Mark Power Blog

When we are 15, we all feel as if we are beginning to become somebody else. Lise Sarfati

 

Lise Sarfati, Magnum

 

... the rites of passage, the birthdays, the bat mitzvahs, sweet sixteen parties, proms, online diaries, the first bra,  whispered secrets…The stammers, the pimples the awkwardness, the flush of embarrassment..

 

 

Rebecca Drobis

 

Coming of age, a common theme in literature and films, is no stranger to photography..as critic Sarah James observed in 2007: “Several young, newly prominent women photographers have more in common than their rising reputations. Trained in graduate programs in the late 90s, they tend to use adolescent girls as their subjects, prefer staged scenes to candid shots and often inject narrative elements into their pictures.“

 

 

Julia Fullerton-Batten

 

Since James made that observation ‘several’ has become many and as Sarah James observed, most are female photographers, most are relatively young, and many if not most, were trained in various graduate programs around the world.

 

 

The theme is adolescence; in particular, young girls ( with some exceptions) confronting their sexuality, their identity, their role in life. These young girls seem to want to escape from the frames of their images, and many avert their eyes, shielding themselves from the camera.

The artist’s strategies range from documentary narratives to surreal tableaux, and ‘candid shots’ are a stronger element of this collective work than critic James allows. And as Kelli Connell observes about her own autobiographical work “A questioning of sexuality and gender roles that shape the identity of  the self in intimate relationships” is often a component.

 

 

Hellen van Meene

 

Precursors to this movement, if it is a movement ( all it needs is a name; suggestions welcome) are Sally Mann’s work with her family and to lesser extent, Cindy Sherman and Tina Barney’s work. Reneke Dijkstra’s portraits have undoubtably been an influence and I would imagine there’s a touch of Nan Goldin in some of this new work also.

 

 

Reneke Dijkstra

 

Here are nine women photographers who at various times have explored the world of the female adolescent and no doubt there are others:

 

Kelli Connell,  Rebecca Drobis, Blake Fitch, Julia Fullerton-Batten,  Anna Gaskell,  Annaleen Louwes, Hellen van Meene,  Michelle Sank, and  Lise Sarfati.

 

 

               

Anna Gaskell

 

These artists with their common themes,  span the globe: Kelli Connell is American, as is Rebecca Drobis, a colleague of mine at Photoworks in Glen Echo, Maryland, where we teach. Blake Fitch is from North Carolina. Julia Fullerton-Batten lives in England. Anna Gaskell is from Iowa. Annaleen Louwes is Dutch as is Hellen van Meene. Michelle Sank, currently living in England, is from South Africa. Lise Sarfati is Algerian, grew up in France and was educated in Russia.

 

 

Michelle Sank

 

Annaleen Louwes

 

Postscript: Alert reader Space Traveler pointed out another photographer working with adolescent girls: Lauren Greenfield. Lauren is also the creator of a number of evocative videos on that subject and many others. Here is the cover picture for her book Girl Culture:

 

 

Lauren Greenfield

 

 

 

Sites where you can see more work from these artists:

Blake Fitch:www.blakefitchphotos.com/
Rebecca Drobis: www.rebeccadrobis.com/
Julia Fullerton-Batten: www.juliafullerton-batten.com
Kelli Connell: http://www.kelliconnell.com/
Michelle Sank: www.michellesank.com
Hellen van Meene: http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/hellen-van-meene/index.html
Anna Gaskell: http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_191_6.html
Annaleen Louwes: http://www.vanzoetendaal.nl/annaleenlouwes/
Lise Sarfati: www.magnumphoto.com ( search Lise Sarfati)

 

 

Jeffrey Gettleman has written a very disturbing article for the New York Times ( June 8, 2008) about the plight of albinos in Tanzania, Africa.

Two paragraphs from Gettleman’s story sum up the incredible situation:

“…at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here.

“Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.”

 

Pieter Hugo: Sam Klein Karoo

 

News from today’s Africa generates one shock after the other: Darfur, genocide, Kalashnikov-bearing children marching to war, famines as regular as the monsoons, the ravages of AIDS, rapacious dictators, gang rape as a political tool, the Janjaweed wreaking destruction from the backs of camels. Even nature weighs in with tsunamis, floods and earthquakes.

We in the West sit in the comfort of our bubble and tut-tut as news of the latest atrocity rolls in, but the truth is we’re exhausted. We can’t absorb it all; the tragedy of post-Colonial Africa seems larger than our comprehension. Photojournalism and reportage , history in the making, only adds to the feeling of helplessness.

 

Pieter Hugo: Aside

 

Gettleman’s story itself is testimony to that exhaustion: normally a story in the New York Times is picked up by the media across the country: what you read on Monday is on TV by Tuesday and in countless other newspapers across the country. But by and large silence has greeted the Gettleman story: it appeared on Sunday and aside from seven minutes on NPR and summaries by a few minor media outlets, by the following Sunday, June 15, the story seemed dead; journalism’s restless gaze was fixed elsewhere.

 

Pieter Hugo: Mikhonzemi Welcome Makma

 

The work of the South African photographer, Pieter Hugo rouse us out of our apathy in a way that words and conventional photojournalism do not.

 

Pieter Hugo: Tabalure Chitope, aged 30, and her guardian, Eletina Nedi,

 

Ironically, if his name is any indication, Hugo is a man of Boer descent. The Boers, according to Wikipedia, are not only descended from the Dutch and the Germans; their ancestry also includes Scandinavians, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Scots, English, Irish and Welsh people; in other words, for all their imperfections, they are us: Caucasians standing across a divide from a world of darker-skinned peoples, whether that world is here or in Asia, the Middle East, or indeed, the Dark Continent.

 

Pieter Hugo:  Medisone Baja

 

Pieter Hugo is a man who sees far beyond that divide. Conventional photojournalism treats albinos - or for that matter, famine victims or refugees - as illustrations to a story; they are more symbols than human beings. But Pieter Hugo’s photography says all you need to do is to look in the eyes of these very real human beings and you’ll see the discrimination, the pain, and suffering that comes along with being a despised minority.

Hugo’s work is rarely explicit about atrocities. Yet his photographs speak volumes of the misery in present-day Africa. His portraits of the the African ruling class, judges and lawyers, his street people, the faces of those who have died from AIDS and his recent series of men who scrape out a living by exhibiting brutalized wild animals – these images form their own map of the troubled continent.

 

 

Pieter Hugo: The Honorable Justice Moatlhodi Marumo

 

Pieter Hugo: Mailam Mantari Lamal with Mainasar

 

 

Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara

 

 

Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi with Mainsara

 

Look at the series “Hyena and Other Men” a group of photographs recently shown in New York to deserved acclaim. in these deceptively simple images you see it all, the poverty, the fury, cruelty, the tragedy. Look at the trash-strewn backgrounds of these pictures, littered with ravaged buildings and the wrecks of cars, where not even a plant seems to survive. Tarzan would not be at home in this apocalyptic Africa. Look at the powerful hyenas, animals as reviled as albinos, crouching abject and furious at the feet of their captors. They remind me how kidnap victims indentify with their captors as a survival mechanism. Look at the captors themselves; their stony faces, and their tattered clothing, a mixture of native dress and cultural cast-offs from the West; in fact, one man’s shirt bears hip-hop inscriptions. Are we surprised that that these men form a family ( seemingly without women) or that their children relate to hyenas and baboons the way our children relate to family pets? Not really.

 

Pieter Hugo: The Hyena Men of Abuja

 

I urge you to spend some time on Pieter Hugo’s website. You’ll see images that penetrate to the heart of the African psyche.

In my post on Pascal Dangin, image-enhancer ( The Artist and the Artisan) I said:

But with the advent of so-called ‘photo-based art’ it has become increasingly evident that the photographer steps aside after taking the picture; the making of the fine-art object involves the handiwork of a shadowy coterie of retouchers, printers, exhibition designers and framers.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, 2001

This is certainly true of one photographer, Gregory Crewdson, and it is to be expected; after all, Crewdson’s elaborately produced scenarios are like film stills, and almost as expensive to produce as a film. Nevertheless, the sheer number of people required to realize the photographer’s vision is staggering. I recently received Crewdson’s book, “Beneath the Roses” – a fine book with remarkable images – and in the back there are three pages of credits acknowledging the efforts of literally hundreds of people who assist Crewdson in the making of his photographs. There are familiar titles from the world of cinema – “best boy; “gaffers”; “key grips” - and other roles which are baffling such as “greensman” and “acquarist”. There are more familiar credits for “set dressers”, “production assistants”; “carpenters” and even a credit for “weather prognosticator.” But nowhere do I find a credit for digital image-enhancement. In the “post-production” section there are credits which come close: There’s a “master printer/digital artist”, a “visual effects supervisor”, and a “computer graphics supervisor.”

And speaking of the final image, the one person who isn’t credited in these back pages is the artist himself, Gregory Crewdson. How unlike the world of film where the film director often gives him or herself three or more credits to everyone else’s one. What would Crewdson’s credit be? “Visioneer?” Or more radically, “photographer?”

After writing the above, I came across Aperture’s website, where many of the roles of Crewdson’s collaborators are explained, including that of Kylie Wright, Crewdson’s “master printer/digital artist”. I only wish they had included these interviews in the book itself. For the rest, in the interest of keeping a post short I recommend you go to http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/

The book has a fine essay by one of my favorite writers, Russell Banks, in which he knowledgeably discusses the photographer’s relationship to the world of film. Oddly, he scarcely touches on the locale of most of the photographs which are the dispossessed factory towns of New England. The dilapidated houses of such towns as North Adams, Ma., built during the Great Depression or earlier, give the photographs their aura in which people seem to inhabit a kind of purgatory where they are doomed to re-live ambiguous moments from their past.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight 2001

This too, is the territory of Russell Banks who might be considered a poet of that hard-scrabble New England where time seems to have stopped. I lived in New England myself for a number of years and a while ago I copied this word-picture from Bank’s writing because it rang absolutely true:

“…Past the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stove pipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or halfcovered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene, the fields compulsively cleared by long-dead generations of Yankee farmers gone now, in this generation, scrubby choke- cherry and gnarled stunted birch, saw the gap- toothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road, glimpsed in windows the blank gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards, the scrawny yellow mongrels nastily barking from the doorsteps at my passing car… Scattered over the fields in no discernible pattern were ten or twelve rusting shells of windowless cars and trucks, some of them further decomposed and more nearly destroyed than others, also … an outhouse lying awkwardly on its side, rusty bedsprings and swollen mattresses spitting yellowish stuffing onto the ground, a pile of fifty-gallon oil drums, an engine block and a transmission housing, both lying atop a child’s crushed red wagon which lay atop an American Flyer sled in splinters, next: to a refrigerator (with the door invitingly open, I noticed ), and a red, overstuffed couch which had been partially destroyed by fire…”

Russell Banks from his novel “Hamilton Stark”.

 

 

The Reclusive Gardener

click on images to enlarge

 

These are some samples of my wife Virginia’s  art: 

a backyard shade garden in a suburb  of Washington DC.

 

 

How different Virginia’s art is from my own which is photography; they’re almost opposites in fact. Her art work is ephemeral and changes from hour to hour with light and shadow, with time and the seasons.

 

 

But these records of her garden are permanent and unchanging although they fix a moment in May that vanished even before the pictures saw the light of day.

 

 

But one day the garden will completely vanish. Maybe someone new will replace the garden with a patio; maybe time will slowly turn the garden into a vacant lot.

 

 

Then we’ll look at the photographs again and notice they too have changed. They have subtly aged, much as a building ages, and now all that’s left of that moment in May are these photographs and our memories of all the other shifting seasons in that garden’s life.

 

 

 In our mind, the memories of the garden echoing with children, or withering in the heat of Summer, or hidden under the snow, slowly evaporate, to be replaced by these few pictures in an album.

 

 

The camera doesn’t smell flowers or feel the wind. The camera is a machine that only sees the present and is oblivious of the future.  It shows us the past as an illusion of present time and we tend to forget that the garden only really looked that way to the camera for a few minutes in May of the year 2008.

Photographs are a sorry substitute for experience or memory but as we stand in the blank future holding the garden in our hand, they are all we have. 

 

 

The New Yorker recently ( May 12) had a fascinating article about Pascal Dangin, pixel-manipulater extraordinaire.

 “Pixel perfect” by Lauren Collins relates how Dangin has become the “premier retoucher of fashion photographs.” Ensconced in his windowless lair , known as “Las Vegas” because it’s always three a.m in the dark night of image manipulation, Pascal wields his “triptych” of  computers all equipped with Photoshop as he and his assistants refine the work of many photographers, including Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. You see Dangin’s work but you don’t see it because Pascal operates in the shadow of anonymity so you’d never know that the March 2008 issue of Vogue featured 144 images ‘tweaked’ by Pascal including the cover photograph of Drew Barrymore.

 

 

All this is not so surprising despite the sheer quantity which is a bit unsettling because image manipulation in the service of commerce has had an honorable and no so honorable history long before the advent of Photoshop. In the 19^th century it was fairly common despite the difficulties of execution, and in our time, Hugh Hefner boldly used the  techniques of airbrushing to define his surreal concept of the “girl next door”.  

 

Playmate Katie Price from Playboy, September 2002

photography by Stephen Wayda and Arny Freytag

click image to enlarge

 

Now of course, cut-and-paste and airbrushing techniques are all relics of history and instead we have Pascal Dangin and crew dancing in front of their glowing computer screens as they transform Drew Barrymore into someone completely unrecognizable. 

It might be expected that photo retouchers wield their art in  the case of advertising and fashion images. But their involvement in the production of fine-art seems to be a more recent phenomenon. There is a big difference between magazine reproductions and original prints in a gallery selling for many thousands of dollars, and the possibility that people like Pascal Dangin are involved in the making of these expensive art objects raises the issue of  an active collaboration. For some time the line between fashion and fine art photography has been occasionally blurred but having Pascal wield his anonymous talents makes it even blurrier, especially when a photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia is involved, a man primarily known for his fine-art work.

 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia:  Marc Jabobs

 

“Technology is in many respects mechanical, but somebody’s got to run the machine,” said DiCorcia as quoted by writer Lauren Collins. “…Pascal is tireless in exploiting all the capabilities of the technology and even possibly creating some new capabilities.” 

“Somebody’s got to run the machine”? I thought that somebody was the photographer. And what exactly are those “new capabilities”? Maybe the real question is when does the artisan becomes the artist? Are we at the point where the artist supplies the ideas and the Dangins of the world do the work? Of course, except in the case of the most minimalist of Duchampian work ( an area where execution is irrelevant), the execution of the idea is an inseparable part of the art itself.

Until fairly recently it was understood that photographers were artists responsible for all aspects of their production: they took the photographs, developed the film and made their own prints ( with a few notable exceptions such as Henri Cartier-Bresson) and even in some cases, made their own frames for exhibitions.

But with the advent of so-called ‘photo-based art’ it has become increasingly evident that the photographer steps aside after taking the picture; the making of the fine-art object involves the handiwork of a shadowy coterie of retouchers, printers, exhibition designers and framers. For some reason, we don’t inquire who made these large-scale prints and we don’t query the nature of the interaction between artist and artisan; we simply assume the artist retains control of the final product especially as those assisting in “postproduction work” are rarely credited.

 

Inez van Lamsweerde: Installation

Click image to enlarge