Affordable Art - UPDATE

For those all those who have so far ordered a print from the first Affordable Edition, they have either just been shipped or should ship today.

And if you haven't ordered yet (and they are going fast - so hurry), just click on the link in the sidebar ever here: -------->

Now, to figure, what shall I pick for the next one...?

Alec Soth on video

Jen Bekman linked to three interesting little videos on Youtube about Alec Soth. Like JB, I especially like the third one on 8x10.

In October of 2004, photographer Alec Soth went on assignment for LIFE
magazine to capture weekend soldiers at an Airsoft
military simulation in Joelton, Tennessee.

In anticipation of his upcoming exhibition, filmmaker Mike Dust traveled alongside Soth for this three-day excursion, interviewing and shooting alongside him as he worked to capture images for, both the magazine shoot as well as for his personal work.

A number of these photographs (Odessa, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004 and Josh, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004) became part of the exhibition Alec Soth: Portraits at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the following spring. The video piece created during that shoot was installed in the gallery as an accompaniment to the exhibition.

The video is broken into three segments entitled On Assignment, Portraiture, and The Ground Glass.

Alec Soth: Portraits – On Assignment (2:33, segment 1 of 3), 2005, Video, 8 minutes, produced and directed by Mike Dust, © 2005 National Projects



Alec Soth: Portraits – Portraiture (2:25, segment 2 of 3), 2005, Video, 8 minutes, produced and directed by Mike Dust, © 2005 National Projects



Alec Soth: Portraits – The Ground Glass (3:06, segment 3 of 3), 2005, Video, 8 minutes, produced and directed by Mike Dust, © 2005 National Projects

Group Show No. 16 - Humble Arts Foundation

Well, I'm extremely please to announce that I'm part of the current Group Show at the Humble Arts Foundation (who I discovered and discussed last month). They chose the picture above from my current Alleys project

It features the work of Monica, May, Ryan Pfluger, Bryan Lear, Rebecca Steele, Johnny Misheff, Mark Johnson, Mark Wise, Alexia Pike, Dave Anderson, Rachel Dunville, Liz Kuball, David Black, Sean Fader, Nguan, Phil Cooke, Susana Raab, Martina Salbi & Tim Atherton (bios here).

I've got to say, putting mine aside, there's some fantastic stuff in there. Here are a couple of tasters, but go and have a look for yourself

HP's slimming camera

Saturday Night Live once did a skit about one of the Slimming Cams on the Oprah show being broken. Now, thanks to HP, it's a reality

Thankfully there are already a few parodies of it floating around. But I bet this is going to sell like hotcakes

(via Joerg over on Conscientious who seems gobsmacked by it all...)

(from Gizmodo.com)

Peter Fraser's Two Blue Buckets etc

Peter Fraser's Two Blue Buckets and more... Fraser seems to have been getting some much deserved wider press recently (and here among others).

For me, he is definitely one of those artists whose work fits into the third of W.H. Auden's Five Verdicts: "I see that this is good and I don't like it but I understand that with perseverance I could come to like it" - although "don't like it" is a bit too strong (I need a verdict 5a) - more "I quite like it, but I don't really like it...".

Because I can certainly see what Fraser is doing and a some of probably why he is doing it. A lot of what he seems concerned with and how he sees echoes with many things in my own work and my approach to it.

"Fraser's color pictures, whether depicting a pair of banal blue buckets or the most technologically advanced X-ray beam splitter stall time, let things just be for a moment, in all the wonder of their thingness."
Johanna Burton

"Everything visible in the world can potentially be seen, but noticing it, giving it due attention, that is quite a
different matter.

In photography of serious ambition, the photographer’s subject is almost never simply the subject matter.

Working around the object…Looking to go beyond the object…

Making allusive photographs…Work that is less immediately willing to give up its secrets…"
Gerry Badger (quoted by Chris Patterson)

Fraser has new book published by Nazraeli Press which certainly looks appealing

Looking-Glass Editions - Affordable Art for $25.00...

Well, I've decided to jump on the train (driven it seems by Jen Bekman...) while it's still slow moving and before it picks up too much momentum.

This picture is the first of my affordable edition prints and is available for only US$25.00 until the edition of 100 is all sold out - This is art you can't not afford to buy

Willow #7, Tin Can Hill - from the Immersive Landscapes - Boreal Forest/Precambrian Shield Project - is an 7 1/2"x9 1/2" pigment ink print on Silver Rag paper, signed and numbered on the reverse.

I'm following Julian Thomas' model of 25x100 - only100 prints for 25.00 each. But there are of course the existing smaller "traditional" editions available in 11x14 and 20x24

This picture is already in a couple of major collections - The Getty Museum Research Institute in LA and the Provincial Art Collection of Alberta.

Simply click on the link in the sideabar to buy (25.00 + 10.50 shipping to wherever you are).
(If you are in Canada, email me at the link in the sidebar, as shipping is a bit cheaper. I will also take USPS International Money Orders - again, email for details. And let me know if the Paypal button isn't working - it seems a bit fussy to set up...)

Finally, it was a comment by the inimitable Luis Gottandi that got me going seriously on this:

"If for no other reason, this is a good idea in that it breaks through the dominant marketing conventions of the day. Yes, I hope it works and taps into a fringe segment of the market that has been waiting for a long time for such an opportunity.

A lot of potential buyers have had to make do with posters and/or sidewalk-show imagery, yet are educated, savvy and hunger for more.

The world of the arts merchants has encysted itself in its own drag shadow for decades now, and is, historically speaking, overly ripe for change."

And why Looking Glass Editions? Perhaps turning things topsy turvy like Alice... and of course every photograph is in some ways like a mirror - and sometimes we only see as in a glass, darkly.

"If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art"

I came across this fun commentary in the introduction to the current Brick

"It is very regrettable that so many contemporary composers care so much about style and so little about idea. From this came such notions as the attempt to compose in ancient styles, using their mannerisms, limiting oneself to the little that one can thus express and to the insignificance of the musical configurations which can be produced with such equipment.

No one should give in to limitations other than those which are due to the limits of his talent. No violinist would play, even occasionally, with the wrong intonation to please lower musical tastes, no tight-rope walker would take steps in the wrong direction only for pleasure or for popular appeal, no chess master would make moves everyone could anticipate just to be agreeable (and thus allow his opponent to win), no mathematician would invent something new in mathematics just to flatter the masses who do not possess the specific mathematical way of thinking, and in the same manner, no artist, no poet, no philosopher and no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as "Art for All." Because if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art."

Arnold Schoenberg

EMPTY DRAWING ROOM

Jorge Luis Borges on the gap between the photograph's deceptive and fading poignancy, and the vibrancy of even the most mundane present moment - the void between appearances and actuality:

EMPTY DRAWING ROOM

Amid the brocade's dimness
the mahogany suite continues
its everlasting conversation.
The daguerreotypes tell their lie:
a false nearness
of old age cloistered in a mirror,
and when we look hard they elude us
like pointless dates
of murky anniversaries.
With a blurred gesture
their anxious almost-voice
runs after our souls
more than half a century late
and there it's scarcely reached
the first mornings of our childhood.
Actuality, ceaseless
ruddy, and beyond doubt,
celebrates in the street's traffic
its unassailable abundance
of present apotheosis,
while the light
slices through the windowpanes
and humbles the senile armchairs
and corners and strangles
the shriveled voice
of these ancestors

Jorge Luis Borges

Well, I have to feature Luis Gottandi's post, because it's almost as poetic as the Borges himself...:

Things conspire to keep us from gawking at the deterministic accident of our lives -- and others'.

The way time folds, like an opening curtain pulled back, from whence the exposure is made until the image is unreadable, or our eyes too gone to read it.

The unspeakable fear so many have that perhaps this is not so egalitarian, and that who we are might define the horizon line of what we can see, that maybe talent cuts education, and salesmanship trumps all the other suites.

Or it could be that we will find out that Atget froze to death in a drawer... Brady died penniless, without any of his pictures...Francesca Woodman walked into thin air at 22...as an old man, Stieglitz wondered one afternoon how long he would have to go without eating so he could afford a copy of The Steerage again. He died without one.

The vacant bliss of sticking strictly to the images and a gunslinger mentality can not be underestimated.

--- Luis

Mohammadreza Mirzaei

The other day I got an email from a young Iranian photographer Mohammadreza Mirzaei for some help with a magazine article he is putting together. However, in his email he had a link to his own work.

I must say that I rather like some of it. While his Humans project isn't quite my thing, it does have a certain appeal.

I did however really like the Wall (make sure you click for bigger pictures - the little squares don't do them justice). There is a long photographic tradition of the frame being broken by a strong vertical - a tree or a post or such - going back at least to Atget and probably before that.

I should add - kudos for his website - I like the graphic, simple, yet slightly quirky design. Would that more photographers websites were like this

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I don't think Walter Benjamin was quite right in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction although the gist of it still stands, but either way, after Jen Bekman's prodding I'm considering following Julian Thomas' lead and offering an edition of affordable art for sale. And don't worry, the aura of the authentic original will be detectable as you hold the print in your hand...

So stay tuned

PS - if anyone's aggregate/feed popped up with a post detailing the edition, I accidentally published rather than saved a rough draft last night - doh... keep your eyes peeled Monday

Ben Lifson on Sugimoto and art

I'll try not to make it Sugimoto week on here, but while writing the last post about Sugimoto, I came across a post on the OpenPhotographyForums by critic and writer Ben Lifson. The context is a (somewhat cynical) discussion about contemporary photographic art in general and Sugimoto in particular.

It's well worth reading (Lifson's post is about half way down). Ben is someone whose criticisms and conversations I've always enjoyed and benefited from - I've extracted a big chunk here - the highlighted emphases are mine:

"THE GENERAL THRUST OF THIS DISCUSSION IS ACCURATE AND IMPORTANT WITH RESPECT TO A LARGE PART OF THE CURRENT PHOTOGRAPHIC MARKET, THE CURRENT PHOTOGRAPHIC SCENE.

But, I believe, Sugimoto is the wrong example.

I feel that he is being unfairly judged here... Sugimoto is really quite good.

I haven't seen these new pictures but my direct knowledge of theoriginal works of his other series leads me to believe that these new pictures, of shadows, also have the same excellences that have made him a strong artist with a specific vision that holds much comfort and reassurance for us in these chaotic and deeply troubling times...Sugimoto makes it look as though it were easy, as though the truths about space, light, recession, projection, the geometry within the rectangle and its relation to the geometry of rectangles, the relationship between the momentary and the eternal which he reveals to us in each picture...Each time different... He makes it look as though these things can be seen and felt by everyone all the time.

I emphasize "felt" because I know from my personal experience with his original works that after only a few seconds of quiet, calm, concentrated looking at them -- leaving one's prejudices and even thoughts behind -- one begins to feel things, a kind of calm, a kind of excited calm, a kind of anticipation of a mystery about to be revealed... A feeling that I've experienced only from his work although often in nature...

True, the things Sugimoto photographs are indeed present and visible all around us all the time, in any corner or on any wall one chooses to look at.

We pass them every day. We sit opposite them for half-hours at a time in airport waiting areas when our flight is delayed, we gaze at them over our computers at the wall opposite when we can't concentrate on our work for a while.

But do we see them?

Do we see them as precisely as Sugimoto has?

Do we know precisely where the edges are, that is, where the unity, the coherence, the integration, the eloquence, the disclosed mystery of this particular patch of the universe ends, the boundary across which the order is engulfed by what seems like a chaos until, with Sugimnoto's eyes, heart, intelligence, literacy, etc. we see where the next set of edges is?...

No. Sugimoto's is not fake art made real by the pricing mechanisms of the market and the greed of investors for rich future returns.

Sugimoto's art is real art that has had the good luck to be recognized as such by the market and given good prices so that Sugimoto can keep making it and be sustained, in part, by the gratification that is given artists by recognition and reputation...It is absolutely correct with respect to much of what is going on,
not only in photography but in painting, sculpture, performance art, conceptual art, drawing, etc...

But we must be careful not to throw out the good artists like Sugimoto with the empty ones.

I was with a good and very well known German artist yesterday who characterized much of what is going on in the art capitals of New York, London, Paris and Berlin as "Pretentousness" which says only "I NEED, I NEED, I NEED, I NEED."

To which a young decorative artist I know and with whom I visited a lot of New York galleries a month ago added, "LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME"

Both artists agree that the general note is DESPERATION.

So Yes, we must continue this thread and analyze and observe and bring to bear on the situation our best intelligences...

BUT WE MUST BE CAREFUL not to judge the value of a work either way, good or bad, by two things: ONE, How much or how little it costs and TWO Whether we like it or not, i.e. our taste.

REMEMBER W. H. AUDEN'S FIVE VERDICTS, which express the difference between taste and judgment.

1. I see that this is good and I like it.

2. I see that this is good but I don't like it.

3. I see that this is good and I don't like it but I understand that with perseverance I could come to like it.****

4. I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

5. I can see that this is trash, but I like it.

****Which is how I came to like Sugimoto's work: I could see that it was honest, true, clean, extremely well done etc but I didn't like it., I felt like many of you here, like So What? or something. But I could see that it was good. It took me five years of struggling against my dislike of and my prejudices against it to see just how good it was and then, one day, passing one print in a museum and being arrested by it, feeling how good it was, feeling all its feelings, and then knowing that it and its artist were, as Keats calls the Grecian Urn, "friends to man" and I embraced it and liked it. Just like some theorems in non-Euclidean geometry, some formulas in
organic chemistry, some projectiles that will get a satellite near enough to Venus to make photographs, some art is difficult to understand.

ben lifson

www.benlifson.com"

Ben also has a series of quite in-depth articles on

RAWworkflow

25x100 - Julian Thomas decides to give it a try

Well, it looks like Julian Thomas has moved from cautious scepticism to experimentation.

He's decided to offer affordable editions of small prints a la Bekman's 20x200 (oh and don't blame Julian for the title above - that's all my doing)

His first offering a 4x12 print of this image from his ‘Three Part Inventions’ series for only 25 Euros (click on it to enlarge). Imo that's a bargain for great piece of work.

And hey - the guy makes his art with an ancient Rollei TLR that needs more coddling and tender care than Paris Hilton, so pony up and help him buy a backup....

And believe me, one day you won't be able to afford even a 4x6 of one of Julian's prints, so grab em while you can. You can contact Julian here

The Romance Industry - John Gossage

I first came across John Gossage's Venice/Maghera work in a compendium volume Identificazione di un Paesagio which originated with Sandro Mescola of the Comune di Venezia as a research project on the industrial transformation of the city of Venice. The aim of the project was to photograph “the substantial economic and social changes underway in its industrial areas.” Mescola assemble an A team of foreign photographers to depict the region - Baltz, James, Shore, Gossage, Shibata, Gohlke, Hütte etc

As I understand it, out of the volume of work that John Gossage produced for the project, he went on to put together the (fairly hefty, but not as big as Berlin in the Time of the Wall) book The Romance Industry.

In many ways this is probably my favorite of all Gossage's books (or at least those I've laid my hands on). It's also beautifully put together by Nazraeli

I'd have to say that while irony seems one of the marks of so much contemporary photography, the only seriously ironic aspect of the book is it's title - and while that throws a light veil over the whole thing, it doesn't seem a major preoccupation.




Reading through the book there are times when Gossage’s pictures can seem quite "harsh" (which is the best word I can find- perhaps "unforgiving"?) - although less so than much of the Berlin work, which I also happen to find quite melancholic. And The Pond could almost be defined as pure deadpan - despite the gentle mediation of it's journey. But while The Romance Industry certainly does has something of an unblinking view I find it to be much lighter in touch than both these books - almost gentler. It may not actually be romantic - far from it - but it is certainly poetic. Though the sort of poetry that - as John Berger describes it - does hard labour. It feels as if the deadpan, irony and melancholy have given way to certain level of fondness or affection.




I find I get a real sense of Gossage's intrigue as he delves deeper and deeper into the places and things he discovers in his investigation.

There are a number of pictures in the book which are some my favourites (at best I could only find some of them in Photoeye's booktease - there aren't many pictures online from this project at all - so some here I've plucked from other work) - incongruously, sheep enveloping a mound in the industrial area; the whole series Contents of a Laboratory (which allowed me to make an obvious but previously unmade connection for me between the approach to my museum and archives work and my personal work); an abandoned industrial area seen through a grid; the landscapes of various "wastelands", a man on a bicycle, both going and returning and perhaps the one truly romantic photogrpah in the book - an ivy covered staircase - and several more...

In an essay for the book, Gus Blaisdell uses a sort of via negativa putting forward a series of propositions about what John Gossage's work isn't, linking it to photographers "with whom he shares a similarly, but an even deeper difference" (and I'm going to borrow the whole section...):

NOT(atmospheric erosion like lichen clocks the head of Pan at Versailles; autumn leaves fallen on steps that descend semicircularly to a circular landing and then continue their descent; the archeology of streets and buildings presented after a terminal moraine has melted): Atget
NOT(the American commonplace so quietly essential as to seem beyond the ability of photography or any other medium to capture, within the reach of nothing but admiration): Evans
NOT(the drama of the hard travellin' road after Whitman and Kerouac in outsider eyes where the lights are always going down, leaving only the ghostlighted stage of the photograph): Frank
NOT(still going down, even Beat-ing it down to its basic beat-i-tude, the discovery of structure where mirrors crack the picture planes into what can be seen front and back and behind and beside, or a vegetal equivalent of abstract expressionist scrawl block the picture surface - a genre of delirious possibility, but still anchored in the often rigid permanence of what looks like asides and throwaways): Friedlander
NOT(a gaze as steady as Buster Keaton's wonders whether the industrial parks depicted manufacture pantyhose or megadeath; hip beyond irony or cool; where what passes for the so-called art world bleeds and leaks itself seamlessly in so called-real world): Baltz
NOT(a metropolis constructed by people for their discomfort, and in turn refuse to reflect them in its curtain walls, eyes more alienated than Antonioni's - eyes of an American veteran who returned with Vietnam locked in behind eyes that for years photographed without film or camera- eyes that stare at the traces of homelessness and the violence of wasted shooting sites where doll's heads hang for targets. Whether we edify or degrade we first create ruins, like Olympic sites once the games are gone and the local economy begins an unending hemorrhage): Hernadez
NOT(the outrage rightly registered at the sight of a few trees that survive on the freeway of Laos Angeles or the stupefied faces of people on terms with the thermonuclear unconscious of Rocky Flats): R. Adams

And certainly not the lush monumentality declared only photographically: A Adams.
Nor hermetic beauties of a zen-inspired series of pictures, a variation of equivalences; but equivalent to what in the world: M White

... Not far away from Weegeee's crime scenes with the bodies and gawkers removed. All the stains in the street and the curbside trash remains. Nature for Gossage is a place bristling with the attractive repulsion of armpits and crotches, and it is always alive, about to declare its animation, the shrubbery like David Lynch's trees tossed in a night wind, violated by a motion characteristic of anxiety, dread and agony. Premonition and foreboding settle in around Gossage as atmospherically as Atget's groundfogs in his parks.

I've come full circle hinting what Gossage photographs might be... Like Wallace Stevens in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," I collapse, loaf and invite my soul, unable to decide which I prefer, inflections or innuendoes' "The blackbird whistling/Or just after.""

Gus Blaisdell

Sugimoto at Libeskind's new ROM extension

There's a nice piece in the Globe & Mail by Sarah Milroy about Sugimoto's exhibition at Daniel Libeskind's angular brand new extension to the Royal Ontario Museum.

Milroy is always good when writing about photography and has some interstign things to say here - especially about Sugimoto's digs at starchitects at the panel discussion on the new building.

(btw, if you can get into the Globe site because it's past seven days, a google news search on the articel will often get you behind the firewall)

"The leading Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is a man of extreme paradoxes, and his touring exhibition History of History, the inaugural show in the just-opened Institute for Contemporary Culture at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, brings that complexity to life.Comprised of both the artist's own work and objects from his private collection, the show allows us to take the full measure of the man.

On the one hand, his serene photographs of the open ocean – wide, uninflected expanses divided only by the horizon line – are the ultimate symbols of eternity, mindfulness and enlightenment. A man of philosophical bent, Sugimoto calls them his attempt to recapture the experience of the first human who contemplated the ocean, in the dawning days of our species, and as depictions of the two most elemental necessities for life: air and water. Other works in this show, such as his palm-sized 13th-century Buddhist “flaming jewel” reliquary fitted out with a tiny oceanscape, seem like contemplative objects that direct us to the eternal.

Yet Sugimoto, 59, is also the ultimate international art star, with a home in New York, a custom-designed apartment aerie in Tokyo, a list of exhibition engagements as long as your arm (Venice, San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Tokyo) and a growing collection of Japanese antiquities, scroll paintings and natural-history specimens (such as fossils), many of which are included in this exhibition. (In the eighties, he augmented his artist's income by dealing in Japanese antiquities – artists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd were among his clients – but he shut his New York gallery, Mingei, in 1990.) So which one is he: The Zen monk with a camera or the shrewd businessman with a strategic eye for profit and advancement? Will the real Sugimoto please stand up...

A conversation about his current collecting activities reveals flashes of avarice and rivalry. He talks with me about his recent passion for medieval miniatures, Greco-Roman antiquities and the set of three used juice boxes from the Apollo 11 moon launch that he acquired at a recent scientific auction. But his big thrill of late is his pursuit of the rare, early negatives made by pioneering British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s. Sugimoto now owns 15 of these, which record plants and various oblique views of Talbot's castle near London. They have never been printed, and he plans to make pictures from them. “I spent one whole year's income on these negatives,” he says to me. “But since I will be using it to make my art, I can write it off. I am creating my art by buying another person's art. I call this art anarchism,” he says with a triumphant laugh, “because I don't pay tax!”

Even more delightful to him is his success at stealing the thunder of his slower-moving institutional competitors. “The Getty Museum has 20,” he says, “and the Metropolitan has 10, so I am number two.”

Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Anyone expecting a courtly display of deference from Sugimoto during his public “conversation” with ROM architect Daniel Libeskind on May 31 was also in for a shock. The artist came out swinging, winning the crowd instantly with his witty derision of star architects and their indifference to the needs of the user (in the case of museum design, the artist as well as the public), pummelling Libeskind with his gaily administered humiliations, including the suggestion that the architect would have been “better off to remain an unbuilt architect,” making drawings, not buildings.


Sugimoto then went on to explain the thinking behind the magnificent curving display wall he has designed for the Toronto show. The ICC is a dramatic, angular gallery with sloping ceilings that is strikingly bereft of walls for hanging art on. “I am trying to fit into his difficult space,” he said to me, “so I have to be difficult too. He makes straight lines so I make curved lines. It is my revenge.” Make no mistake: This is one intensely competitive human being...." more

Bestiaire Upskirts

Okay, I've been wanting to work "upskirt" into a post just to see what happens to the hits on the Googleometer...

That said, this work from (Madame) Loan Nguyen is just plain fun (via iheartphotograph). Photography should make you smile every now and then (it's also got me lookign throught he kids toybox for potential subjects...)

Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff

When I saw this post on 5B4 about Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff there was a certain familiarity but I couldn't place it. I was initially attracted to what seemed to be an interesting selection of scrub/tangle/wild places pictures that struck some chords with my own Immersive Landscapes work. However, it took a couple of days for it to sink in and some digging through unpacked boxes of books, but I realised I had a copy of Conniff's earlier book Common Ground - An American Field Guide Volume 1 that I had picked up some years ago in a used bookstore in Maine (unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the other three planned volumes of the field guide were never published).

Anyway, I got a copy of Wild Edges, not only because of its subject matter, but because the exhibition on which it is based was all ink (jet) prints. He talks in some detail about why he chose that process, and it's in part because of the luscious tones and sense of depth he can get from ink prints with this kind of wild subject matter - on which point I would certainly agree.

I actually like both books. The Common Ground work actually ties in a lot with the traces/alleyways work I am doing, and the Wild Edges also has echoes for me of my immersive landscapes work.

From the exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin:

A resident of Wisconsin for more than thirty years, Conniff has focused much of his artistic energy on the rural Midwest, exploring the interdependent relationship between land and people. For the past fifteen years, Conniff has also been making pictures of rural Mississippi, again focusing on elements of the landscape that resonate with a universal sense of aesthetic familiarity. As he explains, "I am interested in work that defines and protects the vanishing, commonplace beauties that let us know we’re home."

Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff is an exhibition about beauty and its necessary place in daily human life. Most of the pictures in the show were made specifically for the exhibition. All are printed in a rich four-black ink process that evokes the sensuality of nineteenth century photographic materials. In Conniff's affectionate and intelligent work, there is a visible connection to the history of landscape art, reaching back as far as Claude Lorrain and seventeenth century Dutch drawing. Conniff is also a leading practitioner of a new pastoralism that is casting a contemporary eye on the current state of America's open land. Postmodern in the best sense, Conniff's pictures address the timeless human need to see beauty in the world that shapes our lives.

From 5B4:

Conniff pursues beauty, as he describes, with an awareness that without beauty in our everyday lives we are evolving in ways that will potentially lead to a loss of fulfillment in our lives. He argues that we are hardwired with a need and that we are being denied that need.

In this day of issue oriented art, beauty is often something that is allowed to enter the work, but an artist that directly searches it out in its classic forms(without irony) is usually considered a kind of dinosaur. Conniff is a dinosaur, he probably wouldn’t take that as a disparaging term and he shouldn’t. These are not groundbreaking, original works featured in this book. They owe a lot to painting and art history and appropriately, he mentions George Innes of the Hudson River School of painters in his essay. But his versions are at times stunning. What I do know is that he is capable of exciting the viewer even though they may, at first glance, feel very familiar with what he is placing before us.