On Mediocrity and Projects

© Lewis Baltz

Joerg Colberg recently published a piece on Conscientious entitled "Why does it always have to be about something?" In his piece, he argues that making projects that are "about" something has become - for some – a way to get away with making mediocre images. He makes a call for photographs that make us "hungry" to see them and adds at the end, "And let's also accept work more openly again that is not playing along the lines of standard aboutness. It really doesn't always have to be a project."

It's hard to disagree with those thoughts. Who wants to look at lazy mediocre photography that uses "ideas" to cover for visual weaknesses in a photograph, or to place a veneer over the limited abilities and knowledge on the part of the photographer? Why not demand great photographs? And who wants to be the stuffy artiste that mandates that photography must be made in projects for it to be "good" or serious work?

There are, however, some points I'd like to add. First let's talk about the different faculties we bring to the table when we look at photographs and how they might affect how we understand mediocrity in photography, then we can turn to the idea of "mediocre" images, how an idea like mediocrity reflects a specific time and place, as well as the context photographs are viewed in, and finally I'll throw in a general defense of the project for good measure.

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© Joe Deal

When we look at photographs we see a lot of stuff that's there, on the surface, but we also "see" things that are not physically there. When we look at the surface and observe line, color, saturation, composition, tonality and the rest, we might feel excited by their specific qualities or not, feel drawn to look longer or feel nothing. In these terms, which are those considered by the original piece, there are not really any situations that I can think of that would suggest not pushing beyond mediocrity.

I would add, however, that we don't stop looking with our eyes, we also see with our minds and emotions and we see through ideologies and within cultural moments. In the crosshairs of all those elements, we see things that aren't there on the photographs' surface.

If we look at Joe Deal or Lewis Baltz, for two random examples, some might find the removed, black and white, straight ahead work mediocre based on their eyes. As photographs, one can argue that a good percentage of their work isn't spectacular, often falling into the category of work that inspires museum goers to say they could do that.

If we understand, however, how their work is commenting on consumerism through repetition, landscape through its desolation, society through rigid geometry, suddenly these "mediocre" images are given aesthetic life and visual spark through our minds' appreciation of how they use aesthetics to create commentary. We love their appropriation of "mediocre" aesthetics in service of a specific cultural critique

If we also understand the history of landscape painting and photography, we can also "see" their radical departure from aesthetic history, we can feel excited by their move in the ongoing art chess game, by how they advance the conversation, by how they engage the work that came before it. What might seem like just a mediocre landscape or cityscape to someone unfamiliar with the background of the work itself and with art history, to others that are familiar the same work might seem aesthetically exciting because of how its formal qualities relate to the content it engages and to the context it exists in. They can appreciate how it subverts aesthetic assumptions and habits.

While there's no reason to strive for the mediocre, it's worth remembering that we make a judgment of aesthetic quality with more than our eyes. The ideas, knowledge and experiences we bring to looking at an image can excite us and make us passionate about work that seemed at first glance - or to an uninformed viewer - mediocre, and we very well might change our mind about its aesthetic value the more we learn and grow as appreciators of art, as we find more ways to engage with photography other than with just our eyes, giving us a more complex relationship to aesthetics than simply a momentary assessment of form.

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"Mediocre" is an important word choice in this conversation and a good one; other words that might be casually considered a near synonym –boring or banal or bland, for example – would change the conversation a lot.

What's the difference? "Mediocre" is a judgment of performance while "boring" and "banal" and "bland" are descriptions of the visual effect of an image. That's important to note, because mediocre is then a term we can use to assess how well a photograph is achieving what it wants to do, how well it executes its "proposal" and that of the project it belongs to, if it belongs to one.

An image could try to engage the idea, for example, of boredom or banality or blandness in Soviet apartment block architecture by working with images that reflect those qualities in their aesthetic construction, yet only do a mediocre job of doing so. Maybe they're not boring enough! Maybe there's room to emphasize even more banality! Why make mediocre boring and banal and bland images when you could make great ones!

Additionally, within a body of work, say a photobook, we almost always need what I'll call "lunch pail photographs." Putting together your best 50 images as a project won't work; there's always a need for images that aren't all-stars to bridge images in a sequence - they might set off the aesthetic spectacular-ness of the following image or help glue the theme together. I wouldn't go as far as saying that that allows for us to dip down into mediocrity, but there's definitely room for average photographs at times in service of the greater good of a body of work. The themes and ideas of our projects almost always call for aesthetic decisions that aren't just making the best damn aesthetic photograph we can make and selecting those to show.

To add one more point, sometimes "good" photographs can generate heated debate because of their subject, and making visually alluring images might not be appropriate for a given situation, suggesting that perhaps "good" photographs are not always what the photographer should be shooting for (pun noted, and apologized for, but not retracted). Think of the issues eternally surrounding Sebastiao Salgado's work or Teju Cole's Steve McCurry take-down for examples of "great" formal photographs not matching, in the minds of some critics, subject, creating problematic content.

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© William Eggleston

One cultural context or moment will judge mediocrity different than another and we judge mediocrity differently based on context. Just as we ourselves have fluid understandings of aesthetics over our lives, so do we as a culture. Ultimately art is a form of language, and sometimes we need to speak in ways that are subversive to the dominant aesthetic ideas, challenging, perhaps, where we draw the line around what is "mediocre."

Think of William Eggleston as an example of how someone completely ruptured ideas of aesthetics by challenging common ideas of beauty inside of a particular cultural moment. A photograph of the inside of a freezer! And in color! If you've seen a million pretty pictures, you might find beauty in photography that dares to usurp the aesthetics of "mediocre photographs" and posit it as high art. In a way, the entire snapshot movement in contemporary art photography was based in this concept, as well as many other "low culture" visual ideas brought into "high art" during the last several decades.

To step away from the single-image conversation for a moment, I recently saw a slide show in which a curator showed a series of (I believe it was) six photographs by Marco Breuer. The first image in the series is a photograph of a piece of photographic paper that has been folded and reshot. Mediocrity defined. Then, however, over the series of photographs, we see that each print is the previous print, folded again and rephotographed and we see that the color shifts in a mysterious way during the process from blue to red (unfortunately I can't find the images online to share).

That first mediocre image, in the context of the series, suddenly seems pregnant with what it will become, necessary, and next to the busier final images, its very simple construction seems restrained and elegant, not mediocre. In this way, mediocre is defined not only by the larger cultural moment, but also by the specifics of viewing time (through what will subsequently be seen in its sequence) and context (quiet after seeing the busier final images, for example).

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There's nothing wrong with "singles" or one iconic home run photograph standing alone or just a really, really beautiful photograph. Photographic work, or any other artistic work, doesn't need to be presented as a series or project. For better and for worse, doing so helps galleries, museums, critics, historians and collectors talk about and build a narrative for the medium. Doing so also helps classrooms generate content to debate. It helps photography take itself seriously as art. There's obviously no rule, however, written about individual works of art being lesser or unacceptable for standing on their own.

A little in defense of the project, though. I would argue that photography is at its strongest and most interesting when presented in a series or as a project because not only does it offer us images to enjoy individually, it also offers us much more. It gives us the ideas formed between photographs, ideas of narrative or argument through sequence. It gives us images that pop visually and philosophically next to each other. We can appreciate the graceful decisions across the edit, sequencing and layout of a photobook or installation.

In short, a good image can be enjoyable to look at, but a well-done project ultimately gives us much more nutrition by risking and engaging much more while still being made up of solid photographs. When a photographer can successfully juggle all of the many dynamics created by bringing so many variables together, the impact, in my experience, is always much more profound than I find sitting with a single image.

Ultimately it's the "anyone can make a good photograph" argument. That's true, just as anyone can write a great line of poetry. My ex-wife, who is a pianist, has taken some shots that enrage me with jealousy. Incredibly few, however, can put together photographs into a project that unites technique, form, subject, content and context in a way that's cohesive, fresh and that carves out its own place in the current photography conversation, just as none of us can turn our one line of solid poetry into a book of Neruda-quality poems. It's just an infinitely more complex and interesting game.

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Aesthetic understanding is, in essence, relative. While mediocrity isn't a goal to strive for, how we understand and define mediocre photography in formal terms is fluid as we change physical context and as time passes, it is affected by our biases and knowledge as much as by what our eyes physically see. This relativity exists not just on a personal level, but also a cultural one.

There are moments when content calls for backing away from creating our best photographs according to traditional paradigms of beauty and when photography, from my perspective, reaches its height of power in concert, that is to say, in the series and project. Average photographs can help such a body of work come together. So don't erase those "mediocre" images from your Lightroom catalog. You'll see them differently in five years. The mediocre photographs of one situation are not those of the next. And even if they've only risen from mediocre to average in your subsequent assessment, building your best work may just call on you to use some of your most average shots.

Review: Costa by José Pedro Cortes

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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Within landscape photography, the liminal spaces the skirt our cities and communities have long served as a source of fascination not only for what they say about the particular landscape, but our ever conflicted relationship with the natural world, of which we are inextricably a part. They're places of potential contradictions, collisions and confusion, but also potential cliché. In this sense, it's easy to see what drew José Pedro Cortes to the town in Costa (Pierre von Kleist Editions). The beach town in Costa more often than not resembles an abandoned ghost town of the American West than it does an idyllic Mediterranean costal town. Apocalyptic and impressionistic, Costa avoids the trapping of the well-worn genre in which it exists by being fiercely subjective. Forced to follow Cortes through the dunes and cluttered alleyways, we're thrown into the noon sun looking for answers, but going in circles.

The book begins as we head over a dune. Shot from below, the sandy mountain seems insurmountable. Wood and debris hover and jut from its surface impeding our ascent. Climbing over the dune, we are lead down a desolate road. Walking along the meager strip of asphalt, Cortes points out some grass, a snake and a rock, until we reach the town's first buildings. Sealed off with bricks or curtains and often marred with graffiti, the structures are either abandoned or have fallen into disrepair. The streets are empty too, but evidence of inhabitation can be seen in the cars, empty chairs, hung fabric, graffiti and posters that fill and decorate the outdoor spaces. Perhaps everyone has fled this strange landscape or are simply hiding from the oppressive sun. Even the book's cover seems drawn from a foreign or alien landscape—its image of a sickly yellow-green textured earth enticing and repulsing us.

The scrappy costal town of Costa de Caparica sits approximately 14 km outside Lisboa. Hovering on the edge of the beach, the town seems threatened on all sides by the sun, sand and ocean. The sun beats down relentlessly reducing the plants, buildings and ruins to a bleached mirage. The sand surrounds all and seems ready to swallow whole the makeshift houses and huts, whose improvisational nature seems perfectly suited to the shifting and precarious nature of the place. The ocean, barely visible in the distance, lurks over the dunes—its glassy impassivity keeps us on edge.

Sun blanched and raw, Cortes uses both black and white and color to unsettling effect in the work. Images retain or lose color as if drained and sapped by the overpowering sun—fading out and then springing back to life. Alternating between forensic close-ups of plants, snakes and trash and more expansive landscapes and architectural shots, the book's sequencing takes on a bobbing rhythm as its gaze moves up and down. Elemental and foreboding, the landscape offers nowhere to hide. Luckily we have Cortes to lead the way through this world of dazed heat-stroke confusion.

Cortes combines the cool austerity of Lewis Baltz with the poetic nonchalance of JH Engström. An incongruous pairing, but it works. Looking through the book, I was immediately reminded of Baltz's San Quentin Point and Candlestick Point. Like Baltz's almost mechanical eye, Cortes' allows nothing to escape scrutiny, but the work's evidentiary qualities are muted and complicated by its subjective and impressionistic tone. Although the influence of Engström is more noticeable in Cortes' previous book Things Here and Things Still to Come, which included nudes and echoes Engström's own confessional and voyeuristic gaze, Costa shares Engström's relentless exploratory gaze, as well as his often washed out and unstable palette.

Subjects and genres within any medium emerge slowly as the result of a confluence of artists working alone and in tandem, often in response to broader cultural and social changes. Once legitimized, these subjects lure, inspire and influence artists, but also expand the permissible territory of the medium. In the worst case, artists use these subjects and approaches to suggest and posture meaning rather than developing their own language or vision within that terrain. In his attraction to the despoiled landscape of Costa de Caparica, Cortes may follow the pull of an extensive tradition, but he seems to be carving his own path. Too exuberant and fever-pitched to sit calmly in one place or gaze impassively at the landscape, Cortes has given us a vision of a small marginal town that is personal, idiosyncratic and unsettling. Try not to stay out in the sun too long.

Navigating the Stream, Part I

From the wonderfully titled site dumpaday.com

Ah, the stream. That fast flow of fragments of information that makes up the contemporary Internet - Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds of links, images and quotes reblogged, liked and reposted.

Is it a great way to help generate audience for your work, try ideas and discover new work? Is it an almost endless and mindless posting of images and texts that works against depth, coherence and quality of conversation? Is the stream a service or a problem? Should we jump in or is it a waste of time?

These two - or maybe three - posts will attempt to look at some of the defining qualities of the stream as it relates to photography, to argue its inherent problems and strengths for photographers and to add a few ideas for navigating it.

This theme was discussed last year by a number of commentators including Bryan Formhals, Joerg Colberg and Harvey Benge.

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Let's start with some defining qualities of the stream. It is aspatial, with images from anywhere almost always followed by images from almost anywhere else but the first place. The stream itself can be seen as an aspatial entity: it takes form on your screen, but exists nowhere else in the same exact composition, never takes the same form twice and never exists for more than a brief moment, constantly shape shifting as the flow of fragments continues.

The stream is also atemporal. Although posting is sequential and recedes into the past, and while its focus often is the present –"I'm sitting next to LEE FRIEDLANDER RIGHT NOW and he's EATING A CHEEZBUGGER!!!" – the stream is far from strictly and simply trafficking in the moment. It brings images and text from the relatively far past into the flow - family photographs recently rediscovered, quotes from Walker Evans or scans of pages from Doubletake.

These older elements in the stream emphasize that if we look beyond defining the stream simply through posting order and instead look at the totality of information it generates, the stream moves both forward and backward in time. The addition to the digital flow of older content at the same time as we document our contemporary lives minute-by-minute leads me to suggest a replacement term for the stream: The Great Thaw (patent pending), or the unfreezing of the flow of existing information from both the present and the past so that it moves ever more quickly at an ever increasing volume in more than just one temporal and spatial direction.

Looking at other qualities, the stream is also a sequence of illogical juxtapositions and disconnections and frequently non-coherent in and of itself. Last three current threads in my Facebook feed together read: Happy 90th Birthday Grandmother! You never cease to amaze and inspire! Love you! Tomorrow at Friends and Lovers, these pups are gonna have the run of the place... Christmas Everyday. These juxtapositions can be amusing, horrific, or absurd. Whatever the response generated, it's important to note that context does influence the perception of content including the photographs that you both post and see. You cannot control that context - witness the lead image.

Lastly, the stream is comprised of the reduced element - the single image, the quote, the quip, the link, the suite of five images. It frequently breaks down photographic language and conversation by separating the images that once formed part of cohesive photographic sentences in another context – that is, parts of series of photographs in an intended sequence – into the frequently meaningless presentation of single "words" by themselves.

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Let's see if we can build some arguments around taking in aspatial, atemporal, disconnected and reduced information from the stream and bring this conversation a little more towards practical issues with the stream as they relate to photography. I’ll start with negatives today and work towards positives in the second post and ask where the balance rests between the two in the conclusion.

The emphasis on the reduced element - the detail and the everyday instead of overarching ideas - means we're more likely than ever before to see the disconnected single paragraph, quote or photographic image apart from its creator's intended context than we are to engage complete content or connective content that traces threads through parts and presents a cohesive argument or idea. In this sense, the stream works against posts in series or extended formats and the full presentation of the photographic project; complete content frequently becomes an effort to reassemble in order to be able to read or look at the intended sequence, a problem augmented by frequently shoddy attributions, broken links and orthography hijinks.

The volume of both images and photography sites creates a sense of exhaustion both about specific work that's repeatedly passed around – overexposure? – as well as photography images online more generally. The reduced element format and collective exhaustion at the overwhelming amount of material makes your work subject to judgments hastily made based on limited data. The details - a handful of your images, a link, or a quote - are, and will increasing be, the criteria through which your work and ideas are judged.

These judgments in respects to photographer's work are a problem. What if the project takes a left turn midway and viewers attracted to and expectant of a certain project by a few initial images get delivered another? What if an image attached to an interview that seemed great a week after taking it is embarrassingly stuck on the Internet forever when one inevitably realizes it’s not so great (this I have done more than once)? What if, in fact, you are sending out half-baked goods off an incomplete menu and asking people to take a bite and write the restaurant review?

Exhaustion around and quickly formed judgments about photography in the stream may be mitigating one of the Internet's best elements in regards to photography: its populist ability to elevate quality photography to the notice of editors, curators and gallerists who will respond to the viability of work proven by the volume of response to the work online. I want to make sure I don’t overstate the importance I think the public has in influencing editorial and curatorial decision-making through Internet popularity. It's not a lot. However, as images increasingly become about the single post in a feed, single photographs take over a higher and higher percentage of consumption and the volume of images posted continues to increase exponentially, the images become a sort of white noise in which individual names and bodies of work become lost, no matter how high the quality is and I think the quality is often very high. There are some reasons that I think this is exciting (see this post), but it also is possible to argue that this takes away from the role of the public as a litmus test for projects and for online momentum – The Sochi Project, Touching Strangers – to be a determinant in photography distribution and production decisions. The end result is a centralizing of control back in the hands of curators and gallerists and a small group of traditional deciders.

This is compounded by my hypothesis that the stream affects memory, which I would argue empirically. Just as cell phones destroyed my superhuman ability to remember phone numbers, the idea that images and works are constantly present, available and being reproduced again and again online actually makes them less memorable. We feel that we can always access them. And, I'll parenthetically add here, we tend to study images less in the stream. The sheer volume and constant additions make each image more of a glance than a prolonged experience; looking at an image for fifteen minutes to study and appreciate it just doesn't happen in the stream.

One last point: the immediacy of contemporary posting prevents the inherent digestive period of slow media. Instead, we post raw data of events as they have half-happened, including our own photographic projects. Speaking to the general idea first, slow media continues to synthesize and create sense and order from parts, but it's increasingly a secondary source for our news input, a change similar to newspapers being replaced by television and its immediacy as the primary news vehicle in the United States with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Attempting to organize this load of instant information and present conclusive narratives in this context can in fact be dangerous – fact and rumor blend in the flow. Fact checking takes time and stories often need some distance to be commented on with intelligence and our own work does as well.

You might see where I’m going. The stream encourages birthing one's own work way too early. In addition to preventing proper digestion of your work, facilitating hasty judgements of you and your work and the other issues just outlined above, putting too much energy in distribution too early, not only tending to the stream, but also searching for shows, making submissions, and applying to contests, pulls time and energy away from where it should be for a very long time - learning to make good art. The longer you can make art away from the lights, the better.

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These issues all pale compared with the biggest problem of the stream: the way that it allows some photographers to avoid containers and definitions, to not have to stand for something or behind anything, to not have to organize and present coherently their photography as a completed idea.

When a photographer posts everything to see what sticks, when a photographer creates work only for constant feed-posting, the stream becomes the runs. It's a failure to accept responsibility as an artist for creating art. I’m not talking about posting some images from your upcoming book. I'm not talking about posting cool outtakes or a series of old scans. I'm talking about the encroaching idea of posting image after unconnected image on Tumblr or wherever as an "artist" and never moving to make something with the images beyond that....ever. That's fine if you like to photograph cute puppies; not fine if you are an artist and you aren't doing a conceptual project using the stream...or a conceptual project on endless photographs of cute puppies.

I defer to Lewis Baltz:

Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins. (Fittingly, I can't find the original source online. It's a cut-and-paste from a Word Document of my favorite photography quotes.)

Selecting, editing and curating your work creates meaning and moves photography beyond the superficial, beyond just the aesthetic, beyond form and beyond beauty which is, I'm not the first to say, often the simplest way to see things.

To move beyond the increasingly shallow mindless production and consumption of photography on the Internet requires an acceptance of responsibility. It requires effort. It obligates a stance and an argument. More on that in my conclusion, but first let's talk about some of the positives and strengths of the stream.

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Part II here

Reading Shortlist 2.13.14

© Issei Suda, GINZAN-ONSEN YAMAGATA (FROM FUSHIKADEN), 1976

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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Colors Magazine, All Official Portraiture of North Korea's Reigning Kim Family Is Made by Mansudae Art Studio. A little about how to become an official North Korean painter of Kim Jung-un images, North Korean symbology and Mansudae's (generally disastrous) excursions into African public sculpture projects.

Marc Feustel, Amercian Suburb X, Takashi Homma: Adrift in the City of Superflat. Feustel is one of my favorite online writers. He's obviously very well-informed about East Asian photography and he combines clean text with pinpointing ideas and issues. Here he talks about Homma as one of the photographers in the post-Provoke era who searched for a different photography vocabulary to explore the explosion of suburbs and modernization projects in Tokyo after the 1980s economic boom.

John Foster, The Design Observer Group, The Renewed Art of Embroidered Photographs. Here Foster presents both historic embroidered postcards as well as the work of two contemporary photographers who have revived the practice, Maurizio Anzeri and Hinke Schreuders, whose work is below.

© Hinke Schreuders, 

Fotografía Magazine. “Photography is wandering in the universe by yourself” – From a letter by Sergio Larrain. Larrain gives advice to his nephew, who wants to become a photographer, about where to start.

Interview with Judith Joy Ross. Ross speaking about her beginnings in photography, her experience under the dark cloth, meeting John Szarkowski, her relationship with her subjects and her personal reasons for developing her various projects. The interview was done in connection with her exhibition at Foundation A Stichting.

Video still from Interview with Judith Joy Ross

Pasaporte al Arte. ¿Qué está sucediendo con la fotografía en Colombia? Colombian photographers Jorge Panchoaga, Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo and Federico Rios organized a talk at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín on the contemporary photography landscape in Colombia as a response to the series Alec Soth and I have been running on the question. In Spanish. Better audio quality coming next week.

Louisiana Channel, Dayanita Singh, Stealing in the night. Interview with Singh about her project based on a burglary in which the burglars stole her exposed rolls of film from under her bed.

Issei Suda at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art in Portland, Oregon. Hat tip to Kevin Thrasher - I'm enjoying getting to know Suda's work.

TateShots: Lewis Baltz. Can you tell I'm watching lots of photo videos these days? One more video interview, this time with Baltz about his start in photography and his reasons for photographing, the role of the viewer in art, photography as the only "deductive art" and the world as divided between those who like Matisse and those who like Duchamp.

Reading Shortlist 1.29.13

© Christopher Makos, Andy with SX-70 and Konica, undated

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended 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.

Heavy on videos this time. On the shortlist:

Gianpaolo Arena, Landscape Stories, Steve Bisson. Bisson, founder and editor of Urbanautica, shares his thoughts on the state of and future of landscape photography in this short interview from 2010.

Coburn Dukehart, NPR Picture Show, What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief. The article provides a good moment for photographers to make some decisions - before finding themselves in the situation - about their stance on making images in moments of grief and also on making street portraits without permission more generally.

Bryan Formhals, LPV Magazine, Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude. Formhals explores the evolution of his strong reaction to Lick Creek Line.

David Hockney, Louisiana Channel, Photoshop is boring. Hockney raises an interesting question: is Photoshop creating a "stale" look in photography? Includes an awkward bondage conversation at the end.

© David Hockney, Composite Polaroid 31 1/2" x 24 1/2"

Monte Peckham, American Suburb X, INTERVIEW: "A Conversation Between Lewiz Baltz and John Gossage" A free-flowing conversation about cinema as the pre-eminent art form of the 20th century, The Pond, the relationship between photography and linguistics, and how - for both photographers - the subject of the work is the person looking at it.

Polaroid SX-70 promotional video. The SX-70, introduced in 1972, is fully explored and explained in this video. The SX-70 was used, among others, by David Hockney, Ansel Adams, and Walker Evans. Not going to buy the soundtrack to this video, however.

Viviane Sassen, Quality Matters. Sassen talks about her process in this short video, from editing to photobooks. "You can easily make or break a book with design."

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, The Great Leap Sideways, Beauty as Bitter Fruit: Susan Worsham’s By The Grace of God. Wolukau-Wanambwa deciphers what it is about the images of Worsham that pull us in so far.

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

The Image: Alejandro Cartagena, "Untitled Lost River #10"

This image was taken in 2007 or '08 and it is outside the city of Garcia. It was a Sunday drive with my wife in search of dried up streams and rivers around the nine cities of the Metropolitan area of Monterrey, Mexico. The image is part of a five-series project called Suburbia Mexicana I produced from late 2005 to 2009. This image is part of the "Lost Rivers" section of the project that became a crucial eye opener in the development of my work. In Suburbia Mexicana I was exploring the possibilities of representing landscape and urban development in early XXI century Mexico. But more than just producing images of the actual issue of urban growth, which is the first part of the work ("Fragmented Cities"), I was pursuing an interrelationship between the actual sprawl and its causes and effects. That is environmental issues, effects of suburbia on city centers, comparatives between other urban models and the possible struggles of the inhabitants of these new cities.

With "Lost Rivers" I felt I was actually tackling a more complex visualization of suburbanization and creating a dialogue with past images that dealt with the same subject. I was very excited to think of my images as a portrail of "answers" to questions posed by photographers like Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Joe Deal as to what was going to happen with so much development of the suburbs. Here in these images I was representing urban development; you can't see it, but it was making these rivers and streams dry out. I was thinking of photography as something that can make visible the officially invisible. A tool to comment on our urban and suburban well-being that still connects with the history of landscape photography. This image is one of my favorites from that series as it encompasses both the documentary and aesthetic qualities that I was pushing for in this project. It was shot with a Mamiya RB67 and digitally scanned and processed.

- Alejandro Cartagena