Karl Baden

        This past Thursday I went to another photographer's lecture at my school with less than high expectations and came away with a fresh view on things.
        I went to the lecture (Boston area photographer Karl Baden) only knowing of Everyday, which he began in 1987, and consists of straight on neutral images of Baden's face, taken once a day for what is coming up on 23 years. (I haven't seen the project in person, and had only seen documentation of it as it was presented in the Howard Yezerski Gallery in 2007 - as small photographs arranged chronologically on three walls of a room). An interesting concept, but I was unsure what made it too different from all the (horrendous) time lapse photo a day nonsense everyone is doing of themselves on youtube these days.
        As it turned out, not only is Baden's body of work much more expansive than this (not a surprise, I was not expecting that this had been his only project) but the different ways Everyday have been presented were also particularly interesting and made a good argument for the ability of photography to be entirely transformed by the way it's presented.
        Baden started the project based on his interest in incremental change, specifically the way that if you look at the pictures one by one in order change is hardly noticeable, but if you look at the first and the last it's entirely in your face. He has made an effort to show the series of photographs differently each time, and the setup has ranged from simply being installed on a wall (such as at the Yezerski Gallery, where they were available individually for sale for I forget, something like $10), to buttons of just his eye for each election year, to all shrunken down to barely thumbnail size and featured on a single piece of paper, to two time lapsed pieces shown together - of the same video length but increasing by different increments of time - one by day and one by month. He has also made a special piece, covering a year in the 1990's when he was diagnosed with and overcame prostate cancer. The piece is a ~15minute time lapse of the year's worth of faces, with audio from conversations with doctors and family members. The piece is a particularly strong look into the effects of cancer, which are so infrequently seen by those who are not personally effected by it. Comparable to Hannah Wilke's self portraits of her deterioration from Lymphoma (a major difference being that she passed away from it, in 1993), Baden's work is particularly strong because you are confronted with extremely personal dialog, while being looked directly in the eye by Baden's thinning face.
        His other and earlier work also displays a heavy interest in time and the ability to occupy more than one space in one time, (or visa versa) as well as a much more humorous edge. He began with street photography and self-portraits while traveling the across US in his twenties, which he then described as "self-images"- because he believed they were not self-reflective, something he now laughs about acknowledging that they couldn't have been more so. The images are both awkward and funny, featuring things such as his open fist around his stubbled chin against a sunset, and employed a great deal of double exposing (all of his great strange work was done pre-photoshop, and usually in camera, though in a later project also by cutting up prints and inserting himself into other photographs). This evolved to using sheets of paper to plan out entire roles of film so that the contact sheet would create a surrealistic mutant composed entirely of Baden's body parts. He also created collages, scratched and burned negatives and used selective toning (later abandoning such projects that were non-replicable, something he believes is an important part of photography). Though much of his work is humorous, he notes that it is always "about photography".
        Other projects he presented included images created by printing pieces of the negatives that are next to one another on the film (something that is done more frequently now, but he did not know of anyone doing at the time, and used to explore the idea of two spaces existing in one time), the documentation of his wife's pregnancy and his daughter's babyhood (culminating in a book with simultaneously humorous and yet very serious pages from his diary at the time), and a project where he inserted himself into pictures that have ended up with particular weight in photo history.
        An all around interesting man... I really liked the way he thinks.

All of the Everyday shots
Baden's Yezerski Gallery page
Boston.com write-up of the 2007 show at the Yezerski Gallery
Covering Photography Baden's web project, "a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design."




images: various sources, c. Karl Baden