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©picture Pierre Alivon, Paris #3
The series Paris, Souvenires du Present by French photographer Pierre Alivon is a beautiful and startling experiment in time travel. With exquisite detail, Alivon has blended the street photos of a Parisian photographer working in the early 1900s with Alivon’s own images of Paris present day.
Born in Egypt (1967), Nermine Hammam is an Egyptian photo artist, living and working between Cairo and London. As an artist, she photographs the world and then alters the images she captures: her works are intricate composites of layered images and symbols, transformed through the prism of an aesthetic that combines digital manipulation and painting to form a rich and highly personal tapestry.
©picture Nermine Hammam, www.nerminehammam.com
©George Woodman, Loie and Leger, 2009, 24x20 inches, gelatin Silver print
The painted photographs of George Woodman are ripe with mental connections, rich evidence of the artist’s talent for noticing, for witnessing, for making new wholeness. These sensuous black and whites are intense with historical allusions, visual puns, and playful self-reference. Geometric swaths of colour inhabit the photos, bringing them to life in a way that reveals Woodman’s history as a painter and his lifelong immersion in art.
Woodman began his career as a painter when he was only 13 (falling in love with one’s art teacher rarely fails to inspire). For over 30 years he was an abstract painter; he worked and reworked hexagons, tessellations, patterns—all with a very deliberate sense of colour. George Woodman (April 27, 1932 – March 23, 2017) was born in New Hampshire, he grew up in an old New England family, and while they were not artists per say, aesthetic values were prioritised. He was an art professor at the University of Colorado and lived within a community of artists. Painting was in his bones. But after his daughter Francesca’s death, Woodman himself migrated from his 30-year career of painting into photography.
As a photographer, Woodman’s work was far more engaged in the world, playful and intense with meaning. He was a master of elision. Like two mirrors reflecting back into each other, images contain images contain images.
Woodman made a new wholeness from seemingly unrelated parts and the result is both mysterious and amusing. But the union that most makes these images work is Woodman’s painterly placement of colour into his black and white photography. This chromatic shift came naturally to Woodman given his background, and he did it with great balance and care.
While Woodman was clearly not the first photographer to paint on images, he was particularly deliberate and attuned to the nuance of hue and tone because of his 30 years as an abstract painter.
His painted photographs not only blur the lines between photography and painting, they also blur the lines between colour and black and white photography.
Text by Clayton Maxwell
Eyemazing wishes you a wonderful holiday season!
©image Ossip (2023 Brutus Price winner artist)
The Eye Descending
...to bring to the surface our pure state from the primal to the Spiritual
It has been an obsessive pursuit, one that has led me to experience the ever greater discomfort brought about by the forces that serve to cultivate creativity in conformation to the machinery of art. Years of creative experimentation have shown art to be a rare element with its origins outside of my own thought, an element to be found, to be recognized, an absolute only to be marveled at. The process that guides this effort to bring this purity through to the surface has been one of relinquishing control, an attempt to bypass one's preferences, a means to make known that which we do not already know. What issues forth is a cleansed art. It resists absorption into what we have come to know as the "art world," a superficial construct shaped by market consciousness in which we act as consumers/producers in service of its appetite out of control. I look for this new found clarity that it may serve as an aspirant in rekindling within others, the experience of art's infinite nature, one unfettered by these corrupting forces.
...to extract the hand of the artist from the image, to venture outside of ourselves in order to bring inside what is not already a part of us
Striving for ego-less art is language not often heard in this century, where high profile, market-driven artists fight to see who can be the loudest amongst the shouters. This self-consciousness has been leading the viewer into an inbred funnel vision of narrower and narrower meaning; artist's obsessive attention to style and trend is now producing art about art about art. But ego-less photography is not the point here. It is simply to avoid this artistic pretension to which we are becoming so accustomed to, for it is in reciprocity to the degree of Truth in art.
The Eye Descending speaks to those who feel this discomfort, who know simply that there must be something more meaningful than what has been placed in front of them and who are struggling to break free. They need to remove themselves from the creative process and avoid expressing the "I" as we demonstrate our faith in art to reveal, or, more accurately, unveil the Absolute.
These images demand an unflinching eye; subject matter drawn at times from theaters of pain, theaters of absurdity, from states of existential anxiety. How does one resolve the seeming contradiction between its hopeful thesis and the dark nature of its content? It is the formalism that saves us. Art is a combination of form and content which, like two sticks together, can make for the light of fire. It is the form that dominates, not content. It is shape, not subject, that imparts the deepest knowledge. It is through the formal that art makes us aware of, and lets us share in, the optimism of its beatific nature. Our Faith is in form, our memory in content.
© Text and images: Joseph Mills
https://www.caesarionangel.com
©Erwin Olaf ,Dusk - Still life 02- Eyemazing spring 2009
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge d’après Le Bain dit de Gabrielle d’Estrees de Francois Clouet. Avec Tierry Fremont
If he were a character in a fairy tale, he would probably be called the “Cheery Eccentric”. Anton Solomoukha might indeed enjoy that. Fairy tales – Little Red Riding Hood amongst others – fascinate this voluble painter-turned-photographer whose work breathes irony and erotic fantasy.
Born in Kiev, in Soviet-controlled Ukraine, Solomoukha boasts of never having suffered under Communism. In 1978, at the age of 29, he nevertheless seized an opportunity to emigrate, arriving in Paris at a time when it was “absolutely impossible” he says, to leave the USSR. How did he do it? Easy. “I married a woman who was doing a doctorate in musicology in Kiev. Her mother was from Guadalupe. I told the Soviet authorities I wanted to go to France to study the plight of workers from Guadalupe. Thanks to my wife’s French nationality, the Soviets gave me permission to leave for a month, and I never went back”.
Barbara Oudiz (BO): Life for you as a student and an artist in Communist Ukraine was not particularly difficult, you say. Isn’t that surprising?
Anton Solomoukha (AS): My father was an official in the education department of the government. That’s why I always had very good relations with big wigs in the Soviet regime. As a result, I never had the slightest problem in the USSR. All I had to do was phone the police! This was in the days of Khrushchev, when there was a certain degree of openness, and so my father didn’t work in a repressive structure. On the contrary! On top of that, at the age of six, I was lucky enough to win second prize in a worldwide drawing competition.
That experience taught me that it wouldn’t be necessary for me to study math and geometry later on. I hated those subjects. So throughout my youth, I concentrated purely on art, history and literature. Under Khrushchev, we were able to talk about Picasso and other Western artists and so I was able to come in contact with Western art. This was after Stalin and before Brejnev, so the 1960s of my youth were a little like the 60s here. We listened to the Beatles, to the Rolling Stones, etc.
BO: And after your military service, you entered art school in Kiev.
AS: I studied at the best Fine Arts school in Ukraine with a fabulous professor who was very well known at the time, Tatiana Yablonskaia. I studied there from age 21 to 27, and did two doctorates. It was a very positive experience for me, even though the courses were very classic and demanding. The level was very high and the selection process was extreme. Each year they weeded out dozens of students. Seven or eight hours a day were devoted to drawing, five or six hours to painting, and in the evenings we studied Marx. Or rather Marxist-Leninism.
BO: The Socialist Realism ideal was still in full swing then. How did that affect you?
AS: Socialist Realism was actually very good for us artists! We could earn money by making official art! Each exhibition contributed to the Revolution, to industry, to the Kolkhoz, or to some other official cause and so our work was bought by the state (laughs). We were the elite!
BO: And you became a successful painter in Kiev?
AS: I have pursued an artistic career all my life. There were moments of great success. I won many second prizes in painting and drawing competitions. I always came in second, though. And I know why. It’s because a gallery didn’t represent me in those days. I was independent, so I always got the jury’s prize, but never first prize.
BO: How did you get involved in photography?
AS: I’ve only been doing photography seriously for about fours years. While my daughter was at art school, she used to criticize me and say that I spent all day with my paintbrushes and never looked around me, never noticed what was going on in the outside world. It was a joke between us, but one day I took it to heart and made a decision: everything I hated most, I would study! And since I hated photography, I decided to take it up. At first I did it especially to flirt with women. I’d make portraits of women to get to know them. I used to save the images to use later for my painting. Then the Director of the Russian Photography House – which is like the Maison Européenne de la Photo in Paris – came to my studio one evening. She looked at the dozens of slides I had taken and told me: you have to become a photographer! So I started forging my path. Over the past four years, I’ve been in at least 70 group or solo exhibitions. That’s almost an exhibition every month. For a gallery owner, representing a painter is like marriage. Whereas the relationship between a gallery owner and a photographer is like adultery. It’s just a fleeting affair, a much “lighter” relationship.
BO: Tell us about your Little Red Riding Hood?
AS: Little Red Riding Hood was a little girl with her first period. That’s what Freud says. It is her sexuality that is emerging. And all the dangers that come with sexuality. The wolf, according to some interpretations, is the lover, according to others, the father. Why does the grandmother die? Because a woman is born, i.e. Little Red Riding Hood, and an old woman dies. The wolf, the lover, replaces the grandmother.
BO: And the visit to the Louvre?
AS: For me, the spirit of Little Red Riding Hood is like that of a newborn, or like the mind of a child. It is a new and feminine spirit. It is “mature” innocence. Why did I want her to visit the Louvre? I want her to confront life through art. I believe that the concentration of life can be found in art. I’ve understood more about history by looking at paintings than by reading books! This Little Red Riding Hood goes to the Louvre and looks at the paintings, and because she’s still a child, she imagines herself as the Infante Margarita in Las Meninas by Valasquez or as Suzanne in portraits by Rubens.
BO: More often than not, you pose in these staged series.
AS: Yes, but this is not out of narcissism. Although I see narcissism as a very positive thing! It’s the beginning of Christianity. Jesus’ most important rule is “Love your neighbour as you love yourself”. I love myself a lot, luckily! Good thing, because if you don’t love yourself, you’ll never make it… It’s often more out of convenience that I pose. Sometimes I just don’t find the right model. Or I replace a model in a photo when a shoot didn’t work out as expected.
BO: You always stage your scenes against a black backdrop. Why is that?
AS: Because I’m very disorderly, I need something that is a permanent element in my photography. Black is my favourite colour. Night is my favourite time of day. In the dark, light bursts out more powerfully and forcefully. It’s like an image is bursting out against a dark sky.
BO: What new projects are in the works?
AS: There are lots and lots. I would like to do a story about the relationship between the body and food. I’d also like to re-do all the advertising photos that exist and make them resemble works by Rembrandt for example, to ridicule them. I don’t know which idea will emerge yet.
Text by Barbara Oudiz
© picture Anton Solomoukha
I bassa ©Gian Luca Groppi
Gian Luca Groppi is defined by the critics as a modern storyteller who combines sensitivity and irony, hidden by a facade of rigid seriousness", he practices art as a necessity, using mind and photographic medium to express his poetics: he collects stories and create stages, to reveal and recovery illness, emptiness and anxieties of society, cloaking them in a redeeming, rather black humor.
Gian Luca Groppi (1970, Piacenza) lives and works in Genoa, Italy
www.gianlucagroppi.blogspot.it
Rong Rong was born in Fujian province in 1968. In the late 80s, his first exposure to photography electrified him. For three years, he worked a tedious job in the family factory to save money for a camera, and in 1992, set off for Beijing. In the capital, the cheesy wedding photography that dominated most of the training programs held no interest, and he realised his savings weren't going to last long in the big city. In early 1993, he moved to a cheap, run-down flat in a rural suburb on the East side of town to save money and practice photography on his own. Soon he began running into a group of usual-looking guys, whose long hair and bohemian dress was still such an anomaly in China that he knew these were special people pursuing their ideals instead of following the lifestyle of the dominant society. One of these longhaired guys turned out to be firebrand rocker Zuoxiao Zuzhou, frontman of the avant-garde rock band No!, initiating RongRong's first photographic encounter with the Beijing East Village.
Over the next year, he became an integral member of the experimental artist colony there, participating in their gatherings, debating philosophy, art and life with the likes of artist Ai Weiwei (who frequented the Village), sedulously documenting and making art with his camera out of this bizarre and thrilling new life. His photographs of early performances of Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, and others, are considered by many the most powerful visual documentations of the era's flowering of performance art, such as the gender boundary-blurring incarnations of Fen-Ma Liuming whose stunning "female" face and "male" body made Ma Liuming an international sensation; Zhang Huan's hardcore 12 Square Meters, in which the artist smeared his naked body with squid ink and honey and sat in the ammonia-pungent, excrement-encrusted public squatter until his skin was crawling with flies, and many more. In the summer of 1994, after the police broke up one such performance happening, arresting several artists for "pornographic" art, and dispersing the artist colony, Rong Rong and several others moved to Liulitun to pursue their experimental visions. Until its demolition in 2003, the courtyard would serve as the site of an informal "art salon" and fluid community for the many who visited and found solidarity there.
Far away, while Rong Rong was hiding from the police in Beijing, a schoolgirl in Tokyo was discovering the power of photographic images. The unpronounceable truths the camera revealed both frightened and excited Inri. She began to experiment and after graduating from a photography school, she went to work as a photojournalist. In 1997, after three stifling years of portraiture, Inri quit to focus on her own photographic practice. Noteworthy pieces include her dramatic black and white series with dancer Shirakawa Naoko, and Maximax, her unconventional portraits of actress Momoko Bito. In Maximax, she created a performance situation of "intense struggle" for her subject, photographing her in a white room with red paint, and pushing the star to work herself into a frenzy as she smeared the walls and flung the dye and let herself spiral free from ego-control of her external shell and into a state of pure frenetic release. But such release eluded inri. She still felt numb, as if something was missing. When the two first met at RongRong's 1999 exhibition in Tokyo, something came to life inside Inri. His prescient Wedding Gown series, hand-painted black and white photos of a man and woman in wedding dresses, holding each other in ruins. The "unsalvageable loneliness" of his work moved Inri profoundly.
She spoke no Chinese and RongRong no Japanese. Their initial dialogue was almost solely visual—they spoke to each other through their works. For almost two years, before Inri moved to Liulitun, their love subsisted on the sharing of images and rudimentary linguistic communication. They invented a secret language of gestures, expressions, and smatterings of English, Mandarin and Japanese, and collaborated on photography art projects. Their debut collaboration took place during Inri's first visit to China, almost ten months after they met. Naked together on the Great Wall, before the majestic silence of nature, they used a timer and let the camera bear witness.
In the spring of 2001, RongRong flew to Japan for another exhibition and they got married. Following their registration they travelled to Mount Fuji and undertook the celebratory shoot off In Fujisan, against the stark snowy expanse before the great mountain. For three days and nights they filmed almost continuously, napping in their rental car and venturing naked out into the snowstorm. They endured subzero temperatures while performing their mating ritual before the "third eye" of their self-timed camera. Again and again they raced out onto the ice of a frozen lake that they prayed would hold, willing feeling into their freezing extremities with the warmth of their shared breath, and watching the falling snow erase their footsteps.
After this they would go on to share a dynamic career together, showing their work in galleries and museums across the world, with a solo show at this year's Rencontres d' Arles Photography Festival that featured selections from the Liulitun works, and the grand opening of their ambitious 1200 square meter Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing's flourishing new Caochangdi art district this July.
The end of Liulitun came in the same way as it had for the millions of other one-storey brick "pingfang" flats that met their demise before the juggernaut of China's campaign of "modernisation," sweeping the nation since the late 90s. Tract after tract of residences of the urban poor and suburban villages were razed to make way for towering monstrosities of glass, steel and concrete, mostly affordable only to the new rich. Against this social backdrop of massive transformation, the story of this courtyard dwelling's demise is hardly exceptional. And yet, perhaps it is precisely this mundane fact, and the colossal nature of the cumulative loss of a way of life, so poignantly captured in the minutia of the details presented in this sweeping quotidian epic, three-part photography series, that makes the Liulitun series resonate so deeply.
In the first part of this series, RongRong assembles a selection from the thousands of black and white images he shot of the comings and goings at the courtyard—the dinners, distinguished guests and friends; generation upon generations of their feline matriarch Da Mi's kittens; changing seasons; the morning-after convivial carnage of well-savoured, late-night, communal meals; and his own changing self-portraits against the backdrop of this vibrant life.
The second part of the series shifts from stark monochrome to luscious colour-saturated images—images that were for Inri, just arrived for the first time in China and still unable to speak her lover's language, the pictorial language she used to spell out her unpronounceable love for this strange and beautiful new world and the man who knew the silent language of her eyes. The first time I flipped through the set of books commemorating Liulitun, I was drawn to the collapsing parallels between the black and white "before" photographs from Liulitun's early years, and those taken on the verge of, during, or "after" its demolition. Yet when I slowed down and really looked at the tiny images taken by Inri—uncropped, unaltered, strips of colour slide film, laid out like still frames of some experimental film—the pieces of their life together in that space made sacred by the act of loving it came together in ways that caught me sharply somewhere midsection.
I see Liulitun now through Inri's eyes, its rambling, riot of greenery—vine tendrils reaching out into space, grasping for each other, like the new lovers united after a nine month separation of agonising, mute phone calls—and bohemian ambience offering a delicious space in which to breathe freely. I see the sensuality of their half-eaten dragon fruit, suggestive, moist and magenta-skinned; the shy declarations of their bare feet touching; Inri's wonder at the unfamiliar foods in local stores, the rows of strange meats in plastic wrap, culinary mysteries to lay on their table; red roses, hot crimson and belligerent with fragrance; carnal-ethereal moments of the sort we pray never to end, those moments of corporeal discovery in which the tangled limbs of self and other become momentarily indistinguishable, and in the eyes of one's mate you see your own soul; the journeys and homecomings; the mundane rituals of the everyday that make the string of moments hold together in the irreducible chain of subtle repetitions and variations that you come to call your life.
Somewhere in the process of viewing Inri's wordless narration of her entrance into the world of Liulitun, I find myself substituting her for me and me for you. Indeed, the power of these works in their totality lies precisely in this tender sucker punch of substitutions. Somewhere in all of it we know that these moments are so common, so ordinary, so basic that they could just as easily be our own. And it is this profound identification engendered by these images that makes them metonyms—parts that stand for other, similar parts—for our own lives and the moments we have lost and kept, some fiercely squirrelled away in the treasure house of memory.
From here we must confront the human face of what is lost in the name of social progress, and the small, individual stories of RongRong & Inri's everyday lives and losses, indeed, become metonyms—parts that stand for a whole—of the widespread phenomenon of massive demolition and reconstruction that has come to characterise contemporary China. When the couple returned from a three-month trip to Europe at the end of 2001, expanses of rubble dotted their districts. Glued to the wall nearby, an official notice informed them of the impending demolition of Liulitun. A sense of urgency permeated the months that followed and they redoubled their efforts to document their remaining time in the courtyard. On the frosty winter day when the building was to be razed, they came with 200 white lilies to perform a funeral wake for their beloved home. They perched on the gate of the courtyard with their flowers watching labourers take sledgehammers to their house. When nothing was left but splintered hunks of wood, shattered glass, and broken bricks, they huddled in the gutted out cradle of the house frame, clutching each other and their funeral bouquet like a pair of weary, bewildered refugees. Upon viewing these images of Liulitun, I think of lines from the poet E.E. Cummings; think of the places RongRong & Inri take us, places to which I travel gladly through their work; think of how the singular intimacies of their private lives—as with the private lives of all of us—are beyond any experience of my own, and yet the silences in the eye of their camera reveal the frail gestures of life, gestures which enclose us, which we approach but cannot touch, quite simply because they are too near.
Text by Maya Kovskaya, ©pictures Rong Rong & Inri
www.threeshadows.cn
Saul Leiter, was a very humble man who would rather talk about artists and writers he enjoyed than himself, he was happy to share his memories of other photographers he knew well such as Diane Arbus, or his passion for French photographers such as Boubat or Lartigue who he admired.
Back in 2009 Eyemazing encountered this wise artist in New York City and found him to be both passionate and witty when talking about his life and work.
Sarah Baxter: Was the show you had in Paris at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson the first show you had in France, and even in Europe?
Saul Leiter: Unlike a lot of other photographers, I didn't have shows and books and all these things. I always thought that books were for other people. I didn't expect to have a book. I didn't expect to have anything! I didn't know what would happen with my work. I came into the Greenberg Gallery and after a while I began to work with Margit Erb and we became good friends. She is a person who likes to do things. And I am a person who likes putting things off until tomorrow, or next year, or the following year! I had a book published on colour, Early Color (Steidl, 2006), that was the first book. And then, Monsieur Delpire—who years ago wrote me a letter saying he'd like to do a book on my work—contacted me again. And because I am not always very serious, I wrote him and said that I felt very honoured to be part of the Photo Poche collection and that when it was published, I would buy two books! [Laughs.] It's been very nice to see that work I have been doing for 60 years is receiving attention. Sometimes I think too much attention! I have a view of my own abilities, but I also admire great things done by others and I consider my own achievements not to be heroic, although some people admire it greatly. I don't like to admire myself. My father was a great scholar, he was a Rabbi, and he knew the Talmud by heart, he knew thousands of books, he was a linguist. So, compared to my father, I've never taken myself too seriously. He was part of a world of great scholars. And in some part of my brain, there's a great admiration for scholarship and learning. My father hoped that I would be a scholar but I betrayed him! I didn't do what he wanted me to. So sometimes I look at myself the way he looked at me… With disapproval! [Laughs.]
SB: How did you decide to become a photographer?
SL: I never decided anything. I studied in theological schools then I left home and I came to New York and I never finished the university, I never finished certain things. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how I would live. My mother sent me money, kept me alive for many years. Eventually I was friendly with Richard Pousette-Dart who was a painter. Then I began to do photography. I would occasionally make some money. I'm very lucky: I don't remember my early struggles! My life is lost in a mist, in a fog... I would occasionally keep little bits of diaries but then, when I moved, they disappeared and different things got lost.
SB: Isn't the type of photography you make a way of keeping a trace of things?
SL: No. I had no philosophy about photography. Some people have a vision, an idea. I think, for instance, that at a certain point Diane Arbus was out to explore the strange aspects of life, maybe. For example, she writes in her book that she was in England and she hadn’t found anything weird yet. She was looking for weirdness. I never had a specific approach to photography. There are many photographers that I like. I love Kertész and Atget. I like Brassaï, Boubat and the French photographers. But I was just bumbling along [laughs]. I didn't know what was going to happen. Then Henry Wolf at some point gave me work in Harper's Bazaar. I also had some things at shown at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in the show of Steichen's, and at the time, I didn't appreciate that it was a very special thing to have my work shown at the Museum of Modern Art, because I never had a sense of a career. Having a sense in a career can be very important to an artist. Some people have it, and some people don't. And I definitely don't! My friend Henry once said to me that I had a talent… for ignoring opportunities!
SB: You did fashion photography…
SL: I did fashion photography, I did advertising… I tried to earn a living, and was not always successful! I had a studio at 156 5th Avenue for a number of years. And I worked for different people and for magazines. Some of my favourite pictures I did with Soames for Nova, which is an English magazine that I liked a lot. And the Art Director of Harper's Bazaar saw my pictures for Nova and said to me: “Why don't you do something like that for us?” So I gave her an idea a few weeks later and she had forgotten what she had told me and she said: “We can't do that! We're Harper's Bazaar!” and that was it! Sometimes I made some money. Sometimes I was very impractical. I bought prints, I bought certain things. I love the works of Bonnard and Vuillard and owned some. I also had a little collection of Japanese prints. I think that the Japanese explored many ideas long before Western artists ever did.
SB: You made photo portraits as well?
SL: I did them for myself. Magazines at different points had different ideas of what I was. The New York Times gave me work as a children’s photographer. Everybody had a different idea. Well, Avedon did portraits. If something needed to be done, he did it! So there were areas of photography that I might have enjoyed working in, but I wasn't considered proper.
SB: But you did also a lot of street photography?
SL: I did that for myself as well. That was personal work. I enjoyed doing that. The street for me is almost like a ballet. They are all these people moving around, freely, aware of each other and unaware of each other, and twirling and swirling around… And of course you don't have to deal with anybody, you don't have to ask for permission. Although I think it's become more difficult to be a street photographer. But I did things that I liked doing. I'm going through my work now and I discover things that I never printed, that I think are maybe interesting. Sometimes I didn't have the money to print everything. And sometimes I didn't see. Sometimes a photograph needs time. Time is sometimes on the side of the photographer. What seems to be prosaic and ordinary in a given moment sometimes, with the passage of time, becomes exotic.
SB: Some people have discovered your work only lately.
SL: Maybe I should have been more organised! A lot of my negatives were destroyed in a flood and there were two fires where my files were kept, and the fireman came in and sprayed the place and a number of things were badly damaged. But I figured that if I had everything I did it would be terrible; at least I don't have to deal with all of it! Pasternak said something like one should lose a quarter of one's work. I think I lost more, and I think that's good. People who keep everything amaze me. I keep a lot and my house is a mess, a disgrace… I'm ashamed to have anyone come in now! (Ha, but not really.)
SB: You did some of the prints yourself?
SL: I don't print right now. I did a lot of the little prints that are shown at the Howard Greenberg gallery, those are mine. Sometimes I try to get a look or a feeling in a photograph. It's very difficult. When you do a photograph, then someone makes a print, someone reproduces it, there are all these steps in the course of which whatever it was originally gets lost. So if you work, let's say for magazines, you get used to that.
SB: You coloured some of your prints?
SL: Yes, you are referring to the painted photographs. I have different versions of why I started doing that; I don't know anymore which is true. I once had a print on a counter and I was painting and paint got on it and I think that's how I started to paint photographs… But these days I'm not sure if it's true or if I just made it up!
Text by Sarah Baxter, ©EYEMAZING foundation
©pictures Saul Leiter, Courtesy Saul Leiter Foundation, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York and Gallery Fifty One, Antwerp
The American artist Saul Leiter (1923–2013) became enchanted by painting and photography as a teenager in Pittsburgh. After he relocated to New York City in 1946, his visionary imagination and tireless devotion to artistic practice pushed him to become one of the iconic photographers of the mid-twentieth century. An innate sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student of art of all kinds, and he retained his spirit of exploration and spontaneity throughout his long career, in both his fashion images and his personal work.
www.saulleiterfoundation.org
Researching the work of Sofía López Mañán (b. 1982) is like being submerged in an intimate journal that lets you witness someone else’s life through details and fragments of presences. She is an artist who develops each one of her projects by getting involved on all levels. Travels, spiritual retirements, living with foreigners, researching deserted places, dialogues, and films are what define her art not only as photographs but also, as performance works.
López Mañan’s began producing work in 2007. Her body of work includes the series Propiedad Privada, Honduras, Monoblock, Anónimos and Memoria de las ánimas de un bosque. Through them, López Mañán captures nostalgia, oblivion, appropriation, intimacy, indolence and abandonment.
The most obvious influences in López Mañan’s work are Gordon Matta-Clark, Félix González-Torres, Sophie Calle and Francesca Woodman. These are the artists who showed López Mañán the path to her art. Showed her how to examine identity and intimacy by making the subject present only through untidy covers and bed sheets, a trace in a pillow, or maybe a ray of light filtering through brick walls covering a window.
Anónimos (2011) is a series of self-portraits. An intimate compendium where the figures’ individuality remains hidden. In these pictures, the artist strives to give expression and capture her own self while remaining, essentially, anonymous.
“Seeing myself as an anonymous person means to leave my individuality. To multiply and mirror myself allows me to become the person portrayed for a short while. I became anonymous to express the emotions of universal characters. Anonymous of me, myself. Anonymous, because it is always easier to talk about someone else than myself. I speak of myself through photographs where characters are nameless. A character without a face. No characters. Anonymous, because what I create is meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted as many times as necessary while being contemplated. The pieces are created, allowing the same photo to reflect any encapsulated emotion. It is me, it was me, but it can also be someone else. A faceless image with the sole intention of engulfing the viewer thereby positioning the viewer as the portrayed,” she says.
“A girl beneath a fur coat, covered by bell-shaped leaves. The individuality remains hidden and insoluble. On a rock among a field of flowers, two figures meet, absorbed one into the other. At last, the photographic unfold of the female and threatening figure. The Jurisprudence, the always Nuda Veritas,”
Text by Laeticia Mello, ©picture Sofía López Mañán
The story of Chris Sky Earnshaw would be a sad one if I did not know him to be such a spirited man, even at this stage of life when it seems he has next to nothing. Without a doubt, he is a masterful photographer, one whose work has been lost to all up until now. As an artist he is nearly anonymous, and as a human being he hovers inches away from a destitute life. To offer him a hand, to save his work for others, is all that one can do to express one’s gratefulness for what truly enriches our lives.
Earnshaw has maintained an extraordinary and obsessive passion for documenting the disappearing architecture he has loved in Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia, since ten years of age (he’s now 57). On the edge of homelessness, he is bi-polar, a reformed alcoholic, hanging out at the local mental health centre, panhandling at times to save himself, to get through another day—the son of loving parents whose father suffered alcoholism and mother severe bouts of mental illness. He had been coming to me for months with handfuls of Polaroid prints with rubber bands around them, their significance obscured by the sheer chaos he brought to presenting them. Their lack of pretension was what kept the eye but I must confess that his brilliance was not recognised at that point in time. As a fellow photographer I simply felt great empathy for his situation and offered to help, to organise his work for him but with the stipulation that he bring me everything first. Three thousand five hundred images later, in the form of Polaroid and Kodak Instamatic drugstore prints, I was confronted with the undeniable fact that he was one of the most beautiful photographers I had ever come across, one who simply never learned to print. I have now completed a master set of gravure-like prints – 750 in number, with the promise to the artist to devote myself to their publishing, their exhibiting and eventual housing in a permanent collection, never to sell the prints, but to gift them…for others. Earnshaw is an artist whose all-encompassing vision is internal at the source, flowing through his hands in whatever medium he has chosen to work in, which includes drawing, painting, music, poetic writing, as well as acting, a member of the guild as a younger man. Savant-like in his intelligence and memory for the images he has taken, he is able to speak in depth of the great architects of his time and place, as well as of the details on the building and the destruction he witnessed of their beautiful works.
To hold in a photograph what is precious, the delicate nature of what is passing, what is transitory, led Earnshaw to document the great Mississippi bluesman as well, who, like the buildings falling down around him, he witnessed being lost to us at an alarming pace. Whether turned toward a building being wrecked, or a soul being lost, Earnshaw knew instinctively not to interfere with the camera’s ability to see clearly, and in return the profound nature of these men and women was captured with the same great beauty at the heart of his architectural work. His is the true spirit, and his focus and artistic passion have never waned. To grasp mentally his entire body of work, is to witness something rare and increasingly precious in our time, as the artist’s ability to maintain a succinct vision over a life-time wanes, replaced by short term trends at the expense of the long view.
I wrestle with Earnshaw’s work, having photographed the same streets, at the same time that he did with a camera, for I know now that, after 45 years, anonymity was our greatest friend, there being reciprocity between anonymity and clarity. But I also know as well that we do not bring these works forth only to be lost and forgotten to the world, that we have a responsibility towards the things we create, to insure their survival. So as artists we offer each other a hand held out, we try to save the work, that which truly enriches our lives. It is what sustains for it is our connection to the truth of things.
In the beginning of Bob Fosse’s 1979 film All that Jazz an eager, hopeful, young man dressed in black, tries his best to keep up with the auditioning group of young dancers, but is hopelessly out of sync with those around him. The perfection of this scene as metaphor for Earnshaw’s life, out of sync with the world around - always first to be rejected, lies in the fact that this young man in the movie actually is Earnshaw, a budding actor at the time.
It will always disturb me to know that I did not recognise Earnshaw’s beauty as an artist at first, that I rejected him at times in my own way, out of my own shortcomings, as others have. So close to being lost. How can that happen? What have we actually lost through our own inability to see past the awkward human surface, and might it be that our finest artists have never been known to us?
Text by Joseph Mills
©All picture: Chris Earnshaw, https://www.chrisearnshaw.com/
The Go More ©Gerard Bertrand
EYEMAZING wishes you happy holidays, and warm wishes for the New Year!
Searcher
A black widow spider the size of a motorcycle feeds on the head of a bathing beauty. From the nose up, the face of a high-ranking, pipe-smoking colonel dissolves in curdling clouds of smoke. The close-up of an elegant woman, her head resting in both hands, hides her gaze from the viewer; instead of hypnotic eyes and painted eyebrows, four human toes appear above her nose and curl inward to create a forehead of a different kind—of a callous and callus kind. Such images or apparitions are not totally unexpected. Anyone searching for knowledge in the dark forest of schizophrenia discovers enchanted ambiguities and vivid horrors there. But American artist Joseph Mills represents a notable exception to the rule.
Several decades ago, during a psychosis-ridden period in his life, Mills discovered something entirely different in the forest of his mind: an enduring sense of harmony. Whether because of or despite his lengthy hospitalisation period, he came to feel in harmony with himself—and with his art: a substantial body of photographic work that includes an acclaimed street-photography collection. This work reaches a second, aesthetic height with its collection of provocative photomontages. In the distant past, Mills arrived at one of his key realisations while creating his early photomontages: “Every object is meaningful, and every individual is a glorious creation.” This oddly inspiring idea (also a private credo) remains no less relevant when studying the photomontages that Mills creates today.
Basically, deeming all things meaningful and all people glorious creations was meant largely on a visual level, and within this double-notion lived and lives the riddle of form versus content, which Mills has regular artistic dealings with in the present. For certain art genres and artists, reacting to form and content can be far more inspiring than the most exciting subject matter. It can function as the Yin and Yang of the artistic moment or—to quote Mills: “As two sticks rubbed together and made to ignite into great art.” In any case, under Joseph Mills’ command, especially visible in his photomontages, his sensitivity towards form and content culminates in dreamlike spectacles as otherworldly as they are indescribable. His images dare the sanity-loving viewer to look too closely or too long. They epitomise Mills’ unique brand of humour, formerly considered a counter-humour in France, where it was first coined “humour noir” by Surrealist theoretician André Breton. In addition to his black humour, Mills offers viewers his brilliant archiving skills, which extract pertinent impulses from the worlds of art, culture, and history, and elegantly defile them for the sake of a greater psychological cause. His photomontages depict situations that cannot logically exit. Yet viewers find them vaguely familiar—while they generate unfamiliar questions: Can one’s eyes hear visions? Can one experience fear, anxiety, and dread to the fullest because of pasted together scraps? Can parts of photographs create complete mental realities?
Returning to Mills’ style-defining past for a moment—to the portrait of the artist as a young schizophrenic—he arrived at the previously mentioned harmony by way of countless real-life observations: keenly studied mounds of trash, street scenes, stray objects, people, and an inestimable number of photographic reproductions, all of which he came to appreciate as a “treasure of data.” Then like now, when so much information is stored, gathered together, arranged, and utilised in the scenarios of photomontages, Mills produces image-worlds in which the vaguely familiar is transformed into the exquisitely estranged and horrifying. That these images instigate a mental theatre of their own design qualifies as one of the principal achievements of his photomontages.
His visual constructions suggest the history of the photomontage, especially those periods championed by the likes of Max Ernst, Man Ray, Raoul Hausmann, and various Berlin Dadaists of the 1920s. (The word “suggest” is important here.) In addition, it helps to remember that the history of the photomontage is in and of itself a montage: a mix of influences added one to the other, dating back as far as the beginning of World War I, born of photographic manipulations popular in the Victorian era, and finally developed to an art by Berlin Dadaists of the 1920s and Parisian Surrealists. The slightest awareness of Mills’ collage-forefathers greatly strengthens the reception of his work. In addition, his expertise as a maker of photomontages inspires as much praise as envy. His images sleepwalk through Victorianism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and boldly take up residence in the here and now. They imply a chameleonic gift and superpower of the mind’s eye; they conduct experiments on and with the unknown, and they leave viewers moved and disturbed by what they see: visions as beautiful as they are terrifying. This is the famous “treachery of images” at work. Still, Mills’ photomontages combine qualities from the worlds of surrealism and dada without residing in either one. He refrains from calling himself a surrealist, and cryptically said once that he is “more of a realist”—a realist by default—for not being a nihilist, and for considering himself an existentialist in his youth. Mills evokes art periods and methods of the past and calmly surpasses them—by mounting completed artworks to found objects, by reworking their surface qualities, by using 20th-century scraps to shape timeless mental-scenarios, and by expressing modern fixations with the body, sexual cravings, and human suffering. Viewed in its entirety, his work suggests the past—it neither respects nor emulates it—and displays a seething view of modern life, which corresponds with Mills’ twofold private history, a history both distressing and creative.
It hardly surprises that Mills and his art thrive on the twofold or, more accurately, on a duality. His life and art have always been influenced by dualities: illness and health, disorder and harmony, visibility and invisibility, interiors and exteriors, as well as the real and the imagined. Even his medium, the photomontage, is a continuous pasting together of elements two at a time. Thinking along these lines turns the past and the present into two more of his indispensable tools. The effects of the past and the present exist in those photomontages whose surfaces show aging simulations—from their varnished coatings to the creative process through which they reach their conclusions using second and third-generation photographic materials. Also, for appearing so visually mute—as though stills from a silent (horror) movie—Mills’ creations are mentally boisterous enough to challenge any viewer’s peace of mind.
One last duality worth mentioning is the word and the image. In art history, wherever visions common to surrealist thinking are involved, a corresponding literature or writing tends to exist as well. In Mills’ case, this so-called “literature” is found in the titles of his photomontages. These represent interesting additions to his work. During the early 2000s, his images were frequently left untitled. Today, as with any (genuine or fake) Surrealist work of art, each photomontage is psychologically extended by a title that defines or entertains. Some of these evince the wit of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This Is Not A Pipe) or Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Yet Mills could have easily written Photomontage Nr. X, and opted for a touch of Beckett, whose only film production was entitled Film. Instead, the titles of Mills’ photomontages are crass or affecting: The Daughter of Eve for the image of a praying girl-woman with a penis-like object protruding from her pantyhose; The Vase for a deconstructed and reassembled nude transformed to a spectacle of V-shapes topped with branches and blossoms; and The Battle for the Bulge for the still of a Hollywood dance number showing a Gene Kelly type being simultaneously yanked to the left and right by his two female dance partners, while an upside-down GI lights a cigarette on his head. Here, Mills declares himself a fan of subtlety: his title erotically mocks the correct title, “The Battle of the Bulge”—the infamous 1944/1945 German offensive whose goal was to split the British and American allied line in half—and the image repeats the other battle, the real battle, by having two women play at splitting a fake Gene Kelly in half.
For all intents and purposes, however, the strongest duality remains form and content. These two aspects of any Mills image appear to reign simultaneously (even tumultuously) in his photomontages. Still, under closer inspection, form is the more important of the two. This reveals itself no sooner the eye grows accustomed to the arrangement of pseudo-narrative elements: form is more of a tool, mouthpiece, and doorway. And the degree to which the doorway of form opens up always coincides with the photomontage’s effectiveness. In The Cross Dresser, where Mills’ usual constructed reality feels more like a portrait than it does an invented situation, the figure either dressing or undressing demonstrates a spectacle of forms. Based on the interplay of a human torso and its mismatched (criss-crossed or cross-dressed) lower half facing in the wrong direction, what could be a Chaplin-esque ordeal—how to escape from the clutches of a pesky long-sleeved shirt—becomes the statuesque depiction of a deformed creature with podgy human legs. This playfully, discomforting image conjures up a fear of suffocation along with the assorted mishaps awaiting anyone who dresses in private. Here too, as so often happens in Mills’ photomontages, form follows form alone. A greater display of this lurks in The Dance of Marsyas, where the artist’s slight of collage-hand goes so far as to rewrite Greek mythology. Marsyas, the satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest, is not shown to viewers in one of his better-known guises—as nude, bearded, hanging down, or holding a flute. Instead, Mills altogether denies him his maleness and turns the musical contest into a sombre after-dance. This particular Marsyas, formed by overlapping photo-segments and textures—an image created for EYEMAZING Editor, Susan Zadeh, who was a dancer before becoming an art director—epitomises an eerie sense of grace. Nevertheless, what we actually see is a melancholy, one-eyed ballerina whose elongated, unalike arms are held over a downward-tilting tutu. As usual, the careful arrangement of recognisable and unrecognisable elements effortlessly trumps content. But more than the power of form takes over. In a creative constellation of this kind only one thing is ever greater than form: the Surrealist staple of chance. Why is the skeletal structure of the ballerina’s left arm showing? Why does she wear a tilting wreath of thrones and not a diamond-studded Swan Lake tiara? These and other unanswerable questions contribute to the masterly ambiguity likewise the artist’s signature achievement.
By chance as well as deliberately, Mills creates at an artistic height in his photomontages. In the act, he feels brought in touch, he says, with a creativity not his own, and with a strongly religious or spiritual experience, which transpires outside himself. Allowing this “outside himself experience” to reach its own conclusion leaves Mills not only clueless, but also in a state that forces him to relinquish all control over the moment. Like someone subjected to a local anaesthesia, he remains aware of every visual impulse in his vicinity, but his thinking seems to be lost and wandering, forever in search of something. Most significantly, while this state robs him of his bearings, it never actually disturbs his grip on his methods, or lessens the satisfaction he receives during the creative process. This inner agreement (or disagreement) has remained unchanged throughout Joseph Mills’ more than four decades of creative work, documenting, as it were, highly believable but nonexistent facts. In the process, he constantly discovers and rediscovers a purity of expression, and repeatedly applies it to his work.
In turn, the vulnerability inherent in Mills’ methods and his indifference to any established market-mentality qualify as his greatest “art weapons.” They aid his fervent acts of selection and their impossible to anticipate outcome. They help him to ignore the conventional world in favour of exploring the boundaries of an alternative realm made up of changing densities. Ultimately, they allow him to put one of Max Ernst’s axioms to the test: “When an artist finds himself, he is lost.” Even today, Joseph Mills continues to give a face to the underlying suspense in the irrational and the purely imagined, and he remains a relentless searcher.
TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON
Picture: The Callous Woman, ©Joseph Mills
https://www.caesarionangel.com
The Light of What Cannot Last
One species of animal is born to love the sunshine for less than a day. It comes from the order called, Ephemeroptera, but we know it better as the mayfly. If we could imagine, for a moment, what such an existence might feel like, what it might look like, we might come close to understanding the photography of Shidomoto Youichi. In the poem, “Mayflies”, Richard Wilbur sketches his own sense of what such a brief dance with daylight means. He writes:
Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they—
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.
Likewise, Shidomoto captures that separateness between one’s own mortality and the light that will survive it. To look at these photographic mayflies is to share in Shidomoto’s effort. We are “joyfully to see” as much as we possibly can—to embrace, if only for a moment, all those things which cannot last.
Japanese photography in general shares a unique relationship with the ephemeral. As John Szarkowski and Yamagishi Shōji remind us, “All countries have changed greatly in the past quarter century, but perhaps none has changed so radically or with such dizzying speed as Japan.”1 Shidomoto, a photographer whose native Tokyo embodies the very meaning of radical change, employs this tradition beyond its historical momentum. One sees right away how change not only characterises the atmosphere in which Shidomoto works, but it defines the atmosphere of his own inward vision. Change is the muse—a way of seeing and understanding anew, at every moment, the fragile nature of all life’s lovely idiosyncrasies: the splash of a wave, the dead skin at the tips of our toes, even the cityscape which can disappear entirely in the light of the horizon.
It might sound odd to associate the phrase, “joyfully to see,” with Shidomoto whose darker images of fear and isolation feel more like the “night closed in.” But Shidomoto celebrates the discovery, the unearthing of the vision, the joy of finally seeing that which has been hidden, no matter the torment of the subject itself. Mined from the lightless strata of his own memory, the images collected here are less often a matter of creation than laborious excavation. Shidomoto describes his process as a kind of “archaeological digging.” Memories, long-buried beneath “fear, disgust, rancour, hate, stress, bondage and powerlessness,” begin to surface as he peels back the layers of his mind, photograph by photograph. Each picture, therefore, is a witness to Shidomoto’s amazement, as the dead resurrects itself over and over as if from nowhere.2
Shidomoto’s affair with light is unusual. Literally translated, the Japanese word for photograph, kōga, means “light picture.” Perhaps a bit too simplified, the Japanese opted for a more philosophical word, shashin, or “copy of truth.” Both words apply. But Shidomoto approaches light in such a way that renders truth indistinguishable from its illuminations. Light, in this work, has a life of its own. It breathes. It bends. It dances. It is a body unto itself. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Japanese photography, as the historian Anne Tucker tells us, is the way it shows a kind of confidence in itself—a “self-realisation.” Shidomoto carries this tradition a step further. His striking contrasts, his excavations of light from the rockbed of lost memory, invoke a realization of the kōga’s mayflies.3
When I came to this understanding of kōga, the way I looked at Shidomoto’s photography transformed completely. Brainchild of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the performance art known as Butoh (“dance of darkness”) inspired the great photographer of darkness, Eikoh Hosoe. The power of Eikoh’s and Butoh’s art stems from the very fear, disgust, rancour, hate, stress, and powerlessness which lives in the shadows of repressed memory. Consequently, Butoh dancers move like marionettes, contorted and faltering beneath Death’s fingers. Butoh is the image of light’s cancer and bruise, its final death rattle. Shidomoto begins where Butoh ends. What slips away from us into the dance of darkness, a new dance with light revives.
Nothing slips away more easily than youth. One of the most difficult things to write about or photograph is children. Either the stony layers of adulthood’s hardships bury the child within us or we simply gush with sentimentality over a childhood that never really existed. But sentimentality simply does not apply to Shidomoto’s work. TV glorifies the interested child, the child who dives head first into the world of responsibility and maturity. But who was ever that child? Look at the boy tucked too snugly into the swimmer’s cap. He stands at the edge of the pool reluctantly, knowing full well what is about to happen. If we do not jump, we get pushed in. The beauty of childhood is oftentimes the beauty of sheer annoyance. We know this to be true, but so rarely do we see it expressed with such honesty in the visual arts. In perhaps one of the greatest close-ups of a child ever photographed, Shidomoto captures this quintessential mood. Peeking from behind a shadow, the boy glares into the camera’s lens as if to overpower the permanence of photography with the indignant fury of his own light. Or else he fights, as we see him elsewhere sparring with shadows. Fight as he may, however, his 24 hours tick by, as Shidomoto shows the boy, finally, sagged and weary on his grandmother’s shoulder—a powerful moment of beginnings and endings.
Between the faces of youth and the furrows of old age, Shidomoto captures the mayfly-life of the body—that “lamp” of form, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once called it, “suffused with brilliance from inside” which bursts forth like a star. Throughout this collection, the female torso turns nova. Sitting in a chair, relaxed with arms crossed, Shidomoto defines the sinuous contour of a woman’s body in shadowy negative. Without the vague silhouette of her breasts and the brushed suggestion of her forearms, her light would simply blind us. But she holds the sun back within herself. In another image of the sitter, the stark pubis strikes the eye with Dionysian force, borne from the “dark centre where procreation flared.”
Obsessed with angels, Rilke would have adored Shidomoto’s seraphic mayflies. In a photograph that possessed me the moment I saw it, the pronounced ribcage of a woman undulates from the bottom left corner toward the peak of the shoulder blade. Above the shoulder, a lock of black hair severs the body from the head. Already the daylight fails. Already the body falls apart, “thin on love and barley,” as Basho once put it. Her face looks up and leftward, almost behind her, where something that used to be attached to the shoulder is now gone. Or else she waits for its return. We can read in her face an instinctual knowing beyond the dance of darkness. Her gaze is pure flight.
Part of what distinguishes the faces of Shidomoto’s subjects is the intense subtlety of their expressions. We see it in our fighting boy. We see it in the face of the angel who has lost her wings. Such evocative countenance makes the smile of Mona Lisa look like a mime’s stupid grin. More suggestive than all the impassioned ladies of Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey, Shidomoto portrays a woman with eyes closed, her head against the wall, her lips slightly parted in the ecstasy of Bernini’s Teresa. The legacy of great Japanese photography belongs to its subtle ecstasies. Even in the 1850s when photography first reached the long-closed borders of Japan, it boasted the likes of Shima Kakoku and his wife, Shima Ryū, who captured understated moments radiant with love, anger, sadness, and joy. Mastery of this tradition continues in Shidomoto’s art.
Able to manipulate that subtlety in ways which animate even the inanimate, Shidomoto brings his kōga to still life and architecture. When selecting the images for this book, I found myself gripped by the most everyday visions. An ashtray, a straw, a plate, a saltshaker and napkin coalesce into the skyline of some future metropolis, elegant in its geometries and reflections. Whereas the actual cityscapes revert to something even more elemental: pure form, pure light. Ultimately, the many inspired forms of Shidomoto’s photography achieve a difficult balance. Without light, without darkness, no form exists. Shidomoto’s love for what cannot last depends on both, not matter how deeply buried, how painfully retrieved, how brief their flights of ecstasy.
TEXT BY STEVEN BROWN
©picture: Shidomoto Youichi
©Marina Weigl, from the series Horse and I, published in EYEMAZING 2011, http://marinaweigl.com/about/
Through his sensual, multi-panelled panoramic photographs, David Hilliard tells stories—stories about desire, fathers and sons, masculinity unfolding, relationships that elude. This body of work, is his most autobiographical project; through a very tender, observant lens, he looks at his relationships with his parents; the anxieties of being a boy who doesn’t thrill at boyish things; the longing of a young man; and the mature awareness that we will all have to say goodbye to the people we love the most, no matter how hard we may embrace them now. With different focal points throughout and an almost tactile emotional sensibility, the photos portray a beautiful, richly nuanced world: one that Hilliard both perceives and invents through his narrative images.
Clayton Maxwell: Because your panoramic images are composed of three separate photos, they seem to embody the ever present tension between the individual and the collective, both in the actual structure of the images and in their content; the subjects often seem to be both alone and together. Can you tell me more about this?
David Hilliard: I’m really pleased that you made that observation. It’s always been important to me that my photographs, both in form and content, possess a bit of that “separation”. Each photograph represents “a moment”, yet together represent a continuum; a linear narrative of sorts. In the case of the work with my father (Rock Bottom) for example, I wanted to represent our similarities such as our shared genetic pool, our bluebird tattoos and a connection to nature…and maybe even a bit of discontentment. At the same time, we’re very different people. Which is why I chose to create that middle panel in the triptych that for me represents a kind of distance; a division of sorts. There’s a divide created by the distance in the water, the separation of the images, and the fact that the photographs are actually made at different moments. Yet there’s the mirroring of the clouds on the water, another uncontrollable parallel. I’m at once the best and the worst of him. I try to change what I can but remain helpless to control other aspects of our parallel lives. I can never fully separate or control my destiny. None of us can. It’s kind of like determination verses determinism. It’s my hope that the photo remains universal in its message.
CM: In your panoramas, you play with multiple focal points and depth of field, thereby directing the attention of the viewer much like a film director. How did this photographic device evolve for you? What do you think it communicates? What do you hope the viewer experiences?
DH: My early passion as an undergraduate was film making. I wanted to tell stories. Yet as much as I loved film and video I was continually left slightly disappointed at its inability to linger and stare in quite the same way that a photograph could. I also have to confess that I was at times a bit overwhelmed by the expectations to say something larger in a film. I was taken by a photographs ability to depict slices of topics that I was interested in talking about; each one being a sentence of sorts. Yet I wanted to challenge the static nature of the photograph by linking them together and activating them; playing them off of one another. So I then began making linear panoramas with a view camera. I began using it in much the same way I was using the video camera…moving across my subject matter, shifting the focus from image to image and displaying the photographs side by side. It was as if I found a way to take the best of film and photograph and join them together in a kind of hybrid studio practice. I was also excited that I could, within one piece comprised of various images, possess a still life, a portrait and even a landscape. It’s a bit decadent.
CM: Your images feel narrative, as if we are stepping into stories with beginnings and ends we can only guess at. Does each of these images gesture towards your own personal stories? If so, I’d love to know more. For example, Water Breaking and Hope both show fathers and sons out on an adventure; they carry the tone of father instructing son in some manly pursuit. Do these connect to a childhood memory for you?
DH: The images do have beginnings and ends of course. Some are more resolved than others; some illustrate, others joke, while another might be a lamentation of sorts. In my newest body of work, Being Like, there are quite a few father and son images. There are images of myself with my own father. In one we’re hugging. In another we’re worlds apart. Images such as Water Breaking and Hope were made while I was working on a project in Alaska and found myself continually confronted by fathers and sons together in the landscape. It may have been my state of mind at the time; I was travelling alone for quite a few days and the constant dad/boy sightings began to work on my psyche in some strange way. These men were teaching their boys to hunt, fish and do all other kinds of stuff that I never really wanted to do or was pressured to explore. I noticed that some of the boys seemed to be enjoying it more than others. Water Breaking shows a really young boy almost hiding behind his father while birds and fish go crazy in the water and starfish surround them on the beach. They both appear taken aback by all that’s happening. In Hope, this sweet boy holds a handful of halibut fish yet appeared miles away for the potential joyful experience of having caught so much. He reminded me of myself, so many years ago, just trying to get through certain expected rituals so that I could go off and to the strange and wonderful things that I truly wanted to do. Of course, this is all my own baggage that’s running through my mind as I’m looking at them through my camera. Who knows why the boy looks the way he does. That’s what I love about a photograph…it tells and it asks at the same time.
CM: What’s going on in Paul Coerced? He looks like he is walking home from some wild black tie party in the country, the title, his beauty and his state of undress suggesting that perhaps he was coerced into something sexy. What’s going on here?
DH: It’s funny, I made that photograph as part of a project for a charity fundraiser. I selected the model, Paul, from the Ford Modelling website. He not only was beautiful but also possessed a sullen quality that I was really taken with. I later found out that he was only 17 and just starting out as a model. The night before the shoot he had gone to his high school senior prom in Escanaba Michigan. The next day before his journey to the Detroit area where the photograph was made, his mother called me and asked if they (his parents) should throw his tuxedo in the car as well. I loved the idea, I loved that his mother was collaborating with me and that poor Paul had to get up the morning after his prom and model. It was all too strange. In the end I feel I made a pretty sexy image of a young man, potentially post coital and beaten (he’s got a split lip and blood drop on his torso) who was perhaps forcibly ousted from his dates home…or something like that. Again, I want it to be an open-ended narrative. It was my first time working with him. I’ve since returned to Michigan and travelled up to Escanaba to work with both Paul and his family. It’s a pretty amazing place and I’ve been lucky enough to have been embraced by his family and allowed in. Access is always a gift.
CM: Are there any other back-stories about your photos you’d like to share?
DH: I’ve probably told you too many already. I will say this. I do love that each photo I make seems to possess some kind of back-story that exists independently from what the photograph actually represents. I love “the event” of making photographs. I’m usually at my happiest when I creating something that feels smart and resolved in general. I think every artist has these experiences.
CM: So many of these images feel drenched with the desire for connection and intimacy, be it emotional or sexual, but a desire unfulfilled. That sensibility is particularly strong in images like Boys Tethered, Sought, and Rock Bottom. Why is this a prominent leitmotif?
DH: In this case maybe it’s not that complicated. I think that many of us, myself included, are continually searching for “something”, be it love, friendship, community, family, sexual fulfilment or material gain. As a gay man, much of my life, especially in my early years, was spent searching for an identity that was acceptable to both society and myself. Sex has always been complicated and often dangerous. It goes without saying that often times when we finally get what we think we need…it leaves wanting for more. It’s our nature.
CM: Hug, on the other hand, is one photo in this series that shows physical contact between the subjects—the distance between people is physically bridged for a moment. Would you consider that photo a departure from the others in this series?
DH: Maybe within this series. I’ve made plenty of photographs that depict physical connections. But you are right in the case of this newest work, in pointing out that for the most part subjects are often alone or disconnected. In Hug I made the conscious decision to create a moment where I’m actually holding on to my father. In recent years his health has been a bit shaky and it occurred to me that I never really made a photograph where I’m holding him…and I’d be remiss if I didn’t and one day he was gone. To be honest, although we’re hugging, the photo is really about my being alone. It’s a pretty sad image.
CM: Your father is the man in Rock Bottom with the bird tattoos on his chest. He has been a subject in your photographs over many years. Is it really odd to work with your dad, particularly in a state of undress? Do you think that the physical act of photographing someone can help create the intimacy that so many of the characters in your images seem to long for?
DH: It’s not odd at all to work with my father. It’s actually something that we both quite enjoy and take quite seriously. It’s intimate for sure, but we’ve never gone past our underwear…that might get awkward. Yes, in the earlier years, especially while I was a graduate student, my father didn’t quite know what to make of my desire to depict him so obsessively. But he did it. The guy loves me and bottom line is that he’s always wanted me to be happy. He doesn’t always understand who I am and my decisions in life, but he’s in the game with me and supports me for the most part. He’s still amazed that anyone would ever be interested looking at, let alone purchase, a photograph depicting his life. Ultimately I think he’s flattered. We don’t really have many deep conversations around the subject. The day we made the photograph Rock Bottom it was very cold; one of the last days before the leaves changed colour. We were in Maine and it was pretty cold. I desperately wanted to make this photo and he knew it. The man sat in the water, on a lumpy rock, for way too long while I fussed with my equipment. In fact, he kept telling me to slow down so I don’t f--- up the picture. He wanted me to get want I wanted. I made his portrait and then he had to stand in the water and make multiple portraits of me. It was a true collaboration. I’m really glad to have made this picture. Over the years making pictures with my father has been a very personal and intimate father and son activity that for sure has been meaningful. It has brought us closer together.
CM: There are several images, like Mary Remembering and Lickety Split, that seem less about longing and more about the activities and nostalgia of old age. Why have you been drawn to photographing the elderly?
DH: It’s not so much about my desire to embrace the geriatric crowd but rather a newer project where I’m photographing my mother and her community down in Florida. My parents divorced in the 1970s and have since taken very different paths in their lives. My mother is a born-again Christian and it’s taken me many years to get my mind around that and begin to make pictures. It’s obviously quite difficult due to the fact that the very nature of who I am is counter to her spiritual belief system. We love one another…yet there’s so much that’s wrong. Much of this work is Florida is about what remains unspoken. Outwardly the work is playful and colourful. But in actuality it’s heavy and dark. They’re some of the hardest pictures to make. I feel very disconnected in those moments.
CM: Do you feel like your work has a particularly gay content? There are beautiful men, and there is longing and attraction between them, is that enough to categorise the work as gay? Are such categories useful?
DH: Yes, gay content for sure. I hope you noticed that! And yes, there are beautiful men…yet there are also not so beautiful men. But I find them all beautiful. I would argue what unites them is how they’ve been photographically rendered. I am interested in beauty and where it’s found. Sometimes it exists in the world and sometimes I make it. Or both. In some of the photographs I depict men I love, have loved, could never love, never have, never be, etc. Yet I don’t know if I feel comfortable categorising the work as solely gay. Although I’m a gay man that’s not all I am. It is important for me that the viewer is aware that my imagery, all of my imagery, has been made through the lens of a gay man. This does inform the entire body of work and is ultimately my biggest political statement.
TEXT BY CLAYTON MAXWELL
©picture: David Hilliard , courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY
©picture Teun Hocks, Untitled/Zonder Titel, 2007 , Oil on toned gelatin silver print/olieverf op getinte zwart-witfoto,170 x 130 cm, 3 versions
Heather Snider: How would you describe the connection between the real world and the world in your imagery?
Teun Hocks: I do not see the world around me like that, but the exaggerated world I make up in my work helps me to tell the story the way I want to tell it. But sometimes the real world is even stranger and can give me ideas for new pieces.
HS: Some of your images seem to be pointed metaphors for the human condition, while others feel more like open-ended depictions of dreams or fantasies. Would you agree? Or do you see your work as a combination of both, or something else entirely?
TH: I agree, and sometimes I hope it is a combination of both.
HS: How conscious are you of the underlying meanings in your work?
TH: I choose to leave my works untitled because I would like the spectator to have his own thoughts, make his own story and fantasy about what is seen.Those are not necessarily the same thoughts that I had when making the work.
HS: The main character in your work has often been described as lonely or isolated, but it seems that viewers connect to the situations your “everyman” is experiencing, so that your work is more about shared humanity than isolation. Do you agree? Or do you feel that isolation is at the core of human experience?
TH: Difficult question; I tend to agree with both views. It would at least be nice if there were some consolation for the viewer in my work, but that’s never on my mind when I’m working.
HS: What do you hope the viewer will gain from your work?
TH: Not much, a smile, maybe a good feeling.
HS: What emotional or psychological impulses do you work out for yourself by bringing these images into existence?
TH: I wish I knew exactly what is needed to do that; I probably could make more work.
HS: One of the works featured here, depicting a field of alarm clocks (217. Untitled/ Zonder Titel, 2007) is unique in not having the main character that features in almost all of your work. Can you tell us about this piece?
TH: It’s a challenge for me and I always like to come up with a piece in which I don’t need to appear. It is not the first time that I’ve done this, it hasn’t happened very often. This one started with a drawing that kept appearing in my sketchbooks until I felt it was strong enough to make a work out of it. It is not so easy to explain exactly what attracted me in this drawing. Of course one of the things that came to my mind here is the contrast between the extra sentimental sunrise on the quiet land and (on a second glance) the growing alarm clocks that refer to all the things that have to be done.
HS: Because you use yourself as your model and main character, the process of your own aging appears in your imagery. How do you see age or aging as an element of your work? How do you feel that your art, your ideas, and yourself have evolved over time?
TH: Making my first pieces, I never realised that aging would later play a part in my work. Now I feel my aging is something that works in my favour, it makes the images more serious, and more ridiculous also. Apart from my thinning hair, it is difficult to see for myself how my art, my ideas, have evolved over time. To know that, I think one needs a lot of distance. Of course, I hope my work has evolved but when I’m starting on a new piece I always feel I’m starting from scratch.
Text by Heather Snider
Through 22.05.2022
Fondazione MAST, Bologna, Italy
www.fotoindustria.it/en
Fondazione MAST presents, the MAST Collection, a Visual Alphabet of Industry, Work and Technology, the first-ever exhibition of works selected from the Foundation’s collection, showcasing over 500 works, including photographs, albums, and videos from 200 great Italian and international photographers, as well as anonymous artists, curated by Urs Stahel. Some of the artists on display include Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Sebastiao Salgado, Max Alpert, Gabriele Basilico, Gianni Berengo Gardin and Henry Cartier-Bresson. The exhibition also documents the technological progress and analogue efforts of both the industrial world and photography.
©MAST Foundation
Image credits: 1-W. Eugene Smith, Steelworker with goggles, Pittsburgh, 1955, W. Eugene Smith/Magnum Photos* 2-Otto Steinert , Saarland, Industrial Landscape 3, 1950, Estate Otto Steinert, Museum Folkwang, Essen
