Aperture Magazine just set me an e-mail

[rdenney]

I'm curious: Is a concept like this so valuable that it transcends the limitations of our technique-addled brains?

When I see the series, it just does not speak to me at all. Nothing about it challenges me think about anything more than who would spend ten grand for the complete series.

I'd really like to hear from someone (calling Paul Raphaelson! Struan Gray!) who is in touch with these art communities and has the ability to express what they might really be trying to achieve. Clearly, the artists themselves have difficulty expressing their ideas, either in words or pictures, such that I can grasp their intent.

Rick "a Philistine" Denney

[Brian Ellis]

I subscribed for many years just to support a photography publication, stopped about six years ago, and then just this year decided to subscribe again. I kind of like seeing and reading something different than the more standard photography fare but I suspect Ansel, Minor, et al would disown it if they were around today.

[W K Longcor]

Someone much wiser that I once told me -- "If you have to go to great lengths to explain your photographic work -- you've done a lousy job photographically."

[John Jarosz]

Apeture is very difficult for me. I could never pick up an issue up and think "Boy, this is cool." And I can't figure out who does. But someone must, it's been around for a zillion years.

[John Kasaian]

Huh? I don't get it.

[Michael Gordon]

If you want to be really challenged, spend some time reading her artist statements on her website.

I was following the video reasonably well until their heads started bobbing and their hands started waving (3:08).

I need to start using bigger words in my artspeak. "Multiplicitous" is a good one (3:26).

Oh, the crisis of post-modernity...

[Mark Sawyer]

Aperture and its ilk are the products of a self-delegated elite of the foine art world. The language comes from decades of that old cliche, "poets talking to each other", and the results are filled with colloquiallisms heard nowhere else. (Do you ever hear the terms "de-constructing" or "untrue narrative" used anywhere else? You can hardly turn a page of Aperture without bumping into them...) And is it a surprise that the images are as out-of-synch to our world as the language that describes them?

Aperture is meant for a small audience, and we're outside it. Those who publish there would look down on our discussions not unlike we look down on theirs...

[Richard M. Coda]

It looks almost like a full sheet series of test prints. I think I'll start marketing my work that way... for those of you who have very dark homes, try the lighter versions... for those of you with lots of light, try the darker versions. Most respectable photographers throw their test prints in the bin, especially the really under/over exposed/developed ones.

[Nicholas Whitman]

I don't get what they're doing and haven't for a long time. When I was beginning I cherished Aperture. I still refer to the early issues and consider them some of the most meaningful books in my library. For example Light 7. I spent years getting a handle on the idea of light as a subject and a symbol of spirituality. It is now integrated into my photo dna. And the importance of lay out and series as Minor demonstrated in each issue remains a bench mark. How could Aperture gone so completely off the rails? What a loss.

[Richard Mahoney]

I'm curious: Is a concept like this so valuable that it transcends the limitations of our technique-addled brains?

When I see the series, it just does not speak to me at all. Nothing about it challenges me think about anything more than who would spend ten grand for the complete series.

I'd really like to hear from someone (calling Paul Raphaelson! Struan Gray!) who is in touch with these art communities and has the ability to express what they might really be trying to achieve. Clearly, the artists themselves have difficulty expressing their ideas, either in words or pictures, such that I can grasp their intent.

Rick "a Philistine" Denney

Well Philistine as you may be Rick, I'm sure you wouldn't have any difficulty in understanding one of New Zealands most respected (large format) `artists'. A well known -- if not longish -- quote from an interview with Mark Adams:

``I attended the School of Fine Arts from 1967 to 1970. I Majored in graphic design so I could do photography. There was no separate photography major in those days. ... I was looking at English and American fashion and art photographers like Bill Brandt, Man Ray and Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, the London scene. I wasn't really interested in developments in any international art and didn't feel in touch with much of it except the international pop and rock and blues music scene ... I learned bugger all at art school. Tom Palaskas, a fellow student, taught me how to develop film and print. I taught myself how to use cameras. Then I discovered the art schools 4 x 5-inch Linhof plate camera and taught myself how to use that. That changed everything. That was the future. Large-format photography. Analogue.

I imagined I would be a photographer after I left art school. I am a photographer.

If I hadn't attended art school I would have missed out on my peer group and the opening out of the sixties cultures and their political ferment. The art school was no use in teaching me art but good at teaching me a world beyond the shut-down world of 1950s 1960s Christchurch.'' (http://www.artschool125.co.nz/Interviews/M_Adams/)


Not surprisingly, as a New Zealander, I find that Adams' work rings true. To me at least it is authentic -- not pretentious or contrived -- though I'm unsure how it would be seen by many of you in the States:

Adams @ Te Papa (Museum of NZ)
http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Party.aspx?irn=33

Adams @ McNamara Gallery
http://www.mcnamara.co.nz/adams.htm

Adams @ Two Rooms Gallery
http://tworooms.co.nz/artists/mark-adams/


Kind regards,

Richard