Monthly Archives: November 2014

SFAC2
photo series

The Valley/El Valle

Gallery

The Valley/El Valle features twenty diverse prints taken by staff photographers over the past decade. The Chronicle images serve to emphasize the diverse citizens and lifestyles in the Central Valley and include subjects such as members of a mosque in prayer, Hmong dancers and rodeo stars.

—San Francisco Arts Commission

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I was a bit annoyed that there were no photographer credits on SFAC’s original tumblr post. It’s even more annoying that the SFAC official webpage didn’t have any information either.

Still, I liked these. A lot. I may admittedly be a sucker for images from the Central Valley* but I also like images which show people working and having fun and living in a California which is vastly different from the California which people travel to see. This is the California people travel through on the interstate where they can ignore and avoid everything in these pictures.

*Previous posts have touched on Alec Soth, Lisa M. Hamilton, and Ken Light. And I’ve actually posted some of my own work from the Valley too.

It’s also interesting to see these photos online without any of the context in the exhibition. Especially since they’re all photojournalism literally from the news archives. I don’t feel like I need the stories when I see them this way. There’s a sense of place and life that I get when looking at these as they are. Maybe that’s just me filling in my own context as a native Californian. But it’s still something worth noting.

MoMA_Williams2
museums, thinking about photographs

Production Line of Happiness

Note: This originally posted in a slightly different form on NJWV.

Christopher Williams (American, born 1956). Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide / © 1968, Eastman Kodak Company, 1968/(Meiko laughing)/Vancouver, B.C./April 6, 2005. 2005.

I had a mixed response to the Christopher Williams show at MoMA. On one hand, it was a bit of a fuck you to the audience since a lot of it felt like an in-joke that most people won’t get.* At the same time for me it felt like an exhibition which worked really well with Gober. Many of the photos were a little bit surreal or odd. And the whole show played with converting non-art objects to art objects.

*Not the biggest fuck you I’ve received in a Museum exhibition. That honor is still held by Santiago Sierra who, while I get what he was doing, still produced an exhibition that blew off anyone who attended it in favor of the statement that he was making.

In Williams’s case, he’s playing with the concepts behind stock and “professional” photography—bringing photographic muzak into the museum by suggesting alternate readings of the image and revealing some of the artifice in how it was produced. The alternate readings are obscure and stretched and, to my mind, not even that important. I’ve worked in printing, production, and design long enough to understand how everyone includes in-jokes in the process—the more obscure the joke the better so as no one else will notice. That we know he’s winking or enjoying a self-satisfied giggle here is enough for me even though I can totally understand how other people would be upset by this.

Revealing the artifice behind the stock photos is more interesting to me anyway. That so many of them feel a little off makes us question our expectations and points out how much of this photographic language we’ve absorbed even though this kind of photography is universally unmemorable.* Getting into and figuring out why they feel off though is almost impossible. They’re not off in a bad or incompetent way, they’re just somehow less commercial than we expect even while looking completely professional. Some of this is definitely because they’re in a museum rather than a magazine ad. But a lot of it is based on our collective snap judgements against a standard of professionalism that we can’t even articulate.

*It’s interesting to compare Williams to what people are currently calling Hipster Photography. Hipster photography appears to ape the unmemorable product consumption images only without being about the product. Williams makes the product more explicit but tweaks the delivery so it isn’t as unmemorable.

This isn’t “that’s not art” kind of art because it’s giant or made from expensive materials or being trangressive and saying “yes this is art.” Instead Williams directly triggers our “that’s not art” reflex only to have us immediately realize that we may jumped to that conclusion too quickly. I love this kind of category blurring.

I also love all his photos which intentionally include production elements in the frame. I’m a backstager by heart who tends to sympathize with all the unseen stuff that goes into making anything. It’s very easy to forget or be ignorant about all that process so any artist who tweaks the ideas of what belongs offstage* is okay by me.

*For example, Baz Luhrmann’s stage direction.

photo series

Gendering Portraits

On the 4th, I saw this awesome photo in my Twitter timeline:

Harnaam Kaur by Brock Elbank

The tweet linked to a Daily Mail 1 article on Harnaam Kaur, the only female subject in a series of epic beard photos by a photographer named Brock Elbank.

After being bullied as a teen, the teaching assistant tried waxing, shaving and bleaching to hide her facial hair.
Once baptized Sikh, a religion which forbids cutting body hair, the 23-year-old decided to embrace her body as it was.
‘When I first started growing my beard it was for religious reasons but as the years have gone by I’ve kept it for more personal reasons.
‘It makes me feel like a brave, confident woman who isn’t afraid to break society’s norms,’ she added.

So great, right?

From a photography standpoint, it’s interesting to compare Kaur’s portrait to those of the men which the Daily Mail included for comparison:

I have very little in the way of formal photography education, and what little of that there is, was mostly dedicated to retro technicalities like darkroom work. But one of the things that I found fascinating (and not a little disquieting) was the centrality of gender in standard portrait lighting and posing.

The photography program in question is of the trade school flavor, and so the focus habitually was on workaday commercial representations—actor headshots, for example, or photos of business folks businessing. In those applications, representing the gender of the subject in a way that makes them appealing and hireable is one of the main considerations.

That gender is something actively constructed and performed is something I’ve understood for a long time, but until I was actually being taught portrait 101 stuff, it never occurred to me that a photographer has to play an active role in gendering a portrait subject. In my habitual way of thinking, another person’s gender identity and expression is primarily their business, and aside from not misgendering them, not something I need to do anything about.2

So this idea that before I could start working through a portrait of somebody, I’d have to make decisions about what sort of masculinity or femininity I would be building for them was super, super weird. I could (and did) question a lot of what the instructor had to offer in terms of received wisdom for what women and men should look like in portraits—but there’s no easy alternate wisdom to swap in. One can make different choices about this, but one cannot not make choices about it.

  1. Not normally a source of awesome things. ↩
  2. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best default stance; it’s just how I’ve processed this stuff for as long as I can remember. ↩
Lebgaa Fanana, 42 years old. Timimoun, Algeria. Chicken and vegetables CuosCous.
photo series

Delicatessen With Love

Gallery

Gabriele travelled around the world and, next to thousands of other adventures, turned into a curious and hungry grandson for the grannies of all the countries he visited. Appealing to their natural cooking care and their inevitable pride in their best recipe, common factors to all grandmothers in the world, Gabriele persuaded them to do their best in the kitchen.

—Arianna Rinaldo

Pan Guang Mei, 62 years old. Chongqing, China. Hui Guo Rou (twice-cooked pork with vegetables).
Pan Guang Mei, 62 years old. Chongqing, China.
Hui Guo Rou (twice-cooked pork with vegetables).
Laura Ronz Herrera, 81 years old. Veracruz, Mexico. Vegetarian Tamal.
Laura Ronz Herrera, 81 years old. Veracruz, Mexico.
Vegetarian Tamal.
Grace Estibero, 82 years old. Mumbai, India. Chicken vindaloo.
Grace Estibero, 82 years old. Mumbai, India.
Chicken vindaloo.
Fernanda De Guia, 71 years old. Manila, Philippines. Sinigang €“ (tamarind soup with pork and vegetables).
Fernanda De Guia, 71 years old. Manila, Philippines.
Sinigang €“ (tamarind soup with pork and vegetables).
Melanie Hill , 50 years old. American Fork, Utah, U.S.A. Chocolate Toffee Trifle.
Melanie Hill , 50 years old. American Fork, Utah, U.S.A.
Chocolate Toffee Trifle.
Serette Charles, 63 years old. Saint-Jean du Sud, Haiti. Lambi in creole sauce.
Serette Charles, 63 years old. Saint-Jean du Sud, Haiti.
Lambi in creole sauce.
Regina Lifumbo, 53 years old. Mchinji, Malawi. Finkubala (Caterpillar in tomato sauce).
Regina Lifumbo, 53 years old. Mchinji, Malawi.
Finkubala (Caterpillar in tomato sauce).
Julia Enaigua, 71 years old. La Paz, Bolivia. Queso Humacha (vegetables and fresh cheese soup).
Julia Enaigua, 71 years old. La Paz, Bolivia.
Queso Humacha (vegetables and fresh cheese soup).
Ana Lucia Souza Pascoal, 53 years old. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Fejoada light.
Ana Lucia Souza Pascoal, 53 years old. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Fejoada light.
Lebgaa Fanana, 42 years old. Timimoun, Algeria. Chicken and vegetables CuosCous.
Lebgaa Fanana, 42 years old. Timimoun, Algeria.
Chicken and vegetables CuosCous.
Normita Sambu Arap, 65 years old. Oltepessi (masaai mara) Kenya. Mboga and orgali (white corn polenta with vegetables and goat).
Normita Sambu Arap, 65 years old. Oltepessi (masaai mara) Kenya. Mboga and orgali (white corn polenta with vegetables and goat).
Miraji Mussa Kheir, 56 years old. Bububu, Zanzibar. Wali, mchuzina mbogamboga (rice, fish and vegetables in green mango sauce).
Miraji Mussa Kheir, 56 years old. Bububu, Zanzibar.
Wali, mchuzina mbogamboga (rice, fish and vegetables in green mango sauce).
Wadad Achi, 66 years old. Beirut, Lebanon. Mjadara (rice and lentils cream).
Wadad Achi, 66 years old. Beirut, Lebanon.
Mjadara (rice and lentils cream).
Marisa Batini, 80 years old. Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. Swiss chard and ricotta Ravioli with meat sauce.
Marisa Batini, 80 years old. Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy.
Swiss chard and ricotta Ravioli with meat sauce.
Brigitta Fransson, 70 years old. Stockholm, Sweden. Inkokt Lax (poached cold salmon and vegetables).
Brigitta Fransson, 70 years old. Stockholm, Sweden.
Inkokt Lax (poached cold salmon and vegetables).
Valagerdur Olafsdòttir, 63 years old. Reykjavìk, Iceland. Kjotsùpa (lamb and vegetables soup).
Valagerdur Olafsdòttir, 63 years old. Reykjavìk, Iceland.
Kjotsùpa (lamb and vegetables soup).
Inara Runtule, 68 years old. Kekava, Latvia. Silke €“ (herring with potatoes and cottage cheese).
Inara Runtule, 68 years old. Kekava, Latvia.
Silke €“ (herring with potatoes and cottage cheese).

Aside from the fact that this series is limited to the families who can afford to host a traveler. And with the awareness that what host families feed their guests isn’t always what they actually eat every day.* I really like these. A very simple idea but one which I think works really well here.

*My wife and sister both have travel stories about how relieved their hosts were to find out they were vegetarian and didn’t impress their guests with meat. At the same time, there’s also something nice about seeing pictures of food which directly contradicts the stereotypes we have of these places in the west.

I always like watching experts work on things that they can do in their sleep but which they take immense pride in doing well. This is especially true of tasks which are often overlooked or taken for granted. Food preparation is one such task. It’s clear looking at these photos that every woman here is pleased to be recognized for this skill and proud of her creation.*

*One of the things that’s bothered me about the celebrity chef stuff (and a lot of foodie culture in general) is how male-dominated it is since, rightly or wrongly, domestic food prep is usually performed by women. Only glorifying the male celebrity version of cooking gets the essence of food wrong as well in addition to suggesting that the everyday essential food prep that women worldwide are doing isn’t worth celebrating.

There’s also something nice about how so many of the meals seem to match the rooms and the way the women are dressed. I’m curious whether this is intentional or if it’s an organic function of putting together a household and letting everything sort of grow together so nothing feels out of place.

Lastly, I really really appreciate how global this series is. Are there missing areas? Of course. But when picking the images for this post I found myself noticing that there are plenty of examples from all continents to the point where I don’t feel like anyplace is really being slighted. And that’s a rare thing nowadays.