When you are a young man

When you are a young man, you are not yet fully aware how the years can blow past like the wind, that there are good years as well as bad, that they must all be weathered in the same way that trees earn their rings. One of the greatest challenges of becoming an artist is overcoming the fear of feeling like a fool. It is no accident that fools are quickest to overcome that fear.

Through the Looking Glass: Photographer Interviews

Through my blog, I have had the good fortune to interview a number of interesting, accomplished photographers. (A big thanks to all of them.) The links were scattered across this blog, however, and anyone new to the series would have been hard pressed to find and read them in one place. Interviews that appeared in several parts can now each be read on a single web page.

In the hopes of giving them a larger audience, I am planning on pulling the interviews together for an online book. If you know a small press publisher who might be interested, please let me know. I have also toyed with the idea of collecting the interviews as a publish on demand (POD) book (which would sell at cost) or an ebook (which would be freely downloadable) on something like Lulu.com. Versions of this blog entry will serve as my placeholder as I continue working on the book.

Through the Looking Glass: Photographer Interviews
Introduction
Jon Anderson (Interview and Photo Tips & Techniques)
Velibor Bozovic
Hal Buell
Kitra Cahana
Nana Chen
Alan Chin (profile)
James Whitlow Delano
Hugo Infante
Andy Levin
John Loomis
Brad Mangin
Jessie Mann
Allen Murayabashi
Jason Pagan
Stefan Rohner
John Vink

Francis Hodgson on the Prix Pictet Short List

Prix Pictet jury chairman Francis Hodgson recently wrote about the photography prize’s short list in the Financial Times.

There is a word in all of this upon which I would like to rely more than I can. It is a word that hardly construes as a proper verb. It’s also difficult to translate. The word is “matter”. The vast majority of pictures just don’t matter. The photographer had nothing to say, or has been unable to say something meaningful. Photography is demotic and vernacular, and much of it is of no great interest. Yet it is only within that deep mulch that the few major exceptions can be seen to flourish. At the same time photography remains a perfectly ordinary cultural activity in that it responds to analysis. A picture should be demonstrably good or bad for coherent reasons. But not everybody’s mattering is the same. The pictures presented here are very different. But every one of them matters.

The Human Condition (slideshow)

Andy Levin has made The Human Condition slideshow available online at 100eyes. As you will see, Andy did an amazing job curating the 40-minute slideshow, which debuted last year at the inaugural Festival of the Photograph. (I was glad to play a very small part in helping organize the show.) Inspired by Edward Steichen’s great Family of Man exhibit, and taking into account today’s global turmoil, we thought it timely to revisit the great themes that the world’s cultures all share.

Photographer Frank Hurley

Why is one man an optimist, when another is a pessimist? Ernest Shackleton, the famed Antarctic explorer, is considered a good case study for how indefatigable a man can be. A co-worker recently shared with me his copy of the Kenneth Branagh-directed biopic Shackleton. I have read Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer, but it is interesting to see a dramatization of the 1914-17 trans-Arctic expedition that is often characterized as a great survival story. Shackleton, his crew of 27 men and their ship the Endurance never made it to the Antarctic. They were instead trapped in frozen waters, their boat was crushed by ice, and they had to survive on the ice or open water for two years before they were able to seek rescue. Every man made it back.

The accounts of how Shackleton marshaled and rallied his men are inspiring, but I am just as intrigued by the accounts of Frank Hurley, the expedition’s official filmmaker and photographer. A veteran of an earlier expedition to the Antarctic led by Douglas Mawson, Hurley was hired by Shackleton to serve as his official documenter. I want to get hold of the well-known Alfred Lansing account of the expedition, but I recently bought South with Endurance, the collection of Hurley’s stunning photographs from the trip.

The Endurance’s First Officer Lionel Greenstreet called Hurley “tough as nails.” At one point of the expedition, it became clear to Shackleton that they were going to have to man their life boats and head to open waters to escape the melting ice floes on which they had been camping; he told the men that each of them was going to be allowed to take only two pounds of personal possessions with him. Hurley convinced Shackleton that he should be additionally allowed to salvage a number of his photographic glass plates. According to PBS/Nova, which re-broadcast the film re-creation Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure:

When the Endurance sailed in October 1914, Hurley carried a range of cameras, including a Cinematograph motion-picture camera, a square bellows stand plate camera, a Kodak Folding Pocket Camera Model 3A, and a Vest Pocket Kodak camera. The crew was astonished by the lengths to which he would go for an image, from high in the ship’s rigging to the back of a dogsled; First Officer Lionel Greenstreet called him a “warrior with a camera [who] would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture.” Hurley not only had the stamina to haul his cameras to the mountaintop of Duse Fell on South Georgia, but also was a talented artist and innovator. He was a pioneering practitioner of color photography with the Paget color process, and, when the long polar nights descended, he used multiple magnesium flares and long exposure times to capture images of the Endurance beset in darkness.

After they abandoned the debilitated Endurance, Shackleton ordered the crew members to pare their personal possessions down to two pounds each. Hurley had to leave his precious cameras behind, but Shackleton allowed him to keep a selection of photographs and motion-picture footage. Stripped to the waist, Hurley dove into the icy waters to retrieve his treasured images from the sinking wreck of the ship. Together, Shackleton and Hurley chose 120 glass plates to keep and smashed about 400; Shackleton feared that Hurley would endanger himself to return for them later. Hurley sealed the plates in metal tins with improvised solder, along with prints he had developed on board the ship. Hurley documented the remainder of their odyssey with only a handheld Vest Pocket Kodak camera and three rolls of film.

In paying homage to him, Kodak explained Hurley’s contribution to photography.

Hurley raised expedition photography to a new level. He did not make routine photos of explorers posing in the snow. Instead, he often focused on the snow itself, or on grim snowscapes that became beautiful in his compositions. These scenic studies he integrated into the documentation of the expedition.

Update: Michael Ybarra reviews Stephanie Barczewski’s new book Antarctic Destinies, which puzzles over what makes some men heroes, others failures.

Stefan Rohner Interview, Part II

Stefan Rohner is an Ibiza-based photographer.

Wayne: You say that you were able to put down your paint brushes because you came to feel more at peace. Why does photography reflect that inner peace better for you than painting does? What motivated your transition from inspirations such as the Junge Wilde movement–with its quick, decisive strokes–to the more deliberate pace of something like portraiture, which requires you to be deliberate and get to know your subjects?

Stefan: As I said, painting was sort of a liberation for me: very self centered.There was no one else involved. It was something that came from inside me and had to be let out. Painting is a philosophical process, a process that goes on until the work is finished. Some paintings you never finish, since your ideas and feelings change constantly.

To me photography is different. I took it up in a different stage of my life, when I was ready to let go of myself and get in more profound contact with other human beings. It’s like a binary, two ways, from me to the one being portrayed, and from him to me. To me, photography is “easier.” It is less abstract. When you portray a human being with a camera, in most cases you create a reproduction of an image, whereas in painting you are influenced far more by your own feelings, way of view.

Wayne: In what ways do you collaborate artistically with your wife Carina?

Stefan: When I started in portraiture, Carina was my first model, she had to put up
with both my negative and positive emotions, depending if things went wrong or right. I was training myself with her as my model, testing my patience and hers, trying to figure out composition, emotion, light. When we worked on taking pictures, we went through very strong emotions. I was never satisfied. Later, though, when I saw the negatives, I would become happy again.

Wayne: Many of your portraits are gritty and less glamorized, yet they are still beautiful, since you seem to capture the dignity of your subjects. How fair is that characterization? What do you do to capture that sense? How do you choose your subjects, and how do you reach that level of understanding with them? What must a photographer do to establish that kind of rapport?

Stefan: In our world we are surrounded by glamorized images, superficial advertisments in magazines, TV and so on, so there is no need to produce more of this stuff. I agree with you about the characterization. I like to show strong “characters,” fascinating people like Otix, a musician and DJ. Or Alice… when I met her she wanted “glamorized,” “nice” looking pictures–no way, not with me.

Most of my models are friends, neighbors, normal people. It is important to make your model comfortable. There has to be trust between the model and the photographer; the photographer has to have respect for the model. With some people you get to that in a short time; with others you need to communicate over a longer period to establish a relaxed and trusting relationship.

Juan was surprised when I told him that I wanted to photograph him, I made it clear that he was a very interesting personality, it took me some days to convince him. He thought that he was ugly and old. He owns a piece of land in the middle of the town, where he lives in a trailer and rents parking spaces–a wonderful experience to sit there and hear stories told. You also learn a lot about life from these people.

Yanny, a Russian artist who grew up in New York, has lived in Ibiza for 35 years. Mora, another artist. Most of these people are existentialists, they live their own lives on the border of ordered society, that’s what I love, what I admire. When I edit the work I make, I try to show them as strong characters, as interesting personalities. I try to show what makes them interesting to me.

Wayne: Speaking of subjects, some of your most notable photographs are of your daughter Ariel. In some of your photos of her, she is this wonderful blur of activity. In others, she is still and angelic. How deliberate or systematic is your photography of her–of your other family members? How much of it is simply capturing certain moments? And what advantages or disadvantages are there in knowing a subject that well? Since you wife Carina is also a photographer, she likewise spends time documenting Ariel’s life. How different, photographically, do you and Carina see Ariel?

Stefan: Thank you, Wayne. With Ariél there is nothing serious involved. Never. I think that around 95 percent of the pictures of her are quick snapshots, just snippets of daily life. She has known for a long time when she feels like being photographed: if she does not feel like it, she quickly tells us to fuck off. Everything is just normal, no advantages or disadvantages, it is just love! It flows alone….

I don’t know if there is a difference (stylistically) between Carina and me in taking pictures of our children. We are around them everyday. We spend a lot of time together, in different activities. We take pictures when we feel like it. The most important thing is to respect the children’s wish to be photographed or not. Other than that there’s no limitation or imposition.

Wayne: One of your latest series is “The King is Coming: A Journey through Morocco.” What inspired you to document Morocco?

Stefan: I have been traveling to Morocco for more than four years now. Every time I go, I spend time with people in their homes, becoming part–even if only for a short time–of their lives, events, such as weddings. Every time we go back I bring them prints of the pictures I’ve taken. We talk as well as we can, eat together, spend time together. Morocco is wonderful. The people, once you get to know them and respect their way of life, are warm and open. In this last series, though, I took a step back. I wanted to be less involved as a photographer. I wanted to be more of an observer, with less communication, less a dreamy and romantic mood than my work in India, just showing the place.

Wayne: What inspired the creation of Ball Saal? What do you see as its over-arching mission, and what kind of need was there for this kind of group?

Stefan: When I started to take photography more seriously, of course, I also started to have a look around, to see what others did, if there was a way to exchange experiences, ideas, points of view. What I found was disappointing–not because I didn’t find good photography, but because of the superficiality most photography sites were based on. The more nice comments you wrote, the better your own pictures supposedly became.

There are a lot of great photographers out there, our goal at Ball-Saal is to show their work, be it through the monthly exhibitions or through active membership and participation, exchange honest and open critiques, and share our knowledge in an open workshop forum in order to help those who want to learn and take their passion for photography one step further. We don’t care about style, so anybody who applies for membership is welcome, she or he just needs a strong portfolio.

Wayne: You have mentioned a number of painters who have inspired you, but which photographers have been your greatest inspirations, and in what ways?

Stefan: When I started seriously with my first portrait work I did it with a digital camera. Then I found the work of Mary Ellen Mark and Anton Corbijn and asked myself how they got that nice square format! That’s when I learned about 120mm film, bought a used Hasselblad and started to develop my own film. Before this I trained my eyes for a long time by photographing my portraits with a regular, digital 35mm camera, like I would use the square format; I simply cropped the pictures later in Photoshop. Just recently I found the work of the Spanish photographer Alberto Garcia Alix, I think he is a very interesting photographer.

When diving deeper into photography I found Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, I started to buy books, for example “The Italians” by Bruno Barbey. What impressed me most was “Gypsies” by Joseph Koudelka and “The Mennonites” by Larry Towell. I bought more books and a rangefinder camera, went out in the streets to catch daily life and decisive moments. I left portraiture aside and dove fully into street photography.Street is fun! To briefly meet people, talk to them or just run around without communicating–catching emotion and moments.There is never repetition, the moments are always new.

Stefan Rohner Interview, Part I

Stefan Rohner is an Ibiza, Spain-based photographer. He is a member of the photo agency Anarchy Images. He was inspired to create Ball Saal, a a cooperative gallery he founded with Andreas Hering. Stefan’s work has appeared at the Galerie Lichtpunkt in Munich. He has taught at the International Summer School of Photography (ISSP) at the Petersburg Photo Workshops. His latest exhibit is “The King is Coming,” a journey through Morocco.

Wayne: Can you talk about growing up in Germany. What was your childhood like?

Stefan: I grew up with my parents and siblings in a village outside the big cities, at the border of Lake Constance. The area has a beautiful landscape, but a rather conservative, closed environment. I very much enjoyed the journeys to Italy, where I went on holidays every summer—since my mother was born and raised in Italy, and I grew up bilingual—all the antique viewings, cathedrals, museums, sculptures and paintings. The feeling of the old cities with the warmth of the Italian people left an important mark in my youth.

Wayne: How did you get started in painting? What kind of exposure did you have to the arts, and when and where did your interest in the visual arts begin?

Stefan: At the end of my school studies I met a very interesting arts professor; he was a great inspiration to me. He opened my eyes to painting and sculpture, he also introduced me to the wonderful world of classical music. At the time I was around 17 to 19 years old. With him I made my first steps with brush, canvas and plaster. Later here on Ibiza I started working with wood, using a chainsaw and an axe, influenced by Georg Baselitz’s sculptures.

Wayne: How did you end up leaving the Lake Constance area? What kind of painting do you do these days?

Stefan: At the age of 21, I moved from Southern Germany to Berlin, escaping from the conservative surroundings I lived in, escaping from the organized ‘everything has to have its order’ society, breaking out from my parents’ house, and going to see the ‘big world’ outside of the small, provincial town. Berlin was great: galleries, museums, independent arts, artists from all over the world. Everything I saw influenced me, sunk inside me. I started to paint a little more seriously. I loved the Junge Wilde movement: big big canvases, big brushes, quick and wild paintings. I loved [Rainer] Fetting, [Helmut] Middendorf, Salome, they had a huge influence on me. Later I found Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz.

Painting was a way to find my own way, to find the sense of life. Why do we live? There must be something more than only the conservative values that our society instills in us as we grow up—at least better than those I grew up with. After four grey and cold winters I left Berlin and Germany. I came here to Ibiza for work reasons, but I kept on painting, still looking for the sense of life. Painting was very important to me. I turned to it whenever I felt bad inside, whenever I was depressed or heartsick. Later on in Ibiza, I became influenced by Soutine, Miquel Barceló and Bernhard Heisig.

I am not painting anymore. I feel more at peace inside, an important reason for this is my wife Carina [Berlingeri]. ‘Thank you’ to her! I also felt that when I reached the point where I knew how to do certain things, how to form a picture, how to compose it, how to express myself, I stop, I want to go new ways. One of those was letting go of painting and taking photography seriously. I had taken pictures when I was in Berlin—I got an old Nikon FM2 at a flea market—but I never took photography seriously until some years ago. Back then, I never developed any film myself, nor printed pictures, just looked at them on the contact sheets I got back from the shops.

Wayne: The Galerie Lichpunkt has said that you enjoy the encounter with the “living document.” How do painting and photography compare for you, especially for portraiture?

Stefan: I remember only painting two to three portraits ever. Most of the time I was lost in some abstract fantasy world inspired by music or by the work of other painters. For my human portraiture I need time: time to establish a relationship to the photographic subject, time to get to know her or him, time to build up reciprocal trust, get to feel secure, lose fears and shyness—on both sides.

Both the photographer and the one being photographed must feel good, feel free. It can also happen that at the first encounter no picture is made, that there have to be several meetings to establish the trust I am speaking of. Other times it happens quickly. Every person is different, has her or his own times, reacts differently to the camera. To me, as a photographer, the most important things are the emotions of the model; they have to be positive and open. If somebody doesn’t want to be photographed I respect that wish and don’t take pictures. No problem at all. So painting is a mere expression of myself and my feelings, photography on the other side is an interaction with the other human being in front of the lens.

Wayne: In explaining your photography, your fellow Ball Saal member Edward van Herk has said that painting taught you about “structure, grain and strong composition.” How exactly has each of those concepts translated into your photography?

Stefan: I love grain and structure. In some of my paintings I experimented with sand and plaster, giving more structure and making the surface more alive, more vivid. Strong composition to me has graphical order. With a well-ordered graphical composition you can create wonderful depth, space and room, have an interesting, three-dimensional photograph. This is one of the reasons I still do my black and white work with film, the end result on fiber paper is still an unique thing, structure, grain, gloss and depth, wonderful. It also is a beautiful feeling to hold in your hands a piece of art made all by yourself, from the beginning to the end, handcrafted, there’s no machine that can give you such a feeling. A strong character adds also a lot to a picture, we are all unique and beautiful human beings in our own way, I like to capture this uniqueness, one part of it, keeping that moment alive forever. 

Seurat as Street Photographer

Seeing the exhibit of Georges Seurat drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, I could not help but think that the artist would have been a brilliant photographer.

Like many people, I know Seurat best for his obsession with the aesthetics and science of color, perhaps most famously in works like “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” In Seurat’s drawings, however, you also see his keen sense of light, a simplification of subject matter to their base geometries, lines softening to their light and dark cores, a full tonal range of black and white. The subject matter suggests that he would have been equally comfortable as a portrait, street or theater photographer.

Street Artist – Seurat would often roam the streets of Paris with notebook in hand. He would quickly sketch individuals who caught his eye, and he was also known to wander the poorer districts of the city for his artistic studies. The New York Times says:

The sketchbooks show us Seurat on the move, roaming late 19th-century Paris and its more ragged outskirts, noting life in all its aspects. If you want to understand how Seurat’s dark, silhouetted figures convey such an accurate sense of body language, consult these facsimiles. People rush across the pages, as if the whole town were out on an errand. They work hard: Women scrub floors, men wield scythes or break stones for Baron Haussmann’s new boulevards. But they also come to rest, sometimes at cafes or on park benches, sometimes sprawled on the ground, exhausted from backbreaking labor or possibly just passed out drunk.

Portraitist – Associate Curator Jodi Hauptman describes the drawing “Embroidery: The Artist’s Mother,” as a “sculptural abstraction,” a “massing of dark and light tones, enveloped in a soft, velvety blackness.”

Theater Artist – According to Hauptman, Seurat worked on his Cafe-Concert series from the1880s until his death. The series, which Seurat intended as a statement on spectatorship, included “scenes of popular entertainment: acrobats, clowns, circus performers, singers available to city dwellers.” From drawing to drawing, Seurat would shift from position to position, “from long shots to closeups.”

Hauptman also explains Seurat’s choice of materials and his techniques: how Seurat used the textures of the different sides (the “wire” sides and “felt” sides) of his chosen Michallet paper; how he varied in his use of conte crayon, charcoal, black chalk, graphite. In a drawing, he might use an ‘initial light layer of crayon, then subsequent layer of intense darks.’

In drawings like Square House, he would incorporate the texture of the paper. He would divide a sheet of Michallet paper (handmade laid paper, texture of thin parallel ridges called laid lines and more widely spaced perpendicular troughs called chain lines) into four equal sections. Depending on whether the drawing was more of a vertical or horizontal, he would then turn the paper and align the laid lines accordingly.

[In "Eden Concert"], rather than using white of paper to render luminosity and layering of conte to indicate darkness as he had done in past, he now intensifies brightness with either white chalk or white gouache and uses blue pastel for the murky dimness of the theater interior.

The New Yorker calls the exhibit “an exhausting encounter with radical beauty.”

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I have started a microblog on Tumblr. Too often, I want to just jot down quotes that I come across or quick thoughts that come to mind, but they sometimes seem too trivial for my main blog, where, for whatever reason, more and more I feel the need to make my entries weightier. My Tumblr micro-blog is like my electronic journal. Offline, I am also now trying EverNote as a place to keep my notes and thoughts. (For years, I have kept paper journals. I now wonder how I convert those many pages into digital, searchable text–assuming it is all worthwhile, of course.)

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How do all of you cope with your reading that you want to do? These days I am inundated with financial and economic reading because of work. The reading is getting critical, since I do believe that we have reaching a historical turning point in the global economy, one that can potentially make or unmake our lot in life. Reading business publications, economic research and financial newsletters hardly nourishes the soul, however, and I am finding it difficult to find time for personally-important reading in literature and the visual arts.

Through the Looking Glass: Photographer Interviews

Through my blog, I have had the good fortune to interview a number of interesting, accomplished photographers. The links are scattered across this blog, however, and anyone new to the series would be hard pressed to find and read them in one place. I have thought about pulling the interviews together into a book. If you know a small press publisher who might be interested, please let me know. I have also toyed with the idea of collecting the interviews as a publish on demand (POD) or electronic book. (If you were one of my interview subjects, and you do not want to participate in this project, please let me know.) This blog entry will serve as my placeholder as I gather the links and compile them into more readable chapters. I have another interview or two lined up, but suggestions on that front would be welcomed as well.

Through the Looking Glass: Photographer Interviews
Introduction
Jon Anderson (Interview and Photo Tips & Techniques)
Velibor Bozovic
Hal Buell
Kitra Cahana
Nana Chen
Alan Chin (profile)
James Whitlow Delano
Hugo Infante
Andy Levin
John Loomis
Brad Mangin
Jessie Mann
Allen Murayabashi
Jason Pagan
John Vink

Wilfredo Lam in North America

Wifredo Lam in North America, a retrospective exhibition of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, opened at the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee in mid-October. The exhibition continues through mid-January.

The exhibition shows the importance of Lam’s role among the School of Paris artists including Picasso and Surrealist artists including Andre Breton, and his contribution as an Afro-Cuban art after his return to Cuba in the 1940s, according to Curtis Carter, the Marquette University professor and founding director of the Haggery Museum of Art. The exhibition features more than 60 works by the Cuban-born Lam. Carter curated the exhibit.

The exhibition will also travel to the Miami Art Museum, The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California and the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida.