Collected Visions

In a similar vein as the family ancestry online photo archives, artist Lorie Novak created Collected Visions, a web-based art piece on family photography and shared cultural histories as explored through snapshots. Lorie was my teacher at NYU and is an amazing artist, mentor, and friend.

From the Collected Visions website:

"The concept for Collected Visions grew out of the photographs and installations Lorie Novak has been creating since the early 1980s. She uses family snapshots and images from the media to explore the relationships between personal and collective memory. Lorie Novak curates the exhibitions in the CV Gallery and maintains the CV Museum. Because the concept of "truth" is a complicated one, the ownership of the snapshots is not identified beyond what is written in the essays. The majority of submitted stories are posted--the goal of the site is to be a place of diverse voices."

Visit Collected Visions here.

Submit images and essays to Collected Visions here.

Old Family Photos

There are many resources online for people to submit their old family photos for the main purposes of historical reference and family ancestry. While the web design of this particular site leaves a lot to be desired, it is a great resource of old family photography searchable by surnames, school names, categories (there's a section just for circus photos!), and a link to help people search for their long-lost relatives.

A Year of Lex - my vote for the best new baby book

Two very creative first-time parents made this Youtube video of their baby's first year. I thought it was a clever take on a baby book. And yeah, so what if it made me cry happy tears.

Tina Barney

"What people see in my pictures comes from the fact that I care very much about my subjects, and know the environment, the surroundings, and the lifestyle because it's my life. I don't think anyone else could do quite what I do."

"Since I have a view camera, that takes a certain amount of planning. The first step is always to find my vantage point, where i stand, which designates my attitude about the situation...The amount of courage I have in directing people depends on who I'm photographing."

"Metaphorically, [the photographs] might be my way of saying, 'Everything looks fine here, but be careful because it all could crumble.' "

"I do have my own palette. I give credit to my mother, who was a model and is an interior decorator. She has an extraordinary sense of color, and a lot of the interiors in my photographs happen to have been done by her."

"It seems to me that there are viewers out there who actually care about the people in my pictures. They definitely can relate to them, and I love that idea."

"I love it when people call the subjects by their first names, like soap opera stars or movie stars, and that they realize how much I care about them- also, that they might see what is important to me, which is how these people get along with each other. It's not the lifestyle and the interiors and those kinds of small things that matter."

"That's really my primary concern - to investigate how one person treats another...I also want to show them how I feel about them."

-All quotes by Tina Barney from the Smithsonian Series book Friends and Relations: Photographs by Tina Barney, 1991.

Larry Mann by Sally Mann

Originally published in The New Yorker's Sept. 21, 2009 issue:

Family of Mann by Vince Aletti

"Although Sally Mann’s husband, Larry, made occasional appearances in “Immediate Family,” the photographs that made her famous, he played a supporting role to the three uninhibited children cavorting at center stage. But he’s the sole focus of Mann’s new show at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery—a series of nude studies that regard the strength and fragility of the aging male body with extraordinary tenderness. “I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal,” Mann writes. The process may be intimate and collaborative, but the pictures are hers alone. Larry’s head is rarely seen; it’s his body that Sally details bit by bit, in photographs that look like nineteenth-century relics. She exaggerates the imperfections of the antique glass-plate process until the surfaces of her images suggest flayed, eroded, or pockmarked flesh. Larry’s body, though worn down by muscular dystrophy, remains sturdy and broad. Appearing in fragments, he’s as magnificent as shards of Greek statuary, and all the more heroic for his vulnerability."

I had the pleasure of meeting Sally and Larry Mann at their Three Graces farm in Virginia in 2003. I was there as a photo assistant helping out my then boss Bruce Davidson who was on assignment from Newsweek to shoot a portrait of Mrs. Mann. Upon our arrival, Larry rode up to us on horseback as Sally made her way from the house surrounded by greyhounds. After the shoot, they cooked us dinner and we sat out on their porch eating venison and drinking what even what my uncultured 23-year-old palate could tell was really good wine. They are a magical couple, and I'll always be grateful I got to tag along on that hot summer day.

Portrait of Larry by Sally Mann from 1977

Playing with Pictures: Victorian Photocollage

On view now through May 9th at the Met is a small, but fascinating show of Victorian era photocollage called "Playing with Pictures."

Made in England during the 1860s-1870s, this collection of album pages and watercolor paintings explores mixed media in surreal collages. The work was produced almost exclusively by women of the aristocracy using cut-up carte de visite images of family and friends. Their playful, subversive melding of painting, drawing, and photography into surrealist scenes predates the avant-garde art scene by decades (Siegel 13).

This work has been rarely exhibited or appreciated, having suffered from "the double indignity of being the product of both industrial photography and feminine craft" ( Siegel 14). Only recently has Victorian photocollage received attention by art historians interested in vernacular photography and feminist scholars seeking to recognize female artists "peripheral to art history" (Siegel 14).

These images contain elements that have become central issues in the evolution of photography: the cut-out figures from various sittings are a break from the one-point perspective of Renaissance paintings (Siegel 32); in placing these figures into imaginary scenes, the tableau vivant approach to photography is referenced (Weiss 37); not to mention the very act of cutting and pasting as a precursor to Photoshop. I love how these photocollages of the Victorian era are dealing with all these issues that went on to become part of the modernist movement, yet their makers' intentions were much more to do with wit and whimsy. "In Victorian albums, photographs were manipulated not for artistic purpose, but for the pleasurable and empowering strategy of refusing to deal with meaning seriously, in favor of the delights of play" (Di Bello 60).

Works Cited:

Di Bello, Patrizia. "Photocollage, Fun, and Flirtations." Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.

Siegel, Elizabeth. "Society Cutups." Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.

Weiss, Marta. "The Page as Stage." Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.

Photographer George Rippon on Family

Family from George Rippon on Vimeo.

Don't miss at 4:55 for the BBC clip of Larry Sultan and his father discussing "Pictures from Home."