657 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
TEL: 415 512 2020
FAX: 415 512 7109
sfcamera@sfcamerawork.org

Return to Journal Index

Directions

 

 

 

 

Journal navigation


Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts


SPRING/SUMMER 2005

table of contents

    1. In This Issue
    by Trena Noval

    5. Remembering Marnie Gillett
    by Jeanne C. Finley

    9. Digital Glossary

    10. The Path More Or Less Taken
    by Steve Dietz

    15. Making Land
    by Alicia Miller

    20. Artist Portfolio

    30. Land Art for the Networked World     - C5’s Landscape Initiative
    by Christiane Paul

    33. Mapping the Interactive City
    by Marc Tutters

    38. Exhibition Review
    I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time, Erwin Wurm
    by Aimee Le Duc

    40. In the Gallery
    En Masse: Work by Camerawork Members

    43. Book Review
    by Walt Opie

    44. Books Received and Noted
    by Walt Opie and Heather Snider


in this issue:

    It has been a year of great changes for us here at Camerawork. On December 3, 2004, we lost our beloved leader, Executive Director Marie Gillett, to cancer. We dedicate this journal to her. After her twenty years of dedication and deep commitment to Camerawork, her passing has left a gaping hole in our hearts. Jeanne Finley, longtime friend and former associate director of Camerawork, starts this issue off with a remembrance of Marnie and gives us a glimpse into her remarkable and successful life. With this remembrance, we honor the legacy she began here at Camerawork: looking to the future and exploring new territory in image making. So it is with this in mind that we find ourselves traveling on new terrain, mapping new ground and exploring new practices and ideas in this issue of Camerawork, literally, as we look at new forms of mapping and documenting the land. As Finley reminds us, Marnie made her own explorations of the subject as a young graduate student in photography.

    From the beginning of time, humankind has been bound to the land. We live on it, walk it, climb it, explore it, dig and bore under it- and document it. We are forever striving to find ways to preserve it, conquer it, and map it to better grasp its meaning. The landscape has presented a very complicated and complex set of challenges to our efforts. In this issue of Camerawork we look at how current technologies are enabling landscape explorations to become more precise in defining our perceptions and understanding of the land. Blazing the trail in this territory is the research and work of artist collective C5 Corporation. We take a look at their latest endeavor, The C5 Landscape Initiative, a long-term investigation of mapping, navigating, and data collection systems they are developing from their landscape expeditions around the globe. Through visual representations of this data, C5’s landscape explorations bring us a new analysis and interpretation of the land, and their cultural and social implications in a world driven by data.

    We begin the journal with a glossary of terms to help guide the reader through a subject new to many, followed by articles by writers Steve Dietz, Alicia Miller, and Marc Tuters. This spring Steve Dietz was an embedded reporter for The Other Path, a C5 expedition in the northern California landscape. He begins with some background history on C5- who they are and how they got their start- then writes from the field with blow-by-blow accounts of one of the performative data collecting expeditions on the land with the members of C5: Brett Stalbaum, Matt Mays, Bruce Gardner, Steve Durie, Amul Goswamy, Jack Toolin, Geri Wittig, and Joel Slayton. Alicia Miller looks at the last century of American photographers and artists who have documented and worked in the landscape- and have helped lay the path for understanding land explorations and their social implications- including Timothy O’Sullivan, Ansel Adams, Mark Klett, Robert Adams, Andreas Gursky, and Robert Smithson. All helped set a precedent for the work of C5’s The Landscape Initiative. And Marc Tuters brings us up to date on artists who are using locative media technologies to create new forms of art that help to locate us in the middle of our own cultural, social, and political practices.

    In the portfolio section we highlight the three projects that compose The C5 Landscape Initiative: The Analogous Landscape: Rim of Fire, The Perfect View, and The Other Path, on view in Camerawork’s gallery. C5 is interested in how people interact with data, and how data influences the way we interact with our environment. Here the whole picture, three years of research and documentation of C5’s performative expeditions into the landscape through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and data analyses, unfold. The portfolio section includes a curatorial introduction by Marisa Olson, who planted the seed for this project at Camerawork, and documentation of the work generated by database software developed by C5. It also features digital photo-graphic prints, fabri-cated sculptural objects, 3-D visualizations, and digital video, along with database background and information on C5’s open-source software. Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ends the portfolio section with an introduction to The C5 Landscape Initiative website, which in collaboration with this Camerawork exhibition is hosted on the artport website of the Whitney Museum.

    Camerawork is excited to bring this new work into view - and with this we look to Camerawork’s future, continuing to explore new territory and practices of contemporary image-makers.

    Trena Noval
    Editor

home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links

Copyright 2005. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.