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.  

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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.  

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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.

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