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Today, we're in Chicago in Pilsen
outside of Mana Contemporary, a huge complex that
houses exhibition spaces and artist studios,
including that of Jan Tichy, who we're about to visit.
Jan was born in Prague, moved to Israel,
and then moved to Chicago in 2007
for his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
where he now teaches.
And while he's not from Chicago, Jan spent a lot of time
thinking about and investigating his adopted city.
In 2011, he did a project involving the last remaining
high-rise of the Cabrini Green housing project
during its final days before demolition,
illuminating it with lights that blinked in patterns
corresponding to the pace of poems written
by young former residents.
He was also inspired by a series of photographs titled "Changing
Chicago" that was made in the mid-1980s
and attempted to document daily life of the city.
Jan has created a series of video works
by the same title, in which he sets up his camera
and makes a durational image from a single vantage point.
And he's also worked with local high school students
to do the same.
So Jan's thought quite a bit about the place where he lives.
And we're about to ask you to do the same.
So let's go talk to him.
Hi, I'm Jan Tichy, and this is your art assignment.
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When I was invited to work at the Museum of Contemporary
Photography with their collection
and started to go through the entire 12,000 images,
at a certain point, I started to recognize these works coming
from a project called "Changing Chicago," created in 1987.
It sort of attempted to capture this moment-- this portrait
of a city in a particular moment--
and letting 33 photographers bring their perspective
from different parts of the city.
I realized that there are things that I wanted to respond,
that there are things that I'm interested in
to talk about, in relationship to what's happening in Chicago.
And that maybe, in some romantic way,
I wanted to be, as well, part of it-- part of this group
that wanted to document the city 25 years ago.
And I decided to work with video rather than
traditional photography and be in a dialogue with the project.
Not just in a sense of what I'm saying as well
as how I am saying, and sort of bring to this new installation
of all these works coming together
the different notion of time.
Your assignment is to find a place with the potential
of visual movement.
Place your camera on a stable object, build a frame,
and record at least two minutes of video
without moving your camera.
Oh, and no sound.
Jan didn't mention this at the time,
but that's a pretty key aspect of this assignment,
and something that makes it more about photography
than about film or video.
I like this in terms of photography,
because photography is really complicated.
Like, there's that great line about how ultimately, it's
just light and time.
Yeah, and there are a variety of photographers
who kind of play with those ideas,
someone like Hiroshi Sugimoto, who
sets up a camera in a movie theater
and takes a really long exposure that
lasts from the beginning of the film until the end.
JONATHAN: So it looks like it's just one picture,
but actually, it's the whole movie.
And we're calling this assignment
"The Expanded Moment," because it's
a play on the term "the decisive moment"
that we associate with French photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson.
Very good French accent.
Well, you know, you couldn't call him Henry, too.
You know his photographs and would recognize them instantly.
They're some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
And he's famous for this idea of the decisive moment.
And that's this sort of one moment and placement
that the photographer has to seize on and capture.
It's the idea that there is a best moment.
So you may have heard of the decisive moment,
but I wanted to kind of unpack it and see what he actually
said about it.
Cartier-Bresson published a photo book in 1952
with the title, "Images a la Sauvette,"
or "Images on the Run."
But the English edition was titled after a quote
by Cardinal de Retz in the book's preface--
"there is nothing in this world that does not
have a decisive moment."
Cartier-Bresson describes his early days as a photographer,
prowling the streets all day, determined to trap life.
"I crave to seize in the confines of one
single photograph the whole essence of some situation that
was in the process of unrolling itself
before my eyes," "To me," he says,
"photography is the simultaneous recognition
in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event,
as well as of a precise organization of forms
which give that event its proper expression."
Jan is embracing an alternative take on photography-- not
seizing or trapping a moment, but identifying a frame
and letting the scene unroll before our eyes.
Rather than stopping time, Jan proposes
a way to extend that photographic moment, allowing
that change can sometimes be better represented
through expanded moments rather than decisive ones.
And he was talking about event of a split of a second,
and what happens when the bicycle passes.
And I'm more interested in what's happening,
you know, a minute later, when the couple is passing by,
and when another story starts to develop.
In the afternoon, we will go to the Museum of Contemporary
Photography to meet with the curator Karen Irvine
and meet with students from ChiArts, local high schools.
And together we will learn about the original "Changing Chicago"
project, and have the students think
about their way of responding and presenting
their Chicago today in the form of a video of an expanded
moment.
We look today, 25 years later-- we see a different city.
We see the change, right?
And so look around.
Look what has changed, what is going to change,
and even things that you don't know
that they are going to change.
They will eventually, right?
Each of you will take it somewhere completely different,
because you are all different.
And you live in different places.
You see the world around you differently.
And your artistic approaches are different.
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Take your time.
Let the time pass.
Observe.
Think.
And return, again and again.
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