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Interdisciplinary Artists in Residence

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This Fall, Brad Zellar and I are artists in residence at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Along with co-teaching a course entitled Truth, Lies, Memory, and Imagination: The Photograph as Story, we’ll be hosting a number of public events:


Guest Artists Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin
photographer and publisher | graphic designer, illustrator, and author
Wednesday, September 10
4:30 – 5:45 pm
Room L160
Elvehjem Building
800 University Avenue

 

A Conversation with Alec Soth about his current MMoCA exhibition From Here to There with MMoCA director Stephen Fleischman
Saturday, September 13
6:30 – 7:30 pm
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA)
227 State Street
MMoCA event: $10 MMoCA Nights admission/free

 


Guest Artist Susan Meiselas
documentary photographer
Wednesday, September 24
4:30 – 5:45 pm
L160
Elvehjem Building
800 University Avenue

 


Guest Artist David Rathman
painter and multimedia artist
Wednesday, October 8
4:30 – 5:45 pm
Room L160
Elvehjem Building
800 University Avenue

 

Gallery Talk with Brad Zellar
Friday, October 10
6:30 – 7:00 pm
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
227 State Street
MMoCA event: Free admission to all.

 


Guest Speaker Michael Lesy
author and professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College
Wednesday, October 15
4:30 – 5:45 pm
Room L160
Elvehjem Building
800 University Avenue

 


Talk by Brad Zellar:“House of Coates Revisited: Lester B. Morrison, Little Brown Mushroom, and Other Lost Broken Men”
Saturday, October 18
5:30 pm
Community Room
Madison Central Library
201 West Mifflin Street

 

Workshop with Brad Zellar:“How Many Words is a Picture Really Worth? Writing From Photographs”
Sunday, October 19
11:00 am – 2:00 pm
Wisconsin Book Festival event.
See wisconsinbookfestival.org for further details.

 


Guest Artists The Goggles (Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons)
interactive, immersive storytellers
Wednesday, October 22
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Gordon Commons
770 West Dayton Street
Registration recommended: go.wisc.edu/f6mqhm

 

Madison Area Network for Innovation and Collaboration (MANIAC) Lunchtime Talk with Alec Soth and Brad Zellar
Wednesday, October 29
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Gordon Commons
770 West Dayton Street
Registration recommended: go.wisc.edu/f6mqhm

 


Guest Artist Ginger Strand
author
Wednesday, November 12
4:30 – 5:45 pm

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The final LBM Dispatch

photo-12Today we are packing for our seventh and final LBM Dispatch in Georgia. As in the past, we’ll be assisted by students – in this case in cooperation from our project sponsor, The Savannah College of Art and Design. But for this final trip we’ll be taking a slightly different approach to the publishing of the Dispatch. In hopes of spreading the word about our little newspaper, we’re working with a slightly larger publisher, The New York Times Magazine. But hard-core LBM fans will be comforted to know that we’ll still publish a full-scale Dispatch after our work debuts in the Times. In the meantime, follow our journey on Instagram and Tumblr.

 

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LBM + Ping Pong + Germany

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I’m excited to be attending the LBM events in Germany this week. On Friday June 20th, join me for the opening of the LBM Ping Pong Reading Room at the Sprengel Musuem in Hannover. Along with books and ping pong, there will be artwork by Jason Polan, Anouk Kruithof, David Goldes and myself.  The opening is on Friday 3pm. There will also be a Ping Pong Tournament at the museum on Saturday the 21st at 10:30am.

Finally, at 2pm on Sunday the 22nd I’ll be giving a lecture at Freundeskreis des Hauses der Photographie in Hamburg.

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SPRENGEL MUSEUM HANNOVER
Museumsplatz
Alec Soth & Friends
THE LITTLE BROWN MUSHROOM
PING-PONG READING ROOM
David Goldes, Anouk Kruithof, Jason Polan und Alec Soth
21. Juni bis 26. Oktober 2014
Eröffnung am Freitag, dem 20. Juni 2014, 15.00 Uhr

Der Amerikaner Alec Soth (*1969) zählt zu den einflussreichsten Fotografen seiner Generation. Seine um-fangreichen, mittels Großformatkamera entstehenden Bildserien über den amerikanischen Mittleren Westen haben die Selbstwahrnehmung der USA vor allem in den 2010er-Jahren wesentlich geprägt.

Aufgewachsen in Minnesota gelangte Soth über eine Auseinandersetzung mit Land Art, Malerei und einem Studium am Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, New York, unter anderem bei Joel Sternfeld, zur Fotografie. Seine frühe Schwarz-Weiß-Arbeit LOOKING FOR LOVE (1996) gibt ein berührendes Porträt des Alltags in der amerikanischen Provinz. Auch beeinflusst von den häufig an die Erfahrung des Reisens gebundenen Filmen des deutschen Regisseurs Wim Wenders begab sich Alec Soth in den folgenden Jahren immer wieder auf die Suche nach der Gegenwart der amerikanischen Gründungsmythen: Die Landschaften in seinen Bildern sind weit und erhaben. Ihre Bewohner sind eigenwillige Individualisten, die sich behaupten, wo immer sie sind.

In BROKEN MANUEL (2006-2010) führt dies letztendlich zu einer Auseinandersetzung mit Menschen, die, aus welchen Gründen auch immer, ein Leben fern der Zivilisation zu führen beschlossen haben: Der amerikanische Traum hat seine bindende, Gemeinschaft stiftende Kraft verloren.

Die besondere Bedeutung Alec Soths für die Fotografie der vergangenen 15 Jahre begründet sich allerdings nicht allein auf dieser Art fotografischer Forschungsarbeit und seiner Mitgliedschaft in der renommierten Bildagentur Magnum: Der von ihm betriebene Blog LITTLE BROWN MUSHROOM und die gleichnamige Publikations- und Vertriebsplattform gelten als exemplarisch für ein erweitertes Verständnis der Fotografie als Mittel kommunikativen Handelns im Zeitalter des Internets. Sie dienen Alec Soth zudem als eine Art Gegengewicht zu seinem Interesse an eremitischen Existenzen und der von ihm häufig als „beautiful loneliness in voyeurism“ thematisierten Einsamkeit des fotografischen Aktes.

Einem solchen kommunikativen, zur Teilhabe einladenden Ansatz folgt The little brown mush-room ping pong reading room, den Alec Soth für das Sprengel Museum Hannover kuratiert. In Zusammenarbeit mit Künstlerfreunden richtet er auf dem Museumsplatz einen Ort ein, der unterschiedlichste Angebote vereint: Eine Tischtennisplatte lädt zum spielerischen Miteinander – am Morgen nach der Eröffnung kann mit Alec Soth um den von ihm gestifteten Pokal gespielt werden. Derweil lässt die Künstlerfreundin Anouk Kruithof (*1981) Führungskräfte des höheren Managements ihr sportliches Können demonstrieren (PUSH-UP, 2013). David Goldes (*1977) imaginiert die tänzerische Balance eines Tischtennisballs über einem Luftstrom (GRAVITY VERSUS AIR STREAM, 2014).  Jason Polan (*1982), seit Jahren und wohl noch Jahrzehnte damit beschäftigt, jeden einzelnen New Yorker zu zeichnen, steuert Tischtennisschläger bei. Eine kleine Bibliothek bietet ausgewählte Lektüre, bequeme Sitze gestatten das Verweilen.

Alec Soth selbst produzierte speziell für das Sprengel Museum Hannover eine Fotografie, die ein Tischtennismatch im nächtlichen Schneetreiben zeigt. Das große Format wird aus 64 einzelnen Blättern zusammen-gepinnt, liegt aber auch ‚gestapelt‘ zum Mitnehmen und Installieren an den eigenen Wänden bereit. Kleinformatige Reproduktionen historischer Fotografien wiederum erzählen von den möglichen Freuden und Komplikationen des Ping-Pong, von welligen Tischen, sportlich-schönen Männern und Frauen, Ping-Pong spielenden Tauben, u. a.

Eröffnung: 20. Juni 2014, 15.00 Uhr

Es begrüßen Dr. Reinhard Spieler, Direktor Sprengel Museum Hannover, und Dr. Sabine Schormann, Direktorin Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung. Inka Schube, Kuratorin, führt in das Projekt ein.

Im Anschluss spricht Alec Soth zu seiner Arbeit und signiert die anlässlich der Ausstellung erscheinende Bildpublikation:

ALEC SOTH, ST. PAUL, 2014, 64 Blätter à 24,1 x 33,7 cm zu 193 x 269,3 cm + Index, Duotone Offsetdruck, gestapelt in Folie verpackt, Auflage 500, Preis: 20,- Euro

Anlässlich der Eröffnung stehen Shuttlebusse von und zum LUMIX Festival für jungen Fotojournalismus bereit.

Abfahrt LUMIX → Sprengel Museum Hannover
20. Juni 2014, 14.15 Uhr, Auffahrt Expo-Plaza / Deutscher Pavillon
Abfahrt Sprengel Museum Hannover → LUMIX
20. Juni 2014, ca. 17.00 Uhr vor dem Sprengel Museum Hannover

LITTLE BROWN MUSHROOM PING-PONG-TURNIER: 21. Juni 2014, 10.30 Uhr

Alec Soth stiftet den Pokal. Die Teilnehmerzahl ist begrenzt. Um Anmeldung auf der zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung ausliegenden Liste bzw. unter der E-Mail-Adresse fotografie.smh@hannover-stadt.de wird gebeten.

BLUE BOX

20. Juni bis 5. Oktober 2014

SOMEWHERE TO DISAPPEAR

(Dokumentarfilm, 2010, 57 min)

Die Filmemacher Laure Flammarion und Arnaud Uyttenhove begleiten Alec Soth bei seiner Arbeit an BROKEN MANUEL.

Für seine Fotoserie BROKEN MANUAL reiste Alec Soth durch die USA, um Menschen zu fotografieren, die ein Leben fern der Zivilisation führen: in Höhlen, Hütten, Trailern und Hausbooten. 19.000 Meilen legen Laure Flammarion und Arnaud Uyttenhove zurück, um Alec Soth zu begleiten. „Das Projekt“, so schreiben sie, „wurde geboren in den letzten Monaten der Ära George W. Bush. Es beschreibt das Land in einer einzigartigen Periode eines historischen Wechsels, in dem sich die von der Finanzkrise hervorgerufene Not mit der Hoffnung auf den Wahlsieg Barack Obamas vermischt.“ Soth und somit auch das Filmteam trifft auf Menschen, die vereinsamt sind und dies schmerzhaft erfahren, und auf solche, die die Einsamkeit suchen, auf solche, die zutiefst von der amerikanischen Gesellschaft enttäuscht sind, und solche, die in ihr Leben mit und in der Natur als spirituell erfahren. 

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Siren?

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In anticipation of the opening of my exhibition at Weinstein Gallery this Friday featuring projects from the last ten years, a number of people have asked, “What is Siren?”

My last major project was Broken Manual. The subject of these photographs was entirely male. Anxious to photograph something besides bearded loners, I started a project on women with pictures made in Rome, Los Angeles, Moscow, New Orleans and Minneapolis. But before completing this project, Brad Zellar and I started The LBM Dispatch.  As a consequence, this work is still on the back burner with no plans for future publication.

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However, I have already published one book from this project: La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The publisher, Punctum Press, has recently uncovered a box of the Italian edition (with an inserted English translation). We are selling signed copies for $250. Purchase yours here:

Add to cart

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A meditation on John Keats, Rome, pale men, beautiful women and pineapples by the photographer Alec Soth.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by Alec Soth
Curated by Marco Delogu
with an essay by Francesco Zanot
52 pages, 12.5″ x 15.25″
published 2011 by Punctum Press
ISBN: 978-88-95410-31-9

Edition of 500 (250 Italian / 250 English)

Signed Italian Edition (with English translation insert:
$250

Add to cart

 

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Hope, Failure and Binoculars – Meditations on Minor White

Followers of my Instagram feed know that I’ve been thinking a lot about the Buddhist teachings of Pema Chödrön. I’ve particularly latched onto this quote of hers from the book When Things Fall Apart:

As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot. In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon Hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Everyday in everyway, I’m getting better and better.” We hold onto hope and it robs us of the present moment.

One might wonder why I’ve been trying to digest this concept on Instagram. How can a profound Buddhist concept be understood through a media platform built on our desperate hope to be ‘liked.’  I’ve always been wary of people who try to pair spiritual practice with photography. This is what I said in an interview from 2010:

I think photography is the most anti-Zen activity. It’s all about stopping time, possessing things, holding onto them. And you know, if my goal was to be a healthy person, photography would not be the thing. I have this joke about becoming a binoculographer: you go around and look at the world without photographing. That would be a spiritually healthy way of taking things in. But this wanting to possess it is not so healthy.

For this reason, I’ve never given the least bit of attention to Minor White. Until recently I didn’t even know he was born in Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota. While I acknowledged White’s historical importance as both a teacher and as a co-founder of Aperture, I wrote off his photographic work as dream-catcher schlock.

I don’t own a single Minor White book. But earlier this week, a friend lent me White’s opus, Mirrors Messages Manifestations. My sincere hope was to see White’s photographs with fresh eyes and perhaps find an opening for pairing photography and spirituality. But after going through the book a dozen times, I couldn’t talk myself into the pictures. While I can understand some of the dated elements like infrared, even the straightest pictures felt over-idealized.

In trying to figure out what bothered me about White’s pictures, I turned to Robert Adams. Despite cherishing his book Beauty in Photography, I’d always skipped his essay on White. As always, Adams comments are insightful:

At his best, White made pictures because of that authenticity, the appearance of the world. When he failed, it was because he tried to escape it, to travel to what e.e. cummings sardonically called a “hell of a good universe next door.” Because we have all wanted to make that trip, in sheer weariness with home, we can sympathize, but because there is no hope [emphasis mine] of reaching such a destination short of death, we are obliged to resist it.

The problem I have with White’s photographs is that they are dripping in mystical hope. It appears that this was his ambition for the medium from the beginning. Here’s a passage from Mirrors Messages Manifestations:

During April of 1937 before moving to Oregon from Minneapolis to take up photography, I wrote, as William Blake used to, “A Memorable Fancy”: “Changing from verse to photography will only be a change of media, not the core. I have known the taste of poetry while writing, the taste will be the same in photography. If a few years pass without the ecstasy of poetry while I learn the camera, what matter – If some day the taste of Poetry is a Photograph. Contemplation of Deity in all manifestations is the true work of the soul.

But it isn’t long before White sees failure on the horizon. This diary entry is from 1947:

It is hardly surprising that I have concluded, after five years research, that camera is both a way of life and not enough to live by…psychologically speaking. Glass between me and the world is both a channel and a barrier. To live through the lens, to live out my inner conflicts and brambles through the camera, to turn to the camera to help me return to the world was an experiment I set out to explore five years ago. I knew it was headed for failure in some way, but I persevered because little else was left open.

What bothers me about White’s photographs is that they are an evasion of these inner conflicts. His pictures are like dream sequences in a movie – they only work if they are surrounded by the grit of reality. In a fantastic essay on White entitled ‘Cruising and Transcendence,’ Kevin Moore shows some of this grit. In 1939, shortly after taking up photography, White made a picture that I think is better than any of the 226 photographs in Mirrors Messages Manifestations:

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Why does this picture work for me so much better than White’s mystical landscapes? I think it is because his longing is so rooted in the present moment. White isn’t dreaming for a better world, he’s looking at a hot guy in a garbage-strewn doorway with, as Moore describes it,  “his index finger exposed and pointing downward toward a prominent bulge.”

So where does this leave my Instagram investigation of spirituality? Should I just drive around like Garry Winogrand looking at cute ladies on the street with binoculars and make that my new religion?

Or should I give up photography?

Lately I’ve been practicing meditation. The process has been rocky, but now and then I glimpse the potential. After this morning’s visit to the meditation center, I came back to the studio and read this passage of Mirrors Messages Manifestations:

Finally only meditation seems to generate input worth tapping. Hypnosis, drugs, camera, all appear to be skeleton keys to the locked rooms of my house I have never entered. Skeleton keys that open dead rooms.

When I make key for these doors by being still with my Self, the room, opened, is full of flowers, furniture, friends.” – 1963

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An interview with Mateo Gómez Garcia

Last week I participated in a panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art on the topic of American photography. Using Walker Evans as a springboard for the conversation, the panelists were asked to discuss how one defines American photography in an increasingly global context. During this conversation, I thought often of my recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia. While I was there, I visited the home of a young photographer named Mateo Gómez Garcia. Gomez is a student of global photography and his work is clearly inspired by the North American tradition initiated by Walker Evans. Nevertheless, working from his rural home on the outskirts of Bogotá, Mateo is grappling with a distinctly Colombian sense of identity.

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As part of the ongoing series of posts fototazo and I have done on contemporary Colombian photography, I thought I would follow up with Mateo to get his perspective as an up-and-coming Colombian photographer. Many thanks to Tom Griggs of fototazo for translating our dialog.

Alec Soth: You are 25. Do you feel like you’ve reached artistic maturity?

Mateo Gómez Garcia: I feel that I am increasingly strengthening a personal language, however in this process I have tried to be as cautious as possible as far as falling into a fixed style or a formula for producing photographs. Instead, I stay attentive when working on a new project, trying to include new approaches without separating completely from a personal style.

Alec Soth: This desire to find a formula or quickly identifiable style is something quite common in every culture, I suspect. But I gather that your path to educating yourself as a photographer is somewhat atypical of young photographers in the US and Europe. Do you have a sense of those differences? What is your feeling about photographic education in Colombia?

Mateo Gómez Garcia: I would not know how to describe an “academic” education in Colombia, if that is indeed the type of education you are asking me about, because I did part of that type of education in Argentina. However almost 80% of my education I have done on my own, taking pictures and looking at a lot of photography. I think Colombia is a very rich center for producing photography. A restless photographer, who knows what’s going on in photography worldwide and who has a clear vision of what they want to do here in Colombia, will have the tools they need to generate an interesting body work.

Alec Soth: I’m wondering how you feel about the issue of national or regional identity. Is being from Colombia, and Bogotá specifically, something you want to be associated with your work, or not? And do you think Colombian photographers generally should embrace this regional identity, or separate from it.

Mateo Gómez Garcia: Very good question! My work is exactly about the subject of identity. I would not say I define the country as it might sound pretentious, but I give my personal opinion of what I see in the country, using each of my projects as an excuse to address this issue of identity. I think the issues of violence, drugs and conflict are important, but have already been done many times. I guess every photographer has their concerns and ambitions like I do, however I also think that there are some roads that are easier than others – talking about the issue of violence etc. I also think to refresh photography here in Colombia it is important to have a more global view of what is being done elsewhere in the world.

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Alec Soth: That brings us to talk about your work and your current project, A Place To Live. What brought you to start this project? Was it initiated by an idea or by personal experience?

Mateo Gómez Garcia: The project started with an idea and a personal experience. For 10 years I have lived in one of the towns most affected by urban development in the savannah of Bogotá. La Calera, my home, has seen drastic changes during that time: new developments, residential clubs and shopping centers.

“A Place To Live” began as a very focused documentary project to make a record of the virgin land about to be urbanized in Bogotá and its closest municipalities. However with the passage of time it became a record of both the Colombian household and the change of rural life to urban life.

To make a photographic project that looks at so many issues and still suggests a reading which proposes certain narrative coherence was a job that took me almost 3 years. One of those themes that “A Place To Live” tries to suggest is the theme of memory and with the photograph itself being an ambiguous medium, it is largely a record of the past. You have to imagine it as a family album, with a nostalgia for that which no longer exists.

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Alec Soth: I’m interested in the issue of nostalgia as it pertains to age. When I was in my twenties, I had nostalgia for the culture of the late 1960’s (the time when I was born). I find it fascinating now to work with young people who are nostalgic for the 1990’s. Is there a particular era in Colombia that evokes this quality of nostalgia for you? Is this something unique to you and your generation, or are people in Colombia generally nostalgic for a time in the country’s history?

Mateo Gómez Garcia: Ha ha! Well, for me the 90s were times in which I learned what it means to be from a country in which the main protagonist is terror.

It was an era in which both the Medellín and Cali drug cartels fought the government and even to go out for ice cream was a risk, as there were always bombings, in central areas and elsewhere. And if you wanted to leave the city by car you could be a victim of the so-called pescas milagrosas (“miracle catches”) – guerrilla checkpoints with the potential for mass kidnappings – so it really was to be at a crossroads.

For me nostalgia comes from the era of my parents! As well as from the 60s and 70s! As you know I didn’t live those decades, but my grandmother on my father’s side documented all of the trips of my uncles and my father to my grandfather’s farms as an amateur photographer – the waterfalls, the barbecues on the plains, my great-grandfather drinking his whiskey from 6 pm, and my father with his various girlfriends – ha ha! They are times which now are impossible to recreate because my grandfather died and my grandmother is very old and therefore my family is very fragmented.

See more of Mateo Gómez Garcia’s work HERE

 

 

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The snow man takes over the New Yorker

IMG_1160bSome of you might know I’m on Instagram: @littlebrownmushroom. From January 1-5 I’m taking over the reigns of the New Yorker’s Instagram account: @newyorkermag

I’ll be posting from home in Minnesota. As inspiration I’m using one of my all-time favorite poems by Wallace Stevens:

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.