Episode 4: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Leslie Wilson
In this episode, photographer and writer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa joins scholar and curator Leslie Wilson in conversation with MoCP’s Curatorial Assistant, Lindley Warren Mickunas.
Wolukau-Wanambwa and Wilson discuss works in the MoCP’s permanent collection by Rosalind Fox Solomon and LaToya Ruby Frazier as well as their thoughts on photographers’ relationships to the places they photograph, and distinctions between color and black and white photography.
Interview Transcript
Kristin:
This is Focal Point, the podcast where we discuss the artists themes and processes that define and sometimes disrupt the world of contemporary photography. I'm Kristin Taylor, curator of academic programs and collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Today, curatorial assistant and current Columbia MFA student, Lindley Warren Mickunas, is in conversation with guests Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Leslie Wilson. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer writer and educator. His book One Wall a Web was published in 2018 and weaves historical and contemporary sources of text and photography. His photographs are made throughout various American states and are evenly presented alongside historical imagery pulled from four by five negatives the artist carefully culls from eBay. Text components include samples of stanzas of poetry by Marie Albright Kaiser intermixed with quotes from Breitbart News or the current American president. Collectively the book and his work looks at the everyday moments that occur within American cities as evidence of larger structures that enable economic and social disparities in a culture of violence. Originally from the UK, he relocated to the United States in 2012 and has resided here since.
Leslie Wilson is an educator, curator and scholar, who is interested in how photographic approaches and advancements over time have changed the ways images are perceived. She particularly focuses on the documentations of political activism and change, and the blurred distinction between photo journalism and documentary photography. Leslie is working on a book about the shift from black and white to color photography and depictions of South Africa throughout apartheid and how this shift has moved our understanding of the nation's political transformation and the 20th and 21st centuries. She is currently the curatorial fellow for diversity in arts at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and is on leave from her position as assistant professor of art history at Purchase College, where she teaches curatorial studies and museum studies. Today they are discussing an artist they've each chosen from the museum's permanent collection, as well as their own work and practice.
Stanley:
My name is Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and I've chosen a print by Rosalind Fox Solomon from pillar [inaudible 00:02:13] in Indonesia in 1986. So the photograph is a square format picture made with a twin lens reflex camera. The picture's fairly close up to its kind of nominal subjects. It shows, what I take to be the backyard of, or the courtyard maybe, sort of joining together some dwellings in Indonesia. There's a brick wall that sort of runs diagonally from the left frame line through the center of the picture, toward the right and abuts the back of a structure, which I take to be the rear of a house. The house is kept by this corrugated iron roof. And on top of it, there's this small either earthenware pot or maybe plastic pot, could be serving as a chimney, or it might just be catching rain or it might've been left behind. I'm not quite sure.
And in the center of the frame, there are five pillars. They look to have been made from a combination of poured concrete with steel rebar or some kind of rebar in them, and then a molding to their faces. There are three in the front row and then two in behind, and cutting all the way down from left or right in the back of the picture is a clothesline on which six or seven pieces of clothing are drying. And then in the foreground, just in front of the pillars, there's a set of saplings that were strapped together into some kind of pot that's tilted at an odd angle, but driven into the ground.
And all the way swimming up the back of the wall in the back of the frame of the picture, there's just a kind of profusion of leaves from various different kinds of trees. There's banana frons I can see in the back of the frame there, and there's a lot of debris covering the foreground of the picture, disguising the fact that off to one side on the right there's a couple of wicker baskets and some more clothes drying. So it looks to be the backyard of some kind of a domestic dwelling.
Leslie:
My name is Leslie Wilson, and I've chosen a photograph by Latoya Ruby Frazier from the over decade long series that she worked on in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. This is a view of, you're not quite sure if it's a town or a city. What you'd want to say about scale of the place, where we're positioned to look down into the town is from the place of some rubble, something that is being clearly unmade. And so in the foreground, you see really an earth mover of a type of building equipment, along with a couple of workers, one who is seated inside of the vehicle, another who is standing amidst the rubble, looking out from the foreground and into the middle ground. We're seeing parts of the town where cars, small buildings, and then the center, a tavern. And yet it's unclear, especially with this building that is near the center of the work, if it's something that's still occupied or not.
And then we look out into the distance and we see hills, which you can see dotted by cars and homes. With the time of year, the brush looking a little scant, and so maybe we're kind of coming out of winter or about to head into it. This is a landscape that offers you the span of bits. It's a work that compresses the town and lets you see across it from kind of the wreckage of a large building out into the city scape and then out into the distance.
Lindley:
This is Lindley Warren Mickunas. Stanley and Leslie, thank you both for joining me today and welcome to the studio. Stanley, let's start with you. You chose a photograph by Rosalind Fox Solomon. In 2018, you wrote a stunning essay for her book, Liberty Theater. However, the photograph that you chose today is from a different body of work. Can you tell us a bit about why you chose this photograph?
Stanley:
I mean, I had an agenda when I went into the MSTP collection to look to see if they held Rosalind's work and what they held. I knew that there'd been a show in 1990 and this photograph was acquired in the same year as that exhibition. And I knew that I was coming to Chicago to give a reading of that essay. So I was also just interested to see, to look at other pieces of her work. And I might not have, depending on what was there, I may or may not have chosen one of Rosalind's prints, but this one was too good to pass up. I think that I'm interested in Rosalind's work from a variety of points of view. I'm interested in her keen awareness of her own differentiated subject position as against those of the people that she photographs, both people who I take to be within her environment, within her community, and people who are very much not part of her community.
But I'm compelled to deal with the fact that this is a photographer who's willing to look at everyone and everything critically, including herself, and who doesn't necessarily make pictures that force a certain kind of definitive judgment upon the reader of the image, and that ethos, I think, really informs the work that she's made in lots of other parts of the world. She takes the things that she doesn't know seriously, as much as she takes the surface of the world seriously, which is really all we have ever have to work with us photographers. And I think she has an incredibly agile and incisive eye. And in this particular picture that I selected from the NACP collection, there's a conjunction of sort of seemingly diametrically opposed or at least disjunct factors that I find really engaging. So, I mean, I've described the photograph already, but this collection of five pillars that are sort of listing at attention, they're not stood properly upright.
This isn't the kind of ground in which they can ever really regain whatever one might construe to be their intended symbolic vigor. We can see the rebar poking up through the tops of the pillars. If they're a group, the two in the back and not conforming with the three in the front, and they're being undercut in this fantastic way, not just by this clothesline, which sort of injects a level of, not just banality, but kind of necessary function and care, an immediacy, an immediate concern into a space that's sort of otherwise being transformed into a one of a certain kind of lapsed glory, but it's also the saplings and the trees behind all disrupt the pillars' capacity to take center stage. I mean, that's what, that's how these objects are arrayed in this space. But I think at a deeper level, something that I sense a lot in Rosalind's practice is a capacity to, and a commitment to refuse hegemonic power, it's absolute right to assert the parameters within which we make value judgments about what matters and what doesn't.
And in this instance it's happening in the relation between the saplings and the banana fronds and the leaves and all of these scattered leaves on the ground and the wicker baskets and the laundry and these pillars. And I'm enormously enamored of that aspect of her work, of the way that it sort of moves in these incredibly agile and articulate ways between disjunct registers of photographic meaning and speaks to the human experience of the immediate and the grandiose or the systemic. Yeah. So that's why I chose it.
Lindley:
Leslie, you also chose an artist that pushes the boundaries and definitions of documentary photography. What brought you to select this image by Latoya Ruby Frazier?
Leslie:
I had the benefit of a couple of things, which was that Stanley had selected the work by Rosalind Fox Solomon. And I had that as something to think with about kind of the discussion we could have. And it also might be that that photograph also includes rebar. And in that sense, these things that are broken, that seem to belong in one place and have found themselves somewhere else. But pillars, that which holds things up. And so, I was looking through the museum's collection, this jumped out at me and the way in which it's a photograph that says everything inside of it is important. Just every single element inside of this photograph is significant. And you might look at this quickly at a glance and not see that they're actually human subjects in this photograph. There are people who are here and it's precisely because you're standing in the ruins of something, I think, and you assume, looking out from that vantage point, that it's unpeopled.
But that starts to open up to you, and you can start to see that there are actually a few figures within this. And the way that that builds a rhythm for looking at everything else and asking questions about who's here? Who's still here? What has just been pulled apart? What kinds of things are being made new? Are things being made new here? There's also this dynamic, I think, in the town itself and the story that Latoya tells through this, which is which collar of worker is in this community, as the factories left and certain industries moved in, like the health industry. You had a new body of workers who were coming into the community. And then as that leaves, again, what are the cycles of the people who have come through here and who've left, but also that throughout that body of work and in the notion of family, that there's a real affection for this place also. There's real care throughout her work.
And in terms of traditions of that which we would call documentary, this question of care is central. How does the photographer relate to the place? And this is a photograph that I want to ping out to Robert Frank, and think about kind of that window in Montana that he's looking out of, that announces his own subjectivity and the ways in which we don't get that kind of vantage point. And yet the story that Latoya is telling is so personal. But then also to jump across, and this is why I was thinking about Walker Evans just looking at this, to Allentown, to the other side of Pennsylvania and think about the graveyard photograph and the way that it compresses space so intensely.
We're at the crux of life and death and work, and that's here too, but there's this added layer of the way that Latoya is of this place that I find to be so compelling. And I think to what Stanley was just saying, in both of these photographs, you're looking at photographers who have a very sensitive relationship to their subjects, to the ways in which they are either deeply connected to them, or maybe quite distant from them, and that take on different balances in the works that I think are fruitful to think about together.
Lindley:
Leslie, you've done extensive research on documentary photography for your upcoming book, which will address the intersections of art, reportage and documentary practice. I would love to hear you elaborate on the term documentary, as I know it's a very loaded word for you.
Leslie:
Oh yeah. It is a loaded word, but it's a word we can't do away with, or we haven't yet. And I am, in my own right, deeply indebted to the work of Joel Snyder, the University of Chicago, who I worked with in writing my dissertation. Also Sarah Miller, who's another scholar who came out of that program, who is writing precisely about this issue of the origins of the term, who was using it when? And her work has looked so thoroughly at the fact that from its initial application to photography specifically, even though it really has its origins in talking about film, it is contested. People mean different things when they're using it. They may want to say things like truthiness or authenticity, but there's a politics to it. Every time it's deployed, it is a shorthand for something.
And then we can look at it and say, "Ooh, but those practices, you were making this in this kind of place and you were asking people to perform this for you when you were doing it. And so that's not documentary." Maybe, it is. It definitely has been at different stages. And so I'm interested in unpacking it as people deploy it. What do they mean? What do they think they mean? And actually some of the people who are most associated with the term, like Walker Evans, he's going to say that kind of famous thing about documentary style. Really talking about documentary style, but he's going to start that off even before then saying you have to have a really sensitive ear to hear the word. And I think that's part of, again, the question of being critical about what we think photographs are doing.
These categories are certainly with us of things we would put under the broader heading of reportage, photojournalism. Broadly speaking, I think usually when documentary is used, someone's trying to say, "I spent some time here. I didn't helicopter in and take off. I've done more research than that thing that we associate with photojournalism. I've spent more time here," a certain kinds of embeddedness that is different.
The relationship to art though, this is also the tricky stuff. It's both at the same time, somehow different. My work specifically, looking in photography in South Africa, it's that in the 1990s in particular, as more space was made in museums for photography as art, the work that was moving into those museums were by a lot of photographers who had very strong commitments to something like documentary practice. I don't think there's a contradiction at all, but I think there are quite a few people looking at it and saying, "Okay, is South African photography documentary? Is this what we do? And what else would we be making? How would we want to deal with these categories?" And I'm interested in unpacking those kinds of ideas around what we think a certain set of photographs are and what they're doing.
Stanley:
There's also the question, I guess, the distinction of the temporal horizon. The idea that in photojournalism, what you produce is meant to be seen really as soon as it can possibly be distributed, and that where in a kind of documentary project, what you select to display and when you display it will invariably sort of occur at some remove from the moment of the exposure and will not be addressing itself so much to the kind of froth of the instant event. I mean, I say froth and it seems derisory as though a protest in Hong Kong is somehow not important, which it clearly is, but that even in that context, if we sort of pick it up as an example that a documentary photographer say like Matt Conners' work in Egypt, might make pictures in the midst of Tahari Square, but with absolutely no intention of distributing that work in news media.
So the gestation or the incubation period is extended. And then the way in which the image figures actual impossible meaning is shifted by the nature of that suspension. And yeah, I think that stress or that emphasis, sort of the remove of the picture from its instant, can productively call into question how we understand the building blocks of history. Part of what makes Latoya's notion of family projects so a thunderously compelling is the accumulation of histories that it condenses and the way that it describes a particular inevitable characteristically American trajectory of depredation within that history. So yeah, and what's intriguing to me is the extent to which a lot of people in contemporary practice refuse the term while hewing to all of those same logics and processes in the making of their work.
Lindley:
Stanley, in 2018, you released a book titled One Wall a Web in which you place your own photographs alongside four by five archival negatives, which you purchased from eBay, text collages, and an essay that you wrote. Can you speak about what this does for your images to present them in a publication with these other components?
Stanley:
I should be ready for that question. Somehow, I always feel like I'm not. Yeah. I mean, I suppose for me, the easiest way to talk about the interrelations between the various elements in the book is to talk about the book first as a form, as a platform, because in other sort of public scenarios in an exhibition format, differing elements would be combined and a lot of things would have to be left behind. The book isn't something to be transcribed onto exhibition walls, or to be transposed sort of spread for spread into a magazine or any other kind of format. So for me, the possibilities, the expressive symbolic discussive possibilities of the book really organized my thinking around which differing elements could be braided together in the sort of articulation of the work. But so yeah, the interactions in the pictures between the elements and the pictures arose, first of all, because the publisher, my publisher, who's also the designer, Aroja Williams from Rainbow Publications. When we first met and he saw my work, said that he was eager to produce a book that would share the variety of ways in which I interact with photography.
And he'd read my writing long before he'd seen my photographs. So from his perspective, I was a writer first and then I was a photographer second in the kind of sequence of his encounter with me. And that was where the possibility of some kind of text interacting with the pictures arose. Although it took a long time for the two text collages that you mentioned to kind of surface and to make their way into the book. I mean, I hope there are multiple ways in which these different elements speak to one another. So the text collage contain appropriated speech, and it's important to be clear that it's people speaking, it's not prose description of any sort. Every single word in those two pieces are utterances made by either characters in the case of fragments that are appropriated from Ginsburg's poem Howl, or in the case of actual comments from comment threads on breitbart.com, or in the case of a transcript of the very first interview the current president gave to the New York Times in the summer of 2017.
So that the text is speech and it's being uttered for a public and all of my photographs are made in public space. I picture people out sort of in the street or in and around places where any sort of body can move through fairly freely. And it was important to me that the tenor of the moment in which I was making this work and its sort of deep thematic concerns with the normative forms of violence that organized life in this country, address itself to the public square and to people's differentiated experiences of public space. The fact that they are addressed to a reader or to a listener was essential to the way that they might interact with the images, because these are the voices that we hear in our everyday lives. And some of them are inscribed in the spaces that I photographed in certain landscapes.
You can read people who you might assume legitimately will also be on those comment threads that you're reading earlier in the book, or you can certainly read a president whose voice is in most of our lives in some way or other on a regular basis in this country. And reckon with the way that the grammar of that speech articulates certain kinds of unacknowledged, but foundational logics, white supremacist hetero-normative logics, and reckon with the extent to which that speech is intelligible as part of the engine that's moving events in the contemporary moment. And therefore to reckon with the way that it's sort of part of the world that the people you see in the pictures are moving through by braiding together the appropriated archival negatives with the pictures that I've been making in a sort of more contemporary moment.
I hope that first of all, that the sort of notional dated nearness takes a second seat to the ways in which they're made intelligible as linked to the moment that we're living in now. Into the sixties is the profoundly different relationship people had to the camera in that moment and the way in which the camera solicits a performance in which people inscribed themselves into normative relations to contemporary culture, and the way in which the pictures that issue from that interaction continually seek to kind of reiterate and legitimize certain particularly classed and raced norms of identity, of corporarity, of beauty, of power, of authority, et cetera.
And so I think the genesis of our moment is in a lot of those pictures, and you can see even in the moment of their production, to kind of in a sense come back to what Leslie was saying about the contested adoption of a timeline documentary. You can see that people are struggling with it. You can see that people aren't adjusted automatically and uncomplicated leads to the rigors of performing a certain version of oneself for the camera. And you can see that there are differentiated valences in the kinds of performances that are being solicited and rewarded by the lens, and in the interior experience of those performances as they're undergone by the people depicted in the pictures. You can see that there are certain kind of fraught and frayed relations between different groups who find themselves together in certain kinds of spaces.
And you can see that the camera won't answer the question as to what those differences mean, but it can't help but to state that they exist. And there's something, I think, in the way that those appropriated pictures interact with each other, and then potentially with the pictures that I've been making that helps to hopefully state those differences as being simultaneous in their occurrence in a particular country and in a particular moment. Because I think that, Chicagoans are different then New Yorkers and they're not any less or more American for the fact that there's differences, but if they can't encounter and recognize one another from the substance of those distinctions, then there's no viable relationship to be had between them that can last. And so I think maybe another way to think about the mixture of elements in the book is to say that they name differences, they operate in different registers.
They have different intensities and they produce different kinds of sensory experiences and no one gets to claim its superiority over any other. If we're to embrace this country in this moment, then we have to embrace everything, including the reality of the Breitbart comments, as much as the Ginsburg poetry, as much as the mural Rick Heizer, as much as anything else. And then the essay at the end. Yeah. It's linked. I never wanted to write a piece of criticism about my own photographic work. I never will. And, Aroja never asked me to, but he did want me to write something and it took me a long time to figure out what I was going to write. And I think it's, might seem perverse, but I think it's the most optimistic part of the book in that it's a place where I'm trying to reach for a different conceptual and physical and psychological relationship to what blackness is and can be and what photography is and can be.
And I think I wrote it because I needed to. I think I needed to say something, maybe not confessional, but personal somewhere in the book. And I think I needed to kind of publicly ask the question about these two things that I'm going to be for the rest of my life, which is black and a photographer. I needed to kind of work out what does that mean. And not in a kind of casual sense, but in a really, in a deep, philosophical and psychological sense because those questions are important to me.
Lindley:
Leslie, to go off of what Stanley just said about different modes of sensory experience while looking at photographs, it would be wonderful if you could share some of your knowledge pertaining to black and white versus color photography. One of the words that comes up when you talk about color photography specifically is access. Can you speak to the history of these two forms and also the contrast between viewing them?
Leslie:
The context in which I am looking at this, especially right now, is in South Africa. But I think it's more international than this. And this part of my research is in its earlier stages, so I can't break it down in a way that I'm anticipating will happen. But it's that at the very least in its earliest stages for color photography, I mean, we go back to the people who made the field and look at a lot of scientists and adventurers and the lot, but generally these are really expensive hobbies. They're expensive undertakings. And quite a bit of this is embedded in travel, which also says something about your own means. And one of the things that started to jump out to me as I started to pursue a question of, "Okay, when were the first color photographs made in South Africa and how are they circulating, who was making them?"
I was looking at a lot of groups of amateur photographers, amateur in the photographic sense. They're very studied. They're very savvy, but it's not their professional makings. These were groups that featured exclusive white memberships. So if it was the Johannesburg Photographic Society or the Cape Town Photographic Society, those zones of exclusivity started to kind of really scream out to me because they're trading notes with one another about, "Have you heard about these auto chromes? Do you like them? Do you think they'll work for us? Carbro seems really laborious. Are we sure we really want to make these things? I don't think I'm going to pick up color photography until it's easier." And in the wake of World War II, when the technology does improve and more people can make it, who wants color and what are the ways in which they want color photography.
Back to photography's very beginnings, people are talking about color, and Peter Henry Emerson will talk about before he disavows photography in the 19th century, which he does. Because I love it when photographers change their minds. But he's going to say one of the ways in which this medium will become more perfect is when color becomes part of it. People are experimenting with it. They're exploring this through the 19th century. And then we hit this point in the early 20th century with our kind of high modernists, if you will. But from Paul Strands to Stieglitz, as much as they might experiment with color, there's a point where things transition and they say photography in its best practice is a black and white medium. That's part of its identity. And those ideas get bound up in what photography is or it should look like, but they're also bound up in what photography as reportage should look like, as documentary should look like.
There are ways in which we can look at photos and say, "Oh, that's a serious photograph. Someone's asking me to look at that in a real way." What do we mean by these things? Usually it's something like that doesn't look like commercial photography. Up through the 1990s, the New York Times for instance, is going to continue to print its photos and black and white for a whole host of complicated reasons that are not just about trying to make serious photographs. They're about the technology. They're about overhauling, major printing operations to facilitate this, but precisely because of the types of images that have lived in relation to the news, to print news up until that time, we still, I think, bow down to black and white as saying something serious to us.
Part of that seriousness, I think, is in trying not to distract you with things that seem like spectacle. Color gets away from us and risks dazzling us or overwhelming us. This is again part of that discussion. So how do we tamp that stuff down? There's also a question of do you really want to know the truth about the way people look and what black and white can control for? Some of my favorite short essays on the advent of color photography is like, "Oh, but you're going to really know how red your neighbor's nose is. There's going to be so much truth here that what you're going to wind up with is the subject of your photograph punching you in the face." So there's a kind of, in that case, an idealizing of the world that's accomplished through black and white, through that tonality, that there's a sense-making of boiling things down to their bare essence that can happen through black and white.
And yet that lives at a disjunct with how we look at the world on a daily basis, which is in color. And yet, can we replicate a color through our photographs that look like the color that we see on a daily basis? Is that the color we want? And I'm fascinated by the ways that these questions are bound up in technology, but they're also bound up in values, social values, political values. And I think I look at actually Stanley project and to One Wall a Web, and I find that play between the photographs that are in black and white and color really interesting.
The ways in which often black and white precisely, in the archival context, gives us. It immediately will announce that these photographs are historical and yet we can make black and white now and we do. And that's also part of the work that you make. So I think how do we make those decisions? What are we trying to achieve when we say I'm going to make a photograph in 2019 in black white? I'm going to make this in color. I'm going to make it in a color that looks a little bit like seventies color, and we can make those choices too. And so that's a rhythm in the book that I'm really fascinated by.
Stanley:
Yeah, I think it's really helpful that you mentioned that word essence in talking about black and white in that I think of it as kind of like a structural reduction. Invariably, when you're looking at the world in color as a photographer, or at least when I'm looking at the world in color, I shouldn't generalize for everybody else. I'm thinking about whether the yellow of your t-shirt, what the yellow of your t-shirt will do in an image and what it will be surrounded by and the way that its particular intensities will inflect the picture that I make. And then I'm trying to work out how to respond to that. It's true that you're wearing it. That doesn't necessarily mean that I have to photograph it, will have to photograph in a certain kind of a way, but a lot of our experiences in the world, in the scene of Latoya's picture, for instance, tremendously informed by our kind of psychological relationships to color. That's part of the essence too, and all of that gets stripped away in black and white.
So I also, I think, would agree with you that there's no inherent supremacy to one or other selection. There's so much that we can learn about a history of choices in culture that color specifically affords us. And there's so much that we can learn about a history of relations in space that black and white maybe makes more easily available.
Leslie:
But I'd say there's also kind of a false opposition within photography between these broad terms or whatever they would seek to describe, that which is the world of color and that which is the world of black and white, especially talking to photo conservators. They will be like, "We don't even use the term black and white." They'll say monochrome or something broadly, because actually, one of the things that comes through with Latoya's photo here, but certainly also in the exhibition, the Last Cruise, is the warmth of the tonality. And that warmth is so significant. It communicates something. And to me, I feel those discussions that she's having, this sense of trust that she's built with the subjects of her photos, that feels somehow bound up in that warmth that comes through the prints. I don't know. And again, I'm like, where did these ideas come from?
But that they're bound up in this. And so, whether it's brown, certain sepia, if we're getting photo mechanical, certainly in the brown [inaudible 00:35:17], or the cyanotype or whatever is happening. We actually are dealing with a wealth of options that this divide between black and white and color doesn't quite speak to. It doesn't give us that range of actually what's really been happening on the ground with photographs that we've made. And so it's also the world of choices that's emerging broadly flanked by these two, but also all the way through it, in terms of what we're getting. And I think you're totally right with a photograph like this one, but I think also in the photograph by Solomon, imagining in Rosalind's photo, that whatever those colors of the clothes on the line are, and that the black and white here feels so bound up in the effect that the pillars have on you. That we're looking at the monuments of old, that somehow this is just lost from some building that was extant, that were amidst ruins. Black and white and ruins go hand in hand.
Stanley:
Yeah. And it's funny to me, the picture that I made in my book that was most about the ruin is in color, but I know exactly what you mean, and that, again, that wasn't a conscious choice or anything. But I mean, you're right to say that tonality is such an essential part of the register of a photograph's utterance.
Lindley:
All right. Well, thank you so much, Leslie and Stanley, it was a pleasure to speak with you.
Leslie:
Thank you.
Stanley:
Thank you.
Kristin:
Thank you for listening to Focal Point. Focal Point is presented by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago in partnership with WCRX FM radio. Special thanks to Matt Cunningham, Wesley Reno and Sam White. Music is by Zaby. To see the images we discussed today, please visit mocp.org/focalpoint. You can also follow the Museum of Contemporary Photography on Facebook and Instagram at MOCPChi and on Twitter at MOCP_Chicago. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to rate, review and subscribe to Focal Point anywhere you get your podcasts.
