ayler
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 p.10 #5 · Diado Moriyama shooting jpg with a P&S | |
I come here a bit more often than what my tally of posts would suggest, looking for specific info about certain 'alternative' lenses and set-ups - I post very occasionally. Although I don't particularly care for 99% of the photography posted by 'alternative' FM members (the 'non-alternative' forums interest me even less), I do find it useful and entertaining, and relevant in a certain way.
Although I don't really care for the great majority of the photography made and posted here (and in a topsy-turvy way I do), and I do perhaps come from a different background to most, I do think what people do here is a reflection of how photography is 'exercised' by vast numbers and therefore relevant, whether one wants it or not. Some may see this as looking down and elitist, but it's not really. I take an interest in what goes on in a forum like this and try to participate when I think I have something relevant to say (although that's confined by my limited technical knowledge), even though I don't personally 'care for' the 'approaches' to photography often exposited here. This is the other end of some of the stuff I care about, and so, if you want to get the full spectrum, you need to be exposed to and engage with both.
I work professionally as a photographer, but use an alias, as for me, forums are for exchanging ideas under anonymity. But, and a very important but, because I protect my identity, I always try to be courteous and engage constructively. I do feel strongly that at the same time as we all should be entitled to our forum and discussion board personae, we should all act responsibly and not abuse this freedom. The following is not meant to offend, but rather to open up the discussion (we're all trapped in many different ways, by many different realities, ghosts and so on...).
Which takes me to how I feel about this thread. To me, there seems to be a problem of inverse proportionality between how much people care about lenses and other technical and technically derived issues and how open they are to other forms of expression outside the very limited (and often extremely clichéd) bubble they explore - this is not a rule without exception, obviously, but a strongly outlined one nonetheless. I probably own 1/10th of what most people here own and yet, it seems to me, most people here are not even aware of a tiny portion of what's out there. To give an analogy, this reminds of how a lot of high-end Hi-Fi geeks progressively stop listening to music as they concentrate on sound, because most recordings will not live up to the quality of the (often very expensive) replay equipment they accumulate. This often ends up as someone owning an array of millionaire Kondo magic boxes ( circa £20k a pop) hooked up to this massive layer cake of a turntable, listening to audiophile sterile crap, pristinely recorded and kept, through some strangely futuristic boxes that remotely resemble a loudspeaker and cost as much as a house. There's a bit of exaggeration in this, but you get the gist: it's called technophilia and derives from a fetishisation of everything and anything that is technological (and photography is a technological medium). It is using a lens to take photographs that serve as proof to how good that lens is - as corroboration and justification - a tautology of very tired clichés. It seems to me that that's what happens in forums like this most of the time (although there are much worse!). It's the fetishisation of the camera or the lens and an almost complete blockage of anything and everything that doesn't conform to this gospel of how 'a Zeiss will render those leaves better than anything out there', as if what absolutely mattered was the Zeiss and not the leaves, or that the leaves shouldn't be there in the first place, or one shouldn't be taking photographs of leaves! And although I do concede that you need a set up and a pair of speakers to listen to stereophonic recordings, that should be the means and not the end. As for listening to mono 78s on a modern stereo system, a modern mono system or an old Gramophone, it's all very different and there's no ethical better: the modern mono will give you the most fateful sound; the modern stereo will allow you to cancel noise through filtering; and the Gramophone will give you the sound people listened to when the music was recorded.
Although I think the OP hasn't made the best case in defence of this particular photographer, and has not helped his/her cause by responding in the way s/he has responded, I find that people have reacted to Moriyama's photography so strongly precisely because it seems to undermine this very idea that serious photography needs Zeiss and Leica, or professional this or that, or this obscure lens that draws like X and Y (which is another form of snobbery); and instead points to how photography is indexical and how it's often from the series and not from the individual photograph that meaning is derived. It also points to how a relevant, yet purposely unskilled photograph carries a lot more resonance than a highly skilled, but sterile one. I'm not going to take sides on Moriyama, but what I find astonishing is how a body of work spanning decades is dismissed in three seconds because it doesn't conform to how some of the FM Alternative Forum sees the world from its tiny periscope.
And so, to open up the discussion (or not), I shall post a few examples of 'unskilled' or 'cheap camera' photographic work - some of it I love, other I like parts of, for many different reasons:
Dan Graham's "Homes for America" and his subsequent series on tract housing, corporate architecture (particularly lobbies), etc - just google Homes for America and Dan Graham's photo work
Robert Smithson's "Hotel Palenque" slide series - Google will find it - for how RS captured the hotel crumbling and being kept up and being reconstructed at the same time - it points to this idea of perpetual bricolage
Some of Gabriel Orozco's photography, but not all (particularly not the highly staged stuff)
Allan Sekula's "Untitled Slide Sequence" (I do not care much for his other stuff, which always comes across as part of a lecture, but this sequence I do find glorious)
Highly skilled or unskilled? Ed Ruscha's photo-books
You could also say that Walker Evans' work was not intended to be primordially skilled - there's an interesting book that bridges Walker Evans and Dan Graham called "Walker Evans & Dan Graham". I do love the whole of WE, and particularly because he was someone 'caught', as it were, between art and industry, as he needed to fulfil FSA's briefs, at the same time as he was trying to follow his own heart
Now for some very skilled photography with the twist that some of it is carried out by professional studios and not the author (although following the author's strict instructions - Ruscha also instructed an aerial photographer, I believe, to photograph his "34 Parking Lots"):
Anything by Christopher Williams (the conceptual artist) - http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/3375/Christopher-Williams-For-Example-Dix-Huit-Lecons-Sur-La-Societe-Industrielle-Revision-11/1438, http://articlejournal.net/2011/02/03/people-are-looking-better-christopher-williams-at-david-zwirner/, etc
Thomas Struth's early monochrome cityscapes and the two photographs he did at the Max Planck IPP, which are so ambivalent (maybe unintentionally) as to portray spaces of physics research as some kind of science fiction film set
Bernd and Hilla Becher's archaeology of the end of the industrial revolution
The photographs of Gerhard Richter and the paintings he derives from these photographs
Finally, some reading:
Obviously, Roland Barthes' "Camera Lucida"
John Tagg's counterpoint to it in "The Burden of Representation"
Douglas Crimp's "On the Museum's Ruins", particularly the section about Mapplethorpe
Pierre Bourdieu's "Photography: A Middle-Brow Art"
Christian Metz's "The Imaginary Signifier"
Feel free to ignore my post, castigate me or find something useful in the middle...
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