Phillip-Lorca diCorcia, Heads

Phillip-Lorca diCorcia

DiCorcia is an american photographer with a master in fine arts from Yale University, where he now act as a teacher.

Doing his early career, in the 1970s, diCorcia would stage his friends and family members in a domesticity/ interior tableaux so that the viewer would believe that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someones everyday life. But they would in fact be carefully planned beforehand.

                                                       Mario, 1978

He would later start taking photos of random people in the urban space – Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, New York. He would hide lights in the pavement which would illuminate pedestrians and isolates them from the other people in the street.

Since the 1990s diCorcia has redefined traditional street photography, such as Walker Evans´s subway pictures. When he began photographing strangers caught in a strobe light he turned pedestrians into unsuspected performers. The strobe highlights the pedestrians like actors being isolated on stage by a spotlight, focusing on their gestures and letting everything els fade.

Even if the pedestrians seem detached from their surroundings, diCorcia uses the City as the title for the photos, placing the pedestrians back in to the city’s anonymity.

                                                       New York, 1997

To create the Heads series, diCorcia fixed a powerful strobe light to a scaffold high above the streets in New York´s Time Square. He activated the strobe by radio signal and captured unknowing pedestrains in a flash light from over 6 meters away. The strobe could not be sensed by his subject since the photographs were taken in broad daylight. Using this technique, the figures appear to emerge from inky darkness, spotlighted and as if there was almost no distance between the camera and the subject.

                                                        Head # 10, 2001

The images are simple and intimate which is ironic since the pictures are taken for a fare distance. But the distance allows diCorcia to zoom in close to the pedestrians faces with out them knowing that they are being photographed and thereby enhancing the intimacy. It gives a sense of drama from the accidental poses and instant facial expressions.

                                                       Head #23, 2001

The cinematic quality is preserved by the big poster-size print; 120 x 150 cm, high resolution digital scans. Over the course of two years diCorcia took more than 4000 of these photographs, but only those 17 for the series.

The strobe gives us an unusual light that stops time and inclines us to look at what we see every day but fail to notice, and the longer we look the more extraordinary they become.

Unaware of the camera they act like most people would, walking down the street in a crowd, focused on something or nothing. But when they become enlarged and isolated their expression becomes a riddle, intense and melodramatic.

                                                       Head 22, 2001

DiCorcias´s Heads series was center of debate between free speech and individual rights to privacy in 2006. One of diCorcia´s subjects sued the artist and the gallery for exhibiting, publishing and profiting from his picture which was take with out permission. DiCorcia explained that he did not seek consent because the images could not have been made with the knowledge and cooperation of the subjects.

The case was dismissed because of the freedom to photograph in public is protected in the u.s.

                                                       Head #13

Link Phillip-Lorca diCorcia exposed;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpawWn1nXJo

 

American Prospects

In 1978, on the back of a Guggenheim fellowship, Joel Sternfeld set out to explore America and its ever changing landscape.  The final work was initially exhibited in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art under the title “Three Americas”, comprising images from his initial year on the road as well as two subsequent years.  The work was published in 1987 as “American Prospects” and presents another landmark visual account of America in a similar tradition to that carried out by Walker Evans (American Photographs) and Robert Frank (The Americans).

The images from American Prospects demonstrate Sternfeld’s move from the spontaneity of the snapshot to the more composed image; a conscious result of his transition from using a 35mm Leica hand held to a large format camera (8x10).  This new format, with its slower picture taking process, forced deliberation and allowed him to stand back and assemble his shots. In some ways Sternfeld was moving from the sketchbook to the blank canvas where composition became more prepared and to some extent staged. 

In addition to, or resulting from Sternfeld’s increasingly directorial role, he moves his point of view higher and back from his subjects.  This “celestial perspective” allows him to join the foreground and background on to one continuous plain.  Increasingly influenced by compositional and colour painting conventions, he begins to assemble and capture scenes as a painter may. He brings a map like quality to the image; flattening out his points of focus and points of narrative into one large depiction providing the viewer a birds eye view of the scene below.  This new compositional style and his use of people in a photo was inspired by similar approaches taken by traditional painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacob van Ruisdael.  Sternfeld’s frames had now become landscapes within "landscapes". 

From left:  The Fight between Carnival and Lent (Peter Bruegel the Elder, 1559), Wet n' Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando (Sternfeld 1980)

This new elevated position provides a less voyeuristic and more observational perspective for the viewer.   The images unfold upon inspection, bringing the viewer into multiple areas of the frame, sometimes the edges providing the most interest.

The collection of images showcases the cultural and social humanity of America juxtaposed in its natural surroundings.  They provide a perspective of an America ever changing and beautiful but one at odds with its “utopian dreams” and the natural landscape it inhabits.  While always aesthetically pleasing, the images are tainted by a gentle skepticism.  He mixes magic with sadness, hope with uncertainty and prospect with danger.  

Lake Oswega, Oregon (1979)

Sternfeld evidently questions America’s "prospects" but does so in an objective manner.  We sense his own uncertainty about the future based on his observation of the present and the past.  Never cynical but always dubious, you can’t help feel that Sternfeld is painting a picture of reserved hope. It is an America that strives for constant progress but at times succumbs to the pitfalls this ambition brings. Any sense of progress is typically tempered by a reminder of the abandonment of the past.  A prevailing gloominess penetrates the beauty of what America has become or is becoming.

After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979) 

Doug Rickard - A New American Street View.

A New American Picture by Doug Rickard is most simply described as a book of images harvested from Google Street View, which show downbeaten and neglected views of America. But this belies a complexity of thought and ideas which underpin the work.

Rickard’s previous projects - American Suburb X (ASX), and These Americans, show him to be deeply engaged with photography as a medium, and well versed in its history and canon. Looked at as a view into Rickard’s mind, they attest to an ongoing search for the iconic image which transcends its specificity, and an obsessive collecting and cataloguing of what might define the American psyche.

Now focussing his gathering, collecting and editing eye through Street View, Rickard appropriates and recontextualizes as social documentary, an image originally created as pure documentation. The social aspect of this is important, and Rickard cites his conservative upbringing and subsequent study of civil rights and slavery as formative for his work. The book’s essay by David Campany also draws Rickard’s work into the tradition of street and documentary photography the likes of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but also other artists concerned with the day-to-day “beneath the canopy” of American idealism, such as Edward Hopper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Toni Morrison.

The use of Street View to source images immediately raises questions and encourages debate about the very nature of what it is to be a photographer, and more so what it is to be a photographer in the art world. It recalls long standing and recurring debates surrounding the validity of the ready-made as artwork, and the merits of photography as art. It also raises new questions about privacy, the place of technology in the world and the consequence of its ubiquity for photography. 

The process which Rickard uses is relatively straightforward — he searches until he locates the exact view he wants, composes the image on screen, and re-photographs it with a 35mm camera directed at the monitor. It is a process accessible to almost anyone, and does not necessitate a visit to the location in the image - a fact which draws criticism of his work.

51.310296, Amite City, LA (2008), 2010

The very specific technology of multiple wide-angle captures shot from well above eye level and stitched together, creates a look which has a particular feel. As Rickard says, “the actual dynamics of the camera within Google emphasized the way that I wanted to speak in these images.” (From interview recorded as part of a TV segment on Rickard). Particularly striking features of the look are the strong diagonals stretching out to the edge of the frame, the sense of looking down into a scene, and even the lense flares Rickard often includes in his captures. Additionally, the incredibly poor quality, the antithesis of ordinary photographic competence, lends a softness and which recalls early photography or even painting.

42.418064, Detroit, MI (2009), 2010

Initially selecting locations based on what people consider areas to avoid, Rickard also searched by the key phrase of “Martin Luther King”, which invariably located impoverished and neglected urban landscapes to select images from. Seeking a capture which speaks precisely of the place where it is located, he seeks within a frozen world exactly what he thinks is there to be found — an archetypal image. Framed and presented as a large glossy printed, they also wander into the tricky territory of the aestheticizing poverty - beautification possible through the safe access allowed by Street View.

Each picture in the book is identified with a number sequence and place as its title. Whilst based on the geographic location of the image, Rickard has manipulated it to ensure the exact location of each capture cannot be identified. This reinforces the anonymity of the works - connected to the world, but disembodied from it - perhaps similar to the experience of actually using Street View.

Yet the images somehow possess a kind of intimacy too. Rickard has sought out images containing people — never crowds, but almost always there is a lonely figure or small group present. The images draw us in with their universality and apparent glimpse of how other people live their lives. They also feel intimate in their familiarity. However, the blurred faces and the camera perspective which forces even close figures into the distance, emphasise again the effect of anonymity and isolation. As Rickard puts it, “the subjects then are really symbols or icons, and not individuals”.

39.259736, Baltimore MD (2008), 2011

So, A New American Picture is not so much about being completely new, as harnessing technology of the current time to produce something intimately connected and conscious of what has come before it. It also straddles various tensions — of intimacy and distance, placeness and universality, photography and the painterly, the aesthetic and the social. That each of these are palpable in the work ensures it lives beyond being a simple screen capture, and has a power that resonates wider.

Space Framed 2013 - Week 5

This week we will be looking at projects that survey the American Landscape:

Timothy O'Sullivan - Survey of the 40th Parallel (in the book Framing the West)
Various Photographers - New Topographics
Stephen Shore - Uncommon Places, American Surfaces
Richard Misrach - Desert Cantos, Chronologies.

We will be reading the essay by Britt Salvesen in the book New Topographics, on temporary reserve in the Richview library.

Space-Framed 2013 - Week 4

This week, we will be looking concentrating on work taken in the City:

Berenice Abbott - Changing New York
Helen Levitt - A Way of Seeing, Helen Levitt
Garry Winogrand - The Man in the Crowd
William Klein - Life is Good and Good for you in New York 
Michael Wolf - The Transparent City
Philip Lorca di Corcia - Heads

We will be reading Bystander - A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, on temporary reserve in Richview Library

Space Framed 2013 - Week 3

Joel Sternfeld - Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta Georgia, April 1983 from American Prospects

" I am looking at the landscape for what it reveals about the human moment...This is the surface of the earth and what we do with it tells us an awful lot about ourselves"
- Joel Sternfeld, in Interview  'New York Voices'


"Without caption or comment, a photographer can communicate the taste of an era through content, structure and form"
-Stephen Shore in lecture 'Photography and the Limits of Representation' 

"It seems to me that a good photographer is a combination of two things. One is interesting perceptions and the other is an understanding of how the world is translated by a camera into a photograph. You have to have something to communicate. But you also have to have a real understanding of the tools of communication in photography: That you are taking a three-dimensional world that flows in time, and are going through this transformative process of making this flat, bonded, static objects."
-Stephen Shore, in Interview 'The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real'.


This week, we will be looking at Joel Sternfeld's study American Prospects (reviews of this here and here) followed by Doug Rickard's recent work - A New American Picture (here's a post made earlier about this, which came from this essay)

Reading this week is from  John Szarkowski's works - Looking at Photographs and The Photographer's Eye (both on temporary reserve at Richview Library)

Space Framed 2013 - Week 2

Walker Evans - Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, Georgia, 1936

"As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.
It is not difficult to imagine a person...who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension...we would be uncertain ... how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer"
- John Szarkowski, excerpt from catalogue essay for The Work of Eugene Atget: Old France, MOMA, NY, 1981.


Over the next two weeks, we will be looking at four major American photographic works.
This week, we will be reviewing Walker Evans' book American Photographs and Robert Frank's work The Americans
There is an interesting essay on the two photographers by Tod Papageorge here.


At the same time, we will be reading Stephen Shore's book The Nature of Photographs (on temporary reserve in Richview library). We will also look at this lecture - Photography and the limits of Representation given by Shore in London in 2010 that explores further the themes introduced in the book.

Space Framed 2013 - Week 1

Welcome to Space Framed.

This week, to get yourself acquainted with our subject matter, you will watch the BBC series ‘The Genius of Photography’ (Available on dvd from Richview Library or on online). 

The series has six episodes. Please watch episode 1&2 and if possible, the rest of the series.

Select a practitioner from one of the episodes and print out 5 of their photographs that interest you. Research where, how and why the photographs were taken and present these to the seminar at the first session. 

Familiarise yourself with this  blog, and the references and research from previous years.

Space Framed will be held in Hugh Campbell’s office every Monday at 1-2.30 pm from Monday 28 Jan.

David Hockney, Space and the Unphotographable

'We see space through time...somehow you make space in your head' - David Hockney, 2011

David Hockney discusses the process of making his painting 'A Closer Grand Canyon', interviewed by Christian Lund at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in April 2011 as part of the Louisiana Talks series.
In the discussion he talks about representing space, spatial perception through vision, the limitations of single lens photography and 3d film and the potential for representing space through multiple viewpoints.

The grand canyon is a notoriously difficult space to represent. Hockney discusses how when there, you are forced to move your head to look around and into the space - there is no perspectival view, no point of focus, and how at times the space alternates between being deeply spatial and a flat canvas in front of the viewer. (The scene at the end of the Truman Show comes to mind)

He discussed how as he tried to photograph the Grand Canyon (see below) he realises it is unphotographable, saying that 'cameras push things away....(they) always make things a little more distant'. He found that photographing it, even as a collage with multiple perspectives flattens the sense of space.

The Grand Canyon South Rim with Rail, Arizona, Oct. 1982. Photographic Collage, 43x137 in.

The Grand Canyon South Rim with Rail, Arizona, Oct. 1982. Photographic Collage, 43x137 in.

So instead, he painted it - using smaller canvases to make one large immersive canvas that the viewer 'scans'  As the viewer scans the piece, the image of the space forms in their head. The representation is immersive, direct but more crucially navigated by the viewer. They form an embodied image of the landscape.

He then goes on to relate this to work he is currently making using nine cameras to represent the landscape in Yorkshire.

A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998 oil on 60 canvases 81x291 in.
 

Developing ideas as you work

John Szarkowski speaks about ideas and working on a project.
'You can't solve artistic problems in your head, and then execute them. In real life you never know what the answer is. You have to work through it until you can't go any further and you think that must be the answer.'

It brings to mind Mies van der Rohe's statement 'Build, don't talk'.

Street View and Photography

This post is prompted by an essay by Geoff Dyer entitled:
The Believer: "Street View: On Photographers' Appropriation of Google Maps" 
In it, he talks about the work of three photographers - Doug Rickard, Michael Wolf and Jon Rafman, all of whom are photographers that mine Google Street View and represent our environment back to us.


Doug Rickard - 'A New American Picture'  

D. Rickard - #82.948842, Detroit, MI. 2009, 2010

Doug Rickard - #39.177833, Baltimore, MD. 2008, 2011

Doug Rickard - #40.805716, Bronx, NY. 2009, 2011

D. Rickard – #40.805716, Bronx, NY. 2009, 2011

Michael Wolf - Street View Manhattan

Michael Wolf - Street View Manhattan, Image 01

Michael Wolf - Street View Manhattan, Image 07

Michael Wolf - Street View Manhattan, Image 21

Jon Rafman - 9-Eyes.com

Jon Rafman - 9-Eyes.com, untitled

Jon Rafman - 9-Eyes.com, untitled

Jon Rafman - 9-Eyes.com, untitled

PhotoIreland Festival 2012

Official Opening - Thursday 5 July, 7pm @ Gallery of Photography

I Want to Live Close to You - Jacob Fellander

"I wondered, if space drifts over time, perhaps can time drift over space"
 - Jacob Fellander

New York, 2011-03-24

Los Angeles, 2011-03-25

Paris, 2011-04-01

Hiroshi Sugimoto

The one that got away...

Photographers discuss the photographs that didn't quite work for them...here

Martin Parr's Best Books of the Decade

Tokyo Compression - Michael Wolf

As part of the PhotoIreland  Festival, Martin Parr has selected 30 photo books for exhibition at the National Photographic Archive. Exhibition ends 31 July and well worth a look.