Thanks to a heads up at Horses Think, last Friday I saw Mitch Epstein and Paul Schiek talk at a PhotoAlliance event at the Art Institute. Jim Goldberg and Kenro Izu are next on the Calendar, if you’re interested. $10 for the general public, half off for students. Looking back at the archive, it looks like I missed Eirik Johnson and Bill Owens. Dang! And it turns out that a couple of my professors have given talks there this year too. I’ll have to keep my calendar updated in the future.

Schiek “opened,” as it were, for Epstein, showing his digital point and shoot snapshot work that he made as a student at CCA and his second project utilizing blown out highlights to create a ghostly, ethereal effect which he referred to as a kind of reductive information removal. I like the idea behind his blown out work, but I’m not sure that I like the execution. Some of them just seem to be offhand experiments of pushing digital to an extreme. His recent work as turned toward direct “sculptural” manipulation of the photos themselves to remove info – ie cutting portions out. He also talked briefly about TBW books, which he runs, publishing works by Todd Hido and Alec Soth (the current subscription edition) among others. All the books are a signature white and he showed a photo of himself dressed in all white on shipping day to send them out with “good vibes.” He concluded with a photo of his mom, recovered from cancer and flipping off a seal in an aquarium. Maybe a star in the making?

Mitch Epstein

Epstein’s work was less overtly personal. Power, for him, is like a set of Russian nesting dolls: nuclear power cracked to reveal political power, within which you find corporate power, then consumer power, religious power and so on. What I liked was his range – landscapes, interiors, portraits, a newspaper photo he found on a wall – and his inclusion of the act of photographing (or not photographing) in the significance of the pictures. For example, in the instance of being denied entry to the DNC and RNC, he says, “not getting in is just as important,” delivers as much of a message as getting in to shoot the brouhaha would. Or in the instance of the DOE rep who did not allow him to take a picture of solar panels because an air conditioning vent was in view, but who had no problem with him photographing a missile.

Mitch Epstein

He talked about his own process – how the project started out of environmentalist concerns (he gets the NRDC magazine) and out of a general concern for the future that all parents begin to have at some point; and about how he used the internet to do research, at one point getting the idea to photograph the “Terror-free gas” pump from a photo he saw on Flickr. In that vein, this is a project he hopes to take out of the traditional art venues and bring into the street through billboards and some sort of awareness campaign, perhaps even in the communities where the photos were originally shot. To conclude the talk, Epstein quoted Wallace Shawn on the role of artist as a vehicle of change – is this appropriate? is it enough to influence your own circle of friends?

That said, he came at the project without any overt political agenda, which he believes nudges the work into the realm of propaganda, and worked in a very open way. Each morning he would have a plan for the day, but it was all a “ruse” and would invariably be shot as the day wore on, full of unexpected events like the Cheshire, OH grandma who asks him, “would you like to see my gun?”

Mitch Epstein

American Power is the first of his projects which he has shot with a large format camera. In the past he has worked mainly with handheld cameras more suitable to the approach of going where you will and finding the unexpected, but this time he wanted to try “making less photographs and investing more into each.”

Asked to speak on “beauty,” Epstein pointed out that people find art and beauty more enjoyable than power. (Not generally true, methinks. Maybe I’m just jaded, or have a looser definition of “enjoy.”) He went on to say that our sense of beauty is tied to our sense not only of what is pretty but of what is visually awe-inspiring or downright scary, in the case of these plumes of smoke. There is some aspect of beauty that comes out of respect, which is not the same thing as agreement or endorsement or anything along those lines.

Mitch Epstein

The most interesting moment of the lecture for me came when he briefly asserted that much of how Americans view personal property, land and use of space is a legacy of Manifest Destiny and the pioneers’ land-claim mindset, where owning a piece of land was essential to survival on the most basic level.

This is a fascinating idea that touches on how we use or don’t use our public spaces (or the lack thereof), the popularity of single-family homes in suburbia and the need to own. Most of my friends, even the liberal or at least socially liberal, feel a need to own. Mostly this is a decision grounded in being wise with your money, but depending on where you live, the numbers don’t necessarily add up for ownership, yet if they know anything about what they want to do with their lives, they want to own a residence. So on a personal level, I am very curious about this idea, and I think it’s an interesting little puzzle of how a photographer might show these issues visually without resorting to photos of Old West relics.

On a more general level, it’s just fascinating how much we inherit culturally without knowing it. I don’t think any of my friends would really point to Manifest Destiny as the reason they think it’s important to buy a house, but I think it’s something that definitely has trickled down in the culture. That’s not to say that first generation immigrant families don’t have similar desires, but I think that comes from a slightly different place. Though, I would argue that there is a hint of the pioneer in some immigrant experiences. This is not an issue I know a lot about, but boy, I am interested now.

[Which reminds me - I need to read Gridlock Economy, which is about private ownership being a hindrance to innovation. In fact, a few weeks ago, I overheard snippets of a previously-recorded interview with author Michael Heller (mp3) conducted at no other than our very own KZSU.]