Review: Winogrand, Gary. Figments From The Real World. NY: MoMA, 1983.

Winogrand is something of an oddity in that his epigrams on the craft – or the art, if he would allow – are often more impressive than his images.  Statements such as

“I photograph to find out what things look like photographed.”

“Good photographs get made despite, not because.”

resonate more deeply than pedestrian images redolent of contemporary vernacular shots reproduced over and over again on blogs and photo sites across the internet:  a head in a car window, a baby on the beach, two pairs of walking feet.  There are, of course, the iconic shots that show up in surveys of photographic history and which retain a special power: the couple in the zoo holding chimpanzees, the laughing girl with ice cream cone, girls on a park bench at the World’s Fair.  But seen as a collection, the overall impression left by much of his work is uninspiring.

Szarkowski provides an informative essay summarizing Winogrand’s career, portraying the New York native as something of a “city hick” suspicious and even contemptuous of the institutions that supported his work after the decline of the photo magazines – the galleries and the academy.   He produced only four photobooks during his lifetime, none of which enjoyed any commercial success, but experienced greater recognition and some middling fortune in the galleries and as a university lecturer.  The end of his career was a slow fade into obscurity, in which he shot, but left unedited, a third of a million images.

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Review: Curtis, Edward and Christopher Cardozo, ed. Hidden Faces (Native Nations Series). NY: Christopher Cardozo, 1997.

Actual book cover (does not include text)

I found Hidden Faces in the university database and put in a request without examining the book description.  I was a bit disappointed when a couple of days later the librarian handed me a volume I could carry in my hip pocket.  The book features approximately 50 images of mostly Navaho and Kwakiutl, the two tribes that produced and used ceremonial masks.  As the title makes clear, this is a collection of concealed faces, mostly by masks, though a few painted visages are also included. Bits of text lifted from The North American Indian describing the actor or the ceremony provide bite-sized bits of context.  In a volume this size, there is little more that can be offered.  Paper stock is weighty enough that printing on reverse doesn’t bleed through and the quality of image reproduction is quite high.  Still, this is not really something one might buy for a collection so much as an inexpensive gift.

Unfortunately this is the only volume on Curtis in the country’s university library system.  Having a poke around the internet I found a torrent of what appears to be scans of images from all 20 volumes of The North American Indian, Curtis’s monumental document of late 19th and early 20th century remnants of Native American tribes of the western United States.  What is most striking is the number of images of objects such as pottery, clothing, paintings, bags and satchels, dwellings, and flora.   Most reviews or collections – like Hidden Faces -   feature portraits, men on horseback, or dramatic landscapes.  For examples, click through for the rest of the post.

Review: Egan, Tim. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Boston: Mariner Books, 2011..

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher is one of those rare nonfiction works that capture a time, a place, and a person so well it is a bit like reading fiction.  It helps that I am drawn to characters such as Edward Curtis, men given to wanderlust and noble – often lost –causes.  Author Tim Egan paints a rather romantic portrait of a self-taught photographer and anthropologist whose life work was to roam western North America photographing, filming, audio recording, data collecting, and writing on the remaining tribes of Native Americans.  Any hint of liaisons with Indian women, for example, is left to near the end of the story, and Curtis’ only fault seems to be his obsession with his project, leading to the ruin of his finances and marriage.

There is no question that Curtis’ three decades of intense labor is a monumental and genuine gift to humanity, a 20 volume document of the last days of the western Native Americans, The North America Indian.  Egan provides a few examples in Shadow Catcher’s final chapter of how modern descendants of several tribes have used Curtis’ data to reconstruct languages and practices entirely or partially forgotten.  Scholars have used Curtis’ oral accounts to reconstruct and rewrite important events in US history, such as the Battle of Little Big Horn, the last great pitched battle between Indians and Anglos.  Apart from more utilitarian applications, though, is the sheer aesthetic effect, the poignancy of haunted images of a land and a people forgotten by time.   Curtis clearly had great affinity for his subjects and devoted his life that we might see them as they might like to be remembered.

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Review: Traud, Heller, Bell eds (2006). Education of a Photographer. NY: Allworth Press. Section Four: Guides for the Uneducated: Higher Education and Photography

Section Four:  Guides for the Uneducated: Higher Education and Photography

John Szarkowski - Commitment (1962)

Photo director of the MoMA calls on educators to commit themselves to exploring the unknown through photography, thereby inspiring a new generation with equal commitment.

“If we commit our work, then our students may commit theirs, to the business of probing and exploring life, including all those intuitively sensed realities for which we have not yet found formal expression.”

Review: Traud, Heller, Bell eds (2006). Education of a Photographer. NY: Allworth Press. Section Three: The Legends

Section Three:  The Legends

Alexey Brodovitch - Brodovitch on Photography

Unfortunately, the extract is not referenced.  Shame as it is quite good:  clearly written and obviously based on years of experience as an editor and teacher.

On what makes good photograph:

“A photograph is tied to its time—what is good today may be a cliché tomorrow.”

“...the problem of the photographer is to discover his own language, a visual ABC’s to explain this event. The photograph is not only a pictorial report; it is also a psychological report. It represents the feelings and point of view of the intelligence behind the camera.”

“It is every photographer’s responsibility to discover new images and a new personal way of looking at things. If he can do this his pictures will command attention and have surprise quality.”

He notes the insipidness of most images and feels that much of this comes from too much attention to staging images, rather than letting them happen.

“...things should be used which could happen, not things which are obviously posed, obviously artificial only to meet the needs of that ad.”

He believes cropping is an important tool, even though some purists insist on perfecting framing within the camera at the time of the event.  He argues that photographers should make three to four prints from each negative cropped differently.

On the act of seeing/looking:

“There are two phases of seeing in the making of a picture. The first takes place when the photograph is actually shot. This is when the instinctive decision is made which results in the picture being recorded on the film. The second seeing comes in examining the contact prints of the pictures. It is important to be able to recognize the pictures which express your viewpoint and also how these pictures can be printed and cropped to bring out that view point. It is also important to be able to recognize the lucky accidents which can often result in good pictures.”

On developing style, he notes the tendency of new photographers to shoot everything and anything.

“He must learn that shooting just for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable and he must develop a general tendency in his work. With this maturity the photographer will begin to develop his own photographic vocabulary to express new discoveries of vision and understanding.”

On education, he notes that in his job as editor he could always tell from which school students had arrived as they delivered images of similar style and presentation.  He fears too much cliche is the product of formal education. 

“Rather than a teacher in the accepted sense, what is required is someone to tease or irritate the student and to help him discover himself.”

Finally, on the career prospects of photographers, he notes:

“The creative life of a commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who continues to be really productive for more than eight or ten years.”

Review: Traud, Heller, Bell eds (2006). Education of a Photographer. NY: Allworth Press. Section Two: How Others See Them: Considering the Photographer

Section Two:  How Others See Them: Considering the Photographer

William Klein - Brian Palmer, from Klein Symposium Statement

Written by a student-assistant who arranged NYC shoot for Klein describing an evening at CBGBs with attention to Klein's demeanour and working method.

“One gets the impression from watching him work (and talking to him) that he’s damn near self-sufficient, almost self-contained. He moves through space and among people with authority, as if he’s moving through his own living room among guests. Klein assumes he has the right to be there, wherever there may be; and moreover, that he’s got the right to photograph. He’s relaxed when approaching people, thoroughly un-self-conscious and self-assured. Klein gets close to people, literally steps into their space; he comes close enough to intrude—and close enough to be turned away.”

“Klein works like an irritant and a catalyst. He’s bold, often intrusive, not surreptitious in the least. He’s not after candids. Klein imposes himself on situations. And people perform for Klein; they primp, posture, clown, menace. People go off for Klein.... Though Klein is not in the picture, it’s apparent that he has caused or provoked a particular situation into being; his presence is unmistakable in the photograph.”

Interesting to note the professional arrived at the gig with uncharged flashes.  The assistant lent his. 

Review: Traud, Heller, Bell eds (2006). Education of a Photographer. NY: Allworth Press. Section One: Reflections on the Medium:What It Means to Photograph Pt 2

Daile Kaplan:  The Soul of the Image and Visual Literacy (2005)

An essay that appears to be intended for wide public dissemination, such as a newspaper editorial, highlighting the importance of visual literacy in shaping responsible citizenry.  Briefly reviews the history of intellectual and public policy efforts to raise awareness of visual literacy as well as outlining a few current projects (in the U.S.), concluding with a call to action from the reader. 

Vilém Flusser - Towards a Philosophy of Photography (extract) (1984)

Minuscule extract in which the author argues that against the developmental tide turning humans into products of their machines, or apparatuses, photographers seem to have retained some degree of freedom on their production of images.  For the photographer, freedom “equals playing against the apparatus.”  Must look into the full text of this one.

Review: Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection

Following on from Linfield’s review of Robert Capa’s work in Cruel Radiance, I was fortunate to find this tome of a text in the university library, nearly 1000 images in 600 pages covering Capa’s entire 22 year career.  Presented thus it seems so slight.  It helps to recall that photography was not always a near instant process of shoot, edit in camera, and upload.  It might have taken weeks before images were processed and published.  Sometimes they might not have been seen at all.  Two examples worth noting from Capa’s life are shots from Omaha Beach, the US Army landing in Normandy in which Capa participated at great risk to his own life.  All but 11 images of the landing were destroyed by a careless lab worker in London, while images of US soldiers abusing German captives were prohibited from being published by US military censors.

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: 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.

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.

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)”

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: 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.

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.

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.  

Review: Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 2005; Stephen Shore : New American Photography, dir. Ralph Goertz, 2010

Uncommon Places is the book that said, yes, you’ve been here.

Not the places, mind you, though I may have been to a few.  But the mindset of the photographer.  Here is someone who did what I’ve been doing, practiced as I practice.  I intuitively get what Shore was doing, because I’ve been doing the same.  (And I wonder now why none of my tutors, coursemates, or fellow enthusiasts referred me to this earlier.)

Here is how Shore describes his work at this time:

Review: Angier, R. (2007). Train your gaze. Introduction & Chapter One: About Looking

Angier, R. (2007). Train your gaze. 1st ed. Lausanne: AVA.

Nothing in the book itself regarding the author.  I found the following at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where Angier appears to teach.

Roswell Angier (photography, Studio at Tufts) was educated at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. Angier has worked for commercial magazines and on numerous documentary projects. Books include A Kind of Life: Conversations in the Combat Zone (Addison House, NH, 1976), and Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography (AVA Books, 2007). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA. Angier's exhibitions include solo shows at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, and Gitterman Gallery, New York. Current interests are landscape and narrative. He is currently working on Revere Beach Boulevard, a project about the sea wall.

Angier is currently represented by the Gitterman Gallery in New York City. A substantial amount of his work can be seen on the gallery's web site, www.gittermangallery.com.