Contact Sheet Photographs by Karl Baden : Journal of Florida Studies

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Volume 1, Issue 7, 2018

Karl Baden: Florida Photographs

Alison Nordström, Photo Editor

Photographs are both an aid to memory and an impediment to it. The photograph’s unmatched ability to preserve the specific details of a particular place and time can remind us of such facts as where we were and who was with us, what we saw and what things looked like, but they are not time machines. While they may convey the illusion that we are transported to the past, photographs exist only in the present. Every time we look at a photograph, it is the reality of that moment of looking now that we bring to it, not the reality of the time the image was fixed, no matter how much we may think they are the same. Old photographs mark a starting point for the trajectories that follow. The time between a particular image’s making and the now of consuming it is full of other pictures, new knowledge, different feelings and changed points of view.

In 1986, when Karl Baden went to Florida and made these pictures, he was one of some 30 million tourists to visit the Sunshine State that year, and we must assume that, like him, a significant number of those visitors were seeing Florida for the first time. He was 34 years old and had been taking pictures seriously for fourteen years. Already an accomplished street photographer, he found in Florida the outdoor gatherings, distracted people, random occurrences and chance encounters that characterize the genre. In addition, his Northern eyes and sensibilities would have caused him to notice the unfamiliar flora and fauna, curious local pastimes, and such exotic architectural features as termite-tented buildings, swimming pools, and tourist attractions.

Looking at these pictures today, we notice different things. Today, the thrill of recognition has, perhaps, more to do with when these images were made than they are about a place and one person’s first impressions of it. Especially for those of us old enough to have experienced Florida then, our focus now is on aspects of the world that we could not have seen or appreciated at that time. “Yes!” we say to ourselves, “Cars were that long; men wore their hair that way; old people really dressed like that!” “Everybody’s smoking!” “That’s a public pay phone!” Our perceptions, changed by the passage of time, alter the meaning and emphasis of these pictures. Incorporated into the present, these authored fragments of the past tell us more about who we are now than who we were then. We call it memory.

Born in New York in 1952, Karl Baden completed a BA at Syracuse University (1974) and an MFA in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (1979). An exhibiting artist for more than thirty years, Baden has also taught photography at a number of institutions, including Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts; and Harvard University. He is currently an Associate Professor of the Practice at Boston College, where he has taught since 1989.

Volume 1, Issue 7, 2018

Karl Baden: Florida Photographs, 1986

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