Last week I was at the Society for Photographic Education’s National Conference in San Francisco and made a little advertisement promoting the project. I knew I could make the cut lines suggest the curve of a histogram but I went for extra cheesiness by trying to make it look like a representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. Below are the results of this experiment taken over the course of the week:
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Cut photocopy advertisement, March 2012
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Cut out card taped to monitor, Google Maps, 2012
I’ll be in San Francisco this week to give a presentation at the national conference of the Society for Photographic Education. I’m also excited and humbled to announce that The Histograms will be recieving SPE’s 2012 Award for Innovations in Imaging in Honor of Jeannie Pearce! According to their literature, it’s given to a student project dedicated to:
“work only possible because of emerging digital technologies” and that the jurors “will seek to award work that demonstrates the most innovative, unique, and freshest uses of digital technologies.”
This year’s jurors were Christina Z. Anderson, Sama Alshaibi, and Liz Wells.
This conference, then, is the perfect time to begin promoting The Histograms distribution project. So if I’m lucky, I might be able to convince some of the attendees to make work with the data set or come up with proposals.
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Three-channel video, DVD, March 2012. Installation Views courtesy of Ilari Laamanen and XL Art Space, Helsinki, Finland.
A version of The Histograms is currently on display as part of Switch, a three-person exhibition curated by Ilari Laamanen. Along with works by Heini Aho and Bea Fremderman, Ilari—by way of introduction—notes that:
“It is necessary to slow down and learn how to orientate without an address and a map. Because perhaps one of these days all the lights will be switched off and it will get completely dark. How well can we see in the midst of darkness – or can we see at all? Switch is a group exhibition dealing with distance, temporality and spectating. At the core of the exhibition are the ideas of reduced expression and the rotation of images.”
I live in Oklahoma, so in a gesture inspired by the musical genius of the Flaming Lips and their concept album, Zaireeka, I wrote that the three-channel installation is:
“Composed of a fractured version Frank’s original photographic sequence—each monitor displays the entire set of histograms—and when played together suggest a left to right movement through the work that’s reminiscent of the highways and road markings that were critical to Frank’s project. But, because the starting times will never be perfect, each performance will be different, with the highly structured original narrative finally breaking down into a more open and chaotic movement.”
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Set of 9 5x7 inch cards, archival pigment prints, 2011
More so than the two previous images, in this one I was intentionally trying to arrange a Becher-style grid presentation involving the industrial city of Detroit.
From left to right, top to bottom:
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Set of 6 5x7 inch cards, archival pigment prints, 2011
From left to right, top to bottom:
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Set of 72 5x7 inch cards, archival pigment prints, 2011
From left to right, top to bottom:
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan. Set of 83 5x7 inch cards, archival pigment prints, Oct 2011
This arrangement of the entire data set was part of an exhibition exchange between the studio grads at the University of Oklahoma and the MFAs at Kansas State University.
Because I was not there to install the work, and because I was interested in avoiding the highly structured narrative sequencing of Frank’s book, I elected to have my colleagues at KSU arrange the cards to their taste. They ended up saying it looked a little bit like Australia.
