'Rectangles'

Rectangular apartments/flats defines the buildings above the fence

line, rectangular 'notices' for various products and services define the

area below. Your ratings, critiques, and observations are invited and

most welcome. If you rate or critique harshly or just wish to post a

remark, please submit a helpful and constructive comment; please

share your photographic knowledge to help improve my

photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

This is art.

Tommy

You flatter me.

If so, this is is a photo site, and it went over the collective head of many participants, I think.

I am very proud of it.  There are others, a small series -- the site I found was compelling.

Thanks again, Tommy.

john

John (Crosley)

have you slowed down your posting here on photo.net a bit? or are you posting somewhere else?

I have sort of ambiguous feelings about this one. On the one hand the juxtaposition of the sheets in the foreground and the buildings in the background is intriguing.

On the other hand and from where I sit, the background tends to "disappear" simply because it is too far away.

I do not know however how you could make it more "prominent", maybe stepping back and emphasising the telephoto-effect.

L.

I'll stand by this one as posted; you don't have to like or understand them all; one viewer thinks this is pure art; others may differ, yourself included.

I just now have speeded up my posting with eight new psots in two or three days and 429 more possible posts in my hopper.

I was slow as I as on a jag taking some new photos and going over the rest that were not posted, also preparing for a book of older photos, now slowed because I need a quality but not expensive scanner.

When I get it, then the book goes together.

But I did slow for a while; now I've speed up and can't post fast enough; come back and see.

You're always welcome here; as you well know.

john

John (Crosley)

As you may know, my comments on photographs are initially unrelated to my "liking". Of course there are images I like and images I dislike.

In this case I see the graphic element -  the rectangles you mention. Paper rectangles against the rectangular forms of the buildings, in their different forms and shapes: wall panes and windows.

That considered, from where I sit there is not enough graphic contrast between the size of the paper rectangles on the wooden wall and the building rectangles. And this, together with the non-geometrical arrangement of the for- and background, limits the graphic impact of the picture.

An example:

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2001/gursky/montparnasse_pop.html

Cheers,

L.

Two points, one a belated answer by example:

You asked me previously if I had slowed down my posting.

Please check my recent posts - between 16 and 20 in the last 10 days of December.  Not slow at all, but following a period of slow posting.  I think I'm making up for that.

Now for the red meat.

I'm flattered to have you compare me to Andreas Gursky, whose Rhein II, from a high vantage point (his specialty) sold in Nov. 2011 for a record $4.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a photograph, Nov 2011.

I suppose the above photograph was inspired by Gursky, as I recall seeing work similar to his at Photo Paris three or four years ago when I attended, and saying to myself, 'that is interesting -- not my style, but I might adapt that idea to my style some day if I saw the right scene'.

This is not a Gursky and not a record setting $4.3 million photograph.

Then again, Gursky manipulates all his photos; I don't.

He's now rich.

I'm not.

I've borrowed the following from Wikipedia, and although it is not the final word, it is a good word and not too controversial:

********

Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. ^{[footnote omitted].}   In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed.^{[request for citation omitted].}  Writing in The New Yorker magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures "vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and "literally unbelievable."[footnote omitted].   In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the "Düsseldorf" school. In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky's large works:[footnote omitted]

"The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky...I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky's huge, panoramic color prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance."^{[footnote omitted]}

Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own."[footnote omitted]. Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works.  [oh?]  His photography is straightforward.^{[footnote omitted]'}

********

All between the asterisk marks [********] is quotation except bracketed material which is my own notation.

Thank you for comparing my tepid work to a work by the master photographer of 'fictions' which are also deadpan, both 'manipulated' and to one observer 'not manipulated', but we can easliy see the photo you posted a link to is highly manipulated, as are many others of his.

He also is quite frank about that manipulation.

I do not manipulate more than minimum for brightness and contrast and almost always something for sharpness, as that is required for digital captures -- it's a necessity, and the art is knowing 'how much'.

In that way his and my works cannot stand ready comparison except they are of buildings and in some way they see the buildings in a somewhat similar fashion, but he makes a 'statement' (however deadpan) and I make an observation and 'comparison' . . . nothing more,  and I truly make no pretense other than what you see and what you take from my photo, if anything (and it sounds like you took precious little from it).

You saw little, so it must not have impresed you, but at the same time, the comparison was warranted to Gursky to show me how it's done, but the Gursky treatment was not what I wanted from my photo - I'm not of the 'Dusseldorf School'.

I may do more of such work, but he belongs to his school (The Dusseldorf School), and I belong to the School of John Crosley, peripatetic photographer of the contemporaneous and spontaneous, who spies a scene, sums it up in a visual expression with equipment at hand, then moves along - and on occasion returns when light is different and  as photographer I happpen to be in the neighborhood.

Long ago, at age 21, when I took my very first photograph, I knew I was for myself producing 'important' work -- to me that is.  (I never acknowledged it to anyone, perhaps even myself).

One photo from that first roll is in a folder in my portfolio. [three men on ferry boat]

That may sound pretentious, but I find that photo reproduced in several blogs; it's a historical document, and frankly one of my first five or six photos ever -- not more and with NO training - completely inchoate.

I sold my initial and self-taught work within four to six weeks to the highest of the high in the NYC periodical publishing world, as journalistic, photographs, and even then understood there was no proper place for my work outside of perhaps an 'Aperture' monograph if the work had art pretensions, and it did, though I could not sum it up in such words, as I figured (wrongly) I hadn't an artistic bone in my body.

I wanted to be a professional photographer, but there was really no living to be made doing that . . . unless one was a teacher or professor of photography, I had no 'fine arts' degree which was required, and didn't really want one or to study several more years beyond my graduation requirements.  The other avenue was 'advertising photography, and the idea bored me silly.

My senior year when I started taking photos was interrupted by the Columbia student riots and school takeover which I photographed and sold to NY Times, NY Daily News, Time, Life and Time-Life Syndicate as students shut the school down, foreclosing for then my graduation, and delaying that graduation by five or so years.

I went over to Associated Press with my paltry portfolio and said I'd like to have a job as a 'combat photographer' in Viet Nam, not really knowing exactly where Viet Nam was or why we were fighting (it took me 30 years to understand why we were actually fighting and it was not a good discovery to finally learn the truth). 

Such chutzpah from a then 22-year-old!

AP's legendary worldwide photo boss, Hal Buell, in AP headquarters NYC  shook my hand after looking at my photos, congratulated me, said they looked 'great', I had a 'feel' and needed 'seasoning', so he suggested I get a job as a photographer at a small newswpaper in, say, rural Pennsylvania and 'start putting my photos on the wire' and as he led me out the door, his hand pumping mine in goodbye, said 'don't worry, if we want you we'll know how to find you, and we'll come and get you (goodbye forever, kid, and sucker!) [subtext].

Instead I worked my way on a bomb-laden ammunition ship to Viet Nam and except for a nasty scrape with a bullet wound that was infected might have got a Pulitzer after I separated from the ammo ship and became a freelance 'combat photographer' all after I helped steer that ship and chip its hull paint to work my passage to Viet Nam (with my cameras).

I was medically evacuated to the USA, passed my physical and immediately went to San Francisco State College (now university) which had bombings and riots under S.I. Hayakawa, noted president, then, later, University of California, Berkeley and its People's Park riots, where I also took photos (including one noteworthy one) you may recall of a soldier with a gas mask and a bayonetted rifle, all as a freelance.

AP and UPI both then offered me a job, as a photographer (later the legendary photo chief Buell would fly to the West Coast to ask me to become one of his world sevice/worldwide photo editors, and I was later given my second transfer, to NYC world headquarters as a photo editor and also served informally as a AP staff editor/essentially doing some Photo Department head's work at age 24 that the department head was too lazy to do; it involved working as one with AP's top editors daily to plan the following days news coverage commitment, something called 'The Budget'.  I was 24.

One of the writing staff when I was hired as a photograher in San Francisco was an old China friend of Cartier-Bresson, and that friend said my work then reminded him of his friend Cartier-Bresson's work, so he  sent me to meet C-B who was in town in San Francisco 'showing some pictures'. 

I had no grasp of the importance of the event or knowledge of who that Cartier-Bresson fellow was/never he

Thank you for your long post.

It gave me another glimpse in your adventurous life.

I know that Gursky manipulates, and it was not my purpose to propose a comparison between the "Crosley school" and Bernd and Hilla Becher's School, but just to make an example of a geometry-based picture.

I guess that we will have chances to discuss this further.

Cheers,

L.

Luca, you may not have intended to make a comparison of 'schools' but you did make a comparison of works, and that invited the lengthy post and the slightly facetious reference to comparison of 'schools' above and the obvious response that any comparison deserves to be examined in detail to see how well founded it is and also its genesis.

In fact, there was a genesis, which you were unaware of; I had seen his works before at Photo Paris and carried forth some of their influence, however (again there's that word) inchoately.

;~))

john

John (Crosley)