ROSS EVERTSON, PHOTO (BLOG, INFO)

Back when newspapers controlled (and billed for) the word count of classified listings, one had to be extremely frugal. With the advent of the now ubiquitous website craigslist, there is no need for such self-limiting (or censoring, in some cases). Hundreds and hundreds of words replace the twenty, and we’ve all become our own Crazy Eddie, developing our own tactics and tricks in an effort to sell our surplus stuff.

This transition to internet based classifieds, and the “deregulation” of listings has had a rather notable and well covered impact on the newspaper business—mainly that they can barely afford to operate anymore.

Socially, there have been other, less apparent results from this phenomenon, however. Beyond a simple description, often people’s opinions of their possessions are laid bare. Searching for specific keywords can result in an absorbing sociological experiment—and this project is based around just that.  By limiting my search term to the word “classy,” we get a cross section—from Mercedes to telescopes—of what people perceive (or want to have be perceived) as classy. While commercial advertising might try to tell us how we should want to appear to the world— self-generated classifieds let us tell everyone how we view ourselves.

Click here to see the entire project.

Los Angeles, 2005

While attending Art Center I took part in a course that was linked to the United Nations through the school’s program named DesignMatters. The course involved working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were involved in some way with achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. A variety of organizations came to the school to talk about the work that they were doing, how it related to the MDGs and the kind of projects they imagined us creating with/for them.

During the second week of the class another completely unrelated group of students were folding into our class, and that still left only 12 students—and for some reason—4 instructors. All of us, both those enrolled intentionally and unintentionally were then to pick a specific organization to work with.

We could work with Surfrider Foundation, Planned Parenthood and a few other national and local orgs. I went back and forth for a while, considering for whom my work might be best suited. Originally I considered Planned Parenthood, which in a sense would be at the root of the solution to most of the problems put forth by the MDGs (which include eradicated poverty and hunger, improving maternal health and reducing child mortality). It turned out that logistically I wasn’t going to be able to work with them, so I turned to PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) in Los Angeles—mainly because they are supported by both Annette Bening and Rhonda Flemming.

At first I was reluctant to work with a homeless organization because there is no shortage of photographers who are interested in doing a cliché turning of their lens towards the less fortunate. However, after meeting with some of the staff at PATH (their offices are lined with shallow dof photographs of homeless people) I learned a few things that changed my perception of the homeless situation in Los Angeles. The most important revelation being the fact that the highway off-ramp panhandling types only make up about 10% of the 90k+ homeless pop. in LA. This suggested that, well, the problem is bigger than what we see and more importantly we really have no idea what a “homeless life” is really like.

To that end I worked on a project where I provided point and shoot cameras to some of the temporary residents of PATH to show what it was like for the other 90%. I would not claim this to be a brilliant new paradigm in photojournalism, as it has been done many times before (and managed and executed with much more success), but it was worth a whirl. For fear of failure of that project I also worked on something on the side—a project called Disappear Here.

The idea behind the project was to peel back just a single layer, instead of going right to the source like I attempted with the initial project. I simply just began to photograph all of the specific places that I had seen a homeless person occupying. Sometimes the locations had traces of a human’s presence from apple cores to clothing to shit. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, there were no rules to selecting a space, I just made the photographs of where someone had been. I don’t mean that to be as overwrought as it sounds. Simply put, I saw the next layer beyond the people to be the place.

By focusing on those specific locations I had known to have been occupied, it forced me to look at those places as something more than a random corner or a square meter of sidewalk, which felt to me to be enough for this project.

View the project here.

Benny and Arch, ‘06 © Shelby Lee Adams

I’m going to try and kick these off with photographers I have already mentioned on this blog. So, first off, we have Shelby Lee Adams. As much as I would like to critique this and all future statements I post, I will try to refrain out of respect and fear. Don’t let that stop you, though.

Every summer, traveling through the mountains photographing, I am somehow able to renew and relive my childhood. I regain my southern, mountain accent and approach my people with openness, facination, and respect; and they treat me with respect. My psychic antennae become sharpened and acute. I love these people, perhaps that is it, plain and simple. I respond to the sensual beauty of a hardened face with many scars, the deeply etched lines and flickers of sweat containing bright spots of sunlight. The eyes of my subjects reveal a kindness and curiosity, and their acceptance of me is gratifying. For me, this is rejuvenation of the spirit of time past, and I am better for the experience each time it happens. These portraits are, in a way, self-portraits that represent a long autobiographical exploration of creativity, imagination, vision, repulsion and salvation. My greatest fear as a photographer is to look into the eyes of my subject and not see my own reflection.

My work has been an artist search for a deeper understanding of my heritage and myself, using photography as a medium and the Appalachian people as collaborators with their own desires to communicate. I hope, too, that viewers, will see in these photographs something of the abiding strength and resourcefulness and dignity of the mountain people.

Shelby Lee Adams

Shelby has a blog that is as seemingly as new and as oft-updated as my own.

The dry spot on my porch created by the New York Times - Echo Park, Calif. 2006

Being accountable totally blows. The fact that some people think you should be responsible for the things you say and do is one of the more frustrating things about not being five years old. So it’s a shame that more artists aren’t five. Instead they are often hormonally realized adult human beings. They have fully developed frontal lobes that hold them accountable for their actions, artistic or otherwise.

Some artists resist accountability, at least on paper or in interviews. Or in any public venue. Or at home. Some people might think that it is noble, or at least respectable, to claim that your work either doesn’t need or would be ill-served by being bound to a statement. I suppose that’s fair, but is operating on the assumption that people probably don’t care for any supplemental insight into the work. Which is probably also fair.

It is so easy to write a bad statement, even for a great body of work, that it is something that most people have come to expect and resent. Nobody likes to be told what to do–especially hormonally realized adult art patrons–and too often an artist’s statement will tell you how you are experiencing the work. “This blog post forces you to consider your position as a spectator in relation to an art-language-loop.” Right?

I write about my work constantly, via email with other photographers, in “actual” statements, or in notebooks when I am in the middle of a project. It literally is a different language with which to approach and consider what I am doing and I find it a very necessary component to understanding and advancing my work. I also appreciate insightful, informative and helpful statements from other artists. Even more so, I appreciate the schadenfreude experience that comes with reading a truly bad, self-important statement that is neither enlightening or useful in any way.

Starting either later today or tomorrow I am going to start posting statements as I find them. Out of respect and fear I will not comment on them. I will not point out which one made me pee my pants, or the one that originally inspired me to continually write about my work. I originally wanted to be funny about the whole thing, with a grading system that was named with a hilarious acronym. Introspection and counsel reminded me that to be respectful isn’t a bad thing.

So here’s to the glory of lobes and accountability.