Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
Back in the spring of this year, the good folks at Mus Mus (who prefer to remain anonymous) approached me about contributing to their new Mus-Mus project, @Paris. I gently declined due to an already overflowing plate, but they came back a month or so later and asked again, “just to make sure.” I think I again gently declined, but by the time they knocked on the door a third time, I had been thinking about what I would contribute to an online photo-project about Paris.
What I had been thinking about was the above photograph.
Since childhood, this photograph has been lodged in my memory banks. Truth be told, it’s my only connection to Paris. I’ve never been to the city, and while the romance and history of the city definitely has its hold on me, I’ve just never had occasion to get there.
But I’ve been there numerous times through the history of the life of Abdu’l-Baha and the talks he gave in that city almost exactly a century ago. I wrote back and said that if I were to contribute it would be about this photograph, and was that ok? The Mus-Mus folks were so enthusiastic and encouraging that I was glad I had decided to say Yes.
The essay is now written and the @Paris project is live and launched. And to be completely honest, of all the work I’ve been busy with this summer, this is my favorite thing. My piece is just one small touchstone of a much larger, thoughtful online “archive” of photographs by contemporary photographers, about Paris. The jurors were Stephen Shore, my good friend Denise Wolff, of Aperture, and curator/writer Ulrich Baer, who also contributed a wonderful, lengthier essay about Paris and photography. The archive is here. An excerpt from my essay is below:
In 1908, the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress revolted against the despotic Sultan Abdu’l-Hamid. This brought to an end the centuries-old Ottoman Empire and paved the way for a semi-secular government based in the ancient city of Constantinople. With that singular, revolutionary act, all political and religious prisoners throughout the Empire were freed. Abdu’l-Baha Abbas, the man in a white turban pictured in the middle of this photograph, tasted freedom for the first time since childhood. He was 65 years old.
This photograph was made in Paris in the autumn of 1911. Abdu’l-Baha stayed in the city for nearly two months, near the Trocadero Gardens adjacent to the Avenue de Camoëns. After over 50 years of exile from his native Persia, and imprisonment for espousing the universal ideals of the teachings of his father, Baha’u’llah, he had left, by steamer ship, the prison-city of Akka where he had been under house arrest since the age of 24, and embarked on a journey to the West. First London, then Paris and eventually New York City hosted his visit as he sought to create new bridges between the peoples, cultures, religions and ideals of the East and West.
In this photograph, we see Abdu’l-Baha standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, with the Champ de Mars visible in the hazy background….
To read the full essay
who is mus-mus.org?
mus-mus is a collaborative photography space that yokes ideas and images together in an experimental and playful way that seems most appropriate for an internet based salon of an increasingly post-consumer world. In keeping with this ethic we prefer a mildly anonymous position and ‘authorlessness’. Keeping mouths shut about who we are, we hope you will better know the pictures, projects and ideas.
Tags: @Paris, Abdu'l-Baha, Denise Wolff, Mus-Mus, Stephen Shore, Ulrich Baer
Posted in My Published Writing, Photography | No Comments »
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
I’m teaching a history of contemporary photography course this semester at the College of Santa Fe. Thus far we have read, in its entirety and out loud in class, The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore. It’s one of those books that lays a foundation for a semester (if not a lifetime) of discussion about photographs and how they operate on and within us—and likewise, how we, mentally, operate on them.
This post is primarily for my students (but anyone can follow along).
Readings for our Friday, February 20th class include the following (to be found on the web):
* Two reviews of the Lee Friedlander retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Review 1 is here and review 2 is here.
* The text of the essay to William Eggleston’s Guide, by John Szarkowski. A selection of Eggleston’s images from that body of work can be found here.
* The text of the interview I conducted with Stephen Shore last Spring, which can be found here (on this blog).
Some photographs by Lee Friedlander from that exhibition:
Some photographs by William Eggleston from his MoMA show:
Tags: Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
After posting my interview with Stephen Shore a few months ago, I’ve received comments from several photographers along these lines:
“I’ve never seen the reasoning behind using large format laid out better than in this interview. Of course, to achieve the effect Shore talks about, today you can use a high resolution digital camera of considerably smaller format as well…”
This comment in particular made me think about how the tools we use affect our results. I’m talking about the relationship between craft and art.
There are several ways that any tool—here, a large format camera—affects the way one works and, by association, affects the way one envisions and thinks about one’s surroundings. The first, and perhaps easiest to grasp, is the physical interface required by the tool. When Shore stated that he’s “pretty much” put the 8×10 camera away because it’s a lot of work getting it out, he’s talking about the physical interface. It’s a heavy object; it requires a tripod; it’s bulky; there are a lot of attendant tools—level, loupe, dark cloth, shutter-release cord, something to stand on, large lenses and large film holders—required to make a single photograph. All of the physical activity required to make an image becomes part of the process in an intimate way and creates parameters that your body must accommodate and work within.
This physical activity bleeds into the mental activity of making an image with that particular camera (and this is the second way in which one’s tools affect the way one works). The methodical precision required by the 8×10, I’m arguing, leads to a methodical precision on the mental level. Because a relatively large amount of time is required to simply deal with the equipment, a corresponding large amount of mental time goes into the image—the type of image—that one makes. The camera physically and mentally slows you down, makes you more attentive in certain ways.
The converse is true of using a hand held camera; the different physical interface with the tool leads to a corresponding different mental interface with one’s surroundings. Walking around with a 35mm SLR is simply physically different than walking around with a tripod and an 8×10. We also mentally adapt how we look at the world based on the camera we’re using at the moment. And on an even more minute level, different types of hand held cameras make one think and view the world differently. The physical interface between a point-and-shoot (like the Ricoh* GR1, for instance) and a 35mm SLR (like the Leica* R8) is quite different.
This can also be understood when it comes to “thinking” in color or black-and-white, and represents the third way that one’s tools affect the way one works. I’ve heard (and am intimate with the experience myself) many photographers talk about “seeing” in black-and-white or color. With certain tools—in this case cameras and film/pixels—you assess the world in one way, and with different tools, you assess it another way.
The comment the photographer made that one can “achieve the effect” of Shore’s work with a high-resolution camera is false on all three of these levels. Walking around with a hand-held medium format camera is both physically and mentally different than walking around with an 8×10. The last element, which has to do with the materials of the tools, also comes into play here. The way light reacts with film and chemistry is also different than the way light is registered digitally on sensors. It’s not better, just different. Perhaps the best analogy here is the difference between oil and acrylic paint. They simply look different because they are different.
Granted, some of the differences are extremely subtle, but to the trained eye, they are just that differences. (For example, place a sheet of text printed with letterpress next to a sheet of the same paper printed with the same text from an inkjet and the majority of common folk won’t register the difference. Show any one familiar with printing presses and they will see the wide differences.)
Just as there are radical differences in the look of an albumen print and a Polaroid print, or the look between a Cartier-Bresson photograph and an Irving Penn, my argument is that not all of the difference rests on the creative vision of the artist. Some of the difference—and how we value or judge or critique those images—is because of the tools, their materials, and our physical interaction with them.
Any thoughts?
[added 8/14: I'm not concerned with placing a value judgment on any one group of tools/cameras. If anything, the 20th century has amply shown that great images and works of art can be made with the humblest of tools as well as the most complex, technologically advanced of tools. My main concern was to map out some thoughts about the mere fact that our use of certain tools will affect us in ways that are specifically relative to those certain tools. Some people will find that they are most creative with one particular tool used over and over while others will find themselves able to flow from tool to tool. Again, my point is that with each different tool and its variables, they will "picture" things slightly differently. Thanks for all the comments!]
* I’m not on the payroll of any camera manufacturers.
Tags: Stephen Shore
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