The Apartheid - Everyday life

Each photograph shown of David Goldblatt has an old country quality of a film camera, allowing each photograph an implication of significance, or meaning yet each attempts to represent or clearly document quotidian events of different peoples lives in South Africa. The photos are very similar in this conceptual sense as well a stylistically all being in black and white and having no more that three people. Each picture has a soft simple setting which draws attention to the people in the frame. Over exposure and high contrast echo the content of his pictures, the mixing of races, or as Goldblatt may see it, the divisions between races.
The photos are all taken during the enforcement of Apartheid which was from the end of World War II in 1948 until 1994. Each picture successfully represents and portrays life as it is. The blank almost haunting expressions on the faces of the plot holder and the daughter of a servant is compositionally divisive and each person has a separate connection with Goldblatt and none amongst themselves. The portraiture style is old, taking photographic qualities of the late 19th century of a flat, frontal angle, subjects staring straight into the camera, and a grainy, antique quality that was old for its time even in 1962.
The scenes, people, places that they are in, are very different from the work of many of the artists we have seem throughout different presentations in that natural lighting is used. All the pictures are taken at different parts of the day and of different kinds of people: the old landowner, the appearing to be boy scouts of South Africa, a pinic splayed out with assuming a father and his children, a child and his caretaker, and a young girl in her new tutu. The latter of these, the young girl in her tutu, really stands out as different from the rest of the pictures. Compositionally it is very complex: the girl takes a delicate simple pose but is placed amongst a busy background of lines, patterns, shadows, and appears to be lost in the mix of all of it. It is also the only photo of a single person and one of the most recent of the collection of photos. But yet just as the others it is another banal moment capturing a raw quality of simply life as it is, clean and crisp.

Occupy Wall Street Observations

Pictures from Zucotti Park in the financial district. Everyone seems out there under the umbrella slogan the "99%" yet holding signs for anything from animal rights to donate to the homeless. Would love to know what the process is nationally, what is being put in effect, what results is this movement producing- please post and fill in what you have witness, learned and know about Occupy Wall Street.

"How Life Has Changed Since 9/11: Works by Faculty and Staff"

Generally speaking, politically and socially provocative art is always inspiring in some regard so I was generally pleased by NYU's "How Life Has Changed Since 9/11: Works by Faculty and Staff". The pieces on the first floor all relate directly to the World Trade Center Towers and the events that occurred ten years ago, chronicling each artists' relationship and experience with the event on September 11, 2001. Something was especially striking in looking at the photographs of "Missing Person" signs which seemed to appear all over the city. I was overcome with a great feeling of loss and sadness as I read through Peter Lucas' work which combined his narrative of the signs as well as pictures. Reading the exact location of a single person, indicated by an arrow, working for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th Floor, so precisely captured a quotation from Stalin, "1,000 deaths is a statistic. One death is a travesty."

I found the textual based pieces to be quite intriguing as well; a portal into a direct conversation with the artist juxtaposed to their photographs. Deborah Willis speaks of her work in response to the term "Citizen Journalism", the phenomena when a "concerned citizen believes that the telling of a story and the imaging of it do not have equal importance." (See Picture included below)

On the second floor, or 8th floor of the exhibition I was a bit confused. There appeared to be no order, choice, or congruency between the works and especially none with the what now seemed a sort of 9/11 memorial on the first floor. I couldn't draw any parallels between what was on display upstairs versus downstairs, the entire 9/11, "ten years later" theme vanished, save the "Letters to Obama" booklet which showed a few photographs and mainly tacky newspaper clippings put into collages. A letter on the first floor collection was featured at the beginning, asking students to be hyper aware and re-evaluative, warning against returning to any sort of normal life; however, the upper-floor collection seemed do just this, it entered into the space of banality.

I had to return to the first floor to revisit the large prints and finish where I feel my journey had started, in simply remembering 9/11, the people who lost their lives, which all brought an overwhelming presence to my current life, the context in which I live.

01: One Person. Ten Photographs.