A Conundrum

I’m a big fan of Patrick Smith’s work. (See images above and below.) He has a good eye, a nice sense of scale, a feeling for light, and a pleasing way of putting a picture together. But what do you do when you’re a photographer whose pictures are somewhat reminiscent of other photographers who have gotten more exposure than you? In Smith’s case, Massimo Vitali, Peter Bialobrzeski, and Walter Niedermayr in particular. These photographers all deal with large format landscape where the figure is minuscule, and where photography’s relationship to traditional landscape is explored along with man’s relationship to the environment.

It’s a problem that I’m sure affects many photographers and I guess the only advice is to keep taking pictures and looking for places to photograph that differentiate your work based on the originality and freshness of the subject/location. Skiers have pretty much been done, so have beaches. So is it off to the jungle? The desert? Liechtenstein? None of this is to say Patrick Smith is a copyist - he has a much more pictorial sensibility than the more cerebral three mentioned above - but it's an issue that can't be ignored.

In the face of so much photography, it is increasingly clear that we are in a post-post (and maybe even one more post) modern world where concept comes first followed by execution. After that it’s a race to the finish line. It doesn’t matter if you’re Hillary Clinton, the Zune, or “Infamous”. (If you’re scratching your head, “Infamous” was the second film on Truman Capote released in 2006 .)

Not Alexander Rodchenko (but almost)

How fitting that such a constructivist photograph be taken at the French Open after two of the best Russian players – Dinara Safina and Maria Sharapova – had battled it out in the fourth round. Safina (pictured above) won in three sets.

The photograph by Pierre Verdy is one of the best of its kind with its aerial perspective, strong diagonals, and wonderful strokes of footmarks breaking up the clay, not to mention Sarafina’s expression - a mix of exultation and relief.

Again, it’s a picture that appeared in black and white in The New York Sun newspaper and in color on their website, but I think it’s a no-brainer this time that the black and white version wins game, set, and match.

Pictures from a Train

I have been holding off on writing about the upcoming exhibition at my gallery - Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train: Rediscovered – as the New York Times Magazine had an exclusive. But this Sunday they ran six pages on the work together with an excellent audio-visual piece on their website, so now I’m free to blog.

To put it simply and truly, these pictures are my favorite body of work in photography. They were taken on June 8, 1968, from inside the funeral train that carried Robert Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington so that he could be buried beside his brother at Arlington. The photo-
grapher Paul Fusco had been assigned the story by LOOK Magazine and on what turned out to be an unusually hot Saturday, close to a million people – black and white, rich and poor, young and old, singly and in groups - spontaneously came out to pay their respects to the man who had inspired so many Americans.

I first came across the pictures when I was Director of Magnum Photos in New York (Paul Fusco is a Magnum photographer) and was overwhelmed by their emotion, by the very American-ness of the pictures, the skill with which they were captured, the modernity of the color aesthetic, and the surprisingly uplifting response to such a tragic event. Fusco took over 2,000 pictures in the eight hours it took to make the usually four-hour journey and from this group I had the daunting but privileged task of selecting 20 images that we ultimately printed as a set of 27 inch wide cibachrome prints.

To compound the challenge and the pleasure, over the period of a year and a half that Paul and I worked on the project, we kept discovering new troves of the pictures including close to a thousand lost transparencies located by Lesley Martin of Aperture that had been sent to the Library of Congress when LOOK Magazine folded in 1971. (Aperture will be publishing a new book of the work in September.)

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but I’ll also tell you the only area where Paul and I disagreed. For Paul, the event and the photographs represented the end of hope. To me they represent the indomitability of the American spirit.

One final note – the opening of this exhibition is Wednesday, June 11 from 6 to 8 p.m.. I would love to welcome all readers of this blog who can make it to attend the artist's reception of this extraordinary show.

Danziger Projects is at 521 West 26th Street. New York City. New York.

Weekend Video

The flow of talented young British female singers continues unabated with 20 year old newcomer Adele (born Adele Laurie Blue Adkins). A neo soul/jazz singer, Adele was the first recipient of the Brit Awards Critics' Choice, given to an artist who yet to release an album. A few months later, Adele released her debut album 19, which went straight to #1 in the UK charts and was certified platinum within a month of its release.

This weekend’s video shows Adele performing her hit single "Chasing Pavements" live on BBC 1's "Friday Night With Jonathan Ross"

The First Mugshot

This photograph (top) has been somewhat incongruously making its way around the internet recently. However, I guess this should not be altogether surprising as it’s a powerful and seductive picture. It appears heroic in a Che Guevara kind of way, and it’s very chic! However, it is in reality 143 years old and a precursor to the mugshot, being a prison portrait of Lewis Paine (who attempted unsuccessfully to murder Secretary of State William Seward as part of the conspiracy in which John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln).

The photograph was taken in 1865 by Alexander Gardner, the famous civil war photographer also known for his definitive portraits of Lincoln. He photographed Paine and his co-conspirators on board the prison ship on the Potomac where they were incarcerated. Three months later they were hanged.

What is so haunting about the picture is the confidence and poise with which Paine looks at the camera and the modernity of his whole look. As you scroll down, you can see in the picture where the guard is standing beside him that he was enormously tall and if you study the photographs closely, there is certainly a kind of jock arrogance about the man. He’s a fanatic and a fashionista at the same time.

But as we all know pictures can be deceiving. While Paine failed in his task of killing Seward, he brutally stabbed him as well as injuring his two sons Fredrick and Augustus. And while Booth was the only assassin who succeeded in his task, the conspiracy not only robbed America of one of its greatest presidents but set a path of violence that continues to haunt America.

Bodies of the four condemned prisoners at Fort McNair, Washington, following their execution on July 7, 1865. From left, Mary Surratt, Lewis Paine, David Herold and George Atzerodt. Photo by Alexander Gardner.

Assisted

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have great assistants and last night Samantha Contis, my first assistant when I opened Danziger Projects, and Julia Baum, my current assistant, presented an irresistible photo-op. The occasion was the opening of the Yale MFA Photography 2008 exhibition at Danziger Projects which included Samantha Contis's work. If you want to see what the other eight graduates of what is generally considered the top photography MFA program in the country are up to, the show runs through this Saturday.

One other thing that Samantha and Julia have in common is that both have extremely good websites. Samantha’s features a range of her work which is both pastoral and cinematic. She’s terrific at landscape, great with skin, and given any opportunity to combine the two she’s off to the races!

Julia’s website features an ever growing body of portraits of redheads, shot in a luminous outdoor studio she has found for the project. Any genuine redheads living in or passing through New York and wanting to be photographed for the project should contact her via the site or at juliabaum@gmail.com.

Samantha Contis's photographs:





Julia Baum's photographs:

Erupted

At the beginning of this month, the Chaiten volcano in southern Chile, which had been dormant for many thousands of years, began to erupt. Fortunately, there was time to evacuate the town although the ash has now begun to spread its way south across the entire country.

Photographer Carlos Gutierrez of UPI took these dramatic photographs. If you’re a fan of these “hand of god” kind of pictures, which I most certainly am, there’s an apocalyptic element to these images that’s literally incredible. In reality, however, the drama has been caused by the erupting ash and smoke colliding with a lightning storm.




Nevertheless, these kind of images have always had a place in the history of art. The eruption of a volcano was in fact so compelling that it spawned an entire subgenre of landscapes - Vesuvius paintings. Sir William Hamilton, English ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (as Naples and Sicily were known) from 1764 to 1800, was the great patron of this school. In addition to guiding an entire generation of wealthy and artistically inclined young Englishmen up the slopes of the volcano, he commissioned the artist Pietro Fabris to do paintings of the mount in all its moods. Fifty-four of the resulting works were gathered together with Hamilton's own notes and published as Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies. This became a highly sought-after collector’s item as soon as it appeared in 1776. At the same time, Joseph Wright of Derby (one of the greatest British painters of the time) journeyed to Italy to paint Vesuvius and his painting “Vesuvius from Portici” is generally considered the masterpiece of the genre.

Remember that in pre-photographic society an event like this could only be experienced directly – no National Geographic, no evening news. The burning desire to see and record was the force that drove artists to cross oceans, trek the desert, and hack their way through jungles in search of the sublime, the mysterious, the unstoppable force of nature. While today we can travel further, know more, see more second-hand, our opportunity to experience this kind of wonder has changed and become more rare. So when photographs like Gutierrez’s come along, un-photoshopped, unconstructed, and looking the cover of a Meatloaf album, they are a reminder and a warning of the turbulent times we live in and the deceptive sense of connectedness we feel to the planet.

Joseph Wright's “Vesuvius from Portici”, painted 1774 - 1776.

A detail from Joseph Wright's “Vesuvius from Portici”.

Wright's "Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples" painted on his return to England.

Also taken on the first day of what turned into a five day eruption in Chaiten was this photograph by Alvardo Vidal, below.

Memorial Day Weekend Video

In this week of all things Indiana Jones, I’m featuring a 2006 t.v. clip from when its director Steven Spielberg was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor.

The awards, now in their 31st year, are broadcast every Christmas, and for anyone who hasn’t seen them I would highly recommend catching the next one. The premise is simple. Five individuals in the arts are selected each year based on a lifetime of contributions to American culture through the performing arts. Each honoree is introduced by
a friend or colleague, followed a short but always fascinating filmed biography. The tribute is then capped off by some sort of surprise performance.

In Spielberg’s case the performance was of the finale from Leonard Bernstein's Candide, “Make Our Garden Grow”, sung by Gregory Turay and Harolyn Blackwell. Other than being conducted by Spielberg’s longtime composer John Williams, I’m not sure exactly what the connection was but the piece was so movingly and powerfully sung
I promptly downloaded three different versions!

More P.J.s!

Just a few days after my post on pyjamas as outdoor wear, I got an
e-mail from the photographer Justin Guariglia announcing a book signing at ICP this coming Friday for his new book “Planet Shanghai”. The book, which is essentially about the look and style of Shanghai, features dozens and dozens of pictures of people wearing pyjamas outdoors, as well as close-ups of Chinese footwear, Shanghai shoppers, and futuristic looking motorcycle riders.

Taken mostly in 2005, the rapid development in Shanghai is already changing how the city looks and feels and so the book is as much about a moment in time as current Shanghai style, but the images are nonetheless mesmerizing.

The prevalence of pyjamas, Guariglia explained to me, was due to both the extreme summer heat and the lack of plumbing. The area where most of the pictures were taken was one where many people had to use outdoor communal toilets and thus the boundaries of what was considered home expanded past people’s houses to the public bathrooms. Once that relaxation of the dress code became acceptable (starting around the 1980s) the perimeter for p.j.-wear just kept expanding until many people were wearing them day in day out.

In addition to the inherent quality of Guaraglia’s pictures, one of the things many readers of this blog will notice is their similarity to The Sartorialist’s photographs. What is equally interesting is the ways in which they differ. While superficially almost identical, the two photographers are worlds apart in spirit and intent. Guariglia depicts, Sart endorses. Guariglia is a journalist, Sart is an editor. In John Szarkowki’s parlance Guariglia is a window, Sart is a mirror.

What never ceases to be a source of wonder is how a mechanical instrument like the camera can produce images that in the hands of different photographers are so distinctly and personally expressive. It’s a miracle! And it’s why people like me have been involved and committed to photography for such a long time.