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

Some Early Photos

Not sure with what camera these photos were taken but it wasn't my father's Leica though he took most of these in the mid-late 60's. There is one here of my dad which I'm wondering if I may have taken it as there is a photo, taken a year or two later of my father reading a paper on the very sofa that he sits in this photo below. Anyway the one good thing about these photos is that a year and month when they were developed is printed on the side. Several are from Argentina with my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins. Fewer and fewer people are alive that knew these characters. One day it will be the same with me.

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- Family Photos from the 60's

The Winogrand Problem

From Gery Badger write ASX:

At his death in March 1984, Winogrand left some 2,500 rolls of film unprocessed. When John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York came to plan a major Winogrand memorial exhibition, he and his colleagues were faced with the daunting task of sifting through in excess of 300,000 images left unedited by the photographer. Such unbridled profligacy prompts a question, and points to the existence of what one might term the ‘Winogrand Problem.’ For that matter, it perhaps raises uncomfortable questions about the problem of photography in general.

Photographers all too frequently make pictures so conceptually casual and brainlessly superficial that their minimal meaning is exhausted at a glance. A great deal of film is wasted by even the best photographers, and almost criminally squandered by the bad and the mediocre. Garry Winogrand, however, was hardly mindless. He possessed one of the most acute of photographic intelligences, and the best of his pictures exhibit a truly virtuoso use of the 35mm camera, demonstrating a Rabelaesian formal energy that seldom has been equalled. Yet can we say that, if not mindless, much of the gargantuan amount of film he exposed was to somewhat meaningless effect? Did all this exuberant pointing of the camera, this machine gun clicking of the shutter on more than half-a-million occasions, have meaning, or enough meaning beyond a kind of automatic writing, a stream of consciousness tracing of fleeting sense impressions? This is the primary question that would seem to nag at John Szarkowski (in top authorial form) in his profound, disturbing, and moving essay to Figments From the Real World,3 the monograph accompanying MOMA’s retrospective tribute to one of the figures specifically nurtured by the museum’s photography department in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It may be remembered that Szarkowski performed a similar memorialising function for another leading protegé, Diane Arbus, some dozen years or so earlier.4 Then, he was able to organise a brilliantly cogent overview of the photographer’s work. But Winogrand, so much broader in scope as well as so prolific, could not be rounded off so neatly. Despite external problems caused by her choice of subject-matter, Arbus worked within a relatively narrow, familiar photographic framework. Winogrand was by far the more puzzling, enigmatic, and genuinely ‘difficult’ photographer.

The work that clearly bothers Szarkowski emanates mainly from the vast amount of film shot by Winogrand in his latter years and left in an unedited state. The bulk of it was shot in Austin and Los Angeles, the photographer’s last two cities of residence. Faced by this accumulation of material, Szarkowski seems bemused by such first hand evidence of Winogrand’s wayward profligacy, and positively frustrated by the fact that no discernible grand theme emerges from the mass. Much of this late output seems aimless and repetitive, the photographer operating almost on automatic pilot, one might say. Reading between the lines of his essay, I feel that Szarkowski is troubled because photography itself might be implicated as much as a burnt-out, unhappy Winogrand, forcing himself to function in cities where clearly he did not feel at home, in contrast to the well remembered sidewalks of New York. Having proclaimed Winogrand as photography’s leading light for over twenty years, it must have been painful for Szarkowski to admit the following:

‘. . . it seems to me that Winogrand was at the end of a creative impulse out of control, and on some days a habit without an impulse, one who continued to work, after a fashion, like an overheated engine that will not stop even after the key has been turned off.’5

Occasionally, Szarkowski notes, Winogrand dragged himself back to something like his old form, but would seem to have gone beyond the usual artistic process of attempting to make ‘good’ pictures, impelled on a largely aimless course that was compulsively awful but nevertheless fascinating, like a slow motion nervous breakdown:

‘Yet to a biographer the most compelling of the late work would perhaps not be the work of the good days – work with which we are relatively familiar – but the doggedly repetitive, absent minded, oddly ruminative work of the other days.’6

The familiar work of the ‘good’ days – a ‘good Winogrand’, in other words – presupposes a lightning fast, usually candid street shot, a fusing of disparate visual elements into a characteristically choreographed melange of some complexity. This image cannot be foreseen. The motifs gathered together by the camera do not exist prior to their presentation in the frame, and they do not exist afterwards. They are sensed, felt . . . divined subliminally by the photographer and plucked, just as subliminally, out of a flux of shifting visual sensation. Their only existence, their reality, is the picture. Then, as the New York critic Max Kozloff has written, that piece of sensation so intuitively frozen can hopefully be assigned a useful role within the realm of culture – a meaning:

‘To be swayed by photography, it must create a dialogue, that is, enter culture and be assigned mutually enhancing relationships with its own kind. That desirable state, for all serious photographers, is embodied in the problem of recurrence, of recurrent imagery.’7

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From Monday's Snow

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Scenes from the Little Patuxent

The Photography of Rinko Kawauchi

Some spirited photography from Rinko Kawauchi-check out his works at his site.

Photos of Rinko Kawauchi

Matthew Finn's Excellent Photography

I was just introduced to this photographer from the UK that captures a familiar sensibility with true artistic skill. Here are some of Matthew Finn's photograph's and a link to his website and a fabulous interview at A Small Voice, Ben Smith's podcast of interviews with photographers.

Matthew Finn from his Mother "project"

Here is a link to his website:  Matthew Finn

Here is a link to an interview at the always excellent A Small Voice, Ben Smith's Podcast with photographers.

Jim Marshall-Photographer A You Tube Discussion

Some shots from Fall

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Fall Excursions

 

It's been different this fall. We are vaccinated and have greater confidence that we will not die by accident. Instead our fears continue to be a country whose third of the population is actively working to disrupt the traditional democratic election. We have seen this movie many times in Latin America and it has a rotten taste. So we walk during the day to remind us of the other things in life. Lucky us.

Interview with Photographer Ron Jude

Interview with photographer Ron Jude at American Suburb X:

Carl Fuldner: There’s a curious sense of time and place reflected in these works that seems to operate beyond a human framework. It brings to mind ‘deep time,’ a concept attributed to the 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton to describe a timescale reflected in sedimentary rock formations that lies beyond human apprehension. Likewise, the end matter mentions that you made these works over the last four years in four U.S. states (Oregon, California, New Mexico, Hawaii) and Iceland, but those place markers are notably omitted from the inventory of works. The implication seems to be that such geographic designations cease to hold their significance deep within a lava tube or on the edge of a cataract. How have place and time factored into your thinking about this work?

Ron Jude: Your take on the omission of named territories is on target with what I had in mind with the index. I thought it would be useful for the reader to be able to reference the various phenomena depicted in the photographs, but counterproductive to the spirit of the piece to locate the images within the framework of mapping, which carries with it the tangled nature of the human endeavor and our impulse to lay claim to things.

The role of ‘place’ and the narrative baggage it brings to photographs has been something I’ve explored routinely in my work. In Alpine Star, Emmett, and Lick Creek Line, place figures as an essential element of the narratives we construct around lived experience. In work like Executive Model and Other Nature, on the other hand, place is used in an intentionally overstated way. In these works place assumes an implicit authority that collapses under its own weight and can’t be fulfilled. This ultimately undermines the meaning and value of place within the work, calling into question the usefulness of some of the basic documentary-grounded assumptions we have about notions such as ‘place.’ For 12 Hz I intentionally avoided references to place, not wanting to tether the individual images to mappable ‘locations,’ for the reasons stated above.

Time is also something I’ve thought about frequently in my work, typically as it relates to the fallible, slippery nature of human memory and cognition. When I set out to make work that considered forces that fall outside of human experience, however, it made sense to dig into the idea of ‘deep time’ and contemplate a scale that lies beyond our perception. The end result, I hope, is a look at the raw materials of the planet in a way that considers time on a completely different scale and leads to a rediscovery of a sense of awe. So yes, diminishing the prevailing sense of self-importance we share as a species through suggestions of deep time was definitely one of the aspirations I had in mind for the photographs.

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Tom Wood Interview

From Paper Journal, interview with photographer Tom Wood:

When you were shooting most of your work, were you working at the time? How did you spend your days?

Up until 1998 I used to teach two days a week, around the corner from where I lived, and five days a week I used to take photographs. I had just enough money to live simply.

I did photography as well and what I like about your work is the aspect that it’s close to home. A lot of photographers tend to find stuff in other places and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I really like that element of finding interesting things close to home and being close to the people and the characters around you.

The Photie Man book was called that because that’s what the kids used to call me. I shot video all my life as well, so when I took my kids to the park with the video camera and I used to video them, as well as what was going on in the park, you could see peoples relationship with me, it was very clear. One time I left the video recorder in the park and these three lads bought it back to me.

Really! Well I guess there’s a trust there, they’re familiar with you…

That’s right. I used to give everyone pictures. There’s a funny story, about some of the more toughish lads I used to photograph. One of the them, I guess he was the leader of the gang; actually there’s a picture in the book, they were part of the ‘New Brighton Outlaws’ – anyway, they were sitting on top of a car and some girls were walking by and they just turned around and were looking at them. One of these lads used to like me, you know, I used to go round his house and have a coffee and stuff and he would sit there and smoke a joint, a normal guy you know? So this lad rode a scooter and one day he went to work early in the morning and where he lived was very quiet and it was 5 o’clock in the morning. He was at an intersection and went through the red light and he was killed. So there’s a picture of him in Photie Man, leading a gang of lads towards this girl infront of the Waltzer, I’m not sure if you know that picture; he’s from there, Mark, and I had that in the Last Resort exhibition at the Open Eye, a joint show with Martin Parr back in 1985; a very famous show from which Martin kind of made his career on. So that picture was on the wall and it was stolen! And guess what? It’s on the wall of Mark’s mother living room! You know, other people that you’d photograph and you’d see them 10 years later and they’re getting married and asking me to take their pictures. So it’s like an exchange, you know? They tolerate me and I try to give something back.

Do you think it’s changed much – I mean, nowadays there’s a lot more suspicion of people. Do you think if you were to be doing this now, you’d have the same response from the community?

I just don’t know, I mean I still photograph people, I still look at people but not as much. In those days you were fed up with kids pestering you, you used to take someone’s photo just to shut them up. Believe it or not in the early days, people used to call me David because the only photographer that people knew was David Bailey. And then I got the Photie Man tag… but as I said, you used to photograph someone just to shut them up. So six months later you’d make a print and you’d have a big box of prints always there by the door, so you’d see someone and tell them to go round the house to pick up a print.

It’s really nice, that element of your work. I mean people think you take a photograph and you’re taking something from someone else but you’re actually giving them something and there is a real exchange going on in your work. What is it about you as a character that makes you able to do that?

I just felt that I never had the right to exploit them in any way. On the cover of Looking for Love, it was my first book (in 1988), it was about nightclubbing. So the two girls on the front cover saw themselves in the book shop and they thought I was making loads of money and they came around to the house; I showed them the accounts and how I was making a loss every year, so I gave them a print and they were happy, you know?

When I went to the women’s market every Saturday morning for all those years, and I finally got a book out called People, there were a couple of pictures in there from the market. The market traders bought a couple of books off me to help me along, cause they were pleased. I would never sell any of the pictures for advertising, I mean I was offered lots of money for some of the nightclub pictures… it wasn’t easy walking down the Dock road and taking those pictures; I felt guilty anyway, I didn’t want to exploit the people… those doing car boot sales selling pornographic tapes; I didn’t know that. One week I’m not there and they’re raided by Trading Standards. So they’d see me the next week and they think I’m connected with the raid.

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What is Bomba

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Bomba en Loiza

From a three year old article in the NYT on Bomba:

For generations of Afro-Boricua workers and families, bomba has remained central to community, with the drum acting as an instrument of political power, entertainment and spiritual release. Some may even call bomba the soundtrack of Puerto Rican resistance. At this year’s May Day march in San Juan, its lyrics and drumbeats echoed through the crowds airing their opposition to austerity measures, including school closures and university tuition hikes, before police fired pepper spray and tear gas to end the protest.

Bomba’s resilient spirit has become more pronounced in the face of the island’s economic crisis and the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.

At La Terraza de Bonanza, any given bomba night is bound to be packed with young people. Some dance with exaggerated technique, their faces pinched tight with discipline. Traditionalists flick a fan or a skirt to mark their control over the physical space. Others are more avant-garde and incorporate acrobatic moves, or an arrhythmic dance known as flossing.

These nights began with just a few friends getting together to play drums, said Otura Mun, the frontman of the Afro-Caribbean electronic band ÌFÉ, and grew through social media and word of mouth. Attendance really swelled after Hurricane Maria in September 2017; because Bonanza had a generator still on hand from Hurricane Irma, the no-frills, open-air bar was one of few places in the neighborhood with power. It opened for business just two days after the storm.

The resurgence of bomba owes something to formal experimentation. La Tribu de Abrante, a high-energy, 12-piece fusion orchestra, has blended the sounds of bomba with reggaeton, reggae and hip-hop. The openness to new sounds has helped expand bomba’s audience locally, through live performance and radio, and globally, by associating it with popular genres.

“When I traveled to other countries, people would say reggaeton is the traditional music of Puerto Rico,” recalled Hiram Abrante, the band’s frontman, who is from Loíza. “I’d say, ‘What? It’s bomba.’”

His goal has always been to make bomba more accessible to listeners around the world while maintaining respect for its traditions and history. At the recent Festival del Apio in Barranquitas, Mr. Abrante acknowledged bomba’s heritage by closing La Tribu’s set with a salute to two of San Juan’s oldest bomba families: the Cepedas and the Ayalas.

“With evolution, there is responsibility,” said Victor Emmanuelli, 41, a member of the musical group Bomba Evolución and a historian of the genre. “It’s important for young people to have the fundamentals in order for the genre to evolve.” He started playing bomba at age 8 in Carolina, a town between San Juan and Loíza.

Jerry Ferrao, who played with the Cepedas for 20 years, has noticed that some younger players seem overly concerned with playing fast, favoring the rhythm of the dance over the poetry of the songs.

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