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

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

it has been found to be unhelpful to treat people the same and to assume you know how they work. this is much of the reaction to modernism that still hangs around today. it sometimes results in too too much reverence of subjectivity, of not wanting to say something loud about anything other than yourself. but i think this absurd softly-softliness is fading.
that's my art critic thought for the day.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting point. A lot of photography these days seems to not really be very loud or proud at all, and almost seems to be apologising for itself. I think quality, in the technical sense, took a big dive when digital started to really take hold -- 120/220, 4x5 and 10x8 film more or less hit a brick wall, to be replaced by digital cameras that frankly weren't even remotely as good. They were also far faster to use, which (I am tempted to theorise) probably has resulted in a far less careful approach to photography. With film, there was a tendency to make every shot count because every shot costs money. Many people treat digital SLRs like a fire hose -- spraying images everywhere in the hope than one in a thousand will work.

Ironically, it's now the case that digital has steamed right past film in terms of technical capability, to the extent that film has been soundly beaten in terms of image quality, ease of use and (at least ongoing) cost. Though it's technically possible, it is very rare to see a contemporary image equal or exceed the quality that was routinely achieved with large format film in the 1940s. Another interesting experience, again from my visit to the Ansel Adams gallery last year, were a number of contemporary prints on sale that had been shot in the valley of some of Adams's iconic scenes. They were all colour, and on close examination, all really, really bad, blown up way beyond the quality afforded by the original image. OK, that gallery is in a tourist hotspot catering to that market, so it perhaps should be given a bit of a break there, but I actually was really quite upset when I left.