Living in the moment…

If the tag that New York is “the city that never sleeps” is true then all of the action hemmed in by the grid of it streets - whether it was the show you saw last night, or the clubbing you intend to do this evening - becomes about the moment. The issues of past tense and future tense become irrelevant.

The defining terms are “right here,” and “right now.” Forget the projected imperative of “The show must go on!” The show is going on. The show never stopped.

It is this expansion of the moment, the eternalizing of the experience that informs the work of New York-based photographer Thomas Hellstrom. Witness the photographs that comprise Hellstrom’s work Aubade: Boys, in which the subjects themselves seem as determined to hold on to their moment in front of the camera’s lens as they are to hold onto the night, as well as to each another.

The series is the hard-to-ignore centerpiece in the walk-up that serves as Hellstrom’s studio. The urgency of the young men’s need for documentation is evident - and successful. Viewed in person the photographs practically dare you to avert your gaze. The fact that everything about the images themselves came about by happenstance imbues them with an air of discovery; but rather than having the look of something that should be historically archived there is a vibrant and current realness to the shots.

“I came across these two on a scaffolding one night and they were just waiting for an audience,” Hellstrom explains of the young men who are his subjects. That eagerness to be seen comes through in their readiness for their close-up.

There is also a familiarity here. Everything about the young men’s antics suggests a home movie, or an unscripted performance. Yet the lighting, graininess and immediacy of Hellstrom’s photo series shares an enthusiasm that can also remind the viewer of the stills from Andy Warhol’s famous Factory screen tests. Like Warhol’s subjects, the boys in Aubade were not given any direction. But looking at the images it’s obvious none was needed.

As for why this kind of shooting from the hip, if you will, creates such a dynamic piece of work Hellstrom says “A tension emerges between the camera’s attention and the subject’s response to it.”

The result? “The subjects make the show.”

That night on 19^th Street Hellstrom walked by with his camera, and within a matter of seconds a story was told. And it’s the prolonging of valid moments such as these that Hellstrom strives for in his work.

top: Aubade:Boys #2, Pigmented ink jet print, 2008, 12x16”, Edition of five

below: Aubade: Boys #3, Pigmented ink jet print, 2008, 12x16”, Edition of five

-click images to view complete series-

Postcards from the edge…

Thomas Hellstrom, whose work has been included in the art show Pulse New York and shown in galleries internationally, obtained his B.A. in photography from the University of Minnesota in the 1990s before relocating to New York City. The move, he says, left him “running with a fast crowd” the members of which “had careers that were taking off in the art world.”

Rather than become consumed with keeping pace with them as he tried to establish his own place in the city, Hellstrom relied on the visual cues that informed his own aesthetic and looked for a “way to make sense of [his] surroundings.” Translating and interpreting those cues became the impetus for his work. Hellstrom based one photo series from that period upon Klute, the 1971 thriller in which a new arrival to NYC - a detective played by Donald Sutherland - is presented with a shocking close-up of the city’s seedier side, courtesy of Jane Fonda’s character Bree Daniels, a prostitute with a target on her back. Describing it as a “very New York film,” Hellstrom created digitized images from Klute of the moments that he thought reflected his own experience the most. That those moments conveyed a sense of displacement and loneliness would go on to help train his eye to see the same scenes playing out in real time. And that’s where the connection to his series Aubade brings Hellstrom’s examination of the moment full circle. In the classic French poem form that Hellstrom’s Aubade photo series are inspired by, lovers face the coming dawn ever mindful that its arrival will enforce their separation.

Thereafter: 01:22:36.1, Digital c print, 2001, 20x30”, Edition of 3

-click image to view complete series-

The need to make the most of the now creates an urgency and desire to live in the present for as long as possible, either in words or images. Part of the story line Hellstrom’s camera captured with Aubade: Boys gives an added poignancy to both the series’ title and the images they reflect: “The blonde was returning to Sweden the next day,” he says.

The young man’s impending departure comes across, perhaps unwittingly, in his expression. The desire to extend, if not immortalize, his Warholian “15” minutes in front of Hellstrom’s camera, and especially on his last night in New York is glaring. Likewise, the tone of the original aubade form is achingly on display. The experience, again, has become the moment.

“The idea of ’15 minutes’ can have a place,” Hellstrom admits, nodding to the very real nature of longing for immortality that first informed Warhol’s famous observation that now teeters on cliché. “That’s part of my aim: To extend and prolong the experience of time, to give time another kind of attention that is generous and aware of what can constitute a moment.”

To achieving that end in his work, Hellstrom is not afraid to draw from his own life and his own loss. The carnival that spins deliriously through his series Souvenir is “about getting dumped by a lover in Berlin. Finding that carnival was a lucky solace,” he says. In this series it is up to the viewer to determine if the extended moment is the relief or the resolution.

Souvenir #10, Pigmented ink jet print, 2004 - 2006, dimensions variable to 40x120”, Edition of five

-click image to view complete series-

The continuity between the carnival of Souvenir, the young men in Aubade:Boys and the reclaimed image of Sutherland from Klute is their sentimental heft. “Klute will always be an emotional cue, as will a subject as rich as the boys on 19^th Street” Hellstrom says, pausing to add: “What gay man doesn’t know who Bree Daniels is, even if he’s never heard of the movie?”

Real time reporter…

The tradition of found art, or that everything can be art, therefore everyone can make art, wound its way through the twentieth century from the ready-mades of the Dadaists to the re-presented staples of supermarket aisles all the way to the anatomical specimen-as-sculpture that typifies Damien Hirst’s work. Now in the twenty-first century, imbedded cameras in cell, or mobile phones have turned everyone into a cinematographer with YouTube as their screening room. Forget the space-time continuum. This new capturing of the moment is all about real time continuation. And while other photographers of the past ten years or so might have turned their eyes toward the manipulation of the medium by relying on the digital effects now available, Hellstrom now takes advantage of the technology’s immediacy emphasizing “a desire to slow and sustain a moving image.”

This approach relies on a quick hand an even quicker eye. The series This Afternoon, for instance, features over 20 stills from a sudden New York rain shower. Hellstrom shot as furiously as the storm fell on the streets, capturing the images that comprise the series in roughly three minutes. The cinema verite aesthetic can be seen when taking in all of the images and the effect, Hellsrom says, is intentional: “[My work] originates from brief excerpts of cinema and video.”

This Afternoon #16, Pigmented ink jet print, 2005-2006, 12x16”, Edition of five

-click image to view complete series-

With this self-directive as his guide Hellstrom offers that each individual shot might not appeal to the viewer or have the same effect as the series does when viewed as a whole. “[The images] are in sequence, precisely as they are shot. If a point is reached where the artifice can no longer be sustained, then so be it,” he explains. “I prefer to show you the arc of the experience than present its most photogenic results.”

top: Aubade:Boys #07, Pigmented ink-jet print, 2008, 12x16”, Edition of five

below: Aubade:Boys #09, Pigmented ink-jet print, 2008, 12x16”, Edition of five

-click images to view complete series-

The last word…?

Hellstrom’s work owes to the cinematic structure as much as it does to the bound tradition of the written word. In fact he produces each series in leporello form as well as digital: A small, hand-made booklet, the leporello is a folded and continuous documentation of the images that is as much a photo album as it is a film reel. “The leporello slows cinematic grammar to a standstill, rendering discrete and immobile pages culled from the irretrievable passing of moving images.

“In its own right, the leporello is a film, experienced in another form,” the photographer says. Hellstrom, ever looking to extend the experience as well as the moment, feels his images “isolate the ephemeral moving image” so that the viewer can “contemplate the visual and narrative richness” the images suggest. “In the contemplation with the brief encounter with a subject my projects consider the possibilities of video and digital imaging technology in tangible, analog terms.”

Hellstrom makes the moment live on. The experience isn’t simply remembered, it can be held in your hand.

S Ioannes de Deo, Leporello (artists book) composed of 22 video stills, 2004, 12 x 736”, Edition of Five

-click image to view complete series-

As appeared in reFRESH Magazine, Issue No 51, July-August 2008, pages 30-32, Wild Publishing, London, England, UK, copyright Steven Gdula 2008.

www.thomashellstrom.net