Wednesday, October 6, 2010
"Men Like Me" -- missing Bill Jay
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.
Monday, October 4, 2010
An Afternoon with Sandra Kroupa
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).
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).
Sunday, September 5, 2010
I don't understand why Amy Blakemore's photographs are important.
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.
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.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Monoblog?
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 ....
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’….”
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.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Why me? (Is anybody out there?)
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"
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 Arnold Building on their main campus near Lake Union
- 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,
- 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.
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