The Cracked Mirror of Miles Ladin's Photographs

Miles Ladin's photographs of the rich and the beautiful are fascinating because they simultaneously show why celebrities attract some people and repulse others. I fall into the second category and for me Miles's images confirm the reaction I've had since I was a teenager. These days when I'm subjected to celeb images it is almost always against my will. I've stopped watching television altogether; likewise Hollywood movies. I avoid places like malls and big retail stores (for other reasons besides this). But I still have to deal with them in supermarket checkout lines, when driving in my car (highway billboards), visiting NY City (everywhere, especially subway stations) and at my Mom's house (television, though she usually turns it off).

I admire the edginess of Miles's photographs. It's interesting that he regularly publishes in magazines and newspapers with little or no backlash. Recently, his work was also featured in the book, Celebrity & Performance: The World's Top Photographers. The images presented here are more ambiguous, but I'm hoping you will take a closer look at Miles's work to see what I'm talking about. I'm going to contact him about running additional images here, because I'd like to write something about them. In the meantime, this is an introduction and you can go to his website,
Miles Ladin Photography.

Miles and I became friends about twenty years ago when we both studied photography with Larry Fink. While he is not a hardcore traditionalist and occasionally shoots digitally, Miles continues to produce most of his work using Nikon 35mm cameras, making both traditional gelatin silver prints and large scale ink jet prints from scanned negatives.

Double Rainbow

7:00 p.m. this evening, from our back patio. Viva le snapshot.

Martha Posner

Martha Posner is showing at Dalet Gallery, 141 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA, from April 30 – June 6, 2010. Opening Reception: Friday, May 7, 5 – 9 p.m. Gallery Talk: Saturday, May 15, 3:00 p.m.

Martha Posner’s work disturbs me – in the best possible way. Much of the time, I don’t know what the hell to make of it. I’m not sure what it’s about. It bothers me. And that’s a good thing. I think that’s what art—at least some art—should do. Robert Rauschenberg’s work has that effect on me. So does Francis Bacon’s. So do the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka. That’s not bad company Martha.

When I drive down the long dirt road to her farm to visit Martha or her husband, photographer Larry Fink, I’m always tempted to sneak away and peer into her studio upstairs in the 1812 barn to see what’s cooking. And cook she does, melting, stirring, then brushing beeswax from bubbling crockpots onto the dresses, shoes, and other, more amorphous forms she has mounted on wire armatures.

On my recent visit to talk about her work, she's not cooking -- she is in the studio preparing everything for transport to the gallery. Strewn among the quiet figures that feel like they are slowly turning and lifting, are screwdrivers, pliers, paint, nails, brushes, tattered clothing, tree roots, and older sculptures and paintings. On a small table in the corner, laid carefully next to a pile of two dozen not-so-neatly-piled paintbrushes, are a dead bluebird and a dead cedar waxwing. Delivered by Martha’s cats as presents, for now, they are to behold. Eventually, they may become part of an assemblage.

When discussing Martha’s sculptures recently with another artist, the person said to me, “I can’t understand why she would make her work out of materials that are impermanent.” Looking around her studio today, I remember what I said, and why I said it: “That’s exactly what attracts me to her work.”

Martha tells me the figures in her new series have come together quickly after she thought about them for months while working around the farm and tromping up and down the surrounding hills with her Yellow Lab, Max.

Several years ago, Martha completed a series of sculptures entitled Physical Memory, a phrase that seems to apply to all of her work. Like memories—my memories at least—her constructions feel incomplete, unfinished, unresolved. The materials and colors she uses suggest familiar, fundamental things: dirt, blood, hair, feathers, and bone. While familiar, in combination they both repel and attract. I’m drawn to touch them, yet a little frightened. “The last thing I would want,” Martha tells me, “would be for someone to think I’m trying to make angels.” She grits her teeth, as if dreading the thought.

What she does want to explore, she explains, is the “deeply physical and sometimes painful process of crossing between two worlds.” While her figures have both human and animal features, to Martha, the “categories are porous.” Although she doesn’t come across as a mystic, Martha’s work asks the viewer to wonder why wouldn’t spiritual and physical transformation be possible? The figures leave me without an answer, but their physicality has a resonance that causes the question to linger in my mind. Martha Posner’s work is of this world, but it’s also of another world—one I’m still trying to define. I hope I never succeed.

My Uncle John Polachek, Roselle Park, NJ, Circa 1960

Photocommentary is back. Upcoming posts to include more scans of family pictures, a write up on artist Martha Posner, photos by Zev Jonas, Jonno Rattman, Erica Luisi, Larry Fink, Annalisa Gonella, and more.

For now, I hope you enjoy the postwar security of my Uncle John in his parents' back yard in Roselle Park, NJ. He only kept that '57 Chevy (which was orange) another year or two because his two sons, Joe and John Jr., were getting big. I love the way the crease on his pants and the zipper on his bomber jacket line up with the trees in the neighbor's yard-- not unlike the way the trees line up with the suspender and leg of the little boy in Diane Arbus's famous 1960 photograph Boy with Toy Hand Grenade, Central Park. Of course my grandfather, who took this photograph, was not the sophisticated photographer that Arbus was, but his instincts were pretty good, eh?

My Uncle John had been in the infantry in World War II, notably the invasion of Italy. His eyes are just shaded by the brim of the fedora, allowing him the relaxed expression and self-assured stance of someone who has been on the winning side. In his right hand and echoed so nicely in the shadow on the car door, he cups his cigarette. GI's were taught to do this in order that the glow from their smokes would not give away their position at night.

Overhead, the neighbor's laundry waves like Tibetan prayer flags, thanking the oil yards in Bayonne, the Pabst Blue Ribbon Brewery in Newark, and the Kelly Type Foundry in Elizabeth, where my Uncle John and my Grandfather worked, for jobs.