August

There has been a lot of talk like this lately. I am not sure why on one hand, and on the other hand I have been feeling similar thoughts. Feeling thoughts, not necessarily thinking about it. Seems that something is just not right.

Too many flash shots with a gazillion heads. Too many tilted horizons. Too many too skinny girls in less than covering wardrobe. Too many pictures that look the same, over and over and over. Too many images that should not have been seen. Too much criticism without basis and not enough with.

Maybe Robert is right. Maybe it is August.

I witnessed the work of Jo Whaley and Ansel Adams in a show at MOPA this week.

I say witnessed because looked at or saw just doesn't cut it. I felt moved by the excellence. To see right in front of me, the prints of Moonrise, and its exquisite, horribly flawed negative was just moving. The skill and the incredible power of technique when paired with true vision. The work was extreme in its clarity, and relentless in the power of the imagery to connect. It did with my 12 year old. She stared and looked at the Half Dome shots and the Black Sun and so many of the images I literally grew up with.

I used to want to make images like that. I still do, I think.

But for too many reasons, I don't.

August:

"I think we are at the other end of the telescope now, looking back at photography and what it did and meant to us. I say this because almost all of the work I see now is essentially nostalgic, nostalgic of a time or feeling or place or process. Recently Todd Papageorge published “Passing through Eden”, a collection of images from his years wandering Central Park. The work is completely modern in conception, the unrelenting gaze of the camera making what the camera makes, photographs, but the publishing of it is essentially nostalgic. I have read that TP urges his students at Yale to contemplate working in this genre, the lyrical documentarian, camera in hand, and he says he gets no takers. I think that for photography, quote-unquote, this period in the late 60’s early 70’s was the ultimate period, the point at which art photography reached its apogee to borrow a space term. It is hard to get any better than the unblinking, unrelenting, rigourous exactitude of the black and white or colour images of Robert Adams, Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, Eggleston, etc."

Jo Whaley's work was no less powerful, although way more narrow in scope. She took the simplest form of documentary imagery to a level of art. With craft and vision and a concept that presented something simple in a way that makes it fresh... and so accessible.