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

Popebama doing Shedding Waste

From Pasadena

I was in Pasadena this last week for work and got a chance to photograph parts of Pasadena and The Langham Hotel:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Pasadena

Former Air Force Base in Aguadilla

Ramey Airforce Base-wall art and structures:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Ramey Air Force Base

 

Images Over Last Three Weeks

I forget in these fast times to share here some of the images I've encountered during the last couple of weeks. Was in Chicago into another element,

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- Menjunje Ensemble and Chicago

Todd Hido Interview

 

From Lense Culture:

LensCulture: It seems that a lot of your work concerns the “internal” world (both yours and your viewer’s). How much do you let the external world—politics, the cultural climate—impact your photography?

Todd Hido: The internal/personal is often quite political, and external forces have always influenced my work. However, I learned from my mentor, Larry Sultan, that it is through the personal connection that one could relate to another in a truly impactful way.

For one of my last books, Excerpts from Silver Meadows, I was deeply influenced by a television that is constantly running in my kitchen, playing CNN. As I worked on my edit of photographs, there were a lot of really crazy things going on politically. These things absolutely filtered into my work.

Dorothea Lange said, “It is a photographer’s task to portray what exists and prevails.” I came to that message through the work of Robert Adams, who has clearly been doing this beautifully and accurately for almost all of his career.

One thing that is important to know about my work is that not all of it is about me or things that I have encountered. Many of the narratives, particularly in Excerpts, come from things I have seen in others.

My latest body of work, entitled Bright Black World, is very much a reaction to the current times that we live in. I was already working on a body of work that touched upon climate change in my own way, which is an issue growing far quicker than we could have imagined. That being said, I think my work became even darker in this truly horrific and inescapable political atmosphere in America today. There is no way you can turn a blind eye or be willfully ignorant to the tide of current events.

LC: Your photographs strongly remind me of Edward Hopper’s paintings; smooth vistas, and yet charged. Can you talk about some of the visual material you find inspiring? How do you see that material influencing and impacting your work?

TH: I am a fan of Edward Hopper, and I was delighted to have my work hung next to his at a show at the Whitney Museum. Other visual inspiration for me often comes from my library of over 6,000 photography books that I am constantly adding to and referencing.

I am also inspired by things that are in my daily visual path. I love to leave books open on my dining room table and walk past them 100 times. You would be surprised how much that sinks in and becomes reflected in your work.

LC: Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?

TH: Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.

LC: When viewers “place their own memories within,” do they ever react in a way that surprises you?

TH: While I know that my work does elicit a response in people, it is often something that is personal and not really shared with me. This, of course, is totally fine.

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Six Recent Photographs

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- View from March 2022

Photos from this Week

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-March Photos

Six Fotos from This Past Week

Vallejo Nocturno 2022 Copyright

Some Photos from The Last Two Weeks

All Images are from Vallejo Nocturno 2022 Copyright

Learning About Luigi Ghirri

 

From a discussion at Aperture with the curator of a Luigi Ghirri photo exhibition:

Michael Famighetti: The installation for The Idea of Building was quite beautiful and worked so well in the Matthew Marks Gallery space, which has the feel of a modest chapel. How did this project come to be?

Matt Connors: I have been a Ghirri fan for a long time, and a conversation developed with the gallery about me curating a show. The first time they showed Ghirri was in a Thomas Demand–curated show, so I think they were interested in me to see what would happen, because I wasn’t a photographer, but was someone invested in his work. 

Famighetti: Did you work closely with the Ghirri estate on the selection?

Connors: I went to Italy to the archive to meet with Adele, his daughter. Before that, I was buying every Ghirri book. I was freaked out because of how admired and loved he is in the photography world, and I felt acutely aware that I was not a photographer. But I kept digging in on my personal research and wrote a minithesis to send to Adele. And then I went in January 2020, one of my last trips before the COVID-19 pandemic. The archive is in what was once Ghirri’s house; it was an absolute fantasy.

Famighetti: What vision of Ghirri did you present to the estate?

Connors: The process of choosing a Ghirri photograph is kind of like a psychological intake, because there is so much, many different bodies of work; it involves confessing what you like.

After looking at many images, I started to dig out a vision of him as a painter. It sounds self-serving, but because I’m making paintings all day, putting color together materially, I started to see that parallel so clearly in his work.

In the book Project Prints (2012), which is about how he would make contact prints and cut them out and make little maquettes to play with, you can see that the materiality of his approach was key. He was obsessed with building, actually building things—like making tables, folders, and containers—and that just seemed so present in the work. That became the paradigm. I think his entry into art-making via the drawing that was part of his cartography and surveying work set the stage for him to use photography in a more tactile, painterly, material way.

Famighetti: Ghirri was also a prolific author of concise reflections on photography, and he wrote about how he didn’t take pictures, or compose pictures, but rather saw himself as creating things from images—your building angle seems to naturally emerge from his thinking.

Connors: Yes, and there was a nervousness that the title—The Idea of Building—would read as if the show was about architecture. (I had just seen a show that was all about his photographs connected to architecture.) But I did use a few photos he took of Aldo Rossi’s studio, and there are a few others included that are focused on architectural frameworks. He would go back and then make photographs based on his surveying work. Architecture is embedded in how he sees.

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