Still Searching blog gets promiscuous

"window and mirrors"

 I mentioned in an earlier post, my ambivalent reaction to the Still Searching photo blog. On one hand, I appreciated the effort to build a serious photo blog, but on the other, I was annoyed at the unnecessarily pretentious academic tone. Well, a leap day miracle must have happened, because the Feb 29 post ("Photography: A Promiscuous Life, part 1") by Aveek Sen strikes the perfect balance between scholarship and readability with just the right amount of poetic self-indulgence. It came as no shock to learn that he has a degree in English Literature.

Aveek Sen's post is an invitation to promiscuous thinking:

"The word, promiscuous, combines the Latin pro or forward and miscere, to mix. So, the promiscuous moves forward through indiscriminate mixing – a tendency that had to wait for the Victorians to become a sin."

Sen takes inspiration from the god of all photo curators, John Szarkowski, whose 1962 lecture urges photography teachers to lead their students beyond the confines of one discipline (photography as "window" rather than a narcissistic "mirror"). Sen explains:

"To break out of its documentary cage, photography must risk a kind of intellectual and existential promiscuity, an all-absorbing hunger that is at once outwardly directed and inwardly trained. It must learn to look, as William Blake had put it (well before photography was invented), not only “with”, but also “through”, the eyes."

Based on the ads on late-night TV, I don't think the world needs more sexual promiscuity. But a little more intellectual promiscuity might be just the thing to improve your photography.
Read the whole post at "Still Searching" for more inspiration.

Revisiting old photos

The theme this month is "revise, reshoot, refine," but I can't help but add "revisit" to the list. If you've been reading this month's posts, you know that the theme is inspired by the writing process. When it comes to writing academic papers, I have a fairly tedious method. First, I cast the net wide. Let's say, for example, that I want to write about scientific instruments in the 17th and 18th centuries ("Why would anyone want to do that?" you say, and yet I did). I don't like to know exactly what I'm going to say in advance because it doesn't seem very honest. So I read book after book and take notes. I feel like I have to reach some sort of critical mass before I stop collecting notes and actually start writing. One of my best experiences in the "casting the net wide" phase of research was when after a couple of months in the same French library, the librarian let me browse the hidden stacks of not-yet cataloged rare books. For me, it was as if I had tamed the fox in The Little Prince. This is a complete digression, I know, but before I start making things apply to photography, I have to say that going through neglected books, papers, and ephemera is hands-down my favorite part of research (Don't get me started on my week at the Cooper-Hewitt with 12 boxes of papers related to the origins of industrial design or I'll never get this post done.) I like to think that it's the same feeling William Eggleston (one of my favorite photographers) has when he takes a picture of a ceiling fan or a stack of garbage bags.

Did I lose you yet? Let me bullet point my tedious research/writing process and then skip to how this applies to revisiting old photos:

• The initial phase leads to perhaps 100 pages of typed notes
• I then move on to the "notes of my notes" phase, where I pull out possibly relevant quotes and get it down to maybe 36 pages.
• Finally, I write the actual academic article (that will be read by far fewer people than this hasty blog post) and use only a fraction of those notes.

The parallels with photography seem clear, don't they?

• First, I take way too many photos (unlike Eggleston, by the way, who thinks that if you take more than one picture of the same thing, then it's just too painful to have to choose)
• Next, I rate my photos in Aperture. One star means "Why am I keeping this? I should really just delete this. Help! William Eggleston was right!" Two stars—i never use two stars, what's the point? Three stars means the photo has no major technical flaws. Four stars means I think this could be the one, but I don't want to commit until I have seen all the options. And five stars means I think the photo is worthy of actual post-processing attention.
• Post-processing doesn't mean I'll ever bother to print. A very small fraction of photos end up on my wall or in an album. And the ones that make it aren't always the best ones; they're just the best ones for a certain context.

But what happens to the rest? Are they worth revisiting?
This struck me when Becky from "Life with Kaishon" included the following photo of mine in her interview of me:

I actually love this photo, but I had completely forgotten about it. I took it two years ago as Eva was sleeping on my chair. She's five now, and the blanket is still a huge source of comfort for her, although most of the time it has to stay in her bed.

In my hunt for the original file in Aperture, I opened a folder of photos I took for her birth announcement and there it was—the blanket, making its pink and pristine début as a backdrop for our equally pink and pristine baby girl. I immediately made a diptych of the two photos:

There's an empty 8x10 frame on our wall that I have never gotten around to filling. Now, thanks to some digging through forgotten photos, these two become part of a printed composition.

The moral of this story is that a new context might give you a renewed interest in some images that would otherwise fall into oblivion. Take a little time and open one of those folders of neglected images. Wander the uncataloged stacks of your photo library. See what inspires you now. See what a little cross-referencing can do. Give something a chance to make it into print.

Concept inspiration: John Baldessari

John Baldessari photo © 2007 Sidney B. Felsen

For those of you who read my blog mainly for the tutorials, I promise that one is coming soon. But if you also like inspiration, you'll be seeing several posts this month about creative minds doing conceptual work. First up: coneptual artist John Baldessari.

I'm skipping the bio (you can get that at the links) and giving you a few examples of his conceptual work. Maybe one of them will inspire you:

• The first time he used photography in his work was on a project where he looked at the letters C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A on the map, drove to the precise location of each letter, made that letter on the spot out of found objects, and then photographed it. I wish I had thought of that (but then, I was a newborn at the time so I had other things on my mind).
  
• The relation between text and image is a recurring concern in his work (I could go into pedantic mode about the relation between his work and that of various surrealists, but this is supposed to inspire ideas, not sleep.) I love "the pencil story" from 1972-73 (on a side note, don't you find dual dates strange? I mean, it's two pencils and some text, pick a year. Unless he made this on New Year's Eve, I'm just not buying the two dates thing):

(In case the text is difficult to read here it is: "I had this old pencil on the dashboard of my car for a long time. Every time I saw it, I felt uncomfortable since its point was so dull and dirty. I always intended to sharpen it and finally couldn't bear it any longer and did sharpen it. I'm not sure, but I think that this has something to do with art.")

• Long before others were doing it, Baldessari worked with found photography. He would raid the garbage bins of photo processing companies, for example, or simply rip photos from a dictionary. Sometimes he overpainted the images, other times he used them to create collages. Once, he took photos from TV shows, asked his assistant to write a one word caption on or below each photo, and then organized the project into a visual dictionary.
• He collected a series of movie stills and made grid-like collages of heavily cropped sections. In one work, he gathered images of people's hands pointing guns.

Kiss / Panic, 1984, Medium black and white photographs with oil tint

• He often adds bright round circles (like price tag stickers) over the faces of his found subjects

(buy this and others at the Barbara Krakow Gallery)

And finally, here's a little Wikipedia excerpt about Baldessari's conceptual games:
"Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film."

The point in this and future posts on conceptual inspiration is not to give you ideas to copy, but to try and appreciate how one artist's mind works, to get you thinking about and reacting to that work, and from that thinking/reacting....who knows?

Want to read more about Baldessari?
Read the X-TRA interview.
Read Wallpaper's article about the recent Tate show and watch the slide show.
Read the Smithsonian's oral history interview with Baldessari.
Another interview at Art Review.
An interview with Seesaw magazine that I find particularly interesting.

Don't want to read?
OK, watch an interview.

Want to buy a book?
I recommend Pure Beauty. I own it and I love it.

November Monthly Special: Everything but the image

This will be an unconventional monthly special. I have decided to dedicate the month to everything BUT the actual image in a photo. Frames, albums, books, decorating ideas, unconventional use of photos, papers, printing processes, and so on. I want to tackle the problem/exciting challenge (depending on whether your a half-full or half-empty kind of person) of what to do with the photos you take.

I don't scrapbook, and since there is a multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to scrapbooking, I won't try to compete. But I will talk about other book ideas that may or may not fit within your definition of a scrapbook.

I am not a professional framer, but there is a great one down the street here in Paris, and if I can get an interview, I'll give you some tips about framing.

Because I try to do monthly specials that force me to learn new things, I hope to explore alternative printing techniques as well as a variety of display ideas.

And because holiday season is already upon us, I hope to come up with photo-related gift ideas, both homemade and bought.

And here I am doing my post on November 3rd! I had better get moving.

As for your participation (we had 6 last month, that's better than the month before), should you decided to post something and share it with a link below, I'm sure everyone would enjoy it. For example, tell about a favorite photo gift you have given or received. Share how you print and display your photos.

Sure, we all take photos, but then what?

Inspiration or just schadenfreude?

I spent hours today doing no less than FIVE head swaps for a family photo. The result is very convincing, but it took way too much time. It's my own fault for suggesting the head transplant in the first place (but five?). I blame myself for suggesting that a composite could make all 15 people look their best, but I also blame television and the movies for making Photoshop wizardry seem effortless.

The computer corollary, of course, is hacking. Ever watch Chloe Sullivan on Smallville (It's a guilty pleasure)? Sure Clark, let me just hack into the NSA on my iMac.. Frantic typing, wide-eyed intensity,and 5 seconds later...Done. Or Chloe O'Brian on 24? Sure Jack, let me just hack into the Chinese Embassy... Frantic typing, a look of consternation, and 5 seconds later... Done.
(Note to all parents-to-be: Name your daughter Chloe and there's a 95% chance she'll be a computer genius capable of thwarting terrorist attacks and/or Lex Luthor. The other 5% grow up to be waifish models-turned-actresses, so name at your own risk.)

But back to Photoshop. A blog that I find laugh-out-loud funny is Photoshop Disasters. They feature pro-level disasters that have somehow made it past teams of pros and into print. For example, a favorite recurring theme is the hand left in when removing a person from a photo as seen here (or does Kate Moss just have a very shy and skinny friend?):


Even Apple isn't immune from Photoshop disasters. Maybe I'm getting too much enjoyment from other people's mistakes. But somewhere buried in the schadenfreude is an inspirational message:

As Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus would say: Take chances, make mistakes, get messy! (A random reference, I know, but I'm a storehouse of useless trivia.) Instead of showcasing my best, polished work as part of a self-promotional campaign, I want to explore new themes and techniques, and in the process, I hope to inspire you to do the same. So don't be shy. Try out some Monthly Specials in the new year. If the pros are turning out enough disasters to fuel a blog (and it only picks on the pros, by the way), we can afford to make a few mistakes as well.

Hmm. Was that a dubious source for inspiration? Probably. But in any case, laughter is good for the soul.