Project Release: Timothy Archibald, "Stereoscopy Photographs"

fototazo publishes new photography projects, providing an early look at images from selected artists. Today's Project Release is from Timothy Archibald.

Timothy Archibald (b. 1967, Schenectady, N.Y.) is an American photographer living and working in San Francisco, CA. Archibald's personal projects have appeared in the collections of Videotage in Hong Kong, The Australian Center for Photography, The Museum of Sex, New York and The Catskill Center for Photography in Woodstock N.Y.  He is the author of Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews (Process, 2005) and ECHOLILIA / Sometimes I wonder (Echo Press, 2010).

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The Image: Timothy Archibald, "Jessy at Steve's House, 2004"

I was always interested in things that were almost human. Stand-in's for humanity, copycats of the human form. Early projects I wrapped myself up in were focused on ventriloquists' and their dummies, then another small project on robots that looked like people. When my project focusing on inventors of home-made sex machines started to come together, I realized it had everything I had always hoped for in a project: folksy people telling real stories, and then this sensational subject matter that was kind of human, kind of not…to be the enticement to draw people in.

Jessy at Steve’s House, 2004 is a photograph that came from that project. At the time, I had been a big fan of the work of photographer Dan Winters. His photographs were filled with small details, every one of them intentional, that the viewer would discover and feel rewarded by as they put time into his images. In my own clunky fashion, I felt this image showed his influence. We have this four legged sex machine in the corner, like a pet waiting for food to drop. We have this poster riffing on Marilyn Monroe's playboy magazine spread hanging above, flattened by perspective but vaguely recognizable. This ambiguous female shape on the wall above the couch, looking like a mudflap girl silhouette, but not quite complete. Oh, and then we have this un-easy looking subject and a disembodied set of legs, bright against the shiny leather. I thought it all added up to a story set in a sexual setting, with the star of the photograph a four-legged anthropomorphic machine with a human penis for a head.

At the time I was wrapped up in the project a lot of my contemporaries questioned my intentions of getting so wrapped up in this sexual subject matter, wondering if the project was pornography, or if it reflected my life in some way. And really, once the conversation goes in that direction, you can't really talk your way out of it. But it seemed that the people who knew my work over the years, with this interest in subjects just not quite human, had come to understand this as the obvious next thing.

- Timothy Archibald

Timothy Archibald on Portraiture

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 11th in the series of their responses. The other responses is the series have come from Cori Pepelnjak, Anastasia Cazabon, Margo Ovcharenko, Shen Wei, Lucas Foglia, Susan Worsham, Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell and Jess T. Dugan.

San Francisco-based photographer Timothy Archibald is the author of Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews (Process, 2005) and ECHOLILIA/Sometimes I wonder (Echo Press, 2011) and runs the blog T.A.

© Phyllis Galembo. Surprise Box, Jacmel, Haiti, 2004

Timothy Archibald: A great portrait is like a great book or a great song....it has the thing that it is supposed to be about, but then, at closer inspection, it can be about anything, everything, things that are personal to your journey and things that are universal.

It can be this thing you can project into and learn things from all at the same time.

How does a photograph achieve that? That...well, that is the hard part...its just too hard to explain how to create it...one never really knows how to do it, but you know it when you see it.

A recent book that was filled with what struck me as great portraits is Maske by Phyllis Galembo. The attached image is titled "Surprise Box, Jacmel, Haiti 2004." There is no question that I would be able to look at this image time and time again and get something from it. The content is candy-coated...the color and lighting gives us some visual splendor to suck us into the image. But look closely: a hooded man, shiny body, holding a box with a plastic E.T. in it. It's folk art, and pop art, and anthropology all wrapped up and presented to us...but that is just the candy packaging. Look at it long enough and it's like looking at a Rothko painting. Is that guy me? Is that guy the photographer's alter ego? The body language and gesture...the act of giving a gift. Is it generosity...emotional and spiritual generosity....or is it simply American junk? And the pose...is it Madonna and child-esque? Baby Jesus in the shape of E.T.? Really...I could go on and on and on. When that feeling overtakes me...the sheer enthusiasm in which I could really just spit out a stream of consciousness list of all the open-ended things in an image and their possible meanings and references...that is when I feel a portrait is great.

Anastasia Cazabon on Portraiture

© Timothy Archibald

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 9th in the series of their responses. The other responses is the series have come from Margo Ovcharenko, Shen Wei, Lucas Foglia, Susan Worsham, Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell and Jess T. Dugan.

Anastasia Cazabon is from Cambridge, Massachusetts and graduated from the New England School of Photography and from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She was a co-founder of the photography collective The Exposure Project. She was included in the Humble Arts Foundation publication The Collector's Guide to Emerging Art Photography. She has shown her work internationally, including shows in Greece, Germany, the United States, Italy, and a solo show at The Gallery for Photography in Gdansk, Poland.

© Andrea Modica. Treadwell, NY (1987)

Anastasia Cazabon: For me a good photographic portrait is more then just an image of someone, it also tells a story and makes me want to know more. Honesty and sensitivity are critical components to a portrait. I see so many photographs that treat the subject as a commodity or an object, completely stripping away the humanity and leaving the viewer empty. Those types of photographs disinterest me as they are devoid of soul and sensitivity.

I love to see the moment captured when the subject is not conscious of the camera. I know that it’s close to impossible for an individual not to be aware of the camera and not to involuntarily put up and hide behind a defensive wall. Even when someone takes a picture of me I can feel myself tense up. So when I see a portrait that seems to be free of the veil of self-consciousness, it's refreshing. That's perhaps the reason I love the freedom of expression emanating from the photographs of children and young people, because as subjects they are unpretentious and not overly self-aware.

© Viktoria Sorochinski

The portraiture of Andrea Modica, specifically the work in "Treadwell" is an example of photographs that I find to be beautiful, honest, sensitive, and yet mysterious. Some work that I have seen recently that has affected me is Timothy Archibald's project "Echolilia", which focuses on his son who is along the autism spectrum. It's free of any sense of frustration and reverberates with love, acceptance, and humor. Another photographer whose work I just recently saw is Viktoria Sorochinski. Her project "Anna & Eve" is quite exquisite and another example of enigmatic portraiture that speaks to the viewer.