Field Trip - Milwaukee Art Museum - Study Center Print Viewing

Justin Kimball

The Milwaukee Art Museum

by David Kieckhefer

During our visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, I found myself drawn mostly to the image, Spring Street, by photographer Justin Kimball. His series, Pieces of String, tells a narrative of the people who lived in these spaces without having a single image of a person. Kimball's work has encouraged me to take a step back from 'traditional' portraiture and to rely less on the figure when telling a narrative.

Kimball’s Pieces of String is a collection of photographs taken over several years throughout New York State and New England, in abandoned homes and buildings being cleared for sale. His brother, Douglas Kimball, is an auctioneer, whose job it was to empty these spaces and liquidate their contents. The homes examined are in many cases run-down, disintegrating spaces filled with the kind of possessions one might imagine of a miserly shut-in who has not left his house in several decades.

- Lauren Greenwald, Fraction Magazine

“I use the camera's descriptive power and the photographic illusion of truth to create the narrative and inspire feelings about its subject. The resulting photographs are my perception of what happened in those spaces: who lived there? What was hidden and what was seen?”

Spring Street

Florence Road

Florence Road, Mantel

Adler Avenue, Bed

Ideas/ Phantasm/Narrative - Alec Soth

Alec Soth
Photographer/Narrator
Rebeka Schmieder 

Alec Soth is a photographic storyteller. His work focuses on the human condition and specifically, American culture. Soth is a Magnum photographer, using his skills as a photojournalist and artist creates  books. When working on book projects, he collaborates with writers to give a text narrative to accompany the photographs. He has published over 25 photograpic artists' books in his career. In addition, has had more than 50 solo-exhibitions in his hometown, Minnesota and internationally, including Paris and London. In 2013 he earned Guggenheim Fellowship. Soth most recently created a multi-media enterprise, Little Brown Mushroom, focused on visual story telling. 

Front Cover of Songbook 

Songbook is Soth's most recent artist book. It is a collection of photographs that he has taken over the years working for news magazines. In this iteration, however, he has given these images a new meaning. For the first time, Soth did not provide text to go along with the images with the intention of  testing the photo's functionality without text to explain them. Instead, he forces the viewer to imagine the story. The viewer becomes the story teller, but he has provided the images and sequence. In other words, he has provided the basis for a great story, or many stories.

These photos have a rhythm built into the sequential pattern of the book. Some have a musical overturn to it. This is why he says he sees this book as a melodic play. This book is wide open for interpretation and can have multiple meanings depending on the viewer. Each photo is intimate and accentuates the personality of the person portrayed. 

Soth sees photography as a medium of separation. He wants to bridge that gap, but also maintain the medium as a separation from photograph and viewer.

Joseph Mougel - Artist Talk

Joseph Mougel - Artists Now Lecture Series

by Mandy Litwin

Joseph Mougel gave a great artist talk at UW-Milwaukee this past week. It was an enjoyable experience as I have not heard much in depth conversation about his work prior to that talk. I had not known about the way that Joseph was introduced to photography – through his time in the service. It makes it easier to understand his documentary style approach to the photographic art world a lot more. 

From what I heard him speak about, it seems that the process is the most important part of creating work. While there is an outcome to each piece that he is working towards, he is very careful to document the whole process along the way. This became evident in the works he made where he would dig a hole at specific time intervals throughout the day, and then use the hole as another element to his work. It is very much a performance of concept for him.

From Blanc

With his Blanc series, we see many portraits in which Joseph has photographed people who have not served in the armed forces. However, they are all within an age range that is of most priority for recruiting. The figures are all completely camouflaged white against a white background. What initially becomes visible is various outlines of a military uniform and the eyes of these figures. He refers to moments of “the unknown” and “transformation”, as he puts it.

Commerce/Economics-Hand of Man-Corey Arnold

Corey Arnold
By Rebeka Schmieder 

Corey Arnold is both a photographer and a commercial fisherman in Alaska. He studied at the Academy of Art in San Fransisco, CA. During the summer he worked as a fisherman. His first love is fishing and his second love is photography. When he was a kid his dad showed him how to fish and later on his dad introduced him to a camera. His work is a documentary expose on fisheries in Alaska and Europe. His images explore both his personal relationships with his co-workers and also the strenuous work fishermen encounter everyday. Arnold's photographs have been published in a number of magazines, including Time LENS magazine, Esquire. The New Yorker.

His ongoing series Fish Work:The Bering Sea documents his work on multitude of fishing boats, some of which he owes, and on larger vessels as well. It is important for Arnold to accurately present the story of the hard work and danger encountered by fisherman. He would shoot between work and sleep.

Untitled 

Gulf Crossing

Opilio Bed

Between String

The photographs are visually elegant, and sometimes shocking. The photo Opilio Bed is both disturbing and humorous. Arnold does a fantastic job of capturing emotions of the workers. He reveals that it is not always dangerous, sad and dreary work, there are moments of fun among the workers. His work presents all aspects of working on a fishing boat.

In another series, Arnold  focused on life outside of commercial fishing. Graveyard Point documents the residents of a small village in Alaska. The series combines landscape and portraiture.

The Graveyard Hotel

Kvichak Exploratory Committee

Bobby after the Shooting

Ben and King

Arnold documents the unique individuals of this dying community. Despite the appearance of a ghost town, scenic documentary shots and portrait of the residents bring life and character to Graveyard Point.

Arnold's work inspires my documentary work because he manages to do both photography and fishing in equal measure. It's refreshing to see that he did not give up one dream to live out the other. I would like to think that it would be possible for me to do this with my own work.

Event Review - Joseph Mougel - Artist Now! Talk

Artists Now! Guest Lecture Series: Joseph Mougel

February 15 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

By Rebeka Schmieder

Joseph Mougel is a videographer, photographer, sculptor and performative artist. All of these techniques have been methodically used in his projects. His work explores specific places and experiencing the place in its entirety. 

Mougel generously introduced us to his early work and the artists who have influenced him. All  artists are all influenced by other people, events, politics, etc. In most artist talks I have attended, the speaker failed to include influences which helped them create their work. Inspiration is part of the creative process for artists and research is important. Students need to be aware of other artists who tackle a subject, concept, or esthetic that relates to their own developing work.

Mougel's experience as a marine influenced his early work. Rabbit to Bee questions how he came to this place and his travels influencing the man he is today. He photographs himself doing different actions. While photos themselves have an empty feeling, I see them being a small moment in Mougel's life that he is capturing. Although these scenes are choreographed, Mougel still wants the viewer to perceive the images as discrete moments, he wants the viewer to literally stare at them and witness the scene. 

Cowboy

Mougel continues to use his history as a marine in his series Blanc. This series revisits the time in a person's life when they transform into a new recruit for the military. The idea of unification of individuals is the process when someone joined the armed services. What I found beautiful was, as Mougel states, "Even though these figures are fully covered in paint and camouflaged into the background, you couldn't fully erase the identity of the person behind the paint." This notion contradicts what the government's desire to transform individuals into a unified being. No one person can be blended into being the same as another.

002

In my own work, I have started to realize that my interest in landscapes and documentary work is purely based on the discovery and documentation, but there is this underlying theme. I need to show the identity that a body of people give a place. Whether this is a town or a vast landscape, I want to  identify the uniqueness of a land has and how it came to be. The human footprint is what I am interested in. In his work, Mougel explores/discovers, how a place came to be. He settles on a place and studies the landscape in depth rather than photographing it and moving on. This is why he documents his process with different media. Perhaps his influence can help me shape and strengthen my work through examination of one landscape at a time. 

Death/Destruction - Journalism/Fine Art - Mark Neville

Mark Neville
by Rebeka Schmieder
Mark Neville is a photojournalist located in London. His work is exclusive and changing the dynamics of documentary photography. He explores the social functions of photography by shifting the focus of the elite art audience to the lower class audience. Neville has found comfort with making work for the communities he documents. He creates these beautiful photographs and makes a coffee table photo book to disperse amongst the communities. He is more interested in empowering the subject rather than the director or photographer. 

Neville's work is concentrated on working class communities. His series The Port Glasgow Project  shows the life of a once thriving shipbuilding city and now is an industrial and economic decline. After he documented Glasgow, he put them into a book to disperse throughout the city. In an interview, he stated that this book had mixed reviews amongst the public. 

"The most extreme reaction I had was, all the protestant residence in one particular street got together and had a meeting and took their copies of the book and dumped them in the back of  a catholic pub and set fire to them"  

-Mark Neville 

Betty ( Port Glasgow Town Hall Xmas Party), Mark Neville, 2005

Sports Personality of the Year Award, Mark Neville, 2005

When Neville gives out his books to ten thousand people rather than selling the book in a store, the reactions are more genuine and dramatic. The reason for the outburst from the protestant residence was because they thought the book had too many catholic pubs pictures and not enough protestant pubs. It's reactions like this that make documentary photojournalism work so fragile and complicated. But it can also make the work photojournalist do special because you get reactions that are heartfelt as well. 

He most recently published his book Fancy Pictures which is a collective from all of his past works put into one book for publication. This made him reflect on his work in a new light because of a public production of it all. 

Neville is an inspirational photojournalist who produces masterful photos. I think what is refreshing about his work is that he doesn't do it for the sales. He also is not for the fame of his name. I think as photojournalist we have to have this mentality because this style of photography can impact many people. Taking away our personal feelings and biases and creating work for the viewers is more important. 

http://www.markneville.com 

Identity - Family - Tina Barney

Identity - Family - Tina Barney

Family Tableaux Portraiture Photographer

By Rebeka Schmieder

Tina Barney is an American photographer based in New York. Her work presents dramatic tableaux family portraiture and snapshots. She explores the conventions society puts on families and then completely rejects them.  Barney’s work has been shown in prestigious art museums and galleries national and international. She had a solo exhibition at both the Whitney Biennial (1987) and MOMA (1991).  Barney was one of the first photographers to tackle  large scale color printing when she began working in the early 1970's. 

Barney’s work is confrontational and hypnotic. Her subjects engage with the viewer in a humanistic way. Their gestures and the scenery make the photographs relatable. In her series “Theatre of Manners” Barney projects the ideas of family in the simplest manner. It feels like the photos are capturing a split second of reality and intensifying the relationship between the camera and person or people. The emotions appear real and almost tangible. Although her work may be directed, the figures, personalities and self-expression show through the shot. I believe that photographing her family and friends make her work stronger, emphasizing the personal connection between the photographer and the one being photographed. 

Barney shoots mainly on 4 x 5 and 8 x 10 cameras. Over the past 5 years, she has also shot with a digital camera. Shooting on large format cameras allows her photographs to have the detail they need. To connect, with not only the subjects, but also the space. She said, “I want the prints to feel like a movie screenshot quality.”

Although I have not paid close attention to the human form in my photographs, Barney has inspired me to now consider the importance of the  relationship between two subjects in the frame. 

http://www.tinabarney.com