November 2007 Archives

From Guerrilla News Network, via Conscientious, an interview with Philip Jones Griffiths.

Alas, nomenclature is sadly lacking in the field of 'art'. Am I a news photographer? A press photographer? A photojournalist? An artist? I deplore the latter moniker because the word is so misused. For me, art is the melding of form and content, and as that is what I strive to do then perhaps 'artist' is correct. But I'm happy to be called a photojournalist!

I never realized this was a semi-regular feature on her blog, but Amy Stein has been making "Battle Photo" posts for a while now. Each post juxtaposes two photographs of similar subject/treatment by two different photographers. Something like a capsule-sized, visual Ongoing Moment. It's more obvious when you see them collected together.

The Chicago Tribune has reviewed Beate Gütschow's show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

The results are virtually seamless color and black-and-white images that in "LS" resemble Romantic paintings and in "S" severe architectural studies. Both impress viewers on the elementary level of how the artist did them, and that is supposed to get us to forget how when this sort of thing was done before it was ridiculed and eventually swept away by the masters of modern photography.

It's good to see someone else has noticed that all this digital montage work is just a quicker, easier, more seamless version of something that's gone on from nearly day one of photography.

Beate Gütschow: LS/S
Through Jan 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL
(312) 663-5554
(Hey, admission is free!)

MoMA's ongoing annual photography show "New Photography" sets a high bar for itself to show off a handful of groundbreaking photographers each year. It's that word - "groundbreaking" - that trips up each year's attempt because the farther away your target, the greater the margin of error. There is a possibility these works will be appreciated with age, but the chances they will be forgotten are far greater.

The NY Times has a review.

"New Photography" is generally limited to three or four artists, which puts pressure on the chosen few to deliver something fresh. None of this year's photographers accomplish that... You hate to be the spoiler, the insatiable art viewer constantly demanding that rush of something new. But when a show is called "New Photography 2007," you feel within your rights.

New Photography 2007
Through Jan 1 2008 at MoMA
11 W 53rd St
(212) 708-9400

From Artworld Salon, in response to a book review in the Financial Times questioning the relevancy of contemporary criticism based on its need for "a priesthood" of critical interpreters:

Why must art be more popular or, to push the point, more "lay" than either science or philosophy, the two disciplines with which it undoubtedly shares a genuine creative impulse? Or to push it even further: Is this a call for evangelical aestheticism?-i.e. the only way to true "aesthetic understanding" is through one's own personal relationship with art?

Science undoubtedly shares art's "genuine creative impulses"? Hmm, I'm not following that line of thinking, but philosophy certainly does, if that means it long ago spiraled away into the stratosphere and holds very little currency with the daily lives of regular people. Art used to do this, but that sort of thing doesn't seem to pay very well these days.

"The devious lie of a snapshot" is a marvelous phrase. It is not the photographer who is devious, but the nature of the snapshot itself, which isolates and freezes action, disconnecting it from context and sequence. Photographs seduce us into believing that they are objective records, but, in fact, all images are interpretations, texts that must be read.

How the Truth Gets Framed by the Camera by Louis Masur

From the Guardian:

It is significant that the photographers Kozloff includes are often a good deal more famous than their sitters. There are taxi drivers and barmaids here, sailors and majorettes, hustlers, sharecroppers and vagrants. Teenagers and prostitutes outnumber statesmen. Kozloff favours anonymous faces and everyday locations: he makes room for discarded strips of photo booth portraits, but not for the celebrated sitters of Karsh, Bailey, Leibovitz or Testino.

Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900
by Max Kozloff
$44 at Amazon (reg $70)

I've never heard of Ovation cable channel, but starting tonight it will be showing the recent BBC series "The Genius of Photography" starting this evening as part of its "Framed" photography series.

Tuesday night (tomorrow), Ovation will also be showing "Visions of Light", a documentary about cinematography that I highly recommend.

Today's NY Times features an article on the increasingly restrictive conditions photographers face when photographing musical performers in concert. "At Stevie Wonder's concert at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, photographers were told they could shoot only the first 5 to 10 seconds of Mr. Wonder's entrance and the first 60 seconds of his first song." That's pretty amazing. I assume this is directly related to the increasing lack of control celebrities have over the use of their images outside official channels.

Last week the LA Times ran a follow up about photographer Luis Sinco and his now famous photograph of Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, a battle-weary Marine, taken during the 2004 Battle of Falluja. (My commentary at the time, here.) MIller has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome and subsequently has had a tremendously difficult time reintegrating into civilian society. Sinco has taken an extrodinary and laudable step to try to help Miller in the aftermath of his Iraq experience.

Sometimes, when things get hard to witness, I use my camera as a shield. It creates a space for me to work -- and distance to keep my eyes open and my feelings in check. But Miller had no use for a photojournalist. He needed a helping hand.

(via Exposure Compensation)

Alec Soth is interviewed on the Magnum Blog by his intern, Carrie Thompson. He talks about his new book Dog Days Bogatá, which he shot while in Colombia adopting his baby daughter. I thought this comment was interesting, regarding the intermix between a photographer's own experience and his/her experience of a particular place and how that combines to create a particular point of view:

I'm not comfortable making any proclamations about Bogotá. I always say that Sleeping by the Mississippi isn't a document of the Mississippi River and Niagara isn't a document of Niagara Falls. In both cases, there are huge gaps because I'm exploring my own interests. I'm making my own Mississippi, my own Niagara. The same is true with Bogotá. My experience of the place was so profoundly shaped by adoption that I could never suggest I have a clear-eyed take on things.

By now, you have undoubtedly seen Errol Morris's completely amazing series of "blog" posts over at the NY Times in which he attempts to set the record straight about whether Roger Fenton "faked" his famous photo "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." Exhaustive to create and exhaustive to read, but satisfying in both regards, I'm sure. (I put "blog" in scare-quotes because what Morris has been doing stretches the admittedly blurry definition of a blog to its outermost limits.) If you have not, please do.

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? Part One
Which Came First? Part Two
Which Came First? Can George, Lionel and Marmaduke Help Us Order the Fenton Photographs? Part Three

The series is a monument to dedication, obsession, synthesis, attention to detail, detective work and a refusal to take the assertions of others at face value. Some have, however, pointed out the somewhat unpleasant implications of this exercise in glorifying trivia.

If so much energy was put into the discovery of that one small fact, how are we actually supposed to learn anything truthful about larger and more significant events like the Iraq War or global warming.

This sort of realization always occurs to me when I read a news article about something I actually know about, particularly if it's something not important enough to warrant a dedicated reporter who works with the subject day in and day out. Invariably, the treatment is superficial and erroneous in multiple dimensions. I'm always left to wonder "if they can't get something this simple right, what about political issue x?"

Slate's analysis seems to miss the larger point of the exercise and focuses in on whether it matters whether Fenton moved some cannon balls to improve the mise en scene.

One of the interesting but unintentional payoffs of this series is that a Google search for it will unearth some rather interesting blogs that have linked to the series.