Mathew Pokoik - news

Words and letters may also become a sub-album within The Global City. I’ve been pondering the word images of Shannon Ebner, Lee Friedlander, Edward Ruscha and others.

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

©Edward Ruscha

©Shannon Ebner

Sides of buses are becoming a sub-album within the series exploring the media of images in urban environments.

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

Berlin, 5/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

Here is the first scanned image from my recent trip to Mexico City for the Global City.

Polanco, Mexico City, 9/07. ©Mathew Pokoik

This was a challenging and fascinating addition to my growing catalogue of cities. First World and Third World live side by side here, along with clear and decisive class distinctions between wealthy and poor. Two days after taking this photograph I was stopped while working at the same intersection, and (politely) questioned by the police for shooting pictures here. More photos will be coming soon.

A most fascinating article, How Do You Say ‘Got Milk’ En Espanol?, by Cynthia Gorney, with photographs by Catherine Ledner, can be found in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It’s about the growing Hispanic-American consumer power and new trends in advertising to cash-in on this growing American Demographic. One of many interesting tidbits of information contained in this article is that the Hispanic Consumer spent a total of $928 billion on products bought within the 50 States, a whopping $200 billion more than only two years ago.

©Catherine Ledner, John Gallegos with the Energizer Conejo.

My favorite passage is a quote by the star of the piece John Gallegos, the head of a 60 person ad agency, Grupo Gallegos, that targets the American Hispanic audience. I found this quote to be wonderfully hopeful with an edge emerging from my own cynical consumption based point-of-view.

“You ask: the guy who just came across the border with a coyote, do I want to go after him, too?” Gallegos once said to me. “Well, he’s going to get a job. He’s going to work. He’s going to start buying products and contributing to the economy. So while he might not be viable for a Mercedes today, I can introduce you to people who came here illegally or legally, with nothing, and are now driving a Mercedes. Advertising is aspirational. I want to aim ahead of where my audience is. Unless it’s the equivalent of beef to Hindus, I always say, any product and any service should be sold to Latinos in this county.”

On Saturday night I photographed the wedding of my friends Janice and Adam (congrats!). Here are four of the quirkier images from the evening. While this is not my typical type of gig, I had a great deal of fun shooting their celebration. Most pleasurable was working with the hand-held flash, and the strange reality it creates.

©Mathew Pokoik

©Mathew Pokoik

©Mathew Pokoik

©Mathew Pokoik

I’ve been reading and listening to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I’m becoming deeply convinced is one of our greatest modern storyteller’s. Tonight I read the following remarkable and poetic passage from his book Dreamtigers - that so wonderfully speaks of the life, mystery, and duality of being an artist.

Jorge Luis Borges, 1963, ©Eduardo Comesaña

Borges and I

It’s the other one, it’s Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, Stevenson’s prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor. It would be too much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some worthwhile pages, but those pages cannot save me. perhaps because the good part no longer belongs to anyone, not even the other one, but rather to the Spanish language or to tradition. Otherwise, I am destined to be lost, definitively, and only a few instants will be able to survive in the other one. Little by little I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habits of falsifying and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the rock wants to be a rock forever and the tiger, a tiger. But I must live on in Borges, not in myself - if indeed I am anyone - though I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or than in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I passed from lower-middle-class myths to playing games with time and infinity, but those games are Borges’ now, and I will have to conceive something else. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.

I do not know which of us two is writing this page.

I’ve just added a new experimental portfolio to my website - The Old World - it might be a new album or chapter in my ongoing collection of images exploring global urban centers. The Global City explores media nodule points within new environments of urban architecture. The Old World explores themes of history / ancient regimes / religious centers / parks / and colonial empires through their traces in the modern world. Traces that are often in today’s cities - epicenter’s of the global tourist’s travels.

Jerusalem, Old City, Muslim Quarter, Israel, 2007 ©Mathew Pokoik

I’ve not yet had time to list place information that goes along with each photograph - they’ll be coming soon. This is a changing and morphing project - I don’t think of the web site + my work + process as a fixed and stagnant being. It might be that this beginning of a new chapter in the larger work could eventually split into additional subsets and albums. Who knows? So please let me know what you think? And stay tuned for future changes.

Jerusalem, Old City, Muslim Quarter, Herod’s Gate, Israel, 2007 ©Mathew Pokoik

I just noticed this very strange caterpillar feeding on the American Bittersweet vine that’s taking over growing on our front porch. It looks to me like the Shih Tzu of the caterpillar world.

©Mathew Pokoik

©Mathew Pokoik

AVMG from And How Should I Begin ©Mathew Pokoik

Tomorrow, Sunday Sept. 9 at 2 pm, my wife’s dance company, Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group, will be performing an except from her evening length piece And How Should I Begin, as part of the DanceNow|NYC Festival. If you haven’t yet seen this piece or want to see it again please come and also check out the many presenting artists. More info can be found at the DanceNow website here, this is a great festival and an excellent way to sample what’s happening across the board in the NYC modern dance community.

The show will be at: Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th St. bet. 7th and 8th Ave. Tickets are $20 advance or $25 at the door.

I’ll be in Mexico City from Sept. 12-19 to continue work on The Global City. I’m quite excited, apart from the fact that I haven’t made any new work since May after a summer learning more about zoning laws than I ever thought I’d need to know - I’m feeling the photo itch. This will be the first Latin American City to be included in the project.

If anyone has any suggestions for places to photograph related to media saturation / consumer frenzy / sci-fi type public spaces I’d love to hear about them. Also places to eat, drink, and be merry - or even better - your long lost friend currently living in the city to meet up with this lone traveler. Leave a comment or e-mail me: info (at) mathewpokoik.com