Atlanta-based photographer
Maury Gortemiller is the latest Southern photographer to be featured
on One One Thousand, the webzine of Southern photography. Maury has on offer a portfolio of color prints under the rubric
All Time Lotion, some of which are on the
One One Thousand website and more of which are to be found
here, on his website.
Maury has his MFA from the University of Georgia, another sign that Georgia's MFA photography program is one of the major ones in the South.
I must admit I had to think about this work for a while before I got the hang of it. Some of Maury's images seem at first glance to be under-imagined or under-thought, or just odd or even off-putting, at least to me.
I'm not sure that I see immediately, for example, why I'm interested in a list of colors that one might paint a muscle car. Or, for that matter, a picture of a list of colors that someone presumably once considered painting a muscle car. Especially when (though one can't tell from the presentation of this material on
One One Thousand) its likely, if the presentation of this image follows the current practice, that this image would be printed at at least 2x3 feet, or larger.
So I read his
Artist's Statement, which told me that he hopes in these images "
to investigate fully Robert Storr's notion of the estrangement of the photograph, the medium's capability to depict persons and objects in such a way that transforms context and intention." Then I considered that maybe I wasn't getting it because I haven't been to MFA School and learned to look or shoot or think this way.
See, OK, we've got insider knowledge here (who's Robert Storr and why is he having notions?), we've got "the medium" (OK, presumably photography) doing estrangement or other stuff to people and objects (are the people referred to here the photographer, the people in the image, or the people looking at the image?) "in such a way that transforms context and intention."
Is that the context in the frame, or the context of the photographer making the image, or the photographer choosing this image among many, or the photographer talking about the image in this discourse? Or any of the many many contexts in which the image might be seen, or seen by all the possible viewers? And, whose intention? the shooter, the posers in the image who have some say in how they present themselves, or the intention of the people who bring this work to us, whether its a gallery or the folks at
One One Thousand, who make it possible for us to view, and to experience, and to construe, and to construct meaning from this work?
But then I saw this image and I knew where I was.
The brocade upholstered furniture and the pink-and-green print skirt and the talking hands -- that made sense. My aunt used to wear a dress just like that, and she had a chair upholstered in a very similar fabric, though it was green instead of gold, and she and her friends liked to talk with their hands when they wore dresses like this one and gathered in rooms like this with brocade chair upholstery.
So, in other words, I found an image for which I had a context and I was able to make a connection and appreciate the experience of this way of seeing into such a context. But I've never had a muscle car, nor have I ever wanted to paint one. Well, I did own a '67 Camaro once, but I ordered it in navy blue and I was always happy with that color.
So, with the beginning of a (very personal) context in place, I go back to this work, and the more I looked at each image, the more engaged I got, but for different reasons, each time. For example, this image really engages me because I wonder how the light beam got split into so many different beams, going off at different angles.
Or this one, which is a damn fine photograph, regardless of anything else, because I find it intriguing and engaging and I'm arrested in my looking to look deeper and notice new stuff and to wonder new things about what it might (or might not) be about.
So the more I looked, the more engaged I became and (who knows) maybe my context and intention were estranged or transformed in the process. It may even be that when I've looked some more I'll appreciate the photo of the list of colors. There is, at least, a sub-group of these images that is about cars, and perhaps they will all work together for me, with time.
But the photograph of the hind quarters of the dog who looks like he's having an exceptionally bad day is still Too Much Information for me.
Check this work out and let me know what you think.
PS. I think if I am going to comment on Artist's Statements, I ought to open mine for comment as well. If you go
here, you will find that I won First Prize in a juried show at ArtSceneToday.com, and you can see some of my work and an Artist's Statement about the work, and you can write me to say what you make of it.
PPS. Turns out that Robert Storr is the Dean of the Yale School of Art (silly me for not knowing!), and I found a really interesting
interview with him on line in which he says, among other things, that "the process of making art is fundamentally different from the process of writing theory." And here's something else
he said in the interview that I think is really helpful:
"It’s always nice to be a coming attraction, but it’s murder to be a has-been. If it hasn’t happened for you yet, you can at least console yourself with the idea that it might. It’s a fashionable world and even good artists go out of fashion. If you’ve never really thought about what you’re going to do when you go out of fashion because you’ve never been out of fashion, it’s much harder to take than if you’ve gradually come into your own, gotten through difficult times and know that you can survive."
PPPS. This work raises another question, which is, is the experience of a portfolio an experience of a group of images in a certain arrangement or order, or is a photograph first an image on its own, and only then a part of a larger group? In other words, should every image in a portfolio be able to stand alone, on its own terms, or is it OK when assembling a portfolio to include images that are weak on their own, but which set up interesting conversations when surrounded by the other images in the portfolio?
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