Shooting Wide Open

Art/Work by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber is a nice short book that collects observations and advice from different people in the art world, geared toward artists at the beginning of their careers. It’s not comprehensive enough to be a true reference, but it’s worth checking out of the library to go through once, because it has the distinction of addressing very nuts and bolts issues that art teachers and the art world don’t usually talk about. Stuff like keeping records, taxes (keep receipts for everything from museum visits to photobooks and photo magazine subscriptions!), invoicing, contracts. They don’t spell everything out, but I thought it was a good reminder of some practical things that I should start doing to make my life easier down the line.

As for the advice, people have different opinions but here’s a sampling of something people do agree on – the ever treacherous artist statement:

“You’re good at what you are good at. Writers are not asked to be visual artists; no one is asking that visual artists become highfalutin writers for their artist statements. The goal of your artist statement is to clarify and state your intentions. Do not add florid language and overthink it. The jargon isn’t necessary or desirable. Most of the time, especially for emerging artists, it can create a stumbling block between your reader and your work.”
- Sarah Lewis, Yale School of Art

“No amount of poor padding with theory is going to make work look any more convincing or intriging than it already is. I look at everybody’s images first. Then I go to project statemtns. Then maybe I read the artist statement. I am looking for plain language: ‘I am doing this and I am going to do this thig with it.’ I have stayed away from reading the more poetic, theory-heavy, phiosophizing artist statemnts because they kill it. Leave the interpretation to us, the audience. Someone else will put it into words at some point.”
- Shannon Stratton, ThreeWalls

“I am looking for nouns. Nouns and verbs. Anything that starts off too flowery I crumple up and throw away.”
- Leigh Conner, Conner Contemporary Art

“I will read artists statements but artists don’t have to be great writers. Actually, many of them are terrible writers, which is fine, since that’s no the primary ‘language’ of theirs that I’m listening to. If they have taken the time to write a text, I will read it and it can often be quite useful, though artists shouldn’t be overly converned with crafting a perfect, publishable piece.”
- Shamim Momin, Whitney Museum

We intend to establish a self-feed­ing platform that grows with the number of participants and can lead to var­ious me­dia, such as cat­a­logues, posters or exhi­bi­tions.

Goodness.

I discovered The Most Expensive through Dan Abbé’s piece in American Photo. TME is a publishing venture structured so that anyone can upload an image to the site, with the stipulation that each successive user pays $1 more to upload the next photo. When 300 photos have been uploaded (and $45,150 collected), the project closes and a book/catalogue is printed.

And the next project opens.

Pay to play scam or interesting photobook experiment? The answers is… sinking feeling in my stomach.

Well, it ended up in my hands, so too bad for S/L/J/F/Toh…

”I guess you have to take a lot of risks to be famous in any field,” [Damian] said, and then, turning around to look at me, she added: “For instance, to be an artist.”

She was being so serious, but it was just like a bad movie. I love bad movies. I was starting to remember why I liked Damian.

I guestured toward the gift-wrapped salami that was sticking out of my Pan Am flight bag and said, “Any time you slice a salami, you take a risk.”

“No, but I mean for an artist-”

“An artist!!” I interrupted. “What do you mean, an ‘artist’? An artist can slice a salami, too! Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.”

Damian wouldn’t let me disillusion her. Some people have deep-rooted long-standing art fantasies… “But to become a famous artist you had to do something that was ‘different.’ And if it was ‘different,’ then it means you took a risk, because the critics could have said that it was bad instead of good.”

“In the first place,” I said, “they usually did say it was bad. And in the second place, if you say that artists take ‘risks,’ it’s insulting to the men who landed on D-Day, to stunt men, to baby-sitters, to Evel Knievel, to stepdaughters, to coal miners, and to hitch-hikers, because they’re the ones who really know what ‘risks’ are.” She didn’t even hear me, she was still thinking about what glamorous “risks” artists take.

If you haven’t read The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, you are missing a heck of a lot of hilarity. His writing style is so simple and earnest that it reads either as an endearing and funny confession by a quirky personality or are pissed off by the obvious tongue-in-cheek put-on. Maybe people who knew him would be able to read his tone more clearly, but personally I think it’s better not to know whether he’s celebrating mass produced culture or criticizing it. It’s interesting that he’s cited by both sides – I’ve heard serious art historians mention him, as well as fashionistas. You gotta love that. It’s the sort of thing people into which people read what they will.

For some reason he reminds me of Richard Brautigan. Can you like “Winter Sunset”* without liking The Philosophy of Andy Warhol? (Please perform empirical tests.)

Speaking of poetry, in The Anthologist Nicholson Baker brings up an interesting point: why is prose separated into non-fiction and fiction while poetry is not? The answer seems obvious, but still, the division is instructive. Clump paintings and music in with poetry, and film and photography with prose. Maybe in all cases the division is more ambiguous than our classifications suggest, but that we make the distinction about some media and not others indicates the different ways we ingest and perceive these media.

And back again to photography.

*
Winter Sunset

A slash of scarlet
On the black hair
Of a wounded bear.

Taryn Simon, Contraband

Contraband includes photographs taken 24 hours a day of over 1000 items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the U.S. from abroad. Over five days, in both the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility, Simon documented items including counterfeit American Express travelers checks, overproof Jamaican rum, heroin, a dead hawk, an illegal Mexican passport, deer penis, purses made from endangered species, Cuban cigars, counterfeit Disney DVDs, khat, gold dust, GHB concealed as house cleaner, cow manure tooth powder, counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, prohibited sausage, undeclared jewelry, steroids and an ostrich egg. – Steidl

Reminds me of this photo from American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.

All items in the photograph were seized from the baggage of passengers arriving in the U.S. at JFK Terminal 4 from abroad over a 48-hour period. All seized items are identified, dissected, and then either ground up or incinerated. JFK processes more international passengers than any other airport in the United States.

(via A Photo Student)

KZSU received a copy of An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Pt I and the music director thought it was up my alley. It’s a little collection of photographs from Bay Area photographers like Larry Sultan, Jim Goldberg, Michael Jang, John Chiara, and on and on. The volume isn’t large enough to serve as a reference, but the artist statements in the back of the book were pretty interesting, especially the ones that ventured away from explanation of process to include something of the artist’s own personal experience…

Katy Grannan, Gail and Dale, Pacifica (II)

California sunshine is relentless, even cruel. A lifetime spent in the Northeast makes me suspicious of so much sun, but out West there is no hiding from it.

In upstate New York I photographed a girl who planned to move to California to become a rockstar, or a tattoo artist. She called after returning east to her mother’s house, a year or so later, to say things hadn’t worked out in California. She couldn’t find work. She used to many drugs and was robbed by her friends. Upstate New York was better, she said.

I thought about this girl when I moved to San Francisco. I saw people like her everywhere: in the Mission, in the Tenderloin, downtown on Market Street. How could it be that she – that they – had misunderstood the light?

Oscar Wilde famously stated, “Anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” Many of us are still looking for whatever it is we believe the West offers: reinvention, escape… We believe it will be easier here; it will be different.

The sun is shining.

Chauncey Hare, from This Was Corporate America

And then there’s Chauncey Hare’s black and white statement to match his black and white photo. Somebody needs to make a documentary film about this man. It would be fascinating. Or maybe just unsettling.

These photographs were made to protest and warn against he growing domination of working people by multinational corporations and their elite owners and managers.

Richard Misrach, David, from Telegraph 3AM

In contrast, Misrach’s thoughts on the political efficacy of his earlier work:

I began this project when I was twenty-two years old. For almost two years I roamed the five-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue from Dwight Way to the UC Berkeley campus with a camera on my shoulder. I think the fact that I asked permission and was working slow on a tripod actually made people curious and receptive to what I was doing. In every photograph, the street people were looking directly into the camera. This was very important to me. It both suggested their willing participation and their confrontation with the rest of the world. At first I was pretty intimidated, but over time I became a fixture of the Avenue.

It was my first serious attempt at making formally beautiful prints of political content. I also recognized for the first time that creating social change and making art might in fact be at odds. This was a real eye-opener that I’ve been trying to deal with ever since. After Telegraph 3AM was completed, I felt disillusioned. Instead of making an effective political statement, I felt like I ended up with a coffee table book. I’m not sure what I was expecting at the time but it seemed that I had failed. I hadn’t created social change or made particularly great art, but it did get me to reconsider how photography actually functions in the world. Thirty-five years later, I find that the work in fact effectively captures a historical moment. So, perhaps I was too hard on myself back then.

I’m starting to think that political statements in still photography only really effective ask questions instead of declaring things. Experimental photos prompt, what is this a picture of? And much of photojournalism essentially asks the viewer, why do we allow this to happen? To me, there’s something about the muteness of a still that brings more questions to mind than answers.

Not to sound like a 3am self-help infomercial, but… I mean, have you ever found an answer in a photograph? Are photos even supposed to be articulate? I’m reminded of a great quote by Colum McCann in Let the Great World Spin:

The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That’s where the camera came in.

I ordered a copy of Peter Beard’s The End of the Game and the seller accidentally sent me a German language copy. The mistake has been rectified, except I still own the German edition. Does anyone want it? I’d be happy to snail mail it to anyone in the US.

The book was originally published in English, so this is a bit strange, but I can’t think of a single good use for it in my hands unless I want to cut it up for the pictures, which is still something I can’t bring myself to do to books, especially nice ones that have done me no wrong.

You, of course, are free to do that if you have the stomach for it. Only stipulation is that you don’t take it just to resell, scout’s honor. If you’re interested, email jin [at] killeryellow dot com.

UPDATE: The book has found a home.

On this day of new beginnings, I ask: what is this?

(via Isa Leshko)

Eugene Richards’ The Blue Room

Andrew Moore

I randomly came upon a beat up copy of a book by Andrew Moore called Inside Havana in the bookstore blow-out bin and I waffled quite a bit before buying it, because of so many shots verged on the typical commercial architecture shot. The website is a similar experience. There are many strange and wonderful things in each project, but there is also a high volume of fairly typical interiors. Nonetheless, there’s such an impressive range of objects (and messes!) that I was rapt.

Russia is probably my favorite, though it is also at this point in time that the projects are far back enough in time that the files are not quite processed as well for the web as the later photos. (I should be one to talk…) They are all still engrossing photos however, and the Cuba images in the book itself are perfectly fine. I’m going to try to get the Russia book too.