┐ one little, two little, three little fingers, how many do we need to pull? └

Posted on January 7, 2013 by N

You people who read this blog know that it is unusual for me to make a post about something that I don’t like or to make a negative and/or non constructive criticism (even if by sublimation) about something that I first choose to display. I will, for once (?), use this author’s images in order to make a point: that hyper-formal-aesthetic-overlyexplicit-inyourface-photography is not the way to go, unless you’re in a reality show. This really is what I find pornographic in a lot of phtography-based works today – there is no punctum!

all photographs © Mustafa Sabbagh

Mustafa’s site is here

┐ Africa in its primitivist discourse, (obviously) as seen by the west └

Posted on January 7, 2013 by N

“If, however, the Tate Modern were an institution working beyond the smug reflex of Western museological authority, it would have found right in its own context work of artists like Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the Nigerian- British photographer whose work—formally and conceptually—involves a long, rigorous excursus into the distinction between the nude and nakedness as it concerns the African body. The analytic content, not to say the formal and aesthetic contradictions that Fani-Kayode’s photographic work introduces us to about the black body in contrast to the modernist nude, is quite telling. More substantial is its awareness of the conflicted relationship the black body7 has to Western representation and its museum discourse. This makes the absence of works like his in the Nude/Action/Body section of the Tate Modern the more glaring. We can substitute Fani-Kayode with any number of other practitioners, but he is important for my analysis for the more specific reason of his Africanness, his conceptual usage of that Africanness in his imagery, and his collapse of the fraught idea of nakedness and the nude in his photographic representation. Fani-Kayode’s pictures also conceive of the black body (in his
case the black male body with its homoerotic inferences) as a vessel for idealization, as a desiring and desir- able subject, and as self- conscious in the face of the reduction of the black body as pure object of ethnographic spectacle. All these critical turns in his work make the Tate Modern’s inattention to strong, critical work on the nude and the body by artists such as Fani-Kayode all the more troubling, because it is precisely works like his that have brought to crisis those natural- ized conventions of otherness, which throughout history of modern art have been the stock-in-trade of modernism. Whatever its excuses for excluding some of these artists from its presentation, we should discount Tate Mod- ern’s monologue on the matter of the ethnographic films. Accompanying the extracts, which also manifest a characteristic double- speak, the label expounds on the matter of the films’ presence in the gallery:

European audiences in the early 20th century gained experience of Africa through documentary films. Generally these conformed to stereotyped notions about African cultures. An ethnographic film of 1910, for instance, concentrates on the skills and customs of the Senegalese, while Voyage to the Congo, by filmmaker Marc Allégret and writer André Gide perpetuates preconceptions about life in the ‘bush’. However, the self-awareness displayed by those under scrutiny, glimpsed observing the filmmakers subverts the supposed objectivity of the film.

The Tate Modern in this supplementary discourse imputes both the manufacture and consumption of the stereotype to some past European documentary films and audiences, which is to say that the business of such stereotypes lies in the past, even if it has now been exhumed before a contemporary European audience for the purposes of explaining modernism’s penchant for deracinating the African subject. But if the discourse of the stereotype as implied is now behind us, is its resuscitation an act of mimicry or is it, as Homi Bhabha has written, an act of anxious repetition of the stereotype (in “The Other Question”) that folds back into the logic for excluding African artists in the gallery arrangement? Does the repetition of the stereotype caught, if you will, in a discursive double-maneuver posit an awareness of the problem of the stereotype for contemporary transnational audiences or does the museum’s label present us with a more profound question in which the wall text causally explains and masks what is absent in the historical reorganization of the museum’s memory cum history? One conclusion can be drawn from this unconvincing explanatory maneuver: more than anything, it entrenches European modernist appropriation and instrumentalization of Africa in its primitivist discourse to which the Tate Modern in the twenty-fi rst century is a logical heir.”

excerpt of The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition, by Okwui Enwezor, “in Research in African Literatures” Vol. 34, No. 4 Winter 2003: 57–82

┐ Contemporary housekeeping or How to stumble on a stove └

Posted on January 4, 2013 by N

“In the Divine Word it is written, “The wise woman buildeth her house.” To be “wise,” is “to choose the best means for accomplishing the best end.” It has been shown that the best end for a woman to seek is the training of God’s children for their eternal home, by guiding them to intelligence, virtue, and true happiness. When, therefore, the wise woman seeks a home in which to exercise this ministry, she will aim to secure a house so planned that it will provide in the best manner for health, industry, and economy, those cardinal requisites of domestic enjoyment and success. To aid in this, is the object of the following drawings and descriptions, which will illustrate a style of living more conformed to the great design for which the family is instituted than that which ordinarily prevails among those classes which take the lead in forming the customs of society. The aim will be to exhibit modes of economizing labor, time, and expenses, so as to secure health, thrift, and domestic happiness to persons of limited means, in a measure rarely attained even by those who possess wealth.

At the head of this chapter is a sketch of what may be properly called a Christian house; that is, a house contrived for the express purpose of enabling every member of a family to labor with the hands for the common good, and by modes at once healthful, economical, and tasteful. Of course, much of the instruction conveyed in the following pages is chiefly applicable to the wants and habits of those living either in the country or in such suburban vicinities as give space of ground for healthful outdoor occupation in the family service, although the general principles of house—building and house—keeping are of necessity universal in their application–as true in the busy confines of the city as in the freer and purer quietude of the country. So far as circumstances can be made to yield the opportunity, it will be assumed that the family state demands some outdoor labor for all. The cultivation of flowers to ornament the table and house, of fruits and vegetables for food, of silk and cotton for clothing, and the care of horse, cow, and dairy, can be so divided that each and all of the family, some part of the day, can take exercise in the pure air, under the magnetic and healthful rays of the sun. Every head of a family should seek a soil and climate which will afford such opportunities. Railroads, enabling men toiling in cities to rear families in the country, are on this account a special blessing. So, also, is the opening of the South to free labor, where, in the pure and mild climate of the uplands, open—air labor can proceed most of the year, and women and children labor out of doors as well as within.

In the following drawings are presented modes of economizing time, labor, and expense by the close packing of conveniences. By such methods, small and economical houses can be made to secure most of the comforts and many of the refinements of large and expensive ones. The cottage at the head of this chapter is projected on a plan which can be adapted to a warm or cold climate with little change. By adding another story, it would serve a large family.

Fig. 1 shows the ground—plan of the first floor. On the inside it is forty—three feet long and twenty—five wide, excluding conservatories and front and back projections. Its inside height from floor to ceiling is ten feet. The piazzas each side of the front projection have sliding—windows to the floor, and can, by glazed sashes, be made green—houses in winter. In a warm climate, piazzas can be made at the back side also.

In the description and arrangement, the leading aim is to show how time, labor, and expense are saved, not only in the building but in furniture and its arrangement. With this aim, the ground—floor and its furniture will first be shown, then the second story and its furniture, and then the basement and its conveniences. The conservatories are appendages not necessary to housekeeping, but useful in many ways pointed out more at large in other chapters.”

Catherine & Harriet Beecher, in American Woman’s Home, 1869

┐ Be prepared └

Posted on December 28, 2012 by N

Can’t stress enough how amazing this video is

┐ Tranimal – Hybrids before Photoshop └

Posted on December 20, 2012 by N

all images © Austin Young, from Machine Project, Hammer Museum.

“Tranimal…Young’s new endeavor – a collaboration with Squeaky Blonde and Fade-Dra, is infused with the artist’s high voltage underground creative energy. Tranimal is a big and bold project. It incorporates video, photography, and interactive sound design. And its taking performance art to an operatic level. (…) Participants are put through an assembly line where Squeaky Blonde, Fade-Dra , Young costume them, make-them up and turn them into a cast of glamorous, genderless creatures. Mark Allen, director of Machine Project, makes light sensitive circuitry boards that are sewn into theor costumes. The boards have knobs that the performers use to change the sound frequencies, creating musical score with light and movement. Juliana Snapper, an opera singer and performance artist, guides the players to find the vocal expression of their new identities. The particpant-performers become collaborators in a musical performance. Then Young shoots formal portraits and video of the end result.” source: Phil Tarley, Fabrik LA

More of Austin’s work here

┐ Mark Peckmezian’s youth on “youth” └

Posted on December 10, 2012 by N

>© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, fiber gelatin silver print

>© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, @ G20, 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

┐ Holiday Greetings └

Posted on December 10, 2012 by N

┐ Democracy Deficit └

Posted on November 25, 2012 by N

from left top right it reads “Bread”, “Peace”, “Housing”, “Health”, “Education”

┐ Heart is a luxury └

Posted on November 20, 2012 by N

┐ an eye for an eye └

Posted on November 17, 2012 by N

┐ Linda Forsell – Life’s a Blast └

Posted on November 15, 2012 by N

Professor Noam Chomsky on his recent trip to the Gaza Strip, where he publicly called on Israel to put an end to the blockade on the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave. “[Gaza] is a lesson for people from the West,” Chomsky says. “If they can struggle on under really harsh and brutal conditions, it tells us we ought to be doing a lot more.”. Video here

It’s fair to speculate that all photography surfacing from Israel and Palestine is about land. Knowing what we do about land disputes, settlements and segregation in the region, it’s difficult not to ascribe images a political position favoring the land claims of either the Israelis or Palestinians. This is understandable in a climate of contemporary opinion that has roundly rejected the idea of photography and photographer as objective agents.

Linda Forsell’s photographs are not landscape photographs in the traditional sense. However, the beguiling vignettes within the pages of this book do return us to issues of land, and to the discomfiting realisation that no one in Israel or Palestine has a grounded or reliable relationship to the land.

In considering the surety of land-claims – claims backed with violence – in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, it may seem absurd to describe peoples’ connections to land as without root. Perhaps, the word ‘ambiguous’ more faithfully describes the disconnect. Between the certainty of established political positions and the uncertainty of physical existence in the region there exists a vast gulf of ambiguity.

Life’s A Blast is a challenge to convention and photographic authority, a sustained and deliberate visual wobble.

Within a photograph of an older man teetering atop a wall, the wobble is literal. In the photographs of children wielding weapons and playing among destroyed buildings, the imbalance is allegorical. Men, women and children in Forsell’s work maintain relationships among themselves, but struggle to find their feet.

The tropes of photography – particularly photojournalism – in Israel and Palestine are well known; the checkpoint; the rock-slinging youth; the huddled mother; the wall; the distant settlements on a desert hillside; the coffin raised high at a funeral; and – perhaps with most appearances on international newspaper front pages – the flag. The flag is often accompanied by some billowing smoke.

These tropes persist because, within the boundaries of a news story, these scenes are the illustrative of the quote/unquote action. As consumers of images, we must keep at the forefront of our minds that living in Israel and Palestine goes on outside the boundaries of news column inches.

excerpt of Pete Brook’s essay published along Linda’s images in the book Life’s a Blast. continue reading here.

Live updates of the events in Gaza TODAY, 15th November 2012, via The Guardian

more of Linda’s work here

┐ History is written by the disobedient └

Posted on October 30, 2012 by N

I heard of a darkness, descending upon the old archive of words
And the muffled whispers of the elders drowning in the midst of the long rows of obedience
This you must know to be true brother: we are the dead.

The weeping past and his wretched son soon will be victims of their own doing
All else follows
And when all is done and the night is purified of all these thoughts, I will sell you as you sold me
All else follows

It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts

Rejoice, brothers and sisters! Rejoice, brothers and sisters, we are the dead…

So I tilted my head back and held on to what I knew to be true: the relief of nothingness
And reason my dear brother will not suffice.
These vast and silent glass eyed armies and their mirror shaped minds seek but virtue.
But I am corrupt. I am corrupt to the core.

It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
Yes, we’re the dead, brothers and sisters, we’re the dead

I heard of a darkness brothers and sisters, falling down on what remained of whom we were.
And it’s with whispers that our lives have become within a measurable distance of an end
What will become of dreams my dear enemy?
When this delightful destruction of words has rendered its means
When all is done and the night is purified of all these thoughts, I will sell you as you sold me

It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
It’s only by death that you own me

I heard of a darkness sliding down the streets
Tearing apart limbs and all their deeds
and reconstructing these new men, not out of hope, but of love and sorrow
All else follows
Because it’s by death that all these confessions have become my truth.

Words written and sang by João Rui, from a Jigsaw

┐ roots & fruits #12 – Gonçalo Figueiredo └

Posted on October 25, 2012 by N

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 └

Posted on October 22, 2012 by N

more of his work here

┐ roots & fruits #9 – Miguel Godinho └

Posted on October 20, 2012 by N

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

Nihilsentimentalgia

Tag Archives: Portrait