On the Web: February 2006 Archives
Or Miklos Gaal. Take your pick, the suddenly ubiquitous miniature-like style is now available to the masses through a simple Photoshop tutorial. And there's a matching Flickr pool with tutorial examples of varying quality.
More than anything, I think this highlights the weakness of the technique in its original form. A few questions come to mind: does this impact the value of the work in the art market at all? Do photographer's who heavily rely on technique for their personal style risk "commoditization" through Photoshop mimickery?
I try not to get off topic (note to PR folks: this blog is about photography. not scuplture, painting, performance art, etc.) but I used to be hugely into comic books, so I'll digress into this related field on occasion.
Modern Art Notes has posted coverage of the Hiroshi Sugimoto lecture at the Hirschhorn, done in conjunction with the new retrospective being shown there. Part 1 and Part 2. Sounds like Sugimoto is a quite a trippy guy, but judge for yourself. The Hirschhorn has posted the lecture online as an MP3. The Hirschhorn's online Sugimoto exhibit is truly comprehensive, as well.
If you've got a layover at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, you might want to stop at Terminal 5 to see the current display of Terry Evan's aerial photography entitled Revealing Chicago. It's beyond the security checkpoint, so its for passengers only.
If you're not flying to Chicago anytime soon, check out the project's Web site. (via Lucky Pix blog)
"Here I Am Taking My Own Picture"
Art historians say that the popularity of the self-portrait is unprecedented in the century-long history of the snapshot. "I think it is probably a new genre of photography," said Guy Stricherz, the author of "Americans in Kodachrome, 1945-65"
Another fabulous outcome of the digital photography revolution.
Nice retrospective of Sophie Calle's renegade career at PORT.
We are entering an exciting and, for some, fearful era for photography. The transition from analog film to digital capture is coming to a close. As I've mentioned before, more research resources are being applied to using digital processes in ways that traditional film-based photography could not rather than simply replicating silver-halide-based resolution and processes.
One of these is developments is called High Dynamic Range processing, suddenly popularlized by its inclusion in the latest version of Photoshop. You can read several more detailed explanations of the concept elsewhere, but the short description is one photograph is created combining multiple overlapping exposures of the same scene so that it contains a much wider range of exposure values than is possible with a single image. For examples, check out the HDR pool on Flickr. (As you'll see, one drawback is that you have to take several shots of the same scene, limiting its use to landscapes mostly and some particularly postcard-esque landscapes at that.)
One of the side effects is that the color processing tends to be either over or under saturated, like early 20th century film stock.
Photoshop has become the defacto darkroom of this new era. Can a photographer today or even 10- years from now have full control over their media without a thorough understanding of Photoshop? Diane Arbus didn't process her own photographs, but that seems to be a historical oddity, though today we are living in the era of project manager as artist and many auteurs don't have much hands-on time with their own art, so perhaps this isn't all that critical.
There's been some criticsm going around that there just aren't enough negative reviews these days. Modern Art Obsession has rectified this with its review of the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition currently on view at the Japan Society.
