Real Photo Postcard Survey Project

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)

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)

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 USA 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

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

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

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

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.