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.

Still Like a One Eyed Cat

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

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

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

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

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

Famous? Whom?

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



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

What is it with BIG?

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

"Men Like Me" -- missing Bill Jay

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

An Afternoon with Sandra Kroupa

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

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

for a wonderful interview with her.


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.