Interview: Susana Raab

You gotta love Susana Raab. Here’s why.

Liz: I first heard about you on Amy Stein’s blog, where Amy mentioned she’d hung out with you at PHotoEspana, and I figured, “Hell, if Amy likes her, she must be a swell gal.” I checked out your Web site and blog, and you were my new photo hero, a working photographer, making your living through your work, and also producing personal projects that were getting you to Spain and all over the world. Why don’t you start off by telling me how you got into photography in the first place? I think I remember that we’re both English majors (well, I know I was an English major, and I think you were, too). How did you get from English to photography?

Susana: I spent a lot of time out of college trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had switched from a business major (which my mother had urged me to be—“How else will you get a job?”—oh, the irony of that statement now!) to English after I was flunking out of econ and stats from total apathy. Ended up finishing my major in three semesters with close to a 4.0 and really being enthused about my coursework again. Growing up, I was pretty much a latchkey kid, moving every two years till junior high, and, as a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time in my room reading and not really pursuing any other interests. As a result, when I graduated from college, I had no clue what I wanted to do or how to determine it.

Returning to Northern Virginia, I took a job working at the National Beer Wholesalers’ Association, which at the time, as a recent post-grad, sounded way cooler than it was; revisionist history being what it is, I see it now for what it was: a desperate attempt to pay rent at any cost.

Knowing I had to figure something out, I fell back into English, taking grad classes at night, and deciding to move across country to Eugene, Oregon, to pursue a graduate degree in English there. (Two out of my four best years as a kid were spent in Eugene, Oregon, and I think I was drawn there to sort of recapture what I thought of as my Edenic moment.)

About a year in, writing a paper on Foucault and madness, I began to feel slightly mad, realized I was enjoying the literary theory too much and to what purpose? Didn’t want to get a job teaching freshman English in BFE. Stumbled upon a book by Howard Chapnick, Black Star agency founder, entitled Truth Needs No Ally, and realized that, through photojournalism, I could combine my love of words, narratives, social utility, and art.

Started taking classes in photography at the local community college, dropped out of grad school, skied, camped, hiked, joined the Peace Corps, dispatched to Outer Mongolia, and, when I returned to the D.C. area, I started working for local newspapers, which led to an internship and job at Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress, which led to a full-time non-staff position at The New York Times D.C. bureau, freelancing for major pubs, which led to grad school for a self-imposed timeout and a reinvention of myself as a photographer, a process which will probably continue till I die. As you can see, it’s been a long and winding road.

Copyright © Susana Raab

L: I have a master’s in writing from USC, and though I’m glad I was there (because of the people I met), I graduated with forty thousand dollars in student loans and the realization that I didn’t want to be a writer. To me, grad school seemed like a way to force people to write who weren’t writing on their own. Some people I went to school with are writing and publishing; but more of them are just working day jobs paying off their student loans and talking about how they haven’t written much lately. You got your master’s from Ohio University’s School of Visual Communications. What made you decide to go back to get your master’s? What are your thoughts about grad school for photography in general? Do you recommend it? Why or why not? What purpose does it serve?

S: I was really burning out on D.C. photojournalism, covering Congress and the White House, that feeling of being so cool because you were traveling on Air Force One, landing in some small town and walking in a giant pool, colleagues in the bubble being rude to local press, being pushed by and screamed at, “Go pool!” by twentysomething White House staffers, evaluating your photography in comparison to what thirty other people had shot, from virtually the same angle, being asked every evening, “Do you have something that matches the wires?” This was really not for me. I really value not foregrounding one’s ego, being nice to people, regardless of status, byline, or who made the front page of The Washington Post. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I have many fond memories, but I wanted to put more of me into my shots (I mean my thinking, my personality—this might be ego?). I have a lot of respect for the photographers who make their living this way, there are some excellent and nice ones, it’s just not for everyone. It was a fantastic training ground, and I was privileged to learn so much, technically, how to handle situations, how to work a scene, how to work fast, and, of course, the caliber of the people I was working with was super-high. I also was able to meet a lot of extraordinary human beings. So no regrets, but it was time to leave.

Grad school for me was my hall pass. I got out of D.C. I could focus on what I wanted to shoot and how I wanted to shoot it. Moving to Appalachian Ohio was a complete paradigm shift, but moving all the time growing up, and spending that time in Mongolia, I really look forward to new environments and am pretty happy anywhere. My tolerance for ambiguity is infinite. A friend of mine, a noted Magnum photographer, advised me to just go the workshop route instead, so before I went to grad school I took a workshop with another noted Magnum photographer. The other photographer also reinforced the feeling that grad school was for people who didn’t know what they wanted to do. This may be true. But for me, grad school was incredibly more rewarding than that seven-day workshop (though I am not against workshops at all—had a fabulous experience at the Missouri [Photo] Workshop, and am looking for a good one for this year for a little recharge). But in grad school (OU’s VisCom program does a great job of funding—I have no debt), I really became free. I shot medium format exclusively, when I could; I began my Consumed and Off-Season projects; I learned audio, multimedia; and I was free. Free! I drove all over Appalachian Ohio—I loved it! I loved the landscape, the people, the quirkiness, the accessibility. I was inspired by walking into class and being forced to come up with story ideas all the time. It was fabulous being in this cocoon of photography—I didn’t make the connections I would have had I been in NYC, but it was a nurturing, productive period in my life, to which I would return in a second.

Copyright © Susana Raab

So I don’t know what to say about grad school and photography, really. My time in grad school for English ultimately created a great antipathy in me about theorizing, etc. Words, words, words. I’m into narratives—in this sense, I like words. But this ivory-tower navel-gazing is not for me. And I don’t mean any disrespect by this. I am very much a live-and-let-live person, and I accept that much of contemporary art is entangled in this sort of theoretical construct that gives it meaning. I can’t fight it, nor am I interested in doing so. It is simply not for me. If I die obscure and irrelevant because of my refusal to participate in this process, so be it. I am what I am. So I don’t think I would have been a good match for more of an art school, in that sense, as I’m kind of a just-stop-talking-about-it-and-get-out-and-do-it person. Of course, the nature of my work is different from that of contemporary art photographers, so different bodies of work obviously have different modalities. I complete embrace the diversity of expression—I’m just not going to talk a lot of hooey about my work. (Kidding!) That said, I do employ metaphor and symbolism in my work. Living under the shadow of the Washington Monument, I am very phallo-sensitivo. Oh, sorry—off topic!

Okay, back to grad school. I mean, I think it really depends upon the individual and what they are trying to do. I think that the reason I went back is not a common one. And in my program, the majority of students just wanted to get into photography in the first place. I think what is helpful about going back as a more mature student (and I say this pronounced like couture) is that generally, you know what you want out of it, you have something to say, and you’re just trying to find the proper tools to employ in the expression. In any graduate school endeavor, I think it’s best to go and get some “real-life experience” and live a little (or a lot) before rushing into grad school. You do learn a lot along the way. Everything I have done informs me now.

Copyright © Susana Raab

L: What personal projects are you working on now? And what are you hoping to do down the road? Do you want to continue working editorially? Teach? Publish a book? Have a solo show at MOMA? Be copied by every young photographer?

S: I’m a bit pathetic in that I will continue to work on Consumed and Off-Season. I leave them for months—months!—and then will one day be inspired and go back to it. I would love to make Consumed into a book in a couple of years. Off-Season is going to be a longer endeavor. I am always in awe of these photographers who can pull these two-day projects out of their hat and make a fabulous book. This is not me, alas. I started this other project, an homage to my English background, A Sense of Place, on dead writers’ homes. Totally different, and doesn’t appeal to the same people who like my other stuff, generally, but you know, I got to mix it up. I’m a peripatetic person and that extends to my vision. Some projects are poignant, some ironic and humorous. I don’t wake up in the same mood every day. This is probably not the best career choice. But I gotta photograph for me.

Copyright © Susana Raab

One year, at Review Santa Fe, I was lucky to be reviewed by the remarkable Bill Witliff, a very generous soul. He looked at my Consumed work and said, “You have to keep shooting with your heart and not with your head.” And at the time, I thought I was shooting with my head, because at last I was putting something of myself into the photographs, rather than recording history (not that the two are necessarily exclusive—I was just not adept at this at the time), and then months later, I realized he was right, it was all coming from the heart. Every bit of it. So this is why I do what I want to do, because I struggled for a loooong time to realize what I wanted to do, and to deny it now would be ungrateful.

I’ve got a lot of project ideas rolling around the old squash. I’d like to do one in D.C. It’s so ridiculous to live in this town that is fecund with nascent projects and to instead spend five hundred dollars in gas getting to another idea a thousand miles away. Plus, I think it’s very underrepresented in a wider pictorial sense. Andy Cutraro did a nice project last year on the two faces of D.C. along Pennsylvania Avenue that put all us documentary D.C. photogs to shame. I think it’s pretty common for us to overlook our backyard.

I’m starting another one in Peru—was lucky to get an assignment while away that jibed perfectly with a project I’m developing there. I love working editorially, even though at times, I do feel like a waitress with a camera (in the sense that you’re fulfilling an order without a budget that gives you the gift of time to think). I’ve worked enough jobs I really hated to be grateful to be paid for one that, 75 percent of the time, is fantastic.

One day I would love to teach, too. I really enjoy meeting with students and fomenting ideas, inspiring and being inspired. I love sharing—it’s the basis of art, isn’t it? But I’m traveling too much right now to teach, so that will have to wait.

Solo show at MOMA? That’ll be the day! Wouldn’t say no, of course! But it’s not on my inspiration board, at the moment. I’m super-grateful to be working and have the time to do my personal work and have it get some recognition. It’s going to happen, but for me the most important thing is producing the work. Of course, you have to get the work out there. No use doing all this work and dying on the vine. But it’s just much more fun to produce.

Copyright © Susana Raab

L: I just got a US$37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

S: I have to say, I am often more inspired by reading the biographies of artists. Nothing like witnessing third-hand a good struggle to really buck you up and get you out there. For ejemplo: Did you know [Willem] de Kooning didn’t have his first solo show till he was well in into his forties? And you know, I love looking at others peoples’ work, photographers/artists, but I gotta say: Invest in yourself. Buy yourself some gas, film, or fund some time, whatever you have to do to make it happen for you.

If you insist on purchasing a book, I’d say Lars Tunbjork’s Office. Mundane hilarity. Making something out of nothing. The inseparability of humor and tragedy. Not taking the easy way out.

Interview: Greg Wasserstrom

One of my all-time favorite bloggers I’ve never met is Greg Wasserstrom. As I told him when I e-mailed my list of questions, I see him as part of a younger generation of photographers, many of whom seem Serious (with a capital S), and he doesn’t. I don’t mean that his work isn’t serious or that he’s not serious about his work; I mean that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and I dig that.

On to the interview.

Liz: I love your project The Doldrums. It feels really cohesive in its disjointedness to me, like there’s a madness with a method underneath. Is that intentional, or does it just come out that way? I tend to be worried about drawing connections between images, and you seem not to be burdened with any of that, and it works so well. I guess I’m curious how you do it, if that’s even answerable.

Greg: I’m really happy to hear you say Doldrums feels cohesive. Having lived through all the moments the series presents, it certainly feels cohesive to me, but I’ve shown it to a couple gallerists who didn’t agree. But I do feel that these images are inherently tied together and that they are part of an ongoing body of work. The series is about the last few months before I moved from D.C., so I added the subtitle “A Fractional Portrait of the Nation’s Capital.” I think that helps make sense of it for people who don’t see what I’m getting at at first (or second) glance.

At the same time though, I kind of don’t give a shit about traditional organizing principles. Not that there’s anything wrong with creating work in a more project-based way. If that was a process that came naturally to me, I would assuredly use it. But I don’t think like that. I just shoot, and then the art is in the editing. So, in a certain sense, they all are just a bunch of one-off snapshots thrown together. But they create a sort of nonlinear narrative about me and the space I inhabit. If that doesn’t appeal, I don’t blame you. My life isn’t exactly the most fascinating.

But I hope to make work that that’s both personal and socially revealing. Looking at my life and what’s going on around me always makes me think that it’s totally insane that we live in a system that can support kids like me. So I want to try and do things that are sort of self-conscious chronicles of this particular historic moment; something that’s immersed in it all, but always cognizant of the giant thundercloud that’s hanging over this entire period of history.

But even if you don’t buy that, I think that my way of seeing comes across loud and clear. It all serves as a chronicle of depression if nothing else. So one way or another, I think it’s the autobiographical nature of what I do and the inescapable point of view I bring to it that links my work together—at least in my eyes.

Copyright © Greg Wasserstrom

L: How did you get started in photography? What made you want to be a photographer? And you write, too, from what I read on your blog, so how do you mesh the two interests in your life? Do you see yourself more as a photographer or as a writer? Do you want to find a way to combine them more directly?

G: Oh, gosh. I really have been using a camera in some form or other since I was a pretty little kid. I always loved taking pictures when we were on vacation growing up and practically begged my parents for my own camera. They were always really hesitant to give me anything of the sort because I’ve never been very good at keeping things nice. I went through quite a few. I have no idea what happened to all the pictures. I would love to take a look at them now, especially since my way of working has come pretty much full circle.

I got into stop-motion animation when I was ten or eleven, which developed into an interest in video art by the time I was going into high school. I got into still photography around the time I was graduating. The common thread here, I think, is that these are all ways to make art without having to have, say, fine motor skills or other abilities demanded by other forms of visual art. Also, I’m an incredibly analytical person, and I think I’m drawn to the photograph because of its capacity for symbolism. Photographs are interesting, I think, when they add up to depict something much larger than what’s within any individual frame.

That’s how my photography relates to what I write; I’m a political blogger, so my job is to provide commentary, which is what I also try and do with my pictures. So I don’t really see myself as some hybrid of a writer and photographer. I think of myself more as a kind of social observer working across a couple of different mediums. I would love nothing more than to combine these two things directly; they’re the same thing as far as I’m concerned, so I’ve been experimenting with different ways to do this in a kind of interesting or innovative way. To that end, I’m sort of looking to Wolfgang Tillmans and Dash Snow and the way both incorporate news clippings and other text into their work. I’m getting closer, I think.

Copyright © Greg Wasserstrom

L: When you think about photography, do you see it more as a craft or an art? I’m thinking of woodworkers, for example—they can make beautiful things, but they probably still see themselves as craftspeople more than artists. Maybe it’s a moot point, actually. I don’t know . . . scrap this question if it doesn’t do anything for you.

G: I don’t think I could dare to classify an entire medium as one thing or another. I’ve seen wedding photographs that I’ve really loved. And I’ve seen photographs on the walls of museums that make me vomit in my mouth a little. I suppose it has a bit to do with what kind of pictures are being taken and the attitude of the photographer about her own work. All the boundaries are really blurry. But when I think of photography as craft, I think of the guy who takes pictures at Little League games for the newsletter or something, all the way up through certain approaches to photojournalism and some commercial photography. But things are what we make of them, really.

Copyright © Greg Wasserstrom

L: Do you have any specific goals for your photography? Where do you want to go with it? (I sound like a college admissions counselor all of a sudden.) I mean, are you thinking you want to remain in the art world, focus on gallery shows, maybe a book someday, teach, etc.? Or do you think you’ll go the editorial/commercial route and try to make a living from your photographs? Or maybe neither?

G: Yeah, I mean, I have all sorts of grandiose fantasies about where I hope all this will go. I was just at Ryan McGinley’s opening at Team Gallery the other night and it was ridiculous and, of course, I'm sitting there thinking, “I could see this for myself.” So that’s pretty silly and is akin to wanting to be Radiohead or something. In real terms, I don’t have a specific plan for where I’m going. I know I want to be in this for the long haul, I want to get an MFA, I want to teach. I would love to make books. Regular editorial work would be fantastic, though I’m not comfortable enough to start seeking it out just at the moment. And if someone were to pay me to do commercial work for them, I would have no qualms whatsoever. (McGinley just did a big shoot for Heineken, I hear.) But I feel like I have a couple of questions to answer before I go full throttle after my dreams of riches and international superstardom. As soon as I feel like I have a little more control of the kind of work I produce, I’ll be hot on the heels of destiny, or whatever it is they say. I hope to be on much different footing a year from now.

Copyright © Greg Wasserstrom

L: I just got a US$37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

G: I flipped through Brian Finke’s new book, Flight Attendants, when I was at The powerHouse Arena the other night and I would probably pick that up. He takes some pretty well-established archetypes (the pilot, the flight attendant) and does a masterful job playing with them and looking at them in very fresh ways. Also, the images are gorgeous.

Collect this: Embedded

This is my first non-photographic 20x200 purchase. I love L.A., and this image, Embedded, by Aili Schmeltz, captures at least part of the reason why. Get it here.

Copyright © Aili Schmeltz

Interview: Mrs. Deane

Third up: Mrs. Deane (a.k.a. Norman Beierle and Hester Keijser).

Liz: According to your site, “Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from, respectively, Germany and Holland. It is named . . . after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the twentieth century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds oneself confronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the probable. Here, every man has to decide for himself what he holds to be true and what not.” I get all that, but how do you run this operation? Do you both do the writing? Will the real Mrs. Deane please stand up?

Hester: I didn’t realize you believed in resurrection. If the “real” Mrs. Deane decided to answer your call I would be quite shaken. But seriously, “Mrs. Deane-the-Blog” is pretty much a joint venture, with both of us contributing in our own way. I do all the actual writing, but that’s merely a matter of convenience. I studied for two years in the States at a dreadful, posh, all-girls finishing school college in Virginia, making me a bit more comfortable with the language than Norman. Content (raw text) is contributed by both of us. Norman will give me a rough draft, which I then tame into something readable. Finding new stuff is something we both spend considerable time on, somewhere between one and three hours a day. Sometimes we discuss our findings between ourselves before deciding to post about it or not (yet). All this intertwining makes it impossible to say who is “writing” Mrs. Deane, which is why we prefer to keep it open and let Mrs. Deane be our mouthpiece.

L: One of the things I’m most impressed about when reading your blog—and this probably says more about me than anything I’ll ask you about—is how often you’re on vacation/holiday. What’s a day, a week, or a month in your lives like? Are you working artists? Do you support yourself with any kind of day job(s)? How do you make a go of it?

H: That’s hilarious! Of all things, I’d never imagined people would be the most impressed about our periods of absence. How impressed will you be if we’d take a permanent vacation? It’s true we were away a lot last year, but not all these absences were real vacations and often involved working very hard in a place with no (fast) Internet access or good computers.

Norman: We are not the typical holiday-type people. Roasting in the sun on a beach isn’t an “activity” both of us would enjoy. Traveling through Europe is often connected with (art) business. We feel comfortable to bring business and personal things together, so when we visited my brother in Berlin, we also took photographs of exhibition spaces in that city. It’s a common practice for full-time artists to combine business and private matters.

H: Like most full-time self-employed visual artists, we’re overworked and underpaid with the one luxury: that no one tells us when to work and when not. If we feel like skipping a day or two, that’s fine. We’ll make up for it later by working sixteen hours a day or more if need be.

What a month looks like depends very much on the projects we have on the go at the time. It can be quite hectic, like last January and February when we worked nonstop on a commission, three exhibitions, a catalog, and preparing for our guest lectures in Rotterdam, but there have been more quiet times, allowing us to develop work and try new things with the financial backup of a stipend. We’ve always supported ourselves with public commissions, sales, lectures, and stipends, but there’s a serious financial dip looming in the not-so-distant future we need to start worrying about pretty soon, apart from buying lottery tickets.

Copyright © Beierle + Keijser

L: Your blog has really become an authority of sorts. You’re linked out the wazoo, read around the world, celebrities in the photoblogosphere. Knowing what I know about the two of you, you’re probably already blushing in embarrassment if you’ve even read this far. Why did you start your blog, and what do you get out of the blogging experience as artists?

H: I don’t feel that way at all, like a celebrity or an authority. That’s what other people make of it, like the assistant photographer we met last winter in Budapest who almost fell out of his chair when he learned we were “the” Mrs. Deane. I was very embarrassed and told him to get off it, which he luckily did. I feel admiration or a wrongly attributed sense of authority gets in the way of having a normal conversation with another. At the same time, having a blog out there that people read has taken away previously existing barriers as well. In that sense, it’s an excellent business card. But whatever we may think, we’re all pretty much nobodies in this world, especially in the art world, which often forgets how tiny it really is compared to the world of politics or billion-dollar multinationals. What also prevents any hubris to grow, is that in Holland this whole photoblogging thing doesn’t have the same status it seems to have acquired in the States. Honestly, I’m always a bit flabbergasted with the importance attributed to blogs and bloggers in the States, or with the disappointment of bloggers who don’t get the following they hoped for.

To tell you the truth, I really can't remember why we started this blog, which was first published in Dutch only and initially covered a wider range of topics than just photography. Let’s say it just happened one day and move on to the next question.

Copyright © Beierle + Keijser

L: What do you get out of the blogging experience as artists? Do you have a love/hate relationship with your blog? I see that all over the place . . . people taking breaks from their blogs, people starting over with new blogs, people calling it quits and returning to the “real” world. Do you have any of that angst, or does all that vacationing you do pretty much take care of whatever blog-related angst you might be plagued with otherwise?

H: Blogging is a natural extension of our art practice, I don’t see it as something I do on the side. Looking at and discussing the merits of other people’s work and photography in general is something Norman and I did a lot even before blogging. We hardly ever get to do this with Dutch colleagues, who somehow shun such discussions about art. With the blog, we tap into a community with whom we can share this need for an exchange of thoughts. The relative popularity of the blog has made me feel less like the odd one out and more confident about my work.

Also, externalizing thoughts on a daily basis in a format intended for publication is like casting a ruthless light on creatures otherwise kept in the comfortable darkness of one’s private opinion. It helps to expose weaknesses and inconsistencies, it shows where you might be too harsh and where greater sharpness in vision is needed. Writing daily also makes it easier to formulate such odious things as press releases or motivations for one’s work. Discipline is as important in the arts as it is in music or theater, and being able to express yourself in words as a visual artist has (some would say unfortunately) become vital for survival in the current landscape of contemporary art.

None of that love/hate stuff. Of course, there are always times when it’s hard to find stuff to write about or when you feel you’re not exploring the right avenues. Then I have to push myself to reinvent or relocate my initial enthusiasm for blogging about photography. Making up silly projects like the fashion week helps to break any rut I’m in. I still feel Mrs. Deane can be a whole lot better than it is and I am far from satisfied with the scope of my writing. As long I have this vague notion of where it is I ought to be heading with the blog, I don’t think I’ll call it quits. Not yet anyway, but ask us again in a year or two.

L: Your Web site has an incredible variety of work, and I find your work as hard to categorize as Mrs. Deane herself. Talk to me a little about your photography, in particular, and what projects you're working on or care about right now.

H+N: I suppose a lot of our work, both photographic and non-photographic, can be called “site specific” in the sense that, when making work for a show or a presentation, we incorporate in our plans the specific site where everything is to take place. We will take into consideration such variables as the size of the space, the size and number of the images it allows, the kind of light available, what the physical experience of standing in the space and viewing the images will feel like, the demographics of the visitors to be expected, the occasion for which we were invited, the specific prestige (or lack thereof) of the venue and sometimes even the amount of press to be expected. These variables are like pieces of a large puzzle that all need to fall into place. About 80 percent of our shows and presentations, including the publicity, are orchestrated by us from A to Z, even though the public is not always aware of having been part of the plan.

Coming from a background in site-specific installations and public art projects, we apply the same approach to our photographic work, which draws on our passion for (the history of) photography and the context in which photographs appear. Our interest in photography certainly doesn’t stop with taking pictures and making prints of the work. Curators can’t come shopping in our studio for work they’d like to exhibit in whatever venue they have in mind. When invited for a show, we will often make work geared toward the occasion. When making work, we—and especially Norman—always have a very clear idea how the presentation will be in its entirety. Perhaps you could say that the individual objects on display are actualized or come to life by being presented to the public.

The drawback of working with photo-based site-specific presentations (I wouldn’t quite call them installations) is obvious: You can’t simply transplant work from one presentation space to the next. Presenting the same photographs in different places often means finding a new context for the work that is as viable as the original one, and I can imagine going so far as to reprint works in a different size if the space asks for it. When viewing our online portfolio, you miss out on this site specificness of the work. We consider the Web site as a kind of documentation of our work rather than as a presentation in some sort of virtual gallery.

Currently, we’re making tests for an upcoming show in Hamburg with prints developed in a bath of instant coffee, washing soda, and water. The final prints, which have coffee-table decoration as their subject, will be mounted on a piece of wood covered with typical tablecloth material matching the prints. This project was fueled by something we saw at a photo fair: an unusual Belgian frame, which used folded art nouveau decorated wallpaper as a background for presenting rows of small photographs that were stuck in the folds of the wallpaper. We liked the strange combination of the wildly decorated background and the fact that the photographs retained their distinct materiality and their character as “objects for use,” something which contemporary framing methods using Dibond or borderless mounting on aluminum tries to conceal as much as possible.

L: I just got a US$37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

H: If I were you, I’d try to get a refund on that credit or else sell the voucher to someone. Use the money instead on books with photos that can be had for anything between one dollar and five dollars at thrift stores, charity shops, or second-hand book shops. We often get more inspiration out of books with old product photography or ancient color reproductions of gardens and flowers; illustrated user manuals; obscure catalogs of forgotten exhibitions about Gothic cathedrals; scientific publications on crop research, ocean-bed vegetation, or something as odd as paranormal photography (although the latter tend to be expensive). In short, anything in which the photographer wasn’t consciously trying to make “art,” yet which we find striking or intriguing. Fine-art photo books are made by artists, but not necessarily for artists. That’s not to say we haven’t any art photo books in our collections, but the ones we most frequently consult are not those. Having said this, probably the best thing we scored last year was the publication by the Albertina in Vienna, The Eye and the Camera: A History of Photography from the Collections of the Albertina.

N: I think I would get The Thornton-Pickard Story by Douglas Rendell . . . also not available from photo-eye. I’m very fond of my T&P Junior Special Reflex camera. Apart from our “modern” Pecoflex, it’s the first (and also oldest) 6 x 9 SLR we bought without the “usual” shutter-curtain damage. It’s my task to keep the technical gear running, so it was a pleasant surprise to get a full working (tilt-and-shift) camera with original and supple curtain shutter and sufficiently accurate speeds. I feel the Thornton-Pickard reflex cameras are underestimated and that’s why there is hardly any coherent information about them. Ideal would be an exhaustive pictorial chronology about Thornton-Pickard reflex cameras, like you get with Leica cameras listing every single little difference between the models. I haven’t seen the book inside, but I would give it a try.

Domesticated, contemporary art, and Indian food

Amy’s opening was amazing and beautiful and all the things that you would hope an opening would be. Her work is simply incredible.

On my way into L.A., the photo shoot I had lined up fell through when the subject’s wife went into labor, so I had way more time down there than I had planned. That gave me a chance to stop in quickly and see Amy and then walk down to LACMA where I discovered that admission was free because of the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. I scored one of the last available tickets (free, but you still needed a ticket) to get into the BCAM, and I did a whirlwind walk-through of the place. The building is great, and then there’s the art. Say what you will about what’s missing, there are Basquiat and Lichtenstein and Warhol and Kruger and Sherman and Serra and way, way more. I need to go back when I have more time.

After about 45 minutes in the museum, I walked back to the gallery where Amy introduced me to photographer Patrick Romero, who reads my blog and has commented here and who should really, really get his own blog or Web site because his work is too good not to be seen by a big audience. Then off for dinner (Indian food, very good) on Paul Kopeikin. I was lucky enough to be assigned the seat (yes, we were told where to sit by Mr. Kopeikin himself) next to Amy’s husband, John, who is ridiculously fun to talk to. All in all, a great night.

Oh, in case I didn’t already mention it, the show, it was fantastic.

Penelope I’m not

I can’t top Greg Wasserstrom’s recent travel nightmare, but I was stuck in O’Hare for seven hours on Sunday. At some point in the early afternoon, I said to Toni, the woman from Iowa City who became my airport gal pal and who I’ll never see again—I love those kinds of completely circumstance-driven daylong friendships—that I didn’t know why anyone would actually shop for jewelry in an airport terminal. By the fifth hour, I wasn’t buying jewelry, but I was buying a pair of Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses from the Sunglass Hut, thereby negating all the money I saved with my frequent-flier plane ticket. Nice.

Chicago itself, pre-O’Hare, was lovely. Saturday afternoon I went to the Jeff Wall exhibit at the Art Institute, and then down the street to the Museum of Contemporary Photography for the Loaded Landscapes show.

I came away from the Art Institute pleasantly surprised. I can’t claim to have a tremendous appreciation for Wall’s photographs, but I enjoyed the show quite a bit, and the light-box displays were really interesting. I think I actually enjoy Wall’s work better in print than I do in the light boxes, and I’m not sure what that says about me or his work, if anything. My two favorites: Mimic and After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue.

Mimic, 1982. Copyright © Jeff Wall

After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999–2000. Copyright © Jeff Wall

Before we left the Art Institute, we headed downstairs to the photography gallery, where I checked out On the Scene: Kota Ezawa, Sarah Hobbs, Angela Strassheim. I’d seen Kota Ezawa’s work before, and I still can’t figure out where. (I Heart Photograph, maybe?) Sarah Hobbs’s Periodic Table of the Traits was a standout for me, as was the rest of her work, especially Untitled (Indecisiveness) and Untitled (Perfectionist). (You can tell a lot about me from those three choices, I think.) And Angela Strassheim’s work is haunting; Untitled (Grandmother) is one I couldn’t get out of my head.

Periodic Table of the Traits, 2006. Copyright © Sarah Hobbs

Untitled (Perfectionist). Copyright © Sarah Hobbs

Untitled (Indecisiveness). Copyright © Sarah Hobbs

Untitled (Grandmother), 2004. Copyright © Angela Strassheim

Then on to MOCP, and the chance to see Joel Sternfeld’s work in person. It’s funny: I’ve spent so much time with Sternfeld’s books (or at least the two I have) that I was sure seeing his photographs in front of me would be even better. The experience confirmed for me a suspicion I’ve had that photo books are where it’s at. The books are “in person” for me. In my apartment, I can hold the book in my lap, touch the photos with my hands, and come back to them again and again. In a gallery, they seem farther away somehow. The show is worth a visit, though—not just for Sternfeld, but for the ten or so other photographers represented.

No Hey, Hot Shot! for me this season, but I did get an Honorable Mention, and I’m pleased with that. The winners are a diverse and interesting bunch, all deserving and worth your attention if you haven’t yet checked them out. As for me, I’m trying to decide whether to try again in the fall or wait it out for a few rounds until I have something really different to submit. Getting my work in front of those jurors is important, but I want to make sure that I’m approaching each competition (and each round of HHS) deliberately, that it’s not like buying lottery tickets and crossing my fingers. If I don’t have anything that improves upon what I submitted this round, I think I’ll just wait.

All the more reason to get out there and photograph.

Expectations

A few days ago, I posted my thoughts and questions about Todd Hido’s work in the July 15 issue of The New York Times Magazine. I said then (and it bears repeating) that I’m firmly on the side of artists-doing-whomever-whatever-whenever. Andrew Hetherington responded to my post and took it in different directions on his own blog, writing from his own extensive experience as an editorial photographer and pointing out the many and varied difficulties in editorial assignments. (His post is definitely worth a read if you haven’t checked it out already, as is John Loomis’s own follow-up.)

Hido’s photo isn’t my favorite of his; the word I used to describe it in my initial post is unremarkable, and I still think that fits. But I don’t have any judgments about who gets hired for (or accepts) which assignments. Curious is a more accurate description of how I feel about it. I’m simply interested in how Hido came to do that assignment, what his experience was working on it, and how he felt about the pictures he got and the one the magazine chose to run.

Today, Jörg Colberg posted saying:

. . . it is interesting to see how once editorial work (done by fine-art photographers) is concerned, there is a new complex of topics. For the photographers there are some new problems to tackle, . . . and it seems to me that everybody else has to deal with expectations. We know what photographer X has been doing for a while, and we simply expect to find something along those lines in his or her editorial work—an expectation that (just like any other expectation) is not very helpful (even though it’s exactly the kind of expectation that certain magazines seem to count on when hiring well-known fine-art photographers for editorial work).

I read this and the line that stuck in my mind was “an expectation that (just like any other expectation) is not very helpful.” Really? I think expectations are inherent, and for good reason. Each of us is filled with expectations—expectations are part of what it is to be alive. We expect all kinds of things from ourselves and from each other, and those expectations are what not only get us into trouble but bring us joy. If we had no expectations, we could never be surprised. Part of an artist’s job is to challenge people’s expectations. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that, without expectations, art might not exist.

Besides, to think that a person could possibly approach a photograph, any photograph, without expectations is unrealistic. Break it down: If I tell you that I’m going to show you a photograph, instantly you have an idea about what a photograph is. Your expectations will depend on who you are and what experiences you’ve had with photographs (as well as on who I am and what you know about me), but no matter what, you will have expectations. If I tell you I’m about to show you a Todd Hido photograph, your expectations may or may not change, depending on whether you know Hido’s work (and which of his work you know).

The fact that I had certain expectations of a Hido photograph isn’t a bad thing: It means that I not only have had experiences looking at photographs (experiences that shape my thoughts and feelings when I look at new photographs for the first time), but that I have experience with Todd Hido’s photographs in particular. I approach that photo with all those experiences inside me. And so, in that moment of seeing the photograph for the first time, I may love it or hate it or feel something in between those two extremes. But that initial moment of looking is exciting for exactly that reason.

When I was walking to the newsstand, about to see Alec Soth’s work in W magazine for the first time, I was excited to get my hands on a copy because I had expectations and I knew that those expectations might or might not be met. I might think the photos were crap, or I might be blown away by them, or worst of all, I might not feel anything, and then what? But all those feelings of anticipation that were running through my mind were set into motion specifically because of my expectations.

I expect things of myself, of people known and unknown to me, of my government, of my camera, of my car, of my dog. My expectations are often proven wrong—for better or worse. The world continually surprises me, and I continue to surprise myself.

Expectations may not help, but I wouldn’t want to live without them.

Clamor and din

Charlie Rose interviewed Chuck Close Tuesday night for the hour. Close said—I’m paraphrasing here—that photography is the easiest medium for a person to become proficient in (anybody can take a decent photograph) but the most difficult for an artist to develop a personal vision in, because the photographer is not physically involved, is not touching the canvas, shaping the material. He said that if you’re standing across a room looking at a photograph and you can readily identify it as a specific photographer’s work (presumably never having seen it before), that photographer has accomplished something significant.

He also mentioned that, when he was introduced to Willem de Kooning, Close told de Kooning that it was nice to meet someone who’d painted even more de Koonings than he had. Charlie asked him what had become of those de Kooning imitations of his, and Close said he’d destroyed them all, that the artist isn’t responsible for anything unless he puts it out there. Of course, he also mentioned how he goes into museums and touches up his own work, adding to it when necessary, so maybe the responsibility doesn’t end even then.

Finally, when Charlie asked him why some artists make it and others don’t, Close talked about the artist happening to have what the art world was looking for at just the right time and place. Produce work the art world isn’t ready for, and they won’t be interested; produce work that the art world is already over, and they won’t care.

I’m enjoying the sense of community in this virtual world of bloggers, the discussion with people I might never otherwise have crossed paths with were it not for a series of hyperlinks—one link leading to the next, like synapses firing in the brain. But I am equally overwhelmed by it, frightened by it, wishing that I could hit the Pause button on the rest of the world while I spent a few months or years just trying to figure out what I think, what I want, what my own vision is. I’ll have to settle for finding these answers in spite of—and because of—everyone and everything around me. There is no other option, and if I can’t use the din to my advantage, I have no business even trying.

I’ll add a photo later today, but for now, I wanted to get these thoughts out there, while Charlie and Chuck were still on my mind, and before the clamor claimed me.

UPDATE (11:13 a.m.): Check out Shelly Lowenkopf’s post today about Zoe Strauss’s recent Guggenheim post. Both posts are brilliant, and seem, already, to have made me thankful I don’t get everything I wish for, Pause buttons included.

UPDATE (9:26 p.m.): Added photo.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

Evolution (or, I was wrong)

A month or so ago, I wrote a post the gist of which could best be summarized as “concept schmoncept.” The thing is, I was wrong. Much of my argument was based on the premise that writing and photography are similar—and on my own fear that photography would become as paralyzing for me as writing had become. (For many years, I thought I wanted to be a writer. Even went into hock to get a master’s in writing. I make my living as an editor, and what I found was that I couldn’t turn off my internal red pen—it was always at the ready—and writing was no fun at all.)

As I got into photography more seriously (finally getting back to what I wanted to be when I was ten), I started immersing myself in the world of photo blogs and art mags and reviews. And I realized that concept loomed large. Pish posh, I said. Nonsense. The thought that all that analysis could kill the radio star, that I might someday be standing with my camera in hand and be unable to release the shutter because all I’d have running through my mind would be a bunch of isms . . . well, I wasn’t about to let that happen.

I’ve continued reading and thinking, as I’m prone to do, and over the past week or two I’ve seen how misguided I was. Fear is a very strong motivator, but rarely a good one—maybe if it’s what gets you to run from an ax murderer, but not if it keeps you from engaging your mind in your work. And that’s what I was doing. I was going out and taking pictures and refusing to think about what they meant to me, why I was drawn to certain subjects, what I was trying to say, because I was afraid that if I started thinking like that, paralysis couldn’t be far behind.

The final epiphany came this morning as I was reading an old interview with Brian Ulrich on Conscientious. Here’s the bit that got me (I’m taking it out of the context of a discussion on the diCorcia lawsuit, but the meaning is still the same—for the full conversation, click here):

On any visit to a museum one can overhear the comments of “I could do that,” “What makes this so special?”, “Who cares about a urinal on a pedestal?” And that is exactly, in some cases, the point. But some of modern art has created a distrust by the general populace because Duchamp (whom I love) and others showed us that art is in ideas not in objects. This is very liberating, but if art is no longer “special,” if we remove craft from art, then it needs academia to explain it. Without reading some didactic panel, the work is then just a urinal, no magic, easy to dismiss.

This isn’t a new idea, of course—as Ulrich points out, Marcel Duchamp originated the concept of the found object or the readymade, and in so doing put the emphasis squarely on the artist’s declaring of the object art. In many ways, the kind of photography that Ulrich does and the kind of photography I most admire is a photography of found objects. In Ulrich’s photos in shopping malls, big-box stores, and other retail outlets, he’s showing us what we see every day, and he’s saying something about our consumerism and making us examine ourselves in the process. The concept—his message really—matters even more than the technique.

I need to start involving my head a bit more in my photography. As I was telling my boyfriend in an e-mail today:

Yeah, I guess, though, that it would be good to have some kind of idea in mind about why I’m interested in a subject. Why am I interested in that? What does it say to me? If I know the answers to these questions beforehand, it’ll help me in saying yea or nay to a particular image. I guess what I’m saying is that I think I already know the answers to these questions somewhere—I just haven’t articulated them. It’s more instinctual now. Okay, so here’s the deal: You hear about actors talking about training versus instinct. There are some actors who operate solely on instinct. They don’t think, they just act. Then there are other actors who really break down a character, look for motivation, do research, etc. But I think the best actors are able to do all the latter stuff and then, when the time comes to walk out on stage or in front of a camera, they revert to instinct. But all the research and stuff is still there inside of them and informs their performance. They’re not thinking as they’re acting, “I think I’ll draw upon that time when my puppy was drowned by my evil stepfather to evoke the emotion in this scene.” They’re just doing it. I think that’s what I’m saying. That I need to at least do a little thinking about this stuff so that when I go out and take pictures, I’m more informed about why I’m doing it in the first place.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

Peter Parker

My boyfriend and I spend a lot of time in the car, and with my vow to take and post a new photo every day, he’s gotten used to being in the middle of a conversation with me—one or the other of us talking—and hearing me shout out, “Stop!” I think he’s almost gotten to the point where he starts to hit the brakes before I purse my lips to say the p. Today was one of those days, and the result is the photo you see below. I think all the adults were inside watching the Super Bowl, and there were just a few kids in the yard. I learned from one of them—a boy, maybe six years old?—that it was his birthday and that his cousin’s birthday is in eight days. That’s why they have Spider-Man in their yard.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

Next weekend, I’m taking a two-day course at The Julia Dean Photo Workshops in Venice. And that week is also the start of a six-month workshop I’m taking there called “The Long-Term Project”—that’s the one I’m really eager for. I have a couple different project ideas, but the one I think I’ll start with involves the Los Angeles County line. I don’t know that I can articulate my plan just yet—I’m still thinking and researching and figuring out why I’m drawn to this in the first place—but I think it’ll have something to do with following the county line from where it starts just west of Malibu all the way up past Santa Clarita, east through the Antelope Valley near where David Hockney did his Pearblossom Hwy., and then down past Disneyland and toward the beach again.

This will be my first long-term project, so I’m not sure how it’ll play out. I’m assuming (and hoping!) that the project will evolve as I get into it, and that when I start I can’t possibly know what I’ll find. I’ll still post daily photos to my blog, but I’m sure you’ll start seeing some from this project instead of just the one-offs I’ve been posting so far. So stay tuned. It should be fun!

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.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball