Reception 7, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 8 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed.  And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn.

Reception 2, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

In the case of Washburn’s “Twice Told,” on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, the tales that repeat belong to the endless stream of images and narratives available through the television set.  Washburn, a painter, breaks the fourth wall by reacting to this stream, turning the television on and smearing her screen with not just paint, but everyday household items like butter, tape, bread, and potatoes. She then sets up a Hasselblad digital camera, and snaps a picture.

Reception 10, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 15 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The resulting images, which Washburn calls “television drawings,” don’t look much like drawings; nor is the television screen easy to spot. From a distance, many look like abstract expressionist paintings. The spaghetti strewn across the screen in Reception 2, 2011, and Reception 9, 2011, initially calls to mind the gestures of Jackson Pollock, although thoughts of the fleshy materiality and subversive humor of many 1970s feminist artists follow quickly.

Reception 3, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

For many of the images, including Reception 4, 5, and 13 (all 2011), it’s almost impossible to make out any specific background image beyond a field of color. The television’s tell, of course, is its glow, and that glow permeates Washburn’s images: warm in some and cool in others, at times penetrating swathes of paint and at other times merely strengthening the shadows of dimensional objects.

Reception 12, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 12 x 18 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

This interplay of the television image and Washburn’s interventions occurs not just formally (in terms of light and shadow, or scale), but figuratively. In Reception 1, 2011, a rubber-gloved hand creeps onto the scene from the bottom left of the image; blending almost perfectly with a group of three hands in the background, except for the fact that the intervening hand (the gloved hand) has a deep shadow to emphasize its physicality.

Reception 1, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 15 x 15 inches. Image couresy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The beauty and power of Washburn’s work comes from how effortlessly the images marry both formal and conceptual references to a variety of traditionally “opposed” relationships: digital and physical, visceral and cerebral, touch and sight. It’s no wonder that the series is called “Reception” – Washburn’s photographs don’t just rework old narratives and images into new forms, but challenge us to consider our role as media consumers in the 21st century.

“Twice Told” is on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles, through May 19, 2012.

Dana Verkouteren's rendering of Gregory G. Katsas speaking in front of the Supreme Court Justices in Washington, March 26, 2012.

Driving home on March 28, the last day of the SCOTUS affordable health care hearings, I had the radio on and heard interviews with two or three female picketers who had set up outside the Supreme Court. I haven’t been able  to find the transcript of what I heard, but I remember it as one of those “can you tell who’s on what side” stories — like the one NPR did months ago, comparing the fiscally-obsessed language of a Tea Partier with that of a Wall Street Occupier. The similarity that struck me most between these SCOTUS picketers was the use of “I” and “my”: “my Constitutional right,” “my health,” “I have the freedom.” In an Associated Press piece I read later, a woman said of the health care act, “It is the epitome of being in my face and telling me what I can and can’t do for the rest of my life.”

The “I” and the “my” feel embarrassing: people speaking about what they want, and what they feel they deserve, but doing so in language that aligns them to “a side.” On both sides, the “I” and “my” seem in service to bigger red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal interests, and, at least in sound bites, the speakers don’t seem aware of how unspecific their “I” sounds.

Leigh Ledare, who became notorious on a very small scale (he’s only had a few solo shows, some of them outside of the U.S., none in L.A. until now) for using his over-intimate relationship with his exceptionally uninhibited mother as his subject, has work at The Box gallery in L.A. right now. And though everything in his fairly extensive exhibition is in some way or another “confessional,” all you understand about the artist’s wants or likes has to do with his voracious interest in other people — he wants, or likes, to know about those who are or have been close to him.

Leigh Ledare, still from The Gift, 2008.

The Gift, fragments of a softcore film Ledare’s former-dancer mother made with friends, plays in a side room at The Box. Ledare’s mother sent him this  footage, apparently “as a gift,” and Ledare pared it down so that no story, only strange encounters between actors and director are left. In the main gallery space, a room-inside-a-room has been built to hold Double Bind, a wide-ranging series of photographs of Meghan Ledare Fedderly, formerly married to Ledare, interspersed with imagery from vintage magazines, postcards, and other such sources. According to an explanation hung near the entrance to the room that holds Double Bind, Ledare invited his ex-wife on a weekend in upstate New York, intending to photograph her. She agreed, but had remarried by the scheduled vacation came around. Ledare and she took the trip, but she and her new husband took the same trip, at Ledare’s request, soon after. Both ex-husband and new husband took the photos that Ledare assembled to make his “artwork,” and the images aren’t that different.

Leigh Ledare, from Double Bind, 2009.

Around the periphery of the makeshift room for Double Bind there are color photographs from Ledare’s Personal Commission series. In each, Ledare poses in costumes, often on or near beds. Women the artist found via personal ads, who had interests and desires that reminded him of his mother’s, have posed him and taken the pictures. Again, he asserts only his appetite for closeness to desires of others. Somehow, this makes him, an artist always putting himself in situations others would run from, seem cautious. Self-assertion, the kind those picketers outside the court plunged into, can make you look naive and exposed, and Ledare sidesteps that potential. It’s why his work fascinates and resonates, but also frustrates.

Paul Graham, 53rd Street & 6th Avenue, 6th May 2011, 2.41.26 pm (2011), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 56" x 74 1/4" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

Filling the spacious Chelsea Pace Gallery, Paul Graham: The Present displays vignettes that reflect quotidian ritual in New York City. Graham’s large-scale photographs hang at street level and mimic his theme of pedestrian rhythm. Smaller photographs, likewise in an array of diptychs and triptychs, are hung at eye level and also play a role in highlighting the voyeuristic perspective of the viewer, who is both the artist and the gallery audience. Rather than capturing a sea-like crowd of public, each photograph presents a focal character or characters that stands out from the monotony of the masses. Graham contextualizes each vignette by the specific location in which he becomes the ultimate voyeur.  By virtue of his photographs – as they are hung in solitary groupings rather than a vast assembly – Graham elucidates the manner in which a narrative is subject to alteration by the subtlest instances of movement, whether it is light or physical movement of a subject. An anonymous passerby becomes the subject of the frame only then to be replaced by his doppelganger in what seems to be the blink of an eye, for instance in works such as 8^th Avenue & 42^nd Street, 17^th August 2010, 11.23.03 am (2010).

Paul Graham, 8th Ave & 42nd Street, 17th August 2010, 11.23.03 am (2010), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 28" x 37 1/2" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

As Shakespeare astutely put it: “all the world’s a stage […]” and Graham’s photographs testify to this very notion. Both the manner of characterizing the unknown and the capturing of natural light lend to an exquisitely theatrical cadre. As similar to the old masters of photography like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Graham emphasizes the lyrical nature of light just as much as he accentuates his subjects, as seen in works such as Fulton Street, 11^th November 2009, 11.29.10 am (2009) and E53^rd Street, 12^th April 2010, 9.45.55 am (2010). Due to light, the theatrical aspect of Graham’s photographs serves as a mechanism for spotlighting not only his characters within the frame but also the interplay of details that structure the composition.

Paul Graham, Fulton Street, 11th November 2009, 11.29.10 am (2009), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 56" x 74 1/4" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

In what seems to be a subtextual homage to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, in works such as Fulton Street, 11^th November 2009, 11.29.10 am Graham elucidates the intuitive moment of capturing an instant when life lends itself to a compelling composition. In this particular diptych, we watch a girl go from strolling to sprawled out onto the street. The audience is privy to the cause of this girl’s accident, though it is clear that in that brief moment she was not. In many of his other prints, Graham renders a two or three framed story in which the audience is granted the time to comprehend the various details – many of which are speckled with both the mundane and frivolity – that occur in one second in a city. Paul Graham: The Present will show through April 21^st at Pace Gallery 545 West 22^nd Street, New York and is accompanied by a hardcover monograph published by MACK. Graham won the 2012 Hasselblad award in early March.

The Present, Installation view, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery

Gérard Rancinan, Metamorphosis IV - The Big Supper, Argentic print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame 180 x 300 cm - 70.9 x 118.1 in. • Edition of 3

Gérard Rancinan’s thematic series of photographs – Metamorphoses, Hypotheses, Specimens, Wonderful World and Portraits – at the Opera Gallery Singapore are visually seductive and epically provocative representations of the contemporary issues that assail the twenty-first century. Exploring a complex web of interconnected issues – such as human rights, freedom, immigration, globalisation and capitalist culture – that would take more than bulletin news and politicians’s blustery promises to unravel, Rancinan’s photographs undertake this daunting task with interrogative aplomb, consistently alluding to the malaise of insatiable appetites that contribute to (and are subsequently reinforced by) today’s cultural vernacular.

Gérard Rancinan, Metamorphosis I - The Raft of Illusions Argentic print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame.

The Raft of Illusions reworks the cheerless, murky tones of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of Medusa (1818-9), an iconic painting of French Romanticism depicting barely-alive survivors in the aftermath of a shipwreck that precipitated a political scandal of his day. In its current incarnation, modelesque figures are depicted as refugees clad in branded scraps of fabric, who writhe on a raft hailing a partially submerged Hollywood sign and the Eiffel Tower in turbulent waters. These survivors, recast as fashion victims, desperately flail for rescue, yet look to the powerlessness of these selfsame drowning symbols for help.

Gérard Rancinan, Metamorphosis VI - Las Meninas Argentic print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame 180 x 234 cm - 70.9 x 92.1 in. • Edition of 3

If the female personification of a bare-breasted Liberty heroically leads her people with a bayonet and the tricoloured French flag in patriotic solidarity in Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830), Rancinan’s Freedom Unveiled utilises the enduring legacy of the French Revolution and the idea of patriotic militarism to emphasise the mixed-bag of signs that characterise the excess and detritus of consumerist culture. Liberty is, for Rancinan, a woman in a black hijab who stands with ragged street urchins and handcuffed bodies against an apocalyptic backdrop of underground graffiti art, McDonald’s distinctive arches and television images of Mickey Mouse and Christian media evangelism.

The wry appropriation has shockingly humorous appeal at times: Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1495-8) is transformed into a junk-food addiction fest, symbolised by the presence of a burger flipper who takes Christ’s place at the centre of the table, and is surrounded by his 12 obese disciples as customers. Marilyn Monroe in Warholian colours takes centre stage in a remake of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) (she finds her way back into his lens in Desperate Marilyn in Wonderful World series) in a parody of our fascination with celebrity culture, and its quest for physical perfection readily found in surgical procedures with throwaway money. Mass consumption and ubiquity are propositions that are further developed in the Wonderful World series; Batman Family and the Mickey-mouse faced Family Watching TV postulate the dearth of individuality as a consequence of homogeneity and market forces.

Gérard Rancinan, Batman Family, Argentic print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame 180 x 264 cm - 70.9 x 103.9 in. • Edition of 3.

Gérard Rancinan, Metamorphosis II - Freedom Unveiled, Argentic print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame 180 x 246 cm - 70.9 x 96.8 in. • Edition of 3.

In a melange that is part-fashion-spread and glossy poster magazine advertisement, Rancinan’s highly stylised photographs take on the sombre, surrealistic hues of Old Master paintings in a conflation of moralistic sensationalism and hedonistic consumption, expressing a deep ambivalence towards the unchanging nature of human behaviour. His works are quite literally, a metamorphosis – a transformation – of their originals and like their predecessors, also sardonic reflections of contemporary social ambitions and their far-reaching consequences: the plight of immigrants who sometimes turn up European shores barely alive, the phenomenon of junk food culture and climbing obesity rates, the disparity of wealth distribution and the decadence of celebrity lifestyles. But while his oeuvre is a response to cultural decay and the weighty socio-political issues that permeate contemporary life, it celebrates as well, the aspect of absurdity that persistently accompanies the paradoxical sensibilities of modern existence.

***

Gérard Rancinan was born in Talence, France and is a multi-award-winning French photographer. He has exhibited in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Opera Gallery in Hong Kong and London, and will be showcasing his trilogy at the Triennale di Milano in May 2012. This series of works is part of a world tour that began in London, and will be on show at the Opera Gallery Singapore until 25 March 2012.

Luke Stephenson, 'Diamond Sparrow', 2009

Luke Stephenson’s ongoing series The Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds attempts the impossible task of mapping domestic bird pedigrees in images that lie somewhere between portraiture and still life. The series shows the birds’ physical characteristics to their best advantage, emphasizing color, stature and markings, however, the intimacy of the scenes belies the formal beauty of the photographs.  Stephenson is drawn to the eccentric world of breeders, chipping away at the encyclopaedic task of documenting their labors with equally fanatical vigor. Small details like the bright yellow leg ring of a grey finch or the curious gaze of a parrot remind the viewer of the birds’ captive lives and the relationship that binds them to the breeder, and allows them to be viewed as both objects and subjects.

Petrina Hicks, 'Emily the Strange', Lightjet print, 2011

In Petrina Hicks’ Emily the Strange, a young girl cradles a hairless sphinx cat, which clutches her shoulder with a wrinkled paw. A motif of mirroring seems to identify an otherworldly symmetry between the pair; girl and cat each have crystal blue eyes and wear the same pale shade of pink. These unlikely twins comprise a swathe of luxurious textures and vulnerability, and would fulfill that convention of female portraiture in which the subject holds some trinket or fancy that marks her as just one of many ornaments, were it not for the grotesque beauty of the wrinkled cat.

Justin Spiers’ Zoo Series uses the camera’s gaze to highlight the physical barriers that enclose zoo animals while exposing them to scrutiny. Black and white images such as Enclosure VI conjure the aura of nineteenth century photography, offering a glimpse of something remote, exotic and diminished. However, such romance is diminished by the realization that our view is obscured by the sweaty blur of condensation on protective glass. Spiers states, “This mediating layer, which is meant to be clear and not seen, becomes a kind of third space, full of illusory reflections and a patina of scratches and marks.” These images record the unseen viewing apparatus that facilitates the zoo’s illusion.

Justin Spiers, 'Enclosure VI', Inkjet print, 2010

These artists examine ways in which animals are represented as objects of beauty, companionship and amusement, revealing the voyeuristic impulse at play in such constructions.

Hijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia and the United Kingdom

Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 18 February – 8 April 2012

QUAD Derby 3 March – 6 May 2012

Your counselor, hard at work.

I’m currently a photography student. As I try to figure out how I will make a living after graduation, like many photographers, I’m leaning towards a combination of fine art and commercial work. All that said, I want to make an online portfolio showcasing my work, and I’m stuck on the thorny issues of image size and watermarks. I want to minimize the chances of someone stealing the work from my site, but I also want my images to be displayed in an appealing way. What should I do?

Since I’m not a photographer and don’t have any experience with this subject, I contacted Laura Miller, the co-director of ImageWork SF in San Francisco. Here’s what she said:

“For the record, there are inexpensive website programs/add-ons which can secure images on websites so they cannot be dragged off the site. That program, grouped with a watermark program (also readily available) secures the photos. Even if a watermarked image could be dragged off the website, it would require some Photoshopping to remove the watermark. But if the images also can’t be dragged off, the only way to duplicate would be to take a screen shot, further degrading the image and making watermark removal more difficult. So most definitely, the best way to go is to make the photos unmovable and watermarked.”

Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1931.

Ms. Miller also very generously took the time to check in with some of the Photoshop instructors who work at ImageWork SF, and continued, “The word is: there is really nothing you can do to prevent image theft from websites. If someone wants an image badly enough they’ll take it. But you can make it much harder and a big deterrent by installing watermark and safety programs. If someone can’t easily drag the image off, and/or has a complicated watermark to Photoshop out, they may just prefer to steal from an easier source. There are many programs available to secure the photos and do watermarks, just do a search and many varieties come up. One program turns the image to a blank white rectangle when dragged off the site; others simply lock the image in place.

Also, it’s very important to keep web images as low resolution as possible (without affecting the view on the website) so that even if a photo is grabbed, it is would be way too low res to make clear enlargements or prints from it.”

Don’t forget to add a copyright statement to your website. It’s probably not much of a deterrent to the serious, but at least it broadcasts your intent.

Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Love-In, Central Park, New York City, 1969. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

On the other hand, let’s all note the irony of me giving advice about preventing image theft while using illustrative images found on the internet.

Jacob van Oost the Elder, The Artist's Studio, 1666.

As a young artist (4 years out from a BFA) maintaining a disciplined and consistent studio practice is of great importance to me and probably where I direct most of my ‘artistic energy’. What is your idea of a healthy balance between production (of art) and thinking/reading/writing/looking at art? Is constantly producing work a bad thing? Can this harm me?

The wording of your query reminds me of the little tracts on the Sin Of Onanism that the priest would give us in Catholic school. These were always illustrated with pictures of earnest-looking young white kids in sweater sets (no doubt drawn in the mid-sixties), so that’s how I’m imagining you now: sweetly innocent in tennis whites, sitting in front of your easel with brush in hand. And like the illustrated naïfs of yesteryear, I suspect that deep down inside you know the answer to your own question.

I’m glad to hear you are disciplined. It’s one of the hardest things to master, so if you’ve got control of your studio habits and schedule you’re already doing well for yourself. And as a young artist it’s important to be in the studio, thinking, working, and experimenting, trying out new ideas and refining older ones. It’s only through the act of making that we are able to hone our ideas, processes and artwork.

So while constantly producing work is not a bad thing (provided you are following reasonable safety guidelines), it’s also not all there is to being a contemporary artist. Being a teacher, of course I think you should read, though I recognize that it’s not for everyone. Some people just don’t enjoy it. But if you do, one way to really get into your reading is to find a book or article that you liked, and then track down and read the references cited in the bibliography. It will lead you deeper into the things that already excite you, and reading—whether it’s theory and criticism or poetry and science fiction—will inspire you, fueling more thinking and working in the studio.

Jean Frederic Bazille, The Artists Studio-Rue de la Condamine, 1870.

Likewise, you do need to be getting out of the studio as well. If you’re serious about your practice you should be making friends in your community, because these people will sustain you in your studio work. Conversations can be invaluable, friendship is absolutely necessary for your emotional well-being, and hanging out is fun. So go to gallery openings and parties when you can find them, and take a pal to the free day at the art museum. Studio time often means isolation, and you need to balance that with some human interaction.

Above all, you do need to be looking at art, in person, as often as possible. Beyond just soothing or stimulating your emotions and intellect, looking at art gives you an understanding of ideas and techniques that are currently in play. Looking at work will inform your sense of color, scale, materials, and concept. Looking at the work in person and then reading any accompanying texts will give you ideas about how the work is framed with language and how that may or may not inform your understanding of it.

Your answer is embedded in your question: balance is the key. Only you can determine what works for you, and what activities contribute to your practice of being an artist. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and don’t forget that your situation will change and you can and will adapt your actions to suit.

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.

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com.

“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 Johns," 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.

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.

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.

Colorado-based artist Mike Womack’s show Spectres, Phantoms, and Poltergeists opened at the Chelsea gallery ZieherSmith on September 15.  DailyServing’s Carmen Winant had a chance to catch up with him this weekend to chat about his practice and the new work.

Mike Womack, "Spectres (Asteroid Ida)," 2011 c-print, 20 X 30 inches. Photo courtesy ZieherSmith.

Carmen Winant: What is your background in fine arts? Are you trained in sculpture and is that how you would define your practice?

Mike Womack: I’m trained as a painter. In fact, I didn’t start making objects until after graduate school at Pratt. And I currently teach at the University of Colorado in the painting and drawing department. So, I would say: using the vernacular of painting, I make sculpture, installation art, and work within digital media. Above all, I am interested in creating the circumstances and contexts to look at images.

CW: The work seems to engage a certain tenderness, or even magic, with the modern machine and its capabilities.  I think the darkness of the gallery and the sound of the motor add to this romance. Can you speak a little bit about your interest in using motorized systems in your work, or I should say, as the subject of your work?

MW: My interests in creating mechanized imagery are definitely sentimental. I have been accused of being a willful romantic, and I must admit, that is really dead on. I’m fascinated with how technology constitutes imagery. I am idealistic – I want to fall for ideas, to be romanced by them in spite of knowing better. But there is a unavoidable complication within the interplay of technology and phenomenology of media; I am at once in awe of technology, and at the same time made to feel curious and suspicious of it. In this way, I am of two minds: I look at my iPhone and think it’s a miracle. But in the same moment, I want to take it apart, interrogate and look at it from multiple perspectives – to understand, technologically and philosophically, just how we have evolved to this point.

Mike Womack, "Spectres (Muybridge 1)," 2011 c-print, 17 X 28 inches. Photo courtesy of ZieherSmith.

Another example of this divide can also be found in the exploded diagram of how to construct an IKEA couch. You don’t need to know much to understand its mechanics. But suddenly there is a shift into a vastly different kind of technology that surrounds us, like, for instance, electrons moving though silicon products (like a vacuum tube), which rapidly becomes harder to grasp.  There is a kind of slippage between the late industrial revolution’s innovations and forms in building to the digital age. The space between the two is my interest; I usually have one foot in the mechanized world – making things with prescribed naivety – and one foot in trying to tackle more complex things and how they function.

CW: The ways that your work often makes kinetic energy visible through light strikes me as really photographic – which is partially why I asked you about your training and background. Your choice to use Eadweard Muybridge images in the Spectre series also made me more curious about your interest in referencing photography.

MW: I am less interested in the history of photography and more interested in the where the camera aligns and misaligns itself with how we see. I don’t take photographs for my work, but I will often look through the camera lens to see how the values will translate, and how the camera unravels light and creates aberrations.

For the Spectre series, I used black and white moving images to make them into the opposite: color stills. This was really the reason I went back to the very first “moving” image (which never had color to begin with) to attempt to reconstitute the image by applying contemporary filters to it, to both unravel and enhance it. I was also drawn to the early Muybridge images as they were taken with late industrial era technologies, which I keep returning to, and which reference a certain nostalgia.

Installation Shot from Mike Womack's Spectres, Phantoms and Poltergeists. Photo courtesy of ZieherSmith.

CW: Have you read John Keats‘ assertion that Isaac Newton was ‘unweaving the rainbow’ in his studies to understand light? In Lamia, Keats wrote, “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.” Your own work literally unravels the RGB matrix.  Do you relate to Keats’ idea? A fundamental conflict between art and science in experiencing the world?

MW: The final stanza in Walt Whitman’s volume Leaves of Grass speaks to this polemic: “The spectacle of looking at a morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” I’m interested in Whitman for this reason, and have investigated him in this show. I’m fascinated by these conflictual approaches in seeing; of course, there is beauty in knowledge, but must we unravel every natural mystery, and do we dilute them in the process?

To return to Whitman: my piece Threshold at the front of the show is very much about this considered, complicated act of looking. Whitman was a humanist, an advocate for tearing down intellectualism in the arts in favor of a phenomenological experience of the nature world.  Looking, for Whitman, was chief over ideas. The piece is comprised of a bluestone taken from the stoop in front of Whitman’s former Brooklyn home displayed simply on a low, wooden table; it has been transformed into a piece of art by its displacement. In becoming conceptual art, Threshold questions and undermines Whitman’s very principles, demonstrative of a kind of contained, internal conflict that runs throughout the show.

The blue screen piece is a good example of this, too. It is meant to emulate the blue screen of a television set that isn’t getting reception (static no longer exists, as there is now no transmission). In addition to creating a surface of both transmitted and reflected light, I also wanted to reference monochromatic painting. I made the piece on aluminum and then coated the paint with industrial grade reflective beads, used on top of the painted road dividers to cause a reflection when hit with head beams. The result is a halo-inducing color field stuck somewhere between Yves Klein blue and Derek Jarman’s 1993 monochromatic film “Blue”.  In making this giant, undulating sculpture, I am caught in this struggle between the experience of looking – both suspicious of, and appreciative toward, its potential.

This is the hardest I’ve ever made my viewers look at my work, the nearest to abstraction, the least demonstrative. Ultimately, everything in that show is about the act of looking.

Spectres, Phantoms, and Poltergeists is on display at ZieherSmith from September 15 through October 15.

Carl Cheng, "U.N. of C.," 1967, Film, molded plastic, Styrofoam and Plexiglas, 15 x 20.75 x 9 in

Artist Craig Kauffman had been living in Europe and was on his way home to L.A. in the early 1960s when he stopped in New York and saw the work of former friend and neighbor, Billy Al Bengston, on view at Martha Jackson Gallery. Bengston, one of L.A. cool motorcycle-savvy surfer artists had been an abstract painter at the end of the 1950s, as had Kauffman. But now, his canvases were lacquered, spray-painted and shining. That’s what I need to be doing, Kauffman decided, and, when he returned to the Sunshine state, Bengston helped him out, teaching him to spray paint on glass and plastic.[1] It was when Kauffman discovered vacuum-formed plastic, however, that his work really hit its stride. He started using the same technologies the aerospace industry used to make its curved plastic plane windows, creating sleek, clean plastic wall reliefs that he called plastic “erotics.” They had the newness of industry innovations and the lightheartedness of pop.

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 1968.

Because, for me, vacuum forms have more or less become synonymous with Kauffman and cleanness, I was thrilled to discover a different take on molded plastic at Cherry and Martin gallery in Culver City last weekend. Cherry and Martin’s current exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, restages a seminal exhibition that initially occurred in 1970 at MoMA, then traveled across the country. Curated by photo historian Peter Bunnell, the original show put its finger on the pulse of a trend: 3-D photography. Bringing L.A.-based artists and photo-conceptualists together with Vancouver-based photographers, Bunnell showed images that had been re-embodied, so that the flat, condensed space of the picture plane  no longer “depicted” but became multi-sided, dense and object-like.

Carl Cheng, "Sculpture for Stereo Viewers," 1968, Film, molded plastic, wood and Plexiglas, 16.5 x 18 x 8 in

Photographers, it turns out, were tuned into plastics, too. But their take didn’t optimistically celebrate the finish fetish of industrial production. Instead, by using molded plastic to “inflate” formerly flat camera imagery, artists like Carl Cheng and Michael Stone made photographs feel overstuffed in a sort of messy way. In U.N. of C., Cheng’s humping  yellow bears and top-heavy waving U.S. and California state flags are visual comedy: regionalism is blown-up like a flimsy toy, and the vacuum-forms that looked so imperturbable when Kauffman used them, here look like cartoons. That the L.A. Look–which critic Peter Plagens defined in terms of “permanence,” “technical expertise,” and “preciousness (when polished)”–had a more complicated, less polished underside isn’t news, but it’s great to see in the flesh nonetheless, because it drives home the point that no aesthetic trend, not even one toward pristine plastic, is incorruptible.

[1] Hunter Drohojowska-Philp gives this account in her new book Rebels in Paradise.

Lale Tara, Innocent Surrogates, 2010. Medium : c-print Size : 90 x 120 cm, 127 x 190 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

It is often that the photographic lens exemplifies the artistic genius behind the camera as much as the subject that it photographs. That’s not to say that this process is inapplicable to any other form of art production. But if it is only for the pictorial expression of eternal spiritual truths that justifies the existence of icons (and idols), the photography of belief systems – because of its capability to record time and place yet simulate the real – inches towards the profane. Treading this fine line is Idols and Icons: New photography from Asia & the Middle East, a photography exhibition that examines tropes of faith, ideology and theology by producing what is presumed to be too sacred for reproduction.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Masters, 2009. Gelatin silver print. Installation View, Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

With Masters (2009), Manit Sriwanichpoom of the Pink Man fame returns with a photo series of cross-legged monks in meditation, modelled after those who situate themselves in Thai temples receiving alms from the Buddhist faithful. However, Sriwanichpoom’s lens deceives; the blurred life-sized portraits are amulet-type mass-produced objects readily sold in shops, akin to mass-marketed paraphernalia typically associated with cult celebrity behaviour. Masters unapologetically continues Sriwanichpoom’s acerbic photographic critiques of Thai contemporary consumerism, and suggests that the fetishisation of these idols – a non-existent tenet of Buddhism – pushes commonly held religious beliefs into a new, corrupted reality.

Ampannee Satoh, Burqa, 2010. Medium : pigment print on paper Size : 120 x 120 cm, 150 x 200 cm, 120 x 180 cm, 150 x 300 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

Issues of ethnicity and gender are equally prominent grounding anchors in the show. Ampannee Satoh’s Burqa series (2010) visually reduces the conflict to 2 symbols of opposing ideologies: burqa-clad women who stand against Parisian monuments endowed with an idealised republican rhetoric that finds itself reiterated these days (particularly because of the Islamic dress – a clichéd but key signifier of a clash of civilisations that separates public and private boundaries), in the French parliament. Shadi Ghadirian’s Miss Butterfly (2011) is a series of photographs in which a solitary woman weaves a web across several domestic settings, reclaiming the female agency’s dominance in the household while simultaneously suggesting its relentless and inescapable grip.

Shadi Ghadirian, Miss Butterfly, 2011. Medium : c-print Size : 70 x 105 cm, 100 x 150 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

While commonly employed as a discursive indicator of power relations, the feminine figure’s iconic status is far from formulaic. Outside the virtuous woman’s conventional role as the domestic exempla, Lale Tara’s Innocent Surrogates’s (2010) human-sized female doll-subjects inhabit the main frame of the photograph, located – not unlike a medieval tapestry or a painting – within a border of votive reverence. Almost sacramental, suitably dramatic with some measure of artifice, Tara’s dolls occupy, in good unheimlich fashion, conflicted and malaised positions of transgression that cathartically play out our own repressed enjoyments.

Idols and Icons will be on view at the Yavuz Fine Art Gallery until 27 August 2011.

Carmen Winant: Hi Zoe! Thanks for agreeing to talk with us.  In your latest series, LA-Like: Transgressing the Pacific, you photograph real and fictional sites of disappearances into the Pacific Ocean. With descriptive titles like Where Natalie Wood Disappeared off Catalina Island, there is no distinction made between historical figures and invented ones. For instance, you document the Marina Del Rey site where the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson really died in 1983, alongside the location where John Voight’s character drowns himself in the 1978 film Coming Home. Can you address the choice to include real and unreal figures in the series?

Zoe Crosher: Yes. My practice deals with photograph as a tool of fiction of documentary. I have long been interested in thinking through the ways that memory operates through photographs on the basis of the stories that we ourselves write. Also, Los Angeles has a unique and specific relationship to fiction—truth and imagination are easily conflated here—so I am particularly interested how I can use documentary photography to the same end. Ultimately, no matter how adept we have become in reading photographs, there is still the traditional assumption of an overarching “truth” in our approach to documentary work, which I hope to complicate.

CW: I’m drawn to this notion of departures, of heading west to find one’s destiny—and when that cannot hold, even further west—into the ocean’s depths, as the case may be. There is something so tragic and poetic about the idea that the border of the coast cannot hold you. I saw that you wrote about the conundrum of Manifest Destiny: “the endless promise for once you reach that unreachable place, and then you have arrived, there is no where to go anymore.” There is something so fundamentally lonely about that. Can you address this idea of containment, of reaching forever farther, even if it means one’s own demise?

ZC: All my work certainly has a darker backdrop, a kind of impossibility of knowing, but I never look at the work as being lonely. It has cathartic potential, perhaps. And it certainly is concerned with trauma. Joan Didion addresses this sense of Manifest Destiny so well in her books and essays, as a schism between a promise of something and what it actually may turn out to be.

The lore of moving west—what happens when you hit the border or reach the shore, when you can’t push any further—this is a very loaded threshold. Even Lewis and Clark couldn’t believe it when they hit the Pacific, as if the continent should in fact be never-ending, endlessly unfolding. If you live in LA, a frequent question is, “Where are you from?” It implies, of course, that no one is really from here, that the city holds those that sought it out.

CW: You use a medium format camera, which I tend to think of as a nostalgic and self-contained format.

ZC: I’ve always shot with a square format. The square complicates presumed ways of looking. When I started photography seriously in college, I was immediately trying to interrupt what was presumed “real.” For this project I used a Bronica camera, and a tripod and a flash when shooting at night. I only shot film. The final photos are printed on Fujiflex paper, which has a very glossy, reflective surface. In the gallery they are hung fairly low, creating a sense of falling into the water.

CW: How much research went into uncovering the spots where these people disappeared? Or are these locations their own fictions?

ZC: The research took many forms. I had a great intern working with me—Jason Underhill—and together we did newspaper research, looked at police reports, and watched the movies over and over. We found three different articles about Natalie Wood’s death in the Pacific in 1981, but only one mentioned that she was wearing a red down jacket. These selective details are exactly what I am interested in, how we choose to selectively document the past. Some of these places no longer exist; Aimee Semple McPherson faked her own disappearance at the Ocean Park pier, which was halfway between Venice and Santa Monica, and is no longer standing. The final scene for the film Coming Home was in Manhattan Beach, but it was a fantastic goose chase to find the spot, which I originally believed to be in San Diego. There were other issues: The Long Goodbye was shot on Robert Altman’s private property at Malibu Colony, and so on.

Ultimately, this is the point. It was a project that relied on and tested the mimicry of my own memory. History is all estimations, which is effectively a major component of my work.

CW: My next question is about the paradox of marking the SPOT of a disappearance. It strikes me that the idea of being “disappeared” implies that the person vanishes without a trace…do you feel that in some way marking the location lends a certain gravity, much like a gravestone might, to an otherwise mythical action?

ZC: I don’t think it detracts from the disappearances themselves, which, as I mentioned, are still very much my interpretation. I am inspired by crime scene photography, but I can only photograph the moment of crossing, not its finality.

There is something to be said for marking that which refuses be marked. I have been trying to figure out a way to photograph the Santa Ana winds. This idea is so interesting to me—not the expectation of failure, but the expectation of impossibility.

The truth is that everything—every body and every event—is located in space. This process of insisting on a moment that did happen and has a physical reality, the insistence of being a witness, is very important to my practice.

CW: I am interested in discussing this series in light of some of your other LA-Like series, specifically, LA-Like: The Pools I Shot Series and the Michelle duBois project. They both seem tied to place and perception, and the qualities of surface. Can you discuss the relationship between them, perhaps beginning with your interest in water? And, in regards to the duBois series, a kind of desperation to document oneself for consumption by others, and in doing so, creating a kind of vacuum of self?

ZC: Again, all of the work is concerned with testing the limits and constructs of the documentary. The Michelle duBois project is ultimately about the possibility of not knowing oneself—she pretends to be so many versions of herself, taking thousands of photos, all in which she emulates a different persona. She is creating her own kind of destiny in a way, a life constructed on impossible fantasy.

LA-Like: The Pools I Shot is a kind of mapping; LA is, of course, tied up with the history of water. I wanted to merge the poetics and the medium. I took pictures of the sun reflecting in pools, and slightly burned the photographic paper in the printing process.

CW: I noticed that the press release for your show includes a quote from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This struck me as a really apt literary source for your work, as Didion so persuasively investigated the profound emptiness and power of celebrity. I was also reminded of her looking at your swimming pool series, specifically her line from The White Album: “A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye”. And beyond that, Didion’s interest in probing the qualities of mourning, or grappling with disappearance. Have you read much by her? Cinema has obviously influenced your work, but does literature do the same?

ZC: I have read almost every book Joan Didion has every written, and I consider her a great influence on my work. Didion did for writing what I am interested in doing for photography. She collapsed fiction and documentary, confusing the terms of reception and context to great effect. She was a journalist who questioned the very structure of journalism, which ultimately was inextricable for her own reportage. I am working on a book of the entire LA-Like series, and I would love for her to write the introduction.

Didion also encapsulates a version of 1960s California. She’s about my dad’s age, and they both attended Berkeley. So, her work also resonates personally with me; it feels familiar. Didion describes a California that I remember as a child but that no longer exists. Or at least, I think it existed.