thechrisproject photography

Friday night was the CoPA juried exhibit in Milwaukee. After seeing the other photographs selected for the show, I felt quite honored to be included with it. I got a chance to speak with Brian Ulrich, the juror of the show. He talked to me about my work. I told him that this was the first time I had submitted photos for anything like this and that my motivation was mostly to start getting used to rejection. He laughed and said maybe next year we could work on that.  The photo above is from the show.  My photos were about 5 feet to the right of this shot.  And we did have wine in a bucket!
The show was interesting. I got to talk to Donald Rasmussen about his Leave a Light On project. I had an idea a few months ago for a project that would consist of stores at night, shot through their windows. When CoPA announced all the artists that would have work at their exhibit, I went and looked most of them up. I noticed Donald’s Leave a Light On project right away. I thought to myself, “Well, I guess I shouldn’t do that anymore because this guy nailed it.” We talked a little about his technique (no polarizers, film scanned, digital processing, then C-Print) and the meaning and feeling behind the pictures. Below is a photo Donald had in the exhibit.

Saturday I went to Valparaiso, Indiana (aka “Valpo”) for a wedding. It was nice to not be the photographer at the wedding. I could sit and talk with people for more than five minutes. Our friends had a bike theme to their wedding, complete with the father and bride coming in on a rickshaw and the couple leaving on a tandem bike. I did manage to take a few photos.

On Sunday we drove to Chicago in mid-morning and went to the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Their show Relative Closeness had some fantastic work by a number of photographers. I was particularly excited to see Sally Mann’s prints in person (the photo below this paragraph is hers). The biggest discover for me was The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings, a book by KayLynn Deveney. They had a number of prints from the book and I’m kicking myself now for not having bought the book. I’ll get it from Amazon soon. At $14 it’s a no-brainer. Seeing the photos at the Museum was quite inspiring. I’m sure it influenced our next outing, which next paragraph will illuminate in excruciatingly verbose prose.

After the MoCP, we went to the Field Museum. We saw dinosaurs and learned all sorts of fun things and I took pictures of lots of people.

So, on to Viewfinders. If anyone knows the name of a (the?) company that makes wireless viewfinders that you can attach to the eyepiece mount of a Canon 400d, please let me know. I read about them on someone’s blog, but I do not seem to be able to find the product with my normal searching skills. The eyepiece attached a little camera part to the eyepiece and then had what was essentially a little LCD monitor that was wireless. They also had a model that was not wireless with the LCD screen attached right to the eyepiece.

Every year Madison hosts the Art Fair on the Square, a two day event with over 500 artists that is attended by around 200,000 people. At the same times is the Art Fair Off the Square, which is immediately adjacent and you wouldn’t even be able to tell was a different event unless you read about it. I had planned on going to check out the photography on Saturday at the recommendation of a coworker who mentioned a few photographers I should check out. Joachim Knill has an amazingly ginormous polaroid camera he developed himself.

So, I ended up busy a lot of the weekend. Saturday I was working on wedding shots, then shooting derby, then going to see Screamin’ Cyn Cyn and the Pons and Human Aftertaste. Interesting note about that later. Sunday I blanked on the fair until around 3 or 4. I got there at 4:15 with all of 45 minutes to check everything out. I decided to only hit photographers, which made my perusal task seem a little more sane. I also decided to just abandon the idea that I’d be able to look critically at everything. I was all about snap judgments.

I have to get this off my chest now: I’m not the biggest fan of art fairs. Rather, I’m not the biggest fan of all the art at art fairs. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather walk around a shitty art fair than attend a really good baseball game. The artists are usually fun to talk to, and even if I don’t like the stuff I’m seeing, I get to think about it and converse with people about it. The thing with art fairs is that a lot of the styles I see seem so homogeneous. Not completely so, no, but enough so that I’d remark about it.

• Every photographer’s booth I stopped at had an artist statement, and none of them shot digital. Luckily, they all seemed to be cool about it. I’ve been to a photographers booth at another fair where he had a proudly displayed “No Digital” sign up amongst his work. After we talked for a while he let on that one of his favorite parts of the whole process was matting and framemaking. He also revealed that his larger prints were, in fact, digitally printed.
• The subjects were dominated by landscapes, travel photography, and animals. Sometimes more than one. I mean, don’t get me wrong. These photographers are quite talented at what they do. Generally much more so than I am at what I do. I saw a number of photographers who make their own prints and are spectacular printmakers, and I told them so. But when I look at the website of the 2006 Best of Show - Photography winners Barbara & Ernest Abel, I get a little downtrodden. Perhaps it’s the dated looking web design, but maybe it’s because photographs of doors in other countries just don’t do it for me.

One thing that was slightly refreshing was seeing pictures with some real color. Vibrant, saturated color. I know that my enjoyment of the color probably seems contradictory to my indictments of the photography above, but I’m getting tired of the dull, muted colors I see in so much fine art photography on the web.

What is it about art fairs that bugs me? And can I say something here that’s not going to make me sound like an elitist pig? I certainly hope so, because I don’t think I am one. I really respect artists that can support themselves with art, and unless you’re in that 1/10th of a percent that gets catches the big money fine art wave, you’re going to have to do some serious work for a long time. Doing commercial work, doing work that has a wide appeal, and selling your work at as many places as possible is necessary to keep your art and life afloat. I’m guessing that a number of these photographers have some art that I’d really love to see, but isn’t out because it’s not the kind of art that will appeal to the majority of the 200,000 people that will pass it in two days. Now in examining that statement, I think we need to pay attention to the causality. Mass appeal does not cause something to be bad. Can something wildly popular be artistically rich? You bet. There are plenty of blockbuster movies, books, albums, and photographs that I absolutely love and think are wonderful works of art. Heck, my first two favorite photographers when I was young were Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz, in that order. They’re about as big as you can get as far as modern day popularity goes.

So where am I going with this? I think I have plenty of photographs that would fit right in at an art fair. These ones, for example:

I’d love to generate some more revenue from my photography. It’d certainly be nice to afford some equipment I’ve been pining for. I’d also like to know that people enjoy my work. But the idea of buying a big tent and carpeted walls to hang photos on, then to sit around for two days in the hot sun hoping to sell them really seems horrible to me. Then again, I’m an amateur with a day job while these artists are out there making and selling art for a living.  I would just like to see a little more daring and variation in the work they are doing.

I read David Byrne’s blog regularly. I saw today that he mentioned Brian Ulrich, the juror of the CoPA exhibit I exhibiting at and a contributor to a number of wonderful publications (Mother Jones, AdBusters, Harpers etc). I wrote Brian to tell him about it and got a mention on his blog today, which I’m not mentioning on my blog.  While the term “blogosphere” oft times makes me want to punch someone, I have had the realization that it is quite a convenient term for what’s going on here.

From the NY Times obituary:

John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81.

From Joerg Colberg’s blog, Conscientious

• Wolfram Hahn’s portraits of children watching television are haunting
• A great list of photo and art blogs
• This isn’t from Joerg’s blog, but he guested on Jen Bekman’s blog and put up a great post about portraits.

George Barr’s blog is kinda hit or miss for me, but he has some really nice insights. The recent entry comparing music to photography really resonated with me. I’ve commented on the photo/music connection before.

Tech update! Kodak announced a brilliant but deceptively simple improvement on the digital photo sensor a week or two ago. Coverage at The Online Photographer and PopPhoto Flash.

This is the Cat Cam. I read about this at The Online Photographer, amongst other places. What a fantastic idea! Seeing pictures taken of other cats in secret meetings just seems so exciting to me. Check this one out:

This is an older essay that Mike Johntson of The Online Photographer wrote when John Szarkowski retired from the MoMA.  Szarkowski is very much responsible for the way we think about photography as an art form now.  I haven’t read much of his work apart from the writings in Ansel Adams at 100.

Mrs. Deane weighs in on Lara Jade (the 14 year old on a porno DVD cover, discussed earlier) and says it’s a hoax.  While she doesn’t seem to have any proof, it’s certainly something to be considered.  Now if some journalistic type could just do some… journalism,we’d be in the know.