The amazing thing about meeting Allison was that as soon as I saw her work I realized that she had applied for Pause, to Begin. Take a look at her work, and you will realize just how difficult it was to select only 15 photographers for Pause, to Begin. I particularly enjoy her photographs from summers spent in Maine with her family.
You can find Allison’s frequently updated flickr here.
Her personal blog here.
You can also buy the wonderful book (Reflection of a Man: The Photographs of Stanley Marcus) of her grandfather’s photographs that she and her mother put together here. The book will remind you how great Kodachrome was.
I was recently looking at Lars Tunbjörk’s most recent book titled Vinter, and I noticed that the layout and sequencing of the book is really superbly done. In case you haven’t seen the book, here is an image of the cover. I recommend taking a look at it if you get the chance.
The book flows remarkably well, especially considering the complex photographs. For the most part, Tunbjörk photographs funny, odd scenes in Sweden’s long, cold, and dark winter. He uses an overpowering flash frequently to bring out these sometimes strange details. Usually in the photographs with flash he creates an interesting effect by photographing through windows and allowing his flash to light the inside of a house. Pattern, texture, and color are all brought to the forefront of the images, and begin to describe the Scandinavian Winter.
What makes the book so remarkable for me is how these busy photographs are displayed. For the most part, there are a lot of spreads with different photographs on both the left and right side. There are only a few full bleed images, most have about a quarter inch border
before the edge of the page. So when first looking through the book, it appears that nearly every page has some kind of image on it. Then I arrived at this spread…
The blank white page on the left bring even more attention to this photograph that is already strikingly different from everything else in the book. The light is soft, the woman is beautiful, and the effect is jarring when I am used to seeing the busy photographs before it. This calm photograph comes in about the middle of the book, and it is not the first or last single image next to a blank page, but that layout tactic certainly brings extra attention to it.
There are a few other photographs in the book that give a similar jarring feeling upon first seeing them in the books sequence. Mostly they deal with some level of surprise, either with focus, light, or subject matter. None of them, however, show a calm beautiful woman, framed in a classic head-and-shoulders kind of way. It is the fact that this image looks different than every other one in the book, and that the woman is beautiful, that it sticks in one’s head a while after seeing it. While, the image itself is still in my head, it is really the feeling of first seeing it that I remember; the calm surprise. I felt compelled to stare at it, and it slowed me down considerably when looking through the remainder of the book. I began to notice all sorts of subtle things that Tunbjörk saw as he took the photographs.
In the rest of the book, I realized that the same beautiful woman appears a few more times, and once in a bed. She is clearly an important person to Tunbjörk, and I find it interesting that I only first noticed her in the soft-light beautiful portrait, and not in the scenes where she is more of a character.
I am fascinated that one simple image can control how I look at a book so directly. It is interesting how the one photograph of a beautiful woman in the book is also the sole image with soft light. I know a lot of this has plenty to do with my other recent posts about beauty in photography.
I think Nan Goldin presents an interesting case when looking at the beauty of subjects in photographs. Here, in a self portrait after she was abused she looks anything but beautiful.
I’m not sure how to describe this photograph any further either. She looks beaten because she was, and I find acts like that heinous. That said, the photograph is so direct in dealing with her situation that a sense of life and personality comes out of the photograph. I find these senses that bring such unfiltered emotion into photographs beautiful. It may not be physically beautiful, but as Goldin photographs her life she puts her heart into it and that effort and energy is remarkable.
In Goldin’s photograph above of a couple making out, she has captured a moment that may not necessarily look beautiful in an aesthetic sense, but if we were to put ourselves into that situation that undoubtedly involves feelings of love and excitement, beauty would have to enter into our thoughts as well. Would you not think that the other person is beautiful if you were the one making out with them? I hope you would.
So, while the photograph may not in itself posses aesthetics typically associated with photographic beauty, it does have an enormous amount of beauty in it. This seems to be, in a way, Goldin’s method. To photograph extremely passionate moments in her life directly and emotionally to the extent that the beauty of the moment transcends the aesthetics.
I think Nan Goldin’s aesthetic choices are perfect for getting across the varying emotions of her life.
Goldin also photographs the heinous events in her life, and those too are photographed in such an unflinching manner that the beauty of a life’s story begins to appear.
I have been thinking about photographic portraits that do not present their subjects as beautiful today and the single portrait that keeps coming back to me is Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp, a former Nazi slave labor boss. Newman absolutely hated Krupp and understandably so, but he was commissioned to make his portrait in 1963.
As the story goes (according to my good friend and former Newman assistant Ralph Smith), upon finding out that Newman was a Jew, after being assigned make his portrait, Krupp refused to let him make the photograph. Newman insisted to have Krupp look at his portfolio before making a final decision and after seeing Newman’s portfolio Krupp accepted. Arnold Newman then decided to make Krupp look as evil as possible, and the results are just that. Apparently, after the photo shoot when Krupp first saw the portrait he was livid, and you can see why.
I find this photograph to be amazing in that it purposely used horrible lighting and color to make Krupp completely unattractive. There is really nothing that I find beautiful about the image, but yet it is still wildly successful and captivating.
In a way, I want to see more photographs taken today with this kind of passion. I’m not saying that some of the beautiful portraits that I often see in contemporary art today are not taken with passion, but I am suggesting that there is not a lot of daring use of color and light to successfully cary out such strong feelings towards a subject in a photograph.
In an effort to honor the annual college break that many of my friends still have, I decided to take my own spring break for the past two weeks. That may be why you have seen very little blogging.
Another reason is that many of these still-in-school friends decided that Maine is a popular spring break destination. I’m not sure how Maine became as popular as Florida among my friends, but I was happy to have the visitors. The conversations that ensued with them will be the stimulus for my blogging over the next few weeks. If there is anything that I miss about being in school it may be the photo/art conversations that can be had at a moments notice.
The first post I would like to make is in honor of last week’s visitor Rick Williamson (he has no website). We discussed at length the expectation of beauty in photography.
Before I get to anything about beauty, here is an anything-but-beautiful (and I think hilarious) photograph of Rick on the cover of RIT’s on campus magazine Reporter. The photo is taken by Tom Schirmacher.
Okay, on to the beautiful stuff…
Rick and I were noticing that nearly every portrait of someone under 40 makes them look beautiful. Perhaps this is simply the beauty of youth, but I don’t think so.
As a young male who looks at an awful lot of photographs, I often notice that I see images of beautiful women before I notice portraits of unattractive women. I began trying to look for unattractive women in art photography today, and I discovered that it is incredibly difficult to find any of it. I believe that the same problem exists for finding portraits of unattractive men as well.
I began to discuss the consequences of seeing an overwhelming majority of only attractive people in photographs with Rick. We came to the general conclusion that we are conditioned to want to see beauty before ugliness. It is as if it is natural to turn our cameras towards beautiful people. Maybe as photographers as a whole we are not as subjective as we would like to be when it come to photographing people.
It is interesting to mention that if we take people out of the frame altogether photographers seem to have no difficulties to point their cameras to some injustice; some “ugly” event or thing. When I mention injustice I am thinking of Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings and quarries and the harmed landscape in general. I am not thinking about war or combat photography at all in any part of this discussion on beauty. I am really looking at art photography specifically.
Below is one of Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings titled Nickel Tailing No. 31.
To get back to the beauty in portraits and specifically in the subjects in the portraits. I think of Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits and many of the subjects are awkward and young, but because of the seem exposed to the lens and their youthfulness there is also an attractiveness about them. They are not sexy, but they are attractive standing there in the swimsuits looking at us at a young age. To me this is also similar to Hellen Van Meene’s portraits. Her subjects are young and awkward as well, but they too command attention in the frame with both presence and emotional frailty.
I am curious to better understand why we photograph the people we do. There are many people who only photograph those with whom they are close. There are others who only photograph strangers. What is the criteria for them to make a portrait of their subject? A photographer may not say beauty initially, but I am beginning to believe that for the most part beauty enters into the equation somewhere. It may be an unconscious thought, but I believe that most photographers are drawn to photograph people that are beautiful in some way, even if it is not instantly recognizable.
The other aspect of this that fascinates me a lot is when I see a portrait and my gut reaction is that I don’t like it, and I begin to elaborate why and inevitably the subject’s poor appearance comes up. I found myself saying in a conversation with Rick that I thought the photographer should have looked for different light to make their subject look more attractive. I guess this means it might just be me who thinks that people are always beautiful in successful portraits today because I may be overlooking images because the person does not appear beautiful.
This leads me to one more point, are the best art portraits in photography today made of average looking people that have been photographed in such a unique clever way that they appear more beautiful than they would walking down the street? Is it just that photographers, when looking through the camera, are trying to make things beautiful to the extent that the photograph comes out looking more aesthetically pleasing than the person is normally?
I remember in my photo classes being taught how to do studio portrait lighting, and learning what makes people look better and worse. Because of this education do I just want to make all photographs fit into this mold of what good portraits look like? This all goes back to how we have been conditioned to look at photographs.
Since photographing beauty might come from simply having a camera in front of our eyes and looking at people in such a way that makes them more attractive. Looking through a camera instead of just our plain eyeballs is a totally different experience, one that can remove you from the actual event of seeing.
“People act different if they are behind a camera, even if the camera isn’t real.”
“Yeah, you’re overtaken, you do things that you ordinarily wouldn’t.”
I’m pretty sure that all of this dealing with looking through cameras and beauty is related.
Most color photographs from decades ago have faded to a form that does not resemble the original color palate. These photographs still resemble their original form, but they are also clearly not the same. Old photographs tend to evoke a sense of memory or nostalgia, and it seems that people relate faded color to such a feeling. Photographs spawn memories from either their subject matter, the moment that was photographed, or the act of creating the photograph. You can read some different thoughts about photographing to remember here.
The advent of digital photography seemed to also coincide with the end of the inevitable fading of photographs. Here is this pristine medium that I can get rid of dust, save in the most loss-less file format, and have the exact way I photoshopped it until I die. That was until I was looking at Matt Bagwell’s digital diary. Matt is an important part of the PTB team as our Web Developer, so you might assume that he is good at building website code, but I was really impressed when I saw his own digital diary today.
As Matt says on the digital diary page:
Here are some digitally preserved memories (click to examine). They still have a tendency to fade over time, though.
To me, those two sentences make his impressive code more poignant and fascinating. I am curious to see how quickly they fade and disappear. It also wonderfully interesting to see someone create a digital replication of time passing by in such a clever manner. Congrats Bagwell.
You can check out Matt Bagwell’s main website here.
And, in case you were wondering, Matt did not tell me about this, I learned about it from Mat Thorne. As a general rule, I don’t usually post about our team or ourselves on this blog except to remind you of deadlines or give you some news about Pause, to Begin. This seemed like a perfect exception. Enjoy.
We are thrilled to announce that Cig Harvey will be our third Juror along with David and myself. David and I have both heard Cig speak about her work, and anyone else that has such an opportunity would agree that her energy and passion for photography is amazing. We know Cig will bring an unbelievable amount of knowledge and photographic experience to make the jurying process complete.
I have always been drawn to times of fragility and use photography to explore and legitimize moments of struggle, uncertainty and doubt. My previous work examined these flaws within myself. In the past my pictures were of me and about me.
This new portfolio, You Look at Me like an Emergency, examines the people and places that surround me, and my relationship to them. Instead of setting aside a time to make pictures, I am now photographing times that actually exist. There is a life being lived and I am in it. A life that is fascinating in its flaws, doubts and elations. There is a truth in these generously given portraits. These pictures show me that life can be as magical as fiction.
Don’t forget that February 29th is the last day to apply to Pause, to Begin for only $25. After that you will have to pay $35. Get your applications in early! Apply at www.pausetobegin.com.
We have been very busy lately promoting the competition through arts organizations like ArtDeadline.com and inliquid.com. We want thank both of them publicly on this blog. They both have a wealth of information for the emerging artist.
Lastly, don’t forget that we have posters, post cards, and flyers that need distribution across the country. If you are willing to volunteer some time to help display the propaganda in your neighborhood please let us know, we will be more than happy to send you the posters and postcards. In return we will list you on our “donate” page as someone who has donated their time to help make Pause, to Begin what it is today. You will be in some pretty great company on the list!
Please forgive the brief break from insightful blogging for the seemingly shameless promotion, “real” blogging will resume shortly. We are currently putting all of our efforts into making Pause, to Begin the best it can be.
We have just updated our website with a new “Resources” section!
In Resources, you will find four categories:
Newsletter
Calendar
Extras
FAQ
The Newsletter page has moved to a new location in the menu, and also has one exciting new feature. We are going to conduct a raffle of all people that sign up for our Newsletter. We are literally going to pull a single name out of a hat, giving the winner a free copy of the Pause, to Begin book. Sign up today for your chance to win. Don’t worry if you have already signed up, you are in the raffle too!
The Calendar is complete with dates of exciting events at Pause, to Begin through the month of June. We will be adding information as it becomes known.
The Extras section contains numerous goodies for all of our Pause, to Begin fans. Right now it has the newly designed poster, postcard, and flyer, all made by the amazing Josh Gomby. Please feel free to download the files for each, and print them out. You can also email them to a friend. The flyer is specifically designed to be xeroxed, so please print them out and hang them up. If you do this make sure to take a photo of it and send it to us. We will mention you on our website as a way of saying thank you.
The FAQ section is a new place where you can go to learn about Pause, to Begin if you are a little unclear about anything. If that still does not answer your questions, then please send us an email at info@pausetobegin.com.
To end this post on a sad note, our documentary filmmaker Bruno Toré, can no longer fulfill his role. Some unforeseen circumstances came up recently and he cannot make the trip with us in May because of them. Thankfully, we have already contacted some other people in the documentary film industry and we hope to finalize a filmmaker this weekend on a trip to Boston. We will keep you posted.
