Flat Pictures You Can Feel manipulates and repackages how we see (and feel!) images on screens, on walls, and in our hands.

Some of my favorite photographic series are ones that seep ambiguity. While I love typologies and projects with a clear beginning, middle, and end, pictures and sequences that at first bewilder me or make me think “What is this photographer actually thinking?" "What's going on in this image?" or ” Why are these photos organized like this?" often have the most staying power. Will Douglas’ latest book Flat Pictures You Can Feel, published earlier this year by Ain’t Bad, does just that.

Images of bullfights volley against religious iconography, photos of smashed surfaces, gravesites and others balancing soft and hard, peaceful and violent, immediate and metaphoric. Some are Douglas' own photographs, others are appropriated images from advertisements, rephotographed on walls or digital monitors. It's often unclear which are his own, and which are borrowed, but it doesn't really matter. The notion of "feeling," them, pulled from the book's title, is central to them all. Douglas collects and collates these haphazard moments into a strange meditation on how the process of viewing an image – whether it’s on a screen or in physical form – can change or even numb how we understand their place in the world.

After meeting Douglas at Portland, Oregon’s 2019 Photolucida portfolio reviews, I followed up to dig deeper into his ideas, process, and clarify the confusion that first drew me in.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Will Douglas

PostedJuly 3, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Portfolio, Photobooks

TagsWill Douglas, appropriation, masculinity, Flat Pictures You Can Feel, Ain't Bad Books, Photobooks

Hannah Wilke Gum in Cherry Tree 1976 Califonia Series Archival Pigment Print 2019 24x36

Hannah Wilke’s Sculptures in the Landscape exhibition showcases previously never-before seen photographs from the 1970s feminist icon.

Walking into Sculptures in the Landscape at Temple Contemporary, knowing only that the late Hannah Wilke was a second wave feminist artist and that these works were positioned to explore femininity and nature, I anticipated seeing a passé, narrow representation of the female body standing in for the experience of womanhood itself. Chalk it up to my coming-of-age in the twenty-first century, but art that substitutes biological female anatomy, as opposed to other experiences shared by women, doesn’t come across as particularly brave or bold in the way it must have in the late 20th century. Despite these concerns, the exhibition is an expansive, playful, and sometimes psychedelic exercise in feminist art’s sculptural malleability, and subverted the preconceptions I had going in.

Sculpture in the Landscape does center the form of the vulva, but the materials used to recreate it– chewing gum, ceramics, metal – in ways that comment on both common women’s experiences as well as the natural surroundings where these pieces of gum are placed. Most significantly, Wilke’s photographs don’t raise the form of the vulva as something unknowably magical or mysterious, but presents them in matter-of-fact contexts to emphasize their ordinariness and naturalness.

Exhibition Review by Deborah Krieger

PostedJune 27, 2019

AuthorDeborah Krieger

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists

TagsHannah WIlke, 70s feminist art, Feminist Art, yonic art, 2nd wave feminism, second wave feminism, Deborah Krieger

The Dining Room © Guanyu Xu — *The Dining Room* © Guanyu Xu

Beijing-raised, Chicago-based Guanyu Xu’s latest series, Temporarily Censored Home processes the complexities of living and working as a queer artist across cultures of freedom and restriction.

A recent graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program, Guanyu Xu is free to pursue projects that examine his intersectional experience of race, sexuality, and citizenship when in the United States. In Beijing, however, where Xu grew up and where his parents presently live, revealing these significant personal details and their importance to his creative practice gets complicated. It invites unwanted attention from both family and a repressive political regime that prides itself on controlling the lives of its citizens.

In his latest series, Temporarily Censored Home, for which the artist was recently shortlisted for Aperture’s prestigious 2019 Portfolio Prize, Xu covertly creates installations in his parents Beijing home when they are unaware, and photographs them. Straddling a line between installation art, sculpture, and photographic document, he combines images from his childhood and adolescence with portraits of his present-day self and other gay men, forcing an otherwise censored space to recognize his humanity.

After a productive portfolio review at SPE National in March, we communicated about his latest work ad the experience and ideas driving it. He wrote at length about how desire is shaped, the tension of mounting and breaking down clandestine installations while his parents are out of the house, and the varied media and textual sources that influence his practice.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Guanyu Xu.

PostedJune 20, 2019

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsAperture 2019 Portfolio prize, Guanyu Xu, Roula Seikaly, photographer interviews, new photography, SAIC photography MFA, queer photography, photographic interventions

Made using an antique collodion process, the artists' self-portraits reflect her experience and trauma living under the thumb of a religious cult.

Michelle Rogers-Pritzl uses self-portraiture to process her experience within, and escape from a fundamentalist Christian marriage. Borrowing from a Stevie Smith poem of the same name, Not Waving But Drowning is a collection of visual symbols for keeping up appearances within an abusive relationship, praying for change while stuck within an endless cycle of denial.

Metaphors for silencing women repeat themselves throughout the series. In some images, hands bind together, grasp at crooked arms or reach in to cover a face. In others, materials like gauze cover and restrict various parts of the body creating an uncomfortable, visceral response. It’s hard to look at them without a feeling of unease – Rogers-Pritzl packs years of emotional trauma into images that are strangely as beautiful as they are nauseating. Her use of the 19th-century Collodion process adds an additional signal to outdated ideas about women’s roles and subservience and could be interpreted as creating personal distance, pushing her experience into a reflect-able past.

After meeting the artist at Portland, Oregon’s Photolucida portfolio reviews in April, we emailed to discuss the ideas and process behind her work. She’s also included in Humble’s latest online group-show: “Loss.”

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Michelle Rogers-Pritzl

PostedMay 30, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio, Galleries

TagsSouthern Baptist, Religious Cults, Michelle Rogers-Pritzl, Collodion Process, alternative process photography, black and white photography, self portraiture, self portrait photography, Christian fundamentalism

Portraiture, specifically the act of photographing a community outside one’s own, has a difficult history. It can be loaded with the photographer’s projections of their own experiences, and in the worst case scenario, put forth a flawed, voyeuristic gaze directing viewers to stop and stare at people as specimens. Typological, serialized portraiture can drive this even further with less environmental context exaggerating an under-the-microscope kind of looking. But when it works, there’s a balance of collaboration between the photographer and the photographed - an empathy-steered journey.

Enter Los Angeles-based Tracy L. Chandler. We met at the Photolucida portfolio reviews last month and I was drawn to her work for the questions it sparked in me. Her series, Edge Dwellers, is a collection of portraits of a community of socially marginalized people living on the literal and metaphoric edge of the Southern California coast. Photographing them against the sky at a consistent distance, these typological images bring to mind traditions ranging from August Sander through Rineke Dijkstra's Beach Portraits, and more recently and directly, Katy Grannan's 99 series.

Shooting with a 4x5 large format camera, the experience is slowed down. We often look deeply into the eyes of those being photographed while paying attention to every detail of how they look, as a signal of their marginalization. On one level, her portraits feel "outsider" in their approach. Who are we to “look in” on them, to aestheticize their experience, and what right does Chandler have to photograph them? But for the photographer, these portraits are more about collaboration, about a mutual sharing of experience that ultimately ends in a photograph as a memento for a greater bond.

Still curious, I emailed Chandler to learn more.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Tracy L. Chandler

PostedMay 23, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Galleries, Portfolio

TagsTracy L. Chandler, Contemporary Portraiture, Photolucida 2019, Large Format Portraiture, photographic typologies

Will Douglas' New Photobook Flattens and Complicates Our Relationship to a Screen-Based World

A New Exhibition of Second-Wave Feminist Photography Has Vulvas (and Chewing Gum) On The Mind

Guanyu Xu Creates Domestic Interventions That Reflect His Double Life

Michelle Rogers-Pritzl's Photographs Process the Terror of Living Within a Christian Fundamentalist Marriage

Tracy L. Chandler's "Edge Dwellers" and the Question of Seeing vs Being Seen