it's never summer

Google Glass will Not Steal Your Soul

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:25:00 -0700

Google Glass and photography has been a classic example of future shock. There are very few people that have used Google Glass for photography, a limited number of example photos, but many people are predicting that Glass will make public life a little bit more awful.

Sergey Brin, 2012

There are two variations of Google Glass photography paranoia: The first is public - that there will be less privacy in public and new variants of “creepshot” photographs. The second is personal - that your friends and family will use Glass to take bad photos of you eating. This a more realistic fear, because people are already posting unflattering and sometimes cruel photos on Facebook. It isn’t so much a loss of privacy, but rather an exposure of resentment and Schadenfreude. It has nothing to do with technology; people are using 20-year-old photographs from the film era in this context.

The public/privacy fear is often described in magical photography terms. Magical photography is what we imagine photographs can be like, when in reality they are far more banal. Camera companies use magical photography to convince us that a new and better camera can actually produce new and better photographs. Google does a little bit of this with Glass, promoting it as a camera that you can take into activity situations, like ballet dancing, sky diving and cycling. The tech alarmists use magical photography, writing about the Glass camera as if it has Blade Runner-style zoom and resolution.

Last week, Nick Bilton described being at the Google I/O conference, surrounded by dozens of people wearing Google Glass. His blog post ends with a scene at a urinal, where “my world came screeching to a halt.” Bilton attempts to strike fear deep in the heart of male readers: The Borg is coming to photograph your penis. The implied creepshot is magical photography, something like one of David Hockney’s Polaroid “joiners,” well-lit, not at all blurry, spanning from the subject’s feet up to his perfectly recognizable face.

There are two good primers to the UI and experience issues around using Glass as a computing device: “Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface” and “You Lookin’ at Me?” A camera that is connected to your face has the hands-free advantage, it’s at the ready, but it also has some disadvantages. Think about how much freedom a smartphone camera offers in terms of shooting angles. Google Glass actually makes it more difficult to shoot compromising photographs in public. Your face and eyes have to be pointed at, and fairly close to the subject. Once the face is the camera (again), it will probably make the average person a more conservative photographer. We are careful with our faces.

If nobody else has made this prediction, I will: The most humiliating photographs made with Google Glass will be self-portraits.

Two photos of color Donald Judd in Kodachrome, during...

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:41:10 -0700

Two photos of color Donald Judd in Kodachrome, during MOMA’s 2008 “Color Chart” exhibit. (see more of my Judd photos)

If you have any interest in Donald Judd, or thinking about color in art, you’ll want to listen to this week’s Modern Art Notes podcast.

Michael Jang, “The Jangs” It’s funny that...

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:04:00 -0700

Michael Jang, “The Jangs”

It’s funny that Michael Jang came to the Bay Area 40 years ago, under the influence of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, but created a great body of work around a Chinese-American family in a suburban house; along the lines of what Larry Sultan developed around his retired parents a few decades later.

Jang’s Aunt Lucy is a classic subject in photography, a character in a good novel who makes spending time with the book worthwhile. Any photograph she appears in complicates the composition with familial interactions: what’s she doing, what’s her expression, how does that affect her husband and children around her. In part this is due to Jang’s careful editing; Aunt Lucy doesn’t appear in that many of these photos, but she seems to preside over all of them.

For taking place mostly indoors, “The Jangs” offers plenty of chaos, with kids amped up on sugar, skiing indoors, reading under 70s lamps, arranged in front of Magnovox TVs with brick remotes, posing with gag Dr. Pepper bottles. A ventriloquist dummy makes a few appearances.

Then there is a photograph of Aunt Lucy and … Imogen Cunningham. At the opening I asked Jang: how did he get Imogen Cunnigham to have tea with Aunt Lucy? Apparently he was supposed to go with a school group to Cunningham’s house, but showed up hours late. She was not happy about it, until she saw Aunt Lucy and wanted a portrait of her (does this portrait exist?). They had tea and Imogen Cunningham looked through the young man’s portfolio. Jang said she had stacks of old prints around the house that she was selling for $100 each.

It’s interesting to compare this show with Garry Winogrand at SFMOMA - “The Jangs” offers a good dose what Winogrand’s work is missing. Personalities that jump across multiple contact sheets, people that know each other, relationships. If Robert Frank overlooked the suburbs and the seeds of American sprawl, Winogrand picked up on that, but then entirely missed what was going on inside the new construction.

The lone street photograph in the show, a 1973 selfie in downtown San Francisco, feels like Jang is contemporaneously photobombing a Winogrand, complete with the slightly confused young woman, hair blowing in the wind, young man in the 70’s shirt, the concerned man in the suit that is not sure about this photography business.

“The Jangs” is at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery until July 13. The series is also on Jang’s website.

Matt Nuzzaco, Very Large Array, New Mexico Rückenfigur (awesome...

Fri, 03 May 2013 07:54:36 -0700

Matt Nuzzaco, Very Large Array, New Mexico

Rückenfigur (awesome Flickr group | Tumblr tag) are those photographs or paintings of a person’s back in a landscape or composition. Mr. Nuzzaco’s photograph has another layer, which exploits the photographic “mistake” of having something in the background grow out of the subject’s head.

Wondering: is there is a word for utilizing background / foreground confusion? Because you can’t see the face in Rückenfigur, I always call it something-head. In this photograph, it’s the satellite dish-head. The are of course tree-heads, pole-heads, sign-heads, etc.

Saturation comparion of two versions of a William Eggleston...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:17:00 -0700

Saturation comparion of two versions of a William Eggleston photograph found online, with black and white version by me.

Color palettes of Alec Soth over William...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:44:00 -0700

Color palettes of Alec Soth over William Eggleston

previously…

portrait of Yasumasa Yanagisawa Early one evening we were...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0700

portrait of Yasumasa Yanagisawa

Early one evening we were walking across the pedestrian overpasses that criss-cross near Shibuya station, a busy area during the commute, and discovered Yasumasa Yanagisawa making photographs with an old 8x10 camera. That would be a nice surprise, but his camera was very different - he was leaning over a laptop that was connected to it. Attached to his 100-year-old camera was a typical flatbed scanner, which he was using to make an improvised digital back. I realized I was having an excellent “Tokyo Camera Style” moment and snapped this photo of him changing the back with my Yashicamat. He smiled, and pointed out that my camera was only 40 years old.

Yasumasa Yanagisawa has a blog (in Japanese) documenting the technique and sharing some of the photos he’s taken with this set up, see here, here and here.

My opinion of the Richard Prince - Patrick Cariou case changed...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:08:00 -0700

My opinion of the Richard Prince - Patrick Cariou case changed when I had a chance to see the book / catalog related to “Canal Zone,” the show of paintings that brought about the lawsuit. My impression of Prince’s paintings had been formed by two or three jpegs that most blogs and media sites used to illustrate the most obvious similarites of the Prince paintings and Cariou photographs. From reading almost all of the discussion about the case online, it seems these two or three jpegs were the only source for most writers, even those writing 500-1000 words on the topic. After looking at the book, which is now rare and expensive, my opinion was closer to today’s judgement: that most of the paintings are quite transformative.

My impressions of the paintings, from the book:

Prince is using the guitar-playing rasta man as a motif repeating across the works rather than the primary subject of any one painting, as the commonly used comparison jpegs suggest
Many of the paintings use several nude photographs of women in the compositions, which most media outlets would not reproduce.
The nude photographs seem to be sourced from vintage pornography magazines. (I recall reading that Prince inherited a collection of vintage pornography from Taschen, but I can’t find the source). These photographs are probably identifiable, yet I’ve never seen mention of their appropriation.
These paintings have nothing to do with rastas. Prince’s desire was to create descendants of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Woman II.” This intention is so obvious, it’s the red Porsche of an aging artist.

Prince often uses some Warholian formula that states the more obvious the appropriated source, the better the artwork will be (see his recent novel, “Catcher in the Rye”). That’s what’s odd about Cariou - Cariou as an artist and his books aren’t a very well-known source, even in photoland.

Mark Steinmetz and the Winogrand influence

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:34:00 -0700

Garry Winogrand, Utah, 1964

Mark Steinmetz opened his talk at California College of the Arts (sponsored by Pier 24, part of the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program) with the above Winogrand photo. He said he had discovered it in his high school library in Iowa; he didn’t learn the photographer’s name, but something about it seemed different from other photographs in magazines. Later, Steinmetz dropped out of the Yale MFA program and went to Los Angeles, because that’s where Winogrand was known to reside. Before Twitter or cell phones, Steinmetz managed to track him down. He spent time shooting with Winogrand during the last year of his life. And a few early works of his own in the slide deck were clearly Winogrand-inspired. I’m very familiar with Steinmetz’s work, read his interviews, yet I wasn’t aware of this direct Winogrand connection.

Mark Steinmetz, from Greater Atlanta

What’s interesting about this surprise, is that Steinmetz’s books and work seem like an antidote to Winogrand’s unfinished, unedited, agitated world. If you’ve listened to and read Winogrand interviews, there are several quotes about the desire never to make the same photograph twice, or repeat somebody else’s image. Winogrand said that photographs don’t tell stories (“they don’t have any narrative ability at all”), and he distanced himself from the perceived subject matter depicted in his work.

Steinmetz makes no effort to avoid the quotation or reprise. He often connects characters in his own photographs (a boy by a pond in Los Angeles, another boy on a bench in Paris) and with paintings (during the lecture he mentioned works by Raphael and Picasso). He embraces those references, of making books that refer to each other, of repeating themes. He discussed being in Rome, seeing a Bernini and wanting to make a photograph like it. His books South East and South Central are structured to echo each other.

From the number of times he mentioned it, Steinmetz mainly uses a 6x9 camera (perhaps the Fuji). He often uses a tripod, even for shots that look handheld. Steinmetz discussed the fact that outside of cities, America is often very empty. It’s not as feasible to snap photographs of people as Winogrand did in Manhattan or Los Angeles. Going in the other direction, Steinmetz approaches and talks to his subjects, sometimes altering where they stand or their pose, to get the best out of situations with natural light.

What he referred to a few times, perhaps the Winogrand influence, is somewhere in most of his portraits there’s some action or unexpected physical element. Even if he’s directing the subject a bit, even if the camera is on a tripod, there’s still a hand gesture, eating, stirring, waving.

Related to why and how certain subjects are captured photographs, if you haven’t listened to Ian Bogost’s short video on Garry Winogrand, do so. It was produced for a philosophy conference (object-oriented ontology). A key quote is, “people, events, social conditions aren’t in Winogrand’s photographs to become his subjects; they are there just because they were there. Just Because.”

Much of what Mark Steinmetz talked about during his lecture is covered in two excellent interviews: Ahorn magazine (Daniel Augschoell and Anya Jasbar) and Blake Andrews. In San Francisco a show of Steinmetz’s exquisite prints is up until the end of April at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. Finally, spend time at Steinmetz’s web site, it’s well-designed.

Nick DeWolf, Boston Marathon, 1975 Thinking of everyone...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:38:00 -0700

Nick DeWolf, Boston Marathon, 1975

Thinking of everyone involved with the Boston Marathon. I’ve finished a few marathons - it’s one of the slightly insane, wonderful things human beings do. Thousands at a time. It’s much bigger than any violent act.