Category: PROCESS

A TRIP TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ART, DEN HAAG

Okay, my time in Groningen was over. The Noorderlicht International Fotofestival will carry on until December 1st without me. I was booked and bound to go, so I trained to Amsterdam and holed up there for the night.

  • Reading material, en route: Groningen to Amsterdam
  • Turkish street food, West Amsterdam
  • View, West Amsterdam

Next morning made my way to Den Haag to give a Lunch Lecture to the photography students at The Royal Academy of Art, now known as KABK.

  • En route, Amsterdam to Den Haag
  • Den Haag.
  • Donald Weber met me at the station.
  • Poster, Royal Academy of Art.

Donald Weber took me to the auditorium and kindly set me up. Then explained that they never know how many students will attend. Could be 10, could be 150. By the time I started the place was full.

I began talking about my approach, about how I do it for the experience, and that learning and discovery are very important to me. As is allowing the subject (whatever it may be) to dictate (up to a point) how it might be photographed.

  • Outside/inside, Royal Academy of Art

When I was showing some images from USER an audience member raised his hand and made a statement. As far as I could make out he told me that addicts have no agency, are in a constant state of delirium so can’t make proper decisions about anything, and that I had no business photographing them. He seemed to be implying they shouldn’t be photographed at all.

Okay, I responded, although that’s not my experience, I understand why you might think that way. Photographing “the other” is a tricky thing. There’s a lot to be lost and little to be gained treading down that treacherous path. But, properly approached, I continued, there can be worth in working with subjects that are currently considered politically incorrect. (Especially, I thought to myself, in these extraordinarily reactionary times, the reactions coming, of course, from both the right and the left.) And in my opinion, I concluded, the risk is not only worth taking, but also necessary, otherwise our culture will just stagnate.

But this back and forth didn’t really go anywhere. He was certain I was wrong, maybe even a bad man (and is, of course, partially correct, because nothing in this world is pure). I was certain that there are, in fact, ethical ways to broach tough subjects (ditto).

With that dealt with in, really, a less than satisfactory way, I continued to the end of my talk. Don and I then made our way to his 4th year class where we were going to look at and talk about student portfolios.

  • Don with 4th year students

After a bit of a continuation of the Lunch Lecture kerfuffle, Don began showing (referring to, really) a couple of the student portfolios. These portfolios were actually book-like compendiums of bits of 3 or 4 of their recent projects. The ones he handed to me were both quite esoteric, and I don’t really get esoteric.

Now don’t get me wrong, I recognized worth in both those book-things. Problem was the work just wasn’t speaking to me. I was not their audience.
So I got this sinking feeling that I would have nothing to contribute if all the student’s work was aimed in the general direction of academia.

But when I began to look through the portfolios and talk with the students individually I was pleasantly surprised. Most of them were going out into the world and engaging with what they chose to look at and wonder about. They were bringing back their perspectives in a way that strove to accentuate the storytelling qualities of photography in a personal, authentic and non-elitist way.

I wish I had images of the students’ work to show you. But things were moving too fast for me to even begin to think about taking the time out to photograph the portfolios. Instead I’ll break up all these words with a few random pix I shot in Holland . . .

  • View from train
  • Wall
  • Outside my hotel room, Groningen
  • Sandwich

. . . Anyway, here’s a quote from Dawould Bey that expresses what I think in a very succinct way: “. . . the best work tends to result not from the imposition of an idea on a situation, but from being responsive to what is going on once you get there. Otherwise, what results is merely the illustration of an idea.”

And that seemed to be how most of the KABK photography students were endeavouring to use photography . . . in a responsive way. As a result I saw a lot of smart, curious work in their portfolios.

All this made good sense to me, especially after immersing myself in the work on display at the Noorderlicht Fotofestival.

Much of the photography I saw in The Netherlands (at Noorderlicht and KABK) was the product of going out into the world and reacting to it in a personal, rounded and politically informed way. Those reactions (photographs) were then organized so that they communicated complicated thoughts in a non-precious manner.

And that brings me to the other thing I wanted to write about this week: The differences (generally speaking) between the photography I saw in Europe and what I’m seeing in Canada.

But this is already too long, so that’ll have to wait until next week.

Right now I’ll just get myself back home to Ottawa, via a one day stopover in Amsterdam . . .

  • En route, Den Haag to Amsterdam
  • Amsterdam Centraal
  • Selfie in the toilet at FOAM (the white dot is on the mirror)
  • The woman sitting across from me, Amsterdam trolley
  • My Rembrandt hat (totally tourist)
  • Train station, en route to Schiphol
  • View of Greenland from 34,000 feet
  • A vine in my back yard, the day of my return
OTTAWA NOTES

SOME SCENES FROM THE SPAO OPEN HOUSE
  • Outside
  • Inside
  • Vera Saltzman showed her work O HUMAN CHILD in the gallery
  • Some O HUMAN CHILD
  • Detail, first year work. Theme: HOME
  • HOME
  • Second year work
  • Detail

UPCOMING THIS WEEK. OF INTEREST.
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Olivia Johnston and Janet Tulloch: Eternal Representations

Photographer Olivia Johnston and Janet Tulloch, artist and religious studies scholar, will have a conversation about Olivia’s exhibition, Saints and Madonnas. Carleton University Art Gallery, St. Patrick’s Building (no pun intended) Wednesday, November 6th, seven to eight-thirty.

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Kat Fulwider: Voices of the Streets

Voices of the Streets will showcasKat Fulwider‘s portraits and stories of homeless and at-risk youth. The exhibition happens at Thursday, November 8th, Point Of View Gallery, 55 Byward Market Square, 2nd floor, five to eight.

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Fran Ages: The Parkland Portraits

Fran Ages will be showing her suite of images showing survivors of the Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School shooting. Saturday, November 9, Cinqhole, 5b Fairmont Ave., two to five.

COPIED AND CO-OPTED

The current evolution (and devolution) of our culture and thus, politics, as it relates to photography is a (figurative) wormhole down which any thinking person might disappear and lose their mind. I’m going to leave it to smarter, more rounded people than me to bring you well thought out treatises on various aspects of that.

All’s I really want to do here is, I want to bring up, and leave dangling, just one thing . . . How quickly new, innovative photography is copied and co-opted.

Used to be finding new photography that informed and inspired was a long slow process. And for me “long” and “slow” and “process” are things that give worth. I’ve never been a fan of easy. It’s too easy.

But now the knockoff artists are running rampant. Within weeks of some new vision creating a sensation, being noticed, adding something to the canon, it is being copied.

A couple of cases in point . . .

Take the work of Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang. He shook things up a few years ago with the new, weird way he was working with youth and the body. Think Ryan McGinley with a (formal) edge.

© Ren Hang

And Zanele Muholi, from South Africa, who’s way of rendering black skin and showing costume was a revelation.

Skim through the mainstream photo/fashion publications and lots of “fine art” photographers’ websites, and so on, and you’ll see many pale imitations of these (above) approaches. And it seemed to happen overnight.

Spending real time searching for inspiration, for process, for personal meaning seems, in many cases to have gone the way of the dodo bird, i.e. extinct.

Too often in PhotoWorld™ the job gets done by biting someone else’s style.

Of course, nothing is really new. The real innovation (and truth and discovery) comes with (and by) the combining of many and various elements into a whole. When you take (yes, take) bits and pieces of what already exists, tumble them around in your brain, and spend the time and emotional capital to develop tactics and strategies to render that mashup you will (if you care and have talent) end up with something authentic.

OTTAWA NOTES

First of all . . . drool. will not be appearing next Sunday. I’ll be at the Noorderlicht International Fotofestival, The Netherlands.

Not taking my laptop, just a phone. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna write, and format a blog on that thing.

I will, though, be posting copious images and bits of writing on Twitter, Insta, and the Facebook. Follow me there if you need to see that stuff.

DO IT FOR THE GRAIN

There’s a new(ish), free photo zine available in Kapital City. DO IT FOR THE GRAIN, brought to you by Kenneth Yams, is billed as “a semi-regular publication of analog black and white photography by local artists”.

(As an aside, I’m not sure about separating and fetishizing film photography. In should be about the image, right? Why should anyone care what camera was used to create it? But, hey, you start a publication, blog, whatever, you get to do what you want.)

Anyway, in the issue I managed to find (vol 1/ issue 4. 16 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 inches) you will see a mix of, well, analog B&W photography.

Some of the page spreads are quite poetic, others too obvious, but you can tell attention has been paid to sequence, pairings and flow.

Of course, with the ease and relative low cost of printing stuff like this there is always the danger that one will just throw up, onto the printed page, the low-end vacuity often seen on social media. But I must say I was pleasantly surprised by DO IT FOR THE GRAIN. It will be interesting to see how this project evolves.

DO IT FOR THE GRAIN has a kind of bare-bones social media presence, but you can find further info, and where to pick up a copy, on their Facebook and Insta feeds.

A GRANDER SCHEME

In which I begin to stick prints to a board, looking for some pattern, some something.

And if process doesn’t interest you just scroll to the bottom for a review of Leslie Hossack’s show Freud Through the Looking-Glass.

Let’s go . . .

TRIAL AND ERROR AND ERROR AND ERROR

I’ve never enjoyed aimless photography . . . you know, walking around grabbing, like a crow, any shiny thing that attracts my attention.

Neither have I liked photography that is ultra-focused . . . you know, those bodies of work where every damn photo is just about the same.

A grander scheme is what I’m after, something with deeper complexity and dimension than either of the above-mentioned approaches engender.

Now, I prefer to let the subject matter, as much as my biases and proclivities, inform how I photograph each of my projects. The problem here, or, rather, one of the problems, is that I have no idea what the subject matter actually is. This project doesn’t even have a name or any coordinates.

And I must stress here that the subject matter does not necessarily have to be that which I’m photographing. No, the stuff I’m photographing might just be a stand-in for some other thing. You know . . . metaphorical, metaphysical, something.

So the other day I chose 48 images from my select folder and made some small prints.

And so it begins, this (other) initial phase of a project that is unlike any project I have done before.

I’m gonna stick ’em up on my bulletin boards, move ’em around and look for some sense, a pattern, some way forward. At this point I’m just trying to find out what the aim of this project might actually be.

And part of this phase is (maybe) figuring out how I want the images to relate to one another, bearing in mind that the final form of this thing will (might be) be some kind of printed publication.

I kind of like the idea of 2-shot columns. And of course there’s always the good-old standard side-by-side thing. Or what about simply one photo by itself, and then another?

The only thing I know at this point is that I don’t know. That, and that there’s a whole lot more image-gathering, pondering and trial and error and error and error ahead of me.

Something to look forward to.

OTTAWA NOTES

LESLIE HOSSACK at STUDIO SIXTY SIX

After more than a decade spent studying (with brilliant icy precision and a lack of sentimentality) the architectural infrastructure (and thus the politics) of the era surrounding World War II, Leslie Hossack has shifted focus.

Her new work, Freud Through the Looking-Glass (on view at Studio Sixty Six), is framed as a study of the pre-war Vienna of Freud and Hitler, but the photos belie that strict interpretation. This work shows us Hossack’s reactions to encountering the, for lack of a better word, infrastructure surrounding Sigmund Freud.

That is . . . rather than showing us, as she has done in the past, her arrival at some destination (the East Gate of the 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin, for instance) here Hossack shows us her journey to the destination.

Not to give you the idea that these photographs are a travelog of her trip to Berggasse 19, in Vienna, where Freud lived and practiced for almost 50 years. On the contrary, the images here are all situated either directly outside Freud’s old office, or in its inside. The (subtle but present) difference from her previous work lies in the type of images Hossack has brought back from that encounter, as well as in their sequencing.

We are brought from the outside to the inside through a chronological sequence. We enter and move through a hall to the couch where the psychoanalysis took place. It’s a trip.

Further, on the facing wall is a series of images where we see, mapped on as a ghostly smear, Hossack’s face reflected in the glass that covers some of the art and other artifacts that inhabited Freud’s office.

By inserting herself, and by adding narrative elements to the whole, Freud Through the Looking-Glass shows us Hossack’s reaction to what’s in front of her in a way deeper than just registering awe. The work begins to become psychological.

Recommended.

Leslie Hossack
Studio Sixty Six