3200K

Untitled, 2012 from Native Son by Joe Leavenworth

In photographic images, each individual component carries part of the whole: each separate element is related to the next. Within these relationships, we, as viewers, can derive both connoted and denoted meanings, working with cultural understandings and visible associations. We understand collectively, as a contemporary American society, what a string of Christmas lights is supposed to mean, much the same way that we understand what a trophy, or a car, or a house, signifies. But these clear-cut associations and meanings aren’t always supported within the image, and sometimes, we cannot connote these average significances.  Instead, we are forced to view objects in a photograph anew, deriving meaning from their location within a specific image, separate from their common connotations.

In Joe Leavenworth’s Untitled, trophies are stringed out on an interior windowsill, next to zigzagged wires and trash. A chain of Christmas lights surrounds the window, through which we can see a house and a car. Our assumptions about trophies (that they are prized objects, often for children) are undercut by their location on the windowsill. This sill is unrefined (unlike a nicely painted sill of a modern house), industrial perhaps, and littered with refuse. These indications (the trash, the unfinished wood) are then intrinsically bound to the objects that are near them. So, how can we read the trophies? Do we understand them in relation to the culturally connoted images of trophies from our youth? Or do we read them in terms of their location, among refuse in an industrial building? Regardless of how we choose to read them, they refuse to be resolved (their connoted and symbolic meanings not aligning with the denoted information from the photograph): it is here, in this ambiguity, that we as viewers enter into the image, to try and solve it, and, in the process, become absorbed within it.

Joe Leavenworth received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2007, and is now is based in Somerville, MA. Currently on the installation crew at the ICA/Boston and Harvard University, he plans to return south in July to continue photographing for Native Son.

Back Porch, 2012 by Valerie Sanders

Significance in photographs is often derived from the signified and its concurrent referents, but sometimes, it is also found in what is missing. In Back Porch, by Valerie Sanders, it is not the presence of the porch or the bushes, the railing or the door, that is important, but rather, the lack of people inhabiting them. The architecture of the building is non-descript, as are the shrubs surrounding the entry. Only the light (shrouding the door in an ethereal glow) signals to the viewer that the photograph is important. And, when we look, instead of finding what is there, we find instead, who is missing.

The missing people make reference to a passage of time, which is exemplified through the camera’s explicitness in the image. Light leaks and the slight shift in focus near the top of the image recall cameras of our youth (and, in this case, an antique box camera): before digital point and shoots took over, our childhoods were filled with blurry, off-kilter photographs of things that were important to us (even though, years later, we wonder at the significance of a certain rock, or maybe a mailbox). This presence of absence in the photograph creates a void through which the viewer enters. Like the photograph albums of our youth, where photographs often need external information and made up stories to make any sense in the present, we fill in the dots and connect the empty areas in Back Porch, to imagine the people and the objects that once occupied this space.

Valerie Sanders was born in Martinsburg, PA, where she did her undergraduate work at Penn State. She is currently based in Boston, MA while pursuing an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, where her work focuses on communities and the factors that create and sustain them. 

Laura Wulf, Untitled (19110700), 2007 

As Thomas Brennan’s images disrupt the usual photographic relationship between signifier and signified through the lack of an intermediary lens, so too, does Laura Wulf’s work. This image (like the many others in its series) began as a photogram in the darkroom, referencing photographic history, and ends at an intersection between the photographic and the drawn: using sharp tools and sandpaper, Laura scratches directly into the emulsion of the paper. Thus, what you see is not what was photographed (per say).

Begun in the 1990’s, during the peak of the C-print process, this work served as homage to the daily processes of an artist working with photographic media. Now, as color darkrooms disappear, they serve as an elegy to a dying art. The photogram process is something that cannot be created digitally, and, as such, it refers backwards towards its creation: the process of turning dials and spinning apertures, exposing light briefly in a pitch black room. The result that we see is entirely photographic: the photograph is an object, instead of depicting one. And, instead of signifying an object in relation to the picture plane we look at, the photograph IS the object. This disruption of photographic conventions is both unsettling and unnerving, displacing our beliefs about what a photograph can show, but it is in this crux that the work reveals its power.

Laura Wulf holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been exhibited widely, including shows at the Danforth Museum of Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and Gallery Kayafas.

Thomas Brennan, Paradisaea apoda, male female pair (courtesy of American Museum of Natural History), 2011

Thomas Brennan’s work disrupts the usual relationship in photography between signifier and signified. Usually, an object reflects light backwards at the film, which then records its likeness. The image that you see in the photograph is a print, a reproduction, of the light cast from an object, mediated by the lens of the camera, which distorts perspective and chooses focus. Paradisaea apoda, male female pair, however, is lens-less. Created as a photogram in the darkroom, of a taxidermied bird from the American Museum of Natural History, it literally traces the pair of birds onto the light-sensitive paper. In this way, the sign of the object (the exact outline) is more than just a trace of reflected light: it is an exact imprint, a shadow thrown.

These photographs reference work by William Henry Fox Talbot, who pioneered image making like this (notably, with his photogenic drawings in the book The Pencil of Nature). Similarly, in a search for exact representation of the natural world, artists such as Audubon created illustrations meant to be stand-ins for what could not be seen easily (even with careful observation, living birds refuse to stay still for us to examine them). This image draws from conventions of 19^th century taxidermy, which utilized animated poses, pedestals, and taxonomic tagging in a search for a way to represent the ephemeral bird in flight, as well as the history of the photographic medium. Alluring in their abstraction, Thomas’s images become not only visually stunning photographs, but examinations of these historic representations of the natural world.

Thomas Brennan is an artist and educator living in Vermont, where he is a professor at the University of Vermont. His work has been shown widely, including recent solo shows at the Kohler Center for the Arts (2011) and the University of Puerto Rico (2012).

Beer Can Totem, 2011 by David Welch

How do the current consumerist attitudes in this country remove us from the objects that we use? Once, humans only had what they could make themselves, carefully crafting objects and then treasuring them (as extensions of themselves). Now, our goods are mass-produced in other countries, shipped to us, and then quickly discarded: the labor of their production is lost on us, as we aren’t the ones who crafted them. Is it possible to return to the Marxist ideals of items serving as mirrors in which we can contemplate and reflect, further understanding our own selves, our attitudes and our actions?

Inspired by Duchamp’s ready-mades, David Welch builds totems out of these everyday substances, reflecting our collective consumerism in multiples: how many televisions does your home have? How many beer cans do you throw away (or even recycle) each night? In one photo, beer cans reach skyward, in another a pile of laundry becomes insurmountable (how many clothes can one person wear at a time, anyways?). These images, from the series Material World, ask such questions. Within them, viewers see not the consumption of others, but rather their own (suddenly, I’m self conscious of the beer cans in my own recycling bin, not worried about the overflowing bin that I’m looking at in the photograph). And by asking these questions, the images, as much photographs as performative acts and sculptures, push us as viewers to realize our own thoughts and biases, reflecting inward on ourselves.

David Welch holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His work has been shown and published widely, both nationally and internationally, with numerous honors, including an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Hey, Hot Shot! competition and as one of Photolucida’s Critical Mass top 50 photographers. He is currently based on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, MA, where he uses large-format photography to explore social issues.

Free Breakfast, Del Rio, Texas, 2010 by Trevor Powers

Trevor Powers creates images about travel and America, sporting a portfolio rich with symbols that we collectively recognize as representative of our country. These symbols, however, are mediated through the artist’s eyes, and show a land that wouldn’t appear in advertisements or the pages of a glossy magazine: gas stations are overgrown by weeds, railroad tracks seem unused, glowing neon signs advertise for a psychic reader, and, in this case, a waffle sits on a plate. Each photograph is extremely specific (I now know every nook and cranny of this particular waffle, shaped like Texas, but backwards), but in its specificity, it fails to tell the viewer anything about the larger picture: how did this waffle get here? what is it doing? who is with it?

As Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces was about the sensation of travelling across the continent, creating an endless collection of images that together defined the places and the people of the US, so, too, do Trevor’s images capture collective information about a specific time and place. And, like Stephen Shore’s images, they do not show experiences, but rather objects that seem to stand in for experience: they refer backwards towards their making, anchored by titles that describe their location. And in their specificity, they refuse actual description. We may now know every inch of this waffle, but the experience that it seems to embody (Free Breakfast, Del Rio, Texas) is not actually present within the image: it is connoted, but not denoted. And because it isn’t actually there, it gives the viewer room to expand and create their own story surrounding this lonely waffle.

Trevor Powers is a photographer and curator based in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied photography at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has been featured in numerous exhibitions and publications throughout the United States. 

Tara Sellios,  No. 5 from the series Retribution

Tara Sellios’s work recalls the history of art history: still lives and memento mori have been appearing in art since the 17^th and 18^th centuries, when Dutch painters began to capture the ephemeral in paint, concerned with luminous light and alluring textures. These painters were obsessed with the transient nature of human life, fresh fruit in their works conflated with human flesh (that likewise could rot), and references to death and mortality appearing in dead animals and ticking clocks. So, too, is Tara’s work concerned with matching seductive beauty with grotesque brutality, seducing the viewer while simultaneously horrifying them. In this photograph, she does just that, using conventions from art history morphed with more morbid intentions.

In No 5, the sea creature’s head (an octopus? it seems impossible to tell what it actually is.) appears severed from its body, devouring its own tentacles. The title of the image leads the viewer (anchors, as Barthes would say): retribution. So, is this a punishment? An eye for an eye, an arm for an arm, a tentacle for another tentacle?  The image reads first as the creature enacting upon itself, but the background that it is laid upon creates another layer of meaning. It is stained underneath the monster, liquid appearing to seep outwards from its mass. The folds of the background signify that it is a tablecloth, perhaps, or atleast something intentionally laid out: the creature didn’t just end up here, because it was placed. So if it was placed, who placed it, and why? And is it acting upon itself, or is it being acted upon? Like images by photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkins and Chienning Liao, it refuses resolution. It is both acting upon itself, and being acted upon (if only by our eyes, which consume and construct it as we look upon it). Both monster and seduction, like the rest of Tara’s work, it calls upon the viewer to examine the fragility of life: temporal and shifting, death always lurking just around the corner.

Tara Sellios lives and works in Somerville, MA. She holds a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston, and has participated in numerous group shows. In May, Gallery Kayafas in Boston, MA will host a solo exhibition of her work.

The first issue of 3200K is now available to pre-order! The issue contains images by all thirteen photographers, plus an editorial issue by the curator, Sarah Pollman. Each one is printed and bound by hand, and arrives wrapped in glassine with its own set of white cotton gloves. Estimated delivery date is mid-May.

http://3200k.bigcartel.com/

Sarah Gaw’s images are about location. But although they reference a very specific place, they also reference her as the artist within their construction. Sarah utilizes a medium-format Holga camera to shoot on 120 slide film; because of her method, there is a great deal of chance that enters the images. Lines converge, but perhaps not perfectly, and reflections appear without an apparent source. The disparities between the referenced reality and the actual image on the paper create a fissure out of which new meanings arise: suddenly, the photograph also depicts chaos, rhythm and order.

To borrow terms from Roland Barthes, namely the denoted and the connoted images, we can begin to make sense of her photograph. Pieces of the image ground us (as viewers) by showing something clear and recognizable. In the upper right hand corner, a sign appears, pointing out an exit. Further down, we can make out a light bulb, and the lines read clearly as steel beams. The train station is thus denoted to us. But what about the other meanings we can infer? Rhythm is connoted through the repeating lines, and chaos is evident through the disconnect between reflections and their source. We become aware of the photographicness of the image: double exposures are a product of a process, rather than reality and everyday vision. As Sarah writes of her work: “My camera becomes a tool to appease my innate desire for rhythm and harmony while I endure chaos and cacophony. I photograph because I must resolve this disparity in my favor.” Her images certainly accomplish this: the denoted image of a train station quickly gives way to the connoted images of commotion, cadence and constructed order.

Sarah Gaw manages a fine-art digital printing lab at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she also teaches within the photography department.  She also owns a consulting firm, where she advises artists on digital imaging and portfolio development. Additionally, she creates her own fine art, which has been exhibited throughout the Northeast.

Chris Bentley, Escaped Dog

The photographs in Chris Bentley’s series, Our Desert, are placed in the west, amid a vast landscape that gives little information about its inhabitants. The land is stark and dry: it could be Arizona or New Mexico, or maybe Colorado or Idaho or Utah: it is nearly impossible to place the images according to the land itself. The only evidence about the places comes from human interjections on the land: in one photograph, a Wendy’s fast food restaurant invades, in another, bottle caps pepper the ground. Likewise, Escaped Dog reveals little about its place, save for the man-made bits that interject the frame: power lines separating an industrial building and construction equipment from scrubby, brush, and a road, divided down the center by a crack. The subject of the photograph, a stray dog, straddles the fissure in the street, caught between what is behind him, and what is before him.

In this photograph, the dog stands in as human. As Chris writes of his work: “The American desert is a place where man can attempt to fulfill his dreams. The emptiness of the land provides a blank template for these dreams to seed and hopefully prosper […] And the land always remains—vast, arid, and austere—and lacking any knowledge or care of man and his creations.” Like Magali Duzant’s images of the west, in these images, the land is a staging ground for hopes and dreams. But in these images, instead of fulfillment, we see fissure: the distance between the natural world and its inhabitants is vast and wide, and instead of grandiosity, we see detritus. Like the dog, we flee our dreams, feeling the tension between what lays behind us and before us.

Chris Bentley’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout the US, including the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, and the Griffin Museum of Photography. Additionally, his work has been published both online and in print form, in places such as Flak Photo, Incandescent Magazine, Humble Arts Foundation, and F-Stop Magazine.