MoCP Newsletter

February 5, 2007

NEWS AND NOTES

SAVE THE DATE!

APRIL 13, 2007
Join us on April 13, 2007 for Synched, our upcoming spring benefit that supports the museum’s unparalleled public programming. The party will include the opening of our spring exhibition Barbara Probst: Exposures and will be rounded out by great food and entertainment, plus a live and silent auction of internationally acclaimed photography.

COMING SOON!
MOCP’S 2007 FINE PRINT PROGRAM
Our Fine Print Program offers an opportunity to collect contemporary photographs by internationally recognized artists while supporting the Museum of Contemporary Photography. The 2007 artists include Tim Davis, Ben Gest, Alice Hargrave, Misty Keasler, Sarah Pickering, and Mark Ruwedel. Prints will be available in the coming months. Keep checking our online shop for updates and current prints, or contact Michal Raz-Russo with any questions.

AN INTERVIEW WITH MISTY KEASLER

Columbia College Chicago alumna Misty Keasler’s series Love Hotels, on view now at MoCP and published by Chronicle Books in 2006, documents the uniquely Japanese cultural phenomenon of “love hotels,” hourly rooms rented by couples for amorous liaisons, exposing these peculiar, kitschy, private-in-public spaces with unruffled objectivity.

Keasler gave a lecture about her work on January 25, 2007 to a packed Ferguson Hall at Columbia. She talked about the Love Hotels series as well as other bodies of work, including her work documenting Russian orphanages; the massive Guatemala City dump and the people who live within it; photographs of her native East Texas; Chinese amusement parks; and a recent trip to the Philippines to photograph garbage dumps.

MoCP Web Administrator Audrey Michelle Mast conducted this interview via email with Misty Keasler in January 2007.

MoCP: How does the response of Japanese audiences differ with other audiences? You mentioned the “subway car room” (a love hotel theme room decorated to look like a train car) being particularly sensitive in light of the safety of Japanese women on subways. [In recent years there has been a serious problem in Tokyo with male passengers groping women in crowded subway cars; this led to the establishment of women-only train cars during rush hours]. Are there any other cultural reactions you didn’t first expect?

MK: Well, the work hasn’t been seen by a large Japanese audience (at least not one that I am aware of). I do know that some things take on a different light with cultural context, like the subway car room. The cover of the book is a Tanuki bathtub - the tanuki being a mythological Japanese character that looks like a cross between a beaver and a dog with largely exaggerated testicles. You can find forms of Tanuki all over Japan, from garden statues to contemporary art. That image would be highly recognizable and readable to a Japanese audience, as would all the karaoke machines embedded into headboards that western audiences would likely miss. On the other hand, there is an image in the MoCP show of a bondage cross - which from a western viewpoint is a very highly charged image, even a bit dark. But in Japan, the Christian cross carries almost no value other than being an unnamed western shape. I encountered and photographed several of these crosses in rooms, but only wanted to include one in the overall body of work, since it carries so much more weight here and almost none in context.

Taxidermy Showroom, 2003

MoCP: How do these pictures relate to your body of work, which includes documentary photography of Russian orphanages, the Guatemala City dump, and East Texas? How is your process or your formal choices different? Similar?

MK: I think (I hope) my work has a very distinct feel to it, regardless of the subject matter, because I am drawn to shooting in available light even when it requires long time exposures with a square frame and with saturated colors. Ironically, the color palette within different bodies of work varies according to the subject. There is a lot of red and pinks throughout the love hotels while the dominant colors in the orphanages consist of greens, teals, and orange/pink. But the vision in my work stays the same, and I am interested in the charge found in rooms and in using rooms as descriptors of culture and elements within culture. And I am very particular with the framing of photographs. For a while, I even thought about making the orphanage work without any children at all, but I thought it might objectify a socially sensitive subject. In contrast to the orphan and dump work – which comes from a more dignified and heartfelt perspective – the love hotels are more playful, and a bit more withdrawn or cold in their analysis.

MoCP: In your talk you mentioned that the trajectory of your work has gone from an intense interest in portraiture to portraits of a different kind – of space that evokes human presence with visual clues. How did this evolution come about?

MK: I am just so drawn to rooms, and get really excited when I find amazing ones [that] for various reasons are not within the “norm” of my usual routine. I find this on my visits to see extended family in East Texas. I still make portraits of people, but I have come to think of the images of empty rooms as portraits that may even be more powerful than the people portraits. I also find that when I stare at a photograph of, say, my grandfather, I end up looking mostly at his eyes, his specific expression or gesture that may be a descriptor of where he was that day, or how comfortable/uncomfortable he was with the camera. But a photograph of his office becomes this descriptor of a part of his life inseparable from his time, lifestyle and economic class. The pairs of boots, guns lined up, and ball caps in the context of white walls full of framed documents, plastic shelves and an old metal desk are indicators of who he is, not just what he looks like or how he is in a very specific situation.

Spider Room, 2004

MoCP: In your talk, you described the rooms seen in Love Hotels as both “public and private,” and that ideally the love hotel customer has no interaction with hotel staff. Can you elaborate?

MK: I will clarify first by saying that there are some love hotels that do not work this way. But for the most part, the customers will only see staff when something is amiss (like a female American photographer walking in alone with lots of camera equipment).

Generally customers walk into a lobby with pictures of rooms (since most hotels will have themed rooms different from one another and varying in price). If a room is available it is lit from behind and if it is occupied the picture is dark. There is a button by the picture and after being pushed there is some sort of indicator system in place to guide the couple to the room (my favorite were blinking arrows). A computer system unlocks the room door. And since customers pay by the hour, some newer hotels have a system that locks customers in a room until they pay at a machine by the door or with pneumatic tubes that flow from the room to the hidden staff desk (Japan is a cash-heavy economy).

There is room service and small gifts for purchase (even costumes for rent) that arrive at the room, placed in a box inside of the wall near the room door with two panels – one that opens from the hall, and one that opens inside the room. Once the food or another item is placed in the box by staff from the hall and that panel closed, there is a knock on the door and the couple can open the panel from inside the room to retrieve the item without ever encountering another human. The strange thing to me is that the parking lots, entrances and hallways are heavily monitored with video but when walking through these spaces it feels like no one else is at the hotel.

MoCP: The lack of people in the love hotels is striking, yet the human energy in the rooms is palpable, especially in the photos of rooms that have not yet been “cleaned.” What were your reasons for wanting to photograph the “freshly used” rooms?

MK: Just because those rooms have even more visual clues as to the people who were there. There is a great imprint of their presence left in the rooms. Actually, my translator was horrified that I asked to shoot unclean rooms and wouldn’t translate the question at first. Culturally I was very out of line in asking this. But the Hotel Pamplona and Adonis were very good sports about the whole thing.

MoCP: You mentioned being fearless when behind the camera, such as when you photographed a cockfight in the Philippines. How does your camera change your interactions with people and the way you enter into situations?

MK: I think when people are involved with photographs I become much more intimate with them than when I am without the camera. I tend to fall in love with my human subjects, even if it is only for the duration of the shoot. I approach shooting them from a very sympathetic perspective, and want to remain sensitive to their situations, especially in light of the raw subjects I tend to choose. I probably overcompensate in this way but that’s just my makeup. In regards to something like the cockfight, I am desensitized to the violence because things are happening fast and I am focused on nailing the moment in film, on composition and on light. I did watch one fight there without shooting it when I was done and it made me sick to my stomach. So I think it really varies by subject matter.

High School Room with Uniform, 2005

MoCP: What’s next? Where would you love to travel next, either for work or pleasure or both?

MK: I fully consider traveling to make photographs pleasure trips, but I am hoping to photograph a garbage dump in Africa in the first part of the year as a continuation of the work I have done on the subject in Guatemala and the Philippines. Hopefully that work will find its way into the next book (I say that with my fingers crossed).

Love Hotels is on view at MoCP through April 4, 2007. In 2003, Misty received the 2003 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, was named by Photo District News as one of the “25 under 25 up-and-coming American photographers” in 2003, and was made an artist in residence at University of Dallas, Texas in 2005.

Love Hotels is on view at the MoCP through April 4, 2007. In 2003, Misty Keasler received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and was named one of the “25 under 25 up-and-coming American photographers” by Photo District News. She served as an artist in residence at University of Dallas, Texas in 2005. Keasler’s work has been collected by the MoCP, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Kiyasoto Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan. She lives and works in Dallas, Texas.

TECHNICAL NOTES

WHAT IS PHOTOGRAM?

Untitled, from Recto Verso

Several of the images currently on view at the MoCP in Robert Heinecken: Sex and Food a Memorial Exhibition are photograms. A photogram is a photographic print made by placing something opaque or transparent on top of a piece of photographic paper, exposing it with light from above, and chemically processing the paper. It is a form of “camera-less photography.”

The term was invented by the photographer/surrealist Man Ray in the 1930s, though 19th century photographers, such as William Henry Fox Talbot (who called his prints of leaves and lace “photogenic drawings”) and Anna Atkins (whose images of botanical specimens were printed in the first-ever photography book), also used the technique.

Heinecken made the images in his Recto/Verso series by using pages torn out of magazines as a sort of paper negative. When placed directly on top of a piece of Cibachrome (color positive) paper and exposed to light, both sides of the magazine page appear as one image.

Additional reading:
http://www.photograms.org/
http://www.lesrudnickphotography.com/bio.php

ONES TO WATCH

With Rod Slemmons

Greg Stimac, recent Columbia College Chicago graduate, has been working on a few projects that are very much worth noting. The first involves placing a camera on a tripod in front of the shooting stands in various rifle ranges around the country.

The camera is fired remotely as the sports people shoot right by it—usually at the moment of discharge, so as to get both the ejecting shell casing and the muzzle smoke. The resulting images communicate a lot about why people enjoy this sport, and occasionally how their spouses, partners and kids don’t. The second involves the much less scary, but equally noisy, documentation of another common weekend activity—mowing the lawn, mostly with power mowers. What is this thing we have about making noise during our time off?

Stimac’s projects, which take him on trips across the country, are, at their core, concerned with trying to identify Americans by behavior rather than statistics or social theory. What do we look like while we are being identified as we, the people? In this sense he is following Diane Arbus’s lead, and Walker Evans before her, mistrusting abstract notions of “normal.” How do lethal weapons and artificial nature factor in to our political and moral judgments of the rest of the world? Stimac’s series are more complicated than they seem.

Greg Stimac was born in 1976 in Euclid, Ohio. In 2005, Columbia College Chicago awarded him a BA in photography, an Albert P. Weisman Memorial Fellowship, and a Presidential Purchase Award. His photographs have been exhibited at Bucket Rider Gallery, Chicago; Select Media Fest 04, Iron Studios, Chicago; Crocker Kingsley Biennial Art Exhibition, Crocker Art Museum Sacramento, California; and at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in the 2006 exhibition In Sight. Stimac lives in Chicago.

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