Human Action

11/19/04: On 8/29 I went to the big anti-Bush turnout in the city. It gave me a taste for photos of human action, always well dosed with irony – I hope my photos show folks were having a good time, and that war is colorful even on the home front. Have you noticed what a difference there is between the black-and-white photos of World War 2 and those of Vietnam and subsequent wars? I remember first feeling that difference in 1957, when Columbia Studios released "The Bridge on the River Kwai." War in color has a certain Christmas cheer about it – green, the military color, color of the jungle, and the red of blood and napalm. If I were able to photograph a war from the front lines I'd do my best to bring out that irony.

Retrospective

8/1/04: Looking back at what I’ve done so far this year, I see a turn away from the ironic, too-good-to-be-true, realer-than-real, overcolored photos that were becoming my stock in trade. I'm not much interested in stock photos, so for much of my work I've moved back to tiresome black-and-white. Also I began making trips to local tourist spots – zoos, museums, even Coney Island and Grant’s Tomb. If you want a peg to hang that on, think of the haibun travel diaries of the haiku poet Matsuo Basho. (A quick Web search shows me that other photographers have borrowed the same word. Why not? It fits.)

Larry's Fifteen Minutes

6/14/2004. Larry Korhnak found that CBS had borrowed one of his old Barbie photos without attribution.

In Andy's future (which is now) everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes, and nobody will know who he is.

Standard Deviations

5/13/2004. From a letter.

I too find that people are perfectly happy with unsharp images. After many years I concluded they just don't see the difference. Not necessarily optically – seeing being after all a brain function. Then again, most people don't see much at all. Few notice the poles and wires and transformers and such that make the American landscape so hideously ugly, but I always see them, just as I see the floaters and other artifacts of vision nobody notices. Maybe my brain just isn't good at smoothing or whatever brains do to hide irrelevant details. It's not pleasant. I'd be normal if I could.

Procedural

4/15/2004. From a letter.

I put tech info on my prints for my own reference later, and to avoid any trace of auteur-hauteur sentimentality. I figure if they're framed the mat will cover it up. Same goes for signing. Any college-boy interest I had in first editions and limited editions and signed editions evaporated long since; what's important is the thing itself, not whether Picasso mixed the paint with his own spit.

True, I signed some photos we sent to Chris's friend in Miami a year or two ago for some church benefit, but only because they asked for it.

Mind you, there is a reason to want to see originals (or "originals"), even with photos, since no two prints of the same photo are quite alike, and some are very different indeed, 'specially if they're printed years apart and with different equipment. If the same guy is in charge of printing them, you can see trends in his thinking, as in G. Gould's early and late recordings of the Goldberg Variations.

Certainly I'm glad I've had the chance to see, in NYC, photos actually printed by Weston and Ansel Adams and Gene Smith and many others. Often the prints have qualities you just don't get in reproductions, qualities of luminosity and bronzing and foxing and tones. I always felt that one of Henri C-B's few shortcomings was his lack of interest in the photo once it was taken.

The Abbatoirs of Art

4/10/2004. From a letter.

Did Saturday chores with Chris today. We stopped at the Korean (or possibly Viet or Taiwanese) market where Chris is on first-name terms with the fish guy, being probably their best customer. While waiting outside I was startled by a sign in the window: Chilean Sea Bass, $12.99. It wasn't so much the price that got me as the really fine drawing of a toothfish (sold as Sea Bass) on the same poster. Looking at it with the critical eye of a hardened museum jock, I saw it was an original, done in colored Pentel. When I pointed it out to Chris, she was sure the fish man must've done it. She went back in and got him to confess that in Taiwan, or Vietnam, or wherever it was, he was a professional artist. He promised to give her a poster. I'd cheerfully pay for one.

So it is with photography too. Some of the stuff I've seen online is remarkable. I suppose anybody might occasionally get off a lucky shot, but some amateurs are consistently excellent – far better than the Foine Arteests whose crap adorns the walls of the world's most prestigious museums.

It's a blessing that the new arts of the 20th century – e.g. film, cartooning and photography – have seldom been considered art, being instead mere entertainment (like Shakespeare's plays) and (the real kicker) uncollectable. (You can collect comics like stamps or bottle caps, I guess, but not like Gaugins. Ditto for photos; who wants something that can be endlessly reproduced?) That low status has kept them out of the museums and away from the academy. Museums are the mausoleums, academies the abbatoirs of art.

Arthur's Axiom

Arthur B. responded: “I understand - the more difficult things are, the more desirable and valuable. It only makes sense.”

Exactly! Exactly! Digital photography (and video for movies) is being scorned as cheating – it's too easy to make a pretty picture. Likewise, photography itself was dismissed as cheating by artists who slaved for years to learn how to make a likeness, then slaved over the product itself until it looked as much as possible like a color photograph, then varnished it. And Old Masters painting in oils were derided by still Older Masters who refused to do anything but tempera on hardwood, who were dismissed as amateurs by the Eldest Masters who applied gold leaf and cow's urine to parchment, undsoweiter.

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey
And they have smaller still to bite 'em
And so proceeds, ad infinitum.

(3/2/2004)

Comic-Book Colors

My dear friend Fiertel, who's also a Canadian sculptor and photographer, objected to the poster-like colors and look of a recent photo. Here's my reply, which I didn't write for public consumption but which makes a kind of public sense.

I wouldn't want you of all people to think that my fondness for glaring flat colors is just a symptom of twisted color faculties. When I took up, or rather re-took-up, photography in '98 (not even six years ago, just fancy that), I did my thing in the woods mostly. Figured I would retreat from a hostile world into the more frankly hostile wilderness. But it didn't work out that way. I got the idea of doing nature photography as though it was studio fashion photography, partly as a reaction against the stupid websites that wouldn't publish any photo which showed "the hand of man." I began to move in a direction I've long associated with old age, the direction of artifice. (When he was my age, Yeats wrote about this in "Sailing to Byzantium," where he says he wants to be no natural thing but rather like a bird of hammered gold and clockwork that sings to the lords and ladies of Byzantium.) I want to make it clear that my photos are not imitations of natural objects but natural objects in their own right, with their own color and logic. Too good to be true, natural only in the sense we hear at funerals: "He looks so natural!"

So however "realistic" my stuff is – and I try to make it super-real, realer than real, surreal, by keeping images sharp and well defined – it looks somehow fake-o, studi-o. This is Intentional. Death is more perfect than life. I do lots of still lifes in the French spirit – French for "still life" being, of course, "dead nature" – nature morte.

Whereas mit der Viertel, even your raunchiest most distorted images are full of life and the approximations and collisions and irritability that define life almost. Like your sculpture – doesn't look quite like a bod, but has earth in the mouth and dirt under the nails and is in all ways organic and a living thing. My stuff being purposely cold, sterile, unfeeling, distant, dramatic. Yours being lyrical, with no obvious separation of the artist from the art. Mine minus the artist, who's presumably bored and sanding his nails in the wings. Yours supercharged with your own blood, sweat and tears. The blood in mine being merely a decorative element.

You dig.

What's Wrong with This Picture?

Submitted the infamous "Mr. Bun" to a critique forum and raised a ruckus, getting myself (temporarily) kicked off the site. Comments were, to say the least, intemperate. I'll paraphrase them and copy my replies.

A lady complained: "Really sick." Told me I should grow up, had obviously removed the photo to hide my name, etc. (It was removed when I was kicked off.) "PP" is the name of the website.

Some folks lead such happy lives that the sight of a dead animal shocks them. I doubt this photo would get highly ionized comments from viewers in Africa or Afghanistan. Which is a good thing, of course. When you're well fed you can argue matters of taste.

If PP's rules listed dead bunnies as a no-no I wouldn't have posted "Mr. Bun," just as I wouldn't post a photo of a ham on an Islamic website. In my book one of the worst sins is impoliteness – for example, telling an old man to grow up.

I thought of removing the photo, but of course after reading your comment I can't do so. Cheer up: maybe I'll be ostracized again.

Nothing daunted, she replied that she had seen her share of "death and decease" and that she was a cancer survivor who didn't need to be told she was impolite.

Speaking of "death and decease," I'm not quite sure how your having cancer amounts to a critique of my photo. The rabbit shown here succumbed to trauma.

You don't consider it impolite to tell a grown man he's childish, "really sick," tasteless, and a coward who hides his identity? Your politeness threshold must be high, so you won't mind being told that too many of my friends didn't survive cancer for me to be much impressed that you did.

When argument fails, show your scars.

The next is too tasty to paraphrase. "I'm an ALL ANIMAL LOVER and this really pissed me off. I know the facts of life and death but this is too much ..."

Not quite sure what an "all animal lover" is, and would rather not speculate, but I take your point. I loved my mother and father so much I refused to look at them when they lay dying.

If you know the facts of life and death, I wish you'd tell me what they are. I've lived a long time and expect to die pretty soon, but I still don't know the facts.

Nearly everybody said that I and my photo were "tasteless."

Most of the comments here say the photo lacks taste, but can that be right? A glass of water is tasteless; a glass of whiskey isn't.

D.H. said the photo was not only tasteless but "uncalled for."

"Uncalled for"? Surely this site invites people to post their photos. Or if you mean "unnecessary," the comments I see here suggest a crying need for my kind of irony.

D.H. replied, "Irony? Try Stupidity!"

Tut tut, Donnie. If I'm stupid, what are you?

"Blocked!" was D.H.'s response, which left me puzzled. Anyway, a Canadian commenter said the photo was "at the very limit of good taste."

As I suggested in an earlier reply, taste is very important to me. GOOD taste is a personal matter. I like caviar, but many of my friends say it tastes awful.

Another didn't like the purple background.

Glad to see a critical comment, the first so far. I once read an article by a famous critic – can't remember whether it was Susan Sontag or Clement Greenberg – attacking one of Picasso's most famous paintings. They didn't like the purple background. Finally, M.G. wrote a rather sympathetic and sensible note: "'Tasteless'? Well, good taste was obviously not part of your program."

No, good taste isn't in my program. Public taste varies from place to place and time to time, like fashions in makeup. I've seldom been in sync with it. I don't worry about my lack of good taste any more than I worry about not wearing lipstick.

I deny that this photo, or any other photo I've made, has a message or even a meaning. I simply want people to see things differently, as if for the first time, and perhaps to think about something they never thought about, notice something they've looked at a few million times but never saw. Gertrude Stein (I invoke famous names not because I'm famous or want to be famous but because there's not much point in parables about Harold "Peanut" Krezenski, who runs the newspaper stand at the town bus stop), asked about the meaning of her line "A rose is a rose is a rose..." (originally printed in a circle so it had no beginning and no end), said she believed she'd made people see a cliché as something more, that she'd made the rose fresh for the first time since Shakespeare. (Modesty wasn't her weakness.)

What's wrong with this picture? Is it really disgusting? I wish every viewer would stare at it until it becomes banal. As a friend of mine said when I showed it to him and told him lots of viewers said it spoiled their appetite, "In Afghanistan or Vietnam they'd probably ask you for the recipe." He got the point.

Others will find other points in it. Most won't find anything. Most people are asleep, so soundly asleep no shock can wake them. They'll die in their sleep, won't even notice that they're dead. I envy them. Some artists honor the sleepers and compose only lullabyes. Others, the unkind ones to whose company I aspire, use irony to trick the audience awake. Such artists should probably be strangled at birth. Plato thought so.

Digital Bigots

A thread on photo.net was called "Is There Digital Bigotry?" And in fact many who posted to the thread said that digital photography wasn't photography – it was "graphics" or some such.

Words become guilty or glorious by association. "Tragedy" comes from classic Greek for "goat song." (Early dramas replaced rituals that involved tearing a goat to pieces.) During the Renaissance the word took on the shine of ancient culture, so folks could object that Shakespeare didn't write "real tragedies" because the action didn't all happen in one place on one day, as required by Aristotle. A few years later the Romantics decided that plays like "King Lear" were the living embodiment of True Tragedy. Pretty soon everybody wanted to die tragically, since it was super cool, and now the media routinely call death a tragedy. Photography, that mechanical manipulation of chemicals and light, was dismissed for generations as "not art, just...photography." (A case can be made that the realistic paintings of the early 19th century fell out of fashion because they looked too much like photography, not enough like art.) At some point during the generation of Edward Weston and Cartier-Bresson it was discovered that photography is a kind of art after all, or at least "art photography" is. (Oddly, I have yet to see anybody advertise an "art painting.") It's a good sign, I think, that "photographer" has become an honorific, like "writer" or "sculptor," and that so many photographers say the mechanical manipulations of Photoshop don't deserve to be called photography.

In fact every photograph is manipulated. Things don't really look that way – two dimensional, often black and white, with people two inches tall inhabiting a world of dots, doomed to smile forever.

But that's beside the point, which is that the worst sin an artist – sorry, you know what I mean – the worst sin an artist armed with new technology can commit is to imitate what was done with the old technology. What you call the new stuff doesn't matter; if things work out, whatever you call it will become a badge of honor.

The Threefold Path

Put up some straight nature shots. J.D. took exception, and mentioned that "Three elements are needed for a good photograph. Good subject, good light, and good composition, all of which are open to interpretation."

I have a problem with dogma like, "Three elements are needed for a good photograph: good subject, good light, good composition," just as I do with the Buddha's "Eightfold Path." (Eight elements needed for a good life: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.) Are you (or Siddhartha) sure there isn't a fourth element, or a ninth? Good story, maybe, or good color, or good exposure, or good focus, or good perspective, or good technique, or good bokeh, or good message? Or right hobby, or right diet, or right drugs, or right knowledge, or right sex, or right net worth? And what's right, or what's good? "Open to interpretation" is a modern synonym for "meaningless." Consider how many mutually exclusive meanings have been read into, say, the First Amendment. "Good light" is like "good English." Is it good English to say, I dunno, "This was the most unkindest cut of all"? Is the last chapter of "Ulysses" good English?

The usual answer is, "Nobody can define X, but I know it when I see it." In the 40's everybody knew what good light was you could see it in every National Geographic photo and every publicity picture out of Hollywood. Then came the 50's, the Robert-Frank generation, with 35mm and "available light" and nighttime street photography. By 1970 even the National Geographic wouldn't print full-sun-on-the-red-shirt-worn-by-a-guy-pointing-at-the-mountain photos. As for good subject matter, try Joel-Peter Witkin or Mapplethorpe.

So I'm with you on specifics (about these photos, which are pretty pawky stuff) but we part ways when it comes to dogmatic generalities, in which I devoutly disbelieve.

Anthropology at the AMNH

A people photo made at the AMNH.

Part of the fun of visiting any museum, but especially the Museum of Natural History, is the living anthropology exhibit, i.e. the museum-goers, most of them kids or people with kids. I don't mean this ironically. It's fascinating to watch the interactions, or the solitary behavior, of these complex social animals. Also their big shoes fascinate me. And the happy rapport the males seem to have with their fat.

Thoughts on Current Photo Tackle

Of course the S50 is a point-and-shoot and has a tiny CCD sensor; it can't begin to compete with a CMOS DSLR like the 1Ds, the 10D, or even my antique D30. Yet the more I think about current DSLR's the less satisfied I am with them, at least with DSLR's that mimic 35mm SLR's. Two problems stand out:

1) They perpetuate the stupid 2/3 aspect ratio, which has crippled small-format photography since the beginning. I don't know why Oscar Barnack chose that ratio, but it was a mistake. It forces makers to build a lens that covers the long dimension, which means big lenses, especially zooms, and big compromises in optical design. Yet few subjects apart from landscapes and langourous ladies fit well into 2/3, and it's hard to use vertically. 3/4 is a far better ratio, and that's become the standard for cheap digicams. That's what I'd prefer.

2) Loss of resolution. Except for the expensive 1Ds (and the failed Kodak and Contax), DSLR's have sensors of roughly APS size. Yet you're obliged to use standard lenses with 24 x 36mm coverage. As a result you're effectively reducing every lens's definition by 3/5. And of course you also have trouble getting wide angle.

Some new lenses are being designed for the smaller format, but it'll take a long time for Canon or Nikon to duplicate their 35mm offerings in miniature. Meanwhile of course there are no third-party offerings, no second-hand market, etc.

Both Sides Now

Posted a photo of clouds. From a letter to a friend:

Haw. I just posted the photo and one guy sees "the head of a duck," another "a snake coiled to strike." While I was making the pictures, in the parking lot at the office, during lunch hour, a passing colleague, a nice ex-European lady, also saw a snake, or (she said) possibly a dragon. For the life of me I can't see any such. My imagination's been deficient from birth. Very literal, pedestrian mind. This may be why I have such difficulty following the fever dreams of politicians. No "vision thing."

Responding to Praise

Thanks, all. Al's comment is apropos. Art is debrided by time and usage. No matter how hard I try, I can't see the Mona Lisa or even Weston's pepper with the astonishment they deserve, and which they got when they were new. Stravinsky and Tolkien and (in later imitations of Cranach &c) Picasso were able to evoke that feeling by remaking old things in a new idiom, but there are obvious limits to that approach. Argh, best not to think overmuch on such things. That way lies paralysis of the artsy-fartsy muscle.

Human Action

11/19/04: On 8/29 I went to the big anti-Bush turnout in the city. It gave me a taste for photos of human action, always well dosed with irony – I hope my photos show folks were having a good time, and that war is colorful even on the home front. Have you noticed what a difference there is between the black-and-white photos of World War 2 and those of Vietnam and subsequent wars? I remember first feeling that difference in 1957, when Columbia Studios released "The Bridge on the River Kwai." War in color has a certain Christmas cheer about it – green, the military color, color of the jungle, and the red of blood and napalm. If I were able to photograph a war from the front lines I'd do my best to bring out that irony.

Looking Backward

8/1/04: Looking back at what I’ve done so far this year, I see a turn away from the ironic, too-good-to-be-true, realer-than-real, overcolored photos that were becoming my stock in trade. I'm not much interested in stock photos, so for much of my work I've moved back to tiresome black-and-white. Also I began making trips to local tourist spots – zoos, museums, even Coney Island and Grant’s Tomb. If you want a peg to hang that on, think of the haibun travel diaries of the haiku poet Matsuo Basho. (A quick Web search shows me that other photographers have borrowed the same word. Why not? It fits.

Musical Snobbery

I'm a musical snob. When I finally scratched together enough spare change to buy, at the age of 19, my first LP, I plunked down the money for Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Nevertheless I enjoyed the early music of Robert Zimmerman (“Bob Dylan”) when it was sung by Joan Baez. Putting a chain-smoker's sour tongue into the sweet mouth of a soprano made a sweet-and-sour sound I couldn't resist. The same principle works for art in general – I'll spare you a million examples, but I try to apply it myself, when I can, to make bitter sweets. (3/27/2004)

Chuck Close Speaks Sooth

Last week I heard an interview on NPR in the course of which Chuck Close said: “Inspiration is for amateurs.” Exactly! (3/22/2004)

B&W

B&W 's role has changed. Until the 60's you expected photos to be sans color unless the photographer made a special effort. Even TV, if memory serves, was mostly colorless. Then color arrived in carload lots, cheaper and better, till by the end of the 70's B&W was unspeakably antique and dead, dead, dead. It's only in the last few years we've seen a black-and-white revival. A whole generation grew up in color, and many of them find B&W refreshing because it's so schematic, so abstract, so stylized, so...artistic, so...CHIC. I mean, who but somebody with artsy-fartsy pretensions would take the trouble to find black and white film and chemicals on the Internet, nd develop the stuff and scan it and print it, at every step of the way using equipment designed for color, so you have to turn off the defaults. (My Epson 2000P printer's instructions say simply, don't print black and white. I set my B&W images to RGB mode before printing them.)

So universally available color didn't kill B&W after all, any more than photography killed painting - instead the elder technique has acquired real panache. (3/2/2004)