Plagens Again, Sam

[don_e]

This began in: Photography Is Dead. Long Live Photography, referring to this

article:

 

http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349/page/1

 

which ends with this:

 

"As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the

easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy

exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty

and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers?if there are to

be any?will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality.

And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way."

 

Imo, naturalism and realism, as opposed to idealism or symbolism, is extremely

rare in the visual arts (I only know the western tradition beginning with the

Athenians). It was a dominant aesthetic (but not the only one) in photography

for much of the previous century. The author sees it as either vanished or

vanishing in the 21st.

 

Do we (or some "next great photographer") need to reclaim photography's special

link? How would it be done? And what would be a "brand-new way" (and why a brand

new one)?

 

Btw, naturalism, realism, idealism, symbolism definitions are not the subject.

Check a dictionary, wikipedia, or your local library to discover their meanings

in the visual arts.

[anthony_r]

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/12/would_photograp.html

 

I swear they write this junk up once every year just to stir the pot. I agree with much of what

John says in the above link. In the end Who cares? and Let the discussion die.

[don_e]

Anthony, the manipulation and the digital/film debates are not what I intended. So, I think Nack's comments are not relevant (for that matter, neither are Plagen's on those things).

 

I think there is a turn away from realism in photography lately. That it might take the form of "manipulation" or "digital" is vastly uninteresting in light of the fact of it (if it is true).

 

The fact of it has historical parallels and may tell us something about our condition...perhaps a disinterest or avoidance of the banal realities of our daily lives? A desire for a better or more exciting world? If true, it indicates exhaustion with, and a turning away from, life, society, mortality -- our daily lives, and towards simulacra and fantasy.

[steve_swinehart]

Because photography is technology driven to a large extent, you find the aesthetics associated with photography change to explore the latest innovation in technology.

 

Today, the digital workflow remains unexplored. To a large extent, it is being used to replicate analog effects in a digital manner (a digital darkroom).

 

Explorations of the workflow will lead to new ways of presenting photographic images. Whether this includes "reclaiming photography's special link to reality" remains to be seen.

 

We'll know more in 10 - 20 years....in the mean time, to me, it's more important to try and make interesting images rather than fitting into someone else's self-defined aesthetic.

[mr. sullen]

From the article "The last art form to be tethered to realism." I quess my question would be when was photography ever tethered to realism?<br><br>"...the medium seems to have lost its soul." If this person is so disenchanted with photography then get out of it and take up dog grooming or something. Man, did people forget how to have fun in this world?<br><br>"...formerly bearers of truth..." truth in photography, I still don't get it.<br><br>"...but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality." Who made that calim? And if this is what the standard of how the great photographers of the world feel I guess I should just give up photography now, cut the creative and imaginative parts of my brain out, or maybe just get labotomised.<br><br>"...will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality." I think this lady should reclaim her "special link" to happiness and sense of enjoyment.

[don_e]

"I quess my question would be when was photography ever tethered to realism?" Shay

 

Whenever photographers choose to. Realism in the arts means to attempt an accurate representation rather than an idealization or symbolic associations. It's a matter of intention and not an issue of is it really really real anyway.

 

"...it's more important to try and make interesting images rather than fitting into someone else's self-defined aesthetic." steve

 

I agree, but don't know where having to fit into anything came from.

[justinblake]

In the beginning digital editing was used to accomplish things that would usually be done in a darkroom. Although an image was digitally edited it was still unmistakably a photograph. Digital image manipulation has evolved now into a new art form more akin to painting than photography. I have seen some wonderful images created on computers but many of them I would no longer consider photographs.

 

Traditional photography on the other hand can do things that computer edited images cannot. Traditional photography can be used to capture a moment in time, to prove that an object existed or that an event happened. Once an image is manipulated the validity of what it has recorded is called into question and it is no longer a valid historical record. The other thing that it can do is to take something, perhaps something that all of us have seen before, and show it to us in a different way. It gives the photographer the power to grab the viewer by the ears and point their head in the direction of the action. The viewer can be forced to look at something that is interesting, beautiful or disturbing. They can be forced to really look at something that before they may have only overlooked.

 

Neither art is "better" than the other and although their purposes do overlap somewhat neither could replace the other. We should stop trying to promote one at the detriment of the other and instead recognize both as significant.

 

Digitally manipulated art scares traditional photographers because so many of the younger generation are being drawn towards it rather than photography. Traditional photography scares the digital artist because it is the old king and digital art seeks to slay it and take its throne.

 

The sooner each faction stops fighting with the other the sooner each can get back to focusing on developing their art.

[Spearhead]

<i>Traditional photography scares the digital artist because it is the old king and digital art seeks to slay it and take its throne</i><p>I've never heard any "digital artist," if that's what you choose to call them, complain about traditional photography, act scared about traditional photography, or care what people say is or is not traditional photography. Artists move forward, work with the tools, embalmers get hung up on minute nuances of definition and determining who is part of which club.

[jtk]

Don, this is a much better thread than the earlier Plagens...some of the posts actually address the ideas he expressed.

 

Odd suggestion: see Golden Compass. It's a digital/real production, targeted especially at young adolescents and, despite its excesses, beautifully addresses some very tender and powerful concepts, one of which (an entirely new idea to me) has to do with the souls of children and what's involved in transitioning to adulthood.

 

I think this movie relates directly to your concerns...it uses the absolute highest level of digital animation to produce a believable alternative reality...and that alternative reality reflects back significantly on our walking-around reality. It's digitally bloated but it's also digitally shockingly beautiful, seductively unreal and totally real at the same time.

[jtk]

Jeff's quotation, his response and "embalming" comment are significant.

 

Traditional photography (fillum) has certainly been in a self-embalming glide path (wannabe Ansels and street-snappers in particular, IMO), but I think the ancient alternative processes (bromoil etc) are reopening aesthetic eyes that have been shut for a long time.

 

Similarly, digital work often takes its own self-embalming aesthetic path, doting on sci-fi weirdness and dehumanization (examples: the anti-erotic Barbi-Doll-perfection of girl/women via massive retouching and distancing emphasis upon superficial aspects of the elderly through Dragonizing).

 

Both approaches often go too far, or chase their own tails, going essentially nowhere.

 

As a film shooter, I don't think there's much future to my technology, but I'll continue to use it for a while longer to explore the domains that interest me. If that's "embalming," OK. However, I don't think there's any future to the DSLRs that currently seem the top of my potential, such as D300 or M8, so I'm not making that investment...a practical matter. But I'd do it in an instant if it had to do with my livelihood.

 

I'm certain, from Flikr, by contrast to Photo.Net galleries, that kids with cheap digicams and cellcameras will blaze more exciting trails than "serious" digital photographers, many of whom DO seem obsessed with traditional film imagery (going so far as to fake TriX! ), rather than using their vastly more expensive DSLRs to explore new visual ideas or behaviors, events, and phenomena in the world around them.

 

"New" seems the operative word...it can be big new (as on Flikr) or small, vaguely-dubiously-new, as in my own glacier-slow, wandering efforts.

[phyrpowr]

Just a couple of idle comments.

 

Plagens refers to "something real" in front of a (non-digital) camera, and Photoshop fairy tales. As astute an observer as Conan Doyle was led to believe there existed "faeries" by "real" glass plate negative photo manipulation, somebody did a movie on it a few years ago.

 

Cindy Sherman's self portraits are not "fictional", that's her.

 

Does the man even own a camera?

[Spearhead]

It's interesting that you mention alternative processes, because one of the first things I liked about digital printing is the ability to do alternative process-like printing. Being able to print on almost anhy paper without having to spread chemicals around, being able to change borders, effect hues, this opens up a lot of creative avenues. It's not being done as much as it could be, but it is happening.

 

Although I brought up "embalming" as a response to some unsupportable comments about photographic technology that someone made, it's also a problem with people who choose not to learn about, study, and understand the changes that have happened in photography over the last thirty years. HCB clones get more regard here than Cindy Sherman's innovative work here, for example. Is it because it's easier to go out and replicate HCB than to do something truly creative and ground-breaking? Might be, although it's hard to tell. The same thing happens with technological change in photography now.

 

Going back to the article, it's hard to tell if the obvious omissions from the history of photography are intentional or because the writer doesn't know that much about photography. Certainly the pictorialist movement was about disconnecting from reality, Mortensen really tried but was destroyed by Adams and cohorts in an effort to keep photography from moving ahead, even Avedon did things like cut-ups thirty years ago, and certainly Uelsmann and similar photographers were busy breaking down the "reality" connection. What has changed is that it has become quite a bit easier. Some people try to make it sound like this change in degree is unprecedented, but technology transitions in photography have always been marked by a change in ease-of-use, availability, and increasing democratization of the photographic process. Nothing is really new there, except that change happens faster now.

[jtk]

How does "own a camera" relate? Doesn't mere camera ownership encourage wankers who may communicate poorly (write poorly) or have no visual orientation, simply by making a purchase to elevate themselves to "photographers" or "artists?" Buy brushes and oils: ZAP! you're a painter :-)

 

Why would imperfect knowledge of "photo history" hurt Plagens observations about trends and tensions? If he "doesn't own a camera" (absurd..everybody does) doesn't that add weight (eg. objectivity) to his ideas? Aren't aesthetically oriented viewers and thinkers (Plagens writes well and paints) likely to be less constricted than snappers and historians?

 

Jeff spoke of "alternative process-like printing." That hyphenated phrase says : 1) the image "looks like" it was alternatively processed 2) it wasn't 3) the image-making process is insignificant 4) the object itself isn't important...all that matters is image (is "image" a print, a file, or...?)

 

#1 and #2 seem OK, unless falsely advertised/labeled.

 

#3 disagrees with what film-makers Vs videograpers, painters and sculptors regularly say: the medium itself is important. Are they wrong? Can't we envision creative differences between, say, hand-pulled photo silkscreen prints, gum bromoil, and Photoshop/inkjet that develop out of their different "processes?" Is Photoshop "the end of history?" :-)

 

#4 "looks like" : Platinum-like prints are fairly easy in inkjet, I've been impressed, but collectors reportedly pay a premium for the real thing...they apparently love contacted-printed platinum prints that increasingly originate with digicams, Photoshop, and inkjetted contact negatives. Reportedly collectors think the platinum process adds something. Are collectors important?

[don_e]

What Jeff wrote...from the instant photography (and movie making) were used someone was pushing against the perceived limits and towards the possibilities (One old term of art is 'joke photography' meaning double exposure, compositing, "ghost" images, faeirieland under ye olde oake...) -- which is why I think the photographer's intention is the issue, not digital or film, or any other technical consideration.

 

Compare Plagen's first paragraph to the last. In the first he has no problem noting that pound for pound and byte for byte most photographs are realistic...but this is naive photography. He waves bye-bye to all that and heads off to the museums to see art, discovering there's not a lot of realism there...that the shows do not reflect the "special link to reality" that is the metier of photography.

 

So, the art establishment today has little regard for realism. But when did it ever? Since the day the art establishment was founded (Beaux Arts) it has almost always everywhere preferred idealization or symbolic representation -- the bell pepper sublimated, the bell pepper gendered, the bell pepper with pop!, the consummation of all that is bell peppery...but not Marge slicing a bell pepper in the kitchen.

 

Plagens: "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888?1978...

celebrates average Americans who wielded their Brownies and Instamatics to stunning effect." So, back to the naive photographers and their effortless realism...

 

Outside of those too few moments when the art establishment-at-the-time recognized the artistic merit of realism, it is always appreciated retrospectively and is often confused with nostalgia. The snaps are full of interesting and curious things that once were ordinary, but now exotic, but the art establishment's photography of the same era often seems mannered and merely curious in comparision, no matter its artistic or technical merit.

 

So, perhaps photographers whose goal is realism should think not of the contemporary audience, but ones in the future. Contemporary audiences are often unimpressed by photos of ordinary things, no matter their artistic or technical merit. Such a photographer's audience lies in the future when the ordinary and banal have been transformed for others by time into what the photographer recognized when he or she released the shutter.

[fate_faith_change_chains]

I didn't knew it was easy to replicate HCB, if I did I would certainly have replicated him, just

for fun. Didn't knew it was hard to replicate Cindy Sherman , just thought it was nothing

more then putting the ego not behind but in front of the camera / work, no space for in-

betweens either. From what I've read in a book of Walker Evans, he wanted to show in his

photographs the total absence of ego, the ' just because ' of things, but with still a strong

personal vision that would guide that absence or ' just because ' . Isn't thàt the hardest

thing to do ? To

speak without telling.

[jtk]

Phylo, Evans apparently wanted to do what you said, but his work was presented with lots of telling. As for Sherman, more than just a photographer, she's committed to a concept ...to replicate her work, someone would have to invest decades ripping off her concept. Her individual images aren't the point as much as concept, and when her patrons buy her photos they're first buying into decades of her concept. Ansel can hang quietly in the living room, Sherman involves a lot of talk.

 

Don, you're right about "photographer's intention."

 

But "intention" and $.50 won't buy a good coffee: the merit of an image has to do with the photographer's personal capability...which includes his insight, his technique, his ability to deliver, and the medium in question (a snap of Vietnam Memorial and the Memorial itself have different merit).

 

I think we're talking of a complex of intention, skill ("goodness"), and medium. That suggests discussion of digital, film, video, lithography, writing, concept etc are all appropriate parts of a story like Plagens'...even history deserves a place at the table if it can somehow contribute.

[phyrpowr]

Okay, let me rephrase: is Plagens a person with any experience in photography? He doesn't actually have to OWN a camera, at the moment he wrote the article, or now

[jtk]

Jack, sorry I responded so sharply.

 

My question remains:

Why would anybody need even the least experience in photography, from the image-making side, or any accurate knowledge of "photo history" to contribute a stimulating perspective about evident issues in photography today?

 

And given that Plagens raised issues that are routinely discussed among photographers, just who is it that he's upset on these threads?

 

I don't speak Chinese and rarely cook Chinese: Does that mean I shouldn't comment on directions I think I see in Chinese restaurants?

(around here they're hiring staggeringly beautiful Hispanic waitresses and emphasizing Napa Valley wines)

[Spearhead]

<i>Why would anybody need ... any accurate knowledge of "photo history" to contribute a stimulating perspective about evident issues in photography today?</i><p>I don't think useful perspectives come from an absence of knowledge. To act like something has changed in the last ten years in photography, when what has been changing has been going on for well over a hundred years, is just plain wrong. A statement like this: "In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head" is just plain wrong, other than the word "postmodern." Other than that, "fiction" has been in photography for a long time. The conclusion that "The next great photographers?if there are to be any?will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality" leaves me wondering why it's there. There is no real justification for this, any more than painting should still be realistic. In general, video is far better at "realism" than photography, and maybe that is where people who want the closest representation to "reality" should look. Photography's evolution can only be a good thing for its long term value to the art world.

[jtk]

Jeff, I generally accept your spin on "fiction" etc and I agree that a concept of "fiction" has been around forever in photography (pictorialism, for example, or opened eyes of dead Civil War soldiers). Nothing new in that...fictions were around for the Egyptians in their sculptures, when they made all their nobles look like the same pharohs.

 

Still, I think Plagens had something 70s-specific in mind when he used the word...was it Uelsmann? He was certainly touted heavily back then,

a virtual lava lamp.

 

Plagens is conceptually sloppy, which I said in my first post on the other thread. It's remarkable how virulently he's been attacked, and how little has been said to support those attacks..

 

Oddly, we're simply assuming "photography" is a certain kind of activity, and except for Jeff, we're assuming that "photography" excludes video...profoundly uninformed, considering the morphing future of todays DSLRs and the routine use of "photographer" in movie making today, referring to video camera operator and to replace "cinematographer"...

[don_e]

"Don, you're right about "photographer's intention."

 

"But "intention" and $.50 won't buy a good coffee: the merit of an image has to do with the photographer's personal capability..."

 

Maybe, but it doesn't take much to frame a shot and release the shutter on a Brownie or p&s. Do you think the photos in The Art of the American Snapshot exhibit (and similar) have artistic merit? What about the common family album?

[jtk]

Don, I rarely think of anybody's photographs as Art, so I use "art."

 

I'm more inclined to Art if there's a body of work, done over decades, because that might demonstrate the "intention" you've mentioned...and I think "intention" is crucial. I also think "singularity" is important. If someone apes Cindy Sherman for 20 years, it ain't singular, therefore it ain't Art. Sherman's work has arguably BECOME Art because she's continued to work her singular concept.

 

The "intention" of a family album or exhibit is it's own phenomenon, separate from the photos themselves. It may not be "singular," because it may be done without any sort of strong individual vision.

 

An album or exhibit may be more deserving than its photos of the "art" label.

 

I've done my own family albums to a high standard...Photoshopped images inkjet printed, intentionally selected images...some of the images began as "art" in the 19th century (one in my gallery), others were just snapshots. The albums are "art," maybe closer to Art (capital A) than my own photography.

[Allen Herbert]

Why would anybody need even the least experience in photography, from the image-making side, or any accurate knowledge of "photo history" to contribute a stimulating perspective about evident issues in photography today?

 

 

Jeez, thanks John, I feel really confident I can write an article for news week all about nuclear physics....

 

 

I wonder how much money they will pay. All I've got to do is jump on the bandwagon of a well hackneyed subject....and Bob's your uncle.

 

 

How does "own a camera" relate? Doesn't mere camera ownership encourage wankers who may communicate poorly (write poorly) or have no visual orientation, simply by making a purchase to elevate themselves to "photographers" or "artists?" Buy brushes and oils: ZAP! you're a painter :-)

 

You can hear that voice echoed down the ages. And we wonder why so many talented Artists died penniless. Perhaps because they could not write real proper and were wankers.

[Allen Herbert]

Reality is talent is talent. It does not necessarily have a social class; it does not follow any mores, values, and ways. It grasps the enigma of Imagination, emotion,akin to religion in its concept. It's always been a challenge to the social class , the conservative values of the day. They stifle, suffocate, and destroy. The old ways are best ways, the conservative acceptable ways of the day.

[steve_swinehart]

One of the reasons the article is so off the mark is that the author can't seem to separate the ideas about a photograph showing the subject as opposed to the photograph being the subject.

 

In the opening statement of this thread is said, "IMO, naturalism and realism, as opposed to idealism or symbolism, is extremely rare in the visual arts..."

 

The meanings of the words, as explored by artists previously, are not quite what you might think. Naturalism, symbolism, and tonalism are all part of Pictorialism. In fact the Symbolist manifesto was about expressing "eternal meanings" - and drew heavily from the Impressionist art movement to help convey the eternal meanings.

 

The Pictorialists were symbolists. They used the ideas of naturalism, tonalism, and symbolism as the philosophy behind making the images. The Pictorialist movement was, in part, about separating camera vision from human vision.

 

The most important book at that time in promoting the ideas of Pictorialim was P.H. Emerson's book, "Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art." In the book, he stresses the idea that the photographer should produce impressions of reality and not literal transcriptions of it.

 

This, paralleled the painters of the Barbizon, natualistic, impressionistic style of painting - who were interested in capturing impressions of the senses. But, takes the philosophy further by using Symbolist idea that art must not just be a copy of nature, but must cultivate the imagination, and search for the "mysterious center of thought" and the "subjective deformation of nature" (Maurice Denis, "Theories").

 

Pictorialism is also a backlash against the development of the machine age in the 1800's - with cameras being one of the new machines and technologies. Pictorialism banished all references and thoughts to scientific objectiveness and literalness.

 

In 1900, in Camera Notes magazine was an aricle that said, "...the photograph may even be less pleasing to the public, less truthful to nature, and at the same time be more of a work of art...I would rather have the photograph not just exactly as the scene was, but as the artist would have liked it to be, or imagined it to be."

 

Going back to Emerson, he noted that, "when a work was presented as fact it was science; when it presented ideas, it was an art."

 

He further urged that art was, "not to copy nature, but to appeal to the imagination."

 

Stephane Mallarme wrote on the subject, "To name an object is to supress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in a poem...suggestion, that is the dream."

 

Pictorialism was an entire philosophy about the interaction of the image with the viewer - and as such, the photographers chose subjects that were not specific to a time, event, or place in the world but were vague and illusive. They sought nameless, anonymous views on which to project their ideas and associations.

 

If one understands Tonalism (briefly, the idea that a certain level of meaning independent of narrative content could be expressed through the emotional response to one area of color or tone set against another) - and Symoblist ideas, then Steichen's "The Pool - Evening: A Symphony to a Race and to a Soul," can in no way be superficially summarized with the statement:

 

From the Plagens article, "Later in the 19th century, "pictorialist" photographers used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings."

 

While to the uninformed, that may be the casual impression - it is far from the real reasons the works were done in the Pictorialist style.

 

The fallacies and wrong assumptions contained in the piece are exactly why you need some familiarity with the history of the subject about which you're attempting to write. The author's summarization and blithe dismissal of an entire photographic movement - only serves to parade his ignorance on the subject, and not to inform the reader.