Hiltons Als on Dawoud Bey

The New Yorker recently published an essay by Hiltons Als, A Young Black Boy Looks at a Photograph of a Young Black Boy, reflecting on the work of Dawoud Bey. The piece is excerpted from a new monograph on the work of Bey that will be released in September, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply.

Read the essay HERE.

Dawoud Bey’s “Young Man at a Tent Revival, Brooklyn, NY, 1989.”Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Video Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson on the Whitney's Facebook page

"Since the mid-1960s, Lynn Hershman Leeson has been exploring the relationship between identity, gender, and technology in her work, adopting the female cyborg as a figure of transformative power. Experience her work in Dreamlands, on view through February 5."

Follow the link, below:
https://www.facebook.com/whitneymuseum/videos/10154041299021433

Re-post from Hyperallergic / Gordon Parks Color Photos

Gordon Parks’s Long-Forgotten Color Photographs of Everyday Segregation

Gordon Parks, “Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama,” (1956), Archival Pigment Print, 30 × 30 inches (© Gordon Parks Foundation, courtesy of the Foundation and Salon 94) - http://hyperallergic.com/267329/gordon-parkss-long-forgotten-color-photographs-of-everyday-segregation/

Re-post from boingboing.net re: George Eastman House on-line photo database

http://boingboing.net/2016/12/30/george-eastman-museum-releases.html

https://i1.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/eastman-museum-warhol.jpg?w=667

Interview with Kathleen Robins on Strange Fire Collective

http://www.strangefirecollective.com/qa-kathleen-robbins/

Image Credit: Kathleen Robins

Dear Photograph

I'm excited to see that this thing is still going. Useful resource for students in Memory & The Photograph (and others).

http://dearphotograph.com/

From the blog: Dear Photograph / http://68.media.tumblr.com/3390a6e8873a624f78c46907252e30a2/tumblr_oj7r5amOfe1qcuqzso1_1280.jpg

Barbara Kasten at Hannah Hoffman

Collector Daily recently posted a number of very nice installation views of this recently closed Barbara Kasten exhibition at Hannah Hoffman in Los Angeles, including three separate bodies of work. The exhibition press release is at the bottom of the page in the link below - well worth a read.

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2016/09/barbara-kasten-at-hannah-hoffman-2/

Barbara Kasten @ Hannah Hoffman (Image credit: Collector Daily)

Lauren Henkin | Second Nature @ Center for Maine Contemporary Art

Lauren Henkin's ambitious new exhibition is covered on Bloun Artinfo this week. There is an insightful interview included. A highly recommended read. You can view more detailed images of this work on Henkin's website.

Lauren Henkin's "Second Nature" (installation view at CMCA) 

Courtesy of Lauren Henkin (re-posted from Bloun Artinfo)

New Paul Graham Publication from Mack Books

Paul Graham | The Whiteness of the Whale

The Whiteness of the Whale brings together Paul Graham’s three bodies of American photographs: American Night, a shimmer of possibility and The Present, made from 1998 to 2011. These 3 remarkable photographic series reflect upon the social fabric of contemporary America, whilst trying to find something closer to the experience of being and seeing in the world today.

Paul Graham, from the series American Night. Click HERE for more images.

Trevor Paglen's NSA Photographs

While looking over the List of Artists for the ART230 library research project, I was inspired to have a glance back at Trevor Paglen's work in relation to our discussion in ART230 today around the un-representable.  You may find interest in this particular project, commissioned by Creative Time (all images have been made available to the public as high-res files for any use whatsoever).  Click HERE to read the article and view the images.

About this work, Paglen states:

A surveillance apparatus doesn’t really “look” like anything. A satellite built by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) reveals nothing of its function except to the best-trained eyes. The NSA’s pervasive domestic effort to collect telephone metadata also lacks easy visual representation; in the Snowden archive, it appears as a four-page classified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Digital Camouflage

In light of our discussion in ART230 today, I thought some of you might find interest in this article from Gizmodo, The History of Invisibility and the Future of Camouflage.  You can link to the article HERE.

The so-called "boundary luminance" in Cramer and ADS Inc.'s US4CES (from Gizmodo)

Welcome Back, Students!!!

Wow, it's been a minute since I've posted here. I've been on research leave for the past academic year, and had a very productive time. I hope to bring many of the experiences I had over the last year into the classroom to share with you all during the upcoming year.

To start things off, head straight over to the Cornell Fine Arts Museum to view the Jess T. Dugan exhibition, Every Breath We Drew.  I had the pleasure of meeting Jess at a photography event in San Diego last fall called Medium.  And YOU will all have the pleasure of meeting Jess this semester, during two campus visits as well as a scheduled visit to both sections of Photo I.

A bit of info on the exhibition from the CFAM website is below:

Jess T. Dugan, Devotion, 2012, Pigment print, Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas

Jess T. Dugan: Every breath we drew

For nearly a decade, artist Jess T. Dugan has been making photographic portraits that explore issues of gender, sexuality, identity, and community from a highly individual and humanistic point of view. Every breath we drew, Dugan’s most recent project, explores the power of identity, desire, and connection through portraits of herself and others. Working within the framework of queer experience and from her actively constructed sense of masculinity, Dugan’s portraits examine the intersection between private, individual identity and the search for intimate connection with others. She photographs people in their homes, often in their bedrooms, using medium and large format cameras to create a deep, sustained engagement, resulting in intimate and detailed portraits.

Dugan combines formal portraits, images of couples, self-portraits, and photographs of her own romantic relationship to investigate broader themes of identity and connection while also speaking to private, individual experience. The photographs of men and masculine individuals act as a kind of mirror; they depict the type of gentle masculinity Dugan is attracted to, yet also the kind she wants to embody. Similarly, the photographs of relationships speak to a drive to be seen, understood, and desired through the eyes of another person; a reflection of the self as the ultimate intimate connection. Through beautifully intimate and honest portraits, Every breath we drew engages larger questions about how identity is formed, desire is expressed, and intimate connection is sought. This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated book with an essay by the curator and an interview with the artist conducted by internationally-renowned photographer Dawoud Bey.

Trevor Paglen's The Last Pictures

In light of our discussion around digital imaging and the archive in the Photo II class today, below is the link I promised detailing Trevor Paglen's project that was referred to.

Commissioned by public art organization Creative Time, The Last Pictures marks a distant satellite with a record from the historical moment from whence it came. Artist Trevor Paglen collaborated with materials scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a micro-etched disc with one hundred photographs, encased in a gold-plated shell, designed to withstand the rigors of space and to last for billions of years. Inspired by years of conversations and interviews with scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers, the images chosen for The Last Pictures tell an impressionistic story of uncertainty, paradox, and anxiety about the future.

Read more about the project HERE.

Recent Exhibitions Featuring the Work of Aitor Orti and Chris Engman

There were two pretty fantastic sounding exhibitions featured on the re-title.com newsletter for Photography, Film and Video this week (this is a great mailing list to be on, by the way, as they also send out artist opportunities for grants, exhibitions, residencies, education opportunities, etc.).  In light of our conversation regarding the complex relationship around art and photography and the various modes of practice that have become prevalent, the work of Orti and Engman seem particularly apt.

The press release for Ortiz describes his "unrelenting drive to tackle head-on the dilemma between representation and interpretation (perception). In doing so, he forges connections between the content of his images, the physical qualities of the supports he chooses for his works, and the position they occupy in the exhibition space. In consonance, Aitor Ortiz stakes out a broad scope for his work and the relations between the places he photographs, and the conscious and unconscious devices operating in the process of manipulating the image: the eye (interpretation, frame, decontextualisation,…), the photographic camera (focus/out-of-focus, optical distortion, transmission of movement…) and the brain (the limitations of an imperfect device in reading information and its empirical powers: association of concepts...). These relations come together in the exhibition space, where the physical experience once again transcends the actual content of the photographs and becomes part of a process of continuous interaction between representation and the perception of the beholder."

Aitor Ortiz, “NOÚMENOS 003”, 2013 
perforated aluminium plate on lightbox / Aluminum Lochblech auf Lichtbox 
40,9 x 40,9 inches / 104 x 104 cm, Edtion 1/2 (Sourced from re-title.com press release)

Read more about the work of Ortiz HERE.

Chris Engman, Double Skew, 2014
Digital pigment print
55 x 52.25 x 47 x 37.5 in (Image sourced from re-title.com)

The press release for Engman's exhibition, Ink on Paper, describes it as representing "a temporary shift in [his] artistic practice from photographic documentation of environmental installation phenomena—records of process and the passage of time—to a consideration of photographs themselves as an inherently false, mediated and distancing way to experience the world. By focusing not on outer constructions but on the photograph itself as a constructed challenge to perception, this new body of work continues Engman’s inquiry into the illusive and unknowable nature of reality.

Read more about the work of Engman HERE.

Carrie Mae Weems at the Guggenheim

Carrie Mae Weems, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Katherine Dunham (from “Slow Fade to Black”), 2010–11. Inkjet prints, 49 1/4 x 37 inches (124.5 x 94 cm) each. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems. (Image Sourced from:  E-flux Press Release)

Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense/Future Perfect

Friday, April 25–Sunday, April 27, 2014

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
5th Ave at 89th St
New York City

www.guggenheim.org/weemslive