Was it really a linch pin of his career ? There are plenty of artists relying on digital processes. I don't really see that much concern about purity of process in the contemporary art world. I didn't think the work relied on factual representation, particularly previous series, so his claim of "non indexical context" sounds OK for the venues where it was seen (of course, a newspaper is an indexical context, hence the problem). Why wouldn't he have achieved his pre-NYT reputation if he hadn't said anything about his process ? BTW, great to hear from you, Ellis.Originally Posted by Ellis Vener
Children fib...
Adults lie...
Politicians mis-speak...
Artists speak in a non-indexical context?
"I love my Verito lens, but I always have to sharpen everything in Photoshop..."
It certainly seemed to be part of his pitch. For example, it is (used to be) in the first sentence of the blurb for his Aperture "Topologies" book. That would indicate to me that someone thought it was key to his work.
I understand what you are saying here and in your earlier post--that it was a sort of dumb lie since the work, for you, didn't rest upon the claim of purity as a part of its foundation--but nevertheless it was Martins who made the claim, made it repeatedly, and was caught lying about it.
--Darin
It seems to me that the way you are using "indexical" is what we called "representational" when I was studying art in college. Representational art is intended to realistically portray reality (though not necessarily the same as "Realism"--noting the capital R), as opposed to non-representational art, of which there are a zillion varieties.
As an engineer now in the hard sciences, I'm familiar with jargon. But the jargon we use is either an acronym used as a word or a narrow meaning for a word one might find in the dictionary more broadly defined. I hope I don't use words that don't actually exist in the language, because using them adds them to the language in ways that diminish the value of what is there.
So, what is the difference between "indexical" and "representational"? Did that new bit of jargon add some new meaning or subtlety?
Back to topic: Many people do not trust their own responses when it comes to art, but they want to be seen as being art-aware. Artists who know how to bandy words in a way that makes them seem deep and mysterious seem to be attractive to those people. It's the same with people who spend a fortune on wine they don't really appreciate, after hearing a connoisseur wax eloquent about the wine having a bit of a sharp personality, insouciant yet docile, etc.
In my view, artists who use jargon (even jargon I don't like, but that means something to real experts) in a way intended to merely impress or confuse the general art buyer are at best dilettantes and at worst frauds. So, I think his reputation may in fact have been partly built on his language. But he would not be the first.
Rick "respectfully submitted" Denney
The way Martins used the term does boil down to representational of reality or not (and whether there was an expectation thereof), but this is not the specific meaning of the term. Indexical describes how the relationship between photography and reality functions, but the term is not only used in photographic theory. A photograph requires light striking the subject to bounce off and be captured by a camera (Probably not the best to try and describe these things before coffee, but I'm going to elide by the discussion of a photo-sensitive surface to keep it pointed). The camera has to actually be there to record this--you can't take a picture of Australian outback from North Dakota. That's the crux of the term and the foundation of its importance; one can draw or paint the Australian outback from anywhere, but the camera has to be there for a photograph to be made. Another example of an indexical relationship is a footprint in the sand, for the footprint to be there a foot (or at the very least, a foot shaped object) had to actually be there.
That's no different than any field as you well establish, but I think you're giving the wine connoisseur a short shrift as I find your example of him to be negative in connotation. To the connoisseur there really is meaning in describing, for example, the "roundness" of taste of a wine, similarly, I'll describe the blacks in a low-humidity platinum/palladium print as "fragile and cracking". It won't mean anything to anyone who doesn't have the experience and knowledge to understand, but for those who do it gives me a language to discuss something pointedly. The problem isn't with those who actually need/use the terms to discuss, but those who use the terms to obfuscate meaning (usually because they don't know what they are talking about or they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes--Martins).
I think your view is very small-minded (not you, the view) as I take it as saying:
"artists who use jargon that I don't like and may mean something to someone else, but not me, are at best dilettantes and at worst frauds whenever it impresses or confuses a general art buyer"
If you don't understand the language you will always be alternately impressed/confused by it, but have no basis to decide whether the intent was only to impress or confuse. I just wrote a draft of the concepts/theories behind my current body of work. The statement investigates the philosophical idea of phenomenology and application of this philosophy as a photographic working method. I didn't write it to confuse/impress anyone, but if someone with zero background in what I'm discussing read it I am sure they would take it that way. At a certain point of dissemination I cannot control who reads the statement, but I can control what I write to a very exacting level using jargon to get explicitly to the points I am discussing. Without jargon I would have had to define every linch-pin term in my statement and actually confused/diluted my argument rather than illuminating it. At a certain point the common vernacular becomes useless because it is too diluted and too common and a new word (to disagree with your point above) is needed to express an idea--one such word I used in my paper is Kant's use of the word "noumena". He expressly invested this term with a specific meaning to use in his writings.
This is where we get headlong into my personal view, which is that most people think if they can read then if they don't understand something they read the fault lies with the author. Yes, it very well can lie with the author, but still too often people expect full comprehension upon skimming a sentence. I read and re-read sentences, paragraphs, and entire book multiple times to understand not only what I think the author's position and argument are, but also to understand my position on said argument. This usually requires opening up a dictionary (one pertinent to the discussion on hand, if I'm reading a philosophical tract I'll have a dictionary of philosophical terms and if I'm reading a neurology text I'll have a science or medical dictionary) and actually thinking and working to understand. Look at how many things are misconstrued here on the forum in relation to the technical and we have a common jargon (Dagor, f-stop, tilt, graflok). This is why the theoretical discussions, in my opinion, often fall apart: we don't have a common language and can't agree on using the same definitions for something as simple as "photograph" or "image", but due to the nature of a forum there also isn't much ability to lay out a framework for theoretical discussion. Through the use of pointed jargon (art-speak), one can lay down the framework for what they are doing and give a foundation on which it can be discussed without having to define something as fundamental to photography as its indexical nature, which I hope I have explained above is inherently different than (though in the end can be) "representational".
I'm not trying to excuse Martins or those artists who do write things which are a blight on human language, but there are many more who actually utilize such jargon in useful manners. The problem, as I see it, is that many, many, many of these artists are funneled through a BFA/MFA program where they aren't provided an education in how to use the language they bandy about and with every generation it gets worse. The artists themselves don't have any idea what they are doing so they throw up an art-speak smoke-and-mirrors to make their work mysterious and [hopefully] alluring. Then you have artists who are trying to work through what they are doing and are using the same art-speak to try and pointedly discuss, in written language, what they are doing with visual language.
Photo alteration is not new to the digital age. And I think that there are distinct differences between true photo journalism and art. I think if you are dealing with true photojournalism, and I don't mean infotainment, then you need to produce work in which the truth of the scene is intact.
However just the choices made at the time of the image capture in themselves can affect the truth of the image. If you underexpose you change the mood of the scene, if you shoot B&W and use contrast filters, or a polarizer with color you can also alter the mood, and therefore perception of the scene. And let us not forget just what subjects you choose to shoot and how you choose to compose also affects the scene.
If I recall correctly the Martins photos were about the housing crisis, but his digital alterations had no bearing on the story. Cloning in some trees or making the interior of an already nice home a little better compositionally I do not think changes the details or subtext of the story. If he went as far as taking a dilapidated house and making it into a McMansion, I think that might have some bearing, but it seems that his manipulations were more liking spotting rather than photo composing a different POV from reality.
If you look at Ansel Adams' Winter Sunrise, shot at Lone Pine, you'll see where he has spotted the letters "LP" off the Alabama Hills. Is that dishonest on his part?
I think the distinction that Martins makes is that he's not altering the reality or truth of the scene digitally, and that's why he's states that his work is not digitally manipulated, he's just tweaking or spotting it.
No one ever said (in this thread) that digitally manipulating an image is dishonest or that manipulating a negative in the darkroom is or isn't either. We're saying that Martins represented his work as not digitally manipulated. Martins digitally manipulated his work. That's the crux of the issue. Ansel Adams never said his photographs were 1:1 with reality, but were instead the final output of his pre-visualization (which, in this case, did not include those letters).
Altering reality to the extent Martins changed things in Photoshop is not an equivalent to "tweaking" or "spotting it" and I'm not sure how it can be argued that way. Collage/mirroring/cloning are not the same thing as "tweaking" and spotting". One darkroom equivalent to what Martins did would be printing the left half of a negative, flipping it over, then printing the left half of the negative as the right side of the image. How is that not "composing a different POV from reality"?
I'll admit that I share with others a negative view of people who use jargon, especially in art. This comes from long experience trying to decipher these texts only to come to the conclusion that the writer is either confused with their own jargon, saying nothing at all, saying something trivial, or saying something of little to no interest to a photographer (is discussing some philosophical or political issue and the use of photography as an example is a choice of convenience).
But perhaps is did not read widely enough (although I certainly tried) or things have changed in the last ten or twenty years.
Could you suggest a half dozen writers--artists or people who truly understand how art is made--that illustrate your point that some people use jargon well? And who write about issues of substance, of interest to a photographer?
--Darin
Darin, that's one of the problems, because what is of interest to me as a photographer may not be of interest to you.
Here are the texts I cited in a recent paper (this is just works cited, not the entire bibliography):
To move beyond them, just going with a half-dozen specific works I have in front of me right now, which I have read and I find to contain what people would consider "art-speak", but have something more to them: Sadakichi Hartmann (also under the pen name Sidney Allan), Charles H. Caffin, George Bernard Shaw, to go more contemporary: Bill Jay, Robert Adams, and for a current professor writing books: Geoffrey Batchen.Berger, John. "Understanding a Photograph." Selected essays. New York: Vintage, 2003. 216.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics). New York: Routledge, 2002.
Szarkowski, John. Introduction. Ansel Adams: Classic Images. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985.
Now this isn't to say I agree with everything they say (or even any of it), but I find what they say interesting and worth my time to read and understand.
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