Andrew Schroeder

Ladies and gentlemen, it is Friday. I’m off to have happy hour with David before he departs for Bergen, Norway to become a famous photographer and eventually will be stalking my prey and having dinner with Courdis. Before departure, here are a few images that are keeping me sane on this dismal day.

-as

UCLA has an amazing collection of images available through its library. Here’s the link. Over the last two weeks I’ve really soured with photography. It feels like I’m able to know what a photographer is going to do before he/she does it – that the practice of making photographs involves personal style and marketability to such a degree that 90% of the photographs I see are UTTERLY PREDICTABLE.

Maybe that’s why these images have such sway over me right now. Here are a few choice pics from the UCLA archives.

*****

Coming Spring 2009.

I’ve taken a hiatus to tend to the burning feeling that seems to be eminating from my lungs. Ouch. In the mean time, here a just a few images of the week that was.

Hiver 2009

Sunlight

Homemade

As the year winds down, I find myself in need of both personal and artistic… renewal. It is that time of the year again, when fat people like myself make random resolutions they have no ambition to keep.  I’ll dispense saying things like “I’ll stop sleeping around” and “I won’t eat meat wrapped in meat”… instead I give you:

A few simple plans that should be occupying my time in 2009

1. Moving.  A new apartment a new neighborhood. Loring Park or Stevens Square are both calling my name.
2. Simplify. I am going to try to get rid of 75% of my stuff. That sounds crazy, I know, but I have a hunch that I need exceptionally little. Maybe even nothing. Wouldn’t that be strange?
3. Minimalize. Zenhabits is an incredibly inspiring blog that I recommend to anyone that is considering improving their life. The post on “Pushing Your Life’s Reset Button” has me going.
4. Sell. I have so much stuff that could benefit somone else right now. Does anyone need rollers for printmaking? Charbonnell inks? How about a Toyota Tacoma that is in perfect shape? A drafting table? Just let me know.
5. Save. I spend money on crap, just like every other American. I’m going to  actually stop. Who knew that was possible?
6. Make.  Art. Enough. I need to.
7. Dwell. Stay home. I want to make my life a priority… within my life.

That’s it.

I’m beginning a new digital project for y’all. Its called Sympathetic Objects.  Basically, I’m interested in the objects that are passing through life with me. I’ve started a new collection for this project – everything that came into being May 1982.

Object #1:

(A bit of a given… but…)

National Geographic Magazine from May 1982

Object #001

Goodbye beard… you were less than righteous.

this may be all the use my loyal epson sees this year

At some point in the recent past I became what many Americans consider an “adult”.  Maybe it is my age.  Maybe it is the geographic gorging of my under eye region.  But, I have officially reached the phase of my life where all of my peers are doing things like buying houses, sprouting children, or buying Prada handbags.

I’m doing none of these things and really have no ambition to.

However, by some stroke of this thing called “responsibility” I’ve decided that its high time to do things like paying off my credit card debt from my MFA thesis show.  If I start now, and use all my extra cash, I can save $3,000 and be out of debt in 12 months.

What does this really mean?

• I cannot travel for one year. (Goodbye Mexico City, Montreal, Brussels, and elsewhere)
• I cannot fully produce images for one year. (I can take photographs but cannot print, frame, and exhibit)

Two incredibly important things for me to be giving up for New Years.

*****

In doing this, however, I feel there is some hope of liberation. In a time of instant turn-around with digital imaging techniques and also an excess cache of film, I’ve been able to point at will and make photographs with little concern for the resources going into them.

I intend to continue to make photographs, but they will remain latent, unprocessed and unprinted, until December of 2009.

Will this liberate me? Make me take the image making process as something more precious, rare, and important? Will I get to know a new appreciation for the images I see when in 2009 I take the mountain of 4X5 film in for processing?

I cannot guess what an image that has been latent for 12 months will mean to me.

*****

Two things come to mind:

• I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s “Time Capusules”.  Warhol would take various items and simply archive them in brown paper boxes, in a warehouse, until he felt the need to revisit them. Here is Andy at his finest:

“What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey.”

A. Warhol, THE philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again, London, 1975.

• Robert Capa’s lost negatives of the Spanish Civil War – long thought to be lost… http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html

The structures that I am photographing reside in the collective public consciousness of our built environment. Ironically, these modernist structures, which emerge from a movement that eschewed monument and past for nature and future, carry cultural memory incredibly well.  Traces of failed utopian idealism are still found on display in the architectural relics of this period that linger in our urban fabric.With this series of photographs, it is my intention to explore the ways that historical ideas can collapse when intersected with the practices and needs of everyday life.