Sociability & Surveillance Across Photography at the New York Public Library

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The exhibition “Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing” pulls out an impressive fraction of the New York Public Library’s collection of almost five million (!) photographs. Predicated on the notion that photography “has always been social,” the exhibition justifies itself from the second you walk in the door.

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As you enter the room, you see yourself in a tilted mirror hanging from the ceiling and become aware of the text on the floor in front of you, arranged to be read as a caption for the inevitable selfie you take from this vantage point. (See more willing participants in self-surveillance here.) This gimmick effectively highlights the idea of surveillance–as do the photographs of Google street views by Doug Rickard on view–but also our social willingness to implicate ourselves: to report on our own movements and put ourselves in the public eye.

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Taking a long view of photography as a social element in culture, the exhibition has a fantastic display of international carte de visite among its many thematic vitrines. These small portraits, popularized in the 1850s, became a fashionable form of calling card, intended to left at the host’s home by a visitor. The black-and-white scenes are not always straightforward portraits; they are full of character and sometimes feature people posing together, small children, or people in costume. The back of the card is marked by the photography studio that produced it.

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A popular pastime in the latter half of the 19th c. was viewing twinned images, as seen below, through a stereoscope. A stereoscope is a viewing device that holds the images just enough removed from your face that your eyes naturally blend the two side-by-side images to create the illusion of depth. Although this might seem like a solitary pursuit, it was common for families and visitors to gather together to view stereoscopic images. Stereoscopic cards might portray landscapes, street scenes, or people, and they were often sold in themed sets.

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While there is a slew of notable images on view–iconic WPA photos, works by Ansel Adams, more recent projects like Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip–the art history nerd in me was most excited to see images from the origin of photography, when people were still discovering how to make images from light. One of the first vitrines in the exhibition contains an example of the beautifully deep blue cyanotypes that Anna Atkins created of algae and other plants in the early 1840s (the image below is representative of this body of work). Atkins used a new technique to create these images in order to serve a scientific purpose: as botanical specimens.

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Next to her cyanotype lies an original bound volume of “The Pencil of Nature.” William Henry Fox Talbot published this book of photography in 1844-6, featuring scenes of china cabinets that showed how photography could be used to take inventory as well as studies of cottage doorways with a carefully askew broom. With images like the latter, Talbot made the case that photography was an art as much as a science. So unfamiliar was the public with photography, Talbot felt the need to explain to the reader that these images were “photogenic drawings” made by light rather than the human hand–thus the title.

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The debate over photography as art or science has continued, as the topographical studies of the American West, ethnographic documentation, and Google street views in this exhibition attest. Often today we look back at such images through an aesthetic lens: seeing artistic expression rather than documentary veracity. People have approached photography with many attitudes and purposes in the medium’s relatively short history, and I couldn’t help feeling that “The Public Eye”‘s dense, loosely organized viewing experience reflects that diversity and messiness rather than attempting to streamline it into a more coherent exhibition.

This treasure trove of seminal photographs is on view at the iconic Schwarzman Building on 42nd street through January 3, 2016, so plenty of time to visit and revisit. Check online for the schedule of free docent-led tours.

Collaged poetry: Robert Seydel at the Queens Museum

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Collaged poetry, or poems via the pictorial medium of collage? Robert Seydel confuses distinction between the visual and literal in his works on paper. When Queens-based artist Robert Seydel died in 2011 at age 50, he left behind of corpus of pages older than he was–taken from vintage albums and books, thick and yellowed with age, to which the artist added found images, paint, and words. Now many of these collages line the walls of the Queens Museum as part of the exhibition Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter while pages from his journals and typed poems fill cases in the center of the room. Playful, dense, intimate–this is a show that rewards careful attention and voyeuristic complicity.

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I characterize the act of looking here as voyeuristic because the intimacy of scale is combined with the intimacy of the diarist’s musings. The first-person viewpoint of Ruth, an alter-ego Seydel adopts in these quasi-fictional accounts, creates a framing narrative to these fragmentary poems and paragraphs. Seydel tells an inaccurate story of Ruth and Saul, people who in real life were siblings–his aunt and uncle. Pages might describe Ruth’s obsession with artist Joseph Cornell. Seydel knew Cornell, working as his studio assistant, but the one-sided love affair was (probably) his own invention.

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To a great degree, his own concerns blended with those of his fictional aunt, to the point that he said in an interview:

She’s so taken over part of my art-making function that I don’t really question her authenticity anymore. I thought originally I wanted to inhabit another person; now she inhabits me.

What keeps the interest of the viewer in such elaborate, personal arcana is a strong sense of humor, like in the work pictured above. The protagonists are pictured with Ruth’s emblem–the hare–like respectable 1940s space aliens having a family portrait made.

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Seydel uses text in highly visual, nuanced ways. Even when typing up pages of poetry, the artist carefully spaced the words and allowed room for the insertion of stars or painted hares. “A picture always wants to be something else” Seydel said, and one has the sense that in his hands pictures and words were mercurial, amorphous vehicles for expression.

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Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter is on view at the Queens Museum of Art through September 27, 2015. Plaid Duchamp Recording in Magenta, a complimentary event featuring photographs, poetry, and 8mm short films inspired by Joseph Cornell, is happening this Sunday, August 16 from 3 to 5 pm.

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Narrative, Fantasy, Artifice: Curating “Emerges VIII” at ATHICA

Winnie Gier, Last Summer, 2015, Archival Inkjet Print

Winnie Gier, Last Summer, 2015, Archival Inkjet Print

Flagpole magazine recently reviewed an exhibition I curated at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA) called Emerges VIII, of which I said “Rather than relaying an ordinary story, their works often suggested something artificial—perhaps with a hint of a darker underbelly, or something so removed from reality as to be in a fantasy land—thus with the clear suggestion that it is only illusion and not real. Both qualities are mildly subversive, and highly entertaining.” As ATHICA’s eighth annual exhibition of work by emerging local artists, I approached the exhibition as a chance to introduce exciting new work by younger artists to the local community. My three key words were narrative, artifice, and the fantastical.

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Installation view of Saegan Moran’s Vinyl Forest (2015, Found objects, resin, vinyl) with Winnie Gier’s photographs behind. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

I loved having the chance to show photographer Winnie Gier‘s saturated, strange environs next to Saegan Moran‘s Vinyl Forest, both turning the natural into highly artificial states. Work by Jessica Machacek also deals with ideas of artificiality and nature–often in terms of consumerism, as one can see in the blinds displayed on the left in the image below.

Installation view of (L to R): Jessica Machacek’s Privacy Plant (2015) and Aquarium (2013), Michael Ross’s Checkered Hearts (2015), and Cameron Lyden’s Of Those Who Call the Woods Their Home (2015). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Machacek’s scenic window dressing with a view to nowhere exploits the idea of the picture plane as window–something Michael Ross takes up in his large narrative oil painting representing an impossible scene of soldiers wrapped in a Christmas fantasy in the midst of a snowy landscape. Although historically based, elements of glowing tree and presents amidst the tundra seems unlikely; If this is a view, it is one onto a scene of magical realism.

Detail, Cameron Lyden's Of Those Who Call the Woods Their Home, 2015. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Detail, Cameron Lyden’s Of Those Who Call the Woods Their Home, 2015. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Guns lean together on the right of the composition, abandoned, and recalling the functionless yet beautiful tools Cameron Lyden has hung from the wall to its right. His installation features carefully fashioned objects of brass and wood, resembling but not quite functioning as tools.

Ben Rouse, Untitled series, 2015. Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Finally, Ben Rouse presents a series of 10 black and white prints that range from the whimsical to the serious. Viewers are left to construct their own meaning from the mysterious symbology of eggs and contorted body postures.

Emerges VIII is on view at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, GA through August 23, 2015.

Installation view of Saegan Moran's Salivia Diamonds (2015) (L) and (2015) (R). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Installation view of Saegan Moran’s Saliva Diamonds (2015) (L) and Vinyl Forest (2015) (R). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Installation view of Jessica Machacek's (2013). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.

Installation view of Jessica Machacek’s Aquarium (2013). Photograph by Emily Myerscough.