August 8, 2011, Featured Articles, Last Call

Johnny Cubert White: Casual Encounters

Thu, Aug 04, 2011

Documenting his Casual Encounters with the urbanscape through photography, White plays a key role in at once understanding, participating in, and portraying street scenes.

By its public nature, street art, whether it wants to or not, invites interaction from the environment. Vandals, contributors, city cleaners, nature—they affect the physical evolution of the art. White, “a person who walks the city to experience it,” keenly observes the evolution of works by artists such as Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Mr. Brainwash, and Jonny Fenix. At times, he is the documentarian of a moment in the process of decay. Though we get a glimpse of the original works, these photos also capture their decline, reflecting their ephemeral nature. He provides a context that explores art weathered by time, human interference, and nature. Other photos include a dimension of street art in the context of its environment. White superimposes shadows, light, and urban objects with the art, asserting a reinterpretation of the original work. In all his photos, layers play a significant role in the composition, whether they are stripped or imposed.

He composes layers in other urbanscape photos—that of living icons. These photographs reflect an instinct for image and iconography that hark back to his history in filmmaking. They superimpose images in reflections, and he captures an iconographic narrative based on a metaview of the subject. His photography represents subjects in ways other than their original intent. They have been captured by a follower who, with his strong sense of the city, is at once a part of it and apart from it as an objective observer; he pays homage to ephemeral art by documenting its eternal ideas.

In Casual Encounters,” White reflects Baudelaire’s sensibility that found “traditional art inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life,” thus demanding that “the artist assert himself in the metropolis”—the heart of the flaneur. In 1977, Susan Sontag observed:

"The camera has become a tool for the flaneur. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world picturesque."

We see this concept in the works of Eugene Atget, and later photographs of Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In the current urbanscape, Johnny Cubert White undertakes his photography by the same philosophy.

Johnny Cubert White received an MFA in filmmaking from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a filmmaker and artist in Chicago, he was hailed by Chicago Social Magazine as an “avant-garde barnstormer, [He is] conceivably the closest thing this town has to an authentic impresario." His undergraduate degree in philosophy and writing was earned at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University.

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