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?

Fluffytek Blog Review

I admit to being an Anglophile. How can you not love the British who brought us Shakespeare, Churchill and J.M.W. Turner ? Back in the days when the dollar was healthy and Americans could afford to travel to Europe, I went to the U.K. as often as I could. I feel safer and more at home on the streets of London than I do in Manhattan. So perhaps it is no surprise that the best blog about photography of nudes that I have found in my perambulations around the web comes from Great Britain.

The blog is Fluffytek and never mind about the name. There is nothing “fluffy” about it. Just go to the blog and wade in. It is written by a husband and wife team who live in England. Lin, the woman, is pushing 40 but still models and does most of the writing. Richard is the photographer and he also writes.

The entry for Thursday, October 4th is a good example of why I like it so much. Lin writes about one of her personal heroes, Frida Kahlo. Lin, who occasionally alludes to her own chronic pain, writes movingly about Kahlo’s. Separating Kahlo’s pain from her art would be like reversing the law of entropy; it just isn’t possible and Lin doesn’t try. What results is a fine capsule of the essence of Kahlo and her art. You could read an entire biography of her and not get much closer to her than you can in three or four minutes of reading the blog entry.

The day before the Kahlo post, readers were treated to a brief essay about the “photographic eye” and the continuing battle Lin and Richard are having with their son’s art teacher who doesn’t admit photography into the family of art.

Lin, who admits to approaching 40, also writes about modeling. Her insights into a model’s role in producing a good photograph are especially useful, given the dearth of good blogs by models. There aren’t many. In fact, there is a dearth of writing by photo models period. Edward Weston’s model and wife Charis Wilson is about all that is worthwhile. Lin reaches deeply into her own psyche and, from time to time, explores her own motivations; which, at least to this male photographer, seem insightful and wise.

They live in County Norfolk in England. Norfolk has given the world much, including Boudica, the Celtic queen who led an uprising against the Roman occupiers in 60 or 61 A.D., Admiral Lord Nelson and our own Thomas Paine. Nelson once wrote, “I am myself a Norfolk man . . . and glory in being so.”

Norfolk is meaningful to my family too. My father lived there for a year during WWII. He was a B-24 pilot with the 44th Bomb Group which was stationed at Shipdam. You can read about Shipdam here. If you scroll down that Wikipedia page you will see a photograph of a rainy Medal of Honor ceremony in progress. That medal was being awarded to Col. Leon Johnson for his heroics in the low level raid in August 1943 on the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. My father flew that mission as well and his was the only other plane in Johnson’s wing that made it back safely. I am reasonably confident that my father, who was a photographer, took that photo because he had the negative and several other photos taken from the same spot in his possession when he died.

But my family connection is not why you should read Fluffytek. You should read it because it is a thoughtful, rewarding place to spend a few minutes each day. You’ll learn some photography, some quantum mechanics and some humanity.

Oh. I almost forgot. The photography is excellent. All the photographs in this entry are theirs. Check out their galleries here and here.

Art Nudes Blog

Here is the first in what I expect will be a long line of reviews of photography blogs and web sites. After each review, I will add them to the blogroll at the right. Unless, that is, I find nothing useful or redeeming about them in which case I’ll just omit them.

As you would expect there are thousands upon thousands of such sites and I will never even attempt to get to them all. I have a life, you know. Besides, making photographs myself is a lot more interesting and fun than talking about them or talking about photographs of others. And, as I noted yesterday, there is always a new DAM from Adobe that has to be learned and 16 new ways of converting color digital captures into black and white and 50 different ways to leave your lover. So much to do, so little time.

In fact, because time is limited I’ll start with one of the best blogs about photography of the nude. Michael Barnes saves all the rest of us immense amounts of time and labor by winnowing out some of the best nude photography and putting it up on his web blog Art Nudes which you will find here. Like me, I am certain that you will not care for many of the photographs you see there but Barnes posts the best of what he finds and a lot of it is quite good. For a quick survey of what is currently being shot his blog is the best place to start. Barnes himself is quite good and clicking on the link for his website is worth the time. He is very good with studio lighting as you can see from this photograph.
If you want more surveys, you’ll find them on the left side of his blog under “Photo and Fine Art sites.” Some of those are of uneven quality but then a lot of fine art nude photography is of uneven quality.

A warning about the blog. A cretin or a group of cretins objected to the content so now, before you actually get to Art Nudes you have to get past the Google warning sign. You do that by clicking on the orange box. Don’t worry, if you are looking for Fine Art nudes, that is what you will find on the other side of the orange box. Barnes does not post pornography.

Democratization of Photography

We’ve reached the ultimate democratization of photography: Anyone with a point and shoot camera can take a picture and anyone with a computer can start a photography blog and write about the picture.

The question thus arises, “Why should I look at these pictures or read this blog?”

First, these aren’t pictures; they are photographs.

Second, this isn’t the usual blog.  I promise not to be narcissistic nor humorless.  In fact, I intend to inject a fair amount of humor and won’t bother you much with myself. Most blogs today are all about the authors and their lives.  But I doubt that you much care what I had for dinner last night nor do you really need to know the names of my dogs.  (Unless, of course, you model for me someday and one of the dogs comes along. I’ll probably post a picture of them even though I’m trying not to be narcissistic here.)  I’ll also endeavor to write well.

As I said in the first post — which you can read in the “About” section — one of the serious problems with photography of nudes is that much of it consists of photographs made by pretentious photographers taking pictures of self-conscious models.  I suppose we do that to prove that we aren’t doing it just for the salaciousness of the enterprise.  People might misunderstand otherwise.  We live, after all, in a country founded by Puritans.  It would not do to admit that making photographs of naked nubile women is fun nor would it do for the naked young women to admit that taking their clothes off for a camera is, among other things, a lot of fun. The inner voice asserts, “You can’t make Art if you are having fun.  Art is serious.”

Baloney.

It is true that many great artists did not live particularly happy lives, but does anyone seriously contend that most of them did not love doing their art.  Was Alfred Steiglitz not having fun photographing Rebecca Strand or Georgia O’Keefe?  Was Edward Weston not enjoying himself as he made photographs of Charis Wilson?  Would anyone seriously argue that Ansel Adams did not love being outdoors?  I’m guessing that Imogen Cunningham adored making photographs of flowers and young women. Ruth Bernard no doubt loved cramming models into boxes and arranging her studio lights to focus our attention on the beauty of the human form.

So we’ll enjoy ourselves here.  We’ll be unstinting with praise and chary with criticism.  Exploring environmental nudes with empathy, we’ll also examine the human condition and the environment of which we are a part and from which we can never separate ourselves.

Welcome.