┐ roots & fruits #13 – Ricardo Baltazar └

© Ricardo Baltazer, all Untitled, from the series Touching from a Distance, 2012

Ricardo’s project Touching from a Distance was shot in Essen, Germany, in 2012. All images are blow-ups of snapshots he took while paving the streets. Inevitably, they refer to the distance between the author and the subject portrayed, as they speak about the desire to get closer. These blow-ups are attempted gazes, attempts at assuring the account of oneself while trying to look at his surroundings. They are as much voyeuristic as they are introspective, in the sense that what one does while looking desperately out, is trying for a way in.

The camera, as an automaton one can trigger to mediate the space between the self and the other, is always a transparent and potentially authentic way of speaking about the way the author is trying to connect. To view the world through a camera is not to connect with it. Either you are in an impulsive rational process of trying to see beyond reality or you choose to try to be in the present. So this is about the process less than it is about the result. The framing, the composition, the colors, are singular points amidst an abstract composition where the lines are created between people’s gazes.

We know what blow-ups looks like, how they all resemble surveillance stills and evoke the invasion of privacy. I’d like to reference Michael Haneke’s Caché about the contemporary obsession with security which comes to be a way of spreading the false notion of power and control over one’s life. What Ricardo exposes here is the opposite, the notion of fragility, as he lets us know of his state of exception, as a foreigner, behaving as an alien who is forced to document his life through the looks of others, in order to prove his existence.

┐ Mark Peckmezian’s youth on “youth” └

© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled,

© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, chromogenic print

>© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, fiber gelatin silver print

>© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, @ G20, fiber gelatin silver print

© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, fiber gelatin silver print

“I was thinking that the “straight” or naive approach to the theme would be to just play to popular conceptions or idealizations of youth — and I certainly have photos that do that. I used to make a lot of work like this. But in the past few years, I don’t know….I don’t really buy it anymore, I guess. I think a lot of what we see in such photos, by myself or others, is to some degree performance: all these kids, my peers, are hyper self-conscious and incredibly media-savvy. All too often I’ll be out shooting snapshots and hear someone whisper that the photo just taken of them would make a good Facebook profile pic, or some such comment. Once I heard someone, who was running around with some friends on an golf course at night, shout out “why isn’t this being photographed?!”

I think that I now try to approach this subject in a more clear-eyed and honest way — showing the good and bad, wonderful and absurd. I have started an informal project to document this culture more critically (I think there is so much vanity and superficiality among this generation) but also, if I am to actually transcend that at all, with more empathy as well (not pretending that the vanity undermines all the good that also exists, and also understanding that vanity as something woefully, and sort of beautifully, human). The photo of the “kids in the grass” plays to this (Heather says: come to the show to see what image he’s referring to…) – I love that you said “kids,” that’s exactly what I was going for, I wanted to render them (these over-the-top hipster friends of mine, these peacocks, so highly decorated) as children playing in grass, stripped of their affect, innocent.

Finding a good balance is hard though, because I still want to document it relatively straight. I think I’m still working out the kinks, refining my understanding and expression. It’s been a big undercurrent in my work these past few years, I’m sort of on a mission to do this right.” via HMAb

More of Mark’s work here

┐ Vilma Pimenoff └

© Vilma Pimenoff, Untitled (figures-left + beings-right), from The Dark Collection

© Vilma Pimenoff, Untitled (beings), from The Dark Collection

© Vilma Pimenoff, Untitled, from the series Demoiselles de Paris

“Pierce called indexical the process of signification (semiosis) in which the signifier is bound to the referent not by a social convention ( = “symbol”), not necessarily by some similarity ( = “icon”), but by an actual contiguity or connection in the world: the lightning is the index of the storm. In this sense, film and photography are close to each other, both are prints of real objects, prints left on a special surface by a combination of light and chemical action. This indexicality, of course, leaves room for iconic aspects, as the chemical image often looks like the object (Pierce considered photography as an index and an icon). It leaves much room for symbolic aspects as well, such as the more or less codified patterns of treatment of the image (framing, lighting, and so forth) and of choice or organization of its contents. What is indexical is the mode of production itself, the principle of the taking. And at this point, after all, a film is only a series of photographs. But it is more precisely a series with supplementary components as well, so that the unfolding as such tends to become more important than the link of each image with its referent.

(…)
Photography has a third character in common with death: the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time-unlike cinema which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life. The photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later. Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return. Dubois remarks that with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against its own loss. I will add that in life, and to some extent in film, one piece of time is indefinitely pushed backwards by the next: this is what we call “forgetting.” The fetish, too, means both loss (symbolic castration) and protection against loss. Peter Wollen states this in an apt simile: photography preserves fragments of the past “like flies in amber.”6 Not by chance, the photographic act (or acting, who knows?) has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun.”

excerpt from the article Photography and Fetish, by Christian Metz, published in October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90

more of Vilma‘s work here

┐ Will Jennings └

© Will Jennings, Untitled, from the series Tumbling Blocks, 2011

“As an intuitive response to the sudden death of my mother last summer I walked down the Suffolk coast, reconsidering the landscape of my childhood through the eyes of an adult, mourner and artist.

Concrete cubes sporadically emerged along the route, sole man-made interjections in a landscape of permanent flux. As I walked through fog they offered perspective, their staccato rhythm implied passing time, their angular form suggested a grid and attempted rationalisation of chaotic, uncontrollable nature.

I read the cubes as monolithic stelae. Blank vessels into which I store memories, emotions and idea – vessels as fallible as both body and mind, also falling prey to the forces of nature and time.” Will‘s statement

more of Will’s work here

┐ Jacinda Russell └

© Jacinda Russell, Strange Artifacts: A Photographic and Found Object @ J. Crist Gallery, installation view + details, Idaho, 2007
The wunderkammer or “room of wonder” draws heavily upon 16th century European cabinets of curiosity. I combined digital photography with found object sculpture by printing on canvas and encasing the images in weathered boxes, suitcases, drawers, and crates. Objects like false teeth, steering wheels, anonymous sculptures of naked bandits, jars of paint chips, sculpted cotton, and skull necklaces form the installation. All 50 of the objects are influential in defining my childhood and adult years, the various places I have called home, and the things that I carry with me, not yet willing to let go.

© Jacinda Russell, Residue (left) + Hoard (right), from Dark Mass, 2000

© Jacinda Russell, Detritus, 2000

Thus began the conscious decision to gather large quantities of objects, often undesirable items, placed in dilapidated environments and old containers. In Dark Mass, I want to visually portray the fine line between serious collecting and obsessing over a collection to the point where it controls one’s life. I search for the atypical, whether it is the accumulation of the article itself (hairnets, fingernails, and shredded books are not what one would hoard as precious objects), its placement (bicycles resting on their sides, photographs standing at attention, upside down doll feet), or its environment (globes and birdcages piled at the foot of a ladder leading nowhere). Most of the objects are fragile, poised to disintegrate into their surroundings.

© Jacinda Russell, Amass, 2000

Growing up in a house with 225 balloon-tire bicycles, thousands of bottles, telephone pole insulators, soda paraphernalia, rooms filled with cardboard boxes, golden age comic books, trunks of advertising material and endless amounts of artwork, I was convinced to live a life with minimal possessions. Suddenly the realization that I was collecting (never mind the fact that the object in question was trash) was unsettling.

For my 1999 installation, Fear of Schizophrenia, I collected nearly two thousand cigarette packs to understand my great-aunt’s obsessive behavior and paranoid schizophrenia. She collected paper, wrapping her possessions in Kleenex and storing them in sacks. She smoked incessantly, saving the foil of the cigarette pack to use as stationery and the cellophane as wallets. These filthy packages were an important feature of the installation. One year after reinstalling the exhibition and unable to depart from the packs, I kept them boxed in the backyard storage shed, elevated to keep the rain from seeping through the cardboard.

more of Jacinda‘s work here

┐ Chris Toalson └

© Chris Toalson, Penguins, from the series Dioramas, 2007

© Chris Toalson, Mourning Doves, from the series Dioramas, 2007

© Chris Toalson, Alaskan Brown Bear, from the series Simulations, 2008

“My photographic thesis, True West, calls into question the seeming American fascination with the American West. The current state of the West is one where history has become intertwined with myth, where each influences the other, and where more often than not, myth prevails. This thesis is an attempt to understand how we interpret history when authenticity is difficult to distinguish from fabrication. In doing so, my work is meant to encourage a refocus toward a more factual history. My photographs question authenticity, and ask where we draw the line between myth and fact. Throughout the development of this body of work, I’ve become extremely interested in the ways that the myth of the West presents itself as the tourist’s destination, the artist’s canvas, the cigarette company’s advertising campaign, and the filmmaker’s plotline and in doing so become reality.

The photographs in True West are images of images. Rather than depict majestic landscapes impacted by human development, as some of the New Topographics era of photographers so clearly laid out, or the West’s variety of interesting characters, as in Richard Avedon’s In the American West, I’ve utilized photography’s ability as a representational tool to record and re-present already existing representations of western myth. Each image serves as a metaphor for the representation of myth, and in turn, the misrepresentation of truth occurring both within and beyond the lens. excerpt of Chris’ thesis True West that can be accessed here

More of Chris‘ work here

┐ roots & fruits #12 – Gonçalo Figueiredo └

© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Lourenço

© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Rita Tavares (left) and Lara Brandão (right), from the series The Protest, 12/2009

© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Ricardo Baltazar (left) and Gonçalo Figueiredo (right), from the series The Protest, 12/2009

These portraits are part of a series made back in the Winter of 2009 and it depicts a group of students from the Photography Department to which Gonçalo also was part, both as a technitian and as a student. In December, confronted with the lack of conditions and materials the course lacked to offer, they decided to camp at school and endure a silent and peaceful protest until they were heard.

“Let us now consider the time exposure, of which the photo-portrait is a concrete instance. Whether of a live or dead person, the portrait is funerary in nature, a monument. Acting as a reminder of times that have died away, it sets up landmarks of the past. This means it reverses the paradox of the snapshot, series to series. Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as departed. Reciprocally, whereas the former freezes the superficial time of the image, the latter releases it. It liberates an autonomous and recurrent temporality, which is the time of remembrance. While the portrait as Denkmal, monument, points to a state in a life that is gone forever, it also offers itself as the possibility of staging that life again and again in memory.

An asymmetrical reciprocity joins the snapshot to the time exposure: whereas the snapshot stole a life it could not return, the time exposure expresses a life that it never received. The time exposure doesn’t refer to life as process, evolution, diachrony, as does the snapshot. It deals with an imaginary life that is autonomous, discontinuous, and reversible, because this life has no location other than the surface of the photograph. By the same token it doesn’t frame that kind of surface-death characteristic of the snapshot, which is the shock of time splitting into not anymore and not yet. It refers to death as the state of what has been: the fixity and defection of time, its absolute zero.

(…)

Time exposure implies the antithesis of trauma. Far from blocking speech, it welcomes it openly. Only in time exposure (portrait, landscape, still life, etc.) may photography appear with the continuity of nature. The portrait, for example, may look awkward, but not artificial, as would be the case of a snapshot of an athlete caught in the midst of a jump. When continuity and nature are perceived, speech is apt to body forth that perception in the form of a narrative that meshes the imaginary with the symbolic and organizes our mediation with reality.

The word now, used to describe the kind of temporality involved in time exposures, doesn’t refer to actual time, since it is abstracted from its natural link with here: hic et nunc. It is to be understood as a pause in time, charged with a potential actualization, which will eventually be carried out by speech (or memory as interior speech), and is most probably rooted in the time-consuming act of looking.” excerpt from the article Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox, by Thierry de Duve, published in October, Vol. 5, Photography (Summer, 1978), pp. 113-125

More of Gonçalo’s work here

┐ Wojtek Sasiela └

© Wojtek Sasiela, Monster Tree, from the series Eden

© Wojtek Sasiela, Untitled, from the series Eden

© Wojtek Sasiela, Untitled, from the series Eden

© Wojtek Sasiela, Gorton, from the series Eden

more of his work here

┐ roots & fruits #11 – Tiago Casanova └

© Tiago Casanova, all Untitled, from the project The Unknown Island

“The airplane begins to descend. Madeira is down there. From far we can understand the feeling that the fifteenth century discoverers had when they saw Madeira (= Wood) for the first time, and from there we can easily guess the origin of the name. An intensive tropical vegetation fills and covers the island of green, but I cannot help but noticing the various urban clusters, scattered houses, roads and highways and the megalomaniac construction of the new airport. The constructed confronts the natural on a dual mode. Large scars are open, but the consummation of the act makes the built elements part of the landscape. This new landscape causes both fascination and disbelief and it is as beautiful as ugly. (…)”

09/11/11 – (1st Day) – *Excerpt and Polaroids from my Travel Diary do Madeira Island

To see more of Tiago‘s work go here

┐ roots & fruits #10 – Cláudio Ferreira └

© Cláudio Ferreira, all Untitled, from the series Space Project nº 1 – Galaxies, 2012

“And yet, the absence of the subject does not have to be interpreted as a deficiency. Quite the opposite, it could indicate a new quality in the revolution, in a henceforth molecular revolution, and the primacy of multiplicity within it. When the subject is missing, it has not just gone amiss, as a gap (still) gaping and begging to get closed. In view of the composition of the molecular revolution there is no need for unification, or for the representation of a unified (class) subject by leaders, party and vanguard. The rejection of the primacy of the class, or of a specific class (be it the proletariat, or a middle-class threatened by decline) does not in any way imply tuning out the hierarchizing differentiation that takes place more radically than ever in current capitalist production. Differential capitalism striates the differences, hierarchizes and valorizes them. And yet molecular multiplicity raises no hopes in any of the imaginings of resistance against this machinic-differentiating capitalism that undertake to homogenize and totalize differences. Even in their negative manifestation there is no way back ahead of multiplicity, but only its dis/continuous unfolding.

But even the subject, the one, the whole, where it is no longer absent, is not the consequence of a process of collecting, forming, unifying the many, the singular, the dispersed, to be composed into a molar block. It does not follow a logic of addition, but one of subtraction. It must first be extracted from the uncountable multiplicity, detached, dis-counted in order to be one. The one emerges only when the logic of counting, classifying and identifying lays its grids on the multiplicity; when the uncountable is domesticated in the process of counting.

The subject can appear only through subtraction from the multiple.”

excerpt from Making Multiplicity: A Philosophical Manifesto, by Gerald Raunig. continue reading here

More of Cláudio‘s work here

┐ roots & fruits #9 – Miguel Godinho └

© Miguel Godinho, Untitled, from the series Esta é a minha família (This is my family), 2011

© Miguel Godinho, 38 years old (left) + 40 years old (right), from the series 16-06-1950, 2008

© Miguel Godinho, Untitled, from the series Family, 2005

© Miguel Godinho, Untitled (left + right), from the series Entre nós (Amongst us), 2010

Miguel Godinho’s (b. 1984) photography is not easy to describe, not because it is abstract, overly conceptualized or devoided of content, but because it is simple (albeit symbolic) and unpretentious.

Miguel’s body of work fluctuates between intimate moments and a sterile portrait (in the composition) of the world around him. The domestic scenes reveal some kind of obsession with the question of identity, dependent on family history and memory. On the other hand, the outdoor photographs accentuate the distance between nature/landscape and an environment built/invaded by man.

While the images vary from landscapes, portraits and still life, the empty spaces within the narrative allow us not only to understand the author’s personal journey as well as how it forms part of a sociological portrait of his country and its culture.

More of Miguel’s work here

┐ roots & fruits #8 – Diogo Simões └

© Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo

© Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo

© Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo

© Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo

Influenced by current-events (this is a circumstantial analogy) Diogo’s (b.1988, Miratejo, PT) photographs remind me of a kind of portrait of youth that makes me think of Gus van Sant’s universe. If I had seen this series a few months ago I would probably relate it to projects within the realm of the medium itself and think about the meaning of portrait and nostalgia in the history of photography.
Besides Gus van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant, I think of Mathieu Kassovitz’s works La Haine and Assassin(s). Then I’m reminded of a bunch of texts I read last year about riots in France and in the UK and I reread a few . Somehow the associations are too subjective to be treated slightly and I give up. Now I’m looking at these pictures again and I keep thinking youth, nostalgia, ambiguity, inconsequence, insurrection and rebellion. There’s a sense of coolness and fatalism in the air and that’s what brings me back to the suspended effect a film still can have when it hangs over your head.
Finally, these associations lead me to the text that follows and hopefully it will all make sense:

“Elephant depicts a world untethered from certainties and authority, and in this way it can be seen to reflect postmodern anxieties. Slavoj Zizek’s comment offers a relevant critical perspective. The quote cited at the beginning of this essay [below], taken from an interview at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001, is Zizek’s response to a question about his concept of “foreclosure”: the idea that contemporary society prohibits a real articulation of the subject.

[…] precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

According to Zizek (and philosopher Alain Badiou, from whom he borrows the French term), the “foreclosure” of the subject has an inevitable flip-side: “la passion du reel” or “the passion of the real”. Elephant demonstrates some of the implications of Zizek’s notion, and through its poetic strategies affords the viewer an opportunity to piece together some of the elements in the bigger picture. We might regard the killers Alex and Eric as embodying the disenfranchisement that many teens (and not just in the US) feel. Viewing their apparently left-field violence in this context reveals a failure within society to deliver a secure place for their emerging sense of identity.

In the same interview, Zizek compares the idea of foreclosure and its implications with the Nietzchean opposition of active and passive nihilism. He describes passive nihilism as that state of apathy resulting from “living a stupid self-satisfied life without great passions”, which invokes the opposite form of conscious self-destruction. Zizek argues that freedom in contemporary society is devoid of the more “radical dimension” of true democracy, existing instead as the watered-down freedom to choose lifestyle. Zizek also sees in the pervasiveness of virtual realities (such as the Internet) a further disconnection from authentic experience.

In Elephant we can roughly align the characters according to the idea of active and passive nihilism. The adult characters present varying forms of apathy or disconnection; their lifestyles – particularly Alex’s parents, as revealed through the lifeless atmosphere of the family home – suggest an arrival at an unquestioned comfort zone, or passive nihilism. We see Alex and Eric attempting to break out of their transparent, but nonetheless prescribed realities: a bid for active nihilism.”

excerpt of Neera Scott’s Sublime Anarchy in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, in Senses of Cinema.continue reading here

Diogo’s website (currently under construction) is here

┐ roots & fruits #6 – Rui Dias Monteiro └

© Rui Dias Monteiro, Untitled, from Figure in the Landscape, 2011

© Rui Dias Monteiro, Untitled, from Caia Caía, 2011

© Rui Dias Monteiro, Untitled, from Figure in the Landscape, 2011

© Rui Dias Monteiro, Untitled, from O Sabor da Casca, 2009

More of Rui’s work here and here

┐ roots & fruits #5 – Tito Mouraz └

© Tito Mouraz, Untitled, from the series Leitura(s)

© Tito Mouraz, Untitled, from the series Leitura(s)

© Tito Mouraz, Untitled, from the series Finally, No One

© Tito Mouraz, Untitled, from the series Finally, No One

“There has been, since ever, an almost innate obsession for space and its domain through the most varied forms and ways. This domain goes several times beyond intended expectations, such as, self-control that we could or should have about something to which we call “place”, where things happen, grow and bloom, since space is, in its entire definition, more genuine, original and infinite.
When we think about space, our reminiscence bring us immediately for a certain “place” where this can or not evoke good memories, passed situations or even situations/circumstances that might be about to happen.
It is, in these spaces, that the most diverse “objects” emerge or stanch, creating some kind of symbiosis between these two phenomenons. These “objects” many times create and have the gift to give life to spaces through an almost divine force that overlaps to some other thing.
It is clear that this tendency has two sides, on one hand, we have the filling of space through the “object” that occupies its place, metamorphosing what it would be an original landscape (shall we say) and on the other hand, we have the filling of that same place with aberrations that time decided to abandon and live it at drift.
Although these fillings could be considered ambiguous, it is necessary to regard that the beauty of things is in its essence, and frequently, an old van in a putrefaction state in the middle of a ravine can have its beauty, although not everybody agrees with that.
In this way, these are the questions of the presented project, the insertion of perfectly banal “objects” from the common day, incorporated in a space that beside being for everyone, it won a captive place in the soul of the represented “object”, as if, and in a natural way, embraces and creates since the beginning an almost inseparable bond with its own landscape.
Is this real? Or is this the purest of the falsehoods? I cannot find the answer for this question. The most probable is the existence of an alliance that allows a harmony between the two exposed perspectives.
As it can be verified here in the images presented, the spaces can be only constituted for the space itself, trying in this way, to establish one relation between this same space and the notion of the evolving emptiness for itself, even knowing or perceiving that the emptiness acquires a characteristic almost apparent, because it cannot, several times, link to reality as it is known. Therefore, there are two questions which we consider fundamental: the question of the inserted space, such as in time, as in “place”, and the question of time inserted and modified with the presence of an inanimate “object” that is or belonged to everyday life, but that now represents in all is fullness, the magnitude of the presence that is inserted in the same space.”

The author

More of Tito’s work here

┐ roots & fruits #4 – João Varela └

© João Varela, Untitled, from de Toerist

© João Varela, Untitled, from de Toerist

© João Varela, Untitled, from de Toerist

© João Varela, Untitled, from de Toerist

“De Toerist came about in November 2010 when I went to study at AKV|St.Joost in Breda, Netherlands.

As I arrived there, the weather was really different than the one that I was used to. This was one of the many difficulties that I had among others such as renting a house, language barrier and the adaptation to the classes.

With all of these feelings coming to me, I always felt like a tourist and never a proper dutch. So I decided to document the first two months of my journey in the Netherlands. I began to photograph small, not-so-important things that I stumbled on, always with a saying by german photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in my head: If one thing matters, everything matters. Week after week I photographed what I came across, what caught my eye and the situations that I thought were the key to tell my story.

From the approached themes, I must highlight the ones that have particular importance to my project as I was obceced photographing them: the big windows that unveil the private life of dutch people, the various trips I made within the region and the school space that I photographed in order to have a remembrance to the future and also to identify myself with her. Some of my inspirations through this process were the photographs of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Robert Frank. They were my references on the approach to the subject, or even on the subject choose.

The title arose from a photo of a building that I was constantly passing by when I was doing my daily circuit: home-school-home. This was like a methaphore to me, because I really felt like a tourist.”

More of João’s work here