Justine Kurland’s Smoke Bombs

Justine Kurland, Smoke Bombs, 1998 (689.2000)

In Smoke Bombs, from one of Kurland’s earliest bodies series, Runaway Girls, the artist orchestrates narratives within landscapes, often the American West, and features teenaged girls as her models. The uncharted or forgotten spaces Kurland depicts capture the feral state of the runaway. The artist casts her girls into active roles, reinventing the Lost Boys narrative.  Kurland describes the process of this early work, the majority of which was made while pursuing her MFA at Yale, as an act of running away from the East Coast, when she herself drifted on extended road trips. While on the road, Kurland culls her female adolescent models from high schools and colleges; she pulls them along like seaweed for a collaborative moment where she arranges the scene and then documents the interactions between the individuals depicted. In recent years, Kurland has continued to photograph while driving across the country. Her newest work, This Train is Bound For Glory, explores the livelihood of the contemporary American drifter, as well as her relationship with her young son, who accompanies her on the road.

Kate Levy, ICP-Bard 2013

Camera Shy

The American photographer Lee Friedlander is well-known and respected for his documentation of the American social landscape. Though there are many wonderful things to write of Friedlander’s street shots and portraits of jazz icons,  I have always been most interested in his strange brand of self portraiture.

Friedlander’s self portraits are quite different from those of most other photographers; he rarely presents himself in an easily identifiable manner. In these portraits, Friedlander is seen through a reflection, a shadow, or obscured behind an object. A notoriously shy man, he purposefully disguised himself in his photographs and describes the process as ”fascinating and disturbing.”

Friedlander’s frequent partial appearance within his photographs is very odd when considering other photographers’ self portraits. Many use self portraits as a way to explore different versions of themselves, as exercises in photographic and conceptual techniques, and in a few cases (at least) as a means to act out their narcissistic tendencies. Lee Friedlander’s reluctant self portraits don’t seem to fall into any one of these categories…

Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1966 (673.1986)

Lee Friedlander, New Orleans, 1968 (643.1984)

However, Friedlander isn’t the only one who appears to be a bit camera shy. Here are two examples by other artists who have produced similarly cryptic self portraits.

Bernard Plossu, Self Portrait in New York, 1979 (185.1995)

André Kertész, Self Portrait, Paris, 1927 (2011.78.17)

Happy Birthday, Weegee!

Weegee, With Bomb, 1940

The House I Once Called Home

The House I Once Called Home is a beautifully sad book written and illustrated by the American photographer Duane Michals. Inspired by his return to his childhood home shortly following his mother’s death, each page contains haunting photographs and poetic captions pertaining to the past and present of his family, himself, and the physicality of his home. Michals uses double exposure techniques to combine both old and new photographs, portraying the changes that have occurred since his house was inhabited, and eerily highlighting the current absence of his family.

Duane Michals, The House I Once Called Home, 2003 (431.2003)

Duane Michals, The House I Once Called Home, 2003 (431.2003.5)

Duane Michals, The House I Once Called Home, 2003 (431.2003.6)

Duane Michals, The House I Once Called Home, 2003 (431.2003.7)

Duane Michals, The House I Once Called Home, 2003 (431.2003.29)

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live. – Mark Twain

Garry Winogrand, [Woman riding bicycle] from Women are Beautiful, 1975 (257.1984)

Most bicyclists in New York City obey instinct far more than they obey the traffic laws, which is to say that they run red lights, go the wrong way on one-way streets, violate cross-walks, and terrify innocents because it just seems easier that way.  Cycling in the city, and particularly in midtown, is anarchy without malice.

– Author unknown, “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, June 9, 1986

Robert Capa, [Boys on bicycles discussing the Tour de France bicycle race, Paris], July 1939 (2488.1992)

When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day’s sensations:  bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay’s call, ice melting, and so on.  This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind, and focus on nature instead.  I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity.  But I am mentally far away from civilization.  The world is breaking someone else’s heart.

–Diane Ackerman

Danny Lyon, Beekman Street, Sunday morning; Ginco, Tonto, Frankie, John Jr., and Nelson, after exploring the buildings, 1967 (2010.116.21)

Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride. — John F. Kennedy

Helen M. Stummer, Transcending, April 21, 2002 (2009.47.4)

A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness. — James E. Starrs

Weegee, Josephine Barricini, Vine St., Hollywood, Cal., ca. 1953-55 (6130.1993)

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. — Albert Einstein

The Language of Protest

The AIDS crisis in the 1980s propelled many to take to the streets in anger and protest to rebel against the Reagan government, demanding rights to healthcare, treatment for AIDS, funding, and information. This movement mobilized communities, and in particular the queer communities who were initially the most effected by AIDS. This became a battle to be heard and healed. Fueled by anger and desire, a kind of queer politics. Judith Butler says, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire.”

So what did this language of protest look like, how was text and image leveled against injustice, against the system of haves and have nots, good and bad, healthy and sick, dead and alive? In fact, this binary language rests in direct contradiction to the queer methods it sought to enforce. Sarah Ahmed notes that a queer phenomenology would involve an orientation toward queer, a way to inhabit the world that gives support to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place and by their very existence, challenging of the binary. So why was the language of the binary used in so much AIDS activism communication?

ACT UP, Silence=Death/Vote, 1988 (1351.2000)

ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), was founded in 1987 to fight for AIDS treatment and awareness. From the beginning the organization was extremely adept at using the news media, such as its indelible logo—the words Silence=Death printed below a pink triangle on a black background. Silence=Death was a visual icon created by Gran
Fury, ACT UP’s unofficial art propaganda ministers, who used the language of advertising and media. The overt cause-effect, passive-active binary being employed to rally action, and in this case to vote.

Boy with Arms Akimbo, Safe, 1990-91 (1244.2000)

Boy with Arms Akimbo, Unsafe, 1990-91 (1245.2000)

As we see in Safe/Unsafe posters created by Boy with Arms Akimbo, 1991, the same binary device is used to place a spotlight on Louis Wade Sullivan who refused to oppose a law preventing HIV-positive people from entering the US, his smiling face in stark contrast to the entangled gay bodies labelled SAFE.

Nancy Burson and Kunio Nagahima, Visualize This, 1991 (1273.2000)

In Visualize This (1991), Nancy Burson and Kunio Nagahima juxtaposed images with explanatory text that read, “The image on the right is a normal T cell which defends the immune system from infection. The image on the left is an HIV infected T cell.” Visualize This offered a clinical representation of a reality often associated with false stereotypes and prejudices,effectively utilizing the transformative power of scientific imagery and art to inform the general public about AIDS.

fierce pussy, I Am a Stone Butch, 1991-95 (1154.2000)

It is this language of false stereotyping which which the queer movement and AIDS activism in particular has sought to overthrow. This is seen clearly in in the text image by fierce pussy, which in fact celebrates a multitude of assimilations and identity claims.

Perhaps this appropriation of the language of advertising, a semiotics deeply embedded in the the politics of desire, predicated on the have versus have not, employs the binary for the purposes of protest, whilst all the time encouraging one to “watch the line between two frames” as Yvonne Rainer said of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. By employing the overt, the need, the injustice, while simultaneously celebrating the unusual, the irreverent, the queer, the language of protest used to such great effect in the AIDS crisis has in fact paved a way for a more complicated view of human, governmental and economic relationships, what Douglas Crimp would call “a kind of model of polymorphous conspiracy” predicated on the
non-coupling of language and ideas.

–Bridget de Gersigny, ICP-Bard 2013

Theories of Motion

In May of last year, MIT’s Kurtz Gallery for Photography opened with its first exhibition featuring Berenice Abbott. Abbott was hired by MIT to develop photographic imagery for the teachings of physics and spent two years using photography to document the principles of physical science–mechanics, electromagnetism, and waves.

Berenice Abbott, A Bouncing Ball in Diminishing Arcs, 1958-61 (24.1986)

Photographing movement has always been a challenging task. In the early developments of photography, pictures involving motion were often taken in the middle of a bright, sunny day, to allow for the fast shutter speeds. While working for German and Hungarian newspapers, Hungarian-born Martin Munkacsi developed an interest in movement, and developed an expertise in sports photography. Below, in a picture from his series involving acrobatic dancers, Munkacsi captures his subject mid-air, with arms raised, hair flying, and legs extended from her gigantic leap off the raised ladder.

Martin Munkacsi, [Tibor von Halmay and Vera Mahlke], ca. 1931 (2007.110.842)

Winogrand captures a similar moment of women in flight–cheerleaders synchronizing in their performance at a basketball game.

Garry Winogrand, Austin, Texas, from the  Women are Beautiful series, 1975 (263.1984)