L E N S C R A T C H

Photolucida: Colleen Mullins: Cultivar

2013-06-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post is part of several weeks dedicated to work seen at Photolucida...

©Colleen Mullins, Johnson's Beach, 2010

I always enjoy seeing Colleen Mullins at review events and am excited to share her project, Cultivar, that weaves her childhood memories of growing up in Northern California with the experience of discovering her father's negatives. The result is a re examining of familiar places and ultimately combining her own work in a unique exhibition format with some of her father's photographs.

Colleen was born in San Francisco, and has lived in Minnesota for 20 years. She is a college educator and was the Director of the BFA Photography Program at The Art Institutes International Minnesota for over six years, from which she recently broke away to temporarily pursue her creative work in photography and book arts full time, write, and to devote time to professional practices coaching for artists.

Her photographs are in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and the Weeks Gallery Global Collection of Photography at Jamestown Community College, and her artist books are in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography Library, University of Arizona, Dickson Art Center, UCLA, and Yale University Library’s ‘Art of the Book’ collection, among many others. She has been awarded the Women's Studio Workshop Project Grant (1998), four Minnesota State Arts Board Grants (2003, 2008, 2011, and 2013) and two McKnight Artists Fellowships for Photographers (1997-8, 2011-2).

Her work is currently on view in Chicago in Midwest Contemporary at the Lillstreet Art Center through July 14^th, and is featured in the July issue of PDN in an article on the anatomy of successful grant applications.

©Colleen Mullins, Gateway to the Redwood Empire, 2010

Cultivar

In 2006, I began a journey of both discovery and rediscovery, and became an archaeologist of my own history, excavating the object, documents, and photographs left behind in a house we moved out of in 1968. Ultimately, this led to deep photographic investigation of the places between my hometown, San Francisco, and the more rural Sonoma County areas in which my family car-camped in the 70’s.

©Colleen Mullins, Riverbend Resort, 2010

While the bulk of my project unfolds in Sonoma, there is also imagery of other places inhabiting the sphere of fuzzy memories, reignited by digging through the dusty drawers and the damp basement of my childhood home.

©Colleen Mullins, Add-A-Room Tent, 2011

On the simplest level, the work is about a kind of vacation with which many Americans my age grew up. On a more complex and personal level, it deals with the slipperiness of memory, childhood perceptions, and the endurance of a parent’s way of looking at the world as an inheritance of a personal vision.

©Colleen Mullins, Burke's, Forestville, CA 2011

Sonoma County in California’s redwood biome, and in particular the town of Guerneville, has a landscape whose face has been surfaced and resurfaced generation after generation by the force of human ingenuity and desire. For me, it is a place that is both the physical manifestation of the terminus of manifest destiny and the industrial revolution. An act of Congress in 1916, we legislated away manifest destiny toward a culture of conservancy, with photographs by William Henry Jackson and Yellowstone as evidence of the need for protection. But for the Redwoods of Sonoma County, it came long after San Francisco had been built twice with the timbers of old-growth Coastal Redwood and Giant Sequoia.

©Colleen Mullins, Armstrong Redwoods, 2012

Today’s Sonoma County is a blend of conserved state and regional parks, wine producers, camping resorts, and quarries which ironically produce a multitude of aggregate and concrete base products used in the construction of roadways. Much of my work over the last several years has focused on this area, and other attractions in surrounding counties.

©Colleen Mullins, Sutro Baths, 2010

©Colleen Mullins, Muir Woods, 2011

©Colleen Mullins, Col. Armstrong, 2010

©Colleen Mullins, Carr's Drive Inn, 2010

©Colleen Mullins, Mirabel Park Resort, Forestville, CA, 2012

©Colleen Mullins, Quarry, Forestville, CA, 2010

©Colleen Mullins, Cleary Court Sunset

©Colleen Mullins, For Lease, Guerneville, CA 2010

©Colleen Mullins, Vacant, Guerneville, CA, 2010

My father’s work has few literal intersections with the subject matter I photograph, but instead acts within a framework of influence—a way of seeing. Structurally, he organized his pictures the same way I do mine. But we never talked about photography. What I do remember is his interest in ensuring that I saw what he saw, when we were looking at the world without cameras. At times the pictures are goosebump-producing in their similarity of subject and structure. And it is important to note that the discovery of the archive of images came after a good deal of my current work was shot. This collaboration is not one of re-photography, nor intentional mimicry. While the bulk of my project unfolds in Sonoma, there is also imagery of other places inhabiting the sphere of fuzzy memories, reignited by digging through the dusty drawers and the damp basement of my childhood home.

©Colleen Mullins, Miss April, 2011

The basement of the rental property where I found my father’s negatives and other objects and reminders that led me to start my current project.

©Clement A. Mullins, Untitled, 1958

©Colleen Mullins, Fallen, 2007

I found the negative for #2 in a box in the basement of a rental property, in a shopping cart under a pile of bundled stacks of old magazines in 2010

Installation Views, Rochester Art Center

Work has been displayed with my father's, in a conversation between us, if you will.

©Clement A. Mullins, Untitled, 1953

Colleen Mullins is a fiscal year 2013 recipient of an Artist Inititative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. The activity made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant fomr the Minnesota Stae Arts Board thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photolucida: Adrain Chesser: orange blossoms, fire ants and the tyranny of memory

2013-06-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post is part of several weeks dedicated to work seen at Photolucida...

I was born on May 19, 1965 in Okeechobee, Florida. I was groomed to be a Pentecostal preacher, studying the bible and taking piano and organ lessons. I spoke in tongues. I learned to cast out demons. I was gay. I left home at the first opportunity....Arian Chesser

I cried the first time I saw Adrain Chesser's work. His powerful series, I Have Something To Tell You, is one that I have shown in my classes for a number of years and it never fails to move me profoundly. I have admired Adrain's work from afar, so when he sat down at my reviewing table, I was simply, thrilled. Once again, Adrain presented me with work so personal and powerful that it was hard to hold back tears. His ten year visual journey of self exploration, orange blossoms, fire ants and the tyranny of memory, has been a personal therapy, a working through events and demons that shaped his life, but through photography, he has been able to release their power and move forward. I am truly honored to share select images from this body of work.

In Adrain's words:

Photography has been my highest spiritual practice.

It is no coincidence that at a time when I was abandoning the god and the religious dogma I was raised with, I should discover photography as a means to interpret my life.

During my thirties it quite literally saved my life.

Thru the ritualistic nature of image making, I healed deep-seated emotional wounds from my childhood that had manifested as physical disease in my body.

Now, in my mid forties, free from childhood demons, I find my life to be full of moments of transcendence. States of grace elevated above the mundane, moments of such inexpressible beauty that more often than not I am brought to tears by the heart breaking knowledge that comes from the temporal nature of life. The knowing that life is fragile and fleeting, that one moment is always dying to the next.

I have lied, cheated, and stolen so I could feel the erotic rush of watching an image magically appear on what was a blank piece of paper. I’m learning to cast “in” demons. I’ve always felt I would do almost anything to know the power of holding a split second in my hands, and look at it as long and as lovingly as I care to, to capture something as elusive as an emotion, and to feel the power of that emotion possess me each time I look at it. To feel the electric jolt of telling a lie convincingly and above all else, to experience the awe-inspiring, god-like power of creating and witnessing a truth.

Little Bruce

orange blossoms, fire ants and the tyranny of memory

In 2000 I decided that I would return to where I grew up, to photographically document what it was like in to live in a small town in South Florida at the turn of the millennium. After shooting for a month, deeply disturbing memories from my childhood began to surface, which triggered a nervous breakdown. When I returned home I went into therapy. It occurred to me that if I could make a photographic representation of these specific events from my childhood, I could own them outside of myself as an object and that these memories would no longer hold a shadowy power over my subconscious.

Self Portrait Crying

From 2001 to 2011 I returned to Florida at least once a year to make images with friends and family. I would either recreate specific events or I would stay present in my process for images to arise that could hold the emotional weight of memories that remained half shrouded. In the end what I remembered was my resilience and defiance as a child in the face of an overwhelmingly large and seemingly unsafe world. What that came to mean for me as an adult, was the realization that the spectres of my past had no real substance, as if they were only made up of vapor and light.

Dying Orange Grove

Breathe

Mercury Vapor

Pippin' Hot

Pool at Midnight

At Sunset

Rest

Backseat

Orchid

Graveside

What Remains

Easter Sunday

Muddin'

Clouds

On the Day I was Raped

Cabin

The Deluge, No.13

Sundowner

His Hand Fell in Shadow

Burning Orange Grove

Onward

Historic Processes/Contemporary Visions

2013-06-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

©Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman
Unique Cyanotype over archival pigment print

As part of our Photolucida celebration, I am sharing a new exhibition at the Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami that opened on June 8th and runs through August 31, 2013. Dina attended Photolucida in hopes of finding interesting work, and as a result has an exhibition featuring 10 photographers, 7 discovered at the portfolio reviews. The exhibition, Historic Processes/ Contemporary Visions is a group show of artists working with alternative processes to make photographic images. These methods include 19th century techniques such as daguerrotype, wet plate collodion, cyanotypes, platinum prints and photogravures. The making of these prints can be time consuming, labor intensive, and at times toxic. The manual aspect of many of these processes also creates an element of chance, giving each image unique characteristics.

Artists included in this exhibition are Curtis Wehrfritz, Erin Malone, Fritz Liedtke, Gloria O’Connell, Heidi Kirkpatrick, Ken Lyon, Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, Lisa Blair, Rachel Phillips and Rafael Balcazar.

I asked gallerist Dina Mitrani what she was looking for at the reviews:

I went to Photolucida as a first time reviewer with a very open mind. In general, I tend to show international contemporary artists, usually those that explore the narrative, poetic or conceptual aspects of creating images. Before the event, I had met with a Miami photographer using platinum and cyanotype processes, and seeing his work planted a seed for the idea to organize a group show. I had worked with some platinum prints in a gallery in New York many years ago, and really loved the tones and textures, so i was excited about the possibility of showing this type of work in my gallery.

At Photolucida i was (pleasantly) surprised to meet so many artists working with these alternative processes and I decided to put together a group show for the summer. I am very excited about bringing this type of exhibition to the Miami community and show how contemporary artists are using historic techniques to make work! So far, I have had great response to the show. I am grateful to the artists who so quickly shipped their work out to me and made this possible.

©Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman

Unique Cyanotype over archival pigment print

In this digital age, there has been a resurgence of artists working with these "hand-made" methods. Currently the standard analog photographic printing process is the gelatin-silver print, and the standard digital processes are the pigment print and the digital laser exposure on traditional color light sensitive paper. The works in this exhibition are examples of how contemporary artists are rediscovering and using historic methods to make photographs, as well as applying new technologies and practices to these techniques.

Unique Wet Plate Collodion

Cyanotype photograms on cotton made with sunlight

Black & white fiber paper printed from

4x5 Polariod positive / negative film

Photolucida: Gemma-Rose Turnbull: Paper Thin

2013-06-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post is part of several weeks dedicated to work seen at Photolucida...

Today is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day and the timing is perfect to bring light to a subject that rarely gets attention in the photography world, much less anywhere else. Australian photographer, Gemma-Rose Turnbull, brought several projects to Photolucida, including one on this subject. Paper Thin is a terrific collaborative project, both documentary and participatory, giving us enough of the story to fill in the blanks. Another project, Red Light Dark Room; Sex, lives and stereotypes 2011 (created with a group of street based sex workers) also was achieved with the same methodology.

Her projects and photographs have been exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the United Nations Vistors Centre in New York, the Queensland Centre of Photography, the HeadOn, Ballarat and FotoFreo Photo Festivals in Australia, and numerous small artist-run spaces. She has been the recipient of grants from The Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and The Helen Macpherson Smith Trust. Gemma-Rose continues to explore photo-based social practice in a range of collaborative projects with her family; I wish I could spend more time with my family 2013 – ongoing.

PAPER THIN

When I tell people what I am photographing they look at me askance. “Elder abuse? What’s that?” The very few who don’t question the term whisper their own tremulous tale. From this I glean that unless someone you know, be it through family or work, has had his or her vulnerability taken advantage of, then you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

So I find a generic explanation, one I rattle off to everyone, quickly offloading it, without breath or pause: “Elder abuse is any act within a relationship of trust which results in harm to an older person. The most common forms of elder abuse include physical abuse, psychological abuse, financial abuse and neglect.” It does the job but it’s not the whole story.

That’s what I find in the lounge rooms and kitchens I meet people in. Rooms that are, without exception, covered in the collections of long lives; photos, trinkets, albums, newspaper clippings, the bits-and-bobs that add up to the sum of their years. I sit, and I drink tea (endless cups of it) and we talk. Finally I find out what ‘elder abuse’ really means.

Most of the stories leave me gawping in shock, unable to correlate my environment with the words spilling from the person sat in front of me. And I’m not someone who hasn’t come across the horrors that people inflict on each other before. I’ve walked sad paths with very vulnerable people, but this…

But these folk are, in some sense, the lucky ones. They’re some of the ones who have had the resources, education, support or will to find help. And they find it in the Seniors Legal and Support Service (SLASS) at the Caxton Legal Centre.

But the saddest part is that I feel like that for every person who finds that gift of help from SLASS there must be a half dozen more who are being let down by a community that doesn’t respect its aged. And so, almost more importantly than giving these people a voice to tell their stories, is the hope that their stories will make people remember that age and vulnerability does not diminish a person’s worth.

Caxton Legal Centre is an independent, non-profit community organisation providing free legal advice, social work services, information and referrals for the most disadvantaged members of society. Established in 1976, Caxton is Queensland’s longest running free legal advice service. The Seniors Legal and Support Service, or SLASS, provides free legal and social work support for seniors experiencing elder abuse, mistreatment or financial exploitation. SLASS is part of Caxton Legal Centre Inc. www.caxton.org.au

Photolucida: Chantal Heijnen: Bronxites

2013-06-14T03:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post is part of several weeks dedicated to work seen at Photolucida...

Dutch photographer, Chantal Heijnen is a portrait and documentary photography living in The Bronx, New York. Moving to the Bronx from Amsterdam might no be the usual destination, but having a BA in social work and spending 10 years as a refugee counselor in the Netherlands, led her to a place where it was important to tell stories for those whose voices are seldom heard. Her images reflect the community in which she inhabits and they are insightful and beautiful. Chantal brings a dignity to her photographs through color, light, sensitivity, and a nod to the Dutch Masters. She has a video to accompany the photographs that can be seen here.

In 2008, she received a BA in Photography from the Photo Academy in Amsterdam and then moved to New York City and worked as an editorial photographer for international newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Stern Magazine. She currently teaches at ICP in NYC and also gives workshops and portfolio reviews.

BRONXITES

In this ongoing portrait series, I present an insider’s view of everyday life in my adopted neighborhood: University Heights - an area in the South Bronx just south of Fordham Road. Outsiders mostly know the Bronx for its troubled past. But on the inside, the Bronx is a hidden gem.

My project started when I formed an unlikely friendship with Gilbert, a special education teacher and a true gentleman, who has lived in the South Bronx since 1968. In 2008, Gilbert gave me the opportunity to share a space in his apartment, and pursue my long held ambition to photograph individuals from rarely seen communities. As I gained the trust of this community, and found neighbors who let me document their lives, I became exhilarated by their resilience.

The Bronx is part of the most expensive city in the U.S., but its 1.4 million inhabitants constitute one of the lowest income areas of the nation. Yet, despite the challenges they face, most Bronxites show pride and self-respect. In my portraits I try to capture their poise, strength, and endurance.

Mark Naison, Professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham University: “Ms Heijnen's training as a social worker informs her work. All of her portraits come out of relationships she has built with her subjects and they are set in places where her subjects feel most comfortable- their homes, the streets they frequent, stores and places of worship. It aims to give a voice to people who are seldom heard”.

David Gonzalez, journalist for The New York Times: "She has carefully rendered her adopted borough in a series of softly lighted portraits with warm, rich tones. The paint encrusted walls and plastic-covered furniture are familiar to anyone who has spent time in the area where she began her portrait series, which is known as University Heights, just south of Fordham Road. So, too, are the faces — alternately weary, serene or happy".