EM ROONEY

CARTE BLANCHE - EM ROONEY

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1919/21, Palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

The way that I’ve often thought about photographs as private, personal, and small I think might have its roots in the way photographs were often stored at my house when I was growing up. They weren’t typically on display. They were in hidden in boxes in the attic, or shoved in the pages of books – old family photos, or pictures of my mother in High School might drop out of the OED or the Joy of Sex when you pulled them off the shelf. So that relationship between the page, and image (and its one that Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Davey, and many others have often spoken about) was there for me when I was a child, and has reoccurred formally, on and off, throughout the past ten years.

This time has been stuffed to the gills with non-stop reading about, teaching about and seeing shows; talking about work (with my love, artist and collaborator Chris Domenick) first thing in the morning, last before bed at night; getting into serious fights with friends about work they like/don’t like and why; writing about work I love and curating shows, and pouring myself into it. This question, of what has resonated with me, would be incomplete unless it were to include the work of all my friends and everything I learned from Chris and his practice, and every show I’ve seen and then verbally dissected (not to mention the work of so many gifted students I’ve taught since 2010) – the number is probably in the thousands.

Catherine Opie’s show at Lehmann Maupin, comes to mind. It featured the artist Pig Pen as protagonist in a fictional, doomsday narrative laid out in a series of photographs and a video. Pig Pen (aka Stosh Fila) is a person I love looking at who Opie has been photographing for years. The magic of the photograph can be very simple, just like that; I like looking at you. And this is a watered down version of punctum I guess. It's captivating to think about who or what a photographer photographs over time. What subject does she return to? As a student I was obsessed with Steiglitz’s photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, how we could watch her age (becoming more handsome with every year). We saw what Steiglitz saw (although O’Keefe lived much longer after he died). What a privilege the photographer grants the viewer, a stranger to the world of her intimacy. Opie’s show felt particularly impactful, in this way, as I realized her subject, had become someone I’d grown up with as well.

I think the pictorial turn might be the last turn, especially if we think of it in relationship to Foucault’s ideas about surveillance. I’ve seen corporate tools and machines that render quality/detail/data more quickly and easily, tools that are historically and presently, used for military and capital gain; drones and advanced data processing systems, used well by responsible artists. But, I worry that the merging of scientific/corporate invention and genuine creativity will continue to alienate us from our physical world, biochemical feelings, observations and instincts and this will hasten the destruction of the planet.

For the twentieth issue of Objektiv, marking the magazine’s tenth year, we gave twenty artists carte blanche to create portfolios or collage-like mind maps exploring the photography that inspires their practices. Short statements accompanied each contribution. Though not part of our Afterimage series these contribution touches on themes of memory and perception. The artists were given inspirational questions, including a quote from W.J.T. Mitchell. When asked what comes after the pictorial turn, he answered: ‘ I think the study of the whole sensorium – the senses themselves, beyond vision, or as connected to vision – is one thing that follows logically after an emphasis on the visual. I never thought of images as silent; even silent movies were never silent: they had music and text.’