OK I get it. Books are different. The goodness is on the inside and the outside is just a package to sell it, but I am talking about a more disturbing trend that has been with art for quite some time. The trend of artists selling work and viewers buying work on name only.
Name recognition, while being a powerful marketing tool, is by no means a judge of quality. For instance, I had a friend once who in the midst of a conversation about photography said the following blanket statement: "I love (insert artist name here). I just love everything he does." The rest of the conversation went a little something like this.
Me: You love (artist's name)?
friend: Absolutley.
me: You know him?
friend: Well, no not personally, but I love his work.
me: Of course but you SAID, you love him.
friend: so what is the difference?
me: It is a huge difference. He is a person and his work is an object or objects created by him. He could be a complete asshole for all you know.
friend: I doubt it. His work is amazing.
You see where this is going right. Such and such artist can do no wrong and all his work is great because HE made it. While I agree, I really liked one of his books, I thought the rest were mediocre and never bought any of them. But I also never confused the work with the person either. I always try and judge art on the merit of the object, or more often, the effect the object has upon me. If the work moves me in some way or changes the way I think about the world around me, or hell even if I just like the color scheme, then I am a fan. Sure in the past, I have picked up books because I recognized the name, but I have never ordered a book site unseen. (Thank you Photo Eye book tease) So I guess in the end of this ramble, my point is this: Buy work because you love IT.
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I make some art that has to do with our conceived view of nature or wilderness and quite often I come across some ironic things out there. I am not sure if others see the same irony as I do but I'll keep pointing it out just the same.
This is just a thought for the outdoor industry.
When choosing a name for a product that is intended to be used in nature or the wilderness, please stray from naming it things like, "Probe", "Intruder", or "Destroyer". It kind of defeats the purpose.
PS this is not my photo, just one I borrowed from the candy store known as the internet.
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A mentor of mine told me a few years back that the digital revolution had made photography more democratic. It put cameras into the hands of the masses and gave them easy access to the photos and the publication or "self publication" of the resulting photos. I agree with him on his theory as the digital revolution has accomplished this in many different realms.
Journalism has seen this same change as well. Blogs and online magazines run for little or no money at all have popped up all over the map. Even Twitter and Facebook have become sources of news for all of us.
Yet at the same time it has watered down much of the content. On a semi weekly basis I look at Facebook and have to wade through pages and pages of Farmville status updates, shameless self promotion, and meaningless crap to get a few worthwhile pieces of information. Same goes for blogs and online magazines. I see the same work over and over again. The sheer amount of work has increased twenty fold, yet the quality has gone down in my opinion. Don't get me wrong here, when I do find something I really like, I am ecstatic because I had to work so hard to find it. Good photography for me has become like a meal made over an open fire after a 15 mile hike in the mountains. It tastes so much better.
I have no answer to this issue. It just nags at me on a daily basis. Some of you out there probably don't even see it as an issue. Many of you are probably very excited that you now have these new found capabilities to produce and self publish your work. Me, well, I am a big fan of quality over quantity.
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I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.
Steve McQueen
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Well it has been months since the crash of my database and to be honest, I didn't fully intend on getting a blog back up. Unfortunately, the itch to write is stronger than my will to not give a shit so here I am.
Where have I been? Busy. A lot has gone on in the last four or five months and almost none of it has to do with contemporary photography. Well, other than my own work of course. I haven't really been paying much attention lately, so if you are looking for my opinion on new work or the who's who in photography right now, I am happy to say I will probably disappoint you. Check Joerg, Flak, or Fraction for that.
I will try and get some of my old posts up on to this blog. This delightfully low tech blog is a previous version of the Word from a while back. It is super easy and does not run on a database. Unfortunately it does not have very many bells and whistles. Maybe I should say fortunately. Either way, this is what we have to work with as it was already on my server and set up.
So here goes nothing. or something.
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I am a fan of Daylight Magazine and the job those guys do. They keep trying to fill all the voids at once in both a print and online format and for that I respect their effort. They put out a great magazine and do a lot of work with worthy causes on the side.
Here is the official blurb on Issue 8…
“Issue #8, on newsstands February 1st, will focus on Afghanistan from the perspective of photographers from all over the world including: America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, Greece, Turkey, Peru and Afghanistan itself. The portfolios included each highlight a different element of Afghan life and society, from mountain tribes to the
Taliban, from poppy farmers to school teachers, from foreign military personnel to local photographers in Kabul. Together, these photographers show life within Afghanistan with an intimacy and quiet intensity that serves as a necessary complement to mainstream media coverage of the region. While the United States (and the Coalition) have waged an eight year war on the Taliban, rarely do we see the infinite complexities of daily life or the individuals struggling to survive in this beautiful, but fraught, landscape.”
Online publishing is a tough business. I waded in that pond for almost two years on a very serious basis working with Fraction Magazine. In the end I left because of time issues but also for money issues. In the year and half of publishing Fraction I made all of $35 dollars and I received a couple of free books. Mind you, this is for working twenty hours a week or more on top of two other jobs I had at the time. In the end it just didn’t make that much sense to me. I still produce this blog, but very rarely do I put much time into it for this very reason.
While money shouldn’t be the end all factor, it is pretty damn important when it comes down to working your ass off and eating bean burritos. I see that other people in the online publishing and “blogosphere” are starting to get to the same point as well. I imagine that originally all bloggers and online ‘zines started out the same way. They had something to say and self publishing is an easy way to get your name and ideas out there. After a while though and if you do a good job at it, people start to read it and you carry forward ever more and more serious. It begins to take up more and more time. If you are worth your salt at all you keep working harder to make it better but in the back of your mind somewhere you start thinking about money and where it is going to come from.
Your money choices are slim. Google ads? Joke. Google had screwed over the value of advertising so much I can’t even fathom it anymore. You would be better off collecting your check in pesos because at least it would sound like it was worth more.
What about donations? I am a big fan of this. Trust in humanity. Well…. that doesn’t really work out either. People in general, especially on the internet where they are not face to face with anyone don’t always come through on the donations. As a matter of fact you may be lucky if anyone EVER donates.
How about selling your own art as a way to generate revenue? Sounds good in theory until you remember that you already worked hard to make the art and now you have to write daily articles or publish a monthly magazine just to sell it every once in awhile? That doesn’t really make much sense either.
So what are you left with? Selling private ads? This should be a good way to generate some income but the aforementioned Google has pretty much ruined this. The only way this idea works is if you are very popular regionally then you can sell regional advertising but it is still a tough sell.
I hate to sound like a bitter pill over all of this but something will have to change or else the quality things that we all love on the internet will disappear to continually be replaced by new and less quality items. This is where I could put out a call for people to band together and make sure quality blogs and ‘zines somehow get compensated. But in the end I know that will probably come up short. Instead I see a new future on the horizon for things like this. In fact there are already other blogs and ‘zines following this model.
Subscriber rates. That’s right. Pay to read.
I know what your thinking. What the f*!$ !! The internet is supposed to be free. Well… for most of these people who put out good blogs and ‘zines, it is a job for them and they should be compensated. It’s just the way the world works. No one like to work for free and I don’t see why so many people out there complain about having to pay for something. The internet has spoiled most of the world. So maybe we should have to pay. I most certainly agree. The product will only get better as the writers and creators have more free time to produce quality material. We all like quality right?
AND in a perfect world we could do away with all of the advertising we all see everyday. I don’t care what Nikon lens is on sale.
I don’t know how well this model will hold up for singular bloggers and creators but I think if people begin to band together to create something larger it may hold water. I personally would hate to see a few of the things I read and look at on a regular basis disappear. I bet you would too.
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I had the chance to visit the National Gallery this weekend in DC and take a look at the two photography shows they currently have up. DC is one of my new favorite cities for museums, close to home and the museums are free. Top it off with some Ethiopian food after a day in the museums and you are golden. What else could you ask for?
The first of the two shows is In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age. First of all, the title is rather confounding. Did they mean everything before 1990? Because that’s pretty much what the show was. Don’t get me wrong they had newer work than that, there was an Edward Burtynsky print, but in the end I thought it was a fairly vague title for a show. Needless to say there was some great work. It is always a pleasure to see photographs in person after spending so much time looking at work online. There is nothing like seeing work up close, printed on paper, and in all of its super-sized glory, especially when it comes to contemporary work like Burtynsky. Other highlights for me included Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams. That’s right, Ansel Adams. They had two versions of Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, one printed in 1927, and the other in the 1980’s(?). It was interesting to see how much the printing styles had changed over the years as well as the quality of the paper and the print.
The other half of the photo exhibit was portraits by Robert Bergman. I recently talked about the hype surrounding Bergman and his photos and I wanted a chance to see the work for myself. I was not disappointed by the show. The work is quite excellent. Bergman works in 35mm which but from the looks of the images he does not work quickly. The portraits remind me more of work I have seen done in large format. The photos seem very methodical. They all have a very similar look to them. He seems to stick to a very prescribed set of rules when photographing. The work is very painterly and thought out. The lighting is beautiful in all of the images but almost to the point of redundancy and tends to get gimmicky in my opinion. When something is done really well and then done over and over again it cheapens the experience for me. However, most of us only get light like this in a photograph once in a while and Bergman does it over and over again which should attest to his skill.
In the end I left the gallery thinking about the show quite a lot. I will admit we made it to the photo section of the museum quite late and had to be ushered out like children by the barking of the guards. I did not get to spend nearly as much time with the photographs as I would have liked to. We spent way too much time in the The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works show, which I would also highly recommend. Having had a couple of days to think about the show, I think the work is excellent. National Gallery excellent? Maybe not. A few of the photos have stuck in my mind which is a sign of great photography in my book. But in the end I don’t think I would put Robert Bergman at the top of my list.
Good portraiture to me stands out in the fact that it tells me something about myself. No, it doesn’t tell me anything about the person in the photo other than the color of their eyes or what they are wearing, etc. A good portrait makes me ask questions about my own pre-conceived notions of who I am and how I see the world. Rineke Dijkstra’s work does that for me. So does early work by Katy Grannan and Shelby Lee Adams. The point is, I look for portrait work that changes how I see the world through my own eyes and not just images that only force me to view the world through someone else’s eyes. It is the reason I am not fascinated by portraits of famous individuals.
All in all a good show and I am glad I caught it before it came down on January 10th.
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There are three books from the past year that I seem to keep picking up. There were some great books this year that I enjoyed, Fall River Boys, Fake Holidays, etc, but there are a definite three that I have gone back to multiple times.
AMERICAN POWER – Mitch Epstein
I absolutely love this book. I know it has not been out very long yet but I have been waiting for this work to come out in book format for quite some time now.
SAWDUST MOUNTAIN – Eirik Johnson
Another book that I have had for about 5 months now and have looked through over and over again. I simply cannot get enough of this book and every time I look at it I see something new.
MP3 VOLUME II – Curtis Mann, John Opera, and Stacy Yeapanis
Well to be honest it is really Curtis Mann’s book that get’s all the attention but as it is part of a set, you get all three. I think of it as a buy one get two free kind of deal. And.. if Curtis Mann isn’t your cup of tea you have two other choices that might just do it for you.
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(I salvaged this interview from my other crashed blog, but unfortunately I lost the images that went with the interview) you can visit her site here and see the images.
In the last year or so I have come across a few artists who have put together a body of work that really intrigues me and Claire Beckett’s work is near the top of that list. I was ecstatic when Claire agreed to answer some questions for me about her series Simulating Iraq. I would like to thank Claire for taking the time to answer my questions.
JS: How did you get into photography?
CB: I started making pictures while in high school. As a kid I was always into art, and I’d been pretty seriously dedicated to pottery. Then in the 11th grade my pottery teacher, whom I was very fond of, retired and I refused to study with the new one. In need of an art class, I ended up taking photography with the attitude, “I’ll hate this, it’s not me.” But I ended up loving photography from the very first day. I have been making pictures ever since.
JS: How important is your camera equipment to you? Do you consider yourself a gear junkie or not?
CB: The gear is only important to me so far as it enables me to make the picture I want. So for my current project I want a large, focused negative that I can enlarge to a decent size. Compared to other photographers I think I’m not that into gear. Gear in of itself does not interest me all that much—what I want is a really great picture.
Beckett_soldiers_as_villagers
© Claire Beckett “Army Privates Kendra Duffy, Allison Bronner and Jessica-Ann Layug, playing the role of Iraqi villagers at Basic Training, Fort Jackson, SC, 2006”
JS: What is the impetus behind the photographs in your latest series Simulating Iraq?
CB: Prior to working on “Simulating Iraq” I did a project called “In Training,” in which I dealt with young soldiers preparing for war. “Simulating Iraq” sprung directly from my experience photographing soldiers in training. One day I saw a bunch of Basic Training soldiers dressed up like Iraqis and made this picture “Privates Kendra Duffy, Allison Bronner and Jessica-Ann Layug, playing the role of Iraqi civilians during Basic Training, Fort Jackson, SC, 2006.” (see my website under “In Training”) Afterwards I did some research and learned that cultural role playing was becoming a major component of pre-deployment training, and so I pursued the opportunity to photograph at several specialized facilities. Personally I am very interested in the concepts of cross-cultural interaction and role-playing, and these interests stem in large part from my undergraduate training in Cultural Anthropology and my experiences working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa.
JS: I’ve noticed as I look through the series that it plays back and forth between photos that seem very quiet and some that seem very shocking. Could you explain the importance of this, if any, in this series?
CB: Yes, you’re absolutely right. With the Simulating Iraq series I move between quiet, contemplative photographs and more jarring ones. This interplay is important to me. I think of some of the calmer landscapes as setting the scenery or providing the context for the more forceful pictures. If I had a whole wall of the bloody pictures, for example, I think it would really be too much. Mixing the pictures together I think a viewer has a better chance to enter the work and spend some time with it.
JS: How do you find the locations you shoot in?
CB: I do a lot of research before ever going out to photograph. I discover places to photograph through a combination of secondary research and speaking with my contacts in the military. Often I’ll hear about something in the news and then call someone I’ve worked with in the past to get more information about the logistics of photographing at the site and also get more information about the look of the place, which is hugely important to the photography.
JS: How many photos do not make it into your final series of images you show?
CB: Many photos do not make it into the final edit. I don’t edit myself when I shoot. I prefer to make many photographs and edit down in the printing stage.
Beckett_Marine_jihadi
© Claire Beckett “Lance Corporal Joshua Stevens playing the role of a Taliban fighter, Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, 2009”
JS: How much of a directorial influence do you exert over your portraits?
CB: I am absolutely the director of my photographs. Using a 4×5 view camera it is nearly impossible to make a candid photograph, so everything in composed by me in collaborati¬on with the people I photograph. I say “collaboration” because I do solicit a lot of input from both the people I photograph and the other people around. Most recently, when photographing Marines role-playing as the Taliban, I asked these Marines a bunch of questions about their Taliban character as we made the pictures. I tried to base the photographs off of what the Marine said his Taliban character did, or what the Taliban character thought or how the Marine imagined the Taliban character felt, or how the Marine felt about being the Taliban.
JS: How do you begin a new project and when is a project or a body of work finished for you?
CB: I begin a new project when a new idea starts nagging at me and won’t let me be. If the idea doesn’t really stick around and bug me then it probably isn’t a good idea. Likewise a project is finished when it isn’t exciting me anymore. I usually try to make some more photographs just to be sure.
JS: What does the future hold for this project?
CB: At this moment I’m in the editing stage, so I’m not sure. I’ll know once I’m done printing and editing my newest photographs.
JS: How do you get over a creative slump in your work?
CB: I try not to indulge in too much negative thought about a creative block. Instead, there is always something to be done to move the work forward, whether that is shooting pictures, editing, printing, sharing proofs, drafting an artist statement, reading, doing research, revising the website, etc. If I don’t exactly know what to do next I work on whatever is in front of me. I don’t regard not knowing what to do next as a problem, rather I tend to see it as an opportunity for the next thing to present itself to me organically.
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It has been twenty months since David and I sat down in Satellite Coffee in Albuquerque and hatched the idea of Fraction Magazine. It didn’t take long to get it up and running and we have seen lots of great work in that time. The magazine has changed a few times, grown to be respected within the community, and followed by quite an impressive audience.
It is with great sadness that I must tell you all I will no longer be a part of Fraction Magazine. Over the past twenty months I have put any amount of free time I have had into the magazine, through design, programming, constantly looking at new work, updating the blog, etc. While I have enjoyed my time doing it, one thing has suffered in the wake, the amount of time I have left to work on my own personal art and projects. When it comes down to it my own need to produce and create seriously outweighs the time I have to donate to the magazine.
Fear not, David will continue at the helm on his own. With the help of people like Melanie McWhorter and the larger photo community I am sure his efforts will be grand. Don’t be afraid to offer the man your time and help if you are so obliged. I will continue on making new work and remain part of that photo community at large and hopefully lend David a hand whenever I can. You can follow all of my work and my incessant ramblings and bitching about the world of art at my blog. I’ll always be looking at and talking about new work I have come across and posting new thoughts and ideas.
Thanks to all of you for making Fraction a success and stay tuned to see what David has planned for the future of Fraction. ¡Adios compañeros!
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I visited Austin for the first time this weekend. Besides the music, the food, and the people watching I found time to go to the Harry Ransom Center. Not knowing what would be on display, I took my chances and hoped for something photo related. My main goal was to finally get a chance to see Niepce’s first photograph from his window.
On display was the life and times of Edgar Allen Poe in honor of his 200th birthday this year, images from the history of star gazing, the Guttenberg Bible, and Niepce’s photo. The photo is encased in what appears to be a semi permanent installation near the entrance. The photo is basically inside a box and lit from above. The lighting isn’t the greatest for viewing the photo as it is hard to see from straight on, you have to move around to all sorts of angles to get a glimpse. Sadly it actually renders better in some of the pictures you have seen of it in books than it does in person unless you catch just the right angle.
I came across other photos in the gallery, a Dagurreotype of Poe, a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait of Herschel, and some large photos taken moon, but I kept returning to look at Niepce’s photo. In fact I went back five times. I wanted to understand how this one object became what it is today, how before this photo, there were no other photos. It is hard to imagine a world without photography as we have become so utterly dependent on it to display everything we cannot see in person. It has in essence become our roving eyes of the world. I remember quite clearly life before digital, but I talked to a teenager the other day who couldn’t remember cell phones that did not have cameras. So how then did we go from nothing to utter dependency?
I know when I ask most people why they take and keep photos, the common response is for the memories. Most people want a visual reminder of the things and events that were important in their life. Who doesn’t like to look through old photo albums from their families? More than that though we have become almost addicted to what the image has come to represent. The image has come to stand in for our memory and has become a document of proof, the proof that we were there or took place in an event.
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I often think of teaching art as a vocation. Passing on the gift of creativity and pushing people to ask harder and harder questions of themselves and their art to move forward in their work. I came across Robert Adam's thoughts on this once again just today...
Can Photography Be taught? If this means the history and techniques of the medium, I think it can. The latter, particularly, are straightforward. If, however, teaching photography means bringing students to find their own individual photographic visions, I think it is impossible. We would be pretending to offer the students, in William Stafford’s phrase, “a wilderness with a map.” We can give beginners directions about how to use a compass, we can tell them stories about our exploration of different but possibly analogous geographies, and we can bless them with our caring, but we cannot know the unknown and thus make sure a path to real discovery.
Ought photography to be taught? If at the beginning of my own photography I had taken a course in the mechanics, it would have saved time. Learning the history of the medium might also have been done more systematically in a class, but it was fun and easy to do on my own. As for the studio courses in “seeing” – which usually place student work up for evaluation by both classmates and teachers – I was never tempted to take one, and so am not attracted to teaching one. Arrogantly I believed right from the start that I could see. That was the compulsion, to make a record of what I saw. And so listening to most other people speak didn’t seem helpful. Even now I don’t like to discuss work that isn’t finished, because until it is revised over the span of a year or several years there are crucial parts that are present only in my mind’s eye, pieces intended but not yet realized. If I were forced to pay attention, as one would be in a class, to a dozen different understandings and assessments of what I was putting together it would amount to an intolerable distraction, however well mean. Architect Luis Barragan was right, I think: “Art is made by the alone for the alone.”
Am I one to teach photography? When I consider the possibility I can’t help remembering a question put to me by an affectionate and funny uncle when I told him I might become a minister – “Do you have to?” Experience later as an English teacher brought up the same issue. Teachers must, I discovered, have a gift to teach and the compulsion to use it. And faith. Anything less won’t carry you through.
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Fraction got a shout out on the NY Times blog called Lens and one of the artists had a featured little story.
Click on the related link and look for the flood photos from March 24th.
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Signs of life has been a pet project over the last year and a half. It moves along at a snail's pace most weeks and months but over time it has grown ever larger. I finally put it up on my website in some rudimentary form to at least get something out there for you all to see. I have more plans for it and it will continue to grow and take more shape as time marches ever steadily forward.
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It's no accident that the photograph and our external presence to the world are both known as image. We convey our own sense of self through what we perceive the rest of the world sees when they look at us. How we dress, how we wear our hair, and how we move through this world are all part of our image. This has got me thinking over the past few days about how much of my own identity has been taken from the outside world of advertising and popular culture, as well as those in my immediate vicinity and re-incorporated as my idea of self and image.
Over the next couple of weeks I am going to begin collecting images that refer to this and see what come of it.
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OK so we are not screwing around anymore. Fraction Issue 7 is up and running and is by far the best design so far. It incorporates everything I ever wanted it to do. Large photos, all in one screen, everything backlogged and available to the viewer.
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I recently went to hear David Taylor, recent Guggenheim recipient and professor of photography at New Mexico State University. His work deals with the border and the lives, stories, policies, and politics that all happen along it. Being extremely interested in the subject and the myth of the West in general I had to attend.
What interested me most about his work was not his work at all but his stories. His stories enthralled me. He spoke of drug dealers being tazered while diving back over the 12 foot wall back into Mexico, of rocks being hurled over the wall back at the US forces as they tried to confiscate drugs, of lonely mountaintop encounters with drug mules, and conversations with US border patrol agents who didn't really believe they were making any sort of difference at all.
He flashed pictures across the screen as he talked and told the stories and none of the pictures revealed anything at all about his stories. The pictures were quiet and spoke of a calm boring world. Why? I asked myself this question after the talk and one of the few answers I could come up with was this. David had a predetermined set of controls that he was working in. A 4x5 camera and a certain way of photographing. He should have been rolling with the punches more and let the experience determine what he was doing. If it was fast action, why not video and a fast digital camera. He was hung up on making very large prints which inherently dictated a large format camera.Large prints are like dinosaurs in my opinion. Yes there is a time and a place for them but this was not it.
This comes up often in my own work and I often find it hard to move out of my original and intended ideas for the project. This is where I find I have to just let go and experiment and try everything to see if something else more successful can be made of the project. So where is that line? When do you throw away everything that you have done and try something else? I think this is where a group of peers becomes important to bounce ideas off of. Not saying that you should let them decide for you, but you should definitely see if you are headed in the right direction.
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Fraction Issue 6 is out and running. Please check it out. The issue includes five photographers all from New Mexico.
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Iran is a country with a long history of settlement and like most places, a history of conflict. Known officially as Persia until 1935, Iran’s borders contain many different tribes and geographical differences. Goerg Gerster’s story in Iran began in the mid-seventies when he hand delivered a letter to the Imperial Court in Tehran. From 1976 through 1978, he flew 100 separate flights, totaling 300 hours to photograph Persia from above. With the permission from and help of the Iranian government, he captured photos in all seasons and in all areas. As the conflicts in Iran grew in the late seventies, Gerster had to end his project and consequently wait thirty years before he could finally publish the photos. Paradise Lost, Persia from Above is the fruit of those labors.
Photographing a place that most of us know very little about, Gerster gives us a different take on the land. Being a pioneer in aerial photography and having spent the last forty years flying all over the globe, he sees his work as a ‘philosophical instrument’ in that: “Distance creates an overview, and an overview creates insight.” Aerial photography has often made its way into the art world spotlight. Emmit Gowin and his Changing the Earth, David Maisel with his Black Maps and Oblivion, Taiji Matsui’s JP22, and one of my personal favorites, Terry Evan’s and his Inhabited Prairie series, have all taken this same route to change the way we see the landscape and our impact upon it. Gerster’s effort is none the less enthralling and makes for a great book.
The focus of the images range from modern cities to the eroded landscape and cover what seem to be centuries of tradition all happening at the same time. Modern ski areas mingle with ancient methods of farming all with in the same country, terraced rice fields reflect the light from above, walled compounds form geometric patterns, and oil fields burn off in the late afternoon light. Gerster seems to capture the many complexities that all form what was Iran in the seventies.
The photos, all taken in the seventies and on Kodachrome film have a nostalgic feel to them. In contrast to the ever-increasing popularity of the digital world and the look of the digital image, these photos have the look and feel of a time when you could actually determine the film type by the color cast inherent in each different film.
The book is divided into geographic sections and each one is prefaced in the beginning of the book with a short history and description. Also included is a short section of poems from historical Persian poets selected by Maryam Sachs, an Iranian born writer who worked closely with Gerster in the production of the book.
My one complaint with this book is my usual complaint about printing over the gutter of the book, which is too distracting from the images. This seems to be commonplace these days and for the life of me I cannot figure out the logic behind this decision.
The book is due out in April from Phaidon Press and well worth a look. At a time when we are so intimately involved with Iran, yet so many have very little knowledge of the area, maybe Gerster’s ‘philosophical instrument’ into Iran can provide us with more of the necessary insight we need to achieve something greater.
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Recently I came across a book that I somehow missed in my many travels through the libraries and bookstores. I was reading Martha Sandweiss’ Print the Legend and there was short passage referring to a book made in the eighties entitled Sign Language by Skeet McAuley. It sounded quite interesting so I got on the web and found a used copy. When the book finally arrived in the mail I had forgotten I’d ordered it.
Skeet McAuley set out with the task of photographing the Native American at present (remember this was the eighties), and their current situation on the reservation. This is typically a sticky situation for a non-Native photographer to get into. McAuley worked it out in a non-typical way and what he accomplished truly impressed me. The book not only gives you the kind of images you might expect, but quite a few you may not have expected. He spent his time with two tribes, the Navajo and the White Mountain Apache who were both open to his ideas and had a willingness to cooperate. What really sets the book above is who also provides a written read on the photographs, McAuley enlisted the help of Mike Mitchell, a Navajo medicine man from the Dine College in Arizona to sit with the photos and give his own impressions.
I looked through the book once before reading the text to get my own impression of the pictures and then went back again to read Mitchell’s text about the photos. Our impressions could not have differed more. While my view on the photos was coming from a background in practicing photography and years of art history, Mitchell’s view was one of a different read. In a photograph where a tackily dressed young tourist stands inside a Hogan with a Navajo weaving family, my thoughts were of commodification and a constant need of non-Natives to want to give the Native their old way of life back. What Mitchell saw was the sacredness of the Hogan and the virtues of weaving as a Navajo way of life. He never even bothered to mention the young white tourist in the Hogan. It was though he had not even see the young man.
Again this happens when he is shown a photo of water running in a large man made ditch, part of the Navajo irrigation project. Mitchell describes the holiness of water, how it is part of all living things, and the role it plays in ceremony. Not once does he mention how man has diverted and possibly even squandered out natural resources.
How we read a photograph, or how we discern our visual language remains a mystery to many. What we see and how we see it is part of who we are and where we came from. Our culture, our upbringing, and our education have a profound impact on the way we read a photograph. While one person can see one thing, others often read things very differently. Seeing both sides of the coin, or the possibility of more than one reading is at the core of understanding our visual language.
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