Conscientious

A loop we have been stuck in for decades

2012-05-24T21:19:27Z

"Since well before the invention of the photocopier, media industries have pursued a consistent if counter-productive legal strategy of responding to disruptive technologies that decrease costs and open new markets by lobbying for extensions to copyright terms, increased penalties, and criminalizing more behaviors. Their theory--if there is one--is that technologies that make it cheaper to create and distribute content also make it cheaper to violate copyright (see Napster, et. al.). Cheaper production is ignored, while increased potential for violations requires enhanced penalties that can't, in any case, be enforced. It's a lose-lose-lose strategy for producers, creators, and consumers. And it's a loop we've been stuck in for decades." - full story

The price of being female

2012-05-24T20:50:58Z

"Much fanfare greeted the $388m made by Christie's post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York earlier this month--its highest total ever. Few seemed to notice that the auction was unprecedented in another way: it had ten lots by eight women artists, amounting to a male-to-female ratio of five-to-one. (Sotheby's evening sale offered a more typical display of male-domination with an 11-to-one ratio.) Yet proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie's sale tallied up to a mere $17m--less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not." - The Economist

Ronan Guillou

2012-05-24T16:49:20Z

Ronan Guillou's American Series is subdivided into six separate section, which are a bit too literal for me. That minor gripe aside, there's some amazing photography in them - make sure to look at each section.

Chantal Heijnen

2012-05-23T15:48:20Z

These are two photographs from Bronxites, a photography project by Chantal Heijnen. The photographer writes "Through a mutual friend, a very unlikely but special friendship arose between Gilbert, who lives in the Bronx for almost 40 years and me, a young photographer from The Netherlands. In 2008 Gilbert gave me the opportunity to move to the Bronx, to share space in his apartment and pursue my long-held ambition to photograph individuals from communities rarely seen."

Do they really care?

2012-05-23T13:57:18Z

I sense a growing backlash over so-called social media in the photography community. It seems as if more and more photographers are coming to the realization that spending too much time with social media simply takes away time you could spend on more useful things (such as doing real work or maintaining actual business relationships). The latest article I've come across was written by David Saxe: "For any of you aspiring photographers who want to build your businesses, consider this advice: Talk to people directly. When you address someone directly in conversation, there is a good chance they may be listening to you. If you do it via social network sites, they might read you but they will rarely respond."

Miguel Proenca

2012-05-22T15:44:38Z

It's hard to pick just one photograph from Miguel Proenca's Behind the Hill, but I figured this one would do. Faith and superstition (or rather their remnants) in the modern world.

Photography and Place: Appalachia

2012-05-21T17:34:53Z

I thought it might not hurt to address the thoughts I recently outlined in Photography and Place, using a specific location as an example. Given the photographic representation of Appalachia has been very heavily discussed over the past few weeks (c.f. the Perpetuating the Visual Myth of Appalachia posts on Roger May's blog) I figured this particular region might provide a good jump-off point. Find the full piece here.

Jiri Makovec

2012-05-21T14:31:38Z

These photographs are from Jiri Makovec's Untitled ( for Jiajia ). I like them individually, but I also like how they work together.

Review: Time and Space on the Lower East Side by Brian Rose

2012-05-18T19:33:30Z

When I come to New York City, I stay in the area that is being portrayed in Brian Rose's Time and Space on the Lower East Side. As a matter of fact, I realized a little while ago that when I say "New York" I really only mean Manhattan. I noticed this when I talked to someone, and they told me they lived in Brooklyn. Of course, people will never tell you they live in Brooklyn, instead they live in Greenpoint or wherever else. I have no idea where any of those areas are. People usually are nice enough to then add "Brooklyn" when they realize they've run into someone not in the know (which, needless to say, is the mortal sin in NY). When I come to New York I pretty much never go to Brooklyn unless I have to. I also leave the Lower East Side/East Village only when I have to (for example to go to Chelsea). (more)

I first came to New York in 1998, right after finishing my Ph.D. A friend of mine lived in midtown, somewhere near the Empire State Building, and of course visiting was very exciting. For quite a while, I wanted to be able to live in New York. I came close a couple of times, but each time, something got in the way (the first internet bubble crashed etc.). I don't think I would want to live in New York any longer, but this is mostly a moot point given the cost of living there.

I haven't know Manhattan long enough to have seen the state it was in in many of the older photographs in Time and Space on the Lower East Side (the book comprises photographs taken in 1980 and 2010). So I don't share the nostalgia that seems to have crept into some New Yorkers, who talk fondly of the days before a string of Republican mayors transformed the city into what in some places looks like a Disneyesque theme park for the rich ("Of 32,810 New York tax filers who earned more than $1 million a year in the latest public records, 13,818 live in Manhattan - or 42% of all the state's millionaires." - source). I know you could have had a apartment for next to nothing on Ave B - as long as you didn't leave said apartment at night (at least that's what I seem to remember reading in a Sonic Youth biography). I might have too much of a German biography to be comfortable with the dichotomy theme park for the rich versus cheap urban squalor.

Anyway, what you can take away from Time and Space on the Lower East Side is that its maker really loves the city and, of course, that he is a very good photographer. The images all were done with a large-format camera, so they offer a carefully constructed frame that might or might not be filled with a lot of life and details. It's not necessarily a New York I've seen too often in photographs, and I really enjoy looking at the combination of cityscapes, street scenes, and details. Various of the spreads pair the same or very similar setting thirty years apart - things have changed, and they haven't.

Maybe all that talk about money really is just surface, and underneath, New York - or at least Manhattan's Lower East Side - simply is what it has always been: A pretty great, unique place.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side, photography and text by Brian Rose, essay by Suzanne Vega, 126 pages, Golden Section Publishers, 2012

Review: The Present by Paul Graham

2012-05-18T15:07:21Z

I suspect that the reasons why I am not very interested in street photography at all and why Paul Graham worked on what has now been published as The Present might be not so dissimilar. Sure, it's fun to see a photograph of the moment when the fat lady looked at the skinny statue (or the other way around). If you feel particularly frisky you can now look for those moments without even leaving the comfort of your home, using Google's Street View. But at the end of the day, you're reducing what can be an amazing experience - life in the street, the hustle and bustle of the world - to a bunch of snapshots. I suppose that's fine, but I personally don't need to see any more of it. If I want street photography, I take a walk, and I look. (more)

The Present goes about street photography in a different way. In a nutshell, Graham uses the tropes of the genre to subvert it. That short moment street photography is centered on loses its relevance by being placed alongside another short moment, right there, occasionally even yet another short moment. Just like in real life, the focus might shift - from one person to the next, from one configuration of people to another one. Groups form, groups dissolve. It is as if life on the street was a gigantic card game where the cards are constantly and slowly shuffled while the game is going on.

For the most part, the book uses such pairs of images, which sometimes the viewer gets to see side by side, sometimes s/he gets to see one first and then the other. This is an interesting variant of street photography, the next (logical) step if you will. However, I'm still left wanting. It is as if Graham did not want to stray too far from street photography (if you look carefully, a friend of mine - who knows the history of street photography better than I do - pointed out, you can see many well-known locations in the book). I feel the idea of putting moments next to each other could have been taken a bit further - there are some examples where the artist does that, using three images, and those seem to offer me much more.

I caught myself treating many of the pairs like the puzzles I remember from trying to solve as a child in a TV magazine my mother used to buy: You'd get a picture plus a variant of the picture next to it, with some parts missing. The puzzle was to find the missing parts. In the case of The Present I found myself treating the pairs of images pretty much like such a puzzle, trying to identify the characters in both images, to see where they had moved etc.

I also think the presentation of the book could have been simplified. The book relies on all kinds of ways to present you the images, with pairs of images on top of each other, next to each other, on different pages, or using gatefolds. This is all very fine, but for me, the different gatefolds and tricks end up feeling a bit gimmicky. I do think the design ends up overpowering the images a little bit. The images don't need all that trickery.

But maybe I'm just nitpicking. What I do like about The Present is that it tries to evolve street photography, if not dissolve it, by showing that moving sideways might be fun, but moving forward has more to offer. There are quite a few beautiful images in the book (some reminding me a little bit of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's work), especially where the game (spot the difference, look how this changes when I use a different camera focus) recedes. For those, I will happily return the book, because they retain traces of the life they were taken from.

The Present, photographs by Paul Graham, 114 pages, Mack, 2012

(see my video presentation of the book here)

New photobook presentations (Weeks 19/20, 2012)

2012-05-18T11:41:00Z

New photobook presentations: Handbook to the Stars by Peter Puklus, Metalheads by Jörg Brüggemann, and The Present by Paul Graham.

Roberto Boccaccino

2012-05-17T15:01:23Z

"Beirut is a city that lives on present, and it's in the present that it seems to project itself. It's probably a short-term but, at the same time, very solid projection. The pursuit of immediate fullness is evident everywhere, in the uninterrupted urban growth, in the economic and cultural boosts and, of course, in the youth-life, constantly in search for emancipation, amusement, fulfillment. There is no doubt that the city (probably the most open-minded city of the Middle East) offers the possibility to satisfy all that." - Roberto Boccaccino about On the Side

Will Internet Interactions Ever Match Face-toFace Ones?

2012-05-17T14:11:40Z

Yesterday, I remembered an article I talked about on this blog five years ago. Back then, people were interested in "flaming" - why do people leave insanely nasty comments on other people's websites? The answer came in the form of the "online disinhibition effect": When you are in front of another person, some parts of your brain will prevent you from being a jerk. When you are not in front of another person, but your computer screen, those barriers fall. (more)

Now, five years later, social media are all the rage. Social media, we are constantly told, are the future of, well, everything. As an artist, you have to embrace social media if you want to survive. But can you survive even if you do that? I don't think that's quite so obvious.

After all, in any kind of social-media environment the same mechanisms that make flaming so easy operate as well. This doesn't mean that social media are filled with insane behaviour (there is quite a bit of it, though). But even when considering normal interactions, "talking" to a Facebook "friend," say, really is not the same as talking to a friend who is right in front of you. The brain operates in slightly different ways when there is an actual face in front of you, from which you can (and usually will) infer emotional responses.

I'm tempted to think that this must have repercussions for how well social media work. In particular, for artists this might mean that relying solely on social media - without adding any component that adds your face (or voice) back in - might be a serious mistake: Your interactions might be social in an IT sense, but they won't be social in the old-fashioned sense (the one we used to think of before some geek decided to call all of these new internet sites "social media"). And that old-fashioned social - that has been developed and imprinted into our brains for thousands of years. A few years of social media won't be able to do away with that so easily.

I have the feeling there might be some research done about this right now, or maybe it's already published somewhere. But I think any artist operating online might want to spend some time thinking about this.

Is Internet Art Commercially Viable?

2012-05-17T14:03:13Z

"Internet artists, for all of their digital-native wisdom, should know better than to think .JPEGs are a viable commodity when they've seen multi-billion dollar industries like music, film, and newspapers run around like baffled idiots for the past decade trying to figure out why they can't sell MP3s, MOVs, and PDFs like they used to in traditional media." - Brad Troemel

Óscar Monzón

2012-05-16T16:35:26Z

This is an image from Óscar Monzón's Sweet Car, which has just the right mix of everything that might happen in your car. Simple, and good.

Photography and Place

2012-05-15T15:08:54Z

I wasn't really going to delve into the issue, not even with my very short post last week about the recent kerfuffle around the portrayal of Appalachia. But Colin Pantall just published some thoughts about it (scroll down, past the images of sick people). He asks "Who wants to know what Appalachia really looks like? Especially when that 'really looks like' is up for negotiation in the first place." There we are, right at the source of the problem. (more)

I agree with Colin's conclusions. I think we need to realize that what we're really talking about here is a not a problem of photography. It's a problem of us not understanding what photography does, how photography works.

If we wanted to know what a place looked like we would need an infinity of photographs, taken from all possible angles, excluding nothing, seeing everything at the same time. This is, at least at the time of this writing, an absurd idea. The closest we have to this kind of god-like vision is the Google Street View car with its many eyes, that photograph a particular location in a completely disinterested fashion, looking at everything around it.

The moment one starts to exclude something from the all-encompassing view your portrayal of some place will not be faithful any longer in the strictest sense. This is photography's greatest flaw. This is what makes photography such a fantastic art form. As Colin notes, what we value in a photographer when we enjoy her or his work to a large extent is based on the process of selection, on the artist's ability and willingness to make decisions, to prefer one thing over another, in fact over all the other ones in that particular moment.

In that sense, no photographic treatment of any place will ever be truthful. Too much will be excluded, and our brains would never be able to even process the infinity of images and information a truthful portrayal would provide.

Photography is exclusion. Looking at photography must be done with an awareness of that fact.

There is more. Even if we assumed that it was possible to get that infinity of photographs of a place, two people would probably still come to very different conclusions. Just imagine someone living in the place and someone visiting. And that would be just the most obvious difference one could think of. As I've already argued elsewhere our perceptions of photography are very much based on what we bring to the table, our personal, cultural, political biases.

So the simplest defense CNN could have used for their Appalachia edit would have been: Who says that this is not Appalachia? How do you know the real Appalachia? Your Appalachia is as biased as ours. And they would have had a point.

Both CNN's and Stacy Kranitz's views of Appalachia are biased (to be more precise, CNN did a biased edit of a biased body of work). That's photography. There is no way around it. To ask for a truthful portrayal of Appalachia is to ask for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That said, CNN and Kranitz operate in different spheres. Kranitz is a visual artist. CNN is a news organization.

Once we enter the realm of the news we are in tricky territory - and it is absolutely no surprise that so many debates about photography happen right here, in the context of news. As I've argued in the context of manipulation and photography, the main problem is that news organizations like to pretend that there can be such a thing as unbiased photography. In a nutshell, news organizations are behaving like a politician or talk-radio host who already has been married three times but who is still preaching about the sacredness of family values. That just doesn't fly - people aren't stupid.

Photography of a place will inevitably be biased. To pretend that's not the case is a very bad idea. Instead, the solution has to start with acknowledging that. In the CNN case, they should have very openly stated that the images they're showing are their edit of the photographer's work. On top of that, they should have provided a statement about their edit: "This selection of images reflects..." As a result there would have been a hook for a debate. Photography of a place will be biased, but we need to talk about the biases - all of them (the photographer's and ours) because that is where we can learn something.

Any set of photographs, regardless of which context it operates in, derives its value not from pointing out that here, this is the way things are, but from the questions it asks, the commotions it produces inside us that make us learn something. We have no way of getting around our biases, but photographs can help us identify them - so we can hope to mold them, to change them, to maybe even remove some. Note that I'm using the word "bias" in a neutral sense here.

When we say that some photo project does not portray a place accurately, more often that not it indicates that the photographs simply do not gel with our biases: We do not want to see a place portrayed in that light. For the Appalachia debate, it seems very obvious to me that the criticism of CNN's edit originated from that direction. And that's fine, even though we still need to have a debate about that, having in mind that there never will be a resolution.

There are other photography debates where there are different biases at play, and where things might focus on something very different. I mentioned the case of Africa. The history of photography essentially starts out with an incredibly lopsided view of Africa, displaying biases that clearly are not acceptable any longer (colonialism, racism, etc.). When we talk about photography done in Africa, we need to be aware of those historic biases as well as our own contemporary ones. We need to talk about how/whether they are intertwined, especially since historical biases have left their traces in our own cultural heritage. We will never get to that unbiased view of Africa, either, but given the vastly larger number of biases (plus our often shocking lack of actual information about the continent), we should work very hard on understanding what is going on when we look at photography taken in Africa. For great and incredibly informative writing about this subject matter see John Edwin Mason's blog.

It is important to realize that in different contexts, the outcome of our debates might be different. In a news context the idea clearly should be to have us a bit more informed. Despite all the possible biases, that is how we should judge news contents (this is why the debates about the CNN presentation for the most part were successful). In an art context, the general idea usually cannot be described that easily. You can move photographs from one context to another, but you have to be careful with the new "rules".

When it comes to photography and place, the photographs really are only the beginning. We do need to talk about the biases that might be present in any body of work claiming to portray a place. But we also need to include our own biases in the discussion. We must not overburden photography with something it cannot do - providing us with an accurate portrayal of anything. Instead, we must acknowledge the maker's hand, and we should talk about its role - and our reactions.

Rachel Cox

2012-05-15T15:03:38Z

This is an image from Rachel Cox's The past 8 Years, an extended portrait of the photographer's grandmother. (via)

Paula Winkler

2012-05-14T15:50:37Z

Paula Winkler's Exceptional Encounters contains portraits of men found through internet sex forums. (via)

Review: Photo Express Tokyo by Keizo Kitajima

2012-05-11T07:45:17Z

From January to December 1979, Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima showed his photographs of Tokyo in a somewhat different way. Every month, there would be a new selection of photographs on display at a gallery, often with all kinds of innovative ways to show them (incl., but not limited to, creating prints onto photographic paper hanging on a wall). In addition to the show, every month there was a 16 page booklet, showcasing the work. These booklets have now been reissued, in facsimile, as Photo Express Tokyo. (more)

While connected to the extremely stark b/w aesthetic that had been the hallmark of a new generation of photographers emerging in the 1960s, Kitajima's photographs are first and foremost exuberant. This exuberance, along with the fact that the photographs for the most part are literally just black and white (with grey tones in between absent) makes for an exciting experience. Everything is right in one's face - so much that often, one can't even make out what one is seeing without some effort (on the computer screen, the effect vanishes as the images are smaller than the booklets). There is blur, there is tilt, there are crazy crops... Whatever it takes to crank the visual excitement to eleven.

I have never been able to see one of the original booklets, but this facsimile edition looks amazingly close to what I imagine the originals must have looked like. I keep checking my fingers to see whether any ink has rubbed off (alas, this is not to be had). The 12 booklets come with an additional one, which features a very brief introduction, plus many installation views from the shows.

While the medium photobook appears to be undergoing an interesting evolution (maybe expansion) these days, Photo Express Tokyo serves as a most welcome reminder that looking back can offer quite a few examples of photobooks that went beyond the stale diet of the popular gallery-show-on-paper format. I've taught various photobook classes at art schools, and every time I cover Japanese photobooks, afterwards my students leave the classroom in a different, more excited mood. This is not to say that this aesthetic will work for every photo project (it clearly won't). But there are so many options. Making 12 booklets instead of one book, with full-bleed images and smart graphic design, is one of them.

So here is Keizo Kitajima's view of the Tokyo of 1979, which doesn't look at all like what I would have expected. Given that the corresponding year-long exhibition is long over, this reissue of the booklets is the closest we can get to the experience of watching an artist experiment with the creation and presentation of photography.

Highly recommended.

Photo Express Tokyo (facsimile reissue), photographs by Keizo Kitajima, 208 pages (13 booklets with 16 pages each), Steidl, 2012

Review: Handbook to the Stars by Peter Puklus

2012-05-11T06:38:00Z

A photobook is like a sentence, or a story. There is a beginning and an end. Whatever story you want to tell (provided there is one) you need to fit inside, between the covers. Per se, this format allows for an amazing range of options. But what if there is no story, or if you want images to relate to each other not as "this one comes after that one," but as "this one relates to that one, but also to that one and that one"? You could, of course, group all of these images in a single spread, but then that spread becomes its own self-containing unit. What can you do if you want to escape from this restriction? (more)

For his self-published book Handbook to the Stars, Peter Puklus came up with a very simple solution: The images are arranges in an installation, and the spreads of the book show parts of that installation. As a consequence, images often are cut off. You can find their full, uncut versions somewhere in the book, but fragments might appear elsewhere. Conceptually, this approach is not so very different from the old-fashioned idea of sequencing where one image comes after another, with the mental after-image of the image on the preceding page adding to the one on the current page. The difference, here, is that you escape from the often somewhat simplistic idea of "from here to there." Images might relate to each other in non-linear ways, and if they do why not attempt to work with that?

Handbook to the Stars has a strange world on display that is hard to describe. Straight photographs sit next to very much constructed ones, colour photographs sit next to b/w ones (which might or might not be inverted). I think the best approach to the book is not trying to "get" it straight away. This book is no riddle that you solve, to then put it aside and move on (at what stage did the idea that one needs to "get" art enter the discourse?). Instead, the viewer is invited to experience the book and to see connections between photographs. It really is as simple as that. This will inevitably take you somewhere. Where it might take you I don't know. Photography as an art form would be tremendously boring if all photographs did was to take us all to the very same places.

The book is self-published and comes in an edition of 300 copies. With these kinds of books it's hard to say how well they will do, how quickly (or maybe: if) they will sell out. You might want to order your copy, because here's a book that is confident enough to raise the bar. This is what a photobook can look like, this is what it can do.

Handbook to the Stars, photographs by Peter Puklus, essay by Claudia Küssel, 64 pages, self-published, 2012

(find my video presentation of the book here)