Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko, Stairs,1930

Alexander Rodchenko wanted to change the way people saw society. He was a forerunner of the Russian constructivist movement between the two world wars and helped author “The Constructivist Manifesto.” He used new materials and processes to create a collective social knowledge. He wanted everyone in the Soviet Union to be aware of facts. He made it his business to document the cultural revolution in the 1920’s. He called it “factography” and he used odd camera angles, radical foreshortening, and close ups to make his statements.

The pictures we took emphasized line and shadow. In his work, Stairs, Rodchenko creates a striking photograph using his vantage point. He was above his subject, making stairs into long, dark diagonals. We used the shadows of the railing to achieve a (less dramatic) similar effect. We had some trouble not getting the photographer’s shadow in the frame. If we were to do this again, we could have shot at a different time of day so that the subject’s shadow would be crossing the shadow of the stairs as opposed to going parallell with it.

“One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.” – Alexander Rodchenko

Free Write, Dana Williams

Starting in March of my senior year of high school, I had my fist internship experience in art history. I worked under Jennifer Blessing, the Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim in New York. I’m from Long Island and it was a short ten minute train commute after school. When I first started, Jen had me doing a lot of paper work. She liked her coffee black with two sugars and she preferred helvetica to arial. She was in the middle of putting together an exhibition called Haunted that would run through to September. At first, it was a lot of paper work. The paper work turned into organizing and from there (when she figured I wasn’t an idiot and could be somewhat trusted), the work turned into following her around and taking notes. Not the most glamourous thing, I know, but it was incredibly interesting to see how much thought went into every little detail of planning an exhibit. Also, it was great to get to know the people. All the little details made a huge difference. As it came together and we were closer to opening, I realized that you had to sweat the small stuff. Once all the small stuff was taken care of, the big things just fell into place.

During the summer, I had to be there at nine and the work was much more intense. She and Nat, the assistant curator, argued over other details and they would often ask me what I thought. I didn’t feel like an intern, I felt more like a temp, and that over anything else, felt good. The exhibition was in full swing and throughout the whole thing, they changed little details, watching reactions and finding new ways to make it better. This was a photography and video exhibit focusing on human darkness and how it translates into different mediums. It was about how the past creeps into contemporary works. A lot of the media creeped out the people coming to see it. The individual works had never bothered me. For a while, I thought that it was because I had gotten used to them. Once I walked through it myself, I realized that the arrangement of the exhibit had a huge impact on the overall feeling you get when you’re physically in a space.

I learned a lot about how photography influences a space and about how photography influences people during my internship. It was a really great experience and I’m so grateful.

Skin, dana williams

I can think of so many photographs that have changed my life. I’ve always struggled with my health and I can tell my life story through x-rays and MRIs. However, I figure telling a story and changing it are two separate things. Thinking about that, one picture comes to mind. It’s a set of three pictures (I guess it’s a triptych if you want to get technical) of myself after my Steven Johnson Syndrome. Now, I don’t expect you to know what that is. I don’t expect you to have even heard of it. I mean, I didn’t until I actually got it my senior year of high school. One out of a million people get it every year and it’s a severe allergic reaction to a medication. The top layer of the skin dies and sheds through a process of rashes, hives and blisters (mostly blisters). It’s gruesome and I’ll spare you the details because I have a word limit, but some people don’t live through it. If you google image search it, mine was worse then the cases shown.

I was in the hospital for five weeks. Three of them were spent in the intensive care unit. My oldest sister is a doctor and had taken pictures of me every few days or so to track the progression. Some of those ended up being used in a private medical journal as a case study. At the risk of sounding corny, those aren’t the pictures that changed me. Those had shown what I’d been through. Those had shown the IVs, the NG tube, the blisters, the scars. To me, that’s not what was important. It’s how you recover that counts, it’s how you heal. I had beauty stripped from me. I don’t mean beauty as in “hey, I look nice today,” I mean it in the sense of being strong, alive and healthy. I was covered in scars, hairline to soles. Kids would ask their parents what was wrong with me. It’s not a nice feeling. But the thing is that it’s still you in there, even if you don’t look like you. I had to learn to embrace my scars. The week I got out, I took a lot of pictures of myself. I proved to myself that I was more than scars, more than broken skin, more than what had happened to me. They helped me understand that I had survived and that I was healing. Those pictures gave me a bit of myself back. They changed my life.