airBaltic<\/a> <\/em>that has enabled the photographer to visit Riga after his visit was cancelled due to the volcano eruption in Iceland in mid April.<\/p>\nIn 1938, the photographer Walker Evans published \u201cAmerican Photographs\u201d (New York: MoMA, 1938), a expansive body of work that both established particular strategies and defined a unique visual vocabulary, which has since become one of the foundations of “American” photography.\u00a0 In the book\u2019s introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein wrote: \u201c[Walker Evans] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. \u2026 Here are the records of the age before imminent collapse. His pictures exist to testify to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin and to salvage whatever was splendid for the future reference of the survivors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the course of the last two years, the economic, social, cultural, and political climates of both the United States and the world at large have frequently been likened to those of Evans\u2019s time.\u00a0 Despite our survival of the Great Depression, as well as the rest of the twentieth century, similar symptoms of waste and selfishness have recurred, and once again we find ourselves in an age that is seemingly threatened with \u201cimminent collapse\u201d. “Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs” explores the parallels that exist\u2014both in America and in photography\u2014between our own time and that of Evans, and the enduring power of American Photographs as discerned through contemporary American photographic practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever Was Splendid\u201d is by no means intended as a nostalgic update or sentimental plea for photography (or, for that matter, America) to return to its past. Yet consciously or not, all the photographers presented here have, in their own distinct ways, expanded upon many of the themes, strategies, clues, symbols, \u2018certain sights, [and] certain relics of American civilization past or present\u2019 first glimpsed in Evans\u2019s American Photographs. They all inherently possess a somewhat similar \u201cburrowing eye\u201d, and share a determination to record, testify, and salvage what they can of their own precarious age for its survivors.\u00a0 And just like Evans, they have both reinvigorated American photography and redefined their country \u2013 conceptually, aesthetically, culturally, politically, historically, photographically, and so on \u2013 within very contemporary terms, celebrating both the United States and its photography, as Kirstein put it, \u201cwith all [its] clear, hideous and beautiful detail, [its] open insanity and pitiful grandeur.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aaron Schuman is an American photographer, editor and curator. He has studied in New York and London. His works have been published in many prestigious magazines and newspapers such Photoworks, ArtRevies, Modern Painters, HotShoe International, Creative Review, The British Journal of Photography, The Face, DayFour, The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times<\/em> and others.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Saturday, 1 May at 19:00 American photographer Aaron Schuman gave a lecture \u201cWhatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs\u201d. The lecture and the photographer’s exhibition \u201cOnce Upon a Time in the West\u201d are organized in collaboration with ISSP and supported by the Embassy of the US in Latvia. The lecture and exhibition are part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,5,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-past-events","category-kim-events","category-past-events"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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