Ted Partin
Museum Haus Lange & Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany
Ted Partin, Reykjavik (2008), gelatin silver print, 37.5x47.5cm
At first, it all looks like something we’ve seen many times before: young people hanging around, not doing much, many of them look seriously into the camera and appear to be waiting for something. Nothing about them seems special or glamorous, and they don’t seem to have much in common. The photographs of the American artist Ted Partin feel effortless, like brief notes taken in passing: a woman looks through the windscreen into the car, another gets a tattoo, two guys climb over a garden wall, a woman dries her hair in the bathroom. But with a knowledge of how these pictures were made, their contrived character is manifest.
San Francisco I (2004)
Partin travels the country, with an unwieldy 8x10 inch camera, photographing friends or people he happens to see on the street. Every time, he has to set up the camera, install it on its stand, drape the black cloth over his head, and press the shutter release. This is a lengthy process, and his models have to keep still for quite a time. Most of them look fixedly and naturally in the photographer’s direction: they play the game, receiving his gaze and returning it.
Bushwick II (2007)
Each subject of these seemingly documentary portraits becomes an active co-creator of their own staged scene. The tension between formal composition, self-presentation and the viewer’s curiosity gives these photographs an ambivalent intimacy in which the contrived and the authentic can no longer be told apart.
Bushwick I (2009)
Partin’s work is part of a long tradition, and he is young enough not to have to break with it yet. Instead, he takes a long walk through the history of photography: his works resonate with the adolescent anger of Larry Clark, but also the gentle gaze Nan Goldin cast on her outlaw and transsexual friends. They recall the people of the Midwest as Richard Avedon saw them, but also the flash-lit streets scenes of Philip-Lorca diCorcia. In Partin’s masterful contextual play on diverse aspects of art history and clichés from the media and pop culture, one thing is very striking: his insistence on the body.
Mobile (2003)
Almost everyone in Partin’s pictures is either naked or semi-naked, and their openly displayed tattoos, scars and brandings are an assertion of existence and uniqueness. The things we see may be staged, but the bodies in these staged scenes are real. The aggressively modified body becomes the universal signifier and common code of these often many-layered photographs. Surface becomes essence – this applies both to Partin’s models and to his photography.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
Magdalena Kröner
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