Humble Arts Foundation

A few updates from the Humble Art Foundation in NY

They have Group Show No. 18 up - some interesting work as usual

They also have a small (humble?) grant programme for emerging artists - Deadline October 1st.

Finally, they have some limited edition affordable prints for sale (I love Corey Arnold's picture, but having lived in the arctic and sub-arctic for over 12 years, it just looks too cold for me to actually buy...).

I think (or at least I hope) these guys are working hard at breaking the hold of the existing MFA/Gallery system doing what my friend Luis Gottardi has described as "A hybrid, gallery/bloggers kind of tiered filtration system..., with social connections and acknowledgements acting as remuneration of sorts for the lower levels. Much more of an organic, grass-root, seeding system than what we have now, with one legitimizing the other." (no doubt I'll hear if he agrees with my application of his words or not...)

Arnaud Maggs

It sometimes seems - to me at least - that talented Canadian artists often seem to be hidden under a bushel. But maybe it's because I've only been following the art scene here for 20 years...

It can all be very strangely regional and fragmented. Toronto artists might have no idea what is going on in Montreal. And heaven forbid you live out West. Vancouver artists often seem to have more in common with and communication with artists in Seattle or San Francisco than the rest of Canada, and an artist in Montreal can be lauded in Paris and Berlin and barely heard of in the rest of the country.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I ran into one of those late night art documentaries on one of the numerous education channels (TVO if you want to know - which actually carries some good art docs) about a fabulous photographer and artist Arnaud Maggs.

(Of course, maybe I just don't pay enough attention, he did win the 2006 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts... and yet our city library system, which actually has an excellent art collection, many inherited from the city Art Gallery, has none of his several books)

I only caught the programme about a third of the way in, and I think I must have seen a bit of his work at one time in a magazine somewhere, but I was hooked.

First off Maggs came across as articulate and deeply involved with his work. Full of excitement about it and about continuing to explore things. He also came across as rather delightful and somewhat mischievous. I was equally interested to note that he didn't decide to "become an artist" - a full-time one anyway - until he was 47 and he's in his early 80's now.

The film gave something of an overview of his work while following him around his workshop/studio, at exhibitions and wandering around Paris flea markets - where he seems to get much of his inspiration.

He seems to have started off doing series of grid portraits - almost Becherlike in their quality and typology - of course made at the same time that the Bechers were just beginning to show their work as well in N. America and at Documenta. In fact it's not entirely coincidence that one of his more well known pieces Joseph Beuys: 100 Profile Views, was made in Düsseldorf - Becher ground zero:

"Perhaps in its obsessiveness, Maggs's work has some of the serial qualities of the work done by the Bechers, but theirs is a project which cannot escape its subject. Being mainly industrial, the Bechers's buildings are intimately connected with the specific cultural evidence of economic structure. The subject/object dilemma of photography is unabashedly acknowledged in Maggs's work with the presence of some thing as ostensibly subjective as a face."

One essay describes him as a photo-anthropologist, which seems to fit pretty well: "Arnaud Maggs has been referred to as a kind of photo-anthropologist, using his camera to capture and re-present the past’s forgotten ephemera".

After that he moved on to different things, though usually still loosely tied to types or collections of things. Paris "Hotel" signs - all vertical and thin. And black bordered death notice envelopes - yep - sounds odd - and collected from those flea markets, but quite mesmerising. As were his photographs (and other artifacts) of small colourful tags that came from 19th century child labour in French textile mills, listing piece work completed and the children's names and ages.

And although the documentary was made three or four years ago, Maggs seemed vibrant and full of energy and ready to keep heading off in new directions with new ideas - quite inspiring in fact.

JoAnn Verburg update

Yesterday I frustratingly found the stub of an NYTimes article on Verburg's MoMA show. But as the NYTimes decided as of midnight to "de-classify" all of it's online articles and no longer charge for them, the whole thing is now conveniently available today (along with many many more...) - yeay!

"TIME doesn’t exactly stand still in JoAnn Verburg’s photographs. Not that her single images, diptychs and triptychs are set up to create narrative sequences in which one thing leads to another, as with Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies of a man jumping or a horse running. Instead her portraits, still lifes and landscapes generate a state of prolonged experience. Ms. Verburg spends most of her days in Minneapolis in her studio, but she makes a distinction between the production work she does there — scanning her film, editing images, researching — and the creative work she does in other places, mostly in Italy or Florida, where she and her husband spend extended periods of time...

...Italy has been a rich source of inspiration. “Exploding Triptych, 2000” is part of a series of photographs of olive trees that began with a simple snapshot near a house she and her husband rented in the countryside near Spoleto. “There was something I wanted to pursue — I didn’t know what exactly — a freshness or airiness, a sense of vitality,” she said.

Ms. Verburg doesn’t set out with a particular idea of what she wants to photograph. She finds her way into a subject or a theme, “like a dog who circles a few times to make a nest before she lies down in a ball to sleep,” she said. “With the olive tree photos, the best state of mind I can be in is to be without expectations and to be ready to go to work not knowing what the work will be or if I will later like what I have done.”

As ever, she eventually gravitated to the same theme of time and space in that series. As she spent more time photographing in the olive groves, her interest in color grew. She started photographing in the early morning or at dusk, when “the light shifted from blue to yellow to reddish-magenta to purple, and I had to be ready before the yellow light disappeared, or I was too late.”

“Living — being alive — is a present-tense enterprise.”" more

JoAnn Verburg

This looks like potentially pretty interesting work.

After toiling away for many years as part of the Minnesota Photo Mafia (well, "toiling" in Italy as well as wintry Minnesota...), JoAnn Verburg currently has a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art (this is the sort of show I wish I could just take part of a Wednesday afternoon to pop down and look at...).

She has a long record of projects and shows, going back to Mark Klett's Rephotographic Survey Project in the 1970's and having shows at Pace/Macgill etc

Her pictures describe spaces and moments suspended in the reverie that precedes action. Like a Leyden jar, they are containers of potential. - John Szarkowski

As people may have guessed by now I'm pretty interested in using blur, differential focus, narrow focus, movement and complexity/screens to break away from the sharp from foreground to background approach to photography, as well as trying to break the hold of perspectivism on my photography.

This seems pretty hard to do effectively - especially to do in a way that isn't overly contrived or "twee" (as my grandmother would have said). Verburg seems to manage to do this quite successfully in much the work I have seen online

I also like the way most of her diptychs/triptychs work - they don't feel at all forced.

From an article on MNArtists.org:

A little deceptive, and always somewhat elusive, there is nothing easy, obvious, or spontaneous about these images. Each one appears constructed with a deliberation and care that demands a similar sort of attention from us when we view them. We can see this kind of meticulousness in Verburg’s manipulation of focus. In many of the olive tree photos, she varies the camera’s focus so deftly that the seeming simplicity of a tangle of branches or cluster of leaves is belied by a whole host of visual shifts. It’s a very subtle form of choreography, in which the images are composed not by their content, but instead by Verburg’s delicate fiddling.

We see this best in Campello Olive Trees for Giulio (2003), in which a small olive tree stands alone in the bottom center of the image. The dead center of the tree is in focus, but the rest is clouded in a halo of blur; in the extreme right corner, half of an olive branch is in sharp focus. Meanwhile the upper half of the image, a gray sky flecked with branches, is so blurred that it becomes kinetic, spinning as if it could give us a touch of vertigo if we look for too long.

In her pyramid photos, Verburg uses an ambiguous perspective to similar effects. Photographed from an aerial vantage point, it’s impossible to tell whether these sand structures are miniscule or enormous, monumental or in danger of disappearing entirely. Through Verburg’s manipulations, what we begin to see is the act of seeing itself, or perhaps the way our sight gets confounded and enhanced by invisible elements such as atmosphere, light, or point of view, Joann Verburg has written that her many photographs of olive trees are meant to make the viewer feel connected to them. However, she seems to be withholding something in that connection. If these photos invite us into a conversation, it’s not one we’d have with a lover or a dear friend. Not that the substance of our talk would be idle or insubstantial; instead, it’s rather like suddenly stumbling on a very serious discussion with someone you hardly know. It’s intimate, but not personal.

And yet, these photographs don’t leave me completely cold. There is something unexpected, and suggestive, about such reticence. The images, while they frustrate available associations, simultaneously make room for their own.

There's also a nice looking MoMA book Present Tense to go with the show. Alec Soth also has a useful little piece on her.

POSTSCRIPT: I just noticed 5B4 has a very good review of Present Tense

William Eggleston "In the Real World"

I just finished watching the DVD William Eggleston in the Real World (obtained from the local library) - I found it by turns fascinating, mildly depressing and illuminating.

Eggleston comes across as laconic and taciturn in the extreme, yet with burst of humour and grace.

The first 15 or minutes of the film follow him as he wanders around Mayfield Kentucky on a freezing winters day photographing at the invitiation of Gus Van Sant. He seems mildly lost and yet sure of what he wants - he stops and starts, backtracks, prowls around a diner - though I ended up wanting to give him a scarf and a hot cup of tea (with maybe something a little stronger in it).


In different scenes Eggleston seems to slow down almost to a stop but then there would be a burst of energy before slowing down again. His speaks so quietly, his southern accent and diction almost a mumble, that his words are subtitled, highlighting the feeling that this is all something foreign.

And at the temple like Getty Museum in LA he becomes almost like an excited schoolboy as he wanders around a newly hung show of his work, peering closely at a print here, exclaiming about the selection of work there - all the while the public viewing the exhibit apparently oblivious to who this well dressed elderly gentleman is.

Oh and there's also lots of rather drunken rambling.

At the end of the movie, the film maker attempts to engage Eggleston in a conversation about the process of picture making and Eggleston merely becomes more and more obtuse (and the film maker more and more annoying), but it is preceded by his ruminations on dreams about beautiful photographs - which is quite magical - and ends with the following:

"Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other...Art, or what we call that, you can love it and appreciate it, but you can't really talk about it. Doesn't make any sense."

The more you watch him, the more and more his pictures seem to make simple sense - this is merely how he sees. In the end it all seemed to confirm Geoff Dyers description of Eggleston where he says, in part:

"Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation..."

There is a short NY Times review here

And you can view the trailer here

(I should add that the "production values" in this documentary are poor - to put it mildly. But if you can manage to put those aside, which I must admit took me a while, I still think it's worth watching)

Problems with Mrs. Deane

I've enjoyed reading the posts on the blog/sit Mrs. Deane for a while now.

http://www.beikey.net/mrs-deane/

But for the last few weeks I haven't been able to log onto the site. I know it's still going, because Google Reader still religiously reports the new posts every few days - unfortunately it strips out the pictures

But whenever I try and go direct I get the usual "The page cannot be displayed" thingy. This is the only site I seem to experience this on

So I can read the posts but, frustratingly, I can look at the accompanying photos

Anyone else experiencing this? Any suggestions...?

Paul Graham's Chekhov

I was just reading the current Photoeye Booklist magazine (well worth subscribing to btw - usually lots of good reading) and there is a very good interview with Paul Graham about his new book (or rather collection of books) A Shimmer of Possibility. Though the interview also covers a lot more ground than just the new book.

Graham is probably one of the most influential contemporary British colour photographers. I remember encountering his work in the mid 80's and how - at that time - it pretty much blew me away. He could probably be credited in large part with dragging British Photography out of it's 1950's documentary/photojournalism style which had dominated right through until the 80's.

His books A1: Great North Road and Troubled Land are two superb books of photography that still hold their own today. The latter is one of the best representations out there of Northern Ireland during "The Troubles" of the 70's and 80's. The somewhat later New Europe is also worth seeking out. As he says in the interview, he doesn't generally stick with one tried and tested way of doing things, but explores new possibilities.

A Shimmer of Possibilities is described as: "Inspired by Chekhov's short stories-and by his own contagious joy in the book form-photographer Paul Graham has created A Shimmer of Possibility, comprised of 10 individual books, each a photographic short story of everyday life. Some are simple and linear - a man smokes a cigarette while he waits for a bus in Las Vegas, or the camera tracks an autumn walk in Boston. Some entwine two, three or four scenes-while a couple carry their shopping home in Texas, a small child dances with a plastic bag in a garden. Some watch a quiet narrative break unexpectedly into a sublime moment-as a man cuts the grass in Pittsburgh it begins to rain, until the low sun breaks through and illuminates each drop."

Here are a few selections from the interview (Photoeye has the full text online):

Richard Woodward: Let’s start with this new book, which is actually a series of books, and work backwards. How did the project originate?

Paul Graham: My principal sources were Chekhov’s short stories, and the critical essays around those. A lot of people have tried to understand why this writing works so well, since in the stories there’s not much happening. They’re dealing with the simple, everyday things—in one of them a woman is combing her hair for six pages, remembering that night at the theatre; in another a school teacher is coming home in a cart dreaming of meeting the landowner, who does ride past and they exchange a few pleasantries, but nothing more. But there’s something magical about how perfectly described they are, the transparency of what’s happening, without guff or show, simply described, with nothing proscribed. I’ve been traveling around the States for a while now, and wanted to do something looser and freer, to take pictures of people at the most ordinary, everyday moments — cutting the grass or waiting for the bus, smoking cigarettes or traveling to and from the supermarket. I wanted to reflect Chekhov’s openness, his simple transparency; this was something I tried to move toward. I’m not, of course, literally illustrating Chekhov’s stories, but similarly isolating a small rivulet of time. So, each of the individual books is a photographic short story, a filmic haiku. They are quite short, but complete in their modest way...

...RW: But if you’re going to travel to Europe and Japan you must have figured out ways to support yourself.

PG: You sleep on friend’s floors. I traveled in an old Mini—the original Mini—and I slept in the back of that for a long time. I ate in truck drivers’ cafes. I had a friend who found out-of-date film for me. Then you do some teaching and get a small grant. The documentary-style tradition is very strong in England. Eventually I met up with Martin Parr, Chris Killip, Graham Smith, John Davis. Then my first book, A-1 The Great North Road, came out in 1983. It was a journey along the main artery of the UK, much like Alec Soth did with the Mississippi recently. Large format, color, landscapes, portraits, buildings, etc. The book proved quite poisonous to that black-and-white tradition. It’s been forgotten how radical it was to work within the social documentary tradition in color, at that time. Now it’s so commonplace, people wonder what the issue was. Within four years I published three books: A1, Beyond Caring and. But by 1987, I could see this juggernaut of color documentary photography in England; it had really taken off. Martin Parr switched to color, so did people like Tom Wood, and then our students, like Paul Seawright or Richard Billingham too. But I felt it was time to move on from that, before it became exhausted. For example, the mixing of landscape with war photography in Troubled Land was striking and quite successful—I had shows in NYC galleries—but what happens is that you hit this resonant note and everyone wants you to repeat it. I was invited to duplicate Troubled Land in Israel and South Africa. Commissions, dollars, travel, the whole nine yards. But I thought, I can’t do this. For better or worse, I’m one of those artists who once something is “proven,” have to drop it and find another way to scare myself...


RW: So you went to Europe?

PG: In the early to mid 80s I had made friends with a group of German photographers who were quite distinct from the Bechers’ Düsseldorf school. They were mostly around Essen- Berlin: Volker Heinze, Joachim Brohm, Gosbert Adler and Michael Schmidt too, who was running these workshops in Berlin and inviting people like John Gossage and Lewis Baltz to come over.

RW: It’s funny that school is so unknown here. Michael Schmidt even had a one-man show at MoMA.

PG:Yes, a great show and few remember it. It’s as though the Gursky show wiped out people’s understanding of everything else in Germany. Gursky is much more accessible. He goes for the jugular because it is about “the great photograph.” Of course, he succeeds, but it’s recidivist, in a way. Photographers have been trying for years to make bodies of work where images work incrementally to build up a coherent statement. It’s not about one great picture by Robert Adams; it’s about twenty or thirty pictures that build a sensitive, intelligent reflection of the world. It’s the same with Garry Winogrand, or Robert Frank. Gursky brings it back to that “wow” moment. It sort of undoes that way of working, and reduces things to the “What a great shot!” appreciation of photography. I’m a sucker for that as much as anyone, but want people to appreciate what Robert Adams does more so...

Finally, I'd add that there's a dearth of Graham's work online - you're pretty much forced to buy the books (though you can almost guarantee they'll go up in value...)

Nicholas Hughes - In Darkness Visible

Don't you just hate it when you have an idea for a project, but you haven't fully formulated it or got around to it and then you find someone has just done the exact same thing...

That was my first thought when I saw Nicholas Hughes' project In Darkness Visible taken in the great London Parks, on Lens Culture. My second response was hmm - very Steichenesque - which isn't necessarily a bad thing (+ I'm just reading a novel about Steichen's early life and time in France in WWI, which has resulted in half a dozen massive Steichen tomes from the library stacked around the house)

...I have constructed a forest built from accumulated memory and the ghosts of trees...

The city park offers an escape valve – a window leading the weary city dweller to reconstructed, consumable nature. Although the essence of these spaces can appear pseudo-natural, some of these great trees actually predate the infrastructure of the city, and despite their accommodated appearance have witnessed centuries of human endeavour...

You can find Hughes' website here - which has a lot of his other work on as well.

For me this is an interesting use of colour that yes, maybe looks back to the very early days of Autochrome colour and gum bichromate etc, but is also very different from the whole Contemporary American Color look so prevalent right now.

I would really like to see these in person (at the Photographers Gallery from today). As Lensculture says:

"The photographs of Nicholas Hughes play with light and seeing at the extreme ends of lightness and darkness. In his earlier work, his large white on white on white photographs were like whispers of tone and nuance that rewarded the viewer when your eyes could finally detect the delicacy and wonder and richness of what was there with such subtlety. They were so fine that it was nearly impossible for the finest book printer to hint at the overall elegance of the images. And trying to show them on a computer screen would be a crime."

I think I prefer Verse 1 to Verse 2 (which is also very good though)

Now, if only I'd got my arse in gear and actually got down to working on this idea...

(Edward Steichen, Platinum Print with applied colour)

Traces updates

"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the street, the gratings of the windows, the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning-rods, the poles of the flags. Every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls" Italo Calvino, The Invisible City

Here are a few more pictures from the Traces project. I have about another 20 to finish off and put up.

On my earlier post about editing for a selection to print up, many thanks to all who contributed. There was actually quite a wide variation in choices, but enough common ones that seemed to coincide with my own thoughts - and also a few which were consistently chosen several times but which I hadn't really considered. Plenty to think about. Though almost more helpful than that were the thoughtful commentary and criticism that many of you gave - there were some really useful gems in all that.

And Mel Trittin's comments were especially helpful - among other things she reminded me that in the "old days" you would just lay out a bunch of small prints and fiddle with them until they looked rights - well duh! I'm so used to ordering stuff into databases and digital asset management software (mainly from my work in museums and archives) that I had rather forgotten that simple way of doing it... So I printed up a bunch of playing card sized thumbnails on sheets and took them to the cottage with me, then got my two boys to cut them all out and then I got to shuffle the pack and play with them - K.I.S.S.


(Spandrel - 77th Street)

BTW, these photographs haven't been added to the website yet - in fact the small jpegs for the web are the last stage in a somewhat laborious process as these start off as 400+mb scans which often grow to about 800+mb with the addition of adjustment layers which then slows Photoshop down significantly.

But I'd rather get all the adjustments done on the master files rather than working on several different versions and repeating the same things several times.

Lastly, I've got at least a couple of magazine articles in the works (fingers crossed) - one based on this Traces work and another on some of the Immersive Landscapes work - I'll keep you posted.

( Alley- 97th Avenue. Beaver Dam or Edmontonosaurus nest? My boy's are conflicted)

P.S. - yes, there really is such a thing as an Edmontonosaurus...

Eugene de Salignac

There was a bit of a buzz about Eugene de Salignac's photographs a few months ago and now there is a nice article about him and his work in the Smithsonian Magazine

Salignac was a municipal photographer for the City of New York (and in particular the Department of Bridges) who died unheralded in 1943 at the age of 82 and took over 20,000 photographs (mostly 8x10 or so glass plates apparently) of the growing city between 1903 and 1936 - a period of massive and rapid growth in the city.

His work, as a whole body, was only re-discovered in 1999 by New York City Municipal Archives photographer Michael Lorenzini who realized that many of the photographs he was scrolling through in the microfiche records were obviously the work of one eye and hand.

Aperture published a book of his work earlier this year New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac (and have a few more images up on their site). There also a short article and slideshow at the New Yorker. From the Smithsonion Magazine:

De Salignac's time as a city worker coincided with New York's transformation from a horse-and-buggy town into a modern-day metropolis, and his photographs of towering bridges, soaring buildings, trains, buses and boats chart the progress. "In this remarkable repository of his work, we really see the city becoming itself," says Thomas Mellins, curator of special exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York. "During this period, New York became a paradigm for 20th-century urbanism, and that has to do with monumentality, transportation systems, working out glitches, skyscrapers, with technology—all of the things that emerge in these photos."

De Salignac's photograph of the Staten Island ferry President Roosevelt coming into port, made in Lower Manhattan in June 1924 with a bulky wooden field camera, typifies his ability to stretch beyond straightforward documentation. "This is not your typical municipal photograph," says Moore. "There's a sense of anticipation—that perfect moment where the boat is about to dock, and a sense of energy, a flood about to be unleashed." Adds Lorenzini: "It shows him thinking like an artist."

De Salignac's pictures have been reproduced in books, newspapers, posters and films, including Ken Burns' Brooklyn Bridge; though largely uncredited, his work helped shape New York's image. "He was a great chronicler of the city, in the tradition of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott," says Mellins. "The fact that he was a city employee may have made it less likely that people would think of his work in an artistic context, but these images indicate that he really takes his place in the pantheon of great photographers of New York."

Lorenzini still isn't satisfied. "I'd like to know what he did for the first 40 years of his life, to see a photograph of him as a grown man," he says. "Where did he learn photography? Was he formally trained? Did he consider himself an artist?" Information about him, and prints by him, keep trickling in. Not long ago, a woman mailed to the Municipal Archives ten photographs of New York that she'd bought at a Texas flea market; Lorenzini immediately recognized them as de Salignac's. And a cache of 4,000 de Salignac prints was recently unearthed in the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan. "There is definitely more to the story," Lorenzini says...

Bernd Becher by Andreas Gursky

Published in The Art Newspaper, a letter from Andreas Gursky to his teacher, mentor and friend Bernd Becher on his passing (I think this fits somewhere in Alec Soth's recent musings on teaching art):

Yesterday I received the very unexpected news of your death. This news is made all the more painful for me as we did not get to see each other in the past year. You do know, however, how enormously important your influence was—and is—not only to me, but also to a whole generation of younger people.

You and Hilla have produced an invaluable and multi-faceted body of work that has served as an invaluable point of reference for us. We adapted and developed many stylistic characteristics of your technique. Yet, in my opinion, there is another crucial factor that ensured the uniqueness of the Becher School: teacher-artists can be found anywhere, but only a few succeed in transmitting your kind of drive to their students.

You were never a power-hungry man, abusing your international fame for political or institutional influence, but, instead, you stoically endured the criticisms of your academic peers. These made you all the more determined to pursue your unconventional teaching methods, which included affording absolute priority to your own and your students’ artistic visions.

When your students came to you with their work, you often reflected upon it late into the night, and took the time to comment, using apt art-historical examples. By the end of these private tutorials, not only were your floors covered with books, but books were also perched on top of the many red-labelled Agfa film cartons, tripods and ladders that were strewn about your studio. A permanent chemical odour signalled the authenticity of your work and living space—where, for the lifeof me, I cannot remember ever seeing a comfy sofa. Having spent my childhood and youth in over-designed advertising studios, it was a key experience to have such an insight into your world. I still remember my tipsy walk home—through that enchanted gateway in front of your studio, past that red van, which was packed with your heavy ladders of all sizes.

Bernd, I thank you for this important time in my life and hope that you will continue quietly to guide me through today’s art circus with your dry humour and carefree attitude.

In friendship,

Andreas