dispatches

What does it all mean?

I actually have a serious aversion to talking animals in media (if I could, I'd assassinate the Geico gecko), but I'm making a major exception in this case.

What you see is what you get

Giusepe Cade, "The Meeting of Gatier, Count of Antwerp, and His Daughter, Violante, c. 1787

After my assignment I stopped off at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has free admission on Thursdays after 5.  The place was crowded, so I allowed myself to bypass many of the more congested galleries, which were invariably the French Impressionist Greatest Hits rooms. What I was looking for was something that I needed to see at that moment.

My strategy for a museum is to enter a gallery, glance at all the masterworks begging for my attention, and feel which one, and only one, of them is calling me at that moment. This is the one painting, or sculpture, or artifact in the room I will lavish with my attention.

In this case, I was gravitating towards groupings of people. I am photographing people a lot lately, and I suppose I needed some advice on how to proceed. Every compositional problem you encounter, someone has solved it before you. You need not reinvent the wheel. In this case, I found some novel solutions in some 17th and 18th century works that I had never noticed before.

On the way, through the subway-platform-cum-art-gallery rooms, I had to pause at some Monets. No one I can think of handles light, particularly hard midday light in a landscape, better than Monet. How does he make it work?  Then there's the compositional uniqueness of Degas. Even when he's not fawning over dancers, he comes up with a way of arranging the frame that appears explicitly photographic. It's no surprise that Degas was also an ardent photographer.

We do not work in a vacuum. What we choose to expose ourselves to affects the art we make.

Edgar Degas, "The Millinery Shop, 1879/1886"

Takedown

It's the third time I've driven to Portland in the last month. Once was for an assignment, the other times have been to mount and, now, dismount my show at Camerawork Gallery. It's always a sad sort of  denouement to take down a show. What took so much effort to hang, and with such anticipation for what was to occur, is swiftly cleaned away at the end like so many dirty dishes after the dinner party.

The gallery is a funny little spot on the ground floor of the Linfield College School of Nursing, next to Good Samaritan Hospital, but apparently it is the longest continuous photography exhibit venue on the West Coast. I ran into Scott, the gallery manager, on my way out, and he assured me that “Thousands of people have come through to see your exhibit. It's a funny little spot, but it's really a destination to see work.”

Seattle and Portland are different that way. I feel like I am living in a far flung province, remote from where the action is. You can count the number of dedicated photography venues in Seattle on one hand and still have most of your fingers left over.  Portland has this amazing photography community that is extraordinarily supportive, and for which there are an abundance of places to show work. The Portland Art Museum has a quite rich photography department, and Blue Sky Gallery has been a dominant presence in the city for decades. It dates back to the 1950's when Minor White lived here and ran photography critique groups. After he left for Rochester the group still sent him steamer trunks full of photos, which he would return with his criticisms. A strong support for photography seems to have been his legacy.

As I was taking down the show a woman showed up. “Oh, I'm so glad the show is still here,” she said. “I saw it was the last day on my card, and I had to come down.” She oohed and awed, and I think she's now committed to taking a photo a day, just like me, and showing up at the contra dance tomorrow night, with or without husband. People are really serious about their art here. If I were a young photographer looking for a place to move to, I'd pick Portland.

Opinions

Two big photo shows at the Art Institute on this trip to Chicago, Richard Misrach's On The Beach, and the Jeff Wall show. I have opinions.

I have always been a fan of Richard Misrach. His Desert Cantos series is one of the pinnacles of contemporary photography, and it is work that will last. He is not afraid of beauty, which makes him a suspicious entity in some circles. He brings the strands of minimalism, formal landscape, conceptual art and documentary work into a coherent artistic stance. 

I only saw a portion of the beach show, as it wasn't to open until the next day, but the work I did see just sings, loudly. These are huge prints, technically stunning, and haunting in their aerial God-view of figures in a vast space of sand and water. This is Large Work (9 feet wide, some of them) that works. They are photographs that won't translate to the printed page, which brings up all those issues as to whether photography is a reproducible medium or one in which the photograph as object is the point. With Misrach, the judgment is clear—you have to go stand in front of one of these and be amazed.

Now then. Jeff Wall has been an art world darling for a long time. Six months ago he was the subject of back to back profiles in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. His star has never been more ascendent.

It helps to have read about this guy before you see the work. Maybe have an advanced degree in Artspeak (where, for example, you learn to compose prose such as that inanimate objects engage in Dialog, and Things are Informed by something or other). Then you can comprehend that these photographs are made to Mean Something. There is a Big Concept behind them. There is Great Intention. What is absent, however, is any heart. If you read about this guy's working methods, it is evidently the output of an obsessive compulsive narcissist, who will put his subjects through grueling take after take, and spend years constructing a set so that it doesn't appear that it was set up. There are interesting formal compositional elements in the work, there are Ideas, but there is no connection. I left the exhibit feeling as though I had been fleeced. This work will be forgotten, and none too soon.

Henry Wessel: My guru

"To me it's very spiritual. It's secular, it's of the world, but it's very spiritual, because you're suddenly seeing the coherence and the interconnectedness of everything, left to right, top to bottom, front to back. It's all connected, and somehow it's in this balance."
-- Henry Wessel

Watch this video on the KQED website, and be amazed. This is the apotheosis of my desire as a photographer.

B&W Mag winner

Just got word that I made it into B&W Magazine’s Portfolio Issue. I’ll have a four page spread in the June issue. This was through their portfolio contest, which is how they screen work for the magazine now. Out of close to a thousand entrants, 15 of us made it in.

I have no idea what won, though. I keep a spreadsheet of my competition entries, and I have notation that reads only, "Sticks and Venice." That must mean I sent two portfolios. I wonder which one was the winner?

The window for the 2008 Single Image contest is open now. Details here.

Photo Lucida aftermath

I am back from Photo Lucida. It is the most successful review event I have attended in my decade of putting myself through these meat grinder critique marathons. I have a commitment for a show, and, probably, a photo editor for the book project. Here is what I learned about my work:

The contra dance project has legs. But I need to cast my net wider to give it more context. Whether I throw the net into my archive, or back out in the field, I have yet to determine.

It is useful to be working in an arena untrodden by others. Nobody’s looking at what I’m looking at, subject-wise. Even though I am shooting in a style not unfamiliar to any decent editorial photographer, I would not have gotten this degree of attention if I had continued to show my brushy landscapes or my European panoramic silver prints.

Other opinions count. But they shouldn’t account for everything. No decision I make based on this intense look at my work should be considered firm until it has settled in my thinking for a few weeks.

What have I got myself into

It’s nice to get agreement. The consensus I’m hearing is that I have a bigger story to tell than I thought.

Everyone wants more still work. The motion-blur thing is great, but it doesn’t tell enough of the story. As a photographer, a lot of my interest in contra dance has been the challenge of extracting visually compelling images out of a complex, dynamic environment. That’s where I get my jollies. As a storyteller, and that seems to be the larger point of this project now, I need to expand my range. Some of it is in the body of work that spans 20 years, some of it I will need to shoot. Perhaps it is portraits. Perhaps it is dance venues. Perhaps it is the details and elements that tell you that you’re at a contra dance, besides the blurry bodies and joy-infused faces.

Rusty Freeman was close to apoplectic when he saw the work and heard my stories. "You’ve got a tiger by the tail here. This is going to be big." I need scholarship to accompany this project, and I need to expand my team. This is going to take some time to sink in—just what kind of project have I gotten myself into, and who else has to be included? Do I have the ability to actually pull this off?

It’s the best outcome from a good review event—support and fulfillment from what I have accomplished, and terror about how much I have yet to do.

What else I could do

Timing is everything, and it rarely coincides with what you want. Every reviewer said this would be the perfect project for Chronicle Books. When I met with Chronicle I learned they already have a global dance book in progress, by Brian Lanker. Silver Eye Center just did a show with a music theme, and probably won’t program another one for some time.

This kind of thing happened repeatedly with my Ireland book project. Everyone had just done an Ireland book, or was about to. One publisher said, essentially, "This one’s so much better than the one we just signed a contract to do. Too bad."

One has two choices in response to bad timing. You can beat your head against the nearest wall and curse the universe, or the bad judgment of those who are overlooking your genius. Or, you can change the expectation. Alan at Chronicle wants to help me place this book elsewhere. Linda at Silver Eye suggested an approach to text that I hadn’t thought of, that could be a great solution to a particular dilemma I was facing. People want to be helpful. I want to do everything in my power to aid them.

There is another alternative. I had a long talk with a photographer/roving reviewer, James Lerager, who told me to forget the publishers entirely. He said that print on demand is robust enough at this point to do my project that way, and that I’m way ahead of most people in that I have a built in audience for the project, the dance community. There’s about 18 new skills I’d have to master, and I’d need to shell out for an editor and a designer, but it’s a possibility. I’ve been working a ton this spring. What else am I going to do with my money? Replace the 50 year old single pane windows on the house? What fun is that?

How we print now

At the portfolio walk we get to see the work of our fellow Camp Lucida attendees, or rather half of them, the ones whose last names begin in the half of the alphabet not your own. My highly unscientific poll of the print types yielded this. Of the 80 or so portfolios I saw (or more accurately, glanced at), about a third to a half were black and white. I sussed out one silver print portfolio in that group, one ambriotype, and a half dozen platinum/palladium portfolios. The rest were digital prints.

Among the color, 90% or better were inkjet prints, way up from two years ago. The small pool of C-print portfolios were more likely to have been printed with a digital C-print machine (LightJet or Lambda) than in a color darkroom.

Regardless of mono- or multi-chrome, most people appear to be inkjet printing on matte papers.