Mathew Pokoik - news

©The Sartorialist

The Sartorialist, a popular fashion blogger / photographer has a superb show up now at Danziger Projects. To my eye the work touches upon traditional vernacular uses of photography - potentially because of the function these images serve. His story is an interesting one, entering the field of photography through what is now a massively popular fashion blog, he began taking photographs as a descriptive tool to investigate street fashion. In his own words to “simply share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great. When I worked in the fashion industry, I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.”

©The Sartorialist

©The Sartorialist

What really perks my interest in this work is that it indirectly points towards a central aspect of photographic vision. The capacity for photographs to describe, describe, and describe. That is the reason for taking and posting these pictures, to look closely at what people are wearing, to describe it clearly. Yet the best photographs go beyond mere description (which is the key point here), and I believe if you study the work of other photographers who have used photography primarily as a descriptive tool, one will see the same pattern. The transformation from the descriptive to the mysterious, from a document to a poem.

©The Sartorialist

©The Sartorialist

Two image makers in particular come to mind when I consider these images. The first is Michael Disfarmer (1884-1959) a professional portrait photographer from Heber Springs Arkansas who took remarkably poignant, simple, and descriptive photographs of those who came to sit for the camera in his portrait studio.

Michael Disfarmer

Michael Disfarmer

Michael Disfarmer

The second image-maker would be the remarkable, amazing, and one of my all time favorites…August Sander (who it would be questionable to apply the label vernacular to, although he certainly utilized the transparency of photographs). Just in case you are not familiar with him, the Getty Museum describes his work as follows:

“Man of the Twentieth Century” was Sander’s monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Stating that “[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled,” Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people.

In creating this tremendous and ambitious typological catalogue, Sander utilized the descriptive ability of the medium. With a consciousness and directness that allowed for the most subtle facts of a person to rise to the surface through the mediums descriptive possibilities ,while additionally exploring the use of typologies in photography. Could we look at The Sartorialist’s photographs as a similiar typology? Maybe not as ambitious as Sander’s complete portrait of a culture, but rather a portrait of those really well dressed denizens of our streets?

August Sander

August Sander

August Sander

August Sander

James Danziger has an interesting description of the process of putting together this show that is worth a read if your curiosity has been perked here. On a last note, I was curious to see if photographs made for the web would hold up in person, and they do. They are well printed, and even better in real life, shadow detail that is lost while viewing on the web, shows up clear and strong in the printed image. Check out the blog, check out the show, and consider the ways the blogosphere has entered our daily lives.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a review today on this show, comparing The Sartorialist to Sander.  I’m happy to say it was published here first!

Livia, Frederick Sommer ©Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation

With the Holiday’s upon us, which includes lots of cooking and meals with Family and Friends, I thought I’d share a favorite passage from the late and great Frederick Sommer. I’ll be posting more about Fred soon, along with some notes from our conversations. I find this passage to perfectly encompass the experience, discipline, challenges, and joy of photography.

We’re not so damned inspired every day! If we rely on what we meet, some inspiration will arise. As an example, if I go into a grocery store, no matter how beautifully stocked or lush it is in terms of display of fruit and edibles of all kinds, if I am smart I will take home what is best that day. Even if planning a banquet (something I seldom do, believe me), I plan from all the things I find there; I do this every time I go into a grocery store. I buy the best of what there is that day. If the beef looks good, I’m not going to buy lamb. I buy the best of the beef; if the best of the beef is expensive, I buy less of it. I buy carefully, so you can be sure I get a lot for my money. The store may have what you think you want that day. You are looking for pears. There may be pears, but those pears may not be at their best. Confusion is not enriching if you try to unravel it. It is unraveled confusion if you impose upon yourself what is available and come back with bad meat and bad fruit. Take what is really there, and gradually build from it. You build your meal, your banquet; it’s always a banquet when a few things are beautifully related.

From A Talk Given at the Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 1970.

Last night I attended what at first glance appeared to be a remarkable meeting of minds, a panel discussion hosted by Blindspot Magazine titled Truth and Authenticity in Photography, featuring photographers Mitch Epstein, Paul Graham, Katy Grannan, Danny Lyon, Tod Papageorge, and moderated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

©Paul Graham, from American Nights

Initially the conversation was quite interesting and civil. Paul Graham in particular was well spoken and has clearly given the nature of photography a great deal of thought, which comes across in his own work. He identified among the panelists a particular intention and use of the medium that I found intriguing, an “artistic territory” that falls between reportage and the synthetic. He spoke about how this particular tradition has “chosen to enter the world as it happens”; later he used another phrase I enjoyed, speaking about the “canvas of America”.

©Danny Lyon

However the moment Danny Lyon opened his mouth things began falling apart. He quickly insulted the work of Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Lee Friedlander, and all the other panelist for finding this work interesting. He let everyone know that Paul Graham was a kid compared to himself, bashed education and the MFA program Papageorge runs, and seemed convinced that the development of the medium came to a grinding halt with his own work. What was overwhelmingly clear is that Danny Lyon is a giant of an egotist. He even seemed to think that the tradition of the Photo Book began with Robert Frank’s Americans and his own relatively early The Bikeriders. Discussing his megalomania afterwards with an acquaintance, he said that the art-world is after all full of egotists. This is true, yet…I’m saddened by the willingness with which this is accepted, how easily Mr. Lyon was able to shutdown what could have been an interesting and subtle conversation by some of our brightest photographic practitioners.

Update: I just noticed that Christian Patterson also wrote about the discussion here. Curious to see how he picked up on a few different points.

Kara Walker, Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, from the series “Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),” 2005.

I’ve recently been considering how racism has been addressed by photographic artists investigating the American experience. This came about due to a variety of events. First being the Kara Walker show at the Whitney, an excellent example of the power of art to speak to the challenging places of our cultural pysche. Then, recent incidents such as the Jena Six, or much closer to home, at Columbia University, where a noose was hung on the door of a controversial African-American professor. Both events highlight the fact that racism and inequality are a living reality in contemporary America (just in case you are one of the many who believe this is no longer the case).

I strongly believe that one of the roles art can play in our world, culture, and experience is to touch upon these places; to address them in ways that are more complex and nuanced, less black and white, right and wrong, than we may often be willing to accept. Over the next few weeks I would like to take up this challenging and difficult subject matter, to examine some of the ways photography has examined racism in America, ways in which photography bears-witness to this basic American conflict and reality.

Many of the images I will highlight address the basic grammar of visual images; how images can encompass complex social events often with more power through an oblique glance than through the obvious photo-journalistic photograph of “historic events”.

Minstrel Poster, Alabama 1936, ©Walker Evans

The first image that comes to mind on this subject is Walker Evans, Minstrel Poster. It is a remarkable image that creates a feeling of both awe and discomfort in me. It holds my attention by the simple fact that I do not entirely understand it. That is its challenge; we need to work our way through its possible meanings ourselves, with no help from Evans, because of his neutral point-of-view.

In this photo we have an advertisement for a Minstrel Show, a first hand document of popular stereotypes of African-Americans in the 30’s. Playing a banjo, stealing a watermelon, chasing chickens, big-lipped, clowning and laughing, a happy-go-lucky image that degrades by painting a picture that all is happy under the sun. Even the title of the Minstrel troupe “J.C. Lincoln’s Sunny South Minstrels” paints a picture of a comic barrel of monkeys Shangri-la of the African-American experience. As if no harm came be done, which is certainly the image that these stereotypes project.

And yet, the poster is ripped and falling apart; sections are missing giving us only a partial picture of this document. In fact, is the document the poster or is the document Evan’s photograph? Is this torn and fading poster a metaphor for the fading depression era South or is it simply a straight photograph of a torn poster?

Peter Galassi has the following to say about Evans’s work from the introduction of Walker Evans & Company:

Evans approaches the decaying show bill and the weathered facade with the same blunt frontality. The forthright address of his photography may be interpreted as an uncompromising indictment of an ugly fact or as an admiring regard for a beautiful thing…The originality of Evan’s “clinical editing of society” involved a convergence of critical intelligence and passionate feeling. His skeptical mind rejected conventional taxonomies of American identity; to construct his own, he photographed only what moved him. It might inspire him to wonderment; it might fill him with anger and disgust; it might provoke his sense of humor or his sense of irony, or both. If it left him bored or indifferent, he ignored it. Once his volatile intuition had selected the significant thing, however, he recorded it with the studied indifference of an archaeologist, stripping the image of any pictorial rhetoric that would instruct the viewer how to feel.

It is exactly this “stripping of pictorial rhetoric” that challenges me when I approach this image. It is what it is, and Evans presents this torn and fading Minstrel Poster for us to determine what it may mean. We need to navigate these treacherous waters ourselves. Is this only a poster from a era in our collective history? Or is it something greater, a set of facts that rise to a grim poetry, giving voice to an aspect of ourselves and our culture we would prefer to turn away from?

I also find curious that Evans presented us with two different croppings from the same negative. The one above is as he presented it for the MOMA exhibition of American Photographs in 1938. The cropping below is how it was published in the book edition of American Photographs, placed in a sequence after four straight portraits.

Minstrel Showbill, 1936 ©Walker Evans

from Domesticated ©Amy Stein

Next Sunday will be the closing of The Interactive Landscape. This is a great time to visit the Catskills if your located in the city. The leaves are approaching peak color, the air is cool and smells like fall, and its your last chance to see this fantastic show!

Over the weekend one of the exhibiting photographers Amy Stein, came up from the city for a visit. We had a relaxing dinner on the porch, and spoke about photography. Then went over to the annual Center for Photography at Woodstock’s benefit auction, where Amy outbid me on a fabulous Alessandra Sanguinetti print from her series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. All in all a photographically jam-packed evening in the backwaters of Ulster County.

You can see Amy’s point-of-view on her blog here.