charleswood

<p>That's wasn't an attack. I couldn't make hide not tails out of your remark and it came off as brusque and sarcastic.</p>

<p>David thanks for you thoughts.</p>

<p>Thank you David. Would you please also discuss how art appreciation also involves understanding the culture that produced it, both its harmonies and disharmonies? I can't discuss that issue very well myself and would appreciate a good presentation from you if you care to.</p>

<p>Ok. But once we discuss a particular picture to a point then someone, this time me, starts to throw in other works from the larger body of work of the photographer. I don't find much in Two Nuns to stir controversy. In some of the other photos of Bodine I think there are examples which are pretty darn funny today given how much change there has been since those days. I think Bondine avoided controversial works, he isn't known for his controversial images. Lack of controversy in Bodine's body of work is comment worthy.</p>

<p>Alan, is the Parks photo heavy social and political commentary, or was Parks just speaking photographically about the facts of <em>his</em> life? Bodine's life facts look quite different from Parks' don't they? Why is one political and the other just a simple photo to you?</p>

<p>Fred, I've learned so much from you and I am indebted to you for all your efforts.</p>

<p>Rick - "I'd never heard of Bodine and while the original image left me flat it caused me to research and view some of his other work which I liked very much."</p> <p>Yeah I saw some of those other images and I liked them as far as they went. I put up links to specific ones and mentioned that while Bodine was picturing an African American as a happy and dutiful nanny for a little white princess, other now more famous professional photographers were picturing segregated water fountains and the like. I pointed out that Bodine was just as much spinning as was say an Erwitt or a Parks. You, Richard, say you don't think that in Bondine there is anything there. That's what I'm talking about, how Bodine doesn't come off as political, but Parks and Erwitt sure do. I'm just noticing what others don't notice, that's one of my gifts, and I share that gift. I ask myself, why bother? Particularly with the inarticulate Les barking his stuff to no purpose other than to just bark.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Thanks James for pointing out that the haloing as a visual element of the photograph was introduced by the limitations of the burning technique. Once in a while I am able to contribute something to a strictly technical discussion of the craft/art of photography, once in a while I say because of my limited understanding of technique and craft. </p>

<p>Patrick S - "As Fred G knows, I was torn between Bodine and a much lesser known artist's work, which happened to be a male nude."</p> <p>Patrick can you just put a link to the male nude now and we can discuss that?</p>

<p>If you want me to make a big deal out of two nuns I am capable Alan. But we are now discussing a broader body of work and other contexts.</p>

<p>It's the active advocacy component I note as largely unrecognized in Bodine's work. Fred wrote "Sometimes, a more innocent, or unfettered, or unprejudiced, or simply objective view is a much more informative and meaningful historical and social document."</p> <p>Sometimes? How is it that this a simple objective view <a href="http://aaubreybodine.com/gallery/default.asp?rtn=cat&cat=-3&pg=59&bc=16-171">http://aaubreybodine.com/gallery/default.asp?rtn=cat&cat=-3&pg=59&bc=16-171</a> . It couldn't be more surreal!</p> <p>More so than this by Erwitt? http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/photographs/elliott-erwitt-segregated-water-fountains-north-carolina-5544674-details.aspx</p> <p>Obviously there is a different mind engaging with his subject. Each mind advocates for its point of view. But we can't see advocacy in Bodine? How is that even possible to not see him as an advocate of <em>something</em>?</p> <p> </p>

<p>Fred- "Isn't it the nature of a good photojournalist to leave the active social commentary to others?"</p> <p>Bodine was making active social commentary with his photojournalism and he was paid to do so plus he leveraged up a side business of selling books based on his skill and commercial reputation, old South in their flavor. Bodine was editorializing, he wasn't leaving it up to viewers, he was influencing viewers. So were others of his era.</p> <p>Earlier in a weekly discussions we viewed and commented on Elliot Erwitt <a href="http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/2007/09/05/segregated-water-fountains-1950/">http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/2007/09/05/segregated-water-fountains-1950/</a> . Erwitt was a photojournalist who also actively made social commentary. I'm highlighting that Bodine was an institutional photographer with whom Erwitt (institutional photographer) and others were conversing. We can't look only at how they crafted the photographs that spoke for them. We have to look at what they said to comprehend their craft, art, 'journalism'. Parks was also an institutional photographer who also added his voice to that ongoing conversation. But how is that we don't immediately recognize Bodine as just as actively involved in that conversation as was Parks, how it is that we don't immediately recognize that Bodine's conversational participation was just as much a highly political social commentary? Yet we are quick to recognize Erwitt as involved in politics, and Parks as involved even more than Erwitt. Who is innocent, unfettered, unprejudiced, objective and can then claim to document without prejudice, subjectivity, or constraint?</p> <p>Erwitt, Bodine each displayed their own cognizance in each of their frames that made it to viewers, each such frame also subject to editorial review prior to publication, generally speaking. Who is speaking then, the photographer or the publisher? Both, and neither photographer could have ignored in their work the fact that they were working for someone else to a degree. We can't view their work critically without considering that these two photographers, others, were engaged with their world in all the complex ways we all are. Someone conceived of their work as appropriate for an audience, the audience of viewers of the publication and the audience of advertisers in those publications. Bodine's message was Come to [this locale], pay for a hotel, see this place or that, buy food, go to the museum shops, take taxi cabs, etc. His is an advertiser's message well crafted, not photojournalism, instead booster-ism.</p>

<p>Found one! http://aaubreybodine.com/gallery/default.asp?rtn=cat&cat=-3&pg=59&bc=16-171</p> <p>It's under the category "Children".</p> <p>This Bondine doesn't seem to have a cognizant bone in his body.<br> http://aaubreybodine.com/gallery/default.asp?rtn=cat&cat=-3&pg=59&bc=16-181</p> <p>http://aaubreybodine.com/gallery/default.asp?rtn=cat&cat=-3&pg=39&bc=12-063</p> <p>Come <em>on</em> people.</p>

<p>Well, I see Bodine as offering a body of work that primarily reflects his ethnicity. His picture book titles include "The face of Virginia", The face of Maryland", etc. If a black face is shown in those pages, it probably is of a beloved maid standing outside a structure with a mop or a broom. Again, art is dialog and there is considerable social commentary in his 'status quo aren't things quaint' photographs just as there was social commentary in the work of Parks whose work also reflects the photographer's ethnicity. With Bondine, we just don't see race or ethnicity as the primary influence in his work. With Parks, ethnicity is for we Bodines, the most salient aspect of his work and we just don't see Bodine's work primarily in context of his ethnicity. I can guarantee that "The face of Virginia" includes images that harken back to the days of Southern greatness nostalgically, his sense of place is also a sense of social place which in his era underwent change. That's my thesis anyway and I'm not going to bother to buy a bunch of his picture books to explore the extent to which my thesis is a fair description of the body of Bodine's work. My family plantation (I share some of Upton Sinclair's personal history, though not related to him, i.e., somewhat of a lefty and adverse to alcoholism) burned in the 1880's because a forgiven and beloved African American maid put a smoldering broom in the broom closet, having just used it to clean the wood burning stove. An accident it was not, I'm sure of it.</p>

<p>Yes Gerry, thanks, it is the 300 2.8 and I sent it to Olympus Enfield, CT. So from what you're saying it sounds like they probably don't see too many of these lenses at the repair center and it took them a little time to get their heads into it. And it sounds like the tools and qualified technicians who could handle it are in Japan. I'm pretty happy with that, if that's the outcome.</p>

<p>Well the haloing around the nuns is a tad over done and the nuns look a little like they were pasted into the scene. I don't know by the halo if Bodine was trying to convey something spiritual about what otherwise just looks like two women gossiping in the rain. Of course I do admire his vision and fine work, I remember some of the pictures he made too of famous people.</p>

<p>I don't quite know what to make of my recent experience with Olympus warranty service. I shipped them my 300mm f2.4 lens with 3 repair items wanted. (It got to them a day before the extended warranty expired. $200 to get it there UPS store.) 1. Lens hood lock broke. Repair or replace. 2. Bayonet had a screw missing and the others had kept coming loose. 3. focus issue in that it had a hard time rendering sharply the subject it had locked focus on. I figured that was because of the bayonet not quite being in the exact place it should be because of the screws.</p> <p>They called me a couple weeks after getting the lens. First they said the lens had been dropped, the filter holder area had a crack, something was rattling around inside the lens and they could repair it by sending it to Japan, but none of the needed work was covered under the warranty. I said it hadn't been dropped, I wasn't aware of a crack or of a rattling inside the lens. They said they would call me back. They did and said sorry, not covered by the warranty. I said look, the lens hood is, the missing screws are covered or if not, nothing to argue about, and please take a look at the focus issue. I said if there is anything else wrong with the lens it doesn't affect it the performance of the lens, the lens works fine.</p> <p>They said they would call me back. They called me back and said they were sending the lens to Japan and it was covered by warranty.</p> <p>Anyone have any idea what happened to me? I thought they were going to tell me to stuff it, and without my doing anything other than point their attention to the 3 items on the list, they changed their minds. I assume the lens wouldn't need to go to Japan just for a couple screws and a lens hood. Does it then sound like they are going to do the refurbishing that they, by telling me the lens 'damage' wasn't covered, were trying to sell me? Why else send it to Japan? Honestly, I didn't drop the lens in the 5 great years I used it. That they are doing the warranty work is great, and I don't care that it will take them 2 months to get it back to me. But what the heck happened?</p>

<p>So maybe it does come back to</p> <p>Julie "... and creating a <em>beginning</em> (what Clive mentioned earlier, a new or changed question); an opening, a passage, a fissure, the interstices, window, door; ... whatever stimulation or or provocation or kick in the ass that shifts you off balance, into some place or condition that you haven't been able to get to before. In this case you can never point to anything and say triumphantly or happily, 'there it is!' because what you've been given is access. Serious voodoo. Or not. It's up to you."</p>

<p>Clive, I had a friend over last night and was reminded of how difficult it is to present him with a conversational topic that doesn't just remind him of his own existing view points and experiences. He interprets everything in terms of what he already knows and has already experienced. Everything new fits into him as an extension of what's already there, the newness missed, rubbed out, not perceived. But mind extension isn't mind expansion, so as to Huang I see his sculpture as representation art in the Platonic sense, extension without expansion, more of a creative kids game.</p>

<p>Yes 4'33" does claim a moment. There was someone offering a criticism of it on PN as a show for slaves to fashion, and I reject that type of criticism though for some it might elicit, as Clive puts it, a measure of so what. With 4'33" I enjoyed the experience and remembered it as both cognitively engaging and experiential what with the ambient noise to attend to. With meanings, I don't know, I'll try and put 4'33" in the same category as the Scholar's Rocks that Clive introduced me to, where nature performs in the space Cage created and there's definitely something about that space to ponder without definiteness as to meaning, still something of substance there. At the other end, too much meaning can cause us to say so what? as well, just a new way of saying the same old and not interesting, kindly, nauseating, rudely.</p>

<p>Even so, Cage etc., the new interpretation of pain that is <em>You Were On My Mind</em> in both versions (new for the ego that experienced the change from drinking pain away to walking pain away) and the new attitude emphasized by the creative use of the word 'but' has more meaning overall for me at least, and <em>Traviata</em> more meaning than Cage, who tended toward new for new's sake maybe without enough meaning to hold our interest over centuries.</p>

<p>Thanks Arthur. Here's a link to the latter Boubat <a href="http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Edouard-Boubat-741.html">http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Edouard-Boubat-741.html</a>, and with Lella I'll leave it to another to perhaps provide a link and background information.</p> <p>On Parks, and I'll repeat the link since there isn't a title I can readily find, <a href="http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Edouard-Boubat-741.html">http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Edouard-Boubat-741.html</a> : to me Parks photo leaves me this impression of his subject: that's one little girl to whom I would not try and tell a falsehood!</p>

<p>Another of Parks' photographs:</p> <p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/GordonParks.14.jpg">http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/GordonParks.14.jpg</a></p> <p>That's one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen.</p>

<p>Bill C. - "I'm very doubtful that Gordon saw it as a takeoff on the <em>American Gothic</em> painting, and suspect this title was just tacked on afterwards." And "But I wasn't around when it was first published, so I don't know the "atmosphere" in the country at that time, and how it went over."</p> <p>OK, I found both answers in the Parks interview you linked to. Parks states 1:59 into the clip:</p> <blockquote> <p>"I had really thought of Grant Wood's picture, the American Gothic. I put a broom in one hand and a mop in the other."</p> </blockquote> <p>In that same interview, 2:20 into the clip Parks quotes Stryker as having said:</p> <blockquote> <p>"He said 'Well, you're getting the idea, but you're gonna get us all fired.' He says, 'This is a government agency and that picture is an indictment against America.'"</p> </blockquote> <p>Parks ends the interview:</p> <blockquote> <p>"And I realized that, from the reactions of people, that the camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination, and its power against racism."</p> </blockquote> <p>That link again: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDEWN5k53yY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDEWN5k53yY</a></p> <p>So we know from Stryker through Parks what the atmosphere of the time was. Stryker judged that in the atmosphere that existed at that time, Parks' American Gothic, Washington, D.C., would go over as an "indictment against America."</p> <p> </p>