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Albert J. Winn and Richard Sawdon Smith are two living photographers whose works are centered around the complexities of sexual identity for HIV-positive gay men. Based in different countries—Winn in Los Angeles; Sawdon Smith in London—the photographers have collaborated on projects that bring their separate practices and approaches into a distinct spectrum of what it means to sustain a personal life and a creative practice while HIV+. An  "examination of how Winn and Sawdon Smith's solo works visually and thematically rhyme" is the focus of BLOODBROTHERS, an online exhibition curated by David Serotte for Visual Aids.

David Serotte cleared time from an internationally packed schedule to discuss specific works and key points from the exhibition with me. What follows is an edited interview completed in August 2012.

Patricia: How did you first discover Sawdon Smith and Winn?
David: I first learned about Sawdon Smith’s work in an issue of the queer ‘zine, They Shoot Homos, Don’t They?. I was fascinated by his obsession with anatomy and the history of visualizing (ill) health through representations of the body. While assisting Jonathan D. Katz with his upcoming exhibition, Art, AIDS, America, I was reminded of Sawdon Smith’s work and then learned about Winn’s photography.

Through working with Katz, I met Amy Sadao and Nelson Santos of Visual AIDS. When they approached me to curate a web gallery for them, I was initially interested in creating a show that addressed intergenerational relationships within gay and HIV+ culture. It seems like people still attribute the apparent divide between different generations of gay men to the legacy of AIDS. Winn and Sawdon Smith’s collaborations offer an interesting counterpoint to that notion, and now my friendship with both of them serves as a kind of triadic intergenerational connection.

Patricia: How do the individual parameters of each artist's practice inform their collaborations?
David: The collaborations in BLOODBROTHERS are the products of the Winn and Sawdon Smith’s earlier solo works. By adding another artist into the same set up for an earlier solo work, Winn and Sawdon Smith’s collaborations enable the viewer to imagine a narrative or dialogue. Fittingly, the collaborative works were conceived without specific meanings in mind, which opens up the dialogue.

Their original, individual works serve to articulate each artist’s subjectivity within the larger medical and cultural discourses surrounding HIV/AIDS. Though Winn and Sawdon Smith have had different experiences living with HIV, their collaborations represent a desire to transcend that experiential, generational and international divide.

Patricia: Parallel to that, there's definitely a photographic generational divide in the visual experience of these photographs. Winn's Psycho Drama series is undeniably nuanced: it reminds me of Peter Hujar's sincerity behind the camera, mixed with early 20th Century photography, especially “spirit photography”. There is an obvious visual preoccupation with the spirit, especially in the way Winn and Sawdon Smith worked with double exposures.
David: The visual comparison between Winn’s Psycho Drama series and spirit photography is spot on. The work also reminds me of Bill Jacobson’s Interim Portrait series, in which Jacobson captured ethereal soft-focus portraits of people with AIDS to evoke the subjects’ fleeting mortality, as well as the limits of effectively documenting such an immeasurable loss.

Interestingly, while Winn employs multiple exposure photography to reveal the multiplicity of his identity, Sawdon Smith uses the same technique to highlight his marginalization as an HIV+ person. Winn’s diverse selves empower him, while Sawdon Smith is haunted by the “ghost” of his sexual isolation.

Patricia: I'm curious about this portion of your curator's statement: "Safer Sex Series' playful title belies the anxiety of negotiating sexual safety within sero-discordant partnerships. In a sense, Sawdon Smith's work anticipates and critiques the practice of sero-sorting, in which people seek sexual partners of the same HIV status."
David: Visually, the work seems to be about sero-concordance since Sawdon Smith is "having sex with himself." But that is actually a reaction to the potentially fraught nature of sex between people of contrasting HIV statuses.

The idea is that because there is so much fear about sero-conversion within sero-discordant partnerships, people have imagined that a better option is just to sero-sort and “stick with your own kind.” While some may find this freedom from fear liberating, for Sawdon Smith, and many others, sero-sorting is just as alienating as any other form of segregation. Also, from what I understand, sero-sorting among anonymous partners is not actually safer since people can always be dishonest/uninformed about their HIV status, and living with one strain of HIV doesn’t necessarily protect you from another.

Patricia: The selections you curated include some images that aren't usually seen in the discourse of AIDS/HIV+ living: the invasiveness of healing. Was including this angle important to you as a curator, or are these key themes consistent among the works of Winn and Sawdon Smith?
David: I would say both. While the clinical aspect of living with HIV is only one layer of each artist’s body of work, I think both artists have turned to photography as a way to preserve themselves through physical trauma, as well to bring awareness to past and ongoing medical challenges experienced by HIV+ people.

Talking to Winn and Sawdon Smith about their work taught me a great deal about the brutality of many HIV treatments. While the medications for people living with HIV today are more effective and less toxic than earlier drugs, it is critical that these medical advancements not erase the historical and present state of HIV/AIDS.

Patricia: Your show portrays that very well: the photographs situate life with AIDS as life itself, a life lived with spectrums of desire and emotion.
David: I see Winn and Sawdon Smith “owning” their experience with HIV through their work. Not only are they demonstrating how HIV has shaped their lives, but they’re giving shape to the disease through their lives. In doing so, they take HIV/AIDS out of an abstract realm and create a more complex understanding of HIV as a “manageable” disease.

Winn first addressed the need to contextualize HIV’s place in his life through an autobiographical project called My Life Until Now. He began the series in 1990 following his AIDS diagnosis (technically, once you’re diagnosed with AIDS, you’re always considered to be “living with AIDS”). In contrast to the predominant images of people with AIDS as tragic victims, Winn documented his life as a gay Jewish man living with AIDS and his HIV- partner, Scott. Winn told me that when the he first started the project, people were bothered by the matter-of-fact depiction of this sero-discordant partnership. In a way, the work was radicalizing the normativity of AIDS.

Patricia: How does Winn reconcile his Jewish faith and practice with his HIV+ status?
David: When Winn underwent frequent blood testing in order to participate in early AIDS drug trials, he likened the sensation of a tourniquet cinching his arm to the binding leather straps of tefillin, which in Judaism are wrapped around the arms and head during prayer. As a result, this painful and impersonal medical ritual became a meaningful one.

Winn has made other works incorporating Jewish traditions to inform his experience with HIV/AIDS. In 1996, he created an installation at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, CA., entitled Blood on the Doorpost...The AIDS Mezuzah. The work featured a mezuzah on a minimalist door frame, only instead of housing small scrolls with Hebraic text, the mezuzah contained Winn’s HIV+ blood.

The piece connected the plague of AIDS to the ten plagues of Egypt in the Exodus story, in which the Hebrew slaves were spared the final plague, death of the first born child, by smearing lamb’s blood on their door posts. Not only did the work act as a symbolic prayer for survival, but it served as a way to shake the Jewish community out of their silence regarding HIV/AIDS.

Patricia: Your selections highlight personal narratives of the AIDS aftermath, a chronology fractured by physical invasion(drugs, tests) and medical/social neglect.  And aftermath is certainly one of photography's prerogatives. Sometimes I look at certain photographs and consider the medium of photography as one elastic monument to The Aftermath...to Consequence.  A record is hardly enough for prevention, but within a contextualized visual record resides the power of dispensing awareness. I see BLOODBROTHERS as an intersection of lived experience and awareness.
David: I know that Winn’s work is shown to medical students in courses addressing bioethics. There is an ongoing debate in the world of HIV awareness/prevention over the ethics of representing people with the disease. Positive, uplifting imagery supports those personally affected by HIV/AIDS while misleading others about the severity of the epidemic.

Negative imagery can shock and/or encourage people to practice safer sex while demonizing those living with the disease. Yet, this dichotomy doesn’t account for more complex, multi-dimensional images of people with HIV. In a way, I think Winn and Sawdon Smith’s work offer just as much awareness about the disease as they do regarding the forces surrounding it: medicine, science, religion, gay culture.

Patricia: Yes, their work does present autobiography in relation to a fuller spectrum of awareness. At times it's subtle, at times it's emotionally blunt, but that intersection is very present. But there is also more...
David: While BLOODBROTHERS focuses on the autobiographical aspects of Sawdon Smith's work, it is important to note that the artist conceives of his work as a complex conflation of reality and representation in which his self-portraits actually depict personas named The Damaged Narcissist and The Anatomical Man.

These fictional selves establish a critical distance between Sawdon Smith and his image, as well as illuminate the limits of perceiving a subject's "real" identity and (ill) health based on representations of the body. For instance, the realistic tattooed veins and arteries seen in Observe 1994-2011 (2012) are not based on Sawdon Smith's actual circulatory system, but rather on a 1850s anatomical drawing. Thus, the tattoos collapse the real and the constructed, the internal and the external onto the surface of his skin.

Albert J. Winn's work will be included in the group show "Spectrum of Sexuality" at Hebrew Union College, New York, opening  September 5th, 2012.

Richard Sawdon Smith's solo show "The Anatomical Man - Richard Sawdon Smith" is currently on view at Rise Gallery in Berlin until September 1, 2012. 

Photo: Richard Sawdon Smith (with Albert J. Winn), Blood Brothers (Triptych), 2006. C-type print, 16"x20, 16"x12", 16"x20"

Photograph by Lisa Kereszi

Scrap

My mother doesn’t forget anything. She remembers what I wore the night of my first theater performance in middle school; she remembers my scores at high school sporting events; she recalls what kind of cake she made for my various birthdays growing up. She gets hurt when she reminisces, asking, “Don’t you remember that night?” and I say, not really. The details for her seem anchored in the harbor, the one calm cove of her mind. 

It’s real, I know what she remembers so specifically is actual. What’s odd, is that the woman from that time, the woman of my memory is a shell now, in present-time, and mental illness has steered her interpretation of real time here and now as unprocessable. The past is sharp and clear, the details of which she curls her fingers around and doesn’t let go. The world of decades ago is the only solid ground she has left to walk on. The present is filled with people who aren’t actually here, with events that don’t actually happen, and she spends each day nowadays running from them. 

While for me many of the particulars of my childhood are a blur, I do still feel the cadence of what it was like, that part of memory lingers. I slip on the ice of looking back, and part of that weight resting in my gut is the muscle and cell memory of carrying not only my memories, but also what my mother brings forward from her own childhood, and what her mother passed on to her from her upbringing, all of it carrying forth to now, the tether of intangibles that link families  whether we like it or not. History does fold itself into generation upon generation upon generation. 

Lisa Kereszi speaks to this in a conversation with me and it resonates, “I think living as a child of people who have suffered so much loss gives me a real heaviness that I must bear. I live in fear of such tragedies befalling on my own immediate family. You carry the weight of your parent's and grandparent's failures, losses and pain.”

Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, wrote a piece called, “Hard Life with Memory,” and in it she discusses the difficulty in reconciling past and present, in striking that balance between the life we, as adults, work to build, the one we want, hope for, dream about, with the circumstances of what is, and with the bits and pieces of ourselves and our family that remain in the sieve. On good days those pebbles and fragments are a museum, or a library of memories; on hard days, a penitentiary.

Lisa’s grandfather, Joe Sr. built up an empire in the junkyard business. At one time a minor league boxer, he was tough, and the boom years in the 1950s and 1960s brought great success in the retail of leftovers. The lifestyle hummed with Cadillacs, beach cottages, maids, but then gave way to family tragedies, deaths, drugs, violence, modern-era economic loss and downturn. Her father, Joe Jr, owned and ran the junkyard during her childhood. 

In the preface essay to her book out this fall, Joe’s Junkyard,  she writes, “The ‘Yard’ was my dad, Joe Jr.’s life.” Of her images, she tells me, “It's their world, but it's from my point of view.” Lisa took her first photo of the yard at age 16, the same year her father dropped out of high school to work there. In a conversation she tells me, “My grandmother lost 2 sons, 3 houses, her husband and the business. My dad lost 2 brothers, his father, his life's blood business, the junkyard empire, he even lost his family to divorce: me and my sister. He had a tattoo with our names on it, which he had covered up with three women's faces after my mom left with us in tow.”

I ask her to describe one of her photographs, filling in the visual with other senses. I’m drawn to one of the first images in the book, entitled, “Eloyse and her son Joe Jr., Easter, 1998,” in it an older woman sits in a chair, another chair next to her with flowers in the seat. A partially rusted light green pick up truck is in the background, almost itself some kind of horizon. A line of tires rest in a row to the right of the frame, an entry point to the image directing the view to the grandmother in the chair. Lisa’s dad Joe stands behind the tires, in a baseball cap, overalls, smoking. She says to me, 

“The chair's wobbly, on uneven ground. The ground is almost black, dirt and rocks and bits of this and that ground in - wires, nuts and bolts. The place smells like motor oil - you've smelled this is you've walked into an auto repair shop - not a new car dealer's service center, but a place that installs used parts. It's very specific. The phone's ringing, or at least the 2 lines rang a lot in the old days. In the distance, the oil refineries are burning off excess gas - they are pencil-thin smokestacks with a tip of orange flame. You can hear the crazy old tow truck (from the cover) growling around. My grandmother, pictured, is sitting there, bossing the men to move that or clean that or rake that or sort this thing or that thing. It must be exhausting to be her. She has a mouth like a sailor. My dad wanders in and out, handing her money, pocketing some. The Easter flowers were delivered by my grandfather's sisters, 2 Catholic nuns, who were making the rounds of their brothers' businesses. The flowers don’t fit in this landscape...”

I look at these images and am standing there, too. They’re that porous, that honest. Every person remotely interested in photography and its ability to gather up glimpses of the personal and translate them univerally should look at this body of work. Our lives are built of scrap. Families are messy. Her images make me wonder about things like, how big a role does luck play in a life? Geography? Chance? We land where we land, under a hot sun or a snowy sky, into whatever legacies we’re born, fall into a group of hands called family that either hold us or hit or something in between, maneuver through the waking and sleeping hours wherever we are and call it a life. 

When Szymborska died earlier this year, NPR reprinted the beginning section of her poem, “Under One Small Star,”

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.

Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

Each day, each of us pays tribute to what’s big enough to hold, and sloughs off what’s small enough to let go of and become someone else’s loose change. Lisa’s work cultivates the interlude of memory. I ask her what studying her life/home/family through the lens of a camera has given her. 

“Distance, and a sense of looking back, looking in. I always feared that I was too close to the subject...The camera is armor, helps deflect and protect from injury and pain and arrows and bullets. It's too painful otherwise, and has to be buried. I chose to dig it up, I guess.”

Lisa’s book will be out in October, 2012, published through Damiani. To view more of her work visit, http://lisakereszi.com/                                                                                                                              Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Hard Life with Memory” may be read at, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/hard-life-memory/?pagination=false                  The beginning of  Szymborska’s “Under One Small Star” may be found at, http://m.npr.org/news/Books/146281183

Earlier in the summer, I caught up with New York artist Clifford Owens to talk with him about performance art, his relationship to photography and next steps....

Why do you not like to be called a performance artist? Is that not an apt description of what you do?  Well, the term is kind of limiting in its description of the practice as it exists today. It is a title that art history recognizes, but like most categories it comes with potential for misrepresentation. My performances are not about performance art----they are about images.

When did you adopt performance as a means of expression?  In 2000, I was doing research for my graduate thesis at Rutgers. I was struck by what I discovered (and had a hard time discovering) about Black performance artists and their practices. As a result, I have spent the last 12 years creating my own history, but that creation has largely been about photography. Performance art is a critical and crucial practice to understand and ultimately it is a history of photography. I never wanted to be a performance artist-I did not seek it out specifically as a practice. Younger artists work through every kind of media in the expression of ideas and I find a great deal of power in that mode of working.

When and how did photography become a medium for you?  I have been making images since I was 14. Years ago, while working in the photography department with photojournalists at The Baltimore Sun, I was impacted by the ways in which pictures are constructions. I am not a photography purist though. I am an artist trying to say something. I am not married to any medium. My practice is about ideas. Currently, I am best known for performance art, photography and video. However my video work has not been widely exhibited.

Does the camera take an active or passive role?  Generally a camera is passive until the operator asks it to record. In my work, film photography has a more active role while digital photography is more passive.

Is the camera a participant in the performance or simply a tool?  The camera is not as much of a participant as it is a tool-an intermediary device that captures an interaction with an audience. The camera mitigates. Again, my performances are not about performance art. They are about creating images. I am always aware of the camera’s presence and what the camera will capture. This awareness coupled with an understanding of my body’s place and position is critical to making good images. Ultimately, the camera has limitations in conveying a live performance. There is no audio or peripheral view. The camera only captures a partial experience. The rest is about mythology.

Do you use film or digital?  I learned about photography through pictures made with film. For my project, Photographs With An Audience (2008-present), I use film as a way of slowing down. The shutter release, film advance and time lapses to reload film are critical aspects of the overall experience as well as opportunities for the creative process to thrive. Film photography is also about mechanics and the passage of time.

Once, I capture the images on film, I scan negatives and have Lambda prints made. It is sort of an antiquated process. There are not that many labs that still produce this type of print.

I move between film and digital processes. Qualitatively, they both function at high levels. To the trained eye, there is a difference between digital and film imagery, but technology is lessening that gap. However, more depth is still apparent in images produced with film. That said, print photography is easy to love and hate. It is problematic. Moreover, Photoshop muddies the waters in our notion of reality in photographs. Although I use Photoshop to enhance subtlety, I do not want my images to have that veneer.

Is the resulting photograph a document of the performance or an independent art object?  The ways in which I engage with the history and medium of photography are quite complex. Photography is an ephemeral practice of performance art. The recent marketability of performance art calls for a documentation of the experience, but that is not what I am doing. The images that originate from my performance work are discreet works of art. I make a distinction between photography and performance. That distinction moves between being very clear and not so clear, yet it exists nonetheless. I do not think that anyone has ever done this before. In July, I presented my 5^th iteration of Photographs With An Audience at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, GA.

How do you reference the term documentary in your practice?  I do not see documentary as a pejorative term, but it is not what I set out to do with the camera. Documentary photography is about a type of subjectivity. It communicates a social condition or truth. I am an artist and I use the camera to present a re-imaginate of what has been.

So, how did Anthology come about? Where did the name come from and how does it relate to your practice overall?  When I was 18, I wrote a letter to artist David Hammons expressing my gratitude to him.  Art school in the 1990’s was a lonely and devastating place for a Black kid from Baltimore. At the time, identity and multiculturalism were the dominant ideas and I struggled to find mentorship. I was never able to make a connection with David no matter how hard I tried. As a result, I decided that if I were ever on the other side of that scenario, I would make myself available to my community.

An anthology is an archive. Creating Anthology was an incredible and sometimes difficult task in addition to being my first New York museum (MoMa PS1) exhibition. Designed as a large installation comprised of a conglomeration of images and video, it stood as an attempt to make my position explicit and underscore the ephemerality of the practice of performance.

Although Anthology was never about me, it became about me because I did not know how else to do it, but I am passing it on now. That exhibition was an opportunity for me to say THANK YOU to those that have blazed a trail before me and PLEASE to the younger generations of artists that come after me. It is important for me to remember that no matter what progress we think that we have made, we have not come very far. That said, keeping a level of engagement with community by paying homage and passing the baton is critical to me.

Now that Anthology is complete, what’s next for you? Book? Exhibitions?  I have my first book coming out soon-----Fall 2012. MoMA will publish Anthology somewhere between late October/early December 2012. This book will be a comprehensive, 200-plus page offering of scholarly essays by the Christopher Y. Lew, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1, New York, John Bowles, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for Art History, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC and Huey Copeland, Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for Art History, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL along with interviews with viewers of live Anthology performances, scores contributed for the exhibition and images. Anthology brings text, the oral tradition and photography together to grapple with how to invent and contextualize the history of Black performance artists and photography’s shifting ability to communicate a type of distillation of experience. As for upcoming exhibitions, I will be participating in Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century curated by RosaLee Goldberg and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver.

Barber Shop, Asakusa, Japan, by Hiroshi Watanabe

Improvisation

I once worked with an immigrant from Vietnam who told me about living in a basement apartment the first eight years in this country. Each morning he’d wake and look out a narrow window that ran along the top part of his wall. At his sightline were just feet walking back and forth, to work, school, the store, shuffling or briskly maneuvering across the concrete and through the dailiness. The conversation of footfalls, the sidewalk of a world outside a room--the narrative of being somewhere, the beginnings of home, now. 

On the mantle of my home is a postcard Hiroshi Watanabe sent me perhaps 15 years ago. It’s one of his iconic images, a child scaling a play structure in Quito, Ecuador. It’s the child, rungs of hither and yon metal bars, and sky. From the angle the image was caught, the kid is suspended, traversing foot holds and hand grips one at a time to get to some sort of other side. Kids play in the moment and haven’t generally yet developed skills to over-think. They’re vested where they are, and the world is big enough right underfoot. This picture reminds me of the value of making maps of here to pick the way through each day.

Hiroshi’s photo projects show pieces and people from all sorts of internal and external geographies. His work is expansive and far-reaching in every sense. But what’s always struck me about his imagery is that location and context almost don’t matter. I’ve long been compelled by how everywhere-anywhere his images are. They feel to me to be intuitive, improvised revelations of a photographer who works to be present and awake in whatever situation, on whatever corner of earth he’s standing. 

Frederic Rzewski, composer and pianist, once relayed, "In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy [saxophonist and composer] on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: 'In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.' His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds.” 

Hiroshi says to me, “When one is creating, they have no time to think what others are doing or where the medium in whole is going. They just think about their creation and what is means to them.”

Improvisation allows for composition, it’s just intuitively wrought composition that factors out past and future, relying on trust and reflexes to overturn meaning. No time to think, as Hiroshi says, just make. 

Hiroshi was born and raised in Japan, but has lived in the US the past 30 years. He splits his time and self between the two countries. “I feel home in both countries and I love both of them. I cannot choose one or the other even if I am forced to do so.  So I stay with both of them. I see good and bad in both and compare them, and it gives me something to think about the world all the time.”

His American Studies/Japanese Studies project more overtly turns an eye on the splitting of time and self, but this idea is also revealed in another of his recent projects, Artifacts: ‘Things’ from Japanese Internment Camps. The photographs show items people made or used during confinement, many of which Hiroshi dug out of the ground himself with his bare hands during a visit to the Tule Lake site at the Oregon/California border, considered one of the most heavily guarded and severe camps of this era. 

Hiroshi writes, “Many of the internment camps were on dry lakes which used to be lakes thousands of years ago, and if you dig, you will find many shells underground. People were not allowed to go outside, so they used whatever they could find inside the fence on the dry land.”

His image titles tell the story. My words are not necessary, there is no space in this story to fill with rhetoric:

• Pipe-Cleaner Flower Arrangement in Mayonnaise Jar
• Deer Carving
• Carved Bird Pin in Box
• Walking Cane made from Natural Wood
• Raggedy Ann Doll
• Standard Bucket Distributed in All Camps, One Per Family
• Bottle with Dead Bugs
• Metal Rafter Cap, Embossed “May Happiness Come Here”
• Dice
• Carved Bird Dressed with Shell Beads
• Metal Two-Cell Flashlight
• Maxwell House Coffee Tin
• Broken Bottle Neck No. 54
• Broken Light Bulb
• Medicine Bottle with Dropper
• Flower Brooch Made with Shells
• Standard WW II US Army Canteen, Shot Through with Bullet
• Cane Made with Cocobolo Wood Commemorating 60th Birthday
• Johnson’s Baby Powder
• Japanese Doll Made with Old Kimono Fabric
• Melted Glass Bottle No. 33
• Rice Bowl
• Tea Pot
• Shell Flower Arrangement in Gallon Jug
• Hair Brush, No Bristles
• Major Walter Tanaka’s Cap
• Pipe Cleaner Doll with Painted Face on Shell
• Flock of Carved Birds Flying Away

“I am not sure why I was so intrigued by the artifacts that Japanese Americans left many years ago,” he continues. “I have no interest in reminding the negative chapter in the American history, and I am not interested in reclaiming the right of Japanese Americans on their behalf. I was born and raised after the war. I enjoyed the freedom and prosperity that the United States brought to Japan. And now I am living a good life in the United States without much struggle. I am not qualified to speak about injustice and hardship that the American government might have given to the Japanese people. I have no right to do so.

“What I see in these ‘things’ are unsettling emotions that Japanese American must have had when they were conflicted by Japanese ideas and American ideas that they gained in their lives in the United States. When they were asked directly, ‘Which side are you?’ they had to choose a country. They must have not been able to close their eyes from the paradox that their own beings brought to themselves. The real tragedy for the Japanese Americans who lived in that era was that they could not have a single place to stand on, American nor Japanese. That seems to apply for me who is living a life in the present tense.”

I asked Hiroshi what he believes about the world. 

“I think the world is very, very complex and that my imagination is too small and simplistic to understand and figure out what is happening or predict what will happen in the world. It's like looking at a chip board inside my computer. I have no idea what it is and what it does. But that does not mean that I should not try.”

To view images from the Artifacts series and other portfolios, visit http://www.hiroshiwatanabe.com/

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2012 Daylight Photo Awards is

Aaron Vincent Elkaim for his portfolio Fort McKay: Sleeping with the Devil.

Aaron will receive an exhibition at the Daylight Project Space (September) as well as a multimedia feature (October) and a $1000 cash prize.

http://www.avephoto.ca/portfolio/

The juror picks are as follows:

DAVID BRAM / FRACTION

Jess Dugan, Every breath we drew

http://www.jessdugan.com/

ALEXA DILWORTH/ CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES

Ula Wiznerowicz, Behind the Curtain

http://www.ulawiznerowicz.com/ 

JIM ESTRIN / NEW YORK TIMES 

JESSIE WENDER / NEW YORKER

Mu Ge, Going Home

http://mugephoto.com/

PAUL MOAKLEY / TIME MAGAZINE

Pavel Maria Smejkal, Fatescapes

http://www.pavelmaria.com/