Robert Cumming

Robert Cumming is an American artist best known for his conceptual photography. He stages his photographs. Seemingly mundane at first glance, Cumming's photographs exhibits a type of tongue in cheek humor.

Top: Coffee Cup, Tea Cup, and Me-Cup, 1972 / Bottom: Coffee Cups, Tea Cups, and She-Cups, 1972

In Coffee Cup, Tea Cup, and Me-Cup / Coffee Cups, Tea Cups, and She-Cups, the subject of these photos are "cups." I liked how Cumming twisted the word "cup" into a term. Each photograph is nicely composed. No special emphasis was used to direct the viewer's eyes to the "Me-Cup."

Institutional Faucet, 1971

Another photograph that I thought was artfully produced was Institutional Faucet. This photograph is exceptionally funny to me. I don't think I would have thought of having paper towels looped into my typewriter. I find a sense of duo functionality in this photo. There is the business side and the homely side. I like how both sides are symmetrical. The pencil sharpener is balanced by the soap dispenser on the other side.

Chargesheimer/Jo Ann Callis

Another week means another 2 books. This week I checked out a book by German photographer Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, better known as Chargesheimer. The book Chargesheimer features works by Chargesheimer from 1949-1970. Going through the images from the book, I get the sense that Chargesheimer enjoyed experimenting with photography. There were images of photomontages, experiments with light photography as well as abstraction. Although he experimented with photomontage, a large portion of the book featured are street photographs.

Camping An Der Lorelei

The second book I checked out contained photographs by Jo Ann Callis. Callis is an American photographer who became an important figure in the "fabricated photographs" movement. In Objects of Reverie, Callis's photographs are paired with poems by Raymond Carver. The two don't necessarily illustrate one another but because of a share sensibility.

Parrot and Sailboat, 1980

There are a mix of images in color and black & white in the book. Callis was one of the pioneers in color photography. In Objects, the color photographs appear more saturated. It gives a sense of vibrancy and possibly even emphasizing the oddity of the paired subjects. I find the image above quite odd., a tub filled to the brim with water with a toy sailboat and a parrot. Within the book context, the image could evoke a kind of absentmindedness. When I daydream, my mind wanders from thought to thought and I think this photo captures that quite well.

Preview

Here's a preview of the cover of a photo book I've been working on. I've been using a publishing company called Blurb which makes book making fairly easy. Rather than using their 'BookSmart' program, I've been using their plugin for InDesign and I'm liking what I see.

Jeff Wall/Uta Barth

As an assignment for one of my photography classes, we were asked to check out two art books a week from my University's wonderful book collection. Previously, I checked out books by Francis Alÿs and Jean-Luc Vilmouth. This week I found books by Jeff Wall and Uta Barth.

Jeff Wall is a Canadian photographer. Much of Wall's artwork consist of elaborate tableaux ranging from the mundane to referential of famous artworks. Wall refers to his works as 'prose poetry.' Something that I agree upon. His photographs capture that instance. Whatever happened before and after the photo doesn't matter.

A Sudden Gust of Wind, 1993

In this photograph, Wall recreate's Katsushika Hokusai's Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, ca. 1832. Wall recalls the process of making this photo:

"When I was making A Sudden Gust of Wind I knew I wanted to show how the air would carry the papers. Hokusai had already solved some of those problems. If you analyze his composition, you realize that many of the little pieces of paper coincided with very important points on the rectangle. He composed something that had a feel of the accidental. It was not accidental, but he knew how to make it look that way. I thought that the only way to achieve that was to first create chance situations, to create a lot of movement and then just have a lot of material to edit. So we created a way a lot of paper could be moved in air and then tried to think of both the rectangle and the invisible air current in three dimensions. As the papers move in depth, they move away from us and get smaller. I just worked hard on it and tried to compose. There is no guide, it's just a feeling, a sense of the real, how things really are or would be."

Los Angeles based artist Uta Barth examines photographic visual perception. She is interested in "how the human eye sees differently from the camera lens and how the incidental and atmospheric can become subject matter in and of themselves."

Untitled (aot 4) from ...and of time, 2000

In her book, ...and of time, Barth observes light as it tracks across a room, as it bounces off the walls and different objects in the space. It's quite poetic. There something meditative about observing something like light as it moves across a plane.

cicLAvia

Here are a couple of photos from the cycling event held on the streets of Los Angeles, cicLAvia. CicLAvia is becoming a biyearly event created to promote cycling as another possible form of transportation in the city of Los Angeles. During this event the streets of LA are closed off for a couple of hours to motorists and free for cyclists, joggers, skaters, etc. to take over. This would be my second cicLAvia event and it was equally, if not more, enjoyable this time.

Francis Alÿs/Jean-Luc Vilmouth

Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian artist that employs a broad range of media varying from painting to performance art. Alÿs' works examine the tension between politics and poetics and often enacts paseos. He lives and works in Mexico City.

In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997, Alÿs pushes a block of ice during this 5 minute loop video.

Jean-Luc Vilmouth is a French artist working in Paris. Vilmouth's medium ranges from sculpture to video production to performance.

Public Animal 1, 1994

In Vilmouth's PUBLIC ANIMAL 1, 1994, piece, he invited museum guests to don a mask and wear it during the duration of their visit. Having the viewer see the exhibit through an animal's point of view.

Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne

"For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them."

"At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in a crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice."

Sophie Calle, a French photographer, writer, and conceptual artist, decided to follow a man she barely met, "Henri B.," to Venice and photograph his everyday life. This project likens to situations where a predator stalks her prey, a private investigator on assignment, a secret admirer chasing after her target or even a tongue in cheek prank on a friend. Calle ran into a few problems while first arriving in Venice, as described in her diary entry like passages in Suite Vénitienne. The uncertainty of whether she'd find Henri B. in the city of Venice is quite clear:

"I know so little about him, except that he had rain and fog the first days, that he now has sun, that he is never where I search. He is consuming me."

The relationship between Calle's narration and her photographs helps the viewer visualize Callie's journey and in a sense transport the viewer to Venice alongside Calle. Whenever Calle felt as if she should give up on her project completely, her inner thoughts, written in italics, pushes her forward. Calle doesn't post photographs of everything she writes about, with the exception of photos of Henri B., which I think is quite fine. Her photographs to text ratio is acceptable.

Something that I found interesting about her images was that in every photo she takes of Henri B., it never captures his face. Even as they depart from the ferry together after Henri B. catches Calle following him, Henri B.'s face is obscured by his own hand. We're left with this mystery man whose back the audience can easily recognize as "Henri B."

Steven Shore, Survey

Chas Kincaid Grocery Store (16 June, 1976), Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

Stephen Shore is probably one of the best known contemporary photographers. Reading a text on Shore, it was pointed out that he was a self taught photographer. This raises the question, is having an instinctual photographic eye better than having a trained one when composing a shot or is it one and the same? An open ended question with pros and cons from both sides, but a necessary one from an Art Major's point of view. Much of Shore’s photographs capture the everyday life. But maybe it was easier back then to snap a photo and have it be interesting if you were friends with Andy Warhol? But is that bitter of me to say? I like the idea that Shore didn’t want to wait for a good moment to take a photo, but rather taking a photo at that moment. Shore’s candid snapshot photographic style can be seen in today’s casual photographer picture making style.

July 22-23, 1969

I found Shore’s July 22-23, 1969 photograph series to be interesting. The central subject in this series is Shore’s friend Michael Marsh. The photos aren’t particularly interesting and are quite deadpan in fact. But what draws me to these photos is how nonchalant they are. Marsh is quite photogenic and that might be the reason why Shore chose him as the subject. If these photos weren’t exhibited together, I would have a hard time liking them.

Lou Reed, 1965-67

At the age of 17 and without formal training, this photograph seems purposefully composed. I like the at ease posture of the subject and the off camera gaze. The use of diagonals in the photo also helps draw in the viewer.

Self-portrait, New York, New York, March 20, 1976

When someone thinks about creating a self-portrait, one would think to glam themselves up or portray themselves in a particular light. What I like about this photo is how “real” Shore is in portraying himself. He lies in his bed next to a pile of junk in his barren walled apartment. There’s a no shame sensibility about this photograph.

Douglas Huebler, Variable, etc.

Douglas Huebler is Conceptual artist dealing with photography as his central medium. Huebler, although having an on and off relationship with schooling, he eventually graduated from University of Michigan with a B.A. and M.F.A., even obtaining a teaching position at Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts. A quote of Huebler that I found interesting and inspiring states, "I have always scrambled my photographic presentations so that "time" would not be read through sequential events but rather as an all over field which translates the particular into unity."

The above image is Duration Piece #4 Bradford Massachusetts, 1968. What I like about this piece is that is follows Huebler's quote about his artwork. Although the image is of a sequential event, by scrambling the individual images, the audience becomes an engaged viewer. The eye roams across the sequence and pieces the images together. By fragmenting these images, in a way he is uniting it.