Even after more than a month, I still met new Austrian students in the kitchen, so when Kseniya emerged I simply thought she was another timid student whom I hadn’t crossed paths. Ukrainian, bubbly, and talkative, the first conversation I had with her, and most of which that would follow, included a comparison of Austrians to Ukrainians and a reference to a YouTube video. Growing up in the post-USSR, she was pro-West, pro-NGO, pro-Gay Rights, pro-Social Media Millennial. She worked as a journalist but had made a detour in the video arts. Topically she worked like journalist; her most recent project was a series of videos and photos about sex-workers in Poland. The photos were of prostitutes wearing a second-hand wedding dress, but their identity was disguised by a spotlight on their face that left details of the face over-exposed. The accompanying video was the mouths of these woman, close up, talking about their experiences. She showed me a video about the first gay rights parade in Kiev and how the police had to restrain and arrest people who attacked the activists.[1] That was in 2016.

I met Tetsugo Hyakutake while at the ISCP in Brooklyn in 2016. During the residency, curator Walter Seidl saw Hyakutake's work and invited him to exhibit in Camera Austria. In 2018 and Tetsugo invited me to his opening in Graz via Facebook. Like many others from around the world, I accepted the invitation and marked my status as "going." There were two types of “going” on Facebook: physically going and emotional-support going. So when he saw me through the crowd at the opening last night, the red flush that I presumed was his allergy to alcohol blossomed. He was swept away by a manic coordinator of the museum, but before he was, we agreed to meet for a walk through Graz.

Tetsugo work concerned with "the controversial debate concerning the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito, now called Emperor Shōwa, for the wartime atrocities committed by Japanese forces. The media hardly covered the topic of his leadership and responsibility during the war, which was generally considered taboo despite the fact that he had full power over the Japanese military according to the imperial constitution of Japan." Seidl goes on to state,"Tetsugo Hyakutake analyzes moments of Japan’s history since World War II and how they have affected current identity formations within the country, which, for many decades has been under the influence of the United States and, for some, still is."[2]

I recalled seeing these large scale urban photos of bridges and canals in Tokyo in his studio in Brooklyn, as well as his photos that had been treated in chlorine to appear more dated. But the relation that Camera Austria had with Japan was more extensive than just Seidl's Japanphilia; the magazine and organization was co-founded by Seiichi Furuya, a Japanese ex-pat who's lived in Europe since the 1970s and is known for his work about his late wife's suicide, "Christine Furuya-Gössler, Mémoires 1978-1985." [3] The outsider had become an insider, or changed the inside.

Our walk went through the Schloßberg tunnels, down to the Freiheitsplatz, turned through the Stadtpark and ended at Posaune. We ordered a pfandl and talked about the travel, photos, videos and how to live in a city like Tokyo or New York but working abroad. How to stake claims.

[1] “Big turn out for Gay Pride in Kiev,” Associated Press Archive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=585ctLgtwK8
[2] "Tetsugo Hyakutake Postwar Conditions," Walter Seidl, Camera Austria, Graz, Austria, 2018.
https://camera-austria.at/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ca_ausstellung_hyakutake_folder.pdf
[3] "Biography," Seiichi Furuya
http://www.furuya.at/biography.php

Michael and Marleen lent me three books of archival Graz. When I was too weary eyed of editing, I looked at these old black and white images, dating back to the mid 19th Century, just a few decades after the invention of photography itself. The early images showed dirt roads with men in suits, large hotel buildings lining the Mur and beautiful homes with wooden fences. Coincidentally, this era, 1860-1880, was also the years when Graz was responding to a catastrophic flood. One photo showed a man is washing his clothing in the Grazbach. Another photo showed the flood. As one would expect, the city was less densely populated at that time, but the mere existence of photographs at that period suggests that it was a place of intrigue for a photographer, and, already, a place with wealth.

I convinced Vera to participate, which was not a simple achievement. She acquiesced when I wrote her a note, but the very first thing she asked me when I was setting up my gear was, “What are you going to use this for?” That was a question that was really common before social media. People thought of images as having some leverage, utility or intention. A decade before, I would have scoffed at this question, asking myself who this person thought he was, that his image had any value, that the he would be recognizable or connected to their person in anyway. People had always asked this question in a suspicious way, as if I were up to some nefarious task, rather than out of curiosity of where they may see their photo. But this question had largely subsided. In the art world and residencies, where people identify the professional value a well-taken image may bring, I hadn’t heard it for years. The portraits of the artists that I’d been taking while traveling were increasingly rewarding. Stocked with ripening young talent, residencies offered the most basic characteristic of photography: to capture a moment in time, capture the nascent the value and wait for it to growing in the coming years. I wasn’t surprised by Vera’s question, especially in light of our discussion about the Right to Be Forgotten, and her expression that Europeans were more cautious with selfies than Americans. We took a few photos of her in the hallway of Priesterseminar. She was stoic, almost uncomfortable, refusing to smile.

The act of producing these portraits was always a transliteration of the idea of what an artist was in the mind of the sitter and the image and expression she believed equates to that idea. I mean that, in all cases, I was personally familiar with the artist before I request to take their portrait, and almost always I was wrestling with them in order to have them release this ideal from their face and give me the person that I’d met and known instead. For artists, this was usually delineated between smiling or being severely serious. (Take your work seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.) At the best times, I could get the artist to actually smile, not just smile, but produce a sincere facial expression in reaction to something I’d said that was amusing. But Vera wouldn’t budge. But the photo went into my archive.

I rode my bike back out to Saubermacher to capture an establishing shot with the building in the snow. With the open landscape, the white surface undamaged, the building looked truly revolutionary. A block of saplings stood out on their plot. It was cold, bitter cold and only a few joggers were outside, accompanying me along the pedestrian and bike trail that paralleled the OBB. On the fence of the train was graffiti, one of the few places I had seen it in Graz. That was a position in contemporary art.

Frigid, brittle and sniffling, I stopped at Schaumbad to chat with Iris about my filming, Saubermacher and Walter Felber and I felt compelled to clarify the exhaustion I had expressed after meeting with him. Both Iris and Eva had been really excited that I met with him, but I thought they misinterpreted my fatigue after seeing him as ingratitude. In fact, he was something of a warning sign, or an inevitable future that I saw for myself. The junk. The material reflection of a person with too many interests. This man, alone, toiling with his ideas, too independent amidst an industry of waste management or too dated for contemporary art. I wondered if his sluggish response to the shifting political landscape of garbage had somehow reflected his body’s own decreasing pliability. That is, he had taught urban planning at a university level, a decade ago; prior to his retirement people listened to him. But I got the sense that he was desperate for an audience now and that the only way for me to politely excuse myself from his conversation was to flee. Coincidentally, while I spoke with Iris about this, I saw that two walls in the office at Schaumbad were lined with a high-tech, flat, radiating electric heater. “Don’t let Walter see this,” I advised.

Another reason to take a portrait is to do justice to a person who may be in snapshots and smartphone images. I took Iris upstairs to the lounge and pointed one of the theatrical Mole Richardsons at her. We stood the white benches up to act as a bounce and took several three-quarter portraits. Iris had been the singularly most effective person in my project, unflinching to any last-minute request and always positive. But still, it was hard to get her to crack a smile.

I got home and began to process and archive the images, then looked into buying another hard drive to store my images, and another RAID box to back up each hard drive, and furniture to put the RAID array on; I thought of Walter Felber.

20181208: Ukraine | Japan

20181213: Archived | Archiving