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Photography and Community

Summer 2023

June 21st - September 22nd

 

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Camera Club outing at the residence of Frank Q. Story, Alhambra, California, Wikimedia Commons.

Photographers have always been a rather chummy lot. It seems like collaboration and community is baked into our DNA and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fundamental nature of the field and what it is that makes us so community oriented - and often so different than other disciplines. Part of it may be that the strong technological aspect of the field necessitates a lot of education (you still find camera clubs all over the place having speakers and learning about new methods). Our darkrooms, like ceramic kilns, are often group spaces and that has also fostered a certain kind of co-operative culture.

Photography is a discipline with both fine and commercial art practices and, as such, was often excluded from the hierarchy of the traditional art world. Even now, walk into any museum store and you’ll see the big “Art” section and then next to it the smaller “Photography” section. I’m a bit mixed about that issue though - it pisses me off…but it does make it easier to find what I’m looking for. Timewise, we are also closer to our inception, which has meant that many of our institutions have been led by artists instead of academicians…and that makes a difference in steering the dialog and fostering a tradition of artists creating spaces for others.

I started curating because I was interested in exploring ideas about art in general - to show the range of what artists were doing and how they were interpreting different themes. My first attempts at curating exhibitions were in grad school and utilized skills I'd developed in the previous decade organizing commercial photoshoots. It seemed like such a natural thing to do - find something you feel is interesting, shine a light on it and have a voice in the dialogue while you bring different ideas into the mix.

I also come by this mindset very naturally and must celebrate both my mother, Dolores Mitchell and my father, Albert Mitchell, for providing me with great examples of the personal and political responsibilities we have, not only to our own communities, but to the world at large. In the 1960s they ran a coffeehouse on LA’s Sunset Strip called The Fifth Estate (music, art, film and politics) as well as two underground newspapers, the Los Angeles Underground and L.A. Metro.  Now in her 90s, my mother continues to teach art history and publish a monthly newsletter,  Art Talk, while still making sure she paints every day.

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Mitchell Family Album, photographer unknown

The seven artists in this showcase have expanded the dialogue in photography by creating space for others to develop their own voice. Whether through education, curation, publishing or organizing, they’ve helped change our photographic landscape. I wanted to shine a light on their own work, because all of that community building can take time away from one’s artistic practice, no matter how satisfying it is. Join me in celebrating the magic of their voices.

Jill Enfield

www.jillenfield.com

© Jill Enfield, all rights reserved

The New Americans

I started learning how to make wet plate collodion ambrotypes about 2005, and immediately started a project called “The New Americans”. I am first generation on my father's side and second on my mother's. My family was forced to leave their home countries, and it made me curious to learn why people choose to leave their homelands in search of new adventures far from what is familiar to them.

I started with people that I knew and it grew from there, being introduced to people from all over the world. I would invite them to come to my apartment in NYC, or I would meet them where they worked to take a portrait and have them fill out a questionnaire. Their answers ranged from education to leaving bad situations at home to just simply to try something new.

 

As I was putting together a show on Ellis Island, I came up with the idea of a glass house of immigrants, as “those in glasshouses should not throw stones”: we are all immigrants in this country. The show took up 6 galleries and the glasshouse and some of the prints have traveled until just recently.

Kris Graves

krisgraves.com

© Kris Graves, all rights reserved

Privileged Mediocrity

Privileged Mediocrity by Kris Graves examines systemic unfairness in the United States. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment of America and the construction of public and private space. Graves explores how racism, capitalism, and power have shaped our country -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life.

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio

@pablomonasterio

© Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, all rights reserved

Huichol: Mountain, Desert, New York '95-'21

"The first person to photograph the Huichol in their remote communities in the inaccessible canyons of the Western Sierra Madre was probably the Norwegian anthropologist, Carl Lumholtz. He ventured into their territory in 1895, shortly before the arrival of the French naturalist and ethnographer Léon Diguet, who was also a photographer. Like so many who were engaged with documenting Indigenous peoples across the Americas in those brutal years of expansion and settlement, Lumholtz believed that the disappearance of his subjects was inevitable: “the weaker must succumb to the stronger, and the Indians will ultimately all become Mexicans.”

The photographs of the Huichol by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio—taken on some twenty trips over the past three decades—prove that Lumholtz was fortunately, terribly wrong. They reveal abundant evidence of cultural survival (what the Huichol call “la costumbre”), made possible by their extraordinary resistance to the religious, nationalist, and economic forces that have long assaulted—and that continue to assault—Indigenous communities everywhere. Though Ortiz Monasterio is also an outsider, he does not operate—like Lumholtz or Diguet—as an old-fashioned preservationist, nor is he confident in the superiority of Western culture, nor is his work only destined for museum vitrines or archives. Rather, these complex images are the result of long and patient attempts at negotiation and collaboration, of working with the Huichol, amongst them, and ultimately making pictures as much for them as for audiences far from the Sierra Madre.

In 1996, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, an ecologist and engineer, was invited to design a bridge to allow the Huichol to safely cross a deep riverbed that became an impassable and dangerous torrent during the summer rains. An image by his brother Pablo records the bloody sacred sacrifice that celebrated its completion, just as he later documented a Huichol pilgrimage to another suspension bridge, in distant Brooklyn. Perhaps the only ethical position of the contemporary photographer engaged with Indigenous subjects is to work as a bridge or conduit, as a sanctioned recorder of sacrifices, pilgrimages, and other ceremonies—some more secret than others. These remain in the hands of the Huichol, and none of us will ever truly comprehend their spiritual meanings."           - James Oles

Prashant Panjiar

www.prashantpanjiar.com

© Prashant Panjiar, all rights reserved

Kumbh Mela

The first time I went to the Kumbh Mela was in 2001, while on assignment for Outlook Magazine. Coming after 144 years and at the beginning of a new millennium that Mahakumbh at Allahabad, or Prayag as it is now called, was a highly anticipated one. The idea of an ancient almost primordial mega event in a ‘futuristic’ connected global world was extremely seductive. I came back from the festival with many images that lived up to the image of it being the ‘greatest show on the earth’.  But being a non-believer, I was also confused by my attraction on a personal level for what was essentially a religious event. To seek an answer I have been going back to subsequent Kumbh Melas at Prayag in 2007, 2013 and 2019 – never on assignment, always photographing for myself, with no brief or expectation of outcomes.

The Kumbh Mela is all about scale. It is a massive enterprise where on the most auspicious days millions of people converge to bathe in the holy waters of the Sangam, the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Sarswati rivers, to wash away their sins and free themselves from the cycle of death and re-birth. A tented city springs up on the banks of the river, the local government sets up a special administration, a massive police force is deployed, extra trains and buses are run. Pilgrims, religious leaders, shopkeepers, merchants and wandering minstrels stream in from all directions. 

The majority of the pilgrims who come to the Kumbh Mela are rural poor people who walk miles, carrying their meager belongings on their heads and shoulders, crossing the pontoon bridges, clutching on to a family member’s shawl or sari to avoid getting separated and lost. They reach the river bank, camp out in the bitter cold night; cook their simple meals on cow-dung cake flames; prepared to bathe in the holy waters at the crack of dawn at the most auspicious moment. Observing them I learnt that for all its craziness, complexity and enormity, the Kumbh is actually about the simplicity of faith. On reaching the river, after navigating through the crush of millions, the ordinary pilgrim’s final prayer is deeply personal and quietly powerful. You don’t have to be a Hindu, or even a Believer, to be moved by the beauty of this communion.

 

I hope to publish the work as a book before the next Kumbh Mela in 2025. 

Legend has it that when the Gods were under a curse that made them weak, Brahma the Creator advised them to retrieve the Amrit, the elixir of immortality, from the ocean. The Gods sought the help of the Demons and together they churned the ocean to extract the Amrit. As Dhanwantari, the divine healer appeared carrying the Kumbh, the pot of Amrit, a battle ensued between the Gods and Demons over its possession. During this battle drops of Amrit fell at four different places – Prayag (Allahabad), Haridwar, Nasik and Ujjain. Since then the Kumbh Mela is held in each of these places in a twelve-year rotating cycle. The most important is the Mahakumbh Mela, held every twelfth year. The Ardh Kumbh Mela, the fair held every six years, is next in importance. The celebration at Prayag has come to acquire the most significance since it is held at the Sangam, the confluence of the holy rivers of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. Hindus believe that bathing here during the Kumbh Mela washes away their sins and ends the cycle of rebirth and death.

Amanda Smith

@asmithartist

© Amanda Smith, all rights reserved

Keeper of Secrets

We all keep secrets. Some dark, but most are petty and maybe a little foolish. Contrary to accepted opinion, men are more likely to divulge secrets than women. We tend to hold our secrets pretty close. Especially those little, quirky, benign ones.


In this body of work I am not attempting to betray those secrets. I am representing the keepers of secrets, not the secrets themselves, by hiding parts of us away. The secrets reside in the land of our dreams, coexisting side by side, mingling and reproducing, creating ever more opportunities for me to imagine and discover.

Sara Terry

saraterry.com

© Sara Terry, all rights reserved

(Re) Thinking the Male Gaze

(Re)Thinking the Male Gaze is my response to the contemporary conversation about gender, power and representation. I’m engaging with some of the most famous paintings in art history, made by men of nude women, re-creating the paintings as gender-flipped photos. I carefully research each painting, learning about its cultural context, reading feminist critiques, understanding each work’s place in art history. And then I re-stage it, taking on the creator’s role as a woman, choosing backgrounds, time, place, objects, – grounding the work in my own female gaze, putting together my own narrative and critique of gender, power and representation. I also write a short essay for each work.

 

The project began with my re-creation of Manet’s painting, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. His larger-than-life image of a casual picnic marked a groundbreaking moment in modern art – due in large part to its bold depiction of a female nude, which shocked Parisian audiences in 1863 when it was shown at the now infamous Salon des Refusés­­.

 

But in many ways, what Manet painted was nothing new – it was just another depiction of a woman (a naked one), made by a man, for the pleasure of other men, through the lens of the notorious “male gaze.” It’s at the heart of centuries of history of the western world, from the early Christian church to renaissance nobles to Hollywood moguls: the representation of women as objects of desire commissioned by, paid for, created by and made for…men.

 

To be the object of someone else’s gaze: women know that power dynamic only too well. Even with the #metoo movement’s important insistence that women’s voices be heard, and their stories believed, the power dynamics of who gets to do the gazing hasn’t changed much. But it will.

The birth of Venus – the Roman goddess of love – is a creation story that begins with a most brutal act of violence. According to mythology, Cronus – the son of Uranus – cut off his father’s testicles with a stone sickle and threw his genitals into the sea. They caused the sea to foam – and out of that foam, Venus was born.

A man’s creation story of woman. The goddess of beauty and love born from sexual violence.

I respond the only way I know how – by telling a story of my own. With (Re)Thinking The Birth of Venus, I have appropriated this creation story on every level as a woman, including placing myself in the photo as the god(desse)s in the painting. In an era of angry men, I choose to create man from love – and rather than hold a cloak to hide his nakedness, as in Botticelli’s painting, I hold a mirror, inviting him to see himself without artifice, to know that bereft of power or prestige or brute strength, he is man. And this is enough for him to be. I want him to know that he is loved, that he comes from the nurturing earth, not an angry sea, and that he must in turn give back that love.

Mythology says that roses first bloomed when Venus was born. I surround the man in my creation story with sweet peas – inspired by Faith Salie’s essay in Time, on December 1, 2017, as the #metoo movement was rising. It’s titled How to Raise a Sweet Son in an Era of Angry Men.

She wrote: “Hours after I gave birth to my first child, my husband cradled all five pounds of our boy and said, gently, “Hi, Sweetpea.” Not “Buddy” or “Little Man.” Sweetpea. The word filled me with unanticipated comfort…I was witnessing my husband’s commitment to raising a sweet boy.

“Because this is what the world needs now, urgently: sweet boys and people who grow them.”

From my earliest thoughts about Ingre’s Grand Odalisque, I knew that I needed a white male photojournalist for this photo; I knew that I wanted to comment on the othering perpetuated by the white male gaze of my industry for decades. This was my response to learning that Ingres' Odalisque, painted in 1814, was used to justify French colonialism -- an othering of peoples in the Near East and North Africa as a way of "proving" that they desperately needed France's "civilizing" authority. It’s something that photojournalism, unfortunately, has done for a long, long time – justified a white, male Western point of view which has othered women and people and cultures of color.

In May 2019, in Sarajveo, at the annual general meeting of my photo agency, VII Photo, I asked my colleague Christopher Morris to pose for me, and he agreed, with some trepidation. Chris was a natural choice for me. There are connections between us. He covered the war in Bosnia; I covered the aftermath. The photo I made was also my invitation to him, to engage in a dialogue between artists about nudity and representation and who does the gazing. Over the past year or so, Chris had stirred a huge controversy among women photographers with images of female nudes he’d made and shared on his Instagram feed.

And we were in Bosnia, which was an important part of the Ottoman Empire – the very era which also prompted Ingres’ painting and othering of cultures France sought to bring under its subjugation. This was the place to make the photo, and Chris was the perfect model.

I’m weary as I write this. It’s the summer of 2019 and it’s America, and the president of the United States (I will not use his name in the same sentence as the word “president”) others someone or some group of people with almost every tweet he makes, almost every time he opens his mouth. White, male, western power – and the power of naming.

But we’re fighting back, and women are leading the way. Power is shifting, slowly but surely, and I believe images can help move that story forward. I am weary, as I said, but I am hopeful.

Kevin Tully

@kevin.j.tully.3

© Kevin Tully, all rights reserved

Coahuila y Tejas

About eight years ago, when the call was going out from certain segments of society to “Build the Wall” along the border of Mexico with the states of  California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, I came up with the idea of creating a body of work that would ultimately become a book, documenting the area that is the old Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas with images that imitated old tintypes, but not exactly. I wanted something that combined a simulated old look with imagery that was both historic, contemporary, and sometimes ironic or quirky. The text would be meditations on the history, the architecture, the natural environment, and current quotes concerning “The Wall.”

The Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas existed from 1821 until 1836, when Texas became an independent Republic. Coahuila Y Tejas contained the land of all of current Texas and parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming.

The reality of Coahuila y Tejas has held a fascination for me due to the fact that much of the landscape, architecture, culture, and art of the former Mexican state remain irresistibly Mexican or Hispanic. I have traveled extensively through Texas (my home state), Arizona and New Mexico. I have lived and worked in South Texas, not far from the border. I learned to speak Spanish so as to be effective in my job in the construction industry. I’ve spent significant time down in Mexico. My first memory of eating at a restaurant as a child is at Felix’s Mexican Restaurant in Houston, Texas.

So, building “The Wall” represents, to me, something almost existential, an assault, a sacrilege.
These images are sketches, photographic maquettes. Hopefully I can get back to this project again soon.

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