Photo II, Spring 2006

Fuck Ansel Adams. I hate that prick bastard. I am not a technical photographer. I' an intuative photographer. I am so lucking I got a B on this bitch. I won't even bore you with Babs remarks. Not that your boring Babs but these shots were not fun to make. On the flip side of things, I know how to do it and probably will calibrate my Crown Graphic now. These were shot on a Mamiya 1000DTL on Efke KB100 and printed on, who fucking cares. Also I've left one print off as it's flat, and while that never stopped me before, it just hurts to look at it.

Four Self Portraits

These are the images I'm handing in today to replace the one's Babs gave a C. I agree with her. They were C work. I'm not upset about that. I'm upset that so much went wrong. I'll post all the "went wrong" tomorrow. For now I'll just revel in the ungraded glory of this work.

We had this project called the “Free” project. Now this class has like four of us who think in terms of making art as opposed to just taking pictures. I ain't knockin' those other folks. I just have some bigger, maybe unsupportable, ambitions. And for this project we, after our most recent victories, put on our “A” game. Joe worked out this soft sculpture/installation thing using cyanotyping and these weird alien stuffed animals with all kinds of Fruedian text etc. Zach made a movie using slides. Daniel, well, Danny boy did a kind a country porn thing. Now I helped most of these people work out their ideas so I knew what everyone was doing right?

So what did Mikey do?

Project #1: photos of ethnic people holding signs that had question raising statements i.e. an Indian guy with a sign that said, I am not a Hindu, a non smiling black girl holding a portrait of a pretty smiling white woman etc. Not as interesting in real life though, kind oa boring, kind a cerebral.

Project #2 photos of Nashville from my trip to the Ryman and this jack ass brought a view camera. It was like 10 degrees. Not view camera weather. I got six shots on my Kiev using 30 year old TMax 400. Six boring ass shots.

Project #3 pinhole self portraits while drinking liquor. I should not even need to explain why that didn’t work.

SO.

The night before class and the critique, I’m digging through my negs looking for anything, and I mean anything and I found it in spades. I believe Babs, the teacher’s exact words were… “poorly conceived and weakly executed”. C

What went wrong? More than is on this page and I that care to admit right now. Enjoy this work or don't. Babs didn't.

We do one a week. We're supposed to find a photo or a book of them that is interesting to us and write something: what it meant to you, how it works, if it works at all etc. The ones I hand in have a copy of the image for her, Babs, to view but since this work is copyrighted or at least not mine, I have and will link to the artist's page or a page that shows their work or even the actual image I discussed.

These are my thoughts on the work, sometimes coherent thoughts, sometimes drivel. You decide. I'll post the rest as I do them. The ones below this post are the first six weeks worth.

This isn’t my favorite Barbara Ess work. (A shot of woman from the waist down in a frilly skirt with some kind of illuminated trim. She seems suspended in mid-air) It’s beautiful. It speaks to the dreaming line that floats between beauty and death, the flux it hovers over, the impermanent nature of everything. But it isn’t my favorite.

I haven’t ever seen my favorite Barbara Ess photograph in real life. I have only heard about in an article describing one of her gallery shows. It is a pinhole image of a hand-puppet shadow, an animal projected on a wall and the word "wildlife" scrawled on the same wall.

I am in love with the idea that you might paint with shadows and light using the most primitive means available and still arrive at a delicate result.

I am in love with the idea of the image: a false thing, the shadow animal, and the word signifying, telling us what it is but that it is not that at all. I love the lie.

I am in love with reality defined by negative space, defined by negation, defined by absence.

I am in love with the idea that dreams and reality merge, shadows creeping into the real.
This picture reminds me of those connections we make right before we fade to dead asleep, the halfling time when we hear the world around us, nestle in it’s perfume but what we see is a washy mix of our subconscious and the world shutting down around us.

It is how I imagine death, the slow separation of the sense. There is no longer a whole picture to be made, no meaning to be construed. We are at the mercy of our imagination and our memory so that maybe hell is not a place to go but the journey we take through our own life’s choices right before we pass into oblivion.

This is a quicky and I’m okay with that. I hope you are too.

I have Diane Arbus’ “Boy with a Toy Grenade” as my computer’s wallpaper. It was, for a long time, the way I felt all the time. I recently saw a copy of her contact sheet for that roll and it is funny to me how now that’s how I feel.

The boy looks so racked with anxiety. This little boy on the verge of letting loose a bomb even if it wasn’t real. It’s like the acid trip you might have where you believe you see your own death. It’s real enough in your head even it’s more a fantasy. This boy is gonna kill that bitch.

This boy seems crushed by his anxiety. He hates her. I also felt the weight of life that way. Everything was wrong and I had no control, just like this boy. I thought about suicide like some people think about the weather all day long. It’s always right in front of us.

That contact sheet was full of bad shots and missed moments. It was full of the boy getting it wrong. He was sweet and bright eyed, all the glory of unknowing rushing through him like a cool delicious spring.

That contact sheet was full of Diane Arbus’ frustration, her waiting for that decisive moment when fate would come together and give us that shot. It’s funny, the boy seems so plain. He seems happy and then bored and then annoyed. Diane is an intruder in his day. She is the glitch that seems to drive him mad.

You could argue out all the politics of the sixties that might make that picture a potent reminder of the war in Vietnam but I doubt, for Diane, that was the point at all. This was the freak she needed that day. It was how she could love, and if you believe Eudora Welty, that’s the only way you can make art work. You have to love your victim and your killer.

Diane drew out the monster in that boy. I reckon for arts sake it was worth it but I wonder if that boy sees this picture today and is as grateful. I have no idea but I look at it every day as a reminder of where I was.

My mama had died. I was broke and getting broker. My life was outta fucking control and all knew was eventually there was a silver bullet calling my name. And then something broke. You might want to know what I can’t say. Life lay its hands on my shoulders and all the muscles fell lose in it's grip.

It was just that simple. I still cry over mama. I’m still broke but I’m not afraid of it. It’s just life. It’s just art.

These days I let the weather change on it’s own.

Robb Kendrick’s work complicates my life.

You cannot look at this work as a man or as a woman and be an artist of any kind of value. You have to look at the body of the man and see his sexuality or his beauty as richly as you might see it in a woman and, if you want your work to matter, you cannot afford to look away. You have to own your gut.

Kendrick’s work, this piece in particular, has a rawness to it that sits in its construction. It is the novelty of tintypes that draws me. It is the artifact-ness of them. It is the idea that if you held it in your hand you would be holding the only one in existence, ever. There is one Mona Lisa. There is Night Café. Art should be like that. There is one moment, one vision, one heart.

It is certainly flawed, as the tintype process is so fast, you have to own the image even if the emulsion got laid down uneven or developed crooked. This type of process says the world is messy. It invites you to lay down in the unmade bed. It seems stained or soiled or unclean.

It’s imperfection is intoxicating but it is the rawness of the man in the picture that keeps me looking. He is unfinished. His tattoos are just black lines. He is bare chested. He is leaning out of the frame. His mouth, just opened and his eyes squint, seems to say he is unsure what Kendrick wants from him.

There is a subtle erotic nature to this picture like a black and white photo booth strip of two sailors arm in arm, in their sailor suits, grinning at each other. You might want to imagine them somewhere, unaware of their bodies, as they swim later that day on some foreign beach. You might imagine anything. I imagine this man as the Misfit, his eyes “red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking[1]”.

Maybe he’s just the Sal Mineo type, pressed forward, white knuckling the bed post for Jimmy Stark. It’s that kind a story that sits open ended waiting for the right person to sidle up to it and listen. I reckon it goes both ways. You have to be open to make it but you got be just as open to see what the artist has done or doesn’t even know he has done.

It seems to me that if you owned this tintype, you might put it some place special. Not like wall or a shelf but a drawer, someplace you kept those things too private for any guest, in your house, to see.

Good art is like that. It lays somewhere between the glory of God and the stickiest sins of the flesh, proof that in the heart's country we need have no boundries so that there could be no explaining why we tucked it away only the glorious blush of the unexpected.
[1] O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Francisco Mata Rosas took this picture with an Ansco Pix Pano, a cheap plastic “panoramic” camera. It’s a 35mm camera that vignettes an already tiny image. You could crop your own shot and get the same effect and you could argue that a better camera could have made a better picture but I doubt it.

The boys and the dog are playing on a beach that seems less than ideal. There’s the bridge in the distance, maybe worse. I imagine that Mikhailov shot of the Russian men taking the waters out side a factory leaning against the concrete drain. It has that feeling of being off somehow. And the dog isn’t menacing like in Moriyama’s stray dog picture. He seems to be saying just leave us alone. (This was bullshit name dropping on my part. The last line is true though. The dog seems ashamed. )

It’s kind of pathetic and sweet. The photographer is intruding. I try to take my wife’s picture all the time. There these moments that I swear to god are beautiful in that “this is real life” way but she always catches me and the tableau changes to something posed or her hand goes up.

Rosas managed to get the moment. They acknowledge him and seem to want him to leave and it only adds to the image. I wonder if when I catch my wife and she catches me if the moment I am there to grab is the one right after she sees me and after she throws up her hands, that moment when she thinks I gone.

They look and maybe that was his chance to put the camera down and apologize for intruding but he didn’t - he stayed and there they were in a kind a Mexican existential stand off. Who looks away first? Only the dog shows his heartbreak and seems to be saying, "These are my boys. This is our beach. You make it less by watching."

Writing can be the same as photography. Most people just live. They get up, shit, eat, fuck and sleep until they die. I am so driven to get it right, to understand it, to show people what I’ve seen that I punch keys like the Penitent finger beads, mumbling to God.

This picture reminds me that art is not life. Words are not real things. Life is life. The irony being, how would I know if I hadn’t seen this picture and then tried to tell you about it.

Maybe it’s true that the photographer doesn’t have the right to look away, that the only choice is when to shoot.

Maybe a better picture could have been taken but I doubt.

It was tough choosing which piece best represents Dave Anderson’s work. Some of his work inadvertently complements the toy aesthetic and some takes a more mythological bent. I chose to view that work that crossed into the fantastic without the aid of a trick lens. I choose an image that did it on the strength of its own weirdness.

This image is so completely simple: two cloths pins on the line but to me, on first sighting, a hummingbird. I have to wonder what Mr. Anderson thought.

It is that vision, seeing what is not there but is there that draws me. He is seeing into the magic of innocence. Without sounding too sentimental I can remember that spark things had before I started comparing them to other things, before I started seeing them for what they were like because I had not already seen them before.

Mr. Anderson saw something. It wasn’t two just cloths pins.

There is that clear IKEA imagery that people have taken to as art. The image of the place setting, the pillow stack. Everything is crisp and clean-lined. Everything exists in those images in newness of their being.

I know how this can be a study of a thing. Edward Weston’s pepper shots and curled woman shots show us things, are deep studies of form. I appreciate that. I’m not talking about that.

I mean that empty commercial so what crap. It’s crap. It is the world without death and disorder. It’s what being in an anal retentive mind must be like but without the terror waves of disintegration that rush over them all the time driving them to set papers edges to match pens on desks.

Dave Anderson is different. This piece is simple but in motion. It lives in the world. It is full of panic. It’s heart is beating a million beats a second. It is completely alive and it is on the precipice of it’s own mortality.

It is two close hangers fluttering on the line. It is a hummingbird. It is the ticklish wind hours before the twister hits.

Normally, if you go all the way to Africa to shoot wildlife you bring a telephoto lens or two. Not Nick Brandt. He brought a Pentax 67, generally using normal to wide lenses. It was such an inspired choice, a portrait camera and in the case of this photograph, he used a shallow depth of field to “black” out the background.

He used a portrait lens. He made portraits. There is this criticism often leveled at the ethnographic photographers of the 19th century, much later after the fact, that somehow they were denigrating the subject by posing them or by creating situations that were artificial. It was the way of the time.

Like Avedon said, there is no truth in photography. There is a millisecond of time captured that we decide is the truth, it looks like the truth. So they never got at the truth. Their pictures created the idea of the subject that the audience could hold onto. Brandt creates the idea of humanity in animals that we can hold onto. He does it by taking apart reality, by softening, by making it fantastic and just unreal. There is an intimacy, a closeness both from proximity and something else.

On the particular trip he took to Africa that generated his book "On This Earth" he took something like forty rolls of film. Only four or five survived the trip and even many of those negatives were flawed and damaged. The one we are looking at, in fact, is one of those.

Mr. Brandt’s image is so strong it seems to defy the damage done to it. It exists despite that quality. This is very interesting, how do you decide to give up or when do you decide to give in? That is to say, how and when can it be alright to be imperfect? Photography has a long recent history of photographers bashing it out over the hair line difference between two “near” perfect lenses. Photography is a craft built on perfection. It seems so dizzying sometimes.

How do you live in the face of perfection? How do you address each imperfect day with such a challenge. There is the argument that control or mastery of the tools you have makes stronger. There’s no arguing about that. This isn’t about that at all. This is about that moment when you say, even wrapped in flaws such as this image might be, what separates it from any other images, what makes it so clearly better, more direct? When do you say, it does not matter that this image is flawed because at some level something is happening, some alchemy that is stronger than flaw.

The purpose of the oversized negative carrier, to show how you didn’t crop the image at all, has been superseded by the “cool” roughness it lends the image, the extra cache it gives the images, the authenticity. The question might be, what separates that from the image whose “authenticity” occurred naturally? Yes of course, there is the control aspect creeping in. One artist made it and one artist stumbled onto it but what does that matter?

It is the central struggle for me right now. My prints are generally flawed, marked my haste or sloppy technique and I have struggled to overcome this with few good results so what am I to do?

I use distilled water when I can. I clean everything religiously. There is just some glitch in my ethic that roughens things up, darkens things. I can struggle against it and be miserable or I can give in just a little, just enough to see if it will work for me, the way I use my hands in the lab is my voice as a photographer. It is an exacting craft but it is one of hand and eye and mind. The eye sees, the mind decides and the hand does.

Nick Brandt’s tender eye and his rough hand made this portrait.