Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg. Via Edible Geography.
Images of interstellar yogurt lids as a series do the needful. In aggregate, they discombobulate further, make the familiar unfamiliar long enough for us to have a sober acid flashback. I am less enthusiastic about the collections of photographs of street detritus or pocket lint (actually my pocket lint is fascinating, come to think of it).
Thanks to Less Is More, I now know who to blame. Ed Ruscha, look what you did to us. Wikipedia tells me Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) was “a major influence on the emerging artist’s book culture, especially in America.”
I think the emerging artist’s book is something like “You must look at what I see and find it just as fascinating.” Curated collections of the contents of your bag/purse/satchel or a lot of Tumblrs devoted to a single theme run this risk as well. Fifty years ago, Ruscha might have been the first to demand his audience/reader to stare at the mundane with a kind of religious devotion. Now we have the internet.
Less Is More
In the early sixties, Ed Ruscha begins his first projects of series of photographic art books that documented ordinary aspects of life in Los Angeles. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), or Nine Swimming Pools and Broken Glass (1968) are some examples.
I was trying to find a copy of the Peter Jennings “edited” photographic history of 20th century America — The Century — but got lost in the library stacks and came out with something else entirely. (something amazing I promise) What I was looking for was the one and only image of Asian Americans that appeared in his version of 20th century U.S. history. When I wonder why we as a community spend so much time fretting over media representation, I remember that the single photo of an Asian American was an armed Korean shopkeeper, fulfilling his assigned role as the middleman minority. This image is a close approximation (found at Ask a Korean).
Upcoming 20th anniversary events on the L.A. riots
The L.A. riots signified a lot of things for my generation — the first home video of police brutality, race relations in a multicultural America, the Mad Max dystopian city that would find its sequel in images of post-Katrina New Orleans. I kinda wish there was a way to talk about this on the internet in a real way. Something more than hash tags and remember whens.
"The very act of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture."
— Susan Sontag, On Photography.
"Issues of surveillance, and the blurred line between private and public space were central to the formation of the city. In the early 70’s—when I first photographed New York—the street and public spaces were fair game for a photographer, and people not only tolerated but enjoyed having their picture taken. But in the 90s, I found myself questioning how a photographer functions in public space: what is acceptable and what is not, because people were, by then, sensitive to the intrusiveness of cameras (of all kinds) in our culture."
— Mitch Epstein, who popped up in the New York Times recently for his photos of urban trees.
