Pseuds' Corner

lawrence

lawrence

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Photography discussion has for a long time been inundated with drivel that deserves a wider audience and so, stealing the idea from Private Eye, isn't it time we had a Pseuds' Corner here on RFF? Or is this too cruel?

Anyway, my nomination is something I read today in 'Contact: Theory' published by Lustrum Press (p.118):

'A contact-sheet could be termed the sequential authentication or dramatisation of what the photographer makes in the space of time allotted to him during a given occasion. It is a sequential enumeration of emotive similitude. The contact-sheet is evidence of the photographer's subjective perception of an occasion which constitutes a series of sequence of seized moments. The contact-sheet of these seized moments exists outside the stated piece of time and yet re-invents time by recording it as a referential to visual notation'.
 
Deary, deary me. The only problem with Pseuds Corner is that it can be too easy to take something out of context: I live in fear of a sentence or two from my Amateur Photographer column being quoted. But with whole paragraphs like the one quoted... Nah, let's go for it!

Off to do some research...

Cheers,

R.
 
I am sure Hollis Frampton was not the worst offender or someone who didn't have some good ideas, yet he was the first to come to mind. Here's an excerpt from a thought experiment:

"...Time intercedes with its familiar mercies. A generation passes. And then an obscure doctoral candidate stumbles upon a hypothesis that electrifies the scholarly world. Kneeling in the gloom of a subcellar in Rochester, New York, leafing through a crate of Atlantis' leavings, the young man glimpses a pattern of coherence in its contents and leaps to an insight that startles him half out of his wits.

Reasoning from an imperfect analogy with the mysterious culture of porpoises and whales, who abandoned the encumbrance of physical objects when they returned to the sea and embraced instead a bodiless oral tradition of music, literature, and argumentation, our scholar postulates an Atlantic civilization that expended its entire energy in the making of photographs...."

(Hollis Frampton, "Digressions on the Photographic Agony", On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, p. 10)

PS. Perhaps it's time again for the ArtyB******sGenerator: http://www.artybollocks.com/#abg_full

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I imagine we would ( or will) see a lot of academic/MFA theory in this thread. Most art departments no longer grant terminal degrees for studio work alone. One has to show written evidence of critical thinking, and while there's nothing wrong with that requirement per se, the devil is often in the details: students absorb jargon, cant, ideology, twice-baked third-hand critical theory-- all sorts of conceptual wankery-- and are required to produce something similar, i.e. derivative, in their own degree essay or artist statement. Some students outlive it and get on with their art, but academia (in terms if publication and citation) tends to reward those who can spin vocabulary-about-art--and in this way, another generation of academic teachers gets credentialed to spread the gospel of the ivory tower of babble at state schools, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges.

If we can read the stuff, though, with appropriate skepticism--I'm thinking of 'the Emperor Has No Clothes' paradigm--then we can laugh, and that's probably the healthiest response to artistic follies.
 
rhl-oregon said:
I imagine we would ( or will) see a lot of academic/MFA theory in this thread. Most art departments no longer grant terminal degrees for studio work alone. One has to show written evidence of critical thinking, and while there's nothing wrong with that requirement per se, the devil is often in the details: students absorb jargon, cant, ideology, twice-baked third-hand critical theory-- all sorts of conceptual wankery-- and are required to produce something similar, i.e. derivative, in their own degree essay or artist statement. Some students outlive it and get on with their art, but academia (in terms if publication and citation) tends to reward those who can spin vocabulary-about-art--and in this way, another generation of academic teachers gets credentialed to spread the gospel of the ivory tower of babble at state schools, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges.

If we can read the stuff, though, with appropriate skepticism--I'm thinking of 'the Emperor Has No Clothes' paradigm--then we can laugh, and that's probably the healthiest response to artistic follies.
Click to expand...
Dear Robert,

I credential, thou credentialest, he, she or it credentials...

The existence of the word "credential" as a verb is good evidence of the steepness and stoniness of the path ahead of us.

Cheers,

R.
 
rhl-oregon said:
I imagine we would ( or will) see a lot of academic/MFA theory in this thread. Most art departments no longer grant terminal degrees for studio work alone. One has to show written evidence of critical thinking, and while there's nothing wrong with that requirement per se, the devil is often in the details: students absorb jargon, cant, ideology, twice-baked third-hand critical theory-- all sorts of conceptual wankery-- and are required to produce something similar, i.e. derivative, in their own degree essay or artist statement. Some students outlive it and get on with their art, but academia (in terms if publication and citation) tends to reward those who can spin vocabulary-about-art--and in this way, another generation of academic teachers gets credentialed to spread the gospel of the ivory tower of babble at state schools, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges.

If we can read the stuff, though, with appropriate skepticism--I'm thinking of 'the Emperor Has No Clothes' paradigm--then we can laugh, and that's probably the healthiest response to artistic follies.
Click to expand...

Well said Sir/Madam,
I too, could be teaching/preaching with/for the coloured Pencil brigade.
If only I could write such drivel.
Back in my day they stood out a mile.
Bib & brace overalls covered in Goulash?........
Or something like that.
 
Actually, if you read and re-read it several times it makes sense. Consider if you view all the photographs from a single roll of film (or digital series) in sequence at a later date would that not meet the qualifications of that statement? I agree with the statement. It is not obscure.
 
If you can beat Terry Ray Jones' contact you're on the right track.

"The contact-sheet is evidence of the photographer's subjective perception of an occasion which constitutes a series of sequence of seized moments."

Not sure about subjective, but TR-J managed to hit the money more times that not, I wonder how Garry Winogrand would stand up in comparison. . .
 
From Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age, an artist statement captioning a presumably found photo of 4-5 story brick apartments with hurricane fences topped with barbed wire, to which the artist has added 2 computer-generated graphic icons in the foreground: a faceless gunman and a faceless prostrate victim, which clearly don't match the original photo (grimly banal and badly exposed).

"This project was one of the first leading to my exploration of the semiotics of the visual language of the photographic image. While I started using icons as image in this series, my exploration later led to the use of text as image. Text as photograph raises questions about the human thought process, the categorization of data, visual language processing, and our individual cultural/social conditioning. I am interested in the way the viewer contributes to the context and meaning of individual images."

Typing this makes my fingers weep. Yet it is a fair sample from a chapter titled "Thinking and Writing About Images."
 
If only Woody Allen were a member of RFF. Maybe he is. I've seen a picture of him with a Leica. He could do a great parody a la his parody of Susan Sonntag (with parentheses, of course.)
 
"Possible cogent responses to the show include naughty delight and sincere abhorrence. My own was something like a wish to be dead—which, say what you want about it, is the surest defense against assaults of postmodernist attitude. Come to think of it, death provides an apt metaphor for the pictures: memento mori of perishing vanity. Another is celestial: a meteor shower of privacies being burnt to cinders in the atmosphere of publicity. They fall into contemporary fame—a sea that is a millimetre deep and horizon-wide."

... Peter Schjeldahl
 
twhittle said:
If you can beat Terry Ray Jones' contact you're on the right track....

...Not sure about subjective, but TR-J managed to hit the money more times that not, I wonder how Garry Winogrand would stand up in comparison. . .
Click to expand...

It would only matter if contact sheets became more important than finalized photos to museums, newspapers, book publishers, magazines, etc. And isn't it Tony?
 
...which leads me to imagine a group calling itself Contact Sheet or just Contact, with a manifesto contracting members-followers to shoot and print nothing but contacts/thumbnails, no further development or enlargement (indeed, antidevelopment, anti-enlargement), focus on context and continuity rather than on the individual (image or photographer)...

Whether it began as a spoof or with deadly solemnity, it would gain adherents, journals, champions, dealers (of course!), 'discerning collectors', curators...running through my head now, a parade of labels like Dada, Dogma 95, f64, and all the isms with their prefixes (neo, post, anti, sur, pan) staking claims on abstractions like "real" and "modern"...

Wake up, Robert! Or rather Shut up and go shoot some pictures! ;-)
 
rhl-oregon said:
...which leads me to imagine a group calling itself Contact Sheet or just Contact, with a manifesto contracting members-followers to shoot and print nothing but contacts/thumbnails, no further development or enlargement (indeed, antidevelopment, anti-enlargement), focus on context and continuity rather than on the individual (image or photographer)...

Whether it began as a spoof or with deadly solemnity, it would gain adherents, journals, champions, dealers (of course!), 'discerning collectors', curators...running through my head now, a parade of labels like Dada, Dogma 95, f64, and all the isms with their prefixes (neo, post, anti, sur, pan) staking claims on abstractions like "real" and "modern"...
Click to expand...

Or just put no film in the camera.
 
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