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: 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: 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: 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.  

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.

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.