SEEING AMERICAN: SEEING LANDSCAPE

Graduate ThesisMaster of Fine Arts

Memphis College of Art

By

Ohm PhanphirojSpring 2015

Thesis board committeeHaley Morris-Cafiero (Memphis College of Art)

_____________________________________Date_______________Maria Bibbs (Memphis College of Art)

_____________________________________Date_______________Denis Defibaugh (Rochester Institute of Technology)

_____________________________________Date_______________Laura Valenti (Photo Lucida)

_____________________________________Date_______________

SEEING AMERICAN: SEEING LANDSCAPE

Graduate ThesisMaster of Fine Arts

Memphis College of Art

By

Ohm PhanphirojSpring 2015

I hereby grant permission to the Memphis College of Art to copy all orany part

of this written thesis

_____________________________________Date_______________

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am forever indebted to my father, who taught mestrengths, passion, determination, and showed me an exquisite life through a series of in-exquisite journeys. I also would like to thank my committee: Haley Morris-Cafiero, Maria Bibbs, Laura Valenti, and especially Denis Defibaugh for your support, counsel, and guidance in helping me realize not only my thesis, but also how to survive as an artist in the world full of bitterness, heartache, and failure.

I am also grateful to Dr. Gus Kaufman, my dear friend whose support has strengthened and helped me grow as a person.

Lastly, the burning flame in me that refuses to die out, even when faced with obstacles, artistically and personally.

Table of Contents

i: Acknowledgementsii: Abstractiii: Introductioniv. Influence

ABSTRACT

Seeing American: Seeing Landscape is an investigation into American culture/ the psyche of the people who inhibit this land. I do this byvisually examining the landscape from an outsider's perspective. The project is a reflection of their lives--metaphor and symbol using banal landscape to mirror the mind of the people who have lived here and created this. By examining cultural artifacts, shape, form, and color, the images evoke certain ironies about being American--how Americans actually live—a subconscious guide to how they truly view and understand themselves.

INTRODUCTION

I despise writing a thesis, for I firmly believe that arts and artists do not need, nor owe, any explanation to the world as to how art is created. An attempt to even do so ruins the ritual and the spirit of art making. Artists rarely take photographs thinking about why. Theory and theorists try to make sense of art. Art does not needa theory to make sense of itself, and the lack of such does not make it more or less art. Humans have been producing arts for more than 10,000 years, while theorists and intellectual snobs have been tryingto make sense and understand it during the past century. Artists workintuitively, and the act of taking pictures is intrinsically and coherently connected with the inner being. Harry Callahan, an influential photographer once told me that people try to make themselves look smart by discussing art and make senses of it verbally. Art is meant to be appreciated in the manner in which it was intendedly created—personally, intimately, and silently.It's beyond pointless to try to explain something unexplainable. We must let go of the need to gain access to something so intrinsically intangible as art. The act of explaining and understanding it is thatof viewers, and not of the artists. Artists’ sole responsibility is

not to those who desire to understand art, but to the desire to create art itself. Jeff Weise, my former mentor at RIT share my view in this, and every time he exhibits and is asked to write an artist statement, he write 'Artist's statement' and leaves everything else blank.The academic world has gotten it all wrong in thinking that artists who produce art must understand clearly why they do things. Great artists do not and have never understood fully why they do things, only that they 'do' things. Less accomplished artists however, feel the need to substantiate their works with their thought processes, telling how they arrived at the art work, usually supporting a less sophisticated art.Now that I have clarified my stance, I will attempt to fulfill the mechanical and meaningless protocol of this MFA process of art making, so that the thesis can sit and collect dust somewhere in the library, in hope of someone will stumble upon it after I am long gone. (And if I learn something and grow in the process of making this thesis, what the hell.)So let's begin, shall we?

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

During my graduate study in Filmmaking at GSU, I stumbled across photography, and to make this story short, I got hooked. I rememberedshooting hundreds of roll of films, and staying in the darkroom from 6pm to 6am the next morning. Photography became my passion and my sole medium of expression. I and photography speak the same language.The very first image I took, Rear window, won a juried award, and I received 500 dollars, all of which I spent on my first medium format camera. That same image also led me to a first exhibition, and three

photographic agents in NYC, Germany, and Australia. I was the first student artist to have won the PDN photographic contest three consecutive years. After finishing my masters at GSU, I knew I wantedmore knowledge, and I desired to be in a place where I could artistically grow and made a name for myself. I applied for a MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts, School of Museum of Fine Arts, and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and was accepted into every one of them. I decided that because RIT was the number onephotography program in the world, I belonged there. And that's where my next journey started.

ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (RIT)

RIT helped opened up my artistic and visual direction and understand myself as an artist on a deeper and more meaningful level. The

Ohm Phanphiroj, Rear Window, Silver Gelatin, 1997

rigorous system there, both academically and artistically, molded me in ways I could not have imagined. Most professors at RIT were superb, warm, not kind but caring, and egotistical. The level of expectations was high, and if you stopped producing, you fell out of the system. My first walkthrough of my landscape work had a mediocre reception, which was hurtful and disappointing, despite the fact thatthe same body of work went on to win a Communication Arts award. But I learned to strip down all my ego, and re-learn and re-connect with who I am at core as an artist. My second walkthrough about my sexual identity was a major breakthrough, receiving critical praise from allprofessors and visiting artist and curators. I was declared one of the best students to have ever studied at RIT. The validation gave meconfidence and have helped open doors to meet with major figures in the art world, including John Szarkowski, the curator of MOMA and Barbara Millstein, the curator of Brooklyn Museum of Arts. RIT helpedshape me to be the artist I am today.

LEAVING RIT

I left RIT after feeling extremely disappointed with my peers' performances and the lack of intellectual engagement and feedback I received. I had contemplated long and hard about it before deciding that a degree from RIT was not going to help me becoming a successfulartist. At the time I walked away from it, I only had a thesis exhibition to complete.

THE REAL WORLD

After leaving RIT, I worked as a struggling artist in NYC for a while, shooting for fashion mainstream magazines and alternative ones

like Interview, Travel and Leisure, Harper's Bazaar, Flaunt, Black Book, Genre, Attitude, among others. However, the dream of becoming afamous fashion photographer proved to be far too competitive. After an unsuccessful run as a prominent fashion photographer, I shifted back to fine art, creating a body of work in hope of getting galleryrepresentation, and when that did not happen, I again thought I wouldgo back to try fashion. Mentally, I was too impatient to wait for my career to take off.

BOOKS

In 2004, I published my first book, Rough Stuff, with Bruno Gmunder, Germany. The book was critically successful and since has had three editions. In 2005, Genre magazine named me 'One of twelve most influential gay photographers'. With that, I had gained an international recognition, leading to assignments and more magazine shootings. Since then I have two more books to follow, which helped

boost up my credibility as a 'gay' photographer,an effect, however,I wish did not happen.

Ohm Phanphiroj, Rough Stuff, Book,

Ohm Phanphiroj, Rare Views, Book, 2005

Ohm Phanphiroj, Night Hawks, Book, 2007

TEACHING AND BACK TO WHAT I LEFT BEHIND

In 2006, I went back to Thailand to take on a teaching job as a professor in photography and film. In the next eight years, I would teach at three different universities in Thailand including Rangsit university, ABAC university, and Bangkok International University, atthe same time traveling internationally to lecture in Europe and America, trying to establish myself as an educator and a fine art photographer. Between 1997 and 2013, I participated in more than 80 exhibitions worldwide, receiving more than ten awards, and was published in fourteen books.

In 2013, after much contemplation, I decided to move back to America,in order to jumpstart my career and find a teaching job. After failing to secure a full time teaching post, it occurred to me that Idid not have a terminal degree in photography (MFA), as required by

most universities.So I decided to come back to school to get what I walked away from many years ago.

MEMPHIS COLLEGE OF ART: A NEW JOURNEY

When I arrived in Memphis, I had decided that I wanted to create a documentary project called 'Memphis', for my thesis. This project will be a continuation of my passion ands curiosity about the town, the people, and the culture. Memphis is an odd place artistically. Its quirkiness, southern charms, and convention intrigue my desire toapproach it in the only way I know how to--to assimilate myself as a outsider trying to understand what it is that constitutes Memphis as the world knows it. However, as anything else in life, I am biased towards the way I see and want to see. I am particularly interested in capturing the spirit of the town and the people by looking at the neglected, abandoned artifacts, and the displacement and misplacementof things architecturally and domestically. I want to address the interrelations between the visible and the invisible in my works, which one must mirror the other. Things seen in the photograph must automatically speak of things unseen. While I am not interested in humans in the space I photograph, I most definitely refer to them in the photograph. I believe in telling a story through a visual language and letting the images be a vehicle to transport viewers to the next level without me explaining it. If the images fail to conveythe story, then I fail as an artist. I don't believe in writing anything to explain, as that should be the responsibility of the viewers. After all, if I have to produce the visual, and then explainand educate viewers to understand the images, what roles do my

viewers take in participating?

INFLUENCES

I don't have any particular photographers that I see having influenced me and my works. However, often enough, curators and viewers would compare my works to those of Wolfgang Tilmans, William Eggleston, Elliot Erwitt, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

At the art and photographic conference, V Congreso Internacional de Artes y

Humanidades, Oct 9-10, 2014 in Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico, Raul Sangrado, one of the key note speakers, compared my work, Underage, to Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Hustlers, as he quotes “Ohm Phanphiroj's photos are real and raw. Philip-Lorca diCorcia makes great photographs, and all the details are meticulously organized, but it is still a created scene, not real. Phanphiroj's photographs are spontaneous, and not a scene. It's a fuck register...that's the essence and the importance of Phanphiroj's eye. The register of a contemporary kind of human desire....”

V Congresco Internatoinal de Artes y Humanidades, Oct 9-10, 2014, Mexico

As an artist, I have many favorite photographers whose works I enjoy looking at, appreciating their keen eye and visual understandings. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Robert Adams, and Andre Gursky are photographers whom I admire and whose photographic style I am moved by, and who I think share similarities with the way I understand Americans and the landscape.

Walker Evans's systematic look at the American culture's homogenized beauty in his book, American Photographs, offers a sense of uniqueness about an American way of living. Evan's documentary style has createda new convention of photography, suggesting that a photograph is a slice of reality, prompting viewers to question their surrounding

world and therole they have in beinga part of it.

Walker Evans, Wooden Church, South Carolina, 1936

Robert Frank's work, The American, first published in the United Statesin 1959, is also inspiring. A Swiss immigrant, Frank views American culture from an outsider perspective. Frank's photographic viewpoints towards the Americans were not favorably received because of his direct, negative social comments about American iconography and culture, as well as his implicit portrayal of the psychological downfalls of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ the nineteenth century belief that The United States had a divine, God-given right to expand its land territory and divine mission to serve as a democratic, political model for other nations. Frank's commentary on the repercussions of technology and mass production, and the reassessment of basic and eternal human struggles also did not sit well with American's narrow-mindedness at the time. Frank's poignant view of American culture and his romanticism and cynicism about ‘progress’ and American iconography is bold, liberated and timeless all at the same time.

In Denver, A photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, 1997, Robert Adams wrote, “My goal was not only to respond the animate or inanimate fragments, but to show the totality, the landscape.” It is Adam's reference to what we have constructed in the culture and how things are so easily consumed everyday that interests me: home, cars, food products, everyday artifacts, luxury items, and even the land. Adam creates images of the banal growth of Denver that are repulsive, yet beautiful and intriguing at the same time. Adam's photographs reveal the effect of American materialism on the landscape. So do mine.

Robert Frank, The Americans, Silver Gelatin Print, 1959

GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHY : ANDRE GURSKY

I have been interested in contemporary German Photography because of its shared similarities with American photographers of the “New Topographics”. Mundane objects are placed in a specific manner showing a particular photographic sense of objectivity. German photography is known for not trying to provoke the viewer emotionallyor morally, but rather trying to show the viewer what is there to be

Robert Adams, Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969, Gelatin silver print

seen. German school photography is minimalist, with a strong sense of shape, line, patterns. It is subtle, soft, calculated, and intellectual.

Andre Gursky is captivated with mass and congregation of the ubiquitous. A cataloguer of affinities, Gursky began photographing and capturing peripheral landscapes, auto routes and river’s edge. Later Gursky began to include images of places where people congregate: airports, factory interiors, cafeterias, and subjects he felt projected a global orientation. Gursky never directs the viewer's eye to concentrate on one specific area of the photograph. Rather, the viewer must consider the whole image and all its detail. Gursky's works do not necessarily move the viewer emotionally or morally, he is not criticizing and commenting on global politics or art, nor he is trying to explain the world. Gursky simply shows the viewer what he sees.

Reflecting the influence of Jan Vemeer, Adolf Menzel, Jackson Pollock, pictorial value and painterly density are Gursky's concerns for location. Gursky's photographs have no moral or cynical undertones, everything is treated equally. Gursky reduces the importance of people in the pictures and makes them disappear and become just part of the landscape. His photographs show the relationship between culture, nature, and progress of humankind, namely technology. Gursky is well known as a minimalist photographer for his choice of repetition, pattern, and a great understanding of architectural form especially line, shape and forms.

Norbert Messler wrote in an essay on Gursky “...the artist makes the fundamentals of his concept clear:

landscape, places, and people, neutrally illustrated and trouble free, are photographed with a high degree of precision.”

Andreas Gursky, 'Diptych 99 cent store II' 2001