Review: Cotton, Charlotte. (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Ch 3-4

Takashi Homma - Shonan International Village

Chapter Three, Deadpan, looks into a clinical aesthetic based on emotional detachment.  Cotton sees this movement as having developed in reaction to neo-expressivism of the 1980s, a measured retreat from subjectivist perspectives that sought to capture a universal viewpoint.  The movement was characterized as well by large-scale prints.  Cotton identifies the chief influence as Bernd Becherm of the Kunstakademie (Dusseldorf), who trained a large number of students working in this style.  The movement is known otherwise as Germanic, or New Objectivity, and one of the principal exponents is Andreas Gursky, who produces two meter high prints and issues photos like paintings, one-off images that rarely relate to previous images.  Much of his style was based on shooting large crowd scenes from a distance, which when enlarged to enormous prints gave one the impression of stepping into a scene.  Other photographers employ this technique of distance on subjects less crowded, even often empty, highlighting space, while others focus on people, producing portraits of people often isolated from crowds and shot straight ahead, with the subject looking back out through the photo.

P&P: Exercise 15: A Public Space

The final exercise for Part 2 calls for shooting a public space where not everyone will be involved in an "event," but making their own events, as in a public park.  As I shot in just such a space for a previous exercise, I turned instead to the Dubai Fish Market, a landmark visited by local shoppers as well as tourists out for a taste of the authentic.

218 images were captured over one hour on a weekday morning.  44 images were flagged for consideration, and 21 are presented here in chronological sequence.

P&P: Assignment 1: A Portrait

Original Submission

Portraits without People

While working on Assignment 1 I took a photo that inspired me to think about extending the idea to encompass the assignment in full, 5-7 portrait images of an individual.  That then caused me to look for other image makers who have done something similar.  This is what I have so far encountered.

Review: Cotton, Charlotte. (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Ch 1-2

I picked up this book because it is on the recommended reading list and because an electronic copy of the 2004 edition was available at no cost.  It is authored by Charlotte Cotton, an independent curator who has held a number of high status assignments, such as Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Head of Programming at The Photographer's Gallery, London, and former curator of photography at London's Victoria & Albert Museum.  

The book consists of seven chapters, a suggested reading list, and 222 photos (192 in color).  Cotton has structured it as a survey, "the kind of overview you might experience if you visited exhibitions in a range of venues," and so as not to favor style or substance, but to demonstrate the motivations and working habits of the photographers surveyed.  

P&P: Exercise 14: An Organized Event

This exercise calls for shooting an organized event at which people are in motion and at which one can expect to move about and photograph without restriction.  As these types of events are rather uncommon in the Arab summer, I took the opportunity to photograph an organized event that goes on year-round in Dubai - construction.

The work depicted here is the laying of brick to create off street parking in an area featuring a number of schools, one of which can be seen in the background of these images. I happen to pass down this street each day on the way to work, and this morning I stopped off at the gas station to pick up some cold drinks for the workers, an offering that I hoped would endear me enough to be allowed to photograph. I arrived just as they took a mid-morning meal break and so had the opportunity to take some photos of rest.

Street Shooting: Spotted

Camera in hand, I went back out to SZR yesterday, the first time in months.  It was a somewhat dispiriting experience.  I didn't feel like walking so I just sat on the lip of a window sill in front of the metro station and bus stop and watched the world walk by.  A Chinese girl tried to sell me a massage.  A South Asian tried to sell me an iphone, probably stolen.  A Filipino guy tried to sell me a loan.

P&P: Exercise 11, 12 & 13: Standing Back, Close and Involved, Standard Focal Length

These three exercises are experiments with focal length.  The first requires shooting at maximum, then at minimum, and finally at a medium standard.  The purpose is to demonstrate not only the property of lenses, which was included in Part 1 exercises, but also the dynamics of photographer participation.  At maximum length the photographer can often remove himself from interacting with his subject, while at minimum length he becomes a very real part of the scene.

This weekend I took a stroll through Satwa Park, an area of town inhabited largely by South Asian and Filipino laborers.  My intention was to shoot for 30 minutes each at either end of my kit lens - 55mm and 18mm.  Using the rule suggested in the course notes, in which subjects seen with the naked eye are the same size when seen through the view finder,  I found that standard focal length was close to 55mm, the extreme end of my lens.  I therefore shot a few images at 35mm to see what differences might suggest themselves.

P&P: Exercise 10: Capturing the Moment

This exercises seems to be intended to help students consider what has long been known in photography as "the decisive moment," that instant where something unusually expressive is captured with the opening and closing of the camera shutter.  To get good at this takes years of practice and the development of technical skills as well as the ability to read people and situations, to anticipate opportunities to deploy one's technical mastery.

As a Level One course, no one is expecting work at the level of Cartier-Bresson or Joel Meyerowitz.  I've done a fair share of street shooting, much of it mediocre and on display here. For the purpose of this exercise, I examine a sequence shot at the Dubai Fish market in burst mode, resulting in 12 images.  The task was in choosing one that had the most expressive features.

P&P: Exercise 9: Developing Confidence

Part Two of the course moves into photographing people without their knowledge or consent, what might otherwise be known as reportage or street photography.  The exercises assume the student has little or no experience with this kind of image making and so are designed to lead him or her into a public place and gradually move in on the subject, shooting first with a telephoto and then wide angle lens.  This first exercise is nothing but a warm-up:  get out there and shoot.

This morning the wife said we would be doing our weekly food shopping at the Dubai Mall.  Great.  I'll visit the aquarium.  There are always loads of tourists out in front of the big glass wall, all snapping away.  

I wore my tourist hat and bag and blended right in.  Made eye contact with several people and asked the South Asian guys if I could shoot them.  No problem.  They love posing.

The only time I felt inhibited was in wanting to shoot a Saudi family.  Gulf Arabs can sometimes be sensitive, especially the women, and as I didn't want problems with security I just let them be.  

Next up:  Shooting with telephoto.  

P&P: Exercise 8: Varying the Pose

I'm not interested in posing people, and the people I tend to associate with who might be willing to help me are equally disinterested. I looked at some examples and even sent my model a copy as a suggestion of what we could do, but once we got together we found the poses somewhat absurd. He didn't offer and I didn't insist.  I'm 53, he's in his 40s.  Who cares?

Until I had the images lined up in a collage I didn't realize how similar they looked.  Damn. Not likely to redo these as time is pressing.  I spoke with someone at OCA who said I could get a maximum 6-month extension if I complete three assignments by July 03.  The gives me six weeks to knock the work out.  It won't be pretty, but it will be an interesting challenge.

P&P: Exercise 7: Focal Length

"...in general, the longer the focal length, the more attractive the face will appear."

Review: In No Great Hurry:13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2013)

My first photography film in many months and something of a disappointment.  The subject is not interested in being filmed or discussing his work - which is admirable, actually - and spends a lot of time grumbling and wondering why anyone wants to make a film about him.  Much of the footage comes from a period when the 80-year old photographer was in the process of organizing his cluttered existence and so when he is not out walking the neighborhood with his camera, we get interior shots of the subject and an assistant digging through boxes.  Perhaps because I am unfamiliar with Leiter's work, which this film doesn't do much to showcase or contextualize, I found it slow, plodding, and largely uninspiring.  Perhaps the most amazing thing about the subject is that he has lived in the same apartment for over five decades and for a similar period documented the same neighborhood.  In two or three hundred years his work will be incredibly valuable.

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P&P: Exercise 6: Review a Portrait Sequence

This subject of this portrait session is a rather animated human who in day-to-day life is likely at the most unlikely moment to pull a face or strike a pose.  For this session I had him sitting at a desk in a classroom, with me on the other side, my DSLR on a tripod.  Light came from windows to my left, as well as a bank of overhead fluorescents.  On occasion I prompted a pose - "a student just walked in" - but for the most part the subject used the opportunity to showcase his talent - unprompted.  Unfortunately, ISO and shutter speed settings were not adequate to the task and many images were marred by excessive motion blur.  A good example of this from a recoverable image is the one of the hands-up-surprised-face.  Fortunately, the eyes are sharp enough to make this one of the more interesting images in the set, though there were perhaps equally dramatic and interesting poses that didn't make the cut.