you can see it at DotM3u, a music blog and mixtape club of which i am a part.

and happy friggin new year.

I’ve always been drawn to William Christenberry’s photographs- punchy color landscapes and architectural studies of rural Alabama that are full of the intangible qualities of decay and the passage of time and southerness and rural vernacular. His work feels like a collection of old photographs of home, well, because they are actually photographs of home- both his and mine.

Though he was raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Christenberry spent his summers with extended family in rural Hale County - neither of which are too far west of Birmingham. After graduating from the University of Alabama as a painter, he moved to New York. It was in New York that he came across the 1941 book and cornerstone of documentary photography, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. In it, author James Agee describes the experience of living among the dirt-poor farming families of Hale County during the Great Depression. The stories are accompanied by photographs by WALKER EVANS, the godfather of fine art documentary photography.

Shortly after beginning a professorship at Corcoran College, Christenberry began making annual visits to Hale County to visit family and to explore and make photographs. On one occasion in 1973, Walker Evans, who had encouraged Christenberry to take his photographs seriously, accompanied him. This was Evans’ first and only return to Hale County since 1936.

While at home for Christmas this year I had the idea to make a photographic pilgrimage of my own to Hale County. Between the poverty, rural beauty, decay, influence of Christenberry and ghost of Walker looming I thought that the photographs would make themselves and it’d be just oh so easy and fun. Not really the case. And departing from Bham at 3pm for the drive didnt help me out any, either. But the whole thing made for a nice afternoon anyway. Below are a few pictures made during the hour I spent in Greensboro, the county seat, and along the road there and back.

For more on Christenberry, check out this great story from NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

Saw this whilst taking a piss in rojo and immediately thought:
“Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 - J. O . E.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this [roll] everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - your name in print - that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.”

this year for christmas i want a sock monkey.

for more on Arne Svenson, go to the JULIE SAUL GALLERY

more importantly - for more on Sock Monkeys, go to THE RED HEEL SOCK MONKEY SHELTER . Be sure to look up Pierre Mon Frere, leedare of zee reezistaunce. He’ll know I sent you.

I like Dave Anderson’s photographs. A lot. His portfolio from Vidor, TX entitled ROUGH BEAUTY portrays a sense of the heroic and tragic and the assimilation of life and death and landscape in a beautifully lush, poetic way through a sensitive exploration of place and people that yields revelation yet never gives too much away.

All of my life I’ve been sneaking into places I don’t belong. As a child I’d dive into the furthest reaches of the family attic to see what ancient items had been passed down and then forgotten…There is so much beauty in the overlooked details of our world. I love the spare grace of decay and the splendor of the mundane. Caught moments with those I know well and discovered moments with those new to me all offer such magic and delight. And with all of these interests, there’s nothing that fascinates me more than that odd juxtaposition of beauty and isolation that seems ever-present in the landscape and our lives. -Dave Anderson

I wanted to share this work for two reasons- first, I recently met Dave and he has proven to be friendly and open and has provided some much needed encouragement, and second, after discussing the big scary global issues depicted in simon norfolk’s photographs of the militaristic sublime i thought it apropos to share some sort of antithesis- a body of work that addresses the human condition and society in a much different way. I happen to believe that if more people were as sensitive as Anderson to the beauty that surrounds us then perhaps Norfolk would have fewer battlefields to photograph.

For more, go to Anderson’s website, DBAnderson.com, or listen to a nice interview here on NPR.

there is perhaps no other greater influence in my photography than SIMON NORFOLK. i met him at a workshop in bath, england in 1999 and besides being one of the most intense personalities ive encountered he was gracious and informative and genuinely interested in helping the attendees become better photographers. a few years later i had an extended layover in london while traveling back to the states from uganda, where i had just finished a few weeks work on a dairy farm in the luweero triangle, and i met simon for coffee. since that time we’ve sporatically kept in touch, and his career has catapulted and rightfully so- there are few photographers who are able to translate such sensitive societal issues such as war and genocide through a global perspective and into compelling, contemplative, beautifully rendered images. i doubt i could even get a email reply from him now, but in lew of this you and i can vicariously experience a conversation with simon via lensculture, where theres a nice interview available for download. go check it out HERE. but maybe before that you should go to BLDGBLOG and read a great interview by Geoff Manaugh. While most artwork suffers when artists speak about who/what for/why, simon does nothing but inform his work by speaking about it and in turn deepens the context and content.

My favorite part of the interview is this-

NORFOLK: Well, I cannot fucking believe that I go into an art gallery and people want to piss their lives away not talking about what’s going on in the world. Have they not switched on their TV and seen what’s going on out there? They have nothing to say about that? They’d rather look at pictures of their girlfriend’s bottom, or at their top ten favorite arseholes? Switch on the fucking telly and see what’s going on in our world – particularly these last five years. If you’ve got nothing to say about that, then I wonder what the fucking hell you’re doing.

The idea of producing work which is only of interest to a couple of thousand people who have got art history degrees… The point of the world is to change it, and you can’t change it if you’re just talking about Roland Barthes or structuralist-semiotic gobbledygook that only a few thousand people can understand, let alone argue about.

and here is one of my favorite pictures by simon, the ash pond at auschwitz-