III: Wondering - Todd R Forsgren

Tankman from Five Perspectives, 2016.

Jeff Widener was staying on the sixth floor of the Beijing Hotel in 1989, overlooking Tiananmen Square. He was 800-meters away, on his balcony, from where a man stood fast in front of a column of tanks. It culminated just as he was running out of film, but then his friend Kirk handed him another roll of Fuji.

Stuart Franklin was on another balcony in the same hotel, pointing his camera at the scene below, his lens not quite as telephoto. In his picture, we see other details… Tiananmen Square looks like a pleasant public space. To smuggle his film out, he gave it to a French student. The photo left China hidden in a box of tea.

Charlie Cole was next to Stuart Franklin and he hid his film in the toilet of the Beijing Hotel. He sacrificed two other rolls of film to the Chinese Public Security Bureau when they raided his hotel room looking for it. One contained images of protests that he had been beaten during and the other was blank. Did the PSB develop them?

Arthur Tsang Hin Wah was on another balcony at the Beijing Hotel. He had been beaten up the day before, and the PSB wouldn’t let him leave his room so he was stuck. So, his photo is from Room 1111. The day before, a photojournalists friend of his left China, telling him, "I am not gonna die for your country."

Terril Jones was the only photojournalist on ground level, hiding behind a rack of bicycles. We see the faces of two protestors running away. Jones’s photo is not from that seemingly omnipotent vantage point of an ‘eye in the sky.’ It was taken 20 second before the others, but didn’t surface until 20 years later, in 2009.

Wondering What They're Looking at

Empathizing and understanding other points of view is crucial in today’s multicultural and politically polarized world. It has made my image world richer, to understand these diverse culturally histories, and to be able to play with this when I make art. This understanding of human culture and its myriad of differences is critical.

But in this fractured world full of new types of tribes, understanding universals seems daunting. The modernist sought universality in the square, and while it’s important it seems too cold. I seek this connection by trying to leap back and forth between these analytic and intellectualized ideas and that of my animal brain and our shared and primal evolutionary history.

44% blue and 555 nanometers. I find these two values fascinating, because they point towards a connection in our humanity. 44% of people in America say blue is their favorite color. And human eyes are most sensitive to colors with a wavelength of 555 nanometers. These seemingly precise values point to our deep evolutionary history, that lost and forgotten common ancestor, the missing link.

In my opinion, a deep consideration of our evolutionary biology has been largely overlooked or even intentionally ignored by critical theory and popular approaches to art making over the past century. In the sciences, this played out in the “nature vs. nurture” debate (nature being our genetic information and nurture being cultural knowledge). The conclusion that biologists came to is that it impossible to separate the two, nature AND nurture are critical. We need our rational side and our emotional side. The trick is how to reconcile the two.

The Watermelon Camera, 2022.

I made a camera out of a watermelon.
Carving out the insides and drilling a hole.
Then I used it to photograph it's insides.
Of that watermelon, and this was the result.

The Watermelon Camera, 2022

View of Fuji on Kodak on Fuji, 2009-2011.

Sometimes I like to make photographs that are as convoluted as possible. For example, here’s a fictional Mount Fuji in a rainstorm with a color space rainbow. I made it out of cut up photographs of Mount Fuji and rainbows and clouds. Then photographed on Kodak Portra 4"x5" 160NC. I wet mounted the negative to scan it at 4800dpi with an Epson V750 scanner. Then added Adobe Photoshop CS5 histogram sliders and printed it on Fuji Crystal Archive paper at 8"x10", mounted on aluminum with a plexi facemount.

A Play for P in One Act, 2017.

One morning I woke up with a message on my voicemail from a number I didn’t know. The message had two voices, a man and a woman, neither of which I recognized. They were conversing as they walked out into the woods together, and at the very end of the message they shared their first kiss.

I called the number back, just to make sure I didn’t know the subjects… The woman answered. No, we’d not met, as far as either of us could remember. She lived in Alaska and my Florida number was saved on her phone as “P.” I told her I might use the message in an art piece and she told me she was often a muse.

I’ve been obsessed with this message for years, listening to it frequently, it makes me happy. It reads as an almost perfect one act play. The banality of their conversation before that kiss. The contrived situation. I have tried to make it into something several times. I’ve even had people act out the characters.

But none of these attempts felt quite right. Then one evening ten years later I was walking through the woods near my home with my camera around my neck. Somehow the record button got pressed, and just over three minutes of video was the result. A perfect fit for that mysterious voicemail.

Here's a transcript of that voicemail, in case you have trouble hearing it:

Her: These playing fields are sort of boring.

Him: That was my best friend Tom, he's manic, he's totally depressed and happy and depressed and happy.

Her: Yeah, Totally, Totally, most of my friends are too.

Him: He's my best friend. He and I know each other better than anybody. There's no one who I can just call, and say, "We're going into the woods and we've got some adderol, and beer." But he's happy then depressed, then acting like nothing happened. Talking about how he thinks that base line turned out. Like, who says that? Nobody says that.

Her: Yeah, Totally. Ohh... I miss my bestest friend, I miss Preeya. Partners in crime of that sort are the fewest and far between, and I know only a couple will ever, like, come through my life.

Him: Yeah, that's why I miss Tom, Marriages of mind like that. Simon was for a long time, but now I...

Her: Ohh my god, Simon, he made a fool of him self, at that show, at Bobby's house,

Him: Yeah, he's not the same person. I don't really hang out with him anymore.

Her: That kid has DEFINITELY got a problem. Him: Yeah, it's just like, he's lost it, with drinking, and now, when he's sober, he doesn't know how to be.

Her: Ohh, that's soo sad.

Him: It is sad. It's really sad, I try to make him realize, by saying "I'm not hanging out with you unless you don't drink," because he loves me, I know that. And I figure he might get scared, and stop. But he just finds other people who he can drink with. I'm not going to go out of my way to put him in a HALF house or something, it's not my responsibility.

Her: No, No, No, you can't, you can't No, you can't heal him, he needs to come on it in his own way. You can't do it for him, NO ONE can do it for him. I've had to fuck up many times, all on my own. It's the only way.

[long pause]

Her: It's a very important thing to learn that though.

Him: Do you see that star?

Her: It's sort of twinkling, but I'm not sure, it could be twinkling for other things, besides...

[short pause]

Her: Actually, I think it's the trees.

Him: You think it's the trees?

Her: Yeah, I was just moving around, I realized. So it was twinkling a lot.

Him: Wouldn't it be cool if, like, Venus and Mars were in opposite balance?

[Sounds of kissing]

[End]

Ruby-throated Hummingbird, 1995/2000/2020.

I made a hummingbird gif in the early days of the internet.
But it still seems to hold up pretty well, I think.
I put it onto the iconic Windows XP background.
It's 2020, after all, and I need some relief from all this.

Constant Surveillance 001: My Studio and My Daughter's Nursery, lumen Print exposed from October 2016-April 2017.*

Photography had a triple birth in the mid-1800s: One in France, one in England, and a third in Brazil. All three of the “first” images are of landscapes framed by architecture. The reason was largely practical: exposures took a long time in those days and landscapes will hold still for the required hours. And the images were taken out of the author’s studio windows so that they could be close to their chemistry sets.

When my daughter was born, my studio became her nursery. One evening, I was looking out the latticed windows of her room as I rocked her back and forth trying to get her to sleep, reflecting on all the firsts we had been experiencing together. And reflecting on this history of the first photographs.

My daughter and her generation will likely live hyper-photographed lives just 200 years after those first photographs. Rather than install a baby monitor to watch her, and my studio, I placed a pinhole camera on the wall. An unobtrusive frame to capture every moment but simultaneously no moments. So now while our lives change so quickly, we also have a reminder that is rooted in a much slower pace of discovery. My first try was this six months long and the image was still under exposed. The next will be at least a year, I think.

* By the way, this series is ongoing. If you’d like to rent the camera for six months to a year so I can take a photograph of your home or office space, please contact me.

Constant Surveillance 002: Every Hour of the Rotterdam Photography Festival, 2018.

In February 2018, I participated in the Rotterdam Photography Festival (https://www.rotterdamphotofestival.com/exhibitionprogram). During the week of the festival, I set up a pinhole camera to take photographs with hour long exposures using Fuji FP-100C film. The images are of the same subject: the exhibition space and entrance, and the result is a record of every hour of the festival. This work was part of an exhibition Camera Works that included two other artists: Marc Redford and Michael N. Meyer (http://www.michaelmeyerphoto.com/).

Here’s an excerpt from John A. Tyson’s text about the exhibition: “Todd Forsgren’s Constant Surveillance (ongoing) collapses the technology of nascent photography and our image-saturated present. With pinhole cameras he records spans of hours or even years, catching every moment and no single moment simultaneously. Although the project evokes panoptic disciplinary technology, its images are decidedly more aesthetic. Installed in Rotterdam, his work will create an expanding archive of contact prints throughout the festival. Unlike the standard, time-stamped surveillance images, Forsgren’s photos resist bearing the trace of a singular moment in regimented clock time. Nonetheless, their literal, indexical linking his analogue feed to its surrounds is important too. Recalling the tautological logic of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) (a cubic wooden sculpture with a recording inside), the temporality of exhibition becomes coextensive with that of image production in Forsgren’s poetic surveillance.”

Constant Surveillance 003: 25 Day-long Exposures of the Hollywood Sign, 2018.

When I first moved to Los Angeles,
I lived in a modernist house in the hills,
with a view of the Hollywood sign.
These cyanotypes had long exposures,
made everyday from sunrise to sunset,
measuring the difference in UV light.

My Office at Rocky, 1.5 Years, 2020-2022

Reconciling Idealized Form and Perfected Value, 2013.

Ansel Adams spent much of his career photographing the splendor of the American West. He pushed photographic material to theirs very limits in the process, discovering how to make the most out of them. He was a technical virtuoso, shifting tones and values. Using filters, darkroom tricks, and creating his zone system.

With digital imagery, many of these techniques have become more approachable to the amateur photographer. Now we make similar tectonic shifts with a slide of the mouse. Using the histogram, we can see these values which, incidentally, look like little mountain ranges, a bit like the ones that Ansel Adams photographed.

Reflecting on this, I took one of Adam’s most famous photographs (The Tetons and the Snake River from 1942) and started pushing it back and forth. I tried to make the mountain range of the histogram look just like the Tetons, and the Tetons look like the histogram. And in the end, I ended up ruining both.

Bound by the Rules (100 Zip Tied Landscape Photographs that Follow the Rule of Thirds), 2023.

What do You Want? And Why?

In the 1990’s, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid conducted extensive surveys on preferences in art in eleven countries as part of their Most and Least Wanted Painting series (one of my favorite results from this survey is to know that globally, blue is by far the most popular color. In the U.S.A., for example, 44% of respondents identified blue as their favorite). Komar and Melamid used this data in their suite of tongue-and-cheek “most wanted” paintings.

Through those surveys, they discovered an interest in a “mostly blue landscape with trees, water, mountains, and humans and animals.” They made paintings that showed this landscape, which were just as primordial as they were kitschy. This provocation has led to diverse discourse in the arts, with a range of theories attempting to explain why such a similar landscape is persistently popular across cultures. Arthur Danto and Denis Dutton came up with very different a priori reasons to justify this nearly universal trend.

Arthur Danto, famous for coining the term “The Artworld,” reasoned that the popularity of this landscape was due to, essentially, nurture. Danto wrote that the first art seen by so many people in countries across the planet are calendars, desktop images, kitschy grandmother paintings, and postcards of pleasant sunsets and beautiful landscapes. Thus, his argument goes, these are the images most people first associate with art unless they have another and more profound art experience to replace it.

Dennis Dutton, on the other hand, argued that the reason has more to do with our evolutionary biology: these landscapes are like the ones that allowed our ancestors to survive. Their fecundity is what attracts us, and why artists in many cultures have made images of this type of a landscape, often independent of one another. The global popularity of these landscapes on calendars and postcards is a result of this evolutionary history, not the cause.

Separating the chicken from the egg in this way is very tricky business. In my photographs, I attempt to reconcile nature and nurture, rather than try to separate the art historical context from our biological connection. So even as our technological tools develop and our Artworld embraces the difficult to access avant garde, we are and always will be deeply connected by our biological roots. Understanding these roots is as critical to my approach to artmaking, because if we are to find anything that will connect us, I believe it will be in the depths of our shared natural history.

For a Rich Prince: Desert with Camel Taken Through the Eye of a Needle, Camel™ cigarette box sized platinum and palladium print, 2012.

"I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Matthew 19: 23-34.

I created a pinhole camera that takes a photo through the eye of the needle rather than a prick made by the other side of the needle. Using this camera, I photographed an iconic but altered desert landscape: a reconstruction of a box of Camel cigarettes. The whole vast landscape passed through that needle’s eye without a problem. I guess we don't need to worry too much about that parable. But do be careful, because smoking kills.

Flashing with the Fireflies, 2015.

NOTE: BEST VIEWED ON FULL SCREEN MODE SO YOU CAN SEE ALL THE FIREFLIES!

In some places they’re lightning bugs, in others they’re fireflies. All-in-all, there are around 2000 different species of beetles with glowing butts, in the family Lampyridae. Males produce a bioluminescent chemical that causes the glow, which can be a pale yellow, green, or even red. It is normally produced to attract mates, and fireflies recognize their own species based on the color and rhythm of the light.

My favorite fireflies are from the Photuris genus. In this genus, it’s the females that produce light, mimicking the color and rhythm of other species. After luring the other species in close, the Photuris firefly eats the love struck lightning bug. I felt inspired by these dangerous little mimics, so I went out into the field with my camera and a strobe to flash with the fireflies, and to see what I could attract.

The Starry Night, 2021

Todd R. Forsgren

Wondering What They're Looking at

What do You Want? And Why?