ISO Magazine - Spring 2011 by Michael George

SPRING 2011

ISO ISSUENO5SPRING2011 TSOANYU

ISO SPRING 2011

EDITOR’S LETTER People are always fascinated when time seems to stop. Last year, the flashmob sensation group Improv Everywhere staged an event in Grand Central Station that brought together a large group of people who, all at the same time, froze in place for a few minutes. This event inspired countless similar incidents, which were then posted to the Internet and have now accumulated thousands of views. What is it that we find so interesting in giving life a pause button? What do we discover by freezing a myriad of people in a hundred different situations? We become self-reflective, observing and appreciating the small moments that complicate every second of life. These events are like a living tableau. We see moving tableaux everywhere in the city. The streets recycle a brand new crowd every thirty seconds. Looking out our windows and into those of others, we catch a glimpse of many different private lives. When a subway car passes we are presented with twenty windows framing a moment in time. The tableau image is as overwhelming as it is intriguing, enhancing the notion that we are merely a small part in an ever-shifting whole.

In this issue of ISO, we present a keen exploration of photography’s subjective nature—its ability to choose moments and inject them with personal emotion. When editing down a project, we as photographers create reality. Like a craftsman working on a miniature set, with every shutter-click we add another moment into a space that doesn’t really exist. In the following articles, we present a multitude of perspectives on the subject as we welcome you to compare and contrast the clever grids of Duane Michals with the meticulously detailed sets in Michelle Watt’s painterly images. Although not every photographer in this issue works distinctly with the tableau image, their series zero in on some of the individual moments we see within the complex narrative. Over the next year, ISO will transform into a new publication. As the founding staff graduates, we are looking for staff members with the vision to reshape the magazine. If you are interested in joining the staff or getting involved in some other way please visit http://www.isozine.com for more information. MICHAEL GEORGE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ISO STAFF AND CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Michael George DEPUTY EDITORS

Corinne Rapone Shalla Yudelevich ART DIRECTOR

Danlly Domingo PHOTO EDITORS

Sasha Arutyunova Jenna Spitz

APPRENTICES

Alison Lentz, editorial Sara Group, editorial Haley Stark, art Jonno Rattman, photo Cole Saladino, photo

STAFF WRITERS Grace Hanna Lauren Greenberg Annie Quigley Sam Reiss Alison Wynn

BLOG WRITERS

Zeshawn Ali Aziza Barnes Madeleine Boardman Naomi Chasse James Clarizio Celine Comolet Vladimir Gintoff Irene Hartmann John Kurtz Max Mellman Kris Nolte Julia Pugachevsky Madeline Ricchiuto Katie Vogel Carlos Zozaya

ONLINE EDITOR Nicole Cobb

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Alex Arbuckle Sasha Arutyunova Ben Bassoff Beryl Bevilacque Shraddha Uday Borawake Ben Carey Gregory Crewdson Peter Curtis Mark Dalessandro Raphael Dallaporta Charley Damski Larry Fink Ben Franke Soleil Garneau Sarah Elizabeth Getto Perri Hofmann Kristina Knipe Duane Michals Greg Miller Ondine Millot Hanson O’Havor Jonno Rattman Cole Saladino Lupe Salinas Dylan Sites Emma Strugatz Margaux Swerdloff Christina Thomopoulos Michelle Watt Alison Wynn

FINANCIAL DIRECTOR Shivam Mathura

COMMUNICATIONS TEAM Francis Poon Laura Stephenson

FACULTY ADVISOR Editha Mesina

SPECIAL THANKS

Irene Cho Larry Fink Gagosian Gallery Gregory Crewdson Raphael Dallaporta Dean’s Profunds Department of Photography & Imaging Duane Michals Greg Miller Ondine Millot Pace/MacGill Gallery Michael Messina New York University Tisch School of the Arts Tisch Undergraduate Student Council Deborah Willis

SPRING 2011 EDITOR’S LETTER

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CONTRIBUTORS

DUANE MICHALS IS WONDERING

BY JENNA SPITZ

ENCOUNTERS WITH AN APSARA

BY KATIE VOGEL

TABLEAU VIVANT TODAY BY MARGAUX SWERDLOFF

THE PICTURE LIVES

BY JONNO RATTMAN

VISUAL ADVOCACY FOR AN INVISIBLE ISSUE BY ALISON WYNN

THE MEDIUM AS THE MESSENGER

ESCLAVAGE DOMÉSTIQUE

GREG MILLER

NASHVILLE BY MICHAEL GEORGE

LIVE! BY CORINNE RAPONE

SARAH ELIZABETH GETTO

HI, IT’S MOM + PHOTOGRAPHIC GENOME BY ANNIE QUIGLEY

MICHELLE WATT

WHENEVER THEY STOPPED SINGING BY SASHA ARUTYUNOVA

CHARLEY DAMSKI

THE GALLERY

VIRTUAL PAGES

TABLEAU VIVANT

PHOTOFLO

EXCERPTS FROM THE BLOG @ ISOZINE.COM

DIRECTORY

HOW TO SUBMIT

Cover: Alice, MICHELLE WATT Inside front: untitled (henry mercer’s house), BERYL BEVILACQUE Inside back: [Untitled], SARAH ELIZABETH GETTO Back cover: [Untitled], SARAH ELIZABETH GETTO

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

SPRING 2011

DUANE MICHALS IS WONDERING All things mellow in the mind. A sleight of hand, a trick of time. And even our great love will fade. Soon we’ll be strangers in the grave. That’s why this moment is so dear. I kiss your lips, and we are here. So let’s hold tight, and touch, and feel. For this quick instant, we are real. — Duane Michals

The human condition has never been so muddled. Take, for instance, the jibber jabber information age of terrifying social networking, as photographer Duane Michals calls it. In a realm of his own, Michals channels questions of identity, psychology, and human existence through photography. After he gave an outspoken lecture at Tisch in October, I have stood on his doorstep three times in the hopes of divulging the poetic and cerebral vision of his work. For more than fifty years, Michals, now 78, has questioned and challenged, meandered and photographed on a path of his choosing. He is a metaphysician of the imaginary.

Michals has never needed a studio to make his images. Instead, he creates dramas in cramped apartments, subway stations, and storefronts. His brownstone basement doubles as an artist’s study; his laundry room doubles as a viewing room for its optimal light. There are no clocks in his study. His back storage room holds copies of more than twenty different monographs and photo books, as well as museum catalogs, magazines, gallery booklets, and reviews in which his work has been printed. When Michals emerges from his somnambular cellar, he looks around at the world with a curious gaze. “I was walking down 19th Street,” Michals recalled from a day in 1979. “I looked in the window of a little old store and there was this little bathroom in the window, and I was just amazed by it. It was beautiful, made out of enamel, done to scale.” The tiny fixture was, in fact, an old plumbing display, equipped with a tiny bathtub, toilet, sink, and bidet. “I was sparked by the scale. To me, the destination wasn’t taking a picture and walking away. It was a point of departure for my imagination.”

Michals has a talent for telling stories in unusual contexts. After careful thought, he staged one of his most famous works, a sequence called Things Are Queer. In the images, the model bathroom becomes the set for a strange story that travels through time like an ant on a mobius strip, landing right back where it started. Michals began by shooting the bathroom from a low vantage point as if it had been built on a human scale. He then disrupted the image with a series of visual contradictions. In the sequence the bathroom is revealed as a strange stage set, then the stage is revealed as a printed image on a page. The image travels full circle when it is revealed in a frame that was there all along, above the little sink in the very first shot. Suddenly, what you thought was real isn’t real at all. “It gets into your mind,” Michals remarked with a grin. “It bypasses the eyes and goes straight to the brain.” The sequence questions the nature of time, the way the world turns, and the ways that photography can make us see the world differently. A defining moment in Michals’ career was a visit with surrealist painter René

DUANE MICHALS: The Human Condition, 1969 (bottom); Copyright by Duane Michals, Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

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DUANE MICHALS: Front View of Magritte with Back to Easel, 1965 (left) and Back View of Magritte with Face to Easel, 1965 (right) ; Copyright by Duane Michals, Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Magritte at his home in Brussels, when Michals was 35. Magritte’s work defied Michals’ prior notions of photography as a straight documentary device. It illustrated the realm of ideas and dreams in a realistic way as Michals had never seen before. After a week of photographing the painter in his home, as well as watching a few of Magritte’s silly home videos, Michals returned to New York with a heightened desire to turn his camera toward ideas. In his sequences he used mirrors as alchemy to explore the beauty of metaphysics and particles. He used motion blur simulate the tremors of psychosis. Mysteries such as the human condition and the universe fell under Michals’ vision, in which questions could be asked photographically for the very first time. Michals persists in his discovery of mind over matter. He is at work on a new project that he calls Deconstructing

The Photograph. As with the miniature bathroom on 19th Street, Michals uses objects to guide him in his work. In his country home, he shot a still life of the many props or personal affects he’s used in photographs over the years—a hand mirror, a wooden chair, a Japanese screen, a taxidermy owl. To emphasize the colors and graphic elements in the image, Michals hired a digital image editor to follow his cues on how to break down objects into their basic forms. In one sequence a still life of knobby apples changes shape into atoms that drift uncertainly amidst the cosmos. The images have a “who knows?” effect. They give life to the unseen, the unknown, and the unheard of. A contradiction in art is a turn in a new direction, where no path is right or wrong. Michals is fixated on invention, just like great innovators and artists before him. “Anytime you

do something that’s really new, it has to contradict all the givens of what you believe something is. What I’m doing now, I’ve never done before and I’m not quite sure how it’s going to go,” Michals said. “But that’s terribly exciting, letting go of all the old rules. What I took from surrealism was contradiction. Walt Whitman said, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.’ My advice to anybody, even to myself, is to contradict.” — jenna spitz

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

SPRING 2011

ENCOUNTERS WITH AN APSARA Shraddha Uday Borawake, a senior in Gallatin studying the Phenomenology of New Visual Media, is currently working with fashion designer Revati Dilip Borawake on a four-part photographic series (not yet titled) about Indian female identity in the face of Western influence. Through a series of photographs and accompanying text, Shraddha follows one Indian woman through four reincarnated lives. In each of these lives, the woman takes on a different societal role and a different side of her is emphasized. In one part of the series, entitled Encounters with an Apsara, she is an Apsara (Hindu goddess of clouds and water) who embraces her sexual powers and beauty. In another life she is a farmer who demonstrates her duties as a working woman. In the third life, she is a sheepherder by day and a devotee of Shiva by night, which shows her independence as well as her connection to nature and higher beings. In the last of the four reincarnations, she is a traditional Maharashtrian folk dancer in a statue workshop, a setting that accentuates her beauty and ability to inspire art (inspired by the story of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Although three parts of the series are currently in progress, Encounters with an Apsara is the only one that is complete. In Shraddha’s words the shoot for this part of the series “worked out serendipitously. The spirituality we were trying to capture, actually, was a part of the process.” Set on location in Mahabaleshwar, one hundred kilometers from Shraddha’s hometown,

Poona, Encounters with an Apsara opens with a wandering man who spies a beautiful woman whom he believes to be an Apsara. He kneels at her feet to worship her, and as Shraddha narrates in the accompanying text, she “cringes in pleasure upon his touch”. Although she is enchanted by his admiration, she must return to the celestial realm where she belongs. In one of the photographs, the Apsara stands on tiptoe on the steps of a Shiva temple; her long, mustardcolored, cotton sari flows behind her as the “slippery moss ejects her into the very oblivion that made her”. The wanderer extends his arms after her, hoping to catch the transcendental being. In the last shot of the series, the wanderer kneels by a pool and splashes his face with “the very water in which her existence flows”, so at least he can “feel her touch again”. Although the wanderer and the Apsara have a brief and pleasurable encounter, she is ephemeral. Eventually, she returns to the realm where she will be reincarnated and assume another role in a new life. In this project Shraddha is not exploring unanswered questions. “It’s a statement going back to tradition

SHRADDHA UDAY BORAWAKE: Apsara 3

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through the fabric, through the setting, through the storyline. It’s asking, if there are all these beautiful fabrics, why are the women of India wearing pants every day?” Shraddha comments. She and the designer Revati envisioned images that would “blur the lines between fashion and documentary.” Shraddha and Revati instructed the model Priyanka Sanjay Misal “not to look like a model” because this was essential in order “to break away from the portrayal of the female as a sex object.” Priyanka defines one role of a female: one whom is beautiful, and yet has agency and control over her sexual powers. Shraddha explained that in India, “a lot of people would

SHRADDHA UDAY BORAWAKE: Apsara 1 (top left), Apsara 5 (top right), and Farmer (below)

get offended seeing a man at a woman’s feet”, but by presenting her as a mythological creature, they were able to get away with such a bold statement. “Just by making it beautiful, I think you make something acceptable.” Shraddha explores dichotomies and contradictions that Indian women constantly encounter—specifically Indian tradition and Western influence, the role of women and the role of men in Indian society, duty and independence, and the eternal realm and the temporal realm. Shraddha explained that the “chemistry that arises out of these opposites” and the pairing of dichotomies in a single photograph can lead to questions about existence and identity. According to Hindu religion, one is at every moment a part of everything else. When one dies, she or he is reborn into another life, one that is also part of the whole of existence, although she or he takes on a new role. In the face of the eternal, how does one define her or himself? Shraddha seeks to define “what a woman really is” through photography because it is a medium that allows one to define identity in a single instant.

Shraddha’s statement is both traditional and progressive. Although in many ways she pushes boundaries in order to define female identity, her project has been well received by her Indian friends and family. “I hope Americans understand it. This is a very heartfelt expression of where I am coming from as a being,” says Shraddha. She goes on to say that this series shows what defines an Indian woman—“her spirituality is a very large part of her, her beauty is a very large part of her, her oneness with nature is a very large part of her, [and] her ability to

be independent is a very large part of her, even though she is bound by duty. There are many contradictions within an Indian woman…due to the nature of the culture she has grown up in.” As of now, Encounters with an Apsara can be found on Shraddha Uday Borawake’s blog: http://musttkalandar. blogspot.com/2010/10/encounterswith-apsara.html. Look out for the other three parts of her series in the near future! — katie vogel

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

SPRING 2011

THE PICTURE LIVES:

TABLEAU VIVANT TODAY Tableau vivant, French for “living picture,” is an artistic style that marries the art forms of the theatre, photography and painting. Carefully composed, theatrically lit, yet motionless and silent—these are the hallmarks of the tableau vivant style. In photography the term tableau vivant calls for a staged photograph that can function as a narrative: part theater, part film still, and consistently hyperreal. Tableau vivant photographs frame social interactions while developing characters and raising social

questions—much like a motion picture would. After all, a fundamental and intriguing function of art is the artists’ ability to comment on and address social ills. However, the question begs to be asked: is it really possible for a still photograph to share the same capacity as motion picture in capturing life’s daily complexity? Can character development really be achieved as successfully in one single frame as it can in a moving image? Let’s take for example the photography of Gregory Crewdson in comparison

to a film by Wes Anderson. Both Crewdson and Anderson are known for working in the tableau vivant style, using carefully staged and stylized images to further their message. Crewdson and Anderson both seem to understand quite well that character revelation is the essence of good portraiture. Gregory Crewdson is known for working more like a film director than a photographer— scouting complex locations, employing actors and a full production crew, and developing a complicated postproduction process. It is typical of

GREGORY CREWDSON: Untitled (Sunday Roast)

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13 GREGORY CREWDSON: Untitled (Backyard Romance) (right) and Untitled (Forest Gathering) (below)

Crewdson’s photographs to focus on the interaction between the individual and their environment. Much like paintings, Crewdson’s portraits advertise the presence of personality. Within the frame, the colors, people, attire, mood, and setting all work to elicit a desired response.

symmetrically arranged frames in Anderson’s films are reminiscent of children’s books, old photographs, and comic strips. Is it life or is it art? Perhaps the enduring appeal of the tableau vivant—the “living picture”— is that this question, unanswerable, remains fascinating to ponder.

Wes Anderson makes copious use of tableaux vivants in his films, including Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Art-directed to the nth degree, Anderson’s films are filled with balanced set pieces in which he slows down the action so that we can appreciate the beauty—and artificiality—of the scene. Anderson’s use of the stylistic device reminds the viewer of the presence of the writer and director, manipulating, creating, and maneuvering the characters. Not only pleasing to the eye, the tableaux in Anderson’s films underscore the confusion between reality and art. The characters create dioramas and live within them; they are both artists and art. The intricately structured,

Unlike Anderson’s films Crewdson’s character development is necessarily limited. There is no way of knowing what was going on before or what will take place after the photograph was taken. In this sense, still photography requires the viewer to bring his or her own story to the photograph. The portrait is a description of an

individual—a hazy writing about his or her social identity. Unlike a motion picture, which has the ability to dictate a character’s personal history, a still photograph leaves room for interpretation. The outline of a character is being offered, but there is no coloring inside the lines of what their personality has to be. Is this a limitation or an asset? Perhaps it is just a difference. In fact, what tableau vivant invites in photography is speculation. Each tableau is just one scene, one moment out of a mysterious narrative that seems to be ongoing—a fairy tale, perhaps. By freezing and framing, the artist invites the viewer to think about the wonder of it all: who are these characters, what is their story, what is real and what is posed? The making of a living picture: isn’t that what art is all about? — margaux swerdloff

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

SPRING 2011

THE MEDIUM AS THE MESSENGER “…The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” — Jack Kerouac, On The Road In Larry Fink’s photographs exists a vitality diffused with lyrical comedic empathy—a kind of poetic visual dynamism that brims with keen observation of life lived in the social sphere. The pictures transcribe transitory interactions into discrete emotional tableaux that are as much reflections of his subjects as rhapsodic jazz solos articulating the embedded meaning of a sidelong glance or a fingertip gesture. These nuances

bring the pictures to life by capturing the specific instant that separates an interesting moment from the preceding or proceeding ones. When Fink chooses a moment, it sings with vibrant melodrama assembled from an intuitive reading of forms and shapes, faces and spaces. Intuition informs Fink’s behavior—he is as likely to pull out a harmonica as a camera. But when making pictures, Fink intuits the release of the shutter at a decisive moment during which the world yields to his proclivities— whether political, psychological, emotional, lyrical, guttural, carnal, or critical. But, he insists, at the core of his photographs is empathy. Intuition may be informed by experience—constructed from a close reading of day-to-day life that recognizes infinitely repeating patterns

remodeled and reconfigured to fit the circumstances of the moment. The photographer edits all of this visual experience, choosing moments within the flow of time to describe a particular way of seeing the world. The ability to read or to predict the way in which events may go—or to have some sense that things may move in an interesting direction—transforms the photographer into a medium. It is as if Fink is a clairvoyant who uses his intuition to make pictures fusing dynamic content and composition. These photographs may be able to weave narratives strange and unfamiliar enough to be new but familiar enough to evoke some universal truth. But the truth of a photograph is probably founded in multiple and contradictory truths or untruths that may be hidden behind the surface of the image so that the viewer is

LARRY FINK: Peter Beard and Friends (left) and Sante d’Orazio Wedding (right)

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15 LARRY FINK: Detour Fashion (left) and Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party (right)

encouragwed to presume the picture’s reality. In her essay, “Plato’s Cave,” Susan Sontag writes that, “The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now think— or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’” A picture is a portal into external experience—the perceptions of another person. Fink’s images often embody a semi-surrealist take on the ways in which people interact. Their descriptive qualities underscore story-telling intents divorced from an everyday experience of life. The photographs create complex scenes describing instants easily missed— but they are nonetheless just as real as the aggregate experience which one perceives to be reality. In Fink’s photographs a discrete vocabulary of narrative experience is conceived from a carnal, hungry, and curious perception of the world.

between characters not only in the foreground, but also in the periphery. The viewer engages the image as a dynamic exposé of social unease, lust, conquest, apathy, and mania expressed by vivid textures, objects and expressions that fill Fink’s frames. Perhaps this may be best summed up by one of Fink’s often-repeated beatpoetic suggestions that one should “keep the edge in the center.”

The narrative emplanted in the image grows as if a conversation between the photographer, the subjects, and the viewer. If the nature of a conversation is to focus expressly on a specific subject, Fink’s photographs encourage the viewer to explore the connections

Like the tableaux of these earlier artists, Fink’s photographs such as Peter Beard and Friends, East Hampton, August 1976 garner power from the simultaneity of physical, emotional, and psychological innuendo. A woman, back and center-left, peers with lust-

Central to the photographs is a feeling of close proximity in which the observed and the observer coexist— each projects onto the other a sense of social imperative. Fink reveals the deep humanity concealed under gilt and grandeur, casting nuance of contextual information into areas of light and shadow. His style of photography creates a revelatory, theatrical space informed most by the paintings of Goya, Caravaggio, and Daumier.

filled curiosity at a suave man caught in a moment of detached introspection, his ringed hand pausing mid-chin for a near-philosopher’s moment. His gesture is reflected in the foreground where a man and woman’s hands convene to guide a morsel toward delighted lips. The woman’s arm stretches across the frame, bisecting another man’s face so that his identity is obscured but for sweaty curls and jovial eyes that peer with manic interest at the cluster of hands. Just above this, a woman with a straight-and-toothy grin smiles for eternity, her attention seemingly fastened to a thin bracelet dangling from the other woman’s arm. The intrinsic meaning of these interactions is not tied to bible verse as in the paintings of the earlier masters; instead, they may be more related to a semi-sociological undertaking that examines monumentalized incidents of miniature and ephemeral importance. The people in Fink’s photographs are not so different from us—only they live forever, transfixed by the camera in a moment of silent discourse and motionless animation. — jonno rattman

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

SPRING 2011

ESCLAVAGE DOMÉSTIQUE:

VISUAL ADVOCACY FOR AN INVISIBLE ISSUE Sometimes, it is the quiet photographs that give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves—images of houses with neatly-trimmed hedges or upscale apartment buildings, captured while the family is at work and the kids are at school. Pictures that could be used to advertise the crisp cleanliness of a condominium, or the quiet privacy of a suburban backyard. Such are the photographs in Raphaël Dallaporta and Ondine Millot’s Esclavage Domestique (Domestic Slavery) project: ordinary façades that suddenly become eerily silent when paired with concise explanations of what went on behind the opaque curtains. Descriptions of abuse that seem as matter-offact as forced dinner conversation compel the viewer to examine each window, wondering if it was behind those shutters that someone suffered, past that corner that someone planned an escape. In privileged places, it can seem as though all the bad in the world occurs somewhere else— perhaps because when problems arise, most people are quicker to accuse a stranger than a next-door neighbor. However, instead of criticizing the faraway, often abstract crises of

foreign countries, Raphaël Dallaporta and Ondine Millot decided to examine crimes committed within their immediate environments, perhaps even in their own neighborhoods. After researching cases of domestic slavery around Paris, Dallaporta travels to the exact address of the perpetrators, where he photographs their homes in a straightforward manner. Millot reports the incidents using unembellished, clear-cut descriptions, often abbreviating or changing names to protect the identities of those involved. Using an economy of textual and photographic language, they allude to domestic slavery’s simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility. Although Dallaporta’s images happen to depict quiet Parisian households, most of the pictures could represent the

wealthy suburbs of any city—thereby emphasizing the global nature of human trafficking. In many of the situations presented by Dallaporta and Millot, the “bad guy” fits the perfect description of the classic “good guy”—a diplomat, a doctor, a wealthy self-proclaimed “humanist.” One of the most frightening cases is the abuse that took place inside one monochrome apartment building with nothing but a stark playground out front: a seventeen-year-old girl referred to as Hina was viciously wounded by her captors, held prisoner in their apartment for eight months. When she finally escaped and explained what she had gone through to the police, her story made the news, and it seemed as though the perpetrators would be

RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA AND ONDINE MILLOT: Untitled (left) and Untitled (right)

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17 RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA AND ONDINE MILLOT: Untitled (left) and Untitled (right)

punished. However, they never even went to court – as diplomats they used their immunity to deflect the questions of the French police and were never prosecuted. These are situations that we wish could be banished to the realm of horror movies: the kind where the evil remains undefeated, even at the end. How disturbing then to realize that the neighbor could be hiding a slave next door, that someone could be forced to work late into the night not five feet from where we lay our heads. And what of the neighbors that knew or at least had suspicions? It often took years for them to report the incidents. Most people appear to assume that these atrocities could never happen here, and since domestic slavery does not fit into what they consider to be the realm of possibility, it is often ignored. Better to focus on what seem like ethically clear-cut problems, like murders, or faraway wars. There seems to be no particular fixed form to Dallaporta and Millot’s project—it can be assembled as a website, an exhibition, or a book. A PDF file of the project can be downloaded for free at esclavagedomestique.fr, so that it can be printed out or exhibited by anyone, at any time. Yet this unadorned reproducibility eerily echoes the low visibility of the problem itself: printed on plain paper and left at a desk, it could be easily dismissed as a leftover printout from someone’s real-estate search. At times, the work risks becoming too “domestic”, depicting ordinary houses, unembellished text, in a potentially very humble configuration. On the other hand,

it seems fitting to present such a ubiquitous issue using a form that can be similarly widespread, rather than sensationalizing the problem. This way, it (rightfully) seems as though it could happen anywhere, instead of becoming yet another isolated “elsewhere” crisis. But can such a simple project bear witness to the suffering or the complex ethical and moral issues involved in domestic slavery? Insofar as “bearing witness” can mean providing evidence, the project is somewhat lacking— firstly, the images show nothing but the unremarkable façades of buildings, and secondly, the photograph as evidence has become an antiquated notion in the digital age. However, Esclavage Domestique has the potential to improve public awareness of domestic slavery, due to its distinct presentation of the problem. Rather than depicting battered victims or exposing the perpetrators of the crimes, Dallaporta’s images only show as much as the viewer would be able to see if the slaves were still working at the homes he photographed. This visual strategy prompts the viewer to question even the most ordinary-looking dwellings he or she encounters after seeing the project, newly mindful of the fact that

domestic slavery could be occurring in any neighborhood. Unfortunately, awareness of domestic slavery is necessary but not sufficient to ending it, nor does it provide the ordinary citizen with any one concrete course of action to take. Since the roots of the problem are so widely distributed across cultures and continents, it is difficult to pinpoint any specific way for an individual to help. On esclavagedomestique.fr, there is a link to the website of the Comité contre l’esclavage moderne (Committee Against Modern Slavery), which informs visitors about judicial news regarding modern slavery or about donating to the organization, but which offers no future solutions to the problem. Nevertheless, Dallaporta and Millot’s project does elicit an ethical and moral reflection by situating the issue close to home. Much in the same way that people imagine what it is like to live in houses they pass by, looking at Dallaporta’s photographs in the context of domestic slavery compels them to realize that things are not always as they seem, that unimaginable things can happen behind closed doors. — alison wynn

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

NASHVILLE

â&#x20AC;&#x153;It was really kind of chaotic. My memories were not necessarily fond memories.

Going back there, I felt, was more of an investigation.â&#x20AC;?

GREG MILLER

SPRING 2011

FEATURED ARTIST

GREG MILLER A few summers ago, I had the pleasure of interning with Greg Miller. During that time Greg was in the process of moving from his Brooklyn studio in DUMBO, where the subway crossing the Manhattan bridge screeched to a deafening degree, out to rural Connecticut. As we spent long days driving to and from the city, I quickly realized the internship would be less about learning how to be a better photographer and more about how to be a better person. Greg has a keen love for his 8 x 10 large format view camera, the one he uses for both his personal and commercial work. But it doesn’t match his keen love for his subjects. He connects with strangers in a way that shows them the beauty in their every day interactions. From his black and white images on the streets of New York to his vibrant images of county fairs, all of Greg’s images carry the weight of a “suspended moment.” Greg completed his latest project, entitled Nashville, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nashville

BY MICHAEL GEORGE

brings us back to his hometown in an attempt to discover and release all of the emotions that saturated Greg’s adolescence. The images are connected by a tone played in a minor key. This melancholy enters each frame but starkly contrasts Greg’s mastery of light. In our conversation we explore themes of nostalgia, memory, and what it really means to “exorcise those demons” that we all have living in the places we grew up. MG: How did you come up with the idea for Nashville? GM: I grew up in Nashville until I was 18. Even though everything around me was Nashville, my family originated from Maine and I had a strong New England, northern influence. When I went to college all I wanted was to go to New York and once I started making money there I didn’t see any reason to leave. So I lived here, as a professional, and I forgot about Nashville a little bit. But all the time, whenever I would go back down to visit, I thought “Wow, it would really be an amazing thing to photograph.” But it had been loaded. It was my hometown and I wasn’t able to visualize any project largely because my parents were still living there. By the time I got the Guggenheim Fellowship my parents had moved back to Maine. I saw it as an opportunity to go back. MG: Didn’t you have any friends who were still there? Any strong connections at all?

GREG MILLER: Hillsboro Pike, 2008 (opener) and Old Hickory Blvd., 2008 (this page). All images courtesy of and copyright by Greg Miller.

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GREG MILLER: Union Street, 2008

GM: The strongest connection I had was a photographer named Bob Schatz that I used to work for in high school. He was our landlord back then and his commercial studio was across the hall from our apartment. I started working for him and he became something of my mentor and we have stayed in touch. Even with the fellowship, there was no way I could afford to live in Nashville on my own. So that’s where I stayed when I was there. He is great. Truly a saint. He now has two houses right next door to each other. I was living in the house that he uses as his commercial studio. When I first got there I tried getting together with my friends but it was slow at first. Besides Bobby and his family, it really was like there was nobody. MG: How much time did you spend in Nashville? GM: It was all shot over three months from July through September 2008. MG: I feel like a lot of photographers go back to their birth place or home to create new work. Do you think it relates to the general idea that photography is inherently nostalgic? Were you trying to connect your images to memories? Why do you think photographers are so attracted to going back? Was there something you were hoping to discover? GM: I think it’s just the strong emotional connection with where I grew up. I have always felt that growing up in Nashville is at the core of who I am. MG: In your statement you say that Nashville was an “emotional ghost town.” GM: The people who meant so much to me had moved on. My grandmother’s house, for example, is there but she

is not in it. All the places that were important to me are still there but the activities and the things... it’s all over. And I wondered if I point a camera at this house if you can feel the vibration that I feel when I look at it. And that was the game I was playing a little bit. I realized that over the last twenty years when I was photographing in all of these other places, like Brooklyn, I had always been pretending those places were my hometown. I had been in Italy pretending it was my hometown. I was borrowing people’s hometowns. When I went back to Nashville, I thought “This is what it feels like when you are photographing your hometown.” I had been afraid of going back. There was a fear that there would be bad pictures. I wanted to do it right and I think I succeeded. But I do feel like I can always add to it, like I do with every project. MG: What were you looking for then? Obviously, when you were photographing your grandmother’s house that was a direct memory, but a lot of the images feel more candid. They’re obviously strangers in often strange moments. When you went out, were you going back to places that were salient in your memory? What was your process?

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GREG MILLER: Jason Street, 2008

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GM: A lot of the places I went were places I was very familiar with. Places I was familiar or had lived. In fact I asked my parents to do a little research on where we lived because we moved like seventeen times in the twenty years I lived there. MG: You moved seventeen times? GM: My mother had wanderlust or something but in some cases we just weren’t able to afford rent so we moved to a smaller place. It was really kind of chaotic. My memories were not necessarily fond memories. Going back there, I felt, was more of an investigation. One day I went back to an apartment complex where we lived when I was in junior high school. It would have been around 1980. This apartment probably represented for me the most troubling time in my childhood. And it was times like this where approaching it was really hard. The

craziest thing happened though when I arrived. That very apartment where we had lived was actually open, and there were some painters painting it. So I went in, and I was walking around in this apartment we used to live in, and I’m there photographing my old room, my brother’s room, my parents bedroom and these painters are looking at me like, “who is this guy?” It was completely freaky. It was a troubling place, a difficult time. But these are cosmic things. When photographers are in a project and they’re moving through the space, these are the sort of things that are happening. You’re out there and those are the indicators that tell you you’re in the right place. I had a dream in my early 20s about that very apartment where the door was ajar in exactly the same way it was when I arrived that day. I knew that if I was trying to make literal pictures of my childhood, of my memories, I would be disappointed. I said, “Don’t try to make memories, don’t try to take pictures of your memories.” So I tried to make

23 pictures in the places where I was and allowed serendipity or whatever to happen. MG: Well obviously an 8 x 10 camera is no SLR but a lot of your images have a sense of being shot with one. When you were walking around were you walking with your camera? How do you find your subjects? GM: I put pins on a map of places where I had lived before so I could go to those places as starting points. I would drive around looking, when I got to an area or a place where I felt like something could happen I would walk around. How I shoot with an 8 x 10 is influenced by how I used to shoot with a Leica. I really want to have that suspended moment.

may find, because it has to do with something my subject really was doing in the place they were doing it in the clothes they were wearing. And I know that I wouldn’t be interested in anything else besides the moment I saw. I do take some liberties. Sometimes I’ll move them toward the light or away from the light but I think for the most part it is what I saw. It’s based on a true story. MG: Were there any specific moments you were searching for? I feel like many of the imageSA: like the minister walking up to the church — carry a specific emotional weight. Was there any theme or message that came out of it that you weren’t expecting? GM: I think I wanted to cover all of the things that Nashville and growing up in the South meant to me

GREG MILLER: Duck River, 2008

MG: Do you feel like people are reacting to the camera in a much different way than they would if you were to approach them with an SLR? Do you feel like the camera itself is a major component of these images? GM: I think it’s a major component for me. It excites me. It’s kind of funny because I feel like I shouldn’t need something to excite me like that but I do. I love the way it feels. I love to talk to people about my camera. I love the way people react to it. But if you’re shooting with an SLR and you have this same conviction about you, I think people get it. I hate to think that it’s my camera making the pictures. It’s my conviction. MG: So do you witness something and recreate it? GM: When I find people I’ll often see the moment, miss it completely, and then I’ll go over and explain to them what I do and what they were doing and then we make the picture. I don’t find it to be as set up as some people

because there were so many aspects to it. It wasn’t like I was driving around with a bullet list of memories, but there were many things I wanted to say and mostly ambiguous, like people missing each other, teenage angst or not being understood... God and religion was a part of it. The people I knew and my dear friends were deeply religious and left me feeling a little bit like I was not a part of it. I really felt

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like I wanted to be... I don’t know how to say that. I remember feeling like, “That looks fun to be that devoted or religious or...” MG: Faithful? GM: Yeah, faithful. To really be a believer. I ended up just watching a lot of that. I spent my childhood watching a lot of Nashville. From a very early age I was looking and seeing and I think that’s what the project ended up being.

MG: Now that the project is done, do you feel like you have any reason to go back? Did going back reconnect you in any way? GM: Well, I think I successfully exorcised those demons. Now, I can actually see Nashville for the amazing place it is. I love Nashville. Now when I talk about it, I don’t have to say “Well, Nashville...” and put a qualifier on it. I feel like it really is an incredible city and the people I have there, I love. And so, in a way, it succeeded. I would recommend it to anyone! Go back and photograph your hometown. MG: How did the project change your perception of Nashville so dramatically?

GM: When I went down there I had a very open mind. I really didn’t know what I was going to find. Back to the minister picture, it’s a good example, because I was riding with my friend, Bobby. We had gone out together. It was a Sunday, we were maybe 5 minutes from the house on this road going maybe 40 mph and I saw the minister walking out of the church. I said, “Woah, Bobby we should go back.” By the time we turned around and got back, the minister was in his car about to drive away and we pulled up and I explained what I was doing. The next 20 minutes was spent trying to get back to that moment I saw when we were going 40 mph. I ran up the hill to where the road is; Where I saw the picture in my mind. I’m yelling instructions at him, asking him to turn clockwise left and right. But the road was so loud that he couldn’t hear me at all. So I had to run back and forth to give him instructions and to see if it was good on the ground glass. All the while my friend Bobby is looking on. The thing is, the nuts and bolts of the process when I look back at it happening are just me responding to a picture like it happens all the time. Like it’s no big deal. But when you look at it in the body of work it’s such a component part. I can’t imagine the project without that picture. It really takes those kinds of pictures, the big heavy hitter, home runs to punctuate the project. But when they happen it feels like anything but a home run. It seems like nothing is happening and that’s why I would say I actually suffered a lot of depression while I was making the work. I kept thinking “Wow, why am I so depressed?” and it permeated the entire time. I started running and meditating during this time. I say all of this because while I’m making the work it doesn’t necessarily feel very good, like I am making work. When you ask me, “How did it change?” it changed by being good. When I’m in it, I’m in a dark cave. MG: Were you depressed because you didn’t think you were making good work? GM: Yes, at the time I think I connected my depression with whether or not I was making good work. But now, I think I was just depressed, like a biological depression. I don’t

GREG MILLER: Arno Road, 2008

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think it had anything to do with the work. If I am talking to my students about photography, I do mention that when you look at a body of work you don’t see the photographer’s physical state while they’re making that work. It looks like they just went out and shot it, no big deal, it was easy. But I think it’s important to mention that when I’m doing it, it is a struggle. And then it just seems to come together. It is a popular idea to think that depression makes better art. But I don’t believe this. When you make art, you draw upon that dark reservoir no matter what. Depression only affects productivity. If you can’t get out of bed in the morning, you aren’t going to be able to make a whole lot of work. MG: Do you feel like the images only comment on Nashville or do you think they touch on a wider aspect of America and how people live here? Were you trying to make specific statements about Nashville?

GM: In the beginning of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig says that “If you’re reading this to get a better sense of zen or motorcycle maintenance you’re going to be disappointed for either one.” I don’t know if this project is so much about Nashville. I think it touches on it but I think it speaks more to people my age and their sense of coming home. It’s very hard to articulate that–to understand how other people will get my pictures. For me, I know that I wasn’t trying to make it about Nashville; I was trying to make it about me. You know at this point in my career my day job is to make pictures for other people about things that they want to communicate. I really wanted to turn all of that shit off. I really just wanted to make pictures. I wanted to fire the committee. I wanted to make pictures that only I wanted in a place that was my home. It was an exercise in purity. ■

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GREG MILLER: Caldwell Lane, 2008

LIVE!

“What goes on in the confines of a computer screen

is a life in itself.”

CHARLEY DAMSKI

SPRING 2011

FEATURED ARTIST

BY CORINNE RAPONE

CHARLEY DAMSKI By deconstructing concert footage from the internet, Charley Damski has managed to evoke a certain nostalgia within the pixelated impressions of live moments. His series Live! harnesses the pulsating energy of the performances, a familiar pound in the heart and electric shock to the soul for anyone who has witnessed such a spectacle. The result is a series of images chronicling the abstract interaction between artist and onlooker through a current of luminous colors and sexuality. CR: To get started, how did this series come into fruition? CD: I’ve been working with screenshots for a while, mainly as a type of personal journal. Most people use big notebooks and cut things out, but every time I tried that, I lost interest. What goes on within the confines of a computer screen is a life in itself, and I approach it

with older performances, ones that I find really beautiful. So naturally, my “journal” began piling up with these types of screenshots until finally it hit me that maybe I can push this idea into something else. CR: With mountains of video footage out there in cyber space, how do you settle on images? Certainly, there’s quite a lot of material to sift through. CD: The amount of material is infinite, so I really pushed myself to work quickly and instinctively. I always start from a musical standpoint and choose videos where I want to see how the artist or band handled a particular song in a live situation. This is just to satisfy my own curiosity. That’s how the project came about in the first place, so I didn’t want to change that set up. It’s hard to isolate exactly why I choose particular moments or images. I let that be secondary to engaging with the footage. I will put on a video and have my hands ready to take a screen shot. I almost never pause but rather shoot as it plays. If I miss something I will go back. CR: This project is very much about the deconstruction of images, rebuilding them as abstract moments. I remember a project you were working on a few years ago involving enlarging and xeroxing images until they became a more impressionist canvas of pixels. Is this a trend you see following through in your work in the future?

the same as someone who carries around a point and shoot camera. Anyway, music is a huge interest of mine, maybe the most dominating. And the Internet, YouTube especially, is an enormous resource of live footage, television performances, and documentaries. Most of it has been transferred two or three times, from film to VHS to DVD and so on. You start to notice a pattern of degradation

CD: I’ve always been a sucker for spectacle. My answer to most problems is to take it apart and make it bigger. I suppose it is a blessing and a curse. I wasn’t thinking about the xerox when I made this work, but I could totally trace a line between the two. As for the future, I’m sure it will keep popping up. I find it difficult to understand something unless I can really take it apart before I put it back together, which tends to create that impressionist effect you’re talking about.

All images courtesy of and copyright by Charley Damski.

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CR: You mentioned that the electricity of the performance transcends the degraded quality of the images. What do you think it is about these pixels that hold power for such a spiritual experience? CD: The electricity I referred to was not only to describe the performances but also literally the electricity powering these shows. From the amps to the lights to the microphones, every performance requires a lot of power. To me pixels are closer to the actual experience than say paint or negatives, because to see pixels you need electricity. As for spiritual experiences, I think anything sensory that evokes emotion can be spiritual with enough electricity. CR: To me I guess I think of both electricity and pixels in a more mechanical sense, rather than film or paint, which tend to be viewed as more organic mediums—a distinction that calls to mind the beaten-to-death battle of

film versus digital. Would you say you’re more attracted to the mechanical nature of photography? CD: I don’t really think about that. Some dead guy once talked about art as being ideas draped in the cloth of a particular medium. If I limited myself to a particular medium, or an aspect of a medium, then I would be limiting my ideas. CR: Coming from someone who grew up spoon-fed on Zeppelin, and told that Bruce Springsteen was “God,” I definitely feel a strange hint of nostalgia within the vibrancy of these images—the saturated colors, the screaming expressions. Do you think your images are approached differently for those who experienced these performances live? CD: Absolutely. Nostalgia is a funny thing, some sort of mix between memories and dreams. I can be nostalgic for

my childhood as well a time well before I was born. My only experience of the 70s comes from the Internet, which has only been around since the 90s. It’s this discrepancy that I find so interesting. What does it mean to experience something old through something new, and then be nostalgic for that time? CR: Well, I guess to answer your own question, what does it mean? CD: I don’t have a good answer for that. To me it’s the closest I can get to experiencing a past life or something. CR: In a sense would you say this work is as much an ode to the musicians and artists that influenced you as a teenager as it is a reflection of your own aesthetic? CD: Definitely. I think they are one in the same. Sometimes, people ask me if I am poking fun at something

with these images, which I think is understandable whenever you see images of people who look outdated. But this work is more biographical than anything and comes completely from a place of love and admiration. I could have chosen anything to take screen shots of, but I only chose videos that I would watch anyway, that really mean something to me. That way, I am always a part of the work, and it of me. CR: You’re a musician yourself, yes? Have you found any similarities between playing music and taking photographs? CD: I think there are a lot of similarities. Both are very aggressive and egocentric. In order to get somewhere new, you need to figure out how to make your tools an extension of your ideas, without a gap in between. That is what I am trying to get better at in both music and photography. ■

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HI, IT’S MOM

+ THE

PHOTOGRAPHIC GENOME

“The older you get, your mother tends to tell you things that she didn’t tell you before, so you start to become female adults together.”

SARAH ELIZABETH GETTO

SPRING 2011

FEATURED ARTIST

BY ANNIE QUIGLEY

SARAH ELIZABETH GETTO Since graduating from Tisch in 2008, photographer Sarah Elizabeth Getto has been awarded the Constantiner Grant from the Department of Photography and Imaging for the exploration and “celebration” of her adoptive mother in her project Hi, it’s Mom. Getto’s project The Photographic Genome: Faces, Masks, Genes, and Documents, an outgrowth of her initial Mom project that now depicts her two brothers and father as well, was exhibited at the Gallery at 721 Broadway in December 2010. Both projects are multi-media presentations that include Getto’s own photographs as well as drawings, documents, and recorded voicemails. The artist’s photographs of her mother, both in Hi, it’s Mom and in The Photographic Genome are intimate, lacking any boundaries or timidity. Getto strikes a unique balance between her roles as “photographer” and “daughter,” resulting in a vibrant and varied tribute to her mother and, inevitably, an exploration of herself. AQ: Could you talk a little about your project Hi, it’s Mom, how it began, and the inspiration behind it? SEG: I recorded my mom’s voicemails for six months, and every single one of them started with “Hi, it’s Mom,” which I think is funny because who the fuck else would it be? She would leave these completely asinine voicemails like, “Hi Sarah, I’m watching The Biggest Loser, reading Vogue, thinking about you…” She’d basically just pour

her heart out to my inbox. So I recorded those and then showed them with the photos. That project started out as a project about my family, and then my mom just sort of hijacked it, in that all the good pictures were of her. Photo projects have a way of doing that. They sort of guide you. Some people come from the idea that you have to visualize something and then execute it and have as many tools as you can to execute it, but I’ve never worked like that. It’s just not for me. I think photos become extremely static when you spend a lot of time thinking about them. I think that when a lot of people are first starting, there’s a lot of self-consciousness because it’s such a self-conscious stage, and it’s really impossible to just let loose. I don’t think I would’ve gotten the results that I did if I’d said, “Hey Mom, let’s set it up like this.” I basically exhausted her with the camera. I’d always be taking pictures of her so that she couldn’t pose for every one. The key to the Mom project, which is different than the project on display at Tisch now, is that up until that first project, I’d been taking pictures of my family for three years, and I just never showed them the photos. They never saw the outcome. But then when I had my thesis and the show was up on the wall and I got the award and I was on the Internet, the dynamics changed in my family, and everyone realized, “Wow, Sarah is really a photographer and people actually look at her photos.” So in this project, it was a lot more collaborative with my mom, in a more conscious sense. I think that I couldn’t have gotten the images for Hi, it’s Mom without her permission because there’s an intimacy there, but for this project it was more like, “Well, let’s try this and see what happens.” AQ: Your more recent project The Photographic Genome captures not only your mother but your father and two adopted brothers as well, yet it seems

All images courtesy of and copyright by Sarah Elizabeth Getto.

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35 that your mother remains a real center point of the project. What was the importance of this shift in focus, and what prominence does your mother maintain in this new project? SEG: I couldn’t just keep working on Hi, it’s Mom because by the time she’d been to the show and seen the photos, it was done, different. The thing that I did not focus on with the Hi, it’s Mom project because, frankly, I didn’t even think about it, was the fact that I’m adopted. It just started out that my mom is a character. I think you learn the most about your work when your friends ask you questions about it, so I was looking at the photos with some people and I was saying, “You know, she’s just so interesting, and the relationship between us is so interesting,” and I remember saying, “And I’m adopted.” For everyone I said that to, it was like the project changed for them. I realized how powerful that was for some people and I realized that it was interesting to me too, that I spent so much time on it and I didn’t spend any time considering that part. It was probably good that I didn’t think about that beforehand. In the Photographic Genome project, I sort of wanted to walk into it from the vantage point that all three of us are adopted, which is interesting, and I think our family dynamics are very strong because of it. AQ: Both Hi, it’s Mom and Photographic Genome include not only your own photographs, but old family photographs, official certificates and forms, letters, drawings, and the previously-mentioned voicemails. Could you talk more about these elements and their significance to the projects and perhaps to you yourself? SEG: I wanted the projects to be a little bit painterly because I have a strong background in studio art, and I just felt that that’s where I wanted to spend my time. I was more focused on creating a little bit more of an artistic project rather than just a straight photographic one. My birth certificate is actually an amended birth certificate. In New York State—and this is controversial— they don’t put the birth mother’s name on the birth certificate, which is fascinating because it’s almost like an identity transplant as soon as you’re born, right off the bat. It’s almost like putting a dam to change the course of

a river: it doesn’t work unless you do it at the top. I can’t imagine being a 23-year-old person and having a stranger’s name on my birth certificate. That would fuck me up, personally. Ernie and Judy are my parents, they raised me, they’re in the photos, and I would really hate it if I had to show my birth certificate and not have their names on it. The social work papers, however, are my birth mother’s. That paperwork was filled out before I was born. The reason I included that was because under “Hobbies and Interests” it said “all kinds of artwork,” which I thought was fascinating. It was a little hard; my mom and I talked about what it would mean to bring my birth mother in, and I think that’s where the drawings come in: they’re a sort of an atmospheric “other” thing. I’ve never seen an actual picture of my birth mother, and I think it would be a little rough to say, “Oh, and here’s a drawing of my birth mother.” That’s not how I work. I made the drawings, and I’d had them in my apartment for a while, and I really wanted to use them for something. It’s only when everything was together that I realized that, when you include the social work papers, which do acknowledge that I was born to someone else, that that someone else sort of has a way of coming through in other places. One drawing makes me think that maybe that’s what my adoptive mother’s face and mine together would look like, since we’re not genetically related. What if I put together her lips and my nose? AQ: Photographing your mother must be a very intimate process. To many the concept of one’s “mother” is nearly impossible to define. What challenges did you face in trying to capture the essence of someone who is so close

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36 to you? Did you find yourself carrying out this project as “daughter” or as “photographer”? SEG: My family is pretty liberal and intimate. There’s this ongoing joke that whenever all of us have to go out to a Christmas party or something, even now that my brothers are 33 and 32 and I’m 23, we all end up in the master bathroom together, getting ready. There aren’t a lot of boundaries. The nude photograph of my mother was only made possible because she’s so polite. She’s laughing in it because she was on the phone with my other brother saying, “Gotta go, Sarah’s taking pictures of me naked.” It’s not in her nature to slam down the phone and run away. I’m not dealing with a woman who is like some mothers who will say, “What the hell are you doing?” We just spend so much time together that, over time, it was almost like she didn’t even notice anymore because I just exhausted her with it. My apartment is filled with literally thousands of pictures of her, and it’s sort of weird. At the same time, I don’t know a lot of people who have taken that much time to learn about a parent, and the older you get, your mother tends to tell you things that she didn’t tell you before, so you start to become female adults together. A lot of this project was learning about my parent’s marriage, her life growing up, things like that. So in that sense, a lot of times I was genuinely looking at her as a woman, and other times, it would be more photographic, where I was just looking for a good picture, something that’s visual. I would photograph my mother in our home or when we were on vacation in places that matched our home. There’s continuity there. We stayed in environments that matched each other. I think that keeping her in environments that we both were comfortable in was key: home, backyard, pool. And from

an equipment standpoint, I used a 35 mm, which is not too common anymore, with a lens that usually doesn’t require flash. I think a lot of photographers struggle to find the electricity in their photos, and it’s because they can’t move in an environment. I think it would have been a disaster if I’d been walking around with a huge camera. AQ: You mentioned the nude photograph of your mother, and the understanding that you gained, both through growing up and also through this project, of your mother as a woman. Given that, I’m curious about the circumstances behind this photo. Taking a portrait of one’s own mother nude is so intimate that most people might shy away from it. What made it important for you to capture this particular moment? SEG: I was walking up the stairs, and she was running a bath and talking to my brother on the phone, and I said to myself, “I should get my camera.” I had time to go to my room, get my camera, and then I walked back and she was still there, so I decided to take two shots. It ended up just being such a funny shot. I feel like the nudity is just one part of that photo: you’ve got the three portraits of us in the background, my dad sitting on the ground doing exercises, the crossword-puzzle dictionary, and the fabric that she picked out. It’s also just about that room. It’s actually not the house I grew up in, but it looks like the house I grew up in because she made that house too. A lot of these environments she designed herself. Our home is a very important thing to her from a pride standpoint. She loves to have people in her home. Her drapes and the carpet and everything else are so important to her. For example, the photo of my mom on New Year’s with the mirror, and the plate from upstate New York, and the wood—that’s her environment. She didn’t make it to be shown like that, but it very much is her. We’ve lived in three cities, and everyone always says that her house is her way to stay centered. AQ: You’ve said that your Hi, it’s Mom project is the result of trying to “capture every way a person could exist on paper,” and this certainly comes through both in the variety of materials you incorporate, as well as in the many ways your mother is

portrayed in the photographs. Could you talk a little bit about your mother’s role as subject while you were photographing her, and the “sides” of her that you—or she— chose to portray? SEG: When I showed it to my brother, he said the same thing, that there are a lot of different versions of Mom there. I would say that, unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for me to say, “Mom, let’s sit down and get this aspect of you.” My mom is a very big party person: she goes to dinner parties, she’s very polite, she writes thank-you notes, and I felt like every time I attempted to set up a shot with her, it became very House and Country. So almost all of the pictures in Hi, it’s Mom are “stolen” photos, and all of the photos that you don’t see are from the roll where she’s sitting there, smiling. I always have to get her in the next shot. So from that standpoint, we didn’t have a lot of collaboration because that’s not how she likes to exist in photos. When I told her that I had the nude photo, the first thing she asked was, “Do I look fat? Do I look good?” She was interested in the beauty aspect of it. I think the fact that I didn’t choose to picture her in the “Annie Liebovitz dying parent” way was important. I never took that angle with her, and I think that it helped. I think the fact that she looks beautiful and that I celebrated her beauty in all of them made it okay for her to look a little depressed in some of them. I think that’s as far as I took it. For example, there’s one picture of my two parents with a wall in between them, and that’s definitely one moment, but I think if I’d followed that moment too aggressively, it would have been like over-correcting when you’re driving, because it’s not totally their relationship; it’s just a part of it. As far as trying to capture one person on paper, that came from the document standpoint. I was thinking you can write your name, you can draw a picture of yourself, you can take a photograph of yourself, but you could also draw a line and say, “That’s me.” AQ: It seems as though both projects are as much about who you are as they are about your family and your mother. I also imagine you must’ve had to do a lot of literal searching to find some of the documents and old photographs in your work. Was the momentum behind these projects one of self-discovery, or one of self-assertion in that you wanted to present your mother, your background, and yourself to the world?

REDACTED

SEG: I think that to have an idea is an assertive thing, so you think, “Okay, I’m going to spend eighteen months trying to organize this family situation,” but then it grows and interacts. I think that the worst thing you can do with a project is to not go with the changes. We were looking through family photos, and the funny part is that my mom is always saying, “Oh, I’m such a bad photographer,” because she wasn’t good at taking cookiecutter pictures which, now, all these years later, turns out to be really great photography that’s a little chaotic. I love that she takes pictures like I take pictures, where everyone’s doing something different. There’s an original print of hers where I’m on a box on the patio and my dad is reading and the dog is sitting right there and there’s a basketball, and it’s sort of chaotic. I think the Hi, it’s Mom series was chaotic in that sense: water bottles, glasses cases, hanging things, scrunchedup pillows. It was very textured. You look at the photos she took of us as kids, and they’re similarly chaotic. I basically said just look through the photos at home and just send me some. She was saying she didn’t know what to send, and I said just send pictures of us as kids. She really did a good job editing those first ones. I didn’t go on a fact-finding spree. She gave me the initial edit, and then I would pick a few, and she would say “Dad isn’t even looking” and I would say, “Mom, this is a great photo.” So that was interesting to go through with her, getting her to think about her own family photography. And I think she’s really happy to get these photos when the show is done. A lot of it is her own photography, and she’ll get to live with her own images. ■

WHENEVER THEY STOPPED SINGING

“Within a photo lines are made not just from arms and muscles and body movements. I think the most powerful line is made from where a person’s looking.”

MICHELLE WATT

ISO SPRING 2011

FEATURED ARTIST

MICHELLE WATT

BY SASHA ARUTYUNOVA

Michelle Watt is the architect and director of whimsical views into sensuous backstage hangouts and surreal dinner parties. Her characters exchange secret whispers over macaroons and cocktails—shooting luring glances across the room or reveling in their own introspective musings. Each limb and dessert is placed just so, building a visual narrative of seduction and intrigue.

student, it’s always been going to sleep to get up to do work. Just like pooping or something, you just get it over with. You go home, you do it, and then you leave, but now, it’s like you go home and sleep, and it’s this time when your ideas approach you and bestow themselves upon you.

Michelle has been my close friend and creative collaborator since we first began studying photography at NYU. Over the past three years, I have been a witness to her work’s growth in physical complexity, manifested in increasingly elaborate set construction, maxed-out credit cards and a thorough knowledge of the Macy’s Return Policy. Having served the role of producer, photo assistant and model in her productions, I have watched her images come to life from behind and in front of her camera. Michelle’s senior thesis project, Whenever They Stopped Singing is both a culmination and a beginning, laden with the history and nuance of the tableau.

MW: Yeah, and a lot of my fantasies have come from those dreams, but I don’t think I’ve quite achieved illustrating them yet in these images. Instead, they become about something else, but it’s not really the intended fantasy I wanted to illustrate. Another source of inspiration was going to museums, seeing paintings and sculptures and gestures that really moved me. A lot of the Rodin sculptures—just like the little gestures packaged into clay. How do you translate that same type of thing into photography? You see a lot of that in painting too, and I think that’s where my lighting focus comes from because those moments that happen in painting for me are always about light, and how the painter renders the gesture of the person’s emotion— like shock, or awe, or fear—through something like the softest candle light possible.

SA: How did you came up with some of the initial ideas for this elaborate project?

SA: Are they kind of fantasies?

MW: I started from a few different places. The main one was just looking at inspiration in magazines or fashion blogs or artists’ websites and monographs and then accumulating a visual catalogue of images that I like. So then I say, “Okay, I want to do a shoot that kind of looks like this.” I don’t want to copy them like a word for word kinda thing, so I think about ways to make it different but still interesting. How do I apply themes from my own childhood or themes that moved me from other artists to this piece that could create some sort of flow? A lot of times when I’m walking home, I think about those things, and I don’t really see where I’m walking [laughs].

I didn’t really realize this until I started editing in the lab, and I would print out the big, cropped images, and you would say to me, “Oh, my god, that looks amazing, even that tiny area.” That really reminded me of going up close to a painting (which I love doing), really looking at brush strokes, thinking, “Oh, my god, this is just a blob of paint,” it’s just shaped in a really sculptural way and all of a sudden you scoot back, and it’s someone’s eyeball.

SA: So most often the primary image or idea comes from preexisting fashion images that you want to change?

MW: It’s compositionally very specific. My art director Peter Curtis really helped me create lines that drew the eye from place to place. One of the things that I remember realizing a couple years ago, I think in Editha Mesina’s class, was that someone’s gaze makes another line between someone else’s. Within a photo lines are made not just from arms and muscles and body movements. I think the most powerful line is made from where a person’s looking. You

MW: That’s one way. Another source of inspiration is— well, it’s really banal because its every artist’s source of inspiration, but it’s having really vivid dreams. Recently, it’s been a problem just because I want to sleep more. Like, I actually look forward to sleeping just to dream. As a

SA: When you’re directing all the different characters in the shoot, you’re definitely telling them where to put their arm very specifically—

41 automatically look at where she’s looking, and then he’s looking at a person that’s looking at another person. SA: But you do improvise a little bit. MW: Definitely improvise. SA: Even in terms of who shows up to the shoot... MW: Right [laughs] because I’ve already accepted that no matter how much you plan, how much you want it to look one way, it’s never going to look that way. It’s always going to look different. And well, that sucks, but it’s pretty awesome at the same time.

MICHELLE WATT: Alice (opener) and Social Butterflies (this page). All images courtesy of and copyright by Michelle Watt.

You have the basic characters that you know you want in there, and that’s usually about three out of ten people. It’s almost as if once you get to the point where the set is assembled and people are in costume, you feel out the vibe of how the actors are getting along. Who’s more loose? Who’s more comfortable? If they’re not comfortable, how can I use that? A lot of times I haven’t even met the people until the day of the shoot. I don’t know what their nuances are, what their gestures are like, what their smoldering look is and how comfortable they are in giving that. I reuse a lot of people because I know them and I know that I can rely on them, and I know that they’re flexible, they’re good actors and they can stretch their characters to the extreme, they can stretch their personas to fit those characters. SA: When you’re directing all of these people, are you internally panicked or are you at a calm in the process of shooting?

MW: I think a lot of people in the industry have said that you have to at least pretend you know what you’re doing, and you have to put up an extremely confident face because once you are confident and enthusiastic, people start believing that you actually have a carved out vision in your head, and once that falls apart people are going to start losing their trust in you. Although, yes, I am internally panicked always, trying to figure things out. But now, I have different people to help me with very specific roles, like my stylist Cassandra Hsieh. She is in charge of the costumes, gets a corner of the room, and is in charge of making sure nobody spills anything on the costumes because we’re going to return them later. Even talking about the way fabric drapes—she is really in tune with that in the photo. Also, I now have a producer making sure everybody gets

there on time or everybody can make it or communicating details that I wouldn’t have to worry about because I have to think about all of the other visual details of where things are going to place—the design, the set. Even though I pretty much create the basic structural framework of the image, which is actually very pregnant with details, it’s nice to have Peter there as the art director to fine tune and

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SPRING 2011

42 to make sure I’m not forgetting details. Like, to really make something pop as opposed to it just being in the scene. SA: Would you say that the more important thing is the story that you’re portraying or the formal aspects? MW: It’s a mix. I don’t want to call it fashion photography. I want to create these dramatic visual narratives, tableaux

between. At the top of the arc is when you take the picture, the apex. That’s why you can’t just give them that one line, you have to give them the whole progression. SA: What is it like spending a year to come up with five images versus working with a looser process, in which you could capture 5,000 images in just a few weeks, or days? How does that shape your understanding of your project? MW: I think its the exact same process but because each image takes longer, it’s an elongated process. I’ve only taken five images of the 5,000. I’m still fleshing it out. SA: To build a more concrete understanding of where you want to take the project, do you feel you have to shoot that much? Is it a different process to spend so much time thinking about one image?

that tell a story, which use all these other little elements, such as clothes, environment, and make-up to serve a story, as opposed to exhibiting clothes, exhibiting cushions, which just so happen to tell a story. Fashion photography is the only realm right now in the industry where the types of scenes I want to create fit in. SA: It also reminds me of theater. MW: I thought about coming up with scripts for people initially to get them to be less posed and more in the moment, but I haven’t actually explored that yet. The whole point of giving them a script would be so that they can ease into the character and ease out of it, so there’s this arc in

MW: It’s different in the sense that normally when you take a photo that’s not staged, it takes that half-second to realize it’s the photo you want to take, and you take it. That half-second in this case is prolonged to a month where you really think about what you want in the photo. You have to practice how to use your camera before you become intuitive enough with it to make the image you want to make. This is the same approach. I don’t think I’ve gotten to the point yet where I’m making the images I want to make. I’m still fleshing it out. I’m getting more and more used to the process, and that’s how I know this is working, developing. The more I practice the scale, the easier it becomes, and eventually, I can use the scale and create melodies. Right now, I’m still working on the scale. SA: What have the first twelve shoots taught you? What were the things that worked?

MICHELLE WATT: Lion’s Den

ISO

43 MW: Each one is definitely a learning process. I know I’m improving, starting from the first one where I thought I could create something, and I definitely did not achieve that at all and just put one light there and hit everybody. As opposed to now, where I’ve learned to isolate the lights to really render the gestures the way I want to render them, the way painters do that. In terms of casting, the reason I want to avoid using only professional models is because I don’t want it to look like it’s selling clothes. So I’ve decided to use actors more because they can better facilitate the story, the character interaction. Fortunately, a lot of my friends are actors. Beautiful people draw your eye. I still want it to look beautiful. That’s an easy way of going at it, but it still looks a little too much like a student piece because it’s a bunch of young people. So I think I need older people. I need to mix that up, maybe even kids. I guess I tried doing that by bringing the dog in, but a dog’s not a kid and a dog’s not an older person. SA: One aspect that unites all of your photos in the project so far is an opulence, in terms of lushness and abundance of fabrics, decadence of the desserts...

MICHELLE WATT: Lion’s Den details

MW: I think my next project after this (or maybe it’s the same project, but it’s the next direction it’s going) will move toward the direction of minimalism. I was explaining this in class, that I’m filling the frame with all this stuff to hide my insecurity about not enough going on in the scene. When not enough is going on, it becomes about fashion or discovering an effect and wanting something to apply it to. I think it’s really hard to pull it off sometimes—to stage a less abundant scene and have it be effective in conveying an emotion that isn’t too direct or too obvious. Another realization I’ve had recently is that portraits of people alone in the studio— they’re great, there are people who are really good at taking those pictures, and those are a lot fun to take—but putting an object next to a person, even if it’s one very basic object, can really draw out something in that person that I never noticed before. For example, take Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants, it’s the elephants that highlight her beauty, it’s the elephants that make her grandiose, or the dress grandiose. Or even, if you put a girl next to a piano, it’s the curves of the piano that draw out the curves of her face and her body, that draw out her femininity. This

actually works similarly with lip gloss. Lip gloss creates these specks of reflective light on your lips that draw out the specs of light in your eyes that make your eyes sparkle. Or the way a suit transforms the way a man looks. SA: How do you work within the university setting without limiting your vision? MW: I feel very privileged to use the resources they provide us, but I’m trying to work the system. I can use the excuse of having to create a project for their system, for school, for an assignment, for the thesis, essentially, as a way to develop what I actually wanted to do, and school’s just there. If I didn’t have school, I would have found another way to do it. You find ways to make it happen. I think it was Photo II with Mark Jenkinson—it was pretty early on—where he said, “You just have to make it work.” I always hear his voice in my head saying, “You just have to make it work, you find a way.” That’s a mentality that I grew up with—my mom just saying, “Don’t talk to me right now, just make it work.” That was reinforced when I heard that from Mark again as a sort of life principle. In this case, you know what the rules are, and yes, they do limit how much equipment you can check out, how much time you get in the studio, but you also know that your friends want to help you, so you can do it together. ■

ISO ISSUE NO. 5

ISO SPRING 2011

THE GALLERY tableau vivant

The moment of a tableau anticipates a collision. It explores the mounting tension between geometry and emotion. In this issue of ISO, we were inspired by the narratives that appear in busy social interactions, intersecting landscapes, and hyper-real scenarios. These narratives mirror reality, but only exist during the discrete interval in which the image is taken. If we experience these stories in daily life, we may only see a fraction of their dimension. These images immerse us in a web of pointed gazes, forceful lines, and wider angles. — sasha arutyunova and jenna spitz

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Untitled JONNO RATTMAN

Opener: untitled (forest scene) MARK DALESSANDRO; Opposite: untitled (ennui) MARK DALESSANDRO

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Untitled KRISTINA KNIPE

Zakopane, 2009 SASHA ARUTYUNOVA

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Watch the Feet BEN CAREY

Idaho beach, 2010 LUPE SALINAS

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Russian Countryside, 2008 SASHA ARUTYUNOVA

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Before the Rain BEN CAREY

Untitled (Meditations on Pliability) ALISON WYNN

Previous: Benjica, Belgrade BEN FRANKE

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Untitled (Meditations on Pliability) ALISON WYNN

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Untitled, 2010 EMMA STRUGATZ

Untitled JONNO RATTMAN

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Crowds HANSON O’HAVER

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The Last Rager ALEX ARBUCKLE

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Backstage COLE SALADINO

Emilie and Peter PERRI HOFMANN

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Colin SOLEIL GARNEAU

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Untitled CHRISTINA THOMOPOULOS

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Versailles PETER CURTIS

Trees PETER CURTIS

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Untitled JONNO RATTMAN

Skate Park Dystopia BEN BASSOFF

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Untitled, 2010 DYLAN SITES

untitled (choke) MARK DALESSANDRO

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74 PHOTOGRAPHERS

COLLABORATIONS

PORTFOLIOS

GALLERIES

AGENCIES

butdoesitfloat.com

BUT DOES IT FLOAT? . A visually stimulating blog featuring photography as well as drawing, architecture, painting, and sculpture. (Photo: Terry Evans)

rhysbaker.com/blog

www.elenakulikova.com

apachennov.daportfolio.com

RHYS BAKER

ELENA KULIKOVA

EUGENA SOLOVIEV

Baker uses countless techniques and types of cameras to capture, as he says, “the things that everybody knows about but isn’t attending to.”

With an eye for detail and beauty, Kulikova takes ethereal portraits as well as captivating photos for various ad campaigns.

The surreal photos taken and manipulated by this 21-year-old self-taught photographer are truly astounding.

www.500photographers.com

500 PHOTOGRAPHERS A great way to discover new photographers, still 300+ to go!

www.monomondo.com

CHRIS McCAW . Sun Burn by Chris McCaw: “A project taking photography back to its primal beginnings”.

PHOTOFLO

BLOGS

RESOURCES

stuckincustoms.com

STUCK IN CUSTOMS Trey Ratcliff’s website, on which he has promised to post one photo per day, has been named the “#1 Travel Photography Blog on the internet” and for good reason.

www.timmacpherson.com

TIM MACPHERSON From crowded tableaux to individual close-ups, Tim MacPherson’s photos are evocative and highly captivating.

www.loc.gov/pictures

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS temproommate.tumblr.com

www.alexanderbinder.de

TEMP ROOMMATE

ALEX BINDER

A recently-started project in which three friends took over 1000 photos documenting one night and plan to post one every day for three years.

Become absorbed with his bizarre, other-worldly images.

Library of Congress website with thousands of photographs from the Civil War to the FSA- even buy a print!

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VIRTUAL PAGES SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

DECEMBER 8, 2010

PETER FUNCH

BARELY VISIBLE, COMPLETELY THERE

By Max Mellman in Photographers, Photography Over the summer, I skimmed over an article about Peter Funch in one of the many old copies of Juxtapoz magazine I had sitting around my room. Immediately, I fell in love. Using multiple exposures and editing, Funch’s Deja Vu series is filled with images that appear normal, just slightly off. His depictions of Americans immediately after 9/11 are absolutely haunting, and his Crash series turns the gruesome into something beautiful about preserving the atrocities of war. http://isozine.com/blog/?p=1362

By Celine Comolet in Photo Series, Photographers, Photography Liu Bolin is there. If you look closely he is. He can spend up to 10 hours painstakingly preparing his pictures, preparing his chameleon skin, preparing to blend in. It therefore doesn’t come as a surprise, that the artist has fused so well with his surroundings that passers-by only notice him, if he moves. But even if he’s barely visible, Liu Bolin is completely there. While Liu Bolin has gotten a lot of international acclaim, the digital age has given him a hard time: a lot of comments on his photo series concern photoshop, people unimpressed by the pictures because he could have just edited himself in and been completely invisible. But that’s not the point the artist wants to make. The marvel that these pictures produce is due to the quality of Bolin’s camouflage, the details, the precision. We find our minds blown by Bolin’s perceptiveness and just how successfully he has managed to blend in. Bolin started his series “Hiding in the City” in protest against the Chinese government for closing down his art studio and their general attempts at keeping a certain amount of control over the arts. From that start point, he centered the series on the notion of not fitting in to modern society. Because even if he’s barely visible, Liu Bolin is completely there. http://isozine.com/blog/?p=2250

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ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO POST: EXCERPTS FROM THE BLOG @

ISOZINE.COM NOVEMBER 10, 2010

OCTOBER 24, 2010

NOMADIQUE: BRINGING YOU STORIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD THROUGH ART

CHRIS JORDAN’S PLASTIC BEACH

By Katie Vogel in Film, Miscellaneous, Photography NYU students and alum, Jimmy Chalk, Sasha Arutyunova, Jonathan Seale, and Andrew Ellis are dedicated to bringing you stories from around the world through their film, photography, music, and writing. In October, they officially launched the project, “Nomadique”; and the ten or so projects they’ve presented so far are stunningly beautiful. These projects are inspired by stories they encounter and are a part of in any place they are or have been—from the beautiful photographs of the smog takeover in Moscow this summer, to a short film about an omelet stand in South India, to the photographs documenting the daily duties of conductors on the F train in Borough Park, Brooklyn. http://isozine.com/blog/?p=1933

By Lauren Greenberg in Photography Chris Jordan has a magic about him, a strange working in his brain. Within him is a power to transform abstract, vague concepts into images of clear, bold certainty. By this, I do not mean to imply that Jordan’s images are simple. They represent the complex, faulty, swaying tightrope that is truth as Jordan attempts to expose the unexamined. A past project of Jordan’s converted abstract, too-massiveto-digest statistics about American consumption into visual works of grandeur (seen here). His latest project, Midway: Message from the Gyre, an elegy for the Albatross, examines the collective behaviors, absurdities, and immediate effects of today’s consumer-oriented, waste-obsessed society. Though Jordan’s images are void of the human form, mankind is not absent from his work. His images portray our strange rituals of disposal and how we determine our environment. In 2009, Jordan traveled to the remote island of Midway, a small, sandy stretch of land located in the North Pacific Ocean. It is here he came upon a mass graveyard of Albatross birds, all in various states of decomposition. As the birds decayed, their inner stomach cavities became visible, revealing hundreds of different types of plastics the birds had consumed, mistaking the bright colors for food. Midway is considered one of the most remote locations on earth, miles from any continent, and yet our bottle caps, lighters, ballpoint pens and paper clips have traveled there, now live there. We are surrounded. http://isozine.com/blog/?p=1544

DIRECTORY ALI, Zeshawn zsa209@nyu.edu

GINTOFF, Vladimir gintoff.v@gmail.com

SITES, Dylan dws280@nyu.edu

ARBUCKLE, Alex alex.q.arbuckle@gmail.com

GREENBERG, Lauren ljg316@nyu.edu

SPITZ, Jenna jennaspitz@nyu.edu

ARUTYUNOVA, Sasha s.arutyunova@gmail.com www.ispoketoosoon.com 954.822.3243

GROUP, Sara smg501@nyu.edu projectsara.tumblr.com 215.209.9459

STARK, Haley stark.haley@gmail.com flickr.com/photos/superstark

BARNES, Aziza adb382@nyu.edu

HARTMANN, Irene irenehartmann@gmail.com

STEPHENSON, Laura lcs331@nyu.edu 203.848.7885

BASSOFF, Ben ben.bassoff@gmail.com

HOFMANN, Perri perrihofmann@gmail.com

BEVILACQUE, Beryl berylbev@gmail.com

KNIPE, Kristina kek297@nyu.edu

SWERDLOFF, Margaux ms5647@nyu.edu 305.586.2211

BOARDMAN, Madeleine meb560@nyu.edu

KURTZ, John johnkurtz92@gmail.com

BORAWAKE, Shraddha Uday sborawake@gmail.com musttkalandar.blogspot.com

LENTZ, Alison lentzal@gmail.com www.alisonlentz.com

CAREY, Ben bjc305@nyu.edu

MATHURA, Shivam srm382@nyu.edu

VOGEL, Katie kjv207@gmail.com

CHASSÉ, Naomi nvc212@nyu.edu www.naomichasse.com

MELLMAN, Max mdm452@nyu.edu

WATT, Michelle michelle@michelle-watt.com www.michelle-watt.com

CLARIZIO, James jamesclarizio@nyu.edu COMOLET, Céline cjc467@nyu.edu COBB, Nicole nac313@nyu.edu

MILLER, Greg www.gregmiller.com NOLTE, Kris krisnolte@gmail.com O’HAVER, Hanson h.ohaver@gmail.com

CURTIS, Peter peteracurtis@gmail.com

POON, Francis francis.poon91@gmail.com 626.780.2192

DALESSANDRO, Mark mhdalessandro@gmail.com

PUGACHEVSKY, Julia jp2523@nyu.edu 908.907.3452

DAMSKI, Charley charleydamski@gmail.com www.charleydamski.com

QUIGLEY, Annie apq204@nyu.edu

DOMINGO, Danlly danlly@danllydomingo.com www.danllydomingo.com

RATTMAN, Jonno jonnorattman@gmail.com www.jonnorattman.com

FRANKE, Ben ben@benfranke.com www.benfranke.com

RAPONE, Corinne corinne.rapone@gmail.com

GARNEAU, Soleil soleilgarneau@nyu.edu GEORGE, Michael michaelgeorgephoto@gmail.com www.michaelgeorgephoto.com 239.898.1799 GETTO, Sarah Elizabeth www.sarahelizabethgetto.com sarahgetto@gmail.com

REISS, Sam sam.reiss@gmail.com RICCHIUTO, Madeline mer412@nyu.edu SALADINO, Cole ccs322@nyu.edu 949.683.8549 SALINAS, Lupe ges279@nyu.edu

SHANKAR, Avantika aas521@nyu.edu STRUGATZ, Emma emmastrugatz@gmail.com THOMOPOULOS, Christina cpt231@nyu.edu

WYNN, Alison akw267@nyu.edu 203.912.3786 YUDELEVICH, Shalla shalla.yudelevich@gmail.com ZOZAYA, Carlos cz493@nyu.edu 201.640.4268

This project was initiated by students in the Department of Photography & Imaging and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and funded by The Tisch Undergraduate Student Council, Deanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Profunds, the Department of Photography & Imaging, and various individual donors. All NYU students are invited to contribute.

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