By Anton Bogomyagkov, in my little collection, originally stolen from his zip drive.
10/31/2010
"The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time: not human time, but what we might call Redwood time. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years. Plant this small seed, wait 2,000 years, and you get this: the Lost Monarch. It dwells in the Grove of Titans on the North Coast, and was discovered in 1998. And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism. You're like a mouse looking at the foot of an elephant, and most of the organism is overhead, unseen."
10/30/2010
"Many of my pieces, and most conspicuously Forest, deal with the relentless, changing continuities of remembered places and marked events. Because of the density of the images, the repetitions are not always obvious to the viewer, but somebody approaching the piece might slowly realize they’re seeing one picture that nearly duplicates another 30 feet down the wall."
Joseph Bartscherer's Forest grid. Also from BOMB Magazine online, see larger and read more here.
"I began working with groups of photographs right from the beginning. It probably came out of a frustration with what seemed to me the superficial completeness of a single photographic glance. [...] It was more interesting to me that groups of photographs could act as aggregates, that individual photographs could stand in relationship to each other as stanzas in a poem, or collections of poems in a book. That there could be interdependencies that would bolster, reinforce, undermine, contradict each other within the body of a work. [...] I organized the photographs not so much chronologically, or to trace a narrative, or by typologies, say the way the Bechers have, but by following an associative logic based on affinities and disjunctions among pictures and picture groups."
"I try to make my pictures read as plausible stares. It’s one of the things I admired about Robert Frank’s pictures when I first saw them, how much they felt like what it was like to see. In his case and in a lot of Andre Kertesz’s work, it’s not so much a stare as a glance. But the principle holds. One of the things I built into my pieces — most self-consciously starting with Snohomish — was that my proximity to a subject would reflect my curiosity and, to use a loaded word, intention. So when I was photographing things very close up, I often used a wide-angle lens. The pictures don’t look wide angle, but they approximate what it feels like to stand very close to something and stare at it. If I were to use that lens to photograph things from further away, you’d be much more conscious of the photographic distortion. I was interested in disguising the distortion and instead making a sequence of pictures that, one by one, read as moments of consciously focused attention. This introduces the idea of the looker and so raises the question: why is somebody staring at something this closely; wherein lies his curiosity that he would look at something in such a way? To the extent that it evokes the act of looking, it suggests a frame of mind in which somebody’s attention is aroused. Then you have introduced to the photographic project something like literary voice."
Interview of Joseph Bartscherer by James Welling in BOMB Magazine, Spring 2008, Issue 103 here.
"I try to make my pictures read as plausible stares. It’s one of the things I admired about Robert Frank’s pictures when I first saw them, how much they felt like what it was like to see. In his case and in a lot of Andre Kertesz’s work, it’s not so much a stare as a glance. But the principle holds. One of the things I built into my pieces — most self-consciously starting with Snohomish — was that my proximity to a subject would reflect my curiosity and, to use a loaded word, intention. So when I was photographing things very close up, I often used a wide-angle lens. The pictures don’t look wide angle, but they approximate what it feels like to stand very close to something and stare at it. If I were to use that lens to photograph things from further away, you’d be much more conscious of the photographic distortion. I was interested in disguising the distortion and instead making a sequence of pictures that, one by one, read as moments of consciously focused attention. This introduces the idea of the looker and so raises the question: why is somebody staring at something this closely; wherein lies his curiosity that he would look at something in such a way? To the extent that it evokes the act of looking, it suggests a frame of mind in which somebody’s attention is aroused. Then you have introduced to the photographic project something like literary voice."
Interview of Joseph Bartscherer by James Welling in BOMB Magazine, Spring 2008, Issue 103 here.
10/29/2010
"In the Soviet village, socialism was embodied in the institution of the collective farm, or kolkhoz. In spite of petitions and protests, Solovyovo had its turn at collectivization in 1933, and vilagers there spent the next sixty years working primarily for the state rather than for their extended families. [...] In 1992, just as Moscow was beginning its wild ride toward capitalism, Solovyovo's collective farm had a decision to make: What to do with its eighty-five head of cattle, now that subsidies from the state could no longer be counted on? The answer: Slaughter them. Sell the meat. Leave that enterprise behind, and concentrate on selling off the wood of the rich forests of the region. The result: In Solovyovo, as in countless small villages throughout the vast Russian countryside, the primary economy is now based on subsistence farming. The collective farm has not yet been privatized, although the villagers are beginning to use some of its land. Farmers in Solovyovo are still making do with the potato plots assigned to their families in earlier decades and with the tangled gardens around their homes. They hunt in the forest and fish in the nearby lake. They keep bees for honey." (pg. 3)
"This is a book about memory. It is about a single small place, and the ways that place conjures its past into its present, and then casts its present into the future. It is about a Soviet place, a place where history was treated as a burden that had to be lifted. It is about the difficulty of cultural, social, and even economic erasure. And it is about the ghosts of ancestors, who come not only to haunt, but also to heal. [...] I wish to speak of continuities in time – of social memory, as it were – not in the language of inevitable essences, nor in the language of neutrally negotiated, randomly constructed (and easily erased) realities. I wish to speak in terms of use, and action, and habit – and the weathered, eroded, cognitive and symbolic landscapes they forge. Because of my argument – which claims that memory is cumulative and layered, and, yes, weighty – this book with be full of evidence and voices, full of the stuff of social memory. There was no other way to write it: From earth, to foot, from hand and eye, to sky, and story, and song, and lament. From Iuliia's hands, to her voice, to her walk from then, to then." (pg. 9)
"There are two important ways that memory has been linked explicitly to landscape in past scholarship. First, geographical landscapes have been treated as the sites of memory, and therefore the sites of symbol. People remember places, and can remember them through culturally appropriate images. In Social Memory, Fentress and Wickham (1992:93n) discuss this 'geographical sensibility,' and link it, in particular, to agrarian societies. Most often, it is people's own local landscapes that bear meaning and history. In a related way, there have been works that look at the physical landscape as a place of symbolic reverie. Bachelard's lyrical work, Poetics of Space (1964), takes us to lived locations and describes the poetry of houses, corners, and hearths. Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) is a historian's walk through the woods, down waters, and over rock, regarding these places in light of the symbolic features that fill them. In these sorts of works, the link between space and memory is essentially one in which space and place trigger cultural memory." (pg. 20)
"There are ways in which memory's landscape changes over time in great, layered shifts. States change; ideologies change. Hegemonies, with their range of powers over mind and body, change. In Russia, there have been discrete periods of history marked by distinct ideological agendas – each more or less aggressively introduces by the state and its institutions. In each, the past was instrumentalized as programs of power were set for the present. Reactions to these efforts were varied: local practices were at times in harmony with "national maps and hegemonies" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xxiii), and at times they opposed them in the form of defiance or quiet resistance. A Soviet commemoration, for example, would appropriate a holiday from the Orthodox Church, and villagers, in turn, woulg use the same day to regulate their relations with the ancestors. Could it be said, then, that the weight of the dead generations was lifted, light as air? In fact, rituals, commemorations, and crucial symbolic landmarks have been contested in Solovyovo. Archeological layers formed by the advance and retreat of states are traced in this book along institutional lines (Foucault 1969), as hegemony finds its way into the deepest pathways of social memory." (pg. 24)
Margaret Paxson in Solovyovo: The Story of Memory In A Russian Village, published 2005 by Woodrow Wilson Center Press
"This is a book about memory. It is about a single small place, and the ways that place conjures its past into its present, and then casts its present into the future. It is about a Soviet place, a place where history was treated as a burden that had to be lifted. It is about the difficulty of cultural, social, and even economic erasure. And it is about the ghosts of ancestors, who come not only to haunt, but also to heal. [...] I wish to speak of continuities in time – of social memory, as it were – not in the language of inevitable essences, nor in the language of neutrally negotiated, randomly constructed (and easily erased) realities. I wish to speak in terms of use, and action, and habit – and the weathered, eroded, cognitive and symbolic landscapes they forge. Because of my argument – which claims that memory is cumulative and layered, and, yes, weighty – this book with be full of evidence and voices, full of the stuff of social memory. There was no other way to write it: From earth, to foot, from hand and eye, to sky, and story, and song, and lament. From Iuliia's hands, to her voice, to her walk from then, to then." (pg. 9)
"There are two important ways that memory has been linked explicitly to landscape in past scholarship. First, geographical landscapes have been treated as the sites of memory, and therefore the sites of symbol. People remember places, and can remember them through culturally appropriate images. In Social Memory, Fentress and Wickham (1992:93n) discuss this 'geographical sensibility,' and link it, in particular, to agrarian societies. Most often, it is people's own local landscapes that bear meaning and history. In a related way, there have been works that look at the physical landscape as a place of symbolic reverie. Bachelard's lyrical work, Poetics of Space (1964), takes us to lived locations and describes the poetry of houses, corners, and hearths. Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) is a historian's walk through the woods, down waters, and over rock, regarding these places in light of the symbolic features that fill them. In these sorts of works, the link between space and memory is essentially one in which space and place trigger cultural memory." (pg. 20)
"There are ways in which memory's landscape changes over time in great, layered shifts. States change; ideologies change. Hegemonies, with their range of powers over mind and body, change. In Russia, there have been discrete periods of history marked by distinct ideological agendas – each more or less aggressively introduces by the state and its institutions. In each, the past was instrumentalized as programs of power were set for the present. Reactions to these efforts were varied: local practices were at times in harmony with "national maps and hegemonies" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xxiii), and at times they opposed them in the form of defiance or quiet resistance. A Soviet commemoration, for example, would appropriate a holiday from the Orthodox Church, and villagers, in turn, woulg use the same day to regulate their relations with the ancestors. Could it be said, then, that the weight of the dead generations was lifted, light as air? In fact, rituals, commemorations, and crucial symbolic landmarks have been contested in Solovyovo. Archeological layers formed by the advance and retreat of states are traced in this book along institutional lines (Foucault 1969), as hegemony finds its way into the deepest pathways of social memory." (pg. 24)
Margaret Paxson in Solovyovo: The Story of Memory In A Russian Village, published 2005 by Woodrow Wilson Center Press
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