Archive for February, 2009
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
[Photograph from The New York Times Magazine of Wall in his studio.]
We are currently reading through Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph As Contemporary Art as the primary textbook for my History of Photography III at The College of Santa Fe. Chapter 2 (to be read for our Friday, March 6 class) is called Once Upon A Time and “considers the use of storytelling in contemporary art photography.” Charlotte goes on to say that “Some of the photographs shown here make obvious references to fables, fairy tales, apocryphal events and modern myths that are already part of our collective consciousness.” Some of the photographers that immediately come to mind are Yale professor Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sam Taylor-Wood, Justine Kurland, Anna Gaskell, Gregory Crewdson (another Yale faculty member), and of course Jeff Wall. We are going to focus on Wall’s work in class.
There is one outside reading on Wall and his work that is required for class. It is the The New York Times Magazine review, by Arthur Lubow, of Wall’s 2007 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (and which then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
Tags: Charlotte Cotton, Jeff Wall, New York Times Magazine, The Museum of Modern Art
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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Traditional chemical photography is an extraordinarily flexible field, which, even as it disappears, has hardly been touched.—Richard Benson
The Spring 2009 issue of Aperture (194) arrived today with my review of Richard Benson’s recently published book, The Printed Picture. The book, which stands on its own, also accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, and which, thankfully, is still open for viewing (through July 13, 2009). For ANYONE interested in the history of image-making, reproduction techniques, and the history of photography and photographic practices, this show (and book) is an absolute MUST.
Here’s an excerpt from my review of the book:
Benson, a photographer and master printer, has a methodical mind and approaches his subject systematically; The Printed Picture is thus, at its most basic level, a textbook—though the writing is never pedantic or stuffy. Benson developed the material presented here over the course of thirty years of teaching at Yale University, and reading his words is not unlike the experience of being in a lecture hall. Each chapter presents a class of printing processes (such as “relief printing” or “non-silver processes”), and each derivative process within that chapter is limited to a double-page spread complete with illustration and detail enlargement. Entire processes are distilled to three or four paragraphs at most—digestible, succinct, and engaging.
In the first 100 pages of this 338-page book Benson takes great pains to cover all the known processes, and offers a sturdy and admirably comprehensible outline of the fundamental approaches to reproduction prior to photography. In the book’s first four chapters he discusses relief, intaglio, and planographic printing—the triumvirate of ink-on-paper printing techniques—along with early multiple-impression color processes and such elementary printing methods as stencils, rubbings, silhouettes, and the typewriter. All these early techniques, some of which have been around for centuries (in certain cases millennia), seem to have played an important role on the inexorable passage toward the invention of photography. …
The Printed Picture will speak most clearly to those readers who have spent years in the halls of art schools and love the smell of ink and turpentine, who wax poetic at the sight of fixer-stained trays, or geek out over a mammoth-plate albumen print. By the end of the book, it is clear that materiality and man’s incessant curiosity are the central themes of The Printed Picture. The love of objects and of evidence of the artist’s hand—as un-digital as that may sound—are still both relevant and worthy of celebrating. —Darius Himes.
Enjoy!
Tags: Aperture, Museum of Modern Art, Richard Benson
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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
This Friday, February 20th, I’m giving a public lecture/gallery walk at the Palace of the Governors here in Santa Fe, NM. This gallery walk is in conjunction with a massive exhibition entitled Through the Lens, curated by Mary Anne Redding and Krista Elrick. The exhibition, Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe is part of the city-wide celebration of Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary as well as the centennial of the Museum of New Mexico. The exhibition itself features 175 photographic objects (prints of all sorts, from daguerreotypes to platinum prints, to regular old gelatin-silver prints, along with numerous old cameras and stereographic viewers).
The Palace of the Governors was originally constructed in the early 17th century (approximately 1610) as Spain’s seat of government for what is today the American Southwest, making the Palace one of the oldest working buildings in the United States. (Can you beat that, Boston?!). It’s an honor to be able to speak about the show and even more of an honor to somehow contribute to the living history of the building.
Tags: Krista Elrick, Mary Anne Redding, Palace of the Governors
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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Mary Ellen Mark has selected the winner of this years’ Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The “first book” aspect is in support of photographers for whom this is their first published book of work. Jennette Williams’s black-and-white photographs of women bathers was selected as the fourth title to be published through the Prize, which is awarded biennially. Previous winners include Larry Schwarm’s Prairie Fire work in 2003, Steven B. Smith’s series titled Constructed Landscapes of the American West, in 2005 and Danny Wilcox Frazier’s absolutely stunning photo-essay on rural Iowa.
On the depictive level, the work is straightforward and thoughtfully speaks to the physical realities of aging bodies. But coupled with her unassuming approach is an elegance and quietude that is half location—Eastern European and Turkish baths—and half observer. Avoiding obvious pitfalls—photographing nude women has many pitfalls—Williams offers the viewer a chance to reflect on the presence a physical body has in the world.
PRESS RELEASE:
Jennette Williams, a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been selected to receive the fourth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her stunning platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses.
Celebrated photographer Mary Ellen Mark judged the competition and chose Williams for the prize because of her “original and beautifully rendered” photographs. “Jennette is both an excellent documentary photographer and a superb portraitist — a rare combination.” Mark also commented on the difficult decision she had to make, given the quality of the submissions. “It was a long and challenging process — especially knowing how much passion and work the photographers put into their projects.”
“What makes for beauty in women? How do we as a society perceive women as they age?” Williams writes of the bathers she portrays in these sublime and sensuous photographs. “I began with what were simple intentions. I wanted to photograph without sentiment or objectification women daring enough to stand, without embarrassment or excuse, before my camera and I wanted my photographs to be beautiful. . . . I drew upon classical gestures and poses from Titian, Ingres, and Pre-Raphaelites (to name a few) and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness, as if the older or ‘normal’ woman has always been a subject of the arts.”
Jennette Williams is from New York City, and in 1994 she began making photographs of women attending exercise classes at the “once elegant, now dilapidated, indoor pool” on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she took her children for swimming lessons. Eventually, she expanded the scope of her project “to include new sites and their bathing rites and rituals, to broaden the age range of the subjects, and to photograph the aging body usually (safely) covered from view.”
The Bathers will be published in Fall 2009 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Tags: Center For Documentary Studies, Jennette Williams
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Thursday, February 12th, 2009
I’m teaching a history of contemporary photography course this semester at the College of Santa Fe. Thus far we have read, in its entirety and out loud in class, The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore. It’s one of those books that lays a foundation for a semester (if not a lifetime) of discussion about photographs and how they operate on and within us—and likewise, how we, mentally, operate on them.
This post is primarily for my students (but anyone can follow along).
Readings for our Friday, February 20th class include the following (to be found on the web):
* Two reviews of the Lee Friedlander retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Review 1 is here and review 2 is here.
* The text of the essay to William Eggleston’s Guide, by John Szarkowski. A selection of Eggleston’s images from that body of work can be found here.
* The text of the interview I conducted with Stephen Shore last Spring, which can be found here (on this blog).
Some photographs by Lee Friedlander from that exhibition:
Some photographs by William Eggleston from his MoMA show:
Tags: Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston
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Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Lay Flat 01: Remain in Light
Back in the Spring of 2008, Shane Lavalette contacted me about possibly contributing a short written piece to the inaugural issue of a new magazine he was acting as editor of. I said yes, worked on an essay that I titled Close Readings, sent it to him, and patiently waited. The waiting is almost over as Shane is getting ready to start shipping the first issue!
Below is the beginning of my essay. To continue reading, please be a supporter and purchase a copy!
“This brief meditation is about the pleasures of ‘close readings,’ by which I mean spending a long amount of time with a short piece of text. My intent is to illustrate how this discipline—a personal rigor that can be applied at will—relates intimately to contemporary photographic practice.
“Years ago, before graduate school and when I was living overseas, I discovered a book that has stayed close to my proverbial desk ever since. It is a 1951 first edition of Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms. At first I thought it was just another thesaurus, a worn, hardbound version of the little pulp-fiction-style paperbacks they sell in campus bookstores throughout the country (and which had gotten little use during any part of my formal education). I bought it that day partly for the antiquated feel of the binding and speckled-paint edging of the pages, and also partly because I was living in a foreign country and somehow books in English—any books in English—had taken on more importance.
“Sitting with the book and casually browsing the pages that afternoon, I realized that it was not really a thesaurus nor a dictionary of synonyms, at least not how I understood those words…”
…
Tags: Remain in Light, Shane Lavalette
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Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
Chicago photographer Dave Jordano is someone whose work I have admired for the past several years, ever since seeing his images on the Photographer Showcase over at photo-eye. His first monograph, titled Articles of Faith, is due to be released later this Spring by The Center for American Places, which is now part of Columbia College, in Chicago.The project is about churches and houses of worship on Chicago’s south side. Dave goes further: “This documentary project investigates the concept of how a sense of belonging and place can influence the development of a small segment of a community and helps preserve long-standing traditions of cultural and religious belief.”
I was asked by the publisher to review the work ahead of publication and here were my thoughts, as sent to the publisher:
“The vast diversity of religious expression that is found on our planet stems, ultimately, from the vast diversity of humanity itself. Jordano’s photographs of Christian faithful and the houses of worship on chicago’s south Side are a telescopic view of the richness of spiritual sentiment and devotion that has flourished in one tiny corner of this vast, diverse landscape. The insightful and educative essay by Carla Williams is of particular note, perfectly complementing the tender gaze of Jordano’s images. Out of the specificity that these photographs of such particular places conveys rises a sense of binding unity. Worship of the Divine, no matter where it is found, is touched by the same set of universal human impulses and yearnings. The tension between the particular and universal is wonderfully captured in this book.”
Tags: Columbia College, Dave Jordano
Posted in Book Review, My Published Writing, Photography | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
My friend Sara Distin over at Hey, Hot Shot (a Jen Bekman project) just posted a little interview with yours truly:
From the interview with Sara Distin:
“I had the pleasure of first meeting Darius a couple years ago at the Winter 2007 panel review, held in Jen’s cozy and art-filled apartment. In spite of the casual atmosphere, it was an intimidating room to be in: some of the smartest and most insightful individuals working in the fine art photography world were hunkered down, ready to look at hundreds of Hot Shot entries and determine the fortunes of the top ten (now it’s five, but then it was ten Hot Shots). Darius was one of the first to crack a joke and seemed to be having a good time during what can be a really grueling process.
His enthusiasm for contemporary photography was evident. I’m guessing that kind of energy also spills into his other projects, which most recently include Radius Books. Radius, a non-profit, publishes gorgeous books (I am a delighted owner of Michael Lundgren’s Transfigurations) and as part of their mission, donates at least 300 copies of every title to libraries and schools, because as they put it, “the arts–all arts–are vital to our nation and our culture’s future.” To learn more about Radius and to be notified about new editions, sign up for their mailing list. It’s good to be in the know as limited editions sell quickly, like the signed and slipcased Lee Friedlander: New Mexico, which is almost gone.
Here to stay, thankfully, is Hey, Hot Shot! panelist Darius Himes, former editor of photo-eye Booklist, current independent curator, writer, consultant, and co-founder of Radius Books.
SD: How did you come to be a panelist for Hey, Hot Shot!?
DH: Jen and I met at Review Santa Fe a few years ago. There was a really great group of reviewers and photographers that year, and we’ve all stayed in touch. It was right around then that Jen launched 20×200. I like to think that she and I have similar eccentric tastes in photography and share a similar enthusiasm for the field. She asked me shortly thereafter to be a panelist. (At least that’s my version of how it all happened! Jen’s may be different…)
SD: What’s most interesting/engaging for you in seeing so much work from emerging photographers?”
READ MORE ….
Tags: Hey, Hot Shot!, jen Bekman
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Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney