from Barrio

Carl Heldmann talks with Lou Manfredini

Here’s the follow-up to my photo post about going with my dad to do a taping of HouseSmarts TV to talk about his book Be Your Own House Contractor. House Smarts has updated their website with the segment from my dad’s interview and it’s totally neat!

© Joe Kirschling

Marlaina Read was kind enough to include me in the first issue of her new online publication. Noel’s in there too.

Download the premiere issue of INVISIBLE CITY at http://www.invisiblecity.org

Contributors: Marlaina Read Alexander Binder Aaron McElroy Olivia Locher Noel Ruiz Alejandro Cartagena Michael Scaringe Kristen Heldmann Benjamin Reich Carey Macarthur Chih-Han Hsu Jason Reed Jordan Tate Daniel Farnum Susanne Willuhn Grace Kim Bruno Roels Aaron Joel Santos Carlo Dulla Stephen Donnelly Andrew P. Marcinek Nicola Trethowan Vladimir Zykov M Kitchell Kris T Kahn

I will be honest here and admit that the only reason I send mail is to receive mail. I mean, what’s better than getting art and letters made from tangible materials in your mailbox, right? With this in mind, I can’t express how much I value two photographer friends that I’ve made who live on opposite ends of the country and who occasionally grace my mailbox with incredibly generous donations to my aesthetic life. This week, I was happily surprised to find such a package from Shannon, filled with a hefty stack of prints varying in size and color, including a large helping of 11 x 14 prints.

Shannon’s work has been inspiring me for years, before I knew how to use a camera, and even when I wasn’t able to view it on the internet or in my hands, it was there as an idea in my mind. She is so fluidly a documentarian and experimental. She shows no fear, which as a photographer, I think especially, is an obstacle I have had to overcome and still do. She makes more work than anyone I know, save for our friend, Noel Ruiz, but without the kind of warped and incessant need to show everything that I know I feel on  a daily basis. And I admire that (assuming it’s even true), because I really no longer know what it’s like to be left alone with your art. To sit in a room with it and not have the room be a portal to other peoples’ opinions. There’s sincerity there in that space, and a beauty that is imbued in the images from knowing them so well.

Shannon has several bodies of work so it’s hard for me to begin writing about my thoughts regarding the images. I see them individually, but also how they fit into the larger ideas. And I don’t know how much I should share, as it’s not up on the internet for everyone to see. Maybe one day she’ll let me go through her work with her and we’ll make a website and write about it. Her self-portraits, her work in the Tenderloin, Nepal, her images of childhood, her paintings and drawings, her accompanying stories written about the images, and her newer photo project that I think I’m seeing a bit of in a couple of these images.

If I ever have any doubt about being a photographer, I can put it aside for the moment and trust in my friend Mimi, age 2, who was inspired to remember me all the way from Kansas the other day, after having only met me once at the tender age of 20 months , and who according to her mother asked her to “Draw Kristen, Kristen has a camera, draw Kristen’s camera.” Some of the most thoughtful people I know. At any age.

Copyright © 2009 Liz Kuball

Liz Kuball gets three crowd-sourced recommendations on the 20×200 blog. Were I on Twitter, I would’ve added a 4th. (Dare I join Twitter? I’m already swimming in my Google Reader.) Anyway, she totally wins. I was poking around her website and blog to find an accompanying photo, but ran into the trouble of finding too many to choose from! Liz’s blog is a must-read/see as she updates frequently with gorgeous images from her work in Southern California.

Copyright © 2009 Liz Kuball

My friend Joe and his awesome scanner camera were out at the Milwaukee Museum of Art on Friday taking portraits as part of Cedar Block Presents: Jan Lievens on a Jet Plane. See the rest of the portraits here.

1810 W. Cortland photo by Kristen Heldmann, noted only to avoid the confusion ensuing from taking a photo of a building where a guy who took photos of buildings lived

This past fall I became familiar with the life and work of Richard Nickel, a Chicago photographer who made it his life work to preserve elements of Louis Sullivan buildings being demolished throughout the city in the mid-20th century. He photographed the buildings and collected physical artifacts from the demo sites, terra cotta ornament and even staircases. He died quite young while he was doing just this in the Chicago Stock Exchange building while it was being torn down. He was buried under rubble for a few weeks before his body was recovered. The arch of the Stock Exchange is on display behind the Art Institute next to Grant Park, and it stands as a quiet monument to Nickel, I think, for people interested in Chicago history and Nickel’s important work.

There’s a new book out on him as of 2007 and a couple of his photographs were displayed in the Lasalle Bank collection at the Cultural Center this past fall, but his work is primarily seen as architectural and technical, and not in the tradition of art (although he did study under Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design), so as a photographer, he falls into a subdued place in history. The earnest story of his life and his gorgeously-correct large format photographs were captivating to me and the work done by Richard Cahan and John Vinci make the work very accessible in book form. I was enchanted enough by what I had read to find the building that he bought and renovated before his death, the only place he had called home outside of his parents’ house in the suburbs (which isn’t to say that he was unworldly - he had been a photographer for the army after WWII) to see what had become of it. I took my meager, distorted 35mm shot of the building (seen above) and noted with some amusement that the recent tenants of the storefront had been photographers.

I was reminded again of Richard Nickel’s home again tonight after a fellow city resident and photographer, Noah Vaughn, noticed my photo of it. Wondering how one might find this photo in the archives of my photostream, I googled “Grimm’s bldg,” the name that one sees in the ornament above the second floor. I sadly found this .pdf file that indicates that this building is in danger of demolition itself. It’s one of 7 buildings on preservationchicago.org listed as most endangered.

This is, of course, terrible news.  I hope it doesn’t get torn down, but I’m glad to have seen it when I did should it ever make way for some characterless condo complex not unfamiliar to the changing neighborhood.

Read more about Richard Nickel on NPR.

Yesterday, walking out the door to the library of all places, the mail carrier handed me a priority pack from my sister containing the book she recently published in conjunction with her Jail gallery show called Of Course and Never. Happy to have something new and anticipated to look at while on the 15 minute train ride to the Harold Washington Library, I was also amused by the coincidence. I had been meaning to go to the library all week and had only just found the time; here was an entire book provided to me that was acting as a primer for my library experience, introducing aesthetic and philosophical ideas to the outing. As you can see from these images, or in larger form on her website, this series of paintings by Wendy consists entirely of images of library book stacks in various states of disarray. “Tomes slump in their shelves, books lie in unintelligible piles on the floor, and periodicals are strewn across aisles, defying the organizing principles that make their contents accessible.”

Of Course and Never is a beautifully-made book and the accompanying text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is superb, with thoughtful passages on the nature of books and libraries and a lovely introduction to Wendy’s paintings that gives the reader both a physical sensation of the work outside of reproduction and a literary starting point from which to view the images that follow.

One might think that a book accompanying a gallery show might only be a preview of the show, a kind of souvenir, but the number of paintings in the book is only one less than the show itself; it generously provides 17 handsome color plates. The overall effect of the paintings and the text make it a book worth revisiting often, I can already tell, and while I would be happy to add any volume of my sister’s work to my library (as she is both my sister and an artist whom I admire), I am doubly happy to have this book on my shelf.

More information on the book can be found here. Wendy’s solo exhibition at Jail Gallery will be up until March 14th. Read more about it on her website.

The mailing list photos have been mailed and should arrive shortly. In the meantime, check out these marvelous darkrooms shot by Richard Nicholson on a 4 x 5 camera (via JSTN). I’d like to make a crisper and updated image of my darkroom soon.

Political and historical reasons aside, this American presidency and campaign has struck me on a purely superficial level thanks to photographer Callie Shell. Potent images by Shell and others on the campaign trail are turning into potent images in the White House (Pete Souza is the official White House photographer) and offering some of what Obama calls the “new transparency” that he hopes to bring to the presidency.

I get my daily fix of Obama images on Livejournal Community, Obama Daily Pics. My boyfriend and I are also starting a wiki (that might end up being a blog) called Barack Obama’s Day.com, in which we hope to compile, with the help of others, in text the things that Obama does everyday, since everyone seems so concerned about it. I guess we are all fascinated by what a mess he was left with?

My pictures are about a captured moment, rather than about the person. They are about a feeling, and to that extent they preserve my children’s anonymity. They are disguised somehow. I’m showing a moment of life, not part of their personality, and to that extent they could be anyone.

Essentially, this is all a question of perception. It’s like this: someone shows another person a blot of ink and asks them what they see. They reply: “I see a German shepherd dog.” Then they show them another blot, and they see a springer spaniel, then another and they see a doberman. The first person exclaims: “Say, you sure do have an obsession with dogs.” And the second replies: “You’re the one who keeps showing dog pictures.”

Tierney Gearon, The Guardian, 13 March 2001

Photo from the totally awesome and thorough site of Eggleston Trust that I learned about thanks to Jeremy Okai Davis.

Harmony Korine interviews William Eggleston:

HK: What about digital photography?

WE: Don’t know anything about it.

HK: Have you ever shot with a digital camera?

WE: As I said, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know, I might love it.

HK: You’re not opposed to it?

WE: There’s plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film-I don’t think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that’s going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I’m color-blind.

HK: You’re color-blind?

WE: Yes.

My friend Joe made a scanner camera.