Grant Ernhart photography

I met Thomas Macker while in Chesterhill, Ohio during my residency with Harold Arts. Thomas was great because he seemed to be up for pretty much anything, including driving around the windy roads near the farm and enjoying the summer night while looking for interesting things to photograph. It was interesting to go out with him because whenever we saw anyone near the road he would stop and go out to ask them if he could make their picture without hesitation. Meanwhile I sat in the car having mixed feelings, partly I wished I was the one who went out to ask to make their picture and partly I really felt that I was not interested in them at all. While I did take quite a few pictures of my fellow residents at Harold it was still difficult for me to ask complete strangers and somehow whenever I tried I was turned down. I guess I feel like I probably approach portraits like I do landscapes, which means I have some sort of feeling about the scene or situation that creates in me a desire to photograph and perhaps with people I just take too long to decide whether I want to take a picture or not. So, it was interesting to go out with Thomas and see his sort of unrelenting approach to portraiture, where nearly everyone he came across was a potential sitter.  Anyhow, Thomas is a great guy and really down to earth. I had a fantastic time talking with him on the front porch about girlfriends, photography and life in general. I see on his website that a lot of the work he made during the residency is in the project called With God, All Things are Possible go and have a look and also check out his series on Gardeners and Housekeepers.

I will have a photograph in the Texas Photographic Society’s 17th National Competition. Lisa Sutcliffe, a photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acted as juror for this large call for entries. The show will open on September 4 at the Dougherty Art Center in Austin, Texas after which it will move to the Center for Contemporary Art in Abilene, Texas. I am happy to report that my good friend Ryan J. Kellman also had a photograph from his recent work in Albania accepeted into the show as well. For a complete list of accepted works and artists names click here.

The San Francisco gallery Marx & Zavattero has an interesting exhibition up right now. The exhibition Let Us Now Praise San Francisco was co-curated by Robert Mailer Anderson, the show throws together new photography by Sean McFarland, Gregory Halpern and Whitney Hubbs and new works of fiction by local SF writers Victor Martinez, Peter Plate and Michelle Tea. 

According to the gallery’s press-release:

The groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – written by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans – told the story of poor white sharecropper families in the Depression-era American South, and provides inspiration for this exhibit’s premise. The prose and photographs, completed and shot in late May and early June 2008, aim to chronicle an extremely timely and distinct artistic view of San Francisco ranging from its gloomy urban underbelly to its quiet, startling beauty. This atypical exhibition, merging contemporary urban literature and photography in a gallery setting, promises to provide images and stories, both real and imagined, of a San Francisco stripped bare and awkward in all its tragic and sublime contradictions.

I think it is a novel idea, and the combination of the photography and snippets of the short stories together on the gallery wall creates a lingering effect. If you have time, go and check it out it will remain up until August 18th.

I recently stumbled across an older interview between Stopsmiling magazine and Wilco’s frontman Jeff Tweedy. I found some of the things that Tweedy was saying about creating music and the lack of control he has over the way it is received by the world at large to be interesting.

STOPSMILING:Now that Uncle Tupelo/No Depression mythology of your first band has really come to pass, do labels scare you? The way people typecast music? Does being typecast worry you a little bit – as a human being and a songwriter?
Jeff Tweedy: Not at all. I think one of the healthiest things I ever learned out of all of this is that you don’t have any control over what the world makes of what you do. It’s something that you can’t help but think about. I think you’re lying if you say you don’t think about it – what your hopes are about, how people perceive what you do. But the more energy you spend trying to control that, the more you’re diminishing your energy for the parts you can control. You can control how much you enjoy it, how much you’re present for the process, how much you grow, how much you enjoy what you’re doing. All those things you can control or have some elements of control over. But you have zero control over what other people think about it. It’s impossible. It works in really great ways. I believe in that connection in a beautiful way. A lot of times, the world makes something much more rich and beautiful out of it than you could have ever intended, especially in rock music. Think of what the world has made of Elvis Presley compared to what his intentions might have been. You can turn everything off to the point where you can put something really honest and beautiful and powerful on tape and give it to another person – one consciousness at a time. They find enough of themselves in it to pour themselves into it: that’s what the song “The Late Greats” is about on the new record(A Ghost is Born). Everybody talks about it as this literal interpretation of the radio – an element of that is definitely there, but it’s kind of about when you’re listening to a record, where a song is not just being sung. It’s a piece of plastic. It’s being sung inside the listener. It’s an internal process. It might even be more than 50 percent of the equation. To me, it’s probably more important than the side of it that the artist provides. That consciousness is going to try and find that somewhere – whether you made it anything or not. They need to find some way to feel more human. I don’t know how I got this far off on a tangent.

Well, there is a lot to mull over. I think I connect with this idea of “letting go” to some degree, because as I was graduating from SFAI I was so concerned about where meaning resided in my work that it became debilitating. I did not want to take any step without fully “understanding” it first. Currently, I acknowledge that meaning exists in my work, but I also feel that it is futile to try and control it like I once wanted too. I think now it is most important to make something that I really feel and after that the world will understand my work as each person is able to connect with it.

With that said I am going to once again give it back to Jeff Tweedy and Wilco and for anyone who is interested at having a listen to the track he mentioned in his interview, The Late Greats just click the link below.

The Late Greats(Live); Wilco

Unfortunately, while I was away in Ohio a show opened in San Francisco which includes some of my work. I have four pieces in “18 Months: A Survey of Bay Area Photography”, which was a juried show organized by Photo Alliance and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

The exhibition highlights the work of 22 San Francisco Bay Area photographers, the artists in the show are Victor J. Blue, Andres Carnalla, Noah Beil, Alex Fradkin, Hiroyo Kaneko, Michael Maggid, Vanessa Marsh, Sean McFarland, Julia Nelson-Gal, Elizabeth Pedinotti, Mimi Plumb, Kaycie Roberts, Joshua Smith, Susan Lynn Smith, Naomi Rae Vanderkindren, Serena Wellen, David L. Wilson, Jason Winshell, Sabrina Wong, Bijan Yashar, and Jim Zook.

More information can be found on the exhibition page of the San Francisco Arts Commission website as well as fellow exhibitor, Noah Beil’s blog. In addition to a small post of my work, Noah has also put up some snaps of the opening night, which looked well attended.

The show will be up until the 19th of September, so if you are in town go and have a look.

 I am excited to announce that I will be pretty much unreachable from the 13th until the 21st of July. I am heading off to Chesterhill, Ohio, to participate in the second week of the Harold Arts residency program. Harold Arts is primarily run by artists from the Chicago area but somehow they have a connection to the Jeffer’s Tree Farm in Chesterhill and as you can see by the map above the tree farm is in the middle of nowhere! In fact the staff at Harold suggests arriving before it turns dark as the roads to get to the camp are mostly unmarked. 

I am really looking forward to this week for many reasons. However one of the biggest attractions for me besides the opportunity to have a nice block of time to make new work will be the chance to hang out and talk with many new artists. The residency is intersting in that a variety of artists(Greg Stimac, Maggie Haas, Natalia Duncan, Eunice Yi and many more) working in a variety of media have been invited as well as many musicians, so I am hoping for some impromptu concerts under the stars!

 Wish me luck as I have set for my goal during this week to focus on portraiture. If you know my work you will understand that this is a new step. It is something that I have been wanting to try for a while, but when it comes to making it happen in the real world I still am a bit reluctant. It is hard for me to walk up to someone and ask to make their portrait. I am hoping that my captive group of sitters at Harlod(ie. the other residents) will allow me some time to experiment.

I am sorry.

I apologize to anyone who makes any attempt to regularly read this blog. My posting has been pretty dismal at best. I have not provided you with much of a reason to come back… so, if by chance more people than my parents read this thank – you.

With that said, I want to give you some reason to visit. I am going to commit to posting at least one new entry every week and I am also going to change the opening image on my Home page every month. I have quite a few balls in the air right now and I want to show some of the things that are in the works and share some ideas as stuff develops.

So don’t abandon ship. Come back. Things are going to get more interesting.

Amy Elkins, photographer and coordinator of the blogspot wanderlustagraphy has used one of my images on her site. It was part of a nice little triptych about snow and wintery weather. I wanted to say thanks Amy and suggest people to go and check out the collective project if they haven’t already.

Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise-weight-Lose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise: bold”>”The development of a self-aware critical discourse will signal photography’s equal passage into the world of contemporary art.” - from Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be? by CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD The majority of blogs that I come across fit a sort of recipe(this blog included). There are plenty of blogs where artists, curators and others in the photo industry weigh in with their opinions, showcase other artists and highlight other interesting things they deem worthy of being brought to the fore. But the Los Angeles County Museum of Art(LACMA) is proposing to start something interesting and a little bit different. Words Without Pictures is attempting to be a forum where essays about photographic theory will be posted on a monthly basis and then the forum will take shape organically as participants read, process and respond to the essays. While attempting to foster more community in the photography world, it seems that an unwritten goal of the site may be to create a new framework for understanding and speaking critically of the medium. At least that would seem to be the tone as set by the first essay, which was written by Christopher Bedford. Bedford is an art historian and critic based in Los Angeles. He is currently a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In his essay he suggests that photographic criticism suffers from a sort of anemia when it comes to critically discussing work that falls outside a “conceptual process” framework. It is his opinion that new terminology, understanding and considerations need to be given to all the seemingly quotidian choices that photographers make concerning their medium and the effects such choices have on the final product and its meaning.

“Photographers who instrumentalize photography as one component of a broader practice have therefore accrued far more critical and commercial traction than photographers who hue more cLose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercisely to the essentialist, “observe and record” model of photography, simply because their work is more accessible and intelligible to art critics. The latter process of seeing, electing, and shooting is too connoisseurial, too ineffable, and too intuitive to qualify as an intelligent and intelligible conceptual strategy according to the imperatives of the contemporary art world, where a premium is placed on conceptual sophistication. As Maurice Berger has noted, such work is assumed to be “weak in intentionality.” 

- Christopher Bedford

I really like the questions he brings up and the points he makes regarding current photographic criticism and who gets criticized. It is a very well written and engaging essay. I encourage you to read it and to tune into Words Without Pictures to see what unfolds. You can read the essay here.

If you happen to be in the Bay Area this week and find you have a spare minute or two stop by the Worth Ryder gallery at UC Berkeley. I am in this show which was partly put together by Equal Access, a student group at SFAI that tries to promote diversity among the SFAI community. The image on the poster is the image I have in the show.

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