Weng Naiqiang

A slim little book I picked up last year at 798 Photo. If you’ve ever see the drawings in elementary Chinese textbooks, some of the scenes Weng documented seem very familiar. I always thought those were idealizations, but from these photos, it looks like plenty were actually enacted.

So sad that this year I won’t be in Beijing to pick up some more stuff…

Speaking of photobooks, Joel showed the work of Frederick Sommer, who does everything from painting on cellophane negatives to cut paper objects, and pulled out The Box, which is a little clear plastic box of unbound cards with titles printed on one side and reproductions of photos, collages and cut paper on the other. A sort of greatest hits box. I thought it was great, since you get something that’s easy to store and not easily damaged since it’s protected by the box, and if you wanted to display them, you could do it on a rotating mix and match basis. The pieces themselves are a little more hardy too, since they are heavy cards rather than flimsy prints, so it’s easy to lay them around on a table and pick some up without feeling like you’re going to ruin someone’s valuable print.

FYI, there is also a Son of the Box. Unfortunately both are hard to find or extremely pricey at this point, but I wonder what the production costs on doing something similar with contemporary work would be.

I saw this in the New Scientist:

This bacterial “photo” was created by projecting light onto bacterial “film” – genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The film was infused with a sugar that turns black when digested. The bacteria in the dark parts of the Petri dish digested this sugar and so turned black, whereas in the illuminated areas, a light-activated gene prevented the bacteria from eating the sugar, and so these parts remained clear.

Any Chinese readers out there? I’ve seen the work of expats or foreign photojournalists in China, but I wouldn’t really know where to start with native Chinese photojournalists, but in a bit of luck, the first story in Zachary Mexico’s China Underground is about the self-made photojourno using the pseudonymn Maohair. Check out the link for an excerpt about his beginnings. He has a Chinese blog but you can see a few albums of his work at the top. The moniker on the blog is taken from one of my favorite stories, the episodic Journey to the West, where the Monkey King (as he’s known in the West for some reason) Wu Kong fights off all sorts of demons and monsters to help his master complete the quest to retrieve the sutras.

And on a different topic, it turns out Ansel Adams did some street?!

I’m curious about how necessary citizens of other countries find it to smile all the time. My subjective experience has been that in the US people are more prone to smiling at strangers, at customers, at everybody. Which is mostly a good thing, but sometimes you can see that the smile is forced, which is awkward. People who don’t smile as often are seen as more unfriendly. I get the feeling that a person needs to smile a lot, especially if you’re female, to be perceived as friendly or not aloof when of course, those things don’t necessarily actually correlate.

It’s all speculation at this point. Thoughts?

Phil Bergerson

Seeing Bergerson’s fantastic use of color, the question that springs to mind is:

What if, instead of taking candy from babies, you replaced their box of colorful crayons with a palette of subtle grays? Would they burst out into bouts of Greenbergian crying or become master black and white photographers?

Patti Hallock

I saw Patti Hallock’s Wreck Room project a while ago and loved the geometry, for lack of a better word, of her work. I really enjoy these projects where we get a peek into a different world, which may not be all that strange, through little people-less scenes.

On a tangent – NaBloPoMo, anyone? Write a post every day for this month and get… a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Edward Burtynsky

There are new photos on Burtynsky’s site. These are Australian mines. That first photo reminds me of Diebenkorn. The series in general recalls Maisel, of course.

Not long after I wrote about how tired I was of large scale photos, my art history professor, knowing of my interest in Burtynsky, sent me a link to an interview with him in The Morning News about his newly finished project on oil.

Edward Burtynsky

He talked about the project itself:

I started thinking about oil as a theme in ’95 and actually started shooting it in ’97. The thing that occurred to me was that everything I was photographing before was somehow linked. All roads led back to oil as a source of energy that allows this kind of scaled expression to occur: our cities and our roadways and our bridges.

It’s been a difficult project to try and get the photographs. There’s been a reluctance to let photographers into these worlds, but there’s nothing that you couldn’t just go on Google Images, look for oil industries, and see all you want to see, whether it’s oil rigs or oil fields or whatever.

I think that the people working in these places are always fascinated by the process because, generally speaking, nobody goes and photographs these places. So they rarely ever see anybody, you know, paying that kind of attention to the thing that they do. They want to see my Polaroids, they want to talk to me, they want to know what I’m doing and who I’m working for. I’m not working for a magazine, I’m not working for a paper, I’m not working for the company. I’m doing it all on my own initiatives and that’s often very interesting to them.

Edward Burtynsky

He also talks about where he sees himself on that false polarity of art/documentary, which was a particularly interesting read for me:

Editorial expressions of that work through other media and the web are all surrogates, experiences of the work, which also disseminate, but it’s not what I work towards. I work towards the prints in galleries which people can experience for as long as they want, absorbing the image.

I do share some moral things with journalism. I think I tell stories, but they’re not current events. There is no news flash here, nor is it a documentary. I’m not trying to make an exhaustive documentary on every oil country in the world. I’m trying to have these images stand in for a larger kind of thing going on up there. That makes it not journalistic or documentary, but more of an artist trying to bring home a bunch of ideas into existence through the use of photography.

I disagree with him about his work not being documentary. His photographs may not be documentary in the strict sense of the word, but in my mind they certainly have a documentary element that is partly what gives them their impact.

Edward Burtynsky

Then he ended with a few words on emissions reduction and sustainability:

It can only happen with government intervention. I think that through smart policies and through incentivization it can be done without destroying what we built. You still have to be hopeful though. It’s just a question of whether we get there fast enough; things are moving much quicker than expected in terms of climate change.

I’m an advocate for sustainability, because otherwise it’s a pretty cynical view of the world — it’s just, “I want to take care of myself” and “I don’t give a shit about the next generation.” It’s not very nice, especially if you have kids yourself.

We hear this over and over, don’t we? Funny how having kids makes you actually care about the future.

Speaking of which, apparently he is now tackling the subject of water and, to my chagrin, has finished shooting California. I am interested in water in California too – talk about intimidating. But the more I think about this, the more I believe that the more people working on an issue, the better. Practically speaking, it’s not great for the market value of your work, but I think if you care about the issue, more exposure means more public awareness (given that publications don’t tire of it) and that is the whole point. Even if your photos are seen by a very small group of people, I still think it’s significant and worthwhile, a good step forward. The burden, as ever, is on you (me!) to create something stand-out. Good lord, I’m no Burtynsky, but what can I do except try to feel out my corner of the world in my own way. The least I can do is try!

from Articles of Faith

from Chanute AFB

Last week I saw Dave Jordano‘s work at Verve Photo and really loved the Artices of Faith project. It’s rare that I like every photo in a series, but I liked everything I saw in Articles of Faith – personal and public spaces for worship, little messes and striking traces. I usually like a mix of interiors and portraits and landscapes and whatnot in a project like this, but this time the traces say a lot about the people who worship in these places, and I like that it is not about individual characters but about group belief and group action. A book of this work has just come out, and I’m curious to see if these first impressions change at all when I see them pictures in print.

Dave has been working on a project, called Prairieland, which contains a mix of portraits, interiors and exteriors, but I still like the telling little interiors the most. He says:

I do see it as a similar project to the church work, being culturally based and bordering on the idiosyncratic, but on a larger scale and more complex. I’m definitely drawn to subject matter that I am unfamiliar with which drives my curiosity and my need for understanding.

A book is not on the horizon yet, as he is still shooting, but I hope it happens eventually. It’d make a great little book. I’ve had my fill of large scale, highly proportionate industrial scenes for the moment. Anyhow, do check out his work on his site; as you can see from the AFB photos, there’s more to see!

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.]