Untitled #14, 1999

Letinsky's still life imagery “Hardly More than Ever” (1997-2004), is inspired by Dutch still life painting yet pushes the genre beyond its traditional intention. Her still lifes, taken in the morning light, are a residual record of previous gatherings, whether an intimate get-together or larger event. The leftovers become pieces of a vocabulary that construct a visual and emotive tableau distinctly human yet absent of people. Carefully arranged dirty plates, soiled linens, and crumpled napkins act as metaphors not only for the transience of personal interaction but also the fleeting cherished moments of our busy lives.


Untitled #10, 1999


Untitled #52, 2002


Untitled #80, 2003


Untitled #55, 2002


Untitled #54, 2002


Untitled #43, 2002


Untitled #92, 2004

In "Somewhere, Somewhere" (2003 to the present), Letinsky photographed unfurnished rooms in temporary states of transition left with remnants of activity from a previous occupant and untouched by a new inhabitant. Through compositional elements, cropping, and light, the photographs descriptive function becomes an emotive document revealing the subtle complexity of these once intimate spaces. For example, an interior of a hallway reveals open and closed doors with mirrors and reflections that complicate the architecture. Light shines through the window and off the floor where discarded wrapping tissue sits waiting to be swept away.


Untitled #116, 2006


Untitled #111, 2005


Untitled #104, 2005

Questions-

1. How would youdescribe Letinsky's use of color in her photographs?
2. The author above describes Letinsky's work, writing that the objects in the photographs "act as metaphors not only for the transience of personal interaction but also the fleeting cherished moments of our busy lives." Do you agree?
3. Do you find these photographs boring? Why, or why not?
   

Ch. 4- Something and Nothing- Anthony Hernandez

Anthony Hernandez has long been fascinated with the landscape. He began as a street photographer making 35 mm black and white images of people in the urban landscape. In the mid 1980's he moved from documenting the city to making color images of unpopulated places with a large format camera.

Aliso Village, east of downtown L.A., was a low-income housing complex that was built in the 1940s and torn down in 2000. It is here that Hernandez was born and raised. The Aliso Village images are haunting and empty. They include photographs of graffiti filled walls (Aliso Village 16) and brightly painted closets (Aliso Village 14). To make these images Hernandez would sneak into the buildings when the demolition crew was not there and roam around the vacant spaces. The images evoke memories of another time, when the rooms were furnished and the dwellings populated.


Aliso Village #3


Aliso Village #9


Aliso Village 16


Aliso Village 14

by Jody Zellen

Hernandez is a gifted photographer. He closes in on his subject in order to reveal its intricate details. In the series Landscapes of the Homeless, begun in 1988 and finished in 1991, he carefully documented the out of the way places the homeless retreated to. While photographing these encampments he made sure that no one was about, so as not to disrupt the life of its inhabitants. In these works Hernandez is a voyeur looking in at a community that is obviously other. Yet it is the place, not the people, that interests him.

The resulting large color photographs are aestheticized documents of the homeless' horrible living conditions. These are places built for shelter and survival. Hernandez is not out to artify his subject but rather to point out the inherent contradictions within the urban environment. To make these photographs Hernandez scouted out places where the homeless congregate. The resulting pictures document not only the ingenuity of the homeless but Hernandez' sensitivity to their plight. Viewed at a distance, the images appear to be photographs of the natural landscape. Upon close examination the details of habitation reveal themselves. The contrast between "one's expectation of beauty and the reality of homelessness" is central to the works' impact.

Landscapes for the Homeless #24, 1989


Landscapes for the Homeless #17, 1989


Landscapes for the Homeless #54, 1989


Landscapes for the Homeless #18, 1989

Questions-

1. How does knowing Anthony Hernandez' personal history influence what you think about the Aliso Village photographs?
2. Do you agree with Zellen, when she writes "Hernandez is not out to artify his subject but rather to point out the inherent contradictions within the urban environment?"
3. How does the lack of any human presence effect your experience of Hernandez' images?

Ch. 4- Something and Nothing- Nigel Shafran

From the Cotton book:

The photographs in this chapter show how non-human things, often quite ordinary, everyday objects, can be made extraordinary by being photographed. As the title suggests, the stuff of daily life ostensibly counts as the subject, the "something" of the pictures. But because we may ordinarily pass these objects by, or keep them at the periphery of our vision, we may not automatically give them credence as visual objects within art's lexicon. These photographs retain the thing-ness of ehat they describe, but their subjects are altered conceptually because of the way they have been represented. Through photography, quotidian subject matter is given a visual charge and imaginative possibility beyond its everyday function.


Kitchen Table (from the Dad’s Office series)


Bird's Nest


Washing up 16 March 2000, 1:30 pm 2nd photograph of the day. Breakfast crumpets and tea (more with cottage cheese and honey, Ruth’s with Marmite) with Jose and Claudio (who I think washed up)



Wastepaper Basket - Mayflower Hotel, Beruit 2003


Shannon Family Stairs (from Rachel’s Book)


Bookshelves (Archive Bookshop)

Nigel Shafran's work is characterized by the quiet observation of everyday life. His chosen subject matter is deliberately low-key and often domestic in nature: doing the dishes, his Dad's office, charity shops, flea markets. And yet, his work extracts from this something profound and consistently beautiful, the sense of a natural order in ordinary things, or, as Shafran puts it, "an acceptance of how things are."

Questions:

1. Cotton wrote: "These photographs retain the thing-ness of ehat they describe, but their subjects are altered conceptually because of the way they have been represented." How do you think this idea applies to Nigel Shafran's photography?
2. How do you think Shafran's work expresses "an acceptance of how things are?"
3. What does the quality of light bring to Shafran's work?

Ch. 3- Deadpan Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a wide-ranging artist whose photography takes on many forms, he feels no devotion to any particular subject, other than trying to discover what are the most purely photograhic characteristics of an image.

On his series, "Seascapes", he writes,

One New York night in 1980, during another of my internal question-and-answer sessions, I asked myself, "Can someone today view a scene just as primitive man might have?" The images that came to mind were of Mount Fuji and the Nachi Waterfall in ages past. A hundred thousand or a million years ago would Mount Fuji have looked so very different than it does today? I pictured two great mountains; one, today's Mount Fuji, and the other, Mount Hakone in the days before its summit collapsed, creating the Ashinoko crater lake. When hiking up from the foothills of Hakone, one would see a second freestanding peak as tall as Mount Fuji. Two rivals in height—what a magnificent sight that must have been! Unfortunately, the topography has changed. Although the land is forever changing its form, the sea, I thought, is immutable. Thus began my travels back through time to the ancient seas of the world.


Caribbean Sea, Jamaica 1980


Lake Superior, Cascade River 1995


Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland, 1985


Black Sea, Ozuluce, 1991

For his series "Portraits," Sugimoto writes-

In the sixteenth century Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), Flemish court painter to the British Crown, painted several imposing and regal portraits of Henry VIII. Based on these portraits the highly skilled artisans of Madame Tussauds wax museum re-created an absolutely faithful likeness of the king. Using my own studies of the Renaissance lighting by which the artist might have painted, I remade the royal portrait, substituting photography for painting. If this photograph now appears lifelike to you, perhaps you should reconsider what it means to be alive here and now.


Henry VIII 1999


Catherine of Aragon, 1999


Catherine Howard, 1999


7. Richard III, 1999

Questions-

1. Even though these two bodies of work are very different, can you articulate any way of describing the similarities that Sugimoto takes to these projects?
2. Can you use Sugimoto's work as an example of how Cotton describes (below, first post on chapter 3) the "emotional detachment" of the deadpan aesthetic? Do you think these photographs are emotional?
3. How could you compare the "portrait" series by Sugimoto to the work of Thomas Demand, from the previous chapter?
   

Ch. 3- Deadpan Rineke Dijkstra

From the Guggenheim Museum's website-

Rineke Dijkstra documents people in transitional moments: mothers shortly after giving birth, young people entering the military, matadors still bloody from a bullfight, young club kids just off the dance floor, and preadolescent bathers on various beaches in the United States and Eastern Europe. Formally, her images resemble classical portraiture with their frontally posed figures isolated against minimal backgrounds. Despite their uniformity, however, Dijkstra's pictures deftly expose the emotional state of her individual sitters. Although she isolates the subjects in her Beaches series (1992–96) and frames them with only sea and sky, the artist reveals much about them by capturing a subtle gesture or expression in these unguarded moments that reside somewhere between the posed and the natural. In photographing the already awkward young subjects in their bathing suits, Dijkstra sets up a situation marked by a self-consciousness that parallels the uneasy passage between childhood and adulthood.


Kolobrzeg, Poland, 1992




Dubrovnik, 1996


Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993


Evgenya Dec. 9. 2002


Olivier Silva, The Foreign Legion, Quartier Viénot, Marseille, France, July 21, 2000


Olivier Silva, The Foreign Legion, Quartier Viénot, Marseille, France, July 21, 2000


Olivier Silva, The Foreign Legion, Les Guerdes, France, November 1, 2000


Olivier Silva, The Foreign Legion, Camp Raffalli, Calvi, France, June 18, 2001

Questions-

1. Why do you think Dijkstra chooses to take such a similar approach to framing all of her portrait subjects?
2. The quote from the Guggenheim website claims that Dijkstra's photographs illustrate the "self-concsiousness" of her subjects. How do you think they do this?
3. Why do you think Dijkstra chooses to photograph her subjects in "transitional" moments?

Ch. 3- Deadpan Edward Burtynsky

Charlotte Cotton writes-

More photography has been created for the gallery walls in the last decade than any other period of the medium's history. And the most prominent, and probably the most frequently used, style has been that of the deadpan aesthetic: a cool, detatched and keenly sharp type of photography. Here the reader is at the mercy of the leveling out that occurs when photographs are reproduced in a book. The monumental scale and breathtaking visual clarity that predominate when one experiences the photographic print need to be kept in mind. But what can still be seen in a glance if one looks through the images in this chapter is the seeming emotional detachment and command an the part of the photographers. The adoption of the deadpan aesthetic moves art photography outside of the hyperbolic, sentimental and subjective. These pictures may engage us with emotive subjects, but our sense of what the photographer's emotions might be is not the obvious guide to understanding the meaning of the images. The emphasis, then, is on photography as a way of mapping the extent of the forces, invisible from a single human standpoint, that govern the man-made and the natural world. Deadpan photography may be highly specific in its description of its subjects, but its seeming neutrality and tonality of vision is of epic proportions.


Oxford Tire Pile #8 Westley, California, 1999

Edward Burtynsky's photography is a prime example of what Cotton describes as the "deadpan" aesthetic.

From his artitst's statement-

Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.


Shipbreaking #5, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000


Shipbreaking #12 Chittagong, Bangladesh 2000


Shipbreaking #21 Chittagong, Bangladesh 2000


Shipbreaking #1 Chittagong, Bangladesh 2000


Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, 2005

Questions on Burtynsky's work-
1. After reading Burtynsky's statement and seeing some photographs, how do you think his work fits into Cotton's definition of the "deadpan" aesthetic?
2. How would you compare Burtynsky's work to a more traditonal landscape phtotographer, like Ansel Adams?
3. How do you think Burtynsky's photographs create, as he says, a "dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear."

CH. 2- Once Upon a Time- Thomas Demand

Art in America, June 2005 by Pepe Karmel

A few years ago, my son and I took the shuttle bus from Orlando to Disneyworld. As we drove through the flat Florida landscape, I noticed that the woman sitting next to me was wearing the ID tag of a Disney employee. She was from southern Germany, it turned out, and worked in the Bavarian beer garden at Epcot Center. Wasn't it strange, I asked her, to work in a replica of the place she came from? "The town I grew up in was bombed during the war, and then rebuilt to look exactly the same as it did before," she said. "So it isn't really that different."

Like the German pavilion at Epcot Center, Thomas Demand's photographs offer a cleaner, heater version of the real world. At first glance, they appear to be straightforward records of unremarkable locations: offices, auditoriums, hallways, kitchens, bathrooms, staircases, stadiums and gardens, the familiar sites of mass society. It seems mildly perverse to give modest documents such heroic presentation: enlarged to mural scale and laminated to gleaming sheets of Plexiglas. And there is something off about the scenes in Demand's photographs. They record the traces of human activity, but no people appear in them. The surfaces are too smooth, the edges too sharp. Sometimes things are damaged, but they never betray the wear-and-tear of daily life. To walk through the retrospective of Demand's (mostly very large) photographs (1993-2004) at the Museum of Modern Art was to enter an unsettling alternate universe.

Like Epcot Center, everything in Demand's work is a fake, a meticulously constructed replica in paper and cardboard. Unlike Epcot Center, Demand's pictures often lead the viewer into a troubling confrontation with history, both German and international. A 1994 photograph with the anodyne title Room shows a conference room in a shambles: table collapsed, windows askew, moldings tumbled to the floor, chairs overturned. This is Demand's re-creation of the military conference room where Count Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Four people were killed and the room was demolished, but Hitler survived.

Room, 1994


"Tunnel"- stills from a video, a recreation of the scene of Princess Diana's death


Sink, 1997


Space Simulator, 2003


Archive, 1995


Gate, 2004