Research Point:
Go online and find out more about the bodies of work listed above. Can you find some other examples of photography documenting a journey through time and/or space (see Project 3)?
Alec Soth’s Sleeping By the Mississippi:
This artist's journey started with him travelling through America trying to be an artist, driving with ideas taped to his steering wheel and stopping to take photos of things he thought were interesting. “Often these are photo clichés, things that look like work by another photographer,” he says.
The photos in the collection represent multiple aspects of the artist’s journey, overcoming their shyness and isolation to be able to ask people for permission to take photos, as well as understand them and give the photo more context. The photos reflect multiple personalities and they progress from landscapes and randomly placed items such as a bed frame, to people and their life experiences.
https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/alec-soth-sleeping-by-the-mississippi/
Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces:
"In American Surfaces, I was photographing almost every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I peed in. But also, I was photographing streets I was driving through, buildings I would see." —Stephen Shore
This photo series seems to cover ‘anything and everything’, through the artist’s daily existence. There are photos of seemingly mundane objects and activities. Without context, many of the photos could be taken from a beginner’s photo album.
There is a sense of time through the series though, as not only were the photos taken in the early noughties, but the subjects have a candid appeal to them. They're very realistic and unedited, almost raw in terms of professional quality.
https://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/stephen-shore-american-surfaces-munich/
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/shore-west-palm-beach-florida-january-1973-p81308
These examples reminded me of a couple of artists i have discovered, some i learned about in Dean and Miller’s essay, ‘Place’ in part one of the course. The first one that came to mind was Mette Tronvoll and how the artist’s website categorizes collections by their place name. There isn't a great deal I could find about the personality of the artist, only that they were born in Norway and studied in France.
Tronvoll’s works includes some landscapes but mostly they focus on individuals as their subjects, personalities in their own surroundings wherever they are in the world. From zambia to mongolia, the artist seems to want to capture humanity wherever they are travelling to.
http://www.tronvoll.net/Zambia.html
Craig Varjabedian is another artist I have discovered, one who has won awards for his work and has recently published a collection of his photography in his most recent book ‘The Light of Days Gone By’, 2020. The book shares just 48 photographs of his 45 years of photography, capturing the landscapes and population across western America, particularly of New Mexico. The title of the book itself reminds me of the earlier parts of this course, with regards to photography being simply a mechanical imprint of light. The collection in the book not only presents the artist’s best work, but the journey of his life and career.
Craig Varjabedian’s photography captures, with arresting clarity, the ineffable whispers of time and spirit layered deep in New Mexico's cultural landscape. Through the artful combination of his compassionate eye and technical virtuosity, he evokes the past in the present and the holy in the everyday.
-CATHERINE WHITNEY, MUSEUM CURATOR
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