Sally Meister and Sally Mann, during the time of COVID, discuss photographs and the works of Dorothea Lange in a virtual encounter. I found her advice, during the interview, to new photographs insightful. She begins by suggesting that you can not think your way into a body of work, rather, she says, you need to work rather than think, as waiting for inspiration to come to you does not work. You need to just do the work. The second piece of advice is to be ordinary and organized, be who you are not what you think an artist should be, and this will allow you to be outrageous and original.

Finally, she says: If you do a body of work and you think it is good and you are getting somewhere really quickly start another body of work. So that by the time you finish your first body of work you are not inflicted with “the well has gone dry syndrome.” You are already being seduced by the siren song of the next body of work. So you can let the first body of work go and you can make something entirely different.

https://youtu.be/rQGQwaoyZo8

During the interview, she talks about the principle of micro-mensuration and reflects on its meaning in photography. Heisenberg was measuring subatomic particles by bouncing light or photons off particles, he realized that the photons as they bounced off the particles alter their course and therefore the measurement would be inaccurate. She suggests that this uncertainty principle of micro mensuration applies to photography. Digital cameras measure the photons of light that are bouncing off objects, so why would we not expect the resulting image to alter the scene. Mann goes on to explain that photographs both remind us of a moment in time and also alters our memory of that moment. Even though the photograph is a doorway back into a moment of time it also gives to that moment its own meaning distinct and different from the moment as the photographer remembers it. She goes on suggest that in addition to this change in meaning you are also infusing yourself into the photography, “there is no way to take a picture without imposing yourself on it.”

During the interview, she talks about the derivation of some of her bodies of work and how they come out of bad ideas. In her archive, lots of bad negatives are stored along with the good ones. It is a record of how bad ideas evolved into good ideas, and this will become the subject of her new book. I am looking forward to reading this book.

I have been reading my way through “Annie Leibovitz At Work” and ran across the following passage:
“I didn’t start off thinking that the pictures would be so dark. That look was almost accidental. The first polaroids we took were badly exposed, and I loved them. As soon as you opened up the correct exposure they weren’t interesting. Whatever the meter reading was in the barn, we went down about two stops. The natural light was supplemented by lights that had been designed for music videos. They produced very flight light. The flattest light I’d ever used. As the light hit the body it would fall away, creating soft shadows and almost translucent shapes. I thought it was gorgeous. Very fleshy and strangely green. But there was very little information in the negative. My assistant begged me to get a brighter exposure. He said we could darken the print down later. I hear this all the time, even in digital work. The technician will say, “You can’t exposit like that. There’s no detail It’s blown-out.” But sometimes I want it to look like that. I don’t want to play it safe. And I lose control of the process if I don’t get what I want when I’m shooting. The nudes didn’t have the translucent quality when the film was exposed properly. 

The passage was a great reminder that sometimes the best photographs happen initially through an error. In this case it showed her something she would never have found if the exposure had been initially correct. Then used this mistake to create a number of images that are very striking and unique.

I think it also says something about being in the moment and reacting to what is in front of you rather than seeking deliberately. You have to be on “Flow.” 

In positive psychology, a flow state is a mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time.

Ann Thomas the Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada made some interest points about truth in photography as part of her April 21, 2020, virtual presentation and response during the Capture Festival. What I found particularly interesting was her response to a question of how untruthful photography might be in today’s digital world.

Her response to this question was as follows. “Whether digital born or analogue created, the idea that a photograph inherently conveys truth is a misconception. This was confused from the beginning with a recorded image’s ability to appear naturalistic, i.e. to approximate what the human eye sees. This is contradicted by the fact that the act of composing a view is an act of selecting “truth.” The Gustave Le Gray seascape The Great Wave, Sète, 1857, or Henry Peach Robinson’s Hark! Hark! the Lark!, 1882, and William Notman’s Terra Nova, Snowshoe Club, 1875, in The Extended Moment are the results of composing a scene with the use of multiple negatives, and are thus fictions.“

Image manipulation, she is pointing out, is in fact as old as photography itself. Like painters photographs strive to capture the essence of the scene they are looking at and like painters adjust the image to make sure it does so. Even the act of framing a photograph is a process of deciding what is in the image and what is not. In other words, photography is an art form and as such is fiction, after all how can a two-dimension image accurately reflect a three-dimensional scene?

Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes caught with technical difficulties with the collodion process of creating images used two negatives one for the clouds and one for the sea. He did this because he needed different exposure times in order to capture the movement of the waves and the light in the sky. The end result was an image that received high acclaim in London and Paris. To my mind his thinking was not dissimilar to that of any artist, how do I use my tools to create a memorable image. Given he was working with the collodion process in a large format this must have been quite something for its time, given that the process was invented in 1851.

On the other hand William Notman’s photograph was done by staging an event for the camera, by assembling a group had having them pose for the image. Here the photographer was manipulating his subjects so it could create an artistic representation of what a snowshoeing party might have looked like. So it also is a fiction, an artist representation of life in Quebec in 1875.

Lens/cratch’s latest expose on George Nobechi series of images shot through windows toward an outside view, are devoid of people. The series “Here. Still.” viewed in today’s social distancing environment is especially haunting and yet serene.
http://lenscratch.com/2020/05/george-nobechi/

I think it might be interesting to use Nobechi’s series as a concept to create a few images. What is especially interesting about what he is doing is he seems to take the concept of frame with in a frame, and manage to take it beyond a simple farming device. Instead he has, in a number of images, balanced the interior space with the exterior space creating a interesting duality, that forces me to move back and forth between the two creating an emotional tension.

It seems like a perfect challenge for a photograph to see if one can use this idea to create some interesting images, that speak to our current environment.

We curated some of Goga Bayat’s photographic work into an international show of photography during the Capture Festival a few years back. The image below is a new capture from a Street Photography curation process by LensCulture.

I have always enjoyed her photographic work it, lyrical and mysterious. Her range goes from abstract compositions through lush still lifes to more formal portraits. Not only is she a professional stills and portrait artist she works in the film industry and is also a novelist.

Her video of some of her stills gives a good idea of her unique style of photography.

In these days of social isolation Goga might serve as a good example of using window captures, to create a series of images.

Collaging photographic images has become an interesting hybrid form of art work, with many experimenting with the medium. Nadine Broughton was featured recently in Lens/cratch: Fine Art Photography Daily. As Aline Smithson points out her imagery, using vintage sources, “explores the psychology, politics and polarities of mid-century” US culture.

Other artist like Jessie Craig who creates works in photography and film also dedicates some of her time to creating collages like the ones that are above. Here work is very different from Broughton’s work, as it avoids the tradition process of cutting and pasting printed images on a background.

In instagram if you explore any hashtag that starts with #collage you can see a wide range of individuals exploring this method of creating images. One of my favourite contributors is @smallditch. Martha Haversham’s, an interdisciplinary artist has a great instagram feed filled with creative collage images. Her departure from the traditional, buy simply assembling an image, photographing it and the the assemblage is discarded. So the image only exists as a photograph.

Both are again quite different from Rauschenberg’s experiments with collage in the 60’s, as you can see from the image below.

This art form was also popular with Braque and Picasso and their work went on to inspire Dadaist to experiment with this image creating method.

Even the Surrealist found this an interesting method to experiment with their “automatic” method using the subconscious , as you can see in the image below.