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Fred Ritchin’s talk from the Chautauqua Institution is a must watch. It is over an hour, but if you don’t make it through you might just prove his point!
He lays out how digital universe allows us to reorder content as and when we please (a contact sheet has an order; digital files can be swapped about, deleted). He posits that along with the demise of analogue technologies, analogue thinking has disappeared. Today, to read is not to follow a book front to back, to listen to music is not to listen to an album. We take in bits, bytes, single tracks and isolated comments.
Ritchin isn’t moaning, he just wants us to see our current universe for what it is and respond accordingly. Ritchin wants us to use digital [photo] technologies not make models thinner, the pyramids closer or to run algorithms removing unwanted objects from caches of images; he wants us to use digital tools for positive ends. Instead of changing the past and present, why not the future envisioned? Ritchin wants us to present, to image and imagine futures so striking they might alter our behaviours – Earth without animals … or people. If we see the horrifying aftermath of climate change or war maybe we won’t go down that path? Think activist/photo-manipulation hybridism.
Ritchin questions Flickr. Rightly so. The mere upload of imagery is inadequate. After a trip to New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, Ritchin searched Flickr for imagery of “New Orleans”. The first 400 images were of young people partying on their stoops.
Our obsessive production and distribution of images (usually through socially networking) devalues meaning in, and of, photography. In photography we can increasingly find ourselves, but can we find each other? See each other? In a meaningful way?
Photography, as in life, is becoming less about them and us and more about me and I. This is a point Ritchin makes in his recent blog post too:
“I have written elsewhere about the assertion by Paul Stookey (of the singing group Peter, Paul and Mary), about the progression of values in the United States as seen through the popularity of certain magazines. During a 1980s concert he recounted how once the popular magazine in the United States was called Life (about life), then it was People (not about life, but just about people), then it was Us (not even about all people, but just about us), then it was Self (not even about us), and now – to add on to what he had said – it becomes the Daily Me of Nicholas Negroponte, where one’s dentist appointment or Facebook status supersedes the report of the declaration of a new war or healthcare initiative on the “front page” of one’s nearly ubiquitous screen.”
Of course, there is no obligation to use photography always in a means to connect with others.
There is however, an obligation to be honest. As it stands, the predominantly shallow use of image is far less of an insult as that of people obsessed with the past, with the idea of “the power of photography” and with the continued lip service to a dead idea and a false reality.
“It’s More Expensive to Do Nothing explores the dark and often disregarded world of criminal justice, the revolving door of institutionalization, the complexities of remediation, and the programs that have worked to help nonviolent ex-offenders succeed as self-sufficient members of society.”
“The math is staggeringly simple: It will cost $75,000 year if a nonviolent offender returns to prison, whereas $5,000 a year will help that individual lead a productive life outside.”
Book cover: Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes
In the early 1990s, photographer Susan Madden Lankford rented an old San Diego jail for commercial photography. She soon attracted the interest of the homeless in the area, who before long they began to befriend her, trust her intentions and to tell her about their world. She was making a living as a successful studio photographer but was not fulfilled.
“My life and my photography were full of plastic portraiture. Images of individuals wanting the ‘right image’ and not the one with real expression and life.”
She soon embarked on a three publication project looking at the underclass of her home city. downTown U.S.A.: A Personal Journey with the Homeless was her first book, soon followed by Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes about the incarceration of women and children. Lankford is soon to release a documentary film about the criminal justice system.
Inmate Behind Chain Link Fence. Las Colinas Detention Facility for Women in Santee, California. Photo by Susan Madden Lankford. Taken from the book, “Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time,” by Susan Madden Lankford, Humane Exposures Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
The “Safety Cell” Used for Solitary Confinement. Las Colinas Detention Facility for Women in Santee, California. Photo by Susan Madden Lankford. Taken from the book, “Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time,” by Susan Madden Lankford, Humane Exposures Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
This Is My Family. Las Colinas Detention Facility for Women in Santee, California. Photo by Susan Madden Lankford. Taken from the book, “Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time,” by Susan Madden Lankford, Humane Exposures Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
BIOGRAPHY
Lankford studied with Ansel Adams and is a graduate of the Brooks Institute in San Diego. Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes won the following awards: Publishers Weekly – Best Books of the Year, Web Pick of the Week; ForeWord Magazine – Book of the Year, Silver Award – Social Science; ForeWord Magazine – Book of the Year, Bronze Award – Women’s Issues; Independent Publisher Book Awards – Gold Medal, Women’s Issues; 2008 DIY Book Festival – Grand Prize Best Book of the Year; 2009 Eric Hoffer Book Awards – Grand Prize. Lankford’s work is the basis for the new film, It’s More Expensive to Do Nothing releasing this fall 2010.
More on Lankford from the San Diego Union-Tribune here.
Five-part lecture given by Lankford can be viewed. First part here.
You can find out more about her projects at Humane Exposures and get updates on the Humane Exposures Blog.
Prison, Castaic, CA, 2007. Stephen Tourlentes
Stephen Tourlentes‘ work is without doubt one of the most significant photographic responses to American landscape. If Ansel Adams had lived in an era of mass incarceration, I am certain the discard of persons, nature and sustainability in prisons would have captured his activist streak as much as that of our beloved National Parks.
Eighteen months ago, I interviewed Tourlentes, and that contribution to photographic discourse remains one of my proudest moments. Recently, Tourlentes launched his own website.
His work is of yesterday, for today and hopefully of a changed future.
The nocturnal glow of prisons is his subject; it is a subject we own and the weight of its injustices is ours. Across States, we voted for the mass warehousing of human lives. Tourlentes’ prison-scapes capture the “feedback of exile.”
Thirty years ago, Tourlentes would have no subject, but today he presents us with the spectres of our sprawling and unforgiving prison industrial complex. Glowing bright at night, he shows us sites usually lost on the horizon in daytime heat and haze.
Tourlentes has photographed many different prisons, but has now focused his series on the institutions of that accommodate the State execution chamber – he refers to these prisons as “death houses”. Many new (and superior) works are included in his newly presented portfolio. Tourlentes calls the project Of Lengths and Measures:
These institutions tend to sit on the periphery of a society’s consciousness. Many older prisons are situated in towns or along rivers and reflect the use of the land at the time of their construction. By comparison newly opened “Super Max” prisons utilize modern high technology to control their population and offers an updated contrast to the stone castles that preceded them. The rapid construction of new prisons is a result of overcrowding caused by tough new sentencing laws, as well as an economic program to help depressed communities that vie to host them. The land that these prisons sit on is never allowed to go dark. The use of light and surveillance technology has changed the architecture of confinement. The tools of electronic surveillance and computer technology are used as the new keys inside the modern corrections system.
Photographer Mohamed Bourouissa asked a friend – known only as JC – detained in a French prison to share the banality of his confinement via cell phones pictures and over 300 SMS messages.
Bourouissa’s exhibition ‘Temps Mort’ (‘Time Out’ or ‘Dead Time’) which closed at the Galerie Kamel Mennour today featured nine images and an 18 minute film montage of the correspondence.
Earlier this year, Algerian-born Bourouissa gained significant attention in the US with his show Périphéries at Yossi Milo Gallery which depicted the lives of youth in the depressed banlieue neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Paris. (Reviews here and here.) ‘Temps Mort’ confirms Bourouissa’s commitment to the underprivileged in French society.
JC and Bourouissa worked together over a period of 6 months. Initially Bourouissa had to instruct JC closely describing the shots he was looking for. Bourouissa broke down the boundary between the imprisoned JC and himself as a free man by filming repeated actions outside the walls on his own camera phone – at one point in the film the JC’s steps on a jail corridor blur into Bourouissa’s steps through snow in the free world. (I concede this blog post cannot come close to describing the mood of the finished video.)
For exhibition, nine pixelated images were blown-up; the degraded resolution mocking the Parisian preoccupations with Impressionism and Pointilism. As Bourouissa’s press release explains, images were hung adjacent to prison newspapers “reconstructing a comprehensive representation of the prison world, and mentally filling in the blanks of the images, the spaces between the bed pan, radio, barred window, lamp, etc.” The viewer sees the abnormality of confined life.
We should bear in mind that in 2008, Bourouissa and JC were working against a national debate in France about the appalling state of their prison system. Again from the Temps Mort press release, “How not to express our outrage at the French prisons? Their infamous exercise cages, their areas of lawlessness, their unhealthy showers and four rolls of toilet paper monthly.”
Gleaning available information from poorly translated sources (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4A, 4B), I am still not sure how the images were secured. Reviews suggest that cell phones are banned within French prisons – which I would expect to be the case – so the feat seems even more remarkable. (I have detailed a short-lived case of cell phone photography behind UK bars.)
Whatever, first impressions may offer, Temps Mort is not a lazy presentation of “vernacudigi” photos. In many of his projects Bourouissa wants to “make the illegal legal”. Just as with Peripheries he gives over much of the creative process to his subjects. Many images for Peripheries were staged simulations of actual events experienced previously by the photographer and subjects. After a period, Bourouissa gave JC very little direction and their output synchronised. Alone the photographs would fall short, but Bourouissa always intended to pair them with the film.
Of course we should not miss the obvious here. Low-res imagery is associated with the spontaneous capture of event, with protest, with skirmish, with citizen documentation and more often than not with the testimony of the individual against the (violent) uncertainties of the State in which they exist.
Low-res is about the privilege of witness beyond any inherent privilege of existence. Romantically, low-res photography is thought of as a tool for use against dominate conglomerate forces; practically low-res photography is the evidence of the effects of those forces.
Bourouissa presents the incarcerated masses as the disenfranchised and the dispossessed.
MOHAMED BOUROUISSA
A student at le Fresnoy, Mohamed Bourouissa graduated from the National School of Decorative Arts and also holds a DEA (M.A.) in Plastic Arts from the Sorbonne (2004). He recently benefited from a solo exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most notably at the New Museum in New York. In 2010, the artist will show his work at the Berlin Biennial and at Manifesta. Born in Blida, Algeria, in 1978. Lives and works in Paris. Represented by gallery Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris / Brussels. (Source)
via Vingt
© Larry Wolfley
Last month, on a flight from Oakland to Seattle, I sat next to an energetic, punky, wide-eyed young lady. Her view of the world was full of naivete, optimism and anti-capitalism. She lived for music and she talked about the Gilman Club … a lot.
I lived in the SF Bay Area for several years but not being punk, garage, shed or synth-krunk I’d never heard of it. A week later I came across Larry Wolfley‘s photography. As well as photographing at underground shows and East Bay clubs, Wolfley has been a makeshift “house photographer” at the Gilman Club for 12 years.
Wolfley recently did an interview with Maximum Rock and Roll. He has a PhD in English Lit from Berkeley, he taught at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the seventies, abandoned academia, returned to Berkeley, became a carpenter, had a son, took photos, realised he knew nothing, resolved to teach himself photography, and decided street punks on Telegraph Avenue were a good topic. The homeless punks told Wolfley he had to go to the Gilman Club if he were to understand their culture. He’s been shooting punk and music gigs since.
Wolfley is more than twice the age than the majority of the crowd. All the kids know him, his Canon and his black beanie hat.
Just wanted to give a shout out to a local hero whose recognition has been a long time coming. Visit his website.
Source: http://www.artbusiness.com/1open/021210.html
“If life is art and art is life, an arts center must breathe.”
Brendan Seibel for Vingt profiles FACE French/American Creative Exchange, collective in the depressed northern reaches of Paris, set up by Monte Laster, an immigrant from Texas. The project’s centerpiece is the transcendence of the individual above the proscribed traps of generalization:
“A far-reaching social experiment threading together disparate populations is set to commence. Prisoners will join their wardens, expectant mothers will join school children, rappers will join poets, all in an effort to examine how environmental conditions reflect people’s expression.”
What I like most about FACE isn’t just that it’s community arts, but that prisons are considered as a matter of course part of the community. That’s a refreshing alternative to prevailing attitudes elsewhere which think of prisons as dumping grounds; sites to be ignored, buried, distanced.
American Suburb X republished an Art Voice interview with Bruce Jackson.
Bruce Jackson is one of the greats of prison photography, up there with Danny Lyon, Deborah Luster and Alan Pogue.
Jackson: “The people who are in penitentiaries are no different than the people outside, except that they’ve done a certain thing that got them classified as the kind of person that goes to the penitentiary. But they’re in a penitentiary, and being in a penitentiary does something to people. It puts you in a position. All the things that Foucault writes about—about power and what it does and the way it’s used—are there. Prison is a place where power rules. Prison is about power; if it were not, people would walk out the gate. You see it in the way people walk and in people’s faces and the way they present themselves.”
Prison Photography 