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 here and check out his illustrations inspired by this visit below. 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 (Pt. 2)
Last week at the MIA photography library I took a different approach. I looked at photographs by Sze Tsung Leong, Berenice Abbott, and André Kertész, whose approach to their subject matter is entirely different. Less plain, less direct, more complex in composition. So I had some reservations about it. Abbott’s most arresting images of New York, for instance, are from high up. If I borrowed elements from these photographs I would be looking through her eyes from the p.o.v. she’d chosen, of a subject she had cropped for its patterning or arrangement of planes and lines. Kertész captured life as seen from the corner of the eye, fleetingly, with people in motion, their paths intersecting. The subject is the motion and the choreography in a world made up of moving parts.
Looking at this less static photography trains the eye to see things differently even after the photograph is put away. I find myself seeing patterns in the world I am in rather than simply seeing buildings and machines and people. Doing a quick drawing of the photograph prints the angle, the composition, the pattern, the movement on my memory. Photography can freeze motion long enough to draw what the hand and the pencil is ordinarily too slow to capture.
It may be noticeable that I drew these very quickly while standing up and holding the paper and Masonite board in the crook of my arm.
This Kertész photograph caught my eye because it contained some of the same formal shapes and geometry I was drawing in the formal gardens of Versailles.
The Berenice Abbott photograph of the 2nd and 3rd Ave elevated tracks that I drew from reminded me of the interior enfilades and corridors and formal avenues of trees that I have been drawing.
This last drawing is of a part of Chongqing that is besieged by the newer modern towers of the new China. The portion I drew is the small central part of a larger photograph by Sze Tsung Leong.
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.