How to write about one particular picture

Uhooru · November 14, 2016

oops its she not he

Uhooru · November 14, 2016

oops its she not he

Julie H · November 15, 2016

For Steve Murray:

You may be surprised to find me agreeing that YES, the following is true:

The artist's business is I think always in the present: making a work leaves the previous work behind, while the next one is still beyond the horizon. His concern is to make the present work as powerful as he can. The beauty of art, the spiritual and visual density of the artwork, actually seems to derive from that absolute concentration on one moment — never it seems, from an artist's direct, conscious involvement in history. — Rudi Fuchs, writing about Richard Long, 1986 [see Long's work <a href="http://www.richardlong.org/sculptures.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.richardlong.org/Sculptures/2011sculptures/linewalking.html">here</a>]

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And I agree with this, too:

Art work deals with the problem of a piece of art, but more, it teaches the process of all creating, the shaping out of the shapeless. We learn from it that no picture exists before it is done, no form before it is shaped. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it, and no imagination is great enough to know before the works are done what they will be like. — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anni_Albers">Anni Albers</a>, artist, teacher, and wife of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers">Josef Albers</a>

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But does the act constitute what the thing that is made will be? Does the act of sex constitute what the child will be?

As I asked in an earlier post:

<a name="00eDt9"></a><a href="/photodb/user?user_id=3885114">Julie H</a> <a href="/member-status-icons"><img title="Subscriber" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub10.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/3rolls.gif" alt="" /><img title="Current POW Recipient" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/trophy.gif" alt="" /></a>, Nov 08, 2016; 02:10 p.m.

Steve, if I were killing you, I would be concentrating on the action at hand; holding the struggling Steve, pushing the knife into his vital areas, combatting his flailing arms. I am not thinking about why I am killing Steve; are my thoughts while I am killing Steve, why I am killing Steve?

Julie H · November 15, 2016

How?

Back to basics:

Here is Wendy Ewald describing how to teach photography. She starts with a Szarkowski quote about framing:

To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject? The line of decision between in and out is the picture's edge. While the draughtsman starts with the middle of the sheet, the photographer starts with the frame. [/end Szarkowski quote]

... Many people, when they first take pictures, believe they should include everything in order to make the photograph they have in mind -- they might insist that a portrait include everything from the subject's toes to the top of his head. I often see children hold the camera at a diagonal when photographing people. At first I marveled at this desire to experiment, but when asked what they are doing, the students usually tell me they are just trying to fit the feet and head into the frame.

... Sometimes when a child is clearly disappointed by a photograph, I venture to talk about composition. I noticed after a few months that one of my Appalachian students, Maywood Campbell, was never quite satisfied with her pictures. Looking at her negatives, I realized that she had chosen to photograph very intimate family moments. But unlike Denise's assured pictures, Maywood's compositions were a bit off. ... Her frustration came from not seeing in her pictures what she thought she was seeing in the viewfinder.

... Framing has to do with how one of us sees: like fingerprints or signatures, the way we see is unique.

... Ask your students to think about how they would take a portrait of the person deep inside themselves -- the person nobody knows. Where would they place themselves -- in a favorite spot? A bright space? A dark space? What would they wear? A gym uniform tells one story, Sunday clothes another. Maybe they'd like to dress up as they imagine themselves five years from now. What gestures or expression would they want to show the camera? Are they relaxed, annoyed, happy, crazy, funny? How would they show such states of mind, with their body position as well as their expression?

... start simply by asking the students to describe what's happening in one of the pictures. They will need to look closely at the details, think about what they reveal, and pay close attention to what is inside and outside the frame.

... If you wanted to take a single photograph of, say, a baseball game that shows the essence of the sport to someone who had never seen it before, what would that picture be? If you took a picture of the whole field, with all the players in position, you would have to be so far away that very little of the actual game would be comprehensible. In other words, if you're far enough away to see everything, you're too far to understand anything.

... When I asked Denise to document her Thanksgiving dinner, she produced a picture of the turkey on a plate on a bare Formica table, shot starkly, almost clinically, from above. Just as she did when decorating her room, Denise included only the essentials.

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Here is Jan Dibbets asking for more How:

Everything is tied to this what. What, what, what. This, as I see it, is the most problematic aspect of photography. Let's say that in artistic terms, it's the least decisive aspect. The how -- I'm talking about the creative, not the technical how -- is much more important. The how that is often pushed aside, not to say eliminated. The deepest content is to be found in the how. True, a photograph of the assassination of a queen, even one taken accidentally by a three-year-old, can be very interesting. It can end up being chosen Photo of the Year.

[line break added] But that moment has no significance for art. When Cézanne paints "from life," is the subject the most important thing? Of course not. ... [T]he photographer's stress is almost unfailingly on the what, whereas, at least in an artistic context, the opposite should be the case. And when you ask them about the how, the great majority of photographers are lost for words. They have no idea.

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This is not only true of pictures, it's true of criticism, according to dance critic Edwin Denby:

An intelligent reader learns from a critic not what to think about a piece of art but how to think about it; he finds a way he hadn't thought of using. The existence of an "authoritative critic" or of a "definitive evaluation" is a fiction like that of a sea serpent. Everybody knows the wild errors of judgment even the best critics of the past have made; it is easier to agree with contemporary judgments but no more likely they are right. It seems to me that it is not the critic's historic function to have the right opinions but to have interesting ones. ... The intentness of his interest makes people who don't know what he's talking about believe that whatever it is, it must be real somehow ...

... Reading a good critic's descriptions of qualities I have seen, I seem to see them more clearly. If I don't know them, I try looking for them in performances I remember or try to find them next time I go to the theater. And when you look for qualities a reviewer has mentioned, you may find something else equally surprising. For your sharpened eye and limberer imagination is still a part of your own identity -- not of his -- and leads you to discoveries of your own. The fun of reading dance criticism is the discovery of an unexpected aspect of one's own sensibility.

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Julie H · November 15, 2016

Getting back on topic, here is Jonathan Bayer writing about <a href="http://www.americansuburbx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/covered-car-long-beach-ca-1955-56-web.jpg">Robert Frank's well-known Long Beach, Cal, 1955-56</a>:

... Many have seen in isolation the powerful picture of the covered car in Long Beach, Cal and intuitively felt that it was a symbol, in some way, of American culture but have found it difficult to say why. Some have ventured to see the cover, the portable garage, as more than an indication of the luxury Americans can lavish on their cars and seen it as a shroud. The meaning, however, is enhanced if one looks at it as part of a sequence of pictures which one might title 'death on the highway.'

[line break added] This sequence begins with the throw of a dice, a gamble, continues with the act of setting off for a drive in a car and the omnipresence of the automobile (the ironic desire of people to sit and relax amidst the din and fumes of traffic). The meaning of the shrouded car is made painfully clearer by <a href="http://www.americansuburbx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/robert-frank-car-accident-us-66-between-winslow-and-flagstaff-arizona-web.jpg">the ensuing picture of victims of a highway accident on a stretcher covered with a blanket</a>. The dénouement of this episode is the endless road stretching off into the desert which becomes a symbol of America itself, haunted empty space and scalelessness.

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I don't think that's very good writing, simply because he doesn't tell me anything I didn't see for myself. It seems very pedestrian, uninspired, just cranking out the commentary. If you're not familiar with Frank or sequencing, it may have more value.

Julie H · November 16, 2016

Here is an example of very earnest, very well-meaning ... terrible, excruciatingly boring, bad writing about three pictures that surely deserve and should have provoked much more than this kind of pedantic trudging through the literal. If you can read this without thinking "well, DUH!" you're more tolerant than I am.

I give you Elizabeth Kessler writing about the Hubble Space Telescope pictures of three nebulas. [here are links to two of the pictures: <a href="http://www.constellation-guide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Pillars-of-Creation.jpeg">the Eagle Nebula</a>, and <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8d/Cone_Nebula_%28NGC_2264%29_Star-Forming_Pillar_of_Gas_and_Dust.jpg/799px-Cone_Nebula_%28NGC_2264%29_Star-Forming_Pillar_of_Gas_and_Dust.jpg">the Cone Nebula</a>]:

Why do these images lift the human spirit? They depict fascinating objects, but the way in which these objects are presented, the visual tropes used, and their relationship to a larger visual culture, also play a role. The most striking Hubble images typically exhibit a high contrast between light and dark tones. The Eagle Nebula and the Cone Nebula images include the darkest of blacks in the columns and the brightest whites in the stars and tops of the columns. In the Sombrero galaxy, the brilliant white of the core contrasts with the dark edge of the dust cloud and the black background of the sky. These examples also contain a full range of tones between light and dark.

Vivid colors emphasize this dynamic range and give the objects a sense of solidity and mass. The pillars of the Eagle Nebula vary from mustard yellows to red, while the background begins as a deep blue at the top of the image and blends to greener tones in the regions surrounding the columns.

[Kessler goes on in exactly that kind of droning detail for another five paragraphs. Near the end, she mentions, almost as a by-the-way detail]

The images also reflect great interest in the dynamic, even violent, forces of the universe, often portraying colliding galaxies and exploding stars.

These same qualities define the experience of the sublime, a notion that was first applied to aesthetics in the 18th century and became associated with experiences of overwhelming grandeur and power, which can elicit feelings of awe, wonder, and even transcendence. Artists throughout the 19th century depicted the landscape as sublime, especially the unexplored frontier.

The Hubble images bring us new views of the latest unexplored frontier — outer space — and the artistry of those who created them encourages us to respond with awe.

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"Encourages us to respond with awe??" Can you get any more uninspired and uninspiring than that? Is there any part of her writing that told you something you didn't already know and didn't already see with your own eyes? Does anything in that writing answer her own lead question, "Why do these images lift the human spirit?"

There is one — and only one — faintly good sentence, in the middle of the piece that reads, "Christiaan Huygens suggested centuries ago, it looks as if the sky is opening to reveal another realm." She mentions it almost apologetically, but it is there.

Julie H · November 17, 2016

Phil, I'll have more on good-writing-about-bad-pictures in the morning. (Is the picture bad in the eyes of the critic, or is the picture bad in the eyes of history?)

But in the mean time, a kind of riddly bit (koan-ish) that I like and maybe you will too. It's to do with the wiggle space we all have within which to each see many different things in many different ways in any given picture without any of us being "wrong."

This is Jorge Luis Borges proving the existence of God through the fact that we don't know what we saw but we kind of know what we saw:

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer — not-nine, non-eight, not-seven, not-six, etc. — is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.

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:)

Ergo, we don't any of us really know what we see or saw, but we do know that it wasn't less than one or more than ten.

Now you see why I don't usually post in the evening ... thank goodness. I shall read your linked review and have some nice, juicy writing about bad pictures in the AM.

Oh, wait, one more. From Steven Connor, "Asked why he speaks to them in parables, Jesus explains that it is kind of distribution mechanism, designed to pick out those who not only hear but understand what they hear." So, Jesus is on our (wordy) side, too.

Allen Herbert · November 17, 2016

"Does great or better photography inspire better writing? Can you write well about a bad photograph?"Julie

You can write well about any photos....good or bad. Prose is its own Art and it is comfortable telling its stories.

Photography is its own Art and is comfortable telling its own stories.

Julie H · November 18, 2016

Phil, I don't think the review you link was about a "bad" movie. Rather, I though the reviewer thinks that *we* will think it's bad because we aren't as clever and perceptive as he is. I learned a lot about the reviewer and not much of anything about the movie. I don't think that's good writing (about movies/pictures).

Here is some writing, not about one photograph but about all bad photography. It's 'Whistler's Hippopotamus' 1937 by M.F. Agha (then art director of Vogue magazine). He presents this as a dialogue between someone in-the-know, and a viewer who is not:

"... A Modern Photographer is a man who thinks that the hippopotamus' tonsils are more beautiful than Whistler's Mother."

"And just-a-photographer?"

"Just a photographer ... is a man who thinks that September Morn is more beautiful than an Egg."

"Why such extremes? Isn't there anything else to photograph between September Morn and an Egg?"

"Practically nothing. There are only four photographic subjects in the world, and they are evenly divided between two schools of thought. The Traditionalists have Whistler's Mother and September Morn. The Modernists have the Hippopotamus' Tonsils and the Egg. Everything else can be reduced to these four basic types."

"How is that?"

"Haven't you seen thousands of photographs representing sweet, kindly old ladies sitting quietly with their hands folded in their laps? Sometimes they are called 'The Evening of Life' and sometimes 'Memories,' but they are really Whistler's Mothers, all of them. Other subjects, utterly different in appearance can be so imbued with the same spirit that permeates Whistler's Mother that they, too, become Whistler's Mother's Mothers. Take, for instance, a kitten playing with a ball of thread -- a popular photographic subject. It is really nothing but a typical manifestation of Whistler's Mother.

... But it is really much broader than just a love for a cute kitten. In its most sublimated form, the Whistler's Mother fixation can cover such things as windmills in the sunset, fields of wheat under a gentle breeze, swans reflected in a calm pond, square-rigged clipper ships in full sail, and even the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. Anything that elevates the soul is a Whistler's Mother, in one disguise or another."

"What about September Morn?"

"September Morn, on the contrary, appeals to our more carnal instincts and baser nature. I must say, however, that the September Morn manifestations are always of a really healthy and red-blooded kind (boys will be boys). The pure September Morn, by its very nature, is apt to be rather repetitions: a nude young lady with a mirror may be called 'Veritas'; a nude young lady with a soap-bubble, 'The Spirit of the Dance'; a nude young lady with feathers in her hair, 'Indian Love-Song'; a nude young lady smeared with Vaseline, 'Porcelain' -- but basically is it always the same young lady.

The variations, however, are easily produced by combining Whistler's Mother with September Morn. A girl in a bathing-suit, playing on a beach with a puppy (or a baby elephant), is definitely a combination of Whistler's Mother and September Morn in its appeal. And when it comes to more complicated subjects, such as a nursing mother, it takes an analyst to be able to decide where Whistler's Mother ends and September Morn begins."

[our naïve viewer asks "Where does it come from?" and the knowing one gives a whole history of photography that I'm skipping]

"... War [WWII] made people sick of a great many things, among them, of fake mezzotints. ... The good clean fun to be had by photographing a nude rolling a hoop was much too bourgeois for the Moderns. They were not interested in sweet old ladies or juicy young maidens ... They wanted to paint and to photograph strange, weird, grotesque things: garbage cans, George Washington's false teeth, snakes swallowing rabbits, Caesarian operations, smiling horses, behinds of elephants, eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog ... "

"And hippopotamus' tonsils?"

"Exactly. Our friend, the hippopotamus, represents the spirit of modern photography in more ways than one. He stands for everything that is strange and bewildering, formidable and repulsive; but, at the same time, he symbolizes the triumph of honest photography over fake photography. Just look at his skin."

"What has his skin to do with honest photography?"

"It's full of spots and blotches -- as the skin should be in an honest, unretouched. ... [T]hey delight in taking sharp, close-up pictures of people -- dermatological orgies that show every single blackhead and pore."

[ ... ]

"So Modern photography is really honest photography?"

"This is the theory, or at least a part of it. Did I tell you that the Moderns have two principal fixations: the Hippopotamus and the Egg? We have seen that the Hippopotamus is the father of everything that is brutally honest, and, at the same time, bewildering, shocking, and repulsive. Well, the Egg is the mother of everything that is form, design and pattern."

"I do not see any pattern in an Egg, unless it is an Easter Egg."

"That is a pretty poor joke. The fact is that there are thousands and thousands of Modern photographs of Eggs (Paul Outerbridge alone took several hundreds of them). Anton Bruehl claims the distinction of being the only modern photographer who never took a picture of an egg."

"But why do they photograph eggs?"

"Because eggs are egg-shaped."

"?????"

"Eggs are the nearest thing to a globe -- and a globe is the nearest thing to geometric perfection, and geometric perfection is one of the chief assets of Modern photography. Apples are pretty good, too; that is why Steichen, and so many after him, photographed a number of nice globular apples.

... The factory chimneys, in distorted perspective (first introduced by Renger Patch); the sky-scrapers and their rectilinear geometry (capitalized first by Ralph Steiner); even the clouds -- when photographed by Moderns -- become members of the Egg group. So do coils of rope, fish-nets, railroad bridges, Ferris wheels, cart-wheels, cabbages cut in half with drops of dew on them (Edward Weston and the whole California school of photography have a patent on that); barns made of weathered old boards; footmarks on the sand; and, of course, Eggs: broken eggs, scrambled eggs, ham and eggs ... "

"How about Human Beings? Can the Moderns treat them in this geometric, eggy fashion?"

"Very easily. I might give you the impression that the Moderns do not photograph nudes -- but they do (boys will be boys). Man Ray is one of the chief exponents of the art of geometric nude photography. The idea is to twist the model so as to make her really look like one (or several) eggs. You can create a pattern -- by throwing the striped shadow of a Venetian blind on the model, which makes her look like a tiger -- a very popular device. Such photographs are really combinations of Egg with September Morn, and show that basic appeals change only slightly from generation to generation. ..."

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... and of course, now he has to explain how the Egg and September Morn got mixed up ... but I'll stop.

Julie H · November 18, 2016

The writer knows his field — what has been done, what could be done, the limits — the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, he too plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits up the line. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now, courageously and carefully, can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power? — Annie Dillard

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.

That?

Julie H · November 19, 2016

In the film Message from Andrée (2005), black dots of different sizes flicker over a field of white. The viewer sees only inscrutable traces of something fluttering across the screen. The film, at once mesmerizing and cryptic, is based on an ill-fated hot air balloon expedition to the North Pole led by Swedish explorer Salomon August Andrée in 1897.

[line break added] After his balloon crashed, Andrée and his companions continued on foot, a hopeless effort that was documented by one of the explorers, photographer Nils Strindberg. Three decades later, when their bodies were discovered, five rolls of film were also found. Working with the recovered negatives, now stabilized and housed in a historical archive, [Danish filmmaker Joachim] Koester favors the most damaged images. Rather than trying to eliminate the "stains and blots" that mar the exposed frames (the effects of the Arctic environment), he offers these residues instead from Andrée — a fabled figure whom the viewer never sees ... — Karsten Lund, (2013)

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See <a href="http://www.sternberg-press.com/files/book/69/danish_koester_spread_2.jpg">examples of the photographs here.</a>

I don't have any what-I-see writing about this film or the photographs it features. Do I think someone could do good writing about those pictures of random black dots? Absolutely. A good poet, in particular, could work magic from such a starting source.

Wouldn't that writing be about the poet and not the pictures, which, after all are just random black dots? No, the writing would be about the poet and the pictures and the person who made them. All good writing about pictures is about all three. I'd venture to say that if it's not about all three to some degree, it's not going to be really good writing.

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As an example of a written account of acting out a response to a work of visual art, which is what I think Phil's film review does, here is Zin Taylor 's Thirteen Steps of Abstraction, which is a combination of text and <a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/taylor_wrongwaysign.jpg">this photo, Wrong Way to Spiral Jetty, 2006.</a>

I'm giving only some of the written text, but both text and photo are used strictly as illustration to the acting out of Taylor's response to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Jetty">Robert Smithson's work of art, Spiral Jetty</a> (I hope you're familiar with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Jetty">this famous piece of earthwork</a>). In other words, a response to Spiral Jetty — which is never shown nor directly described — is what Taylor's work is 'acting out' much as Phil's film reviewer's description of himself is an acting out of his response to the Malick film.

Here is Taylor:

... Four of us, including my brother Chris, were driving from a wedding in Idaho to the Salt Lake City Airport in Utah to catch a plane back to Canada. We realized before setting out that our return drive would take us by Robert Smithson's often-photographed bur rarely seen Spiral Jetty. We printed out the thirteen-step driving instructions [and, though they followed those instructions to the letter, they got very lost]

... As we continued onward, checking the instructions as we went, it soon became apparent that there were several obstacles that might keep us from arriving at Spiral Jetty:

<ol>

<li>The rental van was not equipped for the roads.</li>

<li>The sun was going down.</li>

<li>We were running out of gas.</li>

<li>The instructional map, on second (or tenth) analysis quickly descended into geographic abstraction as we progressed through the steps.</li>

</ol>

... Returning along the road, feeling a little defeated, we talked about how, perhaps, the trip was the point: navigating the landscape with an idea in mind, only to get lost and re-evaluate the surroundings. We thought about what Smithson would have gone through decades earlier to find the site, and how every step taken represented a descent into abstraction — thirteen of them to be exact. ... I have yet to meet someone who has attempted to find Spiral Jetty, let alone actually seen it. I've read about people who have tried and occasionally succeeded in locating the sculpture, but in general, what exists are thoughts about the earthwork.

That was when my brother decided he wanted to contribute to the future experience of others. In my view, he wanted to propagate the nonsite [a keyword in earthwork lexicon] of traveling through this Utah desert, and the resulting abstracted thought. In actuality, I think he was pissed off about driving around for hours and wanted to take something home. This photo documents the point at which Chris is about to rip the sign out of the ground. We weren't able to find Spiral Jetty, but we were able to find the sign telling us that we were not going to find Spiral Jetty ... twice.

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Allen Herbert · November 19, 2016

"A good poet, in particular, could work magic from such a starting source."Julie.

Hmm, by the same thought...a photograph.

Allen Herbert · November 19, 2016

A poor photograph needs 10,000 words.

A good photo does not need a single word.

Julie H · November 20, 2016

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated from fresh excrement

and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft intentionality that makes them seem to think,

materializes just above my desk, then vanishes, his dense, abrasive buzz sucked in after him.

— C.K. Williams

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Julie H · November 24, 2016

All of the following is from the artist, David Salle:

.

... It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people; the question is how little we can ask of art and still have it fill the space of our longings. By which I mean a state of open awareness like a gravitational field that pulls other things into itself and, in turn, releases quantities of unaccounted-for emotion into the light of day.

[line break added] That is, of course, only one kind of art. Another kind operates more like criticism itself, in which the artist takes up and defends a certain position, and tries to convince us, as Edmund Wilson describes the critic's role, "by the superior power of his argument." The first type is vulnerable; the second tries to limit the artist's exposure to that vulnerability.

... If you are here as a kind of art tourist, that's OK, too; just take whatever you can use and ignore the rest. But if you're here because you can't not make art, or can't imagine your life without that empowering, free-falling, slightly scary, almost illicit thrill of creating, of using your ability to give form to your imaginings — if that is how you see yourself, then the kinds of things we will talk about here [in class] might ease you over some of the developmental hurdles.

... There's a problem when the gap between what a work purports to be — its presumed intention — and what it actually looks like is too big to be papered over ...

... "You don't get it" is not a sufficient rejoinder to criticism. Even in the unlikely case that it's true, your job is to be able to explain exactly in what way your point has been missed; it's your only assurance that there is indeed a point to be gotten in the first place. A lot of points have a way of evaporating when you have to explain how they are manifest.

... I recently saw an early work of mine from 1977 hanging in the storage racks of the Menil Collection in Houston. It happened to be next to a Warhol painting — nothing special, not Andy on a good day, but a Warhol nonetheless. I think it was one of his glitter shoe paintings. Pretty bland image, but good color. One of his more phoned-in iterations.

[line break added] My picture, by comparison, the thing I had come to in a state of almost deranged inspiration and complete originality some thirty-five years ago, on this day looked like nothing so much as a medium-sized hangover, rendered in tones of grayish green. Anemic, tepid, unresolved — in short, full of wishful thinking. ... n my mind's eye it had long been established as a kind of impudent, nervy little picture. I hadn't remembered it as so weak.

[line break added] I was left feeling pretty low. Then I had the somewhat self-serving, ameliorating thought: I had not, in my early twenties, had the benefit of an Emile de Antonio [aka 'Dee'] or a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Geldzahler">Henry Geldzahler</a> to guide me in my studio. ... Andy would show them a few different things ... and they would say: "Do this, this is great; that thing over there is nothing. Throw it out." ... I had no one to tell me how provisional my work was — how tentative. I wish someone had said to me: "What are you so afraid of?!" ... Let's try to be the Dee and Henry for each other.

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Julie H · November 24, 2016

Here is David Salle writing about one particular picture, <a href="http://www.barbarakrakowgallery.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/1/c992810eb2c2c91516410ab02160640d/img_two/katz_ulla_blackhat_400.jpg">Alex Katz's Black Hat 2, 2010</a>:

.

In painting, as in ophthalmology, color is relational. A color is seldom experienced autonomously; we always see one color against another, and those two against a third, and so on. There are dozens of other factors that influence our perception of color, such as value (how light or dark something is) and saturation (how dense a color seems) but what counts most is the intervals between colors, precisely chosen.

[line break added] The way colors work in contiguity creates a powerful chain of response from eye to brain. Jus think about putting together an outfit: Does pink "go" with gray, or is it best set off with another color altogether? In painting, the specificity of color is everything. That orange next to this brown, with a tiny bit of that exact shade of celadon as a bridge. It's analogous to the combination of notes that make up a musical chord: it's the intervals that work directly on our emotional core.

[line break added] A good example of what I mean is Katz's <a href="http://www.barbarakrakowgallery.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/1/c992810eb2c2c91516410ab02160640d/img_two/katz_ulla_blackhat_400.jpg">Black Hat 2</a>, in which the colors of the face and background — pinks, tans, oranges, and yellows in close proximity — form an assertive counterpoint to the jump the eye must take to the dense black of the hat and sunglasses. It's the visual equivalent of a tenor reaching for a high note. This rare alloy of sensibility and materiality is, I think, what enables some artists to transform dross into gold.

</blockquote>

Julie H · November 26, 2016

On September 11, 2001, a dust-covered survivor ran, then walked, from the epicenter of the chaos: "In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to see things, somehow differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual way, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls." "Maybe," Don DeLillo continues, "that is what things look like when there is no one here to see them." Seeing things, somehow, differently ... [bill Brown, 2013]

</blockquote>

Allen Herbert · November 26, 2016

"One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated from fresh excrement and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft intentionality that makes them seem to think, materializes just above my desk, then vanishes, his dense, abrasive buzz sucked in after him."

— C.K. Williams

A small creation part of the ecology of nature merely looking for substance...it plays its part in the grand scheme of things.

I've always admired wonder women; when I was younger I had 9 coffee cups with her image I particularly was enamored by her legs. The actress who played her part always felt particularly powerful when dressed in the wonder women costume. To quote.

Allen Herbert · November 26, 2016

"A good example of what I mean is Katz's <a href="http://www.barbarakrakowgallery.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/1/c992810eb2c2c91516410ab02160640d/img_two/katz_ulla_blackhat_400.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Black Hat 2</a>, in which the colors of the face and background — pinks, tans, oranges, and yellows in close proximity — form an assertive counterpoint to the jump the eye must take to the dense black of the hat and sunglasses. It's the visual equivalent of a tenor reaching for a high note. This rare alloy of sensibility and materiality is, I think, what enables some artists to transform dross into gold" Julie.

Dross into gold...I agree.

Allen Herbert · November 26, 2016

"Does great or better photography inspire better writing? Can you write well about a bad photograph?" Phil.

Perhaps the better photographer has a greater intellectual capacity, which also lends itself to other Arts. Prose. Or, perhaps many Artists/Photographers cannot reach out to other Art. Prose. Maybe they become lost souls in the Arts because they do not have that ability...does one depend on the other?

Allen Herbert · November 26, 2016

"Can you write well about a bad photograph?" Phil".

You can write well about anything...the better the writing the better the belief.

Norman 202 · November 27, 2016

Here is David Salle writing about one particular picture, Alex Katz's Black Hat 2, 2010:

he's writing about [dramatic pause] colour. he references a photo, non?

Allen Herbert · November 28, 2016

To write about a photograph, and how they work for you, is interesting and a positive.

But lets not forget the photograph also writes about itself....for those with eyes that can see.

Hugs Julie.

Julie H · November 29, 2016

Earliness at the Cape

by Babette Deutsch

The color of silence is the oyster's color

Between the lustres of deep night and dawn.

Earth turns to absence; the sole shape's the sleeping

Light — a mollusk of mist.

[ ... ]

... That solitary boat,

Out fishing, is a black stroke on vacancy.

Night, deaf and dumb as something from the deeps,

Having swallowed whole bright yesterday, replete

With radiance, is gray as abstinence now.

But in this nothingness, a knife point: pleasure

Comes pricking; the hour's pallor, too, is bladed

Like a shell, and as it opens, cuts.

</blockquote>

Julie H · November 30, 2016

Landscape

This is Rodney Sappington writing about Karin Apollonia Müller's series <a href="http://karinapolloniamueller.com/work/angels-in-fall/">Angels in Fall</a> which ostensibly features landscape views of Los Angeles:

... One look around our global cities immediately produces a striking effect on the psyche. We've created havoc and beauty.

... It is a condition of living in noise while striving to locate the voices that echo a shared past.

... Photographic skepticism, I am suggesting, questions the photograph's capacity to capture a world that is every day vanishing a little. Tradition is lost (or left behind), and must be rediscovered in a new "land" that has yet to find itself. A gone land in our era has no use for traditions — in fact dispenses with them through neglect or hypercirculation and overexposure of global advertising.

... The skeptic is vulnerable, alive, and longing for an opportunity to relocate tradition ("founding") according to his/her individual compass in a land described by photographer Allan Sekula as comprising "a space that flaunts its departure from tradition." Founding is a verb — an action, an ongoing process. The photographic journey is performed in the heat of the object, in rapt attention toward a point of view from which one cannot turn back onto history, self, or home. It is always on the horizon, yet intimately crucial to one's identity and culture.

... Perhaps this is the "fall" in <a href="http://karinapolloniamueller.com/work/angels-in-fall/">Angels</a>, to be on hold, descending with rapt attention toward the facts of your life that are no longer owned by you but are represented by some entity somewhere, out of reach.

... Landscape is a slice of the earth's surface, but never purely representative of geography, region, or city. Landscape is not "out there." Nor is it purely "in here," in the psyche. Landscapes are representations of the way the world appears and how we dream its embrace. Henry David Thoreau philosophized this very "in-between" of material land and primeval longing (its American nineteenth-century equivalent) for "wildness."

[line break added] Thoreau claimed that "nature" projected outward was no nature at all, but only part of a more complex psychic loop that connects brain and land, land and mind. The "vigor of Nature in us" is part fantasy, part location, and a project of "importing" into landscapes shared modes of life. Writing in his journal, Thoreau described a Utopian desire to project vitality onto wilderness far removed from human contact, and warned that such projection might indicate a lack of vitality inside one's own home, mind, or philosophy:

It is in vain to dream of a wilderness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord ... than I import into it.

... This is not a physical space as much as a crisis of "feeling" that finds its expression in carefully designed roadways and hacienda-like simulations of a "better life" for those who aim to purify all forms of "contentious civility" out of the lived environment.

... People here are figures, a dot next to a railroad track caught in industrial arrangements ...

</blockquote>

Sappington gives a number of in-detail examinations of particular pictures in the series. I've left them out because they more or less repeat what he's written about the series in general.

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