Sunday, July 29, 2007

Meh







Had an ok day in the darkroom today...tried to make some tintypes from the photos I posted the other day, with mixed success. The problem with using color slides in the enlarger is that the exposure times shift wildly from image to image. In pictures with artificial, orangish light, the exposure times are extra long because the tintype emulsion is naturally resistant to orange light (just like regular b&w photo paper; that's why darkroom safelights are orange). So I tried hard to keep frustration from setting in. I'll scan and post these in a couple days once they're dry and I've collected them.

I've also been playing around with hand-coloring tintypes with oil paint. I bought one of those cheesy Marshalls oil kits to start with, and I'm using tintype "seconds:" ones with imperfections on the emulsion or under/overexposed images that won't be part of any final display. I'm not great at it yet, but I must say that they look much better in person than they do in these scans; the scanner managed to make every brushstroke stand out. Also, at the moment I only have five colors, hence the obnoxious yellow hair. Ugh.

Also some "panoramas" from the old hotel and the city of Baahston using my half-frame camera. These are just from scanned negatives, no printing yet.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Some Research






To more fully understand how my mannequin tintypes do (or do not) relate to actual 19th century portraits, I've been doing a lot of research on antique photographs. The above images come from two books: Geoffrey Batchen's wonderful book Forget Me Not, and a book by collector Stanley Burns titled, Forgotten Marriage: The Painted Tintype & The Decorative Frame. The latter book was a bit of a revelation to me. I was unaware of the common practice to hand-color tintypes in the 1800s. It's interesting how the application of paint complicates the reading of the photograph by obliterating its surface. I also happen to LOVE some of the frames the portraits were placed in. They're so large and bold! The gilding and elaborate matting in some of these is just ridiculous.

Another thing I wish to explore is the practice of including hair of the sitter inside the frame's glass. Placing hair, dried flowers, and even butterflies in the glass was an attempt by the owner to make the person in the portrait more "real," more immortal. It also turns the final portrait into a fetish object. I can't help but wonder what would happen if I cut off some of the wig hair from the mannequins and placed it with the portrait. Think the antique store owners would go for me giving their dummies a little haircut?

Some quotes from Batchen's book that I must ruminate on:
  • "In early photos, it seems if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual image, one had to pose as if dead. Not surprisingly, the resulting portraits have all the animation of a wax effigy."
  • "One of the interesting things about this genre of photo-portraiture is how easily its images depart from the realism we associate with the photograph. The portraits of children, in particular, often look strangely surreal."
  • "Memory is always in a state of ruin; to remember something is already to have ruined it, to have displaced it from its moment of origin. Memory is caught in a conundrum - the passing of time that makes memory possible and necessary is also what makes memory fade and die.
  • "The act of remembering someone is surely also about the positioning of oneself, about the affirmation of one's own place in time and space, about establishing oneself within a social and historical network of relationships. No wonder we surround ourselves with memory objects. One's sense of self, of identity, is buttressed by such objects."

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Mannequins...Raw and Uncensored!























These are some of the more recent raw 35mm slides of the mannequins at Wood Bull Antiques that may or may not become tintypes. I recently went back to the store with a tripod, which is essential to photograph some of these in dark locations since I loathe using a flash. As you can see, there are some men and children in the mix now; there was a misconception during the residency that I was only interested in photographing female mannequins - not so. It just so happened that the only dummies that were propped up in areas with enough light to photograph sans tripod were female ones.
Kip and Judy, the owners of the store, were very intrigued with what I was doing, and luckily they are (or were) artists themselves so they are perfectly fine with me mulling about and taking pictures of fake people. I must repay them someday by giving them a tintype, or maybe by buying one of their $1,500 antique dinner tables once I become rich and famous. Gad, there's some beautiful stuff in this barn.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Paper #1

Although much of the discussion presented at the June AIB residency was filtered through an unfortunate haze of cold medicine and sinus pressure, I strove to glean as much useful information as I could from my talented fellow students and the ever so enlightening faculty. I arrived with the knowledge that the bulk of the work I was bringing from my first full semester in the MFA program was under the strict label of “experimentation;” with all but one exception, I saw this body of work as an exploration of medium and process, in the hopes that concept and meaning would cling to bits of it along the way like iron filings to a magnet. And though my thoughts were numbed by a corona of Benadryl, I was able to make sense of much of what was suggested to me during those ten days in Boston, to the point where I now feel I have a solid conceptual direction to move towards, and not just a technical one.

I was taken aback this residency by the sheer number of photographers in the newest pool of students. Further, I was somewhat pleased by the percentage of these newcomers who seemed to appreciate the qualities of traditional and alternative photographic techniques. There are some who believe that I am solidly opposed to digital imaging – not so; I simply believe in my heart that the act of capturing light onto a receptor and creating an image from it cannot be fully understood unless a person spends some amount of time working in a darkroom. Digital processing leaves the artist one step removed from the phenomenon of “fixing shadows.” I digress. The display room I was assigned to this residency was occupied by those artists who work primarily in photography – a drastic shift from my first residency, when I was with ceramicists, illustrators, and painters – and I found it quite helpful. Two newcomers, Elizabeth Schrenk and Lynda Schlosberg, were in my room, as well as fellow “Group 2-er” Jason Wallengren and two more from higher levels, Sarah Golden and Melissa Good. To critique with this group of students was wonderful, as they are all thoughtful people who were free with their suggestions, comments, and ideas.

One particular comment was common to nearly all of the critiques: the series of mannequin tintypes I presented seemed to be the most complete conceptually, and also proved to be the best “marriage” between subject and process. This is a conclusion that I fully agree with. Tintypes (also known as ferrotypes or melainotypes) were used almost exclusively for portraiture in the mid to late 19th century. In today’s light, many of these portraits have a rigid, inhuman quality to them due to the long exposure times and the need for the subject to pose very still for seconds, or minutes, at a time. Oliver Wasow, my former advisor, was reminded of The Twilight Zone when looking at my tintypes. He wondered if the mannequins were coming back to life; some, he said, look real already. In another critique, Julia Schaer and Michael Newman called the work a “perversion of portraiture” and suggested that I push the boundaries of the fetish qualities of the images, as well as my own comfort level, by giving the mannequins names and inventing entire background stories for them. While I am not sure whether this is necessary or an avenue I wish to pursue, I appreciated the opinion as it reinforced the belief I have that photography does not tell the “truth,” in contemporary photography nor in 19th century portraiture. Also discussed was the small 4”x5” size of the tintypes (more or less equal to traditional “half plate” tintype portraits of the 1800s), the kitsch quality of the images and concept, the inclusion of male mannequins and the possibility of photographing them in locations other than the antique barn (shopping malls, etc), and how they will ultimately be displayed in their final form (frames, sleeves, or lockets?). These are all questions I must tackle during this semester. Guest artist Annu Matthew provided me a critique on the morning following her interesting lecture. Her candid opinion and thoughtful insight were especially appreciated. She also found the tintypes the most compelling work that I presented, and further stressed the importance of a working marriage between process and subject.

As for the other works on display, I came in with the feeling that one process, the Polaroid emulsion lift, was leading me to a conceptual dead-end, and that the other process, liquid emulsion on glass, was at a beginning stage and not yet a fleshed-out body of work. These feelings were reinforced by the comments of others in my critiques. More than anything, the professors and fellow students commented more on the blue painter’s tape adhering the panes of glass together on the Polaroid lifts than the lifts themselves (this was a crucial lesson on the importance of proper display, however). While the lifts have an interesting look, the restriction of size, the preventive cost of Polaroid film, and the near impossibility for me to move the viewer past curiosity of process have pretty much convinced me to abandon this technique in terms of the fine art I will pursue in the grad program.

The images of the old hotel in the Catskills that I photographed with a Holga camera and printed with liquid emulsion on glass were found to be intriguing to many “critters” at the residency, but ultimately they found them to be lacking an element that allowed them to extract more meaning from the images. Part of the problem, proposed Oliver, was that the images have an inherent “flatness” to them – old buildings printed with an old-fashioned process – that prevent the artworks to carry an essential “edge,” as he put it. He connected it to an over-reliance on the notion of “nostalgia,” which he and some others believed was a dangerous and gloss-coated idea of the past that must be avoided. His suggestion was to begin photographing modern objects and architecture and printing these images with old processes, to examine the tension that is created. I intend to experiment with this during the second semester, though it is not necessarily a major direction I intend to travel towards. Ultimately, I believe that the liquid emulsion on glass process has strong potential, but the hurdle will be to make sure that I can use it in a way that the subject suits the medium. Part of what I am trying to accomplish during the beginning weeks of my second semester is to figure out how this can be done.

Concept: this is the word that will define the semester for me. I told many people at the residency that I am a “shoot first, ask questions later” kind of artist, but that was really an oversimplification. If anything I tend to over-think situations, both in my art and in daily life. Why this is not reflected more in much of the artwork I produce is unclear to me; perhaps I tend to look at art-making as more of an “escape” from these thoughts and intentionally try to steer clear. Perhaps I’m shy or slightly afraid of what people will think if my art becomes more personal. Whatever the reasons, I must begin to bare my thoughts this semester, both to myself and to others, so that the work I produce will follow suit and hopefully reach the depths of meaning that make them more than just “beautiful” and “interesting” images.

This will require a lot of writing at first, more so than the production of visual art. I need to organize my thoughts and share them with others. I will use my sketchbook, my blog, and restaurant napkins if necessary to jot down ideas and connections as they become clear to me. Right now the concentration of thoughts is being channeled to two bodies of work I wish to explore, and possibly which may become my final thesis. One is the series of mannequin tintypes. This series seems ripe with the themes of reality, memory, history, death, and truth in photography. The other body of work is at the moment but a spark in my mind, and I won’t know exactly what will come of it until I make a trip to Gettysburg, PA, the town I frequented as a child, this fall. The ideas I have for this work would fill up more than a three-page report on its own, but basically it deals with histories: my personal history, photographic history, and a history of war. I expect that I will use, in part, photographic emulsion on glass for this series.

Books Suggested to Me:
· Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not
· Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
· Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
· Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders
· Jerry L. Thompson, Truth and Photography: Notes on Looking and Photographing
· Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real
· Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Artists Suggested to Me:
· Troy Brauntch
· Wallace Nutting
· Gordon Matta Clark
· Rosamond Purcell
· Adam Fuss
· Binh Danh
· Deborah Luster
· Jerry Spagnoli
· Eugene Atget
· Henry Darger
· Hans Bellmer
· Joseph Sudek
· Aiken & Ludwig
· Joan Fontcuberta
· Mark Dion
· Mark Ostermann
· Ilya Kabokov

Friday, July 20, 2007

Mentor Meeting

My new mentor Fawn Potash was incredibly gracious enough to drive 2 hours from her home in the Catskills (in a town named Catskill, appropriately) to the Fenimore Art Museum today to visit with me at work. She and her husband used the convenient excuse of taking their 16 month old son to the Empire State Carousel at The Farmers' Museum across the street from us for their decision to make the journey. I think Fawn is going to be a fantastic choice. We talked extensively about the challenges I have for this semester and she seems to understand. She was genuinely interested in the artwork I've been making, and I think she'll help me work through the ideas in my work and the various (sometimes conflicting) messages I got at the residency this time. Furthermore, she's an artist who finds much importance in teaching children about art, and I want to pick her brain extensively about how she juggles her teaching schedule with her art-making time. I'm happy. Now I've just got to start producing again.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

The Infamous First Post

Welcome friends and countrymen to my blog. Here I'll be sharing my thoughts and musings (hopefully) as I continue towards the coveted MFA degree at the Art Institute of Boston/Lesley University. At this point I am about three weeks into my second semester at the college, at a point where the blur of activity experienced at the 10-day residency should be wearing off and I should be getting back to work on lots and lots of art. Well, um, yeah. Not so much.

What I am working on, instead of producing artworks one can touch, is figuring out the conceptual elements, the meaning, behind what I've been working on during the first semester. No longer can I "shoot first, ask questions later;" now I really need to sit down and think about why I photograph what I photograph, and how I can use this knowledge to create a fully fleshed-out body of work. Easier said than done.

So what I've done in these three weeks is LOTS of reading. I've gone through three books already, including the very interesting Forget Me Not: Photography and Rememberance by Geoffrey Batchen. He explores portrait photography of the 19th century and how it was used to infuse its viewers with a not-very-accurate sense of memory. He fills an important hole in the discussion of the history of photography by exploring what can best be described as "fetish objects:" portraits mounted in lockets & frames with locks of the sitter's hair, dried flowers, butterfly wings, and other sentimental objects. Batchen makes the wise argument that these portraits don't enhance memory so much as replace it, creating new realities that never quite existed except in the viewer's mind. It's already given me lots to think about in terms of the mannequin tintypes I've been creating.