Abstract Psychogeography
ICM
Category: Theory and Concepts
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Helen Sear
Creative Wales award.
Not just the eye. Uses the hand to pain in parts. Sculptural and 3D form. Liberate from computer screen. Different types of paper. Or use CAD.
Body in the landscape, or landscape in the body
What does it mean to be both human and animal?
Wants to concentrate on unremarkable landscape – portrait of a field over a year. Landscape as a living being. And walk to a particular part of forest that changes through being cut down and exposes a particular view suddenly.
Pond 2011 installation at Crescent Arts Scarborough, UK, March 2011. video of frozen winter pond and trees. Occasional birds. Sheep in silhouette on the horizon.
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Sara Pickering
Sarah Pickering has photographed training grounds for the fire and police service.
http://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/Works/Pulic-Order/workpg-01.html
In Public Order (2005), she photographed the £55 million facility in Kent that is used by the police for firearms and riot training. Her images contain no people – though the police service who supported her work wanted her to photograph action she felt that the images without people are more powerful.
Pickering’s images depict a truly uncanny space, some revealing creepily accurate architectural details, others displaying almost comical crudeness in the design of the state-of-the-art facility. The strange, two-dimensional façades of these ‘streets’ give the space a film set or theatre-like quality, in readiness for some grim and violent narrative to unfold… As a viewer one can imagine waking up in this peculiar world and wandering bewilderedly through an inescapable network of streets that don’t lead anywhere and doors that open onto nothing.
(Alexander 2013 p 95)
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John Pfahl
Born in New York in 1939, John Pfahl was raised in Wanaque, New Jersey. He received a BFA from Syracuse University’s School of Art and his MA from Syracuse University’s School of Communications. Pfahl is known for his innovative landscape photography such as Altered Landscape, his first major series of un-manipulated color photographs on which he worked from 1974 through 1978. In these pictures Pfahl manipulates the optics of the camera and plays tricks with perspective by using cleverly placed manmade objects in the landscape to mislead the eye of the viewer. For the past thirty years, Pfahl has been creating images of nature that transcribe the forces of nature and how humans affect it. His work has been shown in over hundred group and solo exhibitions and is held in many public and private collections throughout the world. From 1968 to 1983 he taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and later at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Pfahl is currently professor of photography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.
Renske van Leeuwenhttps://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/john-pfahl?all/all/all/all/0
Power Places 
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John Schott
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.
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.
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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
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)
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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.
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.
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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)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF8JEuZo64U
‘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.
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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.
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Patrick Shanahan
Patrick Shanahan examines the transition from one post-industrial space into a new kind of industry in his series Paradeisos (2005), which explores the creation of the Eden Project in Cornwall. Commencing in 1998, Shanahan’s photographs document the transformation of a redundant china quarry into one of the UK’s most celebrated tourist attractions.
See the work at: http://www.ffotogallery.org/patrick-shanahan-–-paradeisos
Flash-based website.
Only work I could find on the web were ‘New Images’ seaside pictures that seem to question the seaside idyll – is this the same Patrick Shanahan photographer? But not as punchy as those of Martin Parr. Some a bit gimmicky with different angles. Need to look again