Google Street View has a straightforward conceptual goal...to make a continuous panorama that encompasses every public street on earth.
Artists who make photographs in public spaces need not be so dogmatic in their approach. Saul Leiter sought-out small visual miracles, where aspects of the street came together in a 1/60th of a second that created brilliant, harmonious mosaics of color and form.
"'Seeing is a neglected enterprise,' Mr. Leiter often said. Where other New York photographers of the period were apt to document the city's streets discreetly- streets, people, buildings - Mr. Leiter captured the almost indefinable spaces where all three intersect, many of them within a two-block radius of the East Village apartment in which he had lived since the early 1950s." -(Margalit Fox, Saul Leiter, Photographer who Captured New York's Palette, Dies at 89, The New York Times)
"I go out with my camera because I enjoy catching certain moments. Of course I don't know that I'm going to get what I'm going to get. It takes time." -Saul Leiter, In No Great Hurry: 15 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (Thomas Leach, director, 2014)
Saul Leiter, Taxi, 1956
Saul Leiter, Barbershop, 75, 1950's
Saul Leiter, Street Scene, 1959
Saul Leiter, Dog in Doorway, Patterson, 1952
Saul Leiter, Foot on El, 1954
Richard Renaldi, Touching Strangers
For some artists the street is a place for theater, where quickly orchestrated social maneuvers can unfold into tender, awkward moments that become monumental.
CBS Evening News, June 20, 2014
Richard Renaldi, From the series "Touching Strangers"
From; The New Yorker Magazine - 24 Hours at the Epicenter of the Pandemic
Intuitively we may believe an objective image of a landscape could exist, but can it? Won't even a formalist's agenda highly mediate our viewing experience? Is the depiction of a landscape always an act of consumption?
Colorama #274, Surfers and surfboards, Peter Gales, 1966
The Colorama was a backlit 18x60 foot photographic display located inside New York City's Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990, a virtual window looking onto a fictionalized, idealized world where constant consumption and snapshot making abound, and the landscape is often prominent.
Grand Central Station, 1963
The colorama below, art directed by Norman Rockwell, has all the subtle satire of his magazine cover illustrations.
Colorama #126, Amdursky and Baker, Closing a Summer Cottage, 1957
Herb Archer. FAMILY CAMPING, LAKE PLACID NY, July/Aug 1959
Peter Gales, Colorama that appeared in Grand Central Station Aug. 26th, 1968
Rebecca Solnit, in her book, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art writes,
"The desert is famously a place of silence. A place without language, to some extent, unnamed, unmapped, unfamiliar, corresponding to no familiar categories of experience, not truly outside representation but challenging to it. It was, for a long time, literally a territory without a map, the last part of the continent to be explored and mapped, and much of what is now the (Nevada) Test Site seems to be the last part of the contiguous forty-eight states to be mapped. Baudrillard would still be lost out here. Much of the difficulty the desert of the American West presented was linguistic and categorical: it did not correspond to what was known by easterners and Europeans. It is not only because the Spanish arrived earlier that many aspects of this place - arroyos, mesas, playas, bajadas - have Spanish names, but also because there are no English words for such landforms...
Richard Misrach, "Simulated Window" Wendover Airforce Base, Utah, 1986
The politics of the simulacra carry a different weight inside the Enola Gay bunker. Misrach's "Simulated Windows" shows a slab of drywall that closed off that bunker's view of the outside world on which military personnel drew and labeled "simulated scenery," "simulated bush,"...in a collection of images as clever and cold as anything by David Salle or Richard Prince, except that the detachment of these amateur artists is quite likely to be literally lethal, since it is not safely becalmed in the cultural driveway....Nuclear war and the U.S.military can be called, among other things, totalizing discourses, discourses that could be examined most clearly out here among some of the most crucial landscapes of the cold war....
Too, such a landscape at such a time makes demands that undermine the art histories we might call "landscape theory." Clouds here are not equivalents, the landscape is not a pathetic fallacy, because to hear it speak purely of self is to drown out urgent political histories, which affect that self profoundly. Both modernism and post-modernism are essentially urban, eastern practices. In both, landscape has been considered the most pedestrian, unintellectual of the themes of visual art, a kind of mental picnic. To find politics in its most virulent and secret form out in the desert upends those traditions. The landscape is no longer a given, but a threatened territory. The primary landscape tradition for Western civilization is that of the pastoral, in both literature and art: the pastoral as the antithesis of the city, a refuge from the politics and corruption of cities, a place of virtue, a place significantly outside history and ruled by cyclical rather than linear time. The pastoral at its most banal is the resort, vacationland, campsite. This tradition has made it hard to reinvision the landscape as instead the complex place in which futures are being prepared, secret wars carried out, poisons dispersed, histories inscribed." (Solnit p.75-78)
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In his 2009 book, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, Lyle Rexer describes a kind of epiphany he had while looking at an exhibition of modernist photographs at the George Eastman House. Bored by the exhibition of the unnamed photographer, he wandered into the historical collection and "lifted the hood" on a print by William Henry Fox Talbot. Images printed in the 19th century are often protected from light by a fabric covering which must be actively lifted in order to view the image. This action in itself, of instantly exposing to ambient light the otherwise darkened subject seemed to activate the image, and to simultaneously conjure the experiences of those who were alive at photography's inception. He relates this sensation to viewing Gordon Matta-Clarke's film, 1974 film Splitting, which documents the artist cutting a house in suburban New Jersey, suddenly exposing the inside to a shaft of light, and simultaneously rendering it sculptural object. "There occurs a spectacular moment of what can only be called rebirth...like being present at a birth that was also a transformation...I suddenly realized that much of what I had assumed about photography and what it might disclose was wrong." (Rexer p.10) The act of physically splitting the house in two is about the moment it transitions into a sculptural object, transcending its former functionality.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974
Still from Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974
William Henry Fox Talbot, View of the Boulevards of Paris, 1843
Rexer asks, "Why the concern with photographs that withhold at a time when photography inundates us with pictures that disclose so much, and when surely nothing is now left unseen or unknown?" (Rexer, The Edge of Vision, p. 9).
Rexer suggests a different approach to naming or describing what we know as "abstract photography" in an attempt to arrive at a better understanding of the questions it poses. As an alternative to "abstract photography," Rexer suggests the term "novel seeing", a vision of things that have not yet been seen-investigative or undisclosed photography, rather than abstract photography. At its most extreme, it offers objects defined by their concrete, material existence, referring to nothing outside themselves."
"Viewed in this light, the long history of photography looks very different from the formal, sociological, technological, or biographical descriptions we are used to. We find that the investigative dimension of photography is its one constant, intrinsic to its modernity, an outgrowth of its positivist, scientific roots. Indeed, this photography makes us rethink our notions of positivism, because in both post-Newtonian science and photography there is a conviction that experience manifests deep unities that are not logically or immediately perspicuous. We can broaden the vision of Moholy-Nagy's 'eyes outside our bodies' from the perspectival and scientific realms to the aesthetic and spiritual. We feel throughout the history of photography a chafing at its limits, an impatience to mere visuality, and a wish for some more intimate expression of the world's relation-but one somehow made available through the eyes.
"This makes the photographer into a strange kind of artist, at least in the modernist sense-part showman, part magician, part stage-manager. The photographer does not "create" but harnesses and directs. The photograph itself is a piece of performance art, and the performer is light-its passing through and encountering things in the world."
(Rexer, The Edge of Vision, p.11-12)
This quote evokes the spirit of Jackson Pollock as well, working with paint rather than light...
Jackson Pollock, 51, directed by Hans Namuth and Paul Felkenberg. Music by Morton Feldman.
American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock is well known for creating large scale "action" paintings, in which his movements over the canvas can be seen as performative; throwing and dripping paint in rhythmic motions across the canvas. He refers to his first teacher, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) in this documentary as a character to react against. It was liberating to 'check out of reality' and express from within. Benton's work can be characterized by realistic figurative images. Scenes of everyday people in mid 20th century American life; elevated to mythic status. Benton created several large murals in public places in the Midwest, and his house and studio in Kansas City, MO, is open to the public. You can even get his wife Rita's spaghetti sauce recipe while you're there.
An American Family was a groundbreaking documentary and is considered the first "reality" series on American television. Lance Loud, the eldest son of the family, emerged as the star of the show and was the first openly gay
person to appear on television. You can watch episode excerpts here; https://www.thirteen.org/american-family/
Years later, when Lance Loud was diagnosed with AIDS and Hepatitis C, he asked An American Family filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond to make a follow-up film that would take him through sickness and death. We have Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family at the library and usually view it in class. It comes highly recommended from me as a pay-to-view. All that is online of it is the absolutely heart-wrenching last scene;
"SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW" sung by Loudon Wainright III for LANCE LOUD
Loudon is accompanied by his mother, Kate McGarrigle. From the PBS documentary "Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family." (2003)
The PowerPoint below further explores this series and its aftermath;
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Pierre Louis-Pierson, Scherzo di Follia, 1863-1866
Arguably the first performance artist and first “goth chick”,
the Countess took control of her own image to an obsessive and eventually
self-detrimental level. What if Lady
Gaga Gaga-d just a little too much? Her path to fame rose as quickly as it
eventually fell.
Virginia Oldoini: The
Countess of Castiglione, commissioned around 400 images of herself over 4 decades
by the otherwise bland in style Parisian photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. It is documented that her role in these
photographs was beyond mere model and subject, and that all images were
conceptualized and designed in detail by the Countess
herself. Her goal being to use her own
image to gain social status and political gain for Italy.
“Yet the countess’s project extended beyond social strategizing for a
male-dominated world and even the recognition that photographs had an important
role to play in the society as a whole.” (Rexer p. 69). She desired to be portrayed not just as
sitter for a photograph, but as fully-fledged artist in control of the creation of her own image.
"Both during her lifetime and after, the Countess has been variously labeled as a narcissist, a victim, a courtesan, and Italian patriot, a social climber, a fashionista, a hysteric, an adventuress, a Madonna, a recluse, a sociopath - and to add insult to injury- an unfaithful wife and a neglectful mother." -Robert Flynn Johnson, Countess de Castiglione: The Allure of Creative Self-Absorption.
The Countess lost her family, wealth, and influence
over society and eventually became the equivalent of a scandalized 19th century tabloid
subject. She lived her last 20 years alone in poverty, going out only at night dressed in black veils, but her influence stretches beyond this short
period of fame. 20th and 21st century artists Francesca Woodman,
Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee, Gillian
Wearing, all have created extensive bodies of photographs dedicated to the
performance of identity and it's relationship to the photographic gaze.
