The Reservoir

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	<title>The Reservoir</title>
	<link>https://thereservoir.net</link>
	<description>The Reservoir</description>
	<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 18:43:11 +0000</pubDate>
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	<language>en</language>
	
		
	<item>
		<title>toc</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/toc</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2019 18:26:44 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/toc</guid>

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Table of Contents


&#60;img width="1000" height="800" width_o="1000" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7dc2d45b5f635bae9c18737f63491d949a1d8611e30cf5e88bd6bcd6c8204b88/8.jpg" data-mid="43645986" border="0" alt="On Representation and ResponsibilitySasha Phyars-Burgess &#38;amp; Juan Madrid in conversation" data-caption="On Representation and Responsibility&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Sasha Phyars-Burgess &#38;amp; Juan Madrid in conversation&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7dc2d45b5f635bae9c18737f63491d949a1d8611e30cf5e88bd6bcd6c8204b88/8.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="333" height="592" width_o="333" height_o="592" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f0c8c30d1ab49ffe5585a98b5f770d5fe346c40a993bf5236ba16f3cbba348fc/1.gif" data-mid="43645992" border="0" alt="StoriesInterview with Cengiz Yar" data-caption="Stories&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Interview with Cengiz Yar&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/333/i/f0c8c30d1ab49ffe5585a98b5f770d5fe346c40a993bf5236ba16f3cbba348fc/1.gif" /&#62;
&#60;img width="750" height="500" width_o="750" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c3277f8b6dd2240faa62fc91e6bb927f791b4201870a562a6466fad554e25bd/10.jpg" data-mid="43645985" border="0" alt="Where Are You Now, Beautiful BoyLissa Rivera in conversation with BJ Lillis" data-caption="Where Are You Now, Beautiful Boy&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Lissa Rivera in conversation with BJ Lillis&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/9c3277f8b6dd2240faa62fc91e6bb927f791b4201870a562a6466fad554e25bd/10.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1000" height="668" width_o="1000" height_o="668" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3539101cd1131cccd8b1dde8966e77743fdc34e877761c349b71b38a9300f5b9/7.jpg" data-mid="43646012" border="0" alt="Deep Down, Cancer AlleyInterview with Stacy Kranitz" data-caption="Deep Down, Cancer Alley&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Interview with Stacy Kranitz&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3539101cd1131cccd8b1dde8966e77743fdc34e877761c349b71b38a9300f5b9/7.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1000" height="800" width_o="1000" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aea5501ce92761895ce9085837968d0f3e852bc2a16e19a04e4559401ac5e379/4.jpg" data-mid="43645983" border="0" alt="MamaDavid Kasnic interviews Martha Freeman, pastor" data-caption="Mama&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;David Kasnic interviews Martha Freeman, pastor&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aea5501ce92761895ce9085837968d0f3e852bc2a16e19a04e4559401ac5e379/4.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1000" height="800" width_o="1000" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5cf3c07f47831776e45f4cf49f97a14cb4e9d5cd068753af03b4144bd1fd29be/3.jpg" data-mid="43645982" border="0" alt="Bodies Like TheseThe Counter-Archive of Elle Perez" data-caption="Bodies Like These&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;The Counter-Archive of Elle Perez&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5cf3c07f47831776e45f4cf49f97a14cb4e9d5cd068753af03b4144bd1fd29be/3.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="750" height="1093" width_o="750" height_o="1093" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a23c11f4b500868fa152df66d8fe3b401381f8419869a626805a48c024c8e65a/2.jpg" data-mid="43646016" border="0" alt="As Opposed to Being the DesiredInterview with Aubrey Trinnaman" data-caption="As Opposed to Being the Desired&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Interview with Aubrey Trinnaman&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/a23c11f4b500868fa152df66d8fe3b401381f8419869a626805a48c024c8e65a/2.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1000" height="801" width_o="1000" height_o="801" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5a1158216c60ef81bc76b38a79f7dbdd2d32175a3d2b1262951910dfbb7cdfd9/6.jpg" data-mid="43645989" border="0" alt="Like a Dog Tracking a ScentInterview with Rory Mulligan" data-caption="Like a Dog Tracking a Scent&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Interview with Rory Mulligan&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5a1158216c60ef81bc76b38a79f7dbdd2d32175a3d2b1262951910dfbb7cdfd9/6.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="750" height="938" width_o="750" height_o="938" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/05b23b0d467ac054ea0d1afb63e2538d65dafbe16893c6f5b191ec36b7dac8d5/5.jpg" data-mid="43646006" border="0" alt="A Process of BecomingKathryn Harrison &#38;amp; Anna Shimshak in conversation" data-caption="A Process of Becoming&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Kathryn Harrison &#38;amp; Anna Shimshak in conversation&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/05b23b0d467ac054ea0d1afb63e2538d65dafbe16893c6f5b191ec36b7dac8d5/5.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="3000" height="2400" width_o="3000" height_o="2400" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/78ecbbb1d5d9fc7e1f7664f15ea98771497c6adc8993955f10b13ec9f03ab976/Widline_Cadet_11.jpg" data-mid="53033274" border="0" alt="HomePatrice Helmar in conversation with Widline Cadet" data-caption="Home&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Patrice Helmar in conversation with Widline Cadet&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/78ecbbb1d5d9fc7e1f7664f15ea98771497c6adc8993955f10b13ec9f03ab976/Widline_Cadet_11.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="901" height="720" width_o="901" height_o="720" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/23e525047dbb6294c69c6321166619053b0f38723248fe4e7aa359e569a48702/11.jpg" data-mid="43645991" border="0" alt="Between Myth and RealityBen Huff interviewed by Karolina Karlic" data-caption="Between Myth and Reality&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Ben Huff interviewed by Karolina Karlic&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/901/i/23e525047dbb6294c69c6321166619053b0f38723248fe4e7aa359e569a48702/11.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="750" height="600" width_o="750" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be2ee1476446aa3f645df182322d8827e33404a4c17a576887680d1c026b7534/12.jpg" data-mid="43645988" border="0" alt="Angry White Mena conversation between Jason Koxvold and Shane Rocheleau" data-caption="Angry White Men&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;a conversation between Jason Koxvold and Shane Rocheleau&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/be2ee1476446aa3f645df182322d8827e33404a4c17a576887680d1c026b7534/12.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="500" height="625" width_o="500" height_o="625" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/106c6894a5dcd4d4d5fb60f806469713a8823297d627d2eadadfc7c7229ff09e/13.jpg" data-mid="43645995" border="0" alt="Ruinous Silencesan essay by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa" data-caption="Ruinous Silences&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;an essay by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/106c6894a5dcd4d4d5fb60f806469713a8823297d627d2eadadfc7c7229ff09e/13.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="500" height="625" width_o="500" height_o="625" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b2b3006aa66bcb34b2bf3981d2643ae149aefbbec3c6fb9bddf85dd187261ba/9.jpg" data-mid="43645987" border="0" alt="Monolithican interview with Richard Anderson" data-caption="Monolithic&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;an interview with Richard Anderson&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/2b2b3006aa66bcb34b2bf3981d2643ae149aefbbec3c6fb9bddf85dd187261ba/9.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1000" height="786" width_o="1000" height_o="786" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef6f7ab5e642d1a722610a9b21c93abc3d13c42edab9d281b265069de8acea46/14.jpg" data-mid="43645990" border="0" alt="Our New Jerseya conversation between Caiti Borruso and Michael J. Dalton II" data-caption="Our New Jersey&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;a conversation between Caiti Borruso and Michael J. Dalton II&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef6f7ab5e642d1a722610a9b21c93abc3d13c42edab9d281b265069de8acea46/14.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1000" height="800" width_o="1000" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c99d750e1fd18720284d842beda6ef6ad75d535e37f0c65c3afc5bbecc9e8cc1/15.jpg" data-mid="43645984" border="0" alt="The Horror of FleshIlona Szwarc interviewed by Ashley McNelis" data-caption="The Horror of Flesh&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Ilona Szwarc interviewed by Ashley McNelis&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c99d750e1fd18720284d842beda6ef6ad75d535e37f0c65c3afc5bbecc9e8cc1/15.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/31d8212b2fb6600adf598a69d164865ecb1e3436a441553bd312e018b17182e8/Mother_and_Daughter.jpg" data-mid="45759199" border="0" alt="An Almost Imperceptible ShadowDanna Singer interviewed by Lindley Warren Mickunas" data-caption="An Almost Imperceptible Shadow&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Danna Singer interviewed by Lindley Warren Mickunas&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/31d8212b2fb6600adf598a69d164865ecb1e3436a441553bd312e018b17182e8/Mother_and_Daughter.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1439" height="1800" width_o="1439" height_o="1800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f247e8586c74cbb7b3b3282654b5e952a226b2bbda644086d5df59b4c11b76e/Zora-J-Murff-Chris-talking-about-fear-2019-web.jpg" data-mid="59768641" border="0" alt="A Good Patriot is Always ConflictedZora J Murff in conversation with Terence Washington" data-caption="A Good Patriot is Always Conflicted&#38;lt;br&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;Zora J Murff in conversation with Terence Washington&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3f247e8586c74cbb7b3b3282654b5e952a226b2bbda644086d5df59b4c11b76e/Zora-J-Murff-Chris-talking-about-fear-2019-web.jpg" /&#62;


︎</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>patriot lead</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/patriot-lead</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 18:43:11 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

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		<description>A GOOD PATRIOT IS ALWAYS CONFLICTED

Zora J Murff and Terence Washington in conversation</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>patriot text</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/patriot-text</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 18:43:02 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/patriot-text</guid>

		<description>

	Zora J Murff&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I have been trying to find a good—maybe poignant—way of introducing this conversation. I knew I failed when I found myself googling the statistics for becoming a lightning victim. But a strike of lightning succinctly describes the short time I’ve known Terence Washington. We first met at the Silver Eye Center for Photography to discuss the medium’s role as witness and as a mirror for self-critique. That conversation carried forward, leading to him writing for At No Point In Between. We continued talking, and are both very excited to share some of it with y’all.
At No Point In Between was published by Dais Books, and was the winner of a coveted Lucie Photobook Prize in 2019. A limited number of copies are still available through the publisher.
	

&#60;img width="1599" height="2000" width_o="1599" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/755491bd8f41cd68a0983096732b260259e03988d89a81ebd676558563ff98f4/murff-reservoir-20.jpg" data-mid="59575486" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/755491bd8f41cd68a0983096732b260259e03988d89a81ebd676558563ff98f4/murff-reservoir-20.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1572" height="2000" width_o="1572" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/32c11e7c615b80ddd4bc8ac836e658c00596d9c4a79f7d81101862c1b92f153b/murff-reservoir-13.jpg" data-mid="59575479" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/32c11e7c615b80ddd4bc8ac836e658c00596d9c4a79f7d81101862c1b92f153b/murff-reservoir-13.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1600" height="2000" width_o="1600" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/93464396ce172c8e76c47e42205edb868530eaeb5514426401ca2e797437a0d9/murff-reservoir-2.jpg" data-mid="59575465" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/93464396ce172c8e76c47e42205edb868530eaeb5514426401ca2e797437a0d9/murff-reservoir-2.jpg" /&#62;
Zora J Murff, Stripped;&#38;nbsp;Roses;&#38;nbsp;Knight


	Terence Washington &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; What is a question that you get asked about your work that you don’t get to talk about?


Zora J Murff &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; Recently at a portfolio review, I was showing a maquette of my book. A reviewer told me that there should be more textual information, that without it, the work was too heady or cerebral; this actually happened more than once that day.
	

&#60;img width="1200" height="960" width_o="1200" height_o="960" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e85c339c4c9b3dc4b7d0c088659d7afdac3f4b37f38085ac8ede0a0dc656b1a/murff-reservoir-33.jpg" data-mid="59575507" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8e85c339c4c9b3dc4b7d0c088659d7afdac3f4b37f38085ac8ede0a0dc656b1a/murff-reservoir-33.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1200" height="900" width_o="1200" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ffae3522951d685d9d3cdeec13606990a6d755f5b5557031223cf135f6c76efb/murff-reservoir-32.jpg" data-mid="59575500" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ffae3522951d685d9d3cdeec13606990a6d755f5b5557031223cf135f6c76efb/murff-reservoir-32.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1200" height="900" width_o="1200" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/12807e38b7f57b2b865fedee221dc8dbef0a175123edb2846aaae81de35d3c2d/murff-reservoir-36.jpg" data-mid="59575517" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/12807e38b7f57b2b865fedee221dc8dbef0a175123edb2846aaae81de35d3c2d/murff-reservoir-36.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1200" height="900" width_o="1200" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2183dcc125c065aae4bbc39192ebbbb20ac97b2d44cfa11533a5231e7497be31/murff-reservoir-34.jpg" data-mid="59575513" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2183dcc125c065aae4bbc39192ebbbb20ac97b2d44cfa11533a5231e7497be31/murff-reservoir-34.jpg" /&#62;


	TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; What do you say to that?


ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; The work is a conversation about photography’s objectivity; how we choose to believe in images (i.e., how belief systems are found, challenged, or reinforced through imagery); how images are contextualized and politicized. My choice to make the work “cerebral” is to ask the viewer to question what they see and the emotions they feel when they see it. To me, that level of introspection is crucial when looking at images because there is always more information available if one takes the time or puts forth an effort.
	

	I recently wrote a lecture on representation, and I included these images in starting a broader discussion
about the persistence of ideologies garnered from imagery. Both of these examples are inspired by
Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”, a poem supporting European and American imperialism and
ethnocentrism. In Kipling’s words, these “savage wars of peace” were the express way to civilize the
“unwilling barbarian,” effectively placing whiteness on a pedestal and all others underneath.This history is quite deep, and throughout time, we have seen the many dividends paid to whiteness based
on the investment in the oppression of non-white people. Imagery — and photography — has always played
a role in that. Early on, I knew I wanted to wade into that discourse. However, to include a lot of textual
reference to history is to begin writing a textbook, and that was never my intent. In different ways, I
reference that history, but leave enough space for the viewer to do the labor (if they choose to).


	&#60;img width="398" height="599" width_o="398" height_o="599" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ff36627e9e5b030e70656dc789ef9bc6f388d8947cec6bf7c2f93c83b353452b/Pears-Soap.jpg" data-mid="59575521" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/398/i/ff36627e9e5b030e70656dc789ef9bc6f388d8947cec6bf7c2f93c83b353452b/Pears-Soap.jpg" /&#62;Pears Soap Advert (1899)


	TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; This feels a little abstract because I do think people often need help with certain references,
but it strikes me that including a lot of textual reference to history reinscribes text as the default for
the representation of history, and I have a problem with that. It seems like you’re trying to stoke
critical thinking in people rather than explicating everything. And the texts you do have, which Lisa
Riordan Seville and I were fortunate enough to contribute, model that sort of idiosyncratic,
personal response, with mine being a sort of poetic essay and Lisa’s being in a more reflective mode.
Both were inspired by your photographs, which present history as a complicated, multi-temporal
thing.
ZM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Exactly. In the beginning, I naively thought the work would have an “a to b” trajectory. But as I dug
deeper, the progressively more complicated things became, especially when looking at archived materials.
They told multiple — and often contradictory — stories.
When we met in Pittsburgh for our discussion at Silver Eye, one of the images we spoke at length about
was the lynching photograph of Will Brown (Omaha, Nebraska, September 28, 1919). The original image
is quite graphic and shows his body as it burns and the white men who were complicit in the act. I had
some back and forth about including it. I recognized its importance and its connection to the evolution of
anti-Black violence and an illustration of political power.
Historically, photographs of spectacle lynchings are wrapped up in the projection or politics of shame.1
On one end, they were meant to intimidate Black individuals, a way to remind us of white desires to hold
Black people at the bottom of a false racial hierarchy. On the other end, those same photographs become
irrefutable proof of the pervasiveness of white supremacy. The facts that one: a mob of white individuals
can commit a murder in public space, record themselves doing so, and go unpunished; and two: that we
now have explicit depictions of those who were complicit, and what that says about the value or belief
systems of individuals, communities, and the country.
I chose not to include the entire image because of how showing that extreme violence muddies more
critical readings. It becomes challenging to divert one’s eyes from the act of violence itself, and our
bodies, Black bodies, become sensationalized within the gaze of whiteness. By cropping into the image —
and using the original text from the archival object — I keep the history intact and redirect the power of
gaze.
I must say that the use of the photograph in this way is not novel. Anti-lynching organizations, Black-owned newspapers, Mamie Till Bradley, Diamond Reynolds, and others all recognized the agency
photography could carry. Through the now weaponized photograph, we can make manifest the ideals on
which our country was founded.&#38;nbsp;
	

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	Zora J Murff, A Point (2);&#38;nbsp;A Point (3);&#38;nbsp;Terri (talking about the freeway);&#38;nbsp;Jerrod and Junior (talking about fatherhood);&#38;nbsp;A settling of minerals, history, and hurt (1) 
	

	TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Yeah, when I was researching lynchings and perhaps especially the circulation of the
photographs, it seemed to me that the perpetration of any offense was almost secondary to getting
away with it. The impunity was the point. The postcards spread around both participation and
impunity. Someone who possessed one got to identify himself with the perpetrators, but no one with
any legal power was able, or willing, to use that identification to hold anyone accountable. Yet at the
very same time, with the same images, people like Ida B. Wells were able to shame white people into
holding other white people accountable. With these things in mind — the lynching photograph as a
place for both cementing whiteness and holding it up to the light — and with the persistence of
white supremacy now, I have to ask: what is the new lynching photograph?
ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Lynchings were a common practice in the antebellum American South and persisted into the Jim
Crow era. These were once murders that would happen in the cover of night, the men who committed the
crimes shielding their identities. We, of course, know that would eventually evolve into groups of white
people hanging Black individuals in public spaces. I put forth footage of police violence as one of the two most significant analogies that we have to photographs of spectacle lynching, precisely because of the
trajectory in the visibility of that type of violence. I think about the video of Rodney King. How before March 3rd, 1991, when George Holliday would
record King’s beating, that those eight minutes and 56 blows were reserved only for Black communities to
be intimately familiar with. I think about the photographs of Michael Brown’s body left out in the
summer sun for all of those on Canfield Drive — and then the world — to see. The image that, as Ferguson
committeewoman Patricia Bynes put it, “[the act] sent the message from law enforcement that ‘we can do
this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’” I think about
the declining of bringing charges by the grand jury in 2014, the acquittals in 1991, the lack of legal
recourse in 1919; those actions that have told us and continue to say to us that in the United States of
America Black life is less valuable than white.

	
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Growth (diptych)


	I would argue that one crucial change is how the images are made. Spectacle lynchings became a
ritualized act of collection; individuals would take body parts and pieces of rope as souvenirs. As soon as
photography became wrapped up in that ritual, the resulting images were collected as well, photographers
selling the pictures as postcards. Today, the footage is captured by reporters (those who take the videos)
and by surveillance (body cameras, dash-cams, and CCTV). While there is no ritualized collection, there
is still a ritualistic aspect to it. The killing happens, there’s the public demand for the footage, the footage
is released to the public (if it exists), there may be a trial, and more often than not an acquittal. If we
respond to this kind of footage as a corollary to lynching, one question I have is how does the gaze
(whether of the concerned citizen or passive institutional oversight) change our interaction with this type
of image?TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Whereas the lynch mob was aided or conveniently ignored by police, now, police officers have
the legally protected discretion to shoot when they feel threatened and, in some states, armed
citizens also have the right to shoot first and ask questions later. So we’ve gone from abdication by
law enforcement officers of their responsibility to prosecute killers to legal sanction of using violent
means to “protect” oneself. At any rate, the impunity is and always has been the point, and that’s
where the history of lynching comes closest to the present day, at least in my view. But there are a
couple of things that are different now. For one thing, the population calling law enforcement into
question is much larger and more diverse and has more outlets for their voices than ever. For
another, the videos we see now are taken either passively, through automated surveillance, or, when
active, recordings are made with an activist slant, wherein cops are themselves being surveilled by
citizens; both of these aim to record fact for accountability purposes, which is the opposite of what
they used to do.

ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I feel like that is where that water starts to cloud, right? And I think that’s one of the reasons I was
so drawn to the Laquan McDonald case, because of its complications when it comes to perceived threat,
power, and proof.
TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; These things get broken down so much in the court of public opinion that it sometimes feels
like the only fact we have left is that someone is dead forever. All the stuff that happens in police
reports and at trial is about how we place that fact into someone’s hands. I remember reading the
original New York Times article about the New York City Transit Police’s 1987 killing of Michael
Stewart and getting angry, tearfully angry. The article was full of passive voice and these mealy
prepositional phrases — anything to keep the cops from sounding at all responsible, as if Stewart
had somehow beaten himself into a coma. It was like the paper was killing him again by
disrespecting him that way. One of the things I appreciate about the book is your use of the Walter
Scott image because, for one, you use a still, which has him still alive and running. Splitting him
from Michael Slager almost saves him, at least until we close the book. It strikes me as a responsible 
way of thinking about a killing without reproducing the image of it. How do you get past the representation of such violent images? ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; There was a moment when I first split the images, and I thought about Scott running unencumbered
by the other half. It made me feel hopeful about the interventions in the book that even though it’s a heavy
subject, that the more profound things I’m trying to access are necessary. I was abstracting the archival
imagery, radically: both as the thing itself and something more; both in and out of time. You touch on in
your writing, To Wreck A Structure,

…when there isn’t a radical living or dead who never said I; when there may not be one who
 never spoke, even though to speak, to think, is to be in time and to be in time is to crumble: the
 most radical thing is to choose time and its distension, to choose the question of the self and its
 profusion, to choose the problem and possibility of connection…
The dash-cam footage from the murder of Laquan McDonald was the first time that I had decided to
watch that type of video all the way through. It was jarring, and I felt an intense fear as a result. I brought
that same question to all of the other materials, "how does this make me feel, and how do I use context to
encapsulate those feelings?"
	

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All our eclipses bright (Vivian) All our eclipses bright (Will)


	The clearest example of this is the appearance of stills from the murder of Walter Scott and the murder of
Laquan McDonald. One of the first images you encounter is half of the video-still that shows Walter Scott
running from Michael Slager. About halfway through the sequence, you see a video-still of McDonald
right before his encounter with Jason Van Dyke. One of the last images you see is the other half of the
Walter Scott still that shows Slager with his gun raised. These images are meant to keep the reader
grounded in reality. I didn't want this work to escape or transcend the real, and the work overall is a
stretching or — in your words, distension — of multiple timelines.
If we consider the lynching of Will Brown as a starting point and my photographs of North Omaha as an
endpoint, we're looking at a period of 100 years. If we consider the timeline of the Walter Scott video,
we're talking about a period of three minutes and twelve seconds. By splitting that image, I'm presenting a
100-year history that unfolds inside of that three minutes. To see that deep-rooted history that is inherent
in images is to tap into a deeper social consciousness; to see the many crises we face/have faced (police
violence, redlining, lynching), and implicate those who have created and uphold that state of being.
	

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	In your list of questions, you asked about having multiple timelines at once dramatizing something about
the world, or white supremacy. I don't mean to steal it, but how do you think the work interacts with those
ideas?
TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I would hope that representing the coincidence of multiple timelines undermines hegemony in
some way. By showing the coexistence of multiple realities or perspectives, you make a subject out
of that coexistence and its nature rather than out of any single perspective. And once you can point
to a reality as one of many, you’ve got your crowbar under it. That’s one of the things I think the
book does well, and something I aimed for in my writing for it. Your arrangement of the
photographs opens up that Walter Scott moment and asks us to see the shooting as a manifestation
of something bigger than both Scott and Slager, something into which they were born, something
that is and isn’t about them as individuals, though, of course, Scott didn’t and doesn’t have the
luxury of individualism that Slager did. I hoped in writing about how to break a structure to stage a
fight among different perspectives for your recognition.
ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Speaking of your writing, I’ve been curious about your construction of the piece. I intentionally
gave you a lot of liberty because I wanted a genuine read on the work for better or for worse. The first
time I read through it, I was excited because it felt like you were inside of my head, that you saw the
things I saw while I was making and conceptualizing the work. What was that process like?
TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I started off thinking about how to get a reader to jump out of their frame of reference into
that of, say, Walter Scott. Or of literally the Walter Scott image you have in the book. Or the book
itself. I wanted to have the act of reading reanimate Scott in a way. One of those ideas turned into
the next and so on until I felt like I had come to a new understanding of what you’re doing with
time in the book, and that opened something up for me. I also tried to misunderstand the word
“structure” from the title of the pamphlet, or to see how far I could take the idea of “wrecking a
structure.” Instead of doing something more straightforward by writing directly about your
photographs, I think I picked up a mood from sitting with the photos for a while and tried to
convey that. And I was really moved by that choice you made to open up the 3-minute Walter Scott video to
reveal 100 years of history. It made me think of time differently in my writing, and I found myself
trying to slow people down or speed them up with line breaks. The idea of a time inside another
time brought me to funk music — which was built around emphasizing the beats that were
traditionally de-emphasized — so you see some of that in the text. I was thinking that in an anti-Black world, maybe living as Black wrecks the structure. “Let my very being tear the roof off that
motherfucker,” you know? Maybe I still contribute to the demise of the structure by living well in
the time I have. Still, a particularly devastating question stuck with me through all the drafts, and I
wonder how your work gets at it: “what is an individual in this structural context?” What does it
mean to say “I” at all, and how do our concepts of our selves figure into what we do to wreck
structures? How does your work point toward an answer?
ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I like that you ask how the work points toward an answer rather than how it provides solutions. I
lectured quite a bit last year, and a common question I received was, “What do we do?” At a lecture that I
gave earlier this summer in Fort Collins, CO, an audience member asked something to the effect, “We
invite artists of color to come speak, but as you can tell we don’t have a lot of people of color who show
up to these events.”
The room was full of white people, maybe 2-3 people of color, including myself. I responded by saying,
“That question isn’t for me, it’s for you and the other people in this room. I can’t and won’t pretend to
have an answer to that question. Are all of you asking that of each other? How does this community make
these spaces more equitable?”
	

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Zora J Murff, Aftermath; Freddy (talking about his home); King


	This work was an emotional response to things that I saw; art became the conduit that I chose to exorcise
those feelings.
I think that saying the work should accomplish one thing or another is to do it a disservice.
Instead, I believe in the work’s potential. One hope that I have for the work is that it acts as a mirror. Lisa
captures this well in her afterword, referring to the lynching photograph of Will Brown, I ask myself what it takes to perpetrate a casual act of photography amid the smell of burning
 flesh. But I do not ask why I do not see myself among the faces in the crowd. I could come up
 with reasons other than the truth, which is that because they are white and I am white, I can
 convince myself our stories are not conjoined. I can write around it. I know that is a failure of
 sight…In the beginning, you and I were born into this place. Ours is a country that would force
 you to see your outlines in the body of a boy shot to death on Chicago’s Southwest side, and
 absolve me from recognizing mine in the lyncher’s smile.
To see or feel yourself in this work on any level is to say, “I,” an acknowledgment of oneself inside of this
structural context. To be self-aware is to wield power and orient oneself towards an answer.TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; That rings true to me for sure, and I wonder whether acknowledgement of our identities’
construction is itself a way out. Lisa doesn’t see herself in the crowd at the Will Brown lynching, but
she recognizes that failure as a privilege afforded by her being white in this country. Lisa “can write
around” the connection between her and the people in that crowd, “can convince” herself that the
connection is nonexistent rather than invisibilized. But she doesn’t. She undoes the particular
innocence of American whiteness by naming it. She undoes herself by laying bare the strategies she
might have used to shore up her individuality. And when she makes the choice not to separate
herself from that lynching crowd, she holds herself accountable for the effect of whiteness now. Self-awareness makes true choice and accountability possible.
What Lisa’s talking about is the kind of work you asked those people in Fort Collins to do. When
institutions say “we invite them but they don’t come,” the framework is already inadequate. Don’t
just invite people into your space; break down the socio-political barriers that make it possible to
define “your” space versus “theirs.” I don’t always know what that looks like, though. There’s that
section about people getting the vote “in 1870 and 2025,” which I meant to be some sort of radical,
“give non-citizens a vote” thing after reading an article on the subject. Then it hit me that it might
not be very radical at all...it almost sounds patriotic, based in a belief in democracy as we already
know it. And I don’t know if that’s enough — why should my model for an inclusive country be
so...American? To what degree is citizenship part of who I am? Is this something you think about
generally, or while making work?
	

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Zora J Murff, Jhalisa (talking about America); Beacon; Chris (talking about fear) 


	ZJM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; While I was making the project, I was asked on more than one occasion if I felt that I had to make
this work because I was Black, that it wasn’t my responsibility to make it. There were so many different
and overwhelming emotions from that question, but mostly I was pissed. The people asking me were
white, and I was angry because I now had to question if they felt a need or desire to try and provide me
with some absolution or if maybe they were trying to test the integrity of my intentions.
After sitting with it, I realized that no one had ever asked them if they felt the need to make their work
because they were white. I began dreaming of a way to pose my response, one that challenges the
perceived necessity of the question asked of me. The result was the work. That isn’t to say that this is a
foundation of the work, but rather an irrefutable part of it because this is something I was contending with
while I was making it. If we are speaking broadly, this dream isn’t very radical at all, but given the space
that I was in, it was. I hope that I left that space better equipped to think more radically than it once had,
that someone else in the future doesn’t have to ask themselves the questions I had to. Maybe I’m putting
forth dreaming as a continuum.TW&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; “Dreaming as a continuum”...as in, your dream might create the reality upon which the
dreams of the people after you might be built, or from which they might depart. In a way, that
frame is kind of a validation of the idea that the United States itself is an idea — that we’ll never be
done. The union will never be perfect, and justice is never an event, but a process...but maybe
striving toward something better is what this whole experiment is. Yet it’s interesting — you make
work about the present and the past. Or how the past is in the present. For so long it was, you know,
a house and a car and a steady job and a happy family, but in this totally individualistic and
ahistorical way, as if everyone was supposed to build that out of nothing. Now, it’s clearer every day
how much the wealth of our parents and their parents determines our futures, and how the roots of 
some of that wealth run into the deep, dark past of this country. What does it mean to dream of a
reckoning with the past? How do you think of the American Dream then?
ZM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; This makes me think about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ exacting opening essay of the 1619 Project which
points at crucial moments where the “American Dream” was bent to the will of whiteness. One thing that
stuck out was her reflection on how she was once confounded by her father’s display of an American flag
outside of their home, but comes to the following conclusion:
 My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s
 contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that
 the United States simply would not exist without us…Without the idealistic, strenuous, and
 patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different —
 it might not be a democracy at all.
We were once forced to sweat and bleed and die for this county, to set the cornerstone and put up the
walls. We dreamt of a time when that would no longer be the case. We then sweat and bled and died,
turning hammers against what we were forced to build, continuing to dream all the while. When we last
spoke on the phone, I was caught up in this sort of fatalism. I was thinking of our dreaming as stunted or
truncated because at every turn, there has always been someone’s boot on our necks. I was weighing
Black freedom against white privilege. But that has never been the answer. When I close my eyes and
dream, I do not see, but rather feel. It is a sensation that is hard to put into words.
I, too, will sweat and bleed and die and dream, hammering harder until the structure comes down.
	

︎


	Zora J Murff is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. In 2019, Murff was an Aperture Portfolio Prize finalist, selected as a Light Work Artist-in-Residence, and named an honoree for PDN’s 30: New &#38;amp; Emerging Photographers to Watch. He has published books with Aint-Bad Editions and Kris Graves Projects. Murff is also a Co-Curator of Strange Fire Collective, a group of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and curators working to promote and construct an archive of artwork created by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.
	Terence Washington is the curatorial liaison for public programs in modern art at the National Gallery of Art. His writing, which often focuses on Blackness and contemporary art, has been published by the Studio Museum in Harlem, the DC Arts Center, the Clark Art Institute, and, most recently, Dais Books.
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	<item>
		<title>danna lead</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/danna-lead-1</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Jun 2019 14:46:25 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/danna-lead-1</guid>

		<description>AN ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE SHADOWDanna Singer in conversation with Lindley Warren Mickunas</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>danna text</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/danna-text-1</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2019 18:57:57 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/danna-text-1</guid>

		<description>
	Lindley Warren Mickunas&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Something that appeals to me about If It Rained an Ocean is the presence of a multilayered perspective. You are both insider and outsider—in the sense that you grew up in, but later left, the New Jersey neighborhood where the series takes place. How do you view yourself in relation to these photographs?
	

&#60;img width="2000" height="3000" width_o="2000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b5d2b2735f14c8e3156af2de73f4dbe085eabd29a8d6750dbadb9446c21aa53/Bathroom.jpg" data-mid="45441483" border="0" alt="Bathroom, 2016" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Bathroom&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2016&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b5d2b2735f14c8e3156af2de73f4dbe085eabd29a8d6750dbadb9446c21aa53/Bathroom.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="3000" width_o="2000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1d584352943bb62555b0d37426dbc1d5f971318e20b284efb6e2a8224e73825c/Happy_Birthday.jpg" data-mid="45441484" border="0" alt="Happy Birthday, 2017" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Happy Birthday&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2017&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1d584352943bb62555b0d37426dbc1d5f971318e20b284efb6e2a8224e73825c/Happy_Birthday.jpg" /&#62;


Danna Singer&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I see myself as both and for the very reasons you articulated. I left my hometown when I was 23 and have lived in several places since. My leaving changed things, as it often does but I am still connected to the place. Most of the people I photograph are close to me and the ideas in my photographs reflect many of my own experiences and that keeps my position in the work as very much an insider.
Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; That perspective is felt in your images. They're unflinching. What is it that you hope to communicate to those who don't have the same lived experience that you do?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I hope the work communicates the oppressiveness of classism and what it feels like to live in these spaces. I wanted to make images that were claustrophobic and unrelenting, like the daily lives of many of the working-poor in America. There are so few opportunities in working-class communities that its psychological damage is massive. There is a corrosiveness in the lack of possibility, and I tried to get at that with my edit. It needed to feel insistent.

Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; You're very successful at doing this, Danna. There are so many nuances and layers in your work that I really appreciate. You beg the viewer to take a deeper look at what you're showing them. One example is through reflections, which often show additional subjects within the frame, such as in Mother and Daughter and Ellen. Can you tell me about this visual tool you use and also about these two images?

Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Thanks, Lindley. I like using reflections when I can. They often manage to introduce ideas in a photograph without hitting you over the head with them. Reflections let the viewer in on what's happening outside the frame and also create a depth and space that can either intrude on or compliment the narrative. I think a lot about Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. I am inspired by his use of reflection, color and composition.
With Mother and Daughter, I wanted the image of the mother to exist as an almost imperceptible shadow in the frame. She becomes an onlooker, a passive figure who recedes into the landscape. It was a way for me to begin to describe family cycles and how children are sometimes left to manage on their own. In the image Ellen, I used the mirror to create a relationship with the looming male presence and Ellen. I think there is a tension between her gaze and his figure, and the reflection is a tool that brings us to that moment.
	

&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/31d8212b2fb6600adf598a69d164865ecb1e3436a441553bd312e018b17182e8/Mother_and_Daughter.jpg" data-mid="45441487" border="0" alt="Title, 2019" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Title&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2019&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/31d8212b2fb6600adf598a69d164865ecb1e3436a441553bd312e018b17182e8/Mother_and_Daughter.jpg" /&#62;
Mother and Daughter, 2016

	Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Correct me if I’m wrong, but the people shown in Mother and Daughter and Ellen aren’t family members of yours, are they? When did you decide to branch out beyond photographing your family and what was the significance of this for you?

Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; The child in the image Mother and Daughter is my niece’s half-sister Jessica. I photograph her a lot. Her father and my sister were together for a few years when they were in their teens. They had my niece Alexis and we have all been in each other’s lives since. And so, I feel connected to her and her parents in a very familial way. The branching out in the work from family to family friends (like Ellen), and people related to my old neighborhood wasn’t by design, it happened organically. I saw a photograph of an old friend on Facebook and I wanted to photograph him, so I reached out. It felt right because our neighborhood was tight and so I followed that thread and the work opened up from there.

	
&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/27e99552f517a11215bbf093743364419662f167859da88dae026fed10c6ea28/Home.jpg" data-mid="45441496" border="0" alt="Home, 2019" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Home&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2019&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/27e99552f517a11215bbf093743364419662f167859da88dae026fed10c6ea28/Home.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/de2e64f0c9d5c36dd6e1c0e1238ec634476fa2449243366e1d7b45f143c2b383/Bouncing_ball.jpg" data-mid="45441493" border="0" alt="Bouncing Ball, 2016" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Bouncing Ball&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2016&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/de2e64f0c9d5c36dd6e1c0e1238ec634476fa2449243366e1d7b45f143c2b383/Bouncing_ball.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e0cd2224abcb5ff2af84453ef49419021472a55baed2d9b9dcdef4f5805f418a/Ellen.jpg" data-mid="45441489" border="0" alt="Ellen, 2016" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Ellen&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2016&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e0cd2224abcb5ff2af84453ef49419021472a55baed2d9b9dcdef4f5805f418a/Ellen.jpg" /&#62;


	Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I find that it's really important to allow yourself to be open to the work taking you in directions that perhaps you didn't originally intend. What have you learned through the process of making the images both as photographer and otherwise?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; As a photographer, I learned that I get the greatest satisfaction out of working slowly and that I am most excited by building a picture from the ground up. I like to sit with the architecture of a place and then arrange figures in space until I’ve exhausted just about every possibility. And maybe it shouldn’t come as any great surprise, that in the end, the work revealed itself as a self-portrait. It essentially winds its way through the landscape of my own history while pointing the camera in the direction of others. That’s not to say these images aren’t about the subjects as well, but I chose to make the pictures I did because I was responding to the memory of my own experience.
Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; It’s funny when obvious things don’t become apparent until much later in the working process. This reminds me, some time ago you posted an image on your Instagram and wrote “An overlooked picture in my archives.” I find it very striking and honestly, I don’t know how it slipped through the cracks! It makes me think of Andrea Modica’s Treadwell (especially her image of a little girl and a pair of dirty socks on an uncovered mattress) for a few reasons, one being that it’s so rewarding to look at all the details within it – it’s a photo that keeps giving. Tell me about this image. Why didn’t it work for you before?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Wow, that’s quite a compliment. I think Andrea’s work is just stunning. She is a true technician, an artist with complete mastery of her craft and such finesse in her visual language. I aspire to have such command. And so, to your question, I didn’t feel that I had any of that with the image Happy Birthday and so I dismissed it. The paneling and the lack of color separation between the mother’s hair and the wood was the main problem. I was being too obsessive. I shot that picture on two different occasions. I brought in lights for one shoot and it wasn’t working for me, then I hit it with flash and still I was disappointed. It went into the discard pile until last summer when I found it again with fresh eyes. I had this idea of what the picture should have been and wasn’t seeing it for what it was. It’s funny how life can be that way too. When you try to impose your will so strongly, you can’t see the forest through the trees.
Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I can definitely relate to that. With regard to seeing things for what they are, how do you navigate the more complicated aspects of what you photograph? Why is it important for you to show things that are sometimes difficult to look at?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Many of my photographs deal with difficult subject matter and it gets emotional for me. Before almost every shoot, I want to cancel. I convince myself of some reason why I shouldn't go and then spend a lot of time talking myself back into working. I get frightened that I won’t make a good picture, or I worry about the emotional energy it will take to put myself out there to get the pictures I want.
In the end, I go because my ambition is greater than my fear and because working makes me feel better. If I were a writer, I would write it all down, but I’m not, so I say things in the way that I know how and that’s with images. I think it’s important to say something real, to be vulnerable, to have something at stake. The viewer can feel that. I know I do when I see it.
	

&#60;img width="2000" height="3000" width_o="2000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e10c316e2834a89fda27577214100f815c6fd5493ee6abcb086c8b7d5b02e7b/Counting_Change.jpg" data-mid="45441485" border="0" alt="Counting Change, 2017" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Counting Change&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2017&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e10c316e2834a89fda27577214100f815c6fd5493ee6abcb086c8b7d5b02e7b/Counting_Change.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="2671" width_o="2000" height_o="2671" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cb6d83fe447192cdaff0b02ef1e74ce1928f5341a00acacb7cdcce11a5a49645/Contouring.jpg" data-mid="45441488" border="0" alt="Contouring, 2015" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Contouring&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2015&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cb6d83fe447192cdaff0b02ef1e74ce1928f5341a00acacb7cdcce11a5a49645/Contouring.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bdf82254b9afef89c49f3b22ad36f83506d65e70b5fe5589e17ecbc1df7db7a5/Basement.jpg" data-mid="45441486" border="0" alt="Basement, 2019" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Basement&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2019&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bdf82254b9afef89c49f3b22ad36f83506d65e70b5fe5589e17ecbc1df7db7a5/Basement.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1437c8de99d7bfa4cf7f2e5aa511003f3692417f44cfac61028d3d8f199ef0a6/Cellar.jpg" data-mid="45441482" border="0" alt="Cellar, 2017" data-caption="&#38;lt;font color=&#38;quot;808080&#38;quot;&#38;gt;&#38;lt;i&#38;gt;Cellar&#38;lt;/i&#38;gt;, 2017&#38;lt;/font&#38;gt;" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1437c8de99d7bfa4cf7f2e5aa511003f3692417f44cfac61028d3d8f199ef0a6/Cellar.jpg" /&#62;


Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; You blend together various shooting methods which creates a surreal aspect to the work. While looking at your photographs I often find myself wondering if the scene involved your hand or not, which is perhaps irrelevant because you are a strong editor and ultimately you always seem to find a way to say what you intend to whether or not the actual moment was constructed.
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Photography has had such a complicated relationship with “truth-telling” since its very beginning and I wanted to lean into that with this series. And so, the work moves between the directed formal image, traditional documentary modes and staged snapshots. The staged snapshots are the most interesting to me because they attack those relationships so directly. My aim is to push up against and blur those lines while still making work that is genuine and true. A lot of my pictures look at abuse in many forms and sometimes I have to create ways to say it and other times, I find it was there right in front of me, like an open letter.
Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; You began If It Rained an Ocean in 2015 and it is still in progress. Where does it currently stand?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; After grad school, I took a long break from the work and thought it might be finished but in reality, I was just burned out. During the summer of 2018 Hannes Wanderer and I began working on, but never finished, a book of images from If It Rained an Ocean which was to be published by Peperoni Books, an independent Berlin based company owned and operated by Hannes and his brother. Sadly, Hannes passed away suddenly September of that year. His death was a great loss.
Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; What is it about this body of work that keeps you interested?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I studied under Gregory Crewdson, who believes that all artists have one central story to tell, and at its core, it is the defining story of who we are. I think that’s true. We are the sum of our histories, which often play out in cycles and that’s the thread that keeps me interested. I’m drawn to stories about the discarded, the things that are left behind. I make a lot of pictures about addiction, abuse and the emotional aftermath of living in a place where people fill their internal emptiness with anything that resembles love or escape.
The newer images that I started making in December of this year re-engage with the same ideas but dig a little deeper. They begin to create a family tree of sorts as they look at our history but in the next generation. I see a lot of myself in the young girls I’m photographing. I wonder about their expectations as they grow into adulthood and hope they demand more. I remember wanting more for myself when I was young but didn’t feel it was possible, or that I deserved it. I believed that most things, especially art, were for other people — people who were smart, rich and beautiful. There was an implied and then prescribed place that I belonged and that was in the role of mother and wife. Knowing your place was a big thing and to want more was perceived as an indictment of your family’s choices. My newer images confront these ideas pretty directly.
I’m not sure the story ever really ends and so the work will continue until I’ve said all I need to say. I’m not really that interested in the resolution anyway. I’m just looking to make a complete sentence about what it feels like and with any luck the viewer will feel that with me.

Lindley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Is there anything else that you're working on that you can tell me about?
Danna&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I started a new series of images titled I’ll Be Here in the Morning in 2017 after my stay in a motel in South Jersey, not far from my home. Since then, I’ve traveled to Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Nevada making pictures in motels and I am heading to Colorado and New Mexico this August. My main interest is in describing the social and economic demographic who are populating these places. There are long-term residents, some receiving Section 8 housing, others working away from home looking for an affordable place to stay. There are working-class families on road trips and college students passing through for spring break.
My hope is to show a cross-section of America today, a project that both celebrates who we are, who we can be and looks deeper at those who might not be seen.
 ︎


Danna Singer is a working fine artist, and educator from Toms River, New Jersey. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute, and &#38;nbsp;her MFA from Yale University School of Art. She has worked on photographic projects for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and the ACLU. She currently lives in Philadelphia, PA.</description>
		
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		<title>The Horror of Flesh intro</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/The-Horror-of-Flesh-intro</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Mar 2018 23:54:53 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/The-Horror-of-Flesh-intro</guid>

		<description>My characters
NEVER FULLY BECOME
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		<title>Ilona Szwarc: The Horror of Flesh</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/Ilona-Szwarc-The-Horror-of-Flesh</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Mar 2018 23:57:56 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/Ilona-Szwarc-The-Horror-of-Flesh</guid>

		<description>


	THE HORROR OF FLESH

	&#60;img width="1250" height="1000" width_o="1250" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bcf1569f54b07c21d8e0f75aabaf3d63fd348884be592112b39eeeafed161252/Ilona_duze-1.jpg" data-mid="15263271" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bcf1569f54b07c21d8e0f75aabaf3d63fd348884be592112b39eeeafed161252/Ilona_duze-1.jpg" /&#62;Ilona Szwarc, Untitled #21, I am a woman and I cast no shadow, 2015


	Ilona Szwarc's photographic practice is consistent. Very consistent. This cohesiveness is notable for many reasons. For one, she focuses on the mutable themes of identity and how it is conditioned by culture. It is also significant in that she works with the slippery medium of photography. In part, the strength of her practice is due to the basis of her work on being a woman and an immigrant. There are many layers to unpack in each of her images, sequences, and projects connected by these through-lines. Read more about her cleverly complex practice below.&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Ashley McNelis&#38;nbsp;
	

Ashley McNelis &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Hello from freezing Pittsburgh! How is LA? &#38;nbsp;

Ilona Szwarc&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; February is the month of blooming magnolias in LA! Its own version of spring in the land of everyday sunshine.

Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Before LA, you were in New York, New Haven, and Warsaw, right?

Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. I had been coming to the US since I was a child, but I lived here for the first time during high school as a foreign exchange student in Texas. In 2008, I moved to New York to pursue my undergraduate degree at School of Visual Arts, and then moved on to graduate school at Yale. After two years in New Haven, I decided to move to Los Angeles.Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Tell me about your year in Texas. Did your American Girls and Rodeo Girls series come out of this experience?

Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I moved from the largest, most dynamic, and most quickly changing city in Poland to a rural town of 1,200 people in the Texas panhandle. In Warsaw, I could be independent and urbane, but I was steeped in teenage lethargy. In Texas, my life became one of suburban confinement and mindless driving through the endless flatlands, but I really wanted that experience. I wanted life to happen to me and take me away from what I knew.This transition shook my world and that of Canadian, Texas. I was the alien, a displaced kid with an accent with a different taste in fashion and music, different body language, and a different educational background. I became aware of my appearance in a very new way and started picking up clues about what was cool in this world. For me and for my peers, it was a lesson in otherness.


&#60;img width="1308" height="1000" width_o="1308" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e33245708c784d984de9dd45cfec64a447663a75662076286ee187eb41818aab/1_Ilona_Szwarc_AG.jpg" data-mid="14087654" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e33245708c784d984de9dd45cfec64a447663a75662076286ee187eb41818aab/1_Ilona_Szwarc_AG.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1284" height="1000" width_o="1284" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/674fcfbfb2201736093907a0952f3996f3c356bfa9cb06ba903002f3268d59ae/RG_71.jpg" data-mid="14087679" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/674fcfbfb2201736093907a0952f3996f3c356bfa9cb06ba903002f3268d59ae/RG_71.jpg" /&#62;

(from left) Ilona Szwarc, Lariat, Gruver, Texas, 2012; Lexi, Lindenhurst, New York, 2012


For Rodeo Girls, I intentionally went back to Canadian to make a body of work about the place that was so charged for me. When I went to the rodeo on a Thursday night as usual, I stumbled upon a group of young girls who were participating in the rodeo competitions. It was just around the time when I was finishing working on American Girls, a series of portraits of girls across the US who owned customizable, mini-me dolls, and it seemed like a perfect second chapter. Both bodies of work feel related to the awareness I developed as a Polish teen in Texas of how culture conditioned my childhood. In some ways, this is an obvious observation, but it’s impossible to see clearly the effect of culture on oneself. Through those bodies of work, then, I could examine the ways in which American children are specifically American and the ways in which their coming of age resembled mine as an outsider. Both projects deal with the construction of female identity and look at two different cultures of growing up as a girl in the United States. American Girls is about the perpetuation of traditional female roles and the importance of grooming and self-fashioning, while the subjects in Rodeo 


Girls expressed their femininity in a male arena and transferred it onto pampered animals. American Girls is all about the interior of an American domestic space and the staging of childrens’ rooms, while Rodeo Girls is about the beauty of the terrain of the idealized American frontier.


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Your work regularly deals with your being both a woman and an immigrant. It’s telling that that distinction started so early and has continued on so strongly in your practice.


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I base everything on my own life experiences as a woman and as an immigrant. I start from there, and then I look for characters—real or imagined—and details and spaces, vessels to communicate those ideas, conflicts, and stories. Having lived through several identity crises, occasioned by immigration, displacement, and the dissolution of my marriage, I am tirelessly consciously and subconsciously readjusting and composing myself. I am always switching between different expressions and personalities depending on what language I am speaking, never arriving at a fixed identity. Neither here nor there. Can I go home? Where is home?


While formally my newer work looks different from my previous work, the core of my interests remains the same. It is also about the process of becoming and about what it takes to shape a self.


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Would you be able to speak to the concept of constructed identity in relation to your series, You are now entering the human heart?

Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; 

 You are now entering the human heart is a series of collaborative portraits of transgender women from Poland who, in recent years, have been actively seeking a public platform. This has become more urgent and visible in Poland since the national parliament welcomed its first openly trans delegate, Anna Grodzka, in 2011.This body of work builds on my previous projects about socialization and typologies of women as defined by culture and identity. I also approached this project as an outsider looking in, not from the standpoint of a participant. Although my experience of gender is different from theirs, this project was an effort to seek and depict points of connection and relatability between women. 

 
&#60;img width="1000" height="1505" width_o="1000" height_o="1505" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5c925a75d71fd664def5f62bac469a67ec9e0019a7a85da4c6ea6ba8bc3d07a7/2014_SL_Trans_Zara_SpisskaNovaVes-128_NEW_Sharp.jpg" data-mid="14087656" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5c925a75d71fd664def5f62bac469a67ec9e0019a7a85da4c6ea6ba8bc3d07a7/2014_SL_Trans_Zara_SpisskaNovaVes-128_NEW_Sharp.jpg" /&#62;Ilona Szwarc, Zara, Spisska Nova Ves, Slovakia, 2014


The body of work includes portraits and collages that examine how trans women construct their femininity in the context of Polish culture and how they filter and define ideas about what it means to be a woman. The portraits reflect their experiments with makeup and nail polish, trying on high heeled shoes, and their searches for “errors” and inconsistencies in their images. Of course, these are common experiences for many women, regardless of the sex with which they were born, although the specifics—how, when, and with what degree of deliberation this happens—are different in many ways for these women than they were for me.

Through the act of photographing themselves and the desire to be photographed by others, transgender women willfully reduce their body to an image that can be looked at, judged, and reflected upon. This particular reduction of oneself to an image is a form of externalizing, authenticating, and validating an individual appearance. This is in part a result of functioning in patriarchal capitalism and the circulation of images in this system; however, it is also a genuine pursuit of a cohesive identity. Perhaps this cohesiveness in appearance can be only reached in a fixed photograph.


	Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Interesting. There was a collaborative aspect to the project, right?


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I invited everyone to respond to the portrait I took of them by constructing a self-portrait in the form of a collage. They could choose to pull images from political journals, feminist magazines, news, cooking magazines, tabloids, and even porn. From these sources, participants cut and pasted figures and body parts that they believed best represent their self-image, their aspirations, and their desires. In the medium of collage, the body becomes the form, which can be fragmented, transformed, and manipulated.


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Could you speak about your desire to become imperceptible and the connection between one’s appearance and their identity?
Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Becoming imperceptible is one’s desire to fuse the self with her habitat. To mimic an accent, body language, or fashion just enough to belong, to survive. In essence, I mean passing. I can pass as an American woman until someone notices my accent. I have led myself through a series of transformations—both internal and external, conscious and unconscious—to shed my cultural belonging.Mimicry constantly produces slippages, excess, and difference. Cis and trans women learn about gender roles and appearance through mimicry, immigrants learn new languages and customs through mimicry. There is a difference between being American and Americanized. Naturalized. Almost the same but not quite. These are figures of doubling. The translation of identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process is very important to me. My characters never fully become. They are always in a state of unfinishedness.


&#60;img width="1250" height="1000" width_o="1250" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4978e17a5572d834fdb01b27b69ce171d6f3f4abbda6a0d427bc470f04ef2215/Ilona_male-16.jpg" data-mid="14087677" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4978e17a5572d834fdb01b27b69ce171d6f3f4abbda6a0d427bc470f04ef2215/Ilona_male-16.jpg" /&#62;
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&#60;img width="1250" height="1000" width_o="1250" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84f78e9ea3a76946d3c4dc0414f7133ca6cfd37abe03cbe756683e1f033c80e1/Ilona_duze-5.jpg" data-mid="14087673" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/84f78e9ea3a76946d3c4dc0414f7133ca6cfd37abe03cbe756683e1f033c80e1/Ilona_duze-5.jpg" /&#62;


(from top) Ilona Szwarc, Untitled #12, I am a woman and I feast on memory; Untitled #9, I am a woman and I feast on memory; Untitled #21, I am a woman and I feast on memory;&#38;nbsp;Untitled #4, I am a woman and I cast no shadow; Untitled #12, I am a woman and I cast no shadow;Untitled #17, I am a woman and I cast no shadow, (all) 2015


	Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; 

Now might be a good time to transition into talking about your self-published book in three parts: I am a woman and I feast on memory, I am a woman and I play the horror of my flesh, and I am a woman and I cast no shadow. For each series of photographic portraits, you transformed the appearance of American women who strongly resemble you. This performance created a mirroring effect and raises questions about selfhood, assimilation, and becoming. Could you speak about the process?


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; 

 This body of work began with the idea to organize a casting call for my doppelgängers. In this series, I wanted to turn inwards and create my own typology. My identity is both Polish and American, so I decided to look for American women who look like me to bring out the familiar and the foreign simultaneously. I wanted to treat myself as an object and a subject at the same time. It was important that all the transformative gestures were performed on someone visually similar on whom I could easily project my consciousness. I tried to push toward the outer limits of portraiture and self-portraiture. I wanted to have the viewer constantly questioning if they are looking at a portrait or a self-portrait.
	

Through cinematic close-ups of the marks I made painting and drawing on the model’s face, I first created an uncanny portrait of an aged woman. Then, through abstract and colorful mark-making, I transformed her into a large woman. The series culminates with an androgynous, grotesque, saintly mask, a contemporary Vera Icon of my own doppelgänger. I am putting my body through an abstract experiment in reproduction by producing a mask, another face of my own and of my own kind. The series concludes with a Janus figure in which I am looking at myself— at my future and my past at the same time.
The photographs are carefully staged so that every detail is coded with meaning. The narrative thread is just as important to the project as the performative aspect. The three series are intertwined by the use of the same props and through the transference of emotion and identity between the characters that I establish. For example, in the first series, I am a woman and I feast on memory, as the face of the model ages—through the close-up of a hand—we notice that the body of the makeup artist ages too. I am trying to create relationships that question whether we are witnessing two characters and/or an internal dialogue.


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Ilona Szwarc, I am a woman and I play the horror of my flesh, 2015


	Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; There are slippages in the layered photographs that reveal your Polish identity, too. Could you discuss the model’s metamorphosis in relation to your own identity and experience?


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Everything that happens is consistent with the narrative of an actress becoming the character she will embody on stage. The first photograph is a “before” shot where we see her wearing her own clothing backstage. As the tutorial culminates, I am consciously using some props that suggest a Polish (or at least an Eastern European) culture and aesthetic. This ties very much to my personal history. However, putting a traditional, folk Polish scarf on an American model is a reversed projection of my cultural assimilation where my experiences are played out onto her.

Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; You have done live performances of this process, including one in Amsterdam during UNSEEN as a part of FOAM Talent 2016. Do you feel vulnerable during the staging or performance process?

Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I feel much more vulnerable in moments like these, talking about the work, analyzing it. Also, I feel vulnerable when I am with the work on my own: printing, editing, and writing about it. 

During the shoots or a performance, my mind is focused on the production. The intimacy is removed somehow, as I am in essence reenacting scenarios I storyboarded ahead of time. 


I like to use reference images as jumping off points for my models and assistants. I often ask my models to read some of the quotes I've put together about the character or about ideas that I am working through. Sometimes we read makeover testimonials outloud, or passages from books for women with advice on makeup and what not to wear. I love engaging with actors and fictionalizing the characters of the model and the makeup artist. As I am often in front of the camera along with my protagonists, the shoots become acts of orchestrating different people, props, makeup, and lighting. I usually work with an all-female crew which creates a space of camaraderie and friendship.


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; The performative aspect was a very natural next step for the work which is, in part, a performance of and a play on gender. In moving between portraiture and self-portraiture, you are exploring and staging the concept of the ideal self. Your new works are similarly staged but now less project-oriented. Can you tell me about a few of them?


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I’ve moved away from the convention of the photographic series, for now. Since the work is concept driven, sometimes it is just one photograph that fully carries out the idea, while sometimes it’s a sequence. 


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(from top) Ilona Szwarc, She would consider herself defiled, 2018


	Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; 

 The new tutorial series She would consider herself defiled is particularly successful at showing different stages of becoming and transformation. It’s so layered!

	
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Ilona Szwarc, Her eyes retain a devastating memory, 2017


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; She would consider herself defiled is a series of instructional photographs, a tutorial of “extreme old age” stage makeup. I collect books on stage and film makeup techniques. This series is based on a so-called “construction” makeup technique, where a layer of tissue or cotton is applied along with spirit gum and liquid latex to create a textured skin effect. I push it into the realm of the grotesque and introduce a witch as a character. I see the witch as a signifier of women’s cultural un/belonging, a woman on the margins of culture, an intertwined space of gender, transgression, and fantasy. There is also a suspension between fantasy and memory, between auto/biography and fiction, between authenticity and fraud.

Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; You’ve started to introduce found elements in your work, too. For example, Some women can take their eyes out uses a page from a vintage book on photography. How do you relate found objects to the staged photographs?Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Let me answer with an example. Some women can take their eyes out is a photograph of an eye surgery from a book I found in Portland, Oregon. Earlier in 2017, I completed a sequence of close-up photographs of eyes—Her eyes retain a devastating memory—in which I watch my identity disintegrate in the eyes of my double. As her eye tears up, my portrait becomes more and more distorted, and completely blurred in the final image of her bloodshot eye. The found photograph of the dissected eye echoes my intervention in my model’s eye. It’s as if someone else has forcefully taken my character out of her eye. The scale between those works shifts dramatically, but both the viewing experiences enable the viewer to intimately discover the detailed progression of the portraits in the works.


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; There are definitely a lot of connections between makeup tutorials and the many uses of photography. Could you talk about your use of moulds?


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I first started working with silicone moulds in I am a woman and I cast no shadow. I am curious about the optic phenomenon which happens when you place the mould in front of a lens and experiment with lighting. There is a moment of optical illusion in which the mould, although protruding away from the camera, registers in a photograph as if it were facing the lens. I also enjoy working with these sculptural elements—the by-products of both traditional sculpture techniques and special effects makeup—and exploring their potential through a lens-based medium.
	

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 Ilona Szwarc 

(clockwise from top), She is herself a cave full of echoes, 2017;&#38;nbsp;She lives without a future, 2018;&#38;nbsp;She was born without a mouth, 2016;&#38;nbsp;She existed characterless, with no memory at all, 2018


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; How has moving to LA affected your practice?


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Los Angeles is a city of splendid white teeth, long eyelashes, activewear, pet cloning, and self-care regimens. It is also the land of the ghosts of Hollywood, special effects makeup, and prop houses. A whole universe of materials opened up for me here. Lately I’ve been making more work in the studio, focusing on one material with an intentional stripping down of the aesthetic.
For example, She has never seen her own blood before is a series of instructional photographs showing how to make fake blood. I am fascinated by blood recipes from different special effects makeup artists, and how intricate the different techniques are. As with all the titles in this new work, the title for this piece comes from Angela Carter, and it obviously points back to the female experience of menstruation.


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Ilona Szwarc, 

She has never seen her own blood before, 2018


Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I love how you use red “blood” against a blue background in that work. It reminds me of how, in tampon commercials, the “blood” is never red, but blue. The commercials feed into the idea that menstruation is impure and taboo. Also, I appreciate that there is a progression from a sterile, clinical test within a glass to a slightly messy scene that has moved onto the table and the model’s hand. It’s as if this series also subtly conveys that menstruation is not a big deal. 


Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I love that comparison. To make this work in Los Angeles is also to dissect the everyday work of makeup artists working on film sets. It’s to slow down and really look at every step of the processes that so many women and actresses go through daily, quickly, fully normalizing the experience. Los Angeles has also been sneaking up as a backdrop in my work. I love the eclectic Los Angeles architecture, the Art Deco traces, the mid-century modern obsession, the lavishness of 80’s interiors. I’ve been also making work in a Bel Air mansion. Part of that property once supposedly belonged to Clark Gable. It is also just around the corner from both Elizabeth Taylor’s and Alfred Hitchcock's former residences. In She existed characterless, with no memory at all, I am bringing in the decor and the space of Los Angeles into the designated zone of skincare and beauty regimens.


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Ilona Szwarc, 

An American in America, 2014


	Ashley&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Finally, let’s talk about your commission An American in America which parallels those processes but to different ends.

Ilona&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;  An American in America was a commission for S Magazine in Germany. It was an opportunity for me to explore many themes in my work but from a directorial approach. Between high school and college, I briefly worked on film sets and gained experience working with a crew of people in staging and production. 
In this project, the characters are fictitious and the theatricality is evident. They feel most animated and alive through their fantasies but they come back to feelings of introspection and alienation in the real world. I was obsessed with the challenge of portraying a collapsed lifetime in a single picture. I cast two women, a younger character and an older character, and I imagined that they are one person seen at distinct moments of her life.&#38;nbsp;

The series was shot on different locations in New York, which included a funeral home, a psychic’s shop, a commercial photo studio, a flower shop, and botanical gardens. 


At the time, I was very concerned with the question of aesthetics as signifiers of culture. How do you communicate cultural specificity? Can a photograph be American? Polish? I was trying to confuse those spaces and move in and out of the typically American sites, like a Burger King in Queens, to the Bronx, which looks a lot like where I grew up. The work became about staging cultural narratives and tropes. The series concludes with a double portrait of the two women, however disconnected, and poses a Borgesian question: would it be possible to meet yourself at a different age? At 70? At 13? Could you have a conversation with that different version of yourself? The very last photograph— a dark, Eastern European clown—is a harbinger of my next series exploring makeup techniques.


︎

	Ilona Szwarc&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; received an MFA in Photography from Yale University and a BFA from School of Visual Arts. She has been awarded the Richard Benson Prize for Excellence in Photography, the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, the World Press Photo and was recently chosen as FOAM Talent. Her photographs have been featured in numerous publications worldwide and have been exhibited in the US and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian and Regen Projects in Los Angeles, Danziger Gallery in New York and at Unseen Photography Festival in Amsterdam.
	Ashley McNelis &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; is a writer, curator, and art historian specializing in photography and contemporary art. She is the Curatorial Assistant for the upcoming Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. She holds a master's degree in the History of Art, Theory &#38;amp; Criticism from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Our New Jersey intro</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/Our-New-Jersey-intro</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:40:05 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/Our-New-Jersey-intro</guid>

		<description>&#38;nbsp;...sometimes, by leaving the place you're photographing, you end up learning more about what you expect from it, or need from it, or want from it.


</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Caiti Borruso and Michael J Dalton II in conversation</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/Caiti-Borruso-and-Michael-J-Dalton-II-in-conversation</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:39:56 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://thereservoir.net/Caiti-Borruso-and-Michael-J-Dalton-II-in-conversation</guid>

		<description>OUR NEW JERSEY


&#60;img width="1600" height="1280" width_o="1600" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1f63233375566fe2481455847901679a3cbecd7a85c3a3733f098ba9df7ad6e7/761ad2b24d1010f0-web1115collglass.jpg" data-mid="14032261" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1f63233375566fe2481455847901679a3cbecd7a85c3a3733f098ba9df7ad6e7/761ad2b24d1010f0-web1115collglass.jpg" /&#62;
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	Caiti Borruso, Glass Picture, 2015
	Michael J. Dalton II, Broken Glass, 2012


	Caiti Borruso&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I meet Michael at an opening in LIC on the first of September. He is from New Jersey, which makes my ears prick up, and he has a copy of his book, The Great Falls. We huddle under a single streetlight somewhere on a side street looking through it, and I am staring at the map of Paterson thinking about my own maps. When he tells me about his upbringing, I realize he might be the only person who could understand my relationship to Jersey in its entirety. I leave with questions. A month later I visit Paterson for the first time.
	

	Michael J Dalton &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; There is something about making photos in New Jersey that sort of makes me feel melancholic, nostalgic, and curious. It probably comes from the complicated relationship that I have with the place, as we all have with the places we come from... I was transplanted from Maine into the state at the age of 11 after my mother was sent to prison for repeated drug offenses. So my introduction to living in NJ was a little bumpy in the beginning. But I love NJ and think of my experiences there fondly. I still love driving around Passaic, Union, Essex, Hudson, and Middlesex counties to find pictures and just explore. I mean, I also check out other counties, but I keep going back to that area frequently. Counties are funny in NJ. They sort of seem like mini-States.


Where did you grow up in NJ? What are your favorite places to make photos and why? Do you go back these days?

&#60;img width="1280" height="1006" width_o="1280" height_o="1006" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e5532d35f5eba111f84cb4fd9c12f35b0e48e61b43ec13cb18cee04f9ffbd8a/family-at-711.jpg" data-mid="13244431" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8e5532d35f5eba111f84cb4fd9c12f35b0e48e61b43ec13cb18cee04f9ffbd8a/family-at-711.jpg" /&#62;

Michael J. Dalton II, Family Hanging out at a 7-11, 2014

	
	Caiti &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; Making pictures in Jersey has been difficult over the past year. My mother sold my childhood home last year, and we were out of it by March 31st. I grew up in the remnants of a shore town; the homes were built to be modest summer homes. I lived in the attic of a Cape Cod, essentially, from age 5 to 23. The neighborhood was cobbled together, the backyards touch at strange intersections, and there's a lake called Treasure Lake, shaped like an X, a small seawall, and beyond that, the bay. But I was born in Red Bank, and I spent the first three years of my life in Point Pleasant, which is a proper shore town, with fireworks at the beach every Wednesday night. My parents divorced when I was three, and my mom moved us north to Cliffwood Beach and bought a house.

	
Now that the house has sold, my practice has changed. I drive down there now to do something specific, or always stop if I'm making a trip for a different reason. I treat it differently; there is a little more respect, a little more curiosity, a new way of feeling. I am an outsider. I notice the changes more because I see them less, the way you register changes more quickly in people you see twice a year. I used to be able to dictate my moods by the bay's water.
I'll stop for now with two images: one of my childhood bed, and one of Aberdeen-Matawan, which after all these years is no longer my stop on the NJ Coast line, and a question: can you tell me more about the map you made of Paterson?


&#60;img width="1280" height="1043" width_o="1280" height_o="1043" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/55ab3fc86cf635a5f7ad5354bc1ba67f205dd319400f68c67c66375087f61d10/bed.jpg" data-mid="14033210" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/55ab3fc86cf635a5f7ad5354bc1ba67f205dd319400f68c67c66375087f61d10/bed.jpg" /&#62;
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Caiti Borruso, Childhood Bed, 2015; Aberdeen Matawan, 2015


&#60;img width="998" height="1280" width_o="998" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2185d41815fd40380af2156ad74d989e69ce20c993d04e8b91b473abfd2e35e0/stamp-map001.jpg" data-mid="13244432" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/998/i/2185d41815fd40380af2156ad74d989e69ce20c993d04e8b91b473abfd2e35e0/stamp-map001.jpg" /&#62;
Michael J. Dalton II, Stamped Map Print, 2017


Michael&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; That's such an interesting area. I never had a chance to spend much time in that region of Monmouth county. I Google Mapped Cliffwood Beach and Treasure Lake with its X shape and close proximity to the ocean. There was an interesting photo that popped up online—seemed like a huge flood had occurred over a road—maybe from that hurricane you spoke of? I'm so curious… I'm looking forward to checking out that area. I used to visit Sandy Hook a lot when I was younger. We'd take Route 18 to Route 36 up the coast. When my sister and I were in our last years of high school, we skipped a few Friday classes and took that old drive to the shore, even though Asbury Park was a more common beach for us at that time. Back then we had to use maps and our memories. We didn't have cell phones, let alone iPhones with GPS. It became sort of a tradition for me to hit the road and get lost with some friends and find new ways to get home. I often didn't carry a camera back then, as I had little money for film. But I used to love running around like that. 
I guess that’s where the map comes in. 
When I started working on The Great Falls in 2011, I only had a vague idea about the geography, history, the people and the concept that would become the foundation for my book. There is a big connection to William Carlos Williams’ poem Paterson (Book Four)&#38;nbsp;when he writes, "...Just because there ain't no water fit to drink in that spot (or/ you ain't found none) don't mean there ain't no fresh water to be/ had NOWHERE." I actually started the project by obsessively reading the epic poem, and eventually I realized I had to continually visit Paterson. I walked everywhere around Paterson. I love that city. I would take the Jitney Bus from New York Penn Station to Downtown Paterson at least once or twice a week. I went through every neighborhood on foot, multiple times, finding new people and places to photograph with my Pentax 67, 8x10 in a backpack and a tripod slung on my shoulder.

Even though I really loved the city and the people I met, I wasn't really interested in making a project specifically about a place. That in itself is just the first layer of the project. I found ways to make the project more about an atmosphere or a feeling by finding similar experiences when going to other cities such as Lowell, Massachusetts, Newark, Passaic, Clifton, Brooklyn and even Berlin. After coming back to Patterson over the years to make photographs, I was able to identify themes of resilience, escape, and reclamation (regarding both the people of Paterson and the natural elements of the park). I began to seek these themes in my picture making in other cities as well. This gave me the freedom to conceptually work outside the the confines of focusing on a specific geographic location. I was able to be a bit more playful with the utilization of the suspension of one’s disbelief in a reality of what could be perceived as a documentation of a place. It’s strange because with the attempt to make the location disorienting, I ended up making photographs of other places that look like Paterson. In that sense, I was able to make a view of my own version of Paterson. So with that in mind, I wanted to use a map that had similarities to the actual map of the area of the Great Falls, but again was not exactly the same. I drew the original map from memory. After I completed it, I added numbers to the map that correlate to the original sequence of one of the maquettes I created. I also added directions in the map that lead you on a path I took the day I figured out how to complete the project. In the limited edition version of The Great Falls, I made a second map. I used two maps—the final hand drawn map with numbers, and a zoomed in section of The Great Falls from a 1913 map. This was the year of the Silk Strike in Paterson during a time when workers were fighting for basic rights, such as 8 hour work days and safe working conditions. 


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Michael J. Dalton II, (clockwise from top right)&#38;nbsp;Sunday Afternoon, 2013; Guard Rail and the River, 2012; Dead Ducks, 2015; A Young Couple, 2013; A View of Downtown Paterson From Above the Valley of the Rocks (Winter), 2013


My experience living in NJ however was not like the strength and resilience I depict in the people I photograph or the natural environment taking back the landscape. Rather, it was a typical angsty teenage experience, hanging out at convenience store parking lots, malls, skateboarding, partying, trying to stay away from my family as much as possible. But though there was drama and some hard times, I really enjoyed my youth looking back at it. It was aimless and beautiful. Your projects Whale Creek Is Flooding, Shady Acres, and the New Work are hard to place, geographically, and remind me in ways of the American South or Midwest. I'm fascinated by this, as I tend to be drawn to more industrial or urban landscapes. Do you want your pictures to display a specificity of place or do you seek a sense of geographic ambiguity? 
I also like the sense of intimacy in your photos—the picture you shared of your childhood bed, but also the fact that you seem very close to your subjects—there is a comfort and closeness displayed that seems familial. Can you speak a bit on that?&#38;nbsp;


	Caiti&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I actually went to Paterson back in October, about a month after meeting you at Eva [O’Leary]'s opening—I was feeling restless and had been thinking about it and wondering why I hadn't gone. I found these pictures of my grandparents in an album, pictures they had taken of Paterson in the 80s, and wondered why I hadn't gone. So I went, by myself. It was anticlimactic, and I got wet, and I sat alone looking over the falls feeling mildly forlorn. It was hotter than it should have been for October. 

I spent time working in Asbury Park and I loved the shit out of it, but Cliffwood is a little different, not for tourists. There used to be a big pirate ship on the side of the road in CWB, off Route 35. I haven't found out that much about it but it's on my list. 


&#60;img width="1600" height="1280" width_o="1600" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ec36af7840c7ef65de2c74f076c46862bfdfe079f39f4e7e2d6a771ffba4372/4f54bda32a9c2d65-07_cb_web.jpg" data-mid="14032695" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7ec36af7840c7ef65de2c74f076c46862bfdfe079f39f4e7e2d6a771ffba4372/4f54bda32a9c2d65-07_cb_web.jpg" /&#62;Caiti Borruso, Untitled, 2016, from Shady Acres


	It's funny that you mention the poem—when I finally resigned myself to making work about New Jersey (after continually hearing throughout college that I shouldn't be doing that), I started reading Paterson. It felt like research I needed to do; the day I realized that's what I was doing, I bought a copy and started writing in it. I really love the map you made of Paterson, and the retracing of steps, and the frenetic feeling of your map. And I think sometimes by leaving the place you're photographing, you end up learning more about what you expect from it, or need from it, or want from it. I had a similar experience going back to Cliffwood to make Whale Creek is Flooding, what with taking the train back and pacing. So much pacing on foot trying to align myself with something new, trying to belong again.Whale Creek is one of the boundaries of Cliffwood Beach and of Monmouth County itself, and along the creek two different boys I knew died, one in the parking lot and one further down, where the creek meets the bay. So it isn't work made in the south or the midwest but right outside my back door, in the same spot where I grew up, skinned my knees, did the messy shit. Metaphorical messy shit. It's funny, because it doesn't look like anything to me except what it is. All of the pictures but a handful are made within a one mile radius. (The shadow picture was made in Sayreville, outside of my mother's old warehouse; the red house is just down 35 in a neighborhood my mother's cousin owned homes in, the dogs I found at the Englishtown flea market where my mother used to work.)
	

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Caiti Borruso (clockwise from top left), Treasure Lake, 2016; The Pit, 2015, Lawrence Harbor, 2015; Mom’s Chair, 2015 (all from Whale Creek)
	The Shady Acres work is also a place I'm strongly connected to. My aunt owned a campground in Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my summers there, until I turned fourteen. When I was twenty and living alone, I bought a bus ticket out there and saw most of my family for the first time in six years. The place was exactly the same; it felt like it had held its breath, waiting for me, had gently paused everything but my cousins and their aging. I was welcomed back with open arms but still felt like I didn't belong, and thus the camera: it made everything easier. I photographed there intermittently over three summers, until the campground sold in 2016. It was a project I had wanted to continue forever.In terms of the new work: I've been going back to Cliffwood and photographing and taking field samples—audio, rubbings. I don't feel like my work is done with the neighborhood. I haven't figured it out yet.This picture is of my brother at our back door.

	
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(clockwise from top) Caiti Borruso, Pat at the back door, 2016; 
 last self portrait (Dana), 2017;&#38;nbsp;last haircut, 2017


	My mom cut my hair at the head of our kitchen table my entire life. This was my last day at the house.And the third image, from the new work, was made in my bedroom in New York in August when I was in the middle of breaking up with my partner at the time. I am surprised, and honored, that he let me act on that impulse.

	
	I have been trying to make more portraits, especially of the people that I love, or have stopped loving. I realized recently that, after a few long years of pacing an empty beach, and mostly photographing the ground and myself, I wanted to be with other people, and talk to them, and make their pictures. Tapping into other people feels like a hurdle I am trying to clear, one I have been eyeing nervously for years.

Since we are on the topic—what are you working on? How do you approach portraits? I love everything that's happening in the portrait of the trio—the car, the smoke, the girl pursing her lips like she might be blowing out smoke. 
	

	&#60;img width="1195" height="1500" width_o="1195" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/85e4d1a31c405cf78429ce069e18a496866d56245ce9cb142eeaf209307c9eab/self-portrait-1.jpg" data-mid="14030916" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/85e4d1a31c405cf78429ce069e18a496866d56245ce9cb142eeaf209307c9eab/self-portrait-1.jpg" /&#62;
Michael J. Dalton II, Self portrait, 2010
	

Michael&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; That’s great you’re trying to work outside your comfort zone. Portraits can be challenging. There is a lot involved and, in the immediate sense, more at stake. Not that landscapes or still lives can't be challenging or risky. But in portraiture, we are forced to deal with what we want an image to be about. Your memories of the person, the conversation, everything that happened between you and your subject fogs up what's actually happening in the picture.
With portraits, the more I do it, the less awkward I feel. If I haven't done it in a while, I kind of lose the energy and vision. It's funny though, once I make one portrait during a day, I feel completely ready for the next one. Like I just had to break out of my regularly scheduled program and gain a bit of courage. Once I do that one picture, I'm set for the day. I'll go up to anyone and ask them to do whatever it is I feel like having them do in front of the lens. 
Sometimes I feel like I should do more self-portraiture just out of convenience because part of this whole process is time, and time is a challenging problem for me. I mean this literally. I work 40-80 hours a week. More recently, my new projects involve welding and sculpture. I'm also training to become a pipe fitting welder I train for about 2-5 hours each night after work. I'm trying to get my welds perfect. And the time... it's taking forever. But it would be a pay increase so I can afford to continue my artistic practice and pay both my BFA and MFA loans. I actually like the high strung, fast paced experience I’ve made for myself. I think it actually is something that keeps me going. The work ends up being like a freight train, hard to stop.


	Caiti&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I’m just heading back from visiting family in Florida and hardly made any portraits, although I want to, desperately. It is a muscle memory, making portraits, one I have started trying to flex again. It’s the same with anything related to pictures though - it’s like breaking the metaphorical seal. I find making portraits anxiety-inducing at first, but then I settle into a space where I hum, bounce, relax into myself around others in a way that doesn’t happen often. It’s nice, then, that the camera lets me do that. It lets me tap into people I haven’t seen, or wouldn’t have taken the time to see, either.

A portrait I have been meaning to make for months now: Damien is the first of the "next generation" of my neighborhood. He is the spitting image of his father and his uncles. I haven't spent a lot of time around babies of people I've known, and it's wild to look at someone's face and realize it came from someone else. I want to photograph the rest of the boys (now men) that I grew up with; I was one of two girls in the neighborhood, and Janel aligned herself with the boys, while I did not.
It’s funny that you say self-portraits out of convenience. Is that one photograph a photo of you (a self-portrait)? I find myself more emotionally drained after making a self-portrait than I do making images of others; I often feel like I am facing myself, my body, challenging myself. I make self-portraits to mark important dates, mostly, or to try and coax myself back into my skin when I feel like I am about to burst out of it.
Time is a really difficult part of making work—I’ve just switched work schedules, and I work on weekends now. It’s giving me time to adapt to having a studio, and developing a practice, but it means my shooting time is when most of the people I’d like to photograph are working.


&#60;img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/xgcMHyxAmeC--1cMY9YfZIF8XaP5e4dAalXkWm7PPubVRmdaJnl1Ha0tkyLg8qwIcBb5uvGtK4scBrR5-8SGBKXESzL3vjL1px61i3Ma-HaFJKwrFRk3xQ6TvAIOPPeEcY6Fg9_f" width="308" height="386" style="width: 216.411px; height: 271.217px;"&#62;

Caiti Borruso, Lindsay and Damien, 2018


Michael&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; 
Speaking of time, one of the ways I try to make sure I am making as much work as I can is by working on multiple projects at the same time. I can’t stand being unable to make an image because of reasons like weather or accessibility. So, when the time comes, I’ll fluctuate between projects on any given day.
Right now I'm working on a project that I'm temporarily calling Labor. This project has to do with my experience doing manual labor and existing in the blue collar world, which seems to be the complete opposite of what I experience when I drive back to my apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I work with a lot of conservative, racist, misogynistic baby boomer men from the suburbs of Long Island, Upstate NY, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in environments that are in such contrast from my existence in a racially diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn. In the project, I hope to convey my feelings about this blue-collar culture, and my issues with some of their problematic behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. At the same time, I want to show my respect for the hard work and dedication that's required to get a check at the end of the week. In Labor, I am also reflecting on my status as a privileged, educated white male, working in a conservative universe, and my alternate life in a liberal progressive bubble. It’s a work in progress, so the concepts, edit, sequence, and form may change. I’m also bringing in some backup as this project is quite expansive; I’ll be collaborating this time with Aaron Bianco while designing and editing the book. I really dig his style and insight and am excited to complete Labor with him.
 

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Michael J. Dalton II, (clockwise from top left) Image Title, 20xx; Photograph From an Old Glass Negative Bought on eBay. I Accidentally Shattered It Shortly After Scanning, 2014; Trenton Makes the World Takes, 2014


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Michael J. Dalton II, Bird Photograph #1, 2017Another photographic project I'm working on is much more intimate, subtle, and quiet. I started going on walks in Prospect Park with my girlfriend Stephanie, who is a poet and is into birding. As we would go on our long walks, she would point out new species of birds to me and sometimes recite poetry she'd memorized (something that has always impressed me). I often brought my camera on these walks and eventually we both had the idea that it would be interesting to make pictures of the birds that Steph would spot and maybe pair them with her writing. The photographs are majoritively landscape images, and in some moments, the bird that I was trying to make a photograph of has already left. This series is so new that it’s both conceptually and photographically incomplete, but it’s sort of is taking a form similar to Friedlander's photographs of vines and leaves—densely patterned flora that covers the entire frame.
I’m also doing a project about one of my siblings, Nik. I’ve been making photographs of Nik since 2011. Maybe even earlier. It’s an ongoing project that I plan to keep working on. It’s really interesting to see someone grow up through photographs as I don’t get to see Nik all the time. I plan on making these pictures for a while. 


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&#60;img width="1200" height="1510" width_o="1200" height_o="1510" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/caadbb82bc002d9c5c9d73156d96d0e3afab2ca21d49219691619bc0c0cb07d9/nicki024-4.jpg" data-mid="14030920" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/caadbb82bc002d9c5c9d73156d96d0e3afab2ca21d49219691619bc0c0cb07d9/nicki024-4.jpg" /&#62;
Michael J. Dalton II, (from left) The Gift, 2010; First Communion, 2011


	Caiti &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; You remind me of my brother, which is funny. He works as a trucker at a large rigging company in central Jersey. Three weeks ago he rigged some Richard Serra sculptures over on the west side of Manhattan. (Up until January I worked at an art handling/trucking company. After all this time, and my college degree and his lack thereof, we ended up doing mighty similar things, which makes me happy.) He works insane work weeks, like you. I’ve been gently photographing him when I can, but it’s hard to see him, and now our work schedules are misaligned. It’s strange being from Jersey and one of the only people I know from the neighborhood who left Jersey, went to college, no longer lives in the area, etc, etc. I feel responsible for myself, and the way I move throughout the place where I’m from. I felt much more comfortable, in a way, working at an (albeit art centric) trucking company, in a warehouse full of men, than I do now, working at a bookstore in Manhattan. I felt like my mother and brother in the warehouse. I feel much more out of place now, fish out of water. I bought a pair of heels. It’s very strange.
	

	Michael&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; I've always loved the part of NJ that inspires the stupid jokes people will tell you about the place, like, "oh, what exit are you from?" That’s a line that used to make my otherwise very calm grandmother into the serious business, no-funny-stuff-nurse-from-World-War-II grandmother who took no shit from anyone.
I think about the places where you can get a gnarly porkroll, egg, and cheese sandwich at a Krauser’s, or those random delis that also second as bars at night. Route 27 or Route 1. Jersey barriers with weeds growing out of the cracks. All the bridges crossing the Passaic River. The abandoned gas station and strip mall off Route 18. It’s strange how I love the landscape, the detritus, even the suburbs that I swore I’d never live in while I was growing up. Maybe I'd hate it like I did when I was in high school if I moved back.
I tried to do the professional photographer thing, the assistant thing, and attempted to work at an art institution. But by that time I was insanely broke from making art and paying Brooklyn rents. I had to get a steady paying job to afford my bills and art supplies so I went back to construction work. I stopped for a few years while I went to grad school, but now I’m back at it. I’ve been doing it for so long now, I know what you mean when you say it’s strange to put on heels.


︎


Michael Dalton &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; (b. 1985, Marshfield, MA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York as an artist and construction worker. He received his BFA from The School of Visual Arts and his MFA from The University of Hartford. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Berlin. His new monograph, The Great Falls  was published by Peperoni Books (Germany, August 2017), complemented by a solo exbhibit at FKK Gallery (Berlin, May 2018).

	Caiti Borruso&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; (b. 1993, Red Bank, NJ) lives and works in three different basements in Brooklyn, NY. On Thursdays she drives to New Jersey and pisses on the side of the road.

	
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		<title>Ruinous Silences intro</title>
				
		<link>https://thereservoir.net/Ruinous-Silences-intro</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2018 03:00:21 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Reservoir</dc:creator>

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...we should also do away with the notion—deeply embedded in much of the history of documentary photography—that those people shown in these pages seek anything from us as their audience.


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