fototazo: Doug DuBois

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4.01.2016

Photobook Review: "My Last Day at Seventeen" by Doug DuBois

Doug DuBois
My Last Day at Seventeen
Aperture, 2015
156 pages, 79 images, includes illustrations by Patrick Lynch, 9 3/8 x 12 1/4 inches

Also reviewed on: Collector's Daily, Hyperallergic
Additional links: TIME, Lens Culture, Lomography

Additional links on fototazo: Interview Part I, Interview Part II
Additional link on My Last Day at Seventeen by...me: Exposure 48:1 Spring 2015

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I long promised a third part to fototazo's interview with Doug DuBois, the first two parts to which I've linked to just above. We did a preliminary interview for it, but in the end other commitments prevented it from materializing. Instead, now that My Last Day at Seventeen has come out, I'd like to bookend the interviews I did with DuBois during his process of working on the book by cracking the cover and taking a look at the finished project.

This review generally doesn't aim to judge the book, but rather understand how it works.

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My Last Day at Seventeen (MLDAS) contains 79 portraits, staged tableaux, and spontaneous photographs made over five summers in the working-class Russell Heights housing estate located in the coastal town of Cobh in southwestern Ireland.

The book is comprised of four components: the main passages of photographs, a graphic novel-style comic by Patrick Lynch presented in a series of inserts, two sequences of photographs inserted in the same way as the comics and a short ending text.

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In MLDAS, DuBois wraps together several elements to create an investigation of - and revisions to - the traditional coming-of-age narrative: Ireland, the working class, an economic downtown, an insulated community, DuBois' aesthetic vision, the American-ness of that vision, a middle-aged man photographing adolescents and the perspective of a man looking back at his own youth with a sense of loss, to name a half-dozen.

The coming-of-age rite of passage seems at risk of being a still born because of the lack of access to jobs and education for the adolescents of Russell Heights during the end of the Celtic Tiger. Through the complete absence of references to employment or future study in MLDAS, we sense that the next stage of the lives of the subjects is uncertain and the traditional coming-of-age narrative of graduation leading towards new opportunities appears at the point of breaking down. In one photograph, a house with a boarded up window and a "For Sale" sign signals the larger economic difficulties causing the lack of opportunities. That's all we need to understand the larger context. Here DuBois plays a subtle hand well from the elements he works from.

The creation of a world without adults in MLDAS is another twist on the more traditional coming-of-age story that plays on the distinctive elements from which the book was made. This mythical world composed of only teens set within a circumscribed, shared space of drinking holes, alleys and hang outs in which no single subject dominates suggests the collective youth experience defines the individual experience. The neighborhood peer community thus defines the "self" for these teens more so than the institutions of church, parents, nation, work or school, bringing focus to the shared moment of confrontation with the arrival of adulthood.

DuBois singes his images with the melancholic sense of loss that accompanies looking backwards across the landscape of one's own youth and meditating on the sense of loss in leaving adolescence. Doing so gives a much different feel to his portrayal of coming-of-age than other contemporary portrayals, such as the hormone addled teens of Kids, the sensuality of youth adolescence found in Sally Mann's work, the teen awkwardness of Seth and Evan in Superbad or the rebellious fuck you vibe of the train-hopping community in A Period of Juvenile Prosperity.

The book twists and updates the standard coming-of-age narrative, but it is not limited to the particulars of its subjects, time and place. What's most valuable about this project is how DuBois' working techniques push the book beyond the specific conversation.

DuBois pillages the vocabulary of documentary photography freely – frontal, formal, full revealing summer mid-day light, sharp focus and, in his portraits, most often a shallow depth of field. He also works, however, with techniques such as digital compositing, reenacting scenes, staging and poses borrowed from movies and other sources that push away from the straight documentary tradition into the worlds of Larry Sultan or Dziga Vértov.

The intermixing of techniques traditionally assigned to "documentary" and "art" helps create an abstraction based in reality – this is Ireland but not only Ireland, working class but not only working class, Russell Heights but not only Russell Heights. MLDAS is not limited to being a document of a certain group at the crossing of four dimensions. Instead, by freely mixing traditions, the book shows its willingness to put the greater truth above a singular truth, to sacrifice the document in order to more richly represent the inevitable bittersweetness of the end of youth.

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MLDAS present two core narrative structures – linear and cyclical – that create a basic tension in the work and that coexist uneasily in the best of ways. It taps into basic questions about how we frame our experience of our lives and part of the book's power is to show that the same lives can be viewed through different narrative constructs depending on how you look and that these narratives are not mutually exclusive.

The linear narrative begins from the cover with a three drawing sequence lifted from one of Lynch's comics. A character hitting a hurley ball says, “Well, let’s...fucking...go!”

Turning the cover, here we... fucking go! There are no empty white pages, no standalone title page, no dedication or introductory quote from an Irish literature giant you thought was just the name of a bar in Boston. In the two images above, we can see how the book opens directly to the first part of the title on the left and the first image in a two-image sequence on the right. Turning the page we see the second image of the two-image sequence and the second part of the title on the right. The kids in the two photographs have fallen to the right from one image to the next as they wrestle, moving forwards into the book, just as the three figure drawings on the cover moved us left to right into the book.

From the two sequences, we move to an image of a boy lying down with his arm across his face in what appears to be a backyard, blocking his face from the sharp light. This image sets up the idea of the "last day" with a sense of dawn. The book doesn't continue with any sort of day's chronology, instead letting this first image and the title install "a day" as a linear temporal frame.

Many of the spaces and events in the photographs that follow also suggest a forward narrative thrust by their connections to rites of passage defined by a "before and after." A jump from a high structure into water, a crashed car and a star etched into a forearm, for example, all imply teenage rites of passage fulfilled. In addition, a number of times as we move through the pages, we turn a corner and see someone we met earlier in the book. The repeated subjects appear at different ages, underscoring the idea of time passing.

Patrick Lynch's comics, inserted between sections of photographs, provide a parallel linear development as they build a narrative through the book, guiding the book forwards with vignettes based around two main characters (discussed more below).

As we get to the book's end, however, we also see how the comic repeats frames from the end at the beginning (or vice versa), creating a sense of return, drawing us back into the book to start again. We also see that the bonfire images that open the book have a companion image at the end (above), furthering a sense that the narrative of MLDAS also works cyclically. As we look back through the book, we can find a number of images with elements that echo the cyclical structure: adolescents having babies, two young girls in wedding dresses, a print of an image we find the book taped inside another image on a bedroom wall which, in a different way, also emphasizes the idea of cycles.

There are components of the book that help to form connections between the linear and cyclical core narrative structures. The mix of ages of the various subjects in the book creates both a sense of a survey of adolescence, a look backwards across the whole experience of youth fitting more with a linear understanding, but also providing a glimpse at how the coming of age narrative will cycle again in those just entering adolescence as others reach eighteen.

There's also one image in particular where I see the two narrative ideas crossing, in a figure carrying a white door through a field. This door could be another symbol of crossing a threshold forwards, or it could be the removal of that threshold by unhinging it, leaving it dysfunctional, a reading that would also support the earlier conversation around the frustration of the coming-of-age narrative by the economic context these adolescents have grown up in.

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Alec Soth, in apparently impeccable Spanish, said in a recent interview with El País that, "La fotografía se está pareciendo cada vez más a la escritura," or something like, "Photography is increasingly similar to writing." MLDAS pushes that fusion closer.

A post on Lomogaphy – I can't find the author listed anywhere on the page – states that the comics and photographs in MLDAS form "two distinct narratives in one book." DuBois himself, in an interview on Lens Culture, says that the comic narrative "complicates the reading of the photographs and our imagined experience of growing up in Cobh."

I experience the opposite: the comics thread the photographs together more specifically and they – comics and photographs - function together, sharing story elements and a single consistent mood to make potential readings both clearer and limited. The consistency of mood works between the photographs and comics to place me in a created world that has particularity, but not singularity, giving me a fairly specific range to understand the book without telling me too directly how to experience it.

To explain why I get this sense, first it should be pointed out that word and image are yoked solidly together from the opening sequence in MLDAS. We start with the figure from the comics speaking text, then transition into pages that cut between the two-image bonfire sequence and the two parts of the title.

From there we quickly see in the first comic insert that the comics feature faces and subjects in line with those portrayed in the photographs, and we also see that the photographs, especially through graffiti, carry the text of the comics into the real world. The two sequences of photographs inserted into the book the same way as the comics - one of a boy juggling a soccer ball and the other a backyard barbecue with the subjects playing with a gun - are another way to close the gap between the photographs and comics. They are presented as a series of small squares the size of a frame of the comics on the same paper stock as the comics, which differs from the paper used for the photographs (see gun sequence image farther below).

This tight relationship between photographs and comics helps them function together as one narrative that forms a consistent mood. While the book contains images of tenderness and connection – a couple in a doorway, the girl with a hand on the boy's bare chest, a boy goofing around with some sort of fake eyelashes taped onto his eyelids - the two-image bonfire sequence that opens the book establishes a darkness that signals the dominant mood of the rest of the pages.

The boys appear to be hugging in the first image, but in the second we see the "hug" is actually wrestling - with the combatants getting closer to the flames. Other photographs then reinforce this mood through gesture, event and environmental context. We have the rough grasp of hair and redness of skin in the haircut image (above), the crude graffiti in many images, an abandoned car crash scene, the fresh homemade cuts of a star on skin, broken windows, a middle finger and two kids grabbing each other's shirts, ready to fight on a wall. In sum, the passage to adult, which could be seen as a celebration and as an inevitable right, instead is presented as a struggle for survival, a process through which not all will pass.

In the book's closing sequence of photographs, we see a cross, a stigmata reference and then a sort of pietà in the image of one girl plucking the eyebrows of another (the three above images). In these references to the Catholic Church, DuBois opens a conversation about the search for solace, understanding and meaning in the darkness of the his coming-of-age narrative interpretation, suggesting the lens through which many in the community he has photographed would most likely look to understand and overcome difficult times.

The narrative of the comics reinforces the mood of the photographs. They present what appears to be a couple. They portray the male as alienated and the comics end by implying his suicide. This reading is corroborated by the dedication to the memory of three local youth placed at the end.

The darkness of the comics directly affects how we understand the photographs as one narrative that forms a consistent mood. In the clearest example, above, we see a photograph of woods that, after finishing the comic narrative, we understand as possibly the place where the insinuated suicide happened.

There's only one place where the narrative possibilities narrow so much that the suggested range of reading feels more like a demand, leaving me little room to participate: the gun sequence. This feels true to the experience of the world presented, but also too direct. The theme of violence becomes explicit and the ways to read the sequence - and perhaps the theme - become singular in dimension.

To give a place where I see a theme treated more subtly working better, we can just look back to the photograph mentioned earlier, where the economic downturn in Ireland limiting the immediate future of teens from Russell Heights is suggested through a single “For Sale” sign on a house with a broken window. We feel the greater presence without the need for it announcing itself more loudly.

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The last photograph in the book is covered over by the transcription of a conversation between one of the repeating subjects in the book – Eirn – with Doug and a couple of others in which Eirn explains why the photograph that is covered by the transcript can't be used in the book.

She knows she will, in part, be defined by the photograph and in the image she sees herself - and believes that her friends and family will see her - as a "knacker," presented in a tracksuit with a dirty towel behind her.

What does this ending do? First, it completes the sewing together of text and image as the book has worked to do since the cover and the presentation of the title between the bonfire images . Second, it corroborates the feeling of collaboration between the subjects and DuBois we have experienced in the book in which we see a relaxed intimacy between photographer and subject in the closer portraits, in the access granted to spaces where most adults are probably not welcomed such as drinking holes, and in DuBois' eye-level, or, less frequently, below eye-level framing of those he photographs.

Lastly, and most importantly, it presents a young woman taking control of her life through taking control of her image. In this way Eirn completes the coming-of-age narrative that we have seen threatened in various ways during the book by economic lack of opportunity, violence and suicide: the girl who gave the project its title through a comment she made early in the process of making the photographs also ends the project by passing through the last rite of passage of her adolescence - assuming control of and responsibility for herself as an adult.

6.05.2015

Review: Roger Ballen at Alonso Garcés Galería

BASICS
Roger Ballen
Alonso Garcés Galería
Bogotá, Distrito Especial, Colombia
May 2 2015 – June 15 2015

Roger Ballen has 25 photographs from his projects "Outland," "Boarding House," "Shadow Chamber" and "Asylum of the Birds" at Alonso Garcés as part of Fotográfica Bogotá, a biannual photography event being held now.

SNAPSHOT OF THE WORK

The work spans all of his projects created since 1997, when he stopped creating more traditional documentary projects and began to work more with studio portraiture and psychologically charged, manufactured imagery.

CURATION AND INSTALLATION

The show successfully pulls together images from four projects. If anything, it shows how the various bodies of work that make up Ballen's non-documentary practice complement each other, and could be seen potentially as a single project.

Installation is noteworthy in that it's professional and clean, not always the case unfortunately in exhibitions in Colombia.

COMMENTS ON THE EXHIBIT

The show doesn't try to present a theme or argument, providing instead photographs culled from the last few decades as an introduction to Ballen's work. I think that opens the opportunity for a review that also focuses on Ballen's photography more broadly.

First, for those that have never had the opportunity to see Ballen's prints, he is a great printer. They are outstanding as objects, the tones slightly flat. He compresses them towards the darker end of the spectrum, which allows the occasional brighter tones to sing when he strays just outside the reduced spectrum. Darkness, however, never comes at the expense of detail.

Formally, Ballen is a talented draughtsman. He draws with line as well as any photographer, creating echoes of his subjects with wires and cables in many of his most successful images. This sense of line is brought into the actual settings of his images where he and his subjects physically draw on the spaces themselves which Ballen then photographs. He clearly delineates and separates objects and has an incredible organizational sense for composition, making images that seem almost easy, hiding the sophisticated subtleties of balance and counterpoint he employs.

Moving on from here, however, I need to make a disclaimer. Ballen is one of my least favorite contemporary photographers. My reasons echo issues others have already expressed about his work, which I'll mention shortly, and pile on a few more. Now is as good a time as any to try to explain why.

In terms of formal vocabulary, Ballen borrows fairly heavily from Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a little bit as well from Pablo Picasso's proto-Cubist African period and its antecedents, African masks and the art of prehistoric cultures. With Meatyard, there's a direct relationship between the black and white medium format images, composed with vertical and horizontal lines of grotesque figures often wearing masks. We see Basquiat's scribbles and linearity, and occasionally his density of line. Picasso's combination of pushed and pulled human form combined with his use of African masks and "primitive" sourcing has fingerprints all over Ballen's work.

Ballen is aware of these references; he grew up around photography and art. His mother began working as an editor at Magnum when Ballen was 13. He is not, as Sean O'Hagan suggests, an outsider artist, despite being self-taught.

While there is transcendence of these sources at times, overall Ballen largely recycles borrowed elements. It usually doesn't feel like he's quoting and advancing a visual dialogue, the photographs actually look old, as if they could have been made in the 50s or 60s. He's a high Modernist in a world that explored his visual language half a century ago, and I don't see him pushing that conversation forwards.

Before addressing the much-debated topic of the subjects he works with, let's look at the specifics of Ballen's iconography. Rats. Snakes. Crosses. Cockroaches. 666 scrawled on a wall. Dead cats, dead rabbits, dead birds. Fake blood. The middle finger. More rats. Skeletons. A guy pointing a gun to his head. A sample of images from the Outland video directed by Ben Jay Crossman, produced by Ballen, are above, and contain a range of iconography similar to what can also be found in Ballen's still photography. The video clearly aims to ape Ballen's photo aesthetic.

Pulling out this list of elements in Ballen's photographs and video pieces, I hope you can see why I find Ballen campy, the producer of B-movie stills with a set of props borrowed from a Boy Scout's haunted house. If I asked a 16-year-old metalhead in the back row of math class what he'd want to carve into his desk the most, all that cool stuff I just listed is his answer. I find Ballen's visual language often so expected in terms of trying to generate the grotesque or shock, that it has the opposite effect: humor. I find many of his photographs almost funny in their deadpan serious employment of stock shlock horror movie props.

Now let's get into the controversy around the subjects Ballen works with. He has been questioned about and/or implicitly accused of exploitation of his mentally and physically challenged subjects here, here, and here for starters.

Let me start by defending Ballen. Off the top of my head, photographs potentially offensive per se in today's heightened era of attention to the social and power dynamics around the making of images include those of young kids, the poor, the mentally disabled, the physically disabled, naked women by men, people from races other than our own, especially Blacks by whites, especially Black men by white men, subcultures by those that are not part of them, the homeless, people on the subway, people from the "developing world" taken by people from the "developed world," people doing things that are stereotypical of their demographic like Asians photographing or overweight people drinking a huge soda with a hot dog in their other hand, etc.

Cat Catcher, 1998 © Roger Ballen

To ascribe certain relationships between photographer and subject as ethically restricted without attention to the individual case, however, carries risks that one could argue match or go beyond the risks associated by photographing across power and social dynamic lines. Those risks include patronizing the subject of a photograph by removing their agency and power to make decisions for themselves (who are in most cases adults), the assumption of knowledge about the personal connection to and the real world treatment of subjects by photographers, the visual debt we accumulate by prohibiting types of images, the cultural risk of self-censorship and the stigmatization of the field of photographing communities other than our own, one of the richest veins in photographic history, from Robert Frank's The Americans to Doug DuBois' My Last Day at Seventeen and Wayne Lawrence's Taking Back Detroit.

We know photographs lie; judging the subject-photographer relationship based on how a photograph appears to us is a path of folly (unless there is outright murder, abuse or rape happening in the images that documents a real action). "My critics have no idea about the reality of what I do or of the relationship I have with my subjects. The fact is I have a deep relationship with these people. I would go as far as to say, without wanting to exaggerate, that they love me," Ballen says. Two subjects say just that in the "Outland" video.

So be it, honestly it's not our job to judge his relationship to his subjects. And yet I find Ballen's use of his subjects problematic nonetheless. After Ballen gave a video lecture at Fotográfica Bogotá, I went out for drinks with attendees of the event and got into a healthy argument about why. Let me lay out my reasoning here.

Head Below Wires © Roger Ballen, 1999

When Ballen was questioned about why he worked within this particular community by an audience member in Bogotá, Ballen gave his stock answer, one you can find in almost all interviews with him: his photography is only about him. It's not about his subjects, it's an exploration of his own psychology. "At the end of the day, everything is just Roger Ballen," he said to the questioner in Bogotá. On the homepage of his site, he similarly states, "My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey."

Yet to reveal his own subconscious, he uses props and a set that emphasize the distress of his subjects. It's actually the sets or stages that Ballen - with help from his subjects - creates and the interaction between subject, stage and props that I find problematic about his work, not so much the use of the subjects themselves. That is to say, it is not his relationship with and use of his subjects, but their representation in two-dimensions that is the issue.

Go back to that list of his iconography above. Think about the meaning of placing a person in a precarious mental state and extremely poor, often in an exaggerated pose that underlines their formal disparities from the norm, amid those elements.

We end up with "crazy people" amplified by crazy scribblings, trash, dirty mattresses and blood, connections emphasized by the placement of his subjects among animals living and dead and sets filled with the "primitive." He places neon fingers that point to their insanity, to their "base instincts" and to their living conditions, ones that we associate with animals more than humans. These images feed off the animality of their subjects. He produces something of a lampoon of the way he portrays his real mentally and physically challenged subjects by casting Ninja and Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord for the parts of "Insane #1" and "Insane #2" in his much vaunted video for the criminally contagious "I Fink You Freeky."

Video still from "I Fink You Freeky"

As a test, what do you remember about the individuality of the subjects in Ballen's photographs? Can you differentiate their personalities? Who are they beyond their illness, their disability? We don't know. They are insanity, they are disability. They are one-dimensional stock characters. Humanity has been squeezed from the equation, reducing the already marginalized subjects to nothing more than form, simple signifiers, objects on a stage for Ballen to show how crrrrrrrrazy!!!! he feels.

As an aside, my interlocutor in Bogotá argued that humans as form stretches through much photography, Cartier-Bresson and Salgado were his two examples. My reply is that the language of a portrait, Ballen's genre, asserts a different set of conversational parameters than street photography or environmental portraiture. Street photography, as practiced by many, has devolved into a boring game of finding formal connections while you walk around. Fine. Portraiture, however, especially studio portraiture, which Ballen's work basically is, as currently practiced and as based in hundreds of years of history, still generally tries to invoke something more about the subject beyond simply "form." Different games, different rules.

All of this is the inverse of Diane Arbus looking to find a human connection with people on the margins of society that could reflect the alienation she also felt in respect to the dominant culture. This is the dehumanization of others to reflect your own psychological dark corners.

The dehumanization of the mentally ill and their equation with the sub-human (animals) are dangerous and dangerously common tropes. While judging the real world subject-photographer relationship is a path of folly, it is part of our jobs as photographers and those dedicated to photography in other ways to discuss the subjects as they appear in the photographs themselves and the relationship of the photographs to historical and theoretical conversations. We are here to address the representational modes a photographer chooses to employ for his or her subject-photographer relationship, to criticize the portrayal of subjects and their presentation in a public forum. This is where our job as critics begins.

Roger Ballen sharing Roger Ballen sharing an article on Roger Ballen in the Flak Photo
Network. Here Ballen promotes an article on how he feared for his life photographing
"criminals and drug addicts" which seems more than a little revealing about why he
makes these images of subjects that he claims love him when questioned in more
critical contexts.

WRAP-UP

I've conveniently glided around the rich and loaded history of conversations on "the gaze," "voyeurism" and "the other" and related lines of discourse that we have developed around photographing people that Ballen's images should be considered through, in part because those ideas are fairly well-known, and also because at some point you have to avoid the rabbit hole of potential topics opened up by a critique. I would like just to point to their importance in developing a full critique of Ballen.

One perhaps lesser-known idea to mention in relation to Ballen's work is Martin Buber's discernment of difference between the "encounter" one feels in front of another human being (I-thou) and the "experience" one feels in front of an object (I-it). In Ballen's work there is, for me, a very disquieting sensation, a third type of engagement, something like an encounter that is becoming experience, a sense of humanity in transition to object/animal. I recognize the human form, but, empty of dimension, rendered as simply form and surrounded by the particular settings they are photographed within, they start to immediately slide to experience, a perception of the non-human.

To conclude, despite his Facebook post above, I don't doubt that Ballen is connected to and quite deeply involved with his subjects and I am convinced he has made a committed attempt to connect with them. I don't find his work exploitative, actually. If he wants to make these images, so be it. I'm not here to decide what his personal relation to his subjects is and there's nothing morally wrong going on in the pictures or in the making of them.

While we should make the photographs we need to make, what we choose to share and how we share them is a separate question. By taking the step of publishing his work, obviously, Ballen places his images within a system of existent dialogues and understandings of imagery, within an ethics of representation.

Within those conversations, I find Ballen's work deeply flawed. While visually Ballen's work is of a high level, it has its albatross: he plainly emphasizes his search for ways to show his internal mental state at the expense of the representation of his subjects, ignoring issues created by the visual debasing of humans who are vulnerable, stigmatized and in deep need on many levels. He does so through derivative forms and puerile iconography, with sets and props that purposefully amplify the sense of inhumanity of his very human subjects, thereby restating harmful tropes about the socially marginalized, mentally ill, disabled and poor.

The issues are compounded by Ballen's refusal to respond himself more directly to the conversations around his work, as opposed to Sally Mann, for example. This, for me, is a blatant shirking of part of the responsibility of being an artist. A photographer can't simply deny the history of images or the presence of the historical and theoretical conversational matrix of photography into which they place their work. There are long standing arguments about representation and these conversations are how we understand and communicate. Those understandings and communications create communities that speak a common language, and any community develops a sense of ethics in short time. A photographer has to understand how those ethics operate when they create within their borders.

Yet repeatedly questioned on this, Ballen gives us back nothing, with a (paraphrased), "Welp, I've done this for 50 years, and it's all really about me, folks." A disappointing evasion of the opportunity to reflect on his own work from someone whose work calls out for dialogue.

5.01.2014

Photobook Review: "Suburban Dreams" by Beth Yarnelle Edwards

Beth Yarnelle Edwards
Suburban Dreams
Essays by Robert Evren and Christoph Tannert
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2011
Hardbound, 56 color images, 11 3/4" x 9 1/2"

Also reviewed on: photo-eye
Additional links: Huffington Post, Lenscratch

Beth Yarnelle Edwards' Suburban Dreams stitches together images from California and five European countries into a single imagined space, presenting colorful suburban portraits in interiors with all parts in their place. The images hover between candid and staged – perhaps reflecting how the world they depict hovers between the two as well. Her arrangements of rich, saturated color and her palette of light sources unite the various spaces into one world seamlessly.

Edwards works on creating individual portraits as much as a connective, group portrait, sometimes relying heavily on interior space and objects to portray a sense of the person. The portraits traffic to some degree in contemporary suburban archetypes – the rebellious punk, the Lolita sucking on her candy, the cheerleader, the guy who loves his lawn - but Edwards moves beyond a simple critique of archetypes of privilege, and the images aren't judgmental. She sets out instead to create earnest portraits of affluent people in their home environments, making her work more related to Rania Matar in some ways perhaps than to the social commentary-based work on the suburbs and/or wealth of Bill Owens, Tina Barney, or Larry Fink's Social Graces.

The best portraits, such as the image below of an elderly woman on a bed looking at a second, empty bed in the light of a lamp, not only work with interior space and objects to portray their subject, but equally employ gesture, expression, a sophisticated sense of lighting and a tangible sense of Edwards' connection to the person at the moment of making the image that brings the portrait to a (perceived) heightened psychological revelation. This particular image could easily slide into Doug DuBois' ...All the Days and Nights in that regard.

The best portraits also invoke a sense of narrative that's not completely explained - the woman in this particular portrait seems to look at the bed of someone she's lost - and open potential stories about the person and their life that engage a broader sense of who they are instead of defining them for us more narrowly. Photography frequently works at its most powerful when it's allowed to imply instead of being asked to declare and the better photographs in the book function this way.

Over the course of the book, the stronger work moves beyond this premise of straight portraits and opens the question of the suburban world as an unsettled psychological space. What seems initially like a book of solid, but conceptually modest portraits begins to play with the word "dream" – the suburban ideal blends and overlaps with the surreal space imagined while sleeping or daydreaming.

The images that open this second sense of "dream" suburban space – such as a woman in a blue-green dress seen from behind staring at a backyard bbq in a disquieting way or the woman in front of a bureau with a key hiding in her hand [see the three images below] – multiply the possible understandings of Edwards' work. This development of a multi-layered look at the suburbs and dreams, however, remains latent and appears to be more of a presence consequential of the work process rather than being cultivated actively based on Edwards' comments on Suburban Dreams in interviews. Regardless, these photographs open intriguing possibilities for the body of work and it is these images that begin to push the stakes of the project.

2.18.2013

Interview: Doug DuBois, Part II

This is a different type of interview, a summary of several conversations extended over six weeks with current Guggenheim Fellow Doug DuBois while he worked at the MacDowell Colony to turn his photographic series titled My Last Day at Seventeen into a book.

This is the second of two posts that will follow DuBois through his process of editing and sequencing images for the book, providing a window into his ideas and working methods. Images and additional information provided by DuBois will augment the posts. The first post in the series can be found here.

My Last Day at Seventeen is comprised of portraits, staged tableaus and spontaneous photographs made over a period of four summers in a small housing estate in the town of Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. The images as a whole speak about coming of age in Ireland during the current economic downturn. For some background on his project, take a few minutes to watch a clip about My Last Day at Seventeen on the program Imeall (Gaelic for "The Edge") on Ireland's TG4 and also read through "Snapshots from the rough edges" by Aidan Dunne in the Irish Times. Some of the images from the project can also be found here.

DuBois teaches at Syracuse University and at the International Limited Residency Program at the Hartford Art School. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including shows at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art and Higher Pictures in New York and galleries in Europe and Japan. His images belong to the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The San Francisco Museum of Art as well as many others. In addition to the Guggenheim, he now has received two MacDowell Colony residencies, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, a Yaddo Fellowship, and a Light Work Grant in Photography among other awards and grants. A monograph of his photographs titled ...All the Days and Nights was published by Aperture in 2009.

He arrived at MacDowell on December 21st. The three conversations drawn on for this post took place on December 30th and January 2nd and 17th. Bracketed text inside of quotes represent an approximation of DuBois' words...our Skype connections have not always been ideal and the audio recordings of the conversations reflect that.

PROGRESS
Both DuBois and I had a lot of moving parts in our lives right after our initial two conversations and two full weeks passed before we were able to talk again.

When we eventually connect, he says he had a rough week after the holidays. He had felt solid about the beginning of the book draft – the five-image bonfire sequence discussed in the first part of this interview – but that nothing else was working. He says his head swirled with all of the choices he had to make, and he felt lost with the direction of the edit and sequencing.

He began to have conversations with the other artists in residence at MacDowell about where things stood with the work. The filmmaker Natalia Almada came to his studio to take a look at the images. She spoke directly while going through the sequence, saying "This doesn't work....This does...I don't know what you're doing here." He also spoke with the essayist and poet Honor Moore. She told DuBois, "You've got to go back to the basics, retreat, lay it all out in the simplest way and start again."

These two conversations helped jump-start the editing process for DuBois. He went back to the beginning, putting away all the images that he had up on his editing wall and replacing them with only the key images of the project, around 100 in total.

DuBois mentioned the relationship between the creative processes of writers and photographers a number of times during our conversations, especially in terms of what he and other photographers can learn from observing writers. A writing aphorism became a guiding principle for his renewed editing process: "start simply with chronology." He did so within the 100 images he placed on the wall, tacking them up based on characters, and within characters he kept chronology.

At the same time that he organized this simplified, chronological re-edit, a New Yorker article by John McPhee entitled "Structure" serendipitously arrived on his iPad. In the article, McPhee discuses how he organizes his complicated non-fiction pieces, presenting a number of diagrams in the article that show how the parts of a piece interconnect. In response, DuBois started to diagram My Last Day at Seventeen and the book finally started to come together (an image of his diagram and more discussion on this below).

Building from another writing adage borrowed from McPhee who said he can't begin writing until he knows the end of a piece, DuBois sequenced photographs from the start and end of the book, working towards the middle. He knew what the last picture was going to be and had been playing with the bonfire sequence as an opening since arriving at MacDowell. He had a bit of a crisis getting the middles to meet, but eventually they did, and that's where he's at now. The project has been edited down to 78 images and a finished draft. DuBois feels on track and excited.

FEEDBACK
The book draft came together just three days before our conversation and DuBois says it remains very tenuous and could still fall apart. He decided it was time to give the editing a rest and began to make PDFs of the book to send out for feedback, as well as to print out a second copy of the maquette to see what he has as a physical object.

He nervously delivered the PDFs to a small circle of trusted photography friends. The first three to reply – who we'll call AS, JN and OW for this post - all talked about trimming the book down, saying DuBois still has room to make cuts from specific points in the edit. They each suggested a cut of five to ten images, but only one image was slated to be cut by each of them. DuBois tells me, "You can't make a book by consensus, that's ridiculous, BUT it gives you pause and it gives you something to focus on."

The image that they all suggested for cutting is "the real estate" image (above), a photograph DuBois has believed to be important because it mimics and reinforces themes found in a second image he calls "the soccer kid." The soccer kid functions as a junction box for the various themes of the book. In the image, the kid is wearing a jersey with the logo of the nearly-failed international insurance company AIG (below). The photograph combines ideas of sports, corporation, economics, and the housing market that the subjects of the book will never afford. DuBois calls these types of images "transition" images and says that they are exciting and crucial to find in the editing process.

DuBois was told that while the soccer kid works, the real estate image is too obvious in how it approaches these themes. This comment points to an important element in the editing/feedback process. How subtle should DuBois make the presentation? What's readable and what's confusing? These questions are difficult – probably impossible – to answer internally and DuBois looks for reactions to the PDF to help him understand where the current edit stands in relation to these questions.

DuBois has a self-proclaimed sentimental streak, and the respondents have gone after images that are overtly sentimental. DuBois does not want the images to read that way, but does want certain sentiments of childhood to come through, and wants to avoid – on the other side of the spectrum – a purely tough and cynical presentation. Pulling this off will be difficult, and again requires feedback to understand how the images are reading.

The three respondents also gave DuBois feedback on his layout and the placement of the images on the page. AS is nervous about how DuBois has placed images across the book's gutter, telling DuBois that the gutter is always difficult and, while it might make AS appear conservative, he always avoids the gutter. JN and OW wrote that a number of images deserve their own page instead of being part of a double-page spread with images.

This feedback pushed DuBois towards a reconsideration of his initial layout ideas and towards an exploration of a more conservative layout approach: a single image on a page, typically biased slightly to the right. He began to think through the classic layout ideas used by both AS and JN. The emerging layout strategy for DuBois is a series of single image pages and occasionally two images, one on each page. DuBois continues to leave open the idea of engaging the gutter to offer another rhythmic possibility to the sequence, but he acknowledges that what AS told him is true: it's a complicated proposition to pull off well. "I keep looking at different books," he says "[seeing] how people manage it. Bad design is often at the fold. A fold just fucks it up. It's tricky."

While he has arrived at a finished draft, he also wants to go through a round of exploration to see what comes out of making some radical shifts before making final layout decisions.

DEVELOPING AN OVERALL THEMATIC AND SEQUENCE STRUCTURE FOR THE BOOK
MacDowell afforded DuBois time to look at images in a prolonged way, open up their meanings and possible relationships to each other. He struggled initially, however, with articulating the themes and subthemes of the project.

He talked about how he uncovered and focused on certain themes while shooting and editing before his arrival at MacDowell. "Initially you're just sort of discovering, you're stumbling about, looking at this, looking at that [with the camera]. [You make some attempts] that just go nowhere and you say, 'OK, well, that doesn't make sense.' But you have to have a sense of where you're going. I initially thought My Last Day at Seventeen was going to be about the neighborhood as a whole. It's relatively small, very insular, it's manageable, it's interesting. But by the second summer, I realized it would be more interesting if I created an adult-less world. Without adults, I could remain in this somewhat mythic space of youth. I'm looking at it through [the knowledge] of a middle-aged man, knowing it's going to fade, that it's going to end, that it's quite fragile, and also quite beautiful. I'm celebrating this time in a more complicated framework that is simultaneously about loss. It's about the tension between youth and coming of age."

DuBois moves on to talk about the major threads that he has teased out of the images to provide a coherent thematic foundation for the book. Building from the two conversations about simplifying and getting back to the basics that he had with Almada and Moore, he established five major thematic sequences in the book that are simply titled and – for now, he says - somewhat vaguely articulated. It's a foundation, however, that has allowed him to build. He has labeled the sequences "intro," "boys," "home/girls," "the rocks" – which has to do with drinking - and "end." A number of the images cross between the sequence types. There are boys present in some of the "home/girls" images, for example, and the "boys" images have girls in the images. It's overall a simple scheme, but the step of laying things out this way has been critical for breaking his stalemate. Following McPhee's example, DuBois has diagrammed the interactions between these five major sequences (above), drawing arrows to show how they talk to each other via subthemes. "Fashion" for example, crosses from boys to girls and "home" and "babies" also go from boys to girls.

The end at this point is full of religious connotations and gets subtly Catholic, which nobody picks up on their own unless he points it out, he says. There's a stigmata reference and other religious cues. "It might be too much," he adds "That's the chunk that AS was, like, 'OUT!'"

I ask him if the book aims to reflect more broadly on Irish society or on the neighborhood the kids are from. He replies that the kids are just understanding that the end of the Irish economic boom has left them with limited job and advancement possibilities, but while that's part of the background to the work, it's, "not the primary frame for the work...I don't think that's what the images are about, nor do I think they can sustain that critical framework for the entire book."

In a separate part of the conversation, DuBois adds more about this:

I'm not speaking for anyone other than myself. It's very much my voice. I never hold out for any sense of objectivity. I'm not an editorial photographer in this context, and I really don't even use a documentary frame, either. It has somewhat of a documentary look, and I certainly use devices that are associated with documentary photography... but I break what would be considered the rules [of documentary photography] all the time. And I have no problem with that...There's going to be no title, no labels, no introductory text that gives you historical and economic background about Ireland. I'm not going to present a specific discursive frame saying that these images should stand in for Ireland, or even Irish youth, or even this neighborhood. The title is My Last Day at Seventeen. Not 'Kids from Cobh' or 'Russell Heights,' which is the name of the housing estate.

There is, perhaps, something autographical about My Last Day at Seventeen in relation to being middle-aged, he continues. Youth is farther away now for himself than old age. "Looking back is a longer view than looking forward. That's an interesting perspective. And maybe I needed to be this age to have it. I don't know." At twenty years old, he says, this project would have been different - maybe even impossible. He would have been too close in age to the subjects.

NAVIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FORM AND CONTENT IN GENERAL SEQUENCING
DuBois recounted during our third conversation that while visiting a poet in her studio at MacDowell he saw her printed poems laid out in various configurations on her studio floor. He asked what she's looking at when she does this and she replied that she looks for word patterns, how imagery might be here in one poem, but might be better two poems later. He found it very akin to what he's doing with his images.

"This is going to make me sound like a formalist," he says, "but a part of the process when the book begins to happen is that the story has already been written in a sense, if we keep the literary analogy, and now it's about structure. And structure is very much about pattern and of course pattern generates meaning. So what I discover are patterns; what the visual motifs are, and even those that don't seem to mean anything can still have a wonderful sense of play and rhythm. Then there's some that you can read into or not. [In the book] there are all these crows. I'm watching the crows and I don't want too many crows. It's funny, I'll pull a picture, and say, 'No, no, no I can't have three crows in a row. Three is too much.' It can be slightly absurd like that."

He adds, "Houses are a rhythm I really followed throughout the book, as well as gestures...the visual motifs will sound abstract if I list them all out. In and of themselves, they don't mean really anything: crows don't mean anything, houses don't mean anything, the gestures in and of themselves don't mean anything, but as they work through images and all that they imply, they create structure and meaning that gives the viewer, I would hope, something for their imagination to cling to, even if its not really conscious. It's a mix of intuitive and a very careful, formal looking."

CURRENT WORKING PROCESS
At MacDowell he uses two walls: one with a big mass of images, and a second wall that he places raw sequences on. When he finds a sequence that he thinks is going to stick, those images leave the mass wall and they live on the sequence wall. The raw sequences allow him to see patterns. He prints out a miniature version of the sequence and places it on his long studio table (above). This allows him to judge the rhythm of the sequence and to establish which images will be full-bleed, which verticals, and which are going to be double-pages. If he folds and tapes the miniature sequence into an accordion book he can turn pages to understand the rhythm to see how the design elements come through.

The design elements at this point, however, are very simple. If he takes on the whole design thing seriously right now, he says, it will drive him crazy. "That's a whole other thing that will come later. But for now, big image, little image, whether it slides to the right or the left...that's an important rhythm that I'm definitely trying to figure out right now. It's a lot about patterns, which is kind of why I like it. I like this process. I feel the book is written and [I just have to get it] out there in the right way. In that sense, a certain kind of pressure is off. I'm not anxious about, 'Oh I need a picture of this.' When I'm shooting, man, it's a whole other craziness. 'Today sucked, I didn't get any photograph that worked' or 'I fucked up when we were trying to photograph this, what the hell happened?' That's like a writing anxiety. 'That paragraph's no good, it doesn't make any sense, I have to start again, I've got to toss that whole chapter.'"

REFINEMENT OF THOUGHTS ON USING MULTI-IMAGE SEQUENCES
In part one of this interview, we explored in some detail DuBois' interest in including filmic sequences as part of his editing framework. "I'm really interested in trying to do something explicitly filmic," he said in December, "Sequences are at the top of my head right now, and how to work sequences in a book."

The visit from the filmmaker Almada to his studio disabused him of the notion that he wanted to work with longer sequences of up to five images, such as in the bonfire sequence that he had considered opening the book with. "What can you say in five images that you can't say in one or two?" she asked him. DuBois says, "It's a very classic critique...The book was going to open with a five image sequence. She said no, distill it into two, and have it look almost like a highly compressed flipbook, just one [image] into the other, as you turn the page. I think it's a strong beginning...but everything is tentative and contingent on many, many things that I don't know about yet."

THE BOOK VERSUS THE EXHIBITION
An exhibition of My Last Day at Seventeen presented in the neighborhood and town where he had been photographing in Ireland came down at the end of last year. While there's a correlation in images between the exhibition and the book, DuBois comments that they are different beasts. "On a very basic level, the book has a kind of permanence that the exhibition does not. So that makes the book in some ways more definitive. There's a certain weight to the placing and sequencing of images, where in an exhibition, less so. You know, there's all sorts of contingencies, the size of the space, the context of the space, the context of the exhibition, is it a gallery, is it a museum, is it a university, etc., etc., where it's located."

ON MAKING – AND NOT MAKING – IMAGES
As a sidebar to our conversation, DuBois talked about image-making decisions he made while in the field in Ireland. He told his assistant, Ivan, which pictures they were NOT going to make before they'd go out, forming a set of self-imposed rules. DuBois recounts, "When we shot interiors, I said [to Ivan], 'No altars. I don't want pictures on a mantle. I'm not going to do that picture. Don't even point that picture out to me...or if you see me doing that picture, say 'That's an altar!' And the other one was no Madonnas. No women cradling a baby. And there are no pictures of women with a baby. There are men - there's Kevin - holding a baby, but none right now of women holding a baby. There is one Madonna-like image, though, and so I broke my rule, but it's one woman in another woman's lap, where she's plucking her eyebrow and it does have a Madonna-like thing."

In the last five years of his work for ...All the Days and Nights, the images made after 2000, DuBois didn't try to make any photographs in the moment. Similarly, the images that motivated most of the work in My Last Day at Seventeen are those explicitly negotiated with the subject, either through an improvised directing or a prearranged plan: "I want a picture of you doing this." He would barter a little bit with his subjects, taking an image for them, as well as one for himself.

In My Last Day at Seventeen he has also combined some frames digitally and used multiple cameras for the project, in addition to exploring the ideas of multiple-image sequences as we've discussed. All of these push ideas found, albeit more latent, in ...All the Days and Nights.