A blog about the art of photography, more or less.
I basically liked Kevin. He was Michael Riechmann's right hand man, and I quite disliked Michael, but Kevin I liked. Kevin was definitely a hustler, one of those guys who made a living guiding wealthy idiots around in places where they could take photos, a guy who'd built up a modest skill into a reputation, and then sold what we now call parasocial relationships to people who wanted to hang…
David reviewed this book for us a while ago, and I have been sitting on my copy for a good long time while I get over this horrific cold. But at least here I am. I've been working my way through an older edition of Hanson's text on Art History, which mainly covers European Art History, but I'm still learning a lot in spite of it all. One of the big things I've learned is that for most of history…
David comes through again! While all things are possible, I have no particular ambition to turn this into a "guest posts only" blog, but I'm certainly not saying much these days. I'm ruminating on some things, though, so check back occasionally if it moves you to do so. Here's David: Review of Tony Fouhse’s New Book, “the middle of nowhere” I’ve been following Tony Fouhse’s photographic output for…
Our good friend David Smith is at it again. He's been on me to pay attention to The Manhattan Art Review forever, and whenever I do dip in it's well worth it. Somehow, I never stick with it, probably because I am a worthless dilettante. Here's a link, which I don't think David included? TMAR . Without further ado: The Manhattan Art Review The terrain of Manhattan, the putative 'center of the art…
The sentence "all art is political" is a popular one to complain about, from the "why can't art just be pretty" crowd, and I recently ran across one such where some random guy wanted to know what was political about a Rothko. This led to a curiously disjointed hilarity, with about half the replies gesturing vaguely at the connection between the CIA and Abstract Expressionism, and the other half…
Of specific interest to me right now are one or more coherent groups of humans on this planet, mainly far too online, some of them Venture Capital Adjacent, which is to say they either have the attention of, or want to have attention of, the relative newcomers (idiots) in the Venture Capital Industry, by which I mean Marc Andreessen and people like him. These coherent groups of people want us to…
I've been painting a lot. I'm going to borrow an idea from Flusser, and then probably make a terrible mess of it. The idea is magic, and I'm borrowing it from his essay on photography. The underlying idea he's talking about is of a culture, usually an ancient one, that treats time as cyclic. Everything repeats. The sun rises and sets. Winter is followed by spring. The animals migrate, and so on.…
Anyone who's taken any meaningful number of photos and looked at them has likely experienced the sensation that, while a photo looks like the thing, it doesn't look like the thing. This is the gap between the optical reality of whatever it is, and the so-called percept , the impression the thing makes on your mind. If you take a picture of a wrench or something, a "record shot," it probably works…
AD Coleman firmly holds the opinion that a photographer, as an artist, must choose their photos. To simply shoot a bunch of pictures is not enough. To him, Vivian Maier essentially does not exist as a photographer. This is a position with which I concur, and which I have argued for at some length over the years. Photography is choosing. You choose where to stand, where to point the lens, when to…
Yo. I'm back for at least one post because I had some thoughts. Sometimes that leads to more thoughts, which is really the problem with thoughts, isn't it? My family and I went on a trip, to London for a week and Paris for a week, and it was pretty great as you'd expect, and so on and so forth. I had some thoughts about the nature of Travel for Travel's sake, and photography, and so here we are. I…
Really, I am not dead. I just can't think of anything to say about photography. Drawing has kind of eaten my brain lately, but I am utterly unqualified to talk about Drawing, really. Maybe some day. I draw a lot. Every day. I am substantially less bad at drawing than I was a year ago, but I'm not good as such, and I certainly have no expertise or theory. It's always tempting to just pivot to a…
A couple days ago, I guess, some protestors entered the National Gallery (the British one, not the American one) and had a go at a painting, because that's a thing we're doing now. To be clear, I don't think people ought to do this in general, and I don't think these protests make any sense. It's clearly just a "bit" the kids have settled on. That said, it raises in my mind the question of who…
I've stumbled over a few items randomly, which just coalesced into something in my head, so, here we go. Sam Bankman-Fried, currently on trial for operating an enormous kinda-Ponzi scheme in the crypto world (it doesn't seem to have been as coherent and organized as even a proper Ponzi, it seems to have simply been a sort of maelstrom of money that leaked a lot until the money was gone) is having…
A number of threads of thought crystallized this morning, abruptly. Let's see if I can write them down. In 1800s quite a number of photographers mostly took pictures and were paid for pictures and that was that. Gradually companies formed to supply those photographers, and those companies presumably made money. There were amateurs, to be sure, but they knew who they were, and there weren't all…
AD does a nice analysis of this photo, of just the sort I would do. A little more partisan than I would have written it, but AD's philosophy on that is perfectly clear and to my eye a perfectly reasonable approach. If he were disingenuous, I wouldn't like it, but he's not. Read it here. Really, do. It is well worth your time.
There is a school of thought, largely among the low-rent photo-academics that I so enjoy making fun of, that visual literacy is a thing, a thing which can be learned, ought to be taught, and so on. They say supremely stupid things like "one can read a photo just like a novel" and so on. This is one of those ideas that feels immediately kind of stupid. It gets a lot of its traction because of this,…
A photograph which looks like a photo of something or someone, as well as anything else which isn't a photo but which looks like such a thing, mainly does one thing: it testifies to that-which-was. This has been my thesis for a little while now, and it's recognizably lifted directly from Barthes, so if I'm a crank, at least my crankery has a pedigree! What I mean is that a photo, or something that…
David is a regular commenter here, and a friend. Normally he's substantially more acerbic, which I suspect means something. The book sounds fascinating. Someone for Everything by Michael LeBlanc — a review (and a speculative digression) by David Smith Michael Leblanc is a visual artist, and a professor of digital design who I studied under in the early '90s. We stayed in touch, trading news and…
I think I've made a little headway on discovering what on earth I've been on about lately. Perhaps it comes down to the rubric in play. If you're a hull-polisher, your rubric for measuring the quality of a boat and team is how shiny the hull is. This is borderline offensive to someone who's using the rubric "who can get the boat around the course more quickly" which is a more standard racing…
I got the sense from the commenters on the previous remarks that my notes maybe read as an indictment of all photographers, or almost all photographers, and I don't mean that at all. Just... a lot of them. The thing that got me started on this train of thought is a photograph and some remarks by Mike Johnston over on his blog, ToP: Photographs are Gifts . Allow me to be perfectly clear: I like and…
Most photos, almost all photos, are naive witnesses to something or to someone. The snapshot from the party or the beach, the selfie, whatever. These are maybe not well-made, these are maybe meaningful only to a few people. That's ok. All they do is attest to that-which-was, and that's all they are meant to do. At the other end, there are well-made photos that are about something else. Maybe…
There is in this world a wide spectrum of human circumstance, from very comfortable indeed to extremely uncomfortable. At the same time, there is a spectrum of desire-to-change ones circumstance. If one is very uncomfortable indeed, it makes sense to want to change your lot in life, perhaps even to change in some meaningful way who you are. You might think, in fact, that the desire to change…
As previously remarked, I have been making an effort to pursue drawing more seriously. This has been going on about 7 months now, I've worked through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I've been trying to draw every day. There has been some success. The central problem of drawing is that of seeing what is actually there. The goal of a drawing "from life" is to reduce the visual reality to…
I like Tony and I like Tony's work, so as usual, assume a certain bias in what follows although, as usual, I will attempt to be fair minded and neutral. Tony gifted me a copy of his latest, and as usual, I like it. It was one of several things that arrived in my field of view during my Crisis of Faith, and it is a nearly perfect exemplar of what I was talking about. It's open , it's built using…
The Mainstream White Cube art community is a curious beast, at least on the photography side. It seems mandatory for members of the community to deny membership (Fight Club?) and indeed to denigrate the community and its mores. Lewis Bush has made a kind of a career out of bitching about White Cube Art, while simultaneously feasting on its meagre provender as often as possible. Jörg Colberg lunges…