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!

Sreshta Rit Premnath

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.

jordantate.com

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.

Proceed to Artist Feature.

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.

The scientists say that it was the excessive use of tools, what really made us different from other animals. Through the ages our tools and various devices, which make our life easier, became very sophisticated – so much that now we don’t understand them any more. We use our computers, washing machines, hair dryers, but we are not really sure how they work. And if we look inside of such a device, we cannot figure much of all these mysterious cables, screws and other parts that we wouldn’t even be able to name. The progress of our civilization was so huge and recently, so quick, that it brought us to the point when we no longer keep up with it. It is like our civilization wasn’t ours any more – like it was brought to us from some distant place, by some strange creatures, wiser than ourselves. We live surrounded by alien civilization.

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.

It is very helpful, for example, when I take test shots. Sometimes I use large format color transparencies for tungsten light. I prefer tungsten light much better than strobes. But nobody makes these transparencies anymore. So they are very hard to get and therefore precious, I cannot waste them. This is why the test shots are very important. I used to use Polaroid for test shots, but there is no more Polaroid neither, so now I use small digital camera. And this is very handy that I can first look at my object, or my set, on the ground glass in my Sinar and then I can take the lens, bellow and ground glass out, and place my small digital camera in exactly the spot where the lens should be, without changing the position of the big camera itself. For some complicated pictures I have to take several test shots, 20 or even 40, and to analyze them on my computer. Then when I am sure that everything is all right with the vantage point and the light, I reassemble the large format camera. Then I measure the light and I calculate the ratio between the object and the image (actually I made a little computer program which does it for me) and then I am ready to put the film in and take the shot. In the old days, when I was working for commercial studio, we would always do so called bracketing – one shot that we thought was good, plus at least one little bit darker and one little bit lighter. Just in case if something went wrong with our calculations. Now I cannot afford it, because 4×5 color transparencies are so rare. I must be right on when I take a shot. Of course, sometimes, very seldom, it happens that I missed some little detail and I have to repeat the shot. One can never be sure until the photograph has been developed, scanned and carefully examined. This is why I bless the fact that I also have my own darkroom and I can develop my transparencies and my negatives right away, without having to send them to the lab. I simply leave the set untouched and if something goes wrong, I may always repeat the shot.
By the way, if anyone has some unused large format color transparencies for tungsten, sitting there in the fridge – please, sell them to me. I don’t know what I will do, when I cannot get them anymore. It is a little bit scary that so many useful things have disappeared since digital cameras got popular.
I post here some little snap-shots from my studio.

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.

To make it, I needed a camera that would always stay in the same place and that would be protected from the elements, so I could photograph even in bad weather. This is why I built a walk-in Camera Obscura, with lens in the roof and the mirror above it. I used 4×5 inches lens and 8×10 color transparencies, this is why the images are circular. The titles describe the weather conditions on the day when each photograph was taken.

“Weather Report” is sometimes exhibited together with “Garden of Eden”. For example, they will be shown together in two galleries in Poland this year: in the gallery of Gardzienice Theater in Lublin and in BWA gallery in Gorzow Wielkopolski, and then in the Museum of Photography in Riga, Latvia. But usually they travel separately, and the exhibition of “Weather Report” with which I am very excited will be this fall in Preus Museum in Norway. They will show it together with two exhibitions of Norwegian landscape photography, from 19th and 20th Century and it will be on view from September 23rd this year until January next year.

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.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have two framed sets available at the same time, so the Museum in Dortmund framed the prints on their own. This is why they look different there than everywhere else. The exhibition in Dortmund is up until June 24th and is part of Klopsztanga, the series of Polish cultural events in the NRW region.
The first 4 images show snapshots from this exhibition.

The exhibition of Garden of Eden in Krakow is up until May 27th and is one of the accompanying events of Krakow Month of Photography. The set of photographs which is exhibited there is the set with the actual frames I intended for this series. They look like golden frames that you may see around the old paintings in the museums, but in fact they are made of acrylic. This corresponds very well with all these beautiful, but almost artificial fruits in the photographs and with the meaning of the series. (see fifth image of the gallery)

The Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, in cooperation with two Polish galleries which will be showing “Garden of Eden” later – The BWA Gallery in Gorzow Wielkopolski and Legnicka Galeria Sztuki, produced a beautiful exhibition catalog, in three languages: Polish, German and English. It has 64 pages and includes all the images from the series plus my extended bio and the curatorial text written by Prof. Dr. Pamela C. Scorzin. If someone is interested in buying it, it’s available at all the venues which exhibit “Garden of Eden” and also directly from my website.

The last five pictures show some images of the catalog.

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!