Studio Visit: Maureen Drennan
MD: I am a big fan of your work as well! In a word, or two words, you are a bad-ass. I am intrigued with exploring small worlds and communities and I’m curious about the people who live there and their connection to the environment. All sorts of things draw me to my subjects, its an intuitive feeling of attraction. Usually its people’s vulnerability as well as resilience that really resonates with me. I’m attracted to that and want to talk and photograph them. Its funny you ask that about being an outsider, I am in the beginning for sure but then it quickly changes. I feel fortunate because almost everyone I photograph lets me into their life in some intimate way. They will literally invite me into their home or we will have a deep, intimate discussion and then connection right away. Some of my subjects lead such inspiring lives. Of course the reality is that I will always be an outsider but photography allows me to enter the community a little and get close to people.
I used to do a lot of hitchhiking around the United States and Europe with my boyfriend at the time and part of the “code” is that in return for the driver giving you a ride you chat with them, keep them awake during long stretches. But often this thing would happen, particularly at night, with the road feeling rhythmic and meditative, after talking and me asking lots of questions, where the driver would be so open and honest, brutally truthful, about some experiences in their life. I felt so fortunate to be having this encounter with this perfect stranger. The fact that this person was opening up to me, as though I were a priest, was remarkable. And then, we would reach our destination, the driver would let us out and you never saw them again. But for a brief moment there was this very intimate connection. I love that. And now, as a photographer I’m able to continue having these amazing encounters with strangers. People are naturally guarded and I like recreating that experience of getting people to open up.
The people I seek out and photograph are not polished, they are outsiders and are usually existing in out of the way places. The outsider status resonates with my own feelings of alienation and though photography I am able to satisfy my need to connect with others.
Photo Book: “All the Queens Men” by Katie Murray
Katie Murray is a Queens native and photographer / video artist / photo professor that I had the wonderful experience of meeting over cocktails at Noorman’s Kil in Williamsburg earlier this summer. Katie and I are both publishing our first books this month with Daylight Books and taking part in a panel discussion this Saturday night at 6:00pm at Photoville in DUMBO Brooklyn. Our talk, moderated by Michael Itkoff and Taj Forer of Daylight Books, is titled “Family Matters” and will also feature Henry Jacobson and Sarah Christianson along with Katie and myself to discuss our new books and the different ways we all tackled themes of family and connection to the land in our work. With her new book titled “All the Queens Men,” Katie Murray explores her Queens, NY neighborhood as a paradise lost in the decade following September 11th as seen through the eyes of the men who surround her and the streets on which they live.
SM: “All the Queens Men” is such a great title for a book about men and masculinity set in Queens, NY. And I love how it also references your role as a woman who holds some authority over these men, in this case as the person taking their portrait. How did that title come about and what made you decide to run the title only on the book cover with no image?
KM: From the onset of this project I knew I wanted to play off of the word Queens because I think it’s such an interesting word as it calls to mind that which is majestic or mythological. It is also a powerful word as it relates to women, and I always thought it was interesting to be a woman photographing men in a place named Queens. I began to think about these men and this place as a mythological kingdom albeit a fictitious one, but this idea altered the way in which I approached the subject matter and allowed me to play with fiction and non fiction and be free to make work that existed somewhere between the two. Additionally, All The Queens Men is a play on a line from the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. A line, which I think is filled with pathos and hints at one of the themes of the book.
In terms of the all text cover, it came about because after numerous tries, no one image from the book actually worked with the title, but the title worked by itself as a mysterious entrée into this world. There have been many all text cover photo books but the most well known or referential as it relates to my work is Walker Evans’ American Photographs-and with this also in mind I went with the all text cover.
SM: In the book’s beautiful essay by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, she quotes you as describing the landscape of Queens as “both tragic and beautiful” and how that reflects the duality in the men you photograph. The way you photograph these men is straightforward and shows their flaws but there’s a nurturing quality like you love them not in spite of those flaws but because of them. How much of that would you attribute to being a mother of boys? How much of it is being a Queens native yourself in feeling this kinship with your subjects?
KM: I would say that the nurturing aspect you are picking up on has more to do with being a Queens native than a mother of boys. I am by no means photographing the other.
My children were born in 2006 and 2009 well after the work was already in progress. That being said though, having children and becoming a parent did make me aware of the shifting roles that take place when one transitions from being a child to having a child, and this is an idea that is present in the book as it relates to the men.
SM: These photographs span from 1999 to 2013. Obviously, the most significant cultural event that happened in New York during that time was September 11th. Pelizzari goes on in her essay to speak about 9/11 and how that monumental trauma and loss acts as the backdrop to the story of this place and the men that inhabit it. There was a photograph from 9/11 that I saw on your website. Am I right that at a certain stage of the project this image was included in your edit? What made you edit it out of the book?
KM: The picture you reference was made on September 11 2001, and while it was never in any of the many edits I wrestled with, it was a consideration. In the end I decided that it was too referential; it was a one to one relationship, one that swayed the ambiguous narrative in a direction that was inauthentic. The book is not about 9/11 per se but instead is a reflection on the residue of that traumatic event. I felt it was more powerful to speak about that event in symbolic terms rather than be so obvious, and thus the picture was edited out.
SM: Daniel is the subject of many of the photographs and acts almost as a protagonist to the series. What is your relation to him and what were your experiences photographing him? Did it change over the course of the project?
KM: I think the book has more than one protagonist, but if the book has a main protagonist than it would be Daniel. He is the father figure, and is also my father. Making portraits of people you are so connected to and intimate with is always challenging for countless reasons, but perhaps he appears so often in the book because it is always a pleasant experience photographing him. He has never refused to let me make a picture of him; he is always a willing participant and is difficult to work with only because I have to scold him to be serious. Portraits of my father/Daniel are made in-between fits of laughter on both our parts, and that has been consistent throughout.
SM: Towards the end of the book, there’s a spread I want to talk about. On the left is a photograph of an uprooted tree on a suburban street. Because of the perspective of the image, the tree is almost as tall as the house and there is a dark shadow in the middle of the tree that creates the appearance of a cave. Accompanying this image is a photograph on the right titled “11 Boys, Queens, New York 2003” that depicts a group of teenage boys standing in a circle on gravel, many shirtless, with one blindfolded in the center and another boy behind swinging something toward him in what looks like some kind of hazing ritual. The overgrown grass and shrubs surrounding them give a “Lord of the Flies” vibe to the proceedings. The fallen tree and the bullying amplify a feeling I get throughout the book of innocence lost. What is the story behind these images and what was your thought process in pairing them together?
KM: The ways in which images relate to each other and inform each other is one of the amazing things about being a photographer. Often times I would be making a picture while thinking about how it would relate to a previous image and how you can build upon ideas in multiple pictures. The entire book was edited with this thought in mind. So that you would have a book of images that tell a story, and then with more time spent, another deeper story would be revealed. So yes, one of the themes of the book is innocence lost. The pairing you describe is an uprooted tree and a fictitious rite of passage. In this pairing an act of violence has been experienced or is being experienced; so at its base level it’s about violence, but it’s also about not being grounded or rooted and the attempt to find meaning in a ritual that may or may not grant you a sense of belonging.
SM: We are both publishing books with Daylight in the fall. How did you come about working with them?
KM: I was fortunate enough to have applied to a book-publishing grant when one of the publishers at Daylight (Taj Forer) was a judge. As a result, Daylight reached out to me with interest in publishing my book, and the rest as they say is history.
SM: What was the best advice you received in preparing to publish your book? What advice would you give to another artist who was embarking on their first publishing experience?
KM: The best advice I received was to make the book that I wanted to make, and to keep in mind that it will not be the only book I publish. I’m not sure if the second part of that will be true, but it was invaluable because it allowed for me to be free to take risks and to not be safe. (ie the text cover)It’s important to know what you want from the onset, to ensure that you’ll end up with the book that’s in your head.
SM: What are you working on these days?
KM: I’ve just completed a video piece entitled “Gazelle” that reflects upon the struggles one faces as an artist, mother, and wife. It is the first time that I appear in my work, and it’s also the first piece I’ve made that is humorous. “Gazelle” will be shown in October at The Photographer’s Gallery in London in a show entitled Home Truths: Motherhood and Photography curated by Susan Bright.
SM: You teach photography at Hunter, SVA, and Sarah Lawrence. What is your philosophy on teaching photography and what words of wisdom do you try to impart on your students?
KM: Teaching photography is challenging especially since it is a common practice amongst my students in the sense that they are all using pictures in their daily lives with Facebook, Instagram, and the like, so my approach is to try to get them to realize the potential of the medium as a meaningful tool.
SM: As we say goodbye to summer and enter into fall, what’s your idea of a perfect late summer day?
KM: Enjoying a lazy morning with my husband and boys, and a late afternoon trip to Rockaway Beach where we hang out until the sun sets.
For more from Katie Murray and to pre-order her book “All the Queens Men,” please visit her website: http://katiemurray.com/
Photo Book: “Road Ends in Water” by Eliot Dudik
I first came across Eliot Dudik’s incredible self-published photo book Road Ends in Water at Carte Blanche Gallery in San Francisco where both our books were featured in a show curated by Larissa Leclair of the Indie Photobook Library and Darius Himes of Radius Books. And thanks to a suggestion by Jennifer Schwartz of Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, Crusade for Art, and Flash Powder Projects fame, we were recently reconnected to discuss our adventures in the world of first-time book publishing.
Having grown up on the outskirts of suburban Texas where the strip malls meet the farmlands and having spent my entire adult life living in New York City and Brooklyn, I tend to gravitate towards work dealing with the American landscape. In this body of work, Eliot Dudik chronicles the spirit of the South Carolina Lowcountry: its swamps and dirt roads, its weathered porches and ramshackle churches, and the people that are as much a part of this landscape as the giant oak trees that tower over it all. There is an ebb and flow to the sequence of images that rolls along like currents in the deep waters it portrays. This book feels like a baptism. I spoke with Eliot about the two years he spent working on this project while traveling from Charleston to Savannah, Georgia where he was a graduate student at the Savannah College of Art and Design and his experiences turning this project into a beautiful book.
SM: First of all, it was such a pleasure sitting alone in our apartment today for about an hour slowly going through the book and then re-reading and re-looking a couple times. It’s a really great meditation on a certain place and time and on large format photography as a medium. Large format photography is a long tradition that is becoming increasingly difficult for photographers of our generation to afford or even have access to processing. To that end, I’m going to kind of get ahead of myself and ask: how much does the slow, somewhat antiquated nature of large format photography factor into your process documenting a place steeped in its own deep traditions and slower pace? Was that something you thought about during the making of the work?
ED: The use of a view camera factors into my work quite extensively. It is the effects of the view camera on the land, my subjects, and myself that dictates my using this type of camera. Above all else, I enjoy the slow, contemplative and methodical steps associated with camera. It helps me to remain within the landscape. I see it as penetrating into a bubble, whereas I sometimes have difficulty piercing the surface tension with other formats. When making portraits, I enjoy the interaction between the subject and the view camera. They often have a look of pride and confidence in their expression and the way they carry themselves that is sometimes lost when looking down the barrel of an SLR.
SM: Road Ends in Water is such a great title. I know it comes from the road sign you photographed that appears in the beginning of the book. Did you take that photo knowing it would become the title or was that a decision you made once you were in the editing process?
ED: I took the photo for its symbolism and because I thought the sign was funny. It didn’t become the title of the series until the final editing stages. A professor and mentor, Jenny Kulah, suggested it as a title, and it made perfect sense.
SM: What I love about the title is the symbolism of “road” and “water” that appear throughout the book. Both are metaphors for the cyclical nature of life and death. All of the titles of the images refer to their location as being either a river or a road. There’s a definite sense of a journey or being in between things. It feels to me that this body of work operates on many levels: it is a documentary of a little seen pocket of America that is disappearing in the wake of government projects and economics, it is a metaphor for your life being in a somewhat transitional stage being a grad student during the project’s making and this new focus of your life in photography, and it has far broader themes of death and lost traditions. That’s where my head is at, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
ED: You pretty much hit upon everything. The landscape in this region of the country is renewed, flushed, and emptied by a multitude of rivers and tributaries heading toward the ocean. The rivers bring folks together here as much as the roads do. Generations of families have persevered here, living off of the land and rivers.
SM: Your portraits have a lived-in quality. Yet, having grown up in rural Pennsylvania, you are an outsider to this community. How did you approach the subjects of your photographs? “Tom & Tommy, Prices Bridge Road” and “Rob & Ricky, Near Martins Landing” in particular feel like people you know or were mid-conversation with when you set up your camera.
ED: I had lived in the Lowcountry for about six years at the point that I made these images. The landscape and the way of life had initially drawn me to the South. I felt very comfortable with it, yet at the same time, in a constant state of awe. Focusing on this series, I allowed myself the time and solitary peace to traverse the roads and waterways throughout this region for hours on end. I often met folks by happenstance and we would often converse for long periods of time. In the example of Tom and Tommy, I had passed Tom’s house three or four times very slowly, taking in the landscape, and eventually he stopped me and asked if he could help. I explained who I was and what I was doing, and he invited me in to see his framed photo within a newspaper clipping about a local barbeque chicken cook-off. We talked for a while with a couple of his friends, including Tommy, and they asked me to take a photo of them with their barbeque cooker and confederate flags, which I did. We later made the image down on the dock that is in the book.
Rob and Ricky came flying into a river landing in their pick-up truck, spitting gravel everywhere, and came to a halt about 15 yards from where I was set up to make a photograph. They jumped out of the truck and proceeded directly into the swamp near by. I continued about my business, and soon looked up to see Ricky calling to me to let me know that they were going to fire off some guns. I waved to him, packed up my things, and headed into the swamp. They were shooting at tree stumps. We talked for a little while, and they agreed to make the photo that’s in the book.
I sometimes had longer relationships with some of the folks I photographed, seeing them on different occasions as I drove through the area.
SM: The book contains 3 poems, one of which was written by your father. What is your relation to the other 2 authors and why did you decide to include these throughout the book?
ED: Brianna Stello is a friend of mine from Charleston, South Carolina, who is also a photographer. I had read some of her poetry years prior to making the book, and when the time came, I sent her some of my images and asked her if she would be interested in writing something to pair with them.
Dr. E. Moore Quinn wrote an essay that is included in the book. She was one of my Anthropology professors when I was an undergraduate, and continues to be a great friend. She had shared my work with her friend, poet Jerri Chaplin, and Jerri wrote a piece to accompany my photographs as well.
I found the writings to help expand the reading of the photographs.
SM: I definitely see the Alec Soth and Joel Sternfeld influences in your work. They are big influences of mine as well. What other artists were you looking at in relation to this specific body of work? The South is so steeped in incredible writers and musicians- did that offer inspiration?
ED: William Christenberry, Richard Misrach, and Stephen Shore were a few other photographers I was interested in at the time, and still am. I would have to say photobooks were my biggest inspiration during the time I was making this work. All sorts of photobooks, I just gobble them up. I am a big music fan as well, and my taste in music is much like my taste in photobooks, it runs the gamut. Although it would have been a great time to draw inspiration from music while in the car, traveling through the landscape, but I chose to instead mostly listen to NPR and chew sunflower seeds.
SM: Let’s talk about photo book publishing. Roads Ends in Water is self-published, right? And what influenced the decision to make a book? Did you always envision this project as a book?
ED: Yes, it is self-published. I find photobooks to provide a viewing experience much different from a gallery setting. Often a photobook is enjoyed in a quiet, private, and comfortable space, giving the reader the capacity to fully engage with the work. It also lends to the narrative nicely, which can help endow the work with new meaning. I did always envision this work as a book, even before I knew how the work was going to turn out. The self-publishing process was something I was researching during the entire time I was photographing the area. Not only does the photobook provide a more intimate viewing experience, but it also helps me to get the work out to a larger audience than I can solely through exhibition.
SM: Is Saga Publishing your own brand, like Alec Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom?
ED: Yes, Saga Publishing is my own brand. I came up with it at about two in the morning when I was trying to finish a mock-up in time to take to a photo conference. It seemed fitting at the time.
SM: How did you raise the funds to publish 1000 copies?
ED: My Grandmother helped me to fund the printing of the book. This is only one of many reasons the book is dedicated to her. She is a great woman.
SM: In our past conversations, we talked a bit about the inevitable mishaps that seem to occur with every printing experience. The advice is always to be on-press, but for me it was so expensive to make the book at all that the additional cost to travel to press wasn’t affordable. What was your experience with printing with a press in Iceland?
ED: I wanted to travel to Iceland to see the book coming off the press more than anything. I tried to come up with a way I could make it over there, but alas, I was in my last quarter of graduate school, and had several things to pull together in addition to the book. Oddi, the Icelandic printing company I worked with, was terrific. They sent me a physical proof to study, and after that was signed off on, they then sent me a digital proof just to make sure everything was laid out and ordered the way it was supposed to be. Typically, they would send two physical proofs, but because of my time restraints, they sent one physical, and one digital. They sent me some advanced copies in time for my book release and thesis exhibition, and the rest showed up on a pallet a few weeks later. They have a representative here in the States that helps to translate the job to the printing house in Iceland. Everything went smoothly.
SM: We’re both adjunct photo professors. I remember being an undergrad photo students and always wishing there was more real-world advice for how to get your foot in the door in any area of the photo world. It’s the same thing I hear from my students now, which I make a point of devoting at least a whole class to answering those kinds of questions. What is the best advice you give your students?
ED: I treat all of my students as artists, and hold them to the same expectations they will encounter after graduating. I discuss marketing strategies with them in every class. I encourage, and sometimes require submissions to publications, calls for entry, juried and solo exhibitions, internships and apprenticeships. Most importantly, in my opinion, I encourage them to, and mentor them through attending events and conferences like the Society for Photographic Education. I find these kinds of events to be invaluable for emerging artists for a number of reasons, but especially for the networking possibilities. I think we had 12 students or so attend the SPE conference in Chicago last year, and I think they would agree that the experience was remarkable.
SM: What are you working on now and do you see it as a continuation of or departure from the themes or methods of working that you established for yourself in Road Ends in Water?
ED: I recently began working on a new project that explores the American Civil War, especially as it exists in our consciousness today. Fortunately, this work is coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. There are a few different components to this project so far. I am creating landscapes of battlefields, both well known and obscure, with an 8×20 inch view camera. However, instead of using black and white film within this camera, I am using two sheets of color 8×10 inch film. This creates a separation in the image, which I am quite fond of, and lends to all sorts of symbolism. I am also traveling to reenactments to capture the essence of war among some of these battlefields. Additionally, I have begun the portrait component of this project this past weekend at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. I am very excited about these. They are quite unique in their construction, and I think they will lend nicely toward my interests in the cyclical nature of repeatedly reproducing such a bloody war. I am also collecting sounds as I move through these landscapes and episodes that will permeate the photographs.
I would think this new project is somewhat of a departure from Road Ends in Water in technique and construction, but in many ways its also a continuation. I think it retains the sense of a journey, an investigation into life, death, conflict, and varying perspectives on an important subject. Although the equipment I am currently using to interact with the landscape is different, I am still working by the same principals: see, feel, think, create.
SM: And lastly, what’s your ideal summer day?
ED: Ideally: Air conditioning, coffee, images, music, ham and cheese on rye, loved one/s, cards or darts.
To purchase a copy of “Road Ends in Water” please visit http://eliotdudik.com/ and click on “Book.”