Melissa ~ 31 days - meaning #4

To be honest, I just think these two look good together. I suppose the photo of me could be a "what the heck happened to the nice weather" look.(to coincide with the left photo) Really, it's just a "there's a huge effing spider staring at me and I'm going to go lock myself in my bedroom" look. I could not be serious at all for my sp(spider distraction), so this one will have to do.


Inspired. This is what happens when watching the new NIN dvd all afternoon. Thanks Kat! ;)

A simple girl taking simple pictures. That's how Melissa, who hails from the UK, describes herself in her flickr profile - nothing more, nothing less. Simple.Aaron directed our attention to Melissa in his comment on urban ku # 40. He thought (apparently) that her work fit into Ian P.'s notion of 'art unit'- picture + words (Featured Comment - urban ku # 39) and Sean's notion about diptychs as a means of creating meaning (comment - urban ku # 40).

In any event, it appears that Melissa is going to attempt, in her flickr set 31 Days, to create a diptych a day for 31 days. Typically her diptychs are accompanied by diary-style words.

I'll leave it to you to determine if the words add meaning or not. Either way, let me/us know what you think.

PS: under the heading of The More You Know, The More You Know Department, it's interesting to consider that Melissa's 31 Days photographs, irrespective of her simple intentions, are, in fact, part and parcel of the filckr paradigm. I'm not going to begin to try to decipher that idea (I'm certain that someone in academia is already doing so right now) but the flickr idea of groups of flickr buddies, who find each other via key words which describe pictures and subsequently use pictures as an integral part of their communication, is fascinating.

Update on Friday, March 9, 2007 at 11:33AM by gravitas et nugalis

An unforunate end to the 31 Days project. from Melissa: Unfortunately, the 31 days along with self portraits in general have gone down the pooper shooter. :( This afternoon while doing my daily errands, I was approached by a guy who specifically traveled up from London to see me. He printed out one of my photos that had a specific tag, and then decided he would just wander around looking for me. Creepy stuff.(I suppose this is what happens when posting pics on a well known site) Anyways, it got me a bit shaken up and that's the reason behind not carrying on with the 31 days.

Meaning # 3

Speaking of meaning, what the hell does this photograph mean?

Update on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 02:45PM by gravitas et nugalis

publisher's comment: Ian P.'s response is a topic unto itself, so here it is in its entirety.

Featured Comment Ian P. wrote: I'll bite. To pick one particular definition of meaning...meaning: the idea that is intended to be conveyed

Presumably the photograph itself cannot form intent, so immediately we have the question of 'intended by whom'? At least three possibilities come to my mind here. The photographer (assuming that there was one, see later), an editor/image selector (for example if this is a photograph to show as news then there probably was a selector involved), or the poster (being one Mark Hobson)? There could well be other possibilities, and any combination of these possibilities could in fact be a single person.

Pooling from these three possibilities we could speculate at a number of ideas that were intended to be conveyed.

One idea that might have been intended by the image taker is the idea that a particular event took place. If we assume that this idea was the intent, then without any further context there are a number of things we might be willing to infer about the event from the image, but not many: Clearly an event took place somewhere in which someone was lying on the ground with a man with a gun standing over him, and a crowd of people standing behind the man with the gun. It looks like some of the crowd nearest the man lying on the ground were taking photographs or video using cell phones. Judging from the lighting this event took probably took place during daylight hours in sunlight.

Further speculation about the event without further information gets more difficult. Perhaps the man lying on the ground is sufficiently interesting that some of the crowd made the effort to take photos. However the event may have been staged, perhaps the photograph is a still shot from a movie set.

If the intent is judged from the point of view of an editor as the image selector then there is less that I would be willing to speculate about. It may have been selected to convey more realism to a news story. It may have been selected to convey the idea that the editor is good at choosing interesting photographs and knows some good photographers. It may have been selected to generate thoughts of interest about an up coming movie...

The intent of last possible intendor is perhaps the most interesting. From the context I would be willing to speculate that the image is intended to generate ideas about meaning within images and the role that context has on the meaning within an image.

In this context it is possible that the intended ideas have nothing what-so-ever to do with the actual image being displayed. For example, the image could have been selected at random from a large pool of images (such as available on the web) and displayed here through the use an automated script, so that the content of the image is completely unconnected to the selection of the image. It could even be possible, if rather unlikely, that the image itself was taken by some automatic process, for example an unusually high quality security camera, dumped into the universe of images available on the web and then selected completely at random using a script. If we were to find out that this was the case, then the meaning we would then form about the image really comes from the process and has no connection at all to the content of the image.

I have problems with the whole idea of meaning within art, I am not sure that I agree that the purpose of art is to convey ideas from artist to viewer so much as having to do with the generation of ideas in the viewer. That is, I do not like to think of art in terms of what is the idea that the artist is intending to convey, but rather I prefer to think in terms of what ideas or thought processes the artist is generating within the viewer. (I prefer thought process to ideas, and I am thinking of thought processes as being something less tangible than ideas, although idea is often defined in terms of thought processes. In a sense I am thinking of ideas as thought processes that can be thought about and communicated, and assuming that there are thought processes that cannot be or are very difficult to directly think about and communicate). Since the context in which a piece of art appears has an effect on the thought processes that the piece generates, context is an integral part of art.

The Right Reverend James W. Bailey, C.S.A. (Contemporary Southern Artist)

Right out of the box you just have to be intrigued by a guy who claims to be 'Burning the Flesh Off Modern Art' as The Right Reverend James W. Bailey does on his multimedia blog Black Cat Bone.

On his blog, The Right Reverend writes; "The Right Reverend James W. Bailey is an experimental artist, photographer and imagist writer from Mississippi. His art focus includes Littoral Art Projects that explore the fleeting moments of cross-cultural communicative intersections; film projects, including the short film, "Talking Smack"; "Wind Painting", a unique naturalistic art practice inspired by the vanishing Southern African-American cultural tradition of the Bottle Tree; street photography centered on the hidden cultural edges of inner city New Orleans life; and "Rough Edge Photography", a hard-edge non-digital photographic style that celebrates the death of 35mm film through the burning, tearing, slashing and violent manipulation of chemically developed negatives and prints."

Check it out. I love it, but be forewarned, 'Burning The Flesh Off Modern Art' is not an activity for the hidebound traditionalist.

The Colorama - early Jeff Wall-isms?

The Art World has obviously given Jeff Wall the Keys to the Kingdom, but where was it for the last 57 years?

It's been that long since Kodak started hanging pro-filmic constructions - 18 × 60-foot Coloramas - that would have positively dwarfed Wall's "large" photographs. But, of course, when Kodak launched Coloramas on the world - Wall was out of diapers (not by much) - there were no 'Walls' to dwarf.

Question: Are the Coloramas now Art?

Like Wall's work, much conceptualization and control/construction of the pro-filmic moment/event went into their creation. Like Wall's work, many of the Coloramas addressed 'the indeterminate American look' of the era in which they were created. Like Wall's work, or much of it, Coloramas were transparencies displayed on light boxes.

I would also suggest that, like Wall's work, the Coloramas, many of which picture people picturing (Caution - Colliding Realities: in essence, fictive pro-filmic moments of fictive pro-flimic moments), have much to say about the medium itself.

Unlike Wall's work, the Colorama's were created without a nod to Art history and Academia was not involved (no Modernist/Avant-Garde theory here). Unlike Wall's work, the Coloramas were displayed in public places, not galleries or museums. Unlike Wall's work, the Colorama's were seen by millions of Tom, Dick and Harriets, not just the Art crowd.

So, I am seriously wondering if a bit of revisionist Art History is called for. Is the Establishment willing to give credit where credit is due?

In all of his written and spoken Art/Art History speak has Jeff Wall ever mentioned or paid homage to many photographers who over the years were involved in creating Kodak Coloramas? (Honest question, maybe he has).

I am also wondering (on a less serious note) if Kodak, which has been through some recent tough financial times, could dust these suckers off and cut some of their losses. They churned the Coloramas out at the rate of one a month which, over the 40+ years they were being produced, means that they have approximately 4x the inventory of Jeff Wall. At $1,000,000 a pop, that's more than half a billion dollars we're talking about. Kodak used to have an extremely generous Employee Suggestion Program (it made near-millionaires of some) - I wonder if I could at least get a 'finder's' fee?

PS the above Colorama depicts 'the indeterminate American look' of tourism in the Adirondacks in the early 50s.

Woodwards Ruin ~ Julian Frank

Woodwards Ruin • click on photo to embiggen itI love surprises and this one showed up in yesterday's email. It was from Julian Frank, aka Lee Bacchus and Brian Graham - partners in photographic crime, so to speak. Under the collective nom-de-photograph of Julian Frank they are producing, of all things, postcards of Vancouver, Canada. They're creating the photographs using and 8×10 view camera and color negative film - men, or is that a "man", after my own heart, photography-wise.

About the project, Lee Bacchus wrote; "About my landscape. It is one part of a partly finished, partly thought-out project on the visible and invisible within the city. While trying to eschew a purely aesthetic surface (eye candy, to put it simply), I'm trying to "think" through the form here and not over-determine it beforehand. It is open-ended, so that it can suggest and address all that a site like this can: history, memory, progress (or lack thereof) and a kind of upheaval in the geological consciousness (the surface) and unconscious (underground).

I do feel this shot is slightly over-aestheticized (the dusky sky is there as a kind of symbolic end-note, but it still exudes a kind of "beauty"), but unwrapping meaning from the "picturesque" is difficult."

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."

ku ~ a brief "batty" history

Well, well, well. Scratch my back with a hacksaw. I have always believed that there is very little new under the sun, but thank you, Peter Henry Emerson (courtesy of Steve Edwards and his book Photography: A Very Short Introduction) for making it perfectly clear.

Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) is considered by many photo historians to have made a greater impression on Victorian photography than any of his contemporaries. His photography and ideas about photography succeeded in laying down the foundations of a new, unsentimental type of work, and laying the groundwork for the Photo-Secession movement. Heavy stuff, that.

Emerson's big idea at the time was "Naturalistic Photography" - his main claim was that one should treat photography as a legitimate art in its own right, rather than seek to imitate other art forms; imitation was not needed - it could confer its own legitimacy without it.

Emerson's feeling was that pictorialism was becoming somewhat bogged down due to sentimentalism and artificiality. At the same time, others were becoming dissatisfied with the fact that the Photographic Society had become too concerned with scientific rather than with artistic aspects of photography.

Emerson urged that photographic students should look at nature rather than paintings, that one should look at the range-finder or focusing screen and see what kind of pictures this created. He felt every student should "..try to produce one picture of his own...which shall show the author has something to say and knows how to say it; that is something to have accomplished..."

Sound familiar?

Emerson also argued that a photographer should imitate the eye. He claimed that one only sees sharpness in the centre, and that the image is slightly blurred at the periphery, and therefore suggested that one should make a photograph slightly out of focus in order to achieve that effect, merely ensuring that the image in the centre is sharp. In his book he wrote: "Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into something else, often so subtly that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature."

Had a good look at my photographs lately?

In Photography: A Very Short Introduction, Edwards states (regarding this imitate-the-eye approach to photography) that "'[i]t ought to be apparent that Emerson's attempt to model the photograph on a particular conception of the retinal image was quite batty (though, it is no worse a a picture for that). Interestingly enough, it is this very approach that I take to my photography that also drives most camera-clubbers batty. It also drove many of Emerson's peers rather batty as well.

And, for the NPNers in the room, Emerson was not the easiest of people to get on with, and was inclined ... to make sarcastic and vitriolic remarks...

Sound like (ocassionally) somebody you know?

PS - I have finished Photography: A Very Short Introduction. It's an easy, informative and thought-provoking read and, for the most part, avoids any protracted dips into academic obtuseness. Consequently, I am upgrading my previous Must Read Alert to a MUST READ MUST READ - that's a rare double-dog MUST READ alert for this book. I will be bloviating on various ideas and issues raised in the book for quite awhile.

Featured Comment: Paul Maxim wrote (in part); "... the stuff about "imitating the eye" (Emerson) is unadulterated nonsense. The eye may, in fact, see that way (in much the same way that it "sees" things upside down), but the brain doesn't interpret the image that way. It fills things in. Even if the outer regions of the "picture" in reality are out of focus, the brain (and you) sees everything in focus. Saying that a photograph that's fuzzy on the edges and includes very obvious vignetting is "more like we really see" is simply not true...."

Featured Comment: Steve Lawler wrote (in part); "Add me to the Emerson camp. The thing that struck me while following this thread is that in many respects we're discussing the difference between "looking" and "seeing," between the physical capabilities of the organism and the image we "feel." ... Photographic technology of allows us to create sharper images than ever before, yet more often than not, I prefer the impressionistic approach..."

publisher's comment: Mary D., you're totally freaking me out.

Snow storm Saranac Lake style - Aaron, aka, Hugo's dad

Saranac Lake snow storm • click on photo to embiggen itI received a few photos from Aaron this AM. I put these 2 together just to show another view of yesterday's storm.

The fence gate butts right up to the street in Aaron's front yard. Anybody want to venture a guess about how many times he had to shovel it out after the plow went by? There was a bit of frustration involved which explains why he titled the photograph, "screwthatimgoingbacktobed.jpg".