The Great Leap Sideways

Well worth watching - from the tumblr of Daniel Augschoell,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:00:31 +0100

Well worth watching - from the tumblr of Daniel Augschoell, co-founder of Ahorn magazine: Interview with Robert Adams

The Road These are roads to take when you think of your...

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:00:18 +0100

The Road

These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,

reading the papers with morning inquiry.
Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light
chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights

indicate future or road, your wish pursuing
past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,
well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.

Past your tall central city’s influence,
outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,
are centers removed and strong, fighting for good
reason.

These roads will take you into your own country.
Select the mountains, follow rivers back,
travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where

the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,
iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down
into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.

Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.
Airport. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add
history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee.

The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine
in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,
crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder.

The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow,
rivers and spring. KING COAL HOTEL, Lookout,
and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge.

Now the photographer unpacks camera and case,
surveying the deep country, follows discovery
viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

John Marshall named the rock (steep pines, a drop
he reckoned in 1812, called) Marshall Pillar,
but later, Hawk’s Nest. Here is your road, tying

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.

Photograph © Mark Ruwedel, from Westward the Course of Empire (2008), courtesy of Yossi Milo.

The ground-breaking Waffenruhe, by Michael Schmidt. See his...

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:30 +0100

The ground-breaking Waffenruhe, by Michael Schmidt. See his latest, Lebensmittel, also up at Have A Nice Book.

LH “Jug” Lowell, Buffalo Bills Birthday Party, Lookout Mountain,...

Sun, 19 May 2013 07:00:04 +0100

LH “Jug” Lowell, Buffalo Bills Birthday Party, Lookout Mountain, Colorado by Alec Soth, from the forthcoming Colorado, part of the Little Brown Mushroom Dispatches project.

From “South Philadelphia” by Justin James Reed,...

Sat, 18 May 2013 07:00:09 +0100

From “South Philadelphia” by Justin James Reed, (2005 - 2007).

From Brutal, the recently published third book by Michal Luczak....

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:27 +0100

From Brutal, the recently published third book by Michal Luczak. More to follow.

“The problem is the medium’s literalness, so the photographer is...

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:49:59 +0100

“The problem is the medium’s literalness, so the photographer is not only trying to go beyond subject matter and find subject, she has to take her audience with her. Most people, and this can include people quite sophisticated and well versed in other arts, assume that if the photograph is of a white horse, the photographer is talking about white horses rather than loneliness or loss, or any number of apparently unlikely subjects, as well as the more obvious metaphors like strength or grace. Of course, the ultimate task for any photographer is to talk about the most unlikely things and the white horse, in short, to tell the subject’s tale as well as her own.”

— Gerry Badger, writing in his essay “Far from New York City: The Grapevine Work of Susan Lipper”, in The Pleasures of Good Photographs

Photograph from This Russia, (2008) by Irina Rozovsky.

“The function of portrait painting was to underwrite and...

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:00:10 +0100

“The function of portrait painting was to underwrite and idealise a chosen social role of the sitter. It was not to present him as ‘an individual’ but, rather, as an individual monarch, bishop, landowner, merchant and so on. Each role had its accepted qualities and its acceptable limit of discrepancy. (A monarch or a pope could be far more idiosyncratic than a mere gentleman or courtier.) The role was emphasised by pose, gesture, clothes and background. (…)

The satisfaction of having one’s portrait painted was the satisfaction of being personally recognised and confirmed in one’s position: it had nothing to do with the modern lonely desire to be recognised ‘for what one really is’. (…)

It seems that the demands of a modern vision are incompatible with the singularity of viewpoint which is the prerequisite for a static-painted ‘likeness’. The incompatibility is connected with a more general crisis concerning the meaning of individuality. Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.”

— John Berger, “The Changing View of Man in the Portrait” in Selected Essays.

Images in order: August Sander, Young Farmers, Westerwald, 1914; Alex Dellow, Teddy Boys, Tottenham 1954; Robert Frank, Newburgh, New York, 1955; Alec Soth, Josh Joelton, Tennessee; Bryan Schutmaat, Perry, Cascade, Montana

“Pliny the Elder’s Natural History tells the story (also echoed...

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:06:00 +0100

“Pliny the Elder’s Natural History tells the story (also echoed by Turner) of the Maid of Corinth, who “was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp.” This scene, which has been represented often in Western art, expresses both pictures of desire in a single scene; it has its cake and eats it too. The shadow is not itself a living thing, but its likeness and projection of the young man are both metaphoric and metonymic, icon and index. It is thus a ghostly effigy that is “fixed” (as in a photographic process) by the tracing of the outline and (in Pliny’s further elaboration) eventually realized by the maiden’s father in a sculptural relief, presumably after the death of the departed lover.

So the image is born of desire, is (we might say) a symptom of desire, a phantasmatic, spectral trace of the desire to hold on to the loved one, to keep some trace of his life during his absence. The “want” or lack in the natural image (the shadow) is its impermanence: when the young man leaves — in fact, when he moves a few feet — his shadow will disappear. Drawing, like photography, is seen to originate in the “art of fixing the shadow.” The silhouette drawing, then, expresses the wish to deny death or departure, to hold on to the loved one, to keep him present and permanently “alive.” (…)

God makes man in his own image, according to Milton, out of a desire not to be alone. Man, as image of God, has desires of his own, and asks for a mate to love him in turn. Narcissus finds his own reflected image in the water, and drowns in the act of taking possession of what he mistakenly supposes to be a beautiful young man who is returning his passionate gaze. Pygmalion makes an ivory statue of a beautiful woman, and falls so passionately in love with it that it comes alive and becomes his loving wife, bearing him a son.

It seems, then, that the question of desire is inseparable from the problem of the image, as if the two concepts were caught in a mutually generative circuit, desire generating images and images generating desire.”

— W.J.T. Mitchell “Drawing Desire” in What Do Pictures Want?

Images in order: Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Dibutades Or The Origin of Drawing,1791; Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, The Burial Of Atala, 1808; Henry Peach Robinson, Lady Of Shalott, 1860 (albumen print); Glen Luchford, Prada campaign, Spring 1997; Justine Kurland, Wild Palms, 2006

(re)generation by Ben Alper.

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:22:00 +0100

(re)generation by Ben Alper.

Karin Apollonia Müller, from Angels in Fall.

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:10:35 +0100

Karin Apollonia Müller, from Angels in Fall.

“Modern art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends...

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:35:00 +0100

“Modern art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends to assume historical forms — out of context and reified. Parodic or straight, these quotations plead for the importance, even the traditional status, of the new art. In certain quarters this is seen as a “return to history”; but it is in fact a profoundly ahistorical enterprise, and the result is often “aesthetic pleasure as false consciousness, or vice versa.”

This “return to history” is ahistorical for three reasons: the context of history is disregarded, its continuum is disavowed, and conflictual forms of art and modes of production are falsely resolved in pastiche. Neither the specificity of the past nor the necessity of the present is heeded. Such a disregard makes the return to history also seem to be a liberation from history. And today many artists do feel that, free of history, they are able to use it as they wish.”

— Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1998)

From the tumblr of Bryan Schutmaat: Salva López updated his site...

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:31:58 +0100

From the tumblr of Bryan Schutmaat: Salva López updated his site with a lot of great new work.

Mark Steinmetz, Greater Atlanta.

Sun, 05 May 2013 21:22:25 +0100

Mark Steinmetz, Greater Atlanta.

Mark Steinmetz, from Greater Atlanta. I don’t know that it...

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:49:25 +0100

Mark Steinmetz, from Greater Atlanta. I don’t know that it gets much better than this work…

“Often his subjects are depicted in the complex throes of...

Fri, 03 May 2013 20:10:52 +0100

“Often his subjects are depicted in the complex throes of an effort to make sense of their togetherness, and appear at odds to some degree with the environment that surrounds them – disconnected, albeit momentarily, from the ground on which they stand. This disjuncture is counterpointed by alarming and deeply compelling moments of sincerity and intimacy that serve not only to reassert the insufficiency of a model of victimhood as a means by which to make sense of hardship, but that also evince an unbending faith in the essentially humane basis of hope.

All of this is expressed in a vivid palette of striking contrast, and colour imbued with deep-running fertility. So often in these images colour is the analogue of a pivotal emotional tone, but what is perhaps most compelling about its use is the way in which it so often subverts the conventional expectation of the moment or environment in which it is employed. A certain warmth and gratitude underpin the tears of a middle-aged woman stood on a street corner, her gaze welcoming the touch of a man who whose face we cannot see, but whose finger gently brushes a tear from her face; another young woman with a black eye is crowned by the deep gold shimmer of small lights in the distance, her pallid complexion seeming at odds with the warmth that surrounds her. Life as seen in these images is both vivid and monochromatic – as complex as the contradictory circumstances that each photograph seeks so sympathetically to depict. In the end, the images deliver a truth more felt than known.”

— from the introduction to Something more felt than known: a conversation with Curran Hatleberg.

Together with my intrepid and excellent classmates, Janelle...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:00:06 +0100

Together with my intrepid and excellent classmates, Janelle Proulx and Cynthia Henebry, we will be opening our first year MFA show at Black Iris Gallery here in Richmond, April 26th from 7-10pm next week.

The show will be open every Friday & Saturday from 11-5pm until May 18th, 2013. We hope to see you there.

Untitled photograph by Janelle Proulx.

From "Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles"

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:22:20 +0100

“With the final death throes of traditional editorial photography as a means to earn a living, there was a shift of emphasis in the realms of documentary photography and photojournalism, away from the pages of magazines and newspapers and into museums and galleries and the pages of photobooks. Few knew how digital capture or postproduction would impact independent and artistic photography. And I suspect that no one anticipated the extent to which digital dissemination would increase the number of independent photographers and the potential to self-publish. If anything, the schools of and growing market for contemporary art photography seemed content with digital photography mimicking its analog predecessors’ conventions and not particularly interested in deciphering what might be uniquely digital characteristics, in either its aesthetics or its channels of dissemination.

Watching these developments, I’ve oscillated between feeling we are on the cusp of seeing unimaginably brilliant, liberated, and different iterations of photographic ideas in a wholesale digital world and being worried that we may be marking the cynical end of a once-central visual medium that is now being put out to a niche pasture.

My own drama over this problematic cultural paradigm doesn’t stem from a sense of photographic practice per se becoming redundant in its capability for social and cultural awakening. Far from it. Instead, it comes from a genuine concern that the very mechanisms of the medium’s dissemination—publishing houses, museums, commercial galleries, and art schools—that could be seen as having won the good fight to legitimize photography as a contemporary art form with its own medium-specific history are becoming part of the problem. These structures, with their gamut of agendas, unwittingly risk placing a stranglehold upon the evolution of the medium.

It may be stating the obvious to say that no one person—indeed, no institutional matrix—is powerful enough to hold back the momentum of creative change or its full cluster of mitigating factors. The ecosystem of image making continues to evolve, and does not require the validation of art galleries and museums. What is at stake is how the mainstream instruments of “photography as culture” can deal with the arrival of the first wave of independent photographic practice that does not look like or model itself upon the separatist story of photography that institutions have already told.”

— Charlotte Cotton.

"To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:00:26 +0100

“To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully.”

- Posthumous, a speech delivered by Jeffrey Eugenides at the Whiting Awards ceremony, published in The New Yorker, Dec 24th 2012.

Got a letter from 1989 in the post today.

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:00:26 +0100

Got a letter from 1989 in the post today.