Since it's been a little gross out here in New York, and I've been trying to catch up on some old printing and documenting (scanning mostly), I've been a little lazy about printing and shooting.
Of the most recent batch of prints, here are the ones that are ok. I realized that while initially my concept was that I'd just post every single contact print I make, scanning is proving more time consuming than I'd planned, so it's going to be slightly edited. Basically, I tried scanning some of the prints I was a little less enthusiastic about, but I got sick of staring at them in the digital lab. There is, I think, one more picture of LA that I just ran out of time, a picture of a street that might be ok, so I'll try to get that up sometime this week.
So, the LA picture is from before Christmas when I went to California. I've always thought it'd be easy to make pictures in LA, but I found this picture really challenging. I think I just need to get a little more comfortable with the city and maybe start exploring different suburbs. Another problem was that there seems to be much more vehicle traffic at night, which is something that's already difficult in small Long Island towns.
I tried an experiment in LA that I think I'm going to continue. Basically, since I'm working with such long exposures, cars coming by pose a major problem, since they basically appear as streaks of lights, which don't work for the kind of pictures I'm taking. They end up looking both amateur and create this imression of speed or fast moving time, which pretty much kills the moods I try to make. So this time, I thought I'd try to take the dark slide (the black piece of plastic that covers the film in the film holder) from the exposure I'm making and cover the lens while a car walks by. This is tough for a few reasons. One, while the dark slide is black plastic, it's still reflective, and I was worried that I'd be reflecting light straight into the lens. Two, in trying to minimize the amount of light reflecting into the lens, I tried to keep the dark slide as close to the lens as possible, which raised the possibility that I'd bump my camera during the exposure. And third, this whole procedure means I need to be vigilant and pay close attention to my surroundings during the whole exposure, when I'm sort of used to zoning out.
So far, from the negatives I tried this system on, it appears that things basically work, although somewhat imperfectly so. There doesn't seem to be any camera shake or weird, unexplained light, but it looks like I did miss a few spots, although they're way less noticable than the usual bright red lines which completely ruin a picture.
The Long Island pictures are from more recently, during what seemed like what was going to be one of the warm nights we've been having around here. But no, it was cold as hell.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Friday, February 18, 2005
Night
What people want to know about most when they look at these is usually how long it takes me to make these pictures, to which I usually answer around 10 minutes. That's a slight exaggeration. I think most of these pictures were 5-7 minute exposures, and a few of them are fairly underexposed. I shoot on Fuji NPS 160 film, which is not at all made for night photography and I'm told suffers from worse than average reciprocity failure. I'm not really technical enough to answer that, but I've had ok luck taking a light reading, adding three and a half stops and then adding two minutes.
Anyway, the process is basically that I lug around a backpack with a graflex 4x5 field camera and a tripod in the middle of the night, frequently in Lynnbrook, New York, which is on Long Island. I basically picked the location at random and now I'm used to the town. I'm not particularly concerned with a general location but I do like the fact that it looks like almost anywhere.
Anyway, the process is basically that I lug around a backpack with a graflex 4x5 field camera and a tripod in the middle of the night, frequently in Lynnbrook, New York, which is on Long Island. I basically picked the location at random and now I'm used to the town. I'm not particularly concerned with a general location but I do like the fact that it looks like almost anywhere.
The War on Trees
There have been lots of sort of weird working titles for the suburban trees body of work I started last summer. The general idea was that I noticed I kept making pictures at the edges of suburbs, by parks or fields, where trees and vines would be creeping up over telephone poles. At the same time, in the suburbs around New York, where population is slightly denser than the midwestern suburbs I'm more used to, I noticed the phenomenon of holes cut through trees where telephone and power lines cut through them. If you think about it on a certain timescale, these two elements play out into a sort of desperate war between the trees and their zombie cousins, the telephone poles.
Statement
I'm going to post two groups of pictures for two projects I've been working on for the past year, after which point I'll start just posting contact prints as I make them on an approximately bi-weekly basis. Here's an artist statement loosely about those two incomplete bodies of work, one about suburban trees and one about suburban night.
STATEMENT
What are you doing on my lawn?
I was born in suburban Michigan, half a world away from homelands my parents never seemed to miss. Among the endless rows of houses and flat highways, my face is a face without any history, of one always slightly on the outside. And this is not to say that this vague place, this middle of nowhere America, is not my home, that I do not love its comforts and its nurturing, but that this is an uneasy love. My vision of home is a place where the inhabitants linger just out of view.
As I wander down these streets, I see these pictures of unease, of dark roads where lights dance from impossible corners, of lawns organized in martial discipline, where trees slowly war with their estranged brothers, the telephone poles. When I stop to make a picture, it’s an elaborate ritual, a process of staring and adjusting, balancing a clumsy camera on a tripod, and squinting at a ghost image flickering on glass. Then the shutter clicks with a clockwork flick, and light etches the beginnings of a picture onto the film.
Chemistry conspires against my eyes in the dark, bending the imprint of light waves into impossible colors, details that can't exist. The camera sees a world where lights paint the shadows, where any fleeting impression can be possible and real. It is from this revealed world that my pictures emerge, colors pulled in every direction and hidden shadows illuminated.
These are the pictures that tell the stories I love: of people uneasy and unsure of their welcome, of those who are safe and clean, yet bored and alone--the outliers. Stories of people who don’t quite belong in the American suburbs, wandering alone in the middle of roads as cars pass by with quizzical faces. These are the glances an insomniac steals, standing quietly off in the shadows, at houses glowing with eerie light, protected against the outside. These pictures are the feeling of walking home in the last hour before sunrise.
Andrew Ti, 2005
STATEMENT
What are you doing on my lawn?
I was born in suburban Michigan, half a world away from homelands my parents never seemed to miss. Among the endless rows of houses and flat highways, my face is a face without any history, of one always slightly on the outside. And this is not to say that this vague place, this middle of nowhere America, is not my home, that I do not love its comforts and its nurturing, but that this is an uneasy love. My vision of home is a place where the inhabitants linger just out of view.
As I wander down these streets, I see these pictures of unease, of dark roads where lights dance from impossible corners, of lawns organized in martial discipline, where trees slowly war with their estranged brothers, the telephone poles. When I stop to make a picture, it’s an elaborate ritual, a process of staring and adjusting, balancing a clumsy camera on a tripod, and squinting at a ghost image flickering on glass. Then the shutter clicks with a clockwork flick, and light etches the beginnings of a picture onto the film.
Chemistry conspires against my eyes in the dark, bending the imprint of light waves into impossible colors, details that can't exist. The camera sees a world where lights paint the shadows, where any fleeting impression can be possible and real. It is from this revealed world that my pictures emerge, colors pulled in every direction and hidden shadows illuminated.
These are the pictures that tell the stories I love: of people uneasy and unsure of their welcome, of those who are safe and clean, yet bored and alone--the outliers. Stories of people who don’t quite belong in the American suburbs, wandering alone in the middle of roads as cars pass by with quizzical faces. These are the glances an insomniac steals, standing quietly off in the shadows, at houses glowing with eerie light, protected against the outside. These pictures are the feeling of walking home in the last hour before sunrise.
Andrew Ti, 2005
SPRING Group Show
The pictures below are in a group show at a cafe in Williamsburg curated by some painters I knew in college. It was a little last minute, so I ended up just giving them 16x20 work prints, a few of which have been sitting around my apartment for a couple years now. Two of them are in kind of scuzzy condition and spotty as hell, not to mention not very carefully color balanced. I asked Liz and KB to hang them sort of more haphazardly and make sure they were labeled as work prints. I think I said something like "hang them all fucked up with nails or something and we'll call it Works In Progress." We'll see how that goes.
The picture with the trash and the mirror was in another show curated by friends of friends in what ended up being the worst experience ever. I'm at a loss to explain why people are interested in that picture, as I'm not particularly into it.
From the email:
The picture with the trash and the mirror was in another show curated by friends of friends in what ended up being the worst experience ever. I'm at a loss to explain why people are interested in that picture, as I'm not particularly into it.
From the email:
Please join us this Friday February 18th for a reception to celebrate a bright, new, dawn-of-spring-time group show at Phoebe's Cafe in beautiful Brooklyn New York, where the trees are blooming and birds are chirping....
Artists in the show include:
Mamie-Claire Cornelius
Shibani Mookerjee
Brian Sette
Jonathan Smith
Andrew Ti
Ben Young
Phoebe's Cafe
323 Graham Ave
Tel 718-599-3218
(take the L train to the Graham Ave stop - one block from subway station)
Curated by KB Jones and Liz Jonckheer
we hope to see you there!
Beginning
I wanted to start putting my contact prints in a blog because I realized that the way I've been working and accumulating a body of work in the past year and the way I get feedback seems to fit in a blog paradigm, with feedback from interested friends and strangers influencing the way I edit. As well, since I've been shooting on 4x5, contact prints have plenty of information.
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