Portland Museum of Art

• Friday, January 6 Collaborative Curation: Tanja Alexia Hollander and the Facebook Portrait Project followed by Mark Bessire and Tanja Hollander hitting the town and interviewing people during first friday art walk
• Friday, January 20 Collaborative Curation and Confessional: Tanja Alexia Hollander and the Facebook Portrait Project
• Friday, February 3 Opening Celebration for “Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend?”
• Thursday, March 8, 2012 Are They Really Friends?: A Discussion between Museum Director Mark Bessire and Artist Tanja Alexia Hollander

Press Release

Fundraiser #3 - Picture of the week - $25

Every Monday I will offer a print for $25 *NOT* including shipping.  Sometimes they will be small, sometimes large.  Sometimes landscapes, sometimes portraits.  You will also be added to the list of supporters for the project for your purchase.  Buy now and buy often! And buy quick - you only have one week to purchase.  Questions? Pop me an e-mail.  Your name will also be added to the list of sponsors.

Title: Untitled 41215 (Placencia, Belize)
Date: 2004
Size: 5x5" on 7x7" paper
Medium: Archival pigment print

chose one

Picture of the week $25.00 USD

Shout out from Voxphotographs!

Reposted from Voxphotographs

Tanja tackles friendship…

 

Daryl Fort, Portland, Maine©Tanja Alexia Hollander. All Rights Reserved

My personal Facebook page lasted two hours. I signed up with little enthusiasm but felt a general social pressure to “get with it”. The first posting that arrived was the writer’s thoughts on the sunrise that day. The next was a response to that. The third was about waiting for his kids to come out to the car, and I was so shocked by the mind-deadening triviality of this new information highway that I got off at the next stop. The only reason I keep my personal page is that it’s a requirement in order to have a business page. I never look at it. Ever.

Tanja Alexia Hollander is a Maine-based fine art photographer who has been around. But she’s not of my generation and therefore would have been easier with the Facebook way of finding new friends, and staying in touch with old friends and family members. But she obviously wondered to herself at some point how it would all hold up if these “post-ers” were brought from cyberspace into the light of the real world.

Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend? has recently opened at the Portland Museum of Art and runs through June 17, 2012. Tanja must be grinning from ear to ear because the media – from The Boston Globe to MPBN – have been happy to embrace this quirky exhibit, and it’s getting terrific mileage.

read more ...

Andy Bothwell (Aka Astronautalis), Allston, MA©Tanja Alexia Hollander. All Rights Reserved

   

Emma Hollander, Boston, MA©Tanja Alexia Hollander. All Rights Reserved

MPBN Maine Watch interview!

Watch the interview with Jennifer Rooks on Maine Watch.

Shout out from the Portland Phoenix!

From the Portland Phoenix:  Tanja Hollander takes Facebook to the PMA

Friend quest By NICHOLAS SCHROEDER  |  February 8, 2012

VIRTUAL TO REAL TO DIGITAL ‘Bree LaCasse, Chris Moore & Oliver LaCasse Moore, Portland, Maine,’ by Tanja Alexia Hollander.

If you've been buzzing about "Are You Really My Friend?" the new installation of Facebook-inspired portraits by local photographer and Bakery Photo Collective founder Tanja Alexia Hollander, you're not alone. Any high-profile intersection between the fine-art world and a massively influential populist medium is bound to cause a stir.


Some excitement comes from factors outside of Hollander's practice. One of the exhibit's major draws is the totalizing cultural fluency of the language of Facebook — even its most ardent detractors at least know how it works. Of course, displaying hundreds of locals in the state's biggest art museum won't lose you any friends either.


If one of these factors may have drawn you to the show, be careful it doesn't obscure Hollander's true brilliance. Her eye has been praised in these pages often enough; the active ingredient here is the conceptual design. Down the long corridor of the museum's crannied fourth floor, Hollander has arranged ten-by-ten-inch color portraits of her Facebook friends (and their families, where applicable) according to display methods borrowed from the digital world. Most are shown in a long horizontal line, as if the photos of an online slide show were strung together. Others backed with magnets adhere to a giant board, where users are invited to drag-and-drop them as they wish. A couple others — most notably the reverent, compositionally stunning portrait of local art maven June Fitzpatrick — are larger and framed; to continue the analogy, they're the exhibit's profile pictures.


Hollander may be one of the most esteemed fine-art photographers in the state, but thinking of "AYRMF?" as a photography show sells it short. It's a terrifically successful work of relational art, an interdimensional project that examines the "natural" social fabric by purposely disturbing it, and folding that disturbance into the artistic process itself. It's a pretty rare event for Maine art, and especially so for the PMA.


Under the banner of the project, Hollander traveled around the country and photographed her "friends" (per Facebook's definition) in their own homes or studios. While they all are radically different people (obviously), the portraits obey a strict formula — families huddle at their kitchen tables, fellow artists sit in their slick studios, young couples lounge on the couch with their pets. Notably, none of her subjects smile, and it's the application of this simple rule where Hollander shines the most.


Conceptually, an exhibit of a thousand expressionless people has the natural effect of highlighting the more dubious qualities of Facebook, a theme Hollander emphasizes in the title. It also limits her subjects' ability to project their individual personalities. With no clues available in a person's face, the viewer is more inclined to look for clues in the room — food in the cupboards, art on the walls, ukulele in the corner, etc.


The subversion here is a radical one. Social networking has given rise to the notion that a personality can be contained in a photographic thumbnail. Think of how easily we toss dozens of sepia-tinted headshots onto our profiles. By extension, Facebook's conceit is that the presence of a friend can be simulated in the virtual world. Instead, using the very same lexicon that governs Facebook, Hollander suspends this hollow function of the "profile," suggesting that we might get a clearer idea of someone's personality by their material habitat — who and what they surround themselves with — than any of the mediated images we find on their virtual page.

True to most successful works of relational art, "AYRMF?" offers the viewer numerous ethical questions to ponder. Are we using social-networking tools to their fullest capacities? What sort of gap exists between online communities and real-world ones? Couldn't Hollander have done more? As if prompting us along this path, she asks an easy one. HOW IMPORTANT IS FACE-TIME TO FRIENDSHIPS? asks a sign, and we're invited to write our answer on Post-It notes we place on her gallery wall (get it?). Consider yourself poked — so see it.

Nicholas Schroeder can be reached at nschroeder@phx.com.

"ARE YOU REALLY MY FRIEND?" | photographs by Tanja Alexia Hollander | through June 17 | at Portland Museum of Art, 5 Congress Sq, Portland | 207.775.6148 |  portlandmuseum.org

Read more: http://portland.thephoenix.com/arts/133706-tanja-hollander-takes-facebook-to-the-pma/#ixzz1mvdEVwEM Read more: 

Shout out from the Boston Globe!

FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE:


Tanja Alexia Hollander photographs the faces of Facebook ‘friends’


A photographer goes cross-country to capture them where they live


By Cate McQuaid | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT FEBRUARY 05, 2012

From Tanja Alexia Hollander’s photography exhibit ‘‘Are You Really My Friend’’ at the Portland Museum of Art, ‘‘Mark, Aimée, Blakey and Clay Bessire, Portland, Maine.”

From Tanja Alexia Hollander’s photography exhibit, “Kyle Durrie (in Type Truck), Brooklyn, New York."

WESTBROOK, Maine - In a digital world where you can friend and unfriend Facebook connections with a keystroke, what is friendship, anyway?

That was one of the questions photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander had in mind when she started traveling the country, shooting portraits of her Facebook friends last year. An exhibit of her ongoing Facebook-portrait project, “Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend,’’ opened at the Portland Museum of Art yesterday.

Hollander had been photographing close friends for years, and she found the response to the work was mixed. “Essentially, it was, ‘Why should I care about your friends?’ ’’ she says.

Larger map / directions

TANJA ALEXIA HOLLANDER: Are You Really My Friend

Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square,Portland Maine

Closing date:

Through June 17

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• Critic’s picks: Art

When she couldn’t photograph people in their houses, she shot them where she could: musicians on tour buses, an artist, Kyle Durrie, at her mobile letterpress studio inside a retrofitted truck.

She witnessed friends, many of whom are artists, struggling with the sputtering economy. Several showed off how they are managing. “I’ve never seen so many chickens, prize roosters, and gardens,’’ she says.

Hollander’s studio is at the Bakery Photographic Collective, in a mill building in a Portland suburb, where she has lined the wall with a miniature mock-up of the “Are You Really My Friend’’ installation. In the museum exhibit there are two large framed prints and dozens of smaller unframed ones arrayed side by side for 70 feet - along one gallery wall, around a corner, and down another.

Hollander has started blogging and shooting video, which you can see atwww.facebookportraitproject.com. So far, she has visited 144 homes and just over 200 friends. She hopes to photograph all of the 626 Facebook friends she had when she began the process (she has more now).

Best known as a landscape photographer, Hollander has always been an analog artist: shooting on film, printing in the darkroom. Her lush, square landscapes soak in atmospheres of fog and mist, cloud and water. But she didn’t feel challenged by that work anymore - “I knew what kind of fog would happen when,’’ she says - so she began to experiment with portraiture.

"Wayne Curtis & Louise Klaila, New Orleans, Louisiana.”

Her Facebook exhibit is designed to be as interactive as the social medium itself. In addition to the long lineup of portraits, there will be a magnetized wall where viewers can arrange photos however they like, curating their own small shows. They can photograph the results with an iPad and send them to Hollander, send comments to her on the iPad, or leave a sticky note.

For this project, the artist has abandoned the darkroom for Photoshop and digital printing. Initially, when the enterprise was Web-based, printing wasn’t paramount. “Not every image was up to my high quality. I’m using natural light, and some are going to be backlit or out of focus,’’ she says.

Hollander had previously met most - but not all - of her Facebook friends, although, she says, “You really don’t know who a high school random is from 20 years ago.’’

She had not met Jona Frank, a California photographer. A curator had suggested they friend each other.

“I was late to joining Facebook,’’ Frank admits over the phone from Santa Monica. “My husband said, ‘You’ll get all kinds of requests.’ And two weeks later, here’s Tanja asking to come to my house.’’

At first Frank resisted inviting a stranger in. “The idea of her coming to my house felt really personal,’’ she says. But she read up on Hollander, and felt reassured.

“I know what it’s like as a photographer,’’ Frank says. “You ask people to do things you wouldn’t normally ask. I said yes.’’

Hollander took a photo of Frank and her dog, Shep. “She knew exactly what she was doing,’’ Frank says. “She has a real sense of space, and how it conveys who the person really is.’’

The Internet allows people to be invisible, Frank says. “Tanja’s pictures take away that invisibility. They give people a real sense of how these people live.’’

Hollander says she and Frank are now friends. “If this whole project failed, that relationship would be a great thing,’’ Hollander says.

But the project hasn’t failed. It has taken off. And that’s another Facebook phenomenon. “I didn’t realize this would be an incredible marketing tool until four months in,’’ Hollander says. “I was posting, people were reposting. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram - social networking is the best marketing tool for artists in this economy.’’

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Shout out from Yankee Magazine!

From Yankee Magazine blog:

Photography: Modernism in NH, Post-Modern in Maine

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Ed Beem

Currently and coincidently, both the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine are opening major photography exhibitions this weekend. The Currier is filling two large galleries with a show of 125 modernist photographs from its own collection. The Portland Museum of Art is showing a selection of the 600 photographs in post-modernist photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander’s social media portrait project, Are You Really My Friend?

   A New Vision features photographs by a who’s who of 20^th century photography, among the greats being Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Lotte Jacobi,  Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston. The show also features late-modernist works by contemporary photographers such as Paul Caponigro, Lee Friedlander, and Frank Gohle.  

   

Modernism covers a lot of complicated ground from abstraction to surrealism to minimalism. Post-modernism essentially rejects the inherent formalism of modernism in favor of a more conceptual approach to art, one in which the art object is less important than the idea it embodies.

Samantha Appleton by Tanja Alexia Hollander

  

Are You Really My Friend? by Tanja Hollander fits the post-modern bill perfectly because, superficially, it consists of environmental color portraits of the artist’s family, friends, and online “friends.” Conceptually and collectively, however, the portrait photographs ask the question, “Is friendship something photographable?”

   

Hollander, one of the co-founders of the Bakery Photographic Collective, began her social media project a year ago while simultaneously writing a letter to a friend deployed in Afghanistan and sending a Facebook message to another friend making a film in Jakarta.

  

“On one hand,” Hollander writes, “the letter has a tangibility that makes it seem more genuine and real, while on the other hand social networks provide an immediate way to be part of people’s lives all over the world, often through photographs.”

   

In order to explore the mode of social media communication and the meaning of friendship, Hollander resolved to travel all over the country photographing her 626 Facebook friends.  The visual dimension of the project is given depth by the fact that the artist is physically visiting and meeting face-to-face with her cyber-friends. Hollander has been gathering support for the Facebook project by, among other things, selling what amount to subscriptions the prints to underwrite her travels and her work.

Toby and Lucky Hollander by Tanja Alexia Hollander

   

As Hollander is an artist, many of the portraits are of fellow artists and their families. My favorite is Hollander’s portrait of Samantha Appleton, a Maine woman who until recently served as the White House photographer. I also got a kick out of Hollander’s portrait of her parents, because the photograph was taken in the Hollanders’ dining room, which for 40-plus years was my grandparents’ dining room. 

   

There are both a social and personal aspect to Are You Really My Friend? that highly recommend it to public viewing, just as there are social and historical aspects to A New Vision that make it a must-see.

 [Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester NH, 603-669-6144. Portland Museum of Art, Congress Square, Portland, ME, 207-775-6148.]

Shout out from Maine Sunday Telegram!

From Maine Sunday Telegram:

Bob Keyes: Winter wonderscape of new shows

By Bob Keyes bkeyes@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer Posted: January 22

“Mary Bok with Surely & Honey the Dogs, Camden, Maine,” 2011, from the exhibition of Tanja Alexia Hollander’s portraits of her Facebook friends, opening in February at the Portland Museum of Art.

Courtesy of Portland Museum of Art

"TANJA ALEXIA HOLLANDER: ARE YOU REALLY MY FRIEND?"
WHERE: Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square
WHEN: Feb. 4 to June 17. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday.
HOW MUCH: $12; $10 for seniors and students with ID; $6 for ages 13 to 17; free for ages 12 and younger; free for all after 5 p.m. Fridays
INFO: portlandmuseum.org
WHAT ELSE: At 6 p.m. March 8, museum director Mark Bessire and Hollander will discuss the show and her work.

And in February, the Portland Museum of Art opens a solo show by Maine photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander that taps into the social media and Facebook phenomena. "Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend?" uses Hollander's portrait work to explore friendships in the context of social media.

Social media as art

At the Portland Museum of Art, Hollander will explore the concept of friendship in the Facebook age with "Are You Really My Friend?" It opens Feb. 4 as part of the museum's ongoing "Circa" series that specializes in contemporary art.  For the past year, Hollander, who lives in Auburn, has traveled around the country to visit as many of her Facebook friends as possible. Some she knows well, others she had never met. This show features 59 photographs that will remain up throughout the show, as well as new ones added during the course of the show. 

Her Facebook project is an ongoing concern, and Hollander has planned a series of events designed to engage museum visitors.

Hollander is best known as a landscape photographer. She founded the Bakery Photographic Collective, now based in Westbrook.

This project, which started with an idea sparked by a quiet residency in the French countryside, has led her into the next phase of her career.

A St. Louis native, she moved to Portland as a teenager. She took photography classes at Maine College of Art while still in high school, and earned her bachelor's degree at Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1994. She has shown regularly in Maine, New York, Boston and elsewhere, and has twice been selected for the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, winning a purchase prize in 2007.

With this project, Hollander has attempted to remove the virtual limitations of social media by visiting her friends -- 600 and counting -- in person and presenting them as profiles in their homes.  "It's awkward to show up on someone's doorstep with a camera," she told the Maine Sunday Telegram last fall.  "But what I am realizing as I travel and as I meet people, one of the things that is most striking to me is how generous people are. Which is the opposite of what you would expect from a Facebook project.

"These people are real and genuine. People have fed me and offered me a place to stay."

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be reached at 791-6457 or:

bkeyes@pressherald.com

Twitter: pphbkeyes

HELP! Love NOLA and love the trumpet.

As many of you know, my little sister, Emma and I fell in love with New Orleans during Jazz Fest a few years ago. Last year we went off the tourist road, rented a place in the 9th ward, biked around town, learned a ton of history from our friends Wayne and Louise, and discovered a different city away from the fairgrounds and French Quarter. We were stopped in our tracks by the lack of resources the city continues to face post Katrina and have been brainstorming on how two girls from New England with not a lot of money or time can help a place that we love so much.

I was sitting in my studio last night and saw a post on Facebook from Eric Iammusic Gordon Jr (who was a trumpet player for one of our favorite brass bands we saw, The Stooges). He was selling t-shirts so he could buy a new trumpet. I messaged him and bought one, and asked how much a trumpet cost. Assuming he had a long road ahead at $15/piece. I was right, a new trumpet is $1500.

And then I messaged Emma, and said "we have to help him get a new trumpet."

And so we are. On Monday, 1/30 Emma is working industry brunch atTrina's Starlite Lounge and giving 25% of her tips to Eric's trumpet fund. GO see her Boston people. I'm donating all of my sales from the print of the week. If you give him $100, you'll also get 5 editioned 4x6 snap shots of our last trip to NOLA. A win win situation.

chose one or both!

Picture of the week $25.00 USD Eric's trumpet fund $100.00 USD Both! $125.00 USD

You can also out of the kindness of your heart just paypal him directly at: ericgordonsmusic at aol dot com. Or message me for his address. You can check out his music at Eric Gordon's Lazy Boys and To Be Continued Brass Band.

Attached is the post from the night we met him at the Hi Ho Lounge.  He is hamming it up good for me in video #3.

If you know the two of us, or the Hollanders at all, we won't stop posting and begging until he gets his trumpet.

Shout out from Technology in the Arts!

From Technology in the Arts  blog:

Are you really my friend? The Facebook Portrait Project

By Elizabeth Quaglieri | January 18, 2012

I went to elementary school with her- confirm request. He is the son of my mom’s friend from work- confirm request. She’s a friend of a friend that also likes Amos Lee, Portland, Maine and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, but we’ve never actually met- confirm request.

The word “friend” is now synonymous with Facebook and its meaning has been redefined to incorporate relationships formed as loosely as in the situations above. Regardless of how intimate your real world relationships are with your newest virtual “friends,” they receive the same amount of information and become privy to the innermost private details of your life through your Facebook activity, statuses and photos.

Yes, you can “poke” others on Facebook, but Maine photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander, has discovered through her own Facebook friendship odyssey that Facebook cannot replace human interactions

Social media has become a fundamental part of our society in the 21st century. Its convenience allows us to instantaneously communicate and share a level of intimacy with those we know well and many we don’t know at all. Despite its presence in our lives today, social networks cannot replicate human interaction. It is arguable, however, that the online environments we’ve created and the resulting reduction of human interaction have an impact on our relationships.

Hollander set out on a yearlong journey to meet (some for the first time) and photograph all 626 of her Facebook friends, traveling across the state, country and world to reach them in their most intimate and private space: their home. Hollander’s photographic and personal journey grew into the project and upcoming exhibit “Are you really my friend? The Facebook portrait project.”

More than just an exploration of virtual social networks and humans’ dual existence in a cyber space and physical, real world space, Hollander’s project and exhibition explores the evolution and modern-day role of formal portraiture, the meaning of home and the future of human interactions and American culture in an increasingly virtual world.

My project is an exploration of friendships, the effects of social networks and the intimate places we call home. Facebook seemed an ideal forum for this exploration. Though we are in the initial stages of understanding the effects of social networking on American culture and photography there is a pervasive feeling that it is changing our interactions with each other and building a false sense of community.

But do not misinterpret Hollander’s project or exhibition- she is neither defaming Facebook nor purging herself of it upon completion of the project. Quite the contrary, actually. As a result of visiting with and photographing each of her friends, Hollander discovered they do in fact pay close attention to her life online and wanted to follow up about what they saw or read. To Hollander, this gave greater merit and value to the relationships she maintains via Facebook and lessened the gap she was questioned between our simultaneous existence in cyber space and the real world.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Hollander before the holidays as she approached the final stages of preparing for the exhibition. Since her project has received wide coverage and media attention, I wanted to discuss Hollander’s relationship with social media as co-founder of the self-serving, fine arts photography studio, the Bakery Photographic Collective in Westbrook, Maine. As a manager and artist, Hollander is in the unique position of successfully managing the studio and doing so with a great sensitivity and passion for the arts.

Hollander is admittedly still overwhelmed by the possibilities, perks and opportunities of blogging and social media, though she now considers herself a Facebook expert (and if you have been following Hollander, the project’s Facebook page and photographs, you would most definitely agree).

I asked Hollander specifically about the use of Facebook as both an artist and co-manager of the Bakery Photographic Collective

Now I’m obsessed with it. I’m learning as I go. It has been a process of realization of the perks Facebook offers. It has created an audience. Facebook is really important for an artist promoting their own work. In this down economy, artists can’t rely on galleries for sales- that model is shifting.

Hollander plans to turn her Facebook love loose on the Bakery Photographic Collective’s page once preparations for her February exhibit are complete. For Hollander, Facebook has helped her maintain 626 “friendships,” locate each person geographically and most impressively, create a virtual exhibit to complement her real world exhibit at the museum, as each of her photographed friends were asked to upload their portrait as their Profile Picture.

What started out as a personal documentary on friendship and environmental portraiture has turned into an exploration of American culture, relationships, generosity & compassion, family structure, community building, storytelling, meal sharing, our relationship to technology & travel in the 21st century, social networking, memory, and the history of the portrait.

The possibilities of Web 2.0 for artists as creators and managers promoting their work are endless- Hollander says

I am able to post work as I make it, have a dialogue with a global audience, and market – in one location.

Hollander’s exhibit opens February 4th at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

(Photo Credit: Tanja Alexia Hollander)