Artlog

Interview with Laurel Ptak

Laurel Ptak curated Graphic Interchange Format, part of Young Curators, New Ideas at Bond Street. She is an independent curator based in New York City. She is founder of the blog iheartphotograph.com and Educational Programs Manager at the Aperture Foundation. She has recently taught/lectured on photography at the Cooper Union, NYU, SVA, Skidmore College, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, and the 2008 New York Photo Festival. She frequently curates “real world” exhibitions based on her blog and is currently at work on a book project about contemporary portraiture titled Un-Portrait.

You were asked to show where fine art photography is today. Why choose an outdated medium?

Laurel Ptak: It’s a medium that has a 20 year history and you actually still see a lot of artists working that way. I like the irony in that. It’s interesting to see how a medium is evolving. The lifespan of technology is incredible; it’s growing shorter and shorter. It’s amazing to me that the medium actually holds up. The work is really contemporary! When you see the work, you would never expect that it’s an “outdated medium”.

What got you thinking about GIF? I admit I’ve never heard of it…

Since the early days of the internet, it’s something that’s always fascinated me. Plus, there are a lot of new media artists working with it. I thought it would be interesting to see what photographers do with it. Exhibitions should be social experiments!

It seems like there’s a theme running through your curatorial work of the artistic “challenge”. Here you challenged your artists to work with this often unfamiliar medium under a time restraint. In a show earlier this year, you challenged artists around the world to make pictures of New Jersey “regardless of where [they] are in the world.” Why this thread?

I think “challenge” is a little bit too strong of a word. I don’t know another way to do something. Any curator creates a structure in which meaning is understood—in wall text, the order of the images, supporting materials, etc. I honestly don’t see it as so different in a way. It’s not so much challenging the artists. I love the feeling that you can just ask someone for something and have no idea what’s going to come back. You don’t have the advantages of a normal curator where you can see the work ahead of time and pull together ideas. It’s more a challenge to myself.

Who are these photographers? How did you choose them?

They’re mostly people I’ve posted about on iheartphotograph.com or people whose work I’ve seen before. I went a little outside of the reach of photography and also asked designers and new media artists because I thought they would have interesting points of entry as to what this medium is.

So what was the criteria you used in choosing the artists?

Mostly intuition. I looked for people with interesting minds—people willing to push photography in a new direction. I also thought about people who would be into the sporting event aspect of it—three days is a bit different from the normal commission. Additionally, I looked for artists with a variety of past interactions with the medium. Some have never used it before. Some are notorious for it.

In your statement about the show, you said, “Some use the form epically like a novelist or film director; others are self-reflective about the limits of technology and representation; many challenge photography’s usual atemporal disposition; and then some just make me giggle.” Which work made you giggle?

A lot of it! The first one that comes to mind is David Everett’s piece, Building My Virtual Self Esteem. He took a photo of a video game, clearly in some sort of domestic space—a very low fi 80’s looking game. Only a subtle part of it is animated.

Can I ask who you think are the “rising stars” of the photo world?

Everyone I asked to participate in this show should be considered that way! They’re all cutting edge and super hyper contemporary.