Ambition

From despair.com comes this fine nature photo:

Top 10 List

It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.  Here is a list of 10 things we are thankful for here at this blog.  These are in addition to the most obvious and most important: family, friends, good health, shelter, pets etc.

10.  Women unwilling to take off their clothes for my camera.

9.    Hahnemühle Paper

8.    Adobe

7.    Ansel Adams’ Moonrise over Hernandez, NM.

6.    Silver Halides

5.    MOMA

4.    My Cameras – Hasselblad for film; Nikon for digital.

3.     Readers of this blog

2.     Women willing to take off their clothes for my camera.

1.     A land of clear light

Picasso and Shamanism

The third volume of John Richardson’s biography of Picasso is out. 900 or so pages covering the years 1917 through 1932. Here is the New York Times review. Having not finished the second volume yet, I did not rush out and buy volume 3. But I did pick it up and rummage around in it a bit over the weekend. I learned that Picasso was intrigued by shamanism. And the Marquis de Sade. But more about those later. Reading around in it for a few minutes indicates that it is a good read, notwithstanding all those words. And, as in the earlier volumes, lots of pictures which should make Jon Stewart of The Daily Show happy. [1]

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[1] Some months ago he interviewed John Kerry about the environmental book he and his wife have written. Stewart said some nice things about the book, then looked Kerry in the eye and deadpanned, “No pictures though.”

The Limits of Landscape Art

There is a new and fairly silly article about “landscape” in the current edition of Orion Magazine. You can read it here. It is by retired art critic Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including: As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001), River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006) and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2006) and many columns for Orion.

Her “landscape” article is proof that just because you are published, doesn’t mean you are always right.

As I understand her, she finds traditional landscape painting and photography lacking because it does not incorporate enough of reality. She also doesn’t like it because it portrays the earth as feminine and; therefore, passive. Finally she doesn’t like the fact that it “de-emphasizes” the energies which pulse through the landscape and the universe.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Of course landscapes leave out stuff. One of the first and most important compositional decisions an artist makes is what to leave out; what to ignore. That is just like survival; to live we must decide what to ignore. Even if it were possible to depict all of reality in a photograph or on a canvas, no artist would want to. Art is about discrimination. Whatever an artist’s vision is; to convey it to the rest of us compels omission.

Moreover, even though she may like the requirement, “traditional” landscapes do reduce a multi-dimensional reality – probably many more than the three Ms. Solnit recognizes – into two. Photographers must learn to see in at least three dimensions but reduce to two. Another way of counting – and viewing landscapes – is that they reduce four dimensions to three: A good landscape includes time. The eye is drawn into the photograph and then through it, thus incorporating at least one concept of time. But the fundamental point is that the artwork requires imagination from both the artist and the viewer. The limits Ms. Solnit finds in landscapes may well be the limits of her imagination, not the artistic imagination that created the work.

Next she faults landscapes for coming out of a tradition of seeing land, “. . . as feminine and the feminine as passive—as something you act upon rather than an actor.” No doubt many artists may have thought that about land as feminine. The earth is our mother in most traditions, after all. But it is much less certain that landscapes all come from a tradition of viewing the feminine as passive. Inanna, Lilith, Hera, Artemis, Durga and uncounted other women from mythology were anything but passive. I doubt that Ms. Solnit herself is passive. Gender does not determine activity; that is done by genetics and culture.

Comparing landscapes to real estate for sale, she says, “It is easier to dump nuclear waste, for example, into a place you imagine as inert than one you understand to be constantly moving, changing, and connecting to everywhere else.” That too seems wrong. If Ansel Adams had made a photograph of the moon rising over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, I doubt the nation would be contemplating storing our nuclear waste there. No one is suggesting we should store it in Yosemite, thanks in part to Adam’s landscapes.

Finally, she decries landscape art’s inability to portray the energies pulsing through the place. It is true that we humans have a very limited ability to detect energy. We have only five senses which we tap into most of the time. And even those are limited. Most of the reflected light illuminating those landscapes is invisible to our eyes; most of the sound, inaudible to our poor ears; unsmelled by pathetic noses; untasted and mostly untouched. But does that mean I can’t feel the energy pulsing through a Turner landscape or a Picasso representation of a landscape?

What Ms. Solnit worries about isn’t the art form, it is the viewers. But don’t take my word for it. Here is Thoreau on the point: “The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see.”

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The photo was made by Laura Gilpin. Passive? I don’t think so.

Hasselblad H3D-39 or How Mortals Can Go Broke

Today I received an email from Hasselblad extolling the virtues of its new H3Dii camera and imporning me to buy it. However, the email neglected to tell me how much it costs. For that I had to do a search beyond Hasselblad’s web sites. That explains Hassy’s new marketing strategy: “If you ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.”

The new camera takes 50 megabyte photos. You read that correctly: 50 MB per photo. Which means that the human eye will be able to distinguish between a photo made by a Hasselblad and a Nikon or a Canon camera, assuming you blow up the print to about 400 by 400 — feet. A 16×20 inch photograph? Forget it. No human eye could tell the slightest difference.

But, still; it is a Hasselblad. I have a Hasselblad. It is my only remaining film camera and I love it. I have two lenses for it, the standard 80mm lens which came with it and a moderate telephoto lens (150mm) which I use for portraits and many nudes. It is a fine camera and I am proud to own it. (It is also why I am on Hasselblad’s mailing list.)

My question is: What is Hasselblad thinking? What is their marketing strategy? To whom to do they expect to sell their digital cameras which are expensive and for which there are few lenses and the lenses that do exist are almost as expensive as the cameras?

Clearly they are not expecting to sell many to professional photographers. Professional photographers, at least the ones I know, can’t afford a camera that costs this much – or that takes a full 1.5 seconds to capture a single image. Or that does not have a single moderate zoom telephoto lens such as the 18-200mm Nikon lens I use. Moreover, the professional photographers I know are not rich. As I have noted here before, photography is a tough way to make a living. So tough, in fact, that I’ve never even tried.

But what do I know about marketing? I still use WordPerfect and believe that Microsoft represents the triumph of marketing over quality. Maybe Hasselblad has not signed its death warrant by refusing to produce a digital SLR that ordinary mortals can afford. Maybe there are enough hedge-fund managers who are amateur photographers to keep the company afloat. But I am not betting on it.

Did I mention how much this fine camera costs? $43,500.00, unless you have to pay gross receipts tax on it. In my state I would and that would add about another $3000.00. And all I would have is a standard lens.

They’re nuts.

Still Waiting

Will that train never get here?

Slow Trains

When you are waiting for one, all trains are slow trains. Might as well read a good book while you wait.

Terrorist Art Critic

History’s first, and probably only, terrorist who was also an art critic was Felix Fénéon. It was he who discovered and promoted the art of Seurat, an example of which I post here. The woman is not nude but she is certainly beautiful and mysterious and makes you want to see the rest of her. Is that a veil or is it a mask?

Fénéon really was a terrorist. He was once caught with bomb detonators on his person in the streets of Paris, although he was acquitted on those charges. The jury accepted his defense that his father had simply found them on the street. Juries don’t always get it right, although mostly they do. The Fénéon and O.J. Simpson verdicts were aberrations.

Anyway, Fénéon was a perceptive art critic. At the end of one of his essays about Seurat he wrote words that photographers would do well to remember:

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning.