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CAPSLOCK CAPSLOCK AMERICAN

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Catherine Chalmers Ryan McGinley

Explore a wide variety of interesting photographs from two of today’s most prominent artists.

CAPSLOCK MAGAZINE | DECEMBER 2014

PROJECT DESCRIPTION The goal of this project was to design a set of cohesive magazine spreads that appropriately displayed the work of two photographers. By carefully studying the photographers and their works, using a grid, and experimenting with hierarchy, I have put together the first edition of CAPSLOCK Magazine.

CAPSLOCK MAGAZINE | PROJECT DESCRIPTION

CAPSLOCK MAGAZINE | LAYOUT

catherine chalmers american artist

Catherine Chalmers holds a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She has two published books: FOOD CHAIN (Aperture 2000) and AMERICAN COCKROACH (Aperture 2004). In 2010 Chalmers received at Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives and works in New York City.

article by Michael Hornsby

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One of the things I discovered when reading up on the American cockroach is that they are no longer found in the wild. They have existed for hundreds of millions of years, have survived several mass extinctions, yet we have succeeded in changing how they life. Our homes are now their natural habitat. They are, in a sense, our alter-egos, the shadows that clandestinely follow in our wake. As humans dispersed from Africa, where roaches too are believed to have come from (Linneaus misnamed them Periplaneta americana), they have accompanied us through our colonization of the planet.

Cockroaches outnumber us, we can’t control them, and they don’t share our values. I have a theory that early Homo sapiens living in caves probably did not find the cockroach as abominable as we do now; certainly they had more dangerous animals to fear.

Our hatred of the roach has perhaps grown in proportion to the boundaries we have erected between ourselves and the natural world. These animals are one of the few remaining species that can cross over at will and challenge those barriers. I think, at a fundamental level, their trespass upsets us in our ability to successfully control and transform nature to suit our needs and desires. re we skittish about being dominated again? Who knows? The distance humans have forged between ourselves and nature is creating villains out of species that were originally seen as benign, and increasingly transmogrifies animals into one of two categories: pets or pests. And, of course, the animals that fall outside these sets are rapidly becoming extinct.

CATHERINE CHALMERS

It’s likely that there are a multitude of factors that fuel our feelings about cockroaches. They’re nocturnal, coming out at night when we are asleep and vulnerable. They also operate in numbers, whereas we see ourselves as individuals. If we find ten in the kitchen, we know there are hundreds more behind the walls that we can neither see nor get at – a hidden enemy is horrifying to us. And by mutating quickly they can genetically outwit the technologies we throw at them. I also wonder if we have an atavistic memory of when mammals were a diminutive species ruled by the dinosaur. A

It has never been my intention, though, to offer them an apology, to say we shouldn’t hate or shouldn’t kill them. I’m not advocating for their conservation or their destruction. What interests me is that the degree to which people hate cockroaches is so disproportionate to the actual potential for threat in the actions of the animal. This schism is indicative of the subjectivity – perhaps arbitrariness – with which we respond to nature in general. The cockroach is like a distorting mirror that amplifies the attitudes we harbor. I think we have become a species that prefers the substitute.

Cockroaches outnumber us, we can’t control them, and they don’t share our values.

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Our expanding lifestyle decreases the number of animals on which we spend millions to save, and conversely gives rise to the so-called “weed species,” the animals on which we spend millions to exterminate. It’s a portentous conundrum. People persevere in feeding their need for contact with nature, but what satisfies that longing is increasingly notional. Our culture surrounds itself with natural forms; patterns of flora and fauna abound on walls, sheets, and clothes, but we remove ourselves from the real things in their normal environments.

What are the aesthetics of human empathy toward animals?

What if cockroaches were red with black spots like a ladybug, or green like a plant, or, iridescent like a dragonfly? Or perhaps came in a variety of colors and patterns, like cats?

People seem to prefer soft and fuzzy to hard and shiny, big eyes to thin antennae, feathers to scales, colorful creatures to dull ones. These are choices based on abstract visual qualities, often independent of the animal’s behavior. And I think these preferences have had a formative role in determining our attitudes toward specific species, and even entire classes of creatures. They have played a part in defining what we find to be “good nature” as opposed to “bad nature.” Unfortunately for the roach, it embodies several of our least-favored aesthetic attributes.

I found that once I got past the dark, twitchy exterior, the roach is remarkably subtle and beautiful. Its wings are a glowing, translucent amber, its lithe legs are accented with randomly-drawn spikes, and its antennae explore the world with the grace of a ballerina’s arms. I was surprised to be allured by its shape – its body parts are formally compelling, and this is what led me to expand this project into drawings and sculpture. From there, the roach’s syncopated, rhythmic gait led me to video. People prefer to see insects in a garden, pollinating flowers and being useful. That’s idealized nature.

But of course, most insects are predators, savagely ripping apart fellow insects, or, in the case of the cockroach, acting as scavengers, recycling waste and debris. Humans don’t like scavengers. And that the American cockroach can successfully scavenge off of us is the worst of insults. We have worked tirelessly to coerce nature to match our vision, but would the world really be a better place if all insects were pretty and only did nice things?

CATHERINE CHALMERS

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These embellishments are superficial and fall off in a few days, leaving the roach unharmed. But the act of transforming the animal brings up an interesting characteristic of human behavior.

We specifically set out to shape the planet as if it is a tabula rasa for our desires. The terror of whatever a roach does to us pales in comparison to what we can do to it. Genetic engineering is opening up new possibilities for designer plants and animals. Pretty soon, “glowfish” will be available – goldfish engineered to fluoresce, created just for our entertainment. If roaches are here to stay, might we take an alternate route and begin pest manipulation instead of pest extermination? Engineer them to look like a favorite insect, or mammal, or perhaps the kitchen wallpaper? There is real power and bite behind our aesthetic choices.

CATHERINE CHALMERS

Death ties us to the roach in a unique way. We kill them – they survive. We kill ourselves – they survive. I wanted this body of work, though, to get away from the discussion of specific deaths. So my executions were reenacted with already-dead bugs. I have been raising roaches for years and consequently collecting the dead for years; their corpses animate this part of the project. The “Execution” series is not about the suffering humans have endured at the hands of humans, but what other species have endured at the hands of humans. I do not want, in any way, to diminish the pain and horror that we have experienced through the centuries with these methods of killing. It is the opposite perspective: not looking in but looking out across the animal barrier that I am endeavoring to explore these things through this work.

I sometimes paint or add spines or feathers to the shells of my roaches. We have difficulty looking something in the eye as it dies – even if we really want it dead. Not so other predators. For example, the dog; the more its squeaky toy squeals, mimicking a suffering prey, the more excited the dog gets. Humans are incredibly efficient killers, yet remarkably queasy at facing or acknowledging what we do. For us, there is a disjuncture between mass, anonymous, silent deaths, and those that have been individualized. We do not feel the same emotion and responsibility for what we do not witness, whether it is a behind-the-wall pesticide death, or the graver problem of wildlife loss from habitat destruction. But, for the animal facing extermination or extinction, what meaning are our distinctions?

And that the American cockroach can successfully scavenge off of

us is the worst of insults. We are at a time in history when we are becoming aware of the larger impact we have on other species. The roach, strangely enough, is emblematic of the questions we face as we struggle to decipher our relationship to the animal world in general. What do we love, what do we kill, what do we save, and what becomes extinct? We’ve been drawing lines in the sand forever, but maybe now is a good time to see what’s on the other side.

Is it possible that a human-centric viewpoint is setting the stage for an impoverished environment?

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RYAN MCGINLEY The CIA supported Abstract Expressionism because it was the unbridled style that “proved” America, unlike fascist Europe or communist Russia, supported the free expression of the individual. Freedom is also a recurring motif in American photography. The early 20th century landscapes of the American West served as emblems of free movement and iconic war images like Joe Rosenthal’s photo of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima served to document the “preservation” of freedom. The unflinching eye of straight photography underscored the way in which artists functioned as free agents, documenting the social landscape as well as the quirks of its freedom-drunk population.

article by Michael Hornsby

American art and freedom have been most characteristically combined in one concept: the road trip. The classic example, of course, is Jack Kerouac’s bohemian Beat odyssey, On the Road (1957). But the road trip has become a rite of passage for photographers too. Robert Frank’s The Americans was even anointed by a Kerouac introduction: that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car.*

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In his new series of photographs, Ryan McGinley combines all of these things: bohemia, America, the road trip, the search for some kind of freedom. For the last two summers he’s taken vanloads of friends who double as subjects on road trips across the United States and photographed them in motels and houses, campsites and landscapes ranging from forests to deserts.

The subjects are young, kind of beautiful, and romantically reckless. They carry names — Jake or Lily or Tim — but we don’t know anything about them.

They exist in a halo-world of light and beauty, like models in an editorial or ad spread. Only they get to do what those models only hint at doing. They get fucked up and have sex and fight and lie out on the desert sand, naked. They bungee jump and skinny dip in rivers and streams. Nothing comes between them and the great American outdoors.

In many ways, the figures in McGinley’s photographs are recreating the age-old art pastoral: Titian’s bacchanals; Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe; everyone’s bathers (from Boucher to Cézanne to Picasso). Getting out of the city, as McGinley has commented, brings out a freedom and energy. People really let down their guard. That persistent idea of freedom…

The subjects are young, kind of beautiful, and

romantically reckless.

RYAN MCGINLEY

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RYAN MCGINLEY

In McGinley’s works, sex is playful, joyful. This isn’t the fumbling, desperate backseat sex of Teenage Lust — which serves as an analogue for a whole other level of existential frustration. It’s something different. Groups of nudes splash in the water or lodge themselves in a pine tree. The figure merges with the landscape — often literally. The sun washes out bodies in the desert; a torso slips into water. And bodies merge together.

McGinley is characteristically candid about his inspiration for this series. It’s not the photography one would find in galleries or museums — the fuzzy pictorialism of Steichen or the roaming road-trip camera of Friedlander. Rather, he’s turned to the vernacular: that great sea of photographs created by amateurs, “lay” photographers who like to document their friends and themselves at leisure in the buff, riding motorcycles, boating, camping, scuba diving, consuming nature.

McGinley collects photos in the same way Jim Shaw collects thrift store paintings or Richard Prince re-photographs images of topless biker chicks. But where irony rules among Prince and Shaw’s generation — a complicated stance that positions the artist “above” his subjects — McGinley is markedly different. He embraces these found photos, makes booklets of them, copies their subject and tone and, more importantly, identifies with the sense of freedom one gets when looking at these images, a feeling that being nude in nature and documenting it is every photographer — no, every American’s — inalienable right.

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This isn’t the fumbling, desperate, back-seat sex of Teenage Lust —

It’s something different.

With their precedent in the “high art” road trip and their embrace of vernacular culture, McGinley’s photos achieve something beyond the anthropological barometer reading of a moment in history. He’s moved beyond the charged status of the photographed nude, rejecting the “serious” approach to artnudity and adopting the easy, comfortable relationship between the body and nature — and, more importantly, the photographer and his subject — that already exists in so-called amateur photography.

This, then, might be a new definition of freedom: the road trip, not as escape or odyssey into self-discovery, but a journey into an accessible Eden, one already found and enjoyed and documented by thousands (perhaps millions) of clothing-optional Americans. The photographic nude, rather than being conscious of her nudity — her exposure — revels in it. She becomes the everywoman cavorting in the great American outdoors, an emblem of freedom shaken, for a brief moment, from all the complicated associations that word brings forth.

There is, naturally, in all Western art pastorals, the nagging sense of a journey that can never be completed: the return to Eden. However, where much of the pastoral genre swings around this idea of nostalgia and melancholy, McGinley’s subjects are stripped of this. Often, they are smiling. This seems the biggest break from the photographs of the past. For where Larry Clark’s subjects in Tulsa had sex and did plenty of drugs, there was embedded in the photos the dark moral tale: the drug addict whose infant dies; the gun that leads to trouble; the heartland of a country gone rotten.

RYAN MCGINLEY

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COLOPHON CAPSLOCK Magazine includes the typefaces Cambria (regular), Futura (medium), and Helvetica (bold oblique, regular). The text and images were found from catherinechalmers.com and ryanmcginley.com respectively.

CAPSLOCK MAGAZINE | COLOPHON