The Archive:

Images and thoughts,  "The only politics are the ones that are in the room at this moment"Greg Bordowitz

So... here we are AIB

Well the MFA 2nd term is in the run.  Discussions are going well, but somehow I went from 1973 to 1933. in stylized ideals, so move forward.

Ben Sloat: Thoughts and words:

  Image to be less conceived or concept of the final image.
  Shake up the notion of pre thought  do to unusual.
  Bend the frame of division
  Make image more contextual

Oliver Wasow:  Thoughts and words,

Medium is the message
Procedure is the more status then the image
What is the real- fact and fiction
more social media
 look more into this aspect, I get it! thanks

For this crit I listened more then took notes... pity I forgot some comments or rather I got what they said but I am a loss for words.
Matt Sanders
Cinematic, humor, sense of frame
Stylized, voice
humour,

Michael Newman
Political sense. Maybe move into motion NOT SUPER 8mm


more to come....

5th paper

Miah Nate Johnson Johnson  4

AIB/MFA

Oliver Wasow

Overview of MFA

This  final paper explores my works and research during the six months of my MFA residency at AIB.

I set out to look at my roots of who I am and commenced with the portfolios of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, two photographers to whom publishers, critics, curators and editors express my work reminds them of.   I wanted to digest, these two very different styles of seeing the world and ask myself why did I follow the path of this genre of street or social commentary photography.  To start I choose two of Robert Frank’s books, Lines of my Hand , Lustrum Press New York 1972,  and Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans by Sarah Greenough,Robert Frank Steidel Press. 2009.  In the body of work Lines in My Hand ,Frank broke from his first book of the stylized works of The Americans,Grove Press 1955, an icon of who he was as an artist. As Frank stated in his Guggenheim proposal for The Americans project "observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States." ² Guggenheim Grant proposal 1954 Looking into the Americans, Steidel.   By looking at  Lines of my Hand I realized that Frank reinvented himself, mid stride in his career with black and white images that are very abstract, and with a complexity of a narrative that is given by words written on the images or in mirrors. The work is that of a self -expression very different from The Americans portfolio which was more of a documentation or observation of life. I then looked at two books of Garry Winogrand’s work starting with ANIMALS 1969 Museum of Modern Art New York which was a small paper back book of photographs taken in the zoos of New York City.  The images are simple framing, mixed with people but the subject matter has a strangeness  which anthropomorphizes the animals.  The book Man in the Crowd Fraenkel Gallery and D.A.P., 1999 is a look into his street works concentrating twenty years of compelling street photos that form the core of Winogrand’s vision.

I then directed my third paper on a different approach of staged street photography. THe artist I focused on where Jeff Wall and Philip DiCorcia who both work in conceptual narratives with a social messages in their photographs.  Looking at the works of these  two artist through books of these artist work unfolded surreal fabricated situations which arouse subjective states of mind, suggesting fictitious events in a documentary sense.  

By looking at these various artist this allowed me to focus and dismantle my work with ideas and concepts of how my work is created and perceived.  This insightful reflection of others works allowed me to rethink and absorb the comments of my presented portfolio from the Professors during the ten day residency at AIB.   Oliver Wasow’s comment “ break the boundaries of the black frame” along with Jan Avgikos’s comment “a sympathetic traditional stylized format showing the past of a New York”  followed by John Krammer’s comment “you say your work is not political yet it is” these comments struck home but how, and where to go with it? 

In one of my meetings in New York with Chris Boot, Executive Director of APERTURE Foundation, stated while reviewing my work “although I was a strong street photographer, and very gifted printer, The world of contemporary photography has changed the traditional street photographer, in which working with film, darkrooms, and  the Leica camera are really pass’e.   The ideas are based on concept more then technique”. Chris Boot, APERTURE , quote from a meeting in February 2013.

  This took some time to absorb Chris’s comment and those of the AIB professors, who’s used words of boundaries, traditional, stylized and the idea of concept more then technique while looking at my work.   While in New York I went to the exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art which where both on digital Photoshop altered imagery which opened more doors of thought and questioning.  At the MoMA exhibition The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook. One of the artist’s that struck me was photographs of Martha Rosler who Oliver Wasow mentioned during one of our talks at AIB.   Her montage photographs are compositions with simple dynamics, which are powerful political commentaries of that time period in history.  Seeing prints at MOMA also of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand’s work, I got it, the images popped.   This was very different from looking at a book, versus on the wall ,each was an expression of the artist and in a sense was avant garde of that time period in history.  Though I was able to make images that reminded people of these bodies of work, I was not creating something new but following a path that had already been walked. 

One of the largest hurdles I now faced, was questioning myself of my meaning of what my work entails and how do I start the process of taking the street images that I have worked on for so many years and disassemble the idea of traditional black frame, black and white prints, and waiting for the the decisive moment, yet still keep my voice of a political, humanistic, environmental, and at times bizarre vision of what I see. 

Back in the darkroom processing film and making prints, I concentrated on breaking some of the rules of never cropping and losing the full frame black border. In doing so the photograph became more directed, by focusing the viewers attention towards the subject by use of the cropped frame, and enlarged images. But there was still a void something had to be shaken or changed.  The MET and  MoMA  exhibitions still lingered with the new visions, of different styles and techniques the artist used in the medium of photography. How else can I look into my work and make images that tell a story or narrative for the viewer but different from my street works.  

There was one artist I saw at the Brooklyn Museum of Art which completely out of context who I was moved by, named Kara Walker. Her work deals with cut out images on black paper or steel which tell a narrative of old folk tales and true stories of African American history. The work is projected , pasted or silhouetted and each one held it own story line.  I then began to look at other artist John Heartfield and Man Ray montage works, which I began to concentrate on the story line and techniques used. 

Since Adobe Photoshop was out of my financial means I looked into a way I could produce work with out using Adobe photoshop. I took my silver gelatin prints and digital photographs and started to cut out certain individuals with scissors,  I soon had a box full of cut out characters that where to become my new subjects for the photographs that I would create. My thought process was this.  I would find a master print for the background image, I then would search my subject matter and decide which best used, told a story or opened discussion for my work.  At first it was pure mistakes, but then images began to appear that exposed what I truly wanted to say.  Once the image was cutout I would take my spotting brush and match the tonality of the cutout so as to blend the images edge.  I would take a master print place it on the copy stand and then lay the cutout images on top of the master print, by arranging the scene I was able to stage a scene, that evoked a message to the viewer whether environmental, social or sexual.  I discovered that I liked the rawness of the unperfected edge of the image or floating subjects that left the work open for interpretation. 

The results from the works started conversations with people here on the Cape in Wellfleet and in Provincetown, the images carry my message of political, environmental and social conditions, yet still hold in the traditions of black and white street works.

Books looked at and purchased this semester:

Fred Ritchin , After Photography

Fineman Faking It, MET

Philip Di Corcia, MoMA

Philip Di Corcia, Eleven

Alex Soth, Sleeping by the Mississipi

William Klein, ABC

Paul Outerbridge, Taschen

Jeff Wall, MoMA

Philip Di Corcia, ICA, Steidel

Roberts Frank,Looking into the Americans

Robert Frank, Lines of my Hand

Ray Metzker, YALE

Anne Celine Jaeger, Image Makers Image Takers

KEn Light, Witness to our TIme

Nathan Lyons, Photographers on Photography

Diane Arbus, Aperture

Garry Winogrand,Man in the Crowd, Fraenkel

Garry Winogrand, Animals, MoMA

Josef Koudelka, APERTURE

Lee Friedlander, Like a one eyed Cat, Abrahams

Follow up side note:

The image “LUNCHEONETTE” is that of an elderly man eating lunch, the background is a derelict building, across form him is a the nude backside of a young woman, the idea that I am convey is that of a mans thought of being once young and the beauty or lust for a woman.

The image “REPLACEMENT PART” taken in an abandoned air force base, first strike room, shows a woman nude wearing a nuclear face shield, a man clothed is walking into the scene carrying a mannequin bottom half of a woman’s form.  The idea is the male ego, or subliminal thought of replacing a woman with that of a better form.

4th paper

Johnson  4

Miah Nate Johnson

AIB/MFA

Oliver Wasow

Looking at Altered Images.

After Photoshop

Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age

Works by, Matthew Jensen,Kota Ezawa, Joan Fontcuberta, Matthew Porter, 

MoMA show 

THE SHAPING OF NEW VISIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM, PHOTOBOOK

Works By Philip Lorca-diCorcia, Gerhard Ruhm , Paul Graham, Martha Rosler.

“I would like to see photography make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable” Marcel Duchamp

Working in New York City on my photoessay “Disconnected” the exploration of people on cellular phones, I took a break and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the show “After Photoshop” This show examines how artists have used digital technology to alter photographic images from the late 1980s to the present..(Source MET brochure)  

©MIAH

The following day I went to Museum of Modern Art to see “The shaping of New Visions: Photography, film, photo book”. The MoMA show looked into photography’s relation to the past and present development of contemporary artistic practices.

In seeing both shows, my aim was to focus mostly on the manipulated image, with a concentration on how the artist perceives, conceptualizes and exhibits different styles of photography and installations. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art show was a small review of works by some of the masters in the art of the altered digital image.  The first image is that of Beate Götshow who’s landscape photoshopped image is composed of several photographs blended together seamlessly to create a painterly pastiche art work.  Looking at this work it simply looked like a landscape one would simply walk by, not noticing that the work has been manipulated or altered by the artist.  Only looking more closely at the image does one notice things are just to perfect to be all in one image.

Robert Polidori, (Indian street scenes in which characters, buildings, phone lines are added to make as Polidori states “to make a decisive moment” Following in the realm of Henri Cartier Bresson a French street  photographer 1908-2004 who coined the term in his book published 1952 “The Decisive Moment”  taken from Cardianl de Retz  18th century quote  "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment and the masterpiece of good ruling is to know and seize this moment".  Bresson changed this to read in the opening of his book The Decisive Moment "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment" The American publisher, Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster choose this to be the title. 

Which formed a point of view in the photography world that the image taken should capture life at the precise moment when everything falls into place perfectly. 

Bradley Rubenstein uses portraits of children and then replaces the eyes of the children with puppy dog eyes, which are morphed into child's face, the photograph becomes a haunting eery void of expression. 

©Bradley Rubenstein

Debbie Grossman used photographs from Russell Lee 1903-1986, one of the many photographers who worked for the Roosevelt era Farm Security Administration an appointed commission which documented the 1930 depression era for the United States government.  The artist collected from the Library of Congress archives Russel Lee’s photographs from the FSA works portfolio called “Pie Town”. She then manipulated the original photographs by making the faces of the men more feminine, brought the women closer together to form a statement of intimacy and added a subdued color of that period making the photos believable.  The series is called “My Pie Town” as Debbie Grossman states, “Seventy years later, I am drawn to a similar utopian ideal. I'm filled with a longing to connect with that time and the people in Lee’s images – I've had a lifelong obsession with frontier life. I fantasize about locating myself within those pictures and that time. So in an attempt to make the history I wish was real, I have made over Pie Town to mirror my fantasy”. ( source More About Pie Town : www.debbiegrossman.com )

Another photographer drawn to the FSA works is Kota Ezawa who uses geometrical abstract lines of black and white strips to recreate the famous photograph of “Barber Chairs” from Walker Evans Farm Security Administration works of the 1930s.   The portfoilo is part of a series called “The History of Photography Remix” which he reworks the image through hand-tracing and computer manipulation, which stages a critique of photography without actually presenting it. (source www.artpace.com 21 Mar 2011).

©Kota Ezawa

One of the most powerful images that struck me was work done by Joan Fontcuberta. By taking thousands of google images she stitched them together using a density mapping technique or DOT density, with light and dark images. The viewer first notices the large image which upon looking closer it is composed of tiny images each one of an individual frame or dot, when standing back five feet the larger photograph comes into focus. Fontcuberta established a latent image by use of of this technique of first fixed photograph made in 1826 ever made by Niepce 1765-1833 a French inventor/photographer.  It is a well executed use of the digital age melding into the past of when photography was first invented.

  

©Joan Fontcuberta

MoMA show 

THE SHAPING OF NEW VISIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM, PHOTOBOOK

The show at the Museum of Modern Art show was quite different in style from the MET show. The show covered works from 1910 s to the current trend of the photo world. The works touch on many art movements from Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Minimalist, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art. The four galleries showed photo books, traditional prints and manipulated digital photomontages. Unconventional and innovative ideas that range from photograms and photomontages to experimental films and photo books. The show moved from the concept of the risk takers, the avant guard or visionary makers of photography. Photomontages by Man Ray with film clips playing on the wall along side László Moholy-Nagy works with Helen Levitt street photos on an old Kodak carousel slide projector.  The galleries moved from time periods carrying the viewer into each generation of the new idea of photography.  Lee Freidlander fourteen American monuments project, Bernd and Hilla Becher Bauhaus design stylized architectural portfolios, William Eggleston’s Guide, portfolio, and Ed Ruscha Twenty-six Gas Stations fold out books where followed by the artist I will focus on.

Austrian writer composer, photographer Gerhard Ruhm, made into small scrap books or small diaries which showed voyeuristic photos of the notion of how woman are portrayed in society as wife, model, sex object and pornography. 

©Gerhard Ruhm

The photo montages of Martha Rosler with titles First Lady, House Beautiful, Runway, Cleaning the Drapes.  The work is composed of a single image where cutouts are placed onto the final print and rephotographed. The images are powerful statements of the time period of 1967-1972.  The suburbia blindness of America, the Vietnam war, and feminism.  They are simple works but are very strong in their content and design.

©Martha Rosler

A series of images followed by 6 books from Paul Graham consisted of one single staged image shot different perspectives of a woman who in some form of poverty on a porch smoking a cigarette, eating fast food and drinking. The images have an impact of tedium of the suffering or mental process of what might it be like to be poor?

©Paul Graham

Other works consisted of Philip Lorca di Corcia who’s works also staged show an idea of America, removed lonely souls, searching or questioning the sense of being. The posed potrait photographs give the emotional affect of the question of despair, loneliness, depression. 

©Philip Lorca di Corcia

Quote from show" The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." El Lissitzky

The artists I looked at explore constructing a narrative in their works. Deliberately staged scenes, or montaged images originate creative inspirational imagination. These artist give the viewer convincingly perceptions of real scenes, symbolizing photography to depict the physical appearance of things that are untrue.  Many presenting the question of the denoting establishment of standard photography by reconstructing the photograph.  I was mystified by both the shows of looking into the illusionary world of manipulation of the photograph. The artist works in the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exposed a new age of looking at the world which has been around for twenty plus years. Both of these shows focused on the idea of artists using manipulation of photographs to create works that simulate the audience to make unreal real.  

 Before me was a world that was created by a thought process that I never really looked into, since I myself was trained as a documentary, photojournalist style of work, that the camera tells the truth.  As I starred at the images I consumed each one like a good meal. I realized that by dodging, burning, or cropping, I myself manipulate the image in a small sense of the craft of darkroom printing. 

  

Following the shows I had two appointments one with Robert Frank and a portfolio review set up by one of the board members with APERTURE Foundations president Chris Boot.  Robert Frank and I met and we talked of work and photography.  At APERTURE Chris felt my work was strong and in the sense or tradition of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, but... “The world of contemporary photography has changed the traditional street photographer, working with film, darkrooms, and leica camera’s are really pass’e.   The ideas are based on concept more then technique”. I read this passage from Andy Grundberg's book, Crisis of the Real APERTURE PRESS states, "The character of photography in the new millennium will be something more overtly fabricated, manipulative, artificial, and self conscious then the photography we have come to know."

 I was baffled.  I walked forty blocks thinking where thirty years had gone and I was asleep?  How why, when where did it all go?  So I started to rethink myself as a street photographer back in my studio. My new body of work deals with the manipulating the image by placing cut outs onto a master print and rephotographing the image with a digital camera then going into APERTURE and blending images into the background to make a final print.  The aim is make photographs based on the tradition of the street photography but deconstructing the work into a political or social narrative for the viewer

Robert Frank’s hand and Leica ©MIAH