Polish

<p>Supposedly you can't polish a turd, but in photography (and in many other areas, as well), turd-polishing is not only possible, it's often revered. As if a picture can be made to come to life by being perfectly in order and perfectly clean; arithmatic, scrupulous subtractings and addings, and balancings; "sharpness" as a central condition of pictorial value (an obssession brought to us by the same corporate people who made us paranoid about bad breath, B.O. and dandruff).</p>

<p>You start with a diamond. <em>Then</em> you polish. Polishing doesn't lead to diamonds.</p>

<p>Lest you think this is a sneak attack on modern/digital photography (not likely; I love digital and have no problem with "polishing" -- it's the turd part that bothers me) -- what prompted this rant was today's picture in my Met Museum calendar's picture-of-the-day for February 9, 2011. It's Edward Steichen's <em><a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/steichen_melpomene.jpg">Melpomene -- Landon Rives</a></em>, and it was made in 1904-05. While turning the page to today's image (it takes some fiddling), I was catching glimpses of it and thinking how lovely it was and how much I was going to enjoy looking at it. Which I did for about 30 seconds and then I was done. This is not normal for me. I can look at the worst snapshot for an hour or two, just enjoying wandering and wondering among/about the stuff that's in the picture. Good pictures, of course are even better than snapshots and can transport me in indefinite return "visits." This picture, this February 9, Steichen picture is immaculately executed, compositionally perfect in my opinion (Steichen was no amateur). And, to my eye, that's part of the problem. It is exactly, completely right but there's no depth. He's polished the life right out of it (if there ever was any in this arrangement). The only part that I kind of like is the two little dots of light above the woman's right hand.</p>

<p>[if you're wondering, "Melpomene" is one of nine Greek Goddesses, all daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who had as her domain the art of Tragedy. "Landon Rives" is the (real) name of the woman in the picture -- a friend of Steichen's. Link to the photograph is <a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/steichen_melpomene.jpg">http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/steichen_melpomene.jpg</a> ]</p>

<p>I look at this and don't see immaculate or compositional perfection. I mostly see expression and gesture. I'm captivated by the whites of her eyes. The light and space seem to complement her gaze, almost making me feel my own eyes as I'm seeing hers.</p>

<p>This is a lousy rendition of the photo, so I got out my Steichen book. Except for a very few of the portraits, "sharp" is not a criticism I would have leveled at Steichen. I agree with you that over-sharpening is certainly a problem in today's world of photography. Emphasis on sharp lenses and unrefined usage of various sharpening mechanisms in post processing seems in vogue, often not reflecting the softness and blending of edges with which my world is seen.</p>

<p>I like the way his portraits, this one included, seem to play off and even in some sense create an architecture. Here the light, shadow, the mask on the wall are all participating in that. I think of many of Steichen's portraits as a play between gesture/expression and space. I find a lot of depth in that.</p>

<p>There's a directness, but I don't see that as overly polished. There's a posed sense of drama, but I don't think he's pretending for this to be otherwise. I like the two lights as you do. My guess is that if you put this up for critique on PN, you'd get several suggestions to clone them out because they're "distracting." LOL.</p>

<p>Certainly, it's neither a messy nor a particularly candid photo. That's OK.</p>

<p>Thanks for the different perspective, Fred. I am hoping for just such because I'm sort of puzzled by my reaction to this picture ... which seems to be getting worse as the picture stares at me from my desk ... It just seems completely empty/superficial to me. I can't get "into" it to wander around.</p>

<p>Also, as you intuited, I didn't mean the sharpness remark for Steichen. That's the last thing I'd accuse him of (and I admire many of his other photographs; I don't mind his painterly efforts, which are often criticized for being non-photographic).</p>

<p>I don't know how much your polishing relates to pictorialism, besides your example of the Steichen photograph. From Tashen's <em>Camera Work, The Complete Photographs</em> :</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"The pictorialists believed that photography was not about the recording of documentary facts nor was it a vehicle for trying to recreate works of art (something many Victorian photographers had attempted), but was a means of creating a new, purely photographic reality. This was a reality that could only made to exist in a photograph, experienced through the photographer's own personal vision and sublimated and brought into existence by his mastery of the specific technology. The technology served the photographer, not the other way round. The camera was merely the implement used to tranfer the photographer's vision onto the world. It was the be-all, not the end-all. To record the photographer's impressions of these facts, a wide variety of lenses, negatives and manipulated techniques were used, including drawing, etching, painting and schratching both negatives and prints."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Maybe with ( too ) <em>polished</em>, you mean, too much being about the photographer's own "manipulated" impression of the scene, and to little being about the expression of the scene itself ?<br /> Or, how <em>Steiglitz</em> ( not Steichen ), after he broke with pictorialism, expressed his views on Paul Strand's photographs to be positively "unpolished" perhaps : <em>"His work is rooted in the best traditions of photography. His vision is potential. His work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely upon tricks of process....The work is brutally direct. Devoid of all flim-flam;devoid of trickery and of any 'ism'; devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public, including the photographers themselves."</em></p>

<blockquote>

<p>Emphasis on sharp lenses and unrefined usage of various sharpening mechanisms in post processing seems in vogue, often not reflecting the softness and blending of edges with which my world is seen. - Fred</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Perhaps still true for photographers but I think just as much can be said for de-emphasis of sharpness being in vogue, with all the I-phone apps mimicking the film holga aesthetic, images instantly being polished for that look. I've seen more and more of those lately, many made by non-photographers.</p>

<p>On the idea of polish, sharpness, and the many other obsessions that plague the medium also give it a lot of room for diversity, which is rarely explored with the intent of actualizing one's vision, much more often to find a comfy berth on the photographic picket fence.</p>

<p>Adjacent to the idea of polish, and something I think many Steichen images suffer and benefit from is being <em>slick. </em>What's the difference? Maybe semantics, but to me polish implies a kind of deliberate nose-to-the-grindstone thing, while there is an effortless grace to being slick. I think Steichen was more of the latter than the former.</p>

<p>In the picture that Julie linked to this post (and I am at a cafe, away from my library, and thus stuck with the tiny pic) I see an inordinate amount of precision in the weighing of the picture elements in the composition, the daring of leaving such a large part of the field to a stygian void. To pick on some details...note how the upper slant of that shadow comes down to her right arm & sleeve, then goes up, forming a "V". That vee is repeated in her neckline (and echoed with an inverted V in her hair, forming, curiously, a diamond shape, and this second V (or diamond goes down her left arm, and up her forearm. The main of this composition is a "W". The round mask on the wall provides weight into the valley of the first V in the W. (Images of VWs dancing in my head), and the vertical formed by the junction of the two walls also precisely cleaves the second V of the W.</p>

<p>The part Steichen couldn't tie down was the life energies of his subject, which readily, in spite of her rigid pose and obvious collaboration, are distinctly not Steichen-esque and in many ways overwhelm -- and simultaneously synergize -- his iconizing vision. Compare this with the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron.</p>

<p>http://www.masters-of-photography.com/C/cameron/cameron.html</p>

<p>How very different they are. Hers are unpolished, and hardly slick. She was winging it, and the results are on the wing.</p>

<p>Different ways of working, different timespace/cultural coordinates, both masterful.</p>

<p>Ps. I also like the two highlights by the hand.</p>

<p>What do people polish pictures for? The polish that Julie mentions is all about signifiers that denote the conventions of a "good" picture.</p>

<p>I think the attempt to draw connections between "polish" and "Pictorial" fails to work for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Pictorialists had a specific and well-defined aesthetic and they were printers (didn't deal in mere "images").</p>

<p>Like painters, Pictorialists worked in physical media, including lithographs, platinum, gum bromoil etc. The prints were technically demanding, just as were the original plates/negatives. The prints were invariably and extensively " post-processed" physically (retouched), as were the plates/negatives (eg the <strong>cochineal</strong> commonly used exaggerate eye whiteness, as in <strong>Melpomene</strong>).</p>

<p>Pictorial imagery was concerned especially with emotional drama and nostalgia, ergo reference to deities, romantic reveries, history, death, eros, weather, and sadness (architects such as <strong>Bernard Maybeck</strong> in San Francisco, and craftspeople in various "crafts revivals" shared those concerns as contemporaries). <strong> </strong></p>

<p><strong>Phylo's reference to iPhone and Holga are very much to the point. </strong></p>

<p><strong>Fred G's </strong>work seems unintentionally related to Pictorialism.</p>

<p>Some of what appears to be unfinished or amateurish in iPhone and Holga is the direct result of an anti-materialist (or similar) aesthetic.</p>

<p>Many "art school" MFA photo idealists are working with iPhone and Holga specifically to get away from their uncles' tiresome obsession with ultimate optics and narrow SLR/DSLR frame of reference. And of course, the MFAs do print...since since they want their work in galleries along with the work of their painter/sculptor/performance compatriots.</p>

<p>See the link below to a Pictorial group. There isn't much participation but Pictorial ideas are touched upon and the "Photos" section is illustrative. Few of these images seem to me to be fully representative of "Pictorialism" since that had more to do with people-pictures and less with "scenic" IMO. My own contributions are really questions and the merest online post-processed "images" (unprinted)...the other folks, especially <strong>Marco Milazzo</strong> (see his images) actually make fine alternative-process prints (which is historically part of Pictorialism).</p>

<p><strong>http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/pictorial_photography/?yguid=184339898</strong></p>

<p> </p>

<p>Phylo's and Luis's responses lead me to an idea of "genericness." There is no "sharpness" or "softness" absent a context, a subject, a scene, a particular photograph. When "sharpness" is the goal in itself, regardless of what is being made sharp, it becomes more a trend than a decision. What does "nice DOF" mean? "I like that you were able to get the background blurry and the subject in focus"? Well, sure, maybe somewhat of an accomplishment. Means the camera operator knew he could set a certain combination of shutter speed and F-stop and get "an effect." But it's the <em>integration</em> of the DOF, the sharpness, the bokeh, the grain, the color tweaking, the saturation level, the high contrast, that I tend to look for/at and that may be what we're all talking about. As Luis put it, can't we sense a difference when looking at a photo between the photographer "actualizing a vision" and the photographer who is on the photographic "picket fence" (utilizing the latest and greatest photographic tool for no other reason than he/she can)?</p>

<p>I think it's not so much <em>whether</em> we use conventions and incorporate the familiar or even the cliché, but <em>how</em> we do so. It's often very clear when defaults are used and choices or commitments aren't made. It's also often clear when the goal is strictly to make a good picture. That's when symbols and signifiers can ring hollow. When a vision, rather than a good picture, is being pursued, the symbols and signifiers usually fall much more into place.</p>

<p>Here's that Pictorial group link: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/pictorial_photography/?yguid=184339898</p>

<p>Signifiers are conventions that often connote qualities in a picture. When people look at the work of masters, or those who get great ratings on PN, kudos on Flickr, etc., without an understanding of what is going on, they default to the parts they do understand: Usually, the most superficial.</p>

<p>Lusting after a spot on the picket fence, though most of us need to do that at some time in our lives, and hopefully figure out why it doesn't work, is an error. It leads nowhere because it is a longing for quorum nonsense. It has nothing to do with <em>you. </em>It is <em>mimesis, </em>the echoing and ensuing simulation of an extant formula. The idea that if one's pictures fulfill certain requirements will make them great reduces photography to the status of a game, with rules, specific goals etc. This is OK for duffers, a lot of commercial work, where expectations are often specified and met, and a few others.</p>

<p>It is the integration of a lot of things -- with one's own vision. By that I do not mean something that (as I've actually heard people who should know better say) can be put into one sentence, or even the much-despised artist's statement. While some Modernist art, lots of conceptual art, and almost all propaganda art is reducible to one sentence or one meaning/concept, most art is capable not merely of communicating a single (or few) ideas to the viewer, but <em>generating </em>a multiplicity of ideas in viewers.</p>

<p>I often find that good art goes well beyond any of its maker's explanations. This is not due to any inadequacy on the part of language, or artists, but to the way art can work. To use an example most here are familiar with, the work of Fred G. Yes, its primary emphasis is on aging gay men how this affects their body image, dealing with the changes of middle age (and older) how they are viewed by others, and more. I find a lot of other things in Fred's work. As a sextagenarian straight man, I feel more than a kinship with the men in his work. <em>They are me, and I am them.</em> Yes, we live in somewhat different cultures, but are going through a very similar process. Mortality is an integral part of this, and the negotiations we mentally indulge in our heads with the idea. In a youth-centered culture (and I have a high opinion of today's kids), this is a significant issue.</p>

<p>[Personal note: Recently, I was shocked when a gorgeous 20-something acquaintance made me a grandly indecent proposal. My first thought, besides disbelief, was: Poor thing...she must <em>really </em>miss her grandfather!] :-)</p>

<p>The frequent interior backgrounds found in Fred's work offer other insights into the subjects depicted. The interiors, the space and how the subjects react to or live in it, the personal sediments as seen in the objects within the room. And they are also about San Francisco in the early 21st century. There's also a kind of existential quality in several of these pictures, and much, much more. </p>

<p>It's what we do, how, and <em>why. </em>What are we polishing? To what end? Is it just to make it shiny? To get off? So it looks the way <em>it should?</em> If all we're doing is going through the motions, why bother?</p>

<p><em> </em><br>

<em> </em><em> </em></p>

 

<p>I too have looked at this image for only 30 seconds, but I know that I will look at it longer. Why? Not because of its polish or apparent slickness (that doesn't bother me and I don't notice that aspect) or its obvious set-up, but for its brilliant use of negative space (the dark and even the light areas, the latter disrupted only by the punctum of the mask) and the positioning of the girl and her arms and the balance of the negative space masses and those of the girl in relation to all. It seems to me very unlike Steichen. It is not meant I think to portray some (apparently) natural moment as with Cameron (impossible for her to freeze small moments, in view of the technology limitations of her time) but to carry the photo into a different realm, pre-conceived (and why not), but artfully so. One wishes that Steichen had pursued that aspect of his vision, as much as his other more familiar work.</p>

<p>Luis, one quick reaction (as I'm absorbing what you've said and appreciating the depth and seriousness you bring to my work). I often applaud those artists and writers who are not concise. Pithiness takes us only so far. Summaries and succinctness often lack a kind of fullness. Photographs and paintings and musical pieces and architecture and dance and theater are more like <em>pi</em> than like a whole number. The significance is in the dot-dot-dot of open-endedness, the indulgence of possibility, not always expressible in a concise statement. Though I do talk about my own work in various situations, I often feel regret about those words because they seem to pin something down that's not of the character to be pinned down. There's often a false sense of completion attributed to what should be given more as a suggestion than a conclusion.</p>

<p>A photograph is inescapably concise. What we bring to it may or may not be concise, and probably won't be if the image is "significant." In that case what we write will refer to our response to that photograph more than to ourselves. The more convoluted that written response the less likely it is to reflect that significance, the more likely it is to be invention. IMO.</p>

<p>fwiw viewing time of individual photographs by gallery-goers is frequently timed in studies (perhaps first at RIT?). </p>

<p>The 30-second investment mentioned by Arthur P is longer than most, and he will undoubtedly invest more time. The photograph itself remains concise but Arthur's time makes it more valuable, more significant. And I think his response, because it will be generous, will be as concise as his reference to the 30 seconds. Of course, Arthur writes in order to share what he sees and thinks... he's rarely the subject of his own posts.</p>

<p> <strong> </strong></p>

 

<p>The reason I consider Arthur generous is not because he is rarely the subject of his own posts. Arthur doesn't seem to mind self awareness and sharing that. Arthur seems generous because characterizations of others are rarely the subjects of his posts, though the work and ideas of others often are.</p>

<p>[Quick apologies to Arthur and Julie]</p>

<p>Arthur, I used you to make a point about something and someone else. That's transparent and unfair. You don't seek and don't deserve that kind of attention. I'm sorry.</p>

<p>Julie, this is a fine thread. I don't want to hijack it and make it about writing or personalities. Sorry.</p>

<p>Fred and John, don't worry if I am somtimes an unwitting subject of your bi-lateral exchanges. It's for me like water on a duck's back, as I know it is either not very serious, or if so it is unrelated to the topic at hand, so I smile and go on. As one who is not smooth and rounded, but with some perceptible hard edges, I would say that my only generosity is to accept the occasional similar hard edges of fellow debaters. Those facets are indeed useful, just as a tool often cannot shape without one or more of them. </p>

<p>Julie, I also like the thread. It incites some reflection, which I hope I will find some time to do myself before it ends (I am mulltitasking at present - yes, men also can occasionally do that...) </p>

<p>Arthur and I typically arrive close enough to the same page.</p>

<p>We write so differently substantially (or at least partially) because he thinks first in French, which does make his English charming if demanding. I, on the other hand, have been trained in scientific writing (research psychology) and have written many bios as a professional service...readability and honesty are my idea of written virtue. Sorry.</p>

<p>And of course, "Catch 22." ex-PFC Wintergreen addressed all this: http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Ex-PFC_Wintergreen</p>

<p>I saw <strong>"a bout de soufle"</strong> again last night. I'll bet everybody here has. Oui? </p>

<p>Crucial film, amusingly and effectively translated (Arthur, do you agree?). A brilliant collection of concise, telling moments and visual snippets. Those are interesting of themselves, many might be easily edited to still photos, but together they constitute what seems a ninety-minute- but-concise depiction of a certain state of mind at a certain time for a certain kind of person (amoral early 60s American and wannabe-American in Paris). Concise.</p>

<p>It would be easy to inflate what I just said to include quotations from various forgotten cinema critics and obscure academic luminaries, but I'd rather risk dialogue by exposing my presumably eccentric thinking. </p>

<p>(fwiw, Mozart's clarinet noodles in that fillum...a ploy to add a hint of "aesthetic sensitivity")</p>

<p>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=154265816642125228#</p>

 

<p>..that is of course "a bout de souffle" ( 2 f )</p>

<p>And this review is toooo concise: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053472/</p>

<p>Porządku. A teraz wracając do tematu wątku, proszę, zamiast robić to w jeszcze jeden gnój polerowane o pisaniu.</p>

<p>Babylon 9 online translates Phylo's "Polish" :<br>

<br />Order. And now turning to the subject weft, please, rather than do so in one more dung polished on point.</p>

<p>Could be more clear. Maybe use Google translator...</p>

<p>Google: </p>

Gesundheit! And now back to de topic thread, bitte, instead of noch eine weitere Polish language turd avoiding photography.

<p>Strange. If I translate it with Google it translates to :</p>

<p>Order. And now back to the topic thread, please, instead of doing it in another polished turd about writing. </p>

<p>That clears it up.</p>

<p>So, Steichen strikes me as a scrupulous photographer, much in the sense that Luis described above, which I see as a combination of precision and grace, effort that pays off with a sense of effortlessness. The attention to additions and subtractions, to balance and counterpoint, to expression and the way it plays with and against dimension, especially as evidenced in many of his portraits of musicians, seems to pay off. There is definitely precision in the photos of <a href="http://www.stokowski.org/images/stokowski1927_steichen.jpg">Stokowski</a>, <a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_xKjsm4frHvk/R_xpF8pEMRI/AAAAAAAAANg/jPgY0Tb7N1E/s1600-h/jascha-heifetz-1928.jpg">Heifetz</a>, and <a href="http://www.mutualart.com/Images/2010_03/22/0010/819385/129137565302503182_66256134-cc36-451f-86eb-254a837919ba_67760_273.Jpeg">Maurice Chevalier</a>. And why shouldn't there be? He makes music with these pictures. And each of these men had their own kind of precision and polish to recommend them.</p>

<p>There seems to be a scrupulousness of a different character in many of his softer portraits of women and in his nudes. A scrupulousness of gaze, of drawing the viewer into that gaze, of composition and subtle layering, of adorning his subjects with suggestions, of including just enough, of allowing my eye freedom within his frames.</p>

<p>[Julie, I don't suspect you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in that I don't hear you saying that scrupulousness in itself is a negative and should be avoided. But I'm not sure from your description if you feel he may have over-polished something that had potential and which he should have left alone or if you feel he had a turd of a photo to begin with that no amount of polishing could have helped.]</p>

<p>In Steichen's 12 portraits in "Famous Portraits" ed Fritz Gruber 1960 (a wonderful, well designed and well reproduced large format collection of about 50 photographers, late 19th/early 20th), most are heavily retouched, with dramatic heavy engraving slash "effects" on several. Two or three repeating poses, as would be expected from a studio portraitist (one of the reasons Weston abandoned that sort of work for Mexico...see Daybook I).</p>

<p>In his self portrait Steichen is a painter with brush and palate, making an obvious point.</p>

<p>Dramatic, simple, overt "composition," huge solid black areas, a few dignified facial expressions. Little distinctive facial study: he does great work with beautiful faces, not as well with Churchill (for example) . His fashion photography was advanced for his era, not terribly far behind his successors, Penn and Avedon.</p>

<p>The strongest work in this book include, for me, Irving Penn's Malraux and his Colette and his Stravinsky, Cartier Bresson's Sartre, Avedon's Ezra Pound, and Bert Stern's Eartha Kitt. All of these photographers better engage / depict the individuality of subjects (less intentionally monumental than Steichen..has to do with the technology of the respective eras). Not incidentally, HCB/Stern/Avedon/Penn's work blossomed in the era that supplanted Steichen's Pictorial stylings. Time marches along, leaving its marks.</p>

<p> When I was in the Army we used to spit shine (polish) our shoes. It was a source of pride to get your shoe looking just right. Now the Army has those shiny girly shoes. Yuk!</p>