Mathew Pokoik - news

from Plants in the City, The Global City, Dubai. ©Mathew Pokoik

I’ve just completed a major website update for The Global City, many images have been added along with a new organizational structure into series of related albums. The albums are for the time being:

The Street

The Street, Media, and Pedestrians

The Street and Pedestrians

Outdoor Markets

Plants in the City

Windows and Reflections

Monuments

The Bus

Words

Sacred Sites

Bodies of Water in the City

This is a living and morphing body of work and I expect that this list of albums will grow and change in the future.

from The Street, Media, and Pedestrians, The Global City, NYC. ©Mathew Pokoik

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

The fifth installment of new photographs includes two images that I am quite curious about. They might be a new direction or sub-album or they might end up in the reject bin. Working on the Global City in Mexico City, has brought about a number of clarifications about my overall conception of the structure of the larger body of work. Particular albums and sub-albums are taking shape. Some of these series may currently have as many as ten complete photographs while others may be vague sketches with one or two finished images. I see this project as an ongoing epic-sized catalogue on a variety of themes relating to the modern global city. I have many years of work ahead, at the moment I’m trying to finish the initial sketch of themes along with at least one visit to a city in all the populated world landmasses. Still to visit to complete this is South America, Africa, and India.

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

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.”

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

It was recently suggested to me to look up the work of the French post-modernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and I have begun to work through one of his earlier works The Consumer Society. I am quite taken with his work; already after only a brief introduction, I’m finding it to be a remarkable analysis of the state of our global culture. As more and more of my time is spent involved in communication through my laptop this opening passage gave me pause for reflection:

There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather – on a rising statistical curve – with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages. (p.25)

I’m imagining a soundtrack to this passage along the lines of “the age of Aquarius” morphed into “the age of Affluence”, a hallucinogenic journey through the idealization of the 60’s morphing into our modern object / consumption / sign based culture. I’m finding in Baudrillard many of the themes that have possessed me to travel around the world investigating signs of signs of signs, the loss of the authentic, the increasing homogeneous global village. Our modern media based relationship to the center or rather an illusion of centrality, an illusion of the real, an attempt at a modern day object/sign based Utopia, which is after all a “no-place”. I almost fell of my seat after reading the following passage, it was like finding a long lost brother:

What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [le vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality with the dizzying whirl, for the heart of the Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, the ‘Heart’ which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.
So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message – all these things we ‘consume’ – represent our tranquility consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion of the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it.
The content of the messages, the signifieds of the sign are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but offer for our consumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real. It is here that we can define the praxis of consumption. The consumer’s relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility – nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity.

I’ll leave you with the following image from ‘the global city’ dealing with an image of images in the making, being transmitted out to the nether regions of our mass communications system:

Mathew Pokoik, NASDAQ Studio, Times Square, NY