Mark Power Blog

In my post on Pascal Dangin, image-enhancer ( The Artist and the Artisan) I said:

But with the advent of so-called ‘photo-based art’ it has become increasingly evident that the photographer steps aside after taking the picture; the making of the fine-art object involves the handiwork of a shadowy coterie of retouchers, printers, exhibition designers and framers.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, 2001

This is certainly true of one photographer, Gregory Crewdson, and it is to be expected; after all, Crewdson’s elaborately produced scenarios are like film stills, and almost as expensive to produce as a film. Nevertheless, the sheer number of people required to realize the photographer’s vision is staggering. I recently received Crewdson’s book, “Beneath the Roses” – a fine book with remarkable images – and in the back there are three pages of credits acknowledging the efforts of literally hundreds of people who assist Crewdson in the making of his photographs. There are familiar titles from the world of cinema – “best boy; “gaffers”; “key grips” - and other roles which are baffling such as “greensman” and “acquarist”. There are more familiar credits for “set dressers”, “production assistants”; “carpenters” and even a credit for “weather prognosticator.” But nowhere do I find a credit for digital image-enhancement. In the “post-production” section there are credits which come close: There’s a “master printer/digital artist”, a “visual effects supervisor”, and a “computer graphics supervisor.”

And speaking of the final image, the one person who isn’t credited in these back pages is the artist himself, Gregory Crewdson. How unlike the world of film where the film director often gives him or herself three or more credits to everyone else’s one. What would Crewdson’s credit be? “Visioneer?” Or more radically, “photographer?”

After writing the above, I came across Aperture’s website, where many of the roles of Crewdson’s collaborators are explained, including that of Kylie Wright, Crewdson’s “master printer/digital artist”. I only wish they had included these interviews in the book itself. For the rest, in the interest of keeping a post short I recommend you go to http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/

The book has a fine essay by one of my favorite writers, Russell Banks, in which he knowledgeably discusses the photographer’s relationship to the world of film. Oddly, he scarcely touches on the locale of most of the photographs which are the dispossessed factory towns of New England. The dilapidated houses of such towns as North Adams, Ma., built during the Great Depression or earlier, give the photographs their aura in which people seem to inhabit a kind of purgatory where they are doomed to re-live ambiguous moments from their past.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight 2001

This too, is the territory of Russell Banks who might be considered a poet of that hard-scrabble New England where time seems to have stopped. I lived in New England myself for a number of years and a while ago I copied this word-picture from Bank’s writing because it rang absolutely true:

“…Past the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stove pipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or halfcovered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene, the fields compulsively cleared by long-dead generations of Yankee farmers gone now, in this generation, scrubby choke- cherry and gnarled stunted birch, saw the gap- toothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road, glimpsed in windows the blank gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards, the scrawny yellow mongrels nastily barking from the doorsteps at my passing car… Scattered over the fields in no discernible pattern were ten or twelve rusting shells of windowless cars and trucks, some of them further decomposed and more nearly destroyed than others, also … an outhouse lying awkwardly on its side, rusty bedsprings and swollen mattresses spitting yellowish stuffing onto the ground, a pile of fifty-gallon oil drums, an engine block and a transmission housing, both lying atop a child’s crushed red wagon which lay atop an American Flyer sled in splinters, next: to a refrigerator (with the door invitingly open, I noticed ), and a red, overstuffed couch which had been partially destroyed by fire…”

Russell Banks from his novel “Hamilton Stark”.

 

 

The Reclusive Gardener

click on images to enlarge

 

These are some samples of my wife Virginia’s  art: 

a backyard shade garden in a suburb  of Washington DC.

 

 

How different Virginia’s art is from my own which is photography; they’re almost opposites in fact. Her art work is ephemeral and changes from hour to hour with light and shadow, with time and the seasons.

 

 

But these records of her garden are permanent and unchanging although they fix a moment in May that vanished even before the pictures saw the light of day.

 

 

But one day the garden will completely vanish. Maybe someone new will replace the garden with a patio; maybe time will slowly turn the garden into a vacant lot.

 

 

Then we’ll look at the photographs again and notice they too have changed. They have subtly aged, much as a building ages, and now all that’s left of that moment in May are these photographs and our memories of all the other shifting seasons in that garden’s life.

 

 

 In our mind, the memories of the garden echoing with children, or withering in the heat of Summer, or hidden under the snow, slowly evaporate, to be replaced by these few pictures in an album.

 

 

The camera doesn’t smell flowers or feel the wind. The camera is a machine that only sees the present and is oblivious of the future.  It shows us the past as an illusion of present time and we tend to forget that the garden only really looked that way to the camera for a few minutes in May of the year 2008.

Photographs are a sorry substitute for experience or memory but as we stand in the blank future holding the garden in our hand, they are all we have. 

 

 

The New Yorker recently ( May 12) had a fascinating article about Pascal Dangin, pixel-manipulater extraordinaire.

 “Pixel perfect” by Lauren Collins relates how Dangin has become the “premier retoucher of fashion photographs.” Ensconced in his windowless lair , known as “Las Vegas” because it’s always three a.m in the dark night of image manipulation, Pascal wields his “triptych” of  computers all equipped with Photoshop as he and his assistants refine the work of many photographers, including Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. You see Dangin’s work but you don’t see it because Pascal operates in the shadow of anonymity so you’d never know that the March 2008 issue of Vogue featured 144 images ‘tweaked’ by Pascal including the cover photograph of Drew Barrymore.

 

 

All this is not so surprising despite the sheer quantity which is a bit unsettling because image manipulation in the service of commerce has had an honorable and no so honorable history long before the advent of Photoshop. In the 19^th century it was fairly common despite the difficulties of execution, and in our time, Hugh Hefner boldly used the  techniques of airbrushing to define his surreal concept of the “girl next door”.  

 

Playmate Katie Price from Playboy, September 2002

photography by Stephen Wayda and Arny Freytag

click image to enlarge

 

Now of course, cut-and-paste and airbrushing techniques are all relics of history and instead we have Pascal Dangin and crew dancing in front of their glowing computer screens as they transform Drew Barrymore into someone completely unrecognizable. 

It might be expected that photo retouchers wield their art in  the case of advertising and fashion images. But their involvement in the production of fine-art seems to be a more recent phenomenon. There is a big difference between magazine reproductions and original prints in a gallery selling for many thousands of dollars, and the possibility that people like Pascal Dangin are involved in the making of these expensive art objects raises the issue of  an active collaboration. For some time the line between fashion and fine art photography has been occasionally blurred but having Pascal wield his anonymous talents makes it even blurrier, especially when a photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia is involved, a man primarily known for his fine-art work.

 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia:  Marc Jabobs

 

“Technology is in many respects mechanical, but somebody’s got to run the machine,” said DiCorcia as quoted by writer Lauren Collins. “…Pascal is tireless in exploiting all the capabilities of the technology and even possibly creating some new capabilities.” 

“Somebody’s got to run the machine”? I thought that somebody was the photographer. And what exactly are those “new capabilities”? Maybe the real question is when does the artisan becomes the artist? Are we at the point where the artist supplies the ideas and the Dangins of the world do the work? Of course, except in the case of the most minimalist of Duchampian work ( an area where execution is irrelevant), the execution of the idea is an inseparable part of the art itself.

Until fairly recently it was understood that photographers were artists responsible for all aspects of their production: they took the photographs, developed the film and made their own prints ( with a few notable exceptions such as Henri Cartier-Bresson) and even in some cases, made their own frames for exhibitions.

But with the advent of so-called ‘photo-based art’ it has become increasingly evident that the photographer steps aside after taking the picture; the making of the fine-art object involves the handiwork of a shadowy coterie of retouchers, printers, exhibition designers and framers. For some reason, we don’t inquire who made these large-scale prints and we don’t query the nature of the interaction between artist and artisan; we simply assume the artist retains control of the final product especially as those assisting in “postproduction work” are rarely credited.

 

Inez van Lamsweerde: Installation

Click image to enlarge

 

Not only is it the year of Big Brown, the racehorse poised to win the triple crown, but the horse is also celebrated in the current exhibit at New York’s Museum of Natural History, appropriately enough called “The Horse”. The exhibition is an exploration of the evolution of the horse and the many ways humans and horses have interacted over the ages.

 

 

Deborah Butterfield

 

While pondering these events, I fortuitously came across a marvelous rendering of that empathy between horse and human in this deceptively simple photograph of a horse by Esko Männikö which is not in the show but should be.

 

 

Esko Männikö

 

Simplicity is the easiest thing to see and the hardest thing to do well and Männikö has done it supremely well in my judgement. Männikö, a recent winner of Europe’s Deutsche Börse photography competition, is a Finnish photographer who ordinarily documents Finnish culture with an emphasis on old structures.

 

Esko Männikö, Organized Freedom

click image to enlarge

 

But lately he has been photographing animals …

Esko Männikö

 

I began to think back on my own experiences with the noble horse. I spent part of my childhood on a farm in Virginia where I shared a pony with my sisters. Scout was an elderly somewhat obese pony who was blind in one eye which might explain why he cost all of $60. Scout who preferred immobility to a walk, and a walk to a trot and a trot to a gallop, could be persuaded to the latter only after realizing that if he galloped the ride would soon be over.

So one day, after an hour of going through the gears, he finally broke into what he called a gallop. The non-equine world would have termed it a slow canter. Spying my parents watching me trying to get Scout ambulatory, I decided to show off my riding skills so cantering along, I headed for the fence where they were standing. It suddenly dawned on me that Scout was intending to jump the fence, a scenario I wanted no part of, so I turned his head to the right, a procedure that would normally cause a horse to change direction.

Yes, you guessed it. While his good eye was staring at me in injured surprise, his blind eye failed to see the fence, and into it we crashed. I went sailing through the air and landed at my parent’s feet. As they related later. they didn’t know whether to applaud or flee in panic. As I remember they did neither, but stared at me as if I was a UFO which had dropped from the skies.

Scout shook himself once or twice and began grazing on the grass, unharmed. Not so me; the UFO had a broken arm. That was my last ride as a few months later, having reached the age of 15, I obtained official permission to ride mechanical horses and the automobile and I have been inseparable since.

 

Fast forward many years, and while on the same farm, my wife, Virginia, who has been around horses all her life, decided to take in some retirees from Rock Creek Park’s stables. These were ancient hacks who had spent many of their working years plodding about ovals with shrieking children on their backs. [Rock Creek Park is Washington DC’s great natural park in the heart of the city.]

Notable among the elderly steeds she adopted was Clown, so named because of erratic spots on his hide, a result of his Appaloosa blood. Clown was of a great age and had a winsome personality. For example, he was fond of biting children, a trait which W.C. Fields would have admired. I must confess I thought it indicated a superior intelligence myself. Clown also shared Scout’s desire never to move unless it was to search for food, doubtless one reason why he had reached such a great age. Soon Clown and Virginia were inseparable, although she rarely rode, perhaps because she could walk faster than Clown could gallop.           

 

 

 

 

Clown, 1996

click image to enlarge

 

Soon after Clown reached his 40th birthday, he began to visibly decline. Virginia heroically nursed him through several crises and he seemed to be improving. But one morning this is what we found.

 

 

1997

click image to enlarge

 

 

Clown’s funeral was quite an event and I’m sorry I don’t have a photograph to commemorate it. Virginia was determined to give Clown a burial instead of having him hauled to the knacker’s yard, the usual fate of a dead horse. She was ready to dig Clown’s grave with her own hands, something that probably would have taken her a month, but I prevailed upon Gene Stephenson, a farmer who occasionally rented out a field or two from us, and he came over with his trusty backhoe and had an enormous pit ready in no time.

The funeral procession was quite grand with Clown’s carcass raised up in the air on the claws of the backhoe as Gene made his way to the grave, followed on foot by the mourners, me and Virginia. Finally Clown was rolled into the hole and Virginia asked Gene if he might say a prayer for Clown. This caught the old farmer by surprise; I think it had been many years since he had deigned to address his Creator. He removed his Southern States Best Feed cap, and without getting down from the machine, bellowed a mighty LORD! There followed an uncomfortable silence as Gene searched through his memory bank for a horse prayer. Finally, he uttered a strangled THIS HERE WAS A GOOD HORSE…followed by another long silence. And then inspiration struck, and the one word which would set him free came out, a mighty ground-trembling AMEN.

And the year of that good horse came to an end.

 

 

 

 

 

           

First I heard of the Starving Dog show was a week or so ago when I was asked to join “over a million people” in signing a petition protesting an art exhibit in Nicaragua which had taken place in August of 2007.  The petition said a Costa Rican artist named Guillermo Vargas had chained a dog to the wall in the Codice Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua and allowed it to starve to death. Apparently the performance piece was to call attention to the plight of feral dogs in Managua.

“For several  days,” continued the petition, “the ‘artist’ and the visitors of the exhibition watched emotionless the shameful ‘masterpiece’ based on the dog’s agony, until  eventually he died.” The petition went on to say “the reports about the exhibition have sparked international outrage.  Websites, blogs, and petitions were devoted to protesting the exhibit.”

 I was Intrigued by the similarity of this report to to the ‘Death as Art’, performance piece I wrote about in my post “Ars Moriendi” on May 6. A German artist , Gregor Schneider, proposed exhibiting a dying person in a gallery or museum until the end came. There was no mention of the dying person’s last meal or lack of same. Another difference surfaced immediately: Schneider’s performance piece was a proposal that presumably will never take place after causing an uproar of its own while Vargas’ idea was actually carried out. Or was it?

 

 Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, Misawa, 1971

 

It seems that as usual reality is stranger than fiction. Guillermo Vargas. a.k.a. Guillermo Vargas Jiménez, a.k.a Habacuc ( I think I will go with Habacuc as that’s easiest to type) In addition to honoring the feral dogs of Managua also decided to commemorate the memory of Natividad Canada, a 24-year-old Nicaraguan who died in a Costa Rican factory after being attacked by two Rottweiler dogs in 2005. Accordingly, Habacuc named the dog Natividad and in addition to chaining Natividad to the gallery wall, added a few other flourishes as well:

 He made a caption out of dog biscuits: “Ero Lo Que Lees” (You Are What You read) and feeling that was somehow inadequate decided to play the Sandinista  anthem backwards in addition to denying Natividad water and food. Apparently deciding he hadn’t really made his point, he also burned “175 pieces of crack cocaine in a massive incense burner” or so reported Gerard Couzens in the March 30th edition of London’s Sunday paper, The Observer.

Personally I find it hard to imagine the gallery-goers being “emotionless” after being compared to dog biscuits and being surrounded by clouds of burning cocaine as they watched an emaciated dog in his last agonies accompanied by a backward version of “Fight against the Yanqui, the enemy of mankind” 

But it turns out Natividad didn’t die after all, and though he was deprived of food and water during the time of the of performance – three hours a day for three days -  he was fed and watered by artist Habacuc while resting between performances.

Or so maintains Gallery owner Jaunita Bermudez, director of the Codice Gallery. She went on to add that Natividad had escaped on the fourth day when inadvertently released by a night watchman.

 

 

Mr. Woolford and Princess Nu-Nu at Home 

Click to enlarge

 Cruel and inhumane treatment of an animal? Well, I don’t know. My own dogs often go for three hours without food or water but of course they have the choice of plodding a few feet to get water and they’re fed twice a day. But if I endlessly serenaded my little pugs with the Sandinista anthem played backwards the PETA van might well be pulling up to my front door especially after they got a whiff of the burning crack. I would think that if you really wanted to help the street dogs of Managua, you’d raise funds to provide the homeless canines a shelter and food instead of carrying on with nonsensical displays. 

We can only imagine Natividad’s relief when he rejoined his friends on the streets of Managua. I also imagine the homeless dogs will be equally relieved once Habacuc moves on to other causes.