Kill! Kill! Stabbity-Kill!

[compilerbitch]

I'm currently reading a book on art theory, specifically relating to criticism of photographs. It really quite severely gets my goat. In fact, it's pissed my goat off so much that she's going to strap a rocket launcher to her back and then go out hunting postmodernists.

It brings a bit of context to something I found deeply disappointing on my most recent London trip. doseybat and I visited the Photographer's Gallery, near Leicester Square. Other than a few badly displayed, though decent, prints upstairs in a poky little 'print sales' room, I have to say that the exhibition spaces were full of, well, crap. There wasn't a single decent print in there. Most of the walls were filled with an exhibit of 'found' photographs -- basically gone-wrong discarded passport photographs mostly. There were a few interestingly manipulated prints, but the interest was in the idea, rather than the execution. Another exhibit consisted of 15 or 20 black and white prints of a variety of wooden lookout towers, many of which were badly focussed, with blown highlights, plugged shadows or both. There was nothing to recommend the compositions either -- they were simply bad photographs. In the entire exhibit, nearly every print seemed to be glued or blu-tacked to the wall. It was clearly all meant to be a postmodernist rejection of modernist/realist photographic sensibilities*, but all it succeeded in doing in my case was have me wondering about the gallery management, thinking to myself, 'what the hell were they thinking?'

I am trying to understand photography at a deeper level, but I'm not at all sure that this stuff really helps. I suppose it never hurts to know your enemy, but I can't see myself going in that direction. It would seem to have about as much point as spending a year travelling the great sights of this planet, making thousands of amazing images, then exhibiting a wall-sized print of the directory structure of my hard drive. I'm not sure I'm a modernist/realist/f-64 devotee exactly, because I find their ideas a little too restrictive, but I'm sure-as-hell not a postmodernist.

* which sounds awfully impressive, but is probably bullshit. I feel like a full-fledged art critic after spending an hour reading that book...

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

sometimes you just have to do things because you want to live in a world where people do those things, but I have no idea how well that reaction translates into photographic terms.

Actually, this translates pretty well, and is probably pretty close to my own approach. My own tendency is to reject postmodernism because it, in effect, rejects my own art and that of the artists who happen to be my main influences. I also reject the 'driving down the motorway with one foot planted heavily on the brake pedal' traditionalism that exists in photography. For whatever reason, chemical silver-gelatin processes, even more so their predecessors, seem to be revered, whereas digital prints are regarded as a lesser form. This is a widely held attitude by photographers, as well as galleries and collectors. For me, I think it's stupidity -- I work toward the best possible image, printed to the limit of what's technically feasible (or at least as close as my equipment and ability will let me get) -- at the time of writing, this means digital. It's plainly demonstrable, too, but say this too loudly and you're likely to have your head bitten off. Worse still, seemingly, show someone an actual print that demonstrably proves the point, and they then get really out of shape.

My attitude is pretty simple -- I'll do whatever I see necessary to get the final image, and I really don't care about having it (either the image, the way it was originated or the way it was printed) go against the art world's preconceived ideas. My tendency is to push the quality aspect of the image way beyond normally accepted norms -- most of my prints resolve detail finer than you can see with the naked eye, and tend to have more dynamic range than is possible with traditional processes. They are sharper than any silver-gelatin print I've ever seen, including in comparison with 10x8 contact prints. Currently I use coated gloss papers, but I'm considering moving to printing on a special (very expensive) plastic material that is both whiter and smoother than paper, which should result in even higher resolution and even more dynamic range. It's also got far better archival properties than paper because it's chemically inert and doesn't contain plasticisers.

But this is all just the craft of photography -- doing it as well as possible is a technical and mechanical process that in theory anyone should be able to replicate (though in practice few would attempt it). The images should stand for themselves, ultimately -- the art is ultimately in the subject and the composition.