I am not sure I am all that impressed by what we are being offered as portraiture of famous people these days. More often than not, it seems to me, it’s more important to have some sort of gimmick in the photo - often accompanied by gratuitous Photoshopping, to make the result look like a still from a Disney movie. Make no mistake, there is a time and place for this look - for example, in an ad for Disneyland. But this kind of portraiture has become so common that I’m wondering when people will snap out of it. In a sense, it’s not too different from the portraiture that people loved about one hundred years ago, where a b/w photo would be gaudily hand coloured.
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Photography, when taken as a form of art, derives its strength from the fact that a photo might evoke something unique in us. We have been well trained to respond to the photographic language used in the media - regardless of whether we actually feel what we say we feel, but when we deal with photography taken as an art form, we have more freedom. We feel more comfortable to see what it does to us, we feel more comfortable to let it get closer to us.
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I’ve long been fascinated by Dutch classical landscape paintings, with their sweeping, majestic skies, underneath of which you often find the somewhat barren Dutch landscape, sometimes with a city somewhere small, seen from afar. Art historians and theorists are probably much better suited to talk about these paintings than I am, and I admit I have no idea what they might talk about. For me, these paintings resonate with something inside of me for two reasons. First, these Dutch paintings show a landscape very similar to the one I grew up in. And second, they convey a sense of humility: We like to think of us humans as the masters of this planet, but when we are really honest and step back a little, we actually have very little power.
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Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cents” is not just one of my personal favourites, it probably is the one, the photo that I would name - when pressed - as my personal favourite photo. For me, “99 Cents” embodies all that makes contemporary photography the exciting art form that it has become.
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If I was to ask you to name an American 20th Century portrait photographer, I think Sally Mann’s name would probably not be the first one to come up. It is true, there are lots of well-known American 20th Century portrait photographers, some of which I already talked about on this blog, like for example Richard Avedon. But somehow, Sally Mann doesn’t seem to register in a way Richard Avedon does. I find that very unfortunate.
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For me, Ernst Haas’s “Homecoming” is one of the best photojournalistic projects ever done. This particular photo might just say everything the whole series says at once.
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I decided to add a new feature to the blog. Starting today, every week I will post a photo that belongs to my favourite photos, and I will try to explain what the photo means to me. I don’t know how successful I’ll really be with my explanations, but hopefully whatever I will write will shed some light on things.
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