“The Dirty Sock Syndrome”

(I’ll get back to the title shortly.  Bear with me.)

Every now and again I’ll say “I have just got to tidy up my work area.” to which my wife usually responds with bit of a snort and “You spend as much time tidying up in there as you do working in there.”  Not quite true but close enough to be worthy of a snort.

I try to put tools and materials back where they belong as soon as I’m done with them (even for a minute) but I am not by nature a neat and orderly person.  As a consequence the cruft tends to build up – especially when I’m in the middle of, say, mounting and matting prints – until there isn’t enough vacant space on the work surface to put anything else down.  I guess the price of tidiness is eternal vigilance.  But that’s a short-term issue.

A longer-term issue is that of the dirty sock syndrome.  I read of it in (of all the unlikely places) a chapter on building maintenance in an excellent book on church governance*.  In it the author says that if you see a dirty sock on your bedroom floor you pick it up, put it in the laundry basket and forget about it.  Come laundry day it gets clean, you put it in a drawer and all is well.  If you don’t pick it up – leave it there for, say, three days, it becomes part of the décor and you stop seeing it.  It will stay there until your spouse (or whomever) picks it up.  Exasperated parents will instantly recognize this phenomenon in occasional visits to their child’s bedroom.  This, not seeing what is obvious to a stranger, is a longer-term issue.  Once in a while I have to spend some time picking up the dirty socks in my work area.  Looking around me as a write I see about eight – starting with an ink bottle containing maybe 2 ccs of ink standing proudly beside a full one and a small kitchen timer that stopped working even after I put a new battery in it.  I have no idea how long they’ve been there but now that I’ve noticed them they are gone.

Art on a wall works the same way.  After it’s been up for a while (a lot longer than three days) we stop seeing it.  Galleries and museums change their shows – why not our homes?  Chances are good that if you are reading this you have more artwork than wall space.  (If not, support your local artists, buy reproductions from museum shops, frame your own pieces.)

When we moved to our current house three years ago one of my smarter ideas was to put hanging rails on a lot of the walls, making it easy to change our “show”.  I walk past it 20 times a day and as soon as I don’t occasionally stop to smile and say to myself “George Tice certainly makes beautiful prints!” it’s time to change the show – roughly three months.  Only a few of our particular favorite pieces are on “permanent display” but even they move from place to place so they will stay fresh.  

The hanging rails are really helpful but it isn't that big a deal to add or subtract a few picture hooks.  With a bit of forethought the new piece will hide the pinhole left by the former hook.  In our previous house I kept a small jar of filler and another of touch-up paint at the ready.

 

* “Moving on from Church Folly Lane”, Robert Latham, Wheatmark Press 2006

How to Respond.

 

 

This is a bit heavier than my usual blog post content but this has been on my mind a lot.

 Philip, a photographer friend, and I were talking (virtually of course) about how we as photographers could/should/might work in response to the pandemic, the political upheaval, social unrest ….

 Both of us had been carrying a camera while walking around our respective neighborhoods. Photographs illustrating isolation, “social distancing” … are a dime a dozen. What are we not photographing? How are we not photographing.

 Certain photographs, like the recent photograph of the nude woman facing down a wall of heavily armed and armored officers in Portland, will become icons -- much like the photograph of the single protestor in Tiananmen Square facing down a line of tanks – or of the sweet faced young woman putting a flower into the muzzle of a rifle at Kent State – or the horribly burned child fleeing from her napalmed village in Viet Nam. They each record a powerful, moving incident in a specific dangerous, chaotic time and place. Not knowing the time and place would be likely to make me ask “what was going on here?”

 David Douglas Duncan’s “Captain Ike Fenton” does a bit more. Its anti-war message does not require you to know that it was Korea, 1950, that the company he commanded was low on ammunition, pinned down by artillery fire, and could not expect immediate help. But you know that something terrible has happened – is happening – and that this is the face of a man who has stood at the edge of the pit, looked in, and cannot turn around. It gives you enough visual cues to imagine a time and place – or maybe the specific time and place don’t matter.

 But Philip was thinking more along the lines of Picasso’s “Guernica”, works that are conceived from the get-go to comment or express the artist’s response to what’s happening in the world. I would add the likes of John Heartfield’s pre-WWII anti-Nazi posters and illustrations (which resulted in him departing through a window as the Gestapo came up the stairs to his studio).

 Philip’s question was what can we photographers do apart from photojournalism -- if we are not (choose to be not) eye witness to momentous events.

 But that question bumps us up against one of the basic facts about photography. Photographs are spectacularly good at showing what something or someone looked like at a specific time and place but are seldom spectacularly good at showing “about”. How do photographs translate from “images of:” to “images about”?

The great Henri Cartier-Bresson, during World War II, said “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are still photographing rocks.”

 Photography is not good at allegory – as evidenced by Henry Peach Robinson’s “Fading Away” -- or historical or literary references – as evidenced by Gertrude Käsebier’s “Blessed Art Thou Among Women”. George Bernard Shaw, a photographer himself, noted that “The painter gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good — it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.”

 I don’t have a clue how to conceive of a photograph from the get-go to comment on the pandemic, to comment on the disruptions in our cities, to comment on the apparent crumbling of our own government.

 

I Hate Zoom

 

I hate Zoom.

This nonsense of sitting in front of a computer and staring at artwork on a screen instead of staring at the real artwork is getting pretty old.

While I’m at it, I hate sitting in front of a computer looking at a face in a little box instead of looking at a real face .

Moreover I hate looking at art on a screen, Zoom or not.

One of the pundits said that the history of art as you see it in a textbook is really the history of artwork that will reproduce well in a quarter-page illustration.  Michelangelo's David is the same size as a Japanese netsuke.  My addition to that is that all artwork looks the same represented by a 1024x960 pixel jpeg created on a computer screen with unknown color balance and viewed on another computer screen with a different unknown color balance.

A friend was the judge for a show at a not-quite-local gallery.  He chose about 125 prints out of the 2000 or so that were submitted -- by jpeg -- from all over the country.  He told me that when the actual prints arrived about 20 of them were so different from the jpeg (and not better) that he didn't want to hang them.

All that said, just today I watched a lecture by Todd Hido (photographer in the Bay area) arranged by the art gallery of the University of Kentucky.  About 100 people attended from all over the western world.  I regularly attend a critique hosted by a Portland (Oregon) photographer — with attendees from upstate New York, Tennessee, Burnaby BC, northern California, Chicago, Calgary. 

Tonight I have a Zoom meeting with a local group of photographers with whom I have met in person for about 20 years -- sitting around a table with actual prints strewn over it, looking at them and at each other.  

I guess that Zoom and it’s ilk have a place, an important place.  But, dang!  It’s not the only place.

Back to the real world ASAP

 

Aperture Strikes Again -- rant follows

 

Since the pandemic hit I have been reading the, I believe, weekly newsletter from Aperture – part of my “any port in a storm” approach to staying in touch with the photographic world without leaving my lair.  I confess, however, that my usual examination of it consists of the first couple of paragraphs of some of the articles and looking at the photographs, usually with as much puzzlement as amazement.

Today I received an email from Aperture from their “development” department.  The bait to induce me to donate to their annual fund drive was an interview with Dawoud Bey titled “Changes to the Photography World in the Twenty-First Century” and it was worth a careful read.  I became a fan of Bey’s work when I saw some of his portraits at the Tacoma Art Museum (an institution that takes photography seriously) in the biennial portrait competition sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery.  Seeing his work in the flesh, so to speak, is a different experience than on a computer screen.  In fact that distinction appears in his Aperture interview.  He goes so far as to state that to him “photograph” implies a physical object and “picture” applies to what we see on a computer screen.  “Picture” seems too generic to me and I believe that we need a new word for “image captured in some light-sensitive way but displayed on a computer screen”.

Bey’s 29 year old son works in  social media production for a living and is advising him on how to create a presence on Instagram and make it useful.  However, Bey confesses a degree of skepticism and puzzlement about how that can happen.  (I’m with him there!)

The interviewer for this piece is the executive director of Aperture.  Speaking of the changes in their magazine that they recently introduced, he stated that: “Hello, Photography” (Spring 2013), an optimistic assertion of the value of photography; the Aperture magazine issue we did with Magnum Foundation, “Documentary, Expanded” (Spring 2014); and Charlotte Cotton’s book Photography Is Magic (2015), among others. I think Photography Is Magic was the apotheosis of a distinct ontological moment in photography.”  Holy Dektol, Lensman!  Bey lowered the artobabble level in his response to that statement. 

But that brings me to the rant section of this piece.  Asked how he became visible to Aperture, Bey says: “I was surprised, one day, to get an email from one of the editorial staff at Aperture saying that someone (a mutual friend, whom I knew from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s administration) had told them they should take a look at my work. The email went on to ask, “What kind of work do you do, landscapes?”  What colossal arrogance!  The writer of that email didn’t even have the courtesy to spend five minutes or less to find out what Bey’s work was like.  Getting even an uniformed tickle from the rarified heights of Aperture was enough?

Alas, that has been my opinion of Aperture for a long time.  I subscribed to the Aperture and to Art News for several years and found the writing in both, well, dense.  I kept feeling that I should be able to untangle the articles but somehow never did.  I dropped both subscriptions after reading a letter to the editor in one of them.  The writer stated that he was a trained librarian and had read the magazine regularly for nearly a decade.  The previous issue, he was glad to report, contained an article that he actually understood.