$12MM A Pittance For A Stuffed Shark?
About $20 billion of contemporary art is sold annually, which is comparable to the yearly sales of Nike. In other words, it only sounds like a lot of money.
Great Posts about Photography History
“That’s A Negative” has quickly become one of my favorite photography blogs, on the basis of unusual, well researched and image-rich posts like these:
Chas’s post about some strange anonymous French stereographs includes a great quote about how little research or analysis has been done on many critical photographers of photography’s first century. I have a great affinity for early developments in photography and some of my favorite exhibitions when I lived in NYC focused on early photo technologies. Glad to see someone else devoting a little time to the early stuff.
UPDATE: In this same vein “Page 291″ has launched a monthly feature “Nothing New” to cover non-contemporary (or is it pre-contemporary?) photography, Eliot Porter’s bird work in the first post.
Walker Channel: Discussion with Errol Morris
Can’t get enough of Errol Morris? The Walker Arts Center has posted a video of discussion with the documentary director, following a screening of his new film Standard Operating Procedure. The film reviews the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib prison and the systemic dysfunction of the prison and interrogation teams. On his NY Times “blog” (it’s a stretch to call it a blog) Morris has exhastively analyzed the photographs taken by American soldiers to determine what they say about what actually happened there.
Here’s Morris’ take on those Photoshopped Iranian missiles. Again, highly skeptical of taking photographic evidence for granted and rightfully doesn’t blame it on digital technology.
Iranian Photoshop Skillz
A Iranian-supplied photograph of yesterday’s missile tests appears to have been altered to show four, rather than three missiles arcing skywards. Shades of the controversies around propagandistic press images altered by Photoshop during the recent Israeli/Hamas conflict in Lebanon. Was good enough to fool the NY Times, the LA Times, and Chicago Tribune, amongst others. In one of their blogs, the NY Times is reporting on their own snafu.
Most of these incidents demonstrate fairly rudimentary cut/paste/clone effects and are reasonably easy to spot. But there are better retouchers out there. I wonder how many images get by us undetected.
Today’s art is “global marketing swill”
Jed Perl, the art critic for the New Republic, has penned a terrifically long and bombastic broadside against the contemporary art scene, with pot shots aimed towards Koons, Murakami and Hirst amongst others, but sparing no one, not even the museum-going public, ie you and me.
I do not really believe that the educated audience that surveys the work of Koons at BCAM and the Metropolitan, or the work of Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, sees some deep meaning in these overblown comic-book heroes and factory-produced baubles. A lot of the visitors to these shows have a knowing, ironic look fixed on their faces. They can see that what is presented as art with a universalist message is really just global marketing swill…
Surprisingly little reference to photography save calling out an apparent overabundance of Cindy Sherman at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in LA. I would have expected the large-scale photographers to be taken to the woodshed, but I’m luckily photography is still beneath notice in the larger fine art galaxy.
Interview with “Big Picture” founder on waxy.org
Andy Baio of waxy.org interviews Alan Taylor, the Boston.com programmer behind “The Big Picture”, which I referenced a few days back. The lack of organizational obstacles is interesting. Taylor was pretty much able to prototype, launch and maintain the new feature (is it a blog? is it Boston Globe editorial? unclear) without too much interference from the mainstream news operation. While other papers have been experimenting with better ways to showcase photography, I can think of few examples this successful. The only one that redily jumps to mind is the NY Times increasingly frequent multimedia slides shows. These tend to be embedded in other articles and though they are centrally housed in a multimedia “hub”, they aren’t an ongoing feature of their own. Taylor rightly points out that most large-photo efforts in mainstream media are “pictures of the day” sorts that tend to play more to sensational single images than effective story telling.
“Regular Joe” efforts to duplicate this are probably going to be hamstrung by lack of access to large-sized images from the wires and the rights issues, which being affiliated with Boston.com nicely solves for Taylor.
Subject trumps style, at least for a second
An interesting Austrian research study shows that subject matter makes a much bigger, faster impact on viewers of art than the style of that image. Viewers register the image’s content or subject matter in a split second, less than 1/100 of a second into viewing. Still, style’s impact grows quite quickly even within the first second.
The researchers said their results were “astonishing” if you consider that artistic style is presumably reflected in “visual or sensory features including colours, brushwork, and treatment of lines” - features which would appear to correspond to the most basic visual elements of a scene that perceptual theories say are processed first, long before whole object recognition kicks in.
This reminds me of a Nikon training session I attended. One of the speakers said not to worry too terribly much about how crisp or sharp your picture was because the only people who will get close enough to care are other photographers.
(via BPS research blog)
Angst - it’s in the air
After writing last night’s post, something of a stream of consciousness about whether I know what I’m doing when I take pictures, this morning I read a post in a similar vein from Liz Kuball. I just ran across Liz’s blog the other day, but she raises some similar issues about how you grope your way forward to finding your artistic methods and voice.
One interesting comment Liz makes is her disappointment in making two different photographs that could not be visually connected as coming from the same photographer. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing. We seem to forget a time when making that branded, salable artistic style wasn’t as much in the forefront of artistic development and exploring different styles was mandatory, not prohibited.
And in the comments (which contain some good advice, and a reference to the omnipresent Robert Adams), I discovered photographer Tema Stauffer has a blog.
Finding a Way of Working
How are we supposed to learn how to work, how to make pictures? There are plenty of courses on the technical aspects: how to get a proper exposure, rules of composition, eliminating camera shake, etc. What I’,m getting at is how do you come to ideas, how to discover your subject, how to you order your working patterns on an ogoing basis?
On Sunday, I took two hours to drive around the backroads near the little Colorado town where we live and see if I could find anything that caught my eye to shoot. This is my way of working. I threw my camera bag in the car and headed out east towards Greeley, trying hard to skirt the ever expanding housing developments that are encrouching on the farmland. I knew there was a huge tree that’d been stripped bare of branches and bark by the recent tornado and I wanted to shoot that. A warm up, really. It wasn’t as interesting through the viewfinder as I’d thought it would be and good thing because for whatever reason all the shots came out muted (I’m shooting digital.)
Here’s where I feel I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just plowing along in the car, eyes darting to the left and to the right hoping something will catch my eye. I’ve been on this road before, so I have a general sense of some things I want to shoot, but nothing specific is in mind. Am I doing it “right”? Something says that doesn’t matter, it only matters that I’m out shooting. Something else says without a “point” or a plan, I’m unlikely to just stumble across anything good and this is a pointless exercise. But I keep going.
Next was the Kodak film processing plant. Its entrance was dark and looking derelict and I tried for a juxtapose of the Kodak corporate sign sitting out in a swath of grass infront of the gloomy deserted entrance. Not too satisfying, so I hopped in the car again. The whole time I drove on through the country roads each potential stop was haunted by Robert Adams’ The New West, which I’d bought a week or so ago. Was I overly influenced by those amazing photos? Was I just aping Adams’ work? It would be easy to end up mimicking his work, not much has changed about the continuing sprawl on the Front Range in the 30+ years since he made those photos.
I stop at a roadside memorial that I shot earlier in the spring. Pop, pop, pop. Trying to get good exposures, hampered by shooting in broad daylight, somewhat into the sun. Back in the car, onward, looking for another set of crosses I’d skipped that other day. Now, they are engulfed in summer grass.
Roadside memorial in the spring grass, 2008, Todd Walker
The long grass set off my allergies and I’m fighting 60 or more sneezes as I turn back around a retrace my route. I stop to capture some roadside signs that demonstrate some sense of internal irony.
Have a nice day, 2008, Todd Walker
A few more stops to capture a real estate sign (more Adams influence nagging in the head), some sort of decrepit natural gas machinery, storage tanks and the wind generator manufacturing plant. The whole time I’ve got a sinking feeling that I’m running out of time, I need to work fast, I need to get home and I’m going to disappointed with the results. This is a common feeling. I need to do this more, I need to let this way of working become familiar so I can lose the unsettling sense that I’m doing it “wrong”.
Camilo José Vergara: “the end of a gas-based world”
Camilo José Vergara was unknown to me before I attended “Where We Live” at the Getty a little over a year ago. After a road trip through northern New Mexico the summer before, I’d noticed a lot of small churches dotting the highways, often in repurposed buildings, but expressing what I read as an authentic, genuine faith. (As I was writing this post I realized I’d fallen into the assumption that low-design or vernacular designs indicate an authenticity that high design does not, or that poverty is some indication of a truer relationship with God. But I caught myself. Still, this seems to be the entire foundation upon which outsider art is based.) “Where We Live” contained a number of Vergara’s images of vernacular houses of worship, mainly in low income neighborhoods, which was basically the project I’d seen along those New Mexican highways. That doesn’t necessarily negate the opportunity with geographical differences as Vergara’s work tends towards urban examples, while what triggered the impulse for me was rural and semi-rural Southwest churches. And it’s an artificial and false barrier to think that just because a subject has been photographed before, it’s off limits to me. (An excerpt from How the Other Half Worships, Vergara’s book collection of this project.)
Vergara’s work is featured in today’s NY Times with a photo essay about derelict gas stations. Occasionally I’ll see an old gas station and wonder why it hasn’t been turned into something else. I assume there are environmental issues with huge tanks of residual fuels under the properties that make them a hard sell for repurposing. Vergara’s images reflect some of these same issues. Most of the abandoned gas stations he represents are regressing to Eden.
