photography

issue No. 5 III 2012;

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cover by: Jon Rafman

Poncz Magazine EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Maja Dabrowska ([email protected])

DEPUTY EDITOR Piotr Winiewicz ([email protected])

www.ponczmagazine.com www.ponczblog.com

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Sixteen Google Street Views The images are captured by the roving Google vehicle, depict solitary individuals in a variety of contemporary landscapes. Despite Walter Benjamin’s argument that photography’s ability to repro- duce strips even the unique of its uniqueness, I chose these images precisely because they assert their uniqueness and resist categorization. I invite you to consider with me, through these words and the images themselves, how the artist and photography itself can point a way out of this paradox. Street View photography presents a different perspective on the individual’s relation to his external world than the art of previous historical periods. For example, when the Romantics portrayed solitary figures within landscapes, the framework was often an encounter with the sublime. In these landscapes, man felt both in awe of nature but also transcendent over it. The encounter with the sublime, however, also pointed towards the individual’s inner powers and towards his freedom. In Street View photography, Google cars, mounted with nine cameras, roam the earth recording automatically whatever comes within their purview. The detached gaze of their cameras witness but do not act in history. Street View photography, artless and indifferent, without human intention, ascribes no particular significance to any event or person. Bereft of context, history or meaning, the only glue holding the Street View images together is geospatial contiguity. Such a perspective does not easily contain the sublime. Unlike the landscapes of the Romantics, the landscapes of this Street View collection are neither raw nor savage. They are often vast or suggest interminable progression. Empty roadsides, urban projects, and government institutions, social and economic contexts that constrain inner powers and freedom, are the settings in which our subjects are thrust. And yet the very instruments that alienate us can also inform us about the nature of our alienation. Does not Google’s mode of recording the world make manifest how we already structure our perception? Our own experience often parallels this detached, indifferent mode of recording with consequent questions about our own significance. By becoming aware of Street View’s way of conceptualizing our experience, however, alternative perceptions become possible. The artist, in the act of framing the images, undoes familiar conventions and alters our vision of the world. Despite the often-impersonal nature of these settings, the subjects in these images resist becoming purely objects of the robotic gaze of an automated camera. For in the act of framing, the artist reasserts the importance of the individual. This altering of our vision challenges the loss of autonomy and in the transformation of our perceptions, a new possibility for freedom is created. Jon Rafman, 2009

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman

The Park

[Yoshiyuki it’s a pseudonym - his real name is still unknown].

In the early seventies, Mr. Yoshiyuki prowled around the parks of Tokyo looking for lovers groping in the bushes. The Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks were notorious meetings grounds where young Japanese couples came together for nightly public rendezvous as well as the numerous spectators hiding in the bushes who liked to watch. In these black-and-white shots there is a little nudity, hands reaching under uplifted skirts, spectators crawling to see couples. With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, but also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see; as Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, The Park is “a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness, and desperation that so often accompany human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”

Kohei Yoshiyuki Untitled, 1971 From the series The Park Gelatin Silver Print © Kohei Yoshiyuki, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York









A contract of mutual self-delusion exists between the caller and phone sex operator. The caller imagines he is speaking to his most secret fantasy-and the operator willingly plays the part. A phone sex operator must be able understand the caller’s wants. But more importantly, they must be able to decrypt the unspoken desires. Those things that are too preposterous, too scandalous, or humiliating to articulate. From a few mumbled words, a phone sex operator must weave and finely detailed fantasy encounter. It requires a vivid imagination, acting ability, and above all, a deep understanding of the human appetite. What do we crave? What words have the maximum yield? What tone will most effectively reach into a man’s trousers? Phone-sex is theatre. An artificial passion-play in real-time, directed by a skilled verbal fantasist, with only one possible conclusion. 2008-2009 Published by Twin Palms Press in 2009 To see more of the project, please go to www.phonesexthebook.comv

Phillip Toledano

Phillip Toledano

To the caller, when I first answer, I am the inanimate Barbie. They do not know what I look like, who I am, how I am feeling, or how I feel. They can only imagine. It is my job to indulge their fantasies, to convince them that I am not a doll. I am their dream turned real. If they ask if I am blonde, I become a blonde. If they ask how wet I am, I tell them that my panties are drenched. I respond to every sound the caller makes with an affirmation, I encourage them, I breathe life into the fantasy, I carve the doll out of flesh.

Phillip Toledano

My first night was on a Saturday at midnight. It was a gentleman who I believe called himself Bob. He told me about his first experience with a glory hole. He explained that he had no-one he felt comfortable telling this to, and I felt a strange intimacy between us, though it was rooted in a fantasy. I think it’s easier to release repressed desires to a non-judgmental, fictional person, because there are no consequences in the outside world.

Phillip Toledano

I have a naturally high voice. I’m also immature and submissive. The voice I use on the phone is somewhat a representation of those qualities. There’s one specific voice tone I use when pretending to be sexually aroused. Imagine a catholic school girl getting de-virginized by her history teacher. “Oh, oh, Mr. Johnson, it’s so big! You’re gonna hurt me!”

Phillip Toledano

Phillip Toledano

I got into phone-sex because I thought: ‘Why not get paid for talking dirty, instead of doing it for free?” It brings up my self-esteem up so much, knowing guys are looking at my pics and wanting to talk to me.

Phillip Toledano

I am a straight male who speaks to women. They want me. They want me to talk to them, and to take them to another world. I’m good at it. I’m a pro. A ladies man. I speak to younger women. I speak to older women. I speak both spanish and english. I have been thrown offers left and right. They want me to meet up and have my way with them, but I keep it only to phone conversations.

Phillip Toledano

Just last night I received possibly the most disturbing phone-sex call I’d had in a long time. A caller shot himself with me on the phone. The unmistakable sound of a gun-shot followed by the heavy and wet sound of a body falling with a thud to the floor. Things like this always scare me. My current track record stands at one confession of incestuous sexual abuse, being asked to perform fellatio on my younger brother, and two other suicides.

Phillip Toledano

Phillip Toledano

I never thought I would work in the phone sex industry. All those years doing customer service, my customers would comment on my sexy voice. I thought I was being professional, not sexy. This work is customer service. It’s just your customers leave with more than a smile.

Phillip Toledano

I’m 60 years old, have a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and married for 25 years. Men call me for an infinity of reasons. Of course, they call to masterbate. I call it “Executive Stress Relief ”. It’s not sex; it’s a cocktail of testosterone, fueled by addiction to pornography, loneliness, and the need to hear a woman’s voice. I make twice the money I made in the corporate world. I work from home, the money transfers into my bank account daily.

Limit Telephotography A number of classified military bases and installations are located in some of the remotest parts of the United States, hidden deep in western deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land. Many of these sites are so remote, in fact, that there is nowhere on Earth where a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to produce images of these remote and hidden landscapes, therefore, some unorthodox viewing and imaging techniques are required. Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. In some ways, however, it is easier to photograph the depths of the solar system than it is to photograph the recesses of the military industrial complex. Between Earth and Jupiter (500 million miles away), for example, there are about five miles of thick, breathable atmosphere. In contrast, there are upwards of forty miles of thick atmosphere between an observer and the sites depicted in this series.

Trevor Paglen (courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne /Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco)





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“why?”

Some book, on some page, let’s say few years ago, by some writer. While the author is dead and art is finished maybe the right thing to do is to look for understanding of the situation and its in-betweens. When Walter Benjamin in “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” was writing about “presence in time and space” that art was supposed to loose, he probably expected this to go further then just photography, cinema and the other charlatanistic invention’s of the industrial revolution that existed in his time. The internet would probably horrify those who claimed that using a camera was a blasphemous form while they were taking their first naive steps to forming a criticism of photography as a valid art form. So maybe the pictures that finally found their place in the most respected of galleries and museums are now surrounded by website layouts and advertisements. They can be found on the tube surrounded by people with their ipads and those waiting at the next station to get in, this is not a situation to approve, but to appreciate. Maybe in this certain state of mind, the din that surrounds the spectator will turn in to a perfect background which is more sincere then the more and more doubtful contemporary art galleries that more and more prosper like shopping malls. And I am writing those words as a conservative that a month ago would look for those whitest walls and empty spaces in galleries to admire a single piece of art. So it is not about making people watch movies on their cell phones or drug mumble discussions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s genius while admiring some bad reproduction of the “Mona lisa” in some club toilet (which is still not so bad as some might say). It is more concerned with keeping attention on this “aura” which is still a phenomenon which is not reproducible, and maybe thing worth looking for. But my purpose is not to repeat J. Berger and to remind of the great role of context in terms of art reception. It is to question what we can actually catch from the masses. Not in the way that pop-art did, but things that may seem to be more sincere and real now. To capture that which has been drowning in this mass since the beginning of its existence.

piiter

Sharon Core; „Five Hot Dogs” ; 2003 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Candy Counter, 1963” ; 2004 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Candy Counter, 1969” ; 2003 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Pie Counter” ; 2003 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Bakery Trucks” ; 2005 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Steak” ; 2005 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Drive-Thru” ; 2005 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Dewars” ; 2006 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Sharon Core; „Ice Cream” ; 2006 (Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery)

PORTRAIT WITH A CURATOR, 2002, DVD, 8’ Four Polish artists on the brink of a great artistic career. Members of the Azorro super-group appear at various openings and - not asking for permission - photograph themselves with important personas from the Polish art world: directors, curators, gallery workers, critics.

Supergrupa Azorro (Courtesy of the artists and gallery Raster)



watch full video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZRD-o6sDEU

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

Jordan Tate

“Beautiful Crystal Filled Small Size Iowa Natural Geode. Cracked nicely and ready to be a awesome show piece for you. Great collecting~yard~pattio or garden. Add to your gem and quartz collection with beauty. Crystals~!!!”

Peter Happel Christian




„Real nice crystal filled brilliant gem small size cracked Iowa geode. This is a beauty. Full of beautiful shining quarts. Add this gem to your collection or a great spruce up in the garden or yard. Awesome. A great Show Piece~!!!”

Memoria Series “memoria” is an attempt to recover past that was never photographed in its present. Memories that exist just in Junpeis head seem to be transformed by new experiences. The ambiguity of memory and scenes and things he sees in ordinary life mixes up in his head unconsciously, when you try to remember something or someone. As if he himself became a camera to photograph these imprints.

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

Junpei Fukushi

YOSSI MILO GALLERY 245 Tenth Avenue (between 24th & 25th St.) New York, NY 10001 [email protected] www.yossimilo.com

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY 535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor New York NY 10011 tel 646-230-9610 fax 646-230-6131 [email protected]

GALERIA RASTER ul. Wspólna 63 00-687 Warszawa POLAND [email protected] www.raster.art.pl

GALERIE THOMAS ZANDER Schönhauser Straße 8 50968 Cologne / Germany Phone +49 (0)221 934 88 56 Fax +49 (0)221 934 88 58 www.galeriezander.com [email protected]

Photographer’s index Jon Rafman www.jonrafman.com/ www.9-eyes.com Kohei Yoshiyuki www.yossimilo.com Phillip Toledano www.mrtoledano.com www.phonesexthebook.com Trevor Paglen www.paglen.com www.galeriezander.com Sharon Core www.sharoncore.com www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/sharon-core Grupa Azorro http://raster.art.pl/gallery/artists/azorro/azorro.htm Jordan Tate www.jordantate.com Peter Happel Christian http://peterhappelchristian.com Junpei Fukushi http://fukushijunpei.jp

Thanks to all the artist and galleries supporting Us with this issue. Poncz Magazine EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Maja Dabrowska ([email protected]) DEPUTY EDITOR Piotr Winiewicz ([email protected])

The End Users are free to download, use and redistribute this file, provided that it is not modified and that the copyright and disclaimer notice are not removed. This pictures may not be sold for profit or incorporated in commercial documents without the written permission of the copyright holder. Unauthorized inclusion of single pages, graphics or other components of this document in other web sites, print products or electronic media is prohibited. All contents © the respective artists

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