That Melancholy

(my tears are full of eyes)….Because

only the truest things

are true because they can’t be true

e.e. cummings

I listened to a recording of e.e. cummings in the darkroom tonight.  I just had to share these lines from that melancholy, so lovely.  e.e. cummings’ work is a wonderful mix of power and delicacy.  I love how he can speak to such profound crisis, and yet maintain an incredible sensitivity, balanced by wit and lightness.  I hope some of these characteristics find their way into my creative work.

Gluttony

I’m a glutton for their indifference.

Each year, I submit pictures for the Photography Department at MoMA to review.  They provide no commentary, and there is little evidence that they look through the pictures.  I’m not sure why I do it, what I hope to gain.  Alas, I suppose it is part of the game I play…..

Revolution (or Understanding Marx)

I listen to a lot of talk radio in the darkroom.  Today, I was thinking about Bear-Stearns, and our economic meltdown, so I listened to an Ubu podcast (I highly recommend the Ubu website).

I was turned onto this; and I can’t explain, just listen.  It’s only a few minutes, and it’s incredible.

You Have to Give to Receive

When I first started teaching photography, I also curated my first show of photographs.  At the time I was really enthralled with the new power I’d discovered in teaching, and so put together a show of photographs about teaching.  It was called Precedence:  Emmet Gowin and His Students.

Working in the darkroom tonight making proofs, I got to thinking more about my own teaching.  About 10 years have past since I curated this first show, and now I have much more of a foundation as a teacher.

So, as many of you might know, when one applies for a teaching in job in higher eduction in the arts, one is often asked to write a statement of teaching philosophy.  A number of years ago, I wrote this for an application (and I still like this statement):

For me, teaching is largely an intuitive process, and very much an improvisation.  Unfortunately, these are ways of thinking that are not easily explained.  Each of my students is unique, and I try to approach my relationships with them in the classroom as such.  I find teaching to be an improvisation grounded on my own understandings of photography, the unique character of each student, and the collective character of the class as a whole.

As an artist, I think there are several things that I find important to communicate with my students.  First and foremost, I think it is important to model in my own work the standards I set for students in the classroom.  It is important for young artists not only to see the work of more mature artists, but also to see the dedication it takes, and the struggles inherent in the creative process.  I try to make something of my own work — my successes and failures — evident to my students.  To set this example, I treat my teaching much as I treat my own studio work, with a seriousness of pursuit, an insistence on quality, a committed believe in communication, and with an humility and an openness to new experiences.  These are qualities I expect from myself, and therefore from each of my students as well.

I also see the creative classroom as a platform for self-discovery as much as a way for relaying technical and conceptual information.  My hope is that by the end of each course, my students leave knowing more about themselves and their own motivations.  As an artist, I believe it is essential to understand one’s unique relationship to the larger world, and as a teacher I serve as a catalyst for this kind of discovery in my students.

Finally, I try to make my classroom a place where everyone can be treated with good humor, but also feel strongly challenged and motivated.  In class discussions, I try to discuss each student’s work individually, responding to the energy and care with which it was made, and treating the work of each student equally.  Along the same lines, I find it important to develop some kind of personal relationship with each of my students, so that I can look for something of their personalities in their work.

Over the past few years, teaching has become an important part of my own creative process.  Continually, I find myself renewed by the energy my students bring to their work, and further challenged by having to articulate my own thinking about photography and the creative process.  Each semester, I hope that I learn about each of my students as individuals, and that I am able to let their discoveries help me learn more about my own beliefs and motivations.  I always consider myself to be both a teacher for and a student of my students.  I consider it a privilege to be an educator, both for the opportunity to influence a group of people dedicated to their own creative and intellectual development, and also for the creative influence I constantly discover working with them.

And now I offer a toast to those of you I’ve taught; I’ve learned a lot from all of you.

I’ve posted a few websites of former students below (and these are just a few that came to mind, no exclusions are intentional….).

Sarah Bader; Jennifer Link ; Joel Kuschke; Kevin Kline; Christine Serchia; Jennifer Kloth

Quality of Attention

I’ve been teaching photography for about 10 years now.  In that time, I’ve witnessed the transition from film-based to digital photography.

I remember the day the New York Times announced a change in the market, when digital cameras first outsold film cameras.  I remember AGFA going out of business; the restructuring of Ilford; and Kodak discontinuing many of its black and white products.

These days, working in the classroom, I often have students come to me with their new DSLR’s, and show me hundreds of photos, often with one being just like the next.  These students can make hundreds or thousands of photographs at a time, and yet they still haven’t gotten any better.

Today, I’d like to say that clarity is more important than quantity.  I’d also speculate that the incredible ease with which we can make and consume photographs (e.g. with our phones and the internet, etc…), we have a tendency to lose sight of simplicity and directedness.

I like the way Frederick Sommer spoke about the quality of attention.  That should be the real goal.

Wax Trax (or Notes from the Underground)

He was moderate height, lean, and had a very dark complexion.  He spoke quickly, with a sort of urgency: I’ll give you a free hit of windowpane, you a free hit of ecstacy, and you a bag of weed.  There were three of us, and he pointed to each one of separately as he spoke.  We were out on a busy street corner.  And all you have to do is step into this alley and show me some money so that I know that next time you can buy it from me.

I spent most of my high school weekends and nights in Capital Hill, a neighborhood in Denver just outside of the financial district.  Capital Hill is more racially mixed than most Denver neighborhoods.  There was lots of drugs, night clubs, used record and bookstores, and prostitution.  We really went for the pot and the record stores.

Denver was home to a big underground youth culture while I was growing up.  There were a number co-op art galleries, and a big industrial art movement.  There was a great producer named Tom Headbanger, who brought in all kinds of underground stuff.  And there was also one of the world’s largest TOPY chapters, Thee Temple of Psychick Youth.  The center of all of this was Wax Trax, and this was really the anchor store of Capital Hill.

We spent a lot of time there.  In addition to being a great record store, they also sold books and rented movies.  It was really a one-stop shopping place for a young industrial culture enthusiast.  I could pick up some Throbbing Gristle or Coil records, zip next door and rent a Kenneth Anger video or get a Psychic TV t-shirt.

I think this was a large part of the miseducation of my youth.

In Darkness

A friend of a friend recently gave me this picture.

The photograph is a cyanotype, a hand-coated photographic emulsion made with iron. Pictured are flesh corsets. Each of the two girls in the picture has multiple piercings in her flesh, and then the piercings are laced together with ribbon.  The girl on the far right has her sides laced together, and the one just to her left the back of her legs.

By now we should all know that in darkness there is light.

Postcard from Les Baux

I just returned from a week in Les Baux de Provence in Southern France.

I went for my brother’s wedding.

Les Baux is a lovely village, about 30 minutes from Arles.  Les Baux is most well known for the stone citadel at the top of the valley.  It proved a great retreat from the everyday.

Trajectory VI

Twenty-four hours after I defended my MFA thesis, I was turned down for a Fulbright to Indonesia (wait-listed, actually).  And then two days after that, I received a phone call from a man named Roger Freeman.  He offered me a one year teaching position at the prestigious art college in Alfred, NY.

I’ve been there ever since.

Teaching has been an incredible learning experience.  That first year out of graduate school, I was so naive and confused, but teaching proved a great opportunity to begin to pronounce myself.  Graduate school left me tattered and unsure of myself, but to find myself on the other side of the classroom was an act self-determination.  I had to start figuring out who I was again, who I was as an artist and photographer.  When called upon and asked what I believe, I had to have an answer.  My students were eager, welcoming, supportive, exciting, and ready for whatever I wanted to be.

Alfred has been a great place for me to synthesize the different experiences and ideas I’ve used to define myself as an artist.  Grounded in the philosophies of the Bauhaus, Alfred offers a unique education in the arts.  Under the mentorship of John Wood (a student of the Chicago Bauhaus), Alfred strives for an interdisciplinary, material based education in the arts.  It’s proven a great place to knit together my influences and discoveries in literature, gamelan, and photography.

Trajectory V

While spending several years studying, performing, and recording gamelan with Tunas Mekar, I continued to develop my photography.  Increasingly, my photograph eclipsed gamelan, and more and more I was offering my creative self to making pictures.  Eventually, I started to realize that the personal and aesthetic discoveries I found in Indonesia and gamelan needed to grow into something more of my own.  I enrolled in an MFA program in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art.

During these years playing with Tunas Mekar, I worked on making photographs every week if not everyday, though I never showed them to anybody.  It was a very private affair.  I decided it was time to know some other photographers.  I went to Mass. College of Art to study with Abelardo Morell, Frank Gohlke, and Nicholas Nixon, but found just as much (if not more) from the teachers I knew nothing about before starting — Laura McPhee, Barbara Bosworth, Doug Dubois, Accra Shepp, and Lewis Klahr.

Graduate school was an uphill battle for me.  It was challenging, confusing, and often painful.

I had never really shown my pictures to anybody — except my girlfriend — so entering such a competitive and public critique process was hard, to say the least.

I survived my two years, and made many discoveries in photography I never thought possible.  It  difficult but I dug deeply, and found out more about myself.  I completed a thesis exhibition, Familiar Windows.  This was a series of photographs made mostly around my home.  The pictures were all photographs of windows, in some capacity or another, but the windows were often metaphors about looking inside and outside myself.  It was inspired in part by James Joyce:

Diaphane, a diaphane.  If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door.  Shut your eyes and see.

Ulysses