Friday, February 22, 2013

Diamonds, Fashion, and Fine Art

Why do some of us get so cranky when some crummy photograph sells for millions of dollars?

Consider the diamond. This is a more of less common rock (not common everywhere, but where they are found there are lots and lots and lots of them) which is easily synthesized. For some reason, though, diamonds are very expensive. Why?

For social reasons, we as a society want them to be expensive. The social reasons are carefully nurtured by DeBeers but belong essentially to us. DeBeers and society as a whole conspire to keep the supply of diamonds artificially restricted, so that they remain expensive. The diamonds we own remain valuable in some sense, and we enjoy the romance of the diamond as thing. Everybody wins. Well, except the guys digging the diamonds out of the ground.

In the same way, we as a society and those members of our society who are very rich, want there to exist very very expensive pieces of art. The rich want to possess things of rarity and value, and the rest of us want to cluck our tongues disapprovingly or to enjoy fantasies of being rich. The trouble with art is much the same as the trouble with diamonds -- there is just so damn much of it. How on earth can art be valuable or, more to the point, expensive, when it is being produced by the trainload on a more of less daily basis all across the world? Art isn't as common as mud, but it's pretty common.

You do it the same way you make diamonds valuable. You invent gatekeepers and tastemakers to artificially restrict the supply of Art, or at any rate Fine Art. These gatekeepers are primary market collectors, curators, and so on. Their job is similar to that of a fashion designer, they must have an intuitive grasp of what the market is ready for. They must discover new artists and new art at the right rate, to keep the market supplied while keeping prices up. The art must be novel, but not too novel (markets are always ready for something new, but never for something too new). Ideally, it would also be good -- whatever that means. Surely the gatekeepers strive to find good art, of course they do. Still, when a million bucks is on the line we are justified in speculating that closing a deal might take priority over good.

New art must of course be justified as good. Nobody wants to buy a piece that's bad. Happily, the art world comes free with a more or less infinite supply of technical jargon and meaningless phrases which can be used to justify practically anything as good. To reiterate, any piece might well be good, but the point is that it needs to be seen as good. Always assuming that previous sentence means anything at all.

And so we have things like Gursky's Rhine II, which might be good, might be bad, I don't have an opinion. Any competent technician could have made it, and the concept doesn't strike me as particularly strong. It's printed really really big, though. Does it evoke something? Certainly not any more, now all it evokes is HOLY CRAP FOUR MILLION DOLLARS?!! The Fine Art world has successfully destroyed this as a piece of actual art.

We have Cindy Sherman's Untitled #96 which, like all of Cindy Sherman's work, appears to be the work of a not very bright college sophomore (this is at least in part because not very bright college sophomores tend to copy Sherman and her derivatives). This one is a trifle under four million dollars.

It doesn't matter, though. Gursky and Sherman are valuable because they are expensive, and expensive because they are valuable. Whether they are good or bad, or what those words even mean, is entirely irrelevant. The Fine Art world demands it, we demand it as a society, and the gatekeepers and tastemakers can only do their best at supplying what is demanded. Everyone makes a tidy profit, everyone's happy.

It's not fair that artists are selected essentially at random to win the Fine Art lottery, but what can you do? That's how it is.

Monday, February 18, 2013

I see it, but it's not there

Audiophiles have this habit of hearing things from their stereo systems that are not there. I don't personally have any problem with it, but it does lead them to spend a great deal of money. There are two ways, at least, to define not there. The first is does not appear to be measurable. This is routinely countered with "my ears are more sensitive than your instruments" or "you are measuring the wrong thing." The second way is no two people "hear" the same thing. Audiophiles get around that with a combination of meaningless phrases, and talking together. Everyone agrees that "the sound stage is so much more three-dimensional" and "the mid-tones are more vibrant" because in the first place those phrases don't mean anything and in the second place they talk to one another and agree on it.

If you do actual double-blind testing, you find that there's no such thing as most of what audiophiles hear. In these senses of not there at any rate.

This in no way interferes with their enjoyment of their audio systems, and it should not. They love their three dimensional soundstages and vibrant mid-tones. They should, they paid a great deal for them! The key point here is this: if you have a specific perception about a thing, but nobody else shares it, the perception is almost certainly about you and not about the thing.

Onwards to art. Consider again the problem of "art as portrait of the artist". This is really a stand in for a wide variety of fiddle-faddle, we could have the same discussion about really any feature of a piece of art. Sometimes the results would be positive, other times it would be negative.

On the one hand, I have argued that no piece will actually reveal the artist in any meaningful way. On the other hand, who am I to tell the viewer that they do not feel the artist's hand? If you see a photograph, and feel that through it you have grasped something essential about the photographer, well, more power to you.

The question of whether anything is actually communicated about the photographer is still a fair and reasonable one. It's probably ridiculous to attempt to measure the presence of the photographer in the image. I can think of no measuring device which would tell us much on this front.

However, we can force two people who "feel" the photographer to compare notes in a blinded fashion. Perhaps they could write a few lines, without first consulting one another, and then we could quite literally compare their notes. I feel confident that, were this done with due care, the notes would be uncorrelated almost exactly to the extent that the mean something. It's quite possible that that there would be some shared phrases that don't mean anything, repetition of the claim that "I feel the photographer" dressed up in a couple of disguises, and some shared material that boils down to discussing the style of the image. Any actual insights about the photographer: "he was tall", "she was depressed", "he had red hair" would be essentially random.

Guessing the gender of the photographer would be a neat and very specific test.

If people cannot agree about what they perceive about the photographer, then their perceptions are internal and have not much to do with the photograph. The photograph does not in fact reveal the photographer, in any meaningful way. If we were to ask instead about the subject of a photograph of a tree, likely everyone's notes would say "it's a tree" and then we could agree that the photograph does, in a meaningful way, convey the idea of "tree."

To be quite fair, I don't know this for sure. This is pure opinion and speculation on my part. It would be interesting to give it a shot, though!

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Through My Eyes

What follows here might be all wrong, it might not even mean anything. It may be that I am attempting to distinguish between things which are not different, or some similar fallacy. Nonetheless, let us set down some sentences, and see what happens!

There is a degree to which a photograph, especially a casual one, may be considered as a "first person" image. That is, the image may be seen as capturing what I the photographer, see at a given instant. We have self-portraits, sometimes nude, shot in mirrors. We have photographs of "my latte", "my entree", which are explicitly the photographer's eye view. Of course, almost every photograph is literally the photographer's eye view. These photographs are more than that, though, capturing in some sense what the photographer saw or would have seen even if there was no photograph. There is no particular effort to show the subject off particularly well, there is no sense that the photographer adopted a clarifying point of view, or a point of view aimed at making a point, or of juxtaposing the subject with another object, or any of the familiar photographic tropes. It is a picture of an object, shot as I saw it.

Certainly not every casually taken image looks first person, and certainly not every carefully crafted professional image looks third person, but equally certain, I believe, some images do look first person in this sense.

Separately from the look of a photograph, consider the spirit in which a photograph is taken. I believe also that the vast majority of casual photographs are taken in this first person spirit. They are made by casual photographers who see, raise the camera, and click. The point of view is fundamentally "what I am looking at right now" whether or not this is clearly revealed in the image.

Casual photography has, I think, changed in this sense. Decades ago, even casual snapshots where taken from more of a third person attitude. These are my things, this is my wife. Here I am, having tripped the self-timer. This is where I was on vacation. The aim was to record the important things, the attractive things, the interesting things in my life. The aim, perhaps, was to use the camera as an impartial third party, documenting aspects of my life. In more modern times one imagines that the camera has changed in our hands, we no longer need to husband our film. We can shoot, shoot, shoot, and so the camera becomes more and more an augmentation of our own eyes. Rather than recording our Christmas Tree for future generations, we want to show these cool shoes to Kathy who loves red shoes right now hey Kathy check out these shoes I am looking at right now should I buy them?

With this change there is surely some change in the way we, as a society, view photographs. This is not to suggest that we collectively view all photographs as if they were dumb snaps of our latte. Still, surely the ubiquity of the the dumb latte shots will inform how we collectively view all of photography? Are we more conscious of the photographer? Do we give less credence to the notion of enduring? I don't know. I feel like something's up, though.

Thursday, February 14, 2013


Despite the cries of the experts, all of photography partakes of an element of "spray and pray" in which the photographer takes many images and hopes that some small percentage of them work out to be excellent images. Photographers, even the ones that decry spray and pray as the domain of fools and n00bs, brag about how many images they throw away. Photography may be alone in this. Other fine arts do studies and so forth but there is a clear notion of progress, of ideas tried and either discarded or taken up. Photographers always take as many frames as time and patience permit, because they know that one of them will be the best. There may also be a progression of ideas, as in a painter's series of pencil studies, but there is always this element of shooting a lot and throwing the lesser ones away.

There are reasons for this, it is not simply that the photographer is stupid. The photographer has to work with reality, which is not so malleable as paint or words. The photographer begins with what reality provides.

Thus, every photographer accepts a degree of serendipity, of accident, in his work. There are moments which come along at which the photograph is simply better and all we can really do is hope to hit them with a button press.

As I have noted before, photography is unique in that the merest accident, a piece of equipment knocked over by a stray dog, can produce a powerful and moving piece of work. There are degrees of serendipity.

Regardless, the act of sifting through the results and picking out the good ones is an inherent part of photography. Even the greatest proponents of pre-visualization don't claim a 100% hit rate (although Adams may have claimed a number as high as 50%. If he did that is surely a record, and almost surely false). Henri Cartier-Bresson has been accused, half in jest I think, of having his "Decisive Moment" in fact at the contact sheet. The "Decisive Moment" is not when the shutter fires, but when the red pen circles the small image. To an extent, this is certainly no more than truth.

The result of all of this is that if you accept photography as art, you must accept that serendipity is permitted to play a role. I suggest that you may even have to accept that pure accidents might be art, but that is perhaps pushing it too far. Art is then not entirely about the artist's intent, about the "concept" if you will permit the term.

Because of these features of how the photographic process works, one cannot help but suspect that the concept perhaps antedated the photograph. One wonders, always, how much serendipity was in play here, and how much concept. How much, in other words, did the artist contribute, and how much was dumb luck?

In the narrative of photography as art we find such things as Gary Winogrand's 12000 rolls of film in various states of un-edited-ness, all edited up by a cadre of experts after his death. From this, 25 (or some similarly small number of) images were drawn as a sort of retrospective. Good god, how can we possibly know anything of Winogrand as a photographer from this? For all we know he simply hurled his camera at the ground repeatedly.

The current darling of "street", Vivian Maier is in much the same boat. Again, we have something more than 100,000 negatives from which has been drawn a couple of shows and a couple of books. A few hundred images. She is accused of having a unique vision, an astonishing eye, blah blah blah blah. How on earth can we know?

Pull 100,000 images out of flickr, or instagram, at random. You'll find some good ones. Wander around the city blindfolded pressing the shutter button at random 100,000 times, you will without question create some great images. Vivian Maier may well have been a truly great photographer, but whether she was or not is certainly unknowable without access to the complete files (something I venture we're unlikely to get, since she's been turned into a money-making venture).

The worst of this though is surely the artist who has some show and a book about something banal and stupid. America's strip-malls, say. Perhaps the artist sought to strip away the veneer of something or other, and reveal to America her own soul. We cannot help but suspect that in fact the artist sifted through 50,000 terrible images on their computer and noted that they seem to have a lot of pictures of strip-malls. A quick artist's statement later we're off to the gallery and the printer, aren't we? Well, with a little luck, a little pull, and a few connections we are.

Perhaps this is why photography feels itself always at the fringe of art, and why photographers always feel the need to defend photography as art. Its serendipitous nature allows us to craft the "concept" well after the work is made. And that feels like a cheat.

Monday, February 11, 2013

Single-Use Photographs

This is another way to divide the world of photographs up, and I think it's an increasingly important one:

How many times does, generally, does a viewer look at the photograph?

Magazine pictures and news pictures have always been pretty much single-use photographs. Increasingly, we take pictures with the intention of showing them to someone, or of documenting a curiosity for your friends. "Hey, check this out" and we hand the iPhone over, or we share the image out on Mumblebook. The intent here is that the viewer will look at the image once, and never again. The idea of taking a photograph of a thing, because someone we know likes things of that sort, and for the express purpose of showing that someone that thing, is quite modern. It makes very little sense in a pre-digital, pre-networked world. Even in pseudo-art circles, people submit pictures for critique, and here again the intent it to look at the picture once.

As of this writing, we are starting to see new services being offered which make explicit the one-view-only model, presumably for more spicy pictures, but which can be used for anything. Such services are spurred by the perception that some photographs are single-use. The existence of these services feeds back and reinforce into our collective consciousness the idea of single-use photographs.

Several things are in play here, at least these:

  • There are too many photographs being made to look at any of them more than once.
  • Much of the content in photographs time-sensitive, in the sense that it's not interesting next week.
  • Increasingly, people are aware of privacy issues with racy photographs. They want to share naked selfies, but not too widely.

This may represent a true change-in-kind. Digital photography, free imaging, is changing our notion of what photography is. That zeigeist is increasingly dominated by the idea of the single-use image. Images may be single-use for a audience of one or or an audience of our friends, or for whomever comes along. Images may be single-use by intent or by accident. The photograph as something we come back to, to remind ourselves of grandma or to re-savor the artistry of, seem to be fading from our consciousness.

It is perhaps not unexpected that the masses, once a thing is made available to them freely and broadly, should re-imagine it for their own purposes. We art wonks, and wannabee art wonks, are left behind struggling to understand what hoi polloi are up to. We try to fit the photography of the masses into our own view of photography, with rapidly decreasing success. This is not to suggest that art, or Art, photography is dying. Only that it fits now into a world that increasingly views photographs as single-use objects.

Certainly this changing world might declare Art photographs finally irrelevant and dead. Alternatively, the lot of Art photographs may be improved in this new world. Such pictures might enjoy increased novelty as a photograph one might, almost incomprehensibly, want to look at more than once.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

The Photograph as Portrait of the Photographer

One of the pieces of fiddle-faddle that gets tossed around now and then is that a piece of art is in some useful sense a portrait of the artist. I take this to mean that a piece of art gives the viewer the sense that they know or understand the artist. This sense could be the result of actual information about the artist contained in the piece, or because the piece simply creates the impression in the viewer's mind that they know or understand the artist. It may be worth reading this prior post since some of the ideas there are informing my thinking here. Particularly the notion of a successful portrait as creating the illusion that we understand the portrayed.

The only factual information about the artist really conveyed by a piece of art is this:
I chose to make this.

This is pretty thin as a portrait. A body of work may convey more information, as a body of sort of anthropological evidence. Even this requires context to make much sense of, however. Suppose a photographer made 100s of photographs of eggs. Do we conclude that the photographer really liked eggs? Is there a fetish or obsession involved? Perhaps the photographer simply knew a gallerist or collector who really liked eggs, or perhaps the photographer happened to live on an egg farm. In the end, even a body of work can only inform a factual portrait of the artist. The portrait itself can only truly be made by the hard work of biography.

Perhaps, though, what is meant is that a great work of art creates in the viewer the illusion of understanding the artist. It invokes in us the sense that we do understand or know the artist, in some way. Whether our understanding is accurate or not seems irrelevant, the point here is simply that this idea is created in our minds.

What follows might feel like an exhausting of all possibilities, but really it's just me hacking my way through some ideas. There may well be possibilities that elude me entirely.

If we postulate a direct evocation of "the artist" by the piece of art, there has to be something in the work that evokes the artist. We have essentially no semiotic machinery that points to "Bob The Photographer" (we do have semiotic machinery that points to well known artists, more on that in the sequel), so there's really no way that a photograph can create the idea of Bob in our minds. Neither do we have much of anything that points to the more general "The Artist" beyond the obvious fact of the piece itself, which certainly implies the artist. We're at risk of swerving back in to I chose to make this territory here. If the work cannot create an idea of "The Artist" it's going to have a tough time creating the idea of "The Artist Has Suffered" or whatever it is we imagine we know about the artist.

The trouble is that art can evoke universals pretty well, that's what semiotics is all about. Symbols have a pretty tough time expressing specifics, for that we tend to rely on representations of the specific thing. If Bob takes a picture of himself, then by golly, portrait of the artist. Without Bob in the frame, Bob's presence is pretty hard to justify. Well known artists are arguably, as noted, universals which can be evoked by symbols.

On the other hand, I think I can, by squinting a bit, accept that a piece of art can evoke a first person sensation as opposed to second or third person sensations. That is, if we let say suffering stand in for all universal themes, we can imagine that a piece of art might be able to evoke distinctly:

  • Suffering in general.
  • His suffering.
  • Your suffering.
  • My suffering.

Simple adjustments of point of view, placing the camera here rather than there, might well produce the personalized effect of My Suffering, versus His Suffering, for instance. So while we can't necessarily get Bob The Photographer in the frame, or even really The Artist, we might well be able to get a generalized notion of Me into the frame. Let's set this aside and save it for later.

What I suspect a lot of people mean when they imagine they see the artist in the work is simply a distinctive style. They feel that this work is recognizably someone's work, and they feel that they might recognize other work by the same someone. Especially for a well known artist, this feels very very much like the work containing a portrait of the artist. This is wrong. What's going on here is that we already contain a portrait of the artist. We know a little about Edward Weston from this and that, we read a thing in the New Yorker on him, etc. When we see a picture of a green pepper, this is associated with all that information. We see the pepper, we feel a strong sense of knowing a bit about Edward Weston, and we will tend to associate the two. We will tend to think that somehow, Weston got part of his essence into the print. He didn't. All the picture does is poke some pre-existing semiotic machinery. The pepper is a pretty strong symbol that means Edward Weston, and which is connected to a cascade of other symbols and ideas.

Bob The Photographer does not have this luxury. The New Yorker has never profiled Bob, Bob has not had any shows yet, Bob is not well known. There is no semiotic machinery connected to Bob, except amongst Bob's friends (where the Weston effect may well occur, by the by).

If, when I see Bob's photographs, I feel that they are distinctive and that I might recognize other work by Bob, I might still say that I feel Bob's presence in the images. What I mean, though, is that I think these photographs have a distinctive style. Bob has made some choices about what to photograph, how to photograph it, and how to handle photographic problems in general, which choices feel like they might uniquely identify work by Bob. Well known artists, or at any rate recognizable artists, have such a distinctive style. This is how we recognize them, after all. This style becomes the symbol for the artist, which in turn triggers the semiotic machinery, which finally creates the sensation that one knows the artist through the work.

Note that what we think is a distinctive style when we see a single example of Bob's work could be a simple accident, or one of a dozen styles he works in.

If I see such a distinctive style in Bob's work, I might think that the work is a portrait of Bob, by analogy with other styles of well known artists. What I mean, though, is that if I already contained a useful portrait of Bob, this example of Bob's work would certainly evoke it. I don't think this is quite the same thing as the work portraying Bob.

So what? I don't know. I do know that there are at least two distinct things which might produce a sensation of portraitness, and that they seem to me to be pretty much orthogonal:

  • A first person point of view.
  • A distinctive artistic style.

I find neither one particularly satisfactory as an idea of a portrait of the artist. On the other hand, if what you're after is creating the illusion in the viewer's mind that they know you, the artist, these are ways in which you could accomplish that. It is not at all the same thing as revealing your own truth, but they are certainly ways to build a first person narrative or idea that the viewer could associate with you. In that sense, a portrait of the artist can be created, potentially one which feels real, one which might even be real. Such a portrait (like any portrait) is actually real only as a happy coincidence.

Ultimately, I don't think that a piece of art in and of itself reveals much factual about the artist. To the extent that it creates the illusion of understanding the artist as a person the effect is tenuous and second-order. There are enough other ways to talk about these effects that I don't think the use of the word "portrait" is really appropriate here either. In short, I cannot find any way in which I can comfortably interpret the idea that a piece of art is a portrait of the artist.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Rule of Thirds Redux

I have talked before about the rule of thirds. In summary, there are two of them:

  • The photographer's rule says: place important objects at 1/3 lines, ideally where two of them intersect.
  • Everyone else's says: divide the image up into regions on 1/3 lines and place things within the regions.

In order to underline this, I have selected at random some iconic photographs. Which, of course means, not random at all. These are simply the first few that occurred to me, so who really knows what my subconscious dredged up. Anyways. These all have a helpful grid of 1/3 lines placed on them, just as all those terrible "pep up your snaps" web pages have to show you where to stick the boat, or the flower, or the little girl's eyes, to make the photograph look awesome and professional.

Let's see what actual professionals, producing actual superb images do. You may not recognize all of these, but each of these images has been hung in museums, most of them (if not all) multiple times:

How often are things of importance placed on 1/3 lines? How often are things of important placed at the intersections of 1/3 lines? How often is the image divided into thirds vertically, with important things placed within the three resulting horizontal bands? How often is the image divided into thirds horizontally, with important things placed within the three resulting vertical bands?

Think up some other photographs which are iconic enough that you remember them. Use google to find a copy, and place your own grid of thirds on it.

Don't listen to those idiots with their idiotic canned advice about composition. Go look at some good photographs instead.

Monday, February 4, 2013


Conventional wisdom among Fine Art Photographers is that one should process ones negatives and prints to ensure that they last as long as possible. Matting and framing likewise. Please use only museum grade eternal mat board, light-proof glass so that the print will never be harmed by radiation, and a lead frame to keep the neutrinos at bay.

As I have commented before, in general you are simply not that good. Nobody cares enough. Your eternally preserved photography will, within a few decades of your death, wind up in the trash, discarded.

Let us suppose that you are that good. Let us suppose that your print which truly captures the essence of something or other does survive to be admired 200 years from now.

Our best available evidence suggests that, 200 years hence, your print will be admired for being 200 years old and not much else. It will be interesting not for the moment it froze in amber, but because it froze in amber a moment, a moment that is 200 years old. Nobody will much care about the content, or the artistry. They will be interested in the age of this relic, and what, if anything, can be gleaned about their ancestors from it. Old paintings, precisely because they do not freeze a moment, are interesting as art. They haven't got the inherently more interesting feature of captured reality that photographs enjoy, to overwhelm their artistry, their technique, and whatever other features of a painting are interesting.

After due consideration, I don't want my work revered for being old. I do want it loved for being good, but this appears to be an essentially ephemeral phenomenon with photographs. If you want reverence and respect for the artistic value of the work, you must (as far as we know) accept the ephemeral nature of that reverence and respect.

If you're ok with your work being respected merely for existing, then by all means process archivally and stick it in a steel box engraved Do Not Open Until February 2213. Assuming the box doesn't get lost and the world does not end, your freakish black and white two dimensional thingies will be much admired for their strange ancientness.