Editor’s Note, This interview was conducted over the period of months. Federico and I would ping pong ideas back and forth. Being a busy artist, Clavarino had already moved into several different territories from my principal point of trying to tackle Hereafter, his great opus about power, family, archive and how history is activated […]
“In very broad terms, it seems that the work made in the West during the 20th century portrays a prolonged event – a disaster, you could say – that unfolded as modernity overtook the landscape and ideologies were instilled in American culture”.
“The way a photographer “sees” and commits to an image is through experience. These experiences have very little to do with the camera and are built up over years of living-these experiences and the years that sponsor them are not always the glorious nostalgic highlights that we remember in their honey-dipped form, but are also formed of tragedy, comedy and a resistance to our inside force of direction”.
“We propose that what “X” is to “Y” is how “Z” was accomplished. We lack the details of a true oversight and our compunction to rely on discourse written from outside observations can be careless”. When we reflect on history or movements that occur between eras, it is often hard to perceive the […]
“From there it is all ticker tape and pumpkin pie. From the position in front of its double, it’s the smell of Baltimore’s burning brownstone wires and antiseptic hand sanitizer ironically left on the church pew”. “That is no longer considered autonomy. That friend is unfettered barbarism”. No stronger words have been […]
“The intrepid photographer, whether war photographer, journalist or documentary photographer believes their position to be in accord with the act of producing a record- his or her position to remain neutral so far as to let vultures eat at the doubled over haunches of starving children, to let the blood run from 96.8 to a […]
“My initial desire to make this work was my connection and fascination with the language. A language that has existed in my family for hundreds of years but that I do not speak”.
“The general sense of doom and the proclivity towards nightmarish consequences of feast or famine natural disasters ushered in a new era in which spiritualism, cults, and Catholicism all formed an ungovernable supernatural belief state”.
“The achievement of Donald Trump, for every ugly thing he musters to his lips, for every repellent speech and every obnoxiously hypocritical move he makes is entirely endemic of the American century and its reflection in decline”.
“The current political narrative that paints immigrants as invaders has been a part of our national conversation for a long time. I want people to be reminded that there is a long and deep history of immigration that forms the basis of our country’s strength.”
“Haunted by a crisis of faith in its authenticity, the documentary genre is continually trying to re-position itself in relation to today’s excesses of a post-truth ideology and blurred frames of realism.”
Bertien van Mannen’s “Beyond Maps and Atlases” is a composition of dis-rhythmic proportion. Her investigation into the Irish landscape is not so much depressing as it alludes to the bittersweet.