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Erik Schubert (b. 1980, Omaha, NE) received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and his BFA from Columbia College, Chicago. Schubert has taught photography at MassArt, Greenfield Community College, and currently teaches at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Schubert has been in several exhibitions throughout the United States including Boston Young Contemporaries, SPECTRA: National Photography Triennialand the Photographic Resource Center NEO Emerging Artist. Schubert was included in On the Road: A Legacy of Walker Evans exhibition at the Robert Lehman Art Center and the Flash Forward Festival. Schubert is represented by Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA. How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013) is Schubert’s first artist book.

How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

Carl Gunhouse: What are your first memories of photography?

Erik Schubert: My first memory of photography was through books. My immediate family didn’t photograph much. I don’t think my mother even had a camera, at least one that I can remember, and my dad didn’t make the time to use one. Most of the pictures from my childhood came from my extended family – my grandfather with his clunky point and shoot, and my uncles with their SLRs. Because of this, books were an early entrance for me into photography.

Three in particular stood out. One was my grandparents’ complete collection of cream, green, and gold colored Encyclopedia Britannica books that I would pick up at random and travel through the pictures. The second was a book my mother bought me called 20th Century Baseball Chronicles that I would look at religiously, as I was a baseball nut. And the third was the most elusive in terms of memory, but most impactful in terms of feeling, a biography on Harry Houdini.

I would sneak away to the library at the Catholic grade school that I was going to and look at this book during free time. It never seemed to have been checked out. It was a picture-heavy book that, looking back on it, seemed almost fetish-like and other-worldly. It was one of those books that made me feel like I had stumbled upon a secret. I think a part of me wanted to be an escape artist like Houdini. I tried finding it and went back to look for it when I was a teenager, but it wasn’t there anymore. So the memories really stay with me, and the feelings that those photographs left still linger with me today.

CG: How has your work been shaped by growing up in Nebraska?

ES: I don’t think I’m necessarily conscious of how Nebraska has shaped my work, apart from the experiences I’ve had growing up there. I guess there is a sense of quietness that runs through most of my work that is also prevalent in the geography of Nebraska and somewhat in the people who live there as well.

More than Nebraska itself, it was my experiences in my family that really shaped my ability to observe the dichotomies and extremes that were present in my life, and, as such, my need to observe through poking at my environment. I think this injected a dry humor into my work as well. So, I guess, looking at my work, there is a mix of quietness and dry humor that comes from my family and the land.

Basement Rental, Omaha, NE, 2008
© Erik Schubert

Exercise #4, 2010
© Erik Schubert

Untitled (How to Create Original Material), 2008
© Erik Schubert

CG: You did your graduate studies at MassArt in Boston. How did you find your time there? How was studying with Frank Gohlke?

ES: It was challenging, and it shook me up a bit, which was needed for me to change and grow. At the time, it was a mix of frustration and excitement. I really felt part of a community where I was doing something important with this thing called “art.” It was amazing working with all these great photographers in such a dynamic city. I feel lucky to have had those experiences and feel the better for them. When it was all over, I really didn’t want to leave school. I wish it could have been one of those super long grad programs I’ve heard they have in Germany.

Studying with Frank was great! I loved hearing him talk about our work and respected his opinions that were always smart and tender. He took us out photographing one semester, and it was great to see him work. We drove in search of a good location, and ended up at one of the oldest working gas stations in the US. He put on his ball cap that said “Vote for Kinky,” started charting his location with his GPS unit, and then started photographing. It was great to see that.

Frank, Kinky, Lynnfield, MA, 2006
© Erik Schubert

CG: Your Dad was a traveling pharmaceutical salesman, and you traveled with him on sales trips? How much of your father and his profession is in How To Win Friends And Influence People? Can you talk about how this project began?

ES: I traveled on a few sales trips with him in my later teens, which shaped my understanding of him, how he operated as a salesman and how people reacted to him. There’s certainly a theater and ritual to the whole process that I got to see firsthand.

I can remember how his car was always filled with brochures and pharmaceutical drugs and the constant aroma of coffee and bananas, from the peels and empty cups on the car floor. In the back seat, he would always carry a full bottle of Listerine mouthwash, and his suit jacket would always be hanging from the back window. Before each call, he would prepare his materials in the trunk or backseat, put on his suit jacket, take a big swig of mouthwash, spit it out, and go in and make the call.

It’s hard to know how much he’s in the work. He’s in parts of the foundation along with my own experiences in retail sales. He introduced me to this type of landscape and gave me a behind the scenes look at being a salesman for a multinational corporation, so he’s definitely in there.

This project began in the periphery of another project that ultimately failed. I was photographing the television news media on location reporting local news, and I had followed them to an auto expo they were covering. It didn’t turn out so well. Having photographed the media in different situations, I found that in some ways they are a kind of closed-off society. I think I became a kind of threat and pest to them, and it was a real challenge.

Instead of leaving the expo, I ended up staying longer and photographing the expo itself. I found the environment to be both familiar and bizarre and became really interested in these locations. I had gone to expos in my youth – either with my dad, who worked at them, or with my mother for cheap entertainment. There was a comfort there, but it’s extremely bizarre at the same time. Having not gone to one in a while, I could now see the spectacle of it, and because of this, I just kept going to them and this series developed.

Offices, Riverside, CA, 2007
© Erik Schubert

A. Santoni Boxed Shirt, 2007
© Erik Schubert

Variety Still-Life, 2007
© Erik Schubert

CG: You’ve said that your work tries “to explore and communicate metaphorically the success, failure, and complexity of corporate mythologies in society.” Can you elaborate? Where have corporate mythologies worked their way into society?

ES: Through photographing the business ephemera used in the process of advertising and sales or making photographs at expos, the images start to re-contextualize how we read that particular object or place, taking them out of context and examining the aftereffects of their use. In that process, we begin to either understand or become confused about how that object functions in our society, often in ways that are humorously troubling.

We have certain needs in our society. And certainly companies who provide products to meet those needs have to pay for employees, operating expenses, etc. It’s not about this underlying structure; it’s about how far corporations are willing to go to make a profit. It’s about how easily they veer off the path of reality in the conquest of making more profits.

And because of this, corporate mythologies are everywhere. We see these mythologies in advertising on a daily basis. It’s pervasive. In particular, we Americans see so much advertising that it’s eerily similar to the amount of propaganda seen by Koreans about the Kim family in North Korea. I find this correlation eerily fascinating.

One of the biggest mythologies is that they’re operating in the best interest of the consumer, the people making their products, and the environment. I think consumers easily swallow this mythology as an excuse to buy the cheapest products without thinking about the working conditions of the people who made the product, the motives of the corporation and other important ethical questions. We’re not stupid, but questioning becomes harder and harder when more companies aren’t being questioned about this mythology and when there’s a demand for producing cheaper and cheaper products at whatever the cost.

Rejected Public Art, Castle Rock, CO, 2010
© Erik Schubert

Untitled, 2008
Graphite on graph paper
© Erik Schubert

Vacation Expo, 2006
© Erik Schubert

CG: Have you found Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People to be helpful in your own success? What is success to you?

ES: In some ways yes, but on the other hand one has to keep those techniques fresh, I think, in order for them not to come off as disingenuous. So, in that case, no, I haven’t found it aligning with me. But also, some of his philosophies/techniques on communicating are just common sense, and we often can use them without thinking.

As for success, I try not to think about life in those terms since making this work, but I often do so anyway. The barometer of success has been ingrained in me since my youth. It can be dangerous to the psyche to judge one’s worth based on success, and yet, it seems to be a very prevalent and stereotypical way men are judged in our society.

CG: How To Win Friends And Influence People started pre-2008 with the expo work, right? How did the collapse in 2008 affect the direction of the work?

ES: Yes, it started near the end of 2005. The crash didn’t really affect the direction of the work per se. But it did affect my thinking about the work, reconfirming for me that what I had done and was doing had an important connection to our society and the pervasive greed that’s present.

CG: The book looks like a business convention from the early 1980s that was never cleaned up, leaving all the aspirations and hopes behind on drab carpeting. How critical is your work of conventions and selling?

ES: It is critical, and expos also look like these photos in the book. That’s how these places look when you slow down and notice where you are and what’s going on around you, looking between the products, the sale, or you could say in between the “magic.”

It’s also a complex and competitive thing we’ve built to base a living off of. So in some ways, I feel I’m taking an endearing look at these places, focusing on the leftover hopes and aspirations. These people have put their time, money and energy into this structure. In the scheme of things, it seems very fruitless and yet in our society it’s very prevalent.

spread from How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

spread from How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

spread from How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

CG: How To Win Friends And Influence People encompasses lots of disparate ways of making photographs with a variety of pictures like still lifes, interiors, landscapes, as well as a single portrait. In editing, do you ever worry that they won’t all come together? How was the process of working with Lavalette on the editing of the book?

ES: No, I wasn’t worried. I didn’t know of another way that would better uncover and communicate the complexities of the subject. I feel it allows for many different narratives or readings of the work.

Working with Shane was great. It felt good to have fresh eyes looking at the work. I had a basic edit that we started with, and I had these drawings that I had worked on in relation to the photographs that I sent to Shane to see what he thought. He liked them and came up with this great structure where the drawings become the chapter breaks so to speak. And then from there we just threw edits back n’ forth until we refined the edit down to what it is now.

CG: How does it feel to have your first artist book out in the world?

ES: Feels great, and a bit of a relief!

spread from How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

spread from How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

spread from How to Win Friends and Influence People (Lavalette, 2013)
© Erik Schubert

CG: What is one of your favorite photobooks? What was the last photobook you purchased?

ES: That’s a tough one because my favorites seem to be always changing at different stages of my work or periods of my life. Probably the book that sticks with me though, always being on that list of favorites, was the first photo book I picked up, William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest.

Through the sequencing of pictures, Eggleston’s certainly communicating his democratic way of seeing that we all know is tied to his way of working and thinking about his work. I’m interested in how all these disparate images of different geographies, from Memphis to Berlin, come together. They almost feel like a personal quest, maybe without purpose other than to make a journey. You feel his momentary gaze through the pictures and the edit. In some ways it feels very diaristic too.

The last photobook I picked up was Mark Steinmetz’s Greater Atlanta. I think that might have been about two years ago. But there are so many good ones coming out, I’m sure my dry spell won’t last much longer.

CG: What are you working on now? Is there anything we should look out for?

ES: I’ve been working on a few different projects. Photographing at local speedways, looking at the race cars themselves and the spectatorship of it all. Another project, currently titled Vivarium, explores such places as botanical conservatories and other types of man-made environments that are trying to replicate various flora ecosystems. I’m also constantly making pictures around the town that I live in in Colorado and hopefully that will turn into something fruitful.

I’m also in two group shows right now. One in Boston at Panopticon Gallery, called On First Contact, in which two of my portraits are on display. The other is at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs, Colorado, called Gods & Monsters. I have an installation of work from the How To Win Friends And Influence People series with my first ever and finally completed How To Win Friends And Influence People quilt.

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A limited number of signed copies of How To Win Friends And Influence People are available to purchase online in the Lavalette Shop.

How to Win Friends and Influence People Quilt, 2008/2013
Textile of various fabrics, quilted by Stacy Lundberg
© Erik Schubert

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Penelope Umbrico is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her photo-based installations, video, and digital media works explore the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the Internet. Utilizing photo-sharing and consumer websites as an expansive archive, she navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, and the individual and the collective, with attention to the technologies that produce (and are produced by) these forces.

Umbrico has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Le Mois de Photo a Montreal Photo Festival, Canada; Alt. +1000 Festival de Photographie, Rossinière, Switzerland; Lodz, Poland; and Foto Colectania, Barcelona, Spain, among many others. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award, a Deutsche Bank Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, a Peter S Reed Grant, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship.

Umbrico’s work was featured in Lay Flat 02: Meta (Lavalette, 2010), and her first monograph, Penelope Umbrico: Photographs, was published by Aperture in 2011.

Mock-up for exhibition installation of Moving Mountains (1850–2012) for Aperture Remix, 2012
© Penelope Umbrico

Zach Nader: You recently exhibited Moving Mountains (1850-2012) at Aperture, a work in which you rephotographed depictions of mountains from the Aperture Masters of Photography series of books. Using iPhone apps, you processed these and output them as photographic prints, as a digital slideshow, and as a book. In the wall text, you stated, “I propose an inverse correlation between the number of photographs that exist of mountains at any one time and the stability of photography at that time.” What might stability in photography look like today?

Penelope Umbrico: The reason I focused on the mountain was that I had been seeing pictures of mountains everywhere: on the side of U-Haul trucks and moving boxes, insurance ads, the cover of Blindspot magazine. That project was about the immovable mountain, photographed with something that is so moveable, the smartphone. I cannot imagine a more unstable definition of what photography is than what it is to make a photograph with a smart phone. The gravity sensor in smart phones is really what does it for me. You’ll be taking a picture of something at a particular angle and the picture flips around. Many of the mountains are upside down in this project because I’m photographing looking down and the iPhone flips the image. I just left them in the same orientation they were made in the camera.

I began this work by searching the National Archives website where I found numerous scans of Ansel Adams’ photographs. What is interesting about them to me is that they have been created over a very long period of time. Some of the images are scans of prints, some are scans of books, high-res, low-res, copy stand reproductions of the actual photographs, copy stand reproductions of books, and so on. There is an incredible amount of reproduction. I think there is something really interesting about Adams going out with his camera and tripod and making these beautifully crafted images in order to provide the American public access to these mountains, and then the archivists in the National Archives doing the same thing with Adams’ work. They are using whatever means they have to make his work accessible to the American public – but what a huge difference between the two!

So when I was commissioned to make a work around one of Aperture’s books for their 60th anniversary exhibition, Aperture Remix, the entire Masters of Photography series seemed perfect to explore; the idea of the “master” photographing the mountain, in contrast to how we can take photographs now.

from Moving Mountains (1850–2012), 2012
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: In the March 2012 issue of Art in America you refer to images found online, stating that “all images (artful, authored, pedestrian or unauthored) become unassignable and anonymous in this unlimited exchange of visual information, and function as a collective visual index of data that represent us…” In this context, how do you see your role as an individual producer of images?

PU: I was talking about the idea of reception and projection of images. If I put all of my work online, and you do a Google image search for one of my projects, you see it mashed up with everything else. So, it becomes unassignable and unauthored, in a certain kind of sense, in that context. I know that I am authoring my work. But I understand that in the context of the web, anyone else coming to it receives it in any number of possible ways. It takes some work to know something about images you see on the Internet, but the Internet doesn’t encourage this kind of work. It’s very easy to come away with a superficial read of what you’re seeing.

Of course, when an individual takes a picture, she is the author of that picture, and her subject is the subject of that picture. But as soon as that picture is recontextualized on the web, the subject changes, the picture-taker changes, and I think that shift is pretty interesting. The picture goes from being an individual and authored image to a collective anonymous image that regards no author at all.

from Broken Sets, 2009
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: Do you think this authorship can be gained and lost repeatedly?

PU: Yes. But everything can be gained and lost repeatedly. A ring that I lose can be picked up and given to someone else, it could have a history of many hundreds of years, it would mean different things to different people.

ZN: I agree, but many people do not treat images that way…

PU: Nonetheless, it’s still true. Think about the Tiananmen Square picture of the guy in front of the tank – for Americans it represented something completely different than it was said to represent in China. But this is an image that’s known as authored, and seen out of context, will still be assignable. Or when we see a Walker Evans out of context, we still understand it as being authored by Walker Evans. There are images that are so iconic they become kitsch, which creates an entirely new genre of this sort of image. Memes, you might say. Talk about authorship gained and lost repeatedly!

Your work, in some ways, deals with memes, right?

ZN: I am interested in how types of images become sufficiently commonplace, in that their value lies more in their repetitive, reproductive aspect rather than any specific content. One of my main interests at the moment is exploring what happens to an image when the impetus for its creation is replaced.

A recent video of mine, optional features shown, began with clips from car commercials. It is striking to me how similar they all are, though they represent multiple brands from around the world. Through repetition and the removal of the cars, text, and persons – through this clouding of vision, an opportunity to see these images beyond their intended use occurs – their scripted nature can begin to unwind.

Your interest perhaps tilts more often towards personal edits rather than institutional decisions, though both self-perpetuate in similar ways. Your Grand Central project is especially relevant in that it addresses these types of scripted images and their drift over decades.

PU: Yes, that project for the MTA used the photographs I found online of the rays coming into the Grand Central terminal. It is an image taken by a specific photographer, well actually 4 photographers who took almost the exact same image, but online, these four images are repeated in a myriad number of ways – people have flipped them, added color, made them grainy, sepia, high contrast, enlarged and cropped them. They are sold as posters, and mouse pads and coffee mugs, and these four images are attributed to at least eleven different photographers as well as to “anonymous” and “photographer unknown.” And all have the commercial site’s watermark on them with copyright restrictions.

Installation view of Five Photographs of Rays of Sunlight in Grand Central Station
New York Transit Museum Gallery, 2013
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: What are your thoughts on others appropriating your work? Have you seen any successful executions?

PU: I actually don’t think it’s particularly interesting to see other’s appropriations of my work, though it is amusing. The questions for me is why would one appropriate my work – that is, how is the artist engaging with my work, and what is she trying to say by using it. I haven’t yet seen anything that is interesting. I’ve seen a few misguided jerk-ish attempts at criticizing my work – that’s not at all interesting from the point of view of art making – these attempts reveal more of an ignorance about art than any critical engagement with it.

Anyway, I don’t think there can be a successful appropriation of my work – I’m not iconic enough of an artist for someone to be able to do something about my work without it being a personal comment – and that’s just not interesting.

Installation view of TVs from Craigslist, 2009
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: Several of your works emphasize moments of technological breakdown, visually and with the obsolescence or emptying of the depicted object. Televisions are particularly prevalent: Zenith Replacement Parts, Broken Sets, Signals Still, TVs from Craigslist, and collections of Universal Remotes. What is your interest in and relationship to the television?

PU: The television is the first popular device that moved us toward an image-based culture from an audio and text-based culture. And every generation of television promises more life-like images. I am particularly interested in the screen as the surface of reception, and now projection, and how the screen sifts information. And of course, I am always on my screen… half of my studio practice is accessed through the screen, I read and write with it, and most of my professional correspondence is through it.

With TVs from Craigslist, I was thinking about the obsolescence of the TVs being sold – no one wants these big old bulky TV sets. But what I found fascinating is that the subjects taking picture of the TV in order to post them on CL are often reflected in the very object they are trying to get rid of.

As I am wandering across America through various city’s Craigslist sites, I have a kind of access to people’s private spaces – these pictures are taken solely for the purpose of selling a TV, no one seems to care what else is in the image, and I find a lot there! It’s quite voyeuristic except that these images are offered to us without reservation. The images of people reflected in these dark TV screens have the appearance of ghosts, and I have come to think of this work as revealing “us” as the literal ghost in the machine.

Installation view of Signal to Ink, Ink – Out of Order, 2011
© Penelope Umbrico

spread from Signals Still / Ink (Book), 2011
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: Your 2011 artist book Signals Still / Ink (Book) was printed at 125% ink density. The ink quickly rubs off as one flips through the book, leaving marks on the reader’s hands and on the pages. This material aspect of the book seems to physically draw parallels between the ways in which we experience images and the ways in which we leave marks on screens that we touch (blank screens are depicted in the book). What was your thought process in making this work, and what is the significance in making a book that leaves a trace of itself on the viewer?

PU: That project came out of thinking about images and how they are now untraceable when we see them online – the unassignablity you first asked me about. I was considering the materiality of print medium versus the lack of materiality of the screen-based image, but I had come to think of the objects being sold there as heavy physical bodies (some of which contained ghosts). Making physical, material prints of them was a way for me to address an aspect of this materiality/immateriality.

The Signals Still project was about the screen having a signal that has no message, or at least no message we can decipher. I had found a lot of TVs for sale whose screens were turned on but there was no signal, just static, or a haze of light, like a sort of hum. For the book, I printed those screens on an offset press at 125% ink density on newsprint. I wanted to make a relationship between ink on paper as the first screen that sifts information and how we receive images now. And I wanted to address the effect of the signal on our bodies, literally that the medium works on you in a physical way (in the McLuhan sense). So if it comes off on your hands, there it is: the signal leaving a trace on you that is traceable.

Installation view of Signals Still, 2011
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: You have previously referred to yourself, specifically, as a “photographer” rather than an “artist.” What is the distinction and importance for you?

PU: That was more of a response to the exclusivity of what it means, in some circles, to be a photographer. I wanted to acknowledge that there has never been one kind of photography. It was sort of a reactive statement based on the fact that what I do online uses a photo-documentary strategy. I travel, navigate, through virtual space and I look for things that will support an idea I have. I make screenshots or download images and crop them in specific ways for what I am looking for. I frame the virtual world the way I want to see it. This is what a photographer does, frames and edits the world in the way that she sees it. So, at one point, I decided not to make a distinction between my practice and traditional photographic practice. I felt it was constructive within a photo context to claim the medium in my practice by asserting my title as a photographer. I think, in general, those kinds of distinctions are not very useful though, and I have called myself a “photo-based” artist, but even that is sort of ridiculous because I do many other things that are not photo-based. But, I can live with this because I’m always thinking about photography. Maybe everyone needs to be called photo-based now – since we are all making and viewing images all the time and, more than ever, we see ourselves and create our identities through these images.

ZN: In your recent monograph from Aperture you included many texts that support your practice. You chose to scan the original source material, presenting the text in the context of the book page. Why this approach?

PU: The book is laid out in two parts. The first part contains nine bodies of work arranged by theme, and the second part is a sort of appendix about the work. Because all of the work comes from appropriated sources, I wanted to maintain a parallel relationship in the texts – an equal dialogue between the bodies of work and the texts around them.

The idea of treating the text like an object was a way to give it a physical and material integrity. When you read a text in a book, the book itself becomes part of the context. We’re used to receiving or making photocopies of texts, and we all take excerpts of text and re-contextualize them to support an idea. A photocopy is another context, of course, but still the trace of the original book remains. Photocopying seems quite natural, but paradoxically, if you make a good photograph of text, it becomes something else. What is meant to give a contextual integrity seems inverted – the more this image has fidelity to the original book, the more it seems like an appropriation.

Some of the texts just read like text, while others, such as a photocopied page from one part of a book inserted into another part and scanned, read like collage. And some read like objects; A scan of a folded photocopy printed to scale and slipped into the book as though actually a photocopy – it’s an image of an object, but it’s also an object to be read. Of course, these are all meant to be read, but I wanted to raise questions about authorship and how text on a page might function as image and object and conceptual information. I love the slippage between image and text in these reproductions.

Installation view of Mountains, Moving: of Swiss Alp Postcards and Sound of Music
Alt. +1000 Festival de Photographie, 2013
© Penelope Umbrico

ZN: What are some upcoming projects of yours that we can look forward to; any lectures, exhibits, or events?

PU: I’m doing another “mountains” project for the Alt. +1000 Festival de Photographie in a small town in the Swiss Alps. The title of this work is Mountains, Moving: of Swiss Alp Postcards and Sound of Music and the images are sourced from old postcards of iconic Swiss Alp images and images of the Austrian mountains from the film, The Sound of Music. While searching the web for Swiss Alps, these mountains kept showing up. Of course, in the story, they are supposed to be in Switzerland – they’re crossing into Switzerland to safety. I like the fact that one mountain range can substitute for another. I shot all these images of mountains off of my computer screen. I wanted the idea of remoteness to be in the act of looking and capturing, as well… to talk about the idea of distance this way. I’ve never been to the Alps, so for me those mountains are distant, mythical and, in a way, not real. The camera apps further this sense of the unreal, turning them upside down and making them almost psychedelic.

ZN: How will these be displayed?

PU: We’re making out-door billboards – they’ll be situated right in the mountains. I’m also doing a public collaboration there, and calling it A Proposal and Two Trades. The proposal asks people to think about looking collectively, and what it means to take a picture they’ve already seen of the mountains in front of them. The two trades are: 1. Take this “already seen” picture with a smartphone – the ancient mountain and the new smartphone/technology trade information, and 2. E-mail me the picture, I receive it and process it with various smartphone camera filters and send it back. I get new material, they get my work.

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Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver) is a New York based artist working in photography and installation. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam and Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto, as well as exhibitions at The Camera Club of New York, Printed Matter, and The Contact Photography Festival. The publication of her second book Kitsch Encyclopedia is scheduled for winter 2014. She is represented by Cooper Cole Gallery where she recently had her second solo exhibition, Flat Death. Until recently, she was a staff graphic designer at the New York Times Magazine.

Acropolis (Plastic Cups), 2013
Chromogenic print, 24 x 20″
© Sara Cwynar

Corinthian Temple (Plastic Cups), 2013
Chromogenic print, 24 x 20″
© Sara Cwynar

Arianne Di Nardo: The title of your latest series, Flat Death, is a term many may recognize from Barthes’ Camera Lucida. How did this concept inform your methodology; moreover, the themes at play in your work?

Sara Cwynar: For Barthes, the other punctum, the “prick” of the photograph is time, what he calls the “that-has-been” and its “pure representation” in photographic form – how a photo can palpably show you what was – bringing it back to life, while also showing you what is no more. The image produces death while trying to preserve life. I really like this idea for two reasons: first, in relation to resurrecting refuse and re-presenting it in photographic form; second, in terms of how all photographs work.

Barthes suggests this defeat of time is much more tactual in historical photographs; that “This punctum is more or less blurred beneath the abundance and disparity of contemporary photographs.” He wrote in the ’70s, and I wonder how this idea relates to our contemporary experience with images – not so much as individual objects but as a steady stream, largely undifferentiated from one another. It seems an important idea to rediscover. I also thought about this in relation to the supposed death of printed photographs; what does it mean that even the physical reproduction of the thing in the past is gone, that it increasingly never existed, but only passes on by screen? Barthes proposed that the photographic object could be destroyed, yellowed, dead, like anything else. Which is a nice metaphor.

The process began by materializing these ideas using a mix of contemporary and antiquated objects and images: decontextualized stock photos, digital and analog processes, resampling both objects and printed photographs in order to bring them forward and show they existed. At the same time, I wanted to remind the viewer that the originals are gone, and I was thinking about the effect these images might have on a shared visual consciousness.

I interact for hours and hours with found, saved, and collected images and objects in the studio. I hope that my work method might carve a space for dialogue on the ways that images work, on questioning aesthetic tropes, on spectatorship, on the reading of visuals. How many objects and images get discarded in the constant process of generating new ones? These concerns have come to the fore of my practice, after working for the New York Times and other editorial or commercial jobs, where I made the same type of pictures that I’m trying to mess with here.

AD: How did you create these images? What are they made from?

SC: My process begins with a massive personal archive of found objects, and involves reprinting and reworking the images, taking them out of collective spaces and into ones open for personal intervention. Most of the reference images are culled from pop-culture, some are deeply familiar, and others more obscure but still recognizable; still lifes of floral arrangements and gold watches, “how to” manuals, pictures of Greek monuments, nature scenes, pictures of books from old magazines, etc. I am reconstructing vernacular images with found objects and materials from public archives to recreate still lifes on my own terms. I thought a lot about the aesthetic patterns you see in these pictures – a particular lighting, a slickness, a high level of detail. I’m also trying to recycle and subvert conventions of product and commercial photography by using elements that aren’t normally associated with these genres – objects that are now discarded or forgotten, intentional scuffing, not glossy at all.

Man And Space (Books 2), 2013
Chromogenic print, 24 x 20″
© Sara Cwynar

Our Natural World (Books 1), 2013
Chromogenic print, 24 x 20″
© Sara Cwynar

AD: Your practice tends toward an animated obsession with the categorical, with the coded nature of imagery and visual culture. With regards to Flat Death, what are you suggesting about the gaze and the viewing process, about the retrieval and processing of visual information?

SC: I am trying to create Trompe-l’œil images, making a rather mundane image-object difficult to read in order to slow down the process altogether. I want to foreground the experiential, so the photo reveals itself to the viewer as a construction, and asks to be unpacked. The saturation of images in everyday life conditions us to read pictures without really looking at them; I am trying to build that experience into the act of looking.

Of particular interest to me are pictures from the analog era, when there was still a sense that the world could be categorized objectively through images, that the whole thing could be preserved on film. Obviously, that system failed but I think of my process as another way of categorizing the world. I used a found nature photograph of a toucan and reconstructed it with Post-it notes; I recreated encyclopedia images of Greek monuments using found plastic cups; took an image from a book called Picturing the Times of our Lives, enlarged and rephotographed it on a red easel in my studio; I scanned objects from a collection of old darkroom manuals marked with digital noise; I rebuilt the color patterns of floral still lifes using hundreds of found objects. The works are really obsessive – scanning and reworking images hundreds of times to produce an exact effect. In Flat Death, what looks 3D is flat, what looks “beautiful” is made up of junk, what might look old is new; there is a constant mixing of analog and digital process, of contemporary objects with dated imagery. I utilize various systems to confuse the viewing process.

Installation view, Flat Death
Cooper Cole Gallery, 2013
© Sara Cwynar

Installation view, Flat Death
Cooper Cole Gallery, 2013
© Sara Cwynar

AD: The “photographer’s studio” is another trope you subvert; it appears that some of these photos are spliced and re-assembled with duct tape, that you’ve left technical and film information visible. So, indeed, these are not customary iterations on the still life. You mentioned the floral reproductions, which really stood out to me at one of your recent shows; they are large in scale, and from afar truly resemble their primary source. But upon closer examination – and they do beckon the viewer to examine – one sees that these floral arrangements are photographed aerially, and further, composed of ephemera that bears little relation to flora. In fact, most of the objects used to recreate the still lifes are materially synthetic. What were you looking to say through the construction of these works?

SC: I am very interested in the ways that images adapt, how they age, especially with regard to stock and studio photography. They’re all made up of different objects I’ve collected, things that fill household junk drawers, things that are essentially garbage. So this faux-beautiful image of a flower, this artistic cliché, reveals itself to be made of “valueless” things. It’s referencing obsolete technology, analog photographic processes, vanitas symbolism (death motifs, skulls, flowers, candles), faded plastics, and a lot of warped colors. I use the objects to rebuild the tones in the printed matter, which in this case is found images of floral studio still lifes. I play with their underlying conventions, their original intent – for instance by shooting from above instead of the side, as seen in the original. The obsolescence of these images really shows – you are exactly aware of how much the aesthetic has changed with time, transforming an ideal into something that looks absurd, ugly, even sinister. In many ways these bouquets are the most benign, unloaded source image I can think of. For this reason especially, floral still lifes have had pull for many artists (Brendan Fowler comes to mind) – it is almost an empty canvas to work with.

Contemporary Floral Arrangement 1 (Many Perennials Can Be Used In Arrangements Such As This For Winter Decoration), 2013
Chromogenic print, 60 x 44″
© Sara Cwynar

Contemporary Floral Arrangement 2 (Plate 24. Color Changes And Natural Colors Are Combined Effectively In This Mass Arrangement Of Contemporary Style), 2013
Chromogenic print, 60 x 44″
© Sara Cwynar

Contemporary Floral Arrangement 3 (Flowers Arrangements 12, 683 (1963), 2013
Chromogenic print, 60 x 44″
© Sara Cwynar

AD: I think you’ve also created an opportunity to consider the “Death Drive,” especially as it pertains to vernacular photography; and I like that you manipulate that, or at least try to negotiate the anxieties that permeate cultural and utilitarian refuse in consumption society. With that in mind, could you expand on the concept of “aesthetic offensiveness” that kind of imbues these dated magazine clippings and archival images? Where do you think that vulgarity comes from?

SC: I think it’s a combination of technology and taste reflected through images. Old pictures might look odd because technology was different – it marks the image and often makes it look less valuable, less tasteful; this is especially true with regard to commercial genres, where a high level of value is important. Some of it is also that ideas of taste morph so rapidly. In my experience, it’s something that people in commercial photography aren’t really thinking about. We would sort of ogle these super-dated, campy images – but then how do you know you’re not just making more of the same; that in 30 years, your picture won’t look like that to somebody else? I think it likely will. This is something I try to build into my work.

There seems to be a point where something aesthetically ugly or discarded can warp back into being almost-nice; when the value of an image changes, it often starts to appeal to me. Value in visual culture is a concept articulated well by W.J.T. Mitchell, who suggested that images become like biological entities, some gaining value well beyond their actual worth. “Fine art” is a good example of this, or religious iconography – while others lose it rapidly. I’m interested in the ones that lose value, or devolve into kitsch. This quality is highly evident in certain pictures, in food photography, for instance. Think of a ‘70s, orange-toned photo of a steak covered in sauce, or the pink foods of the ’60s. Product shots, especially studio photography, were really heavily stylized. Mitchell says that the separation of good from bad, ugly from beautiful, is the fundamental task of criticism; in my understanding, to parse through pictures and decide what constitutes good taste. I like this idea – that taste is subjective or that only certain people may curate it, whereas my taste tends more toward kitsch or something classically tasteless. This is what has value to me and so I can make it “good taste” in a way, I can make it have value for others. When I select my images, I always try to choose the ones that have had their value questioned somehow.

Gold – NYT April 22, 1979 (Alphabet Stickers), 2013
Chromogenic print, 30 x 40″
© Sara Cwynar

Another common quality of this “aesthetic offensiveness” is a sort of faux-elegance, or a faux-value. I like the way these things read in art photographs; for example, this strange still life of a bunch of gold watches sitting like cobras on bars of gold – this was the source image for Gold – NYT April 22, 1979 (Alphabet Stickers). There is so much gold worked in that this “classy” material just sort of folds on itself and becomes ugly. Another example is the plastic cups in some of my images: I mimic Corinthian columns, ancient architecture, even Mayan ruins by using neon green plastic – and I found them all at junk stores in bulk bags. I love how many levels removed these things are from the actual structures, how they are another way of making an image of an over-photographed monument. Color also plays a big role in the “aesthetic offensiveness” of dated imagery – how it warps and how far from the natural it can get. I am drawn to weird plastic colors; there is a great essay by Barthes about plastic as a material, about how it tries so hard to replicate natural colors, but is never able to do it.

Toucan In Nature (Post It Notes), 2013
Chromogenic print, 30 x 40″
© Sara Cwynar

AD: Regarding meaning and value in art and creative production: do the items you’ve used have “value” to you, or are they simply objects to be recycled, maybe even just sad junk? Is there space for them in contemporary society, and if so, to what extent?

SC: I love this phrase, “sad junk!” I’m a consummate saver of things, a bit of a hoarder, which provides material for much of my practice. I use photography to categorize and re-present this ever-growing personal collection of saved materials. Some of these things do hold sentimental value and were pillaged from my parents’ basement – the old TV remote from my childhood is in one photo, a box of family slides, a mug my Dad always had. Others I found at the dollar store. I pick them each for different reasons; some resonate with the history of photography and still life traditions, while others are simply objects with an aesthetic strangeness that appeals to me.

I don’t think there is room for a lot of this stuff in contemporary society – that’s part of why it interests me, this vast accumulation of stuff that trails behind us. If you are going to put new work in the world, it seems important to consider all the stuff that was already thrown away. There is a consumerist element to it – that most of us live surrounded by piles of this type of junk. These things have no more use-value so maybe I can make them have art-value. There is a lot of discussion about photographs in the world being free of referential ties – I like these objects because together they seem truly rooted in the everyday, in the mundane; junk objects that most people accumulate to some degree.

I save passages from literature where people describe throwing away things they once saved. There is a great one at the end of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where he names a bunch of objects that are actually pictured in my photos; and I hadn’t even thought about this passage while working. He writes:

I threw away picture-frame wire, metal book ends, cork coasters, plastic key tags, dusty bottles of Mercurochrome and Vaseline, crusted paint brushes, caked shoe brushes, clotted correction fluid. I threw away candle stubs, laminated placemats, frayed pot holders. I went after the padded hangers, the magnetic memo clipboards. I was in a vengeful and near savage state. I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they’d put me in this fix. They’d dragged me down, made escape impossible.

I think this speaks to how common the experience is – we all keep this stuff in our homes and everyone has a sort of giant “archive” of things that were never thrown away.

Tree In Nature (Darkroom Manual), 2013
Chromogenic print, 24 x 20″
© Sara Cwynar

AD: I think the overarching theme in Flat Death is the disruption of learned patterns of looking-at, of processing tropes and visual information. Also, as you’ve mentioned, the clash between old and new – be it aesthetics, production processes, or objects. But these are very rich, loaded, tender, even exuberant images, especially in person, due to their scale. I don’t see this so much as a clash, per say, but as bridging the old and new. So what role does nostalgia play in your practice?

SC: DeLillo says, “nostalgia is a settling of grievances between the present and the past.” Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do in small gestures with these pictures – give some space to historical images and objects that continue to resonate with me. There is a great nostalgia in photography to begin with – the fact that you make a record of experience each time you shoot, a nostalgia for analog techniques, a nostalgia for the printed image. I also see a kind of “anti-nostalgia” now – a lot of work that goes all the way to the other end and has a sort of pure digital or computer-based aesthetic and process. I am nostalgic for old techniques and materials, and have an interest in the way most things (including imaging technologies) cycle out of relevance.

Then, on another level, my art practice began with a sort of nostalgic impulse to save, re-arrange, re-present, keep things that might have disappeared if I didn’t save them. I find great satisfaction in resurrecting things that are about to go away, making small breaks in the slide to obsolescence that happens constantly. I guess I have nostalgia for old pictures, wrapped in a love for the way that pictures get away from us – how they accumulate, morph and endure. Certainly there is an intense nostalgia involved in hoarding and collecting, which could be a whole other discussion – the idea of making a physical manifestation of yourself through the things and images you save, some sort of external record that will live on, of never being able to throw something away. That is a deeply nostalgic, existential thing.

Time Is Up (Darkroom Manual), 2013
Chromogenic print, 24 x 20″
© Sara Cwynar

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Ben Alper is an artist based in North Carolina. He received his BFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Alper’s work has been shown widely, including recent exhibitions at the NADA Art Fair in Miami, the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis, Le Dictateur Gallery in Milan, Italy, Meulensteen and Michael Matthews galleries in New York and at Johalla Projects and Schneider Gallery in Chicago. Additionally, his work has been published in The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2, Album Magazine, and the catalog for Young Curators, New Ideas IV. Alper also curates The Archival Impulse, an project dedicated to his personal collection of vernacular photography.

from Terrain Vague, 2012
© Ben Alper

Zach Nader: How did you decide that pursuing an MFA was the choice for you? How has your experience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill been so far?

Ben Alper: Even before taking the Registrar/Preparator job at Julie Saul Gallery, I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school. At that point, though, I had just recently gotten to New York and wasn’t prepared to uproot myself again right away. I wanted to spend some time working, enjoying the city and my friends and making new work. I made a two-year commitment to the gallery and planned to begin my graduate studies after I had fulfilled that promise. Throughout my time in New York I did an enormous amount of research about grad programs all across the country. The first challenge was determining what exactly it was that I wanted in a grad program. As time went on, I decided that an interdisciplinary program was going to suit me best. I spent my undergraduate studies in a strictly photographic program and, for as elucidating as that experience was, I felt that further growth would be fostered more readily in an expanded dialogue – one that encompassed painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, performance and photography.

Fortuitously, when I was at the gallery I worked closely with Jeff Whetstone, who is the Director of Graduate Studies of the Studio Art program at UNC-Chapel Hill. It was really through him that I discovered UNC’s program. It met all the criteria that I was looking for, so I applied, was accepted, and chose to head south.

My first year has been challenging, rigorous, but quite formative. I’ve made more work in 5 months than I did in 3 years in New York. And although much of it has never seen the light of day, it has been incredibly liberating to create without censoring my impulses or over-thinking an idea into non-existence. What I’ve really learned is that it is often through the failures, shortcomings, and flawed ideas that something truly interesting emerges. I have come to embrace these as fully as I can and try to find the value in that which initially seems misguided.

from Background Noise, 2011
© Ben Alper

ZN: Much of your work employs imagery that looks quite dated – faded, torn pictures of people and places that recall decades past. You approach those images in a rather destabilizing way. Why is it important for you to begin with images that have a direct linkage to a time when photography was considered more physical?

BA: Like countless people before me, I spent a great deal of time throughout my childhood looking through my family’s photo albums. Sifting through the quiet, often unremarkable images became a sort of obsession for me. At the time, I never particularly gave the process much thought. I simply enjoyed the ritual; turning the pages, examining the yellowing prints slowly fading from view, reading captions that corresponded to particular photographs and, perhaps most of all, thoroughly enjoying the distinctive smell that old photo albums emit – that musty, thick smell of aging paper and photo chemicals. Looking back at it now, I realize that I connected deeply to the physicality of this experience. It was tactile, visual and olfactory all at once.

Beyond the mere sensory experience though, I think I was also looking for some kind of clarity about my familial history. I’m not entirely sure what I was looking for at first, but I sensed that I may be able to glean something valuable from scrutinizing all of the old, decaying photographs that had been preserved with such care. And I did. It may not have been an especially linear narrative, but pieces of a much larger domestic puzzle began to fall into place. What the process really enabled me to do was place myself within the context that was my family’s generational history.

Growing up in the midst of the digital revolution and the rapid expansion of the internet afforded me (along with the rest of my generation) a dichotomy of experiences in image viewing and consumption. The tactile experience of the photograph as a physical object was suddenly being replaced by a decidedly more virtual one. I have utilized photographs from a more physical time in an attempt to examine the impact that digitization has had on the cultural, personal and historical function of the photographic image. Losing the ability to physically engage with photographs has dramatically altered how we experience and internalize the images we see everyday. This has been aided by the seemingly endless proliferation of images available for consumption online. In an interview with William Eggleston, Alec Soth quotes Robert Frank:

There are too many images, too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art any more. Maybe it never was.

While I don’t fully subscribe to this sentiment, I do believe that photographs have lost some of their power and ability to act as memory objects. There are simply too many images to contend with. We are not capable of processing the amount of visual information that we encounter everyday. We may look at thousands of images in a given day, but how many do we actually see? A great deal of my work from the past 4 or 5 years has underscored this anxiety. Ultimately though, the optimist in me has been trying to push against this. And while I do struggle with a certain anxiety surrounding the state of photography, I do still believe that images can have meaning. This dichotomy can be confusing, but it can also be quite rich. And it is precisely within these two poles that I have attempted to situate my work.

from Pluralities, 2011
© Ben Alper

ZN: I think of photographs as having no specific power, but as objects that are experienced and have meanings affixed. You freely move between found and personal images for source material, heightening the potential of narrative in a picture-based practice. Specifically, the possibilities of memory (perhaps in a Blade Runner fashion) seem to be emphasized throughout your recent projects. What are your questions and concerns around the use of photographic images as mnemonic devices?

BA: I see many of my recent projects as being fundamentally inquisitive, rather than declarative, in regard to memory. There is no articulated claim being made. Instead, I hope the work raises questions about how we order, archive and recall photographs in service of creating personal or historical narratives for ourselves. The vast majority of us, to some degree, rely on photographic evidence to help construct a feeling of continuity with the past. This process, particularly when looking at one’s own family photographs, can also have a great impact in the present; it can affect how we identify ourselves and our place in the world. In this way, photographs can be powerful persuaders, or mnemonic devices, but I tend to agree with you that whatever meaning does exist is annexed by the specific viewer and is thus entirely idiosyncratic. We project who and what we are onto photographic images. We see what we want to regardless of what’s there. There is no essential significance embedded in an image itself – this is applied later and with admitted subjectivity. Now, don’t get me wrong, certain images hold a greater historical or cultural value because they depict events or moments we shouldn’t forget; however, even these images are tinged with a certain amount of fiction. I have attempted to underscore that memory is an ever-vacillating and impermanent function; and that photographic images collude with memory to reinforce, rather than undermine, invented fictions.

ZN: Your recent work (re)generation depicts the destruction and inverse of a photographic print simultaneously. What is the significance of the image used and does this project relate to your views on image abundance?

BA: The image used in (re)generation is the last photograph taken of my grandfather before he died of terminal cancer in 2008. I sensed that he didn’t have much time left and I wanted an image to remember him by – one that I took, one that reflected an exchange between the two of us. Shortly after I made it, he passed away. In the months that followed, I became disconcerted by how quickly my memories of him were overwhelmed by indistinction, inconsistency and distance. When someone dies, you primarily have four things with which to remember them by – your memories, stories relayed by family members, photographs and whatever corporeal artifacts they’ve left behind. In spite of all of these possible triggers though, I was left feeling that these forms of remembrance, photographs in particular, did little to reconstruct a lucid picture of my grandfather. Like a puzzle, each fragment, memory or anecdote contributes to a larger whole, but the intact image always remains illusive.

With this in mind, I view (re)generation as a metaphor for the cognitive process and the reconstitutive nature of memory itself. This particular piece is not a commentary on image saturation, but rather a meditation on the oscillating, ever-malleable manner in which we recall the things embedded in our minds. Sometimes they appear with great clarity; other times they possess an intense ambiguity; and other times still, they are shrouded almost entirely in obscurity. Sometimes a singular memory shifts, transforming into or out of lucidity. The two images in (re)generation that perpetually construct and deconstruct my grandfather’s likeness constitute a visual analog for this process. The video is presented as an endless loop, so this metamorphosis occurs ad infinitum.

from Background Noise, 2011
© Ben Alper

ZN: How do you see your role as an image producer in this image saturated moment?

BA: This is something that I’ve thought about quite a lot over the years. It’s hard though to know where or how to contextualize my own photographic practice in relation to the trends of image making globally. It’s akin to trying to describe a single grain of sand in the context of an entire beach – it is simply a particle of a much larger organism. What I can say is that the pure volume of photographic images existent in the world today has been a source of great overwhelm for me.

I think for some image makers (myself included at times) it is easy to be fatalistic about the state of contemporary photography today. The feeling that everything has been photographed, and photographed ad nauseum, has the power to awaken a sense of futility in contributing more images to an already over-populated image culture. This line of thought though is ultimately defeatist and unproductive. I make images because I truly love the process – because it’s a way of challenging my own assumptions and perceptions of the world around me. As a result, much of my interest lies in the vernacular, the commonplace and the banal. I am far more interested in seeing (or making) something familiar appear strange than I am in seeing something that is wholly unfamiliar to me. It is this transformation that I find exciting, surprising and often off-putting. In the end, I hope that my role as an image maker is one that facilitates this feeling in other people and foregrounds the slighted things in life that so many of us take for granted.

from Terrain Vague, 2012
© Ben Alper

ZN: A thread throughout much of your work seems to be the gathering of the unwanted or overlooked (images, objects, places) and reimaging/reimagining them. What are the links for you between your ongoing Terrain Vague project and your more image focused projects?

BA: I see Terrain Vague as both a continuation and a departure from my previous bodies of work. On the one hand, it signals a new way of working, or accumulating images. Returning to the physical world to make my own photographs, rather than appropriating existing material from archival sources, has been liberating. The subject matter, at least on the surface, is also quite disparate from what I was working with in projects like Erasure and Background Noise. The move away from the personal, domestic and familial histories that were being addressed in those projects has given way to a more social and spatial examination of public space. Where the archival projects are, at least in part, rooted in a specificity that often evades knowability, the sites and materials photographed in Terrain Vague are general, ubiquitous and familiar. I was interested in going almost completely the other way in this regard – to work with a landscape that wasn’t as idiosyncratic as those found in vernacular photographs.

However, where I think the projects overlap is in their exploration of transformation, liminality, and impermanence. The majority of my work has addressed these concepts. And I cannot seem to let them go, so I continue to try and find new manifestations to continue exploring them. The sites depicted in Terrain Vague foreground the process of construction and deconstruction and underscore the liminal period of ambiguous transition from one state of “being” to another. As a result, they evoke a strong sense of being in between histories, function and time. This also activates them to explore a number of seemingly diametric relationships – those between presence and absence, inscription and erasure, preservation and ruination, and appearance and disappearance.

These ideas are also at play in previous bodies of work, but the tenor of the transformation, or liminal state, is different. In the archive-based projects, this is manifested as a mediation between memory and fantasy, the physical and the virtual, or between shifting and uncertain cultural practices. It’s the precipice between two things (histories, function, cultural practice or cognition) that allows for unexpected readings. This space of “in betweenness” is one that is ultimately destabilizing and slightly uncanny. In the end, I’m drawn to this period of precarious transition because it nurtures a particularly temporal experience – one that acknowledges the past and points toward the future, all from a fleeting moment between the two.

from Terrain Vague, 2012
© Ben Alper

ZN: What’s next for you?

BA: I am about to start my second and final year of graduate studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I will be working toward my thesis exhibition in the spring. On top of that, I will be having a two-person exhibition in Brussels in April and a solo show in London in either May or June.

Additionally, I have also resurrected The Archival Impulse – a web-based archive dedicated to my ever-growing collection of vernacular photography. Concurrent with my studies, I plan to continue contributing new content to the site, while also looking to expand the scope of the project by growing the collection and possibly collaborating with other enthusiasts, collectors and archivists in the online photo community.

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