Fall (Mabon)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Full Back to School Moon<\/p>\n
Into the Sierra Club to orient a new member of the Legislative Committee.\u00a0 After that, a couple of hours in the new photo exhibit, Embarrassment of Riches.\u00a0 The new photography curator, David Little, has pushed forward a contemporary approach to the photography and new media department.\u00a0 He’s showing color photographs, unusual against the Hartwell years of classic black and white photography.\u00a0 David also has an edgy, political sensibility that insists on embracing difficult questions contemporary photography either raises or documents.\u00a0 Works for me.<\/p>\n
Ate lunch at D’Amico’s and Kwo showed up.\u00a0 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:\u00a0 Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Burma.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\n
After lunch David Little gave the lecture and walk through of Embarrassment.<\/p>\n
He began the lecture responding to a question about whether he posted information about photographs that had been photoshopped.\u00a0 He does not.\u00a0 His reasons reveal a good deal about contemporary photography and some of the challenges it faces.\u00a0 Photography has had, David says, an obsession with technology, an obsession that has seemed to place the technical aspects of photography in the foreground.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Do you know Degas’ paint brush?\u00a0 How Goya mixed his paints and what elements he used?\u00a0 Any clue about the canvas on that Rembrandt?\u00a0 We do not focus first on technique and implements in the art history of other objects like painting and sculpture.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because the image or the physical object produced commands our attention.\u00a0 David suggests that the same is true of photographs, the images created by photographers.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Photographers, as artists, have the same latitude in shaping their work.<\/p>\n
Photoshop is only one in a long line of manipulations photographers have used.\u00a0 There never has been a “straight” photograph, the real image before manipulation.\u00a0 Choice of light, focus, shutter speed, subject matter manipulates the image in the camera itself.\u00a0 Dark room manipulations have gone on since the development of emulsions.\u00a0 David does not want to create a hierarchy of photographs in which one is more “real” and therefore a “better” image.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This image by and of Cindy Sherman is in the exhibition.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Its creation is not the point; the point is the result, a softly satirical presentation of a type of a New Yorker.\u00a0 There is no real image to find that is behind this one.\u00a0 This seems evident to me in this case.<\/p>\n
David Little’s point is that each photograph we see in the exhibition deserves the same treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fall (Mabon)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Full Back to School Moon Into the Sierra Club to orient a new member of the Legislative Committee.\u00a0 After that, a couple of hours in the new photo exhibit, Embarrassment of Riches.\u00a0 The new photography curator, David Little, has pushed forward a contemporary approach to the photography and new media department.\u00a0 He’s showing … Continue reading Photography as Art<\/span>