Shooting Wide Open

Wait for it, wait for the ghost chorus… If I ever perform in public and need a backing chorus, this is exactly what I will employ.

Peter Croteau

This kid had a lot of ideas, especially about the sublime and the Hudson River School. Better you hear it from him than me. He’s a little guilty of jargon-tossing, but the idea is better than the words. His Mountains are a more interesting conceptualization of his ideas, at least in my mind, since we’ve seen so many construction-in-nature photographs (and I suppose I’m guilty of the CA version of it too), but I still liked most of the series.

Adrian Fish

For some inexplicable reason, I’ve been a big hockey fan (but not a general sports fan) since the 5th grade, and in my short time in Photoland, I haven’t seen any projects of hockey spaces. Thus, instant fondness when I saw these.

This has nothing to do with photography, but FYI, hockey is the most aurally pleasing sport.

Jessica E. Marx

I went to the SPE conference in SF last month and the most enjoyable part was not any of the panels or talks but the night of the portfolio walk through, when the entire atrium of the Hyatt was plastered with prints, laid out on the ground, on the steps, on the bar, on the edge of the fountain… I ended up spending most of my time wandering around staring at other photos rather than standing still to explain mine. Some days I feel like, ah, screw networking! (Most people don’t like looking at small prints anyway…) Just look and enjoy!

So the next three weeks I’ll post a few images that caught my eye. Look and enjoy!

I’m hoping for a fruitful roadtrip this coming week. Will be swinging through Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara to catch a couple of Tuneyards shows (does that make me a hipster?), and then the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, where I’ve never been. In between, I’ll scope out Kern County and thereabouts, then check out some photos while staying with a friend in LA.

Then in May we’ve planned a Utah trip. We’ll make a loop of southern Utah because frankly I’ve been thinking about it too long and the itch needs to be scratched. Lord (Jehovah?), send me some of that harsh, flat mid-day light. (Is it the only cure to a Romantic reading of the West?) It’s high time we did another roadtrip anyway, since the last couple of years we’ve ended up in New York.

I’m very excited, but the planning has eaten up some time. I’ve also discovered that fleshing out the specific lyrical stories with actual details is going to take some research reading, so I’m off to a slow start on the musicking, but my new plan is to work out the sounds and beats while I’m doing the reading in coming weeks. God help me, what am I getting myself into?

Nerhol

Book and paper artist Ryuta Iida partners with Yoshihisa Tanaka to form Nerhol. This work is called Misunderstanding Focus and involves a series of layered time lapses cut strategically to reveal the layers beneath.

Also see: Scott Hazard

Virgilio Villoresi has expressive hands…

Also see: SoLab for Yuksek:

(Bonus round: Making of!)

A ways away, but I love the idea: The NYC Water Tank Project.

300 water tanks, 3 months next spring, with work by Ed Ruscha, Tony Oursler, Marilyn Minter and others. They’ll also have an open call at some point, so keep an eye out.

I’m not sure any of us has made photographs as good as Evans.

- Jeff Wall

I skimmed through Michael Fried’s book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (which focuses quite a bit on Wall as it turns out), and I don’t exactly recommend it. It turned out to be very very theory heavy and focused on the Struth-Bechers-Wall school of photography that’s very realist, large scale and static. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Certainly some of my stuff is tinged with their influence, but sometimes, you just can’t be exactly like your parents.

But this quote jumped out at me. The part of me that loves Walker Evans wants to agree, but the fatter half of me thinks this is completely incoherent as an idea. It illustrate a problematic way of thinking: comparing works against each other in a somewhat linear scale of “goodness.” This way of thinking closes down learning and discussion rather than fostering it since we become more focused on rankings rather than the reasons behind our preferences. After all, when we say that Photographer A is not as good as Photographer B what we’re really saying is that there are differences between the two and we prefer B. And if we say that Photographer A is just as good as Photographer B we are in some sense saying that A and B share some technical or aesthetic qualities in common.

None of us can make Evans’ photographs, that’s for sure. But have there been subsequent “better” images? Better technically? Better in terms of documenting a sense of place? Better in terms of filling the frame? It becomes obvious that without a more detailed analysis of the concrete characteristics of specific images, comparisons between artists or even an artist’s own images is not possible in this holistic ranking metric. But c’mon, you already knew art is subjective and blah blah blah.

The sting for me comes in when I start to think about how this sort of thinking might translate into the market. When it comes to prices there are no multiple dimensions of technical proficiency or use of color or getting the most out of your portrait subjects. There is only the dollar amount, and that fits the single dimensional linear scale perfectly. According to the market, Gursky may very well be “better” than Evans. I’m not trying to argue that people believe the price of work equates with the value of work, though some invariably do, but I do think that the presence at all of prices encourages some people to apply the one dimensional scale to subjective works. At the very least it gives you a way of ranking them.

I’m not sure that there is a solution to this problem or that it’s even a problem, but for me, it seems important to be aware that when we bandy about prices inevitably some part of our brains place the work along a continuum of cheaper or more expensive works. And in fact, isn’t this why it’s a social taboo to ask about someone’s salary? We actively try to prevent just this sort of mental ranking because we know that, at least in the bulk of the bell curve, the amount of money someone makes is no indication at all of their character or personality.

The more I think about it, the less it makes sense to even have a favorite photographer. I see so many images and like such a strange smattering of them that I really can’t say any one or five or even ten photographers are at the top of my list because I like them for such different reasons that they certainly can’t belong on the same list. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that you have favorite aesthetics rather than specific photographers.

Now. What I would like to see a graph of your influences along two or three dimensions determined by you. That feels more like mapping than ranking, and it seems more appropriate in the context of exploring and learning. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours…

[By the way, speaking of Walker Evans, an exhibit just opened at the Cantor last week and will be up til April 8th: Walker Evans: Photographs from Private Collection.]

Seen while flipping through this book of drawings of illustrations of personal creative processes.