En Foco’s Blog

Art Dealer, Curator and Writer Charles Guice expands on his commentary from Nueva Luz volume 17:1, Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: The Photographs of Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme. For the conclusion of this blog series, Charles explores Baldomero Fernandez’s series In America: Traveling Through the United States in Search of Idiosyncratic Americana. This is the final blog post in the series. To read previous parts of this blog series, please click: Part I, Part II, Part III, or Part IV.

Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: A New American Destiny

The enduring legacy of the pioneering photographers Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz is evidenced in the work of a new generation of artists: Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme. Capturing images that eschew explanation in words, their photographs of a new American reality seek to transform destiny into awareness.

Baldomero Fernandez’s photographs present another version of this new American reality, smartly and absent additional interpretation. In America: Traveling Through the United States in Search of Idiosyncratic Americana, a natural extension of his earlier project, Middletown, is a photographic survey of the country.

In Pigeon Forge, a beach ball sits unattended in the parking lot of a motel in the resort town of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The motel’s brightly painted, orange walkways and stairwells draw attention away from the fact that ironically, like the set of a vacant movie lot, Fernandez’s tableau captures traces of human activity devoid of human presence.

As a photographer, Fernandez sees his role more as documentarian than commentator. Regarding Middletown, he wrote: “I portray the situations and objects that I encounter in my travels through middle America honestly and the viewer is left to endow them with a much deeper meaning.”

Born and raised in Miami in 1973, Fernandez began photographing at an early age. A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, he moved to New York to pursue a career in photography. Recognized for both his commercial and personal work, Fernandez’s photographs justly reflect his cinematic aesthetic.

In Happy Hour, Fernandez photographs an empty banquette in a diner in Times Square. Outside the restaurant, however, life teems in motion.

A pamphleteer encourages passersby to visit a popular strip club close by; a woman looks to find her bearings; two men deep in discussion pass hurriedly by. Once again, Fernandez’s work serves only to document here, allowing the viewer to reach his or her conclusions alone.

The new American reality, perhaps, is the loss of the American dream; the sense of optimism, faith in the future and prosperity that many Americans one held and believed in has gone missing.

Fernandez’s photographs uniquely capture that sense of loss; in Tastee Swirl a man sits alone in a restaurant, expressionless, eating a meal; in Lower East Side a young woman styles her hair in a delicatessen window, seemingly oblivious to the woman leaning on a bicycle next to her.

The photographs of these three artists work to provide the viewer with a sense of awareness; they give shape and meaning to this new American destiny, a broad voluminous picture record of things American, past and present. Each of them shares their own view of a cross-section of a country and its society—the largely ignored, the seen and unseen—presented simply and “without confusion.”

Much like Frank’s, their criticism, if it may be considered as such, is not overtly critical. Rather, it is ironic and detached, principally derived from their own fascination and appreciation for their country. It is offered with little forethought for composure and unplanned. And decidedly, for each of these talented artists, as with their artistic forbearers, the true measure of their accomplishment is the indelibility with which their photographs become firmly imprinted on their viewers’ minds.

Previously, Part IV: A Disappearing America

Art Dealer, Curator and Writer Charles Guice expands on his commentary from Nueva Luz volume 17:1, Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: The Photographs of Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme. In this post, Charles analyzes the work of social documentary photographer, Thomas Holton. Guice draws out the similarities between Holton’s and Robert Frank’s approaches to capturing quotidian American life. Like master photographer Robert Frank, Holton uses imagery to critique the commonly accepted notion of the American Dream. This is the fourth blog post in a five part series. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3 by clicking on the underlined text.

Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: A Disappearing America

The enduring legacy of the pioneering photographers Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz is evidenced in the work of a new generation of artists: Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme. Capturing images that eschew explanation in words, their photographs of a new American reality seek to transform destiny into awareness.

Thomas Holton’s After 35 Years, Gladys Is Retiring offers a similar reevaluation of the American dream. Shortly after earning a degree from the State University of New York, Gladys began teaching math at the Gelinas Junior High School in Setauket, a village on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. Settled in 1655, the hamlet’s quaint, New England-style village green features a millpond, a park and an historic post office.

Born during the post-World War II baby boom, Gladys was a true child of the 50s. America stood “at the summit of the world”: triumphant in war, its middle class was earning the highest wages in the world and much of the society was reveling in a decade of prosperity.

Shared values of thrift, hard work, trust and honesty—notwithstanding an ever-present stain of racial discrimination—led many to embrace the country’s growing sense of optimism and the dream of financial security and stability. And like most, Gladys believed her “American dream” included marriage, two children and a home.

But after thirty-five years, Gladys’ faith and optimism was being challenged. The pension and social security that was to serve as the basis of her retirement income had not kept pace with the country’s rising costs. Now single, and the parent of two adult children, her future bore little resemblance to what she had imagined or planned for. For Gladys, the reality of the America that Robert Frank had so adeptly photographed fifty years earlier was being made all too real.

Avoiding oversentimentality, Holton’s 2009 series uniquely captures Gladys’ obvious disillusionment. In the image In Between Classes, Holton photographs the stationary woman as her students, in motion and out of sharp focus, pass before and behind her. Photographed against a wall and just within the frame, the image serves to present Gladys as she might perceive herself, marginalized and ineffectual.

In Thanksgiving, Holton deftly captures her quiet disillusionment in his photograph of Gladys’ Thanksgiving Day table. Gladys will spend the holiday alone, snapshots of her children fixed upright at place settings in lieu of seats that will remain empty. And it is here that Holton’s photographs share much with Frank’s. Like his, Holton’s work captures a nation’s sense of detachment and loneliness. And, like Frank’s again, Holton’s series is not meant to be an indictment of the society, but a glimpse into the lives lived by many of its citizens.

Born in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1969 to a White American father and a Chinese-born mother, Holton, began pursuing photography after completing his undergraduate degree.

He ultimately earned an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005. But Holton credits his late father, a documentary photographer, with his desire to “explore the world and discover himself along the way.”

As social critic, Holton is at his best here. Photographing Gladys as she considers purchasing a new car, he captures the picture of a woman who shows little excitement for her impending decision. Is it because she can only afford to purchase the Toyota instead of a Corvette? We never learn why, but the current downturn has left many feeling little of the optimism held by the country’s previous generations. And despite the wealth and opulence in the communities around her and where she teaches, Gladys’ world is filled with discontent, alienation and resignation.

Next, Part V: A New American Destiny

Previously, Part III: A New American Reality

Art Dealer, Curator and Writer Charles Guice expands on his commentary from Nueva Luz volume 17:1, Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: The Photographs of Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme. In this post, Charles narrates the historical and social connections between master photographers Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz. Additionally he illuminates the connections between Frank’s and Meyerowitz’s bodies of work and those of Alex Leme, Thomas Holton and Baldomero Fernandez. This is the second blog post of a five part series. Read Part 1 of this series here.

Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: This Crazy American Sensation

In 1955, Robert Frank became the first foreign-born recipient of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. In his statement of intent, Frank wrote that he wanted to “photograph freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera exclusively, the making of a broad voluminous picture record of things American, past and present.”

For the next nine months, Frank travelled over 10,000 miles in a used Ford throughout the country, producing 767 rolls of film—more than 27,000 images—in the process. A selection of eighty-three images was published, first in France in 1958 under the title, Les Américains, and in the following year in the U.S. as The Americans.

In an introduction to the American edition, beat poet Jack Kerouac wrote:

This crazy American sensation in the torrid streets when the jukebox plays for the funeral next door, it’s what Robert Frank captures in his stunning photos taken throughout all forty-eight states, from the window of an old used car (thanks to a Guggenheim Grant); he photographed with agility, a sense of mystery, genius, sadness and the odd discreetness of a shadow, scenes we have never before seen on film. We will finally recognize him in this book for all the great art he’s made. You look at these images and by the end you don’t know which one is more sad, a jukebox or a coffin or the intermediate mysteries, this black preacher on his knees for his own reasons with liquid brightness, this Mississippi bayou, Baton Rouge, it’s sunset, a snow white cross and secret incantations that no one knows outside the bayou—or this image of a chair in a café with the sun in the window pouring onto the table in a halo and I never thought we could take pictures of something that couldn’t be explained in words, in their integral visual splendor.

And in an essay on the work published in U.S. Camera that same year, Evans added:

That Frank has responded to America with many tears, some hope, and his own brand of fascination, you can see in looking over the rest of these pictures of people, of roadside landscapes and urban cauldrons and of semi-divine, semi-satanic children. He shows high irony towards a nation that generally speaking has it not; adult detachment towards the more-or-less juvenile section of the population that came into his view. This bracing, almost stinging manner is seldom seen in a sustained collection of photographs. It is a far cry from all the woolly, successful “photo-sentiments” about human familyhood; from the mindless pictorial salestalk around fashionable, guilty and therefore bogus heartfeeling.

Irony and detachment: these are part of the equipment of the critic. Robert Frank, though far, far removed from the arid pretensions of the average sociologist, can say much of the social critic who has not waylaid his imagination among his footnotes and references. Now the United States, be it said, will welcome criticism, and use it. At its worst moments, the U.S.A. today may seem to think it is literally illuminated by the wide smile of one man, and saved for something-or-other by energy and money alone. But worse moments are the province and the mainstay of the daily newspaper.

Despite this praise, the book was poorly received. Critics considered it to be “an indictment of American society,” faulting the photographs for their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” Even the Museum of Modern Art would not sell it.

Although the photographic community eventually came to appreciate his view of America—and the book itself as a masterwork—Frank worked as a commercial photographer to support himself. It was on one of these assignments, in 1962, that Joel Meyerowitz would meet the Swiss-born photographer.

Meyerowitz was not a photographer at the time. An art director for a small advertising firm, Meyerowitz, whose boss had assigned him to watch Frank during a shoot, did not even own a camera. In a 2009 interview, Meyerowitz recalled:

It was such a magical experience, watching him twisting, turning, bobbing, weaving, and every time I heard his Leica go ‘click,’ I would see the moment freeze in front of Robert, and it was such an unbelievable and powerful experience, that when I arrived back at my office, I walked in the door and said to my boss, “I’m quitting.” And he said, “What do you mean you’re quitting?” I said, “I saw this guy take photographs. I want to be a photographer. I want to go out in the street and take photographs of life.”

Emboldened by Frank’s lyrical style of photography (and the gift of a Pentax by his now ex-boss), Meyerowitz did become a photographer—a “street photographer” who adapted Henri-Cartier Bresson’s artistry of the candid and Frank’s inventiveness and creativity into his own. In addition, as one of color photography’s earliest advocates, Meyerowitz has been instrumental in changing the prevailing attitudes toward the use of that form “from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance.”

The enduring legacy of these pioneering artists—Evans, Frank and Meyerowitz —is evidenced in the work of a new generation of artists: Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme. Capturing images that eschew explanation in words, their photographs of a new American reality seek to transform destiny into awareness.

Next, Part III: A New American Reality

Previously, Part I: Defining an American Style

Art Dealer, Curator and Writer Charles Guice expands on his commentary from Nueva Luz volume 17:1, “Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: The Photographs of Baldomero Fernandez, Thomas Holton and Alex Leme.” Part photo-history and part ‘now,’ Charles provides a critical background for understanding the work of this younger generation of photographers and their view of the U.S. This is the first blog post in a five part series.

Transforming Destiny Into Awareness: Defining an American Style

On Thursday, October 24, 1929, following a month-long decline in prices, the U.S. Stock Market began a catastrophic, four-day collapse. From a record close of 381 points on September 9 to October 29, “Black Tuesday”, the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index slid more than 39 percent. And by July 8, 1932, some 34 months earlier, the Index had plummeted even further, to more than 89 percent.

The unprecedented rise in stock prices just prior to the crash inveigled cooks and magnates alike, and the thousands who had invested lost billions of dollars of wealth in just a matter of days. In the U.S., one in four was unemployed, businesses were forced to close; bank loans fell into default and millions were made homeless.

After President Hoover’s policies repeatedly failed to stimulate the economy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was swept into office in the 1932 presidential election. The new President of the United States introduced an assortment of economic programs and initiatives known collectively as the New Deal.

In an effort to illustrate its impact and effectiveness in rural communities, the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration) was charged with documenting small-towns and rural areas. And Walker Evans, the man widely considered to be the forbearer of the American style of documentary photography, became renowned for capturing that dramatic period in history.

After taking the occasional snapshot, Evans began photographing seriously in 1928. In 1935, he accepted a temporary position working for the U.S. Department of the Interior photographing a resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia, which had been built by the federal government as part of the President’s initiatives.

Two years later, Evans was working full time for the Resettlement Administration under the direction of Roy Stryker with a notable group of photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Ben Shahn.

It was during this period that he was to make one of his most significant and lasting marks on the documentary style; Evans challenged Stryker, whose own intent was chiefly to promote social change, to develop a core of images that were “pure record not propaganda,” going so far as to generate lists of subjects that Stryker would eventually use to create shooting scripts.

Evans photographed throughout the South, including Arkansas, Tennessee and Georgia, and in parts of the Northeast. But he garnered the most recognition for a series of photographs he made of Alabama sharecroppers during a leave of absence, which eventually became the foundation for the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of Evans’ work in 1938, publishing American Photographs simultaneously. The book, long “the benchmark against which all photographic monographs are judged[1],” accurately reflected Evan’s view of a country wrestling in the grip of the Great Depression—from the cotton sharecroppers of Alabama to the flappers on the streets of Manhattan. American Photographs was immediately celebrated as the seminal work in his career, firmly establishing Evans as one of the most influential photographers of his era.

In 1955, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank secured a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to “photograph freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera exclusively, the making of a broad voluminous picture record of things American, past and present.” Frank acknowledged Walker Evans’ influence, particularly American Photographs, to which he attributed “his aim and achievement.[2]“

When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny into awareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort.[3]

But Evans’ influence had been more than simply referential. The elder photographer, who Frank had met three years earlier in 1952, had encouraged and helped him to apply for the award. In addition, as Tod Papageorge notes in an essay on Evans’ influence on Frank and his work, Evans had to insist that Frank apply, going so far as to write one of his letters of recommendation—this despite the fact that Frank was intent on returning to Europe.

Evans prevailed and Frank received the grant, the first foreigner to be awarded the prestigious fellowship. Along with the older photographer’s encouragement, Evans’ “consistency of interest, intent and vision”, and the 31-year old photographer’s previous journeys (he had photographed as he had travelled throughout Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom and France, focusing on its people and preferring “things that move,”) Frank was uniquely prepared for what was to follow.

Next, Part II: This Crazy American Sensation