December 2007 Archives

Mary Virgina Swanson has posted a list of links to the various "best of" lists for 2007 photo books. She's also put up some key info about upcoming photo competitions in 2008. Included are Review Santa Fe, Project Competition, and Singular Image.

I have been using Movable Type blogging software for nearly four years now, the whole of the life of this particular blog. And early on, I was amazed at how I was able to get such a powerful and elegant bit of software for nearly nothing. About a little over a year ago, the difficulties dealing with the templates and making this thing look like I wanted it to were just taking way more time than was reasonable. Plus, the tsunami of comment spam that I had to deal with didn't have any simple solution with MT. I thought each successive version upgrade would be a magic bullet. I tried using something else when I launched Gallery Wire using Word Press, a free and open source blogging tool. Wow. It was just what I was looking for: much simpler, much faster, much more usable. (I've also been using Tumbler for my work-related blog, Designing Innovations. It's also a pleasure to use, for a completely different set of reasons.)

Movable Type 4 was released a few months ago, and I gave it one last try. At first, I was pretty impressed, but the more I used it, the more aggravated I become. The last straw is that insane "Photos" module you see to the right. I can't figure out how to shut it off and the template structure of MT has gotten so Byzantine I just figure it's simpler to throw the whole thing out and start over with Word Press. So I have.

You can see the new, updated Gallery Hopper for a week or so at http://www.walkernewyork.com/galleryhopper/. If you have any suggestions or questions, leave a comment here. I'll be switching over to the new installation in the first week of 2008.

I ran across a couple of articles this week that covered photographic responses to the human impact of our expansion in the Western US. The first is an interview with Robert Adams on Bloomberg.com. A small reproduction of one of Adams' images in the 2001 MoMA Gursky retrospective catalog introduced me to his amazing work from the Colorado Front Range, and eventually to his many writings about what it means to be a photographer and how looking at the world photographically relates to living life.

"I was distressed by the inhumanity and greed I was looking at in terms of what human beings were doing, but I was also swept away by the grandeur of the light sweeping over this landscape. In the main, I've tried to talk about both things at once."

Smithsonian features David Maisel's mind bending aerial work.

Maisel also wants to challenge our notions of beauty. He thus describes the usual reaction to his work as "this experience where people are seduced by the seeming surface beauty of an image, and then as they learn more about what it is they may be looking at, they realize that there is, in a way, a betrayal." Bright colors become ugly stains, painterly strokes morph into indelible gouges and marbled veneers turn out to be leached toxins.

The NY Times has a good article on the recent acquisition of the Arbus archives by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus's effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography.

Whenever these "archives" show up, I'm astonished at what packrats people must have been. I'm pretty loathe to throw much away, but every time I move apartments there's an opportunity to purge. When the archives of the luminaries of my generation start showing up I wager they will be mightly thin. Or in the Google cache.

From Black Star Rising: Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons

Depending on who you ask, it's because:

1. It's taking money out of the pockets of working photographers;
2. It's putting money into the coffers of large corporations, whose executives like CC-enabled crowdsourcing even better than Third World child labor;
3. It's supposed to make sharing your work easier, but it often just makes it more confusing -- creating the kind of misunderstandings that lead to lawsuits.

Also:

• Guardian: Photographer Takes Down Bubble 2.0 Fun
  
• Larry Lessig: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law

I shy away from blogs that mix politics with their cultural commentary, so it's slightly hypocritical for me to make this particular post. But with so much at stake again, that surely would be "a foolish consistency".

Happy to see that today Joe Leiberman has endorsed John McCain for president. "On all the issues, you're never going to do anything about them unless you have a leader who can break through the partisan gridlock," Lieberman said. "The status quo in Washington is not working." Of all the alternate histories that play in my head, none is more powerful than the thought of what a different world we'd live in if it was President McCain on Sept 11 instead of President Bush.

Despite not being affiliated with a party as long as I've lived in NY, I have been a long-time McCain supporter, pushing for him in the 2000 nomination and voting for him as a write-in candidate in 2004. (That was an interesting experience, requiring members of both parties to join me in the booth to explain the procedure to ensure that one or the other didn't give me false instructions!)

In today's NY Times, the public editor takes up the complaints of child porn-ish photos in the Times' fashion magazine "T". A few weeks back there was a fashion spread in the supplement (which brings in $5MM per issue!) which featured a 17 year-old model in a few topless (and though unmentioned in the article - bottomless) poses. The editor responsible said the images "didn't give me pause for one second." Later in the article when defending the work, this same guy claims he can't be "shy about walking right up to the line of being provocative, and that's going to cause debate when you get close to that line." Either provocative work doesn't give him pause or he wants to have it both ways, because those two comments strike me as self-contradictory and self-serving.

It's ironic that discussing this issue means even more people will be driven to look at the feature, titled "Gallerina". I had flipped through that magazine a week or two ago and apparently was able to pass by these images without even stopping (gimmicky fashion spreads aren't my thing). I went back and looked this morning to see what caused the ruckus.

Strangely there was one image I remember catching my attention (at left). This struck me because the montage style is so uncommon. The contrivance must have grabbed my attention. I probably looked at it for about five to ten seconds and moved on. I don't recall any of the others so I must have flicked through those pages spending less than a second on each image, making a snap judgment about whether the picture justified closer examination.

The final judgment in the article comes down to whether the audience for the image chose to view it (in other more "edgy" fashion magazines, the customer has sought it out, in the case of "T", its just come with the Sunday paper.) While I think it's a valid argument, it does completely abandon the question of whether we as a society would be able to tip toe up to the edge of exploiting teenage sexuality. In individual cases, this being a great example, various parties involved will make excuses for their own actions while taken as a collective, the impact on culture and social mores is left unexamined.

I always get the impression from these little investigations that the "public editor" must be the most hated many in the Times organization, based on the frequently condescending responses he gets to his questioning the Times editors.

This morning as I was riding the subway to work, I looked up and saw an outdated advertisement for the Jeff Wall retrospective held at MoMA earlier this year. The ad's tagline read "Only at MoMA" or something to that effect. I thought to myself, isn't this same show going on at SFMoMA? Sure enough, it is.

Wall's (new?) work is also being shown in England at White Cube. There's a longish interview in the Telegraph that starts:

Jeff Wall is arguably the most important photographer on the planet. Phaidon recently published a book showcasing 1,000 masterpieces from more than 30,000 years of art history. It contained only one photographer. Rather than Atget, Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson, the panel of experts chose Wall...

Wall is rightfully modest about this assertion. Not to say that Wall's work is or isn't worthy, only that it's ridiculous that only one photo was selected to represent the medium. 'Course, one could say it's a johnny-come-lately art form (if its an artform at all). Still, to be proportionate by time frame, photography would rate at least four more examples. Based on volume, maybe the whole things should be photos.

If you had to pick 5 photographs that would represent the entire medium for a history of art, what would they be?

I hadn't planned to post about this since it's on just about every other photography blog around - Newsweek's article "Is Photography Dead?" But now, having read (skimmed, really) the article, I'll throw in a few thoughts. First, the article's punchline:

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers--if there are to be any--will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

This issue has been bothering me for a couple of years now, the fact that as digital manipulation moves closer to center stage in art photography, photography moves closer to the rest of the arts and risks losing its connection to the everyday world. Yes, you can go on about how from the very beginning of the form, photography has been about deception, manipulation, alteration of reality. Still, it all starts with light on an object, it starts with the real. The farther the form departs from that starting point, the greater the temptation to become inwardly focused to examine only the structures and strictures of the form. The great thing about photography is its outward focus (puns and semi-puns are so hard to avoid) on the world around us, not the art itself.

Is photography dead? Some of it, yeah. All of it, if we're not careful.