Shooting Wide Open

Hello, grant writing weekend. No time for anything but this:

Never thrust any photograph so large that it can only fit inside a museum.

- Duane Michals, Foto Follies – How Photography Lost Its Virginity On the Way To The Bank.

Colin and Joerg both commented on smiling or the lack thereof in portraiture, and I had a thought – can it be that our tendency to smile so much is influenced by exposure to the point of saturation to advertising? Aside from the usual moody blankness of high fashion, everyone in ads is smiling, having a good time.

I’m curious about how necessary citizens of other countries find it to smile all the time. My subjective experience has been that in the US people are more prone to smiling at strangers, at customers, at everybody. Which is mostly a good thing, but sometimes you can see that the smile is forced, which is awkward. People who don’t smile as often are seen as more unfriendly. I get the feeling that a person needs to smile a lot, especially if you’re female, to be perceived as friendly or not aloof when of course, those things don’t necessarily actually correlate.

It’s all speculation at this point. Thoughts?

Art veterans among you are probably over-familiar with this, but I have to work it out for myself.

Abstract works are more purely visual – having a preference means having a preference for the colors and negative space, lines and curves in one particular piece, not a preference of subject matter. If you like to look at things, really look at things, they’re wonderful, but if you need to focus on something human, something more object-oriented, then they’re horribly tedious and boring. Personally I like to approach abstract works on a more purely visual basis than try to find figurative objects. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people say something like “it’s like a beach!” Not that that’s not a legit reaction; I just prefer the more purely visual.

Prof. Morten Hansen was lecturing about space and depth in abstract modern paintings, about Malevich and Barnett Newman, and I thought, hmmm, I’d never considered abstract paintings to be particularly spatial. But then I remembered the Marden retrospective as well as a couple of other works at SFMOMA in 2006. Unfortunately, all the pieces I mention are essentially in-person pieces, but I’ll try to talk about them anyway.

Tom Wesselmann, Picasso

Some works that actually have three-dimensional objects protruding out of the canvas, like Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life 30, looks relatively flat, even in person, whereas something like Picasso’s Seated Woman (1927), if you stare at it long enough, has a strange multi-dimensional feel to it despite being simply lines and shapes. I think Wesselmann was going for a more subtle effect of “hey, something’s off here” rather than a real sense of depth, but before seeing those two things, I’d never thought particularly hard about it.

There was also a great if thinly populated Marden retrospective. Guess single-color canvases draw very few people, but I thought that gathered together, there was an odd peace about them. I don’t know how they play on their own, in the midst of other works, but together there was a coherence to each series as well as the line of his career – together, you could notice things like the fact that his colored lines tend to be neat whereas the grey lines tend to be smeary in many works. You could see the progression from single lines on single colored canvases to his more recent gargantuan Propitious Garden of Plane Image. The six panels covered almost an entire wall and each panel alternately using five of six total colors, the sixth serving as background. I loved staring at how different each color looked on a different colored background, seeing the different colors pop out. I’d like to imagine there is also a line of the background color wriggling invisibly about in the background.

Brice Marden

Something about abstract art is weirdly escapist and hedonist.

This sound makes me happy. And Hutz is just an irresistable performer.

I wish I could’ve found some footage of a song that uses the girls’ legs as drums stands, but no luck. This is what it looks like. They also have a penchant for drum crowd surfing…

This one’s more indicative of their live style, but the quality’s not so hot. Hutz has said their not just a ‘show band’ but are you kidding?! CD is just not the same as live for a band like this. The recordings are just too polished, not to mention everything is compressed to the point of no dynamic range (the music industry equivalent of over-saturated colors?).

Unfortunately, now that they’re getting big, it costs $30+ to see them. Don’t get me started. Poop.

Phil Bergerson

Seeing Bergerson’s fantastic use of color, the question that springs to mind is:

What if, instead of taking candy from babies, you replaced their box of colorful crayons with a palette of subtle grays? Would they burst out into bouts of Greenbergian crying or become master black and white photographers?

Remember the Ralph Lauren ad with the scarecrow-like model (who may have actually been fired for being “overweight”)? Well, there’s more where that came from:

And in another insane development, can you believe that designer Chrisitan Louboutin thinks Barbie’s ankles are fat? What?! I thought everyone had pretty much acknowledged that Barbie’s body is an inhuman idealization, but apparently not even Barbie can escape criticism. Who are these people? Out of touch doesn’t even come close. They should really just make some robots/real dolls as models. God knows it’s not like they need any animating human expressions of joy or anything in their ads anyway.

Then of course, there was Glamour’s use of a plus size model in its back pages. Indicative of how messed up the industry is when a normal looking woman is seen by readers as refreshing and shocking.

On a brighter note though, apparently German lifestyle mag Brigette is banning professional models and using real women from now on. Good to see there’s some backlash against all this, even if it’s only in Europe so far.

Speaking of the Innocence Project, I read this and it stuck in my craw. It is a reminder of how important it is to have journalists researching, questioning and challenging rather than just quoting and straight reporting. In a month-old New Yorker, there is Todd Willingham’s story: he wakes one night to find the entire house on fire, tries to get into his kids’ room and fails, stumbling out just before the fire reaches what’s called flashover. Witnesses report his attempts to get back into the house. Later, they change their testimony in light of arson investigators’ conclusion that he set fire to the house in order to kill his children. He is convicted and executed, but not before a concerned pen pal does some leg work and consults a munitions expert turned arson consultant who, days before the execution, submits a report to the state of Texas claiming that the arson investigators were full of shit and he is an innocent man. No dice. Willingham is treated like a child killer in prison, his ex-wife refuses to bury him next to the kids. What a nightmare.

It turns out until the mid ’90s we didn’t really know anything scientific and confirmed by experiment about fires. Read on. (Hurst is the expert, Vasquez and Fogg are the arson investigators.)

In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.” After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity.

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.”

The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

The article is really worth checking out.

Taryn Simon

This in from the Times:

For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates.

But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another case, a hearing has been scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request: Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves. Among the issues the prosecutors need to understand better, a spokeswoman said, is whether students believed they would receive better grades if witnesses they interviewed provided evidence to exonerate Mr. McKinney.

We’ve all heard this line of argument against bloggers, but journalism students? A little ridiculous. Hell, maybe nobody’s a journalist – we’ve all got that self-promotion ulterior motive. All kidding aside though, that would be an interesting study to commission.

Patti Hallock

I saw Patti Hallock’s Wreck Room project a while ago and loved the geometry, for lack of a better word, of her work. I really enjoy these projects where we get a peek into a different world, which may not be all that strange, through little people-less scenes.

On a tangent – NaBloPoMo, anyone? Write a post every day for this month and get… a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

I can’t believe I just spent a night writing this instead of scanning while watching Big Love (awesome show), but I’ll take some solace in the fact that I got Joerg to put the word “chipmunk” in a subject title.

First off, let’s clarify a bit. Don’t read too much into the chipmunks! I was looking for an excuse to show the Star Wars chipmunk. I admit the images and text in my posts aren’t always closely wedded. It’s fair to say that if I don’t mention the photographer by name in the body of the post, the image(s) aren’t very tightly connected to the ideas in the text. Sometimes I do it to break up the monotony of the text and give readers a few easily identifiable landmarks. I’m going to do this right now. Since this discussion includes La Pura Vida, let’s take a look at Bryan Formhals’ work as we proceed, shall we?

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE CHIPMUNK

So. Our chipmunk is not an example of public art or vernacular art. Art is not the point, which is precisely my point. It is just an example of someone putting together a group of other people’s images for public view, an example of how photography is used for different purposes that don’t necessarily need to be art-related to be ultimately beneficial to the art photo community. Having a public that is excited about photography in all its forms is a good thing for art photography in general in my mind. The issue for me is not whether Flickr is full of snapshots or if artists use it. I agree with Bryan over at lapuravida that it’s very difficult to define what Flickr is since, like the net, it is just an empty template into which individuals can pour anything. I have no doubt that this is mostly true:

flickr it’s just a massive thing. Nobody can just diss it like that. Probably a quarter or half of the photographers we’ll talk about in the future are now or have been there at some point. I think that the whole thing is just starting. Now it has been brewing for a while, and the first photographers and curators are getting out of it into the world. Those exhibitions, books, etc. will have nothing to do with flickr, but flickr has just been the yeast in the process. You’re not looking at it to find the best of the photographers that you already know. You’re looking at it to try to figure out who out of those millions of users you’ll know in a decade.
- Joni Karanka

However, I’m making a broader statement that we should look at Flickr neither as the breeding grounds for new artists or a pool of vernacular photos for artists to draw on, but as a forum for generally getting the public excited about photography in a way that museums can’t. This is done by the interaction, the large number of searchable photos and also the presence of working fine artists, amateur fashion photogs, sports fanatics and what have you. You can be inspired by photos in the MOMA, but you can’t do anything about it, not really, in the MOMA. Flickr on the other hand, is an open DIY invitation. You see something you like, well, sign up and join in. That’s not to say that the point of museums or galleries isn’t to get people excited about and doing photography, but Flickr is built so that interaction and passive gazing occur in the same space.

There really is something for everyone on Flickr. I think we actually all agree on this point. You can find your own level – if you want to post family snapshots and limit your interaction to your own family and friends, you can. If you want to grow up to be just like Dave the Strobist, you can. And so on with fashion, wildlife, landscapes, sports, street, fine art, etc. The percentage of photos that fall into these different “genres” on Flickr probably mirrors the percentage of photos in these genres in the larger world in general. So in that view, fine art is in fact still a small slice of the pie. That’s no surprise.

I threw a monkey wrench into my own argument by tacking on that last paragraph, which was really a lead-in for another issue, and the unfortunate choice of the word “curate.” Edit and group are more accurate terms. I am talking broadly about the skill of parsing sequences or series of images, which is related to the skill of parsing images much as parsing sentences is a step up from parsing words.

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE TROLLS

I do agree with Joerg that the bulk of the discussions on Flickr tend to be about gear, how to be a pro and technique, and are laced with trollish remarks. But those remarks are really just a part of everyday life. Let’s not pretend that every discussion we have in person with a sizable group of people is rational and orderly and even-tempered. It’s just that all the snitty little remarks get recorded permanently which makes them that much more intrusive, but at least on the web you can just skip over comments made by trolls. In real life you actually have to listen to them, or deal with their blather.

Though you get the inevitable pointless ones, I like the comments function. It’s the easiest thing we have these days, and it’s getting better. I can’t think of a site off the top of my head, but now there are ways for a community to render trollish comments invisible by collective vote. This way, you end up with only the comments that most people find worthwhile and you don’t really need one moderator to do this intensively – only everyone to click a helpful/unhelpful button as they’re reading. Of course, this only works with sizeable communities, but actually, I bet it’d work okay if you even had ten loyal readers who regularly voted, depending on how sensitive your visibility threshold is.

Misunderstandings of tone and intent happen a lot online, but part of this comes out of a limitation of technology. For example, there’s gotta be a way to pull these related blog posts together into a more easily readable and respondable (?) form so that I don’t have to open 10 tabs to keep up, without removing them completely. But we’re not quite there yet. I’m hoping the more modular, data-oriented semantic web will make some of this easier. I think you guys are arguing on different planes, about different points. When it comes to the subject of Flickr and the vernacular we all have some easily pushed buttons that when the subject pops up, we tend to harp on. I do it. This is not just a feature of web discussions either.

In my experience, the majority of conversational exchanges over course of a typical day are likely pretty inconsequential, unless you are the lucky bastard that lives among people who have idea diarrhea. I’m missing the smalltalk gene, so I wish the day consisted of one intense debate after another, but realistically, I’ve learned that there’s no way to expect that from other people. It’s just not feasible anywhere, so I’ve developed a tolerance for offhanded remarks, smart alek comments and the inevitable snarky intrusions.

Bryan Formhals

CIVILIZED DISCOURSE: AN EXAMPLE

Actually, I use Flickr now more for the forums than for the pictures. There are groups where more civilized heads prevail. I favor Utata. The pool is pretty typical Flickr. The group’s strength is how well it’s run. Many people have been there for years, so they’ve gotten to know each other, which always helps keep the trolling down. Aside from basic civility, rules are few – there are no genre, gear, or theme restrictions. There are weekly participatory exercises/assignments. Greg writes up a new fine art photographer twice a month – look at this formidible list! It is not comprehensive, but it is nothing to scoff at, considering he used to do it every week in addition to picking some of the assignments, publishing said assignments, culling feature photos for the Utata website proper, writing the occasional text for the front page and being active in everyday discussions, sometimes stepping in when things take on a nasty tone. He shares these tasks with other mods. Behold, a collective with 16 moderators, 17,000 members and nearly 9,000 discussion topics that hasn’t fallen into complete chaos.

Right now there’s a discussion on vegetarianism and slow food, and not long before, there was heated debate over the new development in the Shepard Fairey case (started by yours truly, no less). All sorts of bizarre things pop up. (Cloaca Machines or blink reminder glasses?) I think the amateur/hobbyist nature of the group makes it more laid back and pleasant. I look into more hardcore groups and there are just too many ideological debates for me. Utata is just a nice place to ask a question without being jumped on and picked apart. All this civility might make it too nice for some, but I think it’s a nice place for a beginner to explore without feeling the need to jump on either side of any given argument. The natives are friendly and funny. The group doesn’t have everything but of course, you can supplement with other groups, even start your own.

I think of it has most successful long term relationships – not every moment is fire or peace or happiness, but you know what, it works. 1/6th of the time is really awesome, 3/6ths is good, 1/6th is annoying little things that as much your problem as his, and 1/6th is some serious problems to work through. But what have you got to complain about? 5/6ths of the time you’ve got no problems, you’re not going to break up. (Loosely spun off a study that showed that couples who were negative to each other for more than 1/6th of their interaction time tended to break up.)

But I digress. It takes time to find a community that you’re comfortable with. The thing about the web is that even though it’s a different medium, all the same rules pretty much still apply. You need to reach out to others for others to become interested in you. It takes a while before people respond to and get to know you. Disagreements will arise and there will be drama. It takes time and effort before you really get anything truly rewarding out of it, and at some point, especially if you’re interested in fine art, it’s more efficient to leave Flickr for the world of the blogs and online magazines to see the work you’re most interested in.

I can imagine that if I had been as savvy about what was available online in the blogosphere then as I am now, it might’ve been harder to dig through Flickr, but at the time I was feeling my way around, I had a lot to learn from a wider range of photographs, and I didn’t mind looking at everything I could get my eyes on. I managed to find my way to some contacts whose work I admire (Li Wei, Mu Ge, Lung S. Liu, among others) and it’s a lot easier to hop into a crowd familiar with the history of photography from this point.

Bryan Formhals

NEW WORK, UNFINISHED WORK

One great and unique thing about Flickr – the work keeps pouring in. When I’m learning, I personally feel the need to look at a lot of photos, and sometimes the work featured on portfolio sites and blogs is too periodic. Once or twice a year, if that, photographers release new work. I simply need to look at far more than that to speed up the learning process, and Flickr is perfect for this. All photographers are connected to a web of other photographers, so if I ever feel that I’ve exhausted my pool of contacts, I can trawl my contacts’ contacts or favorites to find new stuff. Also, as someone trying to figure out my own optimal process, it’s better to engage with a group of people who are constantly showing new work rather than a finished, edited portfolio. It helps me feel motivated to shoot new stuff and I get to see the editing process to some extent, of other photographers. This is something that is entirely missing from the museum and artist website models of seeing work.

I suspect that one of the main reasons Flickr isn’t always taken seriously is a practical one – do you want to show potential colleagues and employers outtakes or work that you might ultimately decide isn’t good enough? For art directors or buyers I can see how this is the main problem – streams are just a mash of personal snapshots and serious work (if there is a distinction to be made). Do the snapshots make employers nervous about ability? Or perhaps mostly it’s just a matter of not having the time to look through hundreds of photos. One complaint I do have about Flickr is that for a photo sharing site, it sure doesn’t give you versatile options for display.

Bryan Formhals

A little later in the week I want to address the issue of elitism vs populism and more importantly, our tendency to make these classifications in the first place, but I felt we had to shoo that chipmunk out of the room. It’s gone now, poor thing!