Maybe It's the Color

Almost all photography today is in color. If, as has been suggested, photography is presently in a period of decline - qualitatively, not commercially - is there any connection between that circumstance and the ubiquity of color?

Good question. The answer, I think, is in the nature of color, in how color is used in photographs.

Color, first and foremost, is an expressive element, a formal element, like line, or light, or shape, or space.

Here, William Eggleston almost literally transmutes light into color.


William Eggleston, Red Ceiling, Greenwood Miss. 1973 . Copyright W. Eggleston

Here, Stephen Shore uses color to link forms and define space.


Stephen Shore, US 10,Post Falls, Id. 1974 . Copyright Stephen Shore

Here, Wijnanda Deroo's color amplifies light and form and makes them even more expressive.


Wijnanda Deroo, Cafe Merino, Chihuahua, Mexico, 2001
Copyright Wijnanda Deroo.

But sometimes color is used, not as a formal element, but for its descriptive qualities. Because most of us see in color, a color photograph may be understood as more realistic than one without color. As Stephen Shore points out in The Nature of Photographs: "Color ... adds a new level of descriptive information and transparency to the image. It is more transparent because one is stopped less by the surface - color is more like how we see."

That's not entirely correct, though. It isn't the surface of a black and white photograph that impedes the viewer, it's the abstraction, the emphasis of the formal. At the same time it makes the photograph "more like how we see," color makes it less abstract. This can be risky. Sometimes even a slight increase in descriptive information - with its concomitant reduction in abstraction - is too much for a photograph.

This picture by Robert Adams, for example, has good enough bones to survive almost anything, including rendition in color (if you can imagine it).


Robert Adams, Mobile Home, Colorado Springs, CO, 1972
Copyright Robert Adams

But this one by Henry Wessel does not. In black and white, it might have just enough formal interest to hold its own. In color, it is merely pretty.


Henry Wessel, Real Estate Photo No. 91517, 1991. Copyright H. Wessel

And this is true of a lot of work being done today. Reliant primarily on subject, without much formal strength, such pictures are easily tipped, by their quotidian color, into banality.

(Wessel's excellent black and white work, recently on display at SFMOMA, may also be seen at Rena Bransten.)

Where She Lived

Suicide

The other day I started a post about the widespread use of the term "cowardly" in reference to suicide bombings. From September 11, 2001, to the present, that has been the epithet most predictably applied to such attacks. In the post, I was going to say:

I don't get it. I can see how it might be cowardly to drop bombs from an airplane beyond the reach of ground fire, or to launch a cruise missile from a ship hundreds of miles from its target, or to fly one of those Predator drones from the comfort of your office in Langley. But suicide bombing? Nuts, maybe, but not cowardly.

But then came Virginia Tech, and I was glad I never finished that post. Something about the killings there made me question its conclusion, although I'm still not sure why. Is it that the victims at VT were in some way more innocent than other victims of suicide attacks? Why would that be? Is it, perhaps, because the attack there was not political, was not an act of war?

Or was it?

Vintage v. Contemporary?

This "vintage v. contemporary" thing is a little strange.

On the one hand, I'm certainly grateful to Christian Patterson for his kind words. (Around here, "opinionated" is a kind word.)

On the other, I can't agree that there is any legitimate distinction between "vintage" and contemporary photography. Art exists on a continuum thousands of years long. Even the small part occupied by photography extends back a century and a half. In terms of its relevance to the present, each photograph on that continuum might just as well have been taken today. And every one of those photographs is available for comparison to any other one.

There are lots of good photographs being made today. And many that are not. Same as it always was. At every point in time, there is good work and bad. Everyone who looks at pictures has an obligation - to the pictures, if nothing else - to make that distinction. To look critically. That's how, over time, the bad work gets discarded.

What Was I Thinking?

Help.

Yosemite - Parking Lot #5

Yosemite - Parking Lot #4

Yosemite - Parking Lot #3

Yosemite - Parking Lot #2

Yosemite - Parking Lot #1

Yosemite

Tod Papageorge

Tod Papageorge, Shea Stadium, New York, 1970. Copyright T. Papageorge

I like what Tod Papageorge had to say recently about growth and failure and photography:

"You walk out the door and—bang!—like everyone else, you're part of the great urban cavalcade. But unlike everyone else, you're carrying an amazing little machine that, joined with a lot of effort, can pull poetry out of a walk downtown. All of the failed pictures you've ever made, all of the other photographs you've ever loved, even songs and lines from poems walk with you too, insinuating themselves into your decisions about what you'll make your photographs of, and how you'll shape them as pictures."

From an interview in Bomb.

(His new book of Central Park photographs, Passing Through Eden, will be published in July.)

(Go Yankees!)

What Was I Thinking?

Having recently expressed some criticism of excessively dramatic printing, I offer this as evidence of my credentials in that field. (Not to mention in the closely related discipline of speciously dramatic subject matter.)

(Farsighted genius that I am, I just figured out that I can't possibly continue to post two decent pictures a week here indefinitely. Therefore, I'm hoping I can use this "What Was I Thinking" thing to sneak in some stuff even I don't much like, but that may still be entertaining.)