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A collection of the recent works by my favorite photographer(s) of all. Bill Owens, "We're really happy. Our kids are healthy, we eat good food and we have a really nice home." They look like my mom and dad, as they once were. My parents would never have settled for a house with a transformer in the backyard, though. Bill Owens, "I get a lot of compliments on the front room wall. I like Italian Syrocco floral designs over the mantle. It goes well with the Palos Verde rock fireplace." Another shock of recognition, albeit one more trivial: we had the very same fireplace grille for our very fake living room fireplace. I know you can't see it from the .jpg, but I have Suburbia and I can tell that's the same pattern of geometric holes that I spent about five minutes of my childhood staring at, wondering if it was supposed to represent a holly bush pattern or not. If you were born after 1980, you may (or may not) find it curious that while all the interiors in Owens' Suburbia are dated, they rarely reach the heights of aesthetic piggery you find in James Lilek's Interior Desecrators site. The interiors here are considerably sparer, usually just white walls (or maybe wood paneling) with a liberal splash of tacky ornament (or maybe some art). I presume the reason for the comparative restraint is because these are pictures of a new houses in a new suburb, owned by people who just spent an awful lot of money and can't afford to spend much more on overstuffed sofas and Italian tile and matching refrigerators and chintz. (Indeed, my own family only started on serious interior redecoration after living in our Long Island house for about ten years.) So, a theory, then why '70's residential interiors were so phenomenally tacky: it was the era when all those boomers, en masse, finally became financially stable enough to redecorate their suburban homes. They were sick of spare interiors because they reminded them of their days when they were young and financially immature and couldn't afford much decoration -- so they fled to the opposite direction and covered every square inch with bric-a-brac and pattern. Add the influence of hippy style and you've got hellish interior eye-wrench. Andreas Gursky It doesn't look as if Gursky tries for significance. Seems to me that what he simply (but what is ever simple?) wants to take positively enormous photographs where detail is never sacrificed for the sake of scale. But what kinds of imagery lend itself well to that aim? Large human endeavours where you can't help but reflect on the crushing forces of History vs. the powerlessness of the individual -- concerts, sporting events, stock exchanges, urban buildings, and so on. So without meaning to, for all their Germanic post-everything blankness, these photos take on the middlebrow whiff of this-is-the-way-we-live-now and Koyaanisqatsi and Time Magazine commercial montages and Kid A and all sorts of other sorts of artistic BIG SUMMATIONS. But I don't mind. William Eggleston, The Democratic Forest These photographs are luminously underwhelming. His bad-ass mastery of color is undeniable, but these images occupy a curious nowhere. They eschew statement, yet aren't abstractions. You can't get metaphysical about them at all. This is what I would imagine a dérive through any well-populated region of America would be like: image after image of those forgotten spaces where you can feel a nullity stronger than any happiness. Big Star fans might recognize this one. Simon Schama, A History of Britain (TV Series) I'm going to assume that in dramatizing some of Britain's past warfare, the producers of the show relied on a British culture of historical re-enactment, just as American documentaries and movies make do with American Civil or Revolutionary War re-enactors. When I think of contemporary Britons, I think of a multicultural mix of folk. Yet all the warriors in these re-enactments are ruddy-faced white guys. Sure, maybe men of Pakistani or African descent didn't fight in English armies against the Welsh or the Scots. Still...if a Pakistani gent wanted to join in re-enactments of these Medieval battles, would he be turned away? Would his fellow Caucasian re-enactors believe his skin color renders his presence an historical inaccuracy -- or worse -- regardless of how "English" (how patriotic, how native-born, how whatever) he was? |
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