Recently in Theory Category

From Black Star Rising: Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons

Depending on who you ask, it's because:

1. It's taking money out of the pockets of working photographers;
2. It's putting money into the coffers of large corporations, whose executives like CC-enabled crowdsourcing even better than Third World child labor;
3. It's supposed to make sharing your work easier, but it often just makes it more confusing -- creating the kind of misunderstandings that lead to lawsuits.

Also:

• Guardian: Photographer Takes Down Bubble 2.0 Fun
  
• Larry Lessig: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law

In today's NY Times, the public editor takes up the complaints of child porn-ish photos in the Times' fashion magazine "T". A few weeks back there was a fashion spread in the supplement (which brings in $5MM per issue!) which featured a 17 year-old model in a few topless (and though unmentioned in the article - bottomless) poses. The editor responsible said the images "didn't give me pause for one second." Later in the article when defending the work, this same guy claims he can't be "shy about walking right up to the line of being provocative, and that's going to cause debate when you get close to that line." Either provocative work doesn't give him pause or he wants to have it both ways, because those two comments strike me as self-contradictory and self-serving.

It's ironic that discussing this issue means even more people will be driven to look at the feature, titled "Gallerina". I had flipped through that magazine a week or two ago and apparently was able to pass by these images without even stopping (gimmicky fashion spreads aren't my thing). I went back and looked this morning to see what caused the ruckus.

Strangely there was one image I remember catching my attention (at left). This struck me because the montage style is so uncommon. The contrivance must have grabbed my attention. I probably looked at it for about five to ten seconds and moved on. I don't recall any of the others so I must have flicked through those pages spending less than a second on each image, making a snap judgment about whether the picture justified closer examination.

The final judgment in the article comes down to whether the audience for the image chose to view it (in other more "edgy" fashion magazines, the customer has sought it out, in the case of "T", its just come with the Sunday paper.) While I think it's a valid argument, it does completely abandon the question of whether we as a society would be able to tip toe up to the edge of exploiting teenage sexuality. In individual cases, this being a great example, various parties involved will make excuses for their own actions while taken as a collective, the impact on culture and social mores is left unexamined.

I always get the impression from these little investigations that the "public editor" must be the most hated many in the Times organization, based on the frequently condescending responses he gets to his questioning the Times editors.

This morning as I was riding the subway to work, I looked up and saw an outdated advertisement for the Jeff Wall retrospective held at MoMA earlier this year. The ad's tagline read "Only at MoMA" or something to that effect. I thought to myself, isn't this same show going on at SFMoMA? Sure enough, it is.

Wall's (new?) work is also being shown in England at White Cube. There's a longish interview in the Telegraph that starts:

Jeff Wall is arguably the most important photographer on the planet. Phaidon recently published a book showcasing 1,000 masterpieces from more than 30,000 years of art history. It contained only one photographer. Rather than Atget, Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson, the panel of experts chose Wall...

Wall is rightfully modest about this assertion. Not to say that Wall's work is or isn't worthy, only that it's ridiculous that only one photo was selected to represent the medium. 'Course, one could say it's a johnny-come-lately art form (if its an artform at all). Still, to be proportionate by time frame, photography would rate at least four more examples. Based on volume, maybe the whole things should be photos.

If you had to pick 5 photographs that would represent the entire medium for a history of art, what would they be?

I hadn't planned to post about this since it's on just about every other photography blog around - Newsweek's article "Is Photography Dead?" But now, having read (skimmed, really) the article, I'll throw in a few thoughts. First, the article's punchline:

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.

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!)

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

Strictly No Photography is a photo-sharing site for photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones. Here you can see everything you've ever wanted to see that you're not supposed to. There are pictures that range from the ordinary to the profound. Whatever the content or the quality though we think that each one stands as a little piece of art in itself, as a little expression of personal liberty.

Have had no DSL for a few days and going through a huge backlog of posts to read. Alec posted something the other day that really struck me. This quote is from Gerhard Steidl. He publishes photography books:

After printing for several years, I looked at what I’d done and was never really satisfied with myself. I thought I wasn’t talented enough and didn’t want to end up as a third rate artist in some Hicksville town and only ever look up to others better than me. I thought it would be much more exciting to work with and for those great artists…

I'm feeling this way lately. I don't take enough time to make good work and when I do shoot something that's personal, I usually end up just being incredibly angry with my output. (Though after a few days in the hard drive, things start looking better as my preconceived notion of what it should have looked like starts fading out.) But it frequently brings up Steidl's decision to just give it up.