the space in between

the personal aesthetic

what do you mean when you think of the word "aesthetics?"

is it a detached, dry, intellectual word, something too often and too wearily encountered on yet another artist's statement written by some anonymous gallery assistant?  is it a rare and personalized form of sight that only "master" artists seem to posses?  is it a convenient pivot-term that critics can hover upon when creating confining boxes to fit their arguments about an artist, their output and their psychology into?

does one learn aesthetics or does aesthetics learn you?  meaning: is aesthetics a panoply of ideas and concerns one encounters in a ripe and meaningful fashion, something to add to an artistic arsenal that will further give shape and weight to work made--or is it a different kind of encounter, a shocking familiarity, when you realize that a fully articulated way of thinking about something is one that you have always had and always carried with you, unawares.  until that moment of encounter.

are aesthetics something given to you from the outside, or is it latent potentiality, waiting there for you to recognize it as some part of your self?

what informs you? who cares about beauty and making and thinking in ways that seem important to you, that resonate?  is it a process of thinking or making/doing, or, as new age and cliché as it sounds, a mode of being?  and: who and what has embodied this notion for me?

the first photographer that turned my head was bill brandt.

soho bedroom, 1938

i was but a babe to photography, its history, practice--any and all of it.  but when i looked at the work of brandt, something beckoned.  whispered to me, compadre. 

new as i was to the medium, certain rules were known "rules" and these would concern focus, shadows (and the ability to see deeply into them), varied tonal range, how-to-shoot-a-nude, how-to-shoot-a-documentary-photograph.  the whisper inside me was gleeful and grateful because she recognized brandt as bucking all of those rules and the images, despite the break with what is known as successful image making, still managing to be strong, stand-alone, Moments With Which To Be Reckoned.

i think i saw his nudes first, before anything.

camden hill,  1947

these were not the cool, controlling, perfected bodies of edward weston.  or the shamelessly direct and wondefully amateur turn-of-the-century erotic nudes i had also become aware of.  these were...if they were like anything, they were more like nudes i'd see in paintings than in anything i'd ever seen in a photograph.  elongated, mannerist limbs.  skin tones so contrasty as to lack any perceptive familiarity i had of the notion "skin."  perspective shifted, skewed, on its side.  was the photographer laying on the ground sideways to get this view?  maybe.  and the mood of them...sad like the nudes of edward hopper.  enigmatic and a little dangerous like the collages of max ernst.  or even better yet, like the representations of the feminine by his lesser-known and muchly talented wife, dorothea tanning.

you could not "see into" his blacks.  he did not want you to.  or did not care if you cared.  sometimes the perspective was such that it looked like the photo was made through the fat end of a coca-cola bottle.

east sussex, 1953

what i was responding to but didn't yet know was brandt's capacity to show a range of emotion and form simultaneously.  emotions both protracted and projected as if on a blank, white movie screen.  his accounting for, or dismissal of, the added layer of projected meaning by a potential viewer.  a practiced eye that liked to double the association of forms, to play with that psychology in his photos.  a photographer who, for me, would give me a little (the image), but was more than content to leave much in the way of meaning or interpretation a blank. 

i learned recently that brandt's work was not only unappreciated in his working days, but openly ridiculed and reviled.  in the great big book on brandt that i feel lucky to own, bill jay writes about the experience of having championed brandt's work as a junior editor for Popular Photography.  the editor, les barry instead found it, "...impossible to accept the concept that this collection of poorly printed, ineptly cropped photographs of badly posed, unattractive women is his idea of serious work."  talk about being misunderstood.  jay asserts in his foreward that despite decades of being told that he was a bad printer, an inept portratist, a sentimental documentarian, a horrid seer of the nude form, that he went right on working and working.  making images and printing them exactly as he saw fit.  it seems impossible to imagine a working artist today not withering against such steady, constant negative critique.  when i think how often an artist quickly finds a comfort zone in their aesthetic vision once it has been vetted by curators and commerce (are the two even distinguishable anymore?), and how oftener and oftener it seems that one does not toy with the ingredients of success once you've begun to grope towards it, bill brandt's plodding example seems nearly heroic to me. 

years after i first encountered brandt i found another artist-as-touchstone.  by this time i had become more personally invested in photography; i had been studying it for a number of years, i had rented studio space and built a darkroom that i learned to fail and fail better in.  my travel plans on a student budget consisted of trips to traveling gallery and museum shows in whatever blocks of time i could afford to pay to stay out of town for.  i had met and become friends with some other photographers, and now an intersecting dialogue of ideas, approaches and aesthetics had come to inform and play off of my own. 

at the jackson fine art gallery in atlanta, i first encountered the work of japanese photographer masao yamamoto.  i wasn't quite prepared for what i saw there, or the reaction i would have to his work.  again: the niggling sense of familiarity, of shared sympathies or concerns.  the greeks had a word for it: anagnorisis, meaning literally a recognition of someone, not only of their person but of what they stand for and represent. 

#960

the images, for those of you who have not seen them, are extraordinarily small.  and variegated in size.  some are 2x3, some 3x3, more often than not odd sizes.  they are torn and worn and tea-stained.  they are printed too dark to see distinctly and too light to see for certain.  they are not treated or exhibited as precious objects, and the revelatory experience of seeing contemporary photography speak loudly through smallness and intimacy reinvigorated my sense of the range and possibility of the genre of photography.

installation view at the jackson fine art gallery, 2003

craig krull gallery, santa monica, 2003

i don't know this for certain, but i think that yamamoto allows the gallery to decide how his work is to be shown, with perhaps a few sentences about his working philosophy and thinking.  when i spoke to an assistant at j.f.a., she told me that the photographs arrived at the gallery minus any of the usual fuss and precocious preciousness surrounding the transport of contemporary art.  they were stuffed unceremoniously into a box, all sitting on top and intersecting with one another.  i imagined a cigar box stuffed to the brim with someone's old and aging personal history, closed with a thick rubber band on the outside.

wabi-sabi aesthetics has always deeply resonated with me, and its precepts can be readily seen in yamamoto's works.  the tenets of wabi-sabi, if such a thing exists, would include some or all of the following:

• a purposeful lack of hierarchy; de-emphasis on class or caste (with origins in the traditional japanese tea house, in which the entry to the tearoom is purposefully set very low, so that everyone, regardless of rank, would need to lower themselves to enter)
• preoccupation with a watchful observance
• an emphasis on economy, but without drifting into a kind of miserly-ness
• an appreciation of evanescence, emphemerality, of fleetingness
• leonard koren writes that things wabi-sabi are, "...unstudied and inevitable looking...[but] not without a quiet authority."

to my thinking, wabi-sabi is an aesthetics of removed/impersonal vulnerability.  what do i mean by that?  that it is vulnerable and yielding to nature, events and circumstances beyond its control.  that it shows its wear and tear on its sleeve but does not do so loudly.  it is quiet and proud while being constituted from humble origins.  is it an aesthetic of a new kind of puritanism?  i don't believe so.  within wabi-sabi is a lack of fear or an expectation of any kind of reward.

after all of this disorganized meditation on the constitution of my personal aesthetic, i am no nearer to deciding whether or not aesthetics are something one does, or has done to one.  i certainly experience a "simpatico" moment when encountering something that has managed to articulate something i know to be a deep personal truth, but then, doesn't everyone?  or are those answers and assumptions too pat? do the majority of art-makers and see-ers even give aesethetics a second-glance anymore, or have we all decided that it is the undisputed domain of a bunch of dead french continental philosophers?  are aesthetics confined to the domain of form, art and making?  is it something one lives (here i think of agnes martin, of richard foreman, even of anthony bourdain)?  the one idea i keep returning to, the thing that i want to express here that matters to me, is that a certain self-awareness of one's borders, boundaries, what one gives and what one keeps close to the chest, are all elements of art making that make the making Real to me, that i want to internalize like a mantra, that i wish were more present in the world around me and in those who happen to be in the business of making.

influences and confluences

to have the knowledge that you seek a particular vein of something is to be aware of not only your tastes, but what influences you, creates bias and division, separates one set of concerns from another.  connoisseurship, perhaps, but also a little bit of greek wisdom: to know why you are drawn to specific things, people, situations or a kind of aesthetics is a form of knowing thyself. 

i have been swayed by a particular kind of representation of birds.  for years i've been made aware of this imagistic longing which i posses.  it is very specific.  when i say to someone, "i'm interested in making photographs of birds," to the addressee that immediately creates some presumptions that become harder to correct if the conversation goes much deeper than this.  "oh, so you're into landscape photography then?"  no, not exactly.  not the way you perceive what that genre is, nor, probably, the way that i do. 

when i search for ways to describe this, even to myself, the vocabulary comes up lacking.  the best way i can find to describe what i mean and to describe it absolutely is to pull a photograph or a book from somewhere and physically give it and then in turn my meaning to someone.  to you.  my clumsy visual lexicon:

a certain awareness of grace:

camille solygua

starkness:

michael ackerman

a love of form and play with space:

katsushika hokusai

masao yamamoto

smallness.  delicacy:

ibid 

 

  superstitious:

jim dine : birds
 

from multiple sensibilities i become aware and attuned to my own.  i define what bird is to my own eye, and i redefine each adjective i found to describe each form; meaning becomes expanded and at the same time compressed.  i also define by negation what the image i seek is not.  a healthy respect for both these image makers and what they pulled from within them begins to emerge within me.  awe is balanced by fright which is balanced by play which is balanced by tea-stained memories that never were.  the influences become confluences when i take my camera into a scene with a mind full of birds. 

these were taken a much warmer season ago, in a much warmer clime than i inhabit now.  before i left the south:

 

 

these are sketches of thoughts, really.  the diet of one who intends to make more images which will evoke the lexicon she's using to go by for the moment, and then expand the meanings she had previously described.   more work in the works.  both the written and the seen.

 

less talk, more looking

the manner i've been looking, lately. and what i've been looking at.

birdholes, chattanooga, tennessee

century plant, backyard, savannah, georgia

the house next door used to be a strip club, savannah, georgia

dog person pic, atlanta, georgia

cat person pic (or, the cat that loves me who will not go away), savannah, georgia

i'd like to go back and tea stain some of these, and that's something i haven't engaged in in a long while, anyway. it always seems like so much more of an overwrought process in my mind before i just actually go in and do it. come to think of it, many things are like that: taking photos, reading/writing for a thesis, having a hard conversation, making a meal. is growth really just learning to accomodate a will-to-action?

i took all of the above over labor day weekend, which was spent in part in three places: here, atlanta and chattanooga, tennessee. some i did are in color; i haven't posted any of those yet. staring at so much black and white work of late, color has begun to startle me in an unsettling way.

and i entered two pieces in the atlanta photography group's juried show only in 2004, juried by Anna Walker Skillman, the owner of the jackson fine art gallery in atlanta, georgia. it is my favorite photographic space in the city: it is a tad more intimate than traditional gallery spaces--maybe this has something to do with its being a little cottage house situated on a quiet neighborhood street that you could easily imagine yourself living in. quiet and happy and lush with green all around. aside from that, she shows kick ass work. it was where i first encountered masao yamamoto's work, and there's currently a sally mann exhibit showing. she stages thoughtful shows, and you get the feeling she only puts on the walls things she cares about. i could (and probably am) be entirely projecting that sense, but for what it's worth, that's the sense when you're there and when you return for a new show.

and reading. and reading. more posts to come about musings on more japanese photographers. one recurring theme that visited me today were these photographic elegies that seem to be composed about the relationships of wives and artists. masahisa fukase and yoko fukase, and their split that gave birth to his most known work the solitude of ravens; nobuyoshi araki and his wife (also named) yoko, pictures including their honeymoon, life together and her death; and then the strange strange work of seiichi furuya, who emigrated to graz with his wife christine gossler. i remember seeing his work in chicago, on a tour of the revco collection. the photos are so memorable because they horrifingly show the photographer--step by step--returning home one afternoon to finding an open window, with her slippers carefully placed beneath the sill. as you go with him to the window to look out, he shows you her very dead form on the pavement below, as he mediates his responses and actions through the camera. the pictures--or maybe, more precisely, the act of having not only lived the event but photographing it as one lived it--made me wonder if this was a kind of emotional photojournalism. what else could it be? or could explain the compulsion to photograph such a moment--when that moment is you, your wife, your loss, right now? i still haven't waded through my thoughts on his images, and will sit down with some of them tonight.

and a big beaming thank you to those who've sent the assorted emails and comments i've been receiving regarding this site and my thoughts. it is astonishing to me that anyone wants to read what i'm processing in my head concerning photography and art, and gratifying to hear words and experiences and encouragement from those i've never met or had a conversation with. it's wonderful that writing here becomes its own kind of conversation, and i like how it's pushing me to think more fully about what i encounter, look at and read. i strive to be engaged in a full way, and i've found that writing here has been vastly fulfilling in that regard.

birds on the brain

so happenstance, structures and strategies began as an attempt to understand an artist that i had admired very deeply since i was introduced to his work. masao yamamoto is a japanese photographer that works quietly, quirkily, and, i'd like to believe, quite happily. his work fulfills many aesthetic "musts" for me: it is personal without being preachy; it meditates on itself and outside of itself; it is idiosyncratic; it is intimate; it often makes me wish i made it myself. he does not title his images; he makes many prints of each and each is printed differently; he intentionally distresses them--but not too much--corners are often bent or rounded; they are stained in tea, they are little. and they are legion. this is one of my favorites of his:

i first saw his work at the jackson fine art gallery in atlanta, georgia. probably in 1997 or 1998. i was moronically mesmerized walking from one surprising image to another. they vary in subject matter, but maintain a tone, a way of seeing, that remains consistent. his consistent vision is what surprised me. that it was so constant, so there, in every image. there are photographers who have a "style" or a gimmick that singles their images out as theirs again and again, and if prompted it could probably be argued that yamamoto's images are all small and tea-stained. but i would argue that his is a singular way of perceiving what he would like to show us, as if plucking something out of the world and depositing it into a mason jar, and then putting that mason jar on a shelf next to dozens of other mason jars with equally baffling and/or beautiful contents.

at the time that i saw these images, i was convinced i was going to be a famous documentary photographer (oh youth! oh youthful indescretions!). i was going to one day work for magnum photo, i was going to be a war correspondent, i was going to bear witness to the various sins and graces of which humanity was capable. i didn't know what to do with these tea-stained jewels. but they stuck in my craw.

and one day in my last year of graduate school, with a documentary project going badly, my professor paul d'amato suggested a different tack. "why don't you do a master's study?" he suggested. i looked at him sideways. "isn't that what i'm doing now?" "no, no: a master's study, in the painting sense. pick a master, someone that you consider as such--someone you've always loved and not known why. find out all you can about how they worked, their technique and materials, and try to make some images in their spirit. at first it may look like imitation, but then you might discover something about your own vision that you would never have arrived at." he said that, and i realized what he was giving me: the chance to make images i would never make otherwise, freed from the impending sense that i had to finish the uninspiring project i was undertaking. this was an opportunity to stretch, and see if i could see a fraction of the way that this little old japanese man did, bowling me over as he did so. i knew immediately who my "master" was. masao yamamoto.

i came back a week later sticking these tiny little tea-stained pictures to the wall. in repeating series, each a little varied in exposure, staining or size. photographs without any people in them. photographs of a city of 8.5 million people that looks like everyone just left the party. a hose wrapped around an iron fence. plastic hanging from a lamp post, flying in the wind. birds in a bare tree, looking like ornaments that had been carefully placed there. paul didn't believe i took them, at first. "you?" he kept saying incredulously. "the same person who was photographing civil war re-enactments, you took these?" and then he straightened up. "these were always there in you, waiting to be made. this should be the work you do the rest of the time you are here." and he was right and it was and i have never enjoyed photographs that i have made more, or the making of them.

making them in chicago was almost easy. a place with landmarks both easily recognizable and then others that become almost oddly personal. i had a rule: i only photographed in the area that was one mile in radius to my home or my school, the places where i spent most of my time. i wanted to learn to see what i saw everyday in new ways. in ways that were respectful and quiet and made mine. i photographed through the seasons, from fall into winter when the snow changed the shape and landscape of everything. i realized that my images would never be imitations of yamamoto, if only because i was not an old japanese man making images in japan, but me, myself, making images from the spaces in my head and in my own country, making my own particular sense of self and place. and that it would by necessity be different, unique and uniquely personal.

but moving to the south has daunted this body of work, and i have only made a few pictures that would begin to approach what i tried to do in chicago. i am afraid that the landscape--both regionally and city-wide--makes these images almost saccharine. the south is dilapidated, in that appealing, falling-down sort of way that makes photographers get all misty-eyed. and i've been worried about looking like a bad, tea-stained post card.

but, as the title of this post suggests, i've been thinking about birds lately. about the way they appeared in yamamoto's pictures and in mine. how they suggest delicacy and autonomy; how their movements can't be directed in a photo and are always out of my controlling nature's control; and how birds will do what birds will do whether they are birds in chicago or birds in savannah. so i've been looking at the bird pictures i've made:

and then looking again at some more of yamamoto's:

and then even looking at some others:

(the last was one from Masahisa Fukase)

and then thinking: i can do this here. and: i need a longer lens. and i need to be looking at some more birds. hopefully, in a week or so, some bird pictures will follow. in the spirit of them, and of me.