Last week, Eric Hanson, Coffee House Press‘s artist-in-residence at the Minneapolis Institute of Art’ Research and Reference Library, took a trip across the atrium to spend some time in the MIA’s Photographs Study Room with our Curator of Photography and New Media, David Little. Read Eric’s reflections below and stay tuned for illustrations inspired by this visit, coming soon. Follow along with all his musings (written and illustrated) here on MIA Stories, or over at CHP In The Stacks.
In The Stacks with Eric Hanson: Fragments Ready to Use
I’m a great admirer of photography and have a number of photo books on my own shelves. Mostly photographers from a century or more ago. Atget, August Sander, 19th century British photographers, mountain photography by German and Austrian photographers from the period between the world wars.
Atget and others of his type satisfy my deep interest in architecture and city streets, the places where our ancestors lived. When I’m reading a book set in another time and place I like to be able to visualize the streets the characters are walking down, the rooms where the story is taking place. Atget’s photos are documentary in approach: direct uncropped views of hundreds of Paris streets from the late 19th and early 20th century, most taken at dawn and empty of people and traffic. The buildings are shot directly from eye level (presaging the Google view of the modern streetscape but infinitely more textured and interesting.) They provide a pure unmediated document of Paris at that time, artful in their absence of art direction.
MIA Curator of Photography and New Media David Little (left) and author/illustrator Eric Hanson (right) in the Photography Study Room, May 2014.
August Sander set out to photograph all the characteristic types and personalities of the German Volk, from circus performers to writers to bricklayers and pastry cooks. Each figure stands planted firmly on two feet facing the camera. It anchors them in reality somehow. This continuity of Sanders’ has influenced how I tend draw people, sometimes a dozen sheets or more of figures in a day, variously dressed and built but most of them facing the artist as if about to begin a conversation.
There is something very useful in this kind of documentary image because it doesn’t suggest an artistic approach. There is an absence of commentary and metaphor, allowing me to pilfer the authentic elements they contain and insert them into whatever idea or concept or analogy occurs to me, collaging the drawn elements the way the collage artist Hannah Hoch cut and assembled elements from photographs found in magazines and museum catalogs or the way Joseph Cornell inserted fragments of things into his shadowboxed frame. This kind of photograph becomes a vocabulary of fragments ready to use.
Next week, I’ll share the sketches I made based on the works I encountered during my visit with David.
About Eric: His illustrations and writing have appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s, New York Times, Rolling Stone, McSweeney’s and The Atlantic. A Book of Ages, published in 2008, is his wittily curated collection of moments in the lives of the famous. He also creates children’s books. He will discuss his MIA residency and present new work inspired by it on Thursday, June 19th at 7pm in the MIA’s Friends Community Room, during Third Thursday: Get Local. You’re invited. Until then, you have his words and drawings.