In the past two days I've read two different articles that speak to the nature of found art and photography This one" from the blog "Accidental Mysteries" describes the appeal as being linked to the collector's presence. Maybe these objects give people a certain measure of power over them. Another article, in print, in "The Outsider Magazine" suggested that the appeal lies in the fact that found art is devoid of any personality or input on the part of the artist, in a sense. Whatever what put into the piece is what's there for you to process.

book stain

"The real surprise is in recognizing that a form that is so intimate can be so invisible". I'll get the link on that quote in due time, meanwhile I'll be ruminating on the nature of ritual, the things that connect us, and tender serendipity. It feels good to be a part of a tribe today.

so fly

Celebration

fiction

Through the course of reappraising all my photos, processing and posting them I've begun to take a new approach to them. Before, I felt like I examined them for details that could tell me something about the moment before or the moment after the photograph and about the real lives of the people pictured. I was looking at the photos formally but also for litteral narrative. For some reason it never occurred to me that I wasn't getting at some essential truth but just taking what I needed from the image in an obviously self-serving way. I wonder if this is the way people process everything, do you look at a situation and pick and choose and recombine to suit yourself?

The new way I've been trying to approach these is by fictionalizing them directly, skipping my previous self-delusion. Putting images together and letting them reference each other.

The newspaper clipping above fell out of a wine making book I bought at an estate sale.

Backstage

front


back

With both of these images something is happening just outside of the frame. They both also appear to be happening "behind the scenes" at some sort of event. There's something about to happen on the other side of a curtain, a door, or in the next room.

lovers

I don't usually connect pictures that have no obvious reference to each other in such a way but, I'd like these two images to interact more than conceptually. I want to play matchmaker with these two. They're perfect for eachother.

How I show I care

Different ways of expressing tenda-ness

Friends

Here...just stand in front of the...yeah, that's great, ok!

RE: kids

I love the shadows in pictures of children (kids being a very common subject of home movies and photographs, check out This episode of 'This American Life and this documentary from folkstreams.net, a website I just discovered and can't wait to explore more, for evidence and insights on this effect)

Inherent in a picture of a child, and part of the reason so many are taken, is the knowledge that they're growing and this captured moment is profoundly fleeting. Shadows talk about time and growth, throughout a day, throughout a life, in a second.

kids

they're old now.

Portraits

These two images represent different approaches to the portrait. They're both studied and deliberate in their own way. They seem intent on capturing some essential quality of their subjects but are still only an allusion to the original. The photographer's raw intention in these pictures is very strong.

I've always been interested in the other side, so to speak, of the photographs I've found. There's a dialogue between the photographer and the subject and the viewer and the image that will go on forever. The image itself doesn't possess the primacy of this relationship and the context it lends.

vernacular moments

What can you do with moments that shouldn't have been moments in the first place? What does it mean now that that hazy little guy and that acre of white wall are monuments?

super sleuthin'

Front

Back

This last image raises some issues that I think are pretty central to the discussion of found photos. I hadn't read the back of this image carefully before but it could give the full name of the woman in this picture. I almost feel like I'm learning too much now. The fact that I can talk about them, try to analyze them, and fall in a weird kind of love with the characters I see in pictures makes it easy to forget that these are real people and these are isolated, sometimes accidental views into their lives that I've stumbled upon.

I think the fact that the information here isn't explicit is what I'm uncomfortable with. "Annette and Rochay" is written on the back of the other image. I found the photos in the same box. The name 'Annette' appears on the back of another image and I assume that it's her son pictured on the front. It may be logical that the little boy is a slightly older 'Rochay' but there's still a level of faith involved here and a long thread of my own assumptions.

Is the viewing of a found photograph always uninvited?

This post on one of my favorite blogs, Big Happy Funhouse, goes into another, seedier aspect of this issue. What responsibility to people's privacy does a collector of found photographs have?

Magic

Where the unicorns at?

Showdown

other items

Found in a book at a sidewalk sale, did not buy the book


Found at the zoo, probably by the elephants. I like to think of it as a wonderful incantation.


Ephemera Society

Going

camping for the weekend, be back Monday, no posts until then,

see y'all!

swingset

The shadows and the photographer's distance. The question of whether these two people know eachother or whether the light is more important than the child. The little shoe and little pointed foot towards which the shadow reaches. These are the reasons I am attracted to this picture.

What else does this image describe? It has a very mysterious visual atmosphere and tenor. It's something about the apparent time of day it was taken, when shadows are long and everything white glows in the strangest and most ineffable way.

and by the way, it seems obvious but I had just never considered it before, it appears quite simple, it's possible to calculate the height of a thing by the length of its shadow. It'd blow my mind if someone was able to reconstruct the scene in the photo with... math, maybe:

Length of Shadow = Height of building/tangent(sun altitude)

(HeightBetweenThePoints(onYaxis)*sin(sunangle)) / sin(90 - sunangle)

finding online

Here's an issue: can you "find" photographs or other ephemera online in the same way you can offline? A photograph is already distanced from temporal issues in such a way that I wonder what that extra step out of the world does to an image. Often there's more description to an image online, if only, in this case "Great shot of Dad enjoying a beer in Germany, circa 1958. " though there's still enough ambiguity contained in that so as not to stifle the personal speculation that adds a wonderful richness to the photograph. Though, while there's one is not hindered from developing a unique narrative surrounding the picture the context of the find is removed.

Flickr will never be a dusty attic, I guess, but maybe there's something else to it. Maybe the sharer's impulse to share? Or the implications of putting an image on the web, the fact that now, no matter what, it will always be there? In that respect maybe posting old and new photographs online holds exactly the same import as physically collecting them, the internet memorializes these subjective moments in a way, really, that no collection ever could.

Anyhow, there's a link above to the original posting of the above image and Here's another link to the wonderful set it belongs to. If anyone has any other great online finds, I'd love to see them, send 'em my way.

More families

I chose this photo because of the tender look in the subject's eye. The lean forward, the delicate and poisedly half full mug, the ashtray. Can this image say anything other than family? There's deep familiarity here but also an almost uncanny staging and an element of transition in the emptiness of the scene.

This image seems honest, I chose it at the Broadway Antique Market in Chicago because it seemed so bright and earnest. It's shiny. But, especially in comparison to the snapshot of "Annette and Rochay" It seems calculated. In the other picture you're looking into a little window, the colors are carelessly faded. You get that here too in a different way though both share a sense of being forgotten. The window here is created by the photographer and the relationship between the picture-taker and the woman we see. It's so misty.

middleamerica

yar har har. I've always loved this one.

Family

The above images (the front and back of one photograph) are from an epic find. A whole box of photographs. You'll see a lot of this family, how they all lived in the early through late eighties in Milwaukee, WI. There are wedding pictures, prom, friends, babies. Besides all of the pictures there were letters, cards, bags of old prescription bottles, shoes, a pair of ice skates, a puppet. It was all there one day by the side of the road. I passed by it on my way home at night and gathered up as many photos as I could by flashlight. It rained the next day and then it was all gone.

USA

I see the ‘American Dream’ reflected strongly in a lot of the photographs I find, particularly in these ones. There’s the early morning, pinkish light on the two men in the first, the neatly barren lawn in the second, that obvious landmark. There’s something about being a keeper of these photographs too that relates to this idea for me. I feel that the Dream is about moving forward and progress. It's about the holiness of place and the even holierness of the quest for place. The photograph is proof! You don’t need to take a picture of it to know you’ve seen the Washington monument but maybe you need that record, that evidence not only of your presence but of your own hand in doing the taking. Do you think there’s a place in the paradigm of the American Dream for remembering? How does it fit? Powerful people aren’t often tourists. Why is the travel photo the particular domain of the middle class? Or is it at all?

And isn't that pink T-shirt in the last photo and the posture of the two men in the first one or the crispness of the ponchoed fella's pants just so beautiful?

Lemme introduce a little of what I'm getting at here.

I have to say. These scans don’t cut it. They’re nothing like the thrill of opening up an album in a thrift store or a dumpster or chasing a piece of paper down the street, or wiping mud and dusting dirt from one lying on the corner; the images here aren’t even like pawing through an inexplicably grimy bin of photographs at an antique store, finding just the right one and shelling out the dough (a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar). That’s what’s so difficult about them, and why they’ve become a strange burden to me. I feel responsible for the lives represented here even while I’m not sure there are lives represented at all. I wonder if it's naive to assume that such brief moments really do offer any real portrait of the time, place, memory, and mark they portray.

The good ones are sensitive. They’re are imbued with the subjectivity of framing, subject, and lighting as well as the romance of their finding and their distance (in time, place, and character) to my own life. I really love them. Big time. I’ll show them to anyone who asks or who doesn’t. I’ll pull out boxes and folders and spread them out on my bed or the living room floor. I’ll explain how I found them and everytime I find a new one I’ll think “This is it, I’ve finally found the only one I ever could. This is the mother lode, for real.”

They’re personal. I don’t want to filter them through other media. I don’t want to exploit them. But, part of the burden is that I might be the only person who holds what these photographs hold. Part of the burden is an idea of memory as a memorial. That said, and getting back to the bit about the scans, If you want to see these in real life, to hold them and notice the things about them that make them worthwhile, to speculate and drink a cup of something at my house, let’s do it. The kitchen table can be cleared as a stage anytime and whatever’s on the living room floor can be kicked away.

Sara