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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Often by the time I get around to wanting a book, I am months behind the list of the newest books on the market. So many come off the presses these days it is hard to keep up. Such was the case with Toshio Shibata’s Landscape 2. By the time I contacted Nazraeli Press to get my own they were long since sold out. With only a thousand hand numbered copies out there I was sure I was out of luck. Lucky for me I have Vincent Borrelli here in town who was nice enough to loan me a copy for a review.
Shibata has become one of Japan’s most revered photographers over the last decade. His original Landscape was released by Nazraeli in 1996 and quickly sold out. The second printing in 2000 did the same and he followed up with Dam in 2004. Switching from large format black and white to color for his latest release, the work takes on a whole new dynamic.
Landscape 2 has over five years of work and containing 84 images, the book has a lot to offer. Like his earlier works, Shibata continues to focus on the collision of man and nature and the never-ending battle to control it. Japan’s mountainous interior is constantly under attack by the forces of nature. Erosion is trying to bring Japan back into the sea and humans are trying to stop it when it impedes our own needs. Thus the mountains contain a bizarre conglomeration of attempts at halting nature’s reclamation.
A rigid structure within a natural order, the lines created by the construction take on the appearance of contour lines on a map following the hillsides and riverbeds on a mathematical path. The geometric pattern only becomes all the more beautiful when it begins to coalesce with the forces it is trying to control. The two are completely at odds, one trying to find a balance and the other trying to force a balance, yet together they form something that Shibata has the ability to make beautiful in his photographs. The eerie repetitiveness of the constructions with nature on all sides and quite often creeping back in only made me wonder, who is winning and who is losing?
There is no introduction, no foreword, and no explanation at all, something I find completely refreshing and really enjoyed about this offering. The photographs said all that needed to be said. Shibata’s work left me only wanting more by the time I got to the end of the book. The only thing that bugged me about the book was that the book contains eighty photographs from Japan and four from Oregon. Even without reading the text describing the images locations they felt slightly out of place. Had those four photos been left out, the book would have been just as successful in my opinion.
If you are looking to add some contemporary landscape to your photo book collection, I highly recommend this book. As a limited edition it is almost guaranteed to go up in value if you can stop looking at it long enough to keep it in great condition.
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I came across this article in the Harvard Magazine. It seems like a lot to cover in one article but it does do a good job in a fairly short space. I only had one problem with the article and it was this section
"In Brady’s placid father-son portrait, the younger James wears a military-looking jacket, its nine buttons fastened right up to the collar, and holds a wide-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon encircling the crown. The most telling detail, however, is the way the boy, who stood on a box for the picture, casually rests a forearm on his father’s shoulder. “It illustrates how people posing for portraits in the nineteenth century tried to convey their status, character, and modernity in pictures,” says Robin Kelsey, Loeb associate professor of the humanities. “The pose conveys the extent to which the elder James was a progressive and permissive parent—he grants his son an autonomy and authority that was quite unusual at the time. Most portraits of that era establish the father as the patriarch in no uncertain terms.”"
That is just one read on the photo. Maybe the photographer set it up that way to have the son look as though he rests on his father because he needs his father to be the stronger man, etc. There could be a million reads on that photo and we will never no the whole story. Anyway read the article and decide for yourself.
Article
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Just use video.
OK?
No really. OK?
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In an earlier post I talked about two images of Chief Keokuk. One was a portrait and the other was a painting. Obviously different from each other, I did some research and found out more about them.
In March of 1847, Keokuk and his associates were in St. Louis on some sort of business from their newly established reservation in Kansas. Keokuk and his crew stopped into the studio of Thomas Easterly for a Daguerreotype portrait session. Thus they became the first Native Americans to have their portraits made inside of a American studio. Keokuk carefully prepared his dress for his portrait as one can see in the photo, but left no clues as to his intentions for his portrait. He also has a portrait of his wife and child made at the same visit. Paintings had already been made of him, and some he had even posed for. Did he understand the power of the image? Didi he only want a keepsake for himself? He had to have known how badly the paintings misrepresented his own image. Maybe he thought the photograph was a better reproduction of image.
Another interesting aside to this image is there was more than one made. The one above has the Smithsonian as a credit while the one I came across researching the image has his hand still and on the side of the cane instead of the ball of the cane. It is listed as being in the property of the Missouri Historical Society.
I will post more about this image if I come across it.
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More often than not I get bombarded with shit about the business of photography. What about portfolio reviews? What about contests? Blah, blah, blah.
My best advice to anyone out there is to start by finding a local group of photographers and spending some time talking about your work. Share your time helping them and along the way you will end up helping each other. Go out once a week or once every two weeks and meet somewhere and spend your time talking about each other's work. Not about who knows who or what so and so said on their blog. This way you actually get better at what you do and the work gets better over time. When you really have something good, then work on getting it out there. Bombard everyone you know and can find of importance with the work. If it truly is good someone will recognize it.
I have a certain group of people I have formed relationships with over the years, most of whom are local and I often show my work to them to get some feedback. A lot of times things make sense in my head but when I talk about them to others I often realize that the thoughts were not clear at all. So I ask questions, take some notes, take a big dose of humility, and go home and get back to work. The best part about all of this is it is free. Not 700 dollars to put your work in front of a group of people who are quite often there for their own greedy intentions and not yours.
I know some people say to network with everyone you can and develop these relationships. While I know that can be beneficial, in the end if your work ain't good, it ain't good and everyone else will see it. Make the work first and then start kissing ass. If it really is good, most people will kiss your ass.
Now don't get me wrong. Portfolio reviews can be helpful, if you are finished with the work and it truly is bad ass. There is a chance you might get somewhere following that avenue. There are many other avenues as well and usually the most creative ideas for promotion come from the most creative people and end up getting them the farthest.
A while back I worked for an artist who was a genius when it came to self promotion. He could spend a couple of hundred dollars or less and get his work in front of way more than five reviewers. Be creative and keep at it.
Now go out and find some local artists like yourself and start critiquing.
I promise that after this I will never again talk about the business of photography. From now on only images, ideas, and books.
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I came across this in the Martha Sandweiss book Print The Legend.
In the mid 1980's, Texas photographer Skeet McAuley traveled throughout the Southwest making color photographs that documented the ways in which contemporary Indian peoples, particularly Navajo and White Mountain Apache, lived within a modern landscape shaped by mining, tourism, and tract housing, as well as by long standing ceremonial practices. Explicit about making his project one of exchange, he collaborated with Mike Mitchell, a medicine man at the Navajo Community College (now Dine College), showing him copies of his work, taping his responses, and translating and transcribing these comments for publication in a book with the photographs themselves. Mitchell's readings of the pictures make starkly clear the culture-bound nature of photographic understanding and the capacity of photographs to convey different information to different readers. Indeed, he suggests, knowledge lies at least as much within the mind of the viewer as within the photograph itself. Where a non-native viewer might see the photograph of a concrete irrigation ditch and contemplate the impact of expanding populations on a fragile desert environment, Mitchell sees the photograph as a meditation on the holiness of water and its sacred place in the Navajo life. The picture of a tourist standing in a Monument Valley hogan bedecked with trinkets might trigger thoughts about the commodification of culture and the impact of tourism on Indian life. Mitchell seems not to even notice the young white tourist, seeing instead the spirituality of the hogan; "life lies inside, hope is inside, love lies inside." Photographs are not necessarily a universal form of communication, conveying the same thing to all viewers; what is clearly present and visible to him remains unseeable and unknowable to others. Photographs may reveal, but they can also conceal. Visual evidence is not the same as knowledge; indeed, knowledge comes first, a prerequisite to the interpretation and understanding of visual evidence. The historical photographs stored away in museums and libraries may reveal less about their subjects than some observers fear; they whisper their secrets most loudly to those who already know what they are.
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What can these two images tell us about the West? One will tell you the west is an ugly place and the other will tell you it is beautiful. Were the intentions of the photographers any different? And by different I mean were there final intentions, aka the viewers lingering thoughts on the image any different?
Ansel and Robert both wanted to save the West. They went about it in very different ways. Ansel made pictures that tugged at your heart strings and made you want to sign a petition to rope off some area from development. Robert made photos that made what we are doing seem so silly, ugly, and lonely. I often think of the photo of the silhouette in the window of the home and it makes me feel a million miles from everyone else on the planet.
A good friend of mine once said that every landscape photograph ever taken was about one of two things. Either paradise or paradise lost. In a way I could not agree with him more but part of me wants to know that there is another way of looking at things without having them boiled down to one or the other.
Can the landscape be something else? Can a landscape be beautiful if it doesn't inspire breathtaking emotion? Or is it just our view of the landscape and our constant guilt of destroying Eden? Before we fenced it all off and divided it up, it belonged to someone else. Although they had no concept of ownership, they did have a concept of boundaries and often squabbled over them.
Both Robert and Ansel used photography as a way of getting their point across. Ansel made technically complicated images that pushed the very limits of photography and created images that existed only in his imagination. Robert made images that pushed the envelope of what we refer to as landscape photography and at the same time questioned our path into the future. Both were successful in generating sympathy for their cause. Both were successful in generating beautiful images. Where does the future of landscape imagery lie when the environment of thinking has changed very little in the years since Robert or even Ansel?
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Following the events of yesterday's plane crash in the Hudson, it got me thinking about civilian photo-journalism. With all of the newspapers going down the proverbial toilet, they are desperate to save a buck here and there. All of us are. But then we have everyone on the planet carrying around a camera and desperate for their 15 seconds of fame. So up go the Twitter and Flickr posts, newspapers use them for free and here we are. Photos that have no monetary value. In the end this is going to screw us all, I promise you. When we give away everything for free, we completely devalue everything.
What I am driving at here is this. The blog. Here it is. Free and easily consumed by all. I am giving away these words but at the same time I am setting their value at 0. So now everyone can see what I have to say and for free. At the same time however I am guaranteeing that others will not ever want to pay for this sort of thing ever again. Hence the reasons newspapers and the press are hurting so bad. Why pay fifty cents for a newspaper to read the news when you can go online and read it all for free as well as fifty umpteen million different takes on the event ala the blogging world.
So why you may ask would I blog while complaining about the very same thing? That is a question that I have no real answer for.
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Fraction has been on my mind a lot lately.
Not so much because I just spent the last three weeks completely re-designing the entire site, but more because I wonder what the value in something like this is? I know the reason I started this was to give artists an alternative to showing their work in a traditional gallery. The website can go world wide and introduce the works of photographers in a way a gallery never could. For me this is an act of giving to my fellow artists.
So what then is the worry? Fraction has been seen by over thirty thousand viewers and the number of people who view it goes up exponentially every time. In a way I have accomplished my goal but at the same time I have had to give up a lot of my own time as an artist to do it.
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A few months ago I came across the work of Michael Eastman in a gallery in Santa Fe. The prints were enormous and beautiful, yet so large that I could never imagine owning one. So goes the trend in modern photography I suppose, but there were a few photos from that show that really stuck in my mind. When Rizzoli contacted me about reviewing the book I really wanted to see how the work translated from prints to book form.
I grew up in a town that could have easily been the central focus for this book. The stores are all closing down and everyone drives an hour or more away to shop now. The only thriving businesses are bars and the only places to fill the seats are churches. The mid-west is full of towns exactly the same, boarded up and closed for business.
When the book arrived I was a little surprised by the size. At 192 pages it seemed a little hefty. Not that I mind getting more bang for the buck, but quantity and quality do not always go hand in hand. Eastman has been photographing for the past thirty years on this project allowing for much fodder to choose from. Upon opening the book I found not only an enormous amount of pages, but even more photos.
The book’s layout is one of my greatest complaints. Quite often in the book there are two or three photos on one page with no border in between and butted right up against one another. While this does allow for multitudes of photos in the book it does not allow for many of the photos to be looked at without others distracting from it.
Eastman’s list of influences has to include many of the 20th century masters. He has an amazing eye and a superb talent for making great photos. His talent works especially well on the signage of yesteryear and the patterns created by them. These dilapidated words on the wall write our past and at the same time tell of where our future is headed.
The book is loaded down with nostalgia for times and places that have been forgotten. We all have a certain pang of remembrance for the America that has been lost and often romanticize it even though it is our own choices that have left it behind. The world of Interstates has bypassed Main Street and there is little we can do about it on our current cultural and social path. Eastman seems to be able to find wonder and beauty in this decay. The work is devoid of people, yet at the same time cannot live without them. The human presence is everywhere in the work. The booths in the diners, the chairs along the wall, and the writing on the blinds all have a museum-like quality about them.
In the end this book has less of an effect on me than seeing the work in person. It has nothing to do with the size of the images, in fact the large prints do less for me than the images in the book do, but the show contained a tightly knit group of images edited down from the book. The gallery group did a better job of creating emotion and informing the viewer than did the multitude of images within the book.
If your penchant is for a time gone by and a love for Main Street America then this may well be the book for you. Eastman has an amazing ability for seeing the architecture and covered framework of what once was America, a country of small towns all building and dreaming towards something greater.
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Are you starting to see what I am talking about? Does anyone out there have a few thousand extra dollars to give for a project?
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