thechrisproject photography

I’ll admit, I sometimes feel like I’m at a bit of a disadvantage as far as my knowledge of art and photography goes. Here’s my secret: I’ve never been to an art or photography class. I mean, I took an art class in middle school, and I was a yearbook photographer, but you know what I mean. I read a lot of artist bios on websites and in galleries and museums and most of them seem to start off like this:

BFA from [school with decent art program], MFA from [school with better art program]

My thoughts on Art School and what it means to me and other people could fill up a few posts. Lately I’ve been thinking about how going to Art School probably makes you much more comfortable with the language that the art world uses. I’m not yet fully comfortable calling myself an artist, or talking about “my art” or referring to “my work”. It’s not just a comfort level issue, either, I’m not really sure I am one. I don’t have a very well-formed idea about what makes something art. I don’t have a lot of conversations about what art means to me or to other people. I feel like people get that in art school.  I’ll get back to this later, because it’s a digression from my original intent for this post.  That, and I’m not really yet convinced that it’s something I need.

Lately what I’ve been trying to catch up on is my education about past masters. I’ve been learning about great photographers, studying their prints, their books, and their writings. I spent some time a few months ago studying Robert Frank. Just recently I bought a book of Mary Ellen Mark’s work that I’ve been going through.

Garry Winogrand is a photographer that I’ve been quite fascinated with lately. I don’t have any of his books yet - the local bookstores don’t have any of them - but I’ve found as many pictures of his as possible and have been reading a great deal about him. Up until a few days ago, it was hard to find much interesting information about him. I knew what kind of camera he used, and how prolific a shooter he was, and that he had hundreds of thousands of images undeveloped or unedited when he died. I knew that Szarkowski was instrumental in his career. I didn’t know why he shot so much, or how he edited his pictures, or what his ideas were about the technical aspects of photography. Why did he shoot?

The answer to some of those questions was in a paper I just read called “Class Time with Garry Winogrand” by O.C. Garza. It’s a nicely written 20 page pdf on what it was like to be a student of Winogrand’s at the University of Texas in Austin in the mid-seventies. This essay by Mason Resnick also talks about studying under Winogrand, this time in a two week long workshop in Manhattan.

It led me to the answer of why Winogrand photographed:

I photograph something to see what it will look like photographed.

Those two papers by students of his have taught me more than I’ve learned in numerous other summary articles about him. One of the most helpful things I’ve found so far is this video about Winogrand. I’m contacting the owner of that webpage to see if I can put the video on YouTube so it’s easier to share. Among other things, it shows some of his drawers full of undeveloped film and some shots of him shooting on the street. His technique is interesting and reminds me a little of my own, only I rarely look through the viewfinder on the street and my camera is about 4 times bigger than his. I understand that I lose a lot of framing control… well, I don’t really buy that, actually. It just takes a lot more practice to regain that framing control. One could easily make the argument that Winogrand lost a lot of framing control with his quick shooting style. You can see it in the video, as soon as the camera is at his eyes, the picture is taken and it’s coming back down again.

So if you’re interested in learning about Winogrand, check out some of those links. If you have any other good sources of information about him, please leave a comment.

Mrs. Deane, a blog by two visual artists from Germany and Holland, is doing a week of fashion photography as a self-inflicted penalty for guessing wrong about the veracity of the Lara Jade story.  The other day they posted a link to a piece in Slate by Karen Lehrman about the decline of fashion photography.  Check it out: http://www.slate.com/features/010510_fashion-slide-show/01.htm

It seems like a common early art student project: photograph things that look like letters, and get every letter.  I had some friends that were going to school for art who did something like this.  This is incredible. Lisa tells her story in JPG Magazine.