Smarty pants Mark Peckmezian followed up on the recent post in which I mention his work with an email containing:
1. Bigger images
2. The “story behind those streams”
Let’s have a look:
© Mark Peckmezian
© Mark Peckmezian
© Mark Peckmezian
And, from an interview about the work with Hey, Hot Shot!:
The photos in this portfolio represent 1%, I can guess, of a collection of thousands of photographs and hundreds of darkroom prints created over the past four years here in Toronto. They are the product of a project that I undertook when I, entering university, decided to carry a camera with me at all times. I wanted to indulge my every photographic impulse and interest, in the spirit of Winogrand and Klein, partly, but also Goldin and Araki.
I chose to shoot B&W primarily because it is the common-denominator aesthetic in photography’s history, and thus the more “universal” and “timeless” photographic language. This helps bely the contemporary origin of these diary/documentary photographs. Further, working analog in this way enables me to leverage the objecthood and peculiarities of the photographic print, and, in presentation, the vernacular of the scrapbook and the photo album. The latter compels the viewer to read the collections of images as “Memory” (memories are more so memories when in a photo album, so to speak). In their treatment, they are designed to read to the mind of the viewer as “an artifact” over “a photograph,” due to the more honest and unguarded relationship this induces between viewer and object. This type of relationship between viewer and object, usually exclusive to amateur or found photography, is highly potent and rich, I believe.
In all of the above, I aim to exploit the shift towards digital in photography. On a basic level, I appeal to an ever-growing nostalgia for analog. More importantly, I hope to draw into relief the enduring value of analog-ness, and help cement analog photography’s place in our radically-changing new photographic landscape.
Speaking of complex artist’s statements, let’s not get so wrapped up in our own party that we forget to mention Alec Soth’s talk happening tonight as part of the Magnum/Contact lecture series.
Alec is using stills/video and sound to tell stories in a really fresh which has New York Times readers cheering and jeering at the same time. Check out his piece on Ash Wednesday in New Orleans as part of his ongoing American Picture Show series for the Times. Reaction to his second installment: Iowa Bird Story, was just as divided.
I find this little piece on his 40th birthday trip to Las Vegas charming:
Las Vegas Birthday Slideshow from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.
There are a million ways to tell a story and Alec is bringing a fierce individualism to it. For that reason, you’ll find me at his lecture tonight for sure. Magnum outdated? I don’t think so.
The Deets:
May 6, 7:00 pm
Ryerson University – George Vari Engineering Building
245 Church St, Toronto
ROOM ENG 103
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