copyright Ryan McGinley

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.

Yet I like the pictures. Which fiction is truer? » Read the rest of this entry «

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.

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I see great success for my new venture, 40 over 40, thanks russell, a contest to showcase the best decomposing talent (er, what is the opposite of emerging?) from 40 of the best photographers over 40. AH the entry fees!

I bring this nugget to you as this morning in my inbox arrives yet another reminder from PDN to enter their annual contest, which as you know has been extended, and now because their server is getting hit pretty hard, they are giving you to the end of the week to upload the images, although the deadline is still tonight.

Seems contest were never healthier. Time for me to get on that bandwagon!

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Somewhere between the introduction of the 500CM and the 5D a group of photographers came of age…who now stand as…the 30 over 40…you may be a 30/40 if…

• you have a birthday before January 1, 1968
• you have actually used a bulk loader, 8×10 polaroid, kodalith
• you like the smell of fix
• cross processing was what the kids did before holga and before flickr
• you used a typewriter at the Mayor’s office of Film and Television to get a permit

So who is still around?

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Another photographer and blogger Liz Kuball recently completed a month long trial by fire where she publicly initiated a “portrait month” project where she challenged herself to photograph strangers on the street. It is not easy to do this kind of thing, harder still to own up to the work as you do it.  She gives herself a passing grade but is not in love with most of the work. I posted some followup comments that I want to call out:

As a “task” goes, it seems the portrait month was a success in that you got over the approaching people thing. Now that you are over it you see from the other side that many people are just not that interesting…:)…which is not to say anything “bad” about ordinary people, it is just that you found nothing to hook your interest and that is normal. You can’t be “interested” in everyone, it just does not work that way. So the exercise was limited from the get-go, one by the fact that finding people that you are drawn to is difficult, so substituting anyone is not going to cut it mostly, and two, you had the limits of the street itself as backdrop.I think the challenge of portraiture is in selection mostly, the picture itself happens once you are activated and interested. This is why all those random craigslist projects look so bad, the selection methodology is less than intuitive. You really have to select carefully, look at Avedon, for example, he never photographed a face he was not intensely interested in for one reason or another. And he did that across all social types as well. The gift was he knew what he was trying to find out about people, so the selection process was self-generating. Once you can generate an inquiry about what it is you are searching for in a portrait of a person, the rest will be easier.  

What is so interesting here is the process of generating work. Looking around the internet, (which may not be a good thing) you see a lot “projects” with hooks, work made to satisfy a statement. And also there is that idea of “the sentence”. This was one of the ideas left moldering in the unplugged fridge of Alec Soth’s blog, like Christmas cake that won’t go away. When I try to think of the sentence for some of the photographers that I admire I get nowhere. For example, Lee Friedlander; how in the hell can you “sentence” him? He has done everything, flowers, nudes, self portraits, factories, parks, street, it goes on and on. Of course he has to write grant proposals like anyone else, but never in any one of his books that I have seen have I seen anything about a project statement. The project statement is “I’m a photographer, this is what I shoot.”

I linked to a John Szarkowski interview in LA weekly a while back:

Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.  

I think the corollary is that you make projects out of pictures, not out of ideas. In other words, it is the pictures first. It seems to me that that is essential, the pictures should tell you what you are doing. Ok, you do have to have an idea of where to show up. Or what to show up for. But none of that is going to create good work on it’s own, in this case, “showing up” is not enough. Perhaps showing up long enough to find out what it is you are really doing is another way to look at it:

…but I hope you continue because you really have only scratched the surface, what if you did this for a year? there is so much you can’t tell what is going to come of it that just allowing the current process to continue might be good.I say that because I was in a cafe today and saw some work from someone else who had been photographing in my neighbourhood, and I could see that it was all the pictures I made in the first couple of months, same places, same ideas. More or less. But lately my own work on the same subject has changed and I am seeing things I did not see before, this is after almost two years of photographing basically the same few square blocks. It surprised me. So there is value in just humping it out for a long time with no intention of anything, just to do it. All of a sudden you get “it”, or why you are doing it.  

This discovery for myself was startling, it came out of being the most playful I could be with a camera, yet still seriously trying to make my pictures. And I started to see the narrative power of light by itself, which is another thing entirely.

I remember going to Washington DC the first time and seeing a show by Lee Friedlander, I bought the monograph, since lost, “Like a One-Eyed Cat.” If you have my copy, please return it! What was so great in 1992 was how totally bamboozled I was by this work, I really had no idea of how to make sense of what he was doing, you have a phonebooth with those holes drilled in the side of the metal shield and a city and a dumptruck all falling together. I really could not fathom the “why” of those pictures, in other words, “why would you do that in a picture?” Well the really interesting thing is that I don’t remember when I started to “get” those pictures. For a long time I copied that style, I shot store windows, reflections, self-portraits, but of course that is only imitation. Whenever it was that I started to get the work, it took even longer then to be able to talk about what is the “why of it,” and I think it is this: this is a language, these are the shapes and symbols of the city used like words and formed into sentences that express something greater than the parts. To say that his pictures are about the experience of the city is only halfway, the pictures actually exceed the experience of the city, they distill it into a kind of poetry that is only available to photography. You could say it is like jazz, but the difference between photography and jazz is that photograph gets a whole new set of notes every decade or so, jazz is stuck with the same twelve tones. That is contentious of course. But what I want to emphasize is how photography creates its own language out of the thing it records; reality. So a photograph can be anything as long as you define your language with the pictures. And the pictures define the project.

The new year is that time when we look forward to new projects, what is yours, or how do you go looking for it?

I”ll leave you with this cherry from Tod Papageorge in Bomb:

No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there’s as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.  

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Anyone who knows me has heard these stories, so I beg your forgiveness…

APE (can we get a better acronym?) has a story up today about the language of photography and dealing with word editors in magazines to communicate why a certain picture should run. It made me think of when I first got serious about photography, it was because of a workshop I took in Toronto in 1991 with a great photographer and teacher, Henry Gordillo. Apropos of nothing I bumped into him here on the street about a month ago, and it brought back the class we did together, “Shooting and Talking Photography.” It was a basic portfolio review type class where we were required to put work up we had made in the intervening week and talk about it. Yes kiddies we had to process and print, none of this digital stuff existed. It was enough to pass around contact sheets, or if you wanted, cut out the contacts and stick individual frames to filecards so you could play with the edit. One of the students was working on a longterm project and we spread out what seemed like 500 to 1000 frames once, and all of us pitched in to boil that sucker down to 50 or so, it was an amazing process to see a consensus emerge, and also you had to defend your choices. Well that was what the class was about too. It was not enough to “flickr” it and say “cool” or “I like it.” You had to talk about how and why the image worked, how it supported the essay or extended the meaning. We also had guest speakers who came in and “spoke about” certain work. And this is how I learned the language of speaking about pictures.

The next definitive experience I had in talking about photography was at another workshop in 1994 in Maine. That summer we had the singular experience of hearing Richard Avedon speak extemporaneously for what seemed like three continuous hours about his life’s work while about ten slide trays were projected one after another brought in by his staff. We had hijacked a school auditorium in a nearby town, packed it, and were mesmerized by this performance. And if that was not enough, Sabastio Salgado got up and spoke some more! But Avedon was definitely on his game, what he talked about was what emerged in those publications made for the retrospective the next year, Evidence, 1944-1994 where he said portraiture to him was a performance that existed between the sitter and the photographer, and that what the photographer was dealing with was primarily surface.

Last experience I want to relate is with a great book. Near that time or later I picked up “Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity” by Ted Orland, and also the Daybooks by Edward Weston. Two very different collections of writing. The first is a series of letters written by Ted to Sally Mann over the course of many years, the years when they were both developing into the mature artists they did not know they would become. It provided a sense of what it was like to slog it out in photography’s trenches, albeit some pretty good trenches, the darkroom of Ansel Adams. Eventually Orland left that apprenticeship and the book ends in his accepting a teaching position, but the wonder of it has to do with how we all get to where we want to be when we cannot see the path we are on. If you read it it is going to feel old-timey, but that is really it’s charm.

So you really want old-timey, read the Daybooks of Edward Weston! He bitterly complains about the retouching he has to do to make the old rich hags happy with their portrait commissions, and gleefully talks about the drunken debauchery he gets into with Tina Modotti and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. You get the feeling he is a bit of louche and prig at the same time, he doesn’t seem too too concerned he left his wife and four children back in Glendale. And I almost forgot another great book, California and the West by Charis Wilson and Edward Weston, detailing their travels in the deserts of California and Death Valley making photographs on his Guggenheim fellowship. Charis writes so well, she was but 22 at the time. The shopping lists are priceless because of the prices listed, 8gals gas-$1.56 for example.

Do yourself a favour, push back the computer, shoot a roll of film and cut out the contacts to sort. You will find it so slow, which might be the point. » Read the rest of this entry «

Thanks to my friend Emmet Malmstrom I got a crack at a story for that most famous Swedish architecture and design magazine ForumAID…well, it should be, it is designed and printed beautifully and according to editor Daniel Golling, they go to great cost to actually translate the issue into English for us poor uni-linguals.

Hlynur Atlason is an Icelandic designer living here in New York, his firm Atlason has done all sorts of interesting work and meeting him was a pleasure.

A whopping 5 comments my alltime high-I RULE! Well, I thank you all for noticing, mainly thanks to Andrew. I wanted to post-forward a comment that Olivier Laude offered on an older post:

Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.

Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.

http://www.editorialphoto.com/

Later as Olivier noted anyone who is currently working for BW or Forbes has the SF12 to thank, although they later did renege on the agreement of further increases, but the higher rate has stood. I myself have never worked for BW or Forbes, I think there was a stigma that if you worked for Fortune they did not hire you, but I don’t really know if that is true.

If you look at the history of unionization almost all of the significant action took place at the turn of the century, and it was a pretty bloody affair, but in all those cases you have a group of workers and you have a “workplace” to leave, and get locked out of. Solidarity is enforced bodily at the factory gates, and everyone knows everyone else who works there, you have to work alongside each other which makes scabbing very difficult. Photography knows no such workplace, despite my calling the still life studio the “coal mine.” Enforcing solidarity is practically impossible. Another part is you have two different kinds of workforces, on the one hand a group that was immigrant to this nation, largely poor, used to all kinds of hardship and with few alternatives, the other a privileged mobile group. You can’t herd cats. Read on… » Read the rest of this entry «