Not bad. But is it art?

Massively Critical of Critical Mass

2012-02-21T18:07:00.000-08:00

I went to the opening of the “Critical Mass” show at Photographic Center Northwest tonight. Critical Mass is an event that is under the umbrella of Portland’s PhotoLucida but it takes place each year rather than every other year. My cynical opinion is that, among other things, it is more than a bit of a cash cow for PhotoLucida. Here’s the process:

· There is an open, world-wide call for photographers to submit 10 photographs from a body of work, jpegs of course, along with an entry fee.

· A small body of reviewers winnows the gazillion entries down to 200 and the semifinalists pay a substantial fee to continue. Digression: It seems to me that this is the narrow middle in the hour glass. While I certainly agree that sending all gazillion entries out to all the reviewers isn’t practical, these reviewers are the gatekeepers as to what the larger body of reviewers see. This gives them enormous leverage – really more than the reviewers themselves. Here endeth the digression.

· The 10 photographs of each semi-finalist go out on CD to, I believe, 200 world-wide photography professionals; teachers, curators, publishers, critics, gallery proprietors (significantly to me, no photographers.)

· When each reviewer’s score sheet is in hand, they tally up the votes to select 50 portfolios. These are held up as representative of this year’s state of contemporary photography.

· A single curator, this year Darius Himes of the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, chooses one photograph from each of these 50 projects to make up the show that is currently at PCNW and will travel to Newspace in Portland later in the spring.

It seems to me that making a cohesive show out of 50 prints each taken from a different portfolio that the curator had no hand in choosing is a daunting task. Instead, Mr. Himes quite reasonably chose to emphasize the diversity of work being done as part of the contemporary photographic scene. He chose a purposely vague title for the show – “Love, Hate, (several other words), and everything else.” He then divided the prints into several groups, numbered, but I could certainly not divine the characteristics that made a given print fall into group N rather than group M.

Digression: Since he had no hand in selecting the portfolios, I suppose that they do represent the contemporary scene – at least in the opinion of the gatekeepers and the 200 reviewers. Does that mean that nearly everybody working in contemporary photography is obsessed with the disheveled, despairing, despondent, disadvantaged, disorganized, and angst-ridden? Has “Art does not have to be beautiful.” mutated into “Art may not be beautiful.”? There isn’t much evidence to the contrary in this show.

A notable exception is one of Mitch Dobrowner’s stunning thunderstorm photographs. It was the one print in the show that cried out to be printed big. (It wasn’t.) There were many that did not benefit from being printed big. (They were.)

Or maybe the 200 semifinalists represent the tastes of the gatekeepers.

Here endeth the digression.

Mr. Himes was here to give a talk on the state of contemporary photography and to describe how he curated the show. He is well educated, articulate, and obviously passionate about photography as an art form. He is steeped in contemporary theory – a firm advocate of the position that what matters in art is the idea and the process and not the result. He is also an advocate of semiotics as a vehicle for decoding art – regarding the visual content of art not as visual content but as symbols of coded meanings -- peeling off the outer, superficial, visual layer to expose the layers of hidden meaning that the artist may not even have intended.

He anchors his position on the 1985 “The Spiritual in Art” show at LACMA that attempted to show how the geometrical paintings of Piet Mondrian et al and the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko et al were bearing the torch of spiritual content dropped by the demise of representational painting – expressing the deepest, most personal yearnings of the artist/human being. Moreover, he holds that the rising tide of university-trained photographers is building on that foundation to take contemporary photography to new heights of depth and idea-content. He then showed photographs, mostly chosen from the show, to illustrate his position.

Mark Rothko insisted that his color field paintings were window looking into deeply felt ideas and emotions.

They do?

I’m sure Mr. Himes would agree – he showed a color block painting and a very similar color block photograph and observed that they are really commenting on the objectivity -- or maybe it was lack of objectivity – or maybe it was the irrelevance of being objective or not being objective -- of older and more superficial art.

I completely agree that what a photograph is “of” – what is shown in the print – and what the photograph is “about” – what the photographer’s intended to convey and/or the viewers opinion about what the photograph conveys – are often not the same. I get lost, however, with Minor White’s “What else is the photograph about?” and that, as I understand it, is the basic method of semiotics – identifying elements of the photograph as coded symbols (both Steiglitz and Minor White called them “equivalents”) that carry meanings hidden from the superficial viewer and unconnected with the visual content of the photograph. In my opinion, that is the point at which the connection between artist and viewer is lost unless the artist is consciously building the semiotic structure of the photograph – and the artist and the viewer read the same books. Painters in the renaissance certainly had a lexicon of coded symbols that they consciously used, but a modern viewer who does not know that a small bird perched on the portrait sitter’s finger represents innocence and purity may mistake it for a small bird. Idea-based art in general is a lot like a joke. If you “get it” it is either funny or not according to your taste in humor. If you do not “get it” then having the teller explain it to you rarely gets more than a shrug of your shoulders.

If you grant Mr. Himes his assumptions, then everything he said makes sense. If you do not (and I do not) then it doesn’t. I hold steadfastly that photography is very good at showing what something or somebody looked like at a specific time and place. It is often good at conveying an attitude or emotion illustrated by the visual content. It is not very good at expressing ideas and the more abstract the idea the worse it gets at doing so.

I hate change (in my darkroom)

2012-02-12T21:18:00.000-08:00

I’m not much of an experimenter when it comes to photographic equipment, materials and processes.

Early on in my romance with photography I tried quite a few developers and films and even played with some alternative processes – gum bichromate, cyanotype, litho film, and a color transfer process the name of which I cannot remember. I dabbled with 4x5 and did a bit of color printing, both positive and negative.

With a rare bit of insight, it occurred to me that I didn’t enjoy the excitement and uncertainty of experimenting so I began to zero in on subject matter, cameras, and materials that I did enjoy and, when I found something that worked for me, to stick to it like Gorilla Glue. I have process instructions posted on the wall above my darkroom’s wet bench – both on how to mix the chemicals and how to use them.

The first how-to book on darkroom technique that I bought recommended Kodak Tri-X and Plus X films, D-76 film developer, Dektol paper developer, Rapid Fixer, and Hypo Clearing Agent. Those choices, apart from a few brief dalliances, lasted a very long time.

I changed to Ilford HP5+ film in about 1985 when a friend convinced me that it was a lot like Tri-X but with a longer tail into the shadows. I also changed to Ilford FP4 just because. I changed to Heico fixer about the same time when I got very tired of buying a hardening fixer and then throwing out the hardener. Heico Permawash replaced the Kodak Hypo Clearing agent because it is liquid and a lot easier to mix. In the mid-90s Kodak introduced XTol film developer as a much less toxic alternative to D-76 and it’s a lot easier to coax into solution, too.

My first how-to book also recommended Kodak single-weight, graded paper and I stuck to that until they introduced the variable contrast “fine art” double weight paper. I had a brief romance with a couple of other papers but the box-to-box variations drove me nuts so I stuck with Kodak until they outsourced their paper manufacture and their box-to-box variations drove me nuts. I switched to Seagull paper and loved it – until they went out of business. I started using Ilford Multigrade fiber paper and RC paper about 1995 and am still using it.

This sounds like a lot of leaping and jumping for somebody who claims not to be an experimenter but consider that I have just summarized nearly 50 years of splashing about in the darkroom. Moreover, each of these changes was accompanied by a period of dithering and complaining (ask my wife for verification).

Since the tidal wave of the digital revolution in photography, there has been such an enormous shake-out in the black-and-white, film-and-paper world that curmudgeons like me have felt very uncomfortable. Consider:

• About a year ago, Ilford abandoned packaging HP5+ and FP4 film in my favorite 220 roll length. My backup for 2 ¼ was Plus X and Tri-X professional in 220 rolls but Kodak stopped packaging those, too. OK – so I use HP5+ and FP4 both in 120 and 35mm.

• Heico fixer and Permawash are still nominally available but they aren’t on the shelf at the one remaining local source for darkroom chemistry. Late last year the darkroom guy told me: “We order them but they never come.” OK – switch to Ilford fixer and ZonalPro wash accelerator, figure out how to incorporate them into my darkroom work flow, and make new charts for the wet-bench wall.

• The last time I stopped in for chemicals, the ZonalPro wasn’t on the shelf. “We order it but it never comes.” Heck, I hadn’t even gotten use to having it in my work flow and I’m forced to change again.

So what’s my point?

I want to concentrate on making prints and not figuring out how to use an unfamiliar chemical. Besides, it seems to me that we throwbacks to the analog age should be very aware, appreciative, and supportive of the companies that are making a continuing commitment to the materials we need.

• Kodak has filed for Chapter 11 reorganization and claims that it will emerge from it a “smaller but stronger company” – they have long since abandoned black and white paper and the speculation is that they will sell off their film division as too small a “profit center” to fit their new model. They claim that their photographic chemicals division – pretty much a side-effect of their industrial chemicals division -- will continue to exist “as long as it is profitable”. Hmmmm.

• Ilford sold off their paper and chemicals divisions and the purchaser states that they intend to serve the smaller but still viable niche market of black and white photography for the long haul.
• EcoPro has a full line of black and white chemicals with the additional lure of low toxicity and environmental impact. They also claim that they intend to be around for the long haul.

• I’m sure that Photographers Formulary and Bostic and Sullivan will remain the places for raw materials and alternative processes – but I likely have a lifetime supply of ferricyanide bleach and that’s the only raw material I buy.

Fortunately, I’m already using Ilford films and paper. I spent quite a few hours this week pouring over the technical specifications for the EcoPro paper developer, film developer (gratefully just like XTol), fixer and hypo wash. I think I have all the numbers straight now. I have new charts up on the wet-bench wall (again). I even think I’m going to like it after I get used to it – but I’m an old enough dog that I’m not fond of new tricks.

The New Kodak?

2012-01-20T20:37:00.000-08:00

I took the Kodak plant tour some 35 years ago. It was, of course, their corporate heyday. Kodachrome was king and their black and white films and paper were the industry standard. Their industrial chemicals (including, by the way, the smell that is added to natural gas so a human will detect a leak before something explodes) were largely by-products of their major products. Their research departments attracted the best chemists and engineers. They were model corporate citizens – reclaiming nearly every drop of their solvents – recycling plastics, even the film cans – returning their waste water to Lake Ontario cleaner than it was when they drew it out. They paid their employees well and most of them considered their jobs as long-term.

Kodak declared bankruptcy this week -- and with a gazillion dollar loan from Citibank to keep their corporate officers paid their huge salaries their spokesman promised that they would emerge from bankruptcy a smaller but stronger company. A second announcement, published in the British Journal of Photography, was a scramble to assure the gravely concerned world that their film division was profitable and that they intended to stay in the film business “as long as it remains profitable.”

It seems to me that thinking smaller but stronger might have been a good idea some time back. Yes, the market for film has declined – but it sure hasn’t vanished. Yes, the market for Kodachrome declined to a few percent of its peak. Yes, the market for black & white film in 220 lengths declined. Umm – wouldn’t that have been a good time for smaller but stronger thinking? Seems to have worked for Ilford (now part of Harmon – that was astute enough to pick up a good thing and keep it going.)

But big corporations aren’t good at getting smaller, or even appreciating a small, profitable market. Having spent a good part of my career at Boeing, you can trust me on this one. Every time the market for airplanes declines the mantra of “diversification” can be heard in the halls of power. As soon as the market for airplanes recovers, the mantra changes to “core competency” and the smaller and (usually) profitable sidelines are thrown to the wolves as being not worth the company’s attention.

Will Kodak get the picture and really emerge smaller and stronger? I’ll bet not. A huge, hierarchical company is a lot like a giant cruise ship – it turns very slowly (Kodak purposely slowed their entrance into digital photography because it endangered their very profitable film division) – it costs so much to operate that it has to have lots of income – it has a single purpose and changing it to do something else is nearly impossible.

Kodak’s recovery strategy for the past several years has been to sell off patents (of which they own a huge number) and sue for patent infringement on the ones they keep. They decimated their research activities, and laid off a large number of employees by outsourcing their silver paper production – and Kodachrome processing – and …. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for long-term stability to me.

I’ll bet that their corporate inertia is so huge that they will not succeed at “smaller but stronger.” as a sort of holding company for their smaller divisions. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they sold off their film division as too small to be viable in their corporate environment. I hope so – maybe Harmon will buy them and start making Kodacharome and TXP in 220 length again. After pretty much jettisoning their research department, I doubt that they will achieve a prominent position in the digital world. Not a rosy prognosis for a company that once was so respected.

As a film and wet darkroom hanger-on, I want to support the companies that are stating that they are in it for the long haul in a niche market, not just as long as it is profitable.

“Super Nanny”

2012-01-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

This week’s New Yorker (January 16, 2012) has a brief review (Critic’s Notebook, p 6) of the Vivian Maier shows, yes plural, in New York City. On the one hand, I’m delighted that a show of street photographs got such good press and a positive review.

[Background information follows: A couple of years ago a Chicago historian, John Maloof, who was working on a history of a specific neighborhood bought a lot of negatives from an unclaimed self-storage company in the hopes of finding photographs of the neighborhood he was researching. He didn’t. What he did find was a treasure trove of thousands of street photographs by an unknown photographer named Vivian Maier who died in 2002. After some further detective work he acquired the other half of her negatives and has spent considerable time, effort, and money to get her work in the public eye. The discovery of her work – and the quality of her work – has been on the photographic blogosphere for a year or so. Power House published a book of her work; Vivian Maier, Street Photographer in 2011. Lenswork published a portfolio of her work in its issue #97, Nov-Dec 2011. The first gallery show of her work was in Chicago last year and now two shows in NYC. The “nanny” reference in the New Yorker review alludes to her day job. Here endeth the background information.]

That said; I take a couple of issues with the review.

First is with the “Super Nanny” title. Yes, she had a day job. So did Henri Rousseau. The French art establishment’s labeling him as Le Douanier Rousseau was a not so subtle way of setting him apart from the real artists of his day. Perhaps I am spring-loaded to the sensitive position (having had a day job myself) and perhaps “Super Nanny” is only intended to be clever but it reads to me as a similar “not a real artist” label, especially when attached by a polished writer and critic.

Second is with a phrase later in the review, “Though apparently untrained, she was a keen observer …” “Apparently untrained” – do tell! It’s certainly not apparent to me. Again this reads to me as a “can’t be a real artist without an MFA” statement. A fair statement would be “Though there is no evidence that she had formal training, …” Ms. Maier was, from what little is known of her, an intensely private person – who knows what formal training she may have had. She lived most of her teen years in Paris, then in New York and in Chicago. Who knows what classes she took – what exhibitions she saw – what photographers befriended a quiet, solemn-faced young woman? Speculating about her background is interesting and fun but it’s still speculation.

Not that it keeps me from doing so, of course. It is certainly possible that she was, like Jacque-Henri Lartigue, somehow born with the instinct of knowing which way to point the camera. Looking at her work, though, and knowing that she started photographing seriously about the time she returned to New York in 1951 here’s my guess. Post-war France was a hotbed of street photography. Released from the repression of the German occupation, illustrated newspapers and magazines popped up on every street corner. There were 34 daily newspapers in Paris alone. The giants of photoreportage – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Izis, Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Edouard Boubat, Willy Ronis, and many others – were nearly household names. How could she not have been aware of – even immersed in – the aesthetic that shows so clearly in her own work? The exhibition “Four French Photographers” (Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Brassai, and Izis) at New York’s MOMA introduced this style of work to the United States in 1951.

Let’s see. When did Vivian Maier return to New York? Why, 1951. My mental image is of her going to MOMA to see that show, feeling like Paris had come with her and deciding that she could do it, too. Or maybe she had been yearning to do it but it was too expensive in post-war Paris. By the way, the New Yorker reviewer compares her work to that of Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus. I find a better comparison to be to Helen Levitt and, especially, Willy Ronis.

As for technical training – I’m guessing that she had some, even if it was the counter man at Central Camera. Her beloved 1950s-era Rolleiflex, sans light meter and automation of any kind, isn’t the most friendly of devices to use. Unless she threw away the first several (hundred) rolls of negatives, I would expect her early work to be, well, uneven. According to the interview with John Maloof in the Chicago Tribune, it was not.

There are very few artists who really work with no consideration of audience. Perhaps Vivian Maier would have been embarrassed or even distressed by the notoriety that her work is receiving. Since she left a thousand or so rolls of film undeveloped maybe it was the act of photographing that mattered to her -- or maybe she just couldn’t afford to have them developed.

The Power House book of her work is beautifully printed and many of the photographs are wonderful. I would love to see the gallery show – alas, digital prints not silver but ….

So I took my portfolio to a review anyway.

2012-01-12T16:58:00.000-08:00

Not so very long ago I posted “Why I don’t take my portfolio to reviews.” It isn’t that I’m reluctant to have somebody whose opinion I respect review my work. However, the big review sessions such as PhotoLucida and PhotoFest seem to me to be mostly a cash cow for the sponsor and a lot more about marketing than work development. I’m not against marketing, by the way, but I’d prefer truth in advertising (and much lower prices).

On a whim, I signed up for a portfolio review with Jock Sturges at PCNW a couple of months ago. The price was right, I admire his work (and know him slightly through an internet group to which we both belonged once upon a time), and they were trolling for a few more people to make it go.

[Digression follows: Sturges went digital for a while because he had trashed his back schlepping about his 8x10 view. His back is better so he has gone back to film but is doing color. I saw some of his earlier color work, printed by a lab in San Francisco, at Butters Gallery in Portland a few years ago and, while I still prefer his black and white, it was stunning! He is currently scanning and printing his own negatives and, alas, they do not have the same razor edge. He has also fallen prey to the “make it big” demon. His new book will be an elephant folio (a little book biz talk here) so that the plates will be the size of exhibition prints. Here endeth the digression.]

By the time the day of the review came there were seven people signed up and a motley crew it was, too.

The format was a bit different than the “normal” one-on-one session with the reviewer. The entire group sat in on all the reviews, Jock had to insist on that format but the gallery director, who was there for a review, agreed that it worked. I thought it worked, too.

Three of the seven were pretty much raw beginners still struggling with the craft and flailing around trying to find a direction. I suspect they got the lion’s share of benefit from the reviews. His comments were very insightful.

Seems to me that a necessary ability for a reviewer is to completely divorce what he does from the work presented for review. Jock isn't quite there. His work depends on building long-term relationships with the people he photographs and he makes carefully selected and composed large-format negatives. He is much more conscious of (and concerned about) the formalities of composition – especially figure/ground, positive space/negative space, edge boundaries … What he does, how he does it, and the market for which his work is intended tints, in my opinion, how he sees other kinds of photographs. His discussion of the “no people in the frame” work (four of the seven) was a good deal less influenced by how he does his own work than of the other three.

I took my “Work of the Weaver” portfolio as well as a box of street portraits. Jock was openly dismissive of the Weaver portfolio as well-enough-done but documentary, an approbation in his vocabulary. He suggested that I should get a lot closer, mentally and physically, and pay more attention to simplifying the backgrounds in my street portraits. It was worthwhile to hear Jock’s opinions but I’m to the point of having strong enough ideas about what I do and how I do it to take them with a film can full of grains of salt.

Going to this review was fun, price was sort-of right, and I learned some – primarily that I don’t benefit much from portfolio reviews unless the reviewer is really good. I have had the good fortune to show work to two exceptionally good reviewers – Nick Hansen and David Johnson. Nick is the king. He, the education director at PCNW a couple of decades ago, could look at a group of prints and invariably say something about them that I would never have seen. After he left PCNW following a dustup with the management he taught privately for a while – the sessions with him in his living room in Ballard were what I keep hoping for. In the very unlikely chance that you have contact information for him, please let me know.

I'm puzzled about Post-Modern Art, too.

2012-01-10T19:29:00.000-08:00

(I would have sworn I posted this about six months ago, but I didn't. Maybe I ought to read my own blog.)

Isaac Asimov, describing his approach to writing science fiction, once said something like: “Grant me a couple of assumptions and I’ll write a story in which everything else makes sense.” This strikes me as, with only small modification, a good general purpose statement.

“Grant me a couple of assumptions and I’ll describe a theory of economics in which everything else makes sense.”
“Grant me a couple of assumptions and I’ll build a system of government in which everything else makes sense.”
“Grant me a couple of assumptions and I’ll start a political movement in which everything else makes sense.”

“Grant me a couple of assumptions and I’ll start an art movement in which everything else makes sense.”

Since this is largely a blog about art let’s not go into trickle-down economics, communism, or the tea party. We could take a look at social realism in the former Soviet Union but that horse has already been beaten sufficiently.

I’m re-reading “Criticizing Photographs” by Terry Barrett (an excellent book, by the way) to see how much difference there is between my vintage first edition and the current one.

[Pause here for a short digression. Barrett tells me that the supposed (my adjective) point of Les Krims’ photographs is that he is poking fun at art in general and photography in particular. Krims’ “How to Make Chicken Soup” pokes fun at concerned photography – in his estimation no more effective than chicken soup for a bad cold. Oh, really? I fail to see that point in his book – but then again, I believe that chicken soup is good for a cold. Here endeth the digression.]

Re-reading a book of non-fiction that I really like is an interesting exercise for me — I’m almost always a bit delighted at how much additional insight I get from doing so. In his chapter on the categories into which photographs can be separated he discusses how the post-modern movement fits into his scheme of things. That started a train of thought.

As I understand it, the post-modernists:

• Reject the notion of the genius of the individual artist,

• Reject the notion of the value of art as physical objects,

• Reject the notion of the value of craft in art making,

• Reject the notion of beauty as either a necessary or sufficient component of art. (But seemingly accepting "ugly" as both.)

If you accept one or more of these assumptions then post-modern art makes sense — from Sherrie Levine’s “appropriation” of Walker Evans (and others) photographs — to Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual “One and Three Chairs” or Ed Ruska’s “Every Building on Sunset Strip” — to the Becher’s catalog of German water towers — to Matthew Barney’s sculpture made of petroleum jelly — to JJ’s (artist in “Doonesbury”) “Bagel on Floor”.

Perhaps the post-modern aesthetic is at least partly responsible for much of what I see and hear in popular culture that puzzles me.

Tens of thousands of photographs are posted to Flickr every hour. If everybody’s work is of equal value then this makes sense (if still an unmanageably large number). I wonder why baseball teams don’t recruit using a post-modern approach – they wouldn’t have to pay such outrageous salaries, tickets would be cheaper, and I would find the games a lot more fun to watch.

I recently read a report of a well-conducted survey of relatively young (as in: still enjoying youthful hearing) music listeners. The prevailing opinion was a preference for MP3 sound – not just that the MP3 player was small and convenient but that they preferred it to a higher-quality recording or even to live music. If craft doesn’t matter this makes sense. Would it be even better to electronically reproduce the sound of an Edison cylinder? That would be an interesting experiment. Parenthetically, I also suspect that the preference for the sound of compressed music would be a lot less strong if the music was typically more complex, nuanced, and subtle – but that’s getting back to the value of the artist.

Pop musical groups are lined up against a concrete block wall and photographed with on-camera flash. Profile portraits in New Yorker look like they were done by Richard Avedon on a particularly spiteful day. Much fashion photography seems to be purposely contrived to make the subject look sullen, unkempt, disheveled – men with three-day beards and torn jeans, women faring no better. If beauty doesn’t matter – or is even a detriment – this makes sense.

What really bothers me is not what’s happening in pop culture but what’s happing in museums and galleries.

Alas, I’m more aligned with Tom Stoppard’s assertion that the whole notion of art depends on the fact that some people do things very well that most of us do badly or not at all. Yes, that is an elitist statement.

The only problem is that if you are not willing to grant the couple of assumptions then nothing that follows makes sense — whether it’s tea-party politics (Oops! Strayed away from the subject there.) or post-modern art..

Paris in the Springtime -- or whenever.

2012-01-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

Just last week I finished the printing for a small portfolio from negatives that I took in Paris in 1978. I was there, alas, on business, for 10 days each in early April and in early October. With my twin, brand new Canon AT-1’s in hand, one loaded with Tri-X and the other with Kodachrome, (I'm still using those cameras, by the way.) I had a wonderful time in the limited time left over from being an engineer.

In addition to having a day job in 1978 we also had four kids around the house ranging in age from 17 to 7. I didn’t print a lot of the negatives at the time nor did I do much with the slides.

About four months ago I took a third or fourth or fifth look at Peter Turnley’s book “The Parisians” and wondered if I had enough photographs from Paris to do something with them. I have made a desk calendar each year for six years – did I have enough, roughly 55, to use for this year’s calendar. Apart from scanning the slides (all my slides – some 5500 of them) a couple of years ago I hadn’t seen either the slides or the negatives for a very long time. Fortunately, I have a filing system for the negatives and scanned slides that allowed me to round them up with a modest amount of rummaging around.

Here’s an aside: when Kodak stopped making Kodachrome they did the world of photography a great disservice. Not only were those 30-odd year old slides unchanged from the day they were processed but the scans of them were creamy smooth and beautiful – a joy to work with.

After I scanned a bunch of the negatives and did black and white conversions of another bunch of the slides I had plenty for the calendar and it looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

That was so much fun I decided to make a small silver print portfolio selected from the Tri-X negatives. Twenty is a magic number – that is the number of prints, mounted on 2-ply board with tissue interleafs, that will fit in one of the handsome 11x14, black, 1-inch deep boxes I buy from Lumiere (unpaid advertisement). Besides that, twenty is a nice number – enough prints to make a nice small show but not so many that it turns the portfolio into a major project.

“11x14?” you say. That is a conscious choice on my part. I believe that the BIG PRINT rage facilitated by wide-carriage digital printers is often overkill. Last summer I saw Mitch Dobrowner’s beautiful prints of gathering storm clouds at Blue Sky in Portland. They needed to be big – and they are – and they are spectacular. That does not mean that bigger is better for every photograph. “Because I can.” isn’t a good reason for printing big. My street photographs are not of large-scale subjects and do not require large-scale prints. (Haven't I ranted about this before?).

The portfolio prints I currently make are 7” on the long side for rectangular prints and 5 ¾” on a side for square prints. With these dimensions all prints can be mounted on portrait-orientated mats with the title printed below directly on the mat. This makes a handsome presentation and the small size invites you to come up close to look at the print. I finished mounting the prints over the weekend and I’m pleased with the result. Now I need to hustle a show for them.

A couple of observations: What I am interested in photographing hasn’t changed much in the 33 years between taking these negatives and making prints from them. Along about 1989 I took a workshop with David Bayles (co-author of Art and Fear) on “finding your direction”. After looking over what I regarded as my hopelessly directionless portfolio of 50 or so prints, he assured me that I already had a direction – that I was working in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Ronis, Boubat, Eisenstadt … -- and, since that clearly was what I enjoyed doing, to do more of it.

On the other hand, I sure make better negatives than I did 33 years ago. Several of those negatives were real darkroom challenges. I also am a better printer than I was 33 years ago. I dredged up copies of the few prints I made shortly after returning from Paris but I don’t intend to show them to anybody.

Doing this portfolio was good for me. I revisited a very pleasant episode in my life, I wound up with a finished body of work that I’m proud of, and I got in a lot of darkroom time. I wonder what else is lurking my shelf full of three-ring binders full of negatives.

What is composition good for, anyway?

2012-01-10T18:54:00.000-08:00

My friend Doug and I have an ongoing conversation about the principles of composition – or “rules” or “commandments”, or “suggestions”, or whatever they are. You can probably intuit already which side of the discussion I am on.
Once upon a time, being the linear-thinking kind of guy I am, I decided that what I needed to improve my photographs was a good introduction to composition. This notion was promoted by what I saw every month at the print competition of the camera club to which I then belonged. Critiques ran heavily to pointing out the presence or absence of crash points, eye magnets, negative and positive space, full stops, leading lines, etc. Since I hadn’t a clue what most of these terms meant it made learning about them sound necessary, even vital.
A quick trip to the library and the used book shop equipped me with a book aimed at beginning drawing students and another one specifically about composing photographs. As I recall, I also rounded up a Photographic Society of America (PSA) booklet about competition guidelines with a good many pronouncements about good composition. After a certain amount of study and considerable flailing about I had two prints ready for the monthly print competition. One was a grab-it-when-you-can street photograph (what I usually do) that I was pretty proud of. The other was carefully composed with all the properties that it needed to be well composed – problem with it, however, was that it was completely and utterly boring. Do you want to guess which one scored well in the critique?
A light bulb came on! The camera club’s competition used composition as a yardstick to evaluate rather than as a vocabulary to describe. However, “good” composition is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a “good” photograph. It is way too easy to come up with counterexamples to believe than the principles of composition make an accurate yardstick.
Expressing that opinion did not get me thrown out of the club as a heretic but it was close. I was already on the suspect list for asking why a “good” photograph always has to have at least some sparkly white and some dead black.
Just for fun I briefly joined a second PSA-oriented camera club and found the same attitude.
Moreover, my newfound knowledge of the principles of composition was not helpful to me in doing the kind of work I wanted to do. In fact, as soon as I started thinking in terms of composition I got fewer negatives that I liked – scary.
OK – So are the principles of composition useful in taking photographs as well as for describing them after the fact? You sometimes hear (often with a bit of a sneer) that there is a difference between taking a photograph and making a photograph – are the principles of composition involved in this difference?
My friend Doug finds the principles of composition to be very useful in his work. He prefers to work with camera on tripod. He usually photographs plants, urban landscape details, and sea/lake shore scenes. His goal is to make the most exquisite image capture he can and then manipulate it very little. He consciously thinks about the principles of composition both before and after he takes a photograph. His work is beautiful with a quiet elegance that mine almost never achieves.
Just last night Doug reminded me that John Paul Caponigro goes so far as to sketch how he intends to compose a photograph before he even gets out his camera.
I find the principles of composition of no use whatever in my work. I never think about composition when I am photographing. Well, that’s not quite true – if time permits I often glance around the edges of the viewfinder to see if a half-step will get rid of a dangling tree branch or disembodied arm. I rarely work with camera on tripod. I usually photograph people – mostly informal portraits and everyday activities. My goal is to get the most interesting negative I can and then do whatever I can to turn it into a print that celebrates the moment. When I am printing I do not consciously think about composition in cropping or manipulating the image.
In our frequent and pleasurable sharing of work-in-progress Doug often uses the vocabulary of composition to describe what is going on in my prints – sometimes just to explain why he thinks a print “works”, sometimes giving me an idea that will improve the next version. When I look at Doug’s prints I often can say “I believe it would work better if ….” To which he may reply “You’re right – if I did that then the (noun from the composition vocabulary) would (verb from the composition vocabulary).
I am coming to believe that his use of composition and mine are somehow analogous to improvising in music. There are amazing improvisers whose skill is built on a thorough theoretical knowledge of music – Dave Brubeck, for instance, studied with composer Darius Milhous before turning to jazz. His improvising is a flood of rhythmically and harmonically complex music akin to J. S. Bach’s legendary keyboard improvisations. There are equally amazing improvisers whose skill is built on, well, listening to and playing a lot of jazz. Charlie Parker’s formal training was, to be charitable, modest. Yet he played long, lyrical, intricately complex lines, often lasting several minutes that have the integrity of well-crafted poetry.
There are photographers like that, too. Sticking to my heroes, the French humanist photographers, consider Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau.
Cartier-Bresson – whose catch phrase “The Decisive Moment.” is more accurately translated as “The moment at which everything comes together.” – had considerable formal training in drawing and painting before taking up photography. His style when photographing hardly allowed for careful consideration of formal composition but he vehemently stated that his intent was not to push the button until everything was in the right place. I didn’t find any counterexamples in a couple of passes through the catalog of his retrospective show. Does that mean that he was spectacularly successful at doing what he intended or does it mean that he edited carefully?
Doisneau, on the other hand, had essentially no formal training in art although he was trained as an engraver and had considerable technical skill at drawing. His style when photographing was considerably less athletic than Cartier-Bresson’s. He stated that Cartier-Bresson was a hunter and he was a fisherman. Many of his photographs also exhibit good formal composition. That said, several of Doisneau’s best (in my opinion) can serve as counterexamples.
Doug photographs based on conscious, careful, study and attention to principles. I photograph based on looking at and taking a lot of photographs. We each can work the way we do party because of what we choose as subject matter – or maybe we each choose our subject matter in response to how we prefer to work. There’s an entirely different can of worms to pry open someday.

"Regular Customer" project

2011-07-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

I'm nearly done scanning negatives for my “Regular Customer” project (aka: “50 years at the Pike Place Market”). About a year ago it popped into my head that it soon would be 50 years since we moved to Seattle. We have lived here for 43 of those 50 years. I was one of the modern nomads, an aerospace engineer, so we moved away and came back twice.

Both of us were flat-landers, raised in Illinois, college in Indiana, and neither of us had ever lived in a city. Barbara had been in Seattle once as a child and I had never gotten farther west than central Missouri. We found a 2x4 apartment in the heart of the city with the notion of spending a year figuring out where we wanted to live, bought a machine that roughly resembled an automobile and declared ourselves natives. We kept stumbling on to places that gave us the “Toto, I don't believe we are still in Kansas.” feeling and one of these was the Pike Place Market. Before many weeks passed we were on a first-name basis with some of the merchants, had learned what fresh salmon tasted like, and knew how to navigate the maze of shops on the lower floors.

Not long after that my interest in photography turned from the random family slides – I still had the camera I bought in Germany the summer I played on a USO tour band – to developing my own black and white and making (absolutely awful) prints in my makeshift darkroom. The market became the place I would go to photograph just for fun or just because we were going to be there anyway – I got pretty good at photographing with one hand while holding a grocery bag in the other and balancing a kid on my back. I decided that I really had become a native when I noticed a tourist taking a photograph of me. Time passed and a lot of film wound up cut into neat strips, contact printed, put into plastic protector-pages, and filed in three-ring notebooks.

Did I have enough photographs of the market for a book-length project? I flipped through the contact sheets and my film log (thankfully, I started keeping notes after a couple of years). I counted up well over 300 rolls of film that had at least some market photographs on them. Yeah, probably enough. For just over a year I have been plodding through those rolls of film, ignoring the uninteresting or obviously unusable negatives and scanning the rest. “Plodding” is the right word. Some wag noted that all human progress is made by people who don't understand what they are getting into. If I had realized how long a job this would turn out to be I likely would never have started. But now I'm nearly done – only about 15 more rolls of film to go through – and I have about 850 scanned and lightly edited photographs of the market and its people ready to …. do whatever comes next.

I intend to edit the 900 or so “first cut” photographs down to about 200 but before I start editing I had better have at least a rough idea of how the resulting book is going to be organized. I'll let you know when I do.

I have no idea how this project is going to turn out. I have even less of an idea of whether or not I can get it published if I ever do finish it. On the other hand, it has been fun to slog through nearly 60,000 negatives most of which I have never printed. I have become quite efficient at editing the scans to the “good enough” state that will allow me to make informed choices for the second cut. Which leads me to another observation: I would never have undertaken a project of this size if I were going to do it in the darkroom – I can edit 6 or 7 prints an hour to the “good enough” state. I would be lucky to print 6 or 7 prints a day in the darkroom. Since my goal is an ink-on-paper book I'm eventually going to have to have digital files for each print anyway. When this is all done, the book is published and I'm getting rich off of the royalties (yeah, right) I may well go back and silver print a very select few of the final cut for a portfolio.

Why is Portland a better photography scene?

2011-07-19T14:29:00.000-07:00

I just got the monthly “what's happening in Portland” email from Guy Swanson. Guy is a tireless promoter of photography, ex-gallery operator (Photographic Image Gallery in Portland's old town), retired PR man, docent at Portland Art Museum (PAM) and part-time taxi driver. Part of his email this month is a note from Julia Dolan, PAM's recently-hired curator of photography. She came to PAM after the untimely death of Terry Toedtemeier, who held the post for only two years after it was created (for him). Before that, Mr. Toedtemeier was volunteer curator of photography for several years as well as an active photographer himself and a geologist.

PAM takes photography very seriously – it shows photographs along with contemporaneous work in other mediums, it has an outstanding permanent collection, it has a very nice gallery in which to show work from their collection as well as traveling shows, and an active Photography Council. Their council is 100+ members strong with an active volunteer board and an agenda a yard long. PAM is currently showing Ray Metzger's work and expects to acquire several pieces for their collection using funds raised by the council. Ms. Dolan calls them out in her note as being a major reason for PAM's position in photography.

There is a lot that I like about the Seattle Art Museum – but its institutional attitude about photography isn't one of them.

In my last post I muttered about the Seattle Art Museum’s Photography Council (or lack thereof). SAM did have one some years ago, during Rod Slemmons’ tenure as curator of prints and photography. I was not always keen on Mr. Slemmons’ choices although the Lee Friedlander “Like a One-Eyed Cat” show that he curated remains one of my all time favorites. What I was always keen on, however, was his passion for photography and his unceasing promotion of photography as part of the museum’s offerings. After he departed from SAM, first as an independent curator and then to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Photography Council shriveled and then was absorbed by the Contemporary Art Council. At the time he left SAM I strongly suspected that he had gotten tired of pushing a rope. His successor, Trevor Fairbrother, seemed to regard photography as print-making's poor cousin. He left SAM, I believe as part of a retrenchment that eliminated his position and folded prints and photography into contemporary art.

SAM has never had a permanent photography gallery. It now uses the hallway leading to the Jacob Lawrence gallery to show photographs. It is relatively well-lighted and relatively wide. It is a nice hallway – but it's still a hallway and symbolic of photography's near-orphan status.

It was never clear to me what the Photography Council’s role was supposed to be from the museum’s viewpoint. The other councils – Contemporary Art, African Art, Asian Art – appeared to me to be composed mostly of wealthy, influential collectors and the purpose of the council is to both provide and round up financial support for the respective collections and for exhibitions. The Photography Council was mostly composed of, well, photographers – not a group noted for a plethora of wealthy, influential individuals. Council chairmen that I remember are Nick Hansen (photographer and teacher), David Johnson (photographer and teacher) and David Clarridge (photographer and free-lance accountant).

It was clear to me what the Photography Council’s role was supposed to be from the viewpoint of its members – to promote shows of photography at SAM (difficult since I can't remember ever seeing anybody from the museum at a meeting), reaching out to the photographic community on behalf of SAM by sponsoring lectures, portfolio reviews, and workshops (there were a few), provide a few bucks for purchase of photography. The latter came to a screeching halt when the council made a donation and the museum, without including anyone from the council in the decision, purchased a relatively expensive print from a then-trendy photographer that to my knowledge has never been exhibited.

PAM and SAM are the major institutions in Portland and in Seattle. I cannot believe that the difference between the vital and growing photographic scene in Portland and the current doldrums in Seattle aren't at least partly a result of the difference in approach to photography by the museums.

Why I don't take my portfolio to portfolio reviews.

2011-07-18T11:13:00.000-07:00

Portfolio reviews are a popular event these days. They have morphed from half-day or one day local events sponsored by the likes of the Photography Center Northwest (PCNW) in Seattle and the Photography Council of the Seattle Art Museum (when it had one – but that's the subject of another rant) to multi-day nationally advertised events. The two biggies are the semi-annual FotoFest in Houston and (on the alternate years) PhotoLucida in Portland, Oregon. Local organizations still have them – PCNW, Newspace in Portland, the Photography Council of the Portland Art Museum and so on. In all cases, the format is very similar. The sponsoring organization rounds up an appropriately sized gaggle of curators, gallery owners, teachers, editors and other luminaries as reviewers and hopes that an appropriately sized herd of aspiring photographers will bring their portfolios for review.

In addition to face-to-face portfolio reviews, there is a burgeoning crop of internet/digital based virtual reviews. The giant of these is Critical Mass – connected to PhotoLucida – that carries the process to an even bigger scale with a three-stage process. Thousands of portfolios are sent to a few of the hundreds of reviewers for an initial cut. The lucky winners in the first round get an in-depth review by a select group of reviewers who see all their portfolios. Winners in the second round (now down to 50 or so) each have a piece in a traveling show and a chance to grab the brass ring of a solo show and publication.

The hopes brought to the event by the reviewees are four:
1. the hope that a curator or gallery owner will see their work and offer a show, a publication, or gallery representation,
2. the hope that they will get leads for potential shows, publications, or gallery representation,
3. the hope that a wealthy collector will see their work and buy some,
4. the hope that they will receive guidance either in improving or marketing their work.

All worthy hopes. I have them myself. So why don't I take my portfolio to reviews? Well, I did so a few times. I also spent a fair amount of time schlepping my portfolio around to galleries for one-on-one discussions.

Regarding hopes 1 and 2: I met one (1, uno, ein, un) such person who felt that showing my work was a good idea. Alas, his institution was Seattle's Museum of History and Industry so, since my work is neither historical nor industrial, he didn't hold out much hope of showing it and didn't have any good leads for me. I am going to get back to him if I ever get my "50 years at the Pike Place Market" in a presentable form.
On the other hand I had several reviewers who were openly dismissive of the kind of work I do. One flatly said “Why would anybody want photographs of people that aren't family or famous?” A gallery owner whose opinion I respect very much told me that my street photography was very good and he would be glad to show it if my name was Cartier-Bresson and/or I was dead. OK – that's useful information I guess. My work is so out of fashion that there is little hope of showing it in a gallery or museum (until I've been dead a few decades).

Regarding hope 3: I didn't meet any of these.

Regarding hope 4: One of the local photo supply stores, Rainier Photo – sadly now out of business -- used to sponsor a one-day photography meeting once a year. In addition to vendor displays and programs by vendors and local photographers, they had working photographers do portfolio reviews. Boy, were they useful! I can't say as much for the reviews by curators, publishers, and gallery types. I threw in the towel after a portfolio review at Seattle Art Museum. The first and last of the four reviewers clearly had no interest in my work and were trying to think of something polite to say to fill the allotted 20 minutes. The second hated everything about my work. She latched on to one print and used it to explain why my approach to photographing people was hopelessly voyeuristic, why the quality of my printing was mediocre, and why the presentation of my prints was quaint at best. With tail between my legs I went to the third review. He was very complementary about my work and latched on to the same print to praise my approach to people photography, the quality of my printing, and the clean, simple presentation I use for my prints.

There is also the little matter that portfolio reviews, especially the biggies, have become quite expensive. Juried $how$ and portfolio review$ have turned into $ignificant $ource$ of ca$h for the $pon$or$.

I am proud of my work – well, some of it – and I'm happy to show it either to someone who has some likelihood of showing or publishing it or whose opinion I respect enough to ask for comments about it. But, what with one thing and another, I don't find it worth my time, effort and money to take my portfolio to a review.

But sometimes big really is good.

2011-04-11T18:57:00.000-07:00

Barbara and I are just back from a weekend gallery crawling in Portland. We started at the opening of “The Photographic Nude” at Lightbox, www.lightbox-photographic.com, in Astoria (in which show, I’m proud to state, I have a print). Michael will have jpegs of the entire show up on their website soon. But I digress since the size of the prints in this show ranged from modest to tiny.

Blue Sky gallery in Portland, www.blueskygallery.org, on the other hand had two shows of very large prints by Michael Light and Mitch Dobrowner. Mr. Light (nice name for a photographer, eh?) does aerial photographs of southern California and of Arizona. They are sort of a view-from-above riff on David Plowdon’s “Hand of Man on America”. One of his prints, for example, is of a golf course with verdant green fairways glued on top of an arid mesa in Arizona. I find Light’s work both much more moving and much more visually appealing than Richard Misrach’s “Desert Cantos”.

The wall-hung prints are inkjet prints on aluminum sheet. The metallic sheen of the matrix puts a gleam on the highlights and makes the blacks look hard and cold. …. And the prints are BIG! They are 36” or so square and framed without glazing in aluminum frames. They are dazzling! He also makes huge books with pages about the same size as the wall prints that he displays on what I believe are retired studio camera tripods. The books are clearly labeled “Do not turn the book pages. Ask for gallery assistance.”

The other half of the show is Mitch Dobrowner’s photographs of storm clouds and storms. They are also inkjet prints but printed on rag paper. Mr. Dobrowner recently had a portfolio of these photographs in Lenswork magazine #91, www.lenswork.com. His work looked good indeed in the magazine and, to my taste, the glossy surface of the magazine page suited his prints better than the softer rag paper. But I digress again. At Blue Sky he showed prints in three sizes --medium (16x24 or so), large, and huge. I would characterize them as excellent, splendid, and dazzling.

Both Light and Dobrowner are photographing BIG subjects! Both expect the viewer to stand close to the print even though the prints are BIG! Both sets of prints pass the Brooks Jensen size test (see the December 1 blog entry). MAN, why did you print that so BIG? Oh, wait – this time I know the answer to that question.

Still Like a One Eyed Cat

2011-01-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

The performance by Eric Friedlander (previous post) set me to thinking about his father’s family snapshots – Eric and his sister splashing in the surf, the family (minus Lee, of course, who was always behind the camera as all good fathers are) squinting in the sun at picturesque places in the southwest. Some of them, however, had the quirky humor and lightning eye of Lee Friedlander’s “serious” work all over them. He once referred to photography as a “generous medium” – his photographs are filled to the edges of the frame with detail (just like mine are) but somehow his often make sense (just like mine often don’t). In his best work every fence post, rock and billboard reinforce the ostensible subject of the photograph.

One of my favorites of his is “Laughing Dog”. At a glance, it is a low-rise city street scene with a kind of L.A. suburban look – bright sun and hard shadows, quite a bit of space at the edge of broad, vacant streets at a corner. A small black dog sits alone on the curb. Pretty dull, eh? Look more closely and note that the dog is yawning – the angle of his jaw looks like he is laughing – and the angle of his open jaw repeats endlessly all over the entire photograph. The curbs, street sins, building details … keep looking. I don’t know that he saw that at the instant he took the picture, but if he didn’t there would have been little reason to push the shutter button.

Friedlander, born in 1934 in Aberdeen, had built himself a solid (as in: making a living) career as a commercial photographer doing album covers (jazz and blues being his other passions) and assignments for magazines and corporate annual reports. His breakout show in the art world was in 1967 at NYMOMA with Diane Arbus and Gary Winogrand. He and Winogrand were the stars of the then-new snapshot aesthetic. What I saw of the snapshot aesthetic in local shows left me baffled. I had seen reproductions in magazines of both Friedlander’s and Winogrand’s work – that had also left me baffled. In 1989 the Lee Friedlander show “Like a One Eyed Cat” was at the old Seattle Art Museum in volunteer park, curated by Rod Slemmons (then curator of prints and photography for SAM – now curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago). My reaction to it was “OH, that’s what all the fuss is about!” Friedlander’s are well seen (Edward Weston’s term), meticulously printed photographs presented as if they are casual snapshots. At first glance that is exactly what they are but a second, more careful look shows me that they are much more. I had the same reaction to seeing a show of Gary Winogrand's prints a year or so later. Most of the other snapshot aesthetic work I have seen before or sense is, well, casual snapshots indifferently printed and presented as casual snapshots.

Barbara and I were speculating about what distinguishes Lee Friedlander’s work from Cartier-Bresson's. Both make relatively small prints, both insist on excellent print quality, both record the instant that the frame fills with an edge-to-edge coherent image. Barbara perceptively notes that if Cartier-Bresson’s prints are theater then Lee Friedlander’s are improv. HCB’s photographs give me the impression that he was watching a carefully rehearsed performance put on specifically for him to photograph. Friedlander’s are as if he happened upon the improvised performance and was delighted by it. Lee Friedlander notes that when he was about 15 he heard Charlie Parker’s music for the first time and instantly understood what Parker (the ultimate improviser) was trying to do.

I confess that Lee Friedlander’s more considered later work – the landscapes and the photographs of the cemetery in Italy -- are not to my liking. He street photographs and his compelling portraits of jazz musicians, however, remain on my A-list.

Famous? Whom?

2011-01-10T15:50:00.000-08:00

Barbara and I went to a performance by Eric Friedlander at the Kirkland Performance Center last Friday. He is a cellist and composer – but not what you think. He writes and plays jazz, folk-rock, indie pop and other genres not often associated with cello. Moreover, he not only bows his cello but plucks it – think guitar (his other instrument) with four strings. He has played for and with many big name artists but this was a solo performance of his own music. He played, spoke directly to the audience to explain the context in which his music lives, and showed photographs taken by his father, Lee Friedlander. (You just knew there had to be photography in here somewhere, eh?)

Until Eric was 17 or so his family took an extended road trip – a couple of months – every summer. These were working vacations for his father who both photographed for his personal work and for the many assignments he did for commercial clients – and he took family snapshots. The family, Lee and his wife Maria, Eric and his sister gypsied back and forth across the country in their pickup truck with a camper shell on the back while Eric and his sister watched the world go by, daydreaming from the over-cab picture window of the camper. The music in this performance represents memories – wonderful or not so much, exciting or tedious – of these trips. The photographs Eric used in this performance were a few of the family snapshots his dad took. A filmmaker friend supplied Eric with grainy, home-movie looking, black and white film of (mostly) southwest scenery viewed from a moving car. The films ran during most of the music.

I’m often not keen on multimedia performances but this one really worked. Much of the music is dissonant and harsh but heard in context and accompanied by the visuals it was very effective. There is a CD of the music, “Block Ice and Propane” (the two staple necessities for an extended camping trip) but I doubt that the music would interest me by itself.

As an aside, Eric Friedlander uses a cello with a carbon-fiber body for his traveling instrument. Nearly indestructible, it is a beautiful, graphite-silver grey with a clear, commanding, exceptionally strong voice. He even used a practice mute on it for one moody piece that demanded a soft, dreamy voice.

He stated in his introduction that he had been reluctant to put this program together because he didn’t want to use his father’s fame to promote his own career – a valid concern for an artist with coattails that he could easily grab. Lee Friedlander has some pretty serious coattails – three Guggenheim fellowships, landmark shows at NYMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and most other major art museums (SAM in 1989), roughly ten published books of his work.

Still, my next thought was that outside the more-or-less hardcore photography community Lee Friedlander’s name is likely not a household word. Just for fun I did a brief, unscientific survey of about 60 well-educated, literate acquaintances. The oldest is nearly 90 and the youngest 16. I excluded only those acquaintances that I know to be passionate about photography. The survey question: “Do you know who Lee Friedlander is?” Exactly one person answered yes. I should have excluded her because her late husband was a devoted photographer. Three people proposed that Friedlander must be associated with the local jewelry shops of the same name.

I’ll bet that there were more people at the performance because of Eric Friedlander’s having played for Courtney Love than because of his dad’s photography.

“Famous” – at least as measured by name recognition – and “photographer” seem not to play well together unless the person in question is Ansel Adams or, perhaps, Annie Liebovitz. I’m sure that the same is true of other artists. A couple of years ago, the Seattle Symphony featured John Lill, a spectacular British pianist with a string of accolades a yard long, who played Tchaikovsky’s 2nd piano concerto. I had never heard of him even though I’m pretty passionate about classical music. My daughter tells me that a world-ranked bagpiper, Jori Chisholm, lives in the Seattle area. Did you know that?

Now an NFL quarterback or Lady Gaga would probably fare better on my survey.

Part 2 of this post (coming soon to a computer near you) will have to do with Lee Friedlander’s photography – seeing some of it at his son’s performance reminded me of how much I like it.

What is it with BIG?

2010-12-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

Today I was a participant in trying to put a group show of photographs in order to hang in a local gallery. It was fun if kind of a zoo to watch nine people moving framed prints back and forth with no guiding hand. I’m not at all sure that the hanging order was converging by the time I left.

{The following secondary rant is a digression from the main rant. I’ll notify you when it’s over.} I am dubious, for several reasons, about judging for an art show based on jpegs viewed on a computer screen. Only one of these reasons is germane to today’s rant. The jpeg gives you no idea of the physical size of the piece. I’m sure that the judge for this show was told that there were [some number] of running feet of gallery space. The mental arithmetic that followed was something like “Well, at an average print size of [insert guess here] that means I can select [some smaller number] of photographs.” The trouble with that mental arithmetic is that in these days of wide-carriage inkjet printers the average size is, well, bigger than that. In the absence of the real prints I think it would be only fair to provide the judge with a spreadsheet that chalked up the available space each time a print was selected. Today we had about 20% more prints that wall space. The entire show is crowded and the very few smaller prints wound up hung over and under -- overwhelmed by the bigger works. {end of secondary rant about judging from jpegs – now back to our scheduled rant.}

Somebody said to James Burke (Dizzy) Gillespie: “MAN, why do you play that (some frenetic bebop standard) so FAST!” Dizzy’s legendary answer: “Because I CAN!” An important but unspoken corollary is “… and nobody else can.” I understand that he later recanted and observed that, in his youth, he played everything way too fast.

The corollary doesn’t apply to today’s world of wide-carriage inkjet printers that are, however, still new enough that “Because I can!” is a common if unspoken reason for making a huge print.

Brooks Jensen (editor of Lenswork) posits a test having to do with print size (paraphrased). Stand at a distance from a print and admire it. Move closer and admire it again. Keep on doing this until you stop seeing something new. If your nose isn’t very close to the glass, the print is likely too big.

In a spirit of full disclosure, I don’t do big prints because big doesn’t suit my work or what I do with it. I am not opposed to “big” on principle.

My friend Bryan does big. He does so because big suits the work he is doing – complex, often collaged, layered work that he prints 40” or so high by [very long]. His big prints pass the Jensen test. When my nose is 8” from the print I’m still seeing new things.

For contrast, there was a beautiful still life in the show I was muddling about with today. A roughly hemispherical glass cup sits on a bare tabletop against an indistinct background. Looking carefully at the liquid in the cup you can see the upside-down reflection of the buildings across the street from the window behind the photographer. The size of the print, perhaps 16”x30”, diminishes its impact on me. Printed much smaller it would be a tiny jewel and I would love to have a copy to hang.

I am especially unmoved by street photographs printed big. There are two color, street photographs in the show – printed perhaps 30”x40”. They would pass the Jensen test printed much smaller and I would find seeing 5 or 6 prints in the same wall space much more satisfactory. Besides, in the gallery where the show will hang there isn’t a wall to put them on that will allow them to be seen from sufficient distance to appreciate them.

MAN, why did you print that so BIG? Before you fire up your Epson 9600, think of an answer.

"Men Like Me" -- missing Bill Jay

2010-10-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

I never met Bill Jay. I wish I had because I’m guessing that he and I would have gotten along just fine thank you very much. He was insightful, articulate, passionate about photography, and sharply critical of those who lard photography up with a thick layer of abstract, even metaphysical, pseudo-meaning. His writing was clear, to the point, and often very witty. I recently met one of the legion of students that passed through the photography program at Arizona State during Jay’s long tenure there. He confirmed my suspicion that Jay was an inspiring teacher who demanded a great deal of his students and no less of himself. I’m sure he could be cranky and without doubt highly opinionated, too – I like that in a person.

Jay’s death at 69 last year left me feeling as if I had lost an old friend.

I just finished re-reading his “Occam’s Razor: an Outside-In View of Contemporary Photography”. This 1992 book is a compendium of several, loosely connected, short articles about the then-contemporary art photography scene. The tone of the book is of “pointing with pride and viewing with concern”. It is positively frightening that this book has not become dated: the directions in which he points with pride and the vistas over which he views with concern are still with us 20 years later.

One of the “viewing with concern” bits has to do with those are striving to be different and who disdain the history of the medium because they do not want to be influenced by the past. In the essay “So much for individuality”, he quotes Lionel Trilling who said, “The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.” Keep this quote in mind for later.

Early on Bill Jay decided (well, after a dope slap from his lifelong friend, David Hurn) that his career in photography lay as a historian, teacher, and author rather than in doing photography. Not that Jay didn’t take photographs – or that he wasn’t good at it. Over the years, he made a point of photographing most of the photographers that he interviewed. “Portraits of Photographers: 1968-2006” was published, I believe, in 2008. It is a wonderful book of sensitive, technically adept, portraits -- mostly men because many of the women photographers he interviewed declined to be photographed.

After retiring from teaching in 1999 he moved to a California beach community. His early morning wanderings led him to the acquaintance and “a feeling of kinship” with a community of “over-the-hill, sartorially challenged, with abundant facial hair” men. Nazraeli published his heavily cropped portraits of them in 2005 as “Men Like Me” – and Jay’s face is one of those in the book. Portraits from this project were also featured in Lenswork (for which Jay wrote a column for several years) and in Black and White magazine. The response from the art-photography world was a mildly grudging “Jay has finally done something original.’

Two weeks ago I was at the opening of a photography show at the Larson Gallery in Yakima (in which I have six photographs, by the way). In addition to the work on the walls, the curator had placed a selection of books from their library on display to give the opening-goers a view of photography’s history. Among these books was a retrospective of Bill Brandt’s work. I opened it at random to “Left Eye of Max Ernst: 1965”, a closely cropped portrait of a heavily seamed man’s face. Several similar portraits followed. Brandt was one of Bill Jay’s all-time most admired photographers. He could not possibly have been unaware of these portraits. Bill Jay, in doing this project, was not only presenting an honest, revealing, bold view of these men but was also “cocking a snoot” (as he often put it) one more time.

“Mature artists steal.” And I'll bet that this one snickered, too.

An Afternoon with Sandra Kroupa

2010-10-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Sandra Kroupa was recently interviewed for a series in her professional journal on “dream jobs”. She enthusiastically concurs that she has one. Her official job title is “Book Arts and Rare Book Curator” for the University of Washington’s Allen Library. Last Friday she met with a gaggle of photographers from the University of Washington Photographers’ Group (UWPG) to talk about and show examples from the library’s collection of art books emphasizing books of photographs and art books that use photographic processes. See:

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_11/mandaville/mandaville.html

for a wonderful interview with her.

Ms. Kroupa brought a heaping library cart full of examples from the collection, all in tidy archival boxes made by the library’s conservation department. She gave us an overview of the book arts and rare book collection, part of the “Special Collections” section of the Allen Library. “Special Collections” is best known for its superb Northwest Collection but has over 14,000 items in the book arts and rare books collection. She emphasized that the collection is much broader than she could begin to show us in a short program. It contains, for example, books that are important historically, or that mark milestones in the technology of printing and publishing. For instance, she showed us a first edition with dust jacket of “On the Road” and a first edition in English of “The Decisive Moment” with the dust jacket illustration done by Henri Matisse. Neither of these books are remarkable as art objects. “On the Road” is straight text and the catalog of the recent Cartier-Bresson retrospective shows HCB’s work to much better advantage. However -- in the world of jazz certain artists are referred to as “horn changers” – those whose playing changes forever the way in which a given instrument is regarded. For the trumpet, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis are “horn changers”. These books are “horn changers” and there is something about seeing the original articles that I found very moving.

She then turned to books produced by conventional printing and binding technology that either are of photographs or that incorporate photographs into more complex images. The reproductions in these books are very high quality but are produced in fairly large quantities – tens, hundreds, or a few thousand – that are aimed at a connoisseur or collector market. Denise Wolf of Aperture did an excellent talk on this niche market at Seattle Art Museum earlier this year. One especially beautiful example that Ms. Kroupa showed us was of photographs of broken glass paired with poems by Silvia Plath. The rich warm blacks and open, slightly soft midtones of the photographs reproduced splendidly in offset printing on a creamy paper. Alas, I cannot remember the name of the artist.

Ms. Kroupa then moved on to her real passion – books that are art objects in themselves as well as in content. These are one-of-a-kind or are in very small, limited editions. Every aspect of them, from the materials to the printing to the binding, are part of the artwork. She refuses to enter into the debate about “What is a book?” that has been raging in the academic world for some time. She also refuses to enter the debate about whether a one-of-a-kind object belongs in an art museum or in a library. Instead she casts her net as widely as she can for materials that she feels are important in the development of book art. Only some of the unusual work that she showed us:

• A book of a few pages printed on cloth that combined cyanotype and brief texts with glass (perhaps acrylic) rods stitched together as a spine.

• A doll-sized bed with handmade stuffed mattress, quilts, coverlet and pillow. Each fabric surface was stitched with text taken from a historically important text by a 19th century woman author.

• “Panorama” – a pop-up book for grownups – that on alternated pages with fold up revealed text on the issues of climate change and species extinction and pages with exquisite, layered pop-ups that combined text and hand-painted art.

Ms. Kroupa is quick to point out that, while many of the items she adds to the book art and rare book collection are very expensive, her acquisitions budget is miniscule. Most acquisitions either are outright gifts or are heavily subsidized by generous donors.

She is a passionate believer in the importance of the physical object (as opposed to viewing on a computer screen) even for art books that could be scanned page by page. She feels that experiencing the object as the artist intended is an integral part of the experience. However, she does not disdain the notion of using computers to create work from scratch as book art.

She concluded by noting that if you called and described your special interests you could make an appointment to visit the Allen Library and view items from their collection (an invitation that I certainly intend to accept).

I don't understand why Amy Blakemore's photographs are important.

2010-09-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

Seattle Art Museum just opened a show of photographs by Amy Blakemore. There was a gallery talk by the artist and SAM’s Marissa Sanchez (a former student of the artist) last Thursday.

As an aside, SAM’s photography gallery is really a hallway on the 3rd floor. It’s a nice hallway, broad and with good light. I suppose the traffic through it is good since it leads to the Jacob Lawrence gallery. It’s a whole lot better than no space dedicated to photography (which is what SAM had until the new building opened) but it’s still a hallway.

I had not seen Ms. Blakemore’s work except in reproductions. Two photographs I had seen in a magazine are in the show. One is of an airplane on its landing approach. There is an out-of-focus tree in the foreground and the out-of-focus airplane is near the upper left corner of the frame. The colors are muted, mostly blues. The second is a photograph of a huge folk-art or advertizing statue in Houston. It, too, is partly ocluded by out-of-focus trees. I went to the talk to see some real prints and with the hope of gaining some insight her work. Unfortunately, the hallway was crowded and noisy so I only heard about half of what she and Ms. Sanchez had to say. I wanted to ask her some questions but gave up.

Ms. Blakemore is an artist and teacher based in Houston. Her prints are square, roughly 20 inches on a side, from 120 negatives, some color, some black and white, all from a collection of original Diana plastic cameras. She was originally trained in “the documentary tradition” (which she referred to as the documentary tradition) at UT Austin but switched to plastic camera work while doing a fellowship at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art.

She noted that she does not work in projects and that is easy to believe. Her show at SAM is a few portraits, a few landscapes, a few still lifes, a few street photographs ….

Alas, I didn’t see a single print that I found compelling. I still fail to respond to the two prints I had seen in reproductions. Ms. Sanchez called out a portrait as one of her favorites in the show. It is a color image taken at close range near sunset in warm, nearly orange light. The subject’s blurry head and shoulders are a bit off to the right in the square frame, she looks directly at the camera.
Here is an excerpt from her artist’s statement (ArtDaily, September 5, 2010):

… Amy Blakemore compares the act of taking pictures to the experience of serendipitously gathering broken bits and lost objects during a long walk. …

She wanders around with her camera and photographs what catches her eye. I do that, too.

Blakemore’s photographs have maintained a tantalizing sense of interrupted or incomplete narrative –

She wants you to be intrigued and make up a story to go along with her photographs. I want that, too.

what at a glance may appear to be a banal mise en scène becomes with further inspection a mysterious and psychologically penetrating view of the world we live in.

I’m sorry but they remain banal mise en scenes to me no matter how hard I stare at them. This is my complaint with conceptual art – if the viewer doesn’t get it then there’s no way to get it.

Blakemore's work is in part defined by her embrace of low-tech cameras with limited range of focus.

What is “limited range of focus”? Her work is certainly "defined" by the Diana. It seems to me that her work is about the toy camera as opposed to interesting photographs that happen to be taken with a toy camera. Nick Hansen did the latter – I own three of his prints. Diane Stefanich does the latter, too.

Her use of such idiosyncratic tools can bring a number of unpredictable irregularities to her compositions, including partially blurred passage and a compressed depth of field that, at times, becomes vertiginous.

What is “blurred passage”? What is “compressed depth of field”? I don’t see “vertiginous” in her prints.

At the same time, her compositions are rigorously composed.

I can believe “carefully” but what does “rigorously” mean in this context?

Through skillful printing techniques she coaxes a remarkably nuanced palette in both black and white and color, and she manipulates the idiosyncrasies of her photographs,

Now I can get behind this statement! Ms. Sanchez noted that Ms. Blakemore is a master printer and I find that very easy to believe. Making 20x20 prints from Diana negatives sounds like a challenge at best and several of the prints were wrung out of negatives that I wouldn’t have a prayer of printing.

capturing the ways in which memory at once records and distorts visual information.

Well, memory certainly both records and distorts visual information but these prints don’t read that to me.

I'm glad I went to the talk -- I think -- but I don't understand why her photographs are important enough to merit a show in a major museum.

Monoblog?

2010-08-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

Every year some periodical (NY Times?) has a contest to create new words by changing one letter in an existing English word.
I can never think of a good one but this is close. I'm adding a single letter.
"Monoblog" - a blog that is read only by the author.
That's what I seem to have here, a monoblog. Oh, well. I write the entries mostly to get my thoughts in order anyway.
.... Still it would be nice ....

“After you say ‘It works’….”

2010-08-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

Our young friend, Ed, is a passionate fan and promoter of the graphic novel. The notion of the graphic novel either as an art form or as a literary form has puzzled me for some time. Some time ago Ed twisted my arm until I read “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993). McCloud wrote it, cleverly enough, using the concepts that he is explaining in each chapter.
“Understanding Comics” cleared some of the fog and gave me a good understanding of the techniques used to make text and art work together to tell a story.

It did not convince me, however, that the graphic novel was a form that held any interest for me. I’m not a big fan of the superhero genre or the zombie/vampire/horror genre and those seems to dominate the graphic novel titles. The only one I had even tried to read was Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” (several editions) when it was newly published but had to put it down – it was very well done and effective but it gave me nightmares.

Early this year I read of a series of graphic novels commissioned by the Louvre. There will ultimately be eight titles in the series. I believe that only two are published so far. The Louvre’s requirement to various artist/writers is simple – the Louvre must appear as a significant element in the plot. The announcement I read was for “On the Odd Hours” by Eric Liberge (NBMComicsLit, 2010 for the English edition). The premise, the “hook” if you will, of this book is that all museums secretly employ a special curator whose duty is to care for the souls of the artworks in the museum. The protagonist in “On the Odd Hours” is the young intern to the Louvre’s such curator. This sounded so appealing that I promptly ordered a copy.

Arnold Newman, the famous portrait photographer says: “After you say ‘It works.’ (or ‘It doesn’t work.’) then you can discuss the details.” (my addition in parentheses.)

“On the Odd Hours” doesn’t work. The drawings are very good indeed. Set among the art in the Louvre it certainly is visually rich. The hook is wonderful. But it doesn’t work. The text and the artwork don’t work well together. The graphic layout fails to convey the passage of time and space in many places (at least to me). The plot isn’t visual – it depends too much on understanding the protagonist’s situation, history, and mental state – difficult to express in graphic novel format. It should have been much shorter or much longer – the plot as presented is too short to be a novel but too complex to allow full development at its current length. I keep thinking what a wonderful short story Ray Bradbury could have written over the basic idea. Which also led me to ponder which of the Ray Bradbury short stories would be well-served by a “graphic novel” format. “The Dragon” certainly. There is a recent edition of “The Homecoming” that is already in very close to graphic novel format.

But I digress. After another long talk with Ed (who had not seen “The Odd Hours”) he suggested that I read “Bone” (Jeff Smith, Cartoon Books, 2004) as an example of a graphic novel that he felt works very well. He had to think a while to come up with one that was not a horror, zombie, or superhero plot. “Bone” is a straight-ahead heroic-quest fantasy, complete with a hapless but loveable protagonist who finds his courage, a dim but faithful sidekick, a wise grandmother, a beautiful princess estranged from her heritage, sundry monsters and villains, an evil force to be overcome and even the occasional dragon.

Ed was right. “Bone” does work very well and I enjoyed it even though my taste for fantasy isn’t very keen either. I would not have read it in a text form. It would have been just another fantasy potboiler and, in fact, I doubt that it would have been published.

Jeff Smith’s drawing style, his use of the drawings and the text, and his means of suggesting passage of time and space are straight out of “Understanding Comics”. “Bone” was written in installments over several years so I suppose that the evolution toward sophistication of the drawing style could be just from the passage of time but I think it was more conscious that that. As the story jelled and worked its way into a more complex world, so did the drawing.

OK – so a graphic novel can work. The issue with “The Odd Hours” is not that the graphic novel can’t work; rather that this particular graphic novel doesn’t work.

Why me? (Is anybody out there?)

2010-06-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

In my initial post on this blog, I answered "Why not me?" That's still the best reason I can advance. I tend to write stuff down a lot so a great deal of what I post here comes more-or-less directly out of my journal. However, it would be entertaining to know if anybody other than me ever looks at it. If you do (and you're not me) please leave a "Yup, I read it." comment or something.

Photography show at "the hutch"

2010-06-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

If you need a reminder of how beautiful a black and white silver print can be, may I recommend a visit to the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. A benefactor recently donated a collection of photographs to the center’s art collection. 43 (count ‘em) from the collection are now on display in the main lobby of the Arnold Building on their main campus near Lake Union. The display is a who’s who of the arguably golden age of silver photography.

7 Ansel Adams prints, including the best print of “half dome” I’ve ever seen and a beautiful “aspens vertical”.
4 Brett Weston prints
5 W. Eugene Smith prints, including the iconic “walk” and “row houses” and one that I had not seen “waiting for survivors, Andrea Doria” that is my new Gene Smith favorite.
7 Edward Weston vintage prints including “Shell, 1926” that is absolutely breathtaking
1 Max Yavno
3 Andre Kertez but none of the icons
1 Robert Doisneau – a print I had never seen from one of my favorite photographers
1 Clarence John Laughlin
1 Josef Karsh – the portrait of Pablo Casals playing his cello
1 Henri Cartier-Bresson but not one of the icons
2 Ilse Bing but not particularly distinguished ones
1 Robert Mapplethorpe – a still life
1 Aaron Siskind
1 Jerry Uelesman
1 Josef Koudelka – the icon of the skyrocket launch
1 Jean Claude Gautrand – and here I thought he was solely an editor and curator.
1 Stella Simon
1 Tina Freeman – “the window, London, 1979”. I had never heard of her. I believe that I tracked her down on the web but there is no evidence there of her having done black and white. This print goes into my pantheon of “If money was no object …” acquisitions.
2 Michael Smith
1 Stephanie Dinkins

Good grief, there are a lot of museums with less to show than that! All but a small handful of these prints are ones that I knew from books and only the last four names are ones with which I was not familiar. What a feast.

Term Limits for Curators?

2010-05-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

A short postscript to the last post “Why I’m not …”. Yet another interesting comment from Mr .Wride was that he had been looking at a whole lot of photographs for many years – “probably more than is good for me”.

A year or so before Marita Holdaway closed Benham Gallery I talked to her shortly after she returned from the portfolio review at the biennial PhotoLucida. I asked her if she saw anything that she thought was really outstanding. Her reply was that she had looked at thousands of portfolios over the past 20 years and “it takes a lot to get my attention.”

One of Susan Sonntag’s essays concerns the desensitizing effects of long-term exposure to photographs of violence. Maybe overexposure desensitizes one in other ways, too. Maybe we need term limits for curators, gallery owners, portfolio reviewers.

My musician/mathematician friend, Fritz, (mentioned in an earlier post) made the conscious decision not to become a professional musician after he heard a professional violinist lament that one of Brahms’ symphonies was “sooooo long.” His response to himself was “I never want to feel that way about a Brahms symphony!”

Maybe that makes my path of waiting for a half-century or so until retirement kicks in (as Ted Orland postulates) seem more reasonable. I sure haven’t lost the delight in seeing well-done photographs or drawings or paintings – even if they aren’t from the cutting edge. (Or maybe I’m just rationalizing.)

Why I'm not at Tim Wride's Saturday workshop.

2010-05-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Here is my disclaimer. I don't know what art is. I don't know what art isn't. I mistrust anybody who asserts that he or she does. What I do know is that I see a lot of what is displayed as art and I read a lot about what is regarded as art. A lot of what I see and read about I understand and like -- or understand and don't like -- or don't understand. There are semi-permeable and constantly shifting membranes between these groups. Regard the remainder of this post with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

A second disclaimer. The editor that blogspot supplies drives me crazy. Stray line spaces and bullet points with no text are artifacts. Please ignore them.

A couple of evenings ago I went to a talk at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle by Tim Wride. Mr. Wride is the former curator of photography at LACMA and is now an independent curator, writer, lecturer, and founder of the No Strings Foundation. According to their website, the No Strings Foundation “is committed to providing direct assistance to photographic imagemakers in an effort to facilitate and enhance their creative opportunities and endeavors.” Sounds like a good idea to me.

His talk on Wednesday evening, “What’s up in photoland” was a warm-up for a half-day program on Saturday or a full day seminar on Sunday about looking at photographs (other peoples and your own) critically. Apart from being a bit puzzled myself about “what’s up in photoland” the evening talk seemed like a good way to find out if I wanted to spend the money and, especially, the time to attend one of the weekend programs.

Mr. Wride is certainly an articulate, passionate speaker and it is a treat to hear somebody stating his views about art directly and in plain English. Moreover, I agree with much of what he had to say. The short summary of “what’s up in photoland”:

Contrary to the buzz that the sky is falling, art photography is alive and well but not yet acclimated to the “new normal”.

• The art photography market circa 2008 was bloated with both less-than-spectacular work and less-than-discriminating collectors who were buying it like dot-com stocks.

• The bubble burst in 2009 along with the economic bubble that was providing the money for it.

• He believes that a significant regrouping in the art photography world is now happening with the second-rate work disappearing (or at least diminishing in quantity), far fewer people making any semblance of a living in art photography and collectors becoming more discriminating. Cynically, I read the latter as “buying more of what I suggest or promote.” Ironically, his No Strings Foundation has failed to attract investors/supporters.

• One result of the burst bubble is that there are a lot of people who were making a living at art photography then who aren’t doing so now. His opinion, that I share, is basically “good riddance”.

• A second result is that a good deal of work, much of it “second rate”, is being donated to museums. Some of this will wind up in permanent collections and, in coming years, be regarded as representative of what was was up in photoland in this decade. Well, that’s true – and that is what was up.

Mr. Wride then presented a list of what he regards as red herrings in recent art photography:

• Blurry doesn’t make it art. It just makes it blurry.

• Big and colorful doesn’t make it art.

• Using toy cameras doesn’t make it art.

• Depth of field doesn’t make it art. (I’m not sure what he means by this. I suspect he is referring to the use of swings and tilts to create an implausible relationship between fore/mid/background. If that is it, he’s my man.)

• Euro-installation doesn’t make it art. (I had never heard this term. My interpretation of how he described it is “hanging work very high or low, hanging it in random groupings …”)

• Good art direction doesn’t make it art.

I hasten to add that he was not suggesting that the presence of any of the above precludes it from being art, either. Instead he was disdainful of the use of them, or any other technique, as a gimmick; an attempt to find the Photoshop “Cntrl-P for profound” key postulated by Ted Orland. I would add to his list:

• Beautiful doesn’t make it art, but neither does banal or ugly.

• Spectacular print quality doesn’t make it art but neither does disregard or disdain for print quality.

• Important doesn't make it art, but neither does trivial.

He then suggested that one opportunity facing us is to reconsider the work of underappreciated photographers from recent history. His list included:

• The pioneers of modernist photography: Ralph Gibson, Wynn Bullock, Minor White.

• The feminist photographers of the 70’s, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Judy Dater, Kiki Smith, Diane Niemier (my addition)

• The New Topographic school, the Bechers, Nicolas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams

• The postmodernists, Victor Burgin, Philip Lorca-Dicorcia, Sherrie Levine, Paul Berger

• At least one more group that I can’t recall

Mr. Wride closed his talk by discussing where he felt art photography was going from here. During this discussion he dropped an obita dicta – words said in passing that give the game away. He regards art photography as primarily idea-based rather than image-based – as conceptual art. He openly stated that an exciting visual was not enough to get the work over his threshold - that visual interest is neither sufficient nor necessary. Aha! That explains a lot about his list of underappreciated photographers.

For example, Ralph Gibson’s preference is to show his work in books. In my opinion, book reproduction does not show his work well. His “The Somnambulist”, for example, is weighted (so Gibson says) with deep layers of meaning that I have never seen. Perhaps it is solely my problem but if a conceptual artist wants to convey an idea, it is wise to leave the door open a crack so I can get in. On the other hand, when Benham Gallery showed Gibson’s work I was blown away by some of the work from The Somnambulist. It still isn’t my favorite book but I can now look at it with some appreciation for what he was about.

Far be it from me to demean the socio-political value of the work done by the feminist photographers of the 70’s. It was and is important, valuable and memorable in the same way as the anti-nazi agitprop of John Heartfield. However, part of his admiration for the feminist photographers of the 70’s was that they were struggling against the current (true) and largely forced to wedge their art into a life dominated by making a living and raising a family (true). I see that as not fundamentally different from the situation of, say, Ralph Eugene Meatyard who had a day job, a family, and wedged his art into weekend photography and a yearly paroxysm of printing for a couple of weeks.

The New Topographic work has always struck me in two ways. Both of these ways include appreciation of spectacularly well-done prints. Some, like the Bechers, are of spectactularly well-done prints of spectacularly banal subjects – seen one European water tower, seen ‘em all. Others, like Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, and some of Nicolas Nixon, are of spectacularly ugly landscapes. These are, in my opinion, important as environmental statements but no more new and different than photographs of spectacularly beautiful architectural subjecs or landscapes.

Next I must confess yet another bias. I believe that it was Ralph Hattersly who wrote, “Above all, post-modern art is post-audience art.” It reminds me of the heyday of “cool” jazz during which the disdainful musicians would turn their backs to the audience during a performance so that they would not be distracted. After audiences stopped coming, cool jazz fizzled out. Similarly, it seems to me that most post-modern art is directed at a spiralingly smaller audience – the same people who know anything about, say, Paul Berger’s work are largely the same people who know everything about his work. I’m an exception; I know something about his work. He may be a pivotal figure in the recent history of photography but his work certainly eludes me. The ideas that he attributes to his work aren’t visible even after reading his statements. An artist/poet/filmmaker friend (one of whose short films is in the collection of NY/MOMA) described Berger’s first book “Seattle Subtext” as “another academic screwing around with a camera and a Xerox machine”. My opinion isn't quite that harsh.

In general, I have a lot of trouble with photography as conceptual art. It has always seemed to me that photography is very good at showing what something or somebody looked like at a particular time and place and that photography is very bad at expressing an idea. Words have the edge there.

A second obita dicta was Mr. Wride’s statement that “Photography is a very big place, just as is painting. There are painters that paint houses and painters that produce art. If you want to produce art you better belong to the art world.” What I heard from that and the context surrounding it was “you better produce work that is different from what I saw yesterday or last year or you are more like a house painter than an art painter.” That is a noble goal but not one that can be achieved by pursuing it directly (back to the list of Cntrl-P activities). A local photographer whom I shall not name once openly told me that he was looking for a new angle that would make him famous. He hasn’t found it yet. Edward Weston once commented on a contemporary “He doesn’t have to try to be different. He is different.” That’s more like it.

A third obita dicta was his expressed disdain for those who “have some other career and then decide that they want to be a photographer.” Perhaps that’s why he didn’t include Ralph Eugene Meatyard in his underappreciated list.

So ….. since I am one of the untouchables who had another career, since my work is not new and exciting, since my work is ostentatiously visual and not intellectual – I chose to stay home this weekend and play in the darkroom. I am currently on a lunch break from doing so and Mr. Wride’s Saturday workshop is in progress.

Preston Singletary glass

2010-03-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

Today Barbara and I went to see the Preston Singletary show at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. We planned to also go to an afternoon dance performance (our grandson is a professional dancer) but, alas, I had the day wrong and the performance was yesterday. I'm still pretty sandpapered at myself for that. But back to the Singletary show....
Mr. Singletary is a young, compared to me at least, Tlingit artist who uses traditional motifs and designs but realizes his pieces in blown or cast glass which he "sand carves" and sometimes paints or adheres gold leaf. He has several works in the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum -- where we first saw his work a decade or so ago -- and in an impressive list of other institutions and prestigious collections. If I had a lot of money, I'd own some of them, too. His show at the Museum of Glass is a "mid career" show and it is a large show, indeed, with some of his earliest works as well as pieces that he completed while doing a residency at the museum's hot shop late last year.
Two examples -- "Raven Steals the Sun" (there are two in the show, I'm enamored of the smaller, earlier one) is about half a meter high, the stylized face of the raven, vertical, gleaming jet black, with the gleaming orb of the stolen sun triumphantly clenched in the open beak. It is adorned with the raven design of traditional Tlingit art. "Wolf Hat" is blown glass in the shape of the basketry hats made by many Northwest tribes. It is a bit bigger than life-size, perhaps 3/4 of a meter across the brim, and mounted upside-down. Translucent, pale-blue glass, it is decorated with traditional wolf figures sand-carved (like sand-blasting but much more delicate) to make the surface of the glass translucent. It is lighted from directly above so the piece casts a wonderful shadow on the plinth upon which it is mounted. However, the wolf image in the curved shape of the hat projects on to the flat surface of the plinth as a frog. It literally gave me cold chills to stand and look at it.
Now please understand that glass is not my most favorite medium. I'm not a Dale Chihuly fan (lighting may strike any second now). I'll make an exception for Singletary's work. Apart from the fact that I really like it, I am a sucker for an artist who does what he/she does VERY WELL! (back to the passionate virtuosity, I suppose).
Singletary is going to be in the museum's hot shop as a visiting artist for a few days in April. Sounds like another trip is in order.

It’s all about content?

2010-01-26T16:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I had a few prints in a group show along with a gaggle of other local photographers, several of which are friends from Group f/5.6 (www.groupf56.com if you are interested – or even if you aren’t.) One of these friends, looking through the show, said to me “Well, your photographs are all about content and not print quality.” I was rather taken aback since I happened to think that the prints I had hung were pretty well made. However, when I looked carefully at his prints (he is a very good printer indeed) I believe that I understood what he meant.
To me, print quality is a means in the service of better expressing what I want the print to show. To him, print quality is an end – his goal is to produce a print of eye-popping quality and stunning size. The content is secondary.
Barbara and I saw the traveling show of “late” Edward Weston prints at the Art Institute of Chicago. Frankly, many of his prints strike me as kind of sterile – though spectacularly well printed. Brett Weston printed many of the prints in this show under his father’s supervision. [How two such towering egos could work together so closely and seemingly so amicably has always been a puzzle to me.] One such featured the surface of a shallow salt-water pond. Brett Weston had rendered the surface of the water with such skill that it seemed as if it would drip off the bottom of the frame. The surface itself, the leaves floating upon it, the aquatic weeds growing beneath it were all in their places. The bed of the pond was “zone I dancing with zone II” as Ralph Gibson says. I was dazzled. Barbara caught up with me, looked at this print, muttered appreciatively – and walked on. Talking about it later, we concluded that you have to know how hard it would be to do that before it is dazzling.
There is music like that. The Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto (known as Rack 3 to pianists) is a technical tour-de-force but at least to my ear not as emotionally engaging as numbers 1 and 2. Not that any of them are within reach to most pianists. Perhaps we’re back to the Barth quotation about PASSIONATE VIRTUOSITY.

Passionate Virtuousity

2010-01-18T13:33:00.000-08:00

Barbara and I attend the monthly art history lecture by Rebecca Albiani at the Fry Art Museum in Seattle. My first contact with her was when our daughter-in-law Shannon was a student at the local community college where Ms. Albiani then taught. Shannon came to me, eyes sparkling, and said, “You have got to hear this woman who teaches my art history class!” She was right. I tuned in to the college TV station for a couple of her lectures and, even faced with an auditorium full of nearly art-illiterate teens, she was magic.
Her lecture at the Fry this month was on the feast paintings of Paolo Veronese (1528-1588). In the spirit of full disclosure, that is by far not my favorite period of art and Veronese’s paintings had left me lukewarm – both in books and in person. However, if Ms. Albiani is going to talk about them, I’m more than willing to go listen.
Magic, again. She brings so much information to the lecture that it, too, is a feast. She wove the work into the then-contemporary art scene, the artist into his culture and contemporaries, and both into the political, religious, and cultural environment of the time and place. Her discussion of individual works becomes a grand tour.
Speaking as one who has done a good deal of stand-up teaching, her lectures are incredibly well organized. I would suspect her of reading them from a script – but her answers to questions from the audience are equally well organized and articulate. She just knows the territory.
The icing on the cake (keeping the feast theme) is that she seems to be having such an impossibly good time – her manner suggests that there is absolutely nothing she enjoys more than telling people about some aspect of art that she finds fascinating. One of my favorite quotations is by John Barth: "My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you really want is PASSIONATE VIRTUOSITY." That’s her. Just being around people who show PASSIONATE VIRTUOSITY about their art – or science – or craft – or life -- charges my batteries.
I’m still not ready to put the Veronese paintings on my favorite list but the next time I see one in a museum I will certainly look at it more closely. Ms. Albiani is going to do a series on Vermeer beginning next month. I can hardly wait.

Seeing with two sets of eyes

2010-01-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

Alex is another of the small group of photographer friends with whom I meet every other Monday. He, too, is mostly a people photographer so we have a lot to talk about. Alex is a city kid – born, raised, and lives in Seattle. Moreover, he and I are also from pretty much nuclear families. I have no siblings, he one much older brother. His wife, however, is from a large, extended family that has been on the ground in very rural Kansas for over a century. His wife’s family has made him very welcome and he thoroughly enjoys being in their midst – he quickly became the staff photographer, as it were. Alex still regards Kansas and the warmth and goofiness of large family gatherings with a mixture of curiosity and amazement. This set me to thinking of a show at Benham Gallery some years ago – I believe 1999 – by Concha Navarro and Kevin Bjorkland.

Ms. Navarro is originally from a small agrarian village in Spain, Mr. Bjorkland is, I believe, originally from Salt Lake City. They visited her home village in Spain and both of them photographed extensively while they were there. Their joint show was very successful – it even got a rave review (getting any review at all is rare) in the Seattle Times. Both of them were photographing the village and its people: both were there long enough that their work was not a “drive by shooting.” [Isn’t that a wonderful description of what some tourist photography looks like? Amanda Koster, www.amandakoster.com, used it in a recent lecture and I shamelessly appropriated its use.] Both of them are excellent printmakers.

What Barbara and I both found most interesting was that we could stand back and look down the row of prints on each wall and guess which were hers and which were his – not subject matter, not shooting style, not technical skill but something else. We finally concluded that the difference was in the reaction, or lack of reaction, of the people in the photographs. He was a visitor, a welcome visitor to be sure but still a visitor. The people of the village noticed him and he was seeing them as an observer. She was Senora Navarro’s little girl. They could remember when she was six years old and had black braids and they were seeing her as part of the village. I wished then and wish now that they had done a book of the prints in that show. I’d sure buy one. We did buy a single print.

Neither of them appears still to be active as photographers. At least I can’t find any recent traces of them on the web. That’s a shame.

This, in turn, led me to thinking about a project I did several years ago. Before I retired I traveled a good deal on business. When in the midwest I would spend a weekend with my parents in the small, agrarian town in Illinois where I grew up – a small enough town that, even though I was only there once or twice a year, I couldn’t walk into the hardware store or the one local restaurant without having somebody ask me how my dad was doing. If the weather wasn’t exceptionally dreadful I would almost always take a roll or two of film. After a couple of decades there was quite a bit of it and I decided to see what I could do with it. I made a thick stack of 5x7 work prints, likely a couple of hundred, but couldn’t get an idea to jell. At the time I was studying off and on with a wonderful local photographer/teacher Nick Hanson so I showed my stack of work prints to him. He spread them out on his floor, stared at them for about 15 minutes and then began to shuffle them. When he finished he told me that it was obvious that I didn’t have a project here, I had three projects. In one of them, I loved this place. In the second, I hated this place. In the third, I was just an observer. In a sense, I sometimes I was Concha, sometimes Kevin. (I don’t know who I was in the “hated this place” stack.)

It’s too bad that Alex’s wife isn’t a more dedicated photographer. I would enjoy seeing a “Concha and Kevin” show from Kansas.

Conceptually I Usually Don't Get Conceptual Art

2010-01-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of problem with conceptual photography – it seems to me that a photograph is very good at showing what something/somebody looked like at a particular time and place. It also seems to me that a photograph is very bad at expressing a concept or idea – especially without accompanying words.

Conceptual art is a lot like a joke. If you “get it” then you think it’s funny or you don’t. If you don’t “get it”, well, then you don’t get it – it isn’t funny and you can’t figure out why it should be. If somebody explains the joke to you then the most likely response is a shrug and “Whatever.” Conceptual art is often like the joke that I don’t get.
Conceptual art is hard for any artist. The artist always “gets it” but has to provide enough clues so that some segment of the viewing public will “get it.” Or maybe not. A respected colleague speculates that some conceptual artists aren’t interested in having just anybody “get it” – their art is aimed at an in-crowd. There are jokes like that, too. I don’t understand wanting to make art only for the in-crowd. A poet acquaintance once told me that she would be happy if she could spend her time writing poems that nobody but her could understand. I don’t understand that, either. I once attended a concert of new music at which one piece consisted of a solo violin playing music based on the EKG of a laboratory rat on LSD. The vocal accompaniment was based on the scientist’s notes. I didn’t understand that, either.
Conceptual art is especially hard for a photographer. It’s hard to photograph an idea. I recently heard one of the luminaries of conceptual photography say (not quite verbatim) that a photograph is not a collection of shapes and spaces that somehow relate to one another but an image of a collection of objects. What is important is the relationships among those objects and “composition” only is important inasmuch as it helps the artist show those relationships in the way intended. (I can’t see any evidence of this statement in the artist’s work, by the way.) Working an idea into that framework is a pretty formidable challenge. I don’t know many photographers who can do it.
You can certainly argue that all art is based on some idea, some concept, that the art is supposed to illuminate. At one extreme it’s “I find this (collection of objects in some kind of relationship that my photograph illustrates) to be [beautiful, ugly, appalling, amusing,…]. I hope you do, too.” At the other extreme, there is the very intellectually crafted and idea-based work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Parke-Harrison, Joel Witkin, Duane Michals, ... Somewhere between these extremes the work becomes “conceptual”.
Conceptual art is hard for the viewerm too. It forces the viewer to intellectualize about the piece in addition to processing it visually – to see it in the context of personal background and experience. If you aren’t hip to the conventions of B-movies then the “Untitled Film Stills” are pretty mysterious. Reading the subtitle text generates a “Whatever.”. At the visual art show at Bumbershoot a couple of years ago there was a bigger-than-life-size head and shoulders portrait of Benjamin Franklin made out of various sizes of keys. After a pause – “Oh, I get it. He’s riffing on Franklin’s kite-string and key experiment.” The artist had left enough clues that most people who were educated in the U.S. could “get it”. I still found it pretty dull. The makers of a lot of conceptual art don’t leave enough clues to allow me to “get it.” I’m sure that the artist would maintain that is my problem and that’s likely true. Whatever.

Blowing in the wind (or even slight breeze)

2010-01-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

Barbara and I went to see the Calder show at Seattle Art Museum yesterday. Our goal was to see both it and the “Michelangelo Public and Private” show but the latter was so crowded we gave it up for a bad job after a quick look and will go back on a weekday before it closes. My initial impression was that it wasn’t as spectacular as I had hoped. There are a few studies and sketches from Michelangelo’s own hand and a spectacular, full-scale photomural of “David”. I was hoping to see some more completely worked up drawings. It seems like the show is more interesting from an art-historical view than from the art itself.

The Calder show, however, was a delight to the eye. There are several of his full-scale works showing, including several of the ones you see in the books. None of them is as big as the giant piece that hangs in the central hall of the National Gallery – but that on is in a class by itself. There is a possibly apocryphal story about Calder that I love. The story goes that a collector/patron wanted to commission a mobile with the vanes made of gold sheet. Calder agreed to do it only if he could paint them flat black. I hope that’s true.
As appealing as the larger works are, my eyes were on the smaller pieces and the wire sculpture. The latter remind me of the very sparse drawings – only a few lines – that Matisse did, or maybe Hirschfeld. With only a piece of bent wire they define both shape and volume. Besides which you have to smile at them, especially the cow and the “standing woman”. Some of the small sculptures were made as maquettes of larger pieces but some must have been made just because he wanted to. In fact, my impression is that he did a lot of his work just because he wanted to.
The show also has quite a few photographs of Calder in his studio and a delightful video of Calder and his toy circus. For a man with such a forbidding appearance, he seems to have been extraordinarily light-hearted and able to keep his sense of play alive -- to become older without ever growing up. Joan Miro must have been like that, too.
Many of the works in this show are from the collection of John and Mary Shirley. They certainly have good taste.

No Man's Land

2010-01-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

My friend Craig and I are both members of a small group of photographers that meets every other week to discuss work in progress and keep each other motivated. He, among other admirable traits, is a skilled and meticulous printer. Like me, he tends to work in projects – aiming at a body of work rather than at single prints. When one of his projects is finished, it is really finished. He selects the size, materials, process, toning, and mat board to suit his vision of what the specific project should look like.
Craig does both silver and platinum/palladium printing. His platinum/palladium prints are mostly from in-camera negatives but he sometimes makes them from digital negatives enlarged from 35mm film.
He is beginning a series of photographs of early 20th century gravestones. Many of these, especially in the decade during and after WWI, were adorned with small, usually oval portraits of the deceased. The portrait was covered with glass, often slightly convex, to protect the image. The glass has cracked or shattered on some of these gravestones so the photograph has become stained or damaged. His photographs are of the portrait itself and enough of the surrounding stone to give it context and surface texture.
Craig has been playing with ideas on how to print and present these for some time. Last Monday he brought the first one of the series to our regular meeting. He scanned the 35mm negative and surrounded it with an ornate border scanned from a framed portrait from the same era. The platinum/palladium print, made from a digital negative, is about 6x8 inches so that the original oval portrait is roughly full size.
The portrait is of a young man in WWI uniform with campaign hat at a jaunty angle. His expression is the straight-ahead, uninflected one that you often see in photographs from that era but his eyes are those of a man who has stood on the edge of the pit and looked in. There is a David Duncan Douglas portrait from the Korean War “Captain Ike Fenton, USMC” that has the same eyes and Craig’s print haunts me in the same way.
Craig is still playing with ideas on how to present this project. My fantasy is that of a small show, maybe 20 prints, with each print accompanied by a short poem in the manner of the Spoon River Anthology and a recording of Tommy Makem and Ian Clancy singing “No Man’s Land” in the background. (Nothing is hard for the person that isn’t going to do it.) No matter how Craig decides to present this work, if he can come up with a few more prints with the depth of this first one (no doubt in my mind that he can) he is on to something really good.

A brief postscript

2010-01-01T15:15:00.000-08:00

I also know the king of the alternative to waiting for retirement to kick in. Fritz is a very good violinist, concertmaster for a very capable semi-professional orchestra and leader of a very competent string quartet. He made the conscious decision while still in high school that he didn’t ever want to become jaded and bored with music like some of the professional musicians he had met.
He studied mathematics and became a very competent mathematician – he has made a very satisfactory mark applying his mathematics to computer algorithms. He has the remarkable and admirable ability to throw a mental switch into the “mathematics” position or the “musician” position – to completely focus on one or the other.
This approach didn’t work well for me. Before retirement kicked in I was just as likely to waken in the wee hours thinking of software or of art. This led to a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, as they say.

Wait for retirement to kick in

2010-01-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

Ted Orland suggests several strategies for sustaining yourself while doing art. [“The view from the studio door”, Ted Orland, Image Continuum Press, 2006. Available from his website www.tedorland.com. This is not a paid advert. On the other hand, it is a book that I highly recommend and that I read about once a year just to keep my perspectacles on straight.] One strategy is to find something other than art to do to make money. Below this there are two sub-strategies: pursue your art simultaneously or do the best you can and wait for retirement to kick in. I recently met the king of the latter path, Charles (Chuck) Guildner.
Chuck is a mid-70ish fellow who retired 20 odd years ago and jumped full time, headlong, no excuses accepted, no delay tolerated into his photography. He went back to school to study photography as a craft and as an art. He photographs, he makes his own black and white prints, he teaches, he inspires (well, he inspires me for sure). I have not seen any of his pre-retirement work but I’ll bet it isn’t bad either. I have seen his post-retirement work and it is spectacular.
He is also the king of the notion of using your art to explore people, places, and situations about which you are passionate – as opposed to latching on to a technique or medium and then finding something to use it for. His website www.guildner-photo.com will convince you of that.
Current theory dismisses the notion of art as a precious object, of craftsmanship as an essential part of art making, of beauty (whatever that means) as a necessary or even desirable characteristic of art. Not in his universe. His prints are a reminder of how beautiful a silver print can be.
His landscapes are, well, beautiful. My immediate response was “Boy, you sure get a beautiful print when you start with a large-format negative.” Some of them are from large-format negatives – even a few 8x10’s. However, some of them are from medium-format negatives, too. At 16x20 or 20x24 it takes careful examination to see the difference.
I am especially moved by his portraits – straight-ahead, no frills, no Avedon or Penn artifice, no Newman carefully controlled environment (I admire all of these photographers, by the way.) I compare his portraits to those of August Sander. They have a similar feeling of just being there. In the “Buck Buckles and His Team” portrait, Mr. Buckles is leading two of his enormous workhorses out of the barn. The two horses seem to me to just about as camera-conscious as their boss.
Sadly, Chuck is no longer making silver prints. He is scanning his negatives and then sending them to the state archive in Nebraska. His digital prints are beautiful too but …

Milton Rogovin just had his 100th birthday.

2009-12-30T18:53:00.000-08:00

Milton Rogovin was born in New York city and educated at Columbia. He has lived in Buffalo all his adult life. He is a social activist and documentary photographer who became a full time photographer when his optometry practice was devastated by the McCarthy era witch hunt. His book "The Forgotten Ones" is one that I come back to again and again. For it he photographed the people of the working-class neighborhood in southeast Buffalo near where he lived. Then he photographed them again, as many as he could find, 20 years later. Then he photographed them again, as many as he could find, later yet (he said that he wanted to wait 20 more years but wasn't sure he would live long enough -- turns out he did). He is also a grade-A human being who has deep family ties and community connections.
His archive of something like 30,000 negatives is in the library of congress. That's a lot of rolls of 120 film pulled through his Rolleiflex.
There is a major show of his work at the Burchfield-Penny art center in Buffalo, posters of his work in the Buffalo subway stations, a smaller show of his work at the Henry Gallery at the University of Washington and the public TV station in Buffalo threw a major birthday party for him including showing the recent film "The rich have their own photographers" about him and his work. Not bad for a guy who was once castigated as "the biggest red in Buffalo".
I met Mr. Rogovin a time or two about 35 years ago. We had mutual friends in photographic circles when I lived near Buffalo. I wish I had known him better. Long may he wave.

(By the way, I am sure I'm not going to keep up this pace on posting. Nor are all the posts going to be primarily about photography -- just most of them.)

How I Learned Not to be a Photojournalist

2009-12-30T15:57:00.000-08:00

I just finished rereading "How I Learned Not to be a Photojournalist" by Dianne Hagaman. The first time through, a couple of years ago, I couldn't figure out why it irritated me so thoroughly. This time through I think I got it.
The author was trained as and was working as a photojournalist. At the time of writing she had just completed an MFA. The book began as her MFA project. In a nutshell, her starting points are these:
- Most newspaper photography is hack work.
- Newspaper photographers get no respect from the "word people"
- Female newspaper photographers struggle to achieve any semblance of equality with their male counterparts.
- All newspapers want from a photograph is to attract readers to the story.
- Newspaper work doesn't allow the photographer to develop a project that requires time and developing personal connections.
She briefly dismisses "concerned photography" in order to set up what seems to me to be a straw horse specifically constructed to be knocked down later.
Her response to these points was to begin a long-term project on her own time. It was initally about alcoholism among urban Indians. It morphed into being about the missions and social agencies that serve that population. From that it morphed into being about the religious organizations that sponsored the missions. From that it morphed into being about religion itself. Somewhere along the line she also began working on an MFA, which effort she credits with helping her change herself from a photojournalist to some other kind of photographer. The basic points of change were:
- Slow down
- Back up to show more context
- Go for photographs that aren't a "quick read"; that depend on careful examination
- Use photographs to express an idea rather than surface appearance.
She illustrates the book with photographs from her project as she progressed from a straight-ahead photojournalist to the something else she wanted to become.
---
I agree with much of what she says. Having never worked for a newspaper I have no opinion on her statements about the newsroom status of photographers, male or female. Yes, most newspaper photographs are hack work. Most newspaper photographs are of hack situations -- it's hard to make a grip and grin shot anything but a grip and grin shot.
I could argue for leaving the photograph out but that would violate the next issue. Yes, newspapers principally want photographs to attract attention to the accompanying text. The grip and grin shot doesn't tell you much without the text and I defy a photographer to take a photograph of such an occasion of, say, an award presentation that tells the story without text.
But that doesn't account for the exceptional newspaper photographer who produces excellent work (back to the portrait of Bruce Davidson I mentioned in the previous post). I suspect that the percentage of newspaper photographers that are producing excellent work is about the same as the percentage for any other kind of photography.
No, newspapers are seldom interested in long, complex, visually rich projects. That's not the business they are in. Her response -- to start a project on her own time and dime -- in order to give herself the rewarding experience of doing such a project seems perfectly appropriate to me.
As for her key learnings, the first three "slow down", "back up", "go for complex images" seem like good general purpose advice except possibly for sports or wildlife photography. It also seems to me that the best of any type of photograph (back to the portrait of Bruce Davidson) shows them.
Here are my big itches.
"Photojournalism" is not exclusively newspaper photography. The French term "photoreportage", the documentary essays in the lamented Life and other picture magazines, the concerned photography of Salgado that hangs in art galleries -- I consider all photojournalism: telling a story with photographs, often with photographs and text.
Photographs by themselves are really good at showing what something looks like. She uses a straight-ahead, three-quarter portrait of a man standing on the sidewalk as an example of the newspaper style work from which she started -- a rather rugged, good-looking fellow in work attire and a big silver belt buckle. She's right. It's an excellent portrait and a good newspaper portrait because it would draw your attention to the story. Without the story you wouldn't know whether he was a fisherman, a tribal elder, or one of the street Indian alcoholics with whom she was working.
On the other hand, photographs by themselves are really bad at expressing ideas. One of Hagaman's photographs is of a shelter resident napping on a bench in a hallway. Above him is a bulletin board with, among other items, a picture of Jesus. She claims that the photograph shows that the mission in which it was taken is putting religion (represented by the picture of Jesus) above the subservient residents. Well, ok, I can claim that the photograph shows that religion (represented by the picture of Jesus) is standing guard over the sleeping man and protecting him. I could also claim that it shows a tired man catching a catnap. The idea she wished to express is only clear to her.
That's the point at which my "aha" light came on. The ability of visual art to express ideas is completely dependent on the artist and the viewer sharing symbols. To her (a former Catholic) the picture of Jesus carried the connotation of heirarchy and even repression. To me (a flaming religious liberal) it did not. I believe that a lot of conceptual art fails for just this reason.

Why am I doing this, anyway? Why me?

2009-12-29T18:13:00.000-08:00

Why am I doing this, anyway?

That's a very good question -- it's not as if I have a lot of time hanging heavy on my hands. I suppose my biggest single reason for doing a blog about art is how irritated I get at the lack of coverage of visual art in my local media -- and how lame the little coverage that visual art does get seems.

The immediate spur came from my friend, Joe, giving me a full-page article from the NY Times of Sunday, November 8. It is about one of my heros, Bruce Davidson, whose work is the subject of a new, three-volume retrospective published by Steidl as well as two concurrent shows in New York. The article is informative, witty, carefully researched, and articulate. It is accompanied by several photographs by Mr. Davidson and an excellent environmental portrait of him by a NYT staffer, Damon Winter.

Dang, what a concept! Real writing and in some quantity about visual art? I'll bet I would have to scrape bits and pieces from the local paper for at least a month to make up a full page. The only bit I can remember from the last few weeks that was accompanied by a photograph was about the closing of Benham Gallery (that, by the way, was the best and longest running photography gallery in Seattle). Oops, I let slip where I live (almost) so you can now identify the local paper. Oh, well. I might as well add that they just finished a three-part, front page series of articles on sports fans.

Not to be entirely down on the local Times, they do have reasonably good coverage of books since Seattle is a very booky town. They do have reasonably good coverage on music, even classical. They have reasonably good coverage of movies, especially the Film Festival and NW Film Forum. Visual art? Well, not so much. When Seattle Art Museum has a blockbuster show it gets some coverage. The other museums and the galleries .... pretty slim.

A couple of years ago a new magazine "City Arts" appeared on the scene with three localized editions. It is a side effect of the publishing company that does the excellent programs for most of the local performing art venues -- opera, symphony, ballet, theater. What a good idea. It looked promising for a while. Between the economy flop and their merge with the local music magazine, the prospect for a lot of visual art coverage beyond the calendar doesn't look good. Their feature articles are beginning to look sort of like "what the hip artist is wearing".

Why me?

Another excellent question. I do not claim to be an authority. I do not have a degree in art history or studio art. I don't even claim to be an artist. I am a photographer. Some of what I do is art, some is just for fun, most of it is trash -- just like every other photographer, painter, sculptor, (writer). I read about art a lot. I look at a lot of art. I have a lot of strong opinions about art. Considering a lot of what gets published, I'm not a really bad writer.

So why not me? I have no good notion of how this blog is going to help, how it is going to shape up, even how long or how often I will continue to write for it.

Stay tuned. The first real post will be a book review.