Experiencing Photography

 I have written here before about my surprise at how much I have enjoyed seeing examples of my work in a large size on the 27-inch screen of my iMac computer.  Those on-screen images are a good deal larger than any prints hanging on my walls. Additionally, as I have no more wall space in our little house available for hanging prints, the computer display offers a way to make the big images easily viewable without the trouble and expense of printing and framing.

Up to now I have taken advantage of the on-screen image display by using favorite images as static computer wallpaper.  More recently I have begun to just let a rotating slideshow run in a browser tab which I leave in place when the computer is not otherwise occupied.  The source for that ongoing slideshow is the collection of what I consider my strongest images at my Flickr photo-sharing account.

 

 

 If you want to experience what I am talking about here, go to my Flickr homepage (or yours!). Look for the menu of viewing options in the upper right of the screen.  Then click on the icon representing a computer monitor with a black triangle in the center.

Selecting that icon will toggle a slideshow of the over 1,000 images on my site.  If you prefer a briefer experience you can choose to do the same with one of the available albums in which the pictures are organized around a particular theme. (Press ESC to exit at any point.)

Either way, provided you have a reasonably large screen, you will have an encounter with photography which to me is very engrossing.

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Many museum exhibitions feature some use of video displays, often as a way to supplement what is being presented in the form of prints, paintings or other art forms.

The Albuquerque Museum, more often than not for instance, includes a small wall-mounted screen which might offer some expanded information about the artist or the theme of an exhibit.  There is also a screening room showing films about the subjects of current exhibitions.

Temporary installations of larger screens are sometimes devoted to experimental video art presentations.  Touch screens are often available to provide an interactive opportunity for museum visitors.  However, none of those installations offer the kind of engagement with photographs that is provided by the slideshow format that is described above.

The Albuquerque Museum's photo archives contain approximately 150,000 images.  From that vast collection the Museum's archivist mounts regular exhibitions, often featuring the work of local photo studios from Albuquerque's past.  Those shows mounted on the wall of a south hallway are excellent.  However, once the exhibition is terminated to make way for another, the material becomes unavailable.

The prints exhibited from the Museum's  archives are produced by scanning old prints, negatives and glass photographic plates.  It seems like it would be a relatively easy task to make those scanned images permanently available through digital display in the museum as well as online.

In fact,  the Museum archivist has produced many very good online videos featuring materials from the archive.  However, those videos use the images as props to tell a story along with audio commentary.  That is quite a different format than simply presenting photographs for individual contemplation as is the case when photographs are hung for a wall exhibit.

 One of the major suppliers of digital display equipment for museums has a website that shows some of the digital display technology currently available for museum use, along with an overview of strategies and techniques for digital presentations.  It is worth a look.

A Bright Future

 I look always look forward to this yearly exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum.  It is a delight to see what excellent photographic work is being done by these high school students, and this 2026 show may be the best yet.

 The compositions were uniformly sophisticated and the execution to the final prints was near faultless.  I especially liked this imaginative panoramic collage by Ava Greenwood, Cibola HS, Grade 11.

 The exhibition was divided into "Digital" and "Non Digital".

 

I was not surprised when I overheard a visitor ask "What is Non-Digital?".   Was this referring to digital as opposed to film-based analog photography?  Does the Non-Digital term include the reproduction of the image using traditional or alternative printing methods such as cyanotypes?

My only complaint about the Focus On Youth project is that there is little in the way of explanation of the instructional and technical processes that contribute to the success of this excellent annual show.  It would be nice to see that kind of additional information included in a thorough online presentation. 

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UPDATE

The monthly Third Thurday event will feature the Focus on Youth exhibition. 

Staged Images

 Currently on exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum is the photographic work of Cara Romero and ceramics by her husband, Diego.  She is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe.  He is from the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico.  The photographic images ranged from large posters to billboard-sized images.  I have never been a fan of elaborately staged work, but I found the exhibition interesting for several reasons.

A video narrated by the photographer provided a good overview of style and techniques.

There are online videos which also illustrate the technical aspects of the work, including this shot from a PBS presentation which reveals the image making instrument to be a Canon digital camera.

 Back home after viewing the exhibit I searched online to try to get some idea about how the work was being received.  While I found a lot of links to show Cara Romero has had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, there really seemed to be no critical assessments, but only often-repeated boilerplate publicity. (See here for the Albuquerque Journal review.)

My conclusion at this point is that even though there may be a lot of talk about contemporary photography, there seems to be no general agreement on exactly what that may be.  High-tech digital imagery and directorial staging certainly are prominent, but how any of that relates to the history and practice of photography over the past two centuries is not at all clear.

It is perhaps not surprising that the statements made by the artist are not particularly helpful, as such self assessments and explanations seldom are.  Romero relates that she was initially very enthusiastic about some of the early work by people like Curtis in portraying indigenous people.  As she got more into developing her own ideas and style, however, Romero decided that there was not much done since the early days to bring forth an updated view of how indigenous people are encountering the world today.  So she offers her current work as an effort to fill the perceived void.

The problem I see with that self assessment is that Romero seems to be working with a pretty narrow slice of indigenous experience.  Most of her models seem to be young creatives living in Santa Fe; they and Romero are certainly interesting and often beautiful people, but the pictures resulting from  their collaboration leave aside rather a lot of daily life of the greater community.

I think it relevant to note that elaborately staged photography is not a new idea.  Perhaps due in part to the cumbersome equipment  of the very early photographers and the hurdle of very long exposure times,  staging images - often depicting biblical subjects - was a very prominent technique.  Here, for instance, is a shot by Julia Margaret Cameron.

 Stieglitz and Strand led something of a rebellion which devalued staged work in favor of more spontaneous straight photography, and that trend predominated for the next half century in defining what should be considered as photographic fine art.  However, some staged work continued to wiggle its way into museums and art publications.  One practitioner who has been particularly enduring is Cindy Sherman, whose explorations of female identity were incorporated in self portraits which she called Untitled Film Stills.

And, finally, it cannot be overlooked that staged images have been the backbone of  advertising illustration without a letup since very early in photography's history. 

In a recent online presentation to the New Mexico Film Photographers group Chip Greenberg presented convincing evidence that the role of photographers in producing the avalanche of staged image ads which we have all been accustomed to may be close to an end.  What he did was produce an image using an AI image generator which was very close in appearance to an image he had made in his commercial photography studio years ago.  That AI image - even after some refinement - probably took less than an hour to make, while the original image on film was the product of days of work.

Following Chip's lead and shamelessly borrowing Cara Romero's concept I picked an online AI image generator of many available with a quick Google search and made the following image in under five minutes.  It won't end up in any museum exhibits, but I think it should generate some soul searching by curators and critics. (More about this subject on my other blog.)

Remembering and Forgetting

I don't recall now why I originally placed this post about John Collier Jr. in my Everything Else blog nine years ago.  This great American photographer certainly deserves a place here in my blog about film photography.

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October 24, 2015

John Collier Jr.

I went to a lecture recently which was sponsored by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.  The announcements had indicated the presentation would be about the museums photo archives.  As it turned out, the presenter used some photos from the archives, but mostly as illustrations for discussing theories of photography advanced by European philosophers.  At the end of the talk I asked about the museum's holdings related to the work of John Collier Jr.  The lecturer, currently a curator at the museum, replied that the Maxwell had a very large collection of works by Collier, but that no one had worked with the material.  She said she did not know if anyone in the Anthropology or Education departments at UNM was familar with Collier's work or making use of his techniques in regard to photo analysis and education.

The lecturer's answers to my questions left me discouraged about the state of knowledge about one of Twentieth Century America's photo greats.  John Collier Jr. made a lot of great pictures in the early 1940s while working under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration.  Collier continued making photographs in a similar vein for many more years all over the western hemisphere.  At the same time he also began to develop the concepts of Visual Anthropology and applied those concepts to analyzing teaching and learning processes.  Collier taught photography classes as a full professor for many years at San Francisco State.  His accomplishments as a photographer, researcher and teacher seem all the more extraordinary when you consider that he had very limited formal schooling, due in a large part to injuries sustained as a child which left him with physical impairments, dyslexia, hearing loss and impaired speech.

As it turns out, academic engagement with Collier's work was not as dismally scant as the lecturer had averred.  While browsing the web for information about Collier I stumbled on an interactive presentation about Collier's war-time work with the FSA.  The web pages were the product of a grant project conducted under the auspices of the Maxwell Museum and The College of Education's Technology & Education Center (TEC) at UNM in 2006.  The project's director was Catherine Baudoin, who at the time was the Maxwell's Photographic Collections Curator.  The on line presentation was organized as an interactive lesson plan enabling exercises in interpretation of war-time photo uses by the U.S. government using posters, photo archives and video resources.  To support the lesson plan activities, Baudoin uploaded about 400 of Collier's FSA images to the Flickr photo sharing site where they are still available for viewing.

Unfortunately, Baudoin's web pages had become detached from the Maxwell web site over the years; there is no link there now to the Collier work; the Photo Curator position seems to have evaporated, and Baudoin's name is nowhere to be found.  My guess would be that the skimpy and rather disorganized Maxwell web site is symptomatic of budgetary deficiencies which have focused the institution's efforts more on conservation of holdings rather than on sustaining a coherent educational mission incorporating up-to-date technological communications resources.

Luckily, modern search engine technology compensates for a lot of academic entropy.  Here are some useful  links to information I have come across on the web and elsewhere:

Far from Main Street:Three Photographers in Depression-Era New Mexico (link to Amazon)
A very fine collection of photos along with essays about the FSA/OWI work of  Russell Lee, John Collier Jr. and Jack Delano.  The cover photo is by Collier.  "All photographs are selected from the Pinewood Collection of New Mexico FSA Photographs, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico ... Prints were made from original negatives generously loaned by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division."



Oral History Interview with John Collier, 1965 January 18 Conducted by Richard K. Doud
Amazing insights into the personalities and operations of the FSA/OWI under Stryker.  The first part of the interview is accessible as an on line audio clip, and it gives a good idea of the expressive challenge which Collier over-came and even turned to an advantage during his long career as a photographer, researcher and educator.

John Collier, Jr.: Anthropology, Education and the Quest for Diversity
by Ray Barnhardt, Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
An authoritative, first-person appreciation of Collier's work with Eskimo and Navajo students and teachers as well as with a diverse urban school system in San Francisco.

Photographing Navajos: John Collier Jr. on the Reservation, 1948-1953
by C. Stewart Doty, Dale Sperry Mudge, and Herbert John Benally Photographs by John Collier Jr.
(link to Amazon)

The authors tracked down photo archives of Collier's Navajo work in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia and then interviewed family members of the people depicted by Collier in the Four Corners area.  The photos in the book illustrate the techniques developed by Collier to elicit social and cultural information by showing photographs to informants depicting their own social and physical environments.  The text and illustrations provide a nice followup to the study of the Navajo conducted by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton in the 1930s and 1940s.  Right after the publication of Photographing Navajos the Collier family made the decision to donate their collection of Collier's work to the Maxwell Museum.  The book's introduction notes that "The collection includes fifty years of photographs, film and video, field notes, daybooks, and correspondence."

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John Collier Jr., Bureau with Portraits and Mementos
(and self portrait), Picuris Pueblo, NM, ca. 1945

Critical Writing about Photography

 Good writing about photography is a somewhat rare commodity.  One place it survives is in the Photo-Booth on the New Yorker magazine website (paywall).  The most recent article there is an essay by Geraldo Cadava about Low Rider culture as portrayed in the photos of Stefan Ruiz in the 1990s.

The New York Times used to feature a regular column called LENS about photography, video and visual journalism.  That was discontinued in 2018, but a selection of the articles in the NYTimes archive is still accessible online.

Looking at Art in New Mexico

 Margaret and I spent a lot of time in galleries and museums in the last month.  The exhibition of Canadian Indigenous Art at the Albuquerque Art Museum was excellent.  A show of Black and White drawings and photographs at the New Mexico Art League was great fun.  

Margaret at Arts Thrive

Two exhibitions with great promise mostly brought disappointment.  The annual Arts Thrive benefit exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum had way too much art on the walls.  The Ways of Seeing exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe assembled classics from three private photography collections, but what might have been a great experience was ruined for me by abysmal lighting.  

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

 At the Santa Fe exhibit there were prints from many of Photography's great pioneers including Alfred Steiglitz and Ruth Berhard.  Gertrude Kasebier's small photogravure, "Blessed are thou amongst women", was so poorly lit that I was left wishing I had brought a flashlight.  In fact, all the galleries in the great old Santa Fe building  were dim and dingy looking.  The big palladium prints by David Michael Kennedy at least showed that there is still good work being done today in the State.

Exceptional Ordinary

I have been enjoying daily visits to Jim Grey's photo blog, Down the Road, for quite a while.  Not long ago he began talking about a book he was working on, and in what seems a remarkably short time he had it completed and available for purchase through Blurb Books.  Jim chose, wisely I think, to carry forward the topics and style from his popular blog to the 44-page soft-cover book.  Photographs in color and black-and-white are accompanied by concise and good-humored text.

All of the photos are made with one of Jim's favorite film cameras, a Pentax ME.  The author/photographer talks about the camera's features and why he likes it, but most of the text really focuses on creating a context for the pictures which explains not only how he makes the photographs, but what he finds interesting and compelling in his subjects.  Fans of his blog will not be surprised to find significant sections of the book devoted to Jim's passions for automotive and architectural history, family, friends and pets.

In terms of technique, Jim clearly has a talent for getting at the essence of a subject through the use of selective focus  -- a picture he made of a friend's dog in which only the staring eyes are sharply rendered is one of the best animal shots I have seen in some time.  Throughout the book, and in evidence in the blog postings as well, there is also an approach to portraying life as Jim Grey sees it which seems to be centered on a particularly acute awareness of life's often-fragile and ephemeral nature.  That kind of consciousness coupled to the nearly simultaneous acts of observing and documenting unique to photography  represent the medium's most important potential, and Jim uses it to very good effect in this first book.

A nice on line preview of Jim Grey's book, Exceptional Ordinary; Everyday Photography with the Pentax ME is available at the Blurb Books site.

Species Thought Extinct Found in London

The Guardian has a piece today about recent inductees to the photo agency, Magnum.  One is Matt Stuart, a London street photographer.  Here is a snippet of the "About" page on his web site:

FAQS

How long have you been shooting on the street? 20 years.

What film camera do you use? I use a Leica MP with a 35mm f2 Leica Summicron lens

What film do you use? Fuji Superia 200/400

How many rolls of film do you use a week? At least three rolls a day. I never leave the house without my camera...

Brilliant

When cameras got small enough to carry around about a century ago, manufacturers started fitting them with reflective, waist-level viewfinders.  The simplest type had a lens and a mirror which projected an image onto a small ground-glass screen.  That produced a rather dim look at the scene being photographed and was subject to interfering glare. On better quality cameras, the  ground-glass was replaced with a bi-convex lens which yielded a magnified and very bright view of the subject.  The nicest example of a brilliant finder I have is on one of my oldest cameras, a 1A Folding Pocket Kodak Special.

The nickel silver hood on the 1A finder protects the viewing lens surface in the closed position.  When flipped up from the back, the viewing lens is revealed and the hood helps to shield the lens surface from glare and reflections.  Lifting the hood from the front allows access for cleaning the inner lens and mirror surfaces. The viewfinder can also be swiveled 90 degrees to allow for either vertical or horizontal compositions.  Corner cut-outs help frame the view as appropriate for the camera's orientation.

While the brilliant waist-level finder provided a helpful preview of the image on film, the reversed mirror image was problematic for following action.  As film speed got faster and photographers sought more candid action shots, camera makers responded by producing medium-format instruments with both waist-level and eye-level finders.  Eventually, the waist-level finders disappeared, and with increased miniaturization, the eye-level finders -- particularly in 35mm cameras -- shrank down to minuscule proportions during the 1930s and '40s.

At around the mid-century mark there was a rebound in demand for brighter viewfinders, and one began to see bright eye-level finders with luminescent frame lines in 35mm cameras.  Medium-format manufacturers added fresnel screens to improve the brightness of their reflex finders on high end slr and tlr cameras.

Meanwhile, the really dramatic development in viewfinder design was taking place at the mass market end of the spectrum as Kodak, Ansco and other makers introduced fixed-focus, plastic bodied roll film cameras sporting a picture window on the world.  Under the hood of the Fifties era box camera was a massive viewing lens that was four or five times larger than those in the brilliant finders found in the old box and folding cameras.  With the increasing availability of cheap, fast color processing and printing, people actually were getting a preview of what their pictures were going to look like before they snapped the shutter.

The convenience of the 35mm cassette ultimately overtook the advantages enjoyed by the cheap medium format roll film cameras, along with rapid advances in electronic automation of exposure and focus functions.    Of course, digital then came along and demolished the popular demand for any kind of analog photo technology.  Oddly enough, in the midst of the digital revolution, the brilliant viewfinder box cameras made a comeback when it was discovered that you could point your digital at the old box camera's viewfinder and get an interesting result that incorporated rounded frame corners, lens aberrations, and possibly some fungal smudges to produce images of imagined artfulness.  

For a time, there was quite a spike in the prices on ebay for box cameras with brilliant finders.  Luckily for those of us who are still interested in using the cameras with film, most of those through-the-viewfinder (ttv) artists have now moved on to creating digital images of a fantasized past with the iPhone's Hipstamatic app.  So, the chances are still pretty good that ten dollars plus postage will get you a great old camera with a brilliant viewfinder.

I have added a link in my web site page about the Argoflex  to instructions on how to restore the viewfinder to its original brilliance.