We photographed sculptor Alejandro Almanza Pereda in Mexico City as part of our artist network project. We've been photographing artists in their studios since November. We then ask each subject to name an artist who has inspired or excited them, and then we photograph that person, and so on and on. Alejandro came to us through sculptor Derick Melander, whose work you can see here. Right now, we're looking forward to two new names on the shoot list next month. In the meantime, check out Alejandro's work, and our photographs of him. He has a show coming up in NYC, so stay tuned.
"There is a wonderful insight in heaven's broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit 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. There is at least no flattery in my humble line of art."I love that Hawthorne suggests that truths and secret characters lurk just beneath the surface of everyday life, and that sunshine can expose, and photography can capture, our secret characters. Portraiture seems, in this light, almost a religious vocation. Or in this case, a great pick-up line.
This he perched upon a tripod -
Crouched beneath its dusky cover -
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence -
Said "Be motionless, I beg you!"
Mystic, awful was the process.
Scud. Just turn your face a leetle this way--fix your--let's see--look here.
Dora. So?
Scud. That's right. (Puts his head under the darkening apron. ) It's such a long time since I did this sort of thing, and this old machine has got so dirty and stiff, I'm afraid it won't operate. That's about right. Now don't stir.
Paul. Ugh! she looks as though she war gwine to have a tooth drawed!
Scud. I've got four plates ready, in case we miss the first shot. One of them is prepared with a self-developing liquid that I've invented. I hope it will turn out better than most of my notions. Now fix yourself. Are you ready?
Scud. Fire!--One, two, three.
Women photographers have a complex literary history of their own: as conventional romantic objects of the narrative gaze, but armed with cameras, pointed at history. In W.E.B. Du Bois's 1919 short story, "The Comet," included in the collection Darkwater, the two last people on earth in this almost-romance are a black man from Harlem and a woman from the Upper East Side, who stops by her place to develop a roll. In Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984, the diffident Tereza is a dissident photojournalist. In a very watchable version of Hamlet, set in NYC circa 2000, Ophelia, played by Julia Stiles, has a darkroom/studio on the Lower East Side; she carries Polaroids instead of flowers. Here's a clip montage:
