Guggenheim Essay
My work is defined by geographies found and felt. I am awake to places where many have loved and died, many have fought for and believed in something; territories with complex histories of struggle, contentious realities, and a sense of peace tinged with tragedy. I am drawn to make photographs in small nations that have had to stand up against ancient conflicts that are to this day stamped into the landscape, into the bodies and faces of inhabitants. In this quest for place I have made myself at home as a perpetual, emotional tourist. Perhaps it is my immigrant beginning that has trained me to adapt like a chameleon on the run, or the larger histories of the places I work that are in part my own, an overwhelming sense of relation takes over and quite quickly the place is running through my veins. Ostensibly I’m the outsider but my photographic point of view takes root on the inside. In this way I hope my work allows the viewer a mysterious familiarity, a portal into an actual geography that soon becomes a vast landscape of the mind.
I have photographed in places we know from the comfort of the living room couch—sites of travel photography’s tropes and clichés. Russia, Israel, Cuba, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (which feels through the camera like its own nation state), are all seen without having to visit. My work has aimed to peel back the over described surface image and look at the deeper metaphysical forces at play. I want to debunk the expectation of place and see it askance. What’s beneath the cliché image? For me it’s not knowing what I am looking for, but being prepared to see it with a visual hunger for newness. My vision is informed by an emotional and philosophical probing. What I do not understand about oppression, discrimination, cruelty, self-destruction, and war, stands before me like a riddle and I want to fold it into a picture that hangs heavy like a question mark. What I find confirmed about love, piety, forgiveness, and peace, I want to shine upon these same pictures. I believe if an image holds these opposing forces, it can invite infinite interpretations. Through photographs I contemplate the individual’s tie to his/her land, how the sense of home is disrupted and reclaimed through migration, and the fine line between freedom and captivity. While the photographs are made in specific locations, they transcend country lines, suggesting open-ended stories about the many faces of a universal life force.
My first monograph, One to Nothing (2011) was photographed in Israel. I saw this mythological site of origin against the dusty banality of the current day. The photographs, made in a loose and situational manner—imbue street (and desert) photography with a symbolic undertone. The images ask how the past swallows up the present and why a holy place is ridden with eternal violence and conflict. The title, like the score of a sports match, indicates that there is a winner and a loser—Cain and Able; the Arabs and the Jews; the past and the present—two sides clenched in never ending competition, one meager point marking the unidentified victor. The title, like the imagery, flips into an existential reading— alluding to a Biblical beginning as well as an apocalyptic end: the first man created and the last man left standing on a deserted earth. Either reading of the work calls upon freedom and fear of the abyss, a game of the sublime. The photographs are sandy, hot to the eye, many times with faceless bodies reaching, climbing, running, as if fighting against invisible physics.
My second monograph Island in my Mind (2015), pushes against the commonly held image of Cuba as a preserved colorful playground. Many photographs are steeped in darkness like visions of inferno, punctuated by primary colors and piercing light like fleeting views of an out of reach Eden. A paradise island, which the inhabitants are not permitted to leave, quickly becomes a prison. A country separated from others by crystal green water leaves its inhabitants in a state of naïve isolation, reduces them to the status of children forever fantasizing about what lies beyond the waves. The colors and music that are to a visitor’s eye full of gaiety are seen as a trompe d’oeil, a siren’s call. I am photographing quickly, with a semi-automatic medium format film camera that allows for play and wonder, echoing my own childhood under a communist regime, this time in a tropical setting. I return to photographing animals as stand-ins often times more emotive than the humans in my photographs, evoking questions of free will.
Just like it’s difficult to tell that Israel and Cuba are the sites of the two projects mentioned above, the geography of my ongoing project In Plain Air (2011 – present) is even more slippery. Although the images seem to have been taken in distant and disparate locations, they are all made within a mile radius. I saw Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the quintessential melting pot mecca shared by Americans of every international background, like a kaleidoscope location, a shifting stage set. Circling around the park is like travelling to far lands. I marveled at the way the landscape transforms to meld to its visitors’ projection of their own geographies, transforming their immediate environment into one they’ve brought along. For this reason alone, for the adaptability of its landscape, this park is the true definition of paradise and a vision of original American ideals of equality and acceptance. The photographs are made slowly, with a larger camera, like a painting portrait session shaped by the fickle magic that lies between people and their setting.
Recently I was invited to show work in the Talking Pictures exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was conceived as a set of visual dialogues between pairs of artists. My collaborator Manjari Sharma and I have 122 I-phone photographs on view—61 photographs by each of us. By serendipitous coincidence, at the end of the allotted five month exchange, both of us had delivered a baby—my first child and Manjari’s second. The themes of pregnancy and the election, which also fell within this time, are echoed in our conversation. The project opened my eyes to other possibilities, new paths to follow. The flexibility and play inherent in photographing with the I-phone holds many possibilities for expanding my visual language. Melding the external and intimate by combining photographs of the world at large with those made at home feels very exciting, as a new realm of the socio-personal. The fabric of my everyday life was imbued with metaphoric potential to reflect a larger narrative. And lastly and most importantly, the anticipation and experience of childbirth changed me so radically: the world looks and feels different and I think my future work should reflect this in ways I’m eager to explore.
As such, there are ten images in my application that represent the project Mountain Black Heart (2015 – present) that I would like to propose for your consideration and continue with your support. This is the early phase of a project started over the course of three trips through the countries of former Yugoslavia. I am fascinated by and eager to work in this region and know that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible for me there. I see this as a place that has ridden the roller coaster of history—shortchanged and trampled yet carrying on with vitality, intensity, and grace. The currently developing reality here is additionally complex, shaped by contrasting religions and cultures, and immense demographic shifts, affected by waves of migration, globalization, and urbanization. As Rebecca West said in her epic 1940’s travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, “I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”
I want to explore the mosaic cultural identity of a place that was whole but violently shattered into parts, each piece a separate nation claiming and gripping onto its own sense of self. Due to Yugoslavia’s Slavic culture and historical connections to the Socialist bloc, I feel a poignant connection to a place that has been largely off the radar of Western visual registry since the end of the Balkan wars. I am working in a photographic no-man’s land, and sense here the freedom to write my own photographic language. I want to continue photographing according to my practice—skirting the documentary and harnessing the subjective—as well as call upon things learned in previous projects. The surprising formal flexibility and invisibility and ubiquity of the cell phone camera interests me enormously and allows for both a fair description as well as the potential for a surrealistic image. I’d like to blend various photographic tools in this work to further shift perspectives.
Having experienced the mystery, violence, pain, wonder, and beauty with which life is created and brought out to see the sun, I want to make photographs of the unshakable life force and humanity I have met in this place. I have photographed refugees in makeshift camps, mountain monasteries, stray dogs, village musicians, families living under bridges, disappearing agrarian villages, and more. While I have cast a wide net, my focus would narrow as I spend considerably more time in this region. I would like to shape a personal portrait of a place that feels new yet familiar. And although I describe the place as a journalist might, I hope you see from my earlier work that I am unfaithful to factual realism. I envision this project as a deeply involving and important opportunity to reflect on the nature of a place, the energy of a people, to transcend descriptive reality, and to channel the wildness of the Balkans spirit in imagery that has a mystical and metaphysical charge.
Thank you very much for your attention.
My work is defined by geographies found and felt. I am awake to places where many have loved and died, many have fought for and believed in something; territories with complex histories of struggle, contentious realities, and a sense of peace tinged with tragedy. I am drawn to make photographs in small nations that have had to stand up against ancient conflicts that are to this day stamped into the landscape, into the bodies and faces of inhabitants. In this quest for place I have made myself at home as a perpetual, emotional tourist. Perhaps it is my immigrant beginning that has trained me to adapt like a chameleon on the run, or the larger histories of the places I work that are in part my own, an overwhelming sense of relation takes over and quite quickly the place is running through my veins. Ostensibly I’m the outsider but my photographic point of view takes root on the inside. In this way I hope my work allows the viewer a mysterious familiarity, a portal into an actual geography that soon becomes a vast landscape of the mind.
I have photographed in places we know from the comfort of the living room couch—sites of travel photography’s tropes and clichés. Russia, Israel, Cuba, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (which feels through the camera like its own nation state), are all seen without having to visit. My work has aimed to peel back the over described surface image and look at the deeper metaphysical forces at play. I want to debunk the expectation of place and see it askance. What’s beneath the cliché image? For me it’s not knowing what I am looking for, but being prepared to see it with a visual hunger for newness. My vision is informed by an emotional and philosophical probing. What I do not understand about oppression, discrimination, cruelty, self-destruction, and war, stands before me like a riddle and I want to fold it into a picture that hangs heavy like a question mark. What I find confirmed about love, piety, forgiveness, and peace, I want to shine upon these same pictures. I believe if an image holds these opposing forces, it can invite infinite interpretations. Through photographs I contemplate the individual’s tie to his/her land, how the sense of home is disrupted and reclaimed through migration, and the fine line between freedom and captivity. While the photographs are made in specific locations, they transcend country lines, suggesting open-ended stories about the many faces of a universal life force.
My first monograph, One to Nothing (2011) was photographed in Israel. I saw this mythological site of origin against the dusty banality of the current day. The photographs, made in a loose and situational manner—imbue street (and desert) photography with a symbolic undertone. The images ask how the past swallows up the present and why a holy place is ridden with eternal violence and conflict. The title, like the score of a sports match, indicates that there is a winner and a loser—Cain and Able; the Arabs and the Jews; the past and the present—two sides clenched in never ending competition, one meager point marking the unidentified victor. The title, like the imagery, flips into an existential reading— alluding to a Biblical beginning as well as an apocalyptic end: the first man created and the last man left standing on a deserted earth. Either reading of the work calls upon freedom and fear of the abyss, a game of the sublime. The photographs are sandy, hot to the eye, many times with faceless bodies reaching, climbing, running, as if fighting against invisible physics.
My second monograph Island in my Mind (2015), pushes against the commonly held image of Cuba as a preserved colorful playground. Many photographs are steeped in darkness like visions of inferno, punctuated by primary colors and piercing light like fleeting views of an out of reach Eden. A paradise island, which the inhabitants are not permitted to leave, quickly becomes a prison. A country separated from others by crystal green water leaves its inhabitants in a state of naïve isolation, reduces them to the status of children forever fantasizing about what lies beyond the waves. The colors and music that are to a visitor’s eye full of gaiety are seen as a trompe d’oeil, a siren’s call. I am photographing quickly, with a semi-automatic medium format film camera that allows for play and wonder, echoing my own childhood under a communist regime, this time in a tropical setting. I return to photographing animals as stand-ins often times more emotive than the humans in my photographs, evoking questions of free will.
Just like it’s difficult to tell that Israel and Cuba are the sites of the two projects mentioned above, the geography of my ongoing project In Plain Air (2011 – present) is even more slippery. Although the images seem to have been taken in distant and disparate locations, they are all made within a mile radius. I saw Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the quintessential melting pot mecca shared by Americans of every international background, like a kaleidoscope location, a shifting stage set. Circling around the park is like travelling to far lands. I marveled at the way the landscape transforms to meld to its visitors’ projection of their own geographies, transforming their immediate environment into one they’ve brought along. For this reason alone, for the adaptability of its landscape, this park is the true definition of paradise and a vision of original American ideals of equality and acceptance. The photographs are made slowly, with a larger camera, like a painting portrait session shaped by the fickle magic that lies between people and their setting.
Recently I was invited to show work in the Talking Pictures exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was conceived as a set of visual dialogues between pairs of artists. My collaborator Manjari Sharma and I have 122 I-phone photographs on view—61 photographs by each of us. By serendipitous coincidence, at the end of the allotted five month exchange, both of us had delivered a baby—my first child and Manjari’s second. The themes of pregnancy and the election, which also fell within this time, are echoed in our conversation. The project opened my eyes to other possibilities, new paths to follow. The flexibility and play inherent in photographing with the I-phone holds many possibilities for expanding my visual language. Melding the external and intimate by combining photographs of the world at large with those made at home feels very exciting, as a new realm of the socio-personal. The fabric of my everyday life was imbued with metaphoric potential to reflect a larger narrative. And lastly and most importantly, the anticipation and experience of childbirth changed me so radically: the world looks and feels different and I think my future work should reflect this in ways I’m eager to explore.
As such, there are ten images in my application that represent the project Mountain Black Heart (2015 – present) that I would like to propose for your consideration and continue with your support. This is the early phase of a project started over the course of three trips through the countries of former Yugoslavia. I am fascinated by and eager to work in this region and know that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible for me there. I see this as a place that has ridden the roller coaster of history—shortchanged and trampled yet carrying on with vitality, intensity, and grace. The currently developing reality here is additionally complex, shaped by contrasting religions and cultures, and immense demographic shifts, affected by waves of migration, globalization, and urbanization. As Rebecca West said in her epic 1940’s travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, “I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.”
I want to explore the mosaic cultural identity of a place that was whole but violently shattered into parts, each piece a separate nation claiming and gripping onto its own sense of self. Due to Yugoslavia’s Slavic culture and historical connections to the Socialist bloc, I feel a poignant connection to a place that has been largely off the radar of Western visual registry since the end of the Balkan wars. I am working in a photographic no-man’s land, and sense here the freedom to write my own photographic language. I want to continue photographing according to my practice—skirting the documentary and harnessing the subjective—as well as call upon things learned in previous projects. The surprising formal flexibility and invisibility and ubiquity of the cell phone camera interests me enormously and allows for both a fair description as well as the potential for a surrealistic image. I’d like to blend various photographic tools in this work to further shift perspectives.
Having experienced the mystery, violence, pain, wonder, and beauty with which life is created and brought out to see the sun, I want to make photographs of the unshakable life force and humanity I have met in this place. I have photographed refugees in makeshift camps, mountain monasteries, stray dogs, village musicians, families living under bridges, disappearing agrarian villages, and more. While I have cast a wide net, my focus would narrow as I spend considerably more time in this region. I would like to shape a personal portrait of a place that feels new yet familiar. And although I describe the place as a journalist might, I hope you see from my earlier work that I am unfaithful to factual realism. I envision this project as a deeply involving and important opportunity to reflect on the nature of a place, the energy of a people, to transcend descriptive reality, and to channel the wildness of the Balkans spirit in imagery that has a mystical and metaphysical charge.
Thank you very much for your attention.