If one likes the photography of Chris Jordan, one should look at the artist he is blatently copying his ideas from: Edward Burtynsky.
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
Some of Jordan's Ferrous Metal series are almost straight copies of work Mr. Burtynsky did in the 1990's
Way to go Chris! Get your own ideas.
Burtynsky has a photo exhibited in the George Eastman House's permanent exhibit that is virtually identical to one I did earlier, of a Quarry wall at Rock of ages Quarry in Barre, Vermont. I did mine in the mid 1980s using Polaroid Type 55; he did his in color in the early 1990s. Our framing and composition is nearly identical.
I don't think he ripped me off. It is an obvious and beautiful image. I'm sure dozens of others have taken the same image with their 35mm SLRs and zoom lenses. I kick myself for not having his gift of self-promotion, or for printing large, expensive prints and getting my work out in front of the galleries. More power to him.
From what I've seen of Chris Jordan work and postings, I doubt he would "copy" someone outright. Maybe he's paying a compliment, or sometimes ideas overlap with others, but if you want to cast stones, Burtynsky has been doing the Siskind Inkblot/New Color/Stephen Shore/John Pfahl/Cold German Photographer act just as much as anyone else, and he certainly isn't the first to be doing "his sort of images" either.
People have been photography rusty old crap for decades...
It is true that the whole "cold German artist" aesthetic is pretty pervasive. The fact is, though, that Chris Jordan's very series- even down to their titles- are almost identical to Burtynsky's. It is easy to make an image that looks like someone else's, and if that were the case, this would not be an issue. It is quite another thing to make work that evolves along similar lines to that of another artist.
Also, Jordan is now showing at James Nicholson Gallery, just down the hall from Burtynsky's San Francisco gallery, the Robert Koch Gallery. Check out Burtynsky's page at this gallery. http://www.kochgallery.com/artists/contemporary/Burtynsky/index.html
Burtynsky's pictures were made so many years before- in the mid-nineties, etc- and they are so similar in their look and in their evolution, to Chris Jordan's recent stuff, that the whole situation begins to feel very problematic. It is very hard to resist the idea that Jordan is riding Burtynsky's coattails.
hey Maria, your first post ever on here.. and from a hotmail address no less. Hmmm?
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
"hey Maria, your first post ever on here.. and from a hotmail address no less. Hmmm?"
I smell a Bee
Yes, Frank, people have been shooting rusty crap for decades, even longer than that. And sometimes they look similar. You would have a hard time claiming that Burtynsky stole your image because he probably has never even heard of you.
The problem isn't one of people shooting the same large grand themes that are all the rage right now. This isn't the objection. The objection is that side by side Chris' Ferrous images are almost identical to Burtynsky's work and that Chris knows Burtynsky's work and used to mention him on his website:
"These images draw on the color work of Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky, and the contemporary German school including such artists as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth."
If you bother to compare the Ferrous images of Burtynsky to Chris, you will see more than a trace similarity.
If Chris had produced a series called Desert Cantos, I wonder how 'ol Frank would argue out of that one.
I don't know Chris Jordan personally, but I have a sense that he is not the type of person to ride on coattails. But until the art police interogate him, with electrodes on his cockles and his nose lit up like a Christmas tree, I doubt we'll ever know for sure.
Burtynsky could have seen my images; I used to send promotional materials to Toronto art directors during that time (it's only three hours away from me), and I published a small poster and cards with my Quarry images. My images were also exhibited at the Quarry's visitor center. But no, you're right – he couldn't have seen them because I didn't get them published in ArtNews.
By the way, have you noticed how many MFA student exhibit animals sliced in half? Seems like a far more problematic trend.
"It is true that the whole "cold German artist" aesthetic is pretty pervasive. The fact is, though, that Chris Jordan's very series- even down to their titles- are almost identical to Burtynsky's. It is easy to make an image that looks like someone else's, and if that were the case, this would not be an issue. It is quite another thing to make work that evolves along similar lines to that of another artist.
Also, Jordan is now showing at James Nicholson Gallery, just down the hall from Burtynsky's San Francisco gallery, the Robert Koch Gallery. Check out Burtynsky's page at this gallery. http://www.kochgallery.com/artists/contemporary/Burtynsky/index.html
Burtynsky's pictures were made so many years before- in the mid-nineties, etc- and they are so similar in their look and in their evolution, to Chris Jordan's recent stuff, that the whole situation begins to feel very problematic. It is very hard to resist the idea that Jordan is riding Burtynsky's coattails."
Maria,
I wouldn't want to burst your rose colored bubble, but look at Burtynsky's photographs of the Carerra marble quarry in Italy (where Michaelangelo used to get his marble) on his site. Stuck away in my basement I have a book by an Italian photographer (it may be Ghirri - I can't quite remember) who photographed the same quarry in a very very similar way in the late 70's and early 80's long before Burtynsky. In fact if you mixed their photographs up and laid them out in front of you, you would be very hard pressed to seperate out whose was whose.
At the time they were published widely - I remember seeing them in the London Independant and the NYTimes magazines.
I've also seen Burtynsky's ship breaking photographs done some time ago - but in B&W
There's nothing new under the sun - and very very few photographers doing completely original work as opposed to re-working previous themes
I don't really think Maria Monticello, or whatever her name is, has a very strong argument but Paddy's "Nothing new under the sun" is a phrase mostly used by hacks trying to conceal their paucity of imagination. Be careful, Paddy, you wouldn't want people to think that about you; i'm sure you are quite talented, in your way.
The main argument I have with Chris' work is the following:
CHRIS has seen Burtynsky's Urban mines series and produced a set of images that are nearly indistinguishable from Burtynsky's and are named similarly. He saw Burtynsky's Container Ports and shot something very similar.
Why rush to defend these facts? Why not ask WHY HE DID IT.
If Chris, who seems to have a good eye, was inspired by the likes of the Burtynsky and Misrach, why not go and find something else to shoot? Answer that, folks! If he likes that sort of thing, rust, debris, industry, etc. WELL there's lots of it! He could shoot it differently. He could make it his own in some way. But did he make it his own? no he didn't. For his first big bodies of work, he took photographs that look disturbingly like outright copies of an artists work he had seen and admired.
Brian
I would be interested in seeing your list of truly original, groundbreaking photographers. I believe it to be a fairly short list.
As for copying (are you suggesting plagiarism?, which doesn't really seem to apply in art), it is hard to find a well known photographer (or arist) who hasn't turned to the work of a forerunner rather closely at some stage - except for those few true originals.
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