The End Of The Road Which Is Always Turning Back

Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one horse open sleigh

Dashing through the snow
In a one horse open sleigh
O'er the fields we go
Laughing all the way

... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Bells on bob tail ring
Making spirits bright

O! What fun it is to laugh and sing
A sleighing song tonight

A day or two ago
I thought I'd take a ride
And soon, Miss Fanny Bright
Was seated by my side

The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
He got into a drifted bank
And then we got upsot

... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Hey!

Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride

In a one horse open sleigh

Something to look at

John Edwin Mason loves this picture of a counter-terrorism training exercise in Mauritania. He claims to have brought it up in class where, evidently, he telegraphed his affection for the picture hard enough to make his students agree with him on how great it is, and they discussed why it's great. I swear I am not making this up, it's all there on twitter.

This photo is by Laetitia Vancon, for the NY Times, and I will absolutely stipulate that as a graphic design exercise it is excellent. The color palette is on fleek, the design of form in the frame is pleasing, and there's a weird sense of drama going on.

Unfortunately for John, great photojournalism uses great design to clarify the situation, and this one... doesn't. It's a design for design's sake exercise.

The question one might ask about this photojournalistic photograph is, "what the actual fuck is going on here?"

The answer is unclear. Let's take it right to left.

The dominant figure, on the right, appears to be intently tracking a lizard on the wall just out of frame. This is, god willing, an optical illusion. Perhaps there is a doorway or corner just out of frame. Perhaps he is in fact gazing intently, and aiming his rifle, parallel to the wall. We cannot tell, because the picture is framed for visual appeal, not for information, leaving our poor rifleman looking like a guy hunting lizards with an AK. His trigger disciple is admirable, though.

Next we have a group of what appears to be two guys with three rifles, behind the first figure, some ways down the wall. They are either waving their rifles around randomly, or somewhat vaguely tracking around the sky looking for threats. There are in fact three men, one is hidden (visual confusion) and while they do not have their rifles in a safe rest position, they appear to be looking at the camera rather than sighting along their weapons. They are rather less engaged that the rightmost man.

To be honest, they look a bit like dangerous bozos waving their rifles around in one direction while looking in another.

Next we have some guy apparently pointing his rifle at the camera. Closer inspection suggests that he is intent on a point somewhere over the camera person's right shoulder (perhaps the same area the rightmost man is covering?). It requires close inspection, however. His rifle is foreshortened into a visual muddle which takes real effort to take apart.

The leftmost pair have their rifles down. One is in motion, stepping apparently behind the figure aiming past the camera, perhaps checking sightlines? The very leftmost figure appears to simply be lost in thought.

So we have two guys up front actively aiming, tracking, looking for targets to engage. Behind them, three guys with rifles up but looking at the camera. Perhaps they are sitting out this round, or preparing to step in to the exercise a moment from now. To the left, we have maybe two trainers, one active and one, um, not.

My best guess here is that we have a moment of transition. An exercise has just begun, the players are beginning to move. Trainers are ready to make corrections, other trainees are awaiting a cue. This is an inherently muddled moment, a moment that is neither one thing nor another, but rather the interval between two things.

If it's not a transitional moment, I seriously have no idea what the hell is going on. Who are those two, oops, no, three guys in back and what are they doing? What is the guy on the right so intent on? Why is the guy on the left so spaced out?

It is kind of an anti-decisive moment, it is the moment when things reach a crescendo of unclarity, that moment that is least characteristic and revealing of the unfolding event. There are at least three visually confusing muddles in this thing, one of which I am unable to sort out at all. Mood/motivation are completely unclear in at least 3 of the men, and only to be guessed at in two more.

The picture, unfortunately, lends itself to being read as a buncha dumb Africans fuckin' around with gun.s I mean, it's not this is buncha assholes standing around in the street shooting into the air, but they're not exactly coming across like a crack team of ninjas, either.

I'd like to be able to say something glib like "if these were photos of an LAPD counter-terrorism exercise it wouldn't look like this!" but google suggests otherwise. If anything, LAPD counter-terror training looks weirder and stupider. You have to google for the Israeli equivalent to get the movie-poster dangerous assholes in a badass ensemble pose shots.

But the design of this one is very nice.

The Percept

I am reading Rudolf Arnheim's book Art and Visual Perception, which is more or less a coherent survey of what was known in 1974 about how we visually perceive the world, and artworks within it. It's pretty interesting.

A core concept is the notion of a percept, that which is perceived rather than merely seen. Consider a photograph of a pair of dice, one a little further away than the other, not visually overlapping.

Each die presents itself as an irregular 6-sided figure, broken up into 4 irregular four sided sub-regions. Each sub-region is a more or less uniform pale grey, with one or more elliptical blotches of a much darker grey. One of the 6-sided figures is smaller than the other. This is the visual impression, this is what lands on the retina.

The percept on the other hand is: a pair of identically sized dice.

Were you shown the photo for only a moment, you would certainly recall that it is a pair of dice. Likely you would not recall what numbers were showing. You do not remember the visual impression, you remember the percept.

Photographers strive to see the visual impression more than other people. Through the finder, we notice whether the dice overlap in the visual field. When the dice do, the visual impression changes radically. Rather than a pair of 6-sided shapes, there is a much more complex shape that represents the two dice. Visually, it is completely different. Perceptually, the difference is negligible unless the forward die more or less completely obscures the hinder one. A slight visual overlap is almost literally discarded by our visual system, we still perceive two dice, one a little further away.

It is said that, when shown an arrangement of pieces on a chess board for a brief study, and then asked to recreate the arrangement, the expert will create a strategically similar arrangement, whereas the tyro will places individual pieces on or near their original locations. The latter arrangement may be more accurate in terms of position, but less accurate strategically. The chess expert perceives the chess board quite differently, compared with the tyro.

Most of us are expert see-ers, in the sense of being able to identify salient features of the world around us. We perceive at a fairly high, fairly abstract, level and must exert effort to see more simply, more directly, more in terms of the direct visual impression.

As a result of this hard-won technical, visual, way of seeing, photographers overrate the visual impression. While maybe nobody would urge you to "fix" your photograph of dice by eliminating a visual overlap, we are constantly reminded not to let poles "grow out of" people's heads, which is precisely the same issue. An accidental visual overlap, which may or may not be perceived by non-photographers, is a very great evil, to be cloned out or re-shot.

In reality, if the percept is clear, there is a flagpole behind the person, then let it grow out of their head. Who cares?

This brings me around to one of my perennial favorite topics, the lighting of the photographic portrait.

Lighting the face this way or that alters the visual impression radically, in ways that the enthusiastic strobist notes instantly.

The percept does not budge. Not one bit. We are people-recognizing machines, first and foremost. One light, ten lights, it doesn't matter, we're going to recognize that it's a person and read their mood instantly. We're going to perceive Aunt Sally in an instant.

We are told by strobist web sites to use short lighting on fat people, because it makes them look thinner. (Turn the face a little away from the camera to make the face visually asymmetrical, and then light up the narrowed half.) This isn't really true. We know Uncle Bill, and when we look at the picture we're not really even going to see the visual impression the picture leaves, we're going to more or less directly perceive Uncle Bill and his great moon face. Sorry, Bill.

This is not to say that short lighting is useless on Bill. This particular picture of Bill is, maybe, more flattering, even though it in no meaningful way conceals his fleshy magnificence. What it does, maybe, is allow us to recognize Bill without drawing particular attention to the dizzying breadth of his face. We are invited, rather, to dwell upon the twinkling eye and the neat haircut.

At issue here is really what it means for Bill to "look thinner." In one sense, there is no making Bill look thinner any more than there is making a die look like a hexagon. But in another sense, we can certainly emphasize or attenuate this aspect of that of Bill, or of our die. We can draw attention toward one thing and away from another. By lighting the pair of pips on top, and darkening the other visible sides, the die takes on the character of both a die, and of a rolled snake-eyes.

The die remains a die, unequivocally, but, maybe, the rolled two enters our percept of the die. We might recall the number on top.

The painter can actually paint a thinner man with Bill-like features, or can flatten a die out and render its cube-ness versus hexagon-ness ambiguous. The photographer has no such luxury, short of becoming essentially a painter.

Short of optical illusions, or painting, the photographer has to find actual real things to make the picture out of, with the assumption that they will be perceived more or less as they are. You cannot simply take a picture of a boring thing "in a way that makes it interesting," nor an ugly thing beautiful, nor a large thing small.

If the goal is to render the essentially ugly thing beautiful, you cannot really conceal the ugliness. If you yourself do not see beauty in the thing, you ought to give it up as a bad job. If, on the other hand, you see beauty in the ugly thing, then your job is not to conceal the ugliness but to reveal the beauty which you perceive. There may be more to this than simply lighting the shot and picking the viewpoint. Perhaps you need many photographs, perhaps you need words, or sound, or smell. Perhaps you need to circle the important bit with a red pen.

When you look at something, you perceive much more than the visual impression would suggest. The photograph discards most of that, leaving only a spare and limited visual impression. From that spare and limited visual impression, your audience constructs anew the percept. Your ability to manipulate that perception to match your own is remarkably limited.

Good luck!

Unreadable

The shortlisted entries for the MACK Books First Book Award are all over one of the tiny corners of the world of photography, a corner I inspect regularly. It's interesting. These are all established mid-level artists, and all are presenting what amount to finished books. These are not rough concepts, not prints pasted into a notebook (as Colberg recommends), they appear to resemble commercially-made books as much as possible.

Mid-level artists and up is MACK's bread and butter, of course. They're not in the business of breaking new talent, they're in the business of doing books with people who have exhibited, won or nearly won a few awards, and shopped a couple book dummies around the regular circuit. The cynic might say "artists with an established track record of spending fairly copious amounts of money in search of advancement."

Anyways, as noted by the illustrious Mr. Smith in a comment earlier, these books are all, um, of a type. They are all, with one exception, firmly within the bounds of standard issue glum MFA photography, which again is MACK's bread and butter. The books range from My Sad Project all the way to Huh?, again, with one exception: SHIFTERS seems to be utterly mad and potentially delightful. It has, I predict, no chance of winning, because it is charming, delightful, and would be insanely expensive to make (746 pages!)

Here is a picture from one of the books:

This is a photo by Andrea Alessandrini, from his Piccolo Russia project/book. While there are many ways in which it is not typical of all the work, there is one essential way in which it is completely typical, characteristic.

It is almost completely unreadable.

Photographs show us certain ground facts, some or all of which we note when we look at the photo. These facts, their arrangement, and so on, suggest or evoke something. The picture invites or suggests one or more narratives, explanations. We might tend to feel a certain way, and so on. Photography until recently has been explicitly about doing this better. We are taught that the photograph should reveal, it should tell a story, it should evoke an emotion, and so on.

Just as abstract art arose in response to figurative art (and by the freedom photography afforded artists to abandon figurative art) I think we're seeing a reaction to all these ideas, to this philosophy of photography. The point now is to make photographs which explicitly deny a narrative, which deny their connection to reality, which conceal rather than reveal.

This is a normal kind of reaction for a community to have. Such and such is rather tired and stale, let us do the opposite.

There are basically two difficulties to be confronted here.

There isn't much to distinguish these modern photos from accidental snaps. The hard thing is to reveal, to evoke, to tell. This is essentially the same argument as the one leveled against abstract art, my kid could do that, which turns out to be not entirely accurate. I don't think it's entirely accurate here either, but it's a lot closer. Making a Jackson Pollock is surprisingly difficult. Making a shitty photo of nothing is pretty easy. To get to proper MFA-level pointlessness you still have to cull, to be sure. Go out and try to make some of this shit, you can't just literally point it anywhere and bash the button. But they're still pretty easy to do.

Anyone with a camera, or even a phone, has probably made a few things in this line along the way. So, it's not like the hypothetical I could make a Jackson Pollock it's a much more concrete I have made a bunch of those.

The second difficulty is that, as far as I can tell, this is an unconscious trend. We get occasional junk like the review of HORIZONT on ASX: The camera wasn’t meant to work this way, producing images that push back against its discipline, against our habits of seeing which kind of leans in the direction, but mostly people are dragging out the same "critical" language as always to describe material to which it doesn't apply at all.

These pictures are not evoking a sense of place or whatever the fuck. They are not commenting on the thing, or revealing the essence of the wossname. The entire point is that they arguably do no such thing. They're defying the very idea that photographs ought to do such a thing.

I mean, kinda, anyways. I suspect that the artists themselves are not really aware that they're rebelling. They are, I assume, struggling against the visual ideas that we've been hammering for the last 150 years, and trying to find new ways to, somehow, meet the old expectations. The self-styled critics are duly declaring that they are successful, when manifestly they are failing abysmally. The whole enterprise is wandering in the wilderness.

To return to Andrea Alessandrini's photo, we can see this. Perhaps it's just an awkward momentary posture, a frozen moment of an action that, over the seconds it lasted, made perfect sense. As we see it, though, it's incomprehensible. Who is this guy and what is he doing? The picture, maybe, evokes these questions, but its complete failure to provide any suggestion of an answer leaves us (well, me, anyways) basically uninterested.

Note how common the turned back is in these things. Faces are evocative, interesting, we spin stories and ideas the instant we see them -- and so they are concealed. When we see then, the expression is invariably neutral, unevocative, demanding and suggesting no narrative, no emotion. Human figures are cropped, or turned away. Landscape and architecture is chopped down to meaningless, often confusing, details. One incomprehensible note might be framed in another incomprehensible set of material.

The effort to defy traditionally readable material has led, not surprisingly, to unreadable photographs. I think they've been so busy rejecting the details that they've perhaps not really noticed where they've ended up.

It is as if all the painters and their critics in 1900 or so had rejected every individual precept of figurative painting without ever realizing that they were inventing abstract painting.

I don't know if this place they've landed, even if it were equipped with a philosophical basis, a critical basis, would be any good. It seems anti-photographic, and in the end, it's just so damned easy and blockheaded. What we know for sure right now is that trying to make sense of this new thing using the old critical frameworks is ludicrous.

What we do not know is whether there is any new framework that can be applied in which we can make sense of these things. Nobody seems to be looking. Nobody seems to even be aware that a new framework might be a good idea.

Remixes, Mashups, and Sampling

My lovely commenters have been poking me in the brain. Thanks!

Imagine, if you will, that in 1995 someone somehow managed to print up a dozen of Ansel Adams's rejected negatives to make a new calendar of "hitherto unseen Adams photographs." The detonation would have been epic. Adams was extremely clear on his process, and those things are not Adams photographs. The rejected negatives are merely an essential part of his artistic process, but are no more Adams Photos than his development tray or his enlarger. The fact that they can be printed makes them negatives, but not Adams Photos. I think there is rather a lot of legal machinery in place to enforce this, at present, but that is beside the point.

Plus, in 1995, Adams had an army of fans who would have exploded with fury.

Consider the written word. There is a long tradition of finishing so-and-so's unfinished novel, or unearthing rejected manuscripts and printing those, of publishing the papers of so-and-so, and so on. Recently we've seen remixes, mainly adding vampires and zombies to Jane Austen's novels. The original authors involved are invariably reliable money-makers, because absolutely nobody is going to publish this second-rate stuff otherwise. Nobody will print Aunt Susie's unfinished novel which Cousin Bill wrote an ending for.

Accordingly, these things tend to be viewed as seedy money grabs, feeding a somewhat base appetite for "content" of a sort in order to cash in.

A common thread here is that the money grubber is seen as taking something very very good, and making something that's not terribly new and not terribly good out of it. Sometimes it is popular but it is rarely good.

Contrariwise, we have have Tom Phillips working away remixing a, by all accounts not very good, novel by W.H. Mallock into sort of poetry and art. This is not, I think, seen as seedy at all, and I dare say as a money-making venture it's been a complete bust. Mallock has exactly no value at the till. What Phillips is doing is transforming something bad in to something better, or at least making a credible swing at it.

Consider, now, music. Musicians have been stealing licks from one another for the entire history of music. They improvise new versions of things. They cover songs. Now they sample and remix and mash-up. They cover things and then sample their own covers and use that to make something new. One of the most wildly sampled things ever, the Amen Break, was pulled off a B-side by a minor 1960s funk band.

In music, the conceit is, as often as not, that you're making something that is either radically new, or at least as good, as what you're lifting. Judgements will be passed if you just do the same old thing, and not as well. If you make something wildly original, you might get a pass if it's sloppy. If you make the same old same old, you damn well better be tight as hell.

This brings us around to authorship.

Is A Humument authored by Phillips or Mallock? Surely the former. There is nothing of Mallock in it, really. Is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Grahame-Smith, or Austen? The bootprints of both are visible. Copyright law surrounding music, as far as this non-lawyer can discern, seems to hew mostly to the obvious standard of "Well, does it sound like so and so's thing, and is that thing more than a few seconds long and hence valuable? If so, you have to pay so and so."

To summarize: we have a general notion that remixes, mashups, and whatnot should be either better than the source material, or very different from it, ideally both; authorship ought be assigned roughly on the basis of how recognizable the original source material is.

Authorship of photography is complicated. Photography is layered.

We have the negative, which is incontrovertibly made by the photographer. It's a physical artifact, and a complete artistic object in its own right. In that sense it resembles a song, or a novel. To remove the sense of authorship, you'd have to cut it up into tiny pieces, they way you sample a song or steal a riff.

On the other hand, we have the body of work. A negative not included in the body of work might be considered the same as a riff that didn't fit the song, a turn of phrase that was edited out. Does "It was the best of times, but it was also a bad time" belong to Dickens? Is "From hell's heart, I shout at thee" Melville? Probably not. I think you can use those phrases freely and without attribution. If you're an idiot.

Is a negative a phrase, or a novel? Is a rejected negative a poorly formed phrase, a dissonant harmony, or is it a second-rate manuscript or song? Both, and neither, I think.

Vivian Maier's negatives are certainly authored by Maier, but there is no body of work at all. Which one matters for authorship? Lange's photos, edited in all senses by Sam Contis, are from negatives authored by Lange but the body of work made from them appears in some ways to fly in the face of Lange's body of work. The book is surely Contis, the negatives just as surely Lange. Nobody, I think, would look at Sam Contis's book and recognize these pictures as distinctly Lange's. They might see a hint of Sally Mann here, and a touch of Walker Evans there, and they'd see a lot of Sam Contis, but I really doubt they'd pick up on any essential Lange-ness.

The conceit is, naturally, that what we are seeing is not recognizable as old, stale, Lange-ness, specifically because it is new, fresh, Lange-ness. I am, um, not convinced. It looks a lot like Sam Contis.

Has Sam Contis written a completely new novel from the second-rate discarded phrases from early drafts of Dickens, or has she made Moby Dick and the Seven Dwarves? Is the book better than the original source material (maybe), or wildly different (probably)? Where does authorship land (ambiguous)?

Photographers are tremendous hoarders, and quite jealous of their negatives (files). Even the trashiest reject must be saved forever and ever, unless you are Bret Weston or P.H. Emerson (or me, but just because I am careless in both senses), and even that reject is mine, mine, my precious you can't have it thief! The law lands on the side of the photographer here. This in turn suggests that one must always grant authorship to the negative-maker, always and always.

I'm not convinced that it's a great idea.

That said, it was kinda shitty that the guy who whipped out the Amen Break died in poverty, so it's possible music's standard of authorship isn't great either.

Day Sleeper Sam Contis, a few Notes

This is not a review. I have not seen the book, and continue to be not terribly interested in it, although if opportunity arises to leaf through a copy I might do that.

To set the stage: Day Sleeper is a collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange, selected, cropped, and sequenced into a book by Sam Contis, the book then published by MACK. Sam Contis and Dorothea Lange appear to be listed as co-authors on the MACK site. This book has received brief notice in the Wall Street Journal (essentially a recitation of the press release) and reviews from ASX and Colberg, and presumably others. It is, to an extent, the "it" book of the moment.

I'm going to, here, provide a random smattering of details and facts, and draw some connections. I do not really intend to propose any of the connections as causal per se but I think they are of some interest regardless.

You can find a preview glance of the book on the MACK site here: Day Sleeper (click on the book cover).

Among the photos shown there is one of an dead eagle crucified on a barbed wire fence.

There is here some slight interest. This is not one of the "unearthed" photos "never before seen" that the press release goes on about. It is an FSA photo, shot in 1936, likely on Highway 99 somewhere around Fresno as Lange worked her way up from Exeter to Merced shooting migrant workers in picking season. It is a striking and uncharacteristic photo. Lange simply didn't shoot this kind of thing for the FSA.

One might speculate that it was unusual enough a sight to catch her eye, cause her to pull over, and to record it.

The eagle might have been hung to deter birds, either other eagles or perhaps birds that fear eagles, but to deter them from what I cannot imagine. The field behind appears to be pasture and while an eagle might harass your sheep you wouldn't, by preference, fence sheep with barbed wire. The foreground I think is likely just the ditch beside the highway. Possibly it's just a trophy, or a macabre sense of humor. Anyways, it caught Lange's attention.

The caption describes it as "A very blue eagle" which is probably a joke. Obviously, one can construe the eagle as very sad. Possibly it is a reference to the blue eagle logo of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) which administered parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). This was a very pro-union but problematic set of legal machinery intended to repair the economy. This was quite popular, but was overturned in May of 1935, about a year before Lange photographed this eagle.

It is possible that Lange photographed the eagle as a kind of commentary. She was, after all, working literally daily with the people this agency and law were supposed to help, and was at the time working for a sister agency. One could argue, I suppose, that the NRA was the industrial/urban counterpart of the RA (FSA-precursor) that employed Lange.

It's a stretch, but it does provide, after a fashion, something of an explanation for this weird photo Lange took. It is also possible that whoever hung the eagle might have intended it as a protest against the overturning of the NIRA.

Onwards.

This is not the first time in the modern era that Lange's blue eagle has turned up. It was also the cover of a 2018 album, Furore, by an Italian guitarist named Simone Massaron. Hold on to that date.

Sam Contis did a book in 2017 with MACK, of her own work and some archival material, called Deep Springs which is about Deep Springs College which is one of these tiny weird places where you work at some back to the land shit to build character while studying some no doubt absurdly out of date curriculum. Contis was photographing just prior to the college starting to actually admit women, I think, while it was in the throes of ditching its all-male status.

You can watch someone leaf through the book in this video, I recommend clicking the little gear-shaped tool and selecting a slowed-down playback speed. 0.5 or 0.25. Note the obsession with abstracted bodies, with hands, with people lying down apparently asleep.

Note the dead eagle, held in a crucified position, at time mark 0:50.

If you have not already, I suggest that you look through the preview of Day Sleeper on the MACK site.

I might glibly say that Day Sleeper and Deep Springs are the same book, but that would be unfair. They share a lot. Not just MACK's random approach to picture placement, either. There are hands, there are day sleepers, there is landscape, there are abstracted bodies, and there is a crucified eagle in both books.

Recall now the dates:

2017 - Deep Springs
2018 - Furore
2019 - Day Sleeper

Is it a stretch to suggest that Contis made the first book, then saw the album cover, recognized the eagle, and went looking for Lange's pictures? Yes. Is it possible? Yep, the timeline works just fine, and there's absolutely no way Contis doesn't connect the two eagles. The only real speculation here is whether the music album provides a link.

Anyways.

Flipping through the photos easily accessible from the two books we see, pretty clearly I think, that Day Sleeper is made up of Sam Contis photos that happen to have been shot by Dorothea Lange. There was some careful selection, some cropping, and some printing/post involved to execute the transformation, but that's what it is.

The standard critical conceit has been, and no doubt will continue to be, that Contis is shedding new light on Lange here, that we are re-discovering Lange, blah blah blah.

This is bullshit. What we are seeing here is a recapitulation of the Vivian Maier story.

We know what Dorothea Lange was about, she made her statement. She selected this negative and not that one. She printed this, and not that. There is no mystery to Lange as an artist. There is also, of course, a good sized slush pile. The Oakland Archive, which Contis mined, contains 25,000 negatives and it is perhaps notable than even with 25,000 pictures she could not assemble the book she wanted without also dipping into the FSA archives.

What Sam Contis appears to have done here is to construct a simulation of Sam Contis out of materials from Lange, in much the same way that Maloof constructed a sort of Frankenstein's monster sewn together from parts of other photographers out of Maier's materials.

This is an interesting phenomenon, and I dare say as more and more photographers give up taking pictures to "work with archives" we'll see more and more of this kind construct lumbering around. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I think we need better language to describe this process. Contis (and Maloof) have constructed genuinely new things, things which should not really be ascribed to the original photographer but which cannot justifiably be fully claimed by the editor.

It is, obviously, possible to construct a whole bunch of different "artistic entities" given an archive of negatives. What should we call these things, and how should we talk about them?

Something to look at

Here's a picture to look at. Readingthepictures.org had something to say about it, which I will read later. I have some guesses, but ultimately I don't care.

Read it. Predictably, it's a recitation of their political stance with only the vaguest reference to the pictures, and a merry round of imputation of motives to the people in the pictures which is exactly the kind of thing that stands beyond the boundaries of what a photograph can tell you.

If you know what the picture is of, your reaction will be almost certainly almost 100% dictated by your politics, so let us try to set that aside and instead see what there is to be seen.

We see an armed figure, in front of a more or less grand hall. The room behind the figure looks official, fancy, governmental. The flag indicates the USA. Behind the figure there is a sign indicating NO ACCESS. The figure occupies the approximate position and attitude of a guard, although one would expect a cheap polyester uniform and, at most, a sidearm on a guard located there, not this quasi-military figure.

The figure himself is not military. No insignia, and the "uniform" is honestly not that well put together, stylistically. The mask suggests a, um, looser organization.

The angle is quite low, and the lens is wide. We're fairly close to the figure, the photographer was at some pains to make him "loom" in a slightly authoritative way. The frame feels tilted, although it is not, creating maybe a sense of dynamism in an otherwise static tableau. As a side note, the apparent vanishing point of the architectural features of the room more or less exactly balances the armed figure in the frame. Arnheim's chapter on "Space" in paintings, which I just read, has a lot to say on these things.

This sort of visual suggests either an invader guarding a seized property, or a defender protecting against such invaders who are presumably imminent (otherwise we'd see a rent-a-cop not this guy). The character of the figure's dress and arms speaks of an emergency, or dire circumstance, but we're free to interpret the role of the man as defender or invader. To my inexpert eye, he appears to be handling his weapon in a safe and responsible manner (muzzle to the floor, trigger finger lying alongside the guard.)

This might be considered to reference movie and video game posters. It takes no time at all to dig up this promo for a popular war game:

which picture has the same ambiguity. Is this a good guy or a bad guy? Note that unlike the guy above, this rendered figure is handling his weapon like a moron.

This poster styling was created entirely by the photographer. This is, ultimately, just some mook with a gun standing there. He could have been photographed in a dozen different ways, and the photographer chose this one. We might, tentatively, suspect that the photographer was going for some commentary on the ultimately theatrical nature of what's going on here. But then, real wars are generally given to us as theatrical entertainments too, aren't they? Where is the line?

This guy is, it turns out, one of a group of gun-rights advocates who spent some time wandering around the Capitol building of Kentucky's legislature. He and the people on his side of the political spectrum certainly view themselves as the good guys, defending the rights of American Citizens. And, to be fair, that is exactly what he is doing. Under contemporary interpretations, these are rights held by American Citizens, and public exercise of existing rights is a long-standing and well-recognized method for defending rights. What these guys are up to has a lot in common with walking a path annually to assert and maintain an existing right-of-way.

Obviously there is an opposing view, one which I hold, which is that these rights are stupid and ought to be reduced. We see this fellow as an invader, defending a seized property (the legislature of Kentucky in this case) and would prefer to see him ejected. This is, shall we say, an ongoing debate in the USA.

Notable among the things we cannot see is any real estimate of the man's character. We cannot tell if he is a hero, a coward, a racist, or just someone's son bullied in to showing up here and feeling like an idiot. We can, at best, tentatively assign him to a political movement, and then recall things we have read about beliefs generally held by members of that movement.

Signs and Portents

If you spend much time with contemporary photography books, of the Serious Art variety, you will start to notice repeated tropes. Let us take for our example the suburban landscape, which indicates modern life is hell, but we lie to ourselves about it. There are other tropes which you can go locate yourself if you like. This one references "Edward Scissorhands", "Stepford Wives" and a jillion other movies. It references, maybe, New Topographics, and probably loads of other stuff.

The point is that the photo of suburban landscape is as much a citation of other sources as it is anything else. Frequently, it seems to be little more than a citation.

These things might be blended with some other stuff, indicating which bits of modern life are hell. In American Origami Gonzales mixes his suburban snaps with pictures of teddy bears and testimony about school shootings. Here it is, he says, the hell that lies behind the facade. Kleinstadt has some other ideas, and so on.

These things form a sort of simple language, not unlike words. The signifier (the picture) is dragged out, the signified (life is hell) is duly indicated, just as the word "dog" indicates the four legged nose-transportation system.

This makes life a lot easier for an MFA student, to be sure. Whether there is an actual vocabulary lesson somewhere in the curriculum or not, it is pretty obvious that they are absorbing this vocabulary. It's just a couple dozen grunts without any noticeable grammar, so it's not too hard to pick up. Lucy Soutter's piece Should I do a Photography MA makes this pretty clear. The point of an MA (MFA) is to learn to make work that refers to the work of other Serious (i.e. MFA-holding) Artists, and the obvious way to do this is to a) have and to b) deploy a fairly detailed visual language.

Indeed, I think that in this kind of incestuous hothouse environment a language will almost certainly arise. The whole point is, arguably, to devise a kind of visual slang that only the insiders really understand (although, to be honest, it's not very hard to work out most of it from the outside.)

Contrast this with reality.

In some ways, the real world has language-like properties. The tracks of the raccoon in the mud signify the recent presence of the trash panda, just as surely as the word "dog" signifies the furry nose-transporter, and as surely as the suburban landscape signifies hell on earth. And yet, there also certainly a difference of character here. If nothing else, the signifier of the footprint has infinite depth. You might notice that the raccoon is missing a toe, you might follow the path and guess about intent. The footprint is rooted in reality, it literally rests here in the real world and as such is inextricably entangled with an infinitude of detail.

People talk about "the language of the forest" or whatever, and in some ways they are not wrong. In other, important, ways, it's completely idiotic to talk like that.

The word is a simplification, an abstraction, intended to carry a specific cloud of meaning. Post-modernists will tell you, not incorrectly, that it derives its meaning mostly from the other words around it. Meaning is drawn in through tendrils spreading out through the abstract universe of language and of thought.

The footprint derives its meaning mostly from the other physical details around it. Meaning is drawn in from the actual universe of real things.

The photograph, to my mind, naturally occupies a middle ground here. It is itself rooted in reality, albeit not as firmly as the raccoon's footprint. The sometimes almost infinite detail of the frame contextualizes the subject in a way, to a degree and depth, that mere words cannot.

We can make a photograph that evokes, that signifies in the same way the raccoon's footprint can, it signifies by reference not to the other signs that surround it, but by reference to the real world.

I think one could make the argument that Barthes and his stupid punctum idea are essentially aimed at this. The punctum supposedly reifies the photograph, binds it emotionally to the real world, wherein, then, it gathers its meaning. Without punctum, Barthes claims, the photo is naught but studium, it is nothing but coded meaning. Its meaning derives from the symbols we connect to it rather than from the real world it is drawn from. Perhaps either Barthes or I am taking this a bit too far, I am on the record as stating that I think punctum doesn't exist.

The photograph ought to, I think, reach into the real world to find its meaning. The power of the photograph lies specifically in how lightly it mediates, how minimally it separates us from reality and how little it allows the artist to impose a system of abstract signs onto the picture. The point of the photograph is that the photographer discovered meaning in the world, they spotted the raccoon's footprint, they chose to reveal it to us not as a metaphor for something but rather as the actual trace of the animal itself.

I think that photographs which are built on reality, especially rather than a sort of callow language devised in Art Schools, are better photographs. Or, at any rate, more inherently photographic.

On Critical Writing: A Poem

Feral packs of prepositional phrases roam
modifying the weak and the young

Adrift, verbs activate anything too slow to escape
anything
everything
verbless

Pull quotes blunder through the text
like particularly stupid elephants
quoting random scraps of drivel
it doesn't matter

A rectangular word-blob hangs feckless on the page
meaning nothing
smelling vaguely of stale knock-off erudition

The whole corpulent edifice trembles
wobbles
speaks
moistly
slurring as it were through thick drunken lips

"I read a lot but nothing really
  adheres
  but I learned to write this way from my peers
  endless winding phrases turgid with semiotic weight
  never realized
  unconnected
  with a period dropped in whenever I remember to do that
  and then I remind myself
  to capitalize
  The next word."

This poem is available as a limited edition Ultraprint

here.

ASX

American Suburb X is a weird mixture of stuff. On the one hand, it's an "archive" which is a nice way of saying "it's a big pile of plagiarized material" which material is often pretty good. There's also contemporary content, there are people writing reviews and things for it, and some of those things are ok.

And then there's Brad. Brad Feuerhelm. Is he a robot, an industry in-joke I don't get? Or is he a real person? If real, is he some lunatic living in a cabin in the woods with 200 cats and a half tonne of meth? Or is he actually a real industry person that people take seriously? The last is what appears to be the case, but I am starting to question it. He's written most recently on something something Dorothea Lange. I honestly didn't get past the first paragraph, but he seems to be talking, as everyone else is, about "recently unearthed works" by Lange. I don't really care. Lange is fine, but dredging through people's castoffs is not a particularly interesting passtime.

Here's the first paragraph, though. Three sentences. I'm pretty sure that what he's trying to say here is when we look at pictures taken some time ago, we see them in new ways. Let us take a few minutes to mock the idiotic word salad he has produced instead.

History generally presents itself to the future in visual terms that signify the distance between the two points of time from its creation and its re-purposing and its re-examination. The fallacy in photographic terms of historical representation and its distribution of intent are intertwined between reason and audience over the passing of linear and political time. Time and the changes that govern its passing, in ideological order or other affect the way in which we unpack or re-evaluate the historical image.

Let's take a shot at making sense of this shit. First sentence:

History generally presents itself to the future in visual terms that signify the distance between the two points of time from its creation and its re-purposing and its re-examination.

Dropping some adverbs and adjectives, just try to get a handle on the subject/verb/object business, I think the sentence comes out as:

History presents itself to the future in terms that signify the distance between two points of time.

Obviously History does not actually present itself so we ought to read this idiomatically, in the sense that we, in the future, do or will see history, do or will understand history, in this way. What way?

Backing up we see this phrase: in visual terms. Does this mean that we understand history in visual terms? Or does it mean that, while we understand history in many ways, the visual terms are the ones Brad would like to discuss? It's anybody's guess! He's made such a hash out of his lede that you can't tell! Whichever it is, the visual terms are the ones we're apparently interested in

Whatever the status of the visual terms on which, through which, we understand history in the future, those terms apparently signify something. What?

the distance between the two points of time from its creation and its re-purposing and its re-examination.

To be honest, it's not clear that its even has an antecedent here, but the only candidate in play is History so let us proceed on that basis. History's creation I guess is... when the stuff happened? And the other point in time is when History gets re-purposed and re-examined.

Ok, so guess we can assume that some history is re-examined or re-purposed some time after it happens? But isn't that kind of.. always? I'm pretty sure Brad means now here, or, whatever time we look at pictures from the past and attempt to make sense of them. The gap he is lugubriously laboring toward is, likely, the gap between then and now.

So the claim is that, the visual terms on which we understand history somehow signify that gap, that interval between then and now? Or whatever the interval Brad means is?

This is just gibberish. It sounds erudite and so on, but when you actually attempt to force the sentence to mean something, it simply falls apart into meaningless garbage.

Onwards. Sentence #2, my favorite sentence:

The fallacy in photographic terms of historical representation and its distribution of intent are intertwined between reason and audience over the passing of linear and political time.

Again, let us start be clearing the modifiers away to get to the skeleton of the sentence. The verb is are intertwined which is plural, but the subject appears to simply be a fallacy, which is singular. It's possible we're looking at a grammatical error, and the sentence parses as:

The fallacy are intertwined between reason and audience.

Or possibly the fallacy and the distribution are together the subject:

The fallacy and its distribution of intent are intertwined between reason and audience.

I guess the latter might be the idea here? So the fallacy of historical representation, and the distribution of its intent (I have no idea what the antecedent of its is here, it could be goddamn near anything — fallacy, distribution, and representation are all in play) are two things, which are intertwined between two other things. Is this some sort of net suspended between reason and audience? This visual makes no sense.

Apparently this happens over the passing of time, but not merely time, two different kinds of time. The linear, and the political.

Ok, so, pretty sure this one is just gibberish too. Again, any kind of examination of what it actually means causes it to collapse sobbing in a pile of ambiguous antecedents and verbs in vain search of a subject. Even after you shotgun-marry pronouns to antecedents and verbs to subjects, it still comes out as something are intertwined between something (else?) over the passing of time which doesn't actually mean anything. Does one even intertwine between things?

Sentence three, the home stretch:

Time and the changes that govern its passing, in ideological order or other affect the way in which we unpack or re-evaluate the historical image.

Crush it:

Time and changes affect the way we unpack or re-valuate the image.

We could be looking at a singular subject and a plural verb, yielding Time affect the way we unpack etc but let us generously assume the Brad has matched his plural verb with a plural subject. Don't worry, it doesn't help to assume the other way around (try it if you like!)

I have no idea what the changes that govern its (Time's?) passing might even be. Doesn't time just kind of... go? Without a lot of governance? What on earth is supposed to be in ideological order or other I have no idea. The changes are possible, but also this prepositional phrase could be modifying the governence itself. Either the changes are in order, or the the way the changes govern the passing of time take place under the aegis of ideological order (or other). There's no way to know.

This one, while grammatically a mess, does seem to be desperately trying to convey meaning, to wit, Time changes the way we interpret pictures.

So, 2.5 for 3. Way to go, Brad.

And now you know why I didn't make it past the first paragraph.

The Telling Photo

When I am presented with a photo, or maybe a little group of photos in a book, portfolio, or show, I assume that these pictures have been selected from a larger collection of pictures, that they have been singled out as special somehow.

There are endless reasons one might select this photo over that. Perhaps this one reveals something. Perhaps it simply goes better with that other photo. Perhaps it is of a unique occurrence, or perhaps it most clearly illustrates a common occurrence. And on, and on. It does not much matter what the rationale is for selecting this photo, or these 30 photos, out of the larger mass.

Indeed, there need not even be a rationale. There are probably reasons for showing me 27 pictures selected at random. The point is that I will not, as a base assumption, assume that this is what you're up to. I will assume, absent other information, that photos you show me are special, that they are for some reason telling photographs.

Further, my assumption is that your rationale should be in some sense clear. A rationale that cannot be discerned is the same, to me, as no rationale at all.

That is, when you show me a photo or a group of 32 photos, or a book, I am justified, I think, in attempting to work out what binds these pictures together, what reason you had for selecting these over others. This may seem obvious, even blockheaded, but I want to be very very clear here: the rationale under which you selected these pictures is, to my way of thinking, pretty much the point. These photos are, I imagine, telling photos, and it is my job to work out why. The thing you are trying to tell me, the experience you want me to have, is, in my mind, inextricably bound up in the whatever-it-is that makes these photos more special, and that makes the ones you edited out less special.

Obviously, I could point to any number of MFA photo books which serve as examples of not doing this. The seemingly random collection of photographs of nothing at all is more or less the bread and butter of the Art Making class.

Let us instead examine the work of Street Photographers, Simon King's Instagram to be precise. He uses the same set of graphical/visual tropes everyone else in the genre uses. The Intimate Moment, the Amusing Juxtaposition, The Tiny Silhouette, and of course the every popular What The Fuck. Sometimes he rolls out The Interesting Face.

All of these have the general scent of the Telling Photo, but they are not. They in fact perfectly ordinary snaps which reveal nothing special, are of nothing special. They are Untelling Photos which, having been rendered in high contrast black and white, and having a certain strongly graphical quality, signal that they are Telling Photos.

Consider this photo (mine, copying the trope,) a standard issue Tiny Silhouette:

It feels portentous, potent, as if it ought to be a metaphor for something, or whatever. Indeed, paired with the right surrounding material, I might accept it as a metaphor for man's inherent solitude or whatever. By itself, it is portent without content. It's just a person walking down an alley. Compare with this:

This is just a guy sitting with one girl, looking at another girl. It's my fake Winogrand, which long-time readers are probably thoroughly sick of. This is, I argue, a telling photograph because it reveals particularly well a specific, common, social moment. When a pretty girl walks in to a coffee shop, men look at her. This is common, but in this era it is a slightly fraught social moment, and this photograph does a particularly good job of summarizing it.

Most people with a cultural background remotely similar to mine will recognize it in a moment, and cringe slightly.

People walking down alleys is just as common, but it is not an interesting social phenomenon, and my photograph does not do a particularly thrilling job of explicating it, anyways. There is no reaction to a person walking down an alley, it is an action which carries little or no weight.

The alley photo, my Tiny Silhouette, is vastly stronger as a graphical object but isn't in any meaningful way a telling photo. I can bang them out all day, and so can Simon King, and nothing will ever be revealed by them.

Is it OK to just go shoot masses of graphically strong photographs signifying nothing?

Of course it is, do what you will. When, however, you put these things up on instagram, or put them in a book, or on a wall, I am going to look for something more than graphical strength.

King, and other Senior Street Photographers, spend a remarkable amount of time writing sort of thin think-pieces in which they say, essentially, that their graphically strong photographs are actually really great, because they are made by storytellers. King is a storyteller. What stories he tells, I am unsure, beyond well, that appears to be yet another picture of a human being, and humans usually have some sort of story?

In the same way, the MFA photobook can generally be viewed as a bunch of nothing photographs which reveal nothing, together with a collection of "texts" and design tics which attempt to explain why these nothing pictures are in fact something.

Indeed, there are days when the vast majority of the grand enterprise of photography seems to spend far more effort on explaining why meaningless pictures are actually great pictures than it spends on trying to make pictures or bodies of work that actually mean something.

More LED Lighting Madness

I expended a little more effort on half-assed LED based lighting.

It turns out that you can buy some completely crazy light bulbs these days. Over about 4000 lumens (roughly a "300W equivalent" bulb) you start to get in to commercial lighting, so, suitable for factory floors and so on. The bulb bases begin to get weird. Still, at 3900 lumens I was able to buy a thing that fits a standard light bulb socket. Look at this glorious thing. It's got a bunch of LEDs on the end, but also these five crazy adjustable arms of light.

At $65 we're edging firmly toward oh for god's sake, just go buy actual photo gear territory, and indeed the next step up in light volume would probably be a Godox LED system. For $134 you can buy the baby Godox, which pumps out a bit more light that this thing, and which does not require the additional fixture to plug the bulb in and attach to a light stand, plus it's dimmable, etc etc. Godox goes up from there, um, quite a ways. The big one ($359) bangs out a godzilla-like 20,000 lumens which is probably dangerous to look at.

Jammed into a silver umbrella, without any further modifiers, it enables shooting at around 1/50th, f/4, ISO 400. So, perfectly doable even for my antique camera, and eminently usable even with a little modifier action if you have a fancy modern camera. You can't freeze motion, and you can't overpower the sun, but for almost all purposes a little bitty 3900 lumen light bulb will do just fine.

It me.

Cutie:

Check out the completely crazy catchlights, though! This could be someone's signature style!

What DO People Like?

Having proposed that people (especially, perhaps, photographers) don't much like photographs I am now boxed into a corner. Manifestly people do go look at photographs in particular and Art in general. So I thought about that.

I suppose there are endless reasons, really, that a person might go and look at some Art, but here are four things I think might be at least representative. They probably blend seamlessly in to one another, if you squint, but I'm going to write them down separately.

First, people are interested in subject matter. Famously, people mostly like pictures of themselves. Perhaps you really like water lilies, or Paris. You derive enjoyment from pictures that depict those things.

Second, people are interested in artists. Perhaps you think Monet was quite the fellow, or you would like to know more about him. So, off you go to look at the Monet show. Some people might think Sally Mann is pretty good and travel across the country to see her pictures. Hypothetically.

Third, there are social reasons. Probably the reason you're interested in Monet, and own some Monet prints, is that you've developed the idea that you're the kind of person who likes Monet. And you are correct! Your Monet print over the fireplace identifies you as the kind of person you are, to all who enter your abode! You and your social circle all went to see the Monet, and you can talk about that.

Fourth, and least, you're looking for an Art-like experience. You seek that ineffable sense of growth, of expansion, of somehow understanding something you did not before. You seek to be enriched.

I believe that most of our interactions with Art are driven by the first and the third. We put up photographs of our family, because we love them. Younger people put up posters of fast cars, unicorns, or beautiful people because of a kind of aspirational interest in those subjects. We put up reproductions of Monet, or Cartier-Bresson, as social signaling because we imagine ourselves the kind of person who likes those things, and indeed we are. But, we like those things largely because we are the kind of person who likes them, not because of the intrinsic qualities of the Art we're sticking on the wall.

When we go to the museum to look at some Art, we are going largely because we are the kind of person who goes to the museum to see that kind of Art.

At the same time, we live with a kind of fiction that we love the Art for the sake of Art, for essentially that fourth reason. Photographers of several stripes struggle with composition, with form, presumably because they imagine this will make their work Art-like. We talk around why we like Cartier-Bresson yes, yes, the decisive moment don't you know or Monet the brushwork, don't you know, the brushwork without ever really getting to the point.

We avoid saying stupid things like you know, the thing about the Impressionists is that it doesn't feel like there's anywhere to stand in the picture [*] which would reveal that we've actually looked at the damned thing and formed an idea. I don't know if people mainly don't look at the things, or if they keep their ideas to themselves, but either way something of the Art-like experience we are allegedly seeking is missing, in favor of either silence or mumbling about brushwork.

We pretend, to one degree or another, that our interactions with Art are driven by Art, by the intrinsic qualities of the Art, but in reality we are rather more driven by subject matter and the social connotations that surround the Art. This is, of course, weaponized by the Serious Art Industry, which may be considered to do very little other than build social constructs in which to embed more or less randomly chosen pieces of Art.

Onwards to books.

Books are, more or less obviously, about subject matter and to a lesser extent social signaling. Nobody sticks a bunch of Sartre or Joyce on the shelf because they enjoy reading it, they buy it because they're the kind of person who has an interest in but does not read Sartre and Joyce. We buy books of science fiction, or art history, or the latest Malcolm Gladwell because we're interested in the subject matter.

And so with visual books. I believe QT Luong has sold quite a few books of photographs of the US National Park system, Treasured Lands, and I believe those sales are largely driven by the fact that he has a clear and popular subject. I dare say he's made a lot of extraordinarily beautiful photographs as well. It's a whole package, that begins with something people are interested in.

In addition, of course, this book sitting on your coffee table signals to your guests what kind of person you are. It signals the same to you, providing you with a little taste of virtue every time you see it.

As for the Art-like experience... well, I dare say that's in there too, right? I mean, sublime landscapes and all that. Staggering beauty and I did not know... wow! But that, while absolutely real and a part of the whole package, is the chaser not the shot.

Those of us who aspire to Serious Art, though, might well try to avoid the subject driven work. Why, I am not sure. But whatever the impulse that drove the abstract artists seems to simply arise: no damn it I simply refuse to paint another hot girl, it's all blotches of color from now on, success be damned.

The things I have made that have been best received have had subjects which, in the end, proved interesting to the reader. My most successful project to date seems to have successfully made people feel a genuine interest in the alley that lies behind my house, or at least in the idea of alleys in general.

The trouble with the purely Art-like experience is that it requires work. If you're going to go look at the Monet, or the Mann, and experience that sensation of enlargement, you can't just stand there like an ox and await enlightenment. You've got to think about both the work, and yourself. You have to, as the therapists suggest, "check in" with yourself to find any reaction you might have, and then return to the work to see what's in it, and so on.

Having spent a fair bit of time at this, I have to say that it does not endear you to museum patrons. You're supposed to flow, damn it, flow. It looks for all the world like you are standing there like an ox. An ox who is in the way. An ox who is not flowing. You, of course, are frustrated because people keep flowing between you and whatever it is you're trying to find your response to. Best is very unpopular shows, or if you can contrive to break in after hours, but these solutions have their own problems.

It is easier with books, because nobody's flowing around you and we have an expectation of getting something intellectual or emotional from a book, rather than simply a brief visual impression. Still, the book has its own demands. It wants you to turn the page, but sometimes you have to resist that.

In the end the whole thing is rather exhausting. Spending, let's say, an hour focusing on someone's little body of work is hard work.

I don't think most people can do it. My experience of museums is that almost nobody is taking the time, everyone is flowing. They want to check off the Monet and get on to lunch. Like any critic worthy of the name, they've made up their mind beforehand anyways, so it only remains to quickly whisk through and then on to re-heated quiche and maybe a terrible off-dry white.

While there doesn't seem to be any sort of conclusion here, I suppose one might imagine that some sort of balance is desirable; of subject matter/social signaling, balanced against Art-like experiences, might be rather the thing? Something to draw them in, and then a reward for the attentive? Or perhaps the lesson really is that the only two possibilities are populism and obscurity? Pick one!

—

[*] My reaction to the Impressionists general is basically that with a Manet or whatever, one feels one could step through the frame and be somewhere, but with the Impressionists one cannot. There is a world over there through the frame, but unlike a Corot, a Millet, a da Vinci, one doesn't feel there's anywhere to stand in a Monet or a Cézanne.

Photographers and Photographs

Let me tell you a tale. A sad tale.

Michael Reichmann, as most of you reading this will know, was a respected and well-liked photographer who founded a successful web site which was genuinely helpful to many photographers in the early years of digital photography. I didn't like Michael, but that is irrelevant to our story. Michael was the sort of notional leader of a community of 100s, maybe 1000s, of well heeled photographers. They were his friends, his clients. He led workshops, he plugged gear, he was tuned in to the spending of 10s, maybe 100s, of millions of dollars on equipment, workshops, photo tours, books, videos, and so on.

Toward the end of his life, Michael, perhaps feeling the clammy hand of his mortality, made a bold try to create a Legacy. He started the Luminous Endowmnent, which made grants to photographers to pursue their work. He made a book, a 20-year retrospective of his work; the work that his community so vocally admired. The book was expensive, but huge. Even at $500 for a signed copy, it wasn't an absurdly overpriced monograph. 100s of pages, 10 pounds, of book. Proceeds would go to the Endowment. Win-win, right?

He didn't sell them. I mean, he sold a bunch. Almost half of the signed edition of 500 copies. Probably several hundred more of the unsigned copies. I don't know how many he printed, but the Form 990s from the Luminous Endowment do not seem to support sales of more that about 1000 copes all told. The remainder, about 1100 copies, has I believe gone to the shredders as I write this.

Michael spent probably something on the order for $100,000 of his own money, hoping the book would act as a force multiplier, seeding his endowment with something like a million dollars. It didn't. The endowment folded up after a while, having failed, evidently, to achieve the critical mass of money necessary to be self-sustaining.

Michael's community, ultimately, betrayed him. $50M for cameras, diddly-squat for our "revered friend" and his legacy. If I sound angry, it's because I am. Michael is gone, his endowment is gone, and now his books are gone.

But what, ultimately, is the lesson here? Why were these self-same people happy to drop $10,000 on a workshop/tour to go hang out with Michael, but not $500 (or even $80) on a book? A book of photographs which I genuinely believe they admired? The price of a modest luxury car for a camera outfit, nothing for a book?

In the end, I think the answer is that photographers don't like photographs any more than regular people, which is to say, they generally don't like photographs much. Photographers want to take photographs, they don't want to look at them. I have a notion that a photographer may even be less likely to want to look at a photograph than a non-photographer, but perhaps I am giving the general public too much credit here.

Critics also don't seem to be much interested in photographs. They not infrequently make howlers, or simply admit that they can't be bother to look at the pictures, and even otherwise they seem as likely to completely miss the point as not. Critics want to bloviate, in the same way that photographers want to take pictures. The point is the output, not the input.

Communities of people that would seem on the face of it to be naturally interested in looking at photographs are typically not. There are photographers who like photographs, to be sure, but not every photographer is and I dare say something less than most photographers actually like photographs.

This is why "social" photography tends to go nowhere. When you get a bunch of photographers together, it turns in to a bunch of arguing about gear, and/or a bunch of photographers milling around trying to get the other photographers to look at their pictures while simultaneously fending off portfolios being thrust in their faces.

Photo sharing web sites are places where you put your work up to be admired, not places where you go to look at photographs. The Like button doesn't mean I Like Your Picture it means hi, I would Like you to come look at my pictures. The point is the output, not the input.

The success of photographic social things seems to be inversely proportional to the seriousness of the photography. As long as they measure by uploads, of course, all is well. Flickr had tremendous traction, because every would-be photographer thought this was a great way to be seen. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in doing any actual seeing. As soon as you try to measure by anything meaningful, the wheels fall off, because the street is mostly one way in the wrong direction.

Instagram, widely decried for being positively infested with people who don't take photography seriously, is the only real success story. It is successful precisely because it is infested with non-photographers. It has people who actually want to look at pictures. Not seriously, mind you, they want to just flip, flip, flip, and mainly they're looking for hot girls, celebrities, or themselves, but still. They actually want to look at photos.

The takeaway here is, perhaps, if you're interested in people actually looking at your work, stop hanging around with photographers. They don't want to look at your work, except as a quid pro quo or, sometimes, to borrow ideas from.

Lloyd Chambers

Lloyd is the guy who does the super technical gear reviews. Mostly behind a paywall. Which has pretty much characterized him for me as someone I don't much care about. The general consensus always seemed to be that Lloyd's work was really solid and that if lens resolution was your jam, Lloyd was your man.

Fair enough.

Today I clicked around to something something somehow and I wound up on some page of Lloyd's pertaining to his new Sprinter van.

The Sprinter is the official vehicle of the hipster dillweed. It's a medium duty truck, made by Mercedes-Benz, intended for commercial use. It's a big-ass delivery van. Hipsters are having them fitted out as RVs for some incomprehensible reason, and then going camping in them. Lloyd seems to have been bitten by this particular bug. I guess they make an OK platform for an RV? Pretty sure Mercedes sells them with a blog and a 'gram, though.

Ok, whatever.

Check this out: Mercedes Sprinter Issues. It's somewhere in Lloyd's maze of interlocking web sites in which he rambles on about his expertise in Photography, Computers, Biking, and now Sprinter vans. He's like Thom Hogan, with a whole shitton of domains, each for hosting a slightly different brand of bloviation, and all linking together to artificially jack the ol' SEO.

What I loved about this page was the combination of the content ("my van is doing a weird thing and I have no idea what the hell is going on") with the advert for his new consulting service. Yep, Lloyd will now consult at his usual rates ($280 for the first hour, $200 an hour after that) about Sprinter vans, a topic which he manifestly knows nothing whatever about.

If you poke around he's got all kinds of mumbo-jumbo about how Mercedes is making terrible recommendations in its manual and this fuel good, that one bad, the usual maze of semi-mystical shit that some credulous goober who's spent a year on some internet forums acquires.

Lloyd has clearly decided that he's an expert on anything that he touches, even for a moment, because of his tremendous smartness. I mean, I'm right there with ya, Lloyd, but I'm not quite arrogant enough to charge consulting rates for my pearls of wisdom on random shit I know nothing about. Also, I think I might be slightly more aware of the limits of my knowledge.

Anyways, maybe he's joking about the consulting? I dunno. I'm not buying any of his services, so what do I care.