Reading Shortlist 9.22.15

Lucas Blalock, from the video Lucas Blalock's Digital Tool Kit

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

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Scott Alexander, American Photo, Processing the News: Retouching in Photojournalism Good overview of the slippery problems that surround creating contemporary PJ standards in the midst of questions of truth and manipulation in the Photoshop era.

Art21, Lucas Blalock's Digital Tool Kit A short, well-done video looking at Blalock and his transparently and heavy-handedly Photoshopped images.

David Balzer, The Guardian, "Reading lists, outfits, even salads are curated – it’s absurd" Asks a valuable question - "Does the process of selection and arrangement add any value?" - only to delve into a history of the idea of curation instead. Still worth a read.

JJ Charlesworth, artnetnews, Can Abstract Art Still Be Radical? What's left in the tank for abstract act? Charlesworth insinuates not much, at least not without inventing a new language of forms we don't currently have.

Michael David Friberg, On futility and the myopic nature of the photo world Friberg packs a lot of issues into this semi-rant, including questioning photographer motivation, that is, the idea many photographers create work as monuments to themselves, not with the goal of sharing with or educating others; the advent of photography as communal authorship and social practice, found in projects like Everyday Africa; and the limited audience for - and therefore limited impact of - contemporary art and long-term documentary photography.

Alessia Glaviano, Vogue.it, Taryn Simon A 15-minute interview with Simon that gives a nice overview of her work.

From Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras

Ellie Hall, Buzzfeeed, Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras People can be awesome.

Marvin Heiferman, Paris Photo Forum, The Slipperiness of Photography: Marvin Heiferman A lunch-break length video from Heiferman on the multiple, unruly histories of photography.

Alfredo Jaar, Louisiana Channel, Images Are Not Innocent Jaar argues all images are ideological conceptions of the world and talks about how Western media, through its lack of coverage of events such as the Rwandan genocide, becomes complicit in these horrific events.

Brian Jones, Business Insider, 46 photos of life at a Japanese internment camp, taken by Ansel Adams I didn't know about this work before coming across this link. It helps expand a sense of Adams and his practice in a good way.

From Kool-Aid Man in Second Life © Jon Rafman

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life Jon Rafman videos are on heavy rotation at fototazo International Headquarters.

Bryan Schutmaat, Ahorn Magazine, Interview with Peter Brown A good example of an interview that provides depth through clarity, and not by trying to weave the text as densely as possible.

Donald Weber, Vantage, The Rules of Photojournalism Are Keeping Us From the Truth "At what point did the act of making images subvert the idea of what Photojournalism is and should be?"

Alexi Worth, Cabinet, The Invention of Clumsiness A fascinating hypothesis about the impact of early photography on mid-19th century painting, in particular on Manet.

Photographers on Photographers: Connecting Then to Now by Scot Sothern

© Pavel Titovich

The best photographers, the ones whose pictures are worth looking at, are the ones obsessively looking at the pictures other photographers are making. Currently an endless barrage of images assails us between the blinks from every direction. Everyone everywhere is taking pictures; faces are replaced by iPhones with pictures of faces. In my quest for amazing images I click the mouse, like a shutter, until my neck hurts. Every so often I come across pictures I’d like to put on my wall. I happened across a collection the other day from a talented young photographer whose images took me back to a talented long-dead photographer, and influence from my adolescence.

Early in my evolution as an image-maker, my father, a portrait and wedding photographer pointed me toward Yousuf Karsh an old semi-famous black and white guy who played by the rules and served as the main-man for tutelage and inspiration. I liked Karsh okay, I didn’t really pay attention to photo magazines, lived in a town devoid of cultural hangouts and wasn’t exposed to photography as art. It was business. I was making okay money for a kid, photographing Little League baseball teams; making and selling pictures of tourists in an Ozarkian cave, stalactites above, stalagmites below. I shot them with a Speed Graphic then developed the 4 x 5 film, in my cave-darkroom, slapping it wet into the enlarger. I exposed, developed, dried, trimmed, and inserted into folders 5x7 prints in about ten minutes then sold them for a buck a piece and hoped they didn’t fade before they made it to the parking lot. It was fun but it wasn’t art.

© William Mortensen

My father owned a photobook, Monsters and Madonnas, of rather bizarre photographs by Hollywood glamor photographer William Mortensen. He was the first arty photographer to catch my eye. His images both black and white and in muted colors were printed with texture screens and paper negatives which he pencil-retouched. It was very old-fashioned; many of his pictures looked like illustrations for Shakespeare plays which at the time seemed pretty dorky to me. But still I liked his soft-core nudes; milk maids, witches, and girls in bondage, and I loved his highly-staged photos of grotesque monsters and dark moody creations of torture and madness. It fit right into my 1950s childhood of Hammer Films; vampires and Edgar Allan Poe; teenage werewolves and Frankensteins, and even Mad Magazine; blooming rebellion and middle fingers ushering us baby-boomers into the 1960s.

© William Mortensen

When my pop was still a kid, in the thirties, Mortensen moved to the then artist's community of Laguna Beach, CA, where he opened a studio and school. He published books, instructional and photo, and continued making offbeat photographs. His work was panned in the art world for its sappiness and S&M overtones. He was rudely snubbed from the photo artists elite, f64 purest types. Ansel Adams called Mortensen the anti-Christ. That his work, a precursor of Photoshop, was regarded as near blasphemy only put him higher in my esteem. That his techniques in the darkroom and behind the camera were as good and sometimes better than his critics was not publicly acknowledged. I can still remember reading his instruction on composition and printing, and getting excited about loading a camera and following his Rx. I was a fan and I’m still a fan.

© William Mortensen

And so the other night, clicking the mouse in search of great images I came across a collection that reminded me of William Mortensen. At first glance, of an image that reminds me of another image, I’m programed to brand it derivative and move on. Square format dead-centered pictures of dwarves or transvestites, and unattractive people in front of white backgrounds is at the top of my snooze list. However, there are so many images, so many people with cameras, every style and idea is a shared concept. Is a picture derivative if the maker has never heard of the person they are imitating? And these images that reminded me of William Mortensen did so more on a visceral level. Place and time was right now and a long time ago and I could feel them both.

Pavel Titovich is twenty-eight years old and lives in Belgorod, Russia. He is on Facebook. For me, he captures struggle and beauty in earthy-toned images, erotic and melancholy. Where Mortensen was a Hollywood storyteller and showman, Titovich goes deeper toward a darker realism, all the while putting the same old-fashioned look and feel as the sixty-five year-old photos by an artist he has most likely never heard of. I’d like to put his work on my wall.

© Pavel Titovich

© Pavel Titovich

Leaving home and formal education at seventeen, in the 1960s, Scot Sothern spent thirty-seven unsettled years hustling freelance photography. Scot worked in department stores, churches, bowling alleys, sports events and high school proms. He worked in a cave at a tourist-trap in Missouri, making and selling photo mementos. Traveling with a portable studio, knocking door-to-door in suburban America, he made and sold children's portraits and novelties–photo buttons and key-chain viewers. Scot shot model's portfolios, head-shots, and nude magazine layouts. He spent three years in Tallahassee, Florida, with a photography studio, three seasons with a high school yearbook studio in Los Angeles, and has been employed in three different cities as a darkroom technician.

In 1983, in Saudi Arabia, Scot made industrial training films and photographed the disappearing Bedouin tribes. He worked as an optical camera operator in Los Angeles and New York City. Scot photo-illustrated a series of magazine stories including "Shopping For God: Religious Cults in America." These essays were represented by both the Black Star and Onyx Photo agencies and published worldwide.

Forced into commercial retirement as the crippling byproduct of a motorcycle mishap, Scot now writes books and has continued making photographs. In 2010 Scot's first solo exhibit, LOWLIFE, was at the Drkrm Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2011 Lowlife, the book, photos and text, was published in the UK by Stanley Barker.

Photographers on Photographers: The Other Annie Leibovitz by Steve Davis

©Annie Leibovitz

Olympia-based photographer Steve Davis won 1st place in the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project Competition Award in 2002 and is the recipient of two Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowships. His images have appeared in Harper's and The New York Times Magazine and are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the George Eastman House, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Musee de la Photographie in Belgium, and the Haggerty Museum at Marquette University. A full-length interview with Steve was published on fototazo on March 1st and can be found here.

The Other Annie Leibovitz

by Steve Davis

As a young teenager in the early 1970's, I was interested in two things besides girls -- photography and rock music. Having a tin ear and proving too lazy to practice, that left me with photography -- a pursuit informed by family snapshot photography, classic Adams type landscapes, and increasingly by images celebrating rock stars, and a hip "counter culture" of which I was painfully ignorant. Most of these images were black and whites from Rolling Stone Magazine.

Annie Leibovitz began honing her craft at Rolling Stone at about that time. Her early photography proved to be exceptionally influential to me. Her images, like her subjects seemed mystical -- ambiguous and incomplete by design. Definitive clarity, obvious and accessible visual statements were more traits of an authoritarian culture, and not of Rolling Stone's or early Leibovitz. Her pictures were grounded in a grammar of grainy 35mm Tri-X, sometimes exposed properly, sometimes not; sometimes in focus, sometimes not so much. (I can still experience the smell of film and fixer whenever I lay eyes on those early pictures, and that alone makes me smile).

©Annie Leibovitz

Today it seems, the great celebrity photographer-turned-celebrity is hardly known for her early photojournalistic work. Her post 70's color portraiture has easily earned her a place at the 20th Century Great Masters Supper Table, (and I'll take no time in expressing the importance of that work in this article). One might see no need, I guess, to look back too far into the beginnings of her career and her art. No need to review her remarkable series about Nixon's resignation, the Rolling Stones on tour, or Ken Kesey's farm.

The best of her early portraiture is in my opinion, as good as her later, more polished and refined examples. The 1976 Brian Wilson standing on the beach in his bathrobe shows a man walking out of both surf and Bible. The 1970 John Lennon portrait shows a man both regal and common. Mick Jagger standing in a hospital elevator, patient and mystic -- examples of the photographer making pictures inviting contradiction and open-ended interpretations. If there was a clear message or overarching statement to Leibovitz's pre-1980's work, it is that there is no clear message or overarching statement to be had. Mystery and grace go hand in hand with berserk fans, drugged out rock stars and political corruption.

©Annie Leibovitz

Years ago I attended a workshop by Neal Slavin (famous for his large scale group portraits,) and as it turned out, friend and neighbor to Leibovitz. After speaking briefly about her Vanity Fair style of big business portraiture, he denounced her pre-color photojournalistic brand of photography -- the results of a beginner, not the master she would become. If that wasn't enough, he assured me that Leibovitz herself felt even stronger about the insignificance and amateur nature of those early photographs.

That kind of sucked. One of us was clearly wrong about the strength of that early work. It seemed unlikely that it could be Annie, or even Neal for that matter. What does it mean to base your entire life plan on bad work? Nothing, really. Even Slavin recanted his denouncement on the following day. I realized that none of that really matters. You see what you see.

©Annie Leibovitz

The last time I picked up a Rolling Stone was January 1981. It had the super famous John and Yoko image on the cover, taken by Leibovitz on the last day of his life. His death was a huge sensation of course -- described in the media as the "day the music died," his elegy was the elegy of an era. In looking through "Annie Leibovitz, 1970-1990" (Harper Collins, 1991) I am struck how this John and Yoko image serves as the line of demarcation between "Nikon Annie" and "Leibovitz Inc." I often wondered what could have gone through her head -- to take the final pictures at such a final point in popular culture. (How would you process that?)

Her later flashier, classier, hyper-real fantasy portraits for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the advertising industry will eclipse the kind of work I mention here, probably justifiably so. But seeing pictures made by one person, sans directors, makeup artists, stylists, assistants or a script makes me remember why I picked up a camera.