Jacob Holdt: "American Pictures"
Jacob Holdt - "American Pictures" (Warning: facebook link)
Via http://www.americansuburbx.com/
He sold blood plasma twice weekly to be able to buy film. He lived in more than 400 homes - from the poorest migrant workers to America's wealthiest families such as the Rockefellers. They not only gave him a hospitality and warmth, but their continuing friendship to this day.
He joined the Indian rebellion in Wounded Knee, followed criminals in the ghettos during muggings, sneaked inside to work in Southern slave camps and infiltrated secret Ku Klux Klan meetings as well as Republican presidential campaign headquarters.
Working with prisoners he saw two of his friends assassinated. By the time he returned to Denmark 12 of his friends had been murdered (in the years since so many of his friends have been murdered that he has completely lost count).
I first encountered the above photographs through facebook which skewed the viewing experience in a weird way. The thumbs-up "like" icons approving documentation of dire poverty and brash racism seem grotesque, not to mention the public comments of "Awww" or "what an observation" (no punctuation). The sanitized aesthetic of facebook also conveys the feeling that you're looking at a friend's or family member's photo album, of a vacation, wedding or party.
Of course, the photos themselves are not entirely unproblematic. Many of them share the same flashbulb aesthetic of Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives": questionably "objective" snapshots that are as exploitative as they are documentary, yet undeniably powerful nevertheless.
The photographs are compelling, but are they also pornographic? Sensationalist? Or are they as honest as an outsider like Holdt can get? And can facebook be used as an art-gallery-like medium? Or does it just look gross?
Doesn't seem to be on facebook anymore. Context will always skew your interpretation of something. It's a tough thing to get around...and the more you try to control the context the more it will be difficult to be able to view.
I see them as pornographic but I see most media that way. I've long felt it strange that we place sex as an act so sacred that there should be all this taboo or stigma around it's being recorded yet nothing else seems to be sacred at all.
"as honest as an outsider like Holdt can get?"
Not knowing holdt the problem is compounded. We are outsiders looking at an outsiders perspective. I do think there is some value in viewing worlds outside your own be it irks me how confident people can be going soley off of mediated information. I've spent months living in strange places trying to get a personal intimite understanding of the place and people and in one instance they looked up toronto on a cd-rom encyclopedia and saw a picture of the eaton center and told me how the picture was very impressive...How could I say the eaton center doesn't feel as impressive as it looks in that photo as that it is usually a place I try to avoid....How can any artist communicate the beauty that exists in parkdale to those who are living the beauty of rosedale? How can any artist know the beauty of parkdale or rosedale if they pass through like a vagabond visiting hundreds of places in a few years? Holdts work probably speaks more to the beauty of the vagabond wanderer than anything else.
How do see this http://www.tomhunter.org/html/get_13.htm in comparison?
I like this. There's a piece in the latest issue of Geist done by Faith Moosang, who collects old photo albums from eBay and antique shops. The album for the piece is a bunch of women who worked at a potato chip factory in and around WW2. She tries to figure out from the photos which person actually composed the album. It's kind of interesting and really shows your point: that the only thing we can really be sure about is the subjectivity of the artist, not their attempts and gestures at objectivity.
Here's an older piece Moosang did about the art of collecting:
Futile Gestures: Photo Albums and the Ecology of MemoryI realized that my compulsion to collect photo albums had to do with the idea of rescue. My only consideration when purchasing or otherwise obtaining an album was that the album had somehow left the confines of its originating family and had magically made its way into the impersonal marketplace of the antique store, the thrift store, the dealer in paper ephemera, eBay, the back alley, the garbage dump, the basement of a house being demolished. These albums are like shivering kittens. I rescued them from the nastiness of not being wanted and the potential further nastiness of having a price attached to them. How do you throw away or commodify these mundane precious efforts? I pay for albums in order to remove them from the market, to ensure that they are no longer commodities. I own them. (I think I own them.) They will not be bartered, traded or sold in my lifetime. The supreme importance of these albums lies in the moment of their making and the ultimate indifference to their fate. As Stephanie Snyder notes in Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album, it is precisely because these albums flourished in the domestic sphere, removed as they are from the institutional protection of a museum or gallery, that they are vulnerable to neglect and disappearance. To attempt to forestall the processes of neglect and disappearance is the futile gesture, the essential gesture, of the collector.
When I returned to Toronto a few years ago I moved to a bachelor apartment in a building full of a lot of people new to the city. Even though I was paying more than three times the rent I was paying where I previously lived it was as good a deal as I could find for a place of my own. In the video you can see my bike hanging in the hall in one of the few places there was wood to drill into I cracked the closet shelf on the other side of the wall and did a lot of plaster damage when I missed the shelf). I used part of an old external hard drive chassis as the hook and metal from some discarded venting as the water mat which got wicked grimy after winter event though I shook off the snow and wiped it down before going into the building. Opting for my own place meant at the very least I didn't have to worry about offending anyone else about storing the bike inside. The thing about having your own space in an apartment building is that your own space is shared with all these other people you don't really know(and whom you're not intended to know judging by the lack of buttons to get on an elevator that is going up on any floor apart from the first.) The woman who lived above me was lonely and talked to anyone who would listen about her fibromyalgia, Korea, the son she wasn't allowed to see, about wanting to go to the opera and make connections with Canadians, about being unemployed, about a job she could get if she had a car, about the crooked immigration lawyer who had a job for her, the brother who was a professor in NY. She also talked about this guy she knew who took her with his family on his boat. This guy gave her a cheap built to brake wallDeMort type mountain bike. She scrapped her knee learning to ride it but she learned. She valued the bike enough to worry about it rusting. Unlike me she wasn't willing to store it in her immaculately clean room. She spent a great deal of effort trying to convince management to make a bike shelter. She also spent a great deal of effort wrapping her bike up in a tarp after every ride. She had a lot of trouble with the cold and always talked about the pain the fibromyalgia caused. She couldn't really afford the apartment but gave me the sense she chose to live there anyway as matter of dignity. She had trouble sleeping, sometimes I'd hear loud crashes at 3am. Eventually she got evicted.
You can see my room is mostly empty. But I had an Internet connection for my job. All and all I thought it was relatively luxurious. For fun in my spare time I made some podcast for rabble, I rode the bike, tried to learn french. I made friends with an Woman from Quebec who liked to dance and was raising 4 orphans in a 3 bedroom apartment in Scarborough as well as a very active vegetarian anglophone activist originating from Manitoba who did telephone surveys for money. She kept her bikes on the apartment patio, he had an outdoor spot with a roof in his housing co-op for bikes. He rode 2hrs+ to his job in the north end of the city but he waited a long time to get things fixed, as long as the bike still moved he was happy. In the spring I put a new chain on his bike and made the gears and brakes work. When I gave it back to him he was a little confused about what to do with the gears as he'd learnt to ride in whatever gear the bike naturally fell into. He wasn't normally a spiritual man but I'd have to say he did make unintentional exceptions in his remarkably zen like approach to cycling. I also watched bedroom musicians on youtube on nights when I couldn't sleep...frequently late night crashing sounds certainly didn't help my sleep patterns but it was more pleasant than couples fighting. I liked the beauty in these single shot amateur videos of individuals sitting in a room with a guitar enough that when I got a laptop with a built in webcam It was enough to get me to make my own videos again for the first time since I was in school.
I made Barefoot in the dawn. A youtube user BeautifulGirlByDana included it in one of his compilations.
As I type this I'm wearing wool pants, layers of sweaters and I have cold feet and I think if I could say anything good about the building itself it's that even with poorly insulated windows the 11 floors worth of people below me generated a lot of heat.
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Judith Butler on Diane Arbus: Surface Tensions
Facebook Gallery – American Suburb X
Nice quote. Hmmm...If I were to summarize it in a status update to post the link on facebook could I still capture the sentiment of the full quote?
Wow, Catchfire - thank you for that link. What an amazing project that will take a while to fully (if ever) digest.
ebodyknows, personally, I would boil it down thus: "One wants, in some instances, to turn away, not because the photo is grotesque, but because the human figure is so proud in its enormity or deformity or its plasticity, in its shiny garb, happy, finally, before the camera, Arbus's camera, that provides the occasion and promise to be seen and seen again."
Germaine Greer had some things to say about being photographed buy Arbus as well--not exactly flattering things. Damning by faint praise, if I recall.
I Love Photography
Why am I telling you this? Isn’t it self-obvious? Don’t we all love photography? The answer is no.
There is a percentage of photographers who hate photography. They do not appreciate photography. They do not consume photography. They don’t look at photo books or photo magazines. They hate the guy with the iPhone taking Instagram shots. They hate the guy who just bought the D4 because they don’t have one. They hate people using digital because film is what real artists use. They hate photographers who embrace social media because images should stand on their own.
They hate Getty, Corbis, the AP, day rates, photo editors, assistants, rental houses, camera stores, point-and-shoots, iPads, zoom lenses, padded camera straps, wheeled suitcases, younger photographers, older photographers. The photo of so-and-so on the cover of whatever it’s called sucks. That guy copied the other guy, he sucks. Terry Richardson sucks. Chuck Close sucks. Vincent Laforet hasn’t taken a still in 17 years. Kodak hasn’t been managed well since the 70s. Blah, blah, blah.
I love photography. Let me show you why.