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]

Thanks for the link to the Domestic Landscapes work. Interesting, quite thought provoking. I *love* this one:

http://www.bertteunissen.com/item.php?itemId=199



The composition of this particular photograph is fairly conventional, but as a whole the body of work is a little odd -- the camera back is always vertical, so perspective in the rooms is always exact in the way that it would be if a specialist architectural photographer had taken pains to arrange it. Yet the people are often secondary -- shoved over to one side or more often the bottom of the frame. I kept mentally reaching for the rise/fall knob on my view camera. Also, the aspect ratio is unusual -- almost panoramic in nearly all of the shots, again not something you'd normally see, but it works in context. I wondered whether the photographer had used a panoramic camera (something like an X-Pan, or maybe a 6x17 view camera back) to better take in the rooms concerned without ending up with a very pronounced ultra-wide-angle effect that would be much more apparent with the same angle of view and a more conventional aspect ratio -- this could also explain the tendency to have the camera absolutely vertical, because not doing so would have quite dramatic consequences in terms of converging or diverging verticals. But the real star of the show was the quality of light -- in some images it worked better than others, but the real stand-outs were quite astonishing. I wish I'd seen the exhibit.