Art Stuff : : Misreading Eggleston

I was a shut-in all weekend, desperately trying to finish the slideshow for my book tour, and missed the entirety of the first annual New York Photo Festival. Smart move or what? So I relied on The Jackanory for snappy coverage of all the razzmatazz. Now comes Robert Wright with a smart take on Various Photographs, one the four main shows at the festival, curated by Tim Barber.

So I am back to [Tim] Barber. His show [Various Photographs] demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic?

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.”

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

Read the rest.

Art Stuff : : The MIssing Criticism: Papageorge on Robert Adams and 'What We Bought'

In 2000, the Yale University Art Galley acquired the 193 prints that comprise Robert Adams' book What We Bought: The New World (cover right). Two years later, Tod Papageorge wrote this critical appraisal, which also includes a significant amount of details about Adams' working method, derived from conversations with the artist. The essay originally appeared in the Yale University Art Galley Bulletin.

Download the essay here (PDF).

My intention here is not to “valorize” Robert Adams (or this necessarily imprecise version of him), but to illuminate — or simply surround — what I consider a remarkable moment in the history of recent art. If, as I believe, Adams’s work of this period stands as one of the most significant, and original, achievements produced by an American artist in the last thirty years, it was an accomplishment created and fed by the stringency of the decisions, both personal and aesthetic, that he made in the universal tumult that was 1968.

The pictures that Adams began to produce that September were resolute in their determination to eschew any type of pictorial effect in favor of a direct, matter-of-fact descriptiveness that just avoided triviality. Rather than failing through cleverness or excess or by straining for beauty, these photographs risked that possibility by appearing to be little more than the record-keeping snapshots that architects, contractors, and developers jam into their project-files. The drama in them, such as it was, occurred in the air, as sunlight and figured clouds took on the role of Chorus to the mute prairies, highways, four-way stops and agglomerations of building-types below, elevating them into places worth … cherishing? No, not quite, but certainly worth contemplating as they sat there, so irrefutably present in their nakedness.

Originally published in 1995,What We Bought is currently out of print, though copies are available from the usual sources online, starting at around $400. (Click on the cover image here to see sample spreads from the book). However, the Yale University Art Gallery is planning to publish a facsimile edition next spring. The gallery will also issue an new, expanded version of Adam's Denver next year as well.

Aperture has just published a new edition of Adams' The New West, and reports that "a major traveling exhibition" of the photographer's work will begin touring in 2010.

Papageorge has been the Director of Graduate Study in Photography at the Yale School of Art since 1979. Aperture has recently published his book American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam. Last year, Steidl published his book Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park.

This is the second in an occasional series, Photography: The Missing Criticism, which aims to bring great writing on photography back into print. The first was Papageorge's essay on Walker Evans and Robert Frank.

Art Stuff : : Stephen Shore's Spitzer

Stephen Shore may be making one of his one-day iPhoto books today. From a 2005 interview with the photographer:

One series of books I started a couple of months ago. I think of them as time capsules, and I do them on days when the New York Times has deemed it worthy to have an eight-column headline. You can go a year and not have one, or you can have two in a couple of months. So last week it was when Scooter Libby was indicted, and the last time was when the levy broke in New Orleans. And so on those days I start with a picture of the front page of the New York Times, with the headline, and then I go around and take pictures of what's going on that day. Suddenly I'm thinking about style, and what clothes look like, or cars, or the prices of things. But I'm also interested in what ordinary life is on that day.

In the "60s I was spending a lot of time in Europe, and I was in Europe in '68, when a lot of shit was going down, as they say in the States, including the Kent State shootings. I remember reading the Herald Tribune every day, and it just seemed that the country was falling apart. But a year or so later I was in Europe again, and it didn't seem like there was anything as dramatic going on, but again I had the feeling of things falling apart. And I realized that it was because all I was getting was the news. And the news wasn't reporting that bees were pollinating flowers in Dutchess County today, and the sun rose at 6:51 just as predicted, and that the law of gravity held today as one would hope. If all you're getting are these points of news, you're missing the fact that the world's not falling apart. It's the real stuff, the stable stuff, that doesn't get reported. And so the books, my time capsules, have some of that in them too. So there are things that are very specific to a period in time, what movies are playing, but also just what ordinary things look like.

Art Stuff : : It's Even Better Than He Said It Was

In this week's New York Times Book Review, Gerald Howard writes about Norman Mailer's movie Maidstone. Shot in the Hamptons in 1968, partly scripted and partly improved, Maidstone stars Mailer as Norman Kingsley, an art-film director contemplating a run for the presidency. Ultra Violet, Hervé Villechaize and Rip Torn, among others, also appear in the film.

Howard describes Maidstone as "a Norman Mailer version of a Rat Pack movie, albeit in the manner of Artaud." Mailer described it as “guerrilla raid on the nature of reality.� It all sounds like a big self-indulgent mess, until the ending, which Howard renders in detail:

Then came the last three minutes, which guarantee “Maidstone� a kind of immortality. The filming proper was supposed to have ended one very late night in a so-called “Assassination Ball,� where Mailer/Kingsley, in top hat and tails, delivered a vainglorious speech to the assembled cast, though disappointingly to many, no attempt on his life was staged. The next day the cast went to rustic Gardiners Island to decompress and use up some leftover film. [D.A.] Pennebaker’s camera captures them strolling about the fields and then focuses on Rip Torn, who removes a hammer from a backpack, strides over to Mailer and hits him on the head twice, announcing: “You are supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley. You must die, not Mailer. I don’t want to kill Mailer, but I must kill Kingsley in the picture.� Shocked, Mailer wrestles him to the ground, and they roll down the hill in an ugly tussle, Mailer biting Torn’s ear as Mailer’s wife and children scream.

Of course, YouTube has a clip of this climactic moment, which more than lives up to Howard's description.

Want more? There are stills from the ending, along with the script/transcript, here.

Art Stuff : : The Missing Criticism: Papageorge on Evans and Frank

In 1981, Tod Papageorge curated an exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery that explored the influence of Walker Evans' American Photographs on Robert Frank's The Americans. The catalog for the show is out-of-print, taking with it Papageorge's essay "Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence."

That makes it an ideal candidate to inaugurate a new series, Photography: The Missing Criticism, which aims to bring great writing on photography back into print.

Download the essay here (PDF).

Papageorge's essay is an inspired reading of Frank's indebtedness to Evans, "a debt so profound that . . . we can observe not only the influence, but the way in which a brilliant young photographer embraced and comprehended a masterpiece."

Frank has always been upfront about Evans' influence on his work but, as Papageorge writes, that acknowledgment has mostly been ignored:

Although, since The Americans was published, Frank has consistently stated that Walker Evans . . . was the photographer who most influenced his work, the few writers who have discussed the two men in relation to one another generally have done so by setting them in a Manichaean opposition. In this equation, Evans, on the side of the angels, is seen as a moralist whose work unequivocally accepts and elevates the raw material of vernacular American culture, while Frank, in the devil's party, is seen as the photographic equivalent of Rimbaud — an anarchic poet who sings one brutal song, and then, in despair and exaltation, or whatever joy is found in conjunction with the creation of something incomparable, denies his gift by rejecting it. That the sorrowing world Frank's book describes has been set against Evans' lightstruck community, where, in at least a casual reading, everything possesses the clear gorgeousness of achieved fact, is unsurprising. But the suggestion that the two photographers are related only because they share the same general subject ignores the particular debt that The Americans owes to American Photographs, and, with that, disregards the most subtle triumphs of Frank's book, its transformation of Evans' vision.

Papageorge has been the director of Graduate Study in Photography at the Yale School of Art since 1979. A book of his work, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, was published this year by Steidl. In October, Aperture will publish his book American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam.

Caveat: The essay includes references to page numbers of particular photographs by Evans and Frank that appeared in the catalog; however, no photographs are included in this PDF.

Art Stuff : : Keep New York City a Shooter's Town

This seems like a bonehead move, especially by the Bloomberg administration, which is easily the most competent and least hormonal city government in my New York lifetime (which began in 1979). According to a story last week in The Times:

The new rules, which were proposed by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, would require any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a public place for more than 30 minutes to get a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance. The same requirements would apply to any group of five or more people who plan to use a tripod in a public location for more than 10 minutes, including the time it takes to set up the equipment. The permits would be free.

Picture New York is fighting the good fight. Go sign their petition.

Art StuffWeb Stuff : : Photography: The Missing Criticsim

I like reading about photographs almost as much as looking at them, and though there is a considerable body of great criticism in print, there's also a lot that has gone missing.

Case in point: Tod Papageorge's Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, which was apparently the catalog for a 1981 show Papageorge curated at Yale, where he's run the graduate photography program for years. I'd never heard about this show or book until last week, when Time critic Richard Lacayo mentioned it, calling it "one of the most illuminating books about photography I ever read."

I could buy a copy of Papageorge's book via Amazon or Alibris, but the cheapest price I found is $195.06. I don't want to collect a first edition, I just want to read the essay. A PDF would be fine.

This seems like a perfect opportunity for some innovative web publisher to work the Long Tail, not only for Papageorge's essay but any number of essays and introductions from out-of-print books and show catalogues that warrant being re-introduced to the photographic conversation. Paging Tim O'Reilly!

As long as I'm playing Lazy Web here, I want to add a Lazy Publishing request: Would someone (Aperture, are you listening?) please publish The Collected Introductions of John Szarkowski, a compilation of the essays he wrote for photographers' books.

Art Stuff : : Every Building Everywhere

More on the high-tech descendants of Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

Here comes Google? Jason Kottke points to the Stanford CityBlock Project, funded by Google, to build "technology for digitizing commercial city blocks from sideways-looking video taken from a vehicle driving down the street."

Plus: Use A9's photos to create an "Every Building on . . . " for your favorite street in your favorite city (as long as its one of the 10 cities photographed so far). Greg Allen points to a9: Run up and down the street. Enter the A9 YP URL of a business with a photo, and Mikal Maron's script will pull down as many photos to the left or the right of the building as it can. I haven't played with it yet, but the samples look cool.

Art Stuff : : Ed Ruscha: Internet Search Pioneer

Shouldn't pop artist Ed Ruscha be getting some credit for A9's new block-view feature in its yellow pages. Four decades ago, Ruscha mounted a motor-driven 35mm camera on a car and drove up and down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles making the photographs that became his 1966 book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The accordion-fold book was a literal, deadpan rendering of, well, every building on the Sunset Strip.

Now the folks at A9 have mounted digital cameras and GPS units on SUVs to photograph every commercial building in ten cities (so far), including Los Angeles. Is A9 conscious of its debt to Ruscha? The product page makes no mention of him but does trumpet the "completely automatic" nature of its picture-taking, which was pretty much Ruscha's method as well. The results are also strikingly similar.

Here's the entrance to the Chateau Marmont as photographed by Ruscha (top, a bad photo of a photo) and by the A9 team (below, a screenshot).

Was Ruscha dreaming of search engines when he produced his book? According to Ed Ruscha and Photography, he once said of his book: "It's like a Western town in a way. A storefront plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing." Not exactly tailor-made for an A9 press release.

Still, artists are not always reliable guides to their work. And the ease with which Ruscha's high concept has become a handy search enhancement suggests a hitherto unseen lay line between Pop's focus on serial imagery, machine processes and everyday products and today's database-driven ecommerce aps. Maybe there's more search-engine gold in Ruscha's other books from the '60s. Various Small Fires and Nine Swimming Pools — probably not. Some Los Angeles Apartments — already done by print and the web. But Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Thirtyfour Parking Lots — hello, OnStar, are you listening?