Category: art school

east lyme: pilgrim age

Posted on Posted in art school, book shelf, minimum daily requirement, on photographersTagged , , ,

You know the names of the people, even if you don’t recognize the name of the place. Fellow photographers prompt us. Place probably prompts geographers and letter carriers.
Influence felt and spread. Will you explore for inspiration? What does seeing what they saw provide? I have no answer to either of the questions. I don’t travel to visit places of others. I have never been a pilgrim.

Walker Evans, east lyme… the note idled over a month… for no reason. Okay, one. I considered buying the book. I still haven’t bought it.

Walker Evans lived in this house in East Lyme, Connecticut, from 1967 until shortly before his death in 1975. The house was designed by Evans and his friend Robert Busser, a Yale architecture student. Letters and postcards were often addressed to Old Lyme or Lyme because their Mail truck turned around at Stewart’s Corner, East Lyme.]

Reviewing others’ work provokes a review of mine. Same thing sometimes happens as I edit or revise current work. Few interesting matters ever reach finality.

as test to yourself: Why hold interest in another past place. We don’t see Evans’ time, footprints. A deed with his namespace; perhaps a deposit check could hold as much history– commerce, reverential. Or, is the structure a demonstration of built world a key to His namesake. A keepsake worth travel of two current actors on the artworld.

[Two photographers, James Welling and Mark Ruwedel, just two years apart visited Evans’ home in 2016 and 2018, respectively. This volume places the projects undertaken by both in dialogue, highlighting their similarities and differences.]

[Shooting passersby against a plywood backdrop as they crossed his field of vision from distant right to close left (some noticing him, most not), with the light striking and modeling their features, Evans found that what he was creating with these images was “the physiognomy of a nation.” This book compiles the photographs, contact sheets, small-version printlets, Evans’ annotations to newspaper clippings, drafts for an unpublished text, telegrams and every available print Evans made, along with the Fortune spread as published. Labor Anonymous captures a long-vanished moment in American history, and a crucial project in Evans’ oeuvre.} — here

Welling: (b. 1951)

Ruwedel: (b. Bethlehem, PA 1954)

Oct23 ongoing Picture

Posted on Posted in art school, exs notebook, picture post, the arc, Theory: landscape

picture post, continuing. Abstraction has limits. Not as final as conceptual work, but there is little midgame work to be accomplished – certainly not with photographs. Realism has a silencing effect.

These ongoing, table edits include originals from prior posts. These are reminiscences of portfolio items I called Original In Color (’60s). These pictues are current.

Roger Minick. notes

Posted on Posted in art school, book shelf, old bones, on photographers1 Comment

Roger Laell Minick (born July 13, 1944) 

The “Sightseer” images were first exhibited at the Grapestake Gallery in San Francisco in 1981 . Minick’s photo project on the rural Ozark Mountains of Arkansas begun in 1969, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972. 

“In 1984, Minick entered the graduate art program at the University of California, Davis, where his MFA graduation show in 1986 consisted of both a series of paintings and a series of color photographs. For the next twenty-five years Minick taught photography throughout Northern California, including San Francisco State University, Sacramento State University, San Francisco City College, and the Academy of Art University of San Francisco.”

Dylan Swift is Roger Minick’s nom de plume.

REVIEWS

  • LOS ANGELES TIMES, “Legoland”, April 14, 2000
  • FRIEZE (magazine), “Sightseer Series”, June-July-August, 1997
  • LOS ANGELES TIMES, “Sightseer Series”, March 14, 1997
  •  Katzman, Louise (January 1984). Photography in California, 1945-1980. Hudson Hills.
  • SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Misc. Reviews, May 19, 1977; March 4, 1981; June 5, 1988; Sept. 16, 1989
  • Albright, Thomas (March 1981). “Photography, From Satire to Biography”. San Francisco Chronicle.
  • ARTFORUM, “Sightseer Series”, Summer 1981
  • ARTWEEK, Misc. Reviews, Nov. 13, 1976; Feb. 15, 1980; March 7, 1981; April 16, 1988; Sept. 17, 1988;
  • CHICAGO SUN TIMES, “Southland Series”, June 15, 1980
  • SMITHSONIAN, “Hills of Home”, December 1975
  • VILLAGE VOICE, “Delta West”, A.D. Coleman. June 25, 1970 [in Light-Readings, p.39]

Last saw his work at the Chandler; the place with the great blind dog.

from Delta West: “I speak about where you get on certain things in life and things confuse you. And when you get confused, you don’t know which way to go — and you take the wrong road in lif, the space is narrowed to the coffin. It’s definitely narrowed to the coffin. You just revert to this. You revert to the wandering shadows of shadows and the space is definitely narrowed to the coffin. And when the space gets narrowed to the coffin, well you know and I know, there’s no more space left for us. It’s all over. It’s all over right there. Now that’s definitely right!” https://www.rogerminick.com/delta-west

  • Born in Ramona, Oklahoma, in 1944, Roger Minick grew up in the Ozarks of Arkansas, moved to Southern California in 1956, and entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, where he graduated in 1969 with a degree in history

  • 1966 he began a black and white photographic project on the land and people of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California. Three years later, the project became Delta West (Scrimshaw Press, 1969),

  • 1965 and 1975, Minick was on staff at the ASUC Studio, serving as director from 1971 to 1975.

  • In 1970, he began a black and white photographic project on the rural Ozarks of Arkansas, receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 to complete the series.

  • Minick not only co-designed his own books Delta West and Hills of Home but also books by other photographers, including Margo Davis’s Antigua Black (1973), Richard Misrach’s Telegraph 3 AM (1974), and Steve Fitch’s Diesels and Dinosaurs (1976).

  • 1974 through 1976, Minick worked on Southland, a project in which he photographed freeways, vernacular architecture, and made portraits of people at fast-food outlets and shopping plazas in Southern California.

  • 1977, he was one of five photographers selected to work on a two-year National Endowment for the Arts Photo Survey project on the Mexican American community

  • 1980, Minick began work on Sightseer, his first photographic series in color. Images from this series were included in the hardcover book and major traveling exhibition American Photographers and the National Parks, sponsored by the National Parks Foundation and published by Viking

  • 1981 through 1985, Minick took color photographs in enclosed shopping for a project he called The New Main Street.

  • Between 1987 and 1989, Minick began a color series photographing people on the streets of San Francisco which he called StreetWork

  • 1984, Minick entered the graduate art program at the University of California, Davis, where his MFA graduation show in 1986 consisted of both a series of paintings and a series of color photographs

  • 1998 to 2003, Minick photographed widely with the Holga camera 

  • 2006, Minick switched from analog to digital, and over the next few years experimented extensively making manipulated prints using Photoshop.

  • 2010, Minick founded Perambulation Press