the past is a foreign country

Although I'm a bit late on this on due to my lax and sporadic posts, but I wanted to mention the recent book and exhibition at ICP - Bill Wood's Business. Organized and curated by Marvin Heiferman and Diane Keaton, the book is a collection of the work of Bill Wood, a commercial photographer from Ft. Worth, Texas. From the late '30s to the early 70's, the Bill Wood Photo Company created a photographic record of the daily life (both commercial and private) of a rapidly growing Texas city. From store openings to evidentiary documents to mortuary photographs, Wood's encyclopedic output not only illuminates the distant, yet temporally close past, but also becomes a perplexing exploration of photography's mutable role in our culture.


© Bill Wood, All Rights Reserved

While many curatorial efforts have used photographic archives (individual or collective) to explore and make arguments about the past (Michael Lesy being the most prominant and influential example) or as part of a larger conceptual gesture (Sultan and Mandel's Evidence or Peter Piller and others), Heiferman and Keaton make a conscious effort to avoid decontextualizing or reframing Wood's work as something it is not. It is easy to see how a simple edit of the work could create something as perplexingly obtuse and wonderful as Sultan and Mandel's work, but by refusing to do so, the work emerges as somehow odder and just as rewarding. The dispassionate commercial eye of Wood reveals the distant world of the past, but his images in their encyclopedia scope point down the knotted forked paths of contemporary photography.


© Bill Wood, All Rights Reserved


© Bill Wood, All Rights Reserved


© ICP/Marvin Heiferman, All Rights Reserved

While the exhibition is down, the book is still available and worth checking out here.

Iron Fists and Trademarked Smiles

About a year ago, I got the opportunity to work with Steve Heller on another book, Iron Fists: Branding The Totalitarian State (Phaidon, 2008). Photographing Steve's extensive collection of Chinese figurines and totalitarian paraphernalia was a great pleasure. Housed in a veritable museum of graphic design, pop culture and design ephemera, Steve's collection is as impressive as it is comprehensive. The latest in a long list of Heller's publications, Iron Fists, is a brilliant examination of the ways in which totalitarian regimes (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Communist China) used graphic design to branded themselves and solidified their control.

From Mao's "Mona Lisa smile" and Lenin's proletarian cap to Mussolini's Futurist posters and the Hitler's infamous swastika, the visual cues, typeface, logos and jingles of the various regimes were all as carefully crafted and considered as the marketing efforts of Madison Avenue ad executives. As Heller writes,

A popular brand of frozen food or laundry detergent is not forced down the consumer’s throat with an iron fist...[nevertheless] the design and marketing methods used to inculcate doctrine and guarantee consumption are fundamentally similar.

Heller's exploration does not attempt to diminish the atrocities of the various regimes, but rather illuminates the efficacy, influence and powerful sway these efforts had over their populace. Considering the continued confluence of design, state power and propaganda, the lessons from this era have continued relevance.

It's also telling that three of the profiled dictators considered themselves artists - Hitler, a architect and watercolorist; Mao a calligrapher and poet; and Mussolini, a pulp novelist and hypermasculine sex symbol. As "artists," the state become their platform to terrible ends. Clearly influenced by (and working in collaboration with) the Futurists, the Russian Constructivists and other artists, the regimes drew upon the artistic heritage and wealth of their nations to design and wield terrible instrument of power.

© Steve Heller, All Rights Reserved

© Steve Heller, All Rights Reserved

Read more here and here.