Bored by Photography

"In the end, photographs don't deliver more than information - here's something grotesque, here's something funny, here's something austerely impressive. The mysterious and utopian possibilities of Picasso or Pollock are nowhere to be found as you walk through a photography exhibition."

 

In my humble opinion, between these two provocative assertions from the article, that summarize it, there is an ocean in the middle.

 

Let's not loose sight that not at every paint exhibition you find Pollocks or Picassos. And there are a lot of good photographs that deliver more than information, including fine art.

 

I do agree that Painting and Photography do not stand on an equal footing. And the invention of Photography was very much the cause of it. But precisely here is the challenge of Photography, and of Painting, and of Mankind - crossing the limits.

 

On the other hand Photography is performed by the millions. You can see it as a vulgarized deformation of Art, or, on the contrary, a "democratic" linkage. For me, a good pic is still a good pic.

I didn�t think you thought gross generalizations useful Jeff. In any case I have to disagree with this one. Paintings (which I think is what we have been comparing to photographs), are two dimensional representations normally intended to hang on walls so people can give them a surface look. Art museums often like to give us some background information of course and this can be interesting.

 

Anything that needs a tedious explanation to understand (care to explain the meaning of a blank white canvas or Mondrain colored squares) is probably not worth my time. Picasso's work never really excited me either though it is much more interesting than a blank canvas I suppose. I know someone who can do a pretty convincing Pollack BTW. Not sure if that makes them a great artist though.

 

Another interesting "art work" I saw at MOMA was an Ordinance Survey map of Dartmoor with a line drawn across the moor. A nice map but I am still not sure why it was hanging in MOMA.

My wife and I are art collectors - mostly paintings, also some intaglio or stone-plate lithographs, and some ceramic, wood or fabric works. But we've never bought a photograph.<P>

 

My wife is eager to buy some photographs. She favors large landscape works. We saw some nice silver gelatin prints that were about 3x4 feet at a gallery over the weekend. I, the photographer in the family, haven't quit been able to convince myself to buy.

 

I think chiefly this is because the cost-to-uniqueness ratio seems high. True, the lithos in our collection are not unique, either - but they're not very expensive - Maybe the most expensive one was $600 and most were a bit less. And they were made at the turn of the last century so you know that no more will be made. The photograph we saw was around $1000 and there's no telling how unique it will turn out to be.<P>

 

But the photographs have a bigger "uniqueness" problem than just mechanical copies being churned out. <B><U>ALL</U></B> photographs look the same! At least compared to paintings. Sure, I know every photographer has his own style, his own preferred subjects and lighting and framing. Anyone can tell a photo by Cindy Sherman from one by Helmut Newton. But the physical photos look relatively the same. It's like watching movies - every director and cinematographer is unique but the SCREEN and PROJECTOR are the same. <P>

 

Not so with paintings. I can tell the works of many painters apart upside down in very poor light. Some painters paint impasto, some painters paint with knives, some use lots of thinner. Some paint on canvas, some on linen, some on panel. Some use ultra-fine 000 brushes, some throw paint from 6 feet away. There is a HUGE range of textures and brushwork and even SMELLS to paintings.<P>

 

My wife and I spent the weekend gallery-hopping so here's a test (we did this). Go to some galleries that sell works of several artists. Go to a painting gallery and a photography one. When you walk in the door before examining anything, glance <B>for a second</B> and see if you can tell where the work of one artist ends and another begins. In the painting gallery you can easily tell in that short glance because paintings by different painters look so different. In the photography one you probably can't tell unless you look at the individual photos.

<I>What a ridiculous notion - all photographs 'look' the same - look closer man </I><P>

 

That was exactly my POINT (and that of the test I proposed). You HAVE to look closer than you do with paintings. Photographs have fewer degrees of freedom than painting which is one reason they are more boring.<P>

 

Let's face it - go to any major city where there are a few dozen or a few hundred art galleries and see how many of them feature mainly photos compared to how many feature mainly paintings. The public basically agrees with the guy from the Guardian.<P>

 

Sure, photos feature differences in composition, style, abstraction, subject and lighting. So do paintings, but imagine how boring paintings would be if all artists just used watercolors.

Thank you, Bob, for posting this article. There was a time when I enjoyed framing photographs -- either my own or someone else's but I no longer enjoy this. I agree that the strength of the photograph is that it is possible to make and view many of them and then see what resonates and then hold on to those. I enjoy seeing many photographs and from time to time I see one I want to see over and over again. Those photographs are rare and important to me. But I don't want to treat a photo like a great oil painting.

Let's try another approach to this problem- I look at a lot of work and so much of it is so similar- similar limited subjects, similar approaches, similar overall look- The work looks like the guy's down the hall or the girl's across the street- this is what they see, so it's what they photograph. It is done with a great deal of technical merit but without the passion that comes through when someone is truely interested in what they are shooting.

 

The issue is not the photograph itself- the issue is what the photograph shows us. The issue is how the 10 or 17 or 22 photographs link together to present a fuller view of the subject. I still see plenty of portfolios that are simply a collection of prints with nothing linking them.

 

We need to photograph what we are interested in. Photographing simply to photograph or because we think we are creating art is the visual equal of verb conjugation exercises. They can be technically perfect, and we can learn a lot, but they have little to offer a reader.

 

Photographers have to photograph what they are interested in. We photograph because we are interested in the subject, not because we are interested in photography- the photography is only the vehicle.

 

If you find yourself talking more about the qualities of the print than the qualities of the subject, it's time to re-evaluate.

Art is in the air, the wood floors you're walking on, the beautiful sunsets you wake up to see, and art is your neighbor next door. As long as art has existed, its tried to capture the essence of being, whether it may be the misery of lonelyness or the peace one may feel walking through thick fog covering rolling green hills. Life is art. Whether it is the pure emotion of a dream or the simple beauty of a still lake, the scences of life which are most arresting have been recorded by artists nearly as far as history can reach. Whether an artist is using a paintbrush or camera, the artist is still only making a record and it is what he is making a record of that is art. Artist are simply attuned to the more artistic moments in life, which is what starts to separate painting and photography. The painter want to record life, and life heavily involves emotion, so the painter who can portray emotion in his art will be succesfull. The ones who can't simply never make it as artist. However every photograph records the art of life, capturing every detail of the emotion and the surroundings. Joy is captured in almost every photographic art piece produced; the smiling vaction photos, the smiling prom picture, the smiling family photo, even the cute pictures of kittens batting yarn. The problem is these art pieces depict the art of life in its most common mundane form. The photographer who crosses the line to become an artist simply depicts the art of life in its more rare and emotionly deep times.

 

Art is life and the good artist is simply able to pick out the masterpieces in life, the medium he record it in has no matter.

Be it photography, painting or sculptures, all it really boils down to is if you like it enough to hang over a crack in your wall or to be put on that empty shelve in your bookcase. (don't even get me started on (classical) music and poetry!) Call it naivity of youth, but I cringe when I hear any work being described as "important". While I can see the skill invloved in Rembrandt's "nightwatch", I just don't see why a <a href=http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/sl/gogh.12-sunflowers.jpg>silly painting of a bunch of flowers</a> deserves it's own museum.<p>

Don't get me wrong, there are many beautiful or interesting photographs, paintings and sculptures out there. Some make me take a second look, some make me smile and some make me think: "That is really cool/clever" but all too often I get the feeling these snobs just clan together and make themselves believe they see something/feel that's just not there simply to feel superior to "non-apreciators".

Here's an interesting quote from Helen Vendler's "Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology" that I think is relevant to this discussion. I think you could fairly substitute "photograph" for "poem" and "photographer" for "poet":

 

"Life itself is a continuation of successive moments in one stream. Art interrupts the stream and constructs one segment or level of the stream for processing. In a single act, it describes, analyzes, and confers form on that segment. The form it confers by its ways of organizing the poem makes visible the contour of that life-moment as the poet perceives it. The poet discovers the emotional import of that life-moment by subjecting it to analysis; the analysis then determines how the moment is described, and the invented organizational form that replicates it�

Just as an archaeologist studies ruins, while the rest of us simply walk through Pompeii not understanding much of what we see, a student of poetry becomes more than simply a reader.

You become more like a conductor who studies the musical score before conducting the piece in performance...Through we almost always respond first to the quickly sensed "message" of a poem, the reason for our response (even if we do not at first know this) is the arrangement of the message (on many intersecting planes) into a striking and moving form. To give a poem its due as a work of art, we need to be able to see it as an arranged message."

I did read the article - my wife passed it to me - and it did ring a bell, especially when Jon Jones reduced photography to a means of communication.

 

Personally, I see photography as the perfect symbiosis between art and science, materialism and getting in touch with nature, and lots other seemingly diametrical conflicts which confront us daily.

 

However, who can say the same thing about their telephone or car? Or a painting even?

don't you think that photographs that all look the same is a problem with galleries? In my point of view, too many galleries (photographic, at least) seem to have a very narrow view of what type of photos they will accept. one gallery only does "street", another only landscape, etc., etc..

In 19th century France the hierarchy of painting had landscapes at the bottom, the

theory being that the artist only copied what they saw.

For a little different take on this whole thing, try this:

 

http://www.althausphoto.com/essay1.htm

 

 

I would have posted it here, but it's fairly long.

An interesting read but as usual we are blinded by words and ignore the statistical implications. How many photographers are there in the world who consider themselves artists ,a million ,ten million;how many could possibly be hung in such a gallery, half a million? We are comparing these self designated artists with a handful of painters who we considered to be outstanding artists. Of course the odds are that much of the work of these photographers will be boring.

Peter Nelson, what are your views on literature given that writers

from a certain culture will write in the same language? Are

books boring?

 

To me, a lot of painting looks the same. There are fundamental

elements that define a painting as a painting. Um... use of paint,

for instance. To the poster who didn't "get" the blank canvases, I

believe the artist was reducing painting to its purest form, to its

essential element, in order to allow future painters to redefine

the art (actually, it may have been Rodchenko, who was also a

famous photographer).

Yep. A lot of paintings also look the same, as photography, as literature as cinema.

 

I think it's the feeling of 'all was already invented' that we feel when someone points a sort of art as boring. I was thinking specially about cinema, that in 1920's already has the same language and aesthetical issues that we use today. So, 80 years and we can't make anything really different.

 

But that is the way it is. Don't care that much about it.

It wouldn't hurt to reconsider the old saw "I don't know what's 'art' but I know what I like."

 

This is normally quoted in a disparaging manner to put down some "plebeian" who doesn't care for the latest fad, but think, don't we all have a favorite color, flavor, texture? Is one better than the rest, or are our brains just somehow hardwired, our entire experiences ordered to say "that's it, that's the one!" I think that art appreciation is as intensely personal to each of us as is faith, and that it's on a level as basic .

 

If your idea of "art" is da Vinci, Breugel, Picasso, Weston, or Norman Rockwell, so be it, and I'm happy for ya! If you have to give it names like "high modernist", "Baroque", that's fine, we might need a frame of reference. If you want to point out that one artist appears to be derivative of another, or that the subject matter has been done in a different style, and that the viewer might want to make his/her own comparisons, well, that seems like a neighborly thing to do.

 

If you imagine that your own tastes are innately superior, that any one in disagreement is less intelligent, educated, tasteful, moral, "sensible" etc., then you might want to consider an adventure into performance art.

I think many have missed the point the author makes, which is that photography needs to be immediate and accessible, rather than framed and 'museumed'. I agree with his main points. Too much pretense in photography, with the self-serving term 'fine-art photography' the first indication of 'hackicity'. When I see that term used, I know I'm going to see a time exposures of water running over rocks.

 

Again.

To return to a quote from the article in The Guardian that initiated this discussion thread: "...I find photography in art galleries, framed and hung on the wall, almost entirely unrewarding...."

I've visited a number of shows at major venues for "avant guarde" work in photography, such as the Hirschorn and Corcoran meseums in Washington DC, and find myself in agreement with the writer's statement. The work shown at these museums was meant to be controversial and non-traditional. Unfortunately, unless one is somehow closely "plugged-in" to those groups that emerge to define and dominate contemporary trends in art and photography, the intent of the work on display will be totally baffling as to the photographer's artistic intent and as to whether that intent has been successfully realized in the work that is being shown. That is why I feel that forums such as photo.net offer the potential of being a more successful venue for presenting new work to an interested community, a much better venue than that offered by the established brick and mortar galleries and museums. Another advantage of online exhibits over conventional museums is that online exhibits such as photo.net do not depend on government grants to fund their operations.

 

Politicians with conservative agendas have used the threat of denial of Federal funds that support certain museums as a weapon to try to control the content of these museum's exhibits. This type of threat cannot be used against online displays in virtual galleries, as government support is not a factor in sustaining online operations. My last point goes back to the issue of being "bored" by "an exhibition of classic photographs of New York at the city's Jewish Museum. " Perhaps the Jewish Museum chose to exhibit classic photographs, rather than newer more controversial work, in part because such controversial work might antagonize the Museum's patrons and engender a drop off in financial support to the Museum?

Doesn't this remind you of something that would have been written by Hunter Thompson from a motel room in Las Vegas in lieu of actually attending an assigned event? Photography is a form of folk art not approached by any other visual medium in its accessibility. In this regard, it is truly fascinating. If there is a problem with the exhibition, it is not the fault of photography, but of the jurying. I think a hard core photographer could live without food on elation for several days at such an event. Thoreau said that it takes a great poet to properly appreciate great poetry. The same principle applies here. What kind of a photographer is J. Jones? I don't recognize his byline.

I think I read that article awhile back - it was great.

 

As I'm sitting here, minding a public gallery showing Ansel Adams The Manzanar Photographs, I find myself wishing I could see this work in his book, with his text. I've always found viewing works in galleries to be uncomfortable, both physically and mentally. I'm not sure what it is but galleries always seem to dull my senses. Perhaps it's the always-too-hot-n-dry atmosphere or the fact that I have to stand on my feet too long, but invariably I get tired and lose interest. But give me a book and good light and the works never fail to come alive.

This reminds me of a lot of British art criticism. It's just another

way of saying "i'm too cool to care." If you don't want to see the

real prints made by the photographer who made them, not some

printer in Singapore, or if you are lucky, Italy, then stay at home.

 

If you do want to see the real deal, then buy some orthotics for

your aching feet so you can actually stand long enough to look at

30-80 photographs, and drink some tea for your poor dry throat

and put some vicks vapor rub on your upper lip for the burning

sinuses and get out to the gallery or museum and at best form

an opinion about how a show is curated rather than whine about

how you don't feel comfortable actually walking about looking at

real photographs.

 

If the show sucks blame the curator, not the fact that you are

looking at real prints, standing alone without the support of

anything else except the white walls they hang on.

<p><i>Photographs have fewer degrees of freedom than painting which is one reason they are more boring.</i>

 

<p>this is a lie.

 

<p>photography has every degree as much freedom as painting. i do both. the problem is that it is HARDER to use this freedom. we're stuck photographing things that exist. we have position them, light them, etc.

 

<p>frankly, i take no great pains to be derivitive. call me young and crazy, sure, but i'm out to defy just about every rule of good photography. just to prove it can be done, and people need to quit being so stodgy about it.

 

<p>i think digital is ruining the medium, personally. the world of photography is now filled with six-megapixel-amateurs who think they are pro's, but couldn't operate a camera to save their lives. i see smoothed over, no detail, over sharpened digital pictures trying to be film and failing miserably. even when the subject matter is good (or at least something other than boobs, photosig), the pictures are just... boring.

 

<p>because i do digital crap. but i don't try to hide what i'm doing. they're very clearly compressed, oversharpened, with unrealistic colors and too much contrast. in fact, i don't even use a decent camera. i use a webcam with fixed aperature and shutter speed, unreliable shutter delay, and no focus. it's the modern brownie.

 

<p>i'm currently working on getting these pictures i do together in a portfolio and trying to get a show. they look beautiful when printed very, very large.

 

<p>anyhow. here's my answer to digital crap. someone do please tell if and where they have seen anything like it. is it new and exciting? i don't care if you hate it, as long as it's not boring.

"Road Trip." Boring and I've seen it 100's of times. But this illustrates a point I've made time and again in these forums and with other photographers. Some famous too. Everyone sees a different idea or feels a different emotion when viewing an image. A responder here said they saw an exhibit of images taken "west of England or in west England" and they conveyed their lack of emotions. Why? Others apparantly felt the images worthy of displaying. Was that just their opinion about the lack of emotion in the images? Yes. Obviously. And here is the strength of photography. Something for everyone. A weegee in a print boring and lifeless? Hardly. To everyone. Boring to someone? Yes. Adams seems to take the brunt of the disdain for his landscape imagery. But it sells far and away better than Nactway, Weston, Callahan, Gowin, Mapplethorpe, Arbus, Capa, on and on ad infinitum. Each to their own. That's what makes it so interesting. But maybe we should look more deeply at ourselves when we discount an artist's work. There is value in all of it. The less we like of others work, the more shallow our own vision. Think about it.