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Course: The Museum of Modern Art > Unit 1
Lesson 10: Seeing Through Photographs- Seeing Through Photographs
- Nicholas Nixon | The Brown Sisters
- Hank Willis Thomas | Unbranded
- Katy Grannan | Boulevard
- Vik Muniz | Equivalents (The Museum of Modern Art)
- Marvin Heiferman | Seeing Through Photographs
- Sarah Meister | Seeing Through Photographs
- Lucas Blalock | Strawberries (Fresh Forever), Strawberries (Forever Fresh)
- David Horvitz | Mood Disorder
- Anouk Kruithof | Subconscious Travelling
- Ilit Azoulay | Shifting Degrees of Certainty
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Anouk Kruithof | Subconscious Travelling
Travel photographs, image circulation and obsolescence were on Anouk Kruithof’s mind when she made "Subconscious Travelling." Hear Kruithof discuss the ideas behind this photographic installation, which began with her discovery of an empty travel album she happened across at a secondhand market. -- Enroll in MoMA's new, free online course, "Seeing Through Photographs": http://bit.ly/1KANpxB See other interviews with photographers: http://bit.ly/1o30O85.
Video transcript
My name is Anouk Kruithof. The work in this show
is entitled Subconscious Travelling. It started by me finding an album
just at a second-hand market, and it was apparently an album
with empty negative sleeves of someone's travel archive. I could tell this because there
were some indications of countries and a lot of numbers,
which I didn’t understand. It really got my attention
because I also come from an analog
photographic background, and have always learned
when you work with negatives in all different formats,
6x6, 6x7, 35 mm, you would keep this in the sleeves
to protect from dust. And those pages,
they were cardboard pages, all the negative sleeves are cut
and really quite beautiful, formal compositions
made out of the sleeves. And I have no idea
why you would do that so it was for me like a catch
that I was very excited about. Like, why did someone do this,
what are these travel photos about? So it had this mystery
which got my attention, and then I started to work with it. So I thought of the idea of how
we now travel and record the world, which is obviously an iPhone
or telephones which we always, everyone carries with them, and we outsource those memories
or our travel memories to our phones or maybe the internet. And also we look at the travel photos
of others online so in that way I feel we travel as well
through imagery of others, and we can see the world
through photos which we never made or never experienced. So I started to photograph every page
with my iPhone with a flash, and these photos,
the 99 photos came out very straightforward and simple, and that developed
into this installation of the photo stickers on the wall
and the pieces of glass. So, I would like to focus
on some specific details as I connect it
to that specific piece, Subconscious Travelling. The use of stickers,
the use of iPhone, and the use of flash, can you elaborate on these? Yeah, of course the flash,
when you start with that, you photograph with and without. And obviously,
it needed to be an iPhone, because I felt I'm going to travel
through this album of the absence of that imagery
and its plastic sleeves. So I find it interesting
when I flashed it, that obviously
you get the reflection, so it creates an absence
of pixels, actually, which to me also relates
to memory loss or lost data, but also in more human way,
loss of memory like the absence of that
which struck me. And then, yeah, then you
get an opportunity to show the work, and I start to think about the very
kind of a not pretentious way of showing photographs, which is very much
this matte sticker material, and it's very straightforward. It's and also directly
on the wall of a museum. I really like it because it feels
like you transferred the work, and you make it part
of the walls or the institution. It's less an object
or it has less barriers to the photographic object,
the photo, the print and the wall. It's more one. And then I decided
to use a few pieces of glass, make it more relating
to obvious framing, for example. But on the other hand,
I also thought it’s kind of highlights
out of this travel album, and then of course people
can see their own image reflecting on certain spots, which is also nice because then you
create kind of a little conversation also with the viewers
or how they perceive the work.