Der Greif is calling for entries for its sixth issue! If you are a photographer or author, we are looking forward to receiving your submissions! If you want to take part, just follow the link to our contribute-page.
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The fourth issue of Der Greif has been awarded with the ADC silver medal last weekend. Nice one, thanks! The award is dedicated to all participating photographers and authors who make the magazine to a unique holistic piece of art by submitting their work!
Work from The Last Image.
“The Last Image draws parallels between the death-drive that spurs urban development and that which fuels image making and meaning making in general, by using the figure of a property developer and builder from Bangalore, M. S. Ramaiah (1922-1997), who is said to have believed that he would die if he ever stopped building.
The series of C-Prints titled The Last Image are constructed using photographs of the builder’s brass bust, and procedures including the re-photographing and scraping of the photographic emulsion. Here the spectral work necessary to prop up a monument, the legacy it stands in for and the representational labor present in the making of the photograph are conflated. Siegfried Kracauer coined the phrase “the last image” to describe the “memory image” that one retains of a person, distinct from the spacio-historical contingency of the photograph. The monument is therefore a kind of “last image” built to postpone corporeal disappearance and yet essential to physically mark the power-structure it simultaneously denotes and hides. The gray and white, checkered Photoshop background and Bluescreen paint employed in these C-prints could be seen as a similar marking of absence – a mere placeholder to be replaced or hidden.
The triptych titled &&& continues this theme of postponement. Each part of the triptych reveals a section of the form of an ampersand cut and folding out of a black rubber surface. This set of formal procedures attempts to create a glyph that is part image and part language; part material and part concept. &, usually a hinge that connects two clauses in a sentence is here unraveled in a series that may be read as “and & and” or “& and &” – both sides of the center competing to be the center.
Finally, in the video loop I Will Die When I Stop Building, the pages of a flipbook animate a construction worker raising his sledgehammer to strike and demolish a dome. The loop of the video reflects the physical life of the portrayed dome, which was part of an architectural complex originally built by Ramaiah in the 1960’s that has been demolished and reconstructed multiple times over the last several decades. Here the figure of Ramaiah stands in for the spectral forces of development that are responsible for the constantly changing shape of a city – In this instance Bangalore, amongst the fastest growing cities in the world – while the concrete body of the laborer is subsumed by the abstract labor that presumably keeps Ramaiah “alive”.
We welcome Jordan Tate, who will be writing guest-posts on the blog of Der Greif for the upcoming seven days.
Jordan Tate is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Cincinnati. Tate, a Fulbright Fellow (2008-2009), has a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Indiana University. Tate is the author of the recently published “The Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms” from St. Martin’s Press (2007); his work is currently held in collections nationwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Tate is the founding editor of the contemporary art blog ilikethisart.net.
This week’s artist feature shows excerpts of an ongoing project by Jordan Tate called “New York”. The photo above was shown in Der Greif Issue 5.
Today I would just like to show few photographs from my current project. I am working on it now and it should be completed within next few days. It’s again still-lifes on 4×5 color transparencies, like “Garden of Eden”. It’s titled “Alien Civilization” and features photographs of parts of various home appliances that everyone uses on daily basis. They look a little bit like photographs of space-ships and other sets from SF movies.
I thought that it might be actually interesting to someone if wrote something about my studio, especially that I am working on a new still-life project right now.
As I mentioned, I often work with 4×5 Sinar camera. I really love these good, old cameras. The one I use most often was made in 1980′s, but I also have an older one, from 1950′s, and none of them ever broke. What is wonderful about these cameras, is that you can easily take them apart and reconfigure them, adjusting them to whatever you want to do. Not every view camera has this property.
I thought it would be good to mention something about my other series that is now traveling in Europe. It’s titled “Weather Report” and features 36 views of the same place in different seasons and different weather. I made it when I lived in Moscow, Ontario and the place on the photographs is the Long Swamp Road, going from Moscow to Bellrock, with my neigbourgh’s field on the left and my house and garden on the right.
I am glad that I was invited for guest-blogging for Der Greif right now. My series “Garden of Eden” is now being exhibited in two places in Europe: in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Dortmund, Germany and in Solvay Center for Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland.
Andrzej Maciejewski will be guest blogging for the next seven days. He was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1959. After three different studies of photography in Poland and Czechoslovakia he immigrated to Canada in 1985 where he lives and works today. His books are discussed internationally, two of his projects are on world tour at the moment and his work is part of many private and corporate collections as for example the National Gallery of Canada. Besides he’s teaching at the Haliburton School of Arts, ON, Canada. Welcome Andrzej!
