Is Photography Over?

     So far I do not have a visual for this post because I cannot possibly think of a way to do one for a response to who I agree with in the comment thread given to us. If I come up with something later on, I shall post it. I know this is an incredibly early post, but I haven't attended most of my classes this week (I did make an attempt, I promise) thanks to illness so I had time. ANYWAYS... (sometimes I forget this is a class blog and not a "what I did today" blog.)

Re: This thread. http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/research_projects_photography_over

     Now, maybe this is my senioritis talking, or maybe it's my frustration with Columbia in general talking, or maybe this is how I've felt all along. My initial response to the question of “is photography over?” would be - “it's not that serious.”

      Honestly, I'm not enthralled about how the “legitimacy” of photography SEEMS to have diminished thanks to the digital age and the accessibility of cameras and the massive amount of images just about everywhere, ESPECIALLY the Internet which seems to be a dumping ground of sorts for it all, but, I also know how to move on with my life and keep on making work that is important to me and strive for what my idea of excellence is, photographically. Perhaps my way of thinking and photographing is just really, really simple.

      Several commenters on this San Francisco MOMA page say that it depends on what you mean by “photography” and what you mean by “over.” I have to say that I do agree with that, and that it should in fact be specified whether we are talking about commercial and/or fine art photography (or photography that can generate some kind of monetary profit in general) or any kind of image generation from a device with a lens, including cell phone pictures and Facebook snapshots done with point and shoots (which generally do not create any monetary gain...). I am assuming the question “is photography over?” to mean something along the lines of “is art photography, not including all these excessive grainy camera phone pictures and the like, discredited BECAUSE of how accessible photography is now to nearly everyone?”

      When people say “photography is over” or “photography is dead,” and talk about all I can think is STOP trying to be a hipster that is just too cool for me, because all you are doing is sounding incredibly whiny. Especially with comments like “it is subject to the product life cycle, which is to say that every new device or process reaches a zenith of popularity only to be superseded by the next invention. The seed of each innovation's demise is thus planted at its birth,” from Jennifer Blessing. This just sounds like it's trying to be way too technical and “smart sounding” for the rest of us who just like to pick up a camera (or the “next invention” of camera, if you must) and shoot and not think so hard about the particular means they are using to create an image and why or why not your chosen device is legitimately considered a camera from one group of people's point of view. I know there is a time for when your 

      As for who I agree with... I'll start with this one quote Philip-Lorca diCorcia had. “Most predictions [of the future of photography] are based on technical developments that alter the form more than the content. The delivery system is rapidly shifting but the content is little altered.” I feel like this expresses what photography has become extremely well. The devices we use to capture an image have evolved and changed over the years, but some of the outcome is still the same. Obviously we know that image manipulation – however difficult and time consuming it was before Photoshop – existed before digital cameras... I've always been in awe at this image we looked at last week by Oscar Rejlander.

People clearly still do it today, but not in a darkroom, and not with film or glass plates.

Or, let's look at a portrait by Nadar. 

Nadar's portrait of Eugene Delacroix

     I chose to imitate his style ever so slightly for a European history project final this semester:

Outcome similar, created with different cameras. (Please excuse the hideous watermark, I did it to put them on... Facebook... ugh, how embarrassing. Or not.)

      I'm not trying to say that my work in any way compares with Nadar's right now because his portraits are incredible, (and I certainly could have done BETTER at this project) but I am saying that I can get a similar outcome and quality with the way that I shoot and what I shoot with.

      Moving on, I agree the most with the first commenter, Vince Aletti. To him, photography being “over” seems “unthinkable” because of how much photography dominates our culture. And, despite “the regular disappearance of favorite photographic papers, the recent dismantling of darkrooms, and the relentless rise of digital capture and output,” old processes seem to always be revived. There has never been only one type of photography and now there are more than ever. He also argues that, if photography is discredited now because digital manipulation takes away from photography's supposed ability to capture truth, then it should have been gone a century ago because photography has never been sheerly about indexicality. Photography has always been used for artistic purposes besides just recording something.

      What IS over, according to Aletti, is “the narrow view of photography — the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational — not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract.” I certainly agree with this as well.

      Clearly there are still artists today who do darkroom work and/or use alternative processes, like Robert and Shana Parkeharrison. 

     So that certainly isn't entirely dead, just waning for now, perhaps. Maybe someday in the far off distant future those processes may not exist anymore due to no more materials, but there will still be means of taking photographs.

      I do think that anyone who says photography is strictly darkroom, and strictly representational really does have a narrow view of what photography is or always has been. That is to discredit every renown photographer who has made work that was not entirely straightforward and was even the least bit imaginative.

      I still feel like I am arguing the same point I made several weeks ago about this. If I alter or manipulate an image in Photoshop, it has the same effect as if I were to do it in the darkroom, except much easier on my terrible eyesight. I feel like this is such a merry go round of an argument and that I am just constantly repeating myself. It is not really an argument that can be won. It reminds me of when I go out and talk about Jesus on the streets of hipster neighborhoods here and nobody wants to hear about it because "we all have our own beliefs." Doesn't just about everything in this world eventually get “beaten to death” to the point where it seems like it's “over” because it's been done so much? One commenter said “God is over” to make his point, even. (Though I have to disagree with that particular statement entirely..) It is just the point that most art is done so much that it all eventually becomes old to us no matter the process. I remember my senior year of high school being in art class, and that same teacher taught AP art (the “honors” version that took two class periods instead of one) and all of a sudden everyone in AP art was doing “drip” paintings because it just looked like the cool thing to do. My teacher became irritated and forced all those students to actually do research on its origin and who the artists were who came before them who created that kind of work. Maybe he would even have gone as far as to say, “that style of painting is over.” What isn't over by now, if you put it that way?

Relational Aesthetics

     

     In the documentary “Relational Art: is it an Ism?”, Lewis says relational art is a new kind of art, according to Bourriaud, coming from Europe and America in the 90s.

      In the film, Lewis sets out to find his own relational art.

      First off, He presents a minimalist series of pay phones with tapped wires - “Phone Home” by Elmgreen and Dragset. It is relational because the work requires people to come in and actually “use” what is made or presented as a work of art to give it meaning. Works like this, and these artists in particular make work that are a “step forward in art” and look like they are from minimalism. The new element is ordinary people. Relational art seeks to “link the arts into its social context and surroundings.”

      Lewis approached some artists in Bourriaud's book, but mos of them did not want to be in a documentary about “relational aesthetics.” The artists that did talk to him made his approaches seem outdated, as though he was making things too complicated. Art no longer has to “mean something,” nor does it have to be something just looked at, but something useful (Philippe Parreno's lamp, for example).

      When Lewis visits Bourriaud's gallery, he finds tons of relational art – all interactive and political. Bourriaud says the work shows human relationships, and that relational aesthetics is “ground of sensibility for today.” Lewis simplified it and said “it uses minimal forms to make political statements.”

      The “most relational” artist in the book is Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose art consists of making dinners and exhibiting dishes. He is represented by a leading New York art gallery, by the way. (I just about flipped my lid and stopped watching this film that I was trying so hard to bear for 22 minutes. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! But I guess I'll save my rant for the end...) The sense of “liberty to the work” changed the curator's mind from being irritated by the work to wanting to show it. (WHAAT THE?) “I wasn't sure if was art, but that might prove that it is,” says Lewis. (Actually, I just think it proves that people are becoming more simple minded in a bad way with each passing generation of art..) Lewis is totally right when he said people react to this kind of work by saying “that's not art!” This curator of Tiravanjia's work says that this work is made by unradical people who are afraid to live a good life. (Well, I'LL say.)

      Lewis gains a better understanding of relational aesthetics once he visits Tiravanija at his place. He says he never makes work with something new. He works with the idea of readymade, except with people interacting with it. His subject and medium is “raw life itself.” Lewis comes to the conclusion that these artists use real life in their art because of the way people are so involved in the technology of this digital age.

      On a final note in this film, Lewis says he hopes one day people will talk about relational art the same way people talk about Renaissance art. (all I can say to that is oh gosh, I really hope not...)

      So, let me talk about this quote mentioned over and over again:

"The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art."

      Bourriaud seems to define modern art as art is not quite radical in terms of aesthetics, culture and politics though it introduces those things. Relational aesthetics is an extreme agitation of those things, making them more pronounced. From what I got from the film, the key components of relational art are that it utilizes people (“real life”) to give it meaning, often with them interacting with objects that are already made, or it can mean nothing at all and just be functional, and can sometimes make political statements.

      As for photographers and photographs that can be relational, well... there is Santiago Sierra mentioned in the film, and maybe you could say Philip Lorca diCorcia with his Hollywood portraits on the streets using strobe in which he paid people to be in them.... but he didn't really have people interact with “stuff” to make his work. Then again, the fact that he paid people small sums of money makes a reference to the porn industry and selling of bodies (according to the Charlotte Cotton book) so I guess that is making some kind of social statement.

      But honestly, I don't buy this relational aesthetic thing. I am not convinced that photography is REALLY related to this idea and I really had to “make it fit” when I thought of the Hollywood portraits.

During this entire documentary, I literally felt like getting up and yelling, “SIR, STOP! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” (kind of an inside joke I have with a roommate of mine, but completely appropriate for this, considering all this art looks like one big inside joke to me too.) I have always thought that the concept of making art with readymade objects or something becoming art once people interact with it is ludicrous, and I absolutely hate it. All I can think of is how somebody is making huge bucks from something so ridiculously simple. I know, I know. Who am I to say what is or isn't art? Well, you can call it art, but I don't think it is, and I'll never like it because I do not believe any creative work is really put into it. I cannot fit any kind of photography into this “ism” because even if the photo was made through some kind of interaction, seeing the work itself is not interacting with it the way you'd get into a phone booth in a gallery and make a call. You're still just standing there looking at a picture. 

 

     I guess that's all I have to say, and I'm sorry if I've offended whoever reads this. I don't think you're less of a person if you like this kind of art or make it, I'm just saying I do not wish to collaborate with you or attempt to think critically about your art after I graduate. :)

Photography as Narrative

“The Photographer's Eye” by John Szarkowski

&

“Four Photographers” by Clement Greenburg

&

“Once Upon a Time” from “The Photograph as Contemporary Art” by Charlotte Cotton

      In “The Photographer's Eye,” Szarkowski begins by stating how the invention of photography created a new way of creating pictures – photographs are taken, as opposed to paintings being constructed and “made.” Therefore, there needed to be a way to create something meaningful with this new mechanical process, but it was difficult to find a way to do that with people who loved the “old forms” of art. Meaning was more likely to be created by people who started to do photography but had no training in it. Photography caused thousands of people to learn it and create a massive amount of images. (In 1853 supposedly 3 million daguerreotypes had been made.) Some had been created with a knowledge of photography, some by accident. Then, by the later 19^th century, even more people – snapshooters – joined the giant mass of professionals and amateurs, especially with the invention of dry plates and and with photography becoming so much easier. So then, even more photographs were made, some deemed totally meaningless with no thought given to the principles of art and what makes an image successful. Some of this work evolved and did become important, though.

      Despite the problem of too much “crap photography” being made (for lack of better words), photography did do something painting could not, and that is record many many things, big and small. It could even allow “the poor man” to know what his ancestors looked like. Szarkowski said it best: “painting was difficult, expensive, and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap, and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people.” And basically, people could learn photography in two ways: trial and error, and looking at other photographs. Szarkowski then discusses five issues or problems that were unavoidable:

1. the thing itself – the photographer had to realize he was dealing with a real thing and had to accept it, and also realize that his photographs were a totally different thing from the thing itself, no matter how much the photograph resembled the subject.

2. the detail – outside of a studio, a photographer had no choice but to record things as he found them, not as a story but as “scattered clues.” and they could not be pulled into a narrative. Photographs could then be read as symbols instead of stories. Here is where Szarkowski lays down his main point – that photography can never be a narrative and tell a story even though it was used as a means to do so and “relieve” painters. He says “the heroic documentation of the American Civil War by the Brady Group, and the incomparably larger photographic record of the second World War, have this in common: neither explained, without extensive captioning, what was happening.”

3. The frame – the act of choosing a subject and eliminating other things is determined by the picture edge. This was a problem especially with the use of large plates because photos were seldom enlarged, so it was most economical to fill the entire frame as usefully as possible.

4. time – time is always present in a photo, especially with slow films and slow lenses. Moving subjects created “doubles” and blur, and made photos that were usually considered failures and ignored, yet so many of these photos were made. Faster moving subjects could be captures with the invention of better, faster photographic materials. Capturing these fast moments became very fascinating (like the “decisive moment” coined by Cartier-Bresson – yet the decisive moment not being a dramatic moment but a visual one and is not a story, but a picture).

5. vantage point – Szarkowski says photography taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point. A photographer weighs his options of every angle he could shoot from, and chooses one. And after all this time, photography still has away of making us “challenge and reject our schematized notions of reality.”

      Greenberg immediately makes his point at the beginning of “Four Photographers” and says that photography is literary before it is pictorial. It is first and foremost “historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational.” The difference between the real-life meaning of things and their artistic meaning is especially narrow. This is why there is so much documentary photography made, and its descriptive, informative nature seems to be a threat to the artistic side, according to Greenberg. This is because, in order to be art, a photograph has to tell a story.

      Greenberg seems to then say that Eugene Atget performs all the functions of photography with his work – both the documenting and the pictorial. Atget did not intend to capture “beautiful views” but to “capture the identity of his subject.” Greenburg says Atget was pictorial as well as illustrative, but it came from “his feeling for the illustrated subject, and his "pictorialism" was largely, and properly, unconscious.”

Greenburg then mentions Edward Steichen and how Steichen's painterly photographs made him famous but “have not worn well as art,” especially not as well as other photographers of that time who were working in the same style but had an inspiration Steichen was missing.

He gets even more bold when he says that anything purely formal or abstract is threatening to art in photography, and is manifested in the worst way with the “odd shot”: “the long exposure of moving objects, the reversed negative, the close-up or magnified view that brings out the curious, abstractly curious, configurations any sort of object will reveal when seen in microscopic detail.” he says these kinds of photographs are informative but are not art and is only considered are by people “whose experience of pictorial art in general is defective.” (As bold as this is and is only one person's opinion, I have to say that I agree. Anyways....) Greenburg then says that Andreas Feininger's work is a prime example of this and what is not art, except for when he photographs statues of the female nude.

      Greenburg goes on to say that Cartier-Bresson is one of the best photographers to date, and that his work shows a “frozen-ness” that looks posed. However, he has only produced some work that is “successful enough to be permanent,” but he does not set a good example because his pictures in this “Four Photographers” book are not varied enough.

     So, Szarkowski basically comes to his conclusion that a single photograph cannot tell a story because they can never really EXPLAIN what is going on except when accompanied with text. And this partially is because of all the amateur photography that has happened since the beginning of its invention and how so many people seldom tried to create meaning in their work – it was just a recording of everything an anything. Greenburg does think photos can tell stories, but fail at being pictures (or art, really) because photography is really too descriptive and informative to be pictorial. So Szarkowski does not think “narrative photos” are descriptive and informative, therefore NOT really narrative, but Greenburg thinks they ARE descriptive and informative, thus, tell a story, but perhaps a story cannot be art. I actually disagree with both in some ways. I believe a single photo can IMPLY a story and the fact that you cannot figure it out for sure actually adds the enjoyment to viewing photographs for me. I also disagree that photographs fail as pictures because obviously it's what I do. And I do not believe that painting is the only thing that can be pictorial. Just because a photograph is a representation of a real thing and is informative of that real thing does not mean it fails at being art.

      The narrative is also dealt with in the work of the photographers shown in the “Once Upon a Time” chapter in Cotton's book. Some photographs play off of myths/fairytales/fables/etc. and others show some kind of story simply by the way things are photographed. Though some works are part of a series, the narrative is mostly supposed to be shown in one photo. The staged tableau is a huge part of the narrative, and other important aspects are lighting, time of day, and setup. [ (here we go again) Jeff Wall is one of the main practitioners of this.]

      Division of space and time also contributes to the narrative in a single image (like Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler as well as Sam Taylor-Wood who I mentioned in another blog). So does referencing literature and paintings from the past. 

"The Way Home" by Tom Hunter

"Untitled" from 1998 by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler

 

from "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" by Yinka Shonibare

 

     Another way of making a narrative is being ambiguous of place and time, making things more open-ended and dream-like.. and even using subjects turned away from us as a way of doing all of that and creating anxiety. The use of “youthful protagonists” and digital manipulation is also used. 

from "Five People Thinking the Same Thing" by Frances Kearney

"Shelter" by Liza May Post

"Helen Backstage, Merlin Theater" by Wendy Mcmurdo

 

      An artist who seems to use many of the characteristics listed here so far is Gregory Crewdson, who I did my presentation on in class, so I won't go into too much detail.

      Another approach to narrative photography is photographing spaces and things without a human presence that can tell a story as well. In this kind of work, we as viewers look for signs of things that could have meaning. 

"Lumber" by Anne Hardy

"Police Station, Insurance Building, Gas Station" by Miles Coolidge

..and, not mentioned in this book, but I felt like Sa Schloff's (one of Columbia's photo teachers, who is awesome, by the way) School Pictures series and this one in particular of a librarian at Lane Tech high school (my high school by the way.. WHAT WHAT! I mean, um, yeah). This image in particular is ambiguous of place and time and I think goes well as a narrative.

     So basically Cotton does not even argue about whether or not a photograph can be narrative, but just showcases a bunch of work that does tell a story, or is at least intended to tell a story. And I would have to agree that a story can be gathered from the work in this chapter.

Photography as System

“An Archival Impulse” by Hal Foster

&

“Systems Everywhere: New Topographics and art of the 1970s” by Greg Foster-Rice.

Can I just start by saying this is a little awkward for me to write a blog about one of our teacher's writings for this class? Because odds are, I'm not going to make any sense as I write about it..

….. anyways.

     In “An Archival Impulse” by Hal Foster, Foster discusses an archival impulse at work in contemporary art (though it is not new by any means – active both pre-war and post-war). Artists try to make historical information present in their work, such as with "time readymades,” which uses samplings from other works, either familiar to mass culture or obscure, and really push the issues of originality to the brink.

It is thought that the best place to find stuff for archival art is the internet. Even though this article was written in 2004, I believe it still holds true today. On the internet, artists can find obscure works that are unfinished and open-ended that offer a point of takeoff for another work of art. And in turn, after utilizing the “informal archive” of the internet, the work produces another informal archive in itself. Archival art seeks to connect things together and make relevant something from the past.

      In addition, archival art has a paranoid aspect – in which it attempts to recover utopia. It has “a desire to turn belatedness into becomingness. to recoup failed visions in art. literature. philosophy and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia.”

      In “Systems Everywhere,” Greg Foster-Rice begins with a discussion of how the photographs in New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape seem to be connected with the contemporary art movement minimalism despite no exclusive mention of it by the photographers (such as Robert Adams and Bernd and Hilla Becher) or curator William Jenkins. More than one person noted that the photos had a relationship with minimalism “that was based in the “austerity” and “essential, rectilinear geometry” of the photographer’s “bare and spare documents.”” However, minimalism is a movement based on sculpture, not two-dimensional works of art like photographs. But, New Topographics can still be considered to have ”structural and strategic” aspects that are minimalistic, showing a change in contemporary art practices. This shift, this “new art,” is a system as opposed to the “old art” being an object, according to curator Willoughby Sharp in 1967. He and other artists saw art as being more connected with social life than aesthetic formalism.

"The New Jersey Turnpike with Cars Heading towards Linden with the Esso refinery in the background" by Peter Stackpole, 1951

     Here is where I try to describe system theory as first proposed by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy: something that is complex cannot be understood by its individual parts, but by the relationships of the parts and how they create a whole. It is the organization – not the parts - that defines the system. Thus, the photographers seem to have used the system theory in New Topographics.

      The 60s and 70s was a period of “system-like” life (the system analysts in the government and protesters against “the system”, etc. ) and the artists of that time could more easily talk about it in their work by making work that showed a stray from “socially disinterested practice” and critiqued aesthetic formalism. One of the systems evident in much work from that time was the human-altered landscape. In 1966, Tony Smith wrote something that simply describes this human-altered landscape and what it does in terms of art:

“The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be

called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had

never done. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me

from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a

reality there that had not had any expression in art.”

      Understanding this effect experienced by Smith apparently requires a “systemic approach” in seeing the way the parts of a landscape like this work together instead of looking at the individual parts. New Topographics photographers look at these landscapes and any socio-political issues at a distance in their work about “structures built at ground zero” replacing homes. Basically, doing it scientific more than artistic..... but not really? (that is seriously the best way I can put it.) somehow, New Topographics do acknowledge these issues of the “new systemic order” that could lead to ecological crisis. The issues stem from the U.S.'s excess wealth and the Cold War. This time period could be called “late capitalism,” characterized by the following: “the growth of multinational corporations, globalized markets, off-shore labor, and mass consumption in the United States and Western Europe.”

     And this is all reflected in the photos in New Topographics, maybe not even intentionally, showing the U.S.'s “industrial production to a more consumer oriented society.” The photos are about construction/abandonment/habitation inside of the human-altered landscape. According to Smithson and Benjamin, the human-altered landscape is actually a broken system in which ruin is created for the sake of ruin; the structures built by us in them do not turn into ruin after they are built but become ruin before they are even built. (I'm thinking of pipes from factories that create serious air pollution.) This kind of industrialization can seriously harm and throw off natural ecosystems which it has already done.

      New Topographics photographs strongly oppose the technological sublime strategy in which 19^th century photographers (like Carleton Watkins – image of his shown below) photographed landscapes with human alterations to make the alterations appear as though they flow well with the landscape – as if they belong there. The “natural and technological became compatible,” almost implying an infinite amount of natural resources. (But the 1970s proved that was not the case and that there is indeed NOT an infinite amount of natural resources with all the different “acts” enforced for clean air, water, etc... and this was also especially proved by the atomic bomb which threatened the entire well being of, well, humanity. There was no way THAT could be naturalized.)

by Carleton Watkins

Canon of the Rios Las Animas, by William Henry Jackson in 1882

     When it comes to photography as a system, the New Topographics exhibition seeks to show the art object as something that shows “lived experience” of viewers and the relationship between the art, viewers, and experiences of the viewers. (Again, a system as a relationship between parts, not the dissection of the parts.) Photographs themselves are usually believed to be the one medium that is closest to the real, completely different than any other. But in 1966, John Szarkowski basically said that photos should be considered a summary of a moment in time, simply ABOUT that moment, very distinct from the real event. Again, the sum of the parts. This idea isn't totally rejected by New Topographics photographers, but they worked more in these 3 systems-based strategies:

1. emphasizing serial instead of singular imagery - seriality is different from series in the way that seriality is not necessarily unifying works by exploring a consistent theme but adhering to certain rules established at the beginning of the project. Each individual part of the series is equally important. (Like scientific or vernacular photography.) For example, New Topographics photographer Robert Adams’s The New West is “a serial exploration of an ecological system in which humans play a significant role.” The photos go from east to west along the Colorado Rockies and not one photo dominates the rest. Seriality is also especially evident in the grid presentation of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

2. a procedure of making photos that emphasize visual arrangement instead of aesthetic composition - this is a process that takes place in the conceptual stage before photographs are even made. This seems to be what prevents hierarchy of parts. Photos are not created “in the whim of the moment” but are pre-thought out and settled upon beforehand. The focus of interest and excitement is this exact discovery of a process that works instead of the privilege of a part in more traditional art. (it just dawned on me that this and #1 is how I work with many of my portrait series....) in the New Topographics catalog, Joe Deal said that while the series was being thought out, the denial of any uniqueness of the subjects played a major part. Deal photographed and printed everything in basically the same way. The Bechers worked in the same way. Arrangement > composition, because composition elevates the parts over the whole.

3. making photos with an arrangement showing the system as a whole – the arrangement and framing images constantly in the same way makes these landscapes seem totally endless, showing the whole system instead of just a part of it. In the exhibition, with photos framed the same, surrounded by tons of other photos, makes it difficult to not see the relationships between them all, really showcasing the systems theory.

      So, the conclusion is that the serial order (and everything else about the system) is a method or attitude, not a style (like minimalism). The system in the New Topographics show is the human altered landscape. And this show also helped to “expand the field” of photography (as we learned about last week). It opens more possibilities, and is both art and document. 

New Topographics show

 

      Okay. I am not even going to try and lie an say that I understand all of this. (Guess this means I'm not taking the Cities in Crisis class next semester...) It is really hard for me to wrap my brain around the ideas presented in the archival impulse reading, but how I am going to relate it all is by coming to a conclusion that the archival impulse/archival art is a system and is to be looked at as a whole instead of as a bunch of parts, because if the parts were to take on a hierarchy it might not make any sense, especially with the mention of No Ghost in the Shell. 

     I also want to say that I honestly believe all of us use these 3 system-based strategies to some degree in our work. Like I said, I think I work that way sometimes when I make portraits and I certainly think those processes can be used even with something more like "old fashioned" art like portraits. 


     This reading made the New Topographics show and all the photographs in it somehow talk about the serious issues that come with industrialization without necessarily trying to make a very blunt, outright statement, but the large amount of images I would imagine to be necessary to create a system speaks for itself... numbers can mean something and make a point very clear. 

     Now, as for an artist that works procedurally... I think of Andrew Bush's "66 Drives" from Vector Portraits, made from 1989-1997. His description on his website (www.andrewbush.net) says "portraits made while traveling 50 to 70 mph in Los Angeles and other parts of the southwestern United States." From what I learned in my portrait photo class this semester, Bush basically just decides he is going to drive somewhere, set the camera up in a particular spot of his car, and try to drive up next to people and shoot them driving alongside him, using strobe. He has a way of shooting a certain amount of car in each shot, has the camera in basically the same position, fires a strobe, etc.. the only thing he doesn't plan ahead is exactly what kind of people he photographs. (He shoots a wide variety of races and ages, male and female - the selection I chose to include is small!) So I definitely see him having a system. He also gives each photo a very descriptive title, attempting to describe as much as possible the whereabouts and action of the person he photographed. By shooting this way, I suppose the meaning of the project could really be considered as a catalog/nonbiased vague description of the people one might see while driving at any given time in the areas he drives in. Though I suppose there is some kind of bias in every photograph seeing as he decides who to shoot in the moment, because of his wide variety of places and people, it really could be "just anybody" you see driving.

Man drifting near the shoulder at 61 mph on Interstate 405 around the Getty Drive exit at 4:01 p.m. on a Tuesday in September 1992

 

Woman caught in traffic while heading southwest on U.S. Route 101 near the Topanga Canyon Boulevard exit, Woodland Hills, California, at 538 in the summer of 1989

Woman taking her time rambling south at 63 mph on the Hollywood Freeway near the Vine Street exit in Los Angeles on a Saturday afternoon in 1991

    Anyways, I am going to try to just let my visual at the beginning speak for itself... photography as a system in the grand scheme of essentially everything being a system if you think about it..... and please excuse my excessive quoting, these readings honestly were painful to get through even with as many hours as I spent on them. I hope to actually begin to grasp these concepts in class this coming week.

"Photography's Expanded Field" by George Baker

     Baker begins his argument by saying that the photographic object is currently in crisis or at least in a “severe transformation.” The photographic world now should instead be called cinematic instead of photographic because the photographic object of postmodernism has been “recoded” digitally. The problem, as Baker calls it, is not just that most things image-related can be considered photographic, but that photography itself has been foreclosed, cashiered, abandoned—outmoded technologically
and displaced aesthetically.” Photography seems to become just a portion of an artistic project, or a means or bridge to an end sometimes, not just an end product. (Baker mentions Rineke Dijkstra’s videos of her subjects alongside her portraits.)



      A “photographic effect” still remains in today’s art, but it does not look the same to him. The photograph has been “reconstructed” beginning 25 years ago when postmodern photography opened onto an “expanded field of practice,” or even fields, meaning multiple “sets of oppositions and conjugations,“ which Baker says needs to be defined more clearly. In order to map this expanded field or fields, we have to consider oppositional things in photography. He uses the exampless of  index and icon, sequence and series, archive and art photograph, etc. Baker refers to his own opposition from a previous essay - that of photographic history and practice, which have “been suspended since the medium’s invention.” He also mentions how the photograph can be torn between narrative and stasis. The stillness of a photo is what the medium is known for, yet it is not possible to escape a narrative aspect while looking at it with its “referential grip on real conditions of history and everyday life.”

like this photo by August Sander that we've all seen...

The “movement of a narrative and stoppage of stasis” is a huge part of modernist photography according to Baker, and can be applied to every artist, no matter how hard they may try to remove any referentiality in their work. But the problem is that a photo can never be fully narrative or fully static. Baker is basing his expanded field idea on the writings of Rosalind Krauss, and therefore comes up with the terms not-narrative and not-stasis, and to explain this, paraphrases Krauss and says, “the [not-narrative] is, according to the logic of a certain kind of expansion, just another way of expressing the term [stasis], and the [not-stasis] is, simply, [narrative].”
So when thinking of this, Baker came up with this chart of the expanded field a few years before this essay:

And now, he fills in the structure of the expanded field with specific artists that illustrate his point:

Jeff Wall seems to be the person who uses narrative and stasis at the same time.  But Baker realizes that this expanded field is not about specific artists, but about “new formal and cultural possibilities” of photography.

 

Narrative and stasis can come together in the “talking picture,” in forms such as digital montage (think Jeff Wall) and large-scale tableau (think Gregory Crewdson). Even more new forms of this talking picture may be invented; Baker thinks along the lines of Five Revolutionary Seconds or Soliloquy by Sam Taylor-Wood. She makes photographs that are panoramic, done by a camera that rotates. When exhibited, they are often displayed with a soundtrack coming from speakers, taking the “talking” aspect quite literally.

Soliloquy I, 1998

Soliloquy VI, 1999

Five Revolutionary Seconds X, 1997

 (Obviously I like this work a little too much, apparently... sorry for posting 3!)

This expanded field of photography is not just aesthetic, but cultural. It is not a place where “anything goes” but where photography really is just expanded. If the photographic object appears to be in crisis, it is not because photography has come to and end but it is just that the terminology involved in this expanded field becomes more complicated and the possibilities need to be addressed -  just like we had to address the way we talk about things in the digital age in class this past week. For example, maybe we cannot just say “this is a photographic exhibition” when it includes digitally manipulated work as well as video and sound… but right now I really cannot think of what you would even call that without it sounding redundant. So I suppose this is where the problem lies - when we cannot really figure out how to describe all of this.  

I would say “I’m going to try to not be biased in my choosing of artists to discuss” but I’m picking Joey Lawrence because I love his work and it‘s pretty much everything I wish I could be, sorry. Lawrence is a young fine art and commercial portrait artist who mostly photographs celebrities and musical artists. (www.joeyl.com)
I do not think all of his work fits into the category of cinematic film still photograph, but these images certainly do. (I cannot include the titles because the text on his website on my computer screen is so small I can barely make it out, sorry.)

 

G Unit

Underoath

     These images are very highly produced in every way… The cost of props, the “value” of the celebrities photographed, the Photoshop post production and even the very costly digital camera equipment used.  Though they are still images, one might argue that these images are even more highly produced than some movies.  In these images the subjects are not looking at us and are quite absorbed in whatever they are doing (though of course they are aware of being photographed), giving it a more cinematic feel. Though artificial light is used, in some images it is used to imitate natural light like in movies (like Underoath, G Unit and the man at the bar) and sometimes natural light is combined with artificial, also like movies. His work reminds me of Gregory Crewdson’s work, who Baker also mentioned, though I imagine Lawrence to work with a slightly smaller crew than Crewdson. I think Lawrence’s excellent understanding of light, angle and posing contributes to his work fitting into this particular category of the expanded field of photography.  Everything he does is extremely intentional, not only like Crewdson but like Cindy Take a look at Lawrence’s personal work on his site as well - even that has a cinematic feel to it. It just does not illustrate my point quite as much for me to post it. I really do think it is all in the lighting.

     The next artist I want to talk about is “very contemporary,” as Katie from class called Sandy Kim during her presentation. Her name is Miss Aniela, and that is pretty much all I know in terms of her name. Aniela is her middle name, and I have never been able to find her first or last name. all I know is that I found her on Flickr a few years ago and since then she’s become quite popular, had many gallery exhibitions, books, etc.. she is from London and works with models and her self, inspired by “dreams, paintings and literature” and I believe she fits into the “digital montage” talking picture category, even without audio at her exhibitions.

Basically I cannot save images from her website or Flickr just like Joey Lawrence, so I totally butchered these with screen capture cropping. PLEASE look at the originals on her website: www.missaniela.com 

(remind anyone of Skarbakka?)

 Miss Aniela is obvious about using digital manipulation in her self portraits to tell a story. Maybe this is pushing the "talking picture" thing too far, but her characters often do look like they are actually engaging in some kind of conversation with each other. Though the images are static, they really do seem narrative at the same time and her manipulation and doubling of herself pushes that... in fact, on Baker's expanded field scale I might even say she lies somewhere in the middle between the digital montage talking picture and the cinematic film still despite the fact that all of the characters are her (and if her images were a movie, a lot of extra editing might be involved...) I do not believe that a photographer needs to use projection, video or sound to fit into this expanded field of photography, but new innovative ways of digital manipulation may suffice, like this photographer.