Shooting Wide Open

Guillaume Chauvin

If you haven’t heard about the two students who staged photos in the style of classic reportage, read about it over at Horses Think. Yes, photojournalism has been stylized and has a gritty, scraped off the bottom of a shoe feel to it, but the stunt itself is pretty pointless in my opinion. All they really proved was that it’s possible to fake something, which, come on, we’ve all known for a very long time. It’s the basis of the entire fashion and motion picture industries.

They missed their own point – while they were interested in making a dramatic statement, the magazine was more interested in funding a photographer trying to reporting meaningful content. If the series had been an explicitly stated as staged, it would still work in a personal work context, but it’s fairly meaningless to say, “look, you were fooled,” when there’s no real way a viewer can tell if this type of photo is staged from the photo itself. If anything, they make a compelling argument for credential photojournalists who can be held accountable for the veracity of their content.

The incident did, however, recall the discussion over at VII Agency with Stephen Mayes, Gary Knight and Tim Hetherington about war and photography. They address the same issue those two students claim to be getting at in a much more interesting way. Hetherington says that even no aesthetic is an aesthetic. I take that to mean we may as well accept that styles are a part of journalism as much as they are of art, if only because as a business matter, individual photographers feel a need to develop some coherent body of work and a personal style is an aspect of that, or at least seems to be expected. That’s not news (excuse the pun). And as Knight points out, audiences eventually become bored with prevailing styles and an infusion of something new is not necessarily a bad thing.

There’s a lot ripping around the internet about the crisis in photojournalism. I don’t know if it’s really a crisis – more like an evolution into something better, more complex, which takes into account what’s outside the frame and admits to the fact that eyewitness accuracy is not the same thing as truth in any comprehensive sense.

Is art encroaching on journalism? Is photojournalism trying to be art? This debate almost has the feel of two sides duking it out, but when you think about it, nobody is encroaching on anybody else’s territory. There’s plenty of room for both eyewitness photography of discrete events as well as documentary work aiming to speak on larger trends that involves more ‘interference’ by the photographer. The two are complementary and the subject benefits from an application of both, so I don’t see why both types of images can’t co-exist on the page. Some notion of aesthetic coherence?

[The idea of building a coherent style has bugged me from the start. That seems to be aimed solely at having an optimally marketable product, being someone a client or customer can expect certain things from. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that when a photographer branches out into different styles most of the time he is better at some than others, and this gives the impression that his work is technically inconsistent. But if you are technically proficient in several styles, there's no reason why you shouldn't work in all of them if you can manage it, right?]

One of the VII guys said that the crisis is happening less in photojournalism than in print media overall. I agree. Photojournalism is changing, print media is in crisis. But I suppose since print media is traditionally where photojournalism lives, photojournalism is in crisis by association. I don’t think it’s as big an issue as the blogs, bless ‘em, make it out to be.

Blake Andrews uses the simple sinewave synthesizer Tonematrix, which is based on the concept of the Yamaha Tenori-On, to make mini musical compositions from various black and white photographs converted to 16×16 pixel arrays. He’s posted graphics of the stages of conversion as well as sound samples. The music sounds very similar since the palate is limited, but still, it is veddy interesting. Unfortunately I can’t get Flash to work on my computer, so I will have to scheme to find a computer on which the program runs. (There is a similar iPhone widget but I don’t have an iPhone either!)

The Tenori-On itself, released in 2007, is an interesting piece of equipment. It is a more abstract, simpler version of JazzMutant‘s Lemur, first widely released in 2005. That’s probably giving it more credit than it deserves – maybe it’s more like a combo of Ableton Live and the Kaoss Pad, which is a bit older, having been released in 1999. Of course, sampling and looping devices have been around for a while now (i.e. the MPC), but the new devices are so much more fluid and intuitive.

The interesting thing about these interfaces is that they seem to indicate that sooner or later our electronics interfaces are going to be far more fluid, customizable, and most importantly, tactile, than ever. I’m looking forward to escaping ye olde mouse and keyboard point-and-click interface. (Please, let it be before I develop carpal tunnel!) It doesn’t take too much imagination to see what implications touchscreen technology will have for not only photo but any software. I happen to be familiar with sound devices, but I’m sure similar things are being developed for strictly visual applications, which I’d guess are limited more by the expense of large touchscreens.

I’d hope that the manuals for these devices include videos. It would be inefficient to try to describe the functionality of these very visual devices in mountain of text. If you’re curious, Yamaha has several videos demonstrating the different basic functionality of the Tenori-On, but more interesting are the Youtube videos of musicians being introduced to it in their homes and studios (some of them are filmed opening the box for the first time). You can see what Mouse on Mars and I am the Robot and Proud do with it on Youtube:

You can approximate the passage of time by the light coming in through the window, and by the end of the evening, he’s already pretty adept. I’m extremely jealous of the manual dexterity and coordination of musicians! I confess that I tinkered a bit with sequencers and whatnot before I picked up a camera, but alas, my brain is a visual rather than a musical model so I left musicking to more skilled hands than than mine.

The hardest part of learning a craft when you are no longer a child is that your judgment is well developed (hopefully) and you can tell that in the beginning stages that, to put it bluntly, you suck. As a child, you blunder about, everyone encourages you and you don’t know any better, but as an adult, you have a painful awareness of your own inadequacies, especially when compared to skilled competent practitioners. Once you get to that plateau of basic technical proficiency, it’s hard work by the law of diminishing returns to make each small improvement, but at least the ego blows aren’t quite so violent. My theory is that adults can achieve some degree of pleasing proficiency in almost any new craft if they can live through that first phase of being soul-crushingly bad.

In the end, I wasn’t able to get through that terrible beginning stage with music – it was somehow more painful with music. I’d been ogling things all my life before I even knew what that skill was good for, but I hadn’t learned any instruments, so my brain was in no way primed. I’d also been exposed to more music than fine art photography by then, so I sailed through that first phase of learning photography in semi-ignorant bliss. Not so with music. There’s nothing worse than than being assailed with bad music that you can’t close your ears to. The world is probably a better place when I have a camera instead of an instrument in my hand.

Colleen Plumb

Olivier Laude guest blogged on A Photo Editor about electronic fine art displays. Yes, please! I blogged obliquely about this back in January: “I dream of gigantic e-Ink wall screens where I can display a rotating series of photos which I can store in a tiny device.” e-Ink is a better application of this idea in my mind since I don’t really relish the thought of having a glowing screen constantly on in my living space, or having to turn it off at night unless I want an experience like this. Not to mention it is bendable. OLED certainly does seem promising though.

I do wonder if piracy will become an issue, and if photographers will begin to show smaller and smaller sized photos online. A 800px wide photo may not be high res enough for print, but it might not look bad in a 5×7 digital display. I hope the new technology won’t shrink the endless pool of work available to us online right now. Some photographers think unauthorized use of their work is bad now, but I can imagine it getting worse.

Oh wait, it’s already happening, and condoned by the New York Times, no less. I suppose this sort of private piracy has always happened and will always happen, but to see it actually suggested in a publication like that is outrageous. (via a photo editor)

Melissa Ann Pinney

Melissa Ann Pinney photographs young girls in domestic and everyday settings. I don’t usually go for this sort of thing, but I liked her Girl Ascending series quite a bit. She chooses beautiful light and these portraits have a very relaxed, peaceful feel. Sometimes I feel there is a distinct though inarticulate difference between portraits of young girls taken by male vs female photographers. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I feel that here. These portraits put me at ease.

At any rate, her work definitely passes the Pretty Girl litmus test I’ve begun to apply to portrait photography. (I’m sure this has many incarnations already.) It goes something like this:

1. mentally replace all attractive, youthful persons in frame with bad-skinned, gap-toothed, leering crones (or perhaps with, in a less pseudosexist version, gigantic toads)

2. is it still a good picture?
3. then it’s a good picture!

I suppose this defeats the purpose if you’re attracted to photography precisely because you enjoy portraits of happy attractive people, but, misanthrope that I am, that is not what attracts me to photography. The other possibility is that the test may give false positive after false positive for those who enjoy the twisted and strange for its own sake, but, well, then you’ve just discovered a thoroughly enjoyable mental exercise.

Mike Sinclair

Mike Sinclair photographs the places people go for recreation. I especially liked the Fairgrounds series, and find that I prefer his photos of people and crowds by a slim margin to his landscapes.

Twitter’s involvement in the protests in Iran got me thinking – we text message in smaller and smaller packages, but size aside, a photo is the basic unit of visual communication. As the attention span for text declines into runic brevity, a picture is a picture is a picture.

Also, the ICP has scanned and uploaded some frames from the negatives in Capa’s Mexican Suitcase, which you’ll remember from the news stories early last year. The Times had a slideshow with some select frames a couple of months ago, but those photos are not in those that the ICP has uploaded so far. According to the FAQ, they will update the galleries as they scan more.

Rebecca Coolidge

Held, where else, in Alaska. Please tell me someone has done a fine art series on beards.

Raoul Gatepin

Somehow, I missed Matrix ping pong when it first swept Youtube. You know, I’d be fairly happy if men in black jumpsuits replaced all CGI effects:

Update: These two videos are even more impressive, despite the feeling of a bit too much polish: Matrix food fight and Matrix Olympics.

And, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Y Control” (I was going to lead with this, but no embedding allowed unfortunately) is a fine example of a good but not outstanding song made better by the visible charisma of the singer. It is also an example of visuals made more charming by the audio. Without the sound, it’s mildly disturbing. There is something simultaneously hilarious and creepy about a child miming vampirism. When you think about it, vampirism is kind of an adult concept. I don’t think any little kid would invent the concept of blood-sucking without adult direction.

However, I’d also be happy if small children with fog machines replaced scary looking grown up Hollywood vampires.

Karin Apollonia Mueller

I liked her short series “Man.” The way she frames shots is sometimes a bit off kilter, which I find alternately interesting and disorienting. (Or are those two things synonymous?)

Michael Wolf

From Nick Paumgarten’s article “The Death of Kings,” a somewhat more meditative take on the financial meltdown:

It can be startling to discover how many offices in Manhattan have spectacular views. The first time you gain admission to an aerie in some other blue-chip tower and look out, you think that this particular office must be the finest in town, the seat of secret power, the heart of the plot. But the city is full of them. It’s one of the things about tall buildings: you can see a lot. The takeoffs and landings at the airports, the shipping lanes, the humans below reduced to units: it is easy to begin to think abstractly about the armature of empire. Sitting up there and talking for hours about pools of securitized debt, and seeing them depicted on dryboards, divided into tranches, you can find yourself viewing the buildings out the window as manifestations of that debt – the conversion of financial cunning into steel, brick, and glass.

I found myself inadvertantly thinking about how Michael Wolf’s Transparent City photos, some of which I saw at the beginning of the year, are more landscape than architectural photography. For many of us, field and stream have been replace in daily vision by monolithic stone, steel and glass. In photo after photo, geometric abstraction resolves into the matter of people’s lives. The grid of building structure divides each occupant from another, and each resides alone in his box, staring at computers and televisions.

Some of Wolf’s photographs are similar to Thomas Kneubuhler‘s work, but I get a much stronger whiff of compartmentalization from Wolf. Work exists in one box and private life in another. Every day most of us engage in a mass exodus from our homes to our workplaces and we do it again in reverse at the end of the day. Both fall visually into the mold of high rise geometry, and there is an implied parallel – we work in a small cube and we live in a slightly larger one. Swap in a couch for a desk chair and a TV for a computer monitor, and, from a distance, the scenes are pretty similar. Yet there’s something endearing about all the individual piles of detritus each person creates for himself placed side by side in large human colonies, but the dominant form of the grid does give the whole project a rigid feel.

These photos are not well represented by web viewing. They should be seen as large prints that you lean into to pick out little details, but I don’t find the grand scale of the structures dehumanizing or anonymizing. In fact, I find the act of honing in on one small detail while the rest of the print fills your peripheral vision more personal and engaging than taking in frames and prints as a whole. If he is showing near you, it’s a show that’s definitely worth seeing in person.