Crit: Yagazie Emezi

I'm trolling around on Women Photograph for work I haven't seen that's worth a mention.

Yagazie Emezi appears there, and I went to her web site, which is right here. Basically she only takes a half a dozen different pictures, they're fashion inspired portrait-things, but she does them competently. This isn't high concept fashion, this is people standing against a wall, posing, in clothes, hair, and makeup.

What makes it interesting is that it's African, self-concsiously so. This woman has a limited technical palette (well, for all I know she's got vast and incredible powers with the camera, but here she's only using a few simple tropes) which she is using to explore various and sundry ideas. She shows me things that are new to me, that enlarge me, and she shows them to me in a way I can understand. The fact that the photographs are stylistically familiar, the poses, and to some extent the clothes, gives me a portal to access this stuff. These are modern women, living in the same world I inhabit.

On an approach to beauty in Liberia, in which aesthetics are driven not by "correctly" combining fashion elements to please others, but in which you simply choose individual colors and clothes that you like:

You’re not putting on pink because it matches, but because you like it, so you’re going to put it on you

Taken by itself, it's not even that interesting. Taken with the rest of the pictures in "The Beauties of West Point" and with the text that accompanies that project, it snaps in to focus and reveals itself as a cultural facet, new to me.

On body image in Liberia, we get little snippets of interview with young women, and then a picture:

Royda, 30: "I am a 5'1" and a half, curvy, thicker woman, and when I add five pounds, it may look like 10. In African culture, as soon as you gain a little weight, people tend to say, 'Oh, you're getting fat,' which they think is a compliment. You're getting healthier. But it becomes a subconscious thing for me that I'm gaining weight.

Again, nothing particularly interesting. A competent boyfriend shot, maybe. But taken against the text, and against the text and pictures of other young women of various sizes and shapes (all shot in the same place and, roughly, the same way), I learn a little something of "Body Image in Liberia" and how it is different from in the USA.

Interestingly, it strikes me that western ideas of body image are getting mixed in. There's a curious duality between a skinny ideal, which I identify as western, and a no-skinny ideal, which I adentify as Africa.

Something a little more "traditional western media views Africa" appears in the project "Process of re-learning our Bodies" in that we see Africans with scars, sometimes pretty severe. She talks a little about body image in Africa, but does not do a particularly good job of, I think, of telling us anything interesting. There's something vague about African attitudes toward damaged bodies? But the pictures are interesting, in their own way, because she's continuing to use the simple fashion tropes.

I feel like there's something going on here, something which would reveal something interesting to me if only I had a better handle to grasp.

Anyways. Yagazie Emezi. There's more work on her web site. I think it hangs together, if only because she uses that very small visual vocabulary, and I think she's got some interesting things to say. Also, cheerful Africans who are not posing in Traditional Poses for some western dork with a camera, and that's all to the good, right?

Caleb Stein: Man of Mystery

Recently on PetaPixel we have seen a young photographer name of Caleb Stein, an "emerging" photographer as they say, featured with a bunch of pictures. This sort of thing:

which is instantly recognizable as "kid with a camera documents poverty gonna change the world" and which, upon further inspection, turns out to be exactly what it appears to be. There are all the usual tropes. This kid thinks he's Diane Arbus, but has a handful of other tropes he's picked up here or there that he churns out. So what, it's just PetaPixel. He's got a web site of sorts, and there's some other pictures on it, none of which struck me as much better. It's the homeless-people project that's getting traction, though.

What's interesting about this kid is that he's "published" in at least three magazines besides PetaPixel: Huck, Burn, and Trip. At least two of those have print editions, as well as the web site, although who knows if Caleb's work will get printed. I eagerly await his publication in more four letter magazines, perhaps FUCK, tUrn, and pOOp. Caleb has also been nominated, shortlisted, and runnered up in various competitions.

It is inconceivable to me that anyone publishing this photo essay does not instantly recognize it as the uninteresting lightweight fluff that it is. Which begs the question of why they'd publish it, eh?

In addition, he's interned at Christie's and currently interns for Bruce Gilden (collective "ugh" now, all togather!)

All this on the basis of, basically, nothing. The internet is utterly festooned with this sort of thing. This lad has trotted out to the section of Poughkeepsie where the junkies and homeless hang out, he's persuaded a handful of them to pose for him. Then he wraps this up in a little turgid prose about Poughkeepsie's poverty level (I live in a town that's poorer, and it looks nothing like this, although the homeless people look just like that). There's no structure, this is just a collection of "the best ones" in the sense of Likes, one assumes.

These pictures have been done so many times that they're just symbols, standing in for the photographer's politics. They don't even, in any meaningful way, connect us to poverty, to homelessness, to any sort of social problem any more. They tell us, in short and simple strokes, what kind of photographer we're looking at.

He's pretending that he's documenting Poughkeepsie's poverty, but he's not. He's documenting, mostly, a very small handful of addicts and people he thought looked weird enough to be worth his time. The 19% of Poughkeepsie that lives below the poverty line look, almost universally, like regular people, perhaps a little shabbier, in cheaper clothes. More tired looking. A little hunted.

Caleb's got some bog standard "street" shots, there are 10s of thousands of similar "projects" out there on the web, some better, some worse, mostly just about the same. He's parleying this into a career! Good for him, but how on earth does that work?

I smell a powerful mentor, money, or both.

Black and White Landscape

QT Luong (full disclosure, QT is the man I longed to be for years and years until, arguably, I simply gave up because I lacked the necessary ability) has asked some pointed but intelligent questions on an earlier post. He takes issue with my remark about students of Adams, which was ultimately a throwaway remark based on experiences from decades ago in which I interacted with various and sundry Adams followers.

It's not true, of course, that everyone who ever took a lesson from Ansel Adams sucks, nor I dare say is it even true that they all wrap themselves in the mantle of the great man. Many of them suck, and many of them so wrap themselves (or at any rate did).

More interesting is QT's assertion that black and white landscape all kind of looks like Adams. I read this more as "is naturally associated with" Adams, as a more general statement. Certainly the unsophisticated viewer tends to see a B&W landscape and responds "looks a bit like Adams" pretty much regardless, but I think even there they're simply connecting up the basic tropes, not making a literal statement.

But let's look at some pictures. I have selected two well known photos by Adams, and then three more landscapes by two different Westons with similar tonal ranges. I present them here in two versions, one the "orginal" as downloaded from the web, and two a "crushed tones" version, in which the white tones are lowered to a dismal grey, and the black tones are raised to a somewhat darker dismal grey. Let us see what we can see.

It will be helpful to click the pictures and look at them big. In a proper web browser, it should pop up a viewer thing you can use to flip through the photos.

Ansel Adams:

Ansel Adams again:

Brett Weston:

Edward Weston:

Edward Weston again:

I am going to make the bold claim that Adams's pictures lose more by being crushed than either of the Weston's, although neither do they enjoy the process. In particular, without the glittering whites, Adams's work seems to be to be thoroughly demolished. It's still a pretty scene, but it's nothing special. That's just what those places look like. More on this in a moment.

I don't think anyone would mistake Brett Weston's picture, or Weston's dunes, as an Adams. Both of the Westons are far more about firmly graphical pictures, while Adams enjoyed depth of detail you could sink in to forever. Adams was also, I suspect, frankly afraid of the kind of sensual curves that Edward shot constantly. All three of these men have distinctly different voices, though all are photographing, more or less, the same thing with the same tools.

Like most Adams acolytes, I paid little to no attention to his constant harping on genuine emotional reaction to the scene, preferring instead to re-read the bit on N-1 development and the use of Farmer's Reducer. And, had I kept on with sufficient discipline, I would have probably become what so many of his fans did become, an expert on N-1 development and the use of Farmer's Reducer.

If you're attentive, though, you can see in Adams's pictures precisely what he was on about. Again and again, the picture is about bright sunlight picking out a specific detail, illuminating it in a brief moment of glittering brightness, while the rest of the scene is plunged into gloom, buried in the mist, or sometimes just not quite as glittering. Your average Adams follower goes out and waits for the thing to look a bit like an Adams picture, and goes "click". This usually means exciting clouds over a vista. A more sophisticated one mutters about "the light! the light!" and waits for the light to "do something interesting" before going "click".

Adams, quite clearly, waited for the light to do a specific something interesting. He didn't want some random piece of crap illuminated, he wanted that tree or that waterfall brilliantly illuminated, because to him, that was what the scene felt like. In Adams's Yosemite, Bridal Veil Falls is endlessly falling, a brilliant glowing torrent of purest white, into a dim and mysterious valley of deep green trees while mist dense with spirits swirls around and around forever.

In my Yosemite, the sun has suddenly hit, uh, think it's a big rock over there! Or maybe a chunk of ice! I dunno, but quick, set up the tripod! I am not a landscape photographer and never will be.

This, ultimately, is why I so dislike the work of Adams's followers, in the aggregate. On one end of the spectrum, there are tech nerds who take photographs mostly to test their processes, and make sure to shove in some big clouds. At the other end, there are the light seekers who don't quite know what the light is supposed to do, other than to illuminate something or other, so we can be sure to put a Full Tonal Range down on the paper, the way god intended.

Very very few, it seems, have found a distinct voice, an opinion of their own about the what a landscape is.

Having spent more time with John Sexton's pictures, I have to admit that he's one of them. While he's lifted a lot of design from both Adams and Weston, his voice is distinctly different. Nature is a place of calm, of peace. If he finds his god in nature, John's god is a god of whispers and silence, not of dramatic gestures. But you know, he still lifts the graphics from his precursors, and it's pretty obviously deliberate.

You want to make a living, you better sell some product, after all.

Sexual Harassment in the Art World

This is only of tangential relationship to what I usually write about, but it's a topic I feel strongly about.

Anyone who has not been living under a rock has heard rumblings of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and then against an apparently endless list of others. I neither know nor particularly care whether this allegation or that is true, false, exaggerated, or underplayed. People who seek power do so because they wish to gratify their desires as much as for any other reason. What do men desire? Yep, that.

Some men in positions of power rape, others simply arrange situations in which they may converse politely with young, beautiful, people. There's a spectrum. It is no surprise that some powerful men, lots of them, have used their position to coerce sex. It's not even a question, is it?

I write here and now specifically because the people I pay attention to, artists, writers, editors, and so on are wringing their hands on social media, loudly and vigorously. They re-tweet the shocking news stories. They make vague demands, and ask "what shall we do about this terrible situation?" Everyone agrees that Terry Richardson is really just business as usual, and censuring him is mainly a bit of theater. Apparently "Artforum" is at present under fire for some allegations. This pervades society, including the worlds of Art and Photography. Some photographer named Anthony Turano is accused today.

Like the weather everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it.

I ask those busy re-tweeters and reporters of stories: what are you going to do about it?

You have a platform. I have a platform. We all have platforms. Some of them are large, some are very small.

I occasionally write for online publications. My choice is to talk to my editors, to make suggestions, to apply pressure. I could refuse to write for a publication without an anti-harassment policy that has teeth. I could request that my editors decline advertisements from companies that don't have a good record of anti-harassment. I can, and I do, make my opinions heard, I offer my help, I apply pressure using my small leverage. I do all these things, in one variation here, another there.

If I submit this to you consider it another letter from me, asking you to act. You know who you are. And you're one of the good guys, you want to to the right thing.

Nobody's going full-on politically correct here. I'm not demanding that everyone police their language (although you could, if you like). I'm only asking that those people and organizations do these things:

• Implement for themselves a modern approach to equality and fairness.
• To reach out the next level up and out, to apply the same pressure to whomever and whatever they influence. Ask your advertisers, your boss, your contractors, your friends, your models, your MUAs, your accountant, what I am asking you.

The reaction, I will note, is always positive. This is the 21st century, nobody wants to be some weird 19th century operation. Everyone I speak to agrees, they say "thank you" and sometimes they ask me to help, or tell me how I can help.

Don't wring your hands and say "how awful," and don't wring your hands and say "awww, it's just political correctness." It's just the modern world, knocking on the door, and asking you what you're gonna do to make things better.

Stop re-tweeting and start acting.

What are you going to do, today, now? What change are you going to make, what demand, what request, what polite reminder, are you going to make and to whom. Right now.

A Shift

I've been noticing a shift in photography over, oh, the last several years. It just crystallized in the last few days, though, into an honest theory, or hypothesis anyways.

PetaPixel has, over the last few weeks, featured articles on three different photographers, including these pictures:

Christoffer Relander does landscapes in jars, using double exposures:

Denis Cherim finds visual coincidences and shoots them with great depth of field to make this sort of thing:

And Stefan Draschan finds people in museums who are dressed or otherwise resemble paintings, and waits for them to align with the painting:

These are all very cute, enjoyable to look at. But lightweight. Set aside the issue of whether they're photshopped, the conceit is invariably that they are not, and that is certainly possible.

These all share certain properties. They're instantly consumable. Sometimes you have to take a moment to get the joke, but then you smile, and thumb the Like button on your phone, and swipe on to the next picture. They're all perfectly readable on a tiny screen. None of them particularly engage, but they do generate a certain "oh, neat" or even "oh wow!" response.

Add in to this mix other genres. The UrbEx guys taking pictures of their own feet swinging over a vast city. The #wokeupklikethis hot girl. The picture of my lunch.

These are related to the selfie, the photo of friends at a party, the slice-of-life moment, in that these are meant to be consumed in a moment. There it is, "ha ha", Like, and move on. They are not, however, the same. They're meant as serious pictures, these people are working on these things. Sometimes very hard. They're intended to be universally interesting, not merely interesting to friends and family.

These pictures live in a strange zone. They're lightweight, to the point of the purest fluff, and yet they are also serious.

My first thought was that they would not translate to other settings but I rather think they might. In a gallery, they're consumed the same way. Look for a moment, and move on. Just like things in galleries always are consumed. If you want to irritate the other people, stand in front of an interesting piece and drink it in for a while. Nope. Nope. Glance and move, glance and move. It's the 21st century! A book might work too, glance and flip, glance and flip. Every page, every picture, you get that little jolt of pleasure, there's nothing challenging either visually or conceptually.

It's like fast food, I think. And I don't mean that in a negative way, particularly. The french fry ("chip" to our British friends, I believe) is delicious. I love them. They have more or less negative nutrition, but they're good. They're broadly appealing, everyone likes these things. There's no harm in eating them from time to time, and they give enormous pleasure when eaten. Chips are great!

I don't know about these picture specifically, I don't think I really enjoy them, but I dare say that a) I am a bit of a drip about photography and b) there are probably other, similar, genres I would like. I like cat pictures!

These are certainly the product of social media. The machine that is social media has successfully evolved an area of photography that perfectly fits the needs of the machine. The photographs attract the eye, even on the phone (so you can be shown ads) but don't retain the eye (so you can be shown more ads on the next one). Ever watched anyone "read" instagram?

They look and decide within, literally, milliseconds. A picture that does not attract is flipped past in well under 1 second, the good/bad judgement is almost immediate. Strikingly, even a good judgement buys your picture something like 1-2 seconds of attention. Just enough time to thumb the Like icon, and then we're on to the next one. It's a wild universe.

The engine of Like-and-Follower driven positive feedback has surely driven this evolution, to a large degree.

I posit that another aspect is in play. Followers can be monetized in these degenerate modern times, if you have enough of them. You probably cannot actually make money, and almost certainly not a living wage, but you can get paid. I have a nasty suspicion that people who actually become Influencers, and actually get paid real money, were already rather affluent. It takes real money and real time to create this kind of work. There is evidence that the serious players employ staff. Sure, they're getting paid $170,000 a year, but they're spending $250,000 a year. And they can afford it, because they're already rich.

Like most dreams of riches, the actuality is not available to the poor, or even the middle class. Anyone can become president, or prime minister, anyone at all. As long as he's rich.

Not everyone aspires to be a Social Media Influencer, but that possibility exists, hanging out there like a dream. It encourages everyone, no matter where they sit on the spectrum of Influencer to Loser, wherever they claim to aspire to sit on that same spectrum.

With the increasingly constrained middle class, with the increasing dominance of the gig economy, of stitching ones life together from multiple temporary jobs, surely the idea of monetizing a following is attractive to nearly anyone.

That the possibility exists, dangling out there, surely motivates a little bit of this evolution of the form. To, perhaps, our detriment? But then, I do like chips.

Squid-Eye Thinking

I read these things so you don't have to!

Daniel C. Blight, one of the apparently endless bunch of young turks of photography that Jörg Colberg mentions online from time to time, has published a thing. Link to it will appear shortly. It would not be of any note, except that it was apparently a talk given at a symposium at some academic institution, so it it what passes for scholarship in these degenerate times. It's actually fairly readable, there's not a lot of technical terms you need to look up to make sense of it. The big thing you need to have your arms around is this cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's whack-a-doodle theories. Well, they're not whack-a-doodle, they're probably pretty solid, but they're clearly designed to be misunderstood which is important because they're not very interesting if you have a proper hold of them.

Hoffman has this idea of a Conscious Agent, which has a precise mathematical definition, which you can find if you poke around. Probability spaces, markov kernels, etc. He names the things in it to make it sound more like a "consciousness" as we understand such things, and of course he calls this thing a Conscious Agent. While these things may in fact model a consciousness as we understand the word, they also model pretty much anything else. This mathematical object he's invented is essentially "A Thing that interacts with Other Things" in a probabilistic but organized way.

Hoffman is deliberately abusing terminology to give the impression that he's got hold of something about consciousness, but as far as I can tell, he does not.

He then makes the bold claim that there is no Objective Reality, all there is in Conscious Agents interacting with one another (mediated by what?) which sounds simply amazeballs if you haven't figured out that Conscious Agent means Thing. There is no objective reality, there's just Things. Well, that's a lot less sexy sounding. It almost sounds fucking stupid, actually.

Ok, so what Hoffman wants us to do is to imagine that he has mathematical proof, sort of almost, that the universe is a construction of our own consciousness. He's nowhere near this, of course. He's got a model that might or might not explain the universe as Things Interacting, and is quietly hoping that because he's sprinkled the word "conscious" around a lot, we'll make the jump to "whoa, those Things must be us!" without him explicitly saying it.

Blight, of course, walks right into it, and imagines that Cognitive Science has collectively agreed, more or less, that reality does not exist, it's just a construct of human consciousnesses chugging away being conscious.

Here is Blight's piece. I will summarize it in my usual fashion but, I think, basically honestly, now:

Cite Baudrillard on theory. Po-mo BS, theory is a pushing out, an encompassing, and in the end a destruction.

Think about this in context of theory of representation, that is, that photographs are merely representations of the real world. But the world isn't real anyways, isn't simply "documentable" it's more complex.

People are creatures of signs and metaphors, a photo has many meanings. Namedrop all over the fucking place. Watch me cite "Wayne's World" and then Derrida. Good lord.

This next bit is somewhat muddy, but I think I have it combed out. Rejection of theory is incorrectly confused with dislike for technical writing. Blight seems to be saying that people who reject theory are actually just pissy about language. The implication is, I suppose, that they would love theory if they knew it?

Quotes 3 people, dismisses them as stupid, also lots of virtue signalling -- a lot of hand wringing over being a white male and so on. This is, sort of, relevant later though.

"Theory forces me to accept that I don't understand everything and never will" which strikes me mostly as humblebrag, doesn't seem to connect to anything. Bunch of whining about his name, and something more or less incomprehensible about writing (it's only for myself, yet not me, it's dissent against me, what?)

A little more about writing, it's not "for" anything, but rather "for" everything, anything and, happily, writing need not be clear or even comprehensible. Case in point, the embittered might suggest.

Bunch of stuff about Hoffman's "interface theory" which is fine. Our perceptions did not evolve to see the truth, but to conceal it (which is overwrought, of course, but in a sense correct).

Then the wheels fall off entirely. Blight gets sucked right in to Hoffman's BS and starts going on about how there is no reality, that it's all just a construct of consciousness (our consciousness), and that therefore the camera (itself a construct) records, if anything, only a representation of the construct of our consciousness, producing photographs which are themselves more constructs etc. Essentially, Blight has a "My God, it's full of stars" moment. It's constructs all the way down.

Except, of course, it is not. Hoffman has demonstrated no such thing, and his theory supports no such idea. It is a trap that Hoffman has set, to attract the Wired editors and so on, but it's not real. Objective reality may or may not exist, but Hoffman certainly has no idea either way.

At some point in here we'd like to imagine he's going to get around to why on earth photography needs theory, and here he finally starts to nudge up against it with ths nugget:

Theory mediates the space between reality as a perceptual construction according to cognitive neuroscience, and photography as the cultural production of visual representations bound to fictionality.

In this case as near as I can tell the "fictionality" he's referring to at the end is the construct of our imagination, which we imagine to be reality. It is the thing the camera takes a picture of, more or less. Once you take it all apart, the "fictionality" seems to be precisely "reality as a perceptual construction according to cognitive neuroscience" which is the first of the two things theory mediates the space between. We can call this "reality" if we keep in our pocket the notion that, per Hoffman, it might not be a thing at all, but a construct of, um, whatever. This sentence boils down to:

Theory mediates between reality, and photography as the cultural production of visual representations of reality.

Which seems to be saying, essentially, that "theory of photography" is the "theory of representation" since this is a more or less exact description of the latter. This strikes me as a somewhat limiting view since what he is saying, after you scrape away all the Hoffman, is that photography theory is just a well-mined-out subset of what we currently understand as photography theory.

Anyways. Then he wanders off into some ideas that seem to be in essence, if the world is all made up by our consciousness(es) we should be able to topple the white patriarchy with the power of our mind. I'd be happy if I could imagine myself up a candybar from time to time, but apparently it doesn't work that way. We actually have to do the work, even if it is all imaginary.

I cannot, in any case, discern anywhere in here a justification, or even an attempt to address the question of, Does photography need theory? which is allegedly the question he set out to address. He seems to be getting close when he defines photography's theory, but then it all slips away when you start actually looking up the words (as he petulantly demands you do, early on in the piece). Perhaps he should have asked us to not look up so many words.

This is scholarship? This isn't even clear thinking. It's a careless pastiche of half-understood and largely bogus ideas, with a large helping of name dropping and virtue signalling. No wonder we're still stuck with Sontag, if this is the sort of thing that's been going on since Sontag, that self-indulgent woman is far and away the best we've got.

Art about Art

Inspired by Colberg's latest, I went to look at Thomas Ruff's pictures around the internets. I think I have heard of this guy, but wasn't familiar with his work, and Colberg made it sound interesting.

As an aside, is there some law in Germany that if you're a crashing bore you have to go live in Düsseldorf? The Bechers were up to something, but christ, their students...

Anyways, Ruff is in the business of making Art about Art.

Art about cars is interesting to art people, and car people. Potentially. Art about flowers is interesting to flower people and art people. Art about people is interesting to people and art people, which is, well, it's just people isn't it? Art about Art is interesting to Art people and Art people. That's just Art people.

These are, luckily, exactly the people you need to get interested in your work, because they have the walls to hang it on, they run the museums, the galleries, the shows. They're the critics who talk mainly to other Art people.

So if you do this you're taking steps toward success, but you've lost your bloody way. Art about Art is boring as shit to normal people. It's a stupid, pointless, circle-jerk. Yes, there are moments in time when Art needs a good kick in the ass, but they're not always, not 100% of the time, and anyways most Art about Art isn't doing that. You're not Duchamp, bro, and anyways that was a long time ago. Art, good Art, is accessible to more than a few poncy dipshits standing around smoking Gauloises. Art, good Art, engenders thoughts, enlarges, engages, across a larger field. Perhaps not the great unwashed, but at least more people.

People would rightly mock Art about Paperclips, but by god that might just reach a broader audience.

Back to Ruff. Ruff claims to be "exploring" and "deconstructing" photography.

Exploring photography is like exploring Zurich. It's already full of people, and the only people who really give much of a shit about it are already there. Ruff's claim to fame here seems to be that he does more or less the same old shit, but he prints it really big, and he does an obsessively huge number of whatever it is. So, you know, he's not some dilettante on flickr, he's very serious about huge dead-eyed portraits and weird computer generated bullshit. Plus, he's pedigreed you know.

Maybe Ruff pioneered the huge dead-eyed portrait? I don't know, but that's a vein that's been thoroughly mined out by now, and let us be honest: there wasn't anything there. It's not clear that even being the first here is exactly a feather in the old cap.

Here in the USA we know all about pedigree. We've been knee deep in assholes who "studied with Ansel Adams" for decades now, and they all suck.

Deconstructing is worse. You can deconstruct anything, it consists of saying "but why?" like a five year old over and over, and then saying "look, nothing means anything!" and then banging impressionable freshmen until you're too sore to move. In some remarks I stumbled over, Ruff claims to be showing how, contrary to popular understanding, the photograph lies, it lies all the time. Mostly what it does is lie.

Ok, sure, Thomas. That was a sophisticated point of view in 1970, but if you look around as you explore Zurich and ask any of those people what they think, they'll tell you that photographs lie a lot. Ask me. I've said it often enough.

This is the usual post-modernism routine, which is deeply bankrupt. Meaning does, manifestly, exist. "Proving" that it does not by asking "why?" over and over again (carefully disguising your inner five year old with a complex and inscrutable vocabulary, so the freshmen don't notice) does not change the fact that meaning exists.

Photos lie, but they also carry a lot of truth. Again, ask me. They carry the literal truth of what was in front of the lens, at least. With a bit of honesty on the part of the photgrapher and the editor, they can and often do carry a narrative which corresponds fairly well to the real world. Yes, it's a construct, like language, but language too carries means (shut up, po-mo boobs, it manifestly does).

So, anyways. I guess I don't like Ruff's pictures very much.