written by: Robert HirschBrian Taylor innovatively explores alternative processes including historic nineteenth century printing techniques, mixed media and handmade books. Taylor is a Professor of Art in the photography program at San Jose State University where he has taught for 30 years. The following are highlights from our recent discussions. Robert Hirsch: How would you describe your artistic voice? Brian Taylor: My photographic practice involves visualizing the poetic interior views of my subjects and communicating these visions to others. Most photographers act as hunters in search of a preexisting scene: without a specific image in mind, they stalk the elusive “wild” photograph. In Read more »
written by: Robert HirschAlthough digital imaging has raised society’s awareness about how camera images are constructed, the practice of hand altering photographs has existed since the medium was invented. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of how photographers have actively interacted with pictures before the digital age. Following the curatorial premise that “there is no such thing as an absolutely unmanipulated photograph,” the project offers a stimulating view on the history of photography as it traces the medium’s link to visual truth by concentrating on how images were changed after the camera capture. It does Read more »
written by: Robert HirschArthur Tress is an American experimental photographer who utilizes his anthropological background to construct astonishing, dream-like expressions of his interior landscapes. Tress’s fictions, made up of ordinary objects set in commonplace environments, are organized to reveal their underlying psychological associations. Tress’s direct involvement with his subject matter generates tension between the formalism of the photograph and the subjectivity of his personal vision, creating a new hybrid form: documentary fiction. The resulting unexpected juxtapositions construct surrealistic non-sequiturs in which outer reality merges with the inner mind. The following is a distillation of recent exchanges between Tress and myself. Robert Hirsch: How Read more »
written by: Robert HirschOver the years Carl Chiarenza’s photographs have evolved from tightly framed, documentary-style images into a vocabulary of visual abstraction. He achieved this by taking leave of the natural landscape and constructing collages from scrap materials for the purpose of being photographed under a copy stand with a 4×5 view camera. Chiarenza’s luminous, meticulously crafted black and white photographs remove his subject from the everyday world of color. This allows his images to transcend their specific subject matter and evoke an inner state of consciousness that grapples with his subject matter beyond its external structure. Chiarenza’s spirit of experimentation disrupts customary Read more »
written by: David Vestal“I photograph on unplanned impulse when I’m moved by what I see. It’s not predictable. For me, acceptable imperfection is the price of spontaneity, and that’s often a good bargain.” On Systems In both traditional chemical and digital photography there are systems for photographing things that hold still while the photographer calculates. These include the Ansel Adams-Fred Archer zone system of pre-planned film exposure and development and a newer digital method that combines separate exposures for the subject’s light, midtone and dark areas to get optimum print tones and colors over the whole exposure range. The results can be quite Read more »
Enter into a darkroom and make a small round hole in the window shade that looks out onto a bright outside scene. Hold a piece of translucent paper 6-12 inches from the hole and you will see what is outside the window. This optical phenomenon, which has been known since ancient times, provides the basis for making pinhole (camera) photographs. Wayne Martin Belger’s philosophical approach to his subjects utilizes this phenomenon to build fantastical handmade pinhole cameras, which he then operates to create his images. Robert Hirsch: How did you get involved in photography? Wayne Martin Belger: In the mid-1990s Read more »
Documentary Photographer of the Mind
written by: Robert Hirsch…I am interested in photography’s first 40 years because it was at its zenith right from the start. Photography has not improved much; it’s just gotten more convenient. I like the visual code of the nineteenth century, the formality of it, the way things looked, and the mix between art and science. In an age when digital imagery often disrupts our expectations about photography’s traditional role as a witness to outer reality, Stephen Berkman does so using the collodion wet-plate process. Berkman’s enigmatic, time-traveling images demonstrate how an understanding of our world can be acquired through fabricated methods, thus revealing Read more »
written by: A. D. Coleman. . . the evolution of Stone-Age man entailed a gradual dominance of vision over the other senses . . . beneath our visual selves, beneath even the old Adam, lies buried that mammalian and pre-mammalian self, which feels and smells and intuitively or instinctively apprehends. When the dominating eyes are blunted, these “older” senses again become the masters, and to that extent a new persona is born. — Patrick Trevor-Roper, The World through Blunted Sight Photographs, by their very nature, ask us to experience the world through someone else’s perceptual system, to consider it as seen with someone else’s Read more »
written by: A. D. ColemanKate Breakey’s sensuous, sumptuously colored, riveting pictures depict once-living things—birds and flowers, mostly, but also a lizard, a dragonfly, a butterfly, a moth— that have died and found their way into her studio, to lie beneath her lens and undergo what might be described as a solemn, protracted rite of passage. Some of these she herself comes across in her peregrinations; some reach her by other paths. (“My friends…give me small dead things as gifts,” Breakey writes.) In their original form, these images generally measure 32 inches square. The substrate of each is a gelatin-silver print, a considerable enlargement of Read more »
written by: Kevin MoloneyWhat makes the difference between a recognized artist and a dabbler, an amateur or a dilettante? I am sure there are formulas, Ph.D. dissertations and many entire books on the subject. I’m not writing this as an expert, only an observer. And I’ve been observing the case of Vivian Maier, a long-time amateur street photographer whose work was only discovered by accident in 2007 and attributed to her shortly after her death in 2009. Her images were uncovered by a few auction buyers who purchased her negatives−they were intrigued by the images. Through their efforts her work has since been Read more »
