Pinocchio's Furniture

This recent article in the Guardian has had the online photo world in a tizzy the past few days. If you haven't yet read it, please check it out. It only takes a minute but that's long enough to pack a wallop. Under the titillating headline "Flat, Soulless, and Stupid," Jonathan Jones lists several ways that exhibition photography falls short of the other arts. Painting or sculpture, for example. "A photograph in a gallery is a flat, soulless, superficial substitute for a painting," writes Jones, before supporting his claim with a rather flat, soulless argument. Flat? Soulless? Stupid? Them's fightin' words. They would be easy to pass off as irrelevant if they weren't coming from an art critic in a well respected journal. But they are. So what's going on here?

To give some context, Jones has a history of deliberate provocation. Why is Political Art such Elitist Twaddle? asks another of his essays. Another one gets right to the point, entitled The Tower of London Poppies Are Fake, Trite, and Inward-looking. And yet another opens with the unrebutted claim that "the moving image is much more artistically interesting than the still photograph, to me anyway." As someone in the public eye, he must know full well the likely impact of such statements.

So Jones has laid his cards on the table: 1) He's not a photography fan and 2) He relishes controversy. Knowing those two things about him, it's an open question whether the essay was half-intended as mocking satire, written just to push people's buttons and generate attention. That seems more believable than the idea that any serious critic thinks photography is limited to "unique documentary record of our own lives." So perhaps it's satire. I know I use that form sometimes, and that I deliberately blur the lines past the point where I'm no longer sure what's parody and what's real. This whole paragraph may be satire. The whole post might be. It's sometimes hard to know.

Whatever Jones' motivations, reactions have been predictable. If you vilify photography, photographers lash back. Duh. At least that's been my experience whenever I email anonymous insults privately to random photographers. But the rule also holds in a public forum. "Wow, was this written in 1969?" asks one commenter. "Cheap attention grabbing journo nonsense," writes another. A third opinion: "Jonathan Jones? A soulless and stupid man." And so on. There are 340 such comments and counting on the Guardian page, and many more elsewhere online. This one in particular is a nice rebuttal. And they're all pissed. I can find no comments in support of Jones.

Whenever I encounter a wave of lockstep sentiment —especially one I agree with— my kneejerk reaction is to question it. What if Jones is half right? I don't mean that photography can't be art. That's silly. But what if photography doesn't exhibit physically as well as, say, painting? 

Let me put it another way. Of all the art forms, I think photography loses the least when it's translated from physical form to screen. A painting or a sculpture viewed on a monitor is fairly useless. You generally need to visit the original to get a proper sense of it. But a photograph? Nowadays most photos either originate on a screen or pass through that form on their way to print. They've got digital DNA. They cross easily between screen and print, and I think most can communicate their message quite well in jpg format. But if the translation to physical object is done without proper care —which is too often the case— the resulting print will wind up a lifeless splotch of pixels. That is, it will be rather flat, soulless, and perhaps even stupid. 

Don't get me wrong. I love screens. Love them to death. Where would photography be without them? Its explosive growth in recent decades can be partly credited to the proliferation of screens. I see a few hundred photos a day on my computer and for most of them the screen obviates the need to see the print. That's great, and I think it's fairly unique to photography. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think many sculptors out there are looking at 200 sculptures a day online.

It's the same with photography books. There's a reason they outnumber pottery or architecture books. It's because photographs and pages are both two dimensional forms. I know there are exceptions but generally that's true. "A photograph," in Jones' words, "...only has one layer of content. It's all there on the surface." That's the flat part of "Flat, Soulless, and Stupid", and on this point he's right. Literally. It's just a short hop from there to Garry Winogrand's "Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface." And once you see it in those terms, Jones' proposal to replace photo exhibits with hand-held iPads is perhaps less of a stretch.

Pictures of Magazine 2: Girl reading, after Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Vik Muniz

I've spent some of the past few days catching up on a few local exhibits in both Portland and Eugene. Considering that I couldn't make it to Paris Photo it seemed the next best thing. Ha. All in all I saw 8 shows and about 300 photos. I have to say that many indeed appeared to be flat, soulless, and stupid. 

OK, take that back. I wouldn't go quite that far. I'm glad I saw all of them. But for several of the shows, the experience of seeing prints live on a wall didn't add much to the screen experience. For example I'd already seen Delaney Allen's photos bandied about the internet before catching them at Nationale. The prints were larger and more detailed, and the subject matter oddly imaginative. But after all is said and done, big whoop. Splotches of pixels. 

The group show at Elizabeth Leach? Same deal. The prints fell into formation nice and tidy  like soldiers against the blindingly white wall. The main clue to the fact they weren't large screens was the price list: Most were in the $10 - 20K range. One might argue that Arne Swenson's covert surveillance photos achieve their goal even before reaching a screen. The nexus is him spying. The computer screen revisits the original. Then the print. By the time such an image reaches the wall of Elizabeth Leach, it's a rather limp exercise. Viz Muniz creates unbelievable collages from magazine scraps. He's a crafty genius and I'd love to see his work in person. But by the time they reached the gallery wall they'd been scanned and compressed into a digital file. Meh. Overall the show was rather off-putting. I think the desk attendant may have glanced up at me once, allowing me to feel not completely invisible for a brief moment. But I may have imagined the glance. 

Rubi Lebovitch's show at Newspace was rather sterile. Peruse them on the site and you get the general idea: weird cryptic riddles which perhaps hinted at the gallery's future curatorial direction. Ironically it was Lebovitch's non-photographic pieces which needed to be seen in person. One showed flies taped to a wall. Another was a chopped carpet. I have no idea what they were about, but I think they were the type of non-ideas which wouldn't translate easily into a jpg. Non-you had to non-be there.

One show that bucked the trend was Corey Arnold's Wildlife at Hartman. I think these beautiful inkjets must be seen in real life to have the full impact. Most were about a meter wide. Arnold has learned to dial back the saturation, sharpening, and digital artifacts to invest his photos with living energy. And the subject matter holds up its end of the bargain. I mean, how many nature/wildlife shots have we all seen? But somehow these aren't sappy. Good stuff. The jpg below will give a taste but it falls pretty far short of the print.

Head Strong, 2014, Corey Arnold

Camille Seaman's show at Camerawork probably falls into the same must-see-live category, but only because important details would be lost on a small screen. Although some of the cloud forms are gorgeous, the physical production is stiff, bright, and eager, and perhaps ultimately unbelievable, the cardinal sin of documentary work. That's not a problem for Teresa Meier. Her show at Walt O'Brien's gallery in Eugene is more concerned with Alice-In-Wonderland dreamscapes than real scenes. Meier pulls some interested combinations together but the Photoshopping is sloppy and amateurish. To pull off the Uelsmann effect you've got to sell it. She doesn't. In fact this may be one example where the prints are demonstrably inferior to the screen versions. 

Photography At Oregon's upcoming auction puts the exhibit/screen dichotomy to the test. Bidders can use online jpgs to preview the images now and see what they might like. But of the course the actual bids on November 23rd will be on real prints. It's a tall task to ask of a jpg. Can you connect to it strongly enough to commit to its physical manifestation? If a screenshot won't suffice some of actual photographs are up now at Dot Dotson's in Eugene. But I have to say most of these look pretty screeny even in print form, platinum prints by Dennis Purdy and Rebecca Zeiss being the main exceptions. Screeny. Is that even a word? 

Teresa Meier, showing at O'Brien Photo Imaging

The bright spot yesterday was the Blue Sky 40th Anniversary Show at Portland Art Museum. This is the semi-companion show to their book program I covered last week, so no need to say too much. Blue Sky has shown a very impressive roster of artists —it's a who's who of contemporary photo history. Larry Sultan, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, etc. Major hitters, plus many great lesser knowns. And these are the original vintage prints pulled from various private collections. PAM is currently showing a few hundred of them going back to 1975. Yeah, you could sit at home and look at these on a screen. But you wouldn't. Unless maybe you're Jonathan Jones. 

So what's the difference? Why do these photos need visiting? I think much of it comes down to personal bias. I have a soft spot for photography from the 1970s and 1980s. Many of my photo heroes were active then. So when there's a chance to visit their works in person I like to take advantage. But I can't help thinking there might also be a digital twist. As I said earlier most contemporary photos either originate digitally or pass through that stage at some point. So new prints on the wall tend to feel like an extension of screens. Analogue prints don't have that issue. Remember, this may be satire. Or not.

There were very few people in the museum and I had the Blue Sky show mostly to myself. That's the way it usually is at PAM. It's a fairly large museum and most of it doesn't change much. Once you've seen a certain floor, there's not much need to go back right away. The result is floors and floors of inert pieces by famous artists that just sort of sit there in temperature controlled limbo. 

The photography section, shoved into a dark anonymous mezzanine, is exceptional only in its active curation. It has high turnover compared to the rest of the museum, renewing the work a few times annually. The rest of the museum is much more static. It might be only a matter of time before some indoor street-view app is developed allowing people to peruse the works from home. Or maybe someone can capture all the art on Instagram and we can visit from our phones. I'll probably continue to visit in person, just for old times sake. But how is the photography world going to convince Jonathan Jones? 

Art and Beer

Eugene is an odd place to be a photographer. It's sort of a last-stop town which tends to attracts recluses and iconoclasts. There are many bright people here and even a few geniuses hiding in the woodwork but you'd never know it because people keep to themselves. Do your thing. Live and let live. Earn a Fulbright. Go topless. Whatever. It's very nonsocial in some ways, and that's especially true about the photo scene. There's no center and few galleries. I've lived here 8 years and I know very few photographers still, but that's mostly on me.

That's how I never realized until this week that David Bayles was my neighbor. He lives part-time just up the road on Spencer Hollow. I've had David's book on my shelf for many years and I consider it something of a classic. It's sort of about photography but mostly about other topics. And David too is sort of about photography but he's also a conservationist, writer, fly fisher, boater, and many other things. He stopped exhibiting photographs back in the 1980s, he has no photo website, and he lives happily off the photo radar. Search for an Oregon David Bayles online and you're likely to wind up at this site, but that's not him. One of his few online references is an old newspaper profile from 1980 which describes him living in the woods outside of town, with not much interaction with Eugene or the outer world. Thirty-four years later that news article is still pretty accurate.

So his photo show up now at Capper's caught me by surprise. A world-class photographer crammed into a hastily cleared back room of a busy frame shop with no advertising or fuss. Typical Eugene. For Bayles it's his first photo show in 30+ years. They are color landscapes shot in various places, some as recently as two weeks ago. The photos are very quiet and contemplative. They have a sort of elderly presence like an old cliff watching over a beach of youngsters. Nothing too flashy, but they're well seen. Plus it's David Bayles. The David Bayles. I found his email address in the show's accompanying text, asked him out for a beer, and two nights ago we met for a while to talk shop. 

I'd suggested The Beer Stein because it's central with a good tap selection. Unwittingly I'd picked the same building where David had written much of Art and Fear many years ago. Back then it had been an odd jumble of restaurants stabled under one collective roof. Now it was just one establishment, a large open pub. David had come here because someone had advised him it was easier to write in public settings. Less distractions. And it had worked for him back then. But looking around the pub I wasn't so sure. The wet hopped pale ale in front of me seemed like at least one possible distraction.

It turns out David and I have some things in common aside from being neighbors. Like me, he greatly values his monthly art salon where he can engage with friends and get feedback about current work. And like me, he has to travel to his. It's in Carmel, California. He spends about 40% of his time down there. The Center For Photographic Art (awesome URL) is the focus for most of his photo connections. Yikes. Carmel! And I thought Portland was a helluva commute. Anything for the cause though. 

David came to Eugene originally to pursue his MFA. That didn't work out so well. He soured on grad school, soured on exhibiting photos, and eventually found his muse at home in the woods, with the occasional photo/fishing trip thrown in. He met everyone in the biz back in the 1970s, and those connections still allow him to do workshops, mostly in California. Art and Fear has never fallen out of print and has just been translated into its eighth language —David's t-shirt read Kunst und Angst. He's got a pretty good setup. The world comes to him, not vice versa.

Listening to him talk I found myself again and again nodding my head. Why yeah... That makes sense. And that. And that and that and that. I've basically come to the same place as him independently. I'm basically done pushing my photos on photoland, done trying to convince anyone else to care about them. I'm just gonna hang out in the woods and deal with them on my own terms. Typical Eugene. 

I think we're putting a local salon together beginning in January. We'll each keep our distant groups but it'll be nice to have something local. Eventually we may have to tell some others. Do our thing. Live and let live. Earn a Fulbright. Go topless. Whatever.

Brief Preview

Twenty years after its original publication, authors Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz are preparing a new revised edition of Bystander, to be released hopefully in 2015. I asked Joel Meyerowitz a few questions about the new edition.

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BA: What was the motivation to produce a second revised edition of Bystander? 

JM: This is the 3rd revision. We need to keep track of everything that is happening in the genre, particularly when the internet has added so many new  voices to it. We also have the opportunity to make a newly designed edition since the demise of our first publisher.

Were there things in the original version you regret or wish you could change?

We regretted that back then Robert Frank was reluctant to have his work published in history books. We are hoping that with time and the place this book has earned that he will willingly allow the work to be added.

The first edition of Bystander helped organize and describe various strands in street photography. And by definition it also served as a historical marker, summing  up the state of the art at a specific date. Do you think there is a risk with Bystander of conveying street photography as a historic, old fashioned process whose time has come and gone? 

Our goal and point of view is to show how valuable and dynamic street photography still is, and how seriously new minds have brought fresh attitudes to bear on a form that has always been difficult for the art world to accept and find valuable. We still feel that this form is at the very heart of photography, basically a purely original photographic genre which does not take from the more conventional forms that belonged first to painting, such as; still life, portrait, landscapes, directorial mise en scene, etc. 

Do you think the basic nature of making street photographs has changed since the original edition? And if so, how?

There are implicit restraints and even resentment these days, from a general public whose fears about internet exposure make them constantly on the alert for people who might put them in some compromised situation. And, for example; in Paris there are laws forbidding this kind of approach, laws so daunting that Cartier-Bresson would have found it nearly impossible to make his work there on his home territory. That is just on the street side of the question. On the photographers side we have seen certain tropes appearing that reveal how much the actual street itself has changed, take Natan Dvir's work as an example; his response to the oversized scale of advertising on the boulevards of the world has produced a fresh approach to the way street photography usually describes the street. And we have seen far too many examples of photographers playing point-counterpoint with signage interacting in an ironic or humorous way with pedestrian traffic. We have also seen a more aggressive brand of in your face work in the style of Bruce Gilden, which is a punishing assault on innocent people all for the look of shock on their faces.

Are you still an active street shooter? Are you an active viewer/consumer of street photography?

Yes! I carry a Leica with me every day and find myself still looking to see what a man of my age might find interesting out on the streets now. There is a big difference between being 30 and dancing on the street and being 75. And by being 75 I recognize that I have seen a lot of street life so how do I not simply repeat myself but push on to seeing things that are fresh to me now?

You have one foot in the art world. How do you think that community views street photography generally?

I have both feet in the art world. I stopped making my living commercially, as a means of supporting my personal work, back in 1990 and I have always heard first hand from the many dealers I have worked with how difficult it was for them to convince their clients of the value of street photography. People generally don't get the art of it and would rather see some fashion shot or interior, or objects that have rusted and been colored up by time rather than do the hard work of looking which street photography demands. Yes, there are some great collectors who love our side of the game, but the greater collecting part of the art world prefers setups, conceptual, and easier work.

What's your most basic definition of street photography?

Street photography is at its best when the instantaneous consciousness of the photographer reveals, or draws, new meaning from the ordinary acts of human behavior and daily life.

Fifty-Fifty

Critical Mass Top 50 resequenced according to immediate visual cues:

Blue Sky Books

When I first heard about the new Blue Sky Books program it seemed almost too good to be true. Not only were there dozens of titles by some great photographers, but the books were very reasonably priced. Every title is an open edition printed on demand by Magcloud. If you enjoy racing to buy limited first editions before other collectors, these ain't for you. These are cheap and indefinitely accessible. The thinnest books are $10 while some of the larger ones, running 90+ images, fetch maybe $25. If you've purchased photobooks lately you know that's a relative bargain. 

But the biggest draw is the photographers. I was familiar with many from past Blue Sky shows, and some were new to me. And I liked just about all of them, but of the whole lot (37 photographers) I owned just two books. That's because until now few of these photographers had published monographs, and even fewer were still in print. The Blue Sky shows went up, they came down, and a few months later my memory began to fade. That's where books can help.

Well, here they were in permanent ink. It seemed like a good opportunity, so late one October night in a moment of weakness I wound up ordering seven. They came last week and I'm pleasantly surprised. The Magcloud print quality is pretty darned good. It's not up to Steidl or Mack standards, mind you, but it's comparable to National Geographic or The New Yorker. 

Maybe I should back up a minute to say that Blue Sky Books aren't exactly books. They more closely resemble a sturdy photo journal like Aperture or Blindspot. The cover is stiff and would probably repel a light spill, but it's not a true book binding. The interior pages are thin and glossy. There are no visual fireworks, not even a spine caption. So the word "books" is perhaps a misnomer. But Blue Sky Books sounds better than Blue Sky Magazines, so I understand the marketing strategy.

The other way they're not books is in the production and editing. The word "photobook" nowadays has come to mean so much more than just a collection of images bound in a book. Emphasis is placed on the design, sequencing, materials, references to tradition and to other books, combination of forms, the works. Many photobooks are collectible art pieces in their own right. The cart pulls the horse, and the actual photographs —the process of going out into the world to record what's there– almost seem like an afterthought. 

Not so with Blue Sky Books. No, these titles are quite plain. Most follow the same formula, with one photo after another printed at uniform size, captioned along the bottom. If the sequences feel a bit like walking along a gallery wall, it's because each of these books are taken directly from Blue Sky exhibitions. The Blue Sky books don't exactly replace the gallery experience, but they're the next best thing if you didn't make the original show, or if you want a nice souvenir to remember it by. Souvenir. Does that word sound tacky? Does it sound a million miles away from fine art publishing? Well, maybe at least once in a while, it's nice to see a book like this with no pretention beyond the simple goal of showing kick-ass photos. No collectibility, no year-end list, just pictures for the sake of pictures.

Here's the 8 I have so far (7 bought plus a freebie). There's not a bad one in the bunch. My purchasing bias here is pretty evident. I tend to like photographers who pull directly from reality without too much preconceptual or postproduction influence. That's generally also true of Blue Sky, but not always. So we're a good match. Maybe you are too? If so, take the plunge and buy a few.

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I got Julie Mihaly's The View From Here mostly out of curiosity, because I'm a recovering Diana addict and I don't see a lot of Diana work in print. The Instagram revolution seems to have swept it aside, and Holga before that, leaving us with Rexroth, Blakemore, a Friends of Photography compilation, and that's about it. But at one point in the 1970s Diana was the plastic art camera of choice. Begun during the Diana heyday, this series showed at Blue Sky in 1982, then continued until 2006. The work here is inconsistent, with a few clunkers to go along with many nicely seen pix. A tighter edit would've helped. But if you've got the Diana jones —One word: Plastics— this book is a must.

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Ken Graves and Eva Lipman's Proms approaches the bewitching high school ritual with a sly street sensibility. The photos use direct flash to catch kids in odd juxtapositions and expressions, with the harsh glare of monochrome mixing layers to add confusion. Fans of Public Relations or Billy Monk will dig this. I have no idea how the couple got access. The series was exhibited in 1993 and probably shot during the 1980s when people were less squeamish about kids and cameras. I think it would be very difficult for an outsider to shoot this style of voyeuristic candid photography during proms now.

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Bill McCullough's Technicolor Life is well named. This project has a very unusual color palette which falls somewhere between 1960s TV and recent hypersaturated digital. I'm not sure what's going on but the moments are great. McCullough shot them all during private event assignments but they appear to be out-takes with no practical application. Combining a street photographer's sense of timing and chopped framing with a commercial photographer's mastery of lighting and intimate access, McCullough creates Mise-en-scènes so perfectly quirky they look montaged. Who knows how he made them. I'm not going to pry too deeply. I'll take him at his word. Good stuff.

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For someone with big accomplishments under her belt, Mary Frey continues to fly under the radar. Domestic Rituals is the only book I've seen by her and that's a shame. These photos are wonderful. Bang-Bang-Bang perfect moments which take their cue from the 1970s street scene. Imagine Henry Wessel combined with Michael Jang, twisted by an offbeat sense of humor. It's the full package. 

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I've been a fan of Karl Baden's for a while. Contact Sheet 106 is amazing, as is his Covering Photography site. Both show evidence of a playful iconoclast at work. Sex, Death, and the History of Photography, which bounced around on Facebook last year, does the same. Now it appears in print form, collected in Work from Two Bodies. But the real hit here is the second body in question, Cliche-Verre and Shadow Pictures. This odd series doesn't look like much at first, until you realize the level of precise detail involved in the process. Painting on negatives! Who does that? It's an homage to photo history, an exploration of Pre-Photoshop possibilities, and visual pranks which recall Magritte. I'm a sucker for photographer interviews, and this issue comes with a nice long Q & A discussing Baden's process.

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Mary Berridge's On The Eve may be my favorite book in the series. Her photographs of Post-Soviet Russia on the brink of Putin's hammer show a country adrift, free, and full of photographic potential. It's Hornstra meets Keizo, but more finely tuned than either, with Martin Kollar's sense of precision. Photographically Mary Berridge nails it, and the sequencing is also fine. Of all the Blue Sky books I've seen this one is probably most similar to the contemporary book spirit. The editing is loose and dreamy, narrative without being predictable. By the end you feel you've visited 1990s Russia.

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Ford Gilbreath is another old favorite. He self-published one monograph in the early 1980s combining street photos, hand painting, infrared, panoramics, and just about everything else you're not supposed to do nowadays. It was one of the first photobooks I ever bought and I was an immediate fan. 1997-2012 collects some of his more recent experiments, including nighttime marsh scenes shot from an aquarium tank, outdoor flatscans, stereoscopic views (with no viewer, sadly), and vertical slit composites with a homemade 8 x 10. In lesser hands these might feel gimmicky. But Gilbreath instead gives the sense of a free spirit following his muse, with complete disregard for convention or outside opinion.

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Full disclosure: I can't report impartially on M. Bruce Hall's Promised Land. Not only is Bruce a friend but I wrote the afterword. So there's that. But even if I'd stumbled on this book out of the blue it would win me over. If your mental image of Los Angeles is movie stars, liposuction, and sports cars, these photos will bust your myth. Bruce's B/W photos of 1980s downtown L.A. build a dark, gritty world of deferred promise. He spent 10 years shooting photos, then showed them to very few people before they were first exhibited at Blue Sky in 2007. Then they were lost to history for a while more —Bruce has no website and he may have moved to Mexico by now— before this publication rescued them for posterity. If you like classic street photography, buying this is a no brainer.