Let me introduce you to some old friends.

I certainly don’t have the world’s best photobook collection, in many ways it is not even a collection. There have been no rules applied in its creation. Some are gifts, some were too cheap not have a look. Heteroglot I think is the word. Some are missing, loaned, purloined, misplaced in moves-Mark, you still have my Paul Strand and my Friedlander One Eyed Cat!

I don’t buy as many photobooks now as I used to, even though the availability and selection has never been better. A Photographer’s Place may be gone, but we have our friends now at Dashwood here in New York. It’s a treat going in there, I feel guilty because I rarely buy anything there. Aren’t we all a little cash-strapped? But photobooks are as much for the lookey-loo as they are to to buy and own. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent as a young photographer scanning the spines of photobooks in a variety of bookstores over the years. I was not alone, this was part of “the education” of becoming a photographer. There was a distance and an intimacy that is the paradox of any obsession. Libraries, books and old things can do that. They create a silence, a place to dwell in.

Probably some good work but I will never get to browse any of them. How can I know if I like it? I don’t make friends easily…

Despite it’s inefficiencies, the old school publishing model put books in the pews of this old church and you could go in to worship every other sunday. Or like movie marquees, the titles on the dust-jackets offered a world that was just out of reach. Photobooks in days past had the element of the exotic and foreign about them, a club that you could never join, but aspired to. We don’t like that anymore, it gets labeled “elitist” or “un-democratic” or not “accessible.” And our aspiration has been exploited by innumerable contests where the only path to success is to win!

The photobook of yore was where I learned what is was to be a photographer. As unrealistic as that sounds. Almost by default, there was really no other place. You read Forwards and dust-jackets and biographies, all 606 pages of Shadow and Substance, the life of W. Eugene Smith by Jim Hughes, or the Weston Daybooks, a two-volume set-and you put yourself in their tripod sticks. There was no one telling you how, in art schools you surveyed the same books and imitated your professors, commercial photographers used assistants, so you assisted. Workshops offered a chance at shouldering up next to your idols, for a short while, but the photobook could be your constant companion. And through it you got to know a photographer’s work over time and with respect to what was relevant in your life at that moment. Most of the photobooks I “know” I don’t even own, but have tasted over the years, either in libraries or in stores. Let me share some deep dark secrets; I don’t even own a copy of The Americans! I’m such a fraud! And oh how I wish I had stolen that Life & Work Werner Bischof from the Kingston Public library in 1992! Now its out of print…

Joke: Brett, when you go down to the market don’t forget to get peppers…

December 21. I can’t go on this way.  I must acquire a formula for my portraits. I compromise anyway-and give far too much of myself to an unappreciative audience.

Yesterday, I quit-put down my prints on which I had spotted all morning. Poor technique? Yes, but not my fault-finger prints and scratches and bad retouching done by others-retouching necessary to make an American of questionable age look like a vivacious senorita. I quit, I say, and paced the floor the afternoon-the worst reaction to professional portraiture I ever had. It made no difference to me that rent was due and the work had to go on….

Yet here I am this morning at my desk, working harder than ever, attacking this negative almost with a ferocity, as though it were one of the tasks of Hercules. The outward and superficial reason that if it is not done by tomorrow I cannot go to El Toreo Sunday!-and five foot letters announce Silveti y Nacional!

(What was I complaining about portraiture the other day? Same as it ever was!)

Tell me what a twenty-five year old living with his parents in Ajax can learn from Edward Weston in Mexico in 1924 about being a photographer-? Maybe if I figure out SEO finally I can go to the Bullfights on Sunday? But this was part of “the education,” learning what came before. Photobooks were the cathedral of the ancients, but they didn’t seem ancient even when they were. When your only point of reference is the book on a shelf Weston is just as alive as the person next to you. Ansel Adams wrote The Camera, The Negative, The Print in the early 80’s, detailing principles that had been in use for decades. It was neither new nor old, it was just “Photography” and part of the curriculum.

One of my teachers said that a student of his had learned black and white printing mainly from looking at photobooks-he thought that this is what a good print should look like, and since he had no access to actual prints, it was all he had to go on. The point being, photobooks were responsible for many aspects of the craft and it’s transmission over the years. For many it was the sole point of connection to the medium. We now have the luxury of unlimited search the world over, seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan is now possible, in the days of the photobook, you were limited to what was published. Here we have another facet; for better or worse, the photobook was a gatekeeping mechanism. Making it to a store shelf confers a status on the work, it also reinforces status. Now from the point of view of me seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan I much prefer the internet. But from the point of view of separating wheat from chaff there is nothing wrong with a few barriers to entry.

Sadly, I never really internalized these rules.

We take the online community for granted already, but pre-internet, you suffered your successes and failures alone. Or you shared letters with friends and classmates. One photobook that was very important to me early on was Ted Orland’s “Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity”, mostly cobbled together from a correspondence between the author and another young photog-Sally Mann. It is sort of their modern day emails to each other, published. But because they are letters, we get a care and depth of expression that is timeless. In the book you get a picture of what “emerging” photographer meant circa 1973-1984, the drudge-work, the uncertainty, but mostly the idealism. It is not unlike blogs today, at least the blogs that I like to read. Photobooks were web “point-oh” you could say.

Ted’s Photographic Truths: Photographers fade faster than photographs…

The last point I want to make about photobooks is that recently some have become fetishized collectibles. I suppose in a world where images are in infinite supply, we must ration every possible point of purchase in order inflate their value. I don’t feel this is a healthy situation. It is a sad fact that inefficiencies of the old publishing model meant that photographers made no money creating books, they never sold well, and the bulk of them were then remaindered and then pulped. But you can go down to Strand and revel in the exhaust of this process, and pick up copies relatively cheap. In the secondary market they have long lives, like those people I suspect you see at company parties year after year but never find out their names. It is comforting to know that they are still there. Now a lot of good work is going into print on demand- a place where I can’t browse, move in alongside, live in, a virtual marketplace of limited runs that sometimes are created to sell out, be buzz-worthly, and appreciate in value. At least that is what the email blasts are urging me to do, only twenty copies left!

Obviously I have mixed feelings about this. I love that anyone can self publish a great book, except for the fact that it will have little impact beyond an even smaller number of people that the old publishing model serviced. But I’m ready to see the end of the day dominated by a few large imprints publishing yet another book no one needs to see. Taschen you know who you are. Breasts. Really? And I am a fan of the breast, clearly. But I am not a fan of the last few years of pseudo-porno photobooks depicting behind the scenes of any number of moral low-tide pools. Publishers think or know these books sell well enough to justify their production. And photo books where magazine fashion photography is paraded as art. Ya know, without the typography these pictures are BO-RING.

But I think the photobook does not serve the same purpose now. It is not the wooden church of the photographic, the point of first contact. It is becoming a quick status symbol. A collectible to flaunt your discerning taste. A tick box on the list of photographic things you try when you are starting out, like toy cameras and tilt-shift. None of them will be around long enough to show the next generation of photographers what it was like back in your day.

This morning I got a letter from William Schmidt, deputy managing editor of the NYT. My hand trembled as I opened the envelope. (there was no envelope) Maybe the “Weekender” is coming in a new Coach Edition with matching leather gloves for smudge free reading?

TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS

This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.

As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”

The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.

This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:

Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.

Sincerely,

William E. Schmidt
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company

The gloves will have to wait. But they have come off. Obviously some battening down of hatches is going on after the Edgar Martins débâcle. It is to be expected. It is also the first time I have ever gotten any official direction in writing with respect to “a policy” on alteration…well corporate communication is always an oxymoron. I did know what was permissible out of common sense. You wonder who doesn’t? As for that bit about consulting your editor if you have a question, well, in my experience Photoshop is most useful to them as a box to make the monitor higher. Raw converters, high radius sharpening, LAB colour, moire, curves vs. levels, shadow-highlight, none of this is going to get you more than a wha? Honestly, it is not their job to understand digital capture technology or be digital referees. Their job is to understand pictures and make intelligent assignments. They do this very well.

Part of the reason I was approached by the Times to do work for them was that I was outside of the newspaper world. I had not cut my teeth on newspapers, I did not go to J-school, I had never shot a grin and grab nor a high school soccer game. I don’t have that memory bank of solutions to photo problems that go through a 24mm lens close to the subject if you know what I mean. Which is not to disparage what journalists have to do. There are necessary limits implied by the mandate, I will get back to that.

My development in photography had come totally through editorial magazine work, and the editors that were calling were also veterans of that world. Their learning curve was steep also. While some may have had experience on newsmagazines or financial reporting, none had significant newspaper backgrounds. But the sections I was being assigned to were not “news” sections, it was feature fare like Dining, Arts, Style. I was not being asked to “report” on anything. I still got chastised early and often however for my scant captions. I figured the less I said the better. I did not want the responsibility of reporting, since I am not trained. My mandate is to take the intelligent handoff from an editor and make good pictures in my style. That’s what they wanted me for. Which is not reporting, probably not journalism, and may or may not be reality either. By the standards above, almost everything I was assigned was a photo-illustration, in that I directed people, moved furniture and generally futzed around until I got the photograph that I wanted, whether it was a portrait, a still life or interior. This is standard editorial practice.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

“Illustrations of ideas or situations” might encompass any situation where I was present and made choices about photographing a person or group. But portraits and still life gets a pass evidently, unless the “people or thing” is “artificially arranged”, which takes me back in a circle to almost all portraits and all still life. I am no clearer after this clarification. (secret answer: there may be no answer to this for newspapers, read on…)

Tangential to that, (going somewhere, I promise) my cable provider has seen fit to scramble the location of the channels, I now have C-Span and NY-1 in the low digits. I am enjoying the Wendy Williams show for the first time. How You Doing? Fine, thank you, and getting up early on Sunday mornings for my long runs means that I get back around 10am, just in time for Richard D. Heffner’s excellent program “An Open Mind” broadcast from SUNY somewhere upstate, NY. For the last two weeks he has been interviewing Alex S. Jones, an authority on media issues, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times staffer through much of the eighties. He has a new book out called “Losing the News” “The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.” Here is an excerpt from chapter one, “The Iron Core”:

Imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each day’s serious reported news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy. This iron core is big and unwieldy, reflecting each day’s combined output of all the professional journalism done by news organizations — newspapers, radio and television news, news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and a few magazines. Some of its content is now created by new media, nonprofits, and even, occasionally, the supermarket tabloids, but the overwhelming majority still comes from the traditional news media.

This iron core does not include Paris Hilton’s latest escapade or an account of the Yankees game or the U.S. Open. It has no comics or crossword puzzle. No ads. It has no stories of puppies or weekend getaways or recipes for cooking great chili. Nor does it include advice on buying real estate, investing in an IRA, movie reviews, or diet advice. There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Indeed, pleasant and diverting stories are far more appealing to most people than the contents of the core, which some find grim, boring, or riddled with bias.

It has no editorials and does not include the opinions of columnists or op-ed writers or political bloggers. These things are derived from the core. They are made possible because there is a core. Their point of departure is almost always information gleaned from the reporting that gives the core its weight, and they serve to spread awareness of the information that is in the core, to analyze it and interpret it and challenge it. Opinion writers pick and choose among what the core provides to find facts that will further an argument or advance a policy agenda. But they are outside the core, because they almost always offer commentary and personal observation, not original reporting.

Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office. There is an account of a public hearing on a proposal to build new ball fields and an explanation of a regional zoning concept that might affect property values. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming. There is news of business, both innovation and scandal, and even sporting news of such things as the abuse of steroids. An account of the battle within the local school board about dress codes is there, along with the debate in the state legislature over whether intelligent design should be taught as science. The iron sphere is given extra weight by investigative reports ranging from revelations that prisoners at the county jail are being used to paint the sheriff’s house to the disclosure that the government is tapping phones without warrants as part of the war on terror.

Alex feels we are eroding this Core, and are at risk of losing it altogether. The core cannot be maintained in any type of “free” way. Basic reporting is like digging ditches, rarely any glamour involved, you are not going to get an intern to go to Afghanistan for free to do this. It requires resources and commitment over the long haul. Notice also the distinction he makes between original reporting and opinion and analysis. Without the core, you cannot have the rest.

…So I get this email this morning reminding us all about the standards and practices involved and it makes me think-how do you square this circle? In other words, in trying to create a product more interesting to more people newspapers have enlarged the scope of their coverage well beyond the confines of the iron core that Alex talks about. Tthey have done this for a long time, except with staff photographers. Lately they have seen fit to hire outside the choir you could say. Which gets you Edgar Martins, an art star who has no connection to print and obviously no concern. Or it gets you Nadav Kander, (who I love) and a set of completely manipulated portraits that passes muster because as I read above, portraits and still life can be called photographs, except when they are photo illustrations. So is it not a photo illustration to completely change and insert a background? The Magazine, the website and the Newspaper all have to adhere to the same standard according to the letter above. If I am confused, imagine the lay reader.

Newspapers seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. The mandate to create compelling (which you can also read as trendy, fashionable, provocative) content may not always coincide with the mandate to report facts. When you start to mix up this iron core with sections from Agronomy to Zymurgy, (just leave my astrology thank you!) when you start to look outside the J-schools and newspaper ranks for editors and creatives, and when the pressure of the bottom line starts to pinch, then you get mission “creep”.  Profit and ambition can compromise integrity, and the reader loses faith in the core itself. News becomes confused with info-tainment.  Reporting start to look less like truth and more like the opinion of the newspaper owner.

We now are awash in opinion, mine included. I have no solution here but wanted to draw attention to Jones’ writing and his “core” idea. I believe that accountability reporting as he calls it is essential to our democracy. You are not watching your city council, but you know someone is. Dutifully, so that one day there is a paper trail, and a story can emerge of corruption or improvement. Technologists like to posit that the camera phone, the citizen journalist and the very transparency of information on the internet can provide what newspapers currently provide. But you cannot expect bloggers to be able to withstand the lawsuits that even a simple investigative piece could generate. Certainly that lone blogger could “tweet” for help but this is a naive fantasy. I heard Eric Schmidt of Google gush that the simplicity of fact checking on the internet means that politicians will have a harder time lying in public. Guess he has not tuned into C-Span lately. Maybe he needs to rescan his converter box to make sure he is getting all the channels…

A whole post and I only mentioned running once.

The title of this is copped from John L. Parker Jr.’s excellent book “Once a Runner.” I may do a review of running books in the future. It is easy enough to understand, a koan on trials, both olympic and personal, and the miles to get there.

Something to keep track of those miles? Perhaps you are considering purchasing a GPS training device like the Garmin 405? The 405 has been out for quite a long time, I only got mine after Mac support was provided. More on that later. I got the kit which included the heart rate monitor. A wireless usb dongle is responsible for getting the data off the watch and into your mainframe computing unit.

The first question might reasonably be, do I need this? If you are coming to this blog for the first time the history is that I began running in June of 2008 it what can only be described as a full on-midlife crisis. But I digress:) The first couple of months were primarily concerned with survival. It was hot, and there was a lot of phlegm. But that will pass young Skywalker, er, runner. Eventually I got a Nike sport kit for my ipod, well, I got a nike sport kit and I got an ipod. Again, I repeat, do I need this?

I think starting out the ipod provided a welcome distraction from my gasps for breath, my flapping footfalls and jangling keys. Eventually all that went away. I apologize to all the other runners. The Nike sport kit was useful for a long while, it does a reasonably accurate job of recording your pace and time and distance. But the caveat “your mileage may vary” has never been truer. If you contemplate doing tempo workouts or intervals, the Nike sport kit will get very, very confused. It also gets confused if you run faster than about 8 minutes per mile or have very short strides. Calibration is difficult. Nike has you run a specified distance to teach the unit I presume the number of strides you make to cover that distance. Getting the unit to be accurate to less than 10% is difficult, and if you intend on covering more than 10 miles, guess what? Exactly. Not.

So enter the Garmin 405. What was innovative about the 405 over previous models was that it looked more like a real watch, the size was not too big, the controls were minimized by using touch technology, and the wireless data transfer function was added. Depending on your point of view, all the additions were great or absolutely disastrous.

Speaking from my own experience these are the pluses and minuses:

The GPS function is very accurate over the terrain I have covered, meaning Brooklyn, Manhattan, the suburbs. I have not used the watch in dense forest or mountainous areas. But it does work under the tree cover I have experienced on light trails. If you tend to begin runs from the same point, the GPS will acquire a signal quickly and hold it. Later you can even see where you crossed from one side of the street to the other, the accuracy is to within a few meters.

There are a bewildering array of functions you can use, you can set GPS waypoints or use it to navigate. I have not explored any of this. What I use it for is monitoring pace, average pace, heart rate, distance and time. You can customize the data fields that are displayed, or have the watch auto scroll through the fields perpetually. I tend to like to see heart rate and either pace or average pace. When you check pace instantaneously you may be surprised, it can vary tremendously, about a minute either side of what you are actually doing. In practice you need to check a few times to make a mental average. Or you can use average pace, but this will be the total average, so if you are doing a tempo run for example, it will include the warm up lap which will distort the total. But overall you can get an accurate gauge of your pace at a point in time, and you quickly teach yourself through “biofeedback” what your pace and heart rate are based on your own internal GPS watch, which can be very accurate. Having used the watch now for 8 months I can tell within +/- 5 bpm my heart rate, and +/- 20 sec/mile my pace. But this is for paces that I know, as you get faster you will need to relearn the differences. I can tell a 8 minute mile from a seven minute mile, but beyond that, since I don’t regularly run tempos under 7, I have no idea. Later in my marathon training I have some speedwork at 6:51/mile assuming I can get there. I think I will be focused primarily on not puking.

So this is what it can do (and more) but what about usability? Touch technology is coming to us whether we want it or not. And for the most part, the iPhone and other touch enabled devices work very well. Where they have difficulty is in adverse conditions. Moisture interferes with most touch devices and the Garmin 405 is no exception. You would think that since running is often associated with, oh well, I don’t know, SWEATING, that this might have been a dealbreaker for some. It can be.

The instructions say that the watch is not to be immersed, although you can and probably should rinse the watch off after use. But overall the water resistance of even the two pushbuttons is somewhat sketchy. Sometimes they just don’t respond to repeated pushes, stabs, jabs, or profanity. And then a minute later all is fine. Same with the bezel. The “innovation” of the 405 was the inclusion of the touch bezel, that allows you to select functions by touch and scrolling, or circling around the bezel. On “dry land” this works fine. Throw in a little sweat or rain and it is easier to leave well enough alone and just let the watch count what it is counting. Attempting to access functions while the watch is wet is difficult. Not impossible. It makes the watch less reliable and you wonder why four sealed buttons would not have worked as well. I have learned to deal with it and I think the trade off is size. The newer Garmin 310XT is waterproof, aimed at triathletes, and is much larger overall. Or that could be the improved GPS part too.

With regard to the wireless data transfer, it makes sense to remove the usb port to improve water resistance, yet the watch is not really happy in water. So now you are adding another layer of difficulty in getting the data off the watch. And to be clear, there are two exposed charging pins, why you could not do data transfer and charging at the same time like the older larger 305 is one example of how improvements are not always improvements.

I can’t speak to the experience on a PC, but the Mac support was long in coming, and now that it is here it is fair to say you might be less than impressed. I am using the software on an older PowerPC G5, which Garmin does not officially support but acknowledge that it does work. I can report, it does work. Period. (NOTE: there is a firmware upgrade for the 405 available but good luck getting it onto the watch! I l almost bricked my watch attempting it. Be very sure you need to bother before going down this road.)

…the trials of miles, gain, loss, max, avg, calories. where does it all end?

(picky readers will notice it says 19.57miles not 20 miles. I stopped the watch outside the park to buy a water and a banana for after, but did not restart the watch on the way home. Therefore: Never stop the watch! It does have a setting where it pauses when it detects you are not moving. Like that moment you collapse on the hill…)

The wireless ANT dongle (Another Needless Thing?) does not like going to sleep and waking up. You find yourself quitting the Garmin Ant Agent program, replugging the dongle, and relaunching the program. It may take a couple tries to sync. Eventually it gets done. Transfer to the Garmin website, well, YMMV again. Garmin has been rolling out a lot of software updates lately on their server side, I have found it easier to manually upload the data. Once uploaded you get a map of your workout, splits, averages, max values etc. You can generate reports of all your runs, although I cannot get average pace over many runs for some strange reason. Sometimes the simplest things…

That might be a suitable conclusion for this user review, “sometimes the simplest things.” I started out asking “do I need this?” It turns out that that is a very interesting question with regards to running overall. I cannot say there is an answer to that. Recently I started leaving the iPod at home, and found the experience very enjoyable. But sometimes, like last weekend and last night, it was fun to blast away with the tunes. I’m not much of a data junkie, however, keeping some kind of training log is essential I think, much like a daily journal, you can find insight in the record keeping. And the data is useful, you can see improvements, you can find encouragement, you can see how weather and time of day affect your performance. Or you can keep track of food and clothing, which is just as important. Gotta go back to ye olde paper and pen for that!

You don’t need any of this to run. A simple Timex will do, plus some indication of distance which is now available on websites like WalkJogRun.net or MapMyRun.com. Or just run dammit. I have no problem with that. If you are training for a distance event, I feel these devices do give you useful data that you can use during your runs to train better and more effectively. Just don’t expect to get a runners high off of them. That was what the running itself was for, remember?

Pros: size, accuracy, durability, website improvements hold out hope for better in the future from Garmin

Cons: touch bezel is a mixed bag, Mac support is thin, wireless is unnecessary

Overall: maybe you can get it used? And used to it…Not as bad as all the above.

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.

Survival of the fittest may be a good title for this race which was held Saturday morning in a frigid Central Park. Temperature in the low twenties, a threatening wind, and a fresh blanket of snow on the park and park roads made this one to remember. Fewer runners than last weekend, but still a very large turnout in a winter wonderland. Had to hand it to the volunteers, this one should guarantee entry to the NCMY for standing there in sub freezing temperatures for hours watching the water in the cups freeze over. I could turn mine over at the water stop and none spilled out…

I ran this one with a friend as back of the pack bunnies, but as you can see by the graph, we snowplowed our way to negative splits. The bump at mile 6 was me taking a potty break. Here are the splits:

1. 10:12
2. 9:04
3. 8:53 

The first two miles was like learning how to skate again on a crowded rink, we were back in the third corral and it was pretty bunched up.

4. 8:41
5. 8:31 – 5 mile split of 45:21 – 9:04/mile
6. 9:17 – visit mr. john

7: 8:15
8: 8:12
9. 8:10 – second 5 mile split was 42:25 – 8:29/mile 

Totals 15k- 1:20:05 – 9:12/mile but the early crowding and the slippy start cost us a lot of time. At the end my friend had some mysterious jolt of energy around Cat Hill and opened up a 10 yard lead, by the last mile it had tripled- I didn’t see him finish. Nice kick. I was content with avoiding congestive heart failure…

We got lucky with the wind, which was not a factor although at the end heading northbound I was feeling it. But surprisingly not cold even at 25 degrees with the right clothing. 

End of year thoughts on running…

Some 500+ miles covered since June when I began. The calendar only says “June 1, first run”. I cannot remember how far or even where I went. Since then I have run in Ontario, Omaha, Dallas, New Delhi (ok, that was on a treadmill in the hotel gym…) and Bhutan-that was though rice fields.

It is hard to describe just what it is exactly that I have gotten out of running. Part of it is control, certainly, that I can make my body do something continuously, automatically even, that is outside of daily living and breathing. Like an engine, the body becomes a motor for the mind to drive around, and the world becomes the view out the window. It is not that far from photography really. The inner mind of perception looking out through an eye or lens or window onto the world. And the unfolding of a landscape rolling sideways. There are times in running where it does feel very much like this, like being in a car driving, or in a train looking out at the homes and fields and trees passing by. The way I am describing it suits my personality, for sure. I am describing being immersed yet distant from the world, and those of you that know me might recognize this characterization. For everyone else, welcome:)

“Fire up the colortini’s, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures as they fly though the air.”

I know I promised a review of the Eggleston show at the Whitney and part of that has been written. I just don’t know if I agree with it any more…but the prints are stunning, you should go just to get an idea of what colour should look like.

Maybe if i get inspired an end of year post with some dead certain conclusions about the state of the world we are in. » Read the rest of this entry «

Liz Kuball bid adios in this post and it twigged something in my mind, a paragraph she wrote:

It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of. It’s almost as if all the photographers whose blogs I read have become one photographer in my mind, and that one photographer never stops, never has to work, never gets sick or lacks inspiration. I know this isn’t true, of course—know that they all have their own struggles, that they all work hard to produce the work they do. But when all you see are the beautiful photographs, it’s hard to keep that in mind.

I have been turning this over in my mind since the Various debacle, what to make of the apparent future of photography. Not to rehash the whole thing, but I think that for me, what sticks out about Various Photographs was that is was very representative of where we are now, our taste, speaking of the internet world. Some would say it is wonderfully diverse, and perhaps it is, we now have available a tremendous mass of work, all made equal in a sense by the computer screen, 72 pixels is all you get. It is like submitting to galleries 35mm slides, the old saying, it makes good work look bad and bad work look good. What you end up with is this constant flow, and I think that is something that Various Photographs is trying to dip a toe into, this stream, to take a temperature, stir up some eddies.

Liz gets at it, how this stream affects you if you are making work. Never before have we had this kind of volume of work available. When I was getting going in Toronto in the early 90’s it was book stores, even that was overwhelming, although the volume of books has only increased.

I was visiting home last week and on the way back the rental car had XM satellite radio to keep me company, so perversely I listened to the comedy channel for 8 straight hours.  I do not recommend it. But I realized how similar the experience was to looking at photography and blogs on the net. It is one reason, the main reason, why I do not feature other photographers work on my blog. There are other places for that. But even then, I question the effect it has. It is like the satellite radio. How is it possible to make comedy unfunny? By massing it together in a continuous stream you realize that very few people have anything truly funny or new to say, and in fact will repeat themselves over and over in the same genres and topics. Careful here, I am not saying anything to the individuals, I am saying the stream defeats the purpose. Well, my continuous listening does that, but made possible by the stream. It is the effect of consumerism, the construction of a world dedicated to making it easy to consume things.

What the internet has done is turned photography, all of it, into another consumer product. Of course it hasn’t, but that is the effect.

We should not be so eager to treat the world like a box of chocolates.

I think what you are seeing is a generational thing amplified by the www. In the development of a photographer or artist there are stages that you inevitably go through, fascinations, being naive to certain things, unaware of what has come before, excitements at the discovery of an artist previously unknown to you, all of these things from the perspective of someone starting out are very different experiences compared to someone who is battling mid-career issues, etc. There are commonalities, like finding inspiration, finding places to show, sharing experiences. But it is this particular time, the confluence of technologies of digital photography, the www for sharing, a boom in consumer credit allowing amateurs to purchase gear that only professionals would have bothered with in the analogue days, all of this has brought an unprecedented number of photographers into the arena at exactly the same time and often at the same phase, that early discovery phase that used to go by fairly unnoticed in art schools around the country. And asking the same questions over and over. Of course there is nothing wrong with this per se, except as it has manifested across blogs and the www. So you see the consequences, a great deal of burnout, bad work, and this somewhat toxic flood of imagery.

Charlie Rose was interviewing George Will last night and they were discussing the Barack Obama nomination, and that task ahead for him. The charge has been that he cannot connect because of his “elitism” and Will neatly deconstructed that. He said in politics it is never the question that the elites rule the masses, but it is the question of “which elites” will rule. You hear so much talk about relating to the “common man” and often politicians like to portray themselves as the “common man” as much as possible. Well, I agree with Will here (perhaps the only thing I share with his views), I want an “uncommon man” as a leader, really, that is what we all want but do not acknowledge.

Similar goes for photography, photography may have it’s common charms, but I really don’t need a flood of common imagery. It is the uncommon we need more of. » Read the rest of this entry «

Various Democracies

Photography as Collection

The exquisite corpse: the future of photography, it is not about any one person’s work, it is about the mass. 

How collecting other work saves you from making your own?

These were all titles I considered for this follow-on piece. I am trying to put it in a bigger context. Where are we going in photography? Or where did we think we were going because we misunderstood the past…

By Tim Barber’s own admission, he functions more as a collector than as a curator. The web creates the possibility of bringing together unlimited numbers of photographs and the attraction is to ffffind something in that mass. I think this is where some confusion sets in. I think it is one thing to see collection as a valid strategy for curation (which it is in my opinion) and another thing to see collection as a valid strategy for making work. The trouble that TB gets into is that he conflates the one with the other. See it is perfectly fine to work in the typological mode, which is essentially being a photographic collector of types. The Bechers, Sander, etc. But they are not collecting ANYTHING, they are curating what they collect. Water Towers, Professions. 

To curate a show based on the photography of EVERYTHING, in other words to be a collector of photographs of anything is where you can get into trouble. The defense is that photographs can BE about ANYTHING. Yes, a photograph can be about anything, but it doesn’t necessarily follow it is a good photograph…

It makes me think of The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston. Thousands upon thousands of photographs. When asked what he was working on lately Eggleston responded, “I have been photographing democratically.” There is a lot in that statement.

This the “rationale” about Various Photographs, and the basis of a lot of photography, that it is somehow “democratic” because it is an artform that nearly anyone can do. And further, that this should be a good thing.  I have a friend who is legally blind, who reads text at a distance of about four inches, but who makes the most astonishing photographs I have ever seen. In the sense that photography is universal, you could say that photography is democratic. Anyone can take a picture. The act. Looking at it that way you can say anyone can paint. The act. But we are not so accepting of that, although David Letterman has some great Elephant paintings to show you. So there is the act, and there is the intention. An elephant can make a great painting but he or she cannot intend to make a great painting. At least as far as we can tell…

So what did Eggleston mean when he said he was photographing democratically? My sense of it is that his democracy was of the subjects within the frame. Do not read that as “all subjects are equal.” You can read that as “you can photograph anything.” But it is not about “the subject” it is about everything in the frame. 

His “war with the obvious” was not about showing us the beauty of the ordinary, which is how I believe many people take it, his war was with “obvious” subjects. A single object depicted in space in the center of the frame. Eggleston’s democracy was to see everything and depict with equal weight all objects in his frame. This is why he talks about the reproduction of Bresson’s Decisive Moment, typical of the era in that it was flat,  open, and low contrast, it depicted all elements in the frame equally, whereas when he saw the originals they were standard prints. It was the democracy of the reproduction that made the pictures work. Go back to read the afterward in the book and you will see what I mean.

This is the problem: how do you see THE FOREST for the trees. How do you see it all at once when you are looking at details. I believe the garden variety understanding of Eggleston’s importance is misunderstood, we think of him as a photographer of the mundane details (this is what Eudora Welty says in the introduction) that reveal existential meanings and the presence of life. My understanding of The Democratic Forest is the opposite, the book begins with a photograph of a solitary tree and a dedication to “The memory of my aunt, Minnie Maude Schuyler”, followed by a photograph of a map of the United States and world globe titled “Memphis, at the Travel Agent’s.” You don’t even need to see these pictures to get the implication-this is the war with the obvious, a dedication to a late loved Aunt who would not understand what was to follow save for this lone tree, an fitting photograph of a simple lovely subject dead-center in the frame. But that was not what he wanted to show, The Democratic Forest is the problem of how do you see the FOREST, all of it, the map of the United States and The Globe, and depict it from Memphis Tenn? How can you be simultaneously everywhere and here? How does a picture make itself out of the world?

So I am back to Barber. His show demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic? 

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.” 

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

How do I know I am right? When you come out of looking at that show, or any similar collection like that you do not want to take pictures. Your reaction (my reaction) is, god, everything has been photographed. You are exhausted. Subject matter has been exhausted. Which is why it is not about the subject. To photograph everything is not to “see” anything. This is the sickness of the collector. It is impossible to collect everything. Collyer syndrome. And collection is only a substitute for understanding. If we could only collect, catalogue, name, describe, everything then we would know and control and understand. To dissect the exquisite corpse.

By the way, one version of an “exquisite corpse” is a drawing divided in three completed by different individuals. Maybe the single line of photographs was never intended…?

I’ll leave it there. My intention is not to tear down but to challenge. I write about what I react to, and what moves me strongly. In terms of the future of photography, whatever that possibly could mean, and Various Photographs, there is something there to consider. I think many people who saw the show saw “the photographs” and to them it looked like what they have come to expect from photography now, at least on the web. That met expectation, at least as I gauged it from the people at the show, the Saturday crowd, the more everyday crowd, not the photo-crowd, that met expectation is very much a barometer of where we are. Perhaps it is the failure of one kind of photography and the success of another. Perhaps photography has become “democratic” by becoming what many people wish, as opposed to photography being democratic by nature. » Read the rest of this entry «

I didn’t go to this one but MDM put me on to it. About the only thing I can pull from it is this quote, which relates to my post yesterday, at about 30:35:

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? » Read the rest of this entry «

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 «

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 «