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The American Dream, a term coined by James Adams over half a century ago, has gone through many manifestations and produced a variety of Americas, some of which are more apparent than others. Bryan Schutmaat, a recent graduate from the Hartford MFA program, has shouldered the task of understanding a less known side of America. He goes into the heart of the country, into places once romanticized as open frontiers of liberty and prosperity and documents the reality of what they have become.

 In his newest series, “Grays The Mountain Sends”, one gets a glimpse into the byproduct of America’s dreams. Pensive, distant portraits mirror cold and barren landscapes and ultimately a world that has moved on to fulfill other dreams.

 With a background in history, Schutmaat aims at approaching America with an objective mind, yet a discerning eye. The photos are simply a response to the land and times Schutmaat finds himself in, and a desire to relay to the rest of the world the real people who inhabit it.

  “Grays” follows in Schutmaat’s tradition of depicting the America held outside of the spotlight, though departs from the more “roadside” approach seen in earlier works.With a more personal focus than previous photographs, one can sense a desire to relate to the subjects. The viewer can only muse about the America of today and how it so blindly pushes so much of itself out of view in order to hunt down new aspirations.

 The lore of America is still fresh in many minds, however. America is still characterized as being the land of unbounded potential, of a place that promises prosperity and freedom. Although much of America is clouded in modernity, there is still also the promise of expansive wilderness, plentiful fields, and rural communities that border the untamed. In a way Schutmaat presents the viewer with a land that American’s may still feel exists but do not see, and does so with no indictments.

 The series is named after an excerpt from Richard Hugo’s poem, ‘Degrees Of Gray In Philipsburg’. It is in many ways an effective response, though he says his portrayal of the American West is much more tender than Hugo’s. The series ends with an excerpt from writer William Kittredge’s essay, Heaven on Earth, and the image of a young woman, her face hidden by red hair. The essay from which the excerpt is taken muses about the ideal of a western American paradise still never realized. Coupled with the image of the solitary, red-haired woman, Schutmaat softens the tone and implies a sense of hope still left in the heart of America.

“You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down. The last good kiss

you had was years ago. You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year. The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage. Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down...”

- Richard Hugo

To see “Grays The Mountain Sends” and other works by Bryan Schutmaat here: http://www.bryanschutmaat.com/

“If it weren't for my mother-in-law calling the police I wouldn't be here now,” caption.      Photograph by Ula Wiznerowicz

Here, Then, An Elegy of Sorts

“I must say, I encountered the most moving experiences on this project when I took part in a series of addiction therapy sessions organized regularly at this hospital in Radziejow. After a series of visits to the clinic, as I closed the hospital doors behind me and looked back at the looming silhouette of the grey building, I became aware that most of the families of the people I had met here had no idea how to help alcoholics.”

Ula Wiznerowicz, a finalist in Daylight Magazine’s 2012 photo contest, creates images for her Behind the Curtain series that utilize a palette of twilight, soft and flickering, as sleep or disappearance. These color and tonality choices beautifully intersect with the starkness of both the literal and implied content of a quietly powerful body of work that presents an interior view of the disease of alcoholism through direct portraits of faces and homes. 

A native of a small Polish village of 120 inhabitants, Wiznerowicz had been living in the United Kingdom for seven years and thinking about this project idea, when she decided to return and try to see her homeland with the perspective of an outsider. 

“It was easier for me to start this project. In fact there was no chance I would have thought about it while I was living there...I knew it would be tough, not logistically, but mentally. I was simply scared of bringing up the memories from the time when I lived there as a child and face them now as an adult,” she tells me.

Her project artist statement lists impressions, snapshot images of literalness that stand in for metaphors of the insidiousness of alcoholism. Forgotten and useless things covered in dust; emaciated cats running around searching for leftovers; rooms taken over by spider webs; and the strong odor of alcohol, she writes. Alcoholism—for the alcoholic as well as for everyone within arms’ and heart’s reach—is bits and pieces of gathered and discarded, hoped for and lost, almost and far away. It is one great concession to brokenness. 

“Behind the Curtain was my way of trying to understand the lives of my former neighbors, who had either encountered these problems or had struggled with them for many years. I know all of the people in my pictures, their wives, children, the interiors of their homes and the views from their windows. For 15 years I was part of that community and, like the majority of these people, I ignored or accepted without protest the situation around me and the inevitable misery of life in this world.”

Wiznerowicz tethers captions to each of the images in the project, further contextualizing the specifics of each person and place photographed, as well as providing a sense of raw reality that uncomfortably, yet utterly appropriately, rubs up against the softness of the actual imagery. Some caption examples include:

“He's been gone for three hours already. I look out the window and every time a car appears on the horizon I hope it's him. Every day he says he has to go to the shop to buy something like a screw, a washer or a nail. He's just looking for an excuse to get out of the house and go for a drink with someone, saying he'll be back in half an hour.”

“I got used to the piles of junk and clothes scattered around the flat, the dirt and the horrible smell. It was quite dark, the room was engulfed in clouds of cigarette smoke, the cats were running from corner to corner, like crazy, trying to find something to eat. But nobody took any notice and nobody was bothered that I was there, as they opened another bottle of vodka.”

“When he came back from prison he never even said sorry. He doesn't talk to me anymore and he stopped coming over since he finished that bloody house. In court they asked if I forgive him. I said alright, but who will pay for all our grief?”

Wiznerowicz was the juror’s pick by Alexa Dilworth, Publishing Director/Editor at Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In her juror’s statement Dilworth writes, “Ula Wiznerowicz’s photographs in Behind the Curtain come together in the way a collection of short stories might, stories woven together to tell a larger story both elusive and straight-up sad and difficult. Ula went back to the place she grew up, Palmowo, Poland, to photograph place, people, and problems—specifically, men and women struggling with alcoholism, either themselves or collaterally. And she was also looking at, thinking about, her own past. As she says, ‘I know all of the people in my pictures, their wives, children, the interiors of their homes, and the views from their windows.’ This understanding is manifest in her pictures. Rather than put a frame around public, more predictably dramatic, portrayals of her subject, she shares with us a private view, an atmosphere, a way of being that she both reveals and creates. The formalism of the photographs plays both against and with the tumult, resignation, and loneliness of these very particular lives lived out in a quiet, slowly disappearing community. I found myself revisiting this world behind curtains over and over. The quotes that accompany the photographs—as spare yet revealing as the images—drew me further into these rooms where people sit, wait, sleep.”

Wiznerowicz tells me about the expanding dimension of using a camera to view and consider such a difficult subject, one that for her is deeply rooted socially, historically, and culturally. She talks about being wealthy “beneath the surface, spiritually.” She continues, “When working to tell a story, photography can make people think, which could lead to action, even if it’s just changing a way of thinking. There is an interaction between the photograph and the viewer. People, particularly Poles, do not like to discuss sensitive or difficult subjects, especially if they are about them. They rather hide them, pretending that they do not exist.”

“I have learned how to listen,” Wiznerowicz says. 

And that, perhaps, is one of the wisest statements of self-discovery that could be made relative to a disease like alcoholism. 

To view more images from this series, please visit: http://www.ulawiznerowicz.com/

Photograph by Fazal Sheikh

Distillation

“Forgetting would be an insult to one’s humanity. To heal we must remember. We need to know what the scars are for.” --Tom Cauuray, July, 2007, Sierra Leone

Cauuray said that to me in reference to the internal, as well as political and social work of figuring out how to continue to live beyond that country’s brutal civil war. We were sitting outside in Freetown, under an awning, it was raining hard, we were sipping tea. 

At the time I was in Sierra Leone, regions throughout the country still maneuvered daily life without electricity, or running water, in a lot of cases without roofs or all four walls on living structures, the remnants of war still visible in these homes, still and forever visible on the scarred and maimed bodies. But each morning, a cooking fire is started, a pot is pulled out, fruit is cut. Each morning, yesterday’s clothes are plunged in water, then hung to dry on lines, and if you drive down some roads, rows and rows of fabric billow and snap so that an entire eyeful of landscape is heralding a sky of just another ordinary day, the kind removed from--or existing in spite of--guns, machetes, lost limbs, and a lot, a lot of scars.   

And this commitment to moving forward, even if that movement means simply getting up and getting through another day, is humbling, capable of teaching, and worth learning about. 

Widely recognized (Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, MacArthur, to name just a few) for his resonance as a photographer, Fazal Sheikh’s images often address the shadows of the world--warfare, trauma, exile, displacement, inequality, and utter loss of basic human rights. But at the same time, his photographs are fiercely beautiful. At its extremes, the counterbalance of death is life, and Sheikh addresses both with an honesty and forthrightness that defies the mere aesthetic. 

Photographing in places like Kenya, Somalia, India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Sheikh’s many book and exhibition projects honor stories and the people who live them. Visual archives of memory and surviving, of grace and gratitude, his photographs continually give forth metaphor and layers of implication to this world we think we know so well. The prayer of history is that context unfolds meaning, and Sheikh talks with me about a photograph functioning as an invitation, piquing the viewer’s interest and deepening the reference points, providing just enough insight into a particular subject, suggestive in a way that is not reductive, but additive in complexity. 

In her seminal anthology, Against Forgetting, poet Carolyn Forché compiled poems of witness spanning the 20th century. She writes in the book’s foreword, “Regardless of ‘subject matter,’ these poems bear the trace of extremity within them, and they are, as such, evidence of what occurred. They are also poems which are as much ‘about’ language as are poems that have no subject other than language itself.” And in this respect, Sheikh’s work similarly coexists as images of witness, as well as statements on the medium itself, reflecting how, for example, a portrait holds the capacity to offer empowerment to the sitter, as well as to reveal so much more--whether political, social, cultural, or circumstantial--beyond the specifics of the face photographed. While expressing story and metaphor and a glimpse into the life or self of an individual, a complex portrait reveals more and more upon subsequent viewings, and it is the kind of art that partners with time to peel back the layers, even re-contextualize memory. The creative process itself, Sheikh feels, also holds the potential to manifest in work capable of operating as both art, as well as documentation. 

Accessibility to his images and stories is a commitment marked by Sheikh’s International Human Rights Series, a project begun in 2001 that publishes and makes certain bodies of work available in their entirety online free of charge. This democratic accessibility strives to provide a progressive distribution in addition to and separate from the traditional publishing and gallery venues typically associated with art. In this way, work concerned with complex human rights issues can potentially engage with an international audience (and perhaps especially with the people about whom he is photographing and writing), furthering the conversation and thought.

Why is work like Sheikh's necessary? Because loss can be caught and held for awhile on a rectangle or square of film, or in a digital file, held just long enough to look it in the eye and come to some kind of terms with it, even if that only lasts a minute or two. Because reconciliation happens in fits and bursts and then is stitched together by time and light. 

Because last week, a few miles from my house, there was a shooting in a shopping mall full of holiday shoppers. Because a few miles from lots of people’s houses on every single continent of the world people hurt or oppress one another in one way or another. They always have, and I imagine they always will. But there is more than this. And Fazal Sheikh captures the ‘more than this.’

Because we need to continue looking in faces--in real time, in person, on film, on paper, in however we can--to remember. To remember that we’re all getting up each new day and starting all over again, continuing forward, whether we realize it, or even want to.

My daughter and son, who know firsthand too much already at their young ages about profound loss, are cutting out paper snowflakes to send to Connecticut. When the children who survived the Sandy Hook shooting return to school in January, their teachers want the school to be a magical winter wonderland when they walk through the doors. I’m watching my children take a white rectangle of the most ordinary, cheap paper on the planet, fold it, hold it, cut shapes in it, peer intensely at it while doing so, then unfold it into something beautiful, shake it out, throw it up in the air, bring the sky to earth. That is a kind of falling that yes, holds the velocity of elegy--but of something more, too. 

And it is in the chronicling of it all--the awful, the beautiful, the loss, the belief, the exceptional, the ordinary--that Sheikh affirms the narrative of a time and a place through his images, as well as and perhaps most importantly, of the individual men, women, and children he photographs. The specifics of one bloom to be of us all. 

Next week the earth turns to unveil a new year. The synthesis of every single act of every single one of us is tilled over. Sheikh does not believe his images offer answers, that implies a right most of us (all of us?) don’t have. He does, though, try to propel conversation or deeper thought about specific and often overlooked issues. He talks to me about the gift of time to consider and explore, and that perhaps is the essence of what a new year implies--we each have a little more time, a year ahead to get closer to becoming, forgiving, understanding.  

For more information on Fazal’s projects and to view some of his photographs, visit: http://www.fazalsheikh.org/

Looking Back into Forward

A little over a month ago, the voice of time in Britain died. For over two decades Brian Cobby fulfilled the role of, as he called himself, “Brittania’s wristwatch.” A role previously held only by women, his baritone voice would be heard over the years by two billion who dialed for time on the telephone exchange. 

In one take lasting 50 minutes, Cobby recorded the speaking clock’s 86 separate words that would go on to comprise the 8,640 daily announcements of the service. 

To be on time. To know the time. To do what we’re supposed to be doing at the time we’re supposed to be doing it. And yet, what does that effect? Does promptness or the division and demarcation lines of a day as held by the hands of a clock really change outcome to anything? The urgent ticks and tocks imply balance. If only. 

We still live with regret and most everyone I know would change some thing or many things if they could go back, find a little more than the allotted time comprising an hour, a day, a life.

French photographer Clarisse d’Arcimoles’ project Forget Nostalgia--A Little Theatre of Self  explores this idea of going back in time. A study on the medium and history of photography, the work also looks at how we individually place ourselves in the context of history, and its relevance. 

“The original idea came from a playful and childish notion of simply wanting to enter a black and white photograph, but each choice ended up being really crucial and meaningful in the complex context of the history of photography as technology and art,” d’Arcimoles tells me. 

Her degree in set design lends itself well to the constructed spaces the viewer enters. For her current exhibition at Breese Little Gallery in London, she transformed the space into a Victorian photographic studio where the audience can pause in front of a backdrop and experiment with being immersed into a black and white world themselves.

“Each of my projects are deeply connected to one another. I have always been fascinated by the beauty of old photographs and developed an obsession with going back in time, experimenting with different ways to enter those photographs. I use time as a collaborative partner, and my roots in set design allow me to materialize the past by re-staging it in the present,” she continues.

“I first opened a dialogue with time in Un-Possible Retour (2009) in which I reconstructed and re-photographed selected family photos in the attempt to reconnect with the past. Drawing on this collection I sharply focused my attention on the concept of aging, while ensuring a consistency of location.

Forget Nostalgia strongly echoes Un-Possible Retour, however, more recently I have moved away from personal snapshots to anonymous photographic portraits dating back to the early years of English photography.”

For a few moments--whether in viewing d’Arcimoles’ images, or in immersing oneself in her constructed scenes--transportation occurs to somewhere else, somewhere removed from the immediacy of the here and now. 

Imagination is a conversation with what could have been, and relative to d’Arcimoles’ work, with what was. Ultimately, a shift in time and place, whether fabricated or actual, is an effort at understanding from a more visceral perspective, and Forget Nostalgia is a presentation of sincere intent to this end. Of this project d’Arcimoles says,

“I have tried to imagine what my life would have been like at a local photographer’s studio a century ago. Photographing myself in a parade of shifting styles, re-creating scenic backdrops and posing in Victorian clothes, I have re-staged postcard scenes and reenacted them using today’s photographic methods.”

Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) wrote a series of poems in tribute to one of his influences, the master Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933). The first stanza of Twilight, as translated by Paul Merchant, reads:

You know that moment of midsummer twilight

in the closed room; the faintest rosy reflection

spread across the ceiling boards; and the poem

half finished on the table--two verses in all,

the unfulfilled promise of a splendid journey,

of a kind of freedom, a kind of independence,

a kind of (relative, of course) immortality. 

To view more of Clarisse d’Arcimoles’ work, visit: http://www.clarisse-darcimoles.com/

Her exhibition at Breese Little runs through December 19. For more information and to see installation shots, visit: http://www.breeselittle.com/

We are pleased to announce that both of Daylight's titles this year were selected as Photo-eye's Best Books of 2012!

Congratulations to Kevin Kunishi for Los Restos de la Revolucion and Will Steacy for Photographs Not Taken!

View the complete list here:

http://www.photoeye.com/magazine_admin/index.cfm/bestbooks.2012.books