Cover Contest winners: Robert Canali and Sarah Fuller

Buy BlackFlash 2.0 Online
NOT AVAILABLE ON NEWSSTANDS

In Canada: $8 CDN plus shipping

Elsewhere: $8 USD plus shipping

Saturday 27 March 2010
The Broadway Theatre, Saskatoon
Doors: 7:00pm Show: 7:30pm

The benefit concert will feature 6 local bands and artists, covering some of their favorite musical acts, as well as performing their own original music. All proceeds will help support BlackFlash in the face of the funding cuts to small magazines in Canada by the federal government.

Featured Musicians:
Jen Lane covering The Rolling Stones

Shuyler Jansen & Foam Lake covering John Cale

Tyson McShane covering Will Oldham

The Perogies covering The Clash

Ride ‘Til Dawn covering The Replacements

Smokekiller covering Ryan Adams

Tickets: $15 * all ages

Donations: $50 or more will receive a tax receipt and two complimentary tickets to the concert.

at the Broadway Theatre box office

BlackFlash is a not for profit registered charity. The magazine is about photography and new media in art that is distributed nationally. Winner of the Saskatchewan Magazine of the Year (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009).

Buy BlackFlash 27.2 Winter issue:

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John Shelling, Managing Editor

Cover Image: Doug DuBois, Spencer with his Violin, Ithaca, NY 2008, digital c-print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm, courtesy of Higher Pictures, NY

Links:

• Richard Hines and Doug Dubois’ entire conversation
• Bart Gazzola’s two part interview with Clive Robertson for the A Word on CFCR FM in Saskatoon:
  Part One, Part Two

Articles:

• A New Model of Perception: Elaine Stocki by Wayne Baerwaldt
• North Central Intervention: Terrance Houle by Felicia Gay
• Family Dialogue: a conversation between Doug Dubois and Richard Hines.

Artist Project:

• Orbit: Doorknob Poster by Kristan Horton

Artist Pages:

• Joan Kaufman. Text by J. Lynn Fraser

Column:

• Frottage by Mark Clintberg

Departments:

• Review: Then And Then Again, Clive Robertson, AKA Gallery and PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, June 26 – July 31 2009.
• Emerging: Alex McLeod
• Review: Nuit Blanche
• Review: Vanitas, Sheila and Nicholas Pye, Art Mur, Montreal, August 15- September 12, 2009
• Print: Projecting Questions? Mike Hoolboom’s Invisible Man between the art gallery and the movie theatre, Art Gallery of York University, 2009
  Steve Reinke’s audio interpretation can be heard here

Hines and Dubois talked by phone about their work on September 21st , 2009. The following is their conversation.

Richard Hines: Congratulations on the book. What has the reception of the book been from? Especially from the people at Aperture, your family and friends?

Doug Dubois: There have been some good reviews online and a couple of them I think have been really smart. That means at least some people seem to be getting it. I did a book signing at Aperture in NY in June when the book came out. It was great, standing room only, lots of people came.

RH: You said that you wanted people to “get the book”. What is it that you want them to get out of it?

DD: There isn’t one message or meaning to get. There is no moral to the book. If they understand it, they understand my subjectivity, they understand that the pictures hide as much as they reveal, that the photographs are designed to be open ended, and they recognize some of the visual and emotional threads that run through the book.

I am very happy with both Donald Antrim’s text. Donald wrote about the problems of memoir and begins with the line: “Memoir can be a treacherous preoccupation.” I couldn’t of asked for anything better to introduce and frame my photographs.

RH: I am curious to know about the Afterword that you wrote for the book. I had read your artist statement included in the “Close to Home” exhibition catalogue and I really like the sentiment in that one. I thought it came across as very personal. It didn’t come across as an artist statement in that very academic way. I was wondering when you wrote this piece if you had looked back to what you had written previously?

DD: Of course I looked at it, and in some ways it intimidated me. I wrote that essay in my twenties when my family photographs first got published. It’s not too bad. For the book essay, I kept thinking, I’ve got to do better than this – I’m a little older and wiser. I sweated over the afterward quite a lot.

A year or so ago, Joerg Colberg asked for some essays about portraiture for his website, “Conscientious.” I wrote a short essay about my father looking at my book – it’s, more or less, a first draft of my afterward. In a broad sense, I tried to tease out how memory and meaning in photographs interact and shift over time. I couldn’t have fully engaged these ideas in my early twenties – simply because I was too young.

RH: What does your family feel looking through the book? Obviously they’ve seen many of the photographs before but how does the book change the final product?

DD: It’s complicated. My sister, Lise, was the only one in the family that I showed drafts of the writing and early sequences of the photographs. She has been a sounding board for me for years and I trust her intuition and opinions.

But everybody in the family saw a maquette of the book before it was published. Nobody asked me to change anything. My father had the most complicated response. He is very generous and at the same time critical. He understands, respects and acknowledges my subjectivity but for him, the story, the experience of our family was different. My father would argue there were moments of happiness and joy that you don’t see in the photographs and that’s what prompts his question, Was it really that bad? It’s a question that I can’t really answer.

In the end, I think everyone in my family understands that there is a difference between their photographs and their lived experience.

RH: They aren’t them?

DD: Yeah, yeah. They are in some ways characters.

RH: Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home series raises some of the same questions and concerns from his parents surrounding the subjectivity and interpretation of the self with photographs. The discussions that he has with his father (which are part of the exhibition and book as text) are particularly good and at one point his frankly points out that he does not see himself in those photographs. Do you sometimes feel like you are missing the mark?

DD: What is the mark? In our heads, we all have our mark, this idealized image of ourselves. When we look at a photograph of ourselves, it’s not just an image — like in a mirror – but a picture of our ideals, our self-image. And when the photograph inevitably falls short, or goes awry, or every once in a while, exceeds our expectations, we have to accept or reject it. Most people, myself included, are too self-conscious to comfortably look at their own image.

RH: I’ve had a similar experience with my project. My project started in 2001 and although it has only gone on for 7 or 8 years I’ve found it increasingly difficult to photograph them recently. I felt as if I was beginning to ask too much of them, as if I was pushing them around. It started to feel like the relationship was more one-sided and I needed to start giving more. When you are having that photographic experience, you are asking for something intangible and that uncertainty can be quite draining on both sides of the camera. I’ve found that to be a very difficult relationship to sustain over a long period of time.

DD: I sense from looking at your photographs is that we are working in a similar mode. One of the first blurbs on my book characterized it as a diary. It’s not a diary. I don’t usually photograph in the moment like Nan Goldin. Over the past ten years, especially, I have more often than not, set aside a space and time to make photographs. Like you said it is demanding. I’ve found, over the years, that if I parcel out the time for photographing and make it explicit, that in some ways, it’s easier for all of us to manage.

So some times I visit my family to work and other times I’m there without my camera. Of course, I’ll see something and think – oh, I wish I had my camera, but then I’ll just attempt to recreate it or re-approach it at another time.

RH: Yes this summer I traveled with my family and I just left my camera at home. I found it liberating to not have to work all the time. It was nice just be there and not feel that constant pressure to photograph. …

RH: Was that your choice to leave the captions and dates at the back of the book or was that suggested to you?

DD: No. That was my choice. It was a bit of a debate, for me, whether to have any text at all. I think if I had complete control, I would have had absolutely no text – no essays or list of plates in the back. Just images. I’m not convinced, however, that this would have made a better book.

RH: That is interesting because I read in your interview with Alec Soth that you said originally (when you started the project) there was text at the bottom of the photographs like Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor series.

DD: (laughing) When it started yeah way back when. At the time it wasn’t really about my family but instead about making portraits and doing something collaboratively. Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor had just come out and I just wanted to try the handwriting thing, see what that was about.

RH: When you did that did you have your family members write the accompanying text on the photograph?

DD: I’ve got a set of some of the earliest images, like the one of my sister turning in her room and looking at herself in the mirror, my brother with the washcloth to his eye, my father packing — the very first ones in the book have little narratives written underneath. There is a photograph in the book of my parents dancing on New Year’s Eve. If you look carefully, you can see one of the photographs with handwriting framed on the wall.

RH: (laughing) So what did they say? I’ve always loved that one of your sister in her room. What did that one say? Can you remember?

DD: She writes about getting dressed up for a party on Christmas Eve and just turning 20 or 21. What I love about the image is that she is in between being an adult and a teenager and her room is a wreck. It is a great moment of life – no longer a child, but still without too many responsibilities.

But in general, the things that they wrote about were pretty banal — they just weren’t that interesting and added little to the photographs. And when I first met Jim Goldberg — I went up to him at an opening — I asked him how the hell did you get people to write that stuff? And he said he worked at it. He worked with them closely and wrote the texts with them. It wasn’t immediate at all. The text was very precisely edited.

RH: And that is the thing about that work that makes it so powerful. Sure the images are great but it is really the images and text working together, feeding of each other that make the work so compelling. Some of the writing he gets out of them almost breaks your heart, both side of the rich and poor dichotomy.

DD: Nothing comes easy. Most people if left to their own devices will tell you nothing.

RH: Yeah, that photograph has such great energy and a sense of anticipation. I was curious about the difference in feel of the photographs from the first half (1984-1990) of the book to the second half (1999-2008). The later photographs had a sense that maybe your hand was in the photographs more. Is that true? It also looks as if you switched cameras?

DD: Yeah I would say some of that is true. Parallel to the narrative about my family is my progression as a photographer. I photographed my parents very differently in my forties than I did in my twenties: partly because I have a different relationship to them but also because I am a different photographer. The first photographs were done with a 6X9 camera, which is a medium format camera with 35mm proportions. There are a handful of 35mm in there too. The second half is mostly 6X7 and 4X5.

In the second half I am overtly directorial. My lighting is also much more complicated. In the first part, I was learning about light: how to bounce a flash, and then how to bounce a flash and combine it with ambient light. Then by the second half of the book there are images that took half the day to set up just the lighting. Some photographs took a day to make while some others took 3 or 4 attempts to get it right.

RH: I started the opposite way. I started with the 4X5 view camera, the strobes, more directorial, and then near the end of the project, I’m not sure if I’m done, I began moving away from that control and attempting to be more free. I was more interested in allowing situations to unfold and have photographs that appeared more spontaneous. I found I was getting tired of telling people what to do and I was more inclined to see what the world had to offer. You get a lot more duds shooting this way but when you do get a good one it feels like you’ve really captured something. At the same time I’ve also started to miss looking through the ground glass of the view camera and seeing things that you don’t see unless you have that experience.

DD: One question I had of your work was – how do you know when the project is done?

RH: Ahh… I had the same question for you. I thought about a year ago that my project was done.

DD: And what made you think that?

RH: Just that I had no urge to continue. And that I had all these other ideas that seemed more exciting and the stuff I was doing seemed old and tired. I just couldn’t think of anything new to shoot. Originally, that is when I introduced the smaller, medium format camera. I wanted to lose control a little. I don’t know if that means that I have to abandon it. . I didn’t want my family to come in as actors anymore. I didn’t want them to play a part anymore. I just wanted them be themselves. No gimmicks. As I started doing that I was excited again but that quickly that changed to, but I want to try something new. I don’t know if that means I have to abandon it.

DD: What about your stepson, Jacob, how old was he when you started photographing him?

RH: He was 5 or 6. He’s now thirteen.

DD: My brother, Luke, is significantly younger than me, by fifteen years, so he was seven when I started my project. With my nephew, Spencer, I have images of his birth, so he has grown up with my camera and like my brother, has learned to accommodate and collaborate with me on the photographs.

And I am wondering if you went through a similar process with Jacob? And now that he is thirteen, my guess is he is demanding a certain autonomy, which has shifted the dynamic between you.

RH: Yeah I would say that is the case. I think subconsciously that was why I switched cameras because I wanted, I did want him to feel like he was acting for me. I felt, as he was getting older, some tension from him. He would even say, “I don’t want to do this”. So I thought if I went to a quicker camera he wouldn’t notice me, and the process, as much.

There was definitely a time when he was younger that he just couldn’t stay still. That is partly why I switched to using strobes because previously the exposures were between 4 and 8 seconds and he was always blurry. You can’t actually ask a kid to stand still for that long. So with the lights and the faster exposure times it was more a matter of waiting for him to do something and taking the picture. After working this way he actually became very good at getting into that shooting mode.

DD: He knew what to do. With my parents they began to know all too well and after a while all the pictures started to look the same. I had to find a way to rupture, complicate or work around that process. It goes back to the question of how do you know when it is done. Maybe it is when you start taking the same picture over and over again. That’s the time that you have to pause or stop for a while.

RH: How do other aspects of your work, such as the Avella, PA series, inform coming back to the family work? Do the photographs with your family feel like your most important work?

DD: Yeah, inevitably. But there was also a time when I stopped photographing completely. I just had a crisis where I didn’t know what I was doing at all, a kind of photographic writer’s block. And then there are other times where I am very prolific and might be working on several things projects at once.

I just did this residency in Ireland, and Ireland was a lot like Avella, and I hadn’t photographed in a mode in which I had to gain trust in short order. Avella was still attached to my family because that is the town my father grew up in and so I had a certain connection to the place and some sort of reason to be there that didn’t make me a complete outsider. In Ireland I had no such story. At first, most people wouldn’t allow me to photograph them until I started to go back to this one same neighbourhood over and over again. Two weeks into the residency I was thinking — get me outta here. But by the third week I hoping to stay longer.

I was also much bolder and quicker with my 4X5 camera. The big camera is a great way to gain trust. You can’t just take their picture quickly, there has to be an agreement, and a dialogue occurs. I use a digital camera as well, like a Polaroid, and this way I can show people an image on the spot and email them a copy.

RH: The project I was doing over the summer (where I was photographing people on vacation) was done on film but most of the people I talked with assumed it would be digital. One of the reasons I didn’t want to use the digital camera was that I was scared of that immediacy. I find it takes a lot of time with an image, and especially a group of images to really see what you have. Most images reveal themselves to you slowly (the ones we take anyway). I didn’t want to be tempted to start editing while still on the trips with people. The result is I think people had a hard time figuring out what I was getting with the images. I think people were sort of scared of what I might get.

DD: Right, right they’re insecure about their own image.

RH: Yes. And partly it is vanity. I mean they understood I was taking pictures for me and not them but there was still quiet questioning, maybe, of them asking why is he taking pictures of us doing this?

DD: I still wonder what motivated people to do this project with you?

RH: I don’t know. Maybe it’s partly this idea of seeing what their travels look like from someone else’s perspective. Maybe it’s even simpler, taking pressure off themselves to take pictures. Maybe there is a performative aspect to it and maybe the prevalence of reality television.

DD: Reality television feeds off this idea that your life doesn’t have significance or authenticity if it isn’t recorded.

RH: Authenticity is a good point because when I first started looking for participants I put classified ads in a few publications throughout North America and I had absolutely no response. My feeling is that it lacked legitimacy and authenticity. It was that failure led me to contact the Winnipeg Free Press to see if they would be interested in doing a story on my project and the funding that I received for the project. They were and from that article I got approximately 80 offers from people traveling throughout the world. Couples, single people, families…all expressed interest.

DD: How did you pick the people that you eventually traveled with? Was it intuitive?

RH: Some of it was intuitive and some of it was timing because I had been teaching at the University of Saskatchewan and I wanted to fit it into the summer. A large part of the decision came from the discussions I had with people once I short-listed groups. I was interested to see how they understood the project and if they were open to what the project could be. That is also why I wanted people that I didn’t know. I’ve held strong to the belief that it was important to limit any preconceived notions.

DD: How did you set up the ground rules? Did you stay at the same hotel? Get a room next to them or down the hall?

RH: (laughing) Well sort of. I did stay at the same places but not necessarily in the same room. In Newfoundland, we all stayed (I was with a couple) at a vacation property on Fogo Island. They were in one bedroom and I was in the other. It was much the same with the other two trips. I have to say, all the people I was with were very brave and giving individuals. From there I would just go with them wherever they went. When to photograph was a weird thing to negotiate because you want to be courteous and not over-step your boundaries but at the same time you sometimes want to push a little. Otherwise, everything will be very safe and expected. So I am always asking myself “can I take this picture, can I take this picture”? Some groups were more open to intervention (them asking me if they should do that again) than others but that’s fine. It’s the nature of this unwritten social contract and each group was so different.

DD: You’d be the last person I’d ask to come on my vacation.

RH: (laughing) Why is that?

DD: Because I hate being photographed (laughing).

RH: Yeah, well me too. Even the project with my family I have tried to put myself in some of the pictures but most of the time it just hasn’t worked out. Most of the time I just look silly. It’s hard when you can’t see yourself.

DD: Yeah I gave up on any attempt at self-portraiture long ago. I mean every photograph I make, like Avedon said, is a kind of self-portrait, I’m always there but I don’t have to be in the picture. I think other people are more facile in front of a camera but I’ve never found myself to be that. I just look out of place.

RH: The pictures where I do appear…

DD: Yours are good — your presence is a significant marker and adds a complexity to the image that is both about you as the author and as the father/husband. So you’ve figured it out or at least you’ve found a couple that work.

RH: Yeah, that is more the case. It’s just sheer probability. The best one is the three of us on the beach and you can’t even really see me.

RH: I wanted to ask you about the photograph titled My Father and C, Bridgeville, PA, 2005. It is a very intriguing photograph when you look at the book as a whole because it is the only one with a subject, or person, who hasn’t appeared before. She appears to be involved with your dad (they’re holding hands) but she is looking away from you and the camera. Is the composition a result of her not wanting to be photographed or is it something else?

DD: No. No. It is all directed. It was the first time I had photographed them together, so it was a tense event. I brought out the gear and I just remember her looking aghast as I began hauling in all these lighting and camera cases. There is a picture of my father holding a drink in the kitchen, it was the first photograph I made at their new house and I made it within ten minutes of my arrival. The light was so beautiful, I just had to take that picture. So I pulled out the 4X5 view camera and she just freaked out and left the room.

I explained to her that I knew this was her house and that she don’t have to be in any photographs at all, and if she felt that I was behaving inappropriately all she had to do was tell me. But my father knows what to do. He knows how to take directions and he just does it. After a while she agreed to be photographed. I posed them, which neither of them knew it at the time, to evoke an earlier picture of my mother and my father where he is lying on the bed and she is gently touching his sleeve. I placed their hands together to make that reference. There are a couple of variations of that picture and in one I had her turn her head. I thought it might be important to disguise her identity. My mother had never seen her and at the time, didn’t know they were living together.

RH: Also, because she is looking away there is more tension in the photograph. The awning behind them also highlights that feeling as the stress in the string curls and bends the fabric between them. For me I read awning and the possible tension as the presence of your mother. Of your mother’s presence in the book and even the idea of her looking through it and seeing this picture. I don’t know if she is okay with your dad’s relationship but you feel the struggle.

DD: A lot of people actually don’t even realize that the woman in that photograph isn’t my mother.

RH: Oh really.

DD: Oh yeah. They are roughly the same age, so it’s not immediate apparent, but their hair is very different.

RH: That is surprising to me… So was it important that the work was finally going to be published as a book. Books allow you more control over the narrative structure and there are certain photographs in …all the days and nights that seem to take on more significance because of their placement in the book. An example of that are is the three photographs of your mother that follow one after another. These seem to put an emphasis on the physical strain that your mother has gone through. Was that fun to play around with the sequencing?

DD: I began editing and putting together the book three years before it was published. I was on a residency at McDowell and I just brought everything, I brought all my contact sheets and scans of individual frames. I even had them bring in extra walls so I could put everything up. After that two months I had the most Baroque, ridiculous edit. It was awful (laughing). It was a start though. I would show people my edit and they would say that it made no sense. I didn’t want to go chronological, I had all these pretensions about jumping around in time and nobody understood what I was doing so I let the work sit for a while.

Probably the most important person in helping with the book was Jim Goldberg. He just kept badgering me. He said you’ve got to make yourself a deadline and show it to somebody. So I called up the MoMA and I said I’ve got this book and I’d like to show it to you. But, of course, I didn’t have a book, what I had was a mess. So I sent Jim one PDF after another and he kept saying it was crap. Finally, he said I think you have a book. The night before I met with Susan Kismaric at MOMA, I was still taping the dummy together. When Susan looked at it, I could tell by her comments and where she paused in the sequence that I had a book.

Along with Jim Goldberg I also worked with Philip Brookman at the Corcoran and Alice Rose George, so when I brought it to Aperture, I had it sequenced and edited as a book. At Aperture, Lesley Martin, who is a terrific editor, made it even better.

A really good editor sometimes knows what you want to say even better than you do and can offer just the right suggestion to make you see it yourself.

RH: I know you consider the spaces between photographs as very important. Was that part of the drive to get the work published as a book, to allow for those spaces physically?

DD: The book is a form that demands careful sequencing. There are plenty of books out there by artists that are essentially exhibits in a book, but there is a long tradition of photography books that are more complicated, more literary. I am very interested in that tradition. How about your work – do you see it as a book?

RH: Yes I think so. Whenever I’ve had exhibitions they have left me feeling a little empty and disappointed because I always feel like I’m leaving so much out. I think the story is bigger than those few photographs that you can put up on the wall. It becomes more about the objects and the presentation than the pictures themselves. The book is one cohesive form. It has a beginning and end. And you know the photographer has sequenced the flow.

A massive Bird vs. Andre as Inigo Montoya in dance off in front of a green screen.

Zombie photo Ian Campbell

Winner of the overall costume contest Doc as a monster eating his head. photo by Ian Campbell

Patrick as Anton Chigurh and Jordan as Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget photo Maja Montgomery

Winner of the Best Costume in the Wild Card category Amber is a Mouse Trapped. photo by Maja Montgomery

Brenda as Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) from Cabaret. photo by Maja Montgomery

Brenna and John as an Ice Princess and a Tiger. photo by Maja Montgomery

$22 for 2 Years (6 issues) That is only $3.67 an issue.

Offer valid until December 1, 2009 to Canadian residents only.

BUY TICKETS NOW
NAME WILL APPEAR ON GUEST LIST AT THE DOOR OF THE EVENT
Tickets $10 in advance $15 at the door

Saskatoon’s best Halloween costume party will be resurrected on 20th Street!

Saturday October 31st , 2009

Screening 7:30pm

Dance Party  8:30pm

424 20th Street West Saskatoon

Featuring:

• PAVED Members Screening
• Video Dance Party
• DJ MidLife Crisis
• MC Camel Toe
• VJ Ian C
• DJ Wham!bo
• Scream Off Contest
• Costume Prizes for best non human, most disgusting and best off all

For more information or to purchase advance tickets please contact:

Laura Margita executive@pavedarts.ca 652 5542 PAVED Arts 424 20th Street West Saskatoon open: 12–6pm Mon-Fri

John Shelling editor@blackflash.ca 374 5115 Rm 727 Bessborough Hotel 601 Spadina Cres. E Saskatoon open: 10am-2pm Mon-Fri

Photography is caught between an invocation and a denial of death.1 On the one hand, it petrifies a scene, a moment. When sitters “hold still, smile, and say ‘cheese’,” they are fully aware of how they look at that moment, or at least how the camera sees them, will be carried into the future and seen by others. It is like a little moment of death, or of loss — what Roland Barthes calls “mortification.”2 The moment the photographer releases the shutter is the moment to be remembered (or imagined) by whoever sees the photograph in the future. Even if it is seen the day after the photograph was taken, there is a melancholy to it as an object of the past, of time enduring.

On the other hand, photography is often understood as a way of stopping time and thereby “cheating” death, gaining immortality, and sustaining memory. It is the agent of fame, a way to “live forever” as the movie song preaches. Rather than being a reminder of (our own) death, as Barthes would have it through “mortification,” the photograph is a way of embalming or preserving a memory of a life. It is what Andre Bazin called “mummification.”3 Is this the opposite of the death drive?4 Of course, death for Bazin does not have to be literal; it can also mean old age, decay, change and its associated distress.

“Mortification,” what Barthes sees as a pathological process of inserting a part of the self into the image, i.e. posing, invokes unease because it can never truly encompass one’s self. It is a mask, a physical mold. On the other hand, for Bazin the photograph is, in effect, the object. Following the “mummy complex,” the photograph is equal to the object. Through the photograph, one could preserve an experience, or even an object, resist change and therefore evade death. It is the ultimate form of preservation. It is a sustained pause, a yearning for stasis, for maintaining a status quo.

If death, or its denial, is what we face when looking at a photograph, I would like to argue that film and video present to us the living dead.5 If “cameras are clocks for seeing,”6 then the video camera is a time machine. The photograph represents the past, but the moving image brings the past to the present. Through motion, film brings back to life what was lost.7 The photograph evokes the past, the time belonging to the photographer and the sitter. With the moving image, the time is always now. It belongs to the viewer.

What happens, then, when movement is denied to the moving image? When nothing changes except the shifting of weight from one leg to the other, blinking, or breathing, as in Adad Hannah’s Stills? In traditional photography the decisive moment when the photographer releases the shutter is the precise moment when she does not see her subject. The shutter blocks her field of view, and she will only see it as a representation (after being developed on film and then on paper). But Hannah refuses to go blind, even momentarily, keeping his penetrating eyes open wide, unflinching from the subject. He is not undecided as to when to release the shutter, he simply refuses to do so. Hannah creates video snapshots — though without the actual snap, as his works are videos disguised as snapshots. Working in some form of cinema instead of photography allows Hannah an element of surprise and anticipation that is impossible with still photographs.

Stills is an ongoing series of videos, ranging in length from three to twelve minutes long, featuring people “frozen” in mid-action. In his Stills, Hannah strips video of movement and sound, video’s basic elements, to see what survives. Displayed on flat-screen televisions that hang flush against the wall, the stills appear at first glance to be photographs. The complex images hold the viewer’s attention long enough for her to notice tiny movements and realize these are time-based works. Although nothing seems to “happen” in these works, they are charged with action as we watch for tiny movements, as if these people are trapped in a picture and are trying to come to life. Despite their static composition, the stills are mesmerizing to viewers waiting for little imperfections, like blinking or twitching, the inevitable failure to become statues. In this way, Hannah’s “photographs” retain not only the viewer’s attention, but the possibility of surprise.

For Stills, Hannah constructs scenarios inspired by the complexity of daily life and action, most of which fall under the general subsets of Museums, Architecture, Hotel Rooms, and Family. Grouped together, the series of Family Stills form a strange family album comprised of what, at first glance, seem like a collection of typical snapshots. Some of them look like vacation photos, while others document domestic moments such as car washing or eating dinner. A second take, however, reveals scenarios begging for explanation.

For example, my favourite Family Still is Dinner in Florida. It shows five or six seniors around a dinner table enjoying coffee and cake, “frozen” in mid conversation. It is the best one because it is the most failed in a way: the subjects constantly fidget and move, they breath very deeply, and they generally lack the physical discipline it takes to truly hold still (which explains its short 2 minute and 34 second running time). Hannah has composed the work overlooking a woman’s shoulder, with the side of her face making up the left margin of the frame. Her proximity to the camera accentuates her breathing and movements even more. This vantage point complicates the work, pitting the viewer in the spot presumably of a fellow table mate who had gotten up, presumably to take the photo, leaving her teacup and chair askew and opening up a semi-circle of company. A woman across the table looks directly at where the viewer, the absent guest, is standing, reinforcing the conflation of viewer with subject in the work.8

Two of the Family Stills, Abuji (Father) and Otter on the Car, are framed around cars. The former depicts a shirtless older man (the artist’s father-in-law) on a driveway hunched over the back of a station-wagon, scrubbing it with a sponge. His awkward, forward-bent position makes holding still particularly difficult, and his stomach droops at an irregular rate as he fails to hold his breath. It is a sweet portrait of suburban life, tender care for the family vehicle.

Otter on the Car (also using Hannah’s in-laws) suggests a family vacation to a manicured park, with an otter having climbed onto the hood of the car. A woman in a visor feeds the animal Cheezies, while a man sneaks up behind it, about to wrap the furry creature in a towel. The Cheezies, the towel, and the car suggest a complete disconnect from anything natural at all, the towel indicating the man’s fear of actually touching it, while the lone Cheezies strewn about the hood suggest they may not be a snack favoured by small wildlife. Of course, the otter is stuffed and couldn’t eat them anyway, as his stoic stillness would have been impossible, even for a trained animal. In a very similar Still, Cheezies, the same otter is being unsuccessfully fed by the same woman, this time as a pet sitting in a grassy backyard.

Less exotic but equally compelling are a few Family Stills featuring older couples. Murray and Beverly was presumably shot in an upscale suite similar to the one in which Dinner in Florida takes place. An older couple sit on a chair and loveseat, in contemplative, quiet poses. Again, they are framed with a foreground foil, this time over the back of a photograph next to a vase of flowers on a side table. Other photos sit on a similar table by a faux Tiffany lamp. These discreet touches are important, as they hint at being the objects of this couple’s contemplation. Murray and Beverly is, in essence, a portrait of memory, a vista onto nostalgia. The inclusion of the photographs is a sophisticated move on Hannah’s part, playing off the work itself, which is an attempt to breath life into photography.

The counterpart to Murray and Beverly is Emoh and Emohbu, in which an older couple sits cross-legged on the floor, next to a low mahogany table. The woman holds an old, green telephone to her ear, the kind to match her 70’s-style printed muumuu dress. Like Murray and Beverly, their thoughts are elsewhere, possibly on a conversation with a distant relative. In this work, the anachronistic green phone serves the same function as the photographs and kitschy décor used in Murray and Beverly.

These works are coated with the patina of memory that is so touching and important in family photos. The Family Stills are not completely photographic, yet they are imbued with the sense of death and loss mentioned earlier that is inherent to photography. Many of the Family Stills depict older relatives who have since passed away, and their age, like a clock, brings the element of time’s passing to the foreground. Perhaps it is their pose, the conscious attempt to arrest the body, so visible in these works that quotes photography and, by extension, death.

Not only do Hannah’s Stills play so eloquently with the qualities of photography and video, they riff beautifully on the viewer’s position as well. The tension ofanticipated movement captivates the viewer as she mirrors the work while watching it. Both viewer and subject stand still, waiting for the other to succumb. As the viewer experiences the crux of spectatorship, she is forced to consider her own performance within the gallery, and thus her relationship to art, and to time.

In Hannah’s works, the placement of figures is obviously constructed, as if they were posing for Jeff Wall photographs. Hannah chooses banal scenes of daily life in a “developed” country. He is interested in the construction of culture through images and brings those forth quite literally by “pausing” them. This technique sustains our attention long enough to actively watch a video rather than scan a photograph.

Hannah has often quoted other artists, especially older works such as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in Two Mirrors and August Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais in Recast and Reshoot (discussed below). Hannah’s newest work, All is Vanity (Mirrorless Version)9, is made after Charles Allen Gilbert’s optical
illusion from 1892, a drawing depicting what appears to be a large grinning skull, but upon closer examination, is revealed to be a young woman gazing at her reflection in the mirror. In Hannah’s version, the drawings become a video, akin to the Stills series. It mimics a Victorian-era photograph of a woman in a somber dress seated facing her vanity, a lit candle sits on the edge near a vase of lilies Hannah’s version, like Gilbert’s, is an optical illusion. There is no mirror; what appears to be the woman’s reflection is actually her twin sister, dressed exactly the same. This becomes apparent when one notices the sister looking directly at the viewer, rather than back at the figure with her back to us. Another hint to the physical, rather than optical, connection between the two figures is the apron on the figure’s dress, which turns into the tablecloth on the parlour table. If she were to get up from her seat, she would knock over the bottles arranged in a row in front of her, essentially tearing down the barrier between the two figures. Such a move would shake the foundations of our belief in the “fourth wall” and bridge the division between spectator and subject.

Hannah is remarkably consistent in his interests. The motif of breaking down the wall between spectator and subject is obvious throughout his practice, along with his interest in the still and moving image. For example, Still (not to be confused with the Stills series), is an interactive video installation set in a darkened room. Viewers walk in and, within a few moments of their standing still, a video image of themselves begins to appear in real time on one of the dark walls. If they move, they are plunged back into darkness. In a way, Hannah traps us in a cage of our own narcissism. If one keeps moving, one avoids being “caught” or “shot.” This is the fugitive approach.10 When more than one viewer is in the room, Still creates an unspoken pact between them, a form of peer pressure, what Steve Reinke calls a “social compact towards group narcissism.”11

For Recast and Reshoot (2006), Hannah has set out to restage August Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Burghers of Calais (1895), in every city that houses one of its bronze editions.12 The first (and as yet only) rendition of Hannah’s series takes place in Seoul, Korea, where he has chosen six employees of a courier company to assume the burghers’ poses. He records them in the round with a dolly-mounted video camera on a circular track. The same is done for Rodin’s sculpture, as each city displays the various figures in different ways. The two videos are projected onto either side of a single suspended screen.

What Hannah has done in Recast and Reshoot is what he does in Stills: he strips a medium of what is assumed to comprise it in order to see what remains. In Recast and Reshoot, Hannah alludes to space with a 360-degree video pan, but we experience the piece as a flat representation. Not only is it flat, but it is time-based. Hannah turns the encountering and manipulation of a sculpture into a temporal experience. In the Stills series, Hannah does something similar to video: he strips it of movement and sound, what are normally considered video’s basic elements, in order to see what survives:

“When I embarked on what would become the Stills series I was considering the importance of sound in video, as well as techniques of trick-photography from the early days of cinema. The first Stills I made were the products of a distillation exercise, I wanted to remove everything that makes a video and see what was left. I put the camera on a tripod, asked people to stay motionless, and stripped away the sound. The choice to show people caught in action rather than passively sitting, standing, or sleeping (as Gillian Wearing, Thomas Struth, and Andy Warhol among others have done) was inspired by early photography when exposure times were measured in minutes and seconds.”13

Hannah is engaging the photographic via video, infusing it with time and duration — with presence. And presence is life. This leads me back to asserting that video is “live.” When life is invoked, so is its opposite: death. Hannah comes to the same conclusion: “[I]t is ironic that these works which foreground the breathing, blinking, and swaying — or vital signs so to speak — of the human subjects should also invoke death so consistently.”14 Hannah’s work never goes to either extreme of denoting life through complete presence (video) or death through complete absence (photography), and so he forever straddles the line between the two.

Adad Hannah’s work can be viewed at
adahannah.com

1. Like the French phrase, “Arrêt de mort,” which Derrida tells us means both death sentence and to stop death. See his Parage under “Survivre” (Paris: Galilée, 1986).
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
3. Andre Bazin. What is Cinema? (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).
4. If such a drive exists, it is fundamentally linked to time. Recall Peter Pan’s allegory of the alligator who swallowed a clock: Every time the deadly beast came near, the ticking terrified Captain Hook.
5. For more on this see Cécile Chich’s The Obscenity (or Miracle) of Film (London: Lux, 2004).
6. Barthes, 15.
7. Christian Metz discusses filmic presence as the result of motion in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). See especially his discussion of Barthes on page 9 where he states “In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of impression, the real presence of motion.” It is also useful to remember the etymology of “animate” as meaning both to bring to life and to movement.
8. This is a strategy Hannah has pursued in other works, such as Two Mirrors, shot at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, for which he inserts two men and a mirror into Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Although they share only one mirror, Hannah’s title refers to the painted one above, believed to reflect the king and queen posing for their portrait. Velázquez implicated the viewer to a privileged position, just as Hannah does.
9. Commissioned by BMO Financial Group in 2008
10. There is an interesting link between fugitives and photography, especially through “mug” shots and surveillance cameras. To arrest their image is the first step in arresting their bodies. Several children’s games teach this, including Red Light/Green Light
11. Steve Reinke, Adad Hannah: Folk & Still (Toronto: TPW Online Essays, 2004)
(6 January 2008)
12. Rodin’s monument is to the six burghers who were ready to sacrifice their lives in order to save the rest of Calais’ residents held under siege by the British in 1374.
13. Otino Corsano, Interview of Adad Hannah
(Dec. 2004 – Jan 2005) (14 April 2006)
14. Ibid.

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