News

Thursday, March 24 is an exhibition opening at Morrison Hotel Gallery, 116 Prince Street, Soho, NYC, featuring photographs of Johnny Cash and friends by Jim Marshall, who shot five Cash album covers during his long, storied career as a rock and roll photojournalist. On view will be rarely-seen and iconic images taken between the mid- ’60s and mid-’70s, including intimate photos of the Cash family over a period of 30 years.

Beforehand, Michelle Dunn Marsh, editor and photo book designer, will be giving a brief talk/slideshow presentation from his last book, Pocket Cash, across the street at the Apple store,103 Prince St., at 7:00 pm, followed by the gallery opening in the Loft space at #116 until 10 pm.

Read more from Michelle on Marshall from one year ago here: http://www.chroniclebooks.com/blog/author/michelle-dunn-marsh/

Event info here: http://www.apple.com/retail/soho/

And here: https://www.morrisonhotelgallery.com/post/default.aspx?postID=139

Gallery hours:

11-6 Mon - Thurs
11-7 Fri - Sat
12 - 6 Sunday
Tel.  212-941-8770

The Laughter and Forgetting (L.A.F.) Project documents life on the road to democracy in the former Soviet state of Georgia by bringing together the work of many photographers, both Georgian and international. Through exhibits and an online Photoblog, photographers will be able to document life and address issues in Georgian society, creating a global community while bringing these concerns to the attention of the rest of the world.

The first theme of L.A.F. in Georgia is centered around the Internally Displaced People (IDPs); approximately 240,000 IDPs remain in the country whose population is only 4.5 million.

"L.A.F.'s goal is to bring much needed attention to the IDPs in Georgia," writes Sarah Martin, the Director of Communications for the L.A.F. Project, "who are still very much in need of attention as they struggle with inadequate housing, poor educational standards, sparse access to health care and a lack of socio-economic integration back into the community. We believe that bringing several photographers' work together for the exhibition will give a broader view of the crisis."

The L.A.F. Project is currently looking for photographers who have documented the IDPs in Georgia since the conflict in 2008. The work will initially be shown in the form of a short video at the Tbilisi Photo Fest in May 2011. The deadline to submit work for inclusion in the video is April 1, 2011. The L.A.F. Project will continue to accept submissions throughout the summer for the Photoblog and exhibits in Georgia and at Prague's Forum 2000 Human Rights Conference. For more information on how to submit, contact Sarah Martin at sarahalycemartin@yahoo.com.

http://www.lafproject.org

What photographers do is take the real stuff of the world and edit it down, noticing, choosing, pointing, framing, removing something from one context and placing in another, hopefully transforming it in one way or another. What if there is a second camera directly involved, or nine? Google Earth and Street View are adding another layer to the way we can interact with our environment, all from the comfort of our home computers or our iPhones. We can fly around the world in an instant, see the activity along roadsides and curbsides from Kalamazoo to Kishniev. If photography itself is really a form of editing, does it matter that the initial camera operator is not the artist himself, but a spooky, indiscriminate Google car thousands of miles away, connected by satellite and signal? Does authorship even matter, or is the anonymous, motor-driven nature of this image collecting an interesting conceptual layer? Anonymous people shot by an anonymous camera.

Appropriation is nothing new in the art world, from Richard Prince to Carrie Mae Weems. Having a DP shoot your film is nothing new, either, like Gregory Crewdson and legions of film directors. Having a robot shoot your raw material is a little newer, though. Just like in the real world, most of life along the roads of Street Viewis repetitive and mundane, but when it isn’t, it’s shocking and wonderful. Sure, most of what gets highlighted from Google’s database online is merely silly, scary and plain old strange; fortunate findings of unfortunate occurrences appear on websites with names like StreetViewFun and StreetViewGallery. Photographer Benjamin Donaldson has been using serendipitous images from Urlesque’s “Top 10 Moments Caught on Google Maps Street View” in his undergraduate Introductory Photography lectures since they appeared in 2009. What’s out there? Fires, accidents, a Viking quest battle royale, flashers, those who have fallen and can’t get up, dead deer, Horse Boy, firemen coaxing down a cat in a tree, fence jumpers and crimes in progress.

Photographer Michael Wolf won an honorable mention in the most recent World Press Photo Contest for his series of pictures captured via Street View, entitled "A Series of Unfortunate Events," a prize that was hotly debated and stirred up controversy. Purists saw the award as unfair. After all, Wolf didn’t “take” the photos in person with his own camera. He did, however, “make” them, in a way, by the act of editing Google’s world in the same way that he would otherwise edit the real world: with a camera in hand. How different is this from Garry Winogrand’s steer crossing the road, or Walker Evans shooting from an immutable, unstoppable train window in the Fortune magazine portfolio "Along the Right of Way"? It’s not the same, exactly, but it’s not utterly different. It is conceptually different, with an added layer of meaning attached to the project, since the pictures are captured not by a human who chooses where to stand and how to frame, but by a robotic car, clicking pictures every few meters, without cognitive reasoning, and involuntarily, like a heartbeat.

As with any photography project, some image-makers are more interesting than others, and some are artists, while others are entertainers. After all, the real stuff of the world was already available already; whether it’s in person or on screen might not matter so much. Two of the most compelling examples came into my inbox this week. Photographer Jon Rafman has posted a series on www.9-eyes.com that includes pictures you can hardly believe exist, full of prostitutes, Segways, one unicycle, accidents, the Rod Stewart Fan Club, a whale and birds and a human suspended in air (separately). The improbability of real life events and the wonder of the wide world seem to be a subject of this collection of images. I felt as if I had visited places I never even knew existed, and that I had a better idea of what life might actually be like in a far-flung place only shown to us previously in professional, commercial photographs. Street View shows us, with a heightened sense of super-reality, what the glossy travels mags leave out, like a boring corner hosting a kid fallen off a bike or a traffic stop gone awry. How great and wild and weird the world is.

Another photographic artist making carefully-edited work in the same way is Doug Rickard, whose project, “A New American Picture,” debuted late last year at Le Bal during ParisPhoto: http://www.le-bal.fr/fr/mh/a-new-american-picture/ , and as the subject of a limited-edition Schaden book: http://www.schaden.com/book/RicDoueAN06296.html . Rickard chooses to be much more narrow in focus, and not so interested in the sensationalist and silly. His piece is about poverty in America. The Google car goes down every street, and in so doing, traverses the streets in those “bad neighborhoods” that many people actively avoid, but also those same street corners and curbsides that many other people cannot escape. Scenes from Detriot, Memphis, Oakland, Camden, NJ and more picture mostly African-Americans, and mostly run-down, neglected neighborhoods. Graffiti, abandoned cars, a man pushing a shopping cart full of cans, the projects.

Citizens are frozen in time, forever disobeying the “No Loitering” signs pictured nearby, a 21^st century response to Robert Frank’s “The Americans.” Walker Evans’s Depression-era photos come to mind, as do Paul Graham’s from “ A Shimmer of Possibility.”  The photos are unflinching and damning, even though the initial camera operator couldn’t flinch anyway. The pictures visually also remind one of Paul Fusco’s “RFK Funeral Train,” in that there are regular American people seen alongside a route, often looking at the Google car, caught in mid-wave or shout, barely making contact with the lens in that split second as time, and the car, drives on. There is no coffin of a much-loved American icon on board however, and no one has a hand on heart or in salute. Instead, people sometimes stop to see and be seen by the Google cameras, as if to say, “Take my photo. I am here. I exist.” (They sometimes stop to flip the world the bird, in the 9 Eyes series, at least.) There is nothing funny, however, about Rickard’s series. Instead, it shows deadly-serious devastation. He is telling us to look around, to pay attention, and not to lie to ourselves and pretend that this America does not exist.

"...all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, to the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply  the cruel radiance of what is. This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time." -James Agee, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"

(Rickard’s other interest in pre-existing photographic works and archives, anonymous or well-known, was the subject of last week’s post: http://www.daylightmagazine.org/blog/2011/2/27/1044 There, you can also find a Gerry Badger essay about Winogrand's manic overshooting at the end of his life, and discusses the problem of "a mindless accumulation of automatic images, whose meaning at best is peripheral and uncertain, whose tenor at worst is dumbly exploitative and reactionary": http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/03/garry-winogrand-i-dont-give-rap-a... )

Daylight Books Launch Party
Friday March 4th, 9-11pm
25CPW, NYC

Please join us in celebrating the release of Daylight’s first full-length monographs:

Bruce Haley’s Sunder and Alejandro Cartagena’s Suburbia Mexicana.

Featured by the New Yorker and New York Times!

Download the press release here

Check out some party pics here

Hank Willis Thomas
HOPE and QUESTION BRIDGE
A collaborative, multi-site exhibition, curated by Diego Cortez, January 20 – March 4, 2011, John Hope Franklin Center and Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Hank Willis Thomas, HOPE and QUESTION BRIDGE: BLACK MALE are two concurrent solo exhibitions of Thomas' work in Durham, North Carolina, curated by Diego Cortez. HOPE is an exhibition at the John Hope Franklin Center of eight works that, as Cortez says, "aim to distill the conceptual photographer's work into a quintessence, an epitome, a perfect example. A concise survey spanning a mere seven years, HOPE presents the zenith of this young artist's work." QUESTION BRIDGE: BLACK MALE, a video in progress, is screened at the Franklin Humanities Institute (Smith Warehouse) in an old tobacco mill on top of which flies a helium balloon in the shape of a comic book quotation bubble and it reads HOPE.
    HOPE opens with a lenticular and rectangular text as image. It reads HOPE, and as you move by it or back and forth, it becomes HOPEFUL and HOPELESS - the FUL and LESS interchangeable, overlapping, canceling each other out, arguing against each other. Having seen the funny and beautiful balloon hovering above the other show, I couldn't help but feel more helpful than hopeless. HOPELESS HOPEFUL is from the ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL SERIES. You feel trapped in limbo, a kind of purgatory, our status quo of having the first African-American President of the United States who galvanized this country out of 8 years of dreadful republican rule but into what? After the recent republican sweep of mid-term elections and the absurd rise of the Tea Party, one can't help but feel hopeless at times. While HOPELESS HOPEFUL is not a photograph, it functions photographically: it is black and white; it is an image full of contradiction - an inherent problem in most social documentary photography; it is a caption. Like Felix Gonzalez-Torres's black billboards with strings of white text - historical events and dates that conjure photographic images in viewers' minds - Thomas' lenticular print sears its ambivalent position into our eyes. Do we fight and resist, struggle and survive, hope and dream or do we submit and acquiesce, become complacent and apathetic, misanthropic and abject?
    Thomas is known for his striking appropriation of images throughout history, as well as for his shocking performative acts of scarring and branding - eight NIKE swooshes scarred onto his chest or one swoosh on his scalp, BLACK POWER stuck into the smiling front teeth of a black man. This show presents unforgettable examples of both of these modes of production. IT DIDN"T JEST GROW BY ITSELF, 1984/2008, from the REBRANDED SERIES, is a diptych of two appropriated photographic images. On the left is a nostalgic photographic image of a smiling black woman bent over in a sunny cotton field, clouds of cotton in her happy hands, her hair pulled back in a white scarf. On the right is a more pixilated color photograph of a smiling Asian woman in a field of green tea leaves. Trin Ti Minh Ha states that "cultures become culture through the same eye." Thomas is not equating cultures but he is drawing attention to the manner in which we see and represent other cultures, even our own, as idyllic and equal, despite extreme and specific differences and intense struggle. These are images of labor, of women working, most likely in unfair conditions; both women rendered "other" to these assumed white readers/viewers. What intrigues most is the title that is included at the bottom of the images, "It didn't jest grow by itself," a sarcastic retort, a pedagogical moment between mother and child, a voice of defensive pride, a slap in our placid faces of privilege. Thomas knows how to take us there willingly, to the zone of self-implication and critical analyses of systems of representation and the spectacular media, both historical and current. Diego Cortez writes, "Both women smile as they work, blurring the distinction between historic slavery and the low-wage slavery on which contemporary consumer capitalism is premised."
    Thomas' reductive collages ALIVE WITH PLEASURE and BELIEVE IT, from his 2010 series FAIR WARNING, remove all but the actors from cigarette advertisements targeting Black audiences. This technique, applied systematically, reveals the other techniques applied to the actors, showing up their ultra-stylized "blackness" as a shameless attempt at commodifying consciousness and identity. Revealing and resisting a racism that markets itself as capitalism – funnily enough, by making the ads much whiter – Thomas creates a discursive space where there was once only a behind-closed-doors conversation. Cortez says this is a "raw depiction of the marketing of blackness."
    ALONG THE WAY is a video mosaic from 2007, commissioned for the Oakland International Airport in California, in collaboration with ©ause Collective. ALONG THE WAY is a collection of over 1,500 video portraits of the diverse community members in Oakland, from a young boy in a suit posing for the camera and another boy making faces to an old lady clown and men giggling, women dancing. It is feels like a commercial for joy, for pleasure, for community. It makes you want to live in Oakland. The hundred of images form a larger image of eyes that Willis zooms in and out of, showing us several or a couple or a grid of portraits, strangers together. This is a much lighter video than the QUESTION BRIDGE: BLACK MALE video across town in which he expands discursive space through a video-mediated conversation among diverse members of the U.S. Black male population. One man asks a question; another in a different location answers. Thomas describes this project; "The goal is to expand the common notions of black masculinity, while simultaneously facilitating a dialogue between Black males who normally might not be able to talk to one another in such a candid manner." The video's style of the consistently centered talking head with only incidental background is similar to the style of Thomas' reductive collages that perhaps it reads as a response to them, in which the consciousnesses of Black males is no longer superficially advertised and consumed; it is performed.
    One black male poses a profound question, like "what's so great about selling crack" or "why am I considered a traitor to my race if I date outside of my race" and another black male answers the question. It is a serious work that raises important issues and questions like the use of the "n word". There is something very sweet and human and real about these black men speaking their truths. I feel uncomfortable even saying this, as a white woman. I feel guilty watching this video, as if I have judged these men myself before knowing them, expecting different answers than I would from white men, but of course they would be different answers. It is the awe and discomfort of listening to these questions and answers, these real stories and experiences that stay with me, that get under my skin and stay there.
    The image that stays with me from the John Hope Franklin Center's HOPE show is the one of the silhouetted lynching tree, HANG TIME CIRCA 1923 (2008), in which Michael Jordan performs his iconic lay-up while dangling from a noose. Cortez writes, "…The Jumpman logo from Nike's Air Jordan ad campaign is reappropriated to reference lynching. Witnessing the Air Jordan logo hanging from a noose on a tree forces the viewer to contemplate the systemic violence against African Americans that is the very emblem of de-humanization, setting the stage for the persistence of racism." Nina Simone's Strange Fruit cries out in my memory and yet, I am jolted by the very contemporary, almost humorous, figure of Jordan - ball glued to his talented hand, legs spread in amazing flight, body taut and victorious. There is no way that his body dangles. It is too strong. Is the noose the noose of success, of sports as profit and entertainment, of stereotypical expectations and roles for black men, or the noose of real criminal and atrocious history that lingers and takes new forms?
    The single monochromatic brown tone photograph, SCARRED CHEST (2003) of Thomas' torso with eight Nike swooshes scarred into his chest makes me dizzy with references. I remember Edward Weston's angelic photograph of Neil's torso. I remember Naomi Klein's critical book NO LOGO. I remember the Nike sweatshops and students organizing against unfair labor practices. Simultaneously, I recognize that many of my "radical" friends wear Nikes without a second thought. City councils encourage the concept of branding to promote growth rather than encouraging engaged civic life. Branding cattle. Branding slaves. Branding athletes. I am lost. And implicated. I struggle to figure out how to talk about such complicated, dense and controversial subjects. Thomas' work demands nothing less of us and everything more.