AMP

So, I’ve been somewhat busy getting my show ready at SF Camerawork (so busy I actually forgot to ‘publish’ my last post when I wrote it…), but I’m happy to say that the show is up, the doors are open, and I’m extremely proud of how it looks, how it works, and what it says. That said, I wouldn’t even be CLOSE to being finished on time (and a little ahead of schedule) if it wasn’t for the help of some very hardworking friends and colleagues. Images of the making-of (and the finished exhibition) are below, but first I want to thank the following people for their advice, help, and support:
The Baum Foundation, Chuck Mobley & SF Camerawork, Bill Daniel, Lucas Foglia, Stuart Kogod & Rayko, Stephen Lee, Sean McFarland, Philip Pacheco, Ray Potes & Hamburger Eyes, Victor Prieto, Graham Puleo, Anastasiia Sapon, Laura Skayhan, and anyone else I might have forgot–thank you! I hope to see you all out at the opening–this Friday, May 11th, from 5PM-8PM.

Sorry for the silence on my end–I’ve been busy getting things in order for my upcoming show at SF Camerawork. One of the components of the show is going to be the creation of an ‘abandoned’ darkroom (actually a reworking of this piece) inside the actual gallery. The inside of the gallery will be empty save for large-scale photograms of the darkroom equipment which will line the walls in a continuous floor-to-ceiling 360-degree mural. Some in-progress shots of the photograms are below. Tomorrow we begin building the darkroom!

I like to think that my artwork is the product of divine intervention–beautiful forms originally created by some artistic and omnipotent being are injected directly into my brain, at which point I’m left to do the best job I can at physically manifesting the ideas. Unfortunately, most of the time I’m just trying to copy something I’ve seen and thought was cool. Case in point: ‘Selected Methods of Archiving‘.

The concept for this piece was the result of realizing the enormous number of forms & technologies used to archive images and sounds, and being acutely aware that their obsolesence was ramping up in recent years. The form this piece took, however, was based directly off one of my greatest finds–a box of magic lantern slides.

The science department at my school was throwing these out, most likely because they had no use for them since magic lantern slides had fallen out of use more than 50 years ago. When I discovered this box, I remember being amazed at it’s beautiful and simple craftsmanship. Opening up the box revealed a treasure-trove of glass slides that depicted everything from world’s fairs, to science experiments, to ornithological samples, to reproductions of works of art. The index bore no relation to the actual slides–for example, the box would say that slot #26 contained an example of ‘Sticky Glands’, however when I looked at slide #26, I would see that it was a depiction of the Shroud of Turin. In fact, I couldn’t find any sticky glands anywhere in the box.

I imagine my experience would be similar to a young child coming across a card-catalog, or a microfiche machine in the basement of an old library today. It’s a strange combination of basic comprehension of purpose, lack of instruction, and appreciation of form. Sure, it was slow and inefficient, but damn if they weren’t well-made and beautiful.

Any way, I was so taken by the experience of finding this box, that I knew I had to incorporate into my practice somehow. At about the same time, I was entertaining myself with thoughts of creating a photographic process so inefficient and so impractical that it risked collapsing in on itself at any given moment. Staring at this obsolete, heavy, and musty box of glass and wood, I knew I had a good match–and that’s how content met form.

In the current issue of Art in America (the Photography Issue), they ask a number of historians, curators and artists to say a few words about the medium of photography. In her first sentence, the artist Penelope Umbrico touches upon a critical point that I think is often misunderstood or overlooked about how photographs ‘live’ today:

“Pictures are not still anymore–no longer tied to any particular substrate (or file extension), they’re constantly moving and forever changing.”

While I agree that it’s easier today for a photograph to go from phone to monitor to paper than it was in the past, that doesn’t mean that the photograph has been freed from any specific storage medium or ‘particular substrate’. It just means it’s existing on a lot of different substrates at once, which really, shouldn’t be that surprising seeing as how the photographic process lends itself to making multiple copies. Walter Benjamin hit upon this nearly 80 years ago (think of the Mona Lisa existing as poster, postcard, coffee mug, t-shirt, etc.).

I think the popular misconception is that, with the onset of digital photography and the digital storage of our photographs, they exist in some sort of ether or cloud only to be called up to our monitors or phones when we wish to see them. Unfortunately, photographs are just as tied to a substrate as much as they were the day they were invented. Photographs are information, and even if that information only exists as a memory inside one person’s head, when the brain fails the photograph/memory is gone. So when a photograph is stored on millions of computers world-wide, it does not mean cease to be a physical thing. It’s the series of bits written to the memory of those computers, and if the computers fail, or the electricity goes out, then the photograph is gone. Information will always be tied to particular substrates.

That said, I’m willing to give Umbrico the benefit of the doubt, and focus more on her point about the malleability of the photograph image. The ‘moving and changing’ has significantly ramped up in the past decade, especially now that the number of image changers (people who may or may not know how to use image editing programs, the ease of self-publishing, relaxed attitudes toward appropriation, etc.) has increased exponentially. Joerg Colberg touches on this in his search for a Rineke Dijkstra image. Photographs are transferred and translated like a giant interconnected game of telephone.

Thinking about these issues brings to mind a piece I’ve always wanted to execute, but have never gotten around to organizing it. Here’s the gist: I would deconstruct a photograph down to it’s individual pixels. I would then print out these unique ‘pixels’, each about the size of a business card. Every participant would be given one pixel (one pixel = one person, which would require at the very least ~ 2,000 participants), with instructions to either a.) meet up at a specific place and time with all the other participants in order to reconstruct the image, or b.) photograph their pixel and upload to a site where the image would be reconstructed online. People who didn’t/couldn’t participate would register as ‘dead pixels’. Think of it as 21st century version of Mole & Thomas’ human sculptures or a football fan sign x 1000.

I like projects like this because it makes us confront the physicality of the photograph. By using humans as the particular substrate, it highlights the flaws, errors, and accidents that effect us both. The pixel, whether stored in a human, a piece of paper, or thousands of machines is still an element of our world and susceptible to a whole world of potential influences and mutations.

My previous post on the Hubble Deep Field image made me think about a different image that’s been on my mind recently, also famous for being an ‘old’ image:

Nicéphore Niépce’s ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’, created ~1826, is credited with being the oldest photographic image. But what does that mean when looking at the Hubble Deep Field image, in which we’re seeing galaxies that are billions, with a B, of years old. Should we stop thinking of Niépce’s image as the oldest image and instead point to the Hubble?

For a further mindf•ck, if some alien civilization with advanced optics was able to image the Earth at the level of say, Google maps, and they just happened to witness that spot of France where Niépce was making the first photograph, would we consider their image to be just as old?


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For the past year or so I’ve been obsessed with this image:

It’s essentially the raw Hubble Deep Field image, before color and other effects are added. The image, created in 1995, became exceptionally popular for the simple fact that it depicted (at the time) the most distant and youngest galaxies ever seen–giving us an important look back into the adolescence of the universe.

There are several reasons why this image evokes a quasi-religious experience in me;

1. It’s a result of intense and sustained looking. In layman’s terms, they pointed the telescope at the same spot in the sky for ten consecutive days. That kind of patience and dedication is only found in monasteries these days.
2. It’s a visual time-machine. These galaxies appear to us in the photograph as they appeared billions of years ago. Yes, billions. That means that there is a good chance that some of these galaxies no longer exist, let alone the potential beings and cultures that could have existed within them.
3. The section of sky that was sampled was so small, it would occupy the same space that a tennis ball would if viewed from 100 meters away. And yet, we’re able to see over 3,000 galaxies. If that doesn’t make you feel infitesimally tiny, I don’t know what will.

Having any of these thoughts in your head, let alone all three, can be a bit jarring. So, I’ve found clarity and meditation on these thoughts by carefully spotting out the stars and galaxies depicted in the image, one by one. I like to think that I’m correcting the image in a way, to make it more accurately reflect the current state of ‘now’, i.e. some of these galaxies no longer emit light/are black holes/have exploded, etc. Or, another way of thinking about my actions is that I’m looking into the future as much as the telescope was looking into the past–if I spot all the galaxies out–to a point where nothing exists at all. Just a dim afterglow. Nihilistic? Maybe. But to me it’s one of the most beautiful images ever made and it gives me solace every time I think of it.

Years ago I was assisting a photographer on an editorial shoot somewhere in California. At this point I had assisted this photographer several times and was comfortable in my routines–perhaps too comfortable. In my cockiness in loading/unloading film I had taken the slide out of what I assumed was an empty holder. To my surprise/horror/dread, this holder was loaded–with exposed film. The additional exposure I gave it guaranteed that I wiped-out the latent image. Embarrassed, I swallowed my fuck-up (we had already moved-on to the next location, a re-shoot was out of the question) and postponed telling the boss about it until we were back home, looking at the processed film.

When that time did come, I prepared for the worst. To my surprise/amazement/relief, the boss didn’t seem to care that much–’shit happens’. I almost fell over backwards like in the cartoons. Even though I wanted to put the whole situation behind me, I asked if I could keep the 8×10 negative as a souvenir of sorts. Even then, looking at the contact sheet made from the fogged film, I could tell my error had transformed it into something different, something potentially beautiful.

Looking at the piece now, I’m not only still struck at it’s beauty, but I also think it makes a nice swan-song for the medium of film itself. The color reminds me of twilight–the hue of the sky after the sun has set but before it goes completely dark. When printed large I become lost in the piece, like looking at a frozen moment of Olafur Eliasson’s ‘360° room for all colours’. The process of the piece also reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg’s exchange with Willem de Kooning, in which he erased a de Kooning drawing and exhibited it as his own work.

The element of the human hand (and all the unpredictability that it can bring) is, to me, one of the most interesting and important elements in photography. In a medium that allows so much of the process to be dictated by a machine, the injection of the hand is welcome, refreshing, and necessary for the medium to keep evolving.

I’m working on my upcoming show at SF Camerawork and revisiting some older work that I haven’t thought about for a while–be it repression or forgetting. One picture that came across, and serves as sort of an icon for my Human Error zine series, is this picture of my hand that I took in 2006:

It was the day after I tried climbing a fence in a drunken frenzy, feared I was being chased (I wasn’t). It was one of those dumb moments that is both humbling and hilarious, and in the end, leaves a mark and makes a great story. I can’t think of a better analogy for photography at it’s best. I’m also thinking about pairing it up with this picture:

For those who don’t know, before the ‘Dust & Scratches’ tool in Photoshop was around, dust was eliminated in photograph prints by actually painting dye into the print. For the lazy retouchers, one could buy bottles with popular colors pre-mixed (sky, trees, etc.), with skin tone being a particularly popular one. If I remember correctly, it was a bit too light for really dark skin, but had to be diluted about 1:100 for my own skin color.

YEARS ago, like four or five, I began working on a project I called ‘Human Error’. That project eventually became what is now ‘G.U.T. Feeling’. But, I still like the title, and the concept plays a large enough role in my new work that I’m using it as a title for a series of zines/books that I’m working on in conjunction with my new work. Here’s some images of the first issue–let me know if you’d like a copy.

March into your local bookstore and demand they carry it NOW!

For the past week I’ve been hard at work constructing a book maquette for my ‘Speed of Dark/Plato’s Home Movies/Blue Line of Woods’ work. While it’s a lot of time and work, I’m really enjoying the process and pleasantly surprised with the results. Check out some photos and videos of the first draft:

The basics of the maquette: It is a 9.5″ x 11″ sized accordion-style book, with a die-cut cover page and folded insert/poster. It has 32 spreads which unfold to be nearly 50 feet long.

The images are tritone prints from the blueprint originals. The title is a riff from a Flannery O’Connor line–traditionally blueprints are referred to as ‘bluelines’.

The ‘narrative’ (if you could call it that) of the book is that of a walk through the woods. The density of the trees increases as you approach the book’s center. Once you reach the thickest part, it begins to thin out until you reach the end. Ideally, the book should be viewed unfolded and fully extended. The binding allows one to remove the accordion part so you can lay it out on the ground or pin it up on a wall.