145 | 2019

LAURA MCLEAN-FERRIS

Camera Grammatica

The history of the camera is a history of changing rooms. From the camera obscura to the smartphone, the elements of space, light, and time have been subjected to extraordinary and astonishing modifications and compressions. How exactly does the light enter a space? How should we open the shutters? Which glass? And what is outside asking to come in? (Wolves, rats, cats, pigeons?) Further, if cameras are really rooms, then could the opposite be proposed as a truth: Are rooms cameras? Are such equivalencies at all illuminating or, given the history of the darkroom, usefully endarkening?
The artwork produced by Studio for Propositional Cinema, whose activities also include publishing, organizing exhibitions and events, and other activities, often involves such questions related to the ontology of various media, by situating them in a curious zone between the mythological and the analytical. Take, for example, the exploration of a camera-as-room, which appears in the Studio’s “Camera Manual” (2018): “The breadth and penetrability of an aperture controls the flow in and out of a room. The supermarket encourages entry but controls exit; the theater controls entry then demands exit; The Minotaur’s cave discourages entry and precludes exit: our cameral relations are born within the logic of control.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 145/2019, pp. 11–22.

GUDRUN RATZINGER

On the Circulation of Images

Vladislav Shapovalov shows this letter by the Northern Rhodesia Photographic Association, penned in the year 1959, as a reproduction in his installation “I Left My Heart in Rhodesia” (2017), which is part of his extensive project “Image Diplomacy” (2015–ongoing). The other components of this installation are a projection of eighty-one black-and-white slides and an audio loop with the musical composition that lends the work its name. At first glance, the installation appears to be a sequence of these 200 slides, mentioned in the reproduced letter, yet discrepancies between letter, images, and sound leave room for doubt. A closer view of the selected photographs reinforces this sense. They are too closely tied to a narration for them to be autonomous works by individual photographers. Their concentrated optimism sparks further skepticism: there are pictures of children playing, eager university students, and people at the workplace, whereas conflicts, poverty, or other unsavory themes are omitted. Different skin colors and national costumes, various landscapes and architectural forms suggest that the promise of progress conveyed by the series of images is targeting an international audience. In “I Left My Heart in Rhodesia,” Vladislav Shapovalov reconstructs an exhibition that never took place. In so doing, he takes recourse to an archival inventory that originates from the addressee of the letter cited above: the photography section of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (SSOD). This association was established in 1958 from an institution that had been founded several years after the October Revolution, with the aim of disseminating a positive picture of the Soviet Union through exhibitions, film screenings, and visits by cultural professionals.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 145/2019, pp. 23–34.

ANNA BARFUSS

Charged Places, Landscapes

A wall in the night, a narrow section of which is illuminated by a streetlight. A fence around a small house; a monotonous, machine-like hum accompanying a squeaking swing. In Deborah Stratman’s 33-minute-long film “In Order Not To Be Here” (2002), static shots charged with tension show isolated property barriers protecting suburban one-family homes in the darkness of night. In a kind of loop construction, the film begins and ends with images from a surveillance camera. Lengthy footage of an empty nighttime landscape of parking lots in front of a Target, the drive-in path to a fast-food joint, industrial parks, and ATM structures describes the established paths of everyday life in an American suburb.
In her many film, video, and installation works, Deborah Stratman explores political ideas and concepts in a variety of settings; in the process, the camera’s gaze again and again reflects the way audio and visual productions are made as well as how manipulations of image and sound are perceived. Empty sections, gaps, and temporal staggering between the audio and visual tracks further complicate any attempt to create meaning; instead, the focus is shifted to the way interpretation and perception function, for instance the attraction a deficit or a void can exert. Stratman brings new technologies of vision that seem to promote certain forms of usage and interpretation into dialogue with shared affects and political notions.
Landscapes that demarcate political topographies play another key role in Deborah Stratman’s approach. These appear both as the sediment of social relationships as they are lived, as places that reflect interior states, and as imaginary spaces¹ connected to the circulation of media imagery in which concepts of identity are put to the test.

¹ Cf. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 145/2019, pp. 35–46.

NICK PINKERTON

His Master’s Voice

Throughout Andrew Norman Wilson’s “KODAK” (2018), images emerge from and then return to a field of darkness, some of them still, some of them moving. The first of these is the image of a man, George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak company of Rochester, New York. Through his popularization of the easy-to-use, spool-wound roll film cartridge and the affordable cameras making use of it, he was the entrepreneur who brought photography out of the formal studio setting and put it into the hands of families. Eastman, as we first see him, is a thin-lipped, sharp-eyed fellow with thinning white hair, a portrait of respectable middle-aged rectitude. His is a keen, hard, wary face, suggesting the spirit of acquisitive thrift and moderation that William Carlos Williams, writing of
Benjamin Franklin in his In the American Grain (1925), saw as founded in terror. The outwardly upstanding Judge Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) exemplified such a hoarding spirit, revealed by the harsh truth of the daguerreotypist’s camera eye. “There is a wonderful insight in heaven’s broad and simple sunshine,” Hawthorne has his photographer say. “While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 145/2019, pp. 47–58.