PDA 2, Ron 0 (but it's ok now)

The trademark bonfire has burned down to ashes after a couple of more weeks of emails and a face-to-face seance with the big shot.  Short version:

• They don't agree that the book is "fair use"
• I'm not going to sign their trademark license agreement (7 pages of dense, one-sided legalise)
• I told him of my plan B and that I was going to do it.
• We parted without major upset on either side.

Given that standoff I went through the book and removed their trademarked phrases from the text.  They agreed (and I have written confirmation) that I don't have to photoshop their trademarks out of the photographs.

Boy, am I glad that's resolved.

I'm going to the annual fund-raiser for the Market Foundation (not-for-profit that administers the social services located at the market, low-income housing, senior center, medical and dental services, food bank) at the invitation of their executive director.  It will be a lot of fun and I'll shamelessly hype the book.  The current draft is looking pretty spiffy.

Later tomorrow I have another seance with the curator of photography at MOHAI (at his invitation) to get his spin on the draft I sent him. 

Maybe I'll get this done someday.  Now I'd like to get enough pre-orders to justify a decent sized press run.

PDA 1, ronfstop 0 (rant follows)

Stand by for a rant.

After several weeks of dithering about whether to grant me a trademark license for my "Regular Customer" book, the PDA agreed that they would consider granting me a no-cost, no-royalty license for a first printing of my book.  (Good)

However, they have to take that proposal to a subcommittee (are you beginning to get nervous) for approval.  (Bad)

Then, if the subcommittee approves they must take it to their full governing council (are you more nervous yet) for approval next month.  (Badder)

After I retired from a prominent aerospace company formerly headquartered in Seattle I was cheerful at the prospect of never again dealing with a bureaucracy larded up with one-size-fits-all policies. (sigh).  Is this really an issue that should take up the time of their entire governing council?

Moreover, the  fine print tells me that, if the license is granted, I have to indemnify the PDA to the tune of $1,000,000 (count the zeros, that's right: 6 of 'em) in case (and I quote) somebody gets hurt in any way related to the book or sues the PDA in any way related to the book. Since there is no time limit I would be required to maintain the liability insurance, well, forever.  (Baddest)

Having looked up the "fair and nominative use" clause in the trademark law I proposed to my buds at the PDA that the book is clearly a fair use and doesn't require a license anyway.  All they have to do is send me a letter saying that they agree.  Considering the track record I suspect it is not a good idea to go forward without their agreeing unless I am prepared to engage an very expensive intellectual property attorney to go to court for me when they sue.

I have no idea how this will fly even though I know that somewhere in their den there is a person with the authority to say "yes." (But, again like the prominent aerospace company, it takes a whole gob of bureaucrats to say "yes" but only one to say "no".)

Plan B is to go through the text of the book and replace all offending phrases with neutral terms:  "Pike Place Market" == "Seattle's downtown farmer's market" and the like.  Then I don't need a license, they have no exposure to liability and I press on.

On a lighter note, the final edit of the book is going very well.  I'm over halfway through it and it's looking good.

Arnold Newman: Early Work

Barbara, knowing that I’m a big admirer of Arnold Newman’s work, gave me a copy of “Arnold Newman: Early Work” (Steidl, 2008) for my recent birthday.  It’s a large format, beautifully printed book with duotone reproductions of Mr. Newman’s work from 1935 or so until 1941 when he settled in New York, had his first major show, and quickly became a big name.

Knowing that he worked in a portrait studio from his earliest days as a photographer I expected his early work to be portraits.  Not so!  Think Walker Evans or even Paul Strand.  Think Helen Levitt. Well, not quite – think Helen Levitt stopping to chat up her subjects, carefully posing them, photographing them with a 4x5 camera -- and still catching the spontaneity and sense of life that is in her photographs.  

Mr. Newman’s early work shows the same degree of consideration and attention to formal arrangement as his studio portraits.  How he managed to do this with street photographs is a mystery to me.  I suppose he set up his tripod, carefully selected his position and direction, composed all the stationary objects, and waited for the crowd to take the shape he wanted.

There are a few still life photographs of a violin maker’s patterns in the book as well as the justly famous photograph of a rack of violins.  The way he arranged the violin patterns foreshadows his use of materials from an artist’s environment as props in his portraits of musicians, painters and sculptors (Isaac Stern, Piet Mondrian, Jacob Lawrence, Isamu Noguchi).  The cutouts and collaged images in the book foreshadow his use of torn and reassembled portraits (Dr. Seuss, Paul Strand, Andy Warhol). 

I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Newman twice.  The first was at a weekend workshop held at the downtown location of Yuen Lui Studios.  Mr. Newman and Wah Lui, son of Yuen Lui and an excellent portrait photographer himself, were friends.  The workshop was held in a cavernous upper floor studio graced with a high ceiling and a huge skylight.  It soon became evident that the secret to Mr. Newman’s portrait technique was largely his personal warmth and humor and his relentless attention to detail.  The highlight of the weekend was his demonstration of doing a standing dual portrait of Wah Lui and his lovely wife.  Accompanied by a steady stream of witty patter he spent about 20 minutes nudging them into the exact pose that he wanted, adjusting a couple of huge reflectors to put the light where he wanted it and getting the camera position micrometrically correct – and then 30 seconds or so to blast three double-sided film holders through the camera.  It was like watching a fine pianist play a Chopin ballade – no flashy technique, just every note in the right place and the right time.  And I’ll bet that if you had stopped him anywhere along the way he would not have been able to articulate what he was doing.  When he finished, the attendees applauded.

The second was at a lecture and reception at the University of Washington.  I don’t recall the occasion but I do recall that it also involved the painter and University of Washington professor Jacob Lawrence.  It may have been in conjunction with Mr. Lawrence’s retirement from the University.  Mr. Newman and Mr. Lawrence -- old friends; the famous Newman portrait of Jacob Lawrence was done in 1959 -- spoke of their art and poked witty, gentle fun at each other.  Both artists made it very clear that they worked in an intuitive way – playing with the materials and the process until it came out right.  Mr. Newman reiterated his famous aphorism: “After you say ‘It works.’ then you can discuss details.”  What neither of them said was that the foundation under their process was “good chops” -- skill internalized by of doing it until it is below the conscious level. 

Good chops for a photographer applies both to camera handling and to knowing which way to point the camera.  Arnold Newman: Early Works clearly shows that Newman had good chops as early as 1935.

Regular Customer -- still slogging along.

OMG!! – as they say in the text-messaging and tweeting world.  I just looked back in the blog and found that the previous post about  my Regular Customer project was in July 2011. 

“All progress is made by people who don’t know what they are getting themselves into.”  I wish I had an attribution for that quotation.  Regular Customer has become a case study to illustrate it.

 [For those who have not been hanging on my every word – Regular Customer began with my noticing that as of 2013 I would have photographs from Seattle’s Pike Place Market over a span of 50 years.  Says I: “I’ll bet there are enough negatives in there somewhere for a nice project.”  Turns out there were about 4000 of them

The sheer scope – 50 years and 4000 negatives – pointed towards a book which in turn suggested that I needed to go digital.

I rummaged through contact sheets, thankfully carefully filed with the sheets of negatives, and scanned about 2000 of them.  That was the state of affairs in July 2011 when I was four months into the project.  I’m now just over two years into it.]

From the 2000 or so scans I selected about 1000 as candidates for whatever the book was going to turn out to be.  Ah, there was the next question: What is it going to turn out to be?  Several months of dithering and sorting thumbnail images followed.  Eventually the book settled out to be a metaphorical walk through the market to show a visitor what it looks like and what it looked like years ago.  Several more months of dithering about book format and size ensued with numerous absolutely-final-for-this-week decisions, pilot trials, and back-to-the-drawing-boards.  The process eventually converged on a book of 300 or thereabouts photographs in a landscape format a bit smaller than 11x8 ½ inches.

It wasn’t too difficult to get from 1000 to 500 but then it got a lot harder.  I decided that the only practical scheme was to take what I had, put together a draft, and edit it down further from there.  I remember reading about a novelist who said that when his son was six years old so was the first draft of his first novel and the two were about the same height.  I understand.  He also said that the novel went through seven drafts, the first six of which were bad and the first three were very bad.  I understand.

My fifth draft looked good enough that I was willing to show it to a couple of people including my friend, Joe, a retired art director.  Boy, did that generate a lot of red ink!  As a result the sixth draft started to look like a semi-finished product – still close to 400 photographs however.  Before going further I needed to get reactions to it both from people close to the Pike Place Market and from people with an interest in local history.

By a stroke of sheer luck I had an opportunity to show the draft to the librarian and to the curator of photography of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI).  To my delight they were enthusiastic about it and urged me to press on.  By another stroke of luck I was able to contact the daughter of one of the long-time market vendors, Pinhas Almeleh, to whom the book will be dedicated.  She, too, was enthusiastic and pointed me to the not-for-profit Pike Place Market Foundation.  Their director also was enthusiastic about it and, in turn, pointed me to the Friends of the Market – the loosely organized group founded in the 70s to oppose destruction of the market and construction of a high-rise.  I have met with them twice and find them a crusty, opinionated, funny, delightful gang of old coots (and I feel right at home with them).  What with one thing and another I now have a lot of additional caption information for the book and a lot better idea of how to edit the book down to about 350 photographs.  At that point I’m declaring victory and will be ready to produce the seventh and final draft, print a mammoth pdf and send it off to the print shop.

The only fly in the ointment is (sigh) a bureaucratic one.  The quasi-governmental Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA) now demands a license to use the trademarked name “The Pike Place Market” for any commercial purpose.  Now I never regarded my book as a “commercial” product but I would like to sell enough copies to at least partly pay for the printing costs.  I have been on “a couple of days, a week tops” for over a month now on whether I need a license, whether I have to pay the hefty fee for a license, when I will get a license.  I’m sure this will eventually work out.  I’m sure this will eventually work out.  I’m sure this will eventually work out.  I’m sure this will eventually work out.

On a lighter note, I also selected twenty photographs of market old-timers from the early years of my negative trove and made a set of silver prints of them that look just fine, thank you very much.  Fourteen of them are currently hanging in our photography group’s gallery and I’m pretty sure that MOHAI wants a set of the twenty for their collection.

I’ve done several smaller, less complicated books.  When I started, my expectation was that a book of 300 or so was only going to be six times more work than a book of fifty or so.  Silly me!  

Out of the shadows -- in more ways than one

I met an interesting character last night at the opening reception of the “Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows” show at Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW).

[For those not up on the photographic buzz – Vivian Maier lived in Chicago for most of her adult life, working as a nanny for wealthy families on Chicago’s north side.  Unknown to almost everyone she photographed nearly daily in her neighborhood and on the inner-city streets of Chicago for 30 years.  Her work is often compared to Lisette Model’s work but I find it more in the tradition of the French humanist photographers – Willy Ronis or Robert Doisneau – or city photographers such as Helen Levitt or John Gutmann.  She was more than a bit of a hoarder, renting a couple of storage lockers in which to stash her negatives and other memorabilia.  She neglected (or could not afford) to pay the storage rentals so her materials were eventually sold at auction shortly before her death.  The worth of her negatives was quickly realized and a scramble ensued to gather them together from the several people who had bought boxes with unknown contents.]

The show at PCNW is made up of 50 or so 12x12 inch silver prints selected from the 20,000 or so 2 ¼ negatives in the “Goldstein” part of the negatives left behind when Ms. Maier died in 2009.  80,000 or so negatives and color slides are owned by a Chicago realtor/historian named Maloof.  There may be more.

Both Mr. Maloof and Mr. Goldstein have published books of photographs drawn from their respective shares of this treasure trove.  Both books are worth having.  In my opinion, the Maloof  book is more tightly edited and the reproductions are superior to those in the Goldstein book.  On the other hand the Goldstein book contains a much broader cross-section of Ms. Maier’s work and has a well-researched accompanying text about her life.

Ms Maier did little printing of her negatives and her darkroom skill was definitely no match for her skill in knowing which way to point the camera before pushing the button.  Mr. Maloof and his colleagues embarked on the monumental task of scanning their treasure trove and have had several shows of digital prints made from Ms. Maier’s negatives.   Mr. Goldstein decided that these negatives would be better served by silver prints – the technology available at the time Ms. Maier was taking them.  A selection of these prints makes up the show at PCNW.

Well, unlike the situation in 1968 or thereabouts, photography labs capable of making exhibition quality prints don’t grow on trees today – not even in a city the size of Chicago.

Enter the interesting character.  Ron Gordon is a below-the-radar, Chicago-based photographer doing mostly architectural photography for his own work – and a printer who began that career in a commercial lab in 1968.  For most of the intervening years he had his own lab specializing in black and white silver printing both for commercial and artist clients.  He has retired “a couple of times” intending to concentrate on his own work but returning to custom printing upon sufficient pleading.  A mutual acquaintance introduced him to Mr. Goldstein – who showed him some of the Maier negatives – and the game was over.  Not only did he fall in love with her work but he said that it was almost certain that he and Ms. Maier were photographing at the same place on the same day sometime during the years that Ms. Maier was active: he with his 4x5 on a tripod, she with her trusty Rolleiflex.

This good-natured, unassuming, supposedly-retired master printer and his co-conspirator, Sandra Steinbrecher, have spent most of the last two years cranking out editions of 15.  His air is that of a man who is having a wonderful time. 

I hasten to assure you that master printer is exactly what he is!  The prints remind me of how pretty a silver print can be.  You can like the photographs or not (I do – at least most of them) but you cannot fail to be dazzled by the beauty of the prints.  Mr. Gordon gave an impromptu talk about the photographs, his attraction to them, and his printing of them.  It’s pretty rare for a back-room person like him to get roaring applause.

I haven’t seen a crowd that thick at a PCNW show for a long time.  Almost everyone there had seen the show at least once before.  The gallery director asked the crowd how many were darkroom workers – about half the crowd raised a hand. It seems that the age of silver isn’t past yet.

I find it heartening that there is so much buzz about a body of work that is definitely not avant garde – straight-ahead representational photography, relatively small prints, no lofty artist statements, white mats in black frames.  I suppose that the fact that Ms. Maier died unknown adds to the buzz. (A gallery director in Portland assured me that he would be glad to show my street photography if I were dead.)   I wonder how it would have been received if she had attempted to show it herself?  But that is a different rant and rave.

Age of Silver

I recently bought John Loengard’s book "Age of Silver: encounters with great photographers". It is a collection of portraits that he encountered during his long career as a photo editor for the weekly Life magazine and later for People magazine. Each portrait is a company by a short essay either about the photographer or the circumstances in which they met. The portraits of Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, VanderZee, Lartique and others are each worth the price of the book.

That said: I'm not completely satisfied either with the format or the content of this book. The reproductions are good but I would gladly have paid a few dollars more for excellent. I also recently bought the new book of Vivian Meier’s photographs. It, about the same size and only a few dollars more expensive, has reproductions that are dazzling.

If you read the old weekly life magazine the layout of this book will be very familiar. The size of the photographs vary widely; some pages are full bleed; some photographs are printed across the gutter (an immoral act in my opinion); the text is sometimes presented in columns and sometimes as an extended caption for a photograph. This layout works well for the extended photo-essays that Life did so well but I've never been a big fan of it for other purposes.

What really bothers me about this book is Loengard’s presentation of it as sort of an epitaph for silver photography. In the introduction Loengard states:


Today it is easier than ever to take pictures using digital cameras, and it is a pleasure to do so. Digital photographs are formed electronically and do not use the chemistry of silver. There is no negative. Critic and photographer, William Myers points out, "The film camera is becoming a harpsichord, a wonderful instrument if you know how to play it, but obsolete".


Wrong and wrong in that order. Neither the harpsichord nor the film camera are obsolete. True, you do not see many harpsichords being played in a cabaret and you do not see many silver film cameras in the hands of photojournalists. If your goal is the printed page than you would have to be out of your mind not to use digital photography as your chosen medium. If you are called upon to play a Shostakovich piano concerto you will choose a concert grand rather than a harpsichord. Given Loengard’s background is easy to understand how he could view the entire world of photography through the blinders of photojournalism but that is no more the entire world of photography than Shostakovich is the entire world of music.

Massively Critical of Critical Mass

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.