Category: Critique (Page 1 of 2)

The Museum of Fine Arts – Houston is currently hosting a rather large exhibit on photography in war.  The pieces themselves date from the modern all the way back to just a few years after the origins of photography.  The exhibit itself is very large.  In fact, it takes up the entire mezzanine in the Caroline Weiss Law Building of the museum.  Contained in the exhibit are mostly prints, but also a few artifacts, such as pieces of camera technology used in combat zones during different periods, some preserved publications, and even some private journals from journalists and military members.

Most of the prints are original, such as the beautiful Daguerreotypes and silver gelatin prints, but there are also some inkjet prints of older photographs.  I loved seeing the original prints from the older processes.  There were several albumen prints, at least 2 salt prints, 1 carbon print, and, believe it or not, an autochrome print from France during World War I.  There is also one photo from the World War II era that is digitally manipulated, but we will get to that one later.

The reactions I’ve gotten from a couple of my peers who have gone to see this exhibit before me were both pretty much the same – the exhibit was wonderful and that their minds were “officially” blown.  I had to disregard those reviews so my hopes wouldn’t get too high regarding what I was about to see.  I also needed to suppress my own experiences in order to keep that from clouding my judgment regarding the exhibit, which was, of course, going to be the more difficult task.  So, with my mind as clean as I could get it, I walked into the exhibit and began to take it in.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the exhibit.  I mentioned earlier that it occupied the entire mezzanine in the Law Building.  For those of you familiar with the Law Building at the MFAH, then you can appreciate the sheer amount of space dedicated to this photography exhibit. The nearly 3 hours spent walking the exhibit and taking in each piece underscored the importance of war to our history as a species, as well as showing the impact it has on our lives, even if we are far removed from the fighting.

The photos themselves were arranged in a way I would not have initially thought of doing.  The exhibit was broken down into different aspects of war, to include recruiting, actual combat, destruction, rest and relaxation, combat fatigue, memorials, et al, rather than by conflict or chronology.  This grouping does make sense.  The curator of the exhibit needed to strike a balance between highlighting war journalism while also making sure the importance of the messages conveyed by the photographers was not compromised.  To have arranged the photographs in a chronological order or to have grouped them by conflict would have merely turned the exhibit into a history lesson.

As for the images themselves, I actually have seen a lot of them before.  I recognized many from the “Aftermath: Exhaustion and Shell Shock” area as well as the “Aftermath:  Death” areas of the exhibit.  Each area contains one image that became iconic for that particular conflict.  In the former it was this image of a young officer with a “thousand yard stare” after coming back from an engagement.  There is also another rather famous image from the Battle of Gettysburg that shows the battlefield dead.  I am a little embarrassed that I cannot provide the photo in question as there are many similar photos of the battlefield dead at Gettysburg and I can’t remember exactly which it is.  Interestingly, photography started to come of age in the United States during the US Civil War.  The images of the battlefield dead in the US Civil War are often cited as the impetus for the change in public attitude towards war as the camera provided the means by which the actual horrors of war could be conveyed without an artist’s romanticizing a conflict years after it took place.

There is one image in the “Medicine: Wartime Medicine and Medicine Subsequent to War” section that still haunts me.  In this area the viewer is treated to photographs of people who are being tended to after suffering wounds in combat, as well as some of the long term treatments that these wounded soldiers need after returning home from battle.  Many of these are photos of soldiers with their prosthetic devices (usually legs).  There is one large image, the last image in the room, of a mother helping her son out of bed.  At first glance one would think this could be an embrace (a function of the vantage point of the shot), but when the detail is examined, it is evident that there is a piece of this man’s head missing.  Of course, we can surmise that this former soldier is no longer functional as an individual, and will now be, until the day he passes from this earth, dependent for his very survival on others.  I had to ask myself which was the greater cruelty of the war – that he suffered this grave injury or that he was made to survive?

I mentioned earlier that there exists, in the exhibit, one digitally manipulated photo in the “Portraits” area.  This was a full body portrait of General Douglas MacArthur standing next to Emperor Hirohito.  The artist who submitted the work, however, decided to digitally insert his head on MacArthur’s body.  I cannot say that I get why the artist did that, but the greater question was why the curator allowed that particular photograph into the exhibit rather than a reprint of the original image of MacArthur and Hirohito.  This one photograph is definitely the weak link in an otherwise excellent exhibit.

I suppose I can’t really say that my mind was blown by this exhibit.  In my Air Force days we were shown some pretty shocking gruesome images of the effects of chemical weapons during our chemical warfare training.  This was to underscore the importance of the training to our survival on the battlefield.  When I was becoming my unit’s SABC trainer, I also had the pleasure of watching video of battlefield triage, battlefield stabilization, and surgery at a MASH unit (all in Vietnam).  The amputation was definitely one of the most gruesome things I had ever seen up to and since that point.  The execution images are rather haunting, because for many of these they are the point of time just before or after one has crossed into death.  In those that don’t feature the condemned about to die, it shows what their physical beings are reduced to in death, be it scrunched in hastily constructed coffins or the bloodstained shirt worn by the condemned as his sentence was carried out.  The one that will continue to haunt me, however, is the image I described earlier of the man missing part of his head.  The image begs the question I asked at the end of the description, and it’s not one easily answered.

The 1971 film “Johnny Got His Gun” may be streaming somewhere on YouTube or Vimeo.  If not, you can order the DVD through Netflix.  After you watch that movie, you will understand why I ask that question.

As for now, I leave you with me during my participation in one of the many wartime operation exercises that were conducted in Korea during my time there in 1994 and 1995.

Around the dawn of the 20th Century, a new generation of photographers such as Heinrich Kuhn, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen began to challenge the paradigm of photography as a technical activity as their compositions incorporated formal elements of art and their prints began to incorporate color through the use of the gum bichromate printing process. Successive generations of photographers such as Minor White, Ansel Adams, and Jerry Uelsmann pushed the artistic boundaries of photography even further, and today photography as a process is a fully recognized artistic medium.

Along with video production, photography as a medium has benefited greatly from advances in technology. The advances have covered nearly everything to do with photography, from the camera used (wooden boxes with no mechanical shutter to medium format digital SLR cameras) all the way to how the final result is produced (traditional paper to digital frames). Photographers have available a number of different technological processes and will often combine these processes in the creation of their art. The use of formal artistic elements along with the use of light and tone are the reasons behind the success of the two photographs, both different in terms of composition, narrative, and use of technology in processing, to be examined in this paper.

The first photograph is by Jean-Francois Rauziel entitled “Coquelicots.” This chromogenic print, which measures 47-1/4” x 71” and is mounted between two pieces of glass with no border frame, features a field of French Wild Corn Poppies (coquelicots) below and a very large anvil-topped cumulonimbus cloud above. In the field of poppies are two trees separated by large space (in both depth and lateral distance). The foreground tree serves to break up the pattern created by the field of flowers and the swirls of the cloud and it provides a starting point from which one can move their eye around the composition. This same tree holds a bird cage with one bird inside it. The horizon line splits the frame in two equal pieces. As the viewer is drawn in to the depth of the horizon area, the density of the flowers is greater and the cloud gets darker, and we see evidence of an approaching gust front from the thunderstorm.

The composition of the photograph itself is a landscape/nature scene, a genre which lends itself greatly to larger prints in order to emphasize the grandeur of nature. The artist’s use of a very narrow aperture brings the entire depth of the composition into sharp focus. With this, the artist uses the background tree to create depth within the composition using linear, rather than atmospheric, perspective. The streaks of the higher cirrus clouds show the motion of the thunderstorm toward the viewer, which implies motion while keeping the exposure time short enough to avoid motion blur. The small clouds near the horizon line show a gust front, the presence of which implies fast motion toward the viewer.

Lighting is even throughout the composition, which suggests the artist had the benefit of a front-lit scene. However, this is also a chromogenic print, which also suggests that the artist was able to use dodging and burning techniques to his advantage in making the print. The mostly even lighting serves to present us with a large thunderstorm, yet it does so in a non-threatening manner. The lighting brings a large sense of benevolence to the storm, belying its violent nature. As the viewer gets to the deepest parts of the photograph, the dark base of the cloud becomes more apparent, in turn showing the viewer that there is indeed violence with this storm. As the lighting is even throughout, the color becomes important. Without the color, it becomes difficult to differentiate between the different areas over the composition as a whole.

The symmetry created in the composition is nearly perfect in the lower and upper halves. The curvilinear line of the cloud is almost perfectly matched by the line created by the cut foliage in the lower half. This represents the cycle that allows life on earth to thrive. The curved line of the cloud is unbroken and resembles a crown. This shows the artist to be acknowledging the supremacy of the storm in this cycle. The horizontal line represents the strength and stability of the earth, which must work with the fluid nature of the sky (as suggested by the waviness of some of the cirrus clouds) in order to support life. The bird in the cage, which here symbolizes all animal life, is using the vertical line of the tree to assert its position, however small, in the overall cycle represented here. This tiny element is in the tradition of French painters such as Poussin and Lorraine. In these Baroque era paintings the artists downplayed animal life (in their cases they painted actual people) by making them and their activities very small relative to landscapes painted in the scenes.

Given that the print type and the fact that the scale is very close to a 2 x 3 proportion, it is clear that this is a film photograph printed using an analog enlarger. Digital photographs printed using traditional photo paper would bear the label “Digital Chromogenic” as the print type. This is an example of how new contemporary artists are using relatively traditional technologies in order to create new art through their chosen medium.

The second photograph is by a Houston Center for Photography Master Student named Mary Riggs Romain. The photograph, entitled “Perseverance,” is part of a series called Not Myself: A Path to Transcending Trauma. This photograph is a digital inkjet black and white print measuring 22” x 28” housed inside a metal frame. The print makes the hands nearly life size. The fact that they are not gives the viewer the sense that he or she is standing close by as the scene unfolds, but not so close as to be a part of the scene at this point in the series.

The composition itself shows a pair of hands coming from a lighted area and reaching into the darker space of the foreground. A person is resting there hands just outside a lighted area and is visible through the opening. The individual elements, layered over top of each other, make this appear as if multiple exposures were used in the creation of this photograph. This idea is reinforced by the holes, which resemble sprocket holes found on 35mm film at the top of what appears to be a curtain (at the top of the composition itself). Given the 11 x 14 proportions, however, it can be inferred that this particular composition is a photo manipulation of elements photographed and/or scanned by the artist.

The focal point of this piece is the pair of hands just below center of the frame. This element is also the only element that is not a straight line, which is what makes it the focal point. The curtain at the top half of the frame contains many vertical lines and one horizontal line across its top area. The repeating vertical lines are a strong exertion of control by the dark curtain, that it has a dark purpose to it. The horizontal lines denote the strength of the curtain’s resolve in performing the task of keeping the suffering person out of view and hidden from the viewer.

The main source of light here is coming from the other side of a curtain that prevents the viewer from seeing the entire body. The curtain itself is dark and ominous, and the foreground in front of the rock on the bottom also gets darker the further it goes from the light. This use of chiaroscuro effectively creates a reverse of what one would normally expect when confronted with a series on overcoming adversity. Because of this high contrast, color is not needed as the artist wishes us to focus on the image itself. Normally many pieces of this type would involve compositions from the point-of-view of the viewer as the suffering and would be going from darkness to light. This often invites the viewer to become a participant in the piece. This particular composition, however, shows the suffering person opposite the viewer, with this person seemingly offering her hand to the viewer as an invitation to come into her world. The light denotes activity on the other side of the crawlspace.

Symmetry is achieved through the vertical. In terms of the horizontal, however, the composition is asymmetric. The frame is split evenly along the horizontal axis by a dark horizontal line. This line serves to create the effect that the viewer is observing through a window. While the viewer can make up their own mind as to where he or she is while these events unfold, it is clear that, according to the artist, the viewer is the one in the dark.

This particular piece is part of a larger series by the artist. Unfortunately the larger body of work is not currently available so the context of this piece cannot be fully appreciated. Unlike the photograph by Rauziel, who was reacting to his environment, Romain selected individual elements to add to a base in order to build up the final composition. The sprocket holes along the top of the frame provide the only evidence of the source of any of the elements. It is not unreasonable to infer that the source elements are a mixture of analog and digital.

Today there are many artists that manipulate different selected elements from many sources to create new compositions. The most famous of these contemporaries are Jerry Uelsmann and his wife, Maggie Taylor. Uelsmann creates all of his surreal compositions using strictly traditional film and darkroom methods while Taylor creates all of her work digitally. Ramain’s photograph is also reminiscent of the work of Man Ray, who was a big influence on Jerry Uelsmann.

In terms of personal reactions, each photograph elicits a different response from this author. With Rauziel one almost feels as if they are standing outside in a field of coquelicot flowers watching an approaching storm. The only thing that keeps that perception from becoming the actual reality is the fact that Rauziel stopped at nearly 4’ x 6’ in terms of size with this print. In Ramain’s “Perseverance” there is both a darkness and insidious force at work. While the narrative, as seen by this author, is one of the suffering person trying to bring another into her world (where the viewer is actually the one in the dark), there also exists the possibility that narrative put forth by Ramain is that of the viewer being the one in suffering while the hand is the viewer’s only link and way back to the world of light. It would be necessary to study the entire series to know which of these competing narratives is correct.

John Szarkowski describes the five “interdependent aspects of a singular problem” (Szarkowski 3) when it comes to photography in his book The Photographer’s Eye. These problems are: The Thing Itself (presenting reality as it is found), The Detail (the question of why something is the way it is), The Frame (inclusion and exclusion from the photograph), Time (the slice of time in which the photograph was made), and Vantage Point (the view of the subject). A successful photograph solves one or more of these issues. In “Coquelicots,” Rauziel solves the problem of The Thing Itself by presenting the reality he has found, but also addresses the question of The Detail as a narrative is being formed with the imminent approach of the storm. Although the photograph is stop motion, we get a sense of time from this work as the motion implied by the clouds and gust front address the issue of Time. As this photograph addresses three of the issues, it succeeds on many levels with many different viewers. “Perseverance” is a typical example of The Detail as this, being part of a series, furthers the narrative the artist has created. Even when taken alone, we ask ourselves the question of what could be on the other side of the curtain or why the hands are even present.

Both photographs tell very different narratives. One projects the grandeur and majesty of nature and the circle of life while the other invites the viewer into the world of someone dealing with a traumatic event. In both cases the formal elements of line use and lighting serve to advance the goals of the artist. In the case of “Coquelicots,” the artist uses linear perspective created by a very deep depth-of-field and as well as the large scale of the print in order to achieve success. In “Perseverance,” the artist uses chiaroscuro to create the darkness and light of two very different worlds both inside a single frame. Both also use very different technological processes to produce the final results, which is one of the benefits enjoyed almost exclusively by photographic artists today.

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

Magnus Lindbom is a self-taught professional photographer from Sweden.  He earns all his money from photography-related work such as writing articles for publication, leading photo tours and workshops, and selling prints.  His goal with photography is “to inspire others to venture out into nature and experience for themselves what so many of us are missing in today’s hectic urban life”.  His concentration on landscapes (both color and black and white) have given us some amazing photos which seek to capture feelings rather than the place it was shot.

This photo, entitled “Magical Morning”, was taken at Tyresta National Park in Sweden.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the serenity that this photo conveys.  The mist on the water hides any ripples that would convey energy while allowing the reflections of the clouds and trees to come through with good clarity.  The gradations in the tone are nice and smooth, which definitely adds to the feeling of witnessing a serene morning sunrise.  As the scene appears to be backlit, that makes the gradations of tone (not to mention the great exposure) all the more impressive.  While I’m not a fan of placing the horizon in the center of the frame (something I have been guilty of more than once in the past), here the mist blurs the horizon enough to make one have to imagine it’s there.  In turn, the mist also makes obvious where the water meets the land.  While this helps the viewer see where the reflection begins, it does put a damper on what would have been the appearance of the land floating in the air.  In terms of composition all three elements (land, water, and air) are in good balance, with all three competing for, but none winning, attention.  The symmetry of the land and its reflection are almost insignificant when the photo is taken  as a whole.

All in all this is one of the best entries in this year’s “Folios” edition of Silvershotz.  The tones and mist definitely convey a sense of serenity and calm, enough so that the location of this scene is the very last thing I thought of when I looked at this photo.

More of Mr. Lindbom’s work can be seen by clicking here.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

Click to see full size

Comments are welcomed and encouraged.

Croatian Nenad Saljic fell in love with photography and the mountains in his early teens.  Of course, life has a habit of getting in the way and in the course of some life events, he pretty much left his passions unpursued.  Fortunately for Saljic (and the rest of us) he rediscovered his passion for photography and has graced us with some beautiful black and white photos.  In 2009 and 2010 he produced a series called “Matterhorn”, which are, of course, shots of The Matterhorn in the Pennine Alps.  The photo below, entitled “Evening Clouds”, comes from this series (click on picture for a larger view):

Few things can bring forth the image a grand conjuration than watching clouds borne from orographically influenced winds.  I was treated to a few myself as a Weather Observer in the United States Air Force, although admittedly nothing to this scale.  I’m reminded of the great eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I wonder if this is the last thing that most of the rest of Middle Earth will see before the shadow of death descends upon them.  One almost gets the feeling of being a Hobbit watching from a hiding place as the conjuration of evil begins to really take hold.

The play on the tones is the part that sets the mood of this photograph.  The dark foreground tones suggest a hiding place – we have our safe vantage point and as long as the mountain can’t see us we are safe.  The moutain itself is mostly low-key in tone.  Toward the bottom it is lighter and gets darker as you go up, which suggest that a transformation of sorts is taking place.  Of course, the clouds are the stars of this photograph.  The brilliant white stands in stark contrast to the rest of the photo, letting us that we are in for something.  The beauty of the clouds belies both the violence that produced them and the violence that is sure to follow their conjuration.  And when one looks at the fact that the peak of The Matterhorn is enveloped by the clouds, one can’t help but get the impression that they’re in the path of the full force of what’s to come.

Of course, these clouds are merely the result of updrafts over the surface of the mountian.  Even though I can’t see the rest of the sky, I would safely assume that support for these clouds is almost non-existent at a few miles from the mountian itself.  Of course, not many people outside the meteorological community (or those who live near the mountain) would necessarily know that.

Normally when we see photographs of the power of nature, it’s in the aftermath of whatever phenomenon took place.  This photograph provides a rare glimpse at how powerful nature is, even on a small scale.  What makes this photograph even more powerful is that it almost seems to contain that power, even though we know what’s coming toward us.  The play on the tones of the photo suggests a doom scenario where Mother Nature is releasing her full power and the viewer, unfortunately, is about to be caught up in it.

Saljic uses HDR processing pretty extensively in a lot of his more static work, which unfortunately makes his finished photographs look almost like rasterscan line drawings.  His “Matterhorn” series (at least from what I can tell) is free of HDR processing, which sets this series apart from most of his other work.  You can view more of the series by clicking here.

Would anyone like to discuss this photo further?