who we were then

Today we were outside of time, I suppose, since it was our first Critique Day. We will do these every Wednesday for the rest of the session, not only to see what everyone has made, but to look at contemporary and historical theory, and to talk about how these techniques and ideas are useful to their own practice back in the future. With a small class like this, we can talk about each student’s work in depth. We have the luxury of time.

For just six students, we have a remarkable range of artists. One student, though young, has been painting consistently since she was 13; another has had a much later start to her career, and so seems younger to the rest of us; one has had a deep and varied career of study, and is eager and hungry; another grew up in the arts, in New York, but had to escape by hopping the rails for a while; one has traveled the world and has almost too many ideas; one has found herself in North Carolina, deep in transition from who she was to who she will be. I suppose I, too, am in some transition, as I’ve found to be the case for every student in these Concentration classes. You go to the mountain to seek something, always.

This first Crit is always planned as a sort of extended introduction, and I will use the things they have done to anchor our understanding of what they will do here. Even if it’s just experiment and play, it’s useful to have their other work as a marker and a guide. I was amazed at all the varied work the students have done, as well as their willingness to take on the small challenges and big ideas of the first two days here, moving back from 2015 to the early days of Digital.

Without a doubt the Mavica cameras were a great hit, and the romance of the small pixellated image really was the wonderful lead-in to the course that I hoped it would be. What amazes me the most, however, is how instantly the class bonded together: they have been making a low-res collaborative horror film with these cameras, running around with costumes and fake blood, their pockets stuffed with floppy disks. Honestly, to see this sort of excitement, brilliance, and play right away, is about the greatest joy any teacher could get. All I did was give a bunch of smart people some new toys…

from today film is dead

I distinctly remember the very real panic of the early ’90s (um, 1990’s, that is) when I was in Grad School and all anyone could talk about was the clearly imminent Death of Film. I was learning Photoshop 2.0 at the time, Postmodernism had led to Identity Politics, the “Y2K” was coming, and we were all doomed. I’m not saying that all that isn’t true, exactly, just not with the same clangor and wailing that seemed to come from all directions back then. We still have film, for now at least.

So here we are, today, back at the turn of the century. The time-traveling has begun, and this is my gift to the students, ca. 2002:

It was pretty exciting, actually, getting these beasts to work – 1.2 Megapixels! – scrolling through the sad built-in image effects, listening to the sounds of writing to a floppy disk. (It’s so satisfying a noise; why hasn’t that been co-opted for something, skeumorphically, as it were?) I had even brought an unopened box of floppies to use – and a USB floppy reader! I always say, Limits are good for Art. Let’s see what they can do with these.

The weather looks rainy all week, but just like yesterday, the morning gloom wore off (for the most part) after lunch, and everyone could go shoot. A few of the students got really excited about the cheap video included with the Mavicas, and spent some of the afternoon planning a quick horror-film shoot for tonight. (I overhead one say, “I want a bloody death.”) I may have been worried about the heady slowness of our beginning yesterday, but already the pace is picking up. Of course there are printer glitches, and Dropbox hangups, and small technological incompatibilities with these old cameras, but that’s digital technology for you – it just slows your whole life down.

Tomorrow we have our first Critique Day. We’ll look at the work from these first two days and each student’s previous work as a sort of introduction to what they want from these eight weeks. Let me end with a quote I gave them today, one I only recently saw online, and which may serve as our guiding principle for this whole class:

the digital multitudes

First proper night, first proper insomnia, whether from excitement or anxiety I don’t know… What I do know is that there’s a lot to get into today – photography in the present – and I’m up early to organize my thoughts. I’d like to get them just thinking and shooting this week, before we start getting overly technical. It’s a digital and point-and-shoot kind of week (at least until Friday), thinking about memory, color, digital vs. chemical, and the screen image vs. the print. I have stats and terms and timelines and ideas. I have slides…

We set ourselves up by the new iMacs and Epsons next door to the darkroom and I made sure everyone had their phones, with the exception of my one awesome  semi-Luddite student (hooray!) who has no cell phone (really!) but does shoot a lot of digital photographs for her mixed-media work (oh, okay.) Also, she confessed to having an iPad, as did another student who rocks a DumbPhone™. I tried to get that student to shoot with her little phone, but the iPad would have to do for now. This is Photography Today: everyone with a camera. It’s the rare exception who doesn’t.

I asked everyone about the most recent photographs they took; many had tried to capture the beauty of Penland, of course, as have I. One student had just shot a picture of her grandson to send to her husband. One had taken a picture of her license plate for the number to go on the school’s official info forms. I had to hit them with some of the usual frightening statistics about the sheer amount of photographs we take today, even though many of the numbers I found were from a couple of years ago, and the reported source has now vaporized into the blogosphere. One of my favorites:

How does this unimaginable quantity of photographs taken change how we experience the world? It has been said that the camera is not so much a tool to extend the eye as one that extends the memory, but since memory is a creative act, constantly re-made upon each remembering, the photographs we take in order to spark our memories may end up replacing them entirely. For proof, look at Linda A. Henkel’s studies on photography and memory (recently discussed on NPR), which show how taking pictures of everything actually impairs memory (but photographing with close focus and intent may increase it):

This just seems to confirm what we experience every day: you forget the name of that guy from that thing, and suddenly you’re deep in an RGS (Recreational Google Search) right in the middle of your dinner conversation… We are forgetting faster and faster.

Of course, this too is not new. Our Culture seems always to have been in the business of forgetting our Nature. Via the blog booktwo.org I discovered a perfectly related story as an ancient precursor to Henkel, wherein Socrates tells of two gods, Thamus, the king of all Egypt, and Theuth. Theuth was the inventor of things like arithmetic and geometry and astronomy (and also, oddly, dice.) But his best invention was writing, and he proudly showed off his work to Thamus:

Anyway, this is a lot to think about, here on our first day on the mountain. And there was more, too, from memory to artifice and other differences between digital photography and real photography. As photos become more and more pixellated, reblogged, unattributed, shopped, and chopped, will there be a time soon when they no longer carry even the smallest spurious scrap of truth? My youngest student, at 19, may still believe in photos, but will her children? We’re on our way already… This last bit is from The New Aesthetic blog, a favorite of mine: it’s #HYPERREALCG, which collects amateur CG and 3D-rendered images of mundane subjects, done so well as to be virtually indistinguishable from reality.

Of course you realize, as you scroll through image after image of the most absurdly boring yet incredibly real-looking images – I can’t believe they made that! – that these are not CG-created at all. It’s just a bunch of lame, lost snapshots stolen from the web. We’re now more likely to belive in fake images online than we are in “real ones” (whatever that means…)

Time to search elsewhere for meaning. I’m bringing them back about 15-20 years tomorrow, and then beginning to look further. If today was Today, then tomorrow is our first Yesterday…

big mind

I’m reviving my old blog-muscles in order to keep some record of another intensive session at the Penland School of Crafts – the eight-week Spring Concentration in Photography. For this class, I’m attempting to do what I’ve always wanted to do: everything. See, I have always been equally obsessed with the purely physical joys of the handmade object and all the cerebral pleasures of theory and a Big Think, determined as I am to show that there is no decent making without thinking, and there should be less thinking without making… or something like that.

Penland is the perfect place to do it, not only because they encourage me to do what I like here (now that I’ve been coming here for half of my life) but also because the school puts a premium on creative work and the handmade object. It is fundamentally a crafts school, although that opens up an argument of a different flavor, for a different time. Nevertheless, no matter where I go these days, I find myself pushing an agenda that calls for a headier but handier way to work – Big Thoughts in Plain English. It’s pro-art, anti-artspeak, and it calls for the interrelatedness of all aspects of the creative life: History, Theory, Daily Life, and Hard Work, among others. “Everything’s related,” I say. “There are no accidents.”

The plan is to cover the whole history of photography at most of its key points, backwards.* We will start with today, with iPhones and “social media”, then work through the advent of digital photography, the everyday of color prints, slide-carousel memories, the 35mm black-and-white document, the medium-format point-of-view, large-format artistry. We will talk about the heyday of the Gelatin Silver Print, the retro romance of Pictorialism and non-silver processes, the technical brilliance of wet-plate and albumen prints, the struggles of the paper negative, the dead perfection of the daguerreotype. We will look at the Pre-Photographers, their origins, and their early attempts to “fix a shadow”. On the last day, we might just have to draw… At each of these moments, the very physical syntax of how a photograph was made affected the way we thought (and do think) about pictures. Yes, everything is related, and our plan is to get in there, push it all around, and make our own unique work from those ideas.

I’ve stacked the deck by inviting along an old friend as my assistant, one who, like me, was a favored student of Christopher James (although a good twenty years later.) She’s kind, capable, and able to kick ass, and could probably use a couple of months on the mountain to get back into her own work, too. Bringing someone to Penland might be the best gift I could give anyone, especially a good friend.

As for me, I never actually get much work of my own finished here, but I always allow myself to experiment, and I open myself up to new ideas, new media, and new methods. I leave here somehow both exhausted and refreshed, disconnected a bit from the rest of my life, but more connected to my creative self than seems possible from where I’m sitting now. It’s daunting, and I’m in a little over my head, but that’s where I like to be. I am trusting from experience that something wonderful will happen. Let’s begin, shall we?

I didn’t mean to disappear, although I have had to admit finally just how much I travel for art and teaching…

For this Spring semester, I am mostly settled in at Hollins University, in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, trying to stay quiet and still when I can. It’s an amazing gig, really – I have more time and resources to work than I have had in years, with just one class to teach as my weekly obligation (and my escape from daily solitude…) Now, Hollins is women-only at the undergraduate level, and while there are conflicting arguments on the benefits of single-sex education for girls (in high-school), I am inclined to believe those benefits are real for the students here. My class of eighteen young women is one of the most comfortably outspoken I’ve had in years, without the usual slow start to the discussions… They’re great, and it’s already been a lot of fun.

What we’re discussing is “How to Talk About Art.” My subtitle seems to be “Big Thoughts in Plain English”, and it’s squarely set against the proliferation of often meaningless jargon in recent Art writing in favor of telling the truth about their work. It’s always tough going, but writing clearly for oneself can make a huge difference – not only can good writing clarify what an artist is after, but it tends to feed back positively, inspiring more and better work. (For what we’re up against, look back at this.) I’m trying my best to take my own advice, and to write new things for my next show at Daniel Cooney in New York, coming in May.

I have an exhibition of some 30-odd works (or is that “30 odd works”?) that just opened last week at the Museum here at Hollins, and will be giving a public lecture on April 18th. If you’re anywhere nearby, do come…

Also, in other news, here’s an interview I did with an online magazine from Germany: SEEANCE MAGAZIN.