The schism in "fine art" photography

I would like to suggest two NYC galleries, Bonni Benrubi Gallery, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, whose offerings are representative of works that this discussion touches on. Both of these gallery proprietors have stated in print that new and important work that they choose to show is mostly being done in color and is often (especially Benrubi) very large.

It's actually amazing to me how unsaturated (how anti-Velvia if you will) the color is and, in many instances, how often the work resembles what has been discussed above....no Yosemite, no Tuscany, no Rocky Mountain golden hour sunset, autumn aspen, alpenglow, cotton candy waterfall and lupine meadow. But how long will anyone want to live with a 40x50 image of a tire in a junkyard. Who the hell are the buyers of this stuff anyway??

OTOH, it's also notable to me the degree to which paintings in NYC galleries and other major centers are beginning to show beautiful paintings of beautiful things. It's true that there are still the execrable "show me something I've never seen before" artworks that may consist of colored paper clips in hanging ranks and files, and good luck to 'em since I bear no artist ill will, but I'll be damned if I'll take such crap seriously...let alone choose to buy it if I had the wherewithall.

To make a musical analogy if I may. The 20th century witnessed the rise of art music (whatever that means, it is certainly the antithesis of popular music) that absolutely and unequivocally alienated the mass audience. Academic composers seem still to even be proud of the notion that if it's accessible, it must, a priori, suck. They have the arrogance to demand that the audience learn their private, and unique musical language. Composers who are lucky enough to get even one performance usually realize they'll rarely, if ever, get another. And this passes for a career??

So...not to worry. Most people, I think, want to cherish music, art, and photography that is emotionally, or visually, or aurally resonant with something within them that matters. The good stuff WILL find an enthusiastic audience.

jovo said:

...Both of these gallery proprietors have stated in print that new and important work that they choose to show....

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Hmm, & just how did it become "important," exactly?

bjorke said:

Hmm, & just how did it become "important," exactly?

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Like any parent will comfortably express: ."because I say so!" Go figure? The fact is that these are major galleries in NYC and what they deem to be important "is" important for no other reason that they have amassed the clout to make it so. Please tell me how you and I could be an equally potent force in the high end art photography dodge.

In the mean time, check out the really nice work here: http://foleygallery.com/index.php3

I bought a Christopher Burkett 'graph from Michael when he worked for the Edward Carter Gallery. He's honest, and knows his stuff.

I don't know if it's a schism, so much as different schools. Just my opinion on semantics.

In any event, maybe the tide is turning. Strictly anecdotal "evidence":

About 10 years ago I visited the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. By making an appointment, you could choose any three portfolio boxes in their collection, and they would bring them to you to spend an hour with the prints. I picked three boxes of Edward Weston because I had never seen an actual print. The thrill of the hour spent there is a whole other story ...

I was aided by a young photography student from the univesity who worked at the CCP. She had absolutely no interest in the Weston prints, and although polite and helpful, was obviously bored. So, I asked her what type of photography she did and liked and some of her favorite photographers. I didn't recognize any of the names she stated, but got a clear picture from her description of the images. Color, candid, "edgy" avant-garde, etc. OK, fine.

Now, I am acquanted with a grad student in photography who does all sorts of things, yet the all sorts includes not only digital, but hybrid, straight B&W, alt processes and now wet plate. And just recently, I was at a gathering of photographers which included several students. A 20ish year old young lady, who otherwise reminded me of the one from 10 years ago, picked up one of my straight "old fashioned" silver prints and said one word: "Wow!"

David Brown said:

. A 20ish year old young lady picked up one of my straight "old fashioned" silver prints and said one word: "Wow!"

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Maybe the pendulum is now motorized, and set to a higher speed than it's been previously set to.

doughowk said:

We've also seen a resurgence of interest in alt processes such as Gum Bichromate. But, from a recent gallery tour, its evident that PS users can easily create the almost garish aspects of Gum printers. No real solution for this conumdrum but we do need to emphasize the hand-crafted aspect of fine art in order to differentiate ourselves.

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Divorced from any dialog with the content or meaning of the resulting artwork, the choice of media- especially alternative media, such as gum, cyan or, at this point, silver- and the affect that the media lends to the work has to be acknowledged and addressed in the work if it is to be taken seriously in an artistic context. Otherwise, these techniques are just window dressing- flash and smoke to capture the interest of the viewer who hasn't seen such stuff before. It is no longer sufficient, if it ever was, to use salt prints, for instance, in an arts context, without having a very specific reason for having done so. Hopefully, there is more to such a choice than the desire to accrue value from the hand-crafted, that is, unique, nature of the art object. That position implies a value system where the idea of private property, that the work is something that can become the exclusive possession of one individual, can supersede the meaning or value of what the image says.

jovo said:

To make a musical analogy if I may. The 20th century witnessed the rise of art music (whatever that means, it is certainly the antithesis of popular music) that absolutely and unequivocally alienated the mass audience. Academic composers seem still to even be proud of the notion that if it's accessible, it must, a priori, suck. They have the arrogance to demand that the audience learn their private, and unique musical language. Composers who are lucky enough to get even one performance usually realize they'll rarely, if ever, get another. And this passes for a career?? ...

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It's interesting to note that among the direct musical "descendants" (as in "trained by") of Schönberg and Stockhausen, we find the far more accessible (and popular) Kraftwerk and Rammstein. If you listen closely, the influences are obvious.

And that's what often happens in art: Some radical change is introduced by someone. The next generation then splits in two, with one part "purifying the concept" and becoming ever more inaccesible, the other half melding the old with the new and strengthening both.

Perhaps. or maybe diluting and destroying both...

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy much of Weston's work and when I first discovered it, found it inspirational. Wouldn't it be a boring, suffocating world, though, if all photography emulated what he did....All things have to move on and evolve, he taught amongst other things the beauty in the 'banal' - and that's the message that other artists and photographers are still exploring, in different ways, through different mediums.

I find it hard to see any 'schism' as such. Or if there is one, it seems an inevitable and predictable thing in any 'art' scene.

laverdure said:

Forgive a few generalizations.

In my experience of serious (art) photographers' websites, there are roughly two kinds:

One is that produced by APUG type photographers- mostly b/w, heavily influenced by the big names of the first century&odd of photography, somewhat chatty, usually offering direct sales, and usually featuring the words "Fine Art Photography" (or -er) somewhere prominently.

The second kind, belonging more often to art school trained or else "urban," for lack of a better word, photographers, who almost always shoot color, seem to take little interest in any photography before 1960, say nothing about themselves except their showing/publishing resume, never offer direct sales, and never, ever, use the words "fine" or "art."

Clearly, culturally these are worlds apart. Clearly, there are successful and famous artists working in both camps. Why the disconnect?

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And the third category is that there are those photojournalists who are primarily documentary photographers but on a 24 hr. news cycle. Some of these folks are more than just news photographers. But how they are always able to come up with something meaningful in such a short time period is a big question to me...

Thank you all for your replies. It is, to me, a very interesting subject, and you've given me a lot to think about.

Ole said:

It's interesting to note that among the direct musical "descendants" (as in "trained by") of Schönberg and Stockhausen, we find the far more accessible (and popular) Kraftwerk and Rammstein. If you listen closely, the influences are obvious.

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The funny thing is that with colour photography, it's more the opposite that happened, and during similar times: the vernacular is made more elaborate and less accessible.

There are of course plenty of instances in classical music where folksongs made their ways into a symphony (Dvorak's New World), or in literature (Wordsworth and Coleridge penning the "Lyrical Ballads"). If I was a little more Continental in my philosophy I would go as far as arguing for an operating dialectic, but I'll hold back any claims regarding alienation through appropriation...

Few people think it strange that the music that was popular in 1937 is not what is popular now. Likewise the movies and the hairstyle or the (lack of) hats.

Thinking that visual arts and particularly photography should stand still is absurd.

Death to rocks and trees.

To original question
There are fundamental differencies between B&W and color photography that keep them apart. So and between photoghraphers. There are also soooo good photographers that would give honour to any ancient time. What is a problem today is audience which is more interseting in $2 walmart poster than original rembrandt. Artist somehow have a stomac and cannot walk around with a print for weeks to sell one single for $50, so he make posters or art is a hobby.

If you deep into automotive engineering (at least in America) and own some modern american car you will wonder how it moves at all. There are engineers that after so many years designing cars still need weeks to find out the difference between couple and moment (this is low level high school knowledge). So it is not just in photography, what you posted as a question is a mark of today world.

"... Clearly, there are successful and famous artists working in both camps. Why the disconnect?"
There is only one single judge to say someone is artist or not: time, around 100 of years at least (this moment in head). The longer the better. Yes artist will be always born but how you know what you said above ("Clearly...")?

Today word Art (not art, which is nearly dead) is marketing joke.

By the way, art (in general sense) never in history experinced such crisis as nowadays.



www.Leica-R.com

Of "fine art" schisms in photography...

Interesting thread, lots of good thinking going on. Maybe I could add a few thoughts. Someone along the line touched upon the ubiquity of photography these days and how this affects photography as an artform, if it is one (yes I do think it can be). Photography is everywhere, whether on TV in moving form, in the cinema, or in the print media -- it's inescapable. Western society is defined by industrialization, and photography is the industrialization of picture-making. Given photography's overwhelming ubiquity and familiarity, it would seem to be difficult to carve out space for it as an art form, give it uniqueness and importance. And yet it doesn't seem to be difficult, given the primacy of photography and video in modern art galleries and museums, a trend still growing stronger. I find this puzzling: are art schools emphasizing photography over drawing and painting? And is it justified by what one sees on gallery and museum walls? This is where I sometimes get plain angry. I'll give an example, which happens to be drawn from Finland but could probably be from anywhere... Picture a photographic exhibition in an important Helsinki gallery space. Picture very large colour prints, a series, of leafy garden and house exteriors in summer. Also an interior shot of a young woman lounging by a wall in a colourful, dim room. Nice pictures, yes, and very large, 1.5 m by 2+ m. Would that it had stopped there, but the photographer, being an artist, had to find meaning or at least impose it. So, on the picture of the leafy garden in summer he took words from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, seemingly at random, and fixed them on the print with a pin. Then, from each of Shakespeare's pinned words, he ran a taut thread to a second pin, located somewhere else on the print (creating a link of meaning). Many words, many pins, many threads: a kind of spider-web. The title of the piece, which I can't remember, had something to do with Romeo & Juliet. The same method was used for other pictures in the exhibition -- words taken from a famous work of literature, pinned and threaded onto the pictures. I was aghast. To begin with, totally arbitrary pictures meaning nothing more than "nice", "colourful", "warm", etc. Then a totally arbitrary yet intricate imposition of meaning from e.g. Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. No, no, no. I protest, and I can't protest enough!

laverdure said:

Why the disconnect?

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Age.

Regards, Art.

bjorke said:

Few people think it strange that the music that was popular in 1937 is not what is popular now. Likewise the movies and the hairstyle or the (lack of) hats.

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Absolutely. Whilst the music of the 1930's/1940's was popular in its time (obviously), it is now still enjoyed and played but only by a small minority (of strange, eccentric people like me!).

As for hats....


Steve.

Ah, the incomplete overlap of art and popular culture! Art is timeless...pop culture is fashion. Any work of art may or may not have anything to do with popular culture at any given time. Steinbeck once sold better than he sells now but he still sells. Tab Hunter...not so much.

copake_ham said:

You might find this to be hard to believe, but if you look at the historical record. there are no true color images prior to the development of Kodachrome.

With the development of Kodachrome - people suddenly realized that there was really color in the world - we know this because it could now be documented on film!

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Actually, Europe (France, in particular) was in color before the US. Auguste and Louis Lumiére patented Autochrome in 1906. Unfortunately, color spoiled somewhat during shipping it across the Atlantic ocean, so it didn't come into vogue until better processes were available.

copake_ham said:

You might find this to be hard to believe, but if you look at the historical record. there are no true color images prior to the development of Kodachrome.

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I hope you are not being literal with this comment? If so, you are quite wrong because there were some beautiful true color three-color carbon prints made as early at the first decade of the 20th century.

Sandy King

sanking said:

I hope you are not being literal with this comment? If so, you are quite wrong because there were some beautiful true color three-color carbon prints made as early at the first decade of the 20th century.

Sandy King

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For an example- the works of Russian photographer Sergei Prokhudin-Gorskii -

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ethnic.html

These were taken between 1907 and 1915