Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
Asger Carlsen - The Prestige
Asger Carlsen on the roof of his Hester Street apartment and studio. New York, July 2013 |
Asger in his studio / editing space. |
A portrait of the artist as a young crime scene photographer. |
A self portrait by Carlsen. |
It’s no small feat to be a photographer with
an inimitable style these days. There’s something
like 500,000,000 photos posted to the internet every day. But amid that
tidal wave of images, I would wager you could easily spot Asger
Carlsen’s work.
A couple of weeks ago I got a chance to visit Carlsen in his
Chinatown studio to talk about his work. As a huge fan of Asger’s photographs I
was excited to see his process and just how he creates his wonderfully
impossible images.
Asger was born and raised in Denmark. At 16 he started a
photography internship at a local newspaper. He said at the end of the
internship he just kept going in, and he soon found himself working as the
crime scene photographer. After a decade as a journalist he shifted into
commercial photography, eventually leading him to New York. It was here
that he began to focus more on his photographs as an expressive art form and
developed his singular style.
Upon arriving at his apartment / studio I was surprised to
see that the area where he shoots his photos is relatively small. Many of the photos in his book Hester were shot in the corner near the door. In fact
the book takes its name from the street he lives on. He said it’s taken some
wrangling to convince subjects of his commercial and portrait work to make the
trek to his 6th floor walkup, but that he wants to be a studio
artist and prefers shooting at home to more elaborate studio setups.
Asger shoots digital images and then sets about transforming
them at his computer workstation. When I asked if he used a tripod or flash rig
to make sure all the shadows were the same angle, he showed me how he can
simply create any shadows he needs in photoshop. As someone who barely
edits anything I shoot I was floored by freedom of that demonstration. “You can
make the photo anything you want?!”
Lest you think that the use of a computer somehow means that
these images were easy to create, I want to note the extreme patience and skill
required in this process. The task of matching skin colors, textures, lighting,
and shadows is painstaking. While a photo shoot for source material may last
only 20 minutes, there are some images that are worked on for years before they
are finished. There is a post-it note on the wall above his computer that
reads simply “you exist”, a good reminder when you spend days at a time alone
in the studio.
In his first book, Wrong, Carlsen presented a surreal vision
of everyday life. Full of looming amorphous globs, elaborately constructed
artificial limbs, bulging eyeballs, and bizarre portraits of impossible
anatomies, the collection was both disturbing and humorous. Like seeing a magic
trick, these images demanded to be inspected and explained; your eye scanning
for a clue as to how they were made.
Some images from Wrong:
Wrong embraced photo manipulation as a creative tool and
eschewed the notion of photography as simply a means of recording the world in
front of the camera. Photographs are the raw materials from which
he works, but the final images are a combination of photography,
collage, painting, and sculpture.
His most recent book, Hester, represents Asger’s take on the
female nude. The book is full of unsettling arrangements of faceless limbs and
torsos and hulking mounds of flesh whose grotesque morphology defies biology.
There’s a journalistic aesthetic to the work that calls to mind his days as a
crime scene photographer; heavy on flash, and high contrast, the contorted
human objects that he molds evoke the abstractions of a disfigured corpse.
Some images from Hester:
The work is extremely sculptural, and he
fluently incorporates influences from a broad survey of art
history: prehistoric sculpture, ancient statuary, surrealism, cubism,
seedy pin-ups, science fiction, Francis Bacon, Schiele, and Picasso. They are
all in there, and yet the result feels like something entirely new.
I highly recommend that you check out his site to see tons
more of his pioneering, challenging, funny, beautiful, and complex work.
I promise you’ll see something that will surprise you. Also note that his books
and editions tend to sell through quickly, so get them while you can. If you want to know more there are a couple of good interviews here, with Vice and here with Glossom.
Thank you Asger for your time!
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Friday, August 2, 2013
Max Fish is Dead, Long Live Max Fish
These are some pictures from the last few nights of Max
Fish.
I first went to Max Fish in 2001, just after moving to the
city from Iowa. I remember looking for the bathroom and seeing a skate video
playing on the TV near the back, and I immediately knew the place was good. 12
years later, as I stood in the same spot watching another in a years-long
succession of skate videos, I found out the bar would soon be packing up and
moving to Brooklyn.
A bar is a weird thing. Essentially it’s just a room with
booze and music and strangers. There are roughly 18,000 bars in New York. Most serve the same booze and many play
similar music. In the end, you pick a bar based on the type of strangers you
hope to meet. If you keep going back, the strangers slowly reveal themselves as
a community (no matter how dysfunctional) and eventually you may start to feel a
part of that community. Somewhere along the line that bar becomes “your” bar.
I think anyone that went to Max Fish twice felt like it was “their”
bar, at least a little. Known as a place for artists and skaters and ‘creative
types’ (read: drug users) in reality it was a hodgepodge of just about everyone
who found themselves downtown and looking for an interesting place to kill some
time. Funny expression, that.
In the final weeks and days of Max Fish on Ludlow Street there
were literally thousands of people that passed through to have one last drink.
People flew in from all over the country to close the place out. Each
‘generation’ had their own trove of cherished stories, and each group seemed to
feel their era or crew had the most ‘authentic’ Max Fish experience. You could see everyone felt as if they
belonged to something special within that room; a community both sprawling and somehow
singular to them.
Max Fish was many things to many people. For me it was a place
to go with the hope of encountering an interesting stranger. In times when long and isolated hours at work left
me desperate for human contact and socially crippled, I could go to the bar and
stand alone watching skate videos and soak in the humanity, even if at a
distance. Though occasionally lonely, I never felt awkward lurking there.
In
time I found friendships that gave me great comfort. Just to sit and talk to
someone at the end of the day, to feel a kinship not only with your fellow barfly
but with the vast community of Max Fish (both past and present) was a powerful
and meaningful thing. It’s the type of community I moved to New York hoping to
find, a sort of Island of Misfit Toys, and I think that’s why losing it is so
painful for so many.
I always avoided taking pictures at the bar. I didn't want
to make people uncomfortable and frankly I don’t think most pictures of people hanging
out in a bar are that interesting. Only in the last few nights before closing
did I try to capture a few snapshots of the room and the strangers with whom I've
spent so much time. I’m glad to have them.
Thank you to Ulli and everyone at Max Fish! See you on the other side (of the East River.)
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