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.
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 personalities” with 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 Arbus’ work 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
mind’s 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
photographer’s 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 critics—with
their love of the abstract theory—and
criticism irrelevant, and after one panel discussion in Washington, D.C., whose
host was a famous writer on art, he said furiously, “I’ll 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, photographed” baffled 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 Garry’s work) by a delay between the making of a
picture and the seeing of it. You only know what you have later, when you’ve
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 himself—to
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 America—all 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 idea” because 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
one’s 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 don’t
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 photographs—one
photographed in order to learn something. To discover something. And he said, “I could say that I’m
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 say—the more varied these
possibilities were—the
less you were likely to be able to know in advance whether they’d
work. You had to allow yourself to be led by pictures, your own or anyone else’s,
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 up—that 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 vision—he keeps, that is, the
practice of observation—for
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 White’s theories I regard as absolutely demeaning. I
have a grasp on what I am about, and it isn’t 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 city—the
windows are barred and at night a roll-down steel door covers the storefront.
The woman thus finds the name “Go-Getters” an 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 poignant—either 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 displayed—first
in a gallery, then in the hallway of a collector’s home, and later in a
museum when she has her retrospective—will
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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