Portrait

This three-DVD collection features 18 titles, 10 years of videography, and over six hours of material by Donigan Cumming.

"Cumming has said that it is his intention to question, "the myth of the innocent, invisible photographic witness." Borrowing from what he calls, "experimental ethnography," Cumming consciously positions himself not only as investigator, but also participant, caretaker and friend. Thus his examinations of human frailty are always tempered by a compassion that stems from his own involvement in the situations he records."

Utilizing a mix of documentary and improvisational styles, the portraits featured in these three videos highlight the often forgotten, the marginal, those on the edge of society. The portraits are equally grotesque, comic and tender, and Cumming’s photography is characteristically unblinking and relentless.

A short portrait of artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004). The film consists of an interview and 16mm footage made in and around her studio at the Yaddo artist colony, as well as footage from her home studio in Washington D.C.  Rather than an attempt to depict her art, which is in many respects un-photographable, the core of the film is found in Truitt speaking about the course and meaning of her work. Says Cohen, "I was honored to know Anne Truitt, and doubly so when she allowed me to make a short record of her presence and thoughts.

Atomic Ed & the Black Hole tells the story of a scientist-turned-atomic junk collector known as Atomic Ed. More than 30 years ago, Ed quit his job making “better” atomic bombs and he began collecting what he calls “nuclear waste,” non-radioactive high-tech discards from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. As the self-appointed curator of an unofficial museum of the nuclear age called “The Black Hole,” Atomic Ed reveals and preserves a history of government waste that was literally thrown in a trash heap.

Spanish subtitled version available.

A cold stone structure stands in frigid defiance to the moral decay which shrivels the leaves of erect extensions to the human lust for creative expression. This video portrait of art in the making and cats on the prowl will let out of the bag a Pandora's mix of cat chow and chit chat befitting upright blokes.

A portrait of a studio photographer, Her + Him VAN LEO also examines the photography of the 1940s and 50s from a critical perspective rather than a nostalgic one. This documentary utilizes traditional portrait photography and video in a dialogue between two media: crafted black and white print, and the electronically colored and manipulated screen. This dialog comments on the transformations in art practices and terminologies, and evokes some of the social/urban/political transformations that took place in Egypt over 50 years of its recent history.

This tape includes an interview with Larry Poons in his "barn" studio, combined with at a talk he gave at the New School. Poons is highly charged, articulate, and doesn't give a damn about the New York art world that made him famous in the 1960s for this dot paintings. Shown speaking and in creative action, Poons addresses his own history in this video and tells anecdotes along the way, revealing himself as a notoriously feisty, creative person. Poons is simple but distinguished, forceful, blunt, streetwise, and intelligent.