Category: American

Photographer: Alec Soth

November 2008

 

Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) 'Two Towels' 2004

 

Alec Soth (American, b. 1969)
Two Towels
2004
From the series Niagara (2006)

 

 

Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth has attained international recognition for his photographic series. Notable are the two series Sleeping by the Mississippi (1999-2004) portraying the river and the life along it’s banks and Niagara (2006) where Soth focuses his large format camera on the hotels, residents loves and lives and the environs around Niagara Falls.

His work is firmly rooted in the documentary traditions of Walker Evans and Robert Frank but pushes the documentary form. Whereas Frank used a foreigners eye and ‘snapshot’ photography to challenge traditional notions of American culture in his seminal book The Americans (1958), Soth photographs everyday events of American life – home, romance, religion, bliss, heartbreak and agony – and constructs his vision of the land and people in poetic form. His use of handwritten notes is especially poignant.

His view of America is both narrative, truth and epic construction. Working in a serial form, Soth builds the themes within his series. The connections between people living their lives and facing their plight together – with dignity – becomes fully evident.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) 'Charles, Vasa, Minnesota' 2002

 

Alec Soth (American, b. 1969)
Charles, Vasa, Minnesota
2002
From the series Sleeping by the Mississippi (1999-2004)

 

 

Alec Soth website

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Art work: Cy Twombly ‘Cold Stream’ 1966

November 2008

 

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Cold Stream' 1966

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Cold Stream
1966
White wax pencil on canvas

 

 

This painting reminds me of the drawings of Rudolf Steiner (see the exhibition Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne earlier this year) but here the performance of marking is pushed beyond the bounds of the spiritual by the ferocious attack of the artist – repeating the form but transgressing the boundaries of that form, disintegrating the ritual into the physical release of energy through the hand.

One can almost see the maelstrom of the splitting of the atom in Twombly’s repeating performance threatening to destroy himself and the world around him.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Rudolf Steiner. Blackboard Drawings, 1919-1924

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Quotation: Susan Sontag ‘Photography: A Little Summa’

November 2008

 

 

“5. In a modern society, images made by cameras are the principal access to realities of which we have no direct experience. And we are expected to receive and to register an unlimited number of images of what we don’t directly experience. The camera defines for us what we allow to be “real” – and it continually pushes forward the boundary of the real. Photographers are particularly admired if they reveal hidden truths about themselves or less than fully reported social conflicts in societies both near and far from where the viewer lives.”


Sontag, Susan. “Photography: A Little Summa,” in Sontag, Susan. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007, p. 125.

 

 

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Book: Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans (with Eugene Atget and Diane Arbus)

November 2008

 

Edward S Curtis (American, 1868-1952) 'Nuhlihahla-Qagyuhl' Nd

 

Edward S Curtis (American, 1868-1952)
Nuhlihahla-Qagyuhl
Nd

 

 

Following my thoughts on the series The First Australians on SBS we have this wonderful coffee table book of photographs: Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans with images taken from his seminal 20 volume work The North American Indian.

Curtis worked on the project from 1906 to 1927 hauling his large format glass plate camera across the United States much as Eugene Atget did at roughly the same time in Paris, taking photographs of the old city and its hotels, shops, parks and gardens. Atget died in 1927 with his art recognised by few whilst Curtis lived on into the 1950’s, dying in obscurity and poverty after the fame of his ground breaking work had disappeared. Both photographed a vanishing world capturing it for prosperity on fragile glass plates. Both brought to their projects a unique vision and a belief in what they were doing.

Atget’s photographs of people half seen through shop doors and windows, like shadows of the night. Curtis’s photographs of masked Yeibichei dancers wearing elaborate attire. Curtis thought he was photographing the dying races of the American Indians. Atget knew he was photographing the collapsing spaces of old Paris. Both use the space of the photograph to signify their intentions: an understanding of their subject matter, an empathy with a disappearing way of life, a need to record their vision of this world – and an intensity of insight into that condition.

No other photograph has the space and timelessness of an Atget. No other image the presence of the plains that Curtis summoned.

His masked dancers remind me of the last photographs of the great American photographer Diane Arbus in their candour and beauty, posthumously called Untitled. Finally Arbus has found a subject matter that she could return to over and over again. As did Atget and Curtis.

As Doon Arbus has commented,

“These images – created out of the courage to see things as they are, the grace to permit them simply to be, and a deceptive simplicity that permits itself neither fancy nor artifice … The photographs appear to be documents of a world we’ve never seen or imagined before – one with its own rituals and icons, its own games and fashions and codes of conduct – which, for all its strangeness, is at the same time hauntingly familiar and, in the end, no more or less unfathomable than our own.”1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Arbus, Doon. “Afterword,” in Diane Arbus: Untitled. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

~ Diane Arbus: Untitled
~ Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans
~ Some late Diane Arbus photographs from Google Images
~ Eugène Atget Wikipedia entry
~ Eugène Atget Google images

 

 

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