Over on PetaPixel we find a complaint that it's hard to make a living teaching photography, with, to the author's credit, some ideas about what to do about it. The elephant in the room here is that photography is easy, now. Those motivated, interested, students that are a joy to teach are motivated enough to figure out almost all this stuff on their own, or by spending a few bucks on a craftsy course, as needed.
The main impediment to new photographers is old photographers with their stupid advice. I am watching a tragic conversation unfold in which a guy wants to shoot product for his eBay store in which some doofuses on the internet are trying to teach him how to use strobes. He was using continuous light (totally appropriate, a 100x easier), but switched to some sort of strobed light. Probably because some old photographer suggested it.
Ming Thein has a hilarious post in which he reveals to the world the shocking news that image stabilization technology is not perfect, and also makes some fascinating`accusations that I have not read elsewhere (IS components will wear and the image quality will degrade over time, and IS components may not lock in the right position when IS is turned off). It strikes me as almost certainly an apologia for Hasselblad. Whether written at their behest, or whether it's his own idea, I cannot guess, but I note that either is possible.
Also, he doesn't know anything about control systems. Sample rate and shutter speed? What?
Finally, Mike J over on ToP has this interesting post about little details. The obsession with little details is a fascinating study in the world of photography. You can generally sell your obsession with little details as simply being a super-awesome professional photographer, and sometimes it's even true. More commonly, though, it's about avoiding the big questions. If you fuss endlessly over tiny details, then you never have to worry about whether the picture is any good, if the project is any good, if your work is any good. Photography, being endlessly fiddly but ultimately pretty easy, lends itself especially well to this sort of thing.
You can't do this with ballet, because nobody is going to fail to notice that your feet are all over the place while you're fussing with finger positions. You can't do it with sculpture, or drawing, or architecture. It's actually pretty hard to get to a half-decent looking result at all so your obsession with chisel-work, line weight, or mullions, isn't going to distract people from the ugly lump you've made. As a camera user, though, once you figure out how to focus the damn thing, your rotten flower picture looks pretty much like a flower. You can start rattling on about tonal placement, light modifiers, or microcontrast, or something, and there's a chance people won't notice that you suck.
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Friday, August 19, 2016
How Did We Get Here?
PetaPixel recently published a link to a youtube video breaking down the lighting in some photo made by some guy, Karl Taylor. For all I know Karl Taylor is some huge deal, but I've never heard of him and his web site suggests that mainly he teaches people how to Do Photography. Anyways, this picture is sort of typical of a low-rent wanna-bee fashion photographer.
This is, of course, receiving accolades, and people totally wanted to know how he did it etcetera and so forth. And I dare say the breakdown is a good teaching tool for how to spot the light sources. But just look at this stupid thing.
There are three obvious light sources here, with three completely different characters (but all the same color), two of them are on the floor and yet, somehow, the result is still kind of muddy and indistinct.
It's time to come out and say it. Having light sources all over the goddamned place just looks stupid. Yes, yes, I get that you want to show off every little detail of the girl, or the chair, or the car, whatever. Figure out how to do it without looking like you just shoved lights in all over the place because, let us review, it just looks stupid.
How the hell did we get here? Is this just a plot by the lighting companies to sell more crap? Is it some sort of weird technical challenge to see how many lights you can stick in there? Are photographers too lazy to figure out how to show off the object without simply hitting it with light from every angle? Is it basically an easy way to make the picture look expensive and "done"? How the hell did we get here?
For the record, actual fashion photography looks nothing whatsoever like this except that it has hot girls in it. Car photography looks a little like this, possibly because it is very hard to show off both the lines and the wheels without lights all over the place, if you want that nighttime look, which sometimes you do.
This is, of course, receiving accolades, and people totally wanted to know how he did it etcetera and so forth. And I dare say the breakdown is a good teaching tool for how to spot the light sources. But just look at this stupid thing.
There are three obvious light sources here, with three completely different characters (but all the same color), two of them are on the floor and yet, somehow, the result is still kind of muddy and indistinct.
It's time to come out and say it. Having light sources all over the goddamned place just looks stupid. Yes, yes, I get that you want to show off every little detail of the girl, or the chair, or the car, whatever. Figure out how to do it without looking like you just shoved lights in all over the place because, let us review, it just looks stupid.
How the hell did we get here? Is this just a plot by the lighting companies to sell more crap? Is it some sort of weird technical challenge to see how many lights you can stick in there? Are photographers too lazy to figure out how to show off the object without simply hitting it with light from every angle? Is it basically an easy way to make the picture look expensive and "done"? How the hell did we get here?
For the record, actual fashion photography looks nothing whatsoever like this except that it has hot girls in it. Car photography looks a little like this, possibly because it is very hard to show off both the lines and the wheels without lights all over the place, if you want that nighttime look, which sometimes you do.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
"Gesture"
Chris Gampat is at it again, trying to figure out how to turn an almost total lack of ability and a bunch of enthusiasm into a business. He really really really wants to do some kind of magazine based around black&white photography, which is a worthy goal. It just happens to be beyond his skills, and is in fact a very very high wall to climb.
Don Quixote here got me to thinking, though. How would I do it?
The concept I arrived at very suddenly but after quite a lot of noodling on it, is a 'zine called "Gesture", stealing from Jay Maisel. His recent book Light, Gesture, & Color defines his rather personal and idiosyncratic notion of "Gesture" as, roughly, the essence of the thing itself. Maisel tries to do it one frame at a time, with varying success.
This is something I am interested in, the uncharitable might say that I harp on it endlessly. My opinion, oft-repeated, is that the essence of the thing is best got at photographically with multiple pictures, a photo essay, a portfolio.
So this mythical "Gesture" magazine would feature one photo-essay per issue, which gets at the essence of the thing in some way. The artist gets a few column inches of text. I get a few column inches of text. And then there are pictures. Black and white, it's called "Gesture", not "Gesture & Color". Artists selected by me, edited by me, judged by me.
Online and print, funded by a Patreon and whatever sales of the print edition happen. Shoot for once a month. Published on the 1st of the month, every month, every other month, every sixth month, as time and available content permit. Pay the artists.. something. Maybe not much, but always something. "Corporate structure" to be determined. Print edition delivery model to be determined.
It's just a concept. I'm not going to do it this year. I have no time and too many projects already. I'm probably never going to do it. Feel free to steal it and go for it. Let me know if you do, I might buy a copy. Indeed, we could all of us do this 'zine, and every one would be different, every one would probably be worth something.
See MagCloud and its competitors as a starting point.
Don Quixote here got me to thinking, though. How would I do it?
The concept I arrived at very suddenly but after quite a lot of noodling on it, is a 'zine called "Gesture", stealing from Jay Maisel. His recent book Light, Gesture, & Color defines his rather personal and idiosyncratic notion of "Gesture" as, roughly, the essence of the thing itself. Maisel tries to do it one frame at a time, with varying success.
This is something I am interested in, the uncharitable might say that I harp on it endlessly. My opinion, oft-repeated, is that the essence of the thing is best got at photographically with multiple pictures, a photo essay, a portfolio.
So this mythical "Gesture" magazine would feature one photo-essay per issue, which gets at the essence of the thing in some way. The artist gets a few column inches of text. I get a few column inches of text. And then there are pictures. Black and white, it's called "Gesture", not "Gesture & Color". Artists selected by me, edited by me, judged by me.
Online and print, funded by a Patreon and whatever sales of the print edition happen. Shoot for once a month. Published on the 1st of the month, every month, every other month, every sixth month, as time and available content permit. Pay the artists.. something. Maybe not much, but always something. "Corporate structure" to be determined. Print edition delivery model to be determined.
It's just a concept. I'm not going to do it this year. I have no time and too many projects already. I'm probably never going to do it. Feel free to steal it and go for it. Let me know if you do, I might buy a copy. Indeed, we could all of us do this 'zine, and every one would be different, every one would probably be worth something.
See MagCloud and its competitors as a starting point.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Sally Mann, What Remains
I've been living pretty continuously with this book for, I dunno, a month or something. I've seen many of the pictures from it before, I watched the movie, but this is the first time I've had the book in my hands. It's not an easy book. Unless you are new here, you know I am a certified fanboy, and you will likely guess that my reaction is positive. That is an accurate guess. I think I have more to say, however.
I'm going to refer to the artist here as Sally, because she's been rubbing my nose in some pretty intimate stuff for the last month, and I feel like at least in this narrow little region we might as well be on a first name basis. After this we're straight back to Mrs. Mann, though.
First the particulars, a catalog of what we're looking at. Four sections, three of them shot wet plate, one on large format sheet film.
The first section, "Matter Lent" is wet plate, and comes in two pieces. Pictures of Sally's dog Eva after disinterment, and of Eva's dressed pelt, removed before interment. This is followed by pictures of human corpses on the body farm in Tennessee. This bit is about the flesh itself after the organism dies. (notice how I wrote that, "the organism dies") It is frequently stomach-churning, and always very hard to look at.
Next up is "December 8, 2000", sepia toned, quite pale, sheet film photographs of the site of a suicide on Sally's farm in Virginia, together with one color snapshot of the police cars and so forth surrounding the area of the suicide. The pictures look a bit like salt prints, or possibly albumen. Possibly they are, or possibly it's just a look that felt right. With a bit of melodrama, one might imagine they are, somehow, printed with blood. They certainly stand out from the collodion work. Thematically, this is the land where death occurs. The earth to which the flesh returns.
Then we have "Antietam" featuring wet plate photos of civil war battlefields (or, for all I know, just one), following the theme of the land where death occurred into the past. These are lyrical landscapes, printed very dark, demanding and rewarding close inspection. This section emphasizes a trend from the ugly/grotesque to the beautiful.
The book wraps up with "What Remains", close-up long exposures, also wet plate, of Sally's impossibly beautiful children, now impossibly beautiful adults. This is a little spot of affirmation and life, perhaps. The title suggests that these are what remain behind, but I think there might reasonably be seen a little more in these pictures.
The phrase "What Remains" in the English language is pretty marvelously ambiguous, a point which was surely not lost on the infernally erudite Sally Mann. You can read it as "That which is left behind." or "How wonderful are these things left behind!" or "What are the the things that are left behind?" or "Things left behind? There's nothing left behind, what are you talking about?" and probably several others. The phrase is applied both to the pictures of the children, and the book itself. Make of it what you will, but I assume that all apply.
The book is most assuredly sequenced. This isn't some greatest hits monograph, every picture has its place, its reason. There is real flow to these things.
We see progressions toward increasingly ruinous failures of the the collodion process, along with other progressions of light to dark, or increasing degrees abstraction. The "Antietam" section ends with pictures that could be abstract charcoal sketches, "What Remains" ends with milky white pictures with fragments of faces, lips and eyes. There's a plan here, many plans, really. Echoed forms, progressions, references forward and backward. This wasn't tossed together, this was carefully constructed from what I suspect is an enormous body of material. The sheer amount of labor involved here is staggering. Wet plate ain't for sissies.
There is a progression in time, from the decay of flesh, to the land, and back around to the living, which carries with it a progression from the ugly to the beautiful. There's a stick on the Mann farm that I swear shows up on a battlefield.
Now. Onwards to the important part. Time to wake back up.
And now I could dig in to the material, and go on about the bravery of the artist to confront these difficult issues, of death and dying. I could prance around the edges and talk about the artistry and skill she brings to depicting these things, how amazing it is that she found beauty in these dreadful things, blah blah blah. Alternatively I could rattle on about how awful the subject matter is, and rail against the artist, how dare she, etc and so on.
I'm not going to. You can find plenty of this crap out there if you look. (actually, if you look, it's much worse. most reviewers were clearly afraid to talk about the work itself at all.)
What Sally is up to here is something quite different. Sally is a fucking heard-headed cuss who does not dabble in bullshit. There are really only two ways to cope with this material. The first is to ignore it, which you can do perfectly well by talking endlessly about everything except the work and what it might mean. I did it above, blathering about "the organism," it's extremely hard not to.
The second way is to confront it, and see your own mortality, and deal with that as best you can.
This book is about death. Not dying, not the beautiful imagery of the soul departing for more pleasant climes, not the celebration of life lived, not the tragic and beautiful reaction of society to death, none of the usual stuff. This is about death and decay, the essentials of the thing. The soil, the worms, the return to dust (a surprisingly gummy, liquid, sticky journey, it turns out). And then Sally does something remarkable, if you are open she will grab you by the scruff of the neck and insist:
Sally has used her substantial powers to build a collection which echoes the decay and destruction she's interested in, and which is also beautiful, meaningful. Here it all is, no window dressing, no artifice. No attempt to conceal the stickiest, the most grotesque, the most appalling elements, and yet... and yet there is beauty here. Sally is right. This thing, this death business, is many things, but one of those things is beautiful.
This book has the potential to change you deeply, if you are open. Because she's right. It is horrifying to contemplate, it is ugly, sticky, grotesque. And it is beautiful. It is the most natural and normal thing in the world, to return to the soil, to return our matter to nature for her reuse.
The book gains a dimension now with Emmett's death. The "What Remains" section is cast, for us, in a new light. The photographs of the children finish the book with life. These pictures remind us that the decayed flesh, becoming soil, comes back around eventually as new life. Now we are reminded that these too will pass away, and begin anew. Sally was perfectly aware of this, of course. You can see it in the progression of pictures, as the end with the barest traces of ghostly faces lightly impressed on a milky surface.
Emmett's death is surely a tremendous loss and source of sorrow for those near him. For most of us, though, we out here who don't know the Mann family, it is something else. A faraway loss. We can do the usual thank goodness it's not me or mine or however we generally take these things. But we are also granted a new view of this work, to understand and maybe to accept a little better this inevitable end that awaits us.
I thought for a little while that perhaps the present book might be viewed in opposition to the Dylan Thomas poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night" but upon contemplation I think they are simply talking about different things. Nature, the land, the soil, they care nothing if you rage or no against the dying of the light. Rage or no, they will wait. The land has all the time in the world. Where Thomas's poem leaves off is where Sally's pictures start, really, after the rage is burned out, at a point of serenity and a kind of calm.
Sally starts the book out with these lines penned by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, from his "On Death, a Sermon". One supposes that they're appropriate, and they certainly seem to relate to the pictures:
And is that not, in its own dreadful way, beautiful?
The land, the soil, nature, they're going to take care of you. It's OK.
I'm going to refer to the artist here as Sally, because she's been rubbing my nose in some pretty intimate stuff for the last month, and I feel like at least in this narrow little region we might as well be on a first name basis. After this we're straight back to Mrs. Mann, though.
First the particulars, a catalog of what we're looking at. Four sections, three of them shot wet plate, one on large format sheet film.
The first section, "Matter Lent" is wet plate, and comes in two pieces. Pictures of Sally's dog Eva after disinterment, and of Eva's dressed pelt, removed before interment. This is followed by pictures of human corpses on the body farm in Tennessee. This bit is about the flesh itself after the organism dies. (notice how I wrote that, "the organism dies") It is frequently stomach-churning, and always very hard to look at.
Next up is "December 8, 2000", sepia toned, quite pale, sheet film photographs of the site of a suicide on Sally's farm in Virginia, together with one color snapshot of the police cars and so forth surrounding the area of the suicide. The pictures look a bit like salt prints, or possibly albumen. Possibly they are, or possibly it's just a look that felt right. With a bit of melodrama, one might imagine they are, somehow, printed with blood. They certainly stand out from the collodion work. Thematically, this is the land where death occurs. The earth to which the flesh returns.
Then we have "Antietam" featuring wet plate photos of civil war battlefields (or, for all I know, just one), following the theme of the land where death occurred into the past. These are lyrical landscapes, printed very dark, demanding and rewarding close inspection. This section emphasizes a trend from the ugly/grotesque to the beautiful.
The book wraps up with "What Remains", close-up long exposures, also wet plate, of Sally's impossibly beautiful children, now impossibly beautiful adults. This is a little spot of affirmation and life, perhaps. The title suggests that these are what remain behind, but I think there might reasonably be seen a little more in these pictures.
The phrase "What Remains" in the English language is pretty marvelously ambiguous, a point which was surely not lost on the infernally erudite Sally Mann. You can read it as "That which is left behind." or "How wonderful are these things left behind!" or "What are the the things that are left behind?" or "Things left behind? There's nothing left behind, what are you talking about?" and probably several others. The phrase is applied both to the pictures of the children, and the book itself. Make of it what you will, but I assume that all apply.
The book is most assuredly sequenced. This isn't some greatest hits monograph, every picture has its place, its reason. There is real flow to these things.
We see progressions toward increasingly ruinous failures of the the collodion process, along with other progressions of light to dark, or increasing degrees abstraction. The "Antietam" section ends with pictures that could be abstract charcoal sketches, "What Remains" ends with milky white pictures with fragments of faces, lips and eyes. There's a plan here, many plans, really. Echoed forms, progressions, references forward and backward. This wasn't tossed together, this was carefully constructed from what I suspect is an enormous body of material. The sheer amount of labor involved here is staggering. Wet plate ain't for sissies.
There is a progression in time, from the decay of flesh, to the land, and back around to the living, which carries with it a progression from the ugly to the beautiful. There's a stick on the Mann farm that I swear shows up on a battlefield.
Now. Onwards to the important part. Time to wake back up.
And now I could dig in to the material, and go on about the bravery of the artist to confront these difficult issues, of death and dying. I could prance around the edges and talk about the artistry and skill she brings to depicting these things, how amazing it is that she found beauty in these dreadful things, blah blah blah. Alternatively I could rattle on about how awful the subject matter is, and rail against the artist, how dare she, etc and so on.
I'm not going to. You can find plenty of this crap out there if you look. (actually, if you look, it's much worse. most reviewers were clearly afraid to talk about the work itself at all.)
What Sally is up to here is something quite different. Sally is a fucking heard-headed cuss who does not dabble in bullshit. There are really only two ways to cope with this material. The first is to ignore it, which you can do perfectly well by talking endlessly about everything except the work and what it might mean. I did it above, blathering about "the organism," it's extremely hard not to.
The second way is to confront it, and see your own mortality, and deal with that as best you can.
This book is about death. Not dying, not the beautiful imagery of the soul departing for more pleasant climes, not the celebration of life lived, not the tragic and beautiful reaction of society to death, none of the usual stuff. This is about death and decay, the essentials of the thing. The soil, the worms, the return to dust (a surprisingly gummy, liquid, sticky journey, it turns out). And then Sally does something remarkable, if you are open she will grab you by the scruff of the neck and insist:
This. Is. Beautiful.
Sally has used her substantial powers to build a collection which echoes the decay and destruction she's interested in, and which is also beautiful, meaningful. Here it all is, no window dressing, no artifice. No attempt to conceal the stickiest, the most grotesque, the most appalling elements, and yet... and yet there is beauty here. Sally is right. This thing, this death business, is many things, but one of those things is beautiful.
This book has the potential to change you deeply, if you are open. Because she's right. It is horrifying to contemplate, it is ugly, sticky, grotesque. And it is beautiful. It is the most natural and normal thing in the world, to return to the soil, to return our matter to nature for her reuse.
The book gains a dimension now with Emmett's death. The "What Remains" section is cast, for us, in a new light. The photographs of the children finish the book with life. These pictures remind us that the decayed flesh, becoming soil, comes back around eventually as new life. Now we are reminded that these too will pass away, and begin anew. Sally was perfectly aware of this, of course. You can see it in the progression of pictures, as the end with the barest traces of ghostly faces lightly impressed on a milky surface.
Emmett's death is surely a tremendous loss and source of sorrow for those near him. For most of us, though, we out here who don't know the Mann family, it is something else. A faraway loss. We can do the usual thank goodness it's not me or mine or however we generally take these things. But we are also granted a new view of this work, to understand and maybe to accept a little better this inevitable end that awaits us.
I thought for a little while that perhaps the present book might be viewed in opposition to the Dylan Thomas poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night" but upon contemplation I think they are simply talking about different things. Nature, the land, the soil, they care nothing if you rage or no against the dying of the light. Rage or no, they will wait. The land has all the time in the world. Where Thomas's poem leaves off is where Sally's pictures start, really, after the rage is burned out, at a point of serenity and a kind of calm.
Sally starts the book out with these lines penned by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, from his "On Death, a Sermon". One supposes that they're appropriate, and they certainly seem to relate to the pictures:
All things summon us to death;
Nature, almost envious of the good she has given us,
Tells us often and gives us notice that she cannot
For long allow us that scrap of matter she has lent...
She has need of it for other forms,
She claims it back for other works.
Nature, almost envious of the good she has given us,
Tells us often and gives us notice that she cannot
For long allow us that scrap of matter she has lent...
She has need of it for other forms,
She claims it back for other works.
And is that not, in its own dreadful way, beautiful?
The land, the soil, nature, they're going to take care of you. It's OK.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
The Ultimate Counter-Example?
Take a look at this picture:
I can't think of a single rule of composition that this thing doesn't violate. Rule of Thirds? Dynamic Symmetry? Golden Anything? Clean Edges? Don't lead the eye out of the frame? Subject isolation? Point of highest contrast "draws the eye"? Level the horizon? Everything. Try your own favorites out to see if this thing passes them. I'm not even sure he's got the focus on his subjects.
What is it? Robert Frank. "US 90, Texas, 1955". It's better than any photograph I've ever taken. How 'bout you?
Why does it work? Because of the things in it. The people we find after a moment and inspect are wonderfully interesting and sympathetic. We find them without any trouble, we don't need leading lines. The bright headlight which, in amateur critique parlance would no doubt "totally kill it" is in fact a total non-issue in terms of finding the subject, and is vital to the life of the frame. The junk around the edge of the frame doesn't matter, because we find the people instantly, and everything else is less important.
Frank framed it to include the antenna and the headlight, and to give his subjects breathing room in the frame (the antenna and the headlight don't need it), and maybe to eliminate other people in the car. That's why the horizon is cattywumpus, but I bet you didn't even notice that until I pointed it out to you.
It's a terrific photo, which nails a certain time and place, and a feeling. That sensation of being pulled over out in the middle of noplace, USA, is distinctive and instantly recognizable. Because Frank got the right things into the frame, "composition" be damned. (To be fair, and to toot my own horn a little, I think one could argue that Ruskin might find some things to approve of, but he wasn't really a "rules" guy and he also sort of actually knew a few things.)
Next time you see some maroon going on about some sort of rule or method of composition, pull this one out and see what you think.
I can't think of a single rule of composition that this thing doesn't violate. Rule of Thirds? Dynamic Symmetry? Golden Anything? Clean Edges? Don't lead the eye out of the frame? Subject isolation? Point of highest contrast "draws the eye"? Level the horizon? Everything. Try your own favorites out to see if this thing passes them. I'm not even sure he's got the focus on his subjects.
What is it? Robert Frank. "US 90, Texas, 1955". It's better than any photograph I've ever taken. How 'bout you?
Why does it work? Because of the things in it. The people we find after a moment and inspect are wonderfully interesting and sympathetic. We find them without any trouble, we don't need leading lines. The bright headlight which, in amateur critique parlance would no doubt "totally kill it" is in fact a total non-issue in terms of finding the subject, and is vital to the life of the frame. The junk around the edge of the frame doesn't matter, because we find the people instantly, and everything else is less important.
Frank framed it to include the antenna and the headlight, and to give his subjects breathing room in the frame (the antenna and the headlight don't need it), and maybe to eliminate other people in the car. That's why the horizon is cattywumpus, but I bet you didn't even notice that until I pointed it out to you.
It's a terrific photo, which nails a certain time and place, and a feeling. That sensation of being pulled over out in the middle of noplace, USA, is distinctive and instantly recognizable. Because Frank got the right things into the frame, "composition" be damned. (To be fair, and to toot my own horn a little, I think one could argue that Ruskin might find some things to approve of, but he wasn't really a "rules" guy and he also sort of actually knew a few things.)
Next time you see some maroon going on about some sort of rule or method of composition, pull this one out and see what you think.
Monday, August 15, 2016
Criticism: Two Photo Essays
This is me really warming up here, preparing to tackle Sally Mann's What Remains, which I've been living with for a few weeks. Note that I will use the word "surreal" here and there, and I mean it in the colloquial sense. It's a term of art, and I am almost certainly using it catastrophically wrong on those terms, but as colloquial usage I think I am OK.
The rationales for criticism are many, but the one I like best is that criticism at its best completes the Art, or at any rate provides a next step in the conversation. There are really three things you can do when you're confronted with some Art. You can do nothing. You can make a piece of Art in response. You can execute the act of criticism to one degree or another. The latter two kind of blur together, both represent engagement with the Art, and responding publicly to it. The difference is, perhaps, that criticism judges and a artistic response does not. Arguably if I make a photograph in reply to yours, and my photograph makes it clear that I think yours is shit, that's criticism. If it's just what I see as the next photograph to make, in response to yours, it's not.
Anyways. A recent commenter wished out loud there was more thoughtful criticism out there, and following a link or two I found Karel Kravik's work. In hour later I found myself, more or less at random, looking at a personal project from Clara Giaminardi. There are, it happens, certain slight similarities, so I'm going to talk about the two. The dreaded "compare and contrast" some of us may recall from high school essays.
(warning: naked people)
Here's Kravik's work: Blood Unquiet.
Here's Giaminardi's work: Manifesto for a New Objectification
Both sets of pictures lean heavily on one sort of surrrealism or another, although they look nothing alike. It took me a while to see why Kravik's photos feel surreal, since upon inspection they turn out to be, generally, pretty much realistic scenes with one of more children. The first part, as I see it, is that Kravik has a nearly remarkable eye for selecting the surreal in the ordinary, juxtaposing elements in these interesting ways. The second part is the use of tone. Whether through dodging or merely careful use of light, Kravik manages to hit the Giacomelli's note in the the latter's picture from Scanno, Italy. The heavily dodged boy in Giacomelli's picture gives a dreamlike quality, which we see all over again (albeit more subtly) in Kravik's work.
My reading of "Blood Unquiet" was as some sort of dreamlike, surrealist allegory or fable of childhood. Which turns out to be pretty much what the artist intended, substituting "memory" for "dream" (and the two overlap a lot, so I don't see that as important).
Giaminardi's work partakes of an entirely different thread of surrealism. Weirdly contorted bodies, bizarre outfits, mud smeared on the models, and so on. It too is a surrealism built directly out of what is in front of the camera, without any sort of compositing, painting, etc. Her pictures feel more "constructed" than Kravik's, but I think that may be a false sensation. Kravik is simply constructing more naturalistic scenes, and finding the surreal in them, while Giaminardi is more directly constructing surreal scenes.
To Giaminardi's credit she can manage color. Her experience in fashion shows, clearly. These things are very much fashion-inspired, the color palettes are very much in the way of a fashion shoot. Very consistent, very well-defined, quite beautiful. Other contemporary fashion tropes turn up, the "ugly" wall that appears behind the models, the bizarre outfits often have a fashion flavor, as do many of the poses.
The trouble is that without Giaminardi's artist's statement, it just looks like a particularly outré fashion house's latest shoot, except where are the clothes? The messaging, from the point of view of a fashion consumer, is unclear. What do these people make? Who wants to buy it, porn stars? Is the lifestyle Hip? Sumptuous? Young? Sophisticated? Nothing really "reads" from a fashion perspective, it's just the usual tropes except with weird poses and more tits than usual.
With Giaminardi's statement the situation gets much worse. She pretends to be re-imagining something or other, erasing gender inequalities, erasing the distinction between body and mind, by reducing all to flesh. She seems, although digging through the International Art English is always a chore, to be claiming that the road to gender equality is to objectify everyone equally. This strikes the present critic as a device for rationalizing a bunch of second-year art student horseshit as some sort of brave Feminist Statement.
Basically what we're looking at a bunch of naked people, beautifully styled, wrapped in plastic and mud (and.. moss?), posing hopefully. It's a bit prurient, although in this modern era of Internet Porn it's barely titillating. It's certainly puerile. And the attempt to wrap it in the flag of feminism is not only crap, it actually makes the total project considerably worse. Now it's not merely softcore porn, it's softcore porn someone is lamely trying to pass off as High Art and Intelligent Political Commentary.
Paradoxically, each individual picture is pretty good. They're vaguely interesting, they're exceedingly well executed, and occasionally one even gets a frisson of something about gender here (but then, fashion is all about that frisson these days, there are entire campaigns and clothing lines built around gender ambiguity today). These are attractive people, although not always traditionally, often arranged appealingly or at least interestingly. These pictures could each be part of something good, or at least part of something that makes sense. It happens that, as of now, they are not.
Kravik, on the other hand, aims lower and hits his mark well. He's not pretending to make some mighty political statement, he's making smaller but completely genuine statements, and doing so very well indeed. I have not seen this sort of work before. Some of the influences seem pretty clear to me, but there's nothing that feels like a copy of something that came before. The techniques in play are subtle and strong.
I feel that Kravik's project could have usefully lost one or two pictures, or gained a couple. There are a couple (one? two?) pictures which feel a little weak, and if this had been my project (I wish!) I'd either have trimmed it, or filled in a few more "weaker" pictures to build an ebb and flow of pacing. The "weaker" ones are really just the ones that hit the high contrast/surreal notes less powerfully, and in a portfolio dominated by the other sort they feel slightly out of place. Still, perhaps they were necessary to fill out the artist's vision, and the result is superb as-is.
I also wish the gallery-show photos got peeled out and moved somewhere else. It's a bit jarring to run into them at the end of this really marvelous meditation on childhood memory.
Overall, I am pretty excited by Kravik's work. It is genuinely new (to me) and good. Not only is it good but I like it. A twofer.
Giaminardi's work is pedestrian, tedious, and uninteresting, although it is very well executed. It is not good, and I dislike it on the grounds of its superficiality.
The rationales for criticism are many, but the one I like best is that criticism at its best completes the Art, or at any rate provides a next step in the conversation. There are really three things you can do when you're confronted with some Art. You can do nothing. You can make a piece of Art in response. You can execute the act of criticism to one degree or another. The latter two kind of blur together, both represent engagement with the Art, and responding publicly to it. The difference is, perhaps, that criticism judges and a artistic response does not. Arguably if I make a photograph in reply to yours, and my photograph makes it clear that I think yours is shit, that's criticism. If it's just what I see as the next photograph to make, in response to yours, it's not.
Anyways. A recent commenter wished out loud there was more thoughtful criticism out there, and following a link or two I found Karel Kravik's work. In hour later I found myself, more or less at random, looking at a personal project from Clara Giaminardi. There are, it happens, certain slight similarities, so I'm going to talk about the two. The dreaded "compare and contrast" some of us may recall from high school essays.
(warning: naked people)
Here's Kravik's work: Blood Unquiet.
Here's Giaminardi's work: Manifesto for a New Objectification
Both sets of pictures lean heavily on one sort of surrrealism or another, although they look nothing alike. It took me a while to see why Kravik's photos feel surreal, since upon inspection they turn out to be, generally, pretty much realistic scenes with one of more children. The first part, as I see it, is that Kravik has a nearly remarkable eye for selecting the surreal in the ordinary, juxtaposing elements in these interesting ways. The second part is the use of tone. Whether through dodging or merely careful use of light, Kravik manages to hit the Giacomelli's note in the the latter's picture from Scanno, Italy. The heavily dodged boy in Giacomelli's picture gives a dreamlike quality, which we see all over again (albeit more subtly) in Kravik's work.
My reading of "Blood Unquiet" was as some sort of dreamlike, surrealist allegory or fable of childhood. Which turns out to be pretty much what the artist intended, substituting "memory" for "dream" (and the two overlap a lot, so I don't see that as important).
Giaminardi's work partakes of an entirely different thread of surrealism. Weirdly contorted bodies, bizarre outfits, mud smeared on the models, and so on. It too is a surrealism built directly out of what is in front of the camera, without any sort of compositing, painting, etc. Her pictures feel more "constructed" than Kravik's, but I think that may be a false sensation. Kravik is simply constructing more naturalistic scenes, and finding the surreal in them, while Giaminardi is more directly constructing surreal scenes.
To Giaminardi's credit she can manage color. Her experience in fashion shows, clearly. These things are very much fashion-inspired, the color palettes are very much in the way of a fashion shoot. Very consistent, very well-defined, quite beautiful. Other contemporary fashion tropes turn up, the "ugly" wall that appears behind the models, the bizarre outfits often have a fashion flavor, as do many of the poses.
The trouble is that without Giaminardi's artist's statement, it just looks like a particularly outré fashion house's latest shoot, except where are the clothes? The messaging, from the point of view of a fashion consumer, is unclear. What do these people make? Who wants to buy it, porn stars? Is the lifestyle Hip? Sumptuous? Young? Sophisticated? Nothing really "reads" from a fashion perspective, it's just the usual tropes except with weird poses and more tits than usual.
With Giaminardi's statement the situation gets much worse. She pretends to be re-imagining something or other, erasing gender inequalities, erasing the distinction between body and mind, by reducing all to flesh. She seems, although digging through the International Art English is always a chore, to be claiming that the road to gender equality is to objectify everyone equally. This strikes the present critic as a device for rationalizing a bunch of second-year art student horseshit as some sort of brave Feminist Statement.
Basically what we're looking at a bunch of naked people, beautifully styled, wrapped in plastic and mud (and.. moss?), posing hopefully. It's a bit prurient, although in this modern era of Internet Porn it's barely titillating. It's certainly puerile. And the attempt to wrap it in the flag of feminism is not only crap, it actually makes the total project considerably worse. Now it's not merely softcore porn, it's softcore porn someone is lamely trying to pass off as High Art and Intelligent Political Commentary.
Paradoxically, each individual picture is pretty good. They're vaguely interesting, they're exceedingly well executed, and occasionally one even gets a frisson of something about gender here (but then, fashion is all about that frisson these days, there are entire campaigns and clothing lines built around gender ambiguity today). These are attractive people, although not always traditionally, often arranged appealingly or at least interestingly. These pictures could each be part of something good, or at least part of something that makes sense. It happens that, as of now, they are not.
Kravik, on the other hand, aims lower and hits his mark well. He's not pretending to make some mighty political statement, he's making smaller but completely genuine statements, and doing so very well indeed. I have not seen this sort of work before. Some of the influences seem pretty clear to me, but there's nothing that feels like a copy of something that came before. The techniques in play are subtle and strong.
I feel that Kravik's project could have usefully lost one or two pictures, or gained a couple. There are a couple (one? two?) pictures which feel a little weak, and if this had been my project (I wish!) I'd either have trimmed it, or filled in a few more "weaker" pictures to build an ebb and flow of pacing. The "weaker" ones are really just the ones that hit the high contrast/surreal notes less powerfully, and in a portfolio dominated by the other sort they feel slightly out of place. Still, perhaps they were necessary to fill out the artist's vision, and the result is superb as-is.
I also wish the gallery-show photos got peeled out and moved somewhere else. It's a bit jarring to run into them at the end of this really marvelous meditation on childhood memory.
Overall, I am pretty excited by Kravik's work. It is genuinely new (to me) and good. Not only is it good but I like it. A twofer.
Giaminardi's work is pedestrian, tedious, and uninteresting, although it is very well executed. It is not good, and I dislike it on the grounds of its superficiality.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
"Priming"
There's a forum I poke at pretty regularly to try to keep a finger on the pulse of the dumbest parts of the photography-verse. In it there was a recent thread about William Eggleston, and there was a little flurry of the sorts of responses you'd expect from idiots. They're just bad photos (whatever that even might mean - in this context it probably means that they look nothing like bottom-feeder Lifestyle Photos) Snapshots and I don't get it. Not to suggest that everyone should be an Art History major, but 5 minutes on wikipedia would enable pretty much anyone to say something more intelligent along with the I don't like it statement.
Anyways, one of the I don't like it crowd suggested that probably people like Eggleston because they are "primed" to like him. We've heard that he's important, that he's good, so we try to find a reason to like the pictures. This poster phrased it as a dismissal, essentially suggesting that people are "tricked" by the critics and the Art Establishment into liking something that he doesn't like, that is, which is objectively shit.
The thing is, this sort of "priming" is why we like everything. What art do you like? What books do you like? What music? You like it because of all that you have absorbed in this society. You like it because the critics like it (or hate it), and because your Mom likes it (or doesn't) and because your friends like it. This is the nature of these intersubjective experiences, more or less by definition. Art is, literally, good because society decrees it to be good.
Not liking Eggleston isn't a sin, he's not the most approachable photographer ever. Dismissing him as "bad" or a mere maker of "snapshots", dismissing people who do like or appreciate his work as victims of a scam, these merely mark you as an ignorant rube. You might as well fabricate a scarlet R and wear it out around town. It is one thing to disagree with the social consensus, that's perfectly normal and often reasonable. To deny that a social consensus exists, or to dismiss it as irrelevant, is to be a flat-earther.
Also, "priming" is a term of art in psychology which doesn't mean this really at all, but I dare say if we're careful we can get away with the usage here.
Anyways, one of the I don't like it crowd suggested that probably people like Eggleston because they are "primed" to like him. We've heard that he's important, that he's good, so we try to find a reason to like the pictures. This poster phrased it as a dismissal, essentially suggesting that people are "tricked" by the critics and the Art Establishment into liking something that he doesn't like, that is, which is objectively shit.
The thing is, this sort of "priming" is why we like everything. What art do you like? What books do you like? What music? You like it because of all that you have absorbed in this society. You like it because the critics like it (or hate it), and because your Mom likes it (or doesn't) and because your friends like it. This is the nature of these intersubjective experiences, more or less by definition. Art is, literally, good because society decrees it to be good.
Not liking Eggleston isn't a sin, he's not the most approachable photographer ever. Dismissing him as "bad" or a mere maker of "snapshots", dismissing people who do like or appreciate his work as victims of a scam, these merely mark you as an ignorant rube. You might as well fabricate a scarlet R and wear it out around town. It is one thing to disagree with the social consensus, that's perfectly normal and often reasonable. To deny that a social consensus exists, or to dismiss it as irrelevant, is to be a flat-earther.
Also, "priming" is a term of art in psychology which doesn't mean this really at all, but I dare say if we're careful we can get away with the usage here.
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