Having just learned of Duane Michaels’ Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank, I have all kinds of thoughts going through my head. Since I haven’t seen the book, I will stay mum about what I am thinking (if anyone at Steidl is reading this, yes, I would like a review copy).
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I’ve talked about this earlier, but the topic is just not going away. On the contrary, as there is more and more photography from New Orleans emerging, it seems to me that the aftermath (or maybe more accurately aftermess) of Hurricane Katrina is slowly turning into a photographic cliché. I have the feeling that - for a large variety of reasons - that’s the last thing anyone needs (least of all those people in New Orleans whose houses are still in ruins and many of which have been permanently displaced). It would be unfair to single out anyone’s work, because on its own, most of the photographic work I’ve seen is quite amazing (and actually provides a very interesting example of how fine-art photography can supplement standard photojournalism, which - in part - has long turned ago into a cliché producing machinery itself); but the cumulative effect of looking at beautifully shot photos of destroyed houses, exterior and interior, and everything else that goes with it is making me feel a bit uneasy.
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Following up on one of Alec’s posts about photo books, I remembered an interview I had read (in a book) the other day. Luckily, it’s also available online: “I think there’s something aesthetically very satisfying about these books and some of that may derive from my past experience with other books. There’s the way the image sits on the page. There’s the intimacy of looking at the book. There’s simply the experience of seeing the images in a book as opposed to, say, a portfolio: it recalls past book experiences; it is a cultural object. And, in these small (short) volumes, there’s the mind’s ability to hold the whole book at once. The book becomes a single, unified work.” (Stephen Shore). And that’s really quite an important point there: “a cultural object”, and add to that the sheer tactile component.
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There’s an article in LA Weekly that I saw and then decided not to link to, in which the author claims that (fasten your seatbelts) “I couldnÂ’t name a single photographer subsequent to Arbus (and Frank and Winogrand and Friedlander and Eggleston and the other greats of her generation) who ranked on anywhere near the same level, which is to say, who thrilled me near as broadly, deeply or consistently.” I guess I can close shop here and do something else? But then, what might be true for that author is not true for other people (incl., very obviously, for your truly); and haven’t we heard similar complaints (“things today just aren’t as good any longer as they sued to be!”) in the past? In any case, Alec Soth decided to post the piece on his blog, and there’s a bit of a discussion about it over there. Check it out.
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I mentioned Jen Bekman’s Hey, Hot Shot! competition earlier, and for those who missed the last one, there’s the Fall 2006 one, with a deadline on November 7, 2006 (check the website for details, also see the blog). Jen asked me to be a member of the panel this time, so if you decide to participate I’ll probably look at your work.
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Alright, I do realize that this post might tick off quite a few people, but here’s my question anyway: Am I the only one who thinks that HDR photos mostly look like old colour postcards? (sorry for the probably non-ideal link to old postcards - if you know a better site, let me know) You basically get the same effect: The colours look gaudy and artificial, and the scenes look somewhat unreal, the only difference being that HDR photos look crisper. PS: Alright, I do realize I’m being somewhat unfair here. However, in my defense: Most of the HDR photos that people have linked to (and that I thus stumbled upon) look like the ones that I am talking about above.
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What happens when fine-art photography is subjected to the kind of critique that’s so ubiquitous in photography forums online? Well, have a look at what people had to say about one of Alec Soth’s photos. Unlike the parody that I linked to earlier, this is the real stuff. You just can’t make this sh## up! Enjoy!
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After all that heavy theory, here’s something lighter. For those interested in celebrities and what it must be like to take their photo, have a look at this story. Quite entertaining.
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As I mentioned before, I am noto all that much into photography criticism or theory. To make an utterly silly comparison, if I was given the choice between two extreme choices, the first being the Wittgensteinian going into a museum/gallery, looking at a single photo, and then leaving, the second being to spend a long time looking at each and every photo and then reading a ten-page in-depth discussion about the photography, I’d opt for the former, and this is not because I’m lazy (have a look at what Wittgenstein actually is trying to say to find out more). Having said this, when I read the following, the rules of gravity suddenly didn’t seem to apply for my eye-brows any longer: “Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics havenÂ’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography - not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself - with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a ‘community of interest’ with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.” (story) Since I haven’t read many of the texts referred to in that article, I’m not going to disagree too strongly (even though these days not knowing what you’re talking about usually doesn’t prevent people from having a strong opinion about it). As usual, you want to read the article yourself and see whether you agree or not.
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Isn’t it interesting that many people who have no quarrels with seeing the most gruesome war photography - and who would argue very vehemently that war photography was actually useful - have a completely different attitude with respect to photos that show the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11? For another example - apart from the one seen here just yesterday - see this post. Key quote: “More sophisticated viewers should be on guard against confusing the picture of something or the act of taking it with a definite stance on the part of the photographer toward what the picture shows.”
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You might have seen bits of this already, but since the article offers such a nice brief summary, I might as well post it here. Those who don’t want to pay to read Frank Rich’s article need look no further than here - always helps to know the full story. What I find most interesting in all of this is that this is such a prime example for how photographs (in general?) do not have a meaning by themselves, and often you see what you are able to see or even what you want to see.
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“Across the River is a project of German and Polish photography students who examined the changes, dreams, and realities in the border area between Germany and Poland over a period of one year. The 16 photographers depict the living conditions and circumstances in a region at the periphery of two countries from a very personal point of view. They have experienced an area which is often enough simply passed through hurriedly but whose history is richer and more varied than that of many large cities.”
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You want to take a photo of some location, yet there are always people walking in and out of the scene? No problem - simply use the tourist remover tool. I haven’t tested this, though.
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“He was the Führer’s most favored photographer and cameraman. Walter Frentz was the man Adolf Hitler trusted to put him in the right light. Now a new biography has uncovered pictures of the Nazi leader never seen before.” (story) Unfortunately, Walter Frentz’s website is available in German only; it would be quite instructive for non-German speakers to see how his past is glossed over in a sickeningly nonchalant fashion, with leading Third Reich figures presented as “personalities”. You might not be familiar with the name Walter Frentz, but it’s very likely you have seen a photo of him. In this photo, showing leading Nazi propaganda photographer/filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (center), with Walter Frentz operating the camera.
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This post addresses a topic that I have been thinking about for a while, and I have had the occasional discussion with other photographers about this. The main question might be posed as follows. When do similarities between photographs end, and when does plagiarism begin?
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It has lately become quite popular to decry the tampering of photography appearing in magazines or in the news, so here is a collection of such manipulated (and unmanipulated) images. Note the mix of examples that are quite serious and of examples that aren’t even worth a second look.
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If you like listening to music that is a bit older than a few years, you have probably come across the phenomenon that at one stage or another, you find a “remastered” “new” version of your favourite album in stores. At the time of this writing, the latest trick is to add a DVD that contains the very same album, albeit in a different format, supposedly sounding much better, but - and this is really the only interesting bit for the record company - the whole thing costs you $20 or more. Usually, those “remastered” CDs sound just like the old stuff, maybe a bit more sterile, and typically with the volume cranked up quite a bit. Turns out that something similar has now invaded photography, too. In an article in the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman reports on the photographic equivalent of “remastered” CDs, in this case, digitally “enhanced” photos originally taken by Walker Evans. Go and read it - before they start to hide it behind their electronic firewall. Needless to say, this is one of those issues from which endless discussions can (and will) be created.
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“Hurricane Katrina deeply affected the journalists who lived through the crisis, and lifelong New Orleans resident John McCusker took the strain especially hard. McCusker, a staff photographer for The Times-Picayune, was arrested Tuesday after leading police officers on a chase and trying to get them to kill him, his newspaper reported.” (story) “New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer John McCusker was released from the hospital this week and will face four criminal charges related to his confrontation with police two weeks ago, according to his editor.” (story)
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“The Midwest Photographers Publication Project (MP3) series, produced in collaboï½­ration with the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, presents the work of three new emerging talents: Kelli Connell, Justin Newhall, and Brian Ulrich”. (source) Information about the show at MoCP can be found here.
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Watch a new documentary at Magnum in Motion by Chris Anderson.
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If you want to ignore the bizarrely weird caption, in The Guardian, David Smith discusses how Flickr user Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir became an internet photo star. Now, when browsing through her photos, have a look at how many of them have “comment” boxes (or whatever that’s called on that site) around her breasts (example).
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BBC News website’s picture editor, Phil Coomes explains how they handle news photos. Lots of interesting and important points in there: “All the pictures we use are checked for any obvious editing - the easiest to spot being cloning of parts of the image [like in the Reuters example - JMC] […] To some extent the presence of a camera will alter the event, but itÂ’s up to those on the ground to work around this and present us with an objective a view as possible. Digital photography has altered the landscape of photojournalism like nothing before it, placing the photographers in total control of their output. All the news agencies have photo ethics policies, many of which are rooted in the days of film. The standard line is that photographers are allowed to use photo manipulation to reproduce that which they could do in the darkroom with conventional film. […] All this sounds fine until you look at the reality - one manÂ’s colour balancing is another’s grounds for dismissal. By definition a photograph is a crop of reality, itÂ’s what the photojournalist feels is important. But it doesn’t equate to the whole truth, and perhaps we just need to accept that.”
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“Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah.” (story) I guess the first rule when “fixing” photos is to do it in such a way that you can’t see it. But isn’t this another lovely example of how images are used during wartime?
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Continuing what is turning out to be some sort of thread about images and war, here are some more interesting links that deal with the mess that is the Middle East: Julian Borger reports that “Britons and Americans are watching two different wars” when viewing their respective news programmes about the destruction of Lebanon. About the same war, the Columbia Journalism Review reports on attempts to portray the images of the dead civilians in the most recent massacre in Qana as staged. And the Media Guardian reports on “trophy videos” brought home by US troops and posted on the internet.
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“Charlotte Observer photographer Patrick Schneider has lost his job for manipulating the colors in a photo that appeared in Thursday’s newspaper.” - story
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“In the 1960s, the United States blanketed the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant more devastating than napalm. Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the chemical is still poisoning the water and coursing through the blood of a third generation. From Ho Chi Minh City to the town of Ben Tre - and from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Hackettstown, New Jersey - the photographer James Nachtwey went in search of the ecocide’s cruelest legacy, horribly deformed children in both Vietnam and America.” - story
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“Equally at home in downtown fetish bars and stylish uptown parties, Robert Mapplethorpe epitomised the decadence of 1980s New York. He died of Aids in 1989, but his perversely beautiful photographs live on, and are again on show in Britain. Peter Conrad meets his brother, lawyer and assistant and explores the legacy of his cruel and unusual relationships.”
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Mark brought this to my attention: “s soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities. To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as ‘the Leica Freedom Train,’ a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were ‘assigned’ to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States.” - story (also see this page)
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Regular visitors will be aware of Jill Greenberg’s work, in particular her photos of monkeys. But, of course, there are also the photos of cying children a series that, as I just learned, “doubles as a critique of the Bush administration.” (source)
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Something to think about: “Modern nudity carries many messages, all of them united by their lack of sophistication” (story) I don’t think I’d make such a sweeping generalization as far as nude portraits are concerned (even though I definitely agree with the author about the Vanity Fair et al. photography) - over the past months, I’ve linked to some very nice treatments of the nude human form.
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What have happened if a famous photographer had had access to any one of those ubiquitous photography “critique” forums that are so popular? Well, have a look at this. And if you’ve never been to anyof those forums, yes, this is the kind of stuff you usually find there.
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OK, let me make this official: I hereby declare that I have seen enough vacated houses and/or ruins of houses, and I don’t feel like seeing more would add anything to a subject matter, which actually hardly ever deserves such coverage. Oh, and adding some poor, freezing naked woman to the scene only makes it weird and not better.
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“600 photographs from the People’s Republic of China […] went on show on May 20 at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. This is a reproduction of an exhibition that first opened three years ago in Guangzhou before moving on to Shanghai and Beijing. In the original show 250 Chinese photographers showed works covering the past 50 years; the curators had a total of 100,000 photographs to choose from.” - story
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“June Newton’s photographs were never as celebrated as those of her husband, Helmut. Two years after his death, she talks to William Cook about their marriage - and why she was better at capturing people’s souls” (story)
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It happens quite often that I got to somebody’s website, and I see a bunch of thumbnails, and I think “Oh, those must be nice when viewed larger”, and it turns out they’re not thumbnails, they’re the actual samples of the photographer’s work. If you have one of those websites let me ask you this following question: Why do you even bother with a website if you don’t want people to see your stuff? Assuming, of course, that you don’t happen to be a stamp collector who thinks that all good things must be small. But seriously, the internet poses quite serious limitations for photographers already, and offering people, who might be interested in your work, thumbnail-size samples does not further your cause all that much. Oh, and here is my response to potential emails where people warn me about other people “stealing” their photos: Puh-leeeeze!
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Those interested in photography books can now go to Photo Book Guide and get their regular dose of reviews of… well, photography books.
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“Dude, it’s time. Girls, you too. Time to pack up the whole in-your-face, raw, hyper-sexualized, porno, skater, white trash, open wounds, self-effacing, Jackass, loose ethics, 80’s bar mitzvah disco, and party-till-you vomit movement, aesthetic and attitude. Go on, scram. Beat it. We don’t want you hanging around anymore. For those of us that saw this Larry Clark inspired tsunami coming, we all thought Terry Richardson was on to something fun (in 2000) and we all laughed our asses off at Vice’s fashion do’s and don’ts.” (source)
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“These photographs of New Orleans and the surrounding area were taken three months after Hurricane Katrina and are part of a larger project to photograph landscapes around the world that are exhibiting dramatic transformation due to global warming. (See the Canary Project: www.canary-project.org).”
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Something provocative: Photography “as an art form is on the wane. […] he reason for photography’s eclipse as an art form has not just to do with the astonishing superabundance of photographs; it has to do with dramatic recent changes to the medium. Thanks to the digital revolution, there is virtually nothing that can’t be done to a photograph to alter its once unique relationship to reality. There is much to amaze in what is suddenly possible but the amazement is largely technical. In terms of art, something profound has been lost.” (source) I’d actually argue that this kind of criticism should first be applied to Hollywood movies, where imagination has been replaced by digital gimmicks so that most “blockbuster” movies are only watchable if you’re a young teenager who thinks that gratuitous violence and hollow digital effects with no actual plot whatsoever are “cool”. But despite the fact that I disagree with the conclusion drawn as far as contemporary photography is concerned, the author does raise some important points. (updated version - I forgot to link to the article…)
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“Released just one month after the Sago disaster, Coal Hollow - a new book of photographic portraits and oral histories collected by Ken and Melanie Light - takes readers where the network news cameras left off, deep into the hills of southern West Virginia. […] Whether industry barons, retired miners, snake handlers, preachers or state Supreme Court justices, each of the men and women in the Lights’ chronicle have lived their lives in the shadow of the free-market coal economy and watched it shape not only the topography of the hills around them, but also their families, their jobs and their towns.” (source) Also don’t miss the new feature at Digital Journalist. (Updated entry)
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“Freelance photographer Kelly Fajack claims in a lawsuit that one of his photos was reproduced without his permission on a currency note circulating in the central African nation of Burundi.” - story
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If you’re here because you found the link in the May/June 2006 edition of American Photo, welcome! If you’re unfamiliar with blogs, check out the archives for the bulk of the content here.
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Have a look at what happened to Martin Fuchs the other day. It’s interesting to remember that this kind of stuff is not one of those side-effects of 9/11 - which, supposedly, changed everything. Read Robert FrankÂ’s account of his arrest in 1955 over at photopermit.org.
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In principle, nuclear reactors are a pretty good way to generate energy. In reality, they aren’t. Common sense should tell you that if you plan to use a technology that must never ever fail - because of desastrous consequences - then you look for something else. Unfortunately, common sense is not all that common. And then, twenty years ago, the then Soviet nuclear power station in Chernobyl blew up. I remember this event very vividly; back then I was living in what used to be West Germany, and part of the radioactive cloud made it all the way to Germany. Needless to say, it wasn’t nearly as bad as in the immediate vicinity of the reactor, but still… the invisible threat, “in the air, for you and me” (as German electronic act Kraftwerk had described it just ten years before Chernobyl) made you wonder whether we - as humans - were really just too damn stupid to survive. Needless to say, what we got to hear from those people interested in nuclear power, politicians and those making good money from it, was something like “Oh, it can’t happen here”, with a variety of utterly ridiculous reasons added. I never believed that incompetence, neglect, and technological malfuntions adhere to ideologies or are things that only happen to “them”. In any case, watch the Magnum in Motion essay Chernobyl Legacy to see the results of the world’s worst nuclear desaster yet. I have to warn you, though, some of the images are pretty rough.
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I don’t know whether I’m the only one who is puzzled by this, maybe not. What I noticed is that whenever I see self-portraits of people - and some photographers do a fair amount of those - there’s never a smile. Why don’t people smile when they take their self portrait? Is smiling bad? Would a smile take something away from the portrait? Update: A few people emailed me and told me that the reason why people don’t smile is (at least partly) due to the nature of long exposures or having to wait for the shutter. I am not sure I am willing to accept that fully - after all, many photographers go through all kinds of ordeals for photos that they really want.
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Those interested in flashy advertizing or editorial photography might want to check out the set of photographers on the Art Department photography page.
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“Vanity Fair decided against printing its ‘green’ May issue, which is dedicated to environmental matters, on recycled paper - but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing recycled in it. A spokeswoman for the magazine acknowledged Wednesday that the cover photo, […] shot by Annie Leibovitz, was ‘inspired’ by ‘Ballet Society’, a 1948 portrait by Irving Penn of George Balanchine and three collaborators. Although there’s no mention anywhere in the magazine of the connection, the composition of the two photos is virtually identical, down to the leafy garland on Roberts’ head. […] Of course, there’s nothing unusual in a photographer offering a visual tip of the hat to a fellow artist. But Leibovitz […] has not always been open to having her own work referenced: In 1994, she filed suit against Paramount Pictures, claiming an ad for ‘Naked Gun: 33 1/3’ was an unlawful reproduction of her 1991 Vanity Fair cover featuring a pregnant Demi Moore.” - story
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“American photographer Robert Adams has been awarded the 2006 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for his exhibition Turning Back ﾂ– A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration, which shows deforestation and environmental destruction in Oregon. […] Adams said he was donating his ï½£30,000 ($52,300) prize to Human Rights Watch, a social justice organization. ‘However concerned I am about the environment, I’m even more concerned at the moment with a collapse in human decency,’ he says.” (story)
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Over at Gallery Hopper, Todd today asks one of the most important questions for a photographer, especially in these times where photoblogs want to make us believe that editing photos is for cowards: How many [photos] are you satisfied with as your best effort? It might be a bit misleading to put that strong an emphasis on quantity, though.
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“Ideas are so clean and easy. The reality of taking the pictures tends to dirty everything. Best to hold on to that purity while I can.” - Alec Soth
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