Photograph of the HIV Virus

Seriously, photography has reached the point where we can photograph a single bit of the HIV virus. My favorite part of this. The caption on the BBC's website says 'HIV Virus, magnified.' Magnified...really? Easily the winner of the most redundant clarification ever in history. I think if you really needed that clarified you don't deserve to have it clarified for you.

Understanding Materiality

Yeah, it's been a while. But I'm working on a thesis that's gone off the rails in a way that ensures it will still be interesting to me, so understand. Anyway, a couple weeks ago on the atlantic.com Sven Birkerts wrote an article called Resisting the Kindle. Birkerts is a hearty advocate of the physical book, is scared of its demise. I have met and spoken with other people who dislike this, but since Birkerts is smarter than they are he also states the problem in a much more ffective manner, specifically he frames his problem within a paradigm shift, or as he says: "The electronic book, on the other hand, represents—and furthers—a circuitry of instant access, which giveth (information) as it taketh away (the great clarifying context, the order)." I take this to mean information being degraded to the order of trivia and this is something we should be aware. Research and study brings you intelligence, but if you do not understand where the information you learned came from what have you actually learned beyond mere facts.
This obviously applies to photographs along the same line. I have to imagine since the digital camera was created there have been at least a hundred or a thousand times as many photographs taken as were ever taken when film was around. I am not saying people should be carrying around huge 8 x 10 bellows cameras on the back of a donkey and use glass plate negatives, but the value an image holds is degraded by there being so many of them. For instance, look at the above image. that was in the New York Times following Abu Gharib. These are images that were taken digitally, emailed and texted around the world digitally, but to increase the weight of what the images show, that is, the evidence, the art director of the New York Times printed the images out and had the photograph take photographs of the photographs. In other words: these are not fake and they are very very real. It is their very materiality that gives them such a greater impact than just being a digital image.
And no, obviously material giving the image greater weight is not new. In early photographs like the Susan Sontag approved one above an image of dead of missing loved ones are often included in the photograph to take the place of the missing. Now, I suppose you could just photoshop the missing in, but, seriously, is that really the same?

Those Germans; they're not so cute

Lesende, 1994

However, they did give us the man who is one of the three greatest artists of the last 50 years I'd have to to say without much consideration, Gerhard Richter. The man is amazing and as much as I like the gray paintings and the color field/paint sample paintings, and even the pixelation paintings his greatest work (as far as I think anyway) are his portraits. And if you need to ask why someone hopelessly interested in photography loves them so much look at them. While there is more than a tad bit of the feeling of defeatism in the fact that the painter of these works is trapped in era valuing realism over all else the quality of his work eventually triumphs since, and I'll admit to this, I pay more attention to these because they are paintings. I do not believe the reason can be simplified to something as simple as one-point perspective as has been claimed. I believe it is that something in our minds, conditioned by going through photo albums and shoeboxes, allows us more patience and more time to breath and contemplate with paintings than photographs. It's the many functions photographs can serve as opposed to the one paintings due, that of art, even if it's bad art.

Gilbert and George, 1975

In many ways Richter's photorealistic paintings not only draw attention to their very "photoness" by not being a photo at all, but it embodies so many of the qualities many photographers and theorists and curators wish for photography, but which so much of the work has yet to develop. Don't get me wrong; I'm not defeatist (remember: I am the one that loves photography), I am just saying the way I think it is right now in an art form only 170 years from its inception.

Betty, 1991

But enough about that and just look at these paintings. They look good as jpegs; imagine what they must look like right now at the National Portrait Gallery in London where they are having a retrospective of his, yes, portraiture. Damn I wish I was in London right now to see it instead of being red flagged and kind of banned from the country for life unless I get a job or make a very precise and exacting itinerary. Ah, youthful indiscretion at the non youthfal age of 26. Anyway, I saved the best for last. Below is Richter's self-portrait from 1996. It's chilling to thing after looking at the images of the paintings above that a man who seems to see others so clearly (or paint them that way) paints himself like he's barely there at all, or only has a shade of an idea of what he should be looking like.
Now if someone would just get on with it and curate a Richter/Warhol show revolving around their portraiture- a show that actually makes a lot of sense- I will go where that is no matter what.

Those Australians are So Cute

('The Falling Soldier', Robert Capa, 1936)

Seriously, aren't they just adorable? They were founded by even cuter criminals, they have kangaroos and koala bears, they call fucking "rooting" and they have an entire photography festival dedicated to photojournalism, the Reportage Festival. Can you imagine anything more cute? Me neither. Here's an article from Frieze on the festival that took place this past October in Sydney. It's a very interesting consideration of a genre of photography that is largely dying in the way it has traditionally been known because now it is has to, for lack of a better way of saying it, compete with other media. Apparently, as editors see it a single image on its own can no longer pack the punch of some mixture of documentary, interview and photography. As someone in the article in the puts it, "Instead of doing one thing well, you end up doing three things in a mediocre way." Photojournalism as popularized by the likes of Robert Capa, Eugene Smith and the staff of the likes of Life magazine is about contemplation, it's about recognizing the horror and the meaning of it, not simply the information component of it.

('Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner', Eddie Adams, 1968)

For example, if we only cared about the info involved in a photograph why would so many examples of photojournalism offend us not viscerally, but emotionally, morally. The dirty secret of these offensive images (as in we are able to see them because a photographer and an editor out there know they will get a rise out of viewers and offend our sensibility) is that they offend us so well because some part of us finds the images aesthetically pleasing. All the slide show/interview/photography combinations do to us is tell us how to feel and while being pedantic might make the editor and newspaper might feel great, it is condescending to the reader.

And since that was kind of a downer, here are some funny photographs from here:

Understanding Photographs

(Pittsburgh (man cutting grass), 2004, Paul Graham)

Thanks goodness for the Guardian. Not only do they still publish a great newspaper, but their arts section has probably the best coverage of photography out there right now. Today, there's an excerpt of the new book How to Read a Photograph by Ian Jeffrey and the opening sentence really encapsulates the reason photographs are so hard to evaluate. Anyway, here it is: "Understanding photographs has never been straightforward. Not all photographs – including some of the best known – were taken with a clear idea in mind."

That ambiguity between the intention of the person taking the photograph and how it is later viewed by you or I has always been the disconnect between the wide armed acceptance of photography by the more conservative art critics (and David Hockney). I can understand the argument, but that does not mean I agree with it. It's basically the last vestige of aesthetic conservatism such people can hold on to. I'd like to think there were some nasty old critics in the 1400s complaining about painting when perspective was developed. Like there was some guy who refused to believe Piero della Francesca could paint well because he knew a thing or two about geometry. (Though, to be fair, my fictitious guy in the 1400s would be right to question Donatello's addition of checkerboard floors to his sculptures of the mangar scene. It makes it look like Joseph kept his animals in a department store.)

But in regards ambiguous intentions I leave you with some photographs from the 'Blast' series by Naoya Hatakeyama. Using remote control cameras he took photographs of the blasting of limestone in Japan. I think these things are gorgeous and is a really interesting play on nature photography.

The Problem with a Shoebox of Photographs

Today in the New York Times Magazine Virginia Heffernan wrote an article about her (and my) love/hate relationship with Google's Life magazine archive (link on the, um, left side of the page). In short, she believes the images have to be keyworded more effectively, or at all. This is precisely the problem. Having had to search through this database quite a few times now to find all the images of the 1972 Democratic Convention (a job still incomplete at this time) I can verify the fact that it is poorly keyworded. For instance, the above image is the only photograph that came up when I put in the keywords "McGovern" and "Miami". It is from the DNC in '72, but none of the 20-odd photographs of McGovern that actually appear in the same issue actually show up. Oops.
Now if Google wants someone to tag these images properly in a way that shows they understand the purpose of their collection so we can understand the content and its use I am available. I prefer to have benefits, but in this I'll accept a contract, too.

Milton Rogovin

Taking time away from the glamour that is fashion photography I sometimes even pay attention to the kind of photojournalism that is the basis of my thesis. Yes, sometimes I do not procrastinate. One of my jobs this semester with a few other people in my class is to curate the new acquisitions show at Eastman House that will start this September. After looking over the acquisitions books for the last few years we decided on the theme of family photography and so far one of my favorite finds is this triptych by Milton Rogovin taken in the lower west side of Buffalo from the 70s to 1992. Many if not most of his photographs are straight out of the WPA handbook, but I love that handbook and the quiet dignity and respect with which it portrays the subjects. Seriously, check these out, the details really make them remarkable.
Rogovin was born in New York City in 1909 and is apparently still working today. After graduating from Columbia with a degree in Optometry he moved to Buffalo to join a practice. He was socially active in the optometrist union, worked on voter registration drives in African-American communities, and volunteered as the literature director for the local Communist Party. He did not become a full-time photographer until the late 1950s, however, after being called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1957. Rogovin pled the Fifth Amendment, and his trial was widely covered by the Buffalo media, which named him the "Top Red in Buffalo." The adverse publicity damaged his optometry practice. He remains a great socialist to this day, claiming, "The rich have their own photographers. I photograph the forgotton ones."