Sunday sale

"Sunday sale woman," Tim Connor, All rights reserved
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Fecundity

"Summer, 2009," Tim Connor, All rights reserved


"Out my back window (summer)," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Alec Soth's "Black Line of Woods"

Two photos from "Black Line of Woods" exhibit, Alec Soth, All rights reserved

When I first started this blog, Alec Soth had a blog too. I fact, it was the go-to photography blog on the net, the one everybody said you had to read. So I read it -- somewhat sporadically but always with pleasure. It was well-informed, open-minded, generous, often funny -- & every Thursday, or maybe it was Friday, the blog abandoned photography & published a poem.

On his blog Soth himself had plenty to say, most of it very smart, but what impressed me most was his ability to pose questions & guide discussions in useful directions. There is some MC in Soth for sure -- enough ego to lead & even show off a little, but also enough modesty to let others shine. There's probably a lot of teacher in there too. Doing the blog, he was aware of his drawing power as a rising young shooter, recently elected to Magnum, & seemed to enjoy the expansive new possibilities of the internet. He & others would write about Martin Parr or Stephen Shore or the critic Peter Schjeldahl, & hours or days later, lo & behold, responses would appear from the men themselves. Some of these exchanges led to fruitful, long-term discussions. Soth never seemed the least bit stressed by all this maestro-to-maestro dialog.

Then one day he suddenly abandoned his successful, influential blog. I didn't catch the last few posts, but I gather he was simply getting sick of it. He wanted to get back to making photographs.

I thought of all this while reading the recent NY Times profile of Soth, "Trolling for Strangers to Befriend," on the occasion of his new photo exhibit at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The exhibit is called "Black line of woods," from a phrase by Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor "...is talking about where culture ends. I wanted this work to be about the longing to escape,” Soth explains. His new pictures explore "the idea of retreating from the world..." by focusing on hermits, survivalists, monks & hard travelers.

"Monk in the woods," Alec Soth, All rights reserved

In the Times article Soth talks about being terribly shy as a young art student. But he admired the work of Diane Arbus & knew he wanted to make similarly direct portraits -- so taught himself to approach strangers & start conversations. His work since has largely been about telling the stories of those who can't make the transition from shyness to speech the way he did. The awkward & the odd; the diffident & the taciturn; those who slip away. The stranger disarmed of fear. It occurs to me that making photographs of such people is the exact opposite of "retreating from the world."

Anyway, I hope Soth returns to blogging some day. His gift is for pictures yes, but also for pictures defined & informed by words. Here, according to the Times, are some words he taped to his steering wheel to remind him what to watch for as he drove. "beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men’s retreats, after the rain, figures from behind, suitcases, tall people (especially skinny), targets, tents, treehouses and tree lines."

Maybe not a poem yet, but a good start...

State Street blues

"Blue," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Under Gowanus

"Working dog," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Mark Cohen: Approaching the fear

"Jump rope," Mark Cohen, All rights reserved

For years I've carried around a couple of black & white images by Mark Cohen in my head. One is the girl jumping rope (above) & then there's this one. Both pictures, which use Cohen's signature technique -- wide-angle close-ups, flash, radical cropping -- have always intrigued me; but in all those years I never came across more than a few others -- all B & W -- & the only thing I ever heard about Cohen himself was that he shoots exclusively in Wilkes-Barre, PA, a down-on-its-luck former coal town.

So one late afternoon last week I skipped out from work & walked over to Hasted Hunt gallery to see True Color, a collection of Cohen's color work from the 70s . It's a show of modestly sized dye-transfer prints -- grimey, edge-of-grotesque people shots. But I'm not attempting a review here. Without question, the pictures work. They're riveting. What I want to talk about is how Cohen digs them out of ordinary life -- in effect creates a new way of seeing -- by an unusual way of shooting. Mostly, Cohen's method is surprise (another word for it might be ambush). Of course surprise is a strategy used by a lots of street shooters, but this is different. I've never seen anyone shoot strangers the way Cohen does in this video.

There's something animal-like about Cohen's way of shooting. Like an animal -- or perhaps a snake -- on the hunt he moves through the crowd restlessly, before locking his attention on his "prey," (not necessarily a person or group; it could be legs, a torso, a piece of clothing, a hairdo). His approach is fast, fluid & silent. His "strike" -- typically a single photo from inches away accompanied by a small hand-held flash, -- is shockingly invasive. Nevertheless, its swiftness, the way Cohen instantly unlocks his attention afterwards & floats away, apparently indifferent, reassures the startled subject. Did it really happen? Was that guy just crazy? Well, he's gone now, thank god. Some of his subjects appear not to have noticed at all.


"Smoker" (rephotographed by this blogger with altered crop from Mark Cohen gallery print)

I have never known a photographer this willing to risk humiliation or even violence in pursuit of an intuitive attraction that in all probability won't become a good picture (maybe Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden comes close).

It's interesting that Cohen has lived in Wilkes-Barre his entire life, & perhaps even more interesting that his career there has been as a professional photographer. This is a guy who shoots sunny, flattering pictures all day, apparently, and then in his free time turns his hunt-&-snatch style to many of the same people & places -- this time unglossed. It's as though a Jekyl & Hyde personality is playing out in middle America. According to Cohen himself, shooting this way in his home town hasn't been easy.

“I’d shoot and walk away quick - I’d never talk to the people. To people who were watching what I was doing it looked like inappropriate behaviour,” he says...“The antagonism got worse as time went by. It looked like I was up to some suspicious activity - they’d say, why are you taking pictures? People would call the police - if that happened I could give an explanation. But people who didn’t call the police were worse. Because I had no explanation or credentials, people would demand an explanation and ask me why I was taking a picture of their house, their yard, their wife.”

“Sometimes people would take my licence plate number and find out where I lived,” says Cohen. “People like William Klein who worked in big crowds in New York were relatively anonymous, but in small towns like Wilkes Barre, taking pictures looks suspicious to some people - especially since 9/11.”


"Girls with bicycles," Mark Cohen, All rights reserved

Not surprisingly, the pigeonhole that curators & critics have reserved for Cohen doesn't quite fit for all his work. A cursory look at the online collection of his pictures at George Eastman House reveals a number that are more Dr. Jekyl than Mr. Hyde. For the record, Cohen likes gardens, porches and backyards in bloom, & his joy in color is persistent, almost palpable (working seriously in color in the 70s makes him a pioneer of that media) . On occasion his pictures might even be described as lyrical (see above).

Yet, at least in his personal work, the Hyde aspect does seem ascendant. Cohen continues to shoot in Wilkes-Barre -- utterly familiar & resolutely unpicturesque -- perhaps as a way to encourage this. He doesn't completely understand why he takes the pictures he takes, but he understands as well as anyone. “They are a long series of pictures that are very unconsciously driven. They are more psychological than anything else,” he says. “They are also autobiographical in some ways. My work is about fear and approaching this fear and a lot of it may be to do with my own way of thinking. Maybe that’s why some of the pictures work. There’s something I do that I don’t even understand now - that’s why they have this mystery.”

(All quotes above from the blog, Colin Pantall's Writing.)

End of tunnel nears for subway art

"Vandalism or 'intervention' " (from Tim Connor's MTA Arts for Transit lightbox exhibit, Atlantic Ave-Pacific St subway station, Brooklyn), Photo by Lester Burg, All rights reserved

To me most graffiti seems simple-minded. And pretty much all tagging, especially tagging over other people's work, just seems ugly, a form of macho competition -- like dogs trying to piss higher up on the lamppost than the ones who pissed before. On the other hand, the little red flowers that recently appeared on the yellow stockings in my lightbox picture (above) at least have some wit. When I 1st saw them, they made me smile.


"Looking at 'The Gnome's Garden'," Photo by Ranjit Bhatnagar, All rights reserved


"Viewing lightboxes," Photo by Ranjit Bhatnagar, All rights reserved

I have no doubt this uncharacteristically tolerant feeling is because I learned -- at the same time I learned about the "intervention" in my picture " -- that next week my subway show will finally come down. My eight 4' X 6' lightboxes have lit up one wall of the underground passage to the Q train at Atlantic-Pacific subway station for almost a year and a half (I wrote about the show's beginning here & here). The run was a full half-year longer than usual, BTW, a result of the worldwide fiscal crisis, which rattled the MTA even more than most institutions. So I know I've been lucky. They told me when my show 1st went up that an estimated 10,000 people go through that passageway every rush hour. According to my high school math, that comes to almost 9.5 million people for the 18 months!

Of course none of those people were (at least not on purpose) members of the Manhattan art establishment. Ironically, it took some MOMA marketeer's bright idea of plastering cheap, life-size copies of world-famous art all over the station to get them to cross the river. The idea was, I suppose, that the big-name lineup would bedazzle the Brooklyn masses into coming to see the "real thing" on 53rd St.


Photo from "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" by Nan Goldin, part of MOMA's exhibit at Atlantic-Pacific (note my lightboxes across the hall)

Yet the MOMA-Brooklyn show was surprisingly lacklustre. One piece each for maybe 50 artists, it felt like a sampler's pack of commodified art. Not surprisingly, MOMA's arrogance proved too tempting to resist for NY's then-notorious outlaw mash-up artist, Poster Boy, who came to the station in the dead of night to strike a blow for artistic integrity (I wrote about it here).


Above picture by Nan Goldin, as altered by Poster Boy

In fact, Poster Boy's depredations of both old & new masters were funny for about half a minute (he left my pictures alone). But, I have to say, I find the idea that outrage is all it takes to make art to be childish. And the 2nd part of the formula -- that outrage plus bravado equals fame, which is also deemed a form of art -- I find even more dispiriting. As the Poster Boy kerfuffle ran its merry course in the papers & art blogs, I noticed that no one bothered to talk about the art -- or the anti-art for that matter -- you know, those things on the wall. It was the latest news, the buzz, the snide and/or snorting commentary that captivated everyone. The art was just something to argue about.

"AFT show with passersby," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Which brings me back to where I started. This show is about to end. In another week at most (I haven't learned exactly when), it's gone. I hope, if you're a New Yorker, or traveling to New York, you'll go & see it.

The info is here (ignore the dates).