the larger society from which it is hidden, heir to all the same vanities and tragedies, the same minor triumphs – a shadow world, the fractured double of our own, where everything and nothing are the same. Getting there is to stumble, perhaps willingly, into one of many traps – the ground opens up, you took a wrong turn. Or maybe it’s not as simple as that; our falls accumulate, until finally it’s better to stay down. Yet the frailties with which we must live, personally and all together, are here on a scale hard to imagine, appetites never satisfied in the barbed shelter of their addiction, they must live our nightmares and very little separates the people that Dimmock photographed from any one of the lives that must flow past them every day, uncomprehending, on the street under the high-up windows. Dying everyday and re-born in their addiction, this shadow world she entered must live the worst of other lives – their society is ours, each braided together, each alone inside their lives.