Shooting Wide Open

Erich Salomon

Frank McDarrah

Oliver Stone’s W. biopic/satire/what? looks… interesting, or just really bad, like most of his recent films:

Gear lust gone too far.

Michael Kamber‘s (he’s got some really good stuff) field test in Iraq of the Leica digital that concludes that it is actually surprisingly inadequate.

Sort of like the novel in a month self project: Solo Photo Book Month ’08. I missed it, but not a bad idea. So now the question is – do I have 35 good black and whites?

Morph Thing morphs the faces of two famous people, be it Paris Hilton or George Bush or Hitler, into one. Kinda amusing, though not very good. Mostly looks like they combine different parts of the face rather than averaging the entire face.

?

(If anyone knows who did this picture, let me know. I saw it in a compilation or group show site and have since forgotten who the hell took it…)

Irving Penn

I have no idea, but there’s some great photos collected without any explanation on this page.

Did you know that Anderson Cooper was a Vanderbilt? And he was photographed by Arbus when he was a baby according to Bosworth’s Arbus bio. The passage is reproduced with the photo here. I also found a great blog with a whole bunch of less known photos here.

The bio was decent. The bits about her wandering the streets and getting to know her subjects were interesting, but I hadn’t known that she sought random sex with so many strangers after her marriage broke up or that she was so insecure about her work. According to this book, apparently what ultimately led to her decision to kill herself was the feeling that she no longer had complete control over her pictures. She established herself taking pictures of offbeat people in a confrontational way that more and more aggressive and somewhat dishonest as time passed, but when she photographed the ‘retardates’ at a mental hospital, they didn’t pay attention to her, just went on doing what they were doing, and she couldn’t dictate what happened in the frame or suggest poses or get the reactions she wanted. That, combined with her feeling of being alone – no husband, daughters are grown, friends have their own families – seems to have put her into an unalleviated depressive state that she refused to treat with anti-depressants since a toxic reaction to some drugs had led to a case of hepatitis previously.

She sure produced some stunning images, but it seems like she emphasized subject matter over composition to some degree, and finishing the book left me with a sense of grungy pathetic ugliness. I’m sure some think that she was a free spirit, but to me she just seemed like a very insecure woman who never managed to reconcile her childhood training that a woman should be submissive and serve her husband and marriages last forever, etc, with the desire to excel and have a career of her own. Not to judge her exactly, but damn, her way of dealing with shit by having a lot of random sex just seems a bit sordid. Is the art world really so full of promiscuity and neurotic people?

She seemed to be a great teacher though. Some of her assignments were to bring in favorite objects (to recognize that it’s not only art which moves people) and talk about failed attempts to photograph, etc. Yet her methods were just so aggressive (telling people it’d be a headshot when she includes their bare breasts, purposely waiting for unflattering expressions…). I wonder if she would’ve been a lot more stable and successful if she’d lived now. But maybe things wouldn’t be the way they are now if she hadn’t done what she did then. Who knows.

More cool photogs:

• an amusing video of Magnum shooter Bruce Gilden getting up close in people’s faces with a flash, no less:

• Mads Nissen
• Bert Teunissen
• Alex Webb
• And Adam Krause‘s great project on alligator hunting:

  

When you think about it, the amount of good photojournalism out there is incredible. Lots to photograph besides babies and cats!

Jan von Holleben has some fun stuff: Dreams of Flying is the most accessible and whimsical one, but I also like the idea behind It’ll Happen Here and You Run, I Count to 10.

I’ve been scouring the internet for blogs by industry people and for reliable sources of new art and industry news, and it eventually became clear that almost everyone read or followed the magazine PDN so I looked at some of their features and subscribed. They do indeed have very little filler, and seem to be much more impartial than the gear mags that’ve turned into reprints of manufacturer’s press releases. One of the most important things I need to do at this point is to ingest as much notable photography, past and present, as possible so I can avoid wasting time inadvertently reinventing the wheel or going down a path abandoned for good reason.

For instance, Andrew Bush has already done portraits of people as they’re driving. Granted, I was hoping for a different look, but good to know what’s been done before. Martin Parr has done better ones, I think, but I don’t know where to find the book on the project – From A to B.

And similar to our Fusion capsule, Mango Falls is a collection of found film that was developed and printed. Apparently it all started with a crappy roll containing this gem.

I stumbled upon a bunch of great youtube videos following and interviewing some first class photographers as they work:

Stephen Shore
Todd Hido
Martin Parr (Pt I, Pt II)
William Klein (Pt I, Pt II)

Klein’s is more produced and scripted, which I didn’t like until he started going through strips from some of his contact sheets, commenting on each one. I love that we can see the outtakes around each sure shot.

I need to take a look at these books in the library:

• Stephen Shore – Uncommon Places
• Todd Hido – House Hunting
• Parr – From A to B (?), Autoportrait, in which he goes into various touristy/kitschy photo studios and had his picture taken with the cheesiest templates:

  

• Zeng Li – A China Chronicle
• HCB – The Decisive Moment, which I never got around to getting from the reserves desk during the quarter.

I already picked up Parr’s Small World, which is a chronicle of tourists, and the anniversary reprint of Frank’s The Americans, the layout and printing of which was apparently overseen by Frank himself. I like the smallness of the book, which bucks the trend of printing everything huge these days. I like the closeness of the wide angle lens. Then I look at the Parr… whoooa, different aesthetic.

I just spent my entire afternoon and evening scanning photos and documents out of a huge album (80 some pages of photos front and back, with multiple photos per side) someone at the station found on a trash can somewhere and brought in for novelty factor. Apparently it used to belong to someone in an ’80s cover band called Fusion (though there are some promos for a band called Money too – ha!). There are promos, live shots, backstage shots, expense lists, a contract, a certificate for winning a battle of the bands type competition, newspaper clipping xeroxes…

Needless to say, they warrant some sort of online showcase. We’ll figure something. I’m afraid of the man hours needed to crop and resize all that shit though. Thank god we can just chalk the yellowing and fading up to nostalgic kitsch value; otherwise I think I’d spend the next two weeks color correct and doing post on the color shots. I even scanned some of the album pages that didn’t have photos because I’m anal like that and because I suspect they were using them as some sort of dividers.

I pillaged smurph’s book donation pile and came out with just the thing: Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. I have great hope for it since it has pictures like that.

Sui Jian Guo’s The Sleep of Reason is an awesome sculpture. Chairman Mao rests sleepfully in the middle of a colorful landscape formed by hundreds of small dinosaur figures. I spent all my energy sneaking photos of other things in that exhibit, so I ran out of frames right as I was about to take a color pic of this sculpture, which occupies its own mini room. I loaded in B&W, but it doesn’t come across nearly as well. Museum photo policies are not awesome though, so if anyone knows where there’s a better photo online of this sculpture, I’d love to see it.

Also saw the popular Frida exhibit, which was actually a bit disappointing. Her canvases are not particularly large nor her brushstrokes too 3D especially not her earlier paintings, so I didn’t feel like I took all that much away from it that I hadn’t gotten out of the Hayden Herrera book of her paintings. The photo portion, however, had a couple of slide negs mounted on a lightbox which were, true to other people’s rants of slide love, pretty stunning in how colorful and 3D they looked.

Click for Philip Toledano’s Phone Sex photo essay. No nudity, just some quirky portraits of workers on the other end of the line.

From Robert Wright’s blog:

I was visiting home last week and on the way back the rental car had XM satellite radio to keep me company, so perversely I listened to the comedy channel for 8 straight hours. I do not recommend it. But I realized how similar the experience was to looking at photography and blogs on the net. How is it possible to make comedy unfunny? By massing it together in a continuous stream you realize that very few people have anything truly funny or new to say, and in fact will repeat themselves over and over in the same genres and topics. It is the effect of consumerism, the construction of a world dedicated to making it easy to consume things.

I think what you are seeing is a generational thing amplified by the www. In the development of a photographer or artist there are stages that you inevitably go through, fascinations, being naive to certain things, unaware of what has come before, excitements at the discovery of an artist previously unknown to you, all of these things from the perspective of someone starting out are very different experiences compared to someone who is battling mid-career issues, etc. There are commonalities, like finding inspiration, finding places to show, sharing experiences.

But it is this particular time, the confluence of technologies of digital photography, the www for sharing, a boom in consumer credit allowing amateurs to purchase gear that only professionals would have bothered with in the analogue days, all of this has brought an unprecedented number of photographers into the arena at exactly the same time and often at the same phase, that early discovery phase that used to go by fairly unnoticed in art schools around the country. And asking the same questions over and over. Of course there is nothing wrong with this per se, except as it has manifested across blogs and the www. So you see the consequences, a great deal of burnout, bad work, and this somewhat toxic flood of imagery.

Charlie Rose was interviewing George Will last night and they were discussing the Barack Obama nomination, and that task ahead for him. The charge has been that he cannot connect because of his “elitism” and Will neatly deconstructed that. He said in politics it is never the question that the elites rule the masses, but it is the question of “which elites” will rule. You hear so much talk about relating to the “common man” and often politicians like to portray themselves as the “common man” as much as possible. Well, I agree with Will here, I want an “uncommon man” as a leader.

Similar goes for photography, photography may have it’s common charms, but I really don’t need a flood of common imagery. It is the uncommon we need more of.

Truly photographic. A fraction of a second in time, without context. They’re actually dancers doing series of jumps: