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

Stores of Fun

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- nite dance insomnia quartet

Above Monticello

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- Sunday in May

Exploded flower of my mind

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- backyard jam

The Standing Army

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- they'll do it my way

 

Subway fare

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- wall stuff

The Jazz

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- voice + sax

Orioles demise

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- the wait

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.