Welcome to Photoconceptualism,
the final talk of a two-part roundtable series
here at the MCA, generously supported by the
Terra Foundation for American Art.
My name is Lauren Fulton and I'm a curatorial
research fellow here at the museum.
For the past seven months,
I've been organizing an exhibition
about the development of contemporary 
conceptual photography
and core to this show is the work of Chicago-based photographer Kenneth Josephson,
who we're very happy to have here with us tonight.
An artist who I'm sure many of you are familiar
with, Josephson has, for over five decades,
scrutinized photography's inherent reproducibility
and circulation,
made use of a mass cultural archive of images,
and mastered self-reflective, often humorous,
devices.
He has also, arguably, had an aesthetic impact
extending well beyond Chicago,
as this forthcoming show will demonstrate.
In preparation for the exhibition, which will take place at the MCA as part of
the Terra Foundation's citywide 2018 Chicago 
Art and Design Initiative,
we approach tonight's panelists thinking that
they, together, could contribute
to an engaging discussion about the evolution of conceptual photography.
Much of their work, likewise, addresses concerns
shared by Josephson,
though conceptually and formally, their work occupies a wide spectrum.
For this conversation, moderated by MCA James
W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Michael Darling,
we will look at images of panelists' work, and consider some of the larger trends, developments,
and issues in conceptual photography,
and how these artists and historians contend with
and challenge legacies of conceptual art and
photography.
After the discussion, we'll open up the floor
for questions from the audience,
and following tonight's conversation, there will also be
a reception in Kanter Meeting Center
just to the right of the theater.
So, please do stick around and continue the
conversation over some wine and food.
And now, for some brief introductions.
With us tonight we have Jessica Labatte,
assistant professor of photography in the School of Art & Design at Northern Illinois University.
Labatte's work has been exhibited locally at Hyde Park Art Center, Adds Donna, and Golden Gallery,
and was featured in the 2013 MCA exhibition
Think First, Shoot Later.
Her work is also shown at the Museum of Fine Arts Saint Petersburg, Elmhurst Art Museum,
Higher Pictures and Humble Arts Foundation in New York, and Plug Projects in Kansas City.
In 2014, she was an artist in residence at
Light Work in Syracuse,
and last year was a resident at Latitude here in Chicago.
Labatte is locally represented by Western
Exhibitions.
Also, joining us is Adam Schreiber,
assistant professor in the department of Art, Media, 
and Design at DePaul University.
Schreiber is a founding member of the Austin-based
collective Lakes Were Rivers,
which has exhibited at the University of Texas
Harry Ransom Center,
and most recently at the Contemporary Austin.
Independently, his work has been included
in exhibitions at the Contemporary,
at the Museum of Contemporary Photography,
Higher Pictures in New York,
and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
He has had solo shows at Sasha Wolf Gallery 
in New York
and San Antonio's Linda Pace Foundation and Artpace.
Schreiber is a former artist in residence at Artpace,
and the recipient of a 2014 Graham Foundation Grant.
As I mentioned, Ken Josephson is also with
us this evening.
Josephson began teaching at the School of the 
Art Institute of Chicago in 1960,
where he was an instructor in the photo department
for over 35 years.
In 1963, he was a founding member of the Society
for Photographic Education
and the following year was included in the
groundbreaking exhibition The Photographer's Eye,
organized by the Museum of Modern Art.
His work is in collections worldwide, including
the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MCA Chicago,
the Museum of Modern Art San Francisco,
and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
He has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship,
and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.
He currently has a solo exhibition on view
at the Denver Art Museum
titled Encounters with the Universe.
Josephson is locally represented by Stephen
Daiter Gallery.
We're also excited to have with us Xaviera
Simmons, here from Brooklyn.
Simmons is an artist equally committed to exploring a variety of media with her practice,
including photography, video, performance,
sound, and installation art.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and
internationally,
with exhibitions and performances at the 
Museum of Modern Art,
MoMA PS1, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,
to name just a few.
Her works are in major museums and 
private collections,
and she is the recipient of numerous awards,
including a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Art Grants to Artists award
and a 2016 Louis Comfort Tiffany 
Memorial Foundation award.
Simmons has many upcoming projects in New
York, which include
exhibitions and performances at the Museum of Modern Art,
a curatorial project at the headquarters of
Deutsche Bank,
and a building-wide performance and installation
at the Kitchen.
She's represented by David Castillo Gallery
in Miami Beach.
We also have with us Blake Stimson, professor of 
art history in the School of Art & Art History
at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Stimson is the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation,
Citizen Warhol, and he is coeditor of five 
volumes that focus on
various junctures of art and political subjectivity.
Significant to the discussion tonight,
one of these coedited texts is an important anthology 
on conceptual art.
He is currently working on two books—
one to be titled Guilt as Form
that argues for a counter-genealogy of contemporary art
arising from the turmoil of 1968,
and Photography and God,
which focuses on the lost political aesthetic of photographer Paul Strand.
Stimson has contributed to numerous publications
including Art Journal, October, Oxford Art Journal, 
Tape Papers, and Philosophy and Photography,
as well as other journals focusing on photography.
So, now, without further ado, please join
me in welcoming our panelists.
Thank you, Lauren.
I just want to give a big thank-you to Lauren
for pulling this together
and helping to put together such an illustrious group of speakers up here tonight.
And Lauren's really been doing a fantastic job of shaping this show that she mentioned,
which, as she said, was inspired by 
Ken Josephson's work.
And I think we're just so lucky to have Ken
who's still living and working in Chicago,
and for me as well as a lot of other curators
on our team,
looking through his work over the years—
and you'll see images of all the artists on the panel sort of scrolling behind us—
but Ken's work just looks so incredibly fresh and relevant to so much of what's being made today,
and we just thought he'd be a great lynchpin to look at where photographic practices are today.
And Ken, I think maybe it's only proper to start with you,
although I'd love for all the panelists to, of course, feel free to ask each other questions
and keep this ping-ponging around.
But one thing that seems really striking about
your work, Ken,
through the years, even back to the fifties
—and there's some images, I think, up on the screen 
that go back that far
—is how your work seemed to, very early on, question ideas about photographic truth,
which is something that seems very common in any artist working with photography today.
Can you talk a little bit about that and how,
if that's a proper characterization of what you were doing then,
and if you, indeed, maybe even felt alone in the field in kind of pulling back the curtain
and showing that photography is quite subjective and
isn't quite as truthful as it might have seemed?
Yes.
Whoop. Sorry about that.
I think I got most of my thinking about that sort of thing
from studying history with Beaumont Newhall 
when I was at RIT.
And he—one of the people he would speak about and show images of
was [Eugéne] Atget, the Paris documentary
photographer.
And I was, at first, drawn to documentary
ideas and work related to that,
and while I was in Rochester at RIT, I did work 
dealing with a street
that was half skid row and half business—food products and things like that.
And I did a documentary study of that street,
which was very rewarding,
and then I went to the Institute of Design from there, after a year and a half or so.
And there, things were very much more open
to anything you wanted to do, as long as it "worked,"
in other words, if it was somewhat successful
visually and idea-wise.
And one thing Aaron Siskind, who was one of
my teachers there,
he talked about the photograph as an object,
and not just an illusionistic thing of reality—so that it bent, you know?
You could crumple it, or you could do all
kinds of things with it.
It wasn't just this illusion of photography.
And that set me thinking about—oh, for instance,
using photographs within another photograph.
So, I don't know if that answers your question
well enough, but prompt me if you need something else.
Well, it seems like even the photographers you mentioned,
there was still this window that the viewer was peering through, and you seem to zoom back.
So, you made us very aware that we're looking
at a photograph that is an object in the world,
and I think that's why we have Adam, Xaviera, and—
Maybe part of that was reading about filmmaking
and seeing sets and that you had this—
whatever the acting was going on, was being recorded,
and that was the illusion of reality through film,
but just outside of where these actors were, were all kinds of crew members,
with sound equipment and everything.
And so, I kind of thought, well, I would like to show how something is produced
by inserting myself in the picture in some way 
or whatever.
Could I ask follow-up question to that?
I was wondering as a—first of all, as a college student,
my first foray into art was as a photographer
and among other people that I looked very closely at was your work.
And it had lots of influences on me as a young
working photographer,
but I also, at one point, I took a sculpture class with a kind of conventional abstract sculptor
and I produced this sculpture that had a—a conventional abstract sculpture
and then there was a photograph of the sculpture that was part of it.
And I sort of thought of this in relationship to your work
in terms of that self-reflexivity that goes on 
with your work.
And the response that I received from the
instructor was he was just really pissed.
He really hated it, you know?
It really kind of violated his principles.
And the way that I understood it is because
it was so removed, so self-reflexive.
So, I guess my question is, as you moved from
sort of, say, under the influence of things
like The Family of Man and then Harry Callahan
and Aaron Siskind and so on and through the sixties,
and as your work became a little bit more and more conceptual,
did you run into any resistance?
Was there a way in which you were testing people
with the way in which your work was developing?
Fortunately, I didn't experience any of those
things.
I could have, I suppose, but I was just compelled 
to do the work
and have it seen as much as possible.
But I didn't get any bad responses.
So, you did it much more gracefully than I did.
Yes.
I guess that Blake was kind of going on the similar line of reasoning or questioning
I was trying to come up with, too—just wondering if—
are there people that were doing that kind of work at the time that felt like peers to you,
that you felt a kinship with,
or did this feel like something where you were kind
of hoeing this row all by yourself?
Well, I was intrigued a lot by [Lee] Friedlander,
and our work kind of paralleled one another.
So, I was interested in him.
I was also very interested in the work of
Robert Cumming and Ed Ruscha.
I think one of the most interesting conceptual ideas that Ruscha did was the Royal Road Test.
I don't know how many people are familiar with it, but
it's like a pseudo-product test.
It's about that.
And it's Ed Ruscha going 90 miles an hour
and someone photographing and someone throwing this Royal typewriter out of the window,
and then they documented the whole—all the damage
and parts scattered all over and everything.
So, it was this—it reminded me of like . . .
It was interesting visually, but it was more interesting thinking about it.
Like Warhol's films, like Empire and Sleep,
that go on for hours.
The idea is more interesting than the experience,
and I think a lot of conceptual photography's about that.
We have that Royal Road Test book on view upstairs on the fourth floor right now, too,
so if people are interested in seeing it, it's there,
although only one spread is open to it right now.
But that kind of brings up—you touched on the idea of fabricating in the making of a scene or a photo,
or you talked about a movie set,
and I was wondering if, maybe for instance Jessica,
maybe you can talk—that's a big factor in your work.
And maybe you can talk a little bit about that
and how you feel that that feels necessary and relevant to how we look at photos today.
Sure.
Well, I feel like, you know, coming out of
all the stage photography
from Jeff Wall and people like that,
now we're in a moment where photography has so many options for you
in terms of how you're going to produce it,
from the camera to the print, and
all those decisions are very important for the photographer.
So, part of that, for me, has been staging as a way 
to kind of direct
what it is that I'm trying to direct you to look at as the viewer,
and using the studio as a place where I can construct things very intentionally
from things that I'm observing in the world.
It's just a way that I can kind of isolate
phenomena that I'm noticing.
Yeah. I don't know if that . . .
Xaviera, I know you have a different approach to that 
and a similar way of showing the very—
a very objective way of what we're looking at
in your pictures.
I tend to agree with both of you in that it's—well,
at least at this point for me, photography is definitely—
it's an opportunity to have
a performance or a theatrical moment.
I feel like the objects in my particular body of work—
the objects that I make—the sculptures, the photographs, the performances—
they kind of all use each of the languages of the other to help them along,
but that's sort of very similar to having a film set.
It's like a little mini film set in your studio where you're—
the director is helping the actors bring out the emotions.
It's just using the language of directing to 
help the actors move.
And I feel sort of similar in terms of using the language of photography to help the sculptures move
and help the sculptures think about film
so that then I can have more information to go back
into performance.
And that's the way that I come at image making,
actually, and I actually—there's—
for my work, there's two words that—
or two or three words that hold the stability of the studio together or the practice.
One is "the theatrical";
another is "the sculptural";
and another is "the cinematic."
And I use those—and "landscape."
I can't forget landscape, which is like, 
a major foundation for me.
I can't let go of those pillars of the studio,
and I use the language of those practices
to make all of the works come alive.
Adam, those same kind of words seem very applicable
to you in the work that I know you've made, too,
where you almost work like a film director
more than a straight photographer.
Is that accurate?
I think I could think of it that way.
I don't typically, but it's really interesting.
I'm just processing what everyone's saying.
I think, for me, I think about photography
pretty basically as like a way of experiencing something,
first and foremost, because you
always have to sort of do that on some level,
whether or not you have an idea beforehand.
So, for me, in terms of directing, I think it's been a way to insinuate a constructive element to archives
that are at work within the archives.
Like, for instance, at the Ransom Center,
spending time in there with a view camera,
it's not enough to simply look at an object
and photograph it.
It's not enough to have a prescribed idea.
So, if something else needs to happen,
and I think what that something else is is time passing
and realizing what has happened in a photograph—you've captured different frameworks,
different historical frameworks.
It's an aesthetic experience.
It's also a level of fact.
It's also a sort of concept.
And that all comes back to the experience
of looking, for me.
It's like—I was thinking about [Werner]
Herzog's notion of ecstatic truth
in relation to the document.
He's really interested in the presence of
the person making the document,
having an effect on the outcome of what's happening.
And that's, I think, really sublimated in
the photograph in an interesting way.
I think all four of you that are photo practitioners—I
don't know, Blake, if you're still making
art these days, but—deal with, I think,
this idea of fact.
It seems like all of you seem to like to point
to things with your camera and say,
"This is a thing that's in the world" and you
take a picture of it, and then—
but still sort of setting up questions about how it
got there and what that thing means.
And, in many cases, like with Ken's work or
in Xaviera's, that's actually a photo that's
in the picture, too.
So, I wonder, in the age—I mean, I did a
studio visit over the weekend with an artist
that was looking back at the very first image
that the guy that invented Photoshop used
to demonstrate what Photoshop could do.
And that—of course, that's a technology
that emerged in the eighties, so Ken was doing
this kind of work way before then, but I wonder
if—how much that kind of idea of facticity
or the factualness do you all engage with in your work, especially when there is so much doctoring
that's going on in the photographs that we
all look at and consume on a daily basis?
Ken, do you want to jump—try that one first?
No.
Ok.
I'll jump in on that one.
I mean, I—part of the reason I am spending so much time constructing things in the studio is
because I want to create a very accurate 
document of them.
I tend to do very little Photoshop after the fact.
And part of that is—but the images can be
very tricky.
They may look like they're collaged or Photoshopped,
so you kind of have that questioning of what
you're looking at and wondering if it's accurate,
an accurate representation.
But I think that's where we are now in terms
of understanding photography.
Because Photoshop has given us so many options
for re-touching images
you can't look at images and just assume that they're straightforward.
But, knowing that I spend time doing that,
creates an interesting tension for them
because you don't realize it at first.
You have to kind of understand the practice
and know that there was all this labor behind
the image to make it look like it was Photoshopped.
So, it's kind of an analog Photoshop tension
for my work.
Yeah.
And I spend a lot—I like to sculpt things.
So, for instance, with my series The Index Series, 
it's—I build the—those works are
for photographic purposes—the objects and
the sculptures inside of the photographs.
A lot of the times, these—this work here—a
lot of the times, people will ask me,
"Well, do they exist on their own?"
And no, they're not meant to exist on their own.
They're actually partially a conversation
not only with sculpture, but about photography
and the different textures of photographs
and how photographs age over time
and how different inks in magazines and newspapers
over time change the way we—
the way our brain, like the back of our brain—the way
our brain takes in color and texture.
And so, for me, I love the labor of making.
I'm an analog.
I do digital things, but I do also enjoy touching
and feeling and sculpting and labor.
I think it's a part of my practice.
And even with making a work like this, I enjoy—
I work with a four-by-five large-format camera—
that's not mine, obviously.
That's like, one of the most iconic photographic
images we have.
But I enjoy working with film and I enjoy the process, also, of working digitally.
Like, tonight, after this lecture, I'm going
to go—I have to go to Kinko's
'cause I'm going to Mexico to make a work, but I need
to go to Staples or Kinko's or someplace
to print out about 60 JPEGs that I found online
that are going to go into a photograph that
I'm gonna make that's a film-based photograph
that then is gonna be scanned and worked on digitally.
But it goes through all these different processes.
So, I enjoy that feeling—the feeling of
working with objects
and paper and film and wood and other things.
I can follow-up just a little bit on that
and just ask another question for Ken.
If—I was thinking about your Bread Book
and I was wondering if you were thinking of
sculpture in the context of making that,
because it becomes kind of like a loaf of bread, right?
That was part of the original idea,
that the book itself would be something like a loaf of bread,
which takes on a sculptural quality?
Was that part of how you were thinking of it?
I really enjoyed photographing the ends, actually.
They, I felt, were extremely sculptural.
And actually, it would be nice to maybe make
a more three-dimensional covers back and forth
that deal with that sculptural quality of
the bread.
Photo books, like Ken's Bread Book, which
I think there's an image that circulates up there,
and then you mentioned Ed Ruscha
and people like Sol LeWitt and others were
making photo books as objects and things,
and I was wondering if the other artists on
the panel have played with the book as a form for
delivering photographs and creating dialogues 
about photography?
I can start with that.
I work with this collective and we just published
a book in relation
to an exhibition at the Contemporary, and it was an interesting process,
'cause there were like 10 of us trying to edit a book.
And how we communicate is often via G-chat,
and maybe every four months,
we'll be in the same place and we'll have hundreds of Xeroxes of images
and lay them out on the floor and
literally just walk around and create groupings.
That went on for like a year, and then we
came up with that book that was just up there
called Swan Cycle in relation to a film we
made for the Contemporary.
But I think the book is, in some sense, always
a collaborative endeavor,
or at least that's what I got out of it.
You have to sort of let go of your intentions when you set out to make a book, I think,
to a large degree.
I also just—I printed a book—thinking about 
printed matter—
on some Enron paper that I've had for like 15 years.
When they went out of business, a bunch of
their copy paper ended up in these
office supply resale shops in Texas and I bought
a whole bunch of it
and printed all these images that didn't really look very interesting on screen,
but they look great on the Enron paper,
and just hand-bound them and realized that it's something simple like a substrate can transform.
Even though it doesn't say Enron, it's like,
somehow, that's significant.
It carried over into the content of the book.
I love—books are like chairs to me.
There's—I'm obsessed with chairs, and it's
the same way I'm obsessed with books.
I love the structure of a chair and the different
sort of variations that a chair can be and books . . .
The most beautiful book I've ever—
one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen
is Sheila Hicks's Weaving as Metaphor.
It's literally this—it totally complements
the project, her project.
It complements her weaving project.
The depth of the book, it's pretty—and also
Tauba Auerbach's color book, but that's another one.
So, Sheila Hicks's Weaving as a Metaphor,
it's this huge tome,
but it's all soft and sensual and the images are really well-produced.
So, if I were ever to make a book of my images
or someone else's images,
I feel like I would be so intimidated by the fact of the choices that I had to make.
I think it would be a lot more difficult,
'cause it feels so concrete.
I guess a book, for me, feels like once you
have it, you know that it's probably—
especially if it's a monograph or an art book—it's
something that's going to influence so many people,
so I'm afraid of the structure of influence, 
if that makes sense.
Like, the weight of the book is really intimidating to me.
Like the fixedness of it.
That it can't—things can't move around and
migrate anymore.
They're locked in this order that then is
saying something.
And it's also especially—it's also how people
take in part of your visual language, and
it's very concrete, a book.
So, I'm afraid of these books.
Ken, was the Bread Book the only real photographic
artist book like that that you did
that was a standalone concept?
Unfortunately, I should be doing more of those,
but yeah, that was the single one.
But, I really enjoyed doing that a great deal,
because you can—
well, it has kind of a traditional story: a beginning, middle, climax, end.
You can read it forward, which makes the most sense,
but then you could read it from the other side, because it's symmetrical.
But the story is a little jumpy then.
I think we've kind of touched on this a little bit already, but maybe I want to try it from another angle.
It seems like in all of your work, you really privilege 
the idea of serious looking and
really making people kind of scrutinize what
it is that's in front of them
and trying to understand it, almost as if you're urging us
towards a certain kind of more sophisticated, 
visual literacy even.
And I wonder if maybe—and all of you could
answer that question—but also,
how you see that as an important element today, again,
when we're in such a photographic culture
and photographic moment and where maybe things
aren't being looked at as carefully and thoughtfully
as they could be or should be.
Well, you saying "visual literacy" makes me
think of this quote that Moholy-Nagy said
about "the illiterate of the future will
be people who don't know how to read photographs."
And information literacy and visual literacy's
really important to me because of this fact;
because we are in such a visual culture.
And photographs are everywhere and everyone's
making them, so I think it's even more important—and
important for me and my students—to understand
how you kind of take images apart and really
question what it is we're seeing.
And so, that, for me, that's why it works
into my work in terms of illusion and questioning
what it is that we're looking at it is because
I think that's something that we need to be
doing more everywhere is questioning what
we're seeing and how it was made and why and
the kind of politics behind that.
In my work, I try to describe clearly what
the object and the related things are to the
main object that I may be photographing.
It's like—I've always been interested in
forensic photography and the goal of that
is, of course, to describe information very
clearly so it can be read easily and accurately.
And I try to produce a visually interesting
image using whatever means, light and focus
and whatever, to clearly present what I'm
interested in people looking at.
Then the idea has to become one with the technique.
And if it's a conceptual idea, I think that's
kind of paramount.
I think that's the strongest part of the image.
I have a kind of related question, which is
one response to the proliferation of images that's come out in the art world—
and I think of this as being associated most strongly with Hito Steyerl—
is the idea that is to embrace the degraded resolution
of the JPEG or of sort of cheap images.
And so, I was wondering what you all think about not only close looking, but the question of resolution.
How important is it?
How valuable is it as an art concept to sort
of embrace the idea of higher resolution than
an internet image as part of what you're doing?
I think the idea of the poor image in her
sort of constellation is really interesting as an idea.
And she's such a good writer, that the idea
kind of stays alive for as long as you read her writing.
But whether or not I know what that image
is is different.
That's different than looking at a photograph, right?
So, I guess my relationship—you know, I
feel—when I read her, I feel somewhat indicted
as being obsessed with the cult of the gauge—you
know, as what she calls it—somebody who's
really interested in large format and the
sort of blind spot of looking and having an
object that comes out of this process that
you can, in some way, really love on some level.
I don't know.
I think the poor image is the image we all
look at and it's the one we're talking about,
but it may not be like the one I'm pursuing
as an image maker.
I shoot everything large format and make large,
big, beautiful prints
where the resolution is very crisp in them.
But the way I think about resolution did change
once I started scanning those negatives and
had a different experience of the detail of
those negatives on the computer.
'Cause I could see things that you couldn't
see when you just had the negative in the dark room.
So, I do think the resolution's important
to me, but I do love whenever a JPEG is blown
up really big and the resolution's kind of
blown out of proportion.
There's something about that that's really satisfying,
even though I don't know how to work that into my work.
I'm still like, large format.
Yeah, I think—when I'm talking to my students—who,
some of them are here, I hope—
I wish that they—I wish for them that they would—they
could or they would enjoy working analog,
only because it slows you down so that you can look.
And maybe I'm very traditional in that way.
I studied with An-My Lê, Stephen Shore—these
are people who spend time looking—
so, I try to make works that make you spend time—make
you have to spend the time to look,
because there's so much information.
I like, jam you with information.
Yes, it's information that I choose and that
I make sense of.
I try to provide a map in most of my works.
But digital images, I use those as well.
I make work with digital cameras, but I know
the joy and the . . .
It's so luxurious to see a really well, beautifully produced image that someone's considered.
It just—I don't know.
I feel so old-school cheesy,
but it really does start to have another kind of 
play with your—another aura.
It does.
It has more human handling, you know?
So, that's something that I really enjoy.
But I also, in my work, I also work with low-res—
the piece Superunknown,
which is all the migrants in mid-migration.
That's all low-res JPEGs that I found online
because I was tired of working with a big 
large four-by-five,
carting it around the country.
I wanted to work in a studio, and so I started collecting images—other people's images—
to make another piece.
But in that, I spent time having a conditioning process,
which was very similar to the process of making 
analog photographs.
And I don't think that my practice would have
the pauses that it does
if I didn't know how to work with analog photography.
Now just, when you were talking, I was thinking
about how great analog is
because of things you can't control.
And those periodically happen unpredictably
and they sometimes can be the thing that 
makes it work.
And similarly, with like, Hito Steyerl's notion
of the poor image,
one thing she talks about is those images bear the mark of everybody who's handled them.
Everybody's who's tweaked them or downsized them
or changed the color space or re-uploaded them.
And in that way, they—I don't know, they
have the same—
I don't want to call—I'm trying to avoid the word aura
but they're carriers of significance with a really embedded language.
I don't know.
That's an interesting connection between the
analog and the over-processed image, I think.
What I have learned to appreciate is no matter
what the quality of the image is
in terms of what you're looking at,
if it has a very strong, say, emotional appeal or whatever,
I think no matter what it looks like quality-wise
or technically wise,
as long as it's a strong idea, you don't even think about those things.
One thing I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on
as it relates to a question that stumped me
when I was giving a lecture on photography recently—
and especially talking about photography in this very digital age now—
and I love big, beautiful, juicy prints that are physically 
in front of me
and I can fall into them and things like that,
but I got this question one time of like, "Well, why do these things need to be printed?
Why do they need to exist physically in the world?"
Are we moving towards a moment where
all these amazing images that all of you craft and create
might only exist on a screen?
Can you help me come up with a good argument as to why these things still need to be in the world?
Well, we still have bodies that we're in and
I think that's a big part of it for me.
My relation of my body to the things in the
world is important,
and the images are objects, even when they're 
on a screen.
I don't know.
The physicality of us.
Yeah, and as physical objects, you can put them
away, you know?
When you're done looking at them . . . ?
Like, Fred Sommer, too—I don't know why
he's here, but he is.
He said this thing once about if you make
a really good picture,
you should put it away and not look at it.
Put it in the drawer and shut the drawer.
Well, also, too—totally.
Well, we—I brought all my students to the
city today and we've been going to all the
museums and looking at images,
and a lot of the images are things that they've all seen online a million times.
And then we're standing in front of these prints 
and the prints have dust spots
and weird contrast and a different scale than
they ever knew,
and that really got me thinking about all of the material choices that go into making the photographs
from the camera into the print.
And that's not every—every image doesn't
become a print,
but that still carries with it a different kind of physicality on the screen
and on the laptop or wherever it is.
And I think those things you can't get away
from or ignore,
because they're part of how the image was made.
Yeah. And I think there's something about electricity
and living with electricity.
So, I tend to think of the feeling of walking
into a room that's quiet
or the feeling of walking into a room with a television playing of like, a football game,
of a television from like 1975 or eighty or ninety.
They each have different feelings when you
walk in.
So, if you want to have a continuous feeling
of electrical—I hate energy, vibration,
I don't know what you want to call it—electrical
pull, then you're fine with living with images on a screen.
But if you want to have pause and quiet and
reflection,
I think you have to let go of the electrical sometimes.
And that's something, for me, that I think a lot about 
is letting go of the electrical.
And that's where these images with paper comes
into play, right?
Paper is a lot quieter and doesn't emit as
much "vibrationally" is the word,
but it does emit these images.
You know, these images help you have another
kind of experience
and I think that that's something—I can't see that ever really going away.
Is that a question—and now, all of you teach—is that 
a question that you get from students
or a tendency that you think this current
generation maybe wanting to move away from
the object hood of an image or tempted by
that?
No?
I find that students are really interested
in printing and also different forms of printing.
Like, you know, prints from Walgreens versus
prints you make especially for an ink-jet printer.
I don't know.
I think—I haven't experienced the sort of
prediction of
everything's going onto the screen in reality in teaching.
I don't know.
Do you guys?
Initially, I think my students are turned
off by the economics of printing, but then,
when you start to see the different kinds of paper
and the ways the paper affects the image
they see how beautiful a print can look in physical form
or how a Walgreen's print would contribute to the content and meaning of what they're trying to say.
So, I don't know, I'm trying to encourage
them to think about all the different ways
that the print technology affects the way
that we understand what they're communicating to us.
I can say something about my own personal experience; not so much about my students.
One of the reasons that I got out of making
art sometimes—
I was telling Jessica before—I sometimes refer to myself as a recovering artist.
I was very actively involved in it for a number
of years and then switched to writing about art.
But one of the reasons I got out of it was
in part just feeling overwhelmed by the stuff,
by all the things—and part of it was, at that point,
I had moved from photography into installation sculpture.
And so, just dealing with a lot of things
physically and so on, was overwhelming.
But storage and thinking about sales and everything
else—just the stuff was overwhelming.
So, that's one response.
But then the other response I have—
and I do talk about this a lot with students in the classroom—
is that what I really want from a photograph or an artwork
is a kind of permanence,
a kind of enduring quality.
I want a photograph or an artwork to be something
that I come back to again and again and again
and again and again and again and again.
Maybe the opposite of putting it away.
I don't know.
But in order to—and I want to feel that
desire to come back to it again and again.
That ends up being the kind of make or break
point for me when I'm somehow evaluating the
value of this work in the context of my scholarship,
but also, in the context of thinking about my own personal response.
And so, that very much requires the physical
form, not the fleeting screen form.
Yeah. I agree very much with you.
What I value about photographs, especially
if they depict a—like you're aware of it—
a rather short moment in time and that maybe
has some age to it.
It's so interesting to have something like that 
that isn't moving around
and that you can study it and you can respond to it anyway you want to
and no one's rushing you.
You have all the time you want to spend, you
know, to do this.
So, I value that photographs' giving me that
opportunity.
You can also give photographs to people, you know?
Prints, which . . .
That's a good point. Yeah.
I was thinking about how they age and how
they have a life and how
a print from the eighties has a very distinct look
and that the image on screen looks the same, right?
Or it looks like maybe whoever scanned it
that day at the archive . . .
There's a book in the library here about the
Becker's printed works I just saw on the way
here and it's a history of all their catalogues
and show announcements.
And they're beautiful.
They're just amazing-looking objects.
I've got one more question before we maybe
open up to questions from the audience, which is—
I think in all of your work, there is a real 
sense of emotion.
Sometimes it's a real deadpan kind of quality;
other times it's more obviously humorous, I think.
And I wonder if you all, in your various ways,
might address that and kind of
how you think about emotional content in the work,
but even how it might elicit emotions in the viewers 
of your pictures.
Well, what I strive for is, in many of my
works, kind of a dry humor that I want to convey.
And it's very difficult, but I think if you get someone's attention directed to you because of the humor,
then the other qualities that might be interesting visually for thought can come through
because you've engaged the person already 
through the humor.
Adam, how about you?
I don't . . .
You're the king of deadpan.
Yeah. I didn't know that.
I love the idea of humor being the way in.
That seems like the best way into just about anything.
I don't know.
I don't know how I think about the viewers'
emotions.
I know that when I'm looking at pictures or
in a space,
I'm thinking about the people I'm close to 
and not just my friends,
but the influences I have, whether I want them or not.
And they exert pressures either to do something
or not do something,
and that's like, a constant dialogue that's happening, 
and it's emotional.
You don't always recognize it, but you can
see it later on in the decisions you've made.
But honestly, like, most pictures, when people
respond to them, it has almost nothing to
do with what I intended, you know?
And that's perfectly fine with me.
I think—I'm thinking  a lot about overwhelm and pause and also sensuality.
Right now.
I'm really—even when I'm going into studio
visits, I'm always thinking like,
"Well, what's turning you most on?"
I don't know if I'm supposed to talk to students
that way, but I do wonder,
not necessarily in a sexual way, but in a sensual,
like, how is this resonating on your body, in your body?
How is this landing?
That's something that I'm—I want to know
how things play in the body.
So, when you're making a work, how does it
feel for you?
And so, I think that's something that I'm
continuously working on,
but I do—I don't watch a lot of dramas.
I do love comedy though, so I'm sure that
comes into my work somewhere a lot.
I don't know.
I haven't really thought about emotions in my work
because I think a lot of the emotions that 
I'm trying to elicit
are things that aren't totally verbal
or things that you could name as specific emotions.
They're more like effectual experiences.
But I do think humor's a great tactic that
I am drawn to in Kenneth's work and
that I've used to kind of disarm you so that maybe you
could think deeper.
But I don't know.
That's a hard one for me to answer, I think.
Surprising, 'cause your work is so funny sometimes.
I know.
I guess.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah. It is.
And I think that's good.
I think it is good to be funny.
Maybe I just didn't think of that as an emotion,
which is a weird thing, that humor wouldn't be an emotion.
But yeah, humor's something that can lure
someone in to think deeper, I think.
And I do use it like that.
Well, I think we wanted to make sure we had
some time to have people ask questions,
especially 'cause we've got such amazing people up here on the stage.
Thank you.
Wonderful presentation and thank you very
much.
I am—I've got a question about the Stockholm
photograph that I think was shot in 1967.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the image was created on the street.
I guess it's a shadow or a snow pattern of some kind.
You're talking about two photographs, right?
The Drottningholm one or the Stockholm with
the automobile?
Yeah.
It was just a weather condition where it had 
snowed lightly
and enough to cover the objects in the street.
And then the sun would break through the clouds
from time to time
and melt the snow where the heat of the sun 
would land.
And there was a shadow . . . The light was
coming from behind the subject
and so the shape of the car was in shadow.
And that's the area that didn't melt.
So it looks very magical like you're looking
at a negative and positive image at the same time.
It looks like it may have been produced with
flour or something or whatever,
but when you think about snow, heat, sun,
this kind of vicarious thing happens, I think, with the sense of touch.
Because if you think about that . . .
That's one of my favorite images, and the
first time I saw it,
it had a big effect on me and how I understood photography
and things you'd notice in the world and also,
what it says about light and time and space.
It's interesting, likewise.
And whenever I show your work in class,
when that image comes up, somebody asks that question.
And then we spend a few minutes looking very
carefully at it and deducing.
And I'm happy to say that we're right most
of the time based on what you just said.
Well, I have friends in California who have
never experienced snow
and they think I put down some kind of white material.
They say, "That's a really good idea."
Or a good story.
I think it's so amazing, Kenneth, that you
have influenced so many people.
I just want to say—because I remember being
in school at Bard and
I remember when my art history professor 
showed your work.
It was definitely a moment that I was like,
"Oh my god.
That's amazing. Oh my god."
And you're just—here you are, one person,
human being in this, and
having this profound effect on so many image makers
right now and for a long period of time.
I just have a quick question, how does that
feel?
What does that feel like?
It feels wonderful.
Oh.
And I think you oughta be my agent.
Any other questions out there?
Now's your chance.
Here we go.
With the advancement of technology,
of taking photos with drones and underwater cameras
and 360-degree photos and stuff with the—
now, it's so immediate. Everything's so immediate.
It's easier for people—for anybody—to 
get into photography.
How do you think that changes how people value
photography or what people look for in an image?
I think that's for one of the artists to answer.
Does anybody want to take up that question?
That seems like a theoretical question, Blake.
Well, I think, in a way, we talked a little
bit about that before, just the idea—
I mean, maybe if we just think about it not only in
terms of these clever technologies and so
on, but also just the number of photographs
that are in the world.
So, one of the things I talk to students about—
I do a little exercise with beginning students sometimes
and ask them, "Well, you know, how many times do you think your picture was taken today?"
And usually, they start off with, "Three or
four" something like that,
thinking of their friends shooting them or them doing selfies or something.
But then, we start talking about every intersection
you went through
and every building you walked into and so on.
And then when you start thinking about, well,
what happens to those photographs?
And, of course, they all go up there into
the cloud, right?
And they're all up their circulating, all these millions and millions and millions of pictures of you.
And then, when you start to think about facial
recognition technology,
the capacity to search through images,
suddenly, this kind of technological
wonder starts to take on something that has
at least a little bit of a creepy overtone
to it, right?
And then, when you start to think about that
and then start to think about what artists
like our panelists here are doing as a form
of, I don't know,
an alternative relationship to the image, in part through the high-density image,
the high-resolution image that we were talking about before,
and part through the care that goes into making each image and so on,
that that almost, I don't want to call it "political," but it starts to move in that direction.
It starts to be a kind of principled position
in relationship to the world that we exist in.
And so, if we think of artists, generally photographers, generally who are working in this
vein as occupying that position, I think
that's one way that we can really value art.
Often times, of course, we're asked to devalue
art, to think that art really isn't so important,
because there's so many—everybody's got
a cell phone.
Everybody's taking pictures.
There's so many images out there.
What's art, right?
But if you think about it in this context,
this kind of care, kind of person behind this
that's putting a voice out into the world
as compared to that inundation of images,
then suddenly it seems super important, super
valuable.
Yeah. And I have to agree with that.
And just like a little anecdote: my partner,
he basically—he brands luxury goods, so
he decides the commercials or he decides the
shape of the bottle
or he decides the color of the commercials or where it's gonna be shot.
I mean, I'm talking like, the highest luxury
goods that we have;
the brands that we all know as the 
status symbol brands.
And so, our household is—we're divided in
a certain way.
Yes, we both work with visual language and
color in theory, but he is—
he'll make something for X corporation, and then it's gone and it's over.
Yes, he brings along some of the knowledge
that he learned from the past about branding
a certain product, but he's moving on and
it's about—he's helping people to consume
things with his images, and I'm working to
help people to open up different parts of
their brain and fire different synapses inside
of themselves.
And so, we have that understanding.
I'm working slowly with care and tenderness,
and he's working very quickly, and those are
the images that are coming into your stratosphere—
images on televisions and on advertisements that
are here today gone tomorrow.
And I'm trying to—I think all of us are trying to make images that have an imprint.
Like, the image New York that Kenneth has
made, that was produced in 1970,
and I can see that image in my head
far more than I can ever remember any Gucci ad or Valentino commercial.
Images have a certain way of staying with you 
if you spend time with them,
and if the artist spends time with them,
then you probably will spend time with them and they'll have an imprint in your brain.
They'll become your friends.
Yeah.
Ken, I had a question for you about your postcard
works.
You have described the works where you collage
elements from postcards onto a picture that
you took as having a conversation with vernacular
photography,
but I'm wondering if you ever actually tracked down any of those postcard photographers
to have an actual conversation with them.
No, I didn't.
No, I haven't.
But that would be a very interesting thing
to do.
I just haven't done that.
I have collected some commercial photographers'
work that I value a great deal.
They're kind of like postcards to me.
No, I've never met any of them—and they've
never sued me.
I had a question for Xaviera—?
Xaviera.
—Xaviera, about your image on sculpture
where you're holding the image of the ship
and how displacing it or re-envisioning
an image that harkens back to the New York
State with the ontology of being black.
I would like to know, or be inside your head,
of your process of how you came to that image
and what that process was.
Again, when you spend time with certain people's
works, they stay in your mind.
And I'm an artist who—I'm very influenced
by other artists.
I need other—and my studio practice is in
conversation with other artists.
I'm talking to other artists in my mind as
I'm making work.
And so, that's—it's in line with Ken's work.
It's in conversation.
And it's also in conversation with another
work that I produced, Superunknown.
So, it's thinking about his image and then
also my own personal journeys.
'Cause I spent two years walking, so I have
a relationship with land and sea
that's very much about pause.
And it allows me to look at other people's images
and really let them land on me.
And then, I have to respond.
And so, that's like a conversation that, whether
or not we've met,
this is the first time we've met before, but I know him
in terms of the practice that he's produced.
And can you speak to that then?
Because you're re-envisioning of Ken was just
one little nub,
but it was so powerful on how it like, totally brought in another world.
You're asking me again?
I don't know if this is gonna answer your
question, but I do think—
and I'll ask Ken this question—
how important is a journey in your work?
And I say that because the image that I produced
that is in conversation with your image is—
you wouldn't know where it is produced, but
what I mean by "journey" is that I actually
was physically somewhere else.
Like, I wasn't in my normal New York home.
I was in another place and I was also looking
at other images,
and I found this image and
I ripped it out of a magazine and it just
made sense.
But it was also because I was on a journey.
Like, I was having another experience—a
sort of freer experience than my normal conditions.
And so, for me, journey is really important
to my work.
Like, travel, actually, and experiencing different
cultures in order to return back to some of
the languages that I already know.
And so, I guess that my question is, how important
is journey in your work?
Yes, it's very important
and a good percentage of the photographs I feel have some success to them
have been photographed in other countries.
I find travel, you're just—because you're in a new space,
you're much more aware because you—
it's unfamiliar and you have to pay
attention to everything much more closely
than when you're in your usual environment.
So, I think that heightened awareness of things
and what's happening in front of you
is very important and stimulating and it
produces, I think, interesting work because of that.
Probably have time for one more question.
Yes.
Ann, right there, up in the middle.
How would you feel if I took one of your pictures
from the internet, or many of them,
and chopped them up and used them in my work without giving you credit at all?
Go for it.
I'd like to see a copy of it.
It's out there, I bet, a lot of times.
Yeah. Well, if someone wants to do that,
I'd be interested in seeing the result.
Flattered that you Googled me.
Great. Well, thanks everybody, up here especially,
for lending your time,
and for all of you for being here tonight.
