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The ultimate post of this week is dedicated to a group of Black dancers who have a mission. They take photos or have their photos taken by various photographers either as candid shots or doing dance performances. Every time I see a new image I am bowled over by what people can do with their bodies.

As described in the attached article their political goals will resonate – they want to combat stereotypes that lead to being targets for violence at all levels of society. But independent of showing off the skills and raw talent, there is such joy attached to their movements that it makes me forget, for some minutes, the ugliness that permeates our political and social world. (Photos are from their FB site or the article below.)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-boys-dance-too_us_5ad6337ae4b077c89ced4c19

My dance photographs are from a workshop that the Dutch group arch8 offered last month here in PDX, in connection with a performance of their piece Tetris.

http://www.arch8.nl/en/

The workshop invited children and their parents to explore different forms of movement. I captured in today’s images some of the tender demonstrations of the Dutch performers so at ease with each other.

Below is choreographer Erik Kaiel, a Portland native, explaining how his ballets draw children in and spark their imagination.

Makes me want to dance, too!

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From the Ground up

The Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene creates scenarios that resemble in some ways some of the old Dutch masters’ paintings. The light is natural, the scenery detailed and yet timeless, there is always a mysterious element and the portraits tell stories.

 

She actively searches for young girls/women that trigger her curiosity and does the same with potential locations, often knocking on strangers’ doors to ask if she can use a particular room or building. She then combines her models with other living creatures or special props with sometimes almost mystical results.  (Click on the arrow in the photo spread to see 12 representative images.)

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/maedchen-und-frauen-fotografiert-von-hellen-van-meene-fotostrecke-160233.html

She works from the ground up, carefully choreographing every last detail to achieve moody, sometimes disconcerting portraits.

A different team is working from the ground up to provide opportunities to underserved populations of young aspiring artists in Portland.

http://fromthegrounduppdx.wixsite.com/fromthegroundup/young-women-s-residency-program

Katherine Murphy Lewis, her colleagues and visiting artists offer workshops that prepare for acting, playwriting and other creative outlets in group sessions that are financially underwritten by the fairy godmother of Portland’s art scene, the incomparable Ronnie LaCroute who, in my book, is generosity personified. Which counts double in a city that is not exactly famous for individual generosity towards the arts, if you ask me.

I was able to provide some needed headshots for this term’s participants in the workshop, also in natural light, but no props needed. The women themselves were striking enough.

In times where art in all of its expressions is cut from curricula due to economic pressures, small independent endeavors like FTGU become ever more important to reach a clientele with otherwise little access to tools of learning the trade. We all are the beneficiaries – the stories and talent emerging from workshops like this just might contain seeds for change.

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Linn-Benton Community College Choir

A small two-year junior college located in Albany, south of Portland, has caught my attention – and not only because their mascot is the Roadrunner, a bird I feel at times strangely related too, although in my case it isn’t a coyote that is chasing me….

I had a chance to photograph the LBCC choir members and their conductor, Raymund Ocampo some weeks back.

I had not gathered any information on them, and so did not know at the time that the choral ensembles of this community college in small town Oregon have consistently won prizes, traveled and performed abroad, engaged in workshop with big-name composers and conductors.  All I had to do was listen to them and just acknowledge there was a group making beautiful music.

 

http://www.linnbenton.edu/current-students/student-support/instructional-departments/music1

Not only did they move heartstrings, and easily held their own when thrown in with another choir in joint performance, they also were intensely serious about it, as you can see in the photographs. Many people who go to community colleges have to work for a living at the same time that they pursue a degree. Many students in these rural communities are, in other words, not likely to have lots of extraneous funding and support when pursuing activities beyond the regular curriculum. Their achievements probably require sacrifices that students in wealthier institutions or from wealthier backgrounds do not encounter. The stamina and passion required to pull it all off, then, is remarkable.

And the results speak for themselves (from a performance some years ago in Europe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiD87OTQqa8

Of course I photograph them when they are busy, badly lit and in constant motion with a camera that is not particularly adaptable to these three factors.

Compare the results to the portraits of one of my favorite portrait photographers from NYC, who specializes in portraits of music performers and moves, needless to say, in very different circles with very different gear.

Laurie Anderson by Ebru Yildiz

Ebru Yildiz is originally from Turkey and now lives in Brooklyn. An incredibly talented photographer who manages to make her subjects feel at ease at the same time that she courts them in ways that make the perhaps feel powerful – at least that comes across for me in her pictures. Then again, maybe these subjects are already so famous that they feel powerful to begin with. Who cares. The photographs are brilliant.

 http://www.ebruyildiz.net

John Cale  by Ebru Yildiz

I wonder what the result would be if one put the young women and men from LBCC in front of one of Yildiz’ lenses. We’ll never know.

They are probably too busy rehearsing, a Mozart Requiem is in the works, I hear, to be performed at the Russel Tripp Performance Center on June 8th. But I still think I captured their dedication.

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The Mortuary Collection

During the last couple of months I had the opportunity to take a lot of portraits while on the job documenting this or that event. I will present some of them this week, while linking to the work of others who have caught my interest.

We will start with Soft Shells, a portrait series by Canadian photographer Libby Oliver. For this series, Oliver turns the notion of portrait upside down. The portrayed people are actually hidden, quite literally under heaps of their own clothes, with only this or that body part peeking through. Ranging in age from 4 to 88, selected from a wide variety of backgrounds, through internet calls in addition to family and friends of the artists, the subjects were picked for their wardrobes. Oliver intended to present as many styles as possible – not to accuse of consumerism, but to demonstrate how personality can be expressed through choice of clothing.

 

I am not sure that a pile of jumbled and amassed clothes can necessarily reveal the owner’s personality, since much of that might only emerge in the conscious and/or clever pairing of dress items. I think, though, Oliver is on to something with this idea of hiding behind the outfits in a portrait session in your own bedroom. Good portraits hint at something with something, rather than plainly depict. They catch your attention and ask you to provide interpretation  – that act of thinking brings you closer to the portrayed person (or your assumptions of who s/he is, whether they are true or not,) and establishes thus a connection. In that way good portraits mimic the process of real life encounters with someone, relating to them in the moment, being curious about them, or wanting to gauge them, anticipating interaction.

Soft Shells: A Portrait Series That Presents Subjects in Every Piece of Their Wardrobe by Libby Oliver

 

In addition to making us think about these people, the technical aspects of Oliver’s photographic work are stellar. She obviously had an environment where she could control the lighting, the exposure, the posing etc. None of that was true for the situation I found myself in, working on a movie set recently in Astoria.

 

 

 

I was documenting the behind-the scenes work of members of a film crew that was shooting The Mortuary Collection, a Gothic Horror Anthology; it revolves around an eccentric mortician who spins 4 interconnected tales of madness and the macabre in weird surrounding. Some of it was filmed at Flavell House, a land mark Victorian house in this coastal town.

 http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2018/04/film_in_the_works_features_ast.html

But the days I was there were spent in an old gymnasium, now used for roller-skate derbies, with suboptimal lighting and chasing after a crew that was bustling with activity. Needless to say, I savored every minute of it. I also have a newfound appreciation of how hard people work when making movies. The sheer act of organizing 100s of people on a set, not get in each others’ ways, spending hours in cold, cramped conditions repeating necessary work over and over until it finds satisfaction with the director, is daunting. The workdays are by fiat 12 hours long, with meals sneaked in on set (much depends on the quality of the hired cook) and much of the labor is intensely physical because the machinery and sets are heavy. No wonder the crew is young, given the stamina that is required. And it is not just physical stamina – the producer has to spend years of finding funding, organizing continuity, keep the ball rolling until the final product emerges in all its glory. Or gory – I wouldn’t know, am waiting to see the final version, but it is a horror anthology after all.

My choice of portraits today from that film set are partially tied to Oliver’s wardrobe theme; the young women you see here were responsible for tailoring, dressing, costumes in general, make-up, acting and set-design. The men were responsible for filming, directing, moving the set around, sound recording and the like. Gender difference, anyone? 

A friendly and lively bunch who graciously gave me a few extra minutes of standing still in their mad work day. I certainly will happily do this again.

 

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Large Divergence in Numbers

Politico posted an article yesterday that compared the Trump administration’s reaction to the disasters caused by Hurricanes Maria in Puerto Rico and Harvey in Texas, respectively. Even for hardened souls like me the numbers were astounding; I had known of a systematic neglect of one population compared to the other, but not realized the extent. 

Here is the full article https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/27/donald-trump-fema-hurricane-maria-response-480557

Here is another summary:

At the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain to the US. In March 1917, over 100 years ago, Puerto Ricans were granted statutory US citizenship. Of the roughy 3.3 million people living on the island, more than 45% exist below the official poverty level – and that was before the Hurricane hit, and the tourist $$, one of the main employment/income options, dried up as a consequence.

Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth in association with the United States. The chief of state is the President of the United States of America. The head of government is an elected Governor. There are two legislative chambers: the House of Representatives, 51 seats, and the Senate, 27 seats. Note then, Trump is the head of state here, you know, the guy whose personal travel cost could have covered over 90% of the $36 million it costs the Federal Emergency Management Agency operations to deliver food and water to the island for three months. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-travel-costs-pay-food-water-puerto-rico-three-months-hurricane-a8242736.html

 

 

Of course this administration is not the only force of darkness – quite literally so on the island that still lacks electricity in large swaths after six months since the storm’s landfall. Competing visions of how to rebuild after the storm, and how to restructure large parts of the political as much as the physical landscape, are clashing at this very moment. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/

Here are the relevant excerpts from the instructive article above:

Six months into the rolling disaster set off by Maria, dozens of grassroots organizations are coming together to advance precisely this vision: a reimagined Puerto Rico run by its people in their interests. Like Casa Pueblo, in the myriad dysfunctions and injustices the storm so vividly exposed, they see an opportunity to tackle the root causes that turned a weather disaster into a human catastrophe. Among them: the island’s extreme dependence on imported fuel and food; the unpayable and possibly illegal debt that has been used to impose wave after wave of austerity that gravely weakened the island’s defenses; and the 130-year-old colonial relationship with a U.S. government that has always discounted the lives of Puerto Rico’s black and brown people.

There is also another, very different version of how Puerto Rico should be radically remade after the storm, and it is being aggressively advanced by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in meetings with bankers, real estate developers, cryptocurrency traders, and, of course, the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected seven-member body that exerts ultimate control over Puerto Rico’s economy. For this powerful group, the lesson that Maria carried was not about the perils of economic dependency or austerity in times of climate disruption. The real problem, they argue, was the public ownership of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, which lacked the proper free-market incentives. Rather than transforming that infrastructure so that it truly serves the public interest, they argue for selling it off at fire-sale prices to private players.

I visited Puerto Rico 6 years ago for a memorable week. My photographs were lost, as were all of the trip to Istanbul that same month, don’t ask or I cry and I have reached my quota of tears already for the week. Luckily I have children who share some of my interests and so am able to post recent documentation of Puerto Rico’s graffiti  – my son was there some weeks ago for work and granted me use of his images. I hope to return one day soon together with many other tourists, spending our dollars in support of the local economy in large numbers.

 

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Peculiarity

When I look at photography I often have strong reactions. I like something a lot or I dislike something enormously. I am in awe of people’s technical skills or wonder about their vision. I admire their choice of subjects or I couldn’t care less.

Rarely am I envious, because I consider myself not a straight photographer, for one, and also still a beginner who has made a conscious decision to forgo systematic education in the art and techniques of photography. So I won’t compare my own work to that of others, and avoid envy.

Peculiarly enough that pattern occasionally breaks:  when I see things exhibited that are close to my own pursuits, the resulting images of  which lie comfortably dormant on my hard drive instead of being in some shown in some gallery.

I become so, so jealous. I can tell myself over and over that it is not an desirable emotion; that I do not pursue opportunities to show plain photography, that my own work might resemble the style but not the technical accomplishment. That my strength lies in the painterly revision of straight photography in my montage work.

In any case, it’s a quirk, albeit an unsympathetic one, that I feel on these occasion that the world is closed to me. Case in point for this confession: the extraordinary work of Ori Gersht, in detail described in the link below. Suspension between Sky and Water is an apt description of what his images provoke; it was enough to have me go back to my archival folder of Zwischen Himmel und Wasser (between sky and water) and steam.

Photographs that Suspend Us Between Sky and Water

 

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