Wednesday Edition: Robert Knight
Greetings, collectors! In today's weather report, the summer heat has been tempered by a spectacular thunderstorm that swept in last night. It's still pretty warm, but in an infinitely less oppressive way. My friend Caterina and I watched the storm through the skylight of the restaurant we were eating at. By the time we were done and walked outside, it was a different world - cleaner, cooler and most importantly, less um, fragrant.
Our dinner conversation is actually germane to today's edition, Mameve, Cambridge, MA by Boston-based photographer Robert Knight, from his ongoing series Dwelling. Caterina and I were discussing how this modern world of digital photography and Flickr have influenced contemporary portraiture, and further how our current flavors of portraiture relate to the traditional bourgeois portraits of the Renaissance. (Some pretty highbrow stuff for Tuesday dinner conversation but stick with me here. It's not all that pretentious, I promise!)
Caterina is the co-founder of Flickr, so she's seen a lot more digital images than the average person (and the average person has seen a lot) and she's also got a background as an artist, not to mention a literature-hungry smarty pants. As for me, well, I have the gallery, am a voracious consumer of online imagery and my obsession with portraiture is a long-standing one. Last Summer, it manifested itself in the form of A New American Portrait, an exhibition I co-curated at the gallery with Jörg Colberg, he of Conscientious fame.
It turns out that, as in Renaissance times, people still love showing their stuff off as signifiers of their selves. Caterina was talking about Flickr streams populated by stiff people not relating to one and other, positioned in front of McMansions and Lear Jets. Lately I've been fascinated by the prevalence of snapshot portraiture and how accustomed we've become to having our pictures taken, which has lead to many people taking the careful control of their public image that had until recently been reserved for celebrities and politicians.
This all relates to Robert because one of the things that I've always found so fascinating about his work is how he creates portraits of people using their stuff, without actually including the people in it. What he includes and how he includes it is entirely subjective, as all photography is in the end. As he says in his statement the things in my photographs belong to my subjects, but by looking through my lens and the inherent imposition of my interests, beliefs and stereotypes, they may experience them as if they are another's. To add further texture to his process, all of his images have the lushness of paintings, his still lifes recalling the intricacies and intimacy of the Dutch Masters.
In a world where we're so inundated with photographic images, and where our private selves are so easily accessed via Flickr or Facebook, the role of the artist in constructing identity becomes ever more complicated. This is especially true with photography as an art medium — what distinguishes a snapshot from a "fine art" photo? Can't anyone with a camera take a good picture? How does one distinguish oneself as an artist when so many people are taking so many kinds of pictures? These kinds of questions are endless, and I confess that they sometimes keep me up at night. (In a good way, as it's the kind of thing I enjoy picking apart.) The skill, subtlety and sophistication that Robert employs in his work is one kind of answer, and watching develop Dwelling renews my faith in fine art photography's importance.
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