WTF?

When I began this blog at the start of this past rainy season, one of my first posts was on Deerhoof. I think have finally found the equivalent to Deerhoof in the photographic world: Roger Ballen. Both make work that is ingenius, formally advanced, and that at its heart is totally inscrutable. Note that by inscrutable I don't necessarily mean subtle. Stephen Shore, for example, is subtle.
There are all sorts of things going on in this photo that aren't immediately evident, that take a while to sort through, and maybe after some time with the photo one comes away with a changed understanding of it. That's subtle.

Roger Ballen on the other hand is inscrutable.
Let's see, there's some primitive markings, a chicken, dirty legs, uh huh, hmm. You could spend a while looking at this photo before arriving at pretty much the same point you started which is, "What the fuck?..."

The thing is, I think Roger Ballen is fine with that reaction. After hearing him lecture a few nights ago in Portland, my understanding of him is roughly as thin as before. "Not every question has an answer," he said. "The world has mysteries and that is fine." This was one of many vaguely prophetic pronouncements made through the night while Ballen paced head-down in small circles under a spotlight. Watching him was like visiting some strange photographic oracle. Ballen spent much of his early life underground in mines. There was a lot of time to think down there, and not much space to do it in. So now any time he visits the earth's surface he takes advantage and does a lot of thinking --in this case out loud-- and pacing. The effect was more slo-mo poetry slam than commanding expository. Watching him I couldn't help wondering to myself WTF? But in a good way.

Ballen showed slides from Shadow Chamber, his most recent book. While walking home one day he'd stumbled on a building and realized immediately he had to go inside and make photographs. And lucky he did because the thing was 3 floors full of freaks of all ages including schoolkids, along with an assortment of various barn animals and wall markings, which he proceeded to photograph regularly for two years until one day the building was gone. And that work became Shadow Chamber. WTF?

What do his photos mean? In his lecture Ballen seemed to go out of his way to avoid projecting meaning into his work. He described his photography very much in terms of how it was made. A photo like this

might be described by Ballen as a cat watching a rabbit near some springs and metal shapes which the rabbit thought he could hide behind, and Ballen happened to be walking by that door as this occured. When an audience member asked how active a participant he was in setting up the photos he played coy, "Well maybe I placed the rabbit in the corner and maybe I didn't, I really can't remember," but he said it in such an absentminded fashion that one realized that he was right, that it wasn't really important what had happened, that only the photo was important.

Perhaps one reason Ballen prefers to talk about his work in concrete terms is that he is a complete master of that world. Compositionally the guy can really put together a photo. Repeating shapes, patterned tones, just the right amount of random elements in random places, and a lot of things that look like they shouldn't belong yet somehow do...Ballen juggles all of them before inserting them precisely into his photos. That he uses live models and animals, two types of compositional actors which can throw a frame out of whack in a heartbeat, is quite amazing. Throughout the evening Ballen made several references to hidden forms in his photographs, pointing out the relationship between say a hanging wire and a jawline, as if that were the most important thing in his work.

Still, one can't help wondering what it all means. The ideas in his photographs didn't just appear. They were created by him, presumably in an effort to express some message. I have no clue what that might be but his photos are nonetheless quite powerful. After his lecture I walked out of the hall under the glow of a pleasant photo buzz, wondering calmly WTF?

Wedding photography

Lightleak is a photo group in Portland started a few years ago by my friend Bryan. We meet once a month to share whatever photos we're working on at the moment. I've been going pretty regularly, even after the move to Eugene. Photography can be a lonely pursuit and I think it's good to defy that possibility by showing work in progress to others. Although one can do this online, it doesn't quite compare to meeting in person and looking at real live prints.

This past week we met as scheduled, with one difference. Instead of bringing work in progress, everyone brought work from 15 or more years ago. I have seen enough of each person's newer work to have a pretty good idea of their styles, yet this was the first time I'd seen anyone's photography from before about 5 years ago. It was a very enlightening experience. Each person's work was obviously still their own --the raw roots of their visual strategy was evident --yet strangely different. Rawer. More direct. Perhaps more transparent? It was a bit like when you go to someone's wedding and meet their oldest friends and their parents and siblings, and it shows you a way of looking at that person you hadn't considered. For me it cast a new deeper perspective on everyone's current photography.

If you have a regular photo group, especially one that's been meeting for several years, I suggest you try this for just one meeting. Everyone bring old work that is unfamiliar to the others, that is hopefully radically different from what you are doing now. It's certain to generate intellectual sparks.

2006 Lightleak meeting by Bobby Abrahamson

Colin Wood: What Was He Thinking?

Last night I watched episode 5 of the BBC's Genius of Photography series. For a discussion about Arbus, they tracked down and interviewed Colin Wood. Although his name might not be familiar to photographers his image is. This is what Colin Wood looked like for a split second in 1962:

Amazingly, Colin Wood is recognizable 45 years later as the boy in the photo. The thin frame and eyes are unmistakeable. Perhaps even more amazingly some of the nervous manic energy that Arbus captured still comes through today in Wood's personality. Here's Wood's take on his portait:

"I was absolutely beside myself with energy. I used to eat Junket, which is this pure dessert. I don't know what they made it out of, some like Dow chemical. I think, I think it was about four ingredients away from Napalm. And I used to eat this stuff, like, raw, out of the box, and by the time I was finished with the Napalm or the derivative, I was like walking on the ceiling.

"So along comes this pacific character with really no connection to the inner world of violence, you know, who's wandering around like a cloud with a Hasselblad.

"(showing photo) One of the things I like most about this is these grenades, and I had two of them, and probably the reason I don't have the other one in my hand is because I threw it out the window where we used to live to see if I could blow up the alley.

"From the contact sheet I can see she took about maybe fifteen photos of me, and I was a curiosity for her. And I'm a ham, so in the photos I'm definitely having a pretty fun time, and my feeling about her is that there was this, uh,... I think I liked her because I can see in my face, and definitely here I feel a collaboration, that there would be an encouragement for me to sort of do something a little wacky. She was giving me a little piece of direction. I don't say she suggested I do this, but obviously thematically for her since the other photos don't contain the hand grenade it was important that it be there.

"This is absolutely in many ways capturing an aspect of my life. At the time my mother had just divorced my father, there was a lot of tension at home, I was really very I would say very lonely, but what she was seeking and got which was what her genius is, is the reflection of her own self in many ways, which was very very true, and it was in me."

Another fifteen from George Kelly

World health watch

After years of being out of production, the Diana camera has recently been reintroduced to the market, this time with pinhole and 6 x 6 format capabilities. Several weeks ago curiosity got the best of me and I took the plunge on one. For such a simple camera, the learning curve has been fairly steep. I think the overriding principle is that you just don't know what you're going to get on the negative. You can take the greatest shot in the world and have it blown out by a lightleak, or (more often) an accidental exposure seems to be imbued with oddly serendipous properties. You just don't know. In a world increasingly driven by the twin engines of convenience and perfection, the injection of some good old fashioned uncertainty may be healthy. Here are some initial shots: