Site Specific - 2022

While I love using a lens to capture light I am recently enjoying more of  the iterative, step-by-step  process of making.  I am discovering how building towards something that isn’t preconceived can welcome experimentation and adventure - how the process becomes an integration of each texture, color, pattern - like fabric. Something cumulative out of small parts, not always greater than, but a cooperative effort that creates a subtle hand-loomed effect.  Nowhere have I been better able to explore this approach to my art than with the Cyanotype photographic process.

The Cyanotype is a process that came to mind when I was traveling abroad with students this Summer as a way to connect them to the land and cement their understanding of exposure, history and process through experience. We made blue impressions of coneflower, sage, clover and blackberry in the sun in the Czech Republic and later, I spent time, alone, on the far West coast of Ireland, and made my own impressions in blue.

I thought of Anna Atkins and her work combining science and nature in Photographs of British Algae 1843-53, and took the time to walk the shores on the Dingle Peninsula gathering from the edge of the waves and making camera-less images using everything from seaweed to jellyfish as the mist inevitably contributed a temporal ‘print’ to the very site-specific works before I ‘developed’ them in the waters of the Atlantic.

Once home, I returned again and again to the images I had gathered of lace curtains in cottage windows and thought of Julia Herschel’s book - also made using the Cyanotype Process - A Handbook for Greek and Roman Lace Making, 1869.   It has not been uncommon to see doilies, lace and other garments or items of tremendous skill and fragile pattern archived through the cyanotype process. Like the delicate edges and branches of seaweed and transparent agae, these textile pieces are also items  whose images are most faithfully translated  when they do that job themselves. The connection between the threads of lace, skeins of yarn and tendrils of the seaweed wove themselves naturally into something that I am only now just beginning to see the pattern and want to keep playing at the threads - pulling and tucking into something that is more personal and loomed from a rich variety of parts.

Over the Shoulder

There’s not much time between today and when the class ended in Prague. Already, those days feel very far away. Students have left and scattered to their next adventure or to return home. The students whose work remains unfinished is still not in my inbox, and of course, some are ignoring my last communications reminding them that WhatsApp isn’t a suitable way to communicate now that we’re outside of our ‘in-country’ program. None of this is surprising. What is, is that it all feels so far away already though really I feel as if I could look behind me and catch a glimpse of Jana walking to the tram and still, when I enter a spot, I expect and am disappointed that there isn’t the usual ‘ Dobré den!” Greeting me at the door.

Ireland so far has been nice - though I say Ireland and really, it’s only Dublin. As if one city, even one so central as Prague or Dublin, could give one a proper sense of place. I’ve already had, in two days, about as many conversations here as I think I did with strangers in Prague. The Irish are a chatty people - I count myself among them, for sure. I’m trying not to get my hopes and expectations up for. Dingle - not sure what I will find there. For sure, I have more work to do for the class and need to provide their feedback - I am fully aware that human nature is going to make me procrastinate. So perhaps tonight is a good night to chip away at it - or tomorrow morning.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and once I settle tonight, I’ll have a chance to go to a pub and get food and see how social folks are. It is Sunday, so perhaps not the best day for it, but I’m hoping that my adventures will end on a good note.

Focus on the Difficulty & Change your Perspective

Hidden Brain’s Episode: Reframing your Reality Part 1

This episode got me thinking about how things have gone the last few days and how changing out the lens through which we view difficulties can transform our attitude - and our ability make meaning out of our experience.

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A lot of what inspires me to want to write and failing that, create assignments or approaches to teaching in my own classroom, are podcasts, articles read or other obliquely related bits of information. It seems to be the way that my brain works. I get a spark from hearing information outside of my own field of understanding and immediately make some connection to my own life. Perhaps it’s an only child thing.

While teaching abroad, the classroom extends outside of the walls that usually help define boundaries of roles and behavior for both students and faculty. There is no “home: that takes someone outside of the school or class experience while one is abroad. This applies equally to students and to faculty and is something that, I would argue, is not something one can prepare for without having experienced it first hand. There’s no way to predict how a group of otherwise unfamiliar students will react as they have to become room or housemates, how the pressure cooker of every stress of new languages, environments, and transportation will work as a catalyst for the usual quirks that can result in behavioral issues in the dorms or in the classroom.

As the faculty in charge of that classroom, I’ve been experiencing a lot of push back - not to whether or not I have the authority and expertise to teach the subject matter (which is what I’m used to) - but rather the overall role of the instructor in the context of study abroad.

Throughout this class I’ve been challenged to provide structure to an itinerary that has, from the beginning, been tentative, given COVID, Summer holidays in Central Europe and the fact that when one travels, everything is a tentative itinerary - especially right now with post COVID shortages of labor and supply chain issues. It has been a challenge and ultimately, freeing, to have the structure clearly layed out for the course - posted on our institution’s class website - and then left alone (seriously, only one or two students have even logged on since the beginning of class). The course has been a day by day improvisational response to what the students need to know along the timeline of technical paired with aesthetic, etc. developed through experiential learning - hands-on, in person, with an emphasis on process. I’m using prompts to keep them focused on making images and to practice the technical skills we’re building and for the more advanced students, we’re meeting outside of class or as sidebars in class or on our activities to discuss and work on the process of building their body of work and focusing on an artifact that reflects their time and growth here as a artist, not just a photographer.

I know that I can explain what ‘experiential learning’ is to the students but just as teaching abroad for the first time, I’ve found that I need to throw my original plans out the window. This whole trip has been a learning experience - for everyone.

Alternative Approaches

“I find the work in “Past Paper // Present Marks” to be a lovely meditation on the randomness of creativity and the very essence of life, which is wrapped up in so much personal history, dings, scuffs, collisions. It’s what makes us who we are; it’s how we create the things we leave behind that prove we existed.””

— Kenneth Dickerman

From “Past Paper//Present Marks,” published by Radius Books. (Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England)

These photograms made in Robert Rauschenberg’s pool contain multitudes

Perspective by Kenneth Dickerman

Photo assignment editor

July 13, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

For the last four months or so, I’ve been in a bit of a funk. The brutal news cycle detailing global unrest and domestic discord has eaten away at any sense of tranquility I had. Everything seems jumbled, upside down, nonsensical.

I’m just now starting to peek out of the funk. And one of the things I’ve found to be supremely helpful is taking respite in beautiful things — or things that I can get lost in, that carry me away into a sense of reverie. The book “Past Paper // Present Marks” (Radius, 2022) by artists Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England is one of the books I’ve taken some refuge in.

The book itself is gorgeous, which only boosts the pleasure you’ll get while flipping through its pages. But the content (I hate that word!) borders on the sublime. It’s a collection of photograms — or photographic images produced without a camera — made in legendary artist Robert Rauschenberg’s swimming pool at his Florida home.

The images are experimental visions of wonder. Garza-Cuen and England made them in 2018 as part of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Fla.

….. Read the full article HERE

You can read more about the book and purchase it on the publisher’s website, here.

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Alternative Approaches

This afternoon was the seventh day of a three week study abroad course in Prague, Cz. My seven students and myself along with our expat guide to the local outdoor life and foraging culture took the tram home and discussed everything from politics to dogs to our affection for Czech public transportation. Before settling into a bath to wash off the day and before going out to a bar for a poetry night named for a literary reference to Philip K. Dick, I happened upon this article written by Kenneth Dickerman that concerned photo books and photograms.

It has been challenging to organize a course around a particular theme knowing nothing really other than what I’ve been told about our host country and feeling relieved and surprised when come to find out that Prague has a rich and romanced history with the photograph and photographers throughout its history…. the little that I am aware of, to be sure.

This course has been the ultimate lesson in flipping the classroom. The course materials I worked to build online for months and weeks up to the last few days before departing sit untouched in our online shell and the usual ease with which I am able to access my teaching tools both online and otherwise are either missing or just really don’t feel like they ‘fit’ for the class. The readings, topics, videos, etc. are, of course, relevant, and some students are able to find time in our busy schedule to review or work ahead and add to their experience, but I’ve been honest with them and have said that our job here is to learn through experience.

Experiential learning is the ultimate hands-on and the greatest test of a student, at any level, finding comfort in the release of control over outcomes or seeing over the hill at what lies ahead on their path. It is totally uncomfortable as a teacher and for some students creates new opportunities to stretch and flex into the line between what they know what they expect to know and what they actually are presented with.

My own experience here has been that the usual touch points of assignments, regular, documented discussions and other ways in which students get ‘official’ feedback from the instructor don’t serve the students and therefore, I’m not using them for this class. We have two main assignments that will come out of this class and the whole enchilada depends on whether or not they do the work and move through the process as they experience - writing in their visual journals, making videos, voice notes and of course, images to chronicle their journey. Prompts help propel them but our activities hopefully give them opportunities and inspire.

The other assignment that is essential to this course is a collaborative photo book. My temptation today, after reading this article, was to post a link to the class and ask them to read it. However, I paused, wondering if it was actually useful for them to have one more thing to do before their weekend arrives.

I’m realizing that this book “Past Paper//Present Marks,” is relevant to the students in that it is another example of a photo book and therefore a good model by which to gauge their own content and design. It is also relevant to me and my own process. It has, for three years now, been really too much to ask that I make work. I’ve been simply teaching - ha ha - simply - no, I’ve been grinding and clawing my way towards teaching to students online, remotely and without the returns of getting to facilitate their work as they make it and celebrate their accomplishments in person.

This has been a real privilege to both teach as well as travel with this group of students and there is something in the approach that artists Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England took towards the access they had to Robert Rauschenberg’s photographic supplies and home. Their use of the materials and the very specificity of the space in which them made the images seems to be a photographic record in a way that cuts and peels the process of photography back to its purest form.

Photography for early students is all about controlling variables and making precise decisions until the foundations are practiced and results are predictable. Photography is also the practice of taking that foundation and understanding of the precision, the chemistry, the variables and how to control them - and then throwing it all out the window and using expired film, paper, unpredictable light. It’s also about allowing chance and chaos and oblique strategies influence this precise and controlled field in way that only those with that strong foundation can - knowing that something will happen - but not knowing what.

The magic for me in photography is that there is a tremendous freedom from control for those who are receptive to it - an uncertainty that can be produced though setting things up so that the conditions are right for the unknown to breath and thrive.

Photography is always a reflection of ourselves, the photographer as well as ourselves, the viewer. In the case of the photograms made by England and Garza-Chuen, as they wrote, “ set them free in Bob’s pool///….accumulating itinerant light swimming through salt water ///“

Releasing our attachment to the outcomes is a beautiful thing

Short Exposures

April Snow in Portland, Oregon