Friday, March 5, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
sampling, from Echo
Here's some more new work from Echo, which is a collection and mediation project. The work starts with a visual "text" that's created from pairing 2 or 3 images in narrative form, say, a wall of fog and fences. A bookwork results from this. The next stage is a sampling of the "text", where images are taken out of their original context and grouped with other images to form assemblages.
So far, there are 4 volumes of Echo. I'll be exhibiting prints and all 4 volumes at the Photo-Bookworks exhibition at the Sheehan Gallery and at the Visual Studies Workshop. I'm also be working with VSW on future volumes this summer that will be published under their imprint.
Photo-Bookworks Essay for JAB
Visual and Verbal Experience in Photo-Bookworks
by David Schulz
An effective way to examine operational modes of photography within the book form is to studyvisual motifs. In terms of structure, one frequently encounters three primary approaches: Series, Narrative, and Collage. These motifs act as gears that engage the photographs and provide opportunities for (mis)aligning the visual content through the graphic structure of a bookwork. As one observes the ways that photographs operate within a context of graphic motifs that generate meaning, one may also begin to consider how the photographic images engage with one another in terms of verbal experience. The books presented in this verbal/visual essay demonstrate that whether or not a visual work is prompted with verbal language, such as clues found in titles, captions, or ephemera, a photo-bookwork employs various linguistic conventions. Each work situates itself on a trajectory of literal (or non-literal) reading that also acknowledges both its structural and perceptual processes. Within their formal contexts, photographs utilize a multitude of strategies for referencing, representing, and simulating language. These operations can be found within a single image, between two or more images, through the use of parallel narratives, text and image, and many other forms.
A survey of the intersection between visual and verbal experience can be seen to exist on a continuum that spans, horizontally, from photographs with text to photographs with no text, and, vertically, from photographs whose meaning is generated by their representational content, to photographs whose meaning is generated by a subversion of representational content.
Details of the books are shown here with numbers corresponding to brief written descriptions. Works are arranged in clusters that share similar motifs. All of the books utilize photography as a central medium and exist as an artwork in book form, to be distinguished from a catalogue, monograph, or merely a description of an artwork. Some are editioned, some are not, some books are in their second or third (or more) printing and have had a huge commercial success, while others remain undiscovered by all but a specialized audience. Some works here represent an overt evolutionary stage in a work of art following a performance-based piece, and in their use of diverse media and intentional design transcend that of mere documentation. These books achieve not only a representation of an event, but a visual configuration that activates the reader, in a parallel process of discovery and invention.
Other kinds of evolutionary expressions shown here present staging opportunities for the critical understanding of a work and its life in a social context, as with the re-constitutional strategies of the publisher Errata Editions. Taking a first-edition bookwork of great influence and educational importance that is out-of-print, Errata Editions meticulously re-photographs each page and reconstructs a replica, thus making the bookwork once again available.
Finally, over the last few years, photography-based books have enjoyed an increasing interest by the masses. This is perhaps not surprising given the recent technological innovations, such as online print-on-demand services, that make producing a book very easy. It is notable, however, that people should want to make and consume books given the availability of virtually everything on the web. Why do we need objects when their virtual doppelganger is easily consumed online? Possibly, the instant-access and non-physicality of images and information online (much of which has a very short life cycle) not only references its physical counterpart in books, but also stimulates a desire for them.
1 Visible World by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Walther König, 2001
Journeying through Visible World, one moves contiguously from continent to continent by
means of a grid-based structure that directs a narrative of form and color. Propelled by a
lightness and quickness that overcomes any complex human experience, one goes
everywhere in the visible world through proximity and variation.
2 Album by Hans Peter Feldman, Walther König, 2009
Comprised of a wide variety of printed media, Album demonstrates through its countless
subjects: mug shots, bikini-clad stars, cigarette advertisements, animals, etc., the ability of
a photographic archive, through the use of grids and collections, to assemble and collate
objects and forms, and in their efficaciousness, carry out radical purging and reformations
of visual meaning.
3 Atlas by Gerhard Richter, D.A.P., 1997
Atlas is an epic collection of images from newspapers, magazines, family photo albums,
and painting studies, driven by the indexicality of the photograph, through which Richter
pursued his idea that there are “no individual images.” The organizing principles of each
sheet: series, grid, and collage allow for a work of “approximations, experiments, and
beginnings, over and over again.”
4 Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Ed Ruscha, Ed Ruscha, 1966
The serial imagery in Every Building, in conjunction with its structural accordion form,
evokes movement from picture to picture, as one walks (or drives) down the Sunset Strip.
These photographs call attention to their indexicality, turning their subjects into specimens
that promote a comparison with other (un)like objects.
5 Evidence by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, D.A.P., 2003
If seriality and proximity are ingredients that promote visual movement by creating likenesses
between disparate images, Evidence has inverted that formulation. The design of this work—
a series of variably sized and proportioned photographs of varying number on each page—
utilizes proximity and rhythm to stanch the expediency and formality of viewing images. One
stops and lingers on the possibility and relevance of each non sequitur.
6 An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon, Steidl, 2007
The range of non sequiturs in American Index harken back to the infinite possibilities found
in Atlas or Album. Here the relevance of the image (with descriptive text) is pegged to the
dynamism of each viewer’s imagination. Through a single photographic image shown on each
page, access is given to something as real as you want it to be—an index of the possible.
7 Memories of a Dog by Daido Moriyama, Nazraeli Press, 2004
As his eponym demonstrates, Moriyama’s subjects are formal studies of interiority, i.e. maps
of memories. In fact, his memories appear to be very much alive and living in the present,
prone to revision with every new visual experience. On each page, a single image appears as
a confrontation holding forth as icon and portal.
8 Riding First Class on the Titanic by Nathan Lyons, MIT Press, 2000
By inducing synergy through the parallel use of text within an image, and an image sequence
structure (two photographs per opening), Lyons presents the viewer with an opportunity to
make associations between discrete units of visual information that samples a dialogue form.
To a viewer activated in this way, one’s experience of places, things and events in time
becomes a form of reading and re-reading.
9 Ozone Alert by John Wood, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1996
Elegiac in form, tone, and rhythm, the viewer is presented with a singular sequence of
landscape images from post-accident Three-Mile Island overlaid with the names of indigenous
birds. The structural relationship of image and text signifies a surrogate identity of creatures
whose lives in absentia continue to bear witness to a traumatic act.
10 The Newport Museum Postcard Museum by Madeline Djerejian, Self-Published, 2008
Navigating through a museum, one finds objects, images, and artifacts that are presented to the
viewer in conjunction with display information that directs and illuminates the viewer’s
experience. In Newport Museum, Djerejian focuses on the more subjective encounters of
these viewing opportunities, whose impressions—postcard-sized photographic interpretations
of her navigations through the collections—create a relief in relation to the institution’s
presentation strategies.
11 Mine Fields by Bill Burke, Nexus Press, 1995
For Burke, creating a palimpsest of photographic image and text becomes an examination of
parallel experiences. Collages of portraits, documents, ephemera, and hand-written messages
create visual relationships that tell the story of Burke’s failing marriage within the backdrop
of Pol Pot’s atrocities during the 1970s in Cambodia.
12 Jens F. by Collier Schorr, SteidlMack, 2005
With each viewing, meanings derived from the collaged photographic images find revision in
proximity to hand-written notes of description and narration. In Jens F., Schorr finds a
doppelganger to Andrew Wyeth’s Helga, a poetic vehicle of desire, latency, and power.
13 A New History of Photography by Ken Schles, Schaden White Press, 2008
The subtitle, “The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads,” foreshadows the pages that
follow with a presence and visual pacing that likens photographs to mental images. Structured
like Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography, New History is composed of pages that
privilege the autonomy of the image (2–8 per spread), but, in the end, veers far from Newhall’s
hierarchies and conclusions to explore, instead, the intertextuality of creative influence.
14 Fast/Days by Morten Andersen, Centro Portugues de Fotografia, 2007
Lush, full-bleed, black-and-white images made in New York and Tokyo compose fragmentary
objects and moments. In Fast/Days, a narrative of memories is recounted by a profile, a
shadow, or a dark city street—in every case, an apparition brought to light through a noir-
existence disembodied from its past.
15 First, Jay Comes by Takashi Homma, Match and Co., 2009
The depiction of blood on snow in the forest through color photographs and paintings evinces a
parallel existence of image and object—we see with more than just our eyes. The page-by-
page progression establishes a dialogue between the media that heightens our experience as
we become aware of the importance of our own viewing associations in completing the work.
16 Toshi-e (Towards the City) by Yutaka Takanashi, Errata Editions, 2009
The physical distance one senses between the photographer and his subjects, coupled with
the design of the work—single images lining the bottom half of pages with adjacent gray
boxes—lends itself to a narrative leading towards something, in this case, at least figuratively,
a city. Furthermore, the trope of the city underscores the aggressive terrritory-marking activities
of an individual shaping and transforming one’s identity.
17 U-NI-Ty by Michael Schmidt, Scalo Verlag, 1996
Through the use of constellations of images that vary in size and content, U-NI-Ty explores the
possibilities of the subjective in the face of German history and ideology. Photographs form
mental images that indexically reference individual experience and stimulate collective memory.
18 Berlin in the Time of the Wall by John Gossage, Loose Strife Editions, 2004 Exploring the
visibility of empty spaces surrounding the Berlin Wall, Gossage designed his work as an
environment—each spread containing a different arrangement of photographs and staging
strategies—one that represents a place that is fecund with the stories that determine its
geographical phenomena.
19 Fait by Sophie Ristelhueber, Errata Editions, 2009
In addition to revealing its stories through environmental spaces, a place might also present
objects that are the result of human actions. This is the case in Fait where, page after page,
one experiences these objects as marks in the Earth. Here, photographic images of the deep
lines, craters, and fissures form a textual aftermath on the Kuwaiti landscape after the first
Gulf war with Iraq. Taken from many vantage points, one often has a bird’s eye view of the
ground that presents the viewer with a rebus-type narrative of past events.
20 Chizu (The Map) by Kikuji Kawada, Nazraeli Press, 2005
Comprised of a contiguous series of abstract full-bleed photographic images of marks and
visual ephemera on the walls of the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima, Chizu is a mapping of the
subjective experiences that are at once personal and collective, rooted in a specific place
holding great symbolic value. From its many interspersed gatefolds, one experiences a
profound point of departure from the linearity of a map into a multivalent environmental
immersion.
21 Journey Without Title by Balazs Czeizl, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1995
How do we distinguish between images that represent our memories from images that we see
everyday? In Journey Without Title we are confronted by a series of object-images, autonomous
in their sequencing within the bookwork, illuminating an experience of near-misses that
disorient as they progress, while giving promise to a future of comprehension through familiarity.
22 Sunbird by Jason Fulford, J & L Books, 2000
If meaning derived from experience resides, at least partly, in the retention of images in one’s
conscious or unconscious mind, then the vast collections of images within and among us
present associative opportunities for poetic scrutiny. In Sunbird, ready-made images from this
inner-collection are posed in groups of two to four on each opening, situated both vertically
and horizontally alongside unrelated fictional quips, creating vast parallel narratives.
23 Landmasses and Railways by Bertrand Fleuret, J & L Books, 2009
The mechanical reproduction of black-and-white Xeroxed pages provides the staging area for
a purely subjective visual travelogue into a city. Each page, a single full-bleed image, is
presented as a component of one of several levels of immersion into Landmasses and
Railways that reads like pure fiction.
24 A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham, SteidlMack, 2009
A Shimmer of Possibility is a structural examination of the unfolding of individual experience.
Enacting multiple series of photographs, ranging from one to ten images, whose subject
matter probes American iconography of the dispossessed, one is confronted with the
proposition that the discrete intervals of our lives—like the sequencing of film stills—present
significant opportunities for [dis]engagement in the world.
25 Fields by Michal Rovner, Steidl, 2005
In a digital era, the relationship of code to image takes on a particular gestural relevance.
Here, we are confronted with mutating image-aggregations based on scientific archetypes,
i.e., Petri dishes, DNA strands, Rosetta Stones, whose compositions are built with micro-
photographs of individual men standing, walking, and dancing. This work inverts the idea
that we consume images.
26 The Solitude of Ravens by Masahisa Fukase, Bedford Arts, 1991
With the raven, Fukase traces an emotional totemic arc that phasically considers his kinship
through death, loneliness, and fruitless wandering. The full-page black-and-white images of
ravens perching together at night—eyes glowing towards the camera; in flight; being hunted
by cats; or pictured against the backdrop of snow—have a strong graphic quality that
conjures calligraphic writing. As such, this work reads as a pictographic record of sorrow.
27 Still Water by Roni Horn, SITE Santa Fe, 2000
Full-bleed photographs of the surface of water poetically illustrate Horn’s notion of water: it is a
dependent form and its shape is determined by what is in proximity to it (thus, in Still Water, it
flows from opening to opening between two covers in the codex form); it acts as a solvent for
many things and hence accommodates many presences (numbered literary/historical
references appear below the images on each page evincing multiple contexts); and it remains
constant everywhere in the world, physically and ontologically, through its simultaneous
existence as thing and image.
28 A Record of Past Walks in Existing Landscapes by Hamish Fulton, Publié pour le Centre d’Art
de Kerguehennec et la Galerie Laage Salomon, 1988
In its mixing of photographic image and text, and photographic image as text, Walking Through
is as much a meditation on the human imagination in the landscape as it is a document of
Fulton’s walking through the landscape. Motifs such as repeated boulders blocking pathways
and open roads suggest Sisyphean attempts to traverse and intervene in nature’s processes.
29 Weavings, Performance #2 (Portland, Oregon) by Corin Hewitt, J and L Books, 2009
Weavings is the manifestation of a complex matrix of performance, object, image, history, and
personal story. More than a mere document of an event, diverse media including Polaroids,
photographic prints, and drawings of various sizes juxtapose one another as they signify
a process-based experience.
by David Schulz
An effective way to examine operational modes of photography within the book form is to studyvisual motifs. In terms of structure, one frequently encounters three primary approaches: Series, Narrative, and Collage. These motifs act as gears that engage the photographs and provide opportunities for (mis)aligning the visual content through the graphic structure of a bookwork. As one observes the ways that photographs operate within a context of graphic motifs that generate meaning, one may also begin to consider how the photographic images engage with one another in terms of verbal experience. The books presented in this verbal/visual essay demonstrate that whether or not a visual work is prompted with verbal language, such as clues found in titles, captions, or ephemera, a photo-bookwork employs various linguistic conventions. Each work situates itself on a trajectory of literal (or non-literal) reading that also acknowledges both its structural and perceptual processes. Within their formal contexts, photographs utilize a multitude of strategies for referencing, representing, and simulating language. These operations can be found within a single image, between two or more images, through the use of parallel narratives, text and image, and many other forms.
A survey of the intersection between visual and verbal experience can be seen to exist on a continuum that spans, horizontally, from photographs with text to photographs with no text, and, vertically, from photographs whose meaning is generated by their representational content, to photographs whose meaning is generated by a subversion of representational content.
Details of the books are shown here with numbers corresponding to brief written descriptions. Works are arranged in clusters that share similar motifs. All of the books utilize photography as a central medium and exist as an artwork in book form, to be distinguished from a catalogue, monograph, or merely a description of an artwork. Some are editioned, some are not, some books are in their second or third (or more) printing and have had a huge commercial success, while others remain undiscovered by all but a specialized audience. Some works here represent an overt evolutionary stage in a work of art following a performance-based piece, and in their use of diverse media and intentional design transcend that of mere documentation. These books achieve not only a representation of an event, but a visual configuration that activates the reader, in a parallel process of discovery and invention.
Other kinds of evolutionary expressions shown here present staging opportunities for the critical understanding of a work and its life in a social context, as with the re-constitutional strategies of the publisher Errata Editions. Taking a first-edition bookwork of great influence and educational importance that is out-of-print, Errata Editions meticulously re-photographs each page and reconstructs a replica, thus making the bookwork once again available.
Finally, over the last few years, photography-based books have enjoyed an increasing interest by the masses. This is perhaps not surprising given the recent technological innovations, such as online print-on-demand services, that make producing a book very easy. It is notable, however, that people should want to make and consume books given the availability of virtually everything on the web. Why do we need objects when their virtual doppelganger is easily consumed online? Possibly, the instant-access and non-physicality of images and information online (much of which has a very short life cycle) not only references its physical counterpart in books, but also stimulates a desire for them.
1 Visible World by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Walther König, 2001
Journeying through Visible World, one moves contiguously from continent to continent by
means of a grid-based structure that directs a narrative of form and color. Propelled by a
lightness and quickness that overcomes any complex human experience, one goes
everywhere in the visible world through proximity and variation.
2 Album by Hans Peter Feldman, Walther König, 2009
Comprised of a wide variety of printed media, Album demonstrates through its countless
subjects: mug shots, bikini-clad stars, cigarette advertisements, animals, etc., the ability of
a photographic archive, through the use of grids and collections, to assemble and collate
objects and forms, and in their efficaciousness, carry out radical purging and reformations
of visual meaning.
3 Atlas by Gerhard Richter, D.A.P., 1997
Atlas is an epic collection of images from newspapers, magazines, family photo albums,
and painting studies, driven by the indexicality of the photograph, through which Richter
pursued his idea that there are “no individual images.” The organizing principles of each
sheet: series, grid, and collage allow for a work of “approximations, experiments, and
beginnings, over and over again.”
4 Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Ed Ruscha, Ed Ruscha, 1966
The serial imagery in Every Building, in conjunction with its structural accordion form,
evokes movement from picture to picture, as one walks (or drives) down the Sunset Strip.
These photographs call attention to their indexicality, turning their subjects into specimens
that promote a comparison with other (un)like objects.
5 Evidence by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, D.A.P., 2003
If seriality and proximity are ingredients that promote visual movement by creating likenesses
between disparate images, Evidence has inverted that formulation. The design of this work—
a series of variably sized and proportioned photographs of varying number on each page—
utilizes proximity and rhythm to stanch the expediency and formality of viewing images. One
stops and lingers on the possibility and relevance of each non sequitur.
6 An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon, Steidl, 2007
The range of non sequiturs in American Index harken back to the infinite possibilities found
in Atlas or Album. Here the relevance of the image (with descriptive text) is pegged to the
dynamism of each viewer’s imagination. Through a single photographic image shown on each
page, access is given to something as real as you want it to be—an index of the possible.
7 Memories of a Dog by Daido Moriyama, Nazraeli Press, 2004
As his eponym demonstrates, Moriyama’s subjects are formal studies of interiority, i.e. maps
of memories. In fact, his memories appear to be very much alive and living in the present,
prone to revision with every new visual experience. On each page, a single image appears as
a confrontation holding forth as icon and portal.
8 Riding First Class on the Titanic by Nathan Lyons, MIT Press, 2000
By inducing synergy through the parallel use of text within an image, and an image sequence
structure (two photographs per opening), Lyons presents the viewer with an opportunity to
make associations between discrete units of visual information that samples a dialogue form.
To a viewer activated in this way, one’s experience of places, things and events in time
becomes a form of reading and re-reading.
9 Ozone Alert by John Wood, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1996
Elegiac in form, tone, and rhythm, the viewer is presented with a singular sequence of
landscape images from post-accident Three-Mile Island overlaid with the names of indigenous
birds. The structural relationship of image and text signifies a surrogate identity of creatures
whose lives in absentia continue to bear witness to a traumatic act.
10 The Newport Museum Postcard Museum by Madeline Djerejian, Self-Published, 2008
Navigating through a museum, one finds objects, images, and artifacts that are presented to the
viewer in conjunction with display information that directs and illuminates the viewer’s
experience. In Newport Museum, Djerejian focuses on the more subjective encounters of
these viewing opportunities, whose impressions—postcard-sized photographic interpretations
of her navigations through the collections—create a relief in relation to the institution’s
presentation strategies.
11 Mine Fields by Bill Burke, Nexus Press, 1995
For Burke, creating a palimpsest of photographic image and text becomes an examination of
parallel experiences. Collages of portraits, documents, ephemera, and hand-written messages
create visual relationships that tell the story of Burke’s failing marriage within the backdrop
of Pol Pot’s atrocities during the 1970s in Cambodia.
12 Jens F. by Collier Schorr, SteidlMack, 2005
With each viewing, meanings derived from the collaged photographic images find revision in
proximity to hand-written notes of description and narration. In Jens F., Schorr finds a
doppelganger to Andrew Wyeth’s Helga, a poetic vehicle of desire, latency, and power.
13 A New History of Photography by Ken Schles, Schaden White Press, 2008
The subtitle, “The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads,” foreshadows the pages that
follow with a presence and visual pacing that likens photographs to mental images. Structured
like Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography, New History is composed of pages that
privilege the autonomy of the image (2–8 per spread), but, in the end, veers far from Newhall’s
hierarchies and conclusions to explore, instead, the intertextuality of creative influence.
14 Fast/Days by Morten Andersen, Centro Portugues de Fotografia, 2007
Lush, full-bleed, black-and-white images made in New York and Tokyo compose fragmentary
objects and moments. In Fast/Days, a narrative of memories is recounted by a profile, a
shadow, or a dark city street—in every case, an apparition brought to light through a noir-
existence disembodied from its past.
15 First, Jay Comes by Takashi Homma, Match and Co., 2009
The depiction of blood on snow in the forest through color photographs and paintings evinces a
parallel existence of image and object—we see with more than just our eyes. The page-by-
page progression establishes a dialogue between the media that heightens our experience as
we become aware of the importance of our own viewing associations in completing the work.
16 Toshi-e (Towards the City) by Yutaka Takanashi, Errata Editions, 2009
The physical distance one senses between the photographer and his subjects, coupled with
the design of the work—single images lining the bottom half of pages with adjacent gray
boxes—lends itself to a narrative leading towards something, in this case, at least figuratively,
a city. Furthermore, the trope of the city underscores the aggressive terrritory-marking activities
of an individual shaping and transforming one’s identity.
17 U-NI-Ty by Michael Schmidt, Scalo Verlag, 1996
Through the use of constellations of images that vary in size and content, U-NI-Ty explores the
possibilities of the subjective in the face of German history and ideology. Photographs form
mental images that indexically reference individual experience and stimulate collective memory.
18 Berlin in the Time of the Wall by John Gossage, Loose Strife Editions, 2004 Exploring the
visibility of empty spaces surrounding the Berlin Wall, Gossage designed his work as an
environment—each spread containing a different arrangement of photographs and staging
strategies—one that represents a place that is fecund with the stories that determine its
geographical phenomena.
19 Fait by Sophie Ristelhueber, Errata Editions, 2009
In addition to revealing its stories through environmental spaces, a place might also present
objects that are the result of human actions. This is the case in Fait where, page after page,
one experiences these objects as marks in the Earth. Here, photographic images of the deep
lines, craters, and fissures form a textual aftermath on the Kuwaiti landscape after the first
Gulf war with Iraq. Taken from many vantage points, one often has a bird’s eye view of the
ground that presents the viewer with a rebus-type narrative of past events.
20 Chizu (The Map) by Kikuji Kawada, Nazraeli Press, 2005
Comprised of a contiguous series of abstract full-bleed photographic images of marks and
visual ephemera on the walls of the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima, Chizu is a mapping of the
subjective experiences that are at once personal and collective, rooted in a specific place
holding great symbolic value. From its many interspersed gatefolds, one experiences a
profound point of departure from the linearity of a map into a multivalent environmental
immersion.
21 Journey Without Title by Balazs Czeizl, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1995
How do we distinguish between images that represent our memories from images that we see
everyday? In Journey Without Title we are confronted by a series of object-images, autonomous
in their sequencing within the bookwork, illuminating an experience of near-misses that
disorient as they progress, while giving promise to a future of comprehension through familiarity.
22 Sunbird by Jason Fulford, J & L Books, 2000
If meaning derived from experience resides, at least partly, in the retention of images in one’s
conscious or unconscious mind, then the vast collections of images within and among us
present associative opportunities for poetic scrutiny. In Sunbird, ready-made images from this
inner-collection are posed in groups of two to four on each opening, situated both vertically
and horizontally alongside unrelated fictional quips, creating vast parallel narratives.
23 Landmasses and Railways by Bertrand Fleuret, J & L Books, 2009
The mechanical reproduction of black-and-white Xeroxed pages provides the staging area for
a purely subjective visual travelogue into a city. Each page, a single full-bleed image, is
presented as a component of one of several levels of immersion into Landmasses and
Railways that reads like pure fiction.
24 A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham, SteidlMack, 2009
A Shimmer of Possibility is a structural examination of the unfolding of individual experience.
Enacting multiple series of photographs, ranging from one to ten images, whose subject
matter probes American iconography of the dispossessed, one is confronted with the
proposition that the discrete intervals of our lives—like the sequencing of film stills—present
significant opportunities for [dis]engagement in the world.
25 Fields by Michal Rovner, Steidl, 2005
In a digital era, the relationship of code to image takes on a particular gestural relevance.
Here, we are confronted with mutating image-aggregations based on scientific archetypes,
i.e., Petri dishes, DNA strands, Rosetta Stones, whose compositions are built with micro-
photographs of individual men standing, walking, and dancing. This work inverts the idea
that we consume images.
26 The Solitude of Ravens by Masahisa Fukase, Bedford Arts, 1991
With the raven, Fukase traces an emotional totemic arc that phasically considers his kinship
through death, loneliness, and fruitless wandering. The full-page black-and-white images of
ravens perching together at night—eyes glowing towards the camera; in flight; being hunted
by cats; or pictured against the backdrop of snow—have a strong graphic quality that
conjures calligraphic writing. As such, this work reads as a pictographic record of sorrow.
27 Still Water by Roni Horn, SITE Santa Fe, 2000
Full-bleed photographs of the surface of water poetically illustrate Horn’s notion of water: it is a
dependent form and its shape is determined by what is in proximity to it (thus, in Still Water, it
flows from opening to opening between two covers in the codex form); it acts as a solvent for
many things and hence accommodates many presences (numbered literary/historical
references appear below the images on each page evincing multiple contexts); and it remains
constant everywhere in the world, physically and ontologically, through its simultaneous
existence as thing and image.
28 A Record of Past Walks in Existing Landscapes by Hamish Fulton, Publié pour le Centre d’Art
de Kerguehennec et la Galerie Laage Salomon, 1988
In its mixing of photographic image and text, and photographic image as text, Walking Through
is as much a meditation on the human imagination in the landscape as it is a document of
Fulton’s walking through the landscape. Motifs such as repeated boulders blocking pathways
and open roads suggest Sisyphean attempts to traverse and intervene in nature’s processes.
29 Weavings, Performance #2 (Portland, Oregon) by Corin Hewitt, J and L Books, 2009
Weavings is the manifestation of a complex matrix of performance, object, image, history, and
personal story. More than a mere document of an event, diverse media including Polaroids,
photographic prints, and drawings of various sizes juxtapose one another as they signify
a process-based experience.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Brooklyn—Walla Walla Express
While moving out to the west coast from Brooklyn, after having lived there for nearly 15 years, I found myself experiencing an interminable series of interactions between Leaving and Arriving that gave me some awareness of the present moment, every moment. Each step of the way, I left, I arrived: Brooklyn, New London, Columbia County, Bloomsburg, Madison, Sherry, Minneapolis, Dickinson, Red Lodge, Missoula, Willowa, Walla Walla. The threads that bound me to Brooklyn pulling and stretching and gradually giving way to threads tethering me westward. The present continuously fueled by images of past and future. backward. FORWARD. ni-hao. DEATH PENALTY. cortelyou. BACK YARD WITH GARDEN. don’t block the box. DRY HEAT. natori. MICRO-BREWS. There was never a clear-cut view in any given moment of when my past with Brooklyn was succeeded by my future in Walla Walla, just a steady awareness of a tension existing in my present, evinced by a procession of images demanding to be acknowledged, refusing to be identified, complying only with their individual chronologies.
1, 36
2, 35
3, 34
4, 33
5, 32
6, 31
7, 30
8, 29
9, 28
10, 27
11, 26
12, 25
13, 24
14, 23
15, 22
16, 21
17, 20
18, 19
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
New Photo-bookwork: The Mirror
I self-published this work last November and am finally posting it here. Below is the press release. A solo show of this work opens May 2, in Hudson, New York--Please see previous post.
The Mirror, by David Schulz, edition of 200, offset printed, perfect-bound, 44 pages, 7 x 9”, 2008.
The Mirror is a parallel narrative of photographic image and text that contains a story about a man watching a video of his parents, with his wife. As time unfolds, he realizes his dad is actually alone (in the physical world)—his mother is a ghost. Still later, he realizes he is alone—his wife vanishes into thin air. But the story is not about being alone, it’s about how everything is at once itself and an image of itself. As with a mirror, on one side you stand; on the other, your image stands. In the story, his awareness of his predicament becomes his image.
Formally, The Mirror’s double-paged spreads with full-bleed photographs, mimic the subject-object relationship that plays out in a mirror. The photographic content—peripheral views of the everyday—comments on the ebb and flow of things in the world as we gain conscious recognition of them, and lose them, as we lose our memories, in a fluid state of preformation.
In 2009, The Mirror will be exhibited as a solo exhibition at Gallery 345 in Hudson, New York, starting May 2. The Mirror will also be exhibited as part of a photo-bookworks workshop at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe. And plans are developing for an international photo-bookworks conference hosted by the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York that will include exhibition of The Mirror.
The work of David Schulz is primarily concerned with narrative structures. Through the parallel use of photographic imagery and text, he explores motifs such as reflection, memory, and identity. He employs a peripheral seeing of things in the everyday (trees, roadside curbs, radiators, open spaces) as a primary trope for illuminating substantive human qualities and conditions. Photographically, David’s work generally takes the form of assemblage. Whether it is two images, vertically or horizontally adjacent, or four or five images in a cluster, relationships of images pose questions concerning the physical and metaphysical (what is the difference between things and images of things?); ontology (what is the difference between images and memories?); and language (how do we read images? How do they function linguistically?).
Other photo-bookworks created by David Schulz include Variations of a Fall (Visual Studies Workshop, 2002), Travelogue (Hammer Productions, 2001), and Non-Identifying Social Genetic Report (Hammer Productions, 1999).
David Schulz has exhibited with many galleries and organizations in the New York City area including Gigantic Art Space, the Front Room, Dumbo Arts Center, Pratt Institute (where he is a member of the faculty), the Parrish Art Musuem, and the Cellar Gallery (co-founder, 1996). Additionally, David’s work has been included in two exhibitions at the Brooklyn Art Museum: Artists’ Books, 2000, and Open House, 2004. He is part of the following collectives: Nurture Art, White Columns, Pierogi 2000 (flat files), Art in General, and Gallery 345. His photo-bookworks are held in various national and international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Museum, the Getty Research Library, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
David lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)