Limpid Clearness and Consummate Perspicacity

Limpid Clearness

I saw two articles on-line this morning that stimulated my thinking about contemporary photography. First, my artist/writer friend Chuck Stern sent me this review from the NYT about three exhibits featuring contemporary photography currently in New York City. I had been following the New Photography 2009 show that recently opened at the MoMA, but had not been impressed by the pictures as presented on-line. OK, I know I should drag myself down to the City to actually look at art in person. I’ll refrain from talking about the art and simply say that the reviewer, Karen Rosenberg, writes about abstraction being a major trend in contemporary photography.

I remembered an article that John Sevigny wrote several months ago which argued for the abstract in photography. “Photography Must Die” is an intriguing manifesto from a straight, primarily documentary, photographer. He scolds us all for our lack of awareness of art history and absence of clarity about our own vision.

Consummate Perspicacity

Today, Photolucida announced its 50 finalists for this year’s book publishing award. 593 entrants put up a couple of hundred dollars each to roll the dice with over 200 reviewers to determine if their work will make the cut. First, 175 entrants made it through a pre-screening committee composed of over a dozen photographers and photo professionals. The chosen ones were then sliced down to the finalists who are asked to jump through a few more hoops before the 2 winners of the publishing award will be announced. In the past, I’ve been critical of the whole Photolucida concept. Why not simply send your portfolio to publishers to get rejected at no charge? I now see 2 reasons. This year Photolucida is presenting their schtick with such good humor and grace that I guess it may be worth the cash. And, most importantly, the track record of their books has been amazing. Their publications make waves in the photo world. “Waves” is a pun based on the surfer portraits that Joni Sternbach published as a winner a couple of years ago. Her photos are wonderful in person (yes, I actually went to Brooklyn to see them). I don’t know if the alternative processed pictures impressed in book form.

Alejandro Cartagena

I was surprised at how many of the 50 finalists I was familiar with. For instance, I previously posted work by Alejandro Cartagena, and Birthe Piontek created one of my favorite contemporary photographs:

Birthe Piontek

I request all my students, and those who want to be inspired by the everyday wonderfulness of life observed through a camera, to check out Birthe Piontek’s site.

For those of you who are flummoxed by my playful vocabulary choices, “limpid clearness and consummate perspicacity” is a quote from Herbert Guenther’s Kindly Bent to Ease Us. The words are a translation of the Tibetan term for the enlightenment experience. It is described in this link as “a radiant and ecstatic ‘openness’ devoid of subject and object or center and periphery.”

And the Winners Are…

This is the Grand Prize Winner– 4 Boxes by Jeffery Byrnes

HCC alumni Jeffery Byrnes’s multi-frame picture captures my attention because it bridges the divide between traditional photography (in his case a plastic lens film camera) and the digital world (the combining of frames in Photoshop) without overly manipulating the finished picture. UPDATE: I misread this image. It is a total film capture as is. Wonderful work Jeff.

Jeff’s business partner, and also an HCC alumni, Tim Lastoowski takes the First Place Prize in Black and White for his purist, modernist rendering of form and function below:

Photo by Tim Lastowski

Tim Lastowski and Jeffery Byrnes are co-owners of True Resolution.

The winner of First Place in Color Photography is Mary Anne O’Connor for her true graphic dynamism in Windows and Reflections.

by Mary Anne O'Connor

I don’t know what’s going on in Mary Anne’s picture, but I like what I see.

The Special Jury Prize goes to John Balthunis for his magical, clear-eyed capture of objects in the world.

By John Balthunis

The HCC Photo Club wishes to thank the hundreds of past, present and future members who entered, or at least thought about entering, our Photo Club Contest. Every picture, if not every entrant, deserves recognition. I would also like to thank Robert Aller and Chris Lizon for their contribution toward determining the results of the competition.

Centering in Holyoke

This is the week of the Open House at our new Media Arts Center. Drop by on Wednesday afternoon if you are in our general area of Massachusetts. HCC is about 2 hours west of Boston.

THORP AT TABOR

From the "Corn" series by Gregory Thorp

Also on Wednesday, October 28th, is the opening of Gregory Thorp’s show at the Tabor Gallery. The Tabor is HCC’s fabulous exhibition space lovingly lorded over by Amy Johnquest. Her installation of Gregory’s hard to classify pictures about text and context in colonial New England is very powerful. It’s not about corn. The show probably packs more of a wallop if you are in the gallery alone, but come for the reception. The opening is from 11:00 – 1:00 with Gregory giving a slide talk at noon. He has a 30 plus year career of making spectacular pictures. I first saw his work when it was published in the late 1970s in American Photo magazine. I’ve been a follower of Gregory’s vision ever since.

OK, so you drive all the way from Boston and you’ve got three and a half hours to kill between Gregory’s show and the MAC Open House. No problem. Bring your camera and visit Holyoke in the rough.

Factory Foliage, 2009, Frank Ward

Last week my Advanced class went on a fall foliage field trip. The trees are more leaf-free this week, but architectural wonders abound. These pictures epitomize the current conditions in small city New England. My class is looking for the beauty in the midst of decay.

White Windows, 2009, Frank Ward

Post Industrial Interior, 2009, Frank Ward

I’m praising Holyoke, with its own “college on the hill.” Below is a picture of another college (I can’t remember if it is on a hill). I’ve been spending the week looking at my work from Central Asia.

English Classroom, Tajikistan, 2009, Frank Ward

I thought the above picture from my travels this summer has the appropriate theme for this post about education and opportunity.

I’m also going through my Central Asia archive from the 1970s and posting some on my Asia Central blog. Take a look and I look forward to seeing many of you on Wednesday at HCC.

Two Women Who Look

Elaine Mayes

“I’m not interested in creativity, I’m interested in seeing.”That’s a quote from Elaine Mayes at Hampshire College yesterday. She guided her audience on a personal voyage through her career of seeing.

Here’s a picture she took on Hampshire College campus when she was teaching there.

Hampshire College in winter by Elaine Mayes

The art of photography has changed since the conceptual evolution of Post-Modernism in the 1980s and the digital revolution of the 30 years since. One thing that hasn’t changed, photography remains about seeing. Yes, many artists continue to use photography as a springboard for their  ideas about the world, but most photographers choose to look. The camera continues to be the tool through which we see and interpret the world.

New work by Sally Mann

Sally Mann discusses her new pictures on Joerg Colberg’s Conscientious. She talks at length about seeing. “I am a woman who looks. Within traditional narratives, women who look, especially women who look unflinchingly at men, have been punished… I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.” Read her complete essay here.

The Shape of Things to Come

Photoshop mess-terpiece

Size 4 model fired for being too fat. That’s the headline on US Magazine.com that quotes the model in the above picture. For another opinion I checked out The Associated Press’s version. It seems that the fashion industry is as nasty as everyone says it is. Let’s see–abandoning the American textile worker by manufacturing in sweat shops in Asia, abandoning fashion models when they might grow out of their size 4, abandoning the consumer by pricing clothing out of the reach of anyone but the rich. It is time to doubt the ethics of the fashion industry. I still like to watch Project Runway (actually, that’s the link to the Project Run Gay blog which is the best Runway blog going). In protest, I’m reading labels and not buying anything made in China. That way I can protest an industry’s unfair policies and a county’s colonialist, anti-minority ethics in one sweep.

Last week, in my Digital Photography class, we discussed a bill presented in the British Parliament outlining a Photoshop disclosure law for pictures of women. Advertisers and editors may be required to state how much a picture’s appearance has been digitally altered. I basically think this is a good idea, but it might put some Photoshop geniuses out of business. I started thinking about how Photoshop manipulation has slithered its way into international acceptance. Basically, it started one day in 1982 when an editor at National Geographics Magazine digitally moved a pyramid in Egypt to improve the composition of a cover. Since that moderate adjustment on the location of the Pyramids of Giza, editors and advertisers have had their way with all kinds of shapes. The human body seems to have been the most abused by the photoshopping shape shifters of editorial and advertising content. The advertiser in the above poster tried to limit the reproduction of their visual faux pas by threatening the bloggers over at Boing Boing with legal action. Boing Boing discovered the image on Photoshop Disasters, where they chronicle such manipulations almost daily. Check out this jeans ad.

Brad Pittiful

I have traditionally been a fan of hips and I find this trend toward compressing them a bit threatening. Kristen Miller sent me this wonderful picture from Glamour which suggests that it is not too late for the world to become a better place.

Of course, even the cutest of group portraits can go horribly awry with the misguided assistance of Photoshop.

Paws and Claws-- Oh, my Arm!

About Nadav Kander, Students and B.O.

I was deep into Nadav Kander’s website the other day (following the recommendation of Jorg Colberg) and discovered this picture:

Goal Post, Chile, by Nadav Kander

I posted my Soccer Field, Gobi here two weeks ago. Many readers can simply scroll down to it.

For the first project in two of my current photo classes, I ask students to do research on the web and elsewhere. My Advanced Photography assignment is to choose a work of art (it does not have to be photography) and emulate it in a picture of your own. In my Introduction to Digital Fine Art Photography I ask students to come up with their own project, and then research images on the web that illustrate the same, or similar, concept.

The first assignment is a great idea. Most students have very little understanding of photography’s brief history, or the history of culture in general. I am trying to give them motivation to discover historically relevant art that resonates with them. I then ask them to pay homage by making photographs inspired by the art.

My other first assignment, whose intention is to make students aware of the contemporary art scene, seems to be a bust.  The problem is that I let students loose to riffle through the reams of photography on the internet. What they are bringing back to class is a mix of snapshots and commercial work, not photographs mirroring the state of contemporary art. Next time, I’m going to give them blog links and let the army of my favorite photo bloggers guide them.

Here’s a Nadav Kander picture symbolic of the plight of my students trying to do their first assignment.

Field II (Ford Dealership), USA, by Nadav Kander

“Outside of a dog, a man’s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read,” attributed to Groucho Marx.

My students don’t like to read. I’ll stop typing and just show more examples from Nadav Kander’s incredible site.

From The Parade, Untitled #37, by Nadav Kander

From Obama's People, Robert F. Bauer- President's Personal Lawyer, by Nadav Kander

One thing I like about Nadav Kander and two things I don’t like about Barack Obama. Nadav Kander is a great photographer who is not concerned with the (often self-imposed) limitations photographers face to be considered viable talents.

B.O. really stunk up the place when he refused to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama out of fear of alienating the Chinese authorities. He is the first president to do so since the first George Bush. He should have his Nobel rescinded for snubbing a fellow Nobel laureate.

I also don’t like Barack Obama’s pro-war, troop build-up in Afghanistan. It’s not Nobel worthy.

The Hour of Power

From the forthcoming book, American Power, by Mitch Epstein

Holyoke born Mitch Epstein has a new book coming out this month. American Power is a clear eyed visual study of the what, where and how our country is powered. Here’s a quote from Joerg Colbergs review, “Photographically, American Power is nothing but the product of an artist at the prime of his own, yes, artistic power, large-format photography at its finest. It is hard to imagine the energy it must have cost Epstein to produce the different photographs, but the run-ins with law enforcement officials do not seem to have had any impact on the quality of the work.”

Joerg does such an erudite job of reviewing the book that I don’t have to say more about Mitch’s achievement. For my student’s benefit, I think it is more important to alert them to Mitch’s previous book- Family Business. This highly personal collection of pictures created in Holyoke won Epstein many awards, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

From Family Business by Mitch Epstein

The book presents the story of Mitch’s father. To quote Mitch, “Crucial to his story is that of Holyoke itself. The commercial center died in the 70s, its customers gone to the new supermall. Holyoke became a crack-riddled, arson-wrought town. A recent wave of immigrants turned the formerly “white” downtown Hispanic. The culture clash resonates in the relationship between my Jewish American father and his Puerto Rican tenants and employees.”

By now Holyoke’s 21st Century story is unfolding with a new cast of characters. To better understand what we see as we walk the streets of Holyoke today, I implore students to check out these links and pick-up the book. It is a page turner with great writing and photography.

Now, to discover our personal “hour of power” I want to look at the two pictures above. The tenement buildings in Holyoke were photographed when the sun was low, at sunrise or sunset. The light feathers across the buildings to give their bricks a deep, dark texture. In a sense, the light suggests a romantic view that is quickly undercut by the boarded up windows. I think the balance of sweeping light over the emptiness of the whole scene is the key to the mournful demeanor of the picture.

The low light of the power plant picture (above) seems to be from an early morning exposure. The camera faces the dawn creating an almost godlike glow. The effect is also romantic, except the romance is with the power generating station. Again, Mitch creates a fresh response from the viewer by challenging our expectations.

This acknowledgement of  “a certain slant of light” is Mitch’s nod to 20th Century realism within a contemporary context. Here’s a painting from 1930.

Early Morning Light, 1930, Edward Hopper

In the later part of the 20th Century, Stephen Shore utilized this light in his pioneering color photography:

Holden Street, North Adams, 1974, Stephen Shore

Chevron, By Stephen Shore

Shore’s pictures celebrate the beauty in the everyday. Shore’s Chevron from the 1970s leads to Mitch Eptein’s studies of beauty in what could be construed as ugly. There are lots of examples of ugly beauty in 20th Century art. I want to move onto one more example of the power of light in Mitch’s work.

From American Power by Mitch Epstein

My students are prone to use the weather as an excuse. They often say they can’t photograph because the sun isn’t out. Ever since the publication of Robert Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, an overcast day has been the choice time to photograph with a bite. An overcast, or rainy, sky equals bleakness. Mitch Epstein’s power plant above would send a different message if it was framed by puffy clouds in a blue sky. As it is, the American Flag seems riddled with bullet holes.

Probably the greatest photographer of the American Flag is Robert Frank. I won’t show any of his flag masterpieces, but please read the spectacular New Yorker review of his current show on The Americans now in New York.

Butte, Montana, 1956, by Robert Frank

Opportunities– Global and Local

New Voices at SocialDocumentary.Net

It has been about a year since the inauguration of http://socialdocumentary.net, a web magazine/catalog/forum for documentary and photojournalistic photography. At it’s inception, founders Glenn Ruga and Barbara Ayotte knew that they wanted to bring socially concerned photographers together and offer them a place to show their projects. Their open concept has stimulated a diverse, web based round table of documentary photographers and photojournalists from all over the world. Check out their almost 200 exhibits.

Learn more about the SDN competition here.

To kick off the second year of activity SocialDocumentary.Net is inviting photographers to document the global recession in any, or all, of its myriad manifestations. Browse through the multicultural portfolios to see how photographers from every corner of the globe are thinking globally and photographing locally.

View by HCC alumni Jeffery Byrnes

Thinking about photographing locally gives me a great segue to the HCC Photo Club Show and Competition to be shown at the Holyoke Community College Media Arts Center (MAC) Open House on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, from 4:30-6:30. Unless you have a wedding to go to, save this date.

Above is the very first entry into the show. This is the first of three entries that Jeffery Byrnes sent me yesterday. I’ve also used one of Jeff’s submissions as the thumbnail for our new Facebook group HCC Photo Club. Area photographers might find some inspiration with Jeff. He graduated from HCC as a photo major, was president of the HCC Photo Club and is, most likely, Holyoke’s major blogger. Here are some of his many links: LenShare.Com,

1st Impression

See The Brick

For Your Eyes to See

And, along with HCC alumnus Tim Lastowski they run the True Resolution photography studio.

As for submissions from other Club members, uploading pictures to the Googlegroups has been a failure. I’m moving the Photo Club over to Facebook for our main place of communication. Please upload your submissions to the

HCC Photo Club on Facebook

Please keep your uploads small (below 300K) or we’ll max out our space allowed on Facebook. Check here for more show and competition guidelines.

The Shape of Things that Are

Soccer Field, Gobi, 2008, Frank Ward

As a continuation of yesterdays post about the HCC Photo Club Photo Show, here is another example of forms in space. This picture is part of my featured exhibit for the month of September on the Turkish web magazine Fotoritim. The mag has a lot of interesting portfolios so don’t think you have to go there just to see my work.

Before I get to the HCC Photo Club info, I want to direct you to an article for developing photographers. I’m trying to get my students to look at art forms other than photography for inspiration. John Sevigny sent me an email this morning with an article he wrote about looking at painting.

John’s article clearly expounds on what I was thinking about. Read it all here. Check out John’s Gone City blog here. Look at a John Sevigny picture below:

Trio (detail), 2009, by John Sevigny

The HCC Photo Club Rub

I spent awhile last night trying to consolidate the 3 HCC Photo Club Googlegroups. I wasn’t particularly successful so I switched over to Facebook. If you want to participate in our “The Shape of Things that Are” photo show/contest, here are the guidelines:

The HCC Photo Club On-Line Competition/Group Show

Logistics for Entering:

All HCC photo students, as well as Photo Club members, are invited to participate.

All HCC Photo Club alumni are also invited.

Submit pictures to the HCC Photo Club on Facebook (you probably have to be a Facebook member to do it.

If the upload doesn’t work for other reasons, send jpegs to fmward@gmail.com

We want JPEG submissions only, with a file size of around 300K. 1024 pixels on the longest side will project the best.

If you don’t have digital, you can submit a scan from print or film.

Up to 3 submissions per person. You don’t have to submit all files at once.

Place your name in the image or canvas area if you want to be acknowledged in the slideshow. Otherwise, your name will be listed separately.

Deadline for submissions is October 24th, 2009.

Winners published on The Coruscating Camera will be composed of 10% of all the people who sent in pictures. 100 applicants will result in 10 pictures represented on-line.

Editorial privileges apply. The Trustees of Holyoke Community College are prohibited from entering the contest, but they can join the MAC Open House Show.

At least one picture from every contributor will be shown in the presentation at the Holyoke Community College Media Arts Center Open House

on October 28th, Wed. 4:30-6:30.

Here’s the theme:

Geometry, but not necessarily abstraction.

Shapes of buildings and objects, but not particularly about what they literally are,

Pictures about forms in space– floating, sitting, being thrown, held, dropped or just stuck in the ground.

Beautiful pictures about circles, squares, rectangles, ovals, rhombi, trapezoids, triangles, etc.

Please peruse my last few blog posts for more pictures and comments about the theme.

The Ketchup Bottle of Creativity

Rockport Sunrise, 2009, Abe Morell

New Work from 2009 by Abe Morell

I’ve spent the past few weeks gently banging on my student’s bottoms. Like ketchup bottles, you don’t want to bang too hard or you may have a mess on your burger. Well, I have come to realize that banging hard, shaking the bottle violently, and even sticking a butter knife into the cantankerous container may be necessary actions to get what you need out of the bottle. It doesn’t really hold true that too much catsup is undesirable. I’d be as happy as a fully ketchupped burger if my students were putting up pictures as if they were wallpapering the crit room. More is better for my students because any outpouring of primordial ooze will give us something to work with.

There are many good signs. First, students all seem to like Abelardo Morell, the deservedly well-regarded Boston area photographer who teaches at Mass Art. He brings the early impulses of photography’s inventors into present day tangibility. He is illustrating what to do with a camera when you aren’t particularly seduced by the zoom and flash, the rattle and hum, of a small, hand-held automatic plastic box . We don’t all want to be photojournalists, fashion photographers and documentarians.

Actually, I have another reason for mentioning an old U2 album title. The new U2 album has a striking cover by one of the great living minimalist photographers.

No Line on the Horizon by Hiroshi Sugimoto

There’s a neat story about Hiroshi being at a recent U2 concert and getting a shout-out from Bono here.

I did not grab this screen shot because I’m a U2 fan. The only Bono song I really like is on an old duet album with Frank Sinatra.

I like Hiroshi Sugimoto. I showed one of my classes Sugimoto’s pictures of movie theater interiors with the films running. All of the pictures encapsulate a glowing white screen. The length of the movie determines the length of the exposure. Why didn’t Abe Morell think of that?

Theatre by Hiroshi Sugimoto

Has anybody noticed all the Sugimoto and Morell rectangles floating in space? They remind me of my old UMass buddy Bill Kane. Back in the 80s and 90s he was floating actual rectangles of stuff on top of his photographs. He did a great series about Walden Pond.

From the Walden Pond series by Bill Kane

Bill is still floating shapes in space. This is from his New Transrational Works.

Bill Kane, 2008

This 35X83 inch pigment ink on canvas work may look familiar. Take Bob Aller’s History of Photography course to find out more about Bill’s sources and inspiration. Damn, I don’t think HCC will offer it until fall 2010.

This brings me to a special invitation to the HCC Photo Club to do an assignment. I’ve been thinking about all the geometric shapes that inhabit our environment, from “big box” stores and road signs on poles to soccer balls on lawns and balloons in the air. I’d like to see pictures of this geometry deconstructed so they aren’t pictures of signage and buildings and neighborhoods and lawn parties, but indicators of new harmonies– celestial bodies, geometric theories, childhood building blocks (see Abe Morell below), new abstractions. The assignment is to turn objects, like the ever-present billboard, into a less literal symbol of mass culture. Make pictures about the shape of things that are.

Toy Blocks, 1987, Abe Morell

I was about to post a link for club members to upload submissions to our Googlegroups site. I discovered that we have three HCC Photo Clubs on Googlegroups. I’ve got to find a way to put them all together so, more on this later.

In the mean time, if you want to submit to a contest with real prizes, check out http://socialdocumentary.net

More on this later.

What Makes a Picture?

From the forthcoming book Moonmilk by Ryan McGinley

The “gee-whiz” factor of our college’s new photography facilities have settled down and now students are left with what all artists face. What to do? Making art is certainly aided by a good place to create and some support from your peers but, ultimately, art making is a personal endeavor. In an effort to ease the way, I’ve been showing work to all my classes that has been, or can be, made in the local environs of Western Mass.

Some of the pictures from Moonmilk, the book the above photo is taken from, could have been created in the Howe Caverns in nearby upstate New York. To photograph nudes wandering through the heavily touristed caves must have required some serious negotiations on the part of photographer Ryan McGinley. I remember photographing at a military fortress which had been turned into a state park in Maine with a class led by Joyce Tenneson. About twenty of us were gathered around some male and female models near a row of gun turrets along an underground corridor. We had watchers posted at each end warning us when tourists or guards were coming. When the park rangers finally busted us, I thought they were going to arrest us for obscenity and indecent exposure. Fortunately, it was the early 80’s.

In 2009, when it is prohibited to photograph on almost any property deemed private, like a shopping mall, or public, like a subway, photographers have new challenges to deal with before they can even make an exposure. This overall attitude of “NO!” is balanced by the fact that almost every human being is walking around with a camera (mostly in cell phones) and the official paranoia usually doesn’t kick in until security people see a tripod or a (D)SLR.

Photograph the Specifics > Transcend the Generic > Reach for the Universal

There is an answer to the question of what to photograph. I’m throwing out the old rule of forcing students out of their comfort zone to take risks. Young artists need to get comfortable with who they are, where they live, what they do. This is life, and it can offer beautiful pictures. So, get comfortable and get personal! I’m not talking about kicking back and hanging out. I still want students to face some fear. I’m asking students to pay attention, to stay awake, to see themselves with clarity and to cultivate a visual consciousness. Let your camera be the excuse for living more creatively. Let it be your fantasy machine, your memory box, and most importantly, a tool for experiencing your daily life moment by moment.

I’m asking students to photograph their outer and inner worlds. I don’t want to see pet portraits. I want to be surprised. I want to be impressed. I want to celebrate what they celebrate and love what they love.

Here’s the rub. Art must transcend the prosaic, or, at the least, celebrate the everyday with undeniable abandon. Let vision take over.

Joe's Mushroom by Frank Ward

My neighbor, Joe, dropped by last week with his latest find. I grabbed this picture before he went off and sold the sulphur mushroom for $50.

The Media Arts Center

Yes, the brand spankin’ new Media Arts Center is now up and running at Holyoke Community College. Above is a prototype plan for the center initially proposed by Professor Robert Aller in 1977. Over 30 years in the making, the final MAC is now outfitted with Apple computers (rather than the Windows machine pictured above).

I am hesitant to release any photographs of the new facility before our brochure goes to press. Here’s my Basic Photography class as they appreciate the “feng shui” dynamics of the critique room.

First lesson of Basic Photography–Don’t place yourself at the sides of a picture when you know the photographer is using a wide angle lens. I even transformed the distortion to try to make the students on the right and left look more normal. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Second lesson of Basic Photography– The people at the back of the room are not midgets or munchkins, but also normal people similar in characteristics as the students on the far right and left.

Third lesson of Basic Photography– Rather than letting this distortion of human proportions ruin the picture, as in the above example, use it to your advantage to make a better picture. See below.

Fashion Week

See more NYT Fashion Week photos

Fauxtography

The Düsseldorfer Avant-Garde Foto Kunst Akademie of Derriere Garde Photography. Thomas Ruff and or Rineke Dijkstra and or Wolfgang Tillmans, 2001
© Duane Michals

Tattle-Tales from the Land of Fauxtography:

#3 Never trust a photograph so large that it can only fit inside a museum.
#4 Color is the new black and white.
#6 The announced demise of the decisive moment is premature.
#9 Photographers whose next three books will look like their last three books should quit.
#16 Museums should never exhibit photographs of visitors looking at art in museums to visitors who are looking at art in museums.
#21 An eight-by-ten inch photograph by Robert Frank can be heroic. An eight-by-ten foot Gursky is just a billboard with pretensions.
#27 Fashion photography is often artful but seldom an art.

Text and pictures courtesy of 1000 Words Photography

8 or 10 Reasons to Make Pictures

Driving through a waterfall in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan, 2009 by Frank Ward

I thought about this picture as I stared out the window on this rainy day in Ashfield. Then, I looked at my friend Clayton Salem’s picture that he took at my house a week or so ago and I remembered that making pictures is more about where a photographer’s head is at than his body.

Grilling in the rain, 2009, by Clayton Salem

I’ve been thinking about my photo classes and browsing blogs looking for new work that might be of interest to them. A good picture is often good for unquantifiable reasons. It got me wondering about composition.

THE BLANK CANVAS

We can look at our picture making process in a similar manner to painters approaching a fresh canvas. The first thing a painter may think about the canvas is its size. Photographers don’t think about scale often enough. In fact, it is rather curious that photographers seem to prefer a consistent scale in any body of work. A painter may do that also, but the first consideration is how to approach the dimensions of the canvas before his/her eyes. Photographers are cursed, or blessed, with a tunnel vision view through their ground glass viewfinder. That view is most often at a much smaller scale than any print that may result from the photograph. Adding to the blank canvas concept, the photographer is also immediately challenged by the fact that the viewfinder is filled with, often unnecessary, stuff.

What to do? Start looking wherever you can find vast spaciousness- the sky, the floor, pavement, grass, leaves, walls, night, close-ups, backdrops and add what catches your interest from there.

Here are some contemporary examples of pictures made with a fair amount of spaciousness:

Holyoke Mall, 2008 by Lisa Berry

Lisa Berry

by Mohammedresa Mirzaei, 2009

Mohammedresa Mirzaei

By Rita Maas, 2008

Rita Maas

Untitled, 2009, by Aaron McElroy

Untitled, 2009 by Aaron McElroy

Aaron McElroy also has a fascinating series of street portraits. These are quite unique yet, they are made with traditional 35mm negatives and silver printing.

Dolldrums, 2009 by Aaron McElroy

A special thanks to Jorg Colberg for the Aaron McElroy tip.

You may ask, What are the 8 or 10 reasons to make pictures? It depends on how you count them. Normally, I would count Rita Maas’s triptych as one. Rita offers the option of buying the prints individually on Photo Eye so you make the call.

The Dog Ate the Sock

Man Who Collects Stories Struggles to Tell His Own
By JANET MASLIN

THE ANTHOLOGIST

By Nicholson Baker

243 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25

Paul Chowder knows a story about a dog that ate a sock. Why shouldn’t he tell it? Paul, the narrator of “The Anthologist,” Nicholson Baker’s new novel, will talk about anything that flits through his mind. He’s supposed to be thinking about poetry, but Paul is easily distracted. The poetic and the prosaic divide Paul’s attention as he talks about anything from trochaic octameter to mowing his lawn.

But here’s the thing about that dog story: it’s awfully good. Not fancy, but it really makes a point about socks, dogs and art. The dog ate the sock. The sock had to be removed surgically. And somehow that makes Paul think of one of the nifty poetry-writing tricks that he knows: you write a poem about something that’s real. (Call that a sock.) You let that reality “slide right into your poem and twirl around in it.” Then you cut out the sock as if this were veterinary surgery, but that just makes the poem better. The poem winds up with “a mysterious feeling of charged emptiness, like the dog after the operation.”     Full text in the NYT.

Saw this while I was downloading.

Relaxed and Paying Attention

I thought I was going to keep this blog updated with my progress on editing and understanding the work I recently made in central Asia. I will post some related remarks over at Asia Central after I get finished here. My issue is that the rest of the World is spinning with such coruscation that I’m caught simply looking. Now, there are worse things to get caught looking at than blogs and Facebook. For instance, Twitter seems like a real squander of our precious time. So, here are a few links and excerpts from my various emails from the past couple of days.

I’ll start with a quote that Jack Kelleher sent me in an email this morning:

Renowned guitarist Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, when asked what he did with all the money he earned throughout his incredible career, replied: “I spent 80 per cent of it on booze, women and drugs.” When asked what he did with the other 20 per cent, he responded: “I wasted it.”

Scarface by Christopher Lizon

Chris Lizon sent me this Scarface car hood. It’s one of about 500 great pictures he has taken this summer.

Another friend, John Sevigny, sent me this provocative link to the article he wrote about Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ.

John also has a blog, Gone City, that he uses as a platform to rant and rave. He trashes Annie Liebovitz and George Wallace in recent posts. Here’s a still life photograph by John.

My wife, Vivian Leskes, sent me this link from the New York Times about some famous faked photographs.

Check out the NYT’’s excellent Fake slide show.

Steve Bisson, a guy I didn’t know, sent me an email this morning with links to his Urbanautica website and his Facebook page. He’s got a great eye and he’s a damn good designer. Both these links are loaded with strong portfolios, like Dubailand by Aleix Plademunt.

Dubailand by Aleix Plademunt

Still Coruscating

Yes, I’m here and ready to blog. First, I apologize for the long hiatus. I have a three week excuse because my internet satellite dish was down, but that still leaves two weeks in which I also had nothing to post. I’ll call that summer vacation. It is almost time to bring the “all about Frank” cycle to an end and bring the “photo teacher” phase of the blog back into action. I do have a month before I’m back to teaching so I will indulge the “all about me” energy for a few more posts.

Since Vivian and I returned from Central Asia 5 weeks ago, I have been editing my new pictures between cutting and hauling wood. My progress has been slow on both fronts. I still have several logs to drag out of the woods and I still need to discern the themes of all the pictures I’ve made. Understanding the why and whatever of my own work is a challenge. Many documentary photographers begin with a thesis and work to illustrate their project. Whether or not they succeed is irrelevant to having a good project description. Photojournalists investigate issues or take on assignments. They mostly rely on others to figure out the written text. I don’t readily fit into either mold. Sometimes I do photojournalistic types of assignments, but mostly I just see pictures. When I have a camera with me, I make them. I used to draw parameters and attempt to work within my self-created constraints. Those boxes and bags that I would creatively try to fight my way out of have consistently expanded to the size of countries and continents. My approach to photographing the world is one of openness with fewer limits or labels. When I’m “relaxed and paying attention” good things happen.

Oh, oh, I’m blogging toward the category of “photo teacher.” That’s for next month. For now, I’ll shut-up and post-up some pictures. These photos are from Dushambe, Tajikistan.

The square where Lenin used to stand.

I have a pile of pictures from the Tajikistan Pamirs that I’ll upload to my Asia Central blog. Enjoy.

Security Issues

Vivian and I flew in from Russia Sunday night. We spent Monday counting our blessings. Now is the time to debrief and to appreciate our safe return to Ashfield. Here is a picture that was on my flash drive.

The Chess Move

This night chess match from Elista was also posted on Asia Central, the blog that I started while in Uzbekistan where WordPress is banned and blocked. I figure that WordPress must be doing something right (because their software is easier to use than Blogger), so I am back on The Coruscating Camera ever since we got out of Uzbekistan.

Busted for photographing tanks in the park.

Uzbekistan is great if you don’t run afoul of issues of national importance. I had several incidents where I was stopped by police for various questionable reasons. I tried to photograph old tanks that were cemented into the ground in a public park in Tashkent. These officers accused me of breaching national security. After checking my papers, the police made me delete all the pictures that I took of their WWII weaponry. There’s more on the perils of tank photography at the end of this post.

The day after my embarrassing breach of tank etiquette, I was stopped for illegally photographing in a subway station, except that I wasn’t in a subway station. I was in a pedestrian crossing tunnel trying to get from one side of the street to another.

The guilty picture.

A subway entrance happened to be off of that tunnel. Anyway, the Uzbek’s have a beautiful subway system that they should be proud of.

The Tashkent Subway

I previously blogged about the driver who got dragged away while we were in his taxi. I hope he got out of that jam. Remember the most famous picture about human rights in China? You know, the one of the guy standing in front of that tank in Tiannaman Square. I saw all kinds of press about that picture recently, but only scant mention of the brave soul who created that rare, world consciousness raising moment. Various blogs were congratulating the many photographers who took the picture while there was no mention of what happened to that guy who was dragged off by Chinese police. What ever happened to that true hero?

Surveillance and harassment isn’t just an Uzbek thing. As we were driving out of the Pamirs in Tajikistan there were road blocks every 10 or 15 kilometers.

Checkpoint

An Iranian passenger in our 4-wheel drive vehicle was being detained for 10 or 15 minutes at a checkpoint when, finally, one of our Tajik passengers said that she would take care of it. She went into the checkpoint shack and came out with the Iranian. It cost her 40 or 50 cents to pay off the guards. Hell, anyone can get detained, anywhere, at any time, in any country. It’s nice to know that there are a few places where 50 cents can buy more than a cup of coffee. Oh,shite, 50 cents can’t even buy a cup of coffee.

I have empathy for the guards who are ordered to do their unenviable jobs. I was watching these security people at a soccer game in Uzbekistan. They were as interested in me as I was in them.

Giving me "the look"

Radio Contact

Security Patrol

On the job

Stadium Video

It turns out that I wasn’t the only “person of interest” at the soccer game. This guy was systematically recording everyone in the audience of around 10,000 fans. Too bad they simply didn’t have 100 or so cameras nailed to the tops of poles like they would have in any other decently paranoid country- like the USA.

I’m posting a picture of this kid who was wandering the streets in Tashkent because he reminds me of the cover photo off an old Bob Dylan album.

Nashville Skyline anyone?

Roof Dog Harassment

My answer to the World’s security issues is Roof Dogs. They work almost successfully in Mexico and dozens of other countries. The basic idea is that they bark all night and keep everyone awake. Therefore, no one is needed for low paying security patrols because everyone is vigilant and miserable.

I love the way that traveling reveals the answers to all of civilization’s nagging problems.

Learning to live with tanks

For instance, the next time you see a tank in a park, just climb on up (with rollerblades and all) and relax. There is no law saying that you can’t have a good time with a tank. You just can’t photograph one.

Good excuse to photograph tanks.

Or, maybe, you can photograph your girlfriend who just happens to be straddling a tank. In Russia I saw girls straddling tanks all the time.

Elista Hurrah!

Night Chess at the Central Pagoda

I wanted to do a post all about chess in Elista, but I really don’t know much about chess in Elista. They do have Chess City.

Central Hall of Chess City

And they have a Chess Hotel for visiting champions.

Chess suite at the Elista Hotel

Chess only got us so far in Elista,. We were more interested in the Buddhist culture of Kalmykia.

Tree of Prayer Flags

My favorite moment was when the girl on roller blades started spinning the prayer wheel in the central pagoda.

Buddha FanGirl Generates Dharma Energy

To me this is Checkmate. The Buddha wins.

Cozy in Kalmykia

It is so nice to get to a Buddhist culture. Not that the other cultures were not good. There’s just something heartwarming about seeing billboards of the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa along the roads, and having the center of town be a giant pagoda with a prayer wheel inside. I’ll start with some pictures from our day in Moscow. and then dive into Elista.

Moscow Arm

Fallen Hero

The Wait

Heads of State

From a visual celebration of Russia’s Soviet past to a realistic reminder of standard Soviet precedure. This is a monument in Elista recalling 1946, when Staln gave the Kalmyks two hours notice to board boxcars and be shipped to Siberia for over 10 years.

At the Airport, Elista

So, we go from Soviet irrationalism to regional nationalism. At this point of the cultural survival impulse it is great to see everyone trying to figure out who they are and where they came from.

Buddhist Billboard

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Americans are well-liked in Kalmykia

Elena shows us our room

We stayed in this wild “chess” hotel for our first night. I’ll do a chess post later as it is their national pastime. Elena is one of a team of wonderful English language professionals who have been taking very good care of us. Tomorrow she says she’ll take us to the tank monument.

Water pipe jumping

Vivian has been giving workshops every day. Sometimes I hang out at the school. These kids are jumping over the above ground hot water pipes that run all through Russia and the FSU.

Desk and Chairs

This was sitting in the school corridor.

Gayla in the playground

One day I did a mini photo workshop with some of the students. We climbed all over campus.

Sacha, Galya and the waterpipes

Sacha gets a phone call

Students at camp

I’m out of internet time so I’ll add to this later.