B&W Magazine Issue 99, October 2013

It must be mid-Autumn in California, because the profile of Alex Veledzimovich in the October 2013 issue of B&W Magazine is on newsstands now. It was a privilege to bring this highly original, photographer from Belarus to the attention of a wider audience. If what Alex considers "world dharma" has any suasion, his path should only become more brightly illuminated. 

 "...the theatrical elements of his work have moved from the margins to become more strongly foregrounded. Props are given 

greater prominence— a paper moon, a cardboard rocking horse, a doll, or wings made of cardstock— while his images’ themes are less escapist counterpoints like coupling, occupations or parenthood. Despite the more burdened postures of figures in these recent works, the grace notes they hold do not look to me like flags of surrender, and seem more like emblems of protest— asserting that no matter how we arrive at our individual entropy, we will carry a vestige of something not as jaded, something more uncritically hopeful, and engaged." Full text here.

Alex Veledzimovich, coming to B&W, October 2013

Covering Alex Veledzimovich for an upcoming issue of B&W Magazine presented one of those rare opportunities to merely bring a deserving artist the attention of a wider public:

"...There is a directorial mind at work here, one of an auteur who creates what could only superficially be taken for incidental while making highly deliberated artistic statements. Through their staged qualities, Alex’s works accomplish something beyond mere documentation. Werner Herzog once flogged Cinema Verité for confounding fact and truth, stating that “fact creates norms, and truth- illumination.” While ostensibly documenting mere facts, Alex’s most successful works reach that something more- illumination."

"Useless, useless" opening May 3rd, California Building

I am reluctant to share the origins of this exhibition, however, after so many of our contributors offered deeply personal, sometimes heart-rending stories of their relationship to our theme, I could only try to do likewise. I have stated before that "Useless, useless," the last words of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, came starkly to mind at a friend's memorial service last year. I saw how profoundly her one life had affected so many, and it staggered me to consider Booth's inability to recognize how a single hateful act had galvanized so many conflicts. I realized that "the better angels of our nature" have a comparable capacity to accomplish the opposite- resolution, even harmony. This much you know. What I have not shared so far are the griefs and joys that preceded me to this place.. full text here:

Osama Esid, B&W Magazine, 2013

It's astounding how what was true just several weeks ago can so radically alter, but life can be a capricious bitch/bastard; friendships are made and lost, groups cohere then fragment, love turns unexpectedly to acrimony. The only constant is constant change. This should be reassuring, but it seldom is. Still, the sense we make of our lives, and the lives of those around us at a given point in time doesn't lose its valency, or poignancy for having moved past us. We can only aspire to meet life stride for stride, and to keep our hearts and heads in step with its sometimes perilous transformations.

"It is this capacity to combine the rich cultural history Esid comes from with the prospects for self-invention promised here that distinguish his homebound body of work. The banality of the elements he chooses to photograph does nothing to diminish his pictures' effects. What could be a more engaging, challenging image of liberty than a Muslim-American man standing atop his motorcycle, flaunting a headless eagle? In this portrait with its seemingly simplistic pieces, he conveys abundant signifiers- mindless freedom and issues of self-representation while precariously perched on a perilous vehicle. Would that we all could see that the things that make the most potent meanings are often as close at hand as home." full text: here

Art in the Age of Algorithmical Reproduction, or "Tragically Hip(stamatic)"

This winter I've watched now former friends literally pour their souls into wet collodion plate printing, and in the course of watching I've significantly damaged my internal organs by huffing the technique's requisite ether, bromide, silver nitrate, and etc.. It seemed not incidental that at the same time Hipstamatic (what a conflicted neologism that is) deployed their "Tintype SnapPak" app, which affords iphone users vaguely credible approximations of the process which consumed my gizzards and associates. I threw up just a little bit reading some copywriter's hyperventilations that this filter would ""capture the true essence of your subject with haunting clarity (of) this ancient lens." My instinctive reaction is to be revolted by something which will give one's breakfast at Denny's the patina of a Matthew Brady, but I'm inclined to reassess after this season's ongoing consequences. After grousing on Facebook, a photographer I greatly admire relayed this article from the Guardian U.K. whose author raised this point; "One of the problems I have with creative photographic processes and smartphone photo filters is that they are nostalgic, and place the aesthetic over the content. They also seem to surrender a large part of the creative process to the camera program." In this I recognized my own struggle to avoid mediating my own images- to the degree that any digital photographer can. I try to ask whether an image would have the same valency if it weren't rendered in some atypical color, or 'enhanced' by some other means. In many ways though, my work is stymied by the current glut of artificiality- I find it difficult to articulate a sensible alternative. A recent New York Times op ed by Christy Wampole titled "How to Live Without Irony" tried to account for photographer's (and who isn't right now?) attraction to contrivances. She noted that "nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality...by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity." It is no longer enough to merely hold a moment- we require our every quotidian doing to appear sufficiently hip. To me, this belief that your life as it happens is somehow insufficient, and the consequent obsession to augment it somehow is just sad and ultimately vapid. But so also is clinging to fossilized constructs like 'truth,' or 'authenticity' that are themselves nostalgic and often outright dangerous depending on who is enforcing the definitions. The questions raised have so addled me that they've only served to rekindle my inclination to go live in a yurt on one of Ireland's Skelligs until all of this sorts itself out. app: here. 

"An Unfinished Woman"

One of the greatest difficulties I find with reviewing art is having to cover work that I don't ardently love. What do you say of someone's work when they're evidently sincere, and committed to a vision, but little connection has been made to my subjective tastes? One approach that I found is to answer that sincerity without snark, and with equal commitment to one's own capacities as a writer. I try to discern without falsely waxing rhapsodic, what the images might have meant to the maker. I'm grateful to Catharine Carter, and her art, for teaching me this.

"In our era of digital cameras, artists like Carter strain to escape that technology’s clinical means of representation. They prefer to transact in allegory, raising questions as opposed to presenting truths. In times wherein our agency is so constrained, where our ability to effect change in our lives and those around us is so thoroughly hindered, to say that the world needs less of this inclination would be churlish. " full text: here

Angela Bacon-Kidwell, "Travelling Dream"

2012 was a year of profound personal dislocation. Amid tumultuous changes, I contrived many unconventional means to continue producing work. I was especially proud of the days spent escaping my hometown’s 110 degree summer in the Walker Art center’s air-conditioned Flat-Pak prefab house with one of the museum’s ipads, composing essays wirelessly in this infrequently-visited, ad hoc office. When assigned to cover Angela Bacon-Kidwell’s work, I knew that it reflected much of the grief and loss that I’d experienced that year. But it also re-affirmed the tenacity with which we must cling to the things that keep us hopeful. It was a pleasure, even under duress, to work with her. From a coming article:

“For centuries, people have created and kept Memento Mori, representations of death as reminders of their mortality. Photography made possible even more literal manners of this art, affording the bereaved a portrait of their loved ones before they passed eternally into memory. In a like way, Angela Bacon-Kidwell is at war with oblivion, although she aspires to retain and manage her emotional relationship to painful memories, and the ineluctable reality that loved ones depart…Her best works have an acquired poignancy, like smoothed stones that arrive on a beach, scoured of their incongruities yet indelibly marked by the agitation that formed them.” full text: here

Greta Pratt, "Taking Liberties"

While spending part of this winter in Richmond, Virginia, I was fortunate to find Candela Gallery which was featuring Greta Pratt's "Taking Liberties" series. The works have remained very much on my mind, even months after first viewing them, life-sized, hung heroically- their faces just slightly above eye-level. Though the show closed before the essay I wrote could be published, I see no reason to not call attention to this fine work:

“It is apparent that underneath so much tactless raiment are strongly individuated people- clearly someone’s mom, daughter, nephew, or son. Rodney Parker’s probably-homemade “pain” tattoo is visible at his wrist, and Christine Sweeney’s doughy hands sport gecko-green manicured nails. Pratt deftly manages to humanize these figures without reducing them to typology. We don’t learn whether one is a recovering addict, or another a battered mother; we’re “told” only that these are people were compelled to cede a degree of dignity for a nominal wage. It’s a trade off nearly most of us- those who remain employed- can deeply empathize with. The fact that these particular people embody “liberty” only makes the realization more acute.” link

Mike Dvorak, "Amish; one God, one family"

Issue 94 of B&W broke a longstanding precedent of not revisiting artists that had previously been featured. I proposed that Mike Dvorak’s work among a particularly stern Amish sect certainly merited a departure, and this was favorably approved. He and I both negotiated a tenuous balance between romanticizing this way of life, and acknowledging its harsher truths. 

"However artfully rendered Dvorak’s Amish series is, contemporary curators, and collectors tend to view documentary photography as having little current merit, or of having passed into history… Photographic art has frequently shown us what is enduring as well as what is imperiled. Given America’s current struggles, would that it had invested even a modest amount in the country’s artistic capital, rather than limiting its vision to bolstering banks and fortifying Wall Street. Fortunately, a few stalwart traditionalists believe that it remains a relevant endeavor to better acquaint us with the experiences of our fellow citizens.” December, 2012 link

Colleen Mullins, B&W Issue 82

I profiled Colleen Mullins, who would soon after win a McKnight Fellowship, in April 2011. Mullins' mother led her to five-star cruise where she found the subjects of her then current work. It was challenging personally to reconcile the artist’s profound sadness over her mother’s recent passing, with the (inebriated) joy in many of her photographs. And yet, I tried: 

“While Mullin’s photographs have apparent parallels with Martin Parr’s depictions of New Brightonites on holiday, or to Larry Fink’s series Social Graces, her characters seem even less self-aware. Bauble-laden, sequined, they were frequently intoxicated and incognizant of more than their own gratification, then flash-frozen by Mullins in various rictuses of frivolity that devolved as hours passed. …there is an awareness of the festive atmosphere’s vacuity, and vast grief over the ultimate hollowness of her now-deceased mother’s pursuit of such insubstantial connections. There exists simultaneously in this body of work an antipathy towards, and an attraction to, its subjects. It is an indictment of their indifference to pain, even as it's an empathetic porttrait of people of a certain caste enjoying themselves. April, 2011 link

Osama Esid, B&W Magazine 2010

For the past three years, B&W Magazine has generously afforded me the privilege of looking intently into images that I, most often, care deeply about. Now working on my seventh contribution, here is an excerpt from my first essay for them, covering fellow ‘dinosaur,’ and a person more immersed in our medium than anyone else that I know, Osama Esid. 

“Despite the superficial resemblance to a 19th century sensibility which fed the Occident what it wanted to see of the Orient, Esid’s body of work is no mere anachronism or a colonial enterprise. It is of its time with all the graffiti, present styles, and detritus intact. In one image among a series of nudes shot in Lisbon, a figure leans against a doorway. Blurred but definitively feminine, she holds (she is) the source of illumination for both her body and the rooms surrounding her. A surge protector on the floor is given the most prominent focus, which could be a subtle symbol for a conduit of energy, or a clever pun.” December 2010 link

Jefferson's Gardens, 64 Magazine

While ostensibly covering a new season in the gardens of Monticello, I was proud that my editors at 64 Magazine included the following critique of Mr. Jefferson. The article’s timing was somewhat exceptional as well, published just a few short months before the infamous events of September, 2001.


“More than a monument to one man’s stunning accomplishments, many life sagas were played out here- those of craftsman, charwomen, and children born as property. Monticello lets us ponder our own deepest needs for solace, and home, and it quietly compels us to examine whether the means we use to acquire these comforts are just.” May, 2001 link

"Clay Pigeons," C-Ville Weekly

I was once told by an editor in Virginia that my arts coverage was too positive. Thus directed to amend this, I took critical aim at a generally harmless gallery, and still feel remorseful over this: 

“ Bozart (gallery) is an easy mark for an art critic, with its moldering hippie aesthetic, zen pretensions, and co-optation of indigenous people’s cosmology; a free-expression touting boutique of banality. So why bother confronting something so seemingly benign? Blame a strongly averse reaction to the title of this month’s show, “Functional Epiphany”- a dissonant, paradoxical concept that elevates the saleable over the seminal, simultaneously cheapening the idea of profound experience…” Regrettably, I went on. link