Theory: November 2007 Archives

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