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CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival Magazine
TORONTO STAR, Toronto, May 1, 2008
Excerpt from an article on CONTACT Photofestival
Beyond photography
Ten highlights amid hundred's of events
History. Rejecting American photographer Edward Curtis's overtly romanti-
cized portraiture of North American Indians, Eric Klemm's "Silent Warriors"
series at Odon Wagner Contemporary is based on unsentimental First Nations
portraits all done against the neutralizing effect of a white background.
EYE WEEKLY, Toronto, May 1, 2008
Eric Klemm Silent Warriors
Eric Klemm's new series "Silent Warriors" is informed by one of photography's
most famous attempts a comprehensive documentation: Edward Sheriff Curtis
Teddy Roosevelt - approved, J.P.Morgan - funded North American Indian, an
ethnographic survey done between 1907 and 1930 and consisting of over
2,000 photographs.
Curtis has since been criticized for the inaccuracy of the project; he carefully
posed his subjects to suit his romanticized, Rousseauvian view of them.
(A translator once told him, "You are trying to get what does not exist")
Klemm, who is white like Curtis and who also crossed the continent to shoot
his work, could be seen as trying to right some of these perceived wrongs.
The photographs are frank: Klemm has used only natural lighting and white
backgrounds, and has made an effort to be as spontaneous as possible in
approaching his subjects, who are alternately dressed in traditional and con-
temporary garb. Of course, this frankness still bears hallmarks of construction:
the work adopts a crisply focused, mug shot - like style favoured by many
fashion magazines nowadays.
More pertinent is Klemm's apparent interest in the ways in which his subjects
self - construct. Here is ethnic costume at a more varied, personal level than
Curtis saw it ( (the idiosyncratic shadings here may even remind some people
of modern sports - game or rock - concert get - ups).
The project remains a form of portraiture, however ---- one intent on detail, and
arguably frailty, rather than on majestic homogeneity.
THE GLOBE & MAIL, Toronto, May 10, 2008
A Rorschach test of pencil shavings
by Gary Michael Dault
Eric Klemm at Odon Wagner Contemporary
It's funny, sometimes, how things come about. Photographer Eric Klemm had just returned from a long and demanding journey through North America, in pursuit of the photographs that would make up his book, Silent Warriors: Portraits of North American Indians (forthcoming from Steidl). He'd been away from his family for months, and now he was back home on Saltspring Island and ready for a little refreshing downtime.
"I was sitting watching my daughter, Gina, sharpening a coloured pencil," Klemm told me during a recent visit to Toronto for the Contact festival - where he is exhibiting his Silent Warriors photographs at Odon Wagner Contemporary. "It struck me that the pencil shavings were strangely interesting to look at, and I told Gina to keep sharpening while I went to get my camera."
Gina did, and Klemm did, and the result of that day's photographic fancy was a suite of large-scale colour photographs called Shavings, now installed in the second floor gallery at Odon Wagner.
The dramatic Silent Warriors collection is, deservedly, a CONTACT Feature Exhibition. As such, it tends to overshadow the quite different Shavings photos upstairs. Which is a bit unfortunate, really, since these strange, extremely painterly photos of planes of pencil shavings - both Gina's and Klemm's own ("I broke the first pencil sharpener," he tells me, "and went out and bought 20 more") - are pretty much inexhaustible as a locus of photographic incident.
It's always impressive when images are able to hold a multitude of different readings without coming apart under the strain. So it is with the Shavings photographs.
Depending on the kind of pencil that expelled these wafer-thin whorls and parings of coloured wood, the photos can look like a forest floor congested with dead leaves, or, when the shavings are arranged as a disc, a nosegay of flowers. Sometimes they look like floral doormats. Or specimens spread out under a microscope slide, or - as with the photo reproduced here - a pile of potato peelings. Or a meadow crisping in the autumn sun.
It's paradox that powers them: The Shavings photographs are blatant in their beauty and, at the same time, ironic about it to the point of coyness.
On the one hand, their appeal is to a powdery, bedroomy, over-the-top kind of greeting-card fulsomeness. At the same time, however, they proffer an almost demonic guilelessness and a sort of aggressively innocent, open-eyed wonder at their own opulence.
Formally, the Shavings address another duality: First, they are as flat as a photographic plane must inescapably be. But second, as pictorial tapestries, they are made up, visually speaking, of accumulations of pencil shavings that now read as spikes and spirals, curls and shards, that make the photographs look like photographed paintings (they look a little like Jackson Pollocks, for example).
Simultaneously glamorous and cynical, Klemm's Shavings both beckon the viewer with their swarming energies, and, at the same time, withdraw their visual favours, leaving the onlooker restless and indecisive about whether to applaud the ease with which they achieve their effects, or to deplore the apparent impurity of their ambitions.
I am, of course, on the side of applause.
ARGYLE Magazine, Toronto, May 2008
Photographer: Eric Klemm
Odon Wagner Contemporary, 172 Davenport Road
CONTACT TORONTO PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL:
Between Memory and History May 1-31
The 12th installment of North America's largest annual photographic festival
begins May 1st. This year's theme focuses on the
overwhelming impact of
technology on today's society. Artists use photography to communicate the
way in which we are overloaded
with news and how this is shaping the history
of today's world. The festival takes place in galleries and public spaces
across the GTA. www.contactphoto.com