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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Seeing through Another Man’s Eyes: Bill Cottman & The Plymouth Avenue Project
Wednesday 08 January @ 11:58:42 |
 by Lydia Howell
photos by Bill Cottman
“I take pictures of people, places and things that are changing faster than I can imagine and I’m just trying to preserve them,” says Bill Cottman.
His current show, “The Plymouth Avenue Project,” reveals his North Minneapolis neighborhood in a state of economic flux and creative ferment. It was supported by a McKnight Fellowship and a City Arts grant.The camera is the means of “autobiography” for Cottman’s internal reflection; it stands in loving gaze, documenting his community.
Cottman is a man of integrated opposites: meditative and brimming with enthusiasm; a career engineer, now an “emerging” artist who has honed his craft for over 30 years. To many he’s a voice more than a vision, co-hosting “Mostly Jazz” (Saturdays, 9AM-11AM on KFAI) with his mother-in-law, Patricia Walton.
To this, Cottman responds, “I love to watch the reaction! ‘It’s your MOTHER-IN-LAW?’ It’s the stereotyped expectations about that relationship,” he chuckles in enjoyment, then adds, with a grin, “I love DESTROYING that!” He credits Walton with his initial appreciation of what they both call “America’s Music.”
“I have this clear memory of hearing barrel-house piano when I was very young. I saw the film ‘West Side Story’ and that really got me. My mother-in-law, Patricia, is the most influential. At first, I just followed her around. She’s known so many of the great jazz artists! Now, I’ve come into my own and I tell her about artists I’ve discovered.” Cottman notes that saxophone genius, John Coltrane is a near-daily inspiration. “And, of course, the ladies: Billie Holiday, Carmen McCrae, Abbey Lincoln.”
Cottman reminds me of a soprano sax, which is so unique in its range of expression: mystical, playful, drawing on some ancestral memory wedded to the modern. Within the trim, fiftysomething, the jazz-lover and photographer jam together well. Seeing Cottman’s photographs has brought me a new insight about parallels in the two art forms. Both require a dedicated discipline to attain a sound grasp of technique that must become reflexive. Yet, both expressions also aim for being utterly open to spontaneity. That’s the essence of jazz musicians’ improvisation and photographers’ ability to “catch” the visual moment.
A 1967 engineering graduate from a black Ivy League college, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., Cottman had no role model for his first ambition, commercial art. He found photography at the Hallie Q. Brown Camera Club at the Martin Luther King Center in St. Paul, soon after arriving in Minnesota.
“Earlier on, I wasn’t aware of African-American photographers,” he remembers. “And I wasn’t even aware that I wasn’t aware of them.”
He cites a 20th century pantheon that he absorbed: Stieglitz, Stiechen, Weston; he studied with contemporary, Gary Winogrand, who began in the Beat-era. Cottman’s approach seems to leap from that time and 1960’s influences, like gay photographer Duane Michaels’ photographic diaries and intimate narrative series work. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the sharp-angled “outsider’s point of view,” embodied in Diane Arbus’ comet-brief career, or Michaels’ deeply personal documentary, are visible in Cottman’s work. Women and openly gay artists, as much as people of color, have found it difficult to break into the white men’s club of photography and the whole range of visual arts.
“Discovering other African-American photographers made it richer. It made me able to claim more of it,” Cottman cites black artists: Van Der Zee (who documented 1920s and ‘30s Harlem), Gordon Parks and Roy Decarava, whom he’s studied with. “It was a grounding thing.”
He exhibited from Moscow to Harlem to the Minneapolis Insitute of Art in the 1970s and since 2000. Like so many women have done, Cottman devoted himself to family life for a couple of decades. His art became a candle kept lit as a more personal illumination. This is evident in tender portraits of his wife, Beverly, daughter, Kenna, his mother and, of course, his mother-in-law in the series “Four Women.” (This writer wonders: is the title a reference to the same-titled Nina Simone song? It honors black women’s tenacious survival against slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the Northern varieties of racism.) Whether photographing loved ones, strangers on the street or self-portraits, he brings a keen emotional connection to making pictures. Cottman takes a radical turn away from the traditional (white) “male gaze” that too often keeps the world at an objectifying distance. No one in his pictures is reduced to mere “subject.”
Cottman’s work also has an architectural sensibility as acutely aware of our physical environment as of people. It makes for a fully realized command of composition. Visually exciting, so we see “everyday life” anew, as extraordinary.
“I think I have a good sense of balance. There’s a certain order I like to see in a composition,” he muses. “Then, I wait for something to happen: the expected unpredictable thing happens in the composition. That has appeal for me.”
He echoes the musician standing on the solid ground of a jazz standard’s melody (“Stardust” or “Body and Soul”), then, jumping out into improvisational air. Familiar and fresh elements combine for a moment in a combination that’s never existed before and never will again. Cottman’s current exhibit is full of such moments, in picture after picture.
The Plymouth Avenue Project was born out of a Northwest Area Foundation initiative to take new approaches to eliminating Northside poverty. It did not define the residents as “problems” in need of fixing by outsiders; instead it looked within the community for solutions. As Cottman’s artist statement says, “Intersections of faces and places thriving outside the view of IDS, like [poet] Langston Hughes and [photographer] Roy Decarava did in ‘the Sweet Flypaper of Life’ fifty years ago in Harlem.”
All his adult life, Cottman has served in such endeavors. He and his wife, Beverly, bought and renovated their Northside home five years ago. They are part of a building wave of grassroots activists, artists and small business-owners working to get the neighborhood’s fair share of resources to nourish the community’s growth.
“Putting (the Foundation’s) program in my own words: it was about discovering the economic and spiritual assets in the community and how to remove obstacles that keep people from becoming their whole selves,” Cottman explains. “I was part of this for a year. But, I’m about photographic outcomes, so... Plymouth Avenue was natural. I live just two blocks off the Avenue. I’m there at least twice a day every day. This project was photographing people doing things RIGHT—however, you define that.”
Cottman shows us that vibrant encounters happen while walking dogs, shopping and at bus shelters, at community meetings and election campaigns; new and longstanding business are next to empty buildings open with potential.
Elders, children, families and young men are photographed in glorious black and white or in Cottman’s new explorations of color (using a digital camera) and includes people’s stories recorded on video and audio tape. The Plymouth Avenue Project shows a North Minneapolis that local media too-rarely reveals, seeming to prefer crime-scene scenarios. Cottman also found an innovative way to put the Northside “in context” with the rest of Minneapolis: he photographed the cityscape, over time, from his neighborhood’s vantage point at 701 Emerson.
“I work in visual themes, like chapters in a book. The 701 Emerson series had the point of view of the IDS building—which I’ve been photographing since I moved here in the late 1960s. Then, IDS dominated the skyline. Much as the dominant culture dominated the Twin Cities in late ’60s and ’70s.” Cottman makes the IDS a powerful and recurring iconic symbol. “Over time, the cityscape has changed and the IDS has had to yield to other entities. But, if you look carefully, it’s still the TALLEST thing in the skyline.”
One picture shows the IDS and downtown on the left and a fenced vacancy on the right; the two views are totally divided by the heavy shadow of a bridge and the river (Pictured below right). It’s a stark exposure of the denied reality that Minneapolis is the most racially and economically segregated city in America, according to the Census.
“What does it mean to be outside the view of the IDS? If you can see the IDS, what does it mean in terms of your access to economic assets?” he asks. He photographed from the Emerson address on the 10th of every month for almost a year, documenting changes. He asks, “As Heritage Park comes out of the ground, it will obscure IDS. What will this mean?”
Heritage Park is the (mostly upscale) housing and commercial development being built where the Holoman Project stood. That demolished low-income housing displaced 900 poor African-American and Hmong families, scattered across the city and unaccounted for. Northside residents were promised a large percentage of the good-paying construction jobs—a promise broken by the City and being challenged by the grassroots organization Community Collaboratives. Of 700 new housing units, only about 120 “affordable housing” units are planned. “Affordable housing” is a term politicians’ use to get around legal requirements to replace all low-income housing they’ve demolished, by the hundreds annually, for 20 years. Instead, they put public money into middle-class and luxury condominiums that profit private developers. “Economic development” operates in the same way: big corporations, like Target, get huge subsidies, depriving small, community-based businesses of critical investment. So far, Cottman’s “changing view of the IDS” exposes there’s little positive City change, regarding African-American economic access. Returning (mostly white) suburbanites and moneyed elites see the near North’s valuable riverfront property and covet it.
In contrast, Cottman’s exhibit is at a Northside asset: Homewood Studios, begun by his neighbor, retired English teacher and writer, George Roberts. It has six working artists’ studios, a gallery/performance/meeting space. (See the wonderful Northside history at www.homewoodstudios.org).
“My neighbor George says, ‘Art can save your life and does every day,’” quotes Cottman. “We’re all gifted with creative ability. Some find it sooner than others, but we all have it. I like being part of that discovery process with people.” Cottman has taught photography, from the Y to the King Center where he started his own creative quest. Cottman and his wife, Beverly, transformed the basement of their home for hosting a regular creative “salon” for all the arts, making another place of sustenance for new and established talents.
Besides his forays into new mediums for “Plymouth Avenue,” Cottman has forged a collaboration with spoken-word artist j. otis powell! called “Emancipation Stories.”
“His words don’t describe my photographs and I’m not illustrating his words. Sometimes they converge. They diverge. There’s intersections and parallel streams of consciousness we’re exploring as men, as African-Americans, citizens, fathers, sons, brothers, lovers,” says Cottman. Some of this collaboration may be on video and postcards of the Plymouth Avenue Project photographs are at the gallery.
Bill Cottman is that rare person who spends his life looking at the world while keeping a hopeful light of human possibility burning. His humorous calm reminds me of Buddhist monks. He is absolutely humble about his talent, saying, “I tend to sway off the mark in my work. Its always good to have people you tell your project to. They’ll keep asking you about it and keep you on track!”
Fact is, he’s one of the happiest people you’ll ever meet: testament that its not endless consumerism that satisfies, but rather, infinite creativity and really engaging in the part of the world where you live. In his art and his life, Bill Cottman succeeds at both.
“The ultimate would be for me to walk up to someone and give them one of the postcards—-with THEM on it,” he laughs, a delighted child with gray hair. The day his exhibit opened, he got his wish, walking the Avenue.
You can hear a conversation with Bill Cottman Tues. Jan. 14, at 11 a.m. on KFAI (90.3 FM, Mpls 106.7 FM St. Paul). He will give an artist’s talk Tues., Jan. 21, at 7 p.m. at the gallery.
“The Plymouth Avenue Project” runs through Jan. 31. Tues. 10 a.m. - 9 p.m.; W, Th, F, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m; Weekends Noon - 4 p.m. Homewood Studios, 2400 Plymouth Ave. N., Mpls.612-529-0423. http://www.homewoodstudios.org
See Cottman’s earlier photographs and find out about salon events at http://www.salon1016.com
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