Visiting Tom

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Tom, 2009, 10x8 gelatin silver print

On Sunday, August 16, 2009 we went with writer Mike Perry to Tom’s farm. In the process of making photographs with our 8×10 view camera, Tom told the stories that belong to a lifelong collection of experiences and stuff. Posing for photographs altered the relationship with time. Infinite unrecorded moments contribute to the making of a single statement representing an impossibly complex evolution. Invention, persistence, deterioration, obsolescence, and wisdom accumulate on the surface where they were available to the camera. Our photographs, an extended portrait, are published in Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace by Perry. Reviews and interviews about the book have been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Cap Times, OnMilwaukee.com, VolumeOne.org, and Boswell and Books blog. The book made The New York Times Book Review Best-Seller list in September 2012.

The Wisconsin Project

Silverfield Cheese Factory, Fremont, Wisc., Aug. 15, 2009, 3.5x5x5 palladium print

This summer, we’ll be on the road in our 1962 Rambler station wagon making postcard views of places in our native Wisconsin based on our vintage postcard collection and random wanderings. We welcome your suggestions for Wisconsin sites to photograph! We will post these views as we go at wisconsinproject.blogspot.com

20th Century Optimism

Electrical Shock from Season's Gleamings, 2004, 10x8 transparency

We did a book once, Season’s Gleamings, and a film, Foot Massage,  about the optimism of the 1960s expressed through aluminum Christmas tree design and electrical devices, some made in our hometown of Manitowoc.  CBS Sunday Morning and The New York Times  covered it. Most Decembers to this day we get calls from writers to talk about the trees from publications like  Der Spiegel in Hamburg or Third Coast Digest Milwaukee. The trip continues.

Unmasked & Anonymous

Milwaukee Art Museum "Unmasked & Anonymous" installation view, November 2008

“This was effective in a small dimly-lit gallery where Shimon and Lindemann’s tintypes whispered across the way to ta collection of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes with which they shared affinities. Depsite their age differences–or maybe because of it–the air crackled with the electricity of their meeting.”  — Sam Watson, Art Papers, January/February 2009

Unmasked & Anonymous: Shimon  & Lindemann Consider Portraiture exhibition catalog still available here.