Mark Steinmetz has been awarded a commission from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, as part of their Picturing the South series. His project is to photograph in and around the Atlanta airport. The work will be shown at the High Museum in 2018.
The Lyric of Light
By Austin McManus | Originally appeared in Juxtapoz
At age of 22, after dropping out of the Yale MFA program, Mark Steinmetz headed west to Los Angeles to continue his pursuit of making photographs. Despite his dependence on a car within a city of vast sprawl, he repeatedly had chance encounters with the illustrious photographer, Garry Winogrand. During the last year of Winogrand’s life, Steinmetz would subsequently photograph alongside him and adopt similar approaches to his own photographic ethos.
Steinmetz has said that for a significant portion of his young adult life, he would allot the bedroom of his living space to a darkroom, and kitchen to the print washer, while alternatively sleeping in the living room or hallway. The traditional process of shooting film, as well as self-developing and self-printing, continues in Steinmetz’s practice to this day, but he now does the chemical work separately from where he lays his head at night. He has produced over a dozen bodies of work, in categorically nebulous categories, with titles like South Central, Summertime, Greater Atlanta and South East. Steinmetz has explained that the names are more abstract than informative or useful. An exploration of the multitude of compelling images Steinmetz has created over 30 years reveals a cohesiveness and uniformity from which he never deviates. Steinmetz’s work has been included in a number of renowned museum collections across the U.S. and, working closely with Nazraeli Press, he has produced several monographs, many of which have sold out and now command high resale values. —Austin McManus
With Garry Winogrand as His Copilot, Mark Steinmetz Photographed 1980s Los Angeles
By Rebecca Bengal | Originally Appeared in Vogue
It was the summer of 1983. Mark Steinmetz, then 21, dropped out of Yale art school and headed, on a bit of a whim, to California. He’d grown up in the Northeast. He thought he might like to work in movies. And he wanted to meet a hero of his, the photographer Garry Winogrand, who for years lived in Los Angeles, shooting his way through some 8,000 rolls of film.
In L.A., the golden dream fizzled a little. Roaches ran over the futon on the floor in Steinmetz’s studio apartment, in which he’d also managed to fit a darkroom. Someone told him that Winogrand had just left town. But that person turned out to be wrong, and Steinmetz’s instincts were proved weirdly, serendipitously correct: That summer he started running into Winogrand everywhere, in the most far-flung, unlikely parts of the city. “Garry never saw anything of mine,” Steinmetz said in a recent phone call. “He just knew me as a guy with a camera. But I guess I spoke about photography in a way that was acceptable to him. And he was a guy who really just wanted to hang out and do his work.” Driving around Los Angeles in Steinmetz’s champagne-color Fiat, they’d each make photographs. The work turned out to be some of Winogrand’s last (he was diagnosed with cancer just months after Steinmetz first struck up a conversation with him; he died on March 19, 1984, leaving behind thousands of undeveloped photographs); but they were among some of Steinmetz’s earliest pictures, and are published for the first time in his new book, Angel City West, (Nazraeli Press).
Winogrand was a teacher only in the loosest, most accidental sense, breezily steering Steinmetz away from, in his words, the bullshitters, nonsense, and seductions of the world. “His cheerful, practical manner and advice probably helped me shave off years of worrying how to be,” Steinmetz writes in the book’s essay. Though Winogrand may never have seen these pictures, his influence hovers all around them—the second angel of Angel City West. The first, of course, is Los Angeles itself.
“There’s a certain atmosphere, a certain mood, a certain exoticism to different places, and I want to squeeze that into the frame, not so explicitly, but I just want to let that rain over the picture,” Steinmetz says. “I come from a cinema background—film noir—it’s so important to get that kind of atmosphere into the picture. Certain places just get you pumped up to describe that.”
A roller skater, a family gathered around a boom box, a woman waiting for the traffic light to change—the situations are fairly unremarkable. But the pictures record light-changing moments, catching subtle uncommon flashes amid the everyday: delightfully odd discoveries so casually delivered you feel as if you’ve stumbled upon them yourself. Steinmetz’s subsequent, widely exhibited bodies of work wander along city streets, through parking lots at night, backyards, and baseball fields in Italy, Paris, and around the American South, especially in and around Athens, Georgia, where he has lived and worked for many years. Un-orchestrated and artful, his photographs rely on a kind of magic convergence of chance and observation and craft. “Mark Steinmetz works in a venerable tradition of photographic prowling that bets everything on the ordinary,” wrote Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Galassi of an earlier book, South East.
“You go with the flow, you keep your eyes open, and you follow your intuitions,” says Steinmetz. The way he shoots in L.A., Miami, Memphis, or anywhere these days is much the same now as it was in 1983, cruising the freeways with Winogrand or walking the streets solo. It was a purer era in photography back then, though, he says, before a feeling for fictional tableau over straight photography took hold, before “interesting” pictures were valued over beautiful images, before color dominated black and white.
As we speak, Steinmetz spools back to the language of cinema. “There are emotional notes that black and white can deliver that color cannot,” he says. “It’s a different medium. It’s like silent film. You know, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin delivered some moments where they killed you. They just absolutely killed you. It’s not going to happen like that again, with sound.”
SOLD OUT! – MARCH 2016 | MARK STEINMETZ |FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S ANDALUSIA |
Originally appeared in South x Southeast
March 12, 2016
10a – 10p
Join us for a full day of shooting at Andalusia, Flannery O’Connor’s farm outside of Atlanta, with noted photographer Mark Steinmetz. Lunch will be served on the grounds while we discuss the morning’s shoot and plan for the afternoon’s.
At 5p please join us down the road at 3Cent Farm for cocktails, dinner, viewing the day’s images, photo talk, and relaxation.
Space is limited.
$375 includes admission to Andalusia, all-day workshop, lunch, cocktails, and dinner at 3Cent Farm.
To register for workshop only click here.
PORTFOLIO REVIEWS
Country Store, 3Cent Farm
March 11, 2016, 1-5p
Friday afternoon Mark Steinmetz will conduct a limited number of portfolio reviews at the Old Country Store, 3Cent Farm, outside of Milledgeville, Georgia.
Space is limited.
$75
Photographers must be attending the Saturday workshop the following day.
To register for workshop and the portfolio review click here.
photo credit: Irina Rozovsky
MARK STEINMETZ
Mark Steinmetz received his MFA from Yale University in 1986. He is a Guggenheim Fellow whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, among others. Among his 11 published books are The Players, South East, Greater Atlanta, Paris in my time, and the soon-to-be-released Angel City West. We encourage you to visit his website.
How to Start a Project
People want to feel like they are in control. Often, before even starting something new, people try to determine by various means how their project will turn out. It’s important, I believe, not to get ahead of things but to simply allow the outcome to unfold naturally. Trying to decide too soon what results you want will lead to rigidity and lack of surprise.
Also – people like to justify to themselves that the work they are doing is valid and it seems natural to use words to tell yourself that what you are doing is important and meaningful. But it’s important to not to too narrowly define what you’re doing through the use of language. People want to feel like they have a grip on things and so using words to make sense of what you’re doing might provide a feeling of relief and control but be careful you don’t make your project less interesting by having it fit neatly into a scheme of words. Images have a power that is different from the power of words and they communicate in ways that words cannot. In today’s culture, words dominate our thinking and, used in a lazy manner, they help sustain a spectrum of fundamentalist thought. Being able to accept ambiguity leads to a better quality of life and better work.
Garry Winogrand was taking his kids to the zoo while he was going through a difficult divorce. He took pictures, realized he was on to something, and eventually produced The Animals. One afternoon I heard a bat strike a baseball – that sharp crack – and I turned and saw a Little League game and I knew in an instant I would do a body of work on the subject (which will be published next year – The Players). In some ways it was part of a natural progression from what I had been working on but I experienced my realization in one forceful moment. When I moved from Chicago to Knoxville to accept a temporary teaching assignment I very soon had a strong feeling/image for the work I would do there – it was a mixture of vision and intuitive knowing – but I could find no words that might helpfully explain to others or to myself what I was doing – this work would become the book South Central.
It’s important to be cultivated. In my opinion, reading and considering great literature is the best way to do this, but there are many ways to deepen your understandings and your capacity to feel and notice. If you are cultivating yourself, the chances are greater that the work you end up doing will be worth doing as far as others are concerned. It’s best not to ask how your work will be received by the world or how it might boost your reputation. Just stay close to your own guidance and see what comes. Be authentic and natural – it sounds easy enough but it actually takes some discipline and courage. If you are able to quiet yourself and be honest with yourself, then it will be easier for you to embark on a project that truly excites you and rewards you.
—Mark Steinmetz
as published in fototazo, 9.20.2013
