I just got back from the traveling New Topographics show that just pitched its tent at SFMOMA. I was excited to see it, because I’ve been reading Britt Salvesen’s book as well as falling head over heels for Frank Gohlke.

My first impression? Underwhelmed.

I don’t want to say the show isn’t worth seeing. It’s a very important part of the recent history of photography, and some of the photographs in it are extremely compelling as well. However, I was not particularly impressed with the way the actual show was put together.

Probably the biggest objection is that there is a mix of original prints (or at least prints that belong to the period of the show) and prints that were made in the last few years. The new prints are, in many cases, of a different size, a different quality (usually technically superior), and often show a different approach in the printing process — and choices in the printing process can and often do have a real impact on how the viewer sees the photograph. I found the mix and match approach jarring and confusing, and this is a case where some interpretive apparatus really should have been provided — particularly regarding print size, but also regarding contrast, etc.

I also found it annoying (although not surprising) that it felt like the Bechers got the most attention and care. The Bechers, while maybe my least favorite part of NT, tend to play really well with the art museum crowd. Some of the other photographers really got the short stick in terms of how wall space was divvied up. (My museum pet peeve of mounting photographs below other photographs and way below eye height was out in force, and Joe Deal particularly suffered because of it.) Some of the rooms were also surprisingly poorly lit.

There was also a relative of dearth of supporting materials regarding the historical context from which NT emerged — which is a major missed opportunity. There’s a smattering of stuff about cultural landscape studies and historical precursors, but not enough.

All that being said, I’m very glad I saw the exhibit, and I will go back and see it again. The main value I derived from the experience was being able to correct some of my impressions of the photographs, which were previously based mainly on the reproductions in Salvesen’s book, which are fine for some of the photographers, but overcorrected and/or misleading for others. Lewis Baltz, in particular, was very poorly represented in the book.

Seeing the work in person also forced me to reconsider Nicholas Nixon’s NT work, which I had previously found totally uninteresting. I’m not sure that I can say that the book does not correctly reproduce the work — with the exception of the pronounced cold tone of the prints, which is absent from the books. However, something about their presentation framed and mounted on the wall (together perhaps with that cold tone) took away something of the postery quality I found so objectionable in those photographs. They are more critical, and more clinical, than I had originally realized, and I need do some more thinking and looking to decide where I stand relative to them.

Notes

Robert Adams — Softer contrast than NT book repro. Appears unremarkable. It’s a little surprising that people were able to see how important this work is, which is not to say that I don’t think it is that important.

Shore — 2009 reprints. Very clean. And huge. Only a couple are here, and mostly not the interesting ones.

Bechers — The reprints are slightly larger and technically much superior. I actually like some of them a lot more than Becher prints I’ve seen in the past (I’m seeing and noticing detail more easily, and that gives them a reality that often seems missing from their work, sacrificed to form and type), but they don’t seem to fit very well with the original prints or with the show overall. The Loree Breaker photograph (which I cannot seem to find online) is their standout, as far as I can tell.

Nicholas Nixon — Very cold tone. I like these far better in person. On the wall, they seem less like posters — oddly. They seem to be offering the city up for scrutiny rather than eulogizing it. They appear clinical. I wonder if part of the difference is the three-dimensionality of the frame and matting — they enhance my sense of distance. The lighting in the situation is very poor, unfortunately, really abysmal.

Schott — Either printed much darker than the repros in the book, or else these have majorly faded over time. I like it — it makes them seem less comic-kitsch, and more…what? Lament-y? Not exactly. But it tweaks the comedy-tragedy balance a smidge.

Baltz — You can tell these are 35mm. Very different from the book, which was clearly oversharpened, and overcorrected for contrast. The contrast is very hard, which gives the photos a more judgmental quality. Semicoa — very hard contrast, lost blacks, and a greater separation of midtones. Much more sinister and disconcerting. Airport Loop Drive — major lost shadow detail creates a bit of perspective illusion. Stark and trippy. R-ohm (?) — lost detail. Lots of it. The white square is all the eye can look at. McGaw Laboratories — very compelling — is that a screen below the door? East Wall, West Carpet Mills is awesome. Pertec (?) — seems much funnier in person. SE corner, Semicoa — the shadow of the tree is ghostly, ethereal. The light and shadow stuff here is just perfect.

Joe Deal — I didn’t know his stuff was 2 1/4; figured he was view camera. Don’t know why. A bunch of these are mounted below others, stupidly. I had to kneel down to get a reasonable perspective on them. In person, the sense of flatness is profound — the two dimensionality of the photographic medium is underscored.

Wessel — Almost exactly as in the book. Charmingly funny, etc., etc.

Gohlke — The contrast is softer in person; the overall feel is less judgmental, more…delicate? Less certain? Not the right words. Some are darker, more somber.

Companion Exhibit

SFMOMA paired the NT show with a companion exhibit from its collection, which is a major value add. It’s a somewhat mixed bag, but there’s some really great stuff in here. Much better overall, really.

Evans — some very interesting color polaroids. Heavy on the irony and detail, tiny. These would really kill in flickr if Evans were making them today.

Mark Ruwedel — this definitely bears further investigation. “Westward the Course of Empire” — railroads as American ruins (like, stonehenge-style) — very interesting, and almost like a cross between a New Topographer (Gohlke or Adams) and O’Sullivan, with maybe a hint of Atget.

Thomas Barrow — “Cancellations” — “…gouging directly into the negative, producing seamless prints from the defaced film.” This shit calls for an industrial strength eyeroll.

William Gedney — “Kentucky” — This is astonishingly compelling work. Made during two visits to a poor family decades apart. Really lovely, strong sense of…I don’t want to say compassion. Empathy? No. It feels like he was a guest in their house, rather than a social worker. So, I guess the word I was reaching for is respect. That’s part of what is so markedly missing in that Maisie Crow series that bugged me.

Joel Sternfeld — Refer this guy to Karl.

Berenice Abbott — I think the best way to describe the style of these photographs is that it’s like Atget took a step back and didn’t pause to regain his balance before releasing the shutter. (Yes, I know that metaphor is irrelevant with view cameras.)

Wright Morris — “Time Pieces…” WOW. How utterly rich in description these are…”Reflection in Oval Mirror…” — Best reflection in photography, ever. “Photograph of Morris Family homestead…” — Best re-photograph in photography, ever. “A crack in time had been made by the click of a shutter through which I could peer into a world that had vnished. This fact exceeded my grasp, but it excited my emotions…A simpler ritual of survival would be hard to imagine. By stopping time I hoped to suspend mortality.”

SFMOMA has put together some fantastic photography for the exhibitions celebrating its 75th birthday. I wrote a short piece on one of works by Henry Wessel over at 1/125, but really, there are too many fantastic photographs to list.

Best of all, a lot of the photographers I was most impressed by are folks I had never heard of before. The one that struck me most was a street photograph by John Harding which is the most compelling photographic depiction of race I’ve ever seen. (That wasn’t made by De Carava, anyway.) But there are also fantastic images by Max Yavno, Leon Borensztein, Nata Piaskowski, and John Gutmann. (Apologies if I misspelled any of those.)

I also got to check some things off the big list of stuff I felt dumb for not having seen before. First time seeing Minor White’s photographs in print form. (Not as blown away as I thought I would be — the reproductions in Bunnell’s book are very good) First time seeing Atget’s photoraphs in print form — including a portrait of a prostitute which rather disrupted my notion of what Atget is all about. (Also: have I mentioned how much I love albumen prints? I really love albumen prints.) First time seeing daguerreotypes and tintypes.

I had the Koni-Omega with me (see above). I was shooting with Tri-X at 1600 — a good combination of camera and film, with the strengths of each covering the weaknesses of the other. (The weaknesses being Tri-X’s outrageous grain when pushed and the shallow DOF of 6×7, respectively.) And, of course — as usual — the Koni-O drew interested glances and outright interrogations from the other patrons.

So, what I’m going to do is simply post a few thoughts that crossed my mind while I was looking at these photographs. Obviously you should be slow to draw conclusions about Japanese photography, or even the work of the specific photographers in question, even if I appear to be doing so.

Hopefully at some point I’ll be less ignorant. I did recently buy a copy of Japanese Photobooks of the 1960’s and 70’s, so that might help a bit, if and when I ever get a chance to open the thing.

Please forgive any misspellings and my total disregard of any diacritic marks — my notes are, as usual, illegible.

While viewing Hosoe

I can’t help wondering if some of the characteristic techniques of this period of Japanese photography are influenced (or at least enabled) by the rise of the small-format SLR camera. Previously, man-portable cameras tended to be press cameras, rangefinders, etc., which are generally not optimal to use from strange angles or for close-focus work. The sort of (apparently) extemporaneous, awkward camera positions, and the very particular deformations of the perspective, focus, etc. are all things that would be substantially more difficult to control with non-SLR cameras.

…

Contrast perspective here with the (mostly earlier) Western photographers I’ve been looking at a lot lately — Bresson, Atget, Weston, Frank, even Winogrand — in those cases, the perspective is that of a person standing in the space. A pedestrian perspective — not in any derogatory sense, as such, but in the sense that it is the perspective of a person who might happen to be walking by. They seem natural. Here, the play with unnatural perspective is used to dislocate the viewer, and to create a studiously unnatural viewpoint. It is practically a vice, although an excessively “natural” perspective can be a vice as well, I suppose.

While viewing Tomatsu

The are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out of focus) aesthetic implies a willingness to discard information. Huge areas of a given print may contain no information whatsoever, or very limited information — a rough tonal gradient, say — these images come close to being purely graphic.

This is also in stark contrast to what I’ve been mostly looking at lately, where compositions and (with some exceptions) film, paper, and chemistry are being used with great care and skill to capture the most detail possible, and as much in the way of relationships (“relatedness”?) between elements in the frame as possible. This discarding of information displaces us…

While viewing Tomatsu and Kawada

There seems to be a pull toward iconography when it comes to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the war.

If it were me trying to represent these things, I would probably go the same way, simply because icons and symbols are more…manageable. Less frightening. Of course, I have no idea whether that has any bearing on what these folks were doing.

While viewing Moriyama

It seems like the areas of the photograph (dominated by large, irregular patches of pure white or black containing no detail, amid which a person or object may be sandwiched), come together with an almost-audible report, a clap or a clack. Noise. I’m not normally prone to synesthesia, even the merely metaphorical kind…

While viewing Nakahira

Lost detail — defocus, blocked shadows, muddy contrasts, motion blur — these things frustrate the eye, but do they maybe also trick us to project imagined detail (or meaning) where there is none?

Is this why the Moriyama photograph made me see (to borrow from DeCarava) a sound? Or is it merely the vaguely cinematic quality of these choices that makes me think I should be hearing something as I watch?

While viewing Watanabe and Tsuchida

These guys seem to want to be perceived as snapshooters. I find this annoying. Is it also a kind of discarding of information? Not that detail is not faithfully recorded across the frame, but the utterly banal composition or lack of composition deprives the detail of significance.

These do not make a sound. I am probably missing something…

Other thoughts

I don’t know what to say about Fukase’s Ravens,, except that it’s totally heartbreaking.

Also, while I’m not sure this was part of the “Provoke” exhibition, they’ve got an absolutely stunning photograph by Toshio Shibata. You can see a crappy scan here. A really, really fantastic print…

Of course, I would have enjoyed it and the entire museum-going experience a lot more if one of the staff hadn’t forced me to stop making notes with my pen and instead use an f-stopping golf pencil…of all the cockamamy policies…it’s not like I’m pressing my notebook against the photographs to write; I’m several feet away. And on the off-chance that I got it into my mind to go crazy and attack one of these prints, it’s not like issuing me a golf pencil is going to prevent me from doing harm. Honestly, is this what my membership dollars are going to pay for? Because if so, I’d rather they put them toward something else, like the mildewy smell in the vicinity of the staircase on the second floor.

Also, trivial quibble: Why is it that the nomenclature is “silver gelatin print” vs. “platinum print,” vs. “albumen print,” vs. “chromogenic print,” vs. “dye transfer print”? Why not “silver albumen print,” for example. Also, would it kill them to call a polaroid a polaroid? Perhaps there’s a legal issue…

I find it hard not to photograph photographers. I don’t know whether it’s some stupid “meta” thing or whether people just tend to look hilarious and endearing when they’re looking at the back of a camera and trying to figure out why their pictures are backlit.

I don’t mean to dismiss snapshots or point and shoots, mind you. The photographer here, for example, at the SFMOMA rooftop garden, was assiduous about exploring changes in camera position and angle, and had no qualms about kneeling on the ground to get a shot. Better a P&S and a sense of perspective than a pricey camera and no notion of composition…

By the way, do click through and look at the large images. In fact, that applies to all of these — I’ve been finding, as I shoot more street photography, that I’m using broader compositions, including more context, and as a result I’m getting photographs which don’t really lend themselves to being viewed as flickr medium images the way my close-up work and bird photography usually do. : )

The rooftop garden is a nice place to photograph, although quite small. A lot of people take pictures there, I think perhaps because they’re getting it out of their system, after spending time in the exhibits were photography is often forbidden. It’s interesting to see the range of reactions people have to art generally, and to the art that’s currently in the rooftop garden in particular — it’s sculpture there, and modern sculpture tends to be more inscrutable than other art forms, I think.

Some folks seem to have a genuine aesthetic appreciation for the stuff, either naive (simple joy in the thing itself) or informed (intellectual pleasure based on an understanding of the work’s place in the history of art). For the record, I have neither for most of them…

There are other folks who are manifestly trying to pretend that they understand or care about what they’re seeing, and others still who are perfectly up front about not caring, having been dragged there by their parents or their kids or their significant others. I sympathize with them. There are folks — more admirable, I admit — who greet art with a mixture of curiosity and indignation, and who very much want an explanation for what they are being asked to look at.

I can’t say for certainty into which category this gentleman falls, but I suspect it is the last, and probably the best, category. Me, I fall into the category who is more likely to dismiss the art and scrutinize the viewers, which makes me the douchebag in this tableau.

Technically, he succeeds perfectly within the narrow range of techniques he employs — a bit like Atget, in that respect, a sort of single-minded thoroughness in taking those few techniques to their very limit. And I can’t really fault him as an artist, either — he obviously succeeds perfectly well in achieving his vision.

I just, well, don’t fucking like it. (Note: I’m not saying it’s bad.) I find it disturbing and off-putting. And also beautiful and sometimes very moving. And I haven’t really pinned down the source of that disturbance for me, but here’s my best guess at the moment:

Avedon is basically taking people and turning them into gods, or monsters, or monstrous gods. (Part of what I feel when I look at them is almost Lovecraftian, a mingled awe-disgust-fear.)

Why should this disturb me so? The deification of celebrities is nothing new, and should at worst be a matter of banality. The deification of ordinary people (which Avedon executes with the exact same techniques) should be a reversal of the hierarchy, and as such should appeal to the kind of simplistic leftism that is bred in my bones. But it does not.

I think it is something about the deification itself, regardless of subject, which is the source of the wrongness.

Avedon’s process is not like that of, say, Minor White, who can see in the flesh of a person an equivalent, a symbolic link to the numinous. There is nothing spiritual about what Avedon is doing. Avedon is crafting a totem or fetish out of the person. He is converting them into an idol.

This is a rather intense form of objectification — and when I say objectification, I am thinking of what Simone Weil said in her essay on The Iliad, about objectification as a form of violence or force. (Of which the most literal and extreme sort is death — that which transforms a human being completely and finally into a mere thing, that is, a corpse.)

In writing this, something suddenly clicked for me about Avedon’s photography. (God help me, I actually said, “Aha!”)

What clicked had to do with what I was supposed to be seeing in this exhibition. The curators and the reviewer in the Chronicle both placed great stress on the role of motion in Avedon’s photography, and both when I was looking at them in person, and as I mulled them over after the fact, this admonition (to see motion, to see these photographs as being about motion) persistently rang false to me. Or, rather, it rang half-true, and now I see why.

It is not motion which is present in these photographs, but…the false, the unfulfillable promise of motion, as if the subject were threatening (impotently, of course) at any moment to come to life.

This false promise is normally denoted by the term “lifelike,” and it is properly the province not of the photographer, but of the taxidermist…

For example, compare the photographs he made of a Spanish funeral to those he made of a black funeral in the American south, and think about his position in those situations. In the Spanish photographs, he’s at a distance that seems appropriate; at the black funeral, he appears to have no qualms about invading personal space, as my sister put it. Which says a lot about how he felt about those people. Reminds me somewhat of a recent thread on flickr which touched on how a lot of photographers seem to have no problem photographing homeless people when they would think twice about photographing others. It seems to have something to do with different perceptions of people’s reality as human beings.

The captions, as usual, don’t help at all. There’s a photograph (google it) of a black nurse holding a white baby, and the baby is described in the caption as looking determined, which is accurate, but the nurse is described as appearing stoic, when in fact, her main expression is actually a small smile. I don’t know whether this suggests that the captioner has a problem “reading” black faces, or whether the difficulty is that he or she presumed the nurse must be a stoic person, (and in all likelihood she was a stoic person), and stopped there, before looking to see if the actual woman as photographed matched this expectation? Whatever the case, there was a distinct failure to see.

Which is pretty significant when you consider that the person who captioned that photograph is responsible for helping thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in at least three cities understand what that photograph means.

• I didn’t take pictures of the exhibitions. I didn’t feel like getting into a Thomas Hawk situation. I considered not going because of their history of stupidity regarding cameras, but I decided the opportunity to see these prints overrode my qualms about that.
• This is more or less the first time I’ve seen real photographic prints outside of a classroom setting. I feel sort of bad about admitting that.
• I was not as blown away by most of the Adams prints as I thought I might be. Turns out that the reproductions I’ve seen in books have been pretty damn good. The real prints were certainly better, and in a few cases substantially better, but my mind was not blown.
• However, under the heading of other influences and related artists, they had Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30. OMFG. That was mind blowing. I went back a couple of times to look at it some more. The temptation to snatch it off the wall, tuck it under my arm, and run was high, but, thankfully, resistable.
• They also had some stuff by Paul Strand, which was excellent.
• I was not impressed with the curating of this exhibit, or any of the exhibits, really. In this case, the lighting was not great, and some of the frames cast significant shadows across important areas of the O’Keefe paintings in particular. Some of the matting was off, too. I was surprised; I’m assuming several highly paid professionals were involved in this process; they couldn’t catch this stuff?
• Also, their premise — that there are connections between how Adams and O’Keefe depict the human and natural worlds — was, while not at all implausible, not really borne out by most of the images presented. A much smaller exhibition focusing on a few really good, and really congruent, images, would have been a great deal stronger.
• The Frank exhibition was better lit, or at least the lighting was not as noticeably bad. There were also a ton of great supporting materials, like work prints with crop lines on them, correspondence, the first draft of Kerouac’s introduction, etc.
• I still don’t entirely like Frank’s work. In describing it before I’ve said it reminds me something Fanon wrote about a European sociologist’s approach to race. Fanon said that he did not believe it was impossible for a white person to understand things from a black perspective, but that this particular white person did not seem to have made the necessary effort. I feel very much that way about Frank’s depictions of America, particularly where race or class are involved. And generally, it seems to me that Frank’s perspective is basically that of a tourist — and I mean that in the most pejorative way possible. It’s not that he’s not a gifted photographer; he clearly was, and some of his photographs are absolutely stunning. But his method and the way he chose to see seem to me to keep him from getting below the surface. Yes, he attacks these American myths, but does he actually what’s underneath those myths? I don’t think so. Compare his work with that of someone like Roy DeCarava, and you’ll see what I mean. With DeCarava’s body of work available — which gets at not just the surface but at the depths, and which is both heartbreaking and uplifting to view — why are we still talking about this Swiss douchebag’s road trip?
• More interesting in many ways was the small room with photographs from other related/influencing photographers. The stuff from Walker Evans, Bill Brandt, and Gary Winogrand was all very striking. I was particularly impressed with the Winogrand image, which I had previously seen online in a low-quality scan. The print was extraordinary.
• Amusingly, there were very large reproductions of the Frank images — much larger than almost all of the prints by Adams and the others in that exhibition, despite the fact that Frank’s images were shot on 35mm, while the others were shot on 4×5 or larger view cameras. Of course the Frank enlargements show the limitations of 35mm film — plenty of grain, etc. But of course the subject matter does not demand grainless, Group f/64 style prints; quite the contrary.
• From what I could see, not that many people who went to the Adams/O’Keefe exhibition went to the Frank exhibition and vice versa. I could be wrong — maybe everybody had already been to the other one, or went after, or whatever. But I don’t so; the people at the Frank exhibition were also about twenty years younger average.
• The Frank folks also seemed for the most part to have absolutely no idea what they were looking at. I think there were a lot of folks who were dragged there by their boyfriends/girlfriends/husbands/wives, and a lot of folks who were there because someone else told them they ought to be there.
• Regarding the painters and sculptors and whatnot in the rest of the museum, some extremely compelling (a couple of gorgeous Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paintings, for example), some not even remotely compelling. Not surprising. The captions and supporting text for these items varied from the banal and uninformative to the laugh-inducingly pretentious and uninformative.
• Blue Bottle coffee is really good. And I don’t even like coffee.
• Had my Koni-Omega and Olympus XA out while drinking said coffee, and as a result I met a nice couple who were shooting with a Mamiya 645 (which is lovely and very light and compact) and a Rolleicord. The Koni-Omega makes a great conversation piece; I get asked/complimented about it almost every time I take it out. It’s also a great camera to use, of course, and I did that, too. : )

Photos to follow after I get them developed/scanned.