Love Song
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.)
How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
I took these pictures in Minsk, the city where I was raised. It was the month of January. There was mud with wet snow on the streets. I was at the bus stop starting with fascination at the faces glued to the windows in the publication transportation.
The stillness and detachment of the human look together with the surface of the glass was already an enigmatic picture to me, which I then captured on film.
If you haven’t seen Michael Subotzky’s powerful photographs of South African prisoners, now is the time. Michael was recently selected as a 2007 Magnum nominee along with Alessandra Sanguinetti. How exciting for a 25 year-old photographer!
See the series at a much more reasonable scale on his website.
Norwegian photographer and experimental video artist Torbjørn Rødland has a lot of intriguing work. I was reminded of him when I noticed that he had a photograph in the exhibition I went to last week. When I first saw his book White Planet, Black Heart (published by Steidl), I fell in love. Or was it lust?
Torbjørn Rødland is to photography what the Pet Shop Boys are to pop music: a master of the delicately orchestrated cliché overload, a surcharge of the too obvious, too cute or too inane, played to the point where the images are drained of all trace of common sense and suggest a new sense of silence or mystery.
Rødland has a knack for producing images that make you ask what are, in fact, appropriate motives for art photography: Images of single audio or video cassettes? Bleak black and white renditions of countryside churches? George W. Bush’s favourite ice cream? A black banana? Girls and pets, pets and girls? He creates a complex of readings that inveigles the viewer into spending time with each single image, to reconsider its meaning and relevance. White Planet, Black Heart makes no excuses as it reinvents the romantic impulses of popular culture.
There’s plenty to see on his website but if you’ve got the money, the book beats the website. I’m waiting for mine to come in the mail.
Lockhart began by constructing a portrait studio in a small rural community, and extending an open invitation to local children, and then by immersing herself in their environment and noting the complexity of their interactions. Her highly descriptive, almost painterly portraits, taken over the course of several years, abjure narration for the pleasure of the gaze and the notion of temporality. The studio remains a constant, its black backdrop, cement floor and natural lighting a theatrical setting that allows the children to develop a different kind of relationship to the camera. Those stills stand in stark contrast to the pictorialism of a series showing the community’s majestic natural surroundings, and to the portraits on 16mm film that accompany them, which are both literally and figuratively moving.
- Photoeye
Though there were a few intriguing large-format photographs at the exhibition I was much more drawn to the rotating 16mm film segments (that I would later see combined in the full Pine Flat screening) - the long, contemplative scenes depicting children placed within a natural environment. If I remember correctly, all of the work was made over a three year period in a small town in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.
It was the first time I had seen such “photographic” film (or “photographic” film that I liked) and I was captivated by the experience watching a single framed moment unfold in in real time, the camera unmoving. One of the scenes in particular caused a sort of optical illusion effect when viewed long enough. They were startlingly beautiful or perfectly boring, depending on your taste.
Though I couldn’t find any film samples online, there are more stills available here. If you’re interested in Sharon’s work, don’t miss Pine Flat (the book) or her other projects.
Jyrki Parantainen is another interesting photographer from the Helsinki School. Parantainen incorporates other media into his photographs to illustrate such ideas as the field of understanding (or misunderstanding) between individuals and the confusion of a child “on the front of expectations.” As he puts it,
‘Dreams and Disappointments’ explores man’s physical and psychological vulnerability. Representations of the human body are marked, at their perceived points of vulnerability, by push-pins and attached strings. The strings, pulled tight to a point outside the frame of the image, allude to the presence of an unknown, dominant force.
I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Mark Wyse about his work. This is the first in a series of interviews called Contemporary Dialogues. The following conversation (text only) can also be viewed as a printer-friendly PDF.
Shane Lavalette is currently studying at Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His blog focuses primarily on fine art photography and issues concerning contemporary photographic practice. By featuring individual photographers, books, exhibitions as well as exclusive interviews with artists, the blog is both an archive of the author's personal interests as well as a platform for critical discourse.
57 Optional Spots to Crack the Bone, 2004 (from “Dreams and Disappointments”)
