BY GAIA MUSACCHIO

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

I have always been sort of interested in photography since I was a child. In high school I did some experimenting with my dad’s old SLR camera (East-German Exa 1c) for an art project. After that I used a little digital point-and-shoot camera a lot, but I was not really happy with the results. When I was about 20, I bought a used Canon EOS 300D which really got me deeper into the world of “real photography”. At that time I shot mostly landscape and architecture. About three years ago I started buying many different analog cameras and switched completely from digital to film. Then I shot mostly street photography, which I still love doing when I am visiting large cities. But here in North-Eastern Germany, where I live and spend most of my time, I find that street shooting is very hard to do, because there are not many cities. So my interest shifted towards other types of 20^th century and contemporary fine art photography.

© Lars Heidemann

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

I have always been more of a practical person, so what I have learned over the last three years is mostly self-tought. The internet as a great source for information on photography and its history helped me to learn about both technical and aesthetic aspects of photography. I think not only has my research improved in the matter of amount and deepness, but also the Internet is constantly improving and providing more and more great blogs, websites, documentaries and so on. And of course there are many great photobooks, which I learn a lot from.

© Lars Heidemann

3. Tell us about your educational path. You are attending the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Institute. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography when you started?

I am actually a student of English, History and Education, but I spend half of my time with photography. At the beginning of last year I had the chance to get to know Heiko Krause, who is the teacher for photography at the CDFI of the University of Greifswald. He had a look at my portfolio and liked it, so I was given the opportunity to attend courses and participate in a trinational photography project in Zingst, Germany.

© Lars Heidemann

4. What were the courses that you are passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

What I like about courses and projects in general is that one has to focus on a specific topic and work really efficiently in order to get good results in the end. Often, there is a strict time factor as well, which adds more pressure on the photographers / students. This can be really productive and efficient. What I enjoy the most is looking at other students’ work and having them look at mine. Talking and criticising each other’s work is a very important learning factor and is often very inspiring. This is something that you do not get working all by yourself.

© Lars Heidemann

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

That would be Heiko Krause, whom I mentioned above. He has always some good pieces of advice that improve my technical and artistic skills in many different ways. Besides, his own photographic work is a great inspiration for me.

© Lars Heidemann

6. You are also darkroom assistant at University of Greifswald, tell us about this experience.

I started this job only in October 2013, but so far it has been a great experience. Probably the best part is to see students develop their first roll of film or making their first print. The look in their eyes when “the magic happens” is priceless.

© Lars Heidemann

7. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

In general I look at all kinds of photography from its very early days until today. I try not to make a difference if a photographer is well known or not. But I think there are many great “classic” photogaphers that one cannot get around. One thing that I think is a great step forward towards seeing unknown and upcoming photographers are online photography blogs. They really open up a whole new dimension for people doing research on photography.

© Lars Heidemann

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

I own and use all kinds of analog cameras from little point-and-shoots, 35mm rangefinder and SLR cameras to different medium format cameras (6x4.5, 6x6, 6x9) and Polaroid cameras. Currently, I use a Fujifilm GA 645i and a Canon EOS 3 with different old Zeiss lenses the most. For medium format I use mostly expired ORWO NP20 black-and-white film and with my Canon I shoot Kodak TMax 400.

© Lars Heidemann

9. Tell us about ‘Quadratus’?

This on-going series consists of only square format black-and-white pictures that were all taken with an old Chinese Seagull TLR and expired ORWO film. There is a certain aesthetic and calmness in square format that I really like. Also the work with a TLR camera itself is very calming. This series differs from my other work, because I did not really set a topic for it. It is more of a personal study of the square format.

© Lars Heidemann

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

There are many photographers whose work I admire. One would definitely be William Eggleston, who has an exceptional view on colours, composition and the world. Also Saul Leiter and Alec Soth are two very inspirational photographers.

11. Three books of photography that you recommend?

Alec Soth – “Broken Manual”

Walker Evans – “American Photographs”

Werner Bischof – “Bilder”

Alec Soth // Broken Manual from haveanicebook on Vimeo.

12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

One of the last shows I have seen was an exhibition with photographs by Helmut Newton in Berlin. I had not seen a lot of his work before so this was very nice to see.

© Lars Heidemann

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

I am still working on my “Project: Uckermark” series. This is a long-term project about a region and its people in the northeast of Germany. It is a fairly rural region which many people move away from, because there is no work and no prospect for them. I hope at some point in the future I will be able to make a book of this series.

© Lars Heidemann

'THE PLACE WE LIVE'

11.02.2014 - 18.05.2014 

Robert Adams was born in Orange (New Jersey) in 1937 and grew up first in Wisconsin, then Colorado, where he lived for over three decades before moving to Oregon. Since the mid-1960s, Adams has been considered one of the most important and influential chroniclers of the American West. The exhibition “Robert Adams: The Place We Live“ reflects Adams’ longstanding interest in tragic relationship between man and nature and his quest to find redeeming light and beauty in a deteriorating landscape. His photographs are distinguished not only by their economy and lucidity, but also by their mixture of grief and hope.

© Robert Adams, ‘Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California’, 1978

With more than two hundred and fifty pictures chosen from twenty–one distinct series, this retrospective presents for the very first time the diverse aspects of his epic body of work. Edited and sequenced with input from the photographer himself, the exhibition offers not only an intimate and coherent narrative of the development of the Western United States in the late 20th and early 21st century, but also a challenging view of the complexity and contradictions of our contemporary, global society.

© Robert Adams, ‘Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado’, 1978

In his work, Robert Adams shows how the grand landscapes of the American West, documented in the 19th century by such photographers as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, have been altered by human activity. Adams has attempted to remain apparently neutral in his approach; even the titles of his works convey a documentary feel. Above all, Adams renowned for his nuanced and austere photos of urban development in the state of Colorado at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s: images that came to the public eye for the first time in the groundbreaking book, The New West (1974). In 1975, Adams’ work was included in the influential “New Topographics” exhibition.

© Robert Adams, ‘Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California’, 1983

Each of Roberts Adams’ major projects is present in the exhibition, from his first images of quiet buildings and monuments erected by the early settlers of his native Colorado, to his most recent photos of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to The New West, other major projects featured in the exhibition are: From the Missouri West, a series of distant views of majestic landscapes that evidence the hand of man; Our Lives and Our Children, disarmingly tender portraits of ordinary people going about their everyday business in the shadow of a nuclear power plant; Los Angeles Spring, the portrayal of a former luxuriant garden of Eden that has suffered from violence and pollution; Listening to the River, fragmented, lyrical views of rural and suburban locations in Colorado which evoke the sensory pleasures of walking; and West from the Columbia and Turning Back, two series devoted to documenting what remains of the region’s natural heritage to the Pacific Northwest, where Adams now lives.

© Jeu De Paume

Life Framer is a non-profit driven photography competition designed to source and showcase outstanding photography from amateur, emerging and established photographers. Our aim is to bring exposure to talented photographers from all over the world: your talent, your vision, your life.

Every month there is a call for entries with a new theme exploring Life. In it for you is the chance to win some incredible prizes - cash honorariums, professional feedback, interviews and blog exposure, Viewbook portfolios and your image exhibited at our end of year show at theprintspace gallery (Hasselblad Masters Awards) in London!

The judging panel is composed of 12 globally acclaimed photographers who’ve won numerous awards like Hasselblad Masters, WPO, PDN, American Photo, and IPA. They’ll provide a critique of their favourite images, giving you valuable feedback from a top professional.

This month’s theme is an “open call” with no explicit lead… you are free to investigate everything, and free to capture anything. Do your own thing. Enjoy the liberty and show us Life as you’ve seen it, experienced it, or imagined it.

Submission deadline: 28th of February–
For further details please click HERE 

© Juan San Sebastian from THEME 07 / THE FACE OF THE EARTH

The Life Framer Exhibition is the culmination of the first edition of the Life Framer photography award. The exhibition will showcase stunning contemporary work from 24 winning photographers, each selected by globally acclaimed judges across twelve months of diverse themes encompassing ‘Life’ at its most diverse.

The main exhibition: The main show will take place at theprintspace gallery in London, from April 1st to 22nd 2014, with a private view 18:00 - 22:00 on April 3rd, the opening ‘First Thursday’ of the season.
Pop-up exhibition: There will be an additional show at Juraplatz, Switzerland - An outdoor, road-side art space. This will run April 19th - May 3rd 2014

© Life Framer

Map and Territory 

Triumph Gallery, Moscow
29.01.2014 – 13.02.2014

Information so clearly filtered and yet laying claim to be historical narrative undisguisedly bears witness to the fact that it is merely a slanted version with a lone alternative in the form of a term served behind bars, and so must be accepted unquestioningly. (…) But the object of belief turns out to be other than that in the name of which it has been proclaimed ‘the eyes will see, and the ears will hear,’ and any authority dosing vision and hearing as it sees fit, recognizing only one form of freedom – the freedom not to see and not to hear. (…) For this reason, to preserve the faithfulness of meaning and truth, this meaning must be understood in all the absurdity of its visual form, which in this case means to look and to see without avoiding or hiding away from the obvious, and not concealing it.

–Mikhail Allenov. The obviousness of systemic absurdism through the emblematics of the Moscow metro, or the Absurd as a phenomenon of truth.

“Layout of counter-revolutionary agent networks discovered by the KRO NKVD in Leningrad from October 15 to December 1, 1941. A total of 51 organizations comprising 148 persons in total”. Signed: Senior Investigator, Counter-Intelligence Unit, People’s Commissariat of the Interior, Junior Lieutenant of State Security Kruzhkov, December 15, 1941

If you type the words “Leningrad” and “photography” into an Internet search engine you won’t just find modern tourist shots. One of the first links will take you to an album titled The Unknown Siege. Leningrad, 1941—1945. From the articles and interviews by Vladimir Nikitin and other researchers that it comprises, you will learn that only reporters commissioned to do so by their editorial offices were allowed to take photographs in the city during the Siege. It was forbidden for anyone else to keep a camera at home (or, for that matter, radio receivers, film cameras and maps). Working on the book in the FSB archive (the FSB being the successor organization of the KGB), where the cases are systematized by surname (meaning that only a veritable miracle will lead you to the information you’re in search of), Nikitin, randomly, inquired about his own. In this way he learned of his namesake Alexander Nikitin. Attached to the file was a film roll that had been printed off where the “private individual with a camera” had ended up for illegal photography. In black and white shots of a snowy city in a light haze, shot in a fairly romantic manner, there is something of Alexander Grinberg. But if you look closely, you notice that the people in the shots aren’t just walking down the streets – some of them are dragging corpses across the ice. Attached to the case file was a map, on which, for some reason, Nikitin had marked some of the sites of destruction. He was charged under Article 58, sentenced to 5 years, and died in a camp near Solikamsk. Was he a spy, as the appropriate authorities maintained? Or, as is more likely, was he simply a normal amateur photographer?

Anastasia P. Fink, born 191

Sofia Shevchenko, born 1917

For Max Sher, work on the project Map and Territory began with this story, which he’d been told in person, along with other similar episodes. The core of his interest in the Siege, as a native Petersburger, became “the figure of absence” – a strange poverty of information, particularly visual, about what had happened to the city. In addition, there were too few monuments indicating the “human dimension” to what had happened, the meagre academic consideration of that past, and the weakness of attempts to present the subject in modern art:

“I don’t know how we can term it. A taboo? It doesn’t seem to be a taboo. A city secret? A strange myth that’s kept under wraps. To this day there’s been almost no attempt to comprehend, no words other than ‘a heroic feat of Leningraders.’ This is a colossal story, but there are just a few books about it. And the first of them, The Siege Book by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich, came out only thirty years later. There’s some kind of taboo on thought. And a taboo on any image that differs from the official. The symbolic sphere here is for the most part represented by social journalism. I have an album, Artists in the Besieged City published in 1985 – in that, ‘art’ is simply reduced to propaganda posters, caricatures, newspaper illustrations, neutral landscapes, and that’s it. It’s as if the city is besieged to this day.”

Anti-aircraft visual deception techniques (from Youth Technology, a Soviet magazine, 1935): “A squatting soldier would be hard to distinguish from a tree stump; a group of soliders crouching together would look like a bush or a pile of crushed stone from above; soldiers lying in line one after another would resemble a foothpath when photographed from an airplane.”

At the exhibition, the fate of the amateur photographer Nikitin is symbolized by spoiled photographic film. There are few documents here in the normal sense of the word – carefully preserved pieces of evidence, objects that have been subjected to the conservation at museums. But nevertheless, none of the items are the work of the imagination of the author or part of the fashion for mockumentary. Real events stand behind each of them, although these events are not always recognized easily or without additional research. They are the result of painstaking work with books and museums, and detailed conversations between people and Sher himself.

Two of these objects provoke particularly powerful emotions – empathy, anxiety, fear, sorrow. The first is a little known Siege diary that was kept by Pyotr Gorchakov. This is a “not-made- up” object. Originally drawn up in Braille (Gorchakov was visually impaired), then decoded and kept, according to Sher, in the All-Russian Society for the Blind. The descriptions of daily life are interspersed with heroic wishes to be of use to the Homeland. Sher again has one of the pages composed in Braille. Before us is a white sheet, the dots on it difficult to make out – it’s easier to feel them. Beyond this lies not just a modern, often fairly superficial interest in the world of the blind (we’ve had a series of such exhibitions in Moscow), but deep thought on the subject. For example, on the idea that we can’t present the daily torment of the besieged city through banned photographs, but we can through the diaries of an almost blind man who uses a great deal of visual metaphors. Here we recall other Siege diaries, the authors of which were arrested for keeping them, dying of dystrophy in prison camps or being shot.

The second of these objects is a real map of Leningrad from 1927. There are unclear lines, sketched in pencil, indicating the route to Vera Slutskaya Hospital, and to a school in which, during the war, a hospital was set up, and in which the daughter of the author of the project now studies. You are forced to ask a question: Who walked on these streets before us, the people of today, and when? But Sher doesn’t just lazily leave a question posed. In the video presented at the exhibition, he walks those routes, keeping track of the time and trying to imagine the unimaginable – how many hours would it take him to travel these routes in an exhausted condition, in a besieged city covered in snow. The video allows us at least in part, perhaps only in a tiny part, to imagine those sorrowful, difficult journeys. But the surname of the person who allegedly owned those maps, Lavrova, is invented. Her story, nevertheless, interweaves authentic episodes from the lives of other people, such as the situation concerning the collecting of German postcards.

It is these developed explanations to the spectator of his concept that the author attempts to avoid. In his opinion, the division between the invented and the documentary in his objects shouldn’t be discernible without some effort. The aim, firstly, is to show the “non- readability” of individual imaginative constructions, of our “photographically unconscious” contemporaries. Secondly, it is to sense the irrational feeling of being in a place where everything has been turned topsy-turvy. It is not a matter here simply of the incomprehensibility of the internal world of another; the past itself is impenetrable. Not because all this was “a long time ago,” but because our point of view is subjective. Beyond the incomprehensibility, simultaneously, there stand several considerations. For example, of the world of trauma that cordons itself off in silence. Apposite here are the tales of modern families that reject information discovered by researchers on those who died during the war and those who faced political persecution. And the exclusion of the inability to experience simple human emotions, the numbing, the hardening, the bodily ossification and the confused entanglements of the consciousness are too. But this is also about total disbelief in the totalitarian state, where meanings are continually substituted and where it is unclear what is in doubt: the enemy encirclement and the need for security measures were a reality, but the paranoia of the authorities and their brutality with regard to their own people were a mixture of irrationality and the logic of concealment of one’s own lack of professionalism.

“If there were at least photographs, not to mention films, of signboards, shops, people, we would have an entirely different conception of this period,” Sher believes. The absence of “private” filming or photographing prevents us from imagining, first and foremost, daily life. The artist’s job is not to oppose the “heroic” and the “terrible,” or to take the old Soviet version of “heroic feats” and to add to it with horrifying details that began to emerge in the Perestroika era. The artist’s job, in fact, is to revive this world of everyday feelings.

Different schools of psychoanalysis tell us that visual impressions are intertwined with tactile impressions, and that they arise in the unconscious long before an ability to comprehend the world through words and texts. For this reason, art therapists use images with people with seriously damaged psyche: the artistic space “has resources,” it provides the strength to overcome, and with the aid of images we can draw or photograph that which we can only be spoken of with great difficulty. In Map and Territory, the rhizomes of the individual imagination of the photographer are not only transformed into a generalizing and typifying picture of a split collective consciousness and subconsciousness. The incoherent, ragged structure of the project reflects the impossibility for modern man of the imagining of the unimaginable, the extraordinary pain and tragedy of other generations, but it also in some ways creates a link of solidarity between epochs. It is as if Sher at one and the same time tries to reveal the difficulty of coming into contact with the impenetrable past and to sense a hope for the restoration of the world of feelings, and for its healing. His work with images is an attempt to process “long-term” traumas that is specifically needed by modern man.

Why are authentic texts and documents not enough for the author? Why confuse the spectator? And what is it that the imagination and memory are doing here? For example, the diagram of the “counter-revolutionary agent network” allegedly uncovered by Kruzhkov, an officer of the NKVD (a predecessor organization of the KGB), and the photographs of the members of an “enemy group,” the People’s Eye. Sher did the picture himself, this is not a “document of the era”), and the roles of “pseudo-agents” are taken by his colleagues in the photographic field. But the situation isn’t entirely invented: the author has based the work on published documents that can be seen, for example, in historian Nikita Lomagin’s book (also, in fact, titled The Unknown Siege). Investigator Kruzhkov existed. The networks were “exposed.” And judging by the absurd titles provided in the documents – Spiders, Cautious – some of them were simply invented. But there were spies too, nevertheless. The combination of reality and imagination was born within the NKVD itself. Some of the titles have “migrated” to Sher’s diagram, not entirely invited, but not strictly documentary. And photographing “in character” is not “playing at tragedy”; it shows the extracts from the past that are suspended in our imaginations, and our fears, continually reproducing themselves in a country that has never fully been through a process of grieving and consideration, and that the current ruling politicians have no interest in unpicking this tangle.

The text of the captions does not hint at where, specifically, there has been invention. Or where, to be more precise, one might ascertain that information by looking at the objects in greater detail. Involuntarily, one finds oneself considering the meaning of the splintering of text and image that prevails in Russian culture, its focus on “the literary,” and the “inattentive spectator” (an expression of the art historian Mikhail Allenov quoted above). In the case of Gorchakov’s diary, however, a deeper understanding of and interest in the subject is required, and a single viewing is not enough – by no means every spectator is capable of this, and to require this is unusual.

Will the author of the project Map and Territory be able to make contact with the exhibition’s viewers, to go beyond the confines of his own culture, to break through its atomized nature, through the inability to see and the desire to thoughtlessly enjoy the pomp of directed visual spectacles? Can a bridge be built between thought, text and image, or will the images remain superficial, as is the case with many Russian artists? How successful, how serious and how deep are this visualization of the imagined and the unconscious and attempts to show the process of displacement itself.

Perhaps not very. Working on the project, the author had doubts about the extent to which it should be indicated to the viewer that what was before him was documentary or not. The decision to obscure this division, and to create an exhibition where “everything exists in a certain newly created reality of images, where it is no longer important whether a fact is confirmed by something or someone, or is in fact invented” seems to me in itself to be extremely ethically dubious. It no doubt says something about the impossibility of making a clean break in consideration in one fell swoop, which is to say the impossibility of overcoming the existing artistic tradition. But the fact that the majority of these objects absolutely clearly go beyond the framework of a simple “imaginative game” is undoubted.

An argument about truth and plausibility (which, as we know, is neither true or false, but merely possible) has been waged since ancient times. During the Renaissance era, the conversations now being had about photography focused on literature. The theorists of that period came up with the idea of locating invented works in eras from which no documents had survived. The aim was to show the world as it could have been, constructed in a far superior manner to the then present day, a time in which heroes didn’t rot in chains, and a time in which Good overcame Evil. Everything else was the preserve of history. But as we are told by humanitarian theory developed during the post-Modernist era, any historical narrative, irrespective of the apparatus set up in the narration by the author with regard to “veracity”, turns out to be subjective and, what is more, conditioned by the ideological framework of the specific social medium that it finds itself in. The layers and masses of the past, into the depths of which the historian attempts to shine a torch, vexed by honest work with documents, are ultimately impenetrable. And a map is not the same thing as a territory.

The mining of this extent of the “inventedness” in combination with a breakthrough into modern technologies such as Photoshop has resulted in an alarming phenomenon – the washing away of the borders between the document and the staging. Fabricated memoires of the Holocaust, pseudo-war movies, historical inventions – all this exists in the world in significant quantities. The avant garde appropriation of the objects of others is taken to a mass level, and Baudrillard’s simulacra, taken to the extreme, replace the bastion of the documentary that held out to the last.

But nevertheless, as we can see, it seems that Map and Territory fits into another tradition. That tradition in no way came from those territories that we are in the habit of comparing ourselves with in a meaningless attempt to “catch up and overtake.” In fact, it’s more likely that it comes from the territories that we tend to belittle, perhaps because they suffered in the 20th century no less than our territory did. In Afghanistan and in Iran, in China and in India, many modern authors with varying degrees of delicacy or brutality tell of wars waged to restore a solidarity that has been undermined by ruling politicians, mourning the losses of mass purges.

They are all at the cutting edge of a battle for truth that cannot be reduced to voguish discussions of evidence being equivalent to invention. Because the confusion of reality and imagination is not just an “echo of distant wars” or a sign of the subjectivity of the historian in his work with open sources of information, the chasms and lacunae in knowledge, the incompleteness of ref lection, the deafness of society with regard to moral norms, is a part of a continuing present – an eternally renewing wound and the concrete efforts of politicians. All of these authors run up against complex moral problematics and are forced to continually ask themselves how and where, in the artistic sphere, the border between inclusion and recognition, the border between the revealed absurd, the visualization of the suppressed and “the Stockholm Syndrome” passes. The latter is where the author suddenly senses that he is participating in the “substitution of meanings” undertaken by the totalitarian ideology which has an interest in the archives being blocked off, in the absence of an independent expert, in the denial of a crime, in the direct destruction of documents and evidence, or simply in the creation of a sensation that “it’s all too confusing.”

Every artist achieves his goals in his own way, to a greater or lesser extent. The Lebanese Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige burn negatives of “beautiful Beirut,” printing scorched postcards of pre-war beauties, while The Atlas Group, headed by Walid Raad, creates non-existent military documents. Thirteen Argentinian artists combined photographs and mirrors in the “Identity” project in order to assist in the search for children lost during the “Dirty War.” The Iranian Bahman Jalali stamps his portraits with markings that were used under preceding political regimes at photographic studios, striking through their “revolutionary” red, the symbol of the censor – the depictions recall Soviet “vanished commissars.” All this is done not with the aim of “falsifying history.” On the contrary, it is done to graphically demonstrate that its back has been broken. In this context, Max Sher’s Map and Territory is one of the most fascinating projects to go beyond the framework of our own history and modernity alone. [ Text by Viktoria Musvik ]

© Max Sher

Early Work (1976-1996)

ClampArt, New York
20.02.2014 - 29.03.2014

ClampArt is pleased to announce “Nancy Burson: Composites”—the gallery’s second solo exhibition of the artist’s work.

© First and Second Beauty Composites (Left: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe. Right: Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, Meryl Streep)

Since the inception of her career as an artist, Nancy Burson has been interested in the interaction of art and science. In collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Burson began to produce computer-generated composite portraits in the late 1970s to early 1980s. The work was informed by centuries of social, scientific, and pseudo-scientific study of the human face. However, Burson’s attitude toward science was always laced with irony and a keen awareness of the absurdities embedded in many historic concepts, such as race and gender, which we take for granted today.

© Androgyny (6 Men + 6 Women)

“Composites” explores Burson’s pioneering early work with digital technologies—now ubiquitous in photography. Digitally combining and manipulating images of often well-known individuals, including movie stars and world leaders, Burson examines political issues, gender, race, and standards of beauty. In other photographs, Burson creates playful, but unnerving, simulacra of subjects that could never exist in the real world that the medium has traditionally indexed.

© He With She and She With He

Nancy Burson’s work is shown in museums and galleries worldwide, and has been included in major exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the International Center of Photography, New York City; New Museum, New York City; Venice Biennale, Venice; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. “Seeing and Believing,” Burson’s traveling retrospective which originated at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in New York City in 2002, was nominated for Best Solo Show of the Year in New York City by the International Association of Art Critics.

© Warhead I ((Reagan 55%, Brezhnev 45%, Thatcher less than 1%, Mitterand less than 1%, Deng less than 1%)

Best known for her pioneering work in morphing technology (which now enables law enforcement officials to locate missing children and adults), Burson has recently received media attention for her Human Race Machine, which allows viewers to see themselves as a different race. Currently there are several Human Race Machines touring the campuses of universities across the United States. As a photographer, writer, and inventor, Burson has lectured and taught worldwide, including a visiting professorship at Harvard University and an adjunct position at New York University.

In the last few years she has collaborated with Creative Time and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council completing several important public art projects. These projects have included the billboard “There’s No Gene For Race” and the poster/postcard project “Focus on Peace.” The LMCC’s “Focus on Peace” project distributed 30,000 postcards and 7,000 posters around the site of the World Trade Center to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. Burson’s recent public art project, “Looking up,” was co-sponsored by the LMCC and Deutsche Bank and located within the 60 Wall Street Atrium, as well as the storefront directly outside.

© Nancy Burson | ClampArt

BY NATALYA REZNIK

1. You wrote in your artist statement that your approach to photography is very personal, intuitive and at the same time you try to reflect changes in Russian mentality which take place now (that is already, in my opinion, social-documentary approach). How do you manage to combine the two approaches – intuitive one and social-documentary one? And which one is closer/more important to you?

I think there is no contradiction here. I track changes in Russian mentality mainly through my personal perception. Whether I like it or not, I’m one of those who bear it, since I was born and bred in the Soviet country.

My apologies for the truism, but I can’t explain this without using it. Being an artist, an author means being brave enough to have personal vision or understanding and ready to make it public in your work. Telling the truth about the authorities and telling the truth about yourself are undoubtedly different things, but bravery is needed for both.
It isn’t simple for me. I grew up in a family conservative enough in that respect, which I think was typical for many in our country. I overcome myself, try to be open and honest while talking about personal things. Why personal? First of all, I’m a convenient research subject for myself, always at a hand’s reach. This work is comfortable: I like heart-searching, I’m honest with myself, I’m not afraid of my weaknesses. All said, I consider the subject of research secondary. Today it’s me, tomorrow me again, and then I’ll turn to something else. The approach is what matters more.

It might not be completely right, but something inside me persistently resists the intention to designate and map a certain territory for myself somewhere on the imaginary map of photography. Maybe it’s because specifying the field I work in means temporarily limiting or excluding at least some opportunities for my own development. And I like trying something new, doing things I haven’t done before, exploring the unknown. It is true not just for photography, but for many other sides of my life.

2. Please, let us know how did you start doing photography. Who was your first teacher? What changed in your attitude to photography since then? I know that you studied photography at Andrey Rogozin’s workshop, then in Fotodepartament, did you study it somewhere else? In Moscow there are a lot of photo schools and there are quite good schools among them (for instance, The Alexander Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia).

I started taking photographs when I was studying journalism at the Moscow State Pedagogical University. Those photos were often illustrating my own articles. I did my first thought-out project later, when I quit the reporter job and worked in advertising. I did copyrighting and many other quite interesting works, but from time to time I felt displeased and couldn’t rationally explain why. This feeling vanished only when I took photos. I felt like a discoverer who explored the urban space. That’s when I came up with the Moscow metro project idea.

Moscow Metro is a unique place. Built in the Soviet union, it retained the original identity, although the social environment changed. This contrast agitated me. I was interested in the fact that in Metro the poor and the rich, the young and the old ― many different people involuntarily came together.
I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted, I didn’t know how such things should be done, I was afraid that the police or inadequate passengers would interfere etc. But I was inspired by Bruce Davidson and the underground project he did in the 80’s. It helped me start and manage finishing this work.
I still feel nostalgic about the Metro project, which was my first independent one, and from it I learned many things: how to deal with strangers, be “invisible”, and trust myself in a photographic sense.
I have mostly negative memories of my first teachers. Among them, for example, was a photographer who was very famous in Russia. I studied under his supervision for several months and it left me feeling humiliated and ashamed for doing things wrong. I guess that being suited for teaching isn’t necessarily implied by being professional.

For some time I educated myself, getting inspiration from the works of Magnum Photos photographers, since I was obsessed with reporting photography. I watched, analyzed, redrew the photos I took from books and found on the Internet, then I took my own photos. After that I took some photography workshops at the Photoplay School in Moscow, then I completed a year-long course at the Positive photo school, and at the moment I take lessons at the Photo Department school in St. Petersburg. The Rodchenko school is not for me, since I have a full time job and they have only day-time classes.
I changed my attitude to photography since then. At that time I was interested in life’s manifestations, and now my interest shifted towards abstract and being able to represent it through photography.

3. Which photography workshops or courses were crucial for your photographical development? Which teacher was the most influential?

My best photography teacher was Andrey Rogozin, and I consider his project course the most useful for me (I don’t count the Photo Department courses, since they have completely different approach).
A work on a project starts long before you take a first photo – this simple but essential principle became a foundation for me, though I think I still have many things to learn. My emotions always forced me to start the shooting itself as early as I could. I am very grateful to Andrey for being careful with his students’ personalities. I guess it is a rare approach. In the end, you need to gain knowledge and technical skills by yourself. But the artist inside you needs support. At least I’m wired this way.
Seminars, lectures and workshops of world’s best photographers that take place in Moscow and St. Petersburg are also of great support. When you get feedback from experienced experts, you get inspired and grow with double speed. This is what my experience of participating in workshops held by Magnum Photos documentary photographers Steve McCurry and Christopher Anderson was like. Their precise assessments and spot-on comments immediately let me see my weak sides and gave me ideas as to how to work on them in future.
Throughout these seminars big photographers usually tell openly how they think, search, shoot photos and do selection. While listening you realize they also have doubts (not just you), you get to know about their methods, you find out their professional tricks and try to figure out what makes them so accurate and their works so powerful. And learn that - the power and the accuracy.

4. At the moment you attend a course of Nadya Sheremetova in Fotodepartament . How this experience influenced your art? What new did you open for yourself in photography?

It’s my third year there! Before Nadya’s group I took the “Theory and practice of contemporary photography” course at Igor Lebedev’s group. During that time I took various photography courses, a small circle of people fond of it has formed and I still keep in touch with many of them. Once we went out and discussed our current projects. One girl who studied in Nadya’s group at Fotodepartament showed a series she did at that time. She captured routine life, but the pictures were full of some other meaning, far beyond the photos themselves. It was very inspiring. This is when I heard of Fotodepartment for the first time.

For me the education process should focus on considering theory, culture, and philosophy of photography. This knowledge is like a breath of fresh air, it is essential. In order to genuinely understand contemporary photography one needs to know not just theory, but names, variety of schools that existed in the field and current photography trends. It matters for me, and Fotodepartament courses devote much attention to these subjects as well. Studying isn’t easy. You have to be ready to overcome your current level and grow. It feels like a challenge, which in my case helps. Sometimes the volume of educational texts I have to read is too much and I never manage to comprehend it wholly.

I am used to remote education, since Fotodepartament is in St. Petersburg. I connect to the group with Skype video calls. Sometimes the connection drops, but all in all it’s almost like real participation, when you are there in person. You always get to take part in the discussion, make comments. The students are to do various creative activities. Everyone works on their own project, prepares reports on theory and writes texts, you are also free to collaborate. It’s a real comprehensive preparing for your further free float.

I remember vividly how I attended an educational photography conference held by Fotodepartament within the last year’s course. The conference was aimed at discussing the current state of photography over the world and ways it has to develop in. Fotodepartament’s students prepared their reports. The subject I chose was “Photography and cinema”, and in part it was later developed in my project called “Espace Qeulconque”. While I prepared for it and did the reading, a very special field of knowledge opened to me ― I saw the nuances of inter-influences and joint opportunities between photography and cinema as today’s media. I have been studying this subject since that time and probably some future project might come out of it, or maybe even something different.

Throughout over two years my interest to photography grew and the focus shifted. I am now drawn towards projects based on documentary work, which go beyond the frames of certain events or phenomena and study the interconnections between photography and other media in a similar respect.
I also see my future growth lying in the field of modern methods of editing photos, working with exposure, the appropriation technique and other exciting methods which I haven’t got to try yet. I reflect often on what photography is and what it means for me. I feel the curiosity, the yearning to search, to find out. Photography is the tool in my disposal. The fact that the truth can’t be fully comprehended (there is no single answer to any question), the uncertainty of reality, the ambiguity of things rouse my interest even more.

Photography is also my means of active interaction with world. I need to sift through myself the things that happen and give them back in the form of images, stories and abstraction. It is important that a full cycle goes on, including the feedback, the reaction to my works. I might be driven by vanity but I’d rather think that this in not the single and not the key motive. The feedback, the interest of people to what I do as a photographer augments my feeling of being alive. It is some kind of an approval that I live, that I exist. This is important.
I liked paintings even when I was a child, but I wouldn’t become an artist, the brush is just not my kind of tool. Camera is a different deal. It may be an illusion, but I feel like it protects me, gives me freedom and at the same time more control over my own life. I have this persistent feeling that photography makes time longer. It seems like minutes, hours and days flow slower. I like it. I found out that I appreciate such characteristic of photography as stillness. It creates space for reflecting, and I like stopping and thinking. It is also important that photography is memory, its way to be material. It enables saving an exposure of the past and it can be attributed to someone from the past.

5. How do you manage to combine full-time job and studies of photography? You work as a marketing analyst in the company. I guess, after the whole working day it is hard to find time and energy for a creative work…

I guess what helps is that I don’t have a mere office job. I develop concepts and arrange production of new perfume products. There is routine work, like everywhere, but there is something common with art in this. The perfumes themselves, for example. Or the concepts, though their aim is commercial, that is completely different. I’ve been asking myself some questions lately ― what is the most valuable thing in my life, what do I spend the most time on (apart from family and sleep)? I can say that the most important activity for me is photography, and the thing I spend more time on is photography; the ratio is approximately 25/75. My objective is to change that. It isn’t simple, because there is also the money issue. But I think that it is sensible to spend the largest portion of your life on the most important.

6. Please, tell us about your project “Distant and Close”. Was it done during a course in Fotodepartament?

Yes, within the “Theory and practice of contemporary photography” course, supervised by Igor Lebedev. It deals with the phenomenon of human intimacy, the nature of which is ambiguous and contradictive. When it started I had a different, more nostalgic idea about the house I lived in since I was a child and my memories. Igor suggested turning the project towards relationships, “taking tn to another level”, as he put it. I agreed, because I felt it was a challenge. It was hard to decide to show the family relations the way I really see them. Is it correct “tо wash one’s dirty linen in public.”?
We started. Mom was nervous. She wasn’t used to be taken photos of. She didn’t like me intervening in her private space. We spent hours talking about those things. We discussed the relationship we have, the project and photography in general. It was the first time mom encountered it so close. I eventually managed to convince her to give me freedom in the shooting process, and then it went smoothly. Overall, I worked more on the touch, constantly untangling the snarl of emotions and thoughts that I came up with during the project, inventing things, thinking them over, redoing many parts, trying to follow the course, discussing the ideas and pictures with Igor and the group. This method might not be perfect, but I work like this now, with labor and persistence.

7. Which contemporary artists/photographers are close to you, in your opinion?

My current favorite is American photo artist Roni Horn. I like all her works, every piece she created, but most of all I like two books from a series about Iceland named “To Place”. The first is called “Arctic Circles” and embodies the concept of life’s cyclical nature. Roni Horn took photos of an elderly family couple who live in a remote area of Iceland by the ocean shore. She took hotos of their house, their daily routine, of themselves, and the pictures form some kind of a circle, a cycle. Not far from their homes the imaginary line of polar circle lies. I am fascinated by the fact that this work embodies the idea of arctic circle as an abstract geometry in the ocean, embodies it in a visual way with certain people and things. I like thinking about that. The second book, called “You are the weather”, shows how human face becomes a place, a landscape. It includes a hundred variants of pictures of a girl’s face, taken in various thermal springs around Iceland that differ from each other in barely recognizable nuances that the surrounding landscape conveys to it. These pieces are famous and they were created quite a long time ago, but if I like some work it isn’t that important for me how contemporary it is.

8. What was your latest fascination?

A book called “The Arrangement” by Ruth Van Beek. I bought it last November in Paris at the OffPrint fair. I am inspired by the lightness, the sharpness of her mind and the ability to create collisions of visual contexts, which result in new worlds and meanings being born. It is a truly wonderful book.

9. What project are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I am working on the archive theme. Some ideas are beginning to form. I find a beautiful thought of Russian philosopher Sergey Lishaev ― he said that old photos and faded stars are alike. People in the pictures are gone, but the light that came from them, which they left in the photos, is visible to us through so many years. I took a couple of test pictures following this ideology and I’m trying to figure out how I feel about them. Another idea deals with the mechanisms our memory uses, particularly when it rebuilds the constructions from the past in the present. I try to show how memory works, embedding old photos into the present and recreating the activities of my ancestors. I also have some test photos and the result of an experiment, when I did embroidering (it was a traditional activity for women in my family) over an archive photo. The third idea considers analyzing family archive photos taken within a period of several decades in a search for clichés. This seems interesting to me, because it tells about the way of life and the values of those generations, and highlights the relationships between them. At the moment it is hard to say what the result will look like. I will most likely realize one of the ideas, but I might do all three.

10. Would you consider your photography as a auto therapeutical tool? Among your portraits there are a lot of self portraits. What does this self representation mean to you?

If you mean that working on a project helps me live through something, then yes, there are such works among mine. But it is more of a side effect, not the motive or the aim. My aim is to find something, discover or learn. I guess this is more accurate. Regarding the pictures of myself, I am not so sure. Originally I wanted to overcome my fear of being in front of a camera, not holding it in my hands. I felt so vulnerable, so unprotected in front of its mechanical sight, and I wondered why. Then I thought of the following. A portrait is considered as a photographer’s view of a person. And whose is this view when one does self portraits? It seems the sight should be camera’s. But camera is a device, not a person being able to see. I am mesmerized by this contradiction. There is something in it. I am trying to understand what it is. That’s why I go on doing self portraits.

© Alla Mirovskaya

'Still Life and Death'

L A Noble Gallery, London
03.03.2014 - 12.04.2014

L A Noble Gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition in the UK by German photographer Hendrik Faure featuring works from his series Photogravuren: Pictures on decay, beauty and death, alongside a selection of works by fellow countryman Karl Blossfeldt. Born in 1951, Faure previously studied medicine in the late 60’s and early 70’s, ultimately specialising in psychiatry, which he still practices today. His photographs, naturally and instinctively display an enormous depth of understanding of the psychological as well as the physical world.

As a self taught photographer and printer Faure’s fascination and love of photography began early at the age of sixteen with his first large format camera. Since the 1990’s his focus has been using the fine art techniques of the dark room: hand-coloured photos, cyanotypes, photogravures and mixed media and more recently owing to restricted movement he has concentrated on still life photogravures at his home in Reiffenhausen. Each print can take up to three days to produce and must be done using only one hand.

In the best traditions of 16th and 17th Century Vanitas movement, Faure’s still lives have reoccurring themes of life, beauty and decay. Flora and fauna wilt and dry alongside animals, reptiles, birds, skulls and mannequins. Despite the sombre nature of the subjects, his imagery is rich with emotive and silent composure. The distressed appearance of Faure’s work, often as a result of the gravure process, creates a venerable classicism and his sometimes-surreal scenes draw on human experience and reflect his physical self. The polarity of his own body - which only functions properly on one side - appears constantly throughout his work, visually split between the beauty of life and the presence of death.

Alongside Faure’s work L A Noble Gallery will be displaying a selection of photogravures of Karl Blossfeldt from his book Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature). Blossfeldt published this work in 1928, preceding Faure by seventy years at the age of sixty-three, coincidentally the same age as Faure today. Blossfeldt’s plant structures complement the forms from nature predominant in Faure’s work and the still life genre accentuates the transience of both life and the photographic moment. The product of both artists is also the result of painstakingly detailed work in the studio and carefully calculated studies in formal arrangement.

Karl Blossfeldt 1865-1932 worked in Berlin as a sculptor and a teacher. He developed his own camera, providing greater magnification of his subject matter thereby emphasising the structural form of the plants, in order to create teaching materials for his students. These images became iconic in their own right as examples of the New Realism of 1920’s and 1930’s and are still used by teachers today in differing fields of architecture and design as well as fine art and photography.

Gallery Director, Laura Noble, commented «I am delighted to be able to show this remarkable work of Hendrik Faure together with images from Karl Blossfeldt’s iconic work. The psychological drama of Faure’s work contrasts with the architectural simplicity of Blossfeldt’s while both are masters of detailed photographic techniques. Furthermore the beauty of photogravure from the collector’s point of view is that not only do they have an incredible range of tone and stability of image but they also have the benefit of affordability.»

© L A Noble 

BY GAIA MUSACCHIO

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots? 

My approach to photography derives from my interest in how the medium frames subjective experience in time and how the photograph becomes a physical confirmation of an irretrievable past.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

When I was ten, I moved from Melbourne, Australia to Bangkok, Thailand with my family and lived there into my early teens. This sudden migration into an unknown environment evoked feelings of loss, nostalgia and absence. I would often look at photographs from my past in Australia, overwhelmed by the melancholy that these memory objects would stir within me as I tried to make sense of the distance between my present reality and of the past time depicted in the images. Photographs conceived from that time depict Bangkok’s skyline - hazy, blurred and often at dusk, where the city’s smog would cause some of the most haunting sunsets.

We later returned to Australia and I was pushed back into this state of yearning for a past time – one that was depicted in images (that I could hold in my hands) – but was unreachable in time and space; a time that was gone and could not be retrieved.

These experiences shaped my relationship to photography as I sought to investigate the mediums role in articulating time and how it seeks to fix our needs for remembrance. I wanted to explore the paradoxes that underlie the relationship of photography to memory.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

2.How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

From a young age, I used the camera as a way of recording my presence in time and place, with the awareness that inevitably the time will pass and therefore the context of the picture will change. Each of these individual photographs have become part of a larger body/collective and contribute to an organically growing archive of irretrievable past defined in pictorial representation.

I wanted to find a way to deal with the overwhelming accumulation of image fragments in a way that could address my content of loss, memory, longing and the complexity of time.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

My research evolved in various ways. After completing my undergraduate studies, I began working part-time at the State Library of Victoria in the Collection Management Division and then went on to work for the Australian Manuscripts Division. Here, I was exposed to archiving principles and collection management strategies that began to weave into my own methodology.

Travel also plays an important role in my practice– I made several personal research trips in Japan, South East Asia and Eastern Europe – before enrolling in an MFA degree in Melbourne.

3. Tell us about your educational path. Master of Fine Art at RMIT University in Melbourne. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography at that time?

I began my tertiary education in a commercial photography degree where one majored in either advertising; fashion; or editorial photography. With the aim of training us for these commercial careers; the course focused on teaching students the techniques and skills of ‘how to get a good shot’. We learned about what and what not to include in the frame; we learned about lighting a scene, staging a scene… what time of day to take a picture (sunset or dusk) – but there was no consideration to the conceptual. The mediums shortcomings and capabilities were overlooked and I felt rather deflated by this. It was a digital tutorial on airbrushing using Photoshop when I realised for certain I had to leave that environment! I held out for a year, before switching into a Fine Art degree and eventually into the MFA Program at RMIT University. 

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

4. What were the courses that you are passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

The MFA program at RMIT University really helped my practice to evolve. The multidisciplinary nature of the program exposed me to other forms of practice and through the discussion and dialogue of the group tutorials; I learnt to understand the content of broader forms of artistic practice. These cross-disciplinary tutorials were a really effective way to observe how my own work was being read and how content could be generated through my decisions regarding properties like scale, timing, repetition etc.

Installation View, MFA Assessment

The program encouraged creative exploration and experimentation. This led me to moving beyond the conventions of the singular photograph, to engage with the pictorial possibilities and variations in relation to my mediums materiality and techniques.

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

I have been fortunate to work under the guidance of some very motivating and inspirational figures during my tertiary education. I worked with Les Walkling during my undergraduate studies and with David Thomas and Laresa Kosloff as my supervisors in the MFA program. At the beginning of the MFA program my work was about memory - David Thomas encouraged me to use memory (as a device) through formal structures, distribution of images within the space (using repetition, groupings, rhythms, contrasts in scale) to evoke the viewers own memory.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

6. As I can see you have had the chance to exhibit your work in many shows. Any particular advice for young photographers aspiring to display and exhibit their work?

My advice to any creative practioner is to keep engaged, inspired and active. It’s so important to be part of a community of like-minded people to support each other and to keep dialogue and discussion ongoing. Often it is via these professional networks that opportunities arise. Also, running ideas by your professional peers can really go a long way – I will always get a colleague to review my applications for funding or an exhibition proposal well before submission.

I also recommend finding a space – testing your work and documenting it – prior to applying for a show. This can be a really useful way to work through ideas within the proposal body and the documentation can be used as support material.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

There are many components of an art practice that one has to balance, along with other forms of employment. I have found it useful to recognise my peak time of productivity and develop a weekly system/schedule that takes this into account. I’m very much a morning person – my concentration is at its peak in the early morning; an ideal time for reading theory or studio time.

7. You are also among the directors of Australian Thai Artist Interchange. Can you please introduce this project?

I co-founded Australian Thai Artist Interchange (ATAI) together with Rushdi Anwar in July 2012. My own interest in contemporary Thai art stems back to my experience of living in Bangkok as a child and through my regular trips back to Thailand I’ve observed significant changes to the cultural, economical, socio- political and environmental climate. I’m really interested in the ways in which contemporary Thai artists are making sense of these changes through their work.

ATAI’s focus is to facilitate creative collaborations and connections between Australian and Thai Artists. Our first project, The Hua Krathi Project, aimed to present contemporary Thai art to a broad Australian audience. It included exhibitions, forums and lectures that took place in March 2013 over university, non-for-profit galleries and public spaces in Melbourne.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

We are currently planning for our next project which include both Thai and Australian artists in Bangkok for 2015, as well as some smaller co-curated projects in Australia. 

8. What about EYE Collective now…

EYE Collective comprises of the art practices of Trudy Moore, Steph Wilson and myself. We all graduated from the MFA program at RMIT University in 2010 and formed Eye Collective soon after as a way of maintaining the critical discussion and feedback process that we experienced during our time in a shared studio environment.

Our engagement with the materiality of our mediums, the installation component of our practices, as well our shared interest in notions of presence, absence, interiority, and exteriority has led to numerous projects. Through a sort of tutorial process – contemplation of the architecture of the site of installation, discussion, and conversation – we explore ways to juxtapose our own individual works within the space in such a way that a constant dialogue flows and exists between them. In some projects, we have also explored ways to conflate our mediums of photography, painting, drawing and collage to create a single work.

Installation View, KINGS ARI, Melbourne

The collective runs in conjunction with our own individual practices - we aim for at least one project annually. Eye Collective’s upcoming project: Constructing Absence Part III is a site-specific project for Mailbox (an artist run initiative) in April in Melbourne.

9. About your work now. How would you described your personal research in general? 

My film-based practice contributes to the field of photography through the creation of pictorial and spatial structures that use images from my personal photographic archive in combination with installation strategies and components of text. These structures aim to generate contemplation on the transitory nature of image, meaning, memory, loss, absence and the function of the archive.

By retrieving earlier photographs and combining them with more recent photographs, I develop new sets of formal relationships and construct and re-construct components of narrative – both within the space of a singular print and within the installation. This methodology attempts to tie photography back to the way that we experience things in real life. Time operates in an organic and continuous way – but our experiences and recollections are fragmentary.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

My work engages with the materiality, physicality and process of photography to address the contingency of the medium. This includes revealing the material properties and artefacts of the film, like including the black edges of the film strip that disrupt the image, or even scratching into the film emulsion or the paper surface of the printed image - presenting a type of photograph that is less stable and more inherent to memory.

10. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

I have a range of 35mm SLR cameras and lenses – many have been handed down to me by people who have ‘gone digital’. There is certain casualness about using an SLR camera – it’s versatile in terms of its size and weight, I’ve used this type of camera since I was very young.

I also use a Hasselblad medium format camera – and I do love this camera; its highly mechanical body, its weight… It has a very physical presence. I consider the act of taking a photograph to be a highly romantic gesture as it captures a frame in time that becomes a fragment, isolated from its whole. Viewing the world through the Hasselblad seems to embody this notion – the framing and taking of a picture is a carefully orchestrated procedure that simultaneously evokes contemplation and reflection on the very act of taking a photograph in itself.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

11. Are there any contemporary artists or photographers, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way? 

There are a range of contemporary artists who have influenced my practice in some way. I’ve been particularly influenced by the complex language of photography and installation practice ofWolfgang Tillmans and his investigations of the object of photography in its many physical forms.

I’ve also been looking at artists like Sara VanDerBeek, Laurie King & Brendan Fowler whose work moves beyond the conventional photographic language. Recently I’ve been looking at the paintings of English artist George Shaw in relation to urban melancholy, nostalgia and memory. His landscapes are based upon photographs taken of and around his childhood home in England and they really resonate with me.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

I also visited Belgian Artist Nico Dockx at his studio/library in Antwerp last year and was particularly influenced by his work with archives and his collaborations and book projects that form the outcomes of this work.

Other artists who continually influence my practice include Luigi Ghirri, Franchesca Woodman, Candida Hoffer, Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Vija Celmins, Ibon Aranberri, Manfred Pernice, Gerhard Richter, Patrick Pound, David Thomas…. The list could go on and on!

12. Three books of photography that you recommend?

I will recommend four!

Wolfgang Tillmans, ‘Manual’, Koln, Verlag der Burchhandlun Walther Konig, 2007;

John Berger, ‘And our faces, my heart, brief as photos’, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1984;

Stephen Shore, ‘The Nature of Photographs’, Phaidon Press; 2nd edition, 2010;

Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Forget me not – Photography and Remembrance’, Princeton Architectural Press; 2004.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

Reflecting on the evolutionary nature of his practice, Wolfgang Tillmans says “Looking back, looking into the work provides the key of how to carry on”. This is especially applicable to my archival practice, where the constant influx of new material ensues that meaning and context are continually shifting; new formal and narrative relationships are forever being formed.In my practice, each project – is in some way a continuation of the last - presenting new arrangements of imagery in combination with earlier pictures.

I am really excited to begin working on my first book project that will use my recent exhibition at Beam Contemporary, ‘A Way With It All’ as a departure point, to explore/unpack some of my working processes.

It’s often said that my work would lend itself well to the form of a book. Integral to book design is consideration to; how the image is laid out and arranged on the page; the proportion of negative space to image; how the image bleeds off the edge and to the space of the gutter and the margin These sorts of spatial, structural, design, format and presentation decisions are ever present when I arrange and construct my Image Compilation pieces – as well as within the installation process itself.  

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

I will also be undertaking a research trip to Kurdistan, Turkey, Germany and London in the later part of the year that will include an exhibition, as well as participating in an ongoing group project centred on ideas concerning photography and installation. 

I’m also in the process of setting up my studio in countryside Victoria and looking forward to observing how the slower pace of this environment and being immersed in nature will impact on my new work.

© Melanie Jayne Taylor

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
13.03.2014 - 26.04.2014

The 99, Grannan’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, is the result of three years of work in the Central Valley, in which she revisits the region of Dorothea Lange’s work in California during the Great Depression. The exhibition features new, large-scale color portraits contextualized by black-and-white vistas, and is accompanied by a two-volume publication.

© Anonymous, Modesto, CA, 2013

Grannan’s new work is set in the parched landscape and forgotten towns along Highway 99, including Modesto, Fresno and Bakersfield. In her intensely vivid color portraits, the artist works at midday when the sun is direct and the heat is unrelenting, presenting each individual, often simultaneously heroic and vulnerable, against stark, white backgrounds.

© Untitled, Bakersfield, CA, 2011

In the black-and-white photographs, many of her subjects re-appear on Modesto’s South 9th Street and along the banks of the Tuolumne River. Everyday rituals, small interactions and moments of beauty on the fringes of society are depicted in detail, conferring significance to what is often overlooked. 

© Deb soaking wet, Tuolumne River, Modesto, CA, 2013

Katy Grannan (b. 1969, Arlington, Massachusetts) was first recognized in 1998 for an intimate series of portraits of strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Grannan worked for years throughout the northeast and produced several different series entitled Poughkeepsie Journal, Morning Call, Sugar Camp Road, and Mystic Lake, each referring to a local newspaper source or secluded location. Grannan’s process and the consequent images are informed by her own conflicted childhood in the American northeast. Each photograph is imbued with secrecy, desire, and hidden intentions.

© Inessa waits near South 9th Street, Modesto, CA, 2012

With her move to California in 2006, Grannan photographed “new pioneers,” people who, like herself, encountered something very different from the mythological “West” with its promise of eternal summer and personal reinvention. Instead, these new settlers face the end of a continent and the potential for failure as they struggle to define themselves under the scrutiny of the relentless Western sunlight. The Westerns explores the relationship between aspiration and delusion – where our shared desire to be of worth, to be paid some attention – confronts the uneasy prospect of anonymity.

© Gail and Dale, Pacifica (I), 2007 from the series The Westerns

Grannan’s Boulevard marked the beginning of a lengthy series of “street portraits.” These photographs appear to be made without the subjects’ knowledge, but are in fact, spontaneous collaborations between Grannan and strangers met on the streets of San Francisco and Hollywood (and later throughout the Central Valley). Boulevard and the subsequent series, 99, unfold as an enormous procession of humanity – a danse macabre of marginalized and powerless members of society. Grannan uses the ubiquitous white walls of city buildings and the glaring noon sunlight to serve as an impromptu, decontextualized backdrop that emphasizes each individual and defies any preconceived assumption of their “anonymity.” Grannan exhibited Boulevard at Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94, New York in 2011. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) mounted a comprehensive exhibition of this series and a three channel video installation entitled The Believers in a two-person show in 2012, titled The Sun and Other Stars: Katy Grannan and Charlie White.

The 99, Grannan’s continuation of “street portraits” refers to Highway 99, which runs down the spine of California through the Central Valley – a place Joan Didion described as “the trail of an intention gone haywire.” Grannan followed Dorothea Lange’s trajectory (made famous in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ) and discovered a similarly austere terrain and stoic sensibility. Grannan’s large black and white vistas describe a uniquely psychological landscape enveloping cities along Highway 99, where for most, the “American Dream” is pure myth. The region and its inhabitants remain overlooked and undervalued, yet there exists a quiet beauty in the seemingly mundane interactions among those living within this parched landscape.

© View of Stanislaus County from California Aqueduct Vista Point, Newman, CA, 2011

The Nine is the title of Grannan’s upcoming film about a marginalized and charismatic community in the Central Valley that struggles to find meaning and moments of grace in a hostile environment.

© Anonymous, San Francisco, 2010

There are three monographs of Grannan’s work: Model American, The Westerns, and Boulevard. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

© Fraenkel Gallery | Kati Grannan

RALF SCHMERBERG
Greetings from our planet

Bryce Wolkowitz, New York
09.01.2014 - 22.02.2014

Self-taught filmmaker and artist, Ralf Schmerberg has been chronicling his encounters with the world around him with an incisive and candid gaze through photography and film. The focus of this exhibition is the personal photo diary he has kept for the past two decades which constitutes an evolving autobiographical record of his life, work and travels.

Schmerberg has developed a photographic form that is highly personal and open-ended, even deliberately ambiguous - one that engages viewers and rewards their prolonged consideration. He is an obsessive cataloguer of categories. And in cataloguing, the viewer is confronted with all of the difference and dissonance of imposed order. Categories begin to break down and recombine with the sensibility of a poem - the scraggly light of a firework will echo the edge of a fur in a window display, or a splatter of sauce on a plate. Faces become masks, beggars become icons. 

His photographs make the viewer feel uncomfortable at times - not everything is beautiful or refined. There is certainly a dose of the sublime, a touch of transcendence, but there is also a counterweight of stark reality, undressed, discreetly observed, both secret and messy. Suddenly, we are faced with truths that are poignant in their honesty.  This degree of discomfort, of the confrontational aspect of photography, creates an emotional investment with the work. Imagery becomes drama. Each piece tells a story, functioning as stills in a movie the artist has shot. The longer one considers these images, the more questions they pose.

Ralf Schmerberg (b. 1956) lives and works in Berlin. In 2008, Schmerberg founded the art collective Mindpirates, who, with their active presence and community-oriented projects, have become a staple in the cultural life of Berlin. Over the course of his career, Schmerberg has increasingly invested his creative enthusiasm into mobilizing large groups of people into modern forms of participatory art events that combine social exchange and action.

Schmerberg has been awarded the Cannes Lions Bronze-Film award for Craft & Editing (2012), The Leads Award for Creative Leader of the Year in Advertising (2012), the AICP Award for Cinematography (2012) and the Clios Silver- Television/Cinema award (2012). 

© Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery | Ralf Schmerberg 

Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona
28.02.2014 - 25.05.2014

The nine great women photographers from Mexico represented in this exhibition combine very personal and often visionary responses to the social realities around them in images that are often harsh, mysterious and beautiful. These three generations of Mexican women photographers are uniquely connected over a span of three generations and an entire century. Mentors, friends, colleagues- all of them artists of great individuality and passion include Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, Yolanda Andrade, Alicia Ahumada, Ángeles Torrejón, and Maya Goded. Each with a camera and “exquisite eye,” these photographers share a finely tuned way of seeing the truths, visions, and enigmas of their beloved Mexico. Their connections are revealed by a discreet homage, a borrowed element, or by overlapping spiritual territory.

© Nuestra Senora de las Inguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), 1980. Image by Graciela Iturbide

From Lola Álvarez Bravo, one of the most prominent of the first generation of women photographers in Mexico, to Graciela Iturbide, with an international reputation as one of Mexico’s premier contemporary photographers; this exhibition presents the work of a unique sisterhood of artists. Their subjects range from the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas to the gritty street life of Mexico City. Compressed urban scenes and the desolation of a landscape that often reflects the condition of the people are matched by eloquent documents of the vernacular architecture of the Mexican countryside, religious shrines, and the abiding subjects of pastoral and village life.

These photographers were the trailblazers of women’s photographic art in Mexico, and were all independent, self-supporting artists; following the example and the spirit of Lola Álvarez Bravo (1905-1993), herself a pioneering figure in the first generation of women photographers in Mexico. Lola Álvarez Bravo and her husband, Manuel, were intimately involved in the Mexican cultural renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s; she was part of a circle of friends and colleagues that included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

© Diego Rivera by Lola Álvarez Bravo

This vibrant and influential circle built the dynamic traditions of photographic image-making that permeated Mexican cinema and art of the time, and which was very influential in modern Mexican society and culture. In the 1960’s, Mariana and Manuel Álvarez Bravo—first husband of Lola— were mentors to Graciela Iturbide. Kati Horna, in her turn, was mentor to Flor Garduño in the late 1970’s and 80’s, as were Yampolsky and don Manuel. The great technician and printer Alicia Ahumada, assisted both Yampolsky and Iturbide.

The second generation of photographers, Graciela Iturbide, Yolanda Andrade, Flor Garduño and Alicia Ahumada, continued the search for the universality of Mexican-imbued iconography and images. Graciela Iturbide, for example, one of the most published women photographers in the world today, both inspires and unsettles the viewer with her deeply poetic, allusive, and at times surrealistic imagery like “Ojos para volar / Eyes to Fly with” (1991) and “El Senor de los pajaros / The Lord of the Birds” (1985).

© “Reyes de cana (Kings of Cane)”, 1981, Image by Flor Garduño

First Generation: Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna, and Mariana Yampolsky

The women featured in El ojo fino share many influences, but one stands above the rest: Italian photographer Tina Modotti, whose life and work had a catalytic and lasting impact on Mexican women photographers, especially Lola Álvarez Bravo and Mariana Yampolsky. During her years in Mexico, Modotti worked as an independent freelance photographer-one of the first women to do so. Modotti’s life and career opened the door for these women.

Lola Álvarez Bravo is the most prominent of the first generation of Mexican women photographers and the first to follow Modotti’s lead as a freelancer. Bravo and Modotti were good friends; Bravo inherited Modotti’s Graflex camera following her expulsion from Mexico. Bravo is credited with being an honest observer, empathetically training her lens on people from all walks of life. During the latter half of the twentieth century, Bravo was in great demand as a portrait photographer, and her images of the elite and cultural avant-garde comprise some of her strongest work. Establishing herself as a professional did not come easy. Early in her career Bravo stated, “I was the only woman that ran around the streets with a camera, at sports events and the Independence parades, and all the reporters made fun of me. That’s how I got tough.”

Kati Horna began her professional career in Paris in the 1930s, and continued as a photojournalist during the Spanish Civil War, emigrating to Mexico in 1939. She met Lola Álvarez Bravo soon after her arrival and, like her, became a freelance photographer, an influential teacher of photography, and a strong role model through her dedication to an active career. Horna’s commercial work was wide-ranging and she was an early creator of the photographic series in Mexico City.

©  Kati Horna in collaboration with Wolfgang Burger, Serie Hitlerei, 1937. Gelatin silver print, 16.8 x 12 cm. Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna.

Mariana Yampolsky was another immigrant, arriving in Mexico City from the United States in the late 1940s. Inspired by her knowledge of Tina Modotti’s life and career, Yampolsky was drawn to Mexico after graduating from the University of Chicago. She was captivated by Mexico’s vivid colors and the revolutionary ideals of the famous Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop). Beginning as an engraver at the Workshop, Yampolsky later studied photography with Lola Álvarez Bravo. The two remained close friends until Bravo’s death in 1993. As Modotti had mentored them, this generation-Bravo, Horna, and Yampolsky-became mentors and teachers to later generations of women photographers.

Second Generation: Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, and Yolanda Andrade

Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna, and Mariana Yampolsky-three intrepid and talented artists-set the stage for Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, and Yolanda Andrade. During the 1960s, Iturbide was influenced by Yampolsky. In turn, Flor Garduño worked with Horna and Yampolsky during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Both Iturbide and Garduño often joined Yampolsky in capturing images of the landscape or rural towns outside of Mexico City. Graciela Iturbide’s photographs of indigenous cultures in remote regions of Mexico blur the boundaries between photojournalism, poetic sensibility, and magic. Iturbide’s images have been called “anchored fictions and elusive documents.” Many of her subjects, while modern, also practice a fusion of pre-Columbian and Christian religious customs and rituals. She is respected for her ability to use photography in revealing the “humbleness and grace of human gesture.”

© “Mujer angel (Angel woman)” 1979, Image by Graciela Iturbide

Studying at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Mexico City, Flor Garduño met her most influential teacher and mentor, Kati Horna. Horna taught Garduño first to cultivate good ideas, and then find a way to express them. Other significant influences were Yampolsky and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Garduño worked as his assistant and later was hired by Yampolsky at the Ministry of Education to go on photographic assignments to remote Mexican villages. Garduño often photographed with Yampolsky and Iturbide in the pueblos and countryside of Mexico. Garduño’s images of landscapes and indigenous people closely follow in the tradition of her mentors through her strong composition and sensitive portraits.

Returning to Mexico City after study in the United States during the 1970s, Yolanda Andrade became part of the contemporary Mexican photography movement. Andrade is a documentarian-she walks the streets of Mexico City photographing people engaged in public events, ceremonies, festivals, or activities of everyday life. In the process she has created an intimate portrait of the great city itself. Andrade’s background in theatre is also evident in her gaze, whether conveyed by the subject of the image or by the drama of the moment.

Third Generation: Alicia Ahumada, Ángeles Torrejón, and Maya Goded

Much like the women before them, Alicia Ahumada, Ángeles Torrejón, and Maya Goded find new territory for future generations of women to explore. Goded and Torrejón have focused on the people-particularly the women-of Mexico in very distinct settings. Ahumada captures people, but turns her eye to the landscape and architecture as well.

© ‘El bosque erotizado’: photography by Alicia Ahumada and text by Alberto Ruy Sánchez

Alicia Ahumada is recognized as one of the best photographic printers in Mexico, a position of high status. She has printed for many of the country’s leading photographers, including Yampolsky, Iturbide, and others. Ahumada often traveled with Yampolsky to photograph landscapes and rural areas. In her own work-greatly influenced by Yampolsky and Manuel Álvarez Bravo-Ahumada conveys a love of nature, a keen interest in people from the country, and a passion for vernacular architecture.

Maya Goded shares similar interests, creating deeply personal and socially relevant documentary series that feature women. Her subjects range from an isolated mulatto population in Mexico, to her recent series of photographs and interviews with prostitutes in the Merced neighborhood of Mexico City. Much of Goded’s work is influenced by her mentor, Iturbide, whom she accompanied on a trip to Eastern Europe to observe her working techniques.

© Maya Goded, Mexico 

Ángeles Torrejón’s travels have taken her to Chiapas before and after the Zapatista Revolution in 1995. There, she photographed the daily life of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and area Indian sympathizers, particularly the women and children. In her many series of images, she is concerned with the human condition, exhibiting a sincere compassion for human solidarity. She is among a group of photographers revitalizing photojournalism in Mexico, combining aesthetic experimentation and social commitment.

The nine women in this exhibition each have the distinction of creating powerful friendships and serving as examples for younger generations. They have traveled together, conversed, and have been both teachers and students. They share a curiosity about what it means to be a woman in the modern and the primitive worlds. They are all strong artists and are able to stand alone in their work. Together, they are a formidable Mexican voice that will speak with universal resonance through the twenty-first century and beyond.

© Southeast Museum of Photography

BY STEVE BISSON

The biological insufficiency of the human condition is the basis, according to some philosophers, of the great reversal which coincides with the subordination of nature to man. From it we can understand the motivations of the modern era with its primacy of science and technology as a theological drift. The technique has become the horizon of human self-understanding. This cognition may help us to interpret the nihilistic drift of our society, the discomfort of civilization within us, the signs of a dominant culture that is less and less connected to the spirit. There is no encouragement to understand whether it is the twilight or not. Hence the imperative search for a meaning and a sense that is a necessary means for living.

In observing the images collected in the monograph by Marco Maria Zanin, whose title ‘Inhabit the soul’ (in italian ‘Abitare l’anima) directs us in the right direction, I can not ignore what has so far been premised. Photography, when it puts us in relationship with the environment, to the point of de-contextualising its representation in order to decrypt it, then it becomes a philosophical practice through which to retrieve the “right measure” that is lost in the age of technique which has no purpose but only infinite progress.

From here I start reading the journey of Marco Maria Zanin, which begins not surprisingly from the lost myth of the fertility of the earth. The “rural cathedrals” are symbolic manifestations of the abandonment of the qualities inherent in our relation with the land, including humility, that the author reminds us of its derivation from the Latin ‘humus’, or the earth itself. In addition, this survey is carried out in an area where the split with rural memory was violent, brutal and indifferent. Consequently this left visible signs of a hasty and therefore oversized growth. The aesthetic appearance of the fog clears the field from disturbing elements and all of our attention focuses on this state of presence that is a past, a memory, and even a future not yet completely removed.

The book moves on to the Camino de Santiago where the author becomes aware of his own journey, and the slowness needed to make it authentic. It is as if the determination is not a sufficient means to reach a goal. There now is a need for effort to deepen and allow time for the fruit to ripen. And so it applies to the photography of Marco Maria Zanin, who for the last leg of this journey, in São Paulo, Brazil, turns it analog and heavy with the addition of a large format camera.

The metropolis of São Paulo is embraced by far, from the top, almost to win its subjection. It lashes out in its fullness, solidity and saturation to our eyes. It appears devoid of nature and the pale sky, like the mists of the plain, prevents a distraction and escape. Again Marco Maria Zanin is skilled in guiding the viewer, as if we almost want to reach out for an act of generosity that would facilitate the reading of his thoughts.

São Paulo, with its density that seems to have no end, embodies the utopia of the Enlightenment. The notion of individuality exported to the ‘new world’ has found fertile ground. However the author while distancing himself from it shows us an infinitesimal humanity consisting of a multitude of individuals so small that they disappear. The individual who looks at the city as a place for its realization becomes invisible?

What offers further meanings in this book by Marco Maria Zanin are his words. They can not be synthesized without the expense of their existence. They must be read to be heard. The rediscovery of the language is perhaps our salvation.

© Marco Maria Zanin 

Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York
13.02.2014 - 15.03.2014

Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to present “Doll Portraits”, an exhibition of photographs and drawings by New York artist Roz Leibowitz. In her two previous shows with the gallery, Leibowitz focused her creative energies on elaborately patterned narrative drawings. As Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times, they looked “uncannily like the works of a self-taught Victorian mystic.”

Leibowitz came to the art world having worked for years as a children’s librarian and reading teacher, professions that fed her appetite for stories and fables, manuscripts and weathered paper, faded snapshots and family albums, and, of course, dolls. Everything about her work is obsessive: looping lines of ink become pathways from one story to another, figures move from penciled patterns to center stage before the camera. A doll has many lives, she explains, and many tales to tell. More tales than one story or one photo can contain. The goal is to listen closely and work feverishly. When her hand ached from drawing, Leibowitz learned photography built a darkroom. She claims that she lives there now — appropriate for an artist who is always at home in the shadows.

The best advice I ever got in my life came from a doll.

I am not a photographer, but I happened to find myself with a camera, some dolls, and a hand that hurt from too much drawing.

So I shot 1,547 rolls of film and ended up with a long line of small mistakes. Of the 1,527 rolls of film, 328 were of Myron, the most patient of all the dolls. One day, as we were setting up for yet another photo shoot, I confessed my troubles and asked his advice. Myron I said, I’m a bungler. I can’t load film, I can’t attach the lens to the body, I can’t press the shutter without shaking, I can’t figure out all the dials – Myron, I cried – I am blind in the darkroom, bump into the enlarger, and can’t seem to make it from bath to bath, from go to stop to stay without losing my prints on the floor. Worst of all, Myron, your face is always out of focus.

He said to me then: don’t shoot the face, shoot the story.

What story? I asked. You can tell I was, and still am, incompetent. Myron sighed and told me to bring the hat, the one I had found at the flea market. I did as he asked. He told me to put it on his head and tie it under his chin and wrap the long ribbons around his arms and waist so he could lean back into the darkness of the hat and rest his cheek against the rough wool and learn to see again in the fabulous shadow of his Dream Hat. I did as he asked. And I knew then that this was his hat, the one he had worn and lost and found again over and over for more years than there are pictures in this world.

So I shot his story.

But not the whole story, certainly not the beginning nor the end, just a snippet of the middle, just the part that I could really see. The truth is, I was too stupid to know the whole story but smart enough to know that I probably never will. Myron’s story is Myron’s story — but once in a while we meet, and sit and chat as storytellers often do.

And all the other dolls that were waiting? I shot their stories too. Little penny tales that I caught for an instant, just flashes, just the parts that I could really see.

Well you would think that after all this time, after 1,543,982 rolls of film (give or take a few) I would be something of an expert, a big-shot of a photographer, you should excuse the pun. But the truth is – I am still a bungler. What

was wrong before is still wrong so nothing is ever really right. I asked Myron about this recently and he said, look around you. Dolls and stories and pictures are flying like crazy, swooping through this world, up and above and around all the worlds that ever existed, all in an ecstatic flock of Wonder! And you, he said, you are worried about tiny mistakes?

I looked. I squinted. I peered into the darkness. Are you sure, Myron, because I am not so sure.

He sighed and answered, well I am sure. And he looked me in the eye and said, you may be dumb – and then he smiled – but you’re learning. [The Doll’s Story (Or
How These Images Came to Be) by Roz Leibowitz]

© Sears-Peyton Gallery | Roz Leibowitz

BY STEVE BISSON

I receive many books on photography. And sometimes it’s embarrassing, I would like to respond faster. However, for me, writing is more than just a job, or an exercise. Through the writing I crop the time to think. As in a ritual. The book by Nuno Moreira has remained on my bookshelf for some time. Then one day I opened it. Then the next day I did it again. I slowly realized that it would be difficult but mostly useless to write about this book without the involvement of the author. It would come out a grotesque attempt to frame an emotional work. Made of moments of silence and insights. Shortly rational. I would end up quoting some of the important white black photographer. But to what end? So this is why we have come to this interview. To present your book Nuno I would like to start from your premise. I find that it well introduces the essence of this publication. Sharing your emotional empathy with the world through photography is an act of generosity or at least it breaks a sense of loneliness. What drove you to this point of consciousness? How does this project reflect your personal research?

I agree with your observations, Steve, working with images enables me to create visual narratives - which are fortunately very ambiguous in their nature - but also, and most importantly, to analyse my role within the creative process. You see, thinking and working in artistic projects is for me a form of self-discovery. I take a topic that matters to me on a personal level and research and delve into it as much as possible to come up with answers that get closer to some sort of truth. Something that reverberates within me and possibly with the viewer as well. Fact of the matter is that any form of art is (in many aspects) only a personal dialogue of the artist.

When I’m working on a given project – be it a new series of photographs, a design piece, a photo-montage, whatnot, I’m not thinking about the outside world that much or if someone will understand what I’m trying to express – I’m more concerned in letting myself get in the zone of creation and in being truthful with my emotions and instincts and let that guide me along the way. It’s about questioning and looking and repositioning yourself everytime the perspective changes. That’s the motion of creating an art piece: this selfish pursuit to find something, tease someone, or heal a part of oneself that is looking to be resolved. If there are no issues, frustrations, questions, why create? With “State of Mind” I was dealing with topics of how to perceive inner emotions and the process of individuation. How should we view ourselves and others when they are in crisis or transition? Is it right to give time to other people? Are we in any position to demand time from others? Can we really ever understand how someone else thinks and feels or is it all just in our heads? How can I stay true to my own natural rhythm? These were all questions I was trying to get a response while working on this series and the resulting book.

2. Many of the subjects that you have photographed during your travels are lonely people. They are the silent people in your look. However, from this silence begins the recognition of a state of mind. In your approach to people there is a sense of respect for this silence. There is no urge to shout, upset, rape through the medium. How do you recognize yourself in the people you photograph?

I recognize myself immensely in my work and I believe that’s why it’s so natural for me to notice these people immediately and approach them in order to register what I see. You have to understand that to me the person who sits quietly in the corner observing seems always the most interesting and fascinating of the bunch, and that’s most likely because I am also an observer myself. So, yes, it’s only natural that I pay respect to the more quiet people and their “thinking moments” because they’re usually the most peculiar and interesting to talk with and photograph. Having said this, do you know the expression “beware of the quiet ones”? Being shy or introspective doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the most balanced person around…

A statement I wished to pass with the “State of Mind” series is that it’s perfectly all right to be a lonely person and to respect your sense of space and time. The way our lives are build nowadays society makes us feel like we don’t deserve to have free time, we feel guilty, and we tend to forget what was it we enjoyed doing when there’s nothing left to be done. You know, I realized this when I started pursuing what I wanted to do with my life and what made me truly satisfied. It’s interesting and scary but most people really don’t know how to stand still for about 30 minutes without starting to do something. I’m not talking about zen meditation here, I’m talking about regaining consciousness on who you are and how to feel good in your own skin. If you stop everything around you – and I mean shutting down everything – you’ll see what I mean. It tickles. I’m interested in what happens when things stop. That will most probably be the starting point for my next project.

3. Tell us about your photographic influences. Also books, people, art works, stories through which you have acquired significant tools to better interpret your reality.

I like researching a lot and I think all great work comes out of doing research and rethinking things through. I always liked digging and discovering new material in the realms of music, cinema or literature and the feeling of being excited by the new avenues this can open in ones mind. Language and visual arts are in general very projective tools – one can feel stimulated by discovering new forms of expression or just new angles to tackle identical issues. One thing I discovered by looking at so many images is that as an artist you have to come to terms with this idea that you’re not skilled doing a whole lot of different things. Actually, ones natural given abilities and sense of purpose is very narrow, yet if it is recognized and exercised regularly it is indeed unique and can be used in a meaningful way.

To find what you’re good at doing (or expressing) and just keep doing that and working to reach some sort of “perfection” (whatever that word means) is really the best sense of direction you can have. I’ve come to realise that most meaningful artists are not playing the seven instruments at once, they come to peace with their limitations and discover their personal voice (some say it’s a calling), and that’s what makes other people understand them and make them universally appealing – it’s their individual sense of uniqueness and the vast amount of pieces produced using that sense of language. When I’m reading, watching a movie, looking at a painting, I’m allowing myself to clear my emotions and make the illusive effort of walking in the same shoes as the creator. That’s a spring-board into what that piece might mean or at least… If it makes any sense in the context of my future realizations and efforts.

The way I see it, one can choose to discover the world looking outwards or inwards. Personally, I find it more challenging and fulfilling to have my mind expanding inwards and use art not as a mere commodity tool but as a necessity to deposit my wishes, fantasies, urges and frustrations. Fortunately I’m not alone in this kind of self-cathartic scenario so there’s an almost infinite number of interesting works out there to discover… or rediscover.

4. Tell us about an instant, an episode among those you have frozen through the camera. With your words help us to build a scene, imagine a different place.

Earlier today I was doing a phone interview and someone said the pictures on the book seemed to be taken from a ghost point-of-view because the people don’t seem to notice the presence of the photographer yet there is a lot of silent tension involved. I never thought about my work in that way, but I suppose it’s flattering because to me photography is really about creating a sense of awe and imagination. Images have this power of transporting the viewer into a realm beyond time.

Actually I don’t know if I agree with the idea of photography freezing time, I think it’s more about creating another sense of time or opening a door into an unknown territory that can stir and move you differently because there’s really no physical touch involved when you’re looking at a photo. The photo is just there as a separate entity; like a ghost in front of you. The kind of images I’m pursuing are very similar with music or theatre because they’re trying to build an atmosphere and create some sort of wordless storytelling. Many times I take photos of people I meet or happen to see and I just smile and continue as if that moment was a special thing that only me and that person understood. Do you know what I mean?

5. Many photos among those included in the book were made in Japan. What struck you most of the places you have seen? What do you find very distant from your personal culture.

Many photos in the book feature Asian-looking persons but they are not entirely shot in Japan. The reality is that I kept many of the latest photos I did while travelling through Asian countries such as Malaysia, south-Korea or Taiwan because they were simply better than the old ones and more in-tune with the overall concept of the book. The faces might look Japanese but they are really Asian in general. Answering the second part of your question, what stroke me most about Japan when I first visited back in 2011 (right after the big tsunami) was discovering a country so self-absorbed in it’s own cultural obsessions and millenary traditions.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed here compared with European countries is the way the individual is so deeply immersed in society and is viewed as such an indispensable part of the whole. There’s an innate sense of social responsibility that the common Japanese feels he has to fulfil as part of the collective work force. This is totally a work-driven society and people are raised to feel proud in being that way, which to some degree might seem totally outrageous to a western mind more driven by pleasure, or on the other hand an interesting motif to take photographs. In Europe I think we are more considerate of our personal needs in first place whilst in Japan first is your work and your role in society and only then there exists you as an individual (if there is any room left for that). The fundamental difference I see between Japan and Europe is this way in which the individual is omitted and pushed to a secondary stage in favour of the collective/surroundings best “atmosphere”.

Even in language, while speaking, the Japanese omit subjects such as “I” and “You”, becoming something implicit in the conversation to not obstruct the real topic of focus and that’s something I find very interesting. I could go on forever about Japan, this really is a one-of-a-kind place and I mean this with all respect.

6. The publication contains many pictures. Taken in different situations and different geographies. Leafing through it several times I realized that I had missed some images. A pleasant feeling that prompted me to re-open the book. Putting these pictures in a row must not have been an easy task. Please tell us about the genesis of the book, its structure and sequence.

You’re not the first person mentioning that the book gets better and discovering new stuff by revisiting it again. That leaves me satisfied because the intention while doing the editing was really to provoke different layers of interpretation so I’m sure the book gets different with time. Anyway, the photographs from this series derive from an archive of travels and different situations spanning from 2009 to 2013 so the making of this series and the edition of the book took different stages and changed a couple of times. At some point I only had photos where you couldn’t actually see the faces of the people, they were not facing the camera. The first photo selection was of about 150 pictures (out of roughly 300) so that left me with the difficult task of discarding many photos. Some people who saw different versions of the mock-up during production actually advised me to publish two books because there was enough material to do that.

The sequencing of the pictures for the book was done by using real prints and physically moving them several times on the wall or on the floor until I felt comfortable with a certain rhythm and “storytelling”. This was difficult to do because more than pictures I had an emotional tie and a personal chronology attached with these images. Looking back, it’s not that I take many pictures either; it was just too much time to prepare and release this monograph altogether. Prior to actually doing this book, one year before I did a small booklet, which was already a study for the book itself, it was a nice way to get comfortable with the concept and show it to some people to get feedback. Now that it’s finally done and the book is released I feel freer to engage in a subsequent project and continue researching some of the topics addressed on “State of Mind”; lets see where this will take me next.

© Nuno Moreira | urbanautica

BY STEVE BISSON, GAIA MUSACCHIO

1.Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots? 

My Dad and his best friend Tony were passionate photographers and collector of cameras. I grew up surrounded by camera equipment and technical discussions about darkroom techniques and flash lighting, but as a child I wasn’t very interested in the techie side of photography, I preferred the tactile nature of painting and clay.

© Ellie Davies

As a teenager my passion was sculpture. I worked in clay mainly and as my projects became more ambitious my parents bought me a small arc welder and I made several large pieces including a 15’ dinosaur skeleton from welded scaffolding clips and bits of broken down agricultural machinery. I wanted to be a sculptor but I couldn’t envisage a life working alone in a studio. After a frustrating Art Foundation year I took a darkroom course and realised that I could have a creative life without having to be alone. It was a revelation. The black and white darkroom became an addiction.

These first photographic projects made in 2007/8 were mainly self-portraits but I saw them as simply using myself as a model so that I could be independent. I wanted to explore without the constraints of using a model and all that is entailed. It was a very exciting and freeing process. I feel very fond of that work when I look back at it. I can see that I was getting something out of my system, it was a very intense process, and at the same time I fell in love with the intrinsically photographic process of exploring the relationship between the camera, the viewer, and the viewed.  I think this is still a strong element of my process. My photographs in the forest are still a kind of self-portrait.

© Ellie Davies

2.How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

I was interesting in the work of other female photographers using their own bodies and I studied Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman. I looked at Feminist research on the Gaze, and the cultural objectification of women’s bodies, I looked at advertising, and at fashion photography.

3.Tell us about your educational path. MA Photography at London College of Communication. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography at that time?

I began my MA about 4 years after starting down my photographic journey.  I had done the darkroom course, followed by one year studying on the Professional Photographic Practice course at London College of Communication (then in Clerkenwell), followed by 3 years working as a photographer’s assistant.

Whilst assisting I began to take small commissions but I soon realised that I didn’t want to work to briefs, I wanted to continue to make my own work and the only way I was going to have complete freedom was to go it alone.

© Ellie Davies

The MA was a huge creative luxury, it allowed me to return to learning and exploring but it was also challenging and frustrating. This was a painful process but it forced me to evaluate my work harshly and to be really honest about when something is working and when it’s not.  It was tough but ultimately I feel that this process has made my work stronger. 

During the MA I continued to make work focusing on the Gaze and the relationship between figures within the photographic scene, reading Satre and James Elkins, I made the series’ ‘Vantage Point’ and ‘After Dark’. My time as an assistant taught me I didn’t want to use a lot of lights and a big camera, I wanted to be mobile, flexible and self-sufficient. I found ways to work with a very small kit and to use ambient lighting, and this is still the way I work today – camera, tripod, step-ladder and me.

© Ellie Davies

4.What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

Studying darkroom probably had the most profound effect on my work. An understanding of processing, printing and toning gives a real-world background to Photoshop, and in my own work I try as much as possible to only make these kinds of changes during retouching. 

It is very important to me that all the sculptural interventions I make in the forest are ‘real’. Each one usually takes a day to create and photograph and this ‘making’ process is central to my work. It is ironic that I gave up a career in sculpture in favour of a more sociable art-form, only to find myself carving out a working practice that enables me to work alone in the woods and to make things with my hands.

© Ellie Davies

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work? 

Crits with my MA tutors had a big impact on my work. Ultimately one of these crits brought the biggest change to my process so far. One of my tutors was examining my ‘Vantage Point’ series and used the work ‘banal’. This word is still burned into my memory and it made me re-evaluate my process and realise that a complete change of approach was needed. Until that point I had been placing a figure, or figures within a scene, in order to explore their relationship to the camera and to eachother within that setting. I realised that I didn’t need people to do this and I began working in the woods. 

© Ellie Davies

The woods are an entity in their own right, and I began exploring my relationship to the lanscape and the way that the forest makes us feel. This is so much more direct and personal, and my work had grown and developed from that crutial turning point.

6. What do you think about teaching methodology in the era of digital and social networking?

My MA was right on the cusp of film and digital. I was one of the few students on the course using digital equipment, and there was very little emphasis on digital process or work-flow. I hope this is now a much more prominent part of photography courses, but during my own MA I was doing the majority of my learning through trial and error using my own fairly basic digital camera equipment, and learning to use programs such as Photoshop and Aperture.

© Ellie Davies

7. By looking at your bio I can see that you’ve been featured in many exhibitions. Can you talk about these many experience? Any particular advice for young photographers aspiring to display and exhibit their work?

I spent the first year after my MA (2009) participating in group shows with contemporaries from the course and other photographers I’d met through photography groups. Its tough when you leave college so it can be really helpful to form a group. We became Latitude Photographers and met at the British Museum once a month to crit each others new work, and to organise small exhibitions in disused shops and galleries. We also participated in Format Photo Festival in Derby. 

© Ellie Davies

Over the following year I submitted my work into shows with less artists, so that I could show more pieces of work. I also co-curated Sight Unseen at Photofusion Gallery in Brixton, London with three other photographers.  In 2011 my work started to be published in print and online photography magazines, I was selected for several international Photo Festivals, and by 2012 I held five solo shows. The point is that the process of exhibiting happened gradually, its hard work, chipping away and persevering, winning some but facing ten times more rejections. Realize that if you aren’t selected it is probably because your work didn’t fit what the judges were looking for, keep going and it will happen!

I feel it is important to build your CV before you start approaching commercial galleries, they want to see some history to your exhibiting.  Rather that paying out to rent gallery space try to take things into your own hands and plan shows in small, cheap spaces. Do all the work yourself: promote, curate, hang and gallery-sit your exhibitions. 

© Ellie Davies ”Come with Me. Solo exhibition of New Landscape’  at Print House Gallery, London. (November 2011) 

My first solo show was at Brucie Collections in Kiev in early 2011. I had won the Fine Art Landscape category of the PX3 Photo Awards and the curator of Brucie Collections noticed my work through this and offered me a solo show. This illustrates the possible opportunities that awards can have, I entered lots of calls in 2009-2011 and these awards helped to build the momentum of my exposure. It’s really important to read the terms and make sure that they are favourable for you, there are a lot of calls for submission out there that require you to ship framed work abroad etc, and this may not be something you feel is worthwhile.

8. What about your artistic paths and photographic research?

One project emerges from the last, it’s an organic process. I write endless lists of ideas and make notes and drawings, saving them all in a separate folder for each project. I read around the subject and start to sketch out an artist’s statement as I work.

© Ellie Davies

9. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

I use a Nikon D3x, a Manfrotto tripod and a step ladder.  I usually like 35mm but I have recently been making some square format work, which I shoot on the D3x too, 3 frames knitted together – I do this by hand in photoshop.

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way? 

I love and have been influenced by Jem Southam’s Pond and Rockfall work, Ori Gersht’s Rear Window series, Martina Lindqvist’s Ragskar Island, Jitka Hanzlova’s Quiet Forests and Jo Metson Scott’s Ethereal Forest installations. I’m not sure exactly how this work has influenced me but I know it is inscribed on my brain and it filters into my work, the way that I look at the landscape, and the possibilities of photography.

One day I want to make some work in the mountains. I would combine my two passions in life, climbing and the landscape. I love the work of Anton Jankov, Jochen Klein and Meike Nixdorf. Probably the most precious photo-book I own is Boomoon’s Stargazing at Sokcho – the eerie, cold, quiet mountains transport you to another world.

11. You have been featured in many publications. Are you also working on something on your own?

I have started to look into this in the last year, more to come I hope.

© Ellie Davies

12. Three books of photography that you recommend?

'Art Photography Now' but Susan Bright, published by Thames and Hudson, 'Art and Photography' by David Campany, published by Phaidon, and Land and Environment Art’ by Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, published by Phaidon.

13. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

I took my baby son to the Light Show at the Hayward Gallery, we were both inspired!

14. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

I have just launched my new series ‘Between the Trees’. There are currently eight images and a Triptych. This series is ongoing so I will be making new images to add to it over the winter and coming spring. I am working towards a solo show at the Richard Young Gallery in Kensington in London in the autumn of 2014.

© Ellie Davies

Hannah Höch
‘Hannah Höch’

Whitechapel Gallery, London
15.01.2014 - 23.03.2014

Hannah Höch was an artistic and cultural pioneer. A member of Berlin’s Dada movement in the 1920s, she was a driving force in the development of 20th century collage. Splicing together images taken from fashion magazines and illustrated journals, she created a humorous and moving commentary on society during a time of tremendous social change. Höch was admired by contemporaries such as George Grosz, Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters, yet was often overlooked by traditional art history. As the first major exhibition of her work in Britain, the show puts this inspiring figure in the spotlight.

Bringing together over 100 works from major international collections, the exhibition examines Höch’s extraordinary career from the 1910s to the 1970s. Starting with early works influenced by her time working in the fashion industry, it includes key photomontages such as High Finance (1923) which critiques the relationship between bankers and the army at the height of the economic crisis in Europe.

A determined believer in artistic freedom, Höch questioned conventional concepts of relationships, beauty and the making of art. Höch’s collages explore the concept of the ‘New Woman’ in Germany following World War I and capture the style of the 1920s avant-garde theatre. The important series ‘From an Ethnographic Museum’ combines images of female bodies with traditional masks and objects, questioning traditional gender and racial stereotypes. Astute and funny, this exhibition reveals how Höch established collage as a key medium for satire whilst being a master of its poetic beauty.

© Images credit
1. Hannah Höch, Für ein Fest gemacht (Made for a Party) 1936, collage, 36 x 19.8 cm, collection of IFA, Stuttgart. 
2. Hannah Höch, Ohne Titel (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (Untitled [From an Ethnographic Museum]), 1930, collage, 48.3 x 32.1cm, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, photo: courtesy of Maria Thrun. 
3. Hannah Höch, Kleine Sonne (Little Sun), 1969, collage, 16.3 x 24.2 cm, Landesbank Berlin AG.

© Whitechapel Gallery

BY RACHEL WOLFE

At first glance, Joy Drury Cox’s work could be perceived as thoughtful, quiet and unobtrusive. It is in these subtle qualities the viewer is drawn inward, to examine notions of labor, concepts of form, space and constructions within other entities, among other fruitful considerations. Dispelling the engrained mythologies of artists and their methodologies is no easy task. Joy’s work opens these lines of communication by highlighting the simple qualities in good materials and here, explains her aptitude for the succinct by elaborating on her art through action processes.

1. The reoccurring theme of art through action, a minimalism meets poetry, seems to string through the wide variety of mediums you take on in your work. Where would you say your inspiration stems from? And can you describe your artistic processes in relation to time, materials, your preferred work environment?

I like your mention of “art through action.” This is important to me in the most elemental of ways. Like many artists who use more than one medium, it is challenging at times to talk about my work because fundamentally people want to know what I do, what the work looks like.

© Untitled Spaces, Inkjet photograph, dimensions variable, 2006 - present

Saying that I make drawings or take pictures just never feels like enough. I am trying to be intensely cautious when deciding what medium to use to execute each project. Inspiration has always had for me a funny sort of artist-genius mythology tied to it, that at times feels too proprietary and ambiguous. My work stems from actual interactions/reactions to things in the world that anyone and everyone could have a reaction to. It usually starts with the question “why is this thing, this way?” I tend to hold ideas for a while until I have the time to execute them. I usually gravitate to everyday materials- standard sizes, good quality but not overly expensive paper, things you can find at the hardware store. My hope is that these materials are re-highlighted for their simple intrinsic qualities through my work. In grad school when my work became less photographic, I started working at home, and it has been that way for me ever since.

2. In your statement, you speak to “notions of labor, form and space.” What about these topics creates the most interest for you?

Obviously these are pretty broad terms, which people have written book lengths worth of research on. My sort of rebirth as an artist came with a series of drawings I did in 2006 of job applications for low-wage service industry jobs. The words labor, form and space have come to take on various meanings in later work, but for that first series, ‘Applications’, I was really interested in the “space” of a form. More specifically, I was thinking about how people might limit or define themselves in a given proscribed space for the purpose of acquiring a job, and whether this standardized evaluation form could accurately reflect how good a job one might do.

© Applications, graphite on paper, 30 in. x 22 in., 2006

The drawings were made by measuring each line/box of the form and then redrawing it on another piece of paper. I omitted the text of the forms, so the viewer was confronted with this pseudo-abstraction. It was a labored process, but one that didn’t have the look of taking a long time, which I liked.

3. There’s almost an inescapable candor and humility to your work. In other words, in a world increasingly relying on the obscurity in approach, your work though feels a bit more friendly. A great example is your ‘Thank You Letters’. Is there something in particular from your life experiences, environment or anything else that might be contributing to this?

I have a personal interest in saying thank you. Maybe it has something to do with being raised in the South. The ‘Thank You Letters’ are less these days, but I initially sent them in response to specific works of art that I saw museums and curators choosing to display. The lines of communication among the various strata of artists, curators, gallerists, and museum officials aren’t always so open. A few years ago, I was especially responding to works that I saw in institutional spaces that didn’t seem like the fad of the moment. Obviously, I think artists should be thanked for making the work they do, but I also feel like when an institution displays something risky or unpopular, there should be some sort of acknowledgement from the community as well.

© Thank You Letter, (To Ms. Kleinberg), photocopy w/ stamp
11 x 8.5 inches, 2008

Clearly the letters have an affinity to conceptual art’s aesthetic. I’m using an old Smith Corona typewriter, and it is pretty amazing how many times I had to retype each letter to get a mistake free copy. The process makes me really carefully consider each word and sentence. I hope these letters pick up on some untapped, friendly form of institutional critique as well.

4. At the same time, there’s a sense of detachment or perhaps an extreme distilling of content, thought and meaning. Are your works of a personal or non-personal nature? Or perhaps more of a social or slightly scientific exploration of labor, form or space?

My feeling is that most artwork is personal in some general way, if only in that at the very least an artist feels personally connected to an idea that he or she uses art to express. Often the notion of personal or not is made manifest by the conversation surrounding the art rather than the actual objects.

©     Subsidy Opportunity #3 ($642.48)

The danger with discussing work in terms of the personal is how quickly the conversation can change to being more about the person and less about the ideas/art object(s). With that, I’m personally invested in the ideas my work deals with, but I am less interested in how these ideas pertain to me specifically.

5. ‘One Liner’ seems to have had a sense of humor instilled in the piece. It appears as if you leave your artistic intention wide open to interpretation by the viewer. Can you speak more on this?

Measurement has been a component of my work for several years now. I like to address the problems of measurement both through the subject matter that I chose but also through how the work is made (i.e. measuring and re-drawing to scale job applications, birth certificates and other bureaucratic forms). This piece, “one-liner”, was initially conceived of as a response to a call for artists to try to conceive of how cities (like New York) could be in general better places to live. The ruler was supposed to be a pocket-sized tool for people to measure small things in their lives: a device to understand space on a micro level. I guess in some ways I wanted the text to remind the users of how very rare it is to be surrounded by a space where you and all your belongings fit.

© One-liner, wooden ruler, 1 in. x 6 in. edition of 200, signed and numbered, 2011

One of New York’s never ending challenges is coping with or overcoming the inadequacies of confined spaces. Obviously, there is a whole other reading of the piece that is perhaps more where the title comes from. At some point, there will be a twelve-inch ruler and also other rulers made of different materials. I like that the phrase can have more or less weight depending on the ruler. David B. Smith wrote a lovely bit about the piece here.

6. Texts and generally recognized forms take on new meaning in your work. How would you relate your ‘Every State I’ve Ever Stepped Foot’ to ‘Old Man and Sea?

These two pieces were generated from a similar tactic, which I’ve used in several works. I think standard formats provide viewers with something they are visually comfortable with looking at. Through a subtraction of some information, I hope to destabilize the assumptions that go hand in hand with looking at something recognizable.

© Every State I Ever Set Foot In, 10.5 x 7.5 inches, ink on mylar, 2007

With an “edited” re-presentation of a map or a book, I hope that viewers question the essential nature and boundaries of each. What I loved about each of these pieces was how simple the idea was and how much became open from just carrying it out. With the map, the delineating language, which on the surface reads so clearly, really made me question what it meant to “set foot” somewhere. I was drawing this type of personal map for friends for a while, and I repeatedly got the question, “does it count if I just went to the airport in ______?” I also liked the temporal permanence of the drawing, which is now no longer quite as “true,” which points nicely back to actual functional maps of the world that become outdated.

© Old Man and Sea, ink on mylar and limited edition artist book, dimensions variable, 2006, 20012. Installation view of original ink on mylar drawings.

© In 2012, Conveyor published a limited edition artist book based on the original drawings. The book is available for purchase through Conveyor and Sternthal Books.

7. Artists are always working up something new. Do you see yourself taking your work in a new direction, implementing any new mediums or installation techniques that you’d like to share?

I am an artist. Things are always simmering…

© Joy Drury Cox