Mathew Pokoik - news

Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) now has on-line the Windows on the Work, with an interview, based on my photographic work Streetwork. Since 2001, this and another portfolio of my photographs, have been touring school’s around the greater NY Metropolitan area. They’re the center of study in an Aesthetic Education unit taught by an LCI Teaching Artist. It has been fantastic to have now thousands of students ranging from pre-K to post-grad study my work in this setting. Now they have available, The Windows on the Work, a collection of related articles, study aid, and contextual information resource for students and teachers studying these portfolio’s. Sadly, much of the information is password protected, only for teachers and students working with LCI.

What you can see is this interview with me by friend / artist / and fellow LCI teaching artist, Tenesh Weber. I’m quite happy with the way it turned out, I hope you enjoy it. To check out the Windows on the Work go to LCI’s website, click on Repertory Resources, in the left hand column, Then click Visual Arts: Street Work, in the center column and surf away. Sorry that is takes a bit of work to find, LCI’s quirky yet chalk-full of interesting-info website doesn’t allow for easy bookmarking. Below is one of the photos from the Streetwork portfolio. If you would like to see both portfolio’s (minus one forever lost image) click here, and type “lci”.

NYC, Canal St. 1999, ©Mathew Pokoik

©Roger Ballen

I just found this excellent interview with photographer Robert Ballen in the recent issue of See Saw magazine. I find his work to be mysteriously dark and sublime, it touches upon an internal reality, while examining the external world. For those of you who were at the Q&A of the Interactive Landscape, you might be interested in the following quote from the interview:

Chas Bowie: “Your photographs tend to always have an element of spontaneity to them, as still as they might appear.”

Roger Ballen: “There has to be. That’s such an interesting thing that I’ve discovered in photography. A lot of artists today use photography, and they create these sort of installations or conceptual photographs. But you remember almost none of those photographs. They just sort of sit there and you have to figure out the guy’s theory to get into the work. The reason the images don’t get inside you is because the artists don’t understand anything about photography. You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived. The mind doesn’t believe it. The mind has to see that photograph as commenting on some aspect of truth, whatever truth means.

The other night we were speaking/debating about the “authentic” or the “real” in photography. It seems to me that Ballen is saying this is an internal judgment. Its not about “reality” in so far as this is judged to be of the external world, but of an internal correspondence with our own experiences and self-knowledge. We believe what corresponds to our own experiences and internal truths, whether the photographs are staged, manipulated, or “straight”. If we feel betrayed could it be because the hand of the artist has forced a particular point-of-view a bit to strongly - has drifted to far away from actual experience? Has made an image that is “staged” in that it no longer corresponds to the world we know through experience?

©Roger Ballen

Here are two clips from the Q&A discussion this past Sunday night from the opening of The Interactive Landscape. From left to right is myself, Ian Baguskas, Mathew Porter, and Christian Patterson.

In my eyes the conversation did degenerate a bit into questions of photography as art or reality. I was surprised by how much people look at photographs with an implicit trust that a photograph is “real”, even in the present digital age. Images are constructs of our own invention, photographs are deeply subjective, even so-called “straight photographs”. What I felt from the audience was almost a sense of betrayal - a “what do you mean photographs are not real!”. It reminds me a bit of the Science vrs. Religion debate, that certain ideas are so deeply ingrained in us, that even in the light of evidence people cannot allow for their world view to be upset. I suppose this discussion also reinforced for me, how a stronger education in visual thinking is needed in our culture. Are we capable of seeing beyond the surface of photographs so as to have an authentic experience of images?

Update: Susan De George reflects on the Q&A here