moma nicely posted a pdf of their 2001 catalog:
https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_..._300133895.pdf
Peter Galassi's lengthy essay won't convert you into being a fan if you're not already, but might be of interest in the way he connects Gursky's legacy back to America and the view camera tradition here.
Thanks, that is a great resource.
So funny. I just reread the Moma-Galassi Gursky monograph just yesterday. There's a LOT in that essay.Originally Posted by Chester McCheeserton
Perhaps even more funny (I'm not certain whether I mean ha-ha or strange here) is that I have owned a copy of this book for almost a decade now but have yet to read any of the text in it.
Truth be told, I rarely read any of the text in photobooks, except for the captions, explanatory notes about how / where the photos were taken, and interviews with the photographer.
I love to read well-done interviews with photographers, but the opinions of a critic or curator or other famous person about the photos and/or the photographer and their motivation(s) are usually of little to no interest to me. <shrugs>
Depends who writes the monograph. Lots are just filler or background context discussion. Some of the better writers ignore technique altogether. I personally hate a lot of f-stop, lens, and filter notes in nice picture books. How-to articles are more appropriate fot that kind of thing. Szarkowski's classic monographs are wonderfully readable; Hambourg's analysis of Atget in four volumes is quite insightful. Having a bit of retrospective distance in history is also an advantage. When something is at the height of its posssibly transient appeal or inflated sales hype, like Gursky in recent years, it's hard to be objective.
Btw, I did find this on openphotographyforums.com. This was written in 2014, so take this with a grain of salt --
"All the published pictures of A. Gursky up to now, are shot with film and he still works with his Linhof, he did get an ALPA/Phase one combination a couple of years ago, but this is used more instead of a polaroid to compose a shot, he does very little serious work using digital sensor (the Bankong images?) which are much simpler (and much cheaper) single shots and are print using inject [sic] printer…"
Well, I guess the best thing to do is to look over Gursky's later work and actually just look at it to see if there are any artifacts suggesting if the work was shot in film or digital: http://www.andreasgursky.com/en/works
Anyone want to take a stab at this one?: http://www.andreasgursky.com/en/works/2016/media-markt
Can't tell. The web jpg doesn't allow us to enlarge enough to see the micro-structure of the image, which is where you'd find the sort of evidence one would need to seriously debate the question.
It's digital I'm pretty sure. You can zoom in enough to see the digital sharpness/smoothness and lack of grain on things like the pegboard in the middle right side as well as the creases in the vacuum hoses in front of it. This picture is a pale comparison remake of his 99 cent store picture, which was made on film. I saw it once in a group show at Princeton in 2002 and the grain was huge/terrible looking when you got close, especially in comparison to the 11x14 and 16x20 analog prints by other artist photographers that were hung nearby.
Just to keep stirring the pot, I'll post this: Charlie White writing about Mark Wyse's work in 2011...you can read the whole essay here. you guys will love it...http://charliewhite.info/writings/
"The parameters of the material print and its processes have ceased to be determining factors for how the contemporary photograph operates. Physical location, material properties, and chemical procedures are no longer of immediate consequence to the medium. In the photograph’s two-decade-long transition to immateriality, visual representation has been freed from the limitations of location, distribution, and reproduction, while meaning has shifted in conjunction with the removal of the material factors that formerly controlled its reception."
Last edited by Chester McCheeserton; 29-May-2019 at 09:35. Reason: typo
The kandy-kolored, rendered-in-sharpened-jello look is certainly suggestive. But we don't know how many captures went into it. With enough aggregate film area and a heavy dose of noise reduction, color profile tuning and sharpening we might not be able to tell for sure in a jpg at this size.
He doesn't just stitch and blend frames, but is known add, remove, or shift position of people, structural beams, etc, which also means dubbing content into the missing sections, which is why I call it painting instead of photography. And Dali did that kind of thing a thousand percent better with a real paintbrush.
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