m wesley ham. (former ICP teach!)

Neautral Milk Hotel

Holland,1945

The only girl I’ve ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
Now she’s a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames
On empty rings around the sun
All sing to say my dream has come

But now we must pack up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And now we ride the circus wheel
With your dark brother wrapped in white
Says it was good to be alive
But now he rides a comet’s flame
And won’t be coming back again
The Earth looks better from a star
That’s right above from where you are
He didn’t mean to make you cry
With sparks that ring and bullets fly
On empty rings around your heart
The world just screams and falls apart

But now we must pack up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And here’s where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore
And it’s so sad to see the world agree
That they’d rather see their faces filled with flies
All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes

richard olderman.

Self Re-Defined by Richard Olderman

I am so happy to introduce you to Richard Olderman's work. He is the reason I pursued photography. He is not only a fabulous teacher and person, but also an amazing photographer, offering up the magic in the natural world. You will need to visit his website to check out his multitude of portfolios...For this blog, I would like to share his self portraits which are some of the most amazing creative transformations.


Here are some excerpts from a review from an exhibition at the Evanston Art Center...

"In the current exhibition Focus: The Self Re-Defined, artist Richard Olderman takes viewers on a surprising exploration of the self and nature; a journey of self discovery. Curated by Evanston Art Center Director Michele Rowe-Shields, Focus: The Self Re-Defined, Recent Photographs by Richard Olderman presents 22 of Olderman's manipulated, silver gelatin prints. This handtinted series incorporates a group of early black and white self-portraits taken around 1980 with more recent black and white images from nature and cemeteries. Olderman superimposes the two images and then applies a variety of creative
techniques to the print itself, such as adding color and toner or bleaching, scratching and scraping the print. His work deals with a number of issues such as confrontation of the self, transformation, birth, death, coming and going.

" I have always had a fairly comfortable fascination with cemeteries and death. Death in the sense that it's the end of one thing, but is also the start of something new. With this new series it's like scraping away the layers and something new coming out of the ashes," explains Olderman.

In Olderman's earlier portraits he confronts the camera by directly facing the camera without pretense. This process comes out of a need to document a difficult and unsettled time in his life." In combination with his more recent images, the results are stunning. The handtinting is exquisite, the images mysterious and provocative, " says Rowe-Shields. "Richard's remarkable
photographs express the essence of self-portraiture as self discovery. Through his personal struggle and exploration of the self and nature, he portrays a layered reality evoking a spiritual dimension and dramatically capturing his inner sense of being."

jen davis.

luke stettner.

marlene dumas

Marlene Dumas: Name No Names

An unappreciative critic of Marlene Dumas's work once bluntly described it as "cheap thrills." Dumas promptly dubbed the slam a compliment. It was Roland Barthes who, in his famous 1957 essay "Striptease," alerted us to the complexity of the cheap thrill by way of investigating the ritual of Parisian striptease. The irony of the striptease is that its titillating spell is broken at the moment of actual exposure: a stark naked woman is often somewhat scary and anything but erotic. Marlene Dumas refuses to sustain the striptease; rather, she is always interested in coaxing her subjects into dropping their accoutrements of performative sexuality, gender, and race. Dumas claims that if her work has an aim, it is "to 'reveal' not to 'display.'" This doesn't mean that her images aren't sexy: they are. But they are sexy in a raw, dirty kind of way-vaguely pathetic, sometimes embarrassing, often vicious, and always disconcertingly familiar. Insisting that we recognize how inevitably linked intimacy and discomfort are, Dumas makes it her business to root out the well-hidden, but always-present, perversity that is immanent to pleasure-whether we like it or not.

Name No Names, the first comprehensive presentation by a U.S. museum of the acclaimed Amsterdam-based artist's drawings, offers a rare opportunity to examine the breadth of Marlene Dumas's works on paper from 1973 to the present. Dumas once said that she wished she could make single-line paintings, as the ancient Chinese did. Her works on paper, though not produced by single gestures, do seem as though they've landed all at once and then settled in, easing color and line into unexpected configurations. The images feel like quick bodily utterances: gasps, exclamations, shudders. Yet, it is equally important to notice that these marks, spreading like quick stains, are apt, if clearly distorted, documentations of the world around us. Dumas's works on paper, like her paintings, might be loosely categorized as a kind of social portraiture. Dumas asks us to re-see her subjects by magnifying them and abstracting them, by disregarding natural proportions and discarding the comforts of context. It's not just sexual perversion Dumas focuses on as she literally zooms in on her subjects. Her images manifest a perversion or twisting of received social knowledge, a tactical corruption or misinterpretation of meaning.

Born and raised in South Africa, Dumas has said that she "treats all colours as equally strange." This intentionally ambiguous statement not only invokes the surprising use of pigment in her drawings and paintings, but also directly addresses the ways in which race and gender appear as fluid, undefined entities throughout her works. Over the span of her thirty-year career, Dumas has produced work relating to subjects as diverse and ideologically complicated as apartheid, racial stereotypes, motherhood, polymorphous perversity, love, and religion. The thread that runs through what appears, at first, to be an unwieldy range of topics too large to tackle is the fact that each topic is a social construction. Racial prejudice, for example, relies on sustained social fantasies about hierarchies of physiognomy and skin tone; religion is built around long-standing traditions of fear, hope, and superstition. And for each communally held belief system, there exists a vast repertoire of recognizable images-images that serve to remind and to reference. It is from this archive of cultural sensibility that Dumas culls her images.

Never working from a live model, Dumas always begins with photographs that she gathers from fashion magazines and film archives or photos that she takes herself. Dumas revels in thieving images and quotes from wherever and whomever she wishes-her visual and linguistic vocabularies cobble slightly skewed aphorisms to popular and art historical imagery ranging from Mae West to Josephine Baker to Naomi Campbell to Manet's Olympia. What makes Dumas's secondhand depictions so compelling is the way she twists images we've come to take for granted so they are structurally undone, made formally strange, as in Josephine (1997), where the timeless star is simply not herself at first glance. Once we are clued in to the figure's identity through Dumas's title, the cryptic details of the drawing take on iconic pertinence: though for a moment unrecognizable, this is our Josephine, clutching her veil, barely hiding her nudity, her face lit to the point of racial ambiguity. As one would expect, Dumas's background as a white South African-born artist is hardly insignificant in any conversation about her work. Drawings like Selfportrait as a Black Girl (1989) and An African Mickey Mouse (1991) directly address the charged political climate in which she grew up. Yet, Dumas makes a point of making her stance on racial politics more about destabilization than didactic persuasion. Her group of six drawings entitled Mixed Blood (1996) is not about any specific race, but rather about the possibility that perhaps there are no specific races to begin with.

For Dumas, no subject is sacred. Her depictions of babies, even her own, are often ambivalent and highlight the monstrous, parasitic nature of human offspring, as in her series Remembrances of Pregnancy (1985- 1989). If Dumas takes on subjects that are considered taboo, it is because taboo itself is based on strict rules of division that the artist simply won't acknowledge. Like her use of inkwash, which-bleeding, smearing and soaking-extends beyond demarcated lines, her subjects rub up against one another fitfully. In Judas (1994), two faces fill the entire frame of the drawing, their cheeks and lips merging tenderly. The figures' genders are undefined but similar, sexual but also amoebic, as if they are a single cell, splitting. The image without its title is an all-consuming embrace, one both erotic and disquieting; with its title, the image hurtles us into the biblical story we know so well, but does so with a jolt-who has ever pictured Judas in such a shape-shifting, succubine way before? As Dumas has said, her titles "redirect" the way we see the work. These titles aren't meant to secure the meaning of the images but, rather, to show how loosely tethered meaning really is to image, and how heavily we rely on what we already know to decipher what's before us.

Dumas's words and images refuse singular meaning, yet they frame serious political and ethical questions about apartheid, race, gender, and sexuality. By retaining- even insisting on- ambiguity, Dumas skillfully keeps complicated, open questions just that: questions. Working in what has been called a neo-expressionist, conceptualist style, Dumas has been written about as sharing traits with such diverse artists as Jenny Holzer, Emil Nolde, Barbara Kruger, Edvard Munch, Barbara Bloom, and Francis Bacon. Her recent depictions of strippers and prostitutes are phantoms of Egon Schiele's muses from the early twentieth century. Dorothy D-lite (1998), bent-over double, vulva displayed, emerges from the thin inkwash as if she were a flickering light. In Under the Volcano (1998), death and sex merge forces; the skin of the stripper has been infused with a fiery glow, and she peers back over her shoulder at the viewer, beckoning ghoulishly with vacant eyes and too-white teeth. Dumas's strippers, drawn after snapshots she took herself in the red-light district of Amsterdam, are most definitely naked, and most definitely engaged in the trafficking of cheap thrills. Marlene Dumas wouldn't have it any other way. 
Johanna Burton, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Curatorial Fellow

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Marlene Dumas has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 1976. She has had numerous one-person exhibitions in museums throughout Europe and the U.S., including the Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (both 2001) and the Tate Gallery, London (1996), and was a participating artist in the 46th Venice Biennale (1995).

Marlene Dumas: Name No Names was conceived of and organized by the Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris, and is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue (Centre Pompidou, 2001). 

ana mendiata.

The Case of Ana Mendieta

by gillian sneed 10/12/10

25 years ago, on September 8, 1985, celebrated feminist body artist Ana Mendieta fell 34 floors to her death from the window of her Greenwich Village apartment. The only other person with her at the time was her husband of only eight months, prominent minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Arrested and charged with second-degree murder, Andre's three-year legal struggle culminated in a trial by a judge rather than by a jury, a rarity in murder cases. Evidence was suppressed due to sloppy police and prosecutorial work, and ultimately, Andre was acquitted of all charges related to her death in 1988.

"Where is Ana Mendieta? Donde está Ana Mendieta? 25 Years Later" was a symposium held on the closing night of the eponymous exhibition presented in the Fales Library and Special Collections gallery of NYU's Bobst Library. Running from August 1 to October 8, the exhibition presented career-spanning works by Mendieta, related archival documents, and a documentary film about Mendieta, BloodWork: The Ana Mendieta Story, by Richard Move, who also curated the exhibition.

Move also emceed the symposium, which boasted an exceptional panel of noted curators, scholars, and artists including Kat Griefen, Director of A.I.R. Gallery, Genevieve Hyacinthe, professor of Afro-Atlantic and Contemporary Art at SUNY Purchase, José Esteban Muñoz, Chair of NYU's Performance Studies program, Diana Taylor, professor of performance and Spanish studies at NYU, and Carolee Schneemann, legendary performance artist and friend of Mendieta, all of whom spoke about Mendieta's life, work, and controversial death. In fact, the exhibition and symposium are among the only such events to ever explicitly confront the circumstances surrounding her death and to overtly frame Carl Andre's acquittal of her murder as unjust.

The symposium was located in a small theater in the Performance Studies department in NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. The overwhelming turnout for the symposium-turned-courtroom drama was much larger than the venue, and some attendees were turned away; the back rows were designated as standing room only. The event was kicked off with a screening of Move's 15-minute documentary, BloodWork, featuring faithful reenactments of Mendieta's most well known performances by a look-alike actress as well as interviews with Yvonne Rainer, B. Ruby Rich, Carolee Schneemann, and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. LEFT: BODY TRACKS BY ANA MENDIETA, 1982.

In their search to discover "Where is Ana Mendieta?" the panelists plotted divergent paths. Kat Griefen's hunt for Ana led her to the A.I.R Gallery archives, where she excavated information about Mendieta from the three-year period that she was a member of the artist-run gallery. Griefen explains that while she played an active role in the gallery early on, and curated significant exhibitions there such as the 1980 "The Dialectics of Isolation: Third World Women Artists of the United States," Mendieta seemed to have lost interest in the final years of her membership.

It was through the gallery that Mendieta first came to know Carl Andre, when he served on a panel entitled, "How has women's art practices affected male artist social attitudes?" According to Griefen, many associated with the gallery at the time believed that as her relationship with Andre developed, her relationship with the gallery suffered, a feeling that culminated with her resignation in 1982.

By contrast, the scholars on the panel engaged in their quest to "find Ana" by examining her work through various methodological and theoretical tropes. In her talk "Divinating Black Body and Black African Sisterhood," Genevieve Hyacinth confronted issues of race and ethnicity, comparing Mendieta's work to other Cuban female performance artists, and considering it in relation to the Black Cuban spiritual practice of Santería. While Hyacinth acknowledged that Mendieta did not actually practice Santería herself, she asserts that Mendieta drew on the religion in her performances to "assault her whiteness and social privileges." LEFT: CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN. PHOTO BY GILLIAN SNEED

Like Hyacinth, José Esteban Muñoz, investigated Mendieta's ethnic, cultural, and racial "identifications, disidentifications, and counteridentifications." Relying on the theoretical approach he is developing in his forthcoming book, Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect, and Performance, Muñoz discussed the "feeling brown-ness" inherent to her work, an affective tone in which she "stages a sense of the world as brown (not the sole province of ‘brown people') but a sharing out of brown as a sense of the world."

By contrast, Diana Taylor attempted to locate Ana through her absence. Calling into question the notion of re-performance, she compared the reenactments of Mendieta by an actress in Move's film to the re-performances of Marina Abramović's seminal works by surrogates in her recent MoMA retrospective. For Taylor such reenactments are antithetical to authentic performances, and result in the mummification of the works by neutralizing the improvisational risk and vitality of the original performances they seek to approximate, posing the question: "Is [the film] a form of re-performance ... that shows that it's not about the original, but about it's absence, the silhouette washed out to sea?"

The most personal presentation came from Carolee Schneeman, who discussed her friendship with Mendieta (they were both admirers of Maya Deren and met through Stan Brakhage), and compared her own nature-based feminist performance art of the era with Mendieta's. Painting a picture of how difficult it was for women artists in the 70s, she reminded the audience that feminist artists of the time were trivialized and denounced as narcissistic. "We have forgotten the dangers of depicting the explicit female body, how much anger and resistance that inspired," she concluded. LEFT: RICHARD MOVE. PHOTO BY GILLIAN SNEED.

Most riveting, however, was her frank assertion that she is convinced that Andre murdered Mendieta. "She made me change her light bulbs. She was afraid of heights. She would never go near the window," Schneeman confided, adding how eerie it is to her that Andre still lives in the same apartment from which Mendieta plunged to her death, and that his new wife allegedly makes window-based artworks.

As many mentioned throughout the night, and many more continued to ruminate on during the gallery reception held after the symposium, perhaps the most disturbing detail divulged as the evening unfolded is the coincidence that the Tisch School of the Arts directly overlooks the rooftop of the Delion delicatessen, the actual site of Mendieta's violent end. In the face of such uncanny convergences of space and time, one can't help but wonder if in searching far and wide for Ana, we have yet to grasp that she is perhaps much closer to us now than we ever realized.

Robert polidori

I saw some work by Robert Polidori and thought I'd share! Linsey you might be interested.

Slept in Beds- Nick Zinner

Slept in Beds is a book produced by Evil Twin Productions in 2003, with photography by Nick Zinner. He may be better known as the drummer for the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. However, Nick's work was one of the initial reasons why I got into Photography. This series displays beds the morning after, of hotel rooms, friends houses, random locations. Most are ruffled from a nights sleep, while others are still made suggesting one never made it to bed. There is an intimacy added because of the limited production (only 1000 copies of the book ever made). Nick took most of these images during the course of travels with the band.

Nick attended Bard College for Photography.

I've also included the link to Evil Twin Productions for more details.

http://www.eviltwinpublications.com/BEDS.html

"Uniuqe artists book produced in a limited edition of 1000 numbered copies. The luscious color photographs are reproduced on slick glossy paper, the text is screen printed on fabric, the binding is handsewn."

After rediscovering this publication, and realizing it had officially sold out I found a seller on amazon, and purchased a copy. I'll bring it to class when I receive it in the mail.

Stolen from Photographer Alec Sloth's Blog

At What Age Do Photographers Do Their Most Influential Work?

Posted in Flotsam by LBM on October 23, 2011

Jacques Henri Lartigue

Just about anybody who’s been in my company for the last couple of years has heard me yammer on about photography and aging. The best creative years for a photographer, I’d proclaim, are 20 to 40, but the peak is 25 to 35. Of course I’d mention the exceptions, but taken as a whole, photographic greatness seems to me to be a young person’s game.

The thing that got me started on this train of thought was reading a New York Times article from 2010 entitled How Old Can A ‘Young Writer’ Be?:

They (fiction writers) often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young. “There’s something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them ‘budding’ or ‘promising,’ when in fact they’re peaking,” Kazuo Ishiguro told an interviewer last year. Ishiguro (54 when he said this) added that since the age of 30 he had been haunted by the realization that most of the great novels had been written by authors under 40.

Reading this at the age of 40, I began to picture myself as Wile E. Coyote still running after he’s off the cliff. The decline seems inevitable.

But is it? From in-depth quantitative studies, University of Chicago economist David Galenson has proposed two kinds of artist greatness. One he calls Young Geniuses (conceptualists who do their best work early in their careers). The other group he calls Old Masters (those who work by trial and error and improve with age). According to Galenson, Picasso (Young Genius) peaked at age 26 whereas Cezanne (Old Master) peaked at 67.

Does Galenson’s theory apply to photographers? I have no idea. What I need is data. Here is a chartanalyzing the ages of philosophers and their influential contributions (peak age is 38-44). What would such a chart look like for photographers? I have a funny feeling my 25-35 guess might still be right.

What do you think?

Do we really just peak once? My work is always changing, sometimes it is better than others. What happens after I "peak? If I only have one chance to peak I think I would rather it be later than sooner. I want my work to mean something to someone, but I don't want to ever understand photography completely. If I understand it, then there will be nothing left for me to learn and I will loose interest. I never want this to happen.

Mind Mapping

For those that were interested in Mind Mapping, this is where you can download "Free Mind" a free mind mapping program.
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download