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Flourish Online Magazine | Winter 2007 |
Faculty Spotlight: Matt Haffner
The Visionary Behind "Serial City"
By Julie Senger
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Assistant Professor of Photography Matt Haffner was awarded this year’s prestigious KSU Foundation Prize for an ambitious project titled “Serial City.” This $10,000 prize was awarded to Haffner by a committee of his professorial peers representing various academic disciplines at KSU, and it is open to projects from all academic subjects.
“Serial City” is a series of building-size photographic murals, which “examine the delicate play between ephemeral street art and commissioned murals.” They were wheat-pasted onto the outsides of 13 different structures in downtown, urban Atlanta during the last week of September 2006, and Haffner began removing them the first week of November 2006.
Haffner insisted that the urban sites for the murals were on local people’s “day-to-day travel routes rather than tourist routes.” This is because he wanted to create a dialogue among the people who traveled these streets every day and may or may not be patrons of art galleries or have discussions about art. He hoped they’d suddenly notice the art and ask themselves questions like, “Has that always been there? If so, what else is out there that I’m missing?”
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"Low Rider" building-size photograph |
However, since most of these works were on the Atlanta structures for only four to six weeks, these same people might then wonder, “Where did that big picture go?” This is the nature of ephemeral art, or art that seemingly appears and disappears overnight.
Haffner said graffiti, a popular urban form of street art, also disappears soon after it is discovered because many cities are constantly trying to “clean things up.” This is the nature of the similarity between ephemeral street art and his “Serial City” mural photographs, which were commissioned by the Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival in 2006.
In addition, Haffner also took black-and-white photos of the “Serial City” collection while they remained on the Atlanta structures, thereby making the structure an extension of the mural. These photos were framed and displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in January 2007 and also shown in conjunction with other Atlanta Celebrates Photography functions.
Haffner’s underlying goal is to teach people how to really “see things” and create a dialogue about them; this is also one of the most important lessons he hopes to impart to his KSU photography students. He says, “teaching is about shifting perspective; making art is learning how to see.”
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In fact, he admits that often photographers will photograph subjects to learn how to see them; because “a photograph can change a subject into something totally different.” This is because the people who view the photo only have its contents to draw conclusions from; they often do not know the subject outside of the photo.
The subjects of Haffner’s “Serial City” mural photographs were local models who exemplified the diverse ethnicities of Atlanta’s urban neighborhoods. They were placed in poses that you might see ordinary people doing in a particular area of town, such as arguing, waiting or working. The images were shocking because of their multi-story size, yet they looked like they belonged there and may have always been there.
The “Serial City” project, Haffner says, shows people that “how we inhabit space says something about who we are.”