“untitled at the moment”

Big RED & Shiny just published an interview that I did with photographer Harold Feinstein.

He had this great quote, “When your mouth drops open….click the shutter.”

To read more (click here)

Bill Beckley:  You were born in France, but you have lived a long time in the United States.  What is the difference between the aesthetics of the two countries?

Louis Bourgeois:  I’ll tell you a story about my mother.  When I was a little girl, growing up in France, my mother worked sewing tapestries.  Some of the tapestries were exported to America.  The only problem was that many of the images on the tapestries were of naked people.  My mother’s job was to cut out the, what do you call it?

BB:  The genitals?

LB:  Yes, the genitals of the men and women, and replace these parts with pictures of flowers so they could be sold to Americans.  My mother saved all of the pictures of the genitals over the years, and one day she sewed them all together as a quilt and then she gave the quilt to me.  That’s the difference between French and American aesthetics.

(An interview titled, “Sunday Afternoons: A Conversation and a Remark on Beauty” from the book  Uncontrollable Beauty)

P.L. diCorcia was the guest lecturer at MassArt this afternoon. The crowd of about 200 students looked at work stemming from his grad school days at Yale, to his Hustler images from Santa Monica Boulevard to the flash portraits of Times Square.

Capturing the dark side of Hollywood, diCorcia spent about two years photographing the male hustlers around Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A.  These extremely controlled images were presented at MoMA way before ever having gallery representation.  They were not a hit at first – MoMA even called the series, ‘Strangers’ because they were too afraid to disclose what they really were.  diCorcia paid these hustlers (with money received from a NEA grant) the lowest common denominator of what they charged for sex at that time.  He said most people agreed to being photographed, but all they were interested in was getting paid.

diCorcia joked about having people refer to the series of images he shot about strippers as ‘sculptural’.  “Why can’t they say it’s just some strippers on a pole?  If people want to justify what it is I do, that’s fine as long as it helps them to purchase the work.”  Another classic quote was, “There is a narrative, but you have to fill in the blanks yourself….I’m not a public service.”  For the most part people know his work is autobiographical, and he says they get mad when he doesn’t disclose it.

Although he skipped around a lot and his images were not in sequence, his lecture was entertaining and insightful.  I’m almost wishing his retrospective was still up at the ICA.  I may have wanted to take a second look.

My summer has flown by, thanks in part to all of the reading and writing I do for my MFA program (cause it’s never ending).  I have been working on a paper about the museum, the collection and the archive.  It’s funny how you can attach yourself to a snippet of information during a lecture, and the next thing you know, you are off writing a research paper and actually enjoy it.  Unfortunately, this paper will not be used in my thesis (at least I can’t see it right now)…but who knows.

I have been lining up people to photograph this fall.  As I pointed out in an earlier blog, I switched over to color and it’s working out OK.  I say just OK because I need to learn to use it to say something, not just use it to use it.

Here’s another quote from my “Foto Fortunes” project:

 

(Laurie Simmons - Walking Camera I)

My wife cut out a page from the current Oprah Magazine titled, LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE and it included the above images and this quote:

“Sometimes, I imagine my own life as a series of snapshots taken by some omniscient artist who is just keeping track - not interfering or saying anything, just capturing the moment for me to look back at it again later….This is the way it is, the photograph says, and I nod my head in appreciation.  The power of art is in that nod of appreciation,  though sometimes I puzzle nothing out, and the nod is more a shrug.  No, I do not understand this one, but I see it.  I take it in.  I will think about it.  If I sit with the image long enough, this story, I have the hope of understanding something I did not understand before.  And that, too, is art, the best art.”

- Dorothy Allison, from “This Is Our World”

I’m not sure if the “others” that this fortune is referring to will agree, but it’s sure nice to get these kinds of messages from the art gods wherever they may be.

“A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture.  The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.  My concerns are not his.  We have separate ambitions for the image.  His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.”
-Richard Avedon 

(reproduced from the article, What’s in a Face?  Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography.   October Magazine, Fall 2007, No. 122. p. 71-90)

I went to the PRC early on Thursday and had the opportunity to meet one on one with Ms. Barney before her lecture.  I talked to her about “the gaze”, a project I’m currently working on this semester as well as writing about.  She gave me a ton of suggestions and ideas to follow up on.  She said she began to understand it more after she had her portrait painted.  We flipped through her book, which she signed for me, and she pointed out various gazes and explained the relationship they had with her, whether the sitter was her brother, a friend or a stranger.  She even went on to discus it in her lecture.

One interesting quote she said was, “A person’s gaze is made up of everything they see from the time they are born up until now determines their gaze.  How their head sits on their neck, how the neck sits on their shoulders, and so on.”

Most of the lecture mirrored similar stories that I heard in her movie, Social Studies that recently was shown on The Sundance Channel.

I just finished this great book edited by Charles H. Traub titled, The Education of a Photographer. The book is split up into many different stories, interviews and endless quotes and ideas that is a must for any undergraduate or graduate student studying this medium.

There have been plenty of times that I found myself in a rut trying to come up with an idea or a project to photograph next.  This quote by Peter MacGill has given me one option :

“Stay away from what you have seen or done before.  Nurture your convictions.  If you find yourself in a corner, photograph your way out.” 

“It may be that one of the reasons visual art is so highly valued and so important to so many cultures is that it provides examples and models for how we might fit into the world.”

-James Elkins, The Object Stares Back, p. 85