I've been a fan of Dylan Chatain's photography since I saw a few of his prints at the Jen Bekman Gallery last year... He's recently posted more work online from project The American Imagination. When I saw his prints lat year and when I checked his work online, the phrase that kept floating into my head was quietly evocative... but instead of reading a description, why not just look at the pictures...
Pentagram Design, as usual, sent out a memorable holiday card. This year it came in the form of a booklet, "The Alphabet: A Critical Assessment", a printed copy of a Marion Bantjes blog post.
on the upper and lowercase Z: "And last, but certainly not least, the Z, with a final flourish, a sword slash (I know!), a signature of completion. The Z has exhuberance and balance ... alas, with the lower case z, the alphabet goes out with a bang and a whimper."
James Brown: Christmas in Heaven
Posting will be sparse until after the holiday.... I trust you all will pass it well.
related: same window
Mexican crime photographer Enrique Metinides' work often leaves viewers unsettled. He is compared to Weegee because of the macabre subject matter and yet Metinides work strikes a darker chord. We look at Weegee's dead mobsters and think they got what they deserved, but when Metinides shoots a kid floating on bottom of a pool the tragedy is palpable...this could be someone you know. Reviewers always compare Metinides photos to film stills maybe because he shoots wide tableaus including bystanders—passersby frozen in a moment of contemplation—this gives the images a larger than life reality that competes with the unreality of the subject matter and distinguishing the images from common tightly composed flash-bulbed newspaper pulp (as an aside it's an effect many art photographers especially those from the Yale school of photographic thought keep trying to replicate). Many of the pictures are hard to look at and yet you are drawn to them. This is not exactly rubbernecking, it's a more primal pull. These are views of death that carry the shade of hard reality. We viewers become bystanders ourselves.
Today the New York Times is featuring a review of a Mentinides show up at Anton Kern Gallery through January.
Andrew Kern
532 West 20th Street
related: another good article on Metinides
Other shows I want to check out this weekend:
Girls Room featuring work from some 30 odd artists...
@ Jen Bekman
6 Spring Street
These were a few of the proposals for the Chrysler Building by architect William Van Alen... Apparently the Chrysler board liked the 2nd proposal, but Chrysler himself didn't think it was modern enough, and pushed the architect to do better eventually leading to the final design. The final decision was made by two men: Chrysler the client and Van Alen the architect with no committees or boards to dull the boldness of the design. Architectural critics of the day hated it by the way which tells you a little something about architectural critics.
Every time I see the Chrysler building from afar I literally hear music in my head... sort of an low chord under an angelic "ahhhhhhh....". This happened the first time I saw the building in person at the age of 4 and it happens today. I hope it never goes away.
related: salon on the building's history, Metropolis of Tomorrow, dentist in the Chrysler Building.
In small towns, like the one in which I grew up, you can often go weeks without running into a stranger. You know people's stories and they know yours. You find mystery by picking up on dissonance between the facades people present and the realities underneath... But in big cities virtually everyone you encounter in a day is a stranger. You pick up little snippets of conversation, see bits of urban drama, but you always catch the stories in the middle. And the beginnings and endings are left to the imagination. Why was there a man in a black overcoat and black sunglasses standing alone on the promenade holding a child's pinwheel? What happened to the young couple fighting on Cranberry street? Did he mean it when he said he would change? Change what? Did she believe him or was she going back to her mother's house in Connecticut as she had threatened? Did the young thief being chased down Atlantic Avenue by cops escape with his loot from the pharmacy? And what of the very old man who wanders the neighborhood with a little camera around his neck? What does he do with those pictures he takes so unobtrusively, unnoticed except by other photographers? Does anyone ever get to see them?
related: photographs I did not take today, unphotographable, urban drama
I see this man around the neighborhood several times a week. He always carries a dog eared book in his big hands. I've never seen the same book twice.
When my childless friends ask what it's like to be parent, I often say that it's like being in a boat lost in fog, but then you figure some tiny thing and the fog clears to reveal a full moon over a calm sea.
Tonight was one of those nights.
Our son fell asleep normally, but kept waking up and crying for his mom. After the 3rd or 4th trip downstairs for my very pregnant, very tired wife, I volunteered to take a shift. The minute our son saw me instead of his mom, he started crying inconsolably.
Now if you've never seen a 2 year old cry, especially a kid like ours who is pure sugar, it's like watching all the sadness in the world poured into this little pup of a human being. There is no anger, no reproach, just pure unfiltered sorrow. So I try to hold him and he just turns away, giant tears streaming down his cheeks. "No daddy. Noooo..."
There is one school of parenting that says, offering comfort in these situations is exactly the wrong thing to do, that you need to steel yourself and be hard and that by going cold turkey the child will learn to sleep by himself. We tried that once or twice and our son sobbed so hard he started throwing up. He was a headbanger as an infant until we brought him to our bed. The headbanging stopped immediately. The kid is just a people person.
Anyway he was sobbing, crying for his mom, and I told him if he felt sad to hold my hand. His hand reached out, grabbed my finger and squeezed it hard. I asked him if he felt better, and he nodded. He turned to me and through a stream of alligator tears said, "Up. Up. Momma. Momma." I told him his mother needed to rest and eat dinner which led to more gulping heaving sobs. He turned away again. He was trying to keep it together, but not doing a very good job of it, with cycles of crying and wails. This went on for a long time and I was about to break down and call for Jenn. Then I whispered, "Hey, I'll hold you until your mom comes to bed, however long it takes. You can hold me too." He turned to me, gave me the tightest hug a kid his size can give, rested his forehead against mine, and held my face with both his hands. The tears stopped, he gave me a kiss, closed his eyes, and fell into deep slumber. That was all there was too it. He didn't want to be alone tonight. And who does really?
Sybil Miller put up a nice post yesterday on Helen Levitt's color work along with a links to several images from Levitt's book Slide Show. Slide Show is on my Christmas list in case anyone in my family is reading this.
Gabriel García Márquez on marriage in Love in the Time of Cholera:
"Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."
Jonathan Moller spent ten years in Guatemala photographing rural Mayan communities at war with the government. The stories he tells are tragic, heartbreaking, and beautiful. A monograph of this body of work is titled Our Culture is Our Resistance. (Note the images on Moller's personal website are presented with lots of compression. Slightly better quality images are viewable, although without context, here.)
I don't remember many of the details of funerals of my childhood, but I do remember hanging out with all my cousins, playing cards, and chasing each other through house. We kids might might cry upon seeing the dead, or afterwards at night, but the sheer exuberance of youth would not allow us to remain sad when so many cousins were around. It was that way this weekend at the funeral of the father of a friend, a respected 70 year old doctor killed in an instant by a drunk 20 year old driver. The brother of the doctor said this, "As I get older I realize more and more that the constant in these family gatherings, the thing that cements them in memory, is sound of of the kids voices and the rumble of their feet tearing through house. I look around this room and I can see almost everyone here as one of those kids. I remember when my brother and I were those kids... it doesn't seem that long ago."
