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In recent years, commissioned artists have been sent to Northern Ireland (Ken Howard, 1973, 1977); the Falkland Islands (Linda Kitson, 1982); the Gulf (John Keane, 1991); Bosnia (Peter Howson, 1993) and Kosovo (Graham Fagen, 1999/2000); Afghanistan (Paul Seawright/Langlands & Bell, 2002); and most recently, Steve McQueen was sent to Iraq (2003). (2)

For McQueen to create significant work in response to the war in Iraq is easier said than done. In late 2003 he visited the war zone and spoke with British troops in and around Basra. However, plans to film in Baghdad were disrupted by the security situation. Such practical limitations were no doubt compounded by creative considerations. For what can an artist create that differs substantially from the work of Victorian artist-reporters, or contemporary media professionals like photojournalists or editorial cartoonists? And what can an artist learn about a complex war situation after a brief visit, under official supervision? Not a lot, feared Nico Israel, whose 2004 article for Artforum about artists in Iraq specifically mentions McQueen’s lightning tour:
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The opening day offered speeches and rounds of congratulations while a myriad of security personnel hovered and camera crews angled for the best vantage point to shoot the illustrious international group of academics and business leaders that crowded the stage to open the convention. Enrique Pena Nieto, the Governor of the State of Mexico, inaugurated the event, noting the importance of ethical communication in the progress of humanity. After the pomp and circumstance of the first day, the television crews cleared out and conference attendees settled down to three days of plenaries and panel sessions.
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In some ways Facebook is hardly unique. Sites like Friendster and MySpace preceded it, and they all provide essentially the same service–the ability to dynamically map and monitor friends over the Internet. In each case a user “joins” a Web site, creating an account that allows him or her to customize a personal Web page. Users then interact with other members of the online community, viewing their pages and electing to add certain members as friends. The end result is a constant work-in-progress, a virtual web of connected nodes that describe personal relationships.
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AA BRONSON: In the early 1970s, we were part of a mail art network, let’s call it; a very loose set of affiliations … begun by Ray Johnson in the late ’60s out of New York [City that] was called the New York correspondence school, and was picked up by the Image Bank, a group of artists in Vancouver. (1) And Image Bank started to produce a sort of newsletter in which they would list different artists’ image requests and send this out to a mailing list every now and then. So you would get a list of so and so in such and such a city at such and such an address wants images of palm trees or scuba divers or whatever it might be. And people would start to mail each other clippings out of newspapers or magazines or whatever. There was a lot of mail going this way and that. In the early days of General Idea we used to get up rather late in the morning, get ourselves coffee and sit and open the mail, and opening the mail could easily take two or three hours. There was always an enormous stack of mostly clippings from other artists–like a strange sort of clipping service, though it often took the form of collages and so on and so forth. And that started to get so out of hand, the network started to get so big, that we came up with the idea of producing a magazine called FILE that would not only send out listings on a regular basis, but also present some of the results, both collaborations and correspondence between artists.
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Around the World showcases photo albums from about 1880 to 1930 that depict travels through Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. During this period, the photo album became a visual personal memoir that developed through travelers first collecting souvenir photographs and later capturing images themselves with the first Kodak cameras. The travelers archived these expeditions with not only photographs and text, but also with collected ephemera–maps, advertisements, news clippings, hotel receipts, menus, postage stamps, ship activity programs–that can be seen as adding another dimension to their memoirs. The juxtaposition of the photographs and ephemera creates a mood that supplements the images and text; some elements are meticulously placed on the page while others are layered haphazardly. Vera Talbot’s 1924 album shows her two-year travels through Asia and Africa through pages wallpapered with photographs and minimal text. As a result, the viewer enters her whirlwind, experiencing the cultures and meeting the inhabitants on each of her stops.
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Covering a ninety-year span, these people documented their times, lives, and loved ones. In this age of electronic (and intangible) personal archives, there is a renewed interest in the paper photograph and the story that a collection tells about a person’s life. Leggi il seguito »

This heavy, beautifully produced book situates itself as a blend of exhibition catalog and illustrated critical monograph. It gives generous samples from Joachim Schmid’s major series with informative essays situating the work of this archival artist. The medley is further established when we find that this has been a collaborative, international project involving Photoworks, the Tang Museum, Nederlands Fotomuseum, BildMuseet, and The Photographers’ Gallery, as the publication coincided with the traveling exhibition ‘Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982-2007,” organized by the Tang Museum. This mix of different backgrounds is appropriate to Schmid’s own work, which remixes vernacular imagery from all over the world found in archives, on city streets, or sent directly to the artist. Leggi il seguito »

Early in 2005, a dramatic discovery was made in the attic and basement of a home in Southern California. It was the complete archive of a photographer apparently active in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. A battery of prints, negatives, logs, and equipment constituted this surprising discovery and revealed a previously unknown chapter of photographic history.
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With the consolidation of the art collection at the V & A came many of the trappings of modernism: the hegemony of the photographer’s print, the narrative of the artist’s oeuvre and the mystique of taste. So it might be surprising to learn that within the heart of the V & A’s photography collection is a fascinating assortment of “worthless” photographic ephemera. More an archive or assemblage than a collection, this is much smaller than the art collection that houses it, but no less specialized. It is of interest because it contains rich, visual items that can be attributed to established photographers. The items that comprise this collection are photographers’ Christmas cards. It is unusually personal because the recipient of every card was the museum’s first curator of photographs, Mark Haworth-Booth, who donated them on his retirement in 2004. The dates indicate that the earliest are from the late 1970s, the time that the national collection began to be built. The presence of recent cards, addressed to a new curator, reveals that the archive is to some degree self-replenishing. It is not unusual to find photographers’ Christmas cards within the context of a serious photographic collection. The fact that some photographers (among them Philippe Halsmann and Angus McBean) are represented in major collections by pictures made for dissemination as Christmas cards suggests that this is a genre in its own right. Leggi il seguito »

This portfolio is one of twelve fictional episodes involving a churchgoing father and son. Each part of the story is assembled out of the memory or use of a machine they have in common. The artists’ book of the same name gets its title from the post-9/11 United States, just after the attacks, when the phrase “God Bless America” was omnipresent. The project points to two metaphors for the machine: that it resembles the mind and that it lacks humanity. The reference to religion plays a large part in the mind-machine metaphor. For instance, we may think of religious zealots as machines in that they are often hardwired and programmed through subjective readings of historical texts. Of course, we are aware that certain groups understand texts of the past to be prophecies of the future; millions of people believe in an afterlife and this belief dictates their contemporary existence. Leggi il seguito »