2/28

I met with my new mentor a few weeks ago for the first time so I wanted to show her all the work I had done in my first two semesters. After she looked at about six of the urban landscape photos she stood up and grabbed a book from her bookshelf. It was Lee Friedlander's 'Sticks and Stones Architectural America' and when I looked at it, it was the closest thing I had seen to what I was trying to do. It was really nice to see something similar to my own work (especially being Friedlander) but I wondered later why not a single faculty member had mentioned this book or seen the connection between what Friedlander had done and what I was trying to do (medium format black and white images taken mostly in cities). The best anyone could come up with at the time was to either shoot color or to look at Lewis Baltz.
Lewis Baltz? His work was of suburban houses from California in the '70's and other than being black and white had little or nothing in common with what I was trying to do with an urban environment in 2008. When I thought more about it I realized that Friedlander probably isn't considered postmodern enough to be relevant. So even though Friedlander is one of the most important and prolific American photographers, a book of his work published in 2004 (and produced in the previous ten years) is either ignored, discounted or unknown by the faculty. It took about twenty seconds for my mentor to see the connection, but not a single faculty member could do the same. It's stuff like this that makes me want to beat my head against the wall.

2/16

The response to my Chelsea street portraits was overall pretty positive, but most of the faculty felt it wasn't enough. That they'd seen similar things in the past and that I needed to expand my ways of portraying the city. That simple portraits weren't enough. People suggested reading up on 'sense of place', which while sounding good remains one of the most nebulous terms thrown around art school. I even had a faculty member tell me he had no idea what it meant. I agreed, although I did find a short one by political geographer John Agnew that I liked. By 'sense of place' he means the 'subjective and emotional attachment people have to place'.
So I'm trying to incorporate some representation of my emotional attachment to Chelsea. How I do this is still unclear but I think it will include urban landscapes, more formal portraiture, and possibly still life's, panoramas and architectural details. After that, who knows?
I'm also continuing to use the idea of 'All-American' city as a way to frame all of these disparate ideas. The All- American City award is given by the National Civic League annually to ten cities in the United States. Chelsea won in 1998, the year I moved here. So one of the questions I keep asking myself is what is American and what does it mean to be All-American? Can there ever be a single definition or is this one of those things that's forever changing. Fluid.
I also like the idea of my work questioning the traditional notion of All American. Given the current political discourse regarding immigration, the fact that Chelsea is largely Hispanic (more than 50%) challenges directly, conservative views as to what is and who are Americans.