Photography Quarterly #89

This publication is made possible in part by generoussupport from individuals, CPW members, subscribers, PQ, advertisers, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the William Talbot Hillman Foundation, the Henry Buhl Foundation, the Sondra and Charles Gilman Jr. Foundation, the Ellen and Gary Davis Foundation, the Douncousos Family Foundation, the Houston Jewish Community Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, the Douglas C. James Charitable Trus~ and with public funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Thank you

'<' NATIONAL NYSCA '",:, ..,....,~ENDOWMENT

orlfBR/>.~ FOR THE ARTS THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.

PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly staff

Editors, Kate Menconeri & Ariel Shanberg Editorial Assistant,Liz Glynn Ad Manager,Larry Lewis Compos~ion, Digital Design Studio, Kingston,NY

PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly is published by the Center for Photography at Woodstock, a not-profit 501 (c) 3 arts and education organization,founded in 1977to serve photographers and their audiences through programs in education, exhibition, residency,publication, fellowship, and services for artists

PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly is printed by Ruder Finn Printing, New York, NY and distributed by Ubiquity Distributors, Brooklyn, NY

PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly #89, Vol. 21, No.4. ISSN 0890 4639. Copyright ©2004. Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street,Woodstock, NY 12498.

Text ©2004 Nancy Barr, Carlo McCormick, Kenseth Armstead, Myra Greene, Priya Kambli,KeishaScarville,Sun-Joo Shin,Noelle Tan,Jane Glucksman,Ariel Shanberg,Kate Menconer.

A I photographs and texts reproduced in PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly are copyrighted by the artists and writers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without wr~en permission from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The opinions and ideas expressed in this publication do not represent official pos~ions of the Center.

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CPW STAFF

Executive Director, Ariel Shanberg Program Director, Kate Menconeri Operations Manager,Larry Lewis Program Associate, Liz Glynn Volunteers: Jane Glucksman,Aaron Miller,JacelynBlank

DIRECTOREMERITUS

Colleen Kenyon

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Susan Ferris, W.M. Hunt, David Karp, David Maloney, Kitty McCullough, Yossi Milo, Dion Ogust, Robert Peacock, Platen, Kathleen Ruiz, Ariel Shanberg, Alan Siegel, Gerald Slota, Bob Wagner

ADVISORY BOARD

Philip Cavanaugh,Brian Paul Clamp,Julie Galant,Alexander Grey, Howard Greenberg- Founder. Sue Hartshorn, Sarah Hasted Mann, Doug James,Julia Joern, Ellen Levy, Peter MacGill, Marcia Reid Marsted, Elliott Meisel, Jeffrey Milstein, Ann Morse, Sarah Morthland, Gloria Nimetz, Sandra Phillips, Lilo Raymond, Ernestine Ruben, Neil Trager,RickWester

Errata.:Ellen Levy's artwork featured in PQ#BB was included as an illustration of the ideas presented in the article SyntheticUghtining:ComplexSimulationsof Nature.It was not part of the same titled exhibition which was presented at CPW in 2003.

Contemporary Photography and the Chronicles ofYouth, 1993-2003 nancy barr 4-13 2003 Woodstock A-I-Rs editors 20-25

Dear Readers,

Welcome to a very special issue of PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly.While we like to think of every issue of the Quarterly as special, the Center for Photography at Woodstock is very pleased to present PQ#89 in full color. We hope to make the PQ full color on a regular basis in the futu_re - calling all patron saints... ! The color printing for this issue has been made possible by generous support from Ruder Finn Advertising and anonymous individuals.We extend them our deepest thanks and appreciation.

Since the invention of the medium, photographers have sought to capture the essence of youth and its passions whether in depicting its short-lived wonder or its humble awkwardness.To engage such a charged subject and its contemporary guises,two innovative curators, Nancy Barr (Detroit, Ml) and Carlo McCormick (New York, NY) assembled the work of seven photographers, (originally as a 2004 CPW exhibition, FRESH:YouthCulture in ContemporaryPhotographsand for PQ#89), whose independent explorations examine the challenges and pursuits of today's teens and gives them a voice.

Barr's in depth article outlines the processes and intentions of the artists, while McCormick's round' table discussion reveals some of the motivations and challenges these artists face in producing images of youth culture. Whether collaborating with teens in their depictions or by participating in youth culture, the artists champion the passionsof youth, not as a passingfad but as earnest modes of expression.

In addition to Barr and McCormick's dialogue on youth culture, PQ#89 features the work of the Center's 2003 artists-in-residence. Since 1999, CPW's WOODSTOCKA1-Rprogram has given crucial support for artists of color working in the photographic arts by providing them with workspace, housing, honoraria, critical, technical, and professional support to move their careers forward. Made possible by generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency,the six artists in this issue's WOODSTOCKA-1-Rfeature broke new artistic ground, completed projects, and moved us all during their residencies here in Woodstock.

Our thanks to all contributors and PQ staff,we trust you will find all the work and ideas featured in this issue as inspiring as we do.

Next issue - the annual benefit auction!

- Ariel and Kate

PS.We'd love to hear what you think! Send us an email: info@cpw.org

Contemporary Photography and the Chronicles of Youth, 1993-2003

NANCY BARR

Innocence, recklessness, beauty, experimentation, rebellion, ignorance, error, enlightenment, identity, fantasy, energy, obsession-these words comprise a short and incomplete list of attributes that attempt to define adolescence and young adulthood. They are also terms applicable to the work of contemporary artists who use the medium of photography, and sometimes film and video, to reveal disparate worlds common to contemporary culture and representative of youth as a complex state of mind and being.

At different stages of their lives and from various cultural perspectives, artists Dawoud Bey, Dennis Olanzo Callwood, Cheryl Dunn, Justine Kurland, Ari Marcopoulos, Ryan McGinley, and Nick Waplington, (featured together in the 2004 CPW exhibition FRESH: Youth Culture in Contemporary Photographs, curated by Nancy Barr & Carlo McCormick), have made the theme of youth and youth culture an integral part of their artistic practice in either brief investigations or in extended explorations over the last ten years. Some of the photographers in this group were not consciously drawn to the subject per se, nor have thought of it as a genre in and of itself. Their interests in various contemporary sub-cultural phenomenon-urban lifestyles, modern tribes, the underground, as well as the constructs of gender, race, and identity-combined with aesthetic methodologies of staged photography, portraiture, or documentation, have led them knowingly or unknowingly to the subject.

Youth and youth culture are intrinsically related concepts, but are distinguished from one another in that the former term is likened to a physical and emotional stage in one's life and the latter is analogous to social and cultural practice emerging from youth. In its most basic sense, youth is the prime physical condition of the body, treasured for its vitality as well as its transience. It is also the time in life when the range of possibilities and experience seem almost endless, until the years encroach, and the opportunities for change, growth, and experimentation become constricted. The rituals of youth can define youth culture but are unrelated, in some respects, to a specific age group. As the experiences and pastimes of youth can live on in the mind and in the lives of individuals regardless of their age.

Although the work discussed here often addresses both ideas, emerging from this duality are two methodologies. The portraits by Dawoud Bey and Dennis Callwood, the staged photographs of teenage girls by Justine Kurland, and the documentary photographs and films of graffiti kids and skateboarders by Cheryl Dunn comment on the constructs that define youth often played out during adolescence. Other work chronicles the social practices and lifestyles emerging as a distinct culture or cultures, but from the photographer's perspective as an insider. The trials, exploits and collective passions for select groups of young adults are evident in the work of Ari Marcopoulos, Ryan McGinley, and Nick Waplington,

who photograph youth collectives-snowboarders, global nomads, and underground urban dwellers.

The adolescent years, roughly thirteen to eighteen years of age, are marked by the search for identitywho am I and who will I become. Artists working with teenagers face the challenge of uncovering an emotional and psychological web of constructs that define human existence during this stage in life. For over ten years, Dawoud Bey has been photographing teenagers primarily from large urban areas, most often through collaborations with cultural institutions and their community high schools. The resulting portraits are monumental in scale, but depict unassuming individuals who represent youth at a particular historical moment. Bey is interested the physical transformations characteristic of puberty as well as the way young people dress, wear their hair, and generally define themselves in contemporary times.

But Bey is driven to give significance and value to the individual lives marginalized and misunderstood by mainstream culture. He demystifies the stereotype of the urban teen as a delinquent or as an unengaged individual who has little to offer society. Through his art he offers glimpses into their developing identities using their images, and in more recent projects, their texts, to reveal the insecurities, dreams, and realities of the teenage experience. His recent video, Four Stories, extends his artistic practice and elaborates on the personal stories of four teenagers, several who are first-generation Americans. A Middle-Eastern girl

muses over her decision not to wear the veil and still be respectful to her family, peers, and the Muslim religion. A young African American man describes his will to do something with his life stating, "I'd rather be a gentleman, than just some dude on the corner doing nothing." Will Bey's work actually help to change people's general perception of urban youth? One of his young subjects from Detroit thinks so, commenting that, "people think we're just kids from the ghetto and that we're all bad because of that, but the city is our home and we are good people. Mr. Bey is here to show them that."

Youth is a time when life experience flourishes with abandon. From 1997 to 200 I, Justine Kurland collaborated with pre-teen and teenage girls to create staged scenarios that define "girlness." Kurland tells her collaborators, "This is the world: You're running away, you live in trees, you eat nectar, you torture boys, and you're a little bit mean." She suggests a make-believe but primal existence. Escape and adventure, experiences traditionally appropriate in a boy's life, infuse the atmosphere of these pictures-girls are running away, seeking diversions, and free of parental surveillance. They are acting out before adulthood grabs hold of their existence.

Young girls from the contemporary world grace the compositions of Kurland's photographs, but the artist's image-making is informed by her own wanderlust (she traveled across the country to make the series), fairy tales she remembers from childhood,

I wont everybodyto know me as being strong 'cause I go through a lot. I om going throughthingsnow where as I feel as though people feel sorry me. I don't wont anybody to feel sorry me. A /or of people are offering a lot of hondwts, and I don't wont to accept it. So I wont everybody to remember me as being strong, independent I'm seventeen years old now, basicallytoking core of myself My mom doesher thing or whatever.and my father lives m Alabama,so really it's 1ust me. I guess it was my attitude towardsmy sistersthat is the reasonthat I om not with them now, but hope(!J/ly they will be able to look over that But I wont people to remember me as basicallyjust me being strong and keepingit together.

DAWOUD BEY

(born 1953, Queens, NY; currently resides in Chicago, 11)

An interest in photographic representations of the human experience and the marginalized factions of society motivated Dawoud Bey to create his first photographic series documenting the citizens of Harlem in the 1970s. Turning to young people as the subject of his work throughout the 1990s, he has photographed higr school students frequently as an artist-in-residence at cultural institutions throughout the U.S. C-eating large-scale. full-color portraits of his subjects. Bey attempts to present teenagers as complex and engaging people, a view contrary to stereotypes found in the media at large.

Bey is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been included in numerous one-person and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. In 1995, the Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his photographic work entitled Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995. Bey is currently working on a series called Class Portraits that will feature work from collaborat1ons with high schools across the U.S. Work from his most recent residency will be featured in the 2004 exhibition

and the aesthetic conventions of nineteenth-centu·ry landscape painting and photography. She combines the past and the present, invoking a part makebelieve, part real world that mesh to reveal what she believes are universal qualities of girlness-curiosity, mischief, and exploration. Interestingly, Kurland cites the influence of landscape photographers William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan, who documented the American frontier. Working on early U.S. geographical survey teams, they took part in all-male explorations of the West. Kurland's photographs embrace and subvert our traditional sense of manifest destiny and its cult of masculinity. Staging and photographing these scenarios in the large open expanses of nature, the landscape becomes a metaphor for a

girl's imagination and unbridled exploration of experiences life may have to offer.

Leaving behind the ideals and adventures of adolescence, many teenagers live hard, cold lives in the streets of cities where the dark side of adolescence lingers. Without anywhere to run and sometimes no one to run to for support except their peers, they find survival and belonging in the underground world of gangs. Photographer Dennis Olanzo Callwood began collaborating with incarcerated gang members as a probation counselor in southern California in 1993. Interested in documenting modern primitive and outsider cultures, Callwood saw that many imprisoned gang-bangers had tattoos, and he began

JustineKurland.FrogSwamp.2001, c-:>rint.30x40~.CourtesyGorneyBravin+ LeeGallery,NYC.

JUSTINE KURLAND

(born 1969, Warsaw, NY; currently resides in NYC)

From 1997 to 200 I, Kurland collaborated with teenage girls on a series of staged photographs taken in lush landscapes throughout America. She contir-ued the work in New Zealand as an artist-in-residence at the Auckland Art Gallery. This work was published in 200 I in her book Spirit West.

A 1998 graduate of Yale University's MFA photography program, Kurland has been included in group exhibitions worldwide and has been the subject of one-person shows at Artists Space ( I 998) and Gorney, Bravin, and Lee (200 I), both in NYC. For her most recent series, Kurland traveled across the U.S. photographing people from rural communes. The work was included in the 2003 exhibition Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography at the International Center for Photography in NYC.

taking their portraits. During the sessions, boys wanting to be identified with their gangs flashed their hand signals. Knowing that many of his subjects were taggers, [A tag is someone's name written graffiti style. A tagger is someone who uses graffiti - specifically someone who marks or "tags" their territory or neighborhood.] he gave the photographs back to the kids and they marked up their pictures and frames with graffiti and, in some cases, wrote biographical texts. As both an artist and social worker, Callwood saw the value of engaging young people with outlets for their self-expression. For the artist, the resulting photographs gave his subjects a voice that would normally have been suppressed throughout their detention in the juvenile probate system.

Callwood's portraits reveal that vulnerability, ignorance, and the need to belong blinds young people who sometimes fall prey to negativity perpetuated in the gang underworld. "I grew up into the Peckerwood family and will die in it," an eighteen-year old boy writes next to his portrait. He is part of a southern Californian skinhead gang and has formed the strongest bonds of his life in an allegiance with those who hate. He signals by using his hands to form the letters "W" and "P" for white power. His skin is branded. His name is also a tag useful for marking his territory. He lives a primal existence where brutality is the means to survival. Living a life that is truly outside of the mainstream, he finds ultimate solace in his surrogate family and strength in its growing numbers as gang life proliferates in America.

DennisOlanzo

DENNIS OLANZO CALLWOOD

(born 1942, St. Thomas, USVI; currently resides 1n Los Angeles, CA)

1994,gelatinsliverprint,30x40~.

Throughout the 1990s, Dennis Cal/wood has collaborated with incarcerated juvenile street gang members at correctional institutions in Los Angeles County. Cal/wood first makes portraits of the inmates, and then he asks them to add their own drawings, graffiti, and text to the images. borders, and frames. He considers the series a work-in-progress that fuses the aesthetics of fine art photography with the aesthetics of graffiti produced by gang members and taggers.

Callwood works part-time in LA County s probation department and devotes his remaining free time to photography. Before working with incarcerated teens, Callwood documented the African American communities in South and Central America. Callwood has also covered the Burning Man festival since its inception 1n 1994. His work is included in the exhibition African American Artists ,n Los Angeles A Survey Exhib1t1on: Fade 1990-2003, shown at the University Fine Arts Gallery, California State UniverS1ty, Los Angeles.

Knowledge and assimilation of underground culture gives credibility to movements and trends that influence young people. Gang taggers may well hav·e been responsible for inspiring the street art known as graffiti, and unique to urban experience and the evolution of youth culture, are forms of expression that grow out of city life. Cheryl Dunn admires the spirit of youth as a pure state of rebellion and transgression. In her films and photographs, she documents skateboarders, young people fresh from the mosh pits at rock shows, those participating in public demonstrations, and street art, including graffiti, in urban areas throughout the United States.

Traveling to a new city, Dunn looks for taggers and skaters, and sometimes arranges to meet and photo-

Pq/8

graph them. This was the case with a seventeen-year old boy pictured in the photograph entitled C-4, from 1999. Dunn saw his tags throughout San Francisco's tenderloin district. She inquired with neighborhood 'homeboys' about the unidentified tagger and tracked him down. She remarked, "he lived in his father's run down one-room apartment and basically did graffiti most of the time when he wasn't robbing and selling stuff. He was a sweet kid craving attention like most of the graffiti guys I've met. He is wearing a teddy bear hat that his mother sewed for him. It made him look like a little boy, yet he was trying to be so tough." Dunn sees beyond the social stigma that brands graffiti kids as vandals and delinquents. She often photographs her subjects as they have momentarily broken away from the pretense and toughness

of their public exteriors to reveal their vulnerabilitykids just looking for attention and finding outlets for their self-expression in the streets.

In the process of documenting youth and youth culture, all of the artists in Fresh are collaborators with their young subjects. Bey, Callwood, Kurland, and Dunn are, for the most part, observers of young people and their culture. In contrast, Marcopoulos, McGinley, and Waplington have found some personal affinity with the social groups and collectives they prefer to photograph, and they become immersed in their lifestyles.

The so-called tribes of the contemporary world have emerged from the youth culture of the past ten years.

CHERYL DUNN

(born 1965, Teaneck, NJ; currently resides in NYC)

Cheryl Dunn looks beyond the boundaries of high art to new art forms emerging from youth and street culture. In her photographs and videos, Dunn documents contemporary modes of self-expression among young people including the art of graffiti and skateboarding. She brings to light the importance and value of their voice and finds beauty and power in their unaffected creative expression, freethinking, and nonconformity.

Dunn has exhibited her photographs ,n group exhibitions nationwide and has participated in film festivals internationally. In 2002 she completed a residency at the VVexner Center for the Arts and produced the documentary film Licking the Bowl in response to Free Basin, a sculptural project' using skateboarding forms created by SIMPARCH, a Chicago-based artist collaborative.

The buzz phrase "global nomadic youth culture" is indicative of a widespread phenomenon that broadly addresses an international movement involving a group of young people who travel together worldwide to seek out unique and authentic life experiences. Ari Marcopoulos likens the group of snowboarders or riders he has been photographing for several years to an international tribe of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans, roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For Marcopoulos, the individuals "are plugged into an international subculture rather than a national identity."

Youth can conjure a Zen-like state of mind that preys on the conscious, unconscious, and even physical realms of human existence-an existence carefully

NICK WAPLINGTON

(born 1965, Ibiza, Spain; currently resides in London, England)

For over a decade, Nick Waplington has created a series of photographic albums that reveal his intimate and extended explorations of the human condition. This work has been a source for his books including Living Room (1991). Other Edens (1994), and The Wedding (1996). \Naplington's 1997 publication, Safety 1n Numbers, features his photographs of underground international youth culture found in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.

Waplington is a 1991 graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, and throughout the 1990s has been included in both group and one-person exhibitions at galleries and institutions primarily throughout Europe and Great Britain. His work was included in the 200 I Venice Biennale. VVaplington is currently working on a feature documentary about drug dealers.

articulated and mediated upon in this series by Marcopoulos. Traveling and spending time on and off mountain runs with these riders, he documents the action and performance of the sport, its rigorsbest-suited for young bodies, but also its down time. He often shows his subjects in repose. Marcopoulos stresses that this is not the state of an idle mind, but a state of deep contemplation necessary for a rider's preparedness, something that Marcopoulos finds fascinating about his subjects. But other rituals of youth emerge in his series too. Drugs, video games, fast food, and exhaustion become part of this lifestyle. Equally pervasive is the backdrop of the pure white landscape, its avalanches, crevices, and cliffs. When confronted, these elements become a metaphor

characterizing the unexpected and barely calculable elements of life.

During the mid 1990s, Nick Waplington found the international scene of sex, drugs, rock and roll, etc., a suitable and timely subject for his photographs. Knowing that his youth would soon be behind him, he became immersed in the party scene excesses of big cities as only a young man could. His ultimate goal was to develop "work that would reflect the experience in a fresh and free manner." The results were prolific and filled the pages of his 1996 publication and like titled series Safety in Numbers for which he prefers the acronym SIN.

ARI MARCOPOULOS

(born 1957, _Amsterdam, The Netherlands: currently resides in Sonoma, CA)

Photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos has documented an international group of snowboarders since the late 1990s. Creating a vast visual chronicle of their lives with 35mm candid photographs, large format outdoor imagery, and breathtaking cinematic views, he captures these mostly male riders hanging out in hotels and nightclubs and competing at events. The work is the subject of his recent book Transitions and Exits and commenting about its title, he noted that the riders "experience transitions, including the big one from adolescence to adulthood: exits ... [are] a metaphor for escape and exploration."

Marcopoulos' work has appeared in numerous publications acd recent exhibitions in Tokyo and New York City including the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His film work includes documentaries on street percussionist Larry Wright and artist Forrest Bess and a longform video for the Beastie Boys.

The book has four sections documenting the exploits of the photographer, his companions, and fleeting acquaintances in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and London. Young people are seen in crowds or in more intimate groups, but most noticeably, they appear as solitary figures-their looming faces are interspersed throughout the book bleeding off each page-they are the inebriated participants of 1990s rave culture. Sometimes the photographs depict subjects so close to the lens that we see every pore of their skin and meet their cavernous pupils head-on. Waplington is clever at invoking a visually provocative viewing experience with these images; he captures in his subjects and simulates for the viewer the heightened sensory perception associated with hallucinogenic and moodelevating drugs. In between these portraits,

Waplington sprinkles environmental scenes, vernacular architecture (clues to his geographical whereabouts), and an array of vignettes featuring everything from pulp visuals to empty trashed bathrooms and plates of half eaten indigenous cuisine. With this bombardment of visual stimuli, Waplington shows the speed at which youth can devour an infinite number of pleasure pastimes and move on for more.

The freedom to experience all good things in life, sometimes to exhilaration and excess, is part of youth. It is a quality rampant in the diversions of youth culture. Living in this moment is twenty-six year old photographer Ryan McGinley. He is the youngest artist featured in FRESH and fully acknowledges that the nature of his work is youth cul'ture.

RYAN MCGINLEY

(born 1977, Ramsey, NJ: currently resides in NYC)

Actively a part of the culture he photographs, Ryan McGinley documents life at the crossroads of adolescence and young adulthood. He looks to hip-hop. graffiti, the East Village gay scene, underground nightlife, and the everyday diversions of his friends for inspiration. Cleverly arranged and assembled in books, Ryan produced I 00 handmade copies of his first book, The Kids Are Alright, on his home computer and sent them to his best friends and admired artists.

Since graduating from Parsons School of Design in 200 I, McGinley continues to photograph his friends and 1s the photo editor at Vice magaZ1ne. He has published his work in The Foder, Index, V, and Vice. His first solo exhibition, The Kids Are Alright, opened at the Whitney Museum of America Art in NY in 2003. McGinley is one of fifty artists included in Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art ond Street Culture at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati.

Aside from his role as photo editor of Vice magazine (which, incidentally, has a reputation for exalting the lewd excesses of young people), McGinley has spent the last five years photographing his friends in NYC's East Village. These are beautiful young people, mostly gay men, exuberant and sometimes even contemplative. They find the best times sharing one another's lives in cramped apartments, dingy bars, and other city environs. They play records, party, and ride their BMX bikes in the streets around Ground Zero. They are the subject of McGinley's self-published book, The Kids Are Alright, aptly titled because those who live in the world of Ryan McGinley are okay. There are no regrets and there is no despair.

McGinley's work in FRESH is his most recent. Shot in

the summer of 2003, he created a series of nudes, mostly nocturnes, on the beaches and in the woods of Vermont. Whereas his previous work was about urban living, McGinley's move to nature was out of a need for reprieve during the hot months in the city. The images suggest an otherworldly place of timeless figures whose unaffected beauty and dreamlike state of existence strike on the universal ideal of youth.

Like McGinley, all of the artists in FRESH set about the task of revealing and defining the universal truths that epitomize youth. If the subject is in fact responsible for an emerging genre in the field of contemporary photography, then the interest is timely and likely analogous to our current obsession with youth and the over analysis of its cultural effects at present. But

with this obsession also comes the inevitability that mainstream culture will misunderstand and misrepresent youth. The artists recognize this problem and through their work attempt to rectify this situation by representing the true spirit and diversity of youth and youth culture. Common to their work is the search, evaluation, and assertion of identity, the need for freedom of self-expression and self-determination, life experience that can sometimes teeter between restraint and overindulgence, and through appearance, interests, and behavior-the branding of otherness exemplifying this existence. FRESH presents the complex ties of life's most critical stage and its culture as a sublime journey from adolescence to young adulthood and beyond.

- Nancy Barr, 2004

Nancy Barr is an assistant curator in the deportment of Graphic Arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She hos curated numerous exhibitions for the museum including Dawoud Bey: Detroit Portraits, Where the Girls Are: Woman Photographers from the DIA's Collection, and Images of Identity: Photographs of Native Americans. Her publications include articles for Big magazine, The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and dialogue. Barr's future projects for the DIA include organizing an exhibition of work by Robert Frank, as well as an exhibit of portraiture by contemporary African photographers.

re: fresh

an inteview with the artists featured 1n FRESHby

CARLO McCORMICK

As the curatorial process is based upon finding ways in which different art works can communicate with one another in a common space,we asked the seven artists in FRESH:YouthCulture in ContemporaryPhotographsto respond to a short series of questions in regards to their work - each answering to a basic and single set of issuesto construct a kind of internal dialogue between us all on this most problematic of themes. Conducted by various means - over phone calls, e-mails and through casual in-person meetings - the diversity of responses here reflect not only a multiplicity of views on the subject of youth and photography but the individuality of these distinct voices and visions.The following composite, if not the conversation we might have all enjoyed sitting together in one room, is a cut and paste simulation that is itself no more or less a fact or fiction than the elusive myth of youth today.

How is that you first became engaged or inspired by youth culture as a subject for your art, and how does it relate to your overall aesthetic practice?

Dennis Olanzo Callwood: Working as a probation counselor in Lancaster,California, I noticed that a lot of the kids who were incarcerated had tattoos. The director there had requested that I create an art program for the young people, so I began an art class for this camp in 1993. I didn't seek out youth culture per se, the idea just sort of evolved. I started doing portraits of the kids, and they'd all start flashing their gang signs.So of the twenty-five plus images you had this little book of gang tattoos. Graffiti was also very popular there, along with tattoos as a form of self-expression.Then I gave these pictures back to the kids so they could put their own tag on it What I discovered was that their voice and art constituted the strongest aesthetic aspect of this work.

Cheryl Dunn: I became more inspired by youth culture as a subJect for my art around the time I made my first film, which was about a group of young artists whose work appeared on the streets or as graphics for boards. I was hanging out with a lot of street artists and documenting graffiti. Through this social group I became friends will a lot of guys that seemed to have a whole network, from skating and traveling, to contests and trading zines,from very early ages.There was a real sense of community and support

for each other's art Maybe because I was a girl and older and really listened to them, I developed some really open relationships and hopefully portrayed some lovely sensitivity in subjects that are often outwardly viewed as hoodlums or vandals.Through this my eyes became keen to the ever-changing textural layers of the city streets. I came to love the folkloric nature of graffiti, stories that were told and re-told, and how you could track someone's moves through their markings. I really got a kick out of seeing my friends tags in different cities, knowing they had been exactly at the same spot as me on the other side of the world.

Justine Kurland: I never thought of my photographs in relation to the larger youth culture, it started with a specific girl, a Humbert Humbert kind of obsession.As it evolved it included more girls and became abstracted even from them, from their specific girl-ness. For me, I was building an army of girls in my imagination, a cumulative world, where the culture of these girls was invented out of the act of photographing them. My process is intuitive, more like looking into an Easter egg than reflecting a larger social picture.

Ari Marcopoulos: The first photographs I took were of my friends when I was probably 16 or so. It wasn't a very sophisticated way of looking at things but I do feel that it is the earliest attempt Of course now it is very different since I'm not in my youth, so the immediate response could be that out of a romantic notion to relive youth or to be young. I think that in my case, with the snowboarder series, I did have the opportunity to be involved in an activity that wasn't even around in my youth and probably unaffordable for me even if it had been around, but that was sort of a pleasant byproduct My main interest was working with unknown factors. From my work with skateboarders I knew some of the things to expect, but the element of the nature of the mountains became a new experience for me. My aesthetic practice did undergo a change since documentation of action is a huge part of snowboarding. The snowboarders themselves would take snapshots for memories and my practice was a natural and integral part of being in the group.

Ryan McGinley: I started photographing my friends, and my friends are still a big part of what I'm doing now. I grew up watching skate videos, and was particularly inspired by the Powell/Peralta

and Mark Gonzalez videos. I was making my own skateboarding videos from 1992 until I went to Parsons to study graphic design in 1996.After I got out of school in 1998 I guess I was more interested in the photographic aspect of design than the typographic, so I started taking my own pictures. For the first two years I was taking photographs it was about documenting what was in my life, but after that it got to the point where it felt like everything that was in my life that was responsible for why I wanted to be a photographer had already happened. I couldn't just wait around for things to happen, so I started directing more as a photographer. They were fictions, but they looked like documentary. When I began I had no clue what I was doing. It was all so spontaneous and a part of what was going on. I was young. I wasn't thinking, I was just reacting.There was no intention. Now my work is more thought out and has become more evolved. Making photos that look authentic but aren't in fact entirely allows a kind of fantasy to happen.What appears to be going on is often not; rather, it is pre-meditated by my idea of what I want in the end.

living in a culture obsessed with youth to a degree that it is constantly recycling its visage in perpetuity, how do your images seek a kind of circumnavigationor intervention toward this highly mediated mythology?

Dawoud Bey: My recent work, which utilizes photographs, audio, and texts authored by the subjects,attempts to find a way to subvert the essentializingcapacity of the photographic image. In this way a more complex sense of the person-as opposed to the iconic or mythologizing image-is able to emerge. I am aware, however, that even these more complex constructions are not in any way an objective truth; they are merely my ideas about the subjects coupled to the way they want to represent themselves, neither of which is without its own biases.

DC: These are voices that want to be heard. It's as if the young people are using me, and these pictures as a way of getting their voices out. In that way it is by nature a kind of circumnavigation, because we are putting them out in these institutions and areas of society, such as museums or colleges, as art, so it becomes more presentable and acceptable.

CD:The culture might be obsessed with a glorified image of youth, but not necessarily an honest portrayal. I'm a good listener and hopefully that translates in what I portray visually.I think in youth there is a great tendency to front - to over compensate for what you don't know or haven't experienced yet. I hope my images get past that and portray vulnerability, wide-eyed excitement, fear, or recklessness- feelings that should be natural at that stage of life if one is able to develop in a somewhat free way.

JK:The girls I photograph understand themselves as photographs; they have the awareness of being outside themselves looking back at themselves looking unaware. So the photograph exists as a will-

ingnessto be, an engagement in the fantasy through our collaborative desire for the fantasy of the photograph to be real.They are pictures of girls pretending to be girls.

RM: Nudity, especially male nudity, makes a big difference. People are scared of dicks. I'm making neo nudes - I don't like taking pictures of people's clothes, I'd rather take them off.

We certainly realize that pictures of kids are not the sole province of doting parents, school yearbooks, or kids themselves. But in the world of fine art photography, by your experience or philosophy, does generation become an authorial issue at some point?

DB: I think the generational issue affords me the distance of time from which to look back at my own adolescent experiences, and realize that there were things that I was thinking that I was seldom asked about. In some way this informs my own examination of teenage experience; it becomes a way of providing a space for the subjects that I didn't have for myself.

JK: No it doesn't.The truth of kids is not some absolute thing that changes generationally. It's multi-faceted, and changes from moment to moment rather than in ten-year increments. Besides, difference is also a way to know something, the way that Robert Frank, an immigrant coming to America for the first time, was the first to identify and establish exactly what made it America -the car culture, fiag waving, glowing jukebox iconography.

AM:It is always the case that when one documents someone, the public sharing of the photos will have its implications. Even when one merely takes a headshot,the result can be a shock for the subject. A photograph can be harsher then a mirror. There is always a judgment process going on as to what can be out there or not. When you deal with youth there might be a sense of abandon as far as caring about what one photographs. It's a hard call; I have certainly had confiicts with my subjects about certain photos. Who decides the documenter or the documented? It's hard to decide where the truth lies; I would say somewhere in between. As long as one is in communication with the subject there is a way to have a balanced view. It should be a collaboration, where the subject is fully aware of what the imageswill ultimately represent.

Nick Waplington: During the production of this work, people I knew or met were photographed. They tended to be of the same age group but not solely; as well landscapes and text appear in a lot of the work. The work is about a state of mind, this sounds cheesy and naive I know, maybe the naivety of youth perhaps. I certainly would not be able to produce work of a similar nature today.

As much as youth is a capital tool of fashion and the market, we are very keen to avoid the obvious ways in which youth

has become a visual commodity. You are in this show because you present a view of youth that is remarkably divergent from its dominant presentation in our culture at large. Can you discuss the ways you have approached this subject-what you decide to present-as something opposed to, or excluded from, the normal modes of representation?

DB: I think conventionally,and certainly within the media,teenagers are presented as types rather than individuals.There is also a longstanding tradition and history of presenting teenagers in the context of various social problematics: the teenage drug problem, the teenage pregnancy problem, the teenage drinking problem, etc. What I hope to do in my work is to show young people as individuals.I make no claims to authenticity however. My goal is only to create a straightforward and unfettered presentation of these young people that renders them as complex and engaging human beings.

DC:This kind of work is not easy to come by. It is essentially usually hidden behind a wall. Eloise Smith began a pilot program in 1977 at MaCaville State Prison that was adopted as a statewide program in California in 1980 called Art In Correctionand I modeled my class after her project. I have a degree in sociology and in art, so this is the combination of those two fields for me. What inspired me was the social condition, which was the fuel for this work. When I began photographing in the prison, it was ultimately about the social, racial, and political conditions that are prevalent to the kids being there. My job was to create a space,to make art a common ground between these combative subcultures.Art could work as both a form of expression and a way to work together. Art was a kind of therapy in the end.

CD: In this show I chose to present imagery that conveys a sense of protest or of challengingthe rules, which I feel is important for all, especially young people. It's about taking risks to express your freedom -to challenge before you choose to accept or reject.

Hopefully my series presents imagery that conveys taking risks for one's freedom of expression, even at the risk of being hurt a little.

AM: My approach to merge different subcultures together works on many different levels. I like to put elements from graffrti, skate, and gay culture together in hybrid ways that kids would never have thought about before. This is something that is super-specific to New York. Certainly mixtures of high and low culture exist in lots of major cities,but if you go to clubs in New York City you see the most random mix of different people, rich and poor, gay and straight, white and black, and for me it's about bringing all these people together.

NW: The question assumes that there is a dominant mode of showing youth within the commercial market place. I believe we live in a world where marketing and advertising is aimed at young people - and young people themselves -are forever involved in a game of hioe and seek, with young people moving forward and advertisers playing catch-up. In recent years this has become ever more complex with role reversal taking place as advertisers employ at the fringes of youth activity and these so called 'outsider' activities entering the mainstream, at least on a superficial level. Basicallyanything with the possibility of the target audience being reached means money and therefore will be swallowed. Skateboarding is a prime example of this, with older established artists like Larry Clark noticing it as a youth 'outsider' activity,making movies about it and selling it as a commodity in blue chip galleries.This sanrtizesit for the mainstream.At the same time the creation of the X-Games, which turns it into 'real' sport, also affects skateboarding,and speeds being gobbled up by corporations. None of this really matters. In fact it produces employment opportunities for people who would have none. But does this really affect my friends and me hanging out on our back yard ramp in London as we have done for years?No it does not. What is does do is make sure we no longer wear the clothes associatedwith Skateboarding, to avoid looking like the masses.In essencethe 'real' goes under-

ground until the 'cultural chancers' have moved on to look for new prey.

FRESH is certainly a selection of "social" work, but it was based very much on an aesthetic criteria. It is perhaps unanswerable, but can you talk about the aesthetic parameters of your work - what constitutesa good or "beautiful" picture for you?

DB: The optical, chemical, and material process of making photographs is just as much a part of what motivates my work as the things I choose to make photographs about. It's the reason I make pictures with the camera. In all of my pictures the people in them were not doing what you see them doing until I engagedthem for the purpose of making a picture. There's nothing casual about them. They may appear to be casualto the viewer, but they are in fact elaborately constructed. The furniture is moved around, I use studio lights, and the gestures and poses also come out of a collaborative process.So a lot of work goes in to making these seemingly casual looking pictures.

I am interested in how the figure works within the rectangular space of the picture, and I set them up in such a way that the subjects activate and engage this space in a very dynamic kind of way. It is my intention to make work that is both socially and aesthetically engaging.I want the viewer to be seduced by the material and form of the picture, but then having done that, I want them to really deal with the content and the substance of what I'm talking about.

DC:When I started this program I had to try to get around some of the other institutional programs in place that saw this material as a condition of blight.Anything related to gangsis wrong and not allowed within the prison. I was working simultaneously as a social worker, a peace officer, and an artist, and I thought that it was

important to bring this material into view. I didn't tell the kids that graffiti or gang related imagery was not allowable because I wanted to give them the freedom to express themselves honestly. In fact, during this program there was a big decrease of tagging around the prison because we were giving them a space for that in this art. We had Bloods, Crips, and White Peckerwoods working together in the same room, and found that most who wanted to write graffiti and were into tattoos had a natural artistic inclination, so. it oecame a matter of teaching them not to fight with each other but to compete with one another on an artistic level.When they saw that this worked,. they began to show it to other people there, and gained their own sense of pride and identity in that process.These pictures come about through the prudent eye of an artist working with kids.When you're being creative you will make mistakes,but a lot of good things can come through accidents,and it's a matter of teaching them how that works as well.

JK: My photographs became about this perfect world, a vision of girls in paradise. I appropriated a 19th century aesthetic because it saw God through the landscape rather than fioating on top of it. The landscapebecomes an expansive stage through which the girls submerge, and become lost within it. Beauty is the sense of awe and terror in that journey.

NW: A beauty aesthetic has never been my goal.Transfer of some sort of idea or just giving people something to interpret or think about is that I wish to achieve. But on a basic level the work is a means of survival enabling me to exist in a world of my own making-a world beyond mainstream 9 to 5 living.Art is an .escape for me and when I can survive from it I am very grateful.

We all have to pay the rent, and for many photographers this may involve "commercial" work that lies outside of "personal" or "fine art" work. For those who take pictures of youth for editorial or commercial projects, how do you navigate the

with this obsession also comes the inevitability that mainstream culture will misunderstand and misrepresent youth. The artists recognize this problem and through their work attempt to rectify this situation by representing the true spirit and diversity of youth and youth culture. Common to their work is the search, evaluation, and assertion of identity, the need for freedom of self-expression and self-determination, life experience that can sometimes teeter between restraint and overindulgence, and through appearance, interests, and behavior-the branding of otherness exemplifying this existence. FRESH presents the complex ties of life's most critical stage and its culture as a sublime journey from adolescence to young adulthood and beyond.

- Nancy Barr, 2004

Nancy Barr is an assistant curator in the deportment of Graphic Arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She hos curated numerous exhibitions for the museum including Dawoud Bey: Detroit Portraits, Where the Girls Are: Woman Photographers from the DIA's Collection, and Images of Identity: Photographs of Native Americans. Her publications include articles for Big magazine, The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and dialogue. Barr's future projects for the DIA include organizing an exhibition of work by Robert Frank, as well as an exhibit of portraiture by contemporary African photographers.

re: fresh

an inteview with the artists featured 1n FRESHby

CARLO McCORMICK

As the curatorial process is based upon finding ways in which different art works can communicate with one another in a common space,we asked the seven artists in FRESH:YouthCulture in ContemporaryPhotographsto respond to a short series of questions in regards to their work - each answering to a basic and single set of issuesto construct a kind of internal dialogue between us all on this most problematic of themes. Conducted by various means - over phone calls, e-mails and through casual in-person meetings - the diversity of responses here reflect not only a multiplicity of views on the subject of youth and photography but the individuality of these distinct voices and visions.The following composite, if not the conversation we might have all enjoyed sitting together in one room, is a cut and paste simulation that is itself no more or less a fact or fiction than the elusive myth of youth today.

How is that you first became engaged or inspired by youth culture as a subject for your art, and how does it relate to your overall aesthetic practice?

Dennis Olanzo Callwood: Working as a probation counselor in Lancaster,California, I noticed that a lot of the kids who were incarcerated had tattoos. The director there had requested that I create an art program for the young people, so I began an art class for this camp in 1993. I didn't seek out youth culture per se, the idea just sort of evolved. I started doing portraits of the kids, and they'd all start flashing their gang signs.So of the twenty-five plus images you had this little book of gang tattoos. Graffiti was also very popular there, along with tattoos as a form of self-expression.Then I gave these pictures back to the kids so they could put their own tag on it What I discovered was that their voice and art constituted the strongest aesthetic aspect of this work.

Cheryl Dunn: I became more inspired by youth culture as a subJect for my art around the time I made my first film, which was about a group of young artists whose work appeared on the streets or as graphics for boards. I was hanging out with a lot of street artists and documenting graffiti. Through this social group I became friends will a lot of guys that seemed to have a whole network, from skating and traveling, to contests and trading zines,from very early ages.There was a real sense of community and support

for each other's art Maybe because I was a girl and older and really listened to them, I developed some really open relationships and hopefully portrayed some lovely sensitivity in subjects that are often outwardly viewed as hoodlums or vandals.Through this my eyes became keen to the ever-changing textural layers of the city streets. I came to love the folkloric nature of graffiti, stories that were told and re-told, and how you could track someone's moves through their markings. I really got a kick out of seeing my friends tags in different cities, knowing they had been exactly at the same spot as me on the other side of the world.

Justine Kurland: I never thought of my photographs in relation to the larger youth culture, it started with a specific girl, a Humbert Humbert kind of obsession.As it evolved it included more girls and became abstracted even from them, from their specific girl-ness. For me, I was building an army of girls in my imagination, a cumulative world, where the culture of these girls was invented out of the act of photographing them. My process is intuitive, more like looking into an Easter egg than reflecting a larger social picture.

Ari Marcopoulos: The first photographs I took were of my friends when I was probably 16 or so. It wasn't a very sophisticated way of looking at things but I do feel that it is the earliest attempt Of course now it is very different since I'm not in my youth, so the immediate response could be that out of a romantic notion to relive youth or to be young. I think that in my case, with the snowboarder series, I did have the opportunity to be involved in an activity that wasn't even around in my youth and probably unaffordable for me even if it had been around, but that was sort of a pleasant byproduct My main interest was working with unknown factors. From my work with skateboarders I knew some of the things to expect, but the element of the nature of the mountains became a new experience for me. My aesthetic practice did undergo a change since documentation of action is a huge part of snowboarding. The snowboarders themselves would take snapshots for memories and my practice was a natural and integral part of being in the group.

Ryan McGinley: I started photographing my friends, and my friends are still a big part of what I'm doing now. I grew up watching skate videos, and was particularly inspired by the Powell/Peralta

and Mark Gonzalez videos. I was making my own skateboarding videos from 1992 until I went to Parsons to study graphic design in 1996.After I got out of school in 1998 I guess I was more interested in the photographic aspect of design than the typographic, so I started taking my own pictures. For the first two years I was taking photographs it was about documenting what was in my life, but after that it got to the point where it felt like everything that was in my life that was responsible for why I wanted to be a photographer had already happened. I couldn't just wait around for things to happen, so I started directing more as a photographer. They were fictions, but they looked like documentary. When I began I had no clue what I was doing. It was all so spontaneous and a part of what was going on. I was young. I wasn't thinking, I was just reacting.There was no intention. Now my work is more thought out and has become more evolved. Making photos that look authentic but aren't in fact entirely allows a kind of fantasy to happen.What appears to be going on is often not; rather, it is pre-meditated by my idea of what I want in the end.

living in a culture obsessed with youth to a degree that it is constantly recycling its visage in perpetuity, how do your images seek a kind of circumnavigationor intervention toward this highly mediated mythology?

Dawoud Bey: My recent work, which utilizes photographs, audio, and texts authored by the subjects,attempts to find a way to subvert the essentializingcapacity of the photographic image. In this way a more complex sense of the person-as opposed to the iconic or mythologizing image-is able to emerge. I am aware, however, that even these more complex constructions are not in any way an objective truth; they are merely my ideas about the subjects coupled to the way they want to represent themselves, neither of which is without its own biases.

DC: These are voices that want to be heard. It's as if the young people are using me, and these pictures as a way of getting their voices out. In that way it is by nature a kind of circumnavigation, because we are putting them out in these institutions and areas of society, such as museums or colleges, as art, so it becomes more presentable and acceptable.

CD:The culture might be obsessed with a glorified image of youth, but not necessarily an honest portrayal. I'm a good listener and hopefully that translates in what I portray visually.I think in youth there is a great tendency to front - to over compensate for what you don't know or haven't experienced yet. I hope my images get past that and portray vulnerability, wide-eyed excitement, fear, or recklessness- feelings that should be natural at that stage of life if one is able to develop in a somewhat free way.

JK:The girls I photograph understand themselves as photographs; they have the awareness of being outside themselves looking back at themselves looking unaware. So the photograph exists as a will-

ingnessto be, an engagement in the fantasy through our collaborative desire for the fantasy of the photograph to be real.They are pictures of girls pretending to be girls.

RM: Nudity, especially male nudity, makes a big difference. People are scared of dicks. I'm making neo nudes - I don't like taking pictures of people's clothes, I'd rather take them off.

We certainly realize that pictures of kids are not the sole province of doting parents, school yearbooks, or kids themselves. But in the world of fine art photography, by your experience or philosophy, does generation become an authorial issue at some point?

DB: I think the generational issue affords me the distance of time from which to look back at my own adolescent experiences, and realize that there were things that I was thinking that I was seldom asked about. In some way this informs my own examination of teenage experience; it becomes a way of providing a space for the subjects that I didn't have for myself.

JK: No it doesn't.The truth of kids is not some absolute thing that changes generationally. It's multi-faceted, and changes from moment to moment rather than in ten-year increments. Besides, difference is also a way to know something, the way that Robert Frank, an immigrant coming to America for the first time, was the first to identify and establish exactly what made it America -the car culture, fiag waving, glowing jukebox iconography.

AM:It is always the case that when one documents someone, the public sharing of the photos will have its implications. Even when one merely takes a headshot,the result can be a shock for the subject. A photograph can be harsher then a mirror. There is always a judgment process going on as to what can be out there or not. When you deal with youth there might be a sense of abandon as far as caring about what one photographs. It's a hard call; I have certainly had confiicts with my subjects about certain photos. Who decides the documenter or the documented? It's hard to decide where the truth lies; I would say somewhere in between. As long as one is in communication with the subject there is a way to have a balanced view. It should be a collaboration, where the subject is fully aware of what the imageswill ultimately represent.

Nick Waplington: During the production of this work, people I knew or met were photographed. They tended to be of the same age group but not solely; as well landscapes and text appear in a lot of the work. The work is about a state of mind, this sounds cheesy and naive I know, maybe the naivety of youth perhaps. I certainly would not be able to produce work of a similar nature today.

As much as youth is a capital tool of fashion and the market, we are very keen to avoid the obvious ways in which youth

has become a visual commodity. You are in this show because you present a view of youth that is remarkably divergent from its dominant presentation in our culture at large. Can you discuss the ways you have approached this subject-what you decide to present-as something opposed to, or excluded from, the normal modes of representation?

DB: I think conventionally,and certainly within the media,teenagers are presented as types rather than individuals.There is also a longstanding tradition and history of presenting teenagers in the context of various social problematics: the teenage drug problem, the teenage pregnancy problem, the teenage drinking problem, etc. What I hope to do in my work is to show young people as individuals.I make no claims to authenticity however. My goal is only to create a straightforward and unfettered presentation of these young people that renders them as complex and engaging human beings.

DC:This kind of work is not easy to come by. It is essentially usually hidden behind a wall. Eloise Smith began a pilot program in 1977 at MaCaville State Prison that was adopted as a statewide program in California in 1980 called Art In Correctionand I modeled my class after her project. I have a degree in sociology and in art, so this is the combination of those two fields for me. What inspired me was the social condition, which was the fuel for this work. When I began photographing in the prison, it was ultimately about the social, racial, and political conditions that are prevalent to the kids being there. My job was to create a space,to make art a common ground between these combative subcultures.Art could work as both a form of expression and a way to work together. Art was a kind of therapy in the end.

CD: In this show I chose to present imagery that conveys a sense of protest or of challengingthe rules, which I feel is important for all, especially young people. It's about taking risks to express your freedom -to challenge before you choose to accept or reject.

Hopefully my series presents imagery that conveys taking risks for one's freedom of expression, even at the risk of being hurt a little.

AM: My approach to merge different subcultures together works on many different levels. I like to put elements from graffrti, skate, and gay culture together in hybrid ways that kids would never have thought about before. This is something that is super-specific to New York. Certainly mixtures of high and low culture exist in lots of major cities,but if you go to clubs in New York City you see the most random mix of different people, rich and poor, gay and straight, white and black, and for me it's about bringing all these people together.

NW: The question assumes that there is a dominant mode of showing youth within the commercial market place. I believe we live in a world where marketing and advertising is aimed at young people - and young people themselves -are forever involved in a game of hioe and seek, with young people moving forward and advertisers playing catch-up. In recent years this has become ever more complex with role reversal taking place as advertisers employ at the fringes of youth activity and these so called 'outsider' activities entering the mainstream, at least on a superficial level. Basicallyanything with the possibility of the target audience being reached means money and therefore will be swallowed. Skateboarding is a prime example of this, with older established artists like Larry Clark noticing it as a youth 'outsider' activity,making movies about it and selling it as a commodity in blue chip galleries.This sanrtizesit for the mainstream.At the same time the creation of the X-Games, which turns it into 'real' sport, also affects skateboarding,and speeds being gobbled up by corporations. None of this really matters. In fact it produces employment opportunities for people who would have none. But does this really affect my friends and me hanging out on our back yard ramp in London as we have done for years?No it does not. What is does do is make sure we no longer wear the clothes associatedwith Skateboarding, to avoid looking like the masses.In essencethe 'real' goes under-

ground until the 'cultural chancers' have moved on to look for new prey.

FRESH is certainly a selection of "social" work, but it was based very much on an aesthetic criteria. It is perhaps unanswerable, but can you talk about the aesthetic parameters of your work - what constitutesa good or "beautiful" picture for you?

DB: The optical, chemical, and material process of making photographs is just as much a part of what motivates my work as the things I choose to make photographs about. It's the reason I make pictures with the camera. In all of my pictures the people in them were not doing what you see them doing until I engagedthem for the purpose of making a picture. There's nothing casual about them. They may appear to be casualto the viewer, but they are in fact elaborately constructed. The furniture is moved around, I use studio lights, and the gestures and poses also come out of a collaborative process.So a lot of work goes in to making these seemingly casual looking pictures.

I am interested in how the figure works within the rectangular space of the picture, and I set them up in such a way that the subjects activate and engage this space in a very dynamic kind of way. It is my intention to make work that is both socially and aesthetically engaging.I want the viewer to be seduced by the material and form of the picture, but then having done that, I want them to really deal with the content and the substance of what I'm talking about.

DC:When I started this program I had to try to get around some of the other institutional programs in place that saw this material as a condition of blight.Anything related to gangsis wrong and not allowed within the prison. I was working simultaneously as a social worker, a peace officer, and an artist, and I thought that it was

important to bring this material into view. I didn't tell the kids that graffiti or gang related imagery was not allowable because I wanted to give them the freedom to express themselves honestly. In fact, during this program there was a big decrease of tagging around the prison because we were giving them a space for that in this art. We had Bloods, Crips, and White Peckerwoods working together in the same room, and found that most who wanted to write graffiti and were into tattoos had a natural artistic inclination, so. it oecame a matter of teaching them not to fight with each other but to compete with one another on an artistic level.When they saw that this worked,. they began to show it to other people there, and gained their own sense of pride and identity in that process.These pictures come about through the prudent eye of an artist working with kids.When you're being creative you will make mistakes,but a lot of good things can come through accidents,and it's a matter of teaching them how that works as well.

JK: My photographs became about this perfect world, a vision of girls in paradise. I appropriated a 19th century aesthetic because it saw God through the landscape rather than fioating on top of it. The landscapebecomes an expansive stage through which the girls submerge, and become lost within it. Beauty is the sense of awe and terror in that journey.

NW: A beauty aesthetic has never been my goal.Transfer of some sort of idea or just giving people something to interpret or think about is that I wish to achieve. But on a basic level the work is a means of survival enabling me to exist in a world of my own making-a world beyond mainstream 9 to 5 living.Art is an .escape for me and when I can survive from it I am very grateful.

We all have to pay the rent, and for many photographers this may involve "commercial" work that lies outside of "personal" or "fine art" work. For those who take pictures of youth for editorial or commercial projects, how do you navigate the

requirements of a job to invest these pictures with a kind of integrity, authenticity, and non-exploitative humanism you can live with?

CD: Well, my friends have to pay their rent too. Everyone has choices. I try to be completely honest with what the shoot is all about and try to get them as much money as I can for their time and image. I stay very sensitive to the issues of exploitation and always stay attentive to my subject's feelings and energy.All of the jobs I've done like this usually involve all of us hanging out having a good time in a cool place, taking pictures, and getting paid. I've never felt any resentment from my subjects.

AM: Well yeah, if one takes photographs of youth, one will inevitably be contacted by editorial or commercial clients to do work. More often then not this is a really difficult situation. Clients tend to look at one image and expect a clone from that - it's very much about repeating what they have seen. It's a growth stifling experience.

AM: I don't discriminate between editorial and personal work. Even if it is for someone else,everything I do, I do for myself I don't do fashion or celebrity photography because I naturally like normal people. I love editorial work because you never know what to expect and you always get something cool out of it.

NW: Can I use this question to advertise for work? I get very little, and I need it to pay for the shows I want to do. Generous art collectors and corporate sponsors needed: WILL WORK FOR ART.

There is a difficult language we inherit around the topic of youth, a list of adjectives that may, or may not, be constructive or accurate. FRESHitself is hardly better, but maybe not so bad as some other terms. let's try some words hereinnocence, rebellion, subculture, sexuality, identity -can you

respond to how hackneyed or appropriate these terms are for you in your vision of youth, and perhaps suggest some others?

DC:Innocence is a good word for the kids as is rebellion - they are all rebellion. Subculture, too, is very appropriate because they are the prisoners of American culture-the ones outside the mainstream. Sexuality is different where I work. For all of youth culture it remains a dominant preoccupation, but my kids,who come from the street into prisons, are denied their sexuality.They have no accessto females,so their forms of expression and thinking are all about that lack of access,be it watching television, writing love letters, or making phone calls - its a constant preoccupation in all of their conversations. I think identity is also important to consider because teenagers are trying to remove themselves from society and family,trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in a particular system.How they are able to do that will in many ways determine who they are in the end. But I would also suggest poverty, which in my case is the determining factor that is so important in terms of identity and all the other words you use here. It's a measurement of how socialized or not socialized these kids are. When they come from a broken family,it is easier for them to create their own subculture, which can possibly be very destructive. If society can catch these kids before gang culture does, a lot of these extremes can be avoided and dealt with before the prison system. It comes down to education and prevention, which should be the goals,because in terms of economic and human cost, they are a lot less expensive.

JK:"Can't stay at home, can't stay at school/ old folks say,ya poor old fool/ down the street I'm the girl next door/ I'm the fox you've been waiting for/ hello daddy, hello mom/ I'm your ch ch ch ch ch cherry bomb." (song lyrics from The Runaways,Cherry Bomb)

AM: Innocence has become such a first response when it comes to youth. When one looks at Britney Spears,who made a big point about being a virgin while dressing in the style of a prostitute, one wonders where innocence really finds itself. Has the age of

innocence lowered itself?Youth is really underestimated by this term. I prefer na1've.Subculture is not necessarilyconnected to age. It's also often now a marketing tool. It seems that what was subculture in the past has been commodified. Even when something is highly controversial, the marketing forces will find a way to bring it in as a new tool to sell something. For obvious reasons sexuality and youth are locked together as the deification of the hard body continues. Of course in youth one doesn't always have to work to obtain this ideal body form. It is hard to separate what has become the norm by conditioning. Reckless,Freedom, Initiative, Abandon, Confusion and Digital are more terms that come to my mind.

NW:The evolution of the English language is something that continues through time and has always been led by young people. Twenty years ago my mother would not have said she was "chillin' out with the TV", but that figure of speech is mainstream now. One day we wake up to find we are old and have been left behind as the languagemoves on.

A number of the artists in FRESHalso work in film and video, some examples of which will be included in the exhibition. For those of you for whom this is applicable, could you please address the possibilities of this other media in relation to your photography?

DB: I've just completed a video work, Four Stories,whose subjects are four teenagers from Detroit whom I have also photographed. Unlike the still photograph, video allows me to create a more sustained narrative. In this piece I've tried to mediate this tendency to allow for more information by not fully describing what any of the teenagers look like. So there's a kind of intimacy that is not fully given in to, since you still don't what they look like. But because of the immediacy and intimacy of their stories you come to know them not through their faces,but through their voices.

CD: I feel my images are a small moment in a bigger story. With film I get to tell the bigger story or portray that moment in relation to other things. Both practices,even though they are also very different, enhance each other: My still photography has trained my eye to fully see frames, and I think my stills are very motion oriented. Either my subjects are moving or I am. Filmmaking can be liberating in the sense that I get to work with many different layers: music, sound, motion, editing, nuance. It is a welcome relief to bo~nce- back and forth between the two. Sometimes I like having less choice.

RM:Basedon the way I make photographs now - taking so many pictures - people tell me I should be making films. In the next two to four years I'd like to make a feature film. I'm inspired by movies, I watch them all the time and I get a lot of ideas from them. For me it's really important to reach a wide audience. From the beginning I was hand making little books and zines to get to as many people as I could. I've sort of come to a realization of how far you can go in museums and photo books. Art is so esoteric; it only reaches a handful of people, and with movies you can touch so many more.

AM:Video is a normal extension of my work since I work in a very filmic way with photography. Most of my work in photography is not about the singular image.Often I will combine multiple images or work in book form. In video one can extend the gaze.

- Carlo McCormick, 2004

Carlo McCormick is a writeron art and popularculturebasedin NYC. Currentlythe SeniorEditorfor Paper Magazine, Carlo'sworkhasalsoappeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, and Interview, amongmanypublications.He hascuratednumerousshowsincludingThe LP Show ( 1999)for Exit Art in NYCand is currentlyworkingon an exhibitionabout Baseballfor the Queens and BronxMuseums,in additionto an exhibitionabout 1980sart for NYC'sGreyArt Gallery.

The print images in the in_authentic_b portfolio are derived from the video of the same name, which was shot on location in three cities in Ghana.The prints present a world in flux. We are placed intimately, face to face with a game, a child, and an abstraction beyond recogntion at first glance. The subject of our vision has multiple layers. The subject is a football game and also a complex network of transmission and coded representation. The image is complete but, oddly, still needs processing. We do the assembly work -fail -succeedquestion -and mend the poetic gaps in syntax.

A mixed-media artist working in print video, and installation, Kenseth Armstead (Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited his work internationally as an individual artist and as a founding member of the collaborative artband X-Prez. A graduate of Corcoran School of Art and the Whitney Independent Study Program,his work has been presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Threadwaxing Space, and most recently in Open House at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Armstead hos hod residencies at Sculpture Space (NY) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME).

Kenseth hos lectured about his work at various institutions including talks at Syracuse University, the Berlin Video festival, the Notional Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN, and at the United Notions University, Global Youth Exchange in Tokoyo,Japan. His work is included in both private and public collections.

KENS ETH ARMSTEAD

M Y R A GREENE

The negotiation of memories occurs in the making of the imagery. I am now conscious of how I mediated my memory to include and exclude details.These images physically represent that process. After completing my last project, The Beautiful Ones,I took stock of what my project asserted: that black beauty was vibrant, mysterious, and elusive. With these ideas I thought it was time to turn the camera inward to see if these lessons would manifest in the way I photographed myself.This was the start of the series Untitled: Self Portraits.

I returned to the studio to unearth a process, which demonstrated the power of deconstructed memory. I experimented with photographic techniques to create a random patterning that devastated the photographic ideals of clarity and precision. These images appeared murky, sickly, and depressed. They became a reflection of not only attitude or memory but my skin tone as well.

Through Untitled: Self Portraits, I explored ways in which I might be perceived: heavy, shadowed, and definitely black.The colors in these pieces reflect the nature of my skin.While initially dismal,a sense of delicacy and grace rises out of the images. Features become pronounced - the thickness of the lips, the weight of the skin, both grotesque and regal. In these images I find comfort in the abstract beauty,yet become visually lost, unable to see or recognize it all.These emotions run parallel to my understanding of self

Photo-basedartist Myra Greene (Rochester, NY) receivedher MFA at the Universityof New Mexico in 2002. She hos exhibited across the United States and been the subject of solo exhibitions at the John Sommers Gallery (Albuquerque,NM) and the American Gallery (NY,NY).Shehos also participated in group exhibitions at Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY), Sculpture Center (NY, NY), AC2 Gallery (Albuquerque, NM), the Red Eye Gallery (Providence,RI), and many others. Greene hos received numerous artistic and academic fellowships includingones from the Print Center,Society for PhotographicEducation,and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.She hos lectured about her work at various Universities including Kenyon Collage (Gambier,OH) and at the Schoolof the Museum of FineArts (Boston,MA). Greenecurrently teaches at the RochesterInstitute of Technology.

When I moved to America in 1993 I crammed 18 years of my life into one suitcase.It weighed approximately 45 kg. It wasn't until recently that I started thinking about the objects I chose to bring and the selection process.

In the series Suitcases, I am interested in juxtaposing snippets of information that interact with each other to convey an open-ended narration.The essenceof the Suitcasesseries is the dialogue created by pairing fragments. The items contained within the suitcasesare sticky with associations and often pertain to travel. Each piece deals with a separate theme and corresponds to a specific hue. Color is the origin of each, giving the suitcases their individual personalities and focuses. Even though the suitcases are self contained and conceived to function independently, they all share many physical and conceptual characteristics.

Distilling ones life to fit the finite parameters of a suitcase meant editing -the inevitability of certain memories being discarded while others attain a new significance.

An MFA graduate of the UniversityofTexas, at Houston, Priya Kambli's (Kirksville, MO) mixed-media work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Living Arts Center (Tulsa, OK) and the University of North Texas Art Gallery (Denton, TX) among others. She has been featured in group exhibitionsat the Houston Center for Photography(Houston,TX), SF Camerawork (San Francisco,CA), the SoutheastMuseum of Photography,(Daytona Beach, FL), the Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA), the Torpedo Factory Art Center (Alexandria,VA), and at venues across the country. A recipient of grants from the SalinasArt Center and the Houston Center for Photography, Priya was featured in PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly #83's In Light column. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Truman State University in Missouri.

Of Many Waters began as a trip my mother and I took to her homeland of Guyana. It was our first time back in over fourteen years.The excursion not only represented a chance for my mother and I to connect, but for my family to come together as well. Births, marriages,and deaths were transmitted through telephone lines across land and water. Our voices became all we knew.

I found myself captivated by the landscape.For my mother it was a more jarring experience. I wanted to capture the tension of returning to a place that was once a home and becomes unfamiliar territory. I explored the places my mother wandered as a young woman. I interviewed my various relatives. I was fascinated by the cyclical character of my family's history and became increasingly aware of my own positioning within my ancestral web. Guyana is often called the "Land of Many Waters." The landscapeseemed to have ebb and flow to it.This is what I wanted to communicate with

KEISHA SCARVILLE

the photographs of my family-memories of the past washing over the present.

A graduate of RochesterInstitute of TechnologyKeisha Scarville's (New York,NY) work hos been exhibited and publishednotionally.Her work hos been included in exhibitions at Sisterspoce Gallery (WashingtonD.C.),and in NYC at the A.I.R.Gallery,SohoPhoto Gallery, the BrooklynMuseum of Art, UFA. Gallery,and Ken Keleba Gallery as well as at the PerkinsCenter for the Arts (NJ).Shehos hod a solo exhibition at the Come/IMuseum in West Palm Beach,Florida.In addition her work hos appeared in Camera Arts Magazine, Time Magazine, Vibe, Nylon, and Russel Simmon's Oneworld. Scarvi//e'swork is included in many public and private collections including the SmithsonianAmericanArt Museum and the Center for Photographyat Woodstock.

SUN-JOO SHIN

My work operates as psychological portraits whose subjects transform their characters with their bare hands and style choices. Through these topographical portraits the difference of nationality, culture, and ethnicity becomes emphasized. Simultaneously these photos contain the specific personal characteristics of each subject that validates their identity as unique.

Sun-Joo Shin (Leonia, NJ) earned her MFA in Pointing and Photographyat the Pratt Institute (NY), as well as a MFA in Pointing from the RochesterInstitute of Technology.She hos exhibited in both the US and Korea,with solo exhibitions at the CollegeArt Gallery at FairleighDickensonUniversity(NJ) and at the Humanities Art Center at Kettering Universityin Michigan.Shehos also been includedin group shows at the Pratt Institute, Stueben Holl Galleries, and at Art in General in New York.In Korea her work hos been shown at the Ku-ie Cultural Center in Ku-ie and at the Catholic Center Gallery in Pu-Son.

NOELLETAN

Interacting with conceptions of photography and photographic process,these two bodies of work depict a landscapethat hovers between emerging and being, the seen and the subliminal. Instead of using contrast to become a "photograph", through the use of white space these images resist tempting the viewer to associate what little is discernable - scattering of trees, people, birds, or a train -with drawings.These generic objects suggest a narrative at work; the white space acts as a stage and the viewer seeks what is "off screen."The effort to create and seek narrative is natural, the state of non-narrative becomes both a site for fear and exploration, asking us where our expectations lie, how we use narrativity, and the way in which photography and the photographic have become intrinsic to this process. It is this play of the visual and its association/use as narrative space that ultimately informs this work.

Noelle Tan (Washington DC.) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited across the country in solo exhibitions at the D30 I Gallery and Creative Artists Agency, both in California, as we// as at the Center for Photography at Woodstockin summer 2004. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Georg j. Doizaki Gallery,and the Headlands Art Center (CA), the SalinaArt Center (KS),Gallery Lobardi and Flatbed Galleries (TX), and in New York at Chambers Fine Art, Vanderbilt Hall at the Grand Central Station;and the AsianAmerican Arts Center.Tan'swork is included in collectionsat the CreativeArtists Agency,Chambers Fine Art, the Asian American Arts Center,and the Center for Photographyat Woodstock.

noted books

Blueprints on Fabric Innovative Uses for Cyanotype, Barbara Hewitt, InterweavePressInc.,Loveland,CO; 1995,soft cover.

The Body: Photographsof the Human Fonn,William A Ewing 0-rnnicle Books,San Francisco,CA 1994,soft cover,black& white and color photographs.DonatedcyLawrenceP.Le.Nis.

Cape Cod and the National Seashore,photographs and text by CharlesFields,FieldsPublishingLLC,Pmvincetovvn,MA 2003,hard cover, color photographs.Donatedcythe artist

FacingSculpture:A Portfolio of Portraits,Sculpture,and Related Ideas,photographs by Ricardo Barros, intmduton by Nick Capasso, ImageSpring Press,Morrisville,PA 2004, hard cover,black& white photographs.Donatedcythe artist

Fact Fiction Fabrication, photographs and text by Phil Harris, PictureheadPress,Portand, OR; 20CfJ,soft cover,black & white photographs.Donatedcythe artist

Here and There at Once:An ImaginativeJourneyThrough LJfe, Death, and Hope, photographs by Lee Conaway Addis, forward by ParrishHarrington.ViaPress,Phoenix.AZ;2003,hard cover,black& white photographs.Donatedcythe artist

In Celebrationof LJght,Photographsfrom the Collection of Cheryl R and JamesF.Pierce,Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu,HI; 2003,hard cover,black& white photographs.

In the Wake of Batt/e:The Civil War Imagesof Mathew Brady, George Sul1Mlf1,Prestel,NY; 2004,soft cover,bk1ck& white photographs.

Knowing Stephanie, photographs by Charlee Bmdsky, text by StephanieByram,withan essaybyJenniferMatesaUn~rsity of Pittsburgh Press,Pittsburgh,PA 2003,hard cover,black& white photographs.

Margaret River, photographs by Frances Andrijich, text by Peter Forrestaland RayJordan,FremantleArts Centre Press,Australia;2003, hard cover,color photographs.

Rememberingto LJve:Visual Poems for the Journey,Mark L Tompkins,EvoMngEditions,Houston.TX;2002,hard cover,black& white photographs.Donatedcythe artist

Richard Buswell - Echoes:a Visual Reflection,photographs by RichardBusv,,ell,intmducton by Dennis Kem,commentary by Margaret Mudd,Archival Press,Helena,MT; 1997,soft cover,black& white photographs.

Strength Beauty Spirit: Images of the Mohonk Presel'Veand ShawangunkRidge,G. SteveJordan,Oove Editions,Stone F-idge,NY; 2003,hard cover,color photographs.

Yehudhith,photographsby ElliotRoss,withtexts about women andthe Holocaust,intmducton by EllenUllman,Hawi<havenPress,SanFrancisco, CA 2004, hard cover,black& white photographs. Donatedcythe photographer.

-editors,JacelynBlank& Liz Glynn

Appalachian Lives: Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams with text by Vicky Goldberg and Shelby Lee Adams, published by The University Press of Mississippi, 2003.

This latest collection of eighty photographs by Shelby Lee Adams is the third volume in a trilogy which features over twenty-five years of photographs of this hardscrabble region and the people he befriended in his home state of Kentucky. Much like a daybook, this forum is an opportunity for him to come to terms with being an Appalachian who moved away and got ahead, yet who remains rooted to the people and their struggles. He describes his working method in detail in his diary, which includes location choices, anecdotes of his interactions, and photographic working concerns. A trusted insider in the community, Adams has earned the respect of his subjects, and their eyes often lock as firmly as any hearty handshake.

In so much as these are clearly the faces of America's bleak rural poverty line, the people in these images appear to pose openly with pride and solid footing. Adam's straightforward approach presents his subjects on their front porches and in their yards with proprietary confidence. They are often surrounded by the solidarity of other family members and cherished animal companions. Adams infuses his pictures with information; the wellcomposed and organized frames are crowded, expanding sometimes beyond their edges; there is so much to describe about the people he knows. Recurring backgrounds and objects ground the work in the nitty gritty reality of a tough existence. Dusty, rocky land is inhabited by the crops of decaying car parts, bushels of old tires, and jumbles of messy electrical wires. These scenes imply haphazard homes and lives teetering on power failure, well below the standards most Americans take for granted. Clearly left behind in the race for technology, there is little evidence of millennium progress, except for the ubiquitous satellite dishes, the only visible link to the world beyond these counties.

Vicky Goldberg says,"the word Appalachia has a certain ring; it is the lugubrious sound of poverty and backwardness. For years certain hills and valleys around the Appalachian Mountain Chain have been one of the poorest spots in America, until the very name of Appalachia has become synonymous with barefoot misery.'' These photographs by Shelby Lee Adams are a departure from those depictions we tend to associate with the rural poor; Adams avoids the pitying cliches of their suffering and portrays instead a community of friends and neighbors. It is on their faces that we see the reflection of his deep compassion and curiosity about this region, and the desire of an artist to gain a better understanding of himself.

The subject of my work is overlooked environments in the city - everyday spaces that are somewhat unfamiliar and marginally inhabited, but nevertheless imprinted with the 'residue' of human presence. I am interested in re-framing and revealing the 'invisible', and in turn drawing attention to the act of looking and seeing.

Threshold is a series of 28 color photographs that depict boundaries - walls, gates, doors, and fences - and the fragmented views glimpsed through gaps and holes in their surfaces.These images were shot from the public space ofToronto laneways looking into the private space of residential backyards. Shot with a macroscopic lens and then enlarged approximately 8 times, the Threshold images reveal scenes that exist solely in photographic form, and are invisible to the naked eye.

In this work, I am interested in the way that the particularities of photography can draw attention to the act of looking and to the /imitations of vision. Facilitated by photography, boundary and space are

simultaneously rendered as a single surface. The foreground and background coalesce in a single ftattened view that is part abstract color field and part sharply focused scene, reducing the apparent separation between surface and space; outside and inside; public and private realms.

LISA KLAPSTOCK is a Toronto based artist who has exhibited in Canada, the U.S.,and Europe at commercial and non-profit galleries, as well as in alternative venues. In the summer of 2002, Klapstock was an artist-in-residence at Stichting Duende in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Her work resides in collections at the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Bibliotheque National de France. She is a founding member of the all-woman international artist collective FreshAir, and is represented in Canada by Diane Farris Gallery. The Center, for Photography at Woodstock presented Threshold, her American solo exhibition debut, in 2003.

In Light artists are selected from the Center's Slide Registry - a slide archive of contemporary photography, m xed media, and digital imagery.It provides a bridge between artists, curators, collectors, educators, and the Center, making contemporary work easy to access- by appointment - Wednesday to Sunday noon to 5pm.

U.S.Postage PAID

WhitePlains,NY PermitNo.5432

photo san francisco

the 5th international son francisco photographicart exposition

july 22 -25, 2004

FestivalPavilionm FortMason

80 galleries and private dealers from the U.S.and Europepresentthe finest photographic art from the 19th Centuryto cutting edge contemporary photography

lectures and seminars

- Mark Citret, Photographer -PenelopeDixon, Consultant -DrewJohnson,Curator, OaklandMuseumof Art

- David Maisel, Photographer

- Sandra Phillips, Curator, San FranciscoMoMA -Joel-Peter Witkin, Photographer

info I contact Stephen CohenGallery 7358 Beverly Boulevard Los Angeles, CA90036 323.937.5525 info@stephencohengallery.com