Take a Look. No, Really, Take a Deep Look!

The Intentional Observer
Post 1: Feb 6, 2023
Neil Berkowitz

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Exhibit Y: Natural History of Puget Sound, multilayer photographic archival pigment print

Everything we see is a made thing. Those pixels. That two foot long receipt for your three items at the drugstore. The items themselves. The drugstore. The corporation that owns the drugstore. That landscape, so sublime, and wild, and exquisitely natural, is a made thing even if it has, miraculously, escaped the direct touch of human hands. When we see it in person we are viewing something that has been shaped by our actions, by our inactions, by the tales we have told around communal fires or turned into song or cave painting or book, by how we surrounded it or cut it off from or fouled what it relies on. And when see it any other way it is a triply made thing, once by forces we shaped and once in its representation.

Ah, number three. If you are agreeing with me then you should also be beginning to consider—or may even have long recognized—that it isn’t just the things around us that are constructions: our vision, too, has been crafted. In non-politicized language we might say that our traditions and our cultures have set up some blinders or filters that shade what we see. Following this a bit further some of us might be willing to suggest that this culture might have some mechanisms that selectively block our view of or redirect our attention from seeing things that might cause too much social upset, that might weaken the culture’s immune system. Some might go further yet: the structures of our societies and of the framework of how we see and think about the world have systems that perpetuate themselves. For the sake of introduction to The Intentional Observer I will perhaps too loosely term that as ideology.

But this site isn’t political. It hopes to be about seeing the world. It wants to encourage and cultivate a personal choice (actually as many personal choices as possible) to practice a more intentional observation of what is around us. And the starting point for that is art. Any art. But visual art is a particularly capable defense against self censorship. If we allow it to art can alert us to what we edit out of our view or ignore, what we leave blurry or obscured or just plain avoid altogether—and to what our cultures’ thought structures camouflage. Better yet, it can not only alert us but can help us form skills that we can apply to anything in our frame of vision.

So The Intentional Observer will be a place to discuss all of this. How can understanding the made nature of things help us to see more deeply and respond with new insight into what we now reveal? Can the making and the viewing of art bring us closer to knowing and improving our daily worlds?

I welcome you in joining me in these dialogs and experiments.

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News and New Work, Summer 2023

A New Medium

I’ve been developing some project in which I want to incorporate video. To that end I have been studying experimental video making with Althea Rao, a terrific artist who works across a range of media. Although I created Comfort Blinders as a learning exercise rather than as part of a larger project it does address one of my longstanding thematic interests: our eagerness to practice self-censorship over what is in plain sight.

Why Ask Me?

My latest project is a scalable ten piece installation of multilayer photographic dry sublimation works on aluminum. Although I have never used prints on metal before it seemed the best substrate for the project’s theme, which asks to reconsider our reliance on communications with our technology tools to solve social problems.

Why Ask Me?
Why Ask Me?
Multilayer photographic archival pigment dry sublimation print on aluminum
On exhibition: August 9 – September 24, 2023, Columbia City Gallery, Seattle

The central piece in the installation is the self-titled Why Ask Me? (above) includes images of the main content of the nine other components. Its larger size, 72” x 48” reflects the need to include textual detail from those other nine possible 45” x 30” elements as well as its role in tying the installation together. As you look at some of the other components below you will notice detail and text that are critical to the work but that do not show well above at web size and resolution.

In its ideal presentation if the space permits I would like to incorporate live video classification through which the hung work that would respond with a mixture of insight and error to viewer scanning of the various component works and at the same time prompt the viewer to record answers to component-specific questions.

Here are several of the other components:

I Could Never Get By Without Your Help!
Multilayer photographic archival pigment dry sublimation print on aluminum
Why Are the Ethics of Stronger Immigration Controls?
Multilayer photographic archival pigment dry sublimation print on aluminum
How Can Hate Win in an Enlightened Society?
Multilayer photographic archival pigment dry sublimation print on aluminum
What Makes this So Complicated?
Multilayer photographic archival pigment dry sublimation print on aluminum
We Can Fix This, Can’t We?
Multilayer photographic archival pigment dry sublimation print on aluminum

On Exhibition this Summer

Dates

Exhibition or Event

Location

Related Events

Aug 9 - Sep 24Heroes and Villains, Columbia City Gallery4864 Rainier Ave S
Seattle WA
Aug 12, 5 - 7 pm
Reception
Jul 6 - Aug 262023 Members’ Exhibition, CoCA (Center on Contemporary Art), Seattle, WA114 Third Ave S. Seattle, WAFirst Thursday receptions both July and August
Jun 7 - Aug 24Summer Art Exhibition, Centennial Center Gallery400 West Gowe St
Kent, WA
Jun 7, 6:30 - 8:00 pm
Opening reception and purchase awards ceremony
Jun 29 - Aug 1721st Annual Local Show, The Gallery at Tacoma Community College6501 S 19th St
Tacoma, WA
Jul 11, 4 - 6 pm
Reception

Other New Work

Art is a Bridge
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print on paper
Layers from the Englischer Garten, Munich; the Leopold Museum, Vienna; Mitte neighborhood, Berlin, during Berlin Gallery Weekend; Aurora Bridge, Seattle; Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle
© 2023 Neil Berkowitz. All Rights Reserved.
Wallflower Overgrowth
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print on paper
Layers a photograph of a painting of mine (acrylic and graphite on acrylic) and my photo that inspired the painting.

Catching Up

My downsizing and move from my home of the past twenty years reshaped my priorities over the past nine months. So while I continued to send news to people on my mailing list I did not add new work here on my site. Given that I want to completely revamp the site, spending time on both my newsletter and the site would have been a wasteful duplication. So while I am posting new work today the best way to keep informed is to sign up for my quarterly newsletter (plus special editions as needed). I should add that some of the work is older, having been created during COVID but with printed incomplete until recently.

A Sampling of New Work

Quo Itur Humanitas
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Three Concurrent Sunsets. Possibly More.
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Fresh Air
Two sided multilayer photographic archival pigment print. To be placed close to wall (18″ for the 24″ x 36″ edition). The side with the top image faces outward. The bottom image faces the wall, on which a similarly sized sheet of reflective Mylar is hung.
Breakfasting with Ghosts in Vienna
Two sided multilayer photographic archival pigment print. To be placed close to wall (18″ for the 24″ x 36″ edition). The side with the top image faces outward. The bottom image faces the wall, on which a similarly sized sheet of reflective Mylar is hung.
Remembrance Pool
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print.
Blue Hour in Eden
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
How Can It Be Eden if the Leaves Never Fell
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Exhibit Y: Where Once Was Eden
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Concentric Triptych,Union Bay Natural Area
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
The Garden Seeks Its Depth
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
July Overgrowth #3
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print

Other News

New Art and Ideas Blog

I’ve recently started The Intentional Observer, a blog hosted on Substack. The broad topic is the need to examine what is in plain sight more deeply. That requires us to see not only art but also our physical, cultural, and ideological worlds as made things. I’ll discuss how this affects current common challenges through illustrations from my own art and that of others. Although I will add my posts to neilberkowitz.com the easiest way to get new posts is to create a free subscription by clicking the link below.


Portfolio Walk on April 2

I will have a table with more than a dozen newly completed prints on view as part of a Portfolio Walk at the magnificent Photographic Center Northwest on April 2 from 12:30 – 2:00. (Another group of photographers will show their work a half hour later.) An even better reason to come is to see thei exquisite show that just opened in their gallery.

Photographic Center Northwest is located at 900 12th Avenue (at the intersection with Marion Street) in Seattle, just across the street from the west entrance to Seattle University.

Am I Wrong or Wronged? Photography’s Lie of Capture, Part 1

The Intentional Observer
March 23, 2023
Neil Berkowitz

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Ode, Enacted Archival pigment print © 2017 Neil Berkowitz. All Rights Reserved

Each time I respond to an opportunity for funding, exhibition, or an artist residency I am asked to state my primary medium. That makes sense for all sorts of reasons. Then I look at the options that are provided. It is easy for me to eliminate things like dance, music, writing. But I smack my head when I am left only with two: visual arts and photography.

WTF? How are those two exclusive to each other? There is a premise, however shoddy, that supports the distinction: Visual art is a made thing. It grows from the intentions or the expressive actions of the artist. Photography captures. It is made only in the sense of production. Yes, there may be skill used to make that product more visually compelling. But in this view of things, that doesn’t change the essence of the photographic print from document or artifact to something more like art, does it?

The stakes in all this are high. Too high. Each time we accept made things without at least some basic level of consideration of the intention communicated in the making we are ceding a piece of our understanding of our world.

I used to think that I was being unfair to those who ask photographers to choose to identify artistic production as either photography or visual art when I wailed against them. I wasn’t.

Photography has brought this on itself. That isn’t quite true since photography isn’t an entity. But since photography’s inception its practitioners and promoters have welcomed the common perception that it is an imprint of the real. While the idea of imprint suggests a form of making, it transfers the role of the making from the photographer to the thing imprinted. The light coming off the mountain or off the polar bear or off Uncle Mike’s glaring baldspot made the picture—and the imprint—the print—a reliably honest record.

Really?

Shouldn’t the lack of a third dimension, just to mention the obvious, be a dead giveaway? The photograph at the top of today’s post was snapped at a particular moment in a live outdoor performance by The Cabriri, an aerial dance company in Seattle. Even though the focus is a bit off it remains one of my favorites. For me it says so much about how we use and treat our bodies and about the strength and the focus we can bring to our lives. I also love the light, the way it gives the arm and the hands a sense of three dimensional physical presence.

But nothing changes the fact that it is a flat thing, not a human body. It is a made thing. I eliminated the vibrancy of the deep blue silk that the dancer is holding and the lighter blue sky so that they wouldn’t compete for our attention with the shadows on the skin or lose the pink of the toe to more compelling blues. The shadows highlight the muscle tone, the skin, the strength of the dancer—and against the less vibrant tones of the background and the silk the relative values (think of value as contrast) define this human form with greater clarity.

And as to capture there is no way to know whether it is a posed scene or a body in motion other than our perhaps gullible expectations. To my studio photographer’s eye the draining of vibrancy from the sky suggest a studio backdrop, something that pleases me as a nod to the subject as one worthy of our reverence.

There is a twist to this immutable dimensional state of two flat images. There is a distant source of our willingness to ignore the lack of a third dimension and prize the two-dimensional. Consider the creation of cave paintings and what their physical presence could communicate over time. Think of the ways that in more recent cultures two dimensional (and three dimensional as well) objects offered more consistency to the legacy communications that people have created for their descendants than did the oral tradition. But that is for another discussion of made things and how we view them.

I would tell you to take my word for all of this. But I won’t. Instead I will just suggest to you that you take on the responsibility of recognizing that things and ideas are made and of understanding them in that context.

Coming Next:

’Scapism and Photography’s Big Lie

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Bubble Stuff: On Witnessing the Impermanent

The Intentional Observer
Feb 15, 2023
Neil Berkowitz

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Breakfasting with Ghosts in Vienna, two-sided multlayered photographic print © 2022 Neil Berkowitz.

Ok. In my first and only previous column I suggested to you that we consider what it means to live within a world of made things. Now, for reasons that may become clearer as you read, I ask you consider that made things don’t have to meet some minimum lifespan to be valued for what they show us. They can be here and then not here in an instant.

That goes for art too. Think about bubbles. I hope we all had the chance to blow bubbles when we were kids (while I also suspect that some did not—and that it is up to us to see that). We made those bubbles, perhaps collaborating with a parent or competing with a sibling, and the bubbles were beautiful. What awe we felt at we and the elements could make. We watched our creations, seeing both them and the sky differently as they rose or fell. Then they were gone. But we knew that they had been here.

I saw Hannah Höch’s painting, Three Faces, (below) at the Berlinische Galerie, just a block or two away from The Jewish Museum Berlin. Although the painting exists today it isn’t the sort of work that Höch is known for by those who write to tell us what to see. Höch knew at least some of what needed to be actively witnessed at the time of the painting. (Her photo collages in themselves are an opportunity to practice more intentional observation.) I know that her making that image at that time took far greater courage or commitment or acceptance of sacrifice than my viewing of it–but I too was an am a witness. I saw the painting in Berlin during the Jewish high holidays. I had been staying in Mitte, just a few blocks away the Neue Synagogue and in a neighborhood with some Jewish stores.  And around each of those shops, closed throughout the holidays, and around the synagogue, were police with heavy arms.

Berlin at the time that Höch painted Three Faces and at the time of my visit brings us to back to our own countries and our own times. The Seattle Art Museum recently had an exhibition presenting the photography of Carrie Mae Weems and Deywould Bey. On my third and final visit I noticed a series of small, reddish brown marks on the floor, between the seating and the screen, in the installation of video component of Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment.  It seemed that Weems might have included something that drew a blood connection between the work, the viewer, and the events that Weems was putting in view.

After checking with the a curator at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, which had put together the exhibition, and another at the Seattle Art Museum, whose iteration might have included additional guidance from the artist, I learned that I, not Weems, had added that element. But to me that strengthens my observation and my case for observing deeply. Weems’ art made me connect it to my world and to the space and meanings of the installation. I had asked two women seated on the benches about the blood trail and one said that she had thought the same thing. We each expanded the work and brought into our greater understanding.

What do you blot from your view? Will you stop and witness the everyday rather than just the headlines? Tyre Nichols, Emmett Till, George Floyd, Michael Brown. These are the seen. But like so many other realities, racism and institutionalized hatred, violence, and oppression can be seen by every one of us every day. And yes, I did promise in my introduction last week that The Intentional Observer would not be political. I will keep that promise. But standing up for the humanity of our neighbors isn’t political in any essential way even if it has been passed off as such by partisan politicians and their myth makers.

“Pay attention” may be one of our most important and most neglected lessons.

Resources:

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News and New Work, April-May 2022

Leading up to my mural recently installed project for the Seattle Children’s Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic (see earlier posts) I had been seeking opportunities to produce larger scale work. After starting that commission I followed up with my First Encounters series of life sized portraits of strangers. Now I’ve created the three works below for submission to a billboard project in Williamsburg, Brookly. If selected they will be part of an ecoartspace.com project, I Am Water, focused on water as a source of life that mediates our planet’s ecosystems.

All Water is One
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Sole Caught in a King Low Tide
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
ReGenesis
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print

I can’t seem to stop producing landscapes, not that I am trying. When I do complete a new one it is likely less to present a recognizable place than a consideration of one or more real places and how I respond to them and connect them to each other.

After the Storm
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print

News and New Work, Nov. 2021 – Mar. 2022

Kyiv Stands
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
44 x 44, edition of 4
24 x 24, edition o 8
17 x 17, edition of 12
State of Change
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
editions tbd

Spring Exhibitions and an Auction

March 31 – April 23: Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, Cemtral Washington University, Ellensburg. Work included:In Between and All Around (above) and Anthropocene Wyoming. Juror Faith Brower, Haub Curator of Western American Art at the Tacoma Art Museum, will speak about the exhibition via Zoom, with in person screening in the gallery, followed by reception, 5:30 – 7:30, April 7.

April 7 – June 5: Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle. PCNW’s gallery is recognized as one of the country’s top venues for contemporary photography. Work included: Still Life in Situ. Join me at the April 14th reception, 6 – 8 pm, which coincides with the Capitol Hill Second Thursday Art Walk.

April 7 – April 24: Artist Trust Annual Auction. My Dog Walkers, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle #2, along with the whole auction catalog, can be viewed by appointment at Axis Pioneer Square, at three events at Axis, or online. I am so pleased to have been accepted for the third straight year. There may be no better place to see the best of Washington’s current art scene–or to support Washington Artists than this event.

News and New Work, Oct. – Nov. 2021

Alas, I had to withdraw my Precurated Legacy series from the Rotterdam Photo Festival. But I will have a new work there nonetheless, also on the theme of “The Human Blueprint,” when and if it takes place. In it full installation (not at Rotterdam) this large print will be accompanied by smaller prints of each frame that observers can rearrange in ways that make the most sense to them. They will then be able to share their curations to supplement the exhibit.

Contact Sheet: 36 Shots at Remaking Tomorrow
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
80 x 96 (unframed, hanging solution provided)
Edition of 4
$1,750

I’ve used more than 250 photographic layers from nearly two dozen places in thirteen countries and six art museums to produce this work, which suggests that the key to thriving tomorrow is connection and effort today. The reuse, recombination, and replacement of its layers the work tells us to test what to hold on to, to look at different options to use what we have, and to willingly toss what holds us back or erodes the good. The contact sheet format further suggests that today is an unfinished work. NOTE: Immense levels of detail are lost in the online image. So I will be glad to provide detail files on request.


The following three works are part of my Precurated Legacy project that was selected for the 2022 Rotterdam Photo Festival, whose theme this year was “The Human Blueprint.” Since museums are a cross between time capsules, cultural advertising, and a catalog of samples of what we have produced. For that reason they offer a wide range of considerations for a human blueprint—though in my mind we are in no position to provide blueprints and ought to go no further than to offer notes and critiques instead.

Installation, Art Institute of Chicago
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
36 x 52 (unframed, hanging solution provided)
Edition of 4
$445
Representation is Always a Deceit
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
36 x 56 (unframed, hanging solution provided)
Edition of 4
$445
Between the Louvre and the Reichsmuseum
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
36 x 56 (unframed, hanging solution provided)
Edition of 4
$445

I believe that we experience and understand a place, as we do with so much else, by forming connections between it and our experience of other places. So I cannot fully appreciate Shilshole, where the semi-panoramic layer here was taken, with the wetlands of the Union Bay Natural Area, or two spots on the outskirts of Yellowstone, which provide the rest of the image layers here. Note that you should try to view this as large as possible to see both texture and detail like the cars on the shoreline or the pole on the jetty), which will be finer in the final print.

In Between and All Around
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
17 x 49, unframed, edition of 6, $400
or
24 x 68, unframed, edition of 4, $600

This looks both south and west from the same point on a trail at the Union Bay Natural Area. None of the layers were shot at night. In fact, beyond the impact of the normal ambient nighttime light, the area is just northeast of Husky Stadium at the University of Washington. So the added light from that part of campus means that true night never arrives here. This condition of a seminatural reserve that cannot find night was my inspiration for this piece.

The Night Visitor, Union Bay Natural Area
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
27 x 44 (unframed, hanging solution provided)
Edition of 5
$375

I’ve been thinking about the aging of place but had not yet produced any work on the theme until this one. We grasp the concept of geologic time through tropes of scale. So we correctly understand its comparative enormity to our lifespans by comparing grains of sand to beaches. But the tropes and the lack of a distinction between notions of the pace of time and the speed of aging trick us into thinking that the geologic time is keeps to a steady pace. And so we dangerously misunderstand our times, when the pace of geologic change is nearly the same as human time. 

Geologic Stratification, Nisqually Delta
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
31 x 44 (unframed, hanging solution provided)
Edition of 5
$375

News and New Work, Summer, 2021

A Exciting Commission

I’ve be invited to design art for about 550 square feet of wall space in the new branch of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, now under construction in the Seattle’s Othello neighborhood. By contract I cannot show the chosen work until the clinic’s formal announcement later in the year.

Here are some of what I created as possibilities for the site but that will not be included in the final project but are available for exhibition, rental, and purchase. Note that this is large work, intended to be over 8 feet in height. So the images here lack considerable detail.

Mr. and Mrs. Le Step Out of the Kitchen of their New Deli,
Othello Neighborhood, Seattle
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
73 x 44, edition of 4
Dog Walkers, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle #1
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
73 x 44, edition of 4
Dog Walkers, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle #2
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
73 x 44, edition of 4
On exhibition Oct. 2 – Nov. 13, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY

The work above reinvigorated an interest in portraiture, which has occupied me at summer’s end. Here are some of my thoughts on portraiture, followed by additional works in my now growing project. First Encounters is a series of multilayered photographic images in which I’ve asked complete strangers to pose for me and then blended the portraiture layer with several from the surrounding location. The three portraits above and the first three below are part of the project.

I didn’t interview the people in my First Encounters series and I know no more about them than I leaned from asking them to pose. Why should I pretend that portraiture captures. At its best it suggests.

Visual portraiture is a unique form for so many reasons. It takes the expansiveness of a human life and frames it, something that gets clumsier and more unreliable with every attempt to be objective. So it is more effective if it offers up a open story. Even when the subject is well known the visual portrait is a much about a life, a person, as it is about a specific, named life. We may know that we are viewing a named individual but we respond to that person as a construction we build from the information in the portrait–and thus as an identity, real and defined but without history or verification. We know what we know about that identity and feel what we feel. But if we are wise enough we recognize both the difference between our constructions and the lives of the subjects and the value of understanding those constructions.

So the detailed presentation of the physical person should not be central to portraiture but merely as one of many elements whose inclusion may help the observer form a subject identity and connect it to his or her understanding of human lives. Some of my portraiture work places the physical subject at the core of the portrait but includes elements to supplement the information about that person’s life. At the opposite end of the spectrum are portraits that exclude the physical appearance of the subject from the array of ways to establish her identity. In other portraits I offer a generally representational image of the subject but obscure it in some way that suggests we need to look beyond the facial recognition to grasp something of the life.

Bouquet
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
73 x 44, edition of 4
Kid Creed at Work, American Visionary Art Museum
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
64 x 44, edition of 4
Hey Mister, Take Out Picture / Chicago’s Welcome Wagon
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
32 x 32, edition of 8
Me, Aging in Place in a Covidian Landscape
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
44 x 64, edition of 4
(not part of the First Encounters series)
Tess in the Studio
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
36 x 24, edition of 4
(not part of the First Encounters series)

I continue to create for other projects as well. The following piece is one of three recent efforts that each grew out of an interest in grasping the aging of place, which is the topic of a curatorial project that I have proposed for a possible residency.

Still Life in Situ
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Three separate prints, each 73 x 44, to be hung as shown, edition of 4

I’m still thinking in mural mode as a result of the commission. So I created for a proposal for large still life work for display at a transit station, where it would be shown at 75″ x 225″. I also will offer it at 44″ x 124″ in an edition of 3.

Sourcing Dessert
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
44 x 124, edition of 3

New Work, April – May, 2021

Grasslands Restoration
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
32 x 32, edition of 8
E Unum Unum / A Stand of Aspen is not Aspens
Multilayer archival pigment print
36 x 24, edition of 12
Walking the Ravine
Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
24 x 36, edition of 12