Graphic Intersections: Artists Announced!

Hey Everyone! So, after spending the better part of the last week going through all of the submissions we received for Graphic Intersections, we are excited to be able to announce the selected photographers. First, I would just like to genuinely thank everybody that submitted to the project and extended encouragement and support for this venture. We had an incredibly difficult time curating Graphic Intersections due to the overwhelming diversity of great work that we received. We hope that this project continues to gain momentum and that there will be the opportunity to curate an entirely new group of artists to carry out this photographic Exquisite Corpse at some point in the future. For now, however, you'll find the inaugural participants below:

Ben Alper
Anastasia Cazabon
Thomas Damgaard
Scott Eiden
Grant Ernhart
Jon Feinstein
Elizabeth Fleming
Alan George
Hee Jin Kang
Drew Kelly
Mike Marcelle
Chris Mottalini
Ed Panar
Bradley Peters
Cara Phillips
Noel Rodo-Vankeulen
Irina Rozovsky
Brea Souders
Jane Tam
Grant Willing

We are extremely excited about Graphic Intersections and truly can't wait to see what unfolds. In an effort to facilitate a completely uninhibited result, however, we will not be posting the images from the project as we receive them. There will be updates when appropriate regarding the final manifestation of this endeavor. Thanks again to everyone who showed enthusiasm. We couldn't have done it without you.

Upcoming Auctions

Exposure Project members Ben Alper and Anastasia Cazabon will have work for sale in a few upcoming photographic auctions. The In-Sight Photography Project, a Vermont based organization, provides a creative outlet through the visual art of photography for the youth of Windham County, Vermont regardless of their ability to pay.

ARTcetera is a biennial contemporary art auction created and supported by a unique partnership between the visual arts community and AIDS Action Committee. This year, ARTcetera features 246 works of contemporary art donated by artists working in a variety of media.

The In-Sight Photography Projects 10th Annual Silent Auction
Friday, October 3 - Wednesday, October 29
45 Flat Street, Brattleboro, Vermont 05301

ARTcetera
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Boston Center for the Arts/Cyclorama
539 Tremont Street, Boston

Both of these auctions benefit excellent causes, so if you're in the New England area and want to support these organizations, think about investing in some contemporary art.

JH Engström's CDG/JHE

Swedish photographer JH Engström's project CDG/JHE is an exploration of Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. This specific place was highly influential in the artist's youth, providing the first point of contact with the world outside his native Sweden. However, the images also seem to speak to the architecturally and socially imposing nature that airports have taken on in the past few decades. Airports have become synonymous with restriction, security and fear, leaving in the past the historical notion of them being gateways to exoticism and adventure. In his statement, Engström asserts:

"For this photographic project I spent three weeks in this particular zone, isolating my self in an airpirt hotel, and spending the days in and between the terminals.

With fiction, poetry and mystery I observed the airport. Raising questions on its social, urban and architectural dimensions.

The airport becomes a new place to observe identities and the history of relations."

Steidl recently published CDG/JHE, which you can preview and buy here.











All photographs from the series GDG/JHE

All Images © JH Engström

Ed Ruscha's Concerning Various Small Fires: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications (1965)

So, it seems that the all too frequent question (Is Photography Dead?) was presciently addressed by Ed Ruscha long before the digital photography revolution was even a technological possibility. In his text "Concerning Various Small Fires: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications" (1965), the artist explores whether photographic representation can ever overcome technological determinism. This text is particularly interesting in light of all the discourse that has surfaced surrounding the impact that digital media has had on the medium. Historically, photography has, and most certainly continues to wage war against the inherently mechanical and reproducible part of its nature. This conflict, or resistance to change perhaps, seems ultimately fruitless and somewhat arbitrary. To paraphrase Doug Nickel, a photography critic and historian, 'digital' has existed since the 1860's; it is only recently, however, that it has manifested itself with such sophistication. The passage below, in which Ruscha discusses the photographs from 26 Gasoline Stations, clearly outlines the artist's photographic ideology:

"Above all, the photographs I use are not 'arty' in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes. I don't mean cinema photography, but still photography, that is, limited edition, individual, hand-processed photos. Mine are simply reproductions of photos. Thus, it is not a book to house a collection of art photographs-they are technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots...

I have eliminated all text from my books-I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of 'facts'; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades..."

Images & Text © Ed Ruscha

William Christenberry at Mass Art

William Christenberry Photographs, 1961 - 2005 opens this Monday, October 13 at Mass Art's Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery. Comprising much of the artist's career, the retrospective addresses many of the vernacular and cultural issues of the American South. In the press release for the exhibition, it states:

"Since the early 1960s, William Christenberry has plumbed the regional identity of the American South, focusing his attention primarily on Hale County, Alabama. Widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of color photography, Christenberry draws inspiration from Walker Evans, while paralleling the work of international practitioners such as Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ranging from his earliest Brownie photographs to his later work with a large-format camera, William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005, is a survey of the artist's poetic documentation of the Southern vernacular landscape and architecture that surrounded him growing-up. The exhibition, coupling never-before-seen photographs with images that are now iconic, reveals how the history, the very story of place, is at the heart of Christenberry's project. While the focus of his work is the American South, it touches on universal themes relating to family, culture, nature, spirituality, memory, and aging.

Christenberry photographs real things in the real world-ramshackle buildings, weathered commercial signs, lonely back roads, rusted-out cars, whitewashed churches, and decorated graves. Dutifully returning to photograph the same locations annually--the green barn, the palmist building, the Bar-B-Q Inn, among others--he fulfills a personal ritual and documents the physical changes wrought by the passing of a year. Straddling the past and present, Christenberry's art evokes the form and power of the passage of time."

William Christenberry Photographs, 1961 - 2005

October 13-December 6, 2008
Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery
621 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA

Artist Lecture: Monday, October 20, 6:00 p.m.
Reception: Tuesday, October 21, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Christmas Star, near Akron, Alabama. January 1, 2000

Image © William Christenberry

Photographic Typologies: Bill Sullivan

Bill Sullivan's More Turns is an interesting, highly controlled photographic study of people passing through subway turnstiles. Conceptually similar to Walker Evans' methodology for his Subway Portraits series, Sullivan's typological approach democratizes his subjects by capturing all of them in the same action and from the same distance. In the writing that accompanies his work, Sullivan states:

I was tired of the conventions in which most photographs of people are taken. And I was tired of the results that often seem to pass for poetry. I needed something to be objective : I wanted the context to be clearly established . I wanted play a role in the situation, but I wanted the situation to take a photograph of itself for me . I would design the scenarios in which this could happen, and then the situation could be responsible for creating the picture. The poetry would be as much in the design of that scenario as from any photograph that might come from it. These situations would include me but I would disappear as any kind of typical photographer. I would simply play a role in the scenario. I would become someone waiting for an elevator, a man reading the New Yorker waiting for a friend to pass through the turnstile, or simply another tourist watching someone having his or her portrait done. The situations were mapped out, tests were made, and special clothing was worn. I became a spy for the obvious.

I developed a situation so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus. The scenario consisted of someone passing through a subway turnstile. At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet. I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.








All photographs from the series More Turns

All Images © Bill Sullivan

Claes Oldenburg's "I Am for an Art" (1961)

I recently bought Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, an anthology of essays, interviews, ideas and manifestos written by artists working from the 1940's through today. One of the more interesting and illuminating texts I've read so far is Claes Oldenburg's "I Am for an Art", a lyrical celebration of the small wonders of everyday life. Below are a few excerpts from the text:

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself...

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick.
I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.
I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweety's arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.

"I Am for an Art" originally appeared in Environments, Situations, Spaces, and was then reprinted in Store Days: Documents From The Store.

Softlight Switches, 1963-9

Work © Claes Oldenburg