1. Robert Frank and photography: Art in the age of image overload

    “…Julia Dolan, the Portland Art Museum’s photography curator, says digital technology may have many more people taking pictures but that doesn’t change what constitutes a photographer or a good photograph. 

    “It’s an issue of intention,” says Dolan. “That’s what separates us from Robert Frank. I can make a grocery list, for example, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem.” 

    Dolan also thinks it’s a tad grandiose to assume this is photography’s democratic era. 

    “Photography has always been available to the masses,” she says. “That was true way back even in the 19th century. Digital technology has just amplified that perception and added new abilities for us.” 

    Intention, as Dolan meant it, suggests a few things: a knowledge of photographic technique and composition, and also photographic history. That means the best pictures have a larger design behind them, a skill that often eludes amateurs…

    …Or maybe his stark reproach is a reminder that feast and famine can be partners in this profligate photographic heyday. Frank, now 87, continues to keep his artistic intentions lean and hungry by pushing back against the legacy that has defined photographic practice for 50 years.

    For the millions of us with smartphones and little pocket cameras, he still has much to show us.”

    Respect!

    2. 4 months ago  Notes (6)

  2. Photographic Genres or The Importance of Being Earnest?

    As is the norm, towards the end of 2011, there were lots of ‘photography related lists’ and the ‘year in reflection’ kind of post floating around in the blogosphere, something I steadfastly refuse to do. For me life is measured by far more important things than arbitrary numbers based on a somewhat flawed system. Life is measured for me in key moments, birth, death, marriage, not numbers. I digress however. Some of these lists were about iPhone/Mobile Phone camera art. Places like google+ and tumblr, saw movements form around the idea that iPhones and mobile phone photography are to be taken seriously as an art form in their own right and with the appropriate levels of respect. The movements make bold claims about their own validity. Groups have also formed around a common belief in the idea that an iPhone or indeed any device can make serious art. Can it? Is using a  mobile phone camera important in the process? Does it matter? 

    Well from where I sit it depends. Don’t get me wrong, carrying a camera everywhere has changed my photography, inexorably, for ever. I enjoy the challenge of subverting the paradigm that is, “here is a picture of something, it was really there and really looked this way”, I enjoy making casual and gestural images and then sharing them with the rest of the world. Are they important? I doubt it, but what makes the Mona Lisa important, or a Delacroix or a Frederick Sommer photograph for that matter?

    My stance on all this is one steeped in tradition, a long and tangled one that makes photography’s position in the arts far less clear than many feel is the case. I am of course referring to the part of history where photography was not considered art. People like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston championed that notion, and with the aid of people like John Szarkowski  the famous curator from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, made this a reality. It still wasn’t really until the 1970s that the art photography boom finally was accepted into mainstream art.

    To get a real feel on why mobile phone photography is not as important as it thinks it is, we need to another place in the history of photography. The introduction of the 35mm film camera. This camera when first introduced was considered an inappropriate tool by the then current crop of ‘professionals’, a position we see repeated now almost 100 years later with many serious photographers convinced only a DSLR can make ‘real’ or good images.

    How then did 35mm photography become accepted as an art form? It was through skillful and artful use of some the mediums now biggest guns. Rodenchko for example, took the camera’s assets, size, portability, & speed and utilised these to make pictures of the world the only way a small portable camera could. Until that point images were static and often from a viewpoint of a camera on a tripod usually at waist level. Robert Capa, and Cartier-Bresson, used these assets to their benefit as well, getting in close, waiting for the right moment etc. Robert Frank took it to the another stratum and made the 35mm camera his personal journal. In this same body of work he  also made it a universal portrait of a country as seen by an outsider.  Frank’s use of the 35mm culminated in one of the most important photographic books or series of images in the history of photography. These ideas and bodies of work came about because of the cameras size, speed and ease of use. They came about because the practioners exploited their tools to create something never before seen. Is there a genre of work called 35mm photography? No. Street Photography is the closest we come to this, for it is in the street where these attributes can be most exploited. But nowhere in any of the history books I’ve read about the medium is there a branch or genre of photography, called 35mm photography. There are only images and bodies of work, some created using small format cameras that exploit or build upon the 35mm camera’s strengths and weaknesses.

    These days with such a proliferation of imaging devices worldwide anyone can make an image. Given art’s slippery definition they can easily call it art too. However even art photography is not art just because an artist makes it and then labels it so. Most artists use a set of tools to get their ideas across. Many ideas are based on process, many are just that, ideas. Most artists though don’t fixate on the tools, just the ideas they are trying to get across. As an example, what paint did Jackson Pollock use? Does it matter? No. While these ideas can be used to judge a picture’s provenance, to measure a pictures cultural worth based on how it was made is low on the scale of evaluation. The image is paramount, but the singular image idea ended once Frank’s The Americans was published. Now many people use a series of images to get their ideas across, because after all with the critical mass that is portable lens based capture devices, the odds of capturing a decisive moment that no-one else has diminishes exponentially.

    In the end Mobile Phone Photography is just photography, practiced by millions and shared with as many. This is not to take from what is a vast repository of images that have some meaning to many, but to simply call it art because it had been shot and processed on an iPhone is a bit of a furphy. I dislike labels such as iPhonegraphy, and would offer that Lo-Fi or gestural photography are better terms to describe this new genre of photography, with all its strengths and  shortcomings perceived or real.

    3. 4 months ago  Notes (2)