Subjectify raises a point concerning nude self portraits of women, which I have been thinking about for a while: “i have been thinking about the trouble with beauty in art photography for some time. i can see an alternate world in which i would earnestly feel that female photographers’ naked self-portraits were brave, theoretically rigorous, challenging, honest, etc…etc… except i rarely do feel that way, because lately i notice that mainly thin, beautiful women engage in these projects in the first place. or at least, their projects are the ones that gain recognition (which is why i see them?). of course, such projects might have something thought-provoking and honest to offer, but overall, it still troubles me.” The occasional exception notwithstanding, I have the exact same problems with this kind of work.
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“Most of [Annie Leibovitz’s] financial woes stemmed from her inheritance of her long time partner, Susan Sontag’s, estate.” - Rob
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I was not going to comment on this article (or this article), but I started to change my mind when a friend called me and told me that Annie Leibovitz pawning of her work to get some millions was a sure sign that photographers were in trouble, given the economy and all. I will not deny that the state of the economy has an effect on photography. However, since most photographers are not involved in, for example, lawsuits claiming “$778,000 for photography-related services” (just as an aside, imagine for a second those $778,000 being handed out to “emerging” photographers instead of being used to create extremely kitschy ads!) I don’t think Annie Leibovitz’s troubles can be easily translated into what her financial problems mean for the rest of us.
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James Luckett on how to get the most out of Blurb
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Richard Renaldi at Jackson Fine Art from Art Relish on Vimeo (found here)
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My friend Robert Lyons sent me the link to this “video” podcast, in which Richard Benson talks about his printing process.
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Melanie McWhorter just published a post in which she mentions a detail of a talk Alec Soth gave in New Mexico: “At one point, he said that one fellow Magnum photographer, who I will not mention here, viewed his work as mean-spirited. He left this description with very little detail in the beginning, but when he reached a particular image, he said this is the one that sparked the comment.”
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This German website with photos of soccer stadiums is positioned somewhere between “useful photography”, “typologies”, and, possibly, much more. Some of the photography is surprisingly good, and if you’re into this kind if stuff check it out. Of course, there’s also Hans van der Meer’s ‘The Landscape of Lower League Football’, which you could compare it with.
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With so many people - especially from the right - railing against government funding for artists, here’s another way to think about it. Without the US government giving money to photographers to document life during the Great Depression, this iconic photograph, one of the most important and famous photographs ever to be taken in the United States, would not have come into existence (see details of the photo shoot here), and the same is true for many other, lesser known examples from that era.
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Réjouissante Madone calls French blog Zoum Zoum Katharina Bosse’s work on motherhood (NSFW, btw). Not everybody agrees, though. After seeing the work presented in German photo magazine Photonews, Rolf Nobel, professor of photojournalism, writes a letter to the editor (which is so 20th Century!), declaring the work to be irrelevant and a calculated provocation (my translation of the German words; his position is mentioned in this post). Unfortunately, none of the Photonews kerfuffle is online (it’s Germany, after all), but Nobel’s letter caused a whole string of follow-up ripostes and defenses (letters to the editor again). Regardless of whether you agree with Herr Prof. Nobel or not, it’s a bold move, isn’t it? When is the last time you saw someone willing to call an artist’s work “irrelevant and a calculated provocation” in public (and no, anonymous cranks in comments or online discussions don’t count)?
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A couple more brand-new photo magazines to mention: Ahorn Magazine by Daniel Augschoell and Anya Jasbar. Plus David Alan Harvey’s Burn Magazine, which also comes with a $10,000 grant (no, that’s no typo). Those who want to stick with good old paper, can now order Lay Flat by Shane Lavalette.
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“I’m always somewhat surprised that there are not more artists reacting to environmental conditions. Perhaps it’s from spending so much time among students, perhaps it’s the latent and fizzling art market that plucked hipsters from bars and placed them on art fair stages, but it still seems so many young artists are still concerned primarily in their work with the self […] Yesterday I received an email from a magazine editor looking for images that addresses the current foreclosure and economic problems, specifically boarded up homes, streets full of for sale signs, etc… […] I couldn’t help but wonder where are all the great photographers who are addressing this subject? […] Since last spring I’ve been photographing much of the retail end of the economy downtown for a new project […] In doing so much research I’ve come across a few others who share some of the same subject and concern, and certainly many Flickr examples. But the few I’ve come across pale in comparison to the number of ‘drunken party pictures’, ‘ambiguous ambiguity’ or the ‘pretty portraits of pretty people’ projects. […] I simply can’t help but wonder when a topic so large looms in front of young artists why not the desire to address it through their work? Is the self still so important? Will it really be how we remember the beginning of the 21st century?” - Brian Ulrich
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“All the money I had squirreled away to pay my future taxes and something for Mr and Mrs Norfolk’s old age has disappeared in a bizarre Icelandic banking collapse. So my prognosis about the economy over the next 5-10 years is not very optimistic, I’m afraid. […] So my predictions for the future? […] Soon we’ll all be amateur photographers with real money-making jobs on the side that we don’t tell our colleagues about. We need to get over the snobbery attached to that.” - Simon Norfolk
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I don’t think I ever mentioned Purpose, the web-based magazine from France, on this blog. So it’s about time I did. They have just published their latest issue - check it out!
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Concerning the discussion about Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster (did he or did he not plagiarize earlier work and/or did he violate somebody else’s copyright): The chickens are clearly coming home to roost. After all, we are still missing meaningful discussions about how new art can relate to earlier art (and by that I do not mean rants about somebody “ripping off” somebody else or rants about how artists can do anything they want), we are still missing meaningful discussions about art and money (if an “underground” artist suddenly can make some money is that so bad - is s/he “selling out”?), and we have allowed people to pretty much reduce the issue of copyright to purely commercial aspects (with corporations, most famously Disney, at the forefront of how copyright should be defined).
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This post continues my lose thread of posts on portfolio reviews. Just like in the first part, I got input from a variety of people. If there are further contributions, I’ll add them here. I’m also going to have an (upcoming) post with input from the photographers’ side (for that post, I need “data” - so send me something, sticking to the format used below and in the first post!).
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I have always been under the impression that while there is a shortage of critical discussions of photography in the blogosphere, which is too bad, since the blog is an ideal medium/format for discussions of photography. So I was extremely happy to find Dissing Disfarmer on Evan Mirapaul’s blog - something to agree or disagree with.
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I’ll have to admit that I’m disappointed with most of the photography that has emerged from these past weeks that have dealt with the inauguration of the Obama administration. I think this is in part because I - like pretty much most other people - have such high hopes that we’ll see something better now, after these past eight, unbelievably ugly years. Maybe I wanted to see that idea of “better” reflected in the photographs, and inevitably things would then end up being disappointing.
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A recent post about “scams” in photography by Rob Haggart resulted in a lot of discussion. While most of it concerned competitions, I also came across some comments about portfolio reviews that I thought needed to get addressed. (Updated - twice - below; further updates will be in separate post)
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“Because it’s the product of three independent parties - photographer, camera, subject - the photograph cannot be owned. Indeed, it can affect us in ways the photographer might never have foreseen or desired.” - William T. Vollmann
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Rob isn’t afraid to handle a very hot potato: “What’s the biggest scam in photography? Judging purely on angry comments I get and see […] when the topic is raised, it’s photo contests with portfolio reviews running a close second.” (Updated below)
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A recent New Yorker review (13 and a half lines - a snippet, isn’t it?) of Josef Schulz’ show at Yossi Milo gallery concludes that his “pictures of sites reduced to abstractions […] might suggest an ominously faceless future if they didn’t look so much like relics of the digital-photography boom of the nineties.” That did strike me as an oddly superficial reading of those images - not that I want to pretend that my initial reaction to seeing the prints (I was quite familiar with the images from the web) was any less superficial: It almost seemed to me that what Schulz had achieved was to take almost all of the ingredients often associated with the “Düsseldorf School” - the sterility, the human detachment, the willingness to digitally manipulate, even down to the diasec and the large prints - and had them distilled into a single body of work: And it doesn’t work. The images are nicely decorative (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but for me they don’t seem to offer anything else. Which means that all those Düsseldorf ingredients really are (actually: should be) only means to an end, and what truly matters is not what the photography looks like, but what it says.
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I’m sure by now you’ve probably already seen possibly the world’s longest photograph by Simon Høgsberg.
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From film to digital to film?
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Alessandra Sanguinetti started a discussion about the New York Times’ choice of imagery for their Gaza war coverage and got some responses from colleagues Christopher Anderson and Alex Majoli.
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Check out Martin Schoeller and Steve Pyke talking about some of their portraits.
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“Paris photographer Patrick Cariou has filed suit against Richard Prince, Gagosian [the man and the gallery], and Rizzoli for copyright infringement. Prince used photos from Cariou’s 2000 book Yes Rasta in the Canal Zone paintings he just showed at Gagosian NY last month” - story
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Photo-Eye Magazine just published the 2008 picks by the Photo-Eye staff and by John Gossage, Alec Soth, Andrew Phelps, Lesley A. Martin, Todd Hido, Richard Gordon, Markus Schaden, Michelle Dunn Marsh, Dewi Lewis, Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, Jeffery Ladd, Chris Pichler, Darius Himes, and Mark Klett. Check it out!
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Todd Hido pointed me to this article (thank you!), which contains quite a few very interesting observations. I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but it’s a very worthwhile read.
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The day after my Elger Esser post Christianne Dearborn from Lapis Press emailed me and told me that the image that I had used (top image, which I had found online) did not have the correct colours (thank you!). A much closer representation of what the photo looked like was given by the bottom image.
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I saw a new body of work by some photographer today (no, I’m not going to say who it is), and I thought “Wait a minute, this looks exactly like the older work.” By “looks exactly like the older work” I don’t mean the photographer’s style, but the general subject matter (imagine someone shot water towers, and then the “new” series is water towers). I immediately felt guilty about the thought, because I try not to treat art like a commodity - where the “new” always has to be different from what is “old” (“This brand-new camera now has 14 Megapixels instead of 13”).
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Roger Ballen at Lens Culture, Lydia Panas at The Girl Project, and Richard Renaldi at Too Much Chocolate.
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“A series of majestic emerald arcs light up one of Britain’s most iconic landmarks in this stunning photograph taken with one of the longest-ever exposures.” (story) Those interested in this kind of work might want to check out Michael Wesely’s work, for example, his two-year exposures of Berlin’s Potzdamer Platz.
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Via David Bram’s blog comes the news that JPG Magazine is closing shop. When I first saw the magazine I wondered how a magazine that basically was Flickr in magazine form could survive - and we now know it can’t. Of course, you could argue that photography in print always looks much better than online, so then doesn’t this all say/mean something? A tempting question, but I think on needs to be careful with what conclusions to draw. I think what this all means is that for JPG Magazine’s target audience the added value of seeing photos printed on paper that they can easily see online does did not translate into sustainability of the magazine. This conclusion cannot necessarily be applied as a whole to other photography magazines, though - Rob might disagree (he does know these things better than I do after all), but I think the demise of JPG Magazine clearly shows that for a photography magazine to be able to survive it needs to offer something that you can’t easily find online.
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Nothing says “Happy New Year” as much as the 2009 calendar images of a German portable-toilet company. No, I’m not making this up. Not safe for work, but you really shouldn’t be working today anyway. Here in Western Massachusetts, it’s only thirteen and a half hours into 2009, and there already is a strong contender for the most revolting photograph to come out of this year. Btw, if you can’t understand German, don’t worry, the captions (explanations! of some of the bits in the photographs) make things only even more tasteless than they already are.
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At least half of our modern world’s politics deals with propaganda or, as the players would probably prefer to call it, “messaging”. It’s not what you really do, it’s what you make it look like. Paul Krugman offers a compelling and simple discussion of how staging an image twice didn’t play out the same way for George W. Bush.
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Chris Raecker sent some comments (emphases as in his original email): “Most are from the, ‘do as I say, not what I did’, two cent bin.”
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Following my earlier request, Suzanne Revy kindly sent me some comments about getting your work reviewed at a portfolio review.
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At the end of every year, I usually spend time looking through all the entries I’ve compiled over the past 12 months, and I pick the three photographers whose work has made the strongest impression on me in that period. So in the spirit of my previous lists, without further ado here are my photographers of the year 2008 (as usual, in alphabetical order). Early in 2008, Joakim Eskildsen’s monumental The Roma Journeys was published. I talked about the work with him in one of my conversations. I picked Hiroh Kikai’s Asakusa Portraits as my favourite photography book this year, which is why I’m including him in this list. This year, I have been very focused on contemporary portraiture, and Hellen van Meene’s work has had a particular appeal for me. I talked with Hellen about here work in one of my conversations.
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I’m pretty sure someone will use this post to start yet another Kittens vs. Puppies Flaming War (it’s the internet, after all), but I figured I might as well post my “Holiday”/New Year wish list anyway. So here are, in no particular order, things I’d really love to see more of in 2009: 1. b/w photography that looks like it was shot in 2009 2. vernacular photography as photography 3. inter-blog discussions 4. truly self-published photography books 5. art photography posing as entertainment 6. photography that shows me something I haven’t noticed already 7. photography criticism/writing that moves beyond the usual suspects (Roland Barthes, John Szarkowski, Walter Benjamin, …) And things I’d really love to see less of in 2009: 1. b/w photography that looks like it was shot in 1975 2. vernacular photography as a freak show 3. meandering “discussions” about photography and its supposed relation to “facts” (or “realism” or [Photoshop] “manipulations”) 4. “on-demand” “self-published” photography books 5. entertainment photography posing as art 6. typologies 7. photography criticism/writing that starts of with and/or quotes excessively the usual suspects (Roland Barthes, John Szarkowski, Walter Benjamin, …)
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In a new post, Alec brings up the “if seeing too much contemporary work is problematic.” Which I want to call the photo blog scene’s strange attractor: “Does it do more harm than good to read all these blogs?”
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Andrew just published an interview with one of the reviewers at PhotoNOLA (Stella Kramer), which is worth the read if you’re thinking about attending a portfolio review at some stage in the future.
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I don’t think this photograph is any worse than any of the other products by the same photographer, but the description of this piece is spot on: “a pandering (unto capitulation) to empty style; excessive color which is nevertheless unattractive; […] a really woeful idea […] that nevertheless doesn’t even work; heavyhanded overproduction; no trace of irony; a blatantly fake background that doesn’t even try to match the studio-shot foreground; a baby butt, for that touch of smack-you-with-a-dead-fish cuteness; campy makeup, kitschy hair; and, to top it all off, a hilariously incongruous product placement like an embarrassing pimple.”
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It seems the photo book scene is changing rapidly, with both on-demand printing and truly self-published books cutting into a market previously dominated by actual book publishers. As someone who loves photo books (books in general actually) I am very excited about this development.
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… over at A Photo Editor (part 2). This is already a few days old, but only now did I get to reading it.
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Mikhael Subotzky tells it like it is: “It seems like the surest way to get your photography noticed is to state the visual reference to historical painting, or the reference to Debord or Deleuze. I recently received a press-release in the mail where the photographer claimed affinity to both Wittgenstein and Foucault. Is that combination possible!? While I have nothing against intelligently and historically framed photographic content, I just start to bristle when these feel like they are what they are just for the sake of the ability to cite the reference, or because that is what everybody else is doing.”
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While there were many great books published this year, finding the one that I enjoyed the most was surprisingly easy this year. Despite the high quality of many books I saw in 2008, Hiroh Kikai’s Asakusa Portraits has had me coming back to it, ever since I managed to get my own copy (just as an aside, this will hopefully also silence those who claim that I don’t like b/w photography). Asakusa Portraits easily fulfills all criteria of a great book: Fantastic photography, a great interview with the photographers, and an extremely wonderful text written by the photographer.
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Jake Stangel’s Too much chocolate is new effort to create a “‘hub’ where emerging photographers can reach out to one another, have a running dialogue, ask questions, just talk, and feel some sense of collectiveness in one place. The end goal is to start a supportive photo community, where photographers can participate in living conversations with one another, that don’t die within the week like blogs comments can. Additionally, there is a rotating gallery and an interview section on the site - you can learn more on the ‘about’ page.”
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Tomorrow, I’ll be on my way to New Orleans for the PhotoNOLA portfolio reviews (on Saturday and Sunday). If you’re around, please come by and say hi!
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I was going to write something about this post at PDNPulse and the underlying topic, but then I thought maybe Rob would do that, and, indeed, he just did, confirming what I thought: “it’s the magazine that determines the ethics of the photography they use. It’s the magazine’s job to fact check not only the stories but also the photography. There are almost always many images to choose from a shoot and the final selection of images to run will ultimately determine the tone of how the subject is portrayed. The editors are making those final decisions.”
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