September 14, 2023 On Photography Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums By Nick Warr W. G. Sebald, from photographs labeled “Korsika Sept 95.” I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away. —W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance. The photographs in the published work of W. G. Sebald represent a similar miscellany of beginnings, with each peculiar form interrupting and channeling the text as it moves toward its inevitable close. “Fiction,” Sebald once observed in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, “is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient.” To resist this dynamic, he concedes, is a difficult task for both the reader and the writer. However, an innate desire to “arrest the passage of time” persists, and it is this that draws us to “certain forms” of visual art. For example, he continues, when you look at a painting: You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this—they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow. Read More
September 8, 2022 On Photography Free Dirt By Angella d'Avignon Free dirt. Photograph via Craigslist. For the past three years, I’ve filled a folder on my desktop with pictures of dirt that I found on Craigslist. The dirt in each picture was offered free of charge to whoever was willing to pick it up (“You haul”) or, if you were lucky, a free-dirter might have offered free delivery. Depending on the angle and composition of the images, “free dirt” posts on Craigslist can look like unintentional landscape vistas. Some shots feature calloused hands covered in tawny fill dirt, vignetted by palm trees and paved driveways in postwar cul-de-sacs. There are endless frames of earth spilling onto asphalt, flattened mounds of rich brown soil indented with tire tracks, craggy piles of dirt gathered evenly along the perimeters of blue tarp in driveways. Where I’m from, in Southern California, free dirt is abundant. Read More
April 6, 2022 On Photography Does the Parent Own the Child’s Body?: On Taryn Simon’s Sleep By Rachel Cusk Taryn Simon, detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021. When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its reality. Yet what the image records is not so much the reality of the baby as that of the person looking at it. If the baby or child is a created work, it is one whose agenda remains a mystery to its creator. Read More
March 22, 2022 On Photography Objective Correlatives By Stephen Shore In compiling the following list of influences and inspirations for my memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, I had a certain, specific range of aesthetic experiences in mind. What I was looking for in this list were particular individuals, works, or bodies of work that engendered in me a deep aesthetic experience that expanded and altered my understanding of art, of myself, and of the world. In some cases these were specific experiences that have stayed with me for decades. CIDOC In 1971, I attended a month of seminars, talks, and workshops at CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. CIDOC was an institute founded by the radical educator Ivan Illich, whose book Deschooling Society was published that same year. Most of the major progressive educational theorists in North America were present that month. Particularly memorable was a one-week workshop I attended that was conducted by George Dennison: “Organic versus Arbitrary Order.” James R. Roberts, Ivan Illich leading seminar at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971. Courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives. The workshop met for a few hours each day, for five days. We sat spread out on a lawn at CIDOC. Instead of being a theoretical discussion of organic versus arbitrary order, the workshop was, itself, a demonstration of organic order—the order that grows outward from the relationship of the essential elements of a situation. Dennison let the discussion go wherever it seemed to flow. He was a person of wide-ranging interests and experience. There were several participants who became frustrated with the free-form nature of the workshop. The “arbitrary order”—the order imposed onto a situation—is what they brought to it. Dennison’s workshop sensitized me to the structural issues at the heart of how a photographer translates the world into a photograph. Read More
February 22, 2022 On Photography Photographic Neuroses: Alec Soth’s A Pound of Pictures By Gideon Jacobs Alec Soth, Quan Am Monastery. Memphis, Tennessee, 2021, archival pigment print, 24 x 30″. All images copyright © Alec Soth. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York. On his travels across the United States, the photographer Alec Soth likes to visit Buddhist temples, and he sometimes asks the monks if photography, with its “desire to stop and possess time,” is antithetical to their teachings. He reports that the response is often some variation on “No, I love taking pictures!” After one such interaction in Connecticut, he found that the monk in question had even tagged him in a photo on Facebook. The average American monk, it seems, isn’t concerned about whether the photographic impulse may be a neurotic one born of upādāna, or worldly attachment. Soth, though, clearly is. Since publishing his now canonical 2004 book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth has been one of the great visual chroniclers of the American condition. His work, armed with Walker Evans’s docu-formalism, fights William Eggleston’s “war with the obvious”; it captures the country’s psychosocial landscape, examining who we are and how we feel, collectively. But his new project, A Pound of Pictures, takes a turn inward. Here, America as Soth finds it serves less as a subject than as a vehicle to examine the photographic medium itself, and his relationship to it. The book and the exhibition play on our desire to memorialize, to preserve pieces of experience. Many of these images contain another photograph somewhere in the frame—there are, by my count, seven pictures of people taking pictures—and interwoven throughout are a handful of portraits of well-known image makers: Sophie Calle, Duane Michals, Nancy Rexroth. When Soth began this body of work, he wasn’t intending to make photographs about photographs. His original plan was to follow the route of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, “in an attempt to mourn the divisiveness in America.” But the project, he writes, felt “lifeless.” So, he abandoned the approach, trying to think less and feel more, allowing his camera to be oriented by an inner compass—the instincts he doesn’t always understand but has learned to trust. The result is a project that is political only in that it asks a people mindlessly producing billions of images every day: What are we doing? And why are we doing it? I spoke to Soth over the phone just after touring his exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. I wanted to ask him some similar questions about the medium he has devoted his life to, and to push him on its efficacy and purpose. But Soth gives no definitive answers, either in our interview or in his photographs: both are characterized by his wandering curiosity. A selection of photographs from A Pound of Pictures follows the interview. Read More
October 18, 2021 On Photography Eavesdropping in the Archives: Six Artist Portraits By Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Lester Sloan The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for Newsweek, where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha’s questions and prompts to her father appear in bold. Lester’s thoughts are set in a lighter typeface. BALLET LESSONS Hoop dreams. You know where this picture was taken? Around the corner from my mother’s house, I think. No—across the street. The house that used to be across the street from my mother’s house. Where Mr. Ringo’s house used to be. Mr. Ringo was the guy who lived across the street from us, and I used to cut his grass and help clean up his house for extra money, and I always enjoyed that because he had a magazine I’d never seen before. He got National Geographic delivered to his door, and he also had other magazines like Life and Look. But he was a reader of magazines and books. This is such a colorful picture. It is. Think about the control you have to have to dribble a ball, pick it up, jump up, pull your arms up as far as you can to overreach the guy trying to block your shot, put the right arch on it so it’ll go over his fingertips and into the ring of the basket. It didn’t surprise me later on when a few basketball players started taking ballet lessons because they discovered that the body control you need to be a great dancer is the same body control you need to develop as a ballplayer. You look at this and realize it’s possible for a kid from the hood to be Nureyev. Read More