Framing, Hierarchy, Roy DeCarava

This is Roy Decarava's most known image, viewed by millions in Moma's Family of Man exhibition.

Roy DeCarava, Graduation, 1949

Without the two main subjects, the girl in the formal dress and the Chevrolet billboard, this would be a very conventionally framed photograph of an empty lot. This balance creates a solid stage for these two unrelated elements to interact. Our eye is first drawn to the figure in the striking dress, contrasting with its murky, unglamorous surroundings. The girl’s posture leads us to the advertisement, which because of the way it’s cropped into, weirdly maintains its original graphic hierarchy, which emphasizes the text. Had the entire frame of the billboard been included it would become more objectified and less communicative. This relationship between figure and ad copy is further strengthened by scale, the billboard being at a distance which makes the car in close proportion to the girl. A generation before, during the great depression, it was a photographic cliché to show looming advertisements above soup kitchen lines. Here a relationship is established that is more complex and open to interpretation.

Roy DeCarava, Sun and Shade

 "A photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or anything else for its life, its reason for being."

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava, from the series The Sound I Saw

Roy DeCarava: Seeing People. Seeing Jazz. A short documentary by Moshe Quinn

Conversations with Roy DeCarava trailer

 

Musicians with their own YouTube channels; Nostalgia and Documentation...is it really now?

 In the second half the Social Photo section Documentary Vision Jurgenson discusses the I was there, I did that sensibility as it is depicted on social media. Everything comes across with a bit of a 'sugar high'...always a bit elevated from everyday reality via the streamlining powers of abstraction. We also often see some form of nostalgia involving recent, or distant times, commonly defined as 'the jealousy the present has for the past'.  Somehow we see these two ideas mutate in the official videos and album trailers of Lana Del Ray, where she seems to live in a past that never existed.

 

https://www.youtube.com/c/LanaDelRey/videos

 

Lana's career was kick started by the viral activity stirred up by the found footage video for her song Video Games. As these videos age they seem to become a kind of dated nostalgia, one that may reflect a 2012 idea of what the 1950s mixed with 1990s should look like. That doesn't deter younger artists like Maggie Lindemann from going down a similar path...

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv011hIm-QqpgDGt32xrIRA/videos

 

...but maybe with more restraint and a different twist on 'camp'.  Then there's an alternative sensibility that's a bit more real, complete with some comic documentary reenactment;

https://www.youtube.com/user/thaomusic/videos

 Thao & The Get Down Stay Down deconstruct the 'serious pop star' sensibility and offer something more organic, with a good amount of live performance and behind the scenes video on their site. 

 

Older artists can indulge in more of an archive sensibility. Niel Young's youtube channel is an extension of his online music store, which actually called Niel Young Archive;

 

https://www.youtube.com/neilyoung/videos

There are definitely a few lost gems here. This last video takes us to an entirely different place, documentary entirely stripped of nostalgia;

 https://www.youtube.com/user/TELEstoryteller/videos

Dion Francis DiMucci, better known as Dion, has a sensibility more interested in now than then, but he isn't afraid to confront the past! Here he tries to remember everything possible about the tour that ultimately took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. These were clearly the bad old days, played out in the winter hell of Wisconsin.

Frida Kahlo's 'Disrupted Symmetry'

 Between 1925 and 1954 Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. In most of these she confronts the viewer in a full-frontal, straight-on manner. This helps her bring you into her world. She wants you to feel her pain, and her passion.

'The Broken column' painted in 1944

Much of her pain was physical. Her health problems began when she contracted Polio at age 6. At age 18 a bus she was riding in was struck by a streetcar and she was impaled by a handrail and her pelvis, spine and leg received multiple fractures. It was during this bedridden recovery period when she began painting seriously. But she never did really recover. In her lifetime she would have 35 surgeries and would wear 50 different supportive corsets and a prosthetic leg.

'Self-Portrait with Monkeys' painted in 1943

Her damaged body did nothing to suppress the power that emanates from the inner self here. We are left to wonder what her understanding of 'self' really was and how she was able to so directly communicate something so intangible. 

Composition was one of her tools. Her figure is slightly off center in these, eyes toward the viewer, with head slightly turned away. 

This type of composition is simple to emulate with electronic media, especially with a camera on a tripod, responding to a central pose, or a centered element, with a slight de-centering. This may evoke disruption, or it may make the image more dynamic.

Four Instagram Accounts with Strong Original Content

 This title is not an oxymoron. Despite being strangled by ads and fluff (literally, in pet form) Instagram has great potential to communicate serious visual information with captions, taken in by hundreds of people, glancing at their phones for just a few seconds. These projects can take many forms...a combination of poetry and images, a memorial to a loved one rich with universal messages, and serial visual art projects that help you feel the journey of the maker.

 

https://www.instagram.com/pauldruecke/

Milwaukee artist/poet Paul Druecke's project involves two components...picking up trash and letting the process take him to a place that inspires prose. The phone camera look gives the images an immediate, documentary feeling. The words can pull you inward to the experience, sometimes...other times they allow you to just float away.

 

https://www.instagram.com/whywelook/

Writer/curator Marvin Heiferman's Instagram became immediately changed by his partner Maurice Berger's unexpected death during the first invasion of COVID. It's a dialog that's healing and life affirming while indulging in mourning and celebration. Who Maurice was maybe best be described by his own quote from his December 2017 essay, Using Photography to Tell Stories About Race...

“As a Jew, I have known anti-Semitism. As a gay man, I have known homophobia. But neither has seemed as relentless as the racism I witnessed growing up — a steady drumbeat of slights, thinly-veiled hostility and condescension perpetrated by even the most liberal and well-meaning people. It was painful to watch, and as my friends let me know, considerably more painful to endure.” 

 

https://www.instagram.com/carlcoreyphotographer/

Carl Corey posts very recent photography projects on his Instagram, allowing the work to unfold as it is created. Most of his images depict the upper Midwest, although a recent Guggenheim fellowship seems to have allowed him to roam a bit further out.

 

https://www.instagram.com/pgracedesigns/

Pat Grace has embarked on a project that has him creating a finished artwork every day, for 100 days. He's on day 80 as this is written. Hope they keep coming after he hits 100! The work is fresh and beautiful, with a subtle message referencing corporate America lurking within it, sometimes underneath the pigment and occasionally in the commentary.

Group Project

 

ART/FIST 340/540 Phases of the Image

 © 1983 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (p. 11) 

It might be interesting to think about images in more straightforward terms:

-Suggesting reality (reflecting everyday)

-Distorting reality (idealizing)

-Only hinting at a possible reality (iconicism, mythical)

-Transforming our sense of reality by not relating to anything we consider real.

Relating to a reality that is understood as fantasy.

 

Sometimes Art isn't so straightforward, blurring such classification, unmasking via masking... 

 Confined to an apartment overlooking NYC's Washington square park, the extraordinary life of Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) would have a final period of solitary reflection. A gift from Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, & Nash) who would occasionally visit the apartment with his wife Susan, would help him objectify this emotional journey...a Polaroid SX-70 camera, the ultimate creation of instant photography inventor Edwin Land.

On page 18 of The Critical Eye Lyle Rexer states, "Kertesz had an ability to find metaphors for his inner experience." Throughout his long career Kertesz's work would embrace this, and in his last pictures that was all that was left.

August 3, 1979

April 11,1979

December 9, 1979

January 1979

Susan Nash, September 27, 1979

"Without a sense of the life and the work that have come before, the world of these last photographs may appear confined and melancholy. With that background, it appears rich with the possibility of making meaning about the most profound experiences, from the smallest things." Rexer, p.22

The Global Village

 It's a pretty easy concept to grasp, the world is getting smaller. In McLuhan's lifetime it was things like satellite news, long distance telephone calls, and international mass-marketing of consumer items, like the Beatles. Now we have auto-translate, zoom, and instagram, the app which is making everyone visually literate. McLuhan's musings on his 'global village' were rather dark, rooted in the cold war, which wasn't really over until after McLuhan's death. The last section of the book opens with a picture of Marilyn Monroe attending the 1959 visit of USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev to the US.

This visit coincided with a period of aggressive build-up of nuclear weapons by both countries. Next comes...

"The (media) environment as a processor of information is propaganda"

A line that's definitely worth pondering.

"Propaganda ends where dialog begins."

 

 

Now with interactive media, do we really have any true dialog? Is instagram all the commercials with none of the programs? And with only the most smug, cliche comments?

Next;

"Quảng Đức's self-immolation came in response to the persecution of Buddhists by the government under Diệm." Students from Vietnam always have much to say about how misleading the narration here is. Then...

"God is dead."

Interestingly interpreted by McLuhan, a devout Catholic. Then, symmetry with the beginning. "You" becomes "...and who are you?" ...it all depends on who you're with.

How do you end this?...with a New Yorker cartoon that propagandizes McLuhan!