Bill Brandt (2)

Bill Brandt, Loch Slapin, Isle of Skye, 1947. Copyright Bill Brandt.

When I first got interested in photography, Bill Brandt was the photographer in whom I was most interested. So when I went to search for what he had said about atmosphere, a few weeks ago, it was nice to spend a couple of hours looking at his pictures, something I hadn't done in a while.

For the first time I can remember, though, I was moved to question the aggressiveness with which many of those pictures are printed.


Bill Brandt, Barbary Castle, 1948. Copyright Bill Brandt.

I knew that Brandt's darkroom work has always been the subject of some criticism, and that the contrast with which he printed increased noticeably over his lifetime. But I had never before been as struck by the extent to which he used contrast, and a general printing down of everything but the highest highlights, to achieve the atmosphere for which he was known.


Bill Brandt, Snicket, Halifax, 1985. Copyright Bill Brandt

And I was a little disappointed. Is all this drama really necessary? Wouldn't these pictures be just as powerful if there were a few more grays in between all those blacks and whites?


Bill Brandt, Halifax, 1937. Copyright Bill Brandt.

I was reminded of something John Szarkowski said not too long ago:

"In a bad photograph, a lot of the time, the frame isn’t altogether understood — there are big areas of unexplained chemicals. It’s especially difficult as the picture gets bigger. If it’s small, a little piece of black can look like a dark place, right? But as it gets bigger, eventually it just turns into a black shape. And you look at the surface of the picture and it reminds you of the chemical factories on Lake Erie, creating pollution problems by making synthetic materials out of soybeans and petroleum derivatives. And you don’t want that. The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It’s not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You’re not supposed to look at the thing, you’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window. And everything behind it has got to be organized as a space full of stuff, even if it’s only air."

I like that. But I do know that many people think the basic materials of silver gelatin printing are inherently beautiful, and that others spend inordinate amounts of time, whether they print with silver or with ink, wondering whether their blacks are really black enough.

Maybe they're too black.

Yes We Have No

The Times reported last week that Chiquita, the banana producer, was permitted to settle, by payment of a fine, charges that from 1997 to 2004 it gave $1.7 million to support Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups classified by the United States government as terrorist organizations.

Yesterday, the government began and ended its trial of David Hicks, an Australian arrested in Afghanistan and held for over five years at Guantanamo. Although the proceeding was straight out of Kafka - Hicks could not call witnesses in his defense, and could be convicted on the basis of evidence that was not disclosed, or was coerced from him - the government was forced to abandon all of its original charges against him. Instead, it sought to justify his five years of confinement and abuse on the sole ground of "material support for terrorism." To which he pleaded guilty, after two of his three lawyers were ejected from the courtroom.

The extent of injustice in this country is almost intolerable.

Popular Photography

Writing in L.A. Weekly last fall, Holly Myers created a minor tempest with the following:

"In thinking about Diane Arbus, as one does from time to time, I came to a distressing realization: that I couldn’t name a single photographer subsequent to Arbus (and Frank and Winogrand and Friedlander and Eggleston and the other greats of her generation) who ranked on anywhere near the same level, which is to say, who thrilled me near as broadly, deeply or consistently."

The tempest notwithstanding, I think Myers was right. There is something about much of contemporary photography that is not satisfying. But I'm not sure the cause to which she pointed is the operative one.

Myers attributed the decline to the elevation of concept over feeling. I think the problem is that contemporary photography too often lacks formal elegance or distinction. In its place, many photographers appear to believe that a clever, or topical, or referential subject will itself suffice. It seldom does.

Consider Brian Ulrich, for example. Ulrich is a good photographer, recently selected by PDN as one of 30 "new and emerging photographers to watch" for 2007. And his pictures are, I think, fairly representative of a style of photography that is widespread. Here's an example of his recent work:

Brian Ulrich, Kenosha, WI (2003). Copyright Brian Ulrich.

A nice picture. Modern commerce in a world of discordant pattern and flat, dispiriting light. With some spilled milk for those inclined to the allegorical.

Now here's another picture of things for sale, this one by Lee Friedlander:

Lee Friedlander, Cincinnati, Ohio (1973). Copyright Lee Friedlander.

It is, in my opinion, qualitatively different, not just a photograph of retail life, but one in which spatial ambiguity and formal complexity combine to transcend that subject matter.

Or take this photograph by Alec Soth:

Alec Soth, Melissa (2005). Copyright Alec Soth

Soth, who has made some excellent photographs, is in or close to the very top rank of photographers today. Not long ago, he identified this picture (in the Guardian) as among his favorites. One of the things he especially likes about it, he said, is that water stain in the lower left. "It was raining out, and it feels like the Falls are creeping in, tugging at her dress."

Now consider this photograph by Manuel Alvarez Bravo:

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Woman Brushing Her Hair (1935) Copyright M. Alvarez Bravo

Although Alvarez Bravo is at least a generation removed from Arbus and her cohort, I chose this picture because the object in the lower right hand patch of light - Is it a scorpion? The fringe of a serape? - serves the same emotional function as the stain in Soth's portrait of Melissa.

Beyond that, though, the pictures have little in common. Soth shows us a surprisingly affectless woman, given the occasion, sitting alone in a place even less inflected than her expression. It's nicely done, no question, but it does not go beyond that description of its subject matter. Alvarez Bravo, on the other hand, offers something very different: vanity and mortality in gorgeous but chilling chiaroscuro.

Are these comparisons valid? I don't know. There's always something suspect about generalizations across generations of artists. Still, I think these pictures may illustrate at least part of what Myers was talking about. What's missing in them, though, is not emotion but something else, something formal, something in that intersection of light and shadow and shape and void that enables a photograph to transcend whatever it might be a picture of.

(Jeff Wall recently said something interesting in this context:

“Believing in the specialness of what you are photographing is a disaster. Then you think the photograph will be good because of what is in it. Cézanne taught me that that is not true.”

From the New York Times.)

Where She Lived

Where She Lived

Enrique Metinides

Enrique Metinides, Untitled, 1979 Copyright Enrique Metinides

Michael Kimmelman, in the Times, had a slightly different take on the sources of surrealism in photography:

"That beautiful woman with her arm draped just so over a bent streetlamp, her face passive, open-eyed, with a delicate trickle of blood that matches her lipstick, can't really be dead, can she? She must be an actress.

"Actually she is an actress: Adela Legarreta Rivas, who was struck on Avenida Chapultepec one April day in 1979 by a white Datsun. There's the car in the background, in the middle of the street, its side crumpled like paper. Mr. Metinides's picture looks too good to be true (if good can describe such a horrible accident), except that it isn't. It's surreal because life is."

Television #2

Things are better now.

Television #1

For the longest time, all we could get around here were gardening shows.

Redon

Odilon Redon, Eye Balloon, 1878, charcoal on paper

On a continuing theme, here are two pictures by Odilon Redon.

Both seek to express something unconscious.

One is invented. The other had its origin, at least, in real things.


Odilon Redon, Vase of Flowers, 1905, oil on paper

One is clever. The other is powerful.

There is a similar dynamic in photography.

San Francisco

"Of course the common people don't want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Hermann Goering, at Nuremberg

Yet Another Post About Jeff Wall, This One Involving Joerg Colberg

Jeff Wall, Men waiting, 2006. Copyright Jeff Wall.

Writing the other day about Jeff Wall's MOMA show, Joerg Colberg, on Conscientious, had this to say about contrivance in photography:

"Time and again I've come across someone saying that there was something wrong if a photographer was spending a lot of time and effort on a single, staged photo. . . . I don't know what it is that bothers me about this kind of criticism, but for me I feel very uncomfortable about it. . . . Why is it wrong to elaborately stage photos, especially if the goal is to create a piece of art that references or follows tradition? . . . How is hiring twenty people and making them wait in some location until the light is right bad? And how would it be different from waiting for days in a spot to take some landscape photo? Why leave the staging of sets and scenes to the people with movie cameras? Is it the belief that photography is somehow more "real" or "authentic" when it's just a snapshot?"

Good questions. If Colberg's point is that there are no valid a priori objections to forms or modes of art, I would agree. Good art works. Bad art doesn't. Of course, this approach leaves lots of room for individual opinion. Eventually, though, a critical consensus will form. We may still be too close to the photography of which he speaks to have such perspective.

Nevertheless, reading the Times Magazine article on Wall, I was struck by the artist's own - perhaps unconscious - ambivalence about his work. For example, instead of hiring actors to play the role of the workers in "Men Waiting," above, he went to an actual corner where such men congregate and hired 20 of them to stand around at a site more to his liking. For a work entitled "In front of a nightclub," he recreated the scene in his studio, complete with dirt and moss in the cracks of the foundation, details that could not be seen in the finished photograph. And "The Flooded Grave" was populated with not just any sea creatures, but ones selected by marine biologists from a single offshore spot.

Why? "I wanted to make it as real as I could," said Wall. But, if there is nothing troubling about contrivance, why bother? Who would know the fish were inauthentic? Who would care? After all, they're swimming in a grave.