Room with a view

Pick one

a cloud follows me wherever I go

its just alec baldwin

how many jokes can you come up with that involve Tiger, POTUS, and Putter?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? well…Frank Rich has a nice column about Tiger and the decade in the NYT

David Sedaris always makes my holiday brighter. With apologies to Eggleston.

you may recognize the colour scheme from my website. ?

When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out-its turn now!-through the keyhole. Yes there is someone in that house who is keeping watch, a man is working there while I dream away. He leads a dogged existence, whereas I am pursuing futile dreams. Through the light alone the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to the night….a rather large dossier of literary documentation could be studied from the single angle of the lamp that glows in the window….” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Pause

In ‘pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected.

Obviously I really like these- I like the scale distortion, the idea of a plane caught in a tree like a kite you might say, the unexpected visual merging of two graphic entities. I could see variations on this where tail markings and other insignia become part of the result. I also like how you can have an idea and someone else will have a similar idea but a completely different take on it. There is no end to the difference you can generate.

Early on I had some failed attempts where I was playing sort of in this garden:

But the results are completely different. And I didn’t have all the technical things worked out.

I think they might have worked best printed large from 35mm negs.

Dancers

The part I haven’t told you is that Steve really can’t see that well. He is legally blind. A birth defect left him with impaired vision, but as a child he used to stare at the sun wide eyed because the colour effects that he was seeing were irresistible. The resulting scars on his retina made things worse. But that didn’t stop Steve from eventually becoming a movie projectionist in New York in the Eighties. Did I mention that when you meet Steve, he will tell you a story. And then another. Possibly a third. All fascinating. You see, you want a paranoid projectionist! Focus! Steve brought binoculars into the booth to see better. So he was constantly on the lookout for blurry images. It makes sense if you let it.

Montauk #3

Digital cameras for Steve are like bionic eyes. He can see things very close up. Like a computer monitor from about 3 inches. And also an LCD on the back of a camera. Viewfinders are useless to him, ah, but on a preview you can magnify your picture…10x or more. All of a sudden, distant details are visible. Steve literally takes pictures to see what things look like. Which is by definition, is what a photographer does. And very Winograndian.

The Corner

We are up to 30% of my TFK pledge. More contributors to come.

I also think you should dress for who you are. I don’t know if people still do that, but when I was a kid, you had to get dressed up for everything. I’m not saying show up as a slob, but you know, I’ve had some interns show up in suits. I’m like, listen, never wear a tie to meet me. You’re in the photo world in New York now. No one wears a tie, man.

So what do you think? I have had to wear a tie but once-photographing in the New York Stock Exchange. Not even in the White House was I required to wear a tie, although I was shooting behind the scenes and not at a State Dinner.  I have had to photograph a lot of ‘Guy’s in Tie’s’ (GITS) and generally felt for them on hot days.

So do only Wedding Pro’s wear ties?

(mad man Thom Browne)

Above: Stack o’ promos to go out. Don’t accuse me of being cynical about this photo business…

TFK UPDATE:

Thanks to some recent donations from the  Mr and Mrs. Jackanory, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. and Mrs. Wright, we are sitting over $600 of $2500, that is more than 25% of the way there!

I caught a serious break on Sunday with the overcast skies and mid-temperatures. The rain was a help too. Does anyone actually make a fabric that can dry in 80% humidity? Dryfit, Coolmax? ShamWow? Cause I’m lookin’.

So it was 20 on the calendar, the first of four 20 milers on the schedule, and after this week of speedwork cut short-and cutting 2.5 off last weeks 18 miler, I was starting to feel like Ludicrous Speed as I have named the schedule was ridiculous.

But that was then, Sunday. Now, Tuesday, thinking about then, I knew that now, or then, as it was, was the time to really commit, so that soon, when then becomes now, I will look back and have done it. Because now you can’t go back to then, you will have just missed it. When? Just now. Got it?

Nick Calcott recently wrote me thinking about running the Paris Marathon, and asked how I got started. A long email followed which I have copied below. Like discussions of photography for non-photographers, discussions of running for non-runners are pretty boring. What isn’t boring is Nick’s work or his blog, 12thpress.

“Thanks for your note-I love getting random shout-outs. Plus I really like the Night Dance series and Nana’s house.

I looked at the paris marathon website faq and noted that they said they serve mineral water every 5km. Too funny. In new york they just open up the fire hydrant to fill garbage pails lined with trash bags and volunteers scoop paper cups of it up.

The first race I ran was last august this time, it was the nike 10k run–I had been running only since june but managed to finish ok. In the two months prior I was just running as I felt, often times every day, about 4 miles or so. What happened in the beginning is that I didn’t know or ignored the advice to step up training in 10% increments, and I started adding mileage too soon just to see if I could do it. I would run 6 miles one weekend, 8 the next, 10 after that, going up to 13. So in a month I think I went from running 12 miles per week to running 25, which was too much too soon on no base. so I got hurt.

Basically all the books and websites give similar advice. Runnersworld.com has a lot of free advice, and you can generate training plans based on your current level. I think what the advice would be is this: have a “base” of regular running, something like 20-25 miles per week before you start the 18 week training for the marathon. Since the Paris is April 11 that means you would start training roughly the beginning of February. And the base should be 6 months or more. So if you are running only 15 miles per week now you might want to slowly ramp that up over the fall to give yourself 4 months of base. (still with me?)

You might also want to and hopefully would enjoy doing some intermediate races in the fall, 10k’s are a great distance, and the Half is also a good distance. Doing these races will give you an idea what to expect running in races, and also about water management and food issues, race day prep, the bathroom! etc. Things that you want to have a grasp of before getting to a marathon. I did a bunch of half’s and 10’s all through my first winter running and loved them all, also loved winter running in general. what I would not give right now for a 32 degree morning! It is so much easier to run in cold I find. In terms of training for Paris you will have to deal with winter running.

So from the fall races you will get a sense of times, your 10K and half marathon times. All of the training plans online and in books predicate your training on your current fitness. This is what you were asking me. When you know that you run a 10K in 50 minutes then that will accurately predict you will run a marathon in 4 hours. Something like that. The reason this works is mountains of data over the years. So for example the plan on Runners World which is what I am using, takes inputs such as a recent 10k or half marathon time, the current number of miles per week you are used to running, and the training effort you want to exert, moderate, intense, severe, and generates an 16 week plan based on that. The plan is similar to other plans – it assumes the “new” thinking that you might not want to run every day- they have you running 4 of 7. You can cross train other days or rest. The thinking here is to avoid injury and overuse. The “old” thinking was that you just buried yourself in miles at a slow steady pace, which now is only one component of the whole training.

What they advocate now is three kinds of workouts- you have speed workouts like tempo runs and intervals to focus on speed, running form and increasing oxygen efficiency, increasing your lactate threshold and teaching the muscles to fire fast, then you have easy days where you run with low intensity to give some recovery, and then you also have the long run day where you go slow and long to increase time on your feet, train your muscles to burn fat calories stored in the liver not muscle stored sugar which helps you avoid hitting the wall (burning through all the glycogen in your muscles entirely, which happens around mile 20).

Combining these three kinds of workouts and optional cross training will give you the ability to run long, economically and finish strong without running mass mileage every day. It is better to be slightly undertrained than over trained and injured on race day. One book is Run Less Run Faster by the RunnersWorld staff.

On a monthly level you go through 3 week circuits of progressive overload and then you get a recovery week. You do this four times, and the mileage increases and the speed workouts get faster progressively. In the last two weeks of training you taper off so that you are well rested for the marathon day. Basically that is it.

You asked about picking a goal time for your marathon-it doesn’t exactly work like that. You can only train so much, so your goal time or marathon pace is dictated by your fitness level going in to the training minus what the training can reasonably hope to achieve. Knocking 30 sec/mile off is a lot. Trying to improve beyond the plan limits risks injury. All of the training plans generally hew to the 10% increment. Once you have some intermediate races done this fall and some times for that, the training plan will dictate a reasonable goal time. For a first marathon I would say completion is a great goal in itself! You only have one first, and Paris is such a spectacular course that you might want to just focus on enjoying all the sights and sounds (meaning try to run no-ipod) and maybe take some pictures. You also want to finish strong, so that it is enjoyable, so speed is not a big issue.

If you read my account of the NJ marathon which was my first, I think it was “an experience” which was owing to the rain, the double loop course, etc. I knew I could finish so it was mainly to do it. Maybe not a great first experience but I was not in pain or cramping or bargaining heavily, so by that measure it was a great success.

My second marathon will be NY this fall, and even tho I am better trained now, I am approaching this with a great deal of trepidation, no matter what, it is one hell of a long way. anything can happen. So you really have to dedicate yourself and not shortcut the training. My last track workout was sub-optimal in the heat, so I give myself a pass because of that, but it bothers me to make excuses, because there are no excuses at mile 20. You have 6.2 more.

Very long email. good luck and keep in touch with what is going on. Take the plunge and commit and you will not be sorry you did.”

best
Robert

Image left of James Worrell circa 1985, Iowa proving that the kids are alright. I am certain of meeting James before circa New York Magazine 1990’s but that feels like a world away. Anyway in the spirit of childhood athleticism he responded to the TFK challenge and made a big contribution to my fundraising. 

Both of us had slideshows in last Thursday’s Slideluck Potshow, you can see his here. 

Week 5 begins today and features an 18 miler sunday.

Around mile 6.

Everyone is away, nothing is doing, we are into August. The gallery openings and free booze are a couple months away, the blogosphere is awaiting the next Edgar Martins to grace the stage, and I have just completed week three of training for the NYC marathon.

Week four is a rest week, the idea is that your muscles get a chance to recover a little from the steady overload they have been experiencing the last three weeks, which culminated in a 16 mile run Saturday evening. See above.

In photography it feels like progressive overload all the time. The steady drum beat of what to do next, how to keep the little ship from sinking. But in August, you really can’t do that, no one is around to hear the sound of your one shutter clapping.

For a while I have been tempted to write in bold caps “PHOTOGRAPHY IS DEAD” as the headline to a post. Catch me in a bad mood and I still might. Still photography for me was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Do I need a degree to say that? You might even say that the moon landing July 1969 was the culmination of all that still photography could do, to relate the actual imprint (via another actual imprint) of man on a landscape. Somewhere in a vault at NASA, exists the actual frame that was exposed to the 1/500th of a second of sunlight reflected from the boot imprint of Neil Armstrong. He also shot the same patch of lunar soil minus his bootprint, the moment before. It shows a great presence of mind to understand that there is the moon “before” and the moon “after.” And more than film or video, still photography is the exact medium in which to contemplate this. There is the film “before” and the film “after” exposure as well. The silver salts are like the lunar soil. Grains recording our existence. Wow. Pretty existential.

You could also argue, and I will, being that it is August and there is nothing else to argue, that at that moment photography died and the moving image became paramount in the culture. It was already happening, in Vietnam, for example, the shootout as it were between still and motion, I think still imagery won that war, pun intended. But the moon landing as it was shown on TV around the world galvanized the power of the flow of images over the still. A series of stills from an alien planet in real time does not have the same power. I remember when the Mars landers started sending back panoramas for the first time, and while the NASA scientists were besides themselves in the control room, the line by line reveal of the  Martian landscape was pretty ho-hum to me. I have watched a scanner work too long to find what it reveals to be that exciting.

I know I would get a lot of argument over whether stills or film was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Motion pictures have shaped our culture enormously. But I feel as a pure art form the still image has evolved the most.

I think we are at the other end of the telescope now, looking back at photography and what it did and meant to us. I say this because almost all of the work I see now is essentially nostalgic, nostalgic of a time or feeling or place or process. Recently Todd Papageorge published “Passing through Eden”, a collection of images from his years wandering Central Park. The work is completely modern in conception, the unrelenting gaze of the camera making what the camera makes, photographs, but the publishing of it is essentially nostalgic. I have read that TP urges his students at Yale to contemplate working in this genre, the lyrical documentarian, camera in hand, and he says he gets no takers. I think that for photography, quote-unquote, this period in the late 60’s early 70’s was the ultimate period, the point at which art photography reached its apogee to borrow a space term. It is hard to get any better than the unblinking, unrelenting, rigourous exactitude of the black and white or colour images of Robert Adams, Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, Eggleston, etc.

This power comes from that sense that you are seeing the trace or existence of something real. Like the lunar footprint, or the image of Lincoln in the Smithsonian, you look closely and it feels as if you can touch reality just on the other side of the glass. But this necessarily limits photography to what actually exists. As soon as you admit fabrication, the power ebbs. And for me the last couple decades of photography have been bouncing along in the nostalgic, either borrowing from painting, or borrowing from the history of photography itself. Sort of like current Broadway musical theatre, a recreation of a long gone heyday.

As I said, we started this trek away from photography during that moon landing. The essential difference between a still photograph and a motion film is that one exists and the other doesn’t. You can hold a photograph in your hand, see it, understand it, confirm it’s existence. You can only apprehend a film, it exists only in your brain as the joining of 24 frames per second by persistence of vision. To see the physical film, there is no motion. It exists only in projection. And you can’t even hold one moment, except as a still, a broken fragment of the whole. This makes motion film the idea medium of what might be, of fantasy. Nothing is real, so it needn’t be. You might argue that the power of documentary film suggests that we still value the real in motion film, but I think we equally value being tricked in film, the willing suspension of disbelief, the surprise twist, the Kaiser Sose at the end. It doesn’t bother us in motion to find out it was all made up. But in still photography, it does. You feel let down. Edgar Martin’d.

Photography is dead. Slowly dying since the 70’s, on life support the last decade or so, I think you will see motion film (video) in many of the applications where the still was used formerly. And I believe the internet is the natural home of the video as print was to the still image. Stills on the internet are not as compelling as motion is. Bandwidth is the only obstacle, otherwise we’d be there now. With youtube, we mostly are there.

Of course there are those that point out that Radio didn’t kill live music performance (although how many of us now know how to play an instrument?) that Television didn’t kill Film, or Print Journalism, and that the Internet will not kill Print. But this does not mean that different mediums have not had to adapt to different, altered or reduced roles. What we are seeing now is the decline of the still image and print. I don’t see any way that it will have in the Twenty First Century, the impact that it did in the Twentieth.

But it is August. Ask me again in September.

edit: another take here on fin de siècle. My opinion, Talk was no George.

I thought of all this after reading about his new Aperture book here and the process of making it, the little cutouts, moving things by hand. (via Rob)

The other desktop

And all this relates back to-running-yes. I bought the book at the opening and indicated the picture I liked most, Dan explained that he was on a job somewhere and got up early to wander around the downtown to make some pictures. So that is how he signed it, “To Robert- Get up Early- Dan Winters”

This is week One of Sixteen in Marathon training. Gonna hafta get up early.

Edit: ok so this is what I should have written-I did say off the cuff…there were so many errors I did not want to perpetuate any misunderstandings-it was the Magazine, not the paper, in which this ran. I had that wrong. So I rewrote the post.

The whole thing struck me as odd-”long exposures but no manipulation”-why exactly are you telling me how these pictures are made-it is like when they do a panorama-”a panorama is a series of photographs put together”-I wrote about this before, about the little girl in the Microsoft ad who is 4 and an PC, and how she sends a photograph to her family, she knows more about digital imaging evidently than we are giving the rest of society credit for…

It is ham-handed, and when someone lies, you get stuck with your hand in the cookie jar as has happened here.

What they should have done was run Edgar Martins own words, his own artist statement:

With artful composition and controlled framing—but no digital manipulation—Edgar Martins creates sublimely beautiful views of often un-beautiful sites. Minimalist nighttime beaches, forests ravaged by fires, and Iceland’s stark terrain have all served as subjects for his large-scale color photographs. He also explores the unexpected impact of modernism on the landscape, including startlingly graphic airport runways and colorful highway barriers that, at first glance, read like abstract murals.-Aperture

Nothing more. Then when it hits the fan, you turn on the author and say, you were telling the truth no? Like Oprah got caught vouching for James Frey-there is ambition on both sides of that equation, and it is not pretty.

Why is NYT running explanations of the ins and outs of digital photography? It is not their place. You can’t fact check a photography, even in film. It could be staged. All you have are trusted sources. How do you have trust? You establish relationships with photographers over a period of time and assignments and then they don’t lie to you. This also means you might not want to run with the flavour of the moment, the MFA grad who just had a sold out show. Because you never know.

Update

An interview here with the person who called it first (evidently). Thanks Simon.

Greetings Photographer,

I’m writing to you today to tell you about a new Manhattan based
company, headed by photgrapher Marc Asnin, that is working for
photographers.  NYCPhotoWorks is a company that is designed to help
photographers on all levels become better photographers, gain
professional insight and exposure, and eventually get work.  We offer
services in many different aspects of professional photography, from
consultations on personal branding to meeting face
to face with the top editors in the magazine world, to workshops taught by
working professionals.

NYCPhotoWorks will be hosting Portfolio Reviews in the fall that are
certain to provide photographers with unprecedented opportunity and insight.

On October 22nd-24th, NYCPhotoWorks will be hosting a Portfolio Review
event at the newly renovated Sandbox Studios in lower Manhattan that will
bring together more than sixty of the top photo editors in the business.
Participating publications include Time, People, Stern, Vanity Fair, Conde
Nast, Details, Forbes, ESPN, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, National
Geographic Adventurer, Redbook, and many more.  Photographers must apply
to be accepted into the event in order to ensure quality of work.  If
accepted, the photographer will be given the chance to meet with 14 photo
editors 1-on-1 over two days, plus a third day of workshops taught by the
Directors of Photography for Conde Nast Traveler, People and Redbook.
This is an unprecedented opportunity for talented photographers to
personally show their work to top photo editors and build lasting
professional relationships.

In a world as competitive and dynamic as editorial photography it’s not
enough simply to drop off or mail in your portfolio.  Meeting the editors
in person lays the foundation for a working professional relationship.
Don’t miss this chance to personally present your work to the top editors
of the magazine world.  Spots fill on a first-come-first-serve basis and
you must submit your work prior to being accepted into the event.

For more information about NYCPhotoWorks please visit our website at
www.nycphotoworks.com

Thanks for your time and please feel free to contact me with any
questions.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Is it me or do they go out of their way NOT to mention money?

So I apply and get taken to a very nice website with a lovely list of editors. Two weeks later, voila, I am accepted and get a login to register.

WHAMO!

$699-599-499-399-Just like iPods, one for every size…

I’ll do the math for you, that’s roughly $45 dollars a sitting.

Ok so you say, Robert…everyone knows it is pay to play…what is your problem? This is no different from paying for LeBook or a promo piece or portfolio pages.

Well, it is different. It is like the wheel has finally come around full circle. Really? Really?

It’s not like I am not already paying out of pocket to do editorial. You know my views on that. But now I really am paying out of pocket! Have we all forgotten folks that we used to drop portfolios off at magazines and have meetings and actually sit down in conference rooms and lobbies and show work to editors for free? This was how business was conducted, the editors need to meet you to get an idea of what you were like, they needed to see prints, they wanted to form a relationship so that you could work together. It was part of their job. Some even liked it! And if it went well, it was not some cherry pick one time assignment where because you shoot waterbuffalo on painted backdrops with a ringflash in your MFA portfolio they just knew it had to be you? But after that, via con dios…

So apart from the efficiency aspect of being able to deliver 200 (? I have no idea the size of this cattle call) culled photographers to 50 editors for example-because, we really are doing them a favour-the magazines, getting their editors all on site on two days for a blitzkreig portfolio review-they are going to come away with something don’t forget-I just don’t get it. Yes, it is highly efficient to be able to see 14 editors in two days, literally, something that would take weeks or months to do conventionally-now. But do you really have a portfolio that is suitable for Business Week, ESPN, Field and Stream, Popular Mechanics, NYTimes Style, Lucky, Prevention and Redbook? Does it make any sense? So right there, out of 32 publications represented, just how many are you really suited for? And if you respond, ‘all of them’, then I think your portfolio needs some cutting…

Sure you could spend $699 every quarter and do a very nice printed Z-fold of new work and blanket all your contacts and I know that might have zero results. But this is no different. Except for the fact that it is something that used to be free, and now, or going forward, probably will not be. File this under “blame commoditization…”

On a secondary rant, part of this has to do with the myth of “personal work.” I guess now that no one is working we all have time to do “personal work.” I’m doing it as fast as I can…have you noticed yet? Perhaps someone with a little more history in the business can corroborate this, but to my recollection, this little bit of slight of hand came up in the 90’s. It was a differentiation tactic. Pure marketing. It said, “you are not just a commercial photographer.” Well I ask you, for example, when Ad agencies are looking for a TV commercial director, and they are shopping reels, do they ask-”hey, where is the personal work? Lemme see his friends half naked at the beach?” Sounds ridiculous huh?

The situation is comparable to the rise and fall of indy cinema, first as outlier, eventually as profit center, with no investment-does this sound familiar-and now as undifferentiated from the rest.

To be “truthy” there is nothing wrong with hiring a photography to do what they do if all they do is shoot to assignment (brilliantly?). You see the perversity of the logic when in the last couple of years we have seen what I would term the “exploitation” of artists in the commercial realm, being hired to reproduce on assignment what they do for themselves. Can anyone put that logic right-side in? How is it any different from hiring an assignment photographer to reproduce what they do on assignment?

If anything, I trust the assignment photographer who has had to deal with more crises on location than the photographer hired to reproduce personal work, which by definition, is work made under the circumstances of the photographers choosing.

Can you imagine asking an Avedon, a Penn, a Meisel, etc, so, where is the personal work? Like the assignment is not good enough?

What am I talking about? A quiet revolution, the cottage revolution. The Sham Wow Revolution. Direct Marketing. Rooney. Ctein. Lavalette. Zeldin. Many many more.

Subscriptions seem to be the newest thing. The idea is give a mouse a cookie once a month and the mouse rewards you with a print. Or something like that.

I just wish I could figure out a way so that when you opened my blog a “blow-in” would fall out on your desk. Look for an announcement, just don’t hold your breath.

Dropped by the Photo Studio on Atlantic between 3rd and 4th Aves’ this afternoon and got ‘roided. Part of the project by Caroll Taveras that will eventually travel to Berlin this summer. Read about it here and here.

Definitely an odd experience on the other side of the camera. JZ is wearing her mittens but no socks folks. You’d think someone from the northeast would know to wear socks in the winter!

I have always enjoyed looking at Nadav’s work. I guess it has been a while since I last tuned in but my reaction to this is pretty negative. It feels to me the most “unphotographic” that I have seen of his work, the most manipulated. Of course I understand it is all manipulated, but many of his portraits have some tone in the background which sort of softens the blend between the shadow, the person and the backdrop. What I am feeling here is bad drop-shadow 101. Photography reduced to graphic design.

Which sort of brings me to another peeve, the way that graphic design has become so intertwined with the Obama administration, for example the silly podium sign “Office of the President Elect of the United States” with the faux POTUS shield, not to mention that the office is not an “Office” at all. 

Consider also Shepard Fairey’s photo-cum-illustration of TPEOTUS:

The Obama O::

Stays Crunchy in Milk!

I’m feeling hit over the head with branding. Are there that many out of work graphic designers?

Perhaps it is commentary by Nadav to turn the administration into cut-out-dolls? If we can paper over our financial troubles by printing money perhaps we can also design our way out of crisis?

And I voted for the guy.

…not by me, here.

You may recall my appreciation of Eggleston’s Democratic ways here.

We don’t exactly agree on the nature of photographic democracy but that is not too important. I think what is more important is that Jordana says;

“It didn’t give me that instant gratification I was seeking, it didn’t feel revelatory, but without my knowing it, I believe it was benevolently working on me even after I’d left it.”

We talked about that today and agreed that the experience of seeing photobooks often is better than seeing the prints, there is something personal, intimate, and evocative about studying a book of work, in your own space and on your own time. The “ownership” experience. Museums end up being about them.

The first thing is that while everyone sees the legislation as a bailout, what is really happening is that the bill is trying to soften the de-leveraging going on right now. Essentially, you had Wall Street investment banks that after many years of de-regulation, going back to the late 80’s, it is not just the current administration that is responsible, these banks were leveraged thirty and 40 to one, whereas commercial banks like the ones we deposit our pay cheques into were limited to something like twelve or fifteen to one. What this leverage meant was that profits were leveraged against profits, paper against paper, and there were no “real” assets against those bets. So now you have a situation which is akin to a margin call, and banks are all hoarding real capital to hedge their bets. But this de-leveraging, the ratcheting down of value against real capital means that wealth is being destroyed. The economy is shrinking. A separate part of this confronts the wisdom of printing money to refloat boat so to speak, but I really don’t want to get that depressed right now.

So what has this to do with emerging photographers? I like to think that over the last five years, the credit bubble helped create a large “supply” in the workforce, those just starting out. And the advent of digital photography also lowered the bar to entry, it was just plain easier to learn enough to be dangerous. So you had a bubble of new photographers entering the system all at once, enabled by the digital bubble which as I have discussed is itself fueled by the credit bubble, and all connected by the www and made accessible through the www. 

You can think of the term “emerging” as a kind of leverage itself. It is a term that is euphemistic at best.  I think the term was a way to sell new photographers into the market at a faster pace than the market was actually responding, but you didn’t notice this in the frenzy. And by frenzy I am speaking of the explosion of blogs, contests for emerging photographers, and also the “leverage” (read onslaught) experienced this last year at openings and festivals. Wall to wall. Way beyond the actual growth of the industry. Everyone has always wanted to be a photographer, as a cliche, but this was different. 

I think it is also no surprise that the number of rep firms have swelled beyond all proportion in the last decade, the supply of new photographers (and new ideas, as well, it is not all bad) was a downpour, and reps provided the kind of gatekeeping mechanism that editors, whom have been reduced in number, used to provide, at least in editorial. And the marginal cost of adding another shooter outweigh the burden on the rep, at least in a bubble. It is another form of leverage. But contrast this with the contraction in the industry experienced after 9-11, when lots of us didn’t work for a long time, and I believe we now have a definite oversupply of talent and and paucity of work. Which can only go down further as the economy collapses.

The conclusion is that the industry has to go through another contraction, 9-11 style or worse. It has already shed some baggage, notice how many labs are suddenly not there? Film is no longer the license to print money. Digital was the license to print money, as I said in the last post, but I think that may be coming to an end. I think there is no way we cannot shed “workers” in the coming recession, and by workers, I think you have to always look at the newest, least experienced, least seasoned, least tolerant of repetitive downturns. I have been through two already. (ok, so this is really a sales pitch, yes I will be here after all of this is over) But as I always said, “emerging to what?” 

Just trying to be ‘truthy.

NB: another similar post here

CLD: What artists, painters do you like to look at?

RF: Well when I…right off the top of my head I think of Hopper…I mean because I have seen the paintings so often, and then I think of the painting my wife (June Leaf) does, I think of…I don’t think so much of paintings really, I think of going out in the street and walking the street and look at people, that’s my favourite, that’s what I like to do…well that’s what…it’s great to keep up your curiosity about what’s around the corner…and it gets harder as you get older but I had that…to walk around with my camera and my curiosity of what is around the corner was important and there are many corners to turn…

moving on… The interview is pretty horrid but what comes out is that RF is extraordinarily sweet, grateful, and patient…

Does anyone have any links to audio or video of the NY photo talks? Anyone? Anyone?

It was apparent from the git-go that someone was not happy, I missed out on the early brouha but it seems the show is not hung the way Tim envisioned. Donald Rumsfeld to the rescue: you go to hang with the space you have not the space you want…

I think TB backpedalled a little too soon, while a single line would have been different and more like his website, I don’t believe the net effect would have been much different. He says it himself, it is a “mish-mash” and whether one row or three, there are a lot of pictures to look at, all sized and framed exactly alike. Three rows creates more narrative connections between different images, so I am not sure what the fuss is about. More likely it was an apology for curation, or curation 2.0 as we are supposed to call it.

Tim’s stated mission was to create “an accessible neutral venue” for a large body of work from all over the world. In this he succeeds completely. He also wanted “an exquisite corpse” and I can see that also.  There is always this populist democratic streak in photography, an anti-elitism. I think it is just the same old process where the new overturns the old. But this dogma comes up again and again, this kind of neutrality, objectivity, democracy. I think it is completely misunderstood.

This is obviously Tim’s show. If there has been a complaint that the NY photo festival is too much about the curators, I respond, so what? We NEED curators, now more than ever, and Tim’s show represents what you get when a curator abnegates responsibility. The point of curation is not to be neutral or accessible, the point is take care of the work and assume responsibility for revealing its meaning. So point one, you have to stand by what is on the wall, regardless. There is no spilled milk here. I think it is extraordinarily irresponsible to distance yourself from what you have done because of contingencies beyond your control. So what, get on with it. 

The real issue is the work on the wall and does it stand up and what is the effect? There are great individual images in the show. But what does it mean to create a group show of hundreds of photographers? For me what happens is the net effect is to de-authorize, horrible phrase, the work. It negates authorship. Suddenly a McGinley could be a Cox, a Kane could be a Traegeser, a Heller a Sutherland, and X could be a Y. What you are seeing is Barber’s own hand, you could interchange this show with a number of his own person galleries and be none the wiser, there would be smoke clouds, random livestock, people in baggy underwear and bloody noses in both. So he strips the work of the original author and substitutes his own imprimatur, and then takes the back door out by saying it is accessible and neutral, and oh, by the way, not what I intended.

I don’t believe it is fair to the people included in the show to be honest. It is reductio-ab-absurdum. One of the panel discussions was Curation 2.0 with Jen Bekman and Laurel Ptak. Guess who was wearing the ironic trucker hat? And really did not have a presentation to make. It was embarrassing compared to many other presentations. And this was one of the festival CURATORS. Breaking news, there is a responsibility there, take it.

Other embarrassments….

Katherine Wolkoff’s presentation on her work also springs to mind, this is one example of you not wanting to hear an artist talk about their work. And maybe we should not expect artists to do this, I don’t know that it is their job after the work is up (but see SN below..). Basically she is really enamoured with a pseudo victorian scientific sensibility coupled with the opposite Romantic sensitive artist streak and throw in a little 60’s environmental crunchy-granola for good measure. Yes it was that painful, sensitive and tortured. Just go see the pictures…

Kathy Ryan misattributes Simon Norfolk’s love of painting and gets a soft glove in the face…but don’t worry, they will hug it out…

Did I hear Rothko invoked again? I thought this was a photography festival, but it seems to be a painting festival. NOthing boils my blood faster than hearing that olde chestnut proffered about how much better a picture is because it evokes a painting…Dammit please can we just have our own medium thank you? I don’t hear people saying that book was so much better or that sculpture was so much better because it was based on a frick’n painting.  So SN got up there and said, I don’t like painting, and these examples I am going to show you are crap, which they were. I am being hyperbolic here, I do know that good work evokes and speaks to other work, there are resonances, references, riffs. Can I just for once hear someone say that picture is better because it is based on a Coltrane track? Then it would just be a reference, and not rationale. Painting and photography have nothing in common except they are a flat thing hung on a wall….and you need your eyes, altho I suppose the blind can enjoy paintings by touch. Oh no, another way in which photograph is deficient…

Simon Norfolk’s presentation was very smooth, this guy has a mind you don’t want to meet in a darkened alley. How this guy gets access to the places he does is a miracle. He basically makes you want to give up photography because the rigor of his ideas sucks all the oxygen out of the room faster than a fuel-air explosion. I think we all felt our innards leaving our mouths at the end.

Two things: he says he does not want to see another photograph of an orphan baby in a refugee camp because he was told that if he bought the bracelet and donated to this other thing and supported the whatever that he would never have to see another orphan baby photograph. In other words he thinks that the emotional confrontation photography sometimes employs is a dead strategy. He prefers the cool intellectual “unpacking” of the black box, although his rage is white hot. His own emotion on the subject tells you the weakness in this argument. To see his work without his own calculated tirade is actually less effective. SN is as much the picture as the picture. I wanted to suggest that he go on the road with the slideshow like Al Gore, because it was a great display. I think you need the emotion, you cannot help but begin in emotion. SN chooses to then take that and sublimate it to a more rigorous intellectual photograph, but I don’t believe it relieves us of having to witness pain, and I think we are on worse ground if we do.  Anyway that is just his choice. 

Second thing: that choice became the subject of an unfortunate question, does the aestheticization of suffering (in either mode, emotional or rational) diminish and exploit suffering? This was the the first question posed after the fuel-air bomb went off. SN ripped him a new one. It is a sensitive point, the charge that creating beautiful photographs of destruction somehow trivializes the evil underneath. He said, well, do you feel that way about this work, and the questioner blanched, and then SN asked the entire audience if anyone else felt that way, and I had the perverse feeling that I wanted to raise my hand simply because it would be fun to see what happened. There was no way you were going to have this argument with this man, the old admonishment, never argue with someone with a microphone applies. The vehemence of the response suggests that it has been thought about however. So there are two parts to this, there is SN’s own personal commitment to his work, which is unassailable, and there is the responsibility that art has in the world at large. Is it enough? What is the function of beauty in photographs of conflict? What is the function of photography itself? I think it circles back to painting sorry to say. There were painters and illustrators sent to most of the major american conflicts, the World Wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, possibly even BushOne v. Hussein and BushTwo v. Hussein. I don’t think anyone ever criticized these artists for making battlefield drawings or paintings, or suggested that it was somehow exploitive. Yet photography is always criticized for precisely this insensitivity. But can you remember a single War painting in the same way as a Nick Ut? 

SN employs his own “shock and awe” in this, by creating seductive work he gets you to look, and then he hopes you consider and think. In this way he is no different from the orphan baby photographers. Essentially this is all you can do with photography, or art, regardless of how tragic, awesome, sublime or liminal it is. What is unfortunate is that the photographer in making the work also assumes the responsibility of how it gets received and used in the world. Different populations will regard the images differently. The context of a coffee table book is different from a gallery wall is different from a personal slideshow and artist talk. Yet the photographer somehow has to control it all and that is impossible. His own explanation was the best I have heard, that going out in the world making pictures causes him to come into contact with people, and their stories are horrific and he feels absolutely responsible to act based on those realities. It is amazing that such an emotional man can create such cool work.

If you are still with me, I thank you for hanging in this long. I want to go back today and see the rest of the typologies exhibit so I might have more to add.