Junk for Code

Barbara C Mensch + old New York

I have just come across, via the City Room blog of the New York Times, Barbara C Mensch's photo documentation or portrait of Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan and then New York's rapidly disappearing waterfront. She has also photographed the Brooklyn Bridge for nearly 30 years.

Barbara C Mensch, wall, New York

These are the worlds of yesterday as the profound change in the urban landscape of New York is sweeping away much of the city’s past. Mensch’s haunting images taken with a Rolleiflex medium-format camera are a reminder of all that was lost.

Barbara C Mensch, Colgate, New York

This New York work reminds me of Eugene Atget spending years photographing Paris, unnoticed, going about his business.

The Fulton Fish Market closed in 2005, moving it to the Hunts Point section of the Bronx marking the end of a 183-year tradition of working-class life on the Manhattan waterfront.

Barbara C Mensch, portrait, Fulton Fish Market

Mensch moved to an apartment near the seaport in 1979, which she has never left. Many of the images for Fulton Fish Market, recently published as South Street, were taken in 1979-1983, a time of profound change in the political and economic landscape of Lower Manhattan. The waterfront below the Brooklyn Bridge was targeted for economic revival, spurred by the demolition of important locales in the fish market, existing piers, working storefronts, saloons and hotels to make room for new commercial spaces, including a shopping mall.

Mensch's story in South Street ends with the closure of the docks and the opening of the Seaport mall, a symbolic victory of corporate interests over more than a century of working class life.

postmodernism + sublime

If the beautiful relates to notions of unity and harmony, then the sublime refers to fragmentation and disharmony, to the moment when thought trembles on the edge of extinction. Thus, the Enlightenment faith in reason meets its suspension in the Romantic fascination with the numinous.

In The Sublime William Shaw says that postmodern culture, which for him, roughly spans the period from the 1940s to the present day (takes a lively interest in the sublime:

Whilst postmodernism retains the Romantic feeling for the vast and the unlimited, it no longer seeks to temper this feeling through reference to a higher faculty. The postmodern condition therefore lays stress on the inability of art or reason to bring the vast and the unlimited to account. In what amounts to a retreat from the promise of enlightenment, its dream of freedom and transcendence, the postmodern affirms nothing beyond its own failure, and it does so without regret and without longing.

The Romantic drive towards transcendence beyond the limits of the empirical world is conditioned and facilitated by the limits of the conceptual ‘system’ or language in which it is expressed.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, representation, 2009

Shaw adds that the differences between Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism can be highlighted in their contrasting attitudes to the unpresentable.

He says that:

Where Romantic art tends, on the whole, to link the unpresentable with ideas of the divine or, in its humanist manifestation, with the concept of mind, postmodern culture endeavours to retain a sense of the unpresentable as absolutely other....Unlike modernism... which ‘allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents’, Lyotard claims that the postmodern ‘puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’

the art of the postmodern, according to Lyotard, ‘denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable … [it] searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable’.

New Zealand Photography: Tony Bridge

Tony Bridge, the New Zealand photographer is based in Canterbury in the South Island. He divides his time between assignments as a professional commercial photographer, writing and running workshops, both in New Zealand and abroad, as well as developing his art photography.

A graduate of Canterbury University in Christchurch (a degree in foreign languages and literature), he is primarily a landscape photographer, runs an interesting a photographic blog, and, like myself, uses a Sony DSC R1 digital camera as his lead documentary camera. Unlike myself he has several lead (full frame) digital cameras. He runs photographic workshops in the Maniototo district in Central Otago and Lake Waikaremoana in the Te Urewera National Park on landscape photography.

Tony Bridge, Maniototo district of Central Otago, New Zealand c 2007

His work is based on using computer software to add layers of meaning and subtlety that enables him to make the crossing from the documentary tradition of photography to the expressive potential of mark-making with a camera and computer. He is both a digital artist and photographer.

In this Beating the drum post he says:

I made the image, knowing that it was merely about capturing the necessary data for later post-production. A feeling was forming about how the scene in some way represented my own journey, and a certain confusion about future direction. I captured the data, knowing that post-production would enable me to extract the meaning from it at a later time. Working in post, and applying a series of techniques (around 10 separate layer adjustments), I was able to find the kernel of realisation the image contained. Was it photography? Of course not. While the device I used to capture the data bore a striking resemblance to the device I might have used to document it for a seed company, the intent was completely different.

The argument is that post-production opportunities offered by image editing software mean that we can step beyond those limitations of film photography:

If we are willing to factor in our imagination and give it free rein, we are able to expand space, time and expression, and make pictures rather than take them. We have the ability to create freely and share our worldview and increasingly novel ways. ....To do this, we need a truly unique source of ideas, a source unlike any other. Ourselves. Each one of us is a completely unique individual, with a singularly original range of experiences upon which to draw.

This appeal to the Romantic tradition, to the creative process, poetic feeling, and the primacy of the creative imagination. Romantic photography seeks to bring the supersensible back into the realm of sensuous representation.

Bridge says that his expressionistic work, which represents his feelings when in the landscape, is about beauty. However, many of his heavily colour saturated images are of the dark moody skies, dramatic light, and stormy conditions that suggest the Romantic sublime is in play. However, the sublime is not sundered from the beautiful in Bridges work; sublimity is regarded as a mode of beauty, not as an
exception.

Broadly speaking, the category of the sublime refers a moment whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding,whenever the power of an object or event is such that wordsfail and points of comparison disappear. As such, the sublime marks the limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what might lie beyond these limits.

When uncoupled from the Judeo-Christian concept of the divine, the sublime is figured in postmodern thought as immanent rather than transcendent---to ‘that within representation which nonetheless exceeds the possibility of representation’. For Bridges the sublime is more conventional as it is an indicator of a higher or spiritual realm, or the divine and its concepts of reverence and awe.

NZ photography: John O'Malley

I mentioned John O' Malley, the ChCh based New Zealand photographer, in passing in this post about Castle Hill Basin in Canterbury, New Zealand. In his art photography he is primarily a landscape photographer and he recently had an exhibition at COCA in Christchurch entitled Sentinels/Crossings.

Crossings explores the relationship between rural railway road signs and their surrounding environment:

John O' Malley, 'Craigieburn Rd #1', Digital image printed with archival pigment inks

The Craigieburn Range of mountains is located on the south banks of the Waimakariri River, south of Arthur's Pass whilst the Craigieburn Valley ski slopes are within an hour and a half from Christchurch. What is represented here can be interpreted within the New Topographics tradition of human altered landscapes.

In this case it is the transport networks of the 19th and 20th centuries ---the railways and roads ---that traverse the landscape and their various signs signifying their presence. They are about a place and time, rather than the beauty of the natural landscape, as can be found in photographs of snow-clad mountains and gentle beaches with golden sand and teal-coloured water.

In contrast, the Sentinels series examines the landforms and rocks of the Port Hills that lie between Christchurch and Lyttelton. This body of work is more in the tradition of wilderness photography and its concerned with the beauty of the landforms and rocks in this volcanic landscape. An example is O' Malley's Sentinel #4'

'

There is little hint of human intervention in the landscape and there is no attempt to move to an abstraction of nagture. The concern is with the beautiful as it relates to notions of unity and harmony and there is no attempt to shift to the sublime refers to fragmentation and disharmony, to the moment when thought trembles on the edge of extinction. In this work the beautiful is prevented from slipping into the merely agreeable.

What is unclear from the photos is whether O'Malley is trying to show and share the beauty he discovers in these landforms, or whether he is finding in nature an expression of an abstract ideal of beauty that is in his mind; expressing his feelings about the beauty and mystery of nature.

Can the two series be juxtapositioned to one another? The exhibition invites such a reading. This gives us a civilization v nature narrative. What then is the relationship between this duality? Is it one of opposites?

It is not simply one of the degradation of nature by human beings versus the beauty of nature as the images in the Crossings series can be interpreted as beautiful, rather than the sublime or ugly.

celebrating Australia Day

Australia Day: --- a barbecue with friends or time spent at the beach. It is a day off paid work. It is also represents the end of the Christmas and New Year holiday period, with people returning from their holiday beach shacks to face the beginning of school and the pressures of work taking off. Today it is all sunshine and smiles. Just another other summer holiday.

There's not enough time to worry about ''What does it mean to be Australian?'' Isn't that last century's anxiety question? And the landing in Sydney Cove is not really felt as an occasion of national significance, even though it was the beachhead for British colonisation.

Simon Letch

There are lots of Chinese-made flags everywhere at Victor Harbor: on cars, flagpoles, draped over balconies and on bodies though not many young males wandering the streets wearing outsize flags as capes. Presumably, many are expressing a love for country and celebrating Australia.

But which Australia? There are different and competing concepts of Australia in post colonial Australia.The conservative one with its Australiania, nationalism, British traditions and whiteness has very little in common with the multicultural, cosmopolitan one that recognises Australian indigenous culture. So we are all celebrating different things.

The former one ts usually voiced in terms of multiculturalism promoting an ideal of segregation not integration or engagement and sot robs people of a common shared destiny as Australians. Hence it robs me of my identity as an Australian. Is this an affirmation of Australia as it is: the country is great, it does not need improvement, so don't tamper with it?

Our time was spent with friends over lunch, taking some photos in the studio, walking the dogs at Kings Beach, and returning to Adelaide. We were quietly comfortable with who we were as Australians and we did not even think about about our common shared destiny.

NZ Photographers: Doc Ross

The emergence of this site on Flickr has caused me to dig around looking for ex-pat NZ photographers now living in Australia to build on my earlier posts of those Christchurch-based who are serious about their art photography.

In the process I came across Doc Ross, who lives in Christchurch New Zealand, and works predominantly in the South Island, with regular trips around the world. His work is a mixture of still life's, abstract details and landscapes and it is analogue based with an emphasis on the fine print. I find this work intriguing: an abstraction from few small rocks shot in his studio on a winters day:

Doc Ross 11th Sept 2001,

This is classic photographic modernism concerned the beauty of form that refers back to the black and white work of Edward Weston' still life studies (peppers) and beachscapes.

Ross says that he has been influenced by Bill Henson and Hiroshi Sugimoto, suggesting that the vitality of the Romantic tradition in New Zealand in a visual culture rather than just a literary culture.

This tradition, which has its roots in the romantic interpretation of nature in England (Constable and Turner) is broader than wilderness landscape photography. It is one that transgresses the isolation of the artist, the insistence on the primacy of an intuitive inspiration, listens only to his own inner voice, is constantly in opposition to a society which resents him and is also a prophet, ‘an unacknowledged legislator of mankind’.

It is a tradition that interprets nature differently from the picturesque approach, as it emphasizes wildness, sublimity, atmospheric effects and a receptive feeling for the atmosphere and mood of the place.

the digital photo: a note

If one looks back at the brief history of digital photography it becomes very clear that the issues that bothered critics and historians twenty years ago are significantly different from the questions we may need to ask now. For many scholars, the most pressing issues were those concerning the digital image’s ability to represent the Real The malleability of digital photographs was then seen by many as the central element of the digital revolution and caused some to herald the ‘‘death of photography’’, shattering the privileged status of the photograph as ‘‘objective’’ truth.

Today, the low-resolution, pixilated appearance of early camera phone photographs and video clips is now an accepted part of the syntax of truthful and authentic reportage in the same way that the grainy black and white photograph once was. The speed with which these highly compressed JPEGs are transmitted and amalgamated into news media is an indication of the acceptance of the explicitly digital image into the structure of news reporting while emergent practices such as citizen journalism and sousveillance rely on the instant distribution that the networked camera facilitates.

The mass-amateurization of photography, and its renewed visibility online signals a shift in the valorization of photographic culture. If, in the past, the arena of public photography was dominated by professional practitioners, currently the work of specialists is appearing side by side with images produced by individuals who don’t have the same professional investment in photography. As a result, the roles of the professional photographic image and that of a snapshot are changing.

a beach mosaic as a grid

Rather than just continuing to take isolated photos on my wanderings with the dogs on their evening walks I've decided to use my photographic time at Victor Harbor to work towards creating a beach mosaic. This is similar in design or concept to the work of Troy Ruffels and it would be constructed from images of the local coastal environment.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari on cliffs, 2010

The mosaic would be shot with a medium format on film and it would consist of rocks, sea, sky, shells and the flotsam I've come across on the beach.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, sea abstract, 2010

Just taking isolated photos on my wanderings doesn't work for me anymore. Now that I have more time for my photography the images need to be part of an ongoing project with definite limits. The limits have to be severe in order for me to be learn how to handle working on the project rather than just taking snaps. What is more severe than the modernist grid?

What is attractive about the modernist grid is that it destroys hierarchy in a picture, for the most part, and because of that it allows me to present ideas without having to know which idea came first or is most important.The modernist grid represents modern art's hostility to literature, to narrative to discourse and aimed to wall the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against writing. It is a visual structure that explicitly rejects an narrative or sequential reading. The order of the grid is one of pure relationship that is divorced from of objects in the world to an order particular to themselves.

It connects with the post-modern reading of nature as a textual construct made up of countless layers of human interpretation, none of which is privileged over another.

Tasmania: photography + broadband

I've been doing a bit of planning for my photographic trip to Tasmania in February over the last few days including looking at Tasmanian photographers. One is Troy Ruffels and his exploration of landscapes in flux series.

Troy Ruffels, Location IV: remote terrain, light & echo 2002.

One problem I've come across is that there is limited access to broadband whilst travelling in Tasmania. Tasmania is the most disconnected state in Australia and though Tasmania is not a small market, it's a market that has been neglected on many digital fronts for many years. That is why Tasmania is the starting point for building the national broadband network.

There is a paucity of free wireless hotspots on the island and my 3 mobile broadband is limited to Hobart. One option is to pay extra ($39 per month) to extend the coverage through Internode's 3G wireless broadband that utilizes the Optus 3G network. However, that is Hobart /Launceston only coverage although the network is in the proces sof being extended. It's not an option.


Troy Ruffels, Location 111, 2002

The reality is that Telstra dominates Tasmania and they have little competition in the state. The only realistic choice for acceptable mobile broadband coverage in Tasmania, outside of Hobart, Devonport, Burnie and Launceston is Telstra's Next G network. The downside is that Telstra's customer service is real lousy. Still, the only realistic option is to use Telstra's very expensive prepaid broadband for my photographic trips--$80 for 6 gig for one month with no carry over of unused gigs.

Update
At this stage we leave Adelaide on the 8th and arrive in Devonport on the 9th of February. We will spend some time in Strahan, Queenstown and then the Cradle Mountain Moe Creek region before dropping down to spend several days in the south around Dover/Recherche/South West National Park We will pass through Hobart in and around 21-23 February as we make our way back to Tunbridge in the Midlands and then explore the east coast from Evanston before returning to Adelaide via the ferry to Melbourne on the 28th of February.

Festival season in Adelaide

It is more or less summer festival time in Adelaide, South Australia. It is ‘Bakhtinian’ party time for Adelaide audiences. All the various festivals--The Fringe, the traditional Arts Festival, and Womadelaide --- are now rolled into one big festival season.

The festival as a platform for presenting culture creates the image of, and repositions, Adelaide as a "creative" city with many voices.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Colonial Mutual Life, Adelaide, 2009

In truth, Adelaide is just part of the global festival circuit and the creative economy. Many of the high art shows, are sourced from the summer festivals in Europe. The Fringe is different as its roots lie in the tradition of the European carnivals of popular culture.

The Fringe:

is used as a platform for the presentation of work, and that means predominantly for new work, for premieres and unearthing new artists who haven’t actually given it a go before, or for professionals, people who have been doing it for years, who run in new work and take their own risks before someone will pick it up and take the risk for them.

The Fringe is mostly a mixture of music, cabaret, circus and art prank and retains the link to grotesque realism and the carnival as a site of resistance to authority, and the place where cultural, and potentially political, change can take place.

Festivals are a forum for the communal gathering of the interests and desires of the communities formed by organisers, performers and audiences

photography's user manual

In the Civil Contract of Photography Ariella Azoulay says that in the 1970s when she began writing about art she was drawn to photography and that she was looking for a way to put photographs into words.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Grote Street, Adelaide, 2009

However, Azoulay says that in the 1970's there was very little writing on photography within the discourse of art:

Artistic discourse turned out to be an obstacle to seeing what was in the photograph, but it was not the only one. Postmodern theorists –– such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, or Susan Sontag –– who bore witness to a glut of images were the first to fall prey to a kind of “image fatigue”; they simply stopped looking. The world filled up with images of horrors, and they loudly proclaimed that viewers’ eyes had grown unseeing, proceeding to unburden themselves of the responsibility to hold onto the elementary gesture of looking at what is presented to one’s gaze.

Azoulay adds that photography has come into the world with the wrong users’ manual.

The existing common manual reduced photography to the photograph and to the gaze concentrated on it in an attempt to identify the subject.

The wrong users’ manual hinders the spectator’s understanding that the photograph –– every photograph –– belongs to no one, that she can become not only its addressee but also its addresser, one who can produce a meaning for it and disseminate this meaning further.Photography is much more than what is printed on photographic paper, transforming any event into a picture. The photograph bears the seal of the event itself, and reconstructing that event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph.

The verb “to watch” is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures.It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.

John Hillcoat + Nick Cave: The Proposition

I saw John Hillcoat's Nick Cave-scripted The Proposition ( 2005) over the Xmas break. It was shot in the central-west Queensland town of Winton and is a graphic representation of the brutal 19th-century Australian outback of the 1880's. Its nihilistic and intensely brutal narrative mocks the conservative or pioneer version of Australian history. In the violent foundation of Australia as a nation men live and die by the gun, and justice comes at the end of a hangman's rope.

Though it references the western and Sergio Leone, The Proposition, as an Australian western, is a grim brutal treatment of the clash between the British Empire and Aboriginals and bushrangers. The landscape shapes the people who live here more than they can ever affect it. It takes western themes—outlaws, isolation, taming the landscape, civilization and progress and transposed them into a thoroughly researched, unique Australian vision.

I haven't seen the earlier Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead about a maximum security "containment facility" located in the middle of a desert, or To Have and To Hold, nor the recent post-apocalyptic The Road.

The visual representation of the sun-scorched landscape landscape by

The reason to turn towards a large format is to break away away from that tendency in Western philosophical thought, from Descartes onward which has excessively privileged “clear and distinct” conscious perception whilst ignoring the ways that this perception is always already grounded in our bodies. Even when we do represent, we are also feeling our bodies, and feeling with our bodies. The image from a large format camera open up a space for us to feel the image with our bodies rather than minds.

photography's language of colour

In an earlier post from the time when I was at Victor Harbor over Xmas I said that:

I even managed to do a little thinking about photography----specifically about Saul Leiter's use of colour as form in photography when I was briefly exploring the possibilities for abstraction in the rock forms along the shoreline.

I didn't post any photos then, but I've uploaded one since.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, orange rocks, near Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor, 2009 It was all so tentative--pretty much a going back to black and white and then introducing a dash of colour.

In his Introduction to William Eggleston's Guide in 1976 John Szarkowski says:

In the past decade a number of photographers have begun to work in color in a more confident, more natural, and yet more ambitious spirit, working not as though color were a separate issue, a problem to be solved in isolation (not thinking of color as photographers seventy years ago thought of composition), but rather as though the world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were one thing. The best of Eliot Porter's landscapes, like the best of the color street pictures of Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and others, accept color as existential and descriptive; these pictures are not photographs of color, any more than they are photographs of shapes, textures, objects, symbols, or events, but rather photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.

Hence the historical significance of the colour work of William Eggleston both as a colourist and as developing a language of colour in photography.

at Victor Harbor

We are back down at Victor Harbor for the weekend for the first time since the Xmas break. We drive down after Suzanne finished work. Upon reaching Victor Harbor Suzanne went off to the Woolworths supermarket for some juice and yoghurt for tomorrow's breakfast and I walked the dogs along the town beach.

The town centre was jumping with holiday makers eating outside in the restaurants, drinking regional wines and enjoying the cool summer night. A cool change is expected on the weekend. The billboards coming into the town are all about lifestyle---both tourism and seachange. Not everybody is off to Bali apparently.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, orange rocks, Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor, 2009

As I waited for Suzanne to pick me up I watched people cruising the art show and fairground. I couldn't help thinking that the Fleurieu Peninsula as a wine region is facing the consequences of the current wine glut of bargain basement wines that are in opposition to the imported New Zealand sauvignon blancs. It's boom and bust all over again in the Australian wine industry.

Whilst down here this weekend we will start planning for our holiday in Tasmania early next month. This is a more serious photograph trip than my earlier one in 2007. In 2007 I had yet to acquire a digital camera. It is more serious as I am taking my 5X4 Linhof Technika.

What we have so far is to arrive in Davenport by ferry from Melbourne, use a base in Evanston and Tumbridge in the Midlands to explore the east coast; then several days walking in, and exploring Cradle Mountain, then off to do some photography at Queenstown; then exploring the South West National Park via Strathgordon in the north and Dover/Cockle Creek in the south.

racial discrimination in Australia

I am continually surprised by the attempts of both the politicians in Canberra and Victoria and the police in Australia to downplay the racism in Melbourne's western suburbs that is expressed in the violent attacks against Indian students. All sorts of convolutions are involved, including pointing to the finger to Indian media, in the attempt to avoid the obvious---the curry bashing.

The obvious is that racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible, and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. This is what is being denied by the Brumby Government in Victoria, with its talk about random violence and opportunistic crimes, and its unwillingness to set up an agency that is responsible for international student safety.

Yeah , I know. Canberra is battling to reassure New Delhi that Australians aren't racist, fearful the outcry over violent assaults may harm relations and stop the flow of lucrative education dollars. The real concern is to keep the dollars flowing in from the international students not the racist undercurrents of Australian nationalism.

The constant appeals to Australian multiculturalism (a tolerant and fair society) is an important policy image in attracting international students. Racism and multiculturalism are two sides of the same coin.

William Eggleston: colourist

Behind the deceptive casualness of William Eggleston's Lecia style snapshots of fragments of reality that might otherwise go unregarded lies an acute and instinctive sense of colour and form that is grounded in a modernist aesthetic. 


William Eggleston, swing, From 14 Pictures, circa 1974.

Though Eggleston didn't invent colour photography he put it on the cultural map with his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. William Eggleston's Guide His 1976 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art--- William Eggleston's Guide ---has become a significant event; a milestone. Black and white were deemed to be the colors of photography.

William Eggleston, road sign, from Dust Bells, vol. 2 2004

The blurb to his current exhibition at Victoria Miro in London--21st Century says of these colourful or painterly common place pictures:

Eggleston's ground-breaking use of color was both controversial and celebrated at a time when black-and-white was standard for "art" photography. In the mid-1960's, color photography was mostly used for commercial advertisements and journalism, but had also become accessible to the average consumer, allowing people to take color snap shots of friends and family. Eggleston was deeply inspired by the unplanned compositions of "ordinary" pictures, and saw in them an ability to access an intimacy and narrative voice unguarded by the carefully planned exposures of art photography's prevailing canon. His images, some 40 years later, continue to offer an intimate and personal sensibility of the world he documents. 


Before Eggleston color images were seen as a tacky bit of business, associated with magazines and billboards and the snapshots that ordinary people took of their vacations and weddings.

photography at the beach

I was down at one of Adelaide's city beach on Sunday night seeking relief from the current heatwave with my cameras. The beach is difficult to photograph and not just because of the formal problems of the horizon cutting the photograph in two. People are suspicious of cameras and they do not want to be photographed.

The suspicion has to do with voyeurism and pedophilia. Childhood has become a much more fraught subject, children's sexuality almost taboo and the gaze of the pedophile becomes the standard by which childhood bodies are increasingly viewed.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, West Beach, Adelaide, 2010

So you cannot just wander around the beach taking photos of bodies at play as if the beach was equivalent to the urban streets. A different strategy is called for, say one of looking at the beach from a distance.

Public unease has been played out in art galleries and the web. Photography of naked children, whether a casual snapshot or a conceptual provocation, is now loaded with possible, often conflicting, meanings that are rooted in society's ever-shifting attitudes.

Australian Photographers: Jane Burton

There is a Flickr aesthetic that is best expressed in Flickr's Explore. It aims to be sensational looking, is computer based, uses powerful post processing software, and it looks to be very similar to the hyped -up saturated colour that we find on both our large higher definition digital television screens and in advertising. Lets call this a neon aesthetic.

Do art photographers develop a counter aesthetic that functions as a critique of this neon aesthetic? Are they developing a different colour language to the neon language? A language that is different from the Rosemary Laing, Deborah Pauwe approach based on the production of mammoth prints where the viewer is seduced as much by the saturation of colour on a gargantuan scale as by the subject.

One option is to continuing working in the black and white photographic tradition as Jane Burton does in in her "Cul-de-Sac (2000) or Badlands ( 2001) series. In The Other Side (2003) the colour is muted and dark:

Jane Burton, The Other Side #4 (2003) Type C photograph.

The dark and muted colour refers to Romanticism, personal spaces, film noir, edgy and seductive. Burton's female bodies are in isolated environments (home and nature), and she constructs a kind of psychological drama of desire and longing where naked feamle bodies are juxtaposed to empty architectural interiors and dark and moody landscapes. This is a sexualized subjectivity bordering on solipsism and a melancholy that is tinged with nostalgia.

The dark and moody Romantic landscape comes to the fore in Motherland (2008) series:

Jane Burton, Motherland #6, from Motherland (2008), Type C photograph.

The landscape is strange and full of foreboding and mystery, suggesting a dark enchanted world that refers to the Romantics' view of nature's correspondence to the mind.

The narratives are ambiguous ones of innocence and desire tinged with a darker edge. So we have a strong visual style that creates mood and atmosphere. Narrative, atmosphere, emotion are contained within this frozen moments of thedifferent series.

Richard Misrach: On the Beach

Richard Misrach was one of the first artists to explore the possibilities of large-scale color prints in the 1970s, when most photographers were still shooting in black and white, and photography was seen as a B-level practice by the art magazines, the art writers, the galleries, the museums, the collectors, and even other artists.

Misrach's recent On The Beach work is a representation of people relaxing and playing at the seaside. This body of work was shot with an 8 x10 view camera from the balcony of the same high-rise hotel in Hawaii over a four year period. Misrach is shooting from a fixed place on the balcony.

Richard Misrach untitled, from On the Beach, 2004

The images represent people having a good time and play and relaxing on the beach. The images don't have the horizon, nor is there any kind of sense of context. You just see this vast sea and these people interacting with it. The vastness suggests the sublime of the ocean.

Richard Misrach untitled, from On the Beach, 2004

People may be having fun at the beach but there is also sense of isolation and vulnerability of human beings in the vastness of the seascape as well.

The early colour period of the 1970s expressed in Szarkowski's bold embrace of Eggleston's work and his argument that colour was a viable language paved the way for another rich level of practice, including digital colour photography.

Sontag + photography

In her On Photography (1977) Susan Sontag argues that photographs have the ability to change and expand our conceptions of the images that are both worthy of our observation and permissive of our gaze. Photographs represent a language of portrayal while embodying the ethical imperatives of cultural signification.

Stephen E. Strom, Rocks patterns, North of Many Farms, AZ from the Secets series

Sontag argues that a photograph provides a moment of actuality--it is a presencing of a moment, a depiction of the material experience of an object, scene, or individual, and a historical document. But a photograph also reflects a pseudo-absence. The full presencing of the subject can never take place in an image; once a moment is captured in stasis that moment becomes subject to interpretation and conjecture. Thus an image is not to be equated with disclosure.

The photograph provides access to depictions of beauty (such as a panorama) that are inaccessible to the eye. By doing so the photograph creates new meaning. But we also find that photography can be qualified for frames of categorization that form a narrative. The 'fragmentary continuities' that a lone photograph engenders may be appropriated into systems of information.

However, Sontag was critical of a photographic culture produced by the mass industrial production of images and specifically on the dangers of images:

The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals.

Sontag was describing an "imageworld," which we had come to inhabit, and where we could only, and at best, maintain an uneasy distinction between the image and the real world by applying a "conservationist remedy," stemming the tide of visual pollution.

The inflation of images has increased since the 1970s and has produced a crisis of representation. In the digital era of hyper-inflation, in that many now hold that our sense of the distinction between the image and reality has been utterly destroyed. It is argued that we live now in the world of the hyperreal, the realm of the simulacrum, a virtual environment. Everywhere we turn today we are surrounded by images. The photograph is no longer an index of reality and images are no longer guaranteed as visual truth. Postmodern culture, then, is characterised by the "dominance of the image" and we learn to live wholly within the image-world.

It is the camera phone that has rapidly moved things towards Sontag's conception of a visually polluted image world ---what we have is a situation of feverish snapping to take images to provide a private memory of birthdays or weddings; or snaps of tourist spots of which thousands of images have already been taken. However, the camera-phone technology has also enabled events to be recoded raw from people on the spot by citizen journalists, thereby providing a public record of events and a public memory of something that might have remained hidden.


cameras, illusion, reality

This Chris Ware video from This American Life is a very interesting interpretation of photography:

Disturbing. According to Ware the cultural effects of the photographic apparatus result in a disengagement from what is happening in everyday life. We take photos of people suffering rather than helping them. We are disconnected from people when we are behind the camera lens and part of the photographic apparatus.

The effect on us of this waning of moral response to suffering is a haunting melancholia. Picturing "illusions of reality" is divorced from ethics. We live in a world of images as mirrors that reflect fictions.

Ware's interpretation is a welcome break from the affirmative commentaries on photography in the photography establishment that have engaged in a celebration of the objective powers of the machine or the subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist. Ware points to an "optical unconscious" of the photographic gaze.

William Klein: style

I know William Klein best for what many claim is his groundbreaking 1956. book New York, 1954-1955 of the constant motion of street life. This book is full of a urgent, messy and off-kilter images that brought an edgy immediacy to the 1950s complacent photographic tradition.

William Klein, Broadway and 103rd Street, New York,1954-55

Klein's photoreportage style involved a rejection of the traditional idea of the photographer as a 'fly on the wall', an unseen recorder of events. Klein recognized and through his methods emphasized the interaction between photographer and subject, often almost pushing his camera with wide angle lens into peoples faces.

William Klein, "Club Allegro Fortissimo, Paris, 1990.

Klein's giant versions of contact sheets showing a series of photographs, painted over in coloured enamel to highlight particular images, were a popular feature of a recent exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.Klein developed the style over 15 years ago and a Paris court has held that Klein's "painted contacts" were a hallmark of his work and that copying the recognized style of another artist and was an infringement of copyright.

Learning From Las Vegas

One of the ways out of the dead end of postwar architectural Modernism, whose early hopes had deteriorated into a dreary corporate functionalism was Learning From Las Vegas. This architectural manifesto and its heartfelt embrace of American popular culture as expressed in the Strip, which in 1968 was a string of flimsy signs, isolated hotels and half-empty parking lots.

Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas, circa 1968

This mid 20th century America was a world of freeways and McDonald’s drive-throughs and Venturi and Brown's polemic from the everyday commercial urban landscape drove a pop sensibility deep into the heart of architecture.

Robert Venturi & Scott Brown were engaged and committed to "what is already there", especially signage, and specifically the undesigned, commercial roadside vernacular signage.

Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas, The Strip, circa 1968

The Strip in the 1960s was a road lined up with neon signs and the signs and symbols of strip development werre juxtaposed against a modernist brutalism impervious to its urban context by Venturi & Scott Brown. The Strip is a wildly exaggerated version of the commercial strip outside of many American cities, and it was created to accommodate to the automobile. It stands for growth.

Today it is no longer the sign that tempts drivers-by, but the themed attractions and The Strip uses contemporary architecture as an element of style, class and spectacle.

Update
There was a big conflict over the design of the book.

Modernist abstraction: C Chiarenza

I didn't know the work of Carl Chiarenza or his close relationship with Aaron Siskind. Chiarenza argued that photography, from its first moment, was made to conform to a Renaissance convention for pictorial representation. He says:

For over 165 years, an extraordinary number of forces have made us instinctively believe that photographs are windows on reality — even when reason tells us otherwise. We share photos of our children and we say, "this is my daughter," as if the photograph was not there. Consequently, we tend to fail to consciously recognize that while a photograph is substantially different from other kinds of pictures, it is still a picture, and, therefore is characteristically, and importantly, different from whatever was in front of the lens.

He aims his lens in such a way that rocks, doors and plants, for instance, would be transformed into compositions of pattern, texture and tone.

Carl Chiarenza, Interaction(cabin wall), 1956, Gelatin silver print

For him, the problem is how to get the viewer to abandon the commonly held belief in the photograph as window; how to get the viewer to go through the window to a new and unique visual event, not to an illusion of one that already occurred.

Chiarenza argued that photographic pictures were more made than taken. A photograph is literally a piece of paper with an array of shapes and tones that may more or less be controlled and manipulated by the person making it, both at the negative and the positive stages of the process. Our sense of landscape, for instance, is that it is a pictorial idea that we construct.

Carl Chiarenza, Hood, fig tree, 1960, Gelatin silver print

He gave up taking photographs outside of his studio in 1979 when he began photographing collages he assembles in the studio out of assorted materials including metal scraps, foil, bits of paper, lids from tin cans and such. Photo collage has remained his approach to photography.

He works in a studio-controlled environment, using a large format camera, carefully collaging materials together and photographing them using the medium of light to control the surfaces. As a result, his imagery appears as miniature unusual landscapes, which in some instances have been created using materials as simple as foil and strips of paper