Photographers: July 2007 Archives

From Cool Hunting, a visit to Lori Nix's studio.

Ashley Gilbertson has been photographing in Iraq since 2002. The latest issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review features a long, detailed article by Gilbertson and his wife called "Last Photographs" covering various experiences in Iraq, all centering on death and photography in some way. "Last Photographs" refers to the times Gilbertson has been the last person to photograph someone before they died, whether a US soldier or an Iraqi matriarch. In June, he was interviewed on NPR to promote his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The interview sheds some light on Gilbertson's motivations, including how his pro-intervention views have changed after years of covering the conflict. Photographs from the book will be on exhibit in October at Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard St.

Suaada’s dentures by Ashley Gilbertson

For comparison, listen to this interview with Time photographer Christopher Morris, from July 2003. At that time, according to Morris, photographing the wounded was allowable, but release of such photography was delayed to allow for notification of families.

Morris covered the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and like a lot of the photojournalists that covered that war, was outraged that the US did not act faster to intervene and put a stop to the genocide. Asked whether the US intervention in Iraq represented a change for the better in this regard, Morris squirms and says "I don't know if my role in society is to give my opinion." That strikes me as an astonishing position for a photojournalist to take, but maybe not for a modern Western journalist who believes journalism truly can be, and is, wholly objective and the only opinions that appear in a paper are on the editorial page. Compare to the position of Philip Jones Griffiths from a generation before: "To me, there is no point in pressing the shutter unless you are making some caustic comment on the incongruities of life. That is what photography is all about. It is the only reason for doing it."

He goes on to say, "We have bit off more, ah, than we can handle in the sense that we are in a region, as part of the world where we are not liked. No matter what we do, what good we do, what our intentions are, it will be turned against us. And I think we have opened a very serious can of worms that we will have to deal with for a long time." That was in the summer of 2003.

Wow, talk about getting a bee in your bonnet. Alec Soth has been on a Tod Papageorge kick all week. Honestly, it seemed a little odd to be shining so much high power light on a living photographer with the aura of Papagoerge. But it has culminated this morning in a fascinating interview with Papageorge himself.

A few months ago, I'd read a small item in a photo newsletter that long-time MoMA photo curator, theorist and photographer John Szarkowski had suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. Since I was unable to verify this from any traditional news source, I left it unmentioned as a rumor. As it turns out, the rumor was true. Szarkowski passed away on Saturday due to stroke-related complications.

From the Times' obituary:

When asked by a reporter how it felt to exhibit his own photographs finally, knowing they would be measured against his curatorial legacy, he became circumspect. As an artist, “you look at other people’s work and figure out how it can be useful to you,” he said.

“I’m content that a lot of these pictures are going to be interesting for other photographers of talent and ambition,” he said. “And that’s all you want.”

The photo book review blog 5B4 has posted a review of Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work. If you are unfamiliar with the Bechers' work, this is a good place to start.

Their approach to photographing was to reduce every aspect of personal style in order to emphasize the impersonal aesthetics of the buildings.

I'm not sure I would go along with this description, perhaps I'm misunderstanding the wording. When I look at the various catalogs of forms that the Bechers' created, "impersonal aesthetics" seems counter to the evidence. Most of the structures they photographed had a strictly utilitarian purpose (grain silos, water towers, gravel plants lime kilns etc.) and while there is a consistent familiarity of form across the structures of any type there is also an amazing variation within any particular type.

The Ryan McGinley hype machine has been operating full tilt over the past weeks, so it was only a matter of time before the backlash began. Metropolitan Museum of Art research associate Mia Fineman has written an essay for Slate (another one of their annoying slide show essays) that questions the longitudinal value of McGinley's work and whether the commercial nature of this work devalues it as art.

This line, to me, is as imaginary as a national boundary. It's there in our minds, but you can't actually see it even when you walk right up to it. Film, for instance, is considered to be art, despite its commercial aspects. So why not commercial photography? It's not as if there is not a monetary component attached to photographs created purely for the gallery market.

(via muse-ings)