Birnbaum v. James Wood (link)

JW:  … When Virginia Woolf read Chekhov she said something like, “The emphasis falls on such unexpected places so that you hardly realize that it is an emphasis at all.” And that’s what I very much love about Chekhov is this extraordinary subtlety and unpredictability. That the sentimental moment is always avoided, just at the last second.
…
RB: In the 19th century, was there that kind of self-consciousness about the novel form?

JW: Well no, there wasn’t really. And that’s why James is interesting. There wasn’t anything like that self-consciousness, really until James and Conrad. And if you go back to [pause]—well that’s not quite true. The decisive thing was probably Flaubert, where there was a new kind of self-consciousness. Where in a way, for the first time you see art being turned into a religion but also into a stylistic agony—Flaubert at his best doing a hundred words a day. Agonizing over repetitions. Prose has become poetry at that point. And you can see in his letters, Flaubert is frankly envious of, as he sees it, the great writers who didn’t need to worry about that kind of thing. He says Cervantes, Moliere, and Shakespeare, they could just toss it off. Surely any writer that abundant, can just, they are not thinking. I [Flaubert] am, on the other hand, however am caught in this modern dilemma of agony, of artistic self-consciousness. And James met and corresponded with Flaubert and in some ways is an inheritor of that Flaubertian agony, too. Though it didn’t seem to stop his productivity.

Wood is perfect in quoting Virginia Woolf on Checkov’s brilliance. I’d like to do the same with my photos. Put the emphasis somewhere unexpected. So softly that it is hardly noticed. A disguised but studied avoidance of sentimentality. His bit about the self-reflexive nature of modern art ties in with what I was said in the essay published this week.

As an aside, hearing Woods talk it really bought home how rare it is to find criticism of photography that is as acute, human, and articulate. Szarkowski was of that type. Maybe it is typically more difficult to talk about something visual, but I need to find more of this nourishing writing. People like Aletti, Sante, Rubinfein are writing well now. I wonder who the others are. Szarkowski talks about some early writers on photography here.

Click the link in the title.


Posted 2 years ago

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Michael Daniel - In Your Face (link)

It looks like this guy is using a way of working that is similar to mine. He does very close up street shots but uses a pocket organiser/camera combination and never reveals himself to the person being photographed. The quality of what he does is obviously very poor. But I guess he means it to be that way. Some of them draw you in buy the overall edit seems flat. I don’t like most of them, but I don’t know why. It’s probably just competition.

It’s funny that it’s in burn magazine where I did my first submission. Perhaps this is why they haven’t gotten back to me.

Of course my stuff is far superior. Now I just need other people to say so.


Posted 2 years ago

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On Writing on Top of Photography

A photographer should be scared of talking too much about his work.

  1. Talking usually means not taking photographs.
  2. Saying anything means you’re not saying something else, and so limits what you can say through your pictures (see Open Pictures).
  3. Photography may only have a tenous link to thinking as we understand that process.

But there is suspicion that talking and thinking about it may help. And so I do, very reluctantly.

A new test for all writing: how does this help you take better photographs?


Posted 2 years ago

New York City 1/13, Ashley Gilbertson New York City 13/13, Ashley Gilbertson To create some kind of meaning in a picture a photographer has two tools: showing and hiding. Showing has it’s own complexities and mysteries but is the one that is generally understood, but in the two photos above by the excellent Australian photographer Ashley Gilbertson we see obvious but effective examples of the latter. He hides things that he himself saw in these situations by using opposing values of the one method, exposure. The details he does not want us to see are ignored by his camera leaving only the etchings of his intent. It is a photographer twisting reality to fit his conceptual arguments. But what I like about these photographs is that it doesn’t break the necessary link between the real and the conceptual as so much bad, shallow art does. Our ideas at most can only be worth what our experiences are. What else is interesting is the difference in depths between the two pictures. The darker one is totally concentrated on revealing the layers that make up the photo, the strongest being the man and the smoke which has been lit up by sunlight. The lighter photo is all about dispelling distance and perspective. The tiny couple are fairies, ethereal, without human context, detached from the fallen man or woman at the bottom of the picture. Both pictures create mystery from keeping things hidden.

New York City 1/13, Ashley Gilbertson


New York City 13/13, Ashley Gilbertson

To create some kind of meaning in a picture a photographer has two tools: showing and hiding. Showing has it’s own complexities and mysteries but is the one that is generally understood, but in the two photos above by the excellent Australian photographer Ashley Gilbertson we see obvious but effective examples of the latter.

He hides things that he himself saw in these situations by using opposing values of the one method, exposure. The details he does not want us to see are ignored by his camera leaving only the etchings of his intent. It is a photographer twisting reality to fit his conceptual arguments. But what I like about these photographs is that it doesn’t break the necessary link between the real and the conceptual as so much bad, shallow art does. Our ideas at most can only be worth what our experiences are.

What else is interesting is the difference in depths between the two pictures. The darker one is totally concentrated on revealing the layers that make up the photo, the strongest being the man and the smoke which has been lit up by sunlight. The lighter photo is all about dispelling distance and perspective. The tiny couple are fairies, ethereal, without human context, detached from the fallen man or woman at the bottom of the picture. Both pictures create mystery from keeping things hidden.


Posted 2 years ago

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Frosh-Soph Rush, Columbia University, New York 1950, Garry Winogrand Winogrand exemplifies the most basic photographic characteristic: he says, ‘look, I was there and I saw this’. But this isn’t shouted, it is whispered. But in this photo he does the other thing that photographers do, because their art is limited by a frame, and more importantly limited to tenths and hundreths of a second, he has turned the meaning of the photo inside out. Instead of ecstasy, instead of a crowd high together, joyous, we see a black hole falling on teenagers. They scream at the coming agony; their fear, uncertainty, acceptence are etched into their faces. Even here, Winogrand shoots a little of kilter, kinetically, we are meant to feel that we are lucky to see this at all. We were lucky that he was so quick witted. As with most conmen, we are meant to think that he is doing us a favour. And he is. He has created a terrible meaning out of a split second, out of the inoccuous. For a photographer, a great challenge is the lack of visible emotion in day to day life. People are usually walking around with blank stares, grim grimices, subtle, uninteresting gestures. People packed together is an opportunity for the photographer. Then, people get excited, angry, scared, expressive. It is far easier to say something at those moments. Yet, what sets this picture above is that nearly all the participants are showing extreme, complementary emotion. The hands, those very oddly shaped things we carry around, are well spaced out out, palms are visible. Getting a shot like this is not easy. Often something is wrong crowd pictures: someone is looking bored, another is bending over to get their bag, and so shots of many people together lack wholeness or singularity. But this was one of Winogrands preoccupations, hor to order a mass of things into meaning in a wide frame. What is also critical is the highly structured or layered way he has created linked nodes of attention in this photo. We are drawn to the triangle at the centre of the frame with the nodes being the two fearful boys and the ball above them. It creates a beautiful coherence.

Frosh-Soph Rush, Columbia University, New York 1950, Garry Winogrand

Winogrand exemplifies the most basic photographic characteristic: he says, ‘look, I was there and I saw this’. But this isn’t shouted, it is whispered.

But in this photo he does the other thing that photographers do, because their art is limited by a frame, and more importantly limited to tenths and hundreths of a second, he has turned the meaning of the photo inside out. Instead of ecstasy, instead of a crowd high together, joyous, we see a black hole falling on teenagers. They scream at the coming agony; their fear, uncertainty, acceptence are etched into their faces. Even here, Winogrand shoots a little of kilter, kinetically, we are meant to feel that we are lucky to see this at all. We were lucky that he was so quick witted. As with most conmen, we are meant to think that he is doing us a favour.

And he is. He has created a terrible meaning out of a split second, out of the inoccuous.

For a photographer, a great challenge is the lack of visible emotion in day to day life. People are usually walking around with blank stares, grim grimices, subtle, uninteresting gestures. People packed together is an opportunity for the photographer. Then, people get excited, angry, scared, expressive. It is far easier to say something at those moments. Yet, what sets this picture above is that nearly all the participants are showing extreme, complementary emotion. The hands, those very oddly shaped things we carry around, are well spaced out out, palms are visible. Getting a shot like this is not easy. Often something is wrong crowd pictures: someone is looking bored, another is bending over to get their bag, and so shots of many people together lack wholeness or singularity. But this was one of Winogrands preoccupations, hor to order a mass of things into meaning in a wide frame.

What is also critical is the highly structured or layered way he has created linked nodes of attention in this photo. We are drawn to the triangle at the centre of the frame with the nodes being the two fearful boys and the ball above them. It creates a beautiful coherence.


Posted 2 years ago

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© Adnan Chowdhury 2011