Artist Blog 09/21

7/9 Hope and Fear, Digital Composite, Phillip Toledano

8/9 Hope and Fear, Digital Composite, Phillip Toledano

3/9 Hope and Fear, Digital Composite, Phillip Toledano

1/9 Hope and Fear, Digital Composite, Phillip Toledano

I should be focusing a lot of my research on artists who use objects in place of language, and I was very excited when I found Phillip Toledano’s series entitled Hope and Fear (which I will speak about later). Though, when I came across his work in another series Days With My Father, I was touched and really excited about the idea of keeping a photo journal. I know we’re sort of doing the same thing for this class-photographing each week and keeping a blog-but the entries in Toledano’s series weren’t forced. There was no pressure for him to elaborate or make a point. It was much like free-writing. No one was expecting anything of him. He provides enough information to aid the subject matter in the photograph. Some of the entries contained some of the most beautiful words I’ve ever read, and some of them didn’t say-nor did they need to say- anything. His simplicity and non-chalance is refreshing. Days With My Father focuses on his (Toledano’s) last few years with his father after his mother passed. His images are beautifully taken; he pays very close attention to light, composition and focus when presenting his father to the viewer. Though I contradict myself when I see them because the way they’re taken--they seem to come naturally, like they’ve manifested on their own and Toledano just happened to be there at that moment. His images don’t feel like something he’s constructed, rather, like they’re an aura that is a part of his father and their relationship together, and he has the wonderful privilege and opportunity to take advantage of it and photograph such a phenomenon.

Hope and Fear “is the external manifestation of the internal desires and paranoia that are adrift in America.” All of the work in this series consists of models consumed by objects that, as the description says, represent desires and paranoia of the American public. Toledano quite literally illustrates the “external manifestation” by sticking objects to his models or creating garments out of different objects. His image of a man covered by baby dolls could comment on many matters including larger subjects like abortion or adoption. The races of the baby dolls are all different. Unfortunate as the message in this image is, it’s quite comical. The model in the picture is a very proud-looking white man; a man that will go down with his ship. The message I get from this is that the Caucasian race has been the majority in this country since little after its foundation, and is now very quickly becoming the minority as more and more people are immigrating to this country and more and more people are having interracial relationships and producing multi-racial children. I see the man in this image as a dying society-the last of my parents’ generation- the last generation to be negatively influenced by the racism America has grown with.

While Toledano focuses a lot on larger, more political subjects, he also addresses certain lifestyles that women have become accustomed to and the stereotypes and standards that women are expected to uphold and are, unfortunately, influenced by. He has several images showing women in garments made of body parts. In one image a young woman is covered by hands, another of a woman covered in breasts, and yet still another of a woman in a long skirt made of women’s legs. All these objects stand in as language that suggests that today’s society views women as sex objects; they are things to possess, things to be controlled, and things to take advantage of. These images reinforce the stereotypes that women fall into concerning how it is acceptable for a woman to look, or how a woman believes she should look having been influenced by stereotypes. He uses these objects as language effectively by his placement on the models, as well as how the models are interacting with them, if they are at all.

Artist Website

Days With My Father