Conscientious (10 unread)

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  Do they really care?

  Posted: 23-May-2012, 3:57pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  I sense a growing backlash over so-called social media in the photography community. It seems as if more and more photographers are coming to the realization that spending too much time with social media simply takes away time you could spend on more useful things (such as doing real work or maintaining actual business relationships). The latest article I've come across was written by David Saxe: "For any of you aspiring photographers who want to build your businesses, consider this advice: Talk to people directly. When you address someone directly in conversation, there is a good chance they may be listening to you. If you do it via social network sites, they might read you but they will rarely respond."

  

  
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  Chantal Heijnen

  Posted: 23-May-2012, 5:48pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  

  These are two photographs from Bronxites, a photography project by Chantal Heijnen. The photographer writes "Through a mutual friend, a very unlikely but special friendship arose between Gilbert, who lives in the Bronx for almost 40 years and me, a young photographer from The Netherlands. In 2008 Gilbert gave me the opportunity to move to the Bronx, to share space in his apartment and pursue my long-held ambition to photograph individuals from communities rarely seen."

  

  
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  Miguel Proenca

  Posted: 22-May-2012, 5:44pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  

  It's hard to pick just one photograph from Miguel Proenca's Behind the Hill, but I figured this one would do. Faith and superstition (or rather their remnants) in the modern world.

  

  
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  Jiri Makovec

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 4:31pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  

  These photographs are from Jiri Makovec's Untitled ( for Jiajia ). I like them individually, but I also like how they work together.

  

  
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  Photography and Place: Appalachia

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 7:34pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  

  I thought it might not hurt to address the thoughts I recently outlined in Photography and Place, using a specific location as an example. Given the photographic representation of Appalachia has been very heavily discussed over the past few weeks (c.f. the Perpetuating the Visual Myth of Appalachia posts on Roger May's blog) I figured this particular region might provide a good jump-off point. Find the full piece here.
  

  

  
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  Review: Time and Space on the Lower East Side by Brian Rose

  Posted: 18-May-2012, 9:33pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  

  When I come to New York City, I stay in the area that is being portrayed in Brian Rose's Time and Space on the Lower East Side. As a matter of fact, I realized a little while ago that when I say "New York" I really only mean Manhattan. I noticed this when I talked to someone, and they told me they lived in Brooklyn. Of course, people will never tell you they live in Brooklyn, instead they live in Greenpoint or wherever else. I have no idea where any of those areas are. People usually are nice enough to then add "Brooklyn" when they realize they've run into someone not in the know (which, needless to say, is the mortal sin in NY). When I come to New York I pretty much never go to Brooklyn unless I have to. I also leave the Lower East Side/East Village only when I have to (for example to go to Chelsea). (more)
  

  I first came to New York in 1998, right after finishing my Ph.D. A friend of mine lived in midtown, somewhere near the Empire State Building, and of course visiting was very exciting. For quite a while, I wanted to be able to live in New York. I came close a couple of times, but each time, something got in the way (the first internet bubble crashed etc.). I don't think I would want to live in New York any longer, but this is mostly a moot point given the cost of living there.

  I haven't know Manhattan long enough to have seen the state it was in in many of the older photographs in Time and Space on the Lower East Side (the book comprises photographs taken in 1980 and 2010). So I don't share the nostalgia that seems to have crept into some New Yorkers, who talk fondly of the days before a string of Republican mayors transformed the city into what in some places looks like a Disneyesque theme park for the rich ("Of 32,810 New York tax filers who earned more than $1 million a year in the latest public records, 13,818 live in Manhattan - or 42% of all the state's millionaires." - source). I know you could have had a apartment for next to nothing on Ave B - as long as you didn't leave said apartment at night (at least that's what I seem to remember reading in a Sonic Youth biography). I might have too much of a German biography to be comfortable with the dichotomy theme park for the rich versus cheap urban squalor.

  Anyway, what you can take away from Time and Space on the Lower East Side is that its maker really loves the city and, of course, that he is a very good photographer. The images all were done with a large-format camera, so they offer a carefully constructed frame that might or might not be filled with a lot of life and details. It's not necessarily a New York I've seen too often in photographs, and I really enjoy looking at the combination of cityscapes, street scenes, and details. Various of the spreads pair the same or very similar setting thirty years apart - things have changed, and they haven't.

  Maybe all that talk about money really is just surface, and underneath, New York - or at least Manhattan's Lower East Side - simply is what it has always been: A pretty great, unique place.

  Time and Space on the Lower East Side, photography and text by Brian Rose, essay by Suzanne Vega, 126 pages, Golden Section Publishers, 2012

  

  
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  New photobook presentations (Weeks 19/20, 2012)

  Posted: 18-May-2012, 1:41pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  New photobook presentations: Handbook to the Stars by Peter Puklus, Metalheads by Jörg Brüggemann, and The Present by Paul Graham.

  

  
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  Review: The Present by Paul Graham

  Posted: 18-May-2012, 5:07pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  

  I suspect that the reasons why I am not very interested in street photography at all and why Paul Graham worked on what has now been published as The Present might be not so dissimilar. Sure, it's fun to see a photograph of the moment when the fat lady looked at the skinny statue (or the other way around). If you feel particularly frisky you can now look for those moments without even leaving the comfort of your home, using Google's Street View. But at the end of the day, you're reducing what can be an amazing experience - life in the street, the hustle and bustle of the world - to a bunch of snapshots. I suppose that's fine, but I personally don't need to see any more of it. If I want street photography, I take a walk, and I look. (more)
  

  The Present goes about street photography in a different way. In a nutshell, Graham uses the tropes of the genre to subvert it. That short moment street photography is centered on loses its relevance by being placed alongside another short moment, right there, occasionally even yet another short moment. Just like in real life, the focus might shift - from one person to the next, from one configuration of people to another one. Groups form, groups dissolve. It is as if life on the street was a gigantic card game where the cards are constantly and slowly shuffled while the game is going on.

  For the most part, the book uses such pairs of images, which sometimes the viewer gets to see side by side, sometimes s/he gets to see one first and then the other. This is an interesting variant of street photography, the next (logical) step if you will. However, I'm still left wanting. It is as if Graham did not want to stray too far from street photography (if you look carefully, a friend of mine - who knows the history of street photography better than I do - pointed out, you can see many well-known locations in the book). I feel the idea of putting moments next to each other could have been taken a bit further - there are some examples where the artist does that, using three images, and those seem to offer me much more.

  I caught myself treating many of the pairs like the puzzles I remember from trying to solve as a child in a TV magazine my mother used to buy: You'd get a picture plus a variant of the picture next to it, with some parts missing. The puzzle was to find the missing parts. In the case of The Present I found myself treating the pairs of images pretty much like such a puzzle, trying to identify the characters in both images, to see where they had moved etc.

  I also think the presentation of the book could have been simplified. The book relies on all kinds of ways to present you the images, with pairs of images on top of each other, next to each other, on different pages, or using gatefolds. This is all very fine, but for me, the different gatefolds and tricks end up feeling a bit gimmicky. I do think the design ends up overpowering the images a little bit. The images don't need all that trickery.

  But maybe I'm just nitpicking. What I do like about The Present is that it tries to evolve street photography, if not dissolve it, by showing that moving sideways might be fun, but moving forward has more to offer. There are quite a few beautiful images in the book (some reminding me a little bit of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's work), especially where the game (spot the difference, look how this changes when I use a different camera focus) recedes. For those, I will happily return the book, because they retain traces of the life they were taken from.

  The Present, photographs by Paul Graham, 114 pages, Mack, 2012

  (see my video presentation of the book here)

  

  
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  Is Internet Art Commercially Viable?

  Posted: 17-May-2012, 4:03pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  "Internet artists, for all of their digital-native wisdom, should know better than to think .JPEGs are a viable commodity when they've seen multi-billion dollar industries like music, film, and newspapers run around like baffled idiots for the past decade trying to figure out why they can't sell MP3s, MOVs, and PDFs like they used to in traditional media." - Brad Troemel
  

  

  
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  Will Internet Interactions Ever Match Face-toFace Ones?

  Posted: 17-May-2012, 4:11pm CEST by Joerg Colberg

  Yesterday, I remembered an article I talked about on this blog five years ago. Back then, people were interested in "flaming" - why do people leave insanely nasty comments on other people's websites? The answer came in the form of the "online disinhibition effect": When you are in front of another person, some parts of your brain will prevent you from being a jerk. When you are not in front of another person, but your computer screen, those barriers fall. (more)
  

  Now, five years later, social media are all the rage. Social media, we are constantly told, are the future of, well, everything. As an artist, you have to embrace social media if you want to survive. But can you survive even if you do that? I don't think that's quite so obvious.

  After all, in any kind of social-media environment the same mechanisms that make flaming so easy operate as well. This doesn't mean that social media are filled with insane behaviour (there is quite a bit of it, though). But even when considering normal interactions, "talking" to a Facebook "friend," say, really is not the same as talking to a friend who is right in front of you. The brain operates in slightly different ways when there is an actual face in front of you, from which you can (and usually will) infer emotional responses.

  I'm tempted to think that this must have repercussions for how well social media work. In particular, for artists this might mean that relying solely on social media - without adding any component that adds your face (or voice) back in - might be a serious mistake: Your interactions might be social in an IT sense, but they won't be social in the old-fashioned sense (the one we used to think of before some geek decided to call all of these new internet sites "social media"). And that old-fashioned social - that has been developed and imprinted into our brains for thousands of years. A few years of social media won't be able to do away with that so easily.

  I have the feeling there might be some research done about this right now, or maybe it's already published somewhere. But I think any artist operating online might want to spend some time thinking about this.