Looking at a photo for more than ten seconds

[charleswood]

<p>Not much into poetry though...too many mental visual images to deal with?</p>

<p>And Brad, I also noticed within the last couple months that either your street work has changed or I have changed because like with Allen's, I noticed I actually spend more time when at your city snaps and like what I see. </p>

<p> </p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>Thanks, Brad.</p>

<p>Your city snaps website is an enjoyment.</p>

<p>Charles, you have a story of in your mind of the life and times of the creatures you photograph which I relate to...in a sense your photographs are just an add on.</p>

<p>20 second,:I think to understand another photographers vision you have to hang on to their coat tails and try to understand what their work is communicating...in a way only 20 seconds is a disrespect...</p>

<p> </p>

[Julie H]

<p>Looking at photos made in the video <em>Everybody Street</em>, I can tell you that ten seconds is nine seconds more than they looked when they made the shots.</p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>Sorry, Phil, but I think Julie is being generous.</p>

<p>Your work is far more interesting than any photographers you have recently posted....genuinely; I have to look at your work much longer than 20.seconds... you are a learning curve for me.</p>

<p>Post an example from your work....</p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>And you. Julie.</p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p> </p>

[Allen Herbert]

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

[Julie H]

<p>From the OP:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>When was the last time you looked at a photo, <strong><em>other than one of your own</em>,</strong> for more than ten seconds?</p>

</blockquote>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>Okay, I have been told off.. lets try reading your post.</p>

<p>Elliot Irving he captures us in a clever succinct way... with a clever touch of the Marx Brothers humour...most comedians to be funny have to have a hand on our soul.</p>

<p>Nope, Im not that old to remember the Marx brothers; I would have to be older than dirt;))</p>

<p>http://www.elliotterwitt.com/lang/index.html</p>

<p> </p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>Hmm, I think I have found the thoughts for a post on this forum as requested, from you...to me, Julie.</p>

<p>Current active photographers, and what is their vision, and how do we perceive it.</p>

<p>Have we moved on from those who have walked before us, or just walking endlessly in their footsteps...following their vision. </p>

<p>Need a bit of time to put this together with examples of the latest works....as to why they have moved on; and have they really?</p>

[Julie H]

<p>That's an interesting example, Phil (who still refuses to describe *what* he's looking at when he's looking at that picture ... ).</p>

<p>It did hold me for ten seconds and what I was looking at was out the back of my head. By which I mean, I was staring intently at that hand and wrist as they "grew" the man that they demanded. Takes ten seconds to make a man out the back of my head ...</p>

[Allen Herbert]

<p>"Allen, after looking at it for more than ten seconds, I really like your last posted picture, too bad you didn't get the girl's feet..." Phil.</p>

<p>It was a candid snap, and like most candid snaps , you are limited in time ...</p>

<p>I really appreciate your comments and the constructive thought that you have given them...I will ponder...</p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Continuing my travels through ten-second land, this morning I was stopped by <a href="http://www.inglebygallery.com//wp-content/gallery/garry-fabian-miller/garry_fabian_miller_exposure_7_hours_july_2_2005_web.jpg">this photo</a> by <a href="http://www.inglebygallery.com/artists/garry-fabian-miller/">by Garry Fabian Miller</a>. I had been thumbing through two books of his work, almost but not quite liking anything enough to fully stop, though several were close. I love his intent:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"I'm interested in that moment of peace which descends when someone is reading a book, or observes flowers in a vase, and a certain quality of light comes into the room, some transcendent instant -- and then it passes. I want to preserve a space for those special moments -- the pictures are embodiments of them." — <em><a href="http://www.inglebygallery.com/artists/garry-fabian-miller/">Garry Fabian Miller</a></em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>I realize how 'precious' that statement is so I will pretend it isn't here, but I <em>do</em> like it and it <em>is</em> what I was looking for in his work. The one that stopped me, <a href="http://www.inglebygallery.com//wp-content/gallery/garry-fabian-miller/garry_fabian_miller_exposure_7_hours_july_2_2005_web.jpg">here</a>, did so for two reasons: it's interesting to look at, but I was really looking for the 'why' of its title, which is '<em><a href="http://www.inglebygallery.com//wp-content/gallery/garry-fabian-miller/garry_fabian_miller_exposure_7_hours_july_2_2005_web.jpg">Exposure</a></em> (seven hours of light), 2005.' Exposure of <em>what</em>? How? Why? There is a companion that is '<em>Exposure</em> (five hours of light)' where the colors and essential composition are the same, but the compositional components (center and concentrations of the dots) is quite different. I'll give the technical explanation*, later, but for now, another Miller quote:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"Making something which is other, which seems to have come from an unknown place, is what I'm aspiring to do. Making things visible that have never been seen before." — <em>Garry Fabian Miller</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>... to which my immediate response, in thought was, 'half of photographs are looking for the known; the other half are looking for the unknown.' Then, after about two seconds, I revised that to be 'Okay, make that 90% are looking for the known, 10% for the unknown.' Another two seconds, 'Okay, okay, 99.99999999% are looking for the known, and the remainder, what a scientist would call "effectively zero %" are looking for the unknown.' That zero percent would include me. I am your 'effectively zero' correspondent.</p>

<p>We zeros are a long way from you guys with all the nines. For example, I was recently watching a documentary about the street photographer Max Weber ("More Than the Rainbow") and the video kept trying to <em>make</em> me look at his shots for more than ten seconds. Thank god for the fast forward button. The video goes on to show me the inevitable series of his subway shots and I'm actually shouting at the TV, "It's been DONE!! For god's sake, do you know how boring this is...???" Fast forward, fast forward. I will not look at any more shots of Peculiar People Doing Peculiar Things.</p>

<p>*Back to the 'How?' of Miller's work:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"His main medium is Cibachrome photographic paper (now known as Ilfochrome), a positive-to-positive paper [ ... ]He pins the paper to the wall behind sheets of glass, and floods it with light that is refracted through colored and clear vessels containing oil and water. The reds and blues are created using water in the colored glass vessels, the yellows and oranges by shining light through a clear one containing engine oil. ... Exposure times range from a few minutes to more than 20 hours ... Using stencils cut from pieces of cardboard, he manipulates the patterns of light and color that will emerge after processing." —<em>Nigel Warburton in</em> The Colour of Time: Garry Fabian Miller, <em>2010</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>As I said at the start, Miller's work doesn't really succeed for me. I find it almost boring but in a different way from Weber's street work. The big difference, for me, is my awareness, both in the works and in Miller's words, of his intent, which seems to me to be almost there, almost breaking through. That's enough to make me want to look and keep looking.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>This morning's ten-second pause: <a href="http://www.photoeye.com/bookteaselight/bookteaselight.cfm?catalog=DS772&image=1">looking at the samples</a> from Susan Bernstine's book <em><a href="http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?Catalog=ds772">Absence of Being</a></em>. Trying to suss out the how and why of each picture. I like some of the pictures very much; some not so much, but her intent and how she did it are pretty cool, I think. The book's blurb, which is what attracted me reads:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"Finding no existing camera that could create what her mind envisioned, she began to experiment with building her own and molding her own lenses until she arrived at the prototype for the handmade cameras she continues to use.</p>

<p>"The results are instantly recognizable black-and-white images, which have been described as 21st-century impressionism. Burnstine does not use any of the post-production tools available in today’s digital environment. All of the effects one sees in a Burnstine photograph are created in the camera at the time of exposure of the negative."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Wondering if the book gives more technical details, because <a href="http://www.photoeye.com/bookteaselight/bookteaselight.cfm?catalog=DS772&image=1">the sample</a> gives only pictures, not explanatory text.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>This morning, reading a cinema essay by Susan Sontag, I ran across this: "Sometimes the most enjoyable effects are gained when the material and the form are at cross purposes. ... [P]lacing a hot subject in a cold frame. Other times, what satisfies is that the form is perfectly appropriate to the theme."</p>

<p>Spent a very enjoyable hour trying to "feel" what the frame (form) and material (content) are doing to each other in hot (emotional, immediate) and cold (intellectual, remote, geometrical) combinations. I looked at (slowly, with much back-and-forthing):</p>

<p>Cold frame/ hot material = Ralph Gibson's <em>The Somnambulist</em><br>

Hot frame / hot material = Fukase's <em>The Solitude of Ravens</em><br>

No frame / hot material = Naito Masatoshi's <em>Nihon No Shashinka</em> [think <em>Provoke</em> imagery]</p>

<p>Later in her essay, Sontag says of film:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"It is precisely the defect of the naturalistic theater and cinema that, giving itself too readily, it easily consumes and exhausts its effects. Ultimately the greatest source of emotional power in art lies not in any particular subject-matter, however passionate, however universal. It lies in form. The detachment and retarding of the emotions, through the consciousness of form, makes them far stronger and more intense in the end."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I don't think I agree with that at all. It seems to me that the power of art lies in ambiguity, not form.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>*before you ask, Eggleston's work doesn't have a temperature any more than a cocklebur has a temperature.</p>

<p>They stick in your hair and on you socks and irritate the hell out of you. Make you stop and deal with them, though. And if you look at them, you notice what marvels of engineering they are, randomly dropping their seeds into your into your passing life.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>This morning, looked for a long time at a Mike Brodie photograph because it was recommended by Pieter Hugo, one of my favorite photographers. It's in <em>Aperture</em>'s recurring feature 'Curriculum: A List of Favorite Anythings' from a different photographer each issue. Here is Hugo's description of the picture:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"I own a print by photographer Mike Brodie. I have been told it is of his girlfriend. She is lying on her back reading Flannery O'Connor. With her right hand, she is lifting her skirt to reveal her menstrual-stained panties. I love this portrait. My wife won't let me hang it in our home. We have young children, and she doesn't feel that they are quite ready for this picture. Or perhaps she isn't quite ready to explain it to them. Or to their friends who come to visit. Or to the parents of the visitors. I love how the politics of the picture have stepped out of the frame and provoked a dialogue about what is appropriate and what is not."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>It's a disturbing picture; it's also a powerful picture (<em>#1064</em>), probably the best in Brodie's book, <em>A Period of Juvenile Prosperity</em> (2006-9). Looking at that book for context, wondering how much buffing and massaging went into the 'Mike Brodie story' that reads like a Hollywood script; but mainly when looking at the picture, I'm thinking about Hugo and how this affects my reading of <em>his</em> work such as that in his books <em>The Hyena & Other Men</em> and <em>Nollywood</em>.</p>

<p>Hugo likes the sensational; far from tastefully incorporating it, he puts it front and center. Not only does he not reduce or avoid it, he seems to seek it out and even add or amplify it. But it also has seemed to me that his pictures are more than a sugar hit; they're sticky and do not leave quickly. He's a different kind of photographer than Brodie; I'm interested in how Hugo's feelings about Brodie's picture tinker with my reading of Hugo's work.</p>

<p>Hugo, in the same <em>Aperture</em> segment also picks out Arcara and Santese's book <em>Found Photos in Detroit</em>, which a friend sent to him. Of this book he says: "It feels like witnessing a train smash in slow motion. Simply haunting and extremely sad." That book doesn't really work for me, but I'm wondering how different Detroit seems to a South African than to an American. Again, I'm looking at the work of other photographers but <em>thinking of that work in terms of Hugo</em>.</p>

 

[Julie H]

<p>Phil, you really sent me down a rabbit hole this morning [she writes, as if that's bad when we all know she loves it]. You said "Alec Soth," and I think of how much I dislike him. I go and get the one book of his that I own. <em>Refuse</em> to look at any of his pictures for ten seconds. Blech! Think to myself, he reminds me of the thing actors say: "I'm not a doctor; I just play one on TV." Soth is not a photographer; he just plays a photographer -- and does it better than most real photographers, I'll give him that.</p>

<p>Which made me think of John Gossage, who is unquestionably a photographer. Gossage is no dummy but ... he did a project/book with Soth. Maybe Gossage <em>is</em> a dummy ... I go and look at a few of his books. Nope. I find his work very uneven, but always ... possible, interesting, on-scent.</p>

<p>Using this goose-chase as an excuse to look at -- for more than ten seconds each -- most of the pictures in Gossage's book <em>A Dozen Failures</em> (that <em>this</em> is my favorite of his books may tell you something ... ). I love studying the pictures and finding out how they fail. He doesn't give fakes or obvious duds; these are very, very close to not failing. Several make me argue that Gossage has failed in picking failures because this one succeeds ... but usually I end up finding that I agree with his choices. It's a delicious inverted kind of critical exercise.</p>

<p>Finally, at the end of Gossage's brief text in <em>A Dozen Failures</em> he writes:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"Maybe every picture delivers just as much as any other, it's just that some deliver things I can't use. Failures? Or am I just not prepared for what the world has to offer?</p>

<p>"Maybe failed pictures are like illusionists who make things only seem to come true, while all the time we know if we look hard enough they don't. Things that you were sure were there, but now you have no proof of, and doubt. And love lost through lack of skill and understanding, giving off the slightest whiff of fear.</p>

<p>"Tone deaf."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I think those last two words are wrong: tone deaf is someone who only plays a doctor; failures are someone who smelled something but then lost the scent (to mix metaphors).</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Find an Alec Soth picture that you like and tell me what you see/think. I won't argue with you, I promise. I'm just curious.</p>

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

<p>This morning, doing a Phil kind of ten-seconder; that is, looking at a picture in memory for more than ten-seconds that I only looked at 'in-fact' for less than two seconds.</p>

<p>On the Matt Weber documentary video <em>More Than The Rainbow</em> that I panned in a previous post, there is an episode where photographer Zoe Strauss describes the following incident. I am telling this from memory so I will probably get the details wrong but the main story should be about right:</p>

<p>One day when Strauss, who is a short, somewhat chunky lesbian, was street-shooting in New York, a man said to her, something like "Do you want to come up to my room and see me naked?" To which Zoe replied, "Yes" with evident delight. She then tells that she and the man, a burly, middle-aged 'typical' New Yorker, went up to his tiny apartment, he took off his clothes and she took his picture. She immediately said, "Thanks!" and quickly left.</p>

<p>Her picture of the man is then shown: no surprise, it's a burly middle-aged 'typical' New Yorker lying on his side wearing only his rumpled socks on his unkempt bed in his not-unusual small (unkempt , homey) apartment in the kind of usual light one finds in a small New York apartment.</p>

<p>Zoe finishes with a huge smile and "It was <em>incredibly</em> beautiful!"</p>

<p>To which my passing response, to both the story and the picture was "That's just stupid." Harrumph.</p>

<p>And thought I'd taken care of <em>that</em> ridiculousness ... except that the story/picture kept coming back to my mind since then. Why am I still thinking about it? She -- <em>and</em> he -- have upset so many boundaries. This totally unremarkable, unsexy, somewhat lumpen man lying on his own bed in mid-day, looking at and being looked at by a woman he only met two minutes ago. He's showing everything and revealing nothing; or is he showing that there is nothing to reveal or ... etc. It feels more like a visit to the doctor than a visit to any kind of 'art' experience or sexy encounter.</p>

<p>More than a few other photographers have photographed strangers naked, but I can't think of any others that do it in this kind of mid-day immediate way without any preparation. It breaks all the usual photographic hiding/revealing rules played by people taking and being taken by photographs.</p>

<p>Katy Grannan did something somewhat similar in her <em>Model American</em> collection. She would put "brief ads in small-town newspapers" to get her 'models,' but though strangers, they had <em>time</em> to choose and manipulate the encounter with each other. The one good analogy I find in Grannan's book is that of (a woman) hitchhiking: you never know what kind of person is going to pick you up and they don't know if you're a criminal, either. But there's no revelation in the hitchhiker relation, just a silent watchfulness. Grannan also describes her work as "equal parts affection and predation." That's more interesting, but still not as clean or decisive as Strauss's encounter.</p>

<p>Okay, maybe it was just "stupid." But if a picture keeps floating back into my mind, I like to let it work. If I got it wrong, I'm happy to have a second chance to see it; not to miss what was given to me.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>I'll tell you what Braeckman feels like to me; the crawl space under my house. My home, like any home, has living areas are clean and ordered (more or less ... ) and painted and shaped and all that good stuff. But if you go into the crawl space under the house it's dark, there's damp, there's dirt there's insulation some of which is sagging, there's wiring and pipes and ducts and tape and unpainted wood and cinderblock and mice and bugs. It's not 'a place,' it's the side that's not supposed to show.</p>

<p>What Braeckman does to me is show all the holes and cracks and wires and dirt that kill the illusion of assumed structure(s). What he doesn't do for me is give me any <em>other</em> illusion; any other story or narrative or claim of what's *really* the structure of space. He makes me look up its skirt and see the plumbing. He's not claiming anything; he's just making me look at what I don't look at.</p>

<p>The Venus of Willendorf has no face, but she has an asshole.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Yes, exactly. I should have said that. For me, that's why they're so ... horribly good. The 'gaps' are so unavoidably there.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>I think Vande Veire is too rational.</p>

<p>If you take utopian-perfection (think Moholy Nagy) as one end of a spectrum and the documentary (including the artistically documentary) at the other, you'd think all photographers would fall somewhere on that continuity. Braeckman doesn't. He's not on photography's evolutionary tree.</p>

<p>That spectrum is rational; he's not. They're dancing, walking, fighting, doing <em>coherent</em> things. There is structure. Not in Braeckman; Braeckman is falling. He removes our support, while also very carefully removing all avenues to fantasy (escape). Takes us to 30,000 feet and pushes us out of the plane without a parachute. And leaves. No dialogue; not even any questions; no <em>reason</em>.</p>

<p>James Dickey wrote a poem about a stewardess who was sucked out of a commercial night flight over the Midwest when an emergency door popped open accidentally. The poem, <em>Falling</em>, includes:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>[ ... ]<br>

... finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat<br>

The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something<br>

That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air<br>

Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation ..<br>

[ ... ]<br>

... There is time to live<br>

In superhuman health seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing<br>

An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving<br>

In a square town ...</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Of course at the end of the poem:</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Lies in the fields in <em>this</em> field on her broken back as though on<br>

A cloud she cannot drop through while farmers sleepwalk without<br>

Their women from houses a walk like falling toward the far waters<br>

Of life in moonlight toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms<br>

Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands ...</p>

</blockquote>

<p>To the above, Hollywood would have added a soaring full symphony soundtrack.</p>

<p>To the above Braeckman says ... ummm ... no.</p>

<p>Or rather, he never says anything. Saying is not what he does; he just removes. No poetry. No symphony. You are falling. [ pure silence ] Not even a question mark, just the pictures in your face and all escape removed.</p>

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

<p>I would guess that there are inherent limits to what can be done (heh!) by not doing, but I can't say that for sure. Maybe Braeckman will show us in the future.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Looked at <a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/foglia_adamkillingcow.jpg">this picture</a> by Lucas Foglia for a long time today, and not just because I like cows.</p>

<p>It's a long way from Braeckman. Or, it's no way at all; it's the outside of what Braeckman is the inside of.</p>

[Julie H]

<blockquote>

<p>... and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. — <em>from James Joyce's</em> 'The Dead.'</p>

</blockquote>

<p>If you strip out all narrative, as I've tried to do with the Joyce fragment, that's what I find in Braeckman's work. It's like entering the process in process, with no distance, no separation. No perspective. Expressing his reservations about making a book of his work, Braeckman says, in his intro into his big yellow book (I have two smaller ones but texts are not in English, so I can only look): "A book postulates something, sets things out in black and white, while I want to keep my work as transient and open as possible," and "Every image should stand alone, unlimited in relation to other images," and "I prefer to keep all options open so that the viewer can decide how he wishes to approach my work."</p>

<p>He's got a John-Cage-ish approach. But this can be limiting; as explanation of how/why, I give this from this magazine article about a contemporary English piano composer (Hough). I think Braeckman (a la Cage) can be compared to the 12-note system approach:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"Traditional tonality works by creating and resolving tensions — "placing markers along the way, paths to return home," Mr Hough says. "Conversely the 12-note system ensures that all roads are equal, that no note is more important than any other ... a nomadic circular path where home is the journey itself." This system became the basis for a cramping orthodoxy which still has adherents. Mr. Hough's Piano Sonata III (Trinitas) is an ingenious experiment designed to undermine that system by taking it to its logical conclusion. "I want music to move me," he says, "and I don't think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It's the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Which is to say, as with 12-note music, Braeckman's work can be (very) disturbing and certainly artistic, but can it move you, can it be poignant? Notice how, when Fukase, in <em>The Solitude of Ravens</em>, adds the frame of narrative to his otherwise disoriented pictures, people respond <em>because of that frame</em>. Braeckman gives no frame.</p>

<p>"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead," (last sentence of Joyce's story) is beautiful, but it's far, far more poignant and moving if you know the story that led to it.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Crewdson, to me, is good for the same reasons he's not good. This is just for me; not arguing, just describing my feelings ...</p>

<p>I find his craftsmanship to be <em>incredibly</em> satisfying (watch the documentary on him ... ); he gives me <em>exactly</em> what I expect, down to the last molecule. And that's just why I find him not any better than a great craftsman; he closes his circle, he never surprises me; the very thing that satisfies me disappoints me.</p>

<p>He's like a great character actor who can deliver the most pitch-perfect representation of a 'type' but who could never carry a picture because that which makes him so good (that he <em>is</em> exactly what you expect) is what prevents him from <em>moving</em> me. He goes nowhere.</p>

<p>At his worst, I find Crewdson to be painfully laborious. As if he knows he's too predictable so he just says, okay, you, take off your clothes. Thud.</p>