I wish I had been able to see this piece while it was still installed.
30.3.10
Smiley smiles :) :)
The other night I spoke with Maansi, a girl from my dorm who I met during welcome week. She said I should check out an article in the Style section of last Wednesday's New York Times because it was about Patrick McMullan, a photographer whose work reminded her of photos I showed her at the beginning of last semester.
If I remember, I first showed her some of the work I made at various parties in my final year of high school.
She seemed genuinely interested so I mentioned that I study photography with Larry Fink and pulled out my copy of "Social Graces." We leafed through the book; we talked; she left. We made only chitchat on the occasions when we ran into each other--until our conversation last Thursday night.
When I got back to my room I immediately dove into the article she referenced. But I was struck by the distance I felt from McMullan's work. It elicits superficial smiles rather than introspection.
©Patrick McMullan
Like any number of contemporary photographers, McMullan professes disdain for technical prowess. (I understand the spurn: who really needs to know their camera if they can produce compelling images without that knowledge?) In an interview with the Times he said, “I could be a better photographer, but I’ve also gotten caught in running a business, and almost, if you can get this as a joke, being Patrick McMullan and all that means.” As a graduate from the business school at NYU, McMullan is a good businessman; one who understands that his audience does not care about compelling images. He serves an audience that pays to be seen; one that pays for generic blondes smiling at the camera.
© Patrick McMullan
McMullan sets up photo opportunities rather than being an opportunistic paparazzo (the second category of party photographer the article outlines). But this limited and categorical approach reveals only McMullan's bowdlerized view of one specific, artificial social dynamic. It removes the possibility of finding and capturing nuanced dramas. In contrast, Fink's work highlights the sly smile and the hand's caress that may transport us into an exploratory realm where we recognize the essences of human interaction.
© Larry Fink
© Larry Fink
In an article recently published in Ag, The International Quarterly Journal
of Photographic Art & Practice, Bill Lowenburg (one of my dearest mentors) allows us to glean an insider's view into Fink's visual exploration of a "Night at the Met." We find that Fink consistently eschews the practices of photographers like McMullan; he does not direct his subjects, instead he is intuitively drawn to off-the-cuff, natural arrangements.
of Photographic Art & Practice, Bill Lowenburg (one of my dearest mentors) allows us to glean an insider's view into Fink's visual exploration of a "Night at the Met." We find that Fink consistently eschews the practices of photographers like McMullan; he does not direct his subjects, instead he is intuitively drawn to off-the-cuff, natural arrangements.
© Larry Fink
Lowenburg writes, "Some of the guests beg him to take their picture, grabbing one another, grinning and posing. He refuses. Deflated, they seek out the other photographers in attendance, both pro and amateur, who seem happy to oblige."
It is precisely McCullan's grinning and posing subjects that deter our engagement with the photograph; their pearly whites are impassible palisades which prevent us from probing into their personhood. By contrast Fink slips in with sub rosa ease, making a picture before his subject can ham it up for the camera.
© Larry Fink
"'Come on, take the real picture now,' a 20-something redhead giggles, clutching the arm of her crew-cut date after Larry has popped his flash into the middle of their whispered conversation.
'I just did,' he replies, and rolls on."
29.3.10
"For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path"
From the front page of The New York Times online:
"For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path"
This is the same old horror story that has been circulating for years. I have to believe that a new business model will emerge as Fred Ritchin and many others have discussed.
If not, I guess there's always investment banking!
Oh...
"For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path"
This is the same old horror story that has been circulating for years. I have to believe that a new business model will emerge as Fred Ritchin and many others have discussed.
If not, I guess there's always investment banking!
Oh...
26.3.10
Democracy Now! interview with Wafaa Bilal
Check out this Democracy Now! interview with Wafaa Bilal, my photography professor, about his newest work "...and Counting."
Seeing this performance live forced me to conceive, appreciate, and attempt to reconcile the sheer enormity of the suffering precipitated by the Iraq war. Reading, or hearing read the names of both the soldiers and the civilians killed since the invasion is an utterly overwhelming experience. If we choose to recognize the meaning of each of those names we realize that each is the epicenter of several waves of additional destruction. Together they signify a vast swath of anguish amalgamated from the individual experiences of each parent, sibling, relative, friend.
I think that I often reduce the significance of death, overwhelmed by volume. The numbers associated with the well-known genocides and the great wars lose their meaning, for me. How is that I can casually read of the twenty to twenty-five million civilian and military deaths in the Soviet Union during World War II without a thought to what those numbers denote?
When a name replaces a number it begins to hold meaning, value. But why does it take a name to hold meaning? At Bilal's performance, I read from a list of Americans killed in Iraq. I can only imagine what each soldier believed was the significance of what they had been sent to do; what promise they believed a career in the military would offer; where their thoughts gamboled in the instants before death. The Iraqi list was daunting in a different respect: it revealed the destruction of entire households.
From the destruction of Bilal's brother comes a work of living art which compels us to recognize of the significance of the individual death within its overwhelming context.
25.3.10
My first concept-based project
Images/video:
1. Whitetail deer in sylvan misé-en-scene at the American Museum of Natural History (digital photograph)
2. Power plant near Martins Creek, Pennsylvania (digital photograph)
7. A series of experiences related by a man who only exists on a state ID (video)
There exists a logical, if abstracted, relationship between each of the images I present in this deadpan-inspired assessment of image definition and image appropriation.
The series opens with Whitetail deer in sylvan mise-en-scène, a photograph I made at the American Museum of Natural History. A buck peers around the edge of the frame, as if to examine the viewer. In the foreground, a doe cranes her neck toward some of the plastic plant-matter that also occupies this carefully painted and manufactured reality. My image holds immobile this scene, which is—at its essence—also immobile, permanent, fixed for viewing by thousands of museum visitors.
In the next image of a Power plant near Martins Creek, Pennsylvania exists a contrast between static, man-made infrastructure and the fertile winter-waste former farmland in its immediate proximity. Vegetation grows, its significance trumped by the wooden power poles and concrete-and-steel that afford modern convenience to the region. On a different plane of viewing exists the struggle between appreciation of the scene's geometry and the seduction of the cooling towers to be read through the viewer's image repertoire (and reduced to just another photograph of cooling towers).
The third photograph of a Hula girl shower curtain embraces its relationship with the viewer's image repertoire, existing as a manufactured (in several senses of the word) representation of an iconic, touristy, knickknack experience. It forces the viewer to further explore and question the translation of a Hawaiian woman's cultural dance into a dashboard trinket and the translation of that image onto a household necessity.
In the fourth photograph of Two couples off the dance floor at a European nightclub, Brooklyn the viewer examines the physical reflection of emotion in the nuances of hand, arm, and facial gestures. An exchange of power unfolds as the women dominate the men and, in turn, the men dominate the women. The image communicates both an air of vulnerability and composure. The woman escaping the frame suggests all of these fleeting experiences which are reduced and objectified by my image.
Insert musician, enjoy is intended to suggest something of the universality of the viewing and listening experience within a context specific to some of the Brooklyn indie scene. The photograph, with its three characters each obscured by silhouette, deletion, or non-description, calls into question the identity of the performer and the audience, suggesting their interchangeability and the examination of the audience-as-subject.
Identity is directly asserted in Gregory Hill Jr's New York State Driver's License, which as an ID card found on a subway platform in Brooklyn is supposed to offer incontrovertible proof of who you are. But this beaten and battered ID appears to be fake—its holograms do not cast spectral flashes of color at each angle of view. A fake identity subverts the value of a real one.
Engrossed by the concept of a manufactured, fake, and appropriated identity, I wrote and compiled a short film to explore A series of experiences related by a man who only exists on a state ID. The film uses images appropriated from the internet, a VHS tape I found in a dumpster near Astor Place, and several feature films to create a non-sequitur, stream-of-consciousness monologue from the point of view of Gregory Hill Jr. The film uses this technique to assert new meaning for images, which at times do, and other times do not follow the narration. By articulating this balance, the audience is forced to both associate and dissociate the meaning behind the images and the aural experience of the film.
In the process of making this film, I was struck by some of the images I saw on the VHS tape—which contained seventeen Arabic-language soda advertisements from the 1980s. I made freeze frames of each of these images. I believe that the individual image can only contextualized by its audio and video timestamps. The juxtaposition of image content and the name of each diptych force the viewer to recontextualize what they see.
In Diptych of a misogynist rescue I appropriated two images from a commercial which features a James Bond-like character and a helpless woman locked to a table. The woman's nervous gaze into the other frame—which shows the same woman drinking champagne from a flute and the man drinking directly from the bottle—creates a sense of lust for indulgence and juxtaposes temporalities.
The Diptych of a lunch counter raid contrasts the blurred abstraction of a fighter-jet escaping the frame with a several teenagers crawling over a lunch counter. Each suggests warmongering, though one is part of the military industrial complex and the other is seemingly innocent. The relationship between each bellicose action creates a discernible unease.
In the final image, Diptych of a man who found Christ, a man squats against a wall, sinking to the ground, enduring the sun. In the opposing image a man stands upright, one arm extended toward the sky; he salutes God. He is situated at the apex of a two lines, which form a triangle with the bottom of the frame. The images are full of visual contrasts; one man sinks, while the other rises; one man wears blue pants and a white shirt, the other wears the opposite. Their attitudes towards life stand in contrast. Perhaps they are two different men, or perhaps the image shows before and after one man found Christ… or a cupcake.
Images/video copyright Jonno Rattman 2009. Rights reserved.
Images/video copyright Jonno Rattman 2009. Rights reserved.
24.3.10
A Founding Post
Many times since the outset of this school year friends have asked me to establish a flickr account, or a tumblr, or to maintain a regularly updated website; until now, I resisted. Today I inaugurate this blog as a place to post my visual and textual trains-of-thought. It will be a space for me to react to photography, imaging, video, writing, music—whether my own or created by other artists.
I must be honest: at one time I would have argued that there are few things more vain than the construction of self-importance through a blog. By this I mean to suggest that a blogger may fail to recognize his own triviality; his limited audience, expounding with tedious self-obsession. At this time, I expect little or no readership and perhaps this experiment will only reveal my own vanity.
Semi-regular updates should provide a sense of my own works-in-progress or of items that I feel deserve additional attention.
I must be honest: at one time I would have argued that there are few things more vain than the construction of self-importance through a blog. By this I mean to suggest that a blogger may fail to recognize his own triviality; his limited audience, expounding with tedious self-obsession. At this time, I expect little or no readership and perhaps this experiment will only reveal my own vanity.
Semi-regular updates should provide a sense of my own works-in-progress or of items that I feel deserve additional attention.
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