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!

Martin Puryear, Blue Blood, polychromed pine and red cedar, 66″diameter, 1979.

Today I went to see the MOMA retrospective on the sculptor Martin Puryear. I’ve met Martin twice, he’s a friend of a friend, and while I was not familiar with his work when I first met him, he immediately seemed like a person with something to offer. It might have been how he walks, or talks, a presence and gentle intelligence I immediately noticed. These traits were clear and strong in his work, a gentle slow love of his craft, a master of his materials. While his work has strong abstract qualities, subtle references permeate throughout, such as folk traditions of basking weaving, wooden duck decoys, historical references within titles that would open up possible meanings and pathways, all by way of simple suggestion rather than forced connections. At times I wanted to crawl inside, feel, handle, physically interact with his works (there are Do Not Touch signs everywhere). I’ve rarely experienced sculptures where the smell of wood brought me into my body and memory and physicality. I felt a gentle joy, shed a few tears, and laughed out-loud, at his child-like playfulness.

Martin Puryear, Old Mole, Red Cedar, 1985

At a time when so many sculptors no longer produce their own work, his craftsmanship is remarkable, yet he still has a healthy conceptual basis. Ideas of internal/external, minimal forms, folk-art and high-art convergence, historical allusions, all have a home in these sculptures.

Martin Puryear, CFAO, Painted and unpainted pine and found wheelbarrow, 2006-7

Also worth noting, this was the first time I’ve seen the new MOMA Atrium used well. Generally the space overshadows everything they’ve installed, a few of Puryear’s works had a scale, height, and ambition that made perfect use of this vast space. MOMA has an excellent website for the show complete with photos of the Atrium installation in case you’re out of town. However to really feel the full presence of these works, go see, don’t touch, and smell these gentle, fierce, and complex works.

Martin Puryear, Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 36′ long, 1996.