The way I see it...

Faces of Ground Zero is the title of a photography book and traveling exhibit (by Joe McNally), both of which purport to be a "Tribute to America's Heroes", but I just don't/can't see it that way. To my eye and sensibility, it looks like little more than commercial crap and media flap.

There are seemingly ever-emerging bodies of recent disaster/tragedy photography (by individual photographers) which seem to exist soley as excercises of "artistic" expression. In addition to Faces of Ground Zero, the Katrina photographs of Dan Burkholder also fall into this emerging "genre" as well.

I don't get it.

How does photographing first-responders, survivors, and victims families with a commercially-slick Cosmopolitan-Covergirl/Bloomingdale-Fashion-Catalog technique create a "tribute"? A tribute to what - the photographic capability to turn everything into commercialized/commodified icons of a consumer culture?

How does manipulating photographs of a natural disaster and the resulting personal tragedies into cartoon illustrations serve any purpose other than artistic technique for artistic technique's sake?

Help me here - what am I missing?

If it is suppose to be the notion of "horrific" beauty, I think that both of these photographers might better spend some time with the disaster/tragedy photographs of Joel Meyerowitz (Aftermath) and Katherine Wolkoff (After The Storm). Both of these photographers have taken a more honest, more respectful, and, much more self-effacing photographic approaches to the disconcerting idea of horrific beauty.

FEATURED COMMENT: Paul Ralpaelson wrote: "When it comes to selling bars, trucks or even politicians, you can wave the flag or you can drape one over a coffin. You can’t do both." His link to a related read.

FEATURED COMMENT #2: Michelle Parent wrote: "I don't get why he had them all in that sterile white space! It isolates them from the tragedy in more than a visual sense. You can't connect these people in these photos with the words next to them. It is as if he took a bunch of actors and put them in costume and makeup, stuck them under lights, etc. They don't seem "real". I hate it!"

ku # 429

Happenstance and serendipty can be kind of nifty. F something and be there.

Paul Raphaelson wrote

It seems silly to think of photography as being fundamentally diffferent from any other medium, doesn't it? Paint can be used for many things ... the walls of your bedroom, the lines on the street, the pinstripes on your Camaro, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There's nothing magical about the medium that turns its products into art.

As far as what DOES make something art, this has been a point of contention for more than few thousand years. But I have little patience for those who refuse to notice the lessons of the 20th Century before spouting off on the subject. Modernism, and even postmodernism, are prettty old news by now, so ignorance is becoming a lame excuse.

Before wedding yourself to a definition of art, I think it's worth acknowledging a couple of things:

1) we routinely speak of bad art. This suggests that art can be bad, and therefore "goodness' may not have a place in our definition.

People who classify things as art based on how "good" they are are seeking what philosophers call a normative defintion ... one based a prescriptive set of standards. The problem is, while they have opinions about whether something meets their standards, they tend to have a hard time articulating what those standards are. Most attempts lead to pre-modern guild-type ideas that prescribe what things must look like or how they must be made.

I think we'd all be better served by a more descriptive definition. One that describes the nature or function of this thing we call art, and allows the thing to shine or fail based on a separate, probably evolving, set of standards. This allows us to have "bad" art ... which we all know we have plenty of.

2) We have close to a century showing us that art can be created by context.

Think about this one. The most obvious example is Duchamp's "readymades." He challenged us to look at banal objects like urinals and snow shovels as art. It was quite easy to do: he hung them in an art museum.

People had a lot of reactions to this, ranging from laughter to outrage to a smug "it's about time someone explained this to the rabble."

Even those who objected violently, citing all the reason the urinal wasn't great art, lost the battle before they even got a word in. Because Duchamp got them to look at the work as art. That's really all it took.

In a sense this actually gives all the power to you, gentle viewer. An object is art when you look at it as art.

This doesn't make it good art, doesn't make it bad art. That's a separate conversation (and a more complex one, I believe). But by submitting it to the conversation at all ... by engaging you critically, emotionally, intellectually, as you would normally engage a painting, you make it art. Love it or hate it, you did it. Duchamp just encouraged you to do it by hanging it on a white wall.

So what--can anything be art? Perhaps. But this isn't a free ride for anyone. By making something art by recontextualizing it ... encouraging others to see it as art ... you are also submitting it to the wrath of their artistic judgements. Your grocery list might be a perfectly respectable grocery list, demonstrating excellent taste in food and fine penmanship. But submit it to the Paris Review as a poem, and it will be looked at as a poem. It will be a poem. And what do you think the chances are that it will survive the hardened standards of the Review's editors? I suspect your humble grocery list would have done better to stay at home, in its comfortable context.

publisher's note Links added to Paul Ralphaelson's personal website and his Yahoo Group, Contemporary Landscape Photography

ku # 428

Detritus, decay, and automotive degeneration. I admit to an attraction to detritus (you should see my office) and I have a great fascination with it in the natural world. I keep vases full of dead flowers and I'll take a weathered shack in the woods over a deluxe prison in the 'burbs any day of the week, twice on Sundays.

And lest I forget, there's also that entropy thing - a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration. The signs of it are all around us. Some it is quite picturesque. Some it stinks all the way to the White House.

If I were inclined to give my photograph titles, I might call this one Bush, Cheney and Rumfield.

ku # 426

Friday - 10/27/06 A view from Lake Placid.

Just to let you know

The Landscapist is moving along right smartly for a newbie blog. The blog is averaging about 120 page loads a day. Visitors to the blog are coming back for return visits - more than 3/4s of the unique daily views are from returning visitors and they are coming from all points on the compass - Iceland, Turkey, Spain (Ministry of Defense server), England, Ireland, Argentina, Germany, Italy, and all across the US and Canada.

My only wish is for more comments and photo submissions from a broader base of visitors - it will make for a livelier blog. ALL POINTS OF VIEW - COMMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY-WISE - ARE WELCOME.

Many many thanks to those who have participated to date.

ku # 425

Just thinking out loud.

Artistically well-grounded ideas of reality?

re: The phrase artistically well-grounded idea of reality - The Katrina aftermath photographs of Dan Burkholder and Katherine Wolkoff are attracting a fair amount of attention. Both have taken "artistic" licence with the subject - Burkholder to a much more dramatic degree (extreme HDR treatment) than Wolkoff, who works in the Joel Meyerwitz Cape Light?Aftermath tradition.

Either way, the photographs are quite beautiful.

Katherine Wolkoff - click through the slide show to see the Katrina photos. Dan Burkholder - a gallery with some Katrina (New Orleans) photos (click to enlarge).

Wolkoff is featured in the Fall 2006 issue of Aperture. Burkholder, along with a detailed description of his HDR techniques, is featured in the Sept/Oct issue of Camera Arts.

Any thoughts?