Is this a good photo?

[Lee Shively]

I'm really enjoying the hell out of reading this thread.

 

[catem]

I, too, find this image troubling - scary, if you will.

I'm really happy to read that, I was beginning to think I was the only one
Cate

 

[blansky]

Assuming this is true, what does it have to do with the photograph?

If you merely mean to reflect on the banality of suburbia against horror, well I don't think you quite hit it. Go back, shoot more. In some sustained way.

KB
(who used to live in a house in Topanga after the previous residents were eliminated in a full-family murder-suicide -- was a long cleanup job)

The reason I stated that, and no it isn't true (sorry), is that the photograph this thread is about was recognized by some people as a "Shore" and in some cases "means it must be good".

My point in using this real estate picture and then adding a context, (fake or not) is that it can, (not necessarily) make the viewer have a second look and place more importance on the picture than it initially had.

For example if I showed a simple team picture, say a soccer team or a hockey team with everyone looking at the camera smiling or mugging, most people would glance at it, having seen hundreds of team pictures, and move on. BUT if I then said that team was all killed a week later while on a road trip in a bus crash, most people would look a lot harder and study the faces and image the family grief, lost fathers, lost sons etc.

The picture would then take on a whole new dimension or even importance, where before it had very little.

My point is, is that many saw this picture in question as a "Shore" and added their own context from previous knowledge. This knowledge gave them perhaps unconsciously, more information and more respect than it did for me, and others who look at this picture as a random picture that cannot stand alone and carry any weight.

Michael

 

[tim atherton]

On the phobia expressed at depicting the ordinary:

I recently read this about DeLillo's Underworld - but I think it possibly applies to Eggleston/Shore etc too.

"DeLillo is smart enough to avoid stating the obvious, that after losing his real father, Nick is sent to a school run by multiple "fathers.'' One of the priests asks him to describe a shoe. "A front and a top,'' he answers.

"You make me want to weep,'' the priest says, proceeding to name all the parts of a shoe including the flap under the lace, the tongue.

"I knew the name,'' Nick says. "I just didn't see the thing.''

"You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look,'' says the priest. Because "everyday things lie hidden,'' he adds; "everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge.''

These are "quotidian'' things -- "an extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.'' This may be DeLillo's way of explaining how to read "Underworld,'' but he's also telling us how to live. "

And perhaps how to photograph and how to look at photographs. Not to settle for one more beautifully executed (semi-exotic) landscape etc. To look for echoes and rhymes and rhythms - sometimes ever so quiet, rather than impact (which is always a collision)

 

[catem]

The reason I stated that, and no it isn't true (sorry), is that the photograph this thread is about was recognized by some people as a "Shore" and in some cases "means it must be good".

My point in using this real estate picture and then adding a context, (fake or not) is that it can, (not necessarily) make the viewer have a second look and place more importance on the picture than it initially had.

For example if I showed a simple team picture, say a soccer team or a hockey team with everyone looking at the camera smiling or mugging, most people would glance at it, having seen hundreds of team pictures, and move on. BUT if I then said that team was all killed a week later while on a road trip in a bus crash, most people would look a lot harder and study the faces and image the family grief, lost fathers, lost sons etc.

The picture would then take on a whole new dimension or even importance, where before it had very little.

My point is, is that many saw this picture in question as a "Shore" and added their own context from previous knowledge. This knowledge gave them perhaps unconsciously, more information and more respect than it did for me, and others who look at this picture as a random picture that cannot stand alone and carry any weight.

Michael

Well, I didn't know it was a Shore, didn't recognise it was a Shore, and still liked it, and thought yours was rubbish, even when I knew the "story"

You also, by your experiment, proved that there is a kind of scary mythology about the suburbs. Which of us didn't read "In Cold Blood" as a teenager - these cultural mythologies can legitimately inform reactions (as I'm sure it did mine) as much as anything else...
Cate

 

[bjorke]

...many saw this picture in question as a "Shore" and added their own context...

In other words, they saw it as part of a larger body of (unseen in THIS context) work. Kind of why I said "shoot more in a sustained way" -- this sort of work doesn't put all its meaning into a single photograph. Often the message comes across only with sustained looking at multiple pictures.

In fact when looking at work that's not of the "pleasing pictures" variety, you can almost always be sure that's the case.

Sad to say photo web sites are almost always exclusively about easy-pleasing one-off's.

I find nothing wrong with this idea at all, it's quite common in art. To cite a Shore acquaintance, consider a Warhol, or a Jasper Johns, a Van Gogh, or even a Norman Rockwell. There's something to see in the picture, but to look at just one picture you miss most of the story.

 

[blansky]

Well, I didn't know it was a Shore, didn't recognise it was a Shore, and still liked it, and thought yours was rubbish, even when I knew the "story"

You also, by your experiment, proved that there is a kind of scary mythology about the suburbs. Which of us didn't read "In Cold Blood" as a teenager - these cultural mythologies can legitimately inform reactions (as I'm sure it did mine) as much as anything else...
Cate

Cate from you previous descriptions, I immediately thought of the Clutter house (in cold blood).

Interesting though, it was a farm house in the country. Rather isolated and lonely. Not in the suburbs, which is surrounded by hundreds of other identical houses.


Michael

 

[blansky]

In other words, they saw it as part of a larger body of (unseen in THIS context) work. Kind of why I said "shoot more in a sustained way" -- this sort of work doesn't put all its meaning into a single photograph. Often the message comes across only with sustained looking at multiple pictures.

In fact when looking at work that's not of the "pleasing pictures" variety, you can almost always be sure that's the case.

Sad to say photo web sites are almost always exclusively about easy-pleasing one-off's.

I find nothing wrong with this idea at all, it's quite common in art. To cite a Shore acquaintance, consider a Warhol, or a Jasper Johns, a Van Gogh, or even a Norman Rockwell. There's something to see in the picture, but to look at just one picture you miss most of the story.

That's in interesting point. Not sure I buy it but it's interesting.

Coming from a studio portrait background, the mindset is probably that every picture stands alone. I would guess that I expect that to be the case in every kind of photograph.

I think I still believe that even when done in a "series", every photograph should be able to carry the weight of the series.


Michael

 

[catem]

Cate from you previous descriptions, I immediately thought of the Clutter house (in cold blood).

Interesting though, it was a farm house in the country. Rather isolated and lonely. Not in the suburbs, which is surrounded by hundreds of other identical houses.


Michael

If I may say so, you're being too literal.

'Isolated and lonely' is a state of being, too, which assuredly exists in the suburbs. The house in the Shore picture DID exude isolation and loneliness to me (agreed, not everyone would have this reaction).

There is a general, powerful mythology with spooky buildings though (I agree that the Shore one is "quietly so" but that doesn't make it any less powerfully so, maybe MORE so because of the understatement).
A really obvious one is that motel & house on the hill in Psycho.
Cate

 

[blansky]

If I may say so, you're being too literal.

'Isolated and lonely' is a state of being, too, which assuredly exists in the suburbs. The house in the Shore picture DID exude isolation and loneliness to me (agreed, not everyone would have this reaction).

There is a general, powerful mythology with spooky buildings though (I agree that the Shore one is "quietly so" but that doesn't make it any less powerfully so, maybe MORE so because of the understatement).
A really obvious one is that motel & house on the hill in Psycho.
Cate

For the fun of it, what type of neighborhood do you live in. And is it spooky to you.

After living for years in a small city, then LA then Portland OR, small city, then suburbs, then suburbs again, I would characterize the picture in question as a small town, not the "burbs".

I did grow up in a rather old, spooky old house. I had a friend who lived in a wealthy looking "haunted" house. Things and possessions were always moved around by "unseen " hands.

A lady hung herself in 1948. Every subsequent family that lived in that house divorced.

OOOOOOOOOOHHH.

True story.

Michael

 

[JBrunner]

It definitely Art because it was presented as such, and has been acknowledged by some to be that which it purports to be. Is it any good? I certainly don't see anything in it, and I am not enough of a mental masturbator to invent a bunch of archetypal backwash to satisfy the blanks. That said, it can be neither good, nor bad. Those are perceptions that do more to define the observer, than the object. Saying this is good or bad is nothing more than a label for yourself.

 

[catem]

For the fun of it, what type of neighborhood do you live in. And is it spooky to you.
Michael

Not the suburbs (not a small town either). No, it's not spooky.
Cate

 

[bjorke]

Define "spooky"

 

[catem]

I've been thinking about this and I think a better word to describe Shore's work is "edgy". "Spooky" is O.K., but maybe a bit strong, and give too much sense of definition to what it is that's not completely straightforward.

Bjorke, I had a look at your work and I don't find it spooky. I don't think I find it "edgy" either, though one or two may be slightly so.
Cate

 

[MurrayMinchin]

The middle one says to me;

"The television, having finally broken free from its enslavement within the bungalow, stopped, turned, and plotted its revenge".

Spooky.

Murray

 

[blansky]

The middle one says to me;

"The television, having finely broken free from its enslavement within the bungalow, stopped, turned, and plotted its revenge".

Spooky.

Murray

And the mummified car....


Michael

 

[bjorke]

Bjorke, I had a look at your work and I don't find it spooky.

I never make claim to any a priori adjectives. It just leads to sorrow.

 

[catem]

I never make claim to any a priori adjectives. It just leads to sorrow.

I think you're right in that, and answers often come later, although that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a clear intention or purpose. I had assumed that your purpose was not 'spooky', or I wouldn't have given my opinion in such bald terms. Now from your slightly ambiguous response I'm not entirely sure, and I apologise if I was mistaken.

There are lots of good words to describe the work you've done, but I don't see it as my place to suggest them as you haven't asked for such feedback. Anyway, it seems that this is a work in progress and I think such works should be allowed to reach completion before dissection....
Cate

 

[bjorke]

Now from your slightly ambiguous response...

I didn't mean to be unduly ambiguous, only to let the pictures be their own messengers, which is imo as it should be. Every viewer will pick their own adjectives, and many viewers, even for the crudest of snapshots, will experience impressions that they cannot neatly tuck into words (or worse, they will pick words that do not fit, and through the effects of mediacy, the words will mask the pictures and subsequently blind everyone who hears them).

​

(It may just be an eccentricity, but I deeply mistrust words as a useful descriptive medium for any arts other than verbal ones. Which is a prime reason why I always try to include pictures in any lengthy post, if at all possible.)

An older related PDF is here. After I made it I realized that all of the photographs had been made within a 500m radius of my desk, though that was not my initial intent.

 

[tim atherton]

Does Shore fancy himself as a sort of present day Atget. Documenting various things but in modern color. However, Shore lacks Atget's insight and humor to name two missing concepts in his work.

A much more apt (though not 100% accurate) comparison would be doing American Photographs, but in colour and in the 1970's (which of course is Evans doing Atget doing America in many ways)

In fact in another way American Photographs is also an interesting comparison. Probably the most important book of American modern photography, it is meant to work as a series. The are some very strong photographs, some not so strong ones and a number of fairly weak ones (and a good few that "don't tell the whole story" in just the one image). Few (if any) depend on dramatics to work their magic. Lots of them are of the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane. But they all work together and inform one another and the sum the whole is greater than the individual parts.

(and Lincoln Kirstein's essay in itself is a valuable read for any photographer)

 

[tim atherton]

Originally Posted by Gerald Koch
Does Shore fancy himself as a sort of present day Atget. Documenting various things but in modern color. However, Shore lacks Atget's insight and humor to name two missing concepts in his work.

I'd also add, Shore does have something of a sense of humour in his photographs, but it's fairly dry and subtle, and while there is also a greater sense of irony, it's nearly always tempered by a strong feeling of affection (much more so than say his contemporary Adams whose work from that period almost feels apocalyptic at times - "there's no hope for suburban America...")

 

[catem]

Every viewer will pick their own adjectives, and many viewers, even for the crudest of snapshots, will experience impressions that they cannot neatly tuck into words (or worse, they will pick words that do not fit, and through the effects of mediacy, the words will mask the pictures and subsequently blind everyone who hears them).

​

(It may just be an eccentricity, but I deeply mistrust words as a useful descriptive medium for any arts other than verbal ones. Which is a prime reason why I always try to include pictures in any lengthy post, if at all possible.)

An older related PDF is here. After I made it I realized that all of the photographs had been made within a 500m radius of my desk, though that was not my initial intent.

I agree that words can be unsatisfying, or worse. And yet sometimes trying to put feelings or reactions into words brings us some insight, (even if we get those insights in rather a muddled and unstraighforward way) and by sharing ideas and views (which we can only do through words) we can sometimes gain further understanding.

I don't think we should be afraid of words, or afraid to use them. Just be sure to realise the limits.

Having said that, I think I personally have probably reached the limits on this one )