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You are here: Home / Archives for ken rosenthal

Thoughts on Photography and History: Ken Rosenthal, Takashi Arai, the Real and the Unreal

July 15, 2012 by Iskra 2 Comments

ArtLibraryEntryGothicArch
Entry to the Art Library, with artist-applied faux-historical “Instagem”™ effect © Iskra Johnson

“…the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by the world. Light bounces off an object or a body and into the camera activating a light-sensitive emulsion and creating an image.”–Geoffrey Batchen

“touch is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical.” — Roland Barthe, Camera Lucida

On Friday I became an art history nun and went into the cloisters. The University art library is not the place I recall from decades ago, but imagining persists. I ignore the flourescent tubes and the blinds drawn against the natural light of the clerestories and am grateful at least for the shadows of leaves cast by the trees. I pretend these silhouettes are a vintage theorem painting being painted again and again by the wind and the sun. I inhale the Dewey decimal system and its attendant odor of pulp and glue, and feel a calm and translucent habit settle about my shoulders. In this funnel of starched linen, a scalloped awning above my eyes, I can sink into pictures and footnotes and the zigzag worry beads of the alphabet. Some call this reading.

We live in a culture so laminated with derivation and appropriation that it is very easy to forget that at some point there was a “real” on which the derivations are based. An entire generation will grow up thinking that an Instagram is a photograph. “Snap a photo with your mobile phone, then choose a filter to transform the image into a memory to keep around forever.” “Retro” is a station on Pandora. “Retro” is, basically, a “filter.” But once long ago there were actual steam engines and eye glasses made of glass and men went under a tent of black canvas and made you sit still forever to get your one very precious portrait taken. I am so taken with these portraits. The person is dressed invariably in shades of umber, against an equally umber backdrop. She or he leans pensively, stiffly (whilst waiting an interminable ten to thirty minutes) until the exposure is complete. If you want to know what this sense of time is like, and how it sounds, take a peek at this extraordinary work by Takashi Arai.

Mirrors in Our Nights, Takashi Arai
From “Mirrors in Our Nights” by Takashi Arai, contemporary daguerreotypes of Japan immediately after the earthquake, with audio of the sounds heard during the very long exposures. You may need attention deficit medication while watching this ten minute video, but it is worth it.

In many historical daguerreotypes the sitter gazes at another daguerreotype in its lovely filigreed case, or poses the case facing out at the camera, creating a loop of self-referential mirrors. Is the person’s mouth twisted in a prematurely elderly grimace from the effort of trying to memorize the tiny image in their hand? Of trying to remember “who was this guy’s name who I might have been in love with at some point?” Or is it the tedium of south Dakota and the fly buzzing in the August heat and the fact that the pose must be held for half an hour? I find these pictures enchanting. The silver on glass does indeed cause the image to float, real and unreal, even in a reproduction.

Only later in the day, gazing at passersby at the Lake, am I startled to see that a glass case of identical size is being held by almost every person. And that they are gazing at this luminous device with rapt attention, admiration and even hypnotism, albeit in full technicolor and not sepia. They are also, in the style of modern liberations, moving their heads without concern, and emoting. And in many casts of light they are seeing their own face reflected over the latest status update on Facebook, which no doubt includes….Instagram photos. Talk about mirrors.

If a photograph was originally intended as an aid to memory, and as a document of the real, what is it now? How can you remember when you have no time in between images to forget? How many millions, trillions, billions of images will we be subjected to in our new modern lifetime? If we live in a world of endless mirrors, but without a mediating lense, light reflects but we do not necessarily absorb it, much less have the capacity to reflect upon it.

I have been dwelling on Batchen’s quote

“…the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by the world. Light bounces off an object or a body and into the camera activating a light-sensitive emulsion and creating an image.”

This idea remains magical. You can easily lose sight of it when you spend hour upon hour in front of a computer revisiting images that are now simply a pixel representation of a moment of touch. Most modern photography (and conversation about it) lacks attention to one elemental factor: emulsion. Invisible on screen or in digital prints, it is the thinnest of membranes, providing the alchemical medium between the world of touch and the world of sight. The essence of this was brought home to me during a lecture, “Seen and Not Seen,” I attended at the  Pacific Northwest Center for Photography on Friday. This enchanted evening in the dark viewing the work of Ken Rosenthal provided the perfect elaboration of everything I had absorbed in the library hours earlier. The primary body of Rosenthal’s photography looks backwards into memory, and is based on personal and historical photographs of his own family. All of the work until very recently relies on darkroom methods for printing. The sense of the physical and intimate path of light comes through very strongly.

SeenAndNotSeen#869-3
© Ken Rosenthal

His methods are exacting and customized, and not entirely revealed. When I see these images I feel transported not just to the past of the event documented, but into the laboratory in which the image was made. One of Roland Barthe’s essays which I read this week describes at length the sounds of a photograph. The verbal description alone, placed next to the seemingly inert photographic reproduction of a horse walking in fog, conveys a sense not just of sound but of air and smell and cinematic immediacy. As I write this, sitting at a computer, having spent all of yesterday “developing” photographs in Photoshop, the convergence of Barthe and Rosenthal, like the bite of a madeleine cake catapults me into another time. I am on the farm in the darkroom, my eight-year-old nose bumping my father’s elbow, watching as he develops prints of an Arabian horse. It is a summer day in July, and we are in the only cool place in the uninsulated farmhouse, in the basement where he tucked a bench and an enlarger in a narrow hall behind the washing machines. I can hear the rattle of the film canister, the click of the enlarger moving up and down, the huf-huff of the dust bellows, the tongs knocking against the developer tray. The red light is terribly mysterious and exciting, and I know at any moment I could ruin everything by opening a door. And then there is the moment when my father lifts me up and stands me on a chair so I can see the image emerge, ghostly, intangible, then gradually an eyelash, a glint of bridle, the unmistakeable ridge of a mane rising up white against a dark unclouded sky.

What Rosenthal achieves in his approach to his own very personal subject matter is not “just personal.” It is about memory and seeing itself.

And it resonates in a universal way with anyone who has ever held a family photograph in their hand, run their fingers along the scalloped edges and wondered about the slightly out of focus and scratched up ancestors buried in the surface. As technology changes, as emulsion and eventually even the memory of emulsion vanishes, as “family albums” come as pre-designed digital templates with faux photo-corners and can be “downloaded” in seconds, although never actually “held,” as vintage or as for that matter everything becomes a “look” referencing another “look” I wonder how his work will seem in twenty years. What filters will viewers see it through? The metaphoric facts of how we see will not change. Memory will “blur” fact.  The eye will continue to alternately focus on one thing and the whole, moving back and forth in time. Light will continue to refract, bounce, enter, transform. Perhaps the early technologies were closer to revealing the unseen than our modern ones in which part of the achievement is the pristine absence of gears and wheels. You will find many contemporary images mimicking the look of the ground-breaking running horse sequences of Muybridge but few of them mimic his idea, which was that he was showing something the eye could not see.

I feel a great solidarity with the artists today exploring alternative photographic processes. All of these methods attempt in some way to recapture the mystery of photography’s origins. Artifact, relic, moment, surface, presence. Something beyond the ever-unpluggable computer screen or the printed facsimile of the screen. An object that takes you believably into the moment both as you create it and as you witness its record. If we are using primarily digital technologies it is an open question if we can transcend them and find in the pixel a convincing fingerprint.

When I left Rosenthal’s lecture at nine o’clock the last of the Siberian forest fire sunsets still hung in the Seattle sky. Who would have guessed these translucent clouds and mesmerizing pinks come courtesy of Russia? The air shimmered with softness and unexpected warmth as I pulled my car over at a construction site. I propped the camera into chain link. Low light, no tripod. Under these  circumstances I don’t usually think about the physicality of light, of how the camera is “touched by the world,” I tend instead to curse the limits of resolution and sensors and my human hand. But for this lantern hour as I shot into the deepening dusk, I let those thoughts go. It could have been another time: the world was young.

ChineseGate_ConstructionSiteDocumentation
Site Documentation: The Chinese Gate © Iskra Johnson

 

Filed Under: Art Reviews, Photography Tagged With: alterntive photography, essays on photography, ken rosenthal, Takashi Arai, thoughts on dagerreotype

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Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?
I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.

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