“Bei, born in Xi’an China, was striving to break through the barrier of classic French ‘couturier’ with her colorful designs and an Asian twist.”

Making one’s way into the limelight of the fashion industry in Paris has not changed since Coco Chanel sought support from members of the wealthy bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century. I took these photos in 2006 at a small, by invitation only, fashion show in the apartment of a well to do French family. The building was located a stone’s throw away from the Champs Elysees. The Monsieur who hosted the event at his private residence had an eye for the work of Bei, a young Chinese fashion designer who had studied in Paris. Her work was and still is symbolic of a crossover between European and Asian design.

Off the Grid.
Ingar Aasen calles himself the Art Ranger and is today an established artist, both in Norway and on the west coast in America. He was born in Fredrikstad, Norway in 1964 and has been living in a communal area called Øra, just outside Fredrikstad City, for the last twenty years. It used to be a sparsely populated area, a nature reserve and a sanctuary for migrant birds. Through the years, a recycling factory was built and large industries have gradually been established. He lives off-the-grid, without electricity or water, in an encampment of old Russian army trucks, camping wagons and old tour buses.

These vehicles are formed as a fortification in-between old trees facing a small lake. One enters the camp through a small hole in one of the walls, and steps into a courtyard where the center point is a huge bon fire that also works as an outdoor kitchen. At first one wonders which world they have entered, standing among dolls dressed up with old fur and army boots; this is The Art Ranger Camp. To make a distinction of what is Ingars formal art pieces is impossible, as the totality of the place is a sort of living art installation in itself.

“I am too free for society” —Ingar Aasen

From an old black burned pot pours out boiling coffee and cake accompanies it, though most likely not on either a table nor a plate. One feels very welcome in Ingars company and he talks a lot; about his own life experiences, his attitudes towards life and society, and about life in general. His humorist way of looking at life and reality is grounded in seriousness and thoughtful reflections. His concern with materialism and the plastic-world we live in, is a reoccurring theme; he called it ‘The Tyranny of Things’. He argues that society creates dreams and illusions on what life is supposed to look like, resulting in feeling of emptiness and depression when life is not turning out out as expected. By living independently from this ‘race’, closer to nature, a presumably hard and rough lifestyle, he feels like he cures himself in simplicity. Some years back, he spent several months in Los Angeles creating art. At the time, he made a conscious voluntary decision to live on the street. By avoiding formalities and rules, and moving boundaries, he feels good about himself and his life. Things are not to be made too complicated—a simple life is in focus—yet colored by creative expression everywhere you look and everything you touch.

Driven by desire of freedom and control of his own life, Ingar does not want to be a part of the system. He does not pay taxes to the government and avoids obligations towards society in order to live a life in the present.

Ingar’s vehicles are all without license plates and he does not have a drivers license, yet this has not stopped him from getting on the road throughout the years. Six times he has been involved in public protests, often in front of government buildings in Oslo, including the Royal Palace. His reason for protesting is lack of freedom of expression. He uses the massive trucks to symbolize fear, and argues that freedom of expression is only valid for people committing to the general system—if you are not a part of the system, people don’t listen to you. So, by being an artist living on the outside of society, people do not respect your opinions, nor do they always understand them.

Even though Ingar questions authority, and disobey the rules of the system, he does not want to have a negative relationship with the police, nor the communal officials. Rather, he would appreciate cooperation without any formal contract. Looking back at Ingars history with authorities, one find that despite his confrontational and offensive performance art demonstrations, they have not led to either imprisonment or fines, rather informal talks over a cup of coffee at the police station.
Finding meaing.

Growing up in Fredrikstad was a troublesome up bring for Ingar. He did not find much meaning in living life within the conventional boundaries, where one finds limited room for individuality, creativeness or extraordinary means of expression. Since Ingar was a child, he refused to learn how to read the clock. Years later, he discovered Salvador Dalí, and his iconic surrealistic watches in his paintings; these watches symbolized a time Ingar could relate to.

“The society has created the illusion of time, and by being part of it, you will be living with a death-watch ticking on your wrist.” —IA

By the first light in the mornings, the camp awakens, everyone is getting ready to work. After the fire is lit, some set out for the hour long walk to a downtown city center to beg, others stay behind at the camp to assisting Ingar throughout the day. It is a lot of hard work that has to be done each day, from cutting firewood, restoring the trucks and structures, to helping in the creation of large paintings and heavy sculptures,—Ingar willingly pays them well. When the sun has set, and the day comes to an end, some arrive back to the camp after a long and cold day in the city center. The evening discussion centers around the days earnings while dumpster food is prepared in old pots and pans over the fire. Clothes and other scrap materials are carefully put into bags in an overfilled wagon which is getting ready to go back to romania with souvenirs. On the weekends, the men take their accordions and other instruments to spend the nights singing and playing their balkan songs outside local pubs and disco-techs.

Down in the city center of Fredrikstad, Ingar Aasens face is easily recognizable, and people greet him wherever he goes. Ingars regularly engagement in the local area, in the cultural scene, as a local friend and a colorful addition to an otherwise conservative city.

Change.
In 2007, a conservative party was elected into office in Fredrikstad. The following winter, Ingar invited some Roma Gypsy families to live together with him in the Art Ranger Camp. He first found them on the edge of survival, sleeping beneath tarpaulins and garbage to endure through the freezing winter nights in Fredrikstad. This was to him an unacceptable condition for anyone to be in.

Since the Roma Gypsy families moved in to the Art Ranger Camp, Ingar Aasen has experienced reoccurring negative attention from the conservative governing local party. Charges have been made against them for various reasons; a colony of people living on public land, no sewage or sanitary systems installed, stealing from the local garbage dump etc. etc. But to Ingar, enforcing displacement and homelessness are not a sustainable solutions for the Roma Gypsies or the norwegian government.

Eventually the mayor campaigned to dismantle the Art Ranger camp. The obvious charge was Ingar Aasen’s occupation of public land; littering the area with scrap materials and other undesirable objects—art objects if you were to ask the artist. Debates concerning demolishment of the camp went on locally. In 2010 a final sentence was given, forcing the Roma Gypsies to leave the camp immediately, and Ingar to demolish the camp within a couple of weeks.
Ingar chose to continue his creations by evolving them into other forms. So rather than demolish them he will reform the structures and build an expressive art installation.

“Where will you go?”, I ask.
“Up”, answers Ingar.

In this series, I document a community whose members devote massive energy to strengthening and displaying their bodies. Rigorous and exciting competitions determine who has the most perfect physique. Line up, walk, display, flex, and judge. These men and women march across a well-lit stage, stop midway and expose sculpted bodies, the product of perseverance and hard labor.

Bodybuilders use weightlifting, diet, tanning, and oils to pursue highly specific results. Their appearance might seem exaggerated or strange to people from the outside world, but within the bodybuilding community, inflated biceps and over-sized chests represent beauty. However, with this allure comes a demand for lifestyle sacrifices and arduous workouts.

Training for competitions is a year-long process and almost a full-time job. Bodybuilders work out six or seven days of the week for three to four hours a day. Contestants follow extreme and highly-regimented diets prior and subsequent to the competitions. Cooking and grocery shopping are often time-consuming, as some routines call for eight meals a day. Bodybuilders struggle to balance their life, which includes training, jobs, families, and sleep. Regardless, many participants relish the experience of being onstage and setting new goals for themselves at every competition. They describe competitions as euphoric. Even though performing and having one’s body scrutinized can be nerve-wracking, the attention bodybuilders receive is highly gratifying, especially for the winner.

As a photographer, I am interested in capturing the tradition of bodybuilding, and the competitive, robust nature of the shows. My series aims to bring viewers closer to this insular and ritualistic community. In the process, I hope to raise questions about the sacrifices we all make in pursuing our ideals.

Recorded history—civilization itself as some would have it—began in Iraq, ancient Sumeria. I would guess that it was women who realized that just as pregnancy was not magic, vegetables came from seed. Agriculture produced surpluses, which produced commerce. Images were used as seals indicating ownership on the urns, which stored the surplus products. Words were invented to track the details of trade contracts and to do accounting. The letters started as pictures of actual things whose names were like the letter’s sound. These glyphs slowly evolved into abstract forms that still bore some resemblance to the original images:

The evolution was caused by technology itself. The early writing was done with a stylus, a pointed stick, used to scratch marks in clay tablets. Straight lines were quicker and easier than the curved lines of the first, curvaceous drawing-like attempts. Drawings, graffiti, had been the only “permanent” communication.

Unfortunately, wealth spawned a breed of big, bad tough guys who undertook one of the oldest rackets: “protecting” the new wealth and the people who produced it. They walled in the cities and civilization was born. The nomadic hunter-gatherers became traders, slaves or marauders on adjacent cities—state-sponsored armed robbery. It was at this point in our evolution that the neomammalian, verbal brain began to extend its characteristic dedication to control perception beyond self into political power, controlling others. The control effort was extended even to the visual arts and gave them a “purpose” – so that the rich and powerful could brag, indoctrinate and intimidate.

Myths deal with the unwritten history of human evolution; the stories were preserved in folk tales like Cinderella and passed down verbally as sung poetry. They were first written down in Sumeria.

Gilgamesh was an historical king in Babylonia around 2700BCE. The epic myth about him was the first written story, inscribed on clay tablets around 2000BCE. Part of its theme is the transition from the paleomammalian, or visual, to the neomammalian, or verbal consciousness. Its first line is “He who has seen everything, I will make known to the lands.” The myth claims of Gilgamesh that “two-thirds of him is god, one third of him is human,” born of “the goring wild bull.” However, although “wise to perfection, [he] struts his power over the people like a wild bull.” Gilgamesh hears of a wild man, Einkidu, who “ate grasses with the gazelles and jostled at the watering hole with the animals.” Einkidu symbolizes the paleomammalian, animal visual brain. Gilgamesh sends a harlot to seduce him so the “animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will be alien to him.” The two men fight at first when Gilgamesh tries to exercise his droit de seigneur and bed a local virgin bride. But then the two men become close, have some mythic adventures, like cutting down cedars in Lebanon and resting in a jewel-dripping, amber-oozing forest. However, when Einkidu is killed, Gilgamesh panics, realizing he too will someday die. He sets off on a quest for immortality, but, drunk on beer, sleeps through his chance, crying out:

“For whom have I suffered?
I have gained absolutely nothing for myself,
I have only profited the snake, the ground lion.”

[The reptilian and paleomammalian brains? The transition to verbal dominance was not an easy one.]

Gilgamesh’s epic ends with him showing off the baked clay tablets on which his myth was written. The steles stood at the gates to his city for all to see. This first written bit of literature turns out to be, at least in part, political propaganda. On the other hand, the myth is remarkable in its honesty in describing the homosexual love between Gilgamesh and Einkidu; no don’t ask, don’t tell here. But also, symbolically, an effort to integrate the personality: thought and feeling, word and image. Ironically, Gilgamesh himself was illiterate, couldn’t read his own PR and died before the myth was written.

These ancient gangsters knew they were only men so, to shore up their power in addition to claiming godhood, they also turned to the priests, of course, and to artists, primarily sculptors. One king posted a massive mythical lion in front of his palace; several commissioned sculpted memorials to their marauding. These did not celebrate the bravery of the regular soldiers or mourn their deaths; the dictator/kings are the largest figures and take all the credit for the killing.

Wealthy people paid the priests for statues of themselves “seeing” the gods. The statues vary in size according to price, another indication of wealth and social status. This priestly cottage industry of selling boons, indulgences and dispensations from church laws, helped cause the Protestant Reformation a few thousand years later. That the wealthy show off their riches by buying “useless” objects is another tradition that continues. Visual artists can thank their stars for that.

The early rulers of civilizations, the power elite, seized on art’s ability to depict the unseeable, the mythic, the propagandist and the lie.

This first era of the neomammalian, the verbal brain, also produced the first written law code, the Hammurabi, to protect the weak from the strong, it was said. The laws were inscribed on baked clay steles. However, the lower classes were punished more severely for crimes against the upper classes than the opposite, setting a tradition still present in the law today. Laws are also evidence of the attempt by the conscious verbal mind to control the other brains transformed into the attempt at its very inception by the rulers of society to control their subjects.

The subjects consisted of “free” men, serfs and slaves. Most of the early civilizations were predatory, warring on neighboring city/states and bringing back wealth and slaves, oil and “guest” workers in today’s parlance. This tradition also persists today.

The Egyptians

It’s one of the loveliest ironies of art history that despite all their elaborate rules for art, the most famous piece of Egyptian art is Tutankhamen, King Tut. It is, after all, a death mask made by Tut’s face itself. And it doesn’t follow the rules. It’s not in profile, a major rule.

With the mummies, Egyptian culture inadvertently created a spectacular integration of many of the themes and purposes of art since the handprints in the prehistoric caves: the effort to escape time, to escape death. Egyptian priests promoted the idea that a person would be condemned to eternal wandering without its body to preserve the Ka. Continuing Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality and the Jericho death mask practices, Egyptian priests created an elaborate rite and technology for preserving the bodies of those rich enough to pay for it. The body was wrapped in several linen sheets and then decorated with a painted or gold gilded plaster death mask. The Pharaoh’s then were buried in the pyramids, extraordinary sepulchers in their own right. Sometimes in an over-the-top extravagance with mummies of their favorite pets.

The audience for the art was not the people of the society, as in Sumeria, but the gods or even the dead kings themselves. To impress the gods to be met in the afterlife and let them know how important the mummy in the tomb had been in society, the paintings and sculptures were buried with the rulers they depicted. Sometimes along with the Pharaohs’ wives, children and slaves. Paintings on the tomb walls depicted everyday scenes, like the cycle of the seasons, to entomb the mummy in an endless cycle the same as his life. Art had a purpose. Although its purpose does seem a wee bit obsessive – crazy actually.

By the time Egypt became a power, visual objects as the baubles of wealth had become a firmly entrenched tradition in art. But “who pays the piper, calls the tune.” The verbal brain dictated elaborate rules about how to depict the powerful, in profile, for example. The sexes were differentiated by color; scale indicated social class or status. Every one was shown in profile.

Hieroglyphs, the Egyptian writing style continued to refer to the actual world; the letters look like birds and hands, lions and lips. The scribes were writing with brushes on papyrus, so curved lines were easy. Technology, the mechanical ability to do something, has sparked major changes in image making and its theories over the centuries.

From this era came Moses’ tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. They were more democratic than the Code of Hammurabi—the commands applied equally to all—and contained a similar if shorter list of things to do and not to do. Strikingly, for the history of art, one of those commandments forbade realistic images:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation
of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth
generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Maybe the ordinary people of Moses’ time had grown tired of the relentless self-promotion of the rulers and their art. They certainly were well aware of the inequities of class: the first recorded appearance of the Cinderella fable was in Egypt, in which a Pharaoh fell in love with a slave girl. Maybe they were tired of all the formal rules governing the painters, which we call Egyptian “style.:” Perhaps Moses understood the hubris of the artist who thought himself a god-like creator, or like Pygmalion, fell in love with his images and wanted them to come alive.

I think Moses could sense the inherent conflict between the visual and verbal brains. He is, after all, a character in the Bible, which starts “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.” His verbal brain here tried to kill off the image, the expression of the visual brain. Don’t confuse me with what you see, with the evidence of the senses, listen to my theory, read my lips, my concept. This conflict persists through the history of art, even to today. To some extent, visual artists can offer a corrective to the inhibitions and limitations of the verbal brain.

WHEN YOU BOIL IT ALL DOWN, I make pictures to remember the fleeting moments and feelings that comprise our daily existence. My journey as a photographer was born from a compulsion to document life around me after watching my grandmother’s memory erased by Alzheimer’s disease. She was set adrift on an ocean of her life’s experience, the tape wound backwards, and soon in her mind, she was back where she started. Life had come full circle.

During this time, I went on a road trip with my grandfather, who loaned me his point and shoot camera. Upon my return, I came upon one photograph of a worn fence post that stood out. Despite its many flaws, this image taught me that a photograph could encapsulate a feeling and a memory. In this, I found a way to remember—breadcrumbs scattered along the way—in case I was to ever become lost, like Mamaw.

Years later, my relationship with photography grew increasingly nuanced and complex. I have a family of my own now and they accept the camera as a part of me. It is a way I express my love to them, my desire to be present and part of their lives and to remember the passing moments we share. With time comes perspective and in the years to come, I hope that these photographs will become something of an anchor in my daughter’s life. In them I trust, she will always be reminded of where she comes from and how much she is loved.

Recently, I have thought a great deal about “innocent photographs,” meaning those that are not refined by years of visual experience but are more pure and reactive; those images that are not weighed down by the burden of photographic knowledge. Not long ago, I stumbled across a tin of slides from the 1950s, made by my other grandmother, Ruby Eich. In those photographs, I found an intangible beauty that I became distinctly aware was lacking in my own pictures. As a result, I wondered: what quality do her images possess that escapes me? I still do not have an answer for this nagging question.

Though I work as a photographer, a large part of my mental focus is on the piece of my family’s visual history that I am working to create and curate throughout my life. It is all part of a larger canvas that grounds us and allows us to know who we are, where we came from and that we are loved.

The images included with this entry span from 1958, shortly before my father was born, to 2011, where my own daughter is approaching her fourth birthday.

When I first began to use electric flash, I found that it was faster than my eye. Each moment became a fresh discovery. With the point and shoot, no matter how fast it is, it is slow compared to my impulse and perceptions. So once again, absolute control is suspended. Yet, this time for the opposite reason, chance within the realm of the tangible can give birth to a mysterious combustion of fact and flight. In fact, in my way of thinking chance is the most profound teacher; its ideology never rigidifies. Seeing is wonderful, adding chance to its wonder gives it an infinite demension.

Enjoy,

Larry Fink

May 14th marked a day of change for my family.

My grandmother June Mama fell in the rose bush outside of her home in Beverly Hills, Florida. In previous falls, she broke a knee, hip, wrist, and shoulder. On this occasion, she cracked her pelvis and broke bones in her forearm. At the time, she was living alone, so she had to scream for help from the bushes. My mother received a phone call from the company that was alerted when June Mama pressed the panic button that hangs from her neck. Before she heard if her mother was okay, she drove 421 miles to be by her side.

This accident meant that June Mama could no longer live alone in her home. She now had to move closer to family, one that she barely knew or relied on. For the first time since her adolescence, my mother would be seeing her mother regularly. On the other hand, I would finally get to know my maternal grandmother, less than one year after my paternal grandmother died after a fall with broken bones of her own.

Two months after June Mama fell and completed physical therapy, I walked into her house for the second time in my life. I entered the kitchen, where my mom and grandma were making me dinner. It was a surreal moment to watch my grandma, who is 4’8”, standing next to my mother, who is a foot taller, chopping tomatoes for tacos. It was a banal scene. I realized that until that evening, I had only been in this house once before in my twenty-eight years. As I entered the kitchen, this was the first time I was witnessing my maternal grandmother cook a meal.

My paternal grandmother, who I saw countless times, was always at the stove cooking. However, I had only seen my maternal grandmother, June Mama, a handful of times during short visits that were rarely held at her own home. The simple act of entering June Mama’s home, walking into her kitchen and seeing her interact with my mother was new and strange. I felt like I should have lived that scene a dozen times before and that left me with a sense of loss and wonder as I sat in the kitchen.

I wandered through her two-bedroom home. My mother and grandmother had already decided which items would remain for the new owners and which belongings would be brought to June Mama’s new two-bedroom apartment in Columbia.

My mother marked with pink tags—paintings, sofas and countless treasures her mother gathered decades ago, when she traveled the world as a military wife—as an indication to the movers that these items needed to be packed. After the division, what remained in the now old house were the following: a plastic plant, twin beds, a living room set, and June Mama’s king size bed. The pillows in her bed were placed on her side ever since her husband passed away ten years ago, and although the pillow-less other half remained empty, that bed along with the home was her last grasp of him.

It is very hard to let go of one’s home and the bed and the past you shared with your late husband. It is difficult to let go of a place, its routine and comfort, like the regular bridge games with dear friends. It is a humbling experience to acknowledge that you are no longer independent, and that it is time to move close to family—one you don’t know very well.

The night after the moving truck collected most of my grandmother’s belongings to drive and deliver to South Carolina, I awoke at 3 a.m. to the sounds of my grandma crying in her bedroom. This would be the last night she would sleep in her bed and Florida home.

My grandmother told me that this move signified “starting over.” To begin is scary, and, at 83, it must be terrifying.

My grandmother (June Stone, née Claudia June Durden), my mother (Claudia Smith Brinson), and I (Claudia Kendrick Brinson) share the same first name, Claudia. However, my grandma and I have never gone by our first names. Twenty-eight years of my life unfolded before my grandmother and I began to get to know each other. At the time, it was a tough moment to start a relationship. I did not know June Mama well; meanwhile, she is such an important person in my life. Being that I am 28 years old and she is 83, it was time.