Our National Anthem. Anthem, Colorado, 2015
The latest news on the publication front…!
It appears that my Black & White Magazine “Portfolio Spotlight” (Neo-Topographics) will come out in the April, 2019 issue. Typically, the “Spotlight” is presented in four pages–three pages showcasing sample images, and a fourth page with a short critique/explanation.
The above image, “Anthem”, will likely be one of several that will be published.
Larry Lytle, art professor, writer, and art photographer (definitely Google his Tableux (sic) Vivant series), has done a superb job with the wordsmithing of the accompanying text. He has a way of making me sound like a serious artist. (OK, I admit that I like to think that I am. I just have a really hard time putting my worldview into appropriate English words. Perhaps that’s why I prefer to present my personal feelings and vision via photographs safely and clinically ordered within rectangles and squares?)
Thanks, Larry!
This is the second time, by the way, that Larry has written up my work. He also did the commentary for my 2016 B&W Magazine Portfolio Spotlight Award (An Orwellian New York) which you can see and read HERE.
As sort of a preview, here is what will be printed:
2018 B&W Spotlight Award: Daniel Joder
Text by Larry Lytle
Water, commerce and the weather headlined the news this past week, affecting my thinking about Daniel Joder’s long-term, environmental photographic project titled “Neo-Topographics.”
Item: Three days ago, in the “California” section of the Los Angeles Times, an article titled “West braces for cuts to water supply” explained how levels in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are dangerously low, and that Nevada and Arizona, followed by California, would be getting cuts to their 2019 water allotment. Item: On the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times “Real Estate” section we are breathlessly invited to “Discover family-sized solar homes,” up to 2,900 square feet, and at a modest price point in the high $300,000s for sale in southern California’s far-flung Moreno Valley. Item: Two days ago, major news outlets depicted the horrific swath of destruction as Hurricane Michael tore across the Florida panhandle; the photographs of obliterated communities and decimated lives are wrenching and sobering.
Carbon dioxide accumulation has been a concern for scientists since the mid-19th century. Prognostications about our biosphere’s health spread into our social realm in the 1960s, and became a topic for artists soon thereafter. Ansel Adams’ photographs for the Sierra Club are the most visible example. Yet obscure, but more enduring is the 1975 exhibition curated by William Jenkins: “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape,” which spawned a school of photographers and photography that’s taken up New Topographic precepts with impactful images and ideas. Forty-three years on, Daniel Joder has become a notable member of that group.
There is a twofold reason for this: Joder’s compelling images, and a new tack that includes unflinching discussions about our impact on the land. This is something that the original practitioners of New Topographics avoided, although several of them were sympathetic to the environmental movement’s goals. However, in the mid 1970s Jenkins’ and photography’s post-modern ideology engaged with issues of photographic theory, specifically the photograph as document. If one thinks about it as a missed opportunity—to center the exhibition solely about environmental concerns—one should understand that at that time, political awareness concerning environmental matters had not reached a necessary tipping point in America’s national consciousness. Today, with increasing drought, wildfires, hurricanes and extreme weather, minds have changed, and concern for the environment has refocused.
Joder’s imagery provides a different vision of the suburban landscape than his progenitors: one that uses irony and melancholy. In “Moving Heaven and Earth, Boulder County, Colorado,” Joder depicts a tremendous mound of bulldozed earth overwhelming the American flag and blocking from view a new house, the ultimate symbol of the American dream. The scene is overarched by a sky of threatening storm clouds. In “Our National Anthem, Anthem Colorado,” Joder shows us a lonely outpost of an unoccupied playground flanked by unchecked suburban sprawl, which becomes the emblem for a new hymn sung by our consumerist nation.
Accompanying Joder’s photographs is his blog, giving unequivocal voice to his imagery’s concerns: “Steadily and generally ignored, even lauded, the bulldozers plow on…vegetation is scraped away…the water tables drop…farms are sold off…condos and McMansions are vomited up…ecosystems are damaged or destroyed…suburbia expands, encroaching ever more on the last refuges of the original, pre-European invasion landscape.” (May 8, 2015)
By including commentary in his imagery and cogently framing his thoughts on his blog, Joder is fulfilling William Jenkins’ concern that “personal inflection or opinion” would interfere with “photography’s information-carrying capacity.” Perhaps this worry was necessary in the era of photography’s struggle to assert its place in the art world, but that intellectual climate, like the earth’s weather, has metaphorically, factually and fundamentally changed.
A sampling of Neo-Topo images for your perusal…
Moving Heaven and Earth, Colorado, 2016 (Mentioned in Larry’s text above.)
Ahhsome Reunion, Colorado, 2016
Behind Sequoia Street, Dacono, Colorado, 2016
Machines At Rest, Colorado, 2016
Nearly Ready at 1029 Redbud, Colorado, 2016
New Gas Line, 95th and Lookout, #2, Colorado, 2016
New Plans for The Plains, Colorado, 2016 (Oh, how I love the irony of the buffalo sign on the hill! Are we–us Human Beans–next up for slaughter, this time by Mother Nature?)
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