Lots of general overview
LINK
Showing posts with label Chase. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chase. Show all posts
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Fink and Model
It is worth noting that Larry Fink studied with Lisette Model. Lisette Model, "Woman with Veil," 1949, Right
Forbidden Pictures - More Images
Fink on Teaching
"In a commercial culture, imagination is the last element to be nurtured. I try to give students the courage to exercise and enjoy the pleasure of their imagination."
Monday, November 5, 2007
The Human Condition
One thing that strikes me about both Larry Fink and Nick Nixon is the way they handle their subject matter (the human condition) with a gentle, human touch. Whether it is Nixon's AIDs patients or Fink's boxers, the idea that these are individual, feeling, living, breathing people is always very apparent. The sadness, the joy, the growth, everything thing about being human is in their work.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
"I know that I often fail – in the grand hope that a good one (photograph) might evoke everybody’s home – but I want to try anyway. It’s a way of making moments of whim, of feeling, have more shape than words could ever give them."
"I always look hard at whatever is in front of me. If I like what I see, I have to make a photograph of it. I just can’t help myself. That, and because I love them so, are why there are so many pictures of my home and my family."
Nixon talking about his Lodima Press Portfolio Book "Home" from 5B4. Link
"I always look hard at whatever is in front of me. If I like what I see, I have to make a photograph of it. I just can’t help myself. That, and because I love them so, are why there are so many pictures of my home and my family."
Nixon talking about his Lodima Press Portfolio Book "Home" from 5B4. Link
Fink Boxing Review
Larry Fink
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART / BOXING, POWERHOUSE BOOKS, NEW YORK, USA
In the course of a long career as a self-categorised leftist social documentarian, Larry Fink has insinuated himself among rich white people at their social gatherings, and amongst poor white trash at theirs. The tension between the objective and voyeuristic aspects of this kind of work is not uninteresting, but problems of finding an appropriate viewing distance may arise. Boxing, the subject matter of his latest exhibition, is especially open to this criticism. Not only is it rife with racial complications, but its intensity is a lure for people who wouldn’t normally have anything to do with it (Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind).
Perhaps Fink is wary of this, for only one of his 23 black and white photographs of boxers, mostly club fighters, taken between 1989 and 1995, shows a fight in progress. Boxing, Blue Horizon, Philadelphia, PA, 1990 (1990) depicted two fighters taken from a steep angle, high up in the crowd at the legendary Philly venue. But the real focus is on a spectator in the foreground, with his back to the camera, who has jumped from his seat with his arms raised. There are equally few fight scenes in the more extensive book version of the project. Instead, Fink has chosen to concentrate on the immediate, grimy, sweat-soaked periphery of the ring: the gym and the locker room.
Many of the images are about men preparing to fight. There are a number of photographs of locker-room scenes in which the boxer is curiously alienated from his surrounding trainers, seconds and various hangers-on. A photograph from the Blue Horizon in 1991 is particularly tense: a black boxer lies on a training table in a white robe, his hands wrapped and folded on his chest. But he goes almost unnoticed at first glance, beneath the oblique gaze of a white man in a suit, at whose shoulder stands a white fighter in street clothes. In another image, from Champs Gym, 1993, a small, intense, white boxer is warming up with his back to a dingy wall. His eyes are downcast and his wrapped hands reveal the swollen knuckles of his little fingers, his slight frame dwarfed by the back, shoulder and stubbly profile of his trainer. In another image from Champs, a black boxer crouches in a dark training ring, but the image is dominated by the trainer’s arm extending out of the shadows, his hand on the boxer’s head.
In the foreword to the book, Fink quotes approvingly from the writer Katherine Dunn, suggesting that the boxing gym is a space for intimacy between men, unsullied by questions of motive, etc. But little of this intimacy is revealed by the photographs.
What does emerge is all too familiar. Boxers are typically working-class men from minority populations, some of whom develop extraordinary physical skills and mental discipline. But in the course of doing so they are, also typically, exploited and patronised. That Fink understands this is clear from the evidence of an image so dark that the gym can barely be made out: a young, edgy-looking black man is being spoken to by a much larger bearded white man in a suit. But does anyone really need to be told, yet again, that boxing is a crucible of both masculinity and hope, or that it is an avenue of escape (however qualified) from the ghetto?
It is certainly true that very specific forms of intimacy develop in the gym. It is also true that they develop within a certain framework, motivated by the prospect of making some money. Even the trainer wants to make money off the boxer he loves (listen for him saying ‘we’ before a fight, and ‘he’ after his man loses). The successful boxer must not only beat his opponent, but come to terms with the corruption of the business he’s in. Fink comes closest to capturing this in one of his simplest images, a portrait of a black fighter in a locker room at the Blue Horizon. Robed, with hands wrapped, gloves beside him, he has the ageless face of a veteran in a sport that shortens lifespans, and is utterly alone and self-absorbed, throwing miniature punches as he visualises what he knows is to come.
The problem with Fink’s vision of boxing is that it is ultimately too peripheral. He seems not to have come to terms with the other side of the relationships between men in the gym. That is, the intimacy that develops between opponents in the ring, when everything else becomes secondary. Fink doesn’t demonstrate much grasp of the respect, the tacit agreements, the spite, the wide range of understandings that develop within fights. So he can’t always persuade us that he really sees what he’s looking at, outside the ring. He risks only giving us more of the stylised seediness that is stereotypical in representations of boxing.
Frazer Ward
Link
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART / BOXING, POWERHOUSE BOOKS, NEW YORK, USA
In the course of a long career as a self-categorised leftist social documentarian, Larry Fink has insinuated himself among rich white people at their social gatherings, and amongst poor white trash at theirs. The tension between the objective and voyeuristic aspects of this kind of work is not uninteresting, but problems of finding an appropriate viewing distance may arise. Boxing, the subject matter of his latest exhibition, is especially open to this criticism. Not only is it rife with racial complications, but its intensity is a lure for people who wouldn’t normally have anything to do with it (Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind).
Perhaps Fink is wary of this, for only one of his 23 black and white photographs of boxers, mostly club fighters, taken between 1989 and 1995, shows a fight in progress. Boxing, Blue Horizon, Philadelphia, PA, 1990 (1990) depicted two fighters taken from a steep angle, high up in the crowd at the legendary Philly venue. But the real focus is on a spectator in the foreground, with his back to the camera, who has jumped from his seat with his arms raised. There are equally few fight scenes in the more extensive book version of the project. Instead, Fink has chosen to concentrate on the immediate, grimy, sweat-soaked periphery of the ring: the gym and the locker room.
Many of the images are about men preparing to fight. There are a number of photographs of locker-room scenes in which the boxer is curiously alienated from his surrounding trainers, seconds and various hangers-on. A photograph from the Blue Horizon in 1991 is particularly tense: a black boxer lies on a training table in a white robe, his hands wrapped and folded on his chest. But he goes almost unnoticed at first glance, beneath the oblique gaze of a white man in a suit, at whose shoulder stands a white fighter in street clothes. In another image, from Champs Gym, 1993, a small, intense, white boxer is warming up with his back to a dingy wall. His eyes are downcast and his wrapped hands reveal the swollen knuckles of his little fingers, his slight frame dwarfed by the back, shoulder and stubbly profile of his trainer. In another image from Champs, a black boxer crouches in a dark training ring, but the image is dominated by the trainer’s arm extending out of the shadows, his hand on the boxer’s head.
In the foreword to the book, Fink quotes approvingly from the writer Katherine Dunn, suggesting that the boxing gym is a space for intimacy between men, unsullied by questions of motive, etc. But little of this intimacy is revealed by the photographs.
What does emerge is all too familiar. Boxers are typically working-class men from minority populations, some of whom develop extraordinary physical skills and mental discipline. But in the course of doing so they are, also typically, exploited and patronised. That Fink understands this is clear from the evidence of an image so dark that the gym can barely be made out: a young, edgy-looking black man is being spoken to by a much larger bearded white man in a suit. But does anyone really need to be told, yet again, that boxing is a crucible of both masculinity and hope, or that it is an avenue of escape (however qualified) from the ghetto?
It is certainly true that very specific forms of intimacy develop in the gym. It is also true that they develop within a certain framework, motivated by the prospect of making some money. Even the trainer wants to make money off the boxer he loves (listen for him saying ‘we’ before a fight, and ‘he’ after his man loses). The successful boxer must not only beat his opponent, but come to terms with the corruption of the business he’s in. Fink comes closest to capturing this in one of his simplest images, a portrait of a black fighter in a locker room at the Blue Horizon. Robed, with hands wrapped, gloves beside him, he has the ageless face of a veteran in a sport that shortens lifespans, and is utterly alone and self-absorbed, throwing miniature punches as he visualises what he knows is to come.
The problem with Fink’s vision of boxing is that it is ultimately too peripheral. He seems not to have come to terms with the other side of the relationships between men in the gym. That is, the intimacy that develops between opponents in the ring, when everything else becomes secondary. Fink doesn’t demonstrate much grasp of the respect, the tacit agreements, the spite, the wide range of understandings that develop within fights. So he can’t always persuade us that he really sees what he’s looking at, outside the ring. He risks only giving us more of the stylised seediness that is stereotypical in representations of boxing.
Frazer Ward
Link
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Since 1975, Nicholas Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters producing a single photograph each year featuring the sisters in the same order (youngest to oldest from left to right) though at various locations along the East Coast. From left to right we see Heather, Mimi, Bebe (Nixon’s wife), and Laurie as they change and grow from year to year in image after image. The Brown Sisters series functions as an ever-evolving portrait of the siblings and their relationship to one another over time.
Although best known for his ongoing portrait series of his wife and her sisters, Nicholas Nixon addresses many traditional themes of documentary photography – the family, the elderly, the ill – essentially pictures of people of all and any type. Using an 8-by-10-inch camera, Nixon captures the essential textures, tonalities, and expressions of the people he photographs. The father/daughter portrait Yazoo City, Mississippi is from a series Nixon made of people on their front porches.
Link
Friday, October 12, 2007
Nixon has said...
When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large.
Link
Fink reflects on his work...
Some people mistake my work for satire. I don’t object because satire is a powerful force, so if the work is seen that way it serves one function. But I don’t agree. The pictures are taken in the spirit of finding myself in the other, or finding the other in myself. They are taken in the spirit of empathy. Emotional, physical, sensual empathy. This work is political, but not polemical. There is potential for the formation of an underlying theme in how the system suppresses and distorts both the rich and the poor, but it is not Marx who chooses the characters in this book; it is lust, attraction, and destiny.
Link
Monday, October 8, 2007
Nixon Bio
Nicholas Nixon was born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied American literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received an MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Nixon has worked as an independent photographer since 1974. He is the recipient of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowships, and a Massachusetts Council for the Arts “New Works” Grant. He currently is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
Nixon has been exploring portraiture and social photography since the 1970s. Although best known for The Brown Sisters, he has created several other series noted for their humanity and restrained emotion. Nixon often spends a year or two exploring his chosen theme: among his subjects have been nursing home residents (Old People), AIDS patients in their final months (People with Aids), and Boston schoolchildren (School).
His photographs have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has published many books of photographs, including: Nicholas Nixon (2003); A City Seen (2001); The Brown Sisters (1999); School: Photographs from Three Schools (1998); People with AIDS (1991); Family Pictures (1991); Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People (1988); and Photographs from One Year (1983). Nixon’s photographs are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.
From Link
Fink Bio
"Larry Fink's photographs are like the stage in a darkened theater. His hand-held flash splendidly illuminates the details of the drama before us and reveals the nuance of the personal moment," wrote Susan Kismaric, associate curator, Museum of Modern Art. Larry has been photographing for almost fifty-one years and teaching for forty-one. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A major retrospective of his work was on tour in Europe for almost ten years visiting more museums than it is possible to mention. He recently had a show at Camerawork in Berlin and opening this month is a show at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in LA. In 1984, Aperture published a book of his work, Social Graces. A new edition of this classic book was published in 2001 by powerHouse Books, who has also published two other monographs of Larry's work, Boxing and Runway, and a catalog published in 2004, Forbidden Pictures, 07/19/01 which was a political satire prompted by the GW Bush Regime. In 2005, Phaidon Press published Larry Fink by Laurie Dahlberg. A new book was just published by Damiani Editore entitled Somewhere There's Music. It is a compliation of 50 years of images from the book at Villa delle Rose in Bolonga, Italy. There are two Somewhere There's Music shows coming up in Italy. The first is in April 2007 at Galleria Forni in Milan. The second is from June 21 to September 9, 2007 at Museo Alinari in Florence. Another recent book release is a collection of praying mantis entitled Primal Elegance published by Lodima Press. He has taught at Yale University, Cooper Union, and the New School and has conducted numerous workshops in the United States and Europe. Since 1988 he has been a professor of photography at Bard. In addition to his personal photography and his teaching, he has photographed for an international array of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone and has shot ads for Adidas, Nike, Gucci, MasterCard, Cunard, and Chivas."
From his Bard page
From his Bard page
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