Before Digital/Dreams Like This

(When We Go After Anything We Get It)

There has been a bit of a storm in a teacup among the photo-blogs recently (which makes me think they are all limited to teacup size really...) in part growing out of an essay by Mike Johnson (who now apparently seems obliged to go on and on about it at length).

(Taking Our Geese to Market)

Some have come out loudly for him

Others against.

(My own limited response - because after a while it just gets terribly, terribly boring - was merely to try and remind people that photographs are essentially about appearances which may often be something rather different than reality. That the belief that "there is a measurable degree of connectedness to the original scene (aka ‘reality’) that some people find important" is a as much a social construct as is any one of the several forms of Renaissance perspective. And that essentially, such arguments as those above simply miss the point withpeople seeing it as an either/or argument with two ends to a spectrum, rather than the fact that throughout the history of photography it has always been a both/and situation:

“Cameras are just boxes for transporting appearances… What is not so simple is to grasp the nature of the appearances which the camera transports. Are they a construction, a man made cultural artifact, or are they, like a footprint in the sand, a trace ‘naturally’ left by something that has passed? The answer is, both”. John Berger

(County Fair)

Which is all a rather roundabout way of getting to a recent email I read by the inimitable Luis Gottardi about the very captivating work of William H. Martin (links to details of all the images there) which I had never before encountered:


(The Modern Farmer)

"These masterfully executed "Tall Tale" images by William H. Martin do much more than tell photographic fibs. They subverted the program of photo-as-evidence, while simultaneously mocking themselves.

The fantasies they depict are of a paradaisical land of plenty. A cornucopiary of endless Super-Sized game, crops, bounty, a place where there is enough for no one to ever go hungry or wanting, where every hunter bags his limit, and fishermen stop fishing because their arms are sore from catching Leviathans, a land brimming with flowering life, blessed by God.

Mr. Martin did tell of a dream, a universal human dream that played itself out with every major human movement in history, in this case, under the guise of the "American" variety.

The poignancy lies after the suspension bridge of disbelief's gossamer woven wish cables break, and it collapses, awakening us to the reality. In a sense, these are closely connected to, and yet the opposite of Robert Frank".--- Luis

(Duck Hunting)

"This postcard was sent to Leon Custard of Mendon, Michigan on May 8, 1909. The message on the back asks, "Did you ever have a dream like this?"

And about "When We Go After Anything We Get It":

"One of the most animated of Martin's photomontages, this rollicking rabbit rodeo is convincing because of its attention to detail. The sketched-in ruts beneath the car and the shadow under the humongous hare add an extra dimension of realism. In the sky to the left of the tree is a tiny flying object that appears to be a hat, carried off by the wind."

What is so interesting about all this is that in a way "Dad" Martin was really so much more free to do this - his own thing for his own reasons - than he would be today. There wasn't really the established framework of photographic rights and wrongs and establishment to hinder his choosing to do so.

P.S. When we took our break at the cottage, for the first time my six year old son and I read our way through Alice's Adventures in Wonderland every evening; and in that light, these pictures seem entirely normal...

Gerhard Richter

One of my favourite contemporary artists is Gerhard Richter (his retrospective book Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting of a few years ago is one I leaf through often).

Of course for photographers, one of the intriguing things about Richter is his use of photography in his painting - though that's not the only thing that appeals to me about his work by any means. (Although the first of his paintings which really grabbed me were the very photographic Baader-Meinhof series - which may also in part have been down to personal history with the Red Army Faction and Rote Zora as much as to do with their "photographic" nature...).

Anyway, I happened to come across what appears to be the "official" Gerhard Richter website the other day.

It's absolutely chock full of stuff if you hunt around. One particular interesting thing is that you can click on what he calls his "Atlas". This is all the photographs he takes day by day, year by year, along with cut outs from magazines, maps, notes etc - some of which finds itself as a basis for his later work. And if this is the case, then the work is linked to the Atlas page

I also just saw there is a book based on this Gerhard Richter: Atlas.

"The Atlas is Gerhard Richter's ongoing encyclopedic work. It is comprised of approximately 4,000 images, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on over 600 separate panels.

The images closely parallel, year by year, the subjects of Gerhard Richter's paintings. The search display will show you images of the paintings sourced from the particular Atlas sheet selected (if there are any).

This comprehensive collection of images provides insight into the different paths and ideas that the artist has researched, spanning his process from sketch to the production of the final work. The photographs explore the way in which we see everyday items and the world around us. Select topics include personal and public issues, as well as classic themes—landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, politics, and nature."

One from the archives - Print Offer

I've actually had three different request for this photograph, so I decided to pull out the negative and look at making some new prints.

"Steps - Compton Durville"

This was taken during a standard English downpour in the hamlet of Compton Durville in Somerset, England (click on the image for a bigger version).

And while it is nice in an 8x10 size (actually 6.5x10 ), it looks really good at 11x16, so I am making both sizes available for a change.

(BTW, I've got some very positive responses back from those who have bought earlier prints in these editions - both about the physical prints and about the pictures themselves. I guess nothing beats actually holding a print in your hand...)

This picture is the fifth of the Looking-Glass Edition affordable prints and is available as follows:

11"x16" (edition of 30) @ $75.00 + $14.00 shipping

6.5"x10" (edition of 100) @ $25.00 + $9.50 shipping

Simply click on the correct link below to buy (btw blogger has developed some very weird formatting of late - so please scroll down...):

11"x16" @75.00 (+14.50 s&h)

10"x6.5" @25.00 (+9.50 s&h)

Addendum: William Eggleston, dye-transfer and inkjet

The Eggleston 5x7 post below quoted the following from a review:

"The exhibition features 24 large-format colour photographs, which measure 30x20 inches, and document scenes of day-to-day life in Memphis. All of the images were taken in 1974 but have only recently been printed for the first time...

...It’s very evident to see in these 24 dry transfer prints why the new colour printing process got Eggleston so excited. A dry transfer print is produced from three separate negatives made by photographing the original negative through red, green and blue filters, and the result is a sumptuousness of colour that give the images a remarkable vibrancy."

On which I got an interesting follow up post from Adrian Tyler:

"i was at that show in edinburgh last week and they were *not* dye transfers, they were inkjets, very beautiful at that... "

Now, I should have noticed this (I guess that's what you get for writing posts late at night after you've finally got the kids to bed), but it must be close to impossible to get someone to make 30"x20" dye-transfer prints in this day and age. Interesting that Eggleston now seems to have joined a growing number of colour photographers (see Irving Penn for example) who were at one time enamoured of dye-transfer but who have found inkjet prints apparently gives them both more control and also colour at least as good (and an many cases better) than the lusciousness and vibrancy of dye-transfer.

And apparently a bit of "Egg" on the face of Rose Shillito?

William Eggleston's 5x7 and New American Color Photography

The Guardian has an interesting review of William Eggleston's 5x7 colour work from 1974, currently being shown in conjunction with the Edinburgh Festival.

But before that, as I was reading the review and looking at some of the pictures, a couple of things struck me, especially in conjunction with the ideas in an earlier post about Contemporary American Color Photography.

First, despite the sometimes obviously outdated fashions and hairstyles, I was really struck by how utterly contemporary so many of these pictures look. This is how so much colour photography is done today - and yet Eggleston still seems so often to be head and shoulders above most of the best and the brightest. It's not simply in his uniquely masterful use and understanding of colour, but also in his choice of subject and the way he manipulates it.

Which feeds into the second thing. In responses to Christan Patterson's orignal post about Contemporary American Color Photography, as well as in some responses to mine, there was a thread which went something along the lines of "why should photographers be concerned about tradition, about what has gone before, about what "tradition" you might be working in" - along with a few who claimed it was better for a photographer to ignore such things all together (for fear of visual/conceptual contamination?).

Well, one simple answer to that (and only one) is that if you don't, you can spend an awful lot of time re-inventing the wheel - and when it's finished and you stand back, you realise huh - oval wasn't the best option after all. Someone else figured out round was better 35 years ago. By which I mean: if you browse few a few books by Eggleston and then sit down and look at a lot of what is being touted as the freshest work being done today, it's surprising how much of it looks like early Eggleston - only not quite as good. Sometimes down to almost being a clone.

But back to the review of Eggleston's 5x7 colour work from 1974. As far as I can tell some of these pictures can be found in the book William Eggleston 5x7 (along with the black and white he was doing at the time), but this seems to be the first time they have been printed up for a major show. From the Guardian:

"Memphis1974 and the jukebox is playing Al Green and Isaac Hayes. The girls have feather cuts and the guys wear Burt Reynolds moustaches. It is hot and dark and a swordfish glints from the wall; though dawn is coming up soon, it still feels like midnight in the bar. A little stoned, a little drunk, the revellers give themselves to the lens with the unresisting candour of the weary, yet their faces emerge from the darkness with the unexpected clarity of Dutch portraits.

The sheer grandeur of the photographs in William Eggleston: Portraits 1974(Inverleith House; until 4 October) startle and not simply because these portraits were made - ahead of their times - with a large-format camera. It is more that Eggleston is noted precisely for his level gaze, his democratic lens, for drifting through America shooting everything from roadside graves to low-wattage drugstores with the same dark-adapted eye.

It is all equal to him, or at least he never draws more attention to one subject than another, yet one feels he knows these Memphis folks of old: the sullen belle, the hippy chick, the president of the Singing Cowboy fan club.

He knows and loves their individuality, the way this girl throws her head back to the beat, the way that girl smiles forgivingly at her drunken lover. Outside, and next morning as it seems, the rheumy-eyed preacher stares knowingly off into the blue and Jackie O lives on in the crimplene knock-off dress worn by a housewife passing by.

These portraits are stark but subtle, their spontaneity a result of Eggleston's extreme reticence behind the lens. The format allows for incredible detail - split ends, the down on a teenager's lip, the caking of Max Factor panstick - and for great scale of temperament. Sweetness, deference, defensiveness and spite, too much sun and too much drink before dawn. Eggleston once said he thought of his photographs as 'part of a novel I'm doing' and these people, more than any before or since, seem to be central characters".

and from another review:

The exhibition features 24 large-format colour photographs, which measure 30x20 inches, and document scenes of day-to-day life in Memphis. All of the images were taken in 1974 but have only recently been printed for the first time.

The timing of this body of work is significant for a number of reasons. Just a year before these images were shot, Eggleston had come across a new colour printing technique, which until then had only been used in commercial photography work such as advertising.

The new technique was called dry-transfer printing and as soon as Eggleston saw the depth of colour saturation and quality of the ink that it afforded he was keen to apply it to his own work.

It’s very evident to see in these 24 dry transfer prints why the new colour printing process got Eggleston so excited. A dry transfer print is produced from three separate negatives made by photographing the original negative through red, green and blue filters, and the result is a sumptuousness of colour that give the images a remarkable vibrancy.

The image of a woman standing on a road in a yellow dress is so fresh that it could easily have been taken yesterday, even though the fashion clearly dates it to the early 1970s. The colours are so rich and luxuriously saturated that the dress seems to actually glow – the treatment and texture seem more akin to abstract painting than portrait photography.

Again, in the three-quarter length portrait of a young man in a vivid pink t-shirt, Eggleston has managed to capture this painterly technique really well. Here, the man’s blond wavy hair looks as though it has been applied in a wonderfully free and loose brushstroke. The texture is so feathery and soft that it is hard to believe that this is really a photograph at all.

And if you happen to want the back-story on the picture of the two girls on the couch, you can find it here.

Finally, the William Eggleston Trust has some fascinating things up on the website, such as pages from Eggleston's notebooks, among other things (lots of essays, articles and book intros.):

(1978)

Hannah Guy's 360 degree trees

I find these interesting for a number of reasons, but a main one being that I tried something like this once in 8x10.

I was interested int he idea of panoramics made from a series of frames and was looking at some of the Victorians who produced 360 panoramics this way, such as Muybridge. Then I figured - hmmm... why not do an inverted panoramic as it where and instead of looking out, look in. So I tried a couple of trees, going around an object, taking pictures looking in from all the points on the a circle.

But I didn't get much further than that - for one thing it took a heck of a lot of 8x10 film... for another, I couldn't quite figure out what to do with them (I actually stretched them out in a series). But either way, I never pursued it much further.

So when I saw these pictures of Hannah Guy's (more info up on Lensculture among other places and some animation here) there was one of those little light-bulb moments - huh. Note that those shown here cover the 360 degrees with just N,S,E and W. The others which are 3 degrees apart are presented as the animation.

Anyway, I like this kind of work which is stretching a few little aspects of photography in one way or another - breaking the single frame, playing a bit with perspective and viewpoint

With her first approach, she made large-format photographs of a single tree in a field, each photo of the same tree taken from four points of view (North, South, East, West). Then she combined these four highly detailed photographs and printed them as one platinum palladium print (as in the photo shown above). She repeated the approach with several solitary trees, garnering unique composites with each attempt.

Then, to capture the same trees another way, she circled each tree with her camera on a tripod, stopping every three degrees to make yet another still portrait of the tree from a set distance. Thus, with 120 still images for each tree, she put them together in a sequence as an animation, which is dizzying and delightful.

She says, "My practice is situated between photography and film. The point at which the still appears to become a moving image fascinates me."

Soth Cell & The Falls - photographic bands

Christan Patterson is having a bit of Friday fun with So what if I formed a band consisting solely of photographers? What would be a good band name?!

Such as:

"Meatyard. Obscure death metal band. They perform masked, naturally."

(there's more where that came from)

But my favourite is a follow up response from Ryan Barone suggesting: "Soth Cell & The Falls:Alec Soth fronts a pop group consisting of subjects from his Niagara monograph."

Though I think Soth Cell should maybe more Velvet Underground. Anyone want to do the cover art for that...? (update: well, I guess Christain stepped up to the plate...)

Soldiers Wanted

I simply like these (via State of the Art) - Soldier Portraits by Ellen Susan

"Soldiers Wanted. If you are a soldier or know one who might want to participate in the Soldier Portraits Project, please get in touch at mailto:contact@soldierportraits.com or call 912-228-0336. You can schedule a time to be photographed and/or ask any questions you might have.

All soldiers who want to be photographed will be. There is no audition or selection process. The only requirements are 3 and a half hours of your time at my studio in Savannah, and the ability to sit very still for up to 30 seconds. You'll receive a unique, one-of-a-kind photograph to take with you when you leave.

I look forward to hearing from you. Ellen Susan"

From State of the Art:

Susan says the project took shape after she and her husband, journalist Rob Walker, moved to Savannah last year and found themselves surrounded by soldiers from nearby Fort Stewart and the Hunter Army Airfield. "I started seeing soldiers in uniform at the grocery store," she recalls. "And I read that many members of the 3rd Infantry Division were being deployed to Iraq for the third time. This was startling. The kid in front of us in line at the Best Buy was probably on his way back to Iraq. And looking into the face -- often impossibly fresh and young -- of someone like that and connecting that face to what we hear happens there was a big change for me in the way I thought about soldiers, and I wanted to make that concrete."

Susan had already begun experimenting with the notoriously arduous collodion process. "I always loved looking at photographs from the wet-plate era, but I didn't understand what made them look the way they do," she says. "When I realized that some contemporary photographers were practicing it, I started seeking out their work. What really impressed and excited me were not the prints but the hard images -- the ambrotypes and tintypes. They are fantastic physical objects."

She says the Civil War-era process lends itself to her modern subjects: "First, the process is primarily sensitive to ultra-violet light, and that means that tones are rendered in a way that is different from standard silver processes. Second, the plates show a great deal of grainless detail. And probably most important is the necessarily long exposures (5 to 30 seconds), which cause the subject to engage with the picture-making in a fairly intense way."

I also like how she presents the pictures next to the soldier's simple questionnaire.

PS - I really like the site as well - clean, simple and good looking

Bart Michiels - The Course of History

(Cannae 216BC, Paulus' Death, 2004)

I mentioned Bart Michiels the other day in a post about Pictures of stuff that isn't there anymore but I only included a couple of pictures.

(Monte Cassino 1944, Monastery Hill, 2004)

I've been looking through his stuff a bit more since then and I must say I really quite like it. As much as anything, the scope of his project - from Thermopylae to Hastings to The Hindenburg Line to Monte Cassino.

"The Course of History. It is the lesson we never learn. When we and our elected leaders repeat the mistakes of the past, we will stay on the course of conflict. Or is warfare a natural component of our civilization, a necessary evil imbedded in our genes doomed to be repeated endlessly?

At the dawn of the new millennium I had lived for more than a decade in the US since leaving Belgium and I wanted to reconnect with my European roots. What experience was so European and not American? For centuries, from Caesar’s legions to the armies of the Nazis, my native country saw war with all its faces : invasion, occupation, terror, chaos, hunger, atrocities, destruction and collapse (of industries). After two world wars, those experiences have shaped what Europe thinks today, still affecting the generations and civilian life in modern Europe.

(Gallipoli 1915, Suvla Bay, 2005)


The photographs in The Course Of History are landscapes of the worst killing fields of Europe, of battles that were turning points in our history, defining our future. My approach to the subject comes from the loss of innocence in nature and the dichotomy of it : beauty and evil. Though they all have a violent history in common, our perception of these landscapes can be peaceful and serene. So, is our sense of place associated with memory and the understanding of the landscape fraught with misreading?

With little or no evidence of battle left on the land, I tried bringing back reference to it by finding happenstance traces and features on the land that refer metaphorically to combat, such as holes dug in the sand by children at Omaha Beach (Easy Red), or tractor tracks cleaving through a field of crops like tanks once did (Verdun, Le Mort Homme). In ‘Cannae’, the ground is strewn with small rocks that refer to the numerous dead (48,000!) in the largest single day defeat in the history of Rome.

(Hastings 1066, Fyrdmen, 2005)

During the long battle of Passchendaele, a battlefield not far from where I grew up, British and German soldiers died in horrible conditions, drowning in the muddy clay fields of Flanders (‘Passchendaele, Tyne Cot’). At Waterloo, I found in a grass field a patch that was flattened. It was also the very spot where Napoleon’s elite troops and cavalry fell on the ridge, sealing the fate of the emperor."

(Passchendaele 1917, Tyne Cot #1, 2005)

Karin Apollonia Müller

I only really know Karin Apollonia Müller's work from her monograph Angels in Fall (quite hard, to find see below). It isn't your usual photographic take on Los Angeles - at least not in my experience. Interestingly, although it's in colour - albeit generally very muted, veiled colour - it seems to have a certain afinity with Robert Adams black and white studies of the Los Angeles, such as Los Angeles Spring or California: Views of the Los Angeles Basin.

(Robert Adams)

On Müller: As a foreigner, Müller's "visitor" status in Los Angeles is expressed by a sense of alienation and beauty. The desolate beauty and latent sense of danger inform Müller's images, which reflect the fleeting and ephemeral movements of Los Angeles. People sleep on the ground, gather on the beach and go about seemingly ritualistic movements within the haze and smog of the Western sky- operating in a biscuit colored sublime. The figures are faceless, alone, sometimes appear homeless and often disengaged from the sprawling city scape that surrounds them: a traffic cop is still among stopped traffic, a homeless man carries his mattress near a freeway and surfers sit alone, submerged in the ocean, tiny toy soldiers engage in mock war games.

One thing I do like about many of here pictures is that the veiled nature of them causes me to be a bit more attentive and to give them the time and attention they seem to deserve. This is work I would certainly like to see first-hand hanging on a wall. I also think it's an interesting little twist on the Contemporary Colour approach to things (and also has something a bit in common with Paul Graham's American Night series, which came out about the same time - interestingly, the work of another exile).

(BTW, it's hard to find many good reproductions of her work online)

Blindspot 35 - what works and what doesn't

IMO of course...

The latest issue of Blindspot turned up the other day, and while it's not my favourite issue ever, it certainly has some thought provoking stuff and is certainly worth the cover price.

I particularly like the Jason Evans' work:

as well as that of Rinko Kawauchi:

and the individual images by Jason Fulford:

But there are a couple of portfolio's that reminded me certain things that just don't seem to do it for me.

One was Alpine Star by Ron Jude. This is all black and white pictures which have very obvious grainy looking halftone dots because the are enlarged prints from newspapers, culled from stories in Jude's local newspaper. I can see the idea behind this - ti's a reasonably interesting concept - and I would probably find looking at the show, on a gallery wall interesting - once. But I've seen this technique used before several different times, and for me it really just doesn't work. Occasionally, perhaps when used in conjunction with something else, or when used for specific purpose - say the photographs in Sebald's novels - it works. But as a whole series of images I've always found this approach is, for me, like nails of a blackboard.

The other thing was some (and only some) of Jason Fulford's work. Now, I like Jason's work (and love his publishing projects at J&L Books), and there are individual pictures in here I really like. But what I'm having a harder time with is the composites or collages - such as the one adorning the cover above. It's not the way the composites go together - the choice of images to combine - that usually seems to work and can be intriguing and interesting. I think it's more to do with the two-dimensionality of them. In a way what appears to be their digital nature. It's not just that they are flat, but it's almost as if they are more than flat. Add that in with the fact that they also appear in a way as just a set of Photoshop layers and I think it really has to do with their physical nature as objects rather than their content.

(Jason Fulford)

It might seem a simple and possibly unnecessary thing, but if you compare them with say the work of Masao Yamamoto, one thing that comes across to me - even in reproduction - is their physical nature, as well as what the pictures are actually about. The two things are intimately bound togehter. They physically overlap, the corners of some curl, they may have a few creases, or glue bubbles. The prints are often also not quite 100% square and even - whereas the digitally made ones seem so rigidly bound by their edges - more so than an individual print. Somehow (and I'm not quite sure why) this makes a big difference for me. The same could be said of David Hockney's "joiners". I've seen digital versions people have made using the same technique, and it's not just that they don't ever have anything near the skill and genius of Hockney, it's also to do with their physical nature. You know Hockney's are made of hundreds, if not thousands, of 4x6 pints all glued together. You know if you saw them first hand you could see that, and that if you ran your hand over them, you could feel that.

(Masao Yamamoto)

Which for me is interesting, because for "straight" photographs, I'm not overly enamoured by the tactile nature of the print. It can be nice, but it's not usually essential for me to experience the physical print as a Pt/Pd print or and Albumen print or such - it can add a bit, but it's not the main thing (although I'm a little intrigued by Stephen Gill burying his prints in various locations around London and digging them up later to use, making use of their decay and damage). But it seems for work that moves into the area of constructs, or collages or combining images, I'm drawn quite strongly to some kind of physicality of the work, its three-dimensionality, and that I usually find it doesn't quite seem to work when it's done digitally.