Reading Shortlist: 6.12.14

Film still from "George Osodi: Kings of Nigeria," part of Al-Jezeera's "The New African Photography" series

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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Al Jazeera, The New African Photography. This six-part video series, each focusing on a young or middle-aged contemporary African photographer, aims to counter the legacy of colonial visual interpretations of the continent and present alternative paths forward for imaging Africa in new ways.

Jörg Colberg, Conscientious, How to Write About Your Photographs. Solid advice from Colberg, especially on how writing can inform your work process.

Philip Gefter, The New York Times, With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography. An article ostensibly about the show "What Is a Photograph?" at the ICP summarizes the big questions in photography today.

Evita Goze, FK Magazine, Interview with Aaron Schuman. Schuman talks about research as part of photography process and product as well as about photography as language.

Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe. Deepest ever view of the universe confirms it looks a lot like Lucky Charms.

Barry W. Hughes, SMBH Blog, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014. Sharp, insightful critique of this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize results and exhibition.

Ieva Laube, Fold, Designing visual novels. Interview with Teun van der Heijden. Dutch designer van der Heijden, who designed Stanley Greene's Black Passport among many other books, talks about how he conceptualizes his role in relationship to the photographer and on what makes a good photo book.

Craig Mod, The New Yorker, Goodbye Cameras. An argument for the holistic potential of networked devices and an end to cameras.

Colin Pantall, Incestuous and Self-Congratulatory Photobooks? Pantall asks a question that deserves a lot more conversation.

Shit My Photography Professor Says. A student in a Thomas Roma class at Columbia documents Roma's wisdom and insanity.

Diversity in Photography and Contemporary Image Distribution Problems, Part II

fototazo International Photo Sites Map showing, well, a general lack of international photo sites

Part one of this post explored the issue of diversity raised by John Edwin Mason’s tweets about the results of Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg’s initiative on what’s new in contemporary photography.

It’s worth reading part one before part two to get the whole argument, but as a quick overview, part one suggested that the value of Mason’s tweets was as a reminder to the participants and anyone else in a position of distributing and promoting photography of the importance of keeping a wide-eye in terms of curation as well as an encouragement for editors to avoid the easy habit of showing what's close at hand ("local" work – both physical and online). I turned the focus of the first post towards the general lack of photography made outside the United States and Western Europe on major independent photography sites that are based in, or written by, people from those two areas as part of an explanation for why the lists made for this initiative were dominated by white photographers from those same areas.

Moving the conversation ahead, Mason's tweets provide us an opportunity to investigate another theme that overlaps directly with part one of this post: problems in online image distribution.

Photography sites such as those run by the people involved in this initiative (I’ll just use "sites" to stand for all blogs, pages, magazines, etc.) are almost all run by people who are also professors or photographers or do other work that actually pays. The hours they commit to this are in most cases a gift, not a job, and they are necessarily limited in the time investment they can make.

Let's say one of these editors responds to and agrees with the premise of part one of this post. How are they going to source the work? While editors can be criticized to a degree for their local selections in this initiative and for general curatorial tendencies towards local work, there are also major problems in facilitating their - as well as anyone else's - encounters with and knowledge of international work. We all have limited time and digging through what's out there and finding sites that feature global work specifically is difficult.

We frequently think about and talk about the sea of images online. Ironically in the digital era of ubiquitous images and information-sharing, there are very few sites specifically focused on showing international work. What’s the best site with navigation in English featuring Brazilian photography? Russian? How about the entire continent of Africa, much less particular to a country?

Tens of thousands of photographers make professional work in areas that are represented by disparate, separate sites that generally have small profiles or else they make work in areas with no local sites at all. Work by international photographers, with the possible exception of Japan, is honestly hard to find online and even Japan, as Tokyo-based editor Dan Abbe has noted, generally does not produce externally focused online editorial projects. I’m not sure about the submissions to other sites, but the great majority of submissions to fototazo are received from North America and Western Europe, I'd guess 80%.

This leaves editors with a real issue assuming an interest in broadening the work they show: with limited time and limited submissions sent to them, the current online architecture is working against their being able to find the work they would theoretically have the desire to show.

To underline the lack of sites focused on showing global work, I’ll mention a series of posts that I've been working on called International Site Profiles. The idea has been to select a site that largely features work from a particular country or region outside the US and outside Western Europe, then to publish a short profile of the site (here’s an example). The sites are then pinned on a Google map to help readers explore them. The minimum requirements for the series are that the site must largely show photography from a specific geographic region, have tabs in English to facilitate navigation, and it must show documentary, fine art photography, or photojournalism - i.e. no commercial sites. As an editor, it has been very difficult to find sites that meet these basic criteria. There is a eye-opening lack of sites that focus on promoting work from geographically specific areas or demographically specific groups that would help to funnel the best of that work to be known by and considered by editors based in other areas of the world.

Let me use Colombia as an example to illustrate the situation because I live here.

First, the inability for much of the photography community here to tap into the strength and opportunity of the online image distribution network compounds many other factors that militate against their success, so distribution problems are on top of other issues. Arts education is not great here, frankly, and there are major issues with equipment cost. Many photographers with a strong skill set and portfolio are working with cameras not considered professional by international and national editors (consider a microgrant donation!).

Despite these issues and others, there is great work being made in Colombia, but what is being produced is not being distributed. There are few sites in the country focused on work produced here, but they are all in Spanish, cutting out a large percentage of international readership, and they are also disconnected from one another. As for sites for an exploratory source of Colombian photography in English, there aren't any. I have shown a number of Colombian photographers on fototazo, but the curation of this site reflects my photographic interests: omnivorous.

The issue is compounded by the fact that the great majority of Colombian photographers, at least those I know, do not have individual, personal sites. The reasons are many, a few guesses include language (site building programs are in English, registering a domain has until recently been difficult without English - Go Daddy, for example, just released a Spanish interface for doing so in March 2012), the lack of local precedent, the fact a site is not a necessity for local competitions and grants, and because people would rather put their resources towards equipment. Many photographers here have Flickr accounts that serve image-sharing interests and needs and meet the local standard for an online presence, but this keeps them from being taken seriously by international editors who usually demand a personal site for their work to be considered. Colberg's yearly Conscientious Portfolio Competition, for example, requires a "proper website" and specifically says no Flickr accounts or blogs, eliminating all of my students and most Colombian photographers I know. A reasonable and common request on his part, but illustrative of a real issue in participation in the online photography world for photographers in many parts of the world.

There is also another issue of aesthetics involved that deserves a mention in here somewhere, although I'll just address it briefly because it could be a separate post entirely – or a book. Some work produced in Colombia may not appeal to US and Western European editors due to aesthetic differences between cultures. To take an example from elsewhere and from another medium, the movies of John Woo produced for Hong Kong have a different aesthetic – in a word, more romantic – than movies he releases in the US which generally has a lower tolerance for what might be considered sentimental. Neither side is right of course, but the difference can sometimes limit the response of one culture to the artistic work of another if people aren't interested in, ready, or able to look past those differences.

The situation in Colombia plays out in other countries. When I asked an editor from India what sites he would recommend beyond his own, he came up with two and sent both with reservations. Three sites for the second largest country in the world. China? I’ve encountered none so far for the international sites series with a minimum of navigation tabs translated to English. For all of Africa, I have found one Tumblr page that goes beyond a personal site. There are surely a number more, but the point remains: there aren’t nearly enough (please send suggestions for the series!).

The last true barrier in photography is geography. I have a concrete suggestion as a first step to resolving the issue: an umbrella page or an International Photography Site Network whose project would consist of the interlinking of sites that focus on a particular country or region in order to facilitate sourcing photography from those arenas. They could also work on the identification of parts of the world not represented by a site with the goal of finding and providing support to editors that would be willing to start sites.

The interlinking could be simple - a separate freestanding directional page of links or a community links page on each site, mutual promotion, and a small badge or icon on the sites showing it's connected to the network. I would suggest participating sites meet two minimum requirements - tabs translated into English to ensure international audiences can navigate the page and a minimum of 50% local or "in country" work featured on the site. Such a network should be developed by and administered by a group of editors from the global community.

Let me add another hope and goal for the international photography community: the development of self-produced major sites ("major" defined as traffic volume). ZoneZero, Invisible Photographer Asia, and La Fototeca may be the only sites that, off the top of my head, qualify for that designation. While recognition by the photography community in the US and Europe is important for international photographers and while international work is important for the audience in the US and Europe to see, the goal shouldn’t be to create an international feeder network for US and Western Europe-based photography sites and editors, but rather to pursue both showing work on those sites as well as developing stronger international sites.

This point was made well by Medellín-based photographer (and microgrant recipient) Margarita Valdivieso in a recent Facebook thread:

     I think the issue is to create our own channels of information with our own means; what if instead
     of dreaming of showing our work on a foreign blog, we collectively create our own and make it just
     as important and as valuable as those that we use as an example for the idea .... Maybe it would be a
     way to enter in the online photography world, approach it and suggest another vision for it.*

Pantall and Colberg’s initiative was in a light-hearted spirit, but Mason's tweets provide a chance to reflect on serious issues. Mason is right to assert editors should be doing more homework on what’s out there, not necessarily with the goal of becoming authoritative experts in international work nor to change one’s sensibilities or site mission, but to put in the effort to consider more global work that fits those sensibilities and mission, even if – or perhaps especially because - it's currently difficult to access. 

If most blogs and independent magazines were started to provide a wider perspective than mainstream photography sites and to show work that the mainstream won't, then surely part of that self-applied mandate should be to include a wide geographic perspective. Furthermore, we can take advantage of freedom from advertising, market pressures, and editorial decisions made by committee to show what we think is important - and hopefully I've argued through these two posts that showing global work is important for us as editors as well as for the photographers and our audiences.

This post has addressed independent sites because they were the ones included in this initiative and to whom Mason directed his tweets. The issues, problems, and responsibilities are compounded for sites and magazines at the top of the distribution pyramid. However - and maybe I’m being overly optimistic here - I believe independent sites serve as a source for the top of the pyramid and the work they choose to show does make it to important desks, adding extra currency to Mason’s comments as they apply to independent sites.

Equally important to arguing editors should do their homework is to make the job of exploring global work easier for everyone by working to address the current disconnected and limited structure of the online global photography world. This should result in a corresponding diversity – and I don’t just mean in terms of race - in the online photography arena. It will facilitate the deepening of the collective voice of contemporary photography, providing a fuller landscape of images and a more balanced vision of what is happening in contemporary photography instead of a homogenized one.

Projecting forward, I think that this will help to avoid past problems in photographic history by eliminating any possibility of duplicating a situation where a tight vision of a limited number of people creates a self-fulfilling narrative of what new ideas in photography are by only considering largely what they know and who they know from limited, local sourcing. Creating a full, rich, representative idea of what contemporary photography is, and of what the photographic history of the 2010's will be, begins at the sources of entry into the contemporary landscape – such as independent photography sites.

* Creo que el asunto es crear nuestros propios canales de información y con nuestros propios medios; Qué tal si en vez de soñar con salir en un blog ajeno, creamos colectivamente nuestro propio blog y lo hacemos igual de importante y valioso a los ejemplos de los que tomamos la idea....Tal ves sea una manera de entrar en el medio, acercarse a él y proponer otra mirada... - Margarita Valdivieso, October 15th, 2012

Diversity in Photography and Contemporary Image Distribution Problems, Part I

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall by asking a range of bloggers and online editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to using new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe."

Pete Brook of Prison Photography made a final post in the series a month ago and in his post he included a summary list of those participating and their choices. Historian, writer, and photographer John Edwin Mason replied to Brook’s tweet linking to the post by replying "The near absence of photogs of color is stunning" and that the lists of the participants as a whole "suggests, pretty strongly, that the blogosphere has a lot of homework to do." He labeled the lists "The Best White North American & European Photographers (with Minor Exceptions) of the First 1/8th of the 21st Century."

I would respectfully suggest a one-word change to his reply. The near absence of photographers of color isn’t stunning, it’s unsurprising, and it manifests a number of problems in contemporary photography broadly and in online photography in particular.

Let’s start a look at the issues with a straight question: does the absence of photographers of color on lists like this really matter?

The arts, and photography in particular, help inform our thoughts and therefore images from artists across races and of different nations make us more aware of realties beyond our own. Without being presented a broad range of photographers and images, we have less specific knowledge of, and therefore take less consideration of, other spaces and people in our worldview and decision-making and limit our aesthetic experiences to a narrower range. So yes, it matters or - to put it another way - it’s problematic if work by photographers of color is not being recognized, especially by editors whose sites serve as a common gateway to broader exposure.

Additionally, in a contemporary landscape devoid of an avant-garde and with our community having lost belief in a singular, linear direction in photography’s growth during the last decades, there’s probably a compelling case to make for hundreds of photographers for potential inclusion in response to the original question from all imaginable demographics who make all kinds of work.

While I could understand an academic argument that says there are less than a half-dozen photographers working with truly new and original ideas in photography (or less...or none), I don’t think that type of extremely discerning and analytic list (and its potential to skew demographic parity due to very small sample size) was the spirit of Colberg and Pantall’s initiative.

So...it’s important and plenty of potential choices were there to be made.

What happened?

Part of the answer lies in the list of editors who were initially invited to respond (I’ll just use "editors" to refer to all participants from now on for cleaner writing, although several probably consider themselves something else). It reflects their heavy concentration in or from the United States and Great Britain in particular. In turn, the lists the participants generated largely reflect the photographers and the parts of the photography world that they are most familiar with and surrounded by, both physically and online. They largely picked either universal names (Soth, Graham, Strauss) or made "local" over "global" selections.

To a degree, making local selections that reflect the community of photographers and the parts of the photography world that we are most familiar with – usually the one we are surrounded by - is natural. I discovered during last years’ f100 series on this site that in order to broaden the list of photographers selected, I had to broaden the list of people making selections as much as possible. We know our localized worlds much better than the global world and it is always easier and more practical to pull from local areas one is already familiar with and knowledgeable about. It would have been a vast investment of time for the solicited editors to make a systematic global search for answers to the original question just for this initiative (more on this sentence below).

When I put Colberg and Pantall’s question to members of a Spanish-language photography Facebook page that fototazo runs, for example, the responses overlapped generally with the editors on the universal names (Soth, etc.), but were completely different on the smaller, "local" names – in this case heavy on Mexican photographers. Not coincidently, the majority of members of the page are Mexicans. It’s not that members aren't theoretically interested in North African or Chinese photography. It's that in a complex photography landscape defined by multitudes of local scenes, it becomes easier to talk about and reference universally known names on one hand and local names on the other. Knowing everything happening out there in the fractured and micro-oriented contemporary photography landscape isn’t possible.

In addition, while photographers of color are obviously a vital part of the local photography communities in the United States and Great Britain, as well as in Western Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, they are significantly underrepresented in art schools, galleries, and the online photography world in relation to their general percentage of the population. The reasons why are outside the scope of this post, but might include, among other factors, discussions of access to arts education, the reflection of broader trends across the fine arts through history, economics and the relationship between fine artists and class, and the fact that whites have historically tended the gates of major museums and institutions.

For this post, lets just say that the local worlds of the invited editors have a smaller number of photographers of color than they should in relation to the general population and their picks reflect this. A random sample of the demographics of undergraduate art programs found online breaks down to roughly 75% white students, 25% students of color (see images below). This correlates to the demographics of the editor's selections.

The fact that Mason’s tweets mention race, but not gender, underlines the idea that selections were focused locally and also correlates to the sample of demographic images I've posted here. Females make up over 50% of undergraduate art programs in the US today and subsequently gender parity is also increasingly a reality in galleries, in publications, and also in the selections made for this initiative. Relative local gender balance is reflected in the editors' selections and - this time in a positive sense – their selections made reflect the local demographic. In short, the selections made by editors reflect their local demographics in terms of race and gender.

Art Institute of Colorado, from the site collegestats.org

Art Institute of Pittsburgh, from the site stateuniversity.com

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, from the site inside.massart.edu

Art Institute of Seattle, from the site collegestats.org

California College of the Arts, from the site collegestats.org

However, while that might make some sense, that's also the problem. While working locally is to a degree a natural response as I’ve suggested, a natural response is not always the best one, and in this case doing so is problematic and reveals a number of larger issues in contemporary online photography.

If we include international photographers in the demographic breakdown of contemporary photography, photographers from beyond the United States and Western Europe, the percentage of photographers of color would obviously rise exponentially. The editors included in the initiative – myself included - deserve the collective comeuppance that Mason delivered for largely ignoring the broader photographic world in our selections. That oversight in our decision-making resulted in a skewed demographic representation of what's new in global photography today in our selections and a limited number of photographers of color that correlates to our local demographic instead.

This is problematic not only because of the importance of exposure to the arts produced by artists from across races and nations as mentioned above, but also because of the role that the editors of major photography sites play. They serve a double function in online photography conversation. Their sites serve local conversation – geographically, but also in the sense of a limited number of people passing information between each other online. To some degree it can be argued that they should serve that local market. However, they also serve as the facilitators of international photographic conversation due to size, prominence, and distribution of visitors. Regardless of why we started our respective sites, with prominence and visibility comes power that also creates a degree of responsibility to serve our global audience in addition to our local one. A general awareness of international photographers is part of the job of the contemporary editor.

To be blunt, the lack of diversity in this particular initiative flows from more general curatorial problems in terms of the search for and promotion of global photographic work. Most major sites tend to stay local, with the famous, or recycle names from other sites. A small group of photographers show up on most major sites, often times showing a new project on one site right after another. While some of the work deserves it, one could fairly say that blogs, magazines, and pages should do more "original research" in the sense of looking for and searching out strong photographers that come from beyond familiar sources and from other well-known blogs, sites, and pages. The end result of these curatorial tendencies can be seen in the lack of broader racial and cultural representation among selected photographers for Pantall and Colberg’s initiative.

In a contemporary photographic landscape with no avant-garde or singular geographic center, it can also be argued that showing international work is a responsibility in order to properly report and assess the contemporary landscape. What is happening in Mumbai and Bogotá is as much a part of contemporary photography and as important as what's happening in New York and Paris. Broadening the work we present beyond the contemporary cannon of online all-stars and beyond graduates from MFA programs of the east and west coasts of the United States - which slant heavily towards white photographers and towards a narrow range of aesthetics - not only fulfills the responsibilities of power as international photography forums and guardians of international exposure, it also serves both our global and local audiences by presenting a range of images that will expand their understanding of what is happening out there in contemporary photography – and therefore in the world - today. Everyone wins, including the editors, who will be showing a broader, more dynamic, more aesthetically diverse range of images which creates a better product.

This inclusion of global photographers on major photography sites is especially important today because visibility is also bringing online editors increasing power offline; they are moving beyond the internet to participate in real world initiatives, serving as conduits for photographers wanting to show work in the brick and mortar world, expanding the importance and the responsibility of their role in the process.

from the site risdmuseum.org

For example, editor Andy Adams of Flak Photo was recently hired by the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design to curate a digital projection entitled “Looking at the Land” that is being shown alongside the museum show America in View. While the show has been reviewed a few times (and I will do so as well in the coming weeks), not enough has been made of the fact that Adams is at the forefront of the important movement of online editors into offline roles, a trend I believe will continue to grow as online magazines and blogs remain a cutting edge conversation and exhibition space for photography which is turned to by gallerists, curators, and others as sources for discovering new work and for following up-to-the-minute contemporary trends and conversation.

As a creative and progressive community of editors with an expanding role, we can work to use the strengths of online photographic distribution to include international photographers, present a more balanced vision of what is happening in contemporary photography and improve our product for our audiences in the process. This particular initiative reflects our failure - so far - to properly do so. I said earlier in this post that it would have been "a vast investment of time for the solicited editors to make a systematic global search for answers to the original question just for this initiative." We shouldn't have been in the position to have needed to. We should be actively educating ourselves on international photographers and projects so that we are ready to consider them for initiatives such as this.

Part II will be posted Thursday, October 25th.

New Ideas in Photography: Jessica Eaton

© Jessica Eaton, cfaal 35, 2010

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall. They asked a range of bloggers and editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way."

My five nominations finish today. My first four selections for the series were Bryan Graf, Amy Elkins, Paul Graham, and Abelardo Morell. The selections are not in any order

Other selections for this initiative will be posted on (or by): Conscientious, Colin Pantall, Andrew Phelps, aCurator, Mrs Deane, Reciprocity failure, Harvey Benge, Microcord, eyecurious, LPV Magazine, and Stella Kramer.

______________________________________________

First a few words on how I made my selections and interpreted the criteria.

I took "new ideas" to mean visually and thematically fresh photography, but not necessarily working within or creating new modes of photography.

"Taken chances" and "unwillingness to play it safe" I understood as photography that has prefaced the pursuit of the internal logic of a project and individual artistic lines of thought over engaging contemporary visual trends - as well as over the artist's own history in making images.

Finally, I also added my own final criteria, choosing photographers I believe produce strong images in addition to using new ideas and taking chances.

I came up with a list of 24 photographers over the last couple months, adding names as I came across new work or thought of someone's work that I believe fits the criteria. I cut the list down to 10 fairly quickly, but getting from 10 to 5 has been difficult. At this point, however, it's time to leap.

______________________________________________

Before talking about my last selection, I'd like to say I appreciate the initiative from Colin and Joerg - I've enjoyed seeing who other participants have selected and thinking about who I believe is making strong, risk-taking work based in new ideas.

I tried to make my list of five a mix of types of work and stages of career and it wasn't that hard to do so; this, in combination with the great selections of others, has left me more optimistic about the number of people out there pushing our medium forwards in different ways at different points in their career.

I would also like to make - like a number of other participants - a nod, in no particular order, towards other photographers that I considered heavily:

Phil Toledano, Masao Yamamoto, Kate Steciw, Marie Quéau, Luke Norman and Nik Adam, and Dmitry Sokolenko.

My last selection for the series is Jessica Eaton.

Somehow this choice came down to either Eaton or Masao Yamamoto, photographers who pretty much couldn't be farther apart on, well, everything. Eaton has pushed herself to evolve her visual investigations of additive color, transparency, perspective, rhythm and other visual phenomena at a dizzyingly intense speed. The images here in this post come from within a two year period, a blistering burst of creativity and innovation for which I nominate her as my last selection for this series.

© Jessica Eaton, XPOL 6.3, 2011

© Jessica Eaton, cfaal 140, 2011

© Jessica Eaton, cfaal 260, 2012

© Jessica Eaton, Pinholes 60, 2011

New Ideas in Photography: Abelardo Morell

© Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: View of Volta Del Canal in Palazzo Room Painted With Jungle Motif, Venice, Italy, 2008

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall. They asked a range of bloggers and editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way."

This week I will select and post a photographer each day. My five selections are not in any order.

Other selections for this initiative will be posted on (or by): Conscientious, Colin Pantall, Andrew Phelps, aCurator, Mrs Deane, Reciprocity failure, Harvey Benge, Microcord, LPV Magazine, and Stella Kramer.

______________________________________________

First a few words on how I made my selections and interpreted the criteria.

I took "new ideas" to mean visually and thematically fresh photography, but not necessarily working within or creating new modes of photography.

"Taken chances" and "unwillingness to play it safe" I understood as photography that has prefaced the pursuit of the internal logic of a project and individual artistic lines of thought over engaging contemporary visual trends - as well as over the artist's own history in making images.

Finally, I also added my own final criteria, choosing photographers I believe produce strong images in addition to using new ideas and taking chances.

I came up with a list of 24 photographers over the last couple months, adding names as I came across new work or thought of someone's work that I believe fits the criteria. I cut the list down to 10 fairly quickly, but getting from 10 to 5 has been difficult. At this point, however, it's time to leap.

______________________________________________

My first three selections for the series were Bryan Graf, Amy Elkins, and Paul Graham.

My fourth selection for the series is Abelardo Morell.

It's hard to think of a photographer more consistently self-challenging and innovative than Morell. His experiments with light and perception, his imaginative repurposing of traditional camera techniques, his playfulness, humor, and visual cleverness are simply unique. His journey from young black and white street photographer to his new color work with tent cameras is an exemplary record of allowing curiosity and vision to drive his work forwards into fresh visual territory, never allowing any of his many successful projects to seduce him into stasis and repetition.

© Abelardo Morell, Map of North America, 1996

© Abelardo Morell, Light Bulb, 1991

© Abelardo Morell, Tent-Camera Image On Ground: Rooftop view of Midtown Manhattan Looking South East, 2010

© Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of El Vedado, Havana, Looking Northwest, 2002

New Ideas in Photography: Paul Graham

© Paul Graham, Pittsburgh 2004 (Lawnmower Man). From the series "shimmer of possibility"

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall. They asked a range of bloggers and editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way."

This week I will select and post a photographer each day. My five selections are not in any order.

Other selections for this initiative will be posted on (or by): Conscientious, Andrew Phelps, aCurator, Mrs Deane, Reciprocity failure, Harvey Benge, Microcord, eyecurious, LPV Magazine, and Stella Kramer.

______________________________________________

First a few words on how I made my selections and interpreted the criteria.

I took "new ideas" to mean visually and thematically fresh photography, but not necessarily working within or creating new modes of photography.

"Taken chances" and "unwillingness to play it safe" I understood as photography that has prefaced the pursuit of the internal logic of a project and individual artistic lines of thought over engaging contemporary visual trends - as well as over the artist's own history in making images.

Finally, I also added my own final criteria, choosing photographers I believe produce strong images in addition to using new ideas and taking chances.

I came up with a list of 24 photographers over the last couple months, adding names as I came across new work or thought of someone's work that I believe fits the criteria. I cut the list down to 10 fairly quickly, but getting from 10 to 5 has been difficult. At this point, however, it's time to leap.

______________________________________________

My first two selections for the series were Bryan Graf and Amy Elkins.

My third selection for the series is Paul Graham.

While I appreciate his early work such as A1: The Great North Road and New Europe, for me Graham is a case of getting more interesting as his career evolves as he has moved from work with political themes to an investigation of the relationship between photography and seeing. It's for his recent projects shimmer of possibility and The Present that I am selecting him. These two projects have attacked and reinvigorated the conventions of street photography, pressing for a new understanding of photography and "the moment" as well as between how the eye sees and how the lens works in regards to focus, flow, and movement. The Present in particular is also one of the first major projects to take advantage of some of the unique qualities of digital photography, hopefully opening ideas for other photographers on how to explore the medium.

Graham is also widely considered a master of the photobook for his layouts, sequences, and use of white space and just happens to be one of the great contemporary writers on photography as well.

© Paul Graham, Man Walking in White Shirt, Atlanta. From the series "American Night"

© Paul Graham, New Orleans 2005 (Cajun Corner). From the series "shimmer of possibility"

© Paul Graham, Rockefeller Center. From the series "The Present"

© Paul Graham, Cafe Waitress, Johns Cafe, Sandy, Bedfordshire. From the series, "A1 The Great North Road"

New Ideas in Photography: Amy Elkins

© Amy Elkins, Charles, Brooklyn, NY. 2006
From the series "Wallflower"

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall. They asked a range of bloggers and editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way."

This week I will select and post a photographer each day. My five selections are not in any order.

Other selections for this initiative will be posted on (or by): Conscientious, Andrew Phelps, aCurator, Mrs Deane, Reciprocity failure, Harvey Benge, Microcord, eyecurious, LPV Magazine, and Stella Kramer.

______________________________________________

First a few words on how I made my selections and interpreted the criteria.

I took "new ideas" to mean visually and thematically fresh photography, but not necessarily working within or creating new modes of photography.

"Taken chances" and "unwillingness to play it safe" I understood as photography that has prefaced the pursuit of the internal logic of a project and individual artistic lines of thought over engaging contemporary visual trends - as well as over the artist's own history in making images.

Finally, I also added my own final criteria, choosing photographers I believe produce strong images in addition to using new ideas and taking chances.

I came up with a list of 24 photographers over the last couple months, adding names as I came across new work or thought of someone's work that I believe fits the criteria. I cut the list down to 10 fairly quickly, but getting from 10 to 5 has been difficult. At this point, however, it's time to leap.

______________________________________________

My first selection for the series was Bryan Graf.

My second selection for the series is Amy Elkins.

Elkins I nominate for the intelligence, visual richness, and - especially - for the variety with which she solves the artistic questions she poses herself about the role of prisons in US society, masculine identity, and longitudinal portrait studies. She embodies the positive development of the photographer as polygamist, working with a variety of approaches to image making, hinging her artistic choices on the requirements of a particular body of work. I appreciate the visual risks she has taken, particularly with "Black Is the Day, Black Is the Night," in which she abandons the obvious abilities she has for "straight" portraiture in order to more successfully resolve the demands of the project.

© Amy Elkins, Willow, Oxnard, CA. 2006
From the series "Where I Found You"

© Amy Elkins, (Not the Man I Once Was)
From the series "Black Is the Day, Black Is the Night"

© Amy Elkins, Orange flowers, Ventura, CA. 2009
From the series "Where I Found You"

© Amy Elkins, Momentary, Brooklyn, NY. 2007
From the series "Gray"

© Amy Elkins, Dan (Wing/Fullback), New Haven, CT. 2010
From the series "Elegant Violence"

© Amy Elkins, Willow and INSP channel, Oxnard, CA. 2009
From the series "Where I Found You"

© Amy Elkins, Lucas, New York, NY. February 25, 2012.
From the series "Lucas"

New Ideas in Photography: Bryan Graf

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Wildlife Analysis"

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall. They asked a range of bloggers and editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way."

The nominations are being posted starting today. This week I will select and post a photographer each day. My five selections are not in any order.

Other selections for this initiative will be posted on (or by): Conscientious, Andrew Phelps, aCurator, Mrs Deane, Reciprocity failure, Harvey Benge, Microcord, eyecurious, and LPV Magazine.

______________________________________________

First a few words on how I made my selections and interpreted the criteria.

I took "new ideas" to mean visually and thematically fresh photography, but not necessarily working within or creating new modes of photography.

"Taken chances" and "unwillingness to play it safe" I understood as photography that has prefaced the pursuit of the internal logic of a project and individual artistic lines of thought over engaging contemporary visual trends - as well as over the artist's own history in making images.

Finally, I also added my own final criteria, choosing photographers I believe produce strong images in addition to using new ideas and taking chances.

I came up with a list of 24 photographers over the last couple months, adding names as I came across new work or thought of someone's work I believe fits the criteria. I cut the list down to 10 fairly quickly, but have had a hard time getting from 10 to 5. At this point, however, it's time to leap.

______________________________________________

My first selection for the series is Bryan Graf.

The rich depth, importance, and thorough exploration of the landscape in photographic history makes it a difficult genre for "new" and "taking chances." How the hell is anyone going to reinvent the landscape photograph? Graf has worked on this question, using explorations of darkroom post-processing, materials and lighting not for effect, but in service of heightening the grace, simplicity, and atmosphere of the environments he photographs, pushing lines of what the landscape photograph can be conceived of in the process .

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Interchanges, B-Sides & Remixes"

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Winter Sun"

Opinion: Pantall, Colberg, Hoepker and Understanding Images

© Thomas Hoepker

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have both recently discussed the above photograph taken by Magnum's Thomas Hoepker on September 11th, 2011.

Pantall uses the image to point to the problem of the narrow emotional range accepted in the responses of photographic subjects to a situation, as well as the difficulty many people have coping with something beyond the simplest of narratives in a photograph. I would continue his points by adding that there's a problem with the assumption that it is possible to come to any correct reading of the emotional state of photographic subjects and in believing we can correctly conclude the narrative of a photograph in any way.

Hoepker makes these very mistakes about his own image. In a New York Times op-ed column by Frank Rich, written in 2006 on the fifth anniversary of September 11th, he's quoted as saying about this image, "They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon...It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it." Slate writer David Plotz makes the same mistakes in a rejection of Rich's column: "The subjects are obviously engaged with each other, and they're almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they're bored with 9/11, but because they're citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate...They came to this spot to watch their country's history unfold and to be with each other at a time of national emergency."

Hoepker and Plotz both assert singular, different, yet conclusive readings of what is going on in the image: "they were totally relaxed"..."they were not stirred"..."they have looked away...because"...and finally "they came to this spot to watch." These assertions of being able to give a factual reading of the events portrayed in the image is problematic; all conversation about a photograph needs to be framed as conjecture. Short of finding the subjects and photographer and asking, we cannot actually know what was happening or why an image was taken - and even their words can be questioned; memories are fickle, we all have agendas.

Colberg follows up on Pantall's post by asserting that a photographer's intentions can't be known and that we observe photographs with inherent biases: "We all like to think that the photographer’s intention inform the image and that when we look at a photograph we can see those intention. [sic] But if we ignore the simple fact that we have no way of knowing what the photographer’s intentions were (How would we know? All we have is a photograph), especially in a news context, we don’t just look at photographs, we look at them with our own sets of expectations (as Colin notes) and biases. We often see in photographs not what they show, but instead what we want to see."

I will add a question to the conversation - if the emotional state of the subjects and the narrative cannot be extracted from an image, and the photographer's intentions cannot be known, how about allegory and metaphor as a strategy for correctly reading images? Not if the word "correctly" is left in the sentence. Reading and concluding - or better yet, creating - the allegorical and metaphorical meaning in an image is informed by one's life experience and knowledge and a matter of subjective insights. As long as the observer remembers that their conclusions also remain in the realm of conjecture, however, metaphor and allegory can definitely be a way to analyze and discuss an image.

This is why I would take what I imagine is an unpopular position and defend Rich's column, even though I don't agree with his conclusions or his reading of the image. Unlike Hoepker and Plotz, Rich does not claim a truthful interpretation of the facts the image contains. Jonathan Jones writes in an article in The Guardian about the debate around Hoepker's image, "[Rich] saw in this undeniably troubling picture an allegory of America's failure to learn any deep lessons from that tragic day, to change or reform as a nation: 'The young people in Mr Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American.'" And Plotz writes about Rich's column, "So they turned their backs on Manhattan for a second. A nice metaphor for Rich to exploit, but a cheap shot." That may be so, and we can attack the conclusion and the arguments Rich uses to construct it, but he avoids making conclusive factual statements about the image of the type that get both Hoepker and Plotz in trouble.

© Gregory Crewdson

Let's start to draw some conclusions from all of this with a few more questions.

If we agree it's not possible to know the true emotions or narrative of an image, nor the intentions of the photographer, and that allegory and metaphor need to be remembered as a subjective reading of an image, does that mean that Hoepker's image of 9/11 should be read in the same way as the above image by Gregory Crewdson?

Should all art photography, photojournalism and documentary photography be read in the same way?

Is a news image in The New York Times as "truthful" as one of Crewdson's constructions?

Do we know as little of the intentions of a advertising photographer making an image to sell a bar of soap as those of a photographer like Crewdson?

Is the answer that we just can't know anything about an image for sure, so all interpretations of it are equally valid?

I think Pantall gives us a way to answer these questions when he writes, "[We] want to reduce things to black and white and right and wrong dualities." To begin answering the questions above, we need to remind ourselves to avoid reducing our thinking about how to look at images to simple dualities - while going ahead and continuing to look at and discuss images. Photography does not allow us to make conclusive readings about images, yet it is part of our job as photographers, critics, curators, and writers on photography to attempt readings anyways. We investigate images and construct arguments for how an image could be read. We aggressively ask what is really going on, what the photographer's intentions are, what biases we have, and what meaning we can construct through allegory and metaphor. This is the foundation of using visual images for communication (and the root cause of really long grad school critiques).

© Nick Ut

Taking this point one more step, all readings of an image are not equally valid - it is not the case that because there is no photographic truth, all readings are therefore of equal value. The problem is that it's difficult to quantify the reasons why. A toddler does not deserve the same voice on an image's meaning as mine or yours. We have more experience looking at images, knowledge of context, life experience, and knowledge of history. My conclusion to all of this is we need to accept something I'll call spectrum reading. Spectrum reading would be the rejection of a duality that says because, for example, we can't know for sure the true emotional states of the children in the horrific Vietnam War image by Nick Ut seen above, they are therefore open to the same degree of speculation as the emotional states of the man and woman in the image by Crewdson. Or that the intentions of a photographer taking an image of a bar of soap are as vague as Crewdson's. Or that because we can't easily quantify the value of a particular response, that all are therefore equal.

We need to read the context of the image, take note of who the observer is, look at who is making the image and try to figure out why; we have to understand the accepted parameters for image manipulation in the media venue of the image, talk with friends and colleagues, etc...then we can make more (or less) intelligent arguments about an image and its meaning. The site Bag News regularly does a good job of this with political and news images. Pantall does this regularly on his site and did so here on this site a month ago looking at an image by the photographer Billy Monk. We can look for truth, argue about intention, divine metaphor - we just can't claim to be absolutely correct.

Lastly, I'm going to be a little more optimistic than both Pantall and Colberg on one final point. Pantall writes, "We are still not very sophisticated in our visual way of experiencing the world" and Colberg writes, "We don’t really understand photography." I'd like to suggest that although the ability to understand visual communication may not be as developed as with written communication, we're not where we were in decades past, either.

There has been a corrosion in the belief in the truth value of a photograph at least going back until World War II. John Szarkowski, the long-term director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, fundamentally refuted the ability of photography to explain large-scale public issues, such as Margaret Bourke-White's attempt to explain the effects of World War II in her photographic work. "Most issues of importance cannot be photographed," Szarkowski claimed, declaring the fields of photojournalism and documentary as non-effectual in his influential book, Mirrors and Windows (1978). His comments reflect a now long-standing trend towards doubt about photographic veracity which became widespread after World War II and continues today, an erosion of confidence represented by the debates about the authenticity of Robert Capa's Death of a Loyalist Soldier (below) and other World War II images. This loss of confidence has helped to create a distance between documentary photography and photojournalism and their traditional roles, facilitating their consideration as works of art or personal expression, an interesting conversation beyond the scope of this particular post.

© Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier

This erosion of confidence in the truth of photographs is also seen in the almost immediate questions we have around the authenticity of an image like the one below. We see it, we question it's truthfulness. As the manipulation of photographs has grown, so has our own skepticism and disbelief - that is the foundation for a more sophisticated reading of images in our culture, an advancement in ability. We now largely understand that, "A snapshot can make mourners attending a funeral look like they're having a party," as Walter Sipser - the man on the right in Hoepker's photograph - wrote after reading Hoepker's comments on the image and Rich's column. We're still not a visually literate society, but we have a wider understanding of the power, lies, and meanings of images now than we did before.

Uncredited image from the Facebook page of "All Things METAL \m/"