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Clinton Ave Public Space, February 2008
Americans are either in their cars, in their homes, or in shopping malls.
The sense of public space in the contemporary American city is so exceptionally abbreviated it seems that I am able to pass to and from work without ever really having to navigate a truly “public” place. I get up in the morning, and pass from my house to an abandoned street of private homes and get onto a bus that systematically seals me off from the public sphere passing outside. When I arrive at work, I migrate upwards into the sky-ways and am deluged by an array of private interests and intentions – starting with some corporate architect’s premeditated control of my movement and ending with the various retail establishments that pull me in to spend money.
There is never a sense of openness, possibility, or social exchange in the mock public environment I’m surrounded by. I guess I’m comparing this to the various public spaces I’ve spent time in – The Zocalo area in Mexico City or Central Park or the Museum Plein in Amsterdam. There is something that is distinctly lost when public space is mutated and downsized as it is in Minneapolis. Supposedly there is a new public space opening up – Target Plaza… next to Target Field… next to the Target Center.
Does it bother anyone else that we are so willing to have our open forum spaces co-opted by a corporation’s private PR interests?
With the above thoughts in mind, I intend to actually start doing some work again (keeping in mind, I can’t really make any prints until this time next year). A couple of goals for this project/direction:
- Research the history of the corporate sponsorship of art, architecture, and the public sphere.
- Photograph the spaces that constitute public space, in its abbreviated and shrunken state.
- Intervene in the dialog between the accessibility and inaccessibility of the public and private, corporate and free.
UCLA has an amazing collection of images available through its library. Here’s the link. Over the last two weeks I’ve really soured with photography. It feels like I’m able to know what a photographer is going to do before he/she does it – that the practice of making photographs involves personal style and marketability to such a degree that 90% of the photographs I see are UTTERLY PREDICTABLE.
Maybe that’s why these images have such sway over me right now. Here are a few choice pics from the UCLA archives.
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I’ve taken a hiatus to tend to the burning feeling that seems to be eminating from my lungs. Ouch. In the mean time, here a just a few images of the week that was.
Hiver 2009
Sunlight
Homemade
this may be all the use my loyal epson sees this year
At some point in the recent past I became what many Americans consider an “adult”. Maybe it is my age. Maybe it is the geographic gorging of my under eye region. But, I have officially reached the phase of my life where all of my peers are doing things like buying houses, sprouting children, or buying Prada handbags.
I’m doing none of these things and really have no ambition to.
However, by some stroke of this thing called “responsibility” I’ve decided that its high time to do things like paying off my credit card debt from my MFA thesis show. If I start now, and use all my extra cash, I can save $3,000 and be out of debt in 12 months.
What does this really mean?
- I cannot travel for one year. (Goodbye Mexico City, Montreal, Brussels, and elsewhere)
- I cannot fully produce images for one year. (I can take photographs but cannot print, frame, and exhibit)
Two incredibly important things for me to be giving up for New Years.
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In doing this, however, I feel there is some hope of liberation. In a time of instant turn-around with digital imaging techniques and also an excess cache of film, I’ve been able to point at will and make photographs with little concern for the resources going into them.
I intend to continue to make photographs, but they will remain latent, unprocessed and unprinted, until December of 2009.
Will this liberate me? Make me take the image making process as something more precious, rare, and important? Will I get to know a new appreciation for the images I see when in 2009 I take the mountain of 4X5 film in for processing?
I cannot guess what an image that has been latent for 12 months will mean to me.
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Two things come to mind:
- I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s “Time Capusules”. Warhol would take various items and simply archive them in brown paper boxes, in a warehouse, until he felt the need to revisit them. Here is Andy at his finest:
“What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey.”
A. Warhol, THE philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again, London, 1975.
- Robert Capa’s lost negatives of the Spanish Civil War – long thought to be lost… http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html
