Release imminent

Through a friend who teaches there, I've arranged to use University of Oregon's color darkroom this term for a nominal fee. I'm stoked! Finally I can start clearing out my backlog of color negatives from the past two years. I've made scans and looked at them on the monitor and made inkjet prints, but for the vast majority of my negatives I've never had a chance to make an honest C-print. I made a few yesterday and it again reminded me how beautiful that process is. The prints really sing. After two years of color constipation it will feel good to unload. In order to celebrate, I will be regularly giving away C-prints on the blog, starting with image below. The first person to contact me gets a signed 8 x 10 C-print on Fuji glossy.

Yard Sale, October 2008

What To Do? #12

34. Arcata, 2008

35. Portland, 2006

36. Eugene, 2008
(What To Do? is a weekly installment of previously unpublished b/w photos from my archives)

And now here it is, your moment of Zen...

By Syndey Harris, Published in The New Yorker, 11/11/91

Quality Pictures

I was sad to see Portland's Quality Pictures go belly up last week, and quickly too. According to Alexis Pike who had photographs in the most recent show artists were asked to pick up their work just a few days before the locks were changed.

QP covered a part of the photography world that the city had been missing and it's hard to see how that void will be filled. If Blue Sky focuses on "emerging" photographers and Hartman on established vintage prints, nearby QP had the Los Angeles angle, treating art as an inscrutably precious commodity sold for thousands in white walled backrooms. Every time I walked in I felt like I'd been transplanted to some undisclosed cutting edge location. Was I still in Portland? QP wasn't necessarily concerned with photographs as much as with Photography capital P, subsection of Art capital A.

Last fall I heard gallery director Erik Schneider lecture on the dynamics of selling photography. It basically confirmed my suspicion that the art world is a confidence game. Prices and publicity are not necessarily a function of quality but of buzz. The more buzz someone has, the more they can charge for a photo. How someone gets buzz is anyone's guess, although hard work and luck are not insignificant components.

The graphic below shows one of the lecture handouts. Everyone gets a ranking based on age and promise. The market determines the rest. I think anyone who hopes to get rich from photography will find the graphic useful. For the rest of us it's still amusing.



From what I can tell Schneider saw his job as generating buzz and feeding off of it. He wanted to bring to Portland people who'd made a name for themselves while helping Portland photographers work their way up the ladder. Although Hartman and Blue Sky are both adequate for these purposes, I don't think it's their primary motive the way it was for QP.

In its brief 2-year run QP showed a pretty amazing array of, well, quality pictures. David Hilliard, Oliver Boberg, Roger Ballen, Vic Muniz, Brian Ulrich, Jason Fulford, Chris Verene, etc. These are photographers you usually see in magazines or online. To nose up to real prints on the wall was a treat. But alas, in order to keep showing artwork like that there needs to be someone out there buying them, and at $5000 or $10,000 a pop that market is limited. In the end the whole setup proved to be just one global financial meltdown from financial meltdown. R.I.P. QP.

Link

This interview is great. Thanks, Bryan, for the link.