the eyes of anne collier

i've been having a hard time with portraits lately.  i've taken a bit of time off from really looking at them (or taking them).

Anne Collier's approach to capturing the subject is very appealing to me right now.  her images raise a lot of questions, ones that i enjoy--about appropriation, looking, documenting, nostalgia, and about why we take photographs.

the top image is from her "Woman With A Camera" series; it's a photograph of a promotional photo for "Eyes of Laura Mars" (the 1978 film in which Faye Dunaway sees--and photographs--through the eyes of a male serial killer).  the second image is "8 x 10 (Left Eye #1)," from a recent series of photographs of 8 x 10 prints in photo paper boxes.

Collier has said of photographing other photographs and album covers: "It's got something to do with self-portraiture, but I'm not really in any of the photographs."

(listen to more at the 2006 Whitney Biennial site.)

self-portraits

Amy Stein's blog offered an answer to my recent questions about female self-portrait projects that explore nudity and questions about the subject while featuring diverse body sizes and perspectives.  

i really enjoyed looking through Jen Davis' portfolio and her self-portrait series.  there are so many images that i enjoyed (though, at 44 photos, it could be edited down and focused a bit more for the web--that said, i think the breadth helped me understand the project more fully).  the project does include several photos that directly address body image and self-esteem, which was at first a turnoff for me--i'd like to see one that doesn't some day--but they are also honest and fit in well with the overall piece.

also check out Jen Davis' project "I Ask in Exchange," featuring some pretty intense portraits of different men.  Amy Stein comments: "You can definitely sense a strong female gaze in the images."

please keep sending more links my way.

feral bodies, tame bodies

i am both compelled and troubled by Megan Cump's project Feral, which i saw on Flak Photo. in the project, Cump goes on solo hiking and kayaking trips and photographs herself going back to nature in some surprising tableaux. the images themselves are compelling enough: beautiful landscapes; contemplations of nature and man's role; a naked, young photographer interested in her ability to lose her humanity and have a feral immersion.

her website is organized so that you can see not only each photo, but a detail zoom of each image's selected punctum (see the above detail images: "bloodbath detail" and "siren detail"). i think the troubling part about the project for me is not the content, but two other things. the first one is desire to explain the importance of the images using the grainy details, instead of letting the viewer find its own meaning in the photograph. in this way, the details are offered as trophies, which i think undercuts the photos themselves. (this approach also reminds me a bit of the hide-and-seek product-placement ads playfully included in Alec Soth's Fashion Magazine.)

secondly, i am troubled a bit by something else, which is not Cump's fault, nor is it limited to her: self-portrait projects from a visually-privileged position of young, white, nude beauty. i have been thinking about the "trouble" with beauty in art photography for some time. i can see an alternate world in which i would earnestly feel that female photographers' naked self-portraits were brave, theoretically rigorous, challenging, honest, etc...etc... except i rarely do feel that way, because lately i notice that mainly thin, beautiful women engage in these projects in the first place. or at least, their projects are the ones that gain recognition in the art world (which is why i see them?). of course, such projects might have something thought-provoking and honest to offer, but overall, it still troubles me.

this uneasiness has kept me from embracing other work that i otherwise enjoy and find interesting, from Elinor Carucci's early work to Janice Guy. i'd love to hear from anyone else who has been thinking along the same lines lately. (and i don't mean to lump these photographers together with Flickr's Female Self-Portrait Artists' Support Group or anything, but it's been on my mind, and i would love to see some antidotes--feel free to email them to me.  see also some more discussion of this here.)

back to Feral--some images from the project are below (non-detail views). Megan Cump's project statement is here, and is worth checking out too. she says:

"Important influences also include Freud’s concepts of the uncanny, turn-of-the-century “spirit photography,” and acts of sudden transformation found in myths."

catblogging van der zee

the other day i had a wow moment, when i came across one of Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee's last portraits. i'd seen it before but never given serious thought to it. but it is hard to wrap my head around the fact that Van Der Zee took the top photograph during the Great Depression, and the bottom one, of Jean-Michel Basquiat, in 1982 at the age of 96. what an amazing life's work.

(there's an interesting article about this period in Van Der Zee's life here, in a 1981 issue of Ebony.)

and Basquiat's portrait of Van Der Zee (VNDRZ) is below.

subject echo: ectoplasm!

i saw Helga Härenstam's work on Conscientious, and enjoyed checking out her project "House of the Extraordinary." i especially liked reading the images in this series as contemporary, color explorations of the way technology and light can manifest as creepy and miraculous.

this reminded me of a book a friend recently gave me: Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840 - 1900 (from the SFMoMA exhibition). the book explores the early use of photography to capture "the realm beyond our everyday vision," from space photography to microscopic particles, X-rays, and even spirit photography.

Helga Härenstam's image (top) instantly reminded me of this 1912 photograph of a medium (and her viewer) from Brought to Light.

whether photography is attempting to capture ectoplasm, the human spirit, or the connection that happens the moment the shutter clicks, i think the best of it is still searching for that realm beyond our everyday vision.

drapery

French photographer Catherine Larré recently sent over her website. some of her work is a bit more gothic and romantic than my usual taste, but i enjoyed the above photographs of bodies and skin from an untitled project.

interestingly enough, she has several statements about her work on her site, all written by other people, in French, and available in translation. here's a quote from one that i enjoyed for being both random and ambiguous enough to offer a lens for thinking about any of her images. (and to think of folds of skin as drapery--fantastic.)

"Drapery," Roger de Piles wrote in 1699, “should not be arranged like dress as used in society; let pleats find their own place around limbs by chance, making them appear as they are and yet stand out through the diligent device of stroking, somehow emphasizing them, with softness and tender winding." --José Puig

twinship

on sunday, i went to the International Center of Photography to see Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now. i am not an adept viewer of fashion photography, but i was drawn to an editorial menswear feature called Princeton--that turned out to be photographed by artist Collier Schorr. i really enjoy Schorr's work and was interested to see that that spark translated to fashion layouts as well. just like in her fine art endeavors, she is great at drawing something special out of the idea of men-as-subjects (and as objects of desire).

downstairs at ICP, there was a small exhibit on Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi, which included this image (installation view from my phone):


which in turn reminded me of Schorr's project The Wrestlers:


here's what she has to say about it:

"There never seems to be a wide range of emotional definitions of men. And I think in wrestling you really see so many different emotions, so many different reactions and interactions... A theme of twinship has always run through my work, of people that look alike. And that was another reason I was drawn to wrestling because I feel like wrestlers look a certain way... I can just tell a wrestler. And I’ve grown to love that face. And so I’m looking for guys that fit that pattern. I’m looking for this tribe of people."

p.s. in a stroke of kismet, Molly Landreth just blogged about "the lines of tribe" and relating it to Collier Schorr's take on capturing tribes, from Schorr's interview with the great PBS series Art21. view the synchronicity here.

that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve?

"that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself"

President Obama's inaugural speech had a small, jangly note for me: his invocation for the lines of tribe to dissolve. in context, he is calling for an end to violence that uses tribal loyalty as an excuse for discord and exclusion.  to see the common humanity that transcends tribal allegiance is an ideal and surely a necessary one. but taken in a much broader context, his statement also makes me consider when the melting pot is not enuf.

could the concept of unity exist without tribes?  (and would we want it to?) tribes are enormously important to us and i think there is no chance of that importance lessening--if anything, new media's power to connect disparate people with similar interests will continue to propagate an increase in new tribes. and today's contemporary tribes, many affinity-based in nature, have shifted the traditional boundaries of our identity politics.

in photography, it is by now a time-honored (or time-worn) tradition to visually document a "tribe." many readers will recognize that this is not my favorite kind of project; especially one that chases at strangeness and specificity with a sort of butterfly-catcher's net.  often these projects, from the POV of the photographer as sociologist, point toward a common humanity as well. (in that way some are universalizing in their otherwise minoritizing lens.)

but although i usually shy away from projects that earnestly attempt to capture and document an actual community, there are many instances where i really enjoy the photographer's particular take on how to group people together into a tribe and how to present them visually.

today, i would like to honor tribes in photography. below are some of the "tribal" projects that i've noticed or been thinking about lately. some i respond to more strongly than others. but all of them, as a category of photographic production, both trouble and delight me.

("this is the price, and the promise, of citizenship.")

Rewilding, Lucas Foglia
(Off-the-grid homesteaders)

Nollywood, Pieter Hugo

(Actors in the Nigerian film industry)

Still Lovers, Elena Dorfman
(Men and their real dolls)

Parameters, Corinne May Botz

(Agoraphobics and their environments)

Aicuna, Paola de Grenet

("The mysterious village of the albinos")

Perfectible Worlds, Sage Sohier

(Obsessive collectors and hobbyists)

Embodiment, Molly Landreth

("A portrait of queer life in America")

squirrel portraits

what better way to dip one's toes back into the frothy waters of the blogosphere than with pictures of cute, fuzzy squirrels?

i've been pondering the tropes of editorial portraiture a bit lately, and i have to say, my hat was off to the photo editors at the New York Times when i read the recent article about serving squirrel meat at trendy restaurants in England ("Saving a Squirrel by Eating One").

there is no way to argue with the brilliant sequencing of the three photos in this article. the article moves through commercial photo clichés even as it moves through the animal's lifecycle: from cute overload-style stock photography (happy red squirrels vs. grumpy invading grey squirrels), to commissioned classic editorial portraiture (in this case, stuffy British gamekeeper complete with three-piece tweed suit, Wellies, hounds, and...dead squirrels), to minimalist food portraiture (portrait of the squirrel as...lunch). amazing.

great subjects: bettie page

it would feel remiss not to post a wee tribute to one of the great subjects of photographic history: Bettie Page.

when i first read Page's New York Times obituary, i thought something was not quite right. it lauds her "trademark" "killer curves" and defines her as "the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era." both of these statements strike me as false. i think the easy label of "most famous pinup" actively erases the fact that most of her work was fairly underground and part of a sexual counterculture (if anything, she was the dark, trussed-up sister to the popular 1950s beauty queen ideal). and i don't think her (average) curves defined her photographic fate.

Bettie Page's trademark as a subject was her electric connection with the camera and, ultimately, the viewer. and by that criteria, she can't be beat.

my puzzling over the false notes of the obituary were assuaged a bit, but not completely, by Manohla Dargis' more thoughtful appraisal a few days later. her lede was the John Berger quotation: "To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself." but Dargis doubts that Berger's skeptical quote could apply to Page's natural, inviting, comfort and "ease" in her own skin.

Dargis is certainly responding here to Page's ready smile, her apparently-naked abandon, her winking knowingness... but is the viewer really recognizing her for her true self? i wouldn't guess so. (i mean, this was an abuse survivor who shot up to bondage-y fame before becoming a born-again Christian and having a nervous breakdown and a spate of mental health problems. i don't mean to pathologize, but i don't think i could know what was going on in her head.) perhaps the key to what made her so compelling on camera is a bit more complicated than easy analysis allows.

nude, naked, or otherwise, i'm comfortable with—and thankful for—the mystery.

muxes

some folks probably saw the New York Times feature this weekend on muxes in Oaxaca, Mexico. muxe is a Zapotec word for that region's transgender women. Katie Orlinsky's slideshow of images from the community was pretty great—and for those who wanted to check out even more, it turns out her website has a more extensive collection. a few that weren't in the Times' edit are above.

thanks Joe for the link!

persona

looking through all the photos in Hee Seung Chung's project "Persona" made me a bit sad. which in a way, is a testament to the subjects, because they are all actors. by examining the gray area where an actor's fictional persona becomes their temporary reality, Chung is exploring the line between "staged" and "authentic" emotional states.

Chung says: "This project also explores the issue of observing the grief of others in the photograph....we know it is a mere fabrication; the expression of grief certainly generates a psychological exchange between the actor, the persona and the beholder. They have a special quality as they break down our own emotional barriers. It is as if they bring about our own inherent feelings of grief and sorrow, which we conceal in everyday life or we project our own emotion or experience onto these melancholic faces."

given the blankness upon which Chung sets the scene, i thought the above subject worked particularly well. her flat affect and colorlessness matches the background, and makes her dark eyes all the more compelling.

Älterwerdens der Ausgangspunkt

here's a project featuring older subjects that i saw just recently on Conscientious. it's Espen Eichhöfer's series "Die Alteren," which he translates as "The Elderly."

Eichhöfer writes: "They originated from questions regarding the phenomenon of aging. The protagonists of this staged production are my parents. The idea that everyone carries all of the previous stages of age within themselves inspired me."

the indiscriminate urge to engage everyone

continuing on this week's theme of portraits of older subjects...

like Michelle Sank's yesterday, Sarah Small's photographs also do not have the aesthetic that i usually go for (which is, oh, you know, mopey, self-important, naturally-lit, brooding, that sort of thing). but i just love the scenarios she presents in her images. the wild colors, the harsh studio lighting, and the juxtapositions are lively and fun and actually surprising. (which sometimes feels a bit rare in this looking-at-photos-online game that we play.)

one theme i noticed in her work is a mix of elders and youngsters in interesting tableaux. little girls spaz out in front of crashed-out grandpas; naked teens and fashion models cavort with relatives, dolls, and animals; different generations pose together in frozen, constructed moments. i'm not sure what it all means, but Sarah Small's vision is consistent and consistently thought-provoking. also, her shoots look like they are a lot of fun.

a few of my intergenerational picks are above.

Small says: 

"My constant curiosity, indiscriminate urge to engage everyone, and fascination with entangling myself in human drama guided me through boundless adventures...I‘ve engaged in an ongoing pursuit to find and photograph enchanting characters, animals, and bold color within all my projects—personal, fashion, editorial, and commercial."