Recently in Misc. Category
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.
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!)
Sorry for the lack of posts of the past couple of weeks. There hasn't been much to say, plus I've been traveling for business and for pleasure, so haven't been able to get out to see anything. Not that there's much to see right now, as evinced by a recent fruitless pilgrimage to Chelsea only to find everything closed up for the season. (I've lived here for how long?)
August picks will focus on the museums in town, though those are a little lacking on the photography front right now. But the fall looks like it's going to be great.
Oh, and check out my other, new site Gallery Wire, for the latest gallery news, sans commentary. It's in stealth mode for the moment, but hopefully will become useful as the galleries come back to life and the fall season gets underway in a couple of weeks.
If you're a Web monkey with a passion for photography, you may want to check out Magnum. They've been continually upgrading their activities on the Web with blogs, videos, online exhibitions etc. Very impressive. They're looking for a Web Content Manager to keep this new engine purring.
I have been driving my wife crazy with the photography-oriented movies I've littered across our Netflix queue. I reviewed the first, War Photographer, a few weeks ago. I was looking forward to William Eggleston in the Real World but it sat unwatched on the TV cabinet for two months. We popped it in the other night and after watching the first 20 minutes or so, I fell asleep on the couch.
First, I had to get past the technical problems of the film. The video quality and audio recording are pretty poor, the audio so bad it occasionally requires subtitles for normal conversation. About five minutes in you can start to ignore that and focus on what's happening, a silent recording of Eggleston at work. This reminded me of War Photographer in a way, where you see from the outside what the photographer is doing, but that is nothing at all like seeing through the viewfinder or understanding how he frames the pictures or quickly makes technical adjustments to bring the image into a semblance of what's in his mind's eye for the shot.
After the first 15 minutes or so, the film leaves this mode and follows Eggleston into some stupefied interactions with his local friends and that's where my mind wandered away. One amazing insight from this initial interaction is that Eggleston is completely assured of his own excellence. He is satisfied with his work. He describes a recent project as the best work he's ever done. I found that astonishing.
According to the price limits of the "Affordable Art Fair" affordable art is whatever sells under $5000. A lot of new photography falls under that price cap, even from the heavy hitters, which is nice if you can swing it. But, honestly, five grand isn't affordable.
For the rest of us, Jen Bekman is prepping an interesting new project, 20 X 200, that appears to be an outgrowth of the "Hey, Hot Shot" contests she's been running for a while. The basic premise is high-count editions equate affordable prices, so you can get a piece of art from an edition of 200 for $20. Get it?
The program will feature both photography and those "other" arts, with the photography being drawn from the Hey, Hot Shot photographers. More details on Jen's blog, Personism.
"Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me." - James Nachtwey
My wife and I watched Christian Frei's Academy Award-nominated documentary "War Photographer" a couple of weekends back. Kind of a NetFlix double feature with The Constant Gardener . The movie is a biographical profile of the the war photographer James Nachtwey, one of the co-founders of the VII agency.
The core of the film is Nachtwey's mantra, quoted above, that photography can have an effect on history. The film primarily focuses on his work in the former Yugoslavia, the Palestinian territories, and Indonesia. Nachtwey initially came across as a cold, callous intruder, pressing his lens into scenes of grief and mourning. The image above is a frame from the film and a fair amount of footage is captured with small microcameras aimed over Nachtwey's Canon SLR or tilted back into his face. This is intended to give a sense of what it's like to shoot, but its a poor approximation for having you eye pressed up into the viewfinder and the world outside the frame fades away in the intensity of looking for the right moment to squeeze the shutter release. The effect was quite odd, particularly early on. It mimics a Doom-like video game, with the shotgun replaced with a lens barrel.
So, the central question is can photography, journalistic photography, make a change as big as ending war? Nachtwey is not just interested in ending specific wars, he wants to end all war and he believes he can do that through his work. He's obviously very intense about it, forgoing the sorts of everyday comforts and relationships most westerners take for granted in order to pursue this dream. Which means he can come off as a bit self righteous at times, but maybe that's the guilt that comes with being exposed to this sort of life philosophy while sitting in your comfy little NYC apt watching a DVD while sipping micro waved hot chocolate.
From a war photography view, the film also shows how our viewpoint of war in the west has changed based which subjects the photographer chooses. Thru the Korean conflict and into Vietnam, to be a war photographer meant your focus was on the fighters and fighting. Now, in the wake of Vietnam, the armies are more wary about journalists (though interestingly, the embed program used in the early phases of Iraq seem to reverse that in ways many photographers found unnerving) and the emphasis became the civilian and noncombatant who feels the lasting effects of the war. In Nachtwey's view I suppose this is also because a dead or traumatized civilian makes a cleaner case than the equivalent soldier, that war must stopped
But the question remains, how effective can photography be in halting an activity that seems to lie at the very core of human nature? Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, a book about violent pictures, delved into this question, attacking the position that simply representing atrocity will. Evoke the proper revulsion and indignation. For some viewers, indignation will lead to thoughts of justice, retribution and revenge. Consider the varying reactions to the cellphone video of Saddam Hussein's execution. Iraqi Shiites lauded it as justice served, Europeans shook their heads at "barbarity", Iraqi Sunnis viewed it as shameful.
During the film, I couldn’t help but wonder about Nachtwey's view on image fatigue, that the volume of photos he taken of dead sons, grieving mothers, the poor, rebellious youth devolves into a heart-numbing mash. Over decades of seeing the same atrocities committed in every continent of the world and public reaction in the West generally responding as a collective shrug, it's hard to imagine Nachtwey doesn't hold onto his idealism simply as a bullwark against the realization that its all been for nothing and that we are condemned by our nature to continue to kill one another.
Just wanted to let everyone know that the Gallery Hopper RSS feed now features the full content of each post, including images and links, rather than only the first couple of lines of each post. If you're not sure what an RSS feed is, Google has a short intro to feeds.
For those of you who have asked to get Gallery Hopper updates by email, I'm now able to offer that, too. Sign up and you'll get a single daily email with all of that day's posts (if any).
Just got back from Finland and wanted to poke my head in to say I'm still here. I was able to see the Sontag show at the Met over the weeknd with a few of the scant hours I had in NYC and will try to write about it by week's end. In the mean time, you can read Tyler Green's interview with Mia Fineman, the show's curator. Strangely, Fineman seems to indicate that there is only one portrait of Susan Sontag in the show, by Peter Hujar, but there are actually two. The second is by Anne Liebovitz.
