More

Boston Public Garden, Spring 2013

I've been doing some new pictures in this series (called Selected People), voluntarily poking my head outside in early May despite the still cool weather. I've been working on this series since 2008 and lately it's started to seem attractive to redo some ideas I had early on in different form. The picture above is from 2013, the one below from 2008. With this recycling, I've been thinking a bit about what I'm trying to say. I realized that I'm interested in time, and sorting images, looking at people and types, but mostly I want to cram more life into my pictures than a traditional instantaneous photo allows (these are composites of hundreds of pictures taken with the camera on a tripod and added together back in the studio).

Esplanade, 2008

Larz Anderson Park, Brookline, MA, late December 2012.

I've had the urge lately to continue my Selected People series, and here's a brand new picture to prove it. My wife Margaret loves to ice skate. I don't. But I agreed on a cold windy afternoon between Christmas and New Year's to go with her to Larz Anderson Park in Brookline, just a mile or two from where we live. It was what my wife's parents used to call a VWW--a veritable winter wonderland. In the past, a little trip like was unlikely to happen. But now, I carry in my wallet a driver's license issued July 12, 2012, the day I passed my driver's test (on the first try). If you're counting, it required 43 years of eligibility to make this happen. Not a terrible rate for me, since it took me, for example, 27 years to get an undergraduate degree (no, I wasn't enrolled the whole time, you wiseacre). We also, unbelievably, have a car. It's always been my theory that the car is as important a tool to a photographer as a tripod or any other accessory--probably more so. It's what gets the camera to where the photographer wants it--a moving  tripod, as I've called it before. So not only is this picture picking up where I left off in spring 2012, it's my first picture using a car as a necessary tool.

The photo is a composite, of course, like the others in the series. There are about 120 different frames represented in this picture and I stood out in the gusty 20-degree wind for about 25 minutes to take about 200 pictures. It took three weeks to finish it in Photoshop. When I went to pick Margaret up at the skating rink, she asked if had fun. I tried my best not to be rude, snide, abrupt, or sarcastic, but I fucked it up. I snapped that it's never fun doing these pictures, and I was freezing my em-effing ass off.  I doubt I really snapped, since my mouth was numb and the words probably came out as mumbles. But it never is fun. I am artistically bold, outspoken in both small personal matters as well as the great issues of our day, firm and foursquare as a family man whose fiber is impeccably moral, etcetera. But when it comes to standing there with my tripod, out in a public park, plaza, or street, taking pictures of strangers who could turn on me at any second, I am timid soul, nervously panting, shifting from foot to foot, putting all my energy into looking comfortable--as if I were harmless (really, truly, I am!), as if I belonged. I don't. I'm sure I looked like a pedophile-terrorist. But the picture seem worth the discomfort.

A blue light hovered over the snow. The brown trees caught the final orange rays. The atmosphere turned a dim maroon. I thought it was too dark to keep taking pictures. But my trusty if antiquated (2005 model) Canon (5d) came through, seeing better than my eyes.

High Visibilty Shirt for a Low Visibility Show

Here I am, talk in hand.

The text of my talk about Strangers at Gallery Kayafas on October 25, 2012. 

First, I want to thank Arlette Kayafas not only for doing this show, but for encouraging me to exhibit this particular work. Thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo for providing the perfect place do this work. And thanks to Margaret, my wife, for all her help. I’m very pleased to be showing with Caleb, and I hope our talks —and the shows themselves—will help you see if and where our turf overlaps.

I’m going to talk about I got some of the ideas, the artists who influenced me, how this work relates to my past work, and  what it all might mean. In fact, I have no idea. But I’m going to give you my best guess.

With that said, this series got started as an experiment in essentialism. It was just curiosity. I wanted to see how much I could change a face before I lost the essence of the person. I wondered if the face would come untethered. But, since I’m a photographer and photographers pledge allegiance to the facts, I felt like I had to stop just short of that. I didn’t want the work to slip entirely into the monstrous or grotesque. I wanted a to keep a feeling of realism so the uncanny would be more believable.

So the pictures look like portraits--they’re vertical, the face predominates, they have certain feeling or mood. But I don’t mean to suggest a personality or a psychology or a story. I want to present faces composed of nothing but themselves, that become something more, or perhaps, less.  I think of these pictures as non-portraits. That’s why the show is called Strangers.

Some facts. The people who posed for these pictures are artists, musicians, writers, and family members. Many thanks to them, since, whatever other virtues these photographs have, they are basically unflattering. Luckily, they don’t look much like the people who posed for them. As they say in the front of books, any likeness to real people, living or dead, is unintentional. Still, the people ARE recognizable some of the time.

How do I do them? My method is to take dozens of extreme close up pictures of a face, then blend them together to make a new version—employing both the methods of Humpty Dumpty and those of Mr. Potato Head. I hold the camera just inches from the sitter’s face, recording the parts of the face in isolation. Everything—distance, angle, lighting—is in flux as I move around. The fragments can’t possibly match when I put them back together. Distortions of focus, scale, anatomy, time, and perspective creep in. At the same time, there is a lot of detail because the picture is made up of many exposures.

It’s amazing that a quarter of an inch here, a quarter of an inch there can change a face so much. At first glance, the faces seem normal enough, then it dawns on you that something is off. I want it to be just wrong enough. This dawning surprise is important to me, one of the sensations I value most in art.

Somehow, these pictures have an almost messy or painterly feeling that doesn’t look explicitly handmade, although, in a sense, they are. I blend each layer on the computer, by hand, so to speak. It’s a little like fitting the contents of your house into a moving van. You try it this way and that until it fits. Nothing is automated.
Photography is too quick for me. Somehow, my temperament is such that I like to make things. So I’ll often do projects that take a lot of work. In the past I’ve made objects to be photographed in the studio and done collage-like photographs. I’ve used the real world as collage material in a series that was kind of like a still version of a time-lapse film. In
this new series, I want to pack in a lot of extra information about a single face, while keeping the look of a pure photograph.

So Strangers grew partly out of my own work and interests, but it’s also worth mentioning a couple of biographical details. I guess I’m more comfortable in the studio, so both Selected People (the time-lapse work) and Strangers are part of a conscious effort to get out of the house more. I like to do different things in every series, and the new work looks very different from my older work. I wanted to do something “powerful” and maybe kind of ugly, since I usually go in the other direction.

So enough about me. Let’s talk about how a few artists have influenced me, in particular, regarding the face.

For example, David Hockney and his photocollages. He had the idea that the more photos go into a finished piece, the more the result resembles the experience of looking, which is a continuous, active process, richer, he argues, than a single still photograph.

Other influences include the big staring portraits of Thomas Ruff, Reinekie Dykstra, Chuck Close, Martin Scholler, and the famous deadpan intensity. I think my work makes fun of them a bit even though they are a real influence. What I like is that it’s a game of chicken. They stare at you, you stare at them.

A special influence is Tim Hawkinson’s wall sculpture Emote--something that is so much on my wavelength that I really wish I did it myself. He made a contraption in which cutouts of facial features are moved by hydraulic pumps mounted on the surface of a large photo. When a switch is thrown, the arms move the features of the face, and you see a see a bunch of random emotions. And in my work, too, sometimes you see opposing emotions on a single face.

In fact, my work is all about this kind of contradiction.

The faces are enormous, the detail tiny. Big and small flip back and forth, like the forest and the trees. A particular photograph seems to capture a single moment, but many moments and feelings are actually represented. One eye flashes in anger, the other is downcast in a single face. They are portraits without specific persons, but they are not generic. These are images estranged from themselves, photographs that are not OF what they depict.

This teetering feeling is what I’m after.

I suppose another word for all this is irony, being two things at once: Hiding and revealing, accommodating contradictions.

You might think I’m alienated from people, or that I believe people are alienated from themselves, or that I’m alienated from myself, or that appearances deceive or that I yearn to connect with people. You might think photographs are unreliable, or that skin tells the truth. You might think I’m a warm person or a cool one. You might think these Humpty Dumpty pictures are about the broken or the fixed. You might think I’ve learned something about the nature of the photographic portrait. You might think I’ve removed the person from the persona. You might think I’ve shocked you out of your bourgeoisie complacency. I might even be problematizing representation!

Hey.

You might be right.

The Show Is Open

Here I am at my show at Gallery Kayafas. That's one of the pictures behind me, of course, proof that the show is really happening. I've been writing my gallery talk, which I'll give this Thursday (October 25, 2012) at about seven. Caleb Cole will be speaking, too. It should be an interesting juxtaposition, since I'll be talking a little bit about identity and more about non-identity and my non-portraits.

Detail: IR, 2010, 57 x 42 inches.

The show opens tomorrow. I'm giving a talk on Thursday October 25 and I'll be at the First Friday reception on November 2.

"...like a masterful broom, his new book had scattered the dust long settled on the subject of identity, and swept it into exciting new piles."

— Edward St. Aubyn
Some Hope

I've been reading The Patrick Melrose novels. They may sound fancy and English but they are also gritty and bleak, heartbreaking and funny. In addition to naffs, tossers, and toffs (I'm never sure what these words mean), the narrator talks about consciousness quite a bit, and this line jumped out at me they way things do when you feel they resemble something about you. This is just what my work is doing!

MH

This is a picture that will be in my show Strangers (Gallery Kayafas, Boston, October 19 to November 24, 2012). I did most of the works in 2010, but this is one from the end of the summer. It combines incompatible emotions on one face--an angry eye and a sad one, in addition to other distortions of scale, perspective, and emotion. I think of them as non-portraits, since I think these pictures are just barely connected to their sitters. The people are almost unrecognizable. But I've come to think that they are connected even though they are greatly changed. I think this line of argument is called essentialism in philosophy

This is self-portrait. I did it to go along with the rest of my Strangers series, which is one way of looking at the face. But I've been experimenting with looking at faces in other unusual ways, and mine is the most available. I thought I might show this with the Strangers, but decided not to. I want to work on it and related projects some more. I may call my next show "Me Time," by the way. I have several other takes on the subject, but I like this animated version best. Meanwhile, later on today I'm taking the prints for Strangers down to Gallery Kayafas in Boston's South End so they can install it during the week. The show opens October 19, 2012.

New Selected People Pictures

I've been feeling like doing more pictures in my Selected People series. Once the weather turned nice, I had some new ideas or the urge to finish some older ideas I never got around to. I've tried a few times in the past to do a picture of birds, but only this one lives up to what I imagined.

PRC in NYC

Here I am, explaining how big something is to my wife (r) and someone else at the opening of  PRC in NYC on May 19, 2012 in Brooklyn. (Picture courtesy the PRC Boston.)

Here I am again, at the same opening, happy to be with my wife and Glenn Ruga, who curated the show.  (Picture courtesy PRC, Boston.)

Click to go the event web site.

  

Frog Pond, Spring

I'm going to be showing work at the New York Photo Festival. Please drop by and say hello if you're in New York (see below). Some of the work is very new, including Frog Pond, Spring (above). I'm pretty excited about it. I'll be there for three days, going to shows and museums as much as possible, as well as events at the festival.

PRC in NYC
111 Front Street, Suite 210
A showcase of the vibrant photography community in New England, featuring work from the Boston-based Photographic Resource Center.
Featured Artists: Noah David Bau, Pelle Cass, Christopher Chadbourne, Dominic Chavez, Vivien Goldman, Nancy Grace Horton, Toni Pepe, Esther Pullman, William Scully, Tom Young
Reception, Saturday, May 19th, 2:30-4:30pm