Licensed to Practice Art: photography

Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Scully and Osterman

These photos are woefully out of order. But essentially, we learned how to make ambrotypes. That's Jenni under the watchful eye of France Scully Osterman. She's pouring collodion on a plate. After that, it will be dunked in a bucket of silver nitrate to make it light sensitive, then put in a plate holder and a photo will be taken. The guy in the foreground is Mark Osterman, France's husband, who teaches at George Eastman House. He thinks polishing the plate is important, too.

Rachel decided that it wasn't a good thing to take photos at 1000 ISO without any humor. The darkroom was pretty dark, so I cranked up the sensitivity and cranked down the aperture. But it is kind of cool to see France Scully doing what she does pretty well.

Mark Osterman (the other half of Scully and Osterman) is warming the varnish (one of the last steps).

the developer. You can't buy it. You have to get a formula and order the chemicals. France did this the day before the workshop. By the way, their work is on display at the Houston Center for Photography (http://www.hcponline.org/.) and it is quite good.

High-tech equipment. Diligent student. That's Jenni polishing her plate. The foil was used to make a reflector. The collodion process isn't ISO 1000 by a long shot. They had to fabricate a reflector, much like they fabricate everything else.

The varnishing stage. Essentially, you take a plate, cover it with flammable material, and expose it to an open flame. Again, well out of order. This is the last step. After fixing the varnish by exposing it to a flame, you can either put the plate in an airtight container (as was typical in the 19th century) or park it on a bookshelf. After a few weeks you can touch it.

Mark Osterman tells us how to varnish the plates. Ironically, and despite what this photo suggests, one should not look up or the plate will catch on fire.

Out of order again, here's the development stage. And the homemade box that you need to hold either the silver nitrate (for sensitivity) or arsenic (f0r fixing). The boxes are identical. The footstool was used to hold distilled water used to slow the development process. Once you see tonality in the face, you throw water into the tray.

A 19th century wet plate collodion camera.

Here's France Scully teaching Rachel (HCP's education coordinator) how to cut and polish the glass plate. This is actually the first step.

Here's Mark teaching us that if we try really hard we can fly.

France says use more elbow grease. And that's just to open the bottle.

How to use the polishing solution.

France tells us how to make the polishing solution: 1/3 water, 1/3 alcohol, 1/3 whiting.

looking at the test portrait.

Why we were all there. Mark took this photograph at the beginning of the workshop. A gorgeous portrait.

In the darkroom. That's cyanide.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

something kind of cool

I found out that the German magazine, Photo News, is about to release its May issue. It will have four of my photographs in it and I can't wait to see how they look. Here's the cover.

Here's the webpage in German with the description of what's in the May issue. http://photonews.de/PHOTONEWS/index.html Google the other photographers. They are awesome.

just another day

I spent some time on the phone today with the admissions office at SAIC. It's registration time. I was all set to go with my classes and had one glitch. The elective I chose, a sculpture seminar with Mary Jane Jacob, the chair of the sculpture department, is allegedly for incoming sculpture grad students. The class is titled Sculpture Seminar: Discourses of Sculpture.

The course description is as follows: Sculpture--perhaps more than any other discipline--offers the widest and most complex view of artmaking. Many of the most essential discourses of what we think of as contemporary art today are rooted in an expanded concept of sculpture. This now includes multiple ways of working: temporary and ephemeral; mixed media and inter- or trans-disciplinary; functional, decorative, symbolic, and critical; and site-specific and community-based. This course is aimed at first semester graduate students in Sculpture but of relevance for all graduates students in any department. Subjects are probed in conversation with visiting artists and other professionals, discussion around readings, and critiques of students' work.

Well, that sounds pretty good to me.

So I told the guy that I wanted to take it, and he said yeah, BUT he had heard this morning that the course was actually for people in the sculpture department and hadn't been blocked to other students. So if I signed up, I would likely get bumped out later. We talked about a bunch of other classes, and I just didn't like the idea of them nearly as much. I asked what would happen if I called the professor and suggested why I ought to get in and he said if I did, and she said yes, that would be the end of it. So I emailed her, talked about my interest in sculpture and installation and she said yes. And so I'm in that class.

The others are:

Grad Photo Seminar: Studio Owens_Clifford. This class is required for incoming Studio students admitted through the photography department. It's how I'm supposed to meet the other photo grad students. Which I am very much looking forward to.

Grad Projects: Interdisciplinary Fandell_Kenneth. Ken is the one guy I've talked to the most at SAIC. He seems most interested in educating artists, rather than photographers, though he teaches in the photography department. He seems to like my non-photographic work, so I'm pretty much looking forward to this projects class.

Grad Projects: Photography DeGenevieve_Barbara. Barbara is the one person everyone I met at the school said is awesome. For 25 years, she's been focusing on sex. Hard to argue with that.

Modern and Post-Modern Art Yood_James. Saw a video of him critiquing work and I'm pretty sure he knows his shit. Looking forward to it. yep.

So that's it. Fifteen hours. Lots of theory, lots of concept. A little photography, a little sculpture. Awesome teachers. I'm a happy guy.

Oh, and here's one more photo of my current man-crush, Keith Carter, from the workshop I took last weekend.

After the class, I emailed him and he had the most (characteristically) upbeat and positive things to say. I'm following his advice, which was as follows: "When you get up to Chicago, just go and take over that MFA program. Make yourself completely indispensable and work harder than anyone else." I know he doesn't mean be competitive, vile or mean spirited and I really like that about him.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Prematurely Named Blog

Welcome. This is a first for me, which is à propos, given that I'm about to embark on an adventure. My first day towards a Master of Fine Arts - Studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will be August 28th. At the conclusion of two years time, I will be [drumroll] Licensed to Practice Art!

The trip to this point has been quite eventful, but the transition between now and August 28 will be complicated too. And the course between then and two years hence is almost impossible to imagine. I'll chronicle some of it here.

For background, it helps to know that I grew up in a town in South Texas, moved to Houston to attend Rice University, then went to the University of Houston for a law degree and I practice law. There. That about covers the first 45 years.

Now, a little about why I chose SAIC and what I want to work on next.

I was rejected by every school with any good sense, but still had to choose between the MFA programs at SAIC and the School of Visual Arts in New York. I conducted a poll of pretty much everyone I know who is involved in art and visited both schools. When I visited SVA, despite the overwhelming students, faculty, graduates, and what not, I came away with the impression that it would be too much like attending law school all over again: very smart people in a very competitive program, hoping to make it big and reap the rewards. I'm confident that SVA would make me a better photographer, and maybe even a very good one. But SAIC feels more like Rice, or at least what I recall Rice feeling like. In my mind, it was an intellectual, academic environment and I will never forget Dennis Huston chasing me down across campus one day, demanding an explanation of why I hadn't showed up for his Shakespeare class. Rice was more about teaching how to learn than teaching the thing itself, and that has proved much more valuable. I think SAIC is going to be the same way. I hope SAIC will make me more of an artist than a photographer. Which is important since I've been studing art history and non-photographic arts for the last year or so.

My friend Kristy and I have been collaborating on installations, and they have become completely non-photographic. Our first installation was at a local community college (involving the printing of photographs on rocks and helium filled ballons). It was called Salted Away, and it was all about epistemology, and curatorial practices. We think. Here's an installation shot.

After it was done, the school asked us to create a permanent installation with the rocks and we installed a spiral jetty, after Robert Smithson. There were no photographs in it at all. That piece is called After Smithson (Limestone Jetty). There's a photo of it too.

We've also proposed three other installations and are waiting word on whether they will be accepted. They all have something to do with art history, epistemology and curatorial practices. We think.

I like referencing non-photographic art and I like using photography for the things that require photography. But I want more tools than photography alone, though I can't imagine abandoning photography. SAIC seems like the kind of place I can do installation, performance, painting, video, sculpture, and photography as long as it makes sense. Sounds good to me.

So what do I do next, photographically? I'm thinking about a purely documentary project for grad school. I visited the Rio Grande Valley (where I was raised) last weekend and liked several of the photographs I made. The day before, I had taken Keith Carter's workshop at the Houston Center for Photography (HCP), and he described his decision to approach East Texas as a tourist in an exotic locale, and how thinking about the place as if he had never been there, didn't know anyone, didn't know the customs or language, etc., really made a difference in his work. The perspective allowed him to make photos that were personal, of his time, and were the first successes he had. It reminded me of advice I got from Peter Brown, another gifted teacher, to photograph the Valley.

So I began thinking of working on a personal documentary of the area, particularly the rural area my family lives in. There is much more there than I could ever photograph: the plants, the people, the racial tension, the stark economics, the crooked judges and sherrifs, the citrus groves, the onion fields, the beaches, the loners who went as far south as they could go, the drug dealers' mansions at the end of dirt roads, the remote Polish farmers in little hamlets who only listen to polkas and have 24 hour weddings, the brutally hot weather, the river, the stunning growth, the diseases that don't exist anywhere else in the country -- I don't know of a place quite like it. There are stories that people swear are true, like encountering Chupacabres (goat suckers) and the night the devil danced at Boccacio 2000, a disco in McAllen, before spinning so fast he melted into a pool of blood on the dance floor, leaving only a black cape behind. I have met people who swear they've seen the Chupacabre and others who swear they were at Boccacio 2000 that night. Anyway, there's no shortage of material there.

All I got this trip, though, was a few shots of the family and my sister's house. Here are some of those.