I have been wrestling with these ideas for a while now, and I am not at all sure how this is going to come out. Let's see!
In something like the first half of the 20th century, a great of deal of Serious Photography centered around a kind of humanist idea. People were photographed with sympathy, yes, but more importantly as the heros of their own stories (I stole this idea from John Berger, who said it of the works of Michelangelo and Léger.) Hero might be too strong of a word, sometimes I suppose people were the villains of the story, or possibly even supporting characters. Whatever the role, it would be anyways eligible for an Academy Award.
Their story was not always an uplifting one, and not every person was inherently heroic, but underlying the whole was the idea that the people mattered, as themselves. The photo might be critical of the subject, but was rarely dismissive.
In contrast, in today's Most Serious Photos, the people are dismissed. Every Alec Soth photo, if it even contains a person, is of someone who might as well appear in the movie credits way down at the bottom of the crawl as Hooker #4 or simply Henchman or Man in Bar. I might have this wrong, but I feel like it all starts somewhere in the general area of New Topographics. That work is built around some notion of the sheer venality of the works of humanity, the idea that people are basically stupid and wrong, that their works are naught but stupid, venal, damage.
I don't mean to suggest that we oughtn't to criticize, we should. But criticism is not the same thing as an endless drumbeat of "look how stupid, how venal, how ugly" which seems to characterize much of the more serious contemporary photography.
I spend, as regular readers may know, a certain amount of time examining work from other continents, searching for that which isn't "white gaze." It occurs to me, grumbling in my interior monologue about all this, that much of what characterizes, say, African Gaze is not so much a distinctly African vibe but rather a return to basic humanism. Someone promotes an African photographer and shows us some work, and comments that this is what happens when you let Africans photograph Africa and send the white boys home; what I see is a return to the 1940s. Africans, under the lens of Africa, are permitted to enjoy a range of emotion, and to be the heroes and villains of their own stories.
Certainly they are also not depicted merely as victims, but more to my point even when they are victims, they're not Flood Victim #17 way way down in the list of credits. Even if she is a flood victim, she has a name, she has personality, one imagines indeed a whole story arc might be associated with her.
I consider it possible that part of what we see here is that the white photographer is not permitted to take the humanist photographs. When this white male colonialist comes home, his editor throws all those humanist frames out. Those are un-serious, unworthy. The modern photograph renders people (yes, especially brown people) as ciphers, as archetypes, as anything but fully formed people. And so what we get to see is a bunch of anti-humanist photographs when our Hemingway stand-in returns from Asia. The Asian photographer is, in some sense, permitted to take the humanist photos. In a sense, arguably, we name humanism "non-white gaze" and claim that white people cannot, or won't, do it.
I cannot help but speculate that there might be in here somewhere an unhealthy vein of colonialist thinking smuggled in. Are we somehow permitting African photographers to take humanist photographs because, well, they're just Africans. They have not yet reached our exalted level of miserable anti-humanism, so we can applaud their primitive humanist approach. For now.
Probably a bit tinfoil-hat but the thought does follow more or less logically, and I do like making hats.
Of course, out here in the hinterlands of the greater West, we also have these humanist pictures. They are not taken very seriously. My children are the heroes of their lives when I photograph them, but nobody wants to exhibit a hall of enormous prints of my kid snaps. Pictures of happy people, or people who are not essentially ciphers, or types, are unlikely to go anywhere, out here in the West. There's a large community of very competent amateurs who take ruthlessly heroic photographs of architecture, celebrating the works of humanity. Galleries and museums, naturally, are the opposite of interested.
There are, of course, exceptions. Sometimes even the gloomiest MFA student is somehow unable to suck all the life out of their subject. Sometimes an artist of sufficient stature to survive the hit can slip a few pictures of living people in here and there. Mostly, though, the more serious you get, the more the people resemble animated corpses, and the more the works of humanity resemble a post-Apocalyptic hellscape.
It is truly just fashion.
These is much to love in this world. There are many people to love, or to hate, or to admire. There are places one might stand in ones mind, places from which humanity and its works do not look quite so venal, so stupid, so vain. There is much criticism which could be done using actual three-dimensional people, and much praise as well. Not everything need be humanistic, but we could certainly stand to bring a bit of it back, here in our gloomy West.
We seem, here, to have fallen down a kind of narrow well of theory in which complaint stands in for criticism, and all else had been drowned in the chilly waters.
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Something to Look At
Jonathan Blaustein of aPhotoEditor wrote about a thing (here) and mentioned a photo that was in the thing. It's an interesting photo. It's this photo. Let's look at it.
This is George Wallace, former Governor of Alabama. At the time this photo was made (1963) by Avedon, he was an avowed racist. Segregation nahw, segregation tomarrah, segregation forevah!
My method, as regular readers will know, begins with an inventory the frame. It is a man. He is posing for a portrait, the standard tropes of Male Portrait are all there: Shoulders turned, near shoulder dropped, face straight on to the camera, head tilt toward aft shoulder, chin up. Any sufficiently low-rent photography forum will contain any number of old men who can and will recite this litany on demand. It is a stern, strong, masculine pose. It is also remarkably uncomfortable.
His suit, shirt, and tie appear to fit well, and as far as we can tell are consistent with the fashionable body-hugging slim-fit narrow tie of the times. What we can see of his clothing is consistent with a certain severity of appearance.
Lighting is pretty Avedon, not quite dead on single light, a very nicely dialed in degree of modelling.
His hair is thinning, combed strictly back, gelled in place. Both his face and his gaze are exactly aligned on the camera, note the symmetry of the ears. His attention appears to be completely on the camera's lens, and by the usual alchemy, on us the viewer. His raised chin creates the impression that he is looking down at us from a higher vantage point. His left eye is centered in the frame. The immediate impression is of an extreme and negative intensity of attention, of gaze. The corners of his mouth turn down severely. A closer look shows that his eyes are black. An accident of eye color, lighting, and the black and white process has eliminated any differentiation between the iris and pupil.
The short, strictly tamed hair, and the absolutely dead-on alignment of the face with the absolutely direct gaze-from-above combine with the black eyes and the set of the man's lips to produce, I think, a sensation of angry intensity. Anyone, I think, would read this face as intense and somewhere between the edge of anger and barely contained rage.
This is perhaps a bridge too far in terms of reading-in, but note also that his head is cocked to the side. This is what birds do when they inspect something they intend to eat. Whether people would specifically read this is dubious, but he certainly does look a little like a bit like an eagle inspecting a wounded mouse.
We in this era, knowing who George Wallace was and the kinds of policies he espoused, don't like him. We likely tend to read this as the expression of essentially an enraged and dangerously intelligent animal. We might reasonably see his expression as one of personal animosity or simply predation — at a basic level he intends to eat us. A supporter might have read it as righteous indignation this guy is gonna go bust some heads, the kinds of heads I want to see busted. Still, I don't quite see how even an ardent supporter would have felt entirely comfortable under that predatory gaze.
But let us, just for fun, look closer. The forehead is smooth, the jowls are not quite loose. The sitter might be holding a little tension in the back of his jaw, but while his face is certainly not softly affectionate, he does not seem to be holding much tension in it. Try this experiment:
Look at the picture for a few seconds, let it soak in. Now cover his mouth. Just the mouth. Let that soak in for a little time. Repeat this a few times, and attend especially to his brows.
What do you see?
What I see is this: with his mouth uncovered, the brows seem to gather tension. Cover his mouth, the brows seem to relax.
Examining some other photos, I conclude that to a degree, George Wallace simply suffered from Resting Angry Face. Certainly he also spent a lot of time being angry, or at any rate appearing so to his supporters. It was kind of his thing.
A personal reaction, now: the man looks inescapably Hispanic to me. Something in the rendering of the print sells his skin as slightly brown, his dark eyes support that idea, and there's something about the way his face is shaped that reminds me of a certain kind of Mexican gentleman that is, somehow, familiar to me. Somehow he feels a little Anthony Quinn, a little Danny Trejo, to me.
I still absolutely buy the illusion of slightly crazed intensity, even after I have worked out that it is in part illusory.
Avedon took several other portraits of the man. There is one other in circulation which looks like it's from this session. That one does not show the intensity of gaze, although neither is it remotely flattering. There is one more, taken when Wallace is much much older and has changed his coat to become an avowed integrationist and supporter of racial equality. In this latter his expression is almost identical to the photo under consideration here, though he is disheveled and posed quite differently. The black eyes, down-turned mouth, and severe, direct, gaze are all present. He even has his chin lifted a trifle.
At this point is is worth reminding ourselves that Avedon selected this frame from many, and surely picked the one with the intensity he was looking for. With that in mind, one can can readily imagine that the session, however it went, was less intense than this picture.
Blaustein, in his piece, sees the photo as hate-filled with extra animosity directed at (gay) Avedon. This is certainly consistent with the appearance of the photograph, and I see what he means. I do not, after spending more time than is sensible, think that it is a the ground truth of the thing, though. I think Wallace is just putting on his standard Serious Engaged Face, which combined with posing instructions from Avedon and the black and white process, produced this thing.
To me, it calls in to question Avedon as portraitist. Looking back on what I recall of Avedon's pictures, it occurs to me that his method did not particularly pretend to get at a person's essence. I have no notion of what the critical consensus on Avedon is, so perhaps I have nothing new whatever to say here (or, perhaps, I fly in the face of any such consensus. A boy can dream!)
Standard portraiture at least pretends to be revealing something of a person's truth, and I suppose that at times it does that. Avedon was less interested in the person, and more interested in locating and photographing a persona, some theatrical, public, veneer that a person might project. That veneer might, or might not, reflect the inner life of the person, and to be honest, I can't see that Avedon gave much of a damn whether it did or not.
This photo of George Wallace strikes me very much as a persona, a projection of someone's (Avedon's? Wallace's? Some collaboration, or just an accident?) idea of a man. A not very nice man.
I suspect that Wallace, about whom I admit I know very little, was likely a hollow man, as are many politicians. I suspect that there was very little of a complex man inside, that he was largely a persona, put on and off, altered as necessary to fit circumstances. Perhaps what Avedon teased out of him that day, though a mere shell, was really all there was anyway.
This is George Wallace, former Governor of Alabama. At the time this photo was made (1963) by Avedon, he was an avowed racist. Segregation nahw, segregation tomarrah, segregation forevah!
My method, as regular readers will know, begins with an inventory the frame. It is a man. He is posing for a portrait, the standard tropes of Male Portrait are all there: Shoulders turned, near shoulder dropped, face straight on to the camera, head tilt toward aft shoulder, chin up. Any sufficiently low-rent photography forum will contain any number of old men who can and will recite this litany on demand. It is a stern, strong, masculine pose. It is also remarkably uncomfortable.
His suit, shirt, and tie appear to fit well, and as far as we can tell are consistent with the fashionable body-hugging slim-fit narrow tie of the times. What we can see of his clothing is consistent with a certain severity of appearance.
Lighting is pretty Avedon, not quite dead on single light, a very nicely dialed in degree of modelling.
His hair is thinning, combed strictly back, gelled in place. Both his face and his gaze are exactly aligned on the camera, note the symmetry of the ears. His attention appears to be completely on the camera's lens, and by the usual alchemy, on us the viewer. His raised chin creates the impression that he is looking down at us from a higher vantage point. His left eye is centered in the frame. The immediate impression is of an extreme and negative intensity of attention, of gaze. The corners of his mouth turn down severely. A closer look shows that his eyes are black. An accident of eye color, lighting, and the black and white process has eliminated any differentiation between the iris and pupil.
The short, strictly tamed hair, and the absolutely dead-on alignment of the face with the absolutely direct gaze-from-above combine with the black eyes and the set of the man's lips to produce, I think, a sensation of angry intensity. Anyone, I think, would read this face as intense and somewhere between the edge of anger and barely contained rage.
This is perhaps a bridge too far in terms of reading-in, but note also that his head is cocked to the side. This is what birds do when they inspect something they intend to eat. Whether people would specifically read this is dubious, but he certainly does look a little like a bit like an eagle inspecting a wounded mouse.
We in this era, knowing who George Wallace was and the kinds of policies he espoused, don't like him. We likely tend to read this as the expression of essentially an enraged and dangerously intelligent animal. We might reasonably see his expression as one of personal animosity or simply predation — at a basic level he intends to eat us. A supporter might have read it as righteous indignation this guy is gonna go bust some heads, the kinds of heads I want to see busted. Still, I don't quite see how even an ardent supporter would have felt entirely comfortable under that predatory gaze.
But let us, just for fun, look closer. The forehead is smooth, the jowls are not quite loose. The sitter might be holding a little tension in the back of his jaw, but while his face is certainly not softly affectionate, he does not seem to be holding much tension in it. Try this experiment:
Look at the picture for a few seconds, let it soak in. Now cover his mouth. Just the mouth. Let that soak in for a little time. Repeat this a few times, and attend especially to his brows.
What do you see?
What I see is this: with his mouth uncovered, the brows seem to gather tension. Cover his mouth, the brows seem to relax.
Examining some other photos, I conclude that to a degree, George Wallace simply suffered from Resting Angry Face. Certainly he also spent a lot of time being angry, or at any rate appearing so to his supporters. It was kind of his thing.
A personal reaction, now: the man looks inescapably Hispanic to me. Something in the rendering of the print sells his skin as slightly brown, his dark eyes support that idea, and there's something about the way his face is shaped that reminds me of a certain kind of Mexican gentleman that is, somehow, familiar to me. Somehow he feels a little Anthony Quinn, a little Danny Trejo, to me.
I still absolutely buy the illusion of slightly crazed intensity, even after I have worked out that it is in part illusory.
Avedon took several other portraits of the man. There is one other in circulation which looks like it's from this session. That one does not show the intensity of gaze, although neither is it remotely flattering. There is one more, taken when Wallace is much much older and has changed his coat to become an avowed integrationist and supporter of racial equality. In this latter his expression is almost identical to the photo under consideration here, though he is disheveled and posed quite differently. The black eyes, down-turned mouth, and severe, direct, gaze are all present. He even has his chin lifted a trifle.
At this point is is worth reminding ourselves that Avedon selected this frame from many, and surely picked the one with the intensity he was looking for. With that in mind, one can can readily imagine that the session, however it went, was less intense than this picture.
Blaustein, in his piece, sees the photo as hate-filled with extra animosity directed at (gay) Avedon. This is certainly consistent with the appearance of the photograph, and I see what he means. I do not, after spending more time than is sensible, think that it is a the ground truth of the thing, though. I think Wallace is just putting on his standard Serious Engaged Face, which combined with posing instructions from Avedon and the black and white process, produced this thing.
To me, it calls in to question Avedon as portraitist. Looking back on what I recall of Avedon's pictures, it occurs to me that his method did not particularly pretend to get at a person's essence. I have no notion of what the critical consensus on Avedon is, so perhaps I have nothing new whatever to say here (or, perhaps, I fly in the face of any such consensus. A boy can dream!)
Standard portraiture at least pretends to be revealing something of a person's truth, and I suppose that at times it does that. Avedon was less interested in the person, and more interested in locating and photographing a persona, some theatrical, public, veneer that a person might project. That veneer might, or might not, reflect the inner life of the person, and to be honest, I can't see that Avedon gave much of a damn whether it did or not.
This photo of George Wallace strikes me very much as a persona, a projection of someone's (Avedon's? Wallace's? Some collaboration, or just an accident?) idea of a man. A not very nice man.
I suspect that Wallace, about whom I admit I know very little, was likely a hollow man, as are many politicians. I suspect that there was very little of a complex man inside, that he was largely a persona, put on and off, altered as necessary to fit circumstances. Perhaps what Avedon teased out of him that day, though a mere shell, was really all there was anyway.
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Meaning
In my wrestling around with photographs of real events and whatnot, versus photographs of artifice, I have reverted to a much earlier notion of mine on photographs. In this conception, a photo is essentially a kind of show-and-tell. I photograph the flower, to show you the flower. I photograph the protest, the automobile race, the model in her dress, to show you the thing I photographed. Distinctions between artifice and not-artifice are set aside.
The point is that a photograph has distinctive properties in the "show-me" action.
Barthes claims that the only thing a photograph does is witness that-has-been, and here I am leaning heavily on that idea. If I draw a rose to show you the rose, that is one thing, and if I photograph the same rose to show it you, that is another. This is not to suggest that the drawing is lesser: I could draw you a cubist rose, and show you the front, sides, and back all at once which a photo cannot do. I could draw a botanist's anatomically detailed rose, based on the rose, and you would learn more of the structure of the thing. The photo shows but one view, obscures details, and if I took it it probably doesn't even show you the color and is kind of muddy anyways.
But the photo of the rose nevertheless has a quality of reality to it. It is more like actually seeing the rose, albeit for a moment, than any painting or drawing can be. It more closely resembles the moment when I point and say "would you look at that rose!" than a painting, a drawing. Even a film does not resemble the moment, but rather something else, perhaps a walk around the rose or something else depending on the way the camera moves or does not.
When I show you, thus, a picture of a cop pepper-spraying a protester, it is a little like coming upon the scene yourself as if transported there from the starship Enterprise by a perennially stressed out Scotsman. Thrown into the world thus, you struggle to grasp what is in front of you, and you fit it into your world-idea. You quickly accuse either cop or protester depending on your politics, and then Scotty beams you back up.
When I show you a photograph of a model in a dress, you need not struggle to fit her into your world-idea, because you recognize the fashion shot as artifice. Still, the dress on the model's body has that same quality of reality, that same quality of being shown you in real life. "Would you look at that dress!" It is more visceral, more immediate and real, than a drawing of the dress or a technical description of the dress. Wow, there it is, that looks great.
You learn almost nothing about the dress, except what it looks like. Happily, the function of a fashionable piece of clothing is to look like something, so the photograph suits the purpose perfectly. You might reasonably, on the strength of the photo, wish to possess the dress.
In the same way, I could show you a photo of a plastic model of a Spitfire, a model you could buy for $19.90 and which includes the necessary glue and decals. The photo would, again, resemble in important ways the experience of seeing the actual built model. Seeing a small model of an airplane might be a thrilling experience for a few, but for many of us — even aircraft enthusiasts — a small plastic model is not particularly thrilling. This photo might not induce a desire to possess. Thrill appears in the painting of the aircraft in battle. Possibly a really good photo of a similar battle scene would be even more purchase-inducing, but it might also be a little too real for comfort.
Perhaps one can more easily set aside the ideas around simultaneously plummetting and burning to death, when one sees a painting.
Regardless, this sort of notional mechanic of "Would you look at that!" strikes me as a sort of useful baseline, the starting point from which we might usefully spin out theories of how photographs induce meaning. And so, you know, I shall and I do.
The point is that a photograph has distinctive properties in the "show-me" action.
Barthes claims that the only thing a photograph does is witness that-has-been, and here I am leaning heavily on that idea. If I draw a rose to show you the rose, that is one thing, and if I photograph the same rose to show it you, that is another. This is not to suggest that the drawing is lesser: I could draw you a cubist rose, and show you the front, sides, and back all at once which a photo cannot do. I could draw a botanist's anatomically detailed rose, based on the rose, and you would learn more of the structure of the thing. The photo shows but one view, obscures details, and if I took it it probably doesn't even show you the color and is kind of muddy anyways.
But the photo of the rose nevertheless has a quality of reality to it. It is more like actually seeing the rose, albeit for a moment, than any painting or drawing can be. It more closely resembles the moment when I point and say "would you look at that rose!" than a painting, a drawing. Even a film does not resemble the moment, but rather something else, perhaps a walk around the rose or something else depending on the way the camera moves or does not.
When I show you, thus, a picture of a cop pepper-spraying a protester, it is a little like coming upon the scene yourself as if transported there from the starship Enterprise by a perennially stressed out Scotsman. Thrown into the world thus, you struggle to grasp what is in front of you, and you fit it into your world-idea. You quickly accuse either cop or protester depending on your politics, and then Scotty beams you back up.
When I show you a photograph of a model in a dress, you need not struggle to fit her into your world-idea, because you recognize the fashion shot as artifice. Still, the dress on the model's body has that same quality of reality, that same quality of being shown you in real life. "Would you look at that dress!" It is more visceral, more immediate and real, than a drawing of the dress or a technical description of the dress. Wow, there it is, that looks great.
You learn almost nothing about the dress, except what it looks like. Happily, the function of a fashionable piece of clothing is to look like something, so the photograph suits the purpose perfectly. You might reasonably, on the strength of the photo, wish to possess the dress.
In the same way, I could show you a photo of a plastic model of a Spitfire, a model you could buy for $19.90 and which includes the necessary glue and decals. The photo would, again, resemble in important ways the experience of seeing the actual built model. Seeing a small model of an airplane might be a thrilling experience for a few, but for many of us — even aircraft enthusiasts — a small plastic model is not particularly thrilling. This photo might not induce a desire to possess. Thrill appears in the painting of the aircraft in battle. Possibly a really good photo of a similar battle scene would be even more purchase-inducing, but it might also be a little too real for comfort.
Perhaps one can more easily set aside the ideas around simultaneously plummetting and burning to death, when one sees a painting.
Regardless, this sort of notional mechanic of "Would you look at that!" strikes me as a sort of useful baseline, the starting point from which we might usefully spin out theories of how photographs induce meaning. And so, you know, I shall and I do.
Monday, June 15, 2020
Arrrrrg
Some students from the Hartford Photograph MFA are doing a print sale to raise money for good causes, so clicked on it and said Arrrrrrrg.
These are MFA students, from the institution where Colberg has been teaching so, really, I ought to have known what to expect. At $100 for an 8x10 print these are, generally speaking, about $110 overpriced. In the sense that if you got pushy I might be persuaded to give you $10 to not send me your print.
Ok, so some are vaguely pleasing pictures, there's a lot of snapshots of nothing, and there's a handful of sweet jesus tear out my eyes in there. Of course there are. It is exactly what it says on the tin.
Any of these could, obviously, make sense and be meaningful in the right setting, and it's possible albeit unlikely that any of these people have accomplished such a setting. Regardless, a bare 8x10 print is definitely not it. I guess it might make sense as an add-on to the book the artist gave you?
On the one hand this is certainly a bunch of basically nice people seeking to help out a cause, and for that they ought to be commended.
On the other hand at least some of these artists are also seeing this as a chance to shift some work. No, they won't make any money, but let's be honest money isn't the point. They hope to gain some little ego boost by selling a few prints. They may even hope that someone Notable will buy a print for a good cause and, somehow realize how Important and Necessary the work is, and something good will result. Heck, it could even happen.
Every arts collective thingy on earth is running one of these, for more or less the same complex of reasons.
I don't mean this as a condemnation particularly. People are complex things, and we do things for many reasons. It is rare that there is not some self-serving facet of a thing.
It's just that in this case is was specifically brought home to me. These are unlovable objects, these are not objects that these artists have really sold many of, if any. I recognize some of them as authors of thoroughly unlovable books that almost certainly sold in very small numbers. The venality of trying to piggy-back on a cause du jour pretty much leaps off the page.
I'd suggest that if you really approve of the cause that you buy a print anyways, except that I have a better idea which is: just donate $100 directly.
The kids are deducting the cost of printing and postage from your $100, so unless you really want one of these pieces of shit, just send money.
These are MFA students, from the institution where Colberg has been teaching so, really, I ought to have known what to expect. At $100 for an 8x10 print these are, generally speaking, about $110 overpriced. In the sense that if you got pushy I might be persuaded to give you $10 to not send me your print.
Ok, so some are vaguely pleasing pictures, there's a lot of snapshots of nothing, and there's a handful of sweet jesus tear out my eyes in there. Of course there are. It is exactly what it says on the tin.
Any of these could, obviously, make sense and be meaningful in the right setting, and it's possible albeit unlikely that any of these people have accomplished such a setting. Regardless, a bare 8x10 print is definitely not it. I guess it might make sense as an add-on to the book the artist gave you?
On the one hand this is certainly a bunch of basically nice people seeking to help out a cause, and for that they ought to be commended.
On the other hand at least some of these artists are also seeing this as a chance to shift some work. No, they won't make any money, but let's be honest money isn't the point. They hope to gain some little ego boost by selling a few prints. They may even hope that someone Notable will buy a print for a good cause and, somehow realize how Important and Necessary the work is, and something good will result. Heck, it could even happen.
Every arts collective thingy on earth is running one of these, for more or less the same complex of reasons.
I don't mean this as a condemnation particularly. People are complex things, and we do things for many reasons. It is rare that there is not some self-serving facet of a thing.
It's just that in this case is was specifically brought home to me. These are unlovable objects, these are not objects that these artists have really sold many of, if any. I recognize some of them as authors of thoroughly unlovable books that almost certainly sold in very small numbers. The venality of trying to piggy-back on a cause du jour pretty much leaps off the page.
I'd suggest that if you really approve of the cause that you buy a print anyways, except that I have a better idea which is: just donate $100 directly.
The kids are deducting the cost of printing and postage from your $100, so unless you really want one of these pieces of shit, just send money.
Saturday, June 13, 2020
On Design
David S. always weighs in when I mention design, and I have finally seen the light. I will no longer design books, instead I will be working with these guys on all future book designs. Thank you for believing in me, David, and leading me finally to the truth.
Artifice II
Really, this is probably the 2478237th essay entitled "Artifice" that I have written, but this one follows up to the most recent one, so, II.
I'm going to break things down to the beginning and see what happens.
A photo reifies its subject. That is, basically, the only thing it does by itself, it bears witness to the realness of whatever the camera was pointed at. Everything else that happens with a photo is inside your head.
So if you want to make some statement, to say something, which relies on or is supported by the realness of something else, a photo is just the ticket.
This is where modern documentary photographers can run into trouble. Mathieu Asselin (in Monsanto) wishes to make real for us a certain train accident which resulted in a spill of chemicals, so he photographs the crossing of road and tracks where the accident occurred some decades before. This is largely pointless, because what he actually wishes to reify is not a piece of land, but rather the billowing clouds of toxic gas.
Absent the clouds of toxic gas to photograph, he's going to want some other approach. No matter what, we are going to have to imagine the derailed train, and the clouds, nobody can show them to us.
In this case he might have been better served by a map indicating, say, the site of the accident, nearby residences and population centers, maybe arrows indicating wind direction. It provides, arguably, no less of an anchor for us to imagine the clouds of gas. But, he is a photographer, so we got a photo.
In the same way, as Mike C remarked, the little plastic model of the airplane is not the point. Nobody really disputes the existence of the little plastic model one can build, and nobody is much interested in it. What we are interested in is the Spitfire Mk IIA because Battle of Britain! (which used Mk Is, I am being witty, see?) so, a photograph of the actual plane would be better, and perhaps best is a painting of the actual plane downing some German fighter plane in a bewildering hail of ack-ack.
The point of a piece of visual art, or at any rate the point I perceive, is to allow you to imagine some larger thing. It is to give you a hook, a kernel, a trapdoor, into something bigger.
In the documentary or vernacular mode, the key lies directly in front of the camera. There's grandma, smiling. Click. By testifying to the reality of grandma and her smile, we open the door most conveniently to the imagining of her joy. The camera is pointed at some moment and scene (or several of them) which summarize the whole thing; in looking at the pictures we mentally reconstitute the whole thing, albeit with flourishes.
When purposefully photographing artifice, the key has to be the object in front of the lens.
The luxury retailer wants you to buy a dress, or a watch, or a car. To persuade you in that direction, they seek to evoke an imagined lifestyle, with drama, ease, and pleasure. The object they're trying to sell you, they want you to imagine, is an integral part of that lifestyle, and so they photograph that in an evocative way. The dress serves the role of the Spitfire, decidedly not the role of a small plastic model of the plane.
To return to Monsanto the dress is the billowing cloud of toxic gas, the lifestyle is the entire train wreck and its aftermath. Asselin wants to sell us a dress by photographing a sewing machine.
I'm going to break things down to the beginning and see what happens.
A photo reifies its subject. That is, basically, the only thing it does by itself, it bears witness to the realness of whatever the camera was pointed at. Everything else that happens with a photo is inside your head.
So if you want to make some statement, to say something, which relies on or is supported by the realness of something else, a photo is just the ticket.
This is where modern documentary photographers can run into trouble. Mathieu Asselin (in Monsanto) wishes to make real for us a certain train accident which resulted in a spill of chemicals, so he photographs the crossing of road and tracks where the accident occurred some decades before. This is largely pointless, because what he actually wishes to reify is not a piece of land, but rather the billowing clouds of toxic gas.
Absent the clouds of toxic gas to photograph, he's going to want some other approach. No matter what, we are going to have to imagine the derailed train, and the clouds, nobody can show them to us.
In this case he might have been better served by a map indicating, say, the site of the accident, nearby residences and population centers, maybe arrows indicating wind direction. It provides, arguably, no less of an anchor for us to imagine the clouds of gas. But, he is a photographer, so we got a photo.
In the same way, as Mike C remarked, the little plastic model of the airplane is not the point. Nobody really disputes the existence of the little plastic model one can build, and nobody is much interested in it. What we are interested in is the Spitfire Mk IIA because Battle of Britain! (which used Mk Is, I am being witty, see?) so, a photograph of the actual plane would be better, and perhaps best is a painting of the actual plane downing some German fighter plane in a bewildering hail of ack-ack.
The point of a piece of visual art, or at any rate the point I perceive, is to allow you to imagine some larger thing. It is to give you a hook, a kernel, a trapdoor, into something bigger.
In the documentary or vernacular mode, the key lies directly in front of the camera. There's grandma, smiling. Click. By testifying to the reality of grandma and her smile, we open the door most conveniently to the imagining of her joy. The camera is pointed at some moment and scene (or several of them) which summarize the whole thing; in looking at the pictures we mentally reconstitute the whole thing, albeit with flourishes.
When purposefully photographing artifice, the key has to be the object in front of the lens.
The luxury retailer wants you to buy a dress, or a watch, or a car. To persuade you in that direction, they seek to evoke an imagined lifestyle, with drama, ease, and pleasure. The object they're trying to sell you, they want you to imagine, is an integral part of that lifestyle, and so they photograph that in an evocative way. The dress serves the role of the Spitfire, decidedly not the role of a small plastic model of the plane.
To return to Monsanto the dress is the billowing cloud of toxic gas, the lifestyle is the entire train wreck and its aftermath. Asselin wants to sell us a dress by photographing a sewing machine.
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Something to Look At
Reading The Pix did a "deep dive" into this picture over on instagram, which you can examine here. As usual, I found their discussion fairly uninteresting, but my attention was caught by the photo. Let us, therefore, examine it.
Let us begin by an examination of the contents of the frame. Let's go back to front.
A storefront, at the corner of Tilden Ave and Bedford Ave, Brooklyn. An area that appears to be undergoing gentrification, just like everywhere else. Home values have tripled in the last decade, the storefront has recently changed hands (or at least branding on it.) In front of the storefront, a group of what appear to be protesters, including many black faces, and many apparently recording with their phones. In front of the protesters, a sedan in the far lane of the street.
On the left side of the frame, a group of uniformed cops, blocking the sedan's path. Centered in the frame, a cop with what looks like a spray bottle, ejecting a stream of liquid to the right. On the right, a group of protesters, at least 3 of them. Two are identifiable as probably white. The nearest figure appears to be a white woman, face apparently averted from the spraying cop.
Both the central cop and the nearest protester are in the near lane of traffic. There is a splatter of some sort of liquid on the ground, and apparently on the cop's pants.
The various lines of attention are peculiar. The protesters in the background attend to their phones, which we assume are directed at pretty much what we can see, but from the other side. The cops frame-left are looking all over the place, or perhaps nowhere. It doesn't seem to mean anything, but it is striking that nobody in frame is particularly looking at anyone else we can see.
The cop in the center seems to be looking at the protesters frame right, behind the foreground woman, and the foreground woman isn't looking at anything.
It's a picture that is structurally a lot like this one. The facts enumerated in this one would overlap a great deal with that one, and there is similarity in the dynamics of the pictures (whatever that means):
Let me quite clear clear here: I think NYPD are a bunch of fucking thugs and should all be fired. I suppose there's probably some good ones in there, but if you're good you can probably get a new job. This is not the same thing as thinking that every NYPD cop is beating the shit out of random innocent people 24x7, I rather think they spend a lot of time doing their jobs more of less competently.
Let us proceed to what one might make of this picture. The standard leftist position is that this is a police officer who has gone off the reservation and is simply randomly pepper-spraying innocent bystanders. More or less. You might suggest that they are non-violent protesters exercising their rights rather than bystanders, or whatever.
The cop appears to be shouting, his arm muscles are clenched, you could certainly see this as an extremely aggressive posture. The foreground protesters are small people, with their hands up, in a posture of submission and innocence.
We have an aggressor, performing an act of aggression, against non-violent protesters. This is what it feels like powerfully to me, and most likely to you if you're reading these words.
Consider the pro-cop position. Let us slip on some uncomfortable moccasins and walk a little ways.
The pro-cop position notes that the protesters are in what by all appearances is an active traffic lane. There is a car in the far lane, presumably Bedford Avenue is open to traffic. That position notes that there's something going on that splattered the cop's pants and the street.
Note also that none of the several cops in-frame seem to have the slightest interest in the protesters on the sidewalk in the background, nor in the evident filming that is going on. Attention, if anywhere, is roughly on the small group of white protesters standing in the traffic lane. It's not at all clear that the uniformed cops aren't simply chatting about baseball.
One might construct a hypothesis: the protesters have been throwing things at the cops (liquid splatter) but are not now doing so. A small group of protesters have blocked the street, and are refusing to move. One of the several duties of the police is, in fact, to clear traffic obstructions, and faced with a stubborn group of excited young women, pepper spray may in fact be the appropriate escalation from giving stern verbal commands which have been, thus far, ignored.
These are two possible readings.
In fact, both of the pictures mentioned above are the same situation. Protesters block the street, leaving police with few options. The entire point of the exercise is to force this exact scenario, the point is to maneuver the players in to this precise photograph, which is why we keep seeing this photograph over and over. It's dramatic as hell, but it is essentially staged. In a sense, both readings above are correct. The cop is aggressively aggressing against non-violent protesters, but has been maneuvered, on purpose, in to doing so.
Now, this is sort of the point of non-violent protest. The strategic idea here is to force the other guy to perform acts that they themselves cannot abide. Getting pepper sprayed is a victory condition. Kinda. In truth, there's a good chance that these cops here are actually doing things 100% by the book, and there's a pretty good chance that they don't have trouble abiding procedures that are actually in the manual. But boy, the photo looks bad.
The second photo, of the woman in a dress, was one of a sequence of photos. I would bet good money that the first photo also was, and that the photographer pulled out the one that looked best, probably the one with the most aggressive looking arm extension, and/or where the central cop appeared to be shouting. It's not much good if he's got a bemused smile, so that one doesn't make the cut, eh?
Let's compare, though, with this one:
This is, to be blunt, a vastly more powerful photograph. The bad guys are completely out of frame, there is no ambiguity for anyone to play with. It isn't really about the act of aggression at all, but about the aftermath. To try to justify the aggression is several steps away, and nothing justifies the girl's grief. The boy is dead, the girl grieves, that's it. No circumstances to parse, to interpret.
The photograph contains nothing that allows the bad guys any wiggle room, because they, and the circumstances, are simply missing. The only things you can try to explain are a dead boy and a weeping girl, and that's going to be hard to do.
There is no stage machinery to be noticed here, because there isn't any. If the boy was deliberately provoking the National Guardsmen, we don't see it. In fact, we don't really know what the boy was up to. Certainly the protests were rowdy as hell, and the Guardsmen were provoked, but the death of Jeffrey Miller was not part of the program. As far as we know, there is no evidence whatever that Miller went out that day to get shot.
The young woman in the first photograph, above, most likely did go out to be pepper-sprayed. The internal evidence of the frame is at least consistent with that idea. The stagecraft is fairly evident in the frame.
Doesn't make it right. If the cops had simply walked off, there would have been no photo-op, and ten minutes later the protesters would have wandered off. Or, maybe they would have kept Bedford blocked all day. So what? Brooklyn has a whole grid of streets.
The protesters got their photo-op, though, and the already-persuaded will be suitably revved up. Won't persuade anyone who wasn't already persuaded, though.
Not like that photo of Mary Ann Vecchio and Jeffrey Miller.
Let us begin by an examination of the contents of the frame. Let's go back to front.
A storefront, at the corner of Tilden Ave and Bedford Ave, Brooklyn. An area that appears to be undergoing gentrification, just like everywhere else. Home values have tripled in the last decade, the storefront has recently changed hands (or at least branding on it.) In front of the storefront, a group of what appear to be protesters, including many black faces, and many apparently recording with their phones. In front of the protesters, a sedan in the far lane of the street.
On the left side of the frame, a group of uniformed cops, blocking the sedan's path. Centered in the frame, a cop with what looks like a spray bottle, ejecting a stream of liquid to the right. On the right, a group of protesters, at least 3 of them. Two are identifiable as probably white. The nearest figure appears to be a white woman, face apparently averted from the spraying cop.
Both the central cop and the nearest protester are in the near lane of traffic. There is a splatter of some sort of liquid on the ground, and apparently on the cop's pants.
The various lines of attention are peculiar. The protesters in the background attend to their phones, which we assume are directed at pretty much what we can see, but from the other side. The cops frame-left are looking all over the place, or perhaps nowhere. It doesn't seem to mean anything, but it is striking that nobody in frame is particularly looking at anyone else we can see.
The cop in the center seems to be looking at the protesters frame right, behind the foreground woman, and the foreground woman isn't looking at anything.
It's a picture that is structurally a lot like this one. The facts enumerated in this one would overlap a great deal with that one, and there is similarity in the dynamics of the pictures (whatever that means):
Let me quite clear clear here: I think NYPD are a bunch of fucking thugs and should all be fired. I suppose there's probably some good ones in there, but if you're good you can probably get a new job. This is not the same thing as thinking that every NYPD cop is beating the shit out of random innocent people 24x7, I rather think they spend a lot of time doing their jobs more of less competently.
Let us proceed to what one might make of this picture. The standard leftist position is that this is a police officer who has gone off the reservation and is simply randomly pepper-spraying innocent bystanders. More or less. You might suggest that they are non-violent protesters exercising their rights rather than bystanders, or whatever.
The cop appears to be shouting, his arm muscles are clenched, you could certainly see this as an extremely aggressive posture. The foreground protesters are small people, with their hands up, in a posture of submission and innocence.
We have an aggressor, performing an act of aggression, against non-violent protesters. This is what it feels like powerfully to me, and most likely to you if you're reading these words.
Consider the pro-cop position. Let us slip on some uncomfortable moccasins and walk a little ways.
The pro-cop position notes that the protesters are in what by all appearances is an active traffic lane. There is a car in the far lane, presumably Bedford Avenue is open to traffic. That position notes that there's something going on that splattered the cop's pants and the street.
Note also that none of the several cops in-frame seem to have the slightest interest in the protesters on the sidewalk in the background, nor in the evident filming that is going on. Attention, if anywhere, is roughly on the small group of white protesters standing in the traffic lane. It's not at all clear that the uniformed cops aren't simply chatting about baseball.
One might construct a hypothesis: the protesters have been throwing things at the cops (liquid splatter) but are not now doing so. A small group of protesters have blocked the street, and are refusing to move. One of the several duties of the police is, in fact, to clear traffic obstructions, and faced with a stubborn group of excited young women, pepper spray may in fact be the appropriate escalation from giving stern verbal commands which have been, thus far, ignored.
These are two possible readings.
In fact, both of the pictures mentioned above are the same situation. Protesters block the street, leaving police with few options. The entire point of the exercise is to force this exact scenario, the point is to maneuver the players in to this precise photograph, which is why we keep seeing this photograph over and over. It's dramatic as hell, but it is essentially staged. In a sense, both readings above are correct. The cop is aggressively aggressing against non-violent protesters, but has been maneuvered, on purpose, in to doing so.
Now, this is sort of the point of non-violent protest. The strategic idea here is to force the other guy to perform acts that they themselves cannot abide. Getting pepper sprayed is a victory condition. Kinda. In truth, there's a good chance that these cops here are actually doing things 100% by the book, and there's a pretty good chance that they don't have trouble abiding procedures that are actually in the manual. But boy, the photo looks bad.
The second photo, of the woman in a dress, was one of a sequence of photos. I would bet good money that the first photo also was, and that the photographer pulled out the one that looked best, probably the one with the most aggressive looking arm extension, and/or where the central cop appeared to be shouting. It's not much good if he's got a bemused smile, so that one doesn't make the cut, eh?
Let's compare, though, with this one:
This is, to be blunt, a vastly more powerful photograph. The bad guys are completely out of frame, there is no ambiguity for anyone to play with. It isn't really about the act of aggression at all, but about the aftermath. To try to justify the aggression is several steps away, and nothing justifies the girl's grief. The boy is dead, the girl grieves, that's it. No circumstances to parse, to interpret.
The photograph contains nothing that allows the bad guys any wiggle room, because they, and the circumstances, are simply missing. The only things you can try to explain are a dead boy and a weeping girl, and that's going to be hard to do.
There is no stage machinery to be noticed here, because there isn't any. If the boy was deliberately provoking the National Guardsmen, we don't see it. In fact, we don't really know what the boy was up to. Certainly the protests were rowdy as hell, and the Guardsmen were provoked, but the death of Jeffrey Miller was not part of the program. As far as we know, there is no evidence whatever that Miller went out that day to get shot.
The young woman in the first photograph, above, most likely did go out to be pepper-sprayed. The internal evidence of the frame is at least consistent with that idea. The stagecraft is fairly evident in the frame.
Doesn't make it right. If the cops had simply walked off, there would have been no photo-op, and ten minutes later the protesters would have wandered off. Or, maybe they would have kept Bedford blocked all day. So what? Brooklyn has a whole grid of streets.
The protesters got their photo-op, though, and the already-persuaded will be suitably revved up. Won't persuade anyone who wasn't already persuaded, though.
Not like that photo of Mary Ann Vecchio and Jeffrey Miller.
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