“Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar.” – Helmut Newton
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” – Diane Arbus
All photography to some extent is a violating act as you are seeing someone as they could never see themselves.” – Susan Sontag
Of course this is a valid point-of-view having roots at least as far back as the modernists. But there are many contemporary artists finding much more relevance in this quote from Jorge Calado’s essay “The Original Sin:”
“Photography begins with an “f” sound that stands for fiction, fake or forgery. And that is the original sin of photography. Only the most untainted purists (and the pedantic New York Times) seem to be unaware of this.” – Jorge Calado (PDF link to essay)
Laurent Millet
James Casebere
Thomas Demand
Joan Fontcuberta
Lori Nix
Robert and Shanna ParkeHarrison
Kim Keever
yours truly
here are a couple of images to prolong the summer feel
and then there’s an october chill in hopper’s paintings of transit and waiting, possibly to if not from destinations such as the new england ponds (the stone bridge through the train window)
museumsyndicate.com
finally, it’s the waiting places that seem to be worn from the anticipation in these photographs by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg of bus stops in Armenia (see also the Hejaz railway photographs on Schulz-Dornburg’s website)
progress update pics for A.M. Richard gallery: “Coney Island”
the pieces for the photograms for coney island installation
the finished photograms
for Nurture Art Gallery: “No Place in Bushwick”
Bushwick Biennial installation piece in progress
…wanting something so intensely you turn inside out, like going all the way around on the swingset; the rides and experiences at coney island in its utopian heyday were intended to deliver an otherworldly experience, to transport the person to a place completely dettached from the reality of gritty manhattan – a dreamland, underwater, the moon, anywhere. no place.
the small-scale installation at A.M. Richard gallery will represent my vision of coney island. i’m undecided about going to visit coney. i already know its multilayered history of escapist fantasy, and the feud between this unreal environment and the natural landscape of the atlantic coast. the piece will be a memory of what coney island was like before i’m let down by it’s current exhausted state. i’m building a coney island i won’t visit.
the bushwick biennial piece for nurture art gallery continues these themes, centering on the process of building non-places with an installation that will include viewfinders scavenged from disposable cameras.
“What you alter in remembering has yet a reality, known or not.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road. This line coming about halfway through the book is as if a violent pink wad of bubblegum was spat smack in the eye of the bleakest dystopian bleached gray. that’s a beautiful thing.
here are a few spectacular stills from Hitchcock’s Saboteur. they occur at points in the film where the hero’s innocence and resolve are tested by man and nature and are right out of the pages of the German romantics 125 years prior (see Philip James de Loutherbourg, An Avalanche in the Alps, 1803, also Casper David Friedrich, Sunset 1830) and the American rocky mountain school (Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866).
have a look at what the neo-romantics are up to now: Christopher Orr, The Farthest Shore, 2008, and here.
on the sublime, here is a list (!) by Hildebrand Jacob in How the Mind is Raised by the Sublime, 1730′s, of such things and places: oceans, either in calm or storm, the setting sun, precipices, caverns and Swiss mountains, compiled during a time when excursions were made to such places for the purpose of inspiration, awe, reverence. in other words to be made to feel small, frail, temporary…
A new maquette/installation featuring a waterfall, precipice and bridge is in planning stage. I plan to have it ready for exhibition in the Fall.
“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”–Pascal, Pensees, 136.
(list and Pascal quote from The Art of Travel)
the body of work in progress, ‘storm story,’ will include my drawings of dark masses obscuring and clouding peripheral vision. they relate to the Viktor Pelevin quote posted earlier and to these lines from Henri Michaux in L’espace aux ombres:
“Shade Haunted Space
Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is.
Certain (shades) especially, girding their loins one last time, make a desperate effort to ‘exist as a single entity.’ But they rue the day. I met one of them.
Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise.
An immense world still heard it, but it no longer existed, having become simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble on for centuries longer, but was fated to die out completely, as though it never existed.”
a. “I only ever see the best things in life out of the corner of my eye.”
-Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra
b. “I heard myself close my eyes, then open them.”
-Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, from Loys Masson, Icare ou le voyageur.
c. in second grade i was stung by a bee, or yellowjacket or wasp, i wouldn’t have known which. but it hurt. so instead of crying in front of my classmates i ran into the bathroom. i only remember this because in that small space i recall pressing my closed eyelids, taking notice of the colors and lines that resulted and forgetting the pain from the sting.
