Gallery Hopper (3 unread)

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  Hello Ocular Octopus, Goodbye Gallery Hopper

  Posted: 9-September-2009, 2:00pm CEST by Todd

  After five-and-a-half years of Gallery Hopper, it’s time for something new. I’m extremely proud of what I’ve put together here over the 5+ years, garnering mentions in Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Examiner, I think its fair to say GH has been a pioneer of art blogging. Thanks to all you who have read my ramblings with whatever regularity and especially to those who left comments. It’s been a great avenue to meeting others with a passion for photography.

  But, while the blog is retiring, I am not. I’m starting over with a new effort, one that will be more expansive and intense than GH has been or the “concept” of “gallery hopping” allows. I’ve begun a new blog, Ocular Octopus.  It’s being updated regularly and will eventually contain a bookstore, a gallery directory and other featured content as new ideas arise.

  Some recent posts you’ll find on the new site:

  • ?09 Fall Shows: New York, Part 1
  • ?09 Fall Shows: New York, Part 2
  • NY Times Credits Matthew Brady Photo to Wikipedia
  • ?09 Fall Shows: San Francisco
  • ?09 Fall Shows: Chicago
  • 100 Museum/Curator Blogs and Resources
  • A List of Photo Book Lists

  Check out the new site. If you like it, I’d invite you to:

  • Subscribe to the Ocular Octopus RSS feed.
  • Follow Ocular Octopus on Twitter.
  • If you’ve got a blog, I’d be honored if you would add Ocular Octopus to your blog list.

  Thanks again for making GH a great success. Here’s to another great run at Ocular Octopus!

  

  
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  Photo Quotable: Richard Misrach

  Posted: 31-August-2009, 2:00pm CEST by Todd

  I usually found that if I had a preconceived idea for a project it wouldn?t amount to much. Discovery?an aggressive receptivity, if you will?of what is in the landscape provides the inspiration for new ideas.

  Richard Misrach, High Museum interview (via Photography for a Greener Planet)

  
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  Eggleston?s ?Democratic Camera? in Washington, DC, through Sept 20

  Posted: 28-August-2009, 9:18pm CEST by Todd

  If you missed the Eggleston retrospective “Democratic Camera” while it was at the Whitney earlier this year, it’s begun traveling and is now showing at the Corcoran in DC. For details, check out the Corcoran site or the Washington Post review.

  The Post review raises the question of how difficult it is to describe what qualities of Eggleston’s work raise it to Art with a capital A. A few days ago I posted a quote from John Szarkowski, primarily responsible for giving Eggleston’s work the “Art” label, denegrating photography that is “flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless”. Yet, these are the very words that were leveled against Eggleston’s original 1976 MoMA exhibition.

  Irony of ironies, the Corcoran’s show is sponsored by both the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (among others).

  William Eggleston, Democratic Camera
  Through Sept 20 at Corcoran Gallery of Art
  500 17th St. NW
  Washington, DC
  (202) 639-1700

  

  
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  Does This Horse Make Me Look Fake?

  Posted: 28-August-2009, 10:20pm CEST by Todd

  

  This photograph of Ulysses S Grant was in last Sunday’s NY Times accompanying an article about photographic fakery, brought up by renewed questions about Frank Capa’s “Fallen Soldier” photograph. (Capa’s photograph, strangely, is for sale in the NY Times online store.) Gen. Grant’s photo jumped out at me particularly because it is included in “Grant and Sherman” a book I’m reading about the generals’ Civil War friendship. The the image is a composite of three separate photographs and had caused me to pause when I first ran across it. Grant’s horse appears to be floating above the foreground. There’s clearly something wrong. Still, the book treats it as a straight portrait, even while calling out the oddness of the pose with the caption: “During the war, numerous photographs were made of Grant by himself and with his higher-ranking officers, but this is the only one showing him against a background of his troops in the field.” Hmm, perhaps not.

  The Times article reviews a series of historical examples of faked photographs. It mixes examples of fakery down before and after triggering the shutter, but no mention of its own recent imbroglio. (I’d call pre-shutter tricks “staged”, post-shutter “faked”.)

  “Critical Terrain” has a long and excellent post on this same issue, concluding all that can be said about a photograph’s truth to be ?This is what the picture you?re looking at looks like.?

  

  
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  Detroit: Disaster Magnetism

  Posted: 26-August-2009, 2:00pm CEST by Todd

  Conscientious has highlighted an article on Vice about the flood of journalists and photographers making the pilgramage to Dtroit to document the implosion of the city. The decline has been going on for a long time, but its the hot topic for media looking for a quick traffic spike. Tomorrow Museum calls it “ruin porn“. As I’ve talked about before, Detroit is just one more “end of civilization” location shoot, starting with Chernobyl and running through Katrina-era New Orleans.

  I’m sure there are other, more shiny things to shoot in Detroit. But at this point, no one would believe it, even in a photograph.

  

  
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  Photo Quotable: John Szarkowski

  Posted: 25-August-2009, 2:00pm CEST by Todd

  Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible.

  John Szarkowski, Focus Magazine, May 2007

  
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  Platon Kids in ?Cookie?

  Posted: 22-August-2009, 8:56pm CEST by Todd

  My wife got a free subscription to Cookie magazine, reason now forgotten. I think of Cookie as the parenting magazine for the “Lifestyles of the Rich or Envious” set. I’d be in the latter category. I’m looking through the most recent issue and was surprised to find a kids fashion spread shot by none other than Platon.

  

  Guess the New Yorker isn’t paying the bills. ‘Course, we’ve all become more aware of how high profile photographers’ spending can get out of hand and magazine work doesn’t pay what it used to. Still, I find this assignment pretty weird.

  
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  The Garry Winogrand Workshop Experience

  Posted: 21-August-2009, 3:41pm CEST by Todd

  This is an old link, but I rediscovered it after taking a workshop a couple of weeks back and now it seems more resonant, to me at least. Mason Resnick’s account of a 2-week workshop with Garry Winogrand:

  After an hour or so of Winogrand’s interminable jokes and more coffee, the whole exercise seemed futile. Suddenly, almost in exasperation, he said, “Aww, let’s go out and take some pictures.”

  That’s when the class started.

  By day three, the class was out on the street, shooting, developing overnight and doing critiques the next day. The long hours required to develop film in the evenings must have been exhausting. An advantage of digital over film is the ability to shoot and develop more in short time frames, which makes it perfect for workshop settings. It certainly made my recent workshop experience less time intensive, but also could allow for faster shoot/develop/critique/shoot cycles.

  Winogrand’s workshop appears to have been primarily “how to shoot like Garry Winogrand”. Resnick talks about watching Winogrand and mimicking his street technique. And the critique feedback appears to have been based on how Winogrand would or wouldn’t have framed something. That could be an ungenerous summary and my experience with photography instruction is limited. Perhaps that’s all you can do, teach how you know it.

  
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  3 Things I Learned From This Morning?s Shoot

  Posted: 12-August-2009, 5:26am CEST by Todd

  This morning I got up and went out shooting, leaving the wife and kids snoozing. I’d planned to go up to the Wyoming border and hike around and see what I could find. Things didn’t quite go as planned, but I learned a few things to keep in mind next time around:

  If you want to get far away and still catch the morning light, you need to set an alarm.
  Last night my wife suggested I set an alarm, but warned me not to wake her and the kids up. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how to do that, so I skipped the alarm. Next thing I know, Kim’s saying “It’s 6am.” The nature area I was planning to go to is about 45 minutes to an hour away, so I’m not going to be able to make it in time to take advantage of the light. Next time, set the alarm, wake everyone else up. They can go back to sleep (fingers crossed for the kids.)

  You can’t use equipment that you don’t bring with you.
  Instead of heading north, I drove east out of town and stopped just on the outskirts to follow a trail along the Cache La Poudre River that I’d noticed a few weeks ago. As I parked the car and pulled out my camera, I noticed the memory card door open and the slot was empty. The card was sitting on the desk back at the house. I started to get a little angry until I remembered I had a few extra cards I’d bought for my recent workshop. I reached into every pocket of my camera bag. I came up empty. Fortunately I’d neglected to bring the computer bag in from the trunk for over a week. I found my stash of fresh memory cards. Forgetfulness both damns and saves.

  After popping in the fresh card and formatting, I noticed the battery indicator was on “low”. My new spare battery, unused at the workshop, was handy, so problem solved. Had I set my alarm, got 60+ miles away, and not been so lucky with the back up gear, I would have been one furious driver coming back down I-25.

  There is more to your gear than what’s in your camera bag.
  After wandering off the main path to make pictures along the river for about ninety minutes, my shoes and socks were increasingly soaked with morning dew. They started to get uncomfortable and I could feel my skin start to wrinkle. Next time, bring spare socks. Or just leave a pair in the car.

  As the summer progresses, it’s become clear I’m a mosquito magnet. And wandering along a river and irrigation ditches is not smart without some mosquito repellent. An extra can of bug spray goes in the car with the socks.

  
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  Photo Quotable: Robert Adams

  Posted: 10-August-2009, 2:00pm CEST by Todd

  Ansel Adams talked often about pre-visualizing everything down to the last level of gray, when he was looking out and making all his calculations before he made the exposure. That has not been my experience. You do try to get as much as you can right there on the spot when you make the exposure, but there are a lot of surprises in photography. If you?re not interested in surprises you shouldn?t be a photographer. It?s one of the great enlivening blessings of the medium.

  Robert Adams interviewed on Art:21 (via We can shoot too)