Book review: Ken. To be destroyed.

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 / 4 COMMENTS / EDIT

Title: Ken. To be destroyed.

Author: Sara Davidmann

Date: 2016

Main points of the book: Davidmann has created works which question the position of art practice within the exploration of archives.

Evidence to prove the points: Davidmann states: “The story of Ken and Hazel is also the story of an archive, things kept, not carefully as in a museum, but stashed in a garage, though not forgotten, only half-remembered, and problematic when they became an heirloom – what do we do with history when it is unassembled, unmapped, bewildering – and ours? ” (Davidmann P 25)

Looking at the vintage photos handed down to her by her mother, Davidmann became aware of their surfaces. The marks of time and damage had become part of the images. She then started to work on the surfaces of the photographs she produced using ink, chalks, hand colouring, magic markers and correction fluid.

Other books which are on the same topic: I have not found any book except work by Jane Long, an Australian photographer and artist , on her website and blog.(3)

Jane Long is a Brisbane-based fine art photographer and artist, who is the mind behind the wildly imaginative Dancing with Costică series. According to Long, she was looking for photos to test her retouching skills on, when she stumbled upon the Flickr account of Costică Acsinte, a Romanian photographer who took the original photos throughout the 1930s and ’40s. (1)

‘After finding the Costică Acsinte Archive on Flickr, I became fascinated with the images and their subjects. I wanted to bring them to life. But more than that, I wanted to give them a story.”

The stories often seem haunting and surreal, even like something out of a Tim Burton movie, and yet still grounded in something profoundly human. “I will probably never know the real stories of these people, but in my mind they became characters in tales of my own invention… star-crossed lovers, a girl waiting for her lover to come home, boys sharing a fantasy, innocent children with a little hint of something dark,” Long says.’ (2)

I think the book by Davidmann differs from the work by Long in that, unlike Long, she does know the history of the subjects in the vintage photographs, so the reworked images extend a known history rather than work purely from the imagination to create a fiction.

The readers who would find this work useful are those, like John Akumfrah, who want us to look at archival material differently.

Does the author have the necessary expertise to write this book:

Davidmann, whose work has been exhibited and published internationally, has been working with UK transgender and queer communities for 15 years.

How successful is Sara Davidmann in carrying out the overall purposes of the book?

The interlacing of relationships is, for me, the strongest element of the rationale in this book. The gripping ties in the relationships cross generations reflect the incredible tensions in the letters : the neice is drawn in to the relationships between husband and wife Ken and Hazel; between Hazel and her sister Audrey; between Audrey and her husband Manfred, and between Manfred and his sister-in-law Hazel.
The protagonist in this story is the author, Sara Davidmann who creates an alternate identity for transgender Ken by giving him a new name K – the pronunciation of which gives him that female identity he always wanted. Through her own manipulation of the original images, she also gives K a female physical identity and dresses him up in Hazel’s dresses. She, as probably her mother before her, must have felt the tension in Ken’s life and, through her artistic intervention in the archival find, seemed to give him peace to be what he wanted to be out in the open.

In presenting the archival material as she has, Davidmann has, in my opinion, produced a very thought-provoking document which is sensitively presented at a time in our social history when LGTBQ issues are at the forefront of our language of social inclusion. The treatment the author gives the subject reflects a meticulous untangling and reassembling of the un-mapped and bewildering historical artefacts. It was as if she was conducting an archeological dig of in her family’s relationships.

What I had hoped would come out was the conversations the author had either with or about her aunt and or uncle.

Compared to the only other art manipulation of archival images, that of Jane Long, this book shows that it has gone beyond digital manipulation of the material. There is a closer relationship between the author and the subject; there is a more sensitively told story through the images; we are not simply marveling at the expertise of the author – we become involved in the story she is telling and the life she is recreating. Although Long was trying to create a new story or fairy tale with her images, there is not the depth of involvement purely because, in reality, she knew nothing about the subjects in her images.

Highlights for me about the book:

A) Regarding the content:

I found it bizarre that the author’s father should annotate the letters not addressed to him. I cannot understand why he felt he needed to do that.

I really enjoyed the space the author gave each beautifully photographed piece of the archive. It seems as if she was trying to get away from the traditional family album format of cramming in as many photos as possible.

The author gets much closer, both physically and emotively, to her relations after their death than when they were alive.

B) Regarding the idea behind the book:

Some of the more destructive treatments paradoxically enhance, in my opinion, the deep reverence the author has for the material in her hands. It reminds me of a quote from John Roberts’ introduction to “The art of interruption. Realism, photography and the everyday” regarding 1960’s Henri Lefebvre theories of culture: ‘The everyday is where the ideological struggles over values are fought out and not in any hypothetical realm of aesthetic sensitivity and beauty.’ (p8). this book is very much concerned with the ‘everyday’ and how we deal with it.

Furthermore, as in Bertold Brecht’s plays, the spectator of the drama revealed in Ken becomes ‘the living consciousness of the contradictions of the real’ – the duality that Ken had to live through because of the attitudes and values of the society of his time, made the lives of so many people in his family a tortured existence, as evidenced in the letters his wife wrote to her sister.

What I take away with me about the work: Its originality and the experimentation that was involved in creating the new images.

What I take away with me about me: I don’t know that I could mess about with photos of archival images. The reason for Davidmann doing that stemmed from her physical interaction with the original images before she photographed them.

Notes: There seems to be a contradiction between her reverence for her relationship with her family and the treatment of the images: the artistic interpretation has a violence in it which I think I would be afraid to express.

Not being from an artistic background, I don’t have that ‘mess’ experience which many artists have been through.

Next steps: Start getting messy!

Star rating: 5

References:

buzzfeed.com / …this-photographer-turns-vintage-photos-into-surreal-works-of-art
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/news/a37417/vintage-photos-art/
http://janelong.fotomerchant.com/dancing-with-costica
Davidmann,S.: 2016. Ken. To be destroyed. Schilt Publishing.

The Open See: Jim Goldberg

FEBRUARY 24, 2017 / 6 COMMENTS / EDIT

This is another work recommended by my tutor for Contextual Studies.

The only work I had known by Goldberg was Rich and Poor in which, unlike Open See, there is an afterword by the author to give the reader benchmarks from which to interpret the images. In Rich and Poor the subjects speak directly to the reader through the text they have hand-written about their images and their situation.

That work speaks to me because the author tells me what he felt about both the editions of the books – in 1985 and in 2013. He ends the 2013 publication with this paragraph which I see as a rationale and an (unpublished) afterword for his 2009 publication of his ongoing project the Open See:

“But I can’t let go of the desire, the impulse, to want to believe in a society where things really will get better. And, if nothing else, I hold out hope that my photographs and all the people I met can at least still speak for themselves.”

Although I understand, through Sean O’Hagan’s 2009 article in the Guardian, that Goldberg’s Open See project is still ongoing so he can’t write an afterword as he did for Rich and Poor, it would have been good to have had more information on the project. For example, Goldberg calls his subjects the ‘new Europeans’ – illegal immigrants, refugees, displaced people and asylum seekers from Africa, the Middle East and eastern Europe. He was commissioned initially by Magnum photographic agency to undertake the project starting in Greece in 2003 because that was where about two million immigrants had landed. This work in progress won him the Henri Cartier Bresson prize in 2007 which allowed him to travel to other parts f Europe which had, by then, also felt the pressure of the migrations.

Goldberg considers himself ‘a documentary storyteller’ creating fragmented narratives much like those in Rich and Poor, are told by the individuals he photographed. At the end of the 4th book in Open See, we rad more detailed stories of several of the subjects of his photographs. He stated:”there is a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though not answering them. I’m not a politically radical person. In fact, I’m much more interested in being radical aesthetically.’ (Guardian)

The questions implied in O’Hagan’s article concern the ‘immigrant as spectacle’; the desensitisation of the viewer through the avalanche of images about the suffering of the refugees / asylum seekers. As in Rich and Poor, the subjects are encouraged to write, in this case, on the Polaroids of the portraits. One of those subjects wrote “My dream is to go to Europe” and another “in the open see (sic) there is no border”. It is this which gave the series its name.

Many of the images in the four books which make up the series are full bleed images allowing no thinking space for the viewer. All the context you need is there in and on the page . Some of the images have the photographer’s markings on them making you focus even more on the subject. Technically, the images are not flawless but it is that ruggedness which, in my opinion, the documentary author is using to put across the desperation of the situation – the images are not clinical. Rough and rugged they part of his radical aesthetic and help deliver the story the author and his subjects want to tell.

This work was started 13 years ago and so many other photographers have tried to highlight the desperate situation. Alixandra Fazzina in the 2010 publication A million Shillings also follows the journey of the emigrants of the Horn of Africa who trust the smugglers off the coast of Somalia to get them to safety. In this, the author tells the stories which accompany the images of the emigrants as they set off at various embarkation points, as they cross, the fate that awaits them on the other side and the perilous journeys of survival when they reach their destinations. This is not part of an ongoing tale in itself, it is a complete cycle which we see repeated on a daily basis many, many times in our media today.

I find it interesting that Goldberg, an American, also finds himself an outsider in Europe and says: “I don’t really understand anything that I am seeing. I can be welcomed into people’s homes, i can be met with suspicion, I can be taken somewhere else altogether. there is always wonderment there for me, even if the person I am photographing may not see it or be aware of it.” (Guardian). Like British photojournalist Fazzina, Goldberg leaves us asking the question ‘will things get better?’ Do we as ‘settled’, privileged viewers share the optimism of the ‘new Europeans’?

References:

Fazzina, A.: 2010. A Million Shillings. Trolley Books.

Goldberg,J.: 2013. Rich and Poor. Steidl.

Goldberg,J.: 2009. Open See. Steidl.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/01/jim-goldberg-open-see-review

Philip Lorca diCorcia

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 / 2 COMMENTS / EDIT

Brief notes on a photographer who inspired my tutor Simon Barber who, in turn, thought that it might help with my research in to my BoW project.

Like the work of Gregory Crewdson and Geff Wall, that of diCorcia is staged and presents large scale colour prints in which truth and fiction co-exist. These ‘dramatising elements’ are what give the images their narrative power but, as we know that viewers come with their own needs and wants, no two people see the images in the same way – no two people construct the same narrative. It is this ambiguity which diCorcia strives to create. He also states”I did it because I wanted it to look like generic vernacular stuff rather than art photography.” (2)

His practice took in the ‘everyday’ beyond the realm of banality and infuses them with emotion and a narrative. The author maintained that whereas the subject was very ordinary, the photograph was carefully planned. diCorcia rejected the description ‘cinematic’ of his work because he maintained that he did not ‘elucidate’ a full narrative but merely suggested it. diCorcia ‘never wanted his images to propagate a moral truth or instigate social change'(1) Despite this caveat, in the report by Lucy Davies, diCorcia maintains that the series Husslers ‘was intended, in part, to be a thorn in the side of the pervading bigotry surrounding AIDS'(2)

‘When John Szarkowski, former director of MoMA’s Department of Photography, included the artist in the second iteration of the Museum’s New Photography exhibition series, in 1986, he wrote, “Philip-Lorca diCorcia involves us in the issues of story and plot by constructing tableaus that withhold information that we expect to be given.”3 DiCorcia’s photographs succeed because of his will to show more and tell less.'(1)

In his later work, the images are even more ambiguous in that there is little specificity in his subject: the scenes could be scenes taken anywhere.

He himself said:”If photography is in some way about the representation of reality, you don’t see it any more.” (2)

As far as my project is concerned, I don’t know if , or to what extent I can stage my scenes. I like the idea of the ‘everyday’. I would like to develop a Bertold Brecht ability to develop a scene in which ‘the spectator becomes the living consciousness of the contradictions of the real’ (John Roberts’ introduction to ‘The art of interruption: realism, photography and the everyday’ p.8)

References

Looking at Jean-Marc Bustamante oeuvres photographiques 1978 - 1999

and

the essay Private Crossing in Doris Drathen's Vortex of Silence

Why did I start looking at the work of this to me unknown photographer? He was recommended by a fellow student whose opinion I value and who also recommended an analysis by a respected critic.

Looking at the work of Bustamante, I felt I needed explanations particularly with reference to the titles he gave to his bodies of work. Why, when everything else is in French, give a title 'Something is missing' in English? particularly since I had no idea what was missing. Is he trying to be enigmatic for the sake of it? . Cyprès 1991, seemingly identical fir tree walls, screening something, perhaps?

References

Criqui, J-P.(Ed).1999. Jean-Marc Bustamante oeuvres photographiques 1978

- 1999.Centre national de la photographie.

von Drathen,D. 2004. Vortex of silence: proposition for an art criticism

beyond aesthetic categories. Charta.

A review of an oral presentation:

An OCA student, Helen Rosemier, asked me on FB if I could review her presentation (https://gmocarosemier.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/assignment-five-the-oral-presentation/) & this was my reply posted on her blog:

Hi Helen,

My thoughts on your oral presentation having never done your module or a recorded oral presentation:

Presentation:

you have a lovely voice which is lovely to listen to.

In my opinion, an oral presentation is not a written one spoken out loud. It has its own modulations, pauses, & gives an audience a chance to react to a question or insight. I would ask rhetorical questions so that the listeners get engaged with what you are going to show / have shown them.

Content:

Excellent – varied & to the point.
Good text / image balance.

IMO, going the start, middle end route is predictable. I would rather go post-modern = have a start a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order; start at the end – you have a super end – and then, at the end or in the middle, give your starter. When I started listening, I took the cursor to the end to see how long it was & promptly went & did something else. When I came back to it, I skipped the start & I am glad I did come back to it because it was very informative with a good balance of theory & image content. It also made me reflect on my essay which I am about to send off.

All the best.

Book review: Ken. To be destroyed.

The Open See: Jim Goldberg

Philip Lorca diCorcia

A review of an oral presentation:

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An OCA student, Helen Rosemier, asked me on FB if I could review her presentation (https://gmocarosemier.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/assignment-five-the-oral-presentation/) & this was my reply posted on her blog:

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