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Tonight I’ll join Rodarte (Kate and Laura Mulleavy) and Catherine Opie at the Hammer Museum to talk about our recently published book (conveniently titled Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth). Believe it or not, I still haven’t met Kate & Laura, so it is a pretty exciting night. One of the things I’m eager to talk about about is the map above. It was made after Kate and Laura sent me a package of pictures and notes describing their creative influences (Condors, Horror Films, Sleepwalking, Hare Krishna’s, etc…). From this list I made a treasure map in which to explore California. It was an amazing trip. I felt like I was sleepwalking through Kate & Laura’s imagination. We’ll find out how well I did tonight.

Info on the talk here

An article about my contribution to the book here.

Some memories from the April 2010: Week 1, Week 2

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voMDL1TgTh4&%22;#t=6m”]

 

Thanks for all of the great comments to my post about short-form video books. The intersection of photography and video appears to be really fertile ground these days. I particularly like this pairing of video and still images that Justin James Reed has on the front page of his website right now. Of course this kind of still video isn’t new. Experimental filmmakers have long explored this terrain.

Perhaps the most notable example is Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film (nostalgia). The 38 minute shows black and white still photographs by Frampton being burned on a hot plate while the soundtrack offers comments on the  content of the images. It is worth noting that this reading is done by Michael Snow who created the other masterpiece of still movies, Wavelength. This 1967 film is a 45 minute long static shot in which a lens zooms across a room and finally focuses on a picture of the sea pinned to the wall. (The movie is also a murder mystery; at one point in the film, a man – played by Hollis Frampton –  walks into the scene and dies).

Can short videos function like photographs? Can you imagine an iPad book of 40, one-minute videos working together much the same way a photography book works? Discuss here: http://tinyurl.com/3ekvdkz

Hey Les. Long time, no etc.

I surfaced in Rome at the end of September (don’t ask). I needed to reconnect with la vita bella. I owed myself an immersion after a long, long period of self-denial (again, don’t ask). Not to say I was after any swooning, Stendhal Syndrome effects; I just felt sorely deprived of beauty. And where better to rejuvenate—beauty inhabits the language, the food, the people, the everyday life of Italy. We know, we’ve been there.

My place was near the Galvani/Zabaglia bus stop, and I was ambling one evening around piazza Orazio Giustiniani. There was all kinds of hubbub, more than the standard Roman white noise. Something about a festival. Another art-photo-extravanganza. Wandering into the midst of it, there in front of me was our friend Alec. His work, I mean. Some darn fascinating pictures in that exhibition; seems he got a commission to photograph the city of Rome. But had his own Stendhal moment and bailed. “Too beautiful,” he said. Can’t say I blame the poor blighter, landlocked Minnesotan that he is. Regardless, he found some things to suggest the beauty he couldn’t address head on, and it’s all gorgeously fascinating and attractive in a Ten Commandments, “thou shalt not” kind of way.

I wasn’t swooning, but I was mesmerized. There’s some sexy stuff in Alec’s show, some almost startlingly so (a nod to the late great Larry Sultan, who we know Alec admired). Some more subtle, though your average 10-year-old ragazzo would probably get the figs and kumquats picture. Some pretty sloppy beauties, though still gorgeous, like the “pale” men, one who seems on a 3-day-bender and the other zonked out in a smoke-filled car. Or that awesome Gabriella, hair like snakes on Medusa’s fearsome head. Snakes (including one impossibly knotted one that ends up looking like a heart), smoke (issuing from a woman’s mouth like a tongue), temptation—ahh, the lustful beauty of it all.

I left full of questions. Is la bellezza truly in the eye of the beholder? Or is there universal beauty? Maybe it’s all in the translation from life to photograph. Good makeup artists and stylists can do wonders, can’t they Les? Bail out a photographer who’s lost his bearings? Worth thinking about.

And for the life of me, I can’t figure out all the pineapples.

 

 

 

 

Ciao bello.

Last night Errol Morris posted a wonderful series of tweets:

For what it is worth, I subscribe to every single one of these assertions. But the fun part of reading this is thinking about the implications for fine art photographers. What does the clumsy and pretentious term ‘Fine Art Photographer’ mean? For me it means the kind of photography in which authorship is essential to the reading of the pictures. With this in mind, Morris’s 2^nd point is key:

The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation).

This speculation is at the heart of what we call fine art photography.When I look out Robert Franks’s window in Butte Montana, I hold in my head all of the other pictures in The Americans along with some words by Kerouac and whatever else I know about Frank and his biography. In other words, the intentions of the photographer might not be recorded, but their speculation is essential to the experience of the work.

This is a point Geoff Dyer eloquently makes about Frank in his book The Ongoing Moment:

“The pictures are apparently so casual as to seem hardly worth dwelling on. If we do choose to linger it is often to try to work out why Frank took a particular picture (what’s so special about this?)…The purpose of the photograph made from a hotel window in Butte, Montana is to confirm that the view, partly hindered by net curtains, does not merit a second glance (as such the photograph demands that we return to it again and again).”

So what is the photographer’s intention when he recreates another photographer’s picture? I’ll leave that for you to speculate.

Alec Soth, from the series Broken Manual, 2008