• Recommends going very fast in shooting scenes. Rene Clair would get a scene perfect, and then say let’s do it again but faster. But is this just for comedy?
• Filmmakers have a natural biological rhythm. Allen’s is shorter, Scorcese’s is longer.
• The first thing the audience sees in a film and the last he tries to make special. He also says the end has to be special. ‘Have a theatrical quality.’
• The first 2 or 3 minutes, good filmmakers can bring you into their world.
• Acting in a play after it has opened is the easiest job in the world. You work for an hour and a half and the rest of the day is yours.
• A central driver in his work is the contention between reality and fantasy. He used movies to escape the harshness of his life. He still hasn’t grown out of that.
• He says the writer creates the world that he’d like to live in, where things turn out the way that he wants. But this isn’t always true for everyone.
• Found Diane Keaton to be a muse. But maybe more than that a creative partner.
• Doesn’t prepare a lot. Does the bare minimum and then wants spontaneity. Usually doesn’t carry the script with him on the set. ‘The less I study it, the fresher it is to me.’
• Doesn’t do too many takes, 2 to 4. ‘One, plus one for protection.’
• Listen to Cole Porter.
• Used very little music in Annie Hall as an experiment. Also influenced by Bergman and his non-use of music. I think he is wrong on this. Wong Kar Wai is an excellent example of why.
• Used very simple titles. What’s the point? Created a brand.
• Does hardly any coverage anymore, just works from long master shots. But he probably had to learn enough to do this.
• Something changed in him with Annie Hall xand he started writing good women’s parts. Better than the men’s part. An internal change he thinks.
• “For me it’s like stamping out cookies. I finish a film and I go onto the next one.”
• “I love the relationship of women to women.”
• “artists frequently are selfish. They need time alone, they need discipline and they need sometimes to behave with people in ways that are important for them but are not really very nice for other people. And Renata has come to the realisation that early on that her art is not going to save her, and it’s bothering her. I sometimes feel that art is the intellectual’s religion. … But the truth of the matter is art doesn’t save you.” By save, he means give you life.
• Recommends I read The Deniel of Death by Ernest Becker.
• Recommends Scorcese pictures as having great dialogue.
• “Yes, from the first day I ever made a film. Editing is a part of the making of a film. It’s so utterly, utterly crucial …”
• “What’s important is that your work is a part of your daily life and you can live decently. You can, as in my case, do other things I want to do at the same time.” Restaurants, children, playing music etc.

• reading notes
• woody allen
• interview

Posted 2 years ago

• Very impressed with Bergman’s films when they were imported to the states.
• Thought the French, Italian, and some German cinema was far more mature, more serious. This got him interested in directors and film history.
• Bergman started off as a script writer. He had to study American scripts and learn to reproduce them. Apparently he has written about this time.
• Allen initially wanted to be a playwright. Started writing and kept writing from an early stage. Wasn’t very good at writing plays.
• On facing the blank page: ‘No, in that way I feel like Picasso, who once said that when he sees an empty space he has to fill it.’
• ‘You learn everything valuable through osmosis.’ He is against film schooling. ‘If you want to teach someone film-directing, you could almost say, “Just keep going to the movies, and it will pass into your body.”’
• ‘Mostly it’s a chore for me to read.’
• Of making his first film: ‘The worst nightmare one could think of.’
• ‘There’s movie-making that’s serious movie-making—whether the film is funny, musical or serious. And then there are people that use movies for a life style.’
• Recounts two ways of writing with someone else. Both either worked together line by line, or talked a lot at the start, planned, then one person wrote the draft and then the other came and critiqued, cycle.
• Doesn’t write notes, treatments, synopsis or anything like that, he writes the whole script. And writes very quickly.
• He had sent a  letter to Carol De Palma asking him to shoot his first movie. De Palma has kept it to this day.
• ‘Really my maturity in films began with my association with Gordon Willis.’ Then he started to use the camera more and ‘searched for other values.’
• ‘Sure! Because what is a film? It’s photography.’
• Stig Bjorkmann: ‘European cinematographers on the whole, I think, are more sparse when it comes to lighting. They show a greater interest in the interplay of light with shadow and darkness. In many American film you see this very flat light. The whole scene, the set is lit up.’
• Look up Mort Sahl.
• ‘And they said that once you emerge as a performer, everything else will follow. And they were right. I got more offers t write and, later on, direct, because I was a performer. It showcases you in a certain way.’
• He made a key compromise on his first big studio film although he didn’t have to. The Artist as protective hero is not how it always has to go.

Reading Faber and Faber edition, Interview by Stig Bjorkman.

• woody allen
• reading notes

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Lee Freidlander

• Winogrand later turned to advertising. He wasn’t very good at it, but got by.
• “For Winogrand, as perhaps for most ambitious photographers of this century, the essential, supportive audience was often small enough to gather around a cafe table.”
• The New Documents exhibition photos were mainly made of of his Guggenheim fellowship. “The exhibition received considerable attention; in Winogrand’s case much of it was directed to what seemed from a traditional perspective the casualness, the formal slackness, of his new pictures. The best of these were more complex, and less immediately forceful, … and may be regarded as a final break with the standards of picture construction that could be discussed in terms of the idea of composition—a felicitous disposition of parts—or the idea of good design …”
• “The new Winogrand pictures proposed a standard of construction in which the appearance of the photograph is the unmediated result of the point of view, framing, and moment that best describes the photographer’s definition of his subject. He has said, ‘There is no special way that a photograph should look’”
• “At a deeper level, however, there was perhaps some justice to the term [snapshot aesthetic], for the snapshooter and Winogrand agreed that the subject was everything. The difference between them was the the snapshooter thought he what the subject was in advance, and for Winogrand, photography was the process of discovering it.” This is so close to being nonsense, that most people give up trying to understand it. It goes to the very heart of why Winogrand is important.
• “By the early seventies Winogrand was beginning to be courted as a minor cult figure by the art departments of American universities, whose perspective was substantially different: to them an artist was not an expert who might share his craft secrets, but a cultural philosopher and therapist.” Everything that is wrong with art education in one handy sentence. Art for an artist is the process. Winogrand of course didn’t fit himself in.
• “… he went out of his way to make it clear to his students that the venture was a bad risk: that in the unlikely case that some of them had the talent and will to be photographers they would be better off working on their own …”
• ‘Q: Why do you make art?
• A: It’s a way of living. It’s a way of passing the time.
• Q: Then I can’t really take your images seriously
• A: Look, so you like a lot of rhetoric. All there is is the pictures. I’m irrelevant to the pictures. You have a lot to learn, young man. The artist is irrelevant once the work exists.’ Brilliant, but did the questioner mean that his art wasn’t concerned art?
• “As Winogrand became better known, he was forced to try to explain in words matters that he knew could not be explained at all, but what might with luck be demonstrated in pictures.”
• “But he knew that his answers, even the best, most epigrammatic of them, were not true but merely art—like a photograph, a piece of truth seen from one advantage point, with edges that excluded most of the data. So he would undermine one epigram with another, delivered with the same Old Testament certainty …” This is what I like about aphorisms. I think this is what Nietzsche liked as well. The ease with which you can contradict yourself. It’s what I like about writing dialogue too.
• “His method with words was perhaps consonant with his method with the camera: if he though he had a chance for a picture he would ‘bang away at it’, and leave the editing for later.”
• On the Public Relations photos: “But a lesser photographer, with eyes focused sharply on the theory rather than on the nutty carnival of the event, might have succeeded better in illustrating the point. Winogrand, inevitably, was drawn to the dramas that were not in the script, to the spontaneous improvisations, the unforeseen contingencies, the minor individual crises that demonstrate—to our relief—that the plan was comically inadequate, and that the event was after all a real event, even if not the one advertised.” He is in the vein of Munro, and Checkhov. Really though? Isn’t he too much of a bear? Maybe a Bellow?
• High praise: “In sustained visual vitality and in Chaucerian richness of incident, the prodigious collection seems beyond the scope of a single photographer. It is unlikely that an anthology of the best photographs by all the other photographers who made pictures bearing on the character of America’s public behaviour during that period would provide so lively and telling a document. And Winogrand gave us in addition the integrity of art—coherent sensibility and style.”
• The critics mainly hated his work and had facile and aggressively negative responses to most of it.
• 1975 was a bad year. Health issues mainly. One which resulted him being bed ridden for 3 months. “His recovery was long and painful, and (worst of all) required a degree of inactivity for which his prior experience had not prepared him.”
• “In his 1963 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Winogrand’s brief statement of plans reveals. calmly and with chilling frankness, the profound pessimism with which he viewed the world and the potential efficacy of his own work: “I look at the pictures that I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes are cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at the magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. i can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life.
• I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project.”
• “By remaining almost perpetually active, and by almost never committing his private thoughts to writing. Winogrand kept the optimist dominant, except for momentary lapses.”
• Winogrand: “How do I say it? The way I put it is that I get totally out of myself. It’s the closest I come to not existing, I think , which is the best—which to me is attractive.” He said this when he was out in the streets. When he was being most honest.
• Winogrand: “I never even decided to be a photographer. I fell into it in a way, but when I fell into it I grabbed at it. Obviously, to me, I needed it desperately, and nothing has ever diverted me from that.”
• He then went to Texas and LA and did not succeed there in finding good pictures. The things he did do well were short assignments. “In viewing the work shot in Texas—for the most part, a mountain of unedited proof sheets—it is not easy to find evidence that he truly managed to engage that place. We see, for the most part, the record of a photographer who is passing time between trips.”
• Fat Stock Show photos are extraordinary and show him at his best.

• reading notes
• szarkowski
• garry winogrand

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Callahan

• Finished off the Friedlander book’s opening essay. Relief. Galassi is not super fun to read. Tosser.
• Good end though: “‘Incessantly’ is if anything an understatement. Having long ago made the labours of discipline into the instincts of habit, and having still earlier obliterated whatever barrier might once have existed between his thirst for experience and his compulsion to make pictures, Friedlander pursues his profligate passion with undiminished pleasure. The consequent outpouring of photographs can seem as inexhaustible as it is fascinating, but so is the world.”
• Saw that Szarkowski had written the introduction to Harry Callahan’s book. Reading that.
• Callahan took up photography at the late age of 26. The film camera was too expensive apparently.
• Having a quick look at Callahan’s photos you can see he must have had the shortest attention span in the entire world. He prefigured a lot of stuff though, his pictures have drastically different looks. Prefigured some of my close up work, but probably with a zoom, the pictures are flat and the detail is not there. But his aesthetic was very clean usually.
• “In the same year he made his photograph of reeds in water ‘Detriot, 1941’. It seems to Callahan that he was as good then as he would ever be.”
• “It is well known that genius has reasons of its own, and that artists are not produced by a standard method. But is also known that artists are not produced by auto-synthesis, out of vapours and wishes, and that new art grows out of old art.” I’m not so sure about this. Initially I thought he was going to go down the deliberate practice path, but no.
• “An artist’s starting point is his understanding of the Tradition—a great floating thieves’ market of parts and schemes, made up of remembered works, dead and living rivals, cafe conversations, museums, and credenda.
• During his novitiate, the artist constructs from these sources a private, imperfect, more or less serviceable theory concerning what has been achieved so far, which serves as a bench mark from which his own advances are measured.
• “Yet in spite of all this perfection the pictures were not sterile but full of force; they were machines that worked.”
• He went against the grain of concerned work that was being done then.
• “In a letter to Todd Webb, he noted that the idea of concerned photography seemed to be attracting considerable attention and support, and added, ‘too bad for unconcerned slobs like you or me.” I wrote something very similar to friends in the past: “look on the web, and on video at all these concerned photographers, writers, activists and I balk. They seem so simple, so naive, so unsophisticated. I can’t help but see a significant, and valid history for poverty, conflict etc. I can’t make the leap to wanting to make it better, or believing it should necessarily be different.”
• S. goes on to say that it is not enough for a picture to have content, that content must be tautly held in a web of form, otherwise it falls flat to the ground. (My metaphor).
• “Callahan did somehow arrive quickly at the sure knowledge that the function of his own work was to describe not the public issues of the great wold, but the interior shape of his private experiences. As a position, it was presumably neither better nor worse than any other, except to the degree that it give energy to talent.”
• Deeply affected by Adams’ Surf Sequence.
• “The cool and distanced eloquence of Callahan’s work is presumably not only a formal matter. His pictures do not describe but embody a world of moral value, a world aspiring to perfect order.” The perfectly opposite method of Winogrand, but to the same end?
• Ah, he was a committed Christian who became an agnostic in college. Left a hole in him though. I wonder how much my loss of faith has motivated my faith in art. But it was always so.
• “Shaw’s figure suggests the quality of  blind, intuitive need, and there is in the work of most exceptional photographers, and surely in Callahan’s, a sense of compulsion, a need to know the world through photographing it.”
• “But no important photographer since Eugene Atget has shown less inclination than Callahan to theorize about his medium or his own work.”
• Callahan himself: “It’s the subject matter that counts. I’m interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see. Wanting to see more makes you row as a person and growing makes you want to show more of life around you. …
• I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor but I believe they develop my seeing and help later in other photos. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.”
• “The ambience of the Institute of Design was in fact a shock to Callahan, since the place was filled with people who liked his work and seemed to understand it.” Went against his artist as lonely hero idea.
• Callahan: “It has been very hard for me to teach here at the school. I am so completely non-verbal. Photography seems so simple to me that there doesn’t seem to be much to say.”
• “Like many powerfully motivated artists, Callahan is not naturally gregarious. … One senses in Callahan a large capacity for privacy—for an interior life unshared even by those closest to him.”  The artist nourishes himself. “Nevertheless, friends are important even to the most self-sufficient of artists—important for their ideas, for the comfort of their support, and for their companionship, when work is impossible or intolerable.
• His friends: Hugo Weber (an intellectual painter), Mies van der Rohe (sometime drinking companion), Aaron Siskind (eloquent photographer), and Steichen. S. says that none of these really affected Callahan’s art.
• Callahan: “Beethoven for instance—his early music sounded like Mozart, and the he worked, the son of a bitch—he didn’t wait a year and write another Mozart, he just kept working until it blasted out, and contributed something altogether new.” Work.
• He is nourished by boundaries, conceptual, or geographic, or technical.
• On the heads stuff that he did: “The technical problems were formidable. To stop motion of the subjects at such close range required a much faster shutter speed than the film of the day allowed in the shadowed city street. Furthermore, the problem of focusing accurately on a close-up moving subject would be almost impossibly difficult. To further complicate the issue, Callahan would also be a pedestrian, photographing as he walked, in order to avoid drawing attention to himself.” Fuck! Welcome to my world! He had to push his film speed significantly, my work is a continuation of this.
• “On the mechanical level of athletic skill, the problem was perhaps no more difficult than wing-shooting woodcock. On an artistic level, the instantaneous, intuitive decisions required were comparable perhaps to those of musical improvisation.”
• A lot of his skyscaper work prefigures Michael (what’s his name)’s work in Hong Kong and Chicago.
• Callahan worked in camera as much as he could and would tenaciously solve problem after technical problem.
• “And on occasion he refers to the greatest problem of all—the difficulty of waiting confidently for the next really good pictures: “I still am very tormented about my photography—it hasn’t been good for a long time. There is still some faith laying around somewhere though.”
• “It is the artist’s faith that discoveries made on such specialised journeys of exploration are somehow consonant with the hidden structures of larger designs.”
• “Most (not all) great photographers have loved photography, and have, more to the point, trusted it—have been willing to follow it some considerable distance on faith, intuitively persuaded that the patterns of its mechanical logic are instructive, elegant, and not yet exhausted.” Winogrand did too. Do I? Write an essay on why I hate photography.
• Callahan: “I am sure of one thing: I want to photograph. I want to search around and find out what will motivate me to photograph—I mean to make a  real photograph. I could go to Cape Cod and look down at the sea; I could stand in the middle of Providence and photograph the people, photograph their faces, their arms, their legs—I have just got to figure out what works. If I were to decide I was going to photograph the sea, and that would be it, that would be ridiculous. I mean I would have to go photograph the sea for awhile, and if that didn’t work. I would have to go photograph something else. So you can’t make those decisions. It’s not in your hands.”
• His pictures are good, but of things that I just can’t take seriously.
• Only photographed women with his close in shots. They are good.
• Did some cool collages.
• Lots of kind of interesting double exposures.
• Some things very Bauhaus inspired, in the mode.

• reading notes
• essay
• szarkowksi
• harry callahan

Posted 2 years ago

Photographs by Stephen Gill

• Had a look at Stephen Gill’s A Book of Field Studies put out by Chris Boot. I was predisposed to not like him. And the introduction is written by an idiot. But looking at the pictures I realised that there was a deep sweet intelligence and restraint with them. They are very basic exercises in looking.
• Gill is looking at many of the things that I look at everyday across the cities I’ve been to: construction sites, gallery attendants, people who are lost. Constructions sites were especially interesting and his portraits of people have a such a tense calm about them. You can feel the picture vibrating.
• The participants are aware that their photos are being taken and this result in an authentic woodenness. It is as they would be considering the situation.
• There is a naive confidence in Gill’s choice of subjects and a soft touch in titling them. For example he titles the photos of personal stereo listeners with the song they were listening to when the photograph was taken, or for his extensive set of photos of billboards (from behind! genius) he puts in the caption the text that’s in the front. Working in colour on grey English days he does very well. A very English look, but sweet, like afternoon tea.
• He’s not trying to prove anything, but in the end proves everything. He has the balls to be who is. That is not a small thing in these very competitive times.
• Took up Friedlander’s MOMA book and have a third go at finishing the Galassi essay.
• Galassi talks of photographer such as Robert Adams, Tina Barney, Richard Benson, Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, Tod Papgeorge, Thomas Roma, Judith Joy Ross, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld making the move in the 80s to medium or large format cameras which “offered a fuller and more subtle rendering of surface, volume, and light—a capacity that dovetailed neatly with a developing aesthetic of patient observation.” He goes on to say as Frank’s influence waned, Atget and the old master’s became more important and are the prevailing aesthetic of the moment.
• Exteded, extended explanation of Friedlander’s use of Hasselblad Superwide for the Desert Seen pictures. It apparently regenerated his art. He went about making the same pictures that he had always made but now with a lot more detail. Made me feel depressed for some reason. It shouldn’t.
• “Even as he has staked an unarguable claim for the artistic [and technical] prowess of his medium, he has celebrated its mundane democracy, dissolving its princely independence into the familiar duties of a reliable servent.”
• Timothy O’Sullivan
• Quotes a brilliant poem by Billy Collins Consolations:
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hill towns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard,
and all of a sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
…
Instead of slouching in a cafe ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the care
as if it were the great car of English itself
and surrounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even to Bologna.
• “The language of photography is intimately dependent upon the local idiom of whatever it seems to describe, and a master of the former is adrift without an intuitive grasp of the latter.” Mentions that only HCB was comfortable everywhere he went.

• reading notes

Posted 2 years ago

Photos by Harry Callahan

• Read Liz Wells’ ‘Photography Reader’. Most of it is academic, theoretical, badly written wank. But some classic stuff by Weston (blogged already), and Wright Morris.
• Wright Morris writes about the key problems with photography today:
• Criticism displacing the very things they are meant to explain.
• The photographer as artist displaces the photograph
• Too many photographs (brilliantly compares it to printing money in times of inflation. But money is all printed paper, a great photograph is something rarer)
• Looked through Tod Papageorge’s Passing Through Eden. Not impressed by the pictures. Maybe 10-15 interesting ones. 3 or 4 very good ones. The whole Genesis idea I think is a bad solution to the problem of a huge edit, untended, unstructured. His text at the end is excellent of course. He made the right decision of not publishing earlier. He knew he wasn’t a good enough photographer.
• Read the 20th Century Photography Encyclopaedia on European Museums and the Museums in America. Interesting. New York’s the place of course for what I’m interested in (and Tucson, Arizona?!).
• Had a look at Assouline’s book on Brodovitch. I was reminded of B. from the end notes of Winogrand’s MOMA book. Winogrand studied with him for a couple of years it seems. The book wasn’t very edifying. Some layouts under his hand. Hard to understand without the context of what other magazines were doing at the time. Some very interesting pictures from Muncaksi. Need to look him up.
• Started up again on the essay by Galassi on Friedlander.
• Friedlander tried really hard to get to Vietnam, but the no magazine was interested. He didn’t want to photograph the war, but the effects of the American presence on Saigon.
• Friedlander’s At Work pictures of heads up close is also very reminiscent of my Archiface work.
• It seems Friedlander was fearless in going into topics which had already been heavily covered. That were cliché. He did not feel a huge desire to be new in subject matter. He already had confidence in the difference in his style. He kept on pushing things to see what he could get away with. A book of the letters of the Alphabet! My god. The audacity. The fun.
• Saw Diamondstein interview with Harry Callahan. Apparently he did close ups on the street with heads filling the entire frame. Interesting. Will need to look him up further. “When you get a style, you’re kind of dead.”
• Had my 5th complete look at Winogrand. Szarkowski’s essay grows larger and more affecting every time I come back to it. In it I see the beginning of my maturity.

• reading notes

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Unknown

The Pompeidou centre library is truly wonderous. The photography section is the largest I’ve seen and the tables, and stuff is great. There is wireless internet but it is like owning a temperamental ass, it does what it wants, and only works part of the day. So many attractive girls in the art section. They all seem very wary of me though. They must know that I’m writing an essay on them.

• Had a look at some of Edward Weston’s daybooks. It’s always such a shock of recognition looking at the writings of another artist. You feel like you’re reading the diaries of a twin brother. You don’t feel exactly the same way, but you’re writing about the same things. He bitches a lot about Steiglitz. Whereas I would have rejected his work out of hand before I came to Europe, I can see the good in it now. And I can see the intelligence. Perhaps instead of wanting meaning in a work what I really want and appreciate is personality, daring, and intelligence. Shock! That’s what I desire from people in life too. He was defensive about his subject matter. But rightly so, it’s great that he did that work. Next I’ll start liking Steichen and Minor White! I get so much from looking at the older, deader masters. I really am fucking competitive. I didn’t really know that. No, really I didn’t.
• Galassi on Friedlander: “He subsequently continued his self-assigned tutorial in the rich collection that slumbered there. “I was interested to know what had been done,” he explains matter-of-factly, as if any young photographer would do the same. But this was unusual behaviour. Even today, when most aspiring artist-photographers attend graduate school (in part to acquire the credentials that will allow them to earn a living by teaching the next generation of aspirants), only a few take it upon themselves to study photography’s past so avidly.”
• “The Leica’s thirty-six-exposure roll of film is just as important as its negligible size and weight; and a patient review of the contact sheet is as fundamental to the art as any number of hours spent on the streets.” Would Winogrand agree? Probably.
• Freidlander. Dense. But only visually. Winogrand was dense with happenings.
• Evans’ writings are strewn around half forgotten magazines and mouldy out of print books. I must find them. The cunt was a razor.
• Szarkowski in the New Documents text: ‘In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach to more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it.Their work betrays a sympathy—almost an affection—for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of it’s terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value—no less precious for being irrational.’ Fuck I have to read everything ever written by Szarkowski before he dies. I have never seen someone who can see art so CLEARLY!
• Awesome that his first book was just all self-portraits. Fucking sweet. How would it look now with Stephen having delivered curries from a gallery? Still it’s funny and things like that need to be done. But looking at the actual pictures, I don’t think the book was frivolous. Preceded that shallow Sherman.
• Paul Strand also went off to make films and then came back to photography.

• reading notes
• essay

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Lee Friedlander

Photo by Luigi Ghirri

• Looked at some of Curtis’ work with the Indian Americans. Some interesting masks and full costumes. Otherwise fairly standard portraiture stuff. Not super impressed. But it was the beginning of me learning the vernacular of shooting primitives. Not that it will matter. I’ll go out there and do work until I like the look of it. And if the past is an indication, it won’t look like what has come before. I have decidedly ambiguous feelings about looking at past work like this. It feels so dangerous, but I like doing it. Of course the answer is if I like doing it, well then I should. I’ll solve the problem of being overpowered by the past when I come to that bridge as they say. Or maybe that ocean?
• Also looked at the work of Luiggi Ghirri. I’m not sure how to feel, but I think I’m disappointed by him. He is such a soft man. His colours are light pastels and what he did when he did it is meaningful but only as experiments. I can’t see him saying anything particularly meaningful, or engendering and emotion besides say wistfulness. He doesn’t have a great eye for shapes either although he tries. You can see him trying. He seems to have also been a bit of a coward in not confronting people. But that’s unfair, because his art wouldn’t be what it is if he wasn’t like that. Reminds me of a Japanese girl or something. They must love him over there.
• Had a look at at the fantastic desert work by Friedlander and wrote a post about it. He is a towering master.
• Also started looking through his big MOMA book and it is fantastic. His sense of the visual is so strong, so experimental, so pervasive. He is always setting himself little visual harmony (or chaotic) challenges which he usually resolves beautiful. His negatives must be a fucking mess. But, but, but, it is teaching me a whole new way to look. Not for meanings, or subjects, but what is I suspect (and fear as I am so verbal, so analytical? (or is that a personal legend?)) is central to all the great photographers, but for sheer pleasure in seeing, in lines and planes, and shadings, and colours. At the risk of being zealot I really start looking at the world differently as I walked out. But it does create some complications. Because although loneliness and a dry, dark mirth pervades his work often his work seems to develop into just experiments. Winogrand did a lot of experiments too, but he had a story to tell in the end and kept his negatives hidden. I feel that Winogrand is the greater master, only because he was the greater man. Both were expert.
• Progress in my mission to find my forebears. I didn’t remember seeing the portraits of Friedlander’s of Jazz greats. But they look like my Architecture work a little. Square format. His colours are deeper, and richer. And of course, his subjects knew they were being exposed. A crucial difference. I need to write more about the looks that I’ve captured in my set. Currently it seems the pictures are a little light weight.
• Saw Sobol’s Tokyo book at the bookstore (talked to a chic girl there whilst doing it). It is kind of impressive. He definitely has a singular vision. I’m not sure that vision is necessarily deep or edifying, and I suspect that it won’t last if he doesn’t innovate away from the work that he has done. The scratchy bland white look is good and better than the millions of copies.
• At the same bookstore, saw the work of Paul Outerbridge from the 20s, 30, 40s. He did colour in a fairly sophisticated way even early on. But what I liked was a still life of an avacado and some other fruits. The Avacado was rotting. I liked that no nonsense sensibility. This ability to say this is the way it is. But not about war or something obvious like that, but to show the very foundations of nature is death and decomposition. Of course, it wasn’t grossly rotting. It would have still been nice on some good bread.
• What I have been reading that has been changing my world is E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art and it is rocking me to my foundations. Well, that’s wrong. It’s been strengthening the foundations of how I feel about making art/taking photographs at this moment in history. I know it is in bad taste but one must think of these things. I know so little about art history, and it is so fascinating through his words and opinions that I want to read the book again. I’ve been dipping in and out. Reading up before an exhibition and so on. But I’ve also read the last two chapters of his book which is about the contemporary scene and he is very good in pointing out how the bizarre is the most acceptable now. Such sense. I feel truly lucky to have run into people like him and Szarkowski and Robert Adams who make it seem all so serene and wonderful, this art game and real, and human, and worthwhile despite all the millions of people shitting everywhere. The reading has resulted in the In Joke post earlier, but I’m sure will result in more. It has made me think more deeply about they why’s and even the how’s than I ever have. I am starting to feel more confident that I’m getting my bearings. Not sure if I like where I’ve landed though.

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Posted 2 years ago