d_poinsett

The "Nirvana" photos you mention that are at the Guggenheim are not what you think. The large (40" x 50"?) print of "Curt Cobain" close up, which to my eye looked *exactly* like Curt Cobain, is a photo of Benjamin Brock. This is just one piece in the Slater Bradley exhibit which includes other photos and videos of "Curt Cobain", "Michael Jackson", and "Ian Curtis". In each case the piece is staged, the real subject is Brock who incidently looks like Bradley's twin in real life. Bradley met Brock several years ago by coincidence and has used him in numerous art projects that challenge the notion of identity and image. This particular exhibit adds the element of celebrity to the mix.

 

Without this background info, the exhibit pieces are almost meaningless. There is a lot of contemporary art that I simply don't "get", but if you are going to make the effort to see this stuff in person, sometimes it pays to find out what it is about.

sey

Right you are Mr. G.

 

Old pictorialists, start your engines.

Postmodern irony will eventually fold far enough back on itself until formal western cultural notions of classic beauty re-emerge. Beyond kitsch and mere pretty. Sublime postmodern neo-classicism. The movement will then collapse again under the undemocratizing weight of requiring a skill set that few possess. Pictorialists, start your engines.

Most ND filters are transparent to IR.

There are many paths to higher consciousness. Will the artist pursuing great concepts arrive sooner than the technician perfecting the craft? Maybe. No one knows.

This is a great example of how context can be so important in visual artistic expression. Irony, social context, and serendipity are the key elements in photos by the blind. Intellectually and emotionally provoking, these works are truly the ultimate in postmodern photography.

The critical element is that there is a cultural and aesthetic text in pictorialism just like any work. Postmodernism just needed to step back far enough to see it.

A transmission densitometer measures the amount of light that passes through different parts of a negative. A reflection densitometer measures the amount of light reflected from different parts of a print. Basically, it measures lightness and darkness.

 

The instrument is primarily for the technically inclined darkroom worker. If you are that person, you can use the tool learn how various materials and processes (exposure, film type, paper type, dev time, temp, agitation, dev type, toners, etc.) interact to affect negatives and prints.

 

The overall density of negatives and prints and differences between the lightest and darkest regions are critical elements in how we perceive the final results. For some people, relating the quantative information to perception can be extrodinarliy useful.

 

However, the less technically inclined you are, the less likely you are to benefit from using a densitometer. For some people, it gives a coldly clinical (not to mention confusing) quality to the process. A sufficiently talented darkroom worker can produce high quality negatives and prints without using a densitometer. I use a densitometer all the time. It has been an effective aid in understanding various materials and processes but it surely has not been a substitute for experience and aesthetic judgement.

Isn't bromide drag dependent on agitation pattern/frequency and the developer itself? In other words, aren't some developers more prone than others?

Mr. Dixon has it.

"How does the artist comes to a state of mind in wich he or she can go with the flow of the creation process and thinking that 'it just doesn't matter'."

 

We all have random thoughts and feelings and we all have things that matter -- even things that we prefer did not matter. Do you know anyone for whom this isn't true? If you surrender your attention to them they will probably become less interesting and less distracting and won't matter so much. Then new random thoughts and feelings and things that matter will appear.

 

One man's static is another man's source of inspiration or something like that.

From "The Tao of Photography"

 

All paths lead to enlightenment. Some paths get there sooner than others but it has nothing to do with the path. The path you are on is the right one. The path you change to is the right one.

 

Mastery and discipline as a path to artistic enlightenment is as valid as any other. Make 5000 photographs of one subject, say a cat. You will find your artistic self. Maybe not. Maybe you'll just be the photographer who made 5000 photographs of a cat.

 

What is a great artist? We tend to say that they communicate powerfully and innovate. Is that true? I don't know. Most great artists are obsessed with creating. They can't easily stop themselves. There's even more to this whole thing but it doesn't matter.

I have both a Soligor 2 (analog) and newer Pentax digital. They both agree with each other quite well. The main difference is that the Pentax has less flare (noticable only in dark areas of high contrast scenes). If you are on a budget, the Soligor 2 is probably among the least expensive useful meters you'll find on eBay.

Rodinal produces larger grain clumps than other developers. While not so much an image issue for 8x10 film, it is the likely source of the "yellowish stain". Silver has a dichroic effect that produces varying degrees of yellow reflection depending on crystal size. Search rec.photo.darkroom in Google Groups for a more thorough explanation by photo sage Richard Knoppow.

 

I have experimented with APHS for making unsharp masks. As you have noticed, controlling contrast is a challenge. I generally use HC110 simply because it is handy for mixing such small batches, the stuff in the bottle keeps well, and because the image is so faint I can get resonably low contrast with a development time that is not too short. But if I where going to use APHS for making photos in the camera, I might experiment with using other developers. You want a long enough time for even development but not so long that the contrast is out of control. I normally use Xtol for regular film so I would probably start there.

 

You may want to contact moderator Lex and ask for advice on slow, low contrast developers. He has a lot of experience with this and very knowledgeable.

Down.

Thanks to Mr. Whatling for the illuminating and informed post. All of your comments are spot on.

 

I tracked done some of the links from the Bansky site and was particularly taken with the material at the GIANT OBEY site. When I talked about complexity in an earlier post, this is what I meant. The whole OBEY thing became a complex adaptive system with nearly (if not completely) a life of its own, nudges from Mr. Fairey and his friends notwithstanding. It has its own ecology with sustained reproduction, adaptations, mutations, etc. like any CAS.

 

I hadn't thought about it before but advertising and mass media has this CAS quality and it is obviously exploited with intention by the more saavy folks in the business. Experts of the hive mind. I think there is more coming in the art world. Work that was previously fringe and underground just keeps reaching further into the mainstream.

 

Among the keys for these evolving works to thrive is a willingness of its creator to get out of the way and surrender to the process. As Bansky observed, doing it for fame will most likely spoil the brew.

 

Thanks again.

There are many Truths, many Beauties. Each artist/viewer chooses/finds/has theirs.

Photography is one of postmodern art's numerous granddaddy's, certainly among its most important. Photography's qualities of reproducibility, access to the masses (both as creator and viewer), integral role in pop culture, capacity for historical and social narrative -- this limited set of qualities alone puts it in postmodern art's living room. It could be argued, based on the stength of these qualities inherent in photography, that even pictorialist photos are at postmodern art's doorstep if not in the foyer.

 

Although postmodern photographic content can include "deconstructing the sacred", it is not limited to this any more than postmodern art is in general.

 

I think what will come after postmodernism is an extrapolation of synthesis and complexity to a level that is not a mere extention but truly a new form. The seeds of this are in Chadwick's work and others. Works may autonomously evolve intentionally. Works may be interactive where the interactivity is not a novelty or the focus but elemental in the expression. Scales of time and space may be as much a part of the pallete as anything else and freely tapped. Stir in all of the best ideas from postmodernism and it will be one wild feast.

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, how ever it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison."

 

Albert Einstein, 1938

Physical concepts are a creation of the human mind. Never underestimate the power of belief. It is the essence of art.

There are no truths, only beliefs.

As I understand it, among postmodernism's many faces is a premise that formal logical analysis yields a point of view that is unique to the process and incomplete. Further, the incompleteness is likely hidden. I can see why this premise would be particularly appealing to artists engaged in a creative process that may require a different set of skills, a process that might even be arrested by logic.

 

Perhaps our more learned participants (Kantor, Kelly, others) would comment on the degree to which they considered this premise an element of postmodern ideology and its validity from various philosopical points of view. (I realize this could be a thesis topic, I'm just looking for an overview. Thanks.)

Brian, the broad range of positions I've described characterizing postmodernism are not 'mine'. I have no real interest in defending them or changing anyone's mind about them. I'm only passing along what I know about it. I currently believe the information to be accurate.

One of the things initally sought in the <a href="http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=1">online symposium</a> hosted by the Georgia O'Keefe Museum was a working definition of postmodernism. Within a few days (the symposium lasted several), it became apparent that there would be no consensus among the leading artists, curators, and art scholars of our day. That is telling.

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Among other things, postmodernism is what happened when rational thought met paradox.

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Brian, I think you are asking all the right questions. Why are feminism and anti-consumerism on the list? Because they both independently/inter-dependently arose out the failure of consumerism and traditional gender hierarchy to deliver us to the promised land. Feminist art, for example, cannot be understood without seeing this context.

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It's not like some committee formally got together to decide what is on the list an what is not. (In fact, there is no universal agreement. This itself is, ironically and self-referentially, postmodern.) But scholars, curators, and artists began seeing an emerging pattern in reaction to the limits (failure?) of modernism thus: postmodernism (I don't remember etymology of the term).

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Well, of course, a sarcastic feminist consumer could be the poster child for postmodernism given all the built-in diversity, irony, and paradox! Your card will be issued soon.

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Lest you think I'm defending postmodernism, I'm not. I don't like a lot of postmodern art and I don't understand most of it. But I have been curious enough about the all the hubbub to find out more about what is going on. I can completely sympathize with the frustration of not getting a concise definition but I am satisfied to know now that, by its nature, postmodernism includes this hazy quality. I also think that a lot of stuff passed off as postmodern is just whining from irresponsible people who have it better than they think. But I also realize that there <i>have</i> been injustices, failures, and limits and that postmodernism is one of several possible legitimate responses.