Interview with Photographer Maureen R. Drennan

noelradley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:10:27 +0000

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

On the Viz. blog September 2009, I discussed Maureen R. Drennan’s photo series "Thin Ice," where Drennan proposes the potential losses to ice fishing with global warming. I recently had an interview with Drennan about "Thin Ice" and being a finalist on the New York Times DotEarth blog/Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition. We discussed remote places, the scale of her project, the themes and the arguments of the photos, as well as the intersections of photography and story.

“A small story about a greater problem”: Interview with Maureen R. Drennan

Viz.: I was talking to a colleague about your series of photos. She said that when she thinks about visual rhetoric and the environment, she thinks of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” She was struck by the contrast between “An Inconvenient Truth” as a visual rhetoric piece and what your series of photos are doing.

Drennan: With Al Gore’s movie, he was really trying to hammer home this situation that is imminent, and I think he’s trying to reach as many people as possible. I think it was done very successfully. It was done in a way where a lot of people could understand it. It was accessible, and it was also dynamic and intense. I know my work is not like that. I wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. That would be for a different photographer…I’m not a scientist. I don’t claim to be an expert.

Viz.: How do you think your photos compare to the other visualizations of climate change?

Drennan: I hope this doesn’t come across as self-deprecating. I think [my images] were a little more subtle. It’s not super dynamic, but I think that’s okay. It’s a small story that I think can relate to the big picture. We’re all involved in small stories. It’s what we’re involved in every day. It makes up the big picture. I think other visualizations of climate change are grand and monumental. My pictures aren’t like that. They’re a lot more quiet.

Viz.: Can you describe how you began to take these pictures of ice fishing?

Drennan: I’m from Manhattan, born and raised here in New York. I’m really drawn to remote, beautiful places because it’s so different from what I’m accustomed to. My husband Paul is from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, which is a very small town in northern Wisconsin. When we would go visit his in-laws, I usually wander around and take pictures of the area. I was just really drawn to these beautiful, remote lakes, and the fact that there are these little shacks on the lake. [For people who aren’t from a cold climate, ice-fishing] is sort of a foreign thing. I was really drawn to it…What are they doing out there? Why are there these little houses out there on the lake? I just instinctually wandered out there and started chatting with people and taking their picture and taking photographs of the landscape and the ice shacks.

What was initially so interesting was the community and how tight knit they are: these temporary communities out on the ice. They only last a few months, and people bond. They become so close. It’s like having a cabin in the summer at the lake. It’s a little place—a little refuge that you go to—and you’re friends with the neighbors. You also (for safety reasons) have to be looking out for one another. Even though it’s an isolated activity, there’s also a community aspect.

Viz.: How did your photos become part of the Artist as Citizen project?

Drennan: Even just in the two years that I have been doing this, the season got a little bit shorter. The ice shacks went out later in the winter and came back earlier. It’s way below zero—like 10 degrees below zero and 20 degrees below when the wind picks up—so I spend a lot of time in the shacks talking to people. In talking to people this past winter, people [would say] how the season is changing and the ice is changing…That’s anecdotal. I don’t think [the ice fishers are] studying charts and graphs, but it was interesting to hear. It just got me thinking about these lovely communities and how this is a small story about a greater problem.

For the full interview, click here.

Century 21

dsmith — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:18:30 +0000

Jeremy Blake’s Century 21 (2004)—the final installment in a trilogy inspired by the narrative of eccentric firearm heir, Sarah Winchester—digs into the psychic tableau of the American West. It’s gorgeous—and horrific.

The frames of Blake’s image montage are layered with different media, including gouache, ink, still photography, CG graphics, and 16mm film. Such image density creates a striking vividness of form that is part acid trip, part interlinear homage to the haunted legacy of Winchester’s eccentric "mystery" mansion, constructed in San Jose, California, from 1884 to 1922. The trilogy was screened for the first time in the U. S. in 2004 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Through these haunted surfaces and images—cartoon cowboys, iconic silhouettes of gunfighters, the tongue-like extensions of succulent plants—viewers observe the formation of narrative around the slowly paced repetition of key figures. Using these elements, Blake is able to address our attitudes toward property, freedom, and, to quote Robert Plant, the “deep and meaningless” contexts of daily life. He also asks viewers to reflect on the paranoia extant in the surfaces of objects and figures that populate the national narratives of individualism, ownership, and deal making.

In a frame that repeats throughout the film, the silhouette of a lone man on horseback arrives, head down, to be overtaken by images of geodesic domes and signage for Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23—forlorn but suggestive sites in Blake’s western geography. The accompanying Aaron Copland soundtrack is layered with the sounds of strong wind and other digitally enhanced elements to deliver a feeling of anxious vacancy.

Compare this with last Thursday’s image of Nancy Pelosi, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson, who met to reaffirm world financial markets that they had a plan for handling the current mortgage/credit crisis. The tension in their faces betrayed the hopeful content of their message. I can’t help but wonder if Sarah Winchester’s paranoid legacy isn’t being carried over into Washington and Wall Street—the ghosts of bad decisions and short-term greed returning to make claims on the conduct of the “American Way of Life”—something that, as Dick Cheney once said, is “non-negotiable.”

As the media and politicians continue to blame faulty mortgages and risky decisions by Wall Street bankers in an attempt to scapegoat the nearest and most exposed playerz of the current financial meltdown, Blake’s visionary tableau of angst argues that national narratives of acquisition, confrontation, and macho individualism influence our ability to make decisions and act within the environments we inhabit. Heroism is outpaced by tragic misfortune and violent contradictions of desire. Our manipulation of the material world, Blake seems to argue, backfires as paranoia and fear catch up with us—and the ol’ homestead awaits foreclosure.

viz. - Visual Narrative

Interview with Photographer Maureen R. Drennan

Century 21