Am I the only one to see a naked emperor?

Hello

 

A local gallery here in Toronto has just closed a showing of prints

by a California photographer or prints of the Pacific Ocean- rocks,

foggy horizons etc. Most seemed to me to be a waste of 4 x 5 FEET

(!!)of paper & silver. The comments and descriptions seemed very

fatuous and precious to me- more creative than the photos!

 

The website- www.tatargallery.com - has these for viewing for a few

more days at least. I would appreciate comments of others on the

aesthetics of these prints.

 

Many Thanks

I dunno man, I think <a href="http://www.tatargallery.com/view_photo.asp?photo_key=1759&sect=exhib">this one</a> is one of the better examples of star trails I've seen in a while. The glow on the right side is a little distracting / detracting though.

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Now I haven't seen the actual prints, and maybe there's a lot of pretentious presentation and stuff, but the photos are kindof nice in a quiet, subtle way. Maybe printing huge would kindof hurt that though.

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It's certainly not going to get a rise out of the photo.net-reading public though, the way <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00AhWS">this thread</a> has.

Richard

 

They are not my cup of tea,but to some people they might have merit.

I see many photos that are suppose to be FINE ART,that I just do not see any sense of composition or quality.That does not mean that they are not reaching other people.The true test (hype aside)is will they sell the images and will they have lasting value?

His website here:<a href="http://www.chiphooper.com"> Chip Hooper</a>.

I really like the pictures but I wouldn't want to see them any larger than 16X20. Some people think that an 8X10 is a picture but if you blow it up to 4ftX5ft it is art. I am not of that school.

When you start showing your work to others,the purity of the art diminishes.You do pure art for yourself..Evan Clarke

I saw an exhibition by Hooper (attended opening night) and wasn't impressed either! The "transcendental..." yadda yadda yadda does over power the lack of contrast, simplistic nature. It isn't even close to the artistic visions of Oriental visions. The other thing that really bother me with his prints that he showed were that they weren't even finished properly. They were printed with a lack of caring/professionalism that should be done for gallery work. Just because they were very large, doesn't make them art! I was approached by a woman that night who dribbled on about the vision and artistic enlightenment... yadda, yadda, blah blah... and I looked at the prints, looked at her and softly asked if she was kidding! Hooper came up to me later that night before my wife and I left and asked my opinion... I told him how I felt about the quality and subject matter and he said nothing other than it is a work in progress... I too saw the emperor and he was buck naked and without a clue!

Marketing more important than talent and pratice?

 

We see it in music, movie and now our beloved art???

 

God help us.

 

But I had one print that I have sold a few of that I did not particularly like. I found out from informed sources that is has a calming and soothing effect on the viewer. Few of the buyers are shrinks.

 

Whatever pays the kid's college!

Most of them didn't do much for me, fairly predictable images, but I thought "Moonlight, Garrapata Beach" was very nice. Sort of a Mark Rothko tone band thing with a highly textured rock sitting there in a jarring sort of way. As for size, these types of images sometimes only work if they are printed large. How large? Hard to say, but for me, not anything smaller than 16x20. Like I said, "for me." As for the commerce part of the art world, gallery owners almost always like bigger prints - mo' money, mo' money, mo' money.

maybe some are not best framed, but alltogether not that bad.^^

I'm always somewhat bemused by the apparent fear of what photographers seem to consider "big" pictures?

 

Why have we insisted on only making minatures for so long?

 

As for the photogorpahs themselves - they are quite nice, but apart from one or seem to lack to power and originality of Sugimotos seascapes for example

Without seeing them, I can't speak for the quality of the prints, but Chip Hooper's photographs do have a spare, minimalistic, "Zen" quality to them that I find appealing. The concept of void, or nothingness, is rarely explored in photography.

 

I have never seen reproductions of his work any larger than 8x10 or so, and I can imagine that by sheer virtue of titanic size they might take on a looming presence that would defeat some of that lightness of spirit. The size would probably best be determined by the context within which they are displayed. Airport or shopping mall atrium? Go big or go unnoticed. In a home or an intimate gallery? I would prefer to whisper rather than shout and thus would scale the final print accordingly. But then, he didn't ask me! :)

I understand what you and others are saying Richard and I am one of those that clearly does not "get it". Aesthetics? What aesthetics? But the fact remains that he was successful at accomplishing a showing of this work at what appears on the surface to be a rather large gallery. Good for him.

 

But at the end of the day the market will either buy into it or they will graciously pass as any piece of art in whatever form it manifests itself in will only be worth what the market is willing to bear. Unless your name proceeds the words "Trust Fund" on the monthly check or you have a day gig to pay the bills, life can be at either end of the emotional and financial scale.

 

Takes all kinds of views to make the world go round.

 

Cheers!

I checked out the website of this photographer who commands $5,000.00 per portrait with her ULF camera, IMHO the lighting is bad, the posing stiff in 99% of the shots I saw, one family portrait has the father with his shirt open at the bottom with his belly button showing,.......she rationalizes away bad technique with Zen-pscyhobabble and judging from the money she's made, folks like her style.

 

My hat's off to her, these are snapshots w/a giant camera, but she's still marketed herself into a success, the biggest, the fastest, the most talented, don't always win the race. Arnold was never a good actor, and he has millions in the bank, two highly paid painters I can think of happen to be elephants.

 

We take our art seriously, but that's no guarentee anyone else does, Van Gogh was considered a bum, sold one picture if I'm not mistaken, Rembrandt died penniless, some of us will be lucky enough to gain some recognition for our work, some of us won't. Being bitter about it if you're on the 'short end of the stick' is a waste of time.

 

Life isn't fair, it never has been, your attitude about that fact has to be 'so what', while you go on to bringing into reality your next idea.

What is art anyway? Art is what others may think of. It is perception and much more marketing. Has been so, will be for ever.

If half the people that see that gallery love it and the other half despise it, the photographer will probably have a good living out of it. And if you're in the half that despises it, it doesn't really matter if you just sorta dislike it, or intensely loath it- you won't be a customer either way.

Richard, I like it. At least I think that I do. Don't know how I'd feel if I saw the original 4x5' enlargements, doubt that they will stand up (visually) that large -- maybe 24x30 tops -- certainly should be printed larger than 16x20. Also, it may be too much of a good thing; I can't imagine a whole room of them. But it would be quiet and restful to have one of them along the wall opposite my little gallery of Weston, Adams, and Strand (all loaded with pure energy). You gotta learn to ignore the hype and look at the images.

I haven't had the chance to look at the images but galleries can make more money/sales from a mediocre large prints than a perfect small one. You are assuming that everyone who buys art from a gallery is an informed buyer..they aren't.

 

 

Has anyone noticed that 8x10 contacts are disappearing to be replaced by big colour prints or large inkjet images? A gallery will show what it hopes it can sell, art is a business after all.

 

 

An old wedding photographer friend I used to help sometimes once told me..'If you can't make them good....make them big' ;-)

 

 

CP Goerz

I saw the show last July at the Weston Gallery in Carmel, and was sufficiently impressed to purchase the catalog.

 

That said, there are a couple of things about these images that don't sit well with me. The first is that they are really large. We all know that bigger is better (Proof, you ask? Well, we use LF.) But there is a point where bigger becomes overpowering. I saw a very large "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM) in New Orleans many years ago. It was neat - and it had a $45K price tag on it. Very impressive, but the gallery was just too small to be able to appreciate something that large.

 

The other thing relates to the subject matter. I was very impressed with the technical quality of the Hooper prints I saw in Carmel - I know that in my own work, images that involve that much blank sky inevitably have all kinds of flaws that make them absolutely miserable to print and spot, and I saw no evidence that Hooper had to go through any of that torture. But they generated the same response as a show I saw of Joel Meyerowitz "Bay Sky" images - ho hum. There's almost too little there to maintain my attention.

Well the images on the website, as a collection, did not seem too bad to me. There were some that were quite booring but others I enjoyed. Perhaps seeing 4x5 prints close-up made for a different experience.

I tend to think of prints in terms of how they would look on the walls of my home. Smaller than 8x10 tends to get lost, while anything larger than 16x20 overpowers a room. Obviously prints 4x5 feet are intended for a much larger space, such as an office building, and are presumably intended as such and probably priced accordingly. Richard, didn't you like any of the images at all?

I greatly prefer them to the usual Adams/Weston clones and the western-landscape-on-velveeta crowd.

I would not buy any of the prints.

 

Even I can do better if I were at those locations and have the time and resources at my disposal.

I know Chip and think very highly of him, and I'm also represented by Tatar

Gallery so maybe my POV is a bit biased. I've seen the show, I really liked it.

What Chip has done is not the usual type of photography. It is very subtle, I

can understand that there might not be enough "fireworks" in these images to

hold the attention of some, but that is part of the point as far as I can tell. He's

going for quiet images, that's also consistent with the kind of quiet that you

can sense on a shore on a foggy or windless day. The Pacific coast is home

for Chip, his prints reflect that peacefulness and serenity.

 

There was a negative comment made here about the print quality, maybe

that's because it's not the standard every shade from black to white type

prints. I can tell you from experience that it is far harder to produce prints of

such subtlety than it is to produce prints of boldness. Having seen the prints, I

thought the print quality was truly excellent.

 

As for the size, someone said that galleries want bigger prints because they

can charge more, in my experience this has not been the case. If there has

been any pressure that I have felt relating to making big prints, it has been

generated by the collectors, not the galleries. Chip chose to make big prints,

and I think that qualitatively they held up very well. However I believe his

work is available in much smaller sizes. I would guess that the bulk of his

sales might be the smaller sizes, however in a large room or a corporate

location, this size might be just the right thing.

 

Chip is very dedicated to his work, and I know for him it's the work, and his

family, that matters.

I thought they were pretty great stuff myself but then I like things understated. I thought the printing was exceptional. As others have said, printing with nothing but subtle tones of gray like many of these, rather than black, midtones, white, can be difficult to do. I thought the sunset one in particular was terrific - first sunset photograph I think I remember seeing that was of an unspectacular but very beautiful sunset. I bet that they look even better in the original, I suspect there's a lot of subtle tones that get lost on the web. I don't know how I'd like them as 4'x5'prints but I think they'd work great around 16x20.