TEACHING | SCRAPS + NOTES

NEW TOPOGRAPHICS

4/1/2021

"The New Topographics : Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was a 1975 exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography (read more here).

"The 1975 exhibition New Topographics signaled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticized views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance. This restaging of the exhibition includes the work of all 10 photographers from the original show: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel (read more via SFMOMA)."

Watch this video of Robert Adams talking about his work >> Art21, Robert Adams in "Ecology"

Reclaiming / Reframing / Facing History

1/10/2021

FRED WILSON

KENYATTA A. C. HINKLE

DAWOUD BEY

MISINFORMATION

11/17/2020

With/in the Post-Truth condition, there is "a circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth."

"Post-truth [is a] cash cow for print and electronic media and fodder for year-around political campaigning and fund-raising; English Dictionary 2016 Word of the Year; interminable open—and closed—door House and Senate hearings on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the internet, Ken Ham's Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, Breitbart, and the presidential bully pulpit; the birther movement, deep state conspiracy theory, global warming and New Creationism debates, and free speech controversies on university campuses across the country."

Barbara A. Biesecker
Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 51, No. 4, 2018. Special Issue: Post-Truth (JSTOR) (Project Muse)

O M E R F A S T

>> More about "CNN Concatenated" on Art21

Ken Ham's "Creation Museum" in Kentucky

The "Creation Museum" has positioned itself as a natural history museum, but it presents a history that is rooted in a literal translation of the Biblical creation story. The exhibits claim the Earth was formed in six 24-hour periods, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and that Dinosaurs and mankind once co-existed, among many other anti-scientific and unsubstantiated claims. When confronted with scientific evidences that discredit the exhibitions, a common rebuttal in the museum is to pose the question, "Were you there?"

The Creation Museum website
Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham Evolution Debate at the Creation Museum - NPR
"We Don't Have to Be Afraid Of The Real Evidence" - The Guardian
Creation Museum Photo Essay - Topic

MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY

No cameras are allowed in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Further reading:
"Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology" by Lawrence Weschler
"... a true hodgepodge of natural history artifacts..." Smithsonian Magazine
David Wilson, creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (via Hammer)

<< For a massive list of texts + resources compiled by my Art Ed 339 students and I, click "Read More" >>

MARK BRADFORD

11/17/2020

Mark Bradford, On Paper (Art21)
(Paradox — Art21)

DATA VISUALIZATION

10/20/2020

D E A R D A T A

>> Click here to read more about the project on the official Dear Data website.

W . E . B . D u B o i s

W.E.B. DuBois was a sociologist, researcher, and co-founder of the NAACP. He was also an artist and designer. He collected data from Black communities in the United States around the Turn of the Century. The data visualizations he created helped to illustrate the gaping racial wounds in our country in the wake of slavery (wounds that still haven't healed, over a hundred years later). He used data to hold society accountable, and he used data as a form of protest. He believed accurate data could lead us toward a more just, inclusive world. His work is incredibly important, on a variety of levels.

>> Here is an excellent mini biography about his life.

>> Here is a great lecture from designer and scholar Silas Munro. I highly recommend this*

F L O R E N C E N I G H T I N G A L E

Florence Nightingale was a nurse, but she was also a mathematician, researcher, and infographic artist.

>> This article has some more information about her.

>> This key should help decode the graphs below.

Red – deaths caused by wounds,
Black – deaths from other causes, and
Blue – deaths caused by diseases.

N I C H O L A S F E L T O N

Felton makes elaborate annual reports about his personal life at the end of each year. They are meticulous and beautiful. Check them out on his website, here. This webpage has some information as well.

N A T H A L I E M I E B A CH

A A R O N K O B L I N

The Nerdy Charm of Artisanal, Hand-Drawn Infographics, via Wired magazine.

EMMA KUNZ

9/28/2020

E M M A K U N Z

Emma Kunz was a Swiss healer and artist. She published three books and produced many drawings. Kunz was born to a family of weavers in 1892 in Switzerland. She was not a trained artist; she is characterized as an outsider artist.

>> This article is great. "Why everyone is rediscovering the Spiritual Illustrations of Emma Kunz."

Carrie Mae Weems // THE FUTURE OF ART

8/27/2020

"THE KITCHEN TABLE SERIES"

"FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED AND I CRIED"

"THE USUAL SUSPECTS"

DIARY OF A PANDEMIC

4/27/2020

Antoine d'Agata

MAGNUM PHOTOJOURNALISTS RESPOND TO COVID-19

NEW YORK TIMES PHOTOJOURNALISTS RESPOND TO COVID-19

Eugene Richards

VIJA CELMINS

4/27/2020

PHOTOS OF NOTHING

4/20/2020

That's a bit of a paradox, I know.

There's really no such thing as a photograph of nothing.

This is a framing for understanding images that might defy easy reading. These images, either through abstraction or overt banality, resist simple interpretation. They ask us to look, again, at something overlooked.

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This article sheds some light on the allure of what could be termed "Photos of Nothing" >>>

When most people think of a photograph they think of images, taken with a camera, of that which can be identified from this world—i.e. people, places or things. However, for most of photography's existence, there has been a parallel tradition of what is generally labeled "abstract photography," or photographs that purposefully stray from presenting things as immediately recognizable and veer towards the abstract.

In their extreme form, these types of images can be understood—to borrow a term from abstract painting—as "non-objective," or containing nothing that can be immediately recognized. (Such paintings have also been called "pictures of nothing." To be specific, the phrase was used by a critic to describe the works of J.M.W. Turner and also served to title a series of collected lectures on the subject of abstract art by Kirk Varnedoe, a former curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.)

In recent years, this tradition has seemed to attract exponentially more attention from artists. Maybe it is because we have too many (representative) images available to us online or it's a reaction to the huge popularity of large-scale, very realistic figurative work, or the influence of the abstract work of certain artists, like Thomas Ruff, on subsequent generations.

Arguably, some of the most interesting photographers working today create non-objective photographs or pictures of nothing. And it seems like there is a new way to explore/picture this subject/technique monthly. For what it's worth, a few of the tendencies could be understood as...

-An interest in light. For example, Alison Rossiter's imagery stems from her experiments with expired photographic papers and Barbara Kasten uses materials such as glass, mirrors, Plexiglas, and mesh, to make large-scale geometric sets, which play with shadow, light, and reflection.
-An interest in visualizations of math and science. For example, Thomas Ruff's cycles are inspired by 19th century science books and are based on visualizations of “cycloids,” mathematical curves that are the product of rolling one curve along a second, fixed curve.
-An interest in focusing very closely on a typically-recognizable object to the point that it becomes abstracted. For example, Daido Moriyama's patterned monochromes are close-ups of legs sheathed in tights.
-An interest in decay and the photograph as a sculptural material as in Ryan Foerster's abstractions, portraits of friends he made that were destroyed (and inherently re-born) by the flooding and destruction of Hurricane Sandy.
-An interest in textures. See, for example, Frank Thiel's photographs of weathered buildings.
-An interested in abstracting history to encourage different perspectives. Farrah Karapetian's large-scale photograms focus on details of scenes and signs of protest.

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This second article has some additional information and resources.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Frank Theil

Carrie Mae Weems

Daido Moriyama

Clar McWeeney

Dino Kužnik

Imogen Cunningham

Kim Llerena

Lee Friedlander

Lewis Baltz

Robert Adams

Stephen Shore

Margaret Bourke-White

Ruth Bernhard

Sarah Phyllis Smith

William Eggleston

Daniel Everett

* Daniel Everett is an artist and professor at the university I attended, and I am a huge fan of his work. Please check out his website here *