Landscape Photographs

Landscape Photographs
Featuring work by Gabriel Blankenship and Brian & Gareth McClave
Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
September 1, 2020—January 15, 2021
Fordham University at Lincoln Center 
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue 
New York, NY 10023

Link

Fordham University is proud to present a new exhibition, Landscape Photographs, which brings together work from American artist Gabriel Blankenship and British artists Brian & Gareth McClave. This exhibition's straightforward title might lead one to presume images that conform to traditional expectations for landscapes—beautiful, transcendent, or sublime; moreover, accessible, and understood within the genre's history. The landscapes depicted here are undoubtedly related to the world we know, although the information is translated and parsed in potentially unfamiliar ways. Both Blankenship and the McClaves observe and take inspiration from the world around us, then process and present their information in carefully managed integers.

With Gabriel Blankenship, we see an array of ordinary suburban rooftops, clouds, powerlines, and foliage with different croppings and color schemes. On the one hand, these views are somewhat general, appearing related to a loose snapshot aesthetic filtered through video game technology. Yet, they are engineered and controlled at the smallest decision-making level, and selectively built up pixel by pixel into iconic images. A tension exists between the extreme control exercised during the image construction and the deceptively casual results. Ultimately, these scenes distill and precisely articulate some of life's quotidian details.

Brian & Gareth McClave utilize computer technology as Blankenship, though their images are abstract in a different manner. The digital slow-scan software that they developed records a picture over time and presents vertical slices of imagery. We view each image both in its entirety as well as chronologically when moving through the image bands from left to right. What might appear initially as a form of digital interference, or potential file corruption, turns out to be discreet stages in the construction of the image. The increments of a time-based narrative are visible, as well as the event in its entirety.

Roei Greenberg English Encounters

Roei Greenberg

English Encounters
Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Fordham University Galleries Online

Fall 2020
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
Link

The rural walk is a well-known English cultural practice. Though it may be civil, the act of walking itself is rooted in ideology from my cultural background; to walk the land is to know the land, and therefore suggests belonging entitlement and ownership. I begin to survey the English countryside, becoming familiar with the island’s geography, an act of mapping that refers to imperial and colonial histories.

Pertaining to Romanticism, I appropriate the visual rules of the picturesque, traditionally used to create an illusion of social and natural harmony. The dramatic light and weather conditions combined with forensic attention to details and on-site interventions intend to provoke the ambiguous feelings of seduction and alienation. Poetic and alluring yet tinged with irony, the images seek to disrupt traditional modes of representation in a place where land ownership and social hierarchy have shaped the form and perception of the landscape for centuries.

Website
Instagram

Gabriel Blankenship Instant Camera

Gabriel Blankenship
Instant Camera
Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Fordham University Galleries Online
Fall 2020
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
Link

Around 2009, I unexpectedly found myself back at home in rural Pennsylvania. I had been studying photography and had grown accustomed to bringing my camera everywhere. I found myself shooting less at home, despite carrying a camera, and sometimes I didn't bring my camera out at all. Allowing myself to be more present was liberating, but not without tension. I kept finding myself wishing I had taken my camera with me, or I would catch myself composing a shot with nothing to record it with.

As I began exploring pixel art, I found the same ideas I was drawn to as a photographer cropping up in my work. Moments I thought I had missed were "developing" in 8 and 16 bits. These "Polaroids" are recalled and imagined landscapes and photographs that I wish I had taken: details noticed in my peripheral vision, seen from the passenger seat of a car, or a third-story window.

thepixelsmith

IN DER FREMDE | PICTURES FROM HOME

Romeo Alaeff

IN DER FREMDE | PICTURES FROM HOME
A haunting photobook on Berlin & the search for home
Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Fordham University Galleries Online

Fall 2020
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
Link

Internationally exhibited artist, Romeo Alaeff, presents a haunting, cinematic photobook on Berlin & the search for “home.” The book features haunting, never-before-seen images of Berlin at night—a city infamous for its nightlife—now presented in a desolate, eerie, and a deeply personal light.

Framed by six essays by renowned writers, the photographs are tinged with a deep sense of longing & touch on themes of migration, alienation, and the search for home. Essay contributions by Yuval Noah Harari, Christian Rattemeyer, Charles Simic, Eva Hoffman, Rory MacLean, Joseph Kertes (+ Romeo Alaeff).

The book will be published by the esteemed Hatje Cantz, “one of the leading publishing houses for art, photography, design, and architecture books with a focus on contemporary art” — a 75-year-old publisher with over 800 titles. The book has already received half of its publication funding via a generous grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds.

Photographs by Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

Photographs

Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Fordham University Galleries Online
Fall 2020
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023

Link

Polaris and Down By Law are ongoing bodies of work that I began in 2015. My photographs picture, but aren’t limited to, the dark mythology of the American dream and the timeless story of returning home.

In Polaris, characters, archetypes, and dreamlike landscapes inhabit 50 miles on a road to nowhere. I grew up in a working-class family catching salmon on a twenty-six-foot hand troller. My parents taught me where the north star was in the night sky. This was a practical instruction given in case I was ever lost in the woods or at sea. This constellation alluded to in literature, myth, and song has guided seafaring people for time immemorial. These photographs were made in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. One of the few capital cities in the United States without a road to the outside world.

The photographs made in Down By Law are made as I’m headed home to Alaska in the summertime. In 2016, I bought a car to bring home to my family and drove from the Bronx to Alaska through the southern states and up through British Columbia. It was a roughly 8,000-mile journey that included a grand finale getting the car and myself into town on a ferry.

I was a resident with Antenna Gallery the following year and spent three months living in New Orleans. For the past five years, I’ve photographed rodeos in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The rodeo is a contemporary colosseum and a meeting place for folks in big cities and small towns.

The history of photography is rife with work made by the upper classes. These visitors often have little connection to people and places they image. In my work, I’m not attempting to document or sensationalize the working class, and queer life. I’m authoring what I would like to exist about my communities in contemporary culture.

I continue to return to the places where I make photographs. Revisiting friends, making new friends, meeting strangers, staying for as many weeks and months as I can before I run out of money or film or both, and letting the spirit move me. —Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

Image caption: Corner House, Juneau, Alaska, 2018

Websites:
Patrice Helmar
Marble Hill Camera Club

Instagram
@patricehelmar
@marblehillcameraclub

Case Study Tokyo 2020

Case Study Tokyo 2020

7×7 in, 18×18 cm
438 Pages
Publish Date May 01, 2020
Preview the entirety of the book here.

Take one part working methodology from the influential 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, combine with the megacity of Tokyo, add Fordham University Gabelli students, stir for ten days in Japan and what do you get? You get direct acquisition of knowledge through experience with a small team, realized in a hardback research volume focusing on branding, sensory marketing, architecture, design, photography, and urban planning.

There is a fiendish pleasure in meeting your students at Tokyo's Narita airport after they have endured a fourteen-hour flight and crossed the International Date Line. Their disorientation is palpable—from bloodshot eyes to messy hair (which actually fits in quite nicely with the local, youthful styles) and from the need for sudden naps and its alternate in the form of sleep-deprived rambling. It is the equivalent of barging into someone's room at 3:00 a.m. and saying, "Wake up, the class has started!"

Nonetheless, over ten days, endless miles of walking unfamiliar terrain, including innumerable fresh sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and experiences, a transformation occurs. The initial shock and strangeness of being in a new country yields to impressions that are increasingly nuanced and personal. Here follows a description of the primary objectives and methodologies employed in this class, which will contextualize the storm of thousands of images that is to come on the following pages.

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour is a landmark study that looked at a city in terms of architecture, density, lighting, signage, sound, and numerous additional prisms. It is an eclectic research tome whose structure served as the skeleton for our case study of Tokyo. While we are not architects, nor did we travel to Las Vegas, we were interested in the idea of looking at a city from multiple vantage points, both literal and conceptual. The eclecticism of our approach has led us to unforeseen revelations and to find engaging connections across different aspects of our topic city, Tokyo.

The megacity of Tokyo (population over 13.9 million) served as the base for our investigations, with research itineraries that brought us from the cosmopolitan ward of Shinjuku to the center of youth culture in Shibuya, from the cutting edge fashion districts of Harajuku to the traditional temples and shrines of Asakusa. Each day brought new and different locations where we quantified aspects of the city for our study. Our team conducted primary visual research via smartphones with an emphasis placed on generating straightforward images that were decidedly not photographic works of art. These images were subsequently categorized into our working data set and eventually output to this book.

For the ten days that comprised our study, each of the students in our team produced five images per day in each of the following categories: sign, object, area, color, and architecture. Images were organized by date, as well as assigned one of the five keywords. In assigning only single, descriptive keywords to each image, several intriguing dilemmas arose almost immediately. How does one appropriately label, for instance, an image of a crumpled, colorful gum wrapper covered with graphics and brand logos, or architect Tadao Ando and fashion designer Issey Miyake's 21_21 Design Site in the Roppongi district? With the former, the wrapper could easily fit into the category for either object, color, or sign. With the latter example, the roof of Ando's building, based on Miyake's clothing concept, "A Piece of Cloth," is folded from one sheet of steel and functions as both an enormous sign and advertisement for Miyake's concepts. Beyond the branding of Issey Miyake, the building's single sheet of folded steel potentially references the sheet of folded paper used in origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. It thus functions as an advertisement for a traditional aspect of Japanese culture. The complexities of categorization are numerous.

During generating thousands of images and assigning keywords, class members began to ask questions. Need signage be large, or be linguistically based? Might a building's silhouette serve as signage? At what point does an object's scale shift into being an architectural structure, or diffuse sufficiently and transform into an area? Is there a color palette specific to Tokyo and fundamentally different from elsewhere? How do companies negotiate co-branded endeavors in regards to color, object relationship, and shelf placement hierarchy? Even with their inherent absurdities, the five basic categories we employed provided a method by which to consider Tokyo, prioritize the defining characteristics of the images produced, and organize our research.

At the very beginning of this course, the class viewed French filmmaker Chris Marker's 1983 essay film on travel and Japan, Sans Soleil. Oddly, here at the end of our process, a quote from the film's narrator resonates strongly and states our Case Study Tokyo's objectives perfectly. She says, "I've been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter." Along with architect Tadao Ando's description of 21_21 Design Site as a "venue to redirect our eyes to everyday things and events," we can see how this study is a collection of small, but precise examinations by a group "relentlessly" traversing Tokyo. The primary goal was simply to see.

What one makes of their observations, detects in the trends within the book, or how one might utilize this data in the future is yet one more very interesting and wonderfully complicated discussion.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, 2020

Landscape Photographs

Landscape Photographs
Bill Burke • Lois Conner
Curators: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock & Joseph Lawton

The Ildiko Butler Gallery Gallery
September 24–November 13, 2019
Reception: Wednesday, September 25, 6–8 pm
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
 *The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays

Fordham University is proud to present a new two-person exhibition of photographs in our Ildiko Butler Gallery by Bill Burke and Lois Conner. Landscape Photographs brings together two photographers that have photographed extensively in both the United States, as well as abroad. Both bodies of work have been made over many years, Burke in Southeast Asia and Conner in China with each utilizing large format cameras to record their subject in extraordinary detail.

Bill Burke: Statement
I began to travel to Asia in 1982. In the years after failing my draft physical in 1968, I began to think I had missed a significant experience that defined my generation. I became curious about the people I would have been ordered to kill or be killed by. Studying the Vietnam War, I became familiar with the names of places and events that took place there. Over the next eighteen years, I visited many parts of the former French colonies of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. Most of my photographic efforts were toward making portraits, but as the region recovered from “The American War,” I began to see how original architecture was being destroyed and repurposed. I also saw how the architecture could be seen to represent the flow of colonial power that had molded the region during the previous century. I took it on myself to make some small record of buildings that might soon be destroyed or that embodied an aspect of the foreign power that had commissioned them.

Lois Conner: Statement
My subject is landscape as culture. I am not interested in an untouched, untrammeled world. What I am trying to reveal through photography in a deliberate yet subtle way is a sense of history. I want my photographs to describe my relationship to both the tangible and the imagined, to fact and fiction.

Image captions: (top) Bill Burke, Abandoned U.S. Consulate, Danang, 1994. Images courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY; (Bottom) Lois Conner, Military Museum, Beijing, China, 2000. Images courtesy of Gitterman Gallery, NY

Exhibition image Captions:
Bill Burke
Left Wall and Left Rear Wall (left to right) Caption information is written directly on the photographs.

Lois Conner
Rear Wall Right (top to bottom, left to right)
Yuanming Yuan, Beijing, China (2011)
Tiananmen, 50th Anniversary Floats, Beijing, China (1999)
Military Museum, Beijing, China (2000)
The Photographers, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China (1993)
Fengdu, Sichuan, China (1997)
Bank of China, Shanghai, China (1999)
Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China (1985)
Yangshuo, Guangxi, China (1985)
Right Wall (top to bottom, left to right)
Zigui, Hubei, China (1997)
Cultural Palace, Lhasa, Tibet (2002)
Beijing, China (1988)
Yangshuo, Guangxi, China (1991)
The Silk Route, Gansu, China (1991)
Reconstruction, Tiananmen, Beijing (1998)