What contemporary photographers are you interested in?

My favorite right now is Martin Parr.

I am not really into the whole art thing. I just want to use my camera to document everyday life and Parr is very good at that.
 
Araakii said:
My favorite right now is Martin Parr.

I am not really into the whole art thing. I just want to use my camera to document everyday life and Parr is very good at that.
Click to expand...

I find him to be a really nice person, with great attitude and some really interesting things to say. When I saw The Changing of a Myth movie, I really liked him. But I just can't get into his photographs.
 
Frank Version Two said:
I could easier tell you the ones that I despise!

So much of what is touted as successful and "of today" is so cold and academic, it's like the mass of "art" photographers have lost the entire notion of gesture, spontaneity, and a large part of what makes photography photographic. Instead the photos are more about their performance in making them, these self-absorbed, pretentious a-holes.

Instead they are just making flat images with cameras and call them "art".

And then, repeat the same damn picture, maybe in a different place but the same flat boring thing, over and over and over until they call it a "body of work" as if it were giant paint-by-numbers set, a ready-made MFA thesis repeated for years and years after graduation....

I mean Hell, all Gursky did was distill the 10,000 MFA students who followed the New Topographics doctrinaire and made his pieces larger and more expensively....

Modern portraitists are even worse, look at the Tate Portrait show for hollowing bad pictures.

Give me a Gene Smith or a Richard Avedon any day, they'd shoot circles around these silly poofs.

I don't think Terry Richardson could lick Smith or Avedon's boots but at least the guy has a personality, which is far more than most of the recent "artists".
Click to expand...

I have to strongly disagree on most accounts. To me this nostalgia for the photographic 'look' and the spontaneous captured moment is nothing more than that - nostalgia. You can still find it everywhere you look in commercial photography and I do have a soft spot for it but it doesn't make me think at all. I like photography that makes me think. Some of it is more academic and some not so much. The best of it, IMO, is both academically challenging and aesthetically pleasing (Jeff Wall for example).

I do agree that the tendendy of many art photographers to do typological work is a bit tedious and, frankly, also outdated. However, I do think that the 'body of work' or group of images as an artwork is more important than ever. More often than not I'm not so much interested in the single image but in the group of images. I think Roe Ethridge, for example, shows a remarkable sensitivity for how photography works in this digital age. Yet no single image of his is a 'masterpiece'.

I think you're totally wrong with your assessment of Gursky. Being a student of the Bechers of course the New Topographics 'movement' (I wouldn't call it doctrinate) is a strong influence in his work but I think he's also shown that he's a master of structure and has an astute understanding of human society. Not all of his work is good but where he's at his best I think you can see that his high standing in art circles is well deserved.

Don't know about Richard Avedon 'shooting circles aroung these poofs'. Avedon was great at his greatest but if he were alive now I don't think he'd have much to contribute. His stuff from the late 90s looks just boring and outdated. And as for Terry Richardson. Yeah, sure, he has a personality. So what? 'Personalities' like TR are a dime a dozen. I've never spent a second thinking about any of his pictures after I stopped looking at them. He does deserve some credit for turning the camera on himself and making himself a kind of pop icon and also for ruthlessly exposing the camera as the exploitational tool it always was.

Don't get me wrong there is an awful lot of crap on the market of contemporary art photography but portraying the most successful as just a bunch of con-artists (excuse the pun) who have somehow tricked the stupid, pretentious artworld into liking their stuff is just ridiculous. People keep coming back to them for a reason. Don't get me wrong, I like Dan Winters but there's a reason his kind of work is firmly rooted in the commercial world. Pretty pictures are good for selling things but they don't really make you think beyond that.
 
Jamie123 said:
...Don't get me wrong, I like Dan Winters but there's a reason his kind of work is firmly rooted in the commercial world. Pretty pictures are good for selling things but they don't really make you think beyond that.
Click to expand...

You make some good arguments but tell you what, it's an academic bet since we'll both be dead (at least I hope so!) but in one hundred years, whose pictures will be more valuable, Winters or Gursky's?

I bet on Winters.

For the same reason that Matthew Brady's pictures still resonate, why his photo of Abraham Lincoln is almost holy.... we want to see what people looked like.

For that matter, the best editorial/commercial work will age gracefully into art status while most of this carefully constructed "art" stuff may well just be forgotten.
 
Last edited:
Frank Version Two said:
You make some good arguments but tell you what, it's an academic bet since we'll both be dead (at least I hope so!) but in one hundred years, whose pictures will be more valuable, Winters or Gursky's?

I bet on Winters.

For the same reason that Matthew Brady's pictures still resonate, why his photo of Abraham Lincoln is almost holy.... we want to see what people looked like.

For that matter, the best editorial/commercial work will age gracefully into art status while most of this carefully constructed "art" stuff may well just be forgotten.
Click to expand...

Matthew Brady lived in a very different age. We are inundated with images nowadays, especially images of celebrities. That's why the group of images as a whole has become more important than the single image these days. A single great image is boring, it doesn't tell you much other than that the creator is a very image savvy person and knows what works and what doesn't.

I don't know Dan Winters but talking to a few celebrity photographers I've often noticed that they struggle with the inherent meaninglessness of their subject matter especially later in their career. They know that what they do is make great images of celebrities in order to sell magazines but at the same time they realize that today's mag is tomorrow's old paper. That's why most of them do personal projects that strongly differ from their usual subject matter.

I think there can be no doubt that in a hundred years Gursky's work will be more valuable than Winters. Gursky's work has a firm place in the canon of important contemporary artworks and his name has found its way into art history books. Nobody's writing papers about Winters so I doubt that he's going to be remembered much as the memory of the high-gloss editiorial magazine world isn't very good.
But that's not an argument for the merit of either of their work, I'm just saying that Gursky's work is here to stay for better or for worse. This idea that somehow the celebration of certain artists in the art world today is just a fluke and that in a hundred years every one will come to their senses and change their mind is just not realistic. What museums buy today will remain in their collections for years to come. What private art collectors will buy now they will pass on to their children. You can think that the art world is just a bunch of pretentious self-absorbed people but there's no indication that this will change anytime soon.

But really, I do personally think that Gursky's work very good and that he deserves every bit of fame he has. Granted, some of his more recent work is a bit boring but his work from the 80s and 90s is exceptional.
 
Last edited:
Jamie123 said:
....Matthew Brady lived in a very different age. ~... I think there can be no doubt that in a hundred years Gursky's work will be more valuable than Winters....
Click to expand...

I still don't agree (in a friendly way!) and I'll concede that any particular favorite artist is a personal subjective choice. But, if we look at the larger picture and return to the past, the New Topographers are analogous to the 19th-Century landscape photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan and Carlton Watkins.... Whereas the portraitists like Winters could be compared to Nadar (the original celebrity portrait photographer!) and Matthew Brady.

And while it is all valuable work, I'll dare to say that after 100 years, a lot of the academic and art gallery "value" will have been long forgotten and stripped away and the work will have to relate to our future society... and I think the portraits, even if they are of Tom Cruise, are going to be more important than the photos of a supermarket.

I think being collected and fawned over by galleries now is not really an indicator of future worth. Galleries like big, decorative - expensive - pictures. That doesn't mean they will be significant over time, as people who paid $300K for a Starn Twins collage in the 80s have unfortunately found out.

Or for that matter, the people who thought Henry Peach Robinson was the be-all, end-all of photography 100 years prior.

Anyway, unrelated to the above, this lady popped up on the chatter today and I think she has some amazing stuff: http://jendavisphoto.com
 
Last edited:
frank, i agree with you on jen davis. i had just seen something earlier today about her work. this is important stuff in light of the skinny we are bombarded with 24/7 ...
 
reaperman said:
I'm starstrucked by the work of Rinko Kawauchi.
Click to expand...

Yeah, 川內倫子 Kawauchi Rinko, very interesting...
Another interesting one, 長島有里枝 Nagashima Yurie, also female and one year younger than Kawauchi.
織作峰子 Orisaku Mineko, I like her works.
Or more famous one, 蜷川實花 Ninagawa Mika, same age w Kawauchi (b. 1972).
 
I find huge inspiration in Patrick Joust's color work in Baltimore. His photographs show a side of reality that most people have only seen through The Wire. His can be found
here.

Another photographer that has always grabbed my attention was Mike Brodie, aka The Polaroid Kidd. He documents his life and many others' on the rails. Not all of his photos are easy on the eyes but they have a true grittiness and raw feeling to them. His work is not the easiest to find online but that's due to his lifestyle.

As far as well known photographers, Edward Burtynsky has left more of an impression on me than anyone else. Same goes for Nehmzow's Hydro Power Projects.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom