01 Magazine Interview

Jeff Otto O'Brien approached me a while back in regard to doing an interview about The Exposure Project for the Canadian online project 01 Magazine. I gladly accepted and the feature is now live amidst a plethora of other engaging essays, interviews, reviews and features that comprise Issue 4 (The "Photo Issue".)

Issue 4 includes, but is certainly not limited to: interviews with Peter Sutherland, Tim Barber, Jessica Eaton and Andrew Laumann, essays by Alexander Binder and Sam Falls, a look through Noah Kalina's book collection (which features my good friend and roommate Timothy Briner's handmade Boonville monograph) an exploration of the publishing house Gottlund Verlag, and, just to make sure all the bases are covered, a review of the new Lil Wayne record.

We would like to thank Jeff again for the opportunity, it was a lot of fun!

Behind the Scenes: New Photography 2009

In conjunction with New Photography 2009, MoMA recently uploaded video interviews with Walead Beshty, Leslie Hewitt, Sterling Ruby, Daniel Gordon and Sara VanDerBeek. For those of you unfamiliar with this year's theme, MoMA's website explains:

"New Photography 2009 is a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. Although the six artists in this installation—Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek—represent diverse points of view, working methods, and pictorial modes ranging from abstract to representational, their images all begin in the studio or the darkroom and result from processes involving collection, assembly, and manipulation. Many of the works are made with everyday materials and objects, as well as images from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, and books. Some of the artists also work in other mediums and their pictures relate to disciplines such as drawing, sculpture, and installation. As traditional photographic techniques are being quickly replaced by digital technologies, the artists included here examine the process and structure of making photographs."


Behind the Scenes: New Photography 2009: Walead Beshty


Behind the Scenes: New Photography 2009: Leslie Hewitt


Behind the Scenes: New Photography 2009: Daniel Gordon

We Can't Paint: Interview With John Feinstein

Noel Rodo-Vankeulen posted an interview with Jon Feinstein on the We Can't Paint today. Their exchange largely centers around the ideas behind Feinstein's latest curatorial effort Still Life - an exhibition which is currently on view at the Camera Club of New York. Below is excerpt from their discussion:

"NRV: Do you feel as if we are at a shifting point in the medium where photographers are beginning to see the notions of ‘the genre’ collapsing? It’s almost as if traditional critical ideas and the complications of being a viewer have become intertwined.

JF: I don’t necessarily think that we’re at a point in which the idea of the “genre” is necessarily collapsing, but instead is shifting and morphing more rapidly than it has before. Many of the photographers in the show come from various practices that allow their work to fit into, or borrow from multiple genres at once. Ann Woo, for example, has a background as a fashion and advertising photographer, which in many ways can be seen in how she makes her personal work. While her non-commercial portraits are not necessarily “product shots”, they are often void of emotional exploration, and generally have the same aesthetic quality as her images of sunsets, and still lifes. Similarly, Lyndsy Welgos’ semi nude, often androgynous portraits borrow from fashion/lifestyle and conceptual practices.

NRV: You make an important point here. Over the last ten or so years photographers have taken on more dynamic roles both in their own practice and within the ‘art world’. It’s almost common for many artists to collectively engage in, say, the blogosphere, or as curators, commercial photographers, writers, etc. I suppose what I’m getting at more specifically is if you think these inverted conventions of portraiture could become problematic in their ‘cool’ navigation of the subject? There has always been is a certain sanctity surrounding photographic portraiture as a mediation between the viewer and subject. Are these new investigations different in relation to the negative aspects of Hutchins and Davidson’s work - or does it matter?

JF: I think there have historically been different camps of opinions regarding portraiture, ranging from the social documentary work of August Sander to the emotive, humanistic or meditative approaches of artists like Rineke Dijkstra, Amy Elkins, and Shen Wei, to the Ruff camp (a large anchor for this show) who critique and reject notions of truth in portraiture, as well as the idea of any kind of sanctity between subject and viewer.

I don’t necessarily think that the photographers inverting the conventions of portraiture are “problematic”, nor do I think that they are necessarily doing something that has not been done before. The kind of inversion that you speak about already occurred decades ago, with artists like Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman and many of the other appropriation based artists included in “The Pictures Generation” show that was recently up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I think we’re at a point where we need to do more than simply cry “problematic” when looking at the work of photographers like Hutchins and Davidson, and instead look to their/ their peer’s work and its criticism, as a means of understanding contemporary work.
One of the ideas behind this show was to look at the idea of objectification from a purely literal perspective. Instead of simply saying “this work is problematic” it attempts to literally investigate the idea of intentionally making pictures of people without any intention of exploring an inner dialogue. Both these new photographers, and Hutchinson/Davidson dealing with similar ideas, but these new photographers are privileged with over 60 years of theory and academic discourse."

Andrew Phelps' Not Nigita

The most recent issue of Ahorn Magazine features an interview with Andrew Phelps which centers around his new project Not Nigita. In addition to highlighting a selection of the images, the piece presents an interview with the artist - an excerpt of which can be found below:

Ahorn: In the preface of the book you say that the work is about “not understanding Niigata”. Everything, every photograph, under this light, seems to represent a “No-Where”. You were able to collect stories about Niigata, but what did you see in these photographs about the real Niigata and what is, on the other side, the fictional part of the story you built?

Andrew Phelps: The term “No-Where” is an important one for me when I think of my photographs on a formal level. It is a combination of a certain lighting, film, paper etc that tends to lend a bit of a stage-like quality to the images. I think this is very important for my work to lift the subject/landscape out of its normal context, almost as if all of the images were made in one shooting, in one studio, with one lighting set up. This type of work is anything but objective. It is a very subjective way of working but has disguised itself as “documentary” through its style. There is no smoke or mirrors, but who and what I choose to photograph, and more importantly, who and what I DON’T photograph, or decide to leave outside the frame, is very important. It is a very egoistic way of working. I’m not there to tell the story of Niigata, though that is what is expected of me as a photographer. The title alludes to my skepticism of this assumption that my camera will tell the truth about a place. I found myself trying to make my HIGLEY images in this place that was very foreign to me and I realized I would and could never understand a culture through photographing it, so I made that interesting cultural gap my subject.

Ahorn: There is a feeling that connects the books you’ve made in these last years: Higley, Baghdad Suite, and now Not Niigata. The city is always a place where we have to think intensely about what is happening around us. We have to stop, look at that photographs, and think about what those cities are, what they represent. In Higley we can see the new side, development of the American Southwest. In Baghdad Suite we ‘re trying to believe that one day the phoenix will be born again and rise from the ashes. And what is Niigata? The atmosphere seems quite meditative.

Phelps: It is for sure that my work in Niigata can’t be as complete and rounded as a series like HIGLEY which took years to make in a place that was once my home. NOT NIIGATA would have been worked to death and probably been useless if I had traveled there time and time again as I did in Higley,AZ. NOT NIIGATA is all about the brief encounter as a traveler, passing through, always lost and illiterate. I think the feeling you mention is one of slowing down the pace with which we usually move through such places. When I decide to set up the camera, it is a slow process and there are no snap-shots to speak of. I am the first to admit that my photographs seldom jump out and grab ones attention right away; they seem even a bit boring at first, so thanks for using the word meditative, that sounds nicer! With the camera, I have the excuse to slow down and stare at something mundane, which in the case of Niigata, is often simultaneously something exotic."


From "Not Nigita"
© Andrew Phelps


From "Not Nigita"
© Andrew Phelps


From "Not Nigita"
© Andrew Phelps


From "Not Nigita"
© Andrew Phelps


From "Not Nigita"
© Andrew Phelps

'Pure Beauty' - An Interview With John Baldessari

The new issue of Seesaw Magazine is now online and contains a wonderful interview with John Baldessari conducted by Aaron Schuman. Below is an excerpt from their exchange:


"Profile with Ear and Nose, (Color) "
© John Baldessari

Aaron Schuman: In your early photo-based work, you took your own photographs and applied them to a canvas. Then you had someone else take pictures of you; then you asked others to take photographs for you; and finally you started to use found imagery, such as film-stills, photos from newspapers, and so on. Why did you gradually take yourself out of the pictures, so to speak?

John Baldessari: It was mainly about trying to escape my own good taste, or good taste in general. I think that each time you do some art you get better at it, so I was trying to figure out a way to work against that. Anytime that I could not take a photograph – where I could just give instructions to somebody else to take a photograph – I would do it; if I needed a photograph of a house, I would just tell one of my assistants, ‘Go out and photograph a house.’ Then I would be honor-bound to accept it, because that’s all that I’d asked for. I didn’t say to them what kind of house, or what kind of architecture I wanted – it was just a picture of whatever they thought a house was. I had other ploys too. I’d sit a camera in front of a TV on a tripod, and put an intervalometer on it so that every five minutes it would take a picture, and I would use those photographs. Another thing that I’d do was compose a photograph perfectly using a tripod, and then pick the tripod up, move it a foot, and take the picture. It was all about getting away from good taste.

Aaron Schuman: Why were you intent on avoiding good taste?

John Baldessari: Back then, I said that I was trying to work against my own good taste because I figured that good taste is going to come out anyway, no matter what you do, so there’s no reason to work at it.

Aaron Schuman: Were you trying to get away from the craftsmanship aspect of it all as well?

John Baldesarri: The craft part of it didn’t interest me at all. Getting the perfect gradation of tone, or making a beautiful print, wasn’t an issue. Of course, I had gone through all of that in my own darkroom, so I knew what it was to make a fine print, but it didn’t interest me; I was just interested in the imagery – in the ideas that the photographs represented.

Aaron Schuman: It seems like many artists of your generation incorporated photography into their work in order to rebel against traditional notions of art – in a sense, the medium itself represented the antithesis of ‘high art’ or ‘fine art’, at least in the conventional sense. Today, photography plays a much more central role within fine art practice – do you feel that using photographs, and what that represents, has changed since you began to do it yourself?

John Baldessari: Now all of those battles have been won, so it’s no longer an issue. Within art connoisseurship and curatorial practice, photography used to be ghettoized; paintings were at the front, photographs were at the back – they would be always be separated. And as I said earlier, back then there was a huge gap between the history of photography and the history of painting. And even at MoMA today, you still have a Photography Department and a Painting and Sculpture Department. What I love about MoMA is that, according to the Photography Department what I do is not photography, and according to the Painting Department what I do is not painting. So that just points out the ridiculousness of the situation. When I was teaching in the late 1960s and 70s, I would say to the students, ‘Just use a camera, because I can teach you everything with a camera that I could teach you with paint.’ And actually, one of my first students at the University of California, San Diego was Allen Sekula – he was always taking photographs in class, and it seemed like he could do everything he needed to do with a camera.

Daniel Gordon Interviews Elaine Stocki

Back in June, I posted some of Elaine Stocki's beautiful and disquieting photographs. Although the images themselves are quite revealing, I was left wanting more of a personal explanation from Stocki regarding her process and philosophy. As it turns out, Too Much Chocolate delivered exactly what I was looking for. Daniel Gordon's interview with Stocki addresses both.


"Jeff, 2009"
© Elaine Stocki

Daniel Gordon: I think the first time I saw one of your pictures was on the invitation card for the 2009 Yale MFA thesis show, and I was immediately transfixed by what I saw. If asked, I don’t think I could tell you where these people were or what they were doing but I couldn’t get the image out of my mind! The color and the light are great, but the expressive faces were extraordinary. To me it felt a bit like they were either watching a performance, or they were a part of one–do you ever think of your work in these terms? If not, how DO you imagine the activity that they are doing? Do you have something particular in mind?

Elaine Stocki: Yeah, there is definitely an interest in the performance, or, to use the term very loosely, the ‘happening’. I like what you said about the people in the photograph either being part of a performance or watching one because in that image I think it’s both things… they are performing, but they also seem to be taking sincere pleasure in watching each other perform as well. I was seeking some sort of genuine expression of emotion in what is a contrived situation. I wanted to bring people’s heads together, and I mean that in a literal way. It sounds really simplistic, but the desire is to see something I have not seen before… and a bunch of heads together, men, women, black and white, wasn’t something I had seen in that way. I guess another way of saying this is that the ideas I always get most excited about are always really intuitive and entirely unacademic, because they have the potential to explode into something much more complex in the visual.

DG: I think that your process of improvisation, both in the making of the pictures and in the “happening” of the scene you are shooting gives your audience space to enjoy your pictures in a uniquely visceral, intuitive way. But, I think there are also other levels to your work that you touched on in your last response that deal with issues of race, class, and gender. It feels kind of like your coming at these issues from inside, as opposed to documenting or illustrating it from the outside–do you have any thoughts about how your process reflects your point of view about these topics?

ES: I think that I’m interested in ideas that I have questions about. And the ideas that I had questions about in this body of work were ideas of how to look at race, class and gender in a way that was different from the heaviness of what I had seen before. There is an honesty in wondering about how the world, real and contrived, looks when it is photographed, and I think that that spirit of curiosity comes through in the photographs, so that the work is free of documentation with an answer already in mind. Given that I am a young white woman, and given the history of both performance and the history of the portrayal (photographic and otherwise) of African-Americans in the United States, the fact that I photograph African-American men could be viewed as problematic from the get-go. Good work that deals with class, gender and race is rife with wit and wickedness. I aspire to that. I have no interest in weighty morality or somberness. New images of social culture are not made with that burden on your shoulders.

DG: Where do you find your subjects and what is your relationship like with them?

ES: Initially adverts, either put up at the library, or on craigslist. And because I was always interested in groups, most of the people that I photographed introduced me to other people that they knew. So, in large part the people that I worked with had ties to each other: friends, family, colleagues. My relationship to most was limited to the photo shoot. A few people that I took pictures of over the course of two years I’ve developed relationships with that extend past the photographic.

DG: Formally, your pictures are very interesting to me. They feel wild and fantastical, but at the same time they are firmly rooted in reality. Can you talk a little bit about how you formed this visual style?

ES: I suppose that trying to find new ways of photographing people is directly linked to formal concerns. I was interested in how groups of people could fill a (most often) square frame. A lot of my photographs are not taken straight on eye level, so yeah bodily proportions begin to be skewed.

I’m also excited about how the tools of the medium can be used to exploit content. So using high-speed film on a sunny day really ramps up the color saturation, and perhaps that, in conjunction with what is happening in the photograph, lends itself to a reading that is ‘wild or fantastical’. The platinum prints do something similar with a technique that is ‘handmade’, and the use of a printing style that has been traditionally used for very non-contemporary subject matter. How does that clash with the content when I use it today? I find these questions really exciting…I’m intrigued by how the tools of the medium can be used in a symbiotic or antagonistic relationship with content. There is the potential for a real push/pull when it becomes part of the message.

A Contemporary Reading of Evidence

The new issue of Ahorn Magazine features Daniel Shea's thoughtful and contemporary reading of Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel's seminal work of archival appropriation, Evidence. Below, Shea examines how the significance of Evidence has politically and artistically shifted since its release in 1977:


From "Evidence"
© Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan

"Regarding a more contemporary reading, where paranoia politics are openly discussed, and the distinction between public and private spheres is dissolving, can we look at this body of work in the same way? The access alone Mandel and Sultan received to make this work is confounding to the modern Westerner. You mean they just went in and started searching through archives of apparently classified documents? I wonder if we can rely solely on the fact that this book was produced in 1977 to remove modern political connotations. And to do this, in some way, undermines the respected notion of an artwork’s “timelessness,” where the ideas are relevant enough to allow us to overlook the dated imagery and iconography. In fact, the vernacular informs this work today in a way that it did not in 1977.


From "Evidence"
© Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan

And so Evidence serves two distinct functions as an aging body of work. The first is the conceptual grace in which Mandel and Sultan seemingly produced this work. The practice profoundly influenced every subsequent generation of image-based artists. The process here triumphs, and the ideas are timeless. Secondly, considering the completed, exhibited work set out to be about image-generated narrative, we understand that narrative to be strikingly different, due to various sociological factors. The presented work and the audience’s interpretation of the deadpan simplicity was clearly an important aspect in its conception, and remains to affect the deeper psychological implications of art-viewing today."


From "Evidence"
© Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan

You can read Shea's review in its entirety here. Also make sure you spend some time looking at T.J. Proechel's wonderful series Dream House and reading the Mårten Lange interview.

Christian Boltanski: Au Revoir Les Enfants

I picked up an old issue of Contemporanea Magazine which has a wonderful exchange between Christian Boltanski and Joachim Petersen entitled Au Revoir Les Enfants. I've always found Boltanski to be one of the more insightful artists working today and this interview is certainly no exception.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I transcribed the whole thing.



"Purim Reseve" . 1989 (Photograph of Installation)
© Christian Boltanski


Joachim Petersen: Your latest works deal more with death, particularly with violent death as the result of a crime or an accident. Is this a reaction to a personal experience?

Christian Boltanski: It is not. Death is one of the great themes in art. I myself have been fascinated for a long time by the transition of a person from a subject to an object. Only yesterday, I could have talked to a person, we could have had dinner in a restaurant, and today there is nothing left of him but a lifeless hunk, a dead body. This subject-object relationship is important in daily life as well, for instance on the sexual level. There was one experience in particular that I remember. Every January, there are striptease tents along the boulevards near Pigalle on Montmarte. I went there quite often, and I will never forget the moment when I discovered that one of the strippers kept a Vittel bottle in the little plastic hut next to her, from which she took a sip from time to time. This "sex object" turned out to be a human being after all, a human being who was thirsty.

Joachim Petersen: The first thing one notices, when looking around in your studio, are the many photographs from obituaries and notices of missing persons, and then one discovers big piles of old clothes. What is the intention behind the idea of combining your Monuments with objects from a collection of old clothes?

Christian Boltanski: Garments are like a second skin. Every shirt, every pair of pants has a history of its own by the time it arrives here - in an enormous, anonymous pile - for an exhibition. Particularly interesting is the moment when a visitor first stalks and eventually walks without any hesitation over the garments spread out on the floor. The feeling is the same as walking over dead bodies. The situation is similar with photographs - a hidden pleasure while looking at photos of cruelty is in all of us, but most of the time I don't even show documents of violent acts.

Joachim Petersen: As a German viewer, I constantly have the feeling of standing before Holocaust victims when I view your installations. This particularly the case with your now famous Les Enfants de Dijon or your latest piece in the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Christian Boltanski: That is something I am confronted with time and again. But I don't mean the victims of the Nazis in particular; it is anonymous death in general that concerns me. There is, for instance, a paper in Spain, El Caso, that publishes particularly grim photographs of traffic casualties and murder victims. We don't have such pictures here. But I like these photos; they are lying around here everywhere. I even walk over them, and thereby become a perpetrator myself in a way. Conceivably this intermingles most clearly the role of perpetrator and the role of the victim. In fact, the Nazi henchmen murdered their victims thoroughly and efficiently, although they were loving family fathers or friends of animals. They did their job mechanically, following orders.

Joachim Petersen: Time and again, your Jewish heritage is mentioned in connection with your work.

Christian Boltanski: I grew up in a Catholic family. My father was a Jew; my mother a Catholic. I believe that I am both, although art has displaced religion for me. This means that art represents a moral institution in some respects. The artist holds a mirror in front of his face, and everybody who looks in the mirror recognizes him or herself at a little distance. In this sense, the individual work is only a trigger for associations that exist already in the viewer's mind. The popular cliches are important in this connection, especially in modernism, where the exemplary life of the artist is frequently more important than the work. The myth created around Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys is proof of this phenomenon. In my case, the myth of the Jew is probably part of my "image," of my picture as an artist who creates such works.

Joachim Petersen: Don't you think that you're artistic intentions went too far, regarding your installation Réserve du musée des enfants? Doesn't the viewer become the victim of a shameless game of irritation?

Christian Boltanski: Yes indeed. Having installed the work in the basement of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, I didn't feel quite comfortable, because the ghostly ambiance determined to a major degree the effect of my installation. That was not my intention. But despite that, I believe that this work in particular was particularly significant in my oeuvre. Somehow, one has to make people feel insecure, make them feel that they have been touched, make something happen after all, at a time when all heads are filled with pictures from films, from magazines, and from daily life. I like to exhibit in spaces that are not galleries in the traditional sense, because the unexpected creates an intensified sensitivity. Visitors feel insecure - they whisper or are afraid. The same holds true for my exhibition in candlelight, where the dim light and the shadows create an unfamiliar ambiance. Then there is also the haptic effect of the garments, which one tries to touch. That also has something to do with the effect of a sacral object, perhaps of fetish. Like the Charged Objects of Joseph Beuys, these clothes, too, are charged. Each individual garment has its history, its fate, its tragedy.

Joachim Petersen: You have spoken of artists as a moral force, and of art as a replacement for religion.

Christian Boltanski: These statements must be seen in the context of my biography as an artist. In this respect I was undoubtedly molded by the seventies. I believe in the provocative character of art as instrument for pointing out bad conditions or threats to vision, such as the indiscriminate flooding of the world with pictures. But at the same time, I do not proclaim a philosophy of life or a message of salvation. Instead, I believe that we artists present a life that we don't live. We pretend something that does not exist, some sort of theater.

Thomas Ruff Interview

Over at American History X, I discovered one of the best interviews I've read in quite a while - an exchange between Thomas Ruff and Gil Blank that originally appeared in a 2004 issue of Influence Magazine. Below you can find a few excerpts from the interview, however, I would highly recommend reading it in its entirety. It's well worth it.


Gil Blank: Many of the portraits you’ve made are of people whom you know personally, but whom most viewers would not. You have a relationship to the subjects, but it would seem those relationships are totally neutralized in the photographs, by their uniform structure and plain, premeditated approach. Was the relative anonymity of the subjects a central part of the process? Did the individual relationships, as manifestations of your own individual knowledge of each person, ever enter into the process? Were the relationships totally incidental, or was the fact that you knew each person a specifically complicating fact that you wanted to see if you could address, avoid, or get around in the series?

Thomas Ruff: When I started with the portraits, it was with an awareness that we were living at the end of the twentieth century, in an industrialized Western country. We weren’t living by candlelight in caves anymore. We were in surroundings where everything was brightly illuminated—even our parking garages. Surveillance cameras were everywhere, and you were being watched all the time. When I started making the portraits in 1981, my friends and I were very curious about what might happen in 1984, Orwell’s year. Would his ideas come to fruition?

They already partly had, because in Germany there were the events surrounding the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group founded by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and others. They plotted—and in some cases carried out—the assassinations of politicians and industry leaders, were captured, and then died under suspicious circumstances while in government custody. So the police were very nervous; there were a lot of controls placed on daily life, and we were often required to produce our passports for inspection.

My idea for the portraits was to use a very even light in combination with a large-format camera, so that you could see everything about the sitter’s face. I didn’t want to hide anything. Yet I also didn’t want the people I portrayed to show any emotion. I told them to look into the camera with self-confidence, but likewise, that they should be conscious of the fact that they were being photographed, that they were looking into a camera.

I wanted to do a kind of official portrait of my generation. I wanted the photographs to look like those in passports, but without any other information, such as the subject’s address, religion, profession, or prior convictions. I didn’t want the police/viewer to get any information about us. They shouldn’t be able to know what we felt at that moment, whether we were happy or sad.



TR: I’m a human being with an everyday life, so sometimes I’m happy, and sometimes things upset me. During the everyday, things happen and I react. If it’s a personal matter I respond directly, while other things force me to react with an artistic work. But I don’t stay personal. I’m trying to find a form that’s also interesting for other people to deal with.

GB: Which is perhaps why many of your series deal with archetypes. I've never known you to pursue the exquisite single image so valued in traditional photography, but rather you question the accepted iconic form of what we expect an image to be. That frustration of originality is, I think, most poignant and painful in the portraits.

TR: Everybody has his own history of treating images and their iconic forms, but I think a lot of people just aren’t aware of how they can be manipulated by either the government or the advertising industries if they aren’t being attentive. Family photographs are probably inoffensive, but as soon as photographs are made by a professional, you need to be careful, because there is then a vendor/client relationship, and that begins to involve personal/political/commercial interests.

From Top To Bottom:

Portrait (C. Pilar), 1988

Portrait (Stoya), 1986

Images © Thomas Ruff

Adam Bartos Interview

The new issue of Bomb Magazine has a wonderful interview with Adam Bartos conducted by author A.M. Homes. Below you can find an excerpt from their exchange, but I would highly recommend picking up a copy at your local bookstore so you can read it in its entirety. You can also listen to a brief audio clip from the interview here.

A.M. Homes: It's interesting how, looking at your work - the yard sales, the United Nations, the Russian space program, Los Angeles - they all have a melancholy tinge of things slightly left behind, or the thing looked back on.

Adam Bartos: It's hard for me to explain what that is. I feel some tenderness about these things - and I suppose that I photograph what I like; I think that includes people as well. John Berger said about Boulevard, my book on Los Angeles and Paris, "Althusser once defined solitude as 'nobody anywhere is waiting for you.' All the places in these pictures have turned their backs on us. For them, the photo doesn't exist."

AMH: Things and places.

AB: I want to maintain a disinterested attitude, a consistent distance, which is important because I'm not trying to make a particular or singular statement about what I'm photographing. Even when I photograph people, as in Hither Hills, I see them in relationship to a landscape, maybe in a kind of sculptural relationship to objects as well. But in spite of myself, that feeling of solitude comes through.

AMH: It's a personal vocabulary, the language of your work, the thing that is the you that's in there, that's not named or articluated or even necessarily intentional, but it is the thing that repeats itself, which I find mesmerizing. Architecture comes back again and again in your work, elements of buildings or relationships to a piece of a building.

AB: My father was an architect. So I was aware of the fact that something is made through a process. As a kid I knew that somebody designed the buildings I saw. And I have also always been interested in vernacular architecture, architecture without architects. The character of surfaces as well, and in particular, how age or newness affects how things look in the present. I like to champion objects and spaces that I think are not fully seen on some level, and that speak to me. The UN project and the Kosmos projectsare both worlds that I felt like I could possess in some way. To me, these places felt as if they had been made to be photographed in color and it had not been done. Also, while the UN building and the Russian space program are symbolic space, the references we bring to them have changed over time, as they became relics of discarded aspirations. So in that sense, I'm examining the past, or reorganizing it for myself because I find these places beautiful.

Darkroom (C.R. view)

Image © Adam Bartos

Sam Falls

I discovered Sam Falls' work via I Heart Photograph today. There is no written accompaniment to Falls' images on his website, a choice that ultimately serves the work in the end. Writing can be essential, it can also, however, overdetermine the meaning of the photographs. That being said, I did find an insightful interview that Johanna Reed conducted with Falls for her blog This Is That. The passage below is excerpted from their exchange. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

"TisT: You touch on an uneasiness in photography—the fact that it's so ubiquitous in advertising, in addition to having a kind of pomp surrounding it in the fine art gallery. You mention that you want to make "people feel at home with photography." It struck me that this kind of approach might never be applied to a medium such as painting or sculpture; I'm not entirely sure, but there might be something inherent in the medium itself (perhaps its relationship to "technology"?) that lends itself to this. Can you talk a bit more about how you see photography making people feel outcast, or even, as you say, "alienated from the present moment"?

SF: I think you're right in pointing to photography's technological element as playing a large role in its cold and impersonal relationship to the viewer—the classic pitfall of its mechanical reproduction. With painting and sculpture for instance, along with writing, their is an inherent acknowledgment of the time the author spent producing the final product, which therefore serves as a much more intimate medium of exchange between the viewer and the creator. Photography on the other hand only depicts the surface of time, namely the miniscule, cropped moment available only to the lens of the camera. The time the artist spent in the depicted space framing the scene, and later developing the film and printing, is both figuratively and literally washed away and lost in the final product. So the viewer really only has their own frame of reference relative to the image at hand, without any sign of the artist's emotion or interaction with the object—something readily apparent in painting and sculpture where texture and material manipulation reveal the artist's interaction over time. This is not always negative I think, because the viewer is left alone to their own interpretations, but I think art is really valuable when the viewer gets to know the artist and where they are coming from. This is where a photographer must relate their subjectivity to the viewer through content and composition. This is perhaps why I've really begun leaning toward photographing the people, places, and things that hold lasting personal value to me. I used to think this was something reserved for amateur photography and photo albums, but now perhaps it needs to be reinstated in a fine art context in today’s image-based world where meaningless images are omnipresent. I mean any advertisement created by a nameless photographer of a model casting a blank stare away from the camera just tells the viewer "I don't care," and I think just saying, "This is what I care about, and you have things you care about," is now a very interesting concept to me."











All Images © Sam Falls

Lewis Baltz: Subjects and Objects of the New Technological Culture

I stumbled upon a wonderful interview with Lewis Baltz over at American Suburb X. Entitled Lewis Baltz: Subjects and Objects of the New Technological Culture, the interview largely centers around the shift from analogue to digital production and whether this move has altered photography's relationship with "truthful" imagery. I realize that this is rather worn theoretical territory, however, Baltz is always insightful, thought-provoking and ultimately worth reading. Below is an excerpt from the interview. You can read it in its entirety here.


Interviewer: An analogue photo seems to maintain a strong link with the real thing that it represents, as we have the negative. So we have a material sign of the passage from a reality to its representation in the picture. With digital photos we don't have any material sign but only a line of numbers, zero and one. So do you think this mean we are getting too far from the real things we see and that we want to take in a picture?

Baltz: No. I think it's interesting that the questioning of the photograph in its relation to the reality, the interrogation of representation, the famous crisis of representation, really all took place before digital technology. Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here. It simply offers another dimension. I'm not sure if it's a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality. I don't think it's farther from or, for that matter, closer to this concept of reality than anything that came before. I don't think the question of "materiality" is really what's at issue here. Photography is less material than painting; digital is less material. But the dematerialisation of art again is something that began thirty years ago as a conceptual gesture and long before people realised that it was not only a possibility but would in fact become the dominant technology.

Interviewer: But in some ways digital technologies change the relationship between the real and the virtual, because we have a real virtual world now. We have virtual reality in which we can have another world different from the real one...

Baltz: I think the balance is tipping in favour of the virtual and away from the real. But as I said before, I think that that balance had already started to tip before digital technologies. Their presence now accelerates that. Not only the presence of the technologies but the availability of the technologies. Everyone now can work with some sort of digital procedure. People are on the Internet, people work with digital cameras. Almost everything now has that possibility, maybe even the necessity, of some kind of digital interface or intervention. So in that sense, the sense that it proliferates, that it's everywhere in society, I think that will yet further detach people from whatever 19th century idea they had about reality, the phenomenal world and their relation to it and in it. Whether that change is an improvement or we are entering a dangerous brave new world, it's really impossible to say. In any case, it is the reality, it's the world we are entering, it's the world we're already half into.

Unoccupied Office

Image © Lewis Baltz

Roger Ballen: Recent Photographs & Interview

The new issue of Lens Culture features a wonderful audio interview with photographer Roger Ballen. He discusses some of the psychological and anthropological issues present in his work, particularly as they relate to his extensive work in South Africa. There is also a gallery of recent images which, in keeping with Ballen's work on the whole, are strange, off-putting and quite visceral. Listen to the interview here.









From Top To Bottom:

Skins and Bones, 2007

Skew Mask, 2002

Puppies in Fishtanks, 2000

Sickroom, 2000

All Images © Roger Ballen

Park Life - An Interview With Tod Papageorge

The new issue of Seesaw Magazine has a worthwhile interview with photographer Tod Papageorge. The discourse largely centers around Papageorge's long-term survey of Central Park and the succeeding monograph, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, which was published by Steidl in 2007. Below is an excerpt from the interview. You can read it in its entirety here.



Aaron Schuman: You mention Chaucer, and there certainly is a sense of mystery or danger in many of the photographs. There’s a sort of menacing atmosphere: ‘Do you dare go in the woods?’

Tod Papageorge: Yeah, ‘Sunday in the Park with Papageorge’!

AS: As you explain in the accompanying essay, the book’s sequence and structure are inspired by the Book of Genesis. How did that theme first reveal itself?

TP: Michael Mack said, ‘These little pictures of nature are very good. Maybe you should think about adding a few more.’ So I started to think about how I could do that, and how I would sequence it. For some reason I started with the Creation, but it was totally mad idea. It took a long time for it to make any sense at all, and I’m sure that it makes much more sense to me than anyone else. But it allowed me a certain freedom in organizing the book. There’s a kind of darkness in the beginning, which is undeniable whether you know the analogy or not. For me, one of the great streams in the history of photography is the so-called ‘narrative’ stream, and it was very important to me to reinforce the sense of that. It’s not a good word, ‘narrative’; it’s not the best word, but I don’t know what the best word would be. In any case, it’s very important in terms of the way I read and see photographs. Photography is not a simple illustration, and maybe the most important thing is that it forces an intelligent viewer to think about the relationship of the photograph to so-called ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. If you’re reading a photograph as a tale, then what does that have to do with whatever was out there in the world? It’s this transformed thing. And that’s always been my obsession while teaching at Yale as well, so I’ve had students like Gregory Crewdson and have been an effective teacher, because I was certainly never talking about photography as a deliverer of the ‘truth’. It’s all fiction to me, whether it’s a complex one or an illustrational one.

AS: Was that something you learned from Garry?

TP: I knew it from that first Cartier-Bresson I saw. That’s why it was so powerful to me – because I knew that it was another world; the photograph. It was completely different, and that’s why it was so powerful.

Photograph from 'Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park'

Image © Tod Papageorge

William Eggleston In Conversation With Harmony Korine

Interview Magazine currently has an interesting exchange between William Eggleston & Harmony Korine on their website. Although Korine addresses the same territory as every other interviewer (Eggleston's landmark use of color, his relationship with Szarkowski and MOMA, his interest in the American vernacular landscape, etc.) there are some engaging insights. Below is an excerpt of the interview.

HK: Are there any particular images that you've never been able to get out of your head?

WE: Not that I can think of. I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say "democratically."

HK: You kind of edit as you go. In some ways you work opposite of how a lot of photographers work today.

WE: Exactly. They take too many pictures.

HK: Well, it's playing the odds, right? If you take a thousand photos-

WE: It doesn't mean that one is going to be good. That's the problem.

HK: You can take a thousand photos and they could all be terrible.

WE: Generally, that's what happens-a fundamental rotting of the idea. They woke up with the wrong idea. It's just like music: If you don't have an innate love or calling for it, then no matter how much you study or how well you can play by looking at the score, it doesn't mean that you're going to make really good music.

Image © William Eggleston

Eyal Pinkas' The Landing

Israeli born, Amsterdam based photographer Eyal Pinkas' domestic constructions strike a similar conceptual chord as the photographs of Alejandra Laviada do. In his statement, Pinkas notes:

"My work is constructed of momentary interferences in the appearance of places and things that are parts of my personal surrounding. I stage common objects and casual interiors, to suggest an autonomous behavior enacted by these components.

The adaptations I am making can be best described as studies on the question of how something would appear if it were able to assume the identity it secretly desires. As a guiding line for my work, I try to imagine what the fantasies of the objects are and infuse them with a Don Quixotic flare. They become fully inspired by their imagination and determine their appearance by it."

You can also read a wonderful and insightful interview with Pinkas over at This Is That.









All photographs from the series The Landing

All Images © Eyal Pinkas

Charlotte Cotton Interviews Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

I found (via Horses Think) Charlotte Cotton's wonderful interview with Philip-Lorca DiCorcia discussing his projects Hustlers and Thousand. This exchange coincided with his recent exhibition at LACMA that Cotton curated. You can also watch a video in which DiCorcia discusses the genesis of Thousand.

Also, for anyone in the Boston-area, DiCorcia will be giving a lecture at Mass Art on November 17th at 2 p.m. I will provide further details as the lecture approaches.

Hartford, 1980

Image © Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

A Conversation With Curtis Mann

Jörg over at Conscientious has just posted a wonderful new interview with artist Curtis Mann, previously discussed on this blog here. The discourse largely centers around the digital versus analog conversation. Mann discusses how the possibilities digital technology have heavily influenced his work, however, further articulates why he has persisted with the analog, some might even say antiquated, method of photographic production. Below is an excerpt of the interview.

Jörg Colberg: The lack of Photoshop as a tool only superficially makes your work different from digitally manipulated work, in the sense that in both cases the final image is being created from a source photograph (which most people, especially in the United States, would think of as something "real"), with orthodox restrictions of what a photograph is and means being discarded (in your case bleached away). So one could easily argue that you are engaging in expanding the boundaries of photography in a very similar fashion as people who digitally modify photographs. Is that a description you'd be comfortable with?

Curtis Mann: Definitely. I think my work is heavily influenced by the possibilities of digital manipulations and the many artists working with those tools. Fundamentally, digital has played an immense role in encouraging a healthy skepticism and disbelief in the image to a much larger amount of people than ever before. Once that truth is disrupted people are responsible for their own truths, or how much they want extract from an image. I am very much interested in following in these footsteps.

Formally, as someone who found photography while it was already in a digital era, I have always been enamored with the nearly infinite manipulative possibilities that the computer offers. So many artists are trying so many different things that I am always encouraged to be as curious, and challenging as possible when dissecting the photograph and its conventions.

I think digital has played a major role in actually encouraging a much more contemporary, conceptual and idea based approach at using physical, dare I say, alternative processes. Digital proved that no matter what tool you are using and how cool it looks, if that process is not part of the meaning and understanding of your work then it just becomes another Photoshop filter or an exercise in aesthetics.

Image © Curtis Mann

A Conversation With Larry Sultan

I was digging through the archives of Big, Red & Shiny this evening and was pleasantly surprised to find an interesting interview with Larry Sultan. I have posted an excerpt of it below, however, you can find the whole thing here.



BRS: There seems to be a model, in the art world and especially in academia, of relating photography in terms of language. Though photography can be a non-verbal experience to a certain degree, it seems that language is often imposed on top of it. Then I wonder about the tension between the analytical mind that can critically look at a photograph versus the creative mind that can produce it. Can a photo be made from a point of view of a deconstruction?

LS: You can, and some people have done beautifully at inventing a practice around deconstruction and analytical investigation. It's not really the way I work, but I think the question is a larger one, about how we teach photography and learn photography.

If you're a painting student, the instructor can come in and push your hand, say, "do this" or "try this kind of strategy". It's an immediate intervention. We usually don't go out and physically make pictures together, so we can only help the student once the picture is made through discussion, through language.

It doesn't have to be an analytic process. Literature especially has an interesting relationship photography--to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging. That weird practice between staging and finding is very much like a Ray Carver (story). You think, "he's seen this," but he's taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.

I've always wanted to be a writer. The text to The Valley and the text to Pictures From Home were really important. I've actually thought about stopping photographing for a while and just writing, maybe that would get closer to the bone.

Photograph from the series Pictures From Home

Image © Larry Sultan