Round Up Week of May 3
/The Producer’s picks for this week’s news relevant to the photography, art, design and production industries:
1) Picture this: Intimacy
Marie, 2018 © Senta Simond.
Robbie Lawrence, Senta Simond, Chad Moore, Matthew Morrocco, and others, reflect on the experience of intimacy amid the current crisis — the second in a series of articles inviting artists to respond to a theme with image and text
The camera does not belong in intimate moments — a foreign object that threatens to disrupt a delicate exchange. And intimacy, in all its subtlety and nuance, may itself prove challenging to capture. Perhaps this is why it so affecting when one does.
Intimacy can also work to create an image: the existence of an intimate relationship between artist and sitter making for a more compelling photograph than if there was none.
At a time when social-distancing has driven a wedge between people, hindering physical and perhaps also emotional intimacy, or forced them to be more ‘intimate’ than ever, confined within the walls of their homes, what image does the word evoke for you?
2) A Different Side to Dorothea Lange
Credit: dorothea lange
Many of the black-and-white images in the new book “Day Sleeper,” by the photographer Sam Contis, look similar to Contis’s own: arid landscapes etched with fencing, cropped views of work-roughened hands, and unstaged, sunlit portraits. For her 2017 volume “Deep Springs,” for instance, Contis focussed on the liberal-arts junior college of the same name, in California—it’s also a functioning desert-valley ranch—to reflect on the mythos of the American West. But, for this project, Contis was not the searching photographer but the instigator, excavator, and editor. None other than Dorothea Lange took the pictures.
Contis culled most of the contents of her lyrical monograph from Lange’s archive, which has been housed at the Oakland Museum of California since Lange’s death, in 1965. Looking through the countless negatives and contact sheets there (the majority of them, it’s hard to believe, have never before been publicly shown), Contis became acquainted with a lesser-known Lange—a keenly observant and prolific artist who did not put down her camera when off assignment nor define herself by her most famous works. Historic images of Lange’s, such as “White Angel Breadline,” from 1933, and “Migrant Mother,” from 1936—both nonpareil emblems of New Deal modernism, produced while Lange was working for federal agencies—endure as distilled, public-domain representations of the Great Depression. And perhaps now they also serve as monuments to a bygone faith in the potential of documentarians to drive social change. Contis’s project, which presents Lange’s images nonchronologically, and without captions, loosens the photographer from the grip of her legacy and lets her work breathe—just in time, it seems, for a new era of suffering.
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3) African Cosmologies — Photography, Time, and the Other
BC1-ND-FC: By and by, I Will Carry this Burden of Hope, till the Laments of my Newborn is Heard #2, 2017. From the series Blazing Century 1, Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos, 2011–17. © Wilfred Ukpong.
Mark Sealy guides us through the work of eight artists from an exhibition he originally curated for FotoFest 2020, examining the relationships between contemporary African life, the diaspora, and global histories of photography and colonialism
“It’s like having a 60th birthday party,” says Mark Sealy, alluding to the 33 artists included in his latest exhibition, African Cosmologies — Photography, Time, and the Other. “I follow artists for a long time — I could be in dialogue with 20 or 30 people for years, sometimes decades. If you live long enough, you can eventually bring these different relationships together in the same room. Hopefully, they’ll all get on, and celebrate the relationships that they share”.
Featuring artists of the African diaspora, the exhibition presents decades of work that examine the social and political conditions that inform concepts of representation, and in doing so question the ways in which subjectivity is constructed by the camera. “Most of the artists are talking about the politics of their time,” says Sealy, referring to the work of Ernest Cole, who documented apartheid in South Africa, for example, or the perfomative portraiture of Wilfred Ukpong, who deals with the social issues facing the embattled oil-rich territory of the Niger Delta.
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4) Eight Photographers’ Pictures From Isolation
In the recent weeks and months, the photographers whose work is shown here have captured moments of connection and self-reflection, as well as evidence of the enduring power of nature. Credit...Clockwise from top left: Renée Cox; Richard Mosse; Wayne Lawrence; © Asako Narahashi; Domingo Milella; © Hitoshi Fugo, courtesy of Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery; © Joel Meyerowitz, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery; Alec Soth
“Like a high-strung racehorse who needs extra weight in her saddle pad, I like a handicap and relish the aesthetic challenge posed by the limitations of the ordinary,” writes the photographer Sally Mann in her memoir, “Hold Still” (2015). In our stilled, stalled time, her words ring especially true. Here we all are, burdened by untold fears, forced to make do, to essentialize, to improvise. And also, within all of this, to open our eyes and attend to new possibilities.
Of course, attention is the linchpin of image-making, and so T asked a number of photographers, many of whom typically derive inspiration from the wider world, how they are approaching this newfound intimacy with the ordinary, and to share what they have invented within it. Some relayed mystical encounters with nature and the animal world: Domingo Milella discovered ancient symbols on the rugged outskirts of Bari, Italy; Richard Mosse communed with the craggy topography of the Burren landscape in Ireland; Asako Narahashi, in Japan, found solace alongside a rescued cat. On the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, Wayne Lawrence embraced proximity to family and the lush surroundings, while in wintry Minnesota, Alec Soth gave in to distance by chronicling his neighborhood through a pair of binoculars, capturing the feeling of being at once near and far, sheltered and susceptible.
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5) During Pandemic, Artist-Parents Reflect and Get Creative With Their Kids
Shaun Leonardo and Mckendree Key paint on tree bark with their children in Vermont during quarantine. (photo courtesy Mckendree Key)
The mystique of the artist locked away in their studio for hours or even days is centuries old. But for artists who are also parents, that ideal is largely laughable. The art world often overlooks the reality of parenthood and the balancing act artists play to maintain a career. As much of the globe is forced to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, artist-parents are confronting greater constraints on their practice, while also coming up with creative methods to engage and educate their children.
Philadelphia-based artist Mia Rosenthal was supposed to have more time for art-making in 2020. Her eldest is in fourth grade and her youngest had finally started preschool — freeing up part of her days for making work. With both back at home, she is balancing their schoolwork with at-home activities, including card-making and sidewalk painting. “We also bake a lot and go for walks,” she explained in an email. “There is something special about being out together on a random Tuesday morning, experiencing nature and early spring, when under normal circumstances we’d each be doing our own thing.” On the weekends, Rosenthal tries to get to her studio for a few hours, where she is working on a series of ink drawings that incorporate objects picked up on walks around Philly — the project taking on new meaning in a time of social distancing.
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6) National Museum of Women in the Arts Honours 'Complex and Varied' Maternal Relationships for Mother's Day
Caption: Elizabeth Catlett, Two Generations, 1979 National Museum of Women in the Arts
Mother's Day in the US falls on 10 May and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC, is celebrating with a focus on profiles of women artists and their relationship to motherhood, including artists who were mothers themselves or who tenderly depicted motherhood in their work despite never having children. The series also challenges the pervasive adage that motherhood can hinder an artistic career, depicting women who gracefully juggled the roles of mom and artist; the French painter and model Suzanne Valadon, a single mother at 18 years old who became the first woman painter to be admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, serves as a prime example.
Other profiles in the series, which will be available on the museum's website and via social media, are devoted to artists like the American painter Mary Cassatt, a suffragist who became well-known for her depictions of motherhood but asserted that marriage would be incompatible with her artistic ambitious; the African-American artist Elizabeth Catlett, who often portrayed images of strong maternal figures in her sculptures exploring the the psychological connection between women and their children; and the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, whose mammoth sculptures of spiders—whom she regard as both predators and protectors—reflects the relationship she had with her mother.