Julie H
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Posts posted by Julie H
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you haven't asked the photographer about the photo.
The picture speaks for itself.
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Looks like political protest to me.
They're not protesting. They're placidly obedient.
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it clearly has wide-ranging effects.
Half the human population.
This is the kind of picture that appeals to the photo.net 'base' (to use a current political phrase). Never mind the rest of us.
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Why is it 'post' anything? I make pictures. The whole thing is a process.
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I would like to know what about the individuals in the photo you have selected makes you think they are female
The breasts and body shape, especially on the central figure.
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Is this the current Picture of the Week? It's three rows down from the top in the PoW main page, but it's the only one I haven't seen before.
If it is, it's yet another entry in the PoW library of "how to objectify women in a picture." Thank you. As if we didn't already have enough of that on this site ...
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F$*k postmodernism.
Perfect. Thank you.
I rest my case.
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Postmodernist relativism is exactly the type of thinking Peterson warns against
You'll note that I said "postmodernism and its consequences." :)
Most of postmodernism's consequences are anti-postmodernism, but they are its consequences.
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Good grief, Phil. That video is 54 minutes long. That's about 49 minutes more than I'm willing to do.
The idea of living in or through one's pictures, or trapping yourself or others via photographs should have been damaged beyond all repair by postmodernism. Here's Lucy Soutter writing to that effect:
"... In modernist art photography, prevalent from the 1910s through to the 1970s, photographers made particularly active use of formal elements of picture-making, such as point of view, arrangement of elements within the frame and printing techniques, to nuance the subject matter of their images. Although such artistry was understood to contribute to the value of the image, it was usually regarded as inseparable from the self-explanatory content (as in Ansel Adams's sublime western landscapes)."But with postmodernism:
"... Ambiguity is absolutely key to the discussion of contemporary art. Ambiguity in art or literature was once seen as a failing ... Contemporary photography, however, embraces ambiguity on several levels. ... Most common of all, however, is an ambiguity of meaning in which different interpretations — even mutually contradictory ones — may be held at the same time. Such interpretive conflict, which might have been regarded as artistic failure in an earlier moment of modernist autonomy or postmodern representational critique, is now regarded as a sign of desirable openness, reflecting the layered reality of experience in our time."... The lasting legacy of postmodernism has been its challenge to the master narratives of the twentieth century, including logic, certainty and truth. Contemporary art discourse thrives on works which are to some extent, illogical, uncertain and riddled with elements of contradiction, fiction and fantasy."I think we find in this forum that "contemporary art discourse" does not thrive: such discourse, along with all things postmodern and its consequences are strenuously resisted by many photographers, artist and amateurs alike. Absent ambiguity, you find Dr. Ceriani being trapped by Smith's certainty.
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That expression, that accent, that secret he seemed on the very point of capturing in her face, was something that drew him into the quicksands of moods, humors, psychology
Freud to Jung on his on the occasion of his only visit to America: “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.”
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"...Because once you've begun," he would preach, "there is no reason why you should stop.
The danger is that there's always the need for drama, real or contrived. It's better or worse, but it's more. See Facebook. It feeds on itself, even though, I'm pretty sure nobody is really fooled by any of it. They are and they aren't, at the same time.
Here, from another era, is what I find to be a very poignant anecdote from the end of Sam Stephenson's new book about W. Eugene Smith. He had interviewed Gary Ceriani, the son of Dr. Ernest Ceriani, the doctor featured in Smith's famous Country Doctor photo essay. If you've never seen it, the doctor who is the 'lead' character in it seems surely to be an incredibly dedicated, even heroic and all-around good man. Here is what Stephenson writes:
"Then, when we were done, I turned off my recorder, packed my bag, and was preparing to leave when Gary made the most interesting and telling comment I heard in five days following Smith's footsteps in Colorado: 'You know, I've never thought of this until now, but I believe there's a chance that my father felttrappedby Smith's work. Smith made him out to be a perfect human being inLifemagazine. Then he had to live up to it.' "................
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On a documentary about the painter Elizabeth Murray (whom I love), Chuck Close says (from memory, so I'm getting *most* of his words right, I hope):
"I like working, staying in the studio because the world, life, outside the studio is so f***** up."Made me laugh and then think about whether, or how much of, the pleasure or photographing is sometimes using it to be able to escape into that little bubble of watching/shooting.
How much of the time, when people say, "You're missing the vacation by photographing the vacation!" or whatever life event it is that you're taking pictures of and therefore not participating in ... you say to yourself, "I'm missing a drab, dreary, dull vacation-from-hell with people I don't want to be with; and I'm making it into something that I like a whole lot better." You're stuck in that f*****-up event. It's a blessing to have an escape and the chance to hop into your portable "studio" (your camera) and make something pleasurable out of it. (Hopefully, I am describing only occasional events in your life, not ... your life.)
I'm speculating here because I don't take my camera to family events. I am, however, now old enough not to have too many of them that require attendance.
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You can't force pleasure. This is from a letter that Alfred Stieglitz wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe in 1916:
"— And just now — after a day or rain, when the sun broke through the clouds, & the Lake in the setting sun became intensely blue — the opposite shore golden — & the sky filled with huge breaking storm clouds — warm in color — & the sky a rich glowing blue! -- As I was wandering down to the dock with my large camera to photograph some of the clouds — I really didn't feel much like photographing but the clouds were unusual & I felt as if I ought (I oughting to??? — ??? I who don't believe in such things) — to finally make an effort to "wake up" — just then as my mind was focused on the clouds your letter from Asheville was handed to me. — "..............
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Scroll down ... down, down. Comments are below the picture.
[Edited to add: first click on the name of the picture, and from that view, scroll down.]
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bed sheet
Ahhh ... relief. I've been trying to remember since yesterday what that reminded me of. Trying to remember ... drives me nuts. Found it! ... though it's not as close as my fuzzy memory made the match.
See Aaron Siskind's book cover.
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You spend whatever on shooting and whatever on post ... then how many times do you ever look at the thing once you're finished with it? Not counting pictures of family and friends.
Before you answer, note that if we add up what you spent on shooting and what you spent on editing plus what you then claim for looking and it amounts to more than twenty-four hours, we will suspect you are from another planet with a different orbital speed.
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I think you have a fish on the line, but you haven't seen it yet ...
Compositing is not photography. There is photography and there is compositing. They are good friends, but they live in separate apartments.
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What's the difference between my photography (the topic of this thread) and my compositing (not the topic of this thread)?
In the following, pay close attention to the difference between the meanings of the words visible and visual:
"Old art attempted to make the non-visible(energy, feelings)visual(marks). New art is attempting to make the non-visual(mathematics)visible(concrete)." —Mel Bochner [emphasis added]Think Minimal art and, beyond that, Sol Lewitt (who was neither conceptual nor minimal, though he used both).
What I do with my photographic composites is the second kind, but I use the visual to do it, or maybe it's more accurate to say, to play with it. I use the visual to make the non-visual visible. Again, note that non-visual is not the same as Old art's non-visible. Got it? :)
I get an extreme pleasure from doing this. Compositing is my obsession: it's my work, it's what I do all day (in between all that other staying-alive stuff).
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“I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory traces of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.” —Francis Bacon.................." Clichés and probabilities are on the canvas; they fill it, they must fill it, before the painter’s work begins. And the reckless abandon comes down to this: the painter himself must enter into the canvas before beginning."" … We do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say. They say that the painter is already in the canvas, where he or she encounters all the figurative and probabilistic givens that occupy and preoccupy the canvas. An entire battle takes place in the canvas between the painter and these givens."—fromFrancis Bacon: The Logic of Sensationby Gilles Deleuze...............
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Rather than Wassily Kandinsky that last one instantly brings to mind Francis Bacon!
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color
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"As a 13- or 14-year old boy, I gradually saved up enough money to buy myself a paintbox containing oil paints. I can still feel today the sensation I experienced then — of paints emerging from the tube. One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colors — exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release, ...
" ... with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness and devotion, with obstinate self-control, with sensitive, precarious balance, living an independent life of their own, with all the necessary qualities for further, autonomous existence, prepared to make way readily, in an instant, for new combinations, to mingle with one another and create an infinite succession of new worlds." — Wassily Kandinsky
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This morning, because of something I read (not about photography), I've been thinking about private vs the public reference photography.
In the origins of the arts, the 'private' was not featured. We had to learn how to get out of the epic, the mythic, the gods and royalty, and find the private life of ordinary people in literature and in the visual arts. Photography was born into the private.
I find, that for me, the private equates to the snapshot. And from that I notice that maybe 99% of the pictures made today are 'private' whereas maybe 99% of the pictures found on photo.net are not private; are public in the sense that they are aggressively not of the (private) snapshot kind. (My idea of a snapshot is a picture that is intended not to be seen: it should be invisible, it should disappear when looked at. Its only job is to cue some scene or thing out of memory. My idea of non-snapshots is a picture that is intended to be seen and looked at. It should make itself necessary to its own sense-making; it should grow in visibility when looked at.)
[in art photography, there is a 'snapshot' style. I don't think those pictures are snapshots: they use/abuse the habitual response to that kind of picture to creatively trap the viewer ... but that's another topic for another day ... ]
I know that many photo.netters make snapshots, carry P&S cameras or use their phone camera to get quick, friendly 'private' grabs out of their life. I don't like to do that, and consequently rarely do that. This is not because I'm an extra fancy photographer but, I think, because I hate looking at things in that way (with my camera).
A second thought on private photography, and this one surprises me, is that I'm not sure there is such a thing. It seems to me that as soon as you've made a photograph of it, it's somehow been taken out into the public world, no matter how snapshot-ish it is. Unlike literature or painting, which source from the mind, the out-there visible is, in many ways, public once it has been made accessible to other eyes.
A small part of what I was reading that got me on this tangent:
"By its very nature this private life does not create a place for the contemplative man, for that 'third person' who might be in a position to meditate on this life, to judge and evaluate it."You'll say, duh!, the viewer becomes that third person. But I think that once third-party judgment and evaluation have been introduced, it is no longer private. It's something else. A presentation, a show.
Except:
"Events acquire a public significance as such only when they become crimes. Thecriminal actis a moment of private life that becomesinvoluntarilypublic."[quotes are from M.M. Bakhtin]Rounding this back on topic, I really viscerally dislike, and find no pleasure in, making 'private' pictures. That's odd because when I was a budding photographer, when my six or seven year old self was on the prowl with her box Brownie, I took only 'private' pictures of cats and dogs, and family members — and derived great pleasure from it. That little girl would have agreed with Tony's ex-parents-in-law and thought 'public' pictures were ... nuts.
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