I have been a quiet admirer of Martina Hoogland Ivanow’s photography since I came across her portraits of Lou Doillon lounging seductively in a turn-of-the-century Parisian fencing club. So when news arrived that Steidl was finally printing Martina’s long-awaited monograph Far Too Close, it seemed it was time to find her in Berlin or Stockholm or whatever far-flung frozen place she was currently residing. Whether it’s Siberia, Tierra del Fuego in South America, Sakhalin Island north of Japan or the Kola Peninsula in Russia, Martina has a taste for remote landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Moody sometimes to the point of eeriness, the images that populate Far Too Close capture both moments of quiet intimacy between members of her family and dark landscape portraiture from distant “ends of continents,” as she calls them. Martina will be signing copies of Far Too Close at Rough Trade East in London on Thursday, March 17th from 7pm.

Julie Cirelli: Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about the photographs in your book. Where were they taken and over how long a period? How did you choose these over others?

Martina Hoogland-Ivanow: Far Too Close is about emotional and geographical distance. Images of my journeys to the far ends of continents are layered with interiors from my home, family and friends. There are photographs from Siberia, Sakhalin Island, Tierra del Fuego and the Kola Peninsula in Russian Lapland that I shot between 2001 and 2005, and images from Stockholm from 2006 to 2008. It started as a personal investigation into my relationship with travel, and travel as a method of creating work. Why is it necessary to travel so far to take a step into oneself? And why is it so much easier, at least for me, to describe something that is geographically remote than it is to describe subjects that are emotionally close. The inclusion of ‘close works,’ so to speak, came at the end of the process – but played an important part. The editing, order and selection in the book were meant as an experiment with a sort of rhythm of perspective – an exploration of two seemingly opposite positions of proximity through the experience of closeness and distance.

Julie: Is there a photograph or set of photographs in the book that is particularly meaningful to you?

Martina: There are a few images that symbolize ‘in-between-ness’ to me – like the boy in the air with silver shoes, the ladder into the water, the two sisters on the cover (my grandmother and her sister) or the horse in search of eye contact – where there is both a sense of belonging and of isolation. It was a while ago now, but I think I searched a lot for that in-between-ness specifically. Also, it has become more and more important to me how one image relates to another – I spend a lot of time with and enjoy that part of the process.

Julie: What was it that brought you to the Kola Peninsula in Russia? How long were you there?

Martina: I was there for a few weeks in 2005. I was looking for those ‘ends of continents,’ originally for their shared history; they all seemed to be places that had certain dark elements to them, like political prisons, war zones or nuclear waste sites. I wanted to capture something of this, but at the same time try to point out my non-relation to each place by positioning the camera far from my subjects. The Kola Peninsula was the last place I visited, and I was there during the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Valley of Death. Because I didn’t experience the war, I wanted to illustrate my distance or inability to relate, if that makes sense. I am not sure if this has any importance for the viewer of the book or the final result, but it was my method.

Julie: Where are you based now? Berlin? Stockholm? How do you balance being home and being abroad, both in terms of your professional practice, and personally?

Martina: I have been back in Stockholm now for just a few months. I had the luxury of spending last year in Berlin at Künstlerhaus Bethanien on a grant from Iaspis (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s international programme for visual artists). Just to know a bit about my background: I left for Paris and New York for art school around 1992, then finished my degree in New York and worked for a few years in London before returning to Stockholm in 2002.

I have been based most often in Stockholm, or at least I always seem to return here. I like Stockholm – I think a lot of people (including me, sometimes) complain about it being too safe, too middle class and with too many repressed emotions, but after so many years abroad, I still think it is quite an unusual and exotic place. It is also quite a strange place – especially considering it’s a capital city. It’s sophisticated and has an old history, and it’s in the middle of the forest and surrounded by water all the way up in the northeast part of Europe. I think it’s a good place to be based – it does not demand your attention and just leaves you to it.

I am not sure I make a distinction between being at home or abroad, but traveling and returning do give you perspective and time to digest your material. Also, I am not the kind of photographer who carries a camera at all times; my work is only done in specific periods and in specific situations. I spend equal amounts of time editing and printing, and for that reason I need to be based somewhere.

Julie: What are your plans now that you’re back in Stockholm? What are you working on now?

Martina: Right now, I am playing with the idea of working with the moving image. Apart from that, I just finished the first part of a project called Satellite, which is about how one defines themselves through others. There are images from various ‘alternative’ communities and other groups, including family and lovers, that explore how we either identify with or are alienated from them. I’m not quite done with it yet, so I might continue a bit this spring and summer and see if I can take it somewhere else.

French artist Sophie Calle was presented with the 2010 Hasselblad photography award last Saturday in Gothenburg, Sweden, signaling the Foundation’s willingness to celebrate artists for whom photography is a tool rather than a craft. With typical self-effacement, Calle told Swedish reporters that she was surprised at her nomination. The Hasselblad is one of the most prestigious awards available to contemporary photographers and counts among its past winners only photography’s upper echelon: Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, et al. Though certainly of equal prominence to the Hasselblad’s previous winners, Calle is known more for her conceptual-performative work, where photography – along with writing, and sometimes film – plays an ancillary role as evidence or documentation.

Throughout her oeuvre, Calle has explored themes of alienation and rejection, often incorporating herself into her own work by acting as an exhibitionist or a voyeur. In her 1981 piece, La Filature, she hired a private detective to follow and photograph her as, unbeknown to him, she led him around Paris; she caused a minor scandal in 1983, when she found an address book belonging to filmmaker Pierre Baudry, with which she created a portfolio of photographs and transcripts of her interviews with people listed in the book (when she published the series in the French newspaper Libération, Baudry retaliated by finding a nude photo of Calle and requesting that the newspaper publish that as well). Calle has mounted large-scale solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others, and was France’s contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2007 with Take Care of Yourself, wherein she asked 107 women to interpret a letter she had received from a lover ending their affair.

Image: Sophie Calle, La Filature (1981)

I met Swedish designer Amanda Ericsson in a dark little bar in Paris. After a few minutes spent exchanging pleasantries, she flashed me a coy smile and removed her coat. There, pinned to the front and dead-center of her pants, was a small, white tassled brooch. A grappe de chatte, she calls it (literally, a pussy cluster, jewelry designed to draw attention to la chatte). It was the latest in a string of projects related to dreamandawake, Amanda’s workshop-based dress-refashioning collective. In addition to remaking dresses and other garments that are painstakingly collected in flea markets all over the world, the designer routinely collaborates with a stable of fashion photographers – Lina Scheynius, Richard Kern, Ana Kras, Chris Heads and Roberto Rubalcava, among them – to photograph the dresses with Amanda as their model and muse.
The concept for dreamandawake is simple. Amanda travels the world buying vintage dresses and brings them back to her London studio to take them apart and resew them. Each object has a precious history. Amanda can tell you the story of every dress she’s sold, like one she tells below about an Algerian doctor who cured her sick friend. From today until Saturday, dreamandawake will be participating an exhibition of erotic photography in Sweden, called Ne te promène donc pas toute nue! (translation: Don’t walk naked) curated by Emeric Glayse.

Julie Cirelli: How does photography relate to your dress-making project?

Amanda Ericsson: I have found it more workable for me to speak about recycling and sustainability in the terms of pictures and photos. I like to go back to basics, to remind people why we wear clothes- that fashion is a concept beyond those basic needs we once had. We do more than cover up our naked bodies, we are driven by wishes for transformation, renewal and demand. Today, an enormous amount of clothes are mass-produced in huge factory cities. Materials travel from one or more corners of the world, trimmings from another, the assembly is made in yet another – and then we can multiply this complexity by 100 and still not get the picture of the history of a garment. How could I sell something with a sense of responsibility when I no longer have control over its heritage? And I am not talking about a manufactured heritage like the stories created by branding agencies – but the actual history of the production of the garment. How can I, as a producer, assure that every person along the chain has been treated well and has had his or her basic needs fulfilled? Finally, in the end, when so much effort has gone into producing this something, this little piece of clothing, from the first person picking the cotton from the ground to the last person putting it on the shelf- I think it would be disrespectful if we didn’t use this little bit of textile until the last fiber in it has vanished and been transformed into dust.

Julie: You and Lina Scheynius seem to work on everything together: you model for her photos and she for yours, and you make such lovely videos together. Tell me a good story about something you did or made together recently.

Amanda: One of my all-time favorite clips is this one. I remember these three separate moments – the first is on the Trans-Mongolian train, the second in Shanghai and third in Beijing. But it is the eating-the-plum scene in the third that I particularly like, because it was shot in a small hotel room in Beijing during one of our little moments of rest in 2007. Lina was terribly sick and I was just about to go out and find her a doctor. I found an Algerian doctor in a long white dress that treated Lina with chocolates and dried apples. He also touched her stomach and told her that it was time for her to have a child. Me, he told it was time to work harder, and later that night I joined the doctor for a dance at the disco. Lina got better and we took off on a train to Ulan Bataar where we met the man who later shot The Man of Our Life in Moscow.

Julie: How about the other photographers you work with. Who are they and how do you work together with them?

Amanda: They all get free hands to play around with the dresses, and they decide exactly where, what and with whom they want to shoot. Some of them improvise with sudden impulses, others plan their shoots carefully. I always find it intriguing to watch their different techniques and ways of depicting the dresses in different places and situations.

Julie: Tell me about the book you made. Who and what is inside it?

Amanda: dreamandawake 01 is a photo book that we made in 2008 as a printed version of some of the series that are shown in the online gallery. The book contains the first of the many photo series that have been made with the dresses. The photographers included are Lina Scheynius, Benoit Grimalt, Vincent Ferrané, Yin John, Roberto Rubalcava, Daniele Ratti, Jesper Ulvelius. Each series has its own story (as well as each book, since every cover is hand-folded by Yin John/temptemps herself). Barbie Blues was shot on a Sunday morning in Paris by Roberto Rubalcava, who had just woken up during his little visit to the old studio that Lina and I shared in 2008. He soon started to fiddle around with his last pack of polaroids, which he fired off within an hour. Ten dresses later, we had the series that became the first dreamandawake exhibition at Mycroft gallery in Paris 2008. Dream was shot by Lina in a friend’s studio in Shanghai where we stayed just before heading off to Beijing, and on the Trans-Mongolian railway. The Man of Our Life was shot in Moscow by Italian photographer Daniele Ratti, who showed up an hour before our planned meeting time and immediately started to shoot us in the room. This man kind of excited me and I got trapped in the daze and haze of enjoyment of his company.

Julie: You make some rather unusual jewelry, can you tell me a little bit about it?

Amanda: The minge cluster! Or maybe let’s rather say, la grappe the original word in Swedish was fitt klase, in French it is grappe de chatte. This is a little spicy brooch used to make boring trousers or tights look better, when you don’t feel like wearing a dress. This is a rather happy jewelry to be used for happy moments or for moments you would like to become happy.

Julie: If the history of dream and awake were a story you were telling to a child, how would you tell it?

Once upon a time in a dream, a naked girl awoke in a bin,
She took a golden sewing thing, threads the needle then begin,
Stitching blankets rugs and scrubs, making water into wine,
Dresses then comes flying out, people start to twist and shout,
For the girl had turned back time, without committing any crime.

Because who wouldn’t want a pair of artificial Japanese breasts with a built-in heartbeat? Or for that matter, a precarious outdoor cage in which to dangle your infant several stories over the street. LIFE magazine has cataloged its picks for most absurd inventions of all time, most of which are rather amusing. A few of our favorites after the jump (rocket belt, anyone?) or visit LIFE‘s site for the full list of weird science-inspired oddities.

LIFE via Animal.

This Wednesday, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York will inaugurate its month-long building project, Pike Loop. A curling brick wall, designed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, will be built over the course of the month entirely by a robot. The one-armed industrial claw – aptly named R.O.B. – employs the same technology and hypnotic high-speed precision used to manufacture automobiles. For four weeks, visitors to Pike Street between Division and East Broadway will have an opportunity to watch as R.O.B. transforms more than seven thousand bricks into a gently arching geometric loop – a structure whose construction promises to be just as engrossing as its result. Click “Read More” for more information.

Pike Loop, a Robot-Built Installation in NYC
Sep 30 2009 – Nov 14 2009
Exhibition opening: September 30, 7pm at Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Installation location: Pike Street between Division Street and East Broadway.
Construction period: October 5 – 27, 9am – 7pm
Installation Inauguration: October 27, 7pm at Pike Street between
Division Street and East Broadway.

For those readers wondering what an epistolary exchange between Dossier‘s own Jared Killeen and his mother might look like, we offer the following missive, in which Mrs. Killeen prods gently at her son, whose filial task it is to answer five maternal questions, all of which help to shed some expository light on the vaguely limned thing Jared calls a personality.

Q:  I’ve never been a Q before. I’m a little worried about coming up with good questions.  People always say, “What are you worried about?” So let’s start there. What do you worry about?

A: I worry about lots of things. I’d say roughly 40% of my waking life is spent worrying. This, in my case, is almost wholly attributable to genetics. I have the worry gene. I do not need to tell you about the worry gene. (Two winters past you dissuaded me from buying a scarf for fear that I would suffer some bizarre scarf-strangulation-type accident a la Isadora Duncan.) I imagine that if a geneticist were to examine my DNA, he’d find at least one very uncomfortable-looking gene huddled among the rest, its little chromosomal brow crinkled with fret. But here’s the weird part. On the whole, I am dissatisfied with my worrying. This leads to a kind of meta-worrying: I actually worry about the quality and content of my ‘normal’ worrying. Usually this entails worrying that I am agonizing over the wrong things. I worry, for instance, that I spend too much time worrying about myself. I am aware that the prospect of saying something stupid at a party weighs heavier on my mind than do most of today’s pressing socio-political problems. Why aren’t I worrying about nuclear catastrophe or global warming or civil liberties every night when I go to sleep? Instead, I’m afraid that I’m going to show up to work the next day with my pants on backwards, or use the subjective personal pronoun when I ought to use the objective. In short, that which I worry about is worrisome.  

Q: DNA-ya gotta love it.  Three gens back along the gene line, Grandma Bertha was the matriarch of mind-wringing.  We used to say that if she somehow found herself without something to worry about, she’d worry about that.  Now, with the meta-fretting I think you’ve taken the family legacy to a new level.  (Way to go!)  And yes, the personal pronoun pitfall is a killer (he/him, thou/thee, s/he, etc.), probably even outside the species…. So, what’s the most significant relationship you’ve had with a non-human being?

A: I’ve had pets to which I’ve been quite attached. In college my housemates and I had just about the most likeable cat on campus. We adopted him prematurely (i.e., before he had been weaned), and some nights I’d wake up to him suckling pathetically on my chin (as you can imagine, this led to a complex psycho-emotional relationship between the cat and me, which some of the housemates found odd). The cat himself was peculiar. He never got bigger than a large gerbil. Notably, he had a sixth digit on each paw. We called him Thumbs, which he didn’t seem to mind much.

Q: Cats-ya gotta love ‘em.  So, beside pets of the furry persuasion, do you have any pet peeves?

A: Before I answer this question, let me compliment you on your effortless segue…. I’m bothered by the same things that bother everyone in NYC. E.g., people who don’t use headphones when listening to music on the subway or car alarms that go off every 10 seconds for no apparent reason. Personally, I find myself peeved by behavior that indicates a lack of consideration on the part of the peever. Not washing dishes; a failure to capitalize the first word of a sentence in an email; shouting in a theater. Boobishness also quickens my pulse. The sight of someone taking a photo of Starry Night with a cell phone is enough to send me to the men’s room in a dark rage.

Q: Boobs – not much to love about them.  It’s good that you fume discreetly (and considerately) in privies, lest you be maligned as an anti-boobite.  In-your-face raging at headsetless audiophiles and shouters and blaring car alarms would only fall on deaf ears.  Like tilting at windmills.  Which, by the way, have you tilted at any lately?

A: I have tilted at the sidewalk several times this month, but in no way was I being quixotic.

Q. Did the sidewalk appear to be vertical at the time?  As you have lived to tell the tale, I picture an animated sequence, perhaps enlivened by dust swirls, flashing stars, and some !@#$%^&*!…which inspires me to inquire: Which cartoon character has influenced you the most?

A: This is a tough Q. I’ve spent hundreds of formative hours watching cartoons and consider myself a connoisseur of the Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, and Disney characters. Not to mention a whole slew of less-iconic Saturday-morning types, all of whom inhabited various real-world action figures, candies, cookies, cereals, juice boxes, comic books, movies, video games, festive napkins, lunch boxes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, underwear, toothpaste, etc. Only as an adult did I realize that these cherished characters were conceived of by corporations as clever ways to sell stuff to kids. I submit, for instance, the “Gummi Bears,” who started out as sucrose globs only to become ‘characters’ in an animated series, less a narrative than a 30-minute advertisement (the quality of which may be compared to the nutritional value of the candy it helped to market). This is the unpleasant truth. So I guess it’s tough for me to look back upon a lot of the cartoon characters I was reared on without feeling slightly betrayed. That said, there was something wondrous about the higher-grade Disney and Warner Bros. characters. I never felt much affinity with the ‘classic’ Disney set-Bambi, Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo-whose ten-inch eye-lashes and oafish cuteness always struck me as false and cloying and even a bit creepy; but I was raised on The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and consider the former to be my first real introduction to the female psyche, as sad as that may be. Wile E. Coyote was also important to me. He was an interesting character: pathetic, lonely, devious, tormented by his own intelligence. The fact that he was both villain and victim always struck me as meaningful and true.

Q: Yeah, we all have to be careful about ordering oversized anvils from Acme Co.  Not being innately 2-D (or inveterately dour), we do have the advantage of perspective, of stepping back and chuckling at our own flubs and foibles.  Then again, Wile E.’s one-up on us is that he can slither out from under the annihilating anvil to scheme again.  One could do worse than learn to emulate that trick!

Well, my Qualms have been Quelled-my Q-debut has been a piece of chocolate cake.  Thank you for your savory A’s!

A: Absolutely.

Richard Kern, Photos 1980 – 1999
JUNE 4 – JULY 5, 2009
@ RENTAL, NEW YORK, NY
RECEPTION: THURSDAY, JUNE 4TH, 7-9PM

RENTAL | 120 EAST BROADWAY 6TH FL NY NY 10002

Monday, June 1st, 6 pm
Union Square, New York City
Accessible by the 4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R trains (map of Union Square)

From The New York Times:

WICHITA, Kan. — George Tiller, one of only a few doctors in the nation who performed abortions late in pregnancy, was shot to death here Sunday in the foyer of his longtime church as he handed out the church bulletin.

The authorities said they took a man into custody later in the day after pulling him over about 170 miles away on Interstate 35 near Kansas City. They said they expected to charge him with murder on Monday.

The Wichita police said there were several witnesses to the killing, but law enforcement officials would not say what had been said, if anything, inside the foyer. Officials offered little insight into the motive, saying that they believed it was “the act of an isolated individual” but that they were also looking into “his history, his family, his associates.”

A provider of abortions for more than three decades, Dr. Tiller, 67, had become a focal point for those around the country who opposed it. In addition to protests outside his clinic, his house and his church, Dr. Tiller had once seen his clinic bombed; in 1993, an abortion opponent shot him in both arms. He was also the defendant in a series of legal challenges intended to shut down his operations, including two grand juries that were convened after citizen-led petition drives.

On Sunday morning, moments after services had begun at Reformation Lutheran Church, Dr. Tiller, who was acting as an usher, was shot once with a handgun, the authorities said. The gunman pointed the weapon at two people who tried to stop him, the police said, then drove off in a powder-blue Taurus. Dr. Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, a member of the church choir, was inside the sanctuary at the time of the shooting.

The police in Wichita described the man who was detained as a 51-year-old from Merriam, a Kansas City suburb, but declined to give his name until he was charged. The Associated Press reported that a sheriff’s official from Johnson County, Kan., where the man was taken into custody, identified him as Scott Roeder.

The killing of Dr. Tiller is likely to return the issue of abortion to center stage in the nation’s political debate. Until recently, President Obama, who supports abortion rights, had largely sought to avoid the debate. Last month, he confronted the issue in a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, an appearance that drew protests because of his views. During the speech, he appealed to each side to respect one another’s basic decency and to work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Mr. Obama issued a statement after Dr. Tiller’s killing, saying, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

Advocates of abortion rights denounced the killing, saying it would send a renewed, frightening signal to others who provide abortions or work in clinics and to women who may consider abortions. Some described Dr. Tiller as one of about only three doctors in the country who had, under certain circumstances, provided abortions to women in their third trimester of pregnancy, and said his death would mean that women, particularly in the central United States, would have few if any options in such cases.

“This is a tremendous loss on so many levels,” said Peter B. Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, who had known Dr. Tiller for years.

Opponents of abortion, including those here who have been most vociferous in their protests of Dr. Tiller and his work, also expressed outrage at the shooting and said they feared that their groups might be wrongly judged by the act.

Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group based in Wichita, said he had always sought out “nonviolent” measures to challenge Dr. Tiller, including efforts in recent years to have him prosecuted for crimes or investigated by state health authorities.

“Operation Rescue has worked tirelessly on peaceful, nonviolent measures to bring him to justice through the legal system, the legislative system,” Mr. Newman said, adding, “We are pro-life, and this act was antithetical to what we believe.”

By late Sunday, Mr. Newman said, some were already suggesting that there were links between the suspect and Operation Rescue. Someone named Scott Roeder had made posts to the group’s blog in the past, Mr. Newman said, but “he is not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer.”

Dr. Tiller’s death is the first such killing of an abortion provider in this country since 1998, when Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot by a sniper in his home in the Buffalo area. Dr. Tiller was the fourth doctor in the United States who performed abortions to be killed in such circumstances since 1993, statistics from abortion rights’ groups show.

Although most of the deadly violence occurred in the 1990s, advocates said, abortion clinics and doctors have continued to be the targets of intense, sometimes threatening protests. Some said they feared that Dr. Tiller’s death might signal a return to the earlier level of violence. At some clinics on Sunday, administrators were reviewing their security precautions.

Adam Watkins, 20, one of the church members, told The A.P. he was seated in the middle of the congregation when he heard a small pop at the start of the service. An usher came in and told the congregation to remain seated, and then escorted Mrs. Tiller out. “When she got to the back doors, we heard her scream,” Mr. Watkins said.

Dr. Tiller had long been at the center of the abortion debate here, one that rarely seemed to quiet much in this southern Kansas city of about 358,000.

In 1993, Rachelle Shannon, from rural Oregon, shot Dr. Tiller in both arms. Two years earlier, during Operation Rescue’s “Summer of Mercy” protests, thousands of anti-abortion protesters tried to block off the clinic, the site of a bombing in 1986.

Friends of Dr. Tiller also described regular incidents of vandalism at the clinic, and a barrage of threats to him and his family — threats they say had concerned him deeply for years.

Family members, including 4 children and 10 grandchildren, issued a statement through Dr. Tiller’s lawyer, which read in part: “George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality health care despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.”

In recent years, Dr. Tiller had also been the focus of efforts by anti-abortion groups and others — including a former state attorney general, Phill Kline — who wished to see him prosecuted for what they considered violations of state law in cases of late-term abortions.

Two grand juries, summoned by citizen-led petition drives, looked into Dr. Tiller’s practices, including questions of whether he met a state law requirement that abortions at or after 22 weeks of pregnancy be limited to circumstances where a fetus would not be viable or a woman would otherwise face “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” — words whose interpretation were at the root of much debate.

This year, Dr. Tiller was acquitted in a case that raised questions about whether he was too closely tied to a doctor from whom he sought second opinions in abortion cases. As recently as this spring, the State Board of Healing Arts was investigating a similar complaint against him.

By JOE STUMPE and MONICA DAVEY

Image: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel