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The Depository Of Unwanted Photographs
In the summer of 2013, I attempted to temporarily get out of my prison-photo-bubble and find out what people loved about photographs by asking them which of theirs they loved the least. Which did they wish to condemn to the trash-bin of history?
For two long weekends at Photoville, a couple of volunteers and I took submissions of embarrassing, forgetful, incriminating and emotionally-burdensome images. The Depository Of Unwanted Photographs (TDOUP) was born. Comprised of a little over 200 images, TDOUP has been in permanent storage over the intervening 5-and-a-half years. Well, it’s going to get a public run out.
TDOUP is part of The Past is Prologue: Vernacular Photography, Pop Photographica and the Road to Selfie Culture, showing at Art Yard in Frenchtown, NJ from April 27th-July 28th. The Past is Prologue traces the evolution of everyday photography from the late 19th century to Instagram.
The collections and works “explore a beguiling terrain comprised of unauthored and found photographs, and commercial objects and images divorced from their original contexts” including discarded works, photo booth portraiture, family albums, newspaper archive press prints, industrial catalogues, and more. From the collections of Pete Brook, W.M. Hunt, Daile Kaplan, Nigel Poor and Cynthia Rubin. Featuring the works of Marcia Lippman and Cassandra Zampini.
The opening reception is Saturday, April 27th, 6-8pm. I’ll be there.
More about ‘The Depository Of Unwanted Photographs’
When asked to name a single image they absolutely treasure, people usually don’t hesitate: a snap of their children, a family Polaroid, or a formal portrait from precious life event, for example. “What is your most beloved photo?” is a common question. “What is your worst photo?”, on the other hand, is a near-perverse inquiry.
If we’re looking for good photography, we’ll find plenty in photobooks, galleries and publications, but where do we find a legitimate and well-researched presentation of bad photography? Does our discussion of what is good not also rely on a shared knowledge of what is bad, unwanted and unloved?
TDOUP was built on a belief that vernacular photos and stories are as relevant as the stories attached to news-photo-exclusives and famous documentary images. People’s stories are central to conversation about how we consume and use photography. We create and circulate billions of images every day and we constantly employ choices (consciously and subconsciously) to share or pass over images. If we accept the mantra that “We are all photographers” then aren’t we all photo-editors too?
There might be many images any individual would want to trash, but in asking people to choose only one, TDOUP urges people to think about the value system they’ve written for their own photographs. In choosing one photo for the great big dustbin of history, TDOUP contributors can meditate on their actions as image-makers and as “editors”.
From serious concerns to exorcism of the frivolous, TDOUP distills our different experiences and priorities—a portrait of a man who’s death spurred the only time a daughter saw her father cry; an engagement ring from a union that never materialized; photos of family abusers follow those of rancid chocolate; bad pics of the moon or the street; blurry photos of friends; the last photo before alcohol-eradicated memory took hold; Polaroids with emotional burden too heavy to carry; embarrassing clichés, cringeworthy selfies; photos of an IVF clinic and of the pogo-stick world record; accidental but beautiful prints made by misfiring processors; haunting images of soon-to-die parents; and a photo from the crowd of the 2013 Boston Marathon hours before the terror attack at the finish line. The interrelation of the images is as unpredictable as the motives for their original submission.
The Depository Of Unwanted Photographs is an unpredictable interrogation of quality that crucially is made by the public, not by the dominant voices of those in the media or culture industries. Which single photograph would you state, on the record, as unwanted?
More about ‘The Past Is Prologue’
Daile Kaplan’s collection of photographic textiles represent one facet of her pioneering work in the creation of a category known as Pop Photographica, representing a range of functional, decorative and commercial objects, from coffee cans to funereal fans emblazoned with images of the deceased. The costume works from her collection in this show range from high fashion dresses to low fashion pajamas. Kaplan is Vice President of Swann Galleries in New York, and an expert appraiser of photography for the Antiques Road Show.
W.M. Hunt’s collection of press prints from late 19th century and early 20th century newspaper illustrations are drawn from his Collection Dancing Bear and Collection Blind Pirate: the former, “magical heart stopping images of people in which their eyes are obscured” and the latter, American Groups before 1950. This is the first time that Hunt, a respected and prolific collector and writer in the field, has drawn from both for an exhibition.
The artist and photographer Marcia Lippman’s installation is a meditation in found images about her life-long search for an elusive biological mother. Born in an era when adopted children were denied access to their own biographical information, Lippman’s quest has been a driving force behind her artistic practice. A short film by Elsa Mora about Lippman’s process accompanies the work. Marcia Lippman is a photographer, a teacher, a traveler, a collector, and a storyteller. Much of her work for four decades has explored the passage and residues of time along with the ephemeral nature of memory.
Nigel Poor is a photographer and co-founder of the San Quentin prison-based podcast Ear Hustle. In the course of her research she happened on a trove of period untitled photographs from inside San Quentin taken in the 1960s and 70s. These arresting images illuminate a world that remains hidden from view to this day.
Curator, lecturer and collector Cynthia Rubin’s collection of 19th century advertising ladies features images of women in 19th century bustles adorned with everyday objects from carpenter’s levels, bakery products and chain mail. Before the advent of sandwich boards or electronic media, women dressed in such Dr. Seussian outfits circulated the commercial districts of their towns promoting their employer’s wares.
United Photo Industries and Pete Brook created and curated The Depository of Unwanted Photographs, a crowdsourced archive of images and stories. Visitors are invited to add to the collection by donating unwanted photographs. Artist Cassandra Zampini has created a video installation representing one second of one hashtag of videos on Instagram.
Other components of the exhibition include:
A sewn timeline of vernacular images starting in the 1920s and leading to the present.
A translucent wall constructed of illuminated x-rays from the 1930s by Elsa Mora.
A Paper Moon photobooth redux. Steve Maiorano invites you to sit for a portrait while floating on a friendly moon, as was done in the 1920s and 1930s.
A rare photo album documenting a year in the life of a nine-year-old girl in 1939, palpably beloved by her family.
Hands on stereopticons and three dimensional historical photographs.
I wrote about the emergence of the Black Power movement in the UK, for Timeline. Specifically, about a small set of images of one protest and associated ephemera:
At the start of the 1970s, the Black Panther movement in the United States was both well established and well organized. It was also well feared by the authorities. By contrast, black activism in the U.K. was young, with barely a toehold on power. The trial of the Mangrove Nine, in 1970, changed all that.
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According to the National Archives, photographs such as the ones you see here were “used by the police to suggest that key allies of the Black Power movement were implicated in planning and inciting a riot.”
Read more: When cops raided a hip 1970s London cafe, Britain’s Black Power movement rose up
Dutch photographer Jan Banning is fascinated by what communism looks like today. In 2013, he set out to document the obscured activities of small Communist Party chapters in Italy, India, Nepal, Portugal and Russia.
“I’m interested in countries in which communism isn’t a dominating ideology and places I could assume that members do it out of conviction and not because they think it’s good for their career,” says Banning of the series, Red Utopia. “Many of the local party members I met, who are still plodding along, certainly have a place in my heart now — either because of their own sad fate or because of how they devote themselves to social justice, often unpaid, and in many practical ways offer help to ordinary people.”
I wrote about the work for Timeline. Read and see more: Photos: A look at communists and their humble party offices around the globe
Trump rages on about a broken America. America is raging about a broken Trump. Among the many memes and earworms the Whinger-In-Chief has provided, “American Carnage” is the one that sticks, for me. As long as Trump can convince his base that other people, other milieus and other communities are in carnage, his base will happily cede logic and allow the White House to enact its politics of division. As soon as Trump bellowed “American carnage” during his inauguration speech, the foreboding inevitability of a belligerent, smarting, testy, bickering presidency came to bear. Do images of social blight carry a different message under a fascistic executive?
Of his series Slow Blink, Open Mouth, Jordan Baumgarten says, “With apparent lawlessness, chaos is inevitable. The world comes alive with bits of magic, bits of darkness, and the inability to discern which is which. In this world, private moments are public, animals and humans roam free, fueled by id, and always, somewhere, there is a fire burning.”
While Slow Blink, Open Mouth is difficult for its content alone, it is also difficult because it might provide the ammunition for both sides of the political battle of rhetoric, fought from distance, over the health and feasibility of the nation. In We Look At The Same Photos, We See Different Things, published on Vantage, I investigate the difficulty inherent to images, in the Trump era, of addiction and social stress.
To quote:
When I view these images I think of failed manufacturing, job loss, modern alienation, big pharma pushing painkillers, crimes of need, and cycles of profit and predation that cannot, will not, be broken by the will power of addicts alone. I see the result of decades of inadequate public education, mental and medical health care and viable addiction treatment. I see the legacy of the failed War On Drugs, mass incarceration, and policy and policing that has criminalised poverty. I see the cracks in society through which individuals have fallen and I know the cracks used to be smaller, and fewer and farther between.
I do not discount, however, the fact that others may see a society that’s lost its way; a society that fell from grace decades ago and needs a short, sharp reset. I know viewers might reason they have nothing in common with Baumgarten’s subject(s) and are moved to do nothing but judge. Trump has fueled the aggressive judgement of others. Perversely, though he hasn’t done this by avoiding the topics of poverty and addiction. Instead, he’s pointed (from distance) to problems in inner-city America (Chicago being his preferred bogeyman) and yelled about carnage, wastelands and the opioid epidemic. Trump is correct in identifying the opioid epidemic as specific to our times, but he’s more invested in stoking dangerous rhetoric about *dangerous* cities than he is listening to, or implementing, nuanced policy and social care solutions.
Read and see more: We Look At The Same Photos, We See Different Things
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Slow Blink Open Mouth will be published as a book by GOST. Please consider buying a print from the series to help support the production costs.
Follow Jordan Baumgarten on Tumblr and Instagram.
There are countless numbers to keep youth out of custodial settings, not least the threat of waste and violence jail brings.
In New York, one group is using art, photo and video as an alternative to jail. The Young New Yorkers intervenes at the juvenile court, and with sanction of the judge, allows children who are convicted of non-violent misdemeanours (turnstile jumping, graffiti, public disturbance) to embark on 3-day or 8-week art programs instead of heading to jail for 3 months or taking on a long community service stint.
The Young New Yorkers (YNY) uses art to help children imagine different lives for themselves, to conjure new possibilities for their neighbourhoods and to interrogate what community justice is and might be.
Yesterday, YNY kicked off its #ArtNotJail campaign to raise funds for 2018’s programs.
“We are raising $10,000 to cover the costs of the next 6-months of public art projects,” writes YNY on its IndieGoGo crowdfunding page. “The next generation of Young New Yorkers will then use art to advocate for themselves, and advocate for a transformed criminal justice system.”
This humanising program listens to children, it opens up new potential and I’m a huge fan. Please consider giving to The Young New Yorkers.
Follow YNY on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Vimeo.
It’s unmistakable. That gazebo. That hexagonal cover to that picnic table. One needn’t notice the flowers, or even the poster, to the memory of Tamir Rice to recognize this utility structure as that under which the 12-year-old was murdered by Cleveland police. Even the bollards between us the viewer and the polygon shelter seem instantly familiar. For it was between those bollards and the gazebo that the cop car screeched to a halt, it’s door flew open and the first emerging officer shot Tamir dead. In the blink of an eye.
Tamir Rice was shot twice from less than 10 feet.
Back in 2014, as I watched the footage of Tamir Rice’s murder, I wondered then, why did the the cops mount the curb? Why did they bypass the pavement and careen the patrol car onto the grass? Into the park? Why the frantic invasion of a place for play and recreation? Why, given the clear lines of sight (evident both in this photo and in the murder footage) from a good distance away, did they not approach slowly and with caution?
“This court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly,” wrote Ronald B. Adrine, Cleveland Municipal Court Administrative and Presiding Judge in an Administrative Order on the case. “On the video, the zone car containing Patrol Officers Loehmann and Garmback is still in the process of stopping when Rice is shot.”
Misinterpreting a situation and mistaking a toy for a gun (in the case of Tamir Rice) — or mistaking anything handheld, or any motion toward a hip or a pocket (in the cases of thousands of others) — is the defense to which law enforcement turns repeatedly and, calamitously, the one which almost always exonerates them of their crimes.
This is a photo made by Alanna Styer. It is part of the project Where It Happened for which Styer visited and photographed 54 sites where people of color were slain at hands of law enforcement. In 2016, The Guardian reports, 1,093 people were killed by police officers in the United States.
“That is an average of three people a day,” writes Styer. “The incidents detailed in my archive span 50 years, from 1965 to 2015. This book documents only 54 of the tens of thousands of deaths that have happened over those 50 years.”
Mostly, the locations and details of those thousands of deaths aren’t known beyond the memory of friends and family, the accounts of the cops involved, and the reach of an investigation … if one occurred. Even then, the details remain contested. The majority of the places in Where It Happened are new to us, the audience. But Styer’s photo of the gazebo at Cudell Recreation Center is not new. It’s power rests, for me, in the fact that I have previous familiarity with the place through the news coverage and activism in the aftermath of Rice’s murder. I recognize the site. You probably do to. We might also recognize the site of Michael Brown’s death on that tarmac road with verges of short, thinning grass. We may recognize other sites of avoidable killings that made it to our news feeds and memory. We don’t, regrettably, recognize the vast majority of the tragic theaters to which Styer’s work speaks. There are too many.
Styer’s photo shifts our vantage point from the elevated view of the CCTV across the street and down to street level. Whereas previously the benches and the posts were rendered in the indistinguishable and out of focus action of the footage, they’re now brought into sharp focus. We see the underside of the gazebo roof, not the top. We’re provided a perspective from the asphalt where the cop car could have and should have been.
Being “in” this image, I only want to get out, of course. A world in which this wasn’t a murder site and you or I didn’t recognize it as such would be, inarguably, a better world. Specifically, I want to step back. The unnecessary haste with which officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback charged into this scene gloms onto this image. That unfathomable CCTV footage is this photo’s frame.
Loehmann and Garmback’s excessive urgency which escalated the event from zero to murder perverts Styer’s image. But it also makes it. This photo works upon and within the collective exposure we’ve had to that grainy footage. Styer’s tribute here isn’t working in isolation but in extension of previous visual feeds to which we’ve all been audience. This image is an intervention and it works to disrupt our (possibly passive) consumption of death. It revisits the space and time of an event in which Tamir Rice had, essentially, no agency. The stillness is terrifying. True, the image could be read simply as a visual description of a memorial but I argue that precisely because it grounds us between the CCTV camera and Rice’s swift execution, the photo re-activates both the event and our relation to it.
Acts of police brutality (or citizen brutality, e.g. George Zimmerman against Trayvon Martin) frequently spurn a battle of images — calls for the immediate release of dash cam footage; calls for body-cams; different photos are circulated and cast as sympathetic, or not, to the victim and the perpetrator; media outlets trawl the social media feeds of victims, perpetrators and associated individuals. Whether conscious or not, Styer is reacting to such frenzies. She is paying homage to the victims, months or years after the news story has passed and the casket lowered. Where It Happened is a dark type of pilgrimage but I feel Styer is making it in good faith and I argue she’s returning with images that are a positive contribution. Google Street View does not make imagery that is conscious or respectful (interestingly, it hovers above street level like CCTV, delivering a detached record). Cellphone images may carry as much, if not more, respect as Styer’s photographs and this might be based on a personal connection to the victim, but those amateur images are not made by an artists intent on publicly disseminating them and talking about the issues that forged them.
I admire and have reported on Josh Begley’s project Officer Involved which uses code to automatically render both satellite and Street View images of sites of deaths involving law enforcement. Thousands of sites. While the subject is the same Styer’s work is considerably different in tone and effect. If Begley manages to remind us of the scale of the problem then Styer’s work reminds us to recognize each depressing part of the problem. I can’t code or manipulate Google Maps API but I can walk, bike or drive to killing sites within my own city. Styer’s practice takes time and effort, away from the screen. In 2015, Teju Cole reflected upon the problem of the constant visibility of death. In Death In The Browser Tab, Cole recounts his discomfort with only *knowing* the death of Walter Scott through the infamous footage made by passerby Feidin Santana who was hiding in the bushes. Cole had the opportunity to visit North Charleston and with a friend he found the parking lot of Advance Auto Parts on Remount Road in which Officer Michael Slager first stopped Scott. Then Cole traced the steps of them both to the park in which Scott was slain.
“[…] being there also revealed, in the negative, the peculiarities of the video,” writes Cole, “peculiarities common to many videos of this kind: the combination of a passive affect and the subjective gaze, irregular lighting and poor sound, the amateur videographer’s unsteady grip and off-camera swearing. Taken by one person (or a single, fixed camera) from one point of view, these videos establish the parameters of any subsequent spectatorship of the event. The information they present is, even when shocking, necessarily incomplete. They [videos] mediate, and being on the lot helped me remove that filter of mediation somewhat.”
Styer’s practice is one response to the problematic mediation that Cole describes. Few of us can identify the problem, let alone respond to it. And just as Cole felt better for mindfully visiting the site of Walter Scott’s death, and just as Styer was compelled to visit 54 catastrophic sites, we can choose to seek out a different image. Away from local TV news and social media, death might become less abstract? The sheer scale of the issue might become overwhelming. It is. But are we citizens that feel or do we just talk about what it is to feel?
Are we inured and numbed by murder on our screens? Or are we compelled to act because of it? We can all easily research the institutional violence in our communities. Maybe some of us might be compelled to make pilgrimages of our own and to carve out time to think about the violence that always plays out on our streets before it is broadcasted into our homes. Styer took the time and she has mediated at these sites. Her image of the gazebo in which Tamir Rice was shot and killed gave me the opportunity to mediate. I am grateful for that.
Sometimes photographs are about what’s literally depicted. Sometimes the lessons in photographs are in the method by which they were made. In Where It Happened it is both.
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Alanna Styer is currently crowdfunding a book of images from her series Where It Happened. Please consider supporting the production of the photobook, titled No Officers Were Injured In This Incident, by visiting Styer’s Kickstarter page.
Listen to a radio interview with Styer about the project and her goals for the book.
I wrote about Lucas Foglia’s third and most recent photobook Human Nature for Photo District News: ‘Human Nature’ Finds New Ways To Understand Our Impact On The Environment
To quote:
Human Nature (Nazraeli) journeys from Nevada ranch lands to constructed paradises in Singapore, from a farm in a New York City jail to a research station on an Alaska glacier. Foglia not only documents ice floes, clear-cut forests, green urbanism and other common climate change subjects, he meditates on what nature has become and how we interact emotionally, or not, with our planet.
He also pulls back the veil on the work of earth scientists. Having resolved that most places on earth had been visited, documented and altered, Foglia decided to demystify the labor behind our understanding of the planet. “I started photographing scientists who measured the air. Amidst all of the news stories and political arguments about climate change, most people don’t know what the process of the science looks like,” he says.
Foglia photographed field researchers at the Guyana Forestry Commission, the Juneau Icefield Research Program, the NOAA Observatories and USDA Agricultural Research Stations. The scientists granted Foglia free access because, he says, they recognized that he was intent, like they are, on describing the world fairly. “We shared a common cause,” he says. […] The Trump administration has proposed cutting NOAA’s budget by 17 percent, including a 26 percent cut to research. “Most of the scientists I photographed are at risk of losing funding,” Foglia notes.
All images: Lucas Foglia. (Top to bottom): 1. Kate in an EEG Study of Cognition in the Wild, Strayer Lab, University of Utah. 2. Esme Swimming, Parkroyal on Pickering, Singapore. 3. Lava Boat Tour, Hawai‘i shows brand new land created by lava pouring into the ocean. 4. Air Sampling, Mauna Loa Observatory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Hawai‘i. 5. New crop varieties are grown and tested in the Geneva Greenhouses at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. The USDA’s national and regional seed banks store hundreds of thousands of plant varieties, and crop scientists race to create a climate-change-resilient agriculture. As droughts, extreme rainstorms, and other erratic weather patterns intensify, farmers need crops that can cope with such stresses. 6. Ice to Protect Orange Trees from the Cold, California. 7. Evan sleeps at Camp Eighteen, overlooking the Vaughan Lewis Icefall. One of the greatest non-polar concentrations of glaciers in the world, the Juneau Icefield spans 90 miles of southeast Alaska. 8. Icebergs float away from the Gilkey Glacier in Alaska. 9. Kenzie inside a Melting Glacier, Juneau Icefield Research Program, Alaska. 10. Honey bees trail water across a rooftop after rain in Portland, Oregon.
I just wrote about Christopher Herwig’s new book Soviet Bus Stops Volume II for Timeline: Photos: From Brutalism to folk art, Soviet-era bus stops crush the myth of Communist homogeneity:
In 1975, the Soviet Ministry of Transport Construction dictated that bus stops “should pay special attention to modern architectural design, in accordance with the climate and the local and national characteristics of the area. Bus stops should be the compositional centers of the architectural ensemble of the road.” But if the shells of these structures reflected governmental decree, their quirky inventiveness is the result of the mores of local artisans.
These remote bus stops are the little cousins to the monumental Communist construction projects — the high-rises, TV towers, space shuttles, and state-owned factories—most of us are familiar with. In his new book, Soviet Bus Stops Volume II, photographer Christopher Herwig examines the Soviet-era bus stop as an architectural type, where regional planners flexed their patriotic muscle and pushed artistic boundaries. These humble structures challenge the preconception of the Soviet landscape as blandly homogeneous.
“Some were made by famous architects and artists,” says Herwig. “Some were made by road construction workers and probably even decorated by school children or at least university students on summer break. Some are one-offs and some are repeated.”
The book is published by Fuel.
Prison Photography 