Handout man / AM New York

Handout man / AM New York, originally uploaded by colorstalker.

Wall to wall

"Artist & installation, Park Slope, Brooklyn," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

This man was hanging an installation of his photographs on the east side of 7th Avenue, just before it reaches Flatbush in Park Slope. The photos were all taken on this same corner over the course of one year, 1999-2000. They were originally installed on this wall in the summer of 2000, but the exhibit was torn down. After 7 years gathering dust in a closet, they are going up again.

Two (excellent) new shows in Brooklyn

Last night I went by the Nelson Hancock Gallery to pick up prints from my recent show & stumbled into the opening for "Beneath the Surface: Springs, Swamps and Oceans" , a knockout selection of mostly color work by Karen Glaser. Aside from being underwater, Glaser shot them straight. But in her case straight is definitely phantasmagorical. My favorites -- the most disorienting of all -- were shot in a humble Florida sinkhole -- a place Glaser calls "...my favorite on the entire planet."


"Spidersharks," Karen Glaser, All rights reserved

I thought of a story I once heard about Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction writer, who had dreamed from boyhood of traveling into space. As Clarke got older, he realized he would never fulfill his lifelong dream, so he did the next best thing. He moved to Sri Lanka so he could scuba dive full time.


"Maxim Kovalov, Cossack soldier, Rostov-on-DonNorthern Caucasus, March 2005," Simon Roberts, All rights reserved

Who knew that a Cossack horseman right out of legend would have teenage acne? I discovered this at another just-opened, brilliant show, "Motherland," by photographer Simon Roberts , serendipitously encountered as I left Nelson's (in fact, next door at the Klompching Gallery).


"Identical twins, Elena and Vera Karnova, Magadan.Far East Russia, August 2004," Simon Roberts, All rights reserved

Roberts made the pictures while traveling east to west for a year across post-Soviet Russia. They are firmly in the documentary tradition but feel personal in a very modern way. The Cossack acne mentioned above, for example, is the sort of unforced detail that fills the images with life. Using a large-format camera & color film, Roberts records Russian everyday scenes & people with great skill & wit -- but no editorializing. His pictures feel thoroughly relaxed & connected to their subjects. But they also brim with an awareness of just how odd images can look outside the context of their own culture.

Tree / Adolescence

"Newly planted tree,Sunset Park," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Simon Norfolk: Toward a military sublime

"Lake Mead," Simon Norfolk, All rights reserved

Simon Norfolk's cover & spread of photos in Sunday's NY Times' Magazine lead story, "Perfect Drought: The Future is Drying Up," masterfully illustrate an important story about dwindling water supplies vs. burgeoning population growth in the American West. But there are no humans in the pictures.

Norfolk generally avoids photographing them unless they -- the actual people -- are his specific subject. He explains in an interview with Geoff Manaugh in BLDGBLOG why so many of his pictures are unpopulated: "...I think people kind of gobble up the photograph. They become what the photograph is... So I've always tried to pull people out of the pictures – and, if they're in my pictures, it's usually because they represent an idea, really. I think if you're going to talk about Dave, or Bob, or Wendy, you have to do it properly. You either do it properly or you don't do it at all. "


"The Israeli destruction of Lebanon," Simon Norfolk, All rights reserved.

The people are not absent because Norfolk is unconcerned. He's a passionate -- & explicitly political -- photographer who has spent a great deal of time in complicated, dangerous places, including recent stints in Afghan & Iraqi combat zones. In fact, he's the exact opposite of a highly aestheticized, conceptual artist; he's furiously intent on making a difference in the world. But not as a photojournalist. Norfolk rejects the prevailing ethos of chasing after the action with a digital SLR. Instead he hauls around a heavy wooden large-format camera & makes very still, very beautiful images.


"The illegal Jewish settlement of Gilo, a suburb of Jerusalem, Simon Norfolk, All rights reserved.


"Rashid Street in central Baghdad," Simon Norfolk, All rights reserved.

“I didn't get fed up with the subjects of photojournalism," he explains. "I got fed up with the clichés of photojournalism... Photojournalism is a great tool for telling very simple stories. 'Here's a good guy. Here's a bad guy. It's awful'. But the stuff I was dealing with was getting more and more complicated – it felt like I was trying to play Rachmaninoff in boxing gloves…

“I'm not down on photojournalism – it does what it does very well – but its job is to offer all its information instantly and immediately. I thought the fact that this place in Afghanistan – this ruin – actually looks a little like Stonehenge: that interested me..."


"Bullet-scarred outdoor cinema at the Palace of Culture in the Karte Char district of Kabul," Simon Norfolk, from Afghanistan: Chronotopia

Norfolk is interested in ruins both visually & as metaphors. He finds them most often in structures, sometimes in entire shattered landscapes. The ruins in his pictures have usually been bombed or otherwise damaged in war. As viewers, we sense that the locations may actually teem with people, yet they're strangely empty. The light is often soft & ethereal, as though the dirty world has been newly washed & purified for Norfolk's lens.

Norfolk explains "... a lot of the artistic ideas that I'm drawing on partly come out of the photography of ruins. When I was in Afghanistan photographing these places – photographing these ruins – I started looking at some of the very earliest photojournalists, and they were ruin photographers..."

"Those photographers" (he mentions early war photographers Matthew Brady & Roger Fenton) "were, in turn, drawing upon ideas from 17th century and 18th century French landscape painting – European landscape painting. Claude Lorraine. Nicolas Poussin. Ruins have a very particular meaning in those pictures. They're about the folly of human existence; they're about the foolishness of empire... the greatest empires that were ever built – the empire of Rome, the Catholic church – these things have fallen down to earth. They all fall into ivy eventually. "

Ruins were also a preoccupation of the Romantics. The poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (of Ozymandias fame) and John Keats were inspired by Europe's greatest ruin, the city of Rome, especially the Appian Way, lined with crumbling Roman palaces & villas so grand they resisted the depredations of man & nature for more than 1,000 years. In the late Romantic period wealthy Europeans built extravagant, useless structures on their estates -- often designed at the outset to be partially ruined -- called "follies."

So what makes Norfolk's ruins different? For one thing they don't represent the subjugation of Man to the Sublime in Nature as they did to the Romantics. They represent the subjugation of men to other men in war. Norfolk reminds us, "Anybody interested in the effects of war quickly becomes an expert in ruins." Looking at them -- as aftermath -- goes beyond the catharsis of human identification with war's futility & loss. Outside time, the photos suggests something even darker -- that war is larger than human concerns. It may even be beyond human control.

It may only end if we utterly remove ourselves from the planet.

Norfolk has also become an expert on the machines, weapons & technological systems that could make the wars of tomorrow different from anything we've seen in the past. Far from war zones he has , in recent years, done incomparable essays on national security technology on Ascension Island and on all-powerful supercomputers . He makes it clear that to him these "objects" -- along with the rest of the world's more & more sophisticated doomsday arsenal --represent a brand new & infinitely frightening face of the same old demon.

"It ends up being like a relationship with the sublime – a military sublime," Norfolk says. "All of the work I'm doing, I might even call it: 'Toward a Military Sublime.' Because these objects are beyond: they’re inscrutable, uncontrollable, beyond democracy."

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

From the "Urban trees series," Tim Connor, All rights reserved.

Last chance to see saints in Brooklyn!

"Red Jesus," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

This weekend is your last chance to see my pictures at Topos: Brooklyn in the Nelson Hancock Gallery. I have 20 pictures in the show, which also includes work by 7 other artists. My pictures document an ongoing obsession with the small, usually plaster, religious statues one can see in gardens,yards & alleyways all over the borough. Here's my artist's statement about why I'm doing it.

Saints

I was drawn to the statues of madonnas and saints in the yards and alleyways of Brooklyn because they seemed to gather light. This was during the dark winter months of 2006. I was attracted to the statues for other reasons too. Raised a devout Catholic, I had turned violently against the church as a teenager and could still fly into a rage when the subject of priests or Catholic dogma came up. For me the statues represented another kind of religious impulse, outside the official church – outside any church -- more ancient. They gave a form to the universal human yearning to be magically protected, to be comforted in a hard and pitiless world. It was easy to make fun of the statues. They were in fact spiritual action figures for grown ups with their bright colors and iconic symbols, and many homeowners had combined them in dizzyingly kitschy displays with everything from garden frogs to Disney cartoon characters. I photographed them on the weekends all winter and through the spring and summer -- statues that were fussed-over and revered as well as those that were being allowed to disintegrate, a vague superstition away from being discarded. Eventually I realized that – weird as they could sometimes be -- I was photographing the saints without irony. In the end, like their owners, I found them comforting.


"Wrapped Madonna," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

The gallery's open today (Friday) & tomorrow, 11-6. It's located at 111 Front Street in the fashionable downtown DUMBO section. First subway stop in Brooklyn. Catch it if you can. Here's how:

DIRECTIONS: Take the F-train to York Street stop or the A/C-train to High Street/Brooklyn Bridge. Walk down toward the bridges and East River until you encounter Front Street. Turn left, if you are coming down from Jay Street (F-train); make a right, if you are approaching from Washington Street (A/C-train).