Photographers you don't really "get" ... and why you should

[ghost]

lol. serrano's shocking? the piss pictures are quaint.

 

[James Brannan]

Hell I even own a Holga and want a lomo. But I don't know why!!!!!! Some of the stuff is so boring and annoying. I swear every time someone comes into the store here asking if I sell them the first thing I think to myself is "great, another imitation photographer who will never learn the art"


hmmm, first time trying to post a quote from a previous post. not sure how it will look so let me apologize in advance.

i do have a lomo, holga and diane and what's cool, to me anyway, is the element of surprise. i don't shoot enough to be able to totally predict what will happen. the light leaks, poor focus, lack of any real control of exposure, etc give me a sense of freewill and not caring. with my slr's and rangefinders i'm more methodical and try to previsualize. with the toy cameras maybe i'll get one really cool/fun picture from a roll. and to make it more "fun", i only buy expired film from ebay.

lately i've been packing one toy camera and one "real" camera when i go somewhere. if time permits i'll grab the plastic and fire off a couple to see what happens.

- chris

That's it! I feel like someone understands why! I own plenty of SLR's and DSLR's and they are great photographic tools. Matrix metering with my newer Nikon bodies is so good that it is downright scary at times. Instant results with a D200, the ability to shoot a few hundred of a scene experimenting with apeture and focal point and then it not costing me anything if it's a waste of time is cool, having a bag full of any lens I need is nice but there are just times where I get tired of it. RF's slow me down. Make me think. Keep in mind that I don't see the allure of a digital RF. I want film. I want the suprise. Using a Holga just adds to that! It makes it even more fun. Like you I've gone to buying inexpensive expired film (off of eBay for me) or just cheap drug store film to see if I get anything useable. When I do it's a delightful suprise. I honestly believe that digital took alot of the fun out of photography for me.

Let me also add that I don't get Ansel Adams. I've tried over the years but just don't. I'll admit I'm not as educated in the subject of the "great" photographers as many of the people here obviously are. I'd say my greatest inspiration probably wouldn't even be considered one of the greats by many. Those that are curious though, I'd suggest looking up Bjorn Rorslett.

 

[Finder]

It sounds like you are talking about "art appreciation" which is defined as the "intellectual" understanding of art. That may be important for art historians and art museums and galleries as it gives them a chance of an income, but I don't think it is important for the artist or the viewer. If it does not blow my hair back, why do I need to try to understand it on an intellectual level. That certainly won't make me feel different about it as I don't believe the power in a work of art is on an intellectual level. (Naturally, folks who like to intellectualize art would disagree, but that does not mean there approach is the only correct way of looking a piece of art.)

I guess I like to spend my time with things that inspire me rather than try to figure out stuff I have no interest in.

 

[ghost]

who doesn't get ed ruscha?

 

[ywenz]

I don't get HCB.. I saw one of this photo at MOMA, and it was crap. His more famous ones are so-so at best IMO... :-\

 

[J. Borger]

who doesn't get ed ruscha?

To appreciate Ruscha you have to like Pop Art.
Besides of that Ruscha is of historical importance as a photographer.. ........ Bernd & Hilda Becher are for instance to a large extent influenced by him
(substitute cooling towers for gas stations 🙂) . The Becher's are leading figures in european photography ..... they teached and influenced a whole bunch of famous contemporary european photographers including Andreas Gursky.

 

[ghost]

is he necessarily an acquired taste?

 

[J. Borger]

is he necessarily an acquired taste?

Ruscha belongs to a large group of photographers in history taking pictures in a documenatry kind of tradition ....just recording "things" as they are ...... not searching for a subjective thing like "beauty".
Walker Evans, August Sander are some older examples of this tradition.
The new topographs like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz are some more recent other examples .

A picture does not need to be beautiful or tasteful to be relevant or important.

 

[chris91387]

i'll gladly stand up and defend ansel adams any day of the week. if it weren't for that fact that he's been shoved down our throats for so long (pretty much my entire life) i think he'd be thought of differently. i've seen his original work up close and his prints are breathtaking. the details in the blacks and whites and everything in between are exceptional. the attention to detail he spent with every picture (or at least the one's we've seen), his technical books ("camera", "negative", "print") are very imformative, his conservationist activitites, etc. i blame the endless calendars, notecards and crappy plastic framed posters to any backlash against him and his work. his explanations of filters, previsualization, zone system, exposure were instrumental in my understanding and love of photography. his pictures are simply inspiring and lovely.

and yes, his portraits are beautiful. but karsh is still my favorite from that era. bring back those hard tungesten lights!!!

- chris

i wonder what else geddes and wegmen have done besides dogs and kids? i bet they're quite good but overexposure just ruined them for the rest of us.

 

[amateriat]

I had a hard time understanding why people loved Edward Weston so much untill i actually went to a gallery and saw a hundred or so of his prints and Kodachromes.

Sort of the same epiphany I experienced when I got to see Andrew Wyeth's paintings up-close-and-personal at a retrospective at the WHitney several years back.


- Barrett

 

[amateriat]

Ok I'm going to list something that isn't a photographer, but you will know what I mean anyways...

I don't get Holga and lomo photography!

I know I should. I know its about just shooting and not being restricted to rules and so forth. I know its about the art and not about having the most expensive, best, whatever gear on the planet.

There's really nothing you "should" get here. It's just as with a Leica or a Deardorff, a pinhole camera, or last week's hot dSLR; whether the medium is film, electrons, a combination of the two (my perference), printing-out paper, or methodically-tortured Polaroid...if the photographer in charge of these tools didn't have something to bring to the party, as it were, there'll be little worth commenting on. Perrsonally, I wouldn't mind having a "Holgaroid" around to mess with once in a while.


- Barrett

 

[amateriat]

Diane Arbus' work usually scares the living **** out of me. But, then again, that is probably good, right?

Correct...and hers was the first body of an individual's work I studied as a young'un many years back (followed immediately by Paul Strand...my teacher must have been a mean college baseball pitcher in another life). Also scared the living daylights out of me, but the work was compelling at the same time. She's been lumped together with the rest of what I've called the "third-rail school" of photography, but unlike quite a few others (Arthur Tress, Les Krims, and a bit of Mapplethorpe's work come to mind here; Witkin fits here too, with a Baroque approach that seems to channel de Sade and Pasolini in one stroke), shock value was but one element of her work, as far as I'm concerned (although most of my friends and collegues hate her work).

Among the other photographers dragged into this thread:

Jerry Uelsmann: I do "get" his work, and frequently like it, but some of it is a tad overwrought. The Photoshop era, far from "dating" his work, IMO, actually strengthens it, given how many of even the most adept at PS seem not to have advanced past the "digital parlor-trick" stage.

Ralph Gibson: I get him, too, most of the time. He's into a visual aesthetic which has a few friends of mine either nodding off or looking for a wall to climb, but I'm into it.

Helmut Newton: For me, when he's good, he's white-hot (re: Big Nudes); when he's bad, he's simply average. I get him.

Nobuyoshi Araki: I "get" Araki, but the "signal" is frequently weak.

Anne Geddes: I "got" her work for about the proverbial fifteen minutes, many years back. Seeing her name pop up again, and doing a quick search, reminds me why I no longer do. An accomplished commercial photographer...nothing less, but, alas, nothing more. (Also see under: "digital parlor-trick")

William Wegman: Yes, I get him. When he's "on", his wit can be enjoyable, and rising above mere schtick; but his work can have a whiff of "one-hit wonder", too (ask me what I think of Phillip Glass).

William Eggleston: I sort of get him, but I find his work highly uneven.

Martin Parr: The snapshot minus the aesthetic, IMO. A few good ones, however. I don't fully get him.

Joyce Tenneson: Doesn't move me, one way or t'other.

Lee Friedlander: I get him, I like him.

Ansel Adams: Depends on the day. I'm serious.

HCB: I got him before I knew I was supposed to "get" him. He was a mercurial guy; so was Picasso. But I never got to talk to Picasso. 🙂


And so on. That's part of when makes art interesting. And I'm just another guy with an opinion.


- Barrett

 

[dll927]

Weegee or Jerry Uelsmann? There are two that each take their share of "understanding".

As for different points of view, there's an old story that when one of Picasso's paintings (I think it was "Nude Descending a Staircase") showed up at at a Paris art show, one critic said it looked like 'an explosion in a shingle factory'. Now, if critics can't make up their minds, where does that leave the rest of us?

 

[fitzihardwurshd]

Diane Arbus.
My vote for most overrated photographer of all time.

Not to get her ( which was the original question) and to find her overrated are two different things tho.
This sounds as if you would find everything overrated what you don't get ?😕

Fitzi

 

[AOI Photo]

Not to get her ( which was the original question) and to find her overrated are two different things tho.
This sounds as if you would find everything overrated what you don't get ?😕

Fitzi

No. There are artists I find overrated and get, and those I don't get and do not think are overrated.

I find Arbus both, because I don't get her, and I think she is bad technically. I don't get a lot of Adams, but he is clearly achieving what he sets out to. Just most of what he does doesn't speak to me.

 

[Simon Larbalestier]

i'll gladly stand up and defend ansel adams any day of the week. if it weren't for that fact that he's been shoved down our throats for so long (pretty much my entire life) i think he'd be thought of differently. i've seen his original work up close and his prints are breathtaking. the details in the blacks and whites and everything in between are exceptional. the attention to detail he spent with every picture (or at least the one's we've seen), his technical books ("camera", "negative", "print") are very imformative, his conservationist activitites, etc. i blame the endless calendars, notecards and crappy plastic framed posters to any backlash against him and his work. his explanations of filters, previsualization, zone system, exposure were instrumental in my understanding and love of photography. his pictures are simply inspiring and lovely.

and yes, his portraits are beautiful. but karsh is still my favorite from that era. bring back those hard tungesten lights!!!

- chris

i wonder what else geddes and wegmen have done besides dogs and kids? i bet they're quite good but overexposure just ruined them for the rest of us.

For me Ansel Adams, Minor White and Edward Weston were a very strong guiding presence, when i started to make b/w prints in the early 80's. I've been fortunate to see Adam's prints unframed and the contact sized prints of Weston and they were both simply amazing. Adam's tonality was extraordinary. The zone system (later explained in more simple terms by Fred Picker who set up Zone V1) was fundemental to me in my understanding of how to measure light and then print an image. I've also seen Witken's prints and Olivier Parkers 11x 14" contact prints unmounted and again the quality, depth and tonality was breathtaking.

Each photographer has their own unique vision - we all do - and to "not get someone" feels slightly arrogant and dismissive to me when disussed like this in a public forum. For me how can I be so sure to "get anyone" when it's hard to understand my own sense of creative self?

IMHO to like or dislke someone's work is one thing but to appreciate it and have some sort of understanding of it on other levels is something quite different.

 

[John Camp]

Diane Arbus might be the most important American visual artist of any kind, but I'd have to think about it before committing myself; I'd have to say that Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper would also be in the running...

If 'getting' an artist requires an intellectual process, then I'd say 'getting' somebody is almost a sure sign that he or she is mediocre. Serious artists tend to reach off the wall and pull you in. Ansel Adams was serious -- all kinds of people are hit by Moonrise and Clearing Winter Storm and a few more, without any further information at all. That's why his calendars have been best-sellers for thirty years. If you don't get him, I don't think the problem is with Adams.

The question gets even more complicated, though. Sally Mann, for example, is a terrific artist, but IMHO what she did with her children was awful. Robert Mapplethorpe was a terrific artist and many of his images are disgusting. And then you have somebody like Annie Leibovitz, a great technician and a person with a really fine eye for design, but with no real ideas. Mary Ellen Mark, while apparently a woman of courage and sensitivity, always seemed to me to be a peculiar kind of tourist. She came back from places that had an intrinsically interesting reality (good or bad, usually the latter) but with images that are oddly uninteresting. You wonder what they would have been had Garry Winogrand been on her trip...I get Joel-Peter Witkin, but I think, what's the point? Does anybody really care about these images? Why? Stieglitz has always seemed more important for his work -- the magazine, the writing, the gallery -- than for his photography.

So I think it's possible to 'get' a photographer and not care. But to repeat myself, I also think that if you don't get a photogapher, then the photographer is probably mediocre.

JC

 

[AOI Photo]

If 'getting' an artist requires an intellectual process, then I'd say 'getting' somebody is almost a sure sign that he or she is mediocre. Serious artists tend to reach off the wall and pull you in. Ansel Adams was serious -- all kinds of people are hit by Moonrise and Clearing Winter Storm and a few more, without any further information at all. That's why his calendars have been best-sellers for thirty years. If you don't get him, I don't think the problem is with Adams.

JC

I think the problem is that "get" is a pretty fluid term, and we all read it to mean slightly (or not so slightly 🙂 ) different things

 

[ghost]

how is what sally mann did with her kids awful? i think it's a terrific thing to do.

 

[amateriat]

I think the problem is that "get" is a pretty fluid term, and we all read it to mean slightly (or not so slightly 🙂 ) different things

Yes, sort of like "grok" (yes, now I drag Heinlein into this mess), which is, perversely, probably closer to what I try to mean with all this. (I also take to heart Simon Larby's remark about reducing one's personal take on a given artist to a Siskel & Ebert "thumb(s)-up/down" contest, even though we're all dangerously clost to doing just that here.) Reducing one's response to another's work to a twenty-words-or-less snapshot is truly asking for it, but in a forum like this, I like to think the exercise can be a springboard for someone to consider (or reconsider!) an artist he or she might have brished off before really getting to know them. Art is at least as messy as politics, but fewer people get shot in the process (Andy Warhol notwithstanding).


- Barrett