In Plato’s cave allegory we are bound and can only see images of the shadows cast by statues of real things. As we free our minds, we first discover that we are looking at mere images, shadows. Next we discover that the shadows are cast not by the real but by statues, imitations of the ideals which they represent. Only when we emerge from the cave do we discover the world of real things.
The day after we went to Paris Photo we went to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and got tickets to the Zoe Leonard exhibit, Al río / To the River, recommended by classmates who had seen it the day before. It’s an immense show that goes on and on for rooms and rooms, vast expanses of white space, perhaps conveyed by the images above. We arrived late morning and were, initially, the only ones there, other than the guards. I was almost more impressed at the opportunity to wander through the vast, empty white space of the museum (reminiscent of my trips to NY’s Metropolitan as a kid, when it was often so empty you could go bowling without disturbing anyone) than I was by the photographs.
The images look at the US/Mexico border area, as loosely defined by the Rio Grande/Bravo. On each wall is a series of pictures, looking at a particular scene, over the course of time (seconds, or minutes, I would guess). Some of these are very affecting; cumulatively, they certainly are. But I was unable to guess at the reason for some of them. One entire room was dedicated to pictures of the swirling water taken, perhaps, over the side of a bridge. While they are far from identical, they are all the same. Another follows a man on horse from a distance, behind, as he travels a short way. The final room is a series of color pictures of a laptop showing security footage of people crossing a barbed-wire-surrounded bridge. No indication of whether this is a public website, or if she’d been granted access to a security control room. Beyond the brochure materials about the exhibit (shown at the link above) there are no placards, captions or other text to explain what you’re looking at or why – which is, in itself, a kind of statement, I suppose. I confess, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Of course, the same might be said of my series of images of the exhibit.
As always, click any image to see them all full-size.
It’s been a busy week for travel. Friday we took the train to Waterloo, then the tube to St Pancras, the EuroStar to Paris, and 2 Metros and a short walk to the hotel for Paris Photo. Walked about 8 miles around Paris before the Expo opened Saturday afternoon then wandered through the glorious (exhaustive and exhausting) expanse of it, along the way picking up a copy of Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures (the 2020 Aperture edition not the one at the link) and meeting her when she signed the book. Sunday walked another 8 miles around Paris including a stop at the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Zoe Leonard exhibit. Then took the 2 Metros back to Gare du Nord to get the EuroStar back to St Pancras, the tube to Paddington and the train to Bristol, then a short cab ride to the hotel for Monday’s collage workshop with Justine Kurland at the Martin Parr Foundation. The Workshop was an all day session with about 12 students. Justine was fantastic – very engaging, discursive, open, collaborative, erudite and discussions with her have really forced me to re-evaluate what I’m doing in photography and how I can better strive to achieve the level of artistic mastery that she displays in her work. In particular I think it is pushing me to start using film in medium or large format again and get serious about more deliberate photographic subjects. Martin Parr wandered in now and again and was truly charming, one of the few male photographers to reach out positively to Justine about her SCUMB Manifesto (which I had previously bought as a gift for my collaging daughter). In the evening she gave a talk to a packed house which walked through several of her projects and was again, insightful, engaging and inspiring.
The next morning the cab to the train station never arrived, the rain was dashing down as we trundled our suitcase to the bus stop, getting drenched, then sat in Bristol traffic and passed the train station where construction has closed the bus stop and walked back through the rain and puddles to Bristol’s Temple Meads train station, hustled to the ticket window to upgrade our tickets for an earlier train we needed to catch to Paddington. Then the tube to Waterloo and the train back to Farnham where, panting, I just made it to my lecture on Queer Theory. Alas, rain had seeped into one of our bags and badly damaged the cover of Girl Pictures although, at least, none of the pages or images seems to have been harmed.
All this by way of excuse for not posting. More pictures to process and post soon.
The last post will be my last shot from New York for a while. At the end of August I “retired” from life in the corporate world and in the middle of September I moved to England where I’m pursuing an MFA in Photography.
Needless to say, this will have an impact on the pictures I’m taking and presenting but I’m not sure yet what it will be. Starting tomorrow I’ll be posting some of the touristy snapshots I took in my first couple of weeks here as I got to know Farnham a bit. Where I’ll go from there, I don’t yet know. Stay tuned.
The plaque says, “Addressing the Statue,” and notes that while some love the historic statue, others abhor the clear subservient stance of the Native and African American.
In fact, the plaque does not so much address the statue’s problematic nature as leverage it to invite visitors to enter the museum “to learn more,” one of the natural long-term outcomes of Ronald Reagan’s charge to mediate everything in the marketplace.
A few months ago the statue was surrounded by stanchions to keep anti-racists at bay. Evidently the Museum has calculated that zealousness to have abated.
Well, I’ve been missing from these pages for a while but I think I’m back. For those interested, here’s what’s been going on with my health. For those not interested, wait a few hours and there’ll be a picture again!
4 weeks ago, I was working at my desk when I realized I felt a little woozy. Not dizzy and not light-headed, just a little woozy. I waited for it to pass but it didn’t. Then I made the classic mistake of looking up wooziness online. The first couple of possibilities were clearly not relevant: dehydration and low blood sugar. I’d had my usual 2 mugs of coffee, a bowl of fruit salad and had gotten through my 3/4 liter seltzer bottle already. The next 2 possibilities were a little more frightening: heart attack or stroke. I was advised not to ignore it but to seek medical attention.
Under the guise of making doctoring more convenient, I now reach my doctor via an app where I can leave him messages and he can write back, anytime, from anywhere. In reality, this means I don’t hear for, typically, 24 hours.
So eventually, after not hearing back, and not wishing to risk a stroke, I decided I’d toddle off to an Urgent Care facility around the corner from me that afternoon, run by Mt Sinai Hospital. My wife accompanied me but, due to Covid restrictions, had to wait in the outer waiting room. I was feeling a bit worse but still nothing really serious. Blood was drawn, an EKG taken and a gentle nasal swab administered. Nothing was found but I’ve reached that age where the young doctors say to me, “if you were my father…” I’d definitely go to the Emergency Room of the hospital (A&E for you Brits). First they gave me an anti-dizziness pill.
So a cab ride to the Mt Sinai ER (really the old St Lukes) and I was triaged, once again leaving my wife on her own to return home. They refused to look at the test results and EKG from the Urgent Care facility and re-administered the blood-work, the EKG, a CAT scan, a chest x-ray, and another gentle nasal swab in between which I sat in a chair in a bay of the ER until after midnight. The anti-dizziness pill had kicked in and I felt fine, if a bit hungry. At this point they wanted to admit me for overnight observation and to get an MRI.
Around 1:00 am a nurse took pity on me and got me some pretzels, a fig newton and 2 containers of applesauce (without spoon). I slept through the night except for the obligatory 4:00 am bp check and the groans of my roommate. Woke to not a bad breakfast and, eventually an MRI. After the MRI I had a quite good lunch (not what I’d ordered when asked, but close) and eventually 2 doctors showed up to discuss my condition with me. All the tests were negative. No Covid, no heart attack, no stroke, no sign that anything untoward had ever occurred. I was advised to follow up with my personal physician and discharged. In the meantime he’d written back to suggest I wait for it to pass, inquired how I was feeling now and suggested I come in for a check-up in 2 weeks. I said to the doctors in the hospital, since you didn’t find anything that means I don’t have to worry if this happens again, right? “No, no, no,” they said, “you must come back to the ER immediately if you feel this again.”
So I took a cab ride home and went about my business. The Urgent Care facility called to say their Covid test came back negative. I continued to feel a bit low, tired, and other kinds of peripheral symptoms of a cold, but nothing serious. No congestion, no sore throat, no coughing or sneezing, just a general malaise and slight disorientation. I started sleeping a lot, in between zoom calls for work and all night. I tried to get an earlier appointment with my GP but no slots were available. A week after returning home I went back to the ER because these annoying symptoms weren’t getting better or going away. Again I was triaged and in a short while another young doctor came and asked me a series of questions. She then left to review my test results from the previous week and returned to say I should go home and see my GP for a follow-up.
I languished for another week, feeling weaker and tireder all the time. Finally, 2½ weeks after it all began the day came to see the Primary Care Physician. I was feeling a little better. I took a cab over, and he interviewed me about what I’d been feeling. He discussed several possibilities and a program of testing to narrow down the possibilities. He had already reviewed all the hospital test results and ruled out anything wrong with my heart, or brain, tumors and neuro-degenerative diseases. He thought the most likely case was a flu, probably Covid. Blood was taken and a painful nasal swab – the kind where you worry about being lobotomized. I was sent home to await results.
Next day, Friday, the Dr called to tell me I had Covid, had had it since the beginning, was no longer contagious, and had passed the 10-day period for isolating or quarantining. and, although my wife had never suffered at all (other than helping me about), she was now past the period of needing to isolate after being in contact with someone testing positive. “How could the Urgent Care and ER have missed that,” I asked. 2 false negatives at 2 facilities seemed statistically unlikely. Probably didn’t really push up there high enough, the Dr replied.
The following Monday, contact tracers from the NY Health and Hospitals called me and my wife and, in the course of long discussions on the whole tale, they informed me of all kinds of benefits available to me and that I was past the point of being contagious or needing to isolate.
That was a week ago. In the meantime I’m mostly recovered. the mystery is how I got it in the first place. Since the pandemic started I seldom go anywhere and am very careful when I do. In fact, there are only 3 possibilities:
So, beware – if your Covid test swab doesn’t make you want to scream, that negative result may be false and not only may you be sick, you may be contagious. Insist on being hurt!
Been feeling a little under the weather lately so no new photos. Hope to come up with some more from the archives before too long, so stay tuned!
Some years ago, on a vacation in Stockholm, I persuaded my family to accompany me to Fotografiska a vast and excellent photography museum there. For something like a year leading up to its opening, I received regular teaser emails presaging the advent of their New York branch. When it finally arrived last year I was disappointed to learn how high ticket prices were and, in the midst of the pandemic mostly forgot about it. But my wife gave me a couple of tickets and a pandemic appointment for an hour last weekend and down we went. (Click any image above to see them all enlarged.)
I have ambivalent feelings about what we saw. There were 3 featured exhibits and a fourth one dedicated to the winners of the Photography 4 Humanity 2020 contest, photo-journalistic work dedicated to human rights issues. There was some excellent work here, in the traditional documentary photography school, some of it dramatically artistic as well.
Next came a powerful exhibit dedicated to death-row inmates who had been wrongfully accused and had been exonerated by DNA evidence, many after years of incarceration and some just hours or days before being scheduled to be executed. While it was a very powerful and moving exhibit, it was only marginally photographic. Each of the subjects was shown in their own floor-to-ceiling portrait, in a darkened alcove, with their voice describing some element of their experience. However, the portraits weren’t still photographs, they were video portraits of their faces.
Next was Naima Green’s Brief & Drenching. The first part was a series of portraits, seeking to explode traditional binary-gendered portrait styles. These were quite good, and certainly had their own style, although they remained, essentially portrait photographs. The rest of the exhibit was less photographic. there was an installation of objects, a video (snapshot of bloody pearls, evidently being pulled from a vagina, above, is from the video), framed collections of motion-blurred, deliberately “artless” Polaroids, and so on.
This was followed by the gorgeous photo-montages of Cooper and Gorfer’s Between These Folded Walls, Utopia, shown in 2 of the pictures above). These were beautiful, sensuous images. I’m not sure exactly how they were made, but certainly not through straight photographic processes.
Finally, there was Andres Serrano’s Infamous. Serrano, no stranger to controversy (think Piss Christ), collected a number of racist artifacts and then photographed them. Taken at face value, they’re a shocking evocation of the extreme racism that was quotidian in this country’s culture throughout its history, reminding us, in the current climate, how important it is to extirpate this scourge. While the photography is pretty straightforward, still-life product photography and the exhibit is powerful, it strikes me that it’s not so much a photography exhibit as a racist artifact exhibit with photography almost incidentally being the medium of display.
So, I came away from Fotografiska having seen some worthwhile, and even important, exhibits but not a lot of photography. Granted, photography is a broad term and all these works can certainly fit within a catholic definition of photography, but only to the extent that the term ceases to mean much more than ‘images created using technology, with content not necessarily concerned with the medium.’ To some extent I know as a white man of a certain age, I tend to think of photography in increasingly outmoded ways. OTOH, it almost feels as if the medium has been exhausted – all that’s left is tendrils of new forms growing out of the corpse of the now-dead photography I grew up with.
I’m in the throes of some long overdue updates but things may be a tad disoriented for a little while. I am attempting to provide a slightly more integrated experience between my blog, obBLOGato, and my main web site. So I have cross connected the links to various pages and changed to a WordPress theme that mimics (somewhat) the left-side menu navigation of my Zenfolio site. I will, over time, slowly integrate them better and, eventually, actually move the others site onto my domain, islerweb.com. Until then, patience…
Nothing to post right now but some changes coming. I’m hard at work on a relaunch of my Zenfolio site and, in attempting to integrate it more tightly with obBLOGato there will be some changes around here. Probably a new theme and a new menu on the left. Still playing around in the sandbox but coming soon… you have been warned!
A disgusting story of corporate deception. TLDR: Plastic is rarely recycled because it degrades, so recycling doesn’t work well and is too expensive relative tot he cost of fresh, new plastic! The oil and chemical companies always knew it and knowingly lied to us so they could keep selling new plastic.
For those interested in books, I have just updated the list on the Books page with several new entries of books of photographs from the years since I first posted the books page and added a new feature at the top, a listing of all books I have been reading, that I can remember, from the last few years, according to Libby, Nook, Kindle and Google Play with a few actual, honest-to-God physical books from my shelf.
Well, I hadn’t intended to change the look and feel of the place for 2020 but WordPress posted notice of a new theme for 2020 and I thought I’d give it a whirl. Only I hit the wrong button and instead of testing it in the sandbox I activated it. But I really didn’t like it (some of you may have seen it there for an hour or so, all cream colored with red-wine highlights).
Then I couldn’t remember or find the old theme so I had to go through them all to find one I liked. Then I discovered it hadn’t kept track of my randomized header images so I had to select and crop and test a bunch of new header images and randomize them. And finally I took advantage of the imbroglio to update some of the widgets and menus.
Welcome to obBLOGato’s new look for 2020!
On vacation… back in a day or two. Happy Holidays, all!
Had great fun (and not a little work) this weekend hosting a Pop-up Gallery show of my photographs and my mother’s paintings at Contra Studios in Chelsea. the pivot of the show was a set of 4 images you can see if you look quickly in the video (around the 20-second mark): a snowy photo of mine and my mother’s painting of it and a painting my mother did of some marsh grass in New Jersey and a photograph I took without knowing about hers, which nevertheless has a striking resemblance.
Also in attendance was a large group of my former classmates from PS 198’s class of 1968. I brought our middle school yearbooks, our class photo and set up a screen running a continuous loop of images I shot for the yearbooks back then, our 50th reunion get-together and some random shots around New York in those days. Most of the pictures here are of these friends and were shot by Peter Calvert, a professional artist and/or his wife Suzanne who is a stained glass artist – many thanks Peter and Suzanne!
I also set up an iMac to run loops of slide shows of my street photography set to music which you can see very briefly right at the end of the video (and hear in the background).
Also appearing, a surprise visit from my workshop friend Markus John from Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb‘s Finding Your Vision workshop last Spring, in NY on a brief trip from Germany.
(Click any picture to see them all enlarged and a few captions.)
I’d also like to thank numerous other friends who stopped by: Frank Burrows, Joe Silver, Gary Shoemaker and Kathleen Chan, Laura Tietjen and Steve Moore, Wayne Parsons and others and my mothers friends from her painting class, her quilting group and her neighbors who were very gracious in their appraisal of the show.
Important news! The gallery show previously announced has moved! We’ll still be opening on Friday evening (25-Oct-2019) at 6:30 pm and on Saturday the 26th from 11:00 to 5:00 but the new location is:
Contra Studios
122 West 26th Street, 7th floor
New York, NY 10001
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be participating in a pop-up gallery show next month. On the evening of Friday, October 25th and during the day on Saturday, the 26th you can see some of my work at Mother & Son an exhibition of my mother’s paintings (S F Stern) with my photographs.
[UPDATE] – We’ve just had a location change (dates and times unchanged). We’ll now be at:
Contra Studios,
122 West 26th Street, 7th floor
New York, NY 10001
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be participating in a pop-up gallery show next month. On the evening of Friday, October 25th and during the day on Saturday, the 26th you can see some of my work at Mother & Son an exhibition of my mother’s paintings (S F Stern) with my photographs.
for more information, don’t hesitate to contact me: adam@islerweb.com.
About 6 and a half years ago, I opened my kitchen cabinet to find General Mills wanted me to share my love of Cheerios on Facebook and I penned this rant. In the interim I have often thought of collecting all the meaningless advertising twaddle we are daily subjected to and scarcely even notice the null idiocy of. But every now and then, I find myself accidentally giving a moment’s thought to one of these banal, meaningless little mendacities and wondering how anyone can stand to be lied to in such obvious and meaningless ways without screaming (that’s changed for a lot of us after the 2016 Presidential election in the US).
So today, I open the cabinet and find Milano cookies from Pepperidge Farms (14 ozs of pure carbohydrates for only $3.89) asking, “Can a cookie be good for the soul?” and then in an underlined handwriting font they answer their own rhetorical question, “We think so.”
So, of course this doesn’t really mean anything. It is presumably meant to create a subliminal feeling of consanguinary warmth about the brand. But let’s be pedantic for a few moments and deconstruct this particular shard of bumf.
Can a cookie be good for the soul? Without wanting to go all Wittgenstein, let’s consider. What is the soul? Are we talking about a Christian soul here, concerned with getting to heaven and Jesus at the end of a good life? Or a Hindu one, striving for oneness with the Supreme Being? Or perhaps with a less religiously aligned soul that is conceived as being spiritual and non-material, or not even a spiritual soul but merely the spark of life animating our body, or one that is only a mental faculty of self-ness? Can any of these conceptions of soul be much concerned with Milano cookies? Can Milano cookies be good for any of these? Frankly, it’s hard to fathom. Let’s check the package and see if they have any soul-satisfying ingredients: hallucinogenic mushrooms maybe, or evanescent tea extracts?
Unbleached enriched wheat flour (flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), folic acid), dark chocolate (sugar, chocolate liquor, chocolate liquor processed with alkali (Dutched), cocoa butter, butter oil, soy lecithin, vanilla extract), sugar, vegetable oils (palm and/or interesterified and hydrogenated soybean and/or hydrogenated cottonseed), eggs, contains 2 percent or less of: cornstarch, egg whites, dehydrated skim milk, salt, soy lecithin, natural flavors and leavening (baking soda).
So that’s probably a “no,” then.
But, “we think so.” So who are we? Some lone marketing genius in Pepperidge Farm’s advertising agency? The entire Packaged Goods marketing team at Pepperidge Farm? Perhaps the Marketing team polled all the employees of Pepperidge Farm or all of Campbell’s Soup which own Pepperidge Farm, together with Bolthouse Farms, Prego, V8, and Swanson brands to find out what they think about Milano cookies’ soul-benefiting qualities, so they speak with some authority when they claim, “we think so.”
I turn the package around and find the now ubiquitous exhortation of companies that are building so-called “communities” of brand lovers: “Share your love for Milano® cookies at: facebook.com/pepperidgefarmmilano.” And what do I learn when I get there?
There are a lot of discount sellers of Milano cookies. The majority of posts are from discount and coupon online stores offering Pepperidge Farms cookies at discounts. There are genuine lovers of Milano cookies who like them well enough to post comments to that effect on Facebook. Evidently not readers of Naomi Klein’s classic, No Logo.
So, having got this off my chest, we return to our regularly scheduled programming. I do have half a mind to continue collecting these ephemeral, meaningless, social-media-oriented, commercial earwigs and posting off-topic rants about them from time to time. Please let me know what you think…
The class I co-taught last Autumn will be exhibiting its work in March, with an opening reception on March 7th, if you’ll be in New York.
