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”.
“Photographs make up the vast majority of how we consider the narrative of California in the late 60’s and early 70’s and Dennis Stock’s California Trip exemplifies the condition for how we examine our historical memory and consciousness of the period”.
“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”.
“Self-apathy, self-torment, and a penchant for observations oscillating between peaks and troughs of life’s banes and boons-or what my friend Jeffrey Silverthorne once described as “Swedish grain syndrome”. “The photograph is for nothing”. Truer words are yet to be spoken. Another in a series of Constant Effigies and notorious negations. A child […]
“Man has understood his place in the cosmogony of things by deliberating over his mortality. In fear, we build a language before we build a language from love. We leave warnings before love letters…”. Robert Fludd (1574-1637), in his assertion that the world is first born of chaos, then divination by light, spirit […]
“Times change, we orchestrate ourselves to different locations and yet with nostalgia nothing need be lost. It can be found again. We can consider the death of an idea as being flexible to finality, but that is a different conversation”. We tend to enshrine people and ideas with a certain sense of […]
“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 […]
“So, when we consider respect in the medium, we can limit our discussion by looking at who is contributing to our world and who is not. Publishers by and large are the unsung heroes of the day”. A friend of mine recently commented on the lack of risk-taking in publishing. I took some […]
“Oobanken seems to be about a home, a house or a mix thereof-its a sub-conscious outpouring of desires for domesticity or understanding of place…” An incredibly curious title floats across my desk. I inquired about the book having previously observed a picture of severed cluck-less chicken feet. Inside, the cement dust –hewn tactility […]
“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 […]