Reading: The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes

I recently blogged on the influence of modern artistic thinking on the development of photography and my own desire to better understand Art beyond the boundaries of photography.  I do not find this easy, I struggle with the conceptual thinking behind art, however, I feel this is important and I will continue the struggle to better understand this topic.  Other than continuing to use my annual pass to the art museums I am also engaged in some reading. A year ago I read E.H. Gombrich's "The Story of Art", which provided an excellent basis in the progression of art from it's earliest origins to the present day, however, such a book can clearly only deal briefly with the rise of Modern Art.  Subsequently I purchased "The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes.

Amazon

This rapidly became shelf-ware, it was only with my investigations of the motivations behind Andreas Gursky's work that I realized it was time to learn a little more.  This book provides a good introduction to the subject of 20th century art, beginning with the impressionists and finishing in the late 1980's with the rebirth of figurative art with British artists such as Lucien Freud and Landscape with David Hockney.  Between these periods he covers the progressive change in art from an expression of what we see and experience to what we feel and emote.  Although not the easiest read and with so much ground to cover at times the flow of information is too fast, I now have a better visual understanding of modernist art and the motivation behind different movements.  He covers the Fascist leanings of the Futurists, the constructivism of the communists and the raw madness of the surrealists.  I was particularly interested to see how art progressively decamped from its traditional home in Paris to New York, with American based artists such as Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Koonig leading the way.  One of the drivers for this move attracted a degree of criticism, the growing wealth of 1960'-80's America creating a supply limited art market, driving values up and ultimately leading to a lot of mediocre art being produced.

What I took from the book was a sense of an ongoing crisis in painted art,  that what was once a revolutionary art form that could inform and challenge simply had nowhere further to go.  Painting in the 20th century went from recognizable depictions of reality, through the dreamscapes of the surrealists into the complete abandonment of representation in abstraction.  The motivation of painters transitioned from a need to understand and represent the visual, to a method of expressing emotion and angst.  It almost seems that every avenue has been explored, what new is left to do?  Photography might be a culprit here, taking over paintings traditional representative role and also appropriating the political.  Whatever is the truth here, painting of the 20th century carries within it the visual language of our generation and this influences directly or subconsciously how we perceive new work in photography.  I think there is great value in learning more of this subject, hard as it is to penetrate.

Reading: Just My Type by Simon Garfield

Not a book about photography, but on a topic that has definite value for developing my photographic practice.

In a recent mail from my tutor the question was asked about where I going with my future as a photographer.  I frequently ponder this question, but as of now do not have a satisfactory answer.  Unless my current job goes South in a hurry I am very unlikely to be able to earn as much as a beginner photographer as a senior business analyst in a large IT company.  A decision to make a living as a photographer would then have to be balanced against a significant reduction in income, although maybe with the incalculable value of actually enjoying my job.  Just not sure if 50 is the age at which to make such a profound change...

However, photography is going to be a major part of my life so I do need to think about what that means.  Currently the greatest pleasure I get from photography is the development and production of photobooks.  Using Blurb I have now published over a dozen titles, ranging from, "here is what I did last vacation", through "harry met sally and they got married", to a few nascent attempts at fine art publications.  Actually, the "what I did last vacation" are the most involved; my vacations could best be described as underwater photography book development with Beer!  In 3 weeks I head away once more to the Pacific, the biggest question is what design will my book have and how to shoot for it.  More about that in a later post.

The design and publication of photobooks is thus going to be a major part of my practice going forwards.  I need to start developing skills appropriate to book publishing, taking and editing photos is merely a small element.  Of equal importance is the design of the book, the sequencing of the imagery, and critically the use of text.  The style of text has a huge impact on the look and feel of the book, the typeface, weight and size can impart a very distinct visual style.  When I produced U - a study of the Munich underground system I used Helvetica Neue LT 55, a very modern looking typeface, very clean and readable, also the closest I could find to that used in the subway system.  For Transient Light I wanted a more romantic almost historical look, so opted for a serif typeface - Bodoni MT.  In both cases the choice of font imparted an atmosphere to the book and influenced how it would be read.

I admit to an early interest in type, after buying a Macintosh Plus in 1987 (1MB memory, 20MB hard disk, a snip for 2000 pounds - and that was with student discount) I was introduced to the world of fonts.  When I published my Ph.D. I typeset it using Donald Knuth's TeX program, using the rather elegant Palatino typeface, one of the first thesis' published in my department that looked like a book rather than a bunch of pages from a typewriter glued together.  Since then I have always been concerned with the design of documents, although nowadays tend to default to the simplicity of the Arial typeface and leave it at that. It is readable and not ugly, but hardly conveys any personality.

So, recently I bought a few books on type and design, with the intent to educate myself more about the mysteries of the published word.  "Just my Type" is not only an excellent introduction to what works and what does not, it is a humorous and somewhat tongue in cheek history of the use of type and how innovation in printing has driven development.  The book intersperses a historical narrative with short chapters analyzing key typefaces and their use.  It looks at the good and the bad - the typeface chosen for the London Olympics takes a major bashing - it is desperately ugly.

Amazon

I now realize that I need to rethink Arial, to never again use Comic Sans, and start to explore Gill Sans, Helvetica, and the many other fonts I willfully ignore.  Another very useful volume I bought at the same time is a pure reference, but allows each typeface to be seen properly in print

Amazon

This is referred to a couple of times in Garfield's book and is an essential reference.

This is not really intended as a review of either book, but a reflection on my dawning realization that design is a key element of a photographers skill set.  Taking, editing and printing a photograph is demanding and takes years to perfect, however, for a photograph to be seen by more than a few it needs to be published and that needs an additional set of skills.  These books are a good source of inspiration and knowledge for building an element of that additional skill set.

Reading: Believing is Seeing by Errol Morris

Ironically I once had a paper published in the Physics World, entitled: "Seeing is Believing".  At the time I was working on theoretical studies of semiconductor crystal growth and with my former PhD supervisor, Dimitri Vvedensky, was collaborating with an IBM graphics lab to do some early animated graphical representations of how the growth proceeded.  This was back in the late 80's and what now would seem very primitive was then a real insight into the dynamics of growth, rather than looking at some spectroscopic curve, these animations showed atoms moving around on the surface of a crystal.

Well, that was the premise, what we were showing of course was a mathematical model driven simulation of growth, the tile of the paper alluding to the fact that because we had a graphical representation it was very much easier to understand what we were modeling and thus to believe that we had it right.  As with science, we are far more likely to believe a news story if it is illustrated by compelling imagery, however, the power of such images brings with it the temptation to embroider, manipulate and even to deceive.

Amazon

Errol Morris, in his book Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photographs), looks into a number of cases in which photographs were manipulated in some way.  The most obvious manipulation in this digital age is to simply edit the photograph by adding or removing content. However, whilst this is commented on, the book looks at more subtle misuses of photography.  These can best be summed up as:

1. The photographer changing the scene, moving things from place to place.  Here Morris looks at the work of the Farm Security administration and in particular a photograph of a cows skull set against parched earth, taken by Arthur Rothstein in the 1930's.  This photograph was used as a propaganda tool to highlight the plight of the Midwestern farmers during the dust-bowl.  However, it was discovered that the skull had been moved 10ft by Rothstein to create better dramatic effect.  Rothstein was heavily criticized, and yet was a victim not a perpetrator, he did not decide how the photograph was subsequently used.  Other examples in the book include Fentons moving of cannon balls in the Crimea and the suggestion that the Mickey Mouse photo in my last entry was managed.
2. Context obscured or altered by use.  The case study used looks at the now infamous Abu Graib photos which have entered the public consciousness as proof that the soldiers portrayed were torturing Iraqi prisoners, soldiers now in military prison.  The back story, however, is very different, sure the soldiers were stupid in taking and then sharing the images, but the torture and murder portrayed were the doing of other agencies, these guys simply took some record shots to prove what happened.  The photos then exploded across newspaper front pages and scapegoats were needed by an embarrassed military.

He finishes the book with a rather sad tale of a civil war soldier found dead at Gettysburg clutching a photograph of 3 children.  He was subsequently identified as Amos Humiston through generous man printing copies of the image and then distributing them until Humiston's wife saw the photograph.  Here things turned unpleasant and the former benefactor begins to profit from the image and effectively embezzles money raised through use of the photograph for orphaned children of the war dead.  Here the photograph is used as a tool of greed, although at no point is the veracity or authenticity of the image doubted.

This book presents a number of case studies, each examining elements of truth in photography, in most cases a good deal of investigative work was completed by Morris and interviews with experts are used to drive the narrative.  The book turns each photograph into an almost living being, the image flowing from place to place driving reaction.  At times the detail is too great, but on the whole I found this to be a valuable and thought provoking examination of the ways in which photographic images can be used to manipulate and deceive, whether honestly or not.  

It is fascinating, but to a certain degree I am beginning to wonder why so much print is expended on this question of truth in photography.  Once upon a time at the birth of the medium people truly believed that a photograph delivered a truth, this was soon disabused.  Although the forms of trickery discussed in the book are all deceptions of a form, the greatest deception of photography is not what is in the photograph but what is omitted.  A photographer editorializes every time they hit the shutter button.  The ultimate viewer never knows what was not photographed.

Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams & Image Makers Image Takers

In perhaps a desperate attempt to stave off having to actually start writing my assignment 4 essay I have been doing a substantial amount of reading recently.  This also coincided with the end of a futile attempt to make  reading enjoyable by sneaking a couple of novels into my life.  Bad Student!!!!  Seriously, though, a key element of my development as a photographic student has been reading about the philosophy and history of photography.  These texts help me to contextualize my own work and see how what I do builds upon the myriads of photographers since the birth of photography in the early 19th century.

I have mixed my reading, varying between classics and contemporary discussion, I also include a little "how-to" alongside the "what", but ultimately I am trying to expand my understanding in two distinct directions, why do we create photographs and what do we photograph.  The two are very much interlinked, the former addresses the personal element, whilst the latter tends to address the cultural position of the medium.

The 2 most recent books I have read are written very much from the perspective of the practitioner and each addresses the questions of why and what, with very differing degrees of success.  Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams attempts to convey this celebrated photographers personal philosophy and starts with the claim that this book asks many questions student photographers should be asking.  Perhaps, however, the answers or at least the dialog contained did not live up to the promise.  I found this a rather rambling discussion of a number of key questions, without really getting a sense of what the authors own position was.  The language was very opaque.  This disappointed me, I was expecting something very much more forth-write from Robert Adams.  Perhaps my mind was in the wrong place when I read the book, a re-read in the future is possibly called for.

Amazon

The one quote I took away and which resonated with me is the following:

"And I am worried by the amount of time spent by photographers in trying to revive nineteenth century photographic technology.  There are conceivably interesting uses to be made of almost any photographic method, but so many contemporary enthusiasts for old ways seem to place their faith simply in the value of doing the antique once more.  The results can be momentarily charming but they are often finally sad, a footnote to history, arcane and a little saccharine"

My reason for dwelling on this has been my own internal debate about using film, should I invest in a film camera, most likely Medium Format, or continue with my Digital practice.  The current craze for everything Lomo, even to the extent of recreating the "Lomo" effect in digital, seems to reflect Adams' comment above.  Given that digital technology is the present and future, why step back to old technology simply because of a sense of nostalgia or a desire to do some "real photography"?  If there is a genuine technical or artisitic reason for embracing film, fine, but only if it really adds something, I do not buy into the mysteries of film, the not knowing until the film is developed.

I mentioned two books, my second and very recently completed is Image Makers Image Takers by Anne-Celine Jaeger.  This is a truly excellent book, vastly different in size, scope, and most importantly impact to Adams' book.  The volume consists of 22 interviews with current photographers and 11 with people involved in the business such as curators or editors.  The interviews are candid, the views expressed are those of the practitioners, there is no editorializing.

Amazon

Philosophy is central to this book, the key question always becomes why, however, the the answers are engaging, they make you want to know more.  To some degree the book is too varied, so many different viewpoints can become a cacophony; conversely this wide range of views serves to underline a single and very simple point.  There is no single philosophy of photography, no single truth, each and every photographer is driven by individual impulses, however much influenced by the world around.  For the successful, it is their own personal vision that matters.

My take away from reading both books is that broad based philosophies of photography are about as valuable as the paper they are written on, it is personal vision and individual ambition that leads to successful photography.  An understanding of popular culture is useful if you want to sell something, but Sontag, Barthes, and Benjamin are not having much influence outside the class room.

Context and Narrative

A noticeable difference in my working practice since starting this course has been the need to contextualize my work and to provide a robust narrative to each photograph and to the set as a whole.  In the first year courses I found myself primarily concerned with the formal aspects of composition and managing image quality from capture through to print.  Whilst these skills are of great importance and still in need of further development, they are no longer enough to create a photograph that has meaning for me, let alone my audience.  Prior to studying photography as an art form, I would have said that composition and image quality were the be all and end all of what I wanted in a photograph.  Now I see the world very differently.

The big question when I take a photograph now is WHY, not WHAT, WHERE, or HOW.

With the last two assignments, I have undertaken difficult stories born in terrible catastrophe, trying to show through my photographs how Munich has moved from the dark into the light.  Taking the photographs was only an element of the activity, equally important was to research the history and then work out how to weave a story in the photographs.  The subject matter was risky, a Brit living in Germany commenting on Munich's Nazi past must do so with respect for both the victims, but also the descendants of the perpetrators who are equally as innocent.  A key outcome of this experience was that choosing a photograph for display had as much to do with the viewer as it did with the subject.  In both assignments I shot well over 1,000 frames and had in the region of 50 good photographs.  Reducing them to the 12 needed was very hard, far harder than taking them in the first place.  This gets to the WHY of photography, why I take the photographs is one thing, why I chose this shot versus another to display and why I place them in this order can determine whether a viewer accepts my images or simply passes them by.

Looking back I can say that Context dealt with why I took the photographs and selected this subject, Narrative determined why I selected the 12 I did and the order that I then placed them in.  As I work on assignment 3 I am finding that this awakening of awareness of the importance of Narrative and Context is making progress very difficult.  When I started this project the goal was simply to study the changing light of dawn and its interaction with the humid air of Autumn.  As the photographs developed, I found that I was building a sequence of images, from the bleak whiteness of pre-dawn mist into the light enfused golden glow of dawn and finally into the blue of early morning.  This developed into a sequence of 54 photographs, published as a book.  The narrative is simple, it is the awakening of the day and the study of light arriving in a new day.  Context is provided by shooting all photographs in one small quarter of a city park, a demonstration of the beauty that can be found in a small area of a vast city.

However, the assignment calls for 8 differing photographs with a linking theme.  I can do that, but this seems to be an exercise in illustration, losing the subject contact that continuity in the images could bring to my work.  I feel I have the versatility to show a broad span of lighting conditions, but every time I look at the photographs together they do not work as a set, context exists, but narrative is killed.  Perhaps that is the nature of this assignment, however, my head is somewhere else, I want each assignment to be a photo essay, not a series of technical challenges.  This will need more development over the next 3 weeks before the deadline for submission arrives.

An unexpected outcome of my increasing awareness of the critical importance of Context and Narrative is a changing feeling about the equipment I use.  Over the last 3 years I have been adding a progressively expensive array of lenses to my kit, mostly fast primes, seeking to optimize image quality in any given situation.  In the last 8 weeks I have almost only used an f/4 24-105mm zoom, a damn good lens, but far from the best.  However, what I trade in quality, I get back in versatility, enabling me to better capture my inner vision of the photograph, worrying less about aperture, speed, and quality, more about does the photograph contain the message I want to  deliver. Interesting..

Oh, and prior to submitting my last assignment I read the following:

Amazon

This helped me to develop many of the thoughts I have expressed here.

Publish your Photography Book

Trawling through Amazon the other day I came across this book by Darius D. Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson.  Intrigues about a book that talks about creating books I ordered a copy.  Fearing that this might be another weak how to book, I was pleasantly surprised to obtain a readable guide to the overall publication process.

I was half expecting something that dwelt on layout and form, instead this book provides a real insight into the way that books are developed, created, marketed and ultimately sold.  As well as talking to the mechanics of the process, the book spends much time discussing the intent of the artist and how that vision is turned into paper and cardboard.  Backing this up are many case studies and examples of real books and how they came into being.  What did surprise me was how small the print run is for a successful photo book, typically around 3,000 copies, clearly this is not a route to riches.  However, what it reinforced was that with the right concept and preparation it is possible to get a book into print.  It also includes self funding and self publishing, even including an interview with the founder of Blurb. 

This has set me to thinking about my developing my own "Art" book - why the quote marks?  Well, I have published over 10 photo books using Blurb, a mixture of wedding albums for friends and chronicles of diving holidays.  I have developed a certain style with these books, especially for my most recent wedding albums - the brides were impressed, and I did try to add a degree of style to the books, avoiding the evils of weird backgrounds and photo montages, however, they are not art:

Kati & Tobi

By Shaun Clarke

Book Preview

The diving books are even further away from art although they are modeled on successful in print photo books.  This is the best one thus far:

Borneo's Hidden Rainforest by Shaun Clarke | Make Your Own Book

As yet I have no illusions about actually printing a book using traditional means, but do believe that it is time to start thinking about creating a book with deeper meaning and a more distinct narrative.  Much of what I am working on at present is designed to be seen as part of a set, not a s individual photographs, but conceptually I cannot see any of them becoming worthy of book treatment.

I do have an idea that might translate well into book form and that is a revisit to my final assignment in People and Place, a study of the Munich subway system:

During development of this assignment I discarded many good images, that I think would work well together as a themed photo book.  I appreciate this is not groundbreaking documentary photography, but it is a graphical subject that fascinates me.  Maybe something that I could develop into a short photobook, published with Blurb as gifts to friends and family for Christmas.  I want to experiment with typography and layout, in particular I am infleunced by the design and style of Martin Parr's "Small World" and "The Last Resort".  As I step towards Year 3 I am increasingly aware of a need to develop threads in my work and a way of presenting the continuity of my work, a book is my current thinking.

I have also been very impressed by two recent purchases.  First of all I was enticed by Apertures reprint of Bruce Davidson's "Subway", a dark somber look at the New York subway system. Completed in the 1980's before Guiliani cleaned up the city these photographs capture the grime and fear that the subway then engendered.  The images mix menace, with squalor and the utter boredom of commuters.  You can almost smell the system in the photographs

Contrasting this is Michael Wolf's "Tokyo Compression Revisted", bringing a different horror from the subway.  Each image shows peoples faces crammed against the windows of the always overcrowded Tokyo subway system.  As with his work in Hong Kong it is the repetition of form that generates the message of the book, a depressing parade of humanity crammed into modern cattle trucks, their faces seen behind beaded condensation dripping down the inside of the subway windows.

Sharing similar subject matter, but with dramatically different treatments, these two books have one more thing in common.  They are superbly produced, beautiful objects in their own right.  In both cases every page is identically constructed, every picture has the same framing and dimensions, Davidison uses Landscape, whilst Wolf puts his travelers in portraits.  Both contain visual narrative and end symbolically.  Davidson ends on a positive note with a sunset lighting up the tracks, Wolfs back cover is opposite, a man raises a finger in comment on the photographer.

My own exploration of Munich's subway is quite different and very clinical, a study of an almost empty system, whose stations stand as art objects in their own right.  Now where did I store those images...

Reading: Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Andrews

As soon as I signed up for the course, I began accumulating reading and viewing material to broaden my understanding of the subject.  Mostly these are photo books by artists I am interested in or those recommended in the reading list, however, I also picked up a few works taking a more general view of landscape art, starting with "Landscape and Western Art" by Malcolm Andrews:

Amazon

The book provides a good overview of the tradition of landscape art within the context of fine art and painting in particular.  It's an interesting read and certainly a worthwhile grounding in some of the key concepts that underly how we came about to think of the world as landscape rather than mud and rain.  How landscape went from simply a container for religious or allegorical content to becoming prized for its ownmerits, is an enjoyable story with as much political as artistic meaning.  However, the overall impression is one of a progression from one version of a romatic vista to another, whether the untamed wilderness or the classical ruin.  The focus is on landscape as LAND, and by this I mean land that is sculpted and managed by those wealthy enough to own it.  Clearly painters must work for someone and a land owners money is as good as anyones, however, what I missed in the book was the development of 20th century landscape art, particularly photography, but also urban themes such as Lowrie.  Stranger still the final chapter leaps into consideration of using the landscape as art, through large scale installations that modify the landscape.  Seems almost orphaned from the rest of the text, a segue via photography would have made more sense to my mind.

The book seems to reinforce the content within the course notes, that landscape is the study of nature, although how a country estate can be seen as nature eludes me.  My greatest struggle remains the gradual process of working out what landscape means to me, the clear implication of the course notes is that landscape is green stuff with some brown and grey stuff, attached to something blue.  Oh and each of these colours needs to be found in nature, as if any British landscape outside of a few remote valleys could ever be described as natural.

What the book did do for me, though was to contextualize all that I dislike about most landscape art.  I am still working on the fringes of the city, looking for contrasts between the green of the countryside and the grey of the city, this book has pushed me further into the city, not out of it.