AMP

I’ve been completely obsessed with the Earth’s moon lately. Besides being the only major counterpart to our Sun in the sky (which I’ve pondered for quite some time), I’ve recently been turned on to it’s thrilling history, inspiration, and potential.

This probably all started when my musical companion Ryan and I wrote a song for a concept album about the chaos of peak oil destroying the planet and being forced to colonize the moon, appropriately titled ‘To The Moon‘. It was my first attempt at playing the drums, and nicely mimics the Apollo 13 mission to the moon which was dubbed a ’successful failure’. Still, it’s a fun jam to play–the last time I played it was at a backyard birthday party in which I jumped in the pool upon finishing the song. Forgot to take my phone out of my pocket. Whoops.

Spread from James Nasmyth's 'The Moon Considered As A Planet...'

After replacing my phone I came across a fantastic little reprint of ‘The Moon: Considered As A Planet, A World And A Satellite’. This book was originally published in 1885 and became known for it’s intriguing illustrations of the moon, which are actually photographs of large and highly-detailed models created from many illustrations based on telescopic observation. The results are otherworldly–I would love to see an original copy with the pigment prints if anybody has one. The text is a basic scientific discussion of how the surface of the moon came to be. I’ll be honest and tell you that I haven’t read much of it and usually just look at the pictures.

Michael Collins' book 'Flying to the Moon'

Not too long ago I was given a copy of Michael Collins’ book ‘Flying To The Moon‘, which is an account of Collins’ training as an astronaut and his experience aboard the Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 flights (he’s known for being the unsung third astronaut to accompany Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon). The book is aimed at younger readers, but I still found plenty to love. I specifically love Collins’ account of orbiting the far side of the moon, completely cut off from all communication and ties to the rest of the world:

“I suppose one reason I didn’t feel lonely was that I had been flying airplanes by myself for nearly twenty years. This time, however, I had to admit that it was a bit different, especially on the far side of the moon. There, cut off from all communication, I was truly alone, the only person in the solar system who could not even see the planet of his birth. Far from causing fear, this situation gave me a good feeling–one of confidence and satisfaction. Outside my windows I could see stars, and nothing else. I knew where the moon was, but in total darkness, it’s surface was not visible: it was simply that part of my window which had no stars in it. The feeling was less like flying than like being alone in a boat on the ocean at night. Stars above, pure black below.”

Later in the book Collins describes how a trip to Mars might happen (unlike the moon mission, which only took 8 days, a Mars mission would likely take a 18 months), the creation of an orbiting city ‘Libra’, and the great potential for both disaster and advanced civilization we have. Did you know that only 66 years passed between the first Wright brothers flight and the moon landing? That’s just fucking crazy.

Spread from Gagarin's work published by Location Books

Lastly, I just received my copy of Location Books‘ first publication which features collages and ‘moonprints’ by Isa Newby Gagarin. It’s very well produced, in a small edition of 100, and features some visually interesting juxtapositions of found photographs and astrophotography. While the bits and pieces of text praising the benefits of laboratory-made diamonds are a bit confusing, the overall metaphor that Gagarin creates throughout the book is strong and inspiring. For Gagarin the moon is a photograph that develops and fades with the sun’s light. It’s an interesting project and works well in book form.

More moon thoughts to come…

Here’s my thesis: The sneeze is the closest bodily function we have to the process of photography–or rather, the sneeze is the closest thing we have similar to photographic time in nature. It reflexively slices time up, obscures vision, and for nearly 1/3 of the population, can be triggered by light. I see the act of photography as split-second of momentary blindness–a reactionary interruption that obstructs our seeing. However, while we photograph to preserve, we sneeze to expel, to rid our body of foreign particles, usually dust or other small particulate matter. By expelling the dust, we are preserving our body, our health, and our well-being.

I’ve always found this sequence by Edison to be an interesting documentation of a sneeze:

Even more so interesting knowing that he photographed with a contraption like this:

I made my own interpretation, albeit these are stills from a video camera:

Still, my favorite sneeze photographs are the ones where the sneezer expels a universe of stars into a boogery atmosphere:

If you hadn’t heard by now, SFMOMA is hosting a two day symposium on the current state of photography, and framing the whole thing with the ridiculous question: Is photography over? I understand the desire to provoke, but feel the question is a bit more sensational than it needs to be. Regardless, I’m glad SFMOMA is doing this as it’s helpful for every medium to have a ’state-of-the-union’ type address and see where we (the photographic community) are at, and where we want to be headed. I wish I could attend, as the list of speakers/panelists is quite impressive. Alas, I’ll have to participate through the blog-O-sphere instead–see my talking points below.

*Enough with the digital vs. chemical photography debate. It’s boring. Digital has won. Chemical photography will always be around. If painters bickered about acrylic vs. oil as much as photographers do with their mediums, I would hate painting.

*’Manipulation’, willful or not, has been around with photography since it’s inception. It’s presence in a photograph cannot be accurately measured, nor should be used to define whether or not something is/is not a photograph. Deception lies in the photographer’s intent, not in the clone stamp (people deceive people, not Photoshop).

*One of the more interesting aspects of contemporary photography is that it has been essentially freed from its mortal pulp body. Discussion on how this is going to affect everything from the vintage print market to the family photo album is needed. We are becoming more and more dependent on technology and corporations that are far removed from our understanding, yet we trust them to look after our treasured photographs. If your computer crashed and Flickr went down, how many photographs would you have?

*Micro-stock and the struggling photo-journalist. I cannot think of any other occupation that has been completely altered due to budding hobbyists and changing technology. Perhaps newspaper columnists and bloggers, but still–there is no comparable existing structure where a client, rather than paying a professional to generate original and exclusive content, can simply purchase existing content online that was most likely generated from an amateur or hobbyist. What does this say about how the public consumes photographs, since they don’t seem to mind? How many times can we recycle an image until the public craves something new?

More to follow…

Charlie Ward is doing a series of interviews with various photographers in an effort to discover which photography books have had the most impact on us. You can read my response below (and also on the Little Brown Mushroom blog):

“The first photo book I can remember having a lasting impact on me would have to be my family’s photo album. I imagine my thrill upon its initial discovery was largely narcissistic, but the album played a major role in how I came to understand my identity, my past, and the formation of my earliest memories. The album itself is as thick as a phone book. The front cover is baby-duck yellow and says ‘Family Album’ in an embellished font, complete with photographs of some generic family enjoying an autumn picnic. Its thick adhesive pages were once a creamy white but have since gone yellowish-brown, a prime example of non-archival storage. The album starts right off with my birth and goes until I am about four or five years old. I think I noticed the album when I was around six, and revisited its contents once a week, experiencing what I can only imagine was a twisted sense of false nostalgia. Yes, I was six, reminiscing about the ‘good ‘ol days’. I kept looking through the album until it was memorized and I still don’t understand why I was so obsessed with it. Any way, no book of photography has affected or moved me in a similar way since. If I was to pick a commercially available photo book: Chronologies by Richard Misrach.”

Since I haven’t seen that photo album for some time, I asked my mother to take a picture of it and send it to me.

Turns out my memory isn’t so good after all. My overall impression was correct, but when I tried to remember specifics, I was wrong several times over. A perfect case of photography ‘correcting’ a memory.

New Year's Eve, 2007

Over the holiday break I went back home to my friends and family in Minneapolis. I’m not sure if it was the holiday spirit or what, but man, we went out A LOT. Like every night. The holiday break also coincided with me purchasing my first digital point-and-shoot, which has become pretty important to my photographic process. For years I would just shoot my old Olympus Stylus point-and-shoot on Tri-X or Astia. So suddenly, photography is back into my life–and in a big way. This makes me re-think some of my earlier thoughts on photography and it’s relationship to the way we experience the world. In the past I’ve argued that it can cause quite an interruption, but I’m ready to argue the other side now.

Photography Studio ~ 1890's

Let me explain. I believe that in photography’s early days (mid 1800’s up until the end of the century), the process of photography was the same as the experience. Many people were photographed just for the experience of being photographed. Thus, I would argue that the interruption of experience through photography was minimal–in most cases the interruption was THE experience. (Terrible Contemporary Analogy = Television is our everyday life experience, and commercials are photography. What I’m saying is that upon the invention/discovery of commercials, people wanted to watch to the commercials just to see what they were like–to experience the watching of a commercial. Only after their newness wore off did commercials become an interruption).

Walker Evans, Subway Passengers, 1938

However, as photography became more and more integrated into modern life, it became more and more of an interruptive pause in experience. Hardly can a family have a group outing without the breaks of posing for the snapshot.

However, my experience with a particular cultural subset (call them Generation Y, Hipsters, or anyone born after 1980) leads me to believe that there is a new contemporary experience of photography that does not treat the technology as an interruption, but rather as a supplement to the experience.

Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988

I believe that this cultural and photographic trend can be traced back to a genre of street photography–’shooting from the hip’. Photography is at it’s most disruptive when your vision is physically interrupted by the camera. A foreign object is placed between you and one of your sensory organs. However, when held to the side, or really anywhere other then in front of your eyes, it simply becomes a supplement–not a replacement.

Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1966

At parties and clubs, I now see cameras and phones being punched upward, attempting to capture a scene that the photographer is unable to see with their own eyes. Due to the fast feedback loop of digital cameras, the rising popularity of DIY documentation, and the omnipresence of cameras, this has quickly become a common sight.

Ryan McGinley, Morrissey 3, 2004

This use of the camera also serves as a supplemental documentation to what may otherwise be a foggy recollection. In fact, if one’s brain-memory fails (which happens more than we’d like it to), the camera-memory can actually supplant itself in the brain memory and serve as THE representation of the original experience.

Underwear Party, 2008

I’m still undecided if this is a good or bad trend. I’m not one to propagate the myth of an ‘original experience’, but I’m also hesitant to trust our memories to consumer electronics.

Jack Goldstein – “A Suite of Nine 7-inch Records with sound effects,” 1976

I’ve been bouncing back and forth between the roles of artist and musician for some time now, and the bouncing always leads to doubts about unfocused talent, spreading oneself too thin, and simply not having enough energy to commit to such both activities. For me, these anxieties subside when I realize that there are different goals for each activity, and each practice has a different, yet equal, outcome.

Here’s my for-instance:

As an artist, I often begin working cerebrally. I’ll think about an idea or a concept and brainstorm how I would manifest it materially. I then work with those materials, sometimes drunk, sometimes with loud music playing, always enjoying it, until I feel like I’m getting somewhere. I then try to recreate it, refine it, and perfect it. Because the end result of an art object is often the exhibition of it in a sterile gallery setting, my choices and actions must be determined and focused on the success of communicating my message and/or experience. In short, the success of my own art is often how well I can defend the choices and decisions that go into it’s creation. This results in a big difference between the creation of the work and the reception of the work.

As a musician, I almost always begin working materially. I’ll get together with friends, talk, drink, and play on our respective instruments. We’ll figure out song structures, cobble together lyrics, and rehearse it until we can play it a couple times in a row, and it still sounds like the same song. Then we’ll commit it to tape. Then we play it live, in front of friends, drinking, and enjoying the company. For some reason the space between the creation and reception of the music seems to be smaller.

A few possible reasons for the difference:

* Some people may argue that with the advent of recording technology, the final reception for music is now the recorded product, and not the live performance. I understand that point, but I still stand to disagree.
* Even still, my music recording experience has never been stressful or serious–I’ve often approached it with a ‘good enough’ attitude.
* This could very well be a material issue. For the musician choosing to work with samples and sequencers, programming can be a very repetitive and focused commitment. Very different from a musician who bleeds ‘feeling’.

Other artist/musicians: thoughts?

I kept myself busy over the long winter writing about my muse–photography. As previously noted, the kind Shane Lavelette published my essay ‘The Crisis of Experience’ in the inaugural issue of Lay Flat. If you haven’t got a copy yet, pick one up. There’s no reason not to (seriously, you can pretty much get it anywhere). At a pace slightly slower than the speed of light, Ian Aleksander Adams wrote a piece in the latest issue of Ahorn Magazine responding to some of the ideas in my essay. This is the digital age doing what it does best: Enabling a rapid fire conversation which is not only thought provoking, but also worth revisiting.

I also churned out another essay which can be found in the latest edition of ARP!, which, if you haven’t heard of & you live in the Twin Cities, you really need to check out. Even if you don’t live in Minneapolis/St. Paul you should pay attention to this zine/journal/newspaper. Seriously, they’ve got some of the best writing & arts coverage in the Midwest–both sides of the Mississippi. If you’re a local you can find a print copy at most arts-friendly businesses. If not, they put their archives up on the web. Their current issue is all about appropriation (titled the ‘Cut & Paste’ issue). My essay deals with how the Internet has changed photographic appropriation for better and worse (works discussed include Mandel and Sultan’s ‘Evidence’ and Penelope Umbrico’s ‘Suns from Flickr’, among others). Grab a copy and let me know what you think–or better yet, craft a well-written, essay-length response!

A couple posts recently blew through the internet that got me thinking about the relationship between successful art and it’s need for an explanation or didactic. Over on lenscratch, J. Wesley Brown states “I think if visual work needs to be explained, it is not good visual work”, while Andrew Schroeder writes on his blog, “Personally and professionally speaking, I do not feel for a piece of art to be worthy of my attention that it has to be visually compelling”. I guess I like to think of myself as being somewhere between both camps. I’m aware that I’ll dismiss art more readily if it doesn’t offer a visual hook (whether that be through beauty, repulsion, or sheer curiousity), but I also understand and value the greater understanding and satisfaction derived from knowing a work’s context, history, and intentions. Obviously all this can’t be made available through artwork itself–hence the desire for a didactic. Whether or not that didactic adds to the work, however, is up to the viewers (a particularly bad, and recent example is discussed here).

Speaking of thoughtful statements–I thought Holland Carter’s piece in today’s New York Times was a nice read–too bad he didn’t write it 3 years ago, when a scathing indictment of the incestual art-world’s cash-orgy would have been more useful. Ah well, wisdom in hindsight.

You can now officially order your copy of Lay Flat by clicking here. Looks like it’ll be shipping in March.

It’s the inaugural issue and it looks like it’s gonna be a banger! A portfolio of 20 unbound photographs by 20 different (and great) photographers…I feel that same excitement as when I’d open a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards. I’ve become a big fan of books with unbound photographs in them–Boris Mikhailov’s ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich‘ and Sigmar Polke’s ‘Photographs 1969 – 1974‘ are both good recent examples. In addition to the 20 unbound photographs is a book of essays, interviews, and a poem. To make it even more of a no-brainer, yours truly wrote one of the essays. Seriously–get your ass on Paypal right now and buy these up!

OK, one of the great things about living in New York City is that there really never is a shortage of art shows–photography art shows–to go and experience. Minneapolis is great, but seriously, Weinstein would have to put on a new show every day of the week in order to keep up with the pace here. The selection to choose from is so huge, in fact, that it really helps to plan, dare i say ‘curate’, your gallery hopping experience. My latest researching tool of choice is artcards.cc–it has a great user interface that allows you to arrange and print your gallery itinerary–perfect for you obsessive nerd types.

Anyway, last week I realized that there was a whole spat of potentially interesting minimalist photography shows within 10 blocks from where I work, so I decided to check them out, see if any interesting juxtapositions/realizations came up, and get my brain thinking about the current state of Chelsea photo shows.

First stop: Gagosian Gallery (21st Street) – Hiroshi Sugimoto – 7 Days / 7 Nights

This was my second visit to this show, as I had never seen a Sugimoto exhibition in person before, and the beauty of the presentation kind of warped my experience of it the first time around. Approaching it a second time, equipped with expectations, I still found the photographs to reek of beauty…perhaps a little too much. The concept behind the images is a bit thin–the images are long exposures, each from a separate day of the week, which span the entire course of, you guessed it, the day or the night. The rigid obedience to which Sugimoto follows his ‘rules’ is impressive, but other people have done it, and pushed the envelope a lot further, too (On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh spring to mind first, as they both have work currently on view at MOMA). I’ve realized that, for me at least, the selling point of Sugimoto’s work is it’s beauty–and that’s OK! The concepts behind the images are good supports, but are by no means the main interest of his work. Rather, Sugimoto has proven himself to be a master at rendering the concept of time in a gorgeously visual form.

Second Stop: Andrew Kreps Gallery – To Be Determined (group show)

Another show that seemed worthy of a second visit is the current exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery. Curated around a group of artist/photographers ‘…whose work stretch the limits of photography”, the show exhibits a surprisingly good balance of formal and conceptual investigations with the medium. Personal favorites were Walead Beshty’s experimental darkroom abstractions and Torbørn Rødland’s image of a stack of ‘Practical Photography’ magazines, but surprisingly good pieces from Roe Ethridge and Liz Deschenes were also present. Most artists were represented by only one or two pieces which seemed to be just about right. I probably could have done without as many tube-pieces from Josephine Pryde, but sculpturally they helped hold the space together. Overall an amazingly cohesive group show that provides an exciting survey of artists making work with photography, about photography.

Third Stop: Luhring Augustine – Luisa Lambri (closes today)

I really wanted to like this show, but I just had a gut feeling that I wouldn’t. Subtlety in photography treads an exceptionally thin line between beauty and boredom. Sugimoto, previously discussed, pulls it off with his large luscious prints. Unfortunately, Lambri’s images were so modestly sized (I can’t believe I’m actually complaining that photographer’s images weren’t big enough–I swear, Lambri is the only exception), that I wasn’t able to fully lose myself in the images. Additionally, the images were grouped in clusters that encouraged a game of ‘detect the differences’ from print to print. Her intentions of expressing the fourth dimension apparently take second when it comes to games ripped off from the back pages of ‘Highlights’. To Lambri’s credit, the far-back room of the gallery isn’t that bad, the images from the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea stand to be the most interesting of the entire show. Still, Sugimoto comparisons aside, I feel it could have been much better had the photographs been a little larger, and not grouped in cliché clusters.

Final stop: John Connelly Presents – Jeffrey Tranchell (in the Tunnel Room)

I only visited this show one time, so I don’t feel entirely confident reviewing it, but I found interesting (note I didn’t say ‘good’ or ‘bad’) enough to warrant greater examination. The photographic works in the show are entirely lifted images from magazines with various price stickers affixed to their surface. Honestly as I write this out I can’t see how I would think this work would be anything but utter horseshit, but really, they aren’t that bad. There’s a beautifully simple coin rubbing that almost warrants a trip itself. The video which cycles through a series of images lifted from apartment rental listings is a little half-assed to me, but it still operates nicely in the space. All-in-all, a decent showing of work based on appropriated photography that doesn’t bore. Check it out–let me know what you think.

Ahh, blogging in my underwear on a Saturday night. Move to New York, kids. Be cool, like me.