Guest Reading Shortlist 6.3.15: Adam Glanzman

Adrian Rondon, Shortstop. From the article Happy 16th Birthday, Here’s $3 Million © Pieter Hugo

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.

Today's guest for Reading Shortlist is Adam Glanzman.

Adam Glanzman is a freelance photographer and photo editor currently based between Boston and New York City. Most recently he worked as a freelance photo editor for TIME.com and is currently a photography intern for the Boston Red Sox.

Nataly Castaño helped organize this post.

______________________________

From The Daily Edit – Los Angeles Magazine: Amy Feitelberg, aphotoeditor

Heidi Volpe, aPhotoEditor, The Daily Edit – Los Angeles Magazine: Amy Feitelberg
Saturday night in LA. This is such a unique idea that was expertly executed with an impressive amount of coordination. I would love to see it re-created on a larger scale or in other cities. This blog as a whole, aphotoeditor, has a wealth of useful and interesting information. I would recommend subscribing to their newsletter.

Photojournalism Links
The mecca for learning about the latest in photojournalism and documentary photography. Mikko Takkunen does an amazing job researching and compiling the best photography on the web and puts it into an easily digestible post.

Joe DeLessio, New York Magazine, Happy 16th Birthday, Here’s $3 Million
Beautiful portraits, each one is unique with vivid colors. Pieter Hugo never fails to impress and this is one example of his work.

From Amy Lombard Interview: Flashy Portraits of Unordinary People © Amy Lombard

Freddy Martinez, PhotoWhoa, Amy Lombard Interview: Flashy Portraits of Unordinary People
Amy Lombard explains her approach to photography. I really admire Lombard's work and her distinct style.

Adam Glanzman, TIME Lightbox, Meet Harlem's 'Official' Street Photographer
An example of an honest approach to street photography. Shows how important it is to approach your subject with respect and his work is a testament to this. I was lucky enough to meet and interview Allah for a piece on TIME.com

Jill Enfield, Freestyle Photographic Supplies, Tintypes with Holga Cameras
This post explains how to do tintype photography on a budget. Alternative types of photography are becoming more and more popular and this site explains how to approach the subject with little previous knowledge.

Valerie Hopkins, Nija Chatman, Lana Chatman, Shirley Chatman, Jessica Chatman, and Lashanda Chatman (right to left) looking outside as a police car passes their Ferguson, Mo. home the day after massive rioting broke out
From 24 Hours in Ferguson: Scenes from the Michael Brown Fallout © Philip Montgomery 

Philip Montgomery, Bloomberg Business Week, 24 Hours in Ferguson: Scenes from the Michael Brown Fallout
Some of the most unique work out of Ferguson. Gritty textures and added grain made it come alive for me. I am a big fan of this photographer's work.

Tom Seymour, The British Journal of Photography, Remembering Tim Hetherington four years on
A very in-depth and heart-felt look at the life of Hetherington.

Features | VSCO
This blog has interesting features on emerging and established photographers. I like to see how photographers are processing their photos these days. It is interesting to see different styles and trends in toning and editing.

Flak Photo
This site is always posting interesting photo-related stories, events and contests. It is a great resource for both photographers and editors. They are also rolling out a new weekly newsletter that I would recommend subscribing to.

Originality Is a Conservative Argument

A few weeks back I put together a review of Looking at the Land, a multi-venue curation project by Andy Adams of Flak Photo. One paragraph in particular has drawn some praise, some fire, and some confusion. I'd like to expand on it to see if doing so can forward the conversation.

Here is the paragraph from the original post:

So many photographers today are making strong, but related images in terms of aesthetics and production methods. I'm actually building to a point that’s not critical or dismissive around the point of originality, a point that's back on the conversational hot plate in articles like this one. I've felt more questioning recently, personally and by others, of the idea of photographers in the 21st-century as individuals. I'm coming around to the idea that all of what we're doing is a collective project, it’s group research into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes. 5,500 submissions? Hundreds of them most likely interchangeable? The common approach seen in much of the work – but by no means all of it – to the landscape in Looking at the Land leads me to wonder just how valid the individual really is in photography anymore, assuming it really ever was valid. We are in some sort of photographic Golden Age – the number of photographers today and the quality of images produced, as shown in this exhibition, is unprecedented, even if finding truly new and fresh ideas and territory to explore is increasingly a limited proposition as the medium enters adulthood. I'd just as soon do away with individual names, contests, and the fetishism of certain work. What does it serve beyond the market and egos?

Bryan Formhals of LPV Magazine clipped out a section of this paragraph and posted it on his Tumblr page, called Photographs on the Brain. Some of the aforementioned fire came as a reply to his posted clip by a photographer who goes by santosha65 on Tumblr and as Nick Ruechel in real life. He wrote:

That’s the most asinine, deluded thing i’ve ever heard. We are in a shit storm as far as photography goes. Corporations are taking over content and the parameters in which we create it. Do away with names? FUCK YOU. 

Upon reading his reply, I had a feeling he might be based in New York City, and indeed he is.*

A more textured, but even more damning reply came from Jörg Colberg on his Tumblr site Conscientious Redux:

To quote John Berger: "After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colours and spaces which the artist has used and arranged. What we take away with us – on the most profound level – is the memory of the artist’s way of looking at the world. The representation of a recognizable incident (an incident here can simply mean a tree or a head) offers us the chance of relating the artist’s way of looking to our own." ([Colberg's] emphasis, from the introduction to Toward Reality, taken from Selected Essays of John Berger) To "do away with individual names" is to essentially do away with art. Art is inconceivable without the individual artist, even if there are many (or, as some might argue, too many).

I'd like to clarify and expand on the original post and, given both Ruechel and Colberg singled out the phrase "do away with individual names," I'd like to focus on the last two sentences of the original post that include this phrase in particular.

____________________________

It's interesting to note how salient the overlap of formal appearance and thematic concern is through much of the work of the photographers in "Looking at the Land" and, one can theorize, among the thousands upon thousands who applied to be part of it. Most of these photographers, working separately, sent in work to be considered for the exhibition that reflects, according to Adams, a shared common thematic concern of a vanquished wilderness and an acceptance of the man-made suburban landscape. They produced images that - in many cases - are approached formally in a very similar way and made with color 6x7 aspect ratio film by similar cameras. Part of this has to do with curation for the sake of coherence to be sure, but the show could also have been comprised on the same theme made up, let's say, of almost entirely 35mm black and white work. Or "toy" cameras. Or images curated from Flickr or Google Earth.

How does this square with the idea that part of being an artist is to avoid solipsism by offering through our vision or voice something unique to the artistic dialogues of our society, the - to return to Berger - "artist's way of looking at the world"? We have chosen to pursue our passions and to make financial sacrifices to engage a pursuit that frequently involves isolation in rooms lit by Lightroom or Photoshop. We have turned our back on more conventional life choices and carved out our own way. We go into the field alone, we edit alone, we maintain a sense of our act of creation as an act apart from others before its presentation, an act shared with others.

It's easy to see how we feel singular, special, and unique given our choices in the context of societal norms and our work structure. And the current glut of competitions heightens this feeling, highlighting individuals, and so does the market as investors have a stock in our names and want to maintain the value of their investments. Art becomes about the individual artist, about you, about building a brand and circulating your name. There's some common sense to this: we're all entrepreneurs in a tough racket. In order to survive we do need to make our name in order to have money to continue to pursue what we love.

There's an issue however. The pure lone wolf artist is part of artistic mythology and always has been, along with natural geniuses and beret-wearing café bohemians who spend their spare time lounging around the Left Bank with naked lovers. It's one of the stories we tell ourselves - and that is imaged by others of us - about our role and relationship with the rest of society.

Behind the frequent feeling of having our own unique vision and "brand" in reality lies layers of interconnections. We build our foundation on top of a large and rich photographic history others have provided. We have formal and thematic debts to our branch of photography. Almost every single photographer in history and every project that they have ever worked on has precedent and references. Our connection and debt is also to each other as well as to our predecessors. We have dialogue with what's happening in the photography art world (and other areas of photography). We respond to it, even if it's a rejection or attempt to steer away from the rest. Our work overlaps. The images we see shape our own aesthetic decisions consciously or unconsciously.

Your sense of color, your obscure project subject matter, your tilted framing, mysterious dark developing, and lens refractions in your prints? Not "yours." You are cutting, combining and pasting visual language and recycling from larger thematic concepts others have also worked with as well. Your particular way of recombining those elements? Yes, it's yours, but let's qualify that correctly. A definition of "progress" in our medium should be based in a photographer’s ability to present fresh visual conversation from the creative combination and balance of technology, form, content, and a consideration of the context in which its made. That being said, don't forget you're working with deep interconnection with, and deep debt to, other photographers and that your uniqueness comes by adding a twist at the end in your combination of elements defined in relation with others.

To say your work is original is to see yourself as removed from history and context, to see yourself in a vacuum and alone. This is why I say originality is a conservative argument. To say your work is truly original is to argue along the lines of conservative political arguments for everything from not paying taxes to cutting social spending. It's seeing the contemporary without history and the individual as separate from the fabric of society, responsible only for themselves.

It's odd that in a field traditionally dominated by liberal minds - and still dominated by liberal minds judging from Twitter feeds and Facebook comments - when it comes to our own field, most get conservative. We forget our interconnection and our debts and that what we use comes in large part from our predecesors and from each other. We get defensive of "our" territory, our stomach falls when our cherished "unique" image shows up in a very similar form by another artist in a magazine or on a blog. We protect our ideas and this alone is an admission that we know somewhere inside ourselves that our work is not actually "original" - we fear another can and will make "our" ideas. We cling to the idea that we've done this alone and that our voice is a singular one.

American artist and writer Chris Wiley is a recent article in The Guardian is quoted as saying, "Everything and everyone on Earth and beyond, it would seem, has been slotted somewhere in a rapacious, ever-expanding Borgesian library of representation that we have built for ourselves. As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality has been radically called into question. Ironically, the moment of greatest photographic plenitude has pushed photography to the point of exhaustion."

Going back to my original post paragraph, why would I suggest getting rid of the focus on individual names, the emphasis on personal accolades, and the fetishism of certain work? Because we're doing this together, our visions are interconnected, and we owe debts. Our "original" visual ideas borrow, interact, and react to those of others. There's no need to be focused on individual canonization and aggrandizement. Photography should have a feeling of collaboration, not of competition. Why not conceptualize what we are doing as a common project into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes? Like doctors across hospitals sharing information in their investigation of cures and causes?

Let's also take my original comments with the appropriate grain of salt. I'm talking about shifting emphasis, remembering what's important, and understanding the limits of the idea of originality. I'm not suggesting there's not any space for visual innovation or that we should never mention or talk about names in the absolute. I'm also not saying all visions are equal or that there's not any difference between how we see things. There is, obviously and thankfully. It's just that those differences have to be seen in their appropriate historical and cultural context.

What I am saying is the experience of the image is what's important, the interaction around the image, the collective investigation between images between different people and over generations of photographers, the connection photography can make between us. The collective project is more important than the individual - and photography is something that we have created together, not any individual alone. Photography is the qualities of the photograph in the context of other photographs and in its cultural context. People forget this in our ever-increasing world of ever more contests, Grand Prix, winners and losers, reviews, and success through who you know.

In fact, as I suggested to Colberg via Twitter, I believe the Berger quote actually supports my point of view. Berger writes about the vision of the photographer and how we receive it - without mentioning the photographer's name. He focuses on a description of the interaction of the observer with the work. Perfect. The chance and experience of relating to that particular vision is what's important, as is remembering the context for that vision.

____________________________

As I sat down to start to write this the other day, in a moment of procrastination I checked Facebook and saw a post written by Heidi Romano on another photographer accusing her of copying her work. Her post serves as a case study and conclusion for this essay.

First, let's look at a few images. (Image credits are at the end of the essay in order to keep names out of these examples.)

Image by artist A [below]

Image by artist B [below]

Image by artist C [below]

Artist A has accused C of copying her images, but has not accused B of the same thing, even though the image by B was made after the image by artist A. Why? Perhaps because A is aware that B - internationally known and respected - has been working with books, including damaged books and with twisting and distorted and water damaged books just as A does in her projects, since the early 1990s - or roughly 10 years before A started her project.

And now let's look at a second group of images by various artists as well as objects sold by crafts vendors, installation images of works by a sculptor, and an image of a window installation at an Anthropologie store in Manhattan:

Artist A claims that HER image - the fifth down from the top - is being ripped off by artist C in work such as the final image in the above sequence. I hope, simply by showing those two photographs surrounded by images by other artists, craftspeople, as well as dudes paid $7 an hour to put stuff in the windows at Anthropologie, the emptiness of the claim of artist A - Cara Barer - against artist C, Romano.

In sum, originality has to been seen as a question of degree and in context. This is even more true in today's photography landscape as finding fresh ideas and territory to explore is an increasingly limited proposition. Going back to the Wiley quote, we now work in relation with a Borgesian library of visual images. Ideas are driven back and forth over. There are going to be overlaps. To be sure, there is copying; that's not what I mean - and of course there is innovative visual content, but let's keep the idea of individual innovation in an appropriate frame.

To tie together these two visual examples with the earlier points in this piece, Barer is ignoring her own artistic debts, forgetting context, oddly hanging the banner of originality around a well-covered and broad idea of working with damaged books, and working against what should be the spirit of the community project of photography. In a conversation you overlap ideas sometimes. That's OK; it's part of the dialectic process between all of us in order to advance our investigation of visual ideas.

Images, from top to bottom, are copyright of: Cara Barer, Abelardo Morell, Heidi Romano and in the second group The Shaw Sisters, Anthropologie Store at 5th Ave. and 16th Street in New York City, Lucille Moroni, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Cara Barer, Jonathan Callan, Jonathan Callan, Abelardo Morell, Heidi Romano

*Mr. Ruechel and I subsequently engaged in a back and forth email exchange that, while not necessarily bringing us to any agreements, brought us to a cordial understanding.

Review: "Looking at the Land"

© Kate Greene, untitled, Massachusetts, 2011

BASICS
Looking at the Land is an exhibition of twenty-first century landscape photographs made in the United States curated by Andy Adams of Flak Photo in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art. The museum contracted Adams to produce the exhibition as a projection installation currently on view in their gallery alongside the show America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now. The gallery exhibition is up until January 13, 2013 in Providence. Adams has also released the exhibition as an online video of the projection alongside an online gallery of the same images with accompanying texts.

The exhibition has also taken physical form for the first time at FotoWeekDC with a selection of 20 images from the exhibition being presented. FotoWeekDC runs from November 9 - November 18, 2012.

Looking at the Land has also been reviewed on PHOTO/arts Magazine, American Photo Magazine, NPR's The Picture Show, New Landscape Photography, n j w v, Time Magazine's Lightbox, and other sites.

© Joshua Dudley Greer, Imperial Sand Dunes, California, 2011

SNAPSHOT OF THE WORK
Looking at the Land is a group exhibition containing images by 88 international photographers made from between 2000 and 2012. The images were culled from over 5,500 submissions received after an online call for work as well as from the Flak Photo Collection, an online archive of images Adams has curated since 2006. The exhibition crosses the boundary of online / offline as well as presentation concepts, being simultaneously shown in Providence as a projection, online as a video exhibition and gallery, and at FotoWeek DC as physical prints. The project includes photographer responses to four questions Adams has asked them about their practice and landscape photography generally as part of the online gallery and via URL links posted with the physical prints in DC.

© Nicole Jean Hill, Highway 14, Ucross, Wyoming, 2011

CURATION AND INSTALLATION
Unfortunately, I have not - and will not - be able to get to Providence or Washington D.C. to see the projection or the installation of prints. The online exhibition consists of a gallery and video of the same images as the Providence projection. Both are straightforward, professionally produced presentations. The gallery is click through, image-by-image, with the photographer biography and their responses to Adams' four questions posted below the photograph.  The video passes through the 88 images at 10 second intervals, clocking in at just under 18 minutes long. The photographer's name, image title, and location and year the photograph was taken appear to the left of the image.

© Rachel Barrett, At Low Tide, Bolinas, California, 2009

COMMENTS ON THE EXHIBIT
There are too many images to really discuss photographers or images individually, so let's pull back and look at the exhibition as a whole.

In his essay about the exhibition Adams talks about the trends and dynamics in the work. He writes:

This survey is by no means exhaustive but it does signal the beginning of a fertile new era in the ever-evolving landscape photo tradition. It studies a cross-section of current landscape photography in the documentary style...We live in a post-New Topographics landscape where an entire generation of photographers was born and raised in suburban sprawl. Wilderness is a foreign concept. Our environment has been significantly altered. We keep nature at arm's length. Photography describes these things. 

And yet, these images are subjective interpretations, not objective facts.

As a whole the photographs included in the exhibition do indeed give a sense of a changed, evolving contemporary landscape photography. As curator and historian Alison Nordstrom writes in the NPR Picture Show review of the exhibition, many of these photographers focus on the integration of a hybrid constructed landscape and nature. The images feel collectively – but not all of them individually – like an acceptance of, maybe even a fondness for the "man-altered landscape" in this generation of suburban-spawned photographers as the landscape they grew-up in ages and matures. This fondness manifests itself in more overtly subjective, personal lens work as well as more space for beauty.

While a handful of the images stop at being merely visually clever, the majority have more sincerity and warmth in their approach to their surroundings then the critical indictments of Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, and others of the New Topographics photographers. In fact, many of the images in the exhibition seem to move beyond criticism to take stock of the poetry in the odd constructed / natural spatial juxtapositions in suburban and urban areas - the formal connection of a cloud and shadow of a tree, groups of birds taking flight from different phone poles at the same instant.

Wilderness seems less "foreign" and "at arm's length" in these images to me than reflecting, perhaps, the role of wilderness in the suburban-dweller's contemporary narrative: an element of power to respect and preserve, even while manipulating and containing what’s around us for our needs.

Adams writes that this is a cross-section of contemporary practice, but by no means exhaustive, which I agree with; his acknowledgement of this blunts what would be my main criticism and suggestion for the exhibition – a wider visual range in the edit while not necessarily increasing the number of images. While knowing he was beholden largely to submissions and images already in the Flak Photo Collection, a broader aesthetic range could be provided without compromising the thesis, providing more visual variety and play while maintaining visual coherence; a number of the images say the same thing and a sense of visual sameness pervades a section of the images. I would briefly add that while Adams overall presents a consistent vision in terms of the exhibition theme and, at the same time that I would suggest of wider variety of image-making approaches within the show thesis, a handful of images fall outside the coherence of the thematic argument he's making with the work.

A second point of critique: just based on the small sample size of photographers I’m familiar with, there is a lot of work based solely in the natural landscape still, work that could be molded by a different editor into an argument we have reconnected with or returned to nature in contemporary landscape practice. In that way, I question whether this idea of suburban-focus and nature / man-made landscape hybrids is really a singular thesis that unites much of contemporary landscape practice in the documentary style or, more likely, a particular thread that Adams identifies. If it’s the latter, I would argue for a change in the exhibition statement that moves it away from the idea that it presents a survey or cross-section and instead focuses on linking this particular work to that specific thread.

Let’s go back to New Topographics for a moment as it’s been a major topic of conversation around the exhibit so far by just about every reviewer. As written above, I believe there is generally a distance in terms of tone in this contemporary work from New Topographics. I do see, however, a technical and formal debt: both shows overwhelmingly present clean, straight, direct, frontal, 4x5 aspect ratio images. The only real large difference between the two exhibitions in these terms is an exact reversal of the role of color and black and white. While Stephen Shore was the only member of the New Topographics Ten to use color, the same percentage of those included in this exhibition (9 of 88, or basically 10%) are represented by a black and white image. The percentage similarities also roughly play out between the two exhibitions in terms of the relatively small amounts of 35mm images (LAL 8 of 88; NT 2 of 10), square formats (LAL 2 of 88; NT 2 of 10), as well as what I’ll call conceptually-lead work which is hard to define, but let’s just say it’s when the idea of the image strikes you first when looking at it, even while staying within the "documentary style" (LAL maybe 5 of 88; NT 2 of 10, i.e. the Bechers).

This common ground - beyond suggesting a technical and formal relationship between the two exhibits and a lineage to the current exhibit - raises the question of whether an issue that the curator of New Topographics, William Jenkins, labeled "a problem of style" or "stylistic anonymity" in his exhibition is also an issue with Looking at the Land, but let's discuss that down below as part of the wrap-up.

Before doing so, let me add that in a critique in graduate school, Larry Sultan talked with us about the specific difficulty of working with the landscape – it’s simply such a rich tradition to work in relationship to. That being said, I really appreciate Adams’ edit and the photographers individually for providing a large number of visually fresh images and, beyond my suggestion above of a wider edit, the editing itself is almost uniformly strong, with impressively few weak points in a 88 image line-up. I also appreciate - while perhaps not completely agreeing with - the idea that we are in a "fertile" moment and the show left me with optimism about contemporary landscape work and a new understanding of the themes presented.

© Brad Temkin, Hanging Deer, Laporte, Indiana, 2005

WRAP-UP
Lots to consider. I'll start with a couple of smaller points and questions the exhibition raises.

Let's first go back to the question of the previous section about Jenkins and "stylistic anonymity," a term which I am admittedly taking completely out of context, distorting its original meaning of an "absence of style" and using to mean "tight stylistic similarity" for my needs in this review. To what degree are we looking at a fine-tuned editorial vision that provides stylistic consistency and how much should we see this as a large number of photographers all coming from the same background and going to the same types of schools producing relatively - considering the broadest range of ways of making a photograph - similar work?

Is the issue of "stylistic anonymity" Jenkins raised about New Topographics an issue here – even if it's applied to work that's warmer and more personal, not the cold anonymity he was originally referring to?

So many photographers today are making strong, but related images in terms of aesthetics and production methods. I'm actually building to a point that’s not critical or dismissive around the point of originality, a point that's back on the conversational hot plate in articles like this one. I've felt more questioning recently, personally and by others, of the idea of photographers in the 21st-century as individuals. I'm coming around to the idea that all of what we're doing is a collective project, its group research into aesthetics, formal and conceptual ideas, and cultural themes. 5,500 submissions? Hundreds of them most likely interchangeable? The common approach seen in much of the work – but by no means all of it – to the landscape in Looking at the Land leads me to wonder just how valid the individual really is in photography anymore, assuming it really ever was valid. We are in some sort of photographic Golden Age – the number of photographers today and the quality of images produced, as shown in this exhibition, is unprecedented, even if finding truly new and fresh ideas and territory to explore is increasingly a limited proposition as the medium enters adulthood. I'd just as soon do away with individual names, contests, and the fetishism of certain work. What does it serve beyond the market and egos?

Another question this exhibition raises: what does it mean to take images from their original context and present them together in the 21st century? On the point of curation and authorship, Nick Vossbrink of n j v w has written much of what I would like to write here and I would recommend reading his review of the exhibition. In essence, he points to the exhibit as part of the trend of curation being increasingly viewed as a creative act.

What exactly is Adams' role? Photographer Mark Powell has been working on a project curating images from the Spanish-language equivalent to the website "Hot or Not." Photographer Paul Shambroom in an interview with Pete Brook, revealingly titled "In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them," recently explained why he’s giving up actually making images, instead working on projects in which he’s culling the images from Flickr. Isn’t Adams' role sourcing images very similar, besides the fact he’s generally working with better images by photographers who would like a "name"? But is this really any different from the role of the curator mounting an exhibit fifty years ago, any different from The Family of Man? Is the exhibition a work of art? Are we moving to the idea of a hybrid photographer-curator? I need a drink.

Another point I won’t attempt to answer here: it seems to me to suggest any number of issues that the suburban-born MFA photographer is generally defining contemporary landscape practice and our collective artistic vision of the landscape. This speaks quite loudly about the limited voices present in contemporary photography practice and suggests a distorted emphasis on certain spaces and their cultural importance because of the personal familiarity of fine art photographers to them.

Moving towards a conclusion, Looking at the Land excites me about the future of exhibitions. As I wrote in a previous post, I don’t think enough has been made quite yet of Adams being at the forefront of the movement of online editors to offline roles to produce exhibitions such as this as well as 100 Portraits (which Adams curated along with Larissa Leclair). I think this presents a turning-point in the relationship of online editors and bloggers to more traditional, brick and mortar spaces.

Finally, most importantly and interestingly, Adams has presented a vision of the future of exhibitions – flexible and nimble, shifting between various iterations of form between offline and online, between physical presentation and Internet video exhibition, between 20 or 88 images. In fact, this should really be referred to as the Looking at the Land Exhibition...s. As the work shifts from the screen to being projected on the wall to a physical print and the number of images included changes, the meaning of the images included changes and, therefore, the exhibition itself.

Adams’ new model also creates a change in the time relationship between the observer and the work. It’s a shift towards a multiple relationship with the work, allowing the images to be digested in parts, in the case of the online iteration, and at one’s own pace. I have about an hour in me, tops, when I go to galleries or a museum. Here online I can take a half-hour one day, ten minutes the next, digesting the work in parts, going back to and reinforcing my understanding of the exhibition instead of trying to consume an entire physical show at once. The format also allows Adams to include more elements to the multi-media presentation with the accompanying texts, enriching the experience. The online version also allows for Web 2.0 interactivity to play a role in the experience, creating an exhibit that all can refer to, facilitating comments, inter-linking reviews, and generating public conversation about the work between people on different continents.

This update of the concept of the exhibition for the contemporary audience is Adams’ pioneering gift with this exhibit, which I say even while appreciating the strength of the work and the photographers he’s selected for it.

© Todd Hido, #6097, 2006

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.

Book Discussion Group Recap: It's Art, But Is It Photography?

© Luc Delahaye, 132nd Ordinary Meeting of the Conference, 2004

I recently joined Flak Photo and Andy Adams to host an online community conversation on the Flak Photo Books Facebook page focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s book of essays, "The Pleasures of Good Photographs."

This public discussion provided a structured setting for expanding our understanding of the essays by reading collectively.

I am following up on these community conversations with posts that will recap a selection of the ideas we discuss.  These follow-up posts will necessarily be an abbreviated selection given the length and quality of the conversation in the community discussion threads. In many cases, what arose from the conversation were questions, points argued from different sides, and ideas to continue to explore - not conclusions or consensus.

My goal with these follow-up posts is to pull out threads from the weekly discussion that can be applied beyond the individual essays to inform our general understanding of the medium itself.

The follow-up post to the essay, "Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans's American Photographs" can be found here, to "A Certain Sensibility: John Gossage, the Photographer as Auteur" here, to "Without Author or Art: The 'Quiet' Photograph" here, and to "Elliptical Narratives: Some Thoughts on the Photobook" here.

Today we finish with the follow-up to the final essay "It's Art, But Is It Photography? Some Thoughts on Photoshop." (page 234)

___________________________________

Photoshop’s Effect on Belief in the Photographic Veracity of Photography
London-based photographer Pete Massingham summarized the core issue of the chapter: the effect of Photoshop - and especially the seamless photo montage - on the belief in the veracity of photography.

Massingham wrote: “Photography's relationship to infrastructures of the real (both time and place) is no longer a scheme that we can depend on for evidencing fact. It has always been a sensitive issue, but it is now imbued with far greater uncertainties. Time and place may now be blended without apparent disruption to historical or physical accuracy. But no matter how seamless it might appear, it is nonetheless an illusion at best and a deceit at worst.

The tools within Photoshop represent a radical shift in our ability to re-present not only a more convincing image (in terms of its 'believability') but a more convincing deceit! Consequently, we have now extended and radically altered the parameters in which the visual veracity of reality is experienced and understood.”

Late in the week he added a comment that continued to elaborate on the idea. “Simplified, I think the point I was trying to make was that Photoshop has freed up the potential for ‘photographers’ to explore these possibilities in a seamless manner. The medium [is] no longer grounded in the here and now!”

Has Photoshop indeed changed the way time functions in an image by introducing seamless montage? Does the photograph no longer relate as absolutely to a singular time and place? Or does the alteration of that relationship make a photograph into art or something else?

The “Compugraph”
Going with that last idea of certain types of - or perhaps just extensive - alteration making a photograph into something else, Massingham added a term of his own to the conversation: “Perhaps some images are so heavily altered and affected by Photoshop tools, that they are no longer classifiable as photographs. I have fabricated the word ‘compugraph’ to differentiate between a photographic print which is ‘straight,’ and one which has been heavily manipulated or altered.”

Another contributor raised questions about how and who would define the line between photograph and “compugraph.” She wrote, “The question is: what is the dividing line between record of reality and the more heavily manipulated version? Taking out a factory? Infusing a patina of fog to create mood or mystery? What role does cropping play in creating a ‘fake’ image? Who decides when the photographer has ‘tricked it up’ (Badger’s term)?”

Massingham responded with a proposal: “I think for me the dividing line is when the material of the original scene observed is altered in such a way that it loses a sense of its original authority or semblance. What I am suggesting is that the boundaries of what constitutes photography are being stretched to the point where we may have to consider the possibility it is no longer photography but something else!”

Badger and Photography As Art
Contributor John Armstrong questioned Badger’s claim that Badger views certain types of photography - photography in the documentary mode and phenomenological-based photography generally - as separate from art.

Armstrong writes, “Just ignore temporarily all the stuff he says about art and just pay attention to what he says about photography. How does he talk about it, how does he conceive it, what does he value about it?...Basically, he talks about photography in artistic terms, he conceives of it as art, he values it as art. Aesthetics, formalism, cult of the medium, a self-justifying pursuit with no practical purpose (X for X’s sake).”

Armstrong goes on to suggest a reason Badger wants to make this separation: “He just doesn’t want to call it art, because to do so would be to admit that it’s the same basic stuff as all the art he doesn’t like. Instead he calls it photography, which for him effectively means a second art, separate from but equal to the first. Or if you want, a ‘secession’ from art.”

By questioning Badger’s separation, Armstrong reframed the conversation, arguing that the larger discussions in the book on the relationship between art and photography reduce to smaller questions about two different types of art: “Once you make this step, you will see that all his discussions of the ‘big’ questions, what is art, what is photography, when is photography art and vice versa, etc. reduce to frankly much smaller questions about one kind of art (‘art’) and another (‘photography’). They reduce, essentially, to questions of taste, couched in theoretical (or at least rhetorical) language.”

© Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk, 1992

Luc Delahaye, Susan Sontag, and the Constructed Image as Documentary
Armstrong also raised idea that the constructed image may have the ability to function as documentary image. “I think people also need to consider the possibility that the manipulation helps more than it hurts – that is, in terms of strengthening the documentary force of the works in question. It’s worth remembering – and I remind people whenever I get a chance – that in her last book...Susan Sontag singled out as an exemplary documentary photograph none other than Jeff Wall’s 1992 work Dead Troops Talk.” He later added, “What I think Susan Sontag is telling me, so late in her life, is: it’s a very good picture, it makes people think and leads them to understanding; the person who made that picture has done a good thing, whatever was going on in their mind as they did it.”

Digitization Enables the Grand Photographic Gesture?
One of the most interesting conversations of the week revolved around the idea of the artistic “Grand Gesture” in photography.

Massingham started it by writing that the ability to create large images of high fidelity through digitization processes may have given photography the opportunity to make the "grand gesture" in art akin to, for example, history painting: “I do believe that certain galleries are still uncomfortable with photography as an art. I think it is because much of photography, until the advent of digitization, lacked the potential for the grand gesture of painting, as something removed or at least distanced from a utilitarian function. Even when it aspired to such lofty intent, it was still imbued and anchored with that ever-present condition of veracity.”

Armstrong replied by writing, “For me the ‘grand gesture’ is possible with straight photography (i.e. no manipulation), but it does require two technologies that have not always been around: high quality color and high quality prints at very large sizes... Between color and printing technologies it is now possible to make photographic pictures that are as big and as dramatic as history paintings.”

George McClintock countered by asking, “A grand artistic gesture cannot be a small black and white print? I hope the ‘grand gesture’ is a metaphor, not a creation of the art market.”

Massingham responded with his definition: “I think the term is ambiguous at the best of times, but in the context of art and specifically painting, it seems to be used (rightly or wrongly) in contemporary discussions as an indicator for the expression of an alternative, radical, or overt ‘narrative’ - the work more often than not of a large scale.

Personally, I have always felt that scale plays a key part in the definition, as do the technical issues you have highlighted. I am less convinced by the arguments for pre-digital high quality colour - at least in the context and parameters of Badger's essay and what I am alluding to as ‘Grand Gesture.’

I also associate the Grand Gesture with notions of History Painting and the dramatic - often of a moral, religious, or mythological nature. For me the term implies a desire on the part of the artist to communicate a narrative, experience, or issue of immense importance, and in a manner where the physical presence of the work is evocative of the value of that idea.”

Problems of Photographic Acceptance in the Digital Age
Massingham also added in a comment on photography and its historic relationship with the fine art world that, “Photography with its ‘basic simplicity,’ ease of execution, and cultural pervasiveness, all contribute to an undermining of High Art's process of rarification, and as such, it must be shunned until certain strategies are found to make it conform. These may include scale, limited editions, and a return of ideas of authorship, to name but a few. Photography for many is quite simply not enough, not sufficiently and inherently modifiable to suit the ambitions or critical criteria of fine art practice.”

Massingham wrote later in the week about the lack of the maker’s “hand” in the seamless montage photograph, building on the idea that it is photography's ability to hide its modifications that has created its complicated relationship with fine arts.

What he wrote is worth quoting at length to keep the full idea intact:

     What role does individuality (I didn't want to use the word ‘authorship’) play in our acceptance
     or appreciation of a work? Bear with me - I know this isn't a new argument, but perhaps it is one
     that has shifted ground slightly. It is a fact that the art world was resistant to photography due to
     its lack of individual identity. Photographs were too realistic in appearance, too mechanical in
     their production to be art.

     Perhaps the seamless nature and net result of digital works is what makes people (and photographers
     and critics of Badger's ilk) uncomfortable. On the one hand we are presented with a technology that
     expands our ability to Create rather than Take pictures. On the other hand however, this new
     window of opportunity (for the manipulation of events, time, narrative, space, etc.) seems even more
     heavily tethered to the illusion of descriptive reality.

     Perhaps digital works are experiencing the exact same issues that confronted their 19th-century
     forefathers - how does the artist generate a work of art that demonstrates authorship or individuality,
     through a medium whose infrastructure remains true or anchored to, the descriptive illusion of
     reality? ...The tools for manipulation have improved, but the same predicaments apply; for if you
     remove that photographic veracity (as I think Badger implies) it is potentially no longer a
     photograph. Finally, perhaps after all the considerations about the validity of photography, its
     inherent qualities, and the process of digitization or Photoshopping, the real issue and answer may
     reside within an unconscious desire for the human trace to be visible in a works production.

Film as Alternative Process 
Armstrong made an interesting and challenging proposal on the state of film photography by writing, “Film is not ‘dead,’ nor is B&W. But film must now be classed with the other alternative processes of bygone eras.”

Co-existence of Photographic Traditions
Photographer and educator Dawn Roe wrote about the contemporary dynamic between photographic traditions: “I’m not sure why anyone should feel threatened by ‘most contemporary conceptual photography’ – at least to me, different modes of working and of thinking about photography and the photographic (some of which may be considered ‘conceptual’) are not putting other (more traditional) modes or ways of thinking under attack, necessarily...I recognize this is a decades old distinction and discussion, but is it really useful or necessary to continue attempting or forcing ourselves to distinguish between these two camps, if they even exist as such?

I, for one, do not see ‘traditional’ modes of photography as being under any kind of threat. Nor, do I see one practice eclipsing another. What I (thankfully) see, is an amazing amount of incredibly interesting work being continually and thoughtfully produced by practitioners who remain energized by this fascinating medium, and choose to work with it in whatever way they see fit.”

__________________________________

Good words to end on.

I appreciate the quality of the comments of dozens of contributors during the ten weeks of conversation. The collective investment made developed the forum into a valuable resource for those interested in reading a text collectively. I enjoyed the chance to get to know participants through their contributions and look forward to the Flak Photo Books space being used for similar conversations in the future.

Book Discussion Group Recap: Elliptical Narratives

© Paul Graham, Las Vegas (part 4 of 6), from the series "a shimmer of possibility"

I recently joined Flak Photo and Andy Adams to host an online community conversation on the Flak Photo Books Facebook page focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published book of essays, "The Pleasures of Good Photographs."

This public discussion provided a structured setting for expanding our understanding of the essays by reading collectively.

I am following up on these community conversations with posts that will recap a selection of the ideas we discussed.  These follow-up posts will necessarily be an abbreviated selection given the length and quality of the conversation in the community discussion threads. In many cases, what arose from the conversation were questions, points argued from different sides, and ideas to continue to explore - not conclusions or consensus.

My goal with these follow-up posts is to pull out threads from the weekly discussion that can be applied beyond the individual essays to inform our general understanding of the medium itself.

The follow-up post to the essay, "Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans's American Photographs" can be found here, to "A Certain Sensibility: John Gossage, the Photographer as Auteur" here, and to "Without Author or Art: The 'Quiet' Photograph" here.

Today we continue with the follow-up to the essay "Elliptical Narratives: Some Thoughts on the Photobook." (page 221)

___________________________________

NARRATIVE, STORY, and the PHOTOBOOK
In “Elliptical Narratives,” Badger makes a differentiation between “narrative” and “story.” By using “story” to describe basic and linear narratives, Badger frees the term “narrative” to be cast very broadly and - with the term “elliptical narrative” – includes photography such as the Provoke photographers and their “radical deconstruction of narrative” as well as books like Germaine Krull’s “Metal” in which viewers construct the image sequence by shuffling them.

By stretching the idea of narrative far enough to include such work, I asked readers if we arrive at the point where we could say Badger believes narrative is inherent in a book format, no matter how aggressively it is attacked.

Photographer and educator Dawn Roe responded, “At first I objected to the insistence upon narrative and story as being what the photobook is ‘about,’ but Badger ultimately offers a fairly rich discussion of (almost) non-narrative / experimental forms in his discussion of elliptical and non-linear narrative strategies employed by [Daido] Moriyama and others.” She later differentiated between different types of narrative and added that she thought it possible to create photobooks without narrative: “I’d just like to emphasize the distinction (for me) between the inherent narrativeS implicitly contained within any subject matter or even medium or style for that matter (socio-cultural / personal narratives, or narratives of abstraction/realism or photography itself) and the deliberate construction of A narrative, of any kind. I tend to think it’s very possible for a photobook to avoid and / or play against dominant / expected narratives through selection and arrangement of images, and that even if A narrative can still be read into the work (as is possible with anything really), this does not necessarily mean the artist / photographer’s primary goal for the work has / had anything to do with its construction.”

Leeds, UK-based photographer and writer Lloyd Spencer agreed: “A lot of the ways in which we examine photos and respond to image collections or sequences draw on instincts and reflexes that are associated with ‘narrative’...but I would not adopt ‘narrative’ as a way to describe the kind of coherence in most successful photobooks. I don't think that that quite does justice to the ambiguity of photos...We can notice ... or fail to notice but still be influenced by... all kinds of themes and interrelations (such as the flags in Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' or the role of the car, or of the road) but it still stops short of being a narrative. It remains a collection of images. A powerfully coherent, suggestive, expressive collection but for me something short of what I would call ‘narrative.’”

San Francisco-based photographer Stefan Jora argued the opposite: “Great photobooks, like 'The Americans', certainly have a narrative; it may be not be the one you're looking for, and it's for the most part different from a film's narrative. In Frank's case it is not an all-encompassing encyclopedic narrative, but a personal and a very subjective one -- pretty much a statement in the from of an extended photoessay (contrary to what he wrote in his Guggenheim grant application). Every photobook has a narrative, whether it's linear, elliptical, or something else; and this is why most photographers turn to photobooks -- because they feel there's more to photography than the isolated, individual image.”

Contributor John Armstrong built from Jora’s comments by writing, “Isolated pictures can communicate meaning only in limited and hit-or-miss ways; a set of related pictures – pictures about the same thing – can do much better. As to narrative, everyone has their own preferred meaning for the term. I think Badger uses it in a very simple but also very appropriate sense. Etymologically narrate means to make known. But making known can happen in two basic ways, all at once – a revelation – or incrementally over a period of time. Narration normally refers to the second kind of making known, the one that involves a process that takes some amount of time to complete.”


ELLIPTICAL NARRATIVE
George McClintock presented a tight definition of “elliptical narrative” by quoting Badger and writing, “The 'elliptical or nonlinear narrative' form of the photobook 'solves the problem of photography's ineffability' by substituting 'poetry and mystery' for 'clarity and the concrete' aspects of linear narratives. (223-224) Words cannot speak for photographs, and sequences of photographs cannot constitute a linear narrative, thus ellipsis is the rhetorical foundation of the effective photobook...elliptical narrative simply means not making known all the information that could be expected, or making it known in a way that is not readily evident.”


THE STILL PHOTOGRAPH AND THE FILM FRAME
In the essay Badger writes, “A photograph is synonymous with the single film frame – in fact they are exactly the same thing – and as a collective entity, the photobook, as I hope to demonstrate, shares particular characteristics with the film.”

Roe wrote in response: “Of course the still and moving image are inherently different, but also share essential characteristics. When we can rely upon a viewer’s knowledge of both forms, we can potentially take advantage of the distinctions - between stasis and movement, arrest and reactivation – to address the very nature of our mediums, and how they work upon the viewer.”

She also added, “And, however we feel about "Camera Lucida," [Roland] Barthes certainly has some things to say on the matter including, 'The photographic image is full, crammed: no room, nothing can be added to it. In the cinema, whose raw material is photographic, the image does not have this completeness…Why? Because the photograph, taken in flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views…Like the real world, the filmic world is sustained by the presumption that, as [Edmund] Husserl says, 'the experience will constantly continue to flow by in the same constitutive style'.”

Armstrong disagreed with Badger in a longer comment worth quoting at length:

   The film theorist Christian Metz called out a fundamental difference  between the ways the audience
   relates to still vs. moving pictures, identifying still photography as fetishism (viewer in control) and
   cinema as voyeurism (viewer not in control). This distinction goes down through the pragmatic to
   the psychological and ultimately to the cognitive layer of seeing. It is the difference between actively
   examining an object and passively watching action unfolding before your eyes.

and:

   I’ve long been troubled by the idea that a moving picture has to be a sequence of still frames...In
   practice they normally are, given the way film and video cameras work, but they don’t have to   
   be...camera obscura and shadow projections don’t have this property, and a recording device that was   
   completely analog in the time dimension (in the way a traditional analog sound recorder is) would not   
   suffer the lossage you see with frame-based cameras, and would let you zero in on smaller and   
   smaller intervals until you reach the limits of its recording precision.


THE PHOTOBOOK VS. EXHIBITIONS AND MULTI-MEDIA
In "The Pleasures of Good Photographs" Badger writes that it’s in the photobook that photographs sing their loudest and most complex song. I asked readers if they felt that the possible expressive capabilities of multi-media and the exhibition were secondary to those of the photobook.

I challenged Badger’s idea by testing it against a list of some of the expressive possibilities of the exhibition: the ability to use a wider scale difference between prints for expression, arranging prints in space on a wall as a vehicle for meaning (witness Paul Graham), being able to take in the sweep of many images and their relationships at a glance, the importance of the photograph in space as an object (framing types, thickness, etc.), and lighting.

Jora replied, “All mediums of expression have both advantages and limitations, and the photobook is no exception. I think the main advantage of the photobook is its ability to preserve an underlining authorial voice (mostly due to the inherently linear layout that a viewer can break out of at any point, but never fully escape, at least not in the traditional format), while the greatest advantage of multimedia books that I foresee is the possibility they offer to decentralize the power of the narrative from the linear path chosen by the author into the hands of the more adventurous viewer.”

Armstrong responded with more questions: “If you take the photos and texts of a photobook and put them on to the gallery or museum wall, what do you lose? Certainly the tactile experience of holding the book in your hands and leafing through the pages, but what else? And what do you gain? If nothing else, showing real prints and, the temptation that’s hard to resist, large prints, much bigger than the reproductions in the book.”


PHOTOGRAPHER AND CONTEXT
Badger makes a series of comments in the essay about the photographer and their cultural context: “Like other major artists, both Frank and [William] Klein were closely attuned to the cultural zeitgeist,” and later on, “Through the medium of the book, [Japanese photographers in the 1960s and 70s] reacted in different ways, some obliquely, some directly, to the political and cultural events of their era,” and finally, “Clearly, most photography reflects – indeed should reflect – the age in which it was produced...”

Badger has formed this essay through the idea of a strong relationship between the photobook, the photographer, and the age in which they photograph. This lead to questions we left unanswered: What is our relationship to context as photographers? Are we inevitably shaped by the era we make work in? Do we have a responsibility to the era in which we photograph? Should photography reflect our times as Badger suggests? How much of our relationship to our context is conscious; how much are we just simply shaped by our surroundings, perhaps inevitably so?


ZEITGEIST
These questions raised the idea of zeitgeist. Armstrong asked, “It's easy enough to identify Zeitgeists in the past and see how they were reflected in art of the time, but what about now? What is our current Zeitgeist and how is it reflected in the art of today?..We are now well over a decade into the 21st century. Where is the 21st century art? There is no question but that the Zeitgeist of today is very different from that of the 90’s (just as the Zeitgeist of the 90’s was different from that of the 80’s and so on back)...At least for Americans, everything changed after 9/11...where is the art of the post 9/11 age?”

Armstrong later wrote that our conversation had perhaps gotten towards some answers to his questions, “Current Zeitgeist: backward rather than forward-looking, pessimistic, impotent, focused on loss rather than gain, nostalgic, savoring the smallest things because everything will be gone. 21st century Art (the first decade): expressions of the same.”


MISSED MOMENTS
Badger concludes the essay by using Paul Graham’s “a shimmer of possibility” as a case study for the idea of elliptical narrative and the final conversations of the week revolved around Graham's work.

Badger writes that Graham’s images look like “missed moments,” something between decisive and indecisive moments and that Graham’s images have the feeling of film grabs which “tend to have a different quality off stopped motion than still photographs.”

Roe replied, “For me, Graham is extending the notion of the moment and how it’s defined through his mode of image selection and sequencing. Or at least challenging the expectations of the photographic moment, or maybe instant would be a better word. They are not missed moments, as they are still moments. But are they ‘decisive’? And, do they need to be? I guess I think of these as anti-instants more than missed moments, if that makes any sense...it seems these shimmers of possibility (anti-instants, but poignant glimpses) provoke the viewer to think outside/beyond the frame and to rely on or call upon memory (of the preceding images/moments/details and in general) to fill in gaps.”

London-based photographer Pete Massingham added, “I think what is interesting is the manner in which Graham's strategy emphasizes what is not seen - particularly the psychological space in an interrupted flow of time. The repetitions or slight shifts function as an almost lyrical device highlighting an experiential dimension perhaps not as readily found in the single statement. Graham like others, shifts our attention away from the single visual experience, to one where we are more inclined to consider the passage of time.”

Finally, another contributor said, “One of the most intriguing parts of this work for me is the use of repetition as a kind of memory trigger. In the book, an experience of the image is no longer a singular encounter, and like memory arises unexpectedly with a slightly different version.”


AUDIENCE AND THE MARKET
Massingham raised the issue of audience and the moral, commercial, and critical implications of promoting limited edition works. The point arose from the humbling current market value of the full, hardcover copy of “a shimmer of possibility”: £750.00. He wrote, “I have no qualms over Paul Graham or any other artist making a good financial return on his/her work, but at what point I wonder, does the market come into conflict with the very people who are interested in that work? So many books now are limited editions, immediately collectible and put out of the range of most people...I wonder who/what the audience for Graham's work might be. How diverse I wonder?” The conversation was raised, but not completed – I hope to see it resumed in a separate thread on the forum.