Artist Research no.5: Brian Gaberman

All Images Brian Gaberman. Silver Gelatin. Dates Uknown. Titles Unknown.

Artist Research no.5: Brian Gaberman

I've been rewinding my life, and trying to find that time when I truly loved photography for itself. I remember sitting in photo class as a junior in highschool, and this devastatingly handsome skateboarder showed me images by Brian Gaberman. This one to be exact.

Anyway, Brian Gaberman is a photographer for Skateboarder, and here's the sweet part, makes images of quickly moving people flying through the air on small pieces of wood with wheels... with a 4 x 5. He also uses a lot of pinholes and a lot of darkroom manipulation. He made me love film. Him and Jerry Uelsmann, but he's another blog. Gaberman captures gritty dirty building exteriors, deep, rich black shadows, and moody skies. His images utilize a lot of blurred motion and have a dreamy aesthetic.

Research no.4: Fuji Instant Film Holder

I'd like to be using my 4 x 5 wide angle pinhole which has a f/ 150 aperture, and is therefore very hard to meter. Yes, I could use my light meter and get an approximate exposure time, but in low light and long exposures, we're talking up to 3 to 4 minutes sometimes, you're in the world of reciprocity. This would take a lot of what my Physics 107 professor Dr. Pat Goolsby would call WAG-ging.. that stands for Wild Ass Guess if you didn't know, and as he'd tell you, one should really make hypothesis' using scientific data instead. So, the logical answer is instant film, that's why I've been looking into alternatives for the now obsolete Polaroid instant film, and my 545ii holder that is rendered useless as well since Polaroid declared Chapter 11. I thought about all those old film hoarding photo junkies but all the film I can find on Ebay is open and sometimes as old as a decade! But thank goodness for monopolies, Fujifilm is here to the rescue, for merely $3.40 a pop I can use their new instant pack film... with their new PA-45 Instant Film Holder ringing up at a bit over $200. I shot a bit yesterday evening, (utilizing my new pocket wizards to pop off some extra light!) using Ilford paper cut into 4 x 5 pieces and loaded into my film backs.. we'll see how this works out, it is really just an experiment, I am guessing it will not be as clear as I'd like, but perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised.. again this doesn't help with the light readings, but sheets of 11 x 14 paper are $1.80/ each, and I fit 6 - 4 x 5 cuts on each sheet, this is only .30¢ a shot then, now that'd be economical... SO

Ilford's 4 x 5 black and white ISO 100 film, is 100 sheets for $90, but I would have to factor in paying for Action Photo to develop the negatives for me, which translates to me waiting for film, and an additional $25 per 10 images, bringing up Ilford film to $3.40 an image + time to develop + at least say 2 sheets of instant film @ $3.40 a piece, I can expect to SPEND: $10.20 an image plus cost of printing..

Versus

Shooting directly onto Ilford paper, at .30¢ an image + approximately 2 sheets of instant film @ $3.40 a piece + time to scan film, print onto transparency to turn into a contact negative @ graphics lab for $1 a dollar, I can be spending $8 an image + cost of printing, this will save some time in waiting for developing and save $1.50 an image..

Here are the stats on paper/ film/ holders...

 

Dreams.

I napped today after spending the afternoon with Courtney Mannion digging through shelves and inhaling deeply into bound journals on the upper levels of Cabell Library. We talked for a brief moment about a perfume that smelled of library books, pipe tobacco and mildewy cloth. That may not sound appetizing to you, but it sounds like heaven to me. Well, I had some of the most vivid dreams ever, it was a bit like time travel, as they were really just memories of mine. I think all this thinking and conjuring up my why has started to yield some results. Let me take you with me...

The hayloft of my barn in Herndon, Va summer of 7th grade we were cleaning out the low eved "attic" and I scraped my back on the wood, and collapsed onto a creation our barn cat was making. Several animals killed and brought up the ladder to his "lair" it was a rat-pigeon-squirrel-vole-mouse-baby barn swallow that had literally congealed together... I had just face planted into it...

Then, I was in California the first year I aged not in Virginia, my birthday, turning 19 my little brother sent me a box, this was the best present I ever received (and a really intense couple of years doing, inhaling, taking things I had no business ingesting made me forget all about this box.) It contained a scrap of fabric I had used to sew a dress with in high school he must have found in a dresser stashed with other things I left when I moved away, and a note that said "STOP: Put on the blindfold and have William help". There was instructions that my then boyfriend followed. I heard him opening little jars and told me to inhale. In through my nose came the smell of my life in Virginia in the fall. First was straw from the horse stalls, then in the next jar was rotting leaves from a big birch tree in the corner of our yard, then ash from the fire pit, then dirt from by the lake, then a small clipping of leather off an unused horse bridle ... I can't remember all the things he put in the jars, but as they say scent is the strongest link to memory and a nauseating rush of homesickness poured over me.  I woke up and spent the last few hours staring at old negatives of mine from high school, when I was so enchanted with photography I wanted nothing else in my life. I haven't felt that way in such a while, and these old images were invigorating and inspiring. I spent much of my high school years crawling through abandoned houses taking slow shutter speed images of me creeping through walls and over exposed windows eating away at my image. I was amazed at the themes and ideas that were floating in those images and I'd like to revitalize them, I seemed to better understand the nature of the camera, the nature of light, and ideas about identity, permanence, memory, and image. I don't know if this is allowed, but it's pretty early in the game, and I'm so very much infuriated by my lack of enthusiasm for my current project. I feel as if art school has shoved things/ideas/images down my artistic esophagus so forcefully that it has engulfed my own self. The work I have made recently, and not so recently does not seem to be mine, it seems to be a response to Richmond, to Being, yes but not to myself. Looking at work from the past year at VCU I see nothing reminiscent of my own personal style except one roll I took during alternative processes, and it's like I'm just looking at things for the first time, because they don't speak of me, my experiences, my desires, my visions. I think there is a more natural and fluid way to express what I've been trying to say, I feel as if I've been devoured by an artist that is not me.  Stay tuned for what's next, I'm heading home to the farm, to memories, to me.

Artist Research no.4: Miranda July

The Hallway from The Hallway on Vimeo.

Did you enjoy the hallway? I did. It was like a mini meditation session. I re-watched "Me and You and Everyone We Know" the other day. I love that movie, it makes you FEEL so many different things. It even gets boring in parts, but it feels INTENTIONALLY boring, I love it. I've always identified with the next door neighbor girl, Sylvie. She collects timeless, classic home appliances and toiletries to save in a hope chest for her husband and her daughter. She lays down Peter and tells him the layout of her home, the breakfast nook, the island with the stove in it, and the conversations she will have with her unborn, unconceived, child. I had completely forgotten about this girl when I put this movie on my Netflix queue.  I just remembered the poop, and the sidewalk of life. The sound track is also amazing. I'm listening to it now. It is hopeful, nostalgic, and desperate all in one. The most amazing thing about Miranda July to me is that she makes art just for me. Her pieces address me, the speak just to me... and to you, but not to both of us at the same time. They are just for the viewer, a single solitary soul, and then the next person, and the next, but each gets their own individual art piece. This video made me remember something I had not remembered in the longest time. My mother and I used to spend Saturdays walking through model homes. They were always furnished, decorated, and stocked, or so it would seem. The grapes were fake, but usually right next to them was a plate of crackers left by a realtor, and when you went to use a toilet you would lift the seat cover and the bowl was blocked off, there was probably a sign left on it that said the toilet in the selling office is functional. We loved to go to the Dream House, each year this multi million dollar home would be raffled off to someone who could not possibly pay the taxes on it, one year it was the most fabulous thing I'd ever seen, I remember each room ever so clearly, or maybe it is just a blend of every model home we walked through...Can't you imagine yourself living here? This little girl's room is designed to look as if it is underwater! Murals on the wall of fish, the carpet the color of sand, the blinds blue and floating/ swaying like water, that bed was a seashell, and there were mermaid pillows. The ceiling was the best, it was painted to look like you were underwater looking up, sun rays rippled through, and the bottom of a boat just started to skim into your aquarium. The basement was a movie theatre, red and yellow, there was a ticket booth, a bar made to look like a concession stand, thick velvet curtains pushed back to enter into the theatre, 3 rows of REAL movie seats with an aisle lined with little tiny string lights, and a projector that illuminated the front wall with some 90's blockbuster hit. This part I don't remember, because I was so fascinated with a home that was just so PERFECT. Nobody could ever live like this, there was no food in the sink, there were no dirty clothes in the laundry, the laundry actually was filled tile samples and paint chips, so you could customize YOUR home. I'm just starting to understand the implications of memories like this, especially now that the housing bubble has popped, and it's hot air that was released is smothering my generation of disillusioned youths, who grew up in perfect little homes, filled with lovely things, driven around in cars not paid off, and  never noticed the ever encroaching disaster that is now your society.

oh yeah, where was I...Miranda July...

She is awesome.

Research no.3: I've got nothing for ya... and it's late.

I keep opening up this page, and then staring at it, and then deciding I don't actually have anything to say. I'll keep you posted though.

Artist Research no.3: Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan is a Seattle based photographer who focuses on American consumerism, and excess in our culture. He creates incredibly large scale works, some over 30 feet long, using central themes of repetition, color, and pattern to draw attention to his ideas. His work is all based on statistics, 65,000  American teenagers under age eighteen  become addicted to cigarettes every month, nine million American children had no health insurance coverage in 2007, 83,000  people have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration's war on terror. These numbers are overwhelming, and we are incapable of comprehending numbers that large, Chris Jordan's images provide a new perspective to view these facts.

Paper Bags, 2007
60x80"

Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.

Detail at actual size

Jet Trails, 2007
60x96"


Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours. 

 

Detail

Plastic Cups, 2008
60x90"


Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.

Detail

Dog and Cat Collars, 2009
60x67"


Depicts ten thousand dog and cat collars, equal to the average number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the United States every day.

Detail

Packing Peanuts, 2009
60x80"


Depicts 166,000 packing peanuts, equal to the number of overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S. every hour.

 Detail

Research no.2: Pocket Wizards

I've been researching ways to create artificial lighting in my sets, and have decided to utilize speedlites as they wont require cords and can be used outside, easily transportable, and I already own them. Nice + !

But here lies my dilemma, I HATE SYNC CORDS. They always stop working on me, I will have tested them prior to a shoot and they work fine,  I get on location, with a model staring at me, and they just wont fire. In any case, one can not use syncs with Canon flashes, they don't have a sync plug! You have to use one on camera, and have the rest fire as slaves, that direct flash is not really what I'm going for.. Alas, POCKET WIZARDS TO THE RESCUE! Pocket Wizard recently came out with something realllllly sweet.

The Flex TT5 paired with a mini TT1 allows you to remotely fire a speedlite to well over 50 feet, around corners, cars, through walls.  Well I just ordered these. And I am EXCITED.

Brain leakings..

Diego Velazquez, The Forge of Vulcan 1630

Velazquez was influenced by naturalist style painters like Caravaggio, and the deep shadows in his paintings come from Caravaggio's chiaroscuro lighting. He mostly painted in genre subject matter with intense realism, as the Baroque period started to arise. 

Chardin, The Silver Tureen, 1728

A French painter during the Rococo period, Chardin had little in common with his contemporaries, he utilizes the same Chiaroscuro lighting with dramatic shadows, employs careful detail of mundane, often grotesque still life images. He played close attention to texture and realism. 

  

Chardin

Chardin also painted genre paintings of domestic interiors, each usually had an underlying tone of discipline for children, and followed mores of the period for obedience. His work is noted for an absorptive relationship of subject to viewer. The subject is often "absorbed" in their own world, and does not show concern or awareness of the viewer. This is seen in work by Jeff Wall as well.

Edouard Manet, Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1863

His use of black paint to outline subjects, and the flatness in paintings like Olympia emphasize the material of the medium, this is a characteristic of his work that describes it as early modern. His genre scenes reference Velazquez, and have often been compared to Jeff Wall's work, seemingly posed actors, interacting with the viewer.

Edward Hopper, 1909, Summer Interior

Hopper was an American Realist, and was greatly influenced by Manet. He was interested in subjects and their relationship with their environment. He painted scenes of urban life using either impressionist light pastel palette and later, a much darker and drab color, similar to film noir, emphasizing line, shadow, and themes of isolation and loneliness. 

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, A Woman in the Sun

His use of lighting is often compared to that of Gregory Crewdson, as is the moment of tension felt when  looking at his paintings.

Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931

Again, Hopper's subjects are unconcerned with the viewer, they are involved only in their worlds.

 Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940

His landscape image glow with light from buildings and seep with desolation, and a sense of sadness.

Jeff Wall, Insomnia, 1994

Jeff Wall is a Canadian photographer who utilizes carefully constructed sets and color choices to illustrate mood and narrative. His work is cinematic, and strange, he has had influence on Gregory Crewdson. He blends together elements of documentary style photography and the constructed reality of fantasy. He is influenced by Manet, Caravaggio, and Hopper. 

 

Jeff Wall, After Invisible Man, 1999-2000

Jeff Wall, Pictures for Women, 1979

This photograph is directly related to Edouard Manet's the Bar Maid, references the photograph itself by including the camera directly in the center, and plays with the element of viewing and seeing by incorporating the mirrors. The seams down the image are transparencies connecting, but help emphasize the artifice of the photograph. 

Now read my post on Crewdson again. 

(This is just a connection of influences, and a streamline of consciousness... and a reflection on my interest in the absorptive subject.)

Artist Research no. 2: Gregory Crewdson

 Gregory Crewdson embodies the film- style photographer/ director/ doesn't even touch the camera photograph maker. This guy creates huge sets, shuts down entire street blocks, blows in hundreds of gallons of fogs, yells down from cherry picker cranes to "figures" and has scores of people at his disposal for lighting, he even has an art director, and some guy who takes the pictures for him, he admits he never even looks through the viewfinder. One could make a very convincing argument that his name should not be the one listed as artist, but then again, he's the one who's brain envisions these things. I think he represents the most modern day Brassai, and his "decisive moment." He tries to create the moment just after the before, and snaps the shutter right before the after has begun. His images are wrought with tension, and unease. What I find most fascinating about his images is the light. He shoots right at that magic moment where twilight is almost night and the light filters in just right, but then he blasts it with 1000's of watts of artificial light from giant hot lights, balanced with just the right amount of bedside table light and that one lone street light, maybe a car headlight or two will create a touch of fill. His sets are completely fabricated, he is known to have cleared entire blocks to allow just the right amount of untouched snow to fall onto deserted streets. I don't have quite the funding he has available at his disposal, but I can sure try to emulate his balance of artificial and natural light. 

All images Copyright Gregory Crewdson

Perhaps, well not perhaps, it is not sound reason to suggest that we can all one day work like Gregory Crewdson, but I have to hope that maybe one day I can. And to finish this post are two quotes from him, well one is from him, one is a message left on his answering machine after he saw a woman's house he liked and left a note on her door asking if he could make a perfect circle of mulch in her backyard and photograph it. 

“It’s funny, when you’re making pictures you’re not really – I’m not – conscious of really the motivations behind the photographs or what they mean, ever. It wasn’t until much later, I was producing the show, that I realized there’s a lot of cars with doors open. I thought, ‘Whoa, strange. I wonder what that means.’ "

- Gregory Crewdson

" Do what you have to do." 

Research no.1: Geoffry Batchen

I read Geoffrey Batchen's Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age, and found his stance on digital photography very interesting. Within the first page he makes a statement I perceived as both beautiful and thought provoking, "

                                                                                                            "

I have recently found myself very interested in the "truthful" nature of photographs, how can any representation of anything at a given 1/60 of a second become symbol to something in our world, real and fluid with movement? This reading seems to side with only digital imaging being unreal, and fabricated, but from the beginning we know photographic images are not truth, can not be said to represent the objects imitated.

He then begins to break down the actual etymology of Digital Photography, saying that unlike film, it never tries to argue that it is actually representative of that which it captures, that it actually represents more of a painterly approach to art, "

                                                                                                                  "

So why is it such a big deal that we fabricate images? Why is it an outrage that news outlets portray "manipulated imagery," is it not all manipulated, light, shadow, focus, etc.? Should every photograph be titled as a "photo illustration," or should it not be already assumed, in the very word of photograph that whatever seen is not the truth, that there is no way that it could be in the first place? I love how Susan Sontag puts it, that a photograph is proof only that something once existed, that a photograph is, "something directly stenciled off the real," and nothing more.

I found it comforting when Batchen addresses the notion that digital photography will result in the death of photography. He asserts that the history of the science is one of transition. That photography is merely 200 years of evolution, from daguerrotypes, to the brownie, to 4 x 5's to those cameras from the 90's that printed out 35mm negative sized stickers, none of which threaten to dissolve the medium in itself.

                           "

                                                   "

But how long will "human" survive....?

At this point your should have three blogs posted, one artist and two research. I can only find two. Make sure to keep up with this. Check out the guidelines I sent out over Bb/email today.

Artist Research no. 1: Aaron Hobson

All images copyright Aaron Hobson. Digital C-Prints


I really dig this guy, Aaron Hobson. For starters, he has an awesome last name.. just has a really professional and talented ring to it.. Just kidding guys, I'm not related to this photographer or anything, and happened to stumble upon him while googling my website months ago. He creates these dizzying panorama-esque images that have a very cinematic feel to them. This is something I'd like to achieve with my series on cordyceps, almost as if they were film stills. Another reason I also feel influenced by his work is the constructed reality element. Each component in frame is carefully arranged to give clues to the narrative being told. Even the final layout has been considered, to further emphasize the "movie" theme, images are sized to be "widescreen" and include the thicker top and bottom black edges. I appreciate the thoughtfulness put into his images.