thechrisproject photography

July 24 at the Haggarty Museum in Milwaukee - Stephen Shore speaks at 6pm about his exhibition opening that day and continuing until September 28th.

Until September 1st Gilbert and Geroge at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Related video via Conscientious

Until September 15th, Lee Freidlander’s work will be at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Review at The Online Photographer

August 14th, 6pm,  John Shimon and Julie Lindemann speak at the opening of Unmasked and Anonymous: Shimon and Lindemann Consider Portraiture, which runs until November 30th.

October 30th 6:15pm, Jen Davis speaks at  the Milwaukee Art Museum.  Jen’s work is featurd in Unmasked and Anonymous.  I’ve seen Jen’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and enjoyed it a lot.

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. […] No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

- —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Via The Online Photographer

First up, Eurobad, the worst of European interiors from 1974.

Next up, great Olan Mills portraits:

I’ve actually dabbled in the Olan Mills style before:

And in a discussion on Mike Johnston’s ingenious satire of internet photography critics, someone brought up this amazing photo from a deleteme group on flickr. These groups work like this: you add a photo to the group’s pool. Then members look at your photo and critique, ultimately issuing a delete or save for the picture. After you get a certain number of votes, your photo stays in the pool or gets deleted from it. They’re great for getting critiques and views, though whether either of those features is worthwhile is up for debate. What Andre did was upload a photo taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and submit it for critique without giving away who took the photo. Some people obviously got it quickly but others offered their advice on how the photo could’ve been improved. The blur was a big no-no. Someone suggested using a tripod. Some people figured it out but defended their critiques, saying that some people were worshipping the photo just because of the photographer, and not the photo itself. However you look at it, it’s pretty damn funny.

My only gripe is with the people thinking they’re giving good critique, when all they’re doing is giving some technical wankery.

My problem with these groups is not that they give critiques, it’s that I don’t think it’s useful to get critiques from just anyone.

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.

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.

Madison Guy’s recent post on Frank Lloyd Wright got me thinking about a lecture by Malcolm Gladwell I heard last year.

In it he discusses the phenomenon of prodigies and late bloomers in art. It’s a very interesting and engaging lecture and definitely required listening for anyone who is, or was, sad at 27 because they didn’t produce the wonderful works of art that others have done by the time they were 25.

Listen to the lecture at the New Yorker site.