Shoot from the hip

By Jon Anne Willow

You may have heard of Cedar Block, Milwaukee’s premiere presenter of offbeat creative events with an emphasis on group participation. You may have heard of Saul Leiter, the New York street photographer who blazed the trail for the use of color in art photography in the mid 20th century. And you may have heard of lomography… or not. But even if none of these are familiar to your ear, you will surely have heard of the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) and of Milwaukee Street in Milwaukee.

And whether you’ve heard of all these things or only the last two, you will soon see them brought together in what is perhaps one of the most interesting collaborations of local and national photography this year.

In Living Color: The Photographs of Saul Leiter opened at the Art Museum on September 28. Unlike his ersatz contemporaries in Abstract Expressionism, Mark Rothko and Richard Pousette-Dart, Leiter’s work wasn’t embraced by the formal art community until recently. But like Fellini or Bergman among filmmakers, his influence has been felt among photographers for decades. And now Milwaukee will be first to acknowledge his contribution to the form with the first-ever major exhibit for the 82-year-old photographer.

As early as the late 40s, Leiter worked primarily in color, shooting scenes of New York City that stunningly captured urban life in saturated frames and off-kilter focus. At that time, color photography was not only expensive to process, but viewed by many as a baser form of the medium. Leiter’s photos further insulted the “art world” by presenting technical “imperfections” rather as augmentation, an approach with which he was rewarded by resounding silence from curators around the world. To his vast credit, Leiter didn’t care: he continued to ply his trade his own way, presenting his work as slide shows with his photographs blown up to the scale of full-size paintings. The MAM exhibit will include a room devoted to a digital slide show in that vein, along with around 70 color prints, a selection of black and white photos and four of his watercolor/govache paintings.

Enter Cedar Block, the brainchild of Brent Gohde, ostensibly a member of Milwaukee’s emerging DIY Art Movement. (Though the city has yet to be recognized nationally as a haven for such, we are confident it will, so we’ll just say it now). Gohde, like his peers, is firmly committed to the principle that there is a place for every artist who wants to work, even if their talents and opportunities don’t fall into traditionally accepted tracks. To that end, Cedar Block stages unusual events, from Weird Science Fairs to essay contests, and now an exhibit of lomography-inspired photographs by local artists in conjunction with the Leiter exhibit.

“There’s never been a voice that shouldn’t be heard,” says Gohde. “These events provide a venue for the non-traditional artist to show their work, have it displayed in a world-class museum. My fondest hope is reaching further quarters of the Milwaukee community so others can be creative.”

Now lomography. In production from the 1950s until 2005, the Russian-made LOMO is a compact, simple camera with a special gift for “accidents” like over-saturated colors, lens artifacts and exposure defects that its legions of users have turned to their own devices. Any camera can be used to create pictures in the lomographic style, which emphasizes casual snapshots and revels in vérité sometimes bordering on the surreal. And what the camera doesn’t capture, Photoshop can augment.

On September 22, Gohde led a team of photographers who responded to an open call on Cedar Block’s website (www.cedarblock.com) to a 15-block stretch of Milwaukee Street to shoot whatever they saw in that particular place on that particular day. They were instructed to “shoot from the hip,” the motto of lomography. Filmmakers documented the event, and on October 13 the public is invited to view the results.

Milwaukee Street, Milwaukee will feature the winning photographs pieced together to form abstract walls of lomographic imagery, as well as multi-media performances by donebestdone, Chris Rosenau, Jim Schoenecker, Hal Rammel and Jim Warchol; a runway show presenting the Fasten Co-Op’s take on the fashions of the 1950s (when Leiter was a fashion photgrapher); a PowerJoint presentation by Evan Gritzon and more. After the show, a selection of the photos will be exhibited at Bremen Café (901 E. Clarke St., Milwaukee) until the end of November.

“Programs like this give local artists a chance to engage in a creative dialogue with the Museum,” explains Katie Heldstab, media relations coordinator for MAM. “We are challenging local artists to make connections, between their own artistic process and the art of Saul Leiter, between each other, and with the city of Milwaukee.” VS