Category: Uncategorized

Karmabella – Reflection (2010)

The subject in this image is a Flickr user who goes by the alias Tangolarina; she documents her life with an emphasis on a curious and unflinching examination of her own sexuality. (I’ve previously featured an image in which she captures herself masturbating.)

I can’t and won’t argue she’s a good image maker–though she does deserve credit for her brash audacity and seeming fearlessness in what she shows of herself.

The above image–presumably made by a friend–is from the stand point of technique–better than the majority of images in Tangolarina’s photostream.

Yes, it has a nice tonal range: it’s segmented between what you might call sepia-lite (in the skin tones), sepia-mid (in the area surrounding the subject) and sepia-heavy (in the reflection). The way it almost looks as if her reflection is staring back up at her is an inspired touch.

Unfortunately, the canted angle distracts from everything else. (What’s that? You say it’s a reference to the cinematic tradition of using an unleveled camera to convey a sense of nightmarish anxiety. Uh, no. I realize that the vast majority of photographers and image makers don’t have the budget of someone like say Annie Leibowitz. That means that we can’t always control everything about rendering the location an exact match to the initial vision. If the fence hadn’t been there, it’s arguably that this might have worked. (And it might’ve worked better given a vertical composition–the trade off being that the aspect of up-down flow would’ve been de-emphasized.)

My point is merely this reads like a back yard that someone is trying to use as an oneiric setting. The tilt isn’t severe enough to fully convey the aforementioned sense of expressionist foreboding and the fence actually blocks additional light that could’ve filled in allowing the reflected face to be fully visible.

As something between proof of concept and a preliminary storyboard, this is a stellar concept that I would like to see executed with greater attention to detail and working towards a clear conceptual end.

I really need to make one more crucial point here–and this is also sooo much more important than any of the preceding observations: I ADORE the way that Tangolarina is pushing the envelope on at what point depicting the body becomes pornographic. While some of her preoccupations and concerns are decidedly prurient, at no point does she allow things to drift across that nebulous line into the realm of pornography.

That alone is worth the time and energy necessary to explore her work.

Hart+Lëshkina – Command to Look for Near East (2015)

Such thoughts/feels about HART+LËSHKINA;  I am at a loss as to how to even begin addressing their work.

I guess as good a starting point as any is their compelling compositions. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m hardly a proponent of vertically oriented photographs/digital images. In fact, I’m rather inclined to dismiss the vast majority of such work as #skinnyframebullshit.

HART+LËSHKINA‘s are a sterling exemplar of how to do vertically oriented framing masterfully–emphasizing an up + down over the left + right image reading default. (Also: while their vertical images absolutely stand on their own, they tend–at least with this editorial–to pair two vertical compositions as diptychs. This is a prescient strategy as far as balancing between orientation shifts but it also works to create a flow not only between images but also across the entire body of work.)

They do an insane amount with very few elements. (If you’ve ever worked in an essentially empty houses like this, you’ll know setting up rigorously staged images like these borders on impossibility.)

There’s a studied patience to everything–the way the pattern of the light passing through the windows is broken by the kneeling figure and broken again by the reflection off the open window we can’t see that is echoed by the open window we can see.

But the thing I like most is that instead of falling into the dichotomy of nudity as signifier for sexual subtext vs nudity as a natural extension of self (and when intersecting with visual representation, a means of expression thereof), this duo takes what I always feel to be the far more interesting route of poo-pooing the dichotomy and presenting it as if it’s simultaneously both and neither.

I also can’t help but think about another conversation I had recently about the pros and cons of the mass proliferation of digital. On the one hand, yes, there is absolutely merit to the notion that digital is a democratizing force. These days the obstacles to accessing a decent camera are fewer than they’ve ever been–and that’s not to discount folks the world over who are still struggling to find clean water and enough to eat. (In other words, it isn’t all about who has a camera and who doesn’t, there are ultimately other more pressing considerations.)

Yet, I don’t believe that this democratization has led to the sort of expansion in vital, important work. In fact, I think that the only real expansion is in half-assed, arrogant or just straight up bad work. And one of the fall outs from this is the expansion of a curatorial class.

As a curator (ostensibly), I have pervasive concerns about curation due to the fact that a curator’s purpose is to sift through impossibly large information reserves and then pass along the best and brightest bits. No matter how much careful consideration on the part of the curator, the resulting decisions are informed by personal bias, prejudice, etc.

On it’s own, that’s a huge problem. But then consider the fact that it’s impossible to sift through all the information and therefore every curator has enormous blind spots. For example: how long have HART+LËSHKINA been around and despite the massive overlap in what their doing and my own personal photographic preoccupations and I’m only now learning about them. (I mean: yes, they work primarily in fashion/editorial, which is decidedly not my bag, baby; still, it makes me wonder sometimes if maybe curators create more problems than they resolve.

Source: hartleshkina.com

Robert Mapplethorpe – Self-portrait 1973

The Perfect Medium is a two-venue Robert Mapplethorpe ‘retrospective’ ongoing until July 31st in Los Angeles, CA.

It’s been on my radar since mid-march when I happened to read The Guardian’s review.

Admittedly, I’m kind of terrible at keeping up with all the various photography exhibitions and happenings. Yet, I’m not dense enough to miss something that makes this big of a splash.

Through a total fluke involving a rare alignment of planets in my favor I ended up in L.A. last weekend after a brutal multi-leg travel itinerary. Going off The Guardian’s advice, I wanted to make sure to catch the part of the show at LACMA.

And through circumstances completely beyond my control, I ended up seeing both exhibits.

There’s a lot that’s interesting about how that came to pass. But what’s most relevant is a conversation I had over drinks in a totally sketchy bar in Culver City the night before I saw the show at the Getty. An acquaintance of my friend in L.A. was explaining that what she–an NYC transplant–was how Mapplethorpe played the uptown art snobs off against the downtown transgressives. I got a little tetchy because one of the things I dislike about Mapplethorpe is that I feel his work steals the spotlight that I would prefer shining on folks like Peter Hujar, Arthur Tress and Stanley Stellar.

As it turns out the uptown/downtown dichotomy is actually integral to the show. The Getty half focuses on how the uptown/downtown preoccupations of Mapplethorpe shaped his artistic practice. Whereas–to me–the half of the show at LACMA seemed more interested in the broader art historical context of the endless battle between the sacred and the profane as motifs for artistic consideration.

My friend accompanied me to both parts and admitted a strong preference for the exhibit at the Getty. To her, it offered a clearer picture of Mapplethorpe–which is maybe the reason that I didn’t like it. It all seemed curated in such a fashion as to appeal to all the hipsters who read Just Kids because it was the cool thing to read.

Whereas the show at LACMA offers a more circumspect reading. You’re treated to some of Mapplethorpe’s early colleges, doodles and sculptural experiments. You get to see him struggle and not quite achieve the desired results and that’s contrasted against a preternatural ability to use photography with grace, control and a sort of aloof clarity of form that transforms photography into something that manages to be painterly only in so far it uses time, light and form in the same way a painter would use light, layered paint and brushstrokes.

Further: the show at LACMA paid special attention to Mapplethorpes obsession with perfection but also tied this in brilliant with a cross section of his high-minded as well as crass and prurient interests perhaps presented in too compartmentalized a fashion to be entirely conceptually appropriate but still interesting, nonetheless.

I was particular taken with two things. Included in one of the long text bits describing currents and movements within the work, there’s a quote about how Mapplethorpe wanted his work to be seen:

I’d like the work to be seen more in the context of all mediums of art and not just photography. I don’t like that isolation.

The other thing that impressed me was the sort of addendum added to balance out the awkwardness of the inclusion of an entire wall of Mapplethorpe’s large color floral prints–and really it’s worth the ghastly $25 entry fee just for those prints–but the final room of the exhibit contextualizes what you’ve already seen in the work of photographers who were Mapplethorpe contemporaries and shared similar considerations. It included images by Larry Clark, Nan Goldin (who as a head’s up: MoMA will be exhibiting her The Ballad of Sexual Dependency starting June 11), Arthur Tress, Peter Hujar, Kiki Smith and stunning excerpt from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Hustlers.

If a poem holds only what we already understand and are comfortable with, we wouldn’t need the poem. Not to write it, not to read it. What we need poems for is their way of pressing beyond certainty, arrogance, and comfort. When we are unseated from ego’s throne, and we still have to find a way to live, when there is no chair or floor under us, what do we do? We look for what isn’t made of the simplest kinds of wood, glue, and joints. A poem is made of this world’s wood, glue, and joints—it’s still language, it’s still words, it still draws from our bodies and minds and this planet’s entire banquet of material and emotional and conceptual richness—but a poem is words somehow doing things that words can’t quite do. This allows us to think the unthinkable, to feel the unfeelable thing, to find ourselves and the world dismantled and continue to breathe, to live.

Jane Hirshfield, from an interview taken by Kim Rosen c. March 2013 (via inspirational-quotes-by-women)
Source: violentwavesofemotion

FTVGirls – Brea (2010)

As far as porn outfits go, FTVGirls is tres problematic. First, there’s the use of the word ‘girl’–which I find more problematic than ‘teen’ and ‘barely legal’ porn. A girl is 11 or 12; in the US someone has to be at least 18 years old to appear in pornographic images/videos. At which point they’re no longer a girl but a grown ass woman.

Also, with FTV there seems to be a fixation with IPD–improvised penetrative devices, especially with extremely large or otherwise unusual props.

That being said–although I loathe their bright, airy SoCal meets daylight studio suffusion of white-on-white light aesthetic–they are at least head and shoulders above most other mainstream porn purveyor in that they actually demonstrate some creative use of technology.

For example: with the image above, You’d expect most porn to have a greater depth of field that would’ve render both her genitals and her face in focus simultaneously. And while the shallow depth of field is intended to draw attention to what’s happening w/r/t her genitalia, I love the way it diminishes the camp value of her expression. (My instinct–if I’d been shooting this would be to focus on her face, while letting the foreground and background bokeh. But I’m pretty sure that would’ve resulted in awkwardness that would render the frame pretentiously arty yet still too porny to really ever be even remotely close to artistic.)

Either way, I really do love the way Brea’s expression scans her.

EDIT: Due to travel related distraction, I neglected to un-queue this. I still agree with my superficial observations; however, I think it would’ve been more interesting to compare/contrast with this image by Natalia Nobile. I feel like both have entirely identical aims that neither quite manages to achieve completely.

Jessica Yatrofsky – Title unknown (2010)

If you’ve ever thought to yourself: Self, you know what? I really, really wish Ryan McGinley had a female twin who was a photographer, too; only I wish she limited her output to stuff in keeping with McGinley’s Yearbook project then Yatrofsky is exactly the image maker you’ve been waiting for. 

It sounds like I’m throwing shade–and, in fairness, I probably am a bit (really, I can’t think of an image maker who embraces such a limited scope of exploration)–but occasionally it pays off for her. The above for example is derivative as fuck but it also captures an open, honest, in-the-moment immediacy that so much made-for-Internet-aggrandizement sorely lacks. And, although her seeming lack of any familiarity with cinematic form is appalling, she is actually putting together interesting, boundary questioning video work. (Please, please for the love of all that is good, pure and holy–if you are shooting video and not celluloid, the resulting work is not ‘film’, it’s ‘video’ or ‘digital cinematography’.)

Source: californic

Terry Smith – Cory on the rooftop of LeStat’s here in San Diego, California (2006)

This isn’t an image you’d ever claim was ‘good’; the focus is soft, the pose is awkward given the composition (or the composition is awkward given the pose–flip a coin) and although it’s less frequently imposed in creating male nudes, this orientation is inherently tied up in an art historical tendency of the body as object, i.e. the dominant eye standing above a supine figure.

All that being said, it is interesting because everything I just finished criticizing is what ultimately makes the image interesting–the soft focus causes the the boy’s skin to stand out against the filthy rooftop, the pose is neither full passive nor entirely active (due to the right leg being elevated off the ground and the objectification is clearly a primary impetus for the picture’s creation.

Also, I’m taken with this because while I’ve never been to LeStat’s, several of my friends do frequent it and speak fondly of the place.

Source: americasfinestkids

Elaine Bezold – Wrap (2014)

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Bezold–her work is all over the place.

When the work lands, there’s a sort of an Allison Barnes and Mark Steinmetz arguing over coffee about the merits/detriments of Emmet Gowin vs. Garry Winogrand to it.

I don’t think the above necessarily lands but it exemplifies something about Bezold’s work that doesn’t fit with any of her potential influences–there’s a nearly pathological preoccupation with texture.

This image is a relatively flat matte with the subject is standing pretty much right up against the wall but the texture of the wet, coiled hair is still clearly represented.

In other images (for example: this, this, or this), there’s a better use of space and depth (also: strobe–in the last two) to present a perfectly exposed image in a way that is interesting and compelling.