fototazo: Ireland

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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.

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.

1.26.2013

Interview: Doug DuBois, Part I

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

This is the first 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 three posts.

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 and the first two conversations summarized here in this post took place on December 30th and January 2nd. 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.

BACKGROUND
DuBois was also at MacDowell Colony in 2003. During that initial residency, he worked for the first time on editing a book of photographs, beginning work on what eventually would become ...All the Days and Nights.

Before he began his first residency at MacDowell, he sought out the advice of Jim Goldberg and others about their editing process and spent a month in his studio at MacDowell culling single frames from hundreds of contact sheets and arranging them in what he thought was a coherent sequence. When DuBois left, however, he says the book dummy he produced was "an absolute piece of shit. It was terrible." The reason? He didn’t realize how critical it was to test edits and sequences by showing the maquette to others. At MacDowell he got caught up alone in his thoughts; when he began to share it, he realized it made little sense. He had to start over. He says, though, it wasn't time wasted: "You have to let yourself make a really bad book, with some reeeeeally bad edits and sequences. It’s very important." He doesn’t expect to have the book finished upon leaving this time, just to have something. Changes will continue as he starts to show the first copy of the maquette after his residency.

The images from My Last Day at Seventeen were made over four consecutive summers. As a photographer he cycles between periods of shooting and editing, and as a self-professed poor multi-tasker, he typically works on one project at a time. He carried a Mamiya 7, Mamiya RZ, a 4x5 view camera, a DSLR, and lights, using the four cameras interchangeably based on the situation. The digital camera served largely to test lighting and take snapshots.

I asked how he decided it's time to put down the cameras and craft the book. How is he sure he has the images he needs at this point and that the book will come together?

He responds:

One of the signs, not the only sign, but one of the signs of when a project is nearing completion is that you begin to repeat images. It’s like, 'Oh yeah, I've already made that picture'...I also felt I was wearing out my welcome. The first time in the neighborhood I was a somewhat exotic American with a camera - either that or a fuckin' perv which I was called repeatedly during my first few weeks there - and I could kind of milk that, people were nice to me because I was a visitor and interested in their lives. When I returned each summer, I entered the fabric and the rhythms of the neighborhood, which was good, but I also became a pain in the ass. 'Oh fuck, here comes that American, he’s going to want to take pictures.' You know? And I could see that people sometimes tried to avoid me. Also it was hard to ask the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, who had originally invited me for a month-long residency in 2009, to put me up in their artists' apartment for 5 or 6 weeks each summer. After four years of this, I think I hold the record for their longest residency. I was incredibly fortunate that the director, Peg Amison, the staff and members of the Irish Arts Council remained generous, helpful, and enthusiastic about the project for so long.

With shooting finished, then, DuBois arrives at MacDowell to make the images into a book.

REFERENCES
I ask DuBois about the books and other reference material he's brought to MacDowell and he quickly mentions Ron Jude's Lick Creek Line, citing how Jude smartly plays with time and sequence in the book, Viviane Sassen's Parasomnia for its activation of the page itself by running images beyond one page onto the next, as well as Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, Jackie Nickerson, Susan Lipper, and John Gossage because they make great books.

A number of the books he has brought with him are there because he likes how the photographers have fit the rectangles of the photographs inside the rectangle of the page. And when a book has a shape and size that feels right, he measures. Why reinvent the wheel?

He subsequently sent an email with his complete list of reference materials:

Photo Books:
Ron Jude: Lick Creek Line, Emmet
Jackie Nickerson: Faith
Viviane Sassen: Parasomnia
Mark Power: The Sound of Two Songs
John Gossage: The Pond
Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi
Susan Lipper: Grapevine
Mark Steinmetz: South Central
Christian Patterson: Redheaded Peckerwood
Tobias Zielony: Trona: Armpit of America
Gregory Halpern: A
Thomas Struth: Stanger and Friends
Ken Schles: Oculus
Chris Killip: Seacoal
Christophe Agou: In the Face of Silence
J. Carrier: Elementary Calculus
Leonie Hampton: In the Shadow of Things

Other Books:
Claire Keegan: Antartica, Walk in the Blue Fields, Foster
The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story
Tod Papageorge: Core Curriculum
Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
Ariella Azoulay: The Civil Contract of Photography
MacDowell reading – poems of Honor Moore

Music:
My hard drive w/ 90 gigs -- Lots of jazz, Bach, Brazilian, Latin, whatever…

Films:
Watching what I can from the MacDowell Library
Natalia Almada: El Velador, El General
Dee Rees: Pariah
Lots of Jem Cohen

FIRST DAYS AND GENERAL WORKING PROCESS
Using what he learned during his first residency, DuBois comes to MacDowell with all of his contact sheets scanned at a resolution that allows him to pull any frame he wants and drop it into a page-layout program – he uses InDesign to create scaled down page spreads to fit on 8 1/2" x 11" paper.

Even though he hasn’t had an extended opportunity to engage with the images, he has been loosely, but consistently, editing the scanned negatives in Lightroom over the four years he has been shooting the project. He has already gone back and looked for any missed possibilities and the last pass almost doubled the number of images under consideration. Four years has changed how he views the original images significantly.

DuBois has the clearance to use the images he's working with. He built up a good level of trust with his subjects and informally involved them in decisions on which images to include in a recent exhibition at the Sirius Arts Centre, just a short walk from the neighborhood where most of the work was shot. He also brought back images every summer, giving away 100s of prints and gauging reactions. Because he was working with minors and outside of the United States, he secured the necessary releases and talked to the parents and adults involved with their lives.

His first step at MacDowell is to take three days to print out a modest-sized image of absolutely every photograph he’s thinking about using - 100s of images - on an HP color laser printer he’s brought, which he says is cheaper and faster than using an inkjet.

When the prints are done, he makes about 25 piles of the images based on very obvious, denotative criteria – such as Roisin, Kevin, Eirn, and other various people – just so he can find the images. Then DuBois starts to play with the images, and they go in and out of their original piles as he begins to edit.

With the images laid out on table, he can work quickly, shifting images around. The playing is a kind of "indulgence." He says, "Maybe it's like a writer trying to write everyday: you just do it, and you try not to think too hard about it." He has an eight-foot table and plenty of wall-space to work with the images. Given that in Lightroom he can fluidly and easily group images together as "collections" and then print out the collections as contact sheets for reference - for example "fights," "houses," or "close-up portraits" - he doesn’t actually have to make certain piles in order to find and work with the images. Once he has a sequence he wants to hold on to, he logs the sequence on Lightroom, the images go back to their piles, and he starts again.

After three or four passes through the images and contact sheets, he told himself he's got to get beyond the "singular image." He began to print out all the frames of a given situation and to think sequentially. He obsessed on two groups of sequential images: one of a drinking spot as well as another of a bonfire. He focused on what he says will probably be a complete tangent: 70 medium format images shot at a distance – like a landscape - of a group of 15- and 16-year olds "bush drinking."

When he wants more permanence, or wants to contemplate an image or group of images for a while, he pins them to the wall and he has done so with each of the 70 frames in this sequence. [see image below] He thought of it originally as a landscape or panorama, but now he's fascinated with how the figures move through the landscape, form groups, and break apart, only to have more kids arrive and the cycle start again. One of the boys recently committed suicide and DuBois can't help but track his movement among the groups. He studies the patterns in their movement and tries to figure out how to represent them on a page. "I’m really interested in trying to do something explicitly filmic. Sequences are at the top of my head right now, and how to work sequences in a book." He considers a landscape orientation as a possible solution, even though he has more general interest in books that have a portrait orientation.

In his process, DuBois goes back and forth between sequenced, small-print images and page layouts. The more content driven editing happens when he plays with the images on the table, looking at what photographs say next to each other. He then moves to the computer to drop the images into page spreads and look at the sequence on a more formal level. When he has a sequence of something that interests him, he prints it out to see how it reads when turning the pages.

There is a big difference, he comments, between looking at a spread and turning the page. "I can never get the rhythm from looking at a spread. I have to spit it out as a book, tape it up, and turn the page." He makes a number of tiny accordion style mini-books, just watching the rhythm of the pages as he flips through. He audibly calls out the sounds of the images as he goes to help him understand if the sequence is working. A sequence that sounds like "da-dee-da-DUM-da" might work, whereas a more even "dum-dum-da-dum-dum" might signal a sequence that’s too even and flat.

"It’s not like any of those steps are exclusive of the other, it's not like you don't think about content when you're turning the pages and all that," he says, but each part of the process tends to focus on one aspect of editing more than others.

By deciding to work with more explicitly filmic sequences he has created an interesting design challenge. How can he establish the rhythm along the page, how close should the images be to each other? Should they be on the left or right of the spread or both? Should he activate the page itself by wrapping images around the page edge? Should he consider a sequence like a flip book?

When he had a dummy of ...All the Days and Nights that he thought was very close to a finished book, he produced an accordion book to full-scale and watched how people looked at it. He noted their body language to see where they paused and to see where they moved through rapidly; it gave a lot of information about readability, pacing, and interest. When the maquette of the new book gets to a more advanced stage, he'll do the same thing.

EARLY EDITING PROGRESS AND CONSIDERATIONS
As far as quantity of images for the book, he's not thinking about it at this early stage. He's working very intuitively right now, trying to make use of everything and letting one image lead to another. By our second conversation, he already has a number of these sequences – he's 35-40 pages into a book layout. "It's likely to be this totally Baroque, overblown piece of shit, but things will be on the page. Then I'll say, 'OK, that’s working, I'm going to hold on to that, that’s NOT working, we’re going to break that up. That would be better before this...' Until I place them on a page and begin to rough things out, I’m not quite sure what it is."

Also in our second conversation, DuBois says he's feeling kind of queasy about his progress. The book has no shape yet, he still doesn't really have an end, or even really a beginning other than the bonfire sequence [discussed below] which seems like an interesting way to set things off: there’s conflict, fire, and house - all sorts of metaphors can be drawn from that combination. He's just starting to write down themes, organize images in Lightroom, and produce contact sheets that are thematic. He's done one on "house," for example, and one on "play/sports." At this point he is also focused on finding transitional images, ones that might bridge evolving themes and connect sequences.

Chronology is another point he's trying to decide how to navigate. Over the course of four years, the physical appearance of his adolescent subjects changed dramatically. How can he handle the temporal narrative structure inherent in the sequential pages of a book in relation to time passing in the images? Does he want to preserve or play with the linear age narrative? Would shuffling that narrative be unnecessarily confusing...or would it be interesting? If at the end he decides not to preserve the chronology of the images, he will need to establish another kind of thematic as the main sequencing criteria.

Photographers can edit and work like writers, DuBois suggests. Some agonize over every word, some write rapidly, getting things out and on the page to edit and refine later. At this point, he falls firmly in the second category and what he really wants is to get the images and ideas flowing early on, to "vomit out some sequences and themes." Then, during the next stages - hopefully - he will be polishing these messy fragments into a finished book.

IDEAS ON NARRATIVE AND BOOK STRUCTURE
DuBois believes narrative is inherent to the book format, which is not to say the book must present a story with a coherent plot. He suggests the photobook should be read like a book of text, not just arbitrarily paged through, and that it engages narrative in a way that is difficult to accomplish, for example, in a gallery exhibition. The narrative goal is to sustain multiple readings, remain complex, and maintain a certain ambiguity that beckons you back to the work again and again. Hopefully, he says, the most interesting and complex themes will be implicit rather than explicit, although there will be some compelling and explicit ideas that will sustain the narrative framework of the book.

In ...All the Days and Nights, DuBois says, "I was very conscious to leave key images out and allow space for the viewer to create the story. I think photographs work best that way. I've always maintained that the narrative is really located between the images. You're really trying to push the reader to think about what happens between images - to imagine, to project...to fill that space with some kind of story. Those gaps are critical."

EARLY SEQUENCE EXAMPLE
In a PDF of a three-page spreads that DuBois sends, we can see an early attempt at a filmic sequence for My Last Day at Seventeen that he is considering as the book opening. On the first spread of the sequence, he has a single image placed on the right page, with half-an-inch from the edge of the image (purple border) to the edge of a page. The half-inch reference point is a formal device that interests him and sets a standard for the following pages. On the second spread of the sequence, on the left page DuBois has let the image move all the way to the edge of the page; on the facing page, we have two images, centered, both bleeds, one to the book gutter, one to the edge of the page, again with a half-inch space between the two. In the last page of the spread, we have the half-inch border from image to page maintained, but the image moved to the left page, leaving the right page empty. The first and last pages would be, as in the PDF spreads above, empty to serve as section breaks.

The framing of the images, the kids, and sequence all move from left to right. There's a good rhythm to the sequence, as it becomes apparent that the kids, who appear to be hugging in the first image, are actually wrestling - and moving closer and closer to the fire. DuBois is trying to figure out how to activate the gutter and also the edges, as well as how to think of the image frame itself while using the rectangle of the book. He wants to keep it dynamic.

There is a strong, singular bonfire image, below, which will appear much later in the book - at a distance from the opening sequence. He knows that he could end the 5-frame sequence with this image, the best bonfire shot, as a big, full-bleed exclamation point. If he leaves that final image separate and apart from the others, however, the sequence remains open-ended and the bonfire becomes an important thread stretched throughout the book instead of a simple prelude to the work as a whole. The idea is to have images refer to other images, both sequentially and at a distance, threading the themes and narrative of the book together.

Part 2 of this interview will be published in the coming weeks.

5.23.2012

89: Anthony Rush

Anthony Rush
untitled, from the series "Of other spaces"
June 2011

Series statement: "Of other spaces" is an attempt to come to terms with the personal buried within a much wider political and historical context, an attempt to come to terms with the issue of belonging and identity on a cultural and personal level. The particular area of interest in this series of photographs is the joint and now former military barracks of Lisanelly and St. Lucia in Omagh, decommissioned in 2007 as one of the conditions of the Northern Ireland peace process. My interest in the space is largely a result of the time my late Father spent living there. He was the eldest son of an Irish Catholic who served as a British soldier for most of his life. The contradictions inherent in his position meant, in the light of the Northern Irish conflict, that my Father's background was for the most part not spoken about. His family, and to some extent our own, seemed always at odds with ourselves and unsure of our place within a polarized society.