imants and personal photography

[Guest stnami]

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I don't live with an urgency and I don't feel compelled to produce something tactile that's why digital suits me, something easily discarded for another.

Most of the stories that stay and evolve with me are the ones handed to me by my peers and elders by word of mouth as opposed to text be it a book or the www of today. Mind you the www is closer to the style of story telling than books.

Though I do like 'tails'.... in a suitcase i.e. a visual/verbal collection of items with no chronological order,direction or intent

The timeless nature of Leica has disappeared with the advent of the urgency of digital camera production, photographing with a camera is a different tale

[smokysun]

hi imants,

 

hmm, digital photography as a throwaway art? never thought of it that way. it's always been amazing to me how much kitsch disappears, though it's been produced in ever increasing amounts.

 

in terms of staying-power i still think an urgency to communicate combined with the ability makes the artist. (just watched 'the agony and the ecstasy' for example).

 

just looked at sally mann's 'immediate family' and though it caused outrage at its publication, what struck me this time is how the careful compositions made these 'intimate' pictures looked posed. (same reaction to early ray decarva vs. his later stuff). if you get away from a certain snapshot quality, you somehow lose what is most personal (and familial).

 

a book i bought on impulse and highly recommend is 'us and them' by helmut newton and alice springs (his wife). even if you're not a newton fan, i think you'll like this book. pics they took of each other and with each other over the years, plus a bunch of portraits at the end where each took a different pic of the same person. an interesting lesson in style. what sets newton apart is a sense of humor. and his wife an obviously powerful companion.

 

to be 'personal' you have to somehow be willing to expose yourself and lay yourself on the line without losing the art of it.

 

thanks for the insights into your work. i still suspect you'd make a great character within it yourself.

 

my best,

wayne

 

wayne pease's Photo Galleries at pbase.com

[Guest stnami]

http://www.simonnorfolk.com/

Simon Norfolk creates some articulate left field tales I find that in his Bosnia: Bleed he gives the viewer a lot of space to move.

[smokysun]

hi imants,

thanks for the new tip. i'm still fascinated by the difficulty in doing a striking, original color photo. seems much more difficult than b&w. (if 'all art is transformation' b&w takes you in one leap toward your goal.)

and speaking of b&w, i'm loving the 'city of shadows: sydney police photographs 1912-1948' (got it from Home) came quickly and worth every penny. great pics, great stories, like going to another world. the photos really make you wonder about the personalities and the settings are like out of a movie. (has anyone made a movie set in this era sydney?) all in all a great addition to my collection.

thanks again,

wayne

[Bob Ross]

Hi Wayne, Glad that this thread is still going, the comments and references are great. I have a friend that is a writer and she is also a good and educated photographer. She says that it is easier to write, too. My take on that comparison is that creative writing, when good, tends to evoke participation by the reader activating the imagination. The writer leads the reader's imagination around in the story. A picture, even in good light and with correct composition, may answer all the questions and the viewer doesn't have to become involved. In my personal photography, I started out with one lens and never could get the whole picture in, so those old photos are, for me, triggers to larger memories. A viewer would not make that connection unless they had been there, done that. The subject were often not universal, but specific in time and place. If I'm not around to set the scene, there is no story in my image for the viewer to imagine. I think fine art photographers go for a universal subject in a striking light to try and provoke the viewer. Poets and Jazz musician are trying to provoke the audience to experience the "in between" of the words or notes. Maybe we need to take incomplete photos to be provocative...:-)

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as clipped digital highlights.......I'll never make it as a writer.....LOL!

Bob

[Bob Ross]

Just after I wrote the above, I went browsing and found this article The Making of a Fine Art Photograph . I'm not really a fan of the writer or his pictures, but it is sort of along the lines of this discussion.

Bob

[Guest stnami]

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I never enjoyed fashion or product shoots with all that milling around and the having the image taken out of your control nor the smashum :grabum: getum out nature of PJ work. The idea of working a image over a long period of time sits well with me most probably due to my installation/ stonemason/ sculpture background. I am a great fan of playing which is what Meyers advocates in the article

Wayne there is a performance artist called Orlan have a look at her work, though performance based photography plays a big part in order to get her message across

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/whoisorlan.htm

That is one of the shifts in photography Dada in the thirties but more so the 70s when environmental, performance,installation artists who were forced to use the camera as a major means of communicating their art to a wider audience, while redefining its purpose beyond aesthetics and documentation ( a regular minefield that)

[smokysun]

hi bob,

 

glad you're enjoying the thread. and thanks for the article. i'm definitely a street-style shooter, not having that kind of patience.

 

but when i pick out a pic to save or show, i suspect my own memory is involved. for example, look at 'talking pictures' (chronicle books, cheap paperback) where all kinds of people, famous and not, talk about photos that mean something to them. a good portion choose family pics for the memories they evoke. a number are historical and resonate with the viewer for what it reminds them of the times. some are picked for their common humanity and inspiration. (personally, the only ones that got me were a couple pages of mug-shots from auschwitz. they all looked like friends - and i knew what happened to these - normal, everyday people in prison garb. having been to dachau as a teenager while living as a military dependent and playing on old german airfields , having read documentaries on the camps and seen the final photos, i had lots of resources detonated.)

 

since a photo can't tell the whole story, the photographer/artist, as you suggest, must invoke memory and mystery. time may do it if the pic becomes an historical document (the sydney photos). or for someone interested in you.

 

i liked the way the article followed his personal involvement. i suspect most of us find it afterward in something we shot intuitively. (johnny stilleto says, 'if you find one good shot on a contact sheet, there's probably a second.') i find i'm operating in a common mode during a particular shoot and the photos related in style and content. and this various from day to day, and thus the story does too.

 

thanks again,

 

wayne

[smokysun]

hi imants,

 

orlan interesting. (uc santa barbara the last bastion of performance art). it brings up a number of questions:

 

1. is the work 'personal' because the artist involved as a character/subject/participant?

 

i'm not a big fan of staged photography, even if i look at a lot of fashion stuff. even cindy sherman, for example, or the japanese artist (male) who dresses up and recreates famous photos (female), don't touch me much. what they lack is vulnerability, what many successful actors have (tom hanks the extreme example). what struck me in the auschwitz mug shots was partly the lack of pose and pretense.

 

2. does this mean the work a photographer calls personal is their best?

 

i don't think so. for me, fashion work of david bailey and guy bourdin much more interesting than the work they did outside and called their personal work. (on the other hand, i like the snapshots of helmut newton in 'us and them' better than the fashion set-ups, partly cause he comes off as a clown among these beautiful women in the informal shots!)

 

3. how does the personal get beyond being merely personal?

 

guess in this case it's wise to read a lot of c.g. jung and get a sense of the archetypal. as i've said, nan goldin's success depends a lot upon her connection with religion and her life as a 'passion play.' and i would recommend reading the german poet rilke, especially 'letters on life', selections in a random house classic paperback. (if nothing else the chapters 'on work' and 'solitude.') nobody in the history of art ever believed so much in art coming from personal depths.

 

"Art is not a making-oneself-understood but an urgent understanding-of-oneself. The closer you get in your most intimate and solitary contemplation or imagination (vision), the more has been achieved, even if no one else were to understand it." Rainer Maria Rilke

 

all this image-making and image-imitating in the modern world raises the momentous personal issue of identity.

no wonder so many people getting tattoos and piercings to give them a sense of individuality.

 

thanks for the reference. as always, you're a touchstone in the art world.

 

wayne

 

ps. just posted a few shots from july. still think i'm too much of an actor in them. they have humor but not so much vulnerability. d-lux 2 july 06 Photo Gallery by wayne pease at pbase.com

[Bob Ross]

"Art is not a making-oneself-understood but an urgent understanding-of-oneself. The closer you get in your most intimate and solitary contemplation or imagination (vision), the more has been achieved, even if no one else were to understand it." Rainer Maria Rilke

 

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Hi Wayne,

That quote has a lot of meat in it. We often think that self expression has to be understood by others to be valid and this might be more the point when we display our art or photos for others to see and comment upon. If it is personal and primarily understood by ourselves, many others might not even notice, while a few perceptive viewers will at least catch the flavor that something personal is going on.

If we use the theory that the world that we perceive is a reflection of our inner self, then the moment at which we choose to hit the shutter will contain a significant reflection of our inner reality and will be personally valid to the extent and nature of the emotion at that moment. If we look at a collection of our personal favorite photos, we, the photographer, should be able to catch a glimps of out inner selves or reality. Now, that would be personal, even if no one else understood it...to quote Rilke's observation.

The choice of subjects, people, landscapes, abstracts, architechture, flowers, etc. will be just part of the medium on which we perceive the reflections of the inner personal self. The art of personal photography might be, how we make those reflections more accurate and more representative. Change yourself or go through lifes changes and you are likely to see it in your personal photographs.

Bob

[Guest stnami]

"is the work 'personal' because the artist involved as a character/subject/participant?"

People like Cindy Sherman, Tracey Moffet, Stelarc, orlan etc are probably as personal as Prince was in is various incarnations. They are concept/ideas based and use their bodies and those of others as a vehicle of communication touching on the subjective emotive nature of being while trying to remain outside those parameters. Photography is just a tool and they search for other media to communicate their concepts, preferring to be seen as part of the keepers of the human evolutionary process.

 

If one deems art as being important then Rilke's statement holds a lot of credibility and I believe that once the art is presented to the public all control and direction is relinquished so the work takes a new persona anyway. As a producer of things Rilke sits nicely though I found it more applicable to landscaping than photography( there are too many "untruths" in my images) It is a long time since I read Rilke,

[Guest stnami]

"Change yourself or go through lifes changes and you are likely to see it in your personal photographs." Pretty much as well as with ideas I would hate to be thinking the same as I was when I was 24.7, my photography was enviromentally based as I was more agile in the rock climbing department. These days the mind is seems to take centre stage

 

If personal photography is about family and friends then I am not a real participant as I never take a camera to family functions, weddings parties or anything

[Bob Ross]

I suppose that we have the evidence right in our archives and shoe boxes that the way we view the world and ourselves in that world changes more than the technology used. I do the family thing, but I'm particular about what I share and sort of class that activity as documentary snap shooting. My days of backpacking seem to be over and having moved on retirement from mountainous California to rather flat Texas, my outside photo adventures have changed.

Bob

[sean_reid]

take the genre of subway pictures (walker evans, luc delahaye, sean reid, and many others). most of them taken furtively. are they substantially different from each other?

wayne

 

Hi Wayne,

 

I don't know Delahaye's work but my subway pictures are very different from those of Evans or Levitt or Davidson. Furtively isn't exactly the word - secretly is closer. But the secretiveness, to the extent that it exists, (and speaking only for myself) is done simply so that I can work from what I see. I suspect the same for Evans but would never presume to know his intentions. I never asked Helen about how she worked in the subways because our attention was always on the pictures - not the method....ya know? <G> The fact that a given picture was made without a subject's awareness defines neither its form nor its content (one reason that a term like "candid pictures" is so useless). The method is just a method - a means to an end.

 

How are my subway pictures different from those of Evans? - form and content (the constant variables <g> among all pictures). It always comes down to the pictures, despite all the red herrings thrown out by Sontag and the like. Many theorists would have us take our eye off the ball and instead concentrate on something tangential. But a good ball player keeps his eye on the ball and the ball is always the picture - not just the subject but the new fact of the picture itself.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[smokysun]

hi imants,

 

if i get you (and perhaps others) to re-read rilke, then this thread will have succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. besides this new selection 'letters on life' there's a translation by stephen mitchell of the poems you may not have seen (also a random house paperback) and a new one of 'the notebooks of malte laurids brigge'. i don't know about landscaping, but it seems to me this quote fits photography:

 

"It is not the ultimate and yet possibly the most peculiar value of art that it constitutes the medium in which man and landscape, figure and world encounter and find each other. In truth they live alongside one another, largely oblivious of each other. But in the painting, the building, the symphony - in a word, in art itself, they seem to join together as if in a higher, phophetic truth, to rely on one another, and it is as if they completed each other to become that perfect unity that characterizes the essence of a work of art." Rainer Maria Rilke

 

and rilke never says 'I' in his poems. most unusual. mostly dramatic scenes, or pictures of things. so to be personal doesn't mean taking family pics or putting oneself in the picture. (he does use himself, but usually in the third person. once in awhile, as in the poem on the photograph of his father, he does say 'my.'

 

hi sean,

much as i love the technical elements that go into making a work of art, what interests viewers, especially in photography, is subject matter, whether it's steve mccurry's 'portraits' or dario mitidieri's 'children of bombay'. if you look at 'talking pictures' from chronicle books where sixty people talk for two or three pages about a photograph that really has meant something to them (and the pictures range from family photos to photojournalism to atget) something in the subject matter evoked feelings in them. true, the art of the particular photograph sometimes matters but not often. that's why the choice of subject is crucial for the creator.

 

as for the subway pictures, luc delahaye's 'L'Autre' a phaidon paperback is different partly because of technique. his heads fill the frame and all are shot from the same low angle. (and taken secretly because french law says an image belongs to the person. but i guess the law didn't get him cause there are at least a hundred pics in this collection.)

 

but what really makes him different, i think, is the religious point of view that stands out in 'winterreise' even though there's no 'religion' per se in the book. his subway people seem to have their eyes on another world and they do not seem to be suffering, the characteristic of most subway pictures. these people don't seem to be alone.

 

this brings up another category of picture: the 'shamanistic'. i would put man ray and manuel alvarez bravo (mexico) in this genre. you see man ray's pictures everywhere. and i think the reason is they place us on the border with a spirit world. (again, this is never said except in surrealist manifestos) obviously, man ray's techniques play an important part, but anybody with a computer can use those and many more techniques easily without being a man ray.

 

hi bob,

 

i hope this all relates to your comments, which are most astute, and the last of which is the essence: "The art of personal photography might be, how we make those reflections more accurate and more representative." for me, that's the whole ballgame.

 

i can't remember the name of tolstoy's book on art, something like 'the spirit of art' but he says a work of art reflects the artist's nervous system, the tics and twitches, the pattern. and here most artists have the advantage over the photographer as they build up their work over time, trace after trace. since, if you say the average photo taken at 1/60 of a second, 3600 photos add up to one minute, and 30 significant photos make a career, it's not the same kind of problem (even adding time on the computer or in the darkroom, for a photograph has to retain a certain reflection of the common reality to be considered a photograph and not another kind of art.)

 

yet we know a diane arbus picture. off her contact sheets she chooses one kind. (just looked through mary ellen mark. very similar work.) and that reflects her view of reality. so very often the art of photography comes after the photo has been taken, though sam abell patiently waits for a certain kind of photo, he still makes a choice off the contact sheet. (another example would be helmut newton's famous photo of four naked models striding toward the camera. i've seen at least five versions and he choose the strongest. or dorthea lange's famous migrant woman, one of a series, and also cropped! and even hcb's puddle-jumper shot cropped, even if he hated cropping.)

 

thanks to all for a stimulating discussion. sorry this bit long-winded.

 

wayne

[Guest stnami]

Imants gave the landscaping game away except for a drystone wall around his vegie patch to keep the cabbages at bay and as well as giving the possums a nice platform to eat his tomatoes at their leisure,but I must admit he does consider them as 'the bloody beggars'.

Right now he is reading Umberto Eco's "Mouse or Rat,Translation as Negotiation" so Rilke has to wait, then a lot of what Rilke writes about is not a issue with Imants, its like yea ok now lets get on with the next thing. Do you think that he is getting bored again or has he transformed his mind?.

I tried to get him to photograph a wedding in B&W in order to have images that evoked another realm and not just a wedding. Sure no worries but I aint doing any of that stuff were is words the goddamn philastine, but he did my CD cover portait for me though the jury is still out about that one.

As Jack wrote

"We are al burning in time, but each is consumed at his own speed......." Makes you wonder what she is up to

[Guest stnami]

Hi Wayne Franklin mentioned Sally Mann as a lady of mystery, her stuff is really out there

see the Shoot the ones...... thread in Customer forum

http://www.leica-camera-user.com/customer-forum/2325-shoot-ones-you-love-love-ones.html#post21578

[smokysun]

hi imants,

 

very interesting thread. i hope everyone will read it. i happen to like sally mann (people ask me these days when they read or see my plays: have you read a lot of southern gothic). what's strikes me about mann's family photos is that from another culture, say a group in africa, they would be totally acceptable and interesting. her father's open-handedness about sex would be normal. but apply that same vision to a white, western family, and oh, boy, you do get a response. (same with nan goldin. okay to show drug addicts and cross-dressers from russia, but america?)

 

i take it from the thread and your comments in it that every choice is an interpretation. it's simply a piece of the 360 plus degree reality of every moment. (if every paradigm can be proved to be true, then the world remains a mystery.) and perhaps we can never create anything strong without it having a personal message and point of view.

 

many friends have given up art because 1. they didn't want to spend so much time alone practising (the value of reading rilke) and 2. they didn't want to reveal themselves to the extent necessary (they didn't want to be 'out there' as you described sally mann). freud said everyone wants to belong to a small tribe and there's the primate fear of death by banishment.

 

joyce cary said, 'an artist has to express the opposite of what he/she believes as strongly as what he/she does.' and he uses the example of dostoyevsky where the devil gets all the good lines, despite dostoyevsky's attempt to foist them off on his gentle heroes.

 

and jung said a lot of energy tied up in denying the side of ourselves which we don't approve. regaining our power means incorporating our shadow side.

 

the good thing about digital is now everyone is conscious of how a photo can be completely faked. believe nothing of what you see and only ten percent of what you hear. i think einstein said that.

 

thanks much for the reference. i deny the assertion an artist can't think and be an artist.

 

wayne

 

ps. here's a very interesting article on luc delahaye related to all this. go to the following and click on the first reference Memo by Luc Delahaye @ Metasearch.com

[Bob Ross]

Hi Wayne,

This, "a lot of energy is tied up in denying the side of ourselves which we don't approve. Regaining our power means incorporating our shadow side.-Jung" was interesting in light of the way that people post process their images today. There is a large number of digital shooters that live to open up the shadows and some of them really dislike the noise that they find in the process. Some of their results are just flat and lifeless. In the art of making prints, one addage was to let the shadows go where they are going and the same for the highlights, because incorporating them in that way gives the image more impact, character and tonal life. It is as though we are seeing a trend to find out what is in our shadow side and change it instead of just giving it value for the shadow that it is. The metaphor of "noise in the shadows"...."voices from the darkside", might be a hint to listen to parts of ourselve, rather than running them through noise reduction and silencing them.....shush, I don't want to hear you. In the digital imaging framework there seems to be two camps on the noise issue, those that can't stand it, especially when they incearse their sensitivity (ISO) and those that don't find the noise bothersome, if it looks like grain and/or doesn't detract from the image . I fall in the second camp and have even been known to add noise...:-)

I think we are seeing and aspect of the photographer in the image qualities variable. It could be that each picture we take is an image of our selves in the metaphor of the subject matter/content and maybe even more so in the images that we further process. How revealing....

Bob

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Hallo,

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[smokysun]

hi bob,

 

very interesting post. hadn't thought about noise and the shadow issue. truth is, we're both spoiled by digital and almost ruined by the computer's ability to magnify a picture til all its warts more than obvious.

 

i think one of the most beautiful color processes ever was autochrome, practised by steichen and others. check out a book called Photographs by a Russian Writer Leonid Andreyev: An Undiscovered Portrait of Pre-Revolutionary Russia. it's an expensive book but the local university library has one (and i confess, i just grabbed the cheapest one off amazon, deciding i wanted my own!) andreyev a famous writer of short novels (the seven who were hanged) and like a lot of writers at the time, pretty dark.

 

autochrome is pure noise!

 

and of course, almost every black and white street-type photo book in b&w hazy with dots. yet this doesn't prevent us from enjoying the french photographers of the fifties.

 

i mentioned 'the fotolog book' and i've browsed pics on pbase a lot. you really have to hunt to find a photographer doing uncommon work. as imants said, it's hard to find people going flat-out and making discoveries. (lots of them fun human documents, however. we're quite a bunch.) millions of pictures and photographers, and none to enter the record books. the dedicated professionals like majoli and kratchovil doing better.

 

i wonder if you don't have to be a kind of monk, avoiding the expectations of others, in order to go far. (sally mann an exception.) majoli, natchwey, they're solo performers all the way. (that said, the history of photography does include happy people like doisneau.)

 

stimulating thoughts. thanks much.

 

wayne

 

ps. just discovered amazon lists 'the art of the autochrome: the birth of color photography' with 75 good-sized plates. should be worth the money.