INSTALLATION SHOTS FROM WIRTZ SHOW
new press in SF WEEKLY
“Dead Men Don’t Look Like Me”: Paul Schiek’s Arresting Images
By Jonathan Curiel Wednesday, May 9 2012
At Stephen Wirtz Gallery, prison mug shots from the 1950s offer a striking counterpoint to the tense portrait of a closed-eyed Ross Mirkarimi. Unidentified Georgia inmates stare straight into the camera, some looking quizzical, some perplexed, defiant, or even smug. Oakland photographer Paul Schiek obtained the original images from a friend, who found them at an abandoned Georgia prison. Schiek narrowed down the stash to 20 men who looked a bit like him — white, darkish hair, between 25 and 40 years old — and then cropped the mug shots and re-photographed them. Detached from prison numbers and other marks identifying them as “inmates,” the photos could be audition shots for a Humphrey Bogart film. The thin line between failure and success, between one economic class and another, is in the eyes of these select men. Despite the exhibit’s title, Schiek is loosely identifying with these criminals, letting them stand as proxies for anyone who believes they could never relate to the incarcerated.
KEN BAKER REVIEWS “DEAD MEN DONT LOOK LIKE ME” IN SATURDAYS SF CHRONICLE
San Francisco OAKLAND photographer Paul Schiek has composed a roomful of head shots at Wirtz, titled “Dead Men Don’t Look Like Me,” in which few visitors will linger comfortably.
After a friend sent him a box load of half-century-old mug shots from an abandoned prison in rural Georgia, Schiek evolved the idea of refashioning them as portraits. He re-photographed the tiny pictures and printed them, much enlarged, on paper with an unusually metallic finish that quietly evokes the “silver screen” of which many of the depicted prisoners appear to have dreamed. Schiek’s treatment magnified the found images’ physical imperfections: They now seem to symbolize whatever defects of personality or judgment landed the men in prison. The source prints’ creases and scratches and their perforation by staples have also made scale in Schiek’s photographs matter in ways it ordinarily does not.
Most of these unsavory-looking characters addressed the intake photographer’s camera as if they had ready-made roles for themselves in mind. “Smith” (2011), though he could not have imagined it, looks a menacing cross between James Dean and James Badge Dale.
“Dunnell” (2011) may have thought a little too much about Lloyd Nolan and George Raft, while others, such as “Victory” (2011) and “Carroll” (2011), merely put across that they had ideas of themselves for which perhaps no Hollywood counterpart could be found.
The recent popular and critical fascination with anonymous photographs of untraceable subjects provides context for Schiek’s series, but Andy Warhol’s “Most Wanted Men” paintings of the 1960s mark its most important artistic precedent. The unabashedly starstruck Warhol silkscreened on canvas enlarged black-and-white images from actual FBI wanted posters to produce nameless portraits of individuals famous - and unavailable - for all the wrong reasons. (Schiek’s series lacks the gay-outlaw subtext of “Most Wanted Men.”)
Sherrie Levine became famous for re-photographing photographs back at the dawn of postmodernism, but she chose as originals some of the most recognized images made by Walker Evans. By choosing source images highly charged by their odd history, their authorlessness and creepy emotional content, Schiek suggests that re-photography may have yet further potential.
Paul Schiek: Dead Men Don’t Look Like Me: Photographs; Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 49 Geary St., S.F. (415) 433-6879. www.wirtzgallery.com.
Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic. kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/04/DDFQ1OBA1T.DTL#ixzz1u6t0C2cQ
State of the photograph: three artists respond to digital technologies
Photography was forever changed with the introduction of cheap digital technologies that have allowed for the mass proliferation of imagery to a level never seen before. In response, various artists have either embraced or rejected these technologies in various degrees. Three current exhibitions of photography embody the various responses by artists to these technologies while creating images that are either unique and arresting or quick and slick in their presentation.
Paul Schiek employs the least use of new technologies to create his works. The inspiration for the works in Schiek’s show, ‘dead men don’t look like me,’ at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, came from a collection of mug shots that a friend of his found in an abandoned prison in Georgia. According to the artist, he has had this collection for some time and was not sure what to do with it. “There are about 400 images of prisoners from all different races and backgrounds that date from the 1940s – the 1960s,” said Schiek as I spoke with him about the show. Sorting through them, the artist decided to “pick out the ones who fit a certain set of criteria to create this show.” Those criteria are a white male, 29 – 37 years of age, with a fob hair cut and that are aesthetically engaging. These criteria are drawn from a loose description of the artist himself, and create the source of irony Schiek has employed in titling the show.
“There is so much cultural baggage attached to mug shots, I was looking for a way to get past that when I used them,” said Schiek as we discussed the technologies behind the creation of his works. The finished pieces range in size from 16 x 12 inches on the small side and 40 x 30 on the large end, with varying editions for each size. To achieve the enlargement from the original image, Schiek scanned the originals with a high definition scanner and then had them printed the using a process that exposes photographic paper to a controlled light source to ensure accurate exposure.
All of the marks, stains, tears, and scratches in the originals have been left untouched in the finished images. The re-photographing of the images has pushed these elements into the image another layer, making them seamlessly integrated to it. The only editing of the images was minor burning and dodging of certain areas to reveal an eye or lip better, which are traditional techniques in photography. The final touch by the artist is the subtle hand cutting of the new images along their bottom edge, which gives them that necessary unfinished element.
The combination of this subtle effort has produced works that leave no doubt to their origins, but do not present the viewer the cultural attachments of a historic artifact or with the issue of image appropriation while revealing their haunting beauty. It is rare to say of a show, but each work is as equally powerful as the next in confronting the viewer with the dark reality of each man’s life and existence when the original photograph was taken. Paul Schiek has employed the latest technologies in subtle and sophisticated ways to present to us, anew, this form of portraiture and to return our gaze to this element of our history and society.
For Immediate Release
Paul Schiek - dead men don’t look like me
26 April – 2 June 2012
Stephen Wirtz Gallery
First Thursday reception: 3 May, 5 -7 pm
Artist reception: 5 May, 4-6 pm
Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present dead men don’t look like me, an exhibition of new photographs by Paul Schiek.
Presented are 15 portraits of men re-photographed from 1950s-era mug shots found by the artist’s friend Mike Brodie in an abandoned Georgia prison. Brodie gifted the mug shots to Schiek, who then edited the original cache of hundreds down to a select few, cropped the images to remove all official documentary references while leaving stains, staple marks, tears and other signs of age, and enlarged the prints on highly reflective chromogenic paper to imbue them with personal and cultural meaning beyond their original purpose.
Mug shots are compelling by nature, and Schiek was particularly struck by his subjects’ brutally glamorous attractiveness, a blood-and-guts charm he describes as “the American male stench.” Like young actors posing for a Hollywood headshot, they smirk and leer at the camera with palpable defiance, collars popped on their standard issue prison shirts. These are haunting and seductive images that reveal the interplay between cinematic fantasy and real-life criminality in the concept of the American antihero—from the iconic movie rebel James Dean, to the mass murderer Charles Starkweather, who infamously resembled Dean, to Martin Sheen, whose character in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands was itself based on Starkweather.
Schiek also drew inspiration from Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, a 1973 cult publication recounting the violent and eerie history of a small, Victorian-era Midwestern town through historical photographs and documents. A formative artistic influence on Wisconsin native Schiek, Lesy’s book asserts “the pictures you are about to see are of people that were once actually alive,” an assertion Schiek echoes in his comments on his own work. “The truth in the photos is these men died. Like all men die. Like I will die.” Recognizing the thin line that connects and separates these men from him, Schiek worked reductively to organize the photographs according to certain obvious visual cues—age, race, hairstyle, bearing—arriving at a group that drew a passing visual resemblance to himself, though the lives portrayed played out differently than his own.
In romanticizing and repurposing these images, enshrining them as icons of dark impulses, Schiek resurrects them as art objects. By utilizing them to wrestle with notions of the self, he stares smack in the face of his own mortality. What results is something rich and unwieldy in its dichotomies—a self-portrait created from typology, fiction created from history, and optimism gleaned from morbidity.
Paul Shiek was born and raised in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He attended California College of the Arts and currently lives in Oakland, California. In 2011, his work was included in the California Biennial, at the Orange County Museum of Art, and Hauntology, at the Berkeley Art Museum, curated by Scott Hewicker and Lawrence Rinder. Schiek is the founder of TBW Books, a publishing imprint that has produced books of his images and those of other photographers. His work is included in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as many private collections.
on press for SF JAZZ BOOK
DEAD MEN DONT LOOK LIKE ME BOX SET
a luxury item needs i nice custom bag to be housed in while it gets shipped to its new home. this is step one . off to be dyed black now. full details to emerge in the next two weeks about the final product.
SF JAZZ BOOK #2
here is the official contributor list, we will be on press next week wednesday wrapping this project up.
will show photos from that as it happens:
Jacob Aue Sobol
Peter van Agtmael
Leon Borensztein
Andrew Bush
Benjamen Chinn
Doug Dubois
Mitch Epstein
J.W. Fisher / J.T. Leonard
Jason Fulford
Bruce Gilden
Greg Girard
Burt Glinn
David Goldblatt
Jim Goldberg
Nan Goldin
Katy Grannan
John Gutmann
Todd Hido
Thomas Hoepker
Dennis Hopper
Bill Jacobson
Susan Meiselas
Richard Misrach
Martin Parr
Christain Patterson
Doug Rickard
Alessandra Sanguinetti
Malick Sidibé
Alec Soth
Larry Sultan
Alex Webb
Ofer Wolberger
