Monday Entry: Candida Hofer

Candida Hofer, who was born in Eberswalde, Germany in 1944, is one of the many acclaimed artists who have learned the traditions of the deadpan aesthetic while studying with the great Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Like her fellow peers, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Ruff, Hofer maintains a cool, detached mood throughout her work. She is known for her exquisite deadpan photographs of public spaces and institutions, which are eerily devoid of people. She has photographic collections of libraries, offices, theaters and more locations. Absence and ambience are her two central concepts; time passes in these public locations and the lighting shifts, and the viewer is reminded of haunted spaces where once life flourished. She is interested in the formal qualities of these spaces, yet it is not the design of the locations alone that draws the viewer's attention; in a good number of these scenes, there are hints that people have just left or will be returning soon.

I am aiming towards this direction with my current series. I love the cool quality of light in these interiors. The absence that I was hinting at with the first part of this year's series is quieter in my new work, but no less apparent, I feel. Hofer's series is similar to my own, in terms of the angles and locations, yet I want to put more emphasis on individual objects and incorporate dramatic lighting.


http://www.renabranstengallery.com/hofer.html

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E3DA173AF936A25753C1A9629C8B63

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/hfer_candida.php

Thursday Entry: Activation

"It is only through activating the space of the spectator that the space of the photograph begins to take shape"
-Michael Tarantino

Tarantino, M. (1999) "Haunted Houses".
James Casebere: Asylum, 104-115.

Author Michael Tarantino's five part article is a thorough and lucid examination of James Casebere's Asylum series. The series of photographs under consideration is of models of interiors, devoid of people, and featuring blank white walls and careful lighting. The author notes that Casebere's imagery is subtle enough to suggest a narrative and not impose one. The photos are curious and allow the viewer to cull information from various elements. In more than one image, the window in the scene is not letting in enough light to sufficiently illuminate the space, yet the interior is awash with light. Tarantino finds oddities like that to be part of the artist's plan to activate the viewer into giving the work a second look. He sights Casebere's variation of angle and distance between the viewer and the subject as further strategies to gain the appropriate attention that the work demands. There are four photographs depicting the entrance-ways to neighboring tunnels that actively pull in the audience because of their disparate framing (two are vertical and two are horizontal) and the variation of the point of view.

In my most recent individual meeting with Paul, the two of us discussed my need to adopt different points of view, and the distance between the viewer and the object(s) of interest in my photographs. Casebere is very subtle in this regard; his images pull you in and you do not often find yourself questioning the vantage point. I find myself more immersed now in Casebere's work having read Tarantino's article.

Monday Entry: Katrin Freisager

Freisager was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1960, and has studied photography in Berlin, Paris, and New York. Her artwork often centers around the themes of suspension, ambiguity, and the tension between fiction and reality. The majority of her photographs feature young women, uniformly attired in tan stockings and underwear. There faces are not often revealed, and they are taking part in actions and activities that seem foreign to the viewer. A strange sense of alienation and foreboding pervades her imagery. The scenes are nearly monochromatic. In Freisager's untitled series from 2002, several limbs from various hosts combine hauntingly to create one abstract form. Her photographs are related to painting, and often look like figural studies for a later work.

I love her restricted palette and emphasis on form. Because of the limited color range, the shadows appear deeper, playing a stronger role. The images featuring groups of models are more interesting to me than the earlier ones with one solitary subject. The purpose behind their interactions is withheld from the audience, a concept that I find intriguing.


http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_39/ai_75761343

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/untitled/

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE2D81F39F930A25755C0A9659C8B63

Thursday Entry: Subjectivity

"We have long since lost our faith in photography's capacity to show untempered reality. Indeed, it is the very opposite that fascinates us today: the subjective vision of seeing how somebody else sees the world around us, which challenges, awes and inspires"
-Christian Eggenberger

Eggenberger,C. (2004)"Introduction".
Photo Suisse, 11-15.

Critic Christian Eggenberger notes the importance and extreme variety of vision exhibited by Switzerland's photographers. Switzerland boasts a great wealth of talent, which may be a result of its mottled cultural make-up. It is the personality brought to the work by each individual artist that cannot be duplicated, despite similar subject matter. The author writes that native artists Balthasar Burkhard and Thomas Fletcher both work with mountains as a concept, but each man has a unique vision and goes about his photography in a different manner. The former envisions the image before arriving on location, while the latter needs to be on the sight and figures out what he is making after it has been captured on film. Every artist is shaped by personal experiences, which have a way of appearing in their work. As an artist, it is terribly difficult to ignore certain compositions and themes relevant to your own interests.

This collection has introduced me to two artists who have similar concerns, but whose work can clearly be differentiated from the others. Both Katrin Freisager and Olivier Christinat have played with the female form and neutral backgrouds in their imagery, but each one has effectively put their own spin on the subject matter. Katrin's work is more playful and at times dark, while Olivier's can be more deadpan, and focuses more on the power of the model's gaze.

Monday Entry: Olivier Christinat

Christinat's artwork builds upon the examination of truth in the medium of photography, which I have been researching recently.He is a native of Switzerland, yet was born in France in 1963, and studied photography at the School of the Arts in Lausanne from 1980-1984. He has shifted between various styles, he has an extensive body of female nudes with neutral backgrounds, but I find his staged group scenes the most enigmatic and fascinating. His series Evenements, which was created between 1999 to 2002, depict groups of men and women, all dressed in dark suits and dresses and posed in such a way to recall famous political photographs. One of the images shows a group of six women gathered around the body of man laid out on a table. This tableaux is based upon a photograph of a Spanish family's wake during the Francisco Franco regime taken by W.Eugene Smith. It is fascinating to look at all of the various gestures displayed by the models in his images. Once he takes the figures from these politically charged photographs and removes them from their context, the interest level soars. The uniformity of their costuming is juxtaposed with the individuality in their gestures.

I first became aware of Olivier Christinat while my current series was still in its gestation period, one year ago. I was immediately drawn to the positioning of his figures and intrigued by the limited color palette he employs. The facial expressions are an integral part of the photographs, and I intend to incorporate more faces into my series.


http://expositions.bnf.fr/face/rencon/chris/index.htm

http://www.pascalpolar.be/repartistes/christinat/christinat.html

www.gdvs.com

Thursday Entry: Fiction

"Now that we know that photography is capable of deception we may be saddened, hardened, made wiser or more cynical, but at the same time we are freed, able to consider it as more than just a recording medium"
-Luc Sante

Sante, L. (1997) "Science and Fiction"
Making it Real, 8-9.

What is taken for granted today was revelatory and even scandalous during its inception. Author Luc Sante compares contemporary tableaux photographers to the ancient creators of fiction, as well as the filmmakers who made a Victorian audience believe that a steaming train may just plow its way through the screen and wreak havoc upon movie-goers. When photography was in its infancy, it was seen as the medium to deliver the absolute truth; it appeared to be an impartial mirror, capturing an event in perfect detail. Photographers soon began to realize the power inherent in the medium and exploited its believeabilty. Civil War photographer Alexander Gardener seemed to have unsurpassed luck when it came to finding compelling images of the war. Audiences in the 1860s would have been shocked to learn of Gardener's photographic slights of hand. To produce such stirring images of our fallen countrymen, the artist actually moved the dead bodies around the battlefields to create better compositions. He placed rifles on unarmed men and even turned their tortured faces towards the camera, all under the guise of documentary photography. Artists such as Gardener lead the way for photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Sandy Skoglund, by allowing them to distort what is presented to the viewer.

Fiction has always been my reason for not giving up the ghost. I could not help but concoct ghost stories and legends while growing up in antique houses. I can remember my small bedroom in Connecticut being illuminated at night by the light from the glowing sign out in front of the town's funeral home, which was conveniently located directly across the street. On one occasion, I peered out my window in hopes of seeing the first snowfall of the season, and was instead met with a grim glimpse of a late-night hearse delivery. I call upon my bizarre and unfortunate experiences from childhood and adolescence when creating my narrative series.

Monday Entry: Peter Garfield

Peter Garfield's artwork centers on the fine line between fiction and reality. Born in Stanford, Connecticut in 1961, Garfield studied photography at Dartmouth and received his MFA from Pratt Institiute in 1987. He is best known for his fantastic Mobile Homes series, which feature haphazard looking images of houses falling from the sky. The artist wanted a tabloid-like appearance to the pictures, and used blur to obscure their artificiality. The photographs are absurd and surprisingly convincing. He created the images by dangling small, detailed models of houses in front of his lens. The model houses are in various states of destruction, which suggests the deterioration of family life.Garfield continued this charade by writing an interview in which he reveals that his process involves the dropping of actual houses. Intrigued by his ability to blur fiction and reality, the artist staged mock-documentary photographs of the creation of this series. In one image, which was digitally manipulated, a helicopter lifts a full-sized house miles into the air, prepared to drop its cargo at a moment's notice. With the same humorous approach, Garfield filled galleries with color-coded garbage for his series, Four Seasons. In the exhibit, he matched garbage with seasonal colors, and analyzed what we as a country consume and dispose of. I love his incendiary sense of humor and the steps that he followed to mask the artificiality of his Mobile Homes series.



http://www.petergarfield.net/index.shtml

http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/garfieldp.html

http://chiefmag.com/issues/4/features/Peter-Garfield/