Larissa Leclair has teamed up with One Hour Photo to feature photographers from this exhibition. Read the initial post here. Today’s photographers are Andrew de Freitas, Joshua Lovelace, Max Cook, Ryan Barone, Michael Huey.
11-noon: Andrew de Freitas
Describe the photograph selected for One Hour Photo in three words:
Ground between houses.
How does one go about selecting a photograph that is good enough for an exhibition but that can never be seen again?
Photography is almost cheating – in its simple form, there’s no such thing as an uninteresting photograph. Even so, there are too many of them. We can’t keep track and we don’t pay any attention to most of them. Exhibition always happens, but knowing that something will never be seen again changes things. We pay more attention.
Archives are amazing; knowing that things are stored and having access to that – but there is also an alluring significance to those rituals that burn something or those ceremonies where the activity is unreproducible and confined to the experience of it. That’s what is happening with these photographs, they become part of a kind of ceremony. I chose this image to be a part of a ceremony.
What are your thoughts on letting go of this image?
I hardly had a hold of it anyway. I remember the place* where I took the photograph as having had a profound effect on me, which is why I think I was taking photographs there. I have written about being there, and gone back to photographs as the point of reference. I think that because of these afterthoughts the distinct impression the place left on me has vacated the photographs now and become too mixed-in with other things. I don’t really remember being there, but because of the images I know that I was. Reviewing the photograph allowed me to start with the image and open up the space again by thinking and writing into it. Now the image is all but spent, it became a kind of a burden. I hoped that for other people there might still be something provocative to recognize in it before it goes.
*One of many incredible grassed space between massive social housing blocks in Petrzalka, across the Danube River from Bratislava.
Website: www.andrewdefreitas.com
12-1pm: Joshua Lovelace
1-2pm: Max Cook
Describe the photograph selected for One Hour Photo in three words:
Mysterious, soothing, inviting.
How does one go about selecting a photograph that is good enough for an exhibition but that can never be seen again?
For me it was a matter of selecting a photo that I had no emotional attachment to, yet it had to stand on its own in terms of quality to have a chance at being selected for the show. I could have chosen a photo of a hubcap, something that means absolutely nothing to me, but it wouldn’t have been any good and it wouldn’t have been right for One Hour Photo. I selected about six images that I thought were good candidates and tried to imagine them being projected for one hour, and in the end chose one that I thought fit the show’s suggested theme more than the others. I think each photographer’s selection and their selection process reveals a lot about them as a person.
What are your thoughts on letting go of this image?
Letting go of something goes completely against my nature. I tend to hold on to things as long as I can because they have special meaning to me or because I might need them one day. I keep receipts just in case there is an issue with my credit card bill (there never has been). I keep boxes so that I can use them the next time I move. I’ve kept a sweatshirt full of holes that is ten years old because it reminds me of a time in my life that I don’t want to forget. I’m not a hoarder, but I certainly don’t like letting go.
I’ve experienced a lot of loss this year, so it makes me nervous to be losing something else. Permanent loss is a tough concept to grasp until it actually happens to you, and then it’s still hard to believe that something, or someone, is gone forever. However, letting go of this photo is refreshing in a way – to go against my inner instincts, to release control, and to do it with something as insignificant as a digital file. Yet in the process of letting it go, and by being a part of this show, the memory of this photo will be seared into my mind forever. So in a way I’m not losing anything.
Website: www.maxcookphotography.com
2-3pm: Ryan Barone
Describe the photograph selected for One Hour Photo in three words:
Several photographic cliches.
How does one go about selecting a photograph that is good enough for an exhibition but that can never be seen again?
With reckless abandon.
What are your thoughts on letting go of this image?
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Website: http://ryanbarone.com; http://ryanbarone.tumblr.com
3-4pm: Michael Huey
Describe the photograph selected for One Hour Photo in three words:
Destruction of Letters
How does one go about selecting a photograph that is good enough for an exhibition but that can never be seen again?
The idea of actively extinguishing or voiding a work of mine at first went against all my instincts. Among other things, I was concerned, when I first considered which work I might submit, that I would be led to choose a second-rate piece; something, in effect, I didn’t mind parting with so much. That seemed an untenable position to me and led to a period of examining what qualities make up a work created with ‘forever’ in mind and, by contrast, which ‘qualities’ a one-hour photo might possess. I decided that I was curious about producing an image to satisfy these (to me) unfamiliar criteria. What kind of piece might become complete only by vanishing? What sort of image might have its value relationships heightened – the way a painting’s value relationships are heightened through manipulation of color – by the fact of its own impending demise? I was thinking of afterglow – of bright colors that linger and grow after the eyes are closed. I considered resonances – how chords hang in the air after they have been played.
What are your thoughts on letting go of this image?
My work is mostly about legacy and loss, often loss in the framework of family history. Usually, I find myself in the position of trying to save or redeem something, rather than consigning it to oblivion. With that in mind, I eventually decided to submit to One Hour Photo an image of an item someone actively wished to have destroyed. (The title of my submission is Letters Someone Wanted to Have Destroyed.) In the past, I have declined to destroy the letters themselves, which I own, and which are a correspondence between my mother and a high school boyfriend (but neither do I feel comfortable reading them – a state of limbo that often occurs in the course of my work). Showing the image for an hour and then allowing it to slip away could be a beneficial act of substitution; a symbolic and necessary act like breaking a bottle of champagne over the prow of a ship.
This exercise asked me to think about a short lifespan, rather than one of eons: an infancy, maturaton, and conclusion all within an hour’s time. Like a fruit fly in a petri dish, the work is born, takes wing, demonstrates its fertility, passes along everything it’s got, and then – spent – falls away, like a husk.
Website: www.michaelhuey.com