I found the ’70s street photography of Charles Gatewood today and was very gratified to see graphic elements rather than the usual crowds of commuters or dolled up women. You can see more on the Robert Tat (SF) gallery site. I tried to make a permanent link, but if it doesn’t work, search for Charles Gatewood.
Speak of San Francisco, I also saw an interesting initiative from the SF Arts Commission today that might be worth applying to if you’re looking to show work (not just photography). They are looking to place art into vacant storefronts (3 more near my street in the last couple of months) to beautify and make use of empty space. Damn good idea, if you ask me. They haven’t released details yet, but you can sign up for their mailing list.
Seeking Artists to Transform Storefronts with Installations
The SFAC’s Community Arts & Education Program and the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development have partnered to create a pilot Art in Storefronts program that places art temporarily in vacant storefront windows. Tough economic times have left many storefronts empty throughout the City, and this program encourages an alternative use of storefronts to reinvigorate and celebrate our neighborhoods, improve streetscape conditions, and support local merchants by increasing foot traffic.
And speak of storefronts, I was told a story overheard from a building manager of a frustrated thief. During the night, someone breaks into the second storey of a building to lift some goods. Except that the business on the second floor has gone out of business and the rooms are vacant. So he breaks into the third floor. Which also turns out to be vacant. He’s so mad by the time that he breaks into the fourth floor that the building manager comes the next morning to find the entire door ripped off its hinges. Then the story was cut off by closing elevator doors. Did he find goods on the fourth floor? Nothing? Old Betamax players? Hello Kitty clocks? What a cliffhanger.
His Spots, I think, are more interesting than his People, but maybe I am more of a Spot person to begin with.
The Edgar Martins digital manipulation brouhaha is ridiculous. Rob at a photo editor points out that in a recent interview, Martins had said, “When I photograph I don’t do any post production to the images, either in the darkroom or digitally, because it erodes the process. So I respect the essence of these spaces.” Talking about adding insult to injury.
To think that you could put something so obvious (look at this photo and tell me where the stairs are going) in the NY Times Magazine of all places, and on the internet no less, and no one would catch it in this day and age of crowdsourcing and pixel-peeping is just insane. Adam Gurno, the guy who first spotted the fake and called it on Metafilter, recalls a maxim in computer programming: “To 10,000 eyes all bugs are shallow.”
The sad thing is that it would’ve made a perfectly good art piece if he’d been upfront about it. But to give it to the Times as journalism, ugh.
Edit: I’ve edited the text to fix some errors and add some links. Also, Heading East looks at a couple of photos from Martins’ portfolio made using the same technique. Martins’ claims about his work are quite strange considering.
In one hand, Michelle Keim’s series of industrial night photographs, Iron Beauties, is surreal and astounding. I especially like the more abstract ones shot from over a hill, where you can’t quite tell what you are looking at. It’s easier to view the photos on the Edelman Gallery site than her own site, which seems to be a little out of date.
In the other hand, good advice, in a letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse, seen on the Hey Hotshot blog:
You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-tricking, nose-sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO… Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world… You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO! I have much confidence in YOU and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work. The worst you think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell.
This is probably as close as I’ll ever get to showing you multiple fireworks. Speaking of which, I nabbed one of the 8×10s of Mike Sinclair’s fireworks on the 4th shot over at 20×200. What a great way to get affordable art and see the prints of photographers whose work you can’t access in person.
Anyhoo, these are color illusions. The light colored arms of the first image are the same color, as are the green and blue spirls in the third image. Each picture in the second row has the same two colors of spiral, but they look different. What else do graphic designers probably know that we don’t?
There’s plenty more on the website. Looking at the patchwork hearts, I realized I never understood Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral paintings properly. My bad.
How did aesthetics come to dominate so in journalism anyway? I think it’s somewhat natural. Part of the problem is that we have a serious fetish for grouping similar-looking things together. (I admit it, at least once in my childhood I was that obsessive kid who sorted and resorted all the buttons in the sewing box into different combinations for no reason. Just to see.) When a museum mounts a show, more often than not it focuses on the aesthetic of a given time, the milieu or influences/influencees of certain famous photographers, rather than on how certain subjects have been depicted differently in different times. It’s the high art version of celebrity fixation. I can see how this would be an effective way to shed light on artistic movements where stylistic change is paramount, but it’s somewhat inappropriate with documentary subjects.
I’d like to see a lot more content-driven rather than photographer-driven shows, but unfortunately probably only the large institutions have the depth of inventory and organizing clout to do it. And as a practical matter, it’s a lot easier to organize a show with one or two photographers than 10 or 20. (Though I did manage to see Into the Sunset at the MOMA and that was a great show, though the subject of the American West is a rather broad and amorphous one.)
But it’s not just a problem of inadequate inventory. Depth of knowledge is basically a barrier to entry. You not only need to have a piece, you need to know that it exists in the first place and it’s a lot easier search and sort by milieu than content (looking forward to the metadata revolution, anyone?). And when physical objects like books are sorted according to content via the Library of Congress method (and that’s only if you have access to a library with serious horsepower), it’s a pain to check out the work of one particular photographer. Can’t we have our cake and eat it too?
One could argue that it’s good that someone needs to amass a deep knowledge of the field before taking on curatorial responsibilities, but while I admire anyone who’s worked in their field for a long time, with some things, I believe the faster we can do them, the better off we are. If someone has an idea, then by all means, I consider it good to be able to bring that to fruition as quickly and efficiently as they’d like. I suppose doing it a slower and more trial/error way builds character though. (Have you ever noticed that it’s mostly unpleasant things that build character?)
Even on the internet it’s hard to search by subject. Say I want to see fine art and documentary work on our car-driven culture. What search terms do I Google to find the critically acclaimed and renowned work as opposed to random shots of cars? Put it this way – what terms do I have to search for to see Andrew Bush’s Vector series? Where’s the database where I can search fine art and documentary photos by subject and get results for projects about actual car culture rather than just photos with cars in them? Will it always be my obligation to sort the two ‘manually’? Do I type “photography car culture” into the MOMA search box? (Tried it – meh.) In a nutshell, how do I find what I’m looking for unless I already know what I’m looking for, aside from paying attention indefinitely til I stumble upon it?
(I will have to approach an art librarian, see if I’m employing deficient search methods.)
If you haven’t heard about the two students who staged photos in the style of classic reportage, read about it over at Horses Think. Yes, photojournalism has been stylized and has a gritty, scraped off the bottom of a shoe feel to it, but the stunt itself is pretty pointless in my opinion. All they really proved was that it’s possible to fake something, which, come on, we’ve all known for a very long time. It’s the basis of the entire fashion and motion picture industries.
They missed their own point – while they were interested in making a dramatic statement, the magazine was more interested in funding a photographer trying to reporting meaningful content. If the series had been an explicitly stated as staged, it would still work in a personal work context, but it’s fairly meaningless to say, “look, you were fooled,” when there’s no real way a viewer can tell if this type of photo is staged from the photo itself. If anything, they make a compelling argument for credential photojournalists who can be held accountable for the veracity of their content.
The incident did, however, recall the discussion over at VII Agency with Stephen Mayes, Gary Knight and Tim Hetherington about war and photography. They address the same issue those two students claim to be getting at in a much more interesting way. Hetherington says that even no aesthetic is an aesthetic. I take that to mean we may as well accept that styles are a part of journalism as much as they are of art, if only because as a business matter, individual photographers feel a need to develop some coherent body of work and a personal style is an aspect of that, or at least seems to be expected. That’s not news (excuse the pun). And as Knight points out, audiences eventually become bored with prevailing styles and an infusion of something new is not necessarily a bad thing.
There’s a lot ripping around the internet about the crisis in photojournalism. I don’t know if it’s really a crisis – more like an evolution into something better, more complex, which takes into account what’s outside the frame and admits to the fact that eyewitness accuracy is not the same thing as truth in any comprehensive sense.
Is art encroaching on journalism? Is photojournalism trying to be art? This debate almost has the feel of two sides duking it out, but when you think about it, nobody is encroaching on anybody else’s territory. There’s plenty of room for both eyewitness photography of discrete events as well as documentary work aiming to speak on larger trends that involves more ‘interference’ by the photographer. The two are complementary and the subject benefits from an application of both, so I don’t see why both types of images can’t co-exist on the page. Some notion of aesthetic coherence?
[The idea of building a coherent style has bugged me from the start. That seems to be aimed solely at having an optimally marketable product, being someone a client or customer can expect certain things from. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that when a photographer branches out into different styles most of the time he is better at some than others, and this gives the impression that his work is technically inconsistent. But if you are technically proficient in several styles, there's no reason why you shouldn't work in all of them if you can manage it, right?]
One of the VII guys said that the crisis is happening less in photojournalism than in print media overall. I agree. Photojournalism is changing, print media is in crisis. But I suppose since print media is traditionally where photojournalism lives, photojournalism is in crisis by association. I don’t think it’s as big an issue as the blogs, bless ‘em, make it out to be.
Blake Andrews uses the simple sinewave synthesizer Tonematrix, which is based on the concept of the Yamaha Tenori-On, to make mini musical compositions from various black and white photographs converted to 16×16 pixel arrays. He’s posted graphics of the stages of conversion as well as sound samples. The music sounds very similar since the palate is limited, but still, it is veddy interesting. Unfortunately I can’t get Flash to work on my computer, so I will have to scheme to find a computer on which the program runs. (There is a similar iPhone widget but I don’t have an iPhone either!)
The Tenori-On itself, released in 2007, is an interesting piece of equipment. It is a more abstract, simpler version of JazzMutant’s Lemur, first widely released in 2005. That’s probably giving it more credit than it deserves – maybe it’s more like a combo of Ableton Live and the Kaoss Pad, which is a bit older, having been released in 1999. Of course, sampling and looping devices have been around for a while now (i.e. the MPC), but the new devices are so much more fluid and intuitive.
The interesting thing about these interfaces is that they seem to indicate that sooner or later our electronics interfaces are going to be far more fluid, customizable, and most importantly, tactile, than ever. I’m looking forward to escaping ye olde mouse and keyboard point-and-click interface. (Please, let it be before I develop carpal tunnel!) It doesn’t take too much imagination to see what implications touchscreen technology will have for not only photo but any software. I happen to be familiar with sound devices, but I’m sure similar things are being developed for strictly visual applications, which I’d guess are limited more by the expense of large touchscreens.
I’d hope that the manuals for these devices include videos. It would be inefficient to try to describe the functionality of these very visual devices in mountain of text. If you’re curious, Yamaha has several videos demonstrating the different basic functionality of the Tenori-On, but more interesting are the Youtube videos of musicians being introduced to it in their homes and studios (some of them are filmed opening the box for the first time). You can see what Mouse on Mars and I am the Robot and Proud do with it on Youtube:
You can approximate the passage of time by the light coming in through the window, and by the end of the evening, he’s already pretty adept. I’m extremely jealous of the manual dexterity and coordination of musicians! I confess that I tinkered a bit with sequencers and whatnot before I picked up a camera, but alas, my brain is a visual rather than a musical model so I left musicking to more skilled hands than than mine.
The hardest part of learning a craft when you are no longer a child is that your judgment is well developed (hopefully) and you can tell that in the beginning stages that, to put it bluntly, you suck. As a child, you blunder about, everyone encourages you and you don’t know any better, but as an adult, you have a painful awareness of your own inadequacies, especially when compared to skilled competent practitioners. Once you get to that plateau of basic technical proficiency, it’s hard work by the law of diminishing returns to make each small improvement, but at least the ego blows aren’t quite so violent. My theory is that adults can achieve some degree of pleasing proficiency in almost any new craft if they can live through that first phase of being soul-crushingly bad.
In the end, I wasn’t able to get through that terrible beginning stage with music – it was somehow more painful with music. I’d been ogling things all my life before I even knew what that skill was good for, but I hadn’t learned any instruments, so my brain was in no way primed. I’d also been exposed to more music than fine art photography by then, so I sailed through that first phase of learning photography in semi-ignorant bliss. Not so with music. There’s nothing worse than than being assailed with bad music that you can’t close your ears to. The world is probably a better place when I have a camera instead of an instrument in my hand.
Olivier Laude guest blogged on A Photo Editor about electronic fine art displays. Yes, please! I blogged obliquely about this back in January: “I dream of gigantic e-Ink wall screens where I can display a rotating series of photos which I can store in a tiny device.” e-Ink is a better application of this idea in my mind since I don’t really relish the thought of having a glowing screen constantly on in my living space, or having to turn it off at night unless I want an experience like this. Not to mention it is bendable. OLED certainly does seem promising though.
I do wonder if piracy will become an issue, and if photographers will begin to show smaller and smaller sized photos online. A 800px wide photo may not be high res enough for print, but it might not look bad in a 5×7 digital display. I hope the new technology won’t shrink the endless pool of work available to us online right now. Some photographers think unauthorized use of their work is bad now, but I can imagine it getting worse.
Oh wait, it’s already happening, and condoned by the New York Times, no less. I suppose this sort of private piracy has always happened and will always happen, but to see it actually suggested in a publication like that is outrageous. (via a photo editor)
Melissa Ann Pinney photographs young girls in domestic and everyday settings. I don’t usually go for this sort of thing, but I liked her Girl Ascending series quite a bit. She chooses beautiful light and these portraits have a very relaxed, peaceful feel. Sometimes I feel there is a distinct though inarticulate difference between portraits of young girls taken by male vs female photographers. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I feel that here. These portraits put me at ease.
At any rate, her work definitely passes the Pretty Girl litmus test I’ve begun to apply to portrait photography. (I’m sure this has many incarnations already.) It goes something like this:
mentally replace all attractive, youthful persons in frame with bad-skinned, gap-toothed, leering crones (or perhaps with, in a less pseudosexist version, gigantic toads)
is it still a good picture?
then it’s a good picture!
I suppose this defeats the purpose if you’re attracted to photography precisely because you enjoy portraits of happy attractive people, but, misanthrope that I am, that is not what attracts me to photography. The other possibility is that the test may give false positive after false positive for those who enjoy the twisted and strange for its own sake, but, well, then you’ve just discovered a thoroughly enjoyable mental exercise.
Mike Sinclair photographs the places people go for recreation. I especially liked the Fairgrounds series, and find that I prefer his photos of people and crowds by a slim margin to his landscapes.
Twitter’s involvement in the protests in Iran got me thinking – we text message in smaller and smaller packages, but size aside, a photo is the basic unit of visual communication. As the attention span for text declines into runic brevity, a picture is a picture is a picture.
Also, the ICP has scanned and uploaded some frames from the negatives in Capa’s Mexican Suitcase, which you’ll remember from the news stories early last year. The Times had a slideshow with some select frames a couple of months ago, but those photos are not in those that the ICP has uploaded so far. According to the FAQ, they will update the galleries as they scan more.
Somehow, I missed Matrix ping pong when it first swept Youtube. You know, I’d be fairly happy if men in black jumpsuits replaced all CGI effects:
Update: These two videos are even more impressive, despite the feeling of a bit too much polish: Matrix food fight and Matrix Olympics.
And, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Y Control” (I was going to lead with this, but no embedding allowed unfortunately) is a fine example of a good but not outstanding song made better by the visible charisma of the singer. It is also an example of visuals made more charming by the audio. Without the sound, it’s mildly disturbing. There is something simultaneously hilarious and creepy about a child miming vampirism. When you think about it, vampirism is kind of an adult concept. I don’t think any little kid would invent the concept of blood-sucking without adult direction.
However, I’d also be happy if small children with fog machines replaced scary looking grown up Hollywood vampires.
I liked her short series “Man.” The way she frames shots is sometimes a bit off kilter, which I find alternately interesting and disorienting. (Or are those two things synonymous?)
From Nick Paumgarten’s article “The Death of Kings,” a somewhat more meditative take on the financial meltdown:
It can be startling to discover how many offices in Manhattan have spectacular views. The first time you gain admission to an aerie in some other blue-chip tower and look out, you think that this particular office must be the finest in town, the seat of secret power, the heart of the plot. But the city is full of them. It’s one of the things about tall buildings: you can see a lot. The takeoffs and landings at the airports, the shipping lanes, the humans below reduced to units: it is easy to begin to think abstractly about the armature of empire. Sitting up there and talking for hours about pools of securitized debt, and seeing them depicted on dryboards, divided into tranches, you can find yourself viewing the buildings out the window as manifestations of that debt – the conversion of financial cunning into steel, brick, and glass.
I found myself inadvertantly thinking about how Michael Wolf’s Transparent City photos, some of which I saw at the beginning of the year, are more landscape than architectural photography. For many of us, field and stream have been replace in daily vision by monolithic stone, steel and glass. In photo after photo, geometric abstraction resolves into the matter of people’s lives. The grid of building structure divides each occupant from another, and each resides alone in his box, staring at computers and televisions.
Some of Wolf’s photographs are similar to Thomas Kneubuhler’s work, but I get a much stronger whiff of compartmentalization from Wolf. Work exists in one box and private life in another. Every day most of us engage in a mass exodus from our homes to our workplaces and we do it again in reverse at the end of the day. Both fall visually into the mold of high rise geometry, and there is an implied parallel – we work in a small cube and we live in a slightly larger one. Swap in a couch for a desk chair and a TV for a computer monitor, and, from a distance, the scenes are pretty similar. Yet there’s something endearing about all the individual piles of detritus each person creates for himself placed side by side in large human colonies, but the dominant form of the grid does give the whole project a rigid feel.
These photos are not well represented by web viewing. They should be seen as large prints that you lean into to pick out little details, but I don’t find the grand scale of the structures dehumanizing or anonymizing. In fact, I find the act of honing in on one small detail while the rest of the print fills your peripheral vision more personal and engaging than taking in frames and prints as a whole. If he is showing near you, it’s a show that’s definitely worth seeing in person.
Jin Zhu lives in San Francisco, loves looking at art, can't stop talking about photography, and is determined to live to see traditional photojournalism evolve to promote solution-oriented, context-based discussions of ecological and social justice issues. This blog was started as a personal scrapbook to keep track of photography-related items on the web.
