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Rich Remsberg

Artist Statement:
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 that ran next to a news story I need about a particular submarine.

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’s short films and other work draws from found and archival historical material.

His films have screened at the Walker Arts Center, Slamdance Film Festival, the Bowery Ballroom, and Mass MoCA. He is a regular participant in the collage marathon, 100 Hours In the Woodshed, and he regularly collaborates with the electronic music duo, The Books.

In his day job as an archival image researcher, Remsberg works primarily on PBS documentaries and independent films, including American Masters, American Experience, and NOVA. He received an Emmy for Outstanding Research in 2008 and is the author of Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs From the Great Depression (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming, spring 2010).
Artist Website:
www.atlasfilms.org
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