Review: Traud, Heller, Bell eds (2006). Education of a Photographer. NY: Allworth Press. Section One: Reflections on the Medium:What It Means to Photograph

This book is part of series for students of the visual arts, including volumes for aspiring Illustrators, Graphic Designers, Typographers, and Comic Book Artists, among others, from Allworth Press.

The book consists of 53 excerpts of essays, interviews, and other texts from a number of prominent photographers and writers on photography, organized into four sections:

1. Reflections on the Medium:What It Means to Photograph
2. How Others See Them:Considering the Photographer
3. Finding an Audience:Working with the Professionals
4. Guides for the Uneducated:Higher Education and Photography

What follows are notes from the first third of Section One.

Review: Nachtwey, James. Inferno. Phaidon Press: 1999.

Having finished Linfield’s Cruel Radiance, in which James Natchwey was the subject of an entire chapter, I was inspired to investigate Inferno, his tome to suffering in the 1990s, with a particular eye on my emotions.  Linfield argues that many of us are dishonest to our feelings when discussing images of cruely and suffering.  They make us feel uncomfortable and so we call for the images to be banned or restricted, or accuse the photographer or media of being pornogrpahers.  What we rarely do is ask how to resolve the situation depicted in the photographs, or how to deal appropriately with our feelings.

Romania:  The pain from having to sleep on cots with no mattresses, only wires to hold blankets.  The cold.   The poor food.  No empathy.

Minor White - Blankness of Mind

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Mark Lewis's Algonquin Park Series

The tutor suggested I also have a look at this series of short videos, but as yet I have been able to find only very small copies that don't really do justice to the work.  Like Misrach, Lewis shows us the tinniness of the human in the landscape.  Lovely stuff.  I only wish I could see it better!

Mark Lewis at the Center for Digital Art:  http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/ArchiveArtistPage.asp?id=59

Clara Mac & Carles Asensio have posted what might be most generously called an homage:  Mark Lewis Was Here:  https://vimeo.com/114825863

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On the Beach by Richard Misrach

In response to the last of my Assignment 2 images, my tutor recommended this series by Richard Misrach.  I was quite taken with them as they do something I admire:  depicting the scale of individual human experience and existence.  These images of lone people or lone couples on a beach speak to how tiny our experience is in relation to our environment.

And perhaps inspired in me a new series, shot from my rooftop.  Let's see.

In one of my recent reads, Susie Linfeld argues that photographs are. like every other representation of reality, incomplete.  They are only a glimpse of our experience, and to be completely understood, they have to be properly contextualized.  When I read about Misrach's work here, though, I was disappointed to find the writer - and even the photographer - ascribing something sinister to these images, a hovering, lurking, anonymous presence.  They were made, it seems, shortly after the events of September 2001, during which time Misrach was in New York to visit his son.

Suburb @ Lenscratch

Navarino Bay Golf Resort, Peloponnese Penninsula, Greece ©Robert Harding Pittman

Peter Carter over at the OCA Student FB page pointed me to a wonderful website called Lenscratch and Dave Jordano's work in Detroit suburbs, Unbroken Down:  http://lenscratch.com/2014/02/dave-jordano-detroit-unbroken/

Did a [suburb] search of the site and came up with more interesting work, including:

http://lenscratch.com/2015/05/robert-harding-pittman-anonymization/

http://lenscratch.com/2015/02/lloyd-degrane-domestic-issues/

http://lenscratch.com/2014/08/review-santa-fe-jiehao-su-borderlands/

http://lenscratch.com/2014/04/william-mebane-empire/

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P&P: Exercise 23: Selective Processing And Prominence

From the course notes:

Select one image that you have already taken for an earlier project, an image in which the issue is the visual prominence of a figure in a setting. For this exercise you will use the digital processing methods that you have available on your computer to make two new versions of this image.

In one, make the figure less prominent, so that it recedes into the setting. In the second, do the opposite, by making it stand out more. Possible selective adjustments are to brightness, contrast, even colour intensity if you are presenting a colour image.

This image was taken during a December 2014 trip to Istanbul.  The version here is how I developed and displayed it on my Flickr account.  For this exercise, I have developed two additional images.

Suburb @ Google Image & Flickr

The typical image at Google stresses pattern and conformity, most often through aerial, high, or wide shots showing rows of nearly identical homes.  What comes to mind is a hive.  

Another typical image shows tree-lined streets.  Notably absent are signs of life.  

Similar results are returned at Flickr, though it seems there are more idiosyncratic images than at Google.  Click Read more to see the Flickr screen shots.

Review: Ken and Melanie Light: Coal Hollow, Valley of Shadow and Dreams

The work of Ken Light was recommended when I put out a request on social media for photographers or photographic projects focusing on American suburbia.  They don't quite fit what I'm after, but they were worth looking at nonetheless.  

Coal Hollow:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jmF3r6_Uls

An examination of the destitute, yet resolute, coal mining communities of southern West Virginia.  Mix of landscape and portraiture shot in black-and-white documentary style.  Much of the imagery is shot relatively close with few sweeping landscapes, no misty mountains, or tiny villages seen from mountain tops, in contrast to the California project, which includes quite a bit of aerial shots.  Composition on most of the images seems fairly standard and straight, where the California photos often feature tilted horizons and odd angles.  Altogether very suggestive - in style and content - of the 1930’s Farm Security Administration project.

California Lost:  Valley of Shadow and Dreams:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20&v=JidVuNhdda4

A survey of agriculture and land development in California, shot in B&W in a style similar to Coal Hollow.  The content appears to be a bit more far-ranging as it covers everything from immigrant farmers to the decline in US agriculture to the housing boom - and bust - of the 2000s.  Like the WV project, this was long term, apparently five years, and included access to a number of people and communities. Again very evocative of the 1930s, and though I never caught a reference to John Steinbeck in the video, I’m sure he must appear in the book.

Ken Light:  http://www.kenlight.com/

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P&P: Exercise 21: Making figures anonymous

Facing away, Small

When the place is the principal subject, but when it will look better inhabited, it is often useful

to find ways of reducing the visual attention that a person or a face tends to command.

The point here is to use people as accents, not as subjects, and thus techniques that make them less individual, and more anonymous, are appropriate.  Several techniques are suggested, including reduced size, facing away or partly hidden, blurred, or in silhouette. 

As with the previous exercises, these images were taken at Dubai Mall.  The one above depicts the shop front of a bakery and uses figures to add some visual interest.  The female foreground faces away, the make at right is small.  

The Truth of Color

P&P: Exercise 20: Busy traffic

From a single figure we move to many.  In this exercise we are to depict a space heavily trafficked, looking for possible patterns in the coming and going.

Exhibits

NYC Boy with Ribbon 1939 Helen Levitt

In the three years I've been studying with OCA I've been to perhaps a half dozen exhibits.  I've looked at far more books, and even more online collections or etexts.  Given the ease of viewing from the computer, I find it difficult to justify the time and money to visit an exhibit, especially when many are so paltry.

I'll be in the USA for a couple of weeks this summer and have found the city art museum is holding an exhibit of 30 Helen Levitt images.  30.  Tickets are $20.00, parking will be $10.00, plus gasoline and the stress of an hour's drive either way.  Forget it.  Here are 50 images and I don't even have to get up from where I'm now sitting.  Can anyone say I've missed anything essential by not seeing the printed images hung on a wall?

http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Helen-Levitt.html

http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/levitt_just_kids.html

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P&P: Exercise 19: A single figure small

We are asked to create an image of a large space with a tiny human figure, one that is at first glance not so easily seen.

Consider how obvious, to a viewer’s eye, the figure will be in the image. Some delayed reaction adds to the interest of looking at this kind of photograph, and there is even an element of surprise if the scale of the place (perhaps a cathedral interior) is larger than expected.

P&P: Assignment Three: Buildings In Use

Original Submission

Review: Linfield, Susie (2010). The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago University Press. Ch 7-9

 Chapters 7:  Robert Capa: The Optimist

This last third of the text is the most challenging.  Linfield profiles three photographers (Capa, Natchwey, and Peress) to highlight different approaches to the problems raised in the previous sections.  She quotes quite extensively, describing numerous photos, but showing very few.  In the absence of pictures, or an appreciation of the work based on extensive viewing, it is impossible to appreciate her reading of how these image makers deal with issues of suffering and truth.

Capa was one of the first great war photographers, winner of numerous awards, and highly respected by peers and public alike.  He was, as she points out, never described as a voyeur or a pornographer.  While ostensibly known as a war photographer, he specialized in work depicting life behind the lines.  He did not point his camera at brutality.  He in fact declined to shoot the liberated extermination camps of Europe.  This she finds more telling of the times and the state of politics, war, and violence before midcentury.

Film: Maboroshi no Hikari, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda (1995)

This film marked Koreeda's first directorial attempt at drama.  His previous three projects were documentary.  Maboroshi is a languid film built largely around images with minimal dialog.  We are left to infer more than we are told.  Over the years Koreeda has added more dialog to his films, but he is still known for showing more than he says.  I found Maboroshi less engaging than some of his later work, but the imagery more powerful.  The film was shot entirely under natural light, which is why some of the images appear somewhat dark or underexposed.  To these I added a bit more contrast.  Click Read more to view a collection of screen shots.

Review: Nakano, Masataka (2000). Tokyo Nobody. Little More: Tokyo.

Tokyo Nobody reminds me of New Year 1989.  I had been in Japan less than six months and wanted to get out of the small city where I was living for a visit to Tokyo.  What a better time to visit than New Year, when there would be all kind of excitement in such a huge international city.  It turned out to be quite the opposite and a wonderful learning opportunity.

Japan celebrates the same year end holidays as in the west.  They make a big to-do about Christmas, even though their traditional holiday is the new year.  Appearances, though, can be deceiving.  In spirit, the holidays are reversed:  New Year is the quiet family holiday spent at home with family and relatives, while Christmas is a time for parties, friends, and colleagues.  Had I known this I wouldn’t have been so eager to visit Tokyo.

Review: Linfield, Susie (2010). The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago University Press. Ch 3-6

A Jewish woman walks toward the gas chambers with three young children after going through the selection process on the ramp at Aushwitz-Birkenau. May 1944. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Yad Vashem.

Chapter Three:  Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz: In the Waiting Room of Death

With Chapter Three Linfield begins an exploration of Place and Event, including the Nazi extermination camps, China’s Cultural Revolution, Sierra Leone’s civil war, and images from the wars of the Middle East.

Beginning with the Holocaust she examines the arguments surrounding the very powerful images of suffering and cruelty, specifically those produced by the Nazis themselves.  She observes that such images are some of the most morally vexing as they depict people soon to be murdered.  They demonstrate quite clearly that photographs in themselves have no moral power or authority. (And in a footnote - p72 - that such images published in wartime generally did not provoke the hoped for responses.) What does it mean, then, to look at such photos?  Should we look?  If so, how?

Review: Linfield, Susie (2010). The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago University Press. Ch 1 & 2

From the copyright page (iv):  SUSIE LINFIELD is director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Boston Review, Dissent, and other publications. She was formerly an editor at American Film, the Washington Post, and the Village Voice.”

Chapter 1:  A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?

There is much in the chapter to be reviewed and of the writers she discusses I have read only bits of Sontag and Barthes, two seminal writers in photographic theory who have an unfortunate disregard for the reader.  Linfield asserts that while these two have done much to shape a negative opinion of photos and photography, their suspicion and distrust can be traced back to Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who she holds primarily responsible for having first articulated a mistrust of the the photograph based on mistrust of emotions.  She argues that modern critics fail to particularize, to take account of Brecht’s situation and concerns in interwar Germany.

P&P: Assignment 2: People Unaware

Original Submission

Review: Jay & Hurn, On Being a Photographer, 3ed, Anacortes, WA: LensWork, 2001

Written as a dialog based on 12 hours of recorded conversation between a photographer (Hurn) and an editor/academic (Jay), this text is a useful guide to the professional and creative aspects of photography.  It is not a cook-book of techniques, but an exploration of what photographers do, how they think and behave.  The first chapter gives a rather long-winded summary of David Hurn’s career - easy to skip if you’re in a hurry - but then gets into some rather interesting discussion of issues of basic important to anyone aspiring to photographic practice.  

The authors stress that first and foremost photographers are selectors of subject, and that without a proper subject, a photographer may be left wandering about taking photos of all sorts of unrelated stuff that may never gel into a project.  I am reminded of the writer called on to narrow down his subject as narrowly as possible and the argument here is much the same. They go so far as to state:  “Much as it might offend the artistically inclined, the history of photography is primarily the history of subject matter. (p29)”

P&P: Exercise 18: How space changes with light

Coming soon.  Idea:  Mother's home at sunrise, high sun, sunset.

Review: Cotton, Charlotte. (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Ch 7

Cotton concludes in Chapter 7:  Revived and Remade surveying work that builds on existing work, either through some form of imitation, or through combination.  This work is highly self-referential and often somewhat cynical, as if to demonstrate wit or cleverness.  She cites as a seminal example the work of Cindy Sherman, who mocks photographic conventions by recreating them in carefully staged images featuring herself as model.   The work of Nikki S Lee is compared as somehow similar, but Lee’s anthropological approach – spending time getting to know and blend in with different subcultures before shooting herself in these guises – seems more authentic than Sherman’s mockery and seems also less concerned with form or style and more with content.

Review: Gregory Crewdson's Photography - Capturing a Movie Frame (2012)

This 30-minute short from The Reserve Channel goes behind the scenes to look at the creation of Crewdson's carefully crafted images.  Most of the work depicted here is the siting, lighting, and decorating of sets.  We see a little of the post-processing work of selecting images for blending, but none of the actual computer work. The film includes interview footage with Crewdson discussing his motivation and interests, as well as some of the processes that go into the creation of his images.  There is unfortunately as well an art critic on hand to reassure us how important Crewdson really is. This is a good introductory film as it doesn't lag nor make any pretense of being an art film about an artist.

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Review: Have A Nice Book

Richard Billingham // Ray's a Laugh from haveanicebook on Vimeo.

As a requirement for my photography course I was making my way through The Photograph as Contemporary Art when I came across a reference to Ray’s A Laugh, a photobook equivalent to an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.  Digging around a bit I found the book (published in 2000) now out of print, with used copies selling in excess of $150, more than $1.00 per page. Ouch.

P&P: Exercise 17: The user’s viewpoint

For this exercise we are to consider the use’s point of view for a space designed for a particular activity, considering height, orientation and focal length.  I have chosen to stay with the library theme established in with the previous exercise.  The first image looks at the entrance and front desk from two perspectives, the patron and employee, with the same space shot from opposite sides.

Review: Cotton, Charlotte. (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Ch 5-6

Billingham:  Ray's a Laugh

Chapter Five: Intimate Life reviews the rather ironic affectation of a vernacular style as an attempt to convey a sense of the opposite – the real, the genuine, the unaffected.  What sets this apart from the typical vernacular is atypical subject matter.  Where family snaps create a sense of normalcy through images of rites of passages and moments of celebration,  the photographers described here point the camera at disjuncture, failure, addiction, illness, anomie.  The work of American Nan Goldin is cited as seminal, a decades long project recording and exhibiting relationships with family, friends, and other intimates.    Her intention was apparently genuinely vernacular in the sense that she did not aspire to a career as an artist but simply to share work with her subjects.  Aesthetically I find little attractive in her images, but appreciate her bravery in exposing herself, as well as her commitment to an extended period of recording.   I would love to see a copy of Ray’s a Laugh, a precursor of reality TV in photobook produced by British artist Richard Billingham as source material for his painting and chronicling the life of his dysfunctional family, all shot in vibrant color with lots of hot flash, reminiscent of William Eggleston (who surprisingly doesn’t rate a mention in this chapter).  The book is now out of print and commands $150-200 used.  Please.  One other project here that struck me was Breda Beban’s Miracle of Death, a series of images of her husband’s boxed ashes, a rumination on death and grieving. This doesn’t seem to have been published in book form (Cotton’s citation does not include a book) and aside from a handful of small images doesn’t appear much in internet searches.

P&P Exercise 16: Exploring Function

With this exercise we are to consider and then document interior space with an emphasis on function.
I have chosen my college library, which is intended for use by the college faculty and students.  This space is not available for use by the public except perhaps on special occasions, such as festivals or other functions, or perhaps by special invitation.  As the building was erected in the early 90’s, I have no record of the designer’s intentions,  and so can only speculate on what was planned.  One thing seems certain.  The lack of closed space suggests it was not intended for archival purposes.  As this is not a research institution but vocational, and as many resources are now available electronically, the library currently serves to support students through the provision of learning space and resources – private study halls, conference rooms, computers, audio-visual equipment, IT support services, a café.  The building is circular in design and absent trees or some kind of multi-floor structure in the central atrium a lot of potential space on the first and second floors seems to have been wasted.  The open space and dome-shaped ceiling serve to amplify sound and make the ground floor quite noisy when there are more than a few students present.

Review: Gunter Rossler:The Brilliance of the Moment, dir. Fred R. Willitzkat (2012)

Gunter Rossler photographed nude women.  He photographed other subjects, including clothed women for fashion magazines, but his legacy is the nudes.  What makes him so unusual, besides the quality of his images, is that he worked for most of his life in the German Democratic Republic.  While communists thought of themselves as radicals, they were also quite prudish.  One of their common propaganda talking points against the West was the depravity of capitalism as seen in the commercialization of sex.