Authentic Americana:: The Art of Social Documentary

By James Crnkovich, Bob Mielke and Lester Joos

This is retrospective collection of the photography of photojournalist James Crnkovich. It is introduced by Bob Mielke and has commentaries by Lester Joos. The book contains fifty-five of James's finest photographs in either black and white or color. The photographs document life in America under the following categories: Intimate Relationsh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blazing Sapphire Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781936135127

Book preview

Authentic Americana:

The Art of Social Documentary

Authentic Americana:

The Art of Social Documentary

A retrospective of the photographs of James Crnkovich

With an introduction by Bob Mielke

And commentaries by Lester Joos and James Crnkovich

Naciketas Press

715 E. McPherson

Kirksville, Missouri 63501

2014

Copyright ©2014 by James Crnkovich

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be duplicated in any way without the expressed written consent of the publisher, except in the form of brief excerpts or quotations for review purposes.

ISBN 978-1-936-13512-7 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014939911

Published by:

Naciketas Press

715 E. McPherson

Kirksville, Missouri 63501

Available at:

Naciketas Press

715 E. McPherson

Kirksville, Missouri, 63501

Phone: [phone]

http://www.naciketas-press.com

Email: [e-mail]

Contents

An Appreciation and Introduction

Artist’s Statement

Exhibitions and Publications

Intimate Relationships

Studies

Rethinking Art

Geometry

Incongruous Places

The Politics of Irony

Gun Culture

Public Permissibility

Babe-acious Behavior

Public Relationships

Being Kids

Vanishing America

What the Critics are Saying

Truth and Lies: James Crnkovich’s Documentary Art—Essay by George Slade

An Appreciation and Introduction

by

Bob Mielke

My first dance with this talented devil came in the summer of 1986, when we worked together on the Iron Range Community Documentation Project, a summer course with field work conducted out of the University of Minnesota at Duluth by the noteworthy American poet Carolyn Forché and her Time-Life photographer husband, Harry Mattison. They had both gained some acclaim for their documentary work in El Salvador, but were burned out by the heat and hassling the Reagan administration was putting on them. So they decided to tackle an American problem in the hopes that Confucian order might emanate from domestic improvements to a more enlightened foreign policy—very noble and idealistic of them. The boom-to-bust scaling down of the mining industry on the Iron Range was a suitable choice of focus.

Much good writing and photography came out of this project. I think it is really where James earned his spurs as a documentary photographer coming out of a tradition which had once flourished in the 1930s with such WPA photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. His previous work had been experimental abstractions and landscapes. (He was already beginning his obsession with drive-in theaters and urban archaeology that led to a text like his photo-book about the Sutro Baths and the abandoned gun emplacements in San Francisco called Monuments of Protection and Pleasure.) He also did a few stylized portraits of friends.

But it was on the Iron Range project that he first triumphed as a superb documenter of everyday people. It was a pleasure and a paradox to watch him work. James is well over six feet tall. Yet despite his physical obtrusiveness, his soft-spoken manner and enthusiasm let this gentle giant get into the hot zone of physical proximity to near-strangers. The results were some of his first major works: old couples dancing in bars, lusty teenagers cruising in their cars (they let him photograph from the back seat). These are his first examples of what I call soul voyeurism. Crnkovich captures figures at moments when they are revealing some mysterious aspect of their character. One senses a rich backstory in these images which we are invited, nay compelled, to speculate about—certain that we could never come in