How to write about one particular picture

<p>Here is <a href="http://www.maureenpaley.com/artists/rebecca-warren/images">Rebecca Warren</a> talking about one particular sculpture, <a href="http://www.maureenpaley.com/system/files/032016/56dc64766bf3b56a730006d4/slideshow_slice_large/Maureen-Paley-Rebecca-Warren-Artwork-Helmut-Crumb-1998.jpg?1460538133">this one called <em>Helmut Crumb</em></a> (not a picture, but a sculpture inspired by pictures, and of course, Helmut is Mr. Newton ...). [it may be NSFW, because it's anatomically correct]:</p>

 

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<p>Years ago I was making two separate sculptures, one related to Robert Crumb's cartoons and the other related to Helmut Newton's photos. Neither was quite working and I couldn't figure out what to do. The second one was small and fragile, so for safety I stood it underneath the first, and suddenly both sculptures were resolved into a single two-part sculpture, <a href="http://www.maureenpaley.com/system/files/032016/56dc64766bf3b56a730006d4/slideshow_slice_large/Maureen-Paley-Rebecca-Warren-Artwork-Helmut-Crumb-1998.jpg?1460538133"><em>Helmut Crumb</em> [1998]</a>.</p>

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<p>Here is Rebecca Warren talking about knowing when a work is 'done' in an interview with Sheena Wagstaff:</p>

 

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<p><strong>Rebecca Warren</strong>: The work tells you. You're heading in some kind of direction, mostly blindly, but with eyes wide open, so that your whole attention is focused on what the work is trying to be. You're following it around and you're hopeful. You don't push it, but you also try not to lag behind. At some point it becomes clear what the thing wants to be.</p>

<p><strong>Sheena Wagstaff</strong>: Your description is not unlike that of Motherwell, who famously said a "painting was finished when it no longer needed the artist."</p>

<p><strong>RW</strong>: Yes, Motherwell understood the important fact that art itself is a player in the game. One of the peculiar things about art is that artists are agents. They follow the art, the scent, and the intention of the art.</p>

<p><strong>SW</strong>: Does chance or spontaneity play a role anywhere in your process? Perhaps even before you start a work, in your choice of subject matter?</p>

<p><strong>RW</strong>: It's all a huge game of chance. There is no way to know who or what is in charge of the game. Sometimes you even feel that you yourself have made a decision, but it's fleeting and probably an illusion! The artist, the art, whatever and wherever these two things come from are engaged in a concerted effort. I think that this applies to any point of the process, from the initial impulse — a feeling about a shape, color, material, or size — all the way up to the final moments when you find that you're doing less and less and achieving more and more.</p>

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<p>Back to the featured picture, which was inspired by the work of other artists, here is Warren talking about influence:</p>

 

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<p><strong>RW</strong>: You find yourself appreciating odd and surprising things, odd aspects of other people's work that stay in your head and resonate with you, a stream of none-too-specifiable natural or internal grammar. For example, what I focus on in cartoonist Robert Crumb's work is a kind of plaintive hope expressed in relentless female rotundity and buoyancy, which in my work becomes a different kind of hope for satisfying profiles and surfaces.</p>

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<p>You will have immediately noticed that Warren's <em>Helmut Crumb</em> has Tim's "gap" from <a href="/philosophy-of-photography-forum/00e6Wj">this thread</a>.</p>

<p>This is Joel Sternfeld writing about the picture, <a href="http://www.phaidon.com/resource/115-holden-street.jpg"><em>Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974</em> by Stephen Shore</a> [<a href="http://stephenshore.net/photographs/six/8.jpg">larger version</a>]:</p>

 

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<p>... The danger of precisionism is that things can get tied up too tightly. It is said that in the great work of art, all the tensions are resolved but allowed to continue. Resolving is the easy part; how to allow the vectors to continue is harder. How does Shore allow them to continue in <em>Holden Street</em>? As in so many aspects of the picture, he does so through the play of duality.</p>

<p>First of all, the picture is inside out. Ever since El Greco looked down on Toledo, or Patinir assumed his eagle's-nest vantage point, or Thomas Cole got up on Mount Holyoke to look down on the Oxbow of the Connecticut River, it has been standard landscape practice to take the 'God's eye' view along with its authoritative implications. Shore does the opposite, and our normal pictorial expectations are confounded by this play of internality and externality.</p>

<p>Related to the notion that this picture is involuted, but different enough that it warrants its own discussion, is the play between near and far that occurs within it. This play keeps the eye constantly moving back and forth between sleeping townscape and distant naturescape (which also appears to be sleeping, but, of course, is not; beneath each gentle leaf is a universe aflame). A conventional psychological reading of the near and the distant would propose that closer objects represent 'self' or 'mine,' whereas the far is 'not-self' and 'not-mine.'</p>

<p>In the progression of Shore's oeuvre, <em>Holden Street</em> may be a bridge between the earlier, self-referential pictures of [his] <em>American Surfaces</em> in which he documents his motel rooms, meals, bathrooms and the work that follows in which he is out in the world looking at 'reality' (or 'not-self'). What is so distinctive about his later work is that he seems to be able to bring to the landscape an infant's sense of omniscient oneness with all that it sees — whereas in the vision of earlier work that came to fruition as <em>American Surfaces</em>, it is the self that is the central point.</p>

<p>[ ... ]</p>

<p>... How did the young Stephen Shore take color photography's unexplored materiality and form and make a picture so rich in association and yet as free of padding as a marble statue? For the very reasons this question cannot be answered, great art is what it is.</p>

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<p> </p>

<p>No picture today, but a good visual in the second bit, I think. First, from Louis Sullivan. I hope you know who he was. This is from his <em>Kindergarten Chats</em>, 1901 (yes, it's for us):</p>

 

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<p>Attention is of the essence of our powers; it is that which draws other things toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experience of our lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experience becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention — the art of seeing, the art of listening. You needn't trouble about memory, that will take care of itself; but you must learn to live in the true sense. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention.</p>

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<p>The following is a traditional tale from Anonymous (a very prolific author):</p>

 

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<p>Saint Francis was known for his sanctity and his ability to communicate with animals. Whenever he was asked how he became so holy, he always answered 'I know what's in the Bible.' He had just given this reply to a mendicant in the piazza at Assisi when the village idiot asked 'Well, what IS in the Bible?' 'In the Bible,' said Francis, 'are two pressed flowers and a letter from my friend Giovanni.'</p>

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<p>Merry Christmas, everybody. </p>

<p>The fact and the wish.</p>

<p>This is David Campany writing around and up to <a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/hido_betweentwo.jpg">this picture by Todd Hido</a> which is from Hido's <em>Between the Two</em> series:</p>

 

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<p>In 1975 Roland Barthes published a perfect little essay, "On Leaving the cinema." Its subject is the pleasurable yet strange sensation that comes over us when a film is over. Our body must awaken, "a little numb, a little awkward, chilly," as he puts it, "sloppy, soft, peaceful: limp as a sleeping cat." Our mind must also move from one state, one reality, to another. We need time to adjust.<br>

[<em>line break added</em>] It is a precious feeling, but so transitive that we are rarely encouraged to take it seriously. Barthes does. The sensation of leaving that dark chamber can be quite dramatic. ... Watching a film in a cinema, you are supposed to forget where you are. To enter the illusion, the apparatus must melt away. At the end of the film you mentally reenter your surroundings and once again become aware of the movie theater, only to leave it.</p>

<p>This never happens with still photography. There is no comparable suspension of disbelief. Yes, a photograph or book of photographs may be immersive, but not in the cinematic sense. The pleasures are very different. Looking at photographs, we never quite "lose ourselves." And in a book, it is in the mental movement from one image to another that meaning is made, without forgetting where you are.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] Hido's pictures are as immersive as any in contemporary photography, but the pleasures of his sequencing keep churning. One is pulled into the imaginative depths of a picture, only to be lured toward another and another. And unlike a narrative movie, a book allows one to feel what one is feeling — to grasp the pleasure and the churn consciously, as sensations in themselves.</p>

<p>Before a movie is made, the director or location scout goes looking for places to shoot. Usually they will take a still camera. If you have ever seen the pictures made on such reconnaissance trips, you will have sensed their strange status. They are documents, records of places, yet they are also invitations to propose, or suppose, what has not happened but could. A good location photograph will leave space for imaginative projection.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] I think Hido's landscapes and townscapes have this quality. A similar feeling is present in actor portraits made by casting directors, and in the preliminary photos taken of fashion models on go-sees for style magazines. Look at Hido's photographs of solitary women that populate this book. In each case there is an encounter, of which the photograph is the palpable result, but what, or who, was <em>there</em>? A player, star or extra, with an unwritten script.</p>

<p>So many of Hido's images hinge on this duality: the retrospective and the prospective. The fact and the wish. The presence and the possibility. His statement that he "photographs like a documentarion but prints like a painter" confirms this, and indicates how the effect is rooted in the very substance of his pictures. It is a constant balancing act, avoiding the sentimentality of "what was" and the cheap melodrama of performed fiction.</p>

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<p>"I'm a terrible writer. I hate to write, thus my endless quoting. I find it exquisitely unpleasant. <<< I like flowery language. That's the only part of writing that I enjoy "Julie.</p>

<p>Hmm, you are very erudite when you post on the POTW.</p>

<p>'How to write about one particular picture" Julie.</p>

<p>I will have ago...</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>Suspicion of intent, of the touching of deep scars, inflicted in the not so distant past. A fear, but the strength to challenge that fear; a defiance.</p>

<p>To challenge adversity...</p>

<p>Subjective.</p>

<p>A photography is about subjective emotional response.</p>

<p>I'm getting the <em>Clockwork Orange</em> treatment AGAIN: over and over and over, I'm strapped to a chair and my eyes are propped open, then I'm forced to look at Allen Herbert's pictures while reading his random commentary ...</p>

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<p>In the economists' market what the producer is compensated by is money: money goes one way, goods or services the other. But in the relation between paintings and cultures the currency is much more diverse than just money: it includes such things as approval, intellectual nurture and, later, reassurance, provocation and irritation of stimulating kinds, the articulation of ideas, vernacular visual skills, friendship and — very important indeed — a history of one's activity and a hereditary, as well as sometimes money acting both as a token of some of these and a means to continuing performance.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] And the good exchanged for these is not so much pictures as profitable and pleasurable experience of pictures. The painter may choose to take more of one sort of compensation than of another — more of a certain sense of himself within the history of painting, for instance, than of approval or money. The consumer may choose this rather than that sort of satisfaction. Whatever choice painter or consumer makes will reflect on the market as a whole. It is a pattern of barter, barter primarily of mental goods. —<em>Michael Baxendall</em>, Patterns of Intention, <em>(1985)</em></p>

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<p>But sometimes the "certain sense of himself" becomes what the artist is bartering for, becomes <em>all</em> that the artist is bartering for. He loses all sight of the art apart from that delicious "certain sense of himself":</p>

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<p><strong>Narcissism</strong><br>

by C.K. Williams</p>

<p>... The word alone sizzles like boiling acid, moans like molten lead, but ah my dear, it leaves the lips in such a sweetly murmuring hum.</p>

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<p> </p>

<p>[pick any Pierre Bonnard painting to look at reference the below; this is true of all his painting, including his nudes]</p>

 

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<p>"The presence of the object, the subject itself, is an embarrassment to the painter at the moment he is painting. The point of departure for a painting being an idea, if the object itself is there at the moment when he is working there is always the danger that the artist will allow himself to be taken in by the specifics of the immediate view of it and in so doing lose the initial idea ... "</p>

<p>"But then you never work before the subject?"</p>

<p>"Yes, but I leave, I go back to check, I come away, I return some time later; I don't allow myself to be absorbed by the object itself. In sum, there comes to be a conflict between the initial idea, which is the good one, the painter's, and the variable and varied world of the object. ... In the first inspiration or idea the painter achieves the universal. It is this inspiration that determines the choice of the motif and corresponds exactly to the painting. If this inspiration, this first idea is effaced, then there is nothing but the motif, the object, which has invaded and dominated the painter. From that time on, he is no longer making his own painting." — <em>Angèle LaMotte relating a dialog with the painter in</em> Verve, <em>1947</em></p>

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<p>Thinking about that last bit, "there is nothing but the motif, the object, which has invaded and dominated the painter," with reference to photography. Do I agree with it? Do I mind if it is true when I am photographing?</p>

Too Platonic for words. It's the old universal ideas vs. transient objects. Significant, indeed, though nothing new.

 

Fun to think about, even inspiring. Neither true nor false.

 

It's not something I'd agree or disagree with. If it's the way a certain painter relates to the world and his work, so be it.

 

Regarding my own photography, the idea and the object can also converse, argue, support, disdain, and feed each other,

in addition to having all sorts of other relationships.

 

I keep reminding myself, there is no secret, no magical special sauce that's going to turn someone into a proper artist or

photographer.

<p>Chaim Soutine was the opposite of Bonnard:</p>

 

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<p>Soutine had to have the thing he was painting out there in front of him. He wouldn't invent. He wouldn't paint from memory, even the memory of a motif he had worked from day after day. He wouldn't paint from drawings or from photographs or from an earlier painting of the subject. He had to have the real thing there.</p>

<p>He even needed it there when painting his paraphrases of old masters. He never copied from the picture, either the original or a reproduction; he reconstructed the motif of the picture, worked from a model or a still-life subject disposed in accordance with the prototype.</p>

<p>... Reconstituting the motif rather than working from the picture was a curious procedure to adopt when transposing other men's images. After all, one of the reasons why painters make copies or transpositions is to save themselves the bother of employing a model or buying a lobster or taking a trip to the country. And as a matter of fact Soutine was often put to more trouble than usual when he tried to find the living equivalent of an image he had chosen to adapt.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] Some of the most grotesque stories in the Soutine legend tell of such occasions. There is the story behind the picture based on Courbet's reclining girl -- the days of motoring round the countryside before a suitable model was found; the jealousy of her husband, a railway gatekeeper, who, after one session, tried to stop her from posing; Soutine's rage and threats of legal action.</p>

<p>... There is the story about the carcass of beef which he had hanging in the studio while painting four or more large canvases paraphrasing the Rembrandt carcass -- the complaints of the neighbors at the stench of decaying flesh; the pail of blood used to freshen up the meat as it got dry; the model hired to fan away the flies so that the motif could be seen; the artist's growing rapture at the colors that emerged as the meat decomposed, and the neighbor's growing desperation; the calling in of the police; Soutine's incomprehension and rage. — <em>David Sylvester</em></p>

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I don't know that the two are actually opposites. It is possible that Soutine's need for the presence of the object, in all its

rancor and stench, allows him access to that very same Idea Bonnard is talking about. While the outward appearance

and process of how they work may vary, this doesn't suggest to me that their thinking about ideas and objects were

necessarily different. As a matter of fact, it's interesting that in transposing the work of the masters, Soutine chooses not to look at

that work but at the objects themselves. Thus he seems to realize that it will be HIS idea of the object rather than the

original master's that will now be significant.

<p>"It's funny since Allen is always eager and first to ridicule the aspect of putting images into words. Yet "whenever he himself is using words with his own images the pictures never quite match the lofty language "Phillip.</p>

<p>Sorry, if my image does not match up to my lofty language. But thanks for the heads up appreciating my lofty language.</p>

<p>Just posted a photo and added a few words....photo nothing special or the words...just joining in. Have I stepped on the toes of those who feel special with deep insights beyond us mortals? Suppose so.</p>

<p>Oh well.</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>Methinks that folks are too lost in the motivations of the Artist than the Art.</p>

<p>I added 10,000 words to my Art.</p>

<p>Now I know I have created Art.</p><div></div>

if the pg has used their imagination in taking the photo then use yours in writing about it

 

avoid using the adjective 'interesting'