I really enjoyed this article about Jen Bekman in the New York Times last Thursday. It’s so easy to look at the curators, gallery directors, publishers, etc as the ones with all the power, it’s good to be reminded that they face many of the same challenges us artists do. The same struggles for recognition, for others to respect their vision, for financial solvency, etc. Jen works amazingly hard, and her success is well-deserved.

I spend plenty of time on this blog talking about the emotional and psychological cost of being an artist. What about the financial cost? Here are items from my most recent credit card statement that deal with the cost associated with the privilege of being an artist:    

This was a bad month in a financial sense (my cost this month will probably be under $50), but in no way unprecedented. I usually have a few months like this every year. It’s not unique to photographers either- my artist friends in other media spend as much or more than me just on supplies. I try not to let worries over cost affect my work, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.

By now most people with even a passing interest in photograph have probably seen the Newsweek article from last month about the death of photography. This argument is really quite tired, having been around for 15 years or so, and in my mind, misses the point. If its truthfulness is the cause of our love for photography, how do we explain our love of cinema, closely related, yet bearing not even a superficial relationship to any notions of truth?

One of my daughters’ favorite presents this Christmas was a kid digital camera.  They have been running around with the thing, which is pink (an added attraction of course) and takes pictures of about the quality of a three year old cell phone camera ($75 well spent), ever since they opened it. With every picture they take, they immediately look down at the LCD screen. I don’t have to observe them very long to realize that their fascination with photography has absolutely nothing to do with it’s “truth value.” I think  this observation is emblematic of the true heart of our fascination with the medium. When have we as a society ever been particularly interested in “truth” to begin with? Without even getting into the issue of what a hollow notion the idea of truth is to begin with, we seem to for the most part believe what we are told, and not spend a huge amount of time verifying its validity or analyzing the agendas that might lie beneath the surface. I am of course grossly over generalizing for the sake of argument…

I really think our collective fascination with photography comes simply from the particular set of languages it uses to portray the world in front of the lens. These languages (one-point perspective, indexicality, relationships to time) provide a unique intersection of ideals going all the way back to the renaissance. They are deeply engrained in our culture, and until those values change or we find something that represents them better, photography isn’t going anywhere.

As an academician, I have to add a footnote here. My thoughts on this subject were heavily colored by Geoffrey Batchen’s essay “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age.” It’s a great essay, and well worth reading, especially if people are going to keep obsessing about the death of photography.

I’ve been and bad blogger recently. I’m going to do my best  to get back, but I have myself spread mighty thin these days.

Soon after I wrote a post on conceptual photography I finally got my copy of the most recent Blind Spot. Between looking for a replacement for Rodinal (any suggestions?) and fixing plumbing problems at my house, I’ve spent more than a bit of time with it. I really applaud Blind Spot for showcasing experimental work like this (they are at least one venue that manages to work in some “conceptual” artist form time to time). However, I have a couple of beefs, one with Blind Spot and one with conceptual photography in general:
1. Let me start by saying, I am a big fan of Blind Spot. I really think it is one of the more interesting contemporary fine art photo magazines out there, and I really look forward to each new edition. However, there are at least one or two photographers in each edition that I look at and just flat out don’t get. I feel like I am reasonably sophisticated when it comes to the language of photography and looking at photographs in general, but I’m missing something. I have a feeling there is usually a back story or a description of the process of making the work that explains the content, but Blind Spot provides no textual hints. Is it because I am supposed to be doing leg work on all these artist to get the back story (which is not always so easy) or I should already be in the know if I’m reading the publication?
2. There are a few beautiful images in Blind Spot (I’ve included a few in this post). However, why is it that so much idea based photography has to be visually uninteresting? A good rule of thumb for me that a lot of idea based work falls short of it this: it needs to hold my interest visually for at least as long as it takes for my mind to latch on to the ideas.

Tim Atherton has a great post on his blog in which he pairs some of the Blind Spot images with quotes from David Hockney et al combined with his own thoughts on the current state of art.

I read Wright Morris’s article “In Our Image” for the first time this week. There were a lot of points in it that got me thinking, but one in particular has motivated me to further exploration. Morris argues that often the vernacular photograph, devoid of the things that cocern us artist such as form and style, carries a weight that is lacking in the “fine art” photograph. The vernacular phtoograph remains a photograph, while the fine art photograph becomes an image, and ultimately an image of the photographer as much as of the subject.

Above is my first paring for an ongoing thread. I think vernacular wins hands down in this case in terms of raw impact.

Two Disclaimers:
1. OK, the photograph on the left is probably not vernacular in the strictest sense, but it was certainly not done for purposes of fine art, so it is still a fair comparison. There will be more strictly vernacular work in future posts.
2. I have a significant prejudice against Serrano’s work. Jorg Colberg nails it for me when on his Conscientious blog he describes Serrano’s photographs as “the kind of stuff you’d expect from a toddler who has just entered the phase where he or she is saying ‘dirty’ words to get reactions out of people and for some reason knows how to take photos.”

If this all is true, where does it leave us fine art photographers? I was briefly troubled by this question, but have realized there are plenty of good reasons for us to do what we do. I just haven’t thought of how to articulate them yet…

Gursky’s 99 Cent II- almost 2.5 million at auction last November.

Michael Murphy had a comment on one of my previous posts that struck a chord with me. I’m not usually one to see much use in labeling and pigeonholing, but I believe the discrepancy between photographers and artists using photography is one that in a practical sense exists and is worth considering. Photography dealer Alex Novak specifically mentioned this distinction (without necessarily endorsing it) in a May interview with Photo District News as a justification for the high price of Gursky’s work:

Gursky and other people of his ilk don’t consider themselves photographers. The consider themselves artists. This is some of the price differential that you’re seeing.

Interestingly, when pushed to explain, Novak can’t offer much:

It’s a strange dichotomy, and somewhat artificial.

Gursky is someone I personally see as first and foremost a photographer- his work, while “conceptual,” is very much about photography (Michael hits it on the head with his designation of Gursky as a “crossover”). Compare that to people like Krueger, Boltansky, Sherry Levine or Carrie Mae Weems who are truly using photography as simply a means to an end. I remember the somewhat disjointed experience of seeing a print by Alec Soth (another crossover) across the room from a photographic piece by Mike Kelly at the Gagosian Gallery last summer. Lot’s of superficial connections (both contained beards and pubic hair), but world’s apart in their effect (I looked extensively for a reproduction of the Mike Kelley piece to include, but came up empty-handed).

So what makes the difference, and why do these distinctions even matter?

What is a conceptual artist? In my mind it is an artist using whatever medium(s) to raise larger questions about the medium itself, art in general, society, etc. Conceptual art is art that makes me think, not just respond. It pushes boundaries and makes us consider things in a new light. Anyone have a better definition?

Then how about the difference between conceptual photographers and conceptual artists using photography? Again, I would love to hear anyone else’s thoughts, but to me a conceptual photographer is making work about photography itself and/or showing a general concern for/fascination with the technical (craft) properties of the photograph.

Whenever I make up boundaries like this, I always find myself immediately looking for examples of work that blur those boundaries. I know they’re out there, but I really can’t think of any. The Starn Twins? Vik Muniz? Uta Barth? Their work is all still pretty immersed in photography. Maybe there’s room for exploration here.

So, is it that there are a much smaller number of photographers doing conceptual, or is it that it’s harder to get recognition for that work? Am I just looking in completely the wrong places? I’ve been around academia long enough to feel there’s no shortage of people doing conceptual work. If it’s harder to get recognition (one commonly held quality of conceptual that I have a major beef with is that it has to consciously deny any aesthetic considerations- maybe this plays in?), is the same true of painting and sculpture and other media, or is it a special prejudice against photography?

Color Printing in Photoshop- The Great Equalizer??

I’m hoping in the next week to undertake the making of my first serious color darkroom prints in probably 8 years. As a color photographer, I’m trained in the digital darkroom. I know all about color management and color correction in Photoshop, but when it comes to chemical based color printing, I have precious little experience.

So why would I want to partake of such an archaic and seemingly more and more irrelevant experience? I’m convinced there’e still something in the smell of that delightfully toxic chemistry that, while it can be mimicked in the computer, can not be found there initially.

As photographers working with color in Photoshop, we are taught a very simple formula for color correction: neutralize the highlights and shadows in levels, then the midtones in curves. The power of these two tools is immense- well beyond the tools of the traditional color darkroom (unlike black and white, where I remained convinced that almost everything you can do in Photoshop has a chemical-based counterpart- albiet an often times very cumbersome one). However, in using this formula (especially for white point neutralization), we are reducing all lighting scenarios to a single state (that of gray), and the beautiful way that color film (especially color negative film) sees the world gets lost. Suddenly, a photograph taken during the golden light at the end of the day becomes almost equivalent to one taken in the middle of the day. As a result, the atmosphere of the original photograph all but disappears.

The same is true for contrast control- I know I have a tendency, as I think many photographers do, to crank up the contrast in the digital darkroom much more than would be possible in the traditional darkroom. As a result, some of that beautifully sublte tonal range associated with C-41 film is lost. Not every image requires a true white or a true black, but with the empty portions of the histograms in such images crying out to me, I have a tendency to overcompensate and give them one anyway. I have no doubt that anything done in the traditional color darkroom can be almost perfectly mimicked in Photoshop, but you first have to have a pretty good sense of what it is you are mimicking…

Despite the fact that I am first and foremost a digital photographer (at least as far as darkroom work is concerned), I find I have a notable prejudice against the look of digital. I can look at a print and almost always tell if it was made with a film or digital camera. I can also tell which photographers were trained in the traditional darkroom (even if their final prints are now made by lasers or droplets of ink). In almost every case, I like the “look” of traditional photography over digital. Is that just my own inability to accept the new language of digital and the new beauty inherent in it, or is there something still superior to the traditional silver based way of rendering the world?

And so, as I begin trying to finalize prints for my most recent project, I find myself doing something I’ve been meaning to do for years- return to the traditional color darkroom to try to answer the question- have I been missing something for all these years in my printing? I will of course post the results of my experiments…

It’s a lonely world out there sometimes.

I re-enter the photo blogsphere and what do I find? None other than a very generous reference to one of my pieces in Amy Stein’s blog. Thanks Amy. Looks like I have an excuse to contribute to her “Gifts in the Mail” thread.

I bring this up because the episode is a good illustration of my love hate relationship with juried exhibitions. They are a rite of passage for the emerging photographer (and often the established photographer as well), and I do believe they serve an important purpose. They give invaluable experience learning what it takes to get work together and shipped for a show, and they allow many of us to maintain active exhibition records.

Yet the experience itself is often a hollow and lonely one. The work goes out, and six weeks later comes back. Other than the occasional review (from which my work is usually conspicuously absent) or exhibition catalog (which I almost always thoroughly enjoy), there is no feedback as to what happened in between. The work could have sat in the basement and never even been unpacked for all I know.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Jen Bekman’s HeyHotShot show is one I got some good feedback from. Now the Griffin show is another. However, I’ve never found them as fullfilling as the exhibitions I do with smaller groups of artists (this sort of exhibition has provided by far the best experiences of my exhibition career). My thanks again go to Amy for providing a foil to my normal juried exhibition experience!

Susana Raab has additional thoughts on her blog regarding juried exhibitions. They are worth checking out.

Poet/photographer Francis Raven wrote a poem about my piece “The Half-Hearted Confession of a Rainy Day Fan:”

You know you weren’t watching the game

Capable of.

As my titles suggest, I’m very interested in exploring the relationship between narrative and text in my photographs, and am excited to see someone else take the idea and run with it. Thanks Francis!

Every so often, a photographer seems to rise to stardom from out of nowhere. Having never seen their work before, you suddenly see it everywhere, and they’re winning awards left and right, getting solo shows, etc. Some disappear as fast as they come, others have the depth and tenacity to remain in the spotlight.

Recently, I would put Amy Stein into this catagory. I’m suddently seeing work from her series Domesticated all over the place. It is a very strong series, with instant inpact, yet enough subtlety to hold your interest for a longer time.

It’s really easy to buy in to the myth of the “undiscovered” artist who, working in both isolation and obscurity is suddenly discovered and rocketed to stardom. I certainly bought into this myth for some time as a young aspiring artist. Yet closer examination pretty much always reveals much more beneath the surface. I have yet to meet a successful photographer who isn’t putting a temendous amount of effort into promoting their work. It’s just part of the job, and arguably requires more time and effort than the making itself.

A quick look at Amy Stein’s blog bears this out. She is constantly on the lookout for what is going on in the contemporary photo world, and taking every oppurtunity she can find to get her work out there.