J. Shimon & J. Lindemann

Art Chicago Next Fair 2011

2011-04-16T16:56:00.028-05:00

Installation of J. Shimon and J. Lindemann prints in
Portrait Society Gallery's, Milwaukee, booth at
Art Chicago Next Fair's Preview Party, Thursday, April 28, 2011.

Debra Brehmer's Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, brought a selection of our prints to Art Chicago Next Fair April 28-May 1, 2011 (222 W Merchandise Mart Plaza). We've been doing a lot of photographs about death lately, but it's these self-mocking rural Wisconsin landscapes (below) that seem okay for public viewing at the moment. Perhaps due to what's going on in the world? Also on view are works by Boris Ostrerov and Bernard Gilardi.

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Tomato Tower, 2008,
Gum Bichromate Print, 36x30 inches

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Silver Queen Corn, 2010,
Tea-Toned Cyanotype Print, 36x30 inches

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Profile with Haystack, 2008,
Gum Bichromate over Cyanotype Print, 36x30 inches

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Painting Wheels, 2009,
Tea-toned Cyanotype Print, 36x30 inches

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Screen Door, 2008,
Tea-toned Cyanotype Print, 36x30 inches

Inspired by Weegee's self-portraits--with a heavy dose of Green Acres-ian ethos--we began making these pictures about summers isolated on our rural Wisconsin farm starting in 1996. In between raising most of our own food in a large organic garden and writing syllabi for the next year's courses, we stave off the inevitable decay of our place and ourselves. We stage the photographs in locations around our farm wearing "costumes" accumulated over decades of thrift shopping while reenacting the chores du jour.

© Weegee
Weegee and his Successor (circa 1948)

Still from Green Acres TV show
Oliver and Lisa with implement (circa 1965)

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Self-Portrait Rototilling, 1996,
Platinum-Palladium Print, 10x8 inches

Our YouTube video documenting the process of making the photographs, titled Too Big, has gotten quite a few views thanks to a shout out on The Online Photographer. Julie's 2006 digital snapshot of John posing with the home-made "big camera" is posted on flickr and has been oft "favorited" (geek out). A print from this ongoing series, Self-Portrait in the Garden at Dusk (see below), is currently on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the Facing the Lens: Portraits of Photographers (through August 28, 2011).

© J. Shimon and J. Lindemann
Self-Portrait in the Garden at Dusk, 1998,
Platinum-Palladium Print, 12x20 inches

Life Is Beautiful

2011-04-10T18:39:00.003-05:00

Lucy was game to learn digital photography and bought a Canon point-and-shoot to take pictures of her life and to bring along on her travels. But before she could start making new photos, she had a legacy of snapshots to reconcile. In particular where the prints that told the story of her brother who died more than 50 years ago of cancer. Recently diagnosed with cancer herself, Lucy remembered her brother's attitude about the disease and how he faced death saying "Life is Beautiful" moments before his death. We met Lucy working on the cancer survivorship project at the Kohler Art Center in July 2010. Staff at the Kohler helped Lucy scan and post her old snapshots on Flickr. Without captions, we read one of the black-and-white square snapshots on flickr as a portrait of a mother figure clad in apron removing a turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving day not realizing it was Lucy's mother preparing the last family holiday supper for her brother. We made a video of Lucy telling the stories of her photographs.

Wisconsin Idea

2011-03-05T19:20:00.012-06:00

Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Sr., 1922,
photographed by J. Lindemann's great uncle
John Glander at Glander Studio, Manitowoc, WI.
Wisconsin Historical Society.

By the time the Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait exhibition opened on February 18, 2011 at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison, the political landscape had completely changed in Wisconsin and the nation. The Wisconsin State Journal covered the show and its uncanny timing and its focus on individual workers in the work place. Thousands of teachers, municipal works, moms, dads and kids had begun gathering at the state capitol building to protest the public union busting scheme of newly elected Scott Walker. Walker appeared to be the antithesis of everything about Wisconsin and the liberalism of people like "Fighting Bob" La Follette that many admired.


Richie "Wenzel" Krueger with Ice, Manitowoc, WI, 2005 © J. Shimon & J. Lindemann

The Wisconsin Labor project was commissioned through a Wisconsin Arts Board Percent for the Arts grant in 2007 for the Wisconsin Department of Work Force Development building on East Washington Street in Madison. It's the place unemployed people go for help. Like us, most of the photographers were academics perhaps somewhat sheltered in the ivory tower. Dick Blau teaches at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Tim Abler at Cardinal Stritch College in Milwaukee, David Heberlein at University of Wisconsin River Falls and we at Lawrence University. Jamie Young left Madison after he finished work on the project for Syracuse, NY where he is a freelancer and his wife Harriet teaches at Syracuse University. The seven of us were selected by a panel of experts and work began on the project. Such a commission to photograph Wisconsin workers seemed a rare opportunity in 2007, a throw back to Roy Styker's Farm Securities Administration photo projects. We photographed throughout the summer and fall of 2007 and by the time our prints were made, framed and delivered in 2008, Barak Obama had been newly elected but the illusion of prosperity burst. Friends lost their jobs, real estate values tumbled and so did the value of stocks. The people we'd photographed experienced the downturn. The pizza place Amber worked at closed, Richie turned his liquor store into Wenzel's Perfect World, a night club because he couldn't compete with all the new franchise liquor stores, the yacht company laid off Dylan due to lack of sales of luxury yachts and so on. The exhibition opened first in Appleton in October 2010 to an ambivalent audience, but by the time it opened in Madison, the Wisconsin Arts Board's Percent For Arts Program that funded the project was on the verge of extinction and the capitol building was teeming with protesters spending days and nights rallying and inhabiting the capitol rotunda with hilarious signs expressing their views. We ran into friends handing out "Recall Scott Walker" bumper stickers and put one on our office door. It seemed the public once again cared about the lives of everyday people rather than the celebrities with ostentatious wealth displayed on high-def full color displays. Hummers and diamonds seemed vulgar and wasteful as they had during similarly challenging times during the Great Depression and World War II when the average person struggled just to get by. A selection of the photographs made for the project are housed at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. We presented a well-attended lecture on the photographs that influenced our approach to the Labor project on April 3 at the Watrous Gallery as documented by Martha Glowacki for the academy and Troy Freund on his blog.


"Imperial Walker," Madison Protests, February 18, 2011

Wisconsin Labor opening at Watrous Gallery, February 18, 2011

"Stop the Attack," Madison Protests, February 19, 2011

Kodachrome and Root Beer

2011-01-22T16:49:00.004-06:00

Lunch at Charlie's Place, Hortonville, WI, Summer 2010.
Kodachrome in the glovebox was not subjected to heat.

When small gauge film expert Toni Treadway of Brodsky & Treadway emailed with an offer of a few rolls of circa 1990s Kodachrome double 8 mm from her freezer, we knew what we'd do with it. While working on the Wisconsin Arts Board Wisconsin Labor Survey in 2007, we photographed a carhop named Elise at Charlie's Place in Hortonville. We wanted to make a short movie about the restaurant and the family that ran it. The owners were a brother and sister team who'd recently taken over from their retired dad who started it after buying an old A&W in 1965. Working together, they kept the place a viable summer business by orchestrating a self-described "shabby" Americana roadside atmosphere and offering up a selection of basic made-from-scratch food. The help of family-members and towns people was also essential. Patrons drink root beer floats out of frosted glasses (not styrofoam cups) and the sandwiches come wrapped in simple paper printed with the word "delicious" rather than the excess of multi-colored corporately-branded boxes. We filmed on classic car night during Elvis death week in August. Carl showed up with bedazzled white jumpsuit and an armful of polyester flower leis he distributed generously as he hugged babies and greeted carloads of customers. Wife Tori, dressed as Marilyn, served sheet cake from the hood of a white Cadillac. We finished shooting by September and shipped it off the exposed Kodachrome Dwayne's in Kansas to beat the processing rush. Not only had the last roll of Kodachrome been produced by Kodak, but K-14 processing was scheduled to cease December 30, 2010 at the family-owned lab in Kansas.

Being There

2011-01-15T10:48:00.012-06:00

Watch the full episode. See more In Wisconsin.

Being on TV is always odd and no less so last week when a Wisconsin Public Television segment on our Real Photo Postcard Survey Project aired. We heard of the solid air date through a newspaper reporter named Suzanne Weiss at the Herald-Times-Reporter. She'd received a press release and wrote a feature story on our project and the upcoming TV coverage.

Television is random as it beams into homes and places sometimes unanticipated. For example, we didn't get around to visiting our friend Nigel at Fox Lake Correctional as we usually do around the holidays. A fan of public media, he anticipated seeing us on TV. After the feature aired on January 6, he wrote us a hand-written letter critiquing our on-camera fashions:

It was fun to see you guys again...one of the early shots showed Johnie while the narrator babbled on and it appeared as though he was wearing a black scarf and I was like Oh no! Pretentious indoor artist scarf. But then later on I saw it was the black camera cloak. So obviously I was relieved...

We received other various responses including an email from a cordial woman named Judith who attached a digital snap capturing her profile. She was at a hockey game wearing wearing pink cat eye glasses and had a pointy chin. She wrote: "Julie...I think we could have been twins...ha ha...I am just 200 pounds larger."

When Liz Koerner (producer/director), Brad Wray (sound engineeer) and Mike Eicher (videographer) visited our studio in June to shoot the segment, we were finishing an intense string of portraits and palladium prints for a project to open in July at Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee. Our studio was cluttered with the stuff of unfinished works-in-progress, yet the crew found order and a visual story. They worked around the sporadic clattering of beer bottles being emptied from a dumpster at the bar across the street and the tangle of lights and cameras only leaving behind one quartz light and stand which we still need to return. We invited our longtime neighbors Ryan Ackley and Rich Bouril to come by for postcard portraits. Ryan owns the Boarding House, a skateboard shop, around the corner from our studio. We've known him since he was nine when we first moved into our studio. Richie owns the Culture Cafe across town and we share rural Wisconsin roots and buy his fresh-roasted coffee. We photographed the crew too.

Liz Koerner (producter/director) interviews John Shimon
in the midst of our cluttered Manitowoc studio while
Mike Eicher shoots video and Brad Wray records sound (6.17.10).

Ach Ja, Tannenbaum

2010-12-21T12:05:00.025-06:00

Assembling an Evergleam aluminum
Christmas tree, Season's Gleamings, 2004

Last week Franziska Felber called from Hamburg as part of her research on artificial Christmas trees. With our book Season's Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree now out of print, we didn't expect much interest in our tree story this year so were surprised. Franziska, a 27-year old journalist apprentice from Berlin, talked with us at length about aluminum tree history in Manitowoc. She ended up focusing on the history for her SPIEGEL ONLINE article titled Holy Tinsel published on Friday, December 17, 2010. It's written in German, which we could not read so my generous and kind cousin Phil Glander, a retired professor of German, provided a translation and we've posted it below. Judith Moriarty also wrote a piece about her memories of aluminum and other Christmas trees for Milwaukee's THIRD COAST DIGEST titled Once upon a time: A Tale of Christmas Trees Past published on December 10, 2010. Prompted by this journalistic interest in the trees, we checked online to see if copies of Season's Gleamings were still available only to find the prices fluctuating wildly from $10 to $100 per copy (original cover price was $16.95) everywhere from Amazon to Ebay. We decided to offer up a few signed copies with an 8x10 glossy inkjet "portrait" print of a gold Evergleam tree through our Etsy Store. We finally mustered up the energy to set up a single aluminum tree in the entryway of our studio. We're grateful the trees haven't been forgotten and that fans continue to surface. Last year, the Wisconsin Historical Society set up a spectacular and didactic exhibition of the trees which seemed their penultimate finest hour! We await their induction into a design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art someday as their sleek geometry and "tree-in-a-box" concept are so stunning that we feel they truly deserve such a treatment.

Self-portrait in Neo-Post-Now Gallery, Manitowoc, Wisconsin,
with aluminum forest installation, December 1996

Holy Tinsel
It was pink or gold and as tall as a man - but one thing it wasn't - real. In the 60s millions of Americans in the US set up an aluminum tree at Christmas time in their living room. The artificial tree became an emblem of the Space Age until a figure from the funny papers started its downfall.

By Franziska Felber
English translation by Phil Glander

"Get the biggest aluminum Christmas tree you can find and paint it pink!" That's what Lucy, the little black- haired girl, told her comic strip friends, Charlie Brown and Linus, for the first time 45 years ago on American TV. In the "Peanuts" Christmas movie, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Lucy, like many Americans, had fallen for a Christmas fad - an artificial metal Christmas tree.

But what does Charlie Brown do? He ignores Lucy's orders and forgets about the shining pink. violet and red fake Christmas tree and gets the only real tree he can find instead: a crooked little tree which loses its needles at the slightest movement. Charlie disappoints Lucy, but his decision has far reaching consequences for the aluminum tree.

The animated film "A Charlie Brown Christmas" put an end to the biggest Christmas phenomenon of the 60s and gave it the coup de grace at the same time. At first the aluminum tree was so sought after in the USA that the Aluminum Specialty Company alone sold more than a million of the glittering trees with little metal curlicues. The tree fitted perfectly into the "Space Age" when artificial materials were the last word and every day technology the spirit of the age. But Charlie Brown's decision disrupted sales and people threw the colorful metal trees in the garbage. Finally production ended completely.

Manitowoc, Capital of the Aluminum Fad

The story of the aluminum tree, this shining Christmas phenomenon, was not yet over. The spurned fake trees celebrated a brilliant come back thirty years later.

Two photographers were the saviors of the tree. Julie Lindemann and John Shimon both come from a small city, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, which was the capital of the aluminum tree craze in the 60s. The trees were manufactured there and adorned not only living rooms. "In the space age there were these kitschy taverns with neon lights. At Christmas they had these aluminum trees behind the bar. I thought they were very
exotic. It was like they were from another planet." says photographer Lindemann recalling her first encounter with the fake trees.

The special feature of the trees from the Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc was that the roughly hundred branches of a tree six feet tall all were the same length. They were stuck into various places on the trunk and formed the shape of a Christmas tree. The aluminum trees were featured at a toy fair in New York in 1959. In the 60s the model "Evergleam" became the bestseller of the company and sold like crazy in shining colors of silver, green gold and pink. Until Charlie Brown came along. In 1962 sales of the aluminum trees reached their peak, in 1967 they were scarcely in demand, and in 1969 they were removed from production.

Artificial Forest Causes a Sensation

When the Peanuts movie was shown on TV for the first time Julie Lindemann was only eight years old. But today she still believes that the end of the aluminum trees came with Charlie Brown. "The movie was shown every year and became a kind of fixture." So people wanted a real Christmas tree to decorate their living rooms instead of a colorful tinsel tree.

Lindemann who had seen her first aluminum tree in a tavern returned to her home town as a grown woman. Aluminum trees had been stuck in the attic and the garage for nearly thirty years by then. People watched Lindemann and her partner Shimon in disbelief when they decided in the 90s to collect the remaining trees and build a forest of them for the gallery they owned together.

The two photographers bought the trees for a dollar or so each, and nobody could believe that anyone at all was interested in the discarded kitschy giants. "We had to hear all the time about why anyone wanted to have junk like that." Lindemann says. In 1993 the collection had grown to about 40 trees, all of which Lindemann and Shimon decorated their gallery with. A painful experience for Lindemann because it took days for her to set up the trees. "In the end I was bleeding and crying. The branches are very sharp and they cut my hands and arms. But they were so beautiful that I forgot my pain when I was finished."

Christmas Among the Prototypes

The bigger their collection got, the more Lindemann became interested in the history of the trees. But no matter whom she asked, nobody could remember Manitowoc's days as capital of kitsch. Yet here the "Evergleam" was manufactured - the most popular aluminum tree in the US. Finally chance came to Lindemann's rescue on a winter day in 1996. Shortly before Christmas she was in the gallery. Outside it was icy cold, inside the trees were lighted. Some were revolving every minute and making a slight rustling sound. The doorbell rang. An elderly couple stood in the cold, asked to come in and walked through the shining forest. The man looked around and said, "I designed these trees."

The man in the forest was Richard Thomsen, former chief engineer for the Aluminum Specialty Co., a large manufactured of aluminum cooking untensils. An expert in mass production, in 1958 Thomsen was given the task of copying a hand made aluminum Christmas tree seen in Chicago and getting it ready for mass production - as quick as he could. Thomsen did just that with the help of two colleagues. Since then he had spent every Christmas under a silver colored prototype nearly nine feet tall. When he met the two artists he was touched to see that his achievement had finally been acknowledged.

The local press soon became interested in the forest in Lindemann's gallery- and so were the residents of Manitowoc. They were proud again of the rejected product of their city. Many did the same thing Thomsen did, they came in the gallery and told of their past with "Aluminum Specialty." Some took out their "Evergleam" boxes out, set the glittering giants in living rooms and store windows and thus began the shining renaissance of the aluminum Christmas tree. But after Lindemann and Shimon erected their winter forest five years in a row they'd had enough. They exhibited their trees for the last time in 1998.

Trees on Ebay

Before they packed them away for the last time they took pictures of their favorite trees and made a picture book of them. It appeared in 2004 under the title "Season's Gleamings." Lindemann and Shimon gave some intereviews but they didn't count on what happened next. The biggest American media came to Manitowoc to tell the story of the home of the aluminum trees. They called Manitowoc "Tinsel Town." "We didn't know how powerful Christmas was for the media," Lindemann says.

But they were happy about the attention the city received. "In the US small towns have a bad image. They look real small against the glamour of Hollywood and this whole marketed life style. But suddenly here was something people could be proud of." Glamour was back in Manitowoc. And trees which once could be bought at garage sales for a dollar now were going for a hundred times as much. In 2005 an especially rare pink colored aluminum tree went for the record sum of 2600 Euros on the internet.

# # #

P.S. One of our favorite aluminum Christmas tree stories was by Rachel Manek for Fox 11 TV in Green Bay from 2004. In the space of a day, the reporter and her crew of one interviewed key people throughout Manitowoc County to tell the tree story. The fantastical CBS Sunday Morning crew and Russ Mitchell had already visited Manitowoc by then and we've posted that piece below too. In addition, various bloggers white about Season's Gleamings time and again.

From the Library Mall to Etsy

2010-12-16T17:17:00.004-06:00

Hand-coated cyanotype print available on Etsy

As part of an experiment for our Digital Processes course at Lawrence University, we set up an Etsy store to sell small items we make in our studio. We wanted to understand how it worked and wondered if our studio art students would find it useful. Kristin Boehm, a former student, has been selling her cool knitted technology cases for several years under the name Spinhandspundesigns and other friends had told us of their Etsy successes. We put together DVDs of our rarely screened films, our out-of-print book Season's Gleamings and a series of cyanotype postcards of Lake Michigan and opened our store last week. We sold 26 individual items in the first few days and are getting to know our helpful postal staffers much better. The scale and intimacy of Etsy reminded us the early 1980s when we'd make cassettes of our band's music (packaged with miscellaneous objects we'd get cheap at thrift stores or the Kresege's in baggies) and zines with hand-silk screened covers to sell at record stores, shows and on the Library Mall in Madison as students at the UW. The immediacy and lack of censorship of the objects was a thrill and seems parallel in many ways to selling art on Etsy sans the pink hair and Aqua Net.

Changed Perspectives @ Kohler Arts Center

2010-12-08T18:57:00.034-06:00

Changed Perspectives exhibition installation
@ JM Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, December 2010

Surivor Janine Bergeron's digital photos with listening station
@ JM Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, December 2010

Our collaborative project with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in nearby Sheboygan, Wisconsin, resulted in an exhibition titled Changed Perspectives. It explores the world view of a dozen cancer survivors forever altered by their experience with the c-word. Yvonne Montoya, Amy Horst and the Kohler staff designed the installation to include shadow box assemblages of the snapshot size prints by the survivor/participants whose subject matter ranged from intensely colorful flowers and trees to ethereal lake, cloud and land-scapes as well as portraits of family and friends. The images had meaning to the individual who made the image way beyond what could be read using the standard art methods which are most often based on formal elements rather than narrative. Listening stations positioned throughout the gallery enable viewers to hear each survivor/participant reflect, in their own words, on their cancer experience and their photos. We made portraits of six of the participating survivors, which are also on display. The show was scheduled to open with a reception and program on December 12, 2010. The Sheboygan Press had even written a preview! Unfortunately, a record-breaking blizzard forced the Kohler Arts Center to close for the first time in five years! The event which was to include a program and refreshments and has been rescheduled for January 20, 2011, 6-8 pm. The show received a brief mention in the Chicago Tribune, an extensive rumination by Domenica Schiro on examiner.com and a review in the Shepherd Express.

When we viewed the show after the blizzard cleared, one of the Kohler security guards recognized us and asked if we had had cancer. Her husband died of cancer 10 years ago and she still felt changed by the experience and found the exhibition bringing back memories and issues. Our experience with cancer was through our mothers. John's mother had been an American Cancer Society volunteer for decades delivering wigs and medical supplies to cancer patients throughout Manitowoc County. Julie's mother had cancer, but did not survive.

When the doctor enters the examining room and orders more tests, everything feels and looks different. Hearing the surgeon say "your mom has a very very bad cancer" that January day in 2007 instantly changed our daily routine. From that moment on, our days included accompanying mom to her appointments for radiation, Chemo, blood tests, CT scans, banana-flavored Barium shakes and the world of DPOA and DNR forms. The news of the cancer came as a shock--there had been little warning. When mom heard the diagnosis she whispered, "I don't have that." But she did and in less than a year's time she was gone.

The following summer, the Kohler invited us for a residency to collaborate on a digital photography project scheduled for the fall of 2010. It would be for cancer survivors in the community who had wanted more art in their lives as part of an ambitious program called Connecting Communities funded through the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kohler has marvelous gallery spaces and an inspiring and always excellent artistic vision rare for a small Midwestern city. With the help of the Sheboygan County Cancer Care Fund and Tim Renzelman (a survivor himself) participants were gathered.

At our first meeting in late August 2010, we gave a slide talk in the Kohler's beautiful auditorium declaring "You are an artist!" and invited surivors to collaborate with us on a project "to make photos reflecting your view of life." The images would be exhibited at the Kohler along with our photographs in December. We showed participants examples of our portrait photographs as well as work by artist/cancer survivors Corinne Day, the fashion photographer who died just days later from her brain tumor and whose book Diary reflected her cancer experience though self-portraits in the hospital, Jo Spence whose breast cancer turned her from artist to heath-care activist and photo-therapist, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard whose cancer inspired his Family Album of LucyBelle Crater series of portraits of his friends wearing grotesque masks.


Survivorship: Through the Lens workshop in the JM Kohler Arts Center Breezeway, 10.30.2010

The Kohler's staff and volunteers worked further with participants to help them use their digital cameras and post images to flickr and the Surivorship: Through the Lens group that had been established. We studied the images as participants posted them then chose six people to photograph. We based our choices of location and content on the images we studied on flickr. The survivors had been scanned, probed, poked, tested and surgically altered during their cancer treatments and they stood bravely before our static and slow 8x10 view camera on its wooden tripod. We felt a sense of gravity as we worked with each person to capture them on film and produce as monumental size print (50x40") as we could given our resources.

Photographing Vicki in the park 9.25.2010

Vicki standing in yoga pose in environmental
park, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 2010

9.25.2010 - Vicki took walks in the park regularly and had completed her Master's thesis on the breeding bird communities in the nearby floodplain. She posted haunting images of the park on flickr which she wrote eloquently about. Since her cancer diagnosis and treatment, she found even more comfort in the park. We talked about her practice of T'ai Chi and yoga, which she teaches to other cancer survivors. “If one can fix one's gaze on the light at the end of the tunnel, treatment can be endured.”

Photographing Tammy at
her mom's house 10.10.2010

Tammy (middle) with her sisters Kathy (L)
and Debbie (R) at their mother's condo
during a Sunday Packer game,
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 2010

10.10.2010 - Tammy and her two sisters gathered at their mom's new condo for the Sunday afternoon Packer game. Their father had passed away from cancer a few years ago and knowing their grandmother had breast cancer, the sisters underwent genetic testing only to discover all three carried the BRCA2 gene. Four years ago Tammy's diagnosis was Stage II and was treated successfully. Then her younger sister was diagnosed with Stage 1 and her youngest sister was clear. "Cancer is a nasty thing" their mom told us. “You realize life is short—you appreciate the people around you,” Tammy added. Tammy posted whimsical almost humorous pictures of toads and garden ornaments on flickr and one portrait of her with her mom and sister taken when they gathered together to watch the Packer game at her mom's new condo. It struck us because it reflected the warmth and closeness the women shared increasingly since sharing their multiple cancer experiences.

Photographing Joanne
in her backyard 10.10.2010

Joanne in her garden,
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 2010

10.10.2010 - Joanne collaborated with her husband to design and maintain their backyard garden, which felt like a sanctuary. She was so involved in her volunteer work that she paid little attention to her symptoms. When finally diagnosed with Stage III cancer 4-1/2 years ago, she underwent intensive chemo and survived it. She kept a journal written in elegant script and illustrated with color snapshots mapping her experiences including a head shaving party during chemo. “You’re thankful for what you’ve got. It can all be gone pretty quickly,” she said. For the Kohler project, she concentrated on photographing hands and feet and posted them on flickr. "I am also a 38 year Rheumatoid Arthritis survivor after being diagnosed at the age of 19," she wrote. "My deformed hands (and feet) are as much a part of me as is any other part of my body. People often comment to me how surprised they are at all I am able to accomplish with these twisted, gnarled hands."

Photographing Dave
at Matthews Oncology, 10.14.2010


Dave in cancer clinic waiting room, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 2010

10.14.2010 - Dave met us in the waiting room at the cancer clinic, which had been newly remodeled. He had spent a great deal of time sitting there before treatments 10 years ago. "I'm still here and some of them aren't," he said of the people he'd met. While waiting he said he'd close his eyes, tip back his head and think, "I'll go somewhere else." Getting cancer was a life-changing event but, "I can't say I really notice the sunsets more now. I noticed them before and I liked them. I didn't have to get cancer to notice them." We were struck by his "treatment buildings" images posted on flickr so decided to photograph him there.

Photographing Dr. Corrigan
at the Prevea Clinic, Plymouth, WI, 10.22.2010

Dr. Corrigan in procedure room decorated
with his framed photograph,
Plymouth, Wisconsin, 2010

10.22.2010 - Dr. Corrigan’s framed color photographs were displayed around the sleek new clinic housing his practice in Plymouth. He self-diagnosed his cancer in 2006 at age 42 then began photographing and writing poetry during his treatment and recovery. “Photography just kind of opened my eyes,” he wrote recently. Struck by the intensity of a medical professional knowing that something was wrong but having to endure the protocol of treatment having a deeper knowledge of the implications struck us. We decided to photograph him at the new clinic where both his profession and avocation could be visible. His images posted on flickr are lush and sometimes haunting studies of trees and some of them are framed and on display at the clinic. He photographed the the participants at one of our workshops and posted them too.

Photographing Lucy at home 11.5.2010

Lucy with her snapshots,
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 2010

11.5.2010 - Lucy’s brother called her Lulu. He died of cancer more than 50 years ago. She found his memory comforting when she was diagnosed with cancer herself two years ago. She recounted his "journey with cancer" while showing us her old snapshots, which she stored in neat envelops in a box covered in floral fabric. JMKAC staff and volunteers scanned and uploaded the snapshots to flickr. “Looking back at these pictures brings tears, happy tears. In my mind, it was like my brother was here.” We made a video of Lucy telling his story which will be included in the exhibition.

P.S. While in Sheboygan after our meetings, workshops and photo sessions, we revisited our favorite eateries including Schultz's and Jume's (with their mid-century lunch counters) as well as checking out more contemporary dining spots such as Field to Fork and the Kohler's own cafe. We hadn't strolled the boardwalk in many years so checked it out on a Sunday afternoon and later found Toy's Grocery on the north side of town on the way back to Manitowoc and stocked up on olive oil, rice, soy sauce, sandalwood soap and Serbian jam!

http://www.examiner.com/events-in-milwaukee/cancer-survivors-integrate-art-into-healing-sheboygan-exhibition-review#comment-13656631

Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait

2010-11-02T18:28:00.007-05:00


Amber baking pizza, Manitowoc, 2007

Before the US economy imploded in the fall of 2008, the Wisconsin Arts Board in collaboration with the Wisconsin State Historical Society commissioned us to photograph "labor" in the state of Wisconsin. We had a sense that the frenetic 20th century consumer economy, high on endless credit and corporate buyouts, was obsolete. The sort of "industrial age" portrayals of labor in photographs that we had grown up with had lapsed into nostalgia as sterile chain restaurants and retail stores mushroomed along the Interstate of every small town we could think of. We were assigned our native region of northeastern Wisconsin. At first we assumed the largest employer in Manitowoc, where we live, would be one factory or another. Instead, it was a hospital with 1000+ employees. The business of taking care of aging factory works was big business. We proposed focusing on self-employed people or those carrying on family-owned businesses. They seemed iconoclasts in a time of increased homogenization working long hours without payoff so much as survival. We modeled our compositional approach after August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century, oft described as a "monumental lifelong project" of making portraits of social "types" around him in Germany. There seemed to be a connection between the fading traditions of pastrycooks, farmers and artists of Sander's era and the self-employed soda pop bottlers and bread bakers we found hidden away in Wisconsin. In 2008, we compiled these portraits plus many we made of farmers in a self-published book titled What We Do Here available online for $24.70.

August Samder. Pastrycook, 1928

Leah in her kitchen, Washington Island, 2007

The James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy has organized a traveling exhibition of the resulting photographs from the WAB project by us plus Tim Abler (prof at Cardinal Stritch University), Dick Blau (film prof at UW Milwaukee), David Herberlein (prof at UW River Falls) and Jamie Young (freelance photographer now living in Syacuse). The show opened on Friday, October 29 at the Wriston Art Center Galleries at Lawrence University where we are on faculty. For the project, we shot both 8x10 color transparency film and black-and-white negative film so produced platinum-palladium prints of our favorite negatives plus updated the project to include several earlier and more recent images plus a 23 minute film called "Charlie's in Kodachrome." The exhibition will travel to the Watrous Gallery in Madison in February and Cardinal Stritch University in fall 2011.

Visitors at Wriston Art Center Galleries. Photo by Leslie Walfish

Wriston Art Center Galleries installation November 2010

Real Photo Postcard Survey @ Portrait Society

2010-07-24T12:21:00.036-05:00

Visitor at Portrait Society Gallery - Photo © Art Elkon

After two years of effort, our Real Photo Postcard Survey opened on Gallery Night and Day at Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee on July 23. Milwaukee had been hit by torrential rains the day before adding an edge to the evening as heat and humidity soared. Still people were out in the streets and headed up five flights to the gallery. Art Elkon made photos throughout the evening and we made a video.

Visitors at Portrait Society Gallery, July 2010

We put 160 palladium contact prints in four cherrywood display cases to show the chronology of their making and consider the human impulses to document, to collect, to communicate something of contemporary existence. The display cases are made by Penzoni Display in Michigan and marketed on eBay for the display of sports memorabilia. We re-purposed them. The small dark prints are demanding to look at and artist-friend Lindsay Lochman has suggested leaving magnifying glasses laying about the gallery to aid viewing. We may take her suggestion before the show ends on Saturday, October 2nd.

Installation view at Portrait Society Gallery, July 2010

A series of lifesize portraits from 8x10 transparencies made with an 11x14 Deardorff studio view camera came out of the project. The scale (72x28") emphasized the physicality of the body and the presentation of self. Scanned at high resolution and output on an Epson 9800 wide format inkjet printer on canvas, the portraits reference Rembrandt and Van Dyke paintings whose subjects were royals and the petite bourgeoisie. In 2010, we have photographed Amber D. who manages a Wendy's restaurant in Manitowoc, Thomas C., a self-proclaimed "recovering alcoholic", wrestling with the gravitas of his ancestry and Jo S., a retired psychiatric nurse. Many of the people in the photographs have intersected with us via the Midwestern art and music communities. For the most part, they are students, professors, writers, artists, curators, family, friends and neighbors.

Amber D. after a day at Wendy's at the opening

Gabriella S. and her mom Jill at the opening

Amber D. had a tough day at the Wendy's, but made the trip to Milwaukee to attend the opening still clad in her work uniform with a green badge promoting salads. Gabriella S. and her mother Jill brought bouquets of flowers and snapped pix. Many others we photographed attended too wearing the garb they were pictured in adding a "living sculpture" element to the evening.

Installation view at Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, July 2010

Framed diptychs of found real photo postcard studio portraits from our collection juxtaposed with our palladium postcard portraits pointed toward our ongoing examination of and use of obsolete technologies and vernacular forms: postcards and the post office in the age of online social networking, analog photography in the age of digital imaging, the photographer's studio in the age of overvalued real estate and escalating foreclosures. Confined to our dark cave like studio for the past two years, the portraits have been taken out into the light with the exhibition.

Debra Brehmer signing catalogs - photo © Art Elkin

The gallery published a catalog/postcard set to document the project. We selected six portraits from the many we made to reproduce as postcards in the set. Two copies of each are included in a folio for a total of 12. Our hope is that the majority of the cards will be mailed out to extend the "mail art" portion of the project. It should be noted that the commissioned portrait participants received 100 postcards of themselves to mail out spinning off into projects onto themselves. The postcard set includes an essay about the project by gallerist, writer and art historian Debra Brehmer plus a grid of the 55 portraits commissioned through the Portrait Society Gallery in 2010. Catalogs are $10 each.

Installation view of Vanessa Winship's photographs, July 2010

Also on view at the Portrait Society Gallery is Vanessa Winship's Dancers and Fighters series of portraits of children in Georgia. The head-to-toe portraits provide a cultural contrast to our own portraits of Midwestern American people.

Experiments in the Studio

2010-06-26T09:05:00.003-05:00

Most of the palladium prints are made for the Real Photo Postcard Survey Project. Our UV exposure unit broke down right after our film processor--thus reminding us of the extensive labor involved and how we depend on all of our art-making machines to work. Editing the prints has been ongoing for months with each portrait set out in a grid on top the flat files in the entryway of our studio as it is completed. Vintage postcard portraits keep turning up and are also set out. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered the project while in process and that turned up a few commissions from people unknown to us thus expanding the scope. Liz Koerner from Wisconsin Public Television's "In Wisconsin" program also spent a day gathering material on the project for a segment to air in fall. We invited our Manitowoc neighbors Ryan and Richie to come by for a portrait that day.

We came upon wall-mounted specimen cases to display the prints and have been experimenting with background colors. We puzzled over how to install the prints for months (nail them to the wall in a grid? frame each individually? hang them in the standard plastic postcard holders?). Can small traditional hand-crafted prints have impact in a time when art often takes the form of grand spectacle (thinking Marina Abramovic @ MOMA or Urs Fischer excavating the floor of Gavin Brown). Our palladium prints are not much larger than an iPhone. They sit silently dark while everything streams and multitasks everywhere else. Face recognition is in the eyes of the beholder. The show opens on Gallery Night, Friday, July 23, 2010 at the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee.

Real Photo Postcard Survey Project

2010-01-16T16:52:00.006-06:00

It's Winter in Wisconsin and people are coming to our studio to be made into postcards. Amber came by with a couple new dresses and the idea that she wanted to make a fashion statement.

Herman (1920-2009)

2009-12-29T19:07:00.005-06:00

Herman died last night (12.28.09) in a nursing home a week before his 90th birthday. We've been photographing him since 1986 and he was one of the four subjects of our One Million Years is Three Seconds film and book project. In 2006 we attended a funeral with him in St. Nazianz and a few years later went in search of the giant rocks he remembered from his childhood that were distributed along the fence line of his property. He wanted to find them again, to touch them, to sit on them, and was able to describe them in detail. He was living in senior housing in the Village of St. Nazianz and his old farmstead was slowly collapsing all the while he told township officials he would repair it soon. It was razed in November 2009. We've been working to add subtitles to One Million Years because the thick Germanic Wisconsin dialects of a couple of the men were somewhat difficult to decipher, especially with the low-fi sound recording methods we used. We were almost finished with Herman's section of the film when we heard the news of his passing.

Aluminum Christmas Trees (1959-2009)

2009-12-18T08:11:00.004-06:00

Most of the aluminum Christmas trees in existence were made by a company here in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Thanks to the ingenuity of a few engineers and salesmen at Aluminum Specialty Company, the tree concept was sold and the first affordable, mass-produced aluminum trees were brought to market just in time for Christmas 1959. Up until the 1990s, there were hordes of the trees forgotten in the attics and garages of former employees. After the tree fad faded, the trees were more or less considered tacky. We thought the design was brilliant in its simplicity--a 7 foot tall tree collapsed neatly into a relatively small cardboard box printed with simple 2-color graphics. Branches were stored in kraft-paper sleeves for protection and easy insertion in the angled holes drilled in the wood dowel trunks covered in foil and held up by a folding tripod stand. The trees were cheap at rummages and thrifts so we bought enough to fill our storefront art gallery--an annual installation from 1993 to 1998. We studied the idiosyncrasies of their design: the way the foil was applied to the trunks or the cellophane tape to the rows of aluminum needles. Installed en masse in a stark white space, the trees formed an undulating mechanical ballet that was at once haunting and sublime. We made portraits of the individual trees with an 8x10 view camera on transparency film which required intense lighting tricks to define their presence. They reflected something poignant about the belief in newness and technology in the early 1960s that interested us (see video below). The photographs became Season's Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree thanks to editor David Brown at Melcher in New York. Designed by Helene Silverman, the first edition quickly sold out after the New York Times, CBS Sunday Morning and US A Today covered "the little pink book" as a prime holiday story at the end of 2004. The media coverage made Manitowoc take the tree story seriously. We met more people in the community who had helped market or make the trees as well as people all over the country who collected them and loved them in ways we could barely imagine. It seemed everyone had a tree story to tell. People showed us incredible snapshots from the 1960s or told us their holiday associations that ranged from childlike sweetness to punk-rock nihilism. Our interest in the trees as manufactured multiples and artifacts of a specific moment of small town innovation could not transcend the pull of straight-up holiday nostalgia. No subject matter we'd addressed before tapped into the emotionality that is Christmas. The burgeoning eBay data base made vintage Evergleam aluminum trees an easy and desirable item to buy and sell online and their value escalated. Trees that were once a dollar at rummage sales now sell for hundreds of dollars online. Pink aluminum trees (perhaps due to their iconic status as an arbiter of shameless American consumerism as in A Charlie Brown Christmas) became the holy grail and sold for as much as $2,000. We stored our trees away despite the popular demand to continue installing them in our gallery each holiday season. After experiencing the media treatment that framed us as "aluminum Christmas tree collectors", we fully comprehended that the trees--in their minimalist tree-ness--could not escape the intensity of Christmas and the media's insatiable desire for fresh holiday stories. We were anxious to pass the aluminum tree mantle to a public institution and that's when Joe Kapler, curator at the Wisconsin Historical Museum came along. He has taken on the responsibility of preserving the history of the Wisconsin-made Evergleam tree through the Museum's expanding collection and annual installations. After 5 years, Season's Gleamings will go out of print after having helped make the once neglected trees and their Wisconsin story museum-worthy.

Trace @ The Project Lodge

2009-12-09T11:50:00.001-06:00

Paul Baker Prindle and his students invited us to show some work in Trace: Wisconsin Portrait Makers at the Project Lodge in Madison. Tom Jones showed his enveloping and lush recent portraits of Native American fur trader era re-enactors (mind-bending), Alan Luft's black-and-white photographs were hung salon style blending portraits examining his German-American ancestry alongside portraits made in the streets of Berlin (gorgeous prints, carefully composed). A giant print by Prindle from his Mementi Mori series portrayed a site where a gay person had been murdered (sad and creepy). Jake Naughton, a journalism student branching out into art, showed color portraits of banal chairs (haunting yet colorful). We showed small inkjet prints from our What We Do Here project hung in a row by small clips. When we were undergrads at UW Madison in the early 1980s, we lived around the corner from the Project Lodge. The space was a womyns food coop then selling brown rice and herb tea. It felt comfortable to be in that place again and reminded us of all the bands, filmmakers, artists, zine people and record stores that used to and still seem to populate the neighborhood.

Milwaukee's Blank Generation 2010 Calendar

2009-10-15T09:15:00.001-05:00

A departure from the soothing Ansel Adams scenic landscape wall calendar, WMSE radio published a calendar of black-and-white portraits by Stanley Ryan Jones. Stan and WMSE invited us to write the liner notes for the back page of the calendar. Instead of changing seasons, we see the changing moods in a nocturnal twilight zone devoid of seasons. Instead of reminding us of camping trips to Yosemite, we remember late nights at the Starship to check out the Cramps or our own vintage prom dress collection always worn with a black leather jacket. We met Stan in Milwaukee 22 years ago. He wore a long black coat and had a black walking stick, a cast on his leg and was living in the Norman Apartments on Wisconsin Avenue. He'd been a smokejumper on the west coast and had fractured his ankle. He returned to Wisconsin to set up a studio and make art. His collages and "drip" paintings (caulk, glitter and enamel paint were among his materials) cluttered the surfaces of his space. He stenciled a decorative border of red and black cockroaches at the top of the walls. He invited us over for homemade burritos and to talk art. His Milwaukee punk/new wave portraits, circa 1979-1981, interested us most. Black-and-white, brash yet intimate 35 mm snapshots, they revealed the directness of his process. He approached the subject, backed them against a pretty patterned wall and pushed the button of his Nikon F2. The blinding light of his strobe illuminated the usually dark, dank night club spaces. His subjects ranged from Iggy Pop and Lux Interior to anonymous scene makers. On January 12, 1991 when the Norman Apartments went up in flames, four people lost there lives and many artists lost their life work including Stan. With his smokejumper background, he crept into the ruins days later to see what if anything was left of his work. He rescued a stack of RC prints fused into a cube and charred around the edges. He peeled the prints apart, built them a black coffin and 16+ years later 83 of the more resonant became part of the Milwaukee Art Museum's permanent collection. Erin Wolf of Fan-Belt.com interviewed Stan about the past and present and you can read it here.

What We Do Here

2009-10-02T15:26:00.000-05:00

We've been driving around Wisconsin photographing what people do here and the landscape they do it in and finished a book of the pictures called What We Do Here. Some of our favorites were Mel (a soda pop bottler in Seymour whose small business supplies the surrounding area with white sugar sweetened pop in vintage 7 oz. glass bottles), Richie (who owns the Culture Cafe in Manitowoc and whose excellent rants critique local happenings that reflect global issues), and Becky from Popp's Resort (who returned to the family business in Crivitz after a career as a Waterski pro). We were interested in self-employed people making their own reality in an obscure place at a time when there's a growing hysteria over job security, health insurance and crumbling institutions. We revisited people we've photographed on their home turf a few times over the past 10 or more years (e.g. Rev. Norb, Dylan, Amber, Tina, Debbra, Jeri) but this time we photographed them where they work be it a chain pizza restaurant or yacht building company. Our author friend Michael Perry posed with his pigs and gave us an essay for the book. It's called "Feed Mill" and it's about his childhood memories of driving to the feed mill with his father. We keep making these pictures as we drive around Wisconsin in our 1962 Rambler Town and Country station wagon.

Don't Forget Who U R

2009-09-07T11:24:00.001-05:00

U R NOT A STAR was "found" scrawled on the back of a broken microwave pictured in the random detritus of one of our photographs. The phrase, and now the title of an exhibition of our portrait photographs, alludes to the meanings and dreamings small town people derive from stuff like punk rock, skateboarding and pop art. Sid Vicious, Joey Ramone and Andy Warhol may loom larger in the minds of people in towns like Manitowoc or Green Bay where rock magazines, MTV and record stores fuelled the sort of ironic escapist fantasies and aspirations expressed in Sonic Youth's cover of Superstar or Patti Smith's cover of So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star. We met the curator of the show, Rachel Vander Weit, at the Milwaukee Art Museum where she was a curatorial research assistant during the time we were working on Unmasked & Anonymous. U R NOT A STAR is Rachel's UWM Museum Studies Graduate Thesis Project focusing on performance as an aspect of portrait photography. We usually make (but rarely show) 3-D images with a vintage Stereo Realist camera which illicits a different sort of performance than our 8x10 Deardorff does. While digging through our archive with Rachel, she selected seven 3-D out-takes from a 1997 summer afternoon shoot with Brett and Nigel at their chaotic Madison, Wisconsin squat. Digital technology made it possible to scan the slides and make ink jet prints that could be displayed and viewed through small 3-D spectacles in a gallery setting. Rachel also included the text we wrote documenting events leading up to the portraits. Some of the people in these photographs actually did achieve a sort of under the radar fame. Brad X has his Get Drunk and Play Records Garage Punk podcast and YouTube Channel showcasing his homespun "vernacular avant-garde" videos including footage from opening night of this show. Rev. Norb is well known as a former columnist for Maximum Rock and Roll and for his many bands including Boris the Sprinkler, which was the only Wisconsin band to make it into the 2008 Encylopedia of Punk. Fame, real or imagined, is relative and a cultural construct that seems a twisted part of the American Dream. Judith Moriarty reviewed it for the Third Coast Digest and our Lawrence University colleague Martyn Smith did a post with video on his Old Roads blog. The show runs September 3-24, 2009 at the UWM Art History Gallery, Mitchell Hall, 3203 North Downer Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Feedback Loop

2009-08-30T11:29:00.000-05:00

They were both working at Papa John's in Manitowoc until it closed in spring. Mark sold Brad a video camera cheap and Brad taped even the most mundane aspects of his daily life like going in to work to deliver pizza on Christmas eve. After working a bunch of food service jobs from Papa John's to McDonald's, Amber began scrutinizing the ingredients on the food packages in her kitchen cabinets then did some Internet research and decided to plant a garden in the backyard of the small house they were renting in an industrial neighborhood. It seemed a good project while they were underemployed. Brad tilled up the plot and videotaped the process. She planted, weeded and mulched. We decided to photograph her in the garden when the first vegetables were ready for harvest in July. She held her hoe, donned her garden gloves and tucked a day lily behind her ear. Brad videotaped us photographing with our 8x10 while wearing his ubiquitous two-tone sunglasses. The regional subtexts our photographs are about can now be viewed on YouTube with the added texture of the sound of voices, the visual detail of interior spaces and the specific qualities of the Midwestern landscape that are obvious and all-encompassing yet remote and obscure. Our photographic interactions become fodder too, making us the subject in an endless feedback loop.

Tintype Studio Pilgrimage

2009-07-15T11:18:00.001-05:00

Henry Ford collected all kinds of morbidly nostalgic objects like the chair Abe Lincoln was assassinated in, a Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion House, an Oscar Mayer Weinermobile and much more for his sprawling museum in suburban Detroit. He collected other buildings too like the Robert Frost house, inventor Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park (NJ) laboratory, brick slave quarters, wood farm buildings and dozens of other iconic American structures to make up his Greenfield Village. Like most roadside tourist destinations, there is an air of the carnivalesque with an earnest attempt to educate while venerating American ingenuity. Stripped from their original contexts and set along neatly paved pathways on tidy mowed lawns, many of the displaced edifices lack the resonance of place. Still, we wanted see the circa-1870 Tintype Studio replica we’d heard was there. Scholars now site the tintype portrait as an example of American Dream brand capitalism in exhibitions such as America and the Tintype so it is easy to understand why a tintype studio fit into Ford’s schema. The tiny gray painted wood building constructed in one day in 1929, features a colorful hand-painted backdrop lit with skylight moderated by a muslin scrim. It made a nice digital snapshot op for tourists like us. The darkroom and dressing room were closed--perhaps opened only for special events featuring Civil War Reenactors or wet-plate collodion revivalists. Ford more or less collected people too. Didactic signage states that when Ford heard his employee Charles Tremear was the “last wandering tintypist in America” he promptly transferred him to Greenfield Village to run his new Tintype Studio. By the time Tremear died in 1943, he is said to have made 40,000 tintypes in the studio including portraits of Lillian Gish and Walt Disney. Despite Tremear’s long tenure and impressive productivity, the complexity of place that resonates at H. H. Bennett Studio which is preserved in its original location on the main drag in Wisconsin Dells, has evaporated with the ether. In contrast, the Bennett family operated the studio in the same building from 1875 til turning it over to the Wisconsin Historical Society in the late 1990s. The surrounding built environment of Wisconsin Dells changed wildly--fueled by Bennett’s own stunning landscapes to make way for water parks and motels in less than 100 years. Bennett Studio stands as an unintentional cautionary tale of the power of photography over place just as Ford’s tasteful Museum underscores a mania for collecting as the power of information to respin history.

Brian Ulrich @ LU

2009-05-17T18:41:00.002-05:00

We hosted Chicago photographer Brian Ulrich at Lawrence University April 30 where he lectured on his Copia series and visited with our photography and video students. His portrait of a goth teen shoe-shopping was among our favorites showing 21st century youthful rebellion being expressed through consumer choice. After photographing Manitowoc youths in Ramones t-shirts in the 1990s, we see a continuum of difference still expressed via shopping. Can teenaged questioning and dissatisfaction evolve into something more than the latest Hot Topic fad or yet another skateboarding revival now? Ultra-goth dead malls, which are great for skateboarders, have been absorbed into Brian's Copia series recently. He just received a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund expanding the work in the coming year. Excellent. He photographs the abandoned structures at night to underscore their eerie presence. The pictures gave us hope that these fading cathedrals of consumerism will soon become permaculture homesteads or nursing homes. Our home town, Manitowoc, features the decrepit empty Brutalist architectural wonder, the Mid Cities Mall. We hope Brian will visit and add an eerie after dark study of the place to his ouevre.

Dawoud Bey @ MAM

2009-05-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

The lush faces of teenagers filled the shadowy white gallery space at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition of portraits by Dawoud Bey called Class Pictures (April 15-July 12, 2009) was made up of sumptuous color prints exuding dewy youth. The show catalog and text panels documented the words of each sitter. As part of his process, Bey asked the students to begin by writing something about themselves. These brief, sometimes edited texts were displayed alongside the portraits often blowing away viewer preconceptions. Bey trains the lens of his 4x5 camera on the person allowing the background elements to fall into the soft focus inherent in view camera pictures. He positions hands carefully to reflect a gesture in the subject's repertoire of gestures. "What should I do with my hands?" is a typical response to posing for the camera. A generation ago Karsh focused on the mature faces and textured hands of great people. He asked them to hold cigarettes, touch faces, fold hands or point fingers as if to contemplate or confront fate. Bey is able to coax a more casual gesture from a generation that perhaps has deconstructed greatness. Wisdom and wrinkles now only make rare appearances in American visual culture though youth is ephemeral.

Yousuf Karsh @ AIC

2009-04-26T19:50:00.000-05:00

The Art Institute of Chicago went out on a limb showing a large selection of portraits by Yousuf Karsh called Regarding Heroes (January 22 - April 26, 2009). There are elements of kitsch and passion that make his work defiantly out of tune with current portraiture be it overly PhotoShopped pictures of pretty people or the deadpan view camera work of so many contemporary practitioners. Karsh's In Search of Greatness was about the only photography book the Manitowoc Public Library had when we first moved back to this small Wisconsin town. The mass-circulated book from 1962 showed off the lush vision of Karsh. Smoldering cigarettes, chewed on cigars, long white eye brow hairs, glasses of booze and rich facial texture emerged from the blackness. It was great to see the large and immaculate silver gelatin prints on display in Chicago where the details crackeld from the prints framed and hanging there on the classic burlap covered walls of the basement photography gallery. This was curator David Travis' last show for the AIC and it rocked as Lisa D. would say.

One Million Years is Three Seconds

2009-04-14T17:33:00.001-05:00

We became interested in how four Wisconsin men (a poet, a dancer, a farmer and a retired factory worker turned outdoor sculptor) experienced the 20th century. Bob, Barry, Herman and Paul lived through most of it--witnessing the introduction of telephones, televisions, automobiles, atomic bombs, and flush toilets into everyday life. They also witnessed the waging of numerous wars and staggering economic shifts. We photographed the four men, recorded their stories and made a 16 mm film about them. In 2008, we compiled a portion of our accumulated material into a book, One Million Years is Three Seconds (96 pages). We've installed the photographs, film loops and ephemera at Turner Art Center Gallery, Shreveport, LA, Caestecker Gallery, Ripon, WI, and Wriston Art Center Galleries, Appleton, WI.