Eleven Theses on the Photography of History: A conversation of sorts between Ali Feser and Damien Bright / August 16, 2023 by Caroline Picard

Push the image away, pull imaging apart. Just as the mass production of photographic film wound down in the late 2000s, film as an aesthetic took off in digital form. Film became filter, chemicals became obsolete thanks to the immortalizing play of pixels, even as solvents and dyes and reagents continue to course through bodies and landscapes out of frame in Rochester, New York. “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx). As if film had withdrawn from the everyday, as if to use it henceforth would only ever be nostalgic or twee or precious and maybe a bit reactionary. Use it or not, we remain inside the dreamscape and Urform of photochemical capital after Kodak: the snapshot. This form saturates the historical present such that we, too, rehearse its reproduction–instinctively, automatically, instamatically. One becomes two becomes five becomes twenty-eight layers of emulsion coated on the film base. Delaminated and stretched out so that we can get between them, if never quite beneath them. The surface multiplies when you peel it off.
To make a snapshot is to call up the history of seeing, to call into being the camera as an apparatus and total situation: mirror, shutter, lens, emulsion, light, shadow, figure, ground, subject, photographer, dust, fog, glare, glance, gaze, every photo ever made. It is an open question how the elements relate, live factors that can only be accounted for in the moment. “The photographer's command, ‘Watch the birdie!’ is essentially a stage direction” (Cavell). Reception is not only baked into the technology but called into being by it. The snapshot is already performance and installation.
What makes flypaper flypaper: the paper or the fly? And newspaper? And photopaper? “You press the button, we do the rest” (Kodak). Behold a sculpture and it styles you as an observer. Behold an installation and it styles you as a participant. Installation works through you and works you through. It is a theater whose fourth wall is always more or less open, more or less inviting, more or less sticky. You are inside the camera. The camera is inside you. Light hits the gallery windows. It turns out they were a mirror, the reflection from the street outside was a backdrop, the streetlights in the streetscape were the lighting overhead, and you were the photographic subject (photographed or photographing, who's to say?). A snapshot comes together before your eyes as if it were already there, as if you just realized you’ve been living in an emulsified world. To open up the black box of the camera after Kodak is to discover you were inside of it all along.
No instant is an image, no image is an instant. When the two are laminated onto one another, sequential time opens up. You might find you have already fallen in. For the snapshot to exist, we have to be already caught in the camera’s embrace: capture or rapture? Inversion is a signature move of the filmic. There is the opening, there is the mirror, there is cctv. “Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, into paranoid situations” (Pynchon). You hide, they seek. Reflection turns the windows into all surfaces, and the street lights become stage lights for a selfie. Pynchon’s missing proverb: there can be play inside here, beyond even the pleasures of the secret.
To pose for or use a camera and participate in imaging calls up performances of the photographic space and photographic relation. The photographic relation is not self-transparent. “The audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing” (Benjamin). The good life imagineered after Kodak takes the white nuclear family as its vanishing point, reproduced when the affordances of photochemistry and technical instruction combine to channel desire this way and not that, to posit and style modes of self-fashioning and intimacy with others one shot at a time. To make a snapshot is to call into being a future subject who will take pleasure in the memory that is being made. It’s a wish for continuity.
In 1895, Bertha Pappenheim (aka Freud’s patient Anna O) took daydreaming up a notch. She developed the art of self-hypnosis. The name she gave to her lapses into unconsciousness: clouds. In 1904, panchromatic film split blue from red and lit up the sky to image a new photographic reality: clouds. Cinema’s inside joke: all the world’s still a stage. Kodak’s inversion: all the world’s a stage still. Who gets the last laugh? To wear away a fantasy when attachment oversteps: stock up on lightbulbs. Leave the slide in the projector for 21 days. There is no up or down here; don't worry if it won't advance. Like sky-clouds, image-clouds fade: put a slide in a window, watch the light come in, see the image appear, fade, and degrade the emulsion. The image-cloud decays and returns to thin air. Stay in the clouds until they lose their referent and heat wears away the emulsion.
All of the materiality, the blood, sinews, muscles and so on, all of the workers who put the clouds in the sky at Kodak, who could have stopped the machine from moving forward were, also, caught up in the clouds. Where would a cloud dweller dwell if the clouds burnt off? “The thing about revolution is that it changes things” (Romer).
How could a single corporation craft a singular visual habitat that becomes the archival structure that will format how our memories and attachments endure and degrade? “Once again we stand in awe of gigantic entities massively distributed in time and space, in such a way that we can only point to tiny slices of them at a time. Once again we find our faith shaken.” (Morton) The corporation waxes immortal in its monumentality. The grandeur, grandiosity, of the corporate form whose magic tricks push us into a world stylized after its imaging powers. Magical thinking: a human habit of drawing nourishment from thin air by desiring that reality conform to fantasy. Born unstable, it holds the possibility for play, laughter, tragicomedy, diversion. The magical thinking of the corporation: grotesque ideas from wooden brains, the world upside down, the despotism of the means of production, fantasy distorted into machinery. The corporation manufactured the dream, crystallized a world in which the creep creep creep of extraction into imagination standardizes capacities for dreaming. The inverse of magical thinking: burning off the clouds.
Burn off the clouds the way clouds burn themselves off, degrading in the blazing light of the sun. It is possible to remontage an image, tease open the process of getting attached and letting go, and refuse the snapshot’s loud because unspoken messaging about “the way we were.” The historical, shareable scales of injury: what cannot be repaired can sometimes be remediated. “All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears” (Sontag). Film, for all of its wreckage, remains an incredibly flexible medium; you can push it, pull it, and it can be induced to materialize that which it's not supposed to materialize. The chemical decay of and in film is a form of historical commentary all of its own: it is an opening resistance of material to the forms imposed on it. Decay is in some ways a refusal of the infinite extension of one future audience over another, the audience fashioned after Kodak, the white nuclear post-war American family. If decay is not inevitable, if decay is intentional, then can it be occupied strategically, the no longer cared for? The inverse of abandonment is letting go.
Take another one just in case; use up the last shots on the roll; get a disposable camera for the kids to take with them; take another one just in case; put the best pictures in the album; get a second set of prints for free; it’s digital, no need to save film, take a dozen just in case; tag your friend in the shot, tag your friends who weren’t there. The content is real. The form is everything. The Kodak moment never stands still.
It is difficult to get rid of something that is no longer there. That ultimate paranoid, the sovereign, will happily lose their head in the immortalizing form of currency. Minted and put into circulation, jangling in pocket and rubbed between fingers, the image-sovereign goes on and on about how the machinery of commercial society, no matter how virtual its tokens and would-be departures from mercantilism aka big government, cannot do without the stamp of political authority, whose reach capital promises to extend and yet proportionately devalues. Lender of last resort; bank bailout; tax cuts; industrial subsidy. The corporate form eats at the table of state, and then slowly begins gnawing at its legs.
“Nothing to see here” puts everything on display.

You can view documentation and read more about the exhibition here.

good morning, moon: An Anchor in Daylight / August 3, 2023 by Caroline Picard

To the naked eye, the moon presents like a dot of cream with predictably fluctuating bounds, a constant and gentle observer of terrestrial life. Often associated with female power, menstruation, and fertility, it organizes the tides of our seas, lakes, and bodies, like an intermediary administrator of earthly and celestial movement. Although inherently unphotogenic, the moon nevertheless maintains a presence in human art and allegory. Its earliest known representation, the “Nebra Sky Disk,” dates back to 1600 BC and is believed to reconcile lunar and solar calendars—a challenge that appears fairly often in ancient traditions and astronomical mathematics. According to Aztec legend, for instance, a rivalry between two prospective sun gods, Nanahuatzin and Tēcciztēcatl, wasn’t settled until another god threw a rabbit in Tēcciztēcatl’s face, making him the lesser source of light—the moon. That third party deity saved the Earth, ensuring it wouldn’t burn up from too much light. And while being the moon might seem like a lesser prize, it remains forever encoded in anecdotes of cosmological balance, distant yet bound to Earth and Sun at once.

Multidisciplinary artist Maddie Vaccaro began photographing the moon during the pandemic. In a practice she refers to as diaristic and meditative, she took digital cameos of the moon to share on social media, instilling a sense of quotidian stability during a time of collective crisis and isolation. “Photographing the moon became a meditative pause and ritual,” Vaccaro says in a recent conversation about her work. “Every time I saw it in the sky, I would stop and try to capture an image of it. The moon reminded me to stop and take a breath.” The impetus for this exercise came when Vaccaro noticed the moon’s presence in daylight. The moon became omnipresent after that, coloring Vaccaro’s life with its fluctuations and moods. She posted affiliated photos with timestamps and diaristic statements like “Shy moon 9:22 pm,” “Home moon, 4:57pm,” “Golden hour moon, feeling cozy, 4:50pm,” “Full moon on the end of my Saturn Return 7:08 pm,” and so on. These slight observational descriptions reconcile the sun’s hour, the moon’s position, and Vaccaro’s own subjective mood during a period of notorious uncertainty. As she puts it, “I was moving through ‘feeling-knowing’ instead of ‘knowing-knowing.’” With the moon as anchor, the posts capture her personal relationship to the cosmos, triangulating her sense of place-feeling additionally with the virtual presence of friends and followers.

The vernacular character of these image-time-phrase posts and their mode of dissemination is key. “Capturing a really beautifully composed, clear photo of the moon hasn’t been the point for me,” she says. These are not precious events, in other words. In one image, Vaccaro posted the moon reflected in a puddle on the ground. One sees the cement under the reflection—earth and sky appear simultaneously through the vehicle of water, or residual rain. The puddle makes a metaphor for social media—a disembodied social arrangement of algorithms and marketing cloaked in social camaraderie. This space was especially vital during the pandemic and has since transformed every aspect of human life. In fact both social media and the weather have become exceedingly present in the past few years, both driven by capitalism and consumption with side effects that pressurize social and ecological communities. Yet social media is notoriously devoid of more-than-human presence, except by way of representation. Vaccaro introduces the moon as it would appear in the sky and reciprocally locating a “ground” in the technoverse. Instagram becomes the reflective puddle that, in this case, looks up and elsewhere.

For her exhibition, good morning, moon, Vaccaro transposed an excerpt of 360 lunar photographs on a fabric mural hanging in Co-Prosperity Sphere’s storefront window. Gridded images in the mural sometimes include cityscape elements, sometimes just the sky. They pass progressively through different times of day, from dark to light to dark again, like the course of a day. But unlike the original data event of her posts, faces of the moon are divorced from text in this installation. Excerpted texts are instead reprinted on two separately framed text panels in a second corner window display. Each block of white typeset text stands out against an image of the Chicago shoreline. Both panels hang in cloud-like frames of white curvilinear forms. Divorcing the originally-paired text and image underscores the translation of the image’s original virtual occasion. Further down in a third window display, Vaccaro has installed twenty-eight ceramic works—referencing the moon’s twenty-eight day cycle, alternately round and square slabs, each with patterned facades that hang in an almost checkerboard fashion, seven by four, or seven days, four weeks. These ceramics are also part of Vaccaro’s meditative practice and coincided with her moon portraiture. “The ceramic works have also been a working anchor/release/therapeutic method of making art that allows me to access a calmer part of my brain.” Vaccaro created a plywood wall to support these ceramics. “I fabricated a cloud-like plywood wall for them to hang on closer to the street.” The cloud again echoes virtual space, reiterating the ways in which Vaccaro makes social technology commensurable with astronomical events by engaging materials—clay, glazes, photography—in a conscious but habitual practice that grounds her daily awareness in a place of making, despite collective precarity and personal loss. This third and final window of ceramics additionally reinforces Vaccaro’s interrogation of organic forms and straight lines. Ceramic slabs are alternately square and round. The moon is always framed by a screen. The fabric, itself soft, and depicting images of the moon, is divided by multiple rectangles which again echo the screen. The flow of time is gridded out by the Roman calendar.

The moon’s real-life presence inevitably eclipses any photographic representation taken with a terrestrial camera but its charisma inspires us to try. Perhaps in doing so, the earthbound among us might better conceive a long lunar view, an aspiration invariably conflated with wisdom and serenity. And while social media platforms seem to simulate a space of non-placeness—free from geography, time, and planetary occasion, we cannot avoid the ways in which those material factors govern our lives. No matter the tycoons who want their own tourist space programs, or twice-indicted former presidents who blithely encourage systemic social injustice, or the catastrophic rise of climate-induced migration, good morning moon, is a welcome reminder to pause, take a breath for a minute, and be in a world with the moon.

The Nowness of Deep Needle Reminds Us We’re Alive / March 17, 2023 by Aricka Foreman

The Nowness of Deep Needle Reminds Us We’re Alive

by Aricka Foreman

A lavender poster reads “Environment/ Must/ Resist/ This Fascist/ American/ Experiment,” facing West 32nd street on the corner of South Morgan. I ask Angela Davis Fegan about a phrase in her artist statement, how this location sits on a racial fault line.

The late afternoon light bends on the corner of her sunglasses, and stretches across the glass of the building where the letterpress posters—some of them sunbleached as we move closer to the Spring equinox— call out the persistent violence we know too well and keep having to survive through.

“There was a time Black folks couldn’t walk past Halsted without being harassed,” she said, and went on to point out some of the origin of the dried flora scattered just below the mixed media paintings.

By the mid-60s, my grandparents—having migrated from Mississippi—made their way North again, to a Black suburb just outside of Detroit called Inkster. While my grandmother's siblings, extended cousins and the like still live on the West Side, most of what I came to learn about Chicago came from someone I loved who already left.

The letterpress display comprised of handmade paper and book making material stacked with slogans that interrogate and make urgent calls the public can respond to: DEFEND/ BLACK/ LIVES/ DEFUND/ CPD; ACCESS TO TREATMENT IS/ FREEDOM/ DENIAL/ OF CARE IS/ VIOLENCE; RIOT/ MOBILITY/ SPECTRUM/ INTERSECTION; MY BODY IS/ UNGOVERNABLE/ AND ITS AGENCY/ CAN’T BE/ LEGI/SLATED. Yet in order for these demands to take root, they must be accepted as truisms in relation to our immediate experiences, knowing that more than one thing can be true at the same time.

But fixed just to this display’s left is an altar: apothecary jars of different shapes and sizes, filled with alchemy; dried eucalyptus and rose petals, splatters of fried and faded menstrual blood. All manner of preserved natural matter inside tequila, rum and whiskey bottles. This space is interior, tender and powerful: and kept uninterrupted behind the glass of the gallery.

Above it sits “Pilsen Window”, a 48’’ x 60’’portrait of the artist and a lover who reappears and pivots us between this move from slogan to activation and conjure, to these intimate pieces that face a street privy to neighborhood folks and visitors alike. And the portrait does the “swing-door” work of inviting those who pass through and those coming home to cross-paths where the fault line doesn’t have to exist if folks don’t want it to.

At night, the exhibition is lit in such a way, you get pulled into the text, into the texture and materiality you might miss, distracted by the glare and reflection of the day. Honestly, it’s at this hour where the work feels its most alive and urgent.

The eucalyptus branches on “Maya Fog: (2023) 24’’ x 36’’, rendered from a photo shot from the rooftop of the artist's print studio, seem to reach out like a hand while the figure in the piece is observed and preserved in time amongst the tall Summer grass. In an industrial-scape, this pause mimics a tender moment of fugivity.

“Gynecology” (2022) 30’’ x 15’’ absorbs and reflects so much texture and variance beneath the light, where its warmth forbids you to ignore how your desire to reach toward: vibrant paint, vegan leather, menstrual blood, paper prints on reclaimed wood. I found myself, tracing my fingers along the window though I knew I couldn’t reach it. The piece's composition does its subversion: a G-spot expansive through the gradient tonal hues in acrylic paint in flesh tones and left to dry in its suspended gravity, incorporating ephemera.

And that’s the tension. As evidenced in this nasty political race for Mayor, and this deeply persistent, communal struggle for liberation that folks forget about until they’re reminded of their desires for resistance; encountering “Deep Needle” requires us to apprehend a clear vision of freedom for everyone until we face what’s exclusionary in ourselves. And root out what does not work in a committed, everyday practice. It’s crossing paths and making room for one another. Dedicating ourselves to a rigorous “paying attention” in the advent of a hypervigilant surveillance state barreling down the tracks with fascists not only conducting the train but choosing alignment with the architects of the tracks.

We need a moment to sit with “Uterine” (2023) 24’’ x 36’’ and ask ourselves how we’re divinely connected, and how we show up to prove that old, multi-ancestral design we’re all tapped into if we listen and we don’t run. A possibility rooted in justice that prioritizes care, of seeing those who’ve we historically and consistently ignored and erased. And so I stood and soaked it in: this vulnerable and urgent, interconnected archive amidst small emblems of grief and healing. And the discipline that a better world exists so close we can touch it, if we tell it like it is and fight to make it clear.

And that this space for co-conspiracy is rooted in making a plan together. A constant in Angela Davis Fegan’s practice is accessibility, that art ownership doesn’t exist to merely serve the wealthy set on building their acquisitional portfolios. The public can take away letterpress calls for rebellion they can place in their homes from inside the Co-Prosperity space and share these objects with their communities. Leave their utterances and questions in lavender chalk on the bathroom wall. As Fegan notes “It creates a sense of precariousness that my experience can be erased at any time. My work is made to ensure that it will not be.”

And in doing so, the artist reminds us that we too are temporary. And we can make the most of our lives by pushing the silence at bay, by keeping it from forgetting ours and one anothers names.