Good-ness, Gracious, Me

Lest anyone think I am merely picking on the hapless Mr. Colberg in the previous, allow me to remind you that the entire thrust of this stupid blog of mine from the beginning has been to work out what separates a good photo from a not good one.

Tyros seem to think that it's a collection of technical and formal qualities (focus, rules of composition, lighting patterns) muddled up with some purely subjective judgments that are beyond the ken of man. See these idiots, for example.

In reality the goodness of a photo, like the goodness of any art, is largely social, but only slightly subjective. We agree, as a community, on what is and is not good. This narrows down to as small a community as a camera club or an internet forum, or even as small as the austere community of 3 or 4 people who actually like German photo books. It grows as large as Western Society all numbly agreeing that da Vinci was quite good after all.

Well, I cannot do much socially about my own status as a pariah, so I am interested in which of these societal judgments are made on the basis of things that actually appear in the frame. Things which I could, in theory, put into the frame.

Let us back up to Duchamp and his urinal. This work is declared good because of the artist, because of his concept, because of the social construct around "Fountain." Nobody ever said Boy, what a great urinal. That's a good urinal. To say such a thing would have been to completely miss the point. See also the banana duct taped to the wall. I am not complaining here, I quite like both pieces. They are both witty, they both make a point (much the same point). I think they are both good but I do not think that the qualities in the piece itself are at all relevant.

On the other hand, we have Ansel Adams. Also in part a social construct, of course. The stature of the artist matters. However, there are formal, visual, qualities in the pictures themselves you can point to which we, as a society, have agreed tend toward goodness. As a society we think wilderness and mountains are pretty. There are formal qualities of composition leading to balance, interest, resolved tension, and so on and so forth. These are things we can observe in the picture which are, to a degree, predictors of the social response to the pictures.

I cannot be Ansel Adams, but I can put things into the picture that will tend to make people like my pictures in the same way they like his. The goodness adheres in part to the content of the piece, in ways that the goodness of Duchamp's "Fountain" does not.

Now, if I vanished into the archives of Michael Schmidt, and came out with this:

there is essentially no doubt that some people who nod wisely and say things like not his best work, of course, but it's obviously good, don't you know. And then, they would be very grumpy to learn that I shot it last night on my phone while walking my dog.

And this is the essential nub of the thing.

I am happy to stipulate that in some sense Michael Schmidt's shitty pictures of concrete, when bound in to a book, are in some sense good in the same way that Duchamp's urinal is.

If anyone can do it, though, if anyone can go to the hardware store and buy a urinal, we have to admit that the goodness in no way adheres to the work itself. It is not present in the qualities of the object.

As nearly as I can determine, anybody can churn out these dreary grey messes more or less endlessly. I seem to be able to bash them out at a few an hour. Now, if I wanted to be a proper photo-monk, I would do it with a view camera, and my rate would drop accordingly, but so what? No matter how much fuss I wrap around this sort of thing, there's no way the pictures themselves are in any way special. This isn't to say that Michael Schmidt and the Mahlers and Michael Ashkin and all these people are not making good work in some sense. I am not part of of community that judges it so, and indeed I don't get it. But there is a community that has passed judgment, and found these artists to be good.

What a community of this sort cannot do, though, is claim that the urinal itself is good. The goodness of "Fountain" does not adhere to the urinal.

Either there are qualities in Schmidt's (and Colberg's) photos that I cannot perceive, or they are in fact stampable-out like donuts by anyone with a camera. I am going to proceed thus, since, after all, I cannot perceive any such qualities. Absent these mysterious qualities, these photos can no more be good than Duchamp's urinal is in and of itself, a good urinal.

So, when Jörg pops up saying one or more of these things are good it captures my attention. It's not a statement that makes sense to me, and so I think about it, quite hard, to see if I can work out what I am missing.

If we pay attention over the next couple of years, we are going to be treated to a case study. Jörg has gotten himself a book deal, and he is indeed capable of grinding out those horrific masses of flat grey. In my judgement he has the attention, to a slight degree, of the powers that be.

If indeed there is some quality inherent in these kinds of photos, some discernible properties which the sufficiently delicate (Jörg, The Establishment) can indeed perceive, then his work should be recognized as good. If on the other hand it's got nothing much to do with the pictures, but with who you know, who your mentors were, how rich you are, and how well you schmooze, well, the mysterious qualities he sees in his pictures might not in fact propel him into the pantheon.

Nothing is certain, of course. It's always partly about how well you schmooze. But we'll be keeping our eyes open! Jörg has already sold one book, assuming it's not some 400 euro monster.