Shooting Wide Open

I thought I’d put this video up after hearing about the upcoming Rineke Dijkstra retrospective in February at the SFMOMA. If you time your visit right, there’s a window of a couple of days when you can see both this show and the Francesca Woodman show.

It is Rineke Dijkstra talking about her life and work with Louise Baring at the Tate. She talks about moving from commercial to art photography, and the differences in body image she saw shooting European vs American children. I don’t particularly like how much they try to read into the body language and expressions of the portraits, but one terribly telling story she mentions is of shooting the following picture at Hilton Head in South Carolina and hearing the mother shout in the background for her daughter to hold her stomach in because she’s so fat.

What an ugly thing we do to girls with this idea of “glamor” and “beauty.”

William Eggleston

If you want to see the Peaches photo, go to Pier 24 immediately! (The American contemporary room is a color lover’s paradise! Soth’s green chair photo that I’d blogged earlier was there!) Although, they said that the next show, which includes some of the Fischer collection to contribute to SFMOMA’s introduction show, will contain all of Eggleston’s Guide. Shows will usually last half a year, but this first one was curtailed to make sure that their Fischer show coincided with MOMA’s.

I went to Free First Tuesdays at MOMA and the photo galleries at 49 Geary that same day for comparison. The jury’s still out on whether Pilara’s collection spans the breadth that MOMA’s does, though his collection sure seems complete – there were whole roomfuls of Winogrand’s Animals, Friedlander’s TV screens and Larry Clark’s Teen Lust, as well as an Arbus portfolio and all of Sugimoto’s portraits of waxen Henry VIII and his six wives.

Muybridge + Klett!

That said, the stuff in the Fischer Collection intro show at MOMA was incredible. (I’ll have to go again, especially since the New Topographics show is coming to town this weekend.) I loved the Calder room – it’s great that they put the mobiles in an area that is a passageway, so that air currents of moving people stirred the pieces. I’ve seen collections of mobiles in enclosed spaces and it just isn’t the same. Though this time the brightly lit area made enjoying shadows impossible. Still, it was fun, I think for the same reason that it’s pleasant to lie under a tree and watch the leaves flutter.

And. The scale and color of the Ellsworth Kellys and Anselm Kiefers were invigorating in a way that made the relative darkness of the warehouse at Pier 24 seem a bit funereal. Still, considering that they only have one full-time and one part-time employee, and charge no admission, it’s very impressive. After the tour ended, I found myself virtually skipping toward the rooms I liked.

Both these places let me with a bittersweet feeling as a side effect of too much exposure to $$$$. You can work at your aesthetic language and photograph for 20 years, but in the end, the people who end up bringing your work to the public in an affordable, appealing way are the super rich guys. It’s great that the money goes toward these sort of things, but you wonder if there will ever be anything that rivals affluent patronage and donations from men looking to preserve their embossed eternal names.

At least there are no prices attached, as in the galleries. It’s so strange to see them next to the work. You know that the thing on the wall is not aimed at you. Strange that a place that shows artists’ work is so implicitly not for artists. Maybe that’s just my cynical side. I’ve been reading books on the art world and there are dollar signs everywhere. It’s a bit disheartening that so much effort is spent talking about the money and business rather than the artwork. But I suppose that’s what sells books.

Still, it’s really strange to see Barry McGee’s work in a corner of Fraenkel. Am I wrong?

Saw this Barry Mcgee/Twist photo installation in the SFMOMA 75th Anniversary show today: (that’s not me, don’t get your Asian girls confused…)

Jen Wong

SFMOMA has a set of photos of the installation of the work, and one of my favorite parts – the drawings of the strange heads:

There’s also an interview with the director of conservation about McGee’s installations in their blog.

The wall text referred to the “Mission School,” referring apparently to the gritty, graf-like, Hamburger Eyes and zine aesthetic of some punks and whonot in the city. I wonder who coined the term and how the artists feel about it.

Penelope Umbrico’s Suns From Flickr was in the next room, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it in person. A pretty good day at the MOMA… the contemporary floors were my favorite as usual – I felt like going a little nuts after staring at so many small dark black and white photos from the past. Not that all work should be large and in color, but it just feels so dead to live in the past so much.

UPDATE: According to Wikipedia, the “Mission School” was coined in 2002 in a Bay Guardian article.

More McGee here and here.

David Trattles

David Trattles shoots in a fairly classic style.

In that vein, a reminder that you have til the end of the week to see Robert Frank’s Americans at SFMOMA. While you’re there, you can check out the Avedon retrospective as well as the double header with Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams. I still have a lot of trouble at retrospective shows with keeping historical context in mind. It’s hard to get excited about Adams, having seen all the derivative work since. Where can I go to see a comprensive chronological history of photography?

I want to see the photo version of an unrealized idea I had for radio which is to play the entire history of music chronologically for an entire week, starting from field recordings of indigenous cultures through various folk music from around the world, to contemporary rock and pop. How great if a museum were to exhibit everything from Daguerre to Shore in one building? It would be a colossal effort, but I would go again and again. As it stands, there seem to be shows of living artists and there seem to be retrospectives but nothing really connecting the two, at least nothing beyond the occasional pairing of giants or contemporaries. The MOMA had a little room at the end of the Frank exhibit showing a few photos from his influences, but nothing extensive.

With a chronological showing, you could change the way people move through a gallery by drawing little colored lines on the walls for viewers to follow from artists to their influences and mentees. I like the idea of a museum as a playground where you run back and forth, where there is a sense of trying to follow clues, literally following a thread on the wall, or find things for yourself. Or this could be done with handheld devices that you can punch the number of an artwork into. It would then show you the numbers of relevent other works. Or, how about this for audience participation – viewers can program their own edited sequence of themed or related photos on the device and upload it into a database where others can download them. The museum curators could then pick one to feature each week. This could work well on the web too. I’d settle for a web version of this if the real thing is too difficult, but I assume that with copyright issues, it’s not something just anyone can decide to put together. Too bad.

Anyhow, I digress. A neat little video you should be sure to see while you’re gorging yourself on black and white photography is Joe Sola’s Studio Visit, which is a part of the Studio Sessions exhibit. He invites visitors to his studio to see a new piece and then… gives them a little surprise. Most of the time when I see a pair of headphones hanging next to a not so captivating video, it feels like an obligation to put on the phones and hear what’s going on, but in this case, it worked perfectly with the presentation. You see strange things going on in the video and cannot wait to hear what’s going on. I was suprised by flat most of the on camera responses were! I wish he hadn’t given them the “do not be alarmed” warning. (Would not doing so count as unethically putting them under undue stress?) You have to see it for yourself, but here is a not so subtle hint:

William Gedney

I’ve been digging through Duke Library’s Gedney collection looking at all the contact sheets. I love seeing other photographer’s contact sheets, the sense they give of the photographer’s approach of a subject, the momentary reactions to the scene rather than the well-considered edit afterwards.

I took advantage of SFMOMA’s monthly free day and was promptly turned off by their semi-interactive show The Art of Participation. Only at an institution like MOMA would a show with the word participation in its title include signs that say “Do not touch” and staff who sternly ask people to “step behind the line.” To be honest, I’d rather there be a physical railing between the work and I than some invisible barrier that I’m not too sure of. I feel like I’m constantly being watched and that’s not my idea of a fun time viewing art.

Some pieces were interaction friendly while others were historical and off limits. You could tell what was which by observing other people, but to be sure, you had to glance at the sign. Personally, I want to look at the work first before reading any (preferably no) signs, so this was a bit deflating, like somebody scraped the icing off the cake. I walked into a dark room with a circle of vintage microphones, and the staff member encouraged me to participate by demonstrating speaking into the mics and virtually jumping around the room. I gotta give her some credit for doing her job enthusiastically, but by that point, I was in no mood to join in. Participation is a choice isn’t it?

However, I’ve never seen so many young people having fun there before (I think there may have been a school trip). Definitely a welcome change from the usual hovering in dead silence. Maybe I’m just a grumpasaurus.

On a positive note, it was the first time I’d been there after they changed their photography policy, and it felt right to see people snapping away on their digicams and big honkin’ DSLRs. My idea of art is something you can take with you, in a manner of speaking, and look at, think about again, share with others. So being able to take photos for personal use in an art museum feels very natural.

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.

I managed to squeeze into the intro photo class. Half the people who came on the first day didn’t get in. We all wrote why we wanted to take the class on notecards for the teacher’s consideration, and it was only later that I realized what I wrote was dumb. I didn’t talk about the specific subjects I want to photograph at all and I didn’t emphasize the fact that I wanted to develop a personal style on my own, that I wasn’t looking for secret ‘get-rich-quick’ tips on how to make my photos “better.”

Though now I am afraid that these art-background people will kick my ass. Apparently pictograms (directly exposing photopaper), collaging and all sorts of things are allowed in the final portfolio in addition to traditional prints. Let’s just hope that I turn out to be one hell of a meticulous printer. We’re supposed to have at least a roll by Wednesday. About half the class has started and the other half has not. Which confuses me. It’s already the third week of a ten week course. We got 2 lectures on the technical aspects and today he showed us Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray photos as a juxtaposition of two styles.

There was a huge Friedlander show at SFMOMA. Both of the photos which seemed memorable to me contained the Statue of Liberty – one with the fake one in Vegas, shot out the car window, and the other of two postcards on a NYC street. I can’t say that I’m appreciative of his style, which sometimes seems very uncomposed and snapshottish, though it could be that it was a statement against formalism. But the overall feeling of the show was very lively and focusing quite a bit on what’s not generally considered photogenic, which was rather inspirational once we got out on the street.

Walking out onto Grant St we both had an overwhelming feeling of everything being photogenic. Unfortunately, we were both paralyzed into inaction til the moment passed. I think it has something to do with the light reflecting off glass buildings onto the stone structures on the other side of the street and creating a very underwater-ish feeling while in the shade of the buildings.

But actually the photos I liked more were Gabriele Basilico’s Silicon Valley set. I’m going to get the book and pore over the photos til I learn something.

After class today I pondered why I don’t like HCB despite understanding why his photos are great and “effortlessly right,” as the instructor put it. He drew an analogy to Mozart in music, and that made it pretty clear to me: I don’t like Mozart either. As much as I listen to Mozart and appreciate how good he is, there’s just nothing to draw me in emotionally. I don’t feel like Mozart or HCB really are of my time. I can’t relate to them, and I don’t live in their world.

Which is why I loved the Basilico. Those pictures are of places I recognize, of a familiar place in the present. There’s just something more relevent feeling about them, and I’d bet it’s what cities of his time felt like to HCB. It seems pointless to aim for the classicism of the past greats anyway, since so many of them were taken in Europe and those cities just have a different feel and look that contributes to the classicism of the shots. Americans don’t live and run about on the streets in the same way and our buildings look somehow more industrial, boxy. There’s a whole other vibe here that I want to learn how to shoot effectively. I haven’t figured it at all, and frankly I’m hoping staring at the Basilico will set something off in my brain, lead me to a common thread between the pics I like.

I also really wonder about people’s reactions to being photographed in public and whether that’s changed any. I mean, photography was relatively new back in HCB’s day and cameras were usually pretty hefty, so a guy using one of the new-fangled tiny 35mm cams must’ve not seemed very intimidating at all. Who knows if he was a friendly guy, but seems like photography would’ve been a much less threatening medium, unlike today, when any photos someone takes of you could end up on the internet, and everybody and their mom has a superzoom or red stripe lens mounted on their huge SLR. I read somewhere that the DSLR market is growing far faster than the point and shoot market. As they become more affordable, a hell of a lot of people are snapping them up. It must change the type of photo available to a street, or candid shooter.

Which reminds me. Felzmann assigned a New Yorker reading (“Exposure” by Philip Gourevitch and – yay! – Errol Morris, who’s making a film about it called “Standard Operating Procedure“) for the class about the Abu Ghraib point and shoot photos, about how the availability of cameras changes the role of the snapshooter, changes who documents history, changes the profession. The old pros have been complaining about this “everybody thinks he’s a hotshot photographer” syndrome for a bit now. I’m sure it’s still a minority of people who can produce seriously good photos, but the attitude certainly has changed, hasn’t it?

Link: Iraq/Afghanistan war photos