tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post99930335064060425..comments2024-03-27T00:32:29.877-07:00Comments on Photos and Stuff: Tradition!amolitorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15743439184763617516noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post-60758873046840874622018-11-08T07:42:33.182-08:002018-11-08T07:42:33.182-08:00The reality of the situation is that hardly anyone...The reality of the situation is that hardly anyone (relatively) cares about photography. Lots of people care about maths because it's pretty much essential to human life. There are whole pompous institutions hundreds of years old set up to care about painting and sculpture and the history and learning of it. <br /><br />And then we have photography. Arts bastard child. For the past 5 years I've photographed hundreds of domestic suburban interiors, Walker Evans stylee, and I can count on one hand the number of 'art' photographs hung as wall decoration. And they ammont to a truck load of NYC steel workers eating lunch, 2 counts of a Burt Hardy photo titled 'mothers pride' and 1 HCB photo of the man and woman looking down over Paris. Oh and I did once see a copy of Uncommon Places on a bookshelf.<br /><br />Yet there are hundreds of shitty no name oil paintings of sailing boats on high seas, non descrip landscapes and endless random sculptures of a plethora of objects. You could fill an aircraft hangar with it all.<br /><br />Yet the most ubiquitous medium of all doesn't get a lookin aside from dodgy family portraits, school phots of the kids and the odd badly printed cell phone snap.<br /><br />So I conclude. Nobody really cares about photography.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13187046670670329383noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post-45269631784891585722018-11-08T01:55:47.774-08:002018-11-08T01:55:47.774-08:00How much of it is just that photography is a lot n...How much of it is just that photography is a lot newer than painting and mathematics? It might just be that it's tough to develop much of a tradition in less than 200 years.Andrewnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post-14035821585703716282018-11-07T23:26:41.242-08:002018-11-07T23:26:41.242-08:00I should think more before posting but still, here...I should think more before posting but still, here goes : photographers tend towards the autistic and don't play well with others. We wouldn't work well with teachers. Patrick Doddshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02542212200114555054noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post-40279354077026248832018-11-07T17:20:34.725-08:002018-11-07T17:20:34.725-08:00I'm not sure it could have been any other way ...I'm not sure it could have been any other way for photography. It's been suggested that something like 1.8 billion pictures were uploaded to the Internet each day in 2014. I'm pretty sure that 1.8 billion paintings or sculptures were not completed today. Is the difference simply that sculpture is hard to learn while photography (at least the technical bits) -- as you've said many times in many posts -- is easy? I think so. <br /><br />The hard part of photography is and will (hopefully) always be making a photograph that someone will want to look at for longer than 0.5 seconds and for more times than 1. I'd like to be able to do that some day, and I'm glad I didn't have to go and live with some grumpy old master and mix pixels for him for five years to learn the necessary skills. <br /><br />Unfortunately, this "short cut" also eliminates one of the positives of the long lineage model you described: the potential for a critical mass of broadly similar work. I don't love the Düsseldorf school either, but the thing that happens when you pull a bunch of people together like the Bechers did is you create a group that, for a while, can do work informed by a common vision. Whether or not the vision is any good is another matter. The undeniable outcome is that you get more impact than you would with the same number of people all working independently with no common vision. I think that's probably why we remember the f/64 crowd today -- there were just enough of them trying to do something broadly similar that the idea and the work had some impact. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17646478958096303475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post-50036492372419631302018-11-07T12:39:00.015-08:002018-11-07T12:39:00.015-08:00I was going to talk about this as well, but boy, I...I was going to talk about this as well, but boy, I had already been rambling a bit.<br /><br />Yes, the various sticky photographic processes are also learned more or less exclusively with in-person training! Modern collodion photographers can almost entirely be traced back to the Ostermans, I think.<br /><br />The trouble here, as it always was, is that you can learn the basics of any one of these processes in a couple of days. In the 1850s, most of the people learning it and teaching it were already painters, but I dare say it escaped the painters quite quickly. There simply wasn't much time, though, so the non-painters who were picking up the process had no time to soak up any of the surrounding material.<br /><br />The one big difference you WILL see in photos made then is the photos made by painters look like paintings, and mostly the ones made by non-painters look like garbage. The standard in the beginning was "make a picture at all" so that was OK.<br /><br />It was decades before any really photographic aesthetic began to emerge, and then that looped back around to to inform painting.<br />amolitorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15743439184763617516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-654754338632526091.post-2496681973122502092018-11-07T12:16:17.728-08:002018-11-07T12:16:17.728-08:00What about the practitioners of alternative proces...What about the practitioners of alternative processes (cyanotypes, wet plate, platinum/palladium, etc.) and the users of large-format cameras? Aren't they the guardians of photographic traditions?erickehttp://www.erickellermanphotography.comnoreply@blogger.com