Liz Kuball Photography | Blog: January 2007

Dry cleaner, Disney

Last night I was on Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, walking to The Counter for a burger and milkshake, and I passed a dry cleaner’s storefront with a light on in the backroom, a man lying on a cot reading. After dinner, the lights were out; he’d gone to bed.

I didn’t post this last night because I wasn’t sure it really worked—it’s hard to make out what’s inside that room unless you know what you’re looking for—but I wanted to post it tonight anyway. What do you think?

No worries—I’m not breaking my streak of daily posts of photos I’ve taken that day. Here’s one of the Frank Gehry–designed Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.

Library

That’s not a suitcase

He said he had a suitcase of coins under his bed. When I walked into his room, I said, “That’s not a suitcase.” But I took a picture anyway.

Anything to stay a little longer.

Labels: S.

Bathtub

I seem to be taking lots of pictures of stores lately—shelves, windows, mannequins. I don’t know that there’s any meaning to be found in that. Just an observation.

photo la

Last weekend, I went to photo la, a huge photo fair with over 70 exhibitors ranging from fotovision to Magnum. I was there mainly to hear a lecture by Alec Soth, but I bought a ticket to the fair, too, just to see what all the fuss was about. I hit the lecture first (more on that in a minute), and then I went to the fair, which was seriously overwhelming. Booths crammed into every available corner, massive prints on the walls, people swarming around them. I only spent a few minutes there—long enough to get the last copy of the second printing (now out of print) of Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississipi (Steidl) from D.A.P. I had to pay an arm and a leg and another arm for it—because it was autographed (and did I mention out of print?), neither of which really mattered to me—but it was worth it. I already have his second book, NIAGARA, and you know how you just find someone—a writer, a photographer, a whatever—whose work you like so much that you want to follow it from the beginning? Well, I came to his work just recently, and it somehow mattered to me that I have a copy of his first book, especially after hearing him talk.

Yeah, so, on that talk: First off, the hotel conference room was packed. People milling around, finding friends who’d saved them seats, and then all of a sudden, someone was on the microphone, and it was Soth saying something about how most of these lectures start with 20 minutes of someone else introducing the photographer, listing all his accomplishments and making him feel amazing, but he knew that we didn’t care about any of that, so he’d just get started. And that pretty much set the tone for the rest of his talk. He showed a photo of himself in high school (to show what a geek he was), talked about his shyness, said he started out in art school wanting to be a painter, showed one of his paintings (to show what a bad painter he was), all by way of explaining how he came to photography. He talked about his early, not-so-successful projects (and how he came to be known in certain circles of Minneapolis as the “sheep photographer”—county fair, sheep, Rembrandt lighting). And then he talked about Sleeping by the Mississippi and NIAGARA, how he plans a project, how he executes it, how things fall into place (or don’t). He spoke about the luxury of not having an audience, of just being able to photograph what you’re drawn to, without having to answer to professors or other students or critics of any sort. There’s great freedom in that, he said, and I got it.

I loved that he had a sense of humor about himself and his photographs—he didn’t hesitate to show us the things that worked along with the things that didn’t. So many people—in any field—want to focus on their successes, but what I got out of the hour or so that he talked was a sense of the evolution of it all. He’s had all kinds of success in the past few years, but it didn’t start out that way, and he let us see proof of that. I don’t know if it’s because he’s from Minnesota and I’m from Michigan and I recognized that whole Midwestern-sensibility thing or what, but his lack of pretension was encouraging.

And good thing I went there first—it got me through the experience of buying a book from D.A.P.

Conversation with sales guy:

“Can I buy this?”

“Uh, yeah, that’s what we’re doing here.”

“Okay, do you take—”

“We take everything.”

Criminy.

Labels: Alec Soth, books, photo la, photographers

Sixty-three minutes

Australian Open. Serena Williams (unseeded) def. Maria Sharapova (1), 6-1, 6-2. Match time: Sixty-three minutes.

Labels: athletes, Maria Sharapova, Serena Williams

Shampoo

Only in Montecito

Art’s

Art’s Delicatessen, Ventura Boulevard, Studio City, California.

Spam

No-head line

Garage surfer

Oversight

Went to the closing of an exhibition of Horace Bristol’s photographs at the East West Gallery in Santa Barbara this week. The gallery—a great, small space—just opened a couple months ago and is run by Bristol’s son, Henri. I didn’t really even recognize Bristol by name, but when I walked into the gallery, I knew immediately who he was. His Tom Joad was on the cover of one of my copies of The Grapes of Wrath. Bristol took the photo during his travels with John Steinbeck to the migrant camps of the Central Valley of California, for what was to be a nonfiction book pairing Steinbeck’s words and Bristol’s photos. Instead, Steinbeck turned the stories of the migrant workers into a novel, and high school kids have been reading the CliffsNotes ever since.

It was my extreme oversight not to include Bristol’s name in my earlier post about Matt Black’s work; to see some of Bristol’s photographs, click here.

P.S. I took this picture of a eucalyptus tree this afternoon in Toro Canyon.

Labels: books, Horace Bristol, John Steinbeck, Matt Black, photographers, writers

More like it

Raincheck

Rainy afternoon in Southern California. Snow visible in the Santa Monica Mountains. Ice in Venice Beach.

What’s the point in paying so much in rent? I could be getting this shit in the Midwest.

Labels: weather

Heineken

For your consideration

In honor of tonight’s Golden Globes and the kickoff to the awards season, here’s a bit of dirt.

Market

It is late and I will start the work week behind. There is not much good in that.

There is good, though, in the market down the street, open surprisingly late on a Sunday night.

Labels: day job

On the way home

Soledad, California.

Conceptualize this

I’ve spent countless hours—hours that I’ll never get back—in literature courses, and it’s taken me years to return to a place where I enjoy reading. There’s nothing like picking apart a great book to ruin it completely. Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, historicism, deconstructionism . . . the isms were, for me, a killjoy. When I got out of literature classes and started spending a lot of time with writers—at workshops, conferences, and in grad school—I discovered that lit crit lives in an entirely different dimension from the people who write the books that are being dissected. Writers generally don’t set out to write something with those isms in mind; they set out to tell a story. The isms come after, and they often have nothing to do with the writer’s intention.

I’ve recently noticed that this same dichotomy isn’t as distinct in the art world. The academics seem to have a stronger hold on artists than they do on writers. Artists think and talk in terms of critical constructs that you just don’t hear writers using. It’s not just about the artist creating; the artist has to have a concept for her work. Concept, schmoncept. It’s as though the scholars and critics have gotten into artists’ minds, and the artists have bought in to what the critics are saying. Don’t get me wrong—I think there’s a place for the kind of intellectualizing that academics groove on. I just wonder whether it has any place in the realm of creativity. How much can you possibly produce when you have all that theory—all that stuff that should come after you’re finished with your work—floating around in your mind?

When their last album was released, I heard the Dixie Chicks say that whenever they’re not sure what to do, they ask themselves, “What would Bruce Springsteen do?” Well, whenever I’m not sure what to do, I ask myself, “What would Joan Didion do?” There is a place in this world for the Susan Sontags. But give me Didion any day. I would argue that both women were/are brilliant, but where Sontag was entirely in her head, Didion volleys back and forth between her neuroses and her heart, with curiosity as her compass. I can’t imagine Didion saying, “I think I’ll write an essay about my existential angst as exacerbated and illuminated by the Santa Ana winds,” or “My concept for this piece is a postmodern look at The Doors waiting for Jim Morrison.” I think she wrote, and writes, to try to answer her own questions and to make sense of the world. After Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 30, 2003, with their daughter, Quintana Roo, in a coma at Beth Israel, Didion wrote to cope with her own grief, and the result was The Year of Magical Thinking, a road map of grief that made me feel, upon reading it, that I could now handle any loss, any death, because at least I would be able to turn to this book and know I was not alone.

And that’s what I want in my own life, in my own work. I want it to be about my questions, my answers, my fears, my opinions, my vision, my voice. I don’t want to get caught up in intellectualizing it—I’ll leave that for other people.

Labels: artists, books, Bruce Springsteen, Dixie Chicks, education, Jim Morrison, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, music, photographers, Santa Ana winds, Susan Sontag, The Doors, writers

Cowboy II

Last month, I went down to the Brooks campus in Ventura, to see documentary photographer Matt Black show his work and talk about it. I first heard about Black when some of his photographs of Oaxacan migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley were published in a 26-page spread in West, the Los Angeles Times magazine (September 3, 2006).

He has the softest speaking voice you can imagine—I had to strain to hear him and a couple times people asked him to speak up—which seems to fit when you see his photographs. Not only are they grainy, but he’s captured such intimate moments that you almost hold your breath when you look at them, just to stay super-quiet and still. The room was silent when he showed his images—not just quiet, but silent. I saw Jane Goodall speak once, and she had a similar aura about her. It’s as though some people are so devoted to observing that when they find themselves in a room full of people, with all eyes on them, instead of the reverse, they’re almost stunned.

Anyway, Black has devoted his professional life to covering, as he put it, the dark places, the places where, from outer space, you can’t see any light.

Data courtesy Marc Imhoff of NASA GSFC and Christopher Elvidge of NOAA NGDC. Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC.

He works in the tradition of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the rest of the Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s. Except instead of being steered by Roy Stryker, he chooses his own stories and then looks for outlets for them. Each story is chosen for how it contributes to the whole. As he said, it’s not about contests or photo spreads—the prize is building a body of work that records a moment in time, for the historical record.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of work I want to do. Is it documentary? Is it fine art? Do I even have to choose?

What I’ve come up with so far is that I want to tell stories, about people and the places they live. Although I completely respect photographers like Black, who see people being abused (some would say enslaved) and want to use their photography to shine a light on the situation, I’m motivated more by curiosity (i.e., What will I find there?) than I am by issues (i.e., What can I do to stop this injustice?).

I’m taking a six-month documentary workshop this year—maybe I’ll find some answers to these questions. Or at least answers that work for me.

P.S. Took this photo this afternoon. He had just kicked off his boots when I found him.

Labels: Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration, Jane Goodall, Matt Black, photographers, Roy Stryker, Walker Evans

Look at the pretty horsies!

I’m not sure what it says about me that I left a small Midwestern town for California, only to find myself taking pictures of horses and roosters. Okay, it was a ten-foot-tall statue of a rooster, but still.

When I was a kid, there was a family in my neighborhood that owned a horse and a rooster. I used to hear the rooster crowing in the morning, and occasionally, the horse would get out of his corral and follow my dad on his daily jog.

Labels: family

Malibu

Driving in to L.A. today on the PCH, the only sign of last night’s fires was a blackened field across the street from Pepperdine. I took this picture about seventeen miles west of where the fire was.

Labels: fires

Cockeyed

Somewhere between Summerland and Carpinteria.

Changing of the guard

Interesting debate going on over at Alec Soth’s blog about some of the post-Katrina fine-art images by photographers such as Robert Polidori. You know your blog has achieved fame when Robert Polidori himself responds, from New Delhi.

Soth’s original post, Polidori’s response, and Soth’s follow-up are all worth reading, and I have my own take on the issue (i.e., post-Katrina images without people), but I think what’s more interesting even than that is the nature of Polidori’s response. He mentions something about the Great Lakes being a “Sour Milk Sea,” implying that Soth (from Minnesota) is somehow bitter. It seems to me that all Soth was doing in his blog was thinking about images by artists whose work he respected but that had left him wanting more. He was questioning not only the work, but also himself, trying to figure out why the absence of people in the images mattered. Isn’t that the point of art—to make people question?

At one point, Polidori mentions having had to “suffer through” numerous exhibitions since the 1970s that didn’t share his personal aesthetic. If Polidori represents the old guard (I realize that’s a big if), and if Soth represents the new (maybe another big if), then I think we’ve just witnessed the changing of the guard. Soth doesn’t seem to suffer through anything.

Labels: Alec Soth, photographers, Robert Polidori

The unchecklist

I’ve just finished a year of photography classes, and with the spring semester set to begin in two weeks, I’m wrestling with myself over whether to take the two classes I’ve signed up for.

I’m not in school to get a degree, so it’s really about what I think I’ll get out of the classes and how I want to spend my time. Of the three I’ve taken so far, one was fantastic, and the other two were good. I’m sure I’d learn things in these two. The question is: Where would I learn more—in class or on my own?

I don’t know . . . I’m excited about what I’m doing on my own, and the thought of having to do assignments somebody else imposes on me right now isn’t all that appealing. If I expect to make a living as a photographer someday, I know it’ll be important to approach assignments or commissioned work with the same enthusiasm and intensity I put into my personal projects—and I’m confident I’ll be able to do that. (I’ve never been much for ennui.) But for now, I want my photography to be about my exploration of what matters to me and what doesn’t. Lately I’ve just been going out with my camera and playing around, noticing what grabs my attention and what I pass by. The more time I spend doing this, the sooner my own visual style will start to emerge. At least that’s my theory.

I’d rather let the classes I take spring from what I’m curious about, instead of being dictated by what classes the school offers and which ones I haven’t yet taken. I’m trying to get away from that checklist approach to learning—it feeds into my anal nature a bit too easily, and easy isn’t what I’m going for.

So I guess I do know.

Labels: education

Cowboy

Just driving around on a Friday night.

The yin and yang of it

American Photo magazine’s State of the Art blog had a post last night about photographers’ blogs that’s well worth checking out. (Click here to read it.) It mentions Alec Soth’s blog and Web site. If you haven’t seen his work, you should—especially NIAGARA (winner of the Golden Light Book of the Year Award for 2006). Soth is one of my favorite photographers working today.

I hadn’t heard of Amy Elkins before, but State of the Art mentions her as well, and I can see why. Her blog is a great example of the power of photography—and of the Internet to get your work out there.

I’ve been seeing my blog as a way to share what I’m thinking about and working on now (i.e., today), a place to put up some stuff that I might not otherwise post to my Web site. I hadn’t even considered blogs as marketing tools, but the State of the Art post makes a strong case for their usefulness in that way.

I’m not far enough into blogging to know for sure what I think of that, but my instinct is that a blog will be much more interesting to read (and write) if the blogger is doing it more as an experiment, a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants way of communicating. If the photographer goes into it thinking of it as a piece of advertising . . . I don’t know—I wonder if that might make it too precious, take all the spontaneity and randomness out of it. Part of what I love about reading blogs—and writing this one so far—is the yin and yang of it, the up and down, the way that, some days, the blogger comes up with something really brilliant, and other days, she has almost nothing. You get to see the process in action.

When you read a novel, you know that the author didn’t just sit down on a Monday at 9 a.m., power up his computer, and start typing flawlessly. You know there were fits and starts, starts and stops, days when the words flowed and days when he was banging his head against the keyboard or hitting the liquor cabinet before noon. But when you read the book, you don’t see any evidence of that—all you see is the (sometimes) beautiful finished product.

The blog is like looking at the crossed-out manuscript of an author, or the marked-up contact sheet of a photographer. You see what works and what doesn’t, and you get to watch as the blogger finds her way.

P.S. I took this photo this afternoon at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Montecito.

Labels: Alec Soth, Amy Elkins, blogs, books, photographers, State of the Art

Cog, bullshit, vampire potential

I had the kind of day at my day job that makes me want to get a black cape and sharpen my eye teeth. I know I’m just a cog, but dammit, I take pride in the way my cog contributes to the whole, and when someone tries to mess with my cog. . . . Anyway, I was caught up in this bullshit for the better part of the day and into the evening, and, finally, when I realized I’d forgotten to eat dinner and it was getting late, I just grabbed my camera and walked out the door.

I ended up a few blocks away, at a house that has to have the best display of Christmas lights I’ve ever seen. I stood on the sidewalk and looked up, and it sounds too easy, but all the stuff I’d been so upset about just minutes before faded away. How could I be pissed when I was surrounded by all that light?

Zero vampire potential.

Labels: day job

Is she breathing?

So I saw a documentary on Dorothea Lange in class last year, and in it, she said, “You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.”

I’ve always meant to put my camera around my neck along with my putting on my flip-flops. I start out doing it, and then one day I forget, and it’s all over. But because I’m trying to post a new picture every day—and because I don’t have time every day to go out specifically with the purpose of taking pictures—I realized that carrying my camera was the only way to do it.

And so, today, I was in Summerland (the city of 1,545 down the coast from Santa Barbara, not the cancelled WB series starring that girl from Full House) at the going-out-of-business Summerland Market picking up a Diet Coke (and, full disclosure, a Hershey’s bar) and I saw the unofficial guardian of the market, the owners’ ancient dog, whose name I’ve never really learned, asleep in her bed, wearing a sweater, her stuffed elephant by her side. I walked around taking pictures of this dog for a few minutes, sometimes getting within five or six feet of her, and she never woke up.

She was breathing—I checked.

Labels: Dorothea Lange, photographers

Welcome

New year, brand-spankin’-new blog!

To kick things off, here’s a bit about me and what I hope to do with this blog.

I got my first camera, a Kodak Disc, for my tenth birthday, in 1983, and for the next twenty years, I always had a camera around. Maybe more important, I was always aware of photography and photographers, sort of like when you have your heart set on a new car, it seems like every time you turn around, you see someone driving one. It’s as if your senses are heightened when you want something that much, and I wanted to be a photographer more than I’ve ever wanted any car.

As I got older, though, and started thinking about a “career” in a more concrete way, I didn’t have any context for what it would mean to be a working photographer, or how to get there. I didn’t know any photographers, and the ones whose work I’d admired as a kid seemed out of reach. Plus, I wasn’t a fan of uncertainty—the thought of not knowing where I was going or how to get there drove me crazy. So I ended up majoring in English and taking a more traditional path, one that led me far away from photography. Sure, I kept my camera, and I took the occasional darkroom class at the local art center. But that was the extent of my involvement with photography, and I thought that’s the way it would always be.

After undergrad, I spent six or seven years working in a job I didn’t love—cubicle, gray walls, fluorescent lights, The Office minus the comedy. In my late twenties, I moved to L.A. (shout out to Angelenos!) and picked up a master’s degree in writing. School was like a Linus blanket for me, all blue and warm and fuzzy, and I thought for sure this degree would change everything. And it did—just not in the way I thought it would.

I didn’t write the Great American Novel or become the Voice of My Generation. But for my master’s thesis, I wrote a collection of essays on photography—and the more I wrote about photography and thought about how much it had mattered to me ever since I got that Kodak Disc camera and wore the collars of my Izods turned up, the more I wanted to be out taking pictures. I started to remember what I’d wanted to do and be when I was ten, before I started telling myself those things were out of reach. I finished my thesis and walked away with forty thousand dollars in student loans—and the decision to be a photographer.

Everything had come full circle.

Today I’m taking some amazing photo classes—not to get a degree, just to learn—and I’m letting my curiosity lead the way. Right now, I’m most interested in documentary work, but I’m open to other possibilities. I’m still growing as a photographer—finding my voice, my style—and I don’t want to limit myself.

In this blog, I’ll post images I’ve taken that same day (like the one below). I’ll also write about the photographers I’ve always admired (and ones I’ve just discovered), photo books that have made me think, lectures and exhibits I’ve attended, projects I’m working on (or hope to work on someday), successes I’ve had, mistakes I’ve made, things I can’t figure out, and anything else that’s on my mind—because if it’s on my mind, odds are, it has to do with photography.

Labels: cameras, debt, education, Kodak Disc

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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Dry cleaner, Disney

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Library

Monday, January 29, 2007

That’s not a suitcase

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Bathtub

Saturday, January 27, 2007

photo la

Friday, January 26, 2007

Sixty-three minutes

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Shampoo

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Only in Montecito

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Art’s

Monday, January 22, 2007

Spam

Sunday, January 21, 2007

No-head line

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Garage surfer

Friday, January 19, 2007

Oversight

Thursday, January 18, 2007

More like it

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Raincheck

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Heineken

Monday, January 15, 2007

For your consideration

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Market

Saturday, January 13, 2007

On the way home

Friday, January 12, 2007

Conceptualize this

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Cowboy II

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Look at the pretty horsies!

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Malibu

Monday, January 08, 2007

Cockeyed

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Changing of the guard

Saturday, January 06, 2007

The unchecklist

Friday, January 05, 2007

Cowboy

Thursday, January 04, 2007

The yin and yang of it

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Cog, bullshit, vampire potential

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Is she breathing?

Monday, January 01, 2007

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