Category Archives: OPP

It may be enough to know that, in theory-drunk circles of the period [the late 70s and early 80s], any sort of aesthetic appeal could be regarded as a stratagem of “late capitalist” ideology or some other wrinkle of malign social power. (The enemy’s identity was never entirely clear.) Artists were obliged to signal knowingness on this score. If critical paranoia poisoned visual and imaginative pleasure, that was unavoidable: a toll of enlightened consciousness.

(Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker)

Many things are clearer to me now. Seriously.

That Jeff Wall. He’s so hot right now.

Few photographers get two articles in the Times in as many days. On Saturday, the obligatory biographical sketch and introduction to the MOMA exhibit. Yesterday’s Times Magazine cover story is long, and I haven’t read it yet. But I share these articles with you becuase Wall is among the most influential living photographers, and it would be a shame not to read them when you have a chance.

If you have no time for words, see the Tate’s online exhibit from last year. It’s a fantastic multimedia tour de force. I wish more museums did this.

I’m fascinated by the images of New York-based photographer Sze Tsung Leong. Most photographs from his History Images series concern development, change, and decay (forced or otherwise). The arty Guernica magazine recently published an interview with him. (via BLDGBLOG)

(That reminds me: I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the current trend in photography concerned with transient things and mutability, often presented via detritus and disorder. A while back I actually put pen to paper to map out a bit of my thinking. When I find those notes, I’ll post them.)

With apologies to Aperture for the title.

David Segal in Slate asks “Can Photographers Be Plagiarists?” and then provides a slideshow with some famous (and infamous) “borrowing” from the last hundred years. (Thanks to Conscientious for reading Slate so I don’t have to.)

But “plagiarism” is such an ugly word. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” so they say. (The Web tells me that dozens of artists were the first to say that.) Plagiarism involves the intent to defraud, which is precisely what art does. Every photograph I make is essentially a lie. Who wants completely honest art? (Perhaps the Bechers.)

But I do think that many (perhaps most) of the photographers I know pick their subject matter or style based on those who have come before. In the dominant mode of nature and travel photography, one excels either by “discovering” new places or relentlessly “perfecting” the same places that have been photographed thousands or millions of times. (I know. I’ve been there, too. The worst part is that it feels really good when you’re doing it.)

Artistic laziness is worse than “borrowing” someone else’s image.

Many thanks to Sonia Faleiro for highlighting the work of Dayanita Singh, who appears to be one of the most prolific contemporary Indian fine-art photographers.

Singh is perhaps best known for her portraits of India’s urban middle and upper class families. These images of people working, celebrating or resting at home, show Indian life without embellishment. She explores another side of India – the place that she belongs to and understands. Her recent work has concentrated on another form of portraiture, of places rather than people. These photographs are taken in a diverse range of interior spaces: from the ballroom of an 18th Century palace to the humbler surroundings of a private home or from museums, libraries and seminaries to the specially constructed wedding ‘stages’ of the traditional marriage ceremonies. An abiding image of India is that of a teeming crowd of humanity. However, all but a few of Singh’s images are devoid of the human figure and they are typified by composure rather than restlessness. The work’s subtle formality is the product of intense and intimate observation, communicating a unique sense of time and place.

(Firth Street Gallery)

How does this actually work in practice? Consider this blurb about her seminal book Privacy:

What can a photographer in India capture on film other than disasters or the exotic? After many years spent documenting the poverty in her homeland, Dayanita Singh was preoccupied by this question. Her answer here is a return to the world from which she came, to India’s extended, well-to-do families and their fine homes. Both on commission and on her own, she photographed friends and friends of friends, creating a portrait of another society, complete with its traditional and post-colonial symbols of prosperity. The self-confident elite of India is nearly unrivalled in the West. Privacy provides great insight into a closed world characterized by tight family solidarity. Singh shows the people as they would like to see themselves, in the middle of splendidly decorated rooms and surrounded by possessions that represent their self-image. At a certain point in her work, Singh realized that even without their residents, the rooms were occupied by the invisible generations that had lived there before. The book closes with photographs of interiors, empty but still filled with spirits.
(Artbook.com)

Her work has been displayed at several galleries both inside and outside India, including Firth Street Gallery, Ikon Gallery, and Gallery Chemould. I should have seen her art in 2005 when it was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but I didn’t. You can read a review from Tiffinbox.

• Review of the “Allahabad” series from The Hindu
• Review of the “Family Portraits” series from The Hindu
• Public exhibitions, from ArtFacts.net
• Bio from The Times of India
• Review of her latest exhibit “Go Away Closer” from Matters of Art
• Ambiguity, Well-Argued — a review in Tehelka

For someone living in the Google age, it’s slow business finding information about Indian phtographers. Thanks to the small number of people who pointed me to a few photographers of note, I got a modest start. But very modest. (Mostly just Raghubir Singh and Prashant Panjiar.)

So I’ve decided to try a different track for a while, searching for and sending queries to various galleries in India. No responses yet — no doubt it got stuck in some spam filter or another. But at the Cymroza Gallery I found a few more names:

• Bhalu Mondhe
• Sabrina and Moutushi

And Wikipedia has a smallish list of Indian photographers, including

• Darogha Ubbas Alli
• F. W. Champion
• Lala Deen Dayal
• Victor George
• Atul Kasbekar
• Madhaviah Krishnan
• Raghu Rai
• B. S. Ranga
• Sandip Ray
• Sukumar Ray
• Sooni Taraporevala

Still . . . more foreigners publishing images of India than Indians themselves.

To say that Ruth Bernhard spent a life in photography would sell short the span of her life and the impact of her work. It’s fairer to say that she spent two or three lives in photography.

• NY Times obituary
• Women in Photography article
• Wikipedia entry
• Google Image Search

I’m a voracious link clicker . . . and pack rat. (I click and I click and sometimes I even read.) Here’s the first in a series highlighting what I would have clicked over the last couple of months (and probably read) if I hadn’t been taking classes:

• The Sentence (Alec Soth, “the emo photographer from minnesota”)
• Ten Best (via Alec Soth)
• A Conversation with Richard Renaldi (Conscientious)
• A Conversation with Paul Shambroom (Conscientious)
• Do people get in the way? — a debate (Conscientious)
• Henri Cartier-Bresson on Charlie Rose (various)
• Amy Stein (via Conscientious)

One of my favorite documentary images from the 1970′s is Leonard Freed’s photograph of a police officer playing a game with kids in New York. (From Garrison Art Center.)

More images…

I haven’t forgotten about my promise to explore contemporary Indian photographers and show what I learn here. Classes are almost over for the semester, and I will be getting back to it. I hope this will tide you over for a while.

“Homeland. But where is home?”

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew‘s work explores (among other things) the expatriot experience. Some of her series include:

• An Indian from India
• Indian Memories
• The Virtual Immigrant

I don’t know much about Terry Falke, but he has a new/first book, Observations in an Occupied Wilderness. It’s a contemporary examination of the man-altered landscape.

Shouldn’t I be at my little club? Oh, that’s right. Here’s some other photography thinking.

Chinese Photography (about.com)

The Value of Space: A Theoretical Sketch for Photographic Art in the Late-Twentieth Century (LensCulture) — “Giotto and other artists and theorists of the early Renaissance altered the course of art with their fundamental conceptions of space related to optics and the camera obscura. Centuries later it was photographers who revolutionized the way we perceive space.”

Going The Long (or Wrong) Way to Brooklyn – Annie Leibovitz (Modern Art Obsession) — All right, I’ve never really gotten into Leibovitz’s work. It’s all so self-similar and hagiographic. The NYT calls it “high-brow, static form of reality television.” Of course, it’s not bad, and MAO gives a nice round-up of the celebrated celebrity photographer and “friend” of house fave Susan Sontag.

Joel Meyerowitz gives a really good lecture. (A year ago I saw him at the MFA and sat looking at Watson and the Shark thinking about what I wanted to do with my work.) He’s engaging, honest, and generates really great images. Oh, and he did a bunch of WTC imagery, not at all like the sublime, quiet Cape Cod photographs. (1 and 2 and 3 and 4)

Ladies and gentlemen . . .

• Bill Owens
• Dianne Arbus
• Catherine Opie
• Zoe Strauss
• Brian Ullrich

And guess where I’m going over Christmas. Getting warm. Getting warmer. That’s right! The city of fish.

Okay, everybody. I’ll be writing soonish about symbols, visual history, and artistic intention; but I wanted to give you all a chance to ruminate on this 2003 photograph, “Awakening,” by Chitra Ganesh. What does it mean to you?

I think we’re familiar with the notion that making former colonies “exotic” and “alluring” satisfies how many people want to see “foreign” places like India these days, when places are packaged as unique travel destinations and people are decorations for the travelers’ set. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Europeans reacted more favorably to visual and literary depictions of India in the second half of the 19th century that emphasized the differentness of India. But nevertheless, as I read the excerpt of Christopher Pinney’s Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs on Amazon, I actually was a bit surprised in (a) the durability of this tourist point-of-view, and (b) modern societies’ slowness to adopt skepticism toward pictures of the “other.”

And yet nonphotographic truth was always very much in question: “One encounters time and time again in the administrative and anthropological literature [of Colonial India] the complaint that in India nothing is as it seems.” There is a “general fallability of native evidence in India.” (p. 20, quoting Norman Cheevers). No doubt the very act of colonization and the insecurities of minority government instilled European distrust, but I suspect the extreme differentness of religion, language, and symbology must have converted “unknowability” into a maleable substance that Europeans could construct for their home audiences.

As Indians present themselves, the subcontinent, and the diaspora in images today, how do they present notions of truth and react to outsiders’ expectations? How do contemporary Indian photographers reforge symbols and culture, both in global an national contexts?