New Topographics 30 years later...

[Bill_1856]

"The world is coming apart, while Adams and Weston are making pictures of rocks." (Inexact quotation by HCB sometime before WW2.)

[Mark Sampson]

Well said Mr. Gittings. Too bad there aren't any forum members trained in rhetoric to decode Frank's original argument. Frank, if you want the art world to embrace your work, you'd better be able to present yourself as a fashion photographer first... that way you'll get respect for being from NYC and rich. Then the pictures will be seen as 'transgressive' (very important in the art world these days) and be worth big bucks.

[Frank Petronio]

While my subconscious and ego are undoubtedly twisted and mangled spiderwebs that just make me a nihilistic depressive... I wasn't trying to interject anything about me or my work into the discussion!

I was just ranking on New Topographics-Belchers-Gursky and their imitators in broad, general terms. With 20-20 hindsight, I'm saying that their criticism and ironic photos of how our culture treats our landscape hasn't panned out to be as bad as what they tried to show us it would be. A nice house in the burbs looks a lot better to many of us nowadays.

[Daniel_Buck]

I shoot what I like, and don't care if it's been shot before or not :-)

[Lenny Eiger]

I think the current movement(s) in photography are being driven by the creeds of "relevance" and "social criticism." But to me relevance is very personal.

Actually, I think its driven mostly by sheer ignorance. Consider a dancer in the Hollywood style who never saw Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelley. What would they do? Probably reinvent a bunch of it. Poorly. Even Michael Jackson, while he was doing Thriller, remarked that he studied those guys. Eric Clapton will reference BB King and a host of others. Why is it that so many photographers think they ought to go out and just take photos - without looking at a book or two.

I remember a photo by Walker Evans, of a woman crying. Maybe he made her cry, maybe something else happened. I imagine Evans sticking this 8x10 in her face and getting under the dark cloth... and I figure any woman today would throw him and the camera out the window... Instead, she turns and reveals all of herself, with all of her emotion she is enveloped with, and gives it up, like a gift. It's real, you can't fake that. To me, that embodies the power of a great photograph.

I am a big fan of Lewis Hine. His work was also documentary, but in every case, he made sure to include the humanity. A while back I saw a documentary film about Julliard. A dance teacher with a heavy Russian accent, full caricature, asks this young fellow to show her what a pushup looks like. He does - and then she slaps him. She says, "Don't ever make a movement with no emotion in my presence again." It's funny, especially in the deep Russian-English, but it's kinda of great at the same time.

It's the same way I feel about photographs. I am not interested in anything without content, and even some emotional content. I am not interested in sappy. I don't like the national Geo photo that Terence referenced, I think it's too commercial. In some of Evan's other portraits, you can look into them and see everything about the person's life (and learn something about your own). There are a lot of other great examples from Sander to Lange. Why bother with anything else. When one can eat real food, why bother with McDonald's?

Lenny

[QT Luong]

Actually, I think its driven mostly by sheer ignorance. Consider a dancer in the Hollywood style who never saw Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelley. What would they do? Probably reinvent a bunch of it.

I doubt it. At no other time in history has the critical discourse be so pervasive, and the preoccupation to engage with the medium's history so frequent. Many contemporary art photographers are schooled with MFAs. One might not like his work, but the scholarship of someone like Jeff Wall goes deep.

[Lenny Eiger]

I doubt it. At no other time in history has the critical discourse be so pervasive, and the preoccupation to engage with the medium's history so frequent. Many contemporary art photographers are schooled with MFAs. One might not like his work, but the scholarship of someone like Jeff Wall goes deep.

I see two groups. I will agree with you that there are contemporaries, I have met a few myself, that are interested in the conceptual. One has to respect their commitment. Personally, I find their work uninteresting. I don't care much for the purely cerebral when it comes to art. (And yes this is my problem rather than anyone else's.) I am upset, however, that the cerebral focus has spread to the museums, to many galleries and educational institutions, and virtually taken over, to the exclusion of all else. When I got my Masters, this work was being done. I have no problem with some good experimentation. However, I have a problem when that's all there is - or all that is recognized.

At the far, perhaps unfair, reaches of the argument is this: When I saw Bunuel's film, Un Chien Andalou, where he cuts open a pigs eye (it looks like he's doing it to a person), it was one of the most shocking things I had ever seen. You had to give him credit for going all the way. But even without being naive, or polyanna-ish, it isn't something I would want to see every day. I'd like to see things that move me, not necessarily make my skin crawl.

On a less intense note, Mark Klett's geological comparisons are interesting, but they don't move me. The amount of interest on the part of the Museums, the Guggenheim, seems a bit much. I'm sure he's a nice fellow, but I don't think he's the next Walker Evans. At least I hope not.

There is a second group, not particularly avant gaarde, that are out there shooting landscapes. Some of them are even on tv, sponsored by some camera company or another. It's clear they have never read a book. I live in CA, I have met a lot of photographers out there shooting, in galleries, etc. 85% of them have seen an Ansel Adams book, and none other. I have nothing against Ansel at all - he did a lot of good things. But I'm sure he didn't want a lot of clones running around all taking the same shots over and over. There are a lot of other good landscape photographers to look at (in addition, not instead).

My point is only this. There is a rich History of Photography and I think every photographer who hasn't looked ought to, and if someone is learning photography they ought to make it a special point to do so.

Lenny

[Bruce Watson]

At no other time in history has the critical discourse be so pervasive...

I don't know about that. Before photography existed there was a truly great period of critical discourse called the Enlightenment. Now those guys, from Kant, Diderot, Hume, Lessing, Voltaire (to name but a few) to Franklin and Jefferson (again to name but a few) across the pond, those guys *knew* how to be Critics! They questioned *everything* and proposed new solutions to everything. Even founded whole new countries to prove their points.

And even these guys (and it was almost exclusively guys for better or worse) stood on the shoulders of giants like Horace, Thales (some credit him with the Scientific Method, or at least including it in philosophy for the first time), Xenophon, Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plato (yet again to name but a few) from many centuries before.

But now I really am getting pretty far afield for a photography discussion, as most of this predates photography by centuries to millenia. And while the great philosophers of the Enlightenment could, and did, turn whole societies inside out, I think turning the admittedly much smaller sphere of photography inside out is more problematic in that the end result still has to be photography, or it becomes something completely different.

But within photography's narrow bounds, I still think it can be, it must be, more than just documentation of "man's inhumanity" which seems to be what's on every curator's mind these last few decades.

It occurs to me that the new topographics movement has lasted longer than the impressionist movement in painting. It might have lasted longer, but somehow I doubt it will be as well loved by posterity -- or is that just me?

[QT Luong]

What I meant was "critical discourse about the arts".

There are so many different practices covered under the term "photography", but I don't think that many of those who call themselves "artists" are unaware of the history of the medium.

[Sevo]

I see two groups. I will agree with you that there are contemporaries, I have met a few myself, that are interested in the conceptual. One has to respect their commitment. Personally, I find their work uninteresting. I don't care much for the purely cerebral when it comes to art. (And yes this is my problem rather than anyone else's.) I am upset, however, that the cerebral focus has spread to the museums, to many galleries and educational institutions, and virtually taken over, to the exclusion of all else.

Just got out of the time capsule? That eightieish feeling will settle once you have lived in 2009 for a few days...

Honestly, conceptual art has had rather a hard standing in the past twenty years - these days, you should be happy to find any exhibition where it is represented, the vast majority of currently fashionable artists being from the Barnum&Bailey school of unabashed showmanship.

Sevo