Painting vs Photography

I have always thought that if I were more practical, or arty, or talented or just had the time or inclination to draw more, that I would like to find a way of merging painting and photography in a complete coherent piece. I find it surprising that so few artists have attempted this, this blurring of boundaries between the two mediums. Particularly in this day and age when so many art works in contemporary galleries deny all attempts to try and describe exactly what it is they are- materially that is- and go instead for the ubiquitous classification of “mixed media”. Or give a lengthy list of all the undefinable ingredients that runs longer the description of the artwork itself and bears no obvious relation to the intriguing colorful and visceral object before you. 

I remember getting really excited the first time I say Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines. Their layering of postcards, photographs, collaged images from newspapers, and the thick tactile persistence of oil paint. Even more so, when those flat surfaced canvases that always appear so multidimensional, as if you could climb up inside them, gave way to the actual 3D objects, the multiple sections of Interview divided up like a child’s treasure chest, the sheep trapped in his white stripped tire standing atop a canvas in Monogram, or the eagle wings emerging from the vertical surface of Canyon. 

 While the books argued over whether these pieces were autobiographical, a hint at his affair with Jaspar Johns, the coining of the term “flatbed picture plane” and the narratives or their art historical context in the reproductions of old classics, I was just disappointed that all the images and photographs included were reproduced, penny postcards and cut outs from magazines. 

I was entirely uninterested as to whether Untitled (Man with White Shoes) held secret references to his family and past, in fact, when the artworks came off the wall and onto the floor they started losing my attention. For me, the more successful works were the ones that blurred the visual boundaries between the collaged elements and painted ones, where photographs, three dimensional objects and those beautiful tactile globs of paint overlapped into one glorious prismatic attack. Still though, not the photographs were being treated as objects to be inserted, a democratic playing field for all elements where a wooden chair is as much a brushstroke as a spot of oil paint. 

 Perhaps the problem is that Rauschenberg was not a photographer, that photography never became a central feature of his art practice. Gerhard Richter is perhaps more directly engaged with the object of the photograph. His earliest photo paintings come from a variety of sources, newspapers books, landscapes, portraits. Starting with a photograph which he has often taken himself he uses a projector to trace the image onto the canvas replicating the look of the original with his distinctive “blur”. These are still oil paintings and his use of photography is encyclopedic as a means for denying any artistic choice in subject matter, rather than an interest in the medium of the photograph itself. His overpainted photos such as the series Firenze merge the two mediums, creating new images from photographs of a variety of subjects by dragging wet paint across the surface. This is more to do with blotting out than creating something new, the triumph of the paint over the mechanically produced image, and the photographs themselves seem to be more taken to serve the purpose of the paint, than intended as finished aesthetic works in themselves. 

I once went to an exhibition that included large pieces of exposed photo paper, mounted on walls, curled up in glass cases, the physicality of the photograph as an object prioritized over the image it contains on its surface. I thought it was Richter exhibition, but only have a vague memory, and my goggle searching isn’t producing any clues. 

Aliki Braine is a trained sculptor, but uses photographs to “seek out the archetypal landscape” she is one of a long line of photographers including most famously Man ray, who manipulate the negative. Braine paints directly onto the negative, inserting her artistic mark in the image production chain. By marking the negative directly, rather than the image, she is showing an awareness of the process of image production in photography,  also working with pin holes and hole punchers to render the negative abstract, rather than as a medium for representation. They still retain their ability to be reproduced, the hallmark of the photograph. Although we are getting a long way from paint here. 

Charlotte Caron takes classical portraits of people and then paints animal heads over them, blurring the lines between the two mediums and making them exist in the same representational function. She creates a duality between the two mediums, photography is the human, mechanical, rational medium used for the cool calm depiction of people, while paint is the instinctual animalistic side, represented by the drips and splatter the wildness that invades the neatness of the photograph and threatens disintegration. By imposing animal faces onto humans she is supposedly humanizing them showing us as bestial in nature, and them as rational, or more so that we would like to think. This si not what is happening for me, rather she is reinforcing the separate natures of the two mediums. While I am not a fan of photorealism which simply apes the skill of detail of photography, after all what makes paint ot visually pleasing is the elements that escape  

representation, the blobs and splatters, the drips and stains. I don’t feel that the identity of her sitters is compromised, as they were photographed for the express purpose of overpainting. That it is their faces that are masked is irrelevant, they are given new ones, new identities. What interests me is the setting up of a binary between painting and photography. Again they sit one on top of the other, their incompatibility emphasized by the struggle for dominance.

I came across another rather neat attempt to merge photography seamlessly into the medium of painting in the art of Jim McManus. Sometimes clumsily, sometimes imperceptibly, he cuts out and collages photographs into his seascapes, creating a picture postcard effect that plays with our sight lines. The photographs are in scale, and often are interchangeable with the painted elements. He is not quite offering an answer to the question of what photography can do that paint can’t (and vice versa), and not all of his attempts work out, but it is one of the more successful merging of the two that I have seen: that fits so comfortably sharing the same space, and neither medium competing for dominance.

In the Darkroom

In the digital age, of instagram, phone photography and the near infinite memory capacity of most digital cameras the art of film seems antiquated. 

In his little history of photography, Walter Benjamin recognizes something new and strange in the photograph, speaking of an early portrait of a fishwife he describes it as “something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name  was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in art”.  

In the early days of its inception, photography was lauded as offering a new reality or truth that could not be perceived by the eye, a window into the optical unconscious. Photography had yet to become the common currency of our everyday lives, used on television, in print and on the internet as well as for our own private recording of events and memories. Those first photographs were incapable of capturing human images, who moved to quickly for the camera’s long exposure times. Daguerres’ Boulevard du Temple from 1838 is eerily empty, the traffic and pedestrian’s moved too quickly to be recorded, on the lower are the only people still long enough to be recorded – a man getting his boots polished.  This aspect of time in photography, meant that there was a stillness, a drawn out aura to the photograph that has been lost to efficiency and speed of today’s technology. As Benjamin puts it, the length of time of the exposure mean that the subject grew into in the picture, in contrast the snapshot. There seems to be a permanence to the photograph that has been lost, also reflected in the physicality of the medium, early daguerreotypes were heavy metal plates encased in velvet-lined books, they were cumbersome one off objects meant to be treasured and preserved.

With the development of photographic technology came the reproducibility of images, challenging the aura of the traditional art object. Benjamin defines aura as “A strange weave of Space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.” 

Whereas the first introduction of photography seemed to challenge the aura of the artwork, present day digital photography invests those earlier chemical processes with a new aura all of their own. The photograph created in the darkroom, through the stages or processing and printing is closer to the skill and learned craft of painting now than to the simple point and click (although even that is done away with in phone photography) of a digital camera. Even though you can in theory make an infinite number of prints from one negative, as I have learned through my own practices in the darkroom, each individual print has some slight difference, this one has a water mark, that one is develop da few seconds longer, another has a slight scratching on the negative that can’t be wiped out. It is this physicality that is lost in digital processes. Not that I am advocating a complete rejection of digital, I use instagram myself. But it is interesting to watch how the old tensions that sprung up between painting and photography upon its invention now apply more to the analog vs. digital technique.  Unfortunately unlike painting, which does not look like it will become extinct any time soon, darkroom developing is more likely to die out as an obsolete technology, going the same way as the cassette tape and the cd.

Part of what I love about developing my own photographs, is the extreme slowness of the process, unlike with a digital image, that you can so quickly shoot, upload to a computer and then edit or adjust to wipe out any flaws or to bright, sharpen or crop, with darkroom developing, first you have to develop the film. I lack the patience to be really fiddly and a lot of my images come out crooked, with watermarks or scratches on the negatives, but even before you get to the printing stage, its necessary to get the development process right. I recently developed a roll of film and thought I had completely messed it up, the developer was too high a temperature and when I pulled the negatives out of the wash, they appeared almost two-tone, completely black and white with very little gradiations of tones. I was really upset – a whole roll of film wasted! But when I got them into the darkroom to begin printing, I discovered that the extreme contrast actually made for much more interesting pictures. I am a complete newbie at all of this, and have been teaching myself from books and just from playing around, and even when I am offered advice by the others in the photo center, I rarely pay much attention. For me it is the getting my hands dirty, the playing with chemicals in a dark room, that has the same joys or making art when I was a kid. The results are not very technically correct, but I am less interested in producing a perfect picture then in just playing around. While I watch the other more experienced members of the photo center go back and forth between enlarger and developing trays, over and over again printing the same image until they have it just right, I tend to toss out print after print from different negative, the blurry ones, the ones with too much contrast, with people’s heads cropped off, or with too much exposure. You can probably tell that I take photographs this way too, ignoring the light meter and often just clicking away aimlessly, all the more delighted when I get a random really good shot.  

While these mechanical processes seemed artificial and mechanical to early critics such as Benjamin, and mastery as a photographer required a mastery of technique rather than artistry, so too now the darkroom is more aligned with the patience and skill of a painter, the hours spent learning to render the shape of an eye or how to capture light and shade, so the photographer in the darkroom spends hours laboring over achieving just the right degree of light, the right temperature of the chemicals and handles it all as gingerly as if they were painting a delicate watercolour. As I’ve learned myself, those chemicals are no joke, they require patience and respect when handling them. 

I’ve included some of my better results below, so you can see the differences between prints and the physicality of them. I’m afraid the RC paper I use doesn’t scan very well, but all the better to pick out the scratches and light leaks, and occasional watermarks.

Samita, printed at different exposure times.

Rebecca

Kevin, with scratches on the right side of the negative.

 

The issue here was with the extreme light when taking the photo, had to do some doging and burning to get Mike on the right to show up at all.

Jenn, a little blurry when printed at 8x10

Karina, came out nicely first time!

Dilia, had a lot of trouble with the exposure as the negative was so grey

I really like the gradiation from white to black in this one

From the ruined negatives, too much contrast but I kind of like it!

New Blog

I started a photo blog on tumblr, where I will try to post one original photo a day.

http://lettuce-bear.tumblr.com/

Venice Biennale 2013

This year's Irish representative at the Venice Biennale is the Kilkenny born photographer Richard Mosse. Mosse's contribution will consist of a a “highly ambitious eight-channel multimedia installation on the subject of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo”.
The photographs will be printed on a huge scale- some are over two feet wide-  which adds to the visual impact of the rich magenta's and crimson brought out by his use of infrared film. Quite appropriately, the film was originally intended for military surveillance. Mosse is quoted in Popular Photography: “I was interested in [the film’s] original purpose as a military tool, but I was also drawn to its peculiar color palette. I wanted to use it as a way of thinking through this conflict and the rules and conventions of war photography.”

While the pure beauty of the landscapes could be used to accuse Mosse of aestheticizing his troubling subject matter, the detachment from the scenes of war, and the fact that none of the images actually represent any scenes of violence, but are taken rather during peacetime show his awareness of the inability of art to sufficiently address such issues. Mosse is not a documentary war photographer, and it is not his intention to draw our attention to the horrors of the conflict, or to highlight any specific war crimes, but rather to comment on the impotence of the artist in such a position. His use of colour awes and overwhelms us with its beauty, but it also renders it subject unfamiliar, challenging our previous conceptions of what war in a place often associated with darkness and the primitive should look like.

For all its associations with military surveillance, the photographs are still very, well, pink. This has a curious effect particularly on the images of soldiers, that perhaps would not occur if the intensity and reversals of colours came out in greens or blues. They make these hardened, sometimes scarred men look almost camp; particularly in the portrait General Février, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010 (above). The uniform is cast a washed out greyish pink, while the beret becomes a stylish accessory, complimented by the gradiating shades of pink foliage in the background. It could almost be from a fashion feature on military style, were it not for the downcast, subdued  eyes of the general, and the very real gun in his hand. It also reminded me of the poartriats of African men in Kehinde Wileys' work, their strong macho stances contrasting with the decorative backgrounds and contemporary fashion. As with Wiley's portraits, Mosse avoids a sense of frivolity; the images are too emotionally loaded, the expression in the subject's eyes too direct for that.

                                             Kehinde Wiley Willem van Heythuysen, 2005


More of Mosse's works and photographs can be viewed here: http://www.richardmosse.com/

Beat Memories

I had the pleasure of working at the Contemporary Jewish Museum last week for the opening of Beat Memories: The photographs of Allen Ginsberg. As well as the main exhibition, there was a curator's talk, a stunning performance of Ginsberg’s poem “America” by Conspiracy of Beards’ musical director Daryl Henline. There was also a zine making corner, a typewriter petting zoo, a bar and readings by local poets.

Ginsberg is one of the most prolific photographers and chroniclers of his group of friends and co-conspirators. Whether or not his photographers can be classed as 'art' is a rather contentious issue, as he originally intended them as snapshots of his beat family, and they were stashed away in storage and forgotten about for years until the 1980's, when with the encouragement of other artists and photographers he began to print many of the undeveloped negatives. This was also when he began writing the inscriptions beneath the images, as a record of what it was he was seeing when he originally took the photos, and what he saw now, years later. Ginsberg is not just any casual picture taker though, and some of the portraits, such as a young Gregory Corso dressed like a Romantic hero in cape and staff crouching in the dust filled confines of a stairway attest. There is a definite self-consciousness to many of the pictures, and the writings under the images add another dimension to the images. Ginsberg is after all, a poet, even if he began to fancy himself a photographer with the encouragement of photographers Robert Frank and Berenice Abbott. As his written commentary on the images expanded, he had to increasingly print the photographs smaller in order to allow more room for his writings. I think this is what tells where his allegiance lies. The words do more than annotate the contents of the picture, they are given equal prominence. It was during this time that Ginsberg conducted a series of talks about 'snapshot poetics' or 'photographic poetics' drawing connections between the two mediums. He gives directives to the photographer/poet in which he states: “Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what’s vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.”

Whether you view it as a profoundly personal record of a generation of writers and characters, or as pieces of art to be promoted alongside Ginsberg's poetry, the pictures are still moving and interesting interventions into the divisions between words and image, photography and poetry.

Beat Memories is on view May 23–September 8, 2013

Take me Away

How often do we venture into our public buildings? Our court houses, and civic centers and city halls? Except for the occasional tourist with an interest in the grand architecture that boasts an individual city's wealth, locals rarely enter these doors. It was with this thought that I went to San Francisco's City Hall to see Take Me Away, an exhibition of photographs organized by the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries.
The SFAC "makes contemporary art accessible to broad audiences through curated exhibitions that both reflect our regional diversity and position Bay Area visual art production within an international contemporary art landscape. By commissioning new works, collaborating with arts and community organizations and supporting artist’s projects, the SFAC Galleries programs provide new and challenging opportunities for contemporary art to engage with a civic dialogue." at least according to the mission statement posted on their website. Sticking a rather interesting and diverse photography exhibition into the basement of one of the more overlooked public buildings in the city does not strike me as the best way to make contemporary art accessible. You could perhaps argue that they are attempting to draw attention to the city hall itself, and open its doors to a wider audience. But this theory doesn't hold up when you actually go in search of the show itself. After a rather impressive wander through the great domed hall and up the sweeping staircase, I had to ask where I could find the photographs, as there was absolutely no signs or advertising.
They were located, I discovered after much searching, in the basement. A long, cold corridor with low ceilings and atrociously bad lighting. Not the ideal venue for any kind of art display. I'm not sure whose bright idea it was to turn this disused room into a gallery but it felt like they had ran out of better venues and stuck it down there out of the way in a moment of panic or oversight.
Which is a shame, because the show itself was surprisingly impressive.

A juried photography exhibition comprised of over 100 works by regional photojournalists and fine artists.  Photographers were encouraged to "reflect on both real and imagined spaces one might visit in order to leave the everyday. The chosen works represent a myriad of places to escape, ranging from virtual space to locations as close as home". In advance of the call for submissions, the jurors selected three established Bay Area photographers to present larger bodies of work. David Gardner’s series about people who trade stability for life in a motor home will sit beside Alice Shaw’s renowned series People Who Look Like Me, which depicts the artist stretching her own identity in order to look more like another person. Rebecca Horne’s domestic scenes contribute an unsettling and fantastical vision of daydreaming gone awry.  "The exhibition ultimately examines human connections to respite, adventure, and fantasy, through ideas and spaces related to escapism."
Actually, the three featured artists I found to be some of the least interesting. Gardner's series of full time nomads was a simple visual documentary of a minority class of people. It read like an August Sander catalogue of a class of people with little insight or artistic merit. The photographs themselves were not particularly striking, and the subject matter, while highlighting an alternative lifestyle and underground movement of people, were emotionless and did little to reveal the personalities of the subjects or give insight into their day to day lives.
Similarly, Alice Shaw's series was an interesting idea whose novelty soon wore off, large colour prints of the artist standing beside a series of people that in some way resemble her, they  are in the style of simple snapshots, but on a much bigger scale. The variety or race and gender in the series shows the mutability of resemblance. There is something to recognize in each person the photographer stands beside, but I think the choice of presentation, and aesthetic style lets the series down somewhat.
Rebecca Horne's series had a little more depth, close up images of ordinary objects they are an investigation into questions of the phenomenology  of everyday objects. they unusual viewpoints, often from below such an item as a pot on the stove or a table top made me think of the angle of view that children have, and how a simple change of perception can so profoundly affect the way we encounter our physical environment.

By far the best work for me was Adam Katseff's Landscapes. Large framed black images behind glass, with the glare from the fluorescent lights on the glass at first they looked like flat blackness, without any photographic image. As you look for longer, the picture emerges, huge mountainscapes and forests, photographed at night with long exposure times, they give more of a sense of the sublime beauty of nature than any painting or colour photograph I have ever seen.

Another work of note was that of Meghann Riepenhoff, whose Eluvium dealt with the physical nature of photography, the process of exposing light in the darkroom to create a physical impression in a piece of paper. Instead of using a camera, she simple covered the paper with sand and then manipulated it into shapes with her voice, the titles describe the vocal action she took to produce the effect. Yelling, screaming, crying, singing, whispering, produces a series of blue and black abstract shapes that are reminiscent of landscapes and call to mind the efluvium after which the series is titled. I found it an interesting parallel between emotion and nature, with the human voice playing the part of wind in the manipulation of soil deposits.

 

Neil krug

Neil Krug is a photographer who creates hazy psychedelic sun-soaked images inspired by the covers of 70's pulp novels. This kind of aesthetic seems to be everywhere at the moment, with new technology seeking to emulate old photography technics such as instagram, and the new resurgence of lomography. Krug uses expired polaroid film to create the hazy bleached out effects in his pictures. Many of the shots look like they are movie stills, particularly those in his book Pulp, which predominantly feature his wife, the model Joni Harbeck. He also makes music videos and is working on a feature film. While the oversexed, throwback nostalgia is a little too idealistic and uncritical for my taste, they are just so breathtakingly beautiful that I find myself wishing I could tease out such psychedelic colours from my own polaroid camera, and envying his ability to make vintage photographs that are still modern enough not to become kitsch.

       

Krug's video for Ladytron: