Anderson Gallery Submission

I submitted three photographs to the Anderson Gallery Student Show last week, and one was accepted. They will be showing my "Doctor's Office" image in the gallery starting Friday the 10th.

Monday Entry: Christian Vogt

Swiss photographer Christian Vogt was born in 1946 and studied at the Basel Design School. He is known for his diverse body of work; he can easily transform, creating imagery in many different modes. Having worked steadily since the late 1960s, Vogt has acquired attention for numerous series, including 1994-1995's Idem Diversum, which is made of several, full-scale portraits of subjects with their eyes closed. The restricting black borders are reminiscent of the walls of a coffin. His more recent work was created outside of the photo studio and is surprisingly fresh for someone who has been working in the medium as long as Vogt has. Since Last Summer, Vogt's 2003 collection of color work, is rife with bizarre photographs, which appear formally sound, yet spontaneous at the same time. The landscapes and figural scenes are set at dusk, which almost becomes a character itself. This collection was an experiment for the artist, he was not attempting to build a series, rather just photographing what he observed during long summer evenings. Moving on, he returned to the practice of creating series in 2004 with Viewings, a more detached and cerebral group of images focused on the tension between interior spaces and the worlds that lie beyond their windows.

Vogt's photography from 2003-2004 resonates strongly with me. I love the mischievous and dark qualities in Since Last Summer; one longs for the events that immediately led to the scenes caught on film. The sobriety of his compositions in his 2004 series of interiors is as unnerving as it is fascinating. Everything is balanced, and the colors almost form bands, as in color field paintings.


http://www.christianvogt.com

http://www.schaden.com/book/VogChrPho03785.html

http://www.webjournal.ch/article.php?article_id=1015

Thursday Entry: Impact

"A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence"
-Susan Sontag

Sontag, S. (1977) "In Plato's Cave".
On Photography, 3-24.

This essay, the first in Susan Sontag's classic collection, extols the benefits of the still image over motion pictures. She sights the influence and power of the photograph, writing about one image in particular, the Vietnamese girl, stripped of her clothing and running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war. Sontag opines that the hours of destruction in Vietnam aired on American television in the 1970s were not nearly as effective and memorable as that single still image of the girl. The critic writes, "Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor". With photography, the artist pays closer attention to the composition and details, distilling what could be an entire narrative down to a single frame. In many cases, there are too many images in film to really appreciate the individual shots. Sontag appreciates the tangibility of photographs, whereas film needs to projected through a machine and cannot be physically interacted with to the same extent. She sees photographs as a unique moment in time; more accessible and considered than motion pictures.

While I am a great admirer of film and would love to experiment more with the medium, I do agree with Sontag. Photography can be extremely potent, when handled correctly. As with several artists I am inspired by, I aim to use the medium to relay an entire story, recounted through the visuals, without relying on text or audio.

Lecture Entry: Josua Poteat and Elizabeth Seidel Morgan

On the evening of March 26th, VCU's English Department hosted two of their previous MFA graduates to present a lecture and give readings of their own poetry. Joshua Poteat received his MFA in 1997 and has gone on to be a published poet, with his 2004 book, Ornithologies. His poetry is visually striking and often quite humorous. Poteat finds inspiration for his poems from various sources, including the artwork of sculptor Alice Aycock. The author admits that he, "steals titles from other works", even naming one poem "Illustrating a Machine to Catch and Reproduce Ghosts" after Aycock's sculpture. Being a Richmond native, there are many references to historical events that happened in Church Hill in his poetry, including one poem about the legendary train tunnel collapse of 1921. His poems evoke images from the early 2oth century. In his upcoming book, the chapters are sorted into fictional departments in an old Sears and Roebuck Department store. In one poem under the heading "Lighting Department", Poteat imagines light bulbs created to replicate the lighting quality of 1920. Historical events and characters effectively coexist with present day surroundings.

Born in 1937, Elizabeth Seidel Morgan was one of the first graduates of VCU's MFA Program for Creative Writing. Despite her years, Morgan was bright and fiery, reliving her early poems with a sharp intensity. Her poems contain violent and barbed diction, which is apparent in a number of the works she shared. The poem "How Much Was the Most Elvis Ever Weighed?" relates a true encounter with Elvis Presley when he was 18 and she was just 16 years old. She met the legendary musician with a friend after one of his shows and her friend posed on his lap for a picture. In the poem, the author mournfully recounts that both Elvis and her teenage friend died around the same period of time, both from drug overdoses. Morgan does write about bitter periods in her life, yet never forgets her sense of humor as evidenced in "All My Friends' Pet are Growing Old". She was a delight to listen to and imparted a number of keen observation on the audience.

Lecture Entry: Amy Stein

Earlier this month, our department hosted photographer Amy Stein, a graduate of New York's School of Visual Arts. Stein first became interested in photography in her early thirties, assisting at photo schools and submitting images to online publications and newspapers. When one of her images became the cover photo of the Washington Post, she gained the confidence and momentum to keep invested in photography. Stein's first real series of images were born after the DC sniper incident and was titled, "Women and Guns". Because Washington DC was the capital of guns and violence, she studied the culture of people who own and use guns frequently. This series eventually led to an interest in the animals slain after a hunting party. Stein began to research taxidermists and photograph their own handiwork in Pennsylvania. The artist came up with the novel idea of returning these taxidermic animals back into nature, where once they lived. This idea grew into the "Domesticated" series, which was created in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2005. The images are based on real stories of animals coming out at night and wandering around town, yet they have a fantastic, otherworldly feel. These animals look for their old habitat amongst parking lots, swimming pools, and light poles. All of the animals appear to be living as they amble discontentedly around man-made environments.
In a more recent series, Stein photographed ill-fated motorists along America's highways. The "Stranded" series features portraits of drivers and passengers whose vehicles have broken down, standing next to their dilapidated cars. This series does not jog the imagination as her previous efforts have. Perhaps this imagery is too familiar or the compositions are too close to other works.

It may be because Amy Stein is relatively new to the world of photography, but it is refreshing to hear from an artist who appears grounded and not too swept up in her success. I liked to hear about her process and the evolution of her ideas. Stein was quick to acknowledge her influences and that there exists similar series to her own. She spoke earnestly and welcomed questions from the audience.

Monday Entry: Katherine Wolkoff

Katherine Wolkoff's body of work is surprisingly diverse, deftly moving from one subject matter to the next. She was born in 1976 in Indiana, studied American History at Barnard College, and graduated with an MFA in Photography from Yale in 2003. In 2007, the artist revealed her series of deer beds, which are simple impressions made by the animals in grass fields. Much like her silhouettes of birds and people, this series of photos engages the viewer, inviting him to imagine the details of the animal, given just the outline. There is a great sense of motion and unease in these pictures, for the animals would have had to be startled away from these habitats relatively quickly before the photos were taken, in order for the beds to be intact. Her silhouettes are equally intriguing; in a way, they are working against the audience's immediate needs while exercising their creativity. Wolkoff allows the colorful plumage of the birds and the facial features of her human models to be superimposed on these silhouettes. We end up seeing just what we want to see in the end. She has moved on to a series of images of New Orleans, after being razed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

I am a great proponent of work that suggests more than it actually shows to the viewer. Absence can be extremely powerful when handled as wisely as Wolkoff has shown. Her deer beds are deceptively simple and carry with them a great deal of possibility.






http://www.wipnyc.org/blog/katherine-wolkoff.html

http://katherinewolkoff.com/

www.point-mag.com/pdf/Point-KatherineWolkoff.pdf

Thursday Entry: Personification

"The rooms that she generates through her photographs of models are not only the rooms of their former occupants...they are also the artist's own rooms"
-Maren Lubbke-Tidow

Lubbke-Tidow, M. (2007) "Spatial Sense"
Anna Lehmann-Brauns: Sun in an Empty Room, 59-61.



The essay published along with Anna Lehmann-Brauns' series, Sun in an Empty Room looks back at her early student work in order to appreciate her current photographs. Author Maren Lubbke-Tidow relates that Anna's student work was much different than that of her peers in Germany; while others were focusing on conceptual documentary self-portraits, she created miniature model interiors, which stood in for people in her life. She injected each constructed space with a personality and christened each image with a person's name as a title. Anna drew from her own experiences with these individuals, the memories she has of them to fashion her interiors. It is more evident in some images (for instance the boy's bedroom titled, "Sebastian") why she decided to title them after an individual. One photograph displays a vibrant red bathroom complete with a tub bubbling over, curiously named "Mamma". Many of her photos go beyond just the owners' own living space and ask just what it is that we remember of someone. The author can relate to the more obscure spaces, commenting that the smell of a certain brand of soap instantly evokes memories of summers with her grandparents. These rooms function as spaces within the artist's mind, revealing intimate recollections of the people in her life.

When working on my series of interiors, I try to find elements that elicit strong memories for me. I attempt to give life to these areas with objects that I introduce to the scene, or with those that I come across that are already in place. The quality of the lighting, in addition to the physical elements in the photographs help me place my own stamp on the locations.