- New work from Charlie White
Girl Posed, 2008 ©Charlie White
Ever since encountering the darkly enigmatic series “In A Matter of Days” (1999), I’ve eagerly been following the work of LA-based photographer Charlie White. In the time between his last series, “Everything is American” (2006), and now, the only trace of new work I’ve discovered was an article in Esopus magazine where White had an artist project titled “American Blondes”. Well, while browsing FA Projects’ website today I stumbled across some of his recent portraits which may be part of his new series.
Teen & Transgender Comparative Studies, #2, 2008 ©Charlie White
If you’re unfamiliar with White’s career, I suggest you check out his website and be sure not to miss White’s video work Pink and Evil.
- 4th Exposure Project Book
If you’ve already submitted to Wassenaar I highly recommend that you also submit work for the 4th issue of The Exposure Project Book. Ben Alper and friends are doing some great things with their collective and this is one of those rare opportunities to published. More details below:
We are asking photographers working in any facet of the medium to send the following:
-5-7 Low Res JPEG’s sized @ 72 dpi
-These images should reflect the vision of an ongoing, or recently completed body of work
-In addition, please send a brief artist statement which corresponds to the work submitted
We are also hoping to publish literary works in addition to the photographs chosen. If you have written an essay, article, review, or conducted an interview that is in some way related to photography we would love to review it. Proposals for unwritten works can also be submitted; simply send Microsoft Word formatted material in an e-mail.
Deadline for submissions is: Monday, January 5th, 2009
All submitted material should be sent to ben@theexposureproject.com. Selected photographers and authors will be notified of acceptance no later than February 1st.
For more details please visit The Exposure Project.
- Submit for Wassenaar 02
It’s that time again! We are currently looking for submissions of photography, writing, and photo books/zines to be featured in Issue 02 of Wassenaar.
Deadline: January 28, 2009
- Non-Photography Friday #7
I thought that since it’s Thanksgiving for all you Americans out there (I’m writing this on Thanksgiving by the way) I would try and do a Non-Photography Friday post related to the idea of food. Here we go…
Back in 2003 while browsing my local video store I came across a film titled “Ravenous” (US, 1999). More from IMDb:
“Captain John Boyd receives a promotion after defeating the enemy command in a battle of the Mexican-American War, but because the general realizes it was an act of cowardice that got him there, he is given a backhanded promotion to Fort Spencer, where he is third in command. The others at the fort are two Indians, George and his sister, Martha, who came with the place, Chaplain Toffler, Reich, the soldier; Cleaves, a drugged-up cook; and Knox, who is frequently drunk. When a Scottish stranger named Colquhoun appears and recovers from frostbite almost instantly after being bathed, he tells a story about his party leader, Ives, eating members of the party to survive. As part of their duty, they must go up to the cave where this occurred to see if any have survived.”
After watching the movie I immediately had to replay it again and again. This is not to say that the film was anything fantastic, in fact the flow of the plot almost ruins the whole thing, but the characters (Robert Carlyle’s performance in particular), concept, and atmosphere completely won me over.
Before I go on check out the trailer to get a sense of what the movie is like:
I’m attracted to this wonderfully dark comedy for a number of reasons, but for today, I want to feature some key tracks from what I think is one of the most unknown, underrated, and original soundtracks ever made. Along with such films as “Blade Runner”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and even the recent droning cascades of “There Will Be Blood”, Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame) and Michael Nyman (minimalist composer) crafted at soundtrack that combined elements of folk, western, electronic, and orchestral music (with a pinch of sound art), to create a score both unconventional and truly fitting.At a time when period films were so often scored authentically, frequently in relation to their represented era’s (strictly folk, strictly orchestral, etc), “Ravenous” was able to reference its underlying concept, a notion that proved highly successful. Moreover, music that would usually be treated in relation a film’s plot structure (dark music for a dark scene) are completely flipped on their head, creating an atmosphere that is both quirky and ominous, a place where humor is allowed to be enjoyed even in the most disturbing context. I found that, although Albarn and Nyman used unconventional mixes of genres and styles, they are able to keep the film in the 1840’s. Truly fantastic stuff!
Below are my favorites from the “Ravenous” soundtrack (note: intro loops are often lengthy):
- Hail Columbia -
- Boyd’s Journey -
- Welcome To Fort Spencer -
- Colquhouns Storys -
- The Cave -
- Run -
- Cannibal Fantasy -
- Manifest Destiny -
- End Titles -
As a bonus here are a few of my favorite clips:
- Sherman catches up!
I’ve often felt that the inherent theatricality that composes a photographic convention like staged photography (particularly that which came into maturity during the 90’s) always feels devoid of substance the older a work gets. This issue, specifically photography that is primarily concerned with a filmic quality (not to be confused with cinema imitating realistic narrative), bleeds heavy the act of observing something constructed. Maybe this is why I’ve haven’t posted about an artist like Cindy Sherman before.
For the most part Sherman’s work has been able to transcend the ‘constructed issue’ not through her concepts, where filmic and mimetic (imitative) positions run wild, but through the way in which her work radicalized photographic looking and the medium as a whole. People who encounter her photographs, similar to those who view Gregory Crewdson’s, tend to accept a high level of artifice, pushing aside the usual standards and conventions of photographic meaning in light of socio-cultural or gender-focused critiques. Do these games still hold up today? Not necessarily.
I think it’s important to note that because staged photography has more in common with painting, not in its treatment of staging, composing, or compositing (which is often cited as the case), but in its ability to be read through its allegorical meaning, it runs the risk of becoming situated within a specific time. Becoming “dated” is the number one fault of constructed photography. However, even with a very limited range of meaning (especially when the artifice consumes the reading) this convention of picture-making succeeds over all other forms of photography in its ability to truly own a metaphorical interpretation. Straight photography, photography concerned with preserving or presenting a sense of actual reality (documentary, photojournalism, street photography, etc), is problematic when it assumes (by explanation or through the artist’s concept) that it can function allegorically, particularly in terms of single images.
So I ask you, what do we think of theatricality in staged photography today? Is it still valid? How have these issues and concerns transformed?
In a recent review titled “Sherman’s March of Time” critic Jerry Saltz addresses Sherman’s newest body of work and the his experience of viewing her photographs throughout her career:
“To me, she was an admirably consistent artist but someone whose work tended toward sensationalism, caricature, gags, and melodrama. Moreover, all the adulatory reviews and academic blather about how she critiques the male gaze are as annoying and blinkered as they are daunting. My theory about Sherman is that she likes to dress up, put on makeup, playact, and take pictures of herself crawling under the skins of stereotypes.”
So often art is labeled as “a product of its time,” specifically for Sherman’s photography, it has clearly resided within a time marked before the now. However, like Saltz, I think her newest photographs transcend some of her longstanding and annoying faults, showing us where theatricality is, and should be conceptually in today’s photography.
“In these large-scale color photographs, Sherman has finally obliterated a psychological and personal fourth wall of photography that has dogged her art, on and off, for years. In many of the new pictures, her best in years, it’s hard to distinguish between her art and our life. Her usual empress-strikes-back attitude is present, but gooniness and shtick have been ratcheted back in all but a couple of pictures. Her new figures show their years, and are more part of the real world, which gives them psychological weight and empathetic power.”
Below is a small selection of Sherman’s recent work:
Untitled, 2008 © Cindy Sherman
Untitled, 2008 © Cindy Sherman
Untitled, 2008 © Cindy Sherman
For details on Sherman’s latest body of work check out Metro Pictures.
- My Kryptonite
Imagine for a moment that you’re a painter. You’ve spent your whole life loving a medium that voices both what you want to express artistically and the only way you know how to express it. Slowly over the years you grow increasingly more sensitive to your materials, so much so that recently you can no longer touch even a drop of paint without getting a horrible reaction. This is my reality, only thing is, I’m a photographer.
It started in my first year of university, I would spend countless hours everyday in the darkroom making black and white prints only to realize that a rash would appear. My skin seemed to become supersensitive and, often by the time I finished for the day, it felt as if my whole body had a bad case of razor burn. When I started making colour prints the same reaction would occur but only this time it was a little less apparent because developing through a machine masked the bulk of my chemical exposure. Through the summer months I would always print digitally and when in my third year I stuck with the process in a digital specific classes. Now in my final year, and due to a renewed interest in black and white photography, I decided to enter the darkroom once again - it was horrible. The rash returned (even with gloves), the razor burn feeling increased and I couldn’t help but face the fact that I could no longer work in a traditional darkroom, let alone with any of the chemical based processes I had come to master.
You see unlike the painter, there is not a specific medium that echoes photography. Formally, and even conceptually speaking, drawing is perhaps the most ancestral process to which an artist whose primary medium is painting can transfer his/her abilities over and still feel (at least somewhat) at home. You could argue that video or film (semantics aside, there is a difference) is as close as one can get to mimicking anything “photographic”. However, photography’s ability to freeze a moment, a reality-based moment, tends to reside within the medium exclusively. Quite simply, for photography you have two options; print with chemicals, or print digitally.
If you have read this far you must be thinking where I’m going with all of this. Well, today I came across Ofer’s post on his recent trip to Paris and I encountered one of the most honest opinions on making contemporary photography. I thought that in light of my much read (and linked) piece “On Advice and Context” I would point you to Alec Soth’s thoughts on printing digitally. From reading far too many emails it seems some of you got the impression that I dislike Soth or think he or Magnum are full of themselves (that was not the point of the post), which is of course ridiculous! I don’t even know Alec or any photographer from Magnum – in fact from what I hear Alec seems to be a very nice and generous person. As I was saying…the video addresses part of what I consider to be the “photo ghetto” of thought, an assumption that if you utilize anything digital you’re not a true photographer (a title I also think is problematic).
I think Alec’s thoughts hit the mark perfectly, excluding his endorsement of HP (I’m partial to Epson printers *wink*), and I hope they will open up more “c-print snobs” to exploring what is inevitably going to be the future of photography. For myself, working digitally (printing digitally that is) has made photography accessible again and, like so many of the various opinions expressed through blogs and the Internet as a whole, it has opened up a traditionally closed medium that so often feels very exclusive.
- Surgery…Again!
I’ll be out of commission for a while due to surgery. If you sent me an email in the last couple of days give a little bit (I’ll try for Saturday) to get back to you. Also be on the lookout for the next call for submissions very soon! Details to come…
