One of my readers (if it's not you, it's the other one) pointed me to this article on the Fstoppers web site, which is essentially about the truth claim of photography, and which gives a not-bad discussion. It's a bit absolutist for my taste, but the world is large and has much room for differences.
As long time readers know, I am mildly obsessed with photography's truth claim, and spend lots of time thinking about it. I want to revisit it, thinking it through via my model of "5 stories."
To review the 5 stories about a photograph are: 1. the ground truth of what was in front of the lens, 2. the photographer's intent; then we add in a viewer and stories 3 and 4 are just the viewer's guesses/understanding of stories 1 and 2 (what you think the ground truth is, and what you think the photographer intended); story 5 is the viewer's all-up reaction to the photograph which subsumes stories 3 and 4, but also other stuff the viewer brings.
Keep in mind that stories 1 and 2 belong to the photographer, they are the photographer's beliefs. Whatever the photographer believes about 1 and 2 is true about them, because they are those beliefs, the model is set up that way. This is why 1/2 are separated from 3/4/5. Stories 3, 4, and 5 are in just the same way the viewer's beliefs.
You can argue about where the lines land between the stories or whatever, but this is just a rough framework, so let's just let that lie.
When someone like Steve McCurry photoshops a bunch of pictures and sells them, and then gets called out on it, the implied accusation is that stories 1 and 2 have too much daylight between them, they are too far apart. Obviously, "too much" is contextual. If an artist is making collages, there is supposed to be a lot of space between these two, but that's OK, and so on.
Of course this accusation, implicit though it is, isn't quite right. What's actually going on is that it's stories 3 and 4 that are too far apart for our personal taste, and our end-reaction, story 5, is excessively colored by our perception of "too much" space between the stories.
If the artist's intention is clear, and it is not to tell the ground truth, we don't mind a bit. Fashion photography has a ground truth of surly models and light stands, but the artist's intentions are completely different. We translate that, and all is well. We don't care that the gap between the ground truth and the fantasy (1 to 2, or 3 to 4, it doesn't matter) is large, because the intention is clear.
No, we run in to trouble most often when the artist believes that the gap is smaller than we believe it is. The artist might say "I photoshopped out the lamppost because it is an anachronism which distracted from the underlying truth of the scene" expressing a basic alignment between stories 1 and 2. While the photographer would agree that the ground truth is not literally present in the photograph, the photograph nonetheless represents in a meaningful way what was truly present. It is, as it were, the lamppost that was wrong, not the photographer. I think this is essentially McCurry's contention.
In this case, stories 1 and 2 are quite close, but 3 and 4 are far apart. Something happens in the translation.
What seems to piss us off is this: we feel (as I do about McCurry) that while the photographer claims that his stories (1 and 2) are the same in all the important ways, the photographer is lying about that, possibly to themselves, but definitely to us.
This, in turn, is because we are ascribing a great deal of weight to our interpretations. We construct our stories, 3 and 4, in such a way as to observe a wrong gap between them. We then conflate our stories with the photographer's stories, confusing 3 with 1 and 4 with 2, and thereby "deduce" that the photographer must have, or should have, observed the same wrong gap.
This is perfectly natural. As humans, we always assume that we understand the mind of other humans more or less perfectly. We handwave a little pretended humbleness, but at the end of the day we think we know what you really meant, you disingenuous bastard. Still, it's not true. We are remarkably, unreasonably, good guessers at this, but we ain't perfect.
This doesn't mean that there are no photographers out there who are kidding themselves, there surely are. It is a big world. And perhaps we're good enough guessers that, most of the time that we see a gap between truth and intent on our side of the divide, there was just such a gap on the artist's side. But surely not all the time, and just as surely, we don't reliably know when we've got it right and when we don't. Even wringing a confession out of the hapless artist often proves nothing, as students of the criminal justice system are all too aware.
We ought, therefore, to approach these situations with an open mind, as with all things Art. We should strive to understand the artist's point of view, to see which one of us has it right, or if indeed perhaps we both do in our own ways.
Having thought it through with some care, and spent some time with the photographs, my disagreement with McCurry (for example) has nothing to do with this bit of cloning, or that erasure. My disagreement is with McCurry's vision of Asia. His photographs are altered from ground truth, but do also reflect McCurry's notions of a larger truth. While I cannot quote him particularly, I think McCurry's position is implicit but clear, that his photographs reflect a true vision of Asia. McCurry sees his stories as pretty close together.
Because I do not believe in McCurry's vision of Asia, my stories are farther apart. There is a problem in translation here, and it is that I think McCurry has fallen in love with McCurry's Asia and therefore cannot see the ground truth in front of him. He sees a world of saturated color and glum people, and I believe that that world is untrue.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Chatting The Pictures
Longer-time readers may recall that from time to time I have lit in to a web site called Reading The Pictures which has long been some schmuck named Michael Shaw writing little essays based on pictures from the news, which essays boil down to remarkably stupid signaling of his academically-approved simplistic left-wing politics.
They've updated their format. Now Michael is making videos, in which he chats with one Cara Finnegan, an apparently equally dunderheaded academic, about a picture from the news. They spend many minutes to signal an even more dull-witted precis of his politics. The essays were always just Michael looking at a picture and writing down whatever random associations popped into his head, and then sort of pretending that these would be, I guess, universals? The videos, as we shall see, are much the same.
Pro-tip: Don't host videos on youtube if you're pretending to be, but actually are not, a widely read web thing. YouTube maintains view counts and shows them to the public. Fun fact: My post here will substantially goose Shaw's view count, because my blog is more widely read than his. Which is fucking astonishing because my blog is extremely unpopular among the very very very small set of people who are aware of its existence. For obvious reasons.
As a side note here, we have a whole category of these little web sites, all promoting one another as Necessary, Important, Must-Read, but whenever we get a peek at the actual numbers we see that the actual engagement is so low that they're not even reading one another's Must-Read material. Colberg plugs RtP, but doesn't read it, and vice-versa. Sometimes they give one another little awards, but still, nobody is reading this material, nobody is watching the videos. You'd think they were just a weird little clique of basement dwellers, but as far as I can tell these people are in fact the "Legitimate Academy" here. Michael Shaw has written (deeply stupid material) for Columbia Journalism Review which as far as I know is a real academic journal that some people take quite seriously. These people, astonishingly, have jobs based on this "work" they produce.
Deep, calming breath. Anyways.
You may examine his latest video either on his web site, in this article, or directly on YouTube. I will insert the picture they're talking about here:
Set aside the video's insanely poor production values and the absolute lack of presence by the principals -- this stuff is actually quite hard. I could not do any better without a great deal of effort and probably some expense. Let us listen instead to what they actually say.
They make, essentially, two substantive remarks in this almost 7 minute video. One is "look, black people" which, to their credit, they do unpack is a reasonable way. The second is "this is a shutdown image!" referring to the recent government shutdown here in the good old USA.
Toward the end the wander off into a discussion of how that's a portrait of Lincoln in the background, something-something negotiation, and look how Lincoln is turning away from the proceedings, to which I can only say what the fuck are you blockheads on about? They, of course, have no point, they just want to compare Lincoln (who successfully negotiated his way into a Civil War) with Trump (who hasn't, yet).
But backing up, they make exactly no case that this is a "shutdown image" merely stating that the episode in which Donald Trump bought fast food for a championship college football team would never have happened except for the shutdown. RtP has made its nut, however tiny, in the last couple of years beating on the "Trump, so Crazy!" drum, so I'm not sure they have a lot of wiggle room here. Honestly, any goddamned thing at all can happen in the white house at any time, these days.
And finally we get to the point that's actually not utterly blockheaded.
The reality is that Washington D.C. the capital district of the USA, is a majority black city. Just barely, now, it used to be 70%, but now it's just over 50%. Regardless, the long-term residents, the people who are born, live, work, have children, and die in DC are mostly black. An hour in the city will reveal to anyone paying attention that it is a city in which less affluent people, African-Americans, tend to the needs of more affluent people, mostly white, who are there as either tourists or government/political workers. The poor, black, residents tend to the needs of visitors both long and short term.
Because Shaw and Finnegan have already characterized this picture as a "shutdown image" they wander off and talk about the the government shutdown (which is over, basically, immigration policy) and racial issues (it is), and some tenuous connection they imagine to the picture. Race, and also race, so, something-something. Right? There's nothing overtly wrong here, except the connection they make from the picture they're talking about. There is no connection, except that these people want to talk about the government shutdown, and to signal how woke they are about race.
Because Finnegan and Shaw see a picture with black people and food in it, they randomly come up with "food desert" and bleat about that pointlessly for a while. Fun Fact: Washington D.C. despite its many flaws rates pretty well on the food desert situation. It's just not that big, and it's pretty dense, so generally people find themselves within a mile of a grocery store. Of course it would be unreasonable to expect the RtP crew to research this, they are clearly shooting this hot mess live and off the cuff, just spouting whatever ignorant remarks pop out of their food holes.
That said, Washington D.C. is a startling fact in the USA. While it does (since 1961) vote for the office of President in that peculiar American way (cf. Electoral College) it has no representation in Congress, while it is simultaneously under the control of Congress. There is a functioning local government, but at least technically, that government must defer to Congress. Their license plates look like this:
This is not a community that is particularly happy with its lot. This is a city of poor people, exploited by the political and national systems that have thrust themselves into the community. You would imagine that at any rate the capital of a place like the USA would be a glittering jewel, a monument to the values we supposedly espouse, but it turns out not so much.
Washington D.C. is a microcosm of the USA's race and class situation. If Michael Shaw and Cara Finnegan had any actual knowledge, they might have cited this picture, by Dorothea Lange, 1936:
which is maybe the most famous photograph illustrating this particular dynamic. Then Shaw and Finnegan might have made the point about what has, and has not, changed in the intervening 83 years. In 1936 in Mississippi, the Democratic Primary election (a party function, not a government function, but the function that selected the candidates) was whites-only. Since the Democratic Party was, for all practical purposes, the only political party in the South of the USA at that time, the black men in this photograph were, in all meaningful ways, completely without franchise. A lot like the citizens of Washington D.C. today.
The clothes are better. The standard of life is almost certainly better. But African-Americans still work for white people a hell of a lot more than the other way around, and at least in the White House, they still can't vote.
Another cultural touchpoint they might have referenced, while we're poking around, is that McDonald's spent something like a decade of TV commercials marketing aggressively to African-Americans. It is possible, even likely, that Donald Trump (a known watcher of much television) actively believes that McDonald's hamburgers are in fact the favorite food of African-Americans. It's possible, even likely, that he conceived his terrible fast-food feast as a special treat for the young athletes he was hosting.
There's a whole pile of stuff that could have been unpacked there, about television, about mass-media, about race, and so on. You could probably even have worked in something about "food deserts." It's purely speculative, of course, but at least it would have been a fun road to run down a little ways.
But, no, Michael Shaw and Cara Finnegan are explicitly doing a show in which they look at a picture, and simply blather about whatever comes to mind first. Since they are dopes, steeped in contemporary academic culture, all that ever comes out of their noise-making apparatus is noises about race and how bad Donald Trump is. These are interesting and, dare I say it, Important, topics but simply mentioning them with a sadly shaking head does not constitute critical analysis.
In fact, Finnegan and Shaw are exhibiting here exactly no critical apparatus at all. It is, I suppose, possible that one or both of them is capable of doing this, of actually looking at a picture, and talking about its context and thence its likely meaning(s), but they are certainly showing no signs of it here and appear to have adopted a format that is peculiarly ill suited to doing so.
They've updated their format. Now Michael is making videos, in which he chats with one Cara Finnegan, an apparently equally dunderheaded academic, about a picture from the news. They spend many minutes to signal an even more dull-witted precis of his politics. The essays were always just Michael looking at a picture and writing down whatever random associations popped into his head, and then sort of pretending that these would be, I guess, universals? The videos, as we shall see, are much the same.
Pro-tip: Don't host videos on youtube if you're pretending to be, but actually are not, a widely read web thing. YouTube maintains view counts and shows them to the public. Fun fact: My post here will substantially goose Shaw's view count, because my blog is more widely read than his. Which is fucking astonishing because my blog is extremely unpopular among the very very very small set of people who are aware of its existence. For obvious reasons.
As a side note here, we have a whole category of these little web sites, all promoting one another as Necessary, Important, Must-Read, but whenever we get a peek at the actual numbers we see that the actual engagement is so low that they're not even reading one another's Must-Read material. Colberg plugs RtP, but doesn't read it, and vice-versa. Sometimes they give one another little awards, but still, nobody is reading this material, nobody is watching the videos. You'd think they were just a weird little clique of basement dwellers, but as far as I can tell these people are in fact the "Legitimate Academy" here. Michael Shaw has written (deeply stupid material) for Columbia Journalism Review which as far as I know is a real academic journal that some people take quite seriously. These people, astonishingly, have jobs based on this "work" they produce.
Deep, calming breath. Anyways.
You may examine his latest video either on his web site, in this article, or directly on YouTube. I will insert the picture they're talking about here:
Set aside the video's insanely poor production values and the absolute lack of presence by the principals -- this stuff is actually quite hard. I could not do any better without a great deal of effort and probably some expense. Let us listen instead to what they actually say.
They make, essentially, two substantive remarks in this almost 7 minute video. One is "look, black people" which, to their credit, they do unpack is a reasonable way. The second is "this is a shutdown image!" referring to the recent government shutdown here in the good old USA.
Toward the end the wander off into a discussion of how that's a portrait of Lincoln in the background, something-something negotiation, and look how Lincoln is turning away from the proceedings, to which I can only say what the fuck are you blockheads on about? They, of course, have no point, they just want to compare Lincoln (who successfully negotiated his way into a Civil War) with Trump (who hasn't, yet).
But backing up, they make exactly no case that this is a "shutdown image" merely stating that the episode in which Donald Trump bought fast food for a championship college football team would never have happened except for the shutdown. RtP has made its nut, however tiny, in the last couple of years beating on the "Trump, so Crazy!" drum, so I'm not sure they have a lot of wiggle room here. Honestly, any goddamned thing at all can happen in the white house at any time, these days.
And finally we get to the point that's actually not utterly blockheaded.
The reality is that Washington D.C. the capital district of the USA, is a majority black city. Just barely, now, it used to be 70%, but now it's just over 50%. Regardless, the long-term residents, the people who are born, live, work, have children, and die in DC are mostly black. An hour in the city will reveal to anyone paying attention that it is a city in which less affluent people, African-Americans, tend to the needs of more affluent people, mostly white, who are there as either tourists or government/political workers. The poor, black, residents tend to the needs of visitors both long and short term.
Because Shaw and Finnegan have already characterized this picture as a "shutdown image" they wander off and talk about the the government shutdown (which is over, basically, immigration policy) and racial issues (it is), and some tenuous connection they imagine to the picture. Race, and also race, so, something-something. Right? There's nothing overtly wrong here, except the connection they make from the picture they're talking about. There is no connection, except that these people want to talk about the government shutdown, and to signal how woke they are about race.
Because Finnegan and Shaw see a picture with black people and food in it, they randomly come up with "food desert" and bleat about that pointlessly for a while. Fun Fact: Washington D.C. despite its many flaws rates pretty well on the food desert situation. It's just not that big, and it's pretty dense, so generally people find themselves within a mile of a grocery store. Of course it would be unreasonable to expect the RtP crew to research this, they are clearly shooting this hot mess live and off the cuff, just spouting whatever ignorant remarks pop out of their food holes.
That said, Washington D.C. is a startling fact in the USA. While it does (since 1961) vote for the office of President in that peculiar American way (cf. Electoral College) it has no representation in Congress, while it is simultaneously under the control of Congress. There is a functioning local government, but at least technically, that government must defer to Congress. Their license plates look like this:
This is not a community that is particularly happy with its lot. This is a city of poor people, exploited by the political and national systems that have thrust themselves into the community. You would imagine that at any rate the capital of a place like the USA would be a glittering jewel, a monument to the values we supposedly espouse, but it turns out not so much.
Washington D.C. is a microcosm of the USA's race and class situation. If Michael Shaw and Cara Finnegan had any actual knowledge, they might have cited this picture, by Dorothea Lange, 1936:
which is maybe the most famous photograph illustrating this particular dynamic. Then Shaw and Finnegan might have made the point about what has, and has not, changed in the intervening 83 years. In 1936 in Mississippi, the Democratic Primary election (a party function, not a government function, but the function that selected the candidates) was whites-only. Since the Democratic Party was, for all practical purposes, the only political party in the South of the USA at that time, the black men in this photograph were, in all meaningful ways, completely without franchise. A lot like the citizens of Washington D.C. today.
The clothes are better. The standard of life is almost certainly better. But African-Americans still work for white people a hell of a lot more than the other way around, and at least in the White House, they still can't vote.
Another cultural touchpoint they might have referenced, while we're poking around, is that McDonald's spent something like a decade of TV commercials marketing aggressively to African-Americans. It is possible, even likely, that Donald Trump (a known watcher of much television) actively believes that McDonald's hamburgers are in fact the favorite food of African-Americans. It's possible, even likely, that he conceived his terrible fast-food feast as a special treat for the young athletes he was hosting.
There's a whole pile of stuff that could have been unpacked there, about television, about mass-media, about race, and so on. You could probably even have worked in something about "food deserts." It's purely speculative, of course, but at least it would have been a fun road to run down a little ways.
But, no, Michael Shaw and Cara Finnegan are explicitly doing a show in which they look at a picture, and simply blather about whatever comes to mind first. Since they are dopes, steeped in contemporary academic culture, all that ever comes out of their noise-making apparatus is noises about race and how bad Donald Trump is. These are interesting and, dare I say it, Important, topics but simply mentioning them with a sadly shaking head does not constitute critical analysis.
In fact, Finnegan and Shaw are exhibiting here exactly no critical apparatus at all. It is, I suppose, possible that one or both of them is capable of doing this, of actually looking at a picture, and talking about its context and thence its likely meaning(s), but they are certainly showing no signs of it here and appear to have adopted a format that is peculiarly ill suited to doing so.
Monday, January 28, 2019
Progressive Design
There is an oft-repeated claim that Art should Stand Alone, a claim hinted at in some recent comments here but not stated outright (I think).
It's worth unpacking this a little, to try to figure out what it actually means. On the face of it, the idea is both very modern and absurd. Modern, because until recent times no Art even attempted to stand alone, it was always shown (if at all) in context. It hung in the home, it stood in the palace. Even today, paintings from before the modern era invariably sport absurdly ornate frames, sculptures stand on pedestals, and so on. Only the most modern of art, in the most modern of museums, is shown without being first encrusted with decorations.
Even the most austere white cube filled with the most austere modernist black and white photographs admits frames, glass, mats, and lighting.
The standard monograph, that sarcophagus for photos, with one picture per page, white paper, large margins, has a cover, the paper has weight and texture. To suppose that the photographs of The Americans or American Photographs stand alone in any literal sense is absurd. More important even than the heavy, luxurious paper, the massy weight of the volume, the thudding weight of The Essay, the photographs sit with other pictures.
In these two books, the ur-monographs, the sequences are linear, unsubtle. Anyone can see them.
In contrast to this, in these modern and degenerate times, we see the so-called design forward book. This is usually a rotten collection of rotten photographs, lumped into a book with pointless gatefold pages and equally pointless die-cut bits and pieces, sometimes with an outré binding to further distract from the weakness of the work.
What I think we really mean by "the art should stand alone" is that we want surrounding design elements to avoid distracting us. We want the Art, whatever it is, to take center stage.
When we read through The Americans we see the photographs first and foremost. The other elements of the tomb are nearly invisible. They rise to the level of conscious note only to people like me, to book nerds. This does not mean that they're not perceived. A book with thick, heavy, toothy paper is going to feel quite different from a book with thin, glossy paper like a magazine. To someone who does not even note the paper, the first book will feel expensive, luxurious, compared with the second one.
We can expand this slightly, and assert that in a book design the elements should function in a hierarchy. You should notice things in a specific order, the photographs first, then the captions, then the delicate horizontal rule that separates the two, and then the thick but glossy paper, and lastly (if ever) the tastefully positioned page numbers.
Indeed, you could remark that it doesn't matter what you do - the design elements will find themselves in a heirarchy. That is, people will notice them, in order, until they've either spotted them all or run out of interest. If you as the book designer are not in control of that order-of-perception then you're going to have trouble. If you stupidly chose a huge flashy font and red ink for the page numbers, well, the photos are likely to get short shrift, right?
In some cases, of course, you want at all costs to avoid the photographs getting long shrift, which is where all the gatefolds and whatnot come in.
Conversely, if your page numbers are important (perhaps the index is a common access point to the book) and they are damn near invisible (I own a cookbook like this) then you're created a book that doesn't work. It's broken.
All of this is just ancillary food for thought, though. The point is that there are and always will be design elements in a publication, and while they may pass unnoticed, they are nevertheless part of the work, and will tend -- though unnoticed -- to influence the way people use and react to the publication.
Mostly what people use is something I am going to dub static design. That is, elements of the pages are the same from one page to the next. Page numbers are always in the same spot. First pages of chapters all look the same. Body text always looks the same. Graphical elements are repeated on every page, the same way.
The idea, here, is obviously to provide a sort of anchor, a constant presence that will make the work feel both finished and unified.
A good design sets the tone of a book. It makes it feel playful, serious, elegant, punk, luxurious, or whatever. You set your design down, and then you adhere to it, and the overall tone of the book flows throughout the book. It does not merely feel playful, it feels consistently, purposefully, playful. It is a playful book, from page 1 all the way through to the end, to page 217.
Finally, now, we work around to the point of this piece.
Nothing else in a publication holds still in the way that design does. The words move forward from one sentence to the next in all but the silliest of publications. The pictures are different from this page to the next, ditto. The content progresses, but somehow we oppose the notion that the design should, except in the most unsubtle of ways.
One might switch from heavy paper to light paper, or from one background color to another, to signal a change in content, a new chapter. I see this sort of thing from time to time.
What I do not see except in my own books is subtle progression, or continuous progression. While design should, ideally, be unobtrusive, and while it is certainly a useful tool to make the book hang together, there is no particular reason the design cannot subtly alter from page to page.
A piano concerto does not contain a single mood. It may change from playful to serious, and it does not do so in a single sudden stroke. A serious theme is introduced, at first seeming only a variation of the playful theme. It grows, becomes more serious, and, after a time comes to dominate the music for a period of time. At the same time, the underlying harmony moves, the key signature modulates. The change to minor key may well go unnoticed by all the non-musicians, but they will certainly feel the gathering storm.
What this means in practice is that the elegant horizontal rule that separates the photograph from the caption might, for example, become lighter from one page to the next, and then fade out entirely at the point that the captions change from Times to Comic Sans and the pictures move from black and white landscapes through muted color before landing on candy-colored saturation and a circus theme.
By holding some elements steady and letting others flow, you can adjust the sense of unity in relation to the sense of flow and progress.
Only a few people, like say me, might notice the changes, but many will (I believe) feel the change in tone, the change in idea. Or, depending on how heavy-handed you are, they will explicitly notice the design changes as well!
Here is my best so-far-realized example, a book available for purchase on Blurb: Bellingham Summer. I would of course, not object if you bought a copy but that is not my point here. Click the Preview button and examine the preview. You can see the whole book there. Enbiggen it to full-screen if you can.
Notice the way the background changes. The flock of little pictures "grows" out across the pages, and then the content begins, the little pictures fade into the background. When there's no picture in front of them they re-assert themselves a little. Then they begin to vanish from the bottom up, imperceptibly, or nearly so. Finally, the last couple blink out and are replaced by a swirl of leaves that blows off the book.
Now, these are not traditional design elements (horizontal and vertical rules, ornaments, chapter heads, that kind of thing.) I've invented background material that looks distinctly un-booklike, because I had in mind something else. I suppose you could argue that these are just more content, but they're certainly a different category of thing. I have another sample in the works which uses a progressive approach to more traditional design elements in order to support the book's natural progression.
Anyways. Most tools for book design encourage static design approaches. The model is built around page templates, which hold all the material which is the same page-to-page, and content which is different page-to-page.
I think there is maybe room for some middle ground here. There is room for supporting material, for background material, which changes and flows to support the change and flow of the book itself. I'm doing my best to explore that!
It's worth unpacking this a little, to try to figure out what it actually means. On the face of it, the idea is both very modern and absurd. Modern, because until recent times no Art even attempted to stand alone, it was always shown (if at all) in context. It hung in the home, it stood in the palace. Even today, paintings from before the modern era invariably sport absurdly ornate frames, sculptures stand on pedestals, and so on. Only the most modern of art, in the most modern of museums, is shown without being first encrusted with decorations.
Even the most austere white cube filled with the most austere modernist black and white photographs admits frames, glass, mats, and lighting.
The standard monograph, that sarcophagus for photos, with one picture per page, white paper, large margins, has a cover, the paper has weight and texture. To suppose that the photographs of The Americans or American Photographs stand alone in any literal sense is absurd. More important even than the heavy, luxurious paper, the massy weight of the volume, the thudding weight of The Essay, the photographs sit with other pictures.
In these two books, the ur-monographs, the sequences are linear, unsubtle. Anyone can see them.
In contrast to this, in these modern and degenerate times, we see the so-called design forward book. This is usually a rotten collection of rotten photographs, lumped into a book with pointless gatefold pages and equally pointless die-cut bits and pieces, sometimes with an outré binding to further distract from the weakness of the work.
What I think we really mean by "the art should stand alone" is that we want surrounding design elements to avoid distracting us. We want the Art, whatever it is, to take center stage.
When we read through The Americans we see the photographs first and foremost. The other elements of the tomb are nearly invisible. They rise to the level of conscious note only to people like me, to book nerds. This does not mean that they're not perceived. A book with thick, heavy, toothy paper is going to feel quite different from a book with thin, glossy paper like a magazine. To someone who does not even note the paper, the first book will feel expensive, luxurious, compared with the second one.
We can expand this slightly, and assert that in a book design the elements should function in a hierarchy. You should notice things in a specific order, the photographs first, then the captions, then the delicate horizontal rule that separates the two, and then the thick but glossy paper, and lastly (if ever) the tastefully positioned page numbers.
Indeed, you could remark that it doesn't matter what you do - the design elements will find themselves in a heirarchy. That is, people will notice them, in order, until they've either spotted them all or run out of interest. If you as the book designer are not in control of that order-of-perception then you're going to have trouble. If you stupidly chose a huge flashy font and red ink for the page numbers, well, the photos are likely to get short shrift, right?
In some cases, of course, you want at all costs to avoid the photographs getting long shrift, which is where all the gatefolds and whatnot come in.
Conversely, if your page numbers are important (perhaps the index is a common access point to the book) and they are damn near invisible (I own a cookbook like this) then you're created a book that doesn't work. It's broken.
All of this is just ancillary food for thought, though. The point is that there are and always will be design elements in a publication, and while they may pass unnoticed, they are nevertheless part of the work, and will tend -- though unnoticed -- to influence the way people use and react to the publication.
Mostly what people use is something I am going to dub static design. That is, elements of the pages are the same from one page to the next. Page numbers are always in the same spot. First pages of chapters all look the same. Body text always looks the same. Graphical elements are repeated on every page, the same way.
The idea, here, is obviously to provide a sort of anchor, a constant presence that will make the work feel both finished and unified.
A good design sets the tone of a book. It makes it feel playful, serious, elegant, punk, luxurious, or whatever. You set your design down, and then you adhere to it, and the overall tone of the book flows throughout the book. It does not merely feel playful, it feels consistently, purposefully, playful. It is a playful book, from page 1 all the way through to the end, to page 217.
Finally, now, we work around to the point of this piece.
Nothing else in a publication holds still in the way that design does. The words move forward from one sentence to the next in all but the silliest of publications. The pictures are different from this page to the next, ditto. The content progresses, but somehow we oppose the notion that the design should, except in the most unsubtle of ways.
One might switch from heavy paper to light paper, or from one background color to another, to signal a change in content, a new chapter. I see this sort of thing from time to time.
What I do not see except in my own books is subtle progression, or continuous progression. While design should, ideally, be unobtrusive, and while it is certainly a useful tool to make the book hang together, there is no particular reason the design cannot subtly alter from page to page.
A piano concerto does not contain a single mood. It may change from playful to serious, and it does not do so in a single sudden stroke. A serious theme is introduced, at first seeming only a variation of the playful theme. It grows, becomes more serious, and, after a time comes to dominate the music for a period of time. At the same time, the underlying harmony moves, the key signature modulates. The change to minor key may well go unnoticed by all the non-musicians, but they will certainly feel the gathering storm.
What this means in practice is that the elegant horizontal rule that separates the photograph from the caption might, for example, become lighter from one page to the next, and then fade out entirely at the point that the captions change from Times to Comic Sans and the pictures move from black and white landscapes through muted color before landing on candy-colored saturation and a circus theme.
By holding some elements steady and letting others flow, you can adjust the sense of unity in relation to the sense of flow and progress.
Only a few people, like say me, might notice the changes, but many will (I believe) feel the change in tone, the change in idea. Or, depending on how heavy-handed you are, they will explicitly notice the design changes as well!
Here is my best so-far-realized example, a book available for purchase on Blurb: Bellingham Summer. I would of course, not object if you bought a copy but that is not my point here. Click the Preview button and examine the preview. You can see the whole book there. Enbiggen it to full-screen if you can.
Notice the way the background changes. The flock of little pictures "grows" out across the pages, and then the content begins, the little pictures fade into the background. When there's no picture in front of them they re-assert themselves a little. Then they begin to vanish from the bottom up, imperceptibly, or nearly so. Finally, the last couple blink out and are replaced by a swirl of leaves that blows off the book.
Now, these are not traditional design elements (horizontal and vertical rules, ornaments, chapter heads, that kind of thing.) I've invented background material that looks distinctly un-booklike, because I had in mind something else. I suppose you could argue that these are just more content, but they're certainly a different category of thing. I have another sample in the works which uses a progressive approach to more traditional design elements in order to support the book's natural progression.
Anyways. Most tools for book design encourage static design approaches. The model is built around page templates, which hold all the material which is the same page-to-page, and content which is different page-to-page.
I think there is maybe room for some middle ground here. There is room for supporting material, for background material, which changes and flows to support the change and flow of the book itself. I'm doing my best to explore that!
Friday, January 25, 2019
Manifesto: Update/Notes
This refers to the previous remarks and the marvelously rich and interesting comments that follow it.
I think there is a slight misunderstanding going on here. These are not rules or edicts or a defining document. What they are is a strident personal statement and an invitation.
If my kind of crazy seems close enough to your kind of crazy to maybe make something interesting happen, hit me up. Send me an email, mail me a book, demand my phone number, come to Bellingham with a case of beer. We aren't going to agree on everything, and this isn't an entrance exam. If my strident position overlaps enough with yours -- and you get to decide what "enough" means -- then you are invited to collaborate with, criticize, be criticized by, and to argue with, me about it.
A maelstrom of disagreement, with occasional cries of "YES! THAT!" is the desired ideal state.
I think there is a slight misunderstanding going on here. These are not rules or edicts or a defining document. What they are is a strident personal statement and an invitation.
If my kind of crazy seems close enough to your kind of crazy to maybe make something interesting happen, hit me up. Send me an email, mail me a book, demand my phone number, come to Bellingham with a case of beer. We aren't going to agree on everything, and this isn't an entrance exam. If my strident position overlaps enough with yours -- and you get to decide what "enough" means -- then you are invited to collaborate with, criticize, be criticized by, and to argue with, me about it.
A maelstrom of disagreement, with occasional cries of "YES! THAT!" is the desired ideal state.
Manifesto
I write Manifestos a lot, it turns out. This is one an attempt to launch something like a school, though. So this essay, this manifesto, is also an invitation. To you!
If, after reading this, you think that's completely wrong or if you think that has nothing to do with me then I bid you adieu with a warm heart.
If you think, on the other hand, something in region between spot on mate! and damn his eyes, he has gotten this vital point utterly wrong, I wish to correct him and am prepared to fight then the invitation extends to you. You are invited to contact me (amolitor at gmail) with angry screeds of response, and/or artistic output which exemplifies what you think this all ought to be about.
I want to make things, and I want you to make things, and I want you and I to make things together.
This is, explicitly, an opening bid for a philosophical underpinning of something. A school of photography, if you will. It is not the closing bid.
I lean toward fiery language, but you may freely substitute "things I find most interesting are..." into statements that sound like statements of fact, or inflexible demands. It's a manifesto, it's supposed to be strident and uncompromising.
1. The purpose of art in general, and photography in particular, is broadly speaking political. Not merely in the sense of supporting or decrying, say, socialism, but in the sense of exposing wrongs and arguing for rights, in the sense of the-opposite-of-wrongs, and also rights in the sense of moral entitlements.
2. I believe in straight photography. A photograph which can be fairly accused of falsehood has no place in an argument for justice. Therefore, a photograph should look like a photograph and not, say, a painting. It should appear true. Further, photographs should accurately represent what was there in front of the lens. Manipulations of any sort are perfectly acceptable, but only to clarify the essential point of what was actually there, and never to alter the ground truth of the image. That is, a photograph should also be true.
3. I believe in the sequence. One photograph alone is almost without exception unclear, ambiguous, incapable of carrying much meaning. The sequence, by enabling repetition, by enabling the reference of one photograph to another, is infinitely more powerful and is therefore the preferred mode of photographic expression. The purpose being to make arguments which are both strong and coherent, a strong form rather than a weak form must be used. The single image, the collection of greatest hits, these are to be avoided.
4. I believe that the photographic work is best conceived as a kind of sonata, with one or more movements, each composed of multiple themes blending and moving in relation to one another. Themes composed of photographs, but also of words, of drawings, of design elements. I believe that this kind of work has barely begun to develop, and that much can be done to create works with far stronger and more persuasive arguments, far stronger and more persuasive Art, then we currently see in the world.
5. I believe in access. Art which is expensive, hard to obtain, hidden away, cannot well serve its purpose of arguing for a better world. Art must make its argument publicly. This suggests that the proper form for photographic art is not merely the sequence, but also the mass-produced (or mass-producible), and affordable, publication.
FIGHT. ME.
Also, send me stuff. Get pissed off, get excited, get motivated, get off your ass.
FIGHT ME!
ETA: If you send me something, I'll both remark on whatever you sent me, and send you something. At least until I run out of somethings to send you.
If, after reading this, you think that's completely wrong or if you think that has nothing to do with me then I bid you adieu with a warm heart.
If you think, on the other hand, something in region between spot on mate! and damn his eyes, he has gotten this vital point utterly wrong, I wish to correct him and am prepared to fight then the invitation extends to you. You are invited to contact me (amolitor at gmail) with angry screeds of response, and/or artistic output which exemplifies what you think this all ought to be about.
I want to make things, and I want you to make things, and I want you and I to make things together.
This is, explicitly, an opening bid for a philosophical underpinning of something. A school of photography, if you will. It is not the closing bid.
I lean toward fiery language, but you may freely substitute "things I find most interesting are..." into statements that sound like statements of fact, or inflexible demands. It's a manifesto, it's supposed to be strident and uncompromising.
1. The purpose of art in general, and photography in particular, is broadly speaking political. Not merely in the sense of supporting or decrying, say, socialism, but in the sense of exposing wrongs and arguing for rights, in the sense of the-opposite-of-wrongs, and also rights in the sense of moral entitlements.
2. I believe in straight photography. A photograph which can be fairly accused of falsehood has no place in an argument for justice. Therefore, a photograph should look like a photograph and not, say, a painting. It should appear true. Further, photographs should accurately represent what was there in front of the lens. Manipulations of any sort are perfectly acceptable, but only to clarify the essential point of what was actually there, and never to alter the ground truth of the image. That is, a photograph should also be true.
3. I believe in the sequence. One photograph alone is almost without exception unclear, ambiguous, incapable of carrying much meaning. The sequence, by enabling repetition, by enabling the reference of one photograph to another, is infinitely more powerful and is therefore the preferred mode of photographic expression. The purpose being to make arguments which are both strong and coherent, a strong form rather than a weak form must be used. The single image, the collection of greatest hits, these are to be avoided.
4. I believe that the photographic work is best conceived as a kind of sonata, with one or more movements, each composed of multiple themes blending and moving in relation to one another. Themes composed of photographs, but also of words, of drawings, of design elements. I believe that this kind of work has barely begun to develop, and that much can be done to create works with far stronger and more persuasive arguments, far stronger and more persuasive Art, then we currently see in the world.
5. I believe in access. Art which is expensive, hard to obtain, hidden away, cannot well serve its purpose of arguing for a better world. Art must make its argument publicly. This suggests that the proper form for photographic art is not merely the sequence, but also the mass-produced (or mass-producible), and affordable, publication.
FIGHT. ME.
Also, send me stuff. Get pissed off, get excited, get motivated, get off your ass.
FIGHT ME!
ETA: If you send me something, I'll both remark on whatever you sent me, and send you something. At least until I run out of somethings to send you.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
On "Schools"
Let me preface my remarks thus: I don't really know a lot here, I have snippets, bits and pieces, and some guesses. But the discussion on the previous notes demands some sort of response (thanks folks!) and so I will record a random assortment of snippets which may or may not add up to something.
John Berger tells us that between Michelangelo and the French Revolution, western painters may be viewed as, metaphorically, painting theater, that they were painting set pieces intended not to reflect nature but to improve upon it. This is indeed a philosophical fragment, which you can see in the paintings (at any rate I recognize the idiom, and assume Berger has gotten the dates right for me). Was this hammered out in tea shops over cigarettes and through shouted arguments? Probably not. Perhaps it arose simply out of painters copying one another's ideas.
Dada, on the other hand, was absolutely hammered out in cafes, with both cigarettes and shouting, as well as written screeds. Many 19th and 20th century Art Movements are supported by lengthy essays detailing the underpinnings, some occasionally written by the practitioners themselves.
"Schools" of Art are, as near as I can tell, some blend of in-the-moment philosophy together with after-the-fact critical analysis. The "theater" model for the aforementioned period of western painting might in fact have been invisible to the painters themselves, as water is invisible to the fish. To us, in the here and now, it is painfully obvious. The blend of these two ingredients varies from school to school, it appears.
The common thread, as I see it, is that there is some underlying philosophy, some set of ideas, that is in play; and at the same time there is a collection of practitioners working from, very approximately, the same set of ideas and playing a game of "Top This!" We see this played out in the most explicit possible way when, in 1832, JMW Turner adds a red bouy to his painting -- after it has been hung -- so that it competes favorably with John Constable's painting hung nearby. How aware the practitioners are of these ideas, how many screeds they write or do not write on the topic, seems to be beside the point.
When this happens, this game, you can spur better and better executions of these underlying ideas. The underlying ideas are clarified, they change, they are altered this way and that, but the general thrust toward better and better work (in some sense) is driven forward sometimes at a furious pace. Competition and collaboration produce growth, clarity, and a whole pile of related works. The pile of works then enables later critical analysis, understanding, of what was going on. One impressionist painting is just a fuzzy picture. 100 of them is interesting, and makes clear what these guys were up to. See also Cubism, although I will grant that 100 cubist paintings, or a million, might not suffice to make clear what the hell they were up to.
I suppose it makes a certain sense that in this modern era in which Art is essentially all conceptual, that competition would naturally turn to having better concepts, rather than superior executions of an underlying concept. A comment on the previous remarks states unequivocally that "a cult of individuality" is the "core directive" to students in at least one institution. If "concept" gets conflated with "process" then the competition degenerates into one of inventing the most absurdly Rube Golbergian process for making a piece of art, which certainly seems to accurately characterize a depressing amount of what we see.
Even if concept doesn't degenerate in this way, you still get work from one artist that is incomparable with the work of other artists. The concept is, as far as I can tell, kind of the base layer, the foundation. Art doesn't go down any further. Without any common foundation, without a common basis, it becomes impossible to compare one artist's output with another. The game of "Top This" falls apart. Constable and Turner had enough shared basis to be able to tell -- instantly -- that they had either won or lost a particular round. Jessica Eaton, on the other hand, has no way to even judge whether "Cfaal 403" is better or worse than, say, Gursky's "99 cent" or Molitor's "Cement Cutter." The comparison would be meaningless. The only metric available is that "Cement Cutter" would sell for $0, "Cfaal 403" for rather more, and "99 cent" for (ironically) $2,480,000.
Cement Cutter
Perhaps it's not so much post-modernism to blame here, perhaps it is after all an inevitable product of the dominance of Conceptual Art.
Another commenter remarks that there may well be schools, but they are global and diffuse. I agree, to some extent. I see in photography "collectives" at work, invariably doing street photography. They seem to have no particular shared philosophy, other than "well, we both have a lot of followers on instagram and we both think Leicas are cool" but I am perhaps being cynical here. Photography groups seem to be built around either a genre, or around a piece of gear. I have not run across any groups built around ideas of the same general shape as Dada, Cubism, or Impressionism, ideas about what Art ought to do and how best to go about doing that.
The photographic community in particular talks great deal about how best to go about doing it, but very little about what "it" might be.
John Berger tells us that between Michelangelo and the French Revolution, western painters may be viewed as, metaphorically, painting theater, that they were painting set pieces intended not to reflect nature but to improve upon it. This is indeed a philosophical fragment, which you can see in the paintings (at any rate I recognize the idiom, and assume Berger has gotten the dates right for me). Was this hammered out in tea shops over cigarettes and through shouted arguments? Probably not. Perhaps it arose simply out of painters copying one another's ideas.
Dada, on the other hand, was absolutely hammered out in cafes, with both cigarettes and shouting, as well as written screeds. Many 19th and 20th century Art Movements are supported by lengthy essays detailing the underpinnings, some occasionally written by the practitioners themselves.
"Schools" of Art are, as near as I can tell, some blend of in-the-moment philosophy together with after-the-fact critical analysis. The "theater" model for the aforementioned period of western painting might in fact have been invisible to the painters themselves, as water is invisible to the fish. To us, in the here and now, it is painfully obvious. The blend of these two ingredients varies from school to school, it appears.
The common thread, as I see it, is that there is some underlying philosophy, some set of ideas, that is in play; and at the same time there is a collection of practitioners working from, very approximately, the same set of ideas and playing a game of "Top This!" We see this played out in the most explicit possible way when, in 1832, JMW Turner adds a red bouy to his painting -- after it has been hung -- so that it competes favorably with John Constable's painting hung nearby. How aware the practitioners are of these ideas, how many screeds they write or do not write on the topic, seems to be beside the point.
When this happens, this game, you can spur better and better executions of these underlying ideas. The underlying ideas are clarified, they change, they are altered this way and that, but the general thrust toward better and better work (in some sense) is driven forward sometimes at a furious pace. Competition and collaboration produce growth, clarity, and a whole pile of related works. The pile of works then enables later critical analysis, understanding, of what was going on. One impressionist painting is just a fuzzy picture. 100 of them is interesting, and makes clear what these guys were up to. See also Cubism, although I will grant that 100 cubist paintings, or a million, might not suffice to make clear what the hell they were up to.
I suppose it makes a certain sense that in this modern era in which Art is essentially all conceptual, that competition would naturally turn to having better concepts, rather than superior executions of an underlying concept. A comment on the previous remarks states unequivocally that "a cult of individuality" is the "core directive" to students in at least one institution. If "concept" gets conflated with "process" then the competition degenerates into one of inventing the most absurdly Rube Golbergian process for making a piece of art, which certainly seems to accurately characterize a depressing amount of what we see.
Even if concept doesn't degenerate in this way, you still get work from one artist that is incomparable with the work of other artists. The concept is, as far as I can tell, kind of the base layer, the foundation. Art doesn't go down any further. Without any common foundation, without a common basis, it becomes impossible to compare one artist's output with another. The game of "Top This" falls apart. Constable and Turner had enough shared basis to be able to tell -- instantly -- that they had either won or lost a particular round. Jessica Eaton, on the other hand, has no way to even judge whether "Cfaal 403" is better or worse than, say, Gursky's "99 cent" or Molitor's "Cement Cutter." The comparison would be meaningless. The only metric available is that "Cement Cutter" would sell for $0, "Cfaal 403" for rather more, and "99 cent" for (ironically) $2,480,000.
Perhaps it's not so much post-modernism to blame here, perhaps it is after all an inevitable product of the dominance of Conceptual Art.
Another commenter remarks that there may well be schools, but they are global and diffuse. I agree, to some extent. I see in photography "collectives" at work, invariably doing street photography. They seem to have no particular shared philosophy, other than "well, we both have a lot of followers on instagram and we both think Leicas are cool" but I am perhaps being cynical here. Photography groups seem to be built around either a genre, or around a piece of gear. I have not run across any groups built around ideas of the same general shape as Dada, Cubism, or Impressionism, ideas about what Art ought to do and how best to go about doing that.
The photographic community in particular talks great deal about how best to go about doing it, but very little about what "it" might be.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Art sans Philosophy
Recently profiled on Luminous Landscape we find the artist Jessica Eaton, yet another Canadian doing fairly safe and not very interesting photography. No surprise there. While I am not here today to bust Eaton's chops, let us anyways begin with a discussion of her methods which, I assure you, will be relevant to what I am going to say later.
Eaton has done a bunch of different things, all cut more or less from the same cloth, but her most recent series of work is a bunch of color photographs made in the same way. She has a large collection of boxes, all painted neutral grey, which can be nested in to one another. She loads a sheet of color film into her camera, and starts in making many many exposures on the same sheet of film. First she might expose a big box through a blue filter. Next she might place a smaller box inside the big box, and expose the pair through a green filter. The outer box is now colored from both the blue and the green exposure, while the inner one is merely green. Repeat for, well, quite a long time. She gets a composite picture of a bunch of nested squares, all different colors.
The results, which you can look up by googling Cfaal, all pretty much look the same. A bunch of colored, nested, squares. Classic abstract art, produced by willfully difficult and capricious means.
If you poke around to see what has been written about Eaton and her art, it is mostly the same. Breathless discussion of her methods, and the money quote from Eaton which is Sol LeWitt's idea: "you find the most beautiful unobtrusive object that can be used over and over again until it disappears, and the idea becomes the subject" which seems to be the totality of her philosophy of art. It begs the question, what idea is is that's becoming the subject? Is it the idea of the idea becoming the subject? Because that's stupid.
Eaton, apparently, has no ideas, she is merely making attractive, marketable, objects and blathering around the edges to create the impression of something deep. In this, to be sure, Eaton is not alone. This is SOP in her industry, and I will say that her objects are really very attractive.
Putting on my proper critic's hat I more or less immediately observe that Eaton is engaged in a process known as "photomontage" which has a rich history dating back to the early 20th century. A reasonable critical approach might be to note that, and then to sketch out some of the prior Art as it were. Early photomontage was often very political, there was a lot of work on representing, say, the plight (or the nobility) of workers, that sort of thing. There were a lot of pretty robust ideas in play here, which may be why nobody drags out this line for Eaton -- her complete dearth of ideas becomes hideously apparent in this comparison.
But again, this is not particularly Eaton's fault. The vast majority of Art made today is done without any ideas. There do not appear to be any philosophical schools of Art any more. There are no Cubists, Impressionists, Precisionists. There is no analog of Classical or Renaissance art today. It may be simply that the art historians haven't got around to categorizing things, but I suspect this isn't it at all. We appear to be in a period of free-for-all, where artists simply pick and choose whatever they like, defending all with a shrill cry of "well it's all just subjective, innit!!!11!!"
It is naturally in the area of photography where I am perhaps least unqualified to speak. In the Victorian era we had strong philosophical bases, drawn from painting initially and then Emerson trundles up with his basket of ideas (lifted, at least in part from still more painters - the Impressionists). A little later on we see Sadakichi Hartmann leading (?) a charge for straight photography which meets up with Modernism and spins off a bunch of different things each with fairly firm ideas about what is good and what is not. You get Clarence White's school, you get Stieglitz suddenly having a love affair with Paul Strand, you get the f/64 people out west. You see the Europeans doing all kinds of crazy stuff (highly political photomontage, in particular).
I think it is not really a coincidence that the wheels fall off this train right around the time post-modernism rears its profoundly ugly head.
While there are I think more subgenres of postmodernism and related ideas than there ever were practitioners, and the whole mess is infernally complicated and subtle, what seems to have gotten taken away as practical advice is a set of useless bullshit like: there's no such thing as truth or beauty, everything is relative, historical context is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the text, everything is subjective.
As a basis for a philosophy of art, this sort of thing just turns into an excuse for self-indulgent idiocy.
Even if two people did get together and say "wow, you and I have some of the same ideas about Art, maybe we should work together" it would get torn down, I suspect, by others. Two people sharing an idea sounds a bit absolutist, doesn't it? Sounds a bit like you're trying to shove your dogma down our throats, eh? One person with an idea is just getting in touch with his feelings, two people is a school. Schools are dangerous, bad, and not at all in line with getting in touch with your feelings.
Your average bloke with a camera, of course, doesn't cite postmodernism. Still, he tends to become very grumpy if you say "look, what you're doing is Pictorialism, and there's a whole body of thought on that you might want to check in to before racing off too far down that road." No, he's finding his own damn way, thank you very much, and he doesn't need your help to produce his hopelessly naive and derivative pictures. He is justified not by his own research into postmodernism, but by the whole environment that is informed by postmodernism (I think).
Perhaps this bloke reads the profile of Jessica Eaton. It may not occur to him that she hasn't got any ideas, or any underlying philosophy, but he certainly isn't going to learn anything like serious artists work from an underlying philosophy from a profile of Eaton, or really of most other serious artists working today. So, he will see no need to have such a thing, and attempts to supply him with one will seem pointless and kind of egg-headed to him. Also, of course, a baseline philosophy of do whatever the hell you want, it doesn't matter is pretty much always going to sell well.
However, it turns out that one of the distinctions between second-raters and first-raters, even today, is a doggedly persistent attachment to an idea, or ideas. Whether you love or hate Sally Mann, Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson, if you have anything more than a very slight familiarity with them you would have no trouble articulating a few lines on what underlying ideas seem to be informing their work.
It is this essential feature that, to me, seems to illustrate the difference between the bush-league artist, the second-rater, and the first-rater.
I have spent quite a lot of time in museums filled with second rate art, and quite a lot of time in museums with the other sort. There's a difference. The former is usually incoherent and, when something like an idea peeks through, it is generally whiny, derivative, and un-nuanced. One-note might also apply. The latter feels quite different, whether or not you can articulate the ideas on the spot you feel them, and if you're interested enough and take the time you can later articulate them pretty clearly.
Having ideas is of course no guarantee of success. Even dogged and singular attachment to one or more ideas doesn't seem to be much of a guarantee. The converse, however, is true. The top tier artists tend to have ideas, and to stick to them. Even in the cruel light of postmodernism, they are distinctly different, distinctly better, and people want their art more.
What we lack in this era is the kind of schools that used to turn up. Around a Cindy Sherman in 1920, we'd see a crew of enthusiasts who share her ideas on "male gaze" or whatever, more or less, and they'd rent a house together and start bashing out photographs at a mad pace, photographing one another and writing angry screeds and getting drunk and fighting. Out of this maelstrom you'd get a handful of very strong artists, and a larger handful of hangers-on making shabby (but at least still idea-rich) copies of the better ones. Sherman's work would have come out quite different, because it would have been informed by late night conversations with peers who were willing not only to drink with her, but punch her, and who were in the end just as good at this as she is.
Somehow this doesn't happen any more. Is there some cult of individuality in Art Schools? I think there is at least a frantic desire not to be seen as doing the same thing as someone else, which can be a gigantic handicap, and really prevents the kind of wine-fueled collaboration and cross-fertilization that from time to time has happened in the past. Can I somehow construct a labored indictment of postmodernism out of this, as well?
Not so far! But I do kind of want to launch a school of photography, except I don't know how.
I like drinking, and I could probably manage a little fighting, so I'm set.
Eaton has done a bunch of different things, all cut more or less from the same cloth, but her most recent series of work is a bunch of color photographs made in the same way. She has a large collection of boxes, all painted neutral grey, which can be nested in to one another. She loads a sheet of color film into her camera, and starts in making many many exposures on the same sheet of film. First she might expose a big box through a blue filter. Next she might place a smaller box inside the big box, and expose the pair through a green filter. The outer box is now colored from both the blue and the green exposure, while the inner one is merely green. Repeat for, well, quite a long time. She gets a composite picture of a bunch of nested squares, all different colors.
The results, which you can look up by googling Cfaal, all pretty much look the same. A bunch of colored, nested, squares. Classic abstract art, produced by willfully difficult and capricious means.
If you poke around to see what has been written about Eaton and her art, it is mostly the same. Breathless discussion of her methods, and the money quote from Eaton which is Sol LeWitt's idea: "you find the most beautiful unobtrusive object that can be used over and over again until it disappears, and the idea becomes the subject" which seems to be the totality of her philosophy of art. It begs the question, what idea is is that's becoming the subject? Is it the idea of the idea becoming the subject? Because that's stupid.
Eaton, apparently, has no ideas, she is merely making attractive, marketable, objects and blathering around the edges to create the impression of something deep. In this, to be sure, Eaton is not alone. This is SOP in her industry, and I will say that her objects are really very attractive.
Putting on my proper critic's hat I more or less immediately observe that Eaton is engaged in a process known as "photomontage" which has a rich history dating back to the early 20th century. A reasonable critical approach might be to note that, and then to sketch out some of the prior Art as it were. Early photomontage was often very political, there was a lot of work on representing, say, the plight (or the nobility) of workers, that sort of thing. There were a lot of pretty robust ideas in play here, which may be why nobody drags out this line for Eaton -- her complete dearth of ideas becomes hideously apparent in this comparison.
But again, this is not particularly Eaton's fault. The vast majority of Art made today is done without any ideas. There do not appear to be any philosophical schools of Art any more. There are no Cubists, Impressionists, Precisionists. There is no analog of Classical or Renaissance art today. It may be simply that the art historians haven't got around to categorizing things, but I suspect this isn't it at all. We appear to be in a period of free-for-all, where artists simply pick and choose whatever they like, defending all with a shrill cry of "well it's all just subjective, innit!!!11!!"
It is naturally in the area of photography where I am perhaps least unqualified to speak. In the Victorian era we had strong philosophical bases, drawn from painting initially and then Emerson trundles up with his basket of ideas (lifted, at least in part from still more painters - the Impressionists). A little later on we see Sadakichi Hartmann leading (?) a charge for straight photography which meets up with Modernism and spins off a bunch of different things each with fairly firm ideas about what is good and what is not. You get Clarence White's school, you get Stieglitz suddenly having a love affair with Paul Strand, you get the f/64 people out west. You see the Europeans doing all kinds of crazy stuff (highly political photomontage, in particular).
I think it is not really a coincidence that the wheels fall off this train right around the time post-modernism rears its profoundly ugly head.
While there are I think more subgenres of postmodernism and related ideas than there ever were practitioners, and the whole mess is infernally complicated and subtle, what seems to have gotten taken away as practical advice is a set of useless bullshit like: there's no such thing as truth or beauty, everything is relative, historical context is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the text, everything is subjective.
As a basis for a philosophy of art, this sort of thing just turns into an excuse for self-indulgent idiocy.
Even if two people did get together and say "wow, you and I have some of the same ideas about Art, maybe we should work together" it would get torn down, I suspect, by others. Two people sharing an idea sounds a bit absolutist, doesn't it? Sounds a bit like you're trying to shove your dogma down our throats, eh? One person with an idea is just getting in touch with his feelings, two people is a school. Schools are dangerous, bad, and not at all in line with getting in touch with your feelings.
Your average bloke with a camera, of course, doesn't cite postmodernism. Still, he tends to become very grumpy if you say "look, what you're doing is Pictorialism, and there's a whole body of thought on that you might want to check in to before racing off too far down that road." No, he's finding his own damn way, thank you very much, and he doesn't need your help to produce his hopelessly naive and derivative pictures. He is justified not by his own research into postmodernism, but by the whole environment that is informed by postmodernism (I think).
Perhaps this bloke reads the profile of Jessica Eaton. It may not occur to him that she hasn't got any ideas, or any underlying philosophy, but he certainly isn't going to learn anything like serious artists work from an underlying philosophy from a profile of Eaton, or really of most other serious artists working today. So, he will see no need to have such a thing, and attempts to supply him with one will seem pointless and kind of egg-headed to him. Also, of course, a baseline philosophy of do whatever the hell you want, it doesn't matter is pretty much always going to sell well.
However, it turns out that one of the distinctions between second-raters and first-raters, even today, is a doggedly persistent attachment to an idea, or ideas. Whether you love or hate Sally Mann, Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson, if you have anything more than a very slight familiarity with them you would have no trouble articulating a few lines on what underlying ideas seem to be informing their work.
It is this essential feature that, to me, seems to illustrate the difference between the bush-league artist, the second-rater, and the first-rater.
I have spent quite a lot of time in museums filled with second rate art, and quite a lot of time in museums with the other sort. There's a difference. The former is usually incoherent and, when something like an idea peeks through, it is generally whiny, derivative, and un-nuanced. One-note might also apply. The latter feels quite different, whether or not you can articulate the ideas on the spot you feel them, and if you're interested enough and take the time you can later articulate them pretty clearly.
Having ideas is of course no guarantee of success. Even dogged and singular attachment to one or more ideas doesn't seem to be much of a guarantee. The converse, however, is true. The top tier artists tend to have ideas, and to stick to them. Even in the cruel light of postmodernism, they are distinctly different, distinctly better, and people want their art more.
What we lack in this era is the kind of schools that used to turn up. Around a Cindy Sherman in 1920, we'd see a crew of enthusiasts who share her ideas on "male gaze" or whatever, more or less, and they'd rent a house together and start bashing out photographs at a mad pace, photographing one another and writing angry screeds and getting drunk and fighting. Out of this maelstrom you'd get a handful of very strong artists, and a larger handful of hangers-on making shabby (but at least still idea-rich) copies of the better ones. Sherman's work would have come out quite different, because it would have been informed by late night conversations with peers who were willing not only to drink with her, but punch her, and who were in the end just as good at this as she is.
Somehow this doesn't happen any more. Is there some cult of individuality in Art Schools? I think there is at least a frantic desire not to be seen as doing the same thing as someone else, which can be a gigantic handicap, and really prevents the kind of wine-fueled collaboration and cross-fertilization that from time to time has happened in the past. Can I somehow construct a labored indictment of postmodernism out of this, as well?
Not so far! But I do kind of want to launch a school of photography, except I don't know how.
I like drinking, and I could probably manage a little fighting, so I'm set.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)