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photography

Playing Politics

Two days ago I jokingly called on people to visit a NY museum featuring dogs. Today I seriously regret that I did not alert people to a very different show, at SUNY on Long Island, which, alas, closed yesterday.

The topic of the exhibit is important enough, though, that it justifies mention, if only in the context of informing ourselves about current US museum “culture.”

The show announcement of Our Land read as follows:

Our Land, a new exhibition comprising photography and video by artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and their diaspora. Curated by Anthony Hamboussi, photographer and adjunct professor of Visual Arts at SUNY College at Old Westbury, the exhibition explores intersections of land, power, and politics to question dominant historical narratives and current Western perceptions of the MENA region. Interested in modes of self-representation, Our Land presents the work of Arab artists based in or having ancestral ties to the region, to consider landscapes of colonization and postcolonial reconstruction, indigenous land rights, ecological injustice, and war. Interrogating the darker histories of landscape photography and “development” in non-Western countries, the exhibition questions the neutrality of scholarly and scientific landscape image production, and the roles of said images and development in imperialism and domination of the region. The works in Our Land were selected for the ways in which they challenge simplistic representations of cultural identity. In turn, the exhibition compels us to reconsider our relationship to the land and its exploitation under advanced capitalism and environmental crisis.

The attached link displays some wonderful examples of the photography offered in the exhibition but also explains the relevant context: https://hyperallergic.com/489534/a-photography-exhibition-corrects-a-mainstream-museums-failure/

In 2016 the Brooklyn Museum of Art offered This Place, an exhibition on Israel and Palestine featuring works by 12 photographers including Josef Koudelka, Stephen Shore, and Rosalind Fox Solomon. It was quickly deemed by progressives as a propaganda project, “art washing” the Israeli occupation of Palestine territories, taking money from Zionist organizations and, importantly, neglecting to include any Palestinian or Arab photographers.

“Not so fast,” was the reply by Frédéric Brenner, who ran the show from its inception.” We did offer it to some local artists, midway, but no Palestinian accepted.”

The brilliant art historian, curator and activist Nina Felshin, someone I revere, took the argument apart:

In 2006, a large majority of Palestinian cultural workers called upon international artists and filmmakers to join them in the boycott against Israeli cultural and academic institutions that receive funding from the State of Israel — part of a larger movement known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). The existence of the BDS movement might well explain Palestinian artists’ unwillingness to participate in an exhibition destined for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among other venues.

Another explanation for Palestinian artists’ refusal to participate in the project might be its impresario’s desire to exclude certain approaches to the subject:

“‘I knew one thing would disqualify a photographer — anger,’ he said. ‘It was important to look at Israel without complacency but with compassion. I believe art has a power to address questions that an ideological perspective cannot.’”

Seriously? Anger disqualifies art? And as it turns out, mention of occupied territories, illegal settlements, home demolitions, evictions, or human rights violations was deemed too ideological to be included in a depiction of the region’s history?

Here is Felshin’s 2016 review of the BAM exhibit, scathing and helpful to understand where Our Land, today, is coming from.

https://hyperallergic.com/298529/a-photo-exhibition-about-israel-and-the-west-bank-that-chooses-sides/ 

Let’s hope Our Land gets a chance to travel to the West Coast!

Music today comes from two sources: traditional Palestinian music

and Boiler Room featuring contemporary Palestinian techno DJ Sama. Boiler Room is a terrific concept: it is an independent music platform which offers international videos of current Club music performances with the goal of bringing people together. From House, techno, jungle, hip-hop to R&B, from Europe to the US to the Middle East and beyond, it covers what’s happening now.

https://boilerroom.tv

Photographs are from my (port) land.

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Caution, falling illusions.

There are people who hint that they face dangers while pursuing their job or their passions, and then there are people who actually do. The former can often be found among those who explore abandoned buildings, factories and mansions. The latter are war photographers.

I was thinking about this when I came across work by a photographer, Bryan Sansivero, who often takes pictures in abandoned buildings. Let me hasten to add I don’t know if he describes his photo shoots as dangerous, but they are presented as spontaneous finds. http://boredomtherapy.com/haunting-abandoned-mansion/

When you check out his website you realize that a lot of what he photographed has been turned into stylized decay –

http://www.bryansansivero.com/americandecay/

with a glorious sense for color, I might add. It looks like something that you wouldn’t be surprised to find in glitzy Town&Country Magazine, which has jumped on the bandwagon of documenting “eerie” settings:

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/g19735205/abandoned-mansions/

Contrast this with people who risk their lives, and in the cases I chose for today, pay with them for what they see as their calling. I cannot begin to imagine what courage it takes, what stamina and strength, to be a woman photographing the ravages of war.

One was Dickey Chapelle who, according to the National Geographic article, attached below, had been working as a war correspondent since 1942 and had reported on dozens of conflicts. She’d been called “the polite little American with all that tiger blood in her veins” by Fidel Castro; held in solitary confinement during the Hungarian uprising; and affirmed as the first correspondent accredited by the Algerian rebels.

She died in 1965 when embedded with a Marine search-and-destroy mission near the coastal city of Chu Lai in Vietnam.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2018/08/world-photography-day-dickey-chapelle-female-war-photographer-combat-vietnam/

Her autobiography, What’s a woman doing here?, is available (for $299.00, I might add) here: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Woman-Reporters-Report-Herself/dp/B0006AXN80

The other photographer was Anja Niedringhaus, who died in 2014 in Afghanistan. The article below describes a strong, cheerful, unflappable woman who was killed by a sniper, ironically, while documenting hopeful preparations for the upcoming elections after years of war in Afghanistan.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/an-obituary-of-german-war-photographer-anja-niedringhaus-a-962995.html

Excerpts from Britten’s War Requiem seems like the appropriate companion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD7n4p-ZfOs

Photographs today are from an abandoned manor house in Tuscany where I traveled in 2016. I believe I have shown some of them before. The Castello was right behind the farm house where I stayed.

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Polder Holland

“Without cows the Dutch cultural landscape is drowsily boring.” The cultural landscape? Or the landscape per se? I mulled over this sentence found in a gallery introduction to the work of Han Singels.  His Polder Holland will open on September 8 in Amsterdam’s Huis Marseille and be on view until the beginning of December.

In his late 70ies now, this photographer still traverses Holland by motorbike, seeing himself in the tradition of the old Dutch masters, capturing the landscape as they did with added points of interest, a bovine here, a dyke there. He used to do fabulous social documentary work for decades at major Dutch newspapers, and I guess, in a way, documents the landscape now.

Collection: Han Singels

 

Lots of talk in the museum world about how he  uses “upholstered” landscapes, with focal objects bringing different levels into the image. Typical quote from his gallery, Wouter van Leeuwen :

Singels plays a game with geometry. He creates depth and cutting planes and uses elements to make visual space backwards. Composition, tone, light and framing are of the utmost importance for the success of the photo.

 

Maybe so. I think just looking around is sufficient –  the Dutch landscape itself offers that very composition of planes, depth, light from the ever-changing cloudscape, as I have written about before.  That is what the likes of Paulus Potter, Albert Cuyp and Maris saw and painted, and that is what is astonishingly still in view, to be captured by the contemporary photographer – despite the changes in agricultural regulations, practices and other modern inventions.

The sky remains. So does the endless flatness, the green, the water. And, for now, the cows.

Landschappen met Koeien

Click on the link above to see some of his work. All other images are mine.

 

 

 

 


What remains as well, is my repetitive documentation of this landscape every time I visit, al though this summer things were parched and algae covered the canals….

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Who knew: it’s all in the narrative

Coppersmith

Today was not the best day. A short trip to San Francisco fell through and we had to eat the cost of the airplane ticket, never mind the disappointment of not going. A challenging and lucrative translation project that had been dangled in front of my nose by the editor was rescinded when the author changed his mind and hired a more famous translator. And finally I came across the attached article describing a project of workplace photography which elicited unwelcome envy.

Work Tables

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/traditional-italian-artisan-shops?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3e8f5fd5d5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-3e8f5fd5d5-66214597&ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_22_2018)&mc_cid=3e8f5fd5d5&mc_eid=1765533648

Titled Heroes  it depicts the workplaces of Italian artisans, and describes small business owners’ struggle for survival.

Puppet Maker vs. Mortuary Casts


Needless to say many of the images of the work tables reminded me of very similar subjects in front of my own lens. (Paired photographs show Pergolesi’s work first, mine second.)

None of the latter, of course, summed up in a coherent fashion that tells a story, but all just taken in in my usual way of cataloging the world as I see it. I started longing, jealously, for a cohesive project, some extended documentation of some worthwhile topic, rather than being my usual flâneuse self.

Leather vs Soap

Francesco Pergolesi certainly has a knack of creating atmospheric shots and I find his work beautiful, particularly when it is centered on the artisans themselves. Making it about an issue rather than being just descriptive elevates it to prominence. The series can be viewed at his website below.

http://www.francescopergolesi.com/?gallery=heroes&mode=f

Bakery Surface vs. Drawing Table

Tomorrow is another day…. and I’ll sweep something up. Maybe. Or maybe not.

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Arch8

The ultimate post of this week is dedicated to a group of Black dancers who have a mission. They take photos or have their photos taken by various photographers either as candid shots or doing dance performances. Every time I see a new image I am bowled over by what people can do with their bodies.

As described in the attached article their political goals will resonate – they want to combat stereotypes that lead to being targets for violence at all levels of society. But independent of showing off the skills and raw talent, there is such joy attached to their movements that it makes me forget, for some minutes, the ugliness that permeates our political and social world. (Photos are from their FB site or the article below.)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-boys-dance-too_us_5ad6337ae4b077c89ced4c19

My dance photographs are from a workshop that the Dutch group arch8 offered last month here in PDX, in connection with a performance of their piece Tetris.

http://www.arch8.nl/en/

The workshop invited children and their parents to explore different forms of movement. I captured in today’s images some of the tender demonstrations of the Dutch performers so at ease with each other.

Below is choreographer Erik Kaiel, a Portland native, explaining how his ballets draw children in and spark their imagination.

Makes me want to dance, too!

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From the Ground up

The Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene creates scenarios that resemble in some ways some of the old Dutch masters’ paintings. The light is natural, the scenery detailed and yet timeless, there is always a mysterious element and the portraits tell stories.

 

She actively searches for young girls/women that trigger her curiosity and does the same with potential locations, often knocking on strangers’ doors to ask if she can use a particular room or building. She then combines her models with other living creatures or special props with sometimes almost mystical results.  (Click on the arrow in the photo spread to see 12 representative images.)

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/maedchen-und-frauen-fotografiert-von-hellen-van-meene-fotostrecke-160233.html

She works from the ground up, carefully choreographing every last detail to achieve moody, sometimes disconcerting portraits.

A different team is working from the ground up to provide opportunities to underserved populations of young aspiring artists in Portland.

http://fromthegrounduppdx.wixsite.com/fromthegroundup/young-women-s-residency-program

Katherine Murphy Lewis, her colleagues and visiting artists offer workshops that prepare for acting, playwriting and other creative outlets in group sessions that are financially underwritten by the fairy godmother of Portland’s art scene, the incomparable Ronnie LaCroute who, in my book, is generosity personified. Which counts double in a city that is not exactly famous for individual generosity towards the arts, if you ask me.

I was able to provide some needed headshots for this term’s participants in the workshop, also in natural light, but no props needed. The women themselves were striking enough.

In times where art in all of its expressions is cut from curricula due to economic pressures, small independent endeavors like FTGU become ever more important to reach a clientele with otherwise little access to tools of learning the trade. We all are the beneficiaries – the stories and talent emerging from workshops like this just might contain seeds for change.

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Linn-Benton Community College Choir

A small two-year junior college located in Albany, south of Portland, has caught my attention – and not only because their mascot is the Roadrunner, a bird I feel at times strangely related too, although in my case it isn’t a coyote that is chasing me….

I had a chance to photograph the LBCC choir members and their conductor, Raymund Ocampo some weeks back.

I had not gathered any information on them, and so did not know at the time that the choral ensembles of this community college in small town Oregon have consistently won prizes, traveled and performed abroad, engaged in workshop with big-name composers and conductors.  All I had to do was listen to them and just acknowledge there was a group making beautiful music.

 

http://www.linnbenton.edu/current-students/student-support/instructional-departments/music1

Not only did they move heartstrings, and easily held their own when thrown in with another choir in joint performance, they also were intensely serious about it, as you can see in the photographs. Many people who go to community colleges have to work for a living at the same time that they pursue a degree. Many students in these rural communities are, in other words, not likely to have lots of extraneous funding and support when pursuing activities beyond the regular curriculum. Their achievements probably require sacrifices that students in wealthier institutions or from wealthier backgrounds do not encounter. The stamina and passion required to pull it all off, then, is remarkable.

And the results speak for themselves (from a performance some years ago in Europe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiD87OTQqa8

Of course I photograph them when they are busy, badly lit and in constant motion with a camera that is not particularly adaptable to these three factors.

Compare the results to the portraits of one of my favorite portrait photographers from NYC, who specializes in portraits of music performers and moves, needless to say, in very different circles with very different gear.

Laurie Anderson by Ebru Yildiz

Ebru Yildiz is originally from Turkey and now lives in Brooklyn. An incredibly talented photographer who manages to make her subjects feel at ease at the same time that she courts them in ways that make the perhaps feel powerful – at least that comes across for me in her pictures. Then again, maybe these subjects are already so famous that they feel powerful to begin with. Who cares. The photographs are brilliant.

 http://www.ebruyildiz.net

John Cale  by Ebru Yildiz

I wonder what the result would be if one put the young women and men from LBCC in front of one of Yildiz’ lenses. We’ll never know.

They are probably too busy rehearsing, a Mozart Requiem is in the works, I hear, to be performed at the Russel Tripp Performance Center on June 8th. But I still think I captured their dedication.

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The Mortuary Collection

During the last couple of months I had the opportunity to take a lot of portraits while on the job documenting this or that event. I will present some of them this week, while linking to the work of others who have caught my interest.

We will start with Soft Shells, a portrait series by Canadian photographer Libby Oliver. For this series, Oliver turns the notion of portrait upside down. The portrayed people are actually hidden, quite literally under heaps of their own clothes, with only this or that body part peeking through. Ranging in age from 4 to 88, selected from a wide variety of backgrounds, through internet calls in addition to family and friends of the artists, the subjects were picked for their wardrobes. Oliver intended to present as many styles as possible – not to accuse of consumerism, but to demonstrate how personality can be expressed through choice of clothing.

 

I am not sure that a pile of jumbled and amassed clothes can necessarily reveal the owner’s personality, since much of that might only emerge in the conscious and/or clever pairing of dress items. I think, though, Oliver is on to something with this idea of hiding behind the outfits in a portrait session in your own bedroom. Good portraits hint at something with something, rather than plainly depict. They catch your attention and ask you to provide interpretation  – that act of thinking brings you closer to the portrayed person (or your assumptions of who s/he is, whether they are true or not,) and establishes thus a connection. In that way good portraits mimic the process of real life encounters with someone, relating to them in the moment, being curious about them, or wanting to gauge them, anticipating interaction.

Soft Shells: A Portrait Series That Presents Subjects in Every Piece of Their Wardrobe by Libby Oliver

 

In addition to making us think about these people, the technical aspects of Oliver’s photographic work are stellar. She obviously had an environment where she could control the lighting, the exposure, the posing etc. None of that was true for the situation I found myself in, working on a movie set recently in Astoria.

 

 

 

I was documenting the behind-the scenes work of members of a film crew that was shooting The Mortuary Collection, a Gothic Horror Anthology; it revolves around an eccentric mortician who spins 4 interconnected tales of madness and the macabre in weird surrounding. Some of it was filmed at Flavell House, a land mark Victorian house in this coastal town.

 http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2018/04/film_in_the_works_features_ast.html

But the days I was there were spent in an old gymnasium, now used for roller-skate derbies, with suboptimal lighting and chasing after a crew that was bustling with activity. Needless to say, I savored every minute of it. I also have a newfound appreciation of how hard people work when making movies. The sheer act of organizing 100s of people on a set, not get in each others’ ways, spending hours in cold, cramped conditions repeating necessary work over and over until it finds satisfaction with the director, is daunting. The workdays are by fiat 12 hours long, with meals sneaked in on set (much depends on the quality of the hired cook) and much of the labor is intensely physical because the machinery and sets are heavy. No wonder the crew is young, given the stamina that is required. And it is not just physical stamina – the producer has to spend years of finding funding, organizing continuity, keep the ball rolling until the final product emerges in all its glory. Or gory – I wouldn’t know, am waiting to see the final version, but it is a horror anthology after all.

My choice of portraits today from that film set are partially tied to Oliver’s wardrobe theme; the young women you see here were responsible for tailoring, dressing, costumes in general, make-up, acting and set-design. The men were responsible for filming, directing, moving the set around, sound recording and the like. Gender difference, anyone? 

A friendly and lively bunch who graciously gave me a few extra minutes of standing still in their mad work day. I certainly will happily do this again.

 

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Large Divergence in Numbers

Politico posted an article yesterday that compared the Trump administration’s reaction to the disasters caused by Hurricanes Maria in Puerto Rico and Harvey in Texas, respectively. Even for hardened souls like me the numbers were astounding; I had known of a systematic neglect of one population compared to the other, but not realized the extent. 

Here is the full article https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/27/donald-trump-fema-hurricane-maria-response-480557

Here is another summary:

At the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain to the US. In March 1917, over 100 years ago, Puerto Ricans were granted statutory US citizenship. Of the roughy 3.3 million people living on the island, more than 45% exist below the official poverty level – and that was before the Hurricane hit, and the tourist $$, one of the main employment/income options, dried up as a consequence.

Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth in association with the United States. The chief of state is the President of the United States of America. The head of government is an elected Governor. There are two legislative chambers: the House of Representatives, 51 seats, and the Senate, 27 seats. Note then, Trump is the head of state here, you know, the guy whose personal travel cost could have covered over 90% of the $36 million it costs the Federal Emergency Management Agency operations to deliver food and water to the island for three months. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-travel-costs-pay-food-water-puerto-rico-three-months-hurricane-a8242736.html

 

 

Of course this administration is not the only force of darkness – quite literally so on the island that still lacks electricity in large swaths after six months since the storm’s landfall. Competing visions of how to rebuild after the storm, and how to restructure large parts of the political as much as the physical landscape, are clashing at this very moment. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/

Here are the relevant excerpts from the instructive article above:

Six months into the rolling disaster set off by Maria, dozens of grassroots organizations are coming together to advance precisely this vision: a reimagined Puerto Rico run by its people in their interests. Like Casa Pueblo, in the myriad dysfunctions and injustices the storm so vividly exposed, they see an opportunity to tackle the root causes that turned a weather disaster into a human catastrophe. Among them: the island’s extreme dependence on imported fuel and food; the unpayable and possibly illegal debt that has been used to impose wave after wave of austerity that gravely weakened the island’s defenses; and the 130-year-old colonial relationship with a U.S. government that has always discounted the lives of Puerto Rico’s black and brown people.

There is also another, very different version of how Puerto Rico should be radically remade after the storm, and it is being aggressively advanced by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in meetings with bankers, real estate developers, cryptocurrency traders, and, of course, the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected seven-member body that exerts ultimate control over Puerto Rico’s economy. For this powerful group, the lesson that Maria carried was not about the perils of economic dependency or austerity in times of climate disruption. The real problem, they argue, was the public ownership of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, which lacked the proper free-market incentives. Rather than transforming that infrastructure so that it truly serves the public interest, they argue for selling it off at fire-sale prices to private players.

I visited Puerto Rico 6 years ago for a memorable week. My photographs were lost, as were all of the trip to Istanbul that same month, don’t ask or I cry and I have reached my quota of tears already for the week. Luckily I have children who share some of my interests and so am able to post recent documentation of Puerto Rico’s graffiti  – my son was there some weeks ago for work and granted me use of his images. I hope to return one day soon together with many other tourists, spending our dollars in support of the local economy in large numbers.

 

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