Aside from Roger Ballen’s now legendary shadowland monologue, and Simon Norfolk’s making cream corn of an unfortunate festival goer who asked “that question,” (more on that later) Tim Barber’s “Various Photographs” exhibit merits some discussion.
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. » Read the rest of this entry «
This is how “behind the scenes” was done ‘back in the day…
Learn about Jam Handy here. I have always liked the Diane Keaton book Mr. Salesman, which is a collection of sales training photographs from the 40’s and 50’s, which I believe were made by Handy, but I am not sure.
Went to see Stefan Ruiz last night at Aperture and he talked about his book “Portraits”.
He signed the book for me, although the “R” in Ruiz got wiped off. I have the only book signed by “Stefan uiz” in existance. Actually, I don’t have it, since I had him sign the wrapper as a lark. I have since discarded the wrapper meaning this is the only photograph of a Stefan Ruiz book signed “Stefan uiz”.
I like this work a lot. There is a lot of space in the pictures and a straightforwardness that I seek in my own work sometimes. And the lighting style provoked some thought.
For the past couple of weeks I have been mulling over an idea that I have had for a while, that there is a style of photography that I might label “reproducible”. It has to do with what I see on the newsstands over the past few years, and conversations I have had with editors about the quality of their paper stock. Time and time again I have heard “that won’t reproduce on our paper” with regards to some dark melancholy photograph I have made, or just recently when I wanted to run a story in black and white in the New York Times I was told the same thing, “black and white does not look good on our paper.”
Huh?
This is the “Grey Lady” we are talking about right? But it is not unique to them.
I think some of the best feedback I ever received from an editorial board was after a job I shot for Fortune too many years back to admit to. In a fit of desperation or you might say after exhausting all my ideas of “good” lighting I decided to arbitrarily put lights up in a kind of north-south-east-west fashion. In other words I was not going to let the subject dictate the lighting. It was just going to be “light.”
Technically this isn’t NSEW, this is more copy-stand like Stefan Ruiz. I was still trying to be nice. Depending on the room configuration I could usually get two or three lights going. But soon this was not enough, and I decided to break the “fourth wall” as it were, and put the remaining light in:
For one of the last issues of George Magazine, see, I am dating myself…
W:
To me, things were getting better. You could see less despite having more lights. Compounding the issue was that I decided to print the negs on Ilford Multigrade Fibre Matt. Yeah, some kinda wonderful…
A party for W magazine-this has flash on camera triggering strobes in the room.
More for Fortune, on risking retirement funds on the stock market. Love that flash glare in the patio door:
And the nadir, same story, but the editor asked, do you have any lighter frames?
I think a lot of this has to do with colour vs. black and white. Magazines Hate Black and White. I think it says, “you couldn’t spend the money for colour?” or “this is olde.” But I think most of it has to do with reproducibility. The paper is so bad that you cannot print anything with any depth. And printing is a significant cost of making a magazine. So do you think there is a style evolved out of the necessities of printing on bad paper that could be called “reproduceable?” » Read the rest of this entry «
Went to the Ryan McGinley opening at Team Gallery last night along with 350,000 or so other lookie-lou’s to see or be seen. These are my impressions.
Straight off, some of the pictures are very beautiful. My favourites tended to be those involving the dunes and the human form, a large 8′x10′ print of two people tumbling naked down the side of dune is tremendous, another 11″x14″ of a far away person lit by a spotlight taking a dive off the top off a dune like a falling angel is wonderful. I can’t find it even on the artists site.
copyright Ryan McGinley
I looked on the Team Gallery website for these images and it seems they favoured more the portrait work and the more “lifesytle” esq imagery. To me this was not what I felt was strong. I probably am in the minority. But overall you could say the focus was beauty, and beauty in the moment. It is not much more complicated than that.
So then there is the other part, the whole production aspect of the work, the models, the assistants, the budget, the 4000 rolls of film, etc, etc. The re-imagining of 70’s style nudist magazines for a contemporary audience. This is a vision of something that didn’t exist at the time, and does not exist now. It is a complete fiction.
I think we all like to imagine our youth was spent or misspent in some sort of free innocence, we all have our own gardens-of-eden that we look back on. In this way I see “I know where the summer goes” as aspirational. It is very close to if not advertising in its effect. No one had what these kids had, well, perhaps a few. But you want it, at least judging by the throngs that showed up to the opening. You want to be close to this kind of life. McGinley is giving us access to something seemingly lost, prohibited, or out of reach. He is giving a shape to a current culture’s dreams.
It makes me think of On the Road.
On the Road is a fiction also, created out of the raw materials of the life of Jack Kerouac which were undoubtedly real, but the story is pure fiction. It went on to become rightly or wrongly the voice of a generation of Beats, and evolved later into a vision of freedom as it might be experienced in life and in art. Sal Paradise is a beautiful loser, a searcher, a Tom Sawyer lighting out for the territories, well, at least Denver.
For me it is interesting to compare the dreams of different generations. For the generations that followed the Beats here is this jazz-inspired solitary poet figure, a little in awe of a greater man (Dean Moriarty). It is the vision of one poet, enough money for gas to get to the next town maybe and a cup of coffee left over.
“I know where the summer goes” is the vision of another poet, albeit one with tens of thousands of dollars, a production van, and cast of hired models. Tell me which one is more innocent? Or true? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but a culture expresses itself through it’s aspirations, and this is a very commercial kind of expression. It leaves me feeling a little poorer.
My MFA-thesis brain has been on nyquil and tylenol lately which makes it difficult to remain standing…
I’ll be off for a week. In the meantime, check out the Bert Stern pics of Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe. Apart from the general ‘wtf’ reaction, it did make me think, we have our “JFK” again, I guess we need our “Marilyn”.
This is the follow up post to the first Sartorialist post. I went thursday to see the prints before the Jurgen Teller opening.
I remember going to see a show many years back of Patrick Demarchelier’s work. It was really awful. Beautiful prints of beautiful people shot beautifully. Stripped of their magazine setting, it was completely coma-inducing. Sometimes that happens, the work is made for a context and and cannot function outside of that. Something similar is happening here, although I feel much more protective of the Sartorialist in this example than Demarchelier. In other words I would rather see the Sartorialist succeed than see PD get his gallery rocks off.
What to say? The things I like; I like that the prints were a nice smallish size, I thought it was a good choice not to try to make these heroic prints you see everywhere. There was another gentleman in the gallery at the time and he was pressed up pretty close to them looking at the details. Small prints can create a kind of intimacy between the work and the viewer. Trouble is there was not much connection to be found. I really got no sense of the people in the photographs, somewhat as I had expected. My impression is that the web is good enough to convey what this work conveys, a sense of style in an instant. And the web is actually better in another way, the fact of the comments and community around the work feels much more interesting than seeing a collection of average prints in a white gallery space.
About the prints, they were fine, suffered a little oversharpening, a little of that digital thing were primary colors were oversaturated relative to everything else. As a group they looked cohesive which tells me a very good printer spent some time getting them all together.
On the way out I overheard a group going in and one said “ok, so the thing is, these are real people..” as an introduction to the show. I think now in photography we have come to expect that what we see is not real on some level, either from retouching or styling or the endless repetition of stars and famous people, the idea of photographing real people is somehow now exotic, and the exotic now commonplace. I did not have the heart to stop and explain that many of those folks were fashion editors and stylists. Certainly real but not “real.”
I wish there was more to say about “the work” but it was not the kind of thing where I come out of the gallery and feel really motivated to go out and take pictures. That is my benchmark when I see a show or a book, how juiced it gets me to want to do my own thing. Certainly others might feel motivated.
I’m going to conclude in a way that perhaps most of you do not expect. I think that overall the Sartorialist, hyperbole aside, is creating a wonderful thing if you just stick to what it is-a fascination with the details of style and dress and manner. Clearly he loves these things, and the people too. I would love to see more of that, more of his affection, more humour perhaps, more attention to the emotional moment. There is always somewhere to go. The invented can become authentic. » Read the rest of this entry «
It is one thing to see it on TV, another thing to live it I am sure. But it is definitely a third thing to read about it on a blog. What am I talking about?
One of the many people forced out of 475 Kent Street this weekend (NYT permalink) was David Alan Harvey, someone I have never met, yet though reading his blog and the comments of his wonderful online community of friends and fellow photographers, I was immediately struck by the emotion of this difficult situation. As it turns out David was in India when the eviction order came, can you imagine being half a world away and finding out your home was being evacuated, possibly never to return. This is a break-in of another kind, one formed out of a lot of people looking the other way until it was too late.
I have no idea what kind of resolution there can be to such tragedies, New York, being what it is probably has thousands of such situations. I am left wondering about my own building, recently a pressure valve gave way, again, and gallons of water flooded into the apartment above me, leaving a full two inches of water on the floor. Thankfully, and mysteriously, very little of that water made its way into my apartment where my camera equipment, computers, prints and negatives are stored.
In David’s case his wonderful friends came to his rescue and organized an impromptu emergency move of his archive to a safe location. His blog was instrumental in the sharing of this information, and also in the creation of that same community. Again, I have never met David, but the spirit and energy of his contributions to others and their contributions back are evident in every post and something to take notice of. The lessons are share with others, and be very suspicious of your landlord.
