Andrew Schroeder

So, I decided to do some exploring of Green Bay today. I thought it might be a good idea to go for a walk by the lake… so I picked one of the parks along the waterfront and headed out. Maybe I should have turned around when I hit the gravel road, but I kept going… listening to the shrill voice of my GPS. I found the park and headed out… noting there were a lot of cars parked in the parking lot but no one around.

Tall grass.

I started walking and heard a very peculiar sound.

Kind of like wheezing.

Then… through the grass I saw it.

Two, elderly men going at it.

Yup. On my first day out and about in Green Bay I found the desperate men hookup park. I turned around and got my ass out of there, realizing that, with my giant camera on my shoulder, I looked even creepier than those engaged in dirty dirty park sex.

Kudos me.

Just a couple of things on the back burner(s):

1. Jorg Colberg has a great recent post that includes the thought that all photographs exploit their subject matter. I’m not quite sure this is always the case. I’m more inclined to believe that the connections between photograph and subject (and viewer) are less exploitative than made out to be. Instead, this connection is more of a dialogue – something less cut and dry and more like the relationship between producers and consumers explored by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life.

2. Google +. I’m on it and it is a strange feeling – much like going to a party, arriving early, and then finding out other guests might now be coming. But this did get me back into reading about Jürgen Habermaas and his ideas regarding the emergence of public space. Habermaas wrote about the role newly emergent 18th century European public spaces played in the rise of a new political class. I guess, I’m a little creeped out how quickly we seem to have evacuated ourselves from physical public space to enter into virtualized, electronic, privately-owned public space.

A great site that is holding my attention hostage this morning. Check it out for a variety of fresh perspectives on one of the most important issues in the contemporary city. Few sites I have come across investigate what makes public spaces successful, desirable, and heavily used in the same way that Project for Public Spaces does. Joy.

And bit more of failed public space from my own travel experiences.

Untitled, Minneapolis, 2009 © Chris Smiar

Colleague and photographer Colleen Mullins has turned me on to the work of photographer Chris Smiar. His series Hibernaculum is particularly engaging to me (or anyone that has to live in the public/private nether region of downtown Minneapolis). Hibernaculum, meaning a place chosen by an animal for shelter during winter hibernation is a concept captured elegantly in Smiar’s photographs. I am particularly drawn to the  accurate representation of the strange intersection of public and private space that occurs in the MPLS skyway system.

Untitled, St. Paul, 2009 © Chris Smiar

Working in downtown Minneapolis is never particularly joyous. During the winter one rarely encounters another human being outdoors… and during the summer, when the sidewalks are passable, one still must look up to see the office drones passing above you in air-conditioned tubes. What I find most gripping about these photographs are the tiny traces of human presence he captures like smudges on what should be precisely maintained glass…

Anyway. The work is excellent and I highly recommend checking the other projects on his site.

It is exceptionally early and I am already at work. To be honest, I walked through the doors to the building I work in Downtown at… 5:45 AM. Yesterday was probably the most confusing/stressful day that I have experienced in months. A definite low that was intermingled with a few bright spots: (more…)

end of public domain

I decided to spend this Easter Sunday hunting around and photographing the abandoned structures that make up Ft. Snelling Park. Located 15 minutes south of MPLS, along the stretch of highways 55 and 62 that lead to the airport, I’ve always been curious about this place. As luck would have it, today Curtis, Lindsay, Amber and I finally had a chance to troll around.

I was a little worried as we wandered about. The area is a mish-mash of public parkland space, and its inverse square: highly restricted airport and military base.  In the back of my mind I kept remembering the story of  my friend David, who was approached by heavily armed military security for setting up a 4X5 camera and photographing the undersides of over-flying planes here.

razorwire and boulder

As I walked to the end of the park and approached the ominous looking airport fence, I was preparing myself for someone to point a gun at me and ask for my CF card. Such seems to be the attitude toward anyone who takes photographs in the public/private hinterlands of post-W America. I keep spinning around one question: What if the powers that be are actually able to stop everyone from photographing things which are not their friends and family?

I have a hard time imagining a world where everyone has been stripped of the (psychologically) externalizing practice of documenting something, someplace. What would the world be like if we were never able to expect a type of documentary truth in our lives that has to come from something like photography? I’m left thinking of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451… a world where the physical record of an idea in book form is illegal… everyone is caught up in their own perceptions as truth.

debris

A few more photos are posted at my FLICKR page.

Clinton Ave Public Space, February 2008

Americans are either in their cars, in their homes, or in shopping malls.

The sense of public space in the contemporary American city is so exceptionally abbreviated it seems that I am able to pass to and from work without ever really having to navigate a truly “public” place.  I get up in the morning, and pass from my house to an abandoned street of private homes and get onto a bus that systematically seals me off from the public sphere passing outside. When I arrive at work, I migrate upwards into the sky-ways and am deluged by an array of private interests and intentions – starting with some corporate architect’s premeditated control of my movement and ending with the various retail establishments that pull me in to spend money.

There is never a sense of openness, possibility, or social exchange in the mock public environment I’m surrounded by. I guess I’m comparing this to the various public spaces I’ve spent time in – The Zocalo area in Mexico City or Central Park or the Museum Plein in Amsterdam. There is something that is distinctly lost when public space is mutated and downsized as it is in Minneapolis. Supposedly there is a new public space opening up – Target Plaza… next to Target Field… next to the Target Center.

Does it bother anyone else that we are so willing to have our open forum spaces co-opted by a corporation’s private PR interests?

With the above thoughts in mind, I intend to actually start doing some work again (keeping in mind, I can’t really make any prints until this time next year). A couple of goals for this project/direction:

1. Research the history of the corporate sponsorship of art, architecture, and the public sphere.
2. Photograph the spaces that constitute public space, in its abbreviated and shrunken state.
3. Intervene in the dialog between the accessibility and inaccessibility of the public and private, corporate and free.