civilized ku # 98 ~ but no better
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 07:54AM 
;)
Grilled sausage smoke • click
to embiggenAt the risk of beating a man when he's already down (in this case, dead) I would like to bring your attention to this quote from Galen Rowell:
One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only to make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.
Let me be up front about this - IMO, I think that the photography of Galen Rowell - he's one of the leaders of a genre of landscape photography that I call The Screaming Colorists - is absolutely without any merit whatsoever beyond the WOW factor. Period.
I have always thought that his pictures are the ones that Sally Eauclaire might have been writing about when she opined (in The New Color Photography):
a school of slick, sensationalized "creative" photography that has saturated the public consciouness of the medium for the past quarter century .... many photographers ... consider visual and/or sentimental excesses as keys to expressivity ... their lust for effect is everywhere apparent. Technical wizardry amplifies rather than recreates on-site observations...they burden it (photographs) with ever coarser effects. Rather than humbly seeks out the "spirit of fact", they assume the role of God's art director making his immannence unequivical and protrusive.
That said, since I have discovered the above Rowell quote, I have come to new-found respect for the man - at least he was honest about his proclivity for photographic untruth and distortion. He made it perfectly clear that picturing the real world is on the minus side of things. The real world was just not good enough for him.
Some have asked why I have such an utter disregard for The Screaming Colorists and their legions of sappy imitators and my answer is simple (putting aside the fact that Rowell had divorced himself from the medium's most unique characteristic - its intrinsic relationship to the real). By, as Eauclaire states, saturating the public consciousness with slick, sensationalized landscape pictures, they have helped spawn a public consciousness that salivates at the sight of nature, albeit a nature made up of only picturesque subject matter - prodigious crags, rippling sands, flaming sunsets, etc.
In that process, what makes up the remaining 99% of the real world of nature - you know, the un-sensational stuff that surrounds us everyday - loses its meaning in relationship to the notion of conservation. In the public's mind, the only thing worth conserving is the picturesque. If we just set aside a few (in the greater scheme of things) natural "monuments", we've done the conservation thing.
I don't know who to fault more for this consciousness - the The Screaming Colorists who encourage it or simpleminded gullibility on the part of the public who embrace it.
Reader Comments (11)
I think it is important to make clear that Galen Rowell was first and foremost a commercial photographer. As we all know, the commercial world is all about faking what's real and important in order to sell stuff. What made Galen Rowell great in my eyes was his skills as a mountaineer/climber and expedition photographer. His ascent of Trango is legendary!
Well, this is an interesting point. While i agree with you and think that it is perfectly legal for an artist to have strong visions (i am not suggesting you go out and kill somebody for that :-) on the contrary this is what i have less appreciated in Euclaire's book. An art (or photography) critic is not asked to formulate rules or to establish the way the world must be looked at.
However i strongly appreciated the whole book.
I happen to like Galen's work, but I totally agree with you about the "screaming colorist" movement. His work, perhaps alongside National Geographic photo editors in the 70's and 80's, is largely responsible for today's obsession with nature "portraiture."
Part of this popularity is because it is easy. It is easy to define, easy to replicate (in terms of mechanics), and easy to understand. There is no subtlety. There is just one, simplified message.
I never heard about this guy Galen Rowell. Seeing his photographic work I admire his physical effort (look at me sometimes I complain for working in a drizzle for half an hour to shoot a picture),
I really admire his climbing up mountains ect. to make these wonderful esthical compositions in photography.
But that's what I dislike very strongly about his photos, it's like as if Nature is just a game of beauty and peace, But Nature is rough! For instance: In the last couple of weeks quite a lot of mountainclimbers where killed climbing the K2 in the Himbalayas. Pure Nature is rough and very dangerous.
The photography of Galen Rowell constantly denies this fact.
I think the oversaturated effect is all wet.
Today he would be accused of playing with Photoshop.
Do you really think Ansel Adams was only reflecting reality exactly? I am curious, though, where you think Rowell faked things, and how something utterly mundane like your accompanying photo is superior in any way to my Aunt Sally, much less Rowell. I fail to see how taking color slides of mountain scenes is not the real world; I guess taking crappy pictures and square-cropping is reality. And BTW, your statement "At the risk of beating a man when he's already down (in this case, dead)" is the most tasteless thing I've read in a while; you are hardly in a position to beat Rowell down. Perhaps you are a big fish in your own pond.
I've read your blog occasionally, but goodbye.
"The screaming colorists" must the same group of people I've been calling "Velvia Demons" :-)
Mark, I have to ask: Do you eat anything other than salad or raw vegetables? Because some of us like our meals prepared to our tastes. And some of us enjoy our images prepared to our tastes as well.
Now, there are those who take a raw/whole foods approach and I'm happy for them if they're happy with their choices. But I don't feel the need to insult them for having preferences that differ from mine.
Hehe, that's not much of a controversy, but at least a tiny one it is.
Uhh ... basically I'm on your side, if for nothing else, then for the fact that my subjects are among the 99%. Still, I don't care a lot. It's a case of live and let die. Fashions come, fashions go, ultimately this is important for the art market, not for the artist.
Btw: brilliant composition :)