Mossless in America: Carl Gunhouse

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003–2013), will be published this spring.

Carl Gunhouse grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, where he would later find solace in the anger and DIY ethics of hardcore punk rock. This is where he began shooting photographs. He went on to study European history, with a dual degree in photography, then earned his MA in American history, and finally completed a photography MFA at Yale. His photography is concise and quite funny, too—even a bit sarcastic at times. His photographs are critical, just as his writing is. We talked about his blog, Searching for the Light, the suburbs, as well as the internet in general, and some of his favourite young photographers.

Mossless: Your photographs occasionally fixate on jarring moral and cultural juxtapositions, like the Upper Deck’s “Coolin Out [sic]” sign on a mural of a wounded soldier being rushed to a helicopter. What draws you to these scenes?

Carl Gunhouse: Most of the work from the America series was done driving around between semesters while I was getting my MFA. Occasionally I had something I wanted to photograph, but most of the time I would set off with an arbitrary destination in mind with the hope that something would strike me as interesting on the way. At the end of the day, I hoped it might say something about how I felt about current events. After working for a couple years on this, the trips became more pointed, where I was looking to photograph specific things, but I tried to maintain a certain openness and wonder about the world.

The "Coolin Out" picture was from Virginia Beach, which I heard was a little bit of a rundown tourist area, so I thought a dying area based on luxury spending was full of potential as a way to describe the larger economic downturn. When I got there, it was pretty clear it was also a base town with lots of military folks, and I just stumbled on the mural. When I was taking it, a guy came up asking what I was taking a picture of. I told him the mural seemed pretty intense, and he looked at me quizzically and said, “I guess.”

I once read that suburbia doesn’t function properly because it divides ways of living far too much. Like the toppings of a pizza, you wouldn’t want tomato on one slice, cheese on another. What were your experiences of this division growing up?

I came from a real white-trash working-class town in New Jersey called Dunellen, but when I was nine my dad got a better job, and we moved to Summit, a wealthy New Jersey suburb, where we were on the poorer side of things. At the same time, my best friend from Dunellen moved to a brand-new suburban development outside of Princeton, so I feel in a weird way I got to see a wide spectrum of suburban living and in a lot of ways was always a bit of an outsider. As a white-trash kid in a wealthy suburb, I felt very aware of living in a wealthy suburb that I wasn’t as wealthy as the other kids but, compared to where I had come from, was pretty well off. I remember as a kid all the rich kids would always refer to themselves as upper middle class. It seemed like it took a real act of courage for them to acknowledge they came from affluence.

As my parents were from Brooklyn and keen on me and my sisters getting lots of culture, we spent a lot of time in the city growing up, so as a kid it felt limiting and a little weird living in suburbia. Which in retrospect probably sparked a lot of my adult interest in it as a place to make work. But mostly I think suburbia suffers from a lack of things to do, especially if you’re a teenager. I think it just breeds a desperation to experience stuff, and the next thing you know, you’re sniffing glue with dudes down by the tracks.

How have you been affected by these changing times?

What is the Walker Evans line? “The depression didn’t really affect me or my friends, because we were already poor.”

I don’t know. I think a lot of it is getting to that part of your life where having a house or a job with benefits would be nice, and as an adjunct faculty member, I do well enough that teaching is my only job, but having something more stable would be nice.

There’s a big shift away from unionized labor and a growing reliance on part-time employees. This starts to hit home when applying for full-time positions. The number of full-time faculty is shrinking every year, and with a shift of retirements into 401Ks, where the returns hinge on the stock market, you see fewer and fewer people retiring. You see professors who a generation ago would have retired, but today they’re holding onto those existing full-time positions. And with the economy lagging, you see people with bigger names picking up teaching jobs, because freelance work is drying up. But despite my bellyaching, generally I am doing OK financially.

You write about photography quite a bit. What is your favorite kind of work to write about? What engages you most?

I remember Tod Papageorge being asked the something similar and saying “good photography.” I come from a pretty traditional straight photo background, so it’s my first love. But I like lots of stuff that’s pretty far afield and do my best to really try to engage with stuff that I don’t get or, for that matter, don’t like. For instance, it took me years of angry disdain before I got into Roni Horn. Now she is easily one of my favorite artists.

Not a lot of people have their own photography-review blog, let alone actually write reviews for it. Your blog, Searching for the Light, is a rare one in that regard. Why do you think this is? 

I started it as something I just did for my students to encourage them to go see some shows, and then I got asked to write for some sites. It mostly came from finding, say, the old Village Voice show listing to be terribly uninformative and universally positive. I wanted to write something that might take a more critical look at stuff, the anti–Vince Aletti but with like a thousandth of his readership. People have seemed to respond to it, and I enjoy doing it. I’ve gotten people mad at me on occasion, but generally people seem to dig it. I am not sure why more artists don’t write stuff. I think if you try to be articulate when being critical, most people don’t take too much offense. I mean, most artists have been through a critique or two and aren’t that thin-skinned. And in many ways, who am I? Just because I don’t like what you’re doing, I am not sure I or any other critic is really going to affect what that many people think about the work.

Jerry Saltz wrote something about the death of criticism, and I think it mostly came down to two things. First, the art market is a large, worldwide beast, so no critic anywhere isn’t really powerful enough to be a tastemaker like, say, Clement Greenberg was. And there are so many blogs out there now that churn out blandly descriptive statements that tend to drown out actual criticism. Second, people in the market for art are watching auction prices and aren’t spending a great deal of time reading art theory. So criticism doesn’t affect how galleries and in some ways artists go about selling and making art.

What are your thoughts on photography on the internet?

As for the sheer number of images overwhelming the medium, which every photo panel seems to devolve into nowadays, I think it’s silly. Writers aren’t complaining that the number of emails on the internet is somehow overwhelming their medium. I think if you can’t tell the difference between art and your friends’ instagram, then you’re probably lacking some basic understanding of the medium.

But personally, I don’t know. I think it’s great that people are taking and looking at so many pictures. It certainly has increased the level of visual literacy and interest in the medium. Remember in the Times in the mid 2000s, when Thomas Friedman kept going on about how technology had made the world flat and any day China and India were going to take over the world? Well, I think the internet has done well by photography; you have access to so much art online. I think there is less polarization about, say, being a straight photographer or a conceptual photographer or whatever subgenres you want, because the pie is so big now that there is room to be Christian Patterson without having to fight for eyes with, say, a Lucas Blalock. But every once in a while, I start going down the rabbit holes of Tumblr or photography blogs, and I become painfully aware how much good photography is out there. And even if I am feeling good about what I do, I can’t help being aware that I am just one of many, and it can make me feel awfully mediocre.

Could you name a few of your favorite young photographers?

Man, lots. Also, as I get older, “young” becomes a very relative term. Off the top of my head, Elle Pérez, Ben McNutt, Maureen R. Drennan, Kyle Tata, Zak Arctander, and John Vigg all come to mind, but I could go on and on.

Since graduating Yale's MFA program, Carl Gunhouse has taught at Montclair State University, Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, and Nassau Community College. He has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Searching For the Light, Lay Flat, and American Suburb X. 

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