Funston

Beach Dog, 2009

Funston

Beach Dog, 2009

Funston

Beach Dog, 2009

Crayon

Loading Dock, California Street, 2009

Crayon

Stairway, California Street, 2009

Crayon

Overspray, Fillmore Street, 2009

Eliss

Got an iPhone? Check out Eliss. Almost too hard to play, but so trippy it doesn't matter.

Stuck!

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Permian Land, 2004

Someone mentioned the other day that my opinions are a little out of step. I know that. My pictures too. What I don't know is how it happened.

Actually, I have an idea.

I took pictures from about 1965 to 1975. Then I did something else for 30 years. When I started taking pictures again, I found myself in a time warp. Not only was I taking the same pictures as in the old days, I didn’t like anything else.

But in this version, at least, there may still be some hope for me. After all, artists grow by working through cliches and discarded styles. (Until, if they’re lucky, they arrive someplace new.)

Maybe I just have more of that to do than most.

On the other hand, I don’t seem to be making much progress. Worse still, I don’t seem to care. So maybe, deep down, I really believe in what I’m doing.

In which case there’s no hope.

Gray City

Mission Street, 2007

Gray City

Broadway, 2008

San Francisco

Near Laguna Street, 2007

Hopper

Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room, 1963

I saw the Hopper & Company show, recently at Fraenkel, a couple of times before it closed. Surprisingly, it wasn’t very good. The Hoppers were mostly second rate, and their connections to the photographs unnecessarily literal.

Still, it was a pleasure to see in one exhibit photographs by Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, and William Eggleston.

And the idea of the show was a good one. Hopper’s influence was amazingly broad. As Geoff Dyer has rightly said: “Hopper could, with some justification, claim to be the most influential American photographer of the twentieth century - even though he didn’t take any photographs.”

More interesting, though, is the apparent limit of that influence. Hopper died in 1967. The latest photograph in the show was an Eggleston from 1974. (There were also a couple of nice Shores from the early 70s.) No one would say that Hopper’s influence somehow just evaporated, but it’s pretty clear that photography began to change course in the late 70s and early 80s, and that it remains on a different course today.

What changed? If it can be characterized in a phrase, I think photographers became more interested in narrative than in visual form. Or from a slightly different point of view, the influence on photography of the purely visual arts was supplanted by that of art forms in which narrative dominates - cinema and the short story in particular. (While at the same time the political content of photography virtually vanished.)

And so Robert Frank and Robert Adams were supplanted by the likes of Gregory Crewdson.

Some would say that narrative was there all along. That if it's true that every picture tells a story, it’s true in spades of Hopper. Wim Wenders, for example, once said: “An Edward Hopper painting is like the opening paragraph of a story. A car will drive up to a filling station, and the driver will have a bullet in his belly. They are like the beginning of American films.”

That may be. But what’s been lost now is the astonishing formal structure of even the least structured Hopper. And all that's left is the story.

I miss photographs that appeal first to the eye.

Crayon

Colonnade, Lake Street, 2008