Last night, I had the privilege to hear and meet William Christenberry at MassArt. He was in town again on the occasion of his Aperture show at MassArt (opening tonight). I was sick as a dog when he lectured at the PRC last year and if I could have, I would have crawled there. Thus, I was very excited he came back to Boston. (You can see images from that appearance on our flicker site.)
What a gentleman! He tickled us with his stories and enchanted us with his images. Best of all, he mentioned a new book from Steidl, Working from Memory, which I am eager to own.
Some quotes from him:
"My mother would approve of this one," (and note he apologized for saying ain't and other mild words, "it ain't rustic, worn out, and bullet ridden"
He quoted Emily Dickinson, "Memory is a strange bed"
Why did you start taking photos?...he replied he wanted a "record of something that has changed and will never reappear"
When asked advice he could give to the younger artists, "find something you really love," build a "love affair" with your subject and "work on that"
First, I apologize, it's been a long time since I've blogged. In typical fashion, I installed an exhibition and promptly got sick for over a week. Today, I am feeling slightly better and surfed around to find today's featured images via Your Daily Awesome.
As far as I can tell, these photos might be authored by a collective called Henry VIII's Wives (it's a little hard to tell from this website). Funny, then disturbing, then provocative, these staged images of famous photographs featuring senior citizens remind me a bit of Vik Muniz's hand-drawn pictures from memory titled "The Best of Life," an example of which is seen at the very bottom of this post. The above images are by far the best from a small online selection; I hope that they continue along these lines. A quote from the mystery site:
The series of photographs entitled The Iconic Moments of the 20th Century emerged in the processual (?) work with the pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow emanates the same impression. A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. - Jelena Velcic in Breaking Step—Displacement, Compasion (sic) and Humour in Recent Art From Britain, Catalog, 2007 Belgrad
I conclude with a quote by Muniz on his series from an interview with Peter Galassi:
The Best of Life Series, for example, are drawings of very famous photographs made entirely from memory. When the drawings were good enough to look like a bad reproduction of the original image, I photographed them and printed them with the same half tone pattern we usually see in these images for the first time in the papers. In these works I tried to find out what a photograph looks like in your head when you are not looking at it. They carried the structure of the famous news pictures but they were in fact very different.
Vik Muniz, Best of Life, Memory Rendering of the Man on the Moon, 1989.
