Hi. I'm Christie.

I take photos and make art.

Sometimes I write stuff.

publications

Review: "Don't Cry for Me When I'm Gone" at Women & Their Work, Austin, TX

In a letter to Orilla “Bill” Miller after the death of her husband, James Baldwin laments the inability of words to lessen the grief experienced after the loss of a loved one, a grief that exists because love exists, a grief that persists because love persists. “I don’t know if there is anything to be said concerning the passage of someone one loved — loves,” he writes, “for love does not exist in the past tense.” Through self-portraits, family photos and archives, appropriated and original texts, collage, found objects, and installation, Irene Antonia Diane Reece’s new solo exhibition exemplifies the nowness of love, even as it looks backward or considers what is to come.

essays

Identity As Construct

A critical characteristic of a photographic image is the fact that it is limited to what can be seen in the frame. “Regard this, remember this,” it says, as it implies that whatever is not seen is not of value, likewise, with archives, textbooks, museums, galleries, newspapers, magazines, and tour guides. The gatherers and distributors of information must decide what to include and what to exclude, and through their decisions, they create and disseminate representations of the world as they see it, or at least as they want it to be seen.

U.S. and Photographic History Through the Lens of the Civil War Era

In the introduction to his collection of essays on photography, Alan Trachtenberg concedes the existence of “a body of scholarship concerning the history of the medium,” but laments that, “insofar as a ‘practice’ is governed by the social structure within which it occurs, photographic history has ignored (by and large) the significant social history of the medium” (vii). Noting the importance of placing photographic history within the context of social and cultural history, Trachtenberg reminds the reader of photography’s birth and coming of age in a time “of change and unrest in Western society” (viii-ix). He lists a number of “great political and social revolutions in France and America,” from transcontinental railroads to expanding cities and the increasing use of machinery in production, but nowhere in his introduction does he even hint at the fact that in 1839, photography made its American debut in a nation intensely and increasingly divided over the issue of slavery. It’s a surprising omission given Trachtenberg’s astute understanding of photographic history as necessarily bound to social and cultural history.

Photography is Art, Is Philosophy, Is Argument -- Comparing the Works of Emmet Gowin and Sally Mann

Emmet Gowin and Sally Mann, photographers whose work is integral to the canon of American photography, built their names and careers photographing their own families in and around their homes in Virginia. With a similar inclination toward softly-focused, monochromatic images, frequently of nude or partially nude subjects, it may seem the obvious choice to focus on their many commonalities: children, spouses, domestic and intimate scenes, some captured spontaneously, others staged, with an appeal to everyday-ness, an organic affection for the human body, a poetic perspective, sometimes haunting, always examining. Their vastly different expressions of like-minded ideas about nature, however, particularly in light of the similarities in their family pictures, is more interesting.

Absolute Faith In the Illusion Is the Only Way

What began as an investigation into the problematic nature of the archive resulted in an Alice in Wonderland-style deep dive into theories of history, memory, and photography where, along the way, I encountered curious characters like Sontag, Kuhn, Bataille, and Derrida (to name only a few) who have wrestled with these recondite concepts and have found them to be about as easy to pin down as the Cheshire Cat. If even one of those words would hold its shape, it might form a solid foundation for defining the others, but studying the concepts seems to make them more slippery until one must throw her hands up and concede that perhaps nothing can be known for certain; things can both be and not be something at the same time. For answers to metaphysical questions, we have looked to technology, history and science for objectivity only to discover that photography and the archive, which, on the surface, appear to present a picture of reality, do not (except when they do;) history, which we perceive to be unchanging, is not (except when it is;) and memories, which we’d assumed to be accurate recollections of past events, are not (except when they are.) Ultimately, such an inconclusive investigation only results in more questions: Why do we collect and save information in the first place? Why do we tell stories? Take photos? Write novels?

Justine Kurland Makes Feminist Art

Photo: Justine Kurland, from her series Girl Pictures .......... It can be difficult to determine who is and who is not a feminist artist, and it doesn’t help that women within the movement not only disagree, but point fingers and accuse other artists of being traitorous to the movement. Pro-sex feminist Marilyn Minter was shamed for creating what other feminists deemed to be pornography. Francesca Woodman, known for creating nude self-portraits, has had her work examined and dissected by critics—some who claim she was clearly a feminist for taking control of the way she would be depicted in images, others who say she was more in line with her contemporaries, and others who claim she was merely troubled and narcissistic. Cindy Sherman has been hailed by some as a feminist artist for her work revealing femininity to be a constructed concept, while others claim she does nothing more than depict the nature of what is and therefore does nothing to change it.

A (Very) Brief Discourse On the Veracity of Photography

Years ago I submitted to my Rhetoric and Composition students a portion of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, a practice essay prompt that required them to construct an argument to support or refute Sontag’s assertion that photography has little ability to document truth. In pursuit of my undergraduate degree in Philosophy, I studied countless texts, both ancient and contemporary, which argued that truth is (or is not) definable, which questioned the existence of a knowable reality, and which wondered, if there was such a thing as a universal truth, how it was possible for anyone to know it. Thousands of years of philosophers could not agree. As for Sontag, she defined truth for herself and her readers and set to showing that photography could never meet those requirements, but in the absence of any qualifiers, without specific parameters, it’s harder to take a side.

What's the Story? Photography In the American South

A Google search for Southern Photography summons a set of photos one might expect to find in a collection of images from the American South: dilapidated structures, moss-and-vine-covered trees, old churches, river Baptisms, poor white people and poor black people. Narrow the search to include History Of and discover Civil War photos, images from New Deal photographers in the 1930s and 40s, and photos documenting the Civil Rights movement. These searches introduce a number of well-known photographers (at least among those who know about American history and/or the history of photography in America,) such as Matthew Brady and George Barnard, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks and Danny Lyon, to name a few.