new and used
Thursday, April 12, 2007
We've had some busy times at the home office the last couple of weeks, with most of my time consumed by the production of a new mega-compilation of royalty free images, soon to be released by Ingram Publishing as a follow-up to our 2006 compilation of Essence.
But now my thoughts turn away from metadata and model releases, and back to a consideration of photography as an expressive technology, especially as materialized in the form of photographic books. Hanging on my mind for the last couple of weeks is my latest purchase, an odd little volume entitled New and Used. Instigated and visualized by Marc Joseph and supported by the verbal poetics of such cultural luminaries as Jonathon Lethem, Thurston Moore, Nick Tosches and others.
I normally would have passed over Joseph's monograph, if I had encountered it at all, but I glanced through a friend's copy while attending a session of Matthew Stadler's Using Global Media workshop, and I also met Joseph when he visited Portland, highlighting March's session of the Backroom dinner and discussion series.
New and Used features selections of Joseph's photographs of used book and record stores, including Portland's Jackpot Records and Powell's Books. My interest in photography more typically runs in the direction of bodies and faces, but Joseph's work presents a number of small enticements that motivated a recent purchase of New and Used.
The first catch was an embodied one: in her essay for the book, Reed College curator Stephanie Snyder adopts the poetic voice of a young Greek man and his physical intimacy with an older partner. "While playing nursemaid to your orgasm," he addresses his lover, a single line that evokes both the gender ambiguity of the literary moment, and intimates after a decentered kind of sexuality that defines the way desire and photography interrelate in my own creative subjectivity.
The second is purely photographic, and relates both to Joseph's craft and to his capacity for correlating geometry and the photographic technology. When I browsed the photographs in the book, I registered at an unconscious level that may of the photographs were special, at a purely formal level, and in a way that transcended the familiarity (or even the banality?) of the scenes depicted.
Only at the Back Room, when Joseph mentioned in passing that he produced the photography using a 4x5 view camera and sheet film, did it occur to me what that intangible pleasure might be, and why it was so surprising. In my own photographic world, I have reached the point where it seems almost inconceivable that I would produce photography on film, much less via application of the methodical and intentional processes required by the big box of the view camera. And yet Jospeh's revelation explained his photography for me; the rectilinear perspective of musical and literary grids could never be seen in material space, and could only be experienced through Joseph's craft.
A final connection derives, for me, from the settings themselves. Using Global Media colleague Scott Wayne Indiana has expressed dissatisfaction with Joseph's project because he finds it too familiar, because it does not reveal a new way of seeing the commonplace settings for which Joseph advocates. My response to Joseph and Scott derives both from my experience of the hyper reality provided by Joseph's craft, and also from the cultural context. According to his critical advocates, Joseph's photographs reference these venues as a kind of primal scene of mass culture, where young men (and perhaps a few women) of a certain age and temperament became introduced to culture as something in which we participate, rather than something to which we are subjected.
As someone who learned how to participate in retail culture at the original Half-Price Books in Dallas, I buy that argument.
posted by fogged @ 10:42 PM 0 comments