ingres vs. manet - any thoughts?

[ericperlberg]

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The emotion has to come from somewhere, but if you look for it, that is, if you start with the idea that you want to express emotion,

....snip

 

I was really referring to something else, the psychological state of the photographer.

 

Along with Sean's links I'd like to add this one of Stephen Shore (its a short video). Shore speaks of non-verbal visual issues which arise out of the internalised understandings of artistic fundamentals like those in the Lifson link. He is a master of these.

 

But additionally he speaks of a mix of psychological issues going on in the photographer and a photographer's (or any artist's) "vision" as how he/she presents these psychological issues. I think Shore makes an interesting point that some (Edward Hopper and Picasso come to mind) have a vision which carries them through their lifetime's work while others (Shore by self description, Meyerowitz also comes to mind) have to reinvent that vision occassionally because they no longer feel they are learning anything new.

 

So a photograph (and this was my point earlier) is a mashup (current fad word, a mixture) of not just the academic issues of form, line, surface, light, colour, composition, negative space etc. though they are clearly a part of the photograph (or artwork) but also something in the work which arises from the psychological issues in the photographer and vision they have for the solution of these issues.

 

The mash up of the formal and the psychological is expressed in something which either does or doesn't have uniqueness and which either does or doesn't have resonance to other people. If it just resonates with the author, fine, a good time was had and £4k for your M8 was well spent. Sometimes it resonates with people across time and geography like HCB's work or Shore's work or Daido Moriyama's work or Araki, etc. But my earlier point was that to understand the photograph, I think it's not enough to look at its structural content. To me, the real "art" comes from the unique psychological factors and how they're expressed.

[smokysun]

yes, this certainly seems to me a key to why one artist resonates with his/her time and another doesn't. their own inner world struggles echo themselves in the lives of others going thru the same thing. lucky the artist who lives in such a time. nan goldin, for example, would very likely not have the same impact in today's world. technique is everwhere. oscar wilde said everybody has talent and few have persistence! with today's cameras the vision is the issue, not the equipment. in theater it's called 'raising the stakes' to get the necessary urgency. nothing risked nothing deeply expressed. put your life on the line in your work and it's another matter.

 

thanks, sean, for the proviso on nan goldin. one of the pleasures of photography is being able to enter worlds without having to physically suffer them! if people really want to be offended, they should look at her cohort, araki, on the other side of the world.

 

Amazon.com: Araki by Araki: The Photographer's Personal Selection: Books: Nobuyoshi Araki

 

yet, if they watch what he has to say for himself on the dvd

 

Amazon.com: Contacts, Vol. 2: The Renewal of Contemporary Photography: DVD: Contacts 2

 

they might be touched by those pieces relating to his wife, their life together, and her death. (in general his work not to my taste, but i'm glad he exists, if that makes sense.)

 

by the way, i can't recommend these 3 dvd's highly enough (and i see all the things i'm recommending becoming much scarcer than a year ago). nan goldin also on one, talking about her work. i keep them by my computer and watch a 15 minute segment whenever i need a pick-me-up.

[sean_reid]

....snip

 

I was really referring to something else, the psychological state of the photographer.

 

Along with Sean's links I'd like to add this one of Stephen Shore (its a short video). Shore speaks of non-verbal visual issues which arise out of the internalised understandings of artistic fundamentals like those in the Lifson link. He is a master of these.

:

 

It's funny that you should mention Stephen. Ben and Stephen were both my professors and mentors a long time ago when I was an undergraduate at Bard College. Their offices were right next to each other and they certainly had many opportunities to influence each other. Both of them were, and are, extremely intelligent and thoughtful. It was a great time to be a photography student.

 

Thanks for the video link - I enjoyed it.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[robertwright]

Hello Mitch,

 

Is that what you meant to write? I'm sure you realize that there is far more to strong photography than that.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

 

where is gary winogrand when we need him...

 

he said something like "its one modus operandi, to decide what to include in the frame, and when to snap the shutter..." for him the problem was how not to make a "good" picture, at least one that he had seen before. It is an interesting counterpoint to this debate.

[sean_reid]

where is gary winogrand when we need him...

 

he said something like "its one modus operandi, to decide what to include in the frame, and when to snap the shutter..." for him the problem was how not to make a "good" picture, at least one that he had seen before. It is an interesting counterpoint to this debate.

 

Tell me more about what you're thinking.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[Guest sirvine]

I'm not one to canonize or name-drop, but I will tell you that I can't look through Araki's Diary Sentimental Journey without having a near-total emotional breakdown, even after many, many viewings. And this is from a guy who most often gets dismissed as a pornographer. From my little worldview, that book is the consummate example of masterful photographic and editing technique paired with the love&death narrative.

 

I'm also very fond of his book of cat photos, which takes the most mundane and cliched of topics, and converts it into something excellent.

[smokysun]

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it's interesting you bring up gary winograd. i was just at barnes & noble drinking chai and looking at

 

Amazon.com: The Art of Collecting Photography: Books: Laura Noble

 

when i looked around and everyone looked peculiar and strange. i thought, 'they all look like they stepped out of a gary winograd photograph.'

 

perhaps this has to do with the comments above on a photographer's psychic states. each who has a recognizable style sees the world in a particular day.

 

other times people at barnes and noble look like they're out of david hockney!

 

how our moods influence the world! and how an artist makes us see it his/her way.

 

alas, i realized with a photo show up for the past six weeks i really have no style, though a local critic said that is a style. it's actually been more of an installation with writings on the wall, aphorisms and theater stuff, as well as props from the theater's back room. one professor in the building called the show 'haunting' (i'll take it). another who's been there at least 25 years said 'it's the most monumental show we've had.' but my favorite comment came from a woman who owns two galleries downtown and sells photographs with paintings, etc. she said she could feel the energy as she walked into the room. 'that's what life is all about.' and i realized it's the spectrum of human life that interests me and not photographs or writing or theater by themselves. (you learn a lot about doing a show. this is probably my first and last time.) i'm shy to give a link to pics of it after such a build up, but what the heck:

 

blue room trinity gallery show Photo Gallery by wayne pease at pbase.com

 

and here's a notice for the show, in case you think i'm faking it

 

California State University, Chico - Events and Calendars

 

i used all kinds of techniques, cameras, lenses, etc. i had two readings of new plays and a showing of a film and photos i'd taken. wed i'm doing a poetry reading of my stuff to close the show. so maybe that's why it feels more like an installation than a photo show. and perhaps that's why i wanted to say certain things in this thread. and maybe it goes with those who say, 'you don't know what you're doing til you do it.'

 

thanks,

 

wayne

 

ps. realized i did add photos and aphorisms after these pics taken, filling out the room a bit more.

[robertwright]

Tell me more about what you're thinking.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

 

well knowing what GW meant when he said what he said was always difficult, he tended to be circular and obtuse, but there is that video from a Bill Moyers special where they interview him (prob on youtube) and there is a little footage of him working in LA. Very fun to watch. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, getting to photography too late for his brief wonderful life, but his pictures have always affected me in a number of ways-

So what was I getting at? Well obviously there is more to photography than putting a frame around something, which is where I enterered the discussion, but I was thinking that there is maybe not much more than that on a certain level. I have to be careful here...Winogrand liked to opine that photographs are what the world looks like, to a camera, and for him it ended and began there. Certainly he was a master of gesture and emotion and humor and rhyme, etc, he has all the "tools", but I think he never wanted to get too caught up the theatricality of what he was photographing, in other words, sometimes the thing is good enough if you pay enough attention. And he never wanted to get caught "making" a picture, in the sense of doing what it is that we all know makes "good" pictures. He had no interest in that. So formal ideas of lines and color and beauty I don't believe interested him as much as what photographs could "be" on their own, minus all that we know about art. He wanted them to stand up on their own as facts beyond any conception of what was good or bad,, what was art or not. For him I believe it was a process of discovery, the invention of a language he had not understood before.

 

I think I am a long way from where this conversation began..but I think to be obtuse, you could if you wanted "just pick up a camera and frame", and that might be enough if you allowed your awareness to expand enough to encompass what the camera can do, which is what I believe winogrand was on to. He said, "the more I do, the more I can do.." which I think expresses this, the more he attempted, the more he could invent, this language. And I think he did it outside of or without paying too much mind to what was supposed to be "good." That is a hard hypothesis to prove, but I think that is where he was going. I also think that is why he never really got the "street" label as applied to him, it was just raw material, more and more of it, but especially since then, the entire school of "street" photography is (long stretch here folks) essentially anti-winograndian, because so much of it repeats the vernacular he invented to a large degree. So I think it would bore him because it would reveal nothing new. At least I feel that way a lot of the time working on the street, beyond the emotional moments and the humourous moments, how am I making this new for me? It is a great challenge.

[sean_reid]

Hi Robert,

 

Thanks for the further thoughts. Winogrand was a good friend of my friend Ben Lifson. You might be surprised as to his relationship to visual art. He actually began as a painter, studying painting at Columbia University and kept a strong relationship to painting throughout his life. Form actually interested him very much and he often repeated to students that "Every photograph is a contention between form and content". In a bookstore with the photographer Leo Rubinfein, he once said (about a reproduction of a painting by Titian, a nude) "Look Leo! Another great photographer". I believe he was very aware that pictures are made and he made them with great precision.

 

Towards the end of his life he was working on pictures where the figures were very small in the landscape and he talked about them, with Ben, in that way. He was interested in beauty and he did, as I understand it, measure his own and others work in terms of what was strong and what was not. About a picture he was preparing for "Stock Photographs" he said to Ben (who was working on the selection with him), "I still can't tell if this is good or not but it interests me and I want to put it in the book so that I can keep looking at it."

 

I agree that Winogrand was highly inventive and that his sense of what was strong was not bound to conventions in photography. But at the same time his inventions had strong ties to visual art generally, especially painting.

 

If Ben has time, I'll ask him to pop in here as well.

 

That question of "how do I make this new for me?" is always a good one to ask, I agree.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[ericperlberg]

It's funny that you should mention Stephen. Ben and Stephen were both my professors and mentors a long time ago when I was an undergraduate at Bard College. Their offices were right next to each other and they certainly had many opportunities to influence each other. Both of them were, and are, extremely intelligent and thoughtful. It was a great time to be a photography student.

 

Thanks for the video link - I enjoyed it.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

It's particularly peculiar that you should mention that. I'm also a Bard Alum. Unfortunately I was sitting in Psych lectures and drinking down the road in the late 60's while Stephen was breaking photographic molds etc etc. Am I envious? Does butter melt in the sun?

[jrc]

it's interesting you bring up gary winograd. i was just at barnes & noble drinking chai and looking at

 

Amazon.com: The Art of Collecting Photography: Books: Laura Noble

 

when i looked around and everyone looked peculiar and strange. i thought, 'they all look like they stepped out of a gary winograd photograph.'

 

 

That happens to me fairly often. If you look at some of Leonardo's sketches of people in the street, and some of Pieter Bruegel's, then go for a walk on most urban streets, you'll start seeing those people everywhere; it can freak you out. Maybe that's why Winogrand was so effective -- he actually looked at people, while most of us have a kind of social screen around us that keeps them from really looking at others...

 

There's a barrier between me and Nan Goldin: I've known quite a few people like her subjects, and when I see her photographs, I have an automatic reaction: here's another dumb-ass. I know we're all human and no man is an island, etc., but after a while, you (or maybe just me) come to realize that some people just aren't worth the effort it takes to know them, that they just don't have much to contribute to anything. They lay around on their asses all day and don't think about much and don't do much and that's what I see when I see a Goldin picture; and I can't get past that. I have the same reaction to Annie Leibovitz; I look at one of her pictures, which are nicely composed and pretty, and of a movie star, and I think, so what? Everything in the photo, including the subject, is a creation of the public relations business and has almost nothing to do with anything.

 

JC

[sean_reid]

It's particularly peculiar that you should mention that. I'm also a Bard Alum. Unfortunately I was sitting in Psych lectures and drinking down the road in the late 60's while Stephen was breaking photographic molds etc etc. Am I envious? Does butter melt in the sun?

 

Really! Adoph's is long now but it wasn't when I was there. Was Frank Oja there when you were a student? In the late 60s, Stephen was still a boy. My education at Bard was worth every penny.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[jrc]

I also think that is why he never really got the "street" label as applied to him, it was just raw material, more and more of it, but especially since then, the entire school of "street" photography is (long stretch here folks) essentially anti-winograndian, because so much of it repeats the vernacular he invented to a large degree. So I think it would bore him because it would reveal nothing new. At least I feel that way a lot of the time working on the street, beyond the emotional moments and the humourous moments, how am I making this new for me? It is a great challenge.

 

There's a great fashion right now for "plein aire" painting in the US -- we use the French term as though "plain air" isn't good enough...and the problem is that the people who do it (who are probably nice enough people; hell of a lot better than sitting in front of the TV) are really just practicing a technique invented by the Impressionists (and a few others, before and after.) But the Impressionists were really not consumed by technique; the technique flowed from the idea that they were trying to catch light, which is why Monet painted so many haystacks -- they were all different, because the light was different. When you see somebody who learns the technique of thumbing the bristles of a brush to flip red paint spatters on a canvas, and then calls it "Field of Poppies," you're not looking at an Impressionist, you're looking at a Technique-ist. That applies to Windogrand, as you say: he wasn't about getting a look, he was about finding something out. Too many phototographers go hunting for "a look," when they should be hunting for life.

 

JC

[robertwright]

Hi Robert,

 

Thanks for the further thoughts. Winogrand was a good friend of my friend Ben Lifson. You might be surprised as to his relationship to visual art. He actually began as a painter, studying painting at Columbia University and kept a strong relationship to painting throughout his life. Form actually interested him very much and he often repeated to students that "Every photograph is a contention between form and content". In a bookstore with the photographer Leo Rubinfein, he once said (about a reproduction of a painting by Titian, a nude) "Look Leo! Another great photographer". I believe he was very aware that pictures are made and he made them with great precision.

 

Towards the end of his life he was working on pictures where the figures were very small in the landscape and he talked about them, with Ben, in that way. He was interested in beauty and he did, as I understand it, measure his own and others work in terms of what was strong and what was not. About a picture he was preparing for "Stock Photographs" he said to Ben (who was working on the selection with him), "I still can't tell if this is good or not but it interests me and I want to put it in the book so that I can keep looking at it."

 

I agree that Winogrand was highly inventive and that his sense of what was strong was not bound to conventions in photography. But at the same time his inventions had strong ties to visual art generally, especially painting.

 

If Ben has time, I'll ask him to pop in here as well.

 

That question of "how do I make this new for me?" is always a good one to ask, I agree.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

 

I have to be careful saying things about "making" photographs, I know it is that old dichotomy between making/taking that gets a lot of juices flowing, so to parse it further, when I say "not want to get caught making photographs" I mean preconceiving something and then setting out to make it, which is I believe how a lot of photographers work. So goes a lot of what is "known" about form and line and composition-

Now of course this is just my idea of what someone else meant based on my reading of the subject, so it mostly accrues to me doesn't it...but I am aware of gw's history starting out, and I agree he had to have used all that we know about line and form and color and gesture, there is just no way around that. Yet-there is something else going on, the intuitive, something which cannot be deconstructed formally in his very formal pictures. It is where like you say, the form and the content, how they overwhelm each other into something new, a new language that just left a lot of other photographers behind, and still has no one that I know saying it in that way, although I am not sure I would want anyone else anyway..?

 

I read all the Lifson articles on that website, I really really loved them all, it would be great to hear it from him.

[robertwright]

That happens to me fairly often. If you look at some of Leonardo's sketches of people in the street, and some of Pieter Bruegel's, then go for a walk on most urban streets, you'll start seeing those people everywhere; it can freak you out. Maybe that's why Winogrand was so effective -- he actually looked at people, while most of us have a kind of social screen around us that keeps them from really looking at others...

 

There's a barrier between me and Nan Goldin: I've known quite a few people like her subjects, and when I see her photographs, I have an automatic reaction: here's another dumb-ass. I know we're all human and no man is an island, etc., but after a while, you (or maybe just me) come to realize that some people just aren't worth the effort it takes to know them, that they just don't have much to contribute to anything. They lay around on their asses all day and don't think about much and don't do much and that's what I see when I see a Goldin picture; and I can't get past that. I have the same reaction to Annie Leibovitz; I look at one of her pictures, which are nicely composed and pretty, and of a movie star, and I think, so what? Everything in the photo, including the subject, is a creation of the public relations business and has almost nothing to do with anything.

 

JC

 

yes, Zoolander is a Documentary film...

[Jamie Roberts]

Great thread!!

 

The intersection of fine art and photography just fascinates me. And yes, it has an influence on my style (there's nothing wrong with having a style, IMO). FWIW, I also studied both photography and fine art--along with literature--though my photography teachers were perhaps less illustrious in the well-known way than some here. Doesn't mean they weren't good teachers though!)

 

John--I agree that the impressionists were not overly hung up on a single technique, and that the play of light itself was their muse (or Monet's, anyway).... but that doesn't mean Monet's resulting work isn't also technically impressive, in terms of colour, composition, gesture and form.

 

In fact, I like to think about Monet's work in photographic terms, even though he could be called a painter's painter (he certainly was accomplished, and established, enough to seek any mode of expression he wanted to, as was, for that matter, Magritte, who could in fact draw realistically anything he wanted to. He just didn't want to very often).

 

But Monet was, to me a true photophile, if you like; his paintings are photography manifested not through film but mental capacity and paint.

 

I'd love to be able to take pictures more in the pure play of light and colour, and that's something I'm still working towards--married with traditional photographic possibilties in time / movement/ gesture and space / form / shape.

 

Having said that, I have the exact opposite to Leibowitz these days that you do.

 

Yes, I know her work is very technically complex and production-oriented: she is certainly making pictures! And on one level they're quite "acceptible" and public-relations oriented (if they weren't they wouldn't be in Vanity Fair or Vogue--though even that's not quite true, since Vanity Fair, anyway, is actually quite intelligent and always has been).

 

But regardless of her complex and commercial production values, I simply love the way Leibowitz is using colour and gesture in increasingly interesting ways, and is slowly but surely channeling the Pre-Raphaelites through a 21st century filter. To me her mastery of colour, light and form subverts the advertising nature of the images. They work against the consumption of the goods, IMO.

 

Her current colour palette is so painterly it's absurd in a magazine. The technical side of me--the working photographer side of me--has nothing but admiration for whoever managing her CMYK separations!

 

More importantly, on the symbolic side she is ironically re-writing a lot of the myths the Pre-Raphaelites loved with pop-culture references or overlays. For example, that Beauty and the Beast she did (in US Vogue Drew Barrymore: Beauty and the Beast: Vogue Slideshow) I think was excellent, even though there's a movie star in it (for that matter, there was a movie star in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast as well!)--maybe because there's a movie star in it. And a stuffed Lion (even if it's not stuffed, it looks lifeless, which is interesting to me).

 

The cartoon message of this? It's what's on the inside that counts? Interesting way to advertise fashion...

 

Ah well. I think the notion, too, of a pure and ethical documentary photography is mostly nonsense. All pictures are made--some are just well-made and others, well, not-so-well-made. Some are intentionally made and some are unconsciously made.

 

To me, that some people think "all they're doing" with their technique is snapping the shutter at the right time--to me, they're just fooling themselves while they practice another convention--a "documentary" one. Sort of like "realism" in literature: it's a convention, not a graphic window on the world.

 

Thanks for the opportunity to ramble!

[DaveSee]

we're just picking up a camera and, unlitmately, just deciding what to put the frame around.

—Mitch/Paris

Is that what you meant to write? I'm sure you realize that there is far more to strong photography than that.

Sean

No Sean, that is out of context: I was just addressing the idea that, in photography, we're not choosing between line and shape (color), between Ingres and Manet. Instead, we're framing a scene; and, in framing that scene, there is obviously a lot more involved to achieve a "good" photograph, or one that can approach art.

—Mitch/Paris

While I do understand the "the idea... we're framing a scene", and by extension that we--whichever the VF used--render in two dimensions what we "frame" in three. However, I disagree that we do not use/choose line, shape or color while rendering an image, from VF, through exposure procedure on the way to "the print presentation". Some of us are more apt to frame with lines we see, or colors more effecting.

 

What I am adding to the "framing" argument is just how subtle and yet important a change in this framing I have found between what I did with a meterless M4 and what I may now do with the M8... and in some ways influencing my outings lately with the M4 and film. I see colors differently (yes, IR too because I now may capture it ), and deep shadow, or highlight shapes may be rendered flat, or given texture/timbre... and all of this in the pre-visualization/framing before the shutter is released. Heck, even my 35 pre-ASPH summicron has become the 40 I always wanted and the 50 I never had. Simply: I look through the VF and see only what could be in the image, formally, and release the shutter when the image is visible... tracing and "eyeballing".

 

rgds,

Dave

[ericperlberg]

Really! Adoph's is long now ... snip, Sean

 

sent you a PM to spare the others!

[Peter Branch]

....... Color in photography can be extremely difficult to use well. ......

 

Sean,

 

This is a fascinating topic. A few years ago one of the favourite questions asked by tutors interviewing applicants for places at Cambridge University’s Engineering Faculty was – Which is the most difficult; Colour or Black & White photography?

 

The answer they wanted was Black & White on the grounds that it was more abstract and required mental agility to “see and analyse” a scene in B&W whereas Colour was there in front of you and required no such mental effort. (Discuss – as they say!)

 

I’m inclined to think however that, in the real world, there has been fewer great colour photographers than B&W photographers. The topic is to my mind bedevilled by documentary, reporting and nature photography where there are some great photographs which, because of commercial and media pressures, are invariably in colour.

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[jrc]

<snip>But Monet was, to me a true photophile, if you like; his paintings are photography manifested not through film but mental capacity and paint.

<snip>

 

Having said that, I have the exact opposite to Leibowitz these days that you do.

 

Yes, I know her work is very technically complex and production-oriented: she is certainly making pictures! And on one level they're quite "acceptible" and public-relations oriented (if they weren't they wouldn't be in Vanity Fair or Vogue--though even that's not quite true, since Vanity Fair, anyway, is actually quite intelligent and always has been).

 

But regardless of her complex and commercial production values, I simply love the way Leibowitz is using colour and gesture in increasingly interesting ways, and is slowly but surely channeling the Pre-Raphaelites through a 21st century filter. To me her mastery of colour, light and form subverts the advertising nature of the images. They work against the consumption of the goods, IMO.

 

Her current colour palette is so painterly it's absurd in a magazine. The technical side of me--the working photographer side of me--has nothing but admiration for whoever managing her CMYK separations!

 

More importantly, on the symbolic side she is ironically re-writing a lot of the myths the Pre-Raphaelites loved with pop-culture references or overlays. For example, that Beauty and the Beast she did (in US Vogue Drew Barrymore: Beauty and the Beast: Vogue Slideshow) I think was excellent, even though there's a movie star in it (for that matter, there was a movie star in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast as well!)--maybe because there's a movie star in it. And a stuffed Lion (even if it's not stuffed, it looks lifeless, which is interesting to me).

 

I agree with about everything you said about Monet; but when it comes to photophiles, look at at the photo cropping in Degas sometime...

 

I don't have any great problem with Leibovitz, it's just that I don't care about it, the same way I don't care about Nan Goldin. It's ME that 's the problem, I guess. However, before you become too impressed with Leibovitz, get some high-style movie sometime and hit the pause button ever once in a while and look at the still shots. There was a pretty bad movie by Keanu Reeves (Constantine) running on cable the other night, and I could hardly figure out what it was about -- demons & etc. But: there are some really nice night-time stills in it. I think what Leivovitz does is spends movie-money on production, and if *you* had movie--money to spend on production, you might be able to do something quite a bit like what she does. When you start cutting stills out of a movie like Constantine, you suddenly find yourself with portfolio of really nice movie-star pictures that are -- dare we say it? -- better than Annie's. And make stills out of Chinatown...no contest.

 

JC