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

Tim Carpenter's A Most Serene Republic

Tim Carpenter e-mailed me today to share some images from his new series A Most Serene Republic, a body of work that explores the personal and collective histories of the American landscape. I'll let Carpenter's statement take it from here:

"I have often wondered in what way forgotten history abides, and what the consequences are of its being forgotten or brought to mind again. I have always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that pass through it. Anonymity is beautiful, and so are names. Universalism is beautiful, and so are particulars.

I didn't write the previous paragraph; Marilynne Robinson did, in her essay "A Great Amnesia." but I couldn’t possibly come up with a better way to express how I feel when I’m making photographs."











All photographs from the series A Most Serene Republic

All Images © Tim Carpenter

Jacob Holdt's American Pictures

I thought I would post some of Danish photographer Jacob Holdt's images from his series American Pictures for anyone who hasn't seen them. Traveling across America in the 1970's with $40 in his pocket, Holdt set out to explore the social inequalities of the United States from a self-proclaimed outsider perspective. Often thought of as controversial, the images from American Pictures unflinchingly expose racial, political and class divides, sometimes its argued, at the expense of his subjects. I've always seen Holdt as a more contemporary Jacob Riis (another socially-minded Danish photographer) whose conviction to show life in all its grittiness and inequality is born out of a form of social humanism. Although his images can come across as highly ideological at times, Holdt's work is a valid compendium to the multitude of projects exploring the soft social morals of American culture. Below is a passage from the Steidl published monograph Jacob Holdt: United States 1970-75:

His photographs, however, could use some protection as well. Jacob Holdt's story looks like a, well, difficult case in contemporary art. To summarize briefly: here's this white, Northern European man, free, independent, equipped with all middle-class privileges. Driven by exhilaration and moralistic excitement, he sets out to shoot a couple of thousand pictures of the life and suffering of black America. This constitutes a problem in so many ways right there, because every white observer of the non-white, no matter how generous, high-spirited, long-haired, will always frame things from the point of view of the powerful. The title of honorary black man doesn't exist, no matter how many have applied. And doesn’t Holdt exoticize the black body here? It could almost be read as a fetish, the views of nudity indications of primitivism, and the photographic act as a re-humiliation of those already humiliated by poverty.

There's something else. The American concept of an "underclass" only developed in the 1980s when American Pictures reached the height of its popularity. For sociologist Herbert Gans, the term served to newly stigmatize poverty. It became a frighteningly effective instrument in the "war against the poor," as Gans puts it, a war American society has now been waging for decades, Gans states. Calling the needy the 'underclass' (instead of simply 'poor people') makes it possible to justify their not being normal, their not belonging with 'us'. How does Holdt prevent his work from being enlisted in this campaign, an undertaking directed not so much against poverty, but against the poor? Don't we observe his subjects as if through a laboratory's windowpanes? Sometimes they are naked, sometimes they are hurt, but 'our' kind of privacy they do not possess.














All photographs from the series American Pictures

All Images © Jacob Holdt

John Mann's Folded In Place

John Mann's project Folded In Place is an exploration of geographic identity through the depiction fragmentary maps. Not without a sense of irony, the images from Folded In Place subvert the traditional modes of landscape photography while still, in essence, exploring topographical space. In his statement, Mann explains:

"Following five years of photographing the landscape and those who travel through it, Folded In Place finds its exploration of place through a visualization of the map as the final destination. These images turn the abstract representation of the map back into a physical landscape, by looking at the map as a geography of its own."











All photographs from the series Folded In Place

All Images © John Mann

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