Critical MassTop 50

I'm a winner this year of Photolucida's Critical Mass competition. Photolucida, which is in Portland, OR, and runs terrific portfolio reviews, assembles 200 reviewers—curators, dealers, collectors, and generally influential photo people—who vote on the merits of some 600 applicants to arrive at the Top 50. There's also a book publication prize for the two or three Toppest of the lot. Good God am I happy!

Here's the Top 50:

Jenn Ackerman
Jody Ake
Leslie Alsheimer
Jane Fulton Alt
Carl Bower
Andrea Camuto
Manuel Capurso
Alejandro Cartagena
Pelle Cass
Edmund Clark
Victor Cobo
Caleb Cole
Scott Dalton
Dorothee Deiss
Mitch Dobrowner
Jade Doskow
Ed Freeman
Lucia Ganieva
Judy Gelles
N W Gibbons
Toni Greaves
Alexander Gronsky
Jessica Todd Harper
Jessica Ingram
Samar Jodha
Mary Shannon Johnstone
Jimmy Lam
Laurie Lambrecht
David Leventi
Larry Louie
Benjamin Lowy
Simone Lueck
David Maisel
Sarah Malakoff
Rania Matar
Tim Matsui
Mark Menjivar
Brad Moore
Kate Orne
Ara Oshagan
Rachel Papo
Bradley Peters
Alexis Pike
Birthe Piontek
Ellen Rennard
Betsy Schneider
Peter Sibbald
Christopher Sims
David Taylor
Phillip Toledano
Will Steacy
Serkan Taycan

Halloween (and the Fourth) Are My Favorite Holidays

I've always liked certain public holidays, the Fourth of July and Halloween, especially. What I like about them is that people mill around aimlessly in public places. They are usually in a good mood, and while children might be excited, the adults are usually just walking or standing or sitting around enjoying having no particular duties except to have a feeling of mild enjoyment. What people enjoy, or at least what I enjoy, is the sharing of this vague, dispersed happiness in a public space--so different from a concert or political rally or other public gatherings, which are focused and have a distinct mood and share a specific interest, a particular band, person, or cause.

But Halloween and the Fourth are swarming, drifting holidays. I think the mood I take from them has influenced the way I take pictures and what I'm looking for when I put together my composites. Community is perhaps the jargon version of the word I'm looking for, but it misses a nuance. The sense of people sharing their private feelings of pleasure or boredom in public--while still maintaining complete privacy and even serenity--despite the chaos and the crowds. I suppose what I am describing is a version of what Walker Evans was looking for in his subway pictures (the book is Many Are Called), pictures of people as they might be at home, unguarded and unobserved.

(Picture info: I took about 70 pictures over about 15 minutes to make this composite of about 100 layers.)

Time and Stuff

The Purpose of Time Is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once 
Suppose your life a folded telescope
Durationless, collapsed in just a flash
As from your mother's womb you, bawling, drop
Into a nursing home. Suppose you crash
Your car, your marriage, toddler laying waste
A field of daisies, schoolkid, zit-faced teen
With lover zipping up your pants in haste
Hearing your parents' tread downstairs, all one.
Einstein was right. That would be too intense.
You need a chance to preen, to give a dull
Recital before an indifferent audience
Equally slow in jeering you and clapping.
Time takes its time unraveling. But, still,
You'll wonder when your life ends: Huh? What happened?


--X.J. Kennedy

***


"Jorge Luis Borges (speaking of blind people), photographed by many, and quoted by even more, felt despair, Dyer noted, because his medium, words, could never describe the simultaneity of everything occurring at once in a given moment in our universe—the ur-realiy of our visible universe—because words (and photographs) are successive, not simultaneous.  But Dyer persists: 'To reconcile the simultaneous and the successive; that is one of the ambitions of these pages,' he writes."

 — Mark Power on writer Geoff Dyer thoughts on photography on Power's blog, the Salt Mine:

***

I'm thinking about naming my show The Purpose of Time Is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once. I've always liked the simultaneous. It's why I like art but also statistics, indexes, air travel--anything that gives you an overall perspective. Of course I love successive things like novels and movies, too. But in my pictures, it's really the capturing of everything at once that grabs me. 

A sidebar: I suppose that the purpose of space is to keep everything from being in the same spot--maybe I should do some sculpture!

New Work, at Last

Thank God it's not all kudo-gathering, paperwork, color-correcting, backing up files, and sending out packets. Some of what I do is make new pictures. Well, the kudo-gathering is also okay. But I like looking out my window for five minutes (top), taking pictures of tourists at the Boston Public Garden (second), listening to tour guides shout as I take pictures at the Granary burial ground (third), and my favorite occupation, standing on the Mass Ave bridge for half an hour (bottom). None of these pictures are quite finished, but I think they're close.

ICA/Foster Prize

I opened up an email last week, and it began, "You have been nominated for the ICA [Boston]’s James and Audrey Foster Prize..." 

This is a big honor, and what I like about it especially is that what the nominators (50 area art professsionals) are looking for is innovation, not just for who's best. The field is winnowed to 20 by January, and early in the year, 4 finalists emerge who will get solo shows at the ICA. Out of the 4, one gets the prize itself, 25 large. Nervous! Happy! Plenty of time later to be disappointed!

 

Caleb Cole

Caleb Cole

Caleb Cole uses a picture of mine on his blog Existing Light to make a comparison of fake v. real. I posted my thoughts over there on his very interesting blog. Also, Caleb's work is really good and funny. He poses in used clothing, imagining himself in the previous owner's original setting. (Sidebar: the above picture seems to be taken just a few blocks from my house, in front of the VFW post.) Look at his photo web site here. What I like is that, while his pictures might be said to "examine identity," his identity stubbornly remains, despite the odd trappings and scenes. The overwhelming feeling I get is that I am looking into the soul of Caleb himself (or the character played by Caleb in the pictures) as he moves through various incarnations.

More Press

My work was featured on Gazeta.ru, which, according to Wikipedia, is the fourth largest Russian-language online news outlet. I got hundreds of hits on my Web site from it. This recurring culutre feature is apparently sponsored by a liquor company. It's called the Dewarist. I'm big in Russia!

The Boston Globe

The show I'm in at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA, was reviewed yesterday in the Boston Globe. That's my picture taking up most of the lefthand page. Mark Feeney describes my picture as a "glorious cacophony." I'll take it. Click here to read all about it.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

(click to enlarge)

It's a sad fact that I don't feel quite alive unless I've got a new picture going. So it's both pleasure and a relief, after a month or doing other things, to be in the middle working on this one, which is of the MFA near closing time on a Sunday. I took about 400 pictures over an hour or so to make this composite, which is not done yet. My wife (that's her with the luscious hair, just to the right of the last column on the wheelchair ramp) and I had  intended to go to  the Greene & Greene exhibition, which was of special interest to Margaret. I stood outside taking pictures instead.

Planning and Preparing

I've stopped taking pictures for the moment to get ready for my show at Gallery Kayafas early next year. The picture above is of the scale model I made of the gallery. It is kind of helpful, at least to figure out how many pictures to include. I'm getting ready so early because 1) I have to rent a printer at NESOP (New England School of Photography) to make thse 24 x 36 inch prints, 2) I'm going to Yaddo for the month of January and the show starts at the end of January, making my deadline for having the show printed and framed December 1 so I have time to plan for Yaddo, and 3) I have no experience in planning for two major events at once.

The practical upshot is that I'm spending my time color correcting and printing tests and fidding with my little model instead of doing new work, which drives me a little crazy.

Danforth Museum

I'm in the Danforth Museum's photo biennial. I'm very pleased about it and hope to see you at the opening on September 12, 6-8 pm! Click on the screen grab above for more details.

Also coming up: the Photographic Resource Center's auction in October and a solo show at Gallery Kayafas, Boston, in February. More about these later.

Crosswalk Two

My previous crosswalk picture is about waiting and boredom, men and women. This one, from the same set of a couple of hundred exposures, is about families--clusters and strings of them. In the very same space and period of time, two very different dramas happened.