This weeks featured photographer is Joe Sobel.  I’ve known Joe for several years now.  In the Winter semester of 2009, Joe and I were in the same photography seminar course at Northern Michigan University.  From the outset of that course, Joe’s work was striking.  He was the most junior of all of us, but his work was, arguably, the most mature in it’s approach and methodology.

It didn’t matter what he shot, it was keen, fresh and almost always fostered the most interesting discussions.  The series that I’m presenting today was born in that class.    Our professor constantly encouraged us to step outside our comfort zones, to see our environments as an outsider would and to pay scrutiny to our assumptions.  More than any of us , Joe did that.  (If anyone from that class is reading this, please forgive me if you disagree)

I got to watch this concept unfold from the initial couple of images to the massive series that it is today.  I remember the first day he brought a few of these images in for critique.  He appeared to be slightly apprehensive, but confident in the work.  The apprehension was undue as the images were well received and further work was encouraged by at least most of us, but probably all of us.  He worked and worked and worked on the series.  Printing more and more of them.  His ability to speak about this body of work improved with each critique.  This tireless effort paid off for him as he now working towards an MFA at Cranbrook.  (If you’re not familiar with Cranbrook, you should be.  It’s one of the top art schools in the country, especially it’s photography program.)

About the work.  As you, no doubt, noticed his subjects are the undesirables, the unclean.  They are society’s castaways and forgotten ones.  These people are reflections of the conditions (physical and mental) in which they live – poverty, dependence, mental illness.  When we walk by them on the streets we hardly pay them a glance, but when we do it’s often judgmental.  We take a step to the side to be certain we are clear of the dirt and grime and the craziness that we know isn’t transmissible, but all the same is best to avoid.

These images, like the subjects have the faint patina of the grotesque.  Instead of focusing on a sense of universality, Joe “emphasize[s] that stigmas placed on marginalized individuals throughout history have not completely disappeared in today’s so-called, enlightened society” and considers these individuals deviants by our design.  After all these people are largely incapable of conforming to our mores and standards because our societal models ostracize unfavorable attributes.  Because of this they are neglected by society and forced into asocial roles – seen, but not likely to interact.  Although a formal title to the series does exist (“Distortions”), Joe refers to the people as “Out of the Societal Sense.”

I believe Joe is going somewhere and I believe that he will accomplish some very great things with photography.  He’s a newcomer, but he’s diligent.  His work is strong and compelling and it will mature even more.  I’m excited to see what Cranbrook is capable of digging out of him.  I’m going to keep tabs on what he’s working on and I think you should too.

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Greetings readers.  This is just a quick update on what the Facebook’s new groups product means for readers and followers of The Photo Playground.  Fortunately the new groups product has made significant improvements over their previous groups product.  Although it does seem that Facebook is always in the middle of some sort of controversy involving privacy, we believe that the new features better secure your privacy based on how you decide to control your information in regards to The Photo Playground’s group and how to limit or maximize the amount of information you receive from The Photo Playground on Facebook.  We have created a new Facebook group and intend to delete the old one within the next week, although an exact date has not been set.  We expect to delete the old group sometime next weekend.  All of the Facebook links on this site have already been changed and link directly to the new Facebook group.  To join the new group please click the large Facebook graphic at the top of the page.  We do not foresee any changes being made our Facebook Page.

A major plus to the new groups is that it allows users to submit photos viewable to all members.  This is beneficial in that it supports peer critique and affords you the opportunity to present your work for consideration at The Photo Playground.  I have all current options and features selected, which essentially offers you the greatest amount of potential interaction with our Facebook group.  Members can post to the wall, publish images, publish videos, engage in discussion, etc.

As a reminder we also have a Flikr group where users can submit photos and enter into discussions.

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As promised last week, here is the second installment of Susannah Benjamin’s photographs.  I’ll keep the writing to a minimum this week and just let you enjoy these amazing photographs.

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This gorgeous machine, readers, is a 13.2 megapixel camera phone produced by Lumix.  It was debuted on the 5th of October, just two days ago, in Japan.  Unfortunately, for now it will only be available in the Japanese market.

From the backside it appears to be like many other slide phones currently available on the market, but flip it over and it looks like a point and shoot digital camera.  The lens is fixed at 27mm (nice and wide) and there is no optical zoom, only digital, so the rings around the lens are a bit misleading.  It’s design feature that adds to its appearance.  It also has a fairly powerful flash.  My point and shoot digital is a four year old Lumix that I bought brand new.  It is close to being the perfect point and shoot digital.  I absolutely love it.  If this phone hits the markets in America I would seriously consider buying it especially if it uses an app friendly browser.  I’m wondering what kind of damage this could do to RIM and Apple.

You can find the website here, but be warned it is in Japanese.

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Today is a rare day.  It’s unique in that I often have difficulties picking only a few photographs from each featured photographer, but I always manage to do it.  Not this time.  You will notice that the title indicates that there are going to be multiple posts on our next featured photographer, Susannah Benjamin.  It truly was impossible for me to limit this feature to just the standard five to eight pictures that I normally show.  I have broken the feature into two parts – color and black and white, with each containing the normal maximum allotment of eight images.  Sorry to those that I have struggled with in the past, but alas, as the owner and editor, this is my call to make.  Quite honestly, though, I do not think that any of my readers will be disappointed in this decision – most of the time more pictures is better, especially when they are of this caliber.

Susannah Benjamin has a vision that is not especially rare for young people, but her ability to express and convey that vision, most certainly is.  When I first viewed these images I was taken aback.  The quality of light, the expressiveness of the models, the technical ability and their conceptual nature were forthright and convincing, seemingly relevant in the world of conceptual photography.  What really got me, however, was these images were taken by a 16 year old (she is now 17).  It took quite some time for me to wrap my head around it.  I have been immersed in photography culture for the past several years and can honestly say that this is the first time I have seen work executed so well from anyone so young.  In my experience, most of the work that I have seen produced by people this age are banal, focused on hedonistic desire and actions, and irrelevant.  Most lack this level of foresight and vision.

Simply put, we need to pay attention to what Susannah Benjamin is working on.  Her work is not as pretty as it is visually engaging.  Despite their minimalistic appearances there is a lot going on in these images.  It is possible while going through her flikr account to see the transformations she has made with her work in just the past two years.  The growth and conceptual development is impressive to say the least.  She will go on to do great things.  Pay attention now, while she is relatively unknown, I think we will all be glad we did.  Stay tuned, next week I will be publishing part 2, which will showcase Susannah’s black and white work.

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John Szarkowski, New York, 1963 © Jacques Henri Lartigue

There is an excellent article written by Sean O’Hagan on John Szarkowski on the front page of the Guardian’s Photography section right now.  It is kind of old news, being published on 20th of July and I should have posted a link sooner, but it is better late than never.  Anyone with a deep appreciation of the artistic merits of photography owes Mr. Szarkowski the world.  Contemporary photography would be decades behind where it is had it not been for his keen insights and tireless work.  Read O’Hagan’s excellent tribute after the jump.

John Szarkowski at The Guardian

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Firstly, a vernacular photograph is one taken by a non-professional often in the midst of a mundane or normal activity.  I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to be considered mundane or normal, but that’s a somewhat fair way of stating it.  They are the pictures that are taken without the intention of them ever being present outside of a family based or familiar context.  They are mementos, a means to illicit a memory, and they are often mistakes.  Unfortunately for the person who framed their initial intent, but fortunately for those of us capable of appreciating their uniqueness, they have been lost, sold, or abandoned by the people who were entrusted to save and protect them.

Vernacular photographs are not art and I believe that it’s irresponsible as art viewers to label them as such.  As I said in the previous paragraph these images were never meant to be on public display.  Despite art-like qualities that some may exhibit, they are not usually artistic in nature.  If they were they would not be located in the contexts and situations in which I find them, i.e. garage sales, antique stores, pawn shops, etc.  They were meant to be private, bound in album or stored in a shoebox for familiar eyes only.  They have no merit as art, but given the innate originality that novice imbues in them they are worthy of the gallery or public viewing.  They remind us of our families, spur private memories and emotions, and have the power to make us melancholic, jovial, or contemplative, but not usually in an intellectual sense.

They are cultural anomalies and serve as a window to our identifiers.  They are small snippets of an era that I never knew, as most of vernacular photos date from 1890-1950.  They have come to embody the various eras of that time period for me.  More than that, however, they show me how little we have changed and that people, despite political changes, economic changes, social changes, etc., will largely remain the same and behave in similar ways.

Despite the obvious value (I pay money for them), collecting vernacular photographs is fulfilling in a sense.  They don’t make my life complete, but they do fill an innately human to desire to collect by illiciting emotional responses.  Most of my vernacular photographs make me smile.  They are also a cheap way to decorate, as I rarely pay more than $5 for a photograph.  They’re great conversation starters and just about anyone can relate to some of them in one way or another.

Today I’d like to share with you some of the photos in my vernacular photography collection. 

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As some of you may know I recieved a BFA in Art and Design from Northern Michigan University in May of 2009 and returned as a post baccalaureate Art History student in January of 2010.  While an undergrad at NMU the Melissa Matuscak, the director of the Devos Art Museum, let me browse through the museum’s George Shiras III photography collection.  I was told that the previous exhibition of his work had been in 1990 – 20 years ago – and that she was wanting to have another exhibition of his work.  My interest was piqued within seconds.  What could be better than a project that merges so many of interests?  Art History, photography, and restoration all in one project.

It took quite a bit of time to get all the details worked out, but in November of 2009 I told Melissa that I would be returning for three semesters and she offered me the project through the Beaumier Heritage Center.  I got to work on it in February of 2010 and worked right up until the day the exhibition opened last May.

So what did we have to work with?  Just under 40 silver gelatin prints made from reproduced 5×7 negatives provided by the National Geographic Scoiety.  Many of them had curled and were in rough shape.  The frames they were housed in, as you can imagine, were old and just a little tacky and really did not carry any air of sophistication that you would expect to see at a professional exhibition.

The negatives, like the prints, were also in a sorry state – more than likely from improper handling 2o years when being used for the initial exhibition.  After talking with Dan Truckey, the director of the Beaumier Heritage Center, and Melissa we decided that what was really in order was a high resolution digital archive of these photographs as well as an exhibition of freshly printed, mounted and framed photos.  I lucked out, I got to do all of the photography and almost none of the historical research, that was conducted by an intern at the Beaumier, Lindsey Strzyzykoski.

Over the course of the semester I used a large format Epson scanner to scan all of the negatives at 4800 dpi.  As I said in the previous paragraph the negatives were largely in very poor condition and required extensive digital restoration.  A good majority of the images took just less than an hour before they were printable, but there were many that took as much as four hours for each one.  I have been working with Photoshop for eleven years – I am very comfortable with the software and create a very efficient workflow.

The restoration, although well within my realm of capability, created the most trying time for me during this project.  Aside from purely visual issues I had to consider philosophical issues of the restoration of historical photographs.  Shiras was by no means a wonderful printer and often relied on the National Geographic Society to do his printing for him.  He was more documentary in his approach, as he and his assistant John Hammer are the folks who literally invented nighttime flash photography in the 19th century.  He photographed wild lands and wild life at night.

So what was I to do?  Should I enhance the images to create a more contemporary aesthetic or do I leave some blemishes and marks that imply age and historicity?  What I did know is that I had to maintain some sort of visual consistency.  I ended up employing a combination of the two.  I removed most of the blemishes from most of the images leaving the ones that I felt carried the strongest implications of historicity.  Meaning I set out to remove the dust and emulsion problems that were distracting, but left the ones that seemed to me to be more “natural” in their occurrance, that includes scratches on the negatives caused by mishandling 20 years ago.

I also had to consider the larger print as a whole.  Shiras’ original images were very contrasty, often with predominantly black grounds with little to no detail or the exact opposite predominantly white with very little detail.  I had to consider this when printing his work.  I chose to continue in this vein and produce contrasty images, although I did have to tame it down in several photographs to make them visually pleasing.  I ended up printing all but five of the images at 13″ x 19″.  Not huge, but not small either – It’s what the budget allowed for and I think that it was perfect.

The five images that I did not print were printed by The Lab in Minneapolis.  Their work is absolutely stunning, they conduct themselves very professionally, and they are very affordable.  They printed for us three 2′ x 3′ prints and two 3′ x 4′ prints and I could not be happier with the results, as I said the images are stunning and are very powerful when viewing them in person.

Once everything had been printed, information panels made, etc. Lindsey and I designed the show in two days.  The two of us and her fiancé created the historical displays, hung the work, ate some food, and had a lot of fun.  The images below are a few of the 37 prints that were on display up until last week.

*Notes on the pictures.  These images are from a PowerPoint that made before all of the images had been restored, as such several do not appear to be finished.  Although these images are now in the public domain, please be courteous and contact me before using them.

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Greetings readers, just thought that I would drop a short friendly message reminding everyone that Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is just around the corner, 25 April to be exact.  So, grab those dusty pinhole cameras stashed away in your closet since last April and run a test roll through them, you’ve only got a month until the big day.  Some of you may be new around here and might be asking what is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day?  Click here and see for yourself -  it’s a lot of fun.

If you don’t have a pinhole camera don’t worry you can stop on over to freestyle photo and pick one up pretty cheap or you could check out the tutorial I wrote last year and build one for yourself in about 20 minutes and it will only cost you a couple of dollars or quid or whatever you call it where ever you are.  Honestly, they really are easy to make, any one can do it and that includes you.

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Because of this I will not be able to dedicate significant amounts of time to this blog.  As of today this blog will only be periodically updated.  Just like the past I will write a small bit information and my opinions on the work the that I present to you.  As always you, the reader, are encouraged to join our flikr group and submit images for consideration.  Also you can email me directly with a link to your portfolio (my email can be found under the contact tab).  I promise that I will look through each and every porfolio that you send my way.  I cannot, however, guarantee that I will email each of you after browsing your portfolio, although I will try.  If you ask me specifically for a critique I will do my best to provide that for you within two weeks; I know how valuable peer review can be.  I will email you if I plan on publishing any of your work on this blog.

I will occasionally publish other materials related, in some way, to photography.  Occasionally news pops up that I feel compelled to share with my readers.  I have also been writing on photography quite a bit lately and maybe compelled to share some of those essays with you.  That will give you the opportunity to critique my writing, if you choose to.  On top of all this I have been offered the chance to be a part of  a small team that is curating  a photography exhibition featuring photographs by George Shiras III.  I am very excited to be a part of this team and will give occasional updates on the status of the exhibition and thoughts that I have through the curatorial process.  My apologies for all this nonsense, but given my recent extended leave of absense, I felt it necessary to update you on the future of The Photo Playground.  I hope you enjoy this weeks selection.

These photographs are from the series Dayblind by Belgian photographer, Paul D’Haese.  Admittedly, I am not usually a huge fan of contemporary black and white photography.  I know and I apologize.  My excuse is more or less baseless – my world is vibrant and rich in color, I thoroughly enjoy visually experiencing the world.  I find it hard to relate with many of the black and white images people produce.  I do, however, make exceptions and really there are a lot of them.  D’Haese’s work is one more exception to add to my list.  My first reaction to his images was excitement, they were unnerving, unsettling, and confrontational.  I experienced a sense of anticipation before each click to proceed to the next image.  What would I discover when the next image popped up in front of me?  How would the next image question my sensibilities?

Whether I stared into one of D’Haese’s rooms or peered into one of his landscapes I could not escape the sense that the subject and I were alone.  It was not a benign sense of solitude.  The images confront you with their expansiveness and the harsh juxtaposition of the subject, regardless of what it is.  They conjure feelings of isolation, the remnant emotion of being left behind.

Although the woman’s eyes are partially closed, the portrait is direct in its confrontation.  Behind her eyes lies an expression of nonchalance or is it indifference?  It’s unsettling not knowing for sure.  The passive-aggressive confrontation is always frustrating – you’re always left with the uncertainty of what the proper response should be.  Is she trying to confuse us or make us disoriented?  Should I stay and try to look harder or deeper or should I proceed to the next, resigned with the belief that I wasn’t supposed to know?

D’Haese’s images are mysterious and they offer little in regards to an explanation.  I loved it.  The formal elements, compositional techniques, and the evocation of emotional responses were spot on.  D’Haese has mastered his art and I look forward to seeing what he produces in the future.

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