How to write about one particular picture

<p><em>"Art-criticism, like art, should furnish something more and better than we can expect from life without it. What might that be?"</em> — Peter Schjeldahl, 2011</p>

<p>The basic aims of good art writing are to explain and/or evaluate. For example, here is Jonathan Bayer talking about one of Ben Shahn's pictures of Ozark sharecroppers (see the picture <a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1f/97/b8/1f97b82f357efb17c843197ebb41248b.jpg">here</a> and <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-15uFa-k7C08/UbiW3HSrecI/AAAAAAAAghs/qj7MQc0-v5I/s1600/Ben+Shahn+-+Wife+and+child+of+sharecropper,+Arkansas,+1935.jpg">here</a>; both reproductions are not great; sorry!):</p>

 

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<p>"Shahn's picture of an Ozark sharecropper family can give the bizarre sensation that the child is more doll-like than the doll and that it is the doll that is the child of poverty. This in no way detracts from the wonderful face of the mother, from the Virgin Mary and Child allusion of the composition, nor from the intricacy of the lines centered around the mother's hands. But one returns to the amazing similarity of the mother's lively face looking off one way and the doll's with a matching intentness looking off in the other direction. It is the doll that shows the same lively twinkle as the mother while the baby is hauntingly lifeless and anomic."</p>

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<p>.</p>

<p>Or consider this sample (extracted from a larger piece) from John Szarkowski, writing about Dorothea Lange's <em>Back</em>, 1938 (<a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/70/e7/08/70e708b5ce422a3be85951c7f7b64400.jpg">see it here</a>):</p>

 

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<p>"Lange made several fine photographs of men's backs, but none more moving than this one. The man's posture is open and vulnerable and evocative of some other half-recollected memory, perhaps of prisoners of war, or burlesque dancers, or Saint Sebastian."</p>

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<p>What do you like or dislike about those examples?</p>

<p>In these first examples, I've chosen to focus on emotional responses rather than compositional description/evaluation. Don't worry, I'll get to that soon enough.</p>

<p>If you have examples of good writing about particular pictures, please post them! Be sure to <strong>include a link to the picture that is being written</strong> about. And please, please, <em>choose only examples of writing about <strong>one, particular picture</strong></em>.</p>

 

<p>I remember the advice from my art history professor from well over 50 year ago. Ask and answer these three questions: What was the artist trying to do? (If you can't tell, that is important) How well did they do it? Was it worth doing in the first place?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>In <em>How to Write About Contemporary Art</em>, Gilda Williams says that there are three jobs for "communicative art-writing":</p>

 

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<p>1 What is it?<br>

<em>(What does it look like? How is it made? What happened?)</em><br>

Keep your description of the art brief and be specific.</p>

<p>2 What might this mean?<br>

<em>(How does the form or event carry meaning?)</em><br>

Join the dots; explain where this meaningful idea is observed in the artwork itself.</p>

<p>3 Why does this matter to the world at large?<br>

<em>(What, finally, does this artwork or experience contribute -- if anything -- to the world? Or, to put it bluntly, <strong>so what</strong>?)</em><br>

Keep it reasonable and traceable to jobs 1 and 2.</p>

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<p>With another cup of coffee, I think I could tie those three to E.J.'s three. Most important is the last one: <em><strong>So what?</strong></em></p>

 

<p>I think there's a difference between viewing art and writing about it. The writer tends to be overly superfluous. It's as if they have to say something, and the more fancy words they write the more self- importance they want to project. A lot of ego is on the line. The average viewer does not get so involved. They look, smile or not, and move on. It's only a picture, after all. And the photo and its photographer are really not that important. </p>

<p>Alan, in this thread, please post "one particular" example of what you're talking about along with a link to the picture it describes. Thanks.</p>

<p><strong>sWriter</strong>: The artist here is trying to assuage his feelings of remorse about the nasty things that happened in his life. One can imagine that by the scene how he probably was deprived. The rich ambiance of the trees and gazebo along with the pink glow of God's creative light was found by the artist in his deep soul of need. One wonders if he pushed the boundaries of credible saturation. The structure and balance of the composition creates a smooth feeling of peace in probably him but that is extended to the viewer who can feel serenity as well. However, the extent of water at the bottom surely reflects that he still has doubt about his wholeness in the world.<br /> <strong>Viewer:</strong> Nice picture. Very pretty colors and winter scene. Makes me feel good.<br /> <img src="https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7296/11854936794_809e2372fc_c.jpg" alt="" /><br /> Photo by Alan Klein.</p>

<p>Alan, the writer (you) doesn't meet any of the goals that both E.J. and Gilda Williams suggested. Thanks for a good example of bad writing.</p>

<p>In my opinion, there's not much to say about that picture. I wouldn't write about it at all, which is what you already suggested. We agree, then.</p>

<p>I'm hurt that you didn't like my picture. Even a little? But that's Ok because your view is an honest statement of what you felt, not some contrived description by an art critic who gets paid by the number of words. </p>

<p>I was going to start another thread based loosely on the premise Julie put forth with this topic. And that being if it's even possible to recognize "craft" by the photographer in a photo.</p>

<p>Or is the craft determined by the interpretation of the viewer which in this case is by the author in their writing about it? Craft in composition. Craft in being mindful enough to see the scene is important or interesting enough to photograph. Craft in post processing, cropping, etc. Craft in telling a story in a still photo. Craft in injecting or bringing out nuance in what we'ld know from looking at the subject isn't normally in such scenes.</p>

<p>I don't have any images to link to that are written about compellingly by good writers, so I'll just see how this thread unfolds.</p>

<p>One of the nice things about writing poetry is not being constrained by guidelines. This was inspired by the photo, shot in 1997. Regardless of what anyone else may say or write, it still resonates with me, and that's what matters.</p>

<p><strong>Country Road</strong></p>

<p>It was a fair trade:<br>

I took a bit of the road's dust<br>

Away on my boots<br>

And left a piece of my heart<br>

In its place.<br>

The dust is long gone<br>

From my boots<br>

A I am long gone<br>

From that forest<br>

But a part of me beats on<br>

In that country road.</p>

<p><img title="?" src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/18307076-sm.jpg" alt="?" width="199" height="130" border="0" /></p>

<p>PS: Hey, Alan - Nice shot! ;-)</p>

<p>William brings up a good question. How much "range" do you like to see in writing about, or maybe more truly, starting from a picture?</p>

<p>Here, for example, is Szarkowski talking about Clarence John Laughlin's <em>The Language of Light</em>, 1952 (<a href="http://nasher.duke.edu/lightsensitive/img/laughlin.jpg">see it here</a>):</p>

 

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<p>"Any child abed in lazy and luxurious convalescence from measles or chicken pox, half-drunk with tea and hot lemonade, learns that the space between the window shade and the casement is a magic place, populated by spirits that cast their shifting, liquid shadows on the screen and tap out their secret messages on the window frame. Once each of us was open to such dramas of the senses, revealed in terms that were trivial and ephemeral: the reflection of the hand mirror on the dressing table, slowly tracing its elliptical course across the ceiling.</p>

<p>"Many of us forget the existence of such experiences when we learn to measure the priorities of practical life; some of us remember their existence but find that in the light of day they have become as shy and evasive as the hermit thrush ... "</p>

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<p>Notice that Szarkowski has said nothing directly about the picture at hand. Do you like that, or find it unwarranted? (I like it!)</p>

<p>Tim, I'm glad to see your "here." Craft will be brought in, very much in subsequent posts. Today seems to be about where a picture takes one rather than about how it's being made.</p>

<p>William, Nice shot. Nice poem. I think it's easier to express oneself in writing, especially poetry than photographically. Getting a good, meaningful picture is hard. That's why people apply special filters, HDR, and all kinds of effects to their photos. To jazz them up to give an appearance of depth and soul. Sometimes it works; often it doesn't. Thanks for your appreciation of my photo. Julie was tough on me and I needed an "<em>atta boy</em>". </p>

<p>Julie, I think Szarkowski's writing was a hundred times more eloquent then the photo. That's not fair to the artist. I think critics are often more in love with their writing about art then art itself. </p>

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<p>Julie, I think Szarkowski's writing was a hundred times more eloquent then the photo. That's not fair to the artist. I think critics are often more in love with their writing about art then art itself.</p>

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<p>They sure can get you to want to buy the art. Maybe they should attach that Szarkowski's quote on the back of that photo. The price would most likely skyrocket. Doesn't hurt to have a hard to spell European name to add panache and credibility as well.</p>

<p>But yeah, Julie, I immediately related to Szarkowski's take on that beautiful but simple Laughlin capture of dancing light on drapes. The author's writing immediately took me back to my having to take a one hour nap at my German grandma's house during summers in the mid 1960's before my brother and I could go swimming at the Lion's Park pool. Couldn't go to sleep and just ran my hands through the curtains similar to that photo, watching the light form different patterns. The dramas of the senses back then were really intense as I remember.</p>

<p>Beautiful. Just beautiful. How can anybody not love this kind of writing? (Especially thank you for more Szarkowski. I wasn't sure how much more of his I could add; now it's your fault. Thank you!)</p>

<p>I'll get into the chess game of composition tomorrow morning when my brain is working (it peters out at about noon).</p>

<p>Give us some more, Phil ... </p>

<p>I'll bite. Here's a photo where I think the short critique does more to add to enhance the photograph than anything the photographer might have said. The commentator is photo.net member Billy K (Billy Kendrick) a photographer who's photos are as poetic as they are visual. His comment did more to inform me of what I was actually shooting in a series than I could articulate myself. </p>

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<p>i like the images in this series- they seem like mediations on absence. yet the images remain compelling- while the viewer goes searching for something 'meaningful'.</p>

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<p>and here's the pic. It was one of the most meaningful (to me) remarks that any ones said about a photo of mine. Sorry i picked one of my own, but it was the closest example of what Julie seems to be after that I could think of..<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/11039643-lg.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p>Barry, the problem I have with Billy K's comment is that, while it gives permission, which is lovely (like the glorious "Once upon a time ... " beginning that is so always delicious), it then ... leaves.</p>

<p>It's sort of like a pick-you-own-fruit farm that says, come and get it! it's in here somewhere, but we won't tell you where! Or a flat-pack box from Ikea that comes with the instructions: "Search for something meaningful!"</p>

<p>Composition 1:</p>

<p>This is Meyer Schapiro writing about <a href="http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/web-large/DT1977.jpg">Uncle Dominic as a Monk, ~1866</a>:</p>

 

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<p>"... Painted in the solitude of the family estate near Aix, it is the image of a strong, fleshy person who strives to contain his passions through the religious habit -- it encloses the somber, powerful head yet allows the body to show its fullness -- and through the self-inhibiting gesture, a crossing or reversal of the hands, which is a kind of resignation, a death of the self.</p>

<p>"The opposites of the sensual and the meditative, the expansive and self-constraining, are well expressed here. The color is imbued with the pathos of the conflict. A scheme of white, grey, and black plays against the ruddiness and earthen tones of the flesh. We pass from white to black through a cold series of bluish tones and a warm series of yellows, reds, and browns.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] The cold, piercing gleam of blue in the neckpiece brightens the whole. The execution, rude and convinced, is of a rare vehemence, even ferocity, like an Expressionist painting; the palette knife is its chief instrument, raising a relief of thick pigment. Within the common intensity of the paint each large area has is own texture and rhythm of handling.</p>

<p>"The conception has a certain grandeur through its simplicity. The figure fills the space to bursting, but is also rigid. The starkness of the form is moving. The dark spots of the face and hands are like three leaves on the common stem of the axis marked by the cross. This cross, in line with the vertical of the left sleeve and tying the head to the hands, is part of a longer double-armed cross formed by the lines of the left hand and sleeve -- a remarkable invention that points to later works in which such continuities of neighboring objects are a constructive, anti-dramatic device.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] The projecting tip of the hood is a sensitive point, prolonging and narrowing the head and displacing its axis -- a vaguely spiritual, even Gothic suggestion; it is like the pointed tips of the hands, through which these are further assimilated to the head."</p>

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<p>Composition 2:</p>

<p>This is Tina Dickey writing about the students of the painter/teacher Hans Hofmann:</p>

 

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<p>" ... 'Every work must show an inner necessity,' Hofmann told the class. Tension is energy, and energy inherently expands. In a 1948 critique, he observed, 'Nothing is good that looks nailed together. It grows not.' He called the realization of tension the '<em>kunstlerisch</em> [artistic] moment, the very thing that gives life to a picture.' Expansion -- the free movement of energy -- Hofmann likened to breath. ... Students learned to recognize a bad painting, Ken Jacobs recalled, as: 'inert, clogged ... Airless.'</p>

<p>"Hofmann explained to his Munich students, 'The picture surface is ... but a flat, simple, dead plane. The task is to bring it to life. Upon it, form is to be created in such a manner that it awakes in the observer a three-dimensional, in other words, plastic quality.'"</p>

<p>" ... 'No matter how you paint, there is always an invisible center,' [James] Gahagan observed. In order to orient itself, the mind projects a center onto any shape. 'It's the way we stand up,' Gahagan explained. 'We live with gravity and the relationship of the vertical, resisting gravity, to the horizontal.'</p>

<p>" ... Returning to <a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/stout_untitled01.jpg">the Stout painting [Myron Stout, <em>Untitled</em>, ca. 1952-53]</a> Gahagan noted how the edges of the white shapes had been worked and reworked intuitively: "He's trying to see torque, he's trying to see energy ... . That's when the 'felt experience' is three-dimensional.' But staring into the black between the two whites, you can begin to sense it twist in response to the whites. 'You've got to see the black as if it were black ink or black milk,' Gahagan said. 'Any movement in the whites is going to make the black water in between move and shift and change its shape. That's plasticity.'"</p>

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<p>In case you glance at <a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/stout_untitled01.jpg">the Stout picture</a> and think, geez, my five-year-old could have done that, take another look with Dickey's comments in mind.</p>

<p>Compare the Stout to my snap, below that's kind of similar in its components. Look at the Stout, look at mine, look at the Stout, look at mine. His is outstanding. Mine is a snap (it really is -- it's two holes in tree bark; quick, fun, and as thin in affect as the half-second it takes to glance at it).</p>

<p>.<br>

<img src="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/twoholed_inbark.jpg" alt="" width="461" height="700" /></p>

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<p>Barry, the problem I have with Billy K's comment is that, while it gives permission, which is lovely (like the glorious "Once upon a time ... " beginning that is so always delicious), it then ... leaves.</p>

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<p>And this is why it's such a good comment. Billy suggests absence. And then ... leaves. </p>

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<p>They sure can get you to want to buy the art. Maybe they should attach that Szarkowski's quote on the back of that photo. The price would most likely skyrocket. Doesn't hurt to have a hard to spell European name to add panache and credibility as well.</p>

<p>But yeah, Julie, I immediately related to Szarkowski's take on that beautiful but simple Laughlin capture of dancing light on drapes. The author's writing immediately took me back to my having to take a one hour nap at my German grandma's house during summers in the mid 1960's before my brother and I could go swimming at the Lion's Park pool. Couldn't go to sleep and just ran my hands through the curtains similar to that photo, watching the light form different patterns. The dramas of the senses back then were really intense as I remember.</p>

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<p>Tim: Let's see Lookingbill is an interesting sounding name as well, more expansive than Klein. Maybe I can get you to sign the back of my photos. But I would prefer the complete Timothy, not the shortened Tim. </p>

<p>Speaking of senses when I was a kid, you brought back memories of me lying on my back at night and watching the streaks of moving lights created by the venetian blinds when cars' headlights would pass by. It was if the lights had a body and mind of their own, traveling across the ceiling suddenly coming to life at one end of the room and disappearing into oblivion at the other end...</p>

 

<p>I'm really enjoying the writing about Lange's <em>Back</em>. It's really getting me to see the picture in a new way.</p>

<p>**********</p>

<p>What to do when you find "something 'meaningful" in a picture. Should you try to write about it even if you know the right words won't come? Maybe you feel or see something "meaningful" in the Picture of the Week. What to do?</p>

<p>I wish you'd tell me about it, in whatever words you can find. Really good writing about pictures is hard to do and consequently not in abundance (in photography it's almost but not quite, Szarkowski, Szarkowski and more Szarkowski), so you'll be in very good company if you just hammer away at what you're trying to express.</p>

<p>To give heart, here is a published bit by Darsie Alexander, who is a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, trying to write about what I think is an interesting aspect of <a href="http://www.phaidon.com/resource/p35.jpg">Nan Goldin's picture, <em>The Hug</em></a>:</p>

 

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<p>"... Goldin amplifies the physical and psychological dimensions of <em>The Hug</em> by introducing a shadow to the left that almost swallows the lovers. On the one hand, this combined silhouette signifies their merge, and adds to the sense of their escape into a private space. On the other, it casts a pall over their moment, implying total self-annihilation.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] It is difficult to speak of shadows without using verbs that convey a sense of doom, since as entities they typically 'loom,' 'haunt' and 'hover.' This shadow extends into the space of their bodies, creating a giant, black void around their heads, suggesting lost consciousness as well as lost identity. Its darkness is particularly damaging to the wholeness of the man ... "</p>

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<p>... and she goes on, banging away at her target, too high, to far left, too low. But she keeps shooting till we get her point, blown to smithereens though it may be. A better writer would have done a clean shot in one or two sentences. Nevertheless, I am grateful to Alexander and to every other writer willing to make the attempt to get on paper or screen what they're feeling strongly inside. But I would also be grateful if they did learn how to write better. :)</p>

<p>Julie: her point may only be her imagination of what she sees in the picture, not what the photographer was trying to do or actually what the image implies. That's my belief. The photographer didn't overthink it. They saw it, compose it, and shot it. Art critics think they're psychologists trying to read the photographer's mind as if the photo was some sort of Rorschach image.</p>

<p>It's fun to write that way, and to read it. But it's really superfluous to most viewers in what they see and more so with the photographer's belief in what his own picture says. </p>

<p>The arm in the Goldin picture is what I'd always focused on -- and I agree it's vulnerable and predatory and all kinds of things all at once. Good stuff. But while I "saw" the huge shadow, but I never really thought about it. I like being made to think about things I hadn't thought about by myself.</p>

<p>*****************</p>

<p>Jumping back to my bark picture and your (Phil's) comment: "Stout - as a painter - could paint that energy and plasticity that Gahagan is talking about by being able to rework the shapes and edges of the white figures and their position relative to each other. You didn't have that option," made me think of the following from Vilém Flusser's book <em>Gestures</em> (took me a while to find a moment to dig it out):</p>

 

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<p>"The assertion that the photo apparatus is an extension and improvement of the human eye is therefore just a figure of speech. In the photographic gesture, the human body is so enmeshed with the apparatus as to make it pointless to assign either one a specific function.</p>

<p>[<em>line break added</em>] If one designates the instrument as a body whose movements depend on those of a human body (if, within the relationship "man-tool," we make the human body the constant and the tool the variable), it becomes almost pointless to define the apparatus as the photographer's tool. It would be no better to maintain that in the search for a position, the body of the photographer becomes the tool of the photo apparatus."</p>

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<p>Well, I think "searching for something meaningful" is possibly Billy's commentary on a certain paradigm of seeing, or viewing photographs. The very western idea of well defined subject and object relationship to focus on. And what he is talking about is another way of seeing or looking at. </p>