On Critical Writing: A Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

This poem is available as a limited edition Ultraprint

here.

ASX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onwards. Sentence #2, my favorite sentence:

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

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

The fallacy are intertwined between reason and audience.

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

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

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

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

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

Sentence three, the home stretch:

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

Crush it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Telling Photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More LED Lighting Madness

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

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

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

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

It me.

Cutie:

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

What DO People Like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onwards to books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

Photographers and Photographs

Let me tell you a tale. A sad tale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lloyd Chambers

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

Fair enough.

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

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

Ok, whatever.

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

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

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

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

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