“And if you became a brand, isn’t that the signal of your complete failure as a human being, isn’t that completely contrary to what you or me or any documentary photographer or artist should want to become. Don’t you think that to have that level of consistency, to have that anal obsessiveness to always talk in one particular way - even when you know it’s bullshit - is alien to everything that is true and honest and good.”
I get this impulse, but I think its more of a struggle than that. If we are happy to follow our inclination - our artistic muse - and only seek personal satisfaction from it, then, yes, being a “brand” is useless and counterproductive.
But what if you have a message to get across? What if you want to influence people to action? For that, you need to accommodate the ways people find, accept, learn and process information. You have to gain some consistency and some volume. Maybe a lot of volume.
The danger lies in the point where we confuse the consistency and volume for the message itself.
We have water on our minds. Right now water is an ominous thought. Tsunami. Flooding. Another Tsunami. Flooding and more flooding. Now, water is a threat. But it is also essential for all life, so much so that the early Greek philosopher Thales said “water is the foundation of everything” and he meant it literally, theorizing that earthquakes were caused by waves on the ocean on which the Earth floated. Thales was a hylozoist. He believed matter was alive, so the water which stood as the world’s foundation was not merely an inanimate object. It moved with purpose. He would have appreciated Lisa M. Robinson’s Oceana.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes immediately came to mind when I first saw Robinson’s work. Sugimoto’s gray bisected images show hardly a difference between ocean and sky but for the shift from light to dark at the horizon line. I naively attribute some sense of color field painting to them and I transferred that expectation to Robinson’s seemingly similar pictures. Upon further reflection, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Whereas I see Sugimoto’s seascapes as generic types, a stand-in for the idea of horizon, Robinson has made specific seas. Slow or fast, these waters are alive. They are active and purposeful. You can feel the cold gripping you. In images like “Etching” (above) the ice sheets pile up like whitecap waves frozen in time, stabbing in the winter air. In others, the black-green of deep ocean water signals the vastness and terror of what is beneath. And there is movement. These are roiling seas, perhaps a picture into the past when the world simply existed and humanity was millions of years yet to come.
Lisa M. Robinson, “Oceana” Through June 10 at Klompching Gallery 111 Front St, Suite 206 Brooklyn, NY (212) 796 2070
Magnum photographers Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth and Mikhael Subotzky at a pop-up show of their collective road trip from San Antonio, Texas to Oakland, California.
Opening: Thursday, May 26, 6-9 p.m.
Friday-Saturday, May 27-28, 12-6 p.m.
“Flickr has become a shoebox under the bed instead of the door of the refrigerator or workplace bulletin board. And shoeboxes under beds aren’t so good for telling stories.”
Selections from the Critical Mass winners, juried by Bay Area photographer Todd Hido are showing at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco through June 10. Lots of familiar names from my Twitter followers in there, which is great to see.
Yesterday we made a pit stop at a Walmart in Hondo, Texas. Two photographers ended up photographing the same subject. A couple questions come to mind:
- How do the two photographic approaches affect the way the viewer sees the subject? - Who were the two photographers? Does it matter?
Left: more naturalistic in its representation of context and use of available light. Fully 3/4 portrait lets the viewer take in all the details of this guy’s face, beard, hair cut, clothes, the location. An empathetic image. Feels “cool” even though it probably wasn’t.
Right: claustrophobic framing, unnatural light from fill flash (to get the eyes out from the hat’s shadow, I’d guess), lens distortion of the face shape make for an unsettling picture. Feels “hot”.
Who made them and does it matter? I’d guess the lefthand is by Alec Soth. I’m less familiar with the rest of the Postcards crew, so I’d have to research to make a guess as to who made the righthand image. Knowing Alec’s work probably lead me to say “empathetic”. Not knowing the hand behind the righthand image mean’s I’m just reading it wholly on the image’s contents plus what context I know of the project and that the picture was made in a Texas Wal-Mart parking lot.
Friday May 13 at 5pm: Meet the Magnum photographers at a special “open bus” event in the parking lot of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin.
The panel discussion will begin at 7pm in the Center’s Jessen Auditorium and will be moderated by our own onboard writer Ginger Strand. For those of you not able to make it to Austin this evening, click on this post’s title for the live webcast link.
I wish more institutions would webcast or record their events like this one.
