Atlas Films

Artist Statement:
Abstract Expressionism of Microfilm

One of the great things about the French photographer, Eugene Atget, is that he was such a good pointer. He consistently aimed his camera at ordinary subjects worth noticing – and otherwise easy enough to have missed.

In my day job, I work as an archival researcher for documentary films and TV shows. Sometimes it’s a matter of methodical searching at the National Archives and commercial stock houses, and other times it’s a matter a finding a good flea market stash or the right old guy with interesting stuff in his basement.

While I’m doing my legitimate research, I bump into all these odd traces of forgotten history – accidentally lyrical footage tucked away in a Treasury Department film, or a 1940s incident of religiously motivated poisoning next to a news story about a submarine that I need.

As experience becomes compressed into history, stories become simpler and scrubbed cleaner. Teasing it back apart, I find it full of broken fragments that, if you hold them up to the light or turn them to a slightly different angle, they look different than we expect them to.

The items that are just weird or that only remind us that there were screwed-up teenagers before 1960 make for a good read, but the material I find truly compelling are the images that have an unsolvable kind of surrealism, or that tell a different story than we tend to tell ourselves about who we are as a people.

In pointing at these documents there is built a sort of in-between space where the mundane may become more delightful, the damaged find a new reason to belong, and the creation myths are a little more troubled.


Biography:
Rich Remsberg is an Emmy-nominated archival image researcher working mainly on PBS documentaries and independent films, including the American Masters on Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Killer Poet, and the Grammy-nominated CD box set, People Take Warning! His own short film, Jeweler’s Eye, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, and Common Pictures: A Journey Through the Eyes of Found Photography was an opening act for the electronic music duo, The Books, on their spring 2007 tour.

He is the author of Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs From the Great Depression, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Described as "eloquent photography" by the New Yorker, Remsberg's book, Riders for God: The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang, has found an audience from Harvard University to the Texas prison system. As a photographer, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek.com, The Christian Science Monitor, and No Depression. He has served on the faculty of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center Field School and received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He lives in North Adams, Massachusetts, where, on Sunday nights he holds an informal film series showing vintage 8- and 16mm movies. If you’re in the neighborhood, consider yourself invited. www.atlasfilms.org.

Artist Website:
www.atlasfilms.org