graeme mitchell

These are the guys that invented fashion photography; pre-WWII consciously or not they created a whole new genre and became the shoulders Avedon and Penn and the rest would later stand on.  Absolutely remarkable.  If you don’t know them, study up, b/c they’ve a great deal to teach.

Horst P. Horst:

photo: Mainbocher Corset, Paris, 1939. ©Horst P. Horst.

Cecil Beaton:

photo: Baba Beaton: A Symphony in Silver, 1925. ©Cecil Beaton Archive.

George Hoyningen-Huene:

photo: Divers, 1930. © George Hoyningen-Huene.

Louise Dahl-Wolfe:

photo: Twins at Beach, 1955. © Louise Dahl-Wolfe.

Martin Munkacsi:

photo: Lovely autumn: the last rays of sunshine, ca. 1929. © Joan Munkacsi.

A rare bird spotted late last night in the W. Village, totally stock and looking wise beyond it’s years. Really real boyhood memories, and more importantly a cognizance of possibilities that will never die.

[Insert Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” track here. Seriously.]

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008

I’ve mentioned Eggleston before but have never done a post on him, b/c I wouldn’t know where to begin or stop…I mean, I have hordes of awe for his vision and his pursuit of it, b/c you see, in so many ways, he is the father of modern fine-art photography. He brought color to fine art photography, and banality, and irony, and the vernacular, and…and pretty much anything you see in color hanging in Chelsea today. Indeed, he’s one of the handful photographers I’d, without hesitation, call a genius of the medium…not ingenious, but truly genius.

I still don’t plan on saying much here b/c it’d become painfully long-winded, so I only wanted to share this picture from his book William Eggleston 5×7. It caught my eye as being so beautiful. It’s not even particularly Egglestonish; it’s softer and lacks his usual detachment; but it’s for this very reason I’m attracted to it.

photo: from William Eggleston 5×7, © William Eggleston.

For more on this picture and the taking of it read this Smithsonian article.

Recently I was researching modern Japanese photographers, trying to understand their aesthetic of transforming and expanding simple content (visual haiku?), their use of space (often empty, often black…), and finally what I see as their consistent perturbed and psychologically dislocated conclusions.

Shomei Tomatsu was one who’s work stood out as being important to me.

photo: “Boy and the Sea,” Tokyo, 1969. © Shomei Tomatsu.

photo: “Melted Bottle” (From the series “Nagasaki 11:02), Nagasaki, 1961. © Shomei Tomatsu.

Dubbed part of the holy trinity of modern Irish lit - alongside Joyce and Beckett - Flann O’Brien’s (born Brian O’Nolan) piece of mastery At Swim-Two-Birds is a must must must (etc) read for one and all. Joyce and Beckett had super smart senses of funny, but O’Brien is of the laugh-your-guts-sore sorts. To the extent that I’d suggest to read him in private. No kidding. Further differences may be generalized as such: I recognize Joyce as one of the acmes of modernism, while Beckett I think is a key to a bridge between modernism and post-modernism, but of the three, O’Brien has his foot the furthest into the post-modern sensibility with his cobbled-meta-fiction and light yet somehow still dark humor that would later become so predominant with the late-post-mod-literature-of-exhaustion satirical writers like Barth, Vonnegut, and suchlike…

So, read O’Brien.

Oh, nearly forgot, the initial inspiration for this post was that when I read At Swim-Two-Birds Joseph Koudelka’s (w/ Magnum) work came to mind, this very special indeed image especially,

photo: “Czechoslovakia, 1960.” ©Joseph Koudelka/Magnum, 2008.

I recalled reading a section in William T. Vollmann’s beautiful book Europe Central that focused on Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist that lived and created through both of the World Wars, but it wasn’t until last night that I came across a book on Kollwitz…and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t well up looking at the work of this artist who lost her son in WWI, her grandson in WWII, and who’s life was spent surrounded by war and death - I could feel the absolute necessity of her work, her tremendous empathy…and seeing what she felt, I counted my blessings.

Etching: “Woman with Dead Child” by Kathe Kollwitz.

Etching: “After the Battle” by Kathe Kollwitz.

Late late last night I was looking through MOMA’s collection of photography. My initial interest was looking at work by unknown photographers, unattributed work, since through the day I’d had this line of thought in regards to identity, reflection of self, authorship, etc, that I was unable to order or find completion in, and viewing work w/o authors seemed like it may prompt uniformity in the line of thought, if you could call it a line. Though a reasonable hope, it ended up being false hope. But I kept clicking through the collection.

And as I ran later and later into the collection I noticed a photographer’s name over and over, Lee Friedlander. I know the name Friedlander, know he’s still alive, know he shoots documentry work of sorts, but even knowing these things I’d never actually looked at or thought about his work. So I did. And I came away thinking that he uses the camera in an entirely imaginative and creative manner that isn’t, how should I say, contrived, or maybe that there appears to be a lack of self-consciousness in his images is a more appropriate phrasing. Instead, his pictures, especially his later works, seem wholly visceral (and b/c of this somehow unmitigated, as you can understand). And to me work that is visceral is most often brave, and brave work is what any artist should strive for.

First, his series of TVs on in empty rooms. I love these. I wish I’d taken these. But I’m acutely aware that any picture of a TV in an empty room will always be in the footsteps of Friedlander.

photo: Galex, Virginia. 1962. © Lee Friedlander, 2007.

Then there are his pictures that his own shadow plays an integral part in. I love these. I wish I’d taken these. But I’m acutely aware that any picture that the photographer’s shadow plays an integral part in will always be in the footsteps of Friedlander.

photo: New York City. 1966. © Lee Friedlander, 2007.

Then, similarly, there are his images with his reflection. I love these. I wish I’d taken these. But I’m acutely aware that any picture with the photographer’s reflection in a window will always be in the footsteps of Friedlander.

photo: Denver, Colorado. 1998. © Lee Friedlander, 2007.

Then, finally, there are his self portraits. Often behind sparse foliage. Initially I did not love these and did not wish I’d done them. But after going through his body of work and seeing how he’d arrived here. I did love them and did wish I’d done them. But I’m acutely aware that any self portrait of photographer behind sparse foliage will always be in the footsteps of Friedlander.

photo: California. 1997. © Lee Friedlander, 2007.

Now I wish to return to the initial topic of this post, and that was my researching unattributed works to better understand and to explore ideas of identity, image, self awareness, reflection, etc. Initially, I asked, what are we but a series of ideas and events that we’ve compiled? Then I thought of self-projection, and thus authorship and began to ask if something in the specific realm of the artist could elucidate a more universal premise. You get the idea. I too quickly concluded the MOMA collection wasn’t going to be much inspiration.

Then Friedlander distracted me.

Then I went to bed.

Then at some point late last night staring at the too yellow street light out my window, I realized Friedlander’s work was what I’d been looking for the entire time. Once I got past wishing I’d taken his pictures, I saw the obvious: that identity, reflection, self-awarenesses, and so forth, are all central issues he’s confronting. What I’ve yet to get my head around is whether he is simplifying or complicating these issues. Is he projecting self, or raising questions around self? Is his work a testimony, a stamp, a marking, a graffiti on the wall exclaiming, Lee was here? Or is it an obscuring of self, a questioning of what makes self up, the photographer/author apparent in his work, meta, post-mod, self as a shadow on others, as a cracked reflection in a store window, as a grotesque figure within yet obviously different from nature?

I don’t know, but it seems like something worth thinking about.

Man Ray was ahead of his time, indeed, way way ahead of his time. He’s the kind of photographer that will always inspire and scare other photographers - forever - b/c he did things first and best that will continue to come and go from fashion. What does this mean? Well, it means after I use solarization in my next story, later whilst I’m loafing around Cafe Gitane pontificating on the trends I’m setting, I’ll have eating away in my conscious the fact that Man Ray already hit that nail on the head nearly 100 years ago. (This goes even for artsy lesbian pornography, which I’m not shooting yet, but which Man Ray already did.) I really have noticed solarization is trying right now in fashion photography. It’s hard to gather enthusiasm about it in it’s modern Photoshop-filter form, at least compared to Man Ray’s pieces…just look at this pic and how timeless it is:

photo: woman with folden arms, © Many Ray (date unknown)

vs. this recent pic by Ruven Afanador (with Art Dept), who’s other work I’m fond of,

photo: © Ruven Afanador (publication and date unknown, found here)

Or if you’ve seen much of Inez and Vinoodh’s portraits (at Art and Commerce), you’ll see an - intended or not - development upon Man Ray’s blurred faces.

photo: La Marquise Casati, 1922, © Many Ray

vs. this portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman for the New York Times 2006 Great Performers Series (slide show here).

photo: Philip Seymour Hoffman, © Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for The New York Times

All fantastic work.

After the mention of Gaddis in the last post I wanted to offer this sentence in addition, from Carepenter’s Gothic. This is beautiful writing, the sort of sentence that one can read over and over…the simple act of reading it aloud makes life itself more beautiful…

From the terrace, where she came out minutes later, the sun still held the yellowing heights of the maple tree on the lower lawn’s descent to a lattice fence threatening collapse under a summer exuberance of wild grape already gone a sodden yellow, brown spotted, green veined full as hands in its leaves’ lower reaches toward the fruitless torment of a wild cherry tree, limbs like the scabrous barked trunk itself wrenched, twisted, dead where one of them sported wens the size of a man’s head, cysts the size of a fist, a graceless Laocoon of a tree whose leaves where it showed them were shot through with bursts neither yellow nor not, whose branches were already careers for bittersweet just paling yellow, for the Virginia creeper in a vermilion haste to be gone.

-Carpenters Gothic. ©William Gaddis, 1985. Viking Penguin Edition. Page 36.

And a Matisse,

Landscape at Collioure. Henri Matisse, 1905

The incessant media on what art is selling for unsettles me. Not b/c of the dollar amounts. Gawd, not at all. I think this stuff is priceless. But b/c what it does is perpetuates the, most often, inane myth of the celebrity artist and, more profoundly, the not inane at all mechanisms of Foucault’s “author function.” Not that there’s anything wrong with these two things if you’re also talking about the work, but when discussion of the work is completely overlooked…

Think. What if all art, all literature, all music was stripped of it’s maker, as though it existed in an ideal of formalism, w/o context or name, and it became entirely its form and the event of experiencing it? Would this change how it affects? Only a hypothetical, since…well the idea of anonymity intrigues me greatly, but so does putting food on my plate…someday I hope I can join Pynchon on an island somewhere, be neighbors and never know it.

As I’m reading JR right now, this is a fitting Gaddis quote:

I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.

-from his Nation Book Awards acceptance speech for JR in April of 1976

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963.

Mark Rothko, White Center, 1950, Private Collection

One thing I envy about writers is that complete, brilliant endings are possible with their work. Photographers don’t have this opportunity, or good ones most often don’t I think. Photographs are vortices, snippets, transitory wisps…photographs may inspire reveries of endings but not supply them. Whereas writers, writers can spin the sort of ending that is like a divine arm sweeping out in a broad gesture of finality. These are the sort of ending that are nearly guilty of bathos b/c they’re usually the last honest moment where the authors’ earned, after much intelligent constraint, the right to let their form touch upon the sentimental, but they’d never be accused of any affront b/c the ending will moreover function as the final pique to the truths that the writer had built with all the pages that came before. This is all assuming it’s a good ending.

Two of the greatest endings in Literature are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final page to The Great Gatsby, and the other is the final paragraphs of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” from Dubliners.

First, Fitzgerald’s picture

photo: no credit info avail, found here

and his final page of Gatsby (quoted from this full text source):

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Then there is Joyce’s portrait (which I think is perfect):

photo: no credit info available, found here

and finally his closing page of “The Dead” (quoted from this full text source).

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I’ve know of Andrea Modica’s Treadwell series for sometime, and each time I come back to it I’m equally engrossed. First and foremost, Treadwell is a fictional town she’s created, photographing the children of it in a manner of the Gothic grotesque, and any sort of fiction this elaborated always garners my respect and inspires my imagination. Secondly, she is shooting 8×10 and the prints are platinum, and while I try to avoid letting technical aspects like this influence my viewing of photographs - b/c it’ll often end up weighing in too heavily - recognition still must be made that these are exquisite platinum prints.

photo: Treadwell, NY (1992) ©Andrea Modica

photo: Treadwell, NY (1993) ©Andrea Modica

Now Alessandra Sanguinetti I just discovered, seeing three Fujiflex prints from her series On The Sixth Day at the MOMA. I stared at them longer than any of the other prints there, longer than the Andreas Gursky print, longer than the Philip-Lorca Dicorcia print, longer than the Jeff Wall print, and this is to Sanguinetti’s credit, b/c as far as I know she’s much their junior. The reason for my staring at them so long was b/c I couldn’t figure out what I felt about them (which makes them good right?). There’s something accessible and nearly plain about them; almost like they’re too “pretty” to hang where they hang - but at the same time there is an apparent tension and violence in them that somehow correlates so well in juxtaposition to the simplicity and beauty. Maybe too I found them a relief b/c they seemed not to be reaching so hard for intellectualism as so much contemporary photography is…

This first photo of the goats - I think they’re goats anyhow - I kept coming back to…there’s something in it, something tremendous. If I collected photographs, I would certainly desire it. Thanks so much for it, Alessandra.

photo: Untitled from On The Sixth Day ©Alessandra Sanguinetti

photo: Untitled from On The Sixth Day ©Alessandra Sanguinetti

Charlotte Cotton has an essay at tip of the tongue discussing the state of contemporary black and white photography. Or you can download this pdf: thenewcolor.pdf. Pretty smart.

I’ve never really thought about it that much. Actually, I try to resist any temptation to delineate what is what in art, seems to me to be a dangerous occupation that, really, only history is qualified for. That’s not meant as an offense to the critics. No no, I love reading this stuff, but my personal hubris can’t muster anything that definitive.

I reserve the right to change my mind on that.

New York Magazine has an article on hip as hell, Lower East Side artists Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, and Dan Colen here. It’s more a fun read than anything, but two things came to mind after I finished it.

First, it’s titled Warhol’s Children, which seemed a bit much. Maybe Warhol’s Son In-laws would have been a more appropriate title. An allusion to his direct heir seems worthy of something more, uh, revolutionary, no? I get that Warhol was an extravagant personality in the scene of his day and was fond of Polaroids too, but he also changed the world of art and the function of the artists persona in the commerce of art. He essentially invented the art star. Not to mention his work and the affect it had and is still having. The comparison the writer draws between Nan Goldin and Dash Snow seems much more appropriate I think, still flattering just more reasonable.

Secondly, and this crossed my mind in more of a vague manner, is the mythologies these guys are constructing around themselves, or in laymen terms the endless radical PR campaign they’re partaking in. In a sense it would make them Warhol’s children since they’ve embraced this facet of Warhol’s legacy so perfectly, but that would hardly be an endearing title then. Warhol’s creation of the celebrity artist may have been as much a byproduct of our culture as his own will, or in other words partially accidental in it’s scope, whereas it seems hyper-self-conscious and not at all accidental with these guys. It’s a farce, a brilliant one, a perfected method to madness. I admire it tremendously b/c it seems more important and magnificent to me than there actual work, and what this made me think was: would it be possible to consider the really great work these guys are doing, the work that will be remembered, performance pieces in the way they are living? Where the Polaroids are just a record of this unending performance of acting out as symbols of what has come of art and celebrity in our culture? Right now, I’m not sure or not if I’m serious…but I had to respond in someway to an article on three artists that doesn’t have even one accompanying image of their work yet readily discusses the impressive size of one of there penises…Colen’s in case you’re wondering.

I don’t know much about it at all really. To me McGinley’s work is good, and I suspect he’s disciplined and intent, but other than that I don’t know except that it seems they’re all having fun, which is a great accomplishment in life. Anyway, some of their work…

photo: © Dash Snow

photo: © Dash Snow

photo: © Ryan McGinley

photo: © Ryan McGinley

sculpture by Dan Colen

sign by Dan Colen

In the vain of lessons learned I recalled this project I began briefly around 2 years ago photographing Senior’s. It was a heartfelt project, but after only two days of shooting a bowling league I realized my futility with the subject I’d raised. Mostly, I just couldn’t not make it garish and blithe, despite my different attempts (in retrospect, I imagine the bowling alley probably didn’t help much on this front). I’d the sympathies necessary, but lacked the maturity aesthetically. So now, after only two years, I look back at these images and the word fumbling comes to mind.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

This is a minor insight, but I bring it up b/c it lends example to the creative process, which is fascinating b/c it’s so unique for everyone. Usually, personally, I have a theme stuck in my head. Then it becomes correlated to very specific imagery imagined. There is much mulling over these, digestion if you will, often while walking. Then there is the will to begin to make the ideas tangible, or the waiting for a good opportunity to do so. Then a series of compromises as the idea is born to reality. Then, as per the example, there is the failure, success, reconsideration, or dismissal of the project. All of it is, for me, private and internalized - I’ve only know two people in my life I can freely deliberate over projects with.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

This is a much different process than many other people I know, which doesn’t lend anything to understanding the work, but is just entertaining to think about. Now, personally, I envy the artists I know who are prolific and produce work with no apologies and no explanations, where every piece is successful just in it’s realization, intended or not. But, more the school I belong to, there are more common those that know very much what they want, but don’t know what they don’t want, making their creative process a series of rejections - albeit usually private rejections. This is fine, more than fine in fact, since as I pointed out, none of it beyond the ideas and works have any merit when the day is done.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

In all, maybe there are a handful of lines of thought I’ve ever been interested in, and maybe I’ll come against a few more with time. It’s weird how natural it seems that all of this effort and strife is an attempt to explore, explain, elucidate, and share one of these simple themes. It makes me think of Joyce’s Ulysses, a massive difficulty that in the end, really, boils down to one word, “that word known to all men.” I hope someday I can muster the courage to attempt to take on that word to such effect. Attempt, mind you.  Attempt.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2004