Amy Stein | Photography | Blog: A Few Questions

Showing posts with label A Few Questions. Show all posts

Thursday, December 16, 2010

A Few Questions for Jo Ann Walters

I met Jo Ann Walters in the summer of 2002 at the Maine Photography Workshops. I was working as a teaching assistant, helping a different photographer each week in the classroom. That summer would end up being an important one for me personally and professionally. I was new to photography and hungry to absorb as much as I could from the teachers and students who were passing through. Jo Ann arrived toward the end of July and within the first few hours of working with her I could tell that I was in the presence of a naturally gifted teacher and exceptionally talented artist. The week I spent working with her changed the trajectory of my career. She introduced me to the concept of photography as art and steered me toward pursuing an MFA.

Jo Ann is now the head of the photography department at SUNY Purchase, where I also teach. All my students who know her sing her praises as an educator, photographer and person. They respect and admire her, something many of us who teach strive for, to earn the respect and admiration of our students.

I've also admired Jo Ann's work for years and was thrilled when Kris Graves announced that he would exhibit her work in November. I asked Jo Ann if she would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when she agreed. This post comes late in the show's run. It closes on Saturday, December 18. If you're in New York and haven't yet seen it you have a few days.

Amy Stein: Your show VANITY + CONSOLATION, that opened at Kris Graves Projects and runs through December 19th, is an examination women and girls in intimate domestic spaces in the small blue color town of Alton, Ill. Can you tell us more about this series?

Jo Ann Walters: All of my work, VANITY + CONSOLATION, DOG TOWN, my early landscape work THRESHOLDS and other side projects can in one way or another be traced back to my experiences growing up in southern Illinois in the 1950’s and 60’s and the choices I made in response to my background.

VANITY + CONSOLATION is, perhaps, my most personal work. The pictures are like secrets you tell someone in confidence but might not to everyone. In my introduction to the entire work, made up of approximately 70 pictures, I describe the shock and isolation that I felt as I began to move further and further from home. In addition to Illinois, I’ve lived in New Orleans, Arizona, Maine and Connecticut where I presently reside. These are unique cultural places within the United States. They each resist the bland sameness usually associated with this country and particularly the mid west.

There is this geographical distance, but there is also the emotional and intellectual distance I traveled. These portraits of young women, mothers and their children comes from my desire to remember where I came from, to understand what I have gained by leaving home, and also to see and feel what I have lost by leaving home.

One of many ways of understanding VANITY + CONSOLATION is as a covert portrait of a runaway. Alice Munro, one of the finest authors I have ever read, has a collection of short stories titled Runaway. I am mesmerized by the varied associations of the title. For example, “Runaway” is a proper name. It might be read as an archetype. It might also be understood as a secret and internal female voice of warning or command to runaway directed toward the women and girls Munro writes about.

There are two pictures in the VANITY + CONSOLATION that suggest this notion of a “runaway” as deep content in the work. One photograph, depicts a young girl on a bicycle riding past a suburban home that might be her own. While passing, she looks back over her shoulder at the front door that seems to be beckoning. It is lit with the gleaming gold of sunset. (Of course, this photograph references two of William Eggleston’s pictures in The Guide. Inside his book, the first picture is of a front door of a suburban home decorated with a basket of artificial flowers and then there is picture of the tricycle on the cover. However, as you move through the sequence of pictures in my work, you see that I reference his work, but use the imagery to different ends.

Another clue is the photograph of the teenage girl with chipped blue fingernails wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt. She has this beautiful distorted Inge -like body in the picture. There is an Adidas lanyard hanging from her neck that holds a set of keys. The keys dangle between her thighs. She is sitting on a guardrail. One fictive interpretation might be that she is a teenage runaway. There is a surprising anecdote about this portrait. The young woman in the picture told me that she had just discovered that she was pregnant.

I like to work long and hard on projects, often for a decade or more. I want my work to feel like a living thing with many layered meanings, emotional range and depths of feeling. I look thoughtfully and carefully when making pictures as well as afterwards when editing and printing. The constellation of particulars, the details, the associations of the subject matter, the skeletal structure and the color and textures of weather and atmosphere that hold a picture together. And then there is the whole, wonderful puzzle of many images to contend with and to make sense of. I build visual motifs out of these elemental details by weaving them together into what I hope are stories of deep inwardness through strange and beautiful appearances.

The motivation for this work was originally a way of validating the righteousness of my new found life away from the Midwest and the burdens I associated with it; the oppressive religious dictates of Catholism, the intellectual and emotional oversimplification of women, the dictate to be seen and not heard, the inevitable future of children and the narrow range of intellectual work. The Emily Dickenson poem 505 describes what might be at stake by staying rather than leaving, of being created rather than creating.

I would not paint—a picture—
I'd rather be the One
Its bright impossibility
To dwell—delicious—on—…

But it’s funny though how the world refuses simple characterization. You won’t find consolation in what passes for the new. Rather you will find it in despised places and corners of your imagination. It might be easier to picture what I mean if I can deviate a bit and talk about making pictures for my newer work DOG TOWN. I started by driving around in the bad neighborhoods, photographing vacant lots, railroad lines, burned-out buildings. These are the parts of my hometown that show the deep scars of industrialism. I was looking for something that nobody else wanted anymore, something anonymous, something forgotten.

By extension, in VANITY + CONSOLATION I try to show the cracks in what seems like an ancient and nearly impenetrable psychic wall of vanity. These are the whorled places that hold the sweet and aching sadness of our desire and beauty.

When I looked back, remembered and gave myself over to search and questioning, I came away with much more than I had bargained for. What was first experienced through distance and fascination, my earliest pictures of this subject attest to this, turned into something far too complex to be depicted solely through irony. Instead, I found the swirl and ache of regret and beauty. I made a picture once, as part of Dog Town, of an empty roadside fruit stand along the highway on one of my many road trips. It had a weathered sign that had once said PEACHES, but the “p” and the “e” were nearly worn away. The first impression reads that it said ACHES before the rest of the word begins to appear. This photograph didn’t make it into the final edit though I printed and re-printed it and tried and tried to make it work. Memory and the sensual are intrinsically linked and in the end I couldn’t breathe life into it. Despite my desire it stubbornly refused to move beyond the illustrative.

AS: As someone who doesn't work on projects so close to home, I always wonder how you (and photographers like Doug Dubois and Chris Verene, for example) separate your personal interest in the subject from your instincts as a photographer. Or do you? Are you trying to make the intimate universal?

JAW: This is an ongoing dilemma, a paradox really, and elemental tension that I wrestle with. It is a question of separating and integrating at once the complex emotions, associations, memories and conceptual attitudes related to one’s home and family with the analytical and evaluative criteria of judgment. I want to translate and make my beliefs and values accessible to a larger world. The goal I think is to find a visual correlative in the world that translates photographically. I’ve learned to trust my intuitive gifts as well as my intellectual ones. I treat all with equal respect. In my best work you can feel that same genrative tension and conflict. You can see the tension of wrestling to keep all in suspension so I can call on any or all when needed. These oppositions are not so much reconciled as accepted. When I work, I try to hold making, knowing and judging in meaningful suspension and trust that what is necessary will come to my aid. It’s a matter of preparation, practice and attention. Of course this is a gross simplification of the process.

I think reaching for the universal is a kind of a religious impulse. Though I am concerned with the first and last questions of spirit and sensuality, I find meaning and consolation in particulars. I am not so much trying to make the intimate universal as attempting to make the intimate graceful and particular.

AS: Your series Thresholds was included in the seminal book New Color/New Work, by Sally Eauclaire, published in 1984, which places you among the masters of early color photography, including Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstein and William Eggleston. As one of the few photographers celebrated for color photography during this time did you have the sense that your work was challenging the conventions of art photography? Was there camaraderie among your contemporaries that spoke of this movement and pushed the work towards greater acceptance?

JAW: Challenging convention? Certainly not at first. I grew up in southern Illinois in a working class town. I had little access to or knowledge of a visual creative world. I went to schools too poor for art classes. I became interested in photography after I graduated from college. My mother and I took a photography class from a high school shop teacher in a neighboring town that had grown up around oil refineries. These same oil refineries have since become part of my current project DOG TOWN.

I moved to New Orleans and had a friend from Arkansas that had grown up on a soybean and peanut plantation. He had been in New York City on business trip and returned with a gift -- William Eggleston’s The Guide. He said Eggleston’s pictures looked just like where he had grown up. Eggleston’s work was strange, fascinating and opaque. I looked at it over and over again for many years. But it was really a combination of Eggleston and Atget that set the wheels in motion. I saw an exhibit of Atget’s gardens curated by Jackie Onassis at the old ICP that set the wheels in motion. I still remember the dizzying affect Atget’s photographs had on me, as well as, the four exhibitions of Atget’s work curated by John Szwarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art. Eggleston and Atget! Strange bedfellows? Maybe, maybe not.

Was there camaraderie among your contemporaries that spoke of this movement and pushed the work towards greater acceptance? Though I eventually met and was mentored by other photographers working in color, I was from Middle America, younger and female, unlike most associated with the “new color”. I was working in the Midwest far from the cultural sophistication of New York City and went on to graduate school in Ohio. Between academic years I met Len Jenshel at the Maine Photographic Workshops when I was his teaching assistant. He was a great support. It was his unabashed embrace of beauty in color that struck me and caused me to question my own relation to beauty. I had been skeptical of beauty and did not quite know how to distinguish it from sentimentality. William Butler Yeats has spoken to the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentimentality, he says, is the hollow image of unfullfilled desire. This conflict continues to be a subject in my work. I make subtle distinctions between the two. Joel Sternfeld’s work was amazing! The beauty, restraint and surprise. He wrote for my Guggenheim application. Richard Misrach use of color was intensely beautiful, minimal and atmospheric. Desert Cantos has a literary component that the best of the work associated with this period of color share.

It wasn’t until I began my very first teaching position at Yale University in 1985 where I taught for 8 years, that I came to truly understand the photographic world as part of a greater cultural debate and the aesthetics of color as part of a contemporary landscape movement. Shortly after my hire I won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel and photograph alongside the length of the Mississippi River. During that time I met and had the exceptional opportunity to live with the Eggleston family in Memphis, Tennessee for several months, and to use their home as a base while I photographed in the south. I looked at hundreds of Bill’s photographs and had long, concentrated opportunities to discuss my work with him. We shared an experience of growing up outside of New York City, in isolated regions of the country. Southern Illinois is at once middle and southern. Much of southern Illinois was pro-confederacy during the civil war. The citizens of my hometown stoned an abolitionist journalist to death. At the same time, there was an underground railroad that transported runaway slaves to the north.

I am not savvy in business, though I suppose it wouldn’t be a bad thing to improve in this regard, that is, as long as I stay true to what I believe in. This is easier said than done. I have been and remain on the fringes commercially speaking. I am also on the outskirts imaginatively. This is good. Imagination (“Poetry”) flows "From ranches of isolation… /Raw towns that we believe and die in.” I concur with W.H. Auden above and William Carlos Williams below.

Look at
what passes for the new:
You will not find it there but in
despised poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A Few Questions for Chris Verene

I’ve been familiar with Chris Verene’s photographs since I started graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in 2006. Chris was a critique teacher there, and although I never had the chance to study with him I was always curious about his highly saturated, unsettling and poignant images of his extended family. Chris has been photographing his relatives in Galesburg, Illinois for 26 years. His approach to depicting his family is tender and humorous and often disturbing. His style is distinctive; marked by his use of fill flash, a square film format and the addition of neatly handlettered text surrounding the image.

His exhibition, Family, is currently showing at Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea until October 16. Last week I had a chance to see the show, which features over 41 images densely packed into two large rooms, and to browse the handsome new book of the same name published by Twin Palms. I asked Chris if he would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when he agreed.

AMY STEIN: I’m interested in your relationship with your family. In particular with the members of your extended family in your images. Are you close? How do you deal with the distance that comes with the repeated act of photographing your family, of placing yourself in the role of observer. Or does the act of photographing them bring you closer?

CHRIS VERENE: I'm very close with my family, pictured and not pictured. As an only child, I clung to my cousins like siblings, and we still are very connected. I do not work as an 'observer,' that is your job as the audience. I am relating the stories from their source, our family, town, and neighbors out to the world at large. I think that the act of photographing makes me close with only the people who really enjoy the photography-- the people who time and again ask for pictures, and compel me to tell those stories.

AS: Your images are accompanied by handwritten text, which gives them context and deepens the narrative of the series. It also mimics the conventions of the family photo album, which is almost extinct. Can you talk about the role of text in your work?

CV: The text is like signing your name on a letter or document. It's one's own writing, and it guarantees that one stands behind what is written. I struggle with the writing every time-- it is hard to do, very permanent, and must be done on every single piece throughout my history. It is the best I can do, but often looks imperfect. It also probably keeps me outside of some curatorial worlds, it's perhaps too weird, too personal, too off-beat in a cool Chelsea world of photo --filled with the slick conceptual object-photos of Roe Ethridge, Oliver Boberg, Sarah Charlesworth, Gursky, etc.

The handwritten text is a rule-- I almost always do it, and I can't escape my thoughts. One key to understanding the text is that it's usually like you said, Amy, it's like a family album-- it tells us why a picture was taken at that exact moment, it tells what was thought to be the story's end at that moment or other key fact that was in our minds when I came to make a picture.

AS: I read somewhere that you were inspired by Arbus. For me your work is reminiscent of photographers who explore family and rural life Nick Wapplington, Shelby Lee Adams and Larry Fink. Can you talk about some of your photographic inspirations?

CV: Well, Arbus was a book I took out of my parents' locked bookshelf at elementary school age. Waplington has not been an influence, but it was encouraging to see that people worldwide accepted him as an artist. Shelby Lee Adams is an influence, as is Emmet Gowin, and Larry was my teacher for 5 great days at a workshop. He's a GREAT teacher, and I like his rule wherein any level of student can study with him, even beginners. I'd say that Nan Goldin's work was not an influence, but when I saw her book in a store (my first exposure to her) I was amazed that people would accept such snapshots as art-- it encouraged me to know that the language of a small flash camera and everyday moments were high art, because that's what I was already doing in the 1980's.

AS: Some of your images comment directly on the diminishing choices of people living in smaller, economically challenged communities like Galesburg. For example, your cousin Cindy and her husband lost their jobs when the Maytag local factory closed down. There was a time in our country where you could comment about economic hardship without it seeming like an overtly political statement. Today, in this hyper-polarized climate that's harder to do. Did you intend these images to be overtly political?

CV: Naw, it's just a sad fact. I am a documentary artist, so I just have facts to show. The North American Free Trade Agreement meant that Maytag could make their fridges about 10 feet across the Mexican border, and make so much more money, because the people in Mexico will work for a lot less money, and the safety restrictions are very shallow across the border--which also is good for corporations' profits. For Candi and Craig, who both worked at the factory, it meant a carefully balanced life of two working parents with young children was dumped quickly for corporate cash. Galesburg workers were suicidal. Their pensions were dumped, their dreams wasted. My grandfather was cheated out of his railroad pension through similar corporate tricks. It's not politics, it's corporate greed and shifty accounting. I could go on-- my cousin worked for Wal-Mart for 20 years and still has no benefits, they keep scheduling her for 38 hours per week-- she's 'freelance'-- but when Wal-Mart started to carry groceries, she was forced to sign a non-compete clause, which meant she had to quit her other job bagging groceries-- because that breaks the non-compete clause... I could go on...

AS: I knew your Family series was a long term project, but I had no idea that you had been photographing for 26 years. That sort of long term commitment and relationship to your subject reminds me of Doug Dubois, who’s also photographed his family for decades.

CV: Yes, Doug is a good friend of mine, but his pictures are elaborately staged theater, which he makes to look effortless. I much prefer Doug's personal family theater to Crewdson's theater of actors.

AS: What are the challenges and rewards of focusing on one subject for such an extended period of time?

CV: Well, it's all I know. I don't really know what it would be to do someone else's family, or some other such story. I have photographed some special people on assignment for magazines, for example I did a Newsweek cover story on men with Chronic Depression. That's just a few hours with a person.

AS: You’re an educator as well and an artist. Can you talk about balancing those two aspects of your career?

CV: The balance part is just a matter of putting enough hours in the day!! I do love teaching at State University/Westchester Community College-- it's great, and the students are often from a very socially and/or economically disadvantaged background. it is similar to my time spent with teenagers in Galesburg.

AS: What, ultimately, would you like us you understand about family and place by looking at your images?

CV: Ahhh- I don't know what to say! I do hope people will spend some time looking at 50 or more pictures and really look at it before they go too far on their own. I also think reading my essay and my father's essay in the new book are required reading to understand the work.

Monday, December 14, 2009

A Few Questions for Geoff Smith

Dishdrainer 2006© Geoff Smith

A little over a year ago I was in need of a digital assistant to help me improve my technical skills and prints. Joshua Lutz suggested I contact his friend Geoff Smith. And I'm really glad I did. Geoff whipped my work into shape, showing me how to improve my scanning and print quality in my preparation for my show at ClampArt this past fall.

Not only is Geoff a technical wiz and a patient teacher, he's a truly nice guy and a very talented photographer. His Signal Nodes series is thought provoking and smart. I asked Geoff if he would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when he agreed.

AMY STEIN: Tell me a bit about your series Signal Nodes.

GEOFF SMITH: The photographs in this project look at the notion of home through images that suggest or evoke rather than document. The idea is that human perception will fill in the blanks when given a set of images that poke around the edges of a subject and synthesize a notion of the whole. Though each image is fully realized, to the extent that I could make it at any rate, they do have the properties of fragments for me, that sort of "half-remembered dream" thing. Hopefully they act on memory in an evocative way for others as they do for me.

I began by looking at a stack of images that I had made over the course of a year or so that had been giving me some trouble in terms of figuring out what they were about. I noticed that I had been photographing the same types of things over and over again, things like kitchen counters and backyards. I finally realized that I was responding to these types of scenes or objects because they reminded me of places that I'd lived, not the location so much as the surfaces, objects and textures. Once I realized this, I was able to give myself a "brief" of sorts to finish the project, concentrating on areas in and around where I live now, in Brooklyn.

Another thing I noticed in pursuing this project was that if I set out to exhaustively document a place, it lost this evocative feeling for me. If I kept it to making images of things that I responded to on a less conscious level then it seemed to work, to bring up these feelings of "home-ness" for me. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up, so I think on some level I don't have an ingrained sense of home as a place, more as a feeling or these fragmentary glimpses which the pictures try to capture. The other concept or theme that the work deals with is transmission, and I mean that in a very general sense. The idea of being transmitted oneself or of one's consciousness being sent from one place to another. Again, I think this comes of having never lived anywhere longer than about 4-5 years until after I graduated from college.

Atlantic City, NJ, View North 2006© Geoff Smith

AS: What defines place for you? Location, objects, or experience?

GS: It's definitely the objects and details of a scene that put me in the mind of a place rather than the precise location. Also, the "realness" of a place doesn't matter to me as much as the details. Let me explain. While I was shooting this project, my wife and I would often, and still do, visit her grandmother who lives in Wilton, Connecticut. Wilton is what I would call "arch-suburbia," in many ways it is an archetypal bedroom/commuter community. It also has the quality of being somewhat frozen in time, looking vaguely like it could be almost anytime from about 1960 through about 1985. Now, of course, I've never lived there. I grew up in Westchester and Rockland counties in New York and eastern Pennsylvania, among other places. But, to me, Wilton looks more like the places I grew up in than the actual places themselves do, especially now. Using it as a stand-in, for my purposes, turned out to be more genuine than the real thing in terms of its ability to evoke these fragmented images of home.

More than this, I found that I often didn't really respond to a scene or object until after I had photographed it. That is to say, I would be drawn, somewhat ambivalently, to photograph a scene and then afterwards have a strong reaction to the photograph itself. I think part of what I was reacting to were properties that all photographs have: flatness, perspective, the relationship of objects to one another and to the frame's edge, etc. It was the "photographic-ness" that I found evocative.

Cable Junction #1 2008© Geoff Smith

AS: Your images seem to be using visual cues to lead the viewer toward an experiential Gestalt. We are enticed to form emotional wholes from the bit and parts of objects and places you photograph. Given that we are basically a confused mashup of personal and popular culture narrative, do you believe we are capable of having 'real' experiences with place or is it all transference?

GS: The motivations for making this work were about where and when I grew up as that relates to where I live now. Others who don't share my background will probably have vastly different associations in looking at the work. Hopefully the pictures are good enough in their own right -- as pictures -- to provide a worthwhile viewing experience for someone who didn't grow up in the northeast, in suburbia, in the 70s and 80s, etc. In terms of whether or not one experience or another is "real," as it relates to place, I don't think anyone can really say. It's too bound up with memory and subjectivity. Certainly some of what I'm photographing is related not to experiences that I had per se, but more to how I remember them. Since one of the supposedly useful properties of photography is as an aide-mèmoir, and since parents tend to compulsively photograph their children as they're growing up, I'm OK with the fact that what I might find evocative about my own work is related to the extent to which they reference family photographs that were made while I was growing up.

It's interesting that you used the word transference. Where I live now, in Brooklyn Heights, is widely thought of as a the first suburb in America. Traders who worked in Manhattan would pay fishermen to ferry them across the East River to and from the original Dutch town of Breuckelen (what is today Brooklyn Heights) in what could be called the first "commute." So, in some sense I've traded suburbia as it was in the 1970s and 80s for perhaps a more genuine or authentic form of suburbia, one where the "urb" in suburbia is overlaid or integrated with the way we live now. Obviously, Brooklyn today is a large city in its own right, but I think there is probably something to the idea that, when my wife and I moved here and planned to start a family, that I wanted my daughter to have this component of what I regarded as an essential characteristic of childhood (but, again, integrated with how I want to live as an adult).

Saturday, May 09, 2009

A Few Questions for Steven Ahlgren

Commercial Bank, New Haven, Connecticut © Steven Ahlgren

When I'm not buying photo books, I'm a compulsive purchaser of old photography magazines. There is so much inspiration to be found in the glossy pages of back issues and every once in a while you find hidden gems by a photographer you've never heard of before. This past winter I bought a copy of the summer 1997 issue of DoubleTake and had one of those wonderful moments of discovery. The photographer was Steven Ahlgren and the work was from a series examining workplace environments.

Accounting Office, New Haven, Connecticut © Steven Ahlgren

What immediately struck me about Steven's photographs was they seemed like they could have been made last week. I went straight to Google to find as much information as I could about his work and career since the piece in DoubleTake. Funny thing was, Steven Ahlgren was nowhere to be found. There was no portfolio site, no recent news stories about exhibitions and no blog posts about this amazing photographer. The only mention I could find was a 1993 New York Times review for a show at the International Center of Photography. The ICP show featured names like Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, Barbara Norfleet, John Pfahl and Lee Friedlander, but the Times paid special attention to Steven's photographs saying they had a "somber and evocative directness."

I dug a little deeper and found a notice for an Introduction to Digital Photography course taught by a Steven Ahlgren at the Media-Upper Providence Library in Media, PA. I emailed the librarian explaining who I was and asking if he could put me in touch with Steven. A week passed and I was beginning to give up hope when I received an email. It was him. He was the Steven Ahlgren I was looking for.

Steven's work had blown me away and I wanted to learn more about his process, but I was also curious how a photographer of such obvious talent found himself on the outside looking in at the contemporary photography scene. I asked Steven if he would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when he agreed and shared his newly launched portfolio site.

Bullet Holes, Insurance Office, Newark, New Jersey © Steven Ahlgren

AMY STEIN: My journey to photography was very much a reaction to my experience with the corporate world. I found it insulating and uninspiring and decided to shift my career towards something that would excite my interests in the world outside of the glass buildings and cubicles. You came to photography after working as a lending officer at a bank. What was it about the corporate experience that compelled you to come back and capture life amongst the copy machines and fluorescent corridors?

STEVEN AHLGREN: When I left banking after five years I really had no immediate intention of going back to photograph that world. I was frankly kind of bitter about the years I spent behind a desk, thinking it was all wasted time, and I didn't want to dwell on it any further. I did however have many vivid visual memories from the office - of dramatic light in hallways and tense faces at meetings, but still I didn't really consider it as a subject. It was only after a few years went by and I had the opportunity in graduate school to earn extra money photographing "networking" meetings - where business people meet after work socially to exchange cards and make contacts - that I began to think about it as a subject. I had also by that point come across the work of several photographers who had photographed the office that got me thinking about it. I still retained some strong (mostly negative) feelings about the time I worked in offices, and those probably contributed to a desire to try and address it as a subject as well.

My first attempt to photograph the business world was photographing these social events, but I felt the need to make the work more conceptual and more critical. I thought the images needed some help to get their point across so I would also photograph selections from pages of various "how to succeed in business” advice books and combine the images and words in black and white prints. The results were satisfying at the time, but the appeal didn't last. Soon after these images seemed overly satirical, caustic, and simplistic. I realized my feelings toward the office, and also to those people who work in them, were a bit more complicated and sympathetic. So I later dropped the text and wrestled with the much harder task of making meaning with just pictures. I also then decided to switch to color - partly out of an instinct that it was better for the subject, but also because I had not photographed a lot in color up to this point and I wanted an excuse to figure it out by working with it.

Commercial Bank, St. Paul, Minnesota © Steven Ahlgren

I liked these new images better, but soon after I decided that the only way to properly address the topic of office workers was to photograph them in their offices. Getting access was the biggest difficulty, but I continued to attend these networking meetings and ask people if I could make some portraits of them at work for a personal project. I told them they wouldn't have to pose or do anything special. I would only use whatever light was there. Just let me set up a camera and watch them as they kept going about their routine. As you might expect most people would decline, but others were open to it. I first spent a few months using color negative film in the same Leica that I used for the networking meetings, but was never satisfied with the prints. So I bought a 6x9 Fuji and that was the thing that did it for me. Finally with the bigger negative the images began to approximate what I was seeing and feeling in these interior spaces. The quietness of the images seemed more pronounced. The light and color were much more evocatively described. I've always photographed by available light and this larger size negative seemed to work better with this. It was exactly what I was after. I suppose it was a good lesson of the importance of using the proper tool for a particular job at hand.

AS: What I love about your series is that the photographs seem very much of the time and yet very relevant now. Save for some outmoded haircuts and computer equipment, the photographs you took 15 years ago could just as easily been taken last week. The same dead stares at the desk. The same polite unease in a meeting. The same subtle power maneuvering between middle managers. What do you think is it about the office environment that makes the experience so consistent over time?

SA: I guess in part it's because the nature of the work itself hasn't changed much. Office work is still primarily about gathering, analyzing, and sharing information. These days of course that information mostly resides in a computer, which for some reason seems to be one of the few markers of time in an office picture. Office furniture seems curiously impervious to redesign - either in form or color palette. And office work is still done by people with all the forever-inherent complications, tensions, resentments, anxieties, etc. that arise when people are organized into a hierarchy and given a task to accomplish.

I have to mention here as an aside how much my working life has changed since these photographs were made. It's ironic to me that now I spend a good deal of my "photography" time working on the computer, probably not looking much different than one of my subjects. One of the reasons I left banking was because I wanted to spare myself from a lifetime of looking at a computer monitor.

Federal Investigation Agency, Leesburg, VA © Steven Ahlgren

AS: When I see photography about office work I am almost immediately reminded of Lee Friedlander's At Work series. Were you aware of these photographs when you started your series? Which photographers inspired you when you were starting out? Which photographers inspire you now?

SA: As a longtime admirer of Lee Friedlander's work - not only his office photographs but even more so his other subjects - that's nice to hear. Friedlander was one of several photographers who addressed the office as a subject that I admired early on, although when I started my series the only ones of his I had seen was a group of photos he did for MIT that showed various workers staring into their computer monitors. He hadn't yet gotten his Hasselblad with the super-wide lens. The other photographers I saw early on were Chauncey Hare, Dan Weiner and Anna Fox. Hare's book This Was Corporate America (published around 1984 I think) was a sort of confirmation that the subject was worthy of serious exploration. Dan Weiner's book America Worked also served that purpose but with a more sympathetic and subtle take. Anna Fox had some office photos from a series called Workstations published in an issue of Aperture in the late 80's focusing on contemporary British photography and her work remained with me as well. But I should mention that probably the biggest influence on me for these photos was actually done by a painter and not a photographer. Edward Hopper's Office at Night has as long as I can remember been one of my favorite paintings. I love the quiet tension in the image, which shows only a man at a desk and a woman standing nearby.

These days I've been looking at recent work (not of the office) by Michael Schmidt - especially Irgendwo - and also Paul Graham. I've also been looking a lot at Rembrandt's self-portraits - no doubt due to some mid-life thing on my part.

Commercial Bank, Duluth, Minnesota © Steven Ahlgren

AS: Have you seen any of the more recent office projects like Eric Percher's Work or Lars Tunbjork's Offices?

SA: I have seen few of Lars Tunbjork's office images. I have not gotten my hands on the book he did of the subject. I like some of them very much, although they seem in a different place than mine. His approach seems a bit more witty and colorful. More Martin Parr-ish. Eric Percher's work, which I had not seen prior to your mentioning it, is likewise rewarding to view. I recently looked at his web site. I am most interested in his still life's.

AS: You worked on Going to Work for most of the early 90's and received a good deal of attention for the series including a group show at the ICP that was reviewed in the New York Times and the feature in DoubleTake magazine. I think most photographers live in a constant state of paranoia that their last success might be their last success. I would love to get a sense of how you viewed your successes at the time. Is that what you were gunning for in your career or were you not even thinking of museum shows and magazine profiles when you first picked up a camera?

SA: I was very happy for the photographs to get the attention and those are the kind of places I had hoped to have them seen and discussed. I hoped it would be the opening of having the work seen more widely, although that was not to be the case - due in part to lack of further positive response from many of those I later showed the work to, as well as a lack of persistence on my part. Hopefully on another go around I can get the work seen in a few more places. Last year I reprinted the portfolio of this work as inkjet prints and I found when looking closely at the work again now that it has (for me at least) weathered time well. As a whole the images still feel true and I find them relevant today. Interestingly many of the images in the series were made when the economy was rapidly growing.

AS: After Double Take you maintained something of a low profile on the photography scene. Where you still taking pictures?

SA: I kept working on it through the 90's and I added to the project by moving outside to explore corporate pedestrians - mostly on Wall Street - in tandem with a group of images of architectural details of corporate office buildings. After working so much inside I think I wanted to get outside in the daylight again. Also these latter two projects didn't require obtaining access. The subjects were there whenever I wanted to work on it. These outside images were only seen once at a now defunct on-line magazine called "word.com". I also started and abandoned several projects - a series on the New Jersey Meadowlands (which someone recently published a book on) and another series on weeds (I think this subject is still virgin territory in terms of a book). Around this time I began doing editorial work since, despite some early success in the art world, I was getting a better response to my work from editors than from curators and galleries. I also found appealing the chance to get paid (more than I was earning adjunct teaching) to travel around the country to make photographs.

Then my personal life changed dramatically in June, 2000 with the birth of the first of my two daughters and the relocation of our family to outside Philadelphia where my wife and I bought a charming yet thoroughly dilapidated old house. Most of my waking hours were soon taken up between tending to the girls and renovating the house to be somewhat habitable - both of which activities I confess to have thoroughly enjoyed. Now however the girls are in school for more of the day and the house, while still needing work, is a bit more under control so I find I can now begin to get back photography again.

Air Intake, Office Building, New York City © Steven Ahlgren

When I did have free time over these past years I spent a good chunk of it trying to figure how to make prints on the computer - kind of relearning photography - which has been a mostly satisfying experience mixed in with periods of extreme frustration. This seems to be the natural order when humans and computers interact. Today I am in the process of completing a web site and beginning to make a maquette comprising and combining all three corporate projects.

AS: What's next? Do you have any new work planned?

SA: I've begun working on a series whose tentative title is Autocratic Landscapes. I am fascinated by the primacy of the car and what our fealty to it yields in terms of the landscape we pass through on a daily basis, in addition to how it effects our architecture and our relationships to each other.

AS: Do you have any advice for young photographers?

SA: I was recently reading an essay about Harry Callahan, and there was a recollection by a former student of how he would always say to just go out and do the work, even if your not sure where it's going. Get up and do some work, any work, and something may come of it. Make something and react to what you've made in order to find a path. That seems like pretty good idea.

Another piece of favorite advice, or perhaps it's more of an admonishment, comes from Walker Evans: "Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

A Few Questions for Stacy Arezou Mehrfar

I first met Stacy Arezou Mehrfar in my early days of learning photography at the ICP. Many years passed and we lost touch. In a weird twist we didn't reconnect until she moved 10,000 miles away to Australia. Since then I have been rediscovering her work just as the world seems to be discovering it for the first time. When I heard a print of Stacy's would be offered for sale as a Humble Art Foundation edition, I asked her if she would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when she agreed.

AMY STEIN: Starting with Robert Adams’ groundbreaking work on the American West, many artists have attempted to reveal certain truths about the suburban experience. What do you believe is your particular truth about the suburbs?

STACY AREZOU MEHRFAR: The suburban development boom of the early 21st century and subsequently the foreclosure crisis we are dealing with now, is the result of our national desire to achieve the all-encompassing American Dream. I believe there is a latent beauty in the concept of suburb, or community. It is the problems of how we go about attaining our goals that I have looked at in my work. We relentlessly built new neighborhoods in order to fulfill the national aspirations of owning a house, equipped with grassy green yard, and a car (or hopefully two) in the driveway. In our quest to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ we lost site of the fundamental principals of the American dream.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson spoke of this in his inaugural speech when he said: “We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature… Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great.”

Over 95 years have passed and the issues Wilson raised in his speech still hit home today. History is cyclical. The problems we are dealing with now are frighteningly similar to those that our nation was dealing with in the early part of the 20th century. These issues are strongly apparent when we look at how sprawl has affected older neighborhoods and even more so when we consider the current state of new developments. Rather than build without consciousness we need to learn from our past to grow our future.

AS: Talk about palimpsests and their connection to suburban developments.

SM: The word “palimpsest” comes from two Greek roots meaning "scraped again." A term from the Middle Ages, “palimpsest” literally refers to a parchment that was reused and re-written upon multiple times. In order to recycle parchment they would scrape the original text, flip the parchment 90 degrees and re-write over it. Often, the original text would be so insufficiently erased that it remained visible creating a palimpsest. Figuratively the term describes an object, place, or area that has been altered but still reflects its history.

When I started photographing American Palimpsests, our nation was expanding at record speed. With homes being built in 60 days or less, new developments were budding everywhere. Essentially erasing the natural habitat, we planted green grass over dry desert soil, excavated the earth to build unnatural lakes and developed tracts of homes over acres of wilderness, only to replant identical nonnative trees in our yards. It seemed to me that we have continuously re-written the land to create our own idealized sense of nature.

Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1935 edition of The Frontier In American History wrote: “The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America. For three centuries the fundamental process in its history was the westward movement, the discovery and occupation of the vast free spaces of the continent.” Over 70 years later and this still holds true.

Americans have throughout history thought of their West as new and full of possibility. The frontier is a concept that has been continuously discussed and regurgitated. Yet we have repeated our actions and our mistakes in our national quest to obtain the American Dream.

AS: Most of the images in American Palimpsests are shot from a distance and show scant evidence of people. What does this say about the lifelessness within these modern living environments?

SM: American life has changed considerably since The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. The concepts “neighbor” and “neighborhood” no longer have the same significance as they did in the 1950s when Levittown, the first mass-produced community was built. In exchange for the colorful, established neighborhoods that promised hope and kinship, we have built sterile, lifeless, indistinguishable environments in bulk. The local popshop has been replaced with McDonalds, KFC and Applebee’s. And anything “local” is now a car-ride away, so everyone drives.

From 2003-2008 I traveled through 28 states on multiple road trips, exploring countless new suburban housing developments. Days would go by where I would hardly see a soul. Many of the suburbs were eerily silent. Cold, even when it was hot outside. Empty, even before the foreclosure crisis had begun. Traveling for days in these communities was awfully dismal and lonely.

AS: Cyril Connolly famously referred to the suburbs as "incubators of apathy and delirium." Movies like American Beauty and the photographs of Gregory Crewdson shed light on suburban detachment while the work of Bill Owens and the TV show Weeds focuses on some of the madness that lurks behind closed doors. Do you see the mere existence of suburbs as evidence of human apathy and delirium?

SM: I love your references. They have all had (at the very least) an indirect impact on my work. I do not entirely agree with Connolly’s statement: ”Slums may well be the breeding grounds of crime, but the middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.” I am deeply influenced by the middle-class suburb that I grew up in, and I think I turned out all right. Well perhaps I am slightly delirious, but not at all apathetic.

I do believe, as I said before, that suburbs have an inherent beauty. I don’t find fault in the idea of suburb. It is in the way we allowed it to get to where it stands today that I have problems. Unfortunately suburbs have developed into tedious, monotonous, uninteresting- lacking in culture and personality- sterile environments. Connolly also said: "We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility." I think his ideas here deal more directly with the issues dealt with in my work.

AS: When I met you at the ICP in 2002 you were working on your series CONTAINED, which explores your relationship to your Iranian Jewish heritage and your experience living in your childhood home as a young adult. How has your move to Australia affected this project? Do you have plans to expand on it?

SM: In CONTAINED I used photography as a way to interpret my relationship to my parents’ culture. At the time I couldn’t connect with their Iranian customs, but I was forced to exist within them. Since I’ve moved to Sydney I have felt a strong sense of loss for my Persian heritage- I’ve realized how special and valuable and odd such a community is. I miss the scents, the sounds, the food, the colors, the fabrics, the language, and the music.

My parents have recently moved to Great Neck, NY. There are some 15,000 Iranian Jews living there. I have begun to document this community- fascinated by their way of life and the society that has developed in this wealthy suburban town. And now that I am living far away, I have found myself nostalgic for a community I never really was a part of. Once again, I have found myself to be an outsider.

AS: Are you finding new inspiration in Australia?

SM: Australia is a fascinating continent. Although it is almost the same size as the US in landmass, there are only 21 million people inhabiting the land. Culturally, it feels very similar to the US- you have the same sort of fast-food restaurants, similar architecture, and the language is the same. But once you dig a little deeper, you come to realize that the lifestyle and certainly the natural landscape, is extremely different- if not the exact opposite. I often find myself thinking that Australia is like the US, only turned upside down.

It took me some time to get settled here, and therefore some time to start making work. I have several projects brewing that deal with Australia and my relationship to my new home. It is too early discuss them in detail, but I am working with the same issues of identity/displacement, culture and landscape I dealt with in CONTAINED and This Was What There Was: American Palimpsests.

AS: Does living outside of America change your perception of the country and its people?

SM: Recently, I went to the opening of a show entitled Bushwhacked at the College of Fine Arts Gallery in Sydney. The show had works from six artists from around the world, including one American. The general attitude of the show was harshly critical of American foreign policy during the Bush years. I walked into the show and immediately had to walk out to get some fresh air. I was so strongly disturbed, and I didn’t really understand why at first. I didn’t expect to have such a strong reaction to an exhibition that in many ways mimicked my own sentiments about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars- but I did.

After a few moments I walked back into the show, ultimately appreciating most of the work. And I realized that a lot of my emotions stemmed from my living abroad. It was hard to swallow “others” expressing such harsh sentiments about my own country. For the first time in my life, I am conscious of the fact that I am “Proud to be An American!"

Sunday, December 14, 2008

A Few Questions for Graham Miller

Last May I was in Berlin and my visit happened to coincide with an exhibition of photographs from Hijacked Volume One, Australia and America. It was there that I first discovered the beautifully poetic photographs of Graham Miller. Each image seemed to preserve a quiet moment of personal reflection that suggested an anguished past and pointed to an uncertain future. The subjects in his photographs hinted at hope, but their hope seemed a desperate act born from a series of quiet defeats.

Since then Graham and I have corresponded quite a bit and his work has garnered a good deal of attention. When I read about Graham's selection as one of the six finalists for the Critical Mass Book Award I asked him if he would be up for a quick interview. I was very happy when he agreed.

AMY STEIN: You've stated that your images are imagined and constructed in ways that are very similar to literary fiction and you have cited Raymond Carver as a primary influence on your work. Carver was famous for his portrayal of the quiet desperation of the working class, but he was also famous for his brevity. Beyond the content of your photography, do you feel a strong connection to his laconic intensity? Are you trying to tell the whole story with as few "words" as possible?

GRAHAM MILLER: My partner is a writer and she introduced me to Carver's work about 13 years ago. What struck me about his writing then (and now) was how he conveys so much emotional weight by sketching out the bare outlines of a story with telling details and simple dialogue. He lets the reader's imagination embellish the rest. His stories are lean but powerful, taking fragments from the lives of regular people and putting a magnifying glass on them for a brief period of time. They are stories of loss, broken relationships and struggle, told in a way that pulls at your gut. His work led me to read other short story writers, like Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford. There's something deceptively uncomplicated in their fiction that I particularly like.

Carver's stories are often unresolved, leaving you hanging to try and make sense of what has just taken place or what was about to happen. I do try to include some of these aspects in my own work, but I don’t profess to be able to convey the complexities or the progression of narrative that is possible in the written short story within the single still image. What I try to evoke is some of the "feeling" I get when I read his work. It doesn't necessarily translate in every picture, but more as an overarching sense for the series of pictures.

AS: Sometimes people are downright angry when they learn my Domesticated photos are staged. Do you feel any push back from people when they discover your images are constructed? Why do you think people have such a hard time allowing for the personal vision and imagination of a photographer compared to a painter, musician or writer?

GM: I've not got the downright angry reaction...more like a kind of knowing, dismissive sigh. I guess the reason people have such a hard time with the constructed image is that for them it somehow feels like cheating. They still believe that because the photograph so closely resembles reality that somehow it must also be "true". For me photography is much like writing- in the sense that you can approach writing about a subject or photographing it as fiction or non-fiction. Both are equally valid, and both are able to speak of the human experience in a moving and profound way. It does puzzle me when people go on about it. It just doesn't feel the right approach for me to work in a traditional photojournalistic sense.

I came across an edition of Carver short stories last year that included an introduction that I hadn't seen before. In it Carver quotes V.S. Pritchett’s description of the short story as “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing. First the glimpse, the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness." This is pretty much how the images come about for me. It's often the setting that I see first - the red interior of a friend's car, the morning light falling on the bed, or the pool of light from a streetlamp for instance- and then later I imagine what characters could be inserted into this scene, to create the emotion that I’m looking for and revisit it when I've worked it out.

AS: I sense a strong connection to Philip-Lorca diCorcia in your work. Did his photographs influence you in any way?

GM: Yes, I'm familiar with diCorcia's pictures and I think his work is great. I came across the yellow covered book of his some years ago and liked his cinematic use of light and the way he was able to subvert the documentary tradition and instill a kind of theatricality and artifice to his subject matter. He is one of the people who I identified with that was able to challenge the idea of photographic truth in a way that was still visually interesting. His work is one of many influences on me. You absorb bits and pieces and try to form your own way. I also think about Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Edward Hopper and filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Ray Lawrence who made the wonderful Australian film Lantana. I don't know why, but it's the work that has a melancholy feel about it that I'm drawn to. If I think about the films that have impressed me the most they are predominantly sad, but impressive movies. There aren't many comedies in there.

AS: You are Australian, but your Suburban Splendor images feel American to me. I don't know what that means exactly, but there is an expansiveness to the frame and an underlying sense of hope in the subjects that I associate with the American experience. Are you recreating an American identity you have experienced through film and literature or are you imagining a more universal suburban identity?

GM: I think you're right; there is something "American" about the images. Perhaps it's in the style, I don't know. Its not something that I consciously seek out to do, but I suppose its inevitable when so many of my influences are American- whether it's film, photographic or literary.

I was born in Hong Kong and didn't come to live in Australia till I was ten years old. In Hong Kong my brother and I lived on a staple diet of American films and television. We used to like to watch all those cop shows like Kojak, The Night Stalker, Colombo, Starsky and Hutch, and Baretta. And cheesy comedies like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. We'd go and see B-grade car chase movies at the cinema like Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Vanishing Point. There was a lot of British TV also, but for me it was the American shows that I liked the best. So in my youth a lot of imagery from the screen that I identified with was American. That attraction has stayed with me. Having said that there are a lot of similarities between Australian suburbia and American suburbia. I guess in the end it's some kind of a blend.