• Tag Archives photography
  • Good Tired

    Samhain                                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    Two days of interviews plus a tour day and all the attendant driving, 3 trips in and back, has left me with a good tired feeling.  Participating on a hiring committee puts me in the guts of an organization again.  I like that, even if it is only a volunteers part.  It’s true, though, that in my work with the Presbytery much of my work came in situations where I had an extra-organizational role in what was happening, so this is not so different from that.

    My embarrassment of riches tour today went well.  Three folks came along and we spent our way wandering through the whole exhibit, talking and oohing and awing right along.  I like this smaller, adult tour where we can work it as a casual stroll, thinking together about the art, offering ideas as we go along.  I have two Thaw tours next week and I’m hoping for a better performance than with the Rochester Friends.

    Another snow storm appears imminent, coming tomorrow night and Saturday.  Thankfully I don’t have a commitment outside in that time frame.  That way the driveway can get plowed, I can do the sidewalk and spread granite grit if necessary afterward.  I’ll be able to enjoy the snow this time.

    One of these days, when life slows down a little bit, I need to get the chainsaw out and take out the cedar and the amur maples broken by the first heavy snowfall.


  • Global Wealth in our Gilded Age: Conclusion

    Fall                                                        Waning Back to School Moon

    David Little has blown into town with contemporary photography and new media at his back.  His energy gives a new breadth and depth to the photography collection.

    Embarrassment of Riches demonstrates both.  He recalls seeing an Annie Leibovitz photograph, an advertisement.  Mikhail Gorbachev sits in the back of an expensive car, his hand somewhat anxiously on the door handle, looking at the Berlin Wall.  Sitting on the seat next to him is a Louis Vuitton bag.  The image exploded.  What would be the equivalent, if say the USSR had won the cold war, Ronald Reagan in a Soviet limo with a gold hammer and sickle sitting next to him, perhaps looking at the same wall from the other side?

    The global reach of capitalism and the vastly increased wealth around the world had wrought an unimaginable change in an icon of our former blood enemy.  Was this how global wealth looked?  In an investigation into how photographers portray wealth and its cultural influence, Little made an interesting discovery.  Documentary photography had focused on the poor, those without wealth, and also without the power and perhaps the understanding to control their own images.  Photographers could access the despairing mother of the depression era, the projects of Chicago’s southside, the barrios of Latin America but the wealthy knew had to handle the paparazzi.  Deny them access.

    Imaging wealth had a taboo feel, but wealth at unprecedented levels must have resulted in some images.  Where were they?  He knew some of them already, but had to search for others, especially others that dealt with wealth from an objective perspective, neither glorifying or chastising.  This show, which takes its name from a Simon Schama book of the same name, aims to show that other side of life, the life of those with power and money, but to show it in situ.

    A traditional problem of photography, of art in general, lies in how to show the invisible, then how to do it and not be obvious, heavy handed.  The photographs in the currency section of the show wrestle with that problem and have several different answers.  Gleaming oil pipelines, stacks of gold bullion, an uber power lunch, a stock exchange, an inventory of lamps all suggest rather than tell, reveal yet also conceal.  They are not didactic, at least not in any propagandistic way.  Value, critical to each image, is ephemeral and socially determined whether by Arab men selling stocks and oil futures or the market for gold or the power carried by top level business leaders gathered in one room.

    Art, too, is a currency of sorts.  It has a market, is sold in galleries and at auction and through private transactions.  Curiously, though, it has no intrinsic value, lumps of marble, paint on canvas, ink on paper, images on photo paper.  The value of art is purely transactional.  So, in this sense, each of the photographs in this exhibition participate in the thing they depict, especially since the world of art tends to be the world of the rich and powerful.

    This exhibit is as much about photography and photography as art as it about the contents of the images in it, more so because the images show only a minuscule slice of the lives of the rich and powerful.  So the title Embarrassment of Riches carries at least a double meaning, it describes what the images contain, but it also describes the images as art.  Worth seeing.


  • Global Wealth in our Gilded Age: Rituals and Style

    Fall                                                   Waning Back to School Moon

    Rituals and Style

    In a clever twist on two Alex Prager images, the first an upper class family in their opulent home, posed as if to reveal joints in a (dysfunctional?) family system and the second a wood-paneled room stuffed with paintings and sculpture and orchids which has an elderly man sitting and a younger man holding a dog standing with his hand on the others shoulder, Alec Soth has shot an understated, by comparison to the other two hanging next to it, interior.  Seated in the position of prominence however is not a prim, confident daughter or a posed son or lover, but Moujik IV, a French bulldog owned by Yves Saint Laurent.  Moujik IV, which means Russian peasant, is the last of four French bulldogs owned by the fashion designer and heir to a considerable fortune of his own.  His bodyguard stands off to the side.  Laurent, if told a country would not accept Moujik, refused to go.

    All three of these images, which occupy a niche near the end of the exhibit, let us peak behind the gates or doorman guarded lobbies of wealthy homes.   We see their inhabitants, both canine and human, in their environments, but posed as part of a documentation ritual of wealth’s domestic codes.

    Cindy Sherman dolled up and posed before an Upper Eastside apartment building (see below) stands in the Rituals and Style section along yet another Abe Morrel piece, 34 million Swiss Francs, a portrait of colorful bundles of Swiss paper currency.

    Martin Parr’s three photographs complete the exhibition.  All of his evoke in-crowd ritual events available only to those with cash or connections, or both.  The first is a cocktail party in Cambridge, England.  It shows only feet, shoes, the bottom of skirts and a martini glass all posed on a white rug.  The second shows an Arab man in traditional clothing looking at a pink stroller (very expensive according to David Little) tended by a woman in a pink hijab.  Next to the Arab man stands a rubinesque Arab woman in high heels and a tight fitting body suit.  This is the lobby at a polo match.  The final picture, which reminded me immediately of Rene Magritte, has five men in bowlers watching or preparing to watch the  Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

    The concluding portion of this review will look at the overall implications of Embarrassment of Riches.


  • Global Wealth in our Gilded Age: Currency

    Fall                                                  Waning Back to School Moon

    David Little has Embarrassment of Riches divided into three sections:  Currency, Space, Rituals and Style.

    Currency

    Abe Morrel makes pictures of currency.  In Embarrassment of Riches he has two photographs, one of gold bars and the other of Swiss Francs.  The photograph at the right has this title:  39 Gold Bar: $15,372,742 (11 AM/GMT-3/13/08): $988.25/oz Zurich, Switzerland.  The full title is important because Morrel, who likes the materiality of currency, also comments on value.  As the title suggests, value has an ephemeral quality, pegged to an exact moment, uncertain and socially determined.  Yesterday gold reached a new all time high of $1,300 an ounce.  Allison suggested an interesting addition to this photo:  a digital readout of the price of gold as it fluctuates.

    This ephemeral quality of value made me reconsider the meaning of currency.  Currency is just that, value at the current moment.

    Also in the currency section is a beautiful and initially puzzling image.  Amidst a north woods setting, pine trees and a gray sky, a glittering metal abstraction snakes just along the forest border, extending as if to infinity along with the edge it defines.  What is it?  An oil pipeline carrying oil from northern Alberta.  Ironically, and I suspect unintentionally, this image meshes with a current Sierra Club initiative aimed at bringing awareness to the very high proportion of Minnesota’s oil supply that comes from the Alberta Tar Sands, an oil source that combines wilderness despoliation with climate changing fossil fuel emissions.

    An inventory of lamps, members of the Kuwaiti stock exchange sitting in white robes on red leather couches arranged in conversational squares, two cars-a Ford and a Lexus with Chinese models draped sinuously over them and the Luc Delahaye image I talk about below complete the Currency section of the show.

    With one exception.  A sock.  That’s right, a man’s sock, displayed on a podium under a plastic vitrine, draped as if just taken off and perhaps thrown on the floor.  How does this fit in the currency section?

    Christian Jankowski works with video installation and performance art.  He is the artist behind the sock.  In Embarrassment, in the Rituals and Style section, a Jankowksi piece called, Strip the Auctioneer, shows over and over again.  It features a genuine Christie’s auctioneer, videotaped by Jankowski in the process of selling first his pocket handkerchief, then his suit coat, a shirt, two shoes and two, wait for it, socks!  The auction was a benefit for an arts school, so the bidding was genuine.

    David says he doesn’t know whether it is the right sock or the left.  It makes a difference in terms of value:  the right sock sold for $3,047 and the left for $3,324.  Of rituals associated with the life of wealth, an auction at Christies or Sothebys must be close to the top, perhaps after certain prestigious horse races.  Oh, by the way, this photograph shows the auctioneer offering the final item for sale in Jankowski’s piece, the hammer.


  • Photography as Art

    Fall (Mabon)                                           Full Back to School Moon

    Into the Sierra Club to orient a new member of the Legislative Committee.  After that, a couple of hours in the new photo exhibit, Embarrassment of Riches.  The new photography curator, David Little, has pushed forward a contemporary approach to the photography and new media department.  He’s showing color photographs, unusual against the Hartwell years of classic black and white photography.  David also has an edgy, political sensibility that insists on embracing difficult questions contemporary photography either raises or documents.  Works for me.

    Ate lunch at D’Amico’s and Kwo showed up.  We discussed China and its pluriform culture, especially important as we consider its rise today in the context of other Asian countries that seem to have much more homogeneous cultures:  Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Burma.  Kwo believes Confucianism and its insistence on obedience to authority has affected especially Japan and Korea, shaping their society into a perfect environment for xenophobia.

    After lunch David Little gave the lecture and walk through of Embarrassment.

    He began the lecture responding to a question about whether he posted information about photographs that had been photoshopped.  He does not.  His reasons reveal a good deal about contemporary photography and some of the challenges it faces.  Photography has had, David says, an obsession with technology, an obsession that has seemed to place the technical aspects of photography in the foreground.  A focus on how a photography makes a given image detracts from emphasis on the image itself, a distraction that embedded a question about photography as art within the very art historical conversation.

    Do you know Degas’ paint brush?  How Goya mixed his paints and what elements he used?  Any clue about the canvas on that Rembrandt?  We do not focus first on technique and implements in the art history of other objects like painting and sculpture.  Why?  Because the image or the physical object produced commands our attention.  David suggests that the same is true of photographs, the images created by photographers.

    Just as painters have long emphasized those parts of a scene that make it look beautiful, harmonious, so do photographers use various techniques to make the final image have a certain look.  Portraitists often create an image of a sitter that is not a mere copy or likeness, rather they highlight some aspects and downplay others to reveal a personality.  Photographers, as artists, have the same latitude in shaping their work.

    Photoshop is only one in a long line of manipulations photographers have used.  There never has been a “straight” photograph, the real image before manipulation.  Choice of light, focus, shutter speed, subject matter manipulates the image in the camera itself.  Dark room manipulations have gone on since the development of emulsions.  David does not want to create a hierarchy of photographs in which one is more “real” and therefore a “better” image.

     

    This image by and of Cindy Sherman is in the exhibition.  It uses a projected building facade from somewhere on the upper eastside of New York and over it Sherman has imposed one of her signature personal images.  She dresses up as many different characters in her work, this time appearing as an art patron in the coded dress of her social class.  Its creation is not the point; the point is the result, a softly satirical presentation of a type of a New Yorker.  There is no real image to find that is behind this one.  This seems evident to me in this case.

    David Little’s point is that each photograph we see in the exhibition deserves the same treatment.


  • Photo, Photo On The Wall

    Lughnasa                                        New (Artemis) Moon

    Sometimes thing go as planned.  Sometimes not.  The session with David Little (curator of photography) this morning did not go as planned.  For whatever reason we had an hour to spare, wandering the wonderful Bergman exhibition as Bill Bomash teased out clues to the stories behind the photographs.  A young girl, wanting to talk about her experience, joined the group and added her observations.  Who’s to say that was wasted time?

    David Little comes out of a museum educators background and has a real feel for what is useful to docents.  He showed some new acquisitions including a surprise by Ansel Adam, a surrealist shot of a scissors and thread.  We also wandered into the 55 degree refrigerator, larger than a large meat locker, where the MIA stores it’s 11,500 photographs.  Cool, man.

    He also talked about how he makes curatorial decisions, relationships with dealers and photographers, in particular as it relates to borrowing objects.  In the contemporary art and photography realm shows need relevance and he finds working with dealers and photographers much more expeditious than working with museums where the decision turn around for a loan can take as much as a year.

    He and Liz Armstrong, the new contemporary arts curator, have a commitment to collecting and exhibiting work being made now and in the recent past.  The two of them, as well as Kaywin Feldman, have brought a fresh energy and verve to the whole museum and I, for one, am glad.  Not that the old museum was bad, it wasn’t, but the new folks have juiced things up, creating new ways to view and understand art.

    We finished up with David Little over lunch.  He promised to get us some bibliography and to develop more in depth photography ed as new exhibitions are hung.  A good event with the timing slightly off.  The quality of the contact with David was high.  Thanks, Lisa.

    Kate and I had a guy, Glenn, come up tonight and give us a presentation and bid on creating a water feature by the patio.  He seems to know his stuff and have a sensible plan to give us what we want.

    Been fighting this same damned virus I had a month or so ago.  Kate says having clusters of illnesses is not unusual in that the body can retain a reservoir of the virus or bacteria.  Your body builds up antibodies and knocks it out at some point.  At least this time I have not had the pink eye or the ear infection.


  • Dull Gray Day

    Fall                                   Waxing Blood Moon

    Another dull gray day as my Aunt Roberta used to say.   The morning so far has been doing work for the Sierra Club, organizing issue briefs and selection criteria, moving our process along.  That’s done now.

    Today I’m going in to the MIA for some interesting education about photographs.  I’ll also pick up my Louvre catalog.  Yes, at the last minute I got added to the list of docents touring this show that focuses on the concept of masterpiece.

    Need to feed the dogs and get a nap in before the drive into the MIA.  Later.


  • The Printing Press Today

    83  bar steady 29.68 1mph SE  dew-point 67  Summer, hot and clear

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    “What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Another late milestone here.  Kate has lunch tomorrow with an old friend she hasn’t seen in a while.  She asked me to print some grandchild pictures.  In the process I selected several photos, including some of her.  The milestone is this.  They came out printed on our Canon Pixma.  The first color work I’ve ever done.  We’ve had many computers over the last 18 years, but only one printer, the HP Laserjet 4.  It has served me very well and still does.  Like the red car I can’t imagine daily life without it.

    We bought the Canon as a copier and fax machine, but it also has the capacity to print photographs and other color images.  I got out the manual, the paper and cracked open the usb cord I bought for it January before last when I purchased it.  Worked like a charm.  Technology amazes me and delights me.

    Off to feed the dogs and read through the Sierra Club material.