Bleeding Edge Large Format [Archive] - Large Format Photography Forum

r.e.

30-Nov-2009, 15:17

Last week I attended MOMA's annual New Photography show, which this year features the work of six young U.S.-based photographers. Only one of them (Daniel Gordon) appears to have a web site, but one can see some of their work on the MOMA site (www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/891) and elsewhere on the web. The New Yorker published a brief description here:www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2009/11/02/091102gonb_GOAT_notebook_aletti

I'm interested in seeing more work that might be considered bleeding edge, whether by new or established photographers, for the selfish reason that I'm thinking through where to go with my own photography and some of what I saw at MOMA was helpful. Suggestions? Out of deference, I used the phrase large format in the thread title, but for the purpose of my question I don't really care what the format is. To anticipate, I'm not really looking for names like Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, etc., who are at this point pretty mainstream.

Thanks.

Steve Sherman

30-Nov-2009, 16:05

Wow, I would not have known that was photography if not for Ms. Eva Respini introducing as such in her opening sentence.

Bosaiya

30-Nov-2009, 17:55

I'm interested in seeing more work that might be considered bleeding edge...

http://bleedingedgephotography.com/??

r.e.

30-Nov-2009, 18:20

jeroldharter

30-Nov-2009, 18:23

If that is "new photography" then call me old school.

r.e.

30-Nov-2009, 18:29

Jerold,

I asked a question, and I am hoping that I'll get some answers instead of standing by while this degenerates into a psychotherapy session for people who want to bash work that they don't like.

Bosaiya

30-Nov-2009, 18:38

Hi Bosaiya,

This appears to be a site that you own. When I click on the image, I wind up, via a choice of using a web-based e-mail account, at a Russian domain that appears (cyrillic not being one of my strong suits) to want a username and password. I know your work, so I'm curious. What's this about, or is it a product of your sense of humour?

Hmm, not sure about the Russian. The image/link (which is the current extent of the site) should just open up an email message in your default program.

r.e.

30-Nov-2009, 18:47

I'm not used to being asked, when I click on a home page image, whether I'm prepared to open Outlook. So I moved to Opera, which gave me the choice of opening Outlook, my Opera e-mail client or a web-based e-mail client. I choose the latter, which led me to a page in Cyrillic that appears to want a username and password.

Anyway, if the image is the only thing on the page, I guess it's a little joke - or does one get an actual e-mail message if one goes along? If so, interesting, but you're assuming a pretty laid back view on computer security.

Bosaiya

30-Nov-2009, 18:53

I'm planning on getting around to adding to it maybe sometime in the future, it's just a placeholder for now. I have no experience with Opera so I can't say, but it seems to work okay (in that it sends an email) in IE and FireFox. I wouldn't have posted it at all if the original message weren't just screaming for it.

r.e.

30-Nov-2009, 18:55

So in this context it's a joke, maybe even a satirical shot, in any event cool.

Bosaiya

30-Nov-2009, 19:02

So in this context it's a joke, maybe even a satirical shot, in any event cool.

I'm not sure yet, still trying to figure that out.

I've added a little text under the photo letting people know that clicking it will send an email. Thank you for bringing that to my attention, the last thing I want is to be the vector for any viruses! I'll have to do a better job of testing in the future.

r.e.

30-Nov-2009, 19:04

Now I want to see the text of the e-mail :)

Bosaiya

30-Nov-2009, 19:09

Now I want to see the text of the e-mail :)

"Congratulations Sir/Madam, you have been specially selected by official prize-awarding agency of my country to receive special money prize! All we need is your username, password, and bank accounts information!"

Struan Gray

1-Dec-2009, 03:15

A lot of the 'bleeding edge' work in that show, and others like it, seems to be re-invigorating the old fear that straight photography isn't enough to be art. I see many similarities of insecurity between that sort of stuff and the pumice-scraping pictorialists.

I enjoy the results, but it's not what I think photography is best at. Rauschenberg for example had the nerve to present his photography as photography, and his mixed media stuff as, well, something else - different, not better.

There are a number of European art schools which seem to produce a regular train of LF-interested photographers. They usually produce galleries of recent graduates' work which can be a great way to keep up with how the formal academic movements are developing (or not).

The Helsinki School is now famous as a place of education and as a movement within photography. Schaden (http://www.schaden.com/suche.php?q=helsinki&qo=&x=0&y=0) have published a number of books on work produced there, and there are several galleries around the web too.

The Becher school in Düsseldorf has famous and less famous graduates. Again, the yearly shows of recent work are a good way of seeing how those ideas are developing.

For my money though the Folkwang in Essen is producing the most interesting work. Otto Steinert is one of Europe's great forgotten photographers and educators, and worked there at the end of his career. More recently Jörg Sasse, Elgar Esser and Peter Bialobrzeski have all had an impact.

The Folkwang has a page of projects here:

http://www.folkwang-hochschule.de/home/gestaltung/fotografie/projekte-arbeiten/

The Bialobrzeski group at Bremen is also worth a look:

http://bialobrzeski-studenten.de/index.php

Richard M. Coda

1-Dec-2009, 10:30

If that is "new photography" then call me old school.

Me, too! Count me out!

Drew Wiley

1-Dec-2009, 10:35

Corny, cliche

Eric Biggerstaff

1-Dec-2009, 10:41

Straun,

As usual, great links and thanks for posting, there is some interesting work there. I need to spend some time going through those sites to learn more, but at first glance it seems to be worth the effort.

Eric

r.e.

1-Dec-2009, 11:19

Thanks Struan,

I've spent the last few hours getting an overview of the work on the Essen, Bremen and Helsinki sites, and in several cases of the work on individual photographers' sites. There are a number of photographers whose work I want to return to and examine more closely. Much appreciated, this is time well-spent.

For those who are interested, the Helsinki School site, which is very well-organized, is at www.helsinkischool.fi

BennehBoy

2-Dec-2009, 04:10

I'd be interested in seeing what you turn up, would you share with us here?

James Olson

2-Dec-2009, 05:10

After seeing the photography, I would hesitate to call it photography. More of a hybrid type of art. It has no appeal at all for me.
jim

r.e.

2-Dec-2009, 08:16

BennehBoy,

Don't know if you have personal messaging turned on, but I've sent you one. I'm interested in purchasing a print of one of your photographs.

Ulrich Drolshagen

2-Dec-2009, 14:53

For my money though the Folkwang in Essen is producing the most interesting work. Otto Steinert is one of Europe's great forgotten photographers and educators, and worked there at the end of his career. More recently Jörg Sasse, Elgar Esser and Peter Bialobrzeski have all had an impact.

The Folkwang has a page of projects here:

http://www.folkwang-hochschule.de/home/gestaltung/fotografie/projekte-arbeiten/

The Bialobrzeski group at Bremen is also worth a look:

http://bialobrzeski-studenten.de/index.php

Thank heaven I am an amateur and don't have to write down all such nonsense about my pictures for to acquire a bachelor degree :D Has ever a poet been asked to supply some pictures illustrating his lyrics?

Ulrich

Ulrich

r.e.

2-Dec-2009, 15:33

Has ever a poet been asked to supply some pictures illustrating his lyrics?

Off the top of my head...
William F. Blake
Langston Hughes
Hart Crane
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A.A. Milne (Now We are Six) :)
Laurence Sterne - OK, this is pushing it, but that black square stays in the mind :)
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Now, if you add writers who, like Hart Crane, consider the exact placement and typography of their words on the page to be part of the work itself...

Interestingly, if you look at the Helsinki School photographers, one of them has replaced the photographic image with words. There is an important American painter (can't recall right now, but was it Jasper Johns?) who included words in his images describing what the parts of the image are, so that in one of his still lifes, there is a broom with the word broom beside it. Or consider the photographer Duane Michals, for whom the image and the words are both an integral part of the work...

An observation for the people who say that the work at MOMA is not photography - Walead Beshty's images are photograms, pure and simple.

seabird

2-Dec-2009, 19:33

Thank heaven I am an amateur and don't have to write down all such nonsense about my pictures for to acquire a bachelor degree :D Has ever a poet been asked to supply some pictures illustrating his lyrics?

I find so much modern work inaccessible that I appreciate *anything* that helps me understand where the artist is coming from/what they are doing. Whether I understand the accompanying text is another matter entirely...

I also value threads like this that point me to new artists/directions. They may not all be my cup of tea, but then the world would be a boring (but better) place if everyone was like me!

Chris Jones

2-Dec-2009, 21:02

I find so much modern work inaccessible that I appreciate *anything* that helps me understand where the artist is coming from/what they are doing. Whether I understand the accompanying text is another matter entirely...

Having to explain, using something as clumsy as mere words indexed to some sort of a-priori transcendental agreement with the transcendence of a new human god now known as Kant is one of the most difficult things us modern day poets have to cope with. But then did not Plato in an archaic era now long passed throw us poets out of the idea of a democratic republic for the very reason that we did not use words. That was our great crime, for which over thousands of years of terrible and ugly history, we find ourselves in exile. But, better to be in this exile then to use words. Every poet knows that. As for myself, I now use a Mamiya RB67 Pro-SD. With this poetry can be made free of the chains binding words to indexing fixtures as slaves and those who once wore chains will always wear chains. Poets know not of this slavery called words.

Chris Jones

2-Dec-2009, 21:23

Trust my sick Australian humour is understood...

More interestingly, I found the return to film and prints as a very plastic media with this exhibition very interesting. The use of assemblage, for example.

It is a difficult argument to make, but it does seem to me, encountering the Zone System and straight photography late in one's career that this is something which has historically hampered what can be done with silver gelatin. It appears to first make the mistake of confusing mechanics with technique and then sets up the zones as a pure empty form of space to be filled with relative content. As a result, what is left is a closed form which denies the plasticity of silver gelatin.

It did seem to me that this is what this exhibition was looking for ways to address, which I found interesting.

Ulrich Drolshagen

2-Dec-2009, 21:55

Struan Gray

3-Dec-2009, 01:16

Artspeak among students is a bit like two year olds with pottymouth. Most grow out of it :-)

I would add W.G. Sebald to any list of inseperable words and pictures. I also have a soft spot for travellers sketchbooks and naturalists diaries. Edward Wilson's antarctic diary is a gem.

Many of the works in the original exhibition in this thread are trying to attack the aspect of photography that the Modernists loved and the Pictorialists hated: its lack of plasticity. A blog with pictures, for example, has little of the charm of a written diary with sketches, or even one with physical photographs pasted in. The smooth mechanical nature of photographs encourages a naive response to them as mere containers, and not as created objects. Photography as a field has learned to use this bias for serious and less serious purposes, and for me at least it is why a sense of history is so important for my attempts to move beyond the snapshot.

Art schools don't of course have a monopoly of the bleeding edge, but the professionalisation of contemporary arts means that those aspiring to a life as an artist more often attend a school at some stage of their careers than used to be the case - either as students, or as faculty once established. They also act as useful repositories of skill and opinion. I highlighted the German schools because they seem to encourage the use of LF cameras (or, rather, a typically LF aesthetic and way of working). British and Swedish schools are more US-influenced, which typically means Shore and Eggleston as models, although the use of typographies and the label 'documentary' as an excuse to avoid having to think, or the hard work of developing a sense of observation, is ubiquitous.

One thing that gladdens my heart, and relates back to the charm of text and pictures, is the way that the barrier between portraits and landscapes is being broken down. Some might see this as a National Geographicalisation of art, but I like the whole-picture aspect of such projects (even if I don't join in myself). Alex Soth is the poster child all others wish to emulate.

Struan Gray

3-Dec-2009, 02:02

PS: one aspect of the digital revolution is that it is now easier and cheaper to integrate photographs with other objects. That, I'm sure, (has already) opened up new ways of working, and new ways of adding aura. All the same, I'm not sure photography as a field needs to re-visit that insecurity: it's nearly a hundred years since photographers stopped being apologetic for their lack of plasticity.

PPS: two blogs worth following: Mrs Deane (http://www.beikey.net/mrs-deane/), which fits my mental tastes like a bespoke glove; and I Heart Photograph (http://www.iheartphotograph.blogspot.com/), which is more frivolous but turns up gems amid the froth.

PPPS: Ralf Grossek is someone who has taken the aesthetic of all those German schools and applied it to some really subtle thinking - and humour. His "Collection of functional intentions (http://www.ralfgrossek.de/englisch/index.htm)" is one of the best combinations of ideas and pictures I have seen in a long time.

rdenney

3-Dec-2009, 02:35

PPS: two blogs worth following: Mrs Deane (http://www.beikey.net/mrs-deane/), which fits my mental tastes like a bespoke glove

Now, there's a find. Their photography is perhaps a bit minimalistic for my own tastes, but it certainly does not run away from the inplasticity of the medium.

And I see what you like about the reading.

Regarding words and pictures--sometimes art is conceived as both, together, and sometimes art is conceived as each separately. If it doesn't work as it is conceived, then either the artist executed poorly or didn't have anything to say that the viewer wanted to hear.

My beef with much of the student art is that I either can't figure out what they are saying, or if I can it doesn't seem significant to me.

The problem, of course, is that I'm also a student. That is made obvious to me by those minimalist portfolios on Mrs. Deane, much more than because of those student portfolios.

Rick "who really liked Orientalis, despite that the irony of a fake setting printed using faked archaic processes was probably aimed at people like me" Denney

Struan Gray

3-Dec-2009, 02:50

I see a T-shirt: 'Inplastic - and proud!'

rdenney

3-Dec-2009, 09:59

I see a T-shirt: 'Inplastic - and proud!'

Heh. Creating new words around here is a dangerous business.

Rick "enjoying the opportunity, however, to use words with unknown and therefore inarguable definitions" Denney

Ulrich Drolshagen

3-Dec-2009, 11:07

I find so much modern work inaccessible that I appreciate *anything* that helps me understand where the artist is coming from/what they are doing. Whether I understand the accompanying text is another matter entirely...

I also value threads like this that point me to new artists/directions. They may not all be my cup of tea, but then the world would be a boring (but better) place if everyone was like me!

If I would separate the artists statements from their picture series and mix them all up, would you be able to put them together correctly? Okay, may be the students are as Struan suggests, not all experienced enough to get to their point.

You surely can create pieces of artwork as composites of text and figurative work and it has ever been done. Think of medieval bibles for instance. And every newspaper and magazine are examples of meaningful composites in a documentary context. (BTW my pictures are often accompanied by little stories too).
But nevertheless pictures (and series of) IMHO should speak for themselves and should not be meaningless without an essay. Here an unstructured not arranged and composed picture of some curly kale is just an arbitrary snapshot without the accompanying conceptual essay. You may see the essay and the pictures as parts of a composite work. But then the essay becomes the main body of the work and the pictures are merely its illustration. You then can read the essay in itself and my be understand it but it is impossible to look at the series and get the point (or some other -for you meaningful- own interpretation).
I have to stress that my rant does not apply to all series seen, that would be unfair. But quite some.

Ulrich

Richard M. Coda

3-Dec-2009, 11:55

If I would separate the artists statements from their picture series and mix them all up, would you be able to put them together correctly? Okay, may be the students are as Struan suggests, not all experienced enough to get to their point.

You surely can create pieces of artwork as composites of text and figurative work and it has ever been done. Think of medieval bibles for instance. And every newspaper and magazine are examples of meaningful composites in a documentary context. (BTW my pictures are often accompanied by little stories too).
But nevertheless pictures (and series of) IMHO should speak for themselves and should not be meaningless without an essay. Here an unstructured not arranged and composed picture of some curly kale is just an arbitrary snapshot without the accompanying conceptual essay. You may see the essay and the pictures as parts of a composite work. But then the essay becomes the main body of the work and the pictures are merely its illustration. You then can read the essay in itself and my be understand it but it is impossible to look at the series and get the point (or some other -for you meaningful- own interpretation).
I have to stress that my rant does not apply to all series seen, that would be unfair. But quite some.

Ulrich

Beautifully put!

Chris Strobel

3-Dec-2009, 12:23

rdenney

3-Dec-2009, 13:44

If I would separate the artists statements from their picture series and mix them all up, would you be able to put them together correctly?

That is a most interesting test. The next time I'm tempted to accompany a picture with a story, I'll have to apply that test to see whether the picture merely illustrates the story or whether the story and the picture are really mutually dependent.

I'm reminded of the book Slickrock, which is a compilation of Edward Abbey's writing and Philip Hyde's photographs. In the preface, Abbey describes how the two of them concluded early on that each had to work separately--there was no way for Abbey to write text that served the photos, and no way for Hyde to make photos that served the text. Each had their own separate vision. So, the first part of the book is text, and the second is photography.

In a recent photo I made for display, I wrote a short essay concerning the subject. The photo was of an old mill building, now in ruins, in our neighborhood. The essay told the story of that mill. I liked the photo because it made the building look like a hollow face, starting out with empty eyes--a dried skull. (I am probably the only person for whom the photo had that effect, but that's a limitation of my technique.) The text explained why there might be ghosts lurking. Each could exist separately, and indeed I don't include the text on my website where I parked the photo, but they also worked together. I would like to think that they supported each other, with neither being dominant.

I also wrote a short essay for a portfolio I put together a couple of decades ago about the old missions in San Antonio. The essay helps glue the portfolio together, but the pictures still have to stand on their own.

I suspect that it's the documentary nature of photography that demands a narrative. When a photograph is contradicting the importance of story, however, it seems to me that any words are likely to subtract rather than add. And some of the photos of those students seem to refute any possible narrative.

Rick "who will someday get that missions portfolio online" Denney

seabird

3-Dec-2009, 14:52

But nevertheless pictures (and series of) IMHO should speak for themselves and should not be meaningless without an essay.

Hi Ulrich,

I agree with the statement that the pictures should speak for themselves. My difficulty is that often they do but I'm incapable of hearing what is being said without further assistance! Usually that is a function of my own inadequacies (no formal art training, not versed in modern art "issues" etc etc). This may be why I find so much modern art inaccessible. But I also get the impression that at other times, the average punter like me is not the intended target audience anyway. Like Einstein's papers on relativity - they clearly have meaning but *I* dont understand them - moreover my inability to understand them is irrelevant because they are addressed to a specialised audience that I'm not a member of! It is a failing on my part that I often dismiss something as meaningless when I'm not prepared to work to understand it.

Of course, at other times my inability to hear what is being said may be due to the artist's inability to speak clearly :-)

I may also have confused the issue. Perhaps I needed to distinguish more clearly between mixed media objects where the text is integral to the artwork, and those presentations where the text accompanies/contextualises/explains the art object. My comments about appreciating accompanying explanatory material (be it text or something else) were in relation to the second circumstance and simply recognising that much modern art seems to operate at a different level to the one I operate at.

Thanks for listening and best regards

r.e.

3-Dec-2009, 15:04

I think that some photographers get to a point where they feel shackled by the medium, and that this feeling can take one or both of two forms: boredom with found subjects (whether inanimate objects or people) and boredom with the constraints of traditional, whether contemporary or so-called alternative, capture and processing.

Personally, I find myself increasingly interested in constructed as distinct from found content, and in images that are made in ways that are not based entirely on traditional capture and processing techniques. I'm also interested in exploring the ideas of incorporating non-pictorial elements - sound, written words and three-dimensional objects - into my work.

At the beginning of this thread, I said that the motivation for starting it was selfish. I need to find a way forward. Last week, in New York, I spent a lot of time at public and private galleries thinking through that path, and I'll be doing the same in Europe and maybe the Middle East after Christmas. Struan's links were also helpful, as much for what I saw and didn't like, as for what I did. Interestingly, the single most valuable bit of input so far has not been still images, but seeing Richard Foreman's play Idiot Savant, with Willam Dafoe, last week at Joe Papp's Public Theater. During the performance, a large part of the audience walked, and a good many appeared to stay only because they weren't close enough to an aisle to leave without being ill-mannered. I was tempted to walk myself, but it was the right challenge at the right time. Sometimes full understanding isn't necessary.

r.e.

3-Dec-2009, 15:37

One thing that gladdens my heart ... is the way that the barrier between portraits and landscapes is being broken down. Some might see this as a National Geographicalisation of art, but I like the whole-picture aspect of such projects (even if I don't join in myself). Alex Soth is the poster child all others wish to emulate.

Could you expand on that?

Does this come within what you mean when you refer to the barrier between portrait and landscape being broken down: http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/photography/turkeycinemascope1.php?sid=1?

Does Paul Strand's work, despite him being quite dead and gone?

Or do you mean something else?

I looked at Alec Soth's site, especially the two series on the Mississippi River and Bogota, both places where I have spent a good deal of time. I was struck, especially in the Bogota series, by how much he closed out the landscape, both of the city itself and of the wild jungle that surrounds it. If you have been to North Dakota/Minnesota, or have seen the film Fargo, you will know that he has done the same to the upper Mississippi. If he has broken down the barrier between portrait and landscape in these series, he has done so in a way that is both highly selective and in my view claustrophobic, which is fine, I'm just trying to understand what you mean.

paulr

3-Dec-2009, 17:36

Off the top of my head...
William F. Blake
Langston Hughes
Hart Crane
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A.A. Milne (Now We are Six) :)
Laurence Sterne - OK, this is pushing it, but that black square stays in the mind :)
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Don't forget James Joyce, who was so worried that readers wouldn't get Ulysses that he published a whole readers' guide shortly after the novel.

The whole "art has to speak for itself" idea only seems to work when you're looking at a familiar genre.

In this case, we're looking at images which, in the opinions of the MoMA curators, are reshaping the boundaries of the medium. So why would we presume to be fluent in the artists' visual language based on our past experience?

rdenney

3-Dec-2009, 17:49

The whole "art has to speak for itself" idea only seems to work when you're looking at a familiar genre.

In this case, we're looking at images which, in the opinions of the MoMA curators, are reshaping the boundaries of the medium. So why would we presume to be fluent in the artists' visual language based on our past experience?

Should it be the artist who does the explaining? I think so, but then the explanations often communicate nothing useful, or help me appreciate the art. In fact, instead of bringing new art to new viewers, they tend to put more distance between the art and the viewer. Rather, it seems to me the job of the critic, or the curator acting as critic, to bring new work to new viewers. Critics and curators are professional communicators. An artist trying to explain his work never seems very satisfying, even those who can manage clear declarative sentences.

Rick "wondering if it's the curators doing the presuming in many cases" Denney

paulr

3-Dec-2009, 18:05

Should it be the artist who does the explaining?

It's nice to know how the artists feel about it; where they're coming from. Trouble is, visual artists tend to be a lot better with pictures than with words. The best statements come from artists who can articulate what they're trying to do, or who at least know their limits. The worst ones come from artists so paralyzed by fear of writing statements that they just write a bunch of pre-digested artspeak and hope for the best.

Rather, it seems to me the job of the critic, or the curator acting as critic, to bring new work to new viewers.

Sure, we should expect them to do the heavy lifting. We especially need them to place the work into historical context, and into the context of other new work.

I can tell you what you I was trying to do with any given photographic project ... but can I tell you why it's important or how it relates to the photographic canon? If I could, would you bother listening? I hope not!