Photography is arguably one of the best documenting tools. Not long after the invention of photography, artists went out on the streets and journalists dived into war zones to bring scenes of leisure and destruction to viewers, metaphorically freezing fleeting moments for further examination.
During Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, a rare civil disobedience in Hong Kong demanding the universal suffrage of the city’s leader, protestors built barricades with found objects around the three occupying sites in order to fend off police’s siteclearings.
Johnny Gin, seeing these barricades as ‘a type of vernacular expression arising from protest culture’, began documenting the ephemeral structure of protestor’s ideological struggle and creativity in his series ‘Architecture of Insurgency’. In the statement of this project, he wrote ‘Set against a backdrop of Government buildings and monolithic office towers, this somewhat “nostalgic” mode of resistance encircled a singular “privatized public” space, underscoring the dialectical relationship between traditional power structures and their subversive counterparts.’
This barricades are not technically the traditional architecture that you photographed, Why do you decide to turn your lens towards these barricades?
I work in Central near the protest site, and I started going there at lunch two or three times a week to observe all the activities and look at the protestinspired street art that was sprouting up all over the area. I noticed all the barricades that were erected within the protest zone and how they changed every time I visited. As someone who is interested in architecture and in particular urban spaces, I began to view them as vernacular architectural expressions because they were spontaneous and constructed with local materials to meet very specific needs.
Even when there was talk about saving all the protest art, I knew that the barricades once dismantled could never be reconstructed elsewhere. I was compelled to undertake this project not only as a typological documentation of these transient structures, but also as a photographic examination of the power struggle between the established authorities and the insurgents as expressed through the spatial and environmental relations.
How does these temporary ‘architecture’ during the movement change your view on architecture and/or your older projects?
The rural vernacular architecture that I normally photograph is usually set against a picturesque backdrop of trees and mountains. Here the barricades are framed against the imposing background of highway infrastructure, Government buildings and towering monoliths of steel and glass—the concentration of money and power in the heart of the financial district. This current project is a bit more conceptual in that by photographing the barricades within this context, and in relation to the repurposed landscape, I hope to reveal them as intermediaries in the struggle. I photographed the barricades in the same manner as I would any architectural subject, with a straight on, formal composition under neutral lighting conditions. I wanted to describe them in great detail but with a disciplined sensibility. In that regard, I haven’t veered dramatically from my other projects.
How do you feel participating in the movement as a photographer? What did you see? What is your story?
The Occupy Movement is probably one of the largest social movements in the history of Hong Kong and also one of the most massively documented events. We have already seen many great images and projects inspired by the Movement that convey the aspirations and struggles of the proletariat. I hope that my project can add to that conversation and perhaps inflect a new and different understanding of the narrative.
Johnny Gin is a copywriter and photographer living and working in Hong Kong. His photographic interest lies in the examination of urban spaces and vernacular environments and the ways in which these spaces inform us about the culture and identity of a city. His personal and student work have been exhibited in Hong Kong and in Savannah, Georgia. He is currently an MFA Photography student in SCAD Hong Kong.
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started?
Some of my earliest childhood memories involve my dad holding a camera. He taught me the first steps of photography. I still remember how fascinating it was to look through the lens. As an adult and a photographer I understand the motive and urge of my father to collect memories by using the camera and I deeply honor him for that. We use photography in different ways yet with much in common. The basics of photography that my father taught me, are still important to me.
2. Tell us about your educational path. (fill in school) What are your best memories of your studies? What was your relationship with photography at that time?
In 2001 I moved to Jerusalem and started my Photography and Digital Media studies at the “Hadassah College”. I graduated in 2004 and continued to study photography in a post graduate program at the “Musrara School” in 2006-2007. During the B&W course I was exposed to the work of Dieter Appelt that has strongly influenced my study and my final project ’The Storm Still Rages Inside’. This project still have a major influence about my identity as an adult.
3. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?
I loved printing at the B&W lab. The red light, the smell of the chemicals… The printing was like a kind of spiritual act. I also spent a lot of time at the library, searching for photographers that could turn on my inspiration and encouraged me to start my own collection of photo books.
4. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?
Daphna Ichilov was the first teacher that really understood my works. She also curated few exhibitions of my works. So she have a special place in my heart.
5. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?
The digital revolution made photography more accessible but it also changed the status of the photographer. I think that not everyone who hold camera is a photographer.
6. About your work now, how would you describe your personal research in general?
My works are always very emotional and walk on the thin line between old and new, sometimes between reality and dream. An important aspect of my works is the actual act of photographing the image, collecting or creating a memory. Photography is my way of expression and it always comes from the depth of my heart. The whole process is very important - from the physical act of walking with the camera to the magic behind the lens, the slow editing and the printing.
7. What about ’The Storm Still Rages Inside’?
Via ‘The Storm Still Rages Inside’, I captured stylish freezings of situations indecisively, realistic or imaginary, and not a vivid everyday environment. In each frame I created a poetic, symbolic and dramatic reality, moving on the thin line between life and death, reality and fantasy, alienation and belonging, sanity and obsession, fear, pain and loneliness; while stretching the physical and emotional borders, a process that eventually leads to catharsis.
This project is a milestone in my life as a photographer and as an adult. The process was a form of meditation and confession of emotions that I couldn’t express in words. Someday I’ll continue it.
'The Storm Still Rages Inside' was a very strong experience and I stretched all my limits during the shooting and the printing. Taking the pictures at the different locations was like a journey to the unknown. The physical act of taking the photo lead my body and soul into another dimension. I couldn't foresee what is going to happen during every session. Projects such as ‘Inner Stations’ and ‘Swan Song’ made me understand that there is something special about being in a place and creating a frame - it’s like being a god who creates a new world.
8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
Most of the my works made by medium format (Bronica 6x4.5 during my studying) or my favorite large format (Shen Hao 4x5). I have also worked a lot with polaroid cameras (SX 70 and 600) and toy cameras (Holga and Lomo). For snapshots and family stuff I use G11 and Instagram.
9. Tell us about your project ‘Disintegration of a Revived Nation’.
It is my main project since 2007. I’ve been roaming across Israel to examine the relationship between man and nature (and the, sometimes absurd) connection and constant tension between past, present and future. I create an intimate atmosphere in every frame and put my personal feelings, emotions and nostalgia into it. Everywhere I go I recognize a personal memory that can ignite a collective memory of the viewer.
I believe that the added value of an image is the ability to make the viewers give it their own interpretation and by that give the image a new life. I am an Israeli photographer who deals with the identity of a complicated and revived nation, but I believe that my work could also reflect the reality of other nations. This is the reason why I intentionally avoid Israeli characteristics and create more universal frames.
10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?
There are a lot of photographers that I really love such as Laurent Champoussin, a master of self making books, Christophe Le Toquin, Gerry Johansson, Andreas Gehrke and many many others.
11. Three books of photography that you recommend?
- ‘Skeltons in the Closet’ by Klaus Pichler - ‘Deutschland’ by Gery Johansson - ‘Topographie’ by Andreas Gehrke
12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
Few months ago I saw the “Magnum Contact Sheets” exhibition, it was really interesting idea for exhibition and the way of presentation was very exciting.
13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
Lately I’m mostly dedicated to my daughter. Yet I am still searching for a publisher for the project ‘Disintegration of a Revived Nation’. I am also working on the archive, and I’m finding works that had been forgotten over time. I would love to be able to publish some of these works, with different formats and concepts.
14. What do you think about Israeli photography? Is it distinct from photography produced in other countries? In what ways?
Right now I’m a little bit outside of the Israeli art scene. I think the Israeli photography has been influenced by The New Topographics and German Photography. My favorite photographers are Yaakov Israel, Sharon Ya’ari, Gilad Ophir, Roi Kuper, Simcha Shirman and Pesi Girsch.
15. Finally I would like you to comment on this sentence I found on an interview with Dieter Appelt in relation with the situation in Israel. «Everyday, we are bombarded by millions of photographic images which by the time evening comes are dead in our memory. Sometimes not just what comes out of my mind, but what I conceptualize in my head is equally important. The mystery in art still exists for me. The more this reflection of something of magic, mysterious, is represented in a work of art, the more we can learn from it.»
First of all I’m not a political photographer, although it’s hard to separate my art work from the political context of my everyday environment. For years I haven’t even expressed any political ideas but I can tell you that the situation in Israel is very different from what you see/hear/read via the media. I believe that when a person is exposed to certain information regarding Israel they should keep in mind its history as well. The media is full of images that are not showing the whole story so you can use it as unrealistic propaganda. I’m not sure that the way artists show Israel is the right way or the way I see it. I wish it could be more balanced.
BOESKY EAST is pleased to present Temporal Maps of a Non-Sedimented Land, a solo exhibition of work by Thiago Rocha Pitta. This is Rocha Pitta’s first show at the gallery, organized in collaboration with curator Simon Watson. The exhibition will run from February 22 – March 22, 2015, at 20 Clinton Street, New York.
Thiago Rocha Pitta’s temporal and sensitive art often depicts environments from his native Brazil. Through watercolor, photography, sculpture, and video, Rocha Pitta focuses on small, yet emotive elements of the natural world, whether ocean tide, rainclouds, or trails of sap. His work manages to decelerate the passage of time within a single frame or subject, requiring the viewer’s close attention and quiet introspection.
In this exhibition, Rocha Pitta develops his study of nature through an installation of five videos, each depicting a different desert terrain in Argentina. Referred to as “maps,” these videos capture a deceptively small physical alteration in the land that causes it to either fall, collapse, or become wet or dry. Although an organic process is not at play here (the alterations are the artist’s experiments), the videos still surge with activity and transformation which allude to universal forces like entropy and death. Enacting a cascade of sand like an hourglass, or a desiccation of a small stream of water, Rocha Pitta suggests that physical dynamism is not only the prerogative of living beings, and further, that maps cannot adequately represent the ongoing effects of time. Viewed together, Rocha Pitta’s videos are a meditation on the formation and deformation of geological processes. Individually, they act like monochrome digital frescoes, amplifying the sometimes small, but nonetheless destructive forces that act incrementally together on the bedrock of our planet.
Thiago Rocha Pitta (born 1980 in Tiradentes, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is widely recognized as one of Brazil’s leading contemporary artists. He has held solo exhibitions internationally at Galeria Millan, Sao Paolo (2014); Gluck50 Gallery, Milan (2013); Andersen Contemporary, Copenhagen (2012); Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro (2010); and Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe (2009), among others. In 2012, Rocha Pitta was selected to participate in the 30thBienal de Sao Paolo with his installation A iminencia das poeticas. His work has been incorporated into public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Hara Museum, Tokyo; the ThyssenKrupp, Vienna; and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paolo, Sao Paolo.
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
I took my first pictures – like I consciously want to take a photograph as an image – when I was about 15 years old. I had to do some homework for a new media class I took back then. I remember strolling through the parental garden, photographing flowers and all kind of things that you can come across in a garden. Before that, I had occasionally taken some pictures of kids, Nathalie Nijs during holidays, celebrations and family gatherings with my father’s Canon AE 1, which actually was a big thing. I felt significant like Nathalie wrote, because film only provided limited number of exposures. It was a serious thing back then, you did not have the liberty to fool around like you can today.
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
Well, I guess I started fooling around with the camera, but the approach to photography is of course totally different from what you do as a kid with a camera. Perhaps I took it a bit too far back. I really started photographing after I finished “Le 75”. While studying, I was too influenced by all this new stuff I was confronted to. I was really impressed by all this “Düsseldorfer Schule” thing going on in the late nineties, early noughties. My first contact with this was an exhibition I saw in ‘95 at the Casino Luxembourg, called “The 90s:A Family of Man?”. They had included some beautiful prints from Roger Wagner, Rineke Dijkstra and many more, and I was totally stoked by the intriguing beauty of this photography. Sharp, precise, with prints where you could almost step into that confronted you like only reality can. I did not understand the technical complexity behind these images but was totally under their spell. After years of trying to get to this quality, I liberated my work with going digital. It allowed me to get a more playful, permissive side to image production that I did not have with the very technical large format, documentary-style influenced photography I was doing. The digital camera was meant to take photographs more easily of the everyday things I was living. Not in an artistic approach, but in a normal, popular, democratic use of photography, which is to stop time and collect/create memories.
3. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?
Digital has opened photography an ease of use that it never had before. But this probably is some kind of Pandora’s box. Never there was as many good photography, but never before this quality got lesser attention than in our fast paced digital days. Regarding social networking, it is probably the most overrated thing we came across the last decade. Ok, you get information about almost everything, but in general things exchanged on this platforms don’t go beyond the futile when it is not a specialised blog like this one. Knowledge gets drowned in information. All is accessible, is just a click away. This is a chance but also a huge dilution. The chance to get your work out of course is given, but does this really bring you opportunities? You better go out there a meet the people in charge for real.
4. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?
My personal research is one of the pictorial values of the photographic image. It is always, in the first line, a questioning of connotation and the independent communication of the photograph. It is a hate-love towards photography and a disbelief in its ability to register and inform on a same level. On a second level comes the photographic investigation of the territory, may it be Brussels as in the collective work of Projet: BXL, realised during a residency at Contretype with Sarah Morissens, Luca Etter and François Goffin, the personal and intimate “territory” in the ephemera series or images of European Landscape - built on a matrix of violence, war and crisis - in the last series called Dystopian Circles / Fragments…all along.
5. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
Absolutely not. Of course I have a tendency to work in 4x5 inch format because of its quality, but the prints are digital. I have used all kinds of cameras and formats until now. Predominately it is about the pleasure of photographing, may it be with a Polaroid camera, a digital Canon, the Pentax 67 II - that I specially cherish - or my Linhof Technica and Sinar camera.
6. Tell us about your latest project Dystopian Circles/Fragments… all along?
DC/FAA is a long-term project. I love being slow in my production. Images have to be taken, then printed and looked at for quite some time before I can really tell if I want to get it out or not. The project really got form after a month-long trip to Lampedusa. I wanted to produce something that made sense, sense in terms of fitting my personal/political view of what surrounds us here in Europe’s wealthiest part. But primarily, the work I have been doing since 2010 is merely about questioning the medium. The title Dystopian Circles is both about what is depicted and the relation of disbelief in the assumed capacities of photography to tell 1000 words. It does tell something, but not necessarily the story extruded of the “reality”. A picture of a lobby of a crematorium of Dora-Mittelbau, doesn’t tell you a lot of things if you don’t get the meta-text. But all of my pictures come short of exactly this information. This is one side of the “dystopic” relation towards photography. What interested me in this series was to photograph places of violence like this lobby, the sea seen from Lampedusa to the south, or the Balkans, landscape of the last (official) war in Europe (a picture of the Fort of Srebrenica – the medieval one, not the Battery Factory- just because of the tension in the conception that you could get) Landscapes linked to austerity and the crisis, primarily in Greece and Italy.
7. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, who influenced you in some way?
Influences in photography are probably very large. As I am collecting books for over ten years now, most of the photography I’ve seen is on paper. I don’t really know what is going on in the digital world; I don’t have tumblr, twitter and all this. I follow photographer’s work in a classical way; I buy a book or go to see a show. For me printing qualities still are an issue. These backlit images on screen tend to be too flattering to the eye and mostly lack the resolution and size to be fully appreciated. My influences definitely are z.Z(t) volume II from Dirk Braeckman, the MOMA publication on Gursky from 2001 - one of the first books I bought – Kuroyami from Sakiko Nomura, Vinter from Lars Tunbjörk or books such as the beautiful Trying to dance from JH Engström. But the list is probably way longer because the photographic image has the ability to get caught somewhere in your neuronal system as it is so close to the experience of vision. Of course there are shows that I’ve seen that left a trace, but the most important is probably the above-mentioned The 90s:A Family of Man? at the Casino because it was some kind of trigger.
9. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
Echolalia: Ana Torfs at the Wiels was a really interesting one. You got a lot of input and she made impressive use of the possibilities of the photographic image. The Berlinde de Bruyckere show at SMAK. You just shut up and look at this work. It is so powerful. And, ok, it is not a show, but I had a really nice experience with Paul Gaffney, Colin Pantall, Fabrice Wagner, Philippe Malcorps and Pierre Liebaert at Tharoul, where they produced a single-copy book. I had the chance to spend an evening with them, the night the book was hand-made by Pierre! A beautiful experience with nice people and a wonderful work produced.
10. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
DC/FAA is the project right now. I am finishing the editing and preparing the first dummy for book that should get out this year. I am also working to install a Project-Space in Luxembourg with noema, an organization which was founded by Francois Goffin and myself a few years ago and that now has moved to Luxembourg an got support from other people, such as Daniela Del Fabbro, a former curator from the CNA in Dudelange – an good place for photography that should be better known. They produced the well-known Coexistence series from Stephen Gill and this year Paul Gaffney will be there for a few weeks to produce new work. We also prepare a show for the Biennale de photographie en Condroz with a photographer, unknown to the public, but with a really interesting production in photography since the 80’s. I hope it all works out.
11. What’s your relation to Nathalie Nijs?
I am not having a specific relation to Nathalie Nijs; we only had the occasion to show our work at the Artwall event organized by Peter Watershoot in December 2014. When I mention her it is first of all because it struck to read about how close our first experience in photography were. There are some intersections in our approach to photography for sure.
Le 75 was a lucky match for me. I had already been accepted in a school in England and, at the last moment, I hesitated and was thinking about going to Brussels. It was just the perfect experience for me; it was more about sharing things, about a bunch of friends, than actually being in a scholar structure. The environment was quite free and permissive and gave just the right amount of support to the students that they needed, or wanted. Coming out of the 75, we wanted to continue with this kind of dynamics and started the “Projet : BXL”, which was realized over the next year within the residency program of Contretype. We got the supported by MonsieurJean-Louis Godefroid, a huge but probably underestimated force in Belgian Photography. He was the first to show people like Robert Mapplethorpe in Europe, gave residencies to people like Elina Brotherus or JH Engström when nobody even had heard of them. I had the chance to meet people that cared, at the 75 or right after my studies.
13. You’re referring to ‘The 90’s : a family man. Why is this so important?
It is more important than other shows that had an impact, simply because it was the first of this kind that I saw. It was a rich mix of the photography done at that time and left a big imprint in my innocent mind back then.
14. You told me you work in well-named territories. Why do you limit yourself to certain territory?
It probably is a protective reflex I have in order to not lose myself in a massive production where I never would find an end to it. I need a certain kind of constraint to be able to focus myself on one thing. I tend to be a bit disjointed. So to keep things free and diverse but at the same time related to each other, I have to set a frame that provides me structure.
NOEMA is a project with people from different backgrounds who just wanted to organize things in the cultural and artistic domain. We needed an association of our own to simply be able to get to height of our ambitions. We were tired of waiting for others to offer the things we wanted to be done. So we are currently trying to give us the means to do so. But it is probably too early to get precise on this topic, as we are moving the organization to Luxembourg and want to get things really rolling for autumn this year.
16. How do you see the future of photography in general evolve?
Photography as a technical medium has seen a lot of development in the past years. When I started, digital was not really an issue – the first consumer cameras with 5MP were arriving on the market, quality was lousy and prices too high – but things have changed at a tremendous pace. Since a couple of years we are at the point where digital and analogue are mostly at eye level. So this technical issue should be off the table and it becomes more of a stance of personal taste than the need for highest possible quality. This transition to a digital tool has freed photography of a lot of restrictions, may they be financial, time-related or of craftsmanship. Things have become much easier than they were 15 years ago. Today a lot can be done within three clicks, things that needed knowledge of a specific technique and time. Filters are probably the biggest and most dangerous advances in digital photography that we have seen the last years. Mediocre photographers can achieve a lot of things by chance and do not necessarily have the comprehension of what they actually are doing.
But all of this is to get to the point that photography today is freer than ever before. You can work with wetplates, you can only work with web-based images, you can cut old pictures up and do collage, and you can still be a documentary photographer or just call yourself an artist. The field of the artistic practice with, or within photography, are today liberated of all sorts of constraint and therefore come closer to classic notion art. The digital aspect of photography will ensure the biggest evolution of the medium. Photorealistic images, completely constructed in the computer, will probably be the next thing getting attention. We will get closer to Hollywood and leave behind the old segregation of the Art and the Photography. But I am happy to see that there still is a place for good old classical photography. The philosophical aspect of indexicality and proximity to reality will be completely irrelevant to the next generation of photographers, but photography – as craft that paints with light and not with electrons – will continue to have its place. The division that separated photography from art until the 80’s will never fully disappear and we will have both ways of handling the medium and its history. Both are appropriate. Photography will get more of a material that you use and the “creative photography” will, from now on, have a certain nostalgic connotation stuck to it.
BANCO DE TEMPO is a project by the duoIsabel Löfgren and Patricia Gouvêa started in 2011 at the Jardim do Museu da República in Rio de Janeiro, and that resulted in a homonymous exhibition at Galeria do Lago, between January and May 2012. The publication released in 2015 unites in a single body of work, a conceptual aspect (text and photo) and a lyrical and poetic side (stills from the video). They find a common ground in the performative or participatory nature of each work. From a photograph - found in the historical archive of the Museum - of former President Nilo Peçanha (resident of Palácio do Catete between 1909/10) sitting on the bench gardens with his dogs, the duo started their observation, research and documentation about motion and the possibilities of experiencing time (acceleration x lenght) by park visitors with the garden benches as the main element. [We talked to the project authors]
Still of the book Banco de Tempo, published in 2015
1 - Jacques Aumont, in his book “Les Théories des Cinéastes”, talking about the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky says that the art of cinema should be the art of treating time, pick it up and re-form it - but with the greater respect for the real-time, for the alive time. It is the procedure that Tarkovsky calls ”sculpting time” (title given to his book about art and cinema). Sculpting (metaphor of fine arts) and, through the editing, creating a rhythm (music metaphor). In fact, Tarkovsky’s film plans are generally long with millimetric camera movements, as if the filmmaker scanned the environment to absorb its fundamentals. In particular, this, impalpable, and omnipresent, time. How it was the work of constructing the videos for the installation ‘Sopro’? Could you define the process as “sculpting time”?
Very interesting that you start quoting Tarkovsky, his work is a very important reference for us. Through films, he was one of the researchers who has gone further with the study of the multiple experiences of time and on how this may affect the viewer. For example, in Andrei Rublev, 1971, we already have at the beginning of the film a long and thorough plan that follows a flying balloon over a river to shatter on the ground, a masterful camera plongée that is accelerating and then cuts another plan in slow motion of a horse gracefully rolling on the ground. This take us into his work through a sensory way.
He was a master at it. The opening of Solaris, 1972, is also amazing, a 4 minutes plan that features a swamp, from micro to macro, with direct sound. Obviously both were millimeter planned and tested, but it always seems that there is room for the observation of the case. This ‘alive’ time so important in artistic experience, which withdraws us from the dimensions of the hours and installs a time of affection and memory.
In our three works of video installation, the starting point was our observation of two uses of time by park visitors: some use the Jardim da República as a passage between the two streets that limit (the Praia do Flamengo and the Rua do Catete), while others use it as a sort of capsule of “permanence”, using the place for experiencing “downtimes”, those that are a priori unrelated to the extraordinary of life. From this observation, we plan performative actions with the camera. We use our bodies as support to the sculpturing of time from the experience of immersion in this place.
In each work existed an initial plan, but the chance was present to a greater or lesser extent. ‘Rotas de Fuga’ was more planned and had a more complicated implementation and editing because for us it was important to have the three channels where we walked each with a suitcase in hand and we were never in the same frame at the same time. This had to do with the fact that we are geographically separated and we find ourselves more in the virtual space than in the “real”. The suitcase for us was a metaphor of the imagined or experienced travel, of the movements we do throughout life, as well our artistic partnership carried out in a time built out of chronological time, since we live in different countries, with different time zones.
‘Sopro’, the last work, was the result 100% of a chance. We plan to spend the day interviewing visitors in the park when a wind storm happened there and so we were sitting on the benches with the eyes closed. There was only time to register.
2 - In the work BANCO DE TEMPO I/DESEJO DE HORAS, memory and desire combine the reports of the meeting between you and the visitors of the park which were interviewed. Which reciprocity, for those who participate, that is, how do you feel part of an exchange? How to mobilize their imagination?
Since the beginning of the project we wanted to do something where the space of the gallery interact with the park and vice versa. We searched the historical archive of the museum behind some visual history of the park, some stories that could serve as inspiration. We found the pictures of Nilo Peçanha sitting on a bench in the park with the dogs. This image matched our observation that benches in the park, which flank all the alleys, are those spaces that give the visitor a break in their day, their walk, and offers a moment of reflection, and contemplation, an opportunity for a nap and even a chat, or a dating, etc. What gives life to the park are the people and the stories that intersect on benches and their corners. What stories are these? What people think while sitting there? Where do they come from and where are they going? What does this moment of pause means in people’s lives? You touched on a key point - how to establish reciprocity with these people through a work of art, or rather, through a sensory experience.
In addition to this human and civil curiosity about the park, there was another concern, the artistic nature. Feeling limited in the practice of photography and video, we wanted to venture into other fields that were unknown to us - into the text field and the field of art in public space, and at the same time to question the notion of a copyright work.
But representing the landscape is not the same thing to intervene in the landscape - and for that we had to develop another language to deal with these new parameters. From the beginning, we have already been feeding a vague idea of doing a work that required the visitor to walk into the park, and there was already a latent a desire to engage the viewer with more than just the look, but engage the body in its moving. As we realize that many people came to the park to read quietly, we had the idea to push this act of reading into something open, public. Our urban environment is polluted with words, cards, signs, advertising, text elements that require our attention all the time. In the park, as an oasis, there was no request of attention to words, but textures, colors, temperatures, environments, nature, people. How could we use a text in a noninvasive way, as if it belonged to the place? Hence arose the idea that on the back of each seat, as in a notebook agenda, we could write a sentence, a fragment of the text that will continue in the near bench and so on, creating a literary wandering through the park. But write what? Quote a text already known? Write in our own handwriting? Everything seemed to return to this copyright issue that had to be unfold. And what if the text was not written by us? And if this work was an opportunity to tell a story about this park, from the people who use this park - something that only belonged to this place?
There would be no other way to tell these stories if not by sitting on the benches and talk to people. And from these rounds have emerged incredible stories. As the whole exhibition was a meditation on time, we use this issue to motivate the conversation. In the book, we wrote a text on these meetings, these people, and everything that did not fit on the benches but was retained in our memory and in our notes. We asked to each visitors: what would you do if you had more hours in a day? In each interview, we extract the answer to this question, which has become a quotation inscribed in the bench itself - as if we were giving back to the park the stories that inhabit it already.
In the end, the result reminded a little of the structure of the book‘Jogo de Amarelinha’ by Julio Cortazar, in which people read the text in the bench as a kind of game, a text that has no beginning, middle or end, and which presents itself as a loop. This form is reflected in our videos, which present ongoing activities and run in loops through time, allowing to watch them anywhere. Likewise, our collection of photographs also has no point of departure or arrival, neither a first nor an after, neither a cause nor a result - the images (such as the sentences) are. As in the game of hopscotch, who only plays jumps.
3 - In the second part of this work, sentences taken from the interviews are applied on each bench of the park and their regular visitors are now invited to choose a route to find written content and fills them with meanings. Meaning that are constructed, interpreted, maintained and processed by each of them. What is the role of this second call for participation?
What happened after the installation of the sentences, that is, how the texts acted, or even changed the daily life of the park is very difficult to document, it required to be present in the park, on the bench just when something happens. Every work of art in public space has this characteristic of unpredictability, and we enjoyed it - not having control over what happens next. We were fortunate to have some visitors who recorded and sent us a few moments of people interacting with the benches. These records are featured in the book as a second form of public participation, this time as registers of experience.
Also curious things happened. As the sentences were stickers on vinyl, in which each letter was an adhesive, there were those who took one or two letters of some words to change the meaning of the sentences. For example, a phrase that was originally “para o estudo” (for study) turned to “para tudo” (for all). Over time, I believe the letters were taken by people, or fell with the action of time, and the sentences were just falling apart. Today it remains very little of those sentences - and we like that too - that traces of the phrases reflect how the memory works. One day it will disappear altogether.
Speaking of side calls, the work of the benches unfolded in another work that was inside the gallery, where visitors were invited to participate, but not in an interview. Near the gallery entrance, we put an open book of dedications with the same question we have asked to park visitors as an instruction: what is your desire now? Every exhibition visitor could thus participate in this work when writing his/her ’wish for nows’ in the book. Within 5 months of exposure, the 40-page book was filled with phrases. Fun, serious, reflective, meditative, etc. This book of dedications, which we call ‘Livro de Horas’ can now be read within our publication as we scanned the pages and present them as a small delicacy.
4 – In the text ‘Ninfas’, Giorgio Agamben proposes the question: how an image can load up time? The answer, for him, is in the treatise “De la arte di ballare et Danzare,” by choreographer Domenico da Piacenza, who speaks of dance as an operation conducted on images sorted to the dancer memory. Thus, according to Domenico da Piacenza, the place of dance is not in the next move to do with the body, but in the image of the still pause that occurs between a move and another, loaded at the same time with memory and dynamic energy. In the work TIME BANK II / AROUND THE PARK IN 80 WORLDS, the images that you present seem also suspended, such as a momentary pause… As if the time that you talk about was the time of the construction of these intervals. An interval as an event between things, between places, a misfit and excessive temporality, which relies on everyday gaps. It is correct this approach?
Yes, this is a beautiful way to think about the interval, and reversing the actual hierarchy of value. It’s no longer the departure and the arrival that are important, but the transitions are becoming the events. In these unfinished lapses, and intervals what matters is that they inhabit the image.
5 - This work also deals with the repetition, as the images are all taken from the same angle. According to Deleuze, «to repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ’nth’ power.» [Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze]. What’s the point of repeating to you?
It’s interesting that you mention Deleuze, because maybe this option of shooting all with the same angle could be a possibility of what he meant by “repetition and difference”. In the work ‘Around the park in 80 worlds’, this choice of the same angle occurred for several reasons. Firstly because it evokes the first picture, which is the photograph of Nilo Peçanha sitting in the park that we found in the museum’s file during the research phase. He had a fetish for dogs, he owned several and walked with them in the park. This picture portrays not necessarily a State figure, but a proud man of his “children” in a very casual photograph made for newspaper publication.
Each photograph we took should evoke that first image, evoking it every time, in every new bench. The idea of the collection or series, began spontaneously when we traveled together in Scandinavia in 2011, more exactly in Suomenlina island. It is a fortress built by the Swedes in Finland now used as a tourist attraction. While walking through this island for a whole day, we started talking about the project and the camera began rolling. And so we started to add points to the project as the picture of Nilo Peçanha.
As it was a work for four hands, we also had to find a way to shoot the “same way” (or almost), so that it was difficult to distinguish the look (and click) from one another. Hence we took as principle to shoot all the benches encountered during the day-to-day, in all trips, until the time of the exhibitions, when we would have exposed one hundred of them. After the exhibition, we kept shooting benches to increase our collection. It has become part of our life, far beyond the project. It was very common during these years to send each other new benches photographed. Since then, the repetition is not only conceptual, but it was an important parameter in order to accomplish it.
In all other video works, we work with the loop, which is a kind of repetition, towards the circular structure of the work. The interesting of these works is that we both do the same gestures alternately, sometimes mirroring each other, sometimes doing the same thing at the same time. The circular action of the films means, in our case, that the films have no beginning/middle/end as they are not telling a story or conveying a message. However, the circular films all have a turning point, a point at which the film resets or returns to an initial state, and starts all over again. Every restart, repeat this action and makes it more powerful, in our view.
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How did it all begin? What are your memories of your first shots?
My first link to photography was my father – he gave me practice and experience. At some point our relationship was built mainly around our time spent together in the darkroom, focusing on acquiring skills. I had my own Zorka or Smiena (I destroyed a few of them), my father always carried Practica and slide, which was an expensive camera then and my biggest dream. I don’t remember him ever wanting me to focus on anything – he just gave me a tool and let my intuition rule. I could have taken my first photo unconsciously, at a very early age. I don’t remember it, but I remember making my first whole film (it actually appeared these were three films which I connected together in my memory) – presenting family, dog, my best friend.
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
Photography started to absorb me more when I discovered lomography and got involved in a relationship with imperfect equipment made of plastic and with using poor films. Then I started working on animated films, documenting shoots and taking DIT jobs. I took part in making of “The City Sails On” 2009 produced by Se-ma-for, which is a story about my home city Lodz. Now I continue this direction while working on “The Wizard of U.S.” by Balbina Bruszewska & WJTeam, which will be finished this year. I also got fascinated by climbing photography, which occupied me for a long time.
3. Tell us about your educational path. Is it true that you attended workshops organized by Sputnik Photos? Do you think these events influenced your personal work and the specific aesthetic you use?
For a few years I studied history, specializing in ancient history, which obviously has a big influence on topics I take up today. On the other hand, a very important moment in my photographic educational path was taking part in workshops organised by Sputnik Photos in 2012. It was really quick, but spent in an extremely inspiring company! For instance, I met there Warzyniec Kolbusz who recently rocks with his “Sacred Defence” and Karolina Gembara, who presents a very interesting view on contemporary India. During that time I was influenced more by the way of working and attitude towards photography than aesthetics. This was what they instilled in me for sure.
4. How would you describe your personal research in general?
I like to say that I deal with archaeology of the present. I show fragments of reality through traces we leave. Recently I avoid people on pictures. I don’t want to concentrate on a human being and to see everything from his/her perspective and that is always my first thought. I don’t know how long it takes before I change my mind again, but the two cycles I’m working on: ‘Antiquity Now’ and ‘No Name Poland’are definitely the result of this attitude.
5. Your latest project ‘Antiquity Now’ focuses on rather peculiar usage of antique references in Polish architecture and popular culture. Could you tell us more about this series?
The idea of this project is rooted in what my professor, Maciej Kokoszko, instilled in me – very trivial but true – that history never totally passes away and is always around us. I don’t mean great monuments, rather everyday usage of antique elements, very often not fully conscious. This attitude linked with my photographic eye constitutes “Antiquity Now”.
6. Why, in your opinion, Poles show such a huge sentiment to antiquity? These lands were never a part of the Roman Empire and that makes this issue even more surprising.
Not only of the Roman Empire, but also of Greece and Middle East, and Egypt at the top. Maybe because of lack of historical roots in the centre of civilisation we have such a fancy for making up for the loss. In the end, when you read Polish chronicles from the Middle Ages, you may notice that Poles are diluted descendants of Alexander the Great. 45 years of our history (communism time) during which travelling abroad was difficult and there was no place and/or means for individualism in Polish architecture just adds to this. After changes in 1989, when the barriers were broken and everyone could build what they wanted, the uncontrolled started to dominate Polish public space.
7. The other series you are currently working on is ‘No name Poland’, which appears to be a very specific investigation of the Polish urban and suburban landscape. Tell as more about this project.
This series is self-defining all the time. It is made when the opportunity occurs and still lacks proper explanation. At the moment I think I want to find some basic landscape, deprived of many elements which are everyday objects and cause distraction. When you reject them, disintegration and decay remains, crooked walls of the chimneys and antennas leaning all sides. This is an attempt of catching the essence of Polish landscape, deducting from it modernity and all changes it underwent during last years.
8. What kind of photography do you like to look at? Could you list a few names of photographers that inspire you?
I’m very inspired by Peter Bialobrzeski, Todd Hido and Aleksander Gronsky. I watch their photos again and again, they haunt me. Recently, I also dig a lot in Fototeka archive, which presents photos from film sets. It serves the history of Polish film seen from behind the scenes, many unknown photographers are there, I guess is just a matter of time. Besides, I love works of Shaun Tan, e.g. “Arrival”. It is a perfectly told story devoid of words, presented only in pictures. Wonderful imagination!
Just recently I’ve reached for the “Black Passport” by Stanley Green again. I still think this is a masterpiece in every sense. From time to time I like to go through Alex Webb’s “The Suffering of Light”, as it feels a bit like my favorite childhood band’s ‘the greatest hits’ album. Moreover, the rigidity of Koudelka’s “Gypsies” and perfection of the “Pastoral” book by Gronsky is what I like to look at.
10. Could you comment on the Polish photography scene?
In my opinion Polish photography is doing quite well. It is visible especially if we take a look at the results of international contests. I wish that more photographers had undertaken projects that are complex and in a way total in their assumptions. I’d like to see more projects like “Stocznia” by Michał Szlaga and “Święta Wojna” or “There’s No Such Thing As an Innocent Eye” by Wojtek Wilczyk. In fact, there are photographers working on this kind of projects, but on a smaller scale. Therefore there is a chance for my wish to come true in the future.
11. Any plans for the future? Do you think of turning your ‘Antiquity Now’ project into a photobook at some point?
In the nearest future I plan to finish shooting ‘Antiquity Now’ and start selecting the material. It will take a while. Publishing a book is a natural way to present one’s work, but I need to take my time and let the project grow till this shape.
Fotomuseum Winterthur presents the first major retrospective in Europe of the work of Paul Strand (1890–1976), one of the great modernist photographers of the twentieth century. Drawing from a recent major acquisition of 3,000 prints by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition shows the evolution of Strand’s work over six decades. It reveals the multiplicity of his practice, from his early efforts to secure photography’s position as a modernist art form, to his embrace of film-making, to his powerful evocation of people and place in his post-war photo books. Strand is revealed as a complex and contradictory figure: a stubborn aesthete, a committed leftist with communist sympathies, and a pastoralist motivated by a strong sense of social purpose.
The exhibition begins with Strand’s rapid mastery of the prevailing Pictorialist style of the 1910s and his growing interest a few years later in abstraction. We see him attempting to incorporate into photography some of the key lessons of modern art, especially Cubism and work by the American artists in the Alfred Stieglitz group. At the same time, Strand began to explore urban subject matter, including a remarkable series of close-up portraits of people taken anonymously on the streets of New York. He was investigating the capacity of the camera to record modern life and was particularly interested in its ability mechanically to capture mesmerizing detail. The exhibition includes Strand’s first short film, Manhatta (1921), a ‘city symphony’ dedicated to New York, made together with the artist Charles Sheeler. At once romantic and highly formal, it is considered the first American avant-garde film.
Strand was always interested in travel and in particular the capacity of the camera to reveal the qualities of place and events that would otherwise not be encountered. Between 1932 and 1934 he photographed in Mexico, a country which had a profound effect on him, deepening his engagement with the politics of the left. Here he made a remarkable series of portraits, placing a prism on the lens of his Graflex camera so as to make images surreptitiously. Strand was also interested in the context of Mexican peasant life, making an equally remarkable series of images of bultos, the carved and painted religious figures in Mexican churches. Strand’s enduring attention to time and history becomes more strongly articulated in these images, an effort to record qualities of life that he deeply valued.
Deeply impacted by the world economic crisis of the 1930s, Strand took an increasing interest in film-making as a means of encouraging social change. It would dominate much of his creative work over the next decade. The exhibition includes excerpts from two important films, Redes (1936) and Native Land (1942). Set in Mexico, the former is a fictional account of a fishing village struggling to overcome the exploitation of a corrupt boss. The latter, co-directed by Leo Hurwitz and by Paul Robeson, is Strand’s most ambitious film and was created after he returned to New York to set up Frontier Films, a collective dedicated to making left-wing documentaries. Blending fictional scenes and documentary footage, Native Land focuses on union-busting in the 1930s from Pennsylvania to the Deep South. Strand’s films reveal the extent of his political commitments, but equally the limits on his filmmaking ambitions as America became embroiled in the Second World War.
After 1945, Strand devoted his energies primarily to the production of photo books, offering him the opportunity to create complex portraits of people and place. With the photography curator Nancy Newhall, he published Time in New England in 1950, a book which conveyed a sense of the intersection of past and present to evoke a tradition in American culture of tolerance, liberty and democratic freedoms. These were important issues for Strand as during the same year he moved to France in response to the growing anti-Communist witch-hunts in the U.S. Here he would continue to search for communities that reflected his political ideals, in particular the Italian village of Luzzara in the Po River Valley which was published with Cesare Zavattini as ‘Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village in 1955’. Influenced by Zavattini’s neo-realist aesthetics the book concentrated on portraits of the villagers in their contexts of work and home, a moving homage to the qualities of everyday life.
Strand also photographed extensively in Africa and in 1963 he was invited to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, its first president following the end of British rule. Fascinated by Ghana’s emerging democracy during these years, Strand was excited to photograph a place undergoing rapid modernization. His book, published eventually as Ghana: An African Portrait (1976), presents a sense of Ghanaian modernity unfolding alongside traditional culture. Strand was clearly energised by the vibrant public life of the country and the book’s portraits are complemented by remarkable street pictures showing meetings, political rallies and outdoor markets.
Strand died at his home in Orgeval, outside Paris in 1976 aged 85. In his later years he frequently photographed his garden and the exhibition ends with a series of his lyrical Orgeval still lifes. These images extend the meditative exploration of nature he had begun in the 1920s and dwell on the domestic pleasures of a garden cultivated over twenty years.
Catalogue The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial scholarly catalogue, co-published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, priced CHF 69.
Credits Paul Strand – Photography and Film for the 20th Century is organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE. It is curated by Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the assistance of Amanda N. Bock, Project Assistant Curator of Photographs. The installation in Winterthur is made possible by the Vontobel-Stiftung and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
1. Tell us about your educational path. What was your relationship with photography at that time?
I have a bachelor’s degree in art history and studio art. While in college, I worked as an assistant for two photographers—one who primarily did advertising and editorial work (Michael Malone) and one who specialized in architectural photography (Patrick Drickey).
2. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?
Generally speaking, I was (and still am) especially interested in classical and modern art, and in all periods of architectural history. Regarding studio art, I would say the foundational courses in design have remained the most meaningful for me. I learned a tremendous amount about the mechanics of photography—cameras, film, lighting, and darkroom work—on the job.
3. Any professor or teacher who has allowed you to better understand your work?
No, but talking with my husband—who was an art historian—about my work and creative process was invaluable to me.
4. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?
To be honest, I think photography as a medium has both suffered and been enhanced by digital technology. One very positive note for photography in the digital age is social networking. Through JPG Magazine and then Flickr, for example, I met a group of international photographers with whom I’ve been interacting since 2008. In addition to receiving critical feedback on my own work, I’m exposed to a constant stream of really outstanding work by this group. So far, this experience has also led to a book—‘MODISMO: An Anthology of Photography’—that was edited and produced by Kurt Nimmo in 2009, and a project and exhibition—‘Souvenirs’—that was curated by Llorenç Rosanes and shown throughout Catalonia in 2011 and 2012.
5. You are also specialized in providing archival imaging and exhibition prints for artists, galleries, museums, and libraries. This is a very interesting topic of which we hear too little. Often even artists and photographers are not aware at all of its importance. Could you comment on this?
I sometimes photograph artwork for the purpose of attribution and authentication, as well. I agree that it is not uncommon for artists to be unaware of the importance of keeping a visual record of their work and of what is involved in creating this type of photograph. Once a painting, sculpture, architectural model—or any other one-of-a-kind piece—is sold or dismantled, the only record the artist has of its existence are the photographs he or she had commissioned of it. These photographs must be as accurate a representation of the object as possible. Lighting and color reproduction are critical, and, regarding three-dimensional work especially, so is composition. The same is true for installations: once an exhibit closes, photographs are the most reliable record curators and artists have of how the space and lighting were configured.
I’ve always enjoyed printing, and (in addition to printing my own work) have been producing exhibition prints for a couple of years now. Most recently, I printed ‘Zoe Strauss: Sea Change’. How a photograph looks online can vary quite a lot depending on screen calibration and other factors; with that in mind, in most cases, I believe a custom-made print is still the ultimate representation of a photograph.
6. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?
I read a lot. My personal work is continually influenced by what I’m reading (and vice versa), whether it’s non-fiction or fiction. In general, I find myself always exploring concepts of time, memory, perspective, and visual perception.
7. Tell us about your latest project?
‘Mind the Gap’ is the project I completed most recently. It grew out of two separate but interrelated series—‘Periphery’ and ‘Intermission’. Both of those series were concerned with intermediacy: ‘Periphery’ with the spaces between and ‘Intermission’ with in-between or transitional moments in time.
8. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?
Absolutely. There are others, but I often find myself revisiting the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, William Eggleston, Thomas Ruff (especially the ‘Cassini’, ‘Stereo Photographs’, ‘Stars’, and ‘Interiors’ series, and the building portraits he created for the Swiss architectural firm, Herzog & de Meuron), and Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’. I would include David Lynch’s directorial work for film and television in that list, too.
9. Some books of photography or not photography that you recommend, and why?
I think every photographer should read ‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes and ‘In Praise of Shadows’ by Junichiro Tanizaki, and peruse the monograph, ‘Thomas Ruff: Surfaces, Depths’. Its focus is much narrower than the books by Barthes and Tanizaki, but I would also recommend ‘Looking Through DuChamp’s Door: Art and Perspective in the Work of Duchamp, Sugimoto, and Jeff Wall’ by Hans Belting. Other books that I encourage everyone to read are ‘The Rings of Saturn’, by W.G. Sebald, ‘Labyrinths’, by Jorge Luis Borges, and the ‘Divine Comedy’ by Dante Alighieri.
10. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring? Also could you tell your impressions of the installation and project ‘Prison Obscura’, an exhibit curated by Prison Photography editor Pete Brook.
‘At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston’ (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and ‘Sophie Calle: Last Seen’ (at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum). Curiously, a few of the exhibitions I’ve seen recently that I’ve found most inspiring are video projects: Jennifer Steinkamp’s ‘Madame Curie 1’ (at the Sheldon Museum of Art); James Nares’ ‘Street’ (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art); and Tacita Dean’s ‘JG’ (at Arcadia University Art Gallery).
‘Prison Obscura’ is a traveling exhibition, and its installation is tailored to each venue in which it’s shown. I’m most familiar with the initial installation, which was at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Although the curator, Pete Brook, is a prison and sentencing reform activist, he doesn’t overwhelm viewers with a lot of explanatory wall text—he lets the work speak for itself. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of Americans don’t spend a lot of time contemplating our prison system; ‘Prison Obscura’ will change that. For me, the most intriguing project in the exhibition is Josh Begley’s ‘Prison Map’. ‘Prison Map’ is compelling on its own, but its impact is even greater when seen within the context of the other work.
11. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
I’m currently working on three series: ‘Cellular Sketchbook’, ‘In Parentheses’, and one tentatively titled ‘Terra Incognita’. The photos in ‘Cellular Sketchbook’ were originally intended just as notes to myself. I would encounter a scene that interested me, make a quick sketch of it with my phone, and return later to photograph it with a “real” camera. I still do that to a certain extent, but I’m so fond of the sketches and the spontaneous quality they have that I decided to make them a project on their own.
I hope to publish ‘Mind the Gap’ as a book in the near future and have some special plans for ‘Cellular Sketchbook’, too.
12. Could you name a few contemporary US photographers that have captured your attention recently?
Yes! Philip-Lorca diCorcia (his ‘Heads’ and ‘Hustlers’ series, in particular) and Taryn Simon (especially her project, ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’).
13. Why did you choose to collaborate with Urbanautica? And how will you help us to better approach and understand the United States photography scene?
I’ve been following Urbanautica for years and am excited to have been invited to become part of the curatorial team. I’m continually exposed to the work of emerging and established photographers, and am looking forward to sharing with the rest of the world the most refreshing and interesting work I come across that’s happening in the United States.
Chan Dick (陳的) is a commercial photographer whose personal work has caught as much as, if not more, public attention as his commercial work . His photo series ‘No compromise’ portray student activists aspired to make social progress in Hong Kong political scene. It is his photo book of picturesque bird eyed view of Chai Wan Fire Station that won him his Hong Kong Photo Book Awards. I talked to him about his production and curatorial process.
1. How does your latest award winning series ‘Chai Wan Fire Station’ turn into a complete photo story?
About one year ago, I heard a commotion from the toilet of my workshop, curious, I opened the ventilation window, peered down and saw firemen playing volleyball. After that, I spent about a month, just observing. I discovered that there is a routine of events that happened in this small volleyball court - training in the morning, volleyball match in the evening. There were occasional kindergarteners field trips, fire trainings and high officials inspections.
The scene is surreally picturesque for a coincidental discovery. I decided to pick up my camera and captured the scenes of the fire station, rare to the public eye, through the tiny window.
15 months later, I have taken over 1,500 photographs. The thought of turning these images into a photo book has always been on my mind, but it is not until the launch of Hong Kong Photo Book Awards that I put my thought into action.
2. You have worked on many projects, from commercial campaign to social documentary, how do you decide to make Chai Wan Fire Station a photo book? What aspects of a photo project do you consider a photo-book-worthy one?
The work I put out in the past, no matter commercial or personal, are conceptual. I spent a lot of time finding venues and subjects. Each photo story is meticulously planned. I spent substantial time and resources on each image and thus each story is composed of few photos only. The last few series of my work, including the photographs I took of Scholarism (a student activist group in Hong Kong) for universal suffrage in Hong Kong titled ‘No compromise’, ‘Escapers’ for a Freshwave (a Hong Kong short film competition for young local filmmakers) movie short and ‘War’, a photo story taken for kart racing aficionado to support the construction of racing circuit in Hong Kong. Each story has about a dozen of images, it was a fair amount to hold a photo exhibition, but too few for a photo book.
I do not mean that the amount of work produced should be the only consideration when it comes to making a photo book. For ‘Chai Wan Fire Station’, since all the images are taken in the same place and has similar visual elements, I was worried that my viewer may feel bored of the repetitive images, I spent much effort choosing the right photos. I tried different things to build a complete narrative.
Generally speaking, when deciding which photo story is to be made a photo book, I will consider four aspects: (1) the amount of work and quality. Take this book as an example, I picked around 30 photos out of the thousand I took to make sure every page fulfil viewer’s expectation. (2) photographic visual diversity of the story. Each photograph should be a surprise. (3) For photo book which has a loose theme, such as collages of snapshots, since the photos lack connection, each photo needs to be impactful. (4) Ideally, every photo should stand alone as well as fit in with a narrative.
3. How does Hong Kong inspire you artistically? Living in a city with such dense visual elements, does it influence your aesthetic and artistic thinking?
Born and raised in this city, I am in a love-hate relationship with Hong Kong. Frankly, I do not find this city visually pleasing. I wander through the crowded city every day. In the years of commercial photography and location scouting, I have witnessed unique Hong Kong landscapes being replaced by identical new buildings. The newer the place and building, the harder it is to find beautiful ‘lines’.
‘Time has chosen us’ (a popular phrase used by student protestors during the Umbrella Movement).The shrinking freedom of art expression motivates me to create more personal work. My task is to turn dull and flatness into beauty in photographs.
4. Any interesting photo project/ photo exhibition?
‘Yangtze, the Long River’ by Nadav Kander is a must-watch. It was currently exhibited in Hong Kong and I am lucky enough to talk to the photographer himself. He made me understand that commercial photography and personal photography are not mutually exclusive. He achieved excellence in both categories, which is my true inspiration.
One of the must-watch photo exhibition is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s in Taiwan. The photographs were spectacular, the atmosphere and the installation worked perfectly together. It was simple yet powerful.
Your favourite photo book of all time. Fujii Tamotsu’s “A KA RI” is definitely my all time favourite. I am fortunate to own a signed copy of the book.
1. Vincent, you currently have two exhibitions in Belgium. Can you tell us what they are about? What are the subjects of these two shows and which quests are lying underneath?
Hello David. Yes, I have two exhibitions in Antwerp: one solo show (‘Dzogchen’) at the FotoMuseum and a two-person show with Max Pinckers at Stieglitz19 gallery (‘The Monk and the Palm Tree’). It is all about photography, of course, and mainly focused on the life and photographic experience I had in the Himalayas. Written like this it could be seen as a new “National Geographic pilgrimage” in the Everest, but it is far from that! I started this project in 2009 when I was living in Kathmandu with my wife and my son. We moved there for one year. I wrote a lot and took a lot of photos during that period of time and later, during trekkings in Ladakh, the Annapurna region, etc. I was maybe searching for peace there and my (inner) nature. I was certainly very curious about everything and I did explore with a strong empathy the city and the mountains in the area, traveling and walking—both physically and in my mind—through literature, along the roads, in the dust, in the wind, as a natural flow.
Energy. I was deeply moved by a strong energy. Walking and writing. I wanted to make a new book, finalizing a trilogy: ‘As Dust Alights’ (sold out rapidly), ‘Some Windy Trees’, and the last one, ‘Dzogchen’ (coming this summer). In this show I mix different kinds of images, as usual, some texts, objects, books I love. It is for me like a living matter with no hierarchy between the different elements, and I try to invite the public to touch a piece of poetry inside common and magical still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. All connected, all the same, no category, no perfect and damaged, nothing about judging or having preconceived ideas and gentle exoticism. With joy and pain.
Drips, animals, rocks, plants, ponytails…. There is also something sacred in this show, a simple spiritual journey inside the colors of my brain…. Something crazy like that. Yeah! The show at the gallery includes images from the same series and also new images from a work in progress made in Cuba, where I came back after nine long years with my first book, made in Havana: ‘Beyond History’. This is more luminous and less nervous than before, maybe, and not so intimate; with just one place or one neighborhood, family, strange relationships, etc. It is more related to a humble maturity, Cuban poetry, (spring) light, old history, countryside, etc. I will try to have a book next year and will be traveling to Cuba again in March.
2. Which one of these two inventions is crucial to your practice: DSLR or tape ? Why?
DSLR = Digital single-lens reflex…. Wow, I had to check those four letters on the web to know what it meant exactly. I have used it only to shoot my books (especially when they are original, unique, copies as is the case with the ‘Revisited’ Cuban book) and keep a reproduction of those objects. Soooo … I guess tape is really the more useful and magic invention in the history of humanity. I can stick my images in crazy notebooks, with scribbles, bad painting, ecoline, texts, works on paper. I use it also on the wall as punctuations and for my new covers of the ‘Revisited’ Cuban book. It is a very sensual tool, and I like the sound when I cut it out with my hands and, well, this is something that is part of me now; I could never get divorced from my tape. But now I am just asking myself if the best invention is not the red marker to write on the books, on the wall, etc….
3. OK, If I summarize: You go far away, you shoot film, you walk, you read, you shoot, you write, you shoot, you draw, you shoot. So you must come back with a shit lot of raw material. How do you proceed to build a book or an exhibition?
With time…. As always, a ton of ideas are coming after the experience of shooting and living in the area of my dreams, and then it is like if I wanted to come back to the starting point of a magic trip where I saw a light, a complete image of something, in a “beginning-dream”. There is always a feeling there, at the birth of the project, (when? I don’t remember exactly, maybe at the exact moment of the first confrontation with the place) some kind of intuition, and the challenge is maybe to get closer and closer to this intuition, back there, under the mud and layers of a long experience. I am just thinking now that all this process is very Buddhist in a way. The perfect nature is just there, has always been there, just here inside, and ordinary experience and mind is just the mud and dust that makes you blind. You don’t see it anymore, or rarely, but this perfect nature is there.
Yes. It is the normal human condition. The point is: there is a forest of poems just there in each artistic project making my life exciting and luminous, and I try to expose them, to share them with others after a process of giving birth. But this is also a process of “editing” (I don’t like that word) … or “searching” also, maybe this word is better, just searching and searching and searching. Making different trips to the lab for the preparation of an exhibition, or having small prints at home to play with in a book, a special event, and spending my time writing again and editing some texts, and working on papers with tape, ink, images, painting. All raw. All stocked in folders and boxes.
Building also a new book (which has been there in my mind from the beginning of the project) with the prints I have at home in the sizes I already have, sticking the prints directly on the spreads of paper, working very fast, and not on the computer. But also taking time to prepare exhibitions on the computer and improvising during the installation with all the images I have from the lab. Leaving a part of the prints in the boxes, sleeping. Wasted images that will be used in further exhibitions. All is reused in my work, revisited (like my Cuban book ‘Beyond History’).
4. The practical question: are you living off of your work? If not, how do you deal with daily needs?
I am a beggar…. No, more seriously, I have jobs in different companies or organizations (NGO): stamping letters, or working with young people with photo projects, or helping refugees to find jobs. I made some fashion photos and corporate pictures. I painted walls in houses. I had artist status, then I finally worked as a (photography) teacher at La Cambre (only workshops) and last year in Le 75 in Brussels. I loved being a teacher or a coach for the students. I hope to have the chance to work there again in the future. Crossing fingers. This is the perfect job for me. I love that energy. Now I also have a gallery in Antwerp: Stieglitz19 gallery, which is very good. Dries Roelens, the owner of the gallery, is like a father to me. And… I have been a shiatsu massage practitioner for 3 years. I learned shiatsu in Belgium and tuina massage in China, and craniosacral therapy in Kathmandu. I have always dreamed of being a doctor…
5. Which advice would you give to a young—and fresh—photographer?
Work, work, and more work. Make it a religion, and take pleasure in photography, simple pleasure, facing the world, searching the good confrontation at your rhythm, the good balance between fiction and your reality, with fun and compassion, not to lose your precious mind. Stay humble, always keep the “beginner’s mind” as Shunryu Suzuki, the great Zen master used to say. Always experiment (with simple techniques) and don’t pretend to know anything before starting. Read, watch, be curious. Curiosity is the best thing in this world. Naivety inside lucidity. And don’t use too much digital camera ;).
6. Is there a photographer you place on top of the others? Why?
That’s so hard to say…. I don’t have maybe anymore this kind of religious veneration for photographers but … I still certainly have it for painters like Marlene Dumas or Peter Doig. And for writers like Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, Jim Harrison, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Gabriel García Márquez, Reinaldo Arenas…. Photographers on top of the top: Morten Andersen for his books, Wolfgang Tillmans for his vivid arborescences and his artist’s books, Robert Frank (of Mabou), and William Eggleston for being the roots, Lieko Shiga for having one of the more powerful books of the last years, Paul Graham for having always the right tone, Todd Hido for having the most erotic picture of my life, Susan Meiselas for being so pure and strong in her achievements, Stephen Gill for his experimental colorful pics and books, Jurgen Teller for Go-Sees, William Christenberry, Chris Shaw, Malick Sidibé, Eugene Richards, Viviane Sassen, Araki and Moriyama, Bertien van Manen, Raymond Meeks, and of course Gerard Fieret!
Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona 27.02.2015 - 10.05.201
“An avid photographer, collector and photographic subject, Warhol incorporated photography into almost every aspect of his aesthetic and social experience.” - Catherine Zuromskis from Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images, 2013
Andy Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement and experimented with many different mediums over the course of his life and career. Of his varied artistic interests, the medium of photography held with him from a young age, beginning when he received his first Brownie camera at the age of nine and later learned how to make black-and-white prints in a darkroom set up in his family’s basement. The technical detail required of early photographic printing, however, was not of interest to Warhol and when he started using photography in his art in the 1960’s, he was drawn to automated, instant processes such as the photo booth and the Polaroid, which he used for commissioned work and to document himself and those in his inner circle at the Factory. In 1971, a new camera called the Polaroid Big Shot was introduced and this became Andy’s camera of choice for taking the portraits that would be used as source material for his commissioned photo-silkscreen portraits.
At the same time, automation and advances made to the compact film cameras and the automatic flash in the 1970’s allowed Warhol greater opportunities to take his camera with him, and the freedom to photograph anything and everything of interest. Through the 1970’s and 1980’s, Warhol set out to take photographs that, as a singular body of work might appear disjointed or random, but were nonetheless in line with Warhol’s obsession with the mechanical properties of the medium, with his focus on the subject more so than the composition or lighting in any given scene. Author Catherine Zuromskis elaborates in her book, The Factory, that while his images may appear “poorly exposed, awkwardly framed, and often compositionally uninteresting…the value of these images lies in the way they allow us to see in a Warholian way and thus be drawn, even if only virtually, into his Factory perspective on the world.”
Andy Warhol’s black-and-white images were featured in numerous publications in the 1980’s and in January of 1987, they were the basis for the exhibition titled Andy Warhol Photographs, presented at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York – one of the only exhibitions of his black-and-white photographs during his lifetime.
“Automatic focus and automatic flash meant that Warhol could pull a point-and-shoot camera from his pocket and take a picture with a moment’s notice. His pictures are characteristically unposed, spontaneous, and raw but, when successful, have strong black-and-white compositions. Unlike the paparazzi with whom he compared himself, Warhol was also a guest and as such could photograph social events from within, at close range.” - Stephen Peterson, from Andy Warhol: Behind the Camera, 2011
Between 1971 and 1987, Warhol produced tens of thousands of Polaroids and over 3,000 rolls of black-and-white film from which over 20,000 frames were printed, a majority of which had never been seen by the public. Upon his sudden death in 1987, his will stated that most of his estate was to be used to create a foundation dedicated to the advancement of the visual arts. This foundation, now referred to as the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, received Andy’s extensive collection of photographs in addition to the exhaustive and varied catalog of artwork and personal possessions now in their care.
In 2007, the Andy Warhol Foundation initiated the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, in which over 28,500 photographs were donated to university museums, galleries and art collections across the United States in honor of the Warhol Foundation’s 20th anniversary. In 2008, the Southeast Museum of Photography received a donation of 107 of Warhol’s original Polaroids and 53 8 X 10 black-and-white prints and was one of 183 institutions to participate in this program. In the spring of 2014, an additional donation of nine photo screenprints were also acquired through this program. Through highlights from both donations, this exhibition showcases Warhol’s Polaroids, black-and-white prints and photo silk screens to provide a glimpse into the inner workings of this iconic figure in 20th century American art and his relationship with the medium of photography.
“When I do a portrait, the first thing is the make-up person puts on a sort of light make-up, so it gets rid of people’s suntans and things like that. It’s just to cut through the suntan. Then I start taking Polaroids. The Polaroid gets rid of everybody’s wrinkles, sort of simplifies the face. I take at least five rolls. I shouldn’t do that. I should only take one. A good photographer takes only two or three shots. That’s how you can tell he’s good. But I take lots because it’s part of the whole thing. People expect it. They like it, even though it’s painful – the bright lights, the flashcubes. I try to make everybody look great.” - Andy Warhol, 1982 interview by Carter Ratcliff
1. How did your passion for photography started? Do you remember your first picture?
I remember the first time I made a photograph. I was very young and intrigued by the Polaroid we had at home. It seemed like a magic box. I think it was then that I made the first picture: in the antique shop of my mother, but I do not remember exactly what it was. I was more fascinated by the “object” of photography rather than its ability of reproduction. Like today, basically. In later years I photographed as if I was taking notes, with small compact cameras. It was a way to take possession of the things I saw, to experience the world that I felt. During the university I picked up a camera, a bit by chance, an Olympus OM10 35 mm with a broken exposure meter. I started taking pictures around my house in Venice using some black and white films. My favorite subjects were seagulls and stones. I began to be excited very much about photography, and so with my savings I bought a Nikon F3 and several rolls in color.
2. At the Venice IUAV you studied with Guido Guidi. How his influence helped you to mark your path in photography and when you think you’ve found “your” style?
I attended the course of Guido Guidi in 2006, towards the end of my studies. At the time I hungered for photography, I had just rediscovered it and I was trying to follow both a theoretical and practical training. I had followed before some technical courses on photography and the history of photography, and the meeting with Guido Guidi was critical and fulminant. I remember very well the enthusiasm with which I took part in lessons.
I owe him a lot, he taught me to “see”, the importance of the error and the insistence of the look. But above all to look, to think about photography and to know how to build a visual experience. Only today I fully understood the lesson of not hurrying and to be able to relate first of all with our own photographs. Guido Guidi is a great professor. The danger is the emulation: for a long time, I admit, almost unconsciously, I wanted to shoot like him. But this is not possible. There is only one Guido Guidi. In a training course I think to “copy” or emulate a teacher is a very important phase, is a way to digest and assimilate a teaching.
The first year of university (architecture) I took a course called ’Typological and distributive characters of buildings’ where the teacher forced us to copy and memorize plans, sections and elevations of about 50 famous buildings. Initially I found it very silly, I did not understand the meaning of “copy” details of projects that I already knew. Years later, when I was designing, I realized that through those reproductions I had experienced them, and I had taken possession of the proportions and, through the design, their spaces.
Guido Guidi still remains a reference for me and his work a constant teaching, yet you need to find your own way. Only recently I have the impression to have started to walk with my own legs. It is a lonely road, as Robert Adams wrote in a letter which I had the honor to receive some time ago: « that doing it is inevitably lonely. Though there is consolation in the voices of collegues like yourself».
3. Your works are rooted in the territory of northern Italy. Which imaginary of landscape are you looking for?
I do not seek any landscape, indeed, the process is just the reverse. What I do in the outside landscape is search for the traces of my inner landscape, to be surprised by encounters and to recognize myself in them, through photography. Rarely when I photograph, I define an imaginary beforehand: photography for me is a continuous discovery and surprise.
My photographs are made where I happened to be or to live. Obviously in some places I went just to take pictures, but I can safely say that it is not very important where I photograph. I care more for what I feel in a certain place. I could photograph the whole life in the same area, it is not so important. The other truth is that to me is hard to photograph. I always had to do other jobs to support myself, and this means having less time to travel and to photograph elsewhere. But even if I had the chance to go anywhere, I think that my approach would not change. I could get surprise while walking in Reggio Emilia as much in Texas, the important thing is to be ready for the right moment.
4. ‘Laboratorio Italia’ that took place during the last edition of SIFest - Savignano Images Festival, in which you participated, offered us a 360 ° view of many of the projects that focus on the “Italian landscape.” How much do you think it was possible to deviate from a genre benchmark as ‘Viaggio in Italia’ by Luigi Ghirri? What’s new and “good” among the contemporary projects that focus on this topic?
This year ‘Laboratorio Italia’ has established, in my opinion, a dutiful and interesting attempt to put together the entities that deal today with photography (of landscape?) in Italy. This, for me, meant to be an opportunity to activate a detailed discussion and a reflection on the realities themselves and then with the public. That, however, seems quite difficult today in Italy: there is much excitement, many new projects, great photographers but, on the other hand, a weak critical apparatus which “can read” (and why not, undermine) those energies. In general, I think the problem is that no one has the courage to take risks.
This is the problem, or at least, I feel like this: we are moving forward, but with the mind we are still in Ghirri’s ‘Viaggio in Italia’. And in between, there were a lot of other experiences. Although my training is closely linked to the experience of the photographers of ‘Viaggio in Italia’, I believe that the danger now would be to continue to re-propose the formal aspect of “that” photography. Although, I think the photography as a tool to describe the landscape is always “actual”.
Returning to Savignano: curators (Massimo Sordi and Stefania Rossl) did a very brave and appreciable attempt. In many of the experiences that have been part of ‘Laboratorio Italia’ there was also my work, since I took part in many collective experiences of recent years. Getting there, in a sense, it was like seeing staged the actual scene (or at least, a part of it) of the photographic research on the landscape in Italy. This made me think a lot. First, most of the photographs and the authorial and collective intent seem to go in the same and someway “reassuring” direction. And the results are good, very good. It amazes me to think that there are so many photographers in Italy today who choose a documentary approach. In Savignano I wondered, very sincerely: where are we going? What is my role and my direction? I would have liked to talk about it with the others involved.
5. What are the lanterns which light up in the sea of photography?
The fixed points are precisely my photographs. They remind me what I am, and make me feel in good company in difficult times. And then there is the comparison and support with other photographers and artists, the exchange with people that I respect and whose work I appreciate, which is fundamental for me and that is a continuous stimulus. And what I saw, what I learned, what I have yet to know.
The only certainty is my need to photograph. Some time ago I read an interview-conversation between Louise Bourgeois and the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York that found me very close. The artist said: «(…) More simply, we could call them artists, and as engaged in the act of creation they are exposed to its curse. Or its privilege. What motivated me, and motivates me, is the realization that being an artist is a privilege (…) Yes, it’s a curse, because it “sequesters” life. But it is also a blessing, a consolation. What I do is tiring.» And yet she continued, «My youth work was the fear of falling. Then it became the art of falling. Fall without getting hurt. Finally the art of not giving up.» In my view I can only figure out my path and clarify to myself why I do photograph. And today I am not afraid of making mistakes.
6. The 2014 was a profitable year for you. The release of the book ‘Lido’ and in December the opening of two exhibitions: ‘Lido, Ravenna and Red Desert’ in Malmo, Sweden and one at MyCamera Ravenna where you exposed your new work ‘Double Bind’. Please tell us about.
Much has happenend in 2014, and very quickly. In May 2014 came out ‘Lido. A sud di nessun nord’, the result of a commission by Osservatorio Fotografico di Ravenna within the photographic research project ‘Dove Viviamo (Where we live)’. Last October, the Osservatorio has curated and organized an exhibition in Ravenna on the outcome of the works commissioned in recent years.
In December 2014 were opened my first two solo exhibitions. Shows that exhibit two different jobs and point in opposite directions. However at the same time they are totally me (I am full of strong contradictions!). On December 4, opened the exhibition ‘Lido, Ravenna, Deserto Rosso’ at Breadfield, a space dedicated to photography in Malmo, Sweden. Tony Kristensson and Genny Lindhe, the creators and curators of the gallery, asked the photographer Gerry Johansson to propose a “young talent” to be presented with an exhibition, and Gerry, who I had the good fortune to meet a year and a half ago, chose me. The exhibition at Breadfield was accompanied by a catalog with my photographs and a series of unpublished photographs of Gerry Johansson from ‘Amerika’; for the occasion was asked to the writer Stefan Lorenzutti to write a text about our work, and so came out a piece really very deep.
On 12 December instead opened the exhibition ‘Double Bind’ at MyCamera in Ravenna by Alessandra Dragoni and with a critical text by Roberto Maggiori. A year and a half ago I felt the need to photograph without thinking, as if I had never done it before. It was an exercise. So I bought a disposable camera and started to take it with me, especially when photographing at night. I was looking for ghosts. I started to take pictures without even looking inside the machine. From the disposable camera I passed to a small compact automatic cameras without the possibility of adjustment, such as the Myu II. The important thing was that they were equipped with flash. I thought that it would be a kind of “diary” of my life, that I would not show anyone. But then I sent some pictures to friends including Alessandra Dragoni, photographer and owner of the gallery “MyCamera” in Ravenna. Alessandra knew me for “other” photographs. She became intrigued about this work and asked me to participate in the series of exhibitions that she was thinking: ‘Things that I could not know if I had not seen them at MyCamera’. The idea was to “expose” little known aspect of an artist. The title, ‘Double Bind’, refers to a study carried by the American sociologist G. Bateson, that of the “double bind”. In a relationship involving two people intimately there may be a short circuit and a gap that affects the communication thus making the inner will incongruent with the external evidence. This is exactly what is photography for me. It is a dialogue denied, it is the outside search for the threads of a discourse that lies inside.
7. In “Red Desert” by Michelangelo Antonioni desolation rules and the earth is populated by ghosts. How this vision approaches to your project exhibited in Malmo?
In the selection of photographs exhibited in Malmo nine were made in the places where it was filmed ‘Red Desert’, fifty years later. ‘Red Desert’ is absolutely my favorite movie, and it was shot in a territory that I became very familiar with. The film has different levels of reading and the images have a strong symbolic power, as well as narrative. Antonioni puts into question the relationship of the points of view and the subject-object-vision, and in the film there is always the dilemma hallucination/reality. There is a scene in the film where Giuliana asks the son what does 1 + 1, and he answers 1. She picks him up, smiling, and saying with confidence that 1 + 1 is 2. But in the end she does not know what is real, she has lost all confidence to the world. For me, the Red Desert is the loss of the sense of reality. What should I watch? What do I see? I tried to make me the same question when I am photographing. I wanted to lose myself in the vision. Another theme that has always interested me in his filmography is the representation of nature; Giuliana is a wild animal in a cage, and throughout the film there is this tension between the “natural” landscape and the industry. So I started to photograph the pine forest and the deer that are now confined into the fence in front of the Enichem plant in Ravenna. I’m still working on it.
8. ‘Lido’, ‘Ravenna’ and ‘Red Desert’ are three different series, even if the photographs were made in the same area, around the city of Ravenna. With which procedures and criteria you have decided to approach them for the exhibition in Sweden? These photographs may be for you the same work?
Tony and Genny (curators of the exhibition in Breadfield, Malmo) known me for the work ‘Lido’, and thus we decided to bring together a selection of photographs from this work, plus other shots that I had done in the same area of Ravenna. The idea was to present a body of photographs taken from various projects, but that had the some consistency. I believe that my work is increasingly oriented to be organized as a unique “flow” of photographs.
‘Lido’ is a series in itself, born of a commission by the Osservatorio Fotografico. The photographs were taken in a specific place at a specific moment in time and thus constitute a “closed” work. Yet at the same time, the photographs of ‘Lido’ may be presented in the exhibition along with other photographs taken from ‘Ravenna’ and ‘Red Desert’ just because they are different parts that make up one body of work. Some of the photographs from the series that (by convention) I called ‘Ravenna’ were actually made in the same days when photographing in Lido, maybe just a few miles from there.
I believe less and less in using the word “project” in reference to my work. When I started taking pictures, it was necessary to build a framework within which to work; but today there is no a priori project, my photographs are all “autonomous” worlds which then make up my career, my life. The real work is put them together, but this comes after and it’s perhaps the most difficult job.
9. The language of ‘Double Bind’ is a meta-language. Have you used a disposable camera with the specific intent to make your work “the most rough and dirty as possible”? Photographing as if you had never done it before, as to reset everything and get to a “primordial state”. Why this desire?
I would not speak of a “primordial state”, but as I said before, it was an experiment and an exercise which is still ongoing. The goal was to take me to photograph without any technical pretense. Rethinking the act of taking a photograph as a simple fact: the disposable camera or small compact denies the possibility of any “technical” choice and allows a minimum range of action. Thus you stay with the process which interests me most. Photography as a tool of knowledge.
Roberto Maggiori writes: «The path therefore more than the result: the (s)object on which it is paid attention, and photography - tending to zero degree - understood without the mediation of software and coeval technology. Technology inevitably characterized by the historical period that creates it, transforming it into something else than the pure and simple tool, something that you can not think anymore because it is already thought.»
10. With this project you think you have moved away from your initial photographic research as a student at IUAV?
In recent years I have certainly traveled a path but, you know, is always me. I believe that life is cyclical, and that the path is oddly shaped, twisted, non-linear. I think we do a lot of things, and inevitably, we make choices that mark our path. But I like to think about taking a road and to make detours. It is a bit like when I go out to photograph with my car. I like to establish a route and then be able to “transgress”, I like to lose myself. I keep thinking that even if you do things that appear very mixed or very different, then it all comes back and goes to make up the whole.
Since I started taking pictures, I had many moments of “crisis” (defined as stages of a change) and reflection and doubt, leading to “changes in the route”. The directions that you take can be manifold, but in the end the journey is only one, it is your work and your life. When I look at the photographs I did ten years ago, I find myself at that time: I was thinking differently, I was different from what I am today, and perhaps photography meant something else to me. However I was me. I remember a statement by Lewis Baltz during the interview with Jeff Rian in which he says that one of the things you learn when trying to reinvent yourself is that at the end of each day’s it’s you again.
I would love to spend a few days at the seaside, to the north, or in a remote dacha in the Russian countryside (and who knows that while you read this interview I might be there …) I am currently involved in a project in Reggio Calabria where in late January I attended a residency within the project ‘The third island’. I started to develop my photography project on the work of Maurizio Sacripanti, which is very important to me. I also have many other things on my mind and future projects, but I do not usually talk about what I have not yet begun. What I have promised myself is to give more time and space to my work.
“Even though it feels like I’ve been doing it forever, I am still daunted. It is easier to alienate a stranger than it is to get to know a stranger. You first have to explain who you are and what your intentions are, and then answer to the inevitable WHY? Then the act of persuasion, coming to an agreement. The subject has to be willing to give something. I don’t want it to feel like the image was taken with me only taking. It needs and I hope for a moment of voluntary vulnerability.” – Pieter Hugo on Portraiture
What does it mean to live in cities today? This question is central to the photographic works of Pieter Hugo (*1976). The South African photo artist, who travelled through Africa while only in his early twenties – then still as a photo journalist for the New York Times and other publications – captures above all the corporeal presence of people in their respective, often conflict-ridden cultures. His urgent portraits come together to form a social tableau that depicts the current and radically critical realities of life, not only in African cities. In the first ever exhibition in Germany to be devoted entirely to the works of Pieter Hugo, | PRISKA PASQUER will be showcasing works from his most important series, including “The Hyena and Other Men” (2007), “Permanent Error” (2009-2010) and “There Is A Place in Hell for Me and My Friends” (2011-2012).
“South Africa is a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and troubled place”, says Pieter Hugo. How can one live there? He feels like a “piece of colonial driftwood”, which is arguably what opens his eyes to the contradictions and conflicts, for the areas of friction and tension that exist within (South) African society. In “The Hyena Men Series” (2005-2007), Pieter Hugo exemplified the innate drama of post-colonial society for the first time. In Nigeria, he found a group of young men living with hyenas, baboons and snakes. Following a tradition, they travel around as actors with their animals and sell traditional medicine. Their performances create a sensation and enthral audiences. In his shots, taken against the backdrop of contourless shanty towns, Pieter Hugo focuses on the men’s relationship with their animals. The clearly composed photographs are unsettling images that symbolise the extreme tension between nature and culture, between humans and animals, tradition and modernity, city and wilderness that characterises urban sub-Saharan life today.
Installation view exhibition ‘Corporeality’ at Priska Pasquer
Africa also serves as a rubbish dump for Europe. Many of the mobile phones, computers and laptops discarded in the West end up in Ghana, where container-loads of computer scrap are piled up high. The deposits are not simply left idle, but rather serve as a precarious working environment for thousands of people who earn a living collecting metal here. Together with their cows, they live on the highly toxic, smouldering mountains of waste, burning appliances in search of reusable metals. Pieter Hugo photographed apocalyptic scenarios on a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Accra – ominous visions of an endgame in which the Information Age and the Stone Age collide and appear to eliminate one another. The exhibition also features the video installation based on the series “Permanent Error” (2009-2010).
Between 2006 and 2013, Pieter Hugo worked on a project that he called “Kin”. This deals with home, proximity, identification and a sense of belonging – something that, in South Africa, he has always experienced as being critical and riddled with conflict: How can one live in this country, which only shed its colonial heritage relatively recently, and which is plagued by racism and a growing chasm between rich and poor? Hugo shot photos at home, in townships and at historical sites, taking portraits of his pregnant wife, of domestic servants and of homeless people. The calm and clearly composed shots show beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, private and public, historical and topical. Without either idealising or dramatizing the subject matter, they paint a portrait of the complex society in South Africa today.
This is because any notion of harmony in the “Rainbow Nation” is wishful thinking. Even twenty years after the end of apartheid, black and white South Africans are still very much divided. In the series of 94 platinum prints “There’s A Place in Hell for Me and My Friends” (2011-2012), Pieter Hugo explores the supposed differences between skin colours. To do so, he took portraits of himself and South African friends. The close-ups, generally in the form of frontal head and shoulder portraits, were digitally processed afterwards. The image manipulation, whereby the colour channels were translated into grey tones, emphasise the pigmentation of the skin, using UV irradiation to render visible skin damage and small blood vessels directly beneath the skin. The results are quite astounding: on these photographs, all people are coloured. There is no longer a difference between “white” and “black” skin, but rather a variety of individual shades. The portraits show the powerful presence of each individual and, at the same time, the fragility of all people and the softness and utter vulnerability of their outer shell.
Installation view exhibition ‘Corporeality’ at Priska Pasquer
With his various photo series, Pieter Hugo has put together an impressive body of work in the space of just a few years. Through this intense perception of corporeality, he captures the complexity and inconsistency of society. Constants in his work include seriousness, neutrality and an underlying respect for his protagonists, whose dignity always remains intact. In this regard, his works are comparable with the monumental portrait works of August Sanders, who created a contemporary picture of the Weimar Republic with his large-scale cycle “Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts” (People of the 20th Century).
Pieter Hugo (born 1976 in Johannesburg) is a photographic artist living in Cape Town. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Fotografiska in Stockholm, MAXXI in Rome and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. Hugo has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, the Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the São Paulo Bienal. His work is represented in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012.
1. Petr, have you ever studied photography? Where and when?
When I first decided on becoming an amateur photographer and bought myself an autofocus SLR there were not too many places to study photography in Russia, and most of them were schools teaching how to shoot model portfolios or pack shots. Despite both these options were not completely lacking in attraction, I somehow managed to evade either and set off on the winding path of a self-taught photographer. It is pretty obvious (at least to me now), that when you are finding your way about the medium on your own, you are spending a lot more time solving questions that other people solved decades ago. Structured studies and exposure to critical opinion certainly help you fast-forward to the point where you start solving questions specific to yourself, rather than to the medium in general.
Years later, around the time I decided on turning myself into a professional photographer, I was lucky enough to become a student of photojournalism workshops organized by Objective Reality Foundation, which carried online for about two years. There was a variety of courses lead by a number of Russian and international tutors, both photographers and photo editors, who helped me a lot in understand-ing how both editorial and photography in general works. Objective Reality were among early explorers of online learning format, several years before Coursera or iTunes-U made it popular, but unfortunately the workshops do not run any more.
After these workshops I twice went to International Summer School of Photography in Latvia. During my first time I was in the class of Eiko Grimberg, and my second time it was Peter Bialobrzeski’s class. The result was that I pretty much steered away from the more photojournalistic approach that I had had. Speaking of the school itself, I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a workshop. It is a team of really nice people, a very nice location, and it is very much about team spirit and community (in case you enjoy team spirit and community).
2. What is your main theme in photography? I saw on your website that you shoot a lot of landscapes/cityscapes in Russia. Why is it important, from your point of view, to photograph contemporary Russia?
It would be tempting to say that contemporary Russia is my main theme, but it might rather be my main tool. The visual language of post-Soviet cityscape is the one I know best, so it is natural to use it in my work. I am not sure whether I am making statements about modern Russia using photography (rephrasing John Schott), or making statements about photography using modern Russia. Perhaps it is neither, and I am using photography and contemporary Russia to make statements about the world and my perception of it.
You cannot help but to see the world through your personal experiences, and much of these, the earliest and most powerful ones, come from your surroundings — these are the ones that inform you. Russia is my peep-hole through which I’m seeing the world.
I am not sure whether it is important to photograph contemporary Russia, but it certainly feels quite rewarding. Russia is a rather unexplored subject artistically and photographically. When making my photographs for “Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers” I could pretty well be sure that I am the first one to approach this or that subject in the given manner. It was similar to what Lewis Baltz wrote about American landscape of the 1970s — a new world was being born that no one wanted to acknowledge. Back then (but in fact very recently) the idea of making a project with the central idea of showing ‘what everything looks like in Russia’ did not appear a single bit absurd.
I think now, five years later, there are a lot more photographic projects focusing on the aesthetics of post-Soviet Russia, than when I was starting this work. Still, making photographic projects in Russia you can allow yourself to work on much broader themes than you probably would in the West, where generations of photographers have been carrying out their explorations, and you need to be very specific so as not to repeat other people’s work.
3. Let us talk about your book 'Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers' which was published this year (it has unlimited digital print run and is available for order). That’s a very interesting book and the concept reminds me about the idea of catalog or online photo stock (you use keywords to describe the photos). Did you think about the idea of stock, when you were working on this documentary project?
The relation of word and image is something that started coming through my work at a certain point, perhaps not unrelated to my language studies at the university on the one hand, and my photojournalistic work on the other. This first resulted in a small series titled ‘Keywords’ in which I combined my photographs with the keywords added by the photo agency. Some of the keywords would come totally out of the blue for me and reveal meanings never intended to be in the photograph, or not even present at all.
In my book ‘Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers’ I took it a step further, writing captions myself and turning them into a plain listing of what I saw in the pictures. When working on the project I was trying to make photographs appear close to being simply lists of what is in them — through composition, shoot-ing style — as if it were photographs of ready-made objects that would otherwise be to too large to be placed in a gallery space.
What also links this to a photo stock is that stock photos most often show archetypal situations, situations impersonal and unspecific enough to be suitable as an illustration to largest possible variety of meanings. In a way I was looking for such unspecific situations, situations that would appear archetypal of post-Soviet space, and could happen anywhere, any time, over and over again.
4. Why did you publish this book with the unlimited print run? Is it a part of the concept as well? It looks like you didn’t want to create something that is very “author’s” and unique. It seems you rather tried to emphasize the feeling of the “catalogness”, “universality” of it. I would say the project is like a visual dictionary of Russian daily life (especially given the list at the end of the book consisting of objects with references to pages where they are depicted.).
It was my intention to make a book that would be an encapsulation of a certain set of ideas. I wanted to place more focus on these ideas than on the physical object of the book, to have a certain transparency of the medium if you will. Limiting your edition to a certain (voluntary) figure you stress the physicality of your product, so doing the opposite felt like a good way to play it down. Unlike traditional printing, digital allows you to print 10 or 100 books at pretty much the same cost per copy, so a fixed print run really becomes more of a convention than a necessity. I was interested in seeing how an unlimited print run might or might not work, so it is too an exploration of the medium.
5. What kind of photographers are you inspired by? Could you give us a couple of names. And why?
Recently I’ve taken special pleasure in looking through “Berlin nach 45” by Michael Schmidt, “Cinque Paesaggi” by Guido Guidi, “Ruhr” by Joachim Brohm, “Uncommon Places” by Stephen Shore, “Apples and Olives” by Lee Friedlander, “Contacts” by Toshio Shibata, “Skirts” by Clare Strand.
Each of these photo books shows its own approach to landscape photography (with the exception of “Skirts”) and to balancing the documentary and the aesthetic (“Skirts” included). “Berlin nach 45” is a brilliant example of how a very tensioned narrative can be built using very limited means. The same goes for “Skirts” by Clare Strand, with the addition of a strange feeling of an unidentified menace felt throughout the book, and the very seductive black and white printing delivered by GOST Publishers. “Apples and Olives” shares this simplicity of the subject and the incredible finesse of the execution — a seven year documentation of apple and olive trees in the Old and the New Worlds. Toshio Shibata’s “Contacts” is balancing on the verge of being a formal exercise but never seems to cross that line. “Cinque Paesaggi” are too photographs of man-altered landscape, but filled with incredible lyricism. There is no need to describe the virtues of “Uncommon Places”, and I will not do that for Joachim Brohm’s “Ruhr” either. There have also been “The Americans” by Robert Frank, the two Paul Strand monograph books that I have, a recent retrospective of Garry Winogrand’s work at Jeu de Paume in Paris, early documentary photographers, such as Charles Marville, Roger Fenton or Alexander Gardner.
I would like to mention some Russian contemporary photographers here too, and among them Anastasia Tsayder, Elena Chernyak, Liudmila Zinchenko, Sergei Novikov, Alexander Gronsky, Valeri Nistratov, Max Sher, Igor Starkov. Most of them are my good friends so I feel lucky.
6. It seems to me that there is a generation of post-soviet photographers such as Max Sher and Alexander Gronsky, who explore Russian landscapes, cityscapes and transformations in a quite resemblant way, likely influenced by Dusseldorf School of Photography, Andreas Gursky, Peter Bialobrezki, etc. Do you think you have something in common with the Russian colleagues?
Let me start with a partial dismissal of the Dusseldorf School thesis. It is not that I do not feel influenced by the Dusseldorf school, it is that it directly or indirectly influenced the whole spectrum of what there is in contemporary photography. The goals and methods of these artists seem to vary as much as the medium of photography can possibly allow. Some artists like Andreas Gursky or Thomas Ruff may use photography as one of their tools in constructing the image, or may do away with it altogether as with Thomas Ruff’s computer generated ‘photograms’. Others, like Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, or Bernd and Hill Becher are nearly as documentary or photographical in their work as it gets.
It recently occurred to me that this interest in photographic exploration of post-Soviet built environment coincided with the general emergence of interest in urban studies in Russia. If we are after historical parallels here, Robert Venturi’s book “Learning from Las Vegas” was published just a couple of years before the “New Topographics” exhibition. When a new interest arises it manifests itself throughout the culture.
7. Do you consider yourself a documentary or art photographer? Do you use any kind of post-production, retouching in your pictures?
I am interested in what is called documentary photography. The ability to document is the inherent quality of photography, so ridding myself of this aspect feels counter-logical. I do not however think that there really exists the opposition of documentary and art photography. To me documentary is rather an approach spanning all over the many uses that we may find for photography, be that photojournalism or art.
I limit my post-production to making the photograph look close to what I think the scene looked like to me when I made the photograph, mostly in terms of colour and contrast. I am not much interested in what I can add to the image (as I more or less know it), rather it is what may happen without my involvement that I feel is worth exploring.
8. Let us talk about your residence in Latvia this year. What kind of project did you work on? What did your learn from this experience (positive and negative sides)?
I titled my project “Artist in residence”, and it was one of the cases when you know the title since the very start and work off it. I had long had the idea of making a project dealing with the phenomenon of artistic residence, making artistic work on commission, the institutionalization of art in general. We often think of making art as of something resulting from an inspiration, so I liked the idea of producing art in a way more associated with the manufacturing of goods, working off a schedule and measuring the result quantitively. The result was 32 square meters of art.
Other than that I felt (and was) quite free in what I was doing, the only guideline from the inviting institution being the name of the residency “Poetry Map of Riga”, so I was trying to make something related to poetry, mapping, and of course Riga. I decided it would also deal with how we make a place into a familiar one, and construct our mental maps and images of the world, and how in fact all is related in our perception of time-space. I started with re-photographing every object in the apartment where I lived and worked, which was another thing I had long wanted to do. As I was progressing with this first step of my exploration, I started making purposeless strolls around my nearest surroundings and photographing this area in a predetermined manner. In my last week I switched to a medium format film camera and shot a series of pictures of Riga in the style that I had used when working in Moscow. I was also photographing everything I was buying in the nearby shopping mall, the food I was cooking, the changes occurring to places and objects over time, how they entered my life and then left it, I made one video, and wrote three short poems loosely related to my photographic subjects.
It was certainly interesting to see how it would feel to work outside of Russia, and I found it different. When I’m photographing in Russia it is much to do with photographing what constitutes my mental image of the world, a process which helps me both explore and enrich it. In Latvia I often did not have this mental image to start off, so it was much about gradually building one.
The visual language of Latvian landscape, though in some ways similar, is still different and not so well known to me as that of Russian landscape. The landscape itself appears more organized as opposed to Russian landscape. Working in Russia you get used to this chaotic energy that only takes channeling to make it into art. It is a bit like oil that is often thought to be the backbone of Russian economy. You do not physically make it, you find the right place, the right tool, you extract it, refine it, and sell it.
9. I know that “Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers” is not your first publication in the book form. Your book ‘Za garazhami' (literally: “behind car-shelters”) was published two years ago. In the text of the book you refer to the idea of non-places. I am aware that the idea of “non-place” belongs to the French anthropologist Marc Auge. But how is it connected with the idea of “za garazhami” - “the area of 80 x 80 meters located in between residential blocks”, which is a natural cityscape for Russians (it is a part of our visual post-soviet culture), but could be very odd for a foreigner?
To start with, ‘non-place’ is very a nice sounding contemporary-speak buzzword. It’s a place, and it’s not one. But apart from that this fragment of Russian cityscape that I am observing is a very typical cross between Soviet city planning and post-Soviet vernacular. I think that in some ways the Soviet Union was a precursor of the globalized world that we live in today, the world that makes possible the existence of ‘non-places’ of Marc Auge. So it could have had all that was necessary to produce settings that would approach Marc Auge’s portrayal of a ‘non-place’, devoid of personality, half-planned and never complete.
Any communication permits multiple layers of understanding, so photography cannot really be expected to act as a true universal language (with the exception of the Grumpy Cat). This is a question I ask myself: how much is getting lost in translation when my images are viewed by someone unfamiliar with the visual language of a post-Soviet residential neighborhood? Can one become familiar with a 80 x 80 meters plot of land through seeing 2 1/2 years worth of photographs populated with different cars and people, and made in different seasons?
10. Are you more interested in people or places? In your projects it seems like people mostly play the role of “staffage”, you look at the scenes from above and are not interested in details of their daily life or in psychology. Why is the idea of place exploration so appealing to you?
I think I am interested in people and places, places built by people, and people inhabiting places. What looks like “staffage” are actually details of daily life, except they might be too tiny to discern. Some of these scenes catch my eye when I am photographing, but normally there is a lot more information in the frame than you can physically absorb as a moving three dimensional stream. So it is quite interesting to study afterwards what it actually was that you photographed. Even if there is no people in the picture, I am interested in traces that people left in it. The psychology is in how people act in these settings, and how they built these settings in the first place. We explore what we do not know or do not fully understand, and that is perhaps what makes me explore places.
11. At what moment do you press the button of your camera? Are you always waiting the people to be arranged in a “special pattern” on the surface, I mean, that everyone is situated in the right place?
I think it is down to what I expect to achieve. In my series “Za garazhami” I was trying to make images that would look un-photographic and un-composed, so I would press the button at a chosen moment that would appear equal in visual importance to any other moment. “Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers” was a lot more about finding a structure in the seemingly chaotic, ‘the order we cannot see’, so I tried to make more balanced compositions, and was perhaps looking for “special patterns”. I think often you will be doing it in an instinctive and not fully conscious way, balancing your composition like you would be keeping your balance on a slippery surface. In my current project I press the button when there is least wind shaking the camera, and no bird flying through the frame.
12. Tell us about your current photographic research. I know that you are working on the project “Ruins”, which has not been published yet. Could you tell us about the concept? How did you get the idea of the project?
“Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers” was an exercise in being un-selective in the choice of subject, and exploring the aestheticizing of what is commonly thought to be unsightly. “Ruins” on the contrary deal with subjects expected to be picturesque, and are very selective. If “Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers” was my answer to the selectivity that I saw in the documentary photography of the time, as well as everyone’s obsession with desolate unpopulated spaces, “Ruins” is an answer to my own obsession with populated spaces in “Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers”.
A few years before I began working on this project I had started thinking of these ruined churches which were so common in Russian landscape, and it had really surprised me that no one had approached the subject artistically. These thousands of abandoned churches scattered in the Russian landscape tell us so much about who we are. Around the same time I received a magazine commission to photograph ruined pre-revolutionary manor houses near Moscow. Photographing them I started thinking of these buildings as of remnants of Russian Antiquity, a term I coined then, something not so distant in time, one hundred years back, but perceived as totally unrelated to the country of today and its people. Their neoclassical architecture only added to this feeling of visiting ancient ruins.
The subject is very loaded both visually and emotionally, and is very layered. There is the architectural layer with different regions having different dominant architectural styles; the cultural layer — most of these churches were built in the 19th century, the century of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky — of what we perceive as the Great Russian Culture; the historical layer with these buildings being so much tied to Russia’s twentieth century history, with how we fail to associate ourselves either with those who built these churches, or with those who destroyed them; the socio-geographical layer with churches standing in the middle of no-where with no human settlement in sight due to migration and rural depopulation in the 20th century; the spiritual layer with signs of grassroots religiousness seen in people decorating the interiors with paper flowers, printed icons, burial crosses. It also acts as a mix of intimate tourism and pilgrimage for me, something we look for going to places like Giza or Athens or St. Peter’s Basilica, only to find ourselves in a crowd of fellow tourists.
I think it was a timely start, if not a slightly late one. Somehow after the collapse of the Soviet Union these buildings seem to have started to deteriorate at a faster pace. At the same time those buildings, which are not losing it to time and ele-ments, get rebuilt in a functional manner and using modern materials and most of the sense of history embedded in them is lost. So I might be photographing an era — the era of the landscape with a ruin — that will soon be gone. In modern Russia you have to be quick as time rushes like a clock that has lost its pendulum.
"The Bronx has a terrible beauty, stark and harsh, like the desert. At first glance you imagine nothing can survive. Then you notice life going on all around. People adapt, survive, and even prosper in this urban moonscape of quick pleasures and false hopes… . Often I am terrified of the Bronx. Other times it feels like home. My images reflect the feral vitality and hope of these young men. The interplay between good and evil, violence and love, chaos and family, is the theme, but this is not documentation. There is no story line. There is only a feeling."—Stephen Shames
A 1977 assignment for Look magazine took Stephen Shames to the Bronx, where he began photographing a group of boys coming of age in what was at the time one of the toughest and most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. The Bronx boys lived on streets ravaged by poverty, drugs, violence, and gangs in an adolescent “family” they created for protection and companionship. Shames’s profound empathy for the boys earned their trust, and over the next two-plus decades, as the crack cocaine epidemic devastated the neighborhood, they allowed him extraordinary access into their lives on the street and in their homes and “crews.”
Bronx Boys presents an extended photo essay that chronicles the lives of these kids growing up in the Bronx. Shames captures the brutality of the times—the fights, shootings, arrests, and drug deals—that eventually left many of the young men he photographed dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, who mature, fall in love, and have children of their own. One young man Shames mentored, Martin Dones, provides riveting details of living in the Bronx and getting caught up in violence and drugs before caring adults helped him turn his life around. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that is too easily dismissed as irredeemable, Bronx Boys shows us that hope can survive on even the meanest streets.
Bronx Boys presents an extended photo essay that chronicles the lives of these kids growing up in the Bronx. Shames captures the brutality of the times—the fights, shootings, arrests, and drug deals—that eventually left many of the young men he photographed dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, who mature, fall in love, and have children of their own. One young man Shames mentored, Martin Dones, provides riveting details of living in the Bronx and getting caught up in violence and drugs before caring adults helped him turn his life around. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that is too easily dismissed as irredeemable, Bronx Boys shows us that hope can survive on even the meanest streets.
The first true retrospective of a towering figure in American photography and the only book on Aaron Siskind currently in print, this volume features important, rarely published work and an authoritative text by noted photo historian Gilles Mora.
Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) was a major figure in the history of American photography. A leading documentary photographer who was active in the New York Photo League in the 1930s, Siskind moved beyond the social realism of his early work as he increasingly came to view photography as a visual language of signs, metaphors, and symbols—the equivalent of poetry and music. Through the forties and ifties, he developed new techniques to photograph details and fragments of ordinary, commonplace materials. This radical new work transformed Siskind’s image-making from straight photography to abstraction, from documentation to expressive art. His concern with shape, line, gesture, and the picture plane prompted immediate comparison with abstract expressionist painting, particularly with the art of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. It took some years for Siskind’s unprecedented photography to gain full acceptance, but, by the 1970s, he was an acknowledged master, publishing and exhibiting widely. Siskind was also one of the founding donors who established the archive at the Center for Creative Photography.
Aaron Siskind’s oeuvre is so original that it defies classification, and it has not received the sustained critical attention that it richly merits. In fact, there are no other books on Siskind currently in print. Aaron Siskind presents the first complete retrospective of this legendary photographer. It highlights important, rarely published bodies of work from Harlem; from Bucks County architecture; and from the “Tabernacle,” “Gloucester,” “Martha’s Vineyard,” “Louis Sullivan,” and “Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation” photo series. The book also includes an introduction by Gilles Mora, an expert on modern American photography, and texts by critic and photographer Charles Traub. This study, based on the Siskind archives at the Center for Creative Photography and supported by the Aaron Siskind Foundation, fills a resounding editorial void around one of the most challenging and important figures in the art of American photography.
My Life as a Man depicts a single collage deconstructing and rearranging its composition. Resolution is sought but never “found.” The book features original text contributions from Matthew Brannon, Moyra Davey, Courtney Fiske, Jim Fletcher, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jonathan Griffin, Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Michael Ned Holte, Sarah McMenimen, Anna Livia, Alexander Provan, Ross Simonini and John Yau. Each book comes with a unique cover image collaged on as well as a folded newsprint poster featuring eighty finished crossword puzzles from the NYTimes by the artist’s mother.
Carment Winant is an artist and writer. She also work as an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Contemporary Art History and live in Columbus, Ohio.
Salt prints are the very first photographs on paper that still exist today. Made in the first twenty years of photography, they are the results of esoteric knowledge and skill. Individual, sometimes unpredictable, and ultimately magical, the chemical capacity to ‘fix a shadow’ on light sensitive paper, coated in silver salts, was believed to be a kind of alchemy, where nature drew its own picture.
Salt and Silver brings together over 100 plates drawn from the Wilson Centre for Photography, accompanied by two roundtable discus- sions with curators, academics, historians and collectors from world renowned institutions. Encompassing many of the great works of the period, the publication includes prints by Edouard Baldus, Louis Blanquart-Evrard, Mathew Brady, Charles Clifford, Louis De Clercq, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, Jean-Baptiste Frenet, Charles Hugo, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Calvert Richard Jones, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, Felix Nadar, Charles Negre, Felice Beato, Auguste Salzmann, William Henry Fox Talbot, Felix Teynard and Linnaeus Tripe.
Participants in roundtable conversations include: Simon Baker, Tate; Martin Barnes, V&A; Elisabeth Edwards, De Montfort University; Carol Jacobi, Tate Britain; Hope Kingsley, WCP; Hans Kraus, Hans P. Kraus Jr Inc; Anne de Mondenard, Mediatheque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris; Lori Pauli, National Gallery of Canada; Michael G. Wilson, WCP.
Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860 is the title of the exhibition taking place at Tate Britain from 25 February through 7 June 2015. This is the first exhibition in Britain devoted to salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography. A uniquely British invention, unveiled by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, salt prints spread across the globe, creating a new visual language of the modern moment. This revolutionary technique transformed subjects from still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images with their own specific aesthetic: a soft, luxurious effect particular to this photographic process. The few salt prints that survive are seldom seen due to their fragility, and so this exhibition, a collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography, is a singular opportunity to see the rarest and best early photographs of this type in the world.
Organised in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography. Curated by Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850–1915, Simon Baker, Curator, Photography International Art, Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Assistant Curator 1850-1915 and Hannah Lyons, Assistant Curator 1850–1915.
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
I started taking pictures when I was a teenager, my first camera was a Nikon FM2 with a 50mm lens. I was shooting friends and my life in general, which is something I don’t do much anymore. But when I do, I still use this exact same camera.
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
When I was studying photography I was very interested in architecture and its relationship to landscape in general. So after my studies I started working for architects, taking pictures of their projects which is now my full time job. Besides taking those pictures which represent their projects for commercial and communication purposes, I like to collaborate with architects on projects that involve photography by using it as a tool to express architectural and urban concepts. In my personal work, I’m always using the prism of architecture to talk about subjects that fascinates me. I like that landscape photography reveals real situations. It has a fantastic power to express a personal vision through the distance created between the subject and the photographer and the limits imposed by framing.
3. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?
I think it gives a larger panel for people to express themselves with the right tool. The ability to take a lot of pictures in digital is fantastic, the same way using a 4x5 analog camera is, but for other purposes. Being able to take pictures with your phone and sending it to people on the spot is something that I do believe is really great. People just have to know the limits of the way they’re using these specific tools, whatever they are.
4. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
My favorite camera is my 4x5. Working with 4x5 films for landscape pictures gives the best results in terms of images, as the softness of the film is incomparable. But what I find most interesting in working with a large format is all the contraints that this process involves. Working with contraints forces you to think more about how to create your work in general. Working with a 4x5 is difficult : it is heavy, you need a tripod, you cannot catch a moment, the films are expensive, etc. All these things help me focus on how and why each picture should be taken. It also creates some kind of distance between the subject and myself. But as I said before, I think every type of picture should be taken in a specific way, requiring a specific tool for a specific purpose.
5. Tell us about your latest project ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’
The most recent important project I’ve worked on is ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’. It is the project for the Belgian pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Venice Biennale. We worked for a year with architects, an art curator and a sociologist. The idea of the project was to make a study about how the architecture has been transformed, adjusted, modified through time, behind the permanence of buildings’ facades. The study that is presented in the book and in the pavilion attempts to define a vocabulary and to reveal the attitudes that, beyond pure form, allow us to define a culture that is specific to these transformations. For this project I travelled for 5 months around Belgium, photographing more than 500 domestic interiors following the same photographic process : taking only frontal images. This process allowed the images to be compared for the purpose of the study and were to be taken with the same approach on various locations. This was important as it allowed the viewer not only to focus on the social status or the decoration of these interiors, but to be able to create a story by associating the images with each other.
6. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, who influenced you in some way?
During my studies the discovery of the new topographics and Dusseldorf’s school approach radically changed my vision of photography. That must but the main influence on my work.
7. Three books of photography that you recommend?
I’m not really into photography books, but I’ll suggest the general works of Bas Princen, Noemie Goudal and Mark Power.
8. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
Laurent Grasso, Double soleil, Perrotin Gallery Paris 2014 Pierre Huygues / Centre Pompidou Paris 2013
These are the two most powerful and consistent shows I’ve seen lately.
9. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
I just finished a workshop with the students of master at LaCambre Architecture School in Brussels, during which we tried to develop a new kind of scale model photography. I am now working on a project to present in an exhibition that will be displayed in the « Château de Seneffe’s garden », with nine other belgian photographers.
10 Tell me something about your adventure in North - Korea…. How did things go there? Did you have a watchdog?
I spent ten days in North Korea. To get there, you have to enter the country through a travel agency that organizes tours with the local authorities. I was there with a company based in Beijing. I spent 3 days with a tour group visiting Pyongyang and the South Korean border. Then I spent 7 more days alone visiting 4 other cities. The tours are very organized, I always had two guides by my side and a driver. Every day I’d visit various sites with my guides that always depicted the grandeur of the regime like museums, factories, public buildings, cooperative farms and of course, monuments. Everything was prepared for my venue and the very few people I met told me how great the country was. When the visits are over, they’d bring me back to the hotel and they’d give me way too much food to eat. As a tourist you can never leave the hotel, walk alone in the streets or ask to stop somewhere as you pass by. I guess it’s a bit like the visits in former USSR. Your guides are trained to entertain you and most of the people that come here to visit, end up leaving the country with a better opinion than the one they had when they arrived. The propaganda system really works well even for foreigners that are aware of the regime’s atrocities. That’s exactly the point of my work, trying to make people realize what it means for a country to be displaying all of this. The explanations linked to the images are the ones provided by the regime and help the viewer understand the scale of the folly.
11. You’re talking about the BECHERS. I see a lot of influences in the Hong Kong series… Why did you go there and why did you use this kind of photography; I see a lot of Gursky -like pictures.
I was transiting in Honk Kong and I decided to spend a few days there to visit the city. At that moment, I received a proposal for a competition about «Utopian architecture and sustainability». I decided to answer the question by presenting a pragmatic vision of sustainable cities that was based on the concept of the vertical city. It was a good pretext to walk around the city and photograph Hong Kong’s urban density. It has some kind of a Gursky point of view in the sense that in some of the pictures the scale of what you see is not always very clear. That’s something I’m very interested in and that I really like in Gursky’s work.
There is a competition for the Belgian pavilion every four years organized by the Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles. I was contacted by the architect Bernard Dubois to join a team consisting of architects Sarah Levy, Sebastien Martinez Barat and art curator Judith Wielander. We won the competition with our project «Interiors, Notes and figures», and presented a year later in the Belgian pavilion in Venice.
I also collaborated to the Korean Pavilion this year. We had meetings in Venice with the general curator Rem Koolhaas and the curators of the other participating countries. I heard that the team of South Korea had a project to make an exhibition about the architecture of North and South Korea. I told them that beside the work I did about the power of North Korea’s propaganda, I also documented as much North Korean architecture as I could.That’s how I collaborated with the Korean curator Minsuk Cho on their national pavilion.
1. About your publication ‘Critical Mass’, what was your personal motivation to do this project?
In the 1980s new social movements emerged in Western societies. People were questioning the economic concepts of growth, the role of woman in society and the arms race. In Germany the use of nuclear power among other environmental issues were fiercely debated. Decades later there is no backing for new nuclear plants and the ones in operation are one by one taken off the grid. With Critical Mass I document a technology which was disputed and the resulting debate changed society over the last decades. From a biographical point of view I am traveling back in time to places I had only heard of when I was a teen but never came close to or had been inside.
2. Where does the name of the title ‘Critical Mass’ comes from? The title Critical Mass refers to physics, to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as well as to sociology and collective political action where it defines the critical number of personnel needed to affect policy and make a change. Critical Mass sums up what my work is about: technology and society.
3. How would you consider the role of the photographer in this critical or controversial subject? Critical Mass is a contribution to the debate on energy issues and in general how we want to live. I place the viewer in a distanced and observing position to the subject. I wanted to create a space, where the viewer can come to her or his own conclusions. The work is intended to asking questions rather then giving definite answers.
4. In your book you emphasize 3 positions: that of the police, the protesters view and the point of view of the author. Is it necessary for you that the viewer takes a (critical) position about this critical mass?
Debates in our societies on gender issues, the environment or the economy are not fought along the lines of left and right. They run deep into our communities and all parts of society participate in these discussions. I wanted my work to reflect this and not only show the disputed technology but also society. This is why in addition to my photography the book shows archive images by two protagonists the state police and a protest photographer from the 1970s and 80s when the plants were constructed.
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5. How would you as a documentary photographer and teacher distinguish the term documentary photography from photojournalism?
Photojournalism refers to an event which took place at a certain time and place. This could be an image taken at a press conference depicting the meeting of politicians. It documents an event and less the intentions of the photographer.
Documentary photography makes something visible which is overseen. The photographer has an intention, he wants to draw attention to an issue in society or celebrate life. Therefore it is always taken from a subjective point of view.
6. In the book you lead the viewer from the outside to the inside of the heart of the nuclear reactor. Did the formality of the book play an important role for the content of your message?
The layout of the book serves my intention: I want to share with the viewer what I saw, give him or her space for thought. I take the viewer on a journey through these plants and explore the dimensions, devices, the security measures put in place and traces of the people at work.
7. In your photographs we experience the presence of people trough their absence, we don’t see them in a literal way, although you’ve made portraits of the employees. What was for you the main reason to decide to show only the empty rooms and not the constant human activity? Does it have to do with the main characteristic of the subject namely the actual invisibility of radioactivity?
To me images of spaces have a hard standing next to images of people. If I would had used both, the portraits would get more attention I assume. I wanted the viewer to carefully read the spaces, their layout, designs and functions. The absence of staff to me also refers to the crucial role people play in running the sites: we might trust their technical knowledge or question their role which after all is fallible.
8. How is the medium photography capable of making visible of what is not visible, in terms of the intangible of nuclear power?
Radioactivity is intangible but the efforts to contain it, are very much visible. An example is the dome shaped building to house the reactor which has cathedral like proportions. There is a lot to see and I hope my photography refers beyond the obvious architecture. It is society I want to draw attention to, how we want to life and how decisions on crucial issues are made.
9. If we look at the book, we experience a sort of oscillation between opposites f. ex. the constant threat of danger towards the cleanliness of the rooms, human failure and the technological sublime. Was it your motive to play with these opposites? Did you experience yourself some discomfort when you entered the rooms?
Visiting the first plants was a little spooky, indeed. However I lost that eerily feeling and developed a routine which the staff must have appropriated, too.
10. On the cover of the book you refer to nature (picture of the forest), but through the holes in the cover we are confronted with a military strategy behind it… Is it a formally way of saying that the sublime of nature has shifted to a sublime of culture; well-defined the sublime of technology?
The cut through the front cover makes use of an archive as well as an image from my work and refers to the interaction of the present time and the past and the conflict between nuclear power opponents and the authorities.
11.These days there is more an emphasize on renewable energy, it seems like the topic nuclear power gets far less attention. Do you think it is important that for instance the younger generation knows about the history of nuclear power?
History has something to say and has effects on the present and the future. Germany opted out as a result of several decades of debates. No party would secure a victory in elections with a pro-nuclear-agenda. Looking back, the nuclear opponents were successful in their demands and shaped society for a long time. Little strokes fell big oaks is what we can learn from their long-term objective. The book ends with images of waste disposal mines. To find a lasting solution for the radioactive waste is a question we still have to find an answer to and generations to come have to deal with.
12.To round up the topic, a medium transgressing question: Did you see the movie ‘Dr Strangelove (1964)’, the black comedy about the nuclear bomb from Stanley Kubrick? If you speak about creating space for the viewer, does it also imply that there is room for humor about these serious topics?
The topic I am negotiating in my work Critical Mass might be serious but anything can be made fun of, I believe. Freedom of speech and expression are among other values what to me our Western societies constitute. Unfortunately after the recent events in Paris and the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this asset is threatened.
13. Which project(s) are you working on at the moment and can you tell us about your plans for the future?
I am in the middle of a new body of work on migration. I love photography and want to further explore my artistic practice as well as to reflect and think of photography when teaching at university.
1. Tell us about your approach to visual art. How it all started?
It is important to my work that the initial images are performative, i.e. created in real time. It allows me to have a dialogue with what I am creating in the moment. This way of working connects back to early video art, specifically signal processing. I started understanding this process during my undergraduate studies at Kansas City Art Institute as a sophomore exploring MAX/MSP & Jitter, software to make software. A colleague and I started making interactive installations and exploring the possibilities of real-time audio-visual manipulation. Around the same time I was looking at the works of Nam June Paik, Woody & Steina Vasulka, and Gary Hill.
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
I became less interested in interactivity. I lost too much control over the message to a “fun house” effect. I still build custom software for each of my pieces that allow me to process and manipulate video in real-time, but the performative nature is in the creation of the recorded images. There has always been a fascination of two things that tied a lot of my early research together complexity and the unseen. Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Marey’s photographs inspired my obsession with the unseen. Their photographs enabled us to see the unseen layers of time by means of a technological tool. I think I’ve always pushed for the creation of software that could do the same. My interest in complexity began when I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and came across the notion of 10,000 things. I wanted to contextualize the 10,0000. The evolution of my research began here and I became progressively more interested in the exploration of the ritualistic spaces of the media. How do we exist within this digitally saturated world? How can ritual help us understand the complexities of that existence?
3. Tell us about your educational path. What about your studies at M.F.A in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University?
The Electronic Integrated Arts M.F.A. program at Alfred University is a fantastic program with outstanding faculty. The program is very focused on self-directed artistic exploration and production. The two-year program main component consists of faculty advisors visiting your studio once a week for an hour to discuss current projects and their progression. It was a life changing experience to be able to work on my own work every day, all day and night for two years. I can’t give enough thanks or praise to the EIA program.
4. Any course or professor that influenced you or that you still remember?
Of course, it is hard to name only one, however the chair of my M.F.A thesis committee, Andrew Deutsch, was significant to the progression of my work. Deutsch has a way of getting to the heart of the matter in critiques. He pushed me to rethink many elements of my work.
The one class that forever changed my work, and inspired many pieces since, was “Myth, Ritual and the Creative Process” taught by Professor Tom Peterson. I believe he had been teaching this same course for over fifteen years. It was brilliantly laid out with each text/religion we studied building onto the next.
5. You are now Assistant Professor of New Media at IU South Bend. Tell us about this experience?
It is essential for me to be immersed in a creative community. I enjoy watching how my students solve problems creatively and seeing their work grow over the years. I am happy I get to teach courses that directly relate to my expertise and creative practice. I teach Video Art, The Artist and New Media, Video Production Workshops, Interactive Multimedia, and Intro to Computer Programming. I host open screenings twice a semester and also produce a 30 minute public broadcast of student video work called “Arts Codec.” The biggest thing I’ve worked on is a new concentration in Video and Motion Media, with four new additional video courses. It has been in the works for three years now and we finally get to offer it in the Fall 2015 semester.
6. Eadweard James Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. Your work ‘Dissecting Muybridge’ recontextualizes that experience. What do you think you’ve figured out through this research?
An inherent critique of the moving image itself arises out of the recontextulization of Muybridge’s work. The three parts of the series attempts to explore the visual metaphors and aesthetic histories of each medium or genera of film, analog video, and digital video. Part one begins with a succession of sequential images creating movement and progresses into notions of films strips, disintegration, and manipulation of the material itself. I relate this to the structural film movement and flicker films that use direct painting or exposing directly on the film, (like the works of Paul Sharits and Stan Brakhage, respectively). Part two has inherent qualities known only to analog video, which focuses on the live manipulation of the signal and its abilities to not only move up and down like the filmstrip, but left and right as well. Finally, in part three we have visuals that only could be generated via the computer, with mass duplication of the video frame.
What has stuck with me the most from the process of creating this series is the need to push the length of production. To give myself time to explore and find different ways of seeing by constantly finding new ways of manipulating and generating images. In the past, I would find a process that worked and make an entire piece out of it. This work contains many processes, which gives the work depth.
7. As you wrote “Screens are how we interface with the digital, with others, and with ourselves”. It’s perfect said. Sometimes when I think of this concept it seems to me that we are at the beginning of something so big that I can hardly guess where are the borders. Where are we going? And what it costs us to keep pace with technological progress?
I’m not sure we know where we are going, because we are surrounded and in the middle of it, but I think most of us like it that way, or at least we don’t seem to mind. I always think back to the way Marshall McLuhan used Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Decent into the Maelstrom” to illustrate how technologies pull down into the vortex. McLuhan used this story as a wise tale, essentially stating that if we can study the vortex we can develop methods of evading it; but I think we enjoy life in the vortex, we enjoy the constant update. The repercussions are only visible through the rear view mirror and we don’t look back very often.
8. What “digital vs analog” does mean for you?
My relationship with these two changed dramatically after my residency at Signal Culture in February 2014; I created the “Dissecting Muybridge,” parts I and II during my time there. For many years now I have been developing interactive real-time systems to create my work, which I thought was very free and exploratory, however not compared to analog. Analog is a very immediate way to experiment with video and audio. It is quite different to twist knobs, push buttons and make physical patches (i.e. connections of video signals via cables to different areas of the system) than it is to code and construct software. The latter is a completely different mindset than analog. The immediacy of analog creates a feedback loop between the artist and the visual.
Signal Culture has built an amazing studio; a seamless digital to analog and back to digital system with modular components. The analog equipment is fairly rare, most was built in the 70s. My stay there has completely changed my practice. I purchased an analog synthesizer that has digital to analog control voltage and also control voltage to MIDI back to the computer, which with some work can allow me to create performative analog/digital systems. The first project I developed with this system is “Multiplying Muybridge”, an audio-visual performance, which is new to mode of presenting my work.
9. Today we are immersed in an ocean of images. Your work ‘Search Engine Vision: Christ’ is a good representation of this feeling of media iteration, iconic redundancy and erosion of meaning. What causes this thought in your mind?
Originally this idea was inspired by Joseph Kosuth piece “One and Three Chairs,” where he has a chair, a picture of a chair, and the definition of a chair side by side. I was curious how we would define objects via the masses. If we could find 1,000 user-tagged chair videos or images via a search engine, would we still be able to understand the results as chair? This resulted in a piece titled Search Engine Vision “Chair”, and later led to SEV “Buddha” and SEV “Christ”.
10. The role of art is to escape from the media vicious circle and their overdose, or is to trigger short circuits from inside?
I think the role of art is to allow one to see different perspectives, which leads to new ways of seeing and thinking. I would say, though, that my work does break, hack, and subvert the language of media in order to, as you say, create short circuits from the inside.
11. Is there any contemporary video or not video artist that influenced you or that you like better some way?
I would say Woody and Steina Vasulka, Bill Viola, Name June Paik, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Gary Hill.
12. Three books that you recommend?
- Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics by Anna Munster. - Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art: 30 by Kate Mondioch - Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas by Marcel Griaule
13. How do you deal with the exhibition of your works. Also is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
It depends on the work. I have a lot of single channel work that is easy to send to places via WeTransfer and Dropbox, and flat screens and projectors are fairly affordable and easy to come by. For some of my installation works I travel to location to install. It’s a challenge to create an autonomous system that is seamless for the gallery or museum that is exhibiting the work. I did get to see the Takashi Murakami “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow" exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea in January. The scale was impressive and immersive. I enjoyed the integration of eastern religious icons and contemporary re-amalgamations.
14. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
At the moment I’m collaborating with some musicians to develop a live audio responsive performance for a program called Art Sounds at the Kansas City Art Institute March 10th. The piece is about an artificial intelligence that is attempting to learn the audio-visual language of its creators. Part one is the programming, part two is the computer trying and failing with ample datamoshing, and part three the AI and live performers are improvising together. I am also working on a new series called Masks of the Media. I was inspired by the idea of mono myth, and applying it to archetypes of cinema and television as a type of possession and assimilation. I am still working on the logistics of either projection mapping onto an actual mask or having a virtual one that maps to the viewer’s face. They would be similar to the Search Engine Vision pieces in that they will have a mass collection of videos playing all at once and at random picking videos to go full screen.
15. Who would you suggest to interview for an upcoming interview that you would like to read?
I would suggest Jason Bernagozzi and Michael Lasater.
1. Hello Wawrzyniec! First of all, huge congratulations - you were awarded with the Paul Hill Award at the FORMAT Festival! Yet this is not the only time you have earned international recognition recently. Your works were presented as a part of the Circulation(s) Festival in Paris and included in a group show in Los Angeles to mention just a few. Could you tell us what does it mean to you?
The biggest award is to realize that my works prompt exchange of opinions related to the underlying political issues. Another important thing is to have a chance to confront my works with a wider audience. Each event I have participated in, gave me an opportunity to discuss it with lots of interesting people: visitors, curators, festival organizers, publishers, people from galleries. I’m glad I had a chance to meet all of them. In many cases we were able to go beyond laconic talks and engage into a longer conversations. We went outside the works itself and discussed related political aspects, which was great. I have a feeling I learned a lot from all of this. There are very different perspectives on issues we think are commonly shared in our societies. It also gave an opportunity to meet a lot of other photographers and see their work followed by an exchange of views. And, on a personal level, it simply gave me some new friends.
2. How would you describe your personal research in general? What kind of a photographer are you?
You used the word research. Yes, research is the first step, just after the idea and internal need to work on particular subject. However, I cannot imagine doing a project without a proper knowledge about the subject beforehand. Accumulating and digesting information before the work is crucial. I have to saturate myself with it. In that kind of approach the meaning of content and visual layer are equally important. And visual part must be designed and planned accordingly to match that meaning. So, there is rather small dose of spontaneity in my work. Research is a process of looking for the general point of view, how to tackle the problem you want to present. As I’m working with political and social content, it makes a big difference how the things are shown. For me it is important that Sacred Defense project, despite its heavily politicized content, can be shown both in Iran and in USA. And to make it I didn’t have to resign from what I want to say with that project.
Having said that, it is important to add that photography is not a research. We may borrow from research approach, but photography is very different in nature. And it is much more than research. Some photographers are able to successfully treat research itself as an output of photographic project, but I separate it in my work. Research is a process of moving from one state into another one, can be creative at times, but photography is always a creation in a pure sense. I’m trying to do a conscious photography, but in general, photography, unlike research does not require consciousness. That’s why photography is open to everyone.
3. Were you always a photographer? I have learnt that you studied at a faculty of economics and sociology and did postgraduate studies in anthropology and African art. Only then, ten years after you had finished your primary studies, you attended workshops organized by Sputnik Photos and then a class in the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. Could you comment on that?
Before doing photography I was involved in other things including cultural anthropology and African art studies. I’ve spent some time in Africa. My research was, in simple words, about cultural side of particular types of traditional African art, but I ended-up talking on very local politics, without diverging from the original subject! At that time I was also doing a little of photography in my anthropological researches. But only unrestricted use of images gives me a freedom to talk on issues, which interest me. Photography is much more accessible for the audience compared to academic discourse. It’s less hermetic. I felt like moving to photography. First on SPUTNIK on a 3 month long workshop, where the most important lesson was to focus on things, which you feel, understand and enjoy. With SPUTNIK you get the access to the best in-class documentary team. A strong team of interesting individuals. It was a good experience. But I wanted to cross the line of documentary; I don’t like being restricted to just one genre or label. So I continued at Akademia Fotografii in Warsaw, where at first I attended courses and later on fully fledged photography studies. At the academy I was introduced to many different art practices, it opened my eyes to the horizon of new things. I learned how to slow down the process, how to look and, hopefully, how to transform things into language of visual communication. It was a great time, full of enriching discussions. It was very good to have plenty of people around, both teachers and students, who are dedicated and with whom you are able to discuss things extensively.
4. How did your educational path influence your photographic activity?
A lot I suppose. I believe it is a general thing, not limited to the education itself. Our experiences shape the way we perceive things. Two persons looking at the same photograph are going to tell a different story, when asked to describe what they see. And it is because what they see is filtered by their knowledge, experience and what really interests them. In my case, field research in the area of cultural anthropology and African art studies, helps to run a photographic project from many perspectives, including research techniques. It influences the final outcome of each series, shapes and structures the approach. In case of Sacred Defense series I was trying to put away, as much as possible, my own cultural baggage and immerse into the role of an Iranian consumer of war images. I watched quite a lot of Iranian war movies, some of which were produced in the space where I photographed. I visited war and martyrs museums together with Iranian tourists. I was trying to use Iranian cultural nuances whenever being there. Immersing allows you to get something more atop of just dry facts; it helps to feel some issues instead of understanding it. On the other hand, a solid preparation meant in-depth studies of Iranian history, politics and foreign affairs as well as Western politics towards Iran. It also meant to study the distribution and consumption patterns of the war propaganda related images, which are contextualizing Iran in the Western media. All of these cultural and political interests left a strong mark on the point of view presented in Sacred Defense.
5. Your internationally acclaimed series “Sacred Defense” belongs to a branch of photography called “mockumentary”. What led you to this kind of an approach?
I’m not sure if the label “mockumentary” is the right one in that case. But I’m not going to offer other one instead either, as I said earlier I prefer to refrain from sticking clear labels in general. There are many shades of gray. Fiction is an underlying subject of that series. In fact, I’m using fiction to comment on fiction, or being more precise to comment on fiction purposely created to mask the reality. It is a specific situation, where fiction is engaged into a peculiar discussion with reality. A fiction with an ambition to become a heavy über-reality. So for such a subject, using fiction, as a tool seemed the most appropriate approach. Plus the fact that simulation and simulacra on its own, especially in political context, is a subject that interests me a lot. In Sacred Defense images make us believe we see the war or consequences of war. We are looking at illusions, however. And that’s a conscious decision, that’s the vantage point I want to give to the viewer. It unifies content and form, and hopefully gives a context to understand the subject. Illusion, as a general mechanism, is just one of the most popular tricks used by the propaganda everywhere. So I replicated that mechanism. There is an evidence and a counter-evidence, in parallel.
In a nutshell, this project is about building group memory and creating political narrations based on reconstructed historical events. It is also about how the visual content is being used to achieve all of it in the context of war, media and politics. On the other hand it is showing how societies are dealing with a tragic past.
It consists of two mirroring parts. In the first part, project traces existing modes of construction of artificial war images and narrations in Iran. It is embedded into the post-war reality of the Iraq-Iran war (1980– 1988), an internationally forgotten conflict which cost nearly one million lives and caused a deep national trauma with consequences comparable to the impact of the Second World War on Western societies. In the Iranian historiography, this war is called the Sacred Defense War. In that part we follow war simulations in different forms. A cinema-city, which is a permanent film-set constructed only for the purpose of shooting war movies. It was created not to be experienced itself, but to become an image of war. This landscape is just a raw material to be photographed and to produce artificial war images of heavy political and social importance. It is a constantly refigured space. Each time I visited that place it was arranged differently.
We also see museums, which reconstruct and mimic war reality in the smallest detail: destroyed school class, trenches, buildings, private lives of civilians exposed to front line conditions. The level of reconstruction is very high, with a lot of effort spent on details. In the same museums we can see wax figures of particular, recognized by name, martyrs, war heroes. Souvenir shops are selling perfect replicas of antipersonnel mines made of plastic. You can internalize war culture by taking it home or embedding it into office design. All of this is used to maintain a political momentum, but also to heal. It is a kind of ‘slow propaganda’. It has a good and bad side at the same time.
7. So this is how the first part of the project works. What about the second, mirroring part?
Both in Iran and here, we are living surrounded by simulacra, which touches mainly commercial and political side of our lives. I wanted to check how it looks in relation to war and history. Artificially generated or amended images are the main tool used to communicate here as well - mainly for propaganda purposes. And what we see in Iran is mirrored in the West. That’s the moment where the second part of the project comes. I amended satellite images of the Iranian nuclear installations with mutually exclusive versions of destruction, which may be caused by the hypothetical Western strike. Buildings destroyed in some images stand intact in others, and all parallel versions of the same event are presented on a ‘single satellite map’. I’m not using past events as a basis, instead I plot alternatives of an event that never happened despite being widely discussed by the media. We don’t know if there is any nuclear weapon program in Iran or not. But what we know is that we see a lot of images with so called evidence that Iranian nuclear program is a weapon construction program. These images are marked with arrows, circles and descriptions ‘explaining’ it. The agenda is to build the case based on fear. Fear is real, but is it reasonable? When you follow the path of these images, which is a very simple thing to do, you will find out that the source consist of just a few ‘think tanks’ closely related to the US administration. More and more analysts, even in the US, are saying that the Iranian nuclear weapon program is just a made up story, same as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Shall we believe in these images and suggested interpretation then? Current warfare is more and more a cyber one, mainly invisible or hardly visible, like the one shown in some of the Norfolk’s and Paglen’s works. Modern warfare allows to destroy nuclear sites using electronic viruses and no one really needs to make a traditional strike. So, shall we believe in what we see on these circulating images? I don’t know. Definitely we should question it, since in majority of cases media are re-distributing and proliferating these images without in-depth verification. We experience a large dissonance between what we should expect from the media and what we really get. We know that already. We may like it or not, but what it really means is that responsibility has been shifted. If we want to properly judge things we have to make an effort to verify it by ourselves. It is safer to question things. And that’s what I do in my project. I’m trying to focus on elements, which prove the misleading nature of many final war images, and to show elements necessary to hold the whole structure together, which are often not visible in final war image, but unavoidable in constructing it.
8. On the other hand, in your other series entitled “Demerger”, you do not play with fake narration. Is this project a classic documentary? What is it about?
Demerger is a specific project. It mimics the documentary approach to record things in a subjective way, but it is not a documentary for me. In Demerger there is no fake narration and actually there is lack of any narration. I was trying to tell the ‘story’ without it, I wanted physical space to take control over any narration in that project. Space and how different groups of people in conflict, experience that space. How they transform what is around them to prove their case. We have competing groups from the government backed by Chinese and Western companies building dams and large water reservoirs on Nile, we have gold-seekers, we have local farmers and finally we have archeologists who try to get the treasures out of the land before it is flooded by water. Each group represents different philosophy. For each of them different attributes are important, hence they convert the space accordingly to their symbolic stand points. They build opposing meta-narrations and they use land to manifest it. It is a conflict zone, but it is usually a hidden conflict not an open warfare, despite some victims. That project stemmed from the same political interests, but mixed with geography understood as experience of space. I was trying to stand back, do not take any side in it. I decided to withdraw from telling it from the perspective of humans. Instead I gave the voice to the landscape, which become a politicized subject both in reality and in the project. That was my way to merge the form and content.
9. What do you like to look at? Do you have any photographers that truly inspire you?
In the first instance I’m inspired by the non-photographic things, mainly texts, various ones but predominantly anthropological and sociological. The real inspiration is linking things, which seems to have no connection. I mean things, which fit together once intertwined, despite a feeling they are from a very distant origin. I like the moment when we discover how certain things work. I like questioning things, leaving the comfort zone. That’s something one may call inspirational, I guess. From the visual point of view, what I like to look at is rather a wide mix. I like works of many different artists, a pretty eclectic gathering: from Wall and Demand to Rosler and Farocki, from Bałka to Hasior, from Richter to Pepe and so on. I love How to hunt series by Søndergaard & Howalt, but also traditional African art, which is very different as it works in other dimensions. I love collages of Wangechi Mutu and paintings of the polish expression of the 80’ties, both very different, but energetic. There is a lot of interesting art in the Middle East and in Africa. I’m also amazed by works of Barbara Probst. She represents a very stable and solid art practice, patiently extended and enriched over the years, but based on the same, relatively simple, yet very strong concept. Her works are constituting a separate world.
10. Could you comment on the condition of the Polish photography scene?
Ohhh…! A very difficult question! We have definitely very good artists in Poland, strong personalities, a lot is going on. And what is going on is intriguing. Look at Urbanautica – you dedicated a separate page, related to Poland, as a first country from the region. I think it tells something. We are strong as individuals, but we have a problem to form equally strong group. We still have to learn how to support each other, how to make it as a whole group. And it is not specific to photography, it is enrooted deeply in our national psyche. There is a need to create institutional support, oriented to promote polish art as a general. It feels like the process has started, but still it is not as vital as it should be. I would like to see a lot more galleries, but there are obvious barriers, so we will see that process of creation spread over years. It will happen eventually, thanks to a wide artist base, good schools, lots of tradition, great names in the past and a lot of creative young people. But institutional animation is needed, since we don’t have a deep and dynamic art market like in China or in Persian Gulf states. I’m sure there is plenty of great stuff not reaching the surface, due to the limitations of the system we still have in Poland.
11. Are you working on something new now?
Yes, I’m on early stages of something new, it evolves so all I can say at this stage is that, in a wide sense, it is going to be a continuation of my interests - it is going to be related to the politics, artificiality and a kind of a conflict.
There are some plans to continue exhibiting Sacred Defense. What I enjoy about that project is its flexibility to be exhibited in a very different ways. What was presented in Paris was very different from exhibition in Wrocław, and so on. I’m working on exhibiting it in Tehran and that’s very important for me. I’m sure Iranians are going to be the most challenging audience I could think of. But this year I’d mainly like to convert it into a book. That project contains distinct chapters, so I hope book is going to be a natural habitat for it. Will see…
1. How did it all start? What kind of work did you make when you started out?
I have always had an interest in photography. As a photographer taking my own photos, but also by working with other people’s photos which led me to making collages. I found a renewed interest in taking photos in the year Canon came out with the EOS 300D. I really enjoyed going outside to take photos of my surroundings. The photos I took in that year and the collages I made are what got me into the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where I graduated from the audio visual department (VAV) in 2010.
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
The shift in how photography is used nowadays compared to when I was growing up is something that intrigues me. The ‘once every six months family slide show’ is one of my favourite childhood memories, but also a happening that has become completely obsolete. The moments we had during these intimate little photo screenings were very special and we all cherished the images that would appear on the projector screen. There was a certain concentration when we would look at these photos, even though most of them were simple snapshots.
Now that ‘everyone’ always has a camera in their pockets and photos are immediately shared and viewable by anyone the sentimental value of the photo has reduced to an all-time low since the invention of photography. I’m fascinated to see how the role of photography has changed so much so quickly.
3. What is your approach to art and specifically to photography? Do you consider yourself a photographer?
I am an artist working with photography. Photography lays at the heart of my work. I use photography as a material source in my work but also as a phenomenon I want to research. I love walking around with my camera hoping to capture something special but also enjoy going through other people’s pictures, trying to make sense of their world.
4. Tell us about your educational path. What are your best memories of your studies? What was your relationship with photography at that time?
The best aspect of studying at the Rietveld was that it gave me the opportunity to develop myself as a person, to dig into the bigger questions of life. Next to that it was a time to explore and experiment and figure out which subjects, materials and media I like to work with. Talking with fellow students and teachers about what it is you are doing is extremely valuable and when finishing your education I think this is what you start to miss most. During my studies I used photography as a means to an end, not so much as a goal. Most of the photos I took were to document an action, intervention or installation. It was after I finished my studies that I started to use the photo camera to capture images as autonomous works.
5. Is there any teacher or fellow artist that has allowed you to better understand your work?
There is one teacher who helped me a lot when I was struggling with what it means to (choose to) be an artist. Every summer one of my teachers, Harry Heyink, organizes the European Exchange Academy (EEA), a five week international summer academy that takes place in the German woods in the ruins of a former tuberculosis hospital in Beelitz-Heilstätten, near Berlin. It’s a very intense period of production and reflection, where you get to meet and work together with other young aspiring artists as well as advisors (there are no teachers here, only advisors) from all around the world. I went here as one of the participants in 2009 and it has been a very important experience in my development. Next to the intellectual experience it also gave me something on a very practical level: exposure. Several videos I made during my stay at the EEA have been screened at a lot of festivals and even won some awards, something that has definitely boosted my confidence in my work and also gave me the possibility to invest in my equipment.
After having been at the EEA as a participant I have returned several times as an advisor and it still holds a very special place in my heart.
6. Nowadays, you are a teacher yourself at the Rietveld Academy. What is the value of teaching to you?
I’m amazed how sharing just a little bit of knowledge, be it practical or theoretical, can have such an impact on how someone develops. This is something that drives me but it is also a big responsibility. I hope my students understand that a teacher’s opinion is not necessarily reflecting the truth, but offers a certain perspective which can help the student to better understand his or her own process and subject matter.
Next to that; teaching is valuable to myself as well, it’s not a one-way street. I also learn while teaching.
7. You work a lot with found footage photos, slides and film. How do you find and choose the footage?
I sometimes literally find them on the street; in Amsterdam it’s not uncommon for people to just dump what seems to be a complete household on the street. I also find them on flea markets, in second hand stores and even bought some from eBay although that is not nearly as satisfying; I guess the act of finding and discovering is a big deal for me. It’s a bit like treasure hunting. I have always done this; as a kid I would take a shovel into the fields hoping to dig up some remains from the past.
The selection process is quite different and more time consuming. Especially with super 8 film it’s always a surprise what you have got; I will not know this until the moment I load a reel onto the projector and start watching. There’s no skipping through like we’ve become so accustomed to with online video, I will watch the whole thing - often more than once. I really enjoy doing this. The same goes for slides. Of course you can already quickly look at the slides by holding them up to the sun, but they really start speaking to me when I project them on a larger scale.
It’s kind of addictive too; once I power up the projector with its distinctive sound and smell it’s hard to stop watching. I try to look for repetitive things in the images; the way someone poses, a recurring object or space or other patterns that were unwittingly left by the people who took the pictures. Sometimes when I have a set of images that once belonged to a couple I can see a clear difference in style of photographing. I like finding these kinds of things, it feels like I am getting closer to the people these photos once belonged to.
Almost always the final work will consist of multiple images of one collection. I try to keep each collection as a whole, so when I work on an installation like ‘Breeze’ in which I used images from multiple collections, it’s hard to keep everything sorted and organized.
8. In the series ‘Verhoudingen’ and ‘Ensemble’ you combine old slides to make new images in different ways. What is the relationship between these two series?
On a formal level they are related in that both works had slides as a starting point and I used not just the image, but the slide as an object in order to create the final work.
On a conceptual level, in both series I’m trying to convey a story by combining images. Where ‘Verhoudingen’ is rooted in doing this by bringing together people and places that in no way had a relationship before I decided them to have one, the ‘Ensemble’ series consists of images that were taken on the same location at moments pretty close to each other. The people in the separate images most certainly knew (and photographed) each other.
The difference between the two is the fact that in ‘Verhoudingen’ the blend of two photographs is fixed and it is hard to figure out where one image ends and the other begins. In the ‘Ensemble’ series, the viewer sees two separate images blend together over time, pulling the work more towards an investigation on a formal level.
9. Sometimes photography is your subject, such as in the series ‘Esthetics Of The Self Timer’. Can you explain some more about this?
This is a series of images that I searched and found online and revolves around the use of the self timer mode of the camera. This interest was triggered after I found two slides of a group portrait. One of them shows the actual portrait, the other is what most people would consider to be a failure: the person responsible for pressing the shutter was not fast enough and appears with his back towards the camera, blocking the group. I decided to see if I could find similar images on photo sharing websites like Flickr and to my amazement there was a lot to be found. I broadened the subject of my investigation to ‘any photo ‘unsuccessfully’ taken using the self timer mode’. Next to the series of ‘runners’ many more categories arose, which I then got printed and presented as small groups of photos.
I guess you can see this work as a photography essay in which I’m trying to make sense of the visual culture we live in. Why do we take pictures of ourselves, what is the function of that particular photo? Why do we still share images that are mostly considered as a failure if one keeps the initial goal in mind? Why are we all taking the same pictures?
10. Can you tell us something about the way you install your work; your use of space and techniques in your installations?
When I’m working on an installation, the selection process is something that happens in my studio. I make small try-outs in which I test the technical aspects of possibilities for an installation. But the real work doesn’t start until I get to be in the space where the installation will be. Especially when working with slide projectors, this is the moment where I can see if the image has to be large or small and how it relates to the space. For example, in the installation ‘Yellow Flowers’ I combined 15 found slides that had been taken in the same living room over a period of several years. By sequentially projecting them on the walls of the space I wanted to give the viewer an idea of what that room must have been like. In this case it was important for me that the people in the images would appear approximately life size. I find it important to create a certain intimacy; these photos were once taken to serve as personal documentation and I want that to be reflected within the work.
11. Is there someone, inside or outside of the arts, that has strongly influenced your work?
My beautiful wife Anne is never tired of discussing what I’m working on and she gives me a lot of room to do what I do. It is an enormous luxury to have someone around to share ideas with and her insights inspire me to push myself further. Her belief in me and my work means a lot and gives me the courage to continue. My words don’t do justice to how much I appreciate what she does to me. She is truly awesome.
12. Can you recommend a book, movie or exhibition that has been a source of inspiration to you?
Growing up we did not have much art around, but my parents had a book in the higher shelves of the bookcase and whenever my parents would be out of sight this was the one book I would risk falling flat on the face for. I would stack cushions on a stool in order to reach to the top shelve so I could have a look. It was the book ‘Hallo!’ by renowned Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken. Since there is some nudity in the book, I wasn’t allowed to look inside, but of course anything you’re not supposed to be doing you will do.
Looking back, I can now see how this book has had a very big impact on my development as an artist. Both the way the photo are combined on the pages as well as the voyeuristic taste to some of the photos are aspects that I can also see in my own work. My parents gave me their copy of the book a couple of years ago and it’s a book I still reach for every now and then. Looking at it right now, I notice that I have placed it on the top shelve of my own bookcase…
13. What projects are you currently working on and what are your plans for the future?
I am very excited to start publishing my own photography magazine, March & Rock, which will have a new edition four times per year. Each volume is loosely built around a theme and will mainly consist of photos, all taken by me and will be printed in an edition of 100. The first volume of March & Rock will be published in April 2015.
Next to that I have developed a personal residence project called Siting, which involves me working in a gallery or art space for one week, limiting myself to take photos in a fixed area around the gallery of only one kilometre radius and with these images present an exhibition. During the project anyone is welcome to visit and I will also have a dedicated blog where you can see the project unfold. The first edition will take place in Qlick Editions in Amsterdam in July 2015.
The ultimate goal is to do this project on many different locations all over the world.
