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…

Fellow photographers and good friends Jim Sherwood and Shirley True recently completed a collaboration they called “Two by Two: The Phoenix Project ”. Both Jim and Shirley are veteran photographers who have often exhibited in the Washington DC area. In February 2012 they began a month-long visit to Phoenix, Arizona and in the ensuing thirty days, each selected an image of the day posting to a select group the two ‘dailies’ without noting authorship.

At the end of the project Jim Sherwood noted: “ [The work-in-progess] evolved into Two by Two: The Phoenix Project. It became a ‘work in time,’ i.e. it was bounded by 30 days, beginning February 15, 2012 and ending March 15.” Selections were based on how well aparticular pair worked together and how each pair meshed with imagesof the preceding days.”

Shirley True : “An important part was nonattribution as to authorship of photos. [The Phoenix Project] is meant to merge artistic identities and challenge the western notion of the significance of individual authorship of a unique work of art. We mean to do this as a way of engaging viewers in how a photo is constructed, how unique vision matters, how seeing overrides technology.”

Another aspect of the work is its structure. Often in critiques of work, we use the term “creative limitations” noting that sometimes freedom can hinder as well as liberate. When everything is open-ended there’s too much for the eyes and mind to take in; a bewildering smorgasbord of choices rush by and rapidly passing time blurs the meaning of what you’re photographing. On the other hand, if you are bound by limitations paradoxically a kind of freedom results. One camera, one lens, one process, a single site, and a guiding concept results in depth rather than breadth.

In the case of the Phoenix Project, Jim and Shirley, both incidentally Easterners new to Phoenix, chose a methodology that at first reading might seem very constricting. But within the self-imposed boundaries of time, geography and concept they found the freedom to create intriguing, meaningful work, gratifying to the eye as well as the mind.

So now at this writing, they are back in Washington engaged in what you would call post-production work. As Jim says: “Our next step is to make exhibition prints of the 68 photos we emailed to friends with no changes in our selections and the order we sent them. The title will remain Two by Two: The Phoenix Project, with no attributions. The third step is to make a book, primarily for ourselves, using an online publishing site. Our fourth step will be to seek a commercial publisher.”

Stay tuned!

I recently encountered an artist, Aaron Canipe, thanks to Simulacra, and then fortuitously discovered he is a student at my old stamping grounds, the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington where young people molded my mind for many years. A senior in the BFA program there, Aaron is inclined both by birth and inclination to dip into the Southern culture of family and story-telling with his project, “Native Place”.