This project grew out of a small idea that I had during the run up to the FR8 exhibition that was part of the 2007 Port of Los Angeles Art on the Waterfront Festival. As the curator of FR8, I had about $14,000 in commissions to award to artists, and it occurred to me that I could commission photographer Slobodan Dimitrov to photograph the artists in his signature style, as the workers and labourers that they are, as a sort of meta-commission. So I set aside $500 and commissioned him to photograph the all of the commissioned artists with a 4″x5″ camera, using Polaroid Type 55 film.
Following the exhibition, I continued to eke out some funding here and there to photograph the various artists that were exhibiting at the Center, or with whom we were doing special projects. Some of these artists were Studio Artists, but most were not. And the project started to grow, it became a curatorial effort on my part, and in some ways a very personal one that I wanted to see become a finished and complete whole. We later began to shoot artists outside of the scope of AGCC, but with relevant history in the Harbor Area. The idea of the project not only as an argument for portraiture of artists in their capacities as workers, but also as a web of connections covering the vibrant arts community that AGCC has long been a hub of became important and relevant, especially to the subjects.
We also began putting the images online as they were produced, uploading them to the Center’s Flickr account and starting a Flickr group to share the project online.
Curatorial Thoughts
Slobodan is a professional and fine art photographer who is best known (by me, at least) for his long term portrait documentation of workers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well as documentation of various union and non-union workers throughout Southern California. One of the first shows I worked on as a preparator for Angels Gate, before I moved into the administrative & curatorial side of things was the multi-venue exhibition Apron Strings, where he documented workers in their aprons. I was awed by his ability as an artist then, and am further awed today. I’m attracted to his style because it is stark, and because of his ability to capture the mood and reality of the subject in a way that the subject cannot control.
I view artmaking as a professional calling, and I that by capturing artists in this style, identical to the process that Slobodan shoots laborers, I am able, as a curator, to make a statement about the value and importance of artists as a labor force. I don’t subscribe to notions that artists are an elite; I view “fine art” as essentially descended from craft and as such, I view artists primarily as craftspeople, and it’s craft that I first look for in an artist’s work. There are several bodies of work out there that document artists, usually people working in either Los Angeles or New York at a certain time, but I don’t see those bodies of work as being more of historical documents of eras than making much of a statement about the professional nature of artists as a group. I really see the generation of this body of work as an effort to create a portrait of the role of artists in American working tradition, and to make a statement that they have a place in it.
Sample Images
All of the images from this project are archived and much more easily viewable in the Flickr group, but here are a few for sharing’s sake. The photo at top is of Dan Gilsdorf, taken during the prep for FR8 at the 2007 Port of Los Angeles Art on the Waterfront Festival.
