Holon Mediatheque and The Shpilman Institute for Photography
(The SIP) present Memoryscapes:
An Interdisciplinary event dedicated to the work of W. G. Sebald

5.3.2012

Interview with Grant Gee, from our blog

More from the event (Hebrew)

From Patience (After Sebald)

Grant Gee, Romi Mikulinsky, the SIP, The SIP Review # 2, Sebald from The Sip on Vimeo.

Grant Gee, the SIP, The SIP Review # 2, Sebald, from The Sip on Vimeo.

By Rotem Rozental

“All of my photography is a progression,” writes Harlan Erskine in his site, “they are a reaction as much as they are a cause of framing a subject.” As an American photographer, living in Brooklyn for the past few years, perhaps it is not surprising that he found himself documenting convenient stores: a project which became a book titled “Ten Convenient Stores”, published in 2005.

There is an illusive quality in his frames, a sense of suspension, an almost contemplative viewpoint which appears in his various projects: be it the architecture of midtown New York at midnight, or imaginary scenarios of wars. In his blog, he also shares his photographic journeys in the art world and beyond, as well as some visual treasures and findings. So, we felt an up-close encounter with his work, personal photographic histories and inspirations is definitely in order:

What was the first image you ever took?

I’m not really sure of the very first image I took. My father always had a 35mm SLR when I was young and I would play with it. Then I got an Olympus as a gift and started using that. The first time I felt like I could take a decent picture was in high school. Two of my friends were into photography and would run through the streets together making pictures. I never went on any of their photo adventures but I started carrying a camera with me regularly.

Why did you want to become a photographer?

Being a photographer was sort of a guess at first. When I was choosing where to go to college, I looked at several schools. I ended up liking the University of Miami because their photojournalism department was friendly and impressed me. My first semester I took a class with Professor Michael Carlebach. In one of his early classes, he showed a video about Nan Goldin. After that I was hooked.

Harlan Erskine, Worlds Without End Part I, 20 x 37 inches, 2009

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist

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By Rick Poynor

Daniel Blaufuks, Terezín, book cover, Steidl, 2010  

All Images are Courtesy of Rick Poynor

In a post about W.G. Sebald’s use of pictures, I reproduced a spread from his novel Austerlitz, showing a room with a grid of shelves from floor to ceiling — the records room at the Terezín concentration camp, the so-called Small Fortress, located about an hour from Prague. I was sure I had encountered the picture somewhere else, but the source didn’t spring to mind and the immediate focus of my essay lay elsewhere so I didn’t pursue it.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to see Daniel Blaufuks’ book Terezín, which was published last year, and there on the cover was a color photograph of the same room. Leafing through, I found that Blaufuks, a Portuguese photographer and artist, was haunted by the picture, which had become the starting point for a multilayered work of image, text and video suffused with its own Sebaldian melancholy. Blaufuks imagines Melville’s Bartleby entering the room and declaiming his famous protest: “I would prefer not to.” He considered writing to Sebald or his editor about the picture, but never did so (Sebald died in 2001).
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By Rick Poynor

 Austerlitz, Penguin Books, 2002

All Images are Courtesy of Rick Poynor

W.G. Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, is one of the greatest European writers of recent years. His books Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1993), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), all first published in German, defy easy categorization. They have been summarized as part hybrid fiction, part memoir and part travelogue, while the adjectives most frequently used to describe their extraordinary prose style, built on long, elegant sentences, are “haunting” and “mesmeric.” These four books affected me more deeply than anything I have read in a long time. I share the view of many Sebald readers that Austerlitz is a masterwork, a book so good that you find yourself constantly rereading passages to savor the luminous intensity with which he evokes people encountered, places visited, things seen and atmospheres recalled.

Sebald is brilliantly visual. He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see. Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the detail of so many things hitting the senses in a rain of fleeting simultaneous impressions, but the precise emotional shading and personal import of each of these moments. His eye records with photographic accuracy and then these perceptions are recovered from memory and reconstituted as fictional experience with the same exhilaratingly scrupulous fidelity. The complication in Sebald’s writing, which he apparently intended, lies in our uncertainty about how much of what he describes derives from his own experiences (seemingly a lot) and how much of it is largely or entirely imagined. Based on a reading of the books alone, the narrators show every sign of being Sebald himself, but we know from what he has said elsewhere that these melancholy figures are fictionalized versions of the author.

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Ignaz Cassar, of The SIP grant winners

The essay brings together the figure of the photographer with that of the psychoanalyst by tracing their work with and through latency. Both photographer and psychoanalyst expose something latent in their work: the photographer through dealing with images that are yet to be revealed; the analyst through dealing with signs that are yet to be brought into a relief of signification. Appearing in either field, the latent finds its conceptual bearings in different contexts and by different means. This essay contends that latency forms a transdisciplinary modality, running across fields that stage its effects in dissimilar ways. By stepping outside the need to establish something analogous in latency’s operation across the fields of photography and psychoanalysis, we discover what is proper to photography: the play of certainty and doubt around the production of images.

Apertures: Weakening Images

Alain Fleischer, Le regard des morts

Image is Courtesy of Ignaz Cassar

To open this text, and to leave it open, we begin with an image. The above photographic image traces more photographic images. Scores of photographs float in trays that remind us of those used in darkrooms to process the prints according to the principles of classic photographic craft: three “baths” turn a latent impression into a visible photograph – develop, stop, fix. The image has appeared. Photographic education still likes to anchor students in this three-step operation, even though with the beginning digitization of photography in the 1980s “darkroom photography” has rather become a rarity.[i] Technological nostalgia might be one way of explaining the photographer’s fixation on processes that have hardly any techno-economic validity or practicality in today’s terms. Nonetheless, the survival of this “redundant” photographic process, which is now differentiated as “analogue”, works in support of a certain photographic pedagogy that could be said to be operating around a belief in “knowing the basics”.[ii] Such pedagogic approach claims the hand-crafted photograph as a model through which to follow the developmental stages of the photograph. Still, there is something of interest for us in sticking to photographic tradition that is beyond historical nostalgia and the ideals of pedagogy: that is how the drawn-out process of accomplishing the image, culminating in the work of photographic development and its ritualistic bathings, builds up a momentum of expectancy that indexes the photographer’s desire to see the image. Here, memories may resurface of that first photograph having come into sight in the darkroom. On the other hand, whose memory could recall the first digitally processed photograph?[iii]

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The visual artist and writer  Zvi Goldstein will take part in a panel devoted to memory and the employment of images in art and literature in the event The SIP Re/View #2: W.G. Sebald (March 5, 2012). His talk will be entitled “The Rucksack.”

This interdisciplinary event, produced in collaboration with Mediatheque Holon, is dedicated to the works of noted German writer and scholar, whose work continues to resonate in contemporary art and culture.

To February 26, 2012, Zvi Goldstein’s exhibition, Haunted by Objects, is on view at the K21 in Düsseldorf.

This is the largest project to date of the visual artist and writer, who continuously defies Western context and comments in his work about the globalized world. Haunted by Objects is a dense environment, comprised of 850 objects, ranging from antiquity to the present.

Haunted by Objects, Installation View. Photographs by Achim Kukulies

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist

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By Rotem Rozental

Acclaimed film director Grant Gee is the keynote speaker of our upcoming event – Memorysacpe: The SIP Re/View #2: W.G. Sebald, in which he will discuss his multi-layered cinematographic essay, Patience (After Sebald) (2011).

Gee first triggered global attention in 1996, when a short film he directed of the progressive house band Spooky was screened outside of the Pompidou Centre, as part of its re-opening. Later, Gee received a Grammy nomination for Meeting People is Easy, documenting Radiohead’s OK Computer tour from 1997. His unique visual interpretation to the tragic story of Joy Division (2006) won him the prestigious Grierson Award in 2008. And this, of course, is just a taste of his numerous inspiring cinematographic ventures.

Prior to his arrival to Israel, we took this opportunity to familiarize with Gee’s work process, personal histories and future projects:

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By Sivan Askayo

“I am sitting at a bar, my Leica resting just above my notepad. It is beautiful Sunday afternoon. A couple sits to my left, the boy instructing his girl on the basics of photography with some kind of digital SLR. They are in love. To my right, a single girl reads a book about Stalin. In between, alone, I nurse an Old Fashioned (an enduring tribute to my father) and try to make sense out why I take photographs. And why only these particular subjects will do….Without the Camera, I would be adrift in his sea of humanity, completely at the mercy of the Ache. I’m in the autumn of my years, I’m still waiting for a very good year. The Camera has become a physical manifestation of Hope and something I am never without.” 

In these words, Photographer David Lykes Keenan describes his photographic manifesto. For many photographers, some more known than others, the camera is something to hide behind. For Keenan, the camera is something to hide behind, but also a tool that gives him  a sense of belonging and fading his sense of loneliness.

“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.” (Paul Strand)

Keenan has that ability of catching the odd, the funny and the quirky moments of humanness around him. Like Elliott Erwitt, Keenan uses a lot of humor in his pictures, that most of the time, covers something else – a different feeling. Loneliness.

Kyle, Profile, NYC, 2010

All Images are Courtesy of David Lykes Keenan

By Victoria Jenkins

 A unique characteristic of photography has been its ability to record the visible, material world. Its perceived objectivity and accuracy has lead to a utilitarian application of the camera as a tool for documentation, and this can be traced back to photography’s early history. Parallel to this is a history that echoes with illusion and trickery; photography carries a false empiricism, for which we may allow our guard to be dropped.

All Images are Courtesy of Contact Editions

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By Peter Nitsch

The American Weekend is an ongoing project by photographer Hollis Bennett that deals with how Americans spend their limited amount of time off at the end of the week and all the nuances that are entailed.

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist

Shooting primarily with a 4×5 camera Bennett describes his image making process as the following: “I am concerned with making honest, sincere and more often than not, stoic photographs of the people that color my life and the surroundings on which life’s stories are played out.

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By Mirjana Vrbaski

What drew me to photography was a freedom from words; a possibility to work with and out of silence and to somehow let silence be felt in my work.

As a starting photographer, I began by photographing inanimate things – empty corners and gardens at night. After a few years at the art academy, I was given a portrait assignment and, though petrified of working with people, I made a complete switch. Since then, I have been solely focused on portraiture. But, despite the drastic change in subject matter, the urge to reduce things to a bare minimum remained.

Irma, 2011

Hannah, 2010

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist

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By Nathaniel Stein, The SIP Grant Winner, Brown University

A version of this essay originally appeared in Katie Koti, asunder (artist’s book: Providence RI, 2010).

Figure in landscape.  As a motif, readily encapsulated.  As a relationship, quite a bit more complex – aesthetically constructed, inscribed by ideology, old but perpetually shifting.  Looking at Katie Koti’s series asunder (2008-present), one might add another term to that list: volatile.

Koti speaks of her images of human figures in the seasonally changing landscapes of rural Western Massachusetts (in the northeast US) as a way of inviting audiences to engage with bodies and ideas that some may find unfamiliar, or even threatening.  The invitation is a generous one, difficult to turn down even if one were so inclined.  Koti’s models – who are friends of the photographer – share their bodies with her, and therefore the viewer, with an openness that allows the images to read as cooperative acts rather than the exercise of a voyeuristic gaze.  That Koti manages to convey a sense of intimacy between photographer and subject is no small feat given the problematic power relations that attend the photographing of people – especially people who are less clothed, or (one may choose to think) less “normal” than the viewers who will eventually consume the imagery.  Yet manage it she does.  Asunder invites one to look without feeling implicated in a process of exploitation; difference meets the viewer with the quiet confidence of self-revelation, vulnerable yet unguarded.

Katie Koti, tracks, 30 x 40″, Archival Inkjet Print

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist

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By Peter Nitsch

 Eanna Freeney is an Irish photographer based in London, UK. He’s also the founder of The Velvet Cell publishing house, an independent publisher of limited edition photography books. The Velvet Cell Books was established to give a platform to similar photographers who are passionate about urban photography. It was founded in 2010 and ran for a year as an online magazine before going on to print artists books. To date, it published the work of seven photographers, from all over the world, including New York, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna and London.

All Images are Courtesy of Peter Nitsch

Why did you set up The Velvet Cell?
Back in 2010, I was growing increasingly disillusioned with mainstream photography. For me, there seemed to a lot of replications and it rarely, in my experiences, diverged from standard landscape or portraiture. Not that this is a bad thing, but I felt that my own personal preferences in photography wasn’t much represented. Yet, I knew of lots of urban photographers. So I endeavoured to try and change the scene by myself and set up The Velvet Cell. And this is where we are at today.

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By Douglas Stockdale

Published by: Ampersand Gallery and Fine Books

I have noted recently that of the many types of ephemera that seem to be cherished are the police mug shots, which either intentionality or intentionality, capture the subjects at their worst. Chris Crites has accumulated a wonderful collection of vintage mug shots, transferred the image to ordinary kraft bags, and then painted the images with acrylic paint. The Crites series of painted mug shots was recently published by Portland, OR based Ampersand Gallery and Fine Books and the book was aptly titled Mug Shots.

The photographic paintings are usually captioned with a title, and in conjunction with his application of color, selection of subject and appearance, provides us with what seems to be portraits that  entirely suit our stereotypes of the criminal act. The photo paintings are on what appears as sections of ordinary grocery bags, with their creases and folds still evident. These grocery bags are themselves intended to be ephemera, to be used for just the one day to assist with carrying home the recent purchases. Similar to the mug shots, Crites has glorified these kraft bags and extended their life much beyond their original intent.

All Images are Courtesy of Douglas Stockdale

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By Nathan Jurgenson

Nathan Jurgenson is working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and wrote this essay for his Cyborgology blog. Find the original post here. It is replicated on The SIP with the author’s permission.

I wanted the photo above to be an example of the new so-called “living pictures” that have garnered much recent attention. However, Lytro has not provided proper embedding code so I can only post this screenshot of a living photo. I highly recommend clicking on the photo or clicking here before reading along.

Okay, by now you have experienced a living photo. You see it, but you can also make it come alive; touch it, change the focus, reorient what is seen and focused on. Some might even argue that you get to decide the meaning of the story the image tells. This post asks: what would it mean if we start posting living pictures across social media? Might it change how we take photos? How might we differently interact with social media photography when we can manipulate the faces of our friends and engage with the images in a new way?

It has been my contention that photography can teach us quite a bit about social media. Not just because there are so many photos online but because photography serves as a familiar and grounding reference point to the newness of social media. Photography situates the novel and sometimes disorienting ways we are documenting ourselves online with a technology that did the same offline more than a century ago.

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By Amos Morris Reich, The SIP grant winner

 Sigmnud Feist (1865-1943) is mostly remembered because of the orphanage for Jewish children that he directed in Berlin, as well as for his work in German linguistics. A collection of recently published letters written to him by 77 of his pupils during their service in the German military during the Great War has brought him back to public attention. But in 1925 he published a widely circulating book entitled Stammeskunde der Juden: Die jüdischen Stämme der Erde in alter und neuer Zeit. Historisch-anthropologisch Skizzen (A History of the Jewish Stock: ancient and modern Jewish tribes of the world. Historical-anthropological Sketches).

Figure 1

While “race” and “type” are central to Feist’s 1925 book on the Jews, in no place does he define them. Indeed, biological and, most notably, Mendelian principles are absent from his discussion. The chapters move from discussion of the Jews as a race in ancient times and the Jews in the Diaspora to a discussion of geographically ordered Jewries, including chapters on the Jews of Palestine, Near East, China, India, Ethiopia, North Africa, Spain, and Ashkenazy Jews, before turning to pseudo- and cryptic- Jews, and ending with a discussion of modern Jews as a race. The book’s structure, therefore, corroborates the argument concerning the heterogeneity of the Jews as geographically spread and as anthropologically diverse and the photographic appendix indicates similarity between Jews and their environments and Jewish anthropological variation.

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By Josh Franco

A Collection of Curious Gastroenterological Cases is photographer Caroline LeFevre’s series “documenting” instances of bizarre consumption. You would not find any of the items documented served in tumblers or champagne flutes—unless you attended a very specific kind of dinner party. While we can’t sit down to a meal with the real people who inspired these photographic vignettes, unfortunately, we can discuss them with their curious documentarian. Here we take some time to discuss the series with Lefevre, mostly laughing, and occasionally trying not to gag.

Josh Franco: First, I want to hear about your process: where did you get the x-rays? Who did the script at the bottom?

Caroline LeFevre: The imagery and the text I created in the darkroom. I wrote the captions by hand. It was a merging of analog and digital technologies. I created the original images in the darkroom. Then I scanned and Photoshopped them to look like x-rays. When I printed them on transparencies, they actually looked and behaved like X-rays. You could hold them up to the light. It was a marriage of some things I was learning at the time and a self-discovery of the kind of elements I work in as an artist. I really love the analog processes and working with your hands, but you can’t deny the convenience and power of the digital processes. Once you get something into Photoshop you can really get what you want.

All Images are Courtesy of 7Stops Magazine

JF: So you made up the vignettes at the bottom?

CL: Well each object, each photograph, was inspired by real stories about people swallowing things. I just tried to imagine what their x-rays would look like. My favorite one is one of the grosser ones, where someone swallowed a retainer. It was inspired by two people with braces kissing and getting locked together.

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By Ben Alper

I’ve always been somewhat of an archivist. Even as a small child, I remember avidly collecting things. Whether it was legos, baseball cards, or books, I was constantly obtaining, organizing and classifying some aggregate of related objects.  I don’t recall ever being too cognizant of any real driving force behind these motivations; it was simply an impulse – and an archival one at that.

It is quite natural then, I suppose, that my artistic practice of the last 4 years has dealt directly with archives of varying, but related forms.  This infatuation (obsession might be a more appropriate word) began after my grandfather died.  In the wake of his passing, I turned toward the material things he left behind in an effort to try and discover how much, or how little for that matter, you can really know about a person from the objects that survive them. It is an admittedly unsatisfactory substitute for inter-personal experience, but when faced with nothing more than a patchwork of artifacts, it is often  one of the only places we can turn.

All Images are Courtesy of Ben Alper

I certainly looked within too.  I summoned a number of discrete memories that each gave some sense of the person he was – some nuance or idiosyncrasy – but in the end memory proved too confounding, distorted and tenuous.  It was a truly strange sensation, similar in effect to the blurring of one’s vision.  Things were there, they were just soft and non-descript.  These encounters with memory’s impermanence ultimately led me back to the concreteness of physical things – things that would, in almost every case, outlive me as well. The most alarming discovery I made though was how quickly the memory of someone begins to shift or fade after they die.

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By Rotem Rozental

Visual explorations of sexuality, empty rooms, abandoned businesses, old newspapers on a wooden floor – photographer Kate Peters continuously brings absences to the fore while examining what society defines as its outskirts. Those absences in the social landscape are manifested as vibrant by Peters’ lens; the viewer cannot overlook their undeniable presence which does not aim at erasing their anonymity. Their presence and absence from society’s focal point co-exist.

Peters is a British photographer, currently living and working in London. Since 2002, she has been taking part in exhibitions and publications, in addition to receiving several awards. Here is what she has to say about her work process and inspirations:

What was the first image you ever took?

The first image I remember taking was of a fork. I was trying to imitate the iconic Andre Kertesz image, La Fourchette, a photograph of a fork resting against a bowl and its shadow.

I’d just started studying photography at school, I was about 15 years old. I used to spend a lot of time, sneaking a look into my photography teacher’s book collection, which was locked in a cupboard. I would try and recreate images that stood out and the Kertesz image was one of my first attempts. It’s a far cry to what I produce now but remains one of my favorite photographs.

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist / INSTITUTE

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By Romi Mikulinsky

On Assaf Shaham, Specific Site at Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv 15-17/9/2011

A three day exhibition offers a great opportunity to talk about the here and now without committing oneself to the weight of the big words that were heard in 2011 in this restless region – from the revolution in Tunisia, to Tahrir square, to the protests in Iran and the mayhem in Lybia, and to the social protest and the tents in the Tel Aviv streets.

Push Da Pin (P-D-P) is a new tradition at the Indie Gallery, a self-managed gallery dedicated to photography located in the south of Tel Aviv. The small, humble exhibition, Specific Site, featured only 3 works: two photographic works by Assaf Shaham and one short video by Michali Bar-Or.  Specific Site provides astute insights not only on the “state of the now” in the geographical-political context and its instability – but also on several pressing questions eminent in the photographic medium. Going beyond the term “Site Specific” (that by now has become somewhat banal), Shaham also marches against the flatness of the photographic medium by stretching a sphinx in a historical group photo he found in his grandmother’s archive (“By The Largest Sphinx 13/1/32”), shooting a photography book where the bullet holes resemble canyons and revealing disembodied letters in  a “myse-en-abyme” like holes (“I Shot Massada”), and Bar Or  comments upon the inseparability of tourism and photography in “The Treasure” where she records the flashes made by the visitors’ camera that occasionally excavate the famous Petra  tourist site in neighboring Jordan.

Shaham seems to propose that photography is a technology that by means of light reveals the history of ruins and the ruins of history. If so why not “shoot” independently of the “specific site” surface conditions and hollow out, re-touch or re-write history?

Asaf Shaham, I Shot Massada

All Images are Courtesy of the Artist

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