Seen: Uncertain Half
Who: Manuel Van Dyck, Dan Epthorp
Where: Totem Pole Photo Gallery, Shinjuku
When: March 28 - April 2, 2017
I’ve been looking forward to this show for a long time. Manuel and Dan are good friends of mine and I’ve been privy to hundreds of workprints as they’ve prepared for this exhibition. I like it for the pictures, which are bonkers in their improbability (the thing, the moment) and their compatibility together. The two guys shot roll after roll through their 35mm half frame film cameras in Tokyo and made something amazing.
All of Dan’s pictures are in black in white. Manuel’s are all in color. The pictures are off-kilter, dead-on, and hotly flashed. The Tokyo seen is a gnarly, sometimes filthy place- viewers will see bags of vomit, rats, and roaches- twisted trees, hospital patients with scabby tubes- interspersed are the inhabitants of the city- (seemingly) abandoned children, the elderly, the young, and a beautiful young woman caught looking directly at the camera as she slides a long sandwich into her mouth. It’s bizarro world in the best way.
Yet there’s little to me that is at the expense of those pictured. Likening the style of the pictures to Bruce Gilden would be superficial. Gilden is selfish crank lacking empathy or a heart- his pictures prove this. Manuel and Dan have intelligence and an emotional core- two things that at certain times, with camera in hand, seem to wobble out of excitement and sometimes anger. Their pictures prove this.
In this way Uncertain Half is a counterstrike to Street Photography™as it is so recently been digitized and propagated and workshopped and blogged about online. Outside of a historical-angle Street Photography has long had little relevance in the Real Art World. It’s taken root on the internet- but without the freshness of the original pictures that the practitioners venerate. Street Photography™ as a contemporary genre has become romanticized and mythicized- and this has come of age with the rise of not simply smartphone and digital photography- but a culture that’s shifted into, through corporatization, around an idea that everything is equal in worth- that the best lesson to be taken from the past are methods and aesthetics- superficial tips n’ tricks to equalling ones own innate genius via presets and filters. Through the vehicle of the internet, Street Photography™ has been dumbed down and Fuji-X’ed up- it’s gotten predictable, safe, codified, and co-opted into another a lifestyle vehicle which exists for personal brands and self-helpers.
It’s precisely how the pictures are so messy that I feel that any self-proclaimed Street Photographer will have a hard time accepting the work. They’re simply straight pictures by two lunatics that function on their own terms- the show is not aligned with an accepted idealization of anything. To me this makes for a satisfying visual experience- it plays against the growingly commercialized, seemingly stagnant and safe socially-networked world.
The whole experience reminded me of something Tod Papageorge said:
I do talk to the students at Yale about using a small camera more and more. Taking so many pictures taught me a lot, even unconsciously, about being out in the world and using a camera to make pictures. It also taught me a lot about different picture forms, and the use of space. Many students today are completely ignorant about that, so the pictures are generally something plopped in the center of the frame and digitally printed to 40x50. I shouldn’t castigate the students, but it turns up in the galleries too, and it’s just not very interesting; it’s not very satisfying as a visual experience.Maybe it’s simply a case of finding a number of interestingly tormented people.
Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander - they were all lunatics.
Via: ‘Park Life’ An Interview with Tod Papageorge 2008 by Aaron Schuman (Interview originally published in the British Journal of Photography (2008).)