(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..
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Paris in the Springtime -- or whenever.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
"Regular Customer" project
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Why is Portland a better photography scene?
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.
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.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Why I don't take my portfolio to portfolio reviews.
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.
Monday, April 11, 2011
But sometimes big really is good.
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.
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