Visser on Dijkstra

February 22, 2012

“One would clearly not want to term the work of Rineke Dijkstra ironic, but it is certainly averse to great gestures, leaden concepts of academic reflection. Despite all her artistic and commercial success, Dijkstra operates on a small scale, and relies chiefly on herself. Her insights into human identity develop primarily in the doing, the act of photographing, and only secondarily — and then at a distance — in reflection. One could say that Rineke Dijkstra’s work developed at the intersection of a Dutch and a German tradition. She takes from Sander, the Bechers and their pupils what one somewhat contradictorily could call a ‘conceptual idiom’, a visual vocabulary that however is not substantively linked to an intellectual concept with regard to the society or the visual culture to which it refers.”

— Hripsimé Visser “The soldier, the disco girl, the mother and the Polish Venus: Regarding the Photographs of Rineke Dijkstra” in Portraits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Nugent R.C. Highschool – Liverpool, England, November 11th, 1994″ Photograph © Rineke Dijkstra.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Criticism, Photography, Thought Tags , , , , , , , , , , ,

Perec on Space

February 22, 2012

“To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory: out beyond the railway stations and the roads, and the gleaming runways of airports, and the narrow strips of land illuminated for a brief moment by an overnight express, out beyond the panoramas too long anticipated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art, it will be three children perhaps running along a bright white road, or else a small house on the way out of Avignon, with a wooden lattice door once painted green, the silhouetted outline of trees on top of a hill near Saarbrücken, four uproarious fat men on the terrace of a café in the outskirts of Naples, the main street of Brionne, in the Eure, two days before Christmas, around six in the evening, the coolness of a covered gallery in the souk at Sfax, a tiny dam across a Scottish loch, the hairpin bends of a road near Corvol-l’Orgueilleux. And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.”

— Georges Perec “The World” in Species of Spaces.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Thought Tags , , , , ,

Kozloff and Sander on Portraiture

February 15, 2012

“In the nineteenth century, the maintenance of the sitter’s stance and the moment of the ‘take’ were in equilibrium. There would have been little interest in any preceding or succeeding incident. The duration of the pose was integral to itself, a kind of ‘time out’ from inconsequent behaviour. Given such an established stasis, specific clients received images that they could cherish as talismans, file as documents, or keep as mementoes. But for us, with our more fluid and indefinite awareness of temporal life, the ‘time out’ of the formal portrait comes to have the unexpected power and wonder of a phenomenon, a thing that anyone might consider worth having a picture of. We tend to regard the archaic dignities of a community, circulated by portraiture throughout the world, quite knowingly from across a divide and another vantage.”

— Max Kozloff in The Theatre of the Face

All photographs by August Sander.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Criticism, Photography Tags , , ,

From “Among Children” by Philip Levine

February 11, 2012

                                                     Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy. There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
dosed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women of Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke or memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.

— Philip Levine, from What Work Is (1992).

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Poetry Tags ,

Berger on storytelling

February 11, 2012

“Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener. Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.”

— John Berger “Ten Dispatches About Endurance” in Hold Everything Dear.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Politics, Theory, Thought Tags , , ,

Fraser on the New Middletowns

February 11, 2012

“In cities as diverse in location and rich in industrial heritage as New Haven, Connecticut, and Birmingham, Alabama, university-hospital complexes have supplanted factories as the dominant actors in their local economies. While labor markets in the factory cities of old used to resemble a pyramid—where on-the-job training and experience made it possible for many workers to ascend the pay scale into middle class comfort—the labor markets of these new cities tend to look more like an hourglass, with a highly educated group of skilled professionals on the top, and a permanent underclass of workers like Jackie on the bottom.

(…)

In Smyrna and Spring Hill, Nashville and Shelbyville, Muncie south and north, the old bargains that sustained working people have broken down. In place of the old stabilities — of careers, of families, of communities — we have become a generation of the dislocated, a country of industrial gypsies and undocumented immigrants in constant search of the next job; of downwardly mobile public school teachers and autoworker permatemps; of impoverished servants to a postindustrial future and twenty-year-olds with no hope for one at all. Citizens all of the new Middletowns.“

— from ”Down and Out in the New Middletowns” by Max Fraser, in Dissent magazine, Winter 2012.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Politics Tags , , , , , , ,

Ute & Werner Mahler on “Monalisen der Vorstädte” (“Mona Lisas of the Suburbs”)

February 11, 2012

A recent and welcome addition to the bookshelf, “Monalisen der Vorstädte” (“Mona Lisas of the Suburbs”) here discussed in a brief interview with photographers Ute & Werner Mahler.

With a remarkable and beguiling deftness of touch, they manage to weave a story about undetermined and quietly nurtured expectations for a future we imagine in the faces of a range of young women who seem at once deeply contemporary, and at the same time rife with the traces of a long cultural history. The imprecise and largely distant outline of the urban environment we find them photographed in – an environment that has throughout a sense of the city limits – is integral to the forcefulness of each young woman’s quiet separateness, but in its distance draws from us both curiosity and concern. These are young women both on the cusp (of adulthood) and at the outer limits of the city, and they are fascinating for the way their portraits elicit from us questions only the future can answer.

 

“Tanja, Minsk.” Photograph © Ute & Werner Mahler.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Photography Tags , , , , , ,

On Bergman’s portraiture

February 11, 2012

“Bergman’s photographs do not set out to motivate immediate direct political action, they are not staging posts for a food drive or publicity shots for a UNICEF mailing. They invite intense reflection and an imaginative engagement with who these individuals might be and what the measure of their lives could have been like. They make an argument, collectively, that anyone might make a worthy subject of sympathetic contemplation. The history of portraiture took a long time to reconcile itself itself to the notion that the unremarked and unaccomplished among us might be just as fascinating and elusive and affecting as the great and the good. Photography has played a substantial role in changing those preconceptions, and Bergman’s portraits make that case forcefully. He has photographed people who appear in many instances to have been marginalised, with all the attentiveness, empathy and vivid fascination that one would customarily dedicate only to those closest to us.

It is the intimacy he achieves with his subjects that gives his portraits license to intimate the character of their lives, to speak to their courage, reservedness, stoicism, resolve, to appreciate in them their own particular beauty. Bergman’s choice of subjects is egalitarian, and in that equality he makes a case for our community, for our communal humanity. In providing no ‘extrapictorial detail’ he in fact removes a means by which we might make ourselves more separate from them, he narrows our focus down not merely to the aesthetic choices he has made, but in fact to subjects of those choices – to the people he has photographed in a kind of rapture.”

— from an article published here last year

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Photograph © Robert Bergman, from A Kind of Rapture.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Criticism, Photography Tags , , , , , ,

Dear Shahid, by Agha Shahid Ali

February 11, 2012

Dear Shahid,

I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.

Rumours break on their way to us in the city.. But word still reaches us from border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soliders smash radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces.

You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian of the Gates of Paradise. Only eighteen years old. Yesterday at Hideout Café (everyone there asks about you), a doctor — who had just treated a sixteen-year old boy released from an interrogation centre — said: I want to ask the fortune-tellers: Did anything in his line of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife?

This letter, insh’Allah, will reach you for my brother goes south tomorrow where he shall post it. Here one can’t even manage postage stamps. Today I went to the post office. Across the river. Bags and bags — hundreds of canvas bags — all undelivered mail. By chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter addressed to you. So I am enclosing it. I hope it’s from someone you are longing for news of.

Things here are as usual though we always talk about you. Will you come home soon? Waiting for you is like waiting for spring. We are waiting for the almond blossoms. And, if God wills, O! those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went.

— from “The Country Without A Post Office” by Agha Shahid Ali.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Poetry Tags , , ,

One off: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra.

February 11, 2012

 

The inimical Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, from the album List of Lights and Buoys.

Discussion Leave a comment Category Art, Music Tags , ,