Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Post Photography_ Documentary Thrive

April 6, 2016

Documentary Thrive: Continued fascination with subject matter and reality

·      9/11 we start to see beginning of new documentary photography
·      This is American trends.
·      Index type, it references something. All photography is documenting. Still photographers have an assumed authority of photography, how you can show the truth in photography.  Some use a lot of text. Using photographs to document performances, are they performance artists or photographers. They enjoy being in these genres. Digital manipulated narratives.
·      Nan Goldin and Larry Clark
o   Known for showing very vulnerable, sick subculture, personal images. She was part of this group of drug addicts so it is documentary not voyeuristic. = more intimate realistic photographs. Very shocking photography at the time. We are not surprised looking at these images now, but then it was breeching the boundaries.
·      Leigh Ledare
o   both focus on relationship between mother and family members, intimate. “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” printed as a book. Photographed his mother daring, personal, and personal way. Sex with boyfriend, drug issues, show taboo details about his mother as a document. Son lives with her, he is the best one to document her.
o   This completely grosses me out as a concept. Relationship on how to be mother, how to be son, how mother looks at son, how son looks at mother. To private of imagery and concept for me to ever do.
o   Defies logic of normal role of mother son relationship. They are kind of making the photographs together.
o   Everyone becomes a voyer, perfomer, maker.
o   Investigation of authorship, performance, personal boundaries, public and private spaces.
o   Grosssssssss
o   She shows other images not sided

·      Latoya Ruby Frazier
o   About family and visual history of where she came from. Braddock, Pennsylvania. Steel mining business. Small town relects political and social decline of America, social documentary. But how family relationship has changed and how it has affected the photographer. She photographs three generations, her mother, grandmother, and herself. She reveals the legacy of racism in a carefully staged documentary style.
o   Her mother collaborated and interjected while being the subject with this work. Wanted more democratic images that talks about demographics of this towns changes and decline.
o   Lots of collaboration and pairs of strong women. She works with black and white to see if she could subvert authenticity of documentary photography of the past.
o   Not a fan of the repeated elements of the same scenes. Traditional power dynamics that occur with family history.
·      Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
o   Idea of representation and portraiture. Raise questions about what can be documentary photography.
o   How is this documentation? I’m a little confused, must research.
o   Roll of paper with soldier? It was present physically, whether this captured reality or not. Is it documentation though!? Min likes this image more than normal documentation. This is a different way of showing and talking about documentation of reality.
·      Erwin Wurm
o   “Inspection” and “Spit in someone’s drink”
o   Wants to question status of glorified work. Poke fun of status of art and some artistic medium. Turn every day absurd activities that you don’t always see. Very snapshot. Turn it into art. What is considered art and what is considered photography?
o   Invites strangers by curator to come up with ideas based on instruction and creates a performance as he goes. Models depict the scenes.
o   “looking for a bomb” models come up with name as well.
o   Documentation of a performance, or a human sculpture, or an action or is it a pure photograph?
o   Everything is perisable, plastic nature or life, poking fun of contemporary lifestyle, uses items that are multiply consumed.
·      Malanie Manchot
o   staged documentary. Boarders real life and constructed circumstances. How does the photographic surface start to look different? Artificial performance.
o   How people occupy public and private spaces in controversial places. She pulls people off the streets and gets them to agree to be in the photo.
o   in front of Russian embassy.
o   strangers creating self portrait and this is the only moment they are together.
·      Kikki S Lee- Korean
o   Transforms herself into American subcultures. Create scenes of herself called parts without significant others showing, you miss these parts. She prints the images and hand cuts the people out. She decides how much she wants to cut and show of herself and her partner. Purpose of the cut is to make people curious about who this is and his identity is affected by the cut and the women left behind and how the woman is defined by the partner not being there.
o   She uses disposable camera to question authenticity of her shots.
o   Gets strangers to take the pictures. She really becomes these subcultures. She keeps the dates in the image. How we build identity and how we create ourselves between gender, race, age, and culture. How do we define ourselves?
·      Beat Streuli
o   Large Scale images, Swiss artist
o   Dense urban spaces zoomed in on singular people. Portraiture. Looks like DiCorcia. People are unaware that they are being photographed. Playing with popular documentary social media aspects.  A photograph is art. Unable to influence the image.
·      Paul Graham
o   Leading photo journalist in England
o   Poverty, Suburbia, Urban street life, he prints by himself.
o   White image, wanted to somehow use it, accident photograph.
o   Could this photograph be valid? If I make it that way. This is a document in his own way. Visual boundaries of photographic surface are breeched. Would not be acceptable for school that’s for sure. Always unwritten rules of photography.
o   Give more light to marginalized people. How are we going to change the reading of the image.
o   Deceptive images of society.
·      Richard Renaldi
o   Ask strangers to publicly perform with him. Complex negotiations that had to be breeched between the performers. Forced to have physical intimacy with these others. Wants preforming strangers to look forced. Using people as sculptural objects, showing identity through portraiture style.
o   Questioning future roll of photography and documentary photography.

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