Keep Shadows Hidden

Tonight I was looking through American Independents when I came across this photo by Joel Meyerowitz:


It looked strangely familiar but I wasn't sure why. It took me several minutes before I realized where I'd seen it before. The exact same street corner is featured in one of Meyerowitz's best known images:


This second photo has always been one of my favorites. It is very surreal with the two shadows cut out of material the same color as the couple on the left, and oh yeah how bout if we envelope the whole scene in smoke for effect? I'd always wondered about the circumstances of its exposure. How had Meyerowitz seen that? Had it been luck or a sharp eye or...? What was going on at the moment he'd shot it?

Seeing this first photo I have a much better understanding of how he got the second. The circumstances are very similar. Winter sunlight, smoke from the grate highlighting shadows, shot from virtually the same vantage. The situation is obvious: Meyerowitz was casing this corner for a particular type of photo. He probably shot hundreds out of which these two are the only ones to make the cut.

All of the sudden my appreciation for the second photo shifts a bit. Instead of being some divine exposure it's merely the result of hard work, maybe standing on that corner all day or whatever it took. Yeah, I know it's still the same photo as before but now I've seen what went into the sausage.

Some of the mystery is gone from that photo. Perhaps it would've been better if I hadn't seen its shadow.

Time...Space...Attention

Bryan and I have a running discussion about The Grid Project. We both agree that for a nine year project, it feels incredibly rushed. Each month comes and disappears in a heartbeat and there never seems to be enough time to explore each grid fully. And that is OK, because it's simply the nature of such a huge undertaking.

The general time scale of photography has a similar tension. It takes no time at all to make a photo. In a 500th of a second the exposure happens. You can do this hundreds of times in a day, and raw creation can happen much more quickly than with any other art form. Compare it to painting for example. A single painting can take weeks or months to finish.

But of course taking the photo is only the first step. To finish the photographic work the film must be processed, an exposure (or scan) made, a certain amount of retouching or tweaking, printing, matting, framing, etc, all of which doesn't even get into the most time consuming process: the editing.

Compare again to painting. Although a single painting can take weeks, when it's done it's done and the artist can start in on another one. After a few months or maybe a year, a series of similar works is complete and ready to show the world. You don't often see painting shows which span more than a year or two, unless it's a retrospective or something. But in the photographic world it's quite common to see work that spans 10 or 15 years, all in the same series. Now why is that?

One explanation is that photography more than most art mediums is shaped by editing. This is why most photographic series take years to complete, from shooting through editing through presentation, whereas something like painting is much more about the work itself, not the work's selection process.

Another explanation is that time is central to the nature of photography. Every photo is connected to a specific moment in time. So spreading those moments over the course of years can often create an interesting narrative. Things change over time, and it's in the nature of photos to show that. They can't not do it.

The third and most likely explanation is that photography is on a spaceship speeding very quickly away from Earth, moving
close enough to the speed of light to create a relative shift in time on the ship compared to the earth, where most painters reside.

Just seeing if you're paying attention.

Film Still Entitled

I don't usually follow Newsweek but when they run articles like this it gets my attention. Somehow the author has credited Cindy Sherman with the current move toward Photoshopped realities. And she invented the iPhone too...

Great quote in the article from Lisette Model:

"Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest."

More true today than ever.

Ego

I bought the 33 1/3 guide to Double Nickels on the Dime and have been listening closely to that album the last few nights as I read the essays about each song. The careful relistening in conjunction with more background info reaffirm my opinion that this is the finest album of the 80s and probably one of the top five of the past quarter century. It's a jazz album as much as it is punk.

For me the guide's most revealing insight is how collaborative Minutemen's creative process was. All three musicians --along with friends and random notebooks-- contributed lyrics. All three wrote songs. Double Nickels was a double album with four sides. Each musician got to pick the songs for one side, in rotating schoolyard selection fashion (the remaining songs made up the fourth side). But it's in the actual music that the collaboration is most apparent. Each instrument is integral. None (apart from D Boon's voice?) is really showcased. It's a team effort from idea to album.

In photography there is a very strong mythology which runs counter to the idea of collaboration. For lack of a better word it is the myth of the auteur. Think of Atget out roaming Paris, or Disfarmer quietly making genius portraits, or Frank driving the U.S. on his personal quest. Each personifies the brilliant genius who must create his art alone because art is inspiration and can't be filtered or helped by others. The word auteur actually comes from cinema where it is used to describe certain directors. But I think the description is much more appropriate for photography. No one pretends that any film can be produced by one person. Hundreds of people are involved in any cinematic undertaking. But with photography, being an actual auteur is much closer to real possibility. Especially in the heyday of black and white, one could go out, shoot, develop, edit, print, matte, and sell one's own photos all solo. Now in the digital age, this possibility has been extended to color printing and bookmaking. And blogging.

The possibility of complete control was a big attraction for me to get interested in photography. I'm a loner. I can't work with others. I always think I'm right even when I'm not, and that leads to problems collaborating. So when I read about Minutemen sharing ideas it's sort of mind-boggling to me. Each of the 3 of them was talented enough to strike out on their own, yet they had some sense that through sharing ideas they could reach higher. What was in them that is not in most photographers? Would my photography be helped by more input from others?

Shawn Records, who I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, now has a blog up. He's a good writer and it's worth a look. Although the blog has just recently started seriously getting down, it actually took its first breath last summer. One of Shawn's first posts is the obligatory "Why am I blogging?" post. Shawn's (wife's) brief answer: Ego.

My color tutorial 2

I spent a few hours with Bryan yesterday in U-Develop's color darkroom. The basic technique is straightforward but gaining an unconscious sense of color management will take some time. Even with no color experience I made two prints that were better than anything I've been able to yet make on my color printer. So that explains why go to all the trouble to use a darkroom. For exhibition prints I think there is really no question a darkroom is more appropriate.

But that still leaves open the question of work prints. If I'm printing a small 5 x 7 or 8 x 10 just to show myself what's in the photo, is it worth driving 100 miles north and renting darkroom space? In fact that is what I do now for b/w printing, but that situation is a little different. I'm a proficient printer. I can whip out 60 work prints in much less time than it would take me to scan, Photoshop, and print them, and they look better. With color the equation becomes shakier. It's much slower than b/w processing, more expensive, and with my inexperience more prone to waste.

Whether it is worth it is still an open question for me. I think it comes down to, what is the purpose of the print? If it's just for myself an inkjet is fine. In fact a computer image is fine and the whole question becomes, why print at all? But if I'm printing to show others, as I regularly do at monthly meetings of my photo groups, I would like my images to look as good as possible. And based on what I've seen so far, until I really get inkjet printing dialed in, a darkroom print best serves that purpose.

So, how solipsistic am I? See my next post for more thoughts on this...