Burtynsky, Socar Oil Fields #6, Baku, Azerbaijan

I've seen some great shows in New York recently and returned feeling satisfied and inspired... and what more could you ask from art?

Here's my top list of favorites.

1. Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, at the Met. It's the 50th anniversary of the Americans, and the prints in the exhibit are sequenced like the book. Bonus: his original Guggenheim application and contact sheets are on display so you can obsess over the project even more deeply.

2. Sally Mann at Gagosian. Wow. I've never been a huge Sally Mann fan, though I did like some of her last body of work, the dog skeleton and civil war battlefields. This work is luscious, tender yet clinical, and full of the materiality of wetplate.

3. Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman. Let's just say that after I saw this show, Jeff Wall got under my skin. I was looking at garages and piles of trash on the New York City streets and feeling like it wasn't quite real, that he had been there before me to set up these little corners of neglect.

4. By far the brightest shining star in the sky, Ed Burtynsky at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler. I have been thinking about Burtynsky a lot as I've been working on my Germany industrial landscapes, and his new series on Oil is incredible. The fidelity of the images at such gigantic sizes takes me in and out of reality, imagining there must be something digitally manipulated about them (though I'm fairly certain he's no Gursky-like photoshopper). And I love the power of his documentary vision in the service of both fine art and environmental awareness.

5. Todd Hido at Silverstein. I liked Hido's suburban nightmares well enough, but these in The Road Divided are so emotional, mysterious, lonely, and lovely. They are simple images but induce such an emotional reaction with so little.

I also went to MoMA's New Photography show and a bunch of other galleries, and was interested in almost everything that I saw... so inspiring.

Penn MFA Studios Open for POST 2009: October 10-11, 12noon - 6:00pm

My MFA program is participating in the 10th Annual POST Philadelphia Open Studios Tour on Saturday, October 10 and Sunday, October 11. POST is a program of The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, a nonprofit career development organization that creates opportunities for artists to reach their professional goals.

All studio buildings will be open. Our largest studio building, Morgan, will be open both days from 12:00 - 6:00pm.

Franklin building, which houses the MFA sculpture studios, will be open with guided tours at 2:00 and 4:00pm both Saturday and Sunday.

Duhring building, which houses the MFA photography studios including mine, will also be open with guided tours at 2:00 and 4:00pm both Saturday and Sunday.

For these two special tours, meet at the Morgan building lobby at 2:00 or 4:00pm.

Come by and see what we're working on!

PennDesign MFA Studios
Morgan Building
205 S. 34th Street (Between Walnut and Spruce Streets)
Philadelphia, PA 19143
215-898-8374

For more information, visit:
www.philaopenstudios.com
www.philaopenstudios.com/penndesign
www.cfeva.org

Piece for ...or is it? Show

I've been in the studio the past few days editing and printing Germany images. This image is the one chosen for our MFA 2nd year show opening Friday night.

I will not be present at the opening but come and enjoy it anyway!

...or is it? Exhibit Opening Friday, Sept. 18, 5 - 7:30pm

The new school year is upon us, and we are hitting the ground running. My class, the UPenn MFA's of 2010, will have a group exhibit titled "...or is it?" on campus in the Meyerson Gallery opening Friday, September 18 from 5:00 - 7:30pm. This show comprised of recent work by the students as a survey of where we are now, entering our second year.

This event conveniently coincides with our weekly School of Design Happy Hour. And believe me, it is happy. If you're in the area, please come!

Opening Reception: Friday, September 18, 5:00 - 7:30pm
Exhibition Dates: September 18 - October 2, 2009

University of Pennsylvania
School of Design
Meyerson Hall, Lower Gallery
205 S. 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-898-8374
fine-arts@design.upenn.edu

Germany: Two (Big Woods)

I traveled far in the wilderness of the Ruhrgebiet. I rode on many trains and walked many miles on foot. I rode a bike around the Emscher canal and fields of coal in Duisburg. In the beginning I was very aware of the existing images in my head of this kind of place. I had proposed the project based upon what I thought I’d find and upon images I’d seen of these sites. Still I wanted to be careful that I not get stuck in just recording what was present. I wanted to remain open to the project changing depending on what I found.

Halfway through my time in Germany I read a Wendell Berry essay titled The Unforeseen Wilderness. It was in an anthology of photography essays and it unfolded into a poignant message for me. He wrote, “…(photographs) can serve as spiritual landmarks in the pilgrimage to the earth that each one of us must undertake alone... Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown...You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else."

Berry was writing about making good photographs, and contrasted the tourist photographer who goes to a destination and makes the same images as everyone else with the fine art photographer who reacts and interprets, who is open to surprises and the unexpected. And he was writing about all that you can learn about yourself and the world through loneliness.

At the moment I was feeling very lonely. I was particularly pained what I didn’t have on this trip- companionship and friendship. Traveling alone enforces solitude. It’s not something I was looking for or particularly needing, but there it was. Feelings of loneliness do not always accompany solitude but for me they wove together and unraveled over and over again, until the moments when I forgot. Until I was absorbed in shooting or mapping out another site or reviewing the shots of the day.

I wasn’t totally isolated as I had internet in my hotel and my good friend CNN to greet me every night on my tv. During the trip I adopted the idea that strangers are only so until you talk to them, and as some faces became more familiar, the loneliness began to subside. But I had some real conversations with myself during this time. Some revelations came to me about my relationships, my choices and my history as I thought about everyone so far away. At moments I was lost in thought, on long train rides, on long treks through the woods. And then: an incredibly beautiful coal shaft would appear from behind the trees. An abandoned railway station would spring up from the middle of a dozen parallel tracks. Along the river lovely butterfly bushes would weave through a grove of aspens, delighting the butterflies, the bees, and me. And I would forget anything but the present, so surprised by the unexpected, the unforeseen, there in the great wilderness.