Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts

Stunning Juxtopositions

In the world of photography, everybody has a story to tell, whether it is through photojournalism, fine art, or everything in between. One can find series online that people have carefully curated showcasing an artist’s body of work. But where else would one be able to tell their story or speak their truth? Photographic monographs tell stories and portray feelings in carefully curated editions. Any consumer of art should look to monographs for three reasons: curated inspiration, ease of access, and a storytelling experience unlimited by traditional cultural distinctions.

BRESSON'S DECISIVE MOMENT

a revolution in photographic composition

By Sophia Oh

This is the book

Henri Cartier Bresson is an early 20th-century French photographer. Although he was not a documentary photographer, he greatly influenced the growing field or genre of photojournalism. He said that his 1931 trip to Ivory Coast, Africa, served as an opportunity to understand what it means to take a photograph. For Bresson, the technical advances of the Laika camera are of great significance, as the Laika gave him the ability to capture what he liked to call the decisive moment. The decisive moment is an aesthetic philosophy of what it means to depict the world and especially moving objects in the world. There is an anecdote that Bresson waited all day in the same place to get the picture he wanted. He was interested in one moment and not many. To do this Bresson would often concentrate and focus on something that we would traditionally not think of as the center of a visual composition.

ENTER THE MATRIX

a review of Paz Errazuriz's "Matrix 251"

By Matt Shapiro

Time to dance? Time to smoke?

My sister used to lend me her purple dress, black fishnets and red lipstick. My mom had a long blond wig that I was very fond of and I pierced my ears in order to wear their jewelry. Sometimes I would take my cross-dressing on the road and show up to school decked out in woman’s clothes. Mostly, because it was fun, against the rules and there’s nothing more fun than breaking arbitrary rules in ridiculous ways. One time I accidentally won the Halloween costume contest before they had a chance to send me home. I don’t want to be a woman, that actually seems like hard work, but I kind of get off on looking like one, sometimes. Being something that you’re not is fun and even more fun when petty authoritarians get angry with you doing it—in the end, people laugh, everyone has a good time and sometimes, just sometimes you’re granted new and interesting freedoms. Try it if you don’t believe me.

WHAT KIND OF DRAGON ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

a few thoughts about Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography at the San Jose Museum of Art through June 30th

By Doris Wang

It's all about the face

Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography at the San Jose Museum of Art is more of a political performance than an art show. You can start with the advertisement, which features Huang Yan’s “Spring” from his series The Four Seasons. The photograph is of a man’s face covered over or tattooed with what seems like a traditional Chinese painting. The image on the man’s face features the type of scenes we’re used to seeing in that type of painting: beautiful trees, mountains and houses in the forest. One could say that the image on the man’s face is beautiful or tranquil or whatever clichés you might have about Chinese painting. The important and obvious point is that the feeling of the image changes because it is on the man’s face. For me, the painting represents the “face” or reputation of China. But here, because it isn't just the painting, but the image of the painting, it’s clear that it is no more than a fantasy of Chinese life, a Westerner’s notion of the “real” China, or maybe even a Chinese person’s notion of a distant Chinese past. Either way, the emphasis is on the unreal grafted on the real and that theme runs through the entire show.

WHAT WE DO WITH GREATNESS

(or an artist is not a baby)

an introduction to the following four essays on Cindy Sherman

By John Wilkins

©Cindy Sherman/Untitled #92

There’s something shocking about great artists and that is you can criticize them and oftentimes with much greater force than all the featherweights, quarter-artists and unimaginative children who keep on churning out novels, sculptures, paintings, dances, films and glass dolphins. It’s much easier to smash a genius than shoot a gnat. So that would seem to be a problem, or at least unfair, or at least that’s the question we had to ask ourselves in taking on Cindy Sherman. She is a great artist, which is to say that critics, artists, smokers, monkeys and drug addicts, that is to say everyone, will want to draw their knives and slash away. When you get the mid-career retrospective, you might as well paint a lipstick target on your forehead and pass out the guns. Of course, some will praise, but that’s not fun and might even make you seem stupid.

THE SEARCH FOR THE AUTHENTIC SUBJECT AND THE INAUTHENTIC SELF

an attempt to think about Cindy Sherman's brilliance and failures

By Brianna Kalajian

©Cindy Sherman/Untitled #216

I am bewildered by Cindy Sherman or as the ads for SFMOMA proudly trumpet, “one of the most influential photographers of our time.” Sherman has been the subject, or, more accurately, the focal point of her large and growing body of work. She has cornered the market on self-portraiture and has become a strange merging of both artist and brand, one of the most recognizable figures in contemporary art. Her work has been building on itself from the beginning, but she has gone through some radical shifts in approach. The layout and chronology of the show helps us see how Sherman has always been essentially Sherman, but also how she has changed to become possibly more of Sherman the personality and less of Sherman the artist. It’s fascinating to see how the “Film Stills” series fro the late 70’s and 80’s inform and contrast with her later work, especially the series “Society” (2008), where she depicts and satirizes high society art matrons, sorry patrons, in a variety of power poses. Although thirty years separates these two series, the contrast illuminates some of the most striking issues about Sherman’s fame and work. This exhibition was an incredible opportunity to see the breadth and depth of Sherman’s approach and I should say, changing approach to the reflected self.

A TALE OF TWO SHERMANS

an appreciation and attack on Cindy Sherman's work

By Immi Hill

©Cindy Sherman/Untitled #56

The Cindy Sherman SFMOMA exhibition is a chronological march through Sherman’s career. Each room feels like a decade of female archetypes, patriarchal male voyeurism and, of course, Sherman’s face. It’s an unforgettable face and is front and center, always the focal point of the photos. It seems like terribly old news to say, but, here it is: Sherman takes on a wide variety of roles, from Hollywood starlets to aging society women, and she is what you might call a master mimic, a comic of being herself while imitating others. She reverses the question of spectatorship and presentation, not to mention the role of the photographer as artist. Her fame is as a photographer, but what she really does is model. It’s doubtful that she ever actually takes the “real” photograph. As I walked through the exhibition I felt a great deal of unease and by the latter part of the show I was mentally and emotionally screaming for the exit. It was one snapshot after another of flawed femininity and intermittent gross images. As the rooms got smaller, the photographs got bigger and it all left me with an empty cry out for my own womanhood. And it was true, I wasn’t wrong, the photographs definitely got bigger and Sherman’s persona, always present, became more and more ironically vain.

FACE THE HORROR, THEN CHANGE

a hard look at Cindy Sherman's "Disaster" series

By Kaitlin Hooper

©Cindy Sherman/Untitled #175

If you are even vaguely familiar with the contemporary art world you will have seen Cindy Sherman’s face, albeit in a variety of guises. She often dresses up as a female archetype of some kind and then playfully shows us the limitations of that very archetype. Sherman has created a large body of work in which she is the principal subject of her photographs, acting as the model and medium of her own private, self-contained world. By placing her face front and center, she has become both artist and brand and it is the “Cindy Sherman” formula for which she has become famous. It kind of boils down to this: Cindy Sherman plays Cindy Sherman playing someone else and we’re comforted, because we always know it’s Cindy Sherman, even though, of course, it’s not.

THE FRAGILITY OF POWER & THESE RAVISHING OLD WOMEN

an appreciation and defense of Cindy Sherman's "Society" photos

By Travis McFlynn

At the speed of light we calculate and record the world through our tastes and fears. If this is perception, do we ever truly see things as they are? Taste might subtly sway how we take in what we perceive; fear certainly distorts our understanding of the world. Our brains are like a surging neuro-chemical cocktail caught in a self-centered and baffling tangle of assumptions, judgments, and, of course, again, fears. This ‘auto-judgment-mode’ syndrome happens without even a pause for a second thought and this is why truism, received wisdom and convention rule the day, like an audio track on endless repeat. It’s hard to account for the cumulative and degrading force this type of narrow thinking has on our cultural life, but you can be sure that it is at the root of all kinds of prejudicial behavior—against different races, sexual practices, religions and even the aged. We want to believe that the world around us is static, fixed and predictable, but that’s because we can’t stand for it not to be and aging is the surest sign that what we want we cannot have.

HERB RITTS, SON OF GEORGIA O'KEEFFE AND ANSEL ADAMS

an examination of fashion photographer Herb Ritts and his aesthetic debt to O'Keeffe and Adams

By Wei Lah Poh

Versace, Veiled Dress, El Mirage

Every shot he took was at once riveting, glamorous and strangely understated: that’s what I kept repeating to myself after seeing, Herb Ritts: L.A. Style at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It’s mystifying how Ritts manages to get such contrary affects and yet uses such basic formal means to achieve them. The mood, each pose, the landscapes he chooses, his use of color are so unified that it’s easy to miss that his work is at once a perfect realization of fashion and its abandonment. He was a fashion photographer who worked regularly for Vanity Fair, Vogue, Allure, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and Elle, to name a few, but what he produced seems unlike anything we are used to seeing in those type of magazines. There have been superb fashion photographers before. Irving Penn and Richard Avedon to name two, but Ritts’ fashion is of an entirely different type.

BINH DANH'S YOSEMITE

a review of Binh Danh's Yosemite Daguerreotypes at the Haines Gallery

By Hayley Delaney

Courtesy of the artist & Haines Gallery

“I don’t care for ‘sublime’ scenery, do you?” – T.S. Eliot

Binh Danh is probably most recognized for his modified anthotype process examining American recollections of the Vietnam War, particularly in relation to the civilians, soldiers, and battle torn jungle landscapes of his birth country. Using photographic transparencies, Danh takes leaves reminiscent of the foliage in Vietnam and Cambodia and fades the faces of the dead directly into the chlorophyll. It has the disquieting effect of clearly placing us within the natural cycles of death, decay, and growth and reminds us that we are all returning to the soil, the plants, and the earth. The fragility of plants highlights the vulnerability and precariousness of being human that unites us all and forces the viewer to identify with these anonymous people and places.

IT'S AS REAL AS YOU MAKE IT

a review of Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection at the DeYoung Museum

By Brianna Kalajian

Martin Parr's "Benidorm"

From it's very beginning photography has always had a whiff of the courtroom in it. Both photographs and the law traffic in evidence and try to correct or adjust our sense of reality and along with it our sense of justice. What are TMZ and the paparazzi, but a corrective dose of ugly reality against the publicist's hype: staged studio photographs vs. "gotcha" photographs. It's a war that's been going on as long as we've had photography and at stake is justice and reality. You look at a photo and say, this is the truth I've been waiting for, that's not a glamour shot, but a genuine shot, another celebrity caught without makeup. We live in a visually constructed reality, but yearn for one unadorned, stripped, and yet alive with photographic, possibly pornographic, truth. What is a candid, paparazzi shot, but a mirror of our own desperation for reality?

Categories