Guest Reading Shortlist 10.21.14: Jo Ann Walters

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

Today's guest for Reading Shortlist is Jo Ann Walters.

Jo Ann Walters has work in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris France among other institutions. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States. She is a professor at Purchase College, SUNY in New York State.

Nataly Castaño helped organize this post.

______________________________

"The Suit and the Photograph" by John Berger.

This is my favorite essay by John Berger, though there are so many great ones. I have used it in my Portrait/Self Portrait seminar for over 15 years. John Berger begins this essay about August Sander with two questions: "What did August Sander tell his sitters before he took their picture? And, how did he say it so they all believed him in the same way?" He answers these questions by way of three group portraits of men wearing suits. He slowly and brilliantly builds context by examining the origins and history of the suit.

Photographs discussed:

© August Sander, Young Farmers, 1914

© August Sander, Village Band, 1913

© August Sander, Four Protestant Missionaries, 1931

______________________________

3-Sections by Vijay Seshadri

3-Sections by Vijay Seshadri is an amazing book of poetry and prose pieces. I have provided a link to a poem included in a review of 3-Sections. Both the poem and prose piece are referenced in the review. However, I was unable to find a link to Pacific Fishes of Canada, thus I have included a link to a review for the book as a whole and which references this essay.  So unless I am mistaken, you will have to buy the book, which is worth every penny, or visit the library. This wonderful essay and says so much about the worth of youthful experience, ill-conceived or otherwise. It is fodder for voice and vision. 

          "Imaginary Number"

          This last line from the poem "Imaginary Number" is introduction enough:

          The soul, / like the square root of minus 1, / is an impossibility that has its uses.

          "Pacific Fishes of Canada"

          This prose piece is a highly personal essay about salmon fisherman set off the northwestern
          American shores during the Cold War. It is rich in information with sensuously detailed
          descriptions of marine life and the business and politics of commercial fishing. Nevertheless
          its arch remains deeply autobiographical. It tells the story of a young Indian American man's
          romantic self gone awry as he suffers from chronic and horrible seasickness throughout
          devastating storms and his subsequent unspeakable transformation that occurs at "the great
          intersection of sea and sky… in the gloom at the edge of the world.”

______________________________

The Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop

This is one of my favorite poems. When I bought 3-Sections by Vijay Seshadri, I had never heard of him. My decision to purchase it came after spending about 15 minutes reading through the book. I read the entire book and had a beautifully cerebral and often unsettling, even disturbing, visceral experience at once.  I then read a bit about him and his poetry.  I discovered that he was a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop and he specifically speaks about In the Waiting Room in an interview. Bishop’s biographer Brett Millier described the poem as "the simultaneous realization of selfhood and the awful otherness of the inevitable world."

______________________________

Artist Statement Generator
Go to site and fill in all the fields.

This artist statement generator was emailed to me accompanied by this note:

"I have a sinking feeling that the ability of this generator to approximate an enlightened artist statement that could seemingly pass for me and my work may in fact be a symptom of a problem (with me and my work). Am curious if it gets anywhere near you and your work."

Like the sender, we should all be worried!

______________________________

Italo Calvino's poetic "CV" from Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985

As an antidote to the Artist Statement Generator above I offer you Italo Calvino's "CV." In a letter written to his publisher in the fall of 1969, Calvino sends this poetic curriculum vitae.

______________________________

Nicholas Muellner's Amnesia Pavilions
Photographs and text by Nicholas Muellner
A-Jump Books, Ithaca, NY, 2011
220 pages; 81 color and 31 black & white illustrations
Edition of 500

I love this book by Nick Muellner. Nick was an undergraduate student of mine at Yale. He graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and a minor in Biochemistry and Biophysics while taking photography courses as electives. I received his book in the mail one day with the most beautiful words inscribed: "For Jo Ann, whose invisible fingerprints are already everywhere in this book." Amnesia Pavilions is an autobiographical story made up of words and photography. It chronicles Nick's return to a small city in Eastern Siberia after a seventeen year hiatus in search of a close friend he had met on his earlier journey. Without warning or explanation their correspondence ends. Nick is haunted by his friend's disappearance. The book philosophically and poetically reflects on photography's historical, vernacular and personal roles as well as the enormous social and cultural transformations of provincial Russian to the present day. But it remains deeply intimate and autobiographical as he reflects on his beleaguered and futile effort to retrace his steps in search of friendship and his former self.

______________________________

Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk

This is one of my favorite memoirs and Orhan Pamuk is one of my favorite living authors. My Name Is Red, Museum of Innocence…

I often use these chapters in my Portrait/Self-Portrait seminar: Chapter 1: "The Other Orhan," Chapter 2: "Photographs in the Dark Museum House," and Chapter 3: "Me."

______________________________

"Image of Proust" by Walter Benjamin (p 201-216)

I was down for over a month with asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia and attendant breathing problems most likely contracted while photographing the flooding Mississippi River in Grafton, Illinois over the past summer. While recuperating, I was reflecting on the first time I read Proust in the early 1980s while living a quiet life in Maine. I was reclining on a outdoor lounge chair in my backyard covered in blankets and coughing terribly. I looked up asthma on the Internet and read through various symptom lists, causes and remedies. By a surprising piece of luck, I came upon an essay by Walter Benjamin via the word asthma. I knew of Proust's self-isolation, but not of his debilitating illness. Benjamin speaks of the "symbiosis between this [Proust's] particular creativity and this particular malady…This asthma became part of his art - if indeed his art did not create it. Proust's syntax rhythmically and step by step reproduces his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections invariably are the deep breath with which he shakes off the weight of memories."

______________________________

Tom Engelhardt

I remember having little interest or patience for politics day-to-day or the news. In high school when political conversations arose, I would state smugly that I was not into current events. Unconscious of my contradictory behavior, I wrote papers on anarchy and chose Political Science as the first of several declared and discarded majors. As I grew as a photographer I became increasingly concerned with singular imaginative perceptions: illumination as it relates to private matters. But we live in dark times and the horrors of our century are senseless, routine and hidden.

Tomdispatch.com is the best site I've found on the subject of politics and the nature of power. Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as The End of Victory Culture and The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books).

I discovered the website via a Facebook post by photographer and writer Michael Serra who posted a link to Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me. I am a fan of Solnit who has authored over a dozen books including River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Solnit writes regularly for Tomdispatch, as does linguist, political activist and luminary Noam Chomsky. In her review of Engelhardt's recent book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, Solnit praises Englehardt: "…his website or blog or postnewspaper wire service …have been one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing. Tom himself, a legendary book editor, is also one of the country's most eloquent and tenacious political writers, electronically publishing three essays a week for all these years and writing many of them himself."

          "Eduardo Galeano, A Lost and Found History of Lives and Dreams (Some Broken)," by 
          Tom Engelhardt

          Tom Englehardt is also full of surprises. He introduces author Eduardo Galeano by way of a
          Tomgram titled, "A Lost and Found History of Lives and Dreams (Some Broken)." Galeano is
          author of Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, a history of humanity in 366 episodes; Memory 
          of Fire, Volume 3, part of a three-volume history of the Americas; Children of Days, described
          by Engelhardt as a kind of prayer book for our time. In the post he chooses 12 of his favorite
          episodes from Mirrors. Engelhardt describes Mirrors as one of the great books of this century.
          "Think of this post as a Galeano-esque mini-history of our last century of turmoil through a
          kaleidoscope of 'characters,' human and inanimate - and then get your hands on Mirrors and
          read the whole thing for yourself." In part, the episodes, remind me of portions of John Dos
          Passos' USA, such as the description of Thomas Edison in 42nd Parallel. Until this post I was
          unaware of Galeano. After reading Engelhardt's introduction, "A Lost and Found History of
          Lives and Dreams (Some Broken)," I immediately ordered all three of Galeano's books. Below
          is a small taste of Eduardo Galeano via excerpts from Tom Engelhardt.

          Stalin
          He pulled the trigger.          
          The gunshot did not kill him.          
          He awoke in the hospital. At the foot of the bed, his father commented:          
          "You can’t even get that right."

           Father of the Computer
          At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid 
          out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that 
          built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess 
          games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. 
          The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent.

          At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual.
          To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The 
          bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went 
          to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back.

           Ali
          "Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger."…

          Walls
          Why are some walls so loud and others mute?

______________________________

The Holy Bible by Adam Broomberg's and Oliver Chanarin with an essay by Adir Ophir

I purchased Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's  The Holy Bible at Printed Matters' NY Art Book Fair at PS1 in 2013. I knew that it had won accolades, so my first impulse was to view it skeptically. I opened it to several pages and felt a kind of terror and awe. I called a friend: "I'm about to spend $80 on a book I've only looked at for two minutes."

The Holy Bible is one of the most rewarding book purchases I have made in a long time. It has a black cover with a gold embossed title that bears a deceptive resemblance to the King James version of the Bible. Inside many of the text pages are overlaid with photographs selected from the Archive of Modern Conflict by the authors and the philosopher Adi Ophir who writes an essay for the book. The images often depict war and genocide and refer obliquely to particular words or passages underlined in red. The Holy Bible draws parallels between the violence of the bible, photography's preoccupation with catastrophe and the violence of the modern state. The juxtapositions are disturbing, sometimes weirdly comic, often horrible and horribly beautiful.

          "Divine Violence" by Adi Ophir (essay from The Holy Bible)

          "Right from the start, almost every appearance he made was catastrophic… Catastrophe is his
          means of operation, and his central instrument of governance."

______________________________

Noam Chomsky: "The End of History? The short, strange era of human civilization would appear to be drawing to a close"

I first encountered Noam Chomsky as an undergraduate in a course titled Socio-Linguistics. While researching a paper, I found a book in which the author was attempting to apply Chomsky's generative grammar methods to various literary texts. I specifically remember referencing his analysis of portions of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. The following semester I enrolled in Transformational Grammar. I had yet to declare a major but I had always been fascinated by grammar and the title mesmerized. It was a required course despised and dreaded by literature majors, but this did not deter me. It was much later that I learned that Chomsky was also a serious political activist. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy.  He also writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate. "The End of History?" is an omen and portent of a grave and calamitous future.

______________________________

"Terror" by Vladimir Nabokov (begins on page 105 of the PDF through the link)

Daniel Bauer sent me this amazingly dense, heartbreaking, very short, short-story by Vladimir Nabokov. I passed it on to a friend who responded: "Holy shit!"

______________________________

Vision Disorder Simulations

click on the above link or on the individual links below.

These simulations depict how our eyes see with different disorders. Our visionary expressions come from perceptions of the body.

  - shows what the world might look like to a person with progressive symptoms of age-related macular degeneration
- shows what the world might look like to a person with progressive symptoms of cataract
- shows what the world might look like to a person with progressive symptoms of diabetic retinopathy
- illustrates the three layers of the tear film and the cells that make them
- shows the path of aqueous fluid, from its formation in the ciliary body through its exit from the eye
- shows what the world might look like to a person with progressive symptoms of glaucoma
- shows what the world might look like to a person with progressive symptoms of myopia

______________________________

And finally,

"Lessness: A Story" by Samuel Beckett (1970)

I used this prose piece by Samuel Becket in a senior seminar. Most were bored and disinterested by the difficulty. I then asked the class to read "Lessness" out loud and all together many times over. Afterwards, bewildered and unnerved, we all somehow understood.

This dry and useful analysis was taken from the website above. "'Lessness' is a prose piece by Samuel Beckett in which he used random permutation to order sentences. Although 'Lessness' is linear prose, its orderly disorder calls for a reading process in which the reader works to untangle the threads of sameness and difference to discern the underlying structure, becoming aware of the usually unconscious processes of interpretation. Tightly interwoven contradictory perspectives drive the reader's attempts at reconciliation. The two halves of 'Lessness' are two of the 8.3 x 1081 possible orderings of Beckett's 60 sentences."

Originality Is a Conservative Argument

A few weeks back I put together a review of Looking at the Land, a multi-venue curation project by Andy Adams of Flak Photo. One paragraph in particular has drawn some praise, some fire, and some confusion. I'd like to expand on it to see if doing so can forward the conversation.

Here is the paragraph from the original post:

So many photographers today are making strong, but related images in terms of aesthetics and production methods. I'm actually building to a point that’s not critical or dismissive around the point of originality, a point that's back on the conversational hot plate in articles like this one. I've felt more questioning recently, personally and by others, of the idea of photographers in the 21st-century as individuals. I'm coming around to the idea that all of what we're doing is a collective project, it’s group research into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes. 5,500 submissions? Hundreds of them most likely interchangeable? The common approach seen in much of the work – but by no means all of it – to the landscape in Looking at the Land leads me to wonder just how valid the individual really is in photography anymore, assuming it really ever was valid. We are in some sort of photographic Golden Age – the number of photographers today and the quality of images produced, as shown in this exhibition, is unprecedented, even if finding truly new and fresh ideas and territory to explore is increasingly a limited proposition as the medium enters adulthood. I'd just as soon do away with individual names, contests, and the fetishism of certain work. What does it serve beyond the market and egos?

Bryan Formhals of LPV Magazine clipped out a section of this paragraph and posted it on his Tumblr page, called Photographs on the Brain. Some of the aforementioned fire came as a reply to his posted clip by a photographer who goes by santosha65 on Tumblr and as Nick Ruechel in real life. He wrote:

That’s the most asinine, deluded thing i’ve ever heard. We are in a shit storm as far as photography goes. Corporations are taking over content and the parameters in which we create it. Do away with names? FUCK YOU. 

Upon reading his reply, I had a feeling he might be based in New York City, and indeed he is.*

A more textured, but even more damning reply came from Jörg Colberg on his Tumblr site Conscientious Redux:

To quote John Berger: "After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colours and spaces which the artist has used and arranged. What we take away with us – on the most profound level – is the memory of the artist’s way of looking at the world. The representation of a recognizable incident (an incident here can simply mean a tree or a head) offers us the chance of relating the artist’s way of looking to our own." ([Colberg's] emphasis, from the introduction to Toward Reality, taken from Selected Essays of John Berger) To "do away with individual names" is to essentially do away with art. Art is inconceivable without the individual artist, even if there are many (or, as some might argue, too many).

I'd like to clarify and expand on the original post and, given both Ruechel and Colberg singled out the phrase "do away with individual names," I'd like to focus on the last two sentences of the original post that include this phrase in particular.

____________________________

It's interesting to note how salient the overlap of formal appearance and thematic concern is through much of the work of the photographers in "Looking at the Land" and, one can theorize, among the thousands upon thousands who applied to be part of it. Most of these photographers, working separately, sent in work to be considered for the exhibition that reflects, according to Adams, a shared common thematic concern of a vanquished wilderness and an acceptance of the man-made suburban landscape. They produced images that - in many cases - are approached formally in a very similar way and made with color 6x7 aspect ratio film by similar cameras. Part of this has to do with curation for the sake of coherence to be sure, but the show could also have been comprised on the same theme made up, let's say, of almost entirely 35mm black and white work. Or "toy" cameras. Or images curated from Flickr or Google Earth.

How does this square with the idea that part of being an artist is to avoid solipsism by offering through our vision or voice something unique to the artistic dialogues of our society, the - to return to Berger - "artist's way of looking at the world"? We have chosen to pursue our passions and to make financial sacrifices to engage a pursuit that frequently involves isolation in rooms lit by Lightroom or Photoshop. We have turned our back on more conventional life choices and carved out our own way. We go into the field alone, we edit alone, we maintain a sense of our act of creation as an act apart from others before its presentation, an act shared with others.

It's easy to see how we feel singular, special, and unique given our choices in the context of societal norms and our work structure. And the current glut of competitions heightens this feeling, highlighting individuals, and so does the market as investors have a stock in our names and want to maintain the value of their investments. Art becomes about the individual artist, about you, about building a brand and circulating your name. There's some common sense to this: we're all entrepreneurs in a tough racket. In order to survive we do need to make our name in order to have money to continue to pursue what we love.

There's an issue however. The pure lone wolf artist is part of artistic mythology and always has been, along with natural geniuses and beret-wearing café bohemians who spend their spare time lounging around the Left Bank with naked lovers. It's one of the stories we tell ourselves - and that is imaged by others of us - about our role and relationship with the rest of society.

Behind the frequent feeling of having our own unique vision and "brand" in reality lies layers of interconnections. We build our foundation on top of a large and rich photographic history others have provided. We have formal and thematic debts to our branch of photography. Almost every single photographer in history and every project that they have ever worked on has precedent and references. Our connection and debt is also to each other as well as to our predecessors. We have dialogue with what's happening in the photography art world (and other areas of photography). We respond to it, even if it's a rejection or attempt to steer away from the rest. Our work overlaps. The images we see shape our own aesthetic decisions consciously or unconsciously.

Your sense of color, your obscure project subject matter, your tilted framing, mysterious dark developing, and lens refractions in your prints? Not "yours." You are cutting, combining and pasting visual language and recycling from larger thematic concepts others have also worked with as well. Your particular way of recombining those elements? Yes, it's yours, but let's qualify that correctly. A definition of "progress" in our medium should be based in a photographer’s ability to present fresh visual conversation from the creative combination and balance of technology, form, content, and a consideration of the context in which its made. That being said, don't forget you're working with deep interconnection with, and deep debt to, other photographers and that your uniqueness comes by adding a twist at the end in your combination of elements defined in relation with others.

To say your work is original is to see yourself as removed from history and context, to see yourself in a vacuum and alone. This is why I say originality is a conservative argument. To say your work is truly original is to argue along the lines of conservative political arguments for everything from not paying taxes to cutting social spending. It's seeing the contemporary without history and the individual as separate from the fabric of society, responsible only for themselves.

It's odd that in a field traditionally dominated by liberal minds - and still dominated by liberal minds judging from Twitter feeds and Facebook comments - when it comes to our own field, most get conservative. We forget our interconnection and our debts and that what we use comes in large part from our predecesors and from each other. We get defensive of "our" territory, our stomach falls when our cherished "unique" image shows up in a very similar form by another artist in a magazine or on a blog. We protect our ideas and this alone is an admission that we know somewhere inside ourselves that our work is not actually "original" - we fear another can and will make "our" ideas. We cling to the idea that we've done this alone and that our voice is a singular one.

American artist and writer Chris Wiley is a recent article in The Guardian is quoted as saying, "Everything and everyone on Earth and beyond, it would seem, has been slotted somewhere in a rapacious, ever-expanding Borgesian library of representation that we have built for ourselves. As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality has been radically called into question. Ironically, the moment of greatest photographic plenitude has pushed photography to the point of exhaustion."

Going back to my original post paragraph, why would I suggest getting rid of the focus on individual names, the emphasis on personal accolades, and the fetishism of certain work? Because we're doing this together, our visions are interconnected, and we owe debts. Our "original" visual ideas borrow, interact, and react to those of others. There's no need to be focused on individual canonization and aggrandizement. Photography should have a feeling of collaboration, not of competition. Why not conceptualize what we are doing as a common project into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes? Like doctors across hospitals sharing information in their investigation of cures and causes?

Let's also take my original comments with the appropriate grain of salt. I'm talking about shifting emphasis, remembering what's important, and understanding the limits of the idea of originality. I'm not suggesting there's not any space for visual innovation or that we should never mention or talk about names in the absolute. I'm also not saying all visions are equal or that there's not any difference between how we see things. There is, obviously and thankfully. It's just that those differences have to be seen in their appropriate historical and cultural context.

What I am saying is the experience of the image is what's important, the interaction around the image, the collective investigation between images between different people and over generations of photographers, the connection photography can make between us. The collective project is more important than the individual - and photography is something that we have created together, not any individual alone. Photography is the qualities of the photograph in the context of other photographs and in its cultural context. People forget this in our ever-increasing world of ever more contests, Grand Prix, winners and losers, reviews, and success through who you know.

In fact, as I suggested to Colberg via Twitter, I believe the Berger quote actually supports my point of view. Berger writes about the vision of the photographer and how we receive it - without mentioning the photographer's name. He focuses on a description of the interaction of the observer with the work. Perfect. The chance and experience of relating to that particular vision is what's important, as is remembering the context for that vision.

____________________________

As I sat down to start to write this the other day, in a moment of procrastination I checked Facebook and saw a post written by Heidi Romano on another photographer accusing her of copying her work. Her post serves as a case study and conclusion for this essay.

First, let's look at a few images. (Image credits are at the end of the essay in order to keep names out of these examples.)

Image by artist A [below]

Image by artist B [below]

Image by artist C [below]

Artist A has accused C of copying her images, but has not accused B of the same thing, even though the image by B was made after the image by artist A. Why? Perhaps because A is aware that B - internationally known and respected - has been working with books, including damaged books and with twisting and distorted and water damaged books just as A does in her projects, since the early 1990s - or roughly 10 years before A started her project.

And now let's look at a second group of images by various artists as well as objects sold by crafts vendors, installation images of works by a sculptor, and an image of a window installation at an Anthropologie store in Manhattan:

Artist A claims that HER image - the fifth down from the top - is being ripped off by artist C in work such as the final image in the above sequence. I hope, simply by showing those two photographs surrounded by images by other artists, craftspeople, as well as dudes paid $7 an hour to put stuff in the windows at Anthropologie, the emptiness of the claim of artist A - Cara Barer - against artist C, Romano.

In sum, originality has to been seen as a question of degree and in context. This is even more true in today's photography landscape as finding fresh ideas and territory to explore is an increasingly limited proposition. Going back to the Wiley quote, we now work in relation with a Borgesian library of visual images. Ideas are driven back and forth over. There are going to be overlaps. To be sure, there is copying; that's not what I mean - and of course there is innovative visual content, but let's keep the idea of individual innovation in an appropriate frame.

To tie together these two visual examples with the earlier points in this piece, Barer is ignoring her own artistic debts, forgetting context, oddly hanging the banner of originality around a well-covered and broad idea of working with damaged books, and working against what should be the spirit of the community project of photography. In a conversation you overlap ideas sometimes. That's OK; it's part of the dialectic process between all of us in order to advance our investigation of visual ideas.

Images, from top to bottom, are copyright of: Cara Barer, Abelardo Morell, Heidi Romano and in the second group The Shaw Sisters, Anthropologie Store at 5th Ave. and 16th Street in New York City, Lucille Moroni, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Cara Barer, Jonathan Callan, Jonathan Callan, Abelardo Morell, Heidi Romano

*Mr. Ruechel and I subsequently engaged in a back and forth email exchange that, while not necessarily bringing us to any agreements, brought us to a cordial understanding.