Zemni Photography Blog

Category: United States

  • John Schott

    John Schott website

    The New Topographics

    His 20 images of motels show the buildings – mostly one-story with adjacent parking lots – located in comfortable surroundings, showing the relationship between the buildings and natural environment. They do not have the harsh angularity of many of the other images from the exhibition. Although the images suggest that cars are the only way to get there (they are motels after all!), there is no critique implied of that reliance. The motels themselves are not homogenised or standardised; they have distinctive architectural features and are not owned by corporate chains. Cars are parked rather than being a threat.

    Motel images from website

    The Building Remembers

    An exhibition and catalog featuring photographs of the Northfield Middle School before it was transformed into the Weitz Center for Creativity at Carleton. Images all show a very strong geometric design, diagonals, verticals and horizontals. It is not always clear why this is so apart from (over?) dramatic impact.

     

  • Nicholas Nixon

    Nicholas Nixon, born in 1947, is known for the ease and intimacy of his black and white large format photography.  As well as being one of the photographers exhibiting in New Topographics, Nicholas Nixon’s subjects include schoolchildren and schools in and around Boston, people living along the Charles River near Boston and Cambridge as well as cities in the South, his family and himself, people in nursing homes, the blind, sick and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Nixon is also well known for his work People With AIDS, begun in 1987.

    Recording his subjects close and with meticulous detail facilitates the connection between the viewer and the subject. Influenced by the photographs of Edward Weston and Walker Evans, Nixon began working with large-format cameras. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on 35mm film with more portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed prints to be made directly from the 8×10 inch negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image. Nixon has said “When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large.”

    Interview with Nixon from Ahorn Magazine

    Urbonautica article

    Nixon’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.

    New Topographics and urban landscape

    Nixon’s early city views taken of Boston and New York in the mid-seventies were exhibited at the New Topographics exhibition in 1975. See Google Images from the Exhibition

    His images are mostly high view images showing complexity of roadways and textured skyscrapers. Although they have a formal beauty, I do not find them as effective in terms of message or emotion as other images in the exhibition.

    His first solo exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art curated by John Szarkowski.

    In the late nineties, Nixon returned to this subject matter to document Boston’s changing urban landscape during the Big Dig highway development project.

    The Brown Sisters

    In 1975, Nixon began his project, The Brown Sisters consisting of a single portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters each year, consistently posed in the same left to right order. As of 2014, there are forty portraits altogether.

    Forty Portraits in Forty Years—Nicholas Nixon portrait series (The Brown Sisters)

    In 2010, theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston organized the exhibition “Nicholas Nixon: Family Album” which included “The Brown Sisters” series among other portraits of his wife Bebe, himself and his children Sam and Clementine.

     Close Far

    2013 Nixon’s book Close Far was released by Steidl. The body of work explores the relationship of the self in physical and psychological proximity to the urban landscape. Nixon presents a dichotomous group of photos made with a large-format view camera, in this case one with an 11×14 inch negative. The first half of the book contains self-portraits, comprising, in Nixons words, sketches of an old man. Filled with anxiety, longing and contentedness, these images chronicle the shapes, slopes and pores of Nixons face. The second half of the book shows views of buildings in the densest part of Boston. Made from high within the buildings and with the same camera, these images without horizons do not gaze down upon but rather through the city. With the lens in the same orientation as his self-portrait photos, Nixons results are remarkable for their richness of detail and complexity of form.

    Interview with Nixon from 2013

     Books

    • Photographs From One Year (1983)
    • Pictures of People (1988)
    • People With AIDS (with Bebe Nixon)(1991)
    • School (1998)
    • The Brown Sisters (2002)
    • Nicholas Nixon Photographs (2003)
    • Home (2005)
    • Live Love Look Last (2009)
    • Close Far (2013)
    • Forty Portraits in Forty Years (2014)

  • Joe Deal

    Joseph Maurice “Joe” Deal (August 12, 1947 – June 18, 2010) was an American photographer who specialized in depicting how the landscape was transformed by people.

    Google images

    Square format landscapes on the Great Plains.

    Biography

    Wikipedia

    Deal was born in Topeka, Kansas on August 12, 1947, and was raised in Albany, Missouri and St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After his graduation in 1970, he was designated as a conscientious objector by the local draft board and was assigned to work as a guard and janitor at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and its museum of photography. He later earned a master’s degree in photography and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico.

    While working on his thesis for his MFA degree in the 1970s Deal started teaching at the University of California, Riverside, where he helped establish the UCR/California Museum of Photography. In 1989, he became dean of theSchool of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. He was named to serve as provost of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island 1999, and lived there for the remainder of his life.

    In the mid-1970s, Deal was one of nine photographers chosen to participate in the “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” exhibition curated by William Jenkins at the Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography. Deal contributed 18 black and white photographs to the exhibit in a 32 cm × 32 cm format. Many of the photographs Deal submitted featured homes newly constructed against the desolate landscape of the American Southwest.

    He continued photographing man’s effect on the landscape in “The Fault Zone”, which featured images combining human and geologic effects on the area surrounding the San Andreas Fault. “Subdividing the Inland Basin” featured suburban areas east of Los Angeles and “Beach Cities” focused on Pacific Ocean communities in Southern California.

     “West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains” featured photographs of the grid pattern of much of the Midwestern United States and was on exhibit at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona after opening at the Rhode Island School of Design and being presented at New York City’s Robert Mann Gallery.[3]

    A ten-year resident of Providence, Rhode Island, Deal died at a hospice there due to bladder cancer at age 62 on June 18, 2010.He is survived by his wife, Betsy Sara Ruppa, and a daughter, Meredith Deal.

  • Lewis Baltz

    Lewis Baltz (September 12, 1945 – November 22, 2014) was a visual artist and photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation and destruction. Baltz’s images describe the architecture of the human landscape: offices, factories and parking lots. His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influenced by and over human beings.

    Approach to Photography

    For me a work of art is something to think about rather than something to look at.

    Photography starts with a world that is overfull. The photograph tries to sort it out. What is the camera looking at and why?

    The new topographics

    In 1974 he captured the anonymity and the relationships between inhabitation, settlement and anonymity in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974).

    Discussing his photographs of Park City 1978-79 Baltz says ‘I want my work to be neutral and free from aesthetic and ideological posturing..’ But his photographs are far from being emotionally barren….convey sadness, disappointment, and anger at how we have used the landscape..It becomes hard to distinguish construction from destruction'(Jurovics in Foster-Ricxe and Rohrbach pp6-7)

     

     

    ‘No one wanted to confront the new homogenised environment that was being built – people pretended not to see it. I was looking for the things that were most unremarkable, and wanted to present them in as unremarkable way as possible to ‘appear objective’ and not show point of view.’ Though obviously not objective.

    Interested in the effect of the place. What kind of people or new world would come out of it.

    Interest in marginalised, things that reminded us of mortality. Wastelands.

    His books and exhibitions, his “topographic work”, such as The New Industrial Parks, Nevada, San Quentin Point, Candlestick Point (84 photographs documenting a public space near Candlestick Park, ruined by natural detritus and human intervention), expose the crisis of technology and define both objectivity and the role of the artist in photographs.

    Baltz moved to Europe in the late 1980s and started to use large colored prints. 1989 started to think of much more direct ways of being social. He published several books of his work including Geschichten von Verlangen und Macht, with Slavica Perkovic (Scalo, 1986). Other photographic series, including Sites of Technology (1989–92), depict the clinical, pristine interiors of hi-tech industries and government research centres, principally in France and Japan.

    Baltz died on November 22, 2014 at the age of 69 following a long illness.

  • Henry Wessel

    Importance of acting on instinct. The first photographs are often the most interesting because they are new. The next ones become more laboured, and more like everyone else’s.

     

    Taking images from the vantage point of the car. Then stop and explore it more. ‘Think of the process as being receptive’ Photograph anything that takes your eye.

    Importance of light. In California light is very sharp.

    Uses 35mm camera.

    The world is filled with wonderful things.

    Present world is chaos. Still photography tries to process it.

    Produce a negative with as much information as possible. Then process to mirror world.

    Revisits contact sheets again later to see what is interesting.

    Everything is interconnected. In balance.

  • Frank Gohlke

    Google images

    Frank Gohlke’s website

    http://terrain.org/2011/interviews/interview-with-frank-gohlke/

    Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape

    ‘ I was frustrated by the discrepancy between the facts surrounding the grain elevators and the intensity of my emotional responses to the objects themselves…To me, the photographs I was making argued that there are deeper impulses lurking somewhere in the functional surfaces and details of the grain elevators, and that subjective choice as well as objective necessity has a role in determining their form.’

    ‘ The dignity of grain elevators, the precision, intelligence and grace of their formal language, their majestic presence within the landscape all seem to confirm the faith that, given the right circumstances, we will make visible the best that is within us.’

  • Joel Meyerowitz

    Google Images for Aftermath

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    Reflections on Ground Zero : BBC Documentary

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    Compare with the way another photographer – a policeman John Bott whose health was seriously damaged by the photography work he did. Unlike Meyerowitz he did not profit from the photos he took.

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    Discussion Exercise 3.3 ‘Late Photography

    Biography Wikipedia

    Joel Meyerowitz (born March 6, 1938) is a street photographer and portrait and landscape photographer.

    He began photographing in color in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art. In the early 1970s he taught the first color course at the Cooper Union in New York City where many of today’s renowned color photographers studied with him.

    In 1962, inspired by seeing Robert Frank at work, Meyerowitz quit his job as an art director at an advertising agency and started photographing streets of New York City with a 35 mm camera and black-and-white film. Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones, Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge and Diane Arbus were photographing there at the same time. Meyerowitz was inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Eugène Atget.

    After alternating between black-and-white and color, Meyerowitz “permanently adopted color” in 1972, well before John Szarkowski’s promotion in 1976 of color photography in an exhibition of work by the then little-knownWilliam Eggleston. Meyerowitz also switched at this time to large format, often using an 8×10 camera to produce photographs of places and people.

    Meyerowitz appears extensively in the 2006 BBC Four documentary series The Genius of Photography and in the 2013 documentary film Finding Vivian Maier.

    He is the author of 16 books including:

    Cape Light, considered a classic work of color photography.

    Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (2006) – he was the only photographer allowed unrestricted access to its Ground Zero immediately following the attack.