Looking at Pictures…

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 - Nicholas Calcott

Junior Bazaar
Junior Bazaar, January, 1947, with art direction from Alexei Brodovitch

Fred Ritchin writes frequently on how photography, and specifically concerned photojournalism, is and has changed on the web and in the era of digital.  A recent post caught my eye:

When one looks at great magazine design there is almost nothing like it on the Web. The era of mass picture magazines started with magazines like Vu in France where the covers were as graphic and stunning as posters. Inside pages for Vu and other early magazines like Regards and Picture Post were used to experiment with all kinds of juxtapositions of images, text and other graphic elements. But what we end up with in terms of design at the beginning of the Web era is much like what we have in desktop publishing — clean sites that look professional but are almost never transcendent.

Clearly, a lot of this has to do with the technology – In print, it’s one thing to, for example, overlay text and image, and in code it’s an entirely different and much more complicated thing.  Which is not to say the technology isn’t there, because it is, in Flash, which is an entirely different ballgame in terms of ease of use and loading times on a site.  As it is, Flash sites tend to be overdesigned, not underdesigned, frequently suffering from the seductiveness of whizzing, moving images and text, not an unwillingness to experiment with the medium.

Anyways, even within the limitations of technology, there are few people willing to push the limitations of text and image on the web.  I can think of one, off the top of my head – i heart photograph, with it’s seemingly endless list of photos of the day and willingness to ignore the conventions of blog interface in order to give the reader an endless way to explore it’s particular corner of the photography world.

Words Without Pictures site is one (recently back online with the publication of their book) even though it’s dialogue between text and photos is defined by a self-conscious absence of the latter. A commenter on Ritchin’s original post points to three other super-flashy sites: http://www.sobluesoblue.nl; http://www.go-no-go.nl; and the really, really excellent accompaniment to the book of the same name, http://www.whymisterwhy.org.

Who knows of any others that bear a special mention?

P.S. I wasn’t able to track down an decent images of Vu, but you can find a couple here and here and some more with a google search.

Leong Repetition

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott


Sze Tsung Leong’s ‚ÄúVictorville, California, 2006‚Ä≥

“Repetition suggests that views are never singular, but that each time we look, we see something different. ”

Sze Tsung Leong, he of the horizon pictures, has posted an extended reflection of the conceptual meaning of repetition in photography as the new essay in Words Without Pictures. Because photography is a medium of repetition, this essay obviously covers alot of ground – and it’s a good one, too:

Photography occupies the meeting point between the mechanics of visual perception and the structures that shape our environments. In the process of giving visual form to the ways of seeing and behaving that define us, and to the contexts that encompass us, it engages layers of repetition inherent within ourselves and our environments. The process of repetition therefore extends in both directions, for to photograph is to multiply the already multiplied: photography mirrors the doubling process of seeing, and duplicates environments already structured by repetition.

An interesting point which does not come up in the essay is that photography is simultaneously a medium of repetition and also a breaking down of that repetition: Though we display photographs in series and create our art in the space between successive pictures, photography becomes a unique medium in an individual picture’s isolation from time and other images around it. It is, in effect, in a zoo, an area apart that allows us to examine it in detail but is constrained in its borders.

One extension of repetition in photography is the repetition of the film strip projected in the cinema. Returning an image to the flow of time helps to tell stories, but isolating it allows us to see around what is actually displayed.

Process, Content, and Dissemination

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott

Words Without Pictures came out with a new essay like a month ago, but it seemed to have passed pretty much unnoticed in the photoblog world. This is perhaps because the essay, ‘Process, Content, and Dissemination: Photography and Music,’ is a doozy. I love this kind of stuff, and it even took me forever to actually read through the damn thing. It’s worth it, though.

The essay, by Charlotte Cotton, LACMA‘s curator of photography, is all about photography in the digital age – economics, distribution, history, fusion with other fields, and also simply how we make work:

In retrospect, I can see that those teams of image-makers were asking an age-old question: “How do we get the money we need to do what we visually want to do?”

The essay is wide ranging and informed. It covers ground as diverse as Madonna and Steven Klein’s advertising model, fashion photography in museums, the expected visual changes with the onset of HDTV, OK Go’s treadmill video, and tons of tons of other seemingly unrelated points where the worlds of photo, art, fashion, and music diverge and intersect. Cotton discusses, as well, why photographers’ fees haven’t risen as much as would be expected considering the explosion of venues to display images on the internet:

While some advertising now covers a modicum of costs for editorially driven online projects, viewers’ surveys about subscriptions confirmed that this would not be its funding structure. Ironically, grant and foundation funding in Europe does reach such forums, perhaps mimicking the support (modest but symbolic) for new media artists and the general eagerness of foundations and cultural institutions to attach their names and resources to those who might meaningfully develop new media, rather than make such investigations a core activity for their own organizations.

You’ll have to read the essay for the full story – it’s too complicated to sum up here. I did, however, want to note that in no part of the essay does cotton cover visual changes in photography brought on by the new technology. Perhaps this has to do with how we define photography – a still image mechanically produced, generally bordered by the four sides of the frame. This formula doesn’t leave alot of room for play – perhaps the only reason photography strictly defined still has a place in contemporary visual culture and the digital world has more to do with its efficiency in delivering visual information than it does anything else.

Photographer Nick Knight‘s project Showstudio.com also pops up in the essay – it’s been around for a while, which is why it hasn’t been brought up on this blog before, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s a great example of how artists are attempting to come to terms with digital media.

The Photographic Book

Monday, May 5th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott

Words Without Pictures, the excellent series of essays on photography produced by LACMA, has finally got around to addressing the photo book, in an essay by Darius Himes:

There is a long and storied history of scribes and manuscripts, of printing presses and the craft of the book, that is outside the purview of this brief essay. But of all the visual and plastic arts, books hold a special place in the history of photography. Most photographers, curators, and gallerists (and especially those of a certain age and older), learned of, and fell in love with, photography through books. Ultimately, books are far more accessible than exhibitions of important work. One can return to them repeatedly and absorb the accompanying texts at will; a lap, two hands, a few hours, and some sunlight are all that is required.

The essay itself reads as a general paean to photo books, and was a little shallow for my taste. It didn’t go too deeply into what photo books mean, why they are so different from exhibitions besides the fact that you can’t hold 36 framed pictures in your lap and look at them with ease.

He doesn’t for example, go into the filmic potential of books (besides a mention of a Lewis Baltz quote), or really examine them as objects, or wonder whether our fetishization of them has more to do with market forces than artistic potential, or any number of other concerns that make the photo book unique and possessing of its own problems and visual language. Anyone else agree with me? What is it about the photo book? Why are we all so attached to it? Is it just that photographers, in the end, are actually really just collectors (all we do is collect pictures that our cameras take, after all) and photobooks are something which is so easily collectible?

Words Without Pictures

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott


Ed Ruscha, ‘Both Sides Of The Sunset Strip’

Those of you who regularly read this blog may have sensed that I have a bit of a critical obsession. I love reading and writing about photography theory. That being said, I’ve frequently complained about how hard it is to find contemporary original photography theory, short of sifting through back issues of Artforum, which are devoted, anyways, to the self-sustaining Art System.

Needless to say, though, one of the more exciting projects that is going on right now is Los Angeles County Museum Of Art‘s Words Without Pictures, an online compendium of new photo essays. If theory isn’t your thing, you’ll probably find it terribly boring. But if it is, you’ll thank me for the link.

The latest essay: Remembering and Forgetting Conceptual Art.