A Photo Student » Teachers

Fall 2010 Courses

James Pomerantz — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:35:42 +0000

School starts back up on September 7th and for those of you who are debating whether or not to follow along this semester, here is what I’ll be taking. I’ve decided to to step outside of my photo comfort zone and learn more about video and performance art. I want to try to have as much new sensory stimulation as possible to help shape and inform my work. We’ll see how it goes!

History of Video Art 1965-1985

David Ross

What is referred to as “video art” has become a ubiquitous feature of 21st-century art practice, yet it is an art form whose emergence is still a relatively fresh aspect of contemporary art history. This course will explore the origins of video art, examining its sources in film, photography and performance art. Through screenings of key works; discussion with artists, critics and curators, and in directed readings, students will be exposed to important works and individuals associated with the first two decades of video. Special attention will be paid to an understanding of the cultural and social context that supported the emergence of video art. We will focus upon the evolution of video art from both a technological perspective as well as the development of a video’s critical and institutional framework. Artists whose works will be viewed and discussed include Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Peter Campus, Vito Acconci, Frank Gillette, Juan Downey, Joan Jonas, Chris Burden, Lynda Benglis, Stanton Kaye, Iras Schneider, Andy Mann, Martha Rosler, Allen Sekula, Shigeko Kubota, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Mary Lucier, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Ilene Segalove, William Wegman, Tony Oursler, Klaus vom Bruch, Muntadas, Keith Sonnier, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Lynn Hershman, Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, TVTV, Videofreex, Marcel Odenbach, Thierry Kuntzel, David Hall, Dan Graham, Valie Export, Douglas Davis, Doug Hall, Marina Abromovic, Eleanor Antin, Richard Serra, Adrian Piper, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Ernie Kovacs.

Master Critique III

Patty Chang

Group critique seminars are the focal point of student activity in any given semester. Assisted by their peers, and guided by prominent figures in the visual arts, students will concentrate on producing a coherent body of work that best reflects their individual talents and challenges the current boundaries of their media.

Thesis Forms I

Penelope Umbrico

This course is required as a preparation for the second-year thesis. Students will finalize the central ideas for their thesis projects, and consider appropriate strategies for the form, presentation and distribution of these ideas. In a highly practical way, the course considers the history and features of various visual solutions available to photographic artists, depending on their audiences and goals. Books, exhibitions, installations, interactive presentations—the course helps students identify the questions each form raises, and work through them to find appropriate answers for their own projects.

Criticism & Theory: Critical Reading

Jan Avgikos

This course will combine a format of reading and classroom discussions aimed at providing critical perspectives on the issues that inform the practice of contemporary art and photography. Readings include texts by artists, writers and theorists of the past three decades that bear upon the practice of the students’ art-making today. Students will be required to develop a framework from these readings that is relevant to their own objectives. Discussion will be based on interdisciplinary study, screenings and exhibitions.

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SVA Announces New Interdisciplinary MFA Program Led by David Ross

James Pomerantz — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:37:47 +0000

David Ross taught the History of the Photo Book course I took last semester and will be teaching the History of Video course I’ll be taking in the Fall. This looks one hell of a program he’ll be heading up and I’m a little jealous! Don’t get me wrong, I love love love the program I’m in. But…I have been craving a bit o’ the old interdisciplinary:

Museum Veteran Invites Artists to Reinvent the MFA

Beginning in the summer of 2011, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) will offer a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Art Practice, a low-residency, interdisciplinary program of study that offers experienced artists an opportunity to deepen their studio practice and to develop an advanced body of work under the guidance of some of the world’s foremost artists and critics. The program will be chaired by educator and art museum professional David A. Ross.

Ross has assembled a leading group of artists, curators, historians and critics to serve as faculty members, guest lecturers and mentors in the new program, including: Vito Acconci, Cory Arcangel, Dara Birnbaum, Liam Gillick, Terence Koh, Ming Wei Lee, Glenn Ligon, Stephen Henry Madoff, Robert Pincus-Witten, Gary Simmons, Andras Szanto, Carrie Mae Weems, Lawrence Weiner, and Terry Winters, among others.

Ross cites the fully-interdisciplinary approach to the MFA degree as an emerging trend in art education. “The MFA in Art Practice is based on the idea that increasingly artists do not wish to define their practice by a specific medium or discipline,” he says. “In this post-Conceptual era, artists often pursue their practice by engaging an idea first, which then may involve a combination of media, technologies and techniques.” Ross explains, “With the flexibility that a low-residency program offers, SVA will provide a new option for practicing artists–across the county and the world–to advance their careers while taking advantage of the remarkable range of resources available to students at SVA.”

The immersive 66-credit degree program is comprised of a rigorous curriculum with coursework structured to be delivered via a feature-rich, interactive online learning environment throughout the course of two academic calendar years, in addition to a series of three intensive 6-week summer sessions to be held at the College’s campus in New York City. During the summer sessions, students will further their body of work during dedicated studio time, while attending classes, seminars and critiques and engaging with the diverse cultural offerings and resources that the city of New York and the vibrant SVA community provide.

Required courses include: Art History: Exploring the Interdisciplinary, which examines the role of art history in preparing and developing one’s own artistic direction; Art History: Challenging the Conventional, which contrasts the canonical history of Modernism with emerging histories, offering a different reading of the social and political context of art history; Artists’ Writings, which looks at the interventions visual artists have made into the art criticism of their time via essays, manifestos, poems, letters, artists’ books and artist-run publications; Autobiography of Place, which investigates how artists situate creative practice in everyday life and how their communities can inform their work; Bases of Criticism, which delves into the prominent theoretical positions within past and present art criticism; The Journal: A Writing Workshop, where students produce a daily record of their work in writing or another platform; as well as workshops in Performance, Advanced Video and Sound Editing, Advanced Digital Imaging, Art Law and Art Business. During each term, students will participate in the program’s Graduate Seminar, as well as Studio Practice and Thesis Preparation courses.

An advocate for contemporary art and artists for the past 40 years, David A. Ross was director of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ross has been active in a curatorial capacity since 1971, when he was named the world’s first curator of video art at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. A widely-published author and frequent lecturer, Ross has taught at the University of California, San Diego, the San Francisco Art Institute, Harvard University and Columbia University. Ross was one of the founders of Artists’ Pension Trust, a pioneering financial planning program for working artists. He has served as a juror and commissioner at numerous international shows and exhibitions. In addition to chairing the MFA in Art Practice Department, Ross teaches in the BFA Fine Arts Department and serves as a special assistant to SVA President David Rhodes.

Prospective students can request more information by contacting the Department via email at artpractice@sva.edu.

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Lyle Rexer on Mirrors – Tate Etc.

James Pomerantz — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:07:45 +0000

The Multiplication of Being,
Or A Reflective Abyss?

Lyle Rexer on Mirrors

Mel Ramos
Velázquez Version 1974
Courtesy Louis K Meisel Gallery, New York © Mel Ramos
Oil on canvas
111.8 x 167.6cm

Essay: Mirrors

Context: Lyle Rexer on Peter Doig in TATE ETC. issue 12, Spring 2008

I follow the lead of Jorge Luis Borges: a few metaphors, but resonant ones: a library, a labyrinth, a map, a mirror. Most
importantly, the mirror. Certainly the mirror came first, as there was water for Narcissus to gaze in before Daedalus built
his labyrinth, or the fatal wings. In front of a mirror I take for granted the difficulty of specifying within any system
of signification which version is the original, which the reflection, although I might feel that I can tell the difference.
Mirrors are difficult to write about. Let the reader beware.

As if I were trapped between mirrors, I seem to oscillate between two images. The first is a photographic work in daguerreotype
made by Jerry Spagnoli. A photographic artist in his own right, he also makes daguerreotypes with Chuck Close. More than 150
years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes called the medium “a mirror with a memory.” The daguerreotype is a thin slab of silver-coated
metal that when sensitised acts like a piece of positive film. Can a mirror remember? Can it forget? The image I have in mind
is one of catastrophe, a plate Spagnoli made hastily from a rooftop during the collapse of the World Trade Centre. The image
bears an almost hallucinogenic clarity, the result of its reflective surface actually bouncing light back up through the exposed
silver grains. I see the event in such mobile particularity that it’s as if it were replaying itself all over again, cancelling
out an archive of images. And I see something else. Because a daguerreotype must be angled just so for the image to appear
amidst all the light bouncing off the plate, I must tip it back and forth. When the disaster image disappears, it is replaced
by the reflection of my peering gaze, and everything behind me: my books, an open window, more light, the world. A world still
here, but changed irrevocably by what that image captured.

Jerry Spagnoli
Untitled (From the series ‘The Last Great Daguerreuan Survey of the Twentieth Century’ 11 September 2001
Courtesy the artist © Jerry Spagnoli
Daguerreotype
16.5 x 21.6 cm

The other image, the brother image, does not yet exist. It is part of a proposed installation by the Italian artist Silvio
Wolf. This installation involves a horizontal series of black photographs arranged along a corridor, imageless squares that
float over illuminated backgrounds. Light seems to emanate from behind the black squares, but they themselves remain resolutely
dark. When a viewer approaches these works (I imagine), they seem to suck vision directly from his eyes. It’s as if the world
itself were wearing dark glasses. If I manage to catch a glimpse of anything in the dark surface, it’s only my fleeting image.

Proposed installation view of Silvio Wolf’s Meditations, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Nicolette Rusconi Gallery © Silvio Wolf

These are the mirror’s two poles: the multiplication of being through a plenitude of representations: or the negation of that
power through the creation of an impossible void in the space of representation, a reflective abyss. Each type of mirror has
its history, its proponents, its victims. With the generative, populating mirror and its problems – of identity, illusion,
narcissism – we are intimately familiar. Plato equates such visions with the shadows on a cave wall, copies of copies whose
original, singular, non-material, non-visual form is the ultimate goal of knowledge. Instead we never leave the realm of illusory
representation. The history of Western art, then, implies the mirror in its basic theoretical framework, that of mimesis,
of imitation, and it carried with it a normative, even pejorative cast. Theorists from Freud to René Girard to Jacques Lacan
have argued that imitation and the mirror have an even more fundamental role – for Freud in the narcissistic personality and
for Lacan in ego formation through what he calls the mirror stage of development. Lacan remarks in one of his lectures that
the fragmented, primitive consciousness of a child gains integrity through a prolonged, fascinated gaze in the “mirror” of
a unified order. The fascination involves both terror and desire. For Girard, imitative or mimetic behaviour is the source
of culture itself, and its violent birth takes place in acts of ritual sacrifice and scapegoating.

In the Christian West of the late Middle Ages, the mirror had a double character. It still stood for vanity, but it also signalled
the world’s increasing availability to Western observation, a widening domain of representation fostered by burgeoning commercial
activity. The artist was the one who trafficked these signs. In Jan van Eyck’s fifteenth-century painting of the Arnolfini
marriage, for example, a convex mirror is the focal point. Two tiny figures can be seen reflected in it as they cross the
threshold of the room. They are probably the painter himself and a young man, perhaps arriving to act as witnesses to the
marriage. The convex mirror is able to absorb and reflect in a single image both the floor and the ceiling, as well as the
sky and the garden outside, which are otherwise all but invisible through the side window. Some commentators have said that
the mirror thus acts as a sort of hole sucking the entire visual world into itself, transforming it into a representation.
More accurately, the mirror (art in its metaphoric guise) expands the territory of the visible beyond what the individual
can directly experience. The expansion and complication of the visual is a theme taken up repeatedly by Mannerist and Baroque
artists, from Parmigianino to Velázquez, most notably in Las Meninas (1656 – 1657).

Diego Velázquez
Las Menias 1656-1657
Courtesy Prado, Madrid / the Bridgeman Art Library
Oil on canvas
318 x 276 cm

It is not difficult to see how such themes become politicised in the nineteenth century – and parodied in the twentieth. In
Manet’s celebrated cultural panorama A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), the fixed perspective of the artist and the supposed transparency of his vision has yielded to a more ambiguous and
compromising position for the viewer. The barmaid poses before us, somewhat abstracted, not looking precisely at us. The wide
mirror behind her reflects her back, off centre, and the crowd she serves (of a class to which she does not belong, – the
looking class, we might call it). We have visual access to all of her, but we can’t view the customers directly because, of
course, we are among them, and our desiring, possessive gaze defines the centre of the picture.

The American Pop painter Mel Ramos encapsulated the entire tradition of the mirrored gaze, with its psychological, sexual
and political overtones, in a 1974 parody of another Velázquez painting, Venus and Cupid. (He also parodied Manet’s Olympia.) His odalisque is a blond-haired, airbrushed movie star, looking at her culturally manufactured image in a mirror while watched
by a monkey. Her gaze is directed at the mirror, but the expression on her reflected face makes it clear who she’s really
looking at. She gives us just what we were looking for.

Only a few years after Ramos’s painting appeared, Canadian Jeff Wall was thinking in a very different vein about the mirroring
problems posed by Velázquez and Manet when he constructed the first of his photographic tableaux. His Picture for Women (1979) is a self-conscious attempt to undo the relationships of the Folies-Bergère by placing the photographer and his subject in the same visual plane, collapsing both “sides” of the picture plane into one
transparent surface and making the centre of the photograph the camera itself, which is pointed at us. However we interpret
this image – as a deliberately feminist statement or a game of confusing the viewer’s eye – it constituted an emphatic announcement
that the arena for exploring the problematic relation of representation, the body and the subjective gaze had shifted from
painting to photography.

Jeff Wall
Picture for Women 1979
Courtesy White Cube Gallery, London © Jeff Wall
Transparency in Lightbox
142.5 x 204.5cm

The shift was inevitable. Because photography is a mechanical process contingent on the refraction of light and its capture
- and depending on the camera, dependent on mirrors as well to reverse the image to its “normal” orientation – its unavoidable
subject cannot be the artist and his expressiveness, but must be representation itself, the peculiar relationship between
things seen and things “seen” photographically. This is, after all, the source of the medium’s fascination. No wonder then
that the medium is so self-reflexive, that there are so many doubles in photography, so many telltale signs of the photographer,
from shadows to explicit self-portraits, so many mirror images. The best of the oeuvre of photographer Lee Friedlander, for
example, contains almost nothing but reflections: in car mirrors, shop windows, television screens, car bumpers. In Friedlander’s
work the camera captures the increasing artifactness of American society through the proliferation of representations, many
generated by cameras and disseminated by television sets, the instruments of “culture”. It is no accident that at the same
time Friedlander was at his peak, Robert Smithson organised his Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969), an installation of mirrors placed in locations in Mexico, and photographed. The mirrors displaced little except the
representation of their surroundings, with their reflections. The “displacement” took place not in the landscape, but in the
camera.

For Plato this total mediation of reality by images, reality experienced at second or third hand, would constitute the ultimate
cave of shadows. I remember a photograph I once saw of a man standing in a mirrored bathroom taking a photograph – obviously
the picture I was looking at. His image was reflected to infinity in the mirrors around him. This level of reflexivity, this
sense of inundation by images and of the complete inauthenticity of experience had produced a Samuel Beckett-like sense of
irony in artists such as Vik Muniz, who finds myriad ways to undercut photography’s mirroring power without quite banishing
its mimetic fascination. In Penelope Umbrico, it has provoked an insightful critical reaction. Her series For Sale/TVs from Craigslist (2008-2009) features appropriated images of televisions for sale on the popular internet site, each of which contains a telltale
reflection of the room in which it was photographed. Turned off, the sets continue to communicate unintended information in
their very blankness. Umbrico reinserts them into the commercial nexus by selling the photographs on Craigslist as if they
were TV sets, for their original internet prices.

Lee Friedlander
New Orleans, Louisiana 1968
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco © Lee Friedlander
Gelatin silver print
27.9 x 35.5cm

Robert Morris
Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) 1965/1971
Courtesy the artist and Spruth Magers Berlin London. Tate © Robert Morris/ ARS, NY and DACS, London 2010
Mirror plate, glass and wood
91.4 x 91.4 x 91.4 cm

For some of the most radical artists of our day, the expanding multiplications of the mirror have suggested ways to transcend
the endgame they represent. We might call them artists of the dark mirror, as does art historian Arnaud Maillet. In the Mirror series, comprising some 50 paintings made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Roy Lichtenstein simply leached out the power
of representation and generation from the mirror by making it blank or covering it with his signature Benday dots. What are
negated in this work are not only the image and the correspondence between a thing and its reflection/representation, but
also the viewer. Our position is not implied, it is confronted. If we see ourselves as represented in any way, it is as mere
dots, as a dispersed body in an empty field. And just as Jan van Eyck put himself in the mirror as an assertion of the artist’s
priority in the chain of significations, Lichtenstein removes him.

Gerhard Richter
Self Portrait, Three Times 1990
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © Gerhard Richter
Oil on photographic paper
50.8 x 60 cm

Gerhard Richter’s series of paintings called Spiegel, grau (Grey Mirror), produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seems to take Lichtenstein’s terminus ad quem as a starting point. These works “submerge the gaze in darkness and indeterminacy” , as Maillet puts it. Richter is well-known
for basing much of his work on photographs, rather than on life (in spite of what many viewers take for their life-likeness).
This approach relieved him of the burden of precision and gave to his paintings a quality of being “once removed” – removed
from pre-existing reality and from the artist, both of which together are presumed to constitute the source of meaning in
art. Art cannot deliver us from this true tyranny of its own appearances, the tyranny that points us towards a Platonic search
for the origins of some singular truth outside ourselves. Nor can art fully liberate us to the pleasure of looking and to
the diversity of feelings that should be its province. Instead, as in the Grey Mirrors, it can offer a kind of empty mirror, not a monochrome that resists our interpretive gaze, but a surface that swallows it
up and gives back an indistinct image of ourselves – grey.

Lyle Rexer is a writer, curator and critic based in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

See the original piece HERE.

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Week 18 Course Update

James Pomerantz — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:47:38 +0000

Week 18 is now just a fading memory, but, thanks to this blog, it’s a memory I’ll be able to recall down the road.

In digital imaging we worked more with quick masks. It is a really useful tool to know how to use and even more useful if you have a lot of patience. It seems that a good deal of photoshop uses a basic set of skills, but then a great deal of patience…hours and hours of patience. One of the reasons that I love photography is that I’m pretty impatient. Painting, model building, sitting in traffic…not for me. But, I know a day will come when I’ll have an image that requires hours of work in photoshop and I know I’ll be annoyed if I can’t work on it myself.

Monday night crit went well, we’re just getting to know each other in the class and get a sense of what we’re planning to work on this semester. I’ve been frustrated lately. I’ve never really enjoyed shooting for myself in NY. I used to do it for newspapers, but it felt very much like work, which isn’t how I want my personal projects to feel. Also, when I shoot, I like to leave NY and spend a week or two or even a few months on location shooting. So, having to show work every two weeks while I’m not able to travel much is a bit…frustrating. I’m going away to shoot for 10 days over spring break which will be nice, but I want to find something local I want to photograph without feeling like I’m just doing it for the sake of crit. waaaa waaaa waaa. Poor ol’ me.

———-

In History of the Book, we had a chat about the readings. The conversation was mostly about Modernist photo books, Futurism in Italy and Russia, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, Rodchenko…

Again, if you’re interested in books, buy these two:

Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 1 . Phaidon, 2004
Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 2 . Phaidon, 2004

———-

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible. Some of the work we looked at:

Joseph Kosuth (Click to view large)

Paola Di Bello

Silvio Wolf (Click to view installation)

Abelardo Morell

And…as we are so very civilized, we also listened to the following two (we didn’t have video). The first is a humorous, insightful speech by Leonard Bernstein about working with Glenn Gould. The second is part of their beautiful interpretation of Brahms Piano Concerto No 1.

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Week 16: Spring 2010 Semester Begins

James Pomerantz — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:24:28 +0000

Don’t forget about Appreciate A Photographer Week!

After a nice little vacation, school is back. The first week of the semester is done. I’ve decided to make a few little changes to the blog. Rather than update for each class every week, I’m just going to focus on the highlights.

A quick reminder of what I’m taking this semester:

Digital Imaging II with Caroline Shepard:

The theory and practice of digital imaging will be explored in this course. The use of digital cameras; flatbed and film scanners; enhancement of images for various output options; tonal and color correction, color management, restoration and retouching techniques will be addressed, with a focus on creative masking and compositing techniques to create images from multiple image sources. Creating photo-real and surreal composites, exploring abstract panoramic image-making and creating a body of work that is well-executed from concept to presentation will also be included.

The History of the Book with David Ross:

The photobook has played a central, if neglected, role in the history of photography. Artists have always known that their use of photographs to tell a story implied the need for some narrative device, and the photobook has long served that role. From early artist books and lavish 19th century albums to mass-produced trade editions and self- published books, photobooks allow images and photographs to be experienced widely and intimately – shaping the medium, and influencing fellow photographers and artists, in profound ways. We are now in the midst of a series of radical changes to the idea of the book as “dead-tree” publishing is being transformed by the online revolution. Through attention to specific books, publishers and online projects, this class will examine the history of the photobook from the earliest efforts to new innovative avenues of self-publishing, print-on-demand and the advent of the photobook in a paperless society. In addition to lectures, guest presentations and discussions, the class will also include field trips to publishers, artists studios and special collections.

Visible and Invisible: The Lens as Interpretation of Reality with Silvio Wolf:

At once abstract and indexical, the lens-based arts reveal and transform the world. Using the visible and invisible as a metaphor, this course investigates the language, experiential and theoretical nature of the lens based arts in all its forms – video, photography and installation. Each session will consist of lectures and discussions of artistsʼ works, including: Antonioni, Arbus, Bacon, Barth, Basilico, Bruegel, Cartier- Bresson, Casebere, Cattelan, Lorca di Corcia, Close, Crewdson, Demand, Escher, Hatakeyama, Kosuth, Lutter, Magritte, Moholy-Nagy, Michals, Ousler, Richter, Rodchenko, Ruff, Sherman, Sugimoto, Struth, Viola, Wall and others. Works are not discussed on an historical basis, but for the insight they can offer to critical examination and study of the concepts explored. In addition to lectures and discussion, there will be assigned projects and written essays that reflect upon theories, concepts addressed and works presented.

Master Critique II with Gus Powell:

Group critique seminars are the focal point of student activity in any given semester. Guided by prominent figures in the visual arts, and assisted by their peers, students concentrate on producing a coherent body of work that best reflects their individual talents and challenges the current boundaries of their media. The program is designed to expose students to divergent points of view.

Right Here, Right Now with Lyle Rexer:

This course offers a forum to research, debate and unravel some of the pressing issues that affect contemporary photographers. Each week, we will concentrate on a question or a theme that is crucial to contemporary practitioners. Subjects include: does size matter? contemporary print aesthetics; the return of black & white; the new color; where has editorial gone? the power of the edit; roles of nostalgia in a digital era. Through lectures and readings, we will connect contemporary photography with historical precedents, and through discussions explore these connections to each student’s photographic practice.

——

This week was mostly introductions and going over syllabi.

In History of the Book, we will be covering a range of topics including:

Picturing the World – Early Photographic Books
Mapping the West – O’Sullivan Curtis and Watkins
The Modernist Photographic Book – The Book Between the Wars
The Soviet Photographic Book – From El Lizzitsky to Stalin
Camera as Witness: Documentary in the 1930’s and 1940’s
Camera as Witness: The Concerned Photogapher – 1950’s and Beyond
The Postwar Photo-Essay: Frank, Klein and Others
The Postwar Japanese Photographic Book
The Artist Photographic Book
The Vernacular Book
New Topographics – The Modern Landscape
Artist and the Archive
Autobiography/Self-portraiture
The Future of the Photographic Book

The main reference books will be using are:

Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 1. Phaidon, 2004
Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 2. Phaidon, 2004
Roth, ed. Book of 101 Books, The: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001
Stephen Daiter Gallery: From Fair to Fine: 20th Century Photography Books that Matter. 2007
Roth, ed. The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present. Hasselblad Center, 2005

I’m really looking forward to this course, particularly with all the discussion going around these days about the future of photobooks.

In Visible and Invisible: The Lens as Interpretation of Reality, we talked about ourselves and our interests and Silvio dropped a few smart bombs on us like:

…a photograph, like all lens-based images, is like the peak of an iceberg: it may only how a visible fragment of Reality; through this we are given limited possibilities of experience, yet these limits offer us the keys to think, to imagine and to interpret the totality which this fragment belongs to. These limits offer the possibility to interpret reality and access – beyond and elsewhere – through the lens: the limits of our medium may represent a power offered to our visual experience.

Photographs, which are images of the evident and of the apparent, of the likelihood and of lifelikeness, may allude and reveal what is not manifest through the visible forms of the world.

The power of the photographer greatly consists of the limits of his vision.

and:

Photographers, like sculptors, subtract matter from totality to reveal images; they impose frames to vision in order to create and bring out images, the ones they respond to and recognize within the matter of visible Reality. Different photographers see differently while looking at the same object and envision different images, as much as different sculptors produce different sculptures from the same marble block, because they see that same matter diferently, they interpret the same object differently.

We may see the photographer as a revealer, a recognizer, a discoverer, a sensitive listener of the visible matter.

It’s gonna be an interesting course.

In Right Here, Right Now, we took a quick look at some images and again introduced ourselves to everybody else in the class:

James Welling

Thomas Ruff

Wolfgang Tillmans

Vik Muniz

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Atta Kim

Gerhard Richter

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Spring 2010 Course Selection

James Pomerantz — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:42:47 +0000

I just finalized my courses for the Spring and I’m really excited:

Digital Imaging II with Caroline Shepard:

The History of the Book with David Ross:

Visible and Invisible: The Lens as Interpretation of Reality with Silvio Wolf:

Master Critique II with Gus Powell:

Right Here, Right Now with Lyle Rexer:

giddy-up!

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Week 11 Course Update: Hip-Hop, PoMo & Dags

James Pomerantz — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:13:22 +0000

It seems like these week updates are happening more and more frequently. I think I’ve just been very busy and the days are really rolling by quickly right now.

In Digital Imaging, we’re now starting to work on our final projects for the semester. The general idea is to produce 8-11 images using the various things we’ve learned in the class and present the digital files along with 5 prints.

I’m taking drawings made by children in various conflict zones and then approximating them with pieces of found photos.

In Criticism & Theory, or Critical Theory or Contemporary Criticism…I’m actually not 100% sure what the name of the course is, we talked more about psychology in art theory and watched a little Eminem and Sylvia Plath and read this essay.

Next week we’ll be getting all Pomo. We’ll be reading:

Hal Foster’s preface “Postmodernism, A Preface” (missing a few pages) from “The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture”
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” also in “The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture”
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism” in “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
“Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” once again in “The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture”

Lighting this week was all about still lifes. For next week we have to take a still life of something with chrome on it and another of something glass. Both photos must use strobes.

In crit this week we learned that we can suggest guests (curators, authors, artists) who we want to come sit in on class during the last two weeks. I’m showing in crit next week so I’ve been busy running around shooting, scanning, printing.

In Past Tense, Present Tense a fellow student gave a little slideshow of work including:

Abelardo Morell

Nicole Dextras

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey

Shimon Attie

And then we had a special guest…Jerry Spagnoli to talk about daguerrotypes. That’s right, Spags on dags.

Jerry Spagnoli

And that was week 11. w00t!

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The Future of Photography (BHQF Part III)

James Pomerantz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:25:52 +0000

Last week I posted part of a department-wide email that was sent out. There is a lot of discussion at school about the future of photography, social networks, the education system…. The faculty are really questioning what their role is as educators, which I think is a good thing.

Artist and faculty member Grahame Weinbren responded to the email with the following which is posted on the SVA MFA website:

Charles –

I am glad you are opening this debate. As you know, I tried to begin to raise some of these questions in Still & Moving last week.

I have a couple of quick responses to your outline.

First I think we have to realize that lens-based image making has become something like writing. Everyone knows how to write, and does so at one time or another. But there are relatively few Nabokovs, Mark Twains, Maureen Dowds. Their writing changes our world.

In a world where everyone makes images, we need to take the position that we are creating image makers whose work changes the world.

The big development over the last 4 years is, of course, the ’social’ internet. Everyone’s images can be ‘published’ at the click of a mouse. I am thinking of Youtube and Flickr and the entire chaos of Web 2.0. However, even though it look like a level pla having equal opportunity for exhibition and equal access to all images, it’s not. Web 2.0 is forming itself into distinct cultures and communities, and we are seeing hierarchies emerging, often driven by the same old forces. Curated, authorized and selected nodes within web 2.0 are grabbing attention and influence, while the local, ‘bottom-up’ communities continue, but seem increasingly soft and irrelevant beyond their own borders.

My point is simply that the new social internet does not represent a radical shift in social and cultural relations: we are dealing with familiar power structures, albeit in new costumes that we don’t quite comprehend yet. One stream that we might pursue as this discussion continues is how the structures of commerce and hierarchy manifest themselves within the social networks.

I agree that our students need application softwares, including some of those you listed. But I am sure that they can develop t that will enable them to learn and use new apps as necessary. It is a wrong approach, in my opinion, to try to teach application softwares as ends in themselves. Let them pick up what they need when they need it, and let’s try to help them develop the general ability to fight their way through unfamiliar applications. I do it, and it is much harder for someone at my stage of life to learn new tricks.

Many of the students already have this attitude, and we will see more and more entering with it. We won’t need to teach “photoshop” or “after effects” — we will continue to need to help students develop concepts, skills and understanding, and to use whatever techniques (using all necessary technologies, old and new) they require to apply them. Most courses in the program — that I am familiar with — already take this approach, and I don’t think we want to shift that. What is missing is a broader kind of support — guiding the students to the technologi heir ideas. We need general technology support for the students at a better level than we currently have, but it should be outside the classroom.

In the link you sent, Oliasson makes an excellent point about the “art world’s” presupposing linearity in many areas: history, individual careers, criteria of success, processes of production. I see the concept of linearity and what the alternatives are as another fruitful area of continuing discussion.

Best

Grahame

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Roy DeCarava 1919-2009

James Pomerantz — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:25:26 +0000

Graduation. 1949. Roy DeCarava.

Roy DeCarava was an amazing photographer and a dedicated teacher. Rather than post an obituary, I decided to post a LA Times review of his retrospective in 1996:

In Shadow and Light

By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT, TIMES ART CRITIC|November 21, 1996

“Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective” is one of those rare and exciting exhibitions that make you slap your forehead in wonderment that you haven’t been intimately acquainted with his quietly powerful work all along. He’s been showing his richly printed, visually acute, emotionally touching photographs since 1947, but mostly in New York, where he was born and has lived almost all his life (he turns 77 on Dec. 9).

DeCarava’s photographs were the subject of small shows in Los Angeles and San Diego in 1982 and 1986, and he, of course, found a secure place in the pantheon of postwar photographers with the landmark publication of his 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” for which Langston Hughes wrote a memorable text. But now that the Museum of Modern Art has assembled a full retrospective overview, the sweep of DeCarava’s achievement is self-evident. The show, which opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the most important exhibition of photography to have been seen in L.A. this year.

It’s quite large, numbering some 200 pictures. For the most part they’re installed chronologically, beginning around 1950, but occasionally the photographs are grouped according to thematic or stylistic similarities, regardless of date. In sharp contrast to the dense, velvety black tones that are something of a trademark of DeCarava’s art, the gallery walls have been painted stark white.

Remarkably, as the show proceeds there isn’t much sense of an artist working out his tentative photographic ideas in his early years, then deepening and complicating them as his career unfolds and his art matures. He starts out full-throttle instead.

The earliest pictures show an exquisitely refined sensitivity that is sustained throughout the exhibition, whether DeCarava is photographing the ordinariness of street life in Harlem, friends at home, the greats of New York jazz, humdrum activity in the subway or civil rights demonstrations in the South. His photographic constancy may be a result of his own relative maturity when he began to use the camera in earnest.

DeCarava started as a painter. In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance had been largely defined by writers and musicians determined to cultivate the vibrancy of black culture; in the wake of the Great Depression, however, the federal establishment of the WPA slowly created a network of visual arts activities.

In Harlem, young artists congregated around painters and sculptors like Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas and Charles H. Alston. Having first studied painting and drawing at George Washington Carver Art School, by the late 1940s DeCarava had switched exclusively to printmaking, finding the graphic simplicity of silk-screening more to his taste.

As MOMA curator Peter Galassi explains in the excellent catalog that accompanies the show (the book also includes an insightful essay by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava, the artist’s wife), DeCarava, like Ben Shahn before him, eventually picked up a hand-held 35mm camera as a way of taking visual “notes” of urban life, for use in silk-screen images he wanted to make. Steadily more intrigued by the possibilities he saw in those camera sketches, which were recording aspects of black American life that could be witnessed almost no place else, he had by the end of the decade fully embraced photography as his medium.

Lucky for us that he did. DeCarava, then in his 30s, created a technically effective visual style that, in a kind of modern update of an early 17th century mode of painting, could be called “tenebrism with a camera.” Characterized by an emphasis on scenes engulfed in sensuous darkness and shadow, pierced by radiant moments of light, the style takes full advantage of the almost limitless range of rich grays possible from gelatin-silver prints.

The result is that you don’t look at a photograph by Roy DeCarava, you peer into it. His pictures require close scrutiny simply to be seen. They slow the pace of your bodily and mental rhythms. Intimacy is established through seemingly effortless visual seduction.

Gittel. 1950. Roy Decarava

“Gittel” (1950) shows how DeCarava’s pictures virtually blossom before your eyes. The crowded facades of an urban street are dominated at the right by the store front offices of one Morris Gittel, insurance broker, notary public, lawyer. The density of street signs, reflective transparency of windows and impenetrable stone building facades have been orchestrated into a vibrant jumble of receding, advancing and engulfing planes, which convey the energetic liveliness of a metropolitan environment.

Only after a few moments do you notice, there in the very center of the visual hubbub, the still, calm profile of a standing woman, dressed from head to toe in black. The woman is next to a stone pillar, her erect form echoing its resilient strength. She quietly becomes the stable axis around which DeCarava’s entire pictorial universe revolves.

Only after another moment do you see the pointing-finger entrance sign that’s been painted on the pillar. The painted finger points to Gittel’s office to direct the passing pedestrian–but it also points to the lady in black, subtly guiding the eye of DeCarava’s passing viewer.

In his pictures of jazz musicians and singers, the intense concentration visible on the subject’s face suddenly gets mirrored in your own. In “Hallway” (1953), the path down a dingy tenement corridor leads to utter darkness surmounted by a bare light bulb–an unknowable future illuminated by a dim ray of hope.

Hallway. 1953. Roy DeCarava.

DeCarava’s technique of causing the viewer to look close and hard creates a sense of dawning consciousness–of revelation that can pack a wallop. During the tumultuous civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s, for example, repeat viewing of news and television pictures could deaden the impact of those extraordinary events. But “Force, Downstate” (1963) restores their power.

The photograph shows an initially confusing, nearly abstract jumble of forms, which slowly coalesce into body parts, then clarify into an upside-down pair of legs being grasped at the ankles by different pairs of hands, as other bodies jostle in close. Suddenly you recognize what’s happening and let out a little gasp. The visceral power in the non-violent idea of a demonstrator’s body being carted off is dramatically renewed.

Anyone who says that art’s social and political content is more important than formal considerations–or can even be separated from them–should take a good long look at Roy DeCarava’s work. The vivid social impact of his pictures is integral to the elegant formal composition he remarkably establishes in the frame. Today, when so much mediocre art has been noisily advanced as significant solely because of the social or political posture it assumes, DeCarava’s magnificent art stands as both exceptional achievement and powerful corrective.

Man In Window. 1982. Roy DeCarava.

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Week 5 Course Update: Let’s Be Frank

James Pomerantz — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:44:08 +0000

Another week has passed. This week feels a little foggy. Not too sure why. My brain could be reaching maximum capacity. It could be the changing seasons.

Monday:

Digital Imaging: Woooo hooooo!! We got to play with the first few tools. We messed around with brushes and select tools. It was fun. What were you doing monday morning? I bet that whatever you were doing, it wasn’t as much fun as I was having with my paint brush, magic wand and polygonal lasso tool.

As usual, Monday afternoon was spent reading for Criticism & Theory.

This week’s readings:

Martha Rosler’s essay “In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)” in The Contest of Meaning, pp. 303-342.

John Berger’s essays “The Suit and the Photograph” and “Understanding a Photograph”

Walter Benjamin’s “A Short History of Photography” Download it by clicking here: “A Small History of Photography” It’s the same thing, just a different translation from the one we read.

Tuesday I was supposed to lead the class discussion on the Martha Rosler piece but there wasn’t time, so that will be for next week.

Tuesday night I got over to the Burtynsky opening at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler. There was a good turn out including SVA MFA Alumni Matthew Pillsbury and Shulli Hallak.

Matthew was recently included in the BAM Photography Portfolio along with An-My Lê, Alec Soth, Richard Misrach and lots of other amazing photographers.

Night Operations III. An-My Lê

West Point, NY. Alec Soth

Richard Misrach

Matthew Pillsbury

Wednesday, as you now know, starts off with lighting. It was a huge day. We finally made the move from piddly, little tungsten bulbs to big Profoto strobes. I don’t know how to use them yet, but soon I will and a whole new world will open up to me.

Wednesday afternoon jumped off with good old master crit. Looking at more students’ work. There was quite a bit of video in class this week. One piece involved multiple projectors, appropriated film footage and originally score!

We had a special visitor this week in Past Tense, Present Tense. Philip Gefter, former NY Times photo editor/writer turned freelance writer of books and essays, came and shared a few of his many thoughts on Robert Frank. Also sitting in on class were faculty members Charles Traub, Randy West and Penelope Umbrico. It was great getting to hear them all discuss Frank. There was a discussion about the world Frank was in and his photo lineage. Here it is:

Marlon Brando in The Wild One

Gun 1, New York. William Klein

Here is Robert Frank’s Guggenheim Fellowship Proposal:

Proposal Summary:

“To photograph freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera exclusively. The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present. This project is essentially the visual study of a civilization and will include caption notes; but it is only partly documentary in nature: one of its aims is more artistic than the word documentary implies.”

The Full Statement:

“I am applying for a Fellowship with a very simple intention: I wish to continue, develop and widen the kind of work I already do, and have been doing for some ten years, and apply it to the American nation in general. I am submitting work that will be seen to be documentation — most broadly speaking. Work of this kind is, I believe, to be found carrying its own visual impact without much work explanation. The project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic. The material is there: the practice will be in the photographer’s hand, the vision in his mind. One says this with some embarrassment but one cannot do less than claim vision if one is to ask for consideration.

“The photographing of America” is a large order — read at all literally, the phrase would be an absurdity. What I have in mind, then, is observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere. Incidentally, it is fair to assume that when an observant American travels abroad his eye will see freshly; and that the reverse may be true when a European eye looks at the United States. I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere — easily found, not easily selected and interpreted. A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none, the farmer and his children, a new house and a warped clapboard house, the dictation of taste, the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights, the faces of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks and postoffices and backyards.

The uses of my project would be sociological, historical and aesthetic. My total production will be voluminous, as is usually the case when the photographer works with miniature film. I intend to classify and annotate my work on the spot, as I proceed. Ultimately the file I shall make should be deposited in a collection such as the one in the Library of Congress. A more immediate use I have in mind is both book and magazine publication.”

———–

It’s interesting to see some of Frank’s photos prior to The Americans, which are more traditionally formal in their compostitions:

Robert Frank

but once he gets to America the classic perspectives and traditional framing are gone and replaced by decapitated people and tilted horizons:

Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey 1955. Robert Frank

Political Rally - Chicago 1956. Robert Frank

Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 1955. Robert Frank

Frank has stated that both Walker Evans and Bill Brandt were huge influences:

Tod Papageorge’s essay “Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence”

Main St, Ossining, New York. 1932. Walker Evans

Walker Evans

Parlourmaid in Window, Kensington. Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt

After Frank? Go buy Philip Gefter’s book Photography After Frank. But, we did quickly mention:

Lee Friedlander

Los Angeles, California 1969. Garry Winogrand

US Route 10 Post Falls, Idaho. August 25, 1974. Stephen Shore

Jackson, Mississippi. William Eggleston

Obviously the web of interconnectivity that includes Robert Frank is HUGE and we just scratched the surface in class.

And that was week number 5! Where will it go from here? What will next week bring? Not even I know…

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