SIMULACRA

What am I looking for in photography? Images that  penetrate the eye, engage the mind, and pierce the heart.  Mark L. Power

Wikipedia: simulacra, from the Latin simulacrum  which means “likeness, similarity”… by the late 19th  century, simulacra had been regarded as an image without the substance or qualities of the original…

Old posts from my former blog, the Salt Mine, can be found in the archive section, from 2008-10.

Recently I uploaded a printing-on-demand book Imperium, to the Blurb website. The book is not a documentary of Washington D.C.  but rather an impressionistic and personal look at a city where I have lived and worked for most of my life. Below are some of the images from the book. The link above will take you to the site where you can preview the book. Comments, pro and con, are welcome. You can send them to mpower1112@comcast.net.

There’s a new photographer on the horizon and it’s no coincidence that his last name is the same as mine because he’s my son, John. Over the years, I have vicariously enjoyed John’s various approaches to  life - he’s been a hunter, a big game fisherman, an actor and on occasion, a journalist. He’s made an excellent living as a professional chef  to the rich and famous. And not to forget his important role as a father to two boys, now grown themselves. And now he’s inviting us to think of himself as a photographer.

Well, you might say, so what? Aren’t we  we all photographers these days? Well,  there is a difference between  people  who take pictures and photographers. As Geoffrey Batchen in a recent issue of Aperture reminds us, today’s photographers in the virtual world  use pictures to anchor themselves in the present time ( I am here) as opposed to treating an image as a memory link to the narrative of our past. Batchen goes on to say “This kind of [online])  photograph is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.” Pictures made today are forgotten tomorrow as a new flood of present-moment images comes our way, a deluge that Michael Kimmelman calls “cellphone chatter”.

But now and then we hear a voice which rises above the chatter and I’d like to think I’d hear John’s voice even if he wasn’t my son. He recently posted some pictures on Flickr which gave me a chance to really look at his work for the first time. I noticed these were observations as much as photographs; that is, they didn’t seem to be made in the hope they would become “good photographs”, the kind that win ribbons in camera club competitions. They appeared to be made quite simply because John was interested in what he was seeing. What he saw was life, not images. You often hear the phrase ‘a sense of place’. Most of JG Power’s picture are calmly observant and have a strong sense of place. Cotton bales along the highway, a prosthesis factory at sunset, a man sitting quietly in a cafe, the mystery in a nighttime Mexican street caused the photographer to wonder and we as viewers wonder right along with him. Pictures online amuse us but rarely do we seek to be amused twice by the same image. John’s picture bemuse instead of amuse and like most good photography, they show us more in a second or third viewing: they are images that linger. 

Here is a sampling of JG Power’s photographs.  You can see more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/93157378@N03/

While sitting on my front porch in early February, I made a few photos of the setting moon at about 8am..

While watching watching the moon continuing its descent…

I began  to think about  the presence of the moon in fine art. Without resorting to my iPhone and Wikipedia and thus separating myself from the *observation of nature - relying in other words on a far more imperfect memory - two iconic images came to mind, Ansel Adams’ ‘Moonrise over Hernandez’ …

…and Van Gogh’s Starry Nights

…and Whistler who more often painted moonlight rather than the moon itself. Of course there are many genre paintings featuring kitschy moons and there are  abstract works with moonlike metaphors.

Robert Motherwell, Monster ( for Charles Ives)

Then I remembered I had seen many Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts with moons in their sky.

                            both by the incomparable Yoshitoshi

Later that morning, by a providential coincidence, Dr Marcus Bunyon’s blog, Art Bart which often brings work to my attention I previously hadn’t seen, featured several 1990 works by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto who has put his inimitable stamp on the moon with his series Revolutions…

Installation photograph of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Revolution at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 2012
Photo: Haydar Koyupinar © 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

 preceding three images © 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

A fascinating aspect of these photographs is Sugimoto’s decision to turn the images on their side, thus re-inventing the horizon as well as formally creating elegant semi-abstract works somewhat reminiscent of Chinese scroll paintings. Such a simple device with such complex results…Sugimoto never ceases to amaze. Time is often Sugimoto’s subject matter as seen in several of the moon images, and you only have to recall his images made in a various  theaters which combine baroque architecture with a blank movie screen. But the screen is anything but conceptually blank because it contains every moment of a given movie photographed with the camera  shutter left open for the duration of the film. There is nothing for the eye to see and everything for the mind to contemplate. 

© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

I remember an amusing story about Sugimoto’s making of this series: it seems the photographer decided to adopt a disguise so he wouldn’t be noticed: “Dressed as a tourist I walked into a cheap Village cinema with a large format camera”.  When the lights came up at the film’s end wouldn’t a  somewhat elderly Japanese man dressed like a tourist with a view camera on a tripod perhaps be noticed? If I ever meet this great artist I might inquire about how his desire for anonymity went. 

                                        ————————

*The separation between man and nature began long before the iPhone, the internet and Wikipedia. As Yaakov Jerome Garba, a professor at Brown University writes in Use and Misuse of the Whole Earth Image. : “The metaphysical separation between humans and their surroundings began when Judeo-Christian monotheistic religions of a god who existed ‘out there’ replaced religions in which local pagan spirits inhabited all living matter.”

In years past, Glen Echo, located  in a nearby  suburb on the Potomac, was Washington’s amusement park. It had a wealth of art deco architecture, its own trolley stop, a dance pavilion, an antique Dentzel  carousel, a rickety wooden roller coaster and a Scary House you could walk through.

But nowadays Glen Echo is less amusing and more educational - in 1968 it became an arts and cultural center run by the U.S, Park service where I’ve had the privilege of working with photographers as a teacher at Photoworks off and on for eight years.