Backyard photographs (in times of turmoil)

hey there this is alex soth in st paul minnesota and uh it's just been an awful week here in minnesota um the the murder of dante wright amidst the trial of derek joven um it's just been so much and um last night i tried to record this vlog and uh sirens kept going off and helicopters above and you know we've had lockdowns various times this week and and it just it made me think you know should i be doing uh a vlog this week on goofy little photo books they seem so inconsequential um so i thought maybe i would talk a bit about that issue itself what it means to make work when the world is in such a state of upheaval um and i just i thought it would be a chance to kind of sit in this room and do therapy with myself and kind of talk through this process where it starts for me is last weekend so this is before the the dante right killing um and it was it was springtime there was this kind of feeling of optimism in the air and i had this desire to look at landscape photographs so the the first book i pulled out was this one right here this is by jem southam and it's called landscape stories let me get rid of my picture here okay and so this this is a real favorite book of mine uh it's kind of a an overview of southam's work it was published in i think i want to say 2004 or so i'm not sure um but it's it's an absolutely lovely compilation now southam uh his way of working is to photograph one place over and over again and uh and this book shows a number of those places and and that's what i thought i was going to talk about but then in the in the back of the book is this one particular section called the garden let me just zoom in here on the photograph and this is this is southam's backyard as seen through his uh his kitchen window and and in this brief text he talks about looking out on this view while he's doing the dishes each day and and it's a lovely little passage and there are just a few uh pictures in the book i don't know how many there are in the series in total i would love to see a whole book of these photographs but it kind of scratched that itch i had for this this feeling of emerging spring and and just kind of the visual delight of photography and so i decided to go looking for some more books in my library that scratched that itch and one that i thought about um from from this book new color new work which is a survey with 18 different photographers but there's one sequence by joanne walters of backyards and these are three different locations around the country ohio maine and illinois and that they're basically just the three different places that that walters had lived in in this span of time these pictures like this picture is made in 1981 and similar to southam's work they are um they're just you know very subtle very beautiful photographs color large format highly detailed and i've always loved these pictures and uh and they've held up for me over the years i i returned to them again and again one interesting thing about them is that they they function almost like traditional nature pictures in that they don't feel dated in any way you have these fragments of architecture but it feels like it could have been made yesterday another book that i looked at was this one summer light by dag alving and this book uh i bought a number of years ago i bought like 10 copies of it was so cheap and and i would give it away to people because i i think it's um a really great book very understated and this sequence here at the beginning is is just called walking around the house the photographs are printed very light there's this feeling of being washed in light this is a nice pairing of pictures here and also here in a earlier episode of this vlog i talked about this this technique that's sometimes used where this is slight movement of time between frames i think that's really effective here doug alvin's pictures at this time uh were very evocative of robert adams but he he would take the work in different directions as well sometimes very surprising pictures like this and then this self-portrait that quite certain robert adams would never take so i looked at that book uh and also this recently published book by terry wifenbach wifenbach lives or or maybe lived i'm not sure if she's moved um in washington dc and these photographs were all made in her backyard i think she shows yeah she shows her yard here and it's it's the pictures are mostly of birds and shown in flight often very shallow depth of field incredibly lush pictures and again this is the kind of thing i was looking for in this moment of optimism last weekend but then uh on sunday afternoon there was the the news of dante wright's murder and i thought well this is i can't show this work now uh doesn't feel right and and it also didn't feel right to suddenly show work that was uh i don't know that was about police brutality or something like that i just it felt forced um and and i just started reflecting and and one of the things that came to mind was joseph sudek so the thing about suedek that's so fascinating is the life he lived and the time he lived uh so sudek was in world war one and while serving on the italian front um he lost his arm through friendly fire and was uh you know was disfigured and and and came home and and then after the war uh he did a little bit of traveling he actually went back to to italy to to photograph and he just couldn't do it and he said you know that's it i'm just going back to prague and i'm never leaving again and and he developed a significant commercial career and everything started going great for him and then nazism took hold and and along came world war ii and his business fell apart and lots of his friends left the country and uh and he was stuck there in his studio and sudek was not the kind of photographer to to go out in the streets and and photograph conflict and that sort of thing um so he was in the studio and and he made his his best known series of pictures which are these window views from his studio i don't know if they're best known pictures um i think they're his most significant pictures and definitely my favorite photographs and so the thing about these studio pictures is that they were all made as contact prints and he used different large format cameras so different sizes and then would produce these contact prints and sometimes the contacts have these borders these black borders that function almost like window frames while he's photographing out windows and sudek had two windows in his studio and you know the bulk of the pictures are from one window and they show this tree and this tree is uh it's it's a lone tree out there and it's it's kind of and it's hard not to see it as a metaphor for sudek himself uh who's was kind of hunched over and and with the single limb had a unique physical quality these pictures are also toned differently and and they each become quite individual so in this case he'll sign the front of the photograph uh others are are printed you know with nice borders it's they're all different and um and it's amazing the amount of variety he gets by virtue of making the glass itself the subject and the perspiration that collects on it or the window sill and creating still lifes out of the window sill this is the other view and it's it's more of a city view i find these these pictures of with the lights really quite haunting and i think it just totally changes these photographs to consider the time in which they were made again he started this uh during world war ii uh but it carried on for 15 years but you have to remember that that czechoslovakia was then under communist rule so there wasn't an opportunity to make all sorts of different types of pictures there's a feeling of constraint and and sudek using these constraints to produce this this really extraordinary work and i guess the thing that i've been thinking about is uh is a the value of this work i'm so glad that sudik made it during that period and also how the context of the time period shapes my understanding of the work a picture like this of a a lone leaf it could be seen as overly romantic or corny but when you consider the time at which they were made the place the person who made them they take on this other kind of meaning the variety is just extraordinary and i'm so smart of him to produce these in different sizes with different cameras and different tints each photograph is so individual and i love these still lives they're um they're so humble and and i i think that's the thing about you know living as we all have lived through this period of the pandemic and and having to learn how to appreciate small pleasures so after looking at that i i then went back to this recently published book by robert adams this is called standing still and and these are all photographs made in his backyard and they're made over the course of different seasons and um i think what's important about this book for me now is thinking about it as being made in 2020 the idea that we've been through this incredible period of time which for robert adams must be uh so heartbreaking after years of of working um on environmental issues and just to see so much uh what's the opposite of lack of progress so much failure i guess uh within uh the american system it just gets worse and worse and and of course he could publish some sort of screed about that but instead he decides to just make pictures in his yard which he he says measures 30 feet wide and 60 feet deep and he's he's lived there uh with his wife in astoria oregon for some 23 years and the book simply moves from spring to fall to winter summer's in there too and in in adam's style he allows for you know phone lines harsh shadows it's not a glamorous glamorized view one thing that i kind of love about this is that you know over the years adams be became such a hero to so many of us and and to realize that he lives in this very simple place he doesn't live on on a mountaintop in solitude i i think that's wonderful this picture is funny to me because it's it's the kind of picture that every homeowner takes out their window of a of a deer and it's there's nothing special about it but it it kind of conveys that feeling that i mean a lot of these are just like homeowner snapshots but then other pictures have a monumental quality so so this shadow cutting diagonally across the the frame and this this burst of white here with the dark sky it's an incredible image these are the winter pictures and there's this sense of like fading away with this fog so i think that in time 50 years from now people might look at this book in the same way that i'm looking at sudex window pictures within the context of time and somehow that gives me comfort that one is allowed to make work that way there's one last thing that i i want to share which is um while i was thinking about these issues i i started thinking about this uh this series of poems made by hanif abderakib and he's a fantastic poet if you're looking for the spelling i will show you there and he did a series of of poems which were entitled how can black people write about flowers at a time like this and and i encourage you to to look up the these poems there are a number of them and they're all quite different and and wonderful but in a in an interview he he talks about how these poems came about and i just want to read this this little segment from this interview he said i was at a reading shortly after the election and the poet who was black was reading gorgeous poems which had some consistent and exciting flower imagery a woman who was white behind me who thought she was whispering said how can black people write about flowers at a time like this and and he goes on to say what is the black poet to be writing about at a time like this if not to dissect the attractiveness of a flower that which can arrive beautiful and then slowly die right before our eyes so i thought that was a another beautiful way to to think about subject matter in art in times of turmoil and and allowing for an expansiveness uh of approaches and allowing for the photographer that photographs the protests and the uprisings and also allowing for the photographer who stays at home and photographs flowers in their garden so something to think about um i hope you're all doing well out there and uh take care thanks so much

Channel: Alec Soth

Views: 24,386

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Id: bHKFc5Gi6L8

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021