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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.
Italian photographer Paolo Ventura is interviewed in the latest update (issue?) to FStop online magazine. Ventura does a lot of commercial magazine editorial work, but this interview focuses on his tableaux work. Ventura is becoming well known for his photographs of action figures reenacting World War II-era scenes - but notably, not combat.
In contrast to the Lori Nix interview from a few days ago, Ventura works in a looser style than Nix, working out the camera angles as the diorama comes together and using common household table lamps for lighting. He also builds the miniatures himself, whereas Nix uses a "fabricator".
Doing a little research on Paolo, I found he'd also done the project "Dress for Eternity", a documentary project about the catacombs of in Palermo, Sicily. Strangely, that work is difficult to find online and isn't even on Ventura's own site. The two subjects and styles are so different, I never would have made the connection otherwise.
I applaud the spirit of learning in-camera techniques over applying a collection of Photoshop filters, but an in-camera cliche is still a cliche.
Last week's Aperture panel "Fine Artist or Commercial Photographer?" apparently turned into a "advice for the young photographer" session. Pop Photo's "State of the Art" blog has posted some tips from Charles Traub, the panel's moderator and chair of the MFA Photography department at School of Visual Arts.
The hobgoblin of my little mind sees an interesting contradiction:
"Do something old in a new way.
...
Don’t use alternative processes—if it ain’t straight, do it in the computer."
Before you know it, 35mm will be an alternative process.
Over at his blog, Alec Soth has been talking a lot about underrated photographers lately. In his post about Denis Cameron, he quotes Cameron: "Our work is to record our world and history will judge us from what we leave behind. Pictures will be our epitaph.”
Last week's New Yorker featured a profile of Jerry Shore, a photographer unknown to me and a great many other people apparently. Few friends or acquaintances knew of his photography and he sold only one image in his life. Now, 12 years after his death, his prodigious, but unknown, output truly serves as his epitaph.
I missed this interview with Alec Soth a few weeks back. (Joerg's mixture of politics and photography puts me off his site for months at a time.)
Photography is essentially a cliché-making machine... I don't think it is healthy for a photographer to altogether run away from clichés -- just as I don't think it is wise for any kind of artist to try and do something entirely new. We are all working within a language and tradition. To avoid that language is to speak gibberish.
Because of the volume of images we experience in our day to day existence, avoiding cliche seems nearly impossible. Repeition drives meaning out of both subjects and techniques. Sometimes I find that my own attempts to avoid cliche cause me to freeze up, to avoid taking a picture for fear it's been taken too many times already. I suppose I intend for this "discretion" to be a good thing and drive me to see uniquely, but after reading The Ongoing Moment last spring, I've been trying to loosen up that fear and realize that it's unavoidable to make pictures similar to others' and only by recognizing that can a photographer move beyond to put his/her own imprint on the subject/technique/etc.
Oh, and Alec now has a blog.
I suppose its frequently unavoidable when you're following the "Kodak rules", take your picture with your back to the sun, but I really hate it when the photographer's shadow ends up in the picture. Ran across a post about the shadow's presence through Thingsmagazine this morning. Oddly the post doesn't mention Lee Friedlander, who raised that particular mistake to an art form.
For the past year or so, there seems to be a burst of interest in Stephen Shore. From a profile on Shore in the Guardian last Fall:
I do think about why people are all of a sudden looking at my work and it occurs to me that it may have needed a distance in time for people to see what I was actually looking at. People need time. It's much easier to look at the past than to look at the present. I was looking at the present and people didn't want to see it until it became - for them - the past.
303 Gallery's Shore show closes in less than 2 weeks, so in case you've missed any of the others, this one would serve as an introduction. What differentiates this show from others I've seen is the inclusion of reproductions of Shore's travel journals from 1973. Each page or two outlines the day, recording the odometer reading, the evening's lodging and TV viewing, the day's meals (where, not what), exposures made and their location, all accompanied by receipts for gas and local postcards from each stop. Interestingly, manyu of these postcards feature unironic landscapes of downtown business districts, mirrored in Shore's own work. As for the record of shots, Shore was using an 8X10 view camera, so the shot count is low. No one day reaches into double digits.
3-Jul-73 by Stephen Shore
Through July 7th at 303 Gallery
525 W 22nd St
(212) 255-1121
It's amazing how the dots come together sometimes. I ran across a great list of jazz quotes that are easily applied to photography or any other creative medium. In this case, the list was created to inspire Powerpoint users. Go figure.
#1: “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
In photographic terms, the ability to see (watch? is the hear/listen analog see/watch?) is more important than any technical expertise.
#5: “Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” (Charlie-Parker)
Edward Weston believed the photographer should stick to one camera and learn all its ins and outs in order to be able to be so casual enough in using it that taking great pictures would be second nature. He had a lot of venom for equipment whores.
#7: “You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.” (John-Coltrane)
It's the photographer, not the camera that determines the final result.
At the end of your life, how many photos will you leave behind? How many will you consider to be good or great? Think about this when you're editing or when you review your work and get discouraged about your output. Harry Callahan considered just six prints a month worthy of his name. Six a month. Between '84 and '89 Andreas Gursky released less than 40 images for public display. How many shots do you take in a month? How many are you satisfied with as your best effort? Are you being ruthless enough? And yet, are you being prolific enough?
All photographers must edit, for after the results of technical errors have been discarded, the only thing that distinguishes a successful picture from a failure is the maker's artistic judgement. - Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Dept. of Photography, MoMA
