Once Upon A Time (or Contemporary Photography - The Grand Tour)

Following up on Charlotte Cotton's essay The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White, Tip of the Tongue has the second essay in the series up entitled Once Upon a Time by Niclas Östlind who is a curator from Sweden.

It's a swift, slightly tongue in cheek, Grand Tour through the world of contemporary photography in the form of a short story (though story is perhaps too grandiose a description).

Here are a few tasters:

"I want to know whether or not photography can be considered art,” he asked. “There are so many devoted photography galleries now—has its art status become official?” A. glanced at her watch. “Well,” she replied, “what do you think?” There was silence on the line. Finally she sighed and said, “Let me guess. You’ve been looking at contemporary work, and it all seems to be large and in color. You’ve noticed the pictures are mostly laminated behind Plexiglas or mounted on metal—only occasionally framed. You’ve reflected on how the medium allows for multiple copies of the same image, and you’ve wondered what the implications of this are. You’ve pondered over how expensive art photographs tend to be, even though there’s no telling how long they’ll hold up....

She was doing her best to suppress her irritation—defending contemporary art photography from the longstanding “style over substance” charge was an awful chore, and the answer was far more complex than the soundbite she knew K. wanted....

She had felt skeptical of much of what had happened on the photography scene in the past few years, particularly the return of expressions and attitudes from before the postmodernist breakthrough; her old nagging doubts about whether photography could be considered a critical (and not simply decorative) medium were coming back...

What was more interesting than the subject matter was the increasingly widespread familiarity with photography that the pictures reflected. People were now sending each other photos in previously unimagined numbers, and what was not consumed right away was saved on hard drives and memory cards. ‘Citizen photography’ had now colonized computer screens and mobile phones, and this new digital flow of images, A. mused, meant that a discussion of post-photographic practice was now in order...

Interestingly the most photographic parts are the opening and closing paragraphs (and I also like the comment about photo-reviews seeming like a terrible waste of the photographer's money, but valuable for the reviewers to be able to network...)

(Photos: Viewpoint-Bognor & Compton Durville. Tim Atherton)

Family Days - Todd Deutsch

Todd Deutsch has a new project he's been working on - Gamers - but the whole gaming world is so alien to me that while I can take a sort of academic interest in the work, what really speaks to me is his Family Days photographs

I think mainly because he takes the photographs that I wish I - as a photographer - could take of my own family... these most definately aren't snapshots. There is a long tradition of photographers documenting their own families; probably because all of a sudden they become all-consuming and your horizons, available time and energy seem to reduce considerably. So the family has often become, by default, a subject for photographers (I even have a friend who once had Lartigue to stay and while he was there he photographed the two sons of the family).

Todd Deutsch's family photographs convey the many small everyday moments that reflect my own experience of having two young boys. He has a knack for really catching those things which happen every day but which you know, in a few years or even months, will just be memories. I'm envious of how well he does this with such apparent ease, especially when I look at my own efforts.

Todd also has a blog

20×200: Art for Everyone

Interesting idea (which has been tried in other ways before) from jen bekman.

20×200: Art for Everyone - "Great prints for twenty bucks in editions of 200. It's art for everyone"

Minimal content and concept at the site so far. In some ways, it's a natural for the interweb world - which can provide the necessary critical mass. And it also plays on the inherent nature of photography's mechanical reproducibility.

bekman says:

"I’ve been open for over four years now, and by artworld standards, the work at my gallery is really affordable. By real world standards, a lot of people who come through the jb want to buy art, but a $2000 (or a $1000, or even a $500) photo is beyond their means. I’ve been puzzling over how to create a way to make great art available at affordable prices and 20×200 is my solution.

The concept is simple: Prints in limited editions of 200, for $20 each. We’ll introduce two new editions a week: a photo one day and a fine art reproduction on another. These prints will be high quality work done by great artists. You’ll be able to sign up for a membership, buy gift certificates and have opportunities to buy larger pieces at affordable prices too..." more

Some will love it and some will hate it for sure.

Toshio Shibata

In many ways, Japanese photography has often gone its own way. After its early introduction, Japanese photography very quickly developed its own character and nuances. This seems to have carried through to the present day.

Often this photography seems to proceed in its own parallel universe for the majority of photographers in the West. Even some of the most well known Japanese photographers are hardly household names in Europe or N. America (even in photographic households).

There are several Japanese photographers I want to pick up on. The first is Toshio Shibata. Unlike some, his work is published outside Japan and fairly widely exhibited. I like what his work does with the relationship between man and the landscape. And his pictures can be quite stunningly beautiful.

"Toshio Shibata's landscape photographs are perhaps most extraordinary for their startling sense of scale, their meticulous, indeed excruciating detail. After immersing ourselves in them, we realize that the man-made structure--usually a dam, or something designed to bring a stream, and sometimes land, under control--is at odds with nature, not just technically, but spatially. Indeed, geometrical structure and nature inhabit their own spaces, but the vastness of the overall space Shibata photographs makes clear how irreconcilable they are. Shibata turns the traditional nature/culture duality into a nature/technology duality..." (from Artforum)

Tara Smith, Thomas Struth

Jen Bekman has all the fun stuff over on her blog. I guess the NY Times reported that Thomas Struth - one of the most well know photographers to come out of the Becher's Dusseldorf stable - got married to on the weekend to Tara Bray Smith in New York - an apparently talented (and good looking) novelist..

The Times article is very sweet - a real artistic romance. So perhaps we should expect more of Struth's flower pictures? (Bee's comment below has frightening possibilities - the first round of Becherite baby pictures...). And of course, imo, Struth is one of the best of the Dusseldorf School.

Roger Ballen

There are are some artists whose work somehow intrigues you, but you just can't quite give yourself over to it - Roger Ballen is on such for me. I don't know how many times I have gone through the University bookstore, picked up Ballen's book Shadow Chamber, browsed through it and put it down again. (Another would be Robert ParkeHarrison's work)

As photography, his work is on the edge of what I really find myself comfortable with - which in itself intrigues me.

Ballen has made a move from documentary work to art in what is in some ways quite a leap and yet in other ways a fairly direct journey. Joerg Colberg has a good interview with Ballen over on Conscientious

"It is impossible to surmise what would have happened to ones' life in another situation. Nevertheless, thinking back over the past twenty-five years the isolation that I experienced living in South Africa forced me to look 'inward' rather than than seek answers from others work. I have always believed that the most important source of inspiration should come from the process of understanding one's existence. I have been very fortunate as photography has allowed me to delve into my interior and externalize it..." more

Atget in the Zone

While I adore Atget's photographs of trees and derelict parcs, and his fascinating proto-surrealist pictures of shop windows have been inherited and appropriated by almost every street photographer since, his photographs of the Zone Militaire surrounding Paris are some of his most intriguing. Walls and fortifications, worn pathways, rag pickers homes, illegal cafes and gathering places.

From a review in the NY Times by Sarah Boxer

From 1910 to 1913, Atget, who made many of what he called ''documents'' to sell to architects, stonemasons, antiquarians and sign makers, tried something different, something verging on the political. He hauled his wooden camera to the city's outskirts. The photographs he took there make up his two outsider albums: the ''Zoniers'' album, pictures of ragpickers and their homes and yards in the ''zone militaire,'' and the ''Fortifications de Paris'' album, pictures of the ramparts lining the city....

Take one of Atget's photographs of a ragpicker's digs at the Porte d'Ivry. There are baskets, wheelbarrows, pots and rags as far as the eye can see. Another picture, taken elsewhere, on the Boulevard Masséna, is at first glance indistinguishable from the first. But if you look closely you can also find a few broken-down chairs and, thankfully, in the foreground, a little white figurine, a tiny dancer with her hands raised seductively behind her head. Ducking behind a post, she points the way to a different world. In this place, she seems to say, it takes time for the eyes to adjust. Just follow me.

And the fortifications? In one sense, they are easier on the eyes. The fences and rampart walls are like train tracks moving off into the distance telling the eyes where to go. But location is still a problem. At the vanishing point of one fortification fence, in a blaze of white light, stand three figures. It is hard to tell which side of the fence they are on, within the city's borders or without. And how does this photograph, taken at 18-20 Boulevard Masséna, relate to Atget's picture taken at 18-20 Impasse Masséna, a dead end? It seems to show the other side of the fence, with a forlorn liquor store and a cat posing neatly in the yard. Did the men in the first picture beckon Atget to take a picture of their store?

And why did Atget spend so much time photographing what looks like a factory, La Bièvre, at the Porte d'Italie? The ''Fortifications'' album has four different views of it. The gallery has two of these. One shows two blurry trees standing like sentries to the left of the factory, which has slatted shutters on its top level and a half-timbered ground floor, all resting on stilts planted in a muddy river. A more distant view of the same site melds the two trees together, but gives some prominence to several white barrels standing in the river.

Why did Atget focus on this particular building? Maybe just because it was there. Or maybe it was, as Ms. Nesbit writes in the gallery guide, to ''let a chaos have its points.''

There is also an article by Molly Nesbit, author of the important book Atget's Seven Albums:

It was not simple to find words for the rags, the scraps, the garbage that began to arrive in the modern picture around 1912. Apollinaire, looking at the pasted papers of his friends Picasso and Braque, told the reader of his new book on Cubism that "mosaicists paint with marble or colored wood. There is mention of an Italian artist who painted with excrement; during the French Revolution blood served somebody as paint. You may paint with whatever material you please, with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, candelabra, pieces of oil cloth, collars, painted paper, newspapers," It was all of it "less sweetness than plainness," he explained, for in modern art one does not choose. But someone else has chosen. Walter Benjamin, looking over much the same material in the pictures of Schwitters, saw the choice to be radical, politically speaking. And Atget? Atget did not take the scraps so literally into his pictures; rather, he chose to photograph them. His way of photographing involved the pursuit of something that initially might be called clarity....

...He showed the ragpickers at home, which was also at work, living with the things they had gathered and were sorting down, preparing the saleable materials for the cycles of resale, or weaving baskets on the side. His pictures did not move to close. The ragpickers had been physically pushed to the limit of the city, to the flats of the old fortifications that encircled Paris then. Out of sight, beneath mind, the ragpickers lived beyond the rhythms of the city’s modern life, eking a living from its waste and taking their distance. Atget let that distance expand in his pictures. He showed he approved it. Theirs was a life and a labor that could not by summarized, triumphantly or synthetically, by a form. It had to be shown as open and closed, surface and substance, the gist of the substance unknowable finally, always revolting, running away.

And despite all the anti-war and left wing influences that can be detected in this work of Atget's, there is still a strong focus in the Zone Militaire of the persistence of nature. As someone pointed out: "perhaps he just liked trees"

Josef Koudelka talk

MP3 file of a talk given by Josef Koudelka here (Note: you might want to right ckick and save it's about 60+mb). Rambles a bit (or at least Vicki Goldberg does...).

background to the talk here

Thanks Jim for the link

Danger! Puritans at work...

As usual, posting on a blog limits how well you can see these, but I've been meaning to photograph this for ages (I think I'm going to re-do them in 8x10 - there are a couple more in the series). You can click on them for a slightly larger view.

From the book The Body and the Lens. Photography 1839 to the Present.

Getting your foot in the door...

Good advice practical from gallerist Edward Winkleman about approaching galleries with your work (via jen bekman's funky personism). BTW, Edward's blog is always a good read about the contemporary art world - along with the odd diversion here and there.

"A while back there was a question in a thread about how an artist got a show with the gallery. I don't discuss specifics about individual artists here, but that question got me to thinking about the reality of the situation, and I figured it's time to revive a few ideas already shared and perhaps dispel a few ideas still floating out there. Also prompting this was an email I received on the topic. It's one of the most charming emails I've gotten asking for advice, but I honestly cannot afford to respond to each such email, so I'll work from it to flesh out my thoughts here:

I write this fully aware that many versions of this letter are sent to you in some variation by other versions of what I am: Artist With Questions. For introducing dialogue, I suppose this is your punishment. I follow with interest the advice you put out and the conversations that follow on your blog and should thank you for extending yourself. Thank you. I think it's generous and rare for the Chelsified to reach out to the art-stricken with their unwieldy ways, gooey hearts, and dirty fingernails. On that note, perhaps you could advise me as to who to approach with my work. I feel fairly gall-ridden and brazen asking this of you (hence the embarrassment of adjectives), but frustration trumps humility finally. I am not asking you to consider me for your gallery, no, rather, I am looking for one of those signs shaped like a finger pointing somewhere, preferably in an appropriate direction. I am a Brooklyn artist having a hard time getting anyone to even look at my work. (I am legion.) So, please look at my portfolio and respond when possible." read more here

"Oh, and finally...never, never, never, never, never...walk into a gallery with your actual artwork in tow. Let me repeat that: NEVER".

(I guess you can be excused if it's to MoMA...)

(Photograph:Robert Frank on the way to the MoMA. Photo by Michal Daniels)

Tom Rice-Smyth

Tom is from London and has a blog which is a diary of his ongoing pictures. There is plenty there to scroll through. I like what he's doing. The "Notes" are interesting. I also liked the mini-cab office. reminded my of a dozen places I'd been in. And somehow the map of Greater London on the wall looks like it could be of the Balkans.

And after so long away, I really notice how very distinct the light in England is.

apropos the day

From The Life of Brian - a film which is actually much more theologically profound than you might think at first glance...

Also a good interview on Salon with Elaine Pagels about the Gospel of Judas

more traces

...or Alleyway - second batch. And I need to come up with a better working title... (I'm thinking of Snicket or Ginnel as a couple of suggestions so far - along with Twitten...)

(please join in the "discussion" in the comments)

Justin James Reed

Nice stuff... pictures from New Cities. I think it's actually quite hard to make something worth looking at when photographing the sort of generic urban architecture that increasingly surrounds us and Reed succeeds admirably.

I know some people are of the opinion "why photograph all this mundane stuff". But in N. America at least (and I'd say large parts of Europe now as well), unless you are one of the minority who lives in some quaint little village somewhere, this is actually the world that surrounds us. Are we so much in denial about how it really looks that we don't think it's worth photographing? I also think it's incredibly difficult to do this kind of new colour/new topographics (maybe it's old colour/old topographics now?) style of work and not come off as doing just the same as everyone else, but also avoid the trap of novelty.

I've always liked this passage about DeLillo's Underworld:

DeLillo is smart enough to avoid stating the obvious, that after losing his real father, Nick is sent to a school run by multiple "fathers". One of the priests asks him to describe a shoe. "A front and a top", he answers. "You make me want to weep", the priest says, proceeding to name all the parts of a shoe including the flap under the lace, the tongue. "I knew the name", Nick says, "I just didn't see the thing".

"You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look", says the priest. Because "everyday things lie hidden", he adds; "everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge". These are "quotidian" things - "an extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace". This may be DeLillo's way of explaining how to read "Underworld", but he's also telling us how to live.

Looking At Pictures

Henry Geldzhaler wrote a great little book (and I mean little - it's smaller than an iPod) called Looking At Pictures, It's about viewing, understanding and - to some extent - creating - contemporary art. While the book is simple and direct, for such a small book it also has some interesting depth to it. A couple of extracts:

"How do you tell the value of contemporary art? One of the ways I've discovered is memorably. If you look and can remember, a day, a week, a month later, the way it's made, the way the forms fit, the color-message of the pictures, then it's probably good. It's a little like leaving Traviata or La Boheme whistling the tunes. If a work calls itself to memory without your asking it, if it insists, if it comes back like a melody, than that's quite serious. Memorability is very important. If you're impressed with a work of art on the spot, and it leaves you with nothing when you're gone, chances are it's not very good.

On the other side of the coin is what Clement Greenberg calls the narrative element in art - and the principle holds true for the most abstract painting as well as the most representational. The work of art must continue to reveal new messages and images on subsequent viewings, and not exhaust itself in what I call the Big Bang, revealing everything to you the first time you see it and then having a lessening impact each time subsequent. The narrative, or the story, reveals itself to you through time. The story is in you. It's an internals troy and only you can judge it...

The best summing up of what in the contemporary art of any period is so exciting is the Ezra Pound paraphrase of Confucius - Make it new. Make is to fashion. It is tradition, or the craft, the history. And new is... make it new, constantly, make it new. If the artist makes it new, then we're going to have to chase to catch up with it, or, it may be mere novelty. If the it, the craft, dominates to such an extent that it makes it difficult to see the contemporary content, the it might take a while longer to catch up. But make it new.

To make it new one must be in touch with a tradition while at the same time knowing exactly where you are and what your own time is about. Those are the beginnings and they’re not easy. They're the hard part...

There are two prerequisites for having any sense of what is of value and quality in your own time. The first is a firm grasp of the history of art. The firmer the grasp and the better you are grounded in every conceivable period, the less shocked or thrown off base you're going to be by something that appears new but isn't or that is meretricious in any of a dozen ways. A grounding in the best art that's ever been done, hitting your head against the concrete wall of achievement, there’s absolutely no substitute for it.

The other prerequisite you must have in order to come to terms with contemporary art is a thorough sense of who you are in your own time. And to combine those attributes in one person is not easy."

(pictures - David Hockney)

Sally Mann - A Family Affair

Conscientious links to two good videos at Newsweek about Sally Mann's beautiful Immediate Family work. They talk with Mann and one of her daughters:

...In fact, what Mann was seeking, with the willing participation of her young subjects, was an honest record of childhood and growing up. But what she recognized from the start of her project was that nothing about childhood is uncomplicated. It’s not the knowing but the uncertainty, on the part of children and adults, that most distinctively marks this territory. The first picture Mann took in the series, “Damaged Child,” shows a little girl who looks beaten, when in fact she has been badly bitten by gnats. But the viewer, with only the visual evidence on display, is left to wonder exactly what is going on. For all its absurd clarity—and every picture in the sequence is a marvel of composition and printing—this photograph nails our inability to ever know the whole truth about, well, about anything, but certainly about childhood first and last...

Is photography art (or flogging a dead horse)

This is a perennial discussion on most photography lists. The Guild photographers and the Art photographers can spend hundreds of posts talking past each other and still never come to see the others point of view...

That said, edward_ winkleman's excellent contemporary art blog had a good post on it the other day (though I see he's picked up on the Chocolate Jesus - should get him some good hate mail). Photography Fever: Myth or Regional Reality? Or, Is There Still Widespread Multiplephobia? picks up on two contradictory articles he came across - one all about the ever increasing prices being paid for photography at auction, and the other asking suggesting collectors still shy away from photography because it's not really art. Anyway, worth a read (as is winkleman's blog in general) - although the discussion on there is as bad as on any photo list...:

"Two contrasting articles made their way across my desktop recently, offering rather different views of where the market for fine art photography stands. I read a good number of photography-based blogs, and have assumed the market was blistering hot, but then I read Ana Finel Honigman's post on The Guardian's blog and got all confused:

Collectors are still shying away from investing in photography, reflecting the medium's ambivalent status in the contemporary art world. [...] The unique issues around collecting photography initially arise from the medium's reproducibility. On the surface, collectors concerned with diminishing the value of their investment seem wise to stick with unique objects and shy away from mediums that can be made in multiples.

I have to admit, that strikes me as an out-of-date analysis. Take for example this opposing view recently expressed by Brian Appel on I Photo Central

.... Soaring prices and the influx of cash is providing a welcome boost for collectors who got in early. Once considered risky and on the fringe, these seductive photographs that describe the 'hyper-reality' of modern media or consumer culture are now THE hotbeds of critical and market attention...."

He goes on to suggest it may be a regional thing? read the whole blogpost here