urban ku # 34/35 - history in the making?

Betty Beaver's Truck Stop & Diner • click on photo to embiggen itIf you have made the effort of late to visit my ku portfolio, you should have noticed that my gaze has turned from so-called "pure" landscape (no sign of humankind) to that which is much more biased towards elements of humankind, albeit EOH within the natural landscape of the Adirondacks.

At first, the decision to do so was twofold - 1st) photography-wise, I consciously wanted to "balance" my landscapes of the Adirondack's natural world with ones which reflected the human presence. After all, 100,000+ people live here in the Adirondack Park, the largest wilderness in the eastern US. 2nd) subconsciously, I was just drawn to EOH. Upon reflection, I think that the reason for this is rather simple - now that I/we have lived here for a good while, the Park has morphed from a place I/we visit into the place we live, aka, home.

It has also occurred to me (filed under, there's-nothing-new-under-the-sun) that I am also toiling in the time-honored tradition of some of the early pillars of Adirondack photography such as Seneca Ray Stoddard, Henry M. Beach and host of other so-called postcard photographers (although Stoddard was much more than a postcard photographer).

From the earliest days of photography until the 1950s, it seems that every Adirondack village of any size had its very own "postcard" photographer. Actually that's a bit of a misnomer, in as much as the photographers did photography of all kinds. The sheer volume of photographs that these guys (I know of no women) created is staggering. Much of it is still around in either institutional or private collections. I would not be surprised if the Adirondack region was the single most postcarded place in the world.

In any event, it has started to dawn on me that I might be creating a body of Adirondack photography which may, in time, be on par with those early photographers. It's an exciting thought. One that I will now keep in mind as I continue to "balance" my collection of Adirondack photography, although at this point in the process, a fair question to ask is, where are the people?

PS - Speaking of home and people, I couldn't be more happy and pleased than I am sharing the Adirondacks with people like Betty Beaver (yes, those are 3 dimensional assets). She runs a respectable place. If you're in the neighborhood, you should stop in for a visit - just off exit 32, on I87. FYI, Betty Beaver's partner, Vincent Gramuglia, has stated that "[t]here is nothing provocative about Betty Beaver. It’s not as bad as Hooters, and remember that the registered (New York) state animal is the beaver and if they all looked like Betty, the woods would be full of hunters." Aahhh, America, the beautiful.

civilized ku # 12 ~ godzilla gets knocked on his ass

A pause to adjust my bearings • click on photo to embiggen itJeff Wall, the artist who uses photography, has stated; "Believing in the specialness of what you are photographing is a disaster. Then you think that the photograph will be good because of what is in it. Cezanne taught me that is not true. He expunged any attachment to the subject matter, except what he brought to it. In the painting he would bring it back to life. Only by believing that his painting it would enliven it could he make it happen."

As I was reading this in yesterday's NY Times Magazine's cover article - The Photographer's Ambition: Where Jeff Wall has taken the photograph, godzilla fell off his perch and warm late-day sunlight streamed in throught the window. Confused and conflicted, I set down the magazine, grabbed my constant companion - my camera, not the wife - and pictured.

The pro-filmic moment possessed no particular specialness. Yes, there was nice warm light striking one of our new chairs (in the tv/family room) but I expect that to happen at least 100+ times in the coming year. Sure, godzilla had rearranged himself to a postion of unexpected prominence and the wife's jacket will probably never again hang on a dining room chair in exactly the same manner. And true enough, this particular moment of Hobson-Kelleher-McGannon household detritus truthiness will never be quite the same, but, at that specific moment, I was looking for specialness, I just needed to conceptualize and hold on to something real.

Why? Because I knew that no matter how large I make my prints (Wall makes his, rather fittingly, wall-size) I will never sell them for a $1,000,000 a pop - Wall's current gallery price. To be more precise, the bulk of Wall's work consists of wall-sized cibachrome transparencies which are displayed on correspondingly wall-sized light boxes.

I also knew that I will never have the luxury to construct a reality (apparently one possessing no specialness) like Wall's The Flooded Grave - Wall described the 'event' of this work as "a moment in a cemetery. The viewer might imagine a walk on a rainy day. He or she stops before a flooded hole and gazes into it and for some reason imagines the ocean bottom. We see the instant of that fantasy, and in another instant it will be gone."

The Flooded Grave
The Flooded Grave 1998–2000 © The artistwas completed over a two-year period, and photographed at two different cemeteries in Vancouver as well as on a set in the artist's studio. It was constructed as a digital montage from around 75 different images.

I also now know that I will never be educated as an art historian (as Wall was) in order to make photographs that conceptually and by the physicallity of their sheer size pay homage to and imitate the medium of painting. Thank god. Although, I must say, I envy Wall's ability to make a very fine living from producing only 135 photographs over a span of about 25 years.

Now, to be sure, I like some of Wall's stuff, but I really deplore the underlying premise that to make it big (pun intended) in the Art world, photography must mimic painting. Haven't photographers, as opposed to artists using photographic apparatus, toiled for generations to establish photography as a medium with its own unique vernacular and one worthy of its own unique standing alongside the "traditional" arts?

Sure enough, Wall is using much of that vernacular to create an illusion of photography's ability to render a reasonable facsimile of reality. And, sure enough, by his controlled fabrication of the pro-filmic moment (rather than "finding" it in the "real" world) he sets the mind a-thinking about photography's truthiness conventions - oh my, oh my, the conceptual irony of it all - but 25 years and a million bucks a pop to figure that out?

Hell, for a mere $9.95, Steve Edwards will set you straight on that notion in his book Photography: A Very Short Introduction.

See more of Jeff Wall's work, and/or, you can read about his current show at MOMA.

Addendum: The more I view A pause to adjust my bearings, the more I am drawn to Steve and Ana's give and take on urban ku # 32; Steve wrote: "I want to make photographs that I would appreciate even with no memory of the time or place they were captured."

Then Ana wrote: "That remark resonated with me in an interesting way because one of the wonderful things about photographs or any art, really is that the work may have no relation to my personal experience and yet when I see them they become symbolic of a time and place in my life. They're like a passage in a book that was written by someone else and yet upon reading they encapsulate perfectly something in my own experience."

Why does this exchange come to mind? Because, although A pause to adjust my bearings is a "passage" in my book, I think that I have pictured a moment which, while it has specificity for me, captures a "unviversalness" (dispite the referent's lack of specialness) that others might "appreciate even with no memory of the time or place [it was] captured".

Featured Comment: this comment came via the emailman - C. Butler wrote; "Blov'
I took a look at one of Wall photos at his site.
The one with the torn or sliced bed.
My quick response is this - "HUH?"
Not to massage your ego, but, the composition
of the photo that you took on a "whim", {godzilla gets knocked on his ass}
is far better than that thrown sh-- I saw on the the 'Wall'."

publisher's comment: Thank you, Clarence. The ego has so noted it.

Featured Comment: this comment also came via the emailman - Lee Bacchus wrote; "Personally,I feel Wall will one day claim equal space in the history of art alongside Breughel, Bernini, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Valesquez, Manet, Goya, Cezanne and many other "masters." The criteria here being (other than his own artistic rigor and craft) the "wholeness" of his experience (by that fuzzy term I mean his faithfulness to "what he has seen" — or "the painter of modern life", as he borrowed from Baudelaire) and his large role in changing the course of art following the advent of modernism and the avant-garde."

urban ku # 33

Sunset with horses and Jay Mt. • click on photo to embiggen itThe wife and I were out wandering around yesterday looking for property. In our travels, just down the road a piece from our house, we came across this little number, pro-filmic moment-wise - quite serene and pastoral.

Post pro-filmic moment and after picturing, we moved farther on down the road a piece to have dinner in the oldest inn in the Adirondacks (proudly serving the traveler since 1808). In its heyday the inn had a very large hotel which played host to 2 US presidents and to John Brown's wife while his body laid in state across the street in the county seat (which, obviously, was before his body lay a-mouldering in the grave at his homestead in Lake Placid).

FYI - thruthelookingglass and member's gallery

It's time to take The Landscapist to the next level.

I like my home here on squarespace and it appears that the audience does as well. Each week every stat category goes up - more pages views, more unique visits, more returning visitors, more new participants comment-wise, etc. It makes the effort and time that I'm putting into this thing well worth it.

So, here's the plan - I have decided to create a Member's Section (module) and a Print (sales) Gallery (module) here on squarespace. The Member's Section will, for the moment, be fee-free. Hopefully, over time, the Print Gallery will subsidize any additional costs associated with the Member's Section.

Journal Entry privileges - posting photographs with text - in the Member's Section will be granted by invitation or approved application for privileges.

My criteria for granting privileges is simple. First preference goes to those with bodies of work/works-in-progress - the number photographs in the work is not important. The notion of pursuing a coherent objective which is defined by even the simplest of artist's statement is. Bonus points awarded to those who are also willing to "exhibit" a minimum of 6 photographs from the work in the Print Gallery at real-world prices.

In my perfect world, each photographer with Member's Section privileges would also be exhibiting in the Print Gallery.

So there you have it. Invitations are going out SHORTLY. If I don't already know your work, you won't receive one. So, if you don't receive one but are interested in this, PLEASE APPLY (send me an email).

As always, any feedback is appreciated.

ku # 463

Is it still possible that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Was it ever possible?

ku # 462 - propaganda and death threats

Cracked ice on the Au Sable • click on photo to embiggen it"Culture seems increasingly colonized by an advertiser's version of a retouched world ... [p]hotography now looks less like a copy or trace than a total fabrication, or a "reality effect" that purveys a fictive world ... advertising and cognate publicity forms have assumed the central role ... these profoundly ideological images demand serious attention ... attention to the fictive constitution of photographs ... becasue the common-sense conception tends to see only the objects and people depicted in the image and overlooks both the interventions of the photographer and the specific character of the apparatus ... [t]he resulting conflation of photographs with the pro-filmic event leaves the viewer open to propaganda of all kinds." - Steve Edwards ~ Photography: A Very Short Introduction

So, this is the core of my distain for pretty landscape photographs - they are propaganda of the most insidious kind. Insidious because the bulk of the Tom, Dick and Harriets out there do not pay attention to the "interventions of the photographer and the specific character of the apparatus". Indeed, they see only the (fictive) places, the "idealized forms" of the photographer's propaganda. They seek a respite from modern times in these "advertiser's versions" of retouched Gardens of Edens.

These photographs deny and obfuscate the reality that virtually every square inch of the natural world is a repository for the deadly detritus cast off by the culture of consumption. Every pro-filmic Adirondack moment that I picture is polluted by "invisible" air-born particulates which eminate from my neighbors to the west. The entire Adirondack biosphere is severely impacted by it.

Ever wonder why I choose to frame my ku with a fictive black film-edge border? One reason is to create a "requiem-esque" conotation - it's part of my apparatus - because, although I consider most of my referents to be beautiful, I also want to temper that beauty with the notion that the referents are living with a death threat.

FYI

I have added a NEW Photo Gallery - some urban ku (Adirondack style)

urban ku # 32 - what might Mr. Jones think?

Window ice • click on photo to embiggen itIn his book, Photography: A Very Short Introduction, Steve Edwards gives an ever so brief afterword-nod to digital photography. It's a very brief, new-day's-a-comin' kind of thing in which he raises a few questions and suggests a few implications about the future of photography in the digital age.

But, the one "issue" he barely addresses is the one that interests me the most - the means of making digital photographs has been placed in the hands of every Tom, Dick and Harriet on the planet (or seemingly so). I don't think that it's a stretch to say that more photographs (1.5 zillion more?) are being made now than in any time in photographic history.

Hell, in my own house, there are now 4 digitally equipped "shooters". The wife, who was the recipient of my largesse (in the form of her first ever digitial camera) at Xmas, has probably taken more photographs since the first of the year than she has over the past 10 years. Then there's the college boy, the senior-itis girl and even little Hugo has his own digital camera (real, not a toy) and flickr site.

Pictures, pictures, everywhere.

My interest in this phenomena is simple - why? What's the deal? What is the fascination with taking pictures? Is there something in the human psyche that cries out for real-time verification of one's self and one's surroundings?

Or is it that living in a media/image saturated culture develops in one the need to be seen (literally and figuratively) as part of the media?

With all of the hoopla surrounding the truth/not truth issue regarding photography, it almost seems that for many, if not most, nothing is real unless it's photographed - see, I really was there, I really did that, that's really me. And all of this is not reserved for after-the-fact memories, it's real-time - take a picture and everyone rushes to see it on the LCD. Take a picture of Mt. Rushmore and everyone wants to immediately see the picture of it even though they're standing right in front of it.

I find it a bit weird when someone takes a photo of little Hugo and then, when viewing the LCD image mere moments later, states, "Isn't he so cute." Again, it is almost that his precence isn't enough to establish his cute-quotient, it needs to be documented.

And there's that word again - documented. Most of the shooters I am talking about are making documents not pictures.

Nevertheless, it all causes me to think that -

...Something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Featured Comment: Sean wrote; "surely the main issue is to what degree the digital can still be regarded as photography (writing with light)... how much alteration can occur before the image is mere illustration (synthetic) rather than photograph?"

publisher's response: We're still "writing with light", but the light-sensitive substrate/material, which is still enclosed in a light-tight box behind a lens, is different. As for illustration v photograph, certainly the techniques with which one can manipulate an image are much more accessible and easier/faster to use, but...as a film-based example, are Jerry Uelsmann's photographs still photographs?

Featured Comment: Ana wrote; "I think it goes right back to the every photo is a death thing --a lot of the desire to photograph is the desire to fix history. In the normal course of events the photograph can be expected to outlast the moment and even ourselves and I think a lot of the impetus behind rushing to view the photo that was just taken is this awareness that 'this is what will be remembered'."