On the Web: 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)