civilized ku # 156 ~ doing our part to rebuild America

Our own little stimulus infrastructure spending package • click to embiggenRemember the purple toilet picture of a week or so ago? As I mentioned, its days were numbered and, with a houseful of guests expected this weekend, the time just seemed right to do the deed.

Replacing a toilet is about as simple as DIY home repairs get - turn off and disconnect the water, unscrew the floor bolts, remove the toilet, remove and replace the wax ring, place new toilet, bolt to floor, hook up the water, and, voila, there you have it. Even for the proverbial 5-thumbed amongst us, it ain't rocket science, right?

Wrong.

To be more accurate, none of what is going on in our bathroom right now involves rocket science. However, it is an abject lesson in the truth and consequences of the fable regarding pulling on the wrong thread and the entire garment unravelling. Believe me when I tell you, our bathroom has unravelled.

A long-ago improperly installed toilet has over the intervening years slowly wicked a lot of moisture into the subflooring - in fact, 3 layers of subflooring (that's a whole other story) were a soggy mess. What's amazing is that no one has landed, toilet and all, in our living room that is beneath the bathroom.

So, it's up the with mess and, oh, by the way, as long the floor is ripped up, there's all those old galvanized pipes that really should be replaced while you have the chance, right? You don't want to have to do this all over again, right? And, what about the sink? As long as you're replacing the galvanized, might as well get a new sink, right?

And now that all those built-up layers of subflooring are gone, the radiator will have to be lowered to the new floor height. And, by the by, how are you going to finish the floor? Would you like to pave it with gold?

Notice the blue bucket. At least, at this point, we do have a pot to piss in.

urban ku # 196-197 ~ crisis? what crisis?

Brant Park and the new "green" Bank of America building • click to embiggenA topic which has been much on my mind of late is that of the picturing response from photographers - or lack thereof - to our current national crisis / dilemma / "situation".

I, for one, have felt for a while that my blogging activity here on The Landscapist has been a bit like fiddling while Rome burns or a form of whistling past the graveyard. Sure, I've launched a few "political" / socio-economic entries but, hey, I'm a picture maker not an op-ed writer, right?

One of the ideas that I have been kicking around involves creating another photo gallery feature like the Kitchen Sink Project where contributors can post their own pictures under the banner of, say, What the F**k?, or, It's a Fine Mess, or whatever. I mean, just about every photo forum site out there has their weekly/monthly themed projects in the time-honored camera club tradition.

Even though The Landscapist is not photo forum site, it is arguably a camera club of sorts. Many regular visitors come here on a repeat basis and the unifying/common interests are pictures and discussions thereof. That's a kind of club, isn't it?

In any event, one of the blogs that I read on a regular basis is Conscientious by Jörg Colberg. Today's entry Where's the Crisis basically poses the question, where are the pictures of the crisis? The entry is borrowed (and attributed) in blog fashion from an entry of the same by Brain Ulrich on his blog, notifbutwhen#2.

That entry has generated 24 comments, some of which point to some picturing work being done that addresses the idea of our crisis. One poster reflects my thought that it is too soon to expect a meaningful body of work on the topic. Hell, it was only a few months that this crisis landed in our laps with what seems like the speed of light. The subject is large, daunting, and complex and I can not imagine a coherent body of working emerging from an unfocused attempt to picture it.

That said, I find this bit from the aforementioned entry rather interesting:

... it still seems so many young artists are still concerned primarily in their work with the self .... Since last spring I've been photographing much of the retail end of the economy downtown for a new project, Dark Stores, Ghostboxes and Dead Malls. In doing so much research I've come across a few others who share some of the same subject and concern ... But the few I've come across pale in comparison to the number of 'drunken party pictures', 'ambiguous ambiguity' or the 'pretty portraits of pretty people' projects ... I simply can't help but wonder when a topic so large looms in front of young artists why not the desire to address it through their work? Is the self still so important? Will it really be how we remember the beginning of the 21st century??

OK, maybe the word "young" doesn't fit the demographic of most of The Landscapist camera club members but the question still remains, albeit slightly modified to suit my desires:

When a topic so large looms in front of all of you out there do any of you have the desire to address it through your work?

I do.

And, in light of the fact that Barrack Obama has not extended an invitation to me to be part of his change-we-can-believe-in directorate, I nevertheless do feel that I do want to contribute something of value to the proceedings. Even if its value is not immediately apparent, at the very least doing so in the hope that it might be so perceived in the future.

How about it? Should I launch a new project gallery?

urban ku # 195 ~ get over it

A kind of Grand Canyon of the East • click to embiggenIt is always very interesting to read (at least it is for me) the ripple-effect discussions and comments on other blogs that occasionally flow from an entry here on The Landscapist. These are easy to find because, in the blog-o-sphere it is de rigueur to provide a link to the entry about which someone is commenting on their blog. And, these links show up on the "Came From" section of just about any web stat software/service - in my case statcounter.com.

Recently, there has been a decent amount of chatter on a few blogs regarding my entry about dense photography and the idea that this descriptor explains much about and helps to define that special genre of picturing now known as Hobson-esque - a nomenclature which seems to be giving Paul Maxim a reason to not go on living (even though he was recently caught red-handed posting a Hobson-esque picture of his very own making).

Now, to be certain, I am not picking on Paul in anyway. Amongst fairly regular commentators on The Landscapist, Paul is the top candidate (and my pick) for the title of Resident Contrarian because, while being a contatrian, his comments are always informed and articulate. I really really value that kind of feedback.

That is why I read with interest his comments re: dense photography on Andreas Manessinger's blog entry, What it is in which he delved into the notion of dense picture making:

... Seriously, though, this whole concept of dense photography or seeing things "plainly" is, for me, just smoke and mirrors with a camera. It's roughly analagous to adding more words to a paragraph or more plots or storylines to a novel or more notes to a musical score, all the while keeping things as commonplace or as mundane as possible.

Your image, for example, certainly has a "sense of place" for you, and probably many others. But for most of us, it doesn't. And there simply isn't anything there that's out of the ordinary to command my attention. I could drive through the city of Rochester and take countless similar images at any number of places. But why would I? How would that be different from what I can see any day, anytime? It's the same question I've been asking Mark for some time: What's wrong with photographing the unusual or the unique? Conversely, what story am I telling by photographing something that can be "plainly" seen by anyone, anywhere? It's true that we tend not to see the mundane in our lives. We pass right by them. The point is, we have seen them - we choose not to see them anymore for a reason. They're just not interesting anymore. That doesn't mean we've lost our ability "to see" things. It just means that the ordinary is just that - ordinary ...

OK, there's actually a fair amount of stuff for me to comment on in his comment but I'll try to stay on the point of "the same question I've been asking Mark for some time: What's wrong with photographing the unusual or the unique?"

IMO, there is nothing at all inherently wrong with picturing the unusual or the unique. Amongst some of the most interesting/intriguing pictures that I have viewed over the last year or so more than a few could most definitely be considered to be pictures of "the unusual or the unique" - imagine seeing Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria 2007 (7th picture from top) printed at 6-7 ft. tall.

Truth be told, I am always interested in seeing something new and different but ... I simply do not equate "new and different" with "unusual and unique". That notion stems from the fact that I pretty much totally disagree with Paul's premise that people choose not to see the "mundane in our lives" because they have seen it before and, therefore, it is "just not interesting anymore".

First and foremost, I disagree simply because unlike Paul, I don't believe that people have seen it before - at least not in a cognitive sense. They may "see" it, in as much as it crosses their field of vision but that is a fer piece down the road from actually noticing it and, in the words of Emmet Gowin:

(Photography is a tool for) dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to.

IMO, and this the point at which I disagree with the notion of photography as entertainment without cultural consequence/significance, people don't notice "the mundane" because, in a media saturated culture fetishistically devoted to attention grabbing "unusual and unique" imagery - must often for some sort of commercial gain in form of higher ratings, inflaming consumer desire, good old-fashion titillation, etc. - people "see" with a near-pavlovian conditioning to ignore the "mundane" and respond only to the "unique and unusual".

IMO, we are in the socio-economic and environmental fix we are in precisely because there is a lot of "mundane" stuff that people are not "seeing" (in a cognitive sense) and therefore not attending to.

Consequently, my picturing of the "ordinary/mundane" is much more informed by Thoreau's reflections upon the virtues and, yes, the pleasures of simple living than it is upon our prevailing cultural paradigm of wretched excess - a paradigm that is in no small part fueled and encouraged by imagery of "unique and unusual" objects of desire.

So, it is entirely accurate to state that a significant part of the "story I am telling by photographing something that can be "plainly" seen by anyone" is a story of "the simple life".

urban ku # 194 ~ I'm not so sure that there's a big problem here ...

Grand Central Station ~ NYC • click to embiggenA question has arisen from my past few entries, not about the topics therein but one the comes from the obvious subject matter of the accompanying pictures - that question being:

... after viewing yesterday and todays images, I was wondering if you have ever been stopped and questioned by the police?

I have read so many stories since 9/11 about photographers being detained and even arrested ....

My response - I have only once been confronted about picturing and, quite honestly, it was not really a confrontation at all. That happened when I was making this picture and this picture.

As I was walking on a sidewalk outside of the Georgia Pacific Plant in Plattsburgh looking for referents which caught my eye and making a few pictures of the same, a gentleman who appeared to be a production line manager approached me, extended his hand in a handshake manner (we shook hands), and introduced himself by name. I did the same.

He politely asked of what it was I was making pictures. I responded that I was merely an "art" photographer looking to make pictures of interesting light on interesting shapes and forms, all the while gesturing in a rather indiscriminate manner at the factory. He accepted that, offered his thanks and went on about his business, which seemed to be that of crossing the street from one part of the facility to another. It did not appear that he had emerged from the place to specifically question me.

And that was that.

That said, and relative to my pictures of NYC, I have never had a problem in NYC. Maybe I'm just lucky but I think not. Rather, IMO, it seems that the blog-o-sphere and the media have made much hay out of a relatively few - relative to the zillions of pictures made in public places everyday - incidents of photographers who have had problems. FYI, I'm not talking about problems in war zones or third world countries.

Now I'm not excusing those who are, shall we say, rather overzealous in their efforts to protect the citizenry from those who might do it harm but it also seems to me that most of the nastier incidents are the result of the activities private dicks, and I do mean "dicks" in the worst sense of the word - those under the hire and auspices of private industry and interests as opposed to, in my case, "NY's finest".

I'll never forget about an incident that occurred long before 9/11 (in fact, I believe it was in 1993). None other than David Letterman had just switched his television show from NBC to CBS, which was owned General Electric Corp. So, one evening during his show, he and a cameraman attempted to enter GE headquarters there in Manhatten to "introduce" himself to his new co-workers and deliver a "thank you" basket of fruit to GE management. The security forces responded immediately and they were none to friendly. In fact they were downright hostile. There was much pushing and shoving, especially so directed at the cameraman. It was, in a word, rather ugly.

All of that said, there is no denying that thanks to George Bush & Company - and with a very special nod (to include the middle finger) to Dick (there's that word again) Cheney - the rule of fear that they have fostered has done much to erode our civil liberties here in the good ole US of A.

urban ku # 193 ~ a sign of the times

Going out of business • click to embiggenThis past weekend, NYC seemed like the same old NYC. For the most part, it felt like life was going on as it always had. Except, of course, it is not.

The most visible sign that things are not quite the way they used to be is the surfeit of empty for-rent retail space. Spaces large and small all over the city sit empty and idle - from New York’s most elegant shopping corridor, the Gold Coast of Madison Avenue (where rents had reached up to $2,000 sq/ft) to much more modest Brooklyn neighborhoods. Nevertheless, that said, for the most part, the city still looks like a going concern.

One area of interest that is not looking good is the Art Market, Photography Division. One sign of the times is found in this horrific account (from the Bloomberg Press) of a struggling artist's dilema:

Gagosian’s $360,000 Photos Linger as Empty N.Y. Galleries Shut

... At the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition, which opened on Nov. 6, 2008, has been extended through March 7. The prices of some of his meditative seascapes have been reduced from $450,000 to $360,000, with plenty still available, the gallery said ...

Oh, no. Say it ain't so. First the poor devil cuts his prices from nearly half a mil to a third of a mil and then the prints don't roll right out the door. What's a starving Artist to do?

FYI, Sugimoto’s meditative seascapes are B&W prints that are in the 47 × 58 3/4 inches size range.

Now, I could easily write an entry about the relative absurdity of a market-gone-mad but, in fact, here's what really kinda gets to me about this situation - consider this little item from DLK COLLECTION ~ One Collector"s View of the Current Photography Market:

... Some of these gallery owners are resorting to the self inflicted wounds of deep discounting, after spending years establishing baseline prices for their artists. On one hand this makes sense, given a new pricing reality and the knowledge that the sale won't happen unless the price is meaningfully lower. On the other hand, offering a collector a print for half of what you have spent the past five years telling him it is worth is a recipe for permanently broken trust. This is "a rock and a hard place" choice ...

Stating that the idea that gallery owners - who are trying survive during a drastic market downturn by offering discounts - are engaged in "a recipe for permanently broken trust" (AKA, "self-inflicted wounds") is an act of hubris that ranks right up there with that of the financial market malefactors who, while on the public dole, want their paychecks, perks, and bonuses to continue unbated as some form of "right" of which they are so justly deserving.

Give me a f**king (sorry Mary) break. What is it about the wealthy (and their sense of entitlement) that they think it is OK for the little guy to fail in order to protect their interests while at the same time they proclaim that they are "too big" to fail? Or, to be much more accurate in this case, too big / too precious / to important to take even a modest hit on their precious wealth/investment.

The little guy gets a helping hand and it's an evil, government-is-the-problem, liberal, tax-and-spend, intellectual elite, pinko-commie-socialist "entitlement" (you can also throw in the "godless" and "faggot" descriptors if that suits your fancy). The big guys get one and it's just a "bailout" - tinkle-down economics at its finest.

IMO, in this case, an investment in the Art market is just like an investment in any market. There's not a bit of difference whether your investment is in slimy credit default swaps or the noble cause of Art - you puts your money down and you takes your chances. If you don't like taking chance, invest in Treasury Bonds and hang them on your walls.

Who the hell ever told these bastards that buying Art came with an ironclad guarantee against loss on investment. That returns on investment would only inflate and never deflate? And, even in my wildest imaginings, I can't conceive of a gallery owner swearing on a stack of whatever they might hold sacred that they would ever voluntarily self-destruct or fall on their sword for the betterment and protection of their lord-and-master benefactors.

At the very least, collectors of photography still have Art to hang on their walls to look at and enjoy. One could even suppose that it is Art that they purchased because they took some kind of pleasure from it other than its worth as an investment. The rest of us only have periodic financial statements - IRAs, etc. - to look at and I don't know anyone who's hanging them on their walls and getting much pleasure from looking at them.

Now I must admit to having more than a few reservations about standing up for a group (gallery owners) who fed, fueled, and gained from the Art Market Bubble, Photography Division, of the last decade or so. The cynic in me says that they were not so much concerned with building trust by telling collectors what stuff was worth than they were with lining their own pockets by telling collectors that stuff was worth fanciful amounts of money.

That is not to say or even imply that they were dishonest or distrustful, but, hey, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Right?

In any event, it appears that yet another market is due for a "correction". A correction that it so handsomely deserves.

urban ku # 192 ~ hiding in plain sight

Pershing Square / Central Cafe ~ under the bridge at Grand Central Station, NYC • click to embiggenYesterday's entry drew 4 great comments (to date) and I will take the time to deal with all of them in separate entries. But before I address Andreas Manessinger's comment and questions, I do want to mention that I am growing increasingly dependent upon your comments as a basis for my entries.

As I have mentioned previously, I have been feeling for some time now that I have said everything there is to be said regarding the medium of photography. Even ignoring the inherent grandiosity and self-delusion contained that statement, I/we have in fact covered a lot of ground here on The Landscapist. For those who have recently come on board, that may not be so obvious but even I am amazed at times at what I re-discover whenever I venture into the archives.

That said, I find myself at a place where I am more inclined to the desire of answering questions / addressing comments than I am to that of creating self-generated entries. It's not that occasional extraneous and extemporaneous events and topics in the wild and wacky world of photography don't intrude upon my said-it-all stasis. They certainly do. It's just that in the blog world, which IMO is at its best when it's a 2-way street, more and more, I keep looking for traffic coming from the opposite direction.

That said, it's on with the show and Andreas' comment from yesterday:

...I don't think that your images are complicated (or "chaotic", as someone said), much to the contrary, they are exceptionally concise, simple and elegant images about very complicated relations.

Basically it is all in your motto of "being true". You can't be true to a complex reality without making aspects of complexity a subject.

That being said, do you "know" or "plan" what your photos "are about"? As I have understood your term of "plain seeing", I get the impression that you don't, because that would be exactly the opposite of "plain", it would be filtered through a plan.

And if I'm right, do you rationalize your images later or are you content with the fact that they happen on another level, outside of verbalized communication?

my response - Andreas is right, regarding the referents found in my pictures, in as much as I do not "plan" in advance of each and every picturing activity what it is my pictures will be about. As I have stated, whenever I leave the building, I just grab my cameras and go. On occasion, I do have a general objective as to the what the specific object of my camera's gaze will be but but on most occasions I just picture whatever it is I see - as Andreas points out, my notion of "plain seeing".

That said, I do, in fact, "know" what whatever I picture "will be about" when it comes to the connoted found in my pictures. The connoted always falls under the heading of what it means to be human.

Now if that sounds like an after-the-fact "rationalization" to some, so be it. However, and in fact, that is and has been the rational, the MO, the raison d'etre for my personal picturing (as opposed to my commercial endeavors) since day one. My interest in making conventionally pleasing pictures has always been far far south of non-existent and none.

That said, and once again as I have stated before, the very word "ku with its roots in the oriental idea of "empty" or "nothingness" - is a big clue as to what is in my head when I picture. What I picture (the referent), as Andreas suggests, "happen(s) on another level, outside of verbalized communication" on a more "intuitive" or seemingly preternatural connection to the object of my camera's gaze. And, yes - emphatically so - I am very content with this process of seeing (although "comfortable" might be a better word).

My picturing is one of the ways by which I explore my connection to the world around me. It is, for me, a process of discovery and learning. After their making and upon subsequent viewing of the prints, my pictures are a source of nearly bottomless fascination for me. They become a true expression of the question, "what was I thinking?", or, more accurately, since I try not to think when picturing, "what was I feeling?".

The answer(s) to that question, more often than not, lead me to little discoveries, little epiphanies, little glimpses, into the world of the unthought known - that is to say, bringing things to the "surface" from the world of things that you "know" on an unconscious level but aren't really thinking about / dealing with. Things that help define and understand what it means to be human".

You know, something along the lines of:

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see. ~ Emmet Gowin

And, BTW & FYI, I find that answers and connections to the unthought known are better accomplished from viewing pictures of "the real" than from those that are caricatures of the real.

All of that said, consider these 2 statement from 2 picture makers who tend to make rather "dense" pictures:

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

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film ... if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better. ~ Garry Winogrand

Now, if some think I am making after-the-fact rationalizations about my pictures, let it be said that those 2 statements represent the one which I cling to most - I offer my pictures of my acts of self-discovery, self-actualization, self-realization to the world, not as an ultimate act of narcissism but rather in the hope that my acts of exploration about what it means to be human may strike a chord with others who are on the same path.

urban ku # 191 ~ platitudes

Scaffolding & trees ~ Brant Park, NYC • click to embiggenIf I lived in NYC, I'd most likely make about a zillion pictures a day. The city is one gigantic tableaux of picture possibilities. I suspect that NYC is not alone in its picturing possibilities. Paris, London, Tokyo, and, for that matter, to a lesser extent so is my humble (by comparison) home hamlet of Au Sable Forks.

Priscilla Ferguson-Forthman postulated what is essentially the same notion when she opined:

The entire visual world is an incredibly interesting place. If that is not sufficient "subject" for you, then I propose that you are in a 'world' of trouble, and had best get out while you can, because this game (of photography) is not for you.

But, for me, here's the thing about that notion that has informed my picture making in cities like NYC or, for that matter, wilderness / countryside places like the Adirondacks where I live. I like my pictures dense. That is to say, I like my pictures packed with information and the more discursive that information is, the better.

Some guy by the name of Matthew Summers-Sparks has given this idea a name - he calls it Dense Photography. In a recent article in The Morning News, he claims that by adopting the dense-photography method of picturing, he is able to "compress many of the sites of this beautiful city into just four handy photographs" - the city being his home town of London. The key word in that statement is "many". Obviously all of the "sites" of any city (and in all probability even my little hamlet of Au Sable Forks) could never be capture in just 4 pictures.

That said, his point regarding dense-photography with which I totally agree, is this:

While I appreciate the closely packed nature of dense photography, what I enjoy most are the memories and idiosyncratic elements that can be incorporated into the shots.

As anyone who has taken the time to view my pictures should know, I really like dense pictures - both those that I make and viewing those made by others.

What I have discovered from a zillion comments - primarily from "photographers" - is that many aren't on board the same train. Most 'photographers' seem to have trouble understanding the notion as is evidenced by their nearly universal consternation when viewing my pictures. The question - "I can't figure out what this picture is about." - almost always arises.

The best that I can determine is that dense-photography violates one of the basic tenets of the rules of photography - the one that states quite simply, "simplify". A rule which, to my way of thinking, simply means that the viewers of your pictures are most likely to be "simpletons", at least so when it comes to looking at pictures.

The idea is that by keeping it simple, the simple-minded will be much better able to figure our what a picture is about. Apparently, the last thing a picture maker should do is tax or challenge the eye, mind, and soul of the viewer. It is apparently much better to speak in simple platitudes than it is to present complex thoughts and ideas - a notion which runs quite contrary to that of Philippe Halsman's thoughts on the matter:

This is the essence of a work of art: that you never touch bottom. If a picture has for everybody exactly the same meaning, it is a platitude, and it is meaningless as a work of art.

My thoughts, exactly.