Tuesday, August 11, 2015

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 hes damn near self-sufficient, almost self-contained. He moves through space and among people with authority, as if hes moving through his own living room among guests. Klein assumes he has the right to be there, wherever there may be; and moreover, that hes got the right to photograph. Hes 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 intrudeand close enough to be turned away.

Klein works like an irritant and a catalyst. Hes bold, often intrusive, not surreptitious in the least. Hes 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, its 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. 



Lisette Model - Max Kozloff, from New York: Capital of Photography
First encounter with this photographer, a refugee from WWII who made her name in NY documenting some of its least glamorous people.  Arbus was one of her students, and so the two are conveniently compared in the next essay. 

"... she depicted misfits, dropouts, and poseurs as charismatic, irrepressibly flawed beings in a cruel environment.  In her private teaching, which exerted and influenced deep and wide, Model emphasized that the greatest failing of the photographic practice was indifference. When she approached a reality or an oddness that could be sinister, it was as a fully engaged artist. In contrast, anecdotal or even reportorial photographers were likely to be disengaged, for it was the story that mattered to them, not their feeling. Where others might judge her beggars to be afflicted loners, she saw them as strong personalitieswith whom she identified, because her life either had been or could be like theirs.



Dianne Arbus - Shelley Rice, from Essential Differences: A Comparison of the Portraits of Lisette Model and Diane Arbus
Arbus, on the other hand, grew up privileged and felt distanced from the world as a result of never having to struggle, to experience adversity or suffering.  The world for her seemed very unreal and the aim of her work, she said, was to show how one could never really experience the other.

Where Model shot close, Arbus often included lots of context.  Model worked in public, Arbus in private.  Model tended to shoot from below, making her characters larger than life.  Arbus shot at eye level, establishing a sense of commonality. Model was explicit is use of compositional elements.  Arbus shot documentary.

Yet the irony of Arbuswork is that she tried to undermine the social order while working very much within its dictates; indeed, the very impact of her pictures depends on the existence of the norms she purports to challenge. Although the accepted social standards of normalcy are not immediately evident in her photographs, they are everywhere by implication; they function as the source of her vision and as the framework within which her rebellion achieves its meaning.




Alexey Brodovitch - Kerry William Purcell, from Ballet
Brodovitch was a refugee from the 1917 Russian Revolution who worked as a set painter for the Russian Ballet in Paris in the 20s before emigrating to the U.S., where he became a well established graphic designer with Harpers and Portfolio.  He published only one book of photography during his life, a monograph of 100 images of the ballet.  This book had a print run of only 500 copies, was never distributed through commercial networks, and as a result of many of the negatives being lost in a 1954 fire was never reprinted.  Even so, it is considered one of the most influential books in photographic history.  What made it so was not just the brilliant design, but the images of bodies in motion, captured through long exposures, something of an oddity in an era that preferred sharpness and clarity of image. 

Reaching out beyond the decisive moment, Ballet strives to capture the before and after of the single snapshot.



Aaron Siskind - Charles H. Traub, from Roadtrip
The writer travelled with Siskind in his later years as an assistant and writes here a reflection of the man and his work that doesn't seem to say very much, as this concluding thought demonstrates:

He finds his vision in real time and space, each body of work is an assemblage of experience that transforms each focused locale, allowing for further travel in the minds eye.

I wonder if the same cannot be said of just about any photographer.



Gary Winogrand -  Leo Rubinfien, from Some Reminiscences
In contrast to the piece on Suskind, this is well written and paints a sympathetic portrait of Winogrand as an artist with a passion for discovery, with no interest in making grand statements or gestures.  He recognises that Winogrand was abrasive and not personally well-regarded by many in photography circles, but feels this was often a misunderstanding of Winogrand's passions.

He insisted that a picture was not the same as the things it showed. He insisted that the picture was not the same as the words people used to talk about it. He insisted that it was not the same as the intentions the photographer had when he made it. He insisted that the moment a particular picture trapped could tell you nothing about the moments that preceded and followed it. He insisted that what you knew about a photographers life helped you not at all to understand his pictures. He insisted that what you knew about history helped very little and that you needed to know nothing about, say, the place you were in to make a good photograph there. He considered criticswith their love of the abstract theoryand criticism irrelevant, and after one panel discussion in Washington, D.C., whose host was a famous writer on art, he said furiously, Ill never do that again. Each time you do that a little piece of you dies.He insisted that the photographer was only partly responsible for the picture that he made, and that the machine, the camera, was responsible for a great deal, perhaps most of it, and I think that there is implied in this the insistence that you do not know as much as you think that you know...

On one of my favourite quotes on the photographic process:

His well-known declaration, I photograph to find out what things look like, photographedbaffled people, and was another thing that made some of them angry. I think I can identify two of the reasons why. One was that Garry was renouncing the idea that the artist is in control of the thing he makes. Photography is usually characterized (it always is, in Garrys work) by a delay between the making of a picture and the seeing of it. You only know what you have later, when youve been through the darkroom, and by that time you can do little to alter it, so to some extent you are working blind. Another was that he was refusing to claim large intentions for himselfto say I photograph to bear witness to the grave events of my time; I photograph to set down on paper the essence of the spirit of Americaall he would say is that he photographed to find out...which seemed to some people to be at once a trivial aim and an ungenerously private one.

And now I have discovered another wonderful quote.  He often said that good photographs get made despite, not because.

It seems he was also not much concerned with printing and publishing:

There was in Garry a perverse refusal of the idea that the quality with which a picture was printed might make the photograph any better or worse (I say the ideabecause in fact his own prints are often beautiful). He would say that the legibility of the print was all that concerned him, and that he cared even less for the sequence in which one placed the pictures in a show or a book, or with the design of a book of ones work...

Further to finding out what things look like photographed and the need to translate images to words:

Though he made plenty of them, the pursuit of masterpieces would have seemed puerile to Garry, and in fact, the pursuit of anything that one could identify in advance seemed to him misconceived. I think that his best pictures must have given him pleasure, and made him feel what I call pride, but I have no evidence to show you. He was private about this, and, in any case, I dont think that that kind of satisfaction was really his objective. Yes, one photographed in order to get photographs, but not necessarily in order to get good photographsone photographed in order to learn something. To discover something. And he said, I could say that Im a student of photography, and I am, but really I'm a student of America.

If you already knew what a good photograph was, you would be doing something you, or someone else, had done before, and in that case, what would be the point? The more things you recognized to be possibilities for pictures, he would saythe more varied these possibilities werethe less you were likely to be able to know in advance whether theyd work. You had to allow yourself to be led by pictures, your own or anyone elses, and the pronouncements of the Artiste, when he encountered them, filled him, I think, with disgust. His refusal to try to translate pictures into words was not, as one writer called it, anti-intellectualism, it came from the supremely intelligent awareness that sophisticated pictures cannot be summed upthat only they themselves can tell you what they mean, that if you could state their meanings in words there would be no need for them. At one point, if the right (that is, the wrong) person asked him for a definition of a photograph, he would say, Some monkey business inside four edges."



Luigi Ghirri - Luigi Ghirri/Charles H. Traub, from Statement/A Remembrance
Very short eulogy to a photographer compared to better know American contemporaries, such as Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Robert Adams.    Train describes Ghirri's subject as the travelogue of Italy in the late twentieth century.  Will have to look into his work. 



Wendell Berry - The Unforeseen Wilderness
Compares the tourist and artist photographer as paradigms for how we relate to travel and the world.  The tourist captures preconceived images to display in his living room.  The artist photographer does not know what he might discover.  In fact discovery is the process. 

His understanding involves a profound humility, for he has effaced himself; he has done away with his expectations; he has ceased to make demands upon the place. He keeps only the discipline of his art that informs and sharpens his visionhe keeps, that is, the practice of observationfor before a man can be a seer he must be a looker. His camera is a dark room, and he has made a dark place in his mind, exultant and fearful, by which he accepts that he does not know what he is going to see, he does not know the next picture.

His pictures are not ornaments or relics, but windows and doors, enlargements of our living space, entrances into the mysterious world outside the walls, lessons in what to look for and how to see. They limit our comfort; they drain away the subtle corruption of being smug....

I do it to taking more than a few of those canned images, those these days less and less.  An important distinction here is the difference between tourism and travel.  Tourism is for people with money but no time, where travel is for those with time but often little money. 



Cynthia Ozick - Shots
This is so short you I could quote the whole thing but since Minor White has been mentioned a few times here, I'll just quote that bit as a taste: 

Moonings on Minor Whites theories I regard as absolutely demeaning. I have a grasp on what I am about, and it isnt any of that.

Unfortunately she doesn't mention what it is she -is- on about. 



Dave Eggers - Woman Waiting to Take a Photograph
Vignette of an aspiring artist on stake-out waiting for the right picture, a parable on how images are created and valued.

The woman is a young woman. She wants to make a living as a photographer, but at the moment she is temping at a company that publishes books about wetlands preservation. On her days off she takes pictures, and today she is sitting in her car, across the street from a small grocery store called The Go-Getters Market.The store is located in a very poor neighborhood of her citythe windows are barred and at night a roll-down steel door covers the storefront. The woman thus finds the name Go-Gettersan interesting one, because it is clear that the customers of the market are anything but go-getters. They are drunkards and prostitutes and transients, and the young photographer thinks that if she can get the right picture of some of these people entering the store, she will make a picture that would be considered trenchant, or even poignanteither way the product of a sharp and observant eye. So she sits in her Toyota Camry, which her parents gave her because it was two years old and they wanted something new, and she waits for the right poor person to enter or leave the store. She has her window closed, but will open it when the right person appears, and then shoot that person under the sign that says Go-Getters.This, for the viewer of her photograph when it is displayedfirst in a gallery, then in the hallway of a collectors home, and later in a museum when she has her retrospectivewill prove that she, the photographer, has a good eye for irony and hypocrisy, for the inequities and injustices of life, its perfect and unmitigated absurdity.


How many of us have been parked in front of that figurative store?

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