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Your counselor, hard at work.

I have about completed my BA in Studio Art with a concentration in photography, but at my school there is really only one digital photo class so I feel ill prepared both for grad school and the “real world”. Ultimately I prefer working in film but I am wrestling with myself over the eternal dilemma of being true to your work vs. selling out. I am definitely interested in going to grad school and earning an MFA in photography but I am afraid I will be “behind” the other students who went to schools with more developed programs. What are your thoughts?

Let’s break your question into its constituent parts: first, you feel ill prepared for grad school (I’m not sure I know which “real” world you’re talking about, so we’ll set that part aside). Second, you feel that working with digital (since you prefer film) is selling out. Third, you’re worried that your skill set will leave you at a disadvantage in regards to your classmates in the hypothetical grad school in your mind.

I’m going to begin by answering your digital dilemma. Here it is: if you feel you need to build skills in digital photography, you can easily find classes (usually cheap ones) at the local community college, photo center, or camera store. You may not love digital, but if your aim is to support yourself as a photojournalist/sports or wedding photographer then you’ll have little choice but to get on board with the prevailing technology. Really, it’s that simple.

As for your art practice, if it is truly the case that your work must be in film to be fully realized then go ahead and shoot it with film. You should use whatever medium best suits the work and your practice—to quote McLuhan, the medium is the message and the fact that your work is in film will actually be part of the content. However, in terms of grad school (and hopefully the long life you lead afterward), your work is going to change; knowing as much as possible about the various tools available will allow you to experiment with clarity and confidence.

It’s true that most grad programs don’t teach technical skills. The MFA is more about your willingness to engage fully with your work on an intellectual level. However, that doesn’t mean that technical knowledge can’t be gained as part of your studio practice if you are diligent and motivated. Graduate school in the arts is largely self-directed, and it’s up to you to pursue your interests and be guided mainly by your own lights. This also applies for any “real world” you might encounter after you leave grad school. The learning cannot stop when you toss your mortarboard up in the air.

Acquiring a new skill set is not “selling out.” In an MFA program you’ll be too busy figuring who the hell you are and what the hell that person makes. You can worry about selling out when you have a buyer, but until that moment comes I wouldn’t give it a second thought.

Bruce High Quality Foundation wants you to skip school and hang out with Chris Burden instead.

I am considering getting a MFA in sculpture/new media, but it is very difficult for me to get a complete sense of the different MFA programs both in the U.S. and abroad. Unfortunately my best resources have been asking friends and old teachers. From them I get a mix of old information, rumors and myth. Can you tell me the top three MFA sculpture programs in the U.S. and the top three abroad? If not, can you tell me about some resources that can help me learn about these schools beyond their, nearly useless, websites?

To begin, let me tell you how glad I am that you’ve already figured out how useless a school’s website can be. From the un-navigable layouts to the endless paragraphs of self-aggrandizing prose, a school’s website can be really ineffective if you’re looking to understand the culture of the institution or the kinds of students who attend. I have first-hand experience with this dilemma myself: when I was applying to grad school, I did a lot of preliminary online research; but when I visited the schools in person, my experience on campus often contradicted my initial impressions. One website made me fall deeply in love, until I interviewed the school’s students and they all were so sad and burned out and disinterested. Another institution seemed very scholarly—important to me because I like art theory—but the second-year students who toured me around were dippy and uninformed. You’re right to be suspicious of websites, and also prudent to ask your colleagues and old professors.  But mostly I’m glad you wrote in, because I’m going to share some hard-earned wisdom with you. Come lean a little closer to the screen because I’m going to tell you a secret about the top three art schools:

They don’t exist.

The good old days: an easel, a model, some charcoal and a tightly-laced corset.

Oh, yes, websites can extol the virtues of the mega-famous faculty and the students who win awards, or the number of curators who troll the MFA show every year, and you can try to impress me with studio size, or student-to-teacher ratios, or just plain old Ivy-League-ness, but I insist—“best” is a racket.

Now before everybody tries to shout me down about how important it is to make “contacts” at Yarvard University/StanArts/School of the Art School of L.A., I want you to consider this: the Best School Ever is the school that is best for you, which is to say that it matters much less how supposedly awesome the school is by some supposedly objective measure, and much more how it fits you and your goals and your learning style. Is it of great consequence to have art-star faculty if they are crappy teachers, or always flying off to biennials and don’t have time for you? Do you need a first-class media lab if you’re a studio potter? Does it matter that representatives of commercial galleries roam the halls if you’re a performance artist? If you don’t care about research, do you want to go to a school that requires a lengthy written thesis? Probably not.

See? Any asshole can go to Andover and Yale. It's not the school, it's what you make of your time in academia—and beyond.

So the Top School is the school that will best suit your needs, and I’m going to help you find it. Start by making a list of your goals. What do you expect to accomplish in an MFA program? What would the most awesome dream program have? Be honest, and write it all down because it’s going to help you find the right place. Now, based on that list, check out the websites. Are there faculty who are doing what you want to do? Does a school have the right kind of facilities to produce your work? Is it in area you want to live? Take a look at the courses they offer. Which are required? Do any sound interesting? Most schools also post photos of student work. Is any of it good or does it suck? You can do this basic research online without too much trouble, and you should be able to come up with a list of about five or ten schools that interest you.

Now contact the schools. Email admissions and tell them you want to come for a visit. Ask them if you can meet with some faculty members, the ones you dug up online. Make appointments with two or three instructors, the dean or director if possible, and at least two students. Meeting students is important because you want to know what kind of student goes to that school. This goes double for small programs! If there are only six artists admitted every year, you should find out if the year ahead of yours is a bunch of pretentious dickheads, because you will have to see these people every day. Check out the studios, too. Yes, it’s nice to go and admire the facilities, but what you want to discern here is whether or not the students are encouraged to be active. Are the studios empty? Or is the hive buzzing? What are they working on? Is it any good?

The right school can be magic. (Sorry, I just couldn't resist.)

I promise that meeting people face to face will help you find the best school. It also signals to the school that you are an enthusiastic student, and as an added bonus, faculty and administration will remember you when they see your application. Yes, it’s expensive to fly around and do this kind of research, but look at it this way: you can pay $1000 to find the right fit, or you can waste $60,000 on two years of being completely miserable. If you really can’t afford to travel extensively, at least make it to one of the three national Graduate Portfolio Days, where many schools have representatives to meet with you and answer your questions.

And as a final word of advice, I’d like to add that after you’ve been out of school for two or three years, no one but your mother cares where you went anyway. It’s more about what you make and where you’ve shown it that counts. So grad school should be a time to focus on making your work better, and there’s a great institution out there that will meet you where you’re at and then help you advance. Good luck!

I was immediately taken with Irina Rozovsky’s current body of work, In Plain Air, a series of photographs taken in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. There is something quietly transcendent about these vignettes – a tranquility rarely evident in public space. I was so pleased to have the chance to ask Rozovsky about these recent photographs and how they relate to her consideration of place.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

How do you feel In Plain Air relates to your previous bodies of work? Does it represent a continuation of certain concerns that are central to your practice?

It’s a new way of working for me—I am slowing down, returning again and again to the same location, balancing the vague images I have in mind and the elements of chance encounters.  Previously, I was a shoot-on-the-go photographer, akin to a version of Eggleston’s democratic camera.  But while what I am looking at and the way I go about it has changed, there is a continuation of interests here.  When I was photographing in Israel, I started to think about history and the essence of time that’s encoded in a landscape and permeates the people of the day.  I think land has age-long, entrenched rules and its contemporary inhabitants subconsciously follow these rules, entering a cannon of history.  In a way, nothing in Israel has changed since it’s beginning. And the park, constructed in the 1860s during the artistic movements of Realism and the visions of democracy, is still running on the same agenda.  It’s simple but profound stuff.  I think it was Gerry Badger that stated by clearly photographing the present, you can access a larger human realm of time.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

I was hoping you could speak a bit about your relationship to your subjects in these photographs.  Are these candid moments or are people aware of your presence?

The subjects in my series In Plain Air are strangers I encounter visiting the park.  We have not met before and typically do not see each other again, but the photograph coalesces in a kind of shared moment—for a split instant, I am let in on a private reverie.  I am drawn to situations where people have carved out a solitary spot in the park to be alone or alone with someone, so very often there is an awkwardness in approaching this intimate space, like coming up to knock on someone’s front door. The pictures are usually made quietly. I don’t tend to say a lot and people seem to accept implicity. It is, after all, a public space, so the rules seem to be the same as on the street. They are not staged, but there is a type of posing that’s going on, since people kind of open themselves for the camera, without breaking from their flow.I usually don’t linger after the photo is made, so as not to impose on or puncture the daydream.

What is the importance of place in your work?

A few years ago, my photography was placeless or worked to undo a solid connection to any specific place. I was traveling a lot and shooting endlessly, but the images never revealed their locations. Instead, they acted as a group alluding to a general pilgrimage, a movement rather than a destination.  With One to Nothing and In Plain Air, the photographs are really playing with a sense of place, but still the connection is amorphous.  For instance, it’s very important that the pictures are made in this particular park and that viewers understand it is a real park and I would not include photos made elsewhere.  Nevertheless, the pictures are not exactly about the park; it’s used as a stage, as a backdrop, as a stand in for a larger human space—the Garden of Eden, America, a mini world.  And many times, it looks to me like the photographs were taken in different places—the south, the bayou, a fictional place.  So it’s interesting to stretch this idea of place.  The photos from Israel work the same way—I’d like the experience of looking at One to Nothing to feel closer to what you already know and feel even if you have never been to Israel.  I hope the places in my pictures have this shifting, virtual nature.

Irina Rozovksy. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

In discussing In Plain Air, you have asserted, “the park is seen as a kind of gritty paradise that wraps its everyday patrons in a sublime, redeeming, equalizing light.” How do you feel the quality of this place serves as an equalizing force?  Is that part of what drew you to this location?

Yes! I was drawn to this place because it felt like a gritty, imperfect paradise outside of time where most traces of modernity are erased and people are returned to themselves.  In the summer, when I started this project, there was bliss in the air, it felt like a sacred place, almost a virtual release from an oppressive life beyond the gates.  Outside on the streets, these same people would have seemed intimidating or unapproachable, but within the park, guards are down and everyone seems to be at their very purest and best. A strange perception of reality sets in and it hardly seems credible that so many different races and backgrounds are all in the same place, all around the same lake, lounging on the same grass.  Fredrick Olmstead designed this park to be shared by all, as a democratic, common land. To see that goal materialized, and hold true today, in some form, a realized vision, it’s uncanny.  Of course, this is idealistic, and ideals are unattainable, but that’s the power of this place; its illusion is that at moments, it seems to come close.

———————-

In November 2011, Kehrer Verlag published Rozovsky’s One to Nothing, which was included on Alec Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks of 2011. Selections from In Plain Air will be in the group exhibition “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from March 2 through March 18 at The Current Space in Baltimore, Maryland.

Stan Douglas, Flame, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

To make the images for Midcentury Studio, a selection of which are at The Power Plant in Toronto until 4 March, Stan Douglas not only constructed a working period studio stocked with authentic equipment from the post-war North America that these images ‘document’, he also invented an impressively resourceful fictional character, a working photojournalist of the time, to make them. Douglas cast himself in the role, and in an extended interview with David Balzer, he talks about the photographer of these pictures in the third person, discussing the work with a distance that is disorienting and fascinating.

Installation of Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

With characteristically intensive research and attention to detail, Midcentury Studio looks at the years just after the war, 1945-51, a time still twinged with darkness and desperation, but one looking forward to the optimism of 1950s  America, when a working hack with a camera might just as easily shoot a murder victim  or a brawl to sell to the papers as he might a cricket match or a magician to run in a magazine feature or as a print advertisement. Vancouver stands in, as it does so well, as anytown, its Hollywood North reputation perfectly matched for this exercise in projection and role-play.

Stan Douglas, Cricket Pitch, 1951, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

In the curated selection at The Power Plant, the emphasis is on entertainment, as depicted by pleasures and distractions like magic tricks, carnival acts, sporting events, dancers, and the staff of a nightclub – a striking wall installation of noir-ish types with uncomfortably steady gazes. The project was in part inspired by Douglas’s engagement with images from the Black Star Collection, now housed at Ryerson University, and some of them will also be on view when the much-anticipated new Ryerson Image Centre opens next fall.

Installation of Malabar People, 1951, in Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

While there’s often only a hazy sense of the narrative contexts in which these pictures would have come to be made and helped to illustrate, there is also an incisive relationship to a longer history of photography as document – not only to the press photography of Weegee, clearly an influence, but also subtler nods to the motion studies of Edweard Muybridge, the typologies of August Sander, and even a kind of retrospective foreshadowing of the kind of images of that could have inspired Diane Arbus.

Stan Douglas, Dancer II, 1950, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

The series seems, significantly,  to be about this trajectory, suggesting the slow slide of the documentary picture. Douglas casts us back to this era of a nobler photojournalism, a stark contrast to the ubiquity and the quick and cheerful aesthetic of images on facebook and flickr. But many of the works here also suggest the duplicitous, or at least enterprising, nature of the documentary photographer, and the ease with which the captured subject can  move toward the constructed object. Like a slight of hand, unbelievable and undeniable all at once.

Stan Douglas, Rings, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

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“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Jerry McMillan, "Wrinkle Bag," 1965. Black and white photographic bag construction with shelf and Plexiglas cover. 12.75 x 11.75 x 7 inches.

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

Installation view of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Jonnson," Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2008.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

Fischer repeated this technique last year for his solo exhibition at the New Museum, taking photographs of the entire third floor, including the ceiling, and then re-papering those same walls at a 1:1 ratio. 2-d images of the side of the exit sign line up with the exit sign itself; the ceiling is covered with a huge photograph that includes two-dimensional images of flickering flourescent lights, right next to the lights themselves.

Urs Fischer, "Marguerite de Ponty," 2010. Installation view. Mixed Media.

By all reports, this was a challenging room to walk through, although reactions varied – many went through to quickly and missed the minor details. Conversely, the reward for those who took their time was an unsettled feeling brought on by the proximity of “real” and “unreal” copies of the same object. There is a visceral difference between experiencing a photographic image on its own and as an image returned to its original context, or placed back in the image world as an object.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these artists is Miriam Bohm, who has completed multiple series – Inventory and Areal, for example – in which she photographs objects such as packages, arranges those photographs in ways that echo the original arrangement, and then rephotographs them. The result is a complex layer of images, leaving you, as the viewer, with nothing concrete save the object of the photograph itself. In the words of Brendan Fay, writing for Artforum, “In Bohm’s hands, it is the photograph’s presence as an object that provides the most immediate basis for apprehending the image it contains.”

Miriam Böhm, "Inventory XII," 2010. Chromogenic color print. 23.6 x 17.7 inches. Edition of 2 with 2 APs.

“Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by the denial of conflict.”

Sontag was curious about the image-world she described, including whether it was the only variety possible. She even proposed an ecology of images, or a mitigating of sorts. In reality, we’ve gone the opposite direction – more images surround us than ever – but when artists insist on re-inserting an image back into its original context, or even threaten to use it to replace an object, it’s hard not to believe there’s a shift afoot.

Since 1949, Young Contemporaries, or the now-named Bloomberg New Contemporaries, has been presenting its view of the future of contemporary art, selecting recent graduates from art schools across the UK. This year, spread across the ICA in London, are 40 artists who span the genres of painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, conceptual art and performance. With the likes of the Chapman Brothers, Anish Kapoor and David Hockney included in past incarnations, there is always the hope that amongst the chosen, the next great British artist is lurking.

With no text to accompany the exhibition, the work must stand on its own merits. While I appreciate that the viewer is encouraged to form unbiased opinions based on the formal, aesthetic and narrative properties inherent in the work, I can’t help but think that we might be missing something, and that much of the work would benefit from further contextualisation – and perhaps a better hang. So what might the future hold?

Noel Hensey, Death is Here, 2009, c-type print on aluminium, 42 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

1. Death by Photography

Tucked away in a less-than stellar location on the stairwells is the work of two artists whose muted photographs capture constructed moments of intrigue. Noel Hensey’s Death is Here is an unsettling and eerie image in which the perfectly balanced, slick composition if offset by the unsettling, and perhaps prophetic, narrative that one envisions may play out in a suburban nightmare.

Ute Klein, Resonanzgeflecht # 8, 2009, lightjet C-type print on dibond, 35 x 36 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

2. Photographic Performance

Ute Klein’s photograph is more about performance than photography, exploring the spaces that bodies may occupy. The extreme corporal contact is both comforting and confining – the contorted poses of the performers intertwine two bodies to become one – calm and content from the interior and impenetrable from the outside.

David Ben White, Painting Pavilion 1, 2011, giclée print, 50 x 33 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

3. Structural Paintings

David Ben White’s Painting Pavilions balance the whimsical with intellectual thrust. Using haphazardly balanced paintings and furniture to construct interior architectural structures, White knocks painting from its privileged place of prestige. With the act of photographing these structures, painting is further kicked while it is down, reduced to common reproduction, and the ultimate decorative item for the home.

Katie Goodwin, Silent Landscape, 2010, HD video, 3 min. Courtesy of the artist and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

4. The De-structuralisation of Cinema

Katie Goodwin’s self-destructive landscape brings unseen violence to the frontlines. The silent video,  based on filmed war footage, features a highly violent series of explosions in an soulless place. Freed from the characters and narratives which overshadow the cinematic landscape, our attention is drawn to the ubiquity of this destruction – constantly looked at, but never really seen.

5. Intangible Performance

One of the most affecting works in the exhibition has no visual reference. Throughout the spaces, the smell of perfume perfuses the air, growing stronger at times and then fading away. Without text, title, or attention, performance artist Leah Capaldi quietly hijacks your senses, playing on individual associations and the memories that scent draws out. Doused with an entire bottle of Chanel Allure perfume, Capaldi’s performers meander through the space and literally take over with their sickening smell. The allure of the perfume is nothing short of nauseating in its excess, as the rituals of beauty are taken to extremes.

This future smells of potential, and may turn out to be quite promising after all.

Judy Fiskin, "Untitled," 1974. Gelatin-silver print, 7 x 5 in.

On the surface, Judy Fiskin’s tiny photographs of stucco apartment buildings (Stucco, 1973-6) and Southern California architecture (31 Views of San Bernadino, 1974) belong to a subset of works by artists obsessed with the typography of architecture, à la Bernd and Hilla Becher, or even Ed Ruscha. Each of these artists has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of images of buildings, usually in black-and-white.  The similarity ends there, however.  Whereas the Bechers were genuinely interested in documenting “type,” and Ruscha finds humor in investigating the banal, Fiskin’s photographs question where one draws the line between the mundane and the precious.

Judy Fiskin, "Signal Hill, Willow and Cherry, Facing Southwest, from the Long Beach," California Documentary Survey Project, 1980. Gelatin silver print on paper mounted on paperboard. 2 1/2 x 2 3/8 in. Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Straight-on shots of ordinary tract homes and businesses, the photographs in Stucco and 31 Views of San Bernadino average only a few inches in height, achieving gravitas through their position: centered in a vast white matte and frame. Other works—like the series Aesthetic Decisions (1984) and Portraits of Furniture (1984)—are more complicated, taking precious, intentionally artful objects and forcing them to hold up to sustained attention.  The viewer’s thoughts involve an internal struggle, noticing both the beauty and the awkwardness of an arrangement, with Fiskin staying pointedly neutral.

“They don’t hang straight!  They don’t drape!”

“Do you want to say they detract from elegance?”

“Yes, because they don’t drape properly.”

“They don’t drape properly.”

“Yes.”

Fiskin also uses that oh-so-unsentimental of mediums, video, to similar effect.  Perhaps the best example is 50 Ways to Set the Table (2003), a 26-minute long mini-documentary of the process of judging the Tablescaping Competition at the Los Angeles County Fair in 2001.  Without taking sides, Fiskin follows two female judges in their process of deciding the winners of categories like “Country Christmas” and “The Lion King,” plus the best-in-show.

“You know, this tablecloth is so white that it makes the salt off-white?  I had to take a second look at that—I’m wondering, is that Parmesan cheese in there?”

Judy Fiskin, "50 Ways to Set the Table," 2003. Still from a digital video with sound), running time 26 minutes. Courtesy Angles Gallery.

I love Fiskin’s sense of humor, but what I appreciate most is the reminder that to limit one’s toolbox to irony and sarcasm is to take the lazy way out. In the clang and clatter of all the artistic voices present for Pacific Standard Time, the Getty’s multi-venue, six-month initiative to showcase post-World War II art from Southern California, the tiny photographs and video of Judy Fiskin hold their own.

Judy Fiskin is represented in Los Angeles by Angles Gallery. Fiskin’s works are on view at various exhibits as part of Pacific Standard Time, including MOCA’s ‘Under the Big Black Sun’: California Art 1974-81, California Museum of Photography’s Seismic Shift: California Landscape Photography, the Getty Museum’s In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980, and the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery’s Civic Virtue: The Impact of the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery. For individual show information, please follow the links above.

THE RE-ENACTMENT

One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Mexican artist Yoshua Okón’s Octopus (2011). Created during a residency at the Hammer Museum, the 4-channel video piece grapples with what is both humanizing and alienating. Day laborers re-enact the civil war in Guatemala, wearing in black or white clothing, depending on which side they had fought for. On the set of a Home Depot parking lot, the laborers replay scenes from their country’s history, but now the opposing sides point invisible weapons at an invisible enemy, not at their historical foes. “Octopus” is Guatemalan slang for the United Fruit Company, alluding to the company’s ambiguous role in Guatemalan politics and complicating the narrative further.

THE ARCHIVE

The pliableness of the document becomes evident through Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). A fictional African American performer is created through an archive of snap shots, film stills, and head-shots. Photography’s role in the construction of history becomes clear as we are left to conjecture about the possibilities of this figure.

While The Fae Richards Photo Archive plays with the divide between fact and fiction, Mike Tribe’s The Dystopian Files (2009-present) solemnly takes on the task of chronicling history. An archive of clips from footage of protest and the policing of these actions is gathered together as something that Tribe refers to as “ritualized conflicts”. The single channel video is disrupted by omnipresent black bars slowly creeping across the screen as eerie, unidentifiable tones collectively moan, the audio’s consistency giving a sense of a cohesive moment from the catalogue of moments.

THE PERSONA

Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana, “People v. Bruce (Parrhesia)”, cardboard, comedy club lights, and audio track, 2011

A cardboard fabrication of a courtroom witness stand and judges bench illuminated with the theatrics of comedy lights and the occasional laugh track enact notions of truth in The People v. Bruce (Parrhesia) (2011). The term “parrhesia” loosely translates to free speech with an obligatory edge. In this installation, collaborators Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana engage with the trial and conviction of obscenity against comedian Lenny Bruce as a way to address the fluidity of truth and free speech amidst the conflicting territories of where one can expect to hear truth spoken – the comedy stage and the courtroom.

In the series The First and Last of the Modernists: (Charles and Michael), Lorraine O’Grady links the public personas’s of poet Charles Baudelaire and performer Michael Jackson through the language of conceptual photography, implying modernism’s hand in the cult and commodification of celebrity.

THE INTERVENTION

Perhaps the least convincing of containers is The Intervention, in which “works recall charged events in history that register cautions about the future”. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but I don’t equate “registering cautions” to “intervention”, which for me has a very active implication. At any rate, Geof Oppenheimer’s Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11) is a “two-unit” piece that encapsulates a formal tightness with a conceptual looseness. A neon portrait of Alan Greenspan leans against a wall, somehow in dialogue with a distant placed steel geometric form wrapped in red bandana material perched askew on an unfinished pedestal. There is something about systems and structures here, but ambivalence reins.

Geof Oppenheimer, Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11)

If you are after the redemptive, look elsewhere; what this exhibition offers are objects of discontent, agitation. In the context of our current political climate, we encounter the spiral of history in these works, rather than it’s unfolding.

Agitated Histories will run through January 15, 2012 at SITE Santa Fe, in New Mexico. It was presented earlier in 2011 at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

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Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.

Men Of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011. Photo credit: Richard Mosse

A military village emerges from the hills of hot pink. A soldier lurks in a crimson jungle. A man with a face erupted in scar tissue from a war trauma pauses for a portrait. Photographer Richard Mosse has captured the Congo using Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued military surveillance film used to detect an invisible spectrum of infrared light, warping the hues of green into a landscape of lavender and revealing much more than an image shot on typical film would.

The Ireland-born photographer’s striking new series Infra — on view through December 23 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City — documents a land of turbulent, shifting politics, systematic massacres, and unrelenting physical and sexual violence. These photographs are devastating in their reality and hauntingly beautiful in their creative form.

Please click here to read more.

Laney at 5th, Federal Building, 2011. Image on Endura transparency, unique photograph 33 1/2 x 28 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery.

Every photographer has wished, at some point, that they could substitute the lens for their own eye. John Chiara does the next best thing: he crawls inside his homemade camera, the size of a small Uhual trailer, in order to make unique photographs. He may not be able to be the camera’s retina, but he can certainly inhabit its brain. The results are monumentally large (Chiara develops the prints in a large sewage pipe), and the intuitive process unpredictable and time-consuming. Chiara’s anachronistic imaging system maps the landscape in front of him, laying bare photography’s own inner workings in doing so.

For Fort at Lime Point,  John Chiara’s second solo exhibition in New York City at Von Lintel Gallery,  the San Francisco based photographer has crafted some of his most subtle and uneasy work to date. Chiara has long chartered the sublimity of nature and its sometimes uneasy cohabitation with the structures upon its surface; this body of work, however, is anchored to a site of specific historical gravity.

Funston at Cascade, 2011. Image on Ilfochrome paper, unique photograph 33 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery.

Fort Lime Point is a little known military base, established on the San Francisco Bay during the Civil War. However, due to a lengthy litigation, the military was unable to begin excavating the site until a year after the war was over, in 1866. They did so by leveling the found with 24,000 pounds of gunpowder, attempting the level a base at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Rubble still exists there, left over from the blast over a century ago. The site is a reminder not only of extreme intervention with natural resources, but a failed attempt at creating a military defense base. It is a telling choice of location, and one that reflects back nicely on Chiara’s medium and process; this site, like the haunting photographs that depict it (and neighboring areas) in this show, is a waking memory of its own flawed history. And like the images, the place decays and morphs in front of our eyes.

Bunker Road at Coastal Trail, Fort Barry Range (Right), 2011. Image on Ilfochrome paper, unique photograph 33 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery.

Oak at 4th, Federal Building, 2011. Image on Endura transparency, unique photograph 32 1/2 x 28 inches. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery.

The images are square, and slightly smaller than I’ve seen Chiara work in the past — both effects are welcome, and passively eerie. Many of the photographs are also inverted, which also add to their ghostliness and sense of self containment. Chiara has allowed for more mistakes and imperfections to abstract and obfuscate (a third of his image has been exposed and is thereby blank in Starr King: Coral: Beacon), and the results are, at points, painterly. In the age of high resolution, it is becoming hard to imagine that a photograph could record so subjectively.

Chiara reminds us of the simultaneous complexities and profound simplicity of the photograph process. It is a box and a lens. But, by pairing it with a site of historical consequence (or non-consequence, as the case may be), it is also the keeper of our memories made manifest.

Fort at Lime Point will be on view at Von Lintel Gallery through January 7th, 2012. Chiara’s work is also on view at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco through December, 16th, as part of the exhibition HERE. Pier 24 Photography recently released a video featuring Chiara discussing his recent works and unique photographic process.

photo: Sara Knelman

The uniformity of medium at Paris Photo a few weeks later made for, by comparison, a serene environment, light and airy without the weight and clutter of sculpture, quiet in comparison to all the sparkly attention-demanding work that dominated Frieze, and cloaked by the elegantly soaring ceilings of the Grand Palais, where over a hundred photography galleries from around the world set up shop for a few days in November. Even still, the volume of work was overwhelming, and presented the same challenge of how to extract and engage with individual works amidst the disorienting repetition of aisles of white cubes.

Ostensibly a fair for historical and contemporary photography, recent work dominated the scene. New Director Julien Frydman, formerly head of Magnum in Paris, also included spotlight spaces dedicated to recent institutional acquisitions, private collections, and African photography. In addition to the encyclopedic catalogue, an expansive book Mutations: Perspectives on Photography, was also published, with an impressive roster of contributors: Simon Baker, Victor Burgin, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Regis Durand, Roxanna Marcoci, Adrian Rifkin, Allan Sekula – to name a few.

There were a lot of pictures to see. Here are a few that struck me, while I wended my way through. Many speak to some larger trends in photo practices: a return to traditional (analogue) processes; the integration of photography with painting in various ways; appropriating appropriated imagery; idiosyncratic views of everyday objects. These emphases on object-ness, uniqueness, insider references and the familiar accumulation of modern life stand in opposition to the kind of documentary, politically-engaged work that is making a resurgence, and which was less present here – though this is not surprising given the commercial priorities of the event.

One image from an installation of Matthias Olmeta’s Ambrotypes at galerie du jour agnès b.

Matthias Olmeta, Louis, 2011, Ambrotype, 33x31 cm, unique, courtesy of galerie du jour agnes b.

Also on view here, a selection of works by Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keita.

Seydou Keïta, untitled, 1952 to 1955, gelatin silver print, 1998, 180x127 cm, courtesy galerie du jour agnes b.

Double exposures layer portraits and paint splatter in work by Thibault Hazelzet at Christophe Gaillard Gallery.

Thibault Hazelzet, Soldat, 2011, C-Print sur ilfoflex monté sous diasec, 200 x 123 cm, courtesy of Galerie Christophe Gaillard.

Cindy Sherman’s film stills have been obsessively revisited by Spanish artist José Ramón Amondarain. A few of his enlarged photographs of painted copies on view at Max Estrella.

Jose Ramon Amondarain, Untitled Film Still no. 21, courtesy of Galeria Max Estrella.

Jose Ramon Amondarain, Untitled Film Still no. 6, courtesy of Galeria Max Estrella.

Georges Rousse’s surreal, trompe-l’oeil architectural interventions at Galerie RX.

Georges Rousse, Heidelberg, 2011, lambda print, 125x160 cm, courtesy of Galerie RX

Georges Rousse, Musée de l’Homme, 2011, lambda print, 125 x 160 cm, courtesy of Galerie RX.

Israeli artist Ilit Azoulay’s expansive piece The Keys archives the lost and found in an obsessively curated and digitally stitched mural-sized work on view at Andrea Meislin Gallery – a work that has been explored on this site before.

Ilit Azoulay, The Keys, 2010, archival pigment print on paper, 59 x 145.5 inches (150 x 370 cm), edition of 3, plus 2 AP, courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York.

LED lights from household electronics flare and bleed in work by German photographer Frank Mädler at Corkin Gallery.

Frank Mädler, Achtachtunddreißig, series: Shine, 2011, analogue c-print, Diasec, 24 1/2 x 43 1/4 in. (62.23 x 109.86 cm), Ed. 8, courtesy of Corkin Gallery.

Frank Mädler, Power, series: Shine, 2011, analogue c-print, Diasec, 25 x 32 in. (63.5 x 81.28 cm), Ed. 8, courtesy of Corkin Gallery.

Woodman most often acted as her own model, and the small black-and-white compositions, usually nudes, are visually straightforward but conceptually complex.  What complicates the work is the knowledge that Woodman is not just the vulnerable nude, but also the architect of that condition.  In many photos Woodman’s gaze is directed at the viewer; and yet knowing she was also the photographer mediates that directness, because ultimately what her model-self was looking at was her photographer-self, backwards through the lens of the camera, posing for her own view.  In this way, she was able to explore her femininity as a construct of at least partially her own making, bringing a feminist awareness to her investigations.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 1/4 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Take, for example, Polka Dots (1976).  Wearing a spotted dress, Woodman crouches against a decaying, dilapidated wall.  Over her head there is a fist-sized hole punched through the plaster and lath.   Similarly, her dress is unzipped at the side, revealing part of her torso and the curve of her left breast.  Splayed fingers hide her mouth, heightening the vulnerability of her posture and semi-nakedness, and her messy hair corresponds to the ruined nature of the room.  Her awkward, submissive pose and undone dress belong to a madwoman—but her eyes are not crazy, they are guiltily sexual.  They dare the viewer to compare the hole in her garment to the hole in the wall and to see how they might be similar.  And yet the title is neutral, focusing coyly on the pattern of the dress and the concurrent black spots on the wall, redirecting the viewer to the composition as a whole and reflecting the conceptual slyness of the work.  Contradictions and ambiguity create depth as Woodman refuses to provide an easy summary of femininity or desire.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 3 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Woodman’s understanding of formal compositions was truly remarkable for someone so young.  Consider Untitled, New York (1979-1980), in which a nude body reclines on a striped mattress.  Echoing ancient Roman and Greek statues, the head is missing, cut off by the camera’s framing. The clean, bold stripes of the sheet direct the eye across the width of the photo, providing a strong horizontal pattern that is softened by the zigzagging line of the torso and knees.  Gentle folds in the flesh at the waist echo the soft ripples in the fabric.  An open barrette scattered on the sheet implies the sensuality of unbound hair that the viewer can’t see, yet the idea of that looseness is physically present in the undone fabric billowing from under the bed’s front edge. Two mysterious black disks lie near the ribcage, like pupils, alluding to sight. The configuration of elements appears intuitive, but the many correspondences indicate that it was very carefully composed.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 5/16 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Identity is the main issue that arises repeatedly in Woodman’s work.  If she is located in front of and behind the camera simultaneously, then her sense of self is similarly flexible.  Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976) in which three naked women stand in a row in a dilapidated room. Each woman holds a photograph of Woodman’s face in front of her own visage.  The posture of the two women on the left indicates that their hidden faces are turned to each other behind the photographic facades.  The third woman, however, faces the camera.  Comparing this woman’s body to the other photographs in the exhibition, the viewer can deduce that this is Woodman herself, cheekily replacing her own face with a representation that claims to be her.  This tableau is further complicated by a fourth photo of Woodman’s face tacked to the wall, and by the paint that divides the wall horizontally making the row of women into an ersatz police lineup.  There are four Francescas in the room: which one is the criminal, which the innocent, or even the “real”?  Further, each woman is naked, but her face—the principle social marker of her individuality—is concealed, questioning what constitutes feminine identification.  Woodman’s own pose, leaning toward the viewer in knee socks and Mary Janes, seems to say you can see me naked, but I am unrevealed; exposed, I am protected.

Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, and it would be easy to let this cast a pall over her work, robbing it of its sly humor and replacing its youthful sincerity with something darker. Knowing this fact, her nude body can suddenly look isolated, her propositions for selfhood change from playfully unfixed to confused, her blacks even more opaque than before.  But subjecting her oeuvre to armchair psychology is the wrong strategy: it’s too convenient to attribute her imaginative choices to the facile cliché of the tortured artist.  Although her photographs expose her physical body and her thoughts to a public audience, it is in the privacy of the darkroom that I imagine her: coaxing an image from light and shadows, sliding paper into chemical trays, bringing an ever-changing idea of herself to life, over and over again.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.

Weegee, "Self-Portrait with Marlene Dietrich," ca. 1940s

My favorite photograph in MOCA Los Angeles’ newly opened Weegee show is the one of the crime photographer turned expert ogler with Marlene Dietrich’s legs. It’s a riff off another Weegee image, “Self-portrait with Marlene Dietrich,” in which the photographer leans in, smiling in a pandering sort of way at the actress, who’s wearing a leotard and cape and clearly saying something. Weegee then took that image and distorted it, superimposing her legs over her torso, so that Marlene is only legs, and it’s those legs he’s leaning in on and smiling at.

Marlene Dietrich, photographed by Richard Avedon for the Blackglama ad campaign, 1969

Other photographers of the era were much more delicate about their fixation with the Dietrich legs, famously insured by Paramount. Richard Avedon, for instance, had the actress in against a dark background with cloak pulled back to expose her long white limbs. Milton Greene showed her, again wearing black and against a black backdrop, sitting bent over so that her torso is barely visible–it’s just blond hair leading down to long white legs. Milton makes her all legs too; there’s just a sculptural elegance that allows the image to ingratiate itself as an aesthetic experience.

Marlene Dietrich, photographed by Milton Greene, 1952

Weegee’s take, on the other hand, is blatant and unapologetically so, clearly not at all worried about offending the star. But it’s not critical in the way Perez Hilton might be or exploitative in the same way a lot of paparazzi photos are. Weegee has been called the first ambulance chaser, and maybe, for some reasons, that’s the right title–after all, he did photograph unappreciative people being carted off in paddy wagons, capture topless women sleeping and snap what must have been an unsanctioned photo of Jane Russell’s behind. Here, however, it feels like he’s on the side of us, the viewers, not manipulating us with beauty in the way Avedon and Greene do, but poking fun at a cultural obsession he’s participating in and inviting us to join him.