I have started to take some pictures for the stranger assignment and have been thinking about two photographers, Adrianne Salinger and Trevor Paglen (an artist I discovered at the Berkeley Art Museum).

Salinger frequently interacted with people she did not know. When she photographed middle-aged men in her home studio, Salinger seemed to somehow turn each photograph into a relationship in itself. It seemed that when Salinger photographed people she did not know, there was a compelling discomfort within the subjects' expressions. The photographs forced the viewer to question their initial reactions through the mysteriousness of a person portrayed as unknown.
Trevor Paglen's work is more abstract, with politically charged photographs documenting secretive sites, often linked to the CIA. In the exhibit, there was a powerful art piece that reflected the numerous surveillance satellites focused on Earth. Paglen's work tends to have a very eerie side to it. With many of his photographs, I felt like I was looking at something forbidden to me.

Here is one project I found on Paglen's website that I found very interesting:
http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/nowhere/photos_images.htm

I think it would be interesting to incorporate some ideas from both of these photographers. From Salinger, I really like the concept of viewing the photograph as a relationship between you and someone you do not know. From Paglen, I want to stress the strange feeling I get when photographing a stranger, like I am invading their identity.

Shirley Tse

Waiting at the place where America parts Eurasia. Iceland, 2004.

I went to SFAI to hear this lecture on November 12th. Tse is originally from Hong Kong and currently based in L.A. and works primarily as a sculptor and installation artist. One of the most interesting points she made was that she thinks of her materials as a huge part of her work. As she shifts and uses new material to create her pieces they say as much if not more about her work than the representational subject that she is trying to convey. She works mainly with plastic, Styrofoam and other man-made substances and it is their synthetic value that really informs her work as she juxtaposes it in natural landscapes. Her sculptures are also temporal, she'll use them for one show or a series of photographs and then discard them. Yet because her materials are ubiquitous, everywhere and they'll last forever, it brings into question the ethics of using materials that are indestructible and yet so damaging for the environment. I found it fascinating that she has done intense research about the history of plastic, its origination, use and place within our society. How she negiotiates precision and awareness in her work between the machine she uses to sculpt with, the form, the material and her hand is really something that I've taken away from this lecture, as well as applying background knowledge to inform one's conceptual work. 

Societe Realiste

On Halloween I went to go see this cooperative Paris-based duo talk about their work.  They came together in 1994 to produce experiments that they refer to as "machines". Their work consists of writing, art and design; they think that the final result isn't as important as the process of a kind of research/experiment. They have constant dialogues or as they say interrogations about their reoccurring obsessions. They call themselves maniacs, I suppose in their tenacious and unflagging efforts to dissect their obsessions and create new forms from their symbols. 

By staging their work they are able to distance themselves from their questions and explore how the political tones of their work play with the nature of public advertisements. By taking different glyphs, strata, maps and symbols, they are able to classify and connect them. One of their projects that does just this is the one where they use color as an alphabet, from international flags and by distilling the unique blues, greens, reds, etc. they create a new language with color that they separate into blocks of what looks like paint samples, but are really unified stratum. They do this similar form of analysis and restructuring with the symbols of money and with national boundaries on maps. 

www.societerealiste.net

www.eflux.com/shows/views/4991

www.salutpublic.be/2ou3choses/a-decouvrir/ailleurs/1768

Kate Pszotka, Friday at Noon - Don't miss it!

Friday, Noon
The Photo Classroom
Kate Pszotka
Art
Conversation
Pizza

Rachel Heath

This artist, Rachel Heath, came up in conversation with Jessie about distressing negatives - but I wanted to share her work more broadly. Rachel doesn't distress her work. She works in 19th century processes like ambrotypes that are by their nature variable since you're painting the emulsion onto a glass plate.

Taryn Simon, The Innocents

Excerpted from the photographer's introduction:

During the summer of 2000, I worked for The New York Times Magazine photographing men who were wrongfully convicted, imprisoned, and subsequently freed from death row. After this assignment, I began to investigate photography's role in the criminal justice system. I traveled across the United States photographing and interviewing men and women convicted of crimes they did not commit. In these cases, photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, assisted officers in obtaining erroneous eyewitness identifications, and aided prosecutors in securing convictions. The criminal justice system had failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic images.

For the men and women in this book, the primary case of wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of photographs and lineups. These identifications rely on the assumption of precise visual memory. But through exposure to composite sketches, mugshots, Polaroids, and lineups, eyewitness memory can change. Police officers and prosecutors influence memory -- both unintentionally and intentionally -- though the ways in which they conduct the identification process. They can shape, and even generate, what comes to be known as eyewitness testimony.

Jennifer Thompson's account of the process by which she misidentified her attacker illustrates the malleability of memory. A domino effect ensues in which victims do remember a face, but not necessarily the face they saw during the commission of the crime. "All the images became enmeshed to one image that became Ron, and Ron became my attacker."

In the case of Marvin Anderson, convicted of rape, forcible sodomy, abduction, and robbery, the victim was shown a photographic array of six similar black-and-white mugshots and one color photo. The face that stood out to the victim was the color photo of Anderson. After the victim picked Anderson from the photo array, she identified him in a live lineup. Of the seven men in the photo array, Anderson was the only one who was also in the lineup. Marvin Anderson served fifteen years of a 210-year sentence.

In the case of Troy Webb, convicted of rape, kidnapping, and robbery, the victim was shown a photo array. She tentatively identified Webb's photo, but said that he looked too old. The police then presented another photo of Webb taken four years before the crime occurred. He was positively identified. Troy Webb served seven years of a forty-seven-year sentence.

The high stakes of the criminal justice system underscore the importance of a photographic image's history and context. The photographs in this book rely upon supporting materials -- captions, case profiles and interviews -- in an effort to construct a more adequate account of these cases. This project stresses the cost of ignoring the limitations of photography and minimizing the context in which photographic images are presented. Nowhere are the material effects of ignoring a photograph's context as profound as in the misidentification that leads to the imprisonment or execution of an innocent person.

I photographed each innocent person at a site that came to assume particular significance following his wrongful conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the alibi location, or the scene of the crime. In the history of these legal cases, these locations have been assigned contradictory meanings. The scene of arrest marks the starting point of a reality that is based in fiction. The scene of the crime, for the wrongfully convicted, is at once arbitrary and crucial; a place that changed their lives forever, but to which they had never been. Photographing the wrongfully convicted in these environments brings to the surface the attenuated relationship between truth and fiction, and efficiency and injustice.

The wrongfully convicted in this book were exonerated through the use of DNA evidence. Only in recent years have eyewitness identification and testimony been forced to meet the test of DNA corroboration. Eyewitness testimony is no longer the most powerful and persuasive form of evidence presented to juries. Because of its accuracy, DNA allows a level of assurance that other forms of evidence do not offer. In the exoneration process, DNA evidence pressures the justice system and the public to concede that a convicted person is indeed innocent. In our reliance upon these new technologies, we marginalize the majority of the wrongfully convicted, for whom there is no DNA evidence, or those for whom the cost of DNA testing is prohibitive. Even in cases in which it was collected, DNA evidence must be handled and stored and is therefore prey to human error and corruption. Evidence does not exist in a closed system. Like photography, it cannot exist apart from its context, or outside of the modes by which it circulates.


Excerpts and photographs from two of the stories in Taryn Simon's The Innocents

» Richard Danziger

Wrongfully convicted of murder, Danziger served 12 years of a life sentence; he suffered serious brain damage from injuries he sustained when he was attacked by fellow inmates in prison.

» Ron Williamson

A former baseball player, he served 10 years of a death sentence for a murder he did not commit.


Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused as part of a prosecutor's arsenal, this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences. Photographs in the criminal justice system, and elsewhere, can turn fiction into fact. As I got to know the men and women in this book, I saw that photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

-Taryn Simon

Josephine Taylor

I went to hear Josephine Taylor speak at SFAI on November 5th.... She draws in ink mostly and showed some of the work done with only the sun and stencils on paper, that will be at her upcoming show at Catherine Clark Gallery in SF. 

Her lecture style was interesting. The symbolism that runs throughout her work becomes even more apparent when you hear how she dodges certain people or subjects that she herself brings up. I know that I wasn't the only one in the audience who was disappointed by her saying how profound an image was and how it is intergral to her  work and then not explaining it because of her work not being her therapy. It seems that that is exactly what her work is. 

She stated that her biggest breakthrough in creating her work was when she was a student at SFAI and she just began doing simple pencil drawings of her family. Family/childhood issues play a huge part in her work, including alcoholism, sexual abuse, violence and a lot of inappropriateness, vulnerability and inescapability that threaded throughout her childhood. All of these issues are either very subtly or overtly shown in her drawings. The fact that she blow up her drawings to show such intimate gestures exposes everything. I think that she struggles with her strength and vulnerable natures as a woman and it takes a lot of courage to put her personal life out there like that. I liked that she said that these huge drawings are a meditation for her, that she uses a very small brush to create. I also like some of the scenes, her family scenes that look like perfect family moments, yet they are caked with small dots of blood that you have to get really close to see and which she adds as a "finishing touch". This is one of the best local/emerging artists that I have heard and I'd  recommend going to her opening at Catherine Clark on November 22. 

www.cclarkgallery.com/artists/taylor.html

www.josephinetaylor.moonfruit.com