Box Count: Fifteen

Last week we crossed a major threshold, 1,000 photographs archived! And to celebrate, while poring over photographs of Montana, Mexico, Kashmir, Iowa, Wisconsin, and New York, we happily poured ourselves a glass of bubbly to commemorate such a happy milestone in the project.

I'm keeping my eyes peeled for images of pool halls for Andrew, while simultaneously making mental notes of repeated motifs. I'm leaning heavily toward photographs depicting food, kitchens, and market places... I feel like a gourmet photography show could be such a fun thing for us to do. I'm even daydreaming of organizing a potluck or enlisting food trucks at the opening, well this is just one place my mind has wandered.

And food art shows are so in vogue right now! We'd be piggybacking on Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine (2013), Peter Fischli David Weiss: Questions, the Sausage Photographs, and a Quiet Afternoon (2011), the forthcoming Check Please at Western Exhibitions. Then there are folks like Ken Fandell with his images of bananas and Cheetos, and Deb Sokolow whose show in the fall humorously told the tale of how some meat is made in Norway. Culturally, it's hard to ignore the rise in popularity of pop-up dinners, and foodie culture in Chicago, or maybe I'm just biased from my new obsession with the Chicago-based podcast Chewing the Fat. It just feels like a food show is begging to happen! Plus everyone loves potlucks and snacks, right? And we are living in one of the food epicenters of the world... like an  ice cream maker, my ideas are churning, and the product I'm sure will be a treat.

Finding Vivian Maier

Do you ever see a film that is so well-done, so interesting, and so pertinent to things you care about, that halfway through the movie you get anxious about the impending end? No? Well I do. And occasionally, one of these gems comes along that makes the hair on my neck stand on end within the first two minutes. Finding Vivian Maier was one of those movies, which comes along once in a blue moon. A film in which my metaphorical stars align and everything I seem to be interested in is addressed, seamlessly, in one fell swoop. From archiving, to museum practice, black and white photography, and tiny villages in France - this movie has it all.

via Nova Planet

For one, a bulk of the documentary takes place in and around Chicago, which adds a level of familiarity and personal interest to a tale of intrigue and mystery - placing me and my home right in the middle of the story. The story is so great, it makes you wonder how something like this could happen, and what treasures are still left to be uncovered. 

John Maloof with his loot via Avoision

A short synopsis:  in 2007 John Maloof, the director and filmmaker, uncovered a box of black and white photographs with negatives at an auction, purchasing the entire lot for a mere $300. He looked through some of the photos, and had a visceral reaction to the images knowing they were "good," that there was something about them that felt important. This knee-jerk feeling led him to methodically seek out and collect every box he could find of work by this same seemingly unknown photographer, to try to figure out who she was, what she did, and why her work was still undiscovered. 

This project reminds me so much of the Warhol time capsule project... it's eerily uncanny, yet unbelievably exciting! 

Maloof's journey led him to contact museums which initially turned him away (gasp!). He persevered, finding out that Maier was an amateur photographer in secret, while maintaining a job as a full-time nanny to support her work. He traveled around the country interviewing her former employers and their progeny, the children she worked for. Maloof even traveled to a small village in France where Maier's mother was from, reconnecting some of the subjects in her work to real place and faces. Maloof held Maier's camera in his hands, then held her mother's camera in his hands. Connecting a tradition and a family interest, into a line that makes sense in the world where Maier maintained perfect anonymity.

Maier's cameras via We Think Photo

The film was emotional and exciting, uncovering the mystery in a wonderful manner of show and tell. Giving a name to the work that so desperately needed to be brought to light. As more and more negatives are developed and enlarged, and more museums and galleries begin to support the work in the manner of hosting exhibitions - Maier's work is finally being seen, after years of gathering dust and begging to be discovered. There's something so wonderful and yet so melancholy about this story - one pregnant with possibility and also tinged with loneliness in its purest form. 

Artist self portrait via Chicago Now

I highly suggest seeing this film if it comes to your town, or seeking it out if you have a chance. I walked out of the theater inspired by my own reflection in glass, by the way the light fell on the world around me, by my own archival project with photographer, Herb Nolan, and by all of the works of art that have yet to be discovered. It's incredible how good this movie made me feel and how inspired it left me. 

Box Count: Ten

We have reached a point in this project where we have a real stride in our step! With ten boxes completed, and only a few small piles of musical photographs left to file and archive, we will be a third of the way done with the this leg of the process. 

It's pretty incredible to see the breadth of the collection, and even this early in the process, my brain is starting to pull images that might work together for an exhibition. Repeated themes and patterns are starting to make themselves apparent in the most unlikely of ways. Images of food and dining are working their way into photographs of musicians performing and hanging out. From Tom Waits smoking cigarettes in a diner to Muddy Waters drinking from a pewter mug in his lobster wall-papered kitchen. Additionally, fashion is an ever present force in the collection. Afros, frenetic patterns, men in heels, aviator sunglasses and turtlenecks, if you can imagine it, they probably wore it. Not to mention images of long-lost hotels and boarded up night clubs, all nothing more than a memory, a moment in time. 

Once we wipe our hands of the musical photographs, we will move on to the "travel" category, which I am really quite eager for. India, Mexico, and Montana are all parts of a whole. It will be interesting to see the commonalities and themes that make themselves known as we review these works in a unified way.

Some other news, Herb discovered one of his photographs is up for auction at Kodner Galleries Inc. We're not quite sure how his work ended up in Florida, but he's in good company alongside Abe Morell, Ansel Adams, and Toulouse Lautrec (to name just a few). If you're interested in buying some of his work not from Kodner Galleries, feel free to reach out to me or Herb directly!

Box Count: Six

Last week, Herb, Mary, and I worked our way through archiving upwards of 250 photographs - bringing our grand total to 300 silver gelatin prints stored neatly in six archival boxes. They were 250 mid-size black and white photographs of musicians playing their instruments in various locations. Festivals, jazz clubs, long-established music venues, beneath highway underpasses, indoor, outdoor, you name it, they played there, and Herb photographed it.

What's been one of the real treats of this experience has been the act of listening. While various types of music emanate through the light-filled living room, we play a game of memory, flashing an image before Herb's eyes only to be regaled with tales of Black Panther buttons, attending festivals in an era where toplessness was the norm, jazz and blues greats crooning so hard and fiercely that the pulsating temples are felt throbbing through the photographs into the room. These stories though sometimes sad, are often served up with a side of humor. The are what make this project rich. Walking through a history, story after story, picture by picture - it's something remarkable. We've discussed potentially setting up a tape recorder, or a video camera (how meta!) to capture what we are doing, the real meat and potatoes of the experience. Might be worthwhile... But we shall see!

Box Count: Eight

What do photographs of unnamed groupies, the Velvet Underground, and pastries from Floriole have in common? Oh, just that they were my favorite things from last weekend, hands down. We plowed through another 150 photographs on Saturday, and the stack of music performing photographs grew smaller as we worked our way down the table. We even refiled some images and put my filing system to work... spoiler alert, everything was organized, easy to find, and now I know what Muhal Richard Abrams looks like. And all of this while munching on delicious treats from my favorite Chicago bakery and listening to the Velvet Underground discography - not too shabby! That said I'm really proud of the work we've done so far, and looking forward to Saturday! And every photograph has a story attached to it, some of which haven't been told for years, I am so darn lucky to take the richness of it all in.

Archiving a Collection

From my time working in a gallery and my years spent wandering the Art Institute, the act of collecting is something that has come to be of great interest to me. Upon reflection, I don't consider myself to be a collector of anything. I didn't collect Beanie Babies, I don't really possess an art collection, and my eclectic mix of records wouldn't be considered worthy of the title "collection" to many music aficionados. And yet, I am drawn to collections. Collections that might not be my own have made their way into my life by way of lists. For you see, I am truly a list-maker.

One of my first projects at the Art Institute was to create a list of all living descendants of donors to the precious Thorne Miniature Rooms - a strange and fun challenge, given that the Thorne Rooms were so important to me as a little girl. I worked on this project diligently tracking down little histories of former donors finding interesting stories (one descendant bred miniature horses!), but also finding dead ends where questions would always be left unanswered.

What I took away from that project was that cataloging things comes naturally for me, regardless of what it is I am working to catalog. Which has led me to an exciting new project I'm pursuing in my free time. I'm currently working to organize, archive, and catalog a collection of photography for a dear family friend and great talent, Herb Nolan. My first visit to his home and studio was this past Saturday, and the work I encountered spanned decades, themes, subject matter, and location broadly and with grace. We whittled down the collection into genres that "made sense," piling photograph after photograph into the proper location based on theme and size. As we moved through the collection, Herb reminisced on memories and moments from an era long since past, and yet, the photographs rich in contrast and intimate in manner perfectly evoked the feeling of the time and place he so beautifully captured.

We only scratched the surface with our preliminary work on Saturday, but ideally an exhibition is in the works. Stay tuned! 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

GPOY - Waiting outside of the Music Box in the snow edition

On Saturday, we anxiously waited in line outside of the Music Box Theater in 20 degree snowy weather, not because we were lunatics, but because we wanted to attend the VIP sneak preview of The Grand Budapest Hotel and see Wes Anderson in person! It was cold, I mean really cold. I was one of the lucky few to nab an RSVP to this impossible-to-get-into event, and while I hated the way my toes felt after an hour and a half of jumping from foot to foot in the cold, I'd say some icy toes were an even trade to be in the same room as Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Tony Revolori, the boy wonder of this film. We killed time sipping chai from Julius Meinl, making up games, trying to read each others' minds, and befriending everyone else in line with us. It was an awesome experience to share with a crowd of Wes Anderson devotees, and I will not soon forget it.

The movie was wonderful, and as rich and colorful as one might expect from Anderson. What differentiated this film from the rest of his oeuvre was the darkness of the story and some of the gruesome moments that caught me off guard. No spoilers, I promise. I will just say that seeing a gory decapitated head and little nubby cut-off fingers was shocking and surprising, adding an element of thrill and horror to the film that was lightened by humor, wit, and beautiful editing. 

What I loved about this film was that Anderson decided, much like he did with the Darjeeling Limited, that he would base his film around a location and moment in time, imbuing the story with the very nature of its surroundings. In prepping for the film, he visited Germany and Budapest, and shot a majority of the movie on site (aside from the adorable animated / sculpted moments). The whole movie was true to the Wes Anderson Universe, but steeped in a different era of nostalgia than so many of his other films take place. 

Was it my favorite Anderson film? Not entirely, but it still invited me to visit his magical mind, basking in the richness of texture and color, allowing me to hunt for details and common threads in all of his films, as if to unlock so mystery of the characters and stories he so lovingly weaves for my viewing pleasure.

Wes, you did it again! Bravo, darling, bravo!