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.

That happens to be a perfect segway into this video of an excerpt from This American Life animated by Chris Ware, recently seen at MakingRoom.

“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.

p.s. a recent This American Lifeepisode about testosterone is really interesting, I recommend listening to it at thislife.org.

p.p.s. Happy Birthday Sean, and Rock Chalk Jayhawk!
(Last year for spring break we saw this, and it was beautiful).

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.

Many followers of fine-art photography world know that Ryan McGinley’s work has been received with mixed emotions.

What those politics might be, exactly, is hard to say, though the question arises in light of the apparently carefree spirit of Mr. McGinley’s pictures. The artist seems to understand this: his inclusion of a shot of a friend, speeding away from ground zero on a bike, his mouth covered by his shirt, carries a jolt of reality-check surprise. However the work develops, it is refreshing to encounter, as we seem to, artists operating to some extent outside the mainstream of the art world itself, where volatile energies — aesthetic and political — are too often stroked into craftsy, resistance-free acceptability.

read more here

You don’t need specific equipment to ape the look of McGinley or Larry Clark or Wolfgang Tillmans or Nan Goldin or Corinne Day or Leeta Harding. It’s just the commercial version of the prevailing snapshot aesthetic — off-kilter angles, high contrast images, on-camera flash, murky available light.

read more here

That being said, his recent video for the New York Times Magazine is without question simply beautiful.

I believe that one of art’s purposes is to challenge our very notion of aesthetics.

The following is what I typically think when I look at photography.  I consider the aesthetics, maybe too much, but I consider them and constantly question them.  Almost everyone, myself included, reuses known successful aesthetics in their work.  It seems that photography today is less innovative visually and more conceptually innovative than it has ever been.  There is nobody that needs to prove that color photography is artistic, or that a point and shoot camera is.  All of these types of arguments have been made.  I wonder where we are going to push the aesthetics of photography.

It is no secret that some other more popular blogs than this one show work that is confined to a specific aesthetic or two.  In other words, a great deal of the work posted on other blogs looks quite similar to the post they made last week.  As a young photographer and co-founder of Pause, to Begin, I am much more interested in seeing aesthetics pushed to a unique level, or viewing something that challenges the way I see, than I am interested in seeing the same types of things over and over again.  Perhaps, you can consider this post part 1 of commonly found aesthetics: the landscape, cityscape, anything not portraiture.

There is an awful lot of large format color photography in the contemporary art world, and I see some trends that can look more like bad habits.  Now, to make myself perfectly clear, this post is not directed at anyone nor is it intended to suggest that I do not enjoy some of the large format color photography out there.  I both enjoy a healthy amount of such photography and the purpose of this is to inspire at least one person to try and push themselves to do new things.Here are some examples of work by photographers that I believe have helped to create the influx of large format color photography today.  The examples are of well known, older work because I think they help to explain why people may try to replicate their style.

Stephen Shore:

Joel Sternfeld:

Mitch Epstein:

Let us examine the photographs.

All of three these images are successful in part because they have wonderful depth, and they are extremely structured photographs.  The other important element in each of these images is the use of color and the palate.

In Shore’s photograph, the amount of rusty oranges and reds with bits of green throughout the frame keep the photograph active in a still frame.  Each of the colors exist in all three planes in the photograph.  The depth is enhanced because of the color that is so perfectly coincidental.  Even the light, which is fairly typical, plays an important role; it creates a shadow that seems to bring attention to the open car door.

In Sternfeld’s image, which was taken in my hometown of McLean, VA, has more of an intellectual depth created by the subject matter.  Once the fireman is spotted picking pumpkins a great deal of irony becomes the focus of the photograph and your eye goes back and forth between the fire and the fireman.  That said, the rotting orange pumpkins in the foreground, the pumpkin stand, and the fire in the background allow for a visual flow to make the photograph complete.  The photographic depth is quite similar to the actual depth at the pumpkin stand.

Finally, Epstein’s photograph is of essentially a flat field, yet with the use of the reflection in the window and the oranges against the blue, he creates five planes for your eye to go though starting with the oranges, the blue curtain, the car, skyline, and the sky.  Some of these elements actually sit on the same plane but because of the color, shape, and light these elements separate and sit individually.  Here the photographic depth is much greater than the actual depth.

Again, the color of the three photographs helps to make the images as powerful as they are.  One of the main culprits of boring color photography that seems to be everywhere these days is that fact that the color has nothing to do with the image.  In other words it is ignored.  In the cases that color is not ignored there are sometimes other problems.  Some are, the lack of form, the over use of space as a compositional tool, and the lack of depth.

According to Jay Maisel, a former student of Josef Albers, Albers said that color and form compete against each other.  This means that to make a photograph in color as opposed to black and white one must compose differently because you cannot use form and color simultaneously, they will counteract.  Edward Weston discovered form in black and white.  If you only photograph color, however, you might get something like Pete Turner.  He became famous for  doing just that, but thankfully some of his photographs still have depth while maintaining the sense of color.  I particularly enjoy this image of his from Times Square.

Perhaps Alber’s various “Homage to the Square” paintings are the perfect example of how to deal with the problem of form versus color.  Do you focus on the squares or colors more?  In most cases, I believe your eyes must choose one to see first.

Using space to compose seems like an easy way to get around the problem of form versus color because adding relatively empty space to the frame automatically minimizes the visual effect of the subject and it’s form.  More space often means more color and less form (Turner did this many photographs).  This stagey tends to quiet the photograph, unless the color itself is so powerful that it is loud (Turner, again).

If you are making an already quite photograph and you quiet even more by adding space it is probably going to reach a point where it becomes boring.  Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Light photographs are quiet and use a lot of space to excentuate wonderful color.  His career long method of “pulling back” from his color street photography to ultimately Cape Light and Bay/Sky did quiet his photographs, but it did not make them boring.  It makes you notice something else.  So the tactic can work, but one must be aware of what it does.

Perhaps everyone should ask themselves as Tod Papageroge asks his students, “Why Color?”With all of the above in my head as I look at color photography, I wonder if I can ever look past the aesthetics and just focus on the concept, the thought, what the image is about.  The answer is yes, but the concept looks much better if the aesthetics are pristine as well.  Perhaps photography is lacking a certain number of brilliant visual thinkers to go along with the sophisticated image making you read about.  I hear about and read of wonderful ideas in photography every day online, but how often do you see a wonderful new photograph online that is as awesome as the idea?  I feel like this does not happen nearly enough.

This morning’s NPR Morning Edition broadcast included a brief segment called “Library of Congress Looks for Help on Photo Labels.” Although I was not fortunate enough to catch the show live, NPR’s incredible podcasting allowed me the opportunity to listen in this afternoon to learn more about a recent web-based photography project that invites everyone to participate in writing a collective history of the United States.

In the last few weeks, the Library of Congress has posted over 3,000 photographs from their collection — all of which reside in the public domain — on the popular photo-sharing site, Flickr. The photographs are primarily from two distinct eras of American history:
1. black and white news photographs from the 1910’s
2. government sponsored photographs from the 1930’s and 1940’s

The project is described as an effort to better caption photographs in the collection with the help of the masses. Flickr’s accessibility and user-friendly interface allows the viewer to comment on every photograph — whether to note a location in the image, provide a name, project about photographic materials, or even banter with other Flickr users.

It is interesting that the morning broadcast noted that “having these photographs mingle with everyday snapshots brings an institution like the Library of Congress off of it’s perceived pedestal”. I wonder, should we be worried about bringing institutions off of their ‘pedestals’ when the proliferation of photographic imagery is already so pervasive? I understand that the Library of Congress is trying to bring their photography collection to the masses. Additionally, I fully support the philosophy promoted by photo-sharing websites like Flickr because they are excellent forums for sharing work, getting feedback and exploring new ideas.

My hesitation lies not in the decision to share the photographs — after all, we are lawfully allowed to view and use the images. I do, however, question the mission of the project. The user comments I read on the Library of Congress’s Flickr page were simple musings about the photographs — in the handful of images I browsed, none had any useful or biographical comments attached.

Sometimes it is difficult for me to seriously consider a photograph when it is presented in a web-based forum. (There is something about the computer that still seems very intangible to me. I would imagine that this notion also has a lot to do with why I cannot read much more than five or six paragraphs on a computer monitor at a time.) The new project championed by the Library of Congress and Flickr will recontextualize every single photograph added to the online collection. Perhaps this will be a good thing because it will, indeed, bring the photographs to the masses. I want to suggest, however, that this new project may also further remove photography from any position as a social document, a recognized fine art, or a historical artifact. With digital technology confusing the definition of photography in the twenty-first century so much so already, this project is simply confusing boundaries even more.

Critiques aside, I will admit that the photographs are fascinating. I have included some of my favorites below. Check out the rest of them here: The Library of Congress’ Photos

“My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light - it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.”
- James Turrell

I recently had the fortunate opportunity to see James Turrell’s light installation called “Gap” from the “Tiny Town” Series at the Albright Knox in Buffalo, NY.  After walking through a zig-zag light trap, the viewer enters a very dimly-lit room and is confronted by a massive blue rectangle on the wall.  At first sight the rectangle looks like a projection — similar to the beginning of a digital slide lecture in art history class — but the viewer soon recognizes that there is no projector in the room.  The blue rectangle is actually a hole in the wall — so evenly lit that the viewer is deceived until he or she puts her hand into it.

Turrell’s installation work intends to transform a space so that the viewer walks away with much more than visual memory.  Standing in the darkened room at the Albright Knox, I could feel the work.  I could interact with it.  I could touch it (the negative space, that is).  Turrell’s work is notoriously about experience.

Art21 cites Turrell’s work as having the capacity to prompt “greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist the common properties of light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the Divine.”

It is interesting that installation art promotes the joy of seeing while at the same time, celebrating feeling.  The relationship between the viewer and the artist is so essential — without one component there would be no art at all.

Photographers always talk about the difference between SEEING and LOOKING.  Further, the act of photographing is often an experience that — although difficult to articulate to the nonphotographer — is something that transcends time and rational thought.  To photograph is to focus (no pun intended) and see the world in a different way.  I wonder if it is possible to share the experience of photographing with our photographs.  How can we articulate to the viewer what it feels like to make a successful picture.

I am fascinated by Turrell’s work because it allows the viewer to experience art making first hand.  I was INSIDE of Turrell’s work because he chose to share it with me and all of the other patrons at the Albright Knox.

With that said…who wants to go see the Roden Crater with me?

“Your typical artist is a mule.”

That is what Garry Winogrand said about the work ethic of a successful artist.

This is the only Winogrand photograph that I can find that comes close to being a mule. It’s a horse at the rodeo, and mules are half horse and half donkey.

The most interesting work that I have ever seen in a critique was a byproduct of hard work more than a perfect idea. Usually, such photographs were interesting because the photographer was still discovering what they were looking at; there was something to discuss. There have been critiques where someone has a wonderful idea, and they squarely execute it, leaving little room to comment on anything more than the idea. The idea may sound good but the work was totally expected, and therefore not especially interesting. It is at this precise moment a great idea looses it’s sense of intrigue. I believe that a great idea becomes better when it leaves room for discovery and visual thought.

I enjoy Garry Winogrand for a few reasons. One main reason is that he simply went out and photographed everyday. I am sure there were plenty of days that Winogrand didn’t discover anything with his photographs, he didn’t even develop over 2,500 rolls. He did, however, work more than any photographer I can think of. He also made a great deal of interesting photographs in his life without planning any of them.

I am confident that everyone reading this blog can learn from Winogrand, even if it is just the value of hard work. I should probably be making photographs right now instead of blogging about making photographs.