Reading Shortlist: 11.19.17

© Wheeland Photography, from the article Couple Encounters a Black Metal Band in Woods During Engagement Shoot

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.

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Daniel C. Blight, American Suburb X, Incoming: Photography, Contemporary Art, Whiteness. Another attack on Richard Mosse's Incoming. It's important to read pieces that you react strongly and negatively towards, just as it's important to see art you hate. This piece is problematic on multiple levels, from the smug academicism to its quizzical attempts to create art-making recipes:

the baseline theoretical strategy of any conceptual artist making political work should be one of complete and utter rejection of the following things: emotional transformation, unique visuality, the novel use of technology, dramatic strategies of display and installation, and awe-inspiring visual or aural effects. These things are, in short, a description of "fireworks" art.

Tim Clark, 1000 Words, David Campany. In this case 1000 Words is about 7000 Words, but the lengthy, sometimes wandering interview is ultimately a very engaging conversation with one of today's great thinkers on photography.

Ben Crair, New Republic, 'Then I Found Myself Seeing Pictures All the Time.'  A 2013 article on Stephen Shore that explains his importance within the contexts of photographic and cultural history. Explains his conceptual intents well.

Untitled © Constant Anée

Anna Heyward, The New Yorker, The Opposite of a Muse. Isabelle Mège may have out Sophie Calle-ed Sophie Calle. She has pursued and convinced around 300 photographers to make a portrait of her during the last three decades.

Eliza Murphy, ABC News, Couple Encounters a Black Metal Band in Woods During Engagement Shoot. I find it enraging that I'm already married and that this will not happen to me.

Robert Frank on photographing The Americans, SFMOMA. Frank talks about how he made a few images from The Americans in a rare video interview.

Kodak 'Investigating What it Would Take' to Bring Back Kodachrome. The rewriting of the "film revival" narrative continues.

Ariel Levy, Catherine Opie,  The New Yorker, All-American Subversive. A check-in with Opie who's settled in to middle age as an artist, teacher, mother and wife.

Ashley McNelis, Aperture, Jason Fulford Can’t Be Contained. All you ever wanted to know about Mr. Fulford with questions that do a good job of elevating the conversation and then getting out of the way to let Fulford respond fully.

Tracy Staedter, Live Science, Tiny, Lens-Free Camera Could Hide in Clothes, Glasses. Lensless cameras so small they can be woven into clothes. People will one day very soon laugh at the quaint privacy concerns we had with cell phone cameras you could actually see.

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.

Brian with Pet Pig, 1999 © Roger Ballen

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.

The Image: Surendra Lawoti

© Surendra Lawoti, Cave, Bāghdwār

This Country Is Yours, started in 2012, is a long-term body of work and is inspired by Robert Frank’s The Americans. The work focuses on Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, and looks at the six social and political movements of Nepal which include: women, Adibasi Janajati (indigenous nationalities), Dalit (untouchable groups), Madeshi (minority groups from southern plains adjoining India), the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Intersex community and religious minorities. Besides the six movements, I am also photographing on the streets, visiting newly built housing developments, offices of political parties and other places that reflect the social and political vernacular of Nepal. As Robert Frank, I am weaving together pictures of quite disparate and complicated, but intertwined ideas. I am using Bagmati River, which meanders through Kathmandu to thread together the diverse set of images of landscapes, portraits and interiors. In This Country Is Yours, I am interested in encapsulating the essence of the social and political transformation of Nepal.

Presenting This Country Is Yours in a certain sequence is very important in order to create a certain reading of the work. The sequencing of the work starts off with two images from Bāghdwār on the Shivapuri Hill, on the Northern edge of Kathmandu Valley. The headwaters of the Bagmati River are located in Bāghdwār. Etymologically, Shivapuri is made up of two words "Shiva" and "puri." Shiva is one of the three powerful Hindu deities. And "puri" in Sanskrit means abode. So Shivapuri means the abode of Lord Shiva, and he lived there with his wife Parbati.

According to the legend, once Shiva laughed feverishly and some of his saliva from his open mouth fell and touched the ground; when it did, Bagmati River sprouted out from the earth. In this way I start the series with Hindu mysticism. When I was photographing Cave, Bāghdwār, I was thinking about Lord Shiva; his esoteric and hermitic life style. During the editing process, I was also thinking about Nepal and how until recently it had been constitutionally declared a Hindu state, which is the root of many of the issues in Nepal today. The Hindu state favoured certain groups linguistically, religiously and culturally. Indigenous nationalities and many religious minorities of Nepal have been subjugated by the high caste Hindus over hundreds of years. So Cave, Bāghdwār subtly refers to the old Nepal, the Hindu state or the status quo, in present day context.

© Surendra Lawoti, Sabita Poudel’s Bible

In sequence of the series, the two images of Bāghdwār are followed by Sabita Poudel’s Bible, Banshighat, one of fourteen squatter settlements along the banks of Bagmati River. There is a subtle juxtaposition here: of the old Nepal and the New Nepal. In 2006, Nepal was declared secular, giving much yearned freedom to many religious minorities including the indigenous nationalities of Nepal. With Sabita Poudel’s Bible, I am referring to the fact that Nepal is no longer a country with one dominant religion but is in fact very diverse and complex. The photograph is taken in Banshighat, one of fourteen squatter settlements, ironically located on the banks of Bagmati River. The owner of the Bible is Sabita Poudel, a young woman who lives in the settlement with her parents and her younger brother. Sabita’s family runs a mom-and-pop store in the first floor of their house they sleep in the second floor. Sabita’s family are Hindu, but she converted to Christianity a few years ago when she was seriously ill for an extended period. This photograph is about Sabita Poudel and the New Nepal that so many Nepalis are aspiring for.

So in the sequencing of the images I use the first few images to introduce the work by providing Nepal’s cultural and historical vernacular. Later on the work delves into the aforementioned six social and political movements of Nepal.

- Surendra Lawoti

Photographers on Photographers: Always Looking Outside: Poetics and Visuality in the Work of Robert Frank by Dawn Roe

I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always changing. - Robert Frank¹

Now, that’s how the phrase is burned into my brain. Robert Frank utters this poignant passage in his film Moving Pictures, and sometimes the phrase is repeated and worded slightly differently – but in the spirit of Frank’s oeuvre, I’ll quote from my own memory, as that is the version that has stayed with me over the years, and continues to impress itself upon me. The evocation of "looking" in this scenario simultaneously suggests both sight and site, or space. To look is not necessarily to see. Perhaps it would be useful here to consider the process of perception as beginning prior to looking in the optical sense, and of originating from within. This seems to be part of Frank’s struggle within this metaphoric conundrum. The act of looking with and/or through a camera as an extension of your mind and body insists that you cast your gaze outside, and conjures notions of glancing or peering into an exterior world through an interior space – to what is out there, and beyond our control.

© Robert Frank, Mabou, 1977

This type of matter-of-fact philosophical questioning as grounded in everyday experience is what initially drew me to the work of Robert Frank, along with his perfect comingling of form and sentiment. Evidenced in all of his work is an authentic and sincere engagement with the world and the self, whether within a single photographic image, serial or collage works, film or videos. Equally present is a careful and critical attention to materiality and process – and a consideration of how these aspects are part and parcel of the poetic structure of his work, greatly contributing to the conveyance of meaning. I’ve been especially influenced by Frank’s persistent interrogation of the relationship between the still photograph and the sequential and/or moving image – mining his own archives and repurposing past images to form new narratives, combining multiple frames or reiterating imagery within and between cinematic and photographic form.

© Robert Frank, mabou, 1977

As a viewer, I have never responded to these tropes as an arbitrary formal device, but rather as an insistent visual strategy – one that challenges any sort of "decisive moment" and instead focuses on the inherent flux of ourselves in the world, and the inability of the camera lens to truly fix an instant in the form of a reproduction that adequately represents space and time as experienced. In an essay discussing the indexical nature of the photograph, Tom Gunning suggests, "the important relation that the photograph bears to a past moment involves more than an indexical relation, worthy of more in depth discussion" one that asks us to explore "further the actual visual experience occasioned by the photograph."² Although at times coupled with elements of collage and drawing, it seems relevant that Frank uses the camera as his primary mode of expression, decidedly responding to the world through a lens, seeming to be very mindful of the photographic-ness of the world, and our relation to it.

© Robert Frank, Sick of Goodby's, Mabou, 1978

Frank’s image "Sick of Goodby's" serves as an apt example of the convergence of his varied methodologies. While seemingly dripping with sentiment, the image is equally cold and calculated in its rigid formal structure, and somehow simultaneously humorous, with the toy skeleton precariously held by a disembodied hand. Pressing together two instances into a single moment through use of the doubled frame is immediately counteracted by the inclusion of the mirror, which suggests a space that repeats itself infinitely, not unlike the world that continuously unfolds in front of us, the present instantly slipping into the past with each blink of an eye or click of the shutter. What is wonderful about this image is that another iteration of this moment exists in one of Frank’s films, wherein the wind-up skeleton vibrates and moves within the cinematic frame. The title of Frank’s monograph Hold Still/Keep Going is conjured here with precision – again through poetics as well as visual structure and mode of presentation.

What exactly is a photograph in-and-of-itself and how does that mode of seeing translate to film/video and our relationship to our selves and the world – regardless of subject matter?

Hollis Frampton speaks of this in, "For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses" with his naming of an "infinite cinema."

A polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever, its lens focused upon all the appearances of the world. Before the invention of still photography, the frames of the infinite cinema were blank, black leader; then a few images began to appear upon the endless ribbon of the film. Since the birth of the photographic cinema, all the frames are filled with images.

There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema filmstrip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.³ 

This image of a frame, any frame, being plucked from the flow lets us think of the instant or moment as a tangible object of sorts – one we can hold within our grasp. The still image stands as a stable relic of the past whereas the moving image simultaneously presses together past and present, continually replacing one for the other. Here then, perhaps, is the essence of time itself, as much as we can possibly understand it via a photographic (reproductive) thinking, if we can call it such.

© Robert Frank, London, 1951

And it’s interesting to look back at some of Frank’s earlier works through this mode of thinking as well. In doing a quick bit of research in an effort to find a particular photograph of Frank’s from London in the 1950’s, I found a version in the form of a diptych, which I had never seen before. Apparently this version was printed in the 1970’s and as you can ascertain from the print, it appears to be two, successive frames from a single contact sheet, illustrating that they were exposed in close proximity (in space and in time) to one another. And what a beautiful extended moment this becomes, so distinct from the image that so many of us know, powerful of course on its own, yet transformed through this simple act of extension.

And this suggests a duration – a consideration of time beyond (or within) the fraction of a second. Henri Bergson of course picks this apart in Matter and Memory when he suggests that, "The essence of time is that it goes by; time already gone by is the past, and we call the present the instant in which it goes by. …But the real, concrete, live present – that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception – that present necessarily occupies a duration. Where then is this duration placed? Is it on the hither or on the further side of the mathematical point, which I determine ideally when I think of the present instant? Quite evidently, it is both on this side and on that; and what I call ‘my present’ has one foot in my past and another in my future."⁴ Once again, back to metaphor and metaphysics in relation to these ideas as expressed in this particular diptych. The foreboding, matter-of-fact presence of the hearse in the left frame coupled with the suggestion of its open door with the young girl seemingly fleeing or escaping down the road in the subsequent image/instant suggests time in terms of both temporality and mortality. While the metaphoric aspects attached to the image come through in the single frame version equally well, the metaphysical notions of being are perhaps emphasized more strongly when the visual experience is prolonged in this formal manner, highlighting the act of perception as responding to the world as one, continual glimpse.

© Robert Frank, Studio, Mabou, 2002

And that’s ultimately what brings me back to Frank’s work again and again. "Always looking outside, trying to look inside." Seems simple, on the surface. But, as Frank said in 1951, ''When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."⁵ Precisely.

Dawn Roe is a photographer and educator based between North Carolina and Florida where she serves as an assistant professor at Rollins College.

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NOTES
¹See various reviews and articles on Frank, such as the following: http://cielvariablearchives.org/en/reviews-of-current-events-cv59/robert-frank-by-judith-parker.html, http://www.squarecylinder.com/2009/07/robert-frank-sfmoma/, http://spot.hcponline.org/pages/5_films_by_robert_frank_903.asp

²Tom Gunning, "What’s the Point of the Index? or Faking Photographs," in Karen Beckman and Jean Ma,ed. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 38 and 39.

³Hollis Frampton, "For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses," in Bruce Jenkins, ed. On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 134.

⁴Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Dover Publications, 1912 and 2004), 176 and 177.

⁵See various reviews and articles on Frank, such as the following: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/01/robert-frank-an-outsider-looking-in.html, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/03/poetry/brenda-coultas

Book Discussion Group Recap: Elliptical Narratives

© Paul Graham, Las Vegas (part 4 of 6), from the series "a shimmer of possibility"

I recently joined Flak Photo and Andy Adams to host an online community conversation on the Flak Photo Books Facebook page focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published book of essays, "The Pleasures of Good Photographs."

This public discussion provided a structured setting for expanding our understanding of the essays by reading collectively.

I am following up on these community conversations with posts that will recap a selection of the ideas we discussed.  These follow-up posts will necessarily be an abbreviated selection given the length and quality of the conversation in the community discussion threads. In many cases, what arose from the conversation were questions, points argued from different sides, and ideas to continue to explore - not conclusions or consensus.

My goal with these follow-up posts is to pull out threads from the weekly discussion that can be applied beyond the individual essays to inform our general understanding of the medium itself.

The follow-up post to the essay, "Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans's American Photographs" can be found here, to "A Certain Sensibility: John Gossage, the Photographer as Auteur" here, and to "Without Author or Art: The 'Quiet' Photograph" here.

Today we continue with the follow-up to the essay "Elliptical Narratives: Some Thoughts on the Photobook." (page 221)

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NARRATIVE, STORY, and the PHOTOBOOK
In “Elliptical Narratives,” Badger makes a differentiation between “narrative” and “story.” By using “story” to describe basic and linear narratives, Badger frees the term “narrative” to be cast very broadly and - with the term “elliptical narrative” – includes photography such as the Provoke photographers and their “radical deconstruction of narrative” as well as books like Germaine Krull’s “Metal” in which viewers construct the image sequence by shuffling them.

By stretching the idea of narrative far enough to include such work, I asked readers if we arrive at the point where we could say Badger believes narrative is inherent in a book format, no matter how aggressively it is attacked.

Photographer and educator Dawn Roe responded, “At first I objected to the insistence upon narrative and story as being what the photobook is ‘about,’ but Badger ultimately offers a fairly rich discussion of (almost) non-narrative / experimental forms in his discussion of elliptical and non-linear narrative strategies employed by [Daido] Moriyama and others.” She later differentiated between different types of narrative and added that she thought it possible to create photobooks without narrative: “I’d just like to emphasize the distinction (for me) between the inherent narrativeS implicitly contained within any subject matter or even medium or style for that matter (socio-cultural / personal narratives, or narratives of abstraction/realism or photography itself) and the deliberate construction of A narrative, of any kind. I tend to think it’s very possible for a photobook to avoid and / or play against dominant / expected narratives through selection and arrangement of images, and that even if A narrative can still be read into the work (as is possible with anything really), this does not necessarily mean the artist / photographer’s primary goal for the work has / had anything to do with its construction.”

Leeds, UK-based photographer and writer Lloyd Spencer agreed: “A lot of the ways in which we examine photos and respond to image collections or sequences draw on instincts and reflexes that are associated with ‘narrative’...but I would not adopt ‘narrative’ as a way to describe the kind of coherence in most successful photobooks. I don't think that that quite does justice to the ambiguity of photos...We can notice ... or fail to notice but still be influenced by... all kinds of themes and interrelations (such as the flags in Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' or the role of the car, or of the road) but it still stops short of being a narrative. It remains a collection of images. A powerfully coherent, suggestive, expressive collection but for me something short of what I would call ‘narrative.’”

San Francisco-based photographer Stefan Jora argued the opposite: “Great photobooks, like 'The Americans', certainly have a narrative; it may be not be the one you're looking for, and it's for the most part different from a film's narrative. In Frank's case it is not an all-encompassing encyclopedic narrative, but a personal and a very subjective one -- pretty much a statement in the from of an extended photoessay (contrary to what he wrote in his Guggenheim grant application). Every photobook has a narrative, whether it's linear, elliptical, or something else; and this is why most photographers turn to photobooks -- because they feel there's more to photography than the isolated, individual image.”

Contributor John Armstrong built from Jora’s comments by writing, “Isolated pictures can communicate meaning only in limited and hit-or-miss ways; a set of related pictures – pictures about the same thing – can do much better. As to narrative, everyone has their own preferred meaning for the term. I think Badger uses it in a very simple but also very appropriate sense. Etymologically narrate means to make known. But making known can happen in two basic ways, all at once – a revelation – or incrementally over a period of time. Narration normally refers to the second kind of making known, the one that involves a process that takes some amount of time to complete.”


ELLIPTICAL NARRATIVE
George McClintock presented a tight definition of “elliptical narrative” by quoting Badger and writing, “The 'elliptical or nonlinear narrative' form of the photobook 'solves the problem of photography's ineffability' by substituting 'poetry and mystery' for 'clarity and the concrete' aspects of linear narratives. (223-224) Words cannot speak for photographs, and sequences of photographs cannot constitute a linear narrative, thus ellipsis is the rhetorical foundation of the effective photobook...elliptical narrative simply means not making known all the information that could be expected, or making it known in a way that is not readily evident.”


THE STILL PHOTOGRAPH AND THE FILM FRAME
In the essay Badger writes, “A photograph is synonymous with the single film frame – in fact they are exactly the same thing – and as a collective entity, the photobook, as I hope to demonstrate, shares particular characteristics with the film.”

Roe wrote in response: “Of course the still and moving image are inherently different, but also share essential characteristics. When we can rely upon a viewer’s knowledge of both forms, we can potentially take advantage of the distinctions - between stasis and movement, arrest and reactivation – to address the very nature of our mediums, and how they work upon the viewer.”

She also added, “And, however we feel about "Camera Lucida," [Roland] Barthes certainly has some things to say on the matter including, 'The photographic image is full, crammed: no room, nothing can be added to it. In the cinema, whose raw material is photographic, the image does not have this completeness…Why? Because the photograph, taken in flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views…Like the real world, the filmic world is sustained by the presumption that, as [Edmund] Husserl says, 'the experience will constantly continue to flow by in the same constitutive style'.”

Armstrong disagreed with Badger in a longer comment worth quoting at length:

   The film theorist Christian Metz called out a fundamental difference  between the ways the audience
   relates to still vs. moving pictures, identifying still photography as fetishism (viewer in control) and
   cinema as voyeurism (viewer not in control). This distinction goes down through the pragmatic to
   the psychological and ultimately to the cognitive layer of seeing. It is the difference between actively
   examining an object and passively watching action unfolding before your eyes.

and:

   I’ve long been troubled by the idea that a moving picture has to be a sequence of still frames...In
   practice they normally are, given the way film and video cameras work, but they don’t have to   
   be...camera obscura and shadow projections don’t have this property, and a recording device that was   
   completely analog in the time dimension (in the way a traditional analog sound recorder is) would not   
   suffer the lossage you see with frame-based cameras, and would let you zero in on smaller and   
   smaller intervals until you reach the limits of its recording precision.


THE PHOTOBOOK VS. EXHIBITIONS AND MULTI-MEDIA
In "The Pleasures of Good Photographs" Badger writes that it’s in the photobook that photographs sing their loudest and most complex song. I asked readers if they felt that the possible expressive capabilities of multi-media and the exhibition were secondary to those of the photobook.

I challenged Badger’s idea by testing it against a list of some of the expressive possibilities of the exhibition: the ability to use a wider scale difference between prints for expression, arranging prints in space on a wall as a vehicle for meaning (witness Paul Graham), being able to take in the sweep of many images and their relationships at a glance, the importance of the photograph in space as an object (framing types, thickness, etc.), and lighting.

Jora replied, “All mediums of expression have both advantages and limitations, and the photobook is no exception. I think the main advantage of the photobook is its ability to preserve an underlining authorial voice (mostly due to the inherently linear layout that a viewer can break out of at any point, but never fully escape, at least not in the traditional format), while the greatest advantage of multimedia books that I foresee is the possibility they offer to decentralize the power of the narrative from the linear path chosen by the author into the hands of the more adventurous viewer.”

Armstrong responded with more questions: “If you take the photos and texts of a photobook and put them on to the gallery or museum wall, what do you lose? Certainly the tactile experience of holding the book in your hands and leafing through the pages, but what else? And what do you gain? If nothing else, showing real prints and, the temptation that’s hard to resist, large prints, much bigger than the reproductions in the book.”


PHOTOGRAPHER AND CONTEXT
Badger makes a series of comments in the essay about the photographer and their cultural context: “Like other major artists, both Frank and [William] Klein were closely attuned to the cultural zeitgeist,” and later on, “Through the medium of the book, [Japanese photographers in the 1960s and 70s] reacted in different ways, some obliquely, some directly, to the political and cultural events of their era,” and finally, “Clearly, most photography reflects – indeed should reflect – the age in which it was produced...”

Badger has formed this essay through the idea of a strong relationship between the photobook, the photographer, and the age in which they photograph. This lead to questions we left unanswered: What is our relationship to context as photographers? Are we inevitably shaped by the era we make work in? Do we have a responsibility to the era in which we photograph? Should photography reflect our times as Badger suggests? How much of our relationship to our context is conscious; how much are we just simply shaped by our surroundings, perhaps inevitably so?


ZEITGEIST
These questions raised the idea of zeitgeist. Armstrong asked, “It's easy enough to identify Zeitgeists in the past and see how they were reflected in art of the time, but what about now? What is our current Zeitgeist and how is it reflected in the art of today?..We are now well over a decade into the 21st century. Where is the 21st century art? There is no question but that the Zeitgeist of today is very different from that of the 90’s (just as the Zeitgeist of the 90’s was different from that of the 80’s and so on back)...At least for Americans, everything changed after 9/11...where is the art of the post 9/11 age?”

Armstrong later wrote that our conversation had perhaps gotten towards some answers to his questions, “Current Zeitgeist: backward rather than forward-looking, pessimistic, impotent, focused on loss rather than gain, nostalgic, savoring the smallest things because everything will be gone. 21st century Art (the first decade): expressions of the same.”


MISSED MOMENTS
Badger concludes the essay by using Paul Graham’s “a shimmer of possibility” as a case study for the idea of elliptical narrative and the final conversations of the week revolved around Graham's work.

Badger writes that Graham’s images look like “missed moments,” something between decisive and indecisive moments and that Graham’s images have the feeling of film grabs which “tend to have a different quality off stopped motion than still photographs.”

Roe replied, “For me, Graham is extending the notion of the moment and how it’s defined through his mode of image selection and sequencing. Or at least challenging the expectations of the photographic moment, or maybe instant would be a better word. They are not missed moments, as they are still moments. But are they ‘decisive’? And, do they need to be? I guess I think of these as anti-instants more than missed moments, if that makes any sense...it seems these shimmers of possibility (anti-instants, but poignant glimpses) provoke the viewer to think outside/beyond the frame and to rely on or call upon memory (of the preceding images/moments/details and in general) to fill in gaps.”

London-based photographer Pete Massingham added, “I think what is interesting is the manner in which Graham's strategy emphasizes what is not seen - particularly the psychological space in an interrupted flow of time. The repetitions or slight shifts function as an almost lyrical device highlighting an experiential dimension perhaps not as readily found in the single statement. Graham like others, shifts our attention away from the single visual experience, to one where we are more inclined to consider the passage of time.”

Finally, another contributor said, “One of the most intriguing parts of this work for me is the use of repetition as a kind of memory trigger. In the book, an experience of the image is no longer a singular encounter, and like memory arises unexpectedly with a slightly different version.”


AUDIENCE AND THE MARKET
Massingham raised the issue of audience and the moral, commercial, and critical implications of promoting limited edition works. The point arose from the humbling current market value of the full, hardcover copy of “a shimmer of possibility”: £750.00. He wrote, “I have no qualms over Paul Graham or any other artist making a good financial return on his/her work, but at what point I wonder, does the market come into conflict with the very people who are interested in that work? So many books now are limited editions, immediately collectible and put out of the range of most people...I wonder who/what the audience for Graham's work might be. How diverse I wonder?” The conversation was raised, but not completed – I hope to see it resumed in a separate thread on the forum.

Shifting Lines: The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography, Part I

© Alec Soth, from Dog Days Bogotá

In the latest in a recent series of articles on Thomas Hoepker’s September 11th image, Joerg Colberg of Conscientious published a well-written piece entitled “How we give photographs meaning.” In the post he opens up several threads of potential conversation: the importance of including context when reading an image, all photographs as fictions with no inherent meaning, the ethics of photojournalism, meanings as constructs, etc.

Given I agree with Colberg’s main points (and to dwell on the few second-tier points I have questions about seems nitpicky), I’m going to build on the conversation his piece continues by pulling out one particular thread of his post. This will also be a way to slow the conversation down and explore in depth one of those potential conversations his essay opens.

Colberg writes (my italics):

               “The meaning of a photograph is a construct that involves a group of people operating
               against a specific background (news, art, …), subject to the group’s personal, cultural and
               political biases. I think what we should be talking about is not how truthful photographs
               are, but how truthful we expect them to be, given the background they’re operating in.”

This quote raises a slippery question: how do we know what background we are operating against? Just where are those lines between fine art photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography?

It’s not immediately clear how we should approach establishing those lines in a photographic world in which someone like Alec Soth, to choose an example, can call himself a documentary photographer while simultaneously being a member of the premier photojournalism agency in the world and having a retrospective at a major contemporary art museum. Is it a question of where we see the photograph? If the same image is in both a gallery and a newspaper, should we say we’re operating against an art background in one situation and against a photojournalistic one in the other? Or is it a question of subject matter so that a picture made to describe a war, for example, is inherently photojournalism? But then what to make of Richard Mosse’s Infra? Is a photograph what the photographer says it is? Joel-Peter Witkin surely couldn’t claim his work is documentary. Then is it the observer that decides? What if you and I differ in opinion - who’s right?

© Richard Mosse, from Infra

To make things more complicated, the question is also a temporal one – the lines between genres are alive, constantly moving and shifting to reflect cultural changes, historical events, prevailing intellectual winds, and the photographic marketplace.

To look at these questions, I’m going to dust off and cannibalize a paper for this post that I wrote a few years ago that explores the history of the relationship between these three genres. More historical than polemical, it examines how the 1970s in particular played an important role in forming the contemporary photographic landscape of more elastic definitions that we live in today.

I’ll boil the paper down as much as possible to get rid of what’s not to the point and polish it up a bit, but I don’t think I can get rid of the fundamental academic feel of having written it in a university setting. I solemnly swear to you, however, that I won’t use the words “hegemony,” “epistemological,” or “syllogism.”

This post will be divided into at least two due to length. Today will give the background for what happens in the '70s which will be the subject of the second (and any subsequent) posts.

______________________________________ 

A number of factors combined during the 1970s to accelerate the movement between the photographic genres of documentary work, photojournalism, and fine art photography that have opened into today’s era of more fluid relationships. During this decade the rise of television and the concurrent decline in the magazine industry, the rise of galleries dedicated to showing fine art photography, the museum’s firm establishment of the photographic print as a unique and collectable object and the resulting development of the market for photographic prints, the development of artist's books, the evolution of an economic infrastructure that helped sustain photographers as artists, and the questioning of the ability of photography to document or record events factually all contributed to the rise of the new era.

The boundaries between documentary photography, photojournalism, and fine art photography have never been absolute and have increasingly overlapped during the course of photographic history. The '70s built on existing trends in photography. Photographic historian Mary Warner Marien writes about the '70s milieu in a book called Photography: A Cultural History:

               The presence of documentary and photojournalistic photographs in museums and
               galleries was not new…Nevertheless, in the past, image-makers, audiences, curators, and
               scholars had considered art photography, documentary photography, and photojournalism
               as having their own separate lines of development and different social agendas. (Marien 410)

© Eugène Atget

To pull out just a few examples, Eugène Atget consciously cropped the developing modern Paris around the historical construct he intended to photograph in his Vieux Paris images and he photographed in correlation to the interests of his various clients, revealing a strong subjectivity to work he labeled “documents.”

Dorothea Lange and other documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration made their way into art exhibitions and Walker Evans exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. Evans defined his work as art despite often being considered a prototypical documentarian by asserting that his work does not have a utilitarian use such as a police crime scene photograph. He also noted the artifice involved in “documentary work.” FSA photographers used stylistic elements such as sharp focus, even lighting, and a frontal composition to code their images as factual and to indicate that they should be read as unbiased. “Documentary?” famously questioned Evans. “That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. . .The term should be documentary style.” (Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, 210) Evans, in short, was aware of the common urge to view documentary images as mimetic, but was cognizant of the bias of the photographer’s perspective.

The Magnum photography agency in 1947 challenged the notion of what constituted photojournalism. Founded as a photographic cooperative, members of Magnum retain the rights to their photographs as well as the authority to conceive and execute their own projects. Although their work still needs to find a market, by removing the responsibility to answer to assignments designed by newspaper and magazine editors, the freelance photojournalists of Magnum defined the term "photojournalism" for themselves, broadening the scope of the genre to include longer projects done in essay form, which becomes close to indistinguishable from the type of work done by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. In turn, Riis and particularly Hine can be listed as either documentarians or photojournalists depending on the article or book.

Original front cover, uncredited image

Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) marked a new era in documentary work in which individual and psychological issues replaced the historical, ideological, and political issues of earlier photographs (such as those of the FSA) and formed a style of intimacy instead of an attempted detachment. Working under a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and not under the guidelines of a newspaper editor or a government program, Frank documented 1950s American society of all strata during his cross-country road trips, photographing flags, politicians, cars, and racial dynamics. At the same time, however, he concerned himself with how the exterior world reflected his interior world. “I’m always doing the same images,” he has stated, “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside.” (Stimson 105) The angry, bemused looks that manifest the photographer’s intrusion in The Americans might be said, according to Stimson, to be the singular moment of the document becoming art, though the document could be considered art since Atget. (Stimson 211)

From the 1950s to the 1970s, work that allowed more space for the personal and contingent in photojournalism became accepted and known as "new journalism." (Mary Panzer, Things as They Are, 27) Although more commonly associated with print journalism, the term “new journalism” became connected to photographers who injected a personal, first-person perspective into their reporting. The Vietnam War, for example, became the center of a perceived link between photojournalism and personal politics as photographers such as Phillip Jones Griffiths abandoned their supposed objectivity and took a stance in opposition of the war.

Lastly, new social documentary photographers emerged from the mix of anti-Vietnam War activism and conceptual art ideas of the era to add another dynamic to the idea of the photograph as a document. The interests of this informal group, which included Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Fred Lonidier among others, included techniques not traditionally associated with documentary work, such as collage, to comment on social oppression without making "victim photographs" that evoked too much overt sympathy or voyeurism. Rosler says, "We wanted to be documentarians in a way that documentarians hadn't been…We wanted to use obviously theatrical or dramatized sequences or performance elements together with more traditional documentary strategies, to use text, irony, absurdity, mixed forms of all types." (Marien 429)

© Martha Rosler, Balloons

We can see that the terms “photojournalism” and “documentary photography” showed significant flexibility before the 1970s. “Photojournalism” went from encompassing the construction of events by the photographer - such as Alexander Gardner's openly rearranged Civil War battle scenes - to considering itself as objective reportage, including politics as part of its stance, and accepting first-person perspective in the form of "new journalism." “Documentary photography” went from being considered the recording of actual documents to being a passionate crusading appeal intended to provoke its audience to action with the work of Riis and Hine, a passive and objective lens with the FSA, an attempt to present psychological reality, sociological assessment, the recording of other art forms for documentation such as earthworks, and even the physical collage of images.

As Lili Corbus Bezner writes in her book Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War, “documentary photography frequently intrudes into contradictory categorization; it exists uneasily, therefore, within the supposedly distinct domains of journalistic, artistic, landscape, fashion, and advertising photography.” (Bezner 1) Similarly, Beaumont Newhall, the first director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a later edition of The History of Photography, “Since World War II the [documentary] movement has lost impetus in the organizational sense. Its tenets have been absorbed and have become essential to the fabric of photojournalism.” (Bezner 12)

To be continued Friday

Reading Shortlist 3.2.12

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with a listing of recommended 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.

Andrea Frazzetta, The New York Times Magazine, "Nollywood's Walk of Fame" Frazzetta's images accompany an article written by Andrew Rice for the magazine about the $500 million-a-year "Nollywood" film industry of Nigeria.

James Dodd, Flickr, "A parting note" Dodd explains his reasons for leaving Flickr and in doing so gives an insight into the current state of what was once a central hub for photography community and sharing. He also touches on the question of sharing your work online for free.

Robert Frank, LIFE (May 21, 1951), "Speaking of Pictures" After checking out this early photo essay by a 26-year-old Frank in Paris of....chairs, I'm prepared to say The Americans is better.

Sam Grobart, The New York Times, A Review of the Lytro Camera Grobart examines the first Lytro which allows you to focus the image on your computer in post-production. Includes a link to an example image that you can experiment with.

Impossible Colors, Wikipedia A fascinating thought: that under special artificial laboratory conditions it is possible to see colors ordinarily impossible. Hat tip to T. F. Tolhurst.

Liverly Morgue In case you missed it, The New York Times launched a new blog on Tumblr featuring images from their photo "morgue" of millions of pictures. The reverse sides of the images are provided and are frequently as interesting as the images themselves.

Sebastiao Salgado, Looking Back At You This link is to part one of a six-part documentary on YouTube about the Brazilian photographer Salgado. Includes lengthy interviews, video of his working process from his cameras to his prints, and footage of him working in the field.

Alec Soth, Minneapolis StarTribune, A photographer's-eye view of Martin Parr Soth calls Parr the "Jay-Z of documentary photography." Includes a link to a second article with a video about Parr's visit to Minnesota to photograph ice this past January.

Larry Towell, CNN, Faces of the Taliban Magnum photographer Larry Towell hired an Afghan journalist in order to enter Taliban camps to make these photographs that give a face the insurgency group.

Pieter Wisse, 500 Photographers Blog, Shut down your computer and go live! Wisse eloquently gives us the reminder we all periodically need to hear. Thanks Pieter.

Interview: Irina Rozovsky

Irina Rozovsky (b. 1981, Moscow) studied French and Spanish literature as an undergraduate at Tufts University and received an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art in 2007. Her work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions and publications, including: 25 under 25: Up and Coming American Photographers, powerHouse Books and Duke University; 31 Women in Art Photography, curated by Charlotte Cotton and Jon Feinstein; Exposure at the PRC, curated by Mia Hamm; the Magnum Expression Award juried by Martin Parr; Humble Arts Collector's Guide to New Art Photography; Rencontres, Arles; PHotoEspaña, Madrid. Most recently, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the New England School of Photography, Boston. This spring she published her first monograph One to Nothing (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg). Irina lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Parsons the New School for Design and the International Center of Photography.

______________________________

fototazo: It’s been said that The Americans is an example of a body of work that could only have been made by an outsider, someone who could look at the United States with the distance necessary to see the country clearly. This is something that has been said several times in reviews of One to Nothing about you and your perspective on Israel.

The counter-argument to this line of thinking has always been that an artist should focus on whom and what they know best – themselves, their world, their community – in order to speak about the world beyond themselves. What do you think of these arguments - that now extend to your work - and what gives you the motivation to make work as well as the faith in making work about the world outside your own?

Irina Rozovsky: I never know where my own world ends and the outside world begins. Since I came here as a kid and had to learn to adapt, I've held onto this idea that I could dissolve into any context and kind of belong, at least temporarily. The camera let's me in close, yet permits a skeptical distance. My immediate world is small and there is so much I want to see beyond it. This wanting allows pictures to happen.

One to Nothing has images that were made out of pure curiosity, surprise and awe that you can only feel when you're confronting something for the first time. Thank you for the Robert Frank analogy, I'll take that anytime, but I never really felt like an outsider. The inside/outside point of view is a complicated thing — I actually believe you can be closer to something you don't know, that is not yours. So at the same time I was a tourist in Israel, I had a very strong sense that I was home in a big way. It sounds new-agey, but it was like suddenly tapping into a living, breathing human history and realizing you are part of it, not just an individual molecule floating in space.

f: In comments on your work, reviews have also frequently talked about how you show the "other side" of Israel and have stayed away from a direct encounter with the traditional storylines and themes that dominate the news and that form the common impression of the country.

How much are your images a conscious - however oblique - look at the dominant themes commonly connected to Israel such as the role of religion in shaping the territory, settlements, Palestinian-Israeli dynamics, violence and the army, and how much are these themes inevitable because of the work having been made in Israel? Or would you disagree that these themes exist in the work? In short - how consciously are you addressing issues in contemporary Israel?

IR: I think no matter what kind of art you make in Israel, it will always be read for a political message. It's in the air and comes with the territory. Oblique is the perfect word here because One to Nothing is apolitical, I'd say — more concerned about the effects and absurdity of conflict, rather than its details. This book wouldn't make for an informative news report, but it intends to convey in a subliminal way this land's complexity, riddled by never ending tug-of-war face-offs. There is no knowing the facts in Israel. Whatever you hear is coming from one side or the other. I'm curious about neutrality, an empathetic distance.

f: In one of the book's two essays Jon Feinstein says that you sought to explore the territory with an "uninhibited whimsy." Looking at your work, however, it seems too consistent, too carefully considered, too conscious of a deeper content to be called whimsical. How would you connect how he describes how you approached making the work and how the images read?

IR: I didn't really go with the idea to take pictures, it was a surprise. I fell into this project but when I landed, my feelers went up and I realized this was very important. The pictures came very quickly, almost violently fast. I made two years worth of pictures in two weeks. I think that's what Jon has picked up on—that there is an instinctual thinking going on rather than an analytical one in the images themselves. Coming to terms with what I'd gathered took longer. The edit for the book was endless in comparison. But even in the sequence and edit it was important to hold onto a sort of whimsy, to avoid obvious combinations and overt statements. The "whimsical" Jon addresses, I think, is a beating-around-the-bush that might be present in this project.

f: We are almost never allowed to connect with the people in the book– eyes are closed, averted, or covered; people face away from us. Talk about your relationship to your subjects, why you keep the observer at a distance from them, and how that helps you to develop the themes in your work.

IR: I might be jinxed because many of the people in my pictures have their eyes closed. I did a small project once where I put all these accidental blinker photos together and it suddenly made all the sense in the world. So when it happens, I want to believe it's a blessing, like the person is trying to tell me something that's very difficult to say. In Israel, the faces averting my camera seem to say there is no time for this, there are bigger fish to fry than posing for photos. The people in these photos are not personalities—they are representations of the human effort dealing with physical and existential challenges. They are stand-ins. Also, I don't want to be visible in this project. I think the only time there is eye contact is the donkey on the back cover, making up for all the missing eye contact throughout.

f: In addition to keeping us from connecting with the characters in the book, you include many unexplained narratives and actions, stripping us of our ability to understand the images through context, and instead use color and location, light and pattern to lace the images together. This abstraction of narrative counters the deep traditional and historical story lines relating to Israel as well as the consistent, almost propagandistic narratives we have heard from all political sides.

It almost seems, ironically, that one of the ways that you are humanizing the space and the people is to make both more abstract, and that your approach to rejuvenating the stale narratives about Israel is to scramble all narrative completely. What's your sense of the role of narrative in your work and how it fits the narratives frequently repeated about the country? Are you actively trying to change the narratives perpetrated by and installed upon the country by giving us different images of the country?

IR: To tell the truth, I hadn't really seen any photography about Israel before going. The only narrative running through my mind, unsurprisingly, was what little I'd read of the Bible. As such, my pictures were a response to the place, to its mythology, to its pre-historic legacy, and to its heart. I had seen a film by Avi Mograbi called August: A Moment Before the Eruption (2002) which I liked a lot. It blends documentary and drama to address the political conundrum in a powerful but deft and humorous way. I think what you're talking about is a broken narrative, where you have to piece things together with all your might, a confusion that reflects the reality itself. Also, it was important to go from dark to light, to emerge from a cave and end in the blistering sun where the image is burned out and hardly there. In that, I saw a type of hope, romantic but impossible.

f: You approach making the images in One to Nothing in a number of ways, but tilting horizons, a warm golden light and a unifying beige palette are among the formal hallmarks of many of the images in the book. I thought about these aesthetic qualities as perhaps a response to the space and light of Israel and as a way you were developing the themes in the work, but then I saw a number of the images from your current work in process - In Plain Air - have similar formal traits. How much of how you make images is about you and your aesthetic interests and how much about the place or subject you are photographing?

IR: I respond so strongly to bright light. I can deal with bleak, blank light and thank God for without it the book would have been like cotton candy. It's hard for me to explain, but I think in the sun I have more options in regards to mood. When the light is diffused and gray, the images can't help but be sad or contemplative downers. But in the sun I have more to work with and it's interesting to try to make sad images despite a bright and cheerful sunlight. It's the same with In Plain Air. It's mostly sunny and bright but there's a strange sadness in the atmosphere because you know this day will run out, it can't last. I am big on Kodak Portra film, which adds to the warmth of the light. So it's both a combination of place/subject and the visual language I lean towards.

f: Let's pick two images and have you talk us through the making of them and use them to continue to explore your answers to some of the previous questions.

First, how about the cover image of the two young men in a wrestling embrace. How did you make it and what does it mean to you? Is this a photograph you set up, a moment you noticed and recorded or something you saw and asked the two men to repeat? Is this a straight-forward slice - out of context - of ordinary life from "the other side" of Israel? Or is this image also a metaphor of Israel and Palestine, or of Israel's past and present, or of Israel’s secular and religious communities or an abstract representation of the struggle between all of these dichotomies of Israel, intertwined and interdependent?

IR: These are my cousins I was traveling with, and this is the Dead Sea. They are brothers. Dan was at one point on the Israeli National Wrestling team and Mark also wrestles. They were messing around and I asked them to hold it, took a couple of shots. It's one of those few moments when a photograph can turn reality into myth. Two very real people become the figures on a Greek vase, they’re dead-locked, they seem equal, their forces zero-out. They could have been like this since beginning of time and will go on indefinitely. I knew immediately it would be the cover: two individuals locked in stubborn confrontation, melding into one unit, something resembling a four legged animal. Strangely, they seem stronger as one. Leaning on each other, the face-off becomes an embrace. Intertwined and interdependent, yes.

f: How about the image of the wrecked car in the distance, seen over the shoulder of a man in the foreground. What is the story behind making this image? How much does it capture a de-contextualized moment of everyday life, a moment out of the ordinary but that could be from anywhere, and how much is it a reference to the violence of the region or to the lack of a political way forward in the region at this point in history?

IR: On our way south, we took a detour at a canyon that was advertised on road signs. Mark wanted me to drive closer to it, around its perimeter on the narrowest path I have ever seen. We argued and I refused to go, I was mortified. Then we noticed a car that had fallen to the bottom of the canyon, and it settled our dispute. Mark sat silent, watching it. I have always thought the back of the onlooker in this photo has a strange tension. In the face of destruction it seems both tranquil and unnerved, hesitant and defiant. Looking down at someone else's demise, you wonder about your own, you feel both mighty and insecure. I have also thought this might be how God looks down on this land. When a curator in Israel saw this image, she said: "this is so banal, we see this all the time." I was shocked, for me it's one of the most outwardly violent images in the book.

f: What are your next steps and plans?

IR: I'm loving the slowness of my current project In Plain Air. I have until recently been an "on the go" photographer, grabbing and running according to a subconscious mind map of image-making. But I have slowed down, I return again and again to the same place, I comb through it, I remake the same image. I am so interested in this place and mean to keep going, which means I have to be in New York. Besides that, I would like to go abroad to make work at some point in the future.