civilized ku # 13 - which came first?

Which came first? • click to embiggen "My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished." ~ Robert Frank

civilized ku # 14 ~ what would Henri Cartier-Bresson have done?

Information • click to embiggenWould H.C.-B. have been content to sit and wait for the 'decisive moment'? Would he have taken lots of moments and then made the most decisive one?

I use to think that Photoshop hadn't changed things too much - it just put the traditional darkroom on steriods. Now, I'm beginning to think that' it has changed everything. To paraphrase the Tyrell Corporation motto - 'More Human Than Human - we can now make pictures that are 'More Real Than Real'.

The man behind the curtainn looms ever larger.

civilized ku # 13 - the morning-after hangover

A Space in NYC • click on photo to embiggen it One of the most profound impressions that I took away from the Wall exhibition was a haunting comment uttered by my good friend Robert (I don't think he owns a camera). Interestingly, the comment was not about the Wall exhibition.

He, Aaron and I spent over 3 hours perusing the 41 Wall photographs. The photographs were very engaging and engrossing. They engendered much discussion, rumination and postulation - my apologies to Robert and Aaron for discussing, ruminating and postulating my way through the last quarter of the exhibition with a lovely and engaging lady from Dublin, Ireland (the wife isn't reading this, is she?).

After the Wall thing, we drifted down to the permanent photography exhibition space where there was an extensive exhibition of photography from masters past and present. Assuming one has paid attention to the history of the medium and its movements and periods, it was more of a nostalgic trip down memory lane, with a few surprises thrown in, than anything else.

It was the end of this exhbit, which we breezed through in relatively short order, that Robert stated simply that "sometimes there's just too much." Now, there certainly was an element of how-much-fried-chicken-can-you-eat? to his utterance, but his point was that a certain numbness can set in in the face of so much'good' photography. This from a guy who does own a computer but, other than an ocassional visit to this blog and few photo exhibits now and again, he spends about as much time on the web looking for photography blogs/websites as I do skinning ardvarks.

His point was well taken and has stayed with me like an irritating bee in my bonnet. Upon some reflection I know why. The few surprises which I encountered on my photo trip down memory lane came from the work of a few modern 'masters' and virtually every one of those 'masters' was making not taking photographs. I was definitely captivated by much of the 'fictive' reality effect that the photographers were creating and presenting, much in the vein, albeit a minor one, being mined by Wall.

This has left me a bit shaken, photography-wise - Is it enough to 'just' be taking pictures rather than making pictures? I now have a firmer grip on the difference between an 'artist-who-uses-photography' and a 'photographer-who-is-an-artist'. I am beginning to feel that there are very few of one and too many of the other.

I am also beginning to understand the Art-Worldist notion that there actually is a modern-day 'photo ghetto' out there. One which consists primarily of the work of those who take rather than make pictures - and have no doubt about it, the 'ghetto' includes, in the opinion of the the Art-Worldists, some of the most recent Szarkowski-era'heavyweight' picture takers in the medium.

Perhaps this is the true import of Wall's methodology and his photography (which is almost an aside). Now that the world is awash with excellent picture takers, the time has come for picture makers to move to the fore.

Update on Wednesday, March 21, 2007 at 05:15PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Ana wrote: "...One of the things that I've realized has been cooking in the back of my head this past semester has been developing a sense of my own agency as a photographer. This is very much a revelation for me, coming as I did from the nature photography genre, which generally speaking doesn't tend to have that sense of agency."

Update on Monday, March 26, 2007 at 02:52PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Tom Connor wrote: "This distinction between "making" & "taking" is useful to think about, but it can become confusing. Do you mean the photograph must be created from scratch, as a painter creates a painting from a bare canvas? Or that it must be generated from the needs/visions/obsessions of the photographer -- perhaps as they can be found in the world? Because, while the 1st is very much in favor with curators & art buyers right now (Crewsden, Wall et al) it can often, be empty & pedantic in my opinion(see my review of Wall's MOMA show here. Whereas work drawn from the rich serendipity of real life can often be deeply personal. I would hate to think that in order to "make", as opposed to "take" images, artists need to absent themselves from the endlesss, wondrous flow of life."

ku # 464/civilized ku # 13

Diningroom window view • click on photo to embiggen it
Spring-like melt on day 1 of Daylight Saving Time • click on photo to embiggen it

Recently, I have become enamored of this window in our diningroom. For whatever reason, it seemd to offer more than a window on the world. As a matter of fact, it really isn't so much a 'window on the world' as it is a window on the bush-world outside of the diningroom.

The gnarly twisted cedar 'bush' that lives next to the house presses right up against the window and creates a kind of 'filter' through which light trickles and streams in broken shafts and pin-pricks. It also hosts rain droplets, ice and snow, as well as a few birds now and again. I swear that, as a weather indicator, it's more dependable and whole lot more enjoyable than the thermometer we have outside the kitchen window.

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."

civilized ku # 3 - The intrinsic perniciousness of camera club and academic views of photography

Potatoes and plant amongst other things • click on photo to embiggen itIntially, I was going to use the word "evil" instead of "pernicious" but thought better of it. After all, camera club-wise having a hobby and enjoying the making of things (in this case, photographs), isn't a bad thing. And, while photography-wise academia is prone to some wretched intellectual excesses, I'd rather live in a world with it than in one without it because, if you can tolerate sifting through and deciphering the obtuse jargon, there are some pearls of wisdom to be harvested.

But, that said, it's my opinion that both schools obfuscate the notion of Art.

Simply put, the camera-club mindset seems to sublimate/bury the emotion of Art behind a wall of technique/craft. The academic mindset, with its obsessive addiction to intellectual concept, seems to suck all the emotion out of Art. In both cases, I am talking about Art, Photography Division.

And, in both cases, I am talking about emotion. Neither school seems to deal very well with emotion. It seems to me that camera-clubbers don't recognize any emotion other than "wow" and that academia is just flat out suspicious of it. Either way, I think the operative word is "fear".

Why "fear"? Well I think that what they both fear about the notion of Art is best expressed by the famous sportswriter, Red Smith, who stated (about his Art), "Writing is easy. All you do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein"

Featured Comment: Paul Butzi wrote, "I once attended a talk by Amy Freed. Someone asked her about support she'd received as an artist. She responded "The support I've been given has enabled me to take the biggest risk an artist can take - the risk of being understood."

All that obfuscation is just a way of avoiding taking that big risk."

civilized ku # 2

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Be careful what you wish for. I can't say that I really "wish" to be labeled as an Observationist, I'm just sorta rumaging around in the big and tall guys department, trying on suits and standing in front of the fun-house "mirrors" to see what fits (and looks good). The "mirrors" (all of you out there) tell me that I'm not going to be able to buy off the rack - that makes sense since my dad always said I had champagne taste and a beer wallet.

In any event, on the topic of "careful", there was a FEATURED COMMENT on yesterday's post that asked, "Does being an observationist mean you will notice things like when I get my hair cut? ~ signed, the wife.

I noticed the comment first thing this AM - before coffee but after my AM trip to the bathroom - so I wasn't entirely with it. Heading downstairs to get coffee, I passed by the wife in the hall amd simply muttered "No", and I kept on moving. She responded with, "No, what?", and I kept on moving.

In the kitchen, a few sips of coffee later, she stated that she hadn't asked me any questions. I countered with a "yes you did", to which, and without a moment's hesitaton, she responded, "I thought your blog was intended to encourage conversation."

Jeeezzz. So I kept on moving.

And, hey Mary, thanks for piling on.

civilized ku # 1

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Shadings and hints of another reality outside my "window".

I am surrounded by landscape. After all, I live in a park which is the largest wilderness in the eastern US - bigger than the state of Vermont, bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, The Grand Canyon and The Everglades parks combined. Traveling by car from the NE edge to the SW edge of the park, the trip takes 3.5-4 hours. It's big.

It's also diverse; 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, 3,000 lakes and "ponds", 46 mountains over 4,000 ft., as well as being home to approximately 120,000 humans who are spread out in 100 small villages and hamlets. About half of the park is protected as "forever wild" public land. Private lands/development are strictly controlled by the Adirondack Park Agency.

Needless to say, there are about one zillion photo opportunities. For most of the last 4 years I have been scratching the surface of the natural landscape photography-wise, that is, if you can call my ku body of work comprised of over 450 photographs "scratching the surface" (and I do). Recently, I have felt compelled to photograph more evidence of the hand of man in the Adirondack landscape in order to illustrate man's relationship with the natural evironment here in the park. These photographs are being created under the name of "urban" ku, although the word "urban" is not really very apt. Perhaps "civilized" ku would be better.

In any event, I am now expanding my idea of landscape to include photographs such as the one posted here. There is just too much life going on to create photographs that only play only to a particular audience or genre. This relates to my previous post wherein I asked, what kind of photographer are you? As I slip slowly from Landscapist to Documentarian, I think that I will slip a little further and become simply an Observationist.