New York Controversial Portrait Prize

[mich rassena]

Actually, even at the provided portrait size, which is obviously too small not even to judge, but actually see it, I could clearly see the face. I think most of you are going to find it in the upper right corner.

The winner case in this case is in using film as photographic media, yet, using it as the canvas.

The complain from former Herald and current camera club guy is the case of vision limited by the photography downsized to the level of trade.
While those of us who see photography as the form of art are familiar with portraits like this:

Courtesy of www.PabloPicasso.org

The portrait as true form of art is something which gives impression, but not always simplified and direct image.

It is in Russian, but easy to get the picture what guys are recognizing person on the portrait:
https://youtu.be/VSyiJ1xb9Pw?t=3m11s

🙂

Is controversial portrait art? I'd agree that it is. Is it good art? I'm not so sure. Is it photography? I'd call it more of a photogram.

Why do people have a problem with this? For myself, it seems a little unfair, as if there was a implied range of work accepted under the title "portrait photograph" and someone submitted a poem and won.

I kind of like the idea of blowing the doors off the category and forcing the next group of photographers to second guess their work as too conventional, and maybe create something a little bit unique.

That said, there are still plenty of people, young and old who haven't adjusted to "modern" art, that is, art from 100 years ago. Is a photograph of a man with an apple obscuring his face a portrait?

 

[RichC]

The story continues! https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...graph-olive-cotton-judge-on-the-global-furore.

It's definitely a photograph, and a portrait. Unconventional? Controversial? Contemporary? All of those things too.

Actually, I could argue that "controversial" and "contemporary" don't quite suit as in some ways this photograph rather old fashioned, harking back to the 1950s and Modernism rather than today's Postmodernism. In 1961, Marshall McLuhan pithily encapsulated Modernism by the phrase "The medium is the message": photography should thus play to its inherent strengths, so it, like painting, should give up trying to represent the three-dimensional world but instead concentrate on the flat, two-dimensional surface and marks made on it - in this case by light - and also the connection between a photograph and reality (a photograph is a bit like a footprint, an impression of reality).

By the tenets of Modernism we get abstract art. And it could be said that this photograph is more true to the essence of what a photograph is than those photographs typically seen on RFF.

However, time marches on, things change, culture evolves. Modernism in art is rather passe, restrictive and conservative now - some argue that even its successor Postmodernism has had its day! Half a century has passed since the heyday of Modern abstract art, so this photograph in many ways is old fashioned, not "modern" at all...