Dennis Adams (b. 1948) is an American conceptual artist whose work includes photography, text, and installation. Adams is best known for his projects involving structures placed in urban bus shelters, uncompromisingly inserted into the public sphere. These politically charged photographs and their accompanying texts are not used to make overtly ideological statements, but are open-ended in ways that challenge viewers to test their own convictions.
For over two years we made it our business to document abandoned working gloves on the streets of NYC. The feelings and thoughts that surrounded this activity connected to the ways his family relates to Gregor Samsa as a cockroach, or whatever Franz Kafka intended him to be in The Metamorphosis after his transformation from a productive citizen to a useless insect. When Gregor can't grant them a comfortable life-style any longer, his family starts to resent and hate the once loved and respected provider, finds him disgusting.
At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.
Animated Contingencies is an animated documentary that looks at how sketches take the place of photography in courtroom settings. Andrews focuses on how two different representations, a photograph and a courtroom sketch, capture the moment Moses Wright, Emmett Till's uncle, pointed out Till's murders while on the witness stand at their trial. The work then examines the authority of photographic evidence and how animated representations can provide both visibility and anonymity in testimony and other contexts.
From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s (b.1931) varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he employed such strategies as appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality, and text/image juxtaposition. With an ironic wit, Baldessari's work considers the gathering, sorting, and reorganizing of information.
From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man star gazes, scruff chats with guys, watches YouTube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs - feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Relative to the immensity of longing, the bodily insides become both portal and lens through which to probe the porousness between interior and exterior, the micro and macro. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic, as Eros is an issue of boundaries: When i desire you, a part of me is gone.
A Body in Fukushima is a film created by dance artist Eiko Otake consisting of still photographs, inter-titles, and an original score. Photographs are selected from tens of thousands taken by historian/photographer William Johnston of Otake alone in the surreal landscapes of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima, Japan. Otake edited the film and sound, which includes original music by Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington.
Horace Bristol discusses his long career in photography, which began with shooting for Life and Fortune magazines in the 1930s. His photojournalism took him to the Dutch East Indies and post-war Japan. His documents of Depression-era workers famously inspired John Steinbeck to write the classic The Grapes of Wrath. “I felt I was not an artist but a worker, so as a photojournalist, I had a job to do,” Bristol says.
Produced by the Fellows of Contemporary Art on artists exhibiting in a Pasadena Armory exhibition.
Los Angeles-based, Kaucyila Brooke (b.1952) makes what she describes as, "wall size photographic sequences in comic-strip format that consider lesbian relationships within American popular culture." Produced over the past five years, Brooke’s large-scale photo-text installations look at aspects of lesbian culture and alternative communities. Wry and often quite critical, they probe some of the ways lesbian relationships both challenge and reproduce the power relations and narratives of the wider culture.
Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was best known as a photographer and filmmaker. He moved to New York from his native Basel in 1935 at age 21. He shot portraits of many artists for Art News during the 1950s and early ’60s, capturing their work methods in candid and intimate photos. His films, frequently portraying cityscapes and urban life, include The Pursuit of Happiness (1940), Under the Brooklyn Bridge (1953), What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street (1956), Square Times (1967), and Inside Dope (1971).
To better understand what he has, filmmaker Cam Archer revisits former subjects, rephotographs them, and seeks new inspiration.
Robert Cumming (b. 1943) is an American photographer/sculptor/bookmaker who borrows from the artifice of theatrical sets to construct his elaborate and often absurd images. He has also published several books of photography and narration. Central to his work is his desire to remind us that we are looking at a photograph, and not at the thing being photographed. His captions sometimes draw on a photograph's narrative aspects or are used to mislead the viewer.
Dark Sun Squeeze is a darkly meditative exploration of a sewage treatment plant, revealing the hidden rhythms and bizarre journey of raw human waste. The images of flowing waste speak of decay, destruction, of madness inherent in excessive consumption. At the same time they reveal the redemptive side of detritus, its regenerative potential, the sublime that exists in the abject.
“Paweł Wojtasik delivers the final word on the absolute value of news, money, politics and just about everything else.”
-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, Oct 1, 2004
A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
Small biographies and musing generalizations--men’s relations to each other and their lives. There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and fro like the rocking of a ship. The minimalism of the photographic presentation allows the viewer to recognize the humanity in each individual document of a body.
Berlin-based Danish artist Olafur Eliasson complicates and simulates perception through his installations, sculptures, and photographs. He has created disorienting artificial illuminations and reproduced natural phenomena such as clouds, glaciers and the sun through large-scale, high-tech installations.
The Embassy deals with the codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial power over the West African country Guinea-Bissau, and with modes of memory production. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed with documentary diligence landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the 1940s and 1950s.
The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images. The loss of the 'genuine picture' means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry, but rather a new policy on images.
“The third part of the Eye/Machine cycle structures the material around the concept of the operational image. These are images which do not portray a process, but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape, then took an actual image during flight; the software compared the two images, resulting in a comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. This confrontation is also a montage, and montage is always about similarity and difference.
The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.
An alcoholic, emaciated father; a grossly obese, tattooed mother; a goofy, hormone-addled brother—all together in a claustrophobic council flat. Welcome to the Billinghams'. Richard Billingham wowed the art scene with his book Ray's A Laugh. Fishtank, his first film, charts the emotional territory of the flat and the family who play out their lives within its confines.
Decidedly low-tech, this optical abstraction begins with a shot of an aluminum reflector inside a lamp; a lightbulb in the shot’s center flicks on and off. As the video plays on, nearly identical shots are superimposed, but at a steadily decreasing scale, resulting in an array of nested rectangles. The rhythmic blinking of intense light- accompanied by audible clicks from the plastic light switch- presents the viewer with a swift progression of blinding geometries, (with) dizzying effects.
-- Michelle Grabner, Artforum, May 2010
Richard Ross discusses his interest in photographing museums—their display of objects, frames, the entire context—in order to question our definitions of the museum. The video also covers his ongoing series of triptychs made using a child’s plastic camera, which Ross turns into “art historical soap operas” by playing off the interactions of the groupings.
Only available on the Fellows of Contemporary Art compilation.
This extensive interview with California artist Doug Hall (b. 1944) provides unique insight into the culture and politics of experimental artistic production during the 1970s. Discussing the founding of the performance group TR Uthco, Hall offers context for his contribution to the field of video art, and shares stories of his collaborations with Ant Farm, Videofreex, and others. Ranging from his early years as an art student, to his romance with artist Diane Andrews Hall, to reflections on technology in art, this interview importantly extends the discourse surrounding topics of archive, performativity, and autobiography—subjects that have come to define the contours of video art today.
In 1998, Zaatari interviewed Egyptian photographer Van Leo in Cairo. In 2001 he made the video Her + Him Van Leo and based it on the story of a woman who once entered Studio Van Leo and asked the artist to take pictures of her naked. At the time, Zaatari had access to a few of the woman's twelve pictures. In 2010 Zaatari came across the entire series showing "Nadia" undressing in twelve poses and expanded the original work into this HD remastered version.
A portrait of a studio photographer, Her + Him VAN LEO also examines the photography of the 1940s and 50s from a critical perspective rather than a nostalgic one. This documentary utilizes traditional portrait photography and video in a dialogue between two media: crafted black and white print, and the electronically colored and manipulated screen. This dialog comments on the transformations in art practices and terminologies, and evokes some of the social/urban/political transformations that took place in Egypt over 50 years of its recent history.
Grieving the recent death of his father, filmmaker Cam Archer distracts himself with the regular photographing of a particular young man.
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain's Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880's, when the introduction of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into the street. For the first time one could be photographed casually in public without knowledge or consent.
The interior was delusional like any visual psyche. The couches and plants, rugs and paintings were all in cahoots and up in arms over the cahootery. The explorers were under-qualified and cowardly.
"In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron’s words, "meaning is set adrift"."
--New York Film Festival, 1997, Views from the Avant-Garde program notes
"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!
The vanishing point of Images of The World is the conceptual image of the 'blind spot' of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn't wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target.
A grinding mortar and pestle vignette analogously describes the evolution of digital resolution; from a single color to a high definition image to an infinite splitting of that image back into the pixels themselves.
This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
"how looking at what has become the skeletons of photographs is a visual lecture on aesthetic pleasure or emotion. and how being, almost entirely denied of this pleasure, or having the pleasure merely suggested induces a viewer to ruminate on the act of viewing and that of wanting to view. and maybe it is evolution which causes this anxiety and art form."
Alfredo Jaar is a politically motivated artist whose work includes installation, photography and film. Born in Chile and now living in the U.S., Jaar’s socio-critical installations explore global political issues, frequently focusing on the Third World and the relationship between consumption and power. A 1988 installation in a subway station in New York involved dramatic photographs of impoverished gold miners n Brazil interspersed with quotations of current gold prices, drawing an unexpected parallel between the material desires that motivate people in both poverty-stricken Br
"This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher. Farocki's admiration for Straub was so great that he said of Between Two Wars, Perhaps I only made this film to earn Straub's recognition." In this observation-driven film, Farocki documents the fulfillment of his wish. The film shows Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film Klassenverhältnisse (1983). Anyone who has seen Farocki's documentary of the shoot will never forget these short scenes.
Estelle Jussim (1928-2004) was regarded as one of the most influential voices in photography and media. An art historian and a communications theorist, Jussim wrote extensively about photographers, movements, and institutions, incorporating postmodern, deconstructionist, and feminist viewpoints in her many writings without being hemmed in by any one critical ideology. Jussim was the award-winning author of Slave to Beauty and the pioneering Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts, which charted new ground in the investigation of the meaning of images.
A pioneer of the small-format camera, Andre Kertesz’s photographic vision shaped the course of contemporary photojournalism. Self-taught and non-conformist, he began photographing in Hungary in 1912 and remained there until 1925, at which time he moved to Paris. In 1936 he moved to New York City, where he felt displaced and forgotten. It wasn’t until 1964 that he was “rediscovered” and began showing in London, Paris, and New York. This video was shot five weeks before Kertesz’s death in 1985 at the age of 91.
Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past. "One of the central questions of philosophy has always been: what can be known? Locke’s Way provides a vivid illustration of this perennial philosophical dilemma. In this short video, Donigan Cumming is preoccupied with the story of his older brother, who seems to have been brain-damaged and spent much of his life in institutions.
Sharon Lockhart is a photographer and filmmaker. Her photographic and filmic works interrogate the inversion of the static image as cinematic and the manipulation of the moving image into a static/stop-motion frame. Her work also contemplates how we perceive our own real-time realities.
"Looking at Pictures is adapted from a lecture I gave on my photography in 2018 in which sequences of photographs were projected while I offered brief statements related to the images being shown. In a gallery exhibition of photographs the following year, I adapted the lecture into a single-channel video with my commentary, which was projected in an adjoining darkened gallery. My words, which appear in the video as brief captions, are based on writings I did around the time I took the pictures or when reflecting on them later."
Unable to locate the grave of Letine—leader of a 19th century acrobatic cycling troupe (and buried locally)—I went home and wondered.
And then I made this film.
Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking, and magic. Plus more.
— Paul Tarragó
Nathan Lyons (b.1930) has contributed to the field of photography as a critic, author, curator, educator, and photographer. He has published several books and catalogs, including Photographers on Photography (1966), Photography in the 20th Century (1967), Towards a Social Landscape (1967), Persistence of Vision (1968), and Notations in Passing (1974). His body of work consists primarily of photographs which focus on American culture.
This 12-minute video by Tom Palazzolo and Chicago writer Jack Helbig tells the story of the recently discovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier. Though she was unknown in her lifetime, her extensive body of work is rewriting the history of post-World War II American street photography. The video, told from the point of view of Maier herself, recounts her life and work, from her childhood in France to her move to NYC in 1951 and subsequent relocation to Chicago, where the majority of her work was done.
Memory Palace is a short video grounded in the personal history of the artist. A discovery of a photo album activates memories of physical spaces, which in turn open doors to reminiscences of past family life. Inspired by the classical method of loci, the film presents a woman — singer/songwriter Alice Smith — at work in Los Angeles.
West coast artists, Mike Mandel (b.1950) and Larry Sultan (1946-2009) became artistic collaborators in 1972 while both enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA program. This interview captures the duo’s camaraderie (look closely, they are wearing matching shirts!) and youthful optimism as they describe the impetus behind their California billboard installations of the early seventies.
A chronicle of rumination / reflections on photography, aging, the woods, and the homeland.
Chance observations of New York's Chinatown, commissioned by the Museum of Chinese in the Americas.
"A sleepwalker's circumnavigation of one of the less homogenized parts of the city."
--Jem Cohen
Nocturne is a 5-minute film shot entirely at night in deserted streets of London. The film attempts to find images of the city that reveal the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, hinting at a concealed history. The deserted streets around the east end of London and Docklands reflect an echoic city filled with shadows. Nocturne is composed of long static viewpoints, each shot slowly unfolding in time as though by looking long enough the city's secrets will be revealed.
In okay bye-bye, so named for what Cambodian children shouted to the U.S. ambassador in 1975 as he took the last helicopter out of Phnom Phenh in advance of the Khmer Rouge, Rebecca Baron explores the relationship of history to memory.
Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this second reflection on photography and its people looks at the individual’s position within the context of war and how photographs become the sole record of that displacement, at the risk of them being dispersed as well.
On Photography People and Modern Times is the outcome of three years of research on photography conducted by the artist in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt during the founding years of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF).
Craig Owens (1950-1990) was a critic who wrote and lectured extensively on contemporary art. He showed particular interest in the issues of photography, postmodernism, feminism, and Marxist thought. A former associate editor for October and senior editor for Art in America, as well as professor of art history at Yale University and Barnard College, his writings were collected in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1994). Owens died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990.
Partially Buried Continued is a meditation on ways in which one’s associations to history, location, and genealogy become tangled in a subjective web which makes it complicated to separate history from fiction.
Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.
As I rummage through a stack of photos the memories of this and that plus who’s what and where rush in helter skelter. There’s a lot to swallow on screen and off (most of it from Oriental kitchens) but there are dashes of the even more exotic as the viewer glimpses renderings of the indigestible here and there (but mostly above and beyond!).
Ingrid Pollard is a photographer living in London. Her photographic works, generally of people and landscape, serve to provide a human context for issues of transmigration and “fleeting” identity. Combining personal photographs with traditional views of the English countryside, Pollard questions as well as reconstructs the concept of “Britishness.” In doing so, Pollard also scrutinizes the location of the “other,” and contrasts actual physical similarity or material likeness of people and places with perceived or socially constructed difference.
Richard Prince appropriates images from commercial advertising and travelogues for his photographs. Choosing these images for their melodramatic, super-real power, he then isolates their stylistic realism to accentuate its rhetoric. In this portrait/performance, Prince narrates experiences that demonstrate his extreme sensitivity to appearances and context. He relates the event of buying his first car as the imprinting of a certain aesthetic impression.
This title is also available on Crossover Series.
Re-Animation 3,4, & 2 are short animations created by looping images of dead insects taken from the artist’s own amateur entomological collections. Each frame of video within a loop is an image of a separate insect in its own distinct contortion. The variety of contortions, coupled with the similarity between insects of the same species, creates the stop motion movement of an individual insect in the final video.
Within the historic district of Saida, Lebanon, a boy learns to capture light.
Cast: Husni Tutunji
Camera: Abdallah al-Bunni
Within the historic district of Saida, Lebanon, a boy learns to capture light.
Cast: Husni Tutunji
Camera: Abdallah al-Bunni
8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. This is the first hand processed color film I've made. The slides were found at a thrift store in Milwaukee, WI in 2009. They are of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer while accompanied by his family. Their touristic gaze is reclaimed, by fragmenting their photographs into new possibilities of the frame, and reviving the bodies that may have perished by the revolution in 1952.
Respite consists of silent black-and-white films shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.' In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by a photographer, Rudolph Breslauer.
Juan Sanchez explores his Puerto Rican heritage and the issue of Puerto Rican independence through his work as an artist and writer. Combining painting, photography, collage, and printmaking techniques, Sanchez’s art joins images of contemporary barrio life with memories of Puerto Rico, and addresses a fragmented Latino community fraught with political resistance and cultural alienation.
Interview by Bibiana Suarez.
A historical interview originally recorded in 1990.
Andres Serrano was born and raised in New York. At fifteen he dropped out of high school. A few years later he attended the Brooklyn Museum School and studied painting and sculpture. After two years, Serrano decided that neither of these art forms were appropriate for his particular vision, and began to make photographs. Serrano’s work came to the attention of the general public as part of the controversy surrounding the issue of censorship and the NEA.
In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody.
— Jeremy Hoevenaar
Cindy Sherman received an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976, where she studied photography. During this time she was also involved with HallWalls, an alternative gallery space in Buffalo. She is best known for her black and white Untitled Film Stills, which she made in the late 70s and early 80s. In carefully designed settings, Sherman placed herself, using costumes, wigs, and makeup, in various scenarios suggetive of B-movies from the 1950s.
Laurie Simmons’s photographs are brought to life in Laurie Simmons: A Teaser, MICA-TV’s portrait of the acclaimed photographer. In the early 1980s, Simmons focused on underwater photographs of women, which suggested the stylized tableaux of Esther Williams’s water ballets. Taping through a glass window in the bottom of a swimming pool, Michael Owen and Carole Ann Klonarides recorded Simmons while she was shooting her models.
Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter that shatters the illusion and causes viewers to doubt the assumptions implicit in their viewing disrupts stills of what seem to be unpopulated landscapes.
Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter that shatters the illusion and causes viewers to doubt the assumptions implicit in their viewing disrupts stills of what seem to be unpopulated landscapes.
According to Harun Farocki, today's photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life - the "still life". The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary "still life": a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.
Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.
John Tagg is a writer, educator, and a leading contributor to the development of art-historical and photographic theory, focusing on political analysis of institutionalized culture and interventions within it. He is a professor of art history at State University of New York-Binghamton and author of Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988). Interview by James Hugunin.
A historical interview originally recorded in 1988.
The Nothing That Is stems from the environment of our streets, both the “virtual” and “other reality” which inhabits them.
Shot in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, this essay uses transportation, video, and photography to examine images circulating in a historically charged, and presently war-torn and divided, Middle East. From images of camels in the desert to images of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the video looks at states of mind in relation to actual geographies. The video pays tribute to an unformatted and open-ended documentary approach, and examines modes of access to information such as travel, television and the Internet, while carefully displaying the resulting iconography.
Using a Super-8 camera, Henricks employs time-lapse photography to document the interior and exterior of his apartment. Inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf, Time Passes uses writing as a metaphor for notions of temporality and impermanence.
This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 2.
Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal's Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life — with all of its unnameable and enchantingly fragmented specifics — and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera's odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal's deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing and terror.
Allan Trachtenberg is one of the most esteemed figures in contemporary photographic history and cultural studies. He received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship for his continuing work on Wright Morris. Other honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. Trachtenberg is the Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American studies at Yale University, where he taught for thirty-five years.
Originating from personal affection toward Seoul, Twelve Scenes portrays the spectacles in daily life by juxtaposing urban space in a twelve month sequence. As the individual particles in a kaleidoscope create splendid illusions by being reflected on a mirror, Twelve Scenes shows our individual life, seemingly separated by time and space, actually composes the scenery in the kaleidoscope of Seoul. Twelve Scenes represents a 'moment for self-reflection' or 'small, but precious enlightenment on life'.
Founded in 1997, the Arab Image Foundation preserves the legacy and collection of photographer Hashem el Madani and the Sheherazade photo studio.
A series of portraits either stroked on canvas or snapped on photo emulsions becomes the theme of this travelette as the viewer relives the visions that confronted me during a hop and skip excursion over state lines and bodily curvatures.
This video considers how Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani captured the everyday movement of crowds, friends and family with his super 8 camera. The rushes used in the five movements of this work were shot in the late 1960s and early 1970s in tourist attractions of Egypt and Lebanon. These sites include the Beiteddine Palace, Kfarhonah, a picnic site in a pine forest in Dahr el Ramleh, and Jezzine, Madani's summer residence.
"Homage to Eadweard Muybridge. A historical Muybridge photo grid is put into an electronic video signal space. Working with collected postcards, in this case, the durational photo series by the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, this video re-enacts the proto-cinema moment using two varyingly synchronized b+w video cameras and a video keyer. The movement effect is created by detuning the horizontal and vertical video sychronization of one of the video cameras. One of the video camera’s image remains still while the other drifts horizontally and vertically at varying speeds.
Voice: off is the autobiography of a forgotten man. Brain damaged, body violated, emotions crushed, Gerry who rarely spoke has now lost the power of speech. The video camera is his prosthesis and he borrows the memories of people who no longer need them. How can this be a comedy? It is. "Donigan Cumming looks at the violence of time that damages the body and exhausts memories. For the main character in Voice: off, Gerald, the illness is incurable. Two cancers are at work, one of which is attacking his throat.
A Walk with Nigel is a video essay that constructs a dialogue between two artists from two different times, between movement and stillness, between speech and silence. An archaeological study of a community, reawakening the archive in the present. A materialist study of streets and social relations.
Although trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall has been working on his expansive photographic light boxes of staged scenes for more than 25 years. Using back-lit, photographic transparencies typically used for advertising display, Wall subverts their commercial association by filling them with quotidian objects.
A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an Internet dating site she writes: 'I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...' What I'm Looking For, a 15-minute high definition video, documents this adventure; the connections formed at this intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision. It is a short tale of desire and control.
Pat Ward Williams’s socially charged works confront issues of race, often dealing specifically with African American history and identity. Using a variety of photographic processes, video, audio tapes, assemblage and text, Williams layers meanings and images. Her subjects range from the autobiographical to the public, often combining documentary techniques with personal responses. “When I make photos about my family, I think my family is not a lot different than other peoples’ families, so that is a way people can access my work...
What are all of these photographers trying to capture, and just who is collaborating with whom? This short piece could be a take on fame and the cult of the personality — or a tourist portrait with the audience as subject.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.
A day in the life of a professional photographer (Wegman) and his eager student (Smith), this tape offers a humorous, at times surreal, how-to instructional course in photography. Filled with practical advice, the tape sardonically centers itself more on the need to cultivate an effective artistic persona than actually taking any photographs. Wegman asks: "Before you carve out your own niche, it’s important to ask yourself one tough question: do you have the aptitude?"
A day in the life of a professional photographer (Wegman) and his eager student (Smith), this tape offers a humorous, at times surreal, how-to instructional course in photography. Filled with practical advice, the tape sardonically centers itself more on the need to cultivate an effective artistic persona than actually taking any photographs. Wegman asks: "Before you carve out your own niche, it’s important to ask yourself one tough question: do you have the aptitude?"
“This work by John Smith looks down onto a busy Viennese intersection and a corner bakery. Constructed from hundreds of still images, it presents situations in a stilted motion, often with sinister undertones. Through this technique we're made aware of our intrinsic capacity for creating continuity, and fragments of narrative, from potentially (no doubt actually) unconnected events.”
--Mark Webber, London Film Festival (2003)