v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Promesas

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- In Charlottesville, at an antique shop-Mexican promesas

Tarek Butayhi-Syrian Artist

Tarek Butayhi

Interview with Owen Kydd

Still from Yucca Color Shift, 2011

From Lay Flat:

Lucas Blalock: Can you talk about the transition in your work from more episodic videos that produce a sort of serialized experience to the very tightly contained loops you have been making recently? I further wanted to ask a sort of goofy question about whether you think of these static, durational, looped pieces as still films or extended photographs?

Owen Kydd: I began by working with a duration of about 30 to 40 seconds per image. I found it was a good length to investigate still/motion, because it seemed enough to provide the manifest of a moment while also giving me the chance to create a montage. I made projects that would slide between a series of 9 or 10 of these images (with ellipses in between). Through this process of looking and editing I began to learn more about making pictures that responded to an extension, and I eventually felt like I could make some singular works.

One thing I found was that durational photographs worked better when they lost the indicators that tied them to a past, and began to confuse the moment of filming with the experience of viewing. Cinema or video works that have a long duration usually quote a recorded or lived time, and even in early pieces like Warhol’s Empire, which is close to losing its temporal markers, one is always made conscious of at least the possibility of an end point. This awareness could also be the tied to the projector’s flicker and the grain, but I also have found this condition in more recent video works. I am interested in trying to locate a more hallucinogenic or endless quality.

In terms of the loop’s designation, I can say that when I think about making a still film, I think about changing a momentum and this feels decisive. But when I think about extending photography it suggests continuing a photograph’s inertia, and this seems more indefinite. My works are technically films because they rely on apparent motion, but the movement is limited within the frame, the effect is minimized, and often the same image is overlapped for many seconds without interruption. This process allows me to consider how a photograph can involve itself in motion.

LB: It is interesting to me that through this ambiguity between the still film and the “durational” photograph you end up bringing into question the boundaries of the device and even the strict usefulness of these categories. I feel that this is akin to the kind of interrogation that has prompted artists of late to return to the darkroom (amongst other strategies), but we are really discussing different limits here altogether.

OK: My pieces are exhibited on backlight screens or monitors. So, as with photography, there is a picture merged with a surface, albeit one that has a CFL light and a refresh rate. I feel that there is still an implicit tension between the screen and the subject. And because I am interested in making a picture of something in the world, I hope this tension presents something like the “possibility of reference” (to borrow Walter Benn Michael’s terms) rather than a fight against it. This is wrapped up in the forced distinction that the flatness of the photograph (and here, the screen) must make between itself and the exterior of the object it depicts, and this is a separation that I’m not sure fully exists in the projected image. I can also say that (with the monitor in mind) I find myself looking for specific surfaces.

Anna Balecho

Interview with Balecho from Dazed Digital:

Dazed Digital: How do you achieve intimacy in your photographs?
Anna Balecho: It's not intentional, in the sense that I don't think about that while shooting, it happens. As much as I can, I only work with what I feel, even doing some kind of fashion editorial, I've done it like I would in my personal work.
 
DD: What's your favourite kind of light?
Anna Balecho: Natural. Not too sunny, and if I can be picky, not directly in my subjects of work. That said... I don't obsess over taking photos. Maybe because I've always used film, or maybe because that's just the way I relate to photography. If 'it’s' there, it’s there - I don't worry about the light.
 
DD: What's your opinion on the connection between memories and photographs?
Anna Balecho: In the end that's what photograph are, right? Memories of your dreams, of what you felt or what you wish you had. In a way we all try to create our memories. I’m not a nostalgic person, not even a bit, but I do have a thing about "stuff" that reminds me of the past...

Balecho's Website

image autonomy

Walter Ben Michaels on photography as art:

I think it’s only in its claim to be art that photography is crucially important. Of course, there are lots of wonderful photographs, made to convey information, or to sell things, and many of them are very beautiful. But it’s the attempt to make art with photography that seems to me theoretically central and politically important. The theoretical interest is the one I’ve described; precisely because the photograph need not be art and because it need not be (and in crucial ways isn’t) even a representation, it has become the site of the most powerful thinking about what representation is, about what it means to make art and about what art is. And at the center of this is the assertion of the intentionality of the photographer.

Which is also, I think, the political interest of photography. If we think of postmodernism as the cultural expression of neoliberalism, it’s not hard to see that the photograph – understood as necessarily meaning different things to different people – embodies both the commitment to the commodity that’s at the heart of neoliberalism and the commitment to the subject position that’s at the heart of neoliberal models of social justice.

Things that are made to sell are made for – determined by – the buyer; they’re made for the market. And because social justice in the market consists of equality of access to it, anti-discrimination is central to neoliberal justice. Your race or sex or sexuality should not limit your access to the labor market. Hence neoliberal societies are increasingly alert to the ways in which we see each other and seek to prohibit what Rancière calls “hierarchies of vision” – racism, sexism, heterosexism. But they’re not much worried about the hierarchies that have nothing to do with vision – the hierarchies produced not by inequality of access to markets but by the markets themselves. That’s why our efforts to make society more equal with respect to race and sex have happily coexisted with greater inequalities of class.

And the inequality of class, of course, is not dependent on how people see us. So the difference I outlined above between two ways of thinking about the photograph – its meaning determined by the way the beholder sees it or its meaning determined by the intentionality of its maker, regardless of how the beholder sees it – is paralleled by two models of inequality. The inequalities of discrimination are determined by how we see each other; the inequalities of exploitation are not.

What this means is that the photograph’s claim to autonomy, its claim to be something other than a commodity, has a kind of political value. It’s not that you don’t want the work to sell – you can’t live if you can’t sell. It’s that the price may be determined by the buyers but the meaning isn’t determined by the beholders.

Maurizio Anzeri

Arianna, 2011
Embroidery on Photograph, 17 x 14 in.

From The Saatchi Gallery:

Maurizio Anzeri makes his portraits by sewing directly into found vintage photographs. His embroidered patterns garnish the figures like elaborate costumes, but also suggest a psychological aura, as if revealing the person’s thoughts or feelings. The antique appearance of the photographs is often at odds with the sharp lines and silky shimmer of the threads. The combined media gives the effect of a dimension where history and future converge. The image used in Round Midnight is an early 20th century ‘glamour shot’ that at the time would have been considered titillating for both the girl’s nudity and ethnicity. Anzeri’s delicately stitched veil recasts the figure with an uncomfortable modesty, overlaying a past generation’s cross-cultural anxieties with an allusion to our own.

“I’ve been collecting old photographs for a long time. A few years ago I was doing ink drawings with them and out of curiosity I stitched into one. I work a lot with threads and hand stitching, and the link to photography was a natural progression. I put tracing paper over the photo and draw on the face until it develops. Sometimes the image comes straight away, suggested by a detail on a dress or in the background, but with the majority of them I spend a lot of time drawing. Once the drawing is done, I pierce the photo with a set of needle-like tools I invented and take the paper away; the holes are obsessively paced at the same distance to convey an idea of geometry. When I begin the stitching something else happens, drawing will never do what thread will – the light changes, and at some points you can lose the face, and at others you can still see under it.”

“Photographs from the 40s and 50s have a totally different quality from photos we’re used to today. We don’t recognise them as photographs now, they really look like watercolours or drawings. The images I use are anonymous, I find them everywhere; I’m really into flea markets and car boot sales, when you enter you have no idea what you’re going to encounter. In everything I see there is something I am interested in, but I try to look at them as plain canvas. Art history is very important to me, it’s all been done before but it’s never been done by you: if you don’t look into the past there is no chance to go into the future. The surrealist movement is important to my work, but I don’t become obsessed by it, it’s not dictating rules. I understand history in a formal respect, and think of past artists like travelling companions – making work is like going for a walk with them. At the end of the day it’s about humanity.”

Stan Douglas

Dancer I, 1950

2010

From ICP, Infinity Award winner Stan Douglas:

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. Since the late 1980s, he has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, he appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide and many major museum collections hold his work. His awards include the inaugural Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2007) and the Bell Award in Video Art (2008).

 

Gretchen Albrecht

 

“Nature has always played an important role in Gretchen Albrecht’s oeuvre… Whether it be a tangled garden or the distant horizon of a glorious West Coast sunset, the truth of the landscape as observed is captured and provided with a new modernist framework within which to view it…

Albrecht’s painting is almost always based on an empirical observation, it is this that defines it and gives it its edge. It helps define an approach to abstraction that is not formalist or formulaic, an abstraction that is inclusive of the viewer rather than exclusive”.
James Ross

How to/ Internet

Lauren Simonutti Interview

From Fluster Magazine:

You proudly (and with good reasons) state your work is “digital free”.   Tell us more about your choice?

 When I first began to study photography there was only film and darkroom and I became entranced by the history and the beauty, the detail in the shadows, the luminescence in the highlights, the sheer magic of watching an image come up on the paper in the developer tray.  I still am.  Silver printing is the only form of alchemy that has ever worked.  I have practiced this craft for over 25 years and have no desire to change.  I make new discoveries all the time.
In the digital era, how difficult is to shoot analog (especially using large format)?

Also, do you find it difficult to convince people that there is no photoshop in your images?

I have not found any significant difficulty in continuing to shoot large format.  Flexibility is required as to availability of materials but I can shoot any film, provided it is true black and white.  The discontinuation of papers is inconvenient but I have always been able to find what I need and make whatever changes to processing that are necessary.  Adaptability is the key.

People do automatically assume that I use photoshop in my images, particularly since I do in camera manipulations with movement and very long exposures, as well as having conjured a few tricks in the darkroom with my own formulas for toners and bleaches. But when asked I am always willing to walk someone step by step through my processes.  I have no problem sharing technical information.  Beyond the straight print most students have no idea what is possible with darkroom.   They have never been exposed.  (Pardon the pun.)

Tell us a story about one of subjects you have photographed that made you want to take their picture.

I do not see an object, location or individual and have the desire to take its picture.  Rather I work from an idea, a turn of phrase, a memory and create a picture to suit the concept.  I am interested in capturing injuries, dreams, nightmares, life, still life, & visions of afterlife.  The world as it exists holds little interest for me, I am trying to create my own.

Why did you choose to shoot selfportraits? When did you start?

 While I am the model in all my shots very few are self portraits.  In my extant body of work I would say there are no more than 3 or 4.  I use myself simply as a matter of convenience.  I live a very isolated life.  I am the only one here.  So when I have constructed a frame that requires a figure I place myself in the frame where that figure needs to be.  Who I am is incidental.