A Conversation with Photographer and Sociologist, David Schalliol

PART FOUR

[Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by David Schalliol, http://www.davidschalliol.com/photography]

Jessica Savitz: Why do you like to photograph at night?

David Schalliol: There are a variety of personal and aesthetic reasons why I enjoy photographing at night.

On the personal side, I am particularly drawn to photographing very late at night because the city is relatively peaceful.

It can be difficult to stop and explore a place during the day because of the bustle of the community or the traffic in the street. But after midnight or 1am on a weeknight, one can particularly appreciate a different kind of relationship to a place.

Aesthetically, I’m both drawn to the night’s palette and its way of drawing attention to the layers of the city.

While human presence is ubiquitous during the day, it is primarily visible at night because of our intentional efforts to lay claim to place through streetlights, porch lights and other sources of “artificial” light like neon signs, blue light cameras or even trains.

These claims can be for community or for individuals, but they are conscious invasions of the darkness.

JS: You write of Detroit, “Streets take on a patchwork appearance from the hues of private light sources: the bluish whites of fluorescent signs, reds of neon gas and pale yellows of porch lights.”

Do you feel these neighborhood light sources, including the speedy beam of light from the el train and lights billowing up behind fog, serve as complex allegories in your work?

DS: I’ve always been interested in visualizing social phenomena, so I think about many of those elements as reminders (if not symbols) of overarching social structures, whether they are commercial, governmental or community institutions. I emphasize that perspective in my Detroit series, in which I explore Detroit residents’ relationship with municipal institutions by documenting their responses to the gaps of Detroit’s relatively dysfunctional streetlight system.

By focusing on absence and presence of personal and public light sources, I hope to more generally call attention to issues of community engagement in a context of resource deprivation.

JS: Where do you see street photography going?

DS: Given the seeming ubiquity of cheap, small digital cameras and the increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, I think some form of street photography will become the dominant mode of photography – if it already isn’t. As photography has been democratized and simplified by these automatic cameras, an astounding volume of photographs is produced every day. Among these images are certainly typical photographs of friends or places that are important to the photographer, but more of these images are of fleeting moments on the street and the beauty or comedy of ephemera. There is already a formalist backlash to these kinds of images, but I expect street photographs will continue to grow in number (and, in some cases, quality) as people have better access to the means to produce them. What will hopefully emerge is a more complete, personal and democratic depiction of human life.

JS: Joseph Campbell wrote in 1985, “The relationship of myths to cosmology and sociology has got to wait for man to become used to the new world that he is in. The world is different today from what it was fifty years ago. But the inward life of man is exactly the same.” He also wrote, “When you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology” (Campbell 169-70).

I am particularly thinking here of your wondrous photograph from The Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation—the young boy in the housing projects surveying the city from above.

Do you ever feel that you are recording with your camera some sorts of promising modern day myths? And how might the role of the photographer tie into this?

DS: Absolutely. Any representation allows viewers to bring their own experiences to settings with which they have little direct experience, offering the opportunity for a wide range of interpretations. Those new interpretations are then integrated into new understandings of the world as it is -- and as it has been. Photography is particularly effective at doing this in part because of its vividness and seemingly easy interpretability. It takes on a special position as a bearer of truth, with photographers creating objects that uniquely facilitate and constrain possible understandings of the world as it is, but also as it could be. As individuals and as a society, we reckon with these depictions of ourselves and assimilate them as we recreate ourselves. The emerging social conception has the potential for tremendous influence.

* * *

A Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, David Schalliol is academically and artistically interested in issues of social stratification and meaning in the social and physical worlds.

In addition to his sociological and photographic activities, David plays an active role on several websites, including his work as Founder and Editor of metroblossom and Managing Editor of Gapers Block.

* * *

We at MIR express our gratitude to David Schalliol for sharing his compelling and masterful photographs and for his eloquent and educational participation in the interviews for the June series.

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a consultation regarding your most prized works of art.



Interview by Jessica Savitz



MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.


Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM


307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308


Chicago, IL 60601


(312) 814-8510



Works Cited:

http://www.davidschalliol.com/photography

Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.

A Tribute to Chicago Painters, c. Late 19th-Early 20th Centuries

Moving to Chicago just a little over a year and a half ago I was unfamiliar with Chicago artists. Loving the artists from my native Minnesota made me curious about the artists of Chicago. The beauty of the city of Chicago and the wonderful geography of Illinois gave me a strong incentive to discover these artists. After searching on the Internet for artists from the Chicago area I found very little information and it became very time consuming. When I joined MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. I finally became immersed with some excellent Chicago area artists. I found that most of these artists were born outside of the United States, but chose Chicago to progress their artistic talents. These artists have helped pave the way in making Chicago one of the premier artist cities in the world.

Gianni Cilfone's Moonrise

Gianni Cilfone was born in Italy and came to Chicago when he was five years old. Gianni Cilfone trained at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting "Moonrise" that is hanging on the walls at Mir was exhibited at the 1929 annual exhibit at the Art Institute. Cilfone's paintings are characterized by his warm colors and impressionistic style. His landscapes give off a peaceful tranquility with his calm compositions. Cilfone would paint side by side for many years with another artist who resided in Chicago named Samuel Bartilotta. Cilfone would later become a instructor at the Art Institute where he would share his knowledge and skill to young artists.

Henry Hulsmann

Henry Hulsmann was a German immigrant artist who painted in and around the Chicago area. Hulsmann grew up in a small farming town in Germany and moved to America when he was nineteen. Hulsmann would individually create frames to match his paintings. This would put a valuable relationship between the painting and the frame. Hulsmann's landscapes look like they could have painted in Germany. Many of his landscapes would have farming themes, which may have reminded him of his native Germany. Hulsmann's daughter was also a well known Chicago artist.

Harry Mintz's Naples 3

Harry Mintz was a polish born Artist who immigrated to America where he became a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. His lively abstract paintings capture the vitality and energy of Chicago. He experimented with a abstract expressionist style that was in a color field style. His paintings are very intuitive and emotionally intense. Some of his compositions would be entirely abstract, while others were more concrete.

Joseph Tomanek

Joseph Tomanek was born in Czechoslovakia and came to Chicago when he was 21 years. old. Tomanek painted very nice nudes that look similar to that of Renoir. His paintings were very delicate and feminine, with his loose brushstrokes and pastel colors. His nudes were very idealized, Tomanek would pick and choose different parts from his models to create the idyllic woman.

These artists are only a small sample of the incredible talent pool of Chicago artists. Chicago is a such a melting pot of cultures that these artists were able to come from all over the world to bring their own styles and cultural experiences to the city of Chicago. This would not have been possible without the proper institutions to harbor the talents of these artists. The Art Institute of Chicago showed how incredibly influential it has been in developing the art scene in Chicago. There are also a number of different artists groups and coalitions that have nurtured the arts scene in Chicago. Here at Mir our appraisers have a wealth of information on Chicago artists, but we are constantly trying to expand this knowledge. If you have any artwork by Chicago area artists, please let our dedicated staff take a look.

Written and researched Robert Snell

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601

Phone: (312) 814-8510

Web: www.mirappraisal.com

Works cited:

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=86711

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=11156817

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=24448

http://www.harrymintz.com

Survey of Polish Artists: Part II

Many Polish artists, although beginning their studies in Poland, studied and traveled extensively throughout Europe and the United States. Three such artists share similar beginnings, all starting their training at the Warsaw Drawing School. Artists Jan Van Chelminski, Jozef Marian Chelmonski, and Wladslaw Czachorski attended the art school in Warsaw in the late 1860s and early 1870s and went on to have successful careers as painters, gaining fame in Europe and the United States.

Jan Van Chelminski, perhaps the most recognized of the three painters, was born in 1851. After training at the Warsaw Drawing School, he left for Munich and worked with Alexander Strahuber and Alexander Wagner, Jozef Brandt, and Franz Adam. During this time, Chelminski traveled to New York, Paris, and London and built a name for himself as an artist. He painted mostly hunting scenes and eighteenth-century genre pictures.

As his popularity grew, he was commissioned to paint portraits of Princess Teresa, Prince Regent Leopold, and Prince Emanuel. King Louis even bought his “The Hunt Par Force”.

In England and America Chelminski painted sport and genre scenes with the air of a traditional English painter. These gained the artist enormous success and provided Chelminski access to important peoples, including Theodore Roosevelt, of whom he illustrated numerous hunting stories. These paintings appeared in Century Magazine in 1885.

As his financial and artistic success grew, Chelminski’s love of battle scenes grew as well. He began collecting weapons, particularly from the Napoleonic period, which later became a significant theme in his work. Through intense study, the artist was able to take his portrayal of battle scenes to the next level, and in 1904, a collection of his battle paintings was exhibited at the Galerie des Artistes Moderns in Paris. The same year forty-eight paintings in tribute to the army of the Duchy of Warsaw were exhibited in Paris as well. These paintings, along with all his battle scene paintings, provide incredible documentation and are extremely historically accurate. Permanent collections of Chelminski’s work are exhibited throughout Poland and abroad. In the United States his paintings have been sold at auctions for close to $100,000.

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. has had the good fortune of appraising pieces by Jan Van Chelminski in addition to researching various reknowned Polish artists. For more information, take a look at our past blog entry about Chelminski and his success in the United States.

Here are a few of Chelminski's works that we have worked with at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.:

http://chicagoappraisers.blogspot.com/2009/07/jan-van-chelminski-1851-1925.html (Past MIR Blog about Chelminski)

Jozef Marian Chelmonski trained at the Warsaw Drawing School from 1867 to 1871. During his studies he worked in the private studio of Wojciech Gerson who greatly influenced his early work. He moved to Munich for the years of 1871 to 1874 and formed a relationship with a circle of Munich-based Polish artists, including Jozef Brandt and Maksymilian Gierymski. Throughout his years in Munich, the artist made many returning trips to Poland, visiting Podolia and the Ukraine. These trips undoubtedly left a lasting impression on Jozef that is quite evident in his work.

Jozef Marian Chelminski traveled to Paris during the 1880’s and in 1889 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Universal Exposition. While working in Paris, the artist formed a relationship with art dealer A. Groupil, who made his paintings available to English and American collectors. Some of his most popular paintings feature a motif of horses galloping through the snow.

The artist also worked as an illustrator, and from 1884 to 1892, was employed by the Parisian magazine Le monde ilustre, like Polish artist Wladyslaw Teodor Benda.

Jozef exhibited in Chicago in 1903 and continued painting up until his death in 1914. He was most inspired and most happy in his native Poland, where he returned permanently near the end of his life. His later works are reflective and melancholic, showing a huge respect and affection for the border regions of his country, where he spent so much of his life.

Quite opposite to Jozef Marian in his affinity for depicting their native country was Wladyslaw Czachorski.

Like Jan Van and Jozef Marian, Czachorski began his studies at the Warsaw Drawing School and like the others, he traveled to Germany and eventually settled in Munich. Czachorski did a lot of traveling throughout his early years as an artist, mostly to France and Italy, sometimes visiting his native Poland. Although he came from a similar background of culture and training as both Chelminski’s, Czachorski created paintings with an English flare, and abandoned Polish cultural influences. In fact, many of his paintings are of Shakespearean scenes. His most recognized work, “Hamlet Receiving the Players”, from 1875 shows his affinity for English literature.

Czachorski also painted portraits, still lifes, and genre scenes. His paintings of young women in luxurious interiors show off his ability as an artist, for the women, jewelry, fabrics, and clothing are depicted with incredible detail. His canvases exude luxury and elegance with an almost photographic realism.

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Researched and written by Taylor Maatman

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601

Phone: (312) 814-8510



Works Cited:
http://www.thekf.org/kf/gallery/artists/Czachorski/

A Conversation with Photographer and Sociologist David Schalliol

PART THREE

[Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by David Schalliol, http://www.davidschalliol.com/photography]

Jessica Savitz: Your masterful photographs often confront social problems and community change—would you say that your artistic aims are perhaps very different from those of someone like Winogrand, who, in the words of John Szarkowski, “insisted that he was not a philosopher, and did not accept the obligations that are incumbent upon that role. He accepted responsibility only for the clarification, within the potentials of photography, of his own experience” (Szarkowski). What does it mean to you to be a photographer and a sociologist? How do you think an artist reconciles morality and aesthetics—for you, as a sociologist and a photographer, do you envision a wedding of the two roles?

David Schalliol: Being a sociologist and a photographer requires holding oneself to multiple standards (some in conflict with each other, most in support of each other), but I mainly see it as having an imperative to seek some kind of truth using a broad range of tools. Rather than primarily expressing my own perspective, I seek to both represent a range of perspectives as well as organize material to illuminate new understandings of the human condition – all the while paying critical attention to aesthetics. It’s a tall order that I am certainly not always able to fill, but I consistently seek to improve my work in the traditions of both disciplines. Negotiating the two is somewhat simplified by an understanding that, as social beings, we must work to consistently hold ourselves to particular principles of social action. Those principles are equally relevant to all activities.

JS: I appreciate your complex reconsiderations of particular settings and photographic tropes and symbology. In your Detroit series, you eloquently write, “Detroit is not merely ‘the failure of Fordism’ or ‘the proving ground for future society’ but a unique lived presence, and, for many, home” (http://www.davidschalliol.com/).

Walker Evans wrote, in a 1934 letter he never sent, “Detroit’s full of chances” (Meyerowitz 286).

You philosophize, “Dereliction, its correction and the steady current of life are fundamentally intertwined,” which brings to mind your striking photograph of the fire lushly blooming beyond a backyard fence.

One of my favorites of your photographs is similarly complex, showcasing people planting bushy grasses in front of an immense, vacant building. It seems to me that this photograph isn’t simply a straightforward ode to “renewal”; rather, it seems a beautiful investigation of repetition and a strange immortality—the abandoned building, expressive of a sort of “intimate immensity”, its empty windows like repeated photographic “frames”, harmonize strangely with the uniform bushy trees and the uniformed planters (which, because of their uniformity, almost gives the sense of a time-lapse photograph of one immortal man, dressed in a yellow tee-shirt, planting in the soil for all time) (Bachelard 184). Is this a picture of the eternal human project of building upon the earth?

DS: I’d say that half of the photograph is about the complexities of human manipulation of the earth in sociopolitical context, but the other half is about the flipside of that process. We are unique creatures, but it is important to remind ourselves that we are as natural as everything else. Reconceptualizing human activity as one aspect of much larger natural processes provides new ways to interpret human action as a contributor to a variety of life cycles rather than an exogenous influence on one another.

JS: Whereas some street photographers might regard a shot of a particular building as incidental or merely visually interesting, you are thoughtfully approaching relationships between buildings and people; buildings can be “harbingers of the aspirations of community change” and “bellwethers of dramatic economic development dynamics” (http://www.davidschalliol.com/) — the nearly heavenly photograph of the Farnsworth-house-pristine white food-stand from Detroit:

and "Chud's" with the gentleman and his shadow walking so intimately past it:

the chapel-like little gray building with drooped shoulders:

Gaston Bachelard writes, “Winter is the oldest of seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old.”

Bachelard quotes Henri Bachelin: “Those were the evenings when, in old houses exposed to snow and icy winds, the great stories, the beautiful legends that men handed down to one another, take on concrete meaning…and thus it was, perhaps, that one of our ancestors, who lay dying in the year one thousand, should have come to believe in the end of the world.”

Bachelard: “And what a striking thing that a mere image of the old homestead in the snow-drifts should be able to integrate images of the year one thousand in the mind of a child” (Bachelard 41-2).

A white house with pink trim somehow seems to emit snow and light and the sense of the eternal, from your Isolated Building Studies.

What did you feel most at the time you took this photograph of the house in the snow? Why is an isolated house in the snow is so evocative?

DS: The relative size of the house, the pink trim and snow evoked an almost idyllic sense despite the obvious indications of heavy industry and neighborhood clearance, but my dominant feeling was actually contrary to the mood of the image. This is a case in which an image is unable to accurately convey the feeling of a place because it doesn’t account for smell. There was an overwhelming stench in the air that appeared just as I was taking the photograph. Despite the smell clearing within a couple of minutes, my chest ached for another hour. Here, the idyllic feeling was counteracted by disgust and a little pain. All of that said, with time, I’ve come to relate to the photograph more on visual than my initial experiential terms.

More generally, I think a snowy landscape is particularly special for visual representations of place because it softens and homogenates the landscape. It covers trash, derelict lots, and other signs of community problems and -- when freshly fallen -- substitutes a pristine softness.

From there, we fill in the blanks. Despite its urban context, the isolated building surrounded by snow has the potential to be read as even more rural, and thus more connected to our idealized agrarian past than our urban present. Rather than seeing a house in a neighborhood that has suffered forty years of decline, we reference the frontier life of farms dotting the horizon.

* * *

A Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, David Schalliol is academically and artistically interested in issues of social stratification and meaning in the social and physical worlds.

In addition to his sociological and photographic activities, David plays an active role on several websites, including his work as Founder and Editor of metroblossom and Managing Editor of Gapers Block.

* * *

Please visit our blog site again soon; next week, we will showcase part four of the Schalliol interview.

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.



Interview by Jessica Savitz



MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.


Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM


307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601


Phone: (312) 814-8510



Works Cited:

http://www.davidschalliol.com/photography

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Szarkowski, John. Winogrand: Figments From the Real World. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988.