Contemplative Photography: Color Assignment 1

The work begins in Chapter 5 with a focus on color. The challenge is ignoring colorful objects, to avoid the process of labeling in order to concentrate on color.  

I did two walk-arounds on campus on two different days, one inside, one out, each about 45 minutes.  I did this during exam week when there were few students about, so it was easy to move slowly and look without being interrupted or worrying about being seen.  

I noticed that while color by itself may be visible, it is nearly impossible to photograph.  An image requires texture or form, and what most often makes a color attractive is contrast - one color against another.  

If you shoot nothing but color, you end up with color swatches.  

These and future images can be viewed in an album at Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/80283129@N03/albums/72157663263927130

#

The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Beginning

Karr, A. and Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography. Boston: Shambhala.

This book has been in my collection since about the time it was published in 2011.  I started doing some of the practices before signing up for the MA Buddhist Studies and the BA Photography.  The former is now all but finished and the latter has become less appealing and may be put on hold, if not abandoned entirely.  I would like to continue to develop photographically, and as the contemplative philosophy mirrors my current conception and practice, this seems like an avenue worth pursuit.  CP may also allow me to explore Buddhist connections to the visual arts, about which I have collected a good bit of reading material.  There is also the possibility of joining CP workshops and developing the practice through community practice.

But first things first.

Exercise 4: What is a photographer?

I had never heard of De Zayas until being assigned this essay.  It seems he was from a wealthy family, well educated, and capable of international travel in the early 20th century.  He first made a name for himself as an illustrator with a hugely popular exhibition of caricatures of NY’s glitterati.  The exhibit was held at Stieglitz’s gallery 291, which resulted in the two men forming a close relationship, with De Zayas subsequently scouting talent in Paris and establishing a career as an art critic and NY gallery owner.  Geoff Dyer could have been writing of De Zayas when he said of himself:  “not taking photographs is a condition of writing about them.”

This essay was composed in 1913 during a two-year stay in NY that saw De Zayas produce his last major piece of illustration.  He had only a couple of years previous published the first interview with Pablo Picasso, whom he had met in Paris, and whose work is referenced in the work under review here.  For an essay on art, it’s not entirely opaque.  It feels like a part of a larger conversation to which we are not a part and therefore requires a bit more attention than a piece written for a general audience.  

Exercise 3: Establishing Conventions

This appears to be a discovery exercise, a chance to look at a variety of images to discover for oneself the techniques and presentations in landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries.  The notes call for using an internet search engine to locate twelve examples, about which we are to discuss the commonalities, and where possible to note the origin of the painting and its intended function, namely public or private exhibition.  

I looked at approaching the task through Google Image and a search parameter of [18th 19th century landscape painting], but the results are somewhat hit and miss in terms of size of image and background information.  I turned instead to online galleries and found two perfectly suited:  

Exercise 2: Photography in the museum or in the gallery?

Krauss, R. (1982). Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View. Art Journal, 42(4), p.311.

I’m glad this was an article and not a book as the text was not terribly reader-friendly.  The argument here is whether pre-photographic art discourse categories are relevant to photographic discourse, with particular emphasis on 19th and early 20th century examples.  Where painters referred to landscapes, for example, 19th cent photographers most often used the term view, a word Krauss finds uncomfortably laden with commercial connotations.  She wonders if the word artist is capable of describing what she might call photographic dabblers, people with extremely abbreviated careers and no long term commitment.  What does oeuvre mean, she asks, when your output amounts to less than a handful of images, or, in the case of Atget, a library of over 10,000?  While she concludes that Atget was a subject of the state cataloging system he sought to fill,  she is mute on her own cataloging imperatives.  Perhaps Szarkowski’s comment, quoted by Krauss, is truer than most, that Atget and his work (and by extension the idea and practice of photography) was many things, and that all ideas to encapsulate him and them are at best partial.  

#

Exercise 1: Preconceptions

This first exercise asks us to sketch a landscape, but as I suck at drawing (one good reason for using a camera), and as the point of the exercise is to examine assumptions about landscapes, I thought I’d discuss one of my recent images.  

The shape of the picture is rectangular.  The camera is at head-height, perpendicular to a road.  A pole is positioned in the vertical center bisecting the image.   There are five horizontal bands, from bottom to top:  sand, road, sand, buildings/vehicles, sky.  The top and bottom bands are approximately equal height and a similar blue-gray. The evenly spaced bands and the center pole form a cross and thereby four smaller rectangles. Three other poles and two palm trees serve as vertical counterpoint and produce symmetry.  The diminishing size of the poles and trees as they appear at greater distance from the camera provide evidence of perspective.  There is one bit of movement, a person striding down the road to the left of the center pole, his movement complimented to the right by a left-leaning pole and a frondless palm tree.  As for mood, I’m not sure how to describe it.  It’s not warm or lively or inviting;  more clinical, perhaps.  It relies more on form than content.  

The exercise also calls for some discussion of why I have enrolled on this course and what I hope to learn.  Some of the background to this has been discussed in a previous post, so I’ll move right on to answer the questions.  I’m doing Landscape because it seems to fit best the kind of work I’m doing now, though I suppose that work could be framed as well as documentary.  I’m less interested right now in working with people, which would be required of documentary, and even less interested in spending all my time on the computer for Digital Image & Culture.  Landscape allows me the opportunity to get out and explore, which is just what I need right now and of which I can take good advantage during this most temperate of seasons in the UAE.

As for what I hope to get out of the course, I’m not really sure.  Perhaps a better perspective on my work and an excuse to travel farther afield to do so.  

#

Starting Landscape

I began this blog without having registered for a class, waiting for results from P&P before making a decision about whether to continue to Level 2 studies. I’m not sure what waiting will accomplish, but I have felt some concern about whether an academic approach to photography is a path I wish to continue walking. The academic investigation of art feels somewhat forced. There doesn’t appear to be much beneath the surface beyond opinion. The writing is often opaque, even pretentious, and the discussions seem to lead back to little more than personal taste. There is also the issue of whether we’ll remain in Dubai for another year and the cost-benefit calculation of registering for another course that will be interrupted by a move to a new country and a new job. None of those issues has yet been resolved, but it seems I may need a practice of some kind to keep me anchored. Part of not becoming anxious about the future is being absorbed in the present. So why not photography, especially as I am engaged in continuing personal practice? I thought to start with Documentary, but reading Bate and looking at my recent work it seems Landscape might be a better fit. Having just finished a year-long anthropology project for a Masters in Buddhist Studies, I’m not terribly eager to get involved again so soon with another community. Right now I like the work I’m doing because it involves exploration, bicycling through the city’s neighborhoods to document the usual and unusual, without having to befriend anyone or take anyone along with me. I’ve downloaded the sample Landscape course materials from the OCA website, which amounts to the Introduction and Part One, and made a start on the course without registering. Once Mutsumi and I make a decision about Dubai, and my grade for P&P comes in, I’ll make a decision about registering. In the meantime, there’s no reason I can’t get a head start.

#

Book Review: Bate, D. (2009). Photography: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg.

This is perhaps one of the more interesting of the half-dozen or so introductory photography books I’ve read as part of my formal photography education.  It’s neither a historical narrative, nor a practitioner's rumination on the craft or art of making images, but a review of some of the critical concepts used in discussing photographic images, of what they mean and how they are used.  Bate does this through the prism of genres, specifically Documentary, Portraiture, Landscape, Still Life and Fine Art.  There are also brief reviews of history and theory, as well as a concluding chapter on global trends.  

The writing is largely accessible, especially in comparison to others who take a similar approach, such as Graham Clarke’s The Photograph, but may assume a bit much from a beginner. There were enough interesting observations scattered throughout to keep me engaged, such as peripateia, a theory of historical painting in which the artist seeks to depict the dramatic moment when past became future, which Bate positions as antecedent to Bresson’s decisive moment.  I also appreciated his treatment of Still Life, often discussed in photography texts only in passing, which Bate frames contemporaneously as product photography, the kind of images you see in catalogs or on websites of e-merchants.  Bate occasionally gets carried away, as in his discussion of product imagery, in which "images of hamburgers are depicted with beautifully lit sesame seeds on the top of the buns, which compensate for or complement the insular singularity of the object with the sign of a multiplicity." 

It seems somewhat odd that a search for published reviews of this text came up empty.  

#

Notes: Bate, D. (2009). Photography: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg.

This book is part of a series designed for students from Berg Press covering key concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including volumes on Media, Technoculture, Food, Globalization, The Body, and Film.  Regarding the author, I pulled the following from his page at the University of Westminster, London:

David Bate [is] a practicing photo-artist. He studied Photography and Film, art history and cultural theory. He received a Doctorate in the Fine Art Department at the University of Leeds in 1999. Currently Professor of Photography, he leads the MA Photographic Studies programme at the University and is also director of its Photography Research Group. He teaches practice and theory mainly to postgraduate students and supervises doctoral student work. He was co-founder of Accident and Five Years Gallery in London, and is co-editor and co-founder of the academic journal photographies since 2008.

As described in the Introduction, Bate organizes the text around the concept of genre, a concept he finds underrepresented in photographic studies.  He defines genre as an expectation generating process, in the case of photography a kind of visual schemata, each with different functions that are often likely to overlap.  In other words, it’s a system for categorization with fuzzy boundaries. No surprise here.  What is of more interest is apart from documentary, photographic genres have been borrowed from painting.  The text is thereafter organized into eight chapters, the first two covering history and theory, followed by documentary, portraiture,  landscape,  still life, art, and world photography.  

Photography theory: a beginner's guide

Could be everything a photography student needs.  

Have you read the Bible cover to cover? Probably not, but it's also fair to assume you know the basic plot, the central characters and a few choice quotes. This is the point Pierre Bayard makes in his mischievously titled book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which is less a beginner's guide and more a study of different degrees of familiarity. Some books you may have read and reread, he points out, and genuinely know by heart; others skimmed and got the gist of. Some you may have heard so much about from others that you can bluff convincingly in conversation. 

There are many such books in photography, referenced and re-referenced so often they're almost an article of faith. We polled our Twitter followers to find out which of these books you consider necessary reading. The results are below, but we'd love to hear if you have other titles we should consider. Maybe you know these texts backwards – but maybe you've read and forgotten them, or never actually taken them on. If the latter, these guides may serve as a refresher, or as pointers to see you on your way. You never know, they may even inspire you to crack open the covers yourself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/10753112/Photography-theory-a-beginners-guide.html

#

What is Documentary?: The case of Mohamed Bourouissa's Périphérique

Bourouissa - Périphérique  (2005-2009)

Reading through the course notes I came across this:

 ...new platforms are pushing the boundaries of documentary and challenging stagnant and outdated conceptions of the genre. Take, for example, the long-held notion that documentary is necessarily the result of a recording process and not a product of the imagination, as Jean-François Chévrier argued in Documentary Now! (2005, p.47). If this were true then Mohamed Bourouissa, a French Algerian photographer based in Paris, would not be, strictly speaking, a documentary photographer.

So I googled Mr Bourouissa and clicked around on the front page of his website, which looks like this:

Exercise 1: What is Documentary Photography?

What is documentary photography? from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

Music.  Listening to Ms Gavin discuss the difficulties of categorizing photography is like listening to music writers trying to define a performance, recording, or artist as belonging to a particular  genre. Is this collection of notes, harmonies and rhythms straight ahead, post-bop, or free? The need for definitions appears to be driven by publishing: how can editors best categorize a set of images (or, in the case of music, a set of  recordings) so they can be easily found - and perhaps understood - by the target audience.  Artists themselves seem to cling to these categories, as evidenced by Ms Gavin’s example of photographer Monique Stauder’s Latitude Zero, work claimed by neither camp to which she might belong, documentary or fine art.  According to Gavin, Stauder preferred documentary, with the suggestion there was something untoward about her work being thought of as fine art.  This apophatic approach seems to be a rather common way of making these kinds of definitions, identifying what something is not. Theologians speak of god in the same way, via negativa, because it so very difficult to say what precisely what god might be.  Academics like to argue about definitions, imagining some great new understanding will emerge.  On occasion one might, but 99% of the discussion is scratching itches, keeping busy, and justifying grants and salaries.

#