Lee Friedlander, et al.

[Merg Ross]

Elsewhere on this forum is a discussion of the work of Lee Friedlander.

This caught my attention, as we exhibited together in an international exhibition of photography in 1963 sponsored by Eastman House. It was an invitational exhibition, with familiar names on the nominating committee including, Adams, Callahan, Siskind, Newhall, Szarkowski and White. The international participants were well represented with works from Italy, Brazil, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Canada, Japan and the United States.

The purpose of the exhibition was to "acknowledge and encourage" the wok being done by a younger generation of photographers. Nathan Lyons, Assistant Director of George Eastman House, directed the exhibition. Of the 148 participating photographers, I was the youngest at twenty-one years of age. Among the photographers from the United States were Meatyard, Uelsmann, Caponigro, Friedlander and Winogrand.

I believe that the comments by Nathan Lyons in his foreword to this 1963 exhibition are relevant to the current discussion of Lee Friedlander's work. They address the concept at the heart of the discussion.

The following excerpt is from the foreword to "Photography 63/An International Exhibition" by Nathan Lyons:

"To truly understand the abilities of the photographer his work must be experienced as an individual synthesis, each photograph seen in the context of other photographs he has taken. The exhibition is designed as a graphic index of photography as practiced by a younger generation of photographers.

On what basis, therefore, might we begin to assess the work in this exhibition beyond obvious technical or stylistic considerations? When we look at the work of a photographer can we sense the unity within his own work? It may be well to say that man seeks to find form for the expression of his ideas and feelings, but to what degree are we willing to share or understand what it is he is attempting to say? The extension of expression, to challenge our feelings rather than satiate them, demands an understanding of the significance of vision and the value of personal expression."

Nathan Lyons, 1963

[mdm]

Beautifully put. Thank you for quoting that. If there is anything I learnt from that thread it is that there are many reasons and ways to make photographs. Aesthetic, intellectual, exploratory, psycoanalytic, commercial, etc. They are all photography.

[paulr]

To truly understand the abilities of the photographer his work must be experienced as an individual synthesis, each photograph seen in the context of other photographs he has taken.

I'd love to see more people adopt this as a mantra. So often people offer individual images for critique, and I don't see the point. Without the context of at least a few more images, I can't even know how to look at the one. The only criticism that's possible in most such cases is of the most superficial, conventional kinds ... Like, is it pretty? Does it conform to certain conventions of composition or craft? Often in these cases good = boring!

[kev curry]

I don't have very sharp tools for these kinds of discussions and my understanding of art history and the history of photography in particular is probably at best nothing more that superficial.

Still, and maybe as a result... I fail to see why a single particular piece cant stand alone in its own right?

Of course I can think of the exception of the artist himself that produces pieces to be seen in the context of a series rather than in individual isolation. That's different.

I'm sure most of us could easily cite examples of prints or other forms of art that have great appeal or power or beauty or message without the viewer having any or little understanding of the art or the artist or any reference to any context other than itself.

Deepening an understanding of the artist and his/her art within the historical, artistic, political, social and intellectual context of the times in which they work/ed could only serve to give the viewer a far deeper and penetrating understanding of the artist and the art, but I guess that's a different discussion.

[Jim Jones]

At last! a discussion on this topic with wisdom and without rancor. Thank you, Merg, David, Paul, and Kev.

[Richard Mahoney]

Deepening an understanding of the artist and his/her art within the historical, artistic, political, social and intellectual context of the times in which they work/ed could only serve to give the viewer a far deeper and penetrating understanding of the artist and the art, but I guess that's a different discussion.

Kev. Years ago now I read Greek and Roman Art and Architecture. One of my papers was on Greek statues of Aphrodite, actually -- if my memory isn't failing me -- mostly Roman copies of Greek originals, most once or twice removed. Initially I had thought that this would be quite a simple and rather amusing subject. After a good while looking at various works and trying to describe and date them on stylistic grounds I realised that I was mistaken on both counts, it was neither simple or amusing. What I did learn though is that `little' things like the arrangement of the pose, the relative proportion of the body, the arrangement of the hair, the depth of the eye sockets, the texture of the marble, the attitude of the subject, all these little things are important, and that their importance only becomes apparent after one has spent a long time looking and comparing. It strikes me that it is no different with photographs and photographers.


Kind regards,

Richard

[Mark Sawyer]

Among the photographers from the United States were Meatyard, Uelsmann, Caponigro, Friedlander and Winogrand.


One thing that strikes me is that these young photographers were all selected while their best work was still ahead of them. I wonder whether the nominating committee was that accurate in recognizing their importance early, or if the show began a self-fulfilling prophecy, giving them recognition and momentum they built on very well. Either way, I would never argue that they didn't deserve it, and the show should probably be as well recognized as the "New Topographics" for its influence. I would have loved to have seen that show, and met those young photographers at the opening reception!


I'd love to see more people adopt this as a mantra. So often people offer individual images for critique, and I don't see the point. Without the context of at least a few more images, I can't even know how to look at the one. The only criticism that's possible in most such cases is of the most superficial, conventional kinds ... Like, is it pretty? Does it conform to certain conventions of composition or craft? Often in these cases good = boring!

Agreed; and what meaning is in a critique if it has no bearing on the photographs to follow? For this reason, books are one of my favorite ways to see photographs. A body of work, carefully chosen.

But I'll take minor exception to your last sentence, Paul. In all types of photography, (but especially in portraiture), I think the best choose their conventions and style of craft (from a long menu of conventions and styles), and work within it. It's mastery becomes part of the consistent context, and a qualifier that this is indeed what is intended. It's the work's own deliberate, self-contained environment, and a statement in itself. Good use of convention can still be boring, but generally, one hasn't much to do with the other.

[paulr]

... I fail to see why a single particular piece cant stand alone in its own right?

It depends on what you're looking for from the piece.

A suite of pictures or a series is capable of articulating a vision in a manner that is both broader and deeper than what a single picture can do. When you create context through additional images, you not only add more information, but you subtract possibilities for interpretation ... you focus attention on a particular line of exploration rather than a near-infinite number.

For example, someone shows you a close-up photograph of a bell pepper. You might find it esthetically pleasing; a nice piece of design. It might conjure whatever associations you have with the vegetable, good or bad. It might even have formal qualities that you find moving in some way. But as far as what it's about or what it's exploring ... the possibilities are so unlimited that none is given any kind of room for articulation.

If you had to imagine another nine images to complete the series, you might imagine:

-other pictures documenting all kinds of vegetables, from many angles and in many settings.
-other close formal studies or mundane objects.
-other close-ups, portraits, and landscapes, that are obvious Weston rip-offs.
-other pictures of this particular pepper; a monet-like study of form and changing light
-other pictures of this particular pepper, in various stages of being grown, picked, cut, cooked.
-a documentary series on some aspect of small farm agriculture

I made up that list off the top of my head. You could go on forever. The point is, each of these imagined series focusses our attention on a particular line of exloration. The other images tell you more in addition to what the pepper picture tells you; they also frame the pepper picture in a way that urges a particular kind of looking and questioning.

With the context, you are able to engage that individual pepper picture on a much deeper level than you are when you see it out of context.



I'm sure most of us could easily cite examples of prints or other forms of art that have great appeal or power or beauty or message without the viewer having any or little understanding of the art or the artist or any reference to any context other than itself.

I assume when you say "without any reference to any context other than itself" you mean other pieces of art in a series, and that you're not dismissing the broader cultural context that makes appreciating art possible at all.

I can think of a few examples. But not many that wouldn't be enriched by by additional context from a body of work.

Scale makes a difference. The "bigger" something is, the better able it is to provide its own context. I don't just mean square inches, but the amount of stuff that is put into those square inches. A painting like "Guenica" can provide more of its own context than one of Stieglize's Equivalents.

Works as large scale as a feature film, a 3-act play, a novel, an opera ... these can typically stand alone. They also have the oportunity of working over time, which pure visual arts typically don't.

Short stories, non book-length poems, one-act plays, paintings, photographs ... these smaller scale works are rarely able to satisfactorily articulate a vision on their own.

Any statement this simplistic is bound to have exceptions ... I'd be curious to hear any examples people think up. I'm not 100% convinced by my own example (Guernica ...)

[ic-racer]

Elsewhere on this forum is a discussion of the work of Lee Friedlander.


Where?

[Eric Biggerstaff]

Hell, I just think it is cool that you were the youngest member to exhibit in such an outstanding show and that is one heck of a panel to be judged by! I see your print every morning when I come own my stairs, it will always be a favorite.

[Mark Sawyer]

Where?

Check the last few pages of the Cindy Sherman thread in the Business forum.

[paulr]

Check the last few pages of the Cindy Sherman thread in the Business forum.

I think it starts on page 974.

[kev curry]

I can think of a few examples. But not many that wouldn't be enriched by by additional context from a body of work.

I'm not 100% convinced by my own example (Guernica ...)



Put like that Paul I couldn't agree more. Your points well made.

I personally would find it impossible to ''...dismissing the broader cultural context... '' that surrounds and gives birth to art or for that matter any other area of human development and endeavor.

Like I said above... Deepening an understanding of the artist and his/her art within a historical, political, social and intellectual context of the times in which he/she works/ed could only serve to give the viewer a far deeper and penetrating understanding of the artist and the art.

On the question of 'Guernica' I would personally insist that prior knowledge of its broader political and indeed historical context was a absolute prerequisite for understanding that particular work.

[Drew Wiley]

Placing things within a particular historical or emotional context might help us understand and appreciate a particular work and justify the role of a critic or art
historian, but they should not be essential as a missing ingredient, for a work which
otherwise fails visually. Guernica is pretty much self-contained as a composition,
whether you understand it or not. Like it or hate it, it still works visually and elicits
a strong reaction, plus has a great deal of internal sophistication. It's not just an
illustration of a story one need to know in advance. It hits the eye first, and keeps
satisfying the eye in many particulars.

[Darin Boville]

For example, someone shows you a close-up photograph of a bell pepper. .......
If you had to imagine another nine images to complete the series, you might imagine:

-other pictures documenting all kinds of vegetables, from many angles and in many settings.
-other close formal studies or mundane objects.
-other close-ups, portraits, and landscapes, that are obvious Weston rip-offs.
-other pictures of this particular pepper; a monet-like study of form and changing light
-other pictures of this particular pepper, in various stages of being grown, picked, cut, cooked.
-a documentary series on some aspect of small farm agriculture

..........

With the context, you are able to engage that individual pepper picture on a much deeper level than you are when you see it out of context.


Maybe you can engage the pepper more deeply but how much of that engagement is just a more sophisticated version of your multiple choice game? For example, let's say we played your game with the same context that most photographers on this board have--they know Weston's work in a general way, maybe have a book or two. They have seen Pepper 30, of course and maybe one more from the peppers. They've not seen the toys and all that stuff. Would they be able to pick out other Weston peppers from a pepper line-up?

Now say you have a guy who has studied Weston's peppers, studied all his veggies, the toys, all the studio still life work. That's his context. Would he have ever imagined Weston's nudes?

Now for a third, arbitrary example. Take someone who has seen all of these images. But they haven't really got it ordered in their head chronologically. Can't really say for sure if the cabbage leaf was made near the pepper, whether the pepper was made in Mexico or California.

Lots of different contexts in which to view that pepper, it seems. Some seem more sophisticated than others and some offer much more opportunity in the way of party talk. But is that really deeper? Or is "deeper" to refer only to an intellectual activity rather than an emotional response?

--Darin

[paulr]

Lots of different contexts in which to view that pepper, it seems. Some seem more sophisticated than others and some offer much more opportunity in the way of party talk.

I'm interested in the context created by the artist. How did Weson group and seqence the work in an exhibit, a portfolio, a book?. That's an editing process which is as intrinsic to articulating a vision as is pointing the camera.

There are some photographers who opted out of the editing process, and left it to others. Most commonly journalists, but also eccentric characters like Gary Winogrand later in his career. When Szarkowski put together the big Winogrand retrospective, he culled a couple of hundred images from over a half million undeveloped frames. The version of Winogrand presented was necessarily one of an almost unlimited number. Critics were correct to see the show as more of a posthumous collaboration than a single-artist effort.

You see more extreme versions of this when remarkable shows are assembled from photographs taken automatically by satelites, or by cameras hung around the neck of a house cat. Editing is a generative part of the photographic process ... as much as any other part.


But is that really deeper? Or is "deeper" to refer only to an intellectual activity rather than an emotional response?

I don't see the two being mutually exclusive. One reinforces the other. Give me work that engages on more than one level any day ...

[Drew Wiley]

I don't get it, Paul ... my cat does not have an opposable thumb. How will it pull the
darkslide in the first place? The last time a cat tried to help me in the studio it got
ahold of the end of big expensive roll of studio backdrop paper, started climbing it
like a hamster on a treadmill, so it could wind the whole thing around himself on the
floor and then wildly shred it to bits from the inside. Now all that confetti would have made an interesting shot in its own right, but I had a portrait client on the way and had to start cleaning things up fast. The cat went outside, of course, to practice his plein air painting; but again, the lack of a thumb was a bit of a problem...

[Merg Ross]

Hell, I just think it is cool that you were the youngest member to exhibit in such an outstanding show and that is one heck of a panel to be judged by! I see your print every morning when I come own my stairs, it will always be a favorite.

Hey Eric, good to hear from you! I have spent all day in the darkroom printing; Brett called it "pure drudgery". However, it is all worthwhile with comments like yours. Glad you are still enjoying the print. That is from 1979 and I visited the same spot in Scotland last year; not a chance to duplicate the photograph, a large tree looms in the background. However, the stone itself looks about the same.

Yes, that was indeed a distinguished panel, international in make-up. The predominant age of the participants was around 30; Meatyard was 38, Friedlander and Uelsmann were 29, Caponigro 31 and Winogrand 35.

Hope you are busy making new images!

Best,
Merg

[paulr]

... my cat does not have an opposable thumb. How will it pull the darkslide in the first place?

This complex question should be directed to Mr. Lee (http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_catcam1.htm) ...

edited to add: no relation to Lee Friedlander.

[tgtaylor]

"To truly understand the abilities of the photographer his work must be experienced as an individual synthesis, each photograph seen in the context of other photographs he has taken. The exhibition is designed as a graphic index of photography as practiced by a younger generation of photographers."

Clearly marketing hype and certainly biased.

Thomas

[D. Bryant]

Clearly marketing hype and certainly biased.

Thomas

Clearly not.

Photographers from Steiglitz to Adams and beyond have exhibited groups of photographs to broaden the viewers experience and understanding of their work.

As Paul said, some photographers know how to edit and some not leaving that to others postumanously or allowing a tallented and experienced curator to organize their presentation of the group, either through selection or sequencing or both and often it's a colaborative effort between curator and photographer.

[tgtaylor]

Clearly not.

Photographers from Steiglitz to Adams and beyond have exhibited groups of photographs to broaden the viewers experience and understanding of their work.

As Paul said, some photographers know how to edit and some not leaving that to others postumanously or allowing a tallented and experienced curator to organize their presentation of the group, either through selection or sequencing or both and often it's a colaborative effort between curator and photographer.

Like I said, marketing hype and purely biased. Meatyard, Uelsmann, Caponigro, Friedlander and Winogrand - although all were historically significant photographers- are not in the same league as Adams and Steiglitz. In fact those birds are not a patch on either Adams's or Steiglitz's royal ass.

Thomas

[paulr]

In fact those birds are not a patch on either Adams's or Steiglitz's royal ass.

In fact? Or are you just giving another example of bias? I'll take Friedlander over Adams any day of the week ...

But it doesn't matter. Adams and Stieglitz were also rigorous editors. Adams of his own work, Stieglitz of his own and many others. Stieglitz especially provides a great example of someone who organized his work into suites and sequences.

He was also a master of marketing hype, but that's a different conversation ...

[tgtaylor]

[QUOTE] I'll take Friedlander over Adams any day of the week ...
QUOTE]

Better you than me!

[Brian C. Miller]

Guernica is pretty much self-contained as a composition,
whether you understand it or not. Like it or hate it, it still works visually and elicits
a strong reaction, plus has a great deal of internal sophistication. It's not just an
illustration of a story one need to know in advance. It hits the eye first, and keeps
satisfying the eye in many particulars.

I remember when I first saw Guernica. It was 1975, and I was in grade school, looking through abstract art, and in particular, Picasso. I had no idea of Spain's civil war, just a set of pictures in a book. I do remember being inspired to make pictures like that. I remember being fascinated by the pain in the picture, but of course the vast majority of the symbolism was lost on me. Nobody explained it to me, and I was left to interpret it on my own.


Clearly not.

Photographers from Steiglitz to Adams and beyond have exhibited groups of photographs to broaden the viewers experience and understanding of their work.

How many photographs do you think a person needs to see before making up their mind? 10? 20? I viewed 100+ of Friedlander's work on the web and I still think he has a knack for making bad photographs. Do I really need to see more?

When work is exhibited, it isn't displayed in a group to give "context." It's done to see what "sticks" and drives a sale. Walking into a portrait studio, how many portraits are displayed on the wall? 10? 20? How about usually two or three? It's only when the photography isn't done as a direct commission that a group of photographs needs to be displayed. This holds true, whatever the venue, unless it's self financed by someone with an income unrelated to art.

[tgtaylor]

Far better than Guernica, IMO, is Goya's El Tres De Mayo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:El_Tres_de_Mayo,_by_Francisco_de_Goya,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg
I had the immense pleasure of viewing this disturbing but exquisite painting up close and in person at the Museo del Prado in Madrid while on a bicycle tour.

[paulr]

I viewed 100+ of Friedlander's work on the web and I still think he has a knack for making bad photographs. Do I really need to see more?

You just need to see better :p

When work is exhibited, it isn't displayed in a group to give "context." It's done to see what "sticks" and drives a sale.[/QUOTE]

Not sure what gives you that idea. I've spent many days in studios and living rooms and galleries laboring with people over editing and sequencing. Sometimes my own work, sometimes helping friends. It comes up whenever anyone is putting together a show or book or portfolio for something important.

This is the final stage of bringing form to a body of work. The best photographers I know sweat over it. And the best critics rarely waste time by critiquing individual photographs.

At any rate, a commercial gallery is only one of many settings where the edit matters, and even there, if the artist is living and is represented as consignor, he or she will typically have most of the input in the editting and sequencing.

[jnantz]

I'd love to see more people adopt this as a mantra. So often people offer individual images for critique, and I don't see the point. Without the context of at least a few more images, I can't even know how to look at the one. The only criticism that's possible in most such cases is of the most superficial, conventional kinds ... Like, is it pretty? Does it conform to certain conventions of composition or craft? Often in these cases good = boring!

i agree paul !

... but what happens when the path taken ends at the same place where it started ?
can we ( as "artists" ) evolve in our work, without apparent change ?
i have seen/heard musicians that have churned out 10 albums that sound exactly the same.
i am sure there are photographers/painters/sculptors who are in the same "groove" ...

[tgtaylor]

Take a look at the link to Goya's El Tres De Mayo that I posted above. One doesn't need another one, two...or a hundred painting for it to register. It's impact is felt immediately, on sight. And it is precisely that impact that I seek when out looking for a "photograph."

Thomas

[paulr]

Take a look at the link to Goya's El Tres De Mayo that I posted above. One doesn't need another one, two...or a hundred painting for it to register. It's impact is felt immediately, on sight. And it is precisely that impact that I seek when out looking for a "photograph."

I find the painting facile. The image gives up everything it has to offer at a glance. It strikes me as didactic and manipulative. And reductive—there's no mystery, no open-endedness, no room to explore. Photographs that work similarly are epidemic in advertising. FWIW, I don't find this to be the case with most of Goya's work.

You're demonstrating that people look to art for different things. Some want easy answers, some want compelling questions. It should be obvious what team I'm on. But it's little surprise that the easy answer work is frequently the most popular with the public while the other is frequently more popular with critics and serious students of the medium.

Billy Collins sells more poetry books than John Ashbery ... but I'd only keep one his books around if the short leg of the coffee table needed propping. Of course, you might disagree ...

[cyrus]

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

[D. Bryant]

When work is exhibited, it isn't displayed in a group to give "context."

In my part of the country museums don't sell art, that's the type of venue I'm speaking of, not exhibits placed in commercial <sp?> galleries which are hardly ever curated as they would be at a public venue.

If you find Friedlander's work discusting that's not my point. We can't draw conclusions about the work of a photographer from a single print or image. A body of work allows the viewer get to know the phographer and further it provides enough work to allow critical examination.

You seem to be all hung up over non-traditional photography, if you don't like it fine but don't make sweeping genralities based solely on your prejudice.

Now end of discussion from me as you obviously just want to be argumenative since you keep repeating the same points as though others will eventually agree with you.

Don Bryant

[Jim Michael]

Beauty isn't always the message.


"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

[Mark Sawyer]

... But it's little surprise that the easy answer work is frequently the most popular with the public while the other is frequently more popular with critics and serious students of the medium.

Agreed as a general rule, but the pitfall is that work like Friedlander's becomes made for the critics and the serious students of the medium, (including himself). It becomes rather inaccessible to the public and almost solely about issues in Fine Art Photography, (deliberate caps). For me, that's the weakness of Friedlander's work; it's photography about Photography. (Of course, it's also its strength...)

[Jim Jones]

. . . The following excerpt is from the foreword to "Photography 63/An International Exhibition" by Nathan Lyons:

"To truly understand the abilities of the photographer his work must be experienced as an individual synthesis, each photograph seen in the context of other photographs he has taken. . . .

Very true. However, photographs can honor the subject as well as promote the photographer. A single photograph suffices to do this. The Cole Weston print of his father's Shell, 1927, on my wall need say nothing about Edward Weston's nature or nude photographs. Karsh's iconic image of Winston Churchill says much about the Prime Minister and about the British Empire in the depths of WWII, but nothing about the lyrical photo of his first wife beneath the willows of his estate nor his late color portraits. If the photographer is more important than his photographs, then certainly the photos should be viewed as a group, perhaps with much text to explain them. But is usually the photographs who make the photographer great (Steiglitz may be an exception). One fine photograph does this better than the entire oeuvre of lesser people.

[paulr]

Agreed as a general rule, but the pitfall is that work like Friedlander's becomes made for the critics and the serious students of the medium, (including himself). It becomes rather inaccessible to the public and almost solely about issues in Fine Art Photography, (deliberate caps). For me, that's the weakness of Friedlander's work; it's photography about Photography. (Of course, it's also its strength...)

You're raising a serious question, and it's one that people have been grappling with (and disagreeing over) for decades and in reference to many different kinds of art.

One of the most basic questions concerns an artist's obligation to accessibility. Is it the artist's problem or is it a problem with education? Or is there no problem at all ... maybe it's fine that people who are drawn to the work will benefit from it, and those who aren't won't.

If anyone's suggesting that universal accessibility is important, I'm curious to know what you think about James Joyce's novels, Wallace Stevens' poems, Bartok's music. Does it fail because it hasn't found a mass audience?

My personal inclination is to blame arts education. I think all of this stuff becomes accessible with a reasonable amount of familiarity. And if the hype is stripped away—people have mentioned hype as an unfair positive influence, but I think it's more commonly an unfair negative one: Joyce is impossible! and Contemporary poetry doesn't mean anything! Pure anti-hype.

FWIW, I agree that there's an element of Friedlander's work being about photography, but it's also very much about the world at large. And being about photography is not such an isoloating element, considering how pervasive photography is in people's lives these days.

[Mark Sawyer]

There is a universe of "inaccessible" material, but it's usually inaccessible by choices by bothe the audiences and the artist. Some work is an "acquired taste", and much more depends on the audience having an intense interest and education.

It's hard to blame the audience; Paul, you're obviously well read and educated in the areas you touched on in your last post (art, music, poetry, novels), but how many areas are each of us ignorant in? We have to pick and choose from myriad possibilities, and visual arts, especially the niche of 70's post-modern self-referential Fine Art photography, is going to have a small audience.

And so it becomes a bit "elitist", but it's a fairly democratic elitism. The resources are there for anyone willing to invest the time and the intellectual effort to develop their understanding and (mabe) appreciation. And so what if Friedlander will never be as popular as Anne Geddes. Things all have their place. It's all good.

[paulr]

And so it becomes a bit "elitist", but it's a fairly democratic elitism. The resources are there for anyone willing to invest the time and the intellectual effort to develop their understanding and (mabe) appreciation. And so what if Friedlander will never be as popular as Anne Geddes. Things all have their place. It's all good.

I agree about the democratic nature of it, in general. It would be more convincingly so if good education were more democratically available.

And of course, I don't think it's important for every person on earth to like Joyce or even to read Joyce. But people aught to have some awareness that it's out there, and the awareness should include positive things, like the fact that lots of people find it wonderful, rather than just negative things, like its reputation for being impenitrable. Education should foster curiosity, if nothing else.

[paulr]

There is a universe of "inaccessible" material, but it's usually inaccessible by choices by bothe the audiences and the artist. Some work is an "acquired taste", and much more depends on the audience having an intense interest and education.

Or just exposure, at a time when tastes and habits of seeing are still malleable.

I get frustrated by how rarely champions of American Modernism are willing to acknowledge how controversial that work was when it was new. It was not mainstream, nor easy, and it fought an uphill battle to gain acceptance.

Eventually it won its place on the walls and in books, and so the next generation that came up while looking at this stuff found it easy.

This cycle repeats over and over again. The least we can do is learn from it.

[ic-racer]

This thread is incredible. People dissing Friedlander...who's vision is the cornerstone of photographic aesthetics since the sixties. Might as well discount all modern artists since Cezanne. Shouldn't threads like this be in the Lounge?

[paulr]

I've heard enough brainwashed shilling for that upstart Cezanne!

[Mark Sawyer]

I agree about the democratic nature of it, in general. It would be more convincingly so if good education were more democratically available.

And of course, I don't think it's important for every person on earth to like Joyce or even to read Joyce. But people aught to have some awareness that it's out there, and the awareness should include positive things, like the fact that lots of people find it wonderful, rather than just negative things, like its reputation for being impenitrable. Education should foster curiosity, if nothing else.

The sad thing about education is that it's "officially" over way too soon. High school students have too many distractions and too little appreciation for anything without immediate self-gratification. Even most college students are too young and inexperienced to appreciate what they're being exposed to in their too-few arts/humanities classes. The university system has become a vocational school...

Most who appreciate art well are at least middle-aged. Maybe that's what it takes, at least as a general rule, in today's environment.


I've heard enough brainwashed shilling for that upstart Cezanne!

Yeah, but he makes a nice flatbed scanner...

[Mark Sawyer]

This thread is incredible. People dissing Friedlander...who's vision is the cornerstone of photographic aesthetics since the sixties. Might as well discount all modern artists since Cezanne. Shouldn't threads like this be in the Lounge?

On Photography Discuss aesthetics, philosophy, history, photographers and photographs.

It seems to fit, and I'm enjoying the discussions and debates. I hadn't though much of Friedlander in years...

...and really, I think his influence, though important, was relatively narrow and short-lived. That's the life-cycle of art; revolutionary in the 60's, recognized in the 70's, passe in the 80's, and looked back on as period-pieces today. Friedlander's work and the issues addressed were important when the work was done. By today's standards, it's "been there, done that".

So I wonder, why do so many of us still hunt the tripod holes of Adams, aesthetically, if not literally? Some traditions, f/64, pictorialism, simple old-school portraiture (for want of a better name), still thrive. Whatever aesthertic ground was broken by Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, Robert Heinecken, all revolutionary heroes of the 60's, seems to have fallen fallow.

Or maybe I just don't read Aperture enough... :rolleyes:

[tgtaylor]

It's just a revolving door...

http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/atoz/friedlander_revolving_door.jpg

Lee Friedlander,1963. Printed 2006.

Thomas

[Brian Ellis]

On Photography Discuss aesthetics, philosophy, history, photographers and photographs.

It seems to fit, and I'm enjoying the discussions and debates. I hadn't though much of Friedlander in years...

...and really, I think his influence, though important, was relatively narrow and short-lived. That's the life-cycle of art; revolutionary in the 60's, recognized in the 70's, passe in the 80's, and looked back on as period-pieces today. Friedlander's work and the issues addressed were important when the work was done. By today's standards, it's "been there, done that".

So I wonder, why do so many of us still hunt the tripod holes of Adams, aesthetically, if not literally? Some traditions, f/64, pictorialism, simple old-school portraiture (for want of a better name), still thrive. Whatever aesthertic ground was broken by Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, Robert Heinecken, all revolutionary heroes of the 60's, seems to have fallen fallow.

Or maybe I just don't read Aperture enough... :rolleyes:

If by hunting "the tripod holes of Adams, aesthetically if not literally . . . " you mean why do so many of us make landscape photographs I can't speak for others. But for myself, I do it because I like it. I've never wanted to be a "revolutionary hero" or follow in the footsteps of revolutionary heroes.

[cowanw]

I can't find the dog

[paulr]

.. Friedlander's work and the issues addressed were important when the work was done. By today's standards, it's "been there, done that".

I don't agree with that entirely. As far as doing exactly what he was doing, yes, of course much of it is "been there, done that." He did the work we're discussing decades ago.

But the stuff that the f64 guys did is way more been there, done that. It's not exerting any influence anymore, except on people who are esthetically dwelling in the in the 1930s … many of whom are likely found in forums devoted to big, old cameras—so it's not surprisingly their voices are disproportionately loud here.

But everything at the core of formal modernism, and certainly of the Romantic landscape tradition, has been thoroughly undermined by the art, ideas, and events of the last half century. It just doesn't exert influence on today's new work.

I'd suggest that when you see people duplicating the esthetic of artists from 90 years ago—finding Ansels tripod holes etc—that's not influence. It's mimicry, and a curiously anachronistic variety of it.

Evidence of Friedlander's influence, however, is alive and well. You see it in the work of people doing very different things, like Thomas Struth, Andrew Boworweic, Mike Smith, and a lot of others I saw recently at the NYC photo festival.



Or maybe I just don't read Aperture enough... :rolleyes:

Or maybe you've been reading Aperture circa early 1950s, and not early 2010s. It's just a magazine of contemporary work...

[GabrielSeri]

It's just a revolving door...

http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/atoz/friedlander_revolving_door.jpg

Lee Friedlander,1963. Printed 2006.

Thomas

I like to photograph Group F/64 type work because I believe that is photography at it's full potential. Maximum sharpness, esoteric tones, exposing and developing a perfect print, etc.. However, I do like this image very much. I think artists should first know their craft's technique to it's maximum potential (F64 group) and then if they want to make "inferior" technical images like this one then that is the photographer's purpose. The problem with this type of snap shot images is that new photographers don't learn the technical aspect of the medium and miss out on a lot.
Obviously Friedlander was a master, at first glance the images he made look almost amateur but after one examines the image, his compositions are witty and very interesting. I still prefer someone like Minor White who made a damn beautiful perfect print but also challenged the viewer intellectually with the subject matter.

[Drew Wiley]

Yes, everything outdoor has been done before. It's all obsolete. People walking around
in the city have been done before. Obsolete. Astrophotography has been done before.
Are we running out of meaningless pigeonholes yet? Oh, digital stitching and image reorganization, that already been done now. Can't do that anymore. C-prints have been done since the 50's. Can't show them anymore. Too bad Gursky. Cave painting
was done long time back - can't put galleries in caves anymore or it won't be modernistic.

[Darin Boville]

>>Andrew Boworweic<<

Oh my God, is Andrew finally becoming a "name"? That was a long road...

--Darin

[paulr]

Yes, everything outdoor has been done before. It's all obsolete. People walking around in the city have been done before..

Drew, come on. You're more clever than that.

[paulr]

Oh my God, is Andrew finally becoming a "name"? That was a long road..

I have no idea if he's a 'name'! But I think he's doing really good, relevant work.
I'm rooting for him.

[Mark Sawyer]

If by hunting "the tripod holes of Adams, aesthetically if not literally . . . " you mean why do so many of us make landscape photographs I can't speak for others. But for myself, I do it because I like it. I've never wanted to be a "revolutionary hero" or follow in the footsteps of revolutionary heroes.


I'd suggest that when you see people duplicating the esthetic of artists from 90 years ago—finding Ansels tripod holes etc—that's not influence. It's mimicry, and a curiously anachronistic variety of it.


I'm back and forth on this, but just for arguement's sake... I'd say you're being a bit rough on old Ansel and his legacy, Paul! If nothing else, he codified, figuratively and literally, one of the still-dominant schools of photography. Every other pop-digital photo mag seems to have an article on "How to Shoot Digital like Ansel Adams", "The Digital Zone System for DSLR's" and so forth. I can't recall many "Shoot Digital like Lee Friedlander" articles...

And I have quite a bit of respect for Brian, and quite a few others here on the forum that claim His Anselness as an influence. And he's been an influence on me. I think we win by outnumbering you on who's the bigger influence, Paul. Trying to figure out why...

Adams is the Black and White Fine Print, the view camera, classic composition, timeless subjects.

Friedlander is "adequate" black and white print, 35mm camera, creating his own rules of composition, and "look at her 60's hairstyle and that old Chevy!"

Adams came earlier, but which is more dated? I'd argue that the AA-f/64-Straight Photography became a universally respected way of working, while Friedlander's was so much a comment on that period's art-photography and his contemporary environment that it was, at least to a significant extent, time-bound. Interesting as a period piece, even a distant-but traceable influence on a smaller number of photographers today, but it doesn't begin to compare.

Then again, if you take the whole Friedlander/Heinecken/Winogrand/etc. photography of the 60's, it still a big influence. Less recognizeable than the influence Group f/64 had on later generations of photographers, but still there.

I'd still give the edge to Adams and Straight Photography.

[paulr]

I'm back and forth on this, but just for arguement's sake... I'd say you're being a bit rough on old Ansel and his legacy, Paul!

I'm not trying to make any comment at all on Ansel himself, or on his work, or on the value of his legacy. I'm speaking more to the continued influence of his legacy which has either waned, or has carried on in the negative ... in the sense that his vision represents a certain set of cultural ideas from a hundred years ago which get put in fairly obvious quotation marks when they're referenced today.


If nothing else, he codified, figuratively and literally, one of the still-dominant schools of photography.

It really depends on what you mean by dominant. I'm interested in what's relevant in terms of contemporary art history, not with hobbyists. In his day, Ansel was an important figure to both groups. Today, he's important primarily to the latter. Hence the presence of Ansel clones in the pop photo mags, but not in Aperture or in any contemporary museum shows.


And I have quite a bit of respect for Brian, and quite a few others here on the forum that claim His Anselness as an influence. And he's been an influence on me. I think we win by outnumbering you on who's the bigger influence, Paul. Trying to figure out why...

We've ALL been influenced by Ansel. But if he's your only influence or ... most significantly ... if influence means you're doing work that hasn't departed from his in significant ways, then you're not doing contemporary work. You've jumped on the coat tails of a world view that's a century old, and as a casualty you aren't addressing the world you actually live in. I think this is a major casualty.


Adams is the Black and White Fine Print, the view camera, classic composition, timeless subjects.

I wouldn't say "classic" and "timeless" ... I'd say deeply entrenched in 19th Century American Romanticism, especially the Sublime, presented with the printing esthetics of the early 20th Century Straight photography school. This does not equal timeless, but rather something that is very much of its time.


Friedlander is "adequate" black and white print, 35mm camera, creating his own rules of composition, and "look at her 60's hairstyle and that old Chevy!"

That's a terrifically superficial characterization of Friedlander. It says virtually nothing about why he's mattered to people.

[Richard Mahoney]

Drew, come on. You're more clever than that.

Well that goes without saying ;) ... But really, Paul, it seems to me -- in my own wee uninformed world here -- that you really are assuming that the world is a little more homogeneous than it actually is. Your assessment of what is `currently relevant' appears to a large extent to read as `what is currently of concern to a few East Coast academics / critics / gallery owners'. I'm uncertain how relevant these concerns are to, for example, many influential Japanese, German or -- dare I say it -- NZ photographers. The world is full of diversity and niche interests and markets. The attempt to marginalise, say, the `School of Anselites' as being irrelevant to Late Modernity, while it might suit the subtext of those who are trying to drive fashion, is somewhat questionable. The photographic world is simply too complex and diverse to easily fit with reductionist marketing categories.


Kind regards,

Richard

[paulr]

The world is full of diversity and niche interests and markets. The attempt to marginalise, say, the `School of Anselites' as being irrelevant to Late Modernity, while it might suit the subtext of those who are trying to drive fashion, is somewhat questionable. The photographic world is simply too complex and diverse to easily fit with reductionist marketing categories.

Agreed 100% that the art world, photo world, etc., is wildly diverse, and that this is a great thing. By relevant, I don't mean relevant to east coast academics. I mean something more fundamental, which as a side effect may make work of interest to those people (I don't know what east coast has to do with it, but ok ...).

I'm simply talking about work that's rooted in the time period it's done in. In terms of subject matter, but more significantly in terms of the way of looking. It's highly unlikely that if you're responding in any first-hand way to your own life, in 2011, you're going to produce something that looks anything like Ansel's Tenaya Lake.

Just food for thought.

[Oren Grad]

I'd still give the edge to Adams and Straight Photography.

If anything, it's Friedlander who practices "straight" photography, with a vengeance. The cult of Ansel is about applying artifice to make sure the world comes out looking the way one thinks it ought to.

[Mark Sawyer]

I'm not trying to make any comment at all on Ansel himself, or on his work, or on the value of his legacy. I'm speaking more to the continued influence of his legacy which has either waned, or has carried on in the negative ... in the sense that his vision represents a certain set of cultural ideas from a hundred years ago which get put in fairly obvious quotation marks when they're referenced today.

I'm not sure which of his cultural ideas deserve to be colloquiallized with quotaion marks. They seem to be simple concerns relevant today; appreciation and preservation of the environment, fine craftsmanship in his art, and a romanticized interpretation of the landscape coupled to an intelligent and aware view of the world.

Is Adams' influence that negative? I suppose, if positive is judged by being a new and different style. But if an older style speaks to you, and seems right for what you have to let out, I think it's okay. And I think Adams' style speaks to more people than Friedlander's

I can see the influence of the dramatic Fine Black and White Print that Adams codified in work by Emmitt Gowan, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jerry Uelsman, Minor White, Paul Caponigro, and others. I think it helped their work, not held it back.

[Mark Sawyer]

I'd still give the edge to Adams and Straight Photography.


If anything, it's Friedlander who practices "straight" photography, with a vengeance. The cult of Ansel is about applying artifice to make sure the world comes out looking the way one thinks it ought to.

Yes, but Adams capitalized the words and made it a recognized "style"!

[Oren Grad]

I'm simply talking about work that's rooted in the time period it's done in. In terms of subject matter, but more significantly in terms of the way of looking. It's highly unlikely that if you're responding in any first-hand way to your own life, in 2011, you're going to produce something that looks anything like Ansel's Tenaya Lake.

What does it mean for work to be "rooted in the time period it's done in"?

What does it mean to "respond in a first-hand way"?

And I can't quite tell whether you mean to be describing what people actually do, or prescribing what they ought to do if they want their work to have any traction in the art world, or want it to be "authentic", or...?

[paulr]

What does it mean for work to be "rooted in the time period it's done in"?

What does it mean to "respond in a first-hand way"?

And I can't quite tell whether you mean to be describing what people actually do, or prescribing what they ought to do if they want their work to have any traction in the art world, or want it to be "authentic", or...?

Reasonable questions.

In response to the first two: my distinction is between art that comes from a desire to explore the world (and ways of looking at the world), and art that comes from a desire to make something that looks a certain way ... typically a conventional way that originated from someone else's genuine exploration, a long time ago.

And to the third question: yes, yes, and yes. Descriptive in that people actually do this. Prescriptive in that I think it's where interesting art comes from, pretty much exclusively. And usefult for getting traction, because curators and art historians generally feel the same way.

[paulr]

Is Adams' influence that negative? I suppose, if positive is judged by being a new and different style.

By negative influence, I mean that a lot of people are made uncomfortable by romantic views of pristine nature, because they feel untrue. Back in Ansel's day, the level of artifice he employed wasn't so obvious, but today it's blatant. Sophisticated viewers feel a tension between what's being depicted and what their experience tells them.

Landscape photographers cannot, however escape the umbrella of Ansel's influence because it's so pervasive. They can't just pretend it's not there. It's a presence for them and for any likely viewers. So they reference Ansel, deliberately or not. And the reference is usually one that involves some kind of irony or subversion, whether it's conscious or not.

These are not new ideas. Both John Szarkowski (probably the most rigorous of the Ansel scholars) and Robert Adams have written about this. Check out Szarkowski's excellent introduction to the Ansel Adams at 100 book, and the first essay in Robert Adams' Beauty in Photography.

[Oren Grad]

In response to the first two: my distinction is between art that comes from a desire to explore the world (and ways of looking at the world), and art that comes from a desire to make something that looks a certain way ... typically a conventional way that originated from someone else's genuine exploration, a long time ago.

OK, let me probe a bit. How, if at all, does the use of antiquarian, or at least commercially obsolete, technical modalities - where the modality, at least, is arguably "not of its time" - relate to this distinction?

[paulr]

OK, let me probe a bit. How, if at all, does the use of antiquarian, or at least commercially obsolete, technical modalities - where the modality, at least, is arguably "not of its time" - relate to this distinction?

I don't think I understand the question. Did I say anything about technical modalities? And what's a technical modality?

[Oren Grad]

Sorry, didn't mean to be obscure. I just meant what materials and methods we use - for example daguerreotype, or LF film, or digital capture. No, you didn't say anything about it, but yes, I mean to ask how the use of non-contemporary materials and methods relates to your thinking about whether work is "of its time".

[tgtaylor]

It's just an execution...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:El_Tres_de_Mayo,_by_Francisco_de_Goya,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg
Francisco de Goya, 1814


It's just a revolving door...

http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/atoz/friedlander_revolving_door.jpg
Lee Friedlander, 1963.

Can you see beyond the obvious?

Thomas

[paulr]

Ah, ok. I don't think there's any set answer to that. Sometimes the most cutting edge work is done with the most cutting edge tools, other times with ancient ones. Look at Atget ... he used printing materials that were considered decades obsolete, but he was making pictures that were like nothing anyone had ever seen.

I don't know his reasons for using those materials ... he didn't talk much. I'm guessing it had as much about habit as anything else. But he found a way to make them serve that remarkable, eccentric eye of his.

And I think it comes down to that ... the technical stuff has to serve the vision. One way or another.

[paulr]

Also, I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by blabbing about this stuff. I recognize that there are a lot of reasons people make art, and a lot of reasons people make photographs that aren't necessarily concerned with art. When I defend someone like Friedlander, or the people who lionized him, my biases—the preference for work that's engaging beyond prettiness, and for work that's historically relevent—are going to come out.

[Oren Grad]

Ah, ok. I don't think there's any set answer to that. Sometimes the most cutting edge work is done with the most cutting edge tools, other times with ancient ones. Look at Atget ... he used printing materials that were considered decades obsolete, but he was making pictures that were like nothing anyone had ever seen.

I don't know his reasons for using those materials ... he didn't talk much. I'm guessing it had as much about habit as anything else. But he found a way to make them serve that remarkable, eccentric eye of his.

And I think it comes down to that ... the technical stuff has to serve the vision. One way or another.

OK, thanks. That seems to me a reasonable way of thinking about it.

I had some of Jerry Spagnoli's documentary daguerreotypes in mind as I was posing the question. But I was thinking of them in what you might call Winograndian terms - seeing what the world looks like when photographed in that way. Depending on the frame of mind you bring to the task, antique methods could be radically exploratory.

[tgtaylor]

I find the painting facile. The image gives up everything it has to offer at a glance. It strikes me as didactic and manipulative. And reductive—there's no mystery, no open-endedness, no room to explore. Photographs that work similarly are epidemic in advertising. FWIW, I don't find this to be the case with most of Goya's work....


... When I defend someone like Friedlander, or the people who lionized him, my biases—the preference for work that's engaging beyond prettiness, and for work that's historically relevent—are going to come out.

Although you weren't defending Goya, you certainly missed the importance and the real meaning of the image beyond the obivious.

Thomas

[paulr]

Depending on the frame of mind you bring to the task, antique methods could be radically exploratory.

I think we're starting to see a lot of that. Often it's traditional materials being used with some kind of new twist, or with an emphasis on something unique about them that hasn't been fully exploited.

[paulr]

Although you weren't defending Goya, you certainly missed the importance and the real meaning of the image beyond the obivious.

I'm not especially interested in art that has a singular "real meaning" that can be stated. If it's that simple, the artist should just save everyone's time and tell us what he means.

[Brian Ellis]

. . . We've ALL been influenced by Ansel. But if he's your only influence or ... most significantly ... if influence means you're doing work that hasn't departed from his in significant ways, then you're not doing contemporary work. You've jumped on the coat tails of a world view that's a century old, and as a casualty you aren't addressing the world you actually live in. I think this is a major casualty. . . .


I live in Central Oregon. I'm surrounded by mountains, lava flows, volcanic residue, canyons carved by ancient rivers, sagebrush, and juniper trees. When I photograph those things I'm photographing the world I live in. Of course those aren't the only things I photograph but that's a lot of what I do and what I enjoy doing. Where do you get off telling me that that's a "casualty" because I'm not addressing the world I actually live in or that I'm not doing contemporary work? You need to come down off your high NYC horse.

[tgtaylor]

I'm not especially interested in art that has a singular "real meaning" that can be stated. If it's that simple, the artist should just save everyone's time and tell us what he means.

Actually the best artists do! It's just that many of us can't see it.

AA reportedly said that "there's nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept." Lot's of (hidden) truth in that.

Thomas

[Merg Ross]

My thought of using et al. when originating this thread, was to include "others". And surely, the 1963 exhibition included many influential photographers other than Friedlander. Quite possibly, it might have been Uelsmann who had the most far reaching influence on what could be done with photography. Some of what he accomplished the hard way is now surfacing with the latest technology; the difference being that he was an artist (and still is).

I was told at a young age, by a very famous photographer, that competition has no place in the arts. I have always subscribed to the notion and approached my assessment of individual photographers with that in mind. So, perhaps some may be more "influential" than others, but none are to be dismissed as being less worthy in their art.

When I peruse the talent in the Photography 63 exhibition, the work of Friedlander does not surpass the content of that displayed by the other participants. It was a talented group, which other than those already mentioned, included: Peter Bunnell, Art Kane, Pete Turner, Carl Chiarenza, Lucien Clergue, Richard Garrod, Eikoh Hosoe, Simpson Kalisher, Mario Giacomelli, Art Sinsabaugh, Don Worth and Nobuhiko Watanabe.

They have quietly contributed works that will endure.

[paulr]

Actually the best artists do! It's just that many of us can't see it.

This is a point that you and I will probably never agree on. The art that you like and the art that I like bear witness to this, so there's little point in arguing about it.

[tgtaylor]

This is a point that you and I will probably never agree on. The art that you like and the art that I like bear witness to this, so there's little point in arguing about it.

You like Friedlander don't you? Then tell us what he is saying in the image above that I posted?

[paulr]

So, perhaps some may be more "influential" than others, but none are to be dismissed as being less worthy in their art.

Yeah, I think we've made the mistake of conflating an artists "goodness" and influence. They're not the same, though probably not entirely unrelated. At any rate, I'm all for art not being a competitvie sport, and for leaving questions of good and bad to the eye of the beholder.

The question of influence comes up because it's a kind of democratic appraisal of importance. If your work changes the course of your peers and of the artists who come after you, then there's probably something to it. It's useful to point out influence as a defense against charges of irrelevence. It doesn't mean anyone's oblgated to like the person's work. You don't have to like Bach, but please don't try to dismiss his significance ...

[paulr]

You like Friedlander don't you? Then tell us what he is saying in the image above that I posted?

You're not getting what I'm saying. We disagree on the possibility of distilling some kind of paraphrasable meaning from good art.

You seem to think that it's possible, even that it's a requirement.

I think the opposite: good art by its nature is rich and layered and rife with indeterminate possibilites. It offers more questions than anwswers, and works most strongly on levels that cannot be reduced to language or propositional meaning.

In other words, your definition of good = my definition of bad, and vice versa.

This isn't remarkable. I see it in all the arts, and I see it throughout history. We just play for different teams.

[Oren Grad]

Then tell us what he is saying in the image above that I posted?

He's not saying anything. He's just showing us things.

If you must have your pictures say something in particular, you need to attach words to them. Even then, someone may take them in a way you didn't intend.

---

I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

-- Lee Friedlander

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/friedlander.php

[Mark Sawyer]

Also, I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by blabbing about this stuff...

Actually, I thank you for stirring the thought processes! :)


...my distinction is between art that comes from a desire to explore the world (and ways of looking at the world), and art that comes from a desire to make something that looks a certain way ... typically a conventional way that originated from someone else's genuine exploration, a long time ago.


I can see this, and it's a great point. My thought is that, at least ideally, all those who think of themselves as artists are explorers. We have all of history to choose our vehicle of exploration from, and perhaps to choose a starting point for our own exploration. And preferences will vary.

To drag in another innocent bystander from the annals of photography... :rolleyes: The work Sudek did in the window of his studio is a much more traditional, less daring visual exploration than what Friedlander did on the streets. But to the romantic in me, it's a much deeper exploration of other things.

Personal preferences... whatcha gonna do?

[paulr]

If you must have your pictures say something in particular, you need to attach words to them.

...or make the picture so simplistic and reductive that few will have any reason to care what you say in the first place ...



I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

He's participating in a long war of art vs. logocentrism.

"No ideas but in things"
—William Carlos Williams

"Not ideas about the thing but thing itself"
—Wallace Stevens

"Ideas are always wrong"
—William Bronk

... and these are all guys whose medium is words.

[paulr]

The work Sudek did in the window of his studio is a much more traditional, less daring visual exploration than what Friedlander did on the streets. But to the romantic in me, it's a much deeper exploration of other things.

Sure, it's an exploration of other things. And it's wonderfully mysterious and strange, and has qualities that I find quite difficult to describe. It may be less formally experimental than Friedlander's stuff, but it's a thoroughly original vision. As you suggested, it works in other ways. And you would never mistake it for the work of anyone else ...

In other words, we probably agree about Mr. Sudek.

[Oren Grad]

...or make the picture so simplistic and reductive that few will have any reason to care what you say in the first place ...

Nerf hammers from the semiotics toolkit... WHACK!

[Oren Grad]

Speaking of Jerry Spagnoli, here's a piece of his that I just stumbled across - a bit of a tangent, but there's plenty in it to chew on for anyone who's been paying attention to this discussion:

http://www.jerryspagnoli.com/Extras/Resources/How%20the%20World%20Looks%20ebook.pdf

(CAVEAT: it's a ~2.5MB pdf, so on a slow connection the download may take a while)

[Richard Mahoney]

... Eikoh Hosoe ...

They have quietly contributed works that will endure.

As a young man this must have been splendid. Eikoh Hosoe's work -- and that of Masahisa Fukase -- makes me see just how much is possible. But it's also a little humbling ... it makes one realize that in comparison one is just playing around.


Kind regards,

Richard

[mdm]

That is a photo book I would like to own. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/24/masahisa-fukase-ravens-photobook

Like Ted Hughes' Crow, poetry at its darkest.

Only at absolute rock bottom does one percieve truth.

[Oren Grad]

That is a photo book I would like to own. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/24/masahisa-fukase-ravens-photobook

I do own it, though not the pricey Japanese first edition. The handful of samples in the Guardian piece hardly begin to convey how rough and how dreary "Ravens" is as a whole.

[tgtaylor]

You're not getting what I'm saying. We disagree on the possibility of distilling some kind of paraphrasable meaning from good art.

You seem to think that it's possible, even that it's a requirement.

I think the opposite: good art by its nature is rich and layered and rife with indeterminate possibilites. It offers more questions than anwswers, and works most strongly on levels that cannot be reduced to language or propositional meaning.


He's not saying anything. He's just showing us things.

If you must have your pictures say something in particular, you need to attach words to them. Even then, someone may take them in a way you didn't intend.

---

I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

-- Lee Friedlander


Do you guys really think that Friedlander walked aimlessly up to that door and thoughtlessly tripped the shutter?

It may well be that he was aimlessly walking the streets of New York "looking for a photo" when he happened upon that door and when he saw it he saw something in his "minds eye" that made him take up a certain position and wait for "the decisive moment."

What are some of the "questions" or "answers" posed by the image? What is he "showing us"? What is "so demanding and so important" about the subject? Indeed, what is the subject?

Ya gotta tink 'bout these things.

Thomas

[paulr]

Do you guys really think that Friedlander walked aimlessly up to that door and thoughtlessly tripped the shutter?

No, and nobody suggested such a thing. If you want to have a conversation, don't put words in people's mouths.

[Darin Boville]

No, and nobody suggested such a thing. If you want to have a conversation, don't put words in people's mouths.

Hmmmm. Are you getting grouchier, Paul? :)

--Darin

[Drew Wiley]

Well, I'm certainly not in the official Friedlander fan club as far as genre is concerned ... but that revolving door shot hardly seems like random luck. Maybe he practiced a bit, but at this juncture at least his timing was impeccable, and I think he was perfectly aware of what he was getting. Speaks a lot about his perceptual skills in general. Pretty remarkable.

[David Low]

I like to photograph Group F/64 type work because I believe that is photography at it's full potential. Maximum sharpness, esoteric tones, exposing and developing a perfect print, etc.. However, I do like this image very much. I think artists should first know their craft's technique to it's maximum potential (F64 group) and then if they want to make "inferior" technical images like this one then that is the photographer's purpose. The problem with this type of snap shot images is that new photographers don't learn the technical aspect of the medium and miss out on a lot.
Obviously Friedlander was a master, at first glance the images he made look almost amateur but after one examines the image, his compositions are witty and very interesting. I still prefer someone like Minor White who made a damn beautiful perfect print but also challenged the viewer intellectually with the subject matter.

Isn't this a bit like saying that impressionist/abstract expressionist/pop art/etc artists should not have pursued their art until they had demonstrated that they could duplicate the academy type painting techniques so popular in the 19th century? Things move on and it seems to me there should be plenty of room for different opinions and ways of working.

[paulr]

... that revolving door shot hardly seems like random luck. Maybe he practiced a bit, but at this juncture at least his timing was impeccable, and I think he was perfectly aware of what he was getting. Speaks a lot about his perceptual skills in general. Pretty remarkable.

I would agree with that 100%. No one's been arguing that he works randomly. To say that someone doesn't work from an idea about what something means is not to say they are undirected. Like a lot of photographers, Friedlander is drawn to scenes and convergences; he responds with his curiosity and sense of form and wonder and visual wit and whatever else it is that makes his vision his own.

This does not imply that he's encoding a thesis into the picture and that we can then decode.

He's noticed something remarkable, something likely unrepeatable that exists for a moment in a particular spot as seen through a particular viewfinder. He is fixing it and telling us, "look at this!" It's then available for us to explore with our own curiosity and surprise and appreciation for form and for quirky subjects and whatever else he's captured. We may find one or more possible "meanings" in the work, but it's folly to think that these meanings are absolute and determinate and universal.

Another way to think about it ... no two people agree on what the world means, but it offers a lot to look at and talk about. Same with this kind of photography.

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - you seem to be implying that there's something irrelevant about wilderness or
classic landscape photography simply because Ansel Adams did it, and that therefore
it is outdated in this particular era, and that everybody doing it is somehow an ideological slave of Ansel. Obviously you don't live in the West. Where I grew
up, Yosemite was considered the big crowded city. Tenaya Lk was where you DIDN'T go camping because it was too busy and noisy. Pointing my camera at some unclimbed peak was just as natural as Friedlander pointing his at a revolving door. Revelance has nothing to do with the subject matter; it's related to HOW someone perceives it and effectively describes it. I also love urban photography, but just don't want to get shot or have my view camera ruined doing it. And yes, I too live in a major urban area, but one in which I am only a five minute walk from a 7000-acre open space (with plenty more around that) or twenty minutes from the coast and redwoods. I don't need permission from the ghost of Ansel to photograph those places I consider home! I don't need his tripod holes! Or do you think New York city if now off limits to photographers because Friedlander already shot there? Heck, he was a late-comer too, comparatively. Are Central Park photographer relevant simply because they allow
a soda can or some other piece of detritus to remain in the foreground of any otherwise predictable postcard shot? Now they're "environmental photographers" doing
something new just because of some added garbage???? Pretty shallow.

[paulr]

Paul - you seem to be implying that there's something irrelevant about wilderness or classic landscape photography simply because Ansel Adams did it, and that therefore it is outdated in this particular era, and that everybody doing it is somehow an ideological slave of Ansel.

No. Not what I'm implying. Read the Szarkowski and Adams essays on the subject. I'm not going to reinvent their wheels.

[Drew Wiley]

It's ridiculous to try to copy Adams. Technique maybe. But vision? He was poetic in his
own way. I've exhibited with him - same geography, both using big cameras, totally different way of looking things. I can appreciate without copying, and I can even
appreciate something without necessarily liking it. And I am one person who has monographs about photographers on my shelves whom I don't "like" or personally respond to, but who are nonetheless interesting in one way or another.

[paulr]

Lots of work I see looks like cloned Ansel vision. It's practically an epidemic. It doesn't mean people do it well (although some do) and I don't see why it matters if they do. Whether it looks just like Ansel's work is less significant than if it represents the same worldview; the same relationships between photographer and landscape and society. That's the part that's dated.

I have no idea if your work looks like Adams' work. I'll take your word for it. For whatever reason you seem to think people are saying that all natural landscape work is somehow cloned Ansel, or for some other reason dated. I don't recall anyone saying that. There's a lot of interesting, un-ansel-like landscape work being done all over the world.

I host a forum (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/contemporarylandscape/) about contemporary landscape photography, so I get exposed to a bit of it. Friedlander, in fact, has a whole series of landscapes, some of them from places like Yosemite, that visually turn the whole modern landscape esthetic on its head in wonderful ways. I'm a big fan of this series.

[Drew Wiley]

Well Paul, there's been a fair amt of cynicism by artsified photographers coming out
to Yosemite or the Navajo reservation etc and basically poking fun at the traditional
conventions. And I'll admit that some of it can be entertaining and fun to look at, but
otherwise pretty shallow, simply because it never connects to the land in a sense of
a fresh personal perspective, but only to photographic stereotypes pro or con. The
Chinese language is based upon five different intonations which a guy like me can't
even hear. It's because I'm on the outside. Got a Norwegian pal who can walk into
a Chinese restaurant and strike up a conversation even in their regional accents.
But all I can do is stumble through the menu at best. And there's something analogous in perception - to outsiders everything looks the same - Ansel no doubt
has wannabees in his wake - but his work is really quite personal. And you've got
to be around his kind of light enough to appreciate that. Maybe I got picked to share
a retrospective just because my stuff was so conspicuously different and served as
a counterpoint to his style. But it still honored what was in front of the lens, was
meticulously printed (by the standards of that time at least), and absolutely was not
some pop-art cynical twist on any genre. (Otherwise, been there, done that, so what.) In fact, some of these remarks remind me of racial slurs about all this or that kind of people "looking the same". And I'm certain that some of them are saying the same thing. I just depends on what point of view you're comfortable with.

[Kirk Gittings]

Paul, I saw this today and thought of you. It is a very well done:

http://online.nmartmuseum.org/earthnow

[paulr]

Well Paul, there's been a fair amt of cynicism by artsified photographers coming out to Yosemite or the Navajo reservation etc and basically poking fun at the traditional conventions.

I'd have to see what you're talking about before commenting, other than to say sure, there are bad and superficial examples of anything. Including contemporary landscape work, and including 100 year-old work. I'm more interested in the good stuff.

[Drew Wiley]

Excuse my typos, Paul, my cat just jumped on the wrong kind of mouse. But to me,
worldview is something very personal, formed within, and not a kind of school one
jumps into in an art academy. To me, a damn weedpile is more relevant and up to
date than anything Friedlander or Cindy Sherman has done, because it's THERE,
it's immediate, it's a moment in life, and then will be gone. I don't give a damn what
Ansel did at that moment. I don't think about it. I don't even think Zone System.
Wasted an 8X10 color neg last wk on a rotting dead cow in the middle of a dirt road.
Almost stumbled over a coyote gnawing on it during the process. I didn't think to
myself, Hey, this stinkin' thing will be arty because it is covered with flies and gore
and will offend people if I print it real big (a ploy in itself which has been done over
and over again for decades). No. What I saw was a set of very complex color relationships and forms. Beauty. Even the arrangement of the flies created an
interesting pattern (and that's what LF allows one to reveal). If I print it, it will never
sell. And no haute art venue will want it; it ain't gross enough or controversial
enought to sell museum tickets. I did it simply because of what I perceived. No
extraneous motive. You're an intelligent guy, and hopefully understand this.

[paulr]

Paul, I saw this today and thought of you. It is a very well done:

http://online.nmartmuseum.org/earthnow

Thanks, Kirk. Cool site ... lots of people I've never heard about. I posted it to the contemp. landscape forum.

[Drew Wiley]

Interesting mix, Kirk. I think of Ketchum as pretty much a Philistine - basically a
postcard photographer with a bit of Eliot Porter imitation but also with some garbage
thrown in just to be artsy and relevant. Misrach had more of an apocalyptic element
to his landscapes, but was also clearly fishing for museum attention (and eventually got it) - certainly landed a few iconic images anyway. Generally, I find most of this
"environmental" photography to be pretentious, i.e., self-consciously trying to be
something arty, with a lot of stereotypes of their own. But the 70's were certainly an interesting era of experimentation. I'm not overwhelmed by the current work of Gursky, but it does stand on its own in terms of compositional strength, and the fact that its used for environmental statements (like Porters and Adams once were) is just fine. I just don't like putting the cart before the horse, or people whose main
objective is to impose something ulterior.

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - just for the sake of comparison, there's a German urban photographer named
Egbert Haneke you might find interesting. He seems to have enough of a following
over there to afford some extremely expensive printmaking infrastructure of his own. In fact, he's the one who has financially given a new lease on the life to dye transfer materials. It's a bit like Eggleston's work, but newer and distinctly European. Let me know what you think.

[Kirk Gittings]

Thanks, Kirk. Cool site ... lots of people I've never heard about. I posted it to the contemp. landscape forum.

My hero at the moment is Michael Berman. Unfortunately the image of his they show on the website, while beautiful, is not one of my favorite images. He is one of these guys who disappears for weeks in the Northern Mexico desert backpacking his VC. His images really get at the real desert rather than the picturesque desert.

More here:
http://www.fragmentedimages.com/simpleframe.html

[tgtaylor]

Just because someone is taking photographs similar to, or even seemingly from the 'same tripod holes, doesn't necessarily mean that they are 'copying' another photographer. Case in point:

I got into photography back in the early '90's when I 'discovered' the Sierra Nevada in a used bookstore in Menlo Park and purchased a brand new Pentax K1000 to document the wonderful landscapes that I found myself drawn to. I had heard of Ansel Adams and on occasion seen an image of his published which I admired but up to that point my interest was confined solely to documenting my travels and I had not yet delved into the literature and lore of the medium. My film of choice back then was color negative processed and printed (4x6) by K-Mart until I switched to WalMart for better quality - instead of sending it off WalMart did it in-house and I got back better results.

Then one day the Ansel Adams at 100 exhibition came to SFMOMA and I bookmarked it for a Wednesday night when admission was free. I was literally floored to see a B&W print, 16x20 I think it was, of Helmet Rock - a sea-mount near the entrance of the the Golden Gate – and taken from the same location and with the same composition and same perspective that I had taken it with the K1000, albeit on color negative film instead of B&W. Previously I had thought that no one else but myself would shoot that.

Case in point: Just this evening I had stumbled over The National Archives and this print by Adams:

http://pictopia.com/perl/get_image?provider_id=1072&ptp_photo_id=natf:8848635&size=550_art&m=1279912098.0

And here is my print of the same scene taken from the exact location around 2002 and printed at a rental darkroom when I was trying to teach myself to print:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3320/5788530237_733448864f.jpg

In neither instance did I know that Adams had taken virtually the same image many years before and now that I am familiar with his body of work realize that I, like many other photographers, am drawn to the the same landscapes that he favored.

Thomas

[paulr]

My hero at the moment is Michael Berman. Unfortunately the image of his they show on the website, while beautiful, is not one of my favorite images. He is one of these guys who disappears for weeks in the Northern Mexico desert backpacking his VC. His images really get at the real desert rather than the picturesque desert.

More here:
http://www.fragmentedimages.com/simpleframe.html

Looks interesting. From what I can see, I'm more interested in his alternative media and the works on paper than the straight photographs. Unfortunately I can't see much ... the pictures on his site are tiny, and some of the galleries aren't working. Any other places to see his work?

Egbert Haneke must be even more famous ... his site isnt working at all!

I need to get in on this trend. Creates mystique ;)

[Brian Ellis]

Speaking of Jerry Spagnoli, here's a piece of his that I just stumbled across - a bit of a tangent, but there's plenty in it to chew on for anyone who's been paying attention to this discussion:

http://www.jerryspagnoli.com/Extras/Resources/How%20the%20World%20Looks%20ebook.pdf

(CAVEAT: it's a ~2.5MB pdf, so on a slow connection the download may take a while)

Fascinating. Thanks.

[Drew Wiley]

One of my favorites is John MCWilliams, who has gotten a lot of attention in the past
and is perhaps best known for his classic, Land of Deepest Shade (LF contact prints of
the South), but who doesn't seem to get spoken about so much at the moment. The
images are rather sinister and apocalyptic, but at the same time show a deep visual sympathy for the region (not pretentious or deliberately amateurish like Christenberry's
work). I think you'd respond well to these images, Paul. Also reminds me of my own sizable body of unexhibited elegaic images of the Mother Lode, though McWilliams leans hard on very wide-angle perspectives, while I prefer the long lens approach.

[paulr]

I don't know McWilliams. What do you mean by amateurish or pretentious with Christenberry?

[rdenney]

I think we're starting to see a lot of that. Often it's traditional materials being used with some kind of new twist, or with an emphasis on something unique about them that hasn't been fully exploited.

I'm reminded of Roger Norrington's introduction to the first of his remarkable series of Beethoven recordings. Just when we thought Beethoven could not sound fresh, up pops Norrington with a series that ignored received performance tradition and instead focused on what Beethoven actually notated in his music. The result was faster and far more percussive than popular renderings before him. And those popular renderings (think the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic, or conductors such as Furtwangler, Fricsay, and von Karajan) had been heavily, heavily influenced by the later Romantic tradition. (A countering example was Toscanini.) Beethoven brought us Romantic symphonies as an antidote to the Neo-Classical symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, but he still had a foot in the Classical style, and composer/conductors such as Wagner vigorously uprooted it.

So, Norrington played the music as it was written, on period instruments, using period performance practices. The result was astonishing. Norrington summed it up: His purpose was to make Beethoven sound new again by performing it the way it was in Beethoven's time when it was shattering to the musical establishment.

Norrington didn't invent something new, he merely restored something forgotten so that it seemed new. But it is not just the techniques that do it--other groups had performed on period instruments without the same effect (Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music comes to mind). Norrington looked past the traditional technique and found what was uniquely shattering about Beethoven in his day, and brought it back.

Using the Zone System does not, therefore, mean we are attempting to channel Ansel Adams. It is just a means to an end--a way of visualizing how tones in the scene will be represented in the print. What makes Adams uniquely Adams was not his use of technique, but rather the importance he places on unsullied Nature with a capital N.

But that doesn't mean that unsullied nature is not relevant to modern man. And this is where the establishment can lose sight of regular people. I was in Alaska for 10 days over the last couple of weeks. I made some purely abstract photos of such things as waves on the sea, bark on trees, the grain of wood, the surface of a pipeline pig, and so on. But it would be wrong to think that one cannot experience Nature (with the N) in the same way landscape artists did 100 years ago. It's easy to say another photo of Mount McKinley has no meaning, but then when you stand there at 2500 feet elevation and look at the top of a mountain peak nearly four miles higher, it has an effect. Some might think it relevant to focus on the tawdry gravel parking lot at the overlook, but most will just stand there with their jaws slack.

So, is there a fresh way to represent a subject so often represented as Mount McKinley? Maybe not, and this is where I get Paul's thesis. But I would not say it can't be done, just that I can't do it. That certainly didn't keep me from trying, however. And when I tried, I was not burying myself in the tradition Adams represented, I was just trying to capture what I felt at the time. I sometimes think post-modern mostly city dwellers have become so cynical about the natural scene that they have forgotten that it can still be powerful, even without showing how humankind is ruining it to make some point.

Alaska is also junky in a lot of ways, and I tried to find a pattern worth recording in that junkiness. Based on my review last night of the digital photos I made, I failed completely. There was nothing of the natural composition of happenstance evident in Friedlander's work. I think trying to copy him will lead me further astray than copying Adams.

I have a poster of Monolith hanging in my house. I notice it every time I walk by it. That hunk of rock speaks through that photo, and no passage of time or excess of familiarity seems to silence it for me.

Now, on the whole issue of individual photos versus self-edited series: I see a place for both. A good poet might write an epic, but he also might right a single couplet. The challenge is to be profound with the simple statement, but to also be profound with the lengthy statement.

This also comes up in music. Much of recent music seems to be a single idea, stated singly. Popular songs have a (as in, one) hook. Popular orchestral music has one theme. I have a hard time squaring that with the multi-themed 45-minute symphonies written in past decades, and many times when listening to a contemporary work I've longed for a longer statement from the composer, or an idea that could sustain a longer statement. Vaughan Williams's fourth symphony explores angst, perhaps, but it explores it from many directions: anger, confusion, melancholy, crying, and shouting. (F minor has that effect.) That is rather like one of Paul's pepper analogies. The Beatles may explore one of those emotions in a two-minute pop song.

There is a place for both. I assembled a portfolio on the San Antonio Missions about 20 years ago, and my purpose was to reflect a broader reaction to those edifices and their history than was possible in any one photograph. But the one acceptable (to me) photo I made of Mount McKinley says all I have the ability to say about that mountain. All the others said nothing that would expand on what was covered in that one.

Cubism was an approach to a subject that represented it from multiple views in a single work--a nose from one side, an eye from the other, and the other eye from straight on. The idea, as I understand it, was to seek a different mode of displaying the broader facets of the subject. I'm not trying to be simplistic--I know this is only one aspect of that approach--but it's a way that allows the artist to say many things in one image. I sense that Paul is applying this sensibility to work like that produced by Friedlander. He is not revealing one aspect of a subject, though. He's revealing many aspects of a situation, subject to many interpretations. Does looking at a series of his photos reveal a point of view? I haven't seen it yet, but I don't blame him for that.

I don't know where I'm going with this, because I don't know where I'm going with my photography. So often, I look through the viewfinder and think "been there, done that" but still make the exposure anyway, mostly just because I know how. Often, I look at the ground glass and think, I like the way this relates to that, but then the photo reveals nothing of that and I wonder what my point was. Sometimes, I see a photo that speaks to me in ways I did not hear and the time I made it, and I think of these as happy accidents.

And that leads me to a question, for which I do not have a clue: Did the likes of Friedlander actually have a point of view when they embarked on their series of photos? Edit: I get the notion that he rebelled against any propositional idea. And indeed that is comforting--most what's in my head is so jumbled that it defies words, and that's why a make photographs to try and explain it. My own point of view seems to be: Nature is awesome, and for many people (not enough), it still is. Does that put me in the box of making nature Sublime? Can the natural scene as a source of renewal, even spiritual renewal, still be relevant? Does one have to live in the remote wilderness to have a claim on that renewal?

Rick "obviously confused" Denney

[paulr]

IDid the likes of Friedlander actually have a point of view when they embarked on their series of photos? Edit: I get the notion that he rebelled against any propositional idea. And indeed that is comforting--most what's in my head is so jumbled that it defies words, and that's why a make photographs to try and explain it.

I think it depends on what you mean by "point of view." If that implies a thesis or some kind of rubric or master plan, I seriously doubt it, based on what Friedlander has said. If it implies a general sense of what he's interested in exploring, then I think he did. His vision is too consistent for long periods to be explained any other way.

Working in an open-ended, exploratory fashion is wonderful because it creates so many opportunities to surprise yourself. Instead of deciding what you're going to show and then executing it, you wander off with an open mind, and later indulge in the process of figuring out what you did. Editing is the stage when you bring coherence to the whole mess, but it comes after looking at your work and questioning it. What's this all about? Or, of the possible things it might be about, which is richest and most interesting? Which is worth continuing to pursue?

Friedlander seemed most interested in making books; books are probably the most tightly controlled medium for sharing photographs. The bookmaker—in this case, the photographer—determines not just the selection of images, but the physical form, the groupings, the sequence, and any accompanying text. It takes a lot of thought, even if most of that thought came after the last click of the shutter.



Can the natural scene as a source of renewal, even spiritual renewal, still be relevant? Does one have to live in the remote wilderness to have a claim on that renewal?

I don't know. Are you showing us anything we don't already know? Are you showing yourself anything you don't already know? Those aren't always easy questions to answer. Sometimes I look at my own work and think, "maybe ..."

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - McWilliams is one of the most influential persons in the development of what you
call "alternative landscapes". Of course, I've been doing them too for half a century, but so what; all kinds of people have who aren't the usual suspects. By pretentious I
mean conspicuously tailored, over-the-top, in order to fish for museum or big-city art
critic attention, at the expense of empathy with the subject matter itself. Includes stuff like taking pictures of outhouses at scenic turnouts just to be artsy-fartsy, or in
the case of Christenberry, to make the South look like a New Englander's stereotype
of the South. McWillams has a certain amt of web presence, so check him out if you
have time. Better, look at a monograph. Older work is classic 8x10 azo contact I think.

[paulr]

I don't see any pretense. Red flags go off for me whenever I hear charges of "pretentious." It's a judgement masquerading as a description; usually shorthand for high-brow, different, or not-what-i-like. Since he's lived in the south for decades, while I have only visited, I won't comment on the work's "authenticity" ... another judgement that masquerades as a description and frequently means nothing that anyone can agree on. For what it's worth, I don't see what Christenberry is pretending to be that he isn't. And I'm baffled by the suggestion of "over the top" ... the top of what? His work looks straightforward and conservative to me.

Can you point to McWilliams links? A search under his name gave a lot of spurrious garble.

[rdenney]

...Since he's lived in the south for decades, while I have only visited, I won't comment on the work's "authenticity" ... another judgement that masquerades as a description and frequently means nothing that anyone can agree on.

A lot of times, photographs and other art about the south focuses on decay and racism, which are two favorite topics. Of course, a lot of photography of the north focuses on decay and racism, too, but depicts in in very different ways. Racism pictures from the north tend to show city poor folks in hopeless conditions, and from the south they show rural poor folks in hopeless conditions. And in the south, they show KKK. I have always lived in the south and have never seen anyone wearing a KKK hood, or seen any evidence myself of their activities. I've seen plenty more evidence of the more insidious institutional racism of the north.

Thus, when artists of "the south" (as a subject) show decayed old country stores, rusting hulks of cars in empty fields, and KKK members peering out of windows, it will be seen by most southerners as playing on northern stereotypes.

It's true that those stereotypes are themselves stereotypes, but nearly all of the south is about different things. He could have described his work as something other than "the south" and a lot of this perception would have been resolved, I suspect.

So, I see where Drew is coming from on that statement. Like you, I don't really get the "pretentious" and "over the top" comments, despite the usual photographing with a box brownie because I'm an artist thing, which most of us will interpret as schtick whether or not it really is.

Rick "who still lives in the south, but not by much" Denney

[paulr]

This article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Christenberry) paints an interesting picture of him.

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - you should be able to get web hits entering, Land of Deepest Shade, or simply,
John McWilliams photographs. There's a fair amt of difference between the work that
got him recognition in the first place and his current work, but my guess is that you'd
appreciate most of it. He does an especially good job illustrating the clash between Old
South decay and modern suburban carnage of the landscape, but in a manner which is
always distinctly visually effective in the individual images per se. Egbert's work over in
Germany isn't quite my personal cup of tea, and it's all 35mm, but he and his wife who
does most of the actual printing are very nice folks, and the cultural difference in what
constitutes effective contemporary imagery is an interesting feature.

[Drew Wiley]

Rick - Certainly Christenberry's LF 8X10 work is unexceptional and would have probably
been ignored outright if he didn't already have his foot in the door with the right connections and his little tabletop shots of KKK figurines, and the fuzzy miniature camera stuff before that. All of it looks artsified to my eye. The KKK is slightly alive in So.Cal with a skinhead/biker bent to it. My great grandfather was an abolitionist Union volunteer who got severely wounded and was personally decorated by Lincoln. He became a true "Dances with Wolves" figure who went to live among the remaining wild
Indians of the Northwest after the war left him with only one arm. Then he bushwhacked across the Cascades to found Bay City, Oregon, where the famous Tilllamook Cheese factory is. The fishing port of Tillmook across the Bay was already a
town inhabited by former Confederate soldiers. Then his eldest son had his
picture and name erased from every family photograph and document in existence. No
one in the clan was even allowed to speak his name. We always wondered why. Finally, when my Father was about 85 years old we discovered a newspaper clipping
from the 1920's. It turns out his unmentionable uncle had been hanging around the wrong crowd in the fishing port and had himself become the Grand Dragon of the Northwest. He burnt down a black church and was carted off to prison, and subsequently his cartouche was chiseled from the very memory of the family. Who would have guessed?

[paulr]

I certainly like the handful of McWilliam's pictures that I found. Considering how long he's been at it, and that he has a book, and that he's the director of an art school, he's cultivated very little little presence on the web. Seems like he's playing hard to get.

[Jim Michael]

I just took a look at some of Christenberry's work (http://www.pacemacgill.com/williamchristenberry-1-1.html) and it accurately reflects the rural South. Some of it reminds me of scenes from an area of west central Alabama when I was doing archaeological field work in the late 80's.

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - I don't know if McWilliams is playing hard to get; he's had some serious venues
in his career. But he's a class enough act that he doesn't need to be in people's face
with some kind of gimmick.

[paulr]

I'm just being tongue in cheek. I don't really think he's playing hard to get. Possibly just never got inspired to build a site and isn't repped by a gallery that has web presence. A little surprising in this corner of the millennium but but not unheard of.

[mdm]

http://alandofdeepestshade.blogspot.com/
Apt?

[Drew Wiley]

Wrong link! "Land of Deepest Shade" was an exhibition then a well-known book published by Aperture. It had nothing to do with the funeral industry, although there are one or two Southern cemetery shots in it.

[mdm]

Here is an interesting article that includes Lee Friedlander, et al.
http://bremser.tumblr.com/post/6320235853/google-street-view

[paulr]

Here is an interesting article that includes Lee Friedlander, et al.
http://bremser.tumblr.com/post/6320235853/google-street-view

That's interesting in that it speaks separately to Friedlander and to the significance of the editing process.

The author's most curious idea (one I've never heard before) is his human-centric definition of a photography. Photography's definition has evolved quite a bit over the years, but every version I've seen is technical. Wayne (I don't know his last name) believes that an image becomes a photograph only after a human has in some way or another participated in the selection ... if not through the viewfinder, then through the culling and editing of piles of mechanically created images.

I'm not really behind this as a definition, but it's an interesting way of looking at things.

[Bill Burk]

I overlooked this thread. Didn't realize it was about Art, the meaning of Life and Everything.

Picked up a promising book at the library the other day, "How to look at everything" by David Finn.

Two back-to-back chapters in the book pulled out my feelings on the Friedlander Adams split. "Walking in the city" and "Communing with nature."

The city chapter enhanced my understanding of the revolving door as Finn described a picture he had taken... "all of us being absorbed in our own worlds and being oblivious to others"

I see two faces fragments to the left of the man walking in the revolving door, one profile and one straight on. Are they reflections of real women, or happenstance shapes that look like faces?

Finn was trying to be thorough but I felt his chapter on nature never got far from people. More a city person I guess. It's currently not my thing, when I go in the city all I see other people's art.

Paul,

Got a kick out of your comment that landscape photographers are over-represented here.

I agree that you need to see a lot of a photographer's work, up close if possible, with the photographer if possible. Once you have an appreciation of the photographer, one piece can hang on your wall to remind you of the rest.

But I side with Drew that there is infinite wilderness to be experienced first hand. Just because it's not modern civilization, doesn't invalidate the theme. I wander around in dumstruck awe when I'm in the mountains, while Drew seems to know the mountains names and how they got there. Different depth of knowledge but felt strongly just the same.

[paulr]

Bill, I've said nothing to suggest that landscapes are somehow an unworthy subject matter. In fact nothing I've said holds one kind of subject matter over another; all my my remarks are about ways of looking or of showing the subject.

Since we're talking about Friedlander, we can take his example of the square format work he did in Yodemite in the 90s and early 2000s. He was using Ansel's subject matter precisely, but his vision was distinct. If Ansel's stance can be summarized as "ain't nature grand," (Weston's snarky remark), Friedlander's might be summarized as "ain't nature complex, inscrutable, confounding, and interesting—just like everything else" (my snarky remark).

His take on the mountains and forests is quite different from the Romantics' and late Modernists' takes; it's different from the New Topographic clan's, and different from the contemporary work that explores human interaction with the national parks.

Nonetheless, I don't see something I'd call a "Friedlander Adams Split." I see two people with different visions; one that represents the early 20th Century and one the late 20th Century. Any kind of country mouse vs. city mouse binary I find totally uninteresting. Significant photographs can be made anywhere and out of anything, provided the maker is doing some significant looking.

[paulr]

For what it's worth, which is probably little, I spend a lot of time in the mountains. I don't do a lot of photographing there anymore, but alpine climbing is actually what put a camera in my hands in the first place

[Bill Burk]

Somehow I got the impression you said it wasn't influential which made me defensive.

Even your snarky remarks are thought provoking so I'm just trying to follow your line of thinking and maybe help you see a little more.

So you were talking about ways of looking.

Country mouse vs. city mouse may be uninteresting, but it does illustrate that there is a difference between where your eyes and my eyes see their best. If you are like me, you made a deliberate decision to focus your attention and your feelings.

When I moved from the mountains to the city, I chose a small town 15 minutes from the city where I can have a small scene of apparent wilderness in my back yard.

My heart remains in the mountains, where I can spend precious little time. So when I go there, I take pictures that attempt to bring the mountains back home. Intellectually, I know it is an illusion, but irrationally I continue to attempt the feat.

I suppose travel photography is a bit like that too.

Back to what I find interesting. When you go to the mountains, you don't take pictures. When I go to the city, I don't take pictures.

I know my sight is turned off. I'm just trying to get to the dentist and back home in two hours. Occasionally I will pause out of respect to watch Yavno's cable car turnaround but I know I can't make a meaningful shot, so I go on my blind way.

You might be deliberately blind in the mountains, like I am in the city. I suppose I could turn on my vision in the city, but right now I can't get past the feeling that architecture and window displays are 'other people's creations.' I'm sure I could get over it if I applied some bravery. I also think you could do the same in the mountains if you could get over your feelings.

[paulr]

You might be deliberately blind in the mountains, like I am in the city. I suppose I could turn on my vision in the city, but right now I can't get past the feeling that architecture and window displays are 'other people's creations.' I'm sure I could get over it if I applied some bravery. I also think you could do the same in the mountains if you could get over your feelings.

For me it's not about blindness, or about feelings being in the way. What I'm interested in looking at is not always the same as what I'm interested in photographing. I've grown interested in photographing things that are not obviously beautiful. I like the process of digging and working to find the form and the relationships and the underlying something or other. In the mountains, that challenge isn't present for me. In all directions the beauty is overwhelming much of the time. In general I feel I would just be making small, lesser versions of it.

This is not a limitation inherent in the place or the subject; it's one that I find in the "ain't nature grand" approach. There are other approaches, certainly, but I find myself too involved in the grandeur to want to experiment with photography when I'm there. Photographing tends to stand between me and my experience of a place; it's why I do my best work in familiar places that I walk past every day. Being in mountains still feels like a privilege to me, even though I've spent years of my life in close proximity. I'm happier to look directly than through a box.

Robert Adams said something I think is profound ... that great art helps us see more than we would without it. He notes that most people would rather spend 30 minutes in front of Hopper's "Sunday Morning" than to spend the same amount of time on the street corner depicted. I know how to make photographs of my local empty lots that are at least sometimes more interesting than the lots themselves. I do not know how to do this with the Grand Teton or the Cirque of the Towers. Up in the high and wild places I'm happy to leave the photographic baggage behind ... both physically and figuratively.

[paulr]

Also ...
I really like Bradford Washburn's and Vittorio Sella's mountain photographs. They bring the perspective of people who have been into these ranges, all the way.

I'm less well versed in contemporary mountain pictures ... many look to me like calendars (Dykinga, etc.) or Adams re-enactments (whether Ansel or Robert).

People like John Brinton Hogan (http://www.johnbrintonhogan.com/Aqua_Peak_Joshua_Tree_NP.html) are doing work that strikes me as significant. This kind of thing gets dismissed as naked irony sometimes, but I don't see that. It strikes me as purely honest. It's what most of us actually experience of these wide-open spaces. This is the contemporary wild landscape in its most characteristic form: a roadside diorama. Teton National Park visitor statistics show that something like 1/10 of a percent of visitors ever leave the road, the scenic overlooks, the visitor centers.

It's why I can leave a traffic jam of humanity behind at Jenny Lake and turn up a climber's trail, and on some days in the middle of the season not see another human being for the next 18 hours. The characteristic view is the groomed, framed, and populated one—it deserves the serious attention given by these photographers.

[Drew Wiley]

Bingo on Sella and Washburn. But I don't see any resemblance between Rbt Adams and
AA's work at all, other than its silver gelatin in each case. The Hogan work you've linked just looks like the kind of stuff that was coming out people's ears in the 70's.

[paulr]

Bingo on Sella and Washburn. But I don't see any resemblance between Rbt Adams and AA's work at all, other than its silver gelatin in each case.

I mentioned them together because they share the same name ... I should have been more clear that I consider them different esthetics.

But they are closer to one another than you may assume. R. Adams was steeped in A. Adams' tradition, and his earlier work can be seen as a response to it.

I'd also be wary of any reductive characterizations of R. Adams' work if you haven't spent time with his less famous projects, like Cottonwoods, Summer Nights, Listening to the River, etc.



The Hogan work you've linked just looks like the kind of stuff that was coming out people's ears in the 70's.

Maybe. Who are you thinking of? I know Stephen Shore's national park work. It strikes me as closer to social documentary than landscape, but it's certainly a precursor to Hogan.

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - there were probably a couple dozen major color photographers working in this
"alternative landscape" category in the 70's. Most (not all) tended to be abominable technicians, both with a view camera and in the darkroom, if they printed their own work at all. Sally Euclaire put up several books and exhibitions which are characteristic of the school, though predictably only the East Coast individuals. There were probably just as many significant players here on the West Coast. Shore was just one example
of the general category. And of course, there were plenty more wannabees around, practically everywhere one looked. As for any resemblance between the two Adams ... Robert's printing style was much moreunderstated and much less theatrical (for lack of a better term) than the old bearded guy's work, plus the obvious distinction in mass-appeal vs elliptical subject matter in the landscapes. I don't think
books do RA's prints justice, simply because many of his images depend more on
textural subtlety rather than the high drama or high contrast which is at least publicly
a stereotype of AA's famous works.

[Bill Burk]

It is still worth discussing what you, I or other people see.

I believe people, as they drive on their road trips across America, see much more beauty in their minds than Hogan reveals literally exists in the reality when they arrive.

People are animals, their eyes and minds work to fuse an impression of the world around them.

Driving up Highway 1 in Oregon, beautiful white sand dunes stretch for miles in unblemished purity. The filth on the car windows, the pavement and weeds fringing the road, barbed wire fences along the estuaries, telephone poles and wires all vanish in the minds-eye as the motorist or passenger drives along.

I felt the impression of pure white sand embraced by forests when I drove by the scene. Family didn't allow me to stop for pictures, but practical reality I would need a whole day to do it justice and I would probably be disappointed by dune buggy tracks.

Farther up in Washington, Elk were lining the highway. As an animal I saw them for the beautiful animals they were. And that's all I saw. When I stopped the reality sunk in. The herd already walked away from the crowd people who had stopped before me.

But I believe people see scenery in a way that photography cannot reveal as they drive and it makes an impression that lasts through the night in the dingy hotel room.

Now send me to Yosemite Valley and I am likely to come away with Stephen Shore pictures. I find the place grotesque and overpopulated. I will include tent-cabins and telephone wires in my pictures because that is honest. But still, as you say, walk a few miles (in my example to Nelson lake) where the eagle soars and cross-country hiking is easier than following trails. Now I can find a pond which is evaporating and the shoreline has no human footprints except my own.

Here there is beauty all around. It is pure. And it is photogenic.

[Bill Burk]

[That trip to Nelson lake was a drier year.]

Still it only takes a few miles along the trail to take you from an everybody experience to a solo experience.

And once a few miles along the trail, it literally might only take a few hundred feet off the trail to put your feet where no human has ever had their feet.

I shuffle around a bit when I think I have done that, just to improve the odds on my claim.

[paulr]

Paul - there were probably a couple dozen major color photographers working in this "alternative landscape" category in the 70's.

I don't understand the designation "alternate landscape." I've never seen that before. It also doesn't make sense to create a label that suggests a kind of fringe for work that describes the world as it's typically seen.

By the mid-20th century, the unspoiled, Romantic, Thomas Moran and Ansel Adams genre of landscape represents an alternative view, not a mainstream one.

[paulr]

Driving up Highway 1 in Oregon, beautiful white sand dunes stretch for miles in unblemished purity. The filth on the car windows, the pavement and weeds fringing the road, barbed wire fences along the estuaries, telephone poles and wires all vanish in the minds-eye as the motorist or passenger drives along.

This is a really interesting phenomenon, and I'm sure we've all experienced it. I'm not the first to wonder the process of tuning out the concrete and fences is innate, or if it's our attention and memory distorting the world to comply with the pictures we've looked at all our lives.

I'm strongly inclined to the latter, since there's very little that seems to be innate in what constitutes a beautiful landscape. Mountains—which seem to be your favorite as well as mine—were seen as a hideous spectacle by Europeans up through the middle ages. They were not "scenery." They were God's wrath made manifest.

The wide open spaces of the American west in the 19th century were likewise not considered scenic. They were not even considered landscape. The word had a narrower definition back then, and the blankness and chaos of the West was seen as inhospitable to the enterprise of art. It certainly was not thought to be pretty.

What's my point? That ideas of beauty in the landscape are as much a social construct as anything else. Ideas of what's beautiful and what's ugly train us to not notice what's actually in front of our eyes. And if there's one photography does spectacularly well, it's to explore what's actually there.

I like to use the camera to challenge my habits of seeing (and the viewers' habits), not to simply reinforce them. One way to do this is to show the things that we typically tune out, and to find a way to make them worth looking at.

[rdenney]

So when I go there, I take pictures that attempt to bring the mountains back home.


In general I feel I would just be making small, lesser versions of it.

It seems to me that this is the nut of the discussion that we've been having in various forms and in many threads.

And it occurs to me that I make photos for Bill's reason, but still agree with Paul as to the outcome.

Many "pretty rocks" photographers who have galleries near those pretty rocks seem to be selling souvenirs to tourists, who also want to take a reminder back home--and a better reminder than they know they'll get with their digicam. Many, many of my photos were made because I had a limited opportunity to be there, and wanted to bring it home. I posted a couple of pictures of Mount McKinley over in the "safe haven" thread, and those were definitely motivated by just that desire. I don't dislike them, I suppose, but they are indeed lesser versions of the real thing.

Not all the photos are necessarily lesser, though. In some cases, I got something beyond what I saw, instead of less than what I saw (which is the usual case). I doubt that I could honestly claim that I did so on purpose.

And that is what runs afoul of Adams. I'm wondering if discussion the semiotics--the meaning of how nature is represented--is a blind alley.


Driving up Highway 1 in Oregon, beautiful white sand dunes stretch for miles in unblemished purity. The filth on the car windows, the pavement and weeds fringing the road, barbed wire fences along the estuaries, telephone poles and wires all vanish in the minds-eye as the motorist or passenger drives along.

This argument hits that point about the meaning of the landscape--a point of semiotics. If the landscape is a symbol of God (or of holiness, or impossible grandeur--whatever), then it earns the respect of being worshipped, and people make or want worshipful pictures of it. Whatever detracts from the holiness or purity is ignored and erased. I've done that so many times that the realization of it is embarrassing, because I don't really want to worship nature, I really want to enjoy nature. But, again, maybe that's a blind alley to the two statements I started with.

I'm thinking the main difference between Adams and Friedlander (as Paul describes him) is that Adams preached pre-visualization, while Friedlander depended on post-visualization. Paul describes him as going out with an idea, coming back with a bunch of stuff, and then finding in it what seems meaningful and editing around that discovery. In contrast, Adams's epiphany at Half Dome was that he saw the final print in is mind, and manipulated his craft to achieve just that.

Friedlander's photos show a real sense of composition and balance, though it only really became obvious to me when I tried to copy the style. His composition is so transparent that it looks random and easy. It is neither. But I think Friedlander had the talent to see those compositions without a lot of analysis and thought--they are innate to his craft. Maybe the art isn't in that. Maybe the art is something else--something fully supported by that craft but not to be confused with it. Maybe it's the same as how Paul describes his own work, finding a meaningful pattern in the plain (or ugly), which leads viewers to their own discoveries.

Sometimes I see the final image, Adams-style, but often when I try to visualize it, it just doesn't turn out that way. I've always thought that was a weakness of craft, but now I'm not so sure.

What I have never done, that Friedlander and Raphaelson seem to do, is go out with an idea. But I do find myself getting into particular moods when confronted with a subject. When I was walking around the National Gallery looking at modern art with my little Leica digicam, I was seeing minimalist images. When I was standing in front of Mount McKinley, I was as far from miminalism as possible--my mood was more maximalist (if that makes any sense). I was trying to capture the grandness, not the simple essence. It comes out worshipful, when I still really want just enjoyment.

I'm not even sure that's a valid or useful realization, or what I might do having realized it. But the two statements I quoted at the start really seem to put a finger on the main issue.

(I actually have quite a lot of images similar to Hogan's, but they never seemed particularly meaningful to me.)

Rick "who loved, for completely unartistic reasons, the pictures of the goofy old motorhomes and trailers" Denney

[rdenney]

Mountains—which seem to be your favorite as well as mine—were seen as a hideous spectacle by Europeans up through the middle ages. They were not "scenery." They were God's wrath made manifest.

I seem to recall literature from previous to Ansel Adams that appreciated mountains as we appreciate mountains. And I seem to recall 19th-century art--Frederick Church comes to mind--that did indeed romanticize raw and jagged nature.

But whether mountains were God's wrath or God's gift or an "Earth gesture" as Ansel Adams described them, people thought of mountains as being bigger than themselves, and beyond human consideration. That respect can be fear or worship, I suppose. They might get represented the same either way. I don't think that response to see mountains in worshipful terms was learned just in the last hundred years, nor do I think how we see it is a result of having seen art. I think it's a result of being made to feel small and insignificant, and all the detritus of humankind becomes insignificant with it.

Rick "who grew up where the tallest hills were freeway overpasses" Denney

[paulr]

I seem to recall literature from previous to Ansel Adams that appreciated mountains as we appreciate mountains. And I seem to recall 19th-century art--Frederick Church comes to mind--that did indeed romanticize raw and jagged nature.

Oh the victorians loved mountains. Prime fodder for the sublime. Mountains became pretty a good hundred years before that era.

Curiously, as late as 1700, the Alps were presumed to be (literally) infested with dragons, which had a much worse reputation among the Europeans than among the Asians. You didn't go there if you could help it.

[paulr]

I'm thinking the main difference between Adams and Friedlander (as Paul describes him) is that Adams preached pre-visualization, while Friedlander depended on post-visualization.

Well, Adams definitely exerted tighter formal control. As far as "pre-visualization," I've always thought that was a load of crap. There's too much information in a print to consciously visualize, and if that's where your attention was, you'd be strangling your intuition. I suspect anyone who ever pushed that kind of control freakery to its limits was rewarded with sad, flat, predictable images (see my various rants on conceptual art ...)


Paul describes him as going out with an idea, coming back with a bunch of stuff, and then finding in it what seems meaningful and editing around that discovery. In contrast, Adams's epiphany at Half Dome was that he saw the final print in is mind, and manipulated his craft to achieve just that.

If I described Friedlander like that then I didn't mean it. I don't think he had an idea, in any prescriptive sense. I think he had a lot of curiosity, and it was attuned to some things more than others. You could describe Adams the same way ... in this respect they really fall pretty close to each other when you put them in the context of all the kinds of photographers that exist. They both go into the world and notice stuff.

But if anything, I'd say Adams was more idea driven. He had ideas about what he wanted his pictures to mean, what he wanted them to do, how he wanted them to be seen. Friedlander, I think, is a lot looser. He's more willing to be guided by what he discovers.


Sometimes I see the final image, Adams-style, but often when I try to visualize it, it just doesn't turn out that way. I've always thought that was a weakness of craft, but now I'm not so sure.

I think it's an opportunity, not a weakness. Milan Kundera famously said that if the novels you write aren't at least a little bit smarter than you are, then maybe you should find another profession. You could say the same about any art. If you're too much in control of what you discover, how are you going to make anything that's smarter than you are?


What I have never done, that Friedlander and Raphaelson seem to do, is go out with an idea. But I do find myself getting into particular moods when confronted with a subject. When I was walking around the National Gallery looking at modern art with my little Leica digicam, I was seeing minimalist images. When I was standing in front of Mount McKinley, I was as far from miminalism as possible--my mood was more maximalist (if that makes any sense). I was trying to capture the grandness, not the simple essence. It comes out worshipful, when I still really want just enjoyment.

Screw ideas! You'll just trip over them when you're photographing. There are times for thinking, and times for quieting your mind. I don't think these tendencies you've discovered are anything to fight against.

[Bill Burk]

You go out with a bit of an idea but a lot of receptiveness. The idea remains filed away most of the time but some lucky moment you realize you are there, and camera ready. All the work is done and you already have the camera to your eye. All that's left is pressing the button.

Now you consciously arrange all you can think, you might even add a fine deliberate detail like a shrub in an otherwise purely rocky view. But your subconscious adds its own surprise for you. Maybe a symbol or shape in a corner you weren't watching. That's how you can make something smarter than you are.

[paulr]

"Filed away" is a nice way to put it. I think of musicians ... they fill their heads with a lot of ideas and theory and technique when they study and practice. All that learning is so they don't have to actively think when they perform.

Just like you don't have to think about grammar when you engage in the amazingly complex improvizational activity of conversation. This is all an imperfect analogy ... it's more about technique than ideas or esthetics ... but I suspect it's close enough.

And it's more of an ideal than anything. I'm not enough a zen master to shut up the inner dialog entirely. My groove gets interrupted by ideas about photography ... and about sex, food, money, getting caught tresspassing with a camera, music, kittens, movies, stuff I'm writing, when I need to call my mother ... it's actually kind of noisy in here.

[Brian K]

"Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Burk
So when I go there, I take pictures that attempt to bring the mountains back home.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paulr
In general I feel I would just be making small, lesser versions of it.

It seems to me that this is the nut of the discussion that we've been having in various forms and in many threads."

I think Rick has pointed out a very clear difference in the perspectives.

I am much more in line with Bill's POV. I am trying to bring home, and share, the feeling of the place I have been. But as it's MY feeling, there's a certain degree of interpretation that I consciously or unconsciously impose on it. I think this is more the Ansel POV.

I disagree with Paul's perspective in that while you can argue that you can never fully capture the feeling of a place, or as he put it, are limited to a small, lesser version of it, not all scenes that ultimately end up as being beautiful or interesting in a print start out that way. I can say with all sincerity that a great deal of my work is a lot more interesting or more beautiful than the original scene because of the decisions I made.

Choosing the right angle and composition, choosing the right light, choosing the right moment and then altering the reality with contrast filters, dodges and burns, exposure, print contrast and diffusion often make a good scene so much more.

And this difference between my perspectives and Paul's might be the difference in POV between a commercial background versus an academic background. My background in photography was mostly about making things look better or more interesting than they really were. That was my job and it is the foundation of advertising photography. And when you've spent a few decades making commonplace things beautiful and sexy you learn that you are not limited by the scene or subject but by your own skill. I think the better landscape photographers have those skills. I think those that are limited to seeing just what is there and documenting it, don't have those skills so they've adapted their work to match their abilities, and i think to some extent to justify their work through verbal or written argument instead of letting the work stand on it's own.

On my trips I see scenes very similar to a great deal of the contemporary landscape work out there, that sort of dead pan landscape. If I think I can turn it into something more, I shoot it. If to me the elements or content of the scene is just too boring, or maybe my own skills limit me from doing something more to it, I won't shoot it. And it's not like I don't have images of mundane scenes in my portfolio, I do, it's just that hopefully by the time it gets to my portfolio it no longer looks like a mundane scene.

Sometimes my work is a lesser capture of a scene, but sometimes it's more than what the scene had to offer on it's own. The work that impresses me the most is not the scenes with God light and exquisite composition, scenes that would make anyone slam on the brakes and grab their camera, mind you I still enjoy that work because it is a scene of immense natural beauty, but what really impresses me is when someone turns a mundane scene into something just as compelling as that brake slammer. And that's not work I see very often, and in most cases all they have done is merely record something of little interest in a less than interesting way.

As for Friedlander, what I find boring about his work is that I've seen it all before. Often through my own viewfinder as a teenager. I grew up in an urban environment and carried a camera with me everywhere, and juxtapositions of people in urban scenes was something I did often and actually found it very easy. It's easy because we are made to have a reaction to other people and as a result react with emotion or at least connection to images of people. It's far easier to empathize with a person in a scene versus a rock. If someone can make me have a feeling about a rock, I am truly impressed and I view that as real talent.

[rdenney]

"Filed away" is a nice way to put it. I think of musicians ... they fill their heads with a lot of ideas and theory and technique when they study and practice. All that learning is so they don't have to actively think when they perform.

Just like you don't have to think about grammar when you engage in the amazingly complex improvizational activity of conversation. This is all an imperfect analogy ... it's more about technique than ideas or esthetics ... but I suspect it's close enough

It's maybe not as close as you think. When I perform music, I'm processing the sound of the product through an amazingly complex filtering mechanism, and making a host of adjustments as I go. The training is so that the mechanism of those adjustments (i.e., technique) does not eat up that mental headroom. No musician performs without thinking, but they are thinking about the musical effect, not the steps they take to achieve it. Those who claim to perform only by feeling without any thinking at all are, I suspect, confusing the processing of feelings with lack of thinking. The brain is not asleep during the process--it is running right to the max. The processing of feelings is a thought process.

That's why I like your idea of propositional thinking, or thinking in logical steps. Intense thought processes during photography, yes. But logical constructs, perhaps not. Neither, though, when we are consuming our minds with f-stops, exposure, reciprocity, Zone system, etc. Photography is high-technology art (even pre-digital, and especially large format) and the temptation is to let the thinking required to address the technology consume all the mental headroom. That's like performing a piece of music and still being worried about whether I know the fingerings on my instrument for that pesky F# scale.

Rick "who practices for technique and thinks for expression" Denney

[paulr]

My background in photography was mostly about making things look better or more interesting than they really were. That was my job and it is the foundation of advertising photography

What interests me has absolutely nothing to do with advertising photography, or anything else that could be seen as gilding the lilly. Advertising photographers make things look sexier or more appealing, but they do not make them more interesting. They do the opposite: make them fit a generic standard of attractiveness.

I'm interested in a process of discovery; of finding something interesting, compelling, beautifual, surprising, and using the various formal tools of picture making to bring those alive in an image. If such work is successful, it will often not be "pretty," nor will it look conventional. It's anti-advertising photography, really.

In this regard, Ansel's style is much closer than Friedlander's to advertising photography. He pushed landscapes toward a common esthetic ideal (one rooted in the romantic sublime from the previous century), and even said that he did so with didactic purposes, including showing or selling the idea of the value of wilderness (even though most of what he photographed represented ideas of wilderness without actually being such).



As for Friedlander, what I find boring about his work is that I've seen it all before.

If you're saying you saw it before Friedlander, then I'll wager you haven't actually seen Friedlander at all ... you're just skittering on the surface.

And if your teenage pictures actually did what his pictures do, then what a pitty you never showed them to Szarkowski. You wouldn't be wasting your time right now bickering with the likes of us!

Anyhow, if you want to argue this point, show us the pictures. Show us pre-Friedlander work by anyone that does what he does ... and I don't mean a cherry-picked lucky image. I mean someone who was able to do it consistently enough to articulate a vision.

[paulr]

Rick, we're stumbling over what "thinking" means, which neuroscientists and philosophers likewise struggle to pin down. When you say

"The training is so that the mechanism of those adjustments (i.e., technique) does not eat up that mental headroom. No musician performs without thinking, but they are thinking about the musical effect, not the steps they take to achieve it. Those who claim to perform only by feeling without any thinking at all are, I suspect, confusing the processing of feelings with lack of thinking. "

I think we're saying close to the same thing. I don't want to suggest that the brain is asleep, just that the more rigid and conscious thought processes aren't in charge at the moment. I assume the brain is very busy during any creative act. But what, precisely, it's doing, I got no idea.

[Bill Burk]

Maybe the senses take charge and work directly (or through very abbreviated paths through the skull).

The gray matter part of the brain takes a long time to do anything, I think the most interesting photographs may be caused by a short circuit.

[Drew Wiley]

Paul - I don't know how you call something "mainstream" when so much of it has
been deliberately skewed to counter previous traditions in landscape work, and has
been heavily influenced both by the Pop Art disease and by Photorealism (whose
painters earned their fame by painstaking craft rather than the avoidance of it like
some of their camera-toting pseudo-clones). Your pigionhole mentality seems like just more myopic NYC garble to me. But scuse me, cause I'm headed out the door with the 8x10, and just about eveywhere on the edge of town there are plenty of things around here which might not be classified as raw wilderness, but where uncluttered nature nonetheless does still heavily prevail, and where you'd have to make the deliberate effort of artificiality to include a Motel 6 or outhouse in the
foreground. I shoot a lot of things in the city too (mostly 35mm, simply for convenience and safety), but there's nothing out of date or backwards about natural subject matter, just because AA is allegedly the only person in the history of the
world who tangled with this kind of thing (or so it would seem from the endless simplistic droning of his name).

[paulr]

I think the most interesting photographs may be caused by a short circuit.

aka "temporary insanity." If only I could bottle that ...

[Brian K]

What interests me has absolutely nothing to do with advertising photography, or anything else that could be seen as gilding the lilly. Advertising photographers make things look sexier or more appealing, but they do not make them more interesting. They do the opposite: make them fit a generic standard of attractiveness.

I'm interested in a process of discovery; of finding something interesting, compelling, beautifual, surprising, and using the various formal tools of picture making to bring those alive in an image. If such work is successful, it will often not be "pretty," nor will it look conventional. It's anti-advertising photography, really.

In this regard, Ansel's style is much closer than Friedlander's to advertising photography. He pushed landscapes toward a common esthetic ideal (one rooted in the romantic sublime from the previous century), and even said that he did so with didactic purposes, including showing or selling the idea of the value of wilderness (even though most of what he photographed represented ideas of wilderness without actually being such).




If you're saying you saw it before Friedlander, then I'll wager you haven't actually seen Friedlander at all ... you're just skittering on the surface.

And if your teenage pictures actually did what his pictures do, then what a pitty you never showed them to Szarkowski. You wouldn't be wasting your time right now bickering with the likes of us!

Anyhow, if you want to argue this point, show us the pictures. Show us pre-Friedlander work by anyone that does what he does ... and I don't mean a cherry-picked lucky image. I mean someone who was able to do it consistently enough to articulate a vision.


Bickering? I thought this was a discussion? So when I write it's bickering and when you write it's an intellectual exchange?

Here's some of my work at around age 17 or 18. These were negs that were easily attainable so they may not be that Friedlander like, and to be honest the work that I did that was closer to Friedlander in style never really got to see the light of day because I didn't like them.

BTW I'd love to see the photographs from the teenage years of others. It's an interesting exercise I think to see the way the years have altered our vision.

[Brian K]

Here's a few more.

The exploding Pepper was in response to an assignment at SVA to shoot a green pepper. Everyone shot Weston's, I decided to blow one up with firecrackers. But I guess that's the predictable approach?

[paulr]

Brian, I was including myself in the 'bickering' remark and I meant it tongue-in-cheek. Mostly taking notice that Friedlander and Shore and Eggleston have better things to do than sit at their computers and defend themselves.

As you pointed out already none of the pics you posted is Friedlander-like. All of them have a central point of focus (in terms of attention); none of them plays with or disrupts any visual conventions (that existed circa 1960s to 1970s); none of them is witty (except maybe the exploding pepper ...)

At any rate, I don't care who's pics you post ... show me anyone pre Friedlander whose work was consistently Friedlander-like. I'd be curious if anyone could find anything of substance.

[GabrielSeri]

I don't know if I am the only one who finds this interesting..Friedlander went to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the same school I went to.
This school is not the traditional art school, at least when I went there, they concentrate heavily on discipline and technique. Honestly, it was almost a military school, at least the first year where they taught all the technical skills. Two teachers at Art Center came up with the zone system, Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. Anyway.. I wonder if Friedlander developed his style as a protest or rebellion against his Art Center teachings. Another thing, if he went to Art Center, believe me he knew the technical side of photography. His work may not show it because that is not his style.

[paulr]

Paul - I don't know how you call something "mainstream" when so much of it has been deliberately skewed to counter previous traditions in landscape work ...

Most movements run counter to previous traditions. Ansel-style landscapes, which you seem to be suggest are eternal and sacrosanct, were in fact radical once, in a couple of ways. They came out of two traditions: Romantic American landscape painting, which was set directly against previous ideas of landscape art, and the f64 school, which was set directly against the style that had previously been accepted as art photography.


...and has been heavily influenced both by the Pop Art disease and by Photorealism...

This is just wrong. I don't know where you get this stuff.


Your pigionhole mentality seems like just more myopic NYC garble to me.

My arguments are rooted broadly in art history. Yours seem come from some conception of the world where the photography you happen to like most was handed down from the Lord on stone tablets. I'll take the charges of myopic and garble and toss them right back. And I don't know what NYC has to do with any of this.


but there's nothing out of date or backwards about natural subject matter, just because AA is allegedly the only person in the history of the world who tangled with this kind of thing

Thank you for spectaculary missing every point I've made (and in many case re-iterated). I'm going to stop responding to you until you show some evidence of having read my posts. The straw man bit is tedious.

[paulr]

Another thing, if he went to Art Center, believe me he knew the technical side of photography. His work may not show it because that is not his style.

That's interesting; I didn't know that. It's not at all surprising looking at his work from the 50s and 60s (which is not as famous as the later work).

[mdm]

Here's a few more.

The exploding Pepper was in response to an assignment at SVA to shoot a green pepper. Everyone shot Weston's, I decided to blow one up with firecrackers. But I guess that's the predictable approach?

They are all interesting pictures but the pepper is nicest because you made it. When we are young we are open and respond with less bias. Learning, experience and discrimination are nothing other than bias (except if they are fact), but not all bias is bad. Commercial photography is about influencing people, creating a bias in favour of the client. But with other work you can look past our bias and show the world what is really there, or you can expose bias for all to see, you can influence others' bias and move them to another place, you can bash your head against a rock only to be apperciated after your brains splatter, we strive for something special but most of us are incapable of changing or moving anyone. Photography that sells for mega bucks changes the world a little. It is not good or bad, its the new bias. Perfection is not art any more than imperfection. Some people are too biased to see that, some people (Mr Wiley for example) can't be moved, and thats ok too.

[Jim Jones]

Brian -- Thank you for posting the pepper. I greatly admire Weston, but can also enjoy a clever spoof on his work.

[tgtaylor]

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/images/full/friedlander/friedlander_selfportrait_haverstraw.jpg

Lee Friedlander
Self-Portrait,
Haverstraw, New York
1966

© Lee Friedlander





The following excerpt is from the foreword to "Photography 63/An International Exhibition" by Nathan Lyons:

"To truly understand the abilities of the photographer his work must be experienced as an individual synthesis, each photograph seen in the context of other photographs he has taken. The exhibition is designed as a graphic index of photography as practiced by a younger generation of photographers.

On what basis, therefore, might we begin to assess the work in this exhibition beyond obvious technical or stylistic considerations? When we look at the work of a photographer can we sense the unity within his own work? It may be well to say that man seeks to find form for the expression of his ideas and feelings, but to what degree are we willing to share or understand what it is he is attempting to say? The extension of expression, to challenge our feelings rather than satiate them, demands an understanding of the significance of vision and the value of personal expression."

Nathan Lyons, 1963


Although I haven't read every page in this thread, it is nevertheless clear to me that only one poster “...understands what it is he (Friedlander) is attempting to say...an(d) the significance of (his) vision and the value of personal expression.”

From the quote neither did Lyons.

Thomas

[mdm]

I dont support the wingeing host site of this portrait, but here is another, not recent.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/21/avedon_lee_friedlander.jpg

[Bill Burk]

I'm beginning to appreciate Friedlander and probably got years' worth of art school too, thanks to this thread.

[Drew Wiley]

OK, don't respond if you don't want to, Paul ... but what on earth do the Old Gray
Bearded One and painterly Romanticism have in common? None of the painters he
hung around were Romanticists, nor we the other members of f/64. Steigliz was
known for advancing a completely different crowd. Statements like this seem like
pigeonholing Carleton Watkins as a "photographer of the fading frontier", to quote
one biographer who plainly didn't understand what was going on visually at all.
Are you sure the Ansel works you're describing and classifying weren't distributed
by someone named Norsigian?

[Brian K]

Brian -- Thank you for posting the pepper. I greatly admire Weston, but can also enjoy a clever spoof on his work.

Thanks Jim. Sadly I only got a "B" for that image......

Last year, I recall some photographer had a show in NY totally comprised of objects being blown up. I guess I was 36 years ahead of the times.....

[Brian K]

I'm beginning to appreciate Friedlander and probably got years' worth of art school too, thanks to this thread.

Bill, years worth of art school is not necessarily a good thing......

[Drew Wiley]

Maybe we've finally figured out Friedlander due to that self-portrait behind the wheel.
He was coming back from watching Rebel Without a Cause.

[tgtaylor]

A few days ago I came down with a cold. At first I thought that it was the flu but after imputing my symptoms in to the Mayo clinic's online symptom checker it told me that I had a cold and not the flu. I rarely get a cold and once went 20 or so years without catching even one. I thought that was a good sign until one day I read that people who rarely get a cold a more prone to get something else that is worse. Well, if it's not one thing then it's another.

Anyway I awoke Sunday morning with a minimum of tingling in the nostrils and only sneezed a couple of times. I hadn't done my usual jog, walk, and trip to the gym for weight training in a few days and really needed to get moving again. A trip to the high country would be unwise as would engaging in any activity that would be strenuous. Then an idea burst forth in my mind like an incandescent bulb being turned on in a darkened room: Why not do a Lee Freidlander trip in downtown San Francisco with my Nikon F3? I could spend several hours walking around the city shooting whatever appealed carrying minimal weight and get some exercise at the same time.

I pulled out the F3 (batteries still good!), 24mm, 50mm and 85mm lens, polarizer (for windows), a couple of rolls of Neopan 400 from the top of the wine cooler, and a small Hakuba photo backpack to carry everything in – a very lightweight set-up to walk around with.

Being a Sunday it was easy finding a downtown parking spot and I located an unrestricted one alongside the Zeitgeist Bar on the corner of Duboce and Valencia – just a block from Market Street. The Zeitgeist is a popular bar but murders have been committed there and, as in all downtown San Francisco bars, one is wise to stay alert at all times.

I worked my way down Valencia and upon reaching Market Street turned east towards the Ferry Building - working the T's and side streets along the way. It was a beautiful day to be out in and I managed to capture several good and candid images. I missed a few though, like the street person walking towards me carrying a large sign across his chest asking for a donation of weed so that he could get stoned; or the film crew with a police motorcycle escort towing an SUV up Market Street with 2 actors in the front seat dressed in business suits being filmed from the back of the tow vehicle with two spotlights providing the lighting - they turned off market and headed towards City Hall; or the well dressed elderly colored lady sitting quietly and alone behind a small circular table with a bottle of orange soda watching the crowd from the front window of one of the many small establishments that cater to anyone including street people; or the equally well dressed elderly colored lady sitting alone on a public bench on Market Street enjoying the fine weather and watching the passing scene.

It was a great day! If you really want to know what makes a street photographer like Lee Freidlander tick, then I'd recommend that you try it out.

Thomas

[Mark Sawyer]

Bill, years worth of art school is not necessarily a good thing......

The only useless knowledge is knowledge you don't have...

[Brian K]

The only useless knowledge is knowledge you don't have...

Actually that's quite wrong. Getting bad, inaccurate or misleading information is worse than not having it. One of the first things I was taught when i started assisting was, "don't work for bad photographers, they'll teach you bad habits". Same is true about art schools, bad instructors disseminate bad information. And let's face the facts, there is some truth to the old adage that those that can, do, those that can't teach.

[Winger]

A few years ago, I saw what I think was a pretty comprehensive exhibit of Friedlander work in Ohio (Cleveland?). Is there a book that covers much of his work or just the different themes? I left that exhibit as a Friedlander fan, btw, though I don't like all of his work. A fair amount of it did resonate with me.
The same weekend, I also saw a good exhibit of Edward Weston work. Interesting contrast between the two. I like both, though not everything from each.

[paulr]

And let's face the facts, there is some truth to the old adage that those that can, do, those that can't teach.

That's not a fact, it's a tired old cliché, and in the art world it holds up less than just about anywhere else. I've gathered from some other remarks you've made that you don't equate an artist's money-making potential with how "good" they are. I don't either. Teaching has become a standard career for many of the best artists in the world, whether writers, composers, photographers or whatever.

But I wouldn't even asssume the best practitioners are the best teachers. Sometimes the best teachers are just the best teachers.

Art schools are like any other schools: some are excellent and some aren't. And no matter where a student goes, their experience will be largely dictated by how well they connect with a particular teacher ... or more than one, if they're especially lucky..

[paulr]

Is there a book that covers much of his work or just the different themes? I left

Yes! This (http://www.amazon.com/Friedlander-Peter-Galassi/dp/0870703447/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308063348&sr=8-1) is the mack-daddy of them all, and the current Amazon price is a steal.

edited to add: just saw this is the new softcover edition. If you want hardbound that should be available too.

[Brian K]

That's not a fact, it's a tired old cliché, and in the art world it holds up less than just about anywhere else. I've gathered from some other remarks you've made that you don't equate an artist's money-making potential with how "good" they are. I don't either. Teaching has become a standard career for many of the best artists in the world, whether writers, composers, photographers or whatever.

But I wouldn't even asssume the best practitioners are the best teachers. Sometimes the best teachers are just the best teachers.

Art schools are like any other schools: some are excellent and some aren't. And no matter where a student goes, their experience will be largely dictated by how well they connect with a particular teacher ... or more than one, if they're especially lucky..

Paul, you fail to post is that I said that there is SOME truth to that adage, I did not claim it as an absolute. There are some truly excellent teachers who are also excellent photographers out there and I know some of them. Not every art or photography school is Yale, RIT, SVA, etc.

I went to art school (SVA), and even taught at art school (SVA). And over the period of 25 years hired hundreds of BFA's to assist me, and looked at the work of and interviewed perhaps thousands of BFA's looking to work for me. People from RIT, SVA, Brooks, RISD, Pratt, Art center, etc. From actually having them work for me I have a pretty good sense as to the skills they leave school with. How many BFA's have you hired?

[paulr]

I have hired four hundred thousand, six hundred eighty two BFAs, and plan to hire three hundred fifty more before lunch. Very busy day.

Seriously, what's the point? You seem to be talking about photo asisting skills, which are not evengets taught in MFA or undergrad fine arts programs. That's vocational school stuff. My friends who used to assist commercial photographers did to GET those skills. They weren't going to waste their education dime on nuts and bolts.

What I see is that there are good and bad schools, good and bad teachers, and in many cases which is which will depend a lot on what student you ask.

We probably agree that a lot of teachers, maybe even a majority, leave something to be desired. I don't think this is unique to art school. A relatively small number of academics that I know (all of them MFAs or PhDs) have a genuine passion for teaching. Even ones who consider it a great responsibility often find themselves beaten down by the thankless tedium of the adjunct prof lifestyle. These people are artists (or scholars or scientists) first, who need a way to make a living, and the one path that they seem qualified for sucks the life out of them. The reasons are usually more administrative and budgetary than anything else.

This situation is the same for my friends who teach art, English, creative writing, political science, art history, and biology.

[Brian K]

Paul, I only hired hundreds, but I viewed the PORTFOLIOS, resumes and interviewed thousands. And while you make light of that bit of experience, it's a vast one that you lack. And what I saw in many of their portfolios was a lack of photographic skill. Poor composition, poor printing, poor sense of light, no lighting skills, predictable cliche imagery, etc. Granted there were some with impressive work, but I would expect after 4 years of college they would ALL be at least at the level of competency.


"That's vocational school stuff. My friends who used to assist commercial photographers did to GET those skills. They weren't going to waste their education dime on nuts and bolts."

Photo assisting skills? Something learned in vocational school? Nuts and bolts? Like lighting, composition, competence? Have you ever even hired ANY assistants? You have no idea about what you are talking about. Your friends used to try to work for guys like me. And they'd start out at my studio by sweeping the floor.

Just what do you think photo assisting skills are? They're about learning how to consistently produce a photograph at high level of expertise on demand, every time. About being able to produce an image under any circumstance, not just about being in the right place at the right time, but being able to MAKE a photograph instead of merely TAKING one. Being able to create ANY image you can imagine. And what is the purpose of art school photo skills then versus assisting skills? Being able to BS about your photographs?

[paulr]

Poor composition, poor printing, poor sense of light, no lighting skills, predictable cliche imagery, etc.

You'll have to forgive me, but considering that you've said basically the same things about Friedlander and some other people who have become icons of 20th century art, I'm not about to give your judgments the benefit of the doubt.


Photo assisting skills? Something learned in vocational school? Have you ever even hired ANY assistants? You have no idea about what you are talking about.

I've worked as a photo assistant, as have many of my friends whom I consider impressive photographic artists. It's all learn-on-the-job stuff. If you want to assist for someone high end, the best preparation would probably be to work your way up through lesser photographers. I would not advise anyone to go to school for this kind of stuff.

But I'm fairly biassed against trade schools. I think they leave people stranded with inflexible skill sets and no real education. Skills can be learned anywhere.

[Brian K]

You'll have to forgive me, but considering that you've said basically the same things about Friedlander and some other people who have become icons of 20th century art, I'm not about to give your judgments the benefit of the doubt.



I've worked as a photo assistant, as have many of my friends whom I consider impressive photographic artists. It's all learn-on-the-job stuff. If you want to assist for someone high end, the best preparation would probably be to work your way up through lesser photographers. I would not advise anyone to go to school for this kind of stuff.

But I'm fairly biassed against trade schools. I think they leave people stranded with inflexible skill sets and no real education. Skills can be learned anywhere.

You would advise that people not go to school for this "stuff"? Good advice because you can't learn this in ANY school. I learned that "stuff" when I assisted photographers at that "high end" level (including Penn and Newman), and you won't find photographers at that level teaching, they're too busy shooting. But because I assisted I had the benefit of watching some real masters shooting in real life situations on a daily basis. And it wasn't nuts and bolts. it was photography.

As for Friedlander and Sherman, darlings of the photo academia, the people who explain photography more than produce it, need I say more?

[paulr]

You would advise that people not go to school for this "stuff"? Good advice because you can't learn this in ANY school. I learned that "stuff" when I assisted photographers at that "high end" level

So we agree on that point.


As for Friedlander and Sherman, darlings of the photo academia, the people who explain photography more than produce it, need I say more?

God no.

[tgtaylor]

You would advise that people not go to school for this "stuff"? Good advice because you can't learn this in ANY school. I learned that "stuff" when I assisted photographers at that "high end" level (including Penn and Newman), and you won't find photographers at that level teaching, they're too busy shooting. But because I assisted I had the benefit of watching some real masters shooting in real life situations on a daily basis. And it wasn't nuts and bolts. it was photography.


I have a tendency to disagree with that last statement. Unless you copied their vision wholesale, than it was, as you put it, the nuts and bolts of photography - the mechanics or technique which may or may not be as important to your personal photographic vision which, granted, you may not have possessed at the time.

Thomas

[Jim Jones]

Three of the best artists in my area received their training in commercial art school. This gave them technical skills which they expanded with their own artistic vision. Two other area artists studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. One could never compete with some of the local self-taught artists. I gave away many of her paintings as door prizes at an art event. Despite a BA in art, I'm outclassed by some of the local amateur painters. Schools should, and sometimes do, give gifted students the opportunity to expand their vision. They should, but more rarely do, give students a solid grounding in basic craft. Artwork that is so poorly executed that it disintegrates during the artist's life lacks qualities essential to great art.

[Brian K]

I have a tendency to disagree with that last statement. Unless you copied their vision wholesale, than it was, as you put it, the nuts and bolts of photography - the mechanics or technique which may or may not be as important to your personal photographic vision which, granted, you may not have possessed at the time.

Thomas

TG, it's not a matter of copying their vision, and it's so much more than "nuts and bolts",
it's their philosophy about photography, it's about the way they solve problems and explore the image, it's a first hand role model of how to be and act as a photographer.

[Jim Michael]

Higher education is more about exposure to various ontological and epistemological perspectives and later towards development of ones own, whereas in the OJT scenario you are pretty much getting exposure to that of one person, and less focus on development of your own.

[paulr]

...in the OJT scenario you are pretty much getting exposure to that of one person, and less focus on development of your own.

It's the gulld / master / apprentice model traditonally used for teaching trades. It's a trade school surrogate.

Before art schools, people learned the fine arts through similar arrangements, but this was when university education existed only for the cultural elite. And the aspiring artist would apprentice under an artist (like a painter), not a tradesman (like an illustrator—their equivalent of a commercial photographer).

[Brian K]

Higher education is more about exposure to various ontological and epistemological perspectives and later towards development of ones own, whereas in the OJT scenario you are pretty much getting exposure to that of one person, and less focus on development of your own.

And you suppose that while someone is assisting a master artist that they are also not going to galleries and museums, or reading up on the subject? Or talking to the other assistants and art directors about art and photography? And what makes you assume that an assistant only assists one person and is only exposed to the ideas and methods of one photographer? And that those photographers were also limited by having worked for only one photographer?

I freelanced, I assisted about 25 photographers. And when I wasn't assisting I was contacting notable photographers and getting their advice on my work and photography. Most were eager to be helpful, Duane Michals being very helpful and giving great advice that I follow to this day.

[paulr]

And you suppose that while someone is assisting a master artist that they are also not going to galleries and museums, or reading up on the subject? Or talking to the other assistants and art directors about art and photography?

So ... it's possible for someone to be self-educated. You need to be well motivated and inquisitive. Even still there's the risk of blind spots: you can only answer the questions you know to ask.

I have no faith that anyone's going to get meaningful education on the humanities side (history, esthetics, all the connections made through interdisciplinary study) by working for a bunch of commercial photographers. These employers are practicing a trade. They're qualified to teach a trade. Maybe you'll be lucky and find one who can teach you more broadly, but it's certainly not what they signed up for. With few exceptions, the only ones I've met who have a clue about art are the ones who are fine artists first and commercial artists to pay the bills.

Edited to add: "Master Artist?" A minute ago we were talking about assisting commercial photographers. How many people get hired to assist master artists? Who is a master artist?

[tgtaylor]

TG, it's not a matter of copying their vision, and it's so much more than "nuts and bolts",
it's their philosophy about photography, it's about the way they solve problems and explore the image, it's a first hand role model of how to be and act as a photographer.

I'd have to agree with this view as long as the assistant retains or is encouraged to find their own personal vision and does not become a mere clone.

I'm probably going out on a limb here but I believe that as no one can take better Ansel Adams pictures than Ansel Adams, no one can take your pictures better than you can. We're all seperate creations living a seperate existence in a unified whole (i.e., the Universe).

Thomas

[Brian K]

So ... it's possible for someone to be self-educated. You need to be well motivated and inquisitive. Even still there's the risk of blind spots: you can only answer the questions you know to ask.

I have no faith that anyone's going to get meaningful education on the humanities side (history, esthetics, all the connections made through interdisciplinary study) by working for a bunch of commercial photographers. These employers are practicing a trade. They're qualified to teach a trade. Maybe you'll be lucky and find one who can teach you more broadly, but it's certainly not what they signed up for. With few exceptions, the only ones I've met who have a clue about art are the ones who are fine artists first and commercial artists to pay the bills.

Edited to add: "Master Artist?" A minute ago we were talking about assisting commercial photographers. How many people get hired to assist master artists? Who is a master artist?

And what are Penn and Newman? Commercial hacks? How many people get hired to assist masters? Those that are dedicated enough to pursue it. And there are master photographers that you never heard of because they never publicly pursued the artistic side of it, they never attempted to exhibit but shot a great deal of excellent art for themselves their entire lives.

And what makes you think that commercial photographers are so incapable of being artists? Most commercial photographers, at least the many dozens that I know, started out as amateur photographers with a passion for the artistic side of it, but faced the realities of making a living and pursued commercial work to pay the bills. Most that i know got BFA's and then assisted, and to a man would all state that it was the assisting that made it all come together for them.

BTW I started out as a sculptor, carving stone.

As for history and aesthetics, do you think I learned that at SVA, or from the fact that I'm intellectually curious and continue to read and learn? And while you consider this type of discussion bickering, to me this is a further education, and while I may not agree with much of what you say, I read, evaluate and learn from it.

[Brian K]

I'd have to agree with this view as long as the assistant retains or is encouraged to find their own personal vision and does not become a mere clone.

I'm probably going out on a limb here but I believe that as no one can take better Ansel Adams pictures than Ansel Adams, no one can take your pictures better than you can. We're all seperate creations living a seperate existence in a unified whole (i.e., the Universe).

Thomas

Thomas I agree with you. But the fact is that unless you're locked away, you're influenced by the work that has come before you. But it is the life that you have led that has molded that influence into what you do now. It is the affects of that life that makes our perspectives unique to ourselves.

I know exactly why I shoot what I shoot and can trace it back to when I was 4 years old.

[paulr]

And what makes you think that commercial photographers are so incapable of being artists?

Many of them are. Usually on their own time. My friends who pay the bills doing commercial work hire assistants for the commercial work, and do not engage them in art historical discussions. They have the assistance schlep gear and set up lights and pop the shutter release. My friend who assisted for Dennis Manarchy got to paint set pieces.

[/QUOTE]As for history and aesthetics, do you think I learned that at SVA, or from the fact that I'm intellectually curious and continue to read and learn?[/QUOTE]

I'm curious to know what you have studied that involves history and esthetics post world war 2.

[Winger]

Yes! This (http://www.amazon.com/Friedlander-Peter-Galassi/dp/0870703447/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308063348&sr=8-1) is the mack-daddy of them all, and the current Amazon price is a steal.

edited to add: just saw this is the new softcover edition. If you want hardbound that should be available too.

Thank you!!!

[paulr]

I've pulled my copy off the shelf since this thread started. It might be the heaviest book in the whole place. I need to spend more time with it ... there are whole bodies of work of his that I tend to forget about, and not because of any failing on the photography's part.

[tgtaylor]

I also just ordered a copy from Amazon so they now have 8 remaining in stock.

I've always liked Freidlander's photography. A lot of it is kind of jazzy and reminds me of the time when an old girlfriend got me interested in driving around at night and looking at the cool lighted front windows in residential homes. Back home (New Orleans) they have a personality all their own and each is unique - some happy, some sad, some pretentious, some humble. Not unique to New Orleans, though, as I have seen the same in other cities - especially those that have some history and whose houses have some breathing room.

Incidentally Freidlander was a fan of jazz music and jazz, to me, seems to have been an influence in a lot of his images. At least they go well with jazz as a background. Walking around with some good jazz playing on the pod is a real help to me when out photographing this particular genera.

Thomas

[paulr]

Incidentally Freidlander was a fan of jazz music and jazz, to me, seems to have been an influence in a lot of his images. At least they go well with jazz as a background

Some of his earliest famous work is color portraits of Jazz musicians. There's a killer portrait of Miles from 1969 in the big book. Most of the rest are from the preceding decade.

To my eyes, Friedlander's pics start to take on the feel of bebop in the 70s.

I want to re-read the essay in the book ... it talks about his connections to the jazz world in nyc in the 50s and 60s. If I had a time machine I'd take some long trips to there.

[rdenney]

And let's face the facts, there is some truth to the old adage that those that can, do, those that can't teach.

It's certainly true that those who can do often can't teach a damn thing.

Rick "who once took tuba lessons from a top symphony performer who could express nothing about how he did things" Denney

[Mark Sawyer]

And let's face the facts, there is some truth to the old adage that those that can, do, those that can't teach.

Since I'm a photography teacher, I guess that puts me in my place. All teachers, I suppose...

[rdenney]

(There are only several dozen full-time professional orchestra gigs for tuba players. That is a fact of the marketplace. These musicians have tenure, and have to really diminish in their abilities to lose their gig. Thus, it is impossible to contemplate the notion that there are not many dozens of tuba players who would be better performers in many of those situations than those who currently hold those positions. Without the opportunity to obtain the gig, however, they teach to put groceries on the table. There is no shame in that. And it is beneficial to those of us who benefit from their teaching.)

One does not seek a broad education to learn how to do something. One seeks a broad education to become educated. Engineers, for example, study physics, math, chemistry, languages, economics, and history. Even when they study specific engineering subjects, they are not just learning processes for making calculations, but rather the theory on which those processes are based. They will be expected to develop their own processes as needed in the professional world, which would baffle anyone merely trained to do the process. They will be expected to have a broad societal view, just so they can understand their role in designing the things people need, and so they can express and explain how their designs meet those needs.

Many in industry complain that engineering schools do not teach skills needed on the job and the first thing they have to do with a new hire is provide them with job training. I've hired many engineers, and I found just the opposite. I found that the only thing they can do is follow a script for certain job skills, but without understanding the underlying theory. They were indeed rigid and narrow and could not be dislodged from what they think they understand. Most interviewees under age 30 in my experience were incapable of expressing themselves extemporaneously on any topic, including engineering. Thus, no matter what skills they had, I could not put them in front of a client. And if they slogged their lives away doing calculations in the back room, they never gained what they needed to be able to interact with a client, and they never progressed.

I've certainly heard a lot of the merely skilled complain when more broadly educated engineers progressed faster and further.

I suspect that the above would nearly always apply if one replaced "engineer" with "photographer," "musician" or any other profession, artistic or not.

So, I completely agree with Paul that education is something we do for its own sake, not job training. Expecting education to be job training undermines both outcomes.

It has been implied by one poster that not understanding Friedlander's work is some sort of sad commentary. If Friedlander's work was that easy to understand, would it be worth the effort? I think it's okay not to like his work after having studied it. But to reject it without consideration seems rather arrogant.

Rick "trying to progress beyond mere skill" Denney

[Brian K]

It's certainly true that those who can do often can't teach a damn thing.

Rick "who once took tuba lessons from a top symphony performer who could express nothing about how he did things" Denney

That's very true, I worked for people like that and I also worked for photographers who taught me more in a day than I learned in a year in college.

[Brian K]

Since I'm a photography teacher, I guess that puts me in my place. All teachers, I suppose...

Why does the meaning of "some truth" seem to be missed and the quote is only viewed as an absolute? As I wrote previously I know some very fine photographers who also teach, I even taught. But I also have seen my share of community colleges, "art" schools, and other accredited institutions where the instructor is someone barely past the amateur level themselves and have little to offer their students anything more than what they picked up in a photo magazine.

And the issue that I have with even the higher learning institutions is that I have seen the work of and interviewed many of their fresh graduates only to find that after 4 years of a very expensive education that many lack fundamental photographic skills. And many of those, unable to actually make a living shooting, end up where? Back in school teaching.

[paulr]

Why does the meaning of "some truth" seem to be missed and the quote is only viewed as an absolute?

Because it's simply a useless but provocative truism. We all agree that the best practitioners are often not the best teachers, we all agree that the best teachers are often not the best practitioners, and we all agree that some of the best practitioners do in fact teach.

So repeating the old cliché, "those that can't, teach," even with qualifiers, serves as nothing but a dig at teachers in general—a group that gets more than its fair share of digs these days from a lot of sources.

[Mark Sawyer]

Or maybe we could just leave it at: there is some truth that those who use the old adage "those that can, do, those that can't teach", can't do either...

One's as accurate as the other! :D

[Robert Hughes]

Those who can't do or teach, comment on internet forums...

[paulr]

Those who can't do or teach, comment on internet forums...

Low, low blow. I have no retort.

[chuckwagongang]

I represent a 75-year gospel group, The Chuck Wagon Gang. Mr. Friedlander is credited for the photo on one of our mid 60's album. We are producing a DVD on our rich history to be released in 2012. We desire to use an alternate photo of this session, pictures on file at Sony Music. Since Mr. Friedlander was not a Columbia/Sony Music staff photographer, they cannot release any photos or grant permission. However, they have stated if I can find the photographer or agent represented, and can get permission, that they would release a photo.

Is Mr. Friedlander still living? Does anyone have an address, phone number, or email address for him?

Thanks for your time.

Harold Timmons
The Chuck Wagon Gang
817-944-2538

[Mike Lopez]

Yes, he's alive and active. Try contacting him through one of his galleries, such as the Fraenkel:

http://www.fraenkelgallery.com

I'm pretty sure he lives in New City, NY, but I don't have specific contact information.