Clifford Ross's New Pano Camera in the New Yorker [Archive]

Lee Hamiel

27-Aug-2006, 13:29

Frank:

Here's another link with some more ...

http://www.cliffordross.com/R1/gigapixel.html

My concern is that Littman will claim infringement - somehow - unless they share the same trustee:)

Seriously - It's probable that he has made his mark on his own & I admire the inventing aspect of anything photographic - even with kites

I do think he's way more legit as a photographer - see:

http://www.cliffordross.com/work/work_method_shoot_1.html

And:

http://www.cliffordross.com/index.html

More photo information to peruse

Regards

QT Luong

27-Aug-2006, 13:39

I think the reason why some folks (not everyone) here do not hold him in high esteem is that they don't have his record of accomplishment and/or self-promotion skills.

Jorge Gasteazoro

27-Aug-2006, 13:55

I think the reason why some folks (not everyone) here do not hold him in high esteem is that they don't have his record of accomplishment and/or self-promotion skills.
I would agree about the self promotion part but not the acomplishments part. What is he famous for? Making so called high resolution cameras which anybody with enough money can do, he is certainly not famous for his photography!

paulr

27-Aug-2006, 14:02

...his record of accomplishment and/or self-promotion skills.

self promotions skills are important, but there's something besides a well-phrased resume involved in getting your work into collections like the met, moma, the guggenheim, and the mfa houston.

QT Luong

27-Aug-2006, 14:09

Jorge, check the bio on his website.

Jorge Gasteazoro

27-Aug-2006, 14:17

Jorge, check the bio on his website.
I did, nobody had heard from the guy until he made his big camera.......hell, I lived in Houston, visited the museum every chance I got and never saw one of his prints.....

Kevin M Bourque

27-Aug-2006, 15:03

Can someone please explain, without sneering or sarcasm, why this fellow is worthy of our scorn? I really don't get it.

alec4444

27-Aug-2006, 15:51

This latest camera is a bit more original than the first one, I think. The R-1 (Ross-1, which is somewhat arrogant, but his choice) was really nothing more special than a needlessly-built-large-format-camera that takes another custom film size. Any ass realizes that if you were to shove the neg into a drum scanner you could make an obscenely large photograph. The common man just didn't have the money nor saw the value in doing so.

This latest thing does sound a bit more original, and kudos to him for getting it to work. What to use it for? Who cares, the fact that it works is great.

And I'm definitely jealous of his PR machine. There's some insanely amazing photographers out there. If you want to make money at it the name of the game is PR. Could be as sophisticated as an article in the New Yorker or as basic as having your parents tell their friends....

--A

Frank Petronio

27-Aug-2006, 17:04

I gather that he comes from money and spends it freely in the quest to find fame as a photographer, even though his work is at best... technically proficient.

But as artwork, it is at best derivative, or maybe the photo equivilant of those $10,000 seascape oils you see for sale in tourist town galleries.

It's "over the couch" art. Seriously, I could see Clifford Ross® prints mass-marketed by Pottery Barn™.

He is probably a great guy to have a drink with, and I am jealous. But what I find negative about the whole enterprise is that he is marketing his art based on resolution and size, not quality. And stealing sales, publicity, and attention from far better and more deserving artists than me.

If his line of BS keeps going, sooner or later gallery directors are going to sneer at the mere hobby togs using their puny 12x20 and 11x14 snapshot cameras.

Lee Hamiel

27-Aug-2006, 17:22

:) ...

Jorge Gasteazoro

27-Aug-2006, 17:26

If his line of BS keeps going, sooner or later gallery directors are going to sneer at the mere hobby togs using their puny 12x20 and 11x14 snapshot cameras.

Naaah..... wait a few years and you will have the 6000 MP sony camera the size of a pack of ciggarettes.... :)

william linne

27-Aug-2006, 19:39

[QUOTE=Frank Petronio]

But as artwork, it is at best derivative, or maybe the photo equivilant of those $10,000 seascape oils you see for sale in tourist town galleries.

It's "over the couch" art. Seriously, I could see Clifford Ross® prints mass-marketed by Pottery Barn™.

Shit, I could say the same of just about every single photo I've seen in the past 10 years(and every single photo I've ever made). When's the last time you saw a photo that changed your life? When's the last time you made a photo that changed someone's life?

Frank Petronio

27-Aug-2006, 19:45

Well I can think of at least a dozen photographers on this site whose work I rather have over my couch...

David A. Goldfarb

27-Aug-2006, 19:50

I think it's more impressive when you see patrons in a museum admiring the exquisite detail in a landscape made by Timothy O'Sullivan or Carleton Watkins, remarking on how photography really hasn't progressed that much in spite of technological change.

william linne

27-Aug-2006, 20:00

I love photography. I have a degree in it (that I still owe 60,000 on), I do it for a living and I do it for fun. But I've always realized that it's one of the lowest art forms. In a way, we're all recording birdsong and claiming it as our own. I don't understand these petty distinctions and jealousies. But then again, I've never understood anything.

WL.

JW Dewdney

27-Aug-2006, 20:07

Okay - I'm an iconoclast... but I have to disagree anyway - I think there are a few of his shots which I'd easily place right up there with the Kenna and Sugimoto. It's the B&W stuff I'm referring to here. As for the color stuff... well... what was he thinking??

Don't forget, this guy's been pushing relentlessly it seems since the mid-70s...! Look at his publication/exhibition record! Have any of US been so persistent and/or at it so long??

Though - who knows... they guy probably has money (!!). Jerk.

paul stimac

27-Aug-2006, 20:40

What bugs me is that several magazines, with him providing the information, I'm presuming, claim that he's made the highest resolution camera in the world. That seems to be the main topic the coverage he gets.

I see nothing wrong with self promotion. But missleading people about your accomplishments and getting lots of press for the specifics of those untruths is a little unsettling.

DrPablo

27-Aug-2006, 20:59

Who cares if he's self-promoted? Pablo Picasso and Richard Wagner did their fair share of self-promotion too.

Those shots of his from Morocco are very arresting. Part of it is his very unorthodox framing (circular and diamond shaped frames). They're so unorthodox they almost hurt the eyes, yet some are very effective. It takes a lot of skill to reject something as cardinal to photography as the concept of a rectangular frame and present it effectively.

JW Dewdney

27-Aug-2006, 21:09

Part of it is his very unorthodox framing (circular and diamond shaped frames). They're so unorthodox they almost hurt the eyes, yet some are very effective. It takes a lot of skill to reject something as cardinal to photography as the concept of a rectangular frame and present it effectively.

A LOT of people have done this... though not all, of course. But I'm just sayin'... it's not quite the maverick thing you'd think. I'm a big fan of Jan Dibbets - who's done crazier things with framing than that...!

http://images.google.com/images?hs=J2X&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=%22jan%20dibbets%22&btnG=Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

DrPablo

27-Aug-2006, 21:14

JW Dewdney

27-Aug-2006, 21:47

I never said it was maverick. I said it was unorthodox, effective, and arresting.

The skill is not in thinking up something like that. The skill is in making it work artistically.

Oh, and those Dibbets examples are great too!

Okay. Gotcha. It just seems to me there are people in the photo community who are unfamiliar with stuff in the artworld. I tend to inhabit both of these worlds, just absorbing the best I see coming from either.

Yeah, I really like Dibbets a LOT. His work somehow gets to be painterly - even without using it. It's just the way he constructs these montages. I find it pretty fascinating. I think the mind responds to it as painting - where the 'brain' keeps confirming it's photographs... that's what's neat about it. I think the bulk of his work is based on using a Rolleiflex TLR with a panoramic head.

alec4444

28-Aug-2006, 07:47

What bugs me is that several magazines, with him providing the information, I'm presuming, claim that he's made the highest resolution camera in the world. That seems to be the main topic the coverage he gets.

That would be pretty annoying to the people that shoot regularly with 12x20, 16x20, or 20x24. They should write into the magazines and state they have a bone to pick....

--A

Greg Miller

28-Aug-2006, 12:44

Well I can think of at least a dozen photographers on this site whose work I rather have over my couch...

Thanks for insulting the rest of us on this site ;)

Frank Petronio

28-Aug-2006, 12:57

ok, 13... lol

Terence McDonagh

28-Aug-2006, 15:14

I never really got why his "first" camera supposedly had "the most resolution, ever," etc. Using the same lenses and film as any of the ULF folks here, why would it be any different? So the standards are MAYBE a little more parallel, etc. Is he not limited by film, diffraction, etc like the rest of us mere mortals? "100 times as much data as the average professional digital camera." In 1994? I bet any 8x20 camera could do that even today.

As an artist, I'd say he's better than average, but then so are 50% of people. I like his night hurricane shots, personally.

Linhof

28-Aug-2006, 17:43

Why don't you like this camera? If you don't like the self-promotion skill, how about this guy at www.gigapxl.org?

Their problems are same.

Frank Petronio

28-Aug-2006, 18:13

Yeah, that guy is a putz too!

dh003i

18-Jan-2009, 20:48

Yeah, that guy is a putz too!

I don't get the dislike of him. I agree that a lot of the work isn't artistically inspiring, but it is technologically inspiring, at least to me. I.e., it should be admired as a technological accomplishment.

Although from what I can gather, his R1 is a 9x20 camera, so similar to 20x24, but smaller film actually. So how is it that he's getting gigapixel images and people shooting 20x24 aren't?

For example, this image here (http://http://www.cliffordross.com/zoomview/index.php?page=bw&bw=bw2&bwsub=bw1), zooming in, you can see details of the tree's leaves. It looks like he has things in sharp focus from near to far, and the image seems to have a clarity (even up close), that stitched images don't. Granted, just looking at the image as a whole, I find it to be just a "good" photo: not great. I think the 17-gigapixel Yosemite pictures are more impressive (http://www.yosemite-17-gigapixels.com/), but not because of having more gigapixels, just composition. (wake me up when someone reaches a terapixe).

As for all of the money one would need to spend to do this, I'm not sure I understand why it's so expensive. I mean, expensive for sure -- but I don't see like hundreds of thousands of dollars. It seems like it wouldn't be more expensive than the digital medium format backs to me. So the price of a car?

PS: Just a thought, but it seems to me that the best way to "own" a 20x24 camera is in time-shares with a group of other photographers locally. After all, how often are you going to actually use it?

cobalt

19-Jan-2009, 06:17

I think the reason why some folks (not everyone) here do not hold him in high esteem is that they don't have his record of accomplishment and/or self-promotion skills.

Ouch! That's gonna leave a mark...

cobalt

19-Jan-2009, 06:21

But as artwork, it is at best derivative, or maybe the photo equivilant of those $10,000 seascape oils you see for sale in tourist town galleries.

Hmmm... speaketh thou heresy 'gainst the Master of Light? :D

cobalt

19-Jan-2009, 06:37

Handeth me mine long-pen, lest I miss the fray!

O boy... here we go...

Let me preface this by saying that this is my OPINION, which many others have versions of, much like armpits and anuses... or is is ani...?

I have to agree with what I think to be the gist of Frank's position here. I've had this conver-argument many times before, and clearly, the war is not yet won. The fact of the matter is that, today (at least in the U. S., don't know about the rest of the world) gimmickry and techno-slickness have replaced mere talent as the proper credential for calling oneself and artist. That is why the Stylistics, Led Zeppelin, Hendricks and Miles Davis were popular in the past; it is why Beyonce, Brittney Spears are popular today, and also explains why some asshole keeps putting Kenny (oop... just threw up in my mouth a little) G. albums in the jazz section.

I love looking at Beyonce's ass, used to like looking at Brittney's abs, and always questioned why that seemingly omnipresent music store employee kept following me around, putting Kenny G. albums in the jazz section, apparently just prior to my arrival at the store. But I got high and had fun listening to Zeppelin, made love to the Stylistics, and learned, to my dismay, that I was not the greatest artist in the world after listening to "Kind of Blue" for the first time. See the difference? It's why my art teacher, eons ago, told me to study the works of Norman Rockwell and Frederick Remington, and then tell him which was the artist and which was the illustrator...

It is a crime, in my view, that I live with everyday. It is particularly glaringly apparent in my home town. But then again, take what I say with a grain of salt; I'm the guy who suggested a certain local "installation" was the result of guys who like to play in the trash. I've apparently been persona not gratis at a few select galleries ever since...

Yet, from hell's heart I stab at thee, with Rapidograph in one hand, Planar in the other! Gimmickry: crush the infamous thing!

OK... I'll go back to my cell now...

David A. Goldfarb

19-Jan-2009, 06:39

Mark Sampson

19-Jan-2009, 07:47

It was my thought from the beginning that the point of these various exercises was to make the highest-resolution camera, and that the pictures made were only to prove the concept. Not unlike wild, big-dollar custom motorcycles that are practically unrideable, and 1000hp, 200mph supercars. Perhaps the desire, knowledge, and drive to produce these ultimate cameras is a different thing than the desire, knowledge and drive needed to produce art with them. Both are admirable in their own way, but they aren't the same thing at all.

dh003i

19-Jan-2009, 07:48

Most of this just seems like ordinary technology like putting a vacuum back from an aerial camera on a Sinar P2 and being a bit more careful about alignment, but at least the Gigapxl guy designed a new lens that covers 9x18". One wonders if there are any plans for going commercial with the Asymmagon--

http://www.gigapxl.org/technology-lens.htm

So in the two years plus since this thread was posted, has anything interesting come of these gigapixel projects?

I'm curious why alignment of the standards matters so much for sharpness...isn't tilt a benefit of LF to get things at varying distances in sharp focus? And if the standards aren't perfectly parallel, doesn't that just mean that the plane of optimum focus will be slightly tilted?

c.d.ewen

19-Jan-2009, 09:20

Back when this thread started, I understood the negative reaction Ross generated. At the time, I still owned a microbrewery, and had seen the same reaction by brewers to Jim Koch of Boston Beer fame.

Many here regret that the general public (and reporters) are ignorant of a lot of photographic knowledge. Here is some brewery knowledge that you may have missed, and will help explain why I feel there's a tenuous analogy between Ross and Koch:

Brewers were hesitant to accept Koch because he didn't make it known to the public that he didn't own a brewery - his beer was contract brewed (https://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/8889924.html)by larger breweries - and besides, he wanted his name pronounced "cook". Alone, this isn't terribly deceptive, but the neck labels on his bottles said the the beer was hand-made in small batches in their Boston brewery....and other places. I would tell people that unless they drank it at Doyle's in Jamaica Plain (recommended), they had never had beer made in Boston. I knew the brewer who later bought the bottling equipment from the Boston plant. He said it had never been used - the place was just for show.

Koch's advertisements also contained less-than-accurate statements: he claimed he used an old family recipe for his beer, when insiders knew the recipe owed more to Joe Owades (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Owades) than his grandfather. He boasted that his beer had been voted the favorite at beer festivals, when insiders knew these popularity contests were influenced by Koch's hiring of attractive young women to solicit votes from beer-sodden attendees.

Perhaps the worst offence, in the eyes of other brewers, was for Koch, a lawyer, to sue another small brewer, claiming only he had the right to use "Boston" in his brand names. Brewers at the time joked that his next beer would be called, "Litigator". (German doppelbock names often use the -ator ending).

Well, there's my rant for the day. I told you the analogy was tenuous; it's just an example of individual self-promotion going beyond what many of us consider a proper boundary.

'Cuse me, while I go off and do something photographic....

Charley

Frank Petronio

19-Jan-2009, 09:41

Well if you really want to make the big bucks in the art market, the ideal is disassociate your photographs from photography... Whether you Scotch tape together rough collages like the 80s Starn Twins or print giant, technically-perfect murals like Gursky, once you call it "Art" instead of photography the price goes up exponentially. So long as Ross markets his work as being the "highest-resolution" photographs, he'll be confined to the novelty market, still selling prints at a paltry $20-30,000 instead of the six and seven figures of the real artists.

(Dave -- it shouldn't matter if the standards are slightly out of wack but the whole act is more about the performance than the results. It's all moot, all anyone has to do is stitch together more shots than the next guy to claim the title of "highest res". In theory you could do it with a point and shoot camera.)

Paul Kierstead

19-Jan-2009, 10:00

And stealing sales, publicity, and attention from far better and more deserving artists than me.

Oh, c'mon, that is BS. That is like saying Britney Spears is stealing sales from Miles Davis. If it is as derivative and pedestrian as you say, they the market demographic is completely different from the "more deserving" artists. There is not only room for a variety of styles in this game, there is a variety of styles by necessity because the market is varied.

Bruce Watson

19-Jan-2009, 10:07

This horse died over two years ago. Why are we beating it again?

Paul Kierstead

19-Jan-2009, 10:12

I think I saw it twitch.

dh003i

19-Jan-2009, 10:49

This horse died over two years ago. Why are we beating it again?

My bad, I didn't pay attention to the date of the last post. I just saw this guy's website a few days ago.

colker

27-Jan-2009, 09:34

Here I am providing a link to an 'artist" and "photographer" in yet another fawning and pretentious article. I guess he has quite a large trust fund... he built an even fancier camera.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060821ta_talk_paumgarten

Puke...

Enjoy ;)

Problem is not the guy but the press which promotes ignorance all the time. Instead of ideas, they promote personalities.

Gordon Flodders

30-Jan-2009, 01:21

This explains it: http://www.cliffordross.com/video/CR_CBS_broadcast.html

evan clarke

30-Jan-2009, 05:57

I think the reason why some folks (not everyone) here do not hold him in high esteem is that they don't have his record of accomplishment and/or self-promotion skills.

Mediocrity often ridicules the extraordinary...EC

Lachlan 717

30-Jan-2009, 14:45

For all of his [alleged] money, you'd think that he could spend a couple of dollars on a level for these cameras.

Take a look at his "Hurricane" series. I wouldn't want to have to row a boat up some of the horizons he's captured in these...

timparkin

30-Jan-2009, 15:47

Personally I found 'Wave' and 'Hurricane Scroll' pretty damed fine photos..

The marketing b/s is just that but we need to realise that the press doesn't comment on art, individual journalists comment on the social worlds that they inhabit and the occasional press release that catches their attention. Art journalists are the arbiters of art and are more likeley to attend trendy art parties where your typical 'great photographer' wouldn't be seen dead as to actually working out what art is (after all, art is what your trendy artist mates like isn't it?).

The gigapixl project is pretty amazing too, not necessarily artistic from our point of view but if we're happy to applaud Linhof or Ebony we should also applaud the this.

It's difficult to ignore someone becoming more successful at ones chosen artistic medium just because they have 'the right friends' or 'unlimited money' but once one redefines 'success' to mean something useful (rather than just more money, more followers or more press coverage) then one realises that success is just relative - he might think he's a complete failure because 'real photographers' take the piss out of him whereas I think I'm quite successful because I have the freedom to enjoy what I'm doing and I think I'm getting better at it - the absolute level of how good I feel I am seems to matter but I try to ignore that side of my personality; getting better is enough.

Anyway - why don't we discuss why ultra large format doesn't necessarily get the sharpest pictures ;-)

Tim

Gordon Flodders

31-Jan-2009, 02:13

It seems perfectly obvious to me that with such a huge and robust camera/lens assembly, attached to a tripod that could probably launch the space shuttle, the neg produced from such an apparatus should be nothing short of razor sharp, so where's the mystery?

Imagine, he could capture the entire population of Australia in one click :p

mandoman7

31-Jan-2009, 07:21

In the art world (and this guy is not in the art world, really), schpiel dominates. You can say its good or bad, but its the reality of what it takes to separate moneyed art buyers from their cash. Its important to remember that a significant art purchase is made to impress one's peers, among other things, and to have an easily told story is a vital component. Shrewd marketers figure this out.

Its frustrating to be someone who works on their craft and puts care and thought into their creations, and then to see someone succeeding with what boils down to a gimmick. But that will always be happening, its some kind of test for the dedicated, I think.

My crisis came many yrs ago was when I had a big show at a fancy winery of work mostly shot in 8x10, nicely framed etc., with a catered reception (ugh!), and sold nothing. A couple of months later an acquaintance had a show there using 35mm shot with a zoom through some 100 yr old window glass that gave it kind of an impressionistic look, of local scenes, and sold everything. It was garbage but people could recognize the locations and it looked arty, and they were cheap.

I haven't lost all of my idealism but you've gotta fortify yourself against certain realities.

JY