civilized ku # 77 ~ naturalistic photography

Valentine tulips • click to embiggenOne of the single most mentioned 'critiques' of my ku and related pictures is about the corners of the pictures - what's with the vignette / blur/ darkness? ... you should use a smaller aperture for more edge sharpness ... or, the ever popular, I like everything but the corners. These observations come almost exclusively from the ranks of photographers, virtually never from the 'public' who view my work.

As I have explained a number of times, the corner blurring / darkening, aka vignette, is created in Photoshop by a series of actions that produce what I have labeled my Holga effect. The reason that I started to do this is both simple and complex;

1. simple - I like the results that the Holga camera produces (but not the extreme limitations of the camera itself).

2. complex - human vision is 'centrist' in nature. When the eye is motionless and fixed on whatever is in the center of the field of vision, all that is in our peripheral vision is very indistinct. We can see / sense changes in light, objects in motion, etc. in our peripheral vision but only with a very low degree of acuity.

The camera's gaze tends to render everything within its plane / field of focus equally distinct and sharply rendered no matter where it resides in the frame. This is especially true with digital cameras that use smaller than full frame sensors which effectively create extended DOF. Coming from a life of film and a variety of camera formats where DOF is narrow and selective focus is a technique that helps lend emphasis to the object of the camera's gaze, I wanted to use a technique that mimics some of the traditional film camera capabilities of selective focus / narrow DOF.

After a bit of screwing around (and thinking about item #1), my Holga filter was fait accompli. Since then, I have applied the filter in exactly the same manner and amount to all of my ku pictures.

You can imagine my surprise, when a few years later, I discovered that I had reinvented a very old wheel. While reading / researching the history of the medium, I came across a fellow named Peter Henry Emerson (I have mentioned him before), who, in 1889, in his Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, championed an approach to photography that was remarkably like my present day Holga filter.

He wrote, "... as has already been shown, the eye is very imperfect, and its images are not therefore perfect, and it could not form theoretically perfect images, even if the atmosphere were pure ether and nothing else, for there are other facts in nature which prevent this ... (a) central spot is a most important factor in the Fovea study of sight and art. For though the field of vision of the two eyes is more than 180 laterally, and 120 vertically, yet the field of distinct vision is but a fraction of this field, as we can all prove for ourselves ... the field of distinct vision depends on the central spots for the reason that the central spot differs anatomically from the rest of the retina by the absence of certain layers which we need not specify here. The absence of these layers exposes the retinal bacillary layer to the direct action of light. Helmholtz says "all other parts of the retinal image beyond that which falls on the central spot are imperfectly seen/' so that the image which we receive by the eye is like a picture minutely and elaborately finished in the centre, but only roughly sketched in at the borders".

For Emerson, the net result was that he made a lot of pictures with unsharp edges and corners.

Apparently, like Emerson, I want my pictures to mimic the human act of seeing and looking at that moment when the eye is fixed upon the thing it wants to see. For me, this is so because I want to draw attention, not only to what is the object of the camera's gaze, but also to the very act of seeing and looking itself.

That is, 'seeing and looking' as a human act, not as a photographic one.

civilized ku # 76 ~ more POD photo book info

Everson Museum - Syracuse, NY • click to embiggenI'm back in the saddle again from a trip to Syracuse, NY. The trip was the wife's gig - a work-related conference, I was just along for the ride.

The trip's low point - Syracuse, the city, (my birthplace) is mostly a desolate wasteland. If it were not for Syracuse, the University, the place would be totally desolate.

The trip's high points - spending time with the wife, the Everson Museum of Art, Light Work Gallery, and a walk (very muddy) through a cemetery looking for a specific monument - a life-size reclining German shepherd - that has a very vivid stature in my early childhood memories of many of my visits to my grand parent's house. My great-uncle took me on walks in the cemetery with his German shepherd and my mission was to find the German shepherd monument.

POD photo books continued -

Thanks to all who have responded both here and by email. To date, we have 15 volunteers.

There have been many questions concerned mainly with production issues - POD printer quality issues, how-to issues, etc. Over the coming week, I will be addressing all questions - feel free to add more to the pile.

During the interim, check out my POD sources of choice:

1) shutterfly.com - great service, very good and accurate image quality, good paper and cover materials, fast turnaround, and inexpensive (primarily due to many ongoing discount offers). caveat: be certain to turn off their VividPic setting which is default on all images - fortunately, it can be turned off globally within project albums.

2) sharedink.com - great service, extremely accurate image match and quality, many superb paper, end paper, and cover material choices, big book sizes, the option to get a single page press proof before printing, slower turnaround, expensive. be advised: you must request, by email, information on there Photographer Program - a 'hidden from the public' part of their website where all the goodies are found. There is a one-time charge to join the program although you can try it out for a free 30-day trial period.

Neither printer requires you to use their tools - all page creation can be performed on your own computer using Photoshop for full freedom image size / placement and text / type creation.

More to come.

civilized ku # 75 ~ whirling dervish-ness

Whirling dervish • click to embiggenThis past weekend Lake Placid was host to the Nature Valley / FIS Freestyle World Cup competition. Most of the world's top Olympic aerialists, men and women, competed in the Saturday night finals. The event will be televised on NBC this coming Sunday (Jan. 27) at 3:30pm. It's definitely worth a look to see the display of extreme / insane aerobatics these athletes perform - not to mention (if they televise it) the nasty / violent face-plant landing by one of the male competitors. FYI, he walked away from it.

Much thanks to Gordon McGregor for his link - on ku # 498 - the real 99.999% problem - to the 20×200 site. The marketing concept of 20×200 is very similar to one that I have been contemplating and discussing for awhile now - one large-sized print in very limited edition (2-4) at a 'high' price, one medium-sized print (of the same image) in a larger edition (15-20) at a 'moderate' price, and one small-sized print (of the same image) in a 'large' edition (150-250) at a very modest price.

The edition numbers and print prices that 20×200 has landed on are: large print edition of 2 @$2,000 ea.; medium print edition of 20 @ $200 ea.; small print edition of 200 @ $20 ea.. Interestingly, if each sized edition sells out, they each yield $4,000 in sales, $12,000 total.

Of the 3 photographers on the site, 1 (a mid-level 'name') has sold out all 3 editions (within 1 week), the other 2 (names that I do not recognize) have generated $4,300 - mostly from small-print edition sales.

I find these results to be very encouraging in as much as they lend a certain amount of credence to the idea that large-edition, reasonably-priced contemporary Fine Art photography will sell in decent numbers. There is, indeed, a market out there that is, for the most part, as yet untapped.

20×200's premise - large editions + low prices x the internet = art for everyone - is very close to the one that percolating in my head. I am delighted to see that someone in the contemporary Fine Art photography world (located in what is arguably the epicenter of the contemporary Fine Art photography world) is finally playing with the medium's inherent ability to make lots of originals.

My brain continues to grind on.

civilized ku # 74 ~ reflections on photography

Reflections • click to embiggenThis past weekend, I was introduced to the photography of Jeff Bark. Jeff Bark is a former NYC fashion photographer of considerable fame, repute, and fortune. Currently, he is an emerging 'darling' of the Fine Art World, Photography Division. His prints sell for $18,000 a pop and his first solo exhibition is now on display at the Michael Hoppen gallery in London.

The photo 'schtik' that Mr. Bark has employed to great art-critic acclaim is to spend a great deal of time and effort to make elaborate studio sets in which to stage nude models (see his Abandon series). The resultant pictures are said to "reinterpret old masters" (painting masters, not photography masters) with a care to lighting and exposure that "is more like the attentive solicitude of a still-life painter".

Even though "he works with a camera, film, and all of the accoutrements of mise-en-scene ... his medium for all visual purposes, is painting". He uses "a large-format camera, soft lighting and long exposures to create a painterly texture ... each (scene) constructed with all the care and skill of a Renaissance masterpiece."

Caveat - the following rant is not in any way, shape, or form about Jeff Bark's pictures. My first inclination from limited web and print publication viewing is to like them.

The Rant -

I don't know if Jeff Bark has any desire to be a 'painter' who uses a camera, film, etc., but it seems that notion, without a doubt, is the message that is being broadcast far and wide by the academic lunatic-fringe art critic / curatorial class. I swear, if I read one more review of photography wherein the only references to 'skill', 'care', 'lighting', 'exposure', etc. are those that are linked to painting / painters, my head is going to explode.

It seems rather obvious to me that the current class of art-history trained art critics and curators know little or nothing at all about the history of photography. If they did, they might actually recognize that Jeff Bark's photography references the past work of many of photography's masters, and, in the case of 'mise-en-scene', the past work of many film (motion picture) masters.

Come on guys, get your heads out of your dark and narrow painting-history asses. Take the time and make the effort to learn something about photography and its broad and detailed history. Then you might even be able to comment about how the 'skill', 'care', 'lighting', 'exposure', etc. in a photograph references the 'skill', 'care', 'lighting', 'exposure', etc. of current and past masters of photography.

Because, what the hell, in the case of "lighting' (as an example), the skill that Jeff Bark employs in the making of and that is exhibited in his prints are those of a modern 'master' working with electricity and multiple 'artificial' lights, with which he actually creates the quality of light that he wants to best meet his purpose. This is a very different skill from that of Renaissance masters who used available / found light to achieve their purposes.

And while you're at it, get some counseling to deal with your painting fetish. Photography is not painting. Photographers do not need to act or think like painters. The medium of photography is inherently different from painting - it, by its nature, is promiscuous and discursive. A photographer can make lots of pictures and produce them in limitless quantity. Neither of those facts, in and of themselves, diminishes in any way the value of a photograph as Art.

Both of these characteristics of the medium of photography - promiscuity and print proliferation - are (to the art critic / curatorial class) like the elephant in the living room. Nobody wants to admit that it exists, much less talk about it. But, in fact, these are the single most perplexing dilemmas, re: photography, that are facing the Fine Art World today -

Can the single act of making an individual work of Art that can then produce an endless number of originals - not 'copies', not 'reproductions' - and therefore be owned by countless individuals, be valued as Fine Art?

To date, the answer is an absolute and emphatic "No!"

No real reasons are given. It's just the historical momentum that since the ordained mediums of painting and sculpture only have one original - all the rest are just 'reproductions', therefore, it must also be so with photography. It seems very obvious to me that the only segments of the Art World that this idea serves is Art marketers and the art-history fetish critics and curators.

Pardon my French, but, f**k them. There has to be a better way.

civilized ku # 73 ~ a real triptych

A 'natural' triptych • click to embiggenAnother 'benefit' of my recent presentation to the SPS (in addition to yesterday's entry about megapixels) was the experience of looking at a large number - about 40 - of my pictures as prints as opposed to images on a monitor screen. It should go without saying that the difference in the total viewing experience is enormous.

Unless, a monitor / screen is your chosen medium of expression, there is absolutely no substitute for viewing a photograph in a print format. 'Print format' includes books, posters, photographic prints and, in the case of a few artists, large print transparencies on a light box.

A monitor is a very poor media for viewing photographs. First and foremost there is the very real issue of issues of color, contrast, brightness and size. At best, all you can view is an approximation of the real deal. I really have to laugh at the idea of critiquing a photograph on an online forum. Any and all comments regarding color, contrast, brightness, hue / saturation, shadow / highlight detail, sharpness, etc. is simply speculative and totally provisional.

As to issues of meaning, narrative, truth, etc. - the connoted in a photograph, 2 issues prevail.

First, there are the aforementioned issues of visual approximations - in as much as these things both effect and affect your complete perceptual apparatus to a considerable degree, your ability to discern the connoted is indeed impaired.

Second, and perhaps most important, is the simple fact that the web, in and of itself, is not suited to the act of contemplation. Any picture created with the intent of communicating intelligent ideas that are worthy of attention, appreciation and investigation requires contemplation. It demands repeated and prolonged viewings. It needs to be 'lived' with. Then, and only then, can a more complete and varied 'understanding' of the picture be had - that meaning and truth that resides beyond / beneath the 'surface' of the picture.

That is why my New Year's resolution is this - to have, by the end of 2008 (at the very latest), an 'actual', not 'virtual', photo gallery operational and open to the public (over 1 million people a year visit my area). A photo gallery, not just for my work, but for the work of others who are attempting to create pictures that communicate intelligent ideas that are worthy of attention, appreciation and investigation.

More on this tomorrow.

The group of pictures to the right are the only pictures I presented via projection during my 'lecture' at the SPS. The reason for this was similar to the above mentioned 'issues'. I knew from prior experience that what these
'Lecture' presentation images • click to embiggenpictures would look like projected was anyone's guess. It would depend entirely on room light, projector quality, the screen calibration of the laptop that ran the projection program, etc, etc.

True to form, they looked like crap. That is why they ran as 'wallpaper' during my 'lecture. Nothing in my 'lecture' depended upon an accurate perception of the pictures. I did provide a separate group of prints of these 12 pictures for viewing after the presentation so that the audience could see what they really looked like.

FYI, the group contains my 'best' photograph ever. Anyone care to venture a guess as to which one it is?

civilized ku # 72 ~ size is a relative thing

Size is relative • click to embiggenTwo good questions, relative to the size thing, emerged from yesterday's entry.

#1) from Jim Jirka; "If you don't want to go back to the big ass film, just take 40 digital images and stitch. That would allow you your large print size, without the costs of film ... Do you think that would be an alternative?"

I have been thinking along those lines but it seems that the problem with that is motion. If things move, and they do in the natural world - water, clouds, all manner of things in the wind - there is the problem of registration when you stitch. I have run into this problem previously and have been able, with a lot of hand work, to solve it to my satisfaction so I guess it could be a solution. Before I make the leap backwards(?) to film, I will be giving it a try.

#2) from Aaron Hobson, son of The Landscapist; "what about the logistics of these prints being sold??? that is my big question. Who has 25 feet of wall space for a photograph?"

I have often wondered about the same issues and I suspect very few people have that kind of space. I suspect that most of the really big photographs being produced are intended for a single audience - curators at museums or wealthy individuals who purchase and then donate them to museums in order to create an art-patron legacy.

But, to clarify my 'big' intentions, I am iclined to the notion of moderately big, which is to say (in the case of my square stuff), a print size of 4×4 feet. A size that, in the confines of an 'average' home, is very large but not so large as to require a single-purpose room to accommodate it.

civilized ku # 71 ~ a tree grows in Chelsea

The epicenter of Art photography • click to embiggenAs always, my recent trip to NYC's Chelsea neighborhood, the epicenter of Art Photography, has left me with a mixed bag of thoughts. One thought-thread in particular that has been repeatedly bubbling to the surface from the murky depths of my mind is that of size.

I have always been a fan of small-ish prints - 16×20 and smaller - because I like the feel of intimacy that comes from moving in close to a small-ish print. Not nose - on - the - print close, but just close enough to take it all in. This sensation also explains why I am so fond of photography books. A well designed and printed book takes on the feeling of a precious object to me.

That said, and of late, my recent trips to Chelsea have provided a constant exposure to a world of photographic prints that are big. Not big-ish, but really BIG. In this milieu if one of the print dimensions isn't at least 8 feet, then it's a small print, especially so when compared to, say, a 25 foot (or bigger) Jeff Wall or Gursky print.

Now I have to state that this exposure to really big has had its effect on my sensibilities - size can matter. Some photographs take on an entirely new perspective when presented really large. Sure, they can impress with their sheer size, but that alone is not the whole story. There is a kind of 'importance' that is imparted and photography's 'reality effect' really comes to the fore. More than ever, life seems to be staring you right in the face.

If you haven't had the opportunity to see really big photographic prints, you should make it a point to do so. Nothing you have seen in photography can prepare you for the experience.

And it is on this size related note that this specific thought-thread keeps coming to the fore.

I want to do big. But, what that means is nothing less than a return to film (nothing in the digital capture world can do really big) and what that means is a return to the world of film processing that has virtually disappeared. It also means a return to the world of dust and 'spotting'. Not to mention hauling around really big equipment and the fact that one exposure costs around $10.

Yikes. Or, as Hugo says, "Poop on a stick."

civilized ku # 70 ~ Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays

Slouching towards Armageddon • click to embiggenIt was the night before Christmas
and all through the house,
not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse ...

... or at least that's what my Landscapist statcounter tells me.

Nevertheless, in hopes that St. Nicholas (and some visitors) soon will be here, I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday. Thanks for stopping by.