Had the good fortune of being featured on Brian Ulrich’s blog Notifbutwhen. He also mentioned another photographer Stephen DiRado and we had a brief exchange in the comments section. Looking at his pictures I get a clearer idea of what I was after, but often could not articulate. The project was not so much about Malls but more about human nature, and also about the emotional weight of the environment. That is something I can really put my finger on now, fifteen years later, but at the time, I really did not know what I was looking for.

Later I will attempt a wrap-up of 2006. Happy holidays.

Update: the newyawkers get to see Brian Ulrich up close at Julie Saul, opening this Thursday, Jan 4 from 6 to 8pm. That was for my five friends who read this…:)

Hope y’all like the redesign, also I moved the writing out of the dot-mac cul de sac that it was in, I give up a little control over design, but the whole functionality is better. Angela says it looks more “professional.” To that I say “thanks” and post the image above:)

In my unofficial poll about appropriation on the internet a resounding 0% of responders had any problem with this. So I decided to ask my friend and editor at the Times what their position was, and I emailed a question as follows:

I got involved in an online blog discussion of usage permissions last week, and I wanted to pose a couple scenarios to you to see what you would have to do to run a photo:

Q: First example is you have a book review in the Arts section on a new monograph by Robert Adams, obviously there is a review copy, and probably the publisher has made available an image from the book. Are there any permission requirements or is it tacitly understood you have permission to run the photo with the review?
A: Publishers often have publicity use approved images, so yes, it is for review… and thus p.r./promotion of the book.

Q: Second example is a subset of the first, say for example the photo critic at the Times wrote an opinion piece about the state of black and white photography, and in the piece he mentions specific photographers, old and new, and for the lead picture the critic wanted to run one picture from a famous collection on work, something that the Times currently does not have rights to. The piece would credit the photographer, obviously, and would cite a book or two from him or her, some are current, some not in print. Would you be required to secure permission from the photographer to run a photo as the lead, or does this fall under some sort of fair use argument? ie; reviewers are serving the public good by talking about the arts and promoting artists. Or there is an educational side to the piece. Logistically, someone would need to get hi res to run in the paper, barring that, the online edition might only run the pic because the pic is “available” on the web. ie; you could “borrow” it. What say you all?

A: Must secure permission, no matter in print or the web. just because other people steal doesn’t mean you can. maybe that other site got permission? But you didn’t.

Q: Third example: a columnist in the metro or city section writes a personal piece about life in the city and an interaction with a bookseller in their neighbourhood, the gist being that a very good book was found amidst the piles and the columnist wanted to share that and remind people about the good work contained in the book. The book happens to be by a famous photographer who is still very alive and working but is difficult to reach. Do you need permission to run a photo from the book as the lead, the picture has significance to the editorial, it makes the point in a beautiful way. Again, a subset, you can’t get hi res except by scanning the book, but the online department can find a version of the pic on the internet. Can they just run it? Can the production department simply scan the book?

A: No, you can show the whole book as object, open to show photo…as for the Times or any other publication, I think photo usage and rights are the same for print and web. there’s no difference when you’re talking about permission to use.

Conclusion: Regardless of what I think about the valuing/devaluing of work on “the screen” and usage issues, there is a change in attitude/morals regarding permissions and appropriation of imagery on the net. Traditional publishing and journalism hews established rules absolutely, part of their credibility depends on it. The blogging world has set out in a different direction. I think this is worth examining.

You should know I really love Robert Adams’s work. His vision enabled my vision, and gave it value. There is a debt there.

And you should know I am a crusty old fart. » Read the rest of this entry «

Over the weekend I got into a little debate with a fellow blogger and photographer Raul Gutierrez about a post on his site Heading East. Let me say I feel he makes wonderful work and his writing is excellent, I enjoy every visit.
But I did not enjoy my most recent visit after being greeted by a very familiar picture, a Robert Adams from his book “What We Bought: The New World” Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area 1970-1974 Spectrum/DAP.
You can and should read the original exchange, I probably was too miffed and said some uncharitable things…basically I called him a hypocrite (nicely) for asking others to respect his work and not use it without permission while he was pimping this great Robert Adams picture at the top of his blog. I felt he was riding on coat-tails so to speak. And that he didn’t need to do that, his own work was very very good.
More constructively I took issue with the blog post because I felt that swiping images from others without permission was essentially wrong, and was devaluing all work. If I can illustrate my creations with work from the best artists, who will pay for the less-than-great? There is the idea of fair use involved, the excerpt, the review, the transformative work. I have no doubt the anyone is fully entitled to write a piece featuring someone else’s work in that context. But I am not so much interested in copyright law as that train left the station for photographers long ago. About the only one protected by current copyright law is Mickey Mouse. You probably know the story. As long as litigation is involved, only the rich will have the protections of copyright law. Fair use yes, but I was asking fair to whom?
So I likened the blog post to something like a radio broadcast, This American Life for example. There are very concrete rules governing the use of copyrighted content on the public airwaves, because they have been regulated from the beginning. Or at least until Michael Powell came along. the point is not the specific rules but the acknowledgment of a value in the “performance” of work.
All of the above is probably me being a curmudgeon.
After a while the real issue hit me; Robert Adams’s work itself and the title of his book. I had referenced it in a previous post about the effects of convenience on the experience of our lives. Every frame of that work documents the transformation of a landscape and a people by the values of a culture with a fetish for convenience. It is so hard to talk about this because it is a part of everything we do now, it is the “modern” world. I could not be writing this unless someone thought it was a good thing to transform publishing so that an individual could do it.
What I am interested in is the value of creative work and how a society rewards that work particularly in the context of the increasing convenience with which creativity can be shared.
What are we trading for? The internets come along and at this point it is clear, with flickr and Youtube and myspace the sharing of imagery is at a galactic high. The volume of published work is astronomical. This is how technology affects convenience. The more advanced the tools the easier it is to do something. All reproductive technologies have destabilizing effects on society. I cannot halt any of that. But I think it is worth examining the trade we are making for convenience. My opinion is that while the sharing of images may be at an all time high, the value of those images is at an all time low. That is a subject that could be debated as well.
A lot of people will think I am making too much of this, that there is no consequence. I think we are probably not taking it seriously enough. Look at the business models of media. If I am wrong, and it is good to share all this stuff for free, then it will have to be regarded as just a kind of leakage I would say. You see it to one degree or another in for example, the stealing/sharing of music, software, and movies on down to blog posting using unauthorized content. If we accept that the technology is going to be disruptive no matter what, and that our ideas of copyright and compensation are outmoded in the new world, then the business model will have to change. Well, who can afford to change? Big business certainly can afford to change. They have always had to deal with leakage of one kind or another, theft, shoplifting, the stealing of product secrets, and now sharing over the internet. So you estimate the leakage to be a percentage of the total and amortize that over millions of transactions. It becomes an expense, the cost of doing business. You factor in the occasional lawsuit. It’s just business. And you vertically integrate so that not only do you sell the product but you sell the transportation of that product. Movie theaters, broadcasting networks, ISP’s, sharing sites, social networking, if you can be the toll keeper it doesn’t matter how much leakage there is, it is all traffic and all monetized somewhere along the flow.
Look at the other end of the scale-you and me. How can we afford to amortize or integrate the effects of this leakage? We don’t own the means to transmit the work. We pay for that. We don’t own the tools-we license those tools from others in the form of software licenses and hardware upgrades, a kind of tax in another form. All we own is the actual content, since we are the content producers. They are our ideas. It is not created out of nothing, it is created out of the individual mind. However, our consumer mindset thinks that we are not creators, that content comes from somewhere else, and that our actions in the marketplace have no impact. I believe they do have an impact and we have no way to shelter ourselves from its effects.

So all this sharing and blogging is great, but without respect for creative works it will in the end, harm the creators of those works themselves. There is no way out of that equation given the scale, the technology and the organization of the system. All we can control are our attitudes towards convenience and consumption and be aware of what we are trading for in the New World.

Hahmemüle on the left and Agfa on the right. You can see the cotton rag underpinnings of the Hanny on the left, the slight weave pattern, the texture. I guess this is “pearl” after all. And on the right, ah, the liquid smoothness that is an air-dried glossy gelatin paper. Certainly better than that Innova crap, but still lacking. Hundred bucks a box for 50 letter sheets-sheesh guys, Portriga was never that expensive!
At least they included a fine profile for my R1800 on their website-something that Innova has not got round to do. I have to say, “its not bad” overall, I guess it depends on what you like, it’s still “granular” to me, still too regular, too “manufactured.”
Maybe it never will be the same, the problems are different. Pigments need a microporous surface to accept the ink. In theory, a gelatin paper could be made for dye inks, but there is a drying issue, they take a long time to dry, in fact, they may never dry totally. So they are very unstable. HP and Canon seem to be sticking to the dye bandwagon, maybe it is time to jump ship?

Here is another take on that:
Reflections on Recent Digital Paper Offerings.webloc

Innova on the left, Ilford MG Fibre glossy on the right. The Innova looks like a farm field freshly plowed from 35,000 feet up. The Ilford looks like a calm lake on a fall sunday morning. Ok that’s a little stretching it. Please please, manufacturers of inkjet papers, remember what it is supposed to look like! Or if not, at least don’t use some sort of textured roller to make it look like fibre. Last time I saw that texture it was on the backs of my thighs after getting out of a 1973 Pinto going to grade school in summer. Yikes!

I have written a few times now about how photography is a technological child where successive generations of evolution of the technology have changed almost all the foundations of photography, and as I suggested in the last post, changed even the existential meaning of photography from the production of facts to the recording of data. I would like to elaborate upon that because I don’t believe I was very clear about the difference.
This is what I wrote last time:

When I look at the process of photography, there is the confrontation with the facts of the world and my reaction to them. And the photograph is a “new fact” derived from the collision of the two. Again that’s Garry Winogrand’s expression for it. So the question, awkward syntax and all is; is data a new fact? Or is data the description of a fact?
It is very easy to believe in the fact-ness of a negative, chrome, or print. There it sits. And I am not talking about the factuality which is truthfulness. This is the imprint of light on a medium. It has existential weight, not to mention physical weight. I might guess that exposed film is heavier than unexposed film-by how much you ask… With digital there is a momentary state change of a charge-coupled device recorded by an array of transistors. There is no fact, only a phase change. How does the production of facts differ from the production of states?

So what am I talking about here? Usually we think of photography as a “recording” medium but I think that that is not accurate enough. We can now “record” on media that is no longer “media” in the traditional sense-the flash card is meant only as a temporary repository of data, not a permanent receptor like film. So I believe that the fact-ness of photography has ceased, again, I am not speaking of truthfulness. Photography was never the truth, it was a truth, a fraction of a moment in time. In almost all regards the photographic moment never “existed” to regular perception, which is why I believe the idea of it as a “new fact” is important’. Photography created new pieces of the world through the action of photons exposing silver salts and photochemically altering them. You can go to the Library of Congress and physically inspect those changes that Walker Evans produced from the 1930’s. They exist as factual evidence of their being made. » Read the rest of this entry «

After having pushed out a major update to this site, and having spent several weeks working in an all-digital still life studio, and after selling some cameras on ebay and shooting some assignments for the New York Times, I have something on my mind.

I have read other posts like this, one was called, The Modern Camera, And the Dilution of Effort by Bruce Wilson. It is mostly a lament on the ease with which one can now make pictures, as compared with turn of the century photographers using wet-plate processes. You can guess where he finds value, and I might agree if I thought his premise was correct: that the dilution of effort the modern camera brings also diminishes the results.

“AND SO WE COME TO IT: the DILUTION OF EFFORT. Photographers have only so much time to take pictures. Jackson would spend days getting one negative. That’s a great deal of effort packed into one image, but what extraordinary images he made! We spend fifteen seconds or less and what do we create? Cascades of snapshots! Piles of photographs that even our mothers won’t hang on the wall. Yep, we are creating nothing more nor less than snapshots, created in an instant, and just as interesting as those Aunt Josephine shot when the family went to that Jersey beach last summer. Shooting fast is diluting our efforts, spreading one hour of our talent into dozens of worthless shots.”

For this fellow, if it is hard it is good. The harder the better. I think I know what his father was like. I also like how he ignores the 100 years of photography between the wet plate and now. I guess he does not think the Leica contributed much to the history of photography, nor Polaroid, and those 4×5 Quickloads must be suspect too. I am not doing the article justice, you should follow the link and read for yourself, but not before I demolish it here!
I think that there is something else at work here, and it has nothing to do with effort. It has something to do with time and space. Not necessarily exterior time and space either. You can imagine William Henry Jackson or Carleton Watkins standing next to a tourist or whatever species of photographer that Wilson is worried about, (and me too) for example the Flickr-fanatic, at the edge of the Grand Canyon and both taking pictures, they both are in the same time and space, but the results would be different.
And just to tease the comparison a little more, lets forget about ability. There is no denying the immense power of some of the work of early photographers (the ones who get up early?) in large format, and in places untouched by human S.U.V’s. It is very difficult to touch those early results currently, by even the best practitioners of the art. It was good to be first. But that is not what I am getting at either.
I think the difference has to do with interiority, which is the inner space of the mind and its thoughts and feelings, and the experience of that space which is called intimacy. A longer explanation would be that interiority is an awareness of a developed and active inner psychological landscape. Intimacy with that space is the ongoing connection to the feelings and thought products in that landscape. Anything that draws us into a closer dialogue with that interior landscape in this case the tools, is better.
In one sense I do agree that it is better if it is difficult: you can imagine Action-Jackson or Watkins and their pack-mules trekking for days to get to some of these locations, the campfires in-between, the hard-tack, the lack of women…But I digress. They had time to consider the work, experience the landscape, and come to a decision on exactly what they wanted to blow a 20×24 sheet of glass. So while it was definitely hard, I believe it was probably very enjoyable, otherwise, why pack 200 lbs of gear-for the fame of it all? Yes the photographs were novelties and attracted wide attention; just imagine today Burt Rutan mounting an expedition to the Moon to make photographs! Masses of fame associated with that-but loads of fun. It would be stunning. 200 tons of gear strapped to an enormous bomb and three lucky souls. Best-week-ever.
To the point, what is missing in the experience of the modern camera is the interiority that older, more difficult processes fostered. I get no joy shooting with a digital camera, but step back to the “primitive” Leica or field camera and it is bliss. Why is this? I am certainly no curmudgeon when it comes to technology. I no more miss the wet darkroom than I miss listening to music on wax cylinders. So what is it?
The experience of working is hard to define, and is different for everyone, however I believe I can generalize a few points of importance. While the “act” of photographing occurs in “real time” the “experience” of photographing occurs in the inner time space, this place I call interiority. You could say that this inner space has a vertical dimension while time, as we understand it has a horizontal dimension. I am certain the Garry Winogrand in his millions of frames never once thought that the actual time it took to make a picture mattered. He famously answered “one-one-hundredth of a second” or similar when asked by a critic how “long” it had taken him to “make” that picture. In other words we are going “deeper” in the experience of interiority than the actual time span would indicate. Digital processes and most of “technology” attempt to replace the vertical span with the horizontal span. They give us speed but no depth. Interestingly, one of the most common complaints about “digital” photographs is that they lack “depth”. Of course this is something different, it is the result of squeezing reality through a regularized mathematical filter that “combs out” irregularity, and it is something that is reaching its extinction point in the current crop of high megapixel chips, 22mp and higher for example. Finally there is enough “data” to represent reality sufficiently to the eye.
But is there something about making a process more convenient that necessarily makes it less meaningful, less “deep”?
The history of photography is the history of one more convenient technology superseding another. This is not new. Photography has always been a technological child and complaining about the lastest thing is to miss the point of photography. It is convenient. The quickness enables a mode of seeing that is not possible otherwise. But the interiority of the artistic process is not so easily “convenienced”. There is another term for this, those who saw the transformation of the typesetting industry called it “de-skilling”. But I don’t believe it is the transformation of the craft itself that is the problem. As I said before, I don’t miss the wet darkroom, although many do. No doubt some interiority has been lost there too.
When I look at the process of photography, there is the confrontation with the facts of the world and my reaction to them. And the photograph is a “new fact” derived from the collision of the two. Again that’s Garry Winogrand’s expression for it. So the question, awkward syntax and all is; is data a new fact? Or is data the description of a fact?
It is very easy to believe in the fact-ness of a negative, chrome, or print. There it sits. And I am not talking about the factuality which is truthfulness. This is the imprint of light on a medium. It has existential weight, not to mention physical weight. I might guess that exposed film is heavier than unexposed film-by how much you ask… With digital there is a momentary state change of a charge-coupled device recorded by an array of transistors. There is no fact, only a phase change. How does the production of facts differ from the production of states?
This is an important distinction. I feel like a passive visual consumer when I am shooting digitally and not an active creator. Without the transactional moment of converting raw film into exposed images, photography becomes pure consumption. Critics used to deride photography as art because it was a “mechanical reproduction” untouched by the “hand of the artist. Sounds quaint now, and here I am deriding digital production in similar fashion. We have learned to live with endless copies, but we may not have learned to live with the absence of a physical original.
The current term for shooting digitally is “raw capture” which is an interesting metaphor also, ignoring the obvious “raw” part which is technical and appropriate, “capture” is an interesting choice, as if we might decide to let it go at some time in the future. In other words, it is temporary, provisional, fleeting. (It is also aggressive, but photography has always had more than its share of aggressive metaphors, coincidentally it is very adept at depicting war.) You can say, “I captured the moment on film” but it has still not worked its way into parlance to say “I captured the moment on digital.” Perhaps some enterprising marketer will help us with that.
So what we traded for, the New World and the worshipping of convenience, is interiority. I believe that it isn’t even a trade; the language of our interiority has become the language of consumption, not thoughts or feelings. Our most, and I hesitate to use this word-sacred-space is now a marketplace where feelings are supplanted by objects that promise and misrepresent. People talk about how the culture has become “pornographic” and geeks talk about tech-“porn” (or pr0n) and I believe this is true, but not in any sexual way. It is the misdirection of the interior space, away from the interior to the external, to the world of false promises of objects that attempt to satisfy that is the result.
Excuse me while I turn off the LCD preview on the back of my camera.
Circling back,

“WE HAVE SOMETHING TO GAIN by taking our time. Instead of shooting three rolls an hour, spend three hours on one photograph. Think about the scene. Is it really worth shooting? …Does your framing of the shot and the composition convey the feeling of the subject that first made you stop and linger on it? Do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? (emphasis mine) If you don’t know, how can you expect your photograph to successfully convey it?”

Bruce is absolutely right here; do you even know how the scene or subject made you feel? Every little thing that diminishes that interiority is what we are trading for in this New World.
Postscript: I bodged the title together for this essay from the title of a great book by Robert Adams; “What we bought: The New World” which is similar in tone but done brilliantly in photographs.

Posting to a dialogue on The Well, a conversation with Photographer Ted Orland;

Given this opportunity, I just have to thank Ted whom I feel a kinship with from his writing in Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity, That book was very inspirational to me when I was starting out in the early 90′s, fresh out of college, and it helped me paint a picture of what my life might be like as an artist and photographer. I still reread it from time to time.
I would like to contribute my perspective on “what makes my art matter” to this discussion, something I have not heard anyone say explicitly, and that is for me Art is about forming relationships in many ways, between yourself and the work and the subject of the work, between the artist and the viewer, and hopefully between a community of viewers if it speaks that broadly.
For me, and I have tried to crack this nut so many different ways, but right now, what works is to say that forming relationships is the most human thing we do. It is the most essential thing, to engage with another and share and risk exposure for reward. So why my art matters is that relationships matter, absolutely, and my art comes out of a relationship with myself-knowing my needs, responding to my desires, respecting myself. So that is the first level, the self -relationship. And with art-making this is often the most complicated level to traverse. Art making is a process, and so is maintaining self-awareness, and Art comes out of an awareness of oneself and a relationship with the self. I could make this more psychological, but I will settle for awareness, an awareness of what I attach to, of what I disengage from and an awareness of what my needs and emotions are. Art has to come out of this process, although many times it comes out in spite of this awareness, in fact explaining it away could make you realise you don’t need to do this! But I don’t think that has to be the case.
So I could go on to elaborate the other relationships, between artist and viewer and between viewers, but it is the same thing really.  Again, for me, Art comes out of the process of exploring relationships, and it is the expression of the most healthy self that you can find. And it is the most basically human activity. So the question, “why does my art matter?” comes down to “it matters because relationships matter” and without relationships the self detaches and isolates. Art matters because it promotes life. How else to say it?
This forum matters for the same reason, it promotes relating and sharing. And it validates the tension encountered in that process, the lonely years without recognition, conversely the enjoyment of the solitude of art-making, all these facets.
It is a gift to be able to share this with everyone and Ted, who creates relationships and Art wherever he goes.