The Drawing Board

©Sarah Greenberger Rafferty

This weekend I decided to hit up some photo shows that my Crit and Theory professor suggested I see. The goal was to hit up LES then Chelsea then the Upper East Side. Galleries: Rachel Uffner, Wild Project, Julie Saul, Aperture, Gagosian and the Whitney. Well, it didn’t exactly go as planned. The Lower East Side went smoothly. I saw Sarah Greenberger Rafferty’s show “Tears”, a body of manipulated images. Her process is as follows; she dripped water on digital printouts (of comedians) in order to manipulate the inks. After the manipulation was finished, she scanned and reprinted. The outcome is a twisted image, almost clown-like in effect. It’s a neat idea, which hearkens back to the early pictorialists like Frank Eugene.

The second gallery I hit up was the Wild Project. It had another process-oriented photo show on display, Wildlife Analysis by Brian Graf. Instead of manipulating the print, Graf sandwiched fogged color film onto his black and white images in order to create an ethereal feel to his photos of New Jersey. After experiencing both these artists, I began to think a theme was beginning to emerge. Finding ways to manipulate imagery without photoshop? A tribute to older ways of manipulating? I decided to make a move to Chelsea in order to see if this trend is in all the galleries.

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Susan Sontag ©Jill Krementz

The first assignment in my Criticism and Theory class this fall is to write the syllabus for the class. Twelve topics on contemporary issues in the theory of photography. Seems like it could be fun right? Wrong. This has been one of the most taxing assignments yet. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about contemporary issues in photography are contemporary issues in general. The environment, war, politics, etc., all start to leap out to me as issues I can apply to photography and art in general. Then I begin to think about how photographs are treated in the present context of the internet, Flickr, Facebook, etc. and all these questions about what photography is as a medium come to mind. This leads me back to issues in objectivity and post-modernism. After all of this thinking, I have come up with 11 topics. But what is my twelfth? What is the topic to end it all? Does anyone out there have their thumb on the most contemporary idea in the realm of photography? I would be interested to know. My list of topics to come after the assignment is due. Added 9/16: The syllabus I came up with….I never got a 12th topic btw. Continue reading →

©Jason Hannasik

Yesterday I had my first critique at SVA with Penelope Umbrico. It was like jumping into a cool swimming pool on a hot summer day. The class was fully engaged with my work and had some great suggestions for me. The doubt I have been feeling all summer about the direction I am taking in my work has been lessened, and I think that it will continue to fade away as the semester progresses. It has only been my first week and I am already feeling a sense of community with my fellow peers and the professors. On another note, I will be at Kris Graves Projects tonight to help with Jason Hannasik‘s opening. It’s going to be a great show. Stop by and say hi!

©Jeff Liao

Part of orientation week at SVA is comprised of lectures by visiting artists. Today I had the pleasure to meet and listen to Jeff Liao, a photographer who documents NYC. When I first viewed his images, I thought to myself, great panoramas. But, as he spoke more about how he works and his technique, I started to understand that his work was not panorama for panorama’s sake, but a delicately constructed reality. For example, in his series Habitat 7, he documented the 7 subway line and the environment around it. He used an 8×10 camera and in each expedition, would take several negatives from one spot of the surrounding landscape. After he documented this landscape, he took the negatives and created the landscape in Photoshop. The result is a hyper-real image that is, dare I say, mystical in composition. He slowed down and sped up exposure times for different negatives with the result being a mix of things in motion and still. While the quality and colors of the images remain documentary and “true to life”, the content leaves one considering a reality that only exists in his imagery. If you are in the NYC area on October 4th, you should check out his opening at the Bronx Museum of Art.