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]

ha ha! actually me and bat were in there sunday for a reviving cup and she mentioned your visit. it's one of my favorite places in london, as i'm sure i've mentioned before. not really very fussed about the current exhibition, the boy quite likes the Found magazine, but i find it a little dull and also find it rather contrived. there was a talk on last night that i meant to go to but ended up going home instead, about analogue photography and nostalgia and possibly touching on what implications it all has for that little section of art dealing with found things. as in, it's more immediate to stumble across a discarded photo, whether the next day or decades later, than it is a lost computer file. though the idea of 'found' archives of digital stuff is also perfectly feasible, there's an interpretive step involved in seeing whatever it is you've found. but i digress.
it's the only gallery i'm currently a member of, despite it being free to get into. so why do i value it? why does it merit my support? hmm...
well i like the whole way the gallery is set up, the print sales is a bit of a mess, yes, but you can wander in there and ask questions and no-one ever glares, the 2 houses embedded in the street, seperate and connected, 2 exhibitions of often very different work in format or style, but linked by an idea. a reasonable bookshop, a good cafe where you can go and sit with a cup of tea and the papers (an oasis of calm 1 minute from leicester sq) and completely ignore the exhibition if you choose, where the queue for the men's sometimes gets held up by a tramp washing in the loo...
as for the work on show, it's hit and miss, but i think it's to be supported that they don't really do the great safe stuff. it's not the place to see Ansel Adams, William Egglestone (the hayward), Robert Frank, Wolfgang Tillmans (tate modern) or Diane Arbus (V&A). it's things i've never seen and people i've never heard of. often flawed and not-entirely-accomplished, but some of it i've really liked. i don't like the current show or the last one, the deutsche borse prize, (i only liked a couple of the shortlist), so the last one i really liked was back in january. "bound for glory: America in colour 1939-1943" little-seen FSA commissioned colour photos, only a few years after Walker Evans. Guardian slideshow. i didn't like the way the photos had been printed pretty big, although i suppose the obvious digital step was part of the process of salvaging. it was just incongruous. there was a mini-black and white room at the back of some of the earlier FSA stuff, together with a camera same model as Dorothea Lange used and notes on how she worked. running concurrently in the cafe-gallery was a solo show by Bert Teunissen
- "Domestic Landscapes", a decade long ongoing project to photograph people and places across europe, the exhibition was simply beautiful prints covering most of the walls. there was a video in the entrance of Teunissen talking about the whys and hows, pretty simple and straightforward, inspired by the rural farmhouses he remembers from his childhood, his fascination with the lighting and atmosphere, his desire to record a disappearing way of life.
it's accessible. i think that's really important. a quiet friendliness.
the shows are subjective and risky (in terms of appeal), in a good way. there's a place for that unpredicatability.
and i like that they sell postcards of the guy that taught A-level photography at my school.
i actually think they might be quite useful for you when it comes to wanting to sell or exhibit your work. i think they might be quite approachable, or at least point you in the right direction. i was once offered a rehanging slot (the few days between shows when the cafe is still open) at a uni exhibition, by a tutor who claimed to have contacts there. i didn't really think the work was up to scratch though, so i never followed it up.
...

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

as a seperate thing, i've never found the terms Modern and Post-modern to be helpful. they're too generic and broad. perhaps i just don't know what they mean (to be sure i don't - i really shouldn't be teaching postgrad architecture...). i suppose modern implies a naieve utopian ideal type thing, blindly thinking the engineered future will be better than the past, treating people as a rather universal type, wanting to change the world. and post-modern is the specifically self-deprecating, self-aware, subjective phase that came after. perhaps. perhaps things are generally (or at present) beyond that, both self-aware and realistic, and also reaching for something and with attention to craft and quality. the idealist in me would like to think so.

which reminds me, i mean to reply to your field camera suggestion...

[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.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I very much approve of them being prepared to go out on a limb to show less safe stuff from up-and-coming artists. I just really didn't like the current show.

Still, better a bad reaction than no reaction, I suppose!

[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.