Christine Welch

Christine Welch is a contemporary landscape photographer that lives and works in Pennsylvania. In her first book of photographs, Commonplace, Welch compiles images she has taken of empty spaces. This project was initiated after developing her contact sheets from a vacation she took with her husband.

Stephen's Too Restaurant, Ashland, Pennsylvania, 1991

The image above was the inspiration for the project in Commonplace. Welch's images exudes a certain mood. In all of her photographs there seems to be a lack of a physical human presence. It seems as if people are occupying the space, or are supposed to occupy the space, but they just mysteriously were not captured on film.

Maxime's Continental Restaurant and Lounge, Ravine, Pennsylvania, 1994

A lot of her images have unoccupied chairs indicating where people would be seen if they were in the photos. I like the works from this book. I see things in common with mine and Welch's work.

Here are some more images from the book:

Meeting Room, Republican County Headquarters, Lisbon, Ohio, 1994

Eighth Street Cafe, Lebanon, Pennsylvania, 1994

Roller Dome Skating Rink, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1994

Another aspect of Welch's photographs that interested me was her use of color. I find the colors in her photograph bright, but at the same time subdued by a layer of fogginess. I feel it adds to the eeriness of the images.

Seismic Shift / Aftershocks

Ahern Rentals, Westminster, California, 2006

Over 60 museums across Southern California have been chosen to be involved in a Getty initiated event called “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.” One of the museums involved is Riverside’s own California Museum of Photography. Each museum had to write a proposal stating why they should be involved in this project. The idea that the California Museum of Photography pitched to the Getty examined landscape photography in California and the impact of heavy hitters Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal on landscape photography today. “Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984” was born.

The exhibition is divided into three parts. The first floor provided a timeline look of landscape photography that spanned the decades. There were photographs from Ansel Adams to Grant Rusk. The photographs in the earlier part of the timeline provided a picturesque view of the untouched landscape, a landscape unscarred. As you walked from bay to bay, the photographs became increasingly marred by human hands. Roads, structures, and power lines became a reoccurring motif in the latter photographs. The photographic movement called the New Topographics began changing the tradition of landscape photography that Ansel Adams and Minor White provided.

As you get up to the second floor, there are digital books that people can flip through to get a better idea of photographs of the changing landscape. On the third floor, you enter a different era of landscape photography. The top floor exhibition is called “Aftershocks: The Western Landscape Today.” This floor provides photos by contemporary artists which now live in a very developed landscape. There are photos by John Divola, Laurie Brown, Brad Moore, and others.

In the series of photographs by Brad Moore, the viewer can sense a type of smart humor emitting from the images. Moore’s photographs provide the viewer with images of development trying to camouflage itself as nature. In the colored photograph, Ahern Rentals, Westminster, California (2006), Moore takes a photograph of a group of cherry pickers which are in various stages of extension and height. The cherry pickers are flanked by two trees which are all behind a two tiered cement block wall. The way the group of cherry picker are positioned makes them look like a silhouette of a third tree. The space between the two trees is now occupied by a synthetic tree made of cherry pickers. The shape of the individual cherry picker can even be thought of as mimicking the individual branches of a tree. The other photographs follow along the same lines of mimicry. The photograph was fairly large in size; I would say 16x30 in. It was framed in a thick dark tinted wood frame.

I enjoyed the exhibit and the photographs presented at the show.

Duane Michals

This week's selection comes from Duane Michals, an American photographer that incorporates text with his photographs. I found his book How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank a funny/serious photo book. Michals' uses a lot of satire in his artworks.

A page that I wanted to point out from the book contained this spread. Throughout the book, Michals used some form of text paired with a photo/series of photos. In the one above, Michals mimics Ed Rusha's famous series Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. He uses an image of a toliet paper roll and repeats it twenty times. Using the same typeface as Rusha's book, he creates an anecdote of the origin of this series of photographs. Michals seems to be mocking Rusha. I'm not sure of the reason why he's doing that, but throughout Michals' book, I could tell he had a certain way of getting his messages across through photography. Whether he intended to mock Rusha seriously or playfully can be interpreted either way.

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."