Thomas Gardiner

Thomas Gardiner graduated from Yale with an MFA in Photography in 2012. He earned his BFA from The Cooper Union, during which time he began working with a 4x5 camera to document the small communities he grew up in around Western Canada. During his studies at Yale he switched to 8x10, and began documenting working-class cities in the Northeast around New Haven. In his first year he was awarded Yale’s Schickle-Collingwood Prize and in his final year both the Leeds-Marwell Photography Scholarship and the Tierney Fellowship. He currently lives in Vancouver.

Untitled, USA

I grew up in the isolated, hinterland regions of Western Canada. Economic life in these working class communities revolved primarily around resource extraction industries such as oil, potash, uranium, and farming. Far from large cities and the cultural centers of the world, I desperately wanted to leave the small towns of Saskatchewan. When I did eventually leave, I found photography. Returning home after several years living in Vancouver and then New York, I saw the people and places I left behind in a totally different light. Through the camera, Saskatchewan seemed like a place from another era, yet at the same time it felt more familiar than ever before. Now living in the US, I find myself searching the towns and cities of this new country for the places I knew in Canada. 

When I photograph, the most important thing I look for is a kind of visual complexity in a space. I tend to find and return to urban communities where industry or manufacturing once thrived, ending up in back alleys, empty parking lots, behind strip malls, and in neighborhoods lost in the seams of the interstate freeway system—economically neglected places that reflect the nation’s disinvestment in its working people. Many of these environments— like the towns where I grew up— seem frozen or forgotten in time. Yet beyond any simple nostalgic attraction to these places, a contemporary theme is located somewhere within the challenging relationship of a visibly aging infrastructure in America versus the overwhelming crises of the modern world we live in today. Despite the apparent frozenness of these neglected spaces, time is still moving forward. 

Though there is certainly a documentary impulse throughout my work, even more important to me are the possibilities for the deliberate creation of a scene. The 8x10 view camera I use is traditionally regarded as a tool for exquisite detail, harnessed for its mimetic ability, for its higher descriptive fidelity. Yet my interest is in rendering those things generally less-easily seen: human desire and the interior dramas within individual lives. By using an 8x10 camera, I want the meditative attention to detail, but also I want the energy of the decisive moment, as is most commonly associated with smaller, faster, lighter cameras. My goal is always to attempt to overcome these limitations of the larger, slower 8x10 camera, and I feel it’s when I come close to this goal that the images are most satisfying to me. The result is a photograph with a unique kind of drama that is both fixed and transient. 

Once a person has agreed to let me photograph him or her, I feel we have become co-agents in a kind of script. The individuals I meet have a concrete relationship to the environment where my camera is placed. My contribution to the script, however, comes from murky memories—psychological, visual, social, and more— of my own past. The people I photograph are in this way cast into those memory scenes, yet simultaneously their actions and decisions infuse the scene with new meaning. The photograph becomes a kind of dialogue, the end result often being a departure from what either photographer or subject imagined. For me, photography is a complete sensory experience. Despite these attempts to describe my photographic process, I firmly believe that attempts to spell out in words a photograph’s meaning are destined to reduce its power. While this isn't to say that writing can’t aid in interpretation, there will always be something lost in translation. That is why I want viewers to consider these images without captions or theoretical viewpoints. And so the only title can be: Untitled, USA.

"What’s going on with Photography" By Carl Gunhouse

Alec Soth, 2013

My knowledge of art history and theory can be spotty at times, so bear with me. I understand the “Death of Painting” to be a point in the late 70’s when art folks believed everything that could be done in painting had been done and maybe Clement Greenberg had broken something. It occurs to me that contemporary photography is in the same place painting was after it was declared dead. Where any early division within or expectations for photography have eroded and anything is possible. In an attempt to deepen my understanding of the “Death of Painting”, I started in on some reading, and even a cursory internet search will point out that the “Death of Painting” apparently has been going on since the mid 1930’s to as late as 2012, when Roberta Smith can be found in The New York Times reassuring readers that the claims of painting’s death have been greatly exaggerated[1]. I did eventually stumble onto an essay by The Nation’s long-time art critic Arthur Danto, who in the 90’s gave voice to my understanding of a 70’s era end point to painting.

“The seventies was a decade in which it must have seemed that history had lost its way. It had lost its way because nothing at all like a discernible direction seemed to be emerging. If we think of 1962 as marking the end of abstract expressionism, then you had a number of styles succeeding one another at a dizzying rate: color-field painting, hard-edged abstraction, French neo-realism, pop, op, minimalism, arte povera, and then what got to be called the New Sculpture, which included Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, Richard Tuttle, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, and then conceptual art. Then what seemed to be ten years of nothing much. There were sporadic movements like Pattern and Decoration, but nobody supposed they were going to generate the kind of structural stylistic energy of the immense upheavals of the sixties. Then all at once neo-expressionism arose, in the early eighties, and gave people the sense that a new direction had been found. And then again the sense of nothing much so far at least as historical directions were concerned. And then the dawning sense that the absence of direction was the defining trait of the new period, that neo-expressionism was less a direction than the illusion of one. Recently people have begun to feel that the last twenty-five years, a period of tremendous experimental productiveness in the visual arts with no single narrative direction on the basis of which others could be excluded, have stabilized as the norm.”[2]

Peter Galassi, MoMA, 1991

I do love “then the dawning sense that the absence of direction was the defining trait of the new period.” To Danto’s credit he almost acknowledges that being in the here and now makes for bad history and the function of art history is to wait and see, which artists and narratives have an effect on generations removed. So with that I throw my hat into the ring, and attempt to talk about what is going on in contemporary photography. Having come up as undergrad in the mid 90’s, I can still remember stories from faculty of the contentious rise of conceptualism and set-up photography in the 80’s. Or to quote Michael Kimmelman’s review of Galassi’s “Pleasure and Terrors” show, “The 80's also witnessed a deep split in the field of photography. On the one hand were the modernists who upheld the notion of documentary or candid images. On the other hand were the post-modernists who, in borrowing images from mass culture and in putting forth contrived and manipulated photographs, both challenged photography's role in shaping social conventions and cast doubt on the credibility of the medium itself.”[3] A split which in legend took on a heightened moral value in which friends stopped talking to friends over the value of manipulating the reality in front of the camera. When leaving for grad school I even remember my undergrad professors only half jokingly telling me that if I returned staging pictures of taxidermy in my basement (a direct jab at the high priest of staged photography Gregory Crewdson) they would disown me. 

Gregory Crewdson, Natural Wonder, 1992-97

I started the Yale MFA program in photography in 2001 and the success of the Yale Girls was at a high and Crewdson was at the peek of his fame. But it was refreshing to learn that most of my classmates had no strong affinity for set-up photography and none of them showed any interest in arguing over the value of straight vs. set-up photography. I felt as Danto described that the old battles were done, the avant-garde of post-modernism, or conceptualism was now a part of the foundation of our education. Roni Horn and Gregory Crewdson were no longer rebels, but on our critique panel, at a leading Ivy League art program. They were no longer the future. But there was no real feeling as to what might come next or even where exactly things were going. It was a moment as Danto described in the transformation between modern and contemporary art, which had “begun insidiously, without slogan or logo, without anyone being greatly aware that it had happened.”[4]

Alec Soth, Sleeping by the Mississippi, 2000

But in retrospect, in 2004, a year after I had graduated with an MFA and still making very straight photographs, stuff had started happening. Alec Soth had his first solo show in New York at Yossi Milo Gallery when they were still a tiny space upstairs across the street from Gagosian Gallery. Later in the year Soth was in the Whitney Biennial, and the following year the work from his solo at Yossi Milo was up across the street at Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world. It was shocking that the art world was wildly embracing an artist making straightforward pictures, which look a lot like Joel Sternfeld. If the mainstream galleries could champion a traditional straight photographer, it was certainly a sign that all things photographic were possible and traditional photography could be contemporary and relevant. Photographers just had to make visually engaging pictures of compelling subject matter. Soth’s work was what photography had always been, going into the world, stopping it, and framing it in a way that said something about the artist and their relationship to the world around them.

Roe Ethridge on the cover of Artforum, 2003

In 2005, when Alec Soth was legitimizing straight photography, Roe Ethridge had already graced the cover of Artforum, going on his third show at the hip and prestigious Chelsea Gallery Andrew Kreps. With a show that if I recall it correctly involved a lot of pictures of strip mall signs listing stores. At the time I was intrigued by the quality of his image making, but perplexed as to what the work was about. Even Frieze described the work in terms of a dated modernist vs. post-modernist struggle over the value of objectivity “their cumulative effect suggestive rather than illustrative of his fundamental inquiry into our ready assumption that photography will tell us something true.”[5] Slowly but surely Ethridge’s work bored its way into my head and I eventually asked Tim Davis, a mutual friend, what Ethridge’s work was about. Davis described him as a working stock photographer, who was trying to justify his trade as an artistic medium. A task that he has certainly pulled off with ease, by essentially curating shows of his own vernacular photographs. Pictures that were unquestionably well crafted, but often superficial, with varying styles and subject matter that were added one next to the other until they made a weird sense, at their best they described a place or moment in history. I took a group of intro to photography students to the Ethridge’s break out Rockaway show and they seemed to immediately get that he was describing a working class beach community. Because at its core Ethridge is making very complex art that works best when you don’t think to hard.

Roe Ethridge

Over the past decade Soth and Ethridge have become ubiquitous; both appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2004 and 2008 respectively), both showed at Gagosian (Chelsea and Beverly Hills respectively) and both have published numerous books while maintaining high-profile professional careers in editorial (Soth with a Sunday Times Magazine cover) and commercial (Ethridge with a W fashion spread) photography. While neither has received a high profile museum show, it seems to be only a matter of time. By any standard they have been the most successful photographers of the last decade, spawning a photographic approach that can be spotted in a generation of photographers like Christian Patterson, Daniel Shea, Joshua Lutz, Greg Halpern and countless recent MFA shows. This style of work is a hybrid of Soth’s traditional narrative style, where the picture contains a clear well crafted idea, and Ethridge’s free-form editing, where placing a vernacular image next to a large format landscape, next to a black and white snapshot, next to a drawing, is all fair game and hopefully creates meaning.

Alec Soth, Sleeping by the Mississippi, 2002

Roe Ethridge, Le Luxe, 2011

What is fascinating about their rise is that Ethridge and Soth have been able to be very successful without butting heads or creating opposing camps of thought. Hell, at Paris Photo Los Angeles the two sat down to a public conversation where they came off as low-key, bearded, white men who very much liked each other’s work. If Thomas Friedman got anything right with his book The World Is Flat it was that the inter-connectedness of the digital age has leveled our culture. The art world has become so widely dispersed that there can no longer be a king maker, a namer of things like Clement Greenberg. Platforms to talk about and see art are so numerous and accessible it is no longer so much a back and forth of competing ideas as a number of people speaking at the same time, so it is nearly impossible for any one idea to gain traction, creating an environment where Ethridge and Soth never had to compete for the same wall space or even the same eyes. The old battles are dead. Photography is in a post-partisan age where all things are possible and acceptable. Of course as I write this Soth and Ethridge have already become passé for people younger than myself who have already moved on to Lucas Blalock’s playing around with photoshop or a hundred other people I am too old to have even heard of, and maybe ten years from now it all be even clearer what was important. But I'll call it, Alec Soth and Roe Ethridge are who will be remembered of photography from the last decade (and possibly a harder to define multi-headed beast of abstract photography that I feel less equipped to try and parse).


[1] Roberta Smith, “Like Watching Paint Thrive” The New York Times, June 28, 2012
[2] Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
[3] Michael Kimmelman, “Joys and Terrors On the Home Front” The New York Times, September 27, 1997
[4] Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
[5] Megan Ratner, “Roe Ethridge” Frieze Magazine, March 2006

Essay by Carl Gunhouse, 2014 

Michael Bach

Abandoned campsite, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, September 2011

Born in 1960, in Albany NY, Michael Bach now resides in Troy, New York. Between 1981 and 1983, he was enrolled in a Fine Arts Foundation Program with a concentration in Photography at the Junior College of Albany (now, Sage College of Albany.) Upon completion, he was awarded an A.A.S. degree in Fine Arts. From 1983-1985, he was enrolled in Bard College's Undergraduate Photography Program, headed by Stephen Shore. At Bard, he studied with Stephen Shore, Ben Lifson, and Douglas Baz. In 1986, he was accepted into the Yale School of Art Graduate Photography Program. While at Yale, he studied with Tod Papageorge, Richard Benson, Thomas Roma, Ben Lifson, Jo-Ann Walter's, Nancy Hellebrand, Stephen Scheer, and Lynn Whitney. In 1988, he was awarded an M.F.A. in Photography from the Yale School of Art.

He has taught at Union College, Rhode Island College, Sage College of Albany, Sage Summer Art Program for High School Student's, and the Art Kane Photography Workshops.

He has exhibited nationally and his work can be found in several permanent  and private collections, notably the Center For Photography at Woodstock Permanent Collection/ Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, New York, The Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, New York, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and Yale University Sterling Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

Due to physical and mental health issues, he did not work for fifteen year's. In 2010,  he resumed working after adding the drug Wellbutrin to his daily ingestion of drugs in treating bipolar disorder. It was at this time that he began the photographic project "Displaced." He continues to pursue this project as well as photographing  scenes in Troy New York and nearby cities in New York State, portraiture and self-portraiture, found still life, and family.

View more of Michael's work here 

Abandoned tree fort, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, November 2011

Displaced Statement

There is a palpable sense of sadness and despair felt when walking in the woods and fields of Mt. Ida, as if a dark veil enshrouded the landscape. While stumbling across remnants of failed lives and desperate attempts at domesticity one cannot help to think of those forced to endure such hardship. In 2010, in a collaborative effort to erase the population that had inhabited  Mt. Ida for many years, the city of Troy and a local university (RPI), banished the homeless from the land. The land was needed in order to accommodate a construction project called City Station. The projects aim was to build a series of graduate housing complexes made  specifically for the university graduate student population. Additionally, at street level, businesses would be open to the general public. Presently, three complexes have been built.

In 2010, ground was broken and it was then that I decided to begin the photographic project "Displaced". Working with an 8x10 view camera and black and white film my aim was to make photographs as a memorial to this once Eden-like landscape and as a testament to the people who once called this place home.

In photographing, I was less interested in literally documenting what I came upon and more in the narrative contained in the personal ephemera, belongings, and structures for living. I wanted to avoid personal bias or the overt social and political implications of the subject matter, allowing the spirits of this neglected landscape to shine through. The photographs are intentionally left open-ended. In the end, the viewer, with their own particular history, will have their own personal experience  when viewing the work. My hope is that the viewer  will have a more empathetic understanding of the issues inherent to homelessness. Given the right circumstances, the tables could be turned and one could find themselves in the same unfortunate situation. Each time I return to Mt. Ida, that thought is always with me. The photographs are generated by emotive responses  to the landscape, the people who once inhabited the landscape, and their shared history.

During the time I have been working, construction projects have threatened and overtaken large portions of the land. Eighty percent of what I have photographed no longer exists. This includes the landscape itself, as well as what was left behind by the homeless. I fear that much of the land of Mt. Ida will, slowly but surely, succumb to this conflicting relationship to man and nature.

Looking through the tree's, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, November 2011

Shawl, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, May 2012

A sleeping bag covered in pollen, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, October 2010

Sleeping bag and large broken tree limb, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, October 2010

Two cushions placed in the underbrush, Mt. Ida, Troy NY, October 2010

Carl Gunhouse

America Statement 

“Under their rule, the federal government is permitted to throw hundreds of billions of dollars around on a misguided bank bailout, but if a banker like John Thain spends $1,500 on a wastepaper basket then all hell breaks loose. Dazzling personal consumption is out. Middle-class drabness is in. It’s sad, but there’s nothing to be done” –David Brooks (02/02/09 Op-Ed column in The New York Times) One way or another, everyone grows up believing in the American dream, an unspoken contract that if we work hard, behave ethically, spend within our means and put some money aside, we will be rewarded with economic security, a significant other and aspirations within our reach. A dream that has been augmented in recent years with the promise of smart phones, 3-D plasma televisions, eco-friendly luxury cars, and most of all, a new home with a sizable yard in pristine suburban neighborhood with good schools. This desire for security and consumer luxury has become so ingrained that these goods feel like entitlements due us for our hard work and sacrifice. And over the last decade, these dreams have been stoked by banks offering pre-approved mortgages, stock portfolios promising minimal risk, and car loans with no money down -- all the tools needed to live the good life. But as American society indulged its desires, the economy imploded, leaving us with empty homes in half-finished subdivisions near malls with the stores that are coming soon to sell merchandise affordable to fewer and fewer of us. The country is caught in suspended animation, littered with enticing ads, large car dealerships and lavish Las Vegas fountains, all the more desperate to attract whatever disposable income is still out there. Meanwhile, the product of this uncontrolled spending lingers in the half finished construction projects, abandoned suburban cineplexes and foreclosed homes that have become all too familiar. Consumption has destroyed the American dream and the earnest assumption that an ideal life is guaranteed by hard work, a college degree and playing by the rules. Instead we are left with entry-level jobs, no opportunity for advancement, no benefits, inescapable debt, and the cold comfort that we avoided a Depression. Our desire for something more has brought consequences visible in every corner of America. In these spaces, we can see the America we have become."

Carl Gunhouse was born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts, but he spent his formative years in suburban New Jersey. Growing up, he developed a love/hate relationship with suburbia that led to the angst familiar to most suburban youth. With this unrest came the discovery of the anger and DIY ethics of hardcore punk rock. Yearning to be part of the hardcore scene, he started photographing bands, which began his love of photography. To escape suburban New Jersey, Carl enrolled at Fordham University in New York City. While completing a BA in European History at Fordham, he discovered that photography could be something to pursue a career so he decided to simultaneously complete a BFA in Photography. After going on to earn his MA in American History from Fordham, Carl concentrated on street photography. In hopes of developing and refining his photography work, Carl completed his MFA in Photography at Yale University. Since graduating, he has found a great deal of personal satisfaction teaching as an Adjunct at Montclair State University, Marymount Manhattan College, and Nassau Community College. He has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Searching For the Light, Lay Flat, and American Suburb X. His photography has been shown nationally and internationally. As an artist, he has produced a body of landscape and portrait photographs by driving around the United States to expose the little visual bits of America that give voice to our shared history and experience. Carl currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

View more of Carl's work here 

Carl also writes for www.seacrhingforthelight.net