All photographers access their subjects differently. Some go out into the world to respond and record while others consume and translate experience from television and the internet. Christopher follows the trials of famous Americans, choosing to photograph their court cases rather than the celebrities themselves.

Michael Vick, Richmond, Virginia, 2007

OJ Simpson, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2007

OJ Simpson, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2007

Michael Vick, Richmond, Virginia, 2007

Casey Anthony, Orlando, Florida, 2011

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, New York City, 2007

Michael Jackson, Los Angeles, California, 2009

Paris Hilton, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2010

Eliot Spitzer, Albany, New York, 2008

Michael Jackson, Encino, California, 2009

Michael Jackson, Encino, California, 2009

Whitney Houston, Newark, New Jersey, 2012

David Kessler of Studioscopic produced a great video exploring Zoe’s work.

Constantly considering visual language and metaphor, it feels great just to have fun and see what happens.

In 2000 Jason and Leanne Shapton started J&L Books “committed to producing books of previously unpublished or rarely seen work by contemporary artists” They produce two to five books annually, and have published multiple award winning titles.









Though best understood by viewing his recent titled The Mushroom Collector and Raising Frogs for Money, it’s Jason intelligent use of sequencing combined with a tremendous visual integrity and wonderful sense of humor that explain his success a contemporary photographer and visual artists. I recommend visiting his site and purchasing a book to learn more about his amazing work.

In this ‘Ruschian’ conversation Jessica mentioned a BBC Documentary titled Reyner Banham Loves LA that contains a scene of Ruscha and the narrator discussing Los Angeles architecture in a convertible while lunching at a drive-in. My imagination went wild, as I was immediately inspired and delighted by this wonderful setting for a documentary interview.

Reyner Banham was a prolific architecture critic who taught at the University of London. He became enamored with Los Angeles architecture and thought hotdog restaurants shaped like hotdogs illustrated of just one of the architectural phenomena at play in this ‘great modern city.’ Along with tremendous enjoyment and interest in his architectural theories, I found this movie to exemplify the weaving of first person perception and documentary voice, a great blurring of fact and fiction, outstandingly hilarious, and absolutely delightful. While I know that one hour is much to ask from most cyber adventurers, I encourage you to kick back with a tasty beverage or favorite snack to learn about an interesting place and time for modern architecture.

I suppose it’s the Roman origins of our number system that program us to think in fives, giving significance to multiples of this number in such forms as the automobile speed limits of 35, 65 and 80 and the emphasized celebration of bi-centennial, centennial, and 50 year anniversaries. This mathematical structure infiltrates our social structure and colors the zeitgeist with historical events aligning with these fifty and one-hundred-year cycles. In 2009 SF MOMA hosted Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” sharing the story of this project along with his photographic and biographic histories.

Bernd and Hilla Becher‘s work in post-World War 2 Germany photographed the industrial architecture of a country whose population was struggling the ramifications of rampant ideology. They photographed and thus recognized a social landscape that was predominately avoided due to the harsh and fresh political history. Similarly between 1955 and 1956 Frank photographed sectors of the American social landscape that were predominately avoided during the post-World War 2 economic boom. His photographs depicted a national identity/landscape contrary to a social climate of national growth, expansion, and international superiority. His photographs crossed the grain of national popular sentiment.

Doug Rickard‘s New American Pictures returns to the streets of American ghettos and the issue of racial inequality. Using Google Street view he’s navigated the most destitute roads of our country. As Frank utilized juke boxes, cars, gas stations and diners to denote the loneliness, angst, and alienation he saw in American life, Doug employs text, static camera position, and social iconography to communicate the segregation, aggression and terminality he sees contemporary African American life.

The visual strength of this work draws from modernist paradigms while his process charts a new photographic path into virtual reality. Doug’s photographs reflect the zeitgeist of approaching 50-year Civil Rights anniversaries and the how complexity of contemporary American life is a melding of technologically and physically generated stimuli. They reveal his hatred of racial inequality.

My friend and mentor Mike Smith said, “Robert Frank didn’t go out with a camera, he had a machine gun, and that thing was fully-loaded.” In thinking of my own process, I photograph some of the most painful things in my life because in that transmission from experience to object they are translated into something beautiful.

In the later, Ruscha mounted a camera to the side of his car and systematically photographed every building with a forensic like repetition of perspective and point of view. He presented the pictures in an accordeon book wrapped in silver foil. He’s shown below holding this book extended.

The author notes that photographs are “best viewed as the outcome of a rule-governed performance” and that the “pervasive auto-maticity…maybe something like a hybrid of current American [1960s] and early avant-garde French artistic trends,’ such as those begun by Marcel Duchamp.

I find the work very inspirational, providing a mode of photographing less focused the modernist idea that the photographer will go out into the world and have a revealing personal experience communicated through art, and more on the idea that the  photographic process and aesthetic can be ontological and reflexive of broader structural systems. In speaking about photography, Iverson quotes Rucha refering at one point to it’s “inhuman aspect, as it records without making qualitative judgments.” I’ve included some of his paintings from that time.

Thanks Gregory, keep up the great work!

These photographs come from Paul’s previous book Tom.

…And some of his commissioned work.
A photo Paul at work pulled from his website…
…And a photo we made signing he’s new arrival at photo-eye in June.

Keep up the great work Paul!!

I recently visited Eric Carroll’s studio to learn about his upcoming solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Rayko Photo Center. The show opens this Thursday, Oct. 27th.

M: What is the role of performance in your work and how you see visual arts?

E: It’s really a huge role, the performative aspect, I think because a lot of time, there’s a certain aspect to my work that’s very labor-intensive and very repetitive whether it be lugging a giant piece of cardboard in the woods and making large scale photograms, or doing these pieces now where I’m taking these pictures of the stars in the sky and spotting them out or drilling through stacks and stacks of photographs or something like that. But the performative aspect is usually hidden. I think it can be informative but I don’t think I’ve ever done a piece where I wanted the actual artwork to have me performing or doing something. Playing in a band sort of fulfills that role of really performing and doing that. There was one piece that I did that was sort of a weird hybrid. It was part magic-lantern show and part musical performance—we made some great images and strange music, but it when the lights came on, that was it. I think its accepted in performance art that it’s not going to last or you’re just gonna have to live it through the documents and ephemera that surrounds performance art. And maybe that’s why I kind of like that. It’s like, tough shit, that’s the nature of the beast, its not going to last. Which is why I find photography so intriguing because it fights against that at every part, and so I think what my work does, it tries to find a way that photography can exist without being permanent, or if that’s even possible at all.

M: I would almost go the devil’s advocate with you. Where does photography ever exist in a permanent way? At some extent, it’s all impermanent, right?

E: Right. It’s funny to read these articles dealing with museums and talking about archival standards and saying like, ‘oh you know, we’d prefer it to be on a medium that’s rated to last 2 to 4 hundred years’ and I’m like, it’s still a fucking piece of paper that’ll go up in a fire. We’re living in a time when even our buildings aren’t lasting more than 60 years before they’re torn down and rebuilt or just destroyed from disrepairs so, if you wanna talk about a permanent piece of art go to Rome and find these marble structures that have somehow lasted all this time, or at least go to Dia:Beacon. But don’t look to photography for permanence.

M: You have a show opening at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco next Thursday, Oct. 27th. What’s the body of work?

E: This show will be a resolution of a project I started making in New Hampshire last summer. It’s a series of blueprints, photographs and a projection piece that are all based around my time in the woods. The images are shadows of trees, large-scale photograms, and short films that I made of being disconnected in the woods. That’s what the pictures are of. The work is about photography, I mean all my work goes back to photography and its struggle to capture and hold onto things, or how it’s changed the way we experience the world. I’m using this experience that I had in the woods, specifically of being ‘disconnected’—like no internet, no cell phone service, no distractions. I became more sensitive to subtle stimuli. Like when a cloud comes and interrupts the shadows of dappled light. I started to recognize these as really precious moments and I’m trying to deal with how to share that moment without ruining or cheapening it. I don’t even know if that’s possible. Part of my exhibition is just trying to figure that out.

M: So the idea is that once you photograph it, the moment’s gone?

E: Kind of. You are partially losing your own moment of something because you’re trying to photograph it. I’ve written about how the act of photography gets in the way of experience, or if it’s a part of experience, or if it changes it one way or another. I don’t think there’s any question as to whether or not it changes it, but if it somehow discounts your experience of it is another question. I don’t believe in the idea of a ‘pure’ experience. Obviously, your experience is always changing. I think that an experience on the computer is just as relevant as one had out in the natural world or whatever. But that said, I still think it’s weird when I see people out in the world with really spectacular things happening in front of them and they’re busy changing the settings on their camera. That can be a frustrating thing to watch because I can pretty much tell them ‘you’re picture is not going to be that great’. It’s not going to, its not going to accurately describe…I don’t know how to say this… when I was teaching photography, I’d always tell my students that a good way to measure a photograph is if the photograph is better than the actual thing itself, right? And I feel a lot of times, the photography I see or make doesn’t do that, you know, I’d rather have the actual thing there. But usually, that’s impossible, right? Like, it’d be cool, I think, for your book, if you just had all the people that you photographed present in one room and these little vignettes were actually recreated with a certain quality of light, you know, if you could just have that all in room, that would be great, but you can’t, and so you take pictures of it because that’s the best you can do and then you present it as a series of pictures. So, from that point of view, photography is sort of a ‘settling’ of an experience which can be kind of sad in some ways, when you try to think back about the original experience and its gone—like a consolation prize, or a quote.

M: This speaks to your Sunburned project, where you took photographs of cliché subjects and tried to aestheticize them into something that would be better. It questions why, when you look at something really great and you want to take a picture of it, the process of taking a picture of it turns it into something cliché.

E: Right. It cheapens it and yet I don’t fault people for doing it because it is such a natural impulse to have. That’s just society at large–when we see something pretty, we automatically think that’d be a great photograph. We don’t just say ‘oh that’s really beautiful’, sit and stare at it for a few minutes and then move on. We take a picture of it and then keep going because we’ve got other stuff to do. So the act of photography is definitely a condensing and a compacting and a compression of real world and you definitely lose something in that. That’s definitely a large part of what my work is about–what’s lost in the process.
The work that I’m making at Rayko is continuing to change and transform. Basically it started in Brooklyn when I was playing with blueprint paper, which is a medium more or less obsolete, and I made images of these lonely sad Brooklyn trees. Then I had a residency and went to the woods and I fell in love with the abundance of nature—I went from having my studio right next to Vice to having my studio in the middle of nowhere. So for the Rayko show there’s a 50-foot wall of woods and they’ll be the original blueprints. Over the course of the exhibition, this will start to fade. If it gets hit with enough light, it will fade to white and pretty much disappear.
I like making something that changes over time because this is more similar to how our brain works and stores memories. Some things last longer than others and sometimes its really hard to figure out why. Like, why do I remember the lyrics to the Humpty Dance…all of them to this day, more than I remember the names of very close friends’ parents? Like, why does certain information stay preserved and other information just kind of goes away. I don’t know why but that’s how my brain works and so I wanted to manifest that because a lot of times the way we use our cameras is not how our brains work…not unnatural. It just doesn’t seem right sometimes. Using really temporary materials seems more right, as weird as it is.

M: So every time you do an exhibition of this work, the work is lost?

E: Exactly, a one-time-only kind of thing. I still hold onto the paper once the image fades away. It still stands for something even though nothing’s on it. It’s an object that has a history. Its not the object that’s depicted that makes it photographic. It’s what it recalls. In that way it’s quite performative.

M: This conjures the point that the picture itself essentially becomes irrelevant while that which it triggers is what’s important. Because you look at it and immediately make associations and connections with everything in your life. While there are some talented people who look at pictures and only see shapes and forms and colors, the majority of us insert our own narratives and experiences to create meaning and at that point what resonates with us is the culmination of those experiences. This suggests that pictures just trigger memories. Some pictures trigger memories that are really poignant to you and others don’t.

E: Right. So what use is a photograph that’s blank and doesn’t trigger anything except for the person who made it? That’s the struggle I’m facing. I’m having these kind of intensely personal and beautiful experiences out in the woods, you know, finding these really beautiful things and I’m documenting them but in sort of a half-assed way. So half-assed, in fact, that they completely fade away over time. People who come to the opening will get to see these images, but over the course of the following weeks as they’re blasted with light, they’ll start to lose contrast, become less impressive, and finally get to a point where they’re hopefully, just white sheets of paper. I think that’s kind of great. That’s what I’m excited about, I’m excited for these things to fade and just do their thing. Just go the course of how they should go, or at least how I expect them to go. So that’s the performance right there. Performing photographs…
It’s been a hell of a time trying to talk to galleries about this. They’re like, ‘oh that’s beautiful, we love it’ and then I tell them that they’re not archival and they say ‘oh yeah tell us when you make it at last’. That’s the response I get from a lot of people, which is too bad, because it’s been both disheartening and really energizing too. Okay, I’m obviously doing something that’s wrong and because of that, it’s kind of right. It’s both frustrating and challenging and so it pushes me to figure out what I value or what I want out of my art or what kind of experience do I want it to create.
The actual blueprint, the material that all this stuff is on is exceptionally fragile. Not only does it fade, but if any water gets on it, it’ll definitely leave a mark and if you’re aggressive, it’ll sort of take the pigment out too. It’s a dead technology, but you can still find it. This guy sold me all his equipment for like, 50 bucks, because he wasn’t using it anymore. You can still get blueprint paper because a lot of developing countries still use it. It’s really cheap. It’s totally not archival but its great if you really want to make big beautiful one-offs.

M: …that don’t last?

E: Yeah, which is kind of what my work is about. Hopefully this is giving you an idea of what the show will be like. I’m excited for it. I’m calling it ‘Plato’s Home Movies’ because I like thinking about how people looked at nature aesthetically pre-photography. Plato had the really great cave analogy.

M: Projections on the wall?

E: Yeah—in his metaphor of knowledge and the philosopher, that’s all people had to look at. I’m working on a six-foot wide video that will shown with the blueprints. It is really meditative to watch and I love the way the projector just lights up the reds and makes them come alive. So in the woods I filmed the movement of the shadows for a while. Then I bring that video into the darkroom and project the video onto light-sensitive paper, which creates this image. For the last step, the video that created the image is projected directly onto it. It’s a confusion that I’m trying to create, blurring the line between still image and an ongoing moment. When does the photograph stop being a photograph and start being a film?

M: In some ways, the mood and feeling is really similar to the music we’re listening to today with sort of a slow pulsing and intensity. It relates to the mood that’s carried throughout your sunburned film and feels like it could be traced to a certain genre or type of music. Like, the visual attributes of a Shoegaze. It’s a subtle, yet has a steady intensity.

E: It’s focused and it’s repetitive but it’s also muddy. It’s definitely a type of distortion. Visually, I always thought of My Bloody Valentine’s cover for Loveless—I love the intense pink colors and the guitar. It’s such a beautiful visual for that album and that’s something that’s always resonated with me. That image is a perfect match to that album. Still, I always find myself being more affected by going to a live concert than a museum or an art gallery. I’ve always come out more affected. It just activates certain parts of me more than seeing art on a white wall has done and so I think that’s something I’m always thinking about. I’m making art in an attempt to trigger the same thing that music triggers in me and if I can’t do that, then I’ll switch to music instead.

Check out Eric Carroll’s featured playlist on Spotify here.

Thanks Eric – Keep up the brilliant work!

More Q&A from our time together in the slide show below:[[Show as slideshow]]