Combustible

What do Chris McCaw and Marco Breuer (links to work here and here) have in common (other than their work sometimes bordering on combustion)? Both artists are very interested in the photograph as an object and the process involved in creating that object. In the current climate of rapid digitization, where the process of photography becoming more removed, this is a refreshing notion.

from the Sunburns series, Chris McCaw

At Friday night’s Photo Alliance lecture McCaw talked about the long daylight exposures, large format (in some cases self built) cameras and paper negatives of his Sunburns series and how he has become more attuned to the seasons and the movement of the sun. This series of work has also made him more aware of his materials as only certain older stocks of paper will give him the results he is looking for. Beyond the aesthetic appeal of the images, the draw of McCaw’s images is the combination of two types of interaction that light has with the paper. The first being the recording of the landscape in the traditional photographic sense and the second being the burning of the paper as if with a magnifying glass.

It’s interesting that McCaw and Breuer have ended up where photography began, creating unique objects rather than multiples. In Breuer’s case a lot of his earlier work was with photograms because, for him, printing photographs in the darkroom felt like working with old ideas, ideas he that had occurred to him days or weeks earlier. His whole output since has been exploring ways to keep immediacy in his work and do away with any mediating process. This in itself is an interesting choice considering photography itself is mediation, a removal from the actual.

PAN(C-289), 2003, Marco Breuer

Breuer’s more recent work, which appears in a recently published book by Aperture, is done by working (sanding, scraping,incising) the surface of exposed color photo paper to reveal different colors. In an interesting side note, Breuer wasn’t terribly happy with the outcome of the book so he began reworking a handful of the actual books in the same way he produced the original work. He sanded, removed text, and otherwise worked the books until they had reached an acceptable level of authenticity. That is what I appreciate about Breuer, his dedication to the ideas that he has set forth for himself and his continuous exploration of those ideas.

Rinko Kawauchi, Part II

I have to say that the Rinko Kawauchi talk last night was a bit of a let down. I don’t know what I was expecting, but she talked mostly about how she got into photography (most of which is covered in the interview link I posted yesterday) and the photography that she showed was all from the Foil website.

On the up side she did show some video work. The work consisted of two five minute sections of a larger twenty minute piece that she will be showing in New York. Ultimately she is planning to do an hour long piece. The video consists of short snippets, anywhere from two to ten or fifteen seconds, of a lot of the stuff you would expect her to be interested in, light sparkling on water, carp, fireworks, a butterfly flapping its wings, etc. Some of the clips have ambient sound, some do not. The reason she gave for her experiments in video is that when she photographs things she feels a lot of “stress” and wanted to be able to capture the motion of things as well.

A few other random points of interest;

To use Alec Soth’s differentiation between book photographers and wall photographers, she is definitely a book photographer. This is probably obvious to anyone who has looked at one of her books and marveled at their exquisite pairings and lyrical sequencing, but it was nice to hear her say (albeit through a translator) that she felt that books were “the most complete form of my photography”.

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Kawauchi credits three people for her development as an artist; Katsumi Asaba, an art directior who encouraged her early in her career as a photographer and gave her some commercial assignments, the publisher Masakazu Takei (who was at the lecture and seems to be quite a character, see here), and Martin Parr, who invited her to show at Photo Arles in 2004 and introduced her work to a wider audience.

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I also thought the way she talked about her first book, Utatane, was interesting. Usually the title is translated as “catnap”, but Kawauchi thought of it more as the place between waking and sleep, or between life and death and that she was “standing in the midst of this divide.” Utatane is also the work that most closely relates to her new video work in that the relation from image to image is less apparent than in her other work. In all her work, images are captured without thinking (無心) and she likes to complete projects while they still have life/freshness (いきがいい). Deciding what she is going to shoot beforehand makes it uninteresting.

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After the lecture I had the opportunity to ask her if she felt any kinship to the other young women photographers she’s often lumped together with (specifically Yurie Nagashima, Miwa Nanigawa and Hiromix who won the Ihei Kimura Award the year before she did). Her response was that she didn’t because she felt she came to be known slightly later than they did.