Gary and Nicole

Field of Sad Trees
Spanish Fork, UT
April 2008

One Sunday while she was digging away in her garden, Gary carved their names on the apple tree. He did it with a pocket knife, real nice, real neat: GARY LOVES NICOLE. Nobody had ever done that before.

Next day she had a lot of things to do, and kept wanting to get back. When she finally reached home, she cleaned out his car first, then climbed up the tree to a place above where he had done it, and carved out: NICOLE LOVES GARY. Then she went into the house just in time to meet him.

He came out into the backyard with a beer and she told him to look at the apple tree. He didn't see anything and she finally had to point it out to him. Then he was happy as a kid, and said she had done hers better than his. Told her it was a beautiful heart she had carved around the names.

excerpt from The House in Spanish Fork
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

What were the odds of driving around Spanish Fork and finding the apple tree where Gary and Nicole had declared their love for one another thirty two years ago? Pretty slim. Like finding love itself. And making it work.

Spanish Fork, where Gary briefly stayed with Nicole, was drearier and poorer and tawdrier than Provo. Dark clouds hung over the town and seemed perfectly right for my impossible mission and my own disillusionment. Does the fact that these dark clouds got me excited make me some kind of truly gloomy person or just practical minded when it comes to telling a story?

I made a sincere effort to look for the most romantic and/or saddest tree I could find with no idea what it would look like when I found it. I found these trees in a field that separated the town from a National Guard unit on its outskirts, and they looked sad enough for me to stop the car and and set up my camera.

I simply didn't have the patience to stay in Spanish Fork for ever and ever looking a tree I'd never find. Some things are just made to stay in your mind like a fantasy or an ideal. I imagined Gary and Nicole walking through the field to carve their names on one of these trees instead. Maybe it was a sunnier day if it is ever sunny in Spanish Fork which was hard to picture at that moment, though I had often imagined the two of them under a hot sun, sweating.

Sean

Sean
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

Before I left the City Center Motel in the morning, I had to take a picture of the clerk - if only for myself. The clerk, Sang, seemed peaceful and kind and tolerant, both towards me as a photographer and towards his long-term dwellers and their various dramas.

While I was waiting for Sang to return to the counter, I found Sean in the lobby of the City Center Motel reading The Book of Mormon Made Easier. I was immediately captivated by his strong and vulnerable face as well as his remoteness and his earnestness. I asked if I could photograph him outside the lobby in better light, and he was quietly compliant - no questions asked.

I photographed him with his book, but perhaps that one looked too contrived.

Cleo

Cleo
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

Wolfman

Wolfman Smoking
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

Just before dusk, I found Wolfman pacing in the parking lot of the City Center Motel chain smoking cigarettes. I told him he looked intense smoking cigarettes, and he said he was intense about everything he did. I said I could relate to that, about cigarettes and everything else.

Throughout the night and even the next morning, Wolfman was still pacing and smoking in the parking lot. His girlfriend was arguing with him from her doorway on the balcony of the second floor of the motel, and it was like a play, except it was real. The argument kept Wolfman in orbit around the girlfriend. He couldn't leave the parking lot and yet he couldn't return to their room upstairs. I thought about how often I had been in his shoes, lighting more cigarettes because what else was there to do.

He seemed to welcome the camera as a distraction - a validation of his plight.

Reflect

copyright Carl Wooley
Light Pole on Island
2008

Friday night's opening of Reflect: Full-time Student Exhibition at the ICP was packed with people and energy. I felt just a little like a proud mom to see excellent work by two of my former students, Carl Wooley and Phillip Gutman, both of whom took my Photographing at Night course this past winter.

Carl's piece, Light Pole on Island, belongs to a series of photographs he has been making at night in the city and on the fringes of Long Island. Using a 4x5 camera and long exposures up to thirty minutes, Carl has been producing beautiful and mesmerizing meditations on light and color and empty, anonymous space. His subjects are places like parking lots and woods where leaves and grass are brightly lit by artificial light, giving them an almost alien glow, and other areas of the image fall into a deep darkness. Throughout the course, we picked Carl's brain for his technical expertise and experimentation and were moved by these dream-like and hypnotic images.

Phillip Gutman brought together his interests in classical portraiture, fashion, gender identity and performance in a black & white collage titled Observation, Provocation and Identity. Phillip, whose fierce physical presence calls to mind a Shakespearean actor with a head of thick and curly hair, casts himself as both photographer and subject. His images portray himself photographing his models, who appear to be drag performers of another era, which he combines with images depicting himself engaged in intimate homoerotic scenarios. The narrative he creates leaves us with perhaps some curiosity about a mysterious world he inhabits with lovers and cohorts.

City Center Motel

Green Curtains
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008


Window
City Center Motel
Provo, UT
April 2008

On the flight to Phoenix, I began reading The Executioner's Song for the second time. The first time was in Chicago in the winter of 1997. My girlfriend and I were sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a poorly heated apartment and shared one copy and passed in back and forth and argued over who got to read it on a given night.

This second time around, I got as far Gary getting out of prison in Utah, Gary and Nicole falling in love, Gary getting drunk and high on Fiornal, Gary and Nicole fighting over sex, Nicole breaking it off with Gary, Gary shooting a clerk in a Sinclair Station, Gary trying to have sex with Nicole's stoned sister in a Holiday Inn, Gary shooting a clerk in the lobby of the City Center Motel, Gary getting captured and put in jail, Gary writing love letters - letters full of sexual longing and jealousy and pain - to Nicole, who falls back in love with Gary and tries to take her own life.

Gary's refusal to fight his death sentence, which the book later describes, created a media sensation in 1976 and drew Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer and eventually his own brother, Mikail, to tell Gary's story and the story of his family and a story about Utah. A juvenile delinquent with a Mormon mother and a violent father who was perhaps the son of Harry Houdini, Gary spent most of his life behind bars. Handsome in a rough way and intensely masculine with streaks of charisma and creativity, Gary, whose hero was Johnny Cash, had the makings of a dark and tragic American icon. His crimes made history and his character fascinated even Matthew Barney and the art world.

My goal was to find the scenes of his crimes and to discover what exists there now and what psychic energy remains in these places. I had already tracked down the City Center Motel at 150 W. 300 S. in Provo via the internet. I was almost surprised, when I made my first call to the motel, to learn that it still existed, and I asked the clerk on the phone, "Is this where the Gary Gilmore murder took place in 1976?". The clerk sounded uncomfortable and said it was under new management and he didn't know what I was talking about. Later, I made a reservation before I left for my drive to Provo, and it was a good thing I did, since the motel was full when I arrived, and most of its inhabitants seemed to live there for long stretches of time.

I spent the night in a room that smelled like stale cigarettes and felt like any motel room anywhere, really. Dingy, sad, lonely. The most interesting thing to me about the motel was its cast of characters, some of whom I photographed, and whose images will appear soon.

The Sinclair service station in the nearby town of Orem no longer exists as far as I could tell. Norman Mailer describes its location as the intersection of 800 North and 175 East. The closest thing I could find to that address was 800 North and 75 East, where small houses sit at the base of a big sky and snow-capped mountains, and my night pictures of this setting didn't quite make it.

Art Space Interview

Brian Sherwin, senior blog editor, recently interviewed me for an online publication, myartspace.com. Thank you Brian for the great questions and the opportunity to think back a little.

The interview can be found here: Brian and Tema on MYARTSPACE.

Hurricane

Hurricane, UT
April 2008

Smiley

Smiley
Dixie Palms Motel
St. George, UT
April 2008

The morning after my trip to Colorado City and Mountain Meadows and my night in the Dixie Palms Motel, I woke up to find Smiley standing in the parking lot outside my room, and I found his innocence as welcome and reassuring as the new morning itself. After I took some pictures of him, he said, "Isn't it great to have a nice neighbor, if only briefly?," and I felt the exact same way.

He invited me into his room for coffee and told me how he took care of the motel grounds and worked with kids on the weekends. The room was his home, and he showed my some of his belongings and the contents of his icebox. He said that he stocked up on a week's supply of cheeseburgers from McDonald's to save money, and reheated the burgers in his microwave, which I thought was pretty gross, but I kept that to myself.

Everything about Smiley spoke of kindness and gentleness, and I felt lucky to start a new day on this note.

The Temple

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
St. George, UT
April 2008

Television

TV Screens
Dixie Palms Motel
St. George, Utah
April 08

"The FBI," she said, "look in on houses to see if people are committing any crimes. They do it through the TV, you know." She lay back on the bed and the room was spinning. It was like the motel room she had gone to with a rich man. She had felt so alive that night because the plastic was so dead.

April Baker
excerpt from The Motel Room
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

After I left Mountain Meadows, I drove back to St. George and checked into a room at The Dixie Palms Motel. I turned on the TV and found the story about the FBI raid on the polygamist compound in El Dorado, Texas on Larry King Live. The same footage played over and over again with victims telling their lurid stories, newscasters with menacing snarls and women who claimed they liked being one of many wives. I sat on the bed and shot digital photos of the TV screen and thought about how everything felt all at once sleazy: television is sleazy, the FBI is sleazy, polygamists are sleazy, newscasters are sleazy, victims are sleazy, motel rooms are sleazy, Utah is sleazy, Texas is sleazy, America is sleazy, religion is sleazy, cameras are sleazy, even I am sleazy.

Memorial Day

Agnes with Phoenix
Brooklyn, NY
May 08

HIV Law Project Exhibition & Silent Auction

I have donated a print of the image, Teenage Boy, to the HIV Law Project exhibition and silent auction which takes place at Moti Hasson Gallery on Monday, June 2nd, from 6 - 9pm. Work by all of the participating artists can be seen at ARTISTS and tickets to the event can be purchased at TICKETS.

Moti Hasson Gallery
535 W. 25th Street

Mountain Meadows

Mountain Meadows
Southwestern Utah
April 2008

After I left Colorado City, my next destination was Mountains Meadows north of St. George, Utah. I decided to stop in St. George to calm my nerves and take a tour of Brigham Young's winter home. The house was clean and quiet and soothing, and the tour guide seemed almost saintly in contrast to the bulky and intimidating men I'd encountered in Colorado City. I felt a little guilty that my motivation to photograph Brigham Young's home was less than celebratory since the guide was so gracious when I asked if I could take some pictures. He told us that Brigham Young fathered fifty-seven children with multiple wives, and I took some photos of his massive canopy bed, upon which lay a top hat and a cane. I sensed that the images might be useless given the overexposure from the sun pouring in from the window behind the bed, and I was right.

My daylight hours were fast fading so I got back on the highway north towards Mountains Meadows. Mountains Meadows is the site of what historian Geoffrey Ward described as "the most hideous example of the human cost exacted by religious fanaticism in American history until 9/11."

I first learned about Mountain Meadows through Jon Krakauer's book, Under The Banner of Heaven. On September 11, 1857, a militia of Mormons disguised as Indians, along with real Paiute Indians, attacked a wagon train of Arkansas families known as the Fancher party who were traveling to California. The Mormon militia persuaded the families to surrender under the false promise of a truce and a safe passage. And then in a brutal slaughter known as The Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon militia took the lives of approximately 140 men, women and children.

After the massacre, The Mormon Church first tried to lay the blame for the killings on the local Paiute Indians. But when evidence revealed Mormon involvement, the church then tried to shift sole responsibility onto John D. Lee, a Mormon zealot and the adopted son of Brigham Young. Lee was executed for his crimes by a firing squad in 1877, and controversy exists to this day about the involvement of other church members in The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

According to an article by Sally Denton in The New York Times in 2003, the current church president, Gordon B. Hinckley, agreed to restore a landmark in 1999 where at least some of the bodies were buried, a concession which drew controversy when a contractor's backhoe unearthed the bones of 29 victims. Denton wrote, "After a debate between Utah state officials and church leaders - what has been called Utah's "unique church-state tango" - about state laws requiring unearthed bones to be forensically examined for cause of death, the church had the remains quickly reburied without any extensive examination that might have drawn new attention to the brutality of the murders."

She further wrote, "At a time when religions around the world are acknowledging and atoning for past sins, the massacre has left the Mormon Church in a quandary. Roman Catholics have apologized for their silence during the Holocaust, United Methodists for their massacre of American Indians during the Civil War, Southern Baptists for their support of slavery, and Lutherans for Martin Luther's anti-Jewish remarks. But unlike the leaders of other religions, who are believed to be guided by the hand of God, Mormon prophets are considered extensions of him ... To acknowledge complicity on the part of church leaders runs the risk of calling into question Brigham Young's divinity and the Mormon belief that they are God's chosen people."

Well, as I drove closer to Mountains Meadows, I wondered just how eerie it was going to be, and man, was it eerie right off the bat. Dusk was just beginning to approach an overcast afternoon, and the feeling of death and evil was nearly as pervasive and palpable as what I recall from a visit to the site of the World Trade Center two months after the attack on 9/11. I took deep breaths as I drove down the dirt road to the memorial site where an American flag was erected to acknowledge the loss of American lives.

I got out of the jeep with my camera and tri-pod, praying that I wouldn't be die alone here, subsumed by ghosts or startled by an attacker looming in the meadow. Shortly after I set up my first few shots, a truck came barreling down the dirt road and two men climbed out with a pit bull. I ran back to the jeep and stood at the door and asked them, "Are you guys spooky?" They assured me that they weren't spooky, but we agreed that this place sure was spooky. They left quickly, and I resumed taking pictures until a large bull walked out of the meadow gazing in my direction, and that was it for me at the memorial site. I drove up to the top of a hill to take in the full view of the meadow and hurriedly took three shots and got back on the road.

Colorado City

Cherry Tree
Colorado City, AZ
April 2008


House
Colorado City, AZ
April 2008

When I was a student in junior high school, I remember reading a short story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery, and the impact that this story had on me. The story is about a farming village which holds a lottery each year and selects one member of its community for a ritualistic sacrifice. A family name is first drawn from a black box, followed by the name of one member of that family, who is then stoned to death in the town square by his or her family and friends.

The story is so chilling, I recall a quiet and profound sense of shock and sadness that settled into me as I finished its final words, an experience that stands out in my mind as one of the events that marked a transition from my own childhood into a darker and more complicated adolescence.

I don't know that anything I subsequently read gave me a feeling like this until, in the summer of 2005, I read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. This work of non-fiction describes the murder of a woman and her child committed by her husband's brothers, Ron and Don Lafferty, in American Fork, Utah in 1984. The Lafferty Brothers, who were members of a fundamentalist sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, claimed that they received a divine commandment from God to commit this horrific crime and later expressed no remorse for causing these violent deaths.

What is further disturbing about Under the Banner of Heaven is the dense history of violence it illustrates surrounding the Mormon religion, and particularly the violence and misogyny associated with Mormon Fundamentalists who to this day practice polygamy in communities in America. Before I read this book, I had no idea grown men were marrying and abusing teenage brides and beating wayward women in "re-education camps" outside of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah.

What I read in this book stayed with me for years, and it became apparent this winter that I could finally make a trip to this part of the country. I didn't form much of a plan other than to simply make the drive across the desert north of the Grand Canyon to see Colorado City and Hildale for myself and to photograph whatever I might find there.

The day before I left for Colorado City, I talked to my mom on the phone, and she told me about the FBI raid on the polygamist compound in West Texas, which I hadn't yet seen in the news. She was concerned since she knew I was planning to drive from Arizona to Utah that week and she figured tensions would be heightened in the area. I didn't mention to her that I was actually planning to drive to Colorado City the next day since that is not the kind of thing you tell your mother, even when you are thirty-four years old.

The drive from Kayenta to Colorado City took several hours passing first through the stark and beautiful Kaibab Plateau and then up into a snowy forest region in the mountains. My sense of fear began to settle in as I reached Fredonia, a small farming town whose name had appeared in the book in relation to the polygamists, and then it grew as I made the last stretch of the drive through a desolate landscape north into Colorado City.

I didn't know what to expect. Would it look like a normal town with a settlement on the outskirts that I would have to search for? I felt waves of fear pass through me like the sensation of being on a roller-coaster that is climbing towards a peak, when the impending moment of the plunge is full of uncertainty and suspense.

The one thing I had read about the area outside of Krakauer's book was an article I found on the internet about a restaurant in Hildale called The Merry Wives Cafe, where women in long dresses serve food to curious travelers. I planned to stop at the cafe to eat lunch and to get my bearings.

As I drove into Colorado City, I realized that the settlement was the town itself and consisted of houses and yards set off of the highway at the base of a mountain. I stayed on the highway and passed the border into Utah and pulled into the parking lot of The Merry Wives Cafe, whose glass windows were black from the outside. I walked into the cafe and ordered a turkey sandwich and a rasberry lemonade from a woman in a long dress, but when she brought the food to my table, my mouth was too dry to take more than a few bites.

The article about the cafe described portraits of polygamist families on its walls and a mural depicting several woman harmoniously working together in a field. As I sat at my table, I gazed at the mural and thought about asking if I could take a photograph, and then decided that it wasn't important enough to call attention to myself as a photographer since my real goal was to drive into the residential section of Colorado City.

I left the restaurant and drove back east on the highway and turned onto a road that led into the settlement. When I stopped the jeep on the street in front of the cherry tree, several small children in traditional dresses who were playing under the tree immediately ran and hid when they spotted me, even before I picked up my camera. I quickly got out of the car and took a few shots of the tree and drove further in the neighborhood. I saw a woman in a long dress standing in her backyard leaning against a fence, and my desire to take a photograph was overwhelming and yet impossible to realize.

Part of what made Colorado City seem so surreal, besides the large houses with dark windows, was the amalgam of the new and the old. The streets were lined with brand new trucks and SUV's with black windows, while the children and women, some of whom were driving these vehicles, appeared to belong to another century.

I wished I were invisible, but knew that I wasn't, and was, in fact, more than conspicuous, and however real or imagined, my sense of danger in this settlement alone with a camera was growing. My heart was racing, and I imagined one of these many trucks chasing me down in my jeep, and how unlikely an escape would be in the event of a confrontation. I took a few more photos of these eerie houses and drove back toward the highway. I passed a boy with a brimmed hat seated grandly on a horse that was slowing trotting down the road, and I quickly leaned out of the the car window to shoot his photo. But as soon as the boy saw my camera, he fled.

The was my last sign to leave Colorado City, and I continued northwest on the highway. And while the drama of this excursion was clearly a reflection of my imagination, I still felt lucky to leave a place where so many women are held captive.

Driveways

Driveway
Monument Valley region
Arizona
April 2008

Along the small highways in the deserts of Arizona and Utah, there are long winding driveways leading to clusters of houses and cars. I found myself entranced by their mysteriousness, but more than a little afraid of the unknowns, wondering who lives down there? Do they own guns? Will they shoot me if I drive down their driveway?

Are they natives? Or a cult? Or a religious sect? What are they protecting or hiding?

People hide out in the west for all kinds of reasons. Some of them aren't hiding at all. But how can you know?

At the moment I took this photo, it was as likely that I'd venture down this driveway as I would have climbed into the Egyptian Room with the mummy cases at the public library when I was on a class field trip in grade school. Meaning, I was spooked, and as soon as I took this shot, I jumped back into the jeep and raced down the highway. I told myself that I was saving any possible thread of courage for my next journey and my next post.

Car Skeletons

Car Skeleton
Highway 163
Arizona
April 2008


Car Skeletons at Dusk
Highway 163
Arizona
April 2008

Alexandrea

Alexandrea
Kayenta, AZ
April 2008

Alexandrea was the first person I met in Kayenta. I saw her blonde hair shining in the bright morning sunlight and pulled the jeep into the parking lot where she was walking with a friend.

I always feel clumsy about these encounters and what to say to someone whose picture I want to take. How would I feel if someone jumped out of a car and stopped me on the street and wanted to take my picture?

If it were someone like Alexandrea, I might be flattered and intrigued, and do my best to share my soul with her for a moment in time, though usually, I am like a deer in the headlights when someone tries to photograph me.

On a Navajo reservation, my awkwardness about taking pictures of people was stronger and more complicated. I felt almost sheepish as a photographer from a middle-class Midwestern family living in New York and wandering this new terrain checking out teenagers. In the end, I didn't make many photos of people in Kayenta, and mostly watched from a distance and wondered how to make these kind of connections. But Alexandrea was open, and I loved her face.

Past, Present, Future

Past, Present, Future
Psychic Reader Palm
Route 66
Flagstaff, AZ
April 2008

I flew into Phoenix on the afternoon of April 6th and picked up my friend's second car from the driveway of his uncle's house in a sun-drenched subdivision near the expressway. My plan was to make the drive from Phoenix north to Kayenta near Monument Valley where my friend works for the federal government as a doctor in a clinic on a Navajo reservation and to spend the night at his house.

I passed through Flagstaff and was enthralled with the pine trees and retro motels lining Route 66 with names like The Frontier and The Wonderland. And while motels like these are some of my favorite forms of eye candy, something about this fortune teller's shop beckoned me to stop the car. Besides the bright pink and green against the blue sky and the long dark shadows cast by an afternoon sun, I also knew that I was at the beginning of a journey to explore some thoughts about America's past, present and future.

And it was the beginning of spring, which is a time of year when I am especially prone to nostalgia - when the past, present and future seem to reveal themselves in uncanny and interconnected ways - when meeting a new person, for instance, can return you to all kinds of important people and events in your life that came before. The threads that bring people together and bind them to one another seem more vivid and almost fated, and memories unfurl like flowers and insects and colors and sounds.

The Internet

Anthony on Rooftop
Manhattan, NY
April 2008

So, Jon Feinstein of Humble Art Foundation shed some light on the crazy starving dog story and sent me a link to an article which exposes the whole thing as a hoax - a stunt by the artist to cause a big stir, which it did. Over a million people signed this petition, which is at least a little heartwarming even if we are all annoyed for having been manipulated. It got me thinking about what we read on the internet, and how we might confuse truth and fiction, and how much weird stuff arrives in my inbox on a daily basis.

Besides the messages selling Viagra and other dubious drugs, I am regularly bombarded with messages revealing that I am the beneficiary of large sums of foreign currency once I have shared some details of my identity and contact information. But worse still are the inquiries from brides and grooms with sketchy yahoo accounts about the costs of my photography services for an upcoming wedding in NYC, usually opening with "Dear Sir or Madame..." and some words of flattery. Most of these messages are allegedly coming from foreign countries and the awkward use of the English language and the creepy tone sounds uncannily similar each time. Who writes these things, I wonder. Is there one evil mastermind with a million yahoo accounts or is there a sweatshop somewhere with laptops where workers are trained to perfect this particular style of bad English and ridiculously excessive formality?

Hmmm. Well, I just wanted to put something simple on the internet today - the face of someone I love and who I think is beautiful. My friend, Anthony, was in town for a long weekend for his cousin's wedding and spent his nights and mornings at my apartment in Brooklyn. While I have previously photographed Anthony on beaches in Minneapolis or making out with a cute guy on a couch in an apartment in the West Village, this time around, I got a shot of him on the rooftop of a building on 39th Street where the wedding reception was held. Too bad you can't see the awesome view of the city from this rooftop, but you might notice the slight coffee stain emerging from beneath his lovely tie which happened on our walk to the wedding in Central Park - the only blemish to his elegant beauty and sophistication as far as I can tell.

And one last thing ... thank you to Paddy Johnson for featuring my work this week in the masthead of her super smart and cool art blog, Art Fag City. You can find the post here: Tema Stauffer in Art Fag City

Petition to Prevent Death Spectacle

Some of you may have received some devastating photos and a link to sign a petition to save another dog's life from the art world which seems to be racing thru the internet like wildfire, thankfully.

But if you haven't, you might want to read the contents this petition and consider adding your name to the list:

http://www.petitiononline.com/ea6gk/petition.html

From the limited information one can gather from this link, an artist named Guilliermo Vargas hired five children to capture a stray dog in Managua and then tied him to a rope in an art gallery. The artist and visitors of the exhibition watched while the dog starved to death in the gallery almost as though it were a performance piece. And the Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American has invited Vargas to recreate this "installation" in the biennial of 2008.

Does this sound like some totally bizarre parody of what the art world has come to? Am I missing something that would help to make this make more sense?

My friend speculated that this piece was intended to call attention to how we see animals starving on the streets all the time in real life and turn our backs to it, and by tying the animals to a rope in the gallery, the artist is calling attention to this kind of suffering. Except that if we tied a helpless person to a rope in gallery and watched the person starve to death, it doesn't quite add up to meaningful art that most of us could stomach.

I'm perplexed and disturbed, so if anyone has more insight on this story, please let me know. I first saw the photos of this dog and read the petition shortly after returning from my trip out west, where seeing stray dogs roaming in parking lots and streets in Arizona was already heartbreaking enough. And having photographed some dead animals and a dog who was taking it's last breathes on a street in Ship Rock, NM, I hope there is a significant moral distinction between between the act of capturing suffering, violence and death and the act of causing suffering, violence and death in the process of making art.

Back in NYC

I got back last night from an eerie journey through the deserts of Arizona and Utah. I spent some nights at a friend's house on a Navajo reservation in Kayenta, Arizona near Monument Valley, those ancient and spooky red rocks, and made drives through Colorado City, Hildale, St. George, Provo, Orem and Spanish Fork in Utah and across the eastern border to Ship Rock, New Mexico.

My rolls of film are processed already, and I can see reversed fragments of broken cars, motels, gas stations, churches, houses, dead animals, dead trees, streets, skies and a few faces from this strange part of the country with a dark history of violence and religious fervor.

More on that in a few weeks when some of this film is scanned ...

Spring Break

Dream-Self

Caitlin
from Daughters of Job
copyright Ali Malone

I'm not really a photographer from Minnesota, as much as I'd like to pretend sometimes because it does sound romantic and man, are some of them successful. I just lived there for four and a half years and was lucky to meet some great photographers who were actually born and bred in those parts. My friend, Ali Malone, is the real deal. Ali moved out to New York a year after I did for the graduate photo program at SVA. I took my first of many Photoshop classes with Ali at MCAD, and she taught me what an adjustment layer is and how to composite images. I am extremely slow and dumb and forgetful, but Ali is a techi whiz kid if I've ever met one.

Ali has work in a group show called Dream-Self opening tomorrow at Broadway Gallery in SoHo. The photographs in this series, "Daughters of Job," portray a secret society of girls ranging in ages from 10 to 20 years old who are the daughters and granddaughters of Freemasons. According to Ali, "These images are concerned with the psychology of identity formation through traditional ritual and role-playing within a patriarchal organization."

To read more about the exhibition, check out the press release.

Dream-Self
Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway, 7th Floor
opening Thursday April 3rd, 6-8pm

Todd Hido

from House Hunting
copyright Todd Hido

I was excited to learn that Todd Hido will be talking about his new monograph, Between the Two, at Aperture Gallery on Tuesday. I have long been a fan of his gorgeous photographs, and his work has been included in two group shows at Jen Bekman Gallery. His earlier books - House Hunting, Outskirts and Roaming - are staples in the night photography class I teach at the ICP. In fact, one of the assignments I give students is to research a photographer and shoot a series of photographs that reflect, exaggerate or even parody his or her style, subject matter and use of lighting. Every session, at least one student chooses Todd Hido's work, and in my current class, almost a third of the students referred to Todd Hido as their source of inspiration. His mastery of light and his ability to create a sense of mystery and mood is undeniable and almost baffling.

I do, however, find that his recent images of anonymous models in hotel rooms, which are included in his new monograph long with images of the interiors of abandoned houses, undermine the rest of his work. Aside from their technical expertise and seductive lighting, these images strike me as little more than soft porn. Or advertising shots for whiskey or luxury cigarettes.

What is sexy about most of his work is what is left to the imagination. The model shots seem too explicit, obvious and cliched. It is disappointing, really.

But nevertheless, I look forward to hearing what Todd has to share about his motivations and processes ...

Todd Hido
Artist's Lecture
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th Fl.
Tuesday April 1, 6:30pm

Sexy Rooms

Canon Falls (Cobain Room)
copyright Melanie Schiff, 2007


H.S.-N.Y.-0-94
copyright Dirk Braeckman


Abduction
from Fire Scene
copyright Sarah Pickering, 2007

Sometimes on my days off from working to pay NYC rent, I remind myself of the most obvious fact that the greatest luxury of living in this city is the ability to see extremely cool art beyond the internet on any given day. Recent trips away from my suburban haven in Brooklyn and into the big city led me to some beautiful and haunting rooms.

One of these rooms is currently on the wall of the Whitney Museum and was brought to us from Minnesota by a photographer based in Chicago, Melanie Schiff. Melanie has photographed a young woman standing with her back to us between parted curtains in a hotel room in Canon Falls, where Kurt Cobain recorded an album with Nirvana. The quality of light and the eerie lore surrounding the image left me standing in front of the it for a long time, mesmerized and quietly unnerved, and returning to it the following day. Her other images in the Biennial include similarly seductive and beautiful and pensive explorations of physical and psychological spaces such as a bathtub harboring an oversized house plant and a dark blue album decaying in a reflecting pool. Both resemble still life paintings and possess a simplicity and depth that rarely seems to be achieved so well in photographs.

I also liked what Melanie wrote about what motivates her work. She said "she wants to make photographs that are like a sad song that - even though created by someone else - somehow resonates with our own experience." She couldn't have accomplished that goal more poignantly, as far as I was concerned. It didn't seem accidental that her photographs were positioned in proximity to Robert Bechtle's photorealist paintings of empty, quiet, tranquil streets. The combination of these two bodies of work was the highlight of the Biennial for me, though I am admittedly biased and have a short attention span for the abundance of video and installation pieces.

I later discovered a vast series of rooms photographed by a Belgian photographer, Dirk Braeckman, at Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea. When I moved to Minnesota in the winter of 2001, the first thing I bought was a small green book containing grainy black & white images of feebly flash-lit interiors with absolutely no trace of text. I fell in love with it in the bookstore at the Walker Art Center and brought it back to my suburban ranch house in St. Louis Park. I had never heard of Dirk Braeckman before and haven't heard of him since. According to The New Yorker, this is his first solo show in New York. The New Yorker described his noirish images of beds and couches and curtains and wallpaper as "deeply depressing" but I found them to be something more along the lines of profoundly mysterious.

Just one block below at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, I even got to see some rooms on fire. Wow. Sarah Pickering's new images were made in "burn units" - which, I learned, are fully furnished rooms rigged to teach forensic teams how to determine the origins of household fire and arsons. Well, the effect is astonishing. I couldn't stop wondering enviously how it is that some artists arrive at such crazy and amazing ideas. Why didn't I think of that? How fun would that have been to photograph? It appears from her website that Sarah is a big fan of explosions. Check it out.

Thank you ...

Well, I made it out of the panel discussion alive and in fact, truly enjoyed the dialogue with Amy and the other panelists. Thank you to Amy Stein for leading our discussion and thanks to Cara Phillips, Mary Mattingly, Sarah Small and Dina Kantor who filled in for Rachel Dunville.

Thanks also to the 3rd Ward and Ladies Lotto as well as Jon and Amani and the rest of Humble Art Foundation for facilitating the exhibition and event.

Also, thanks to my friends who shared their experiences and insights as women in the art world and beyond when I contacted on them on Saturday afternoon to help me prepare for the discussion: Alex Loria, Suzy Poling, Heather Willems, Agnes Dahan, Athena Waligore, Debbie Grossman, and Corinne Dolle.

And thanks to those friends who showed up, despite my neurosis.

Women in Art Photography

Heard
from Born Enough
copyright Rachael Dunville

I will be joining a panel of emerging female photographers based in New York at the 3rd Ward on Saturday to discuss what it means to be a woman making art photography. This discussion is in conjunction with the current exhibition in The Gallery at the 3rd Ward called 31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography organized by Humble Art Foundation and Ladies Lotto.

The panel will be moderated by photographer Amy Stein, whose work and blog and active presence in the photo world have been a great source of inspiration to me and to countless other photographers - men and women alike.

Pictured above is my favorite image in the exhibition by photographer and panelist, Rachael Dunville. Other panelists include Cara Phillips, Mary Mattingly and Sarah Small.

As I am intensely shy and nervous about speaking in front of groups of people, I am sorry to say that I am not actually planning to invite anyone I know in real life as I might have to see them again. It is only Tuesday and already, I am a bit queasy thinking about it. But I'd have felt worse if I ran away from this, as it is such a worthwhile topic and group of women, and in theory, I suppose one should do their best to overcome these fears.

Women in Art Photography
3rd Ward
195 Morgan Avenue
Saturday, March 22/6-8pm

Taiwan Bus Series, 2003

Yesterday, the rain and howling winds left me hunched over my computer for ten hours straight spotting dust off of dusty scans of negatives from a trip I made to Taiwan in the summer of 2003.

One of the prints from a series I shot from the window of a bus en route to Taipei was recently donated by George Slade, Director of the Minnesota Center for Photography, to the Minnesota Museum of American Art in memory of their former director, Jim Czarniecki. I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to revisit these images and to create digital files for the first time.

Anyone who knows me knows that I spend most of my life in a state of unfulfilled romantic longing for one thing or another, and when I returned to Minneapolis in July after three weeks in Taiwan, I was heartbroken. I had culture shock coming home, as the abrupt shift in color palettes and cultural stimuli left a gaping hole in my soul.

I got a job waiting tables in a Thai restaurant. I bought a rice cooker and a dragon blanket. I watched all of Tsai Ming-Liang's films and all of Wong Kar Wai's films. I watched Japanese horror films. I wrote grant proposals to return to Asia to shoot photos, none of which manifested into another trip.

Eventually, I moved to New York City, and the pain has reconfigured into something else. When I take students in my night photography class at the ICP on field trips in Chinatown, I am reminded of these old feelings. I love their photos of chickens in foggy windows and of glittering things for sale. I love those splashes of pink and red and the blur of haunting faces on the street.