Saturday began with a rush into the city to meet Henry for breakfast at a diner in Chelsea. Convinced that we would have only half an hour to eat if we met Henry at 10:00, Abby and I were flustered when construction drastically altered our train schedule, leaving us about 25 minutes late. To our pleasant surprise, the overnight snow had caused our first appointment that morning to cancel, giving us about four hours before our first meeting. With that, we sat down to a leisurely breakfast.
As we ate, we flipped through the gallery listings in Photograph magazine, scoping out the potentials for photography exhibits in nearby galleries. We spent the remainder of the morning wandering from gallery to gallery, checking out the wide variety of work on display. As usual, while I loved some of the work, there was a lot of it I truly didn’t care for, and thought it was interesting how everyone reacted differently to the works. Below, some of the work that I liked:
A window in a gallery that I thought was more beautiful than the work in the gallery itself.
Next, we headed to the School of Visual Arts to meet with professor Barbara Nitke. Having failed to research her work prior to our meeting, I must admit I was a little shocked when a fairly graphic porn scene stood projected as the backdrop to her lengthy introduction. As she began talking, though, everything fell into place, and the larger-than-life sex act on the wall lost all awkwardness.
Barbara explained that her ex-husband was a porn movie director, and she began shooting movie stills on porn sets in the 80s. Since then, she has worked with porn photography, especially fetish porn and the S&M scene, for over 25 years – as that felt repetitive, she has recently decided to try fashion. Barbara explained that she makes most of her living working on TV sets (something she doesn’t recommend doing, since they own the copyright) but that she is never happier than when taking pictures. “That’s the most important thing – to do what you love,” she told us. She briefly described the soundproof box needed to house a camera on set – cumbersome and heavy, giving her pictures an added value, in my mind. I photographed a fair amount of her slideshow, but don’t think they’re quite appropriate to post on a public blog.
Barbara went into a fair amount of detail about the story behind her work. My favorites were moments captured behind the scenes of porn movies, mostly in the eighties, where actors look bored, nap, or exhibit what Barbara called “the 1000-mile-stare… like combat soldiers. They’re not there.” A lot of these shots, she explained, were “artistic” enough not to be marketable, making it easier for her to get the rights to them. She also showed a series of work she made of real S&M couples, attempting to portray the emotion, love, romance, and creativity involved in something that is far too often misunderstood. She said she tries to get the “moment after a scene… where they are in a golden glow of delight with each other.”
Barbara advised us students, for our futures’ sake, to make sure that we own our work – not to give up our copyrights or usage. She also raved about the benefits of teaching, such as health insurance and access to school facilities such as printers. Given my growing interest in teaching, I was encouraged by this; I had never even thought of those things before.
Lastly, we made a visit to photographer David Godlis in what I believe may have been his apartment. David is a street photographer famous for photographing punk bands at the nightclub CBGB’s in the eighties, fortunately timed right before those bands became wildly popular. He described his style as inspired by Bressai’s night shots of Paris in the 30’s – grainy black-and-white, handheld long exposures, with no flash. Personally, I am a fan of the contrasty, heavily pushed aesthetic he uses, and therefore appreciated his work. He described the crazy lifestyle of his youth, working as a photographer’s assistant during the day and shooting at CBGB’s all night, every night. “It wasn’t healthy,” he reminisced, “but I got the pictures, and was young enough to do it.” I felt like that statement could also apply to our hectic lifestyles at RISD.
A lot of what David talked about was how his photographs were not seen as legitimate in the beginning, either in their style or in their subject matter. I really admired David’s perseverance to keep working with what he believed in, and was inspired by how it eventually paid off. It tied in a lot with what Henry often tells us, that work always pays off, although often not quite how one would expect. For example, one of the last things David showed us were t-shirts of his work marketed in Japan with largely nonsensical English phrases, which, hilarious as they seem to us, are apparently quite fashionable abroad.
Hungry and ready for dinner, the majority of our class headed to Williamsburg for dinner with RISD grads at a gigantic, bustling beer hall. Coincidentally, I was able to meet up with Mira, one of my friends from Norway, who had just moved to New York!
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