2.18.2015

 McMurdo Sound, 1915

This is lost photograph from Ernest Shackleton's Ross Sea Party (1914-1917) at Scott's Cape Evans Antarctic base. Negatives were recovered from the darkroom there recently and carefully separated and developed. I like this image because it captures a moment in time that would have been forgotten otherwise, and the passage of time has left physical marks on the film that then contribute to its formal qualities.


ABE MORELL
Camera Obscura - View of Central Park Looking North, Summer 2008 and Winter 2013

I'm intrigued by these images because they deal with time in two dimensions. On one level, they are a series that depicts the same landscape over four seasons (also including fall and spring). More interesting to me is the passage of time inherent in the photograph. My understanding is that these had to have been very long exposures in order to let enough light from the room (lit only by a pinhole in the opposite wall) into the camera. I like that these photographs have time both as subject and process.


JOHN DIVOLA
 Three Acts (1977)          Zuma #41 (1977)  

 The first two images were taken at an abandoned building, which seems to be the same place with a slightly different camera angle. This series includes many pictures that somehow intervene on or modify the room; as the room and sea change, however, the scene remains equally lonely and destructed. I chose these two for the comparison of the sense of movement between the two; the first feels completely stagnant both in the head-on camera angle and the emptiness of the scene while the second shows a hectic scene mid-motion (the flying book), augmented by the off kilter angle.

The picture below was interesting to me primarily in the context of the above series. It also captures movement and time but in a much more spontaneous way. The fact that one artist made both images makes me wonder about the conceptual similarities between the two. The grainy black and white photographs and the extensive treatment of dogs running reminds me of Muybridge's running horses studies.

Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (1996-2001, published 2004)


IRINA WERNING
        Cecile 1987 and 2010, France       Nico Mella 1990 and 2010, France

Nico 1986 and 2010, Buenos Aires

These are from a project called Back to the Future. While such an obvious subject of time passing could be trite, I think these are incredibly successful because of how accurately she is able to replicate the entirety of the scene in terms of location, subject, color, focus. I'm particularly impressed by the lighting - she has taken snapshots (with overall bad light) and meticulously recreated every shadow, down to the precise angle of the flash. I'd love to see what other photographs she took to end up with these final image pairs.


NICHOLAS NIXON
Brown Sisters (1975-2014)

Like Werning's series, Nixon is quite literally capturing the changes that come with passing time. I like that he does not seem to force a particular pose or mood on his subjects, but allows them to act naturally - in this way the honesty of the sister's personalities comes through over the many images. I wanted to include another artist with this series but I could not find her name. She was a feminist photographer working in the 60's or 70's (I think) who photographed herself daily for a month of not eating. They seem similar to me in that the artist is interested in a comparison over time, as if documenting a progression of change.


SUSAN DOBSON
 Untitled from Sense of an Ending (2013)

This photograph feels like a connection between True Fiction and Over Time; Dobson took pictures of existing buildings and modified them to reflect the effects she imagines the passage of time would have on the spaces. She creates an alternate reality out of a real place, and it is something that could feasibly become true.


JOHN CLANG
Time (Apple Store) (2009)

Like Dobson, Clang is manipulating his photographs to create another sense of time and space. Here he's compiling fragments of time in one place as if they could coexist in one moment.


DAVID HURN
Jumping Cactus, Arizona (1980)

2.09.2015

TARYN SIMON (2000)
Calvin Washington, C&E Motel, Room No. 24, Waco, Texas.        Larry Mayes, Scene of arrest, the Royal Inn, Gary, Indiana. 

In "The Innocents" Simon photographed people who were wrongly accused, imprisoned, and eventually released from death row. Her portraits are reconstructions of places and events significant to the arrest or accusation; while building a sort of "truth" about the actual events that occurred, they reflect the lies that photographs can create. In many cases, the wrongful accusations were driven by misinterpreted photographic evidence. She talks about both the beauty and the "devastating ambiguity" of the blur between truth and fiction in photography.


ROBERT CAPA (1936)
The Falling Soldier                                   

Like Simon's photographs, Capa's bring up questions about the inherent honesty in photographs. The first image supposedly depicts a Loyalist militiaman at the moment of his death. It is part of a much-debated series taken during the Spanish Civil War; due to some missing negatives and reconstructed locations that may not add up, it is unclear if photographs were staged. But why does it matter whether or not they were staged? Don't they communicate the same message either way? I think it's interesting how the assumption of some kind of honesty has made the "The Falling Soldier" about truth and fiction rather than about its formal qualities as a photograph or even about its content.


NIGEL TOMM
Angry Girls Portrait Photography Finds China

Tomm creates a puzzling, distorted, and sometimes uncomfortable alternate reality by physically manipulating pre-existing (often pornographic) images. I'm intrigued by the way that conventional beauty and sexuality are made grotesque and somehow darker or more "dirty" when they appear to have been discarded.


DAVID HOCKNEY (1985)
Paint Trolley

Hockney also creates alternate realities using existing objects. While his images are more clearly constructed, and cannot be mistaken for "true," they still call into question the photographer's ability to construct something false or imaginary out of things found in the real world.


HOLLY ANDRES (2006)
Gunfight: Hailey and Mikola         Ashley                                

Andres' images remind me of the Gregory Crewdson images we looked at in class because of their cinematic lighting and over-constructed feel. The way the the reflections line up in these two photographs and the coordinating colors make them seem sort of impossible while building up the importance of the narrative that is unfolding.


JULIE BLACKMON (2008)
American Gothic

Again, the colors give this image a false, yet almost plausible, feel. Every element of the picture is so meticulously arranged - the chair and the bird are perfectly aligned with paintings on the wall, the smaller paintings are evenly spaced and frame the family, the line between the floor and the wall is exactly horizontal, the portrait of the woman is staring at the family. The way that the picture is stagnant because of its over-constructed feel makes its absurdity almost less significant, as if we're distracted by the falseness of the arrangement to the point where it's not surprising that the child is upside down and it seems perfectly natural that there should be a bird.