Clayton Patterson exhibition at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery
Recently I went to Clayton Patterson's exhibit at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery in Chelsea. Patterson has for years chronicled the street culture of the Lower East Side/East Village in film and still photographs. The LES is a neighborhood described more often in the past tense than the present. From its immigrant beginnings to its counter-cultural heyday, it has always been a mythic place. It changes, and it stays the same. There are many different Lower East Sides, and as many different collectors of its memories and images. Patterson represents one stream of memories, one he is very much at the center of.
Patterson ran with the anarchist/squatter crowd on the LES. Others of us were artists or housing activists or garden advocates. Still others were students, new arrivals, the dreaded yuppies, gentrifiers, people with real jobs. The newcomers were most often white or Chinese, who threatened to supplant the Latinos who had replaced the other ethnic groups that had moved out years before. Some of us were overlapping members of these categories. I was a student/artist/housing activist. I ran with the folk music crowd rather than the punk music crowd, but listened to the latter more than the former.
Tompkins Square Riot, 1988, Clayton Patterson
Patterson's notoriety goes back to the so-called Tompkins Square Park riot, which he videotaped and photographed, and placed himself in the middle of. The park was overrun with the homeless, drug addicts, and post-punk anarchists who hovered about like the earlier denizens of post summer-of-love Haight-Ashbury.
I knew the park well. I played basketball every weekend on the courts at 9th and Avenue B with a regular crew of ex-high school and college players. The mostly Black and Latino hoopsters had nothing to do with the people hanging and living in the park. Worlds overlapped at times, but mostly ran parallel.
Eventually, the community surrounding the park pressed for action, but with little consensus on what should be done. When a curfew was put into place and the police sought to enforce it, there was resistance and open provocation. Police discipline fell apart and a riot ensued in which all kinds of people, residents, passersby, and the curious were caught up in.
Tim Raymond in front of Clayton Patterson portraits (Tim is a painter and former resident of Lower Manhattan)
Clayton Patterson exhibition at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery (image taken from the gallery website)
Only a few images in Patterson's exhibit concern the riot, but that's the event that lies at the heart of things. The images of the homeless living in boxes and other documentary photos are lackluster, but the portraits of the kids, the punks, the transvestites, the addicts, the whole panoply of street life that Patterson interacted with are vividly depicted. It's a pretty well-mannered gallery exhibition, however, for such an unruly artist and such unruly subjects. Patterson has sold out–like we all have to some extent or another. Meanwhile, the Lower East Side still exists–persists–regardless of what people say. The clash of civilizations continues as real estate prices soar into the stratosphere, at least for the newcomers who don't realize they are latecomers. The rest of us aren't moving out any time soon.
Self-portrait, Merrrill Lynch conference room, Jersey City
Shooting architectural interiors. Last night JPMorgan Chase, tonight Merrill Lynch in Jersey City, tomorrow H&M New York office near Union Square Park.
Lower Manhattan from the promenade in Brooklyn Heights
Another beautiful end of September day in New York. Bush and Iranian president Ahmadinejad in town at the same time along with dozens of other world leaders. My wife Renée was interviewed about her experiences in New York by a journalist from Vrij Nederland, a major Dutch news magazine. My son Brendan is at the breakfast table shrieking about math homework. I have three photo shoots coming up over the next three days, and next week I will be in San Francisco.
The Civil War project I worked on this summer is now up at the Brooklyn Public Library on Grand Army Plaza adjacent to Prospect Park. It's a show I have some mixed feelings about. I knew from the beginning when I was asked to participate that it would not be a "Brian Rose" exhibit, though my photographs would play an important role. That's the way it has turned out, with perhaps, less emphasis on my pictures than I would prefer.
Brooklyn Public Library
The library lobby is a highly problematic space for an exhibition. The building is Speer-like in its grandiosity (pomposity), although the recently renovated entry plaza is beautiful, and makes the building welcoming. One enters, however, under the semi-watchful eyes of uniformed rent-a-cops who will never catch a terrorist or serious criminal, but who might make you think twice about stealing a book.
Brooklyn Public Library
The lobby is a soaring room that shrinks anything put into it. My 4x5 foot photos hung high along the back wall are greatly diminished in the space. I had hoped with the big prints to bring these heroic Civil War figures down from their plinths and high horses for a closer eye-to-eye view. But hanging them up above the catalog computers doesn't allow for that. The city is full of monuments that are paid little attention to. There are exceptions, as I've pointed out before, like the statue of George Washington in Union Square Park, which served as the focal point of the unofficial memorial to those killed in the World Trade Center attacks. The way in which these historic events are remembered and/or partially forgotten is important and is relevant to how we memorialize contemporary wars and tragedies.
Brooklyn Public Library
If you're not looking specifically for my work, but came for Civil War Brooklyn history, there's lots to see in the exhibition, which is curated by Jeff Richman, a historian passionately involved with the subject. The exhibit design was done by Art Presson, and despite my complaints, comes off admirably. It would be nice, however, to see the exhibit in a more humanly scaled interior. If nothing else, come for the stereographs of Civil War battlefield scenes, including frighteningly real dead soldiers. Seen through a stereoscope, you will forget the cacophony of the room around you. As Art says, it's the peep show part of the exhibit.
Exhibit panel with photo of Monitor memorial in Greenpoint
Grant on horseback and the Rodman gun near the Verazzano Narrows Bridge
I am hoping that my photographs will be assembled as a print portfolio, which will allow them to be judged on their own terms. I will put the complete set online shortly. Although it is commissioned work, I worked very hard on the images, and even the most straightforward looking photographs were arrived at by careful inspection of the object and its context. Look back through my earlier posts and see the images as they were made.
I am still trudging around town taking pictures of various buildings. It's a never ending assignment. The timing for the sunlight has to be right. There's always a truck or some other obstruction in front of things. I've been to some locations 4 or 5 times without success.
Last weekend I attended the funeral of an aunt in Franklin, Virginia. With the passing of most of my close relatives in the area I don't expect to be making too many trips down there in the future. My father's side of the family comes from the area with its peanuts, cotton, and other agricultural products. One of my uncles had a hog trucking business in Courtland (previously known as Jerusalem), a few miles from Franklin, the site of Nat Turner's 1831 slave uprising. It's still a predominantly agricultural area, just outside the urban/suburban orbit of Hampton Roads, the metro area centered on Norfolk, Virginia.
The Virginia Diner, Wakefield, Virginia
The southside of the James River is still a conundrum to me, and I have searched there, largely in vain, for the roots of my own self-identity. After crossing the river at Jamestown, we had lunch at the Virginia Diner, a popular restaurant featuring local Smithfield ham, collards, hush puppies, and lots of fried things. Like much of this part of Virginia, Black and White life is still pretty segregated. There were no black faces in the Virginia Diner--other than in the kitchen.
Main Street, Franklin, Virginia Quiet, but well-preserved.
Franklin exists because of its location on the Blackwater River, which flows south into North Carolina and out to the Albemarle Sound. The river and key rail lines made it a transportation hub for the area. Main Street and a small grid of blocks lies along the river as does a huge paper mill owned by International Paper, formerly Union Camp, which grew from a sawmill on the Blackwater. My aunt Louise worked a good chunk of her 91 years at the mill inspecting paper.
Main Street, Franklin, Virginia
Big Tunes, Home of Da Hits, Franklin, Virginia
Franklin's downtown is well-preserved despite a devastating flood in 1999, and most of its storefronts are cleaned up and freshly painted. Unfortunately, many still await an occupant. After the funeral we met at Fred's on Main Street where the waitresses wore t-shirts emblazoned with whereinthehellisfranklin? To the north was a music store called Big Tunes, Home of Da' Hits. To the south was a possibly still used movie theater. The marquee said: County Line Cloggers and Jesus is Lord.
Franklin, Virginia
Peanut silos, Franklin, Virginia
Freight trains still go right through downtown, and a large complex of peanut silos stood near the tracks. The funeral home was a few blocks away, one of the many grand houses built in the heyday of the town when the Camp family (of the paper mill) was royalty, and money, in general, was more likely to stay in town. Reading up on Franklin, I see that it's a pretty poor community, slightly more African American than White, and significantly less educated than most of the state. Not much bad happens in Franklin with it's 8,000 inhabitants, but overall, crime is slightly higher than in the burg from which I am now writing, New York City.
Katz's Deli, Ludlow and Houston Streets (4x5 film)
One of the evening photographs from a couple of weeks ago--from the ongoing Lower East Side project. A saxophone player and a door opener trolling for change as the throngs blur by.
I am back from a short family related trip to Virginia of which I may have some pictures later. Yesterday, I sat in doctor's office waiting room with my father and sister as video of General Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, played on several overhead TV screens. Fish swam aimlessly in a tank. I drove to Washington, zipped by the Pentagon along I95, ducked beneath the Mall, and easily found--somehow--the Union Station garage entrance where I returned my rental car. I then rode the Acela Express back too New York. Businessmen tapped on their laptops. I did to, working on a short bio for my upcoming Civil War exhibition. A man behind me chatted on his cell phone about a White House briefing he attended.
Deutschebank building, Cedar Street (4x5 film)
Today is September 11th, and there's talk about moving on beyond the tragedy of six years ago. Last week, more finished plans for the new buildings around ground zero were released, but just a few weeks ago, two firefighters died after being trapped in a fire in the black shrouded remnant of the Deutschebank building. It's hard to move on when fireman are still dying at ground zero and soldiers are dying in a war precipitated by 9/11, however falsely linked. I am all for moving forward, and in many ways the city already has, but September 11th will remain an open wound until the war is over, the scar of ground zero is healed, and the dead properly remembered.
Closing this week at ICP in New York is Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969-79. If you are in the city in the next few days, don't pass up the chance. When I first began shooting color in 1976 Shore was well on the way to completing the work that established his career and public personna. As a student I was aware of only several people shooting color with a serious artistic intent: Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. For me, Meyerowitz was a street photographer (before he began working with the view camera), Eggleston was a visual diarist, and Shore was a documenter of the American landscape.
Stephen Shore Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975
The landscape that Shore photographed was not the picturesque idealized panoramas of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Carlton Watkins. In fact, as I recall it, many people were angered by Shore's dystopian view of the American highway. The photographs were bland, random, and lacking a point of view--visually and politically. At the Maryland Institute where I went to school before transferring to Cooper Union, sneering at Shore's work was the norm, and no one seemed to make the connection to Walker Evans' pioneering take on the American landscape.
Walker Evans Gas Station, Reedsville, West Virginia, 1936
For me, Shore's work was revelatory. Having been schooled in the decisive moment, I immediately recognized that Shore was doing exactly the opposite. He was finding timeless, non-moments, and in the process revealing a landscape that was all around us, the outer fringes of cities, parking lots, silent streets, the bric-a-brac of culture and advertising reaching out into the no longer pristine environment of the US and Canada. Ultimately, Shore's pictures were inclusive and open to interpretation. Less anecdotal, and more about the totality contained within the frame.
Stephen Shore California 177, Desert Center, California, December 8, 1976
Most of this is obvious now. We've become accustomed to seeing this way, thanks to Shore, and others. But at the time this was clearly not work that appealed to the camera club crowd--it was work that challenged the protective boundaries of the photography tribe. The connection to Warhol, the early one man show at the Metropolitan Museum, and the way in which the art world sat up and took notice all contributed to separating him from "regular" photographers.
In retrospect this all seems like nonsense. Shore is both a regular photographer and a unique artist. Seeing the exhibition at ICP is to realize how beautifully transcendent the 1970s view camera work is. I doubt that the original C prints ever looked as balanced and vivid as the new digitally made prints. I know from printing my own work from the early 80s that time has not been kind to the film. My guess is that Shore's negatives have been better stored than mine, but even so, I would imagine that scanning and color correcting was a major undertaking.
Robert Frank U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio
It's especially fitting to acknowledge Shore's work in relation to the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's book On the Road because it is part of that American impulse to take to the highway and chronicle what one finds there--both visually and psychologically. Kerouac is, of course, more closely associated with Robert Frank generationally and stylistically. With Shore the temperature is lower, the sense of movement through space slowed. Stream of consciousness has been replaced by a more systematic cataloging of facts and surfaces. Earnestness, while not absent, is tinged with irony and an astringent eye.
Richard Pare's photos at the Museum of Modern Art Views of Lenin's tomb in Red Square, Moscow
Richard Pare's photo documentation of early modernist architecture in Russia is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art and in the book The Lost Vanguard, Russian Modernist Architecture, 1922-32. Pare is one of the finest architectural photographers I know, and I've always admired how he has figured out ways to pursue major personal projects without drowning in assignment work tailored for the glossy magazines. The Lost Vanguard book cover, Richard Pare
I know Richard from Cooper Union, where he was one of my teachers. Shortly after graduating I began photographing the Lower East Side, and Richard bought a number of prints of that work for the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In those days he was, perhaps, more known for his work as a curator and collector. His scholarly book, Photography and Architecture: 1839-1939, highlights the work he acquired for the CCA. The only comparable book is Cervin Robinson's Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present.
The thing about photographers like Richard Pare--and Cervin Robinson--is that they understand that sometimes it is best to remain nearly invisible and let the object dominate the image. Interestingly, despite such a self-effacing modus operandi, the vision of the photographer eventually emerges. It may not be as overt as what we are used to seeing, but style is, in my opinion, an overrated concept.
Often, the critical point lies within the pursuit of a project or thematic idea. Pare, for instance, brings his intellectual curiosity and knowledge of architectural history to whatever he does. A project on the scale of the Russian vanguard required research, repeated trips--often under less than ideal circumstances--patience, and a good deal of doggedness. He sought out the remnants of the modernist movement that survived the Soviet years, and now, in many cases, lie neglected and threatened by real estate developers.
Melnikov House interior, Konstantin Melnikov, 1927-31, Richard Pare
The result is a photography exhibition (and book), although it is shown in the architecture department of MoMA. It is beautifully printed (with Ben Diep of Color Space Imaging) and well presented in the gallery. It is, of course, an exhibit about architecture, but I would urge one to see it as a photographic journey as well. Ultimately, it is the totality of the project that counts.
On a personal note, I have always been fascinated by the short-lived Russian avant-garde in architecture and in the fine arts. It is sobering to realize that artistic expression can be effectively suppressed by ideological hysteria in its various forms. Back when I was working on my east/west border project I wrote--over in my musical life--a song about the end of the Soviet Union from the perspective of architects' utopian dreams. Here's the sound file: Cities on the Aerial Paths of Communication.
Back in Astoria yesterday to photograph a couple of buildings with the 4x5 view camera. After I finished, I walked around two long blocks snapping pictures with my Ricoh digital.
Keep in mind that this is the end of the elevated N and W lines of the subway, but Manhattan is not more than 20 minutes away. Crossing above the elevated subway is the northeast corridor rail line on the massive Hell Gate bridge. This is a bustling shopping district with lots of discount stores and restaurants, particularly Greek, which is the dominant ethnic group in an otherwise diverse area. Middle Easterners in evidence as well. There are apartment buildings and row houses, but the architecture is small in scale. Catholic churches are the biggest structures.
