Crit: Sanaz Mazinani

While I was in San Francisco last weekend, I did more than stop in to the Arbus show. I stopped in to SF Camerworks to see whatever they had up, which turned out to be an exhibit of Sanaz Mazinani's work. I apologize in advance, I feel sure that I have mangled the artist's name at least once in what follows.

This work is mixed media, ultimately rendered as a sculptural wall-mounted object. There's a few other things in the show, a chunk of wallpaper she designed around her methods, a sculpture of colored glass and black rods, some window installations. I will ignore these, except to note that they illustrate her capacity to grow, to experiment, to evolve. The main thrust of the show is the collection of pieces I will now discuss.

Initially the works read each as a set of flat planes with an appealing kaleidoscope-esque pattern of colors and shapes on them. The impression is of a peculiarly angular and quite beautiful flower. One might also read into the large shape, sometimes, some flavor of the planarity of modern "stealth" military vehicles, a B-2 bomber or a Zumwalt class destroyer. This is much more likely after some time spent making a closer inspection of the piece.

The attentive and appropriately knowledgeable might immediately notice the deliberate references to Islamic art, which is often non-representational patterned mosaics and the like.

That's the outermost layer, the largest scale.

Stepping closer, it becomes clear that these patterns are built of of repetitions of smaller fragments. Perhaps you notice the American flag, or you realize that the attractive yellow/orange color is actually a tiny explosion repeated, mirrored this way and that, across the panels of the piece. Closer inspection will unpack more imagery. How much is visible depends on the piece, and this is one of the ongoing problems I find with the work, about which more anon.

It becomes clear, especially after inspecting at least a couple of the works, that the underlying pieces of the patterns are photographs, or fragments of photographs. It is, I think, reasonable to assume that in all cases you'll feel that the photographs are essentially military, political, or both in nature. In some of the works the scale is such that the underlying nature of the photographs is obvious, you can make out quite a bit of detail. In other works you can apprehend enough of the detail, a critical mass of detail, with some effort. The details in these fill in gradually as you work out what you're looking at, the abstraction gradually peeling away. In some of the work, the scale is simply too small to make out much of what's going on in the underlying photographs. You can make out, perhaps, a fragment of a flag and you can tell that there is more but you cannot make it out.

The other problem I see is that the provenance of the photographs is often important. Without knowing that one of the more visually incomprehensible pieces is made up of redacted photographs of flag-draped caskets containing the bodies of slain American soldiers, being carried by other soldiers processionally, the dark rectangles in the pattern do not make a lot of sense. The title of the work contains the word "redacted" but doesn't tell the whole story.

The fact that these photos were not available for a time, and then later made available and only in a censored form, matters. It is the key to understanding what the piece is about, and there is no way to deduce it or even, really, feel it, without being told. I had guessed that the flag shapes might represent coffins, but I did not know if the artist had made the shape through the patterning process, or whether it was part of the original underlying photo, and I don't think there was any way to know.

In general, there is a problem is density. Visual density is sometimes too extreme, rendering the finest layer of visual incomprehensible, other times it is too coarse rendering the effect one of a mere collage. Information density is always too great, if you don't know what the underlying pictures are of and what their provenance is, you have no chance of really grasping the meaning of the piece. It will be, at best, an attractive pattern with some largely unknown but obviously political meaning.

Now, I certainly don't oppose the idea of unplumbed depths, of mystery left mysterious. These works are, however, inconsistent in where they leave off, and in my opinion frequently leave too much beyond the pale and unknowable.

I think Ms. Mazinani needs to find a way to fill in, to some degree or another, those unknowns. I know the provenance of the pictures in these works because the immensely nice chap working at SF Camerworks walked with me and told me, but it seems impractical to include him with the work. A brief artist's statement next to the piece would fill the bill for a gallery show of the sort I saw, but that seems clumsy when selling pieces one by one.

Although I found these pieces inside SF Camerworks, and although cameras were involved somewhere in their production, I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that these pieces are emphatically not photography. For a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, a photograph is something one can apprehend in a moment, it is the essence of still photography, it's what makes a photograph a photograph (yes, yes, abstract this, abstract that and so on, I hear you, I'm choosing to ignore you -- bear with me). These are something else, they demand time and study to even begin to make headway on. They're not video, since you approach them on your own schedule, not the artist's. They might be poems. Some photographs are also poems in this sense, in the sense that they unpack, with labor, into a larger structure of meaning. But these aren't photographs.

Second, and secondmost, one could readily substitute political cartoons, brand logos, campaign posters, and Ms. Mazinani's methods and ideas would translate perfectly. The work wouldn't even look different. It is the transformation of underlying material that is itself charged with meaning that makes these objects work.

The fact that these things are not photography begs the natural question "what on earth is Andrew doing writing about it?" and the answer is that Andrew has to write about it to determine that these things aren't photographs. Plus which, they're interesting, whatever they are.

My complaints aside, I find the work fascinating and in many ways excellent. I very much enjoyed the layering of meaning, from the beautiful flowerlike shape, drilling in to the political, the anti-military, leading perhaps to the re-understanding the large shape in terms of a stealth aircraft. The work invites close inspection, it rewards time spent with it. It invites you to stand back, to approach, to stand back again, to reconsider. It's literally trivial to spend 10 minutes with one piece without getting bored which is, let us be honest with ourselves, truly remarkable for a static piece of art.

I do think Ms. Mazinani would be rewarded by a careful consideration of the problems with density. Not to suggest that she needs to pick a singular solution and to stick with it, only that she consider it, and ponder going forward how she can better reward the careful study of her future pieces, how she can help the art viewer fill in the little details that really drive this work.

If these be poems, then a few (perhaps 1, or maybe 2) of them approach doggerel, and a few are simply too densely "written", and several of them are Just Right. More of the Just Right, please!

I think this artist has huge potential. The work is exquisitely collectible. It's right-sized, big without being ostentatious. It's beautiful. It's dense with ideas and meaning. It's just plain fun to be with. And, she has demonstrated that she can produce, she has demonstrated that she can evolve, that she will be able to produce a body of work that is connected, coherent, without being repetitious. Will she "make it"? Well, to an extent she already has, having enjoyed various success here and there. Will she be launched into the stratosphere of, let me pick the first name that comes to mind, Jeff Koons? Beats me! Probably not, luck being what luck is? But the potential is there!

I'd be happy if she did!

Ugh

Here's a piece on Reading the Pictures, which also appears on No Caption Needed, two web sites I have brought up in the past as bastions of pseudo-intellectual wankery.

Let me quote the author's bio:

Robert Hariman is a professor in the department of communication studies at Northwestern University. His publications include No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, which he co-authored with John L. Lucaites. He and John maintain the blog No Caption Needed, which provides commentary on photojournalism, politics, and culture.

And now let us examine the essay.

Standard rehash of complaints about Trump, standard narrative about social media comma Trump's mastery of, etcetera. Focus on the Trump presidency's lack of transparency. Ok, fair enough, I agree with all of this. It's not exactly deep analysis or interesting at this point, Hariman isn't saying anything that isn't basically part of the standard narrative, simplified form, aimed at 6th graders and up.

Then we get a photograph of some stuff that's on fire, and a paragraph that starts off thus:

"So we get to the photograph above after all. Eye catching, yet mournful: a visual art work of a sort."

Wait, what? How do we get to a photo of, um, I guess it's a camp used by the DAPL protesters, which said protesters (someone?) have set afire for reasons the author does not share with us. "So we get to this photograph" in what way, exactly? Can you show me, if not the path, at least the trailhead? Point in a general direction? Give me a faint clue? Anything? Is it uphill or downhill? No? Ok, then.

Then some discussion of the snowflakes on the lens (obviously written by a non-photographer, the snowflakes are quite clearly not on the lens at all, but falling in front of it) with some blather about how the snowflakes obscure the scene (which they do not, but which seems to be the author's only stab at an actual connection to the anti-Trump rehash) and make the photograph "reflexive" (which they do, if you're a rube who reads them as "on the lens").

And then, just as suddenly we're back to simple-minded analysis of Trump's campaign, photograph long forgotten.

I give this paper an F. This guy is a professor at Northwestern?

Diane Arbus: In the beginning

Diane Arbus is quoted, from time to time, as saying something like a photo is a secret about a secret which is exactly the sort of poncy stuff an arteest might say. But let's see.

The SFMOMA has a show from the MOMA on display now, entitled "in the beginning" which covers a body of Arbus' work that I have not seen before. It turns out that she shot with a 35mm film from the mid 1950s until 1962, when she got a wide angle Rollei, and everything changed. All the iconic pictures seem to be from after 1962. So this show is about the 35mm work, and it definitely provides context.

First, let me remark that the show is hung like shit. It's hung in a maze of identical white rooms, in chronological order but only once you work out what the insane ordering of walls actually is. Walking the work in order is, I think, literally impossible without regular diagonal trips across rooms. I got lost repeatedly. It's ridiculous. And then the show segues into a bunch of larger square pictures, and there's a big gap in the chronology because what you're looking at now is, suddenly, a completely different show. Arbus did a "box of 10 photos" portfolio, which consisted entirely of medium format work. These are, for the most part, the pictures we know about. But the way the show is hung, you don't really notice, or you notice that things are all different, but why? What just happened?

So, it's a mess. Honestly, who the fuck put this thing together?

But anyways, the work. Once you sort out the mess the curators have made, you can get to work and see what's what.

The first thing that strikes me about the 35mm work is how much of it is, from our modern perspective, completely ordinary observational "street" photography that we now know can be ground out by the tonne by anyone with a small camera and the right sort of obsession for mashing the shutter button. People sitting on trains. People standing around. People at the movie theater, etcetera.

This is perhaps a quarter or an eighth of the show. Enough that, in our modern world awash in this garbage, it sticks out.

Half of the show is clearly Arbus finding her way. It's people wearing masks, it's cross-dressers, people with tattoos, circus clowns, circus people, photographs of the movie screen, photographs of people watching the movie, photographs of players backstage. Arbus' obsession with masks and masking, both literal and figurative, is fully in bloom here. She is exploring these ideas, figuring out what works and what does not.

Not all photographs are secrets about secrets, but Arbus' photographs sure as hell are.

We'll circle back to the masks and circus people in a moment.

Another good sized chunk reads as those tedious "street portraits" which people are constantly shooting these days. "Interesting looking" people (freaks, weirdos, overdressed and underdressed people, and so on) shot in a sort of spontaneous portrait style. These I dismissed initially, because again we know now that you can grind this garbage out wholesale. I was, I think, wrong. There's something a little different with Arbus.

What I saw, eventually, was that her "street portraits" are often actually of the moment the victim becomes aware of the camera. The eye contact of the street portrait is there, the awareness, but the victim has not yet formulated a response. It's a fleeting moment when, if you stretch a point slightly, perhaps, the "mask" goes up. The victim sees the camera, the photographer, and assumes an expression. Perhaps a blank stare, perhaps a smile, perhaps an angry stare. It's an opening move, to cover, while the victim decides what to do next. Should I mug for the camera? Tell that woman to stop? Yell at her? Turn away?

My take on it is in fact that Arbus reads this first response as a mask of sorts, and that's precisely what she wants. She's interested in layers that conceal, layers partly but not completely peeled back. The mask covers the eyes but not the mouth; the cross-dresser is bare-chested, and so on. You can peek past the masks, and get at something, but not everything.

Whatever these street portrait-like things are, it's definitely not what happens in the 60 seconds after some smarmy asshole named Eric Kim or Brandon Stanton asks "May I make your portrait?"

Arbus wasn't "making" no damn pictures. She was "taking" in all the senses of the word, make no mistake about it.

Random notes. Arbus liked a good Pietà, two pictures of parents holding sleeping children appear. She enjoyed the grotesque, giving us a wax museum murder scene, siamese twin fetuses in a jar, an autopsy, a dying old woman. She seems to have had an affinity for children. To my eye the two best pictures she every made were 35mm photographs of children on the street.

The themes she would explore with the medium format rig are all present, but in a vastly more spontaneous way, and in I think a much much stronger way.

When we, wandering through the museum, crash confused into the medium format collection of 10 photographs, mostly from much later, we find a much more formal and stagey flavor. It all feels like a surreal and while not precisely posed, perhaps a little forced. There's still the sense of layering, but it has that Eggleston "the suburbs are actually Hell" flavor rather than the urban grittiness of real people with real layers and real secrets. We know now that the kid with the hand grenade is a scam, she has a whole roll of a perfectly normal kid playing with a toy, and one frame of him making a weird face. The pollutes the rest of the square pictures, I at any rate feel like they're probably all scams.

The 35mm work feels a lot more spontaneous and real. They're also a lot more banal. There is no hint of deep darkness, just the ordinary kind of darkness. With the medium format, one feels that she stopped trying to find masks and mask analogs, and started in creating them. She leaned on the slightly weird look of the wide lens, as well, relying on that look to lend a bit of pop to her efforts to find the surreal in the more or less ordinary.

The 35mm work has some really strong ideas in it, but I think much of what we're being shown is in the spirit of exploration, of testing. A great deal of it looks like random experiments in bullshit. As a body of work it really shows what she's thinking, where she's going, but it doesn't read very well as final product. She kind of needs 100 pictures to get the point across. She seems to have thought that the medium format work was the final product, the distillation of the former work. I think the curators at the MOMA want us to accept this narrative.

I think it is wrong.

I think that the 35mm works shows a lot of ideas, I think she's building up a strong vocabulary, she's exploring ideas and methods that have potential and which from time to time produce some really good stuff. Then she gets a medium format wide angle camera and the wheels fall off, and she becomes Eggleston's antecedent, and that's about it. She wandered off into the weeds of a sort of false notion of masks and masking, started printing big, sold some stuff, and that was pretty much it. Then she killed herself. Well, fuck.

If I were pulling together a box of 10 Arbus photos, I wouldn't have much trouble pulling the best of the lot of out the small camera work. My box of 10, I arrogantly submit, would be a hell of a lot stronger than her box of 10. If you asked me for 20, well, I'd have to salt the box with a few duds. Because the final portfolio never really got made.

Fascinating!

This is a very interesting discussion over on ToP, but not in the way you might think.

What we have here is a portrait of Vladimir Putin. What can we say about it, objectively? It's high contrast. The man is apparently making eye contact with the photographer. He appears conscious of being photographed although he appears to be photographed with at least a longish lens so it's not a sure thing. His face appears relaxed. He appears tired, as compared with other photographs, but that may simply be a combination of the light and the relatively high contrast treatment emphasizing "bags" under the eyes. Objectively, it is almost startling in its blankness. The background is vaguely military, but we can't really make out definitively. In the west we might reasonably interpret the head-tilt as a "seriously? You're photographing me?" gesture, but we must accept that a) our cultural referents may be off here, b) Putin may not even have been aware of the camera, and c) even in New York City, this expression is not definitive. It could be Putin's resting face.

Now read the comments. Holy crap.

Consider what we actually know about Putin, as opposed to the various constructs various aspects of various media, variously controlled by various governments. He's ex-KGB, which likely means he's not a particularly nice guy. He went to University. He's old enough to have a career that bridges the USSR's dissolution.

Media constructs paint him as the devil, as a powerful leader, as an assassin, a ruthless killed, a brilliant politician. The west, in particular, resolutely demonizes him, occasionally in ways that are transparent knee-bending to western political interests. (pro-tip: the Crimean adventure is much more complicated than the western press makes out, and it's not actually all that clear that Russia/Putin is in the wrong). The Russian press, which we can observe sort of second hand, seems to be painting him equally improbably, but in the positive. It's certainly possible that he is evil incarnate, or not a nice fellow at all, I don't know. The point is, this is not information that is available to any of us. It is deliberately concealed and obfuscated on all sides.

And yet, confronted with a remarkably bland portrait of the man, a bunch of various westerns are happy to read in, basically, the narrative the media has spoon fed them for the last decade or so. To be blunt, this is ridiculous and naive.

But it is exactly what we do with portraits in particular, and photographs in general. We bring our own massive freight of ideas, our own history, and we project madly onto the picture. A tabula rasa like Turnley's portrait is a wonderful canvas for the careless to project stuff on to, especially when we have such a rich conception of the subject, as we do in this case.

The gap between what's actually in the picture (virtually nothing) and what we think we know about the subject (sufficient material for several long novels) is practically unprecented here, and therefore provides us with a really great case study of how people react to photos.

Why Photographers Don't Get Modern Art

There's this article that popped up on PetaPixel, but originally appeared here on Medium. The author attempts to address the question of why Photographers Don't Get Modern Art. Well, actually, he does not. It sort of seems like he might get there, but I am unable to discern any direct answer to the question.

Still, there are plenty of problems which I think are worth dealing with, and then I'm going to take a crack at the actual question. It's a good question. How is is that photographers, who are essentially makers of contemporary art, so dismissive of contemporary art?

The most obvious issue is that he sets up Modernist Photography in opposition to Pictorialism. Now, Mireles isn't the only person who's done this, but it's still quite wrong. Modernism is a big tent. In fact, I think Modernism is so vague a label as to be virtually meaningless, at any rate I have never been able to make any sense of what it actually is. It appears to be, roughly, a period of time and a list of practitioners, and, maybe, a vague statement of philosophy. Mireles characterization of it as "form follows function" appears to be utterly wrong. That's a practice that allegedly derived from Modernism, specifically in architecture. Modernism, if it is anything, is simply about inventing the new, about creating modernity to replace the old ways.

It is pretty clear that photography, from its beginning, is closely allied with Modernism. It is, after all, profoundly modern at its very core.

The idea correctly set up against Pictorialism is straight photography, and the f.64 group to which Adams belonged was only semi-kinda straight. The f.64 folks were really their own thing, a mish-mash of ideas and methods and themes from all over, largely arranged in opposition to and simultaneously bait for Stieglitz' crew on the east coast. They wanted to separate themselves from the east coasters, as well as to attract their attention and maybe be accepted by Stieglitz, and finally they felt there was something uniquely west coast in their work. Adams, as I have argued in the past, borrowed a great deal from early Pictorialism, Weston was from time to time some sort of ur-Minimalist, and so on. All, clearly, derived from straight photography but largely separated from the Realism that, for instance, Paul Strand seems to have been influenced by (Strand being, in a way, the ur-straight photographer.)

Anyways. Mireles has a plan here, he needs to set up Modernism (or, well, anything it turns out) in opposition to Pictorialism, so that Ansel Adams can that, and so that everyone else can be that too since we're all obviously just Ansel Adams acolytes.

And then it follows, logically, that since we're all Modernists and Modernism is over (replaced initially by the philosophically indistinguishable Post Modernism), we must be stuck in an evolutionary dead end!

Finches are reptiles.
Artistotle is a finch.
Therefore, Aristotle is a reptile

The whole thing is absurd. Photography is not stuck in a dead-end of Ansel Adams imitation. Individual photographers are, certainly. Other individuals are stuck in other dead ends of repeating some other set of tropes over and over. But that's how it goes with artists. Art does not proceed, generally, through the growth and change of individual artists, but by their deaths.

Mireles also takes a good long chunk of words to trot out the tedious notion that contemporary art is inaccessible to all but the anointed few. This is utter nonsense. Anyone with a basic high school education can "get" contemporary art to a degree. While I might not "get" the references to Kafka, I can generally find something to enjoy in a piece of contemporary art. Yes, sometimes I have to read a few lines of text, but it's almost never a "densely written artist statement", it's usually something like this is the carpet from my grandmother's living room or I was inspired by the plight of the Brazilian nickle miners or whatever. One does not expect to "get" every little reference in a novel, but this does not mean that we cannot enjoy the novel, that we cannot feel the greatness of a great one.

What is required to partake of contemporary art is an open mind, an open heart, basic reading ability, and maybe a basic understanding of the larger strokes of the local culture. People who don't "get" art in general lack the first two. To be blunt, these are people who are aggressively trying to not get it, and they are succeeding.

So the question is, really, what is it about photographers that makes them be specifically inclined to belong to the deliberately dunderheaded?

Well. Photographers tend to be technophiles and technocrats. They like gadgets, and they suspect that gadgets and procedures are maybe the answer to most if not all of life's little problems. Photographers love Rules of Composition. They love Photoshop actions. They love 10 Top Tips. It's kind of baked in to the photo enthusiast. It's not that owning a camera makes you a gear nerd, it's that gear nerds are much more likely to buy a camera in the first place. To an extent, amateur photographers are a self-selected group of people who were already crashing bores.

Present company, of course, excluded!

Further, they reinforce it by hanging out together, and their media (vendor/advertising supported) reinforces it as hard as it can. Ideas, concepts, vision, raw creativity are all downplayed. You cannot buy them by the bottle, Canon makes not a cent on these things, and nobody can summarize how to be creative in a 6 minute YouTube video. Perhaps, the technophile amateur photographer secretly hopes, it's not all that important. Perhaps, he reasons, if I can just master how to place the lights to photograph chubbier people, that's just as good. Or better.

Anything which suggests that maybe gadgets, tips, procedures, tools are maybe not capable of producing any answer you desire is looked at, therefore, with suspicion. On the flip side, anything which does use gadgets, tips, procedures, and tools is looked at approvingly. Mastery of tools, that is to say craft, is therefore naturally elevated.

Confronted, therefore, with a piece of contemporary art that exhibits little or no recognizable craft, and which is dense with ideas, the amateur photographer first sees not much that he recognizes as worthwhile, and secondarily perhaps feels slighted, feels a hint of attack on his own ethos.

Certainly I am not claiming this as a blanket diagnosis, it's not that simple. Plenty of non-photographers are bull-headed anti-Art numbskulls, and so surely much of the negativity we see from photographers is just this same bull-headedness all over again. But perhaps what I see as an extra tendency in this direction among amateur photographers can be explained as above.

Photographing The Network

A while I ago I blithely put out some ideas about a notion of "the network" of relationships that one might be able to perceive, and I proposed that this was an interesting thing to ponder while photographing. In the mean time, Russ Lewis has written a somewhat tangentially related piece in which he seems to be arguing that "the network" in my sense, roughly, equals street photography, and is really where photography is best at. This is a slightly radical stance, I think, but I see what he's getting at. Worth a read.

Since then I've had a few opportunities to photograph around and about to specifically work with these ideas "in the field" (gosh does that sound poncy) and I've drafted a piece on the subject for LuLa with some illustrations to be, perhaps, published in the next few weeks (which is most definitely poncy!).

It turns out that this is quite a difficult thing to photograph. It only takes a little effort to perceive the relationships, but committing the idea, that thing you see so clearly, to film (as it were) is not so obvious.

I'm riding a subway. A young man boards, steps across the train car to clear the doorway, and finds himself standing almost next to a beautiful young woman much his own age, engrossed (of course) in her iPhone. She does not look up. I can tell, or guess with fair reliability, that she is carefully remaining glued to her iPhone in part to fend off any attempts at conversation the young man might make. He, in turn, is exquisitely aware of her, is aware of her iPhone gambit, chooses to respects it (good boy), and studiously ignores her. However, he remains where he is, she is visible in his peripheral vision. I feel sure that he's admiring her, while carefully not looking at her. He makes no attempt to engage her but they remain 24 inches apart for another 5-10 minutes, studiously ignoring one another, until I get off the train.

This interaction, and variations on it, happen 10,000 times a day on that train. They'll happen in front of you every few minutes if you ride a subway during moderate usage times. This is one of those relationships that makes up that interesting fabric of urban life.

How do you photograph it? How do you photograph that mildly fraught crackle of tension between two young bodies working hard to create the illusion of no crackle whatsoever?

How do I photograph the way the dew lingers in this spot a little later in the day, which in turn tends to encourage this variety of tiny flower to flourish in this spot rather than a little to the west?

In a way it is the same problem as how shall I photograph the flower so as to reveal its beauty? or how shall I photograph Half Dome to reveal its majesty and the sense of the sublime I feel at this moment? but I think perhaps it is more difficult.

Relationships, between people, between automobiles, between the plants of the forest, are dynamic things. They are revealed over time, through a thousand tiny gestures, through a 1000 repetitions. Any given slice of time appears to be simply a random assemblage. In general, it is the repetition of the nearly random that reveals that a pattern exists.

I have no particular answers here, but I do know that I have seen it done.

With people there are some obvious gimmicks, the sightline, the gesture or movement captured half-completed, the occasional moment of obvious body language, the grimace and the smile. Properly assembled, these can reveal. What of emotion concealed? You have to, I suppose, find the slip-up, the accidental momentary lapse. And you have to photograph it in a way that shows it to be a momentary lapse.

What of that dew and the flower? I have no idea! Do you simply shoot wide to show the moss here but not there, should helpful moss be available to reveal the pattern of dew?

What else?

I do know that inspiration is more likely to strike you if you are consciously aware of what the abstraction is that you intend to shoot. Or, more exactly, if you do not specifically set out to photograph "the network" I do not see how you can possibly manage to accomplish except by blind luck once in a very very great while.

Ren Hang II

I have realized since I made the remarks previous to these that I failed utterly to view Hang's work through the lenses I have so carefully contructed, trame and the idea of "network." So I thought about that.

My first thought was that these pictures are almost astonishing in how little they refer to anything outside the frame. The are fully self contained, each is entirely a little world. My next thought was that they might therefore just as well be paintings. Which leads to my third thought which was good lord there's no way these things could be paintings which leads, tangentially perhaps, into the notion of network.

These pictures are entirely about the situation of being photographed. The subjects are all exquisitely conscious of being photographed, often making direct eye contact, and almost invariably posed very very obviously For The Camera. These things are practically selfies. It is entirely about the fact that there were really one or more actual naked people out there being photographed. As paintings or drawings they would be bad graffiti, at best, and completely different. As a photograph the mildly lurid reality of the set becomes real, it comes home to us.

While I don't think this makes them good as such, because it still seems to be a young man without any ideas beyond twitting the puritans and making visual jokes. But it certainly makes them extremely photographic and goes a long way toward helping us understand the Art World's fascination with the work. These are a powerful expression of the modern selfie-generation photography. These things wouldn't exist without social media, and would make a lot less sense without social media as a backdrop. Even the geometric groupings of naked girls could be, with a bit of stretching, be considered a nod to the standard "6 drunk girls throwing peace signs at a party" picture that infests Facebook and so on.

The intense self-consciousness is, I think, the thing that drives Hang's pictures if anything does. And that, well, I think that's kind of interesting. It certainly separates him from Richardson and his ilk, who seem to be striving for a "oh dear me, I am being photographed, what a surprise" flavor.