Portraits, Self-Portraits, Cindy Sherman & Aging (Part 2)

My last post was inspired by a recent New York Times article about Cindy Sherman's  latest body of work. In it, she presents herself in the style of old Hollywood screen goddesses who are past their prime. Rather than looking sadly like they are trying to still look like their younger selves, the women that Sherman portrays have a certain dignity to them. They look like they are older. They look like they have lived a life.

Sherman states that this work, which came after a 5-year hiatus, was the result of she herself getting older and trying to come to terms with it. She says, “I, as an older woman, am struggling with the idea of being an older woman.” And apparently she is using this new series to try to figure it out.

Sherman is now 62, an age which for many is an in-between state — not quite still middle-aged, but not yet old-old. As author Gerald Marzaroti recently wrote of people that age: "You are milling in the anteroom of the aged." The fact that Sherman is professing that this series of pictures is more autobiographically based than her prior work is really interesting to me, as is the fact that her age is a driving force in making it.

Numerous photographers have used aging as a foundation for their work- Anne Noggle  and Lucy Hilmer are two who leap immediately to mind—and I, too, find myself very consciously exploring it in my own work at the moment.

I have always been interested in the process and effects of aging. For the “Shadowing the Gene Pool” series, I photographed young children and very old adults, marveling in their similarities and differences. I did the same in the “Birth & Death” series. In my current work, I am looking at my own body, how I am aging, what I think about it, and how I see myself as I age, in addition to looking at how others age. While it is not the only issue that my new work tackles, it is a big part of it.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column back in March that speaks to how being older can enrich one’s work. Here is an excerpt:

“…(People are) less likely by middle age to be blinded by ego, more likely to know what it is they actually desire, more likely to get out of their own way, and maybe a little less likely…to care about what other people think.

…They achieve a kind of tranquility, not because they’ve decided to do nothing, but because they’ve achieved focus and purity of will. They have enough self-confidence, and impatience, to say no to some things so they can say yes to others.

From this perspective, middle age is kind of inspiring. Many of life’s possibilities are now closed, but limitation is often liberating. The remaining possibilities can be seized more bravely, and lived more deeply.”

Portraits, Self-Portraits, Cindy Sherman & Aging (Part 1)

The New York Times recently  published an article on photographer Cindy Sherman that focused on her most recent work, which is being exhibited for the first time in New York City this month. Throughout her 40-year career, Sherman has made photographs using herself as a model. At the time that her "Film Stills" series was catapulting her to fame, she stated that these portraits were not “about” her. By this she meant that they did not contain any autobiographical content, and that the viewer should not expect to understand anything about her as a private individual by looking at the pictures. Up to now, she has always maintained that stance about all of her work.

But the New York Times article raised my eyebrows when I read the lines, "...she is now willing to see aspects of herself even in her early photos."

This shift is significant, and I’m sure will lead to much discussion among critics, art historians, and students of her work. Sherman herself attributes this change in her own assessment of her past work to the fact that she is now older (62, to be specific) and looks back at that work from a different perspective than she had when she was younger.

This makes sense to me. As we age, there is often a natural evolution in how we see ourselves. We look back at our own history and ask ourselves, “How could I have been so naïve/courageous/stupid/bold? Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do that? What was I thinking?!” and myriad other questions.

In the case of art, one of the most valuable actions I have taken in recent years has been to look back through my archives every once in a while and try to understand my older work in a new way. With the passage of time, new life experiences help me to understand my younger creative self better, and in different ways that were invisible to me before. I’m glad that I have kept a lot of my early work so I can study it in this way.

I would encourage any artist to do so. If you don’t have the space to keep a lot of original artwork, then keep what is most important/significant to you and digitize as much of the rest of it as you can. Looking at digital reproductions of your artwork is not even close to being the same as looking at the originals, but it is the next best thing, and certainly better than nothing. In this way, you can haul out as much or as little of your past creative history as you want, whenever you want, and learn from yourself about yourself.

The older you get and the more you have to look back on, the more threads you will find that connect the various bodies of work that you have done and the better you will understand your creative voice as it has evolved.

My Photographic Archives- What to Do With Them? (Part 4)

Because I've recently been thinking and writing a lot about what happens to artwork when an artist dies (don't worry, I'm perfectly healthy), I've been researching why artwork gets archived, how it gets organized, recorded and stored, and things to think about when creating a plan for one's archives. Finding solid helpful information was challenging at first. It wasn't until I started using search terms like "estate planning for visual artists" that I began finding items that I felt could usefully guide me towards finding answers to my questions.

What follows are a few of the best sources I could find:

Etched in Memory: Legacy Planning for Artists (An online resource that has a ton of resources listed on this topic.)

A Visual Artist's Guide to Estate Planning

Artists' Studio Archives website (This has a great page of handouts from "how to" workshops that they have offered.)

Artist's Estates: Reputations in Trust (This is a book that outlines what happened to a number of 20th C. artists' works after they died.)

Estate Planning Guide and Career Documentation Workbook (from the Joan Mitchell Foundation- both were updated in Feb. 2015)

After reading a number of the above items, I'll be honest- it's enough to make your head explode, even for someone like me who is crazily detail-oriented. I now realize that, for artists, there are two major things to think about when it comes to estate planning: 1. your artwork, and 2. everything else. Holy crap! At least I've got a fairly up-to-date inventory of my artwork, so that's a start.

Be that as it may, I'm very clear that I do NOT want to burden my family with having to figure out what to do with my artwork once I am gone. Given that, I have to get my act together in order to create a plan that relieves them of that task. I'm glad to now have some guidance for doing that.

My Photographic Archives- What to Do With Them? (Part 3)

I decided to do some research on the nature and purpose of photographic archives recently, and came upon a blog post titled "What Does a Photograph Archivist Do?" by Marguerite Roby, the photographic archivist for the Smithsonian Institution Archives. In it, she described her job as follows: "The images that make up the collection in my particular care are memories of artifacts, exhibits, events, and people that tell the story of this institution. To me, memories are like undeveloped film. They become useless when they are not articulated or developed in a way that makes them meaningful to an audience. Memories are also prone to distortion over time, so it’s paramount to record them so that the stories they tell become a resource for future generations... It is my job to see to the preservation of the physical images as well to capture and preserve the meaning behind them so they remain relevant over time."

That's one of the best explanations I have found for why archives exist. They serve to keep the record straight for future generations. They provide context for those people in the future who seek to understand the past. They provide a connection to who and what has gone before. And from that standpoint, it doesn't matter if you are someone as important in their field as Bob Dylan, or someone whose name will never be known to the masses. Everyone plays a role in the fabric of life, and preserving those stories is important.

I also came across a list of criteria to consider when thinking about what to include in an  archive:

1. The purpose of the archive
2. The uniqueness of an item
3. The quality of an item
4. The amount of documented information about an item that is available
5. Whether an item is too private or personal to include

Those points can help serve as guidelines to answering some of the questions that I have had about archiving my artwork, and the best place to start is to try figure out what the purpose of my archives would be.

My Photographic Archives- What to Do With Them? (Part 2)

My last post addressed the fact that I have been thinking a lot lately about what will happen to my photographs after I am gone. I have not come to any firm conclusions yet, so stay tuned. But there was an article in the New York Times recently about Bob Dylan's archives which interested me. It didn't provide me with any potential solutions to my own problem, but it was great food for thought.

The Dylan archive, which was recently acquired by a group of institutions in Oklahoma, consists of over 6,000 items which include lyrics, notebooks, correspondence, recordings, films and photographs. Apparently no one had known prior to this that his archives were so extensive, and the Times' article discusses what a treasure trove it will be for researchers:

"With voluminous drafts from every phase of Mr. Dylan's career, the collection offers a comprehensive look at the working process of a legendarily secretive artist. ... The range of hotel stationary suggests an obsessive self-editor in constant motion."

Apparently, the archives were formed by simple accumulation over the years, and then placed in storage. Dylan eventually hired an archivist, who started the process of organizing everything before it was offered for sale.

One of the most intriguing questions posed by the article was whether other rock artists of the 60's and 70's will follow in Dylan's footsteps when it comes to their archives. Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen's manager, noted "the disconnect between the needs of professional archivists and the culture of rock in the 1960's. "Was anyone sitting around worrying about this kind of thing back then?", he said. "We were living in the era of 'Hope I die before I get old.'" It's my guess that very few of the giants of rock from that era would have such an extensive collection of items as Bob Dylan has. And I wonder how many artists from all media think about something like this?

Finally, the article mentions that, despite the large volume of items that make up his archive, it reveals very little about Dylan the man that is not already known. Since Dylan is known for being obsessively private, that does not surprise me. It makes me wonder if he edited out anything that referred to his personal life so that it would never see the light of day.

All of this brings up the question of what exactly would be valuable to include in one's archive. In my case, just "final" photographs that were published or exhibited? All of my negatives and contact sheets and RAW digital files with nothing edited out? Technical notes? Work prints? Correspondence with galleries, curators, museums, fellow artists? Personal journals? Bob Dylan is a seminal artist in his field, who has influenced his medium in profound ways. I am not such an artist in my field. It makes sense to me that what would be included in a valuable archive of an artist of Dylan's stature would be quite different from what would be included in mine. But.... maybe not?

The question of what to include is an challenging one because it of course means that you would be editing the items, unless you were to include absolutely everything you ever created or did. And in editing the items, you would be creating a specific picture of yourself as an artist that might be different than the one others would get if left unedited.

And, if you are not a Bob Dylan or an Ansel Adams or a Sally Mann, then who are you creating an archive for? Where would it be housed? Who would have  access to it? Who would be interested in it? Why create one at all?

So many questions, and so few answers, at least for now.

My Photographic Archives- What To Do With Them? (Part 1)

I have no good answer for the question posed in the title of this post. But I've been thinking a lot about it lately. The first time I ever stopped to think about what to do with one's photographic archives was back in 1990. I blogged about this story back in 2013, but I want to return to it now, as it is a good lead-in to upcoming posts that I will write about concerning this topic.

A couple of days after moving into our house, I saw a moving van parked across the street. Two men were taking out all the furniture from a house whose elderly owner had died a few weeks before. Her relatives had sold the entire contents of the house to an estate buyer, and they had come to empty it out.

Among the items lined up for removal was what I recognized as a standing slide file cabinet. Because I was badly in need of one at that point in time, I went across the street to take a closer look. I saw that each drawer was labeled with the locations and dates of what clearly had been trips the deceased had taken. "Nepal, 1972", "California, 1958", "Canada, 1966". I pulled open one of the drawers, and there they were, slide after slide after slide of this woman's life in pictures. I realized with a start that no one wanted them, that they were going to be thrown away, as if those trips and that woman's life had never happened. There was an entire life's history there, and it was going to be tossed. The realization made me feel awful.

The movers asked me if I wanted the cabinet, telling me to just make an offer and I could have it, as it would be one less thing for them to move. But I couldn't.

I knew that if I bought it, I would be the one to throw away those slides, and even if I filled it up and used it for years, the memory of her slides and her forgotten life would linger on. And so would the guilt I would feel.

I know that my potential sense of guilt wasn't rational. But that incident started me thinking about how we deal (or don't) with the photographic records of our lives. What do I want to save for future generations- my artwork, my family photos, both? Will future generations even care? Should my records be saved in print or digitally? Who archives them? Where will they be housed?

I'm working on the answers to these questions because I want to consciously decide what happens to my own archive of creative work. I want to make sure that it will live on in some fashion. And I don't want my printed photographs and hard drives out on the curb one day, waiting for the trash collector, just because I couldn't make a decision about what to do with them.

All artists are faced with this question, and all of us answer it in different ways. But it is important to come up with some kind of answer, if we don't want to see our work disappear from the face of the earth at the same time that we do.

Artists I Like- On Kawara

Perhaps because I am currently working on a project that utilizes photographs that I have made on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis, I am intrigued by artists who have taken that approach in their own work, regardless of medium. On Kawara (1932-2014), a conceptual artist born in Japan, certainly fits that mode.  For 48 years, he would spend a part of each day making a painting that had at its center the date on which he was painting it (his "Today" series). Other creative methods he used were mapping the places he'd been, and  keeping daily lists of people he met. Between 1970 and 2000, he sent his friends more than 900 telegrams just to tell them that he was still alive. In the pre-social networked age that we live in today, that kind of thing would perhaps have labeled him as eccentric. Today it makes him seem to have been far ahead of his time. It's possible that, if he were a young artist today, he would have been posting a daily Instagram of each meal, sending weekly selfies on Snapchat (without showing his face, as he was obsessively private), and tweeting his whereabouts on Twitter. Taken together, his work creates an archive of his life.

In an article on Artnet.com, critic Ben Davis wrote that Kawara not only anticipated our data-obsessed age, "he offers an alternative way of thinking about it, a possible model for how to stay human amid it all."

That brings up the issue of the culture of sharing (oversharing?) of personal information in today's world. For me, the most effective kind of personal sharing through one's artwork is that in which an artist reveals just enough for the viewer to engage with, but which only hints at the deeper currents beyond. I like artists whose work makes me feel like I know them, at the same time that I realize I don't know them at all.

On Kawara's work does that for me. He tells us so much about himself and his life, but ultimately preserves his privacy and seems completely unknowable.  For his art wasn't solely about him per se, it was about the passage of time. By focusing on how that passage is built from incremental steps day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year, Kawara make us aware of our own inexorable movement towards the future, as well as of the past we have left behind.

Making Art Over Time

The Sunday New York Times Magazine recently published an interview with the British actor Charlotte Rampling, whose heyday was in the 1960's and 70's. While never completely off the radar, she has a powerful new film out titled "45 Years" that is bringing her a lot of attention. Now 69, she speaks in the article about what it is like to be the center of attention as an older actor, the nature of her career, and the choices she has made over the years. Here is what she said that hit home for me in particular:

"I wanted to make my life, not a work of art - I didn't think of it that way - but I wanted to create a visible continuity in what I did. I wanted there to be a thread I could follow and other people could follow."

That is exactly how I see my own creative choices when I look back over the course of my career. Without consciously having intended to create it, there is an arc of continuity throughout my work that ties it all together. The various series that I am working on now really point this out. My goal is to have some of this new work out in the world in some form by summer.

We'll see if life allows that to happen!

Photographic Archaeology

A character in "A Forgotten Poet", a story by Vladimir Nabokov, writes, "If metal is immortal then somewhere

there lies the burnished button I lost

upon my seventh birthday in a garden.

Find me that button and my soul will know

that every soul is saved and stored and treasured."

The same could be said for photographs. We take them and put them away somewhere, in a drawer, in a shoebox, on our computers, or in the Cloud. All too often, we proceed to forget about them.

Every once in a while, we happen to come upon these treasures from the past. When we do, our gaze falls upon them and memory is reawakened. Emotions bubble up and time shifts somehow. Going through old photographs is like participating in an archeological dig. We sift through layers of the past, trying to make connections between the history being revealed and the present.

It is inevitable that, in this process, questions will arise that cannot be answered. But by asking those questions, we learn something about our selves, and the past lives again. Photographs are not the only artifacts that have the ability to generate these sensations, but they do it in a way that is unique to the medium.

This has a direct bearing on the creative work I am doing now, in which I am sifting through my photographic archives and discovering much in the process. I'm still editing all of this, trying to make sense out of the thousands of images I am looking at. Stay tuned to what emerges!

Thoughts on Legacy

I was asked the other day what I thought my creative legacy was. Never having been asked that question before, I was stumped for an answer. The next day, I found this excerpt from a novel which resonated for me as it relates to the question of one's legacy: "Everyone must leave something behind when he dies. It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it, into something that's like you after you take your hands away."

~ from the novel Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Thoughts on Our Photographic Archives- #2

I'm certainly not the first person to wonder how the unimaginably vast archive of digital photographs currently being generated will be preserved into the future. The issue of preserving photographs has been with us since photography first appeared on the scene in 1839. But the issue of archiving became more pressing once George Eastman invented roll film in the late 19th century and people could take many pictures in a relatively short space of time. The advent of the snapshot meant that people started generating many prints of family outings and events. These prints were sometimes put into albums, but often just relegated to some shoebox, unlabeled and forgotten until the family either moved or the house was cleaned out.

Back in 1978, author John D. MacDonald wrote a novel titled "The Empty Copper Sea", in which the following passage appeared:

"Long ago a picture must have been an event. Capturing a living image has become too ordinary a miracle, perhaps. They go about with their automatic-drive Nikons and OM-2's and their Leicaflexes, and put their finger on the button, and the hand-held machinery makes a noise like a big toy cricket. Reep, reep, reep, reep. A billion billion slides, projected once, labeled, and filed forever. Windrows of empty yellow boxes blow across the Gobi, the Peruvian highlands, the temple steps at Chichicastenango. The clicking and whirring and clacking is the background sound at the Acropolis, at the beach at Cannes, on the slopes at Ville-franche. All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says: "Mom, I don't know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?"

"Throw them out, dear."

Prior to the digital age, pictures were physical things, objects one could hold on one's hand. Now, most people don't make prints and our visual histories are more ephemeral and at risk than ever. Just as historians worry about the future of the written record, so also should we be concerned about the future of our visual records. If the entire visual history of an individual exists purely digitally, what are the chances that those images will exist 100 years from now, or even 20? And what will be lost if they are lost?

Thoughts on Our Photographic Archives- #1

When I moved into the house in which I'm currently living in 1990, the elderly woman who lived in the house across the street had recently died. Her son was in the process of selling her house, and had hired a person who specialized in estate sales to clean out all her possessions that the family didn't want. One day, a big moving truck arrived, and proceeded to empty out the house and put everything on the curb before loading it into the truck. I noticed what I thought were tall 35mm slide file cabinets, which I knew to be extremely expensive and therefore out of my price range, and went across the street to check them out.

They were indeed what I thought they were. Each drawer was meticulously labeled with titles such as "Spain, 1975", and "Hawaii, 1958". Inside each drawer, the slides themselves were labeled and sorted. Clearly, these were the treasured photographic archives of all the trips this family had taken over the course of time. Since there were no gaps among the slides, I concluded that the woman's children and grandchildren hadn't wanted any of these pictures.

Puzzled, I asked the estate agent what he was going to do with the cabinets, knowing them to be something of a special interest item. He replied, "Oh, we'll throw out all the slides and sell the cabinets themselves." I stood there slightly stunned, as it had not really occurred to me before to wonder what happens to photographs when no one wants them. As someone for whom family history is of paramount importance, I saw these slides as someone's treasure and couldn't bear the thought of them just being tossed in the trash.

The agent asked, "Are you interested in the cabinets? Because if you are, make me an offer right now and you can have them."

I stood there gazing at these amazing cabinets, knowing that I could never afford to buy them under normal circumstances, and here they were, available for a song. But buying them would have meant that I would have become responsible for throwing out the slides, and I knew I could never look at or use those cabinets without thinking of the memories they had once held, and feeling somehow responsible for their loss.

I know, I know. It's just "stuff", right? The slides were going to be thrown out, one way or another. But I just couldn't be the one to do it. I said to the agent, "No, no.... thanks anyway.", and made my way back across the street, in mourning for the loss of another family's visual history. It's something that I knew happens every day of the year, but it was hard nonetheless.

I didn't watch the truck as it pulled away.

Inventory Database for Artists

I've been a pretty organized person over the years when it comes to my art career. But when it comes to keeping track of everything, I finally realized how great it would be if I could keep most records in one place. I've got folders on my computer that contain Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, FileMaker databases, etc., and I'm constantly having to dig through those files in order to cross reference the information in them. In addition, I've been using Excel for my inventory database, but have been frustrated by its limitations. The following images give a visual of what I'm talking about:

You can imagine how many files are contained within these folders. Kind of crazy.

I was aware of inventory software for artists such as Flick! and eArtist, but after looking into them further, decided that they weren't for me.

Then I discovered GYST software. GYST stands for "Get Your Sh*t Together".

Created by artist and educator Karen Atkinson, GYST does far more than even the most fanatically organized person could ever need, which is one reason why I love it. Here's a screenshot of an individual artwork record in GYST. Note that you can add detailed information into any of the blue tabs found in the middle of the window: And if you want to look at your entire database of artwork, it will show up as a list like this: You can pick and choose which features you want to use in GYST. Not only will it allow you to keep your inventory up to date, it will also help you keep track of any proposals you may have out, artist's statements, your resume, contacts, research notes, billing, etc., and it's all found in one place on your computer. Heaven!

Check out the GYST blog, as it's a great resource for professional practices information.

I should add that my only beef with any of the above-named inventory databases is that they are not particularly intuitive or user-friendly, so there is a definite learning curve involved at first. If someone could come up with one that is relatively easy to use from the get-go, I would not hesitate to use it.