#mossfull

mossfull:

Nicolas Descottessent us this fantastic book titledCollisionson "catastrophe control" situation centers, a series he began in 2005. We love this stuff and I'd try to get a print if I could afford it.

"A composition of over 550 photographs from The United States taken by over 100 photographers in the last ten years."

Hey, I just wanted to give a quick boost to this project, Mossless. I really like what they are working on and admire the ambitious scope of the project. 

I also commend them for putting the artists at the fore, electing to share profits from the book with contributors rather than simply offering "exposure."

Time's running short for them, so click on the link (title of this post), and take a look at their project and see how you can help!

A N   I N T E R V I E W   W I T H   R O M K E   H O O G W A E R T S

I've interviewed Romke (pictured above with Grace Leigh) before. Back in 2011, when he was crowd-funding the the publication of the first physical issue of Mossless Magazine. I'd been following Mossless a little while online at the time, mostly drawn to its interviews with new artists that maybe I hadn't come across before, or the words of those I had and most likely looked up to. 

In two years not much has changed. He's still working on Mossless, albeit probably with a bit more confidence at this stage. He still lives in New York. Mossless continues to be a foundational springboard of emerging talent.

I say these things whole-heartedly, and with little time for the Mutual Appreciation Society that has become much of the artworld. With so many people vying to establish any form of legitimacy as a tastemaker, it's refreshing to come across someone approach this by doing rather than talking. I've come to respect Romke's opinion not because he says things that are important, but because it comes through in the work he does. 

DigitalFaun: On Twitter last week, you posted: “To think much of contemporary art is about the failures of mechanics and digital processes, so really about the fantasy of that failure”. How much of this do you attribute to photography and how much is relevant to broader art processes?

Romke Hoogwaerts: It’s more about contemporary art than photography. People like Wade Guyton make bank on fucking up their printer, for instance. People love it because computers are fucking terrifying. It’s like soft proof that we’re still superior. It’s not my thing, though. I like computers. At least they don’t try to play pretend.

When I read this tweet at the time, it sent me into one of those speedy-thought cycles that mostly accompany my anxieties but occasionally, like this time, help me with creative processes. I wanted to write about it. I wanted to use it as a jumping off point and write about how accurate it was in thinking about some of my favourite artists, but I found myself stumped, and instead, decided on asking Romke about it himself so that I could clarify it in my head before putting anything down in type. 

I think the words a pretty true, but not true in the I-Swear-To-Tell-The-Whole style of the word. I mean more in the vein of the unabashed honesty of fucking with 'the system' in order to make something of one's self inside it.

The capital-I Interruption is nothing new to art. It's been the primary source of income for post-modern workhorses and personally I think that's because today's work has gone past the stage of trying to shock its potential audience. The goal has now shifted towards independence and rather than systematic interdependence. I am fascinated by the idea that success might not be measured in how well one does in the artworld but how well you can do in spite of it. 

DF: Do you have any tips for getting over the feeling of having seen it all, that nothing is new anymore?

RH: The problem isn't the makers of content, it’s the providers of it. So you have to think about where you’re getting your content from. The biggest issue is that the best of the best of most work is not getting seen. The most interesting news stories aren't getting reported. The most fascinating people are not getting coverage. Good stuff doesn't necessarily warrant pushy PR campaigns and the publishing industry has gotten exceedingly lazy. Trust me, you’re not alone in this frustration! One good way of circumventing impotent content publishers is to aggregate (and maintain) a feed of a lot of them, and balancing that with a good crowdsource content platform. Reddit has some brilliant subreddits, but they can be hard to find. Hubski is really small but is constantly good, though there’s not much art on there. As for art, well… that’s coming, I hope. The cool new sites aren't doing it right yet.

I graduated from a four year B.A. in Photography in June. The exhaustion of creative spirit that is required to complete a college course in something one has pride in- rather than for monetary gain- is something I wasn't totally aware of until i experienced it. I had heard from previous graduates that afterward they needed a break from the medium, a little bit of time to rebuild themselves, and in short, I had dismissed them as lazy. I thought that anyone who was tired of their chosen field before they had even started work in it wasn't truly serious about their line of work. 

But now I find myself in this post-graduate state of flux and am really unsure of what comes next. Aside from the crippling fear of eternal unemployment - a fear that feels as if my rib-cage has suddenly been swapped out with one much smaller - I've become totally jaded as to whatever is going on with photography right now. 

College instilled a way of seeing, a very specific vista in which to compose your work, and all of us as students were pushed to make work in a certain way. Now that I've finished with the school, I look around and see so many copy-cat-practices at work. Soft-focused portraits of economically depressed areas and fruity photoshop-heavy still life is everywhere. It's not that I think there is nothing new to photography right now, it's just that I don't know where to look to find it. 

DF: What do you think of guys like Bobby Doherty getting bigger jobs for mainstream media?

RH: Nothing gets me more excited. Bobby’s doing beautiful work for the New Yorker. Dave [Brandon Geeting]'s killing it too with his commissioned work. Brea [Souders]’s exploding onto the fine arts photography scene. It’s all really fantastic. I think it’s a really good sign that these mainstream magazines are bringing in these pretty radical aesthetics. It’s a gutsy thing they’re doing, but I’m glad they did. I think Richard Turley of Bloomberg Businessweek is responsible for much of this shift in magazine aesthetics. I met the guy at a job interview and his behaviour was frenetic, you can tell his energy is a lot higher than other creative directors. His style is unbeatable. It’s frenetic too—it looks a lot like the way society feels. I’m a huge fan of his.

I've liked Bobby Doherty since back when I was a kid with a point-and-shoot posting over-clarified jpegs on deviantArt. Doherty's images were so much sharper than anyone else's. He posted photos of his Dad and plaid shirts against plaid wallpaper. It was totally different to anything I had seen at the time. i remember mailing him asking him the most boring question anyone can ask any photographer - "What kind of camera do you use?" - and more importantly, I remember getting a genuine response, explaining how using medium format cameras and really small apertures are a recipe for perfect image sharpness. He totally could have ignored that question but he didn't. 

Doherty was a featured photographer in the first issue of Mossless. Now he does editorial work for big New York publications. I couldn't be happier for the guy. 

DF: Are there differences between developing a magazine and a photobook? How does narrative apply to the way you do things?

RH: Oh god, the differences depend on who you ask. I’m not a traditionalist, so to me the difference is just in the frequency of their publication. A magazine can come in the shape of a book. A book can’t really come in the form of a magazine though, because it comes out only once. Everything between is completely relative I didn't focus on [narrative] much in our first issue, because the four books were supposed to instill a sort of democratic sampling of photographers, but for the second I worked hard to get a sort of flow through the pretty disparate artists, and to get a sort of philosophical arc along the various essays interviews, which I have to say were really pared down to those essentials. For our third issue we’re focusing hard on a sort of narrative structure. We haven’t sequenced them yet yet but it’s going to string hundreds of the best contemporary social documentary photographs from all over the US, and only by online photographers. So we have to think out of the box. To me, a good sequence is really important. I’m a cinephile, mostly on the front of cinematography and editing, so you could see how that’s affected my thinking of books. Our third is definitely going to feel a little cinematic.

Photobooks and magazines, to me, are a lot more difficult to classify than how Romke put it. I've never thought about working as an editor on a photobook of someone else's work. I'd imagine the process would be a lot more comparable to producing a magazine than developing a photobook of my own - something at which I am very hard on myself.

I think it might be a lot easier, in terms of artistic works, to aim to please someone else than yourself, but that's resulted in a lot of work which I wouldn't hold much pride in. Developing someone else's work into a format which fulfills both the artist and the editor is a really tricky balance. 

DF: Is there a role for the written word in photography? Has there ever been or is the lack of it more evident because of a growth in global image production?

RH: Yeah, but it’s more of a supporting role. But you’re right—it’s increasingly absent, or at least, good words on the matter are. The written word is more of an extra nowadays. But that’s the way it’s gotta be—the more that visual motifs are exploited in mass, the less we can rely on them, so as artists we go deeper. We go more complex, less recognisable, until there’s little left to say about these things. I embrace that work though, because I feel the pain of the raping of our visual language too. But having said that, I’m excited for our third issue because it’s pushing for the opposite.

I write about photography and image media in general. I write about it a lot, and aside from some NFL coverage for a different website, I write about it almost exclusively. I think, while it does only provide a supporting role, and I do wish it had a larger influence sometimes, the words are probably the only reason DigitalFaun has any sort of popularity. There are so many places people can plug into if they want a curated stream of images, but this is not one of them. 

It's encouraging to see an approach such as Romke's towards Mossless as the inclusion of text to apply editorial context to other people's work really makes a publication one's own. It's a policy I've practiced for a couple of years now with DF and it's not something I'm likely to give up anytime soon. 

***********************

Romke Hoogwaerts currently resides in New York, NY and can be found online at the following: Main Site | Mossless | Mossfull | Twitter

MOSSLESS will be releasing their new book with photographer, Mark King, "Plastic" at The Newsstand! Tomorrow, Sunday July 14th from 2-4pm

The DigitalFaun Guide To Self-Publishing is coming soon. 

Featuring interviews with Joe Skilton and Romke Hoogwaerts to start and more coming soon after that (hopefully). Tutorials, tips and discussions on the role of zine culture in an increasingly online driven world are all on the table for this new feature.

It'll be a new feature on here that, if all goes according to plan, will be updated every so often like the other (non)features on here. 

In other news, I'm going to be making a Katie's Process zine based on the set on my cargo page and some other photos that aren't up there (that's only a working cover haha). I'd love to do it in colour but there's no way I'll afford it right now. And then after that, I'm doing a split zine with Katie herself which we still need to work out details on (you know like themes, names, PHOTOS).