But is it Art?

During my recent winter of photographic discontent, I roamed around the internet looking at pictures of naked women. Which is pretty much all I saw, pictures. There wasn’t much art being committed. Which led me to the question of what exactly do I mean when I say “art” and how does it apply to photography of landscapes and nudes.

George Orwell laid out the first, and maybe only, test. He said, “For any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival.”

Orwell didn’t prescribe a survival time frame, but a century seems about right to me. If people are still looking at a photograph 100 years after it was made, we can safely call it art, even if it is something we personally don’t like.

For most photography then, it is too early to tell what is art and what isn’t. Photography was invented about 1822 and the first surviving print is from 1826. Here it is.

And although photography’s inventors were artists, the technology to produce fine art prints took time to develop. There is a still life by Daguerre dated 1837 and Henry Fox Talbot made some photographs in the 1840’s that qualify, but it isn’t until the 1860’s that we began to see photographs that manifestly qualify as art under the test of survival. (Although we should note here the photographs that the Frenchman Nadar made of Sarah Bernhardt, especially this one from 1859.

There you have the beginning of modern glamour photography. Note the romantic pose, the wistful expression, the lighting and the drapery.

And, of course, documentary photography can be art and many photographs of the Civil War are, but they are beyond the scope of this modest blog which limits itself to landscapes and nudes.)

Although she didn’t do either landscapes or nudes we must pause to note Julia Margaret Cameron who may be the first true artist who worked in the photographic medium. She spent the last eleven years, from 1868 to 1879 of her life making photographic portraits which are undoubtedly art. Here are a couple of examples. The first is of a 16 year old girl photographed in 1864.

This one is a photograph Cameron made in 1867 of her niece, Julia Jackson, who was the mother of Virginia Wolfe. Jackson was Cameron’s favorite photographic subject.

The first landscape artist to use photography was Timothy O’Sullivan. (1841-1882) About 160 years have passed since his photograph of Canyon de Chelly was made and no one can mistake it for anything other than art. It has survived. No wonder. Look at it. Note the composition. The tones. No modern photograph of the scene has ever come close to its aesthetic perfection.

He made many other photographs which are art. We’ll say more about him in a later post but we’ll leave you today with one more, taken in Vermillion Canyon in 1870.

In our next post in this series we’ll make some educated guesses about the work of Stiechen, Stieglitz, Weston, Adams, Bernhardt, Cunningham and a few others from the early 20th Century and how it fares under Orwell’s test.

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

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.”

_________________________

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.

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.

Snapshots and Art

Snapshots as Art

In addition to an Edward Hopper show and the J.M.W. Turner show, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has a show of anonymous snapshots taken in the United States from 1888 to 1978. Sadly, the National Gallery still maintains one of the most boring websites you’ll attend this year and they hardly ever post more but a few of the works of art on show. The Gallery should do better. It is the National Gallery after all. It would be nice for those of us who live in the hinterlands to see a few more samples.

Typically, for their web page, I could find exactly one of the snapshots which I took the liberty of posting. But you can read about the show here. It is up from October 7 through December 31, 2007.

Fortunately the Washington Post does a better job and it has a small gallery of some of the snapshots here. It also has an excellent critical review of the show by Paul Richard which you can and should read here. If you lack the time to read the article at least take a look at the WP gallery. Following Richard’s notes, look in the photographs for the blurred motorcycle, the gun, the unexplained puff of smoke, the Mom hiding behind the chair and the red cup.

Now, just for a moment, I am turning the blog over to Mr. Richard who makes several interesting points in his review:

Art implies an artist. Great art implies a great one.

So what are we to make of anonymous photos? Do they fail the “art” test because we do not know who the artist was? Or was the photographer even an artist?

Photography was once dismissed as overly mechanical, as not quite real art, but those days have long passed. Just pick up any standard history of photography and riffle through its pictures. The aesthetic of the snapshot — its suddenness, its artlessness — is part of what you’ll see. It’s there in Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Gary Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange. It’s key to street photography.

Yes, but does street photography become art only if we know who the artist was and can therefore judge the artist’s intent? What if the photographer was just lucky? Had no idea what he was doing?

But when it comes to gauging snapshots, how does one decide? What makes a snapshot good? What makes a snapshot bad? Selecting good Vermeers is not much of a problem. It’s a lot harder with photographs that are anonymous and common. By 1977, Americans were snapping nearly 9 billion pictures a year. And this exhibition surveys not just one year, but 90.

These are good questions, especially for an art form for which the mechanical tools are available to anyone. Give me paint, brushes and canvas and I’ll produce something that is highly unlikely to be art. Give me a camera and I at least have a chance at art. I suppose that you could put a set of paints, brushes and a canvas before a monkey and it would paint something but it would not be art. Give the monkey a camera and it will probably learn to work the thing. And what if a beautiful photograph accidentally results. Is it art?

Adobe’s Damn Dam, Part II

Harumph.  I see that Adobe, hard on the heels of its release of Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, has also just released Elements 6.  I haven’t looked at the new Elements 6 yet but woe betide those people if it has yet another DAM to learn.  DAM, for those of you blissfully ignorant of such matters, stands for “Digital Asset Management” and I have railed before about Adobe’s different versions.  You can read that post by clicking on this link.

I actually prefer the prior version of Element’s DAM over anything else in the Adobe line including Bridge and Lightroom.  That is probably close to apostasy and I hope to be forgiven.

Actually, I may commit even further apostasy after checking out the newest version of Elements.  I may decide that all a serious photographer needs for a digital darkroom is Lightroom and Elements.  Imagine having a full digital darkroom without paying $700 for Photoshop.  In fact, I imagine that Adobe is thinking the same thing.  I got an email from them this week offering a special price cut if you buy Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time.  I imagine they may be trying to forestall my apostasy.  It may have occurred to them that the Lightroom/Elements combination will cost only about half of what Photoshop alone costs.

Then someday – and I don’t expect to live long enough to see it but perhaps my descendants will – Adobe will put everything a photographer needs into Lightroom and be done with it.

Of course, when they do, they will probably include some brand new damn DAM to learn.

Free Speech and Photography

I mentioned in the very first post on this blog that I love living in a country where taking photographs is almost always protected speech under the First Amendment even if I don’t like the photography. But I was taken to task for not being more specific about First Amendment rights for photographers and models. Not wanting to turn this blog into a First Amendment seminar I decided to sum up those rights as succinctly as possible. That led me to Professor Walter Dellinger’s “Five Minute Constitutional Law Course.” He sums up freedom of speech law like this:

As for speech, you can generally say whatever you want, but not necessarily where, when, or how you want. It’s also OK for the government to regulate “expressive conduct,” as long as the government is going after the “conduct” part and not the “expressive” part. Also, you have no right to dance naked unless you are a really, really good dancer, in which case it becomes art.

Plug in the word “photograph” for “say” in the first sentence and you have the basics of First Amendment law as it applies to photography. That does not mean, of course, that other laws may not impact photography. Privacy rights can restrict it somewhat; national security may prevent you from photographing the latest gazillion dollar airplane; Indians may prevent you from photography on their lands; child pornography is off limits; public safety may prevent you from nude photography in the middle of a freeway at the height of rush hour, etc. But the First Amendment cuts a broad swath. We are fortunate to live in a place where its writ runs.

That is a photo of the Bill of Rights in the National Archives.

Photographers will appreciate the cover of this old pot boiler’s cover. It isn’t great art, just as the story probably wasn’t either. But the artist did at least get the view camera in foreground right. The image of the model is upside down on the ground glass, just as it would still be today for a photographer using a view camera. I would like a view finder for my digital SLR that would reverse the image for me. Somehow, composition seems to come out better when the photographer’s brain is a little off balance, the way it is when you see the world upside down for a moment. I think it is especially true for landscape photographers and photographers of the nude. It reminds one that this is a photograph being made, not a snapshot.

And who knows, maybe the story was OK. You can’t judge a book by its cover.