This is going to be a two-part piece, a before and after. The before is now, me writing about The Sartorialist from what I know of him on the web, which is all that most people would know of the work. The after will be later this week after going to see the prints in Danziger, the current show.
I think it might be useful to make this distinction, between the work on the web and the work on the wall, because it is the apparent basis of the rabbit that Schuman and Danziger and to a greater extent perhaps, the internet, has pulled out of a jauntily tipped fedora. More on rabbits at the end. So how does one take a photographic novice, add three years, a blogger account and a ton of legwork and get “the leading photographer of the blogosphere” and “the first real fine art photographer of the digital age?”
Gallery hyperbole aside, I want to consider the following: what is it? Is it fashion photography, portrait photography, documentary or street? How do those elements mix? Is the translation from the web to the gallery wall successful? And the larger picture, the emergence of the attention economy.
But this is an appreciation so let me be appreciative, it is fun to read the blog and see through his eyes his development as a photographer. There is a post from shall we say “late career” Sartorialist about an english gentleman and he writes “I always am a little in awe of someone that can stand so still when they are having their photo taken.” and you can see that he is aware of these things, certain moments in photography that occur. I like that he adds these kinds of comments, to me it indicates that he is sensitive to the process. And also, if you look at the whole of it, from beginning to end, the pictures do get a lot better in the last year, and not so much from the subject, but from his attention to figure/ground relationships. It is very hard to make good portraits on the fly, in uncontrolled situations, so when you see those that work, and work as photographs, it is great.
But that is my question, is this portraiture, fashion, documentary, street, fashion illustration, or what? Maybe this is a synthetic question, by his own standards the Sartorialist was primarily interested in creating an inspirational style notebook. But there is no denying with the gallery opening that this has gone to another level, a level where we are being asked to consider this work as something more. So what is that? My feeling from looking at the blog over and over is that these are not portraits in the sense that they are conveying a subjective human quality about the sitters. All of the stylistic elements of portraiture are there, the indicators that make you think these are portraits, but the more I dig into the work the more I am left with the fact that it is primarily the style of the surface we are being shown. In other words, it is photography in service of style, and and not the other way around. So then the question is, is that a judgement of the work, or is this the limit of the format to begin with? I think it is the latter, although it needn’t be. I think it is a question of priorities, and when style is the priority, everything else will tend to diminish. You see, I think it is possible to create a compelling portrait of someone in a fraction of a second, that is what photography can do. Especially street photography. But then the photographer is not really paying attention to the things that The Sartorialist is paying attention to, style, detail, coordination, pattern, color, etc. The street photographer is paying sideways attention to that, and keeping aware of everything that is going on trying to synthesize something from the chaos. I think these are different kinds of attention.
So is a portrait not a portrait when it only describes surface? Is that what I am saying? Actually no. I think in photography all we can do is describe surfaces, all we have is light on surface. But it is the surface that reveals a depth. And the depth is the dimension of human emotion, conflict, joy, reaction, anger, etc. There are moments here, a few. But taken as a whole the sitters display either a consistent good humour or sometimes a fashion-y pout, learned no doubt from fashion photography. There are some where you do get to “I am here,” which is a good place to be in a portrait, and a hard place to get to most times. I hope when I see the prints there is more of this in the edit. It does make me think of Vincent Gallo in Buffalo ’66 when he is taking the photo-booth portrait with Christina Ricci and he admonishes her not to smile-”We are spanning time!” he says, as if we could somehow get back to that kind of innocence. But that is something that has been lost in photography, today it is almost impossible to replicate the kind of Mike Disfarmer look which is not a look but a confrontation in reality. Everyone is thoroughly familiar now with the “affects” of photography. I think sometimes you can see it in school portraits of young children, I have some of my nephews, and a standout features a particular grimace, an untrained smile, it is entirely natural and beautiful, it is a kind of anti-smile, the smile you make before you know what you look like to others in pictures and have assimilated that.
Invoking Disfarmer means also invoking Sander, and the NY Times article made that connection. So I am not going to equate what others say about the work with what The Sartorialist says or does. The comparisons to Sander are pretty thin, that work was made in an entirely different mode, and without the hindsight that photography itself renders, the patina of nostalgia. In this case looking like a duck and acting like a duck is not the same thing as being a duck. I think it shows how our aspirations for photography have changed, Sander was working in the scientific, encyclopedic mode, and at a time when science was regarded as the inexorable way towards enlightenment and the future. His work was to be a catalogue, a kind of phrenology of social types through which objective and accurate knowledge could be gained. Today photography aspires less to record reality than to transform it and escape from it.
While others have worked in this vein before, (I am thinking of Jake Chessum, for New York Magazine. I think Jake’s work is addressing individuality more than style, at least that is my opinion of it. It does not have the attention that the Sartorialist pays to a cuff, a hem, etc. So they are very different in that sense..) I think the biggest difference and lesson is how The Sartorialist has successfully capitalized on the emerging attention economy. Basically, as the amount of available information grows, our ability to pay meaningful attention to any of it decreases. In advertising for example, this means unfortunately that our commercials are louder than the surrounding programming! How I hate that! In the attention economy it is a competition for eyeballs, and there are winners and losers. Looking at our media it is clear that the winners of the attention economy are those that address our aspirations and dreams, to be famous, to be beautiful, to be rich, to be desired.
The blog mechanism is a key component, plus the community of people who comment. This is an interactive ecomony, very different from the static magazine page. I think in that aspect it is the potential and the limitation of the format. The attention economy demands a certain kind of transaction be performed to maintain itself. You see this on many blogs, the commentary is in the majority favourable, the attitude definitely shies away from any negativity or controversy. You could regard this as sunny humanism or servile flattery depending on if you are a cup half full or half empty type. Judging from my writing you might think I would opine the latter but I think it is more complicated than that, or at least it serves my purpose better to regard it that way.
As this transaction gains momentum, the attention economy creates a new kind of wealth which is manifested in “persona” like stars, pundits, the notorious, etc. The persona of “The Sartorialist” allows you to invest in the aspiration of what he is creating. It would not work as “Scott Schuman’s blog.” (guess I am S-O-L) And surrounding this figure of The Sartorialist are the fans, those who leave comments and those who don’t to the tune of tens of thousands of blog hits a day. This is a “real” thing in the sense that it creates a new kind of property, and it has a value. Besides the value of the advertising revenue garnered from the site, there are very “real” prints are being sold in a very real gallery. I think it is even larger than that. If you buy into this idea of the attention economy it has the potential to displace the conventional forms of revenue I have just mentioned.
This brings me around to the art-world connection. Danziger said The Sartorialist was “the first real fine art photographer of the digital age.” This statement is revealing. I know it miffed a lot of photographers to hear that. I can only imagine what the other artists in Danzigers stable think of the project. But if you take my argument above, I think this is representative of how the attention economy has transformed the traditional economy, in this case the art gallery. I might be tempted to re-write the statement to be “the first real photographer of the digital age,” which is to state the reality of the new form of wealth created by the attention economy. The fact that he said “fine art” before photographer shows that there is still some insecurity there, the fact that we have to pay lip service to fine art in the gallery context. I don’t believe there is any way we can justify the work as fine art, and this has nothing to do with photography per se, which is the usual nervous-making aspect of these things. The fact that these are well made photographs does not equate them to fine art. And I don’t believe I am saying anything negative here with respect to the photographs, I am just saying this project is of a different sort as I have described. Maybe someone else has coined this phrase, but it seems to be “attention aesthetic” is a good way to describe the style of The Sartorialists photographs. The photography only has to be good enough to create and keep your attention. It is not a photograph or a question of fine art but a kind of a conversation, like when people say “you know?” It gets you to react, to confirm you are listening.
So in this way we can see the gallery show was not the culmination of a project, as is the tradition, but is a way of extending the conversation, extending the attention. It may seem that it refers to all the trappings of the art world, but that is only superficial, and perhaps unnecessary. Danziger definitely had to placate a traditional mindset which is why it conformed to the mode of “gallery opening.” And the little bit of bait in the form of price, 1200$ and the quote “I have not seen those prices in 10 years” does leave a hopeful note that you too are getting in on the ground floor. Speaking of ground floors, the line outside the gallery at the opening (which I did not attend) was evidently beset by other hopeful proto-sartorialists snapping the snappy dressers. It may not bode so well for them alas. In this respect the first-to-market has the advantage, a rule that holds over from the traditional economy. I fear the same goes for the print collectors. Will their investment hold? And does this question even make sense?
Getting back to rabbits and ducks my conclusion is that this is a horse of a different color. On the face of it, an amazing coup that an “emerging photographer” could attain such heights in such a short time. In reality, a fashion merchandiser creating the next logical marketing form. And maybe not something that could be foreseen, which makes it brilliant and unique.
You will have to wait until later in the week when I have had a chance to see these physical prints for the second part. In some ways the actual show may not relevant given what I have discussed. We shall see what we shall see.
For now I will leave you with a quote I found as I was searching for definitions of “real property.” It is from the Velveteen Rabbit, a book I have not read in a good ten years, but obviously a favourite. I thought it was a nice antidote to all this stylishness;
“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” [Margery Williams, "The Velveteen Rabbit"]
I think this demonstrates that kind of attention we all really want to get, that is, love, despite how we look.
Read here about attention economy and Micheal Goldhaber.
Phew! I bet your glad you got that off your chest. You should get an honorary MFA from Yale for this one. Seriously, I appreciate your careful analysis of the phenom we call the Satorialist. Can’t wait to read about what you think of his prints. It’s hard not to feel all PT Barnumized by the gallerist himself declaring the satorialist himself better than sliced bread.
I really thought you were going to finish with Lewis Caroll’s rabbit hole but your velveteen rabbit works quite well even if you didn’t mention the subtitle to the velveteen rabbit is “how toys become real”…I’d like to see you work in Goodnight Moon into your next post: goodnight to a bowl of mush and an old lady whispering “hush!”
Wasn’t Amy Arbus the first sartorialist? Unfortunately she did it pre-blogosphere.
Robert, another brilliant dissertation. Thank you for sifting through the noise.
In the art world there is always a rush by gallery owners to find the next new thing. Today, plucking someone from a blog and putting work on the wall is a natural progression. The real question is where will that work go, how will the artist mature, and what kind of body of work will they build over a career?
If you want to see where the art world is going, look at where the music business is today. Immature artists plucked from obscurity and thrust into the limelight until they implode or fade away into irrelevance as the next new thing gets paraded forward. They never seem to live up to the early hype, and how could they as they never had a chance to gain any wisdom or insight along the way.
Time will tell.
It doesn’t matter. Art is a business. Can it make money is the real question that gets asked. Even established artists are pressured to reproduce the style of work that makes the galleries money.
Should we be concerned about who has sustainability? I don’t know. Just like the music industry, there are those whose career lasts, and those whose don’t. But in the end, the labels just need to make money. A one hit wonder makes a lot more money than an artists that puts out several good, but not great selling, albums.
@ mike: didn’t you mean Diane, not Amy? I do remember Amy doing a series on characters I think so you might be right.
I don’t think that is the right comparison however. Perhaps Bill Cunningham is the first Sartorialist. Gotta love him. Whenever I see him, and I mean whenever, he has that Nikon over his shoulder. Even in the Times office, he walks around with it. If he has only hadda blog…coulda been a contenda…
@kevin: I’ll take two Warren Zevon’s and call you in the morning.
Been there, done that:
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/exhibitions/fruits.asp
True, no blog, just shy of the attention economy years, but it’s been done.
No, not Bill Cunningham, he has a different style altogether. The Sartorialist and Amy Arbus are working in the same manner and style. See here: http://www.amazon.com/Street-Amy-Arbus/dp/1599620154/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202350610&sr=8-1
@mike: well, ok, bill is out. What strikes me about Amy’s work is that is was nostalgic even as she made it. It was essentially backward looking even as current document. She says as much in an interview I read. Perhaps it is the black and white aspect. Looking at the few examples online, what strikes me is her subject was New York seen through the counter-culture. The Sartorialist has said that he does observe differences between NY, Paris and Milan. I think the difference for me is the innocence of The Sartorialists work compared to the rawness of Amy’s work. There is no rough trade in TS. it is essentially the glitterati speaking to the glitterati. And maybe Amy was doing the same thing, but for the VV, which I’m not sure you could ever “accuse” of being Bryant Park A-list, it was much more urban-A-list and very much NY of the 80′s and 90′s. I guess that is the difference there, the city itself.
I am reminded of the SNL intros during that time, perhaps she shot them?
On the whole, it seems a lot more “street” but maybe the street is so much cleaner now, more disney?
Sure, cleaner, more disney, not as much of a counter culture, fewer homeless, more money. As a whole, TS, his subjects, and youth in general (crap, that makes me sound old) are products of a generation that has learned all too well how to get the attention that everyone on the planet seems to crave and believe they deserve these days.
AA and TS are bound to have differences as they are working in totally different worlds. NYC now bears little resemblance to the NYC of the 80′s. The people that TS photographs all seem as if they must have substantial trust funds to afford such finery, as AA was more drawn to the other end of the spectrum, people who found they wardrobe in the trash, or at Trash.
Just wanted to put my two cents in as someone working in the vein of AA and TS and whomever in the 90′s in NYC while shooting for the Village Voice in the Streetstyle column that followed Amy’s. I’ve always had a hard time categorizing what I was doing- doc., fashion, portraiture- but looking back it truly was a look at how people presented themselves in public, on the streets as opposed to the advertising Gap world as officially presented in the media. It was refreshing to document how people really do look in clothes- as opposed to the truly manufactured look fed through advertising, the media. When I first started shooting the column I realized how hard it was to be Bill Cunningham- to render/catalog the look of the day, an event, or season and make it your own somehow. I don’t know if TS is making this way of working more meaningful than anyone else. AA masterfully found her way to do it. I began to see it less as a cataloging of types as a look at how fashion/the body is a form of self expression- a kind of talking back to the presented world of advertising and a personal expression that’s suspect – that ‘s quite limited in our society as a whole. You can see some of my Streetstyle at:
http://sandraleephipps.com
@sandra: thank you so much for your perspective. You raise the question of meaning, I think what you and Amy are/were doing is fundamentally different from this. I believe the “meaning” of TS has more to do with the exchange factor involved between the blog and the comments.
I was having another discussion about this last night and my friend brought up flickr in this context, which has a similar feel. At least the endless stream of comments congratulating the poster. I have never understood why anyone would bother to participate in a conversation if all they had to say was, “yeah that’s great.” I think it becomes about confirming the taste of the commenter against the assumed established taste of the poster.
It happens all across the blog world, so many which simply point to something and say “I like this.” This kind of “recommendation” is a result of the attention economy, I think it is one of the currency forms. It is not the information that is valuable, it is actually the recommendation that is valuable. FFFound and Amazon employ this transaction.
When you think of physical library, a building full of information, it is actually very hard to find exactly what you are looking for. Or think you are looking for. What you end up finding are things that are related but often don’t confirm or conform to your expectations. You get surprised.
I think the internet is evolving in a way where you tend to find what you think you are looking for more often, in other words it tends to confirm your own views, answer your desires more closely, or substitute the desires of the most for your own. Yes there are still surprises, but I am rarely “surprised” in the way that provokes confusion. When I am surprised I usually “get it” meaning it has been through a filter already.
What does this have to do with TS? Probably very little:) I’ll be seeing the pictures this afternoon, so who knows…
can you go see Ms Modica’s epson prints for me as well? How she goes from 8×10 platinum to pigment should be very very interesting.
Here is from Becker’s “Art Worlds,” page 4.
Someone most respond to the work once it’s done, have an emotional or intellectual reaction to it,’see something in it,”appreciate it. The old conundrum-if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?- can be solved by a simple definition: we are interested in the event which consists of the work being made AND appreciated; for that to happen, the activity of response and appreciation must occur. He continues same page…
Another activity consists of creating and maintaining the rationale according to which all these other activities make sense and are worth doing. Rationales typically take the form, however naive, of a kind of aesthetic argument,a philosophical justification which identifies what is being made as art, as good art, and explains how art does something that needs to be done for people and society. Every social activity carries with it some such rationale, NECESSARY FOR THOSE MOMENTS WHEN OTHERS NOT ENGAGED IN IT ASK WHAT GOOD IS IT ANYWAY.
From Howard S. Becker “Art Worlds” chapter one “Art Worlds and Collective Activity”
He wrote that in 1984, seems pretty prescient to me.