Four Icons in one Image. Amazing!

I think this project is going to be a great success. I've been very careful to make this authentic and real and ethical in a basic human way.  It's called Iconic Beach Portraits and I think it's a winner!

The trouble is the editing is a killer. Just after I shot this picture, a man ran into the frame on the horizon. I like the one above for it's understated quality, but maybe the one below is the ONE. I'm not sure! I simply don't know.

I've got lots of these images from solid, hard work on the beaches of the world. Sometimes the images are great but the light's just not quite right as in the image below. I suppose I could do something with it in post-production, but that's not really the way I roll!

I know I'm the first to do this, but I'm sure people will copy my great idea. If any of my readers are working on similar projects, I'd love to see them, share them on Facebook or somewhere, though I'm sure they won't be as good as mine!

The eyelid drooping, life-denying, thought ending power of "Don't Smile!"

It's easy to blame the viewer for not getting something.

We can blame the viewer for not getting a book by saying they didn't read it correctly or, in a photobook, look at the pictures properly. We can tell people what they did wrong at an exhibition and highlight their critical inferiority. We can even tell people that they are being stupid when they don't do what you want them to do on a website, when they click in the wrong places, or don't stay there long enough to get the message we want them to get.

We can do that and pretend it's the fault of the viewer they don't get it. We can stay in denial about our failure to communicate effectively because it will never be proven otherwise. It's not our fault for being unengaging or boring or failing to understand the audience. It's always somebody else's fault for being too stupid and dull and unaware.

The alternative is to make sure that people do read your book, or see your exhibition, or visit your website in the way you want them to by engaging them, by being interesting, by understanding that the point of a work is to be engaged with the world, and the audience and realise that it takes work to make that happen.

That's what Larry Sultan does in Pictures from Home, just republished in new and perfected form by Mack. It is (as was the first edition) quite brilliant.

First of all, it's a book about something. It's about Irving Sultan, Larry's father. It's about lots of other things too, but Larry Sultan wanted it to be interesting, wanted it to hook the viewer in, so he made a choice. And that choice was for Irving is the focus of the narrative.

Second it's got words and pictures. The pictures matter and so do the words. They really matter, they're the hook, they're what suck you in and take you into a world that goes far beyond Irving, Larry, and Larry's mother, Jean. This is not a text that is stuck at the back of the book because nobody's going to read it. It's right there in your face and it's brilliant.

Third of all, it's also about itself. It's about power, performance, the family album, consent, negotiation, and the archaeology of the photographic image, That's central to what makes the book great, but it comes after the fact. Because first and foremost it's about Larry Sultan's family. That's important.

When I opened the book I read it cover to cover (again), in one sitting. It tells the story of Irving Sultan, of his childhood in a Jewish orphanage, of meeting Jean, of their marriage and of their eventual move west from Brooklyn to California.

It's Irving's personal story, a  story of making friends and influencing people, of how he fought the odds, and made a success of himself, of how he climbed the promotion ladder at the Schick Razor Company and lived the American dream. Until he got fired and the dream faded.

So it's a history of being a salesman for corporate America.It's also a social history of America, it's the art of persuasion of the 1950s, it's the hedonism of the 1960s, it's the transformation of California into a suburban overflow, it's a history of home, consumption and property and becoming rich.

Pictures from Home is also about Jean. It's about the challenges of being married to Irving, growing old, and how the job never ends, how Irving grows a dicondra lawn because 'it's the most difficult and demanding lawn to grow'. Once a salesman always a salesman, the world becomes his target. So it's a book about that; the isolation of living in the non-corporate world.

The pictures are a mixture of formats and genres; family album images are mixed with home movie film stills which are mixed with corporate images from Irving's time at the Schick Razor Company, all topped off with Sultan's glorious staged portraits of his parents in and around their homes.

And it's about how we make pictures and the expectations we have of them and the uses we  make of them. One of my favourite quotes is this one from Irving to his son.


'I don't know what you're doing. You seem to be just as confused as I am I mean, you pussyfoot around; half of the time the tape recorder doesn't work and you want me to repeat conversations that occurred spontaneously, and on the other hand you take the smae picture over and over again and you're still not happy with the results. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't know what you're after. What's the big deal?'

Or

'All I know is that when you photograph me I feel everything leave me. The blood drains from my face, my eyelids droop, my thoughts disappear. I can feel my facial muscles go limp. All you have to do is give me that one cue, "Don't Smile," and zap. Nothing. That's what you get.'

And Larry's response: 'No. What I get is an image of you that you don't like. Doesn't it come down to vanity and power? A question of how you look and who determines that, who's in control of the image.'

So it's about power and photography, and control of the image. Larry Sultan manages both to question both the genres of more functional photography found in Pictures from Home - the corporate, the family album, the home movie still - and the devices that he uses (both photographic and textual) to tell the lives of Larry and Jean. But despite all this question of images and the power structures they are part of, the stratas of visual narrative if you like, there is still a heart to the book. It is not just about questioning.  Because ultimately the control of images is secondary to how we tell a story. Because Pictures from Home is about story telling - using different voices, different photographic genres that link to different stratas of history that have emotional substance to them. And that emotional substance is the truth factor in the book.

Sultan isn't just letting his pictures, magnificent though they are, just sit there on the page. He is weaving familial relationships, grievances, neuroses and mythologies into the mix. It is not an easy path to take, but he takes it perfectly.

As for the new Mack edition, it is wonderful. The font and the layout are much cleaner, the pictures given more room to breathe, there is a sense of freshness to it that is compounded by the type being slightly more spread out, and genuinely easier to read (while staying true to the original - see the comparison spreads above). The big difference is the paper. The new Pictures from Home feels wonderful. It's a treat to touch, a treat to read, a treat to see. It's simply wonderful.

Buy Pictures from Home here.

Storybook Homes and Cinderella Houses

All you can lose is your heart is KayLynn Deveney's follow-up to the wonderful Private Life of Albert Hastings.

It's a very different book. Where the Albert Hastings book was a touching and very gentle meditation on the rhythms of old age, All you can lose is your heart is a series of images of storybook houses in New Mexico.

Storybook houses were a particular kind of house that were built in the late 1950s in Albuquerque and other areas of New Mexico and Southern California. Imagine Hansel and Gretel houses, designed for the wife, and built in the desert and you're getting there.

The pictures of the homes are quite close, and bring out key design details such as rooftops, eaves and windows. Sometimes you see the original wooden shingles (these are not made anymore due to fire laws), sometimes you see the accompanying yard, the present impinging on the idealised past.

As well as images of houses, there are also fascinating texts including an interview with a local journalist Hank Stuever and Jan Valjean Vandruff, a house designer from the 1950s.

Vandruff (who designed and built a specific kind of storybook houses - 'Cinderella' homes  - in the mid-1950s) tells Deveney that '...every home I ever designed was designed with the people in mind who would live there, but especially the wife/mother. She must have a constant free-flow of sight and communication with her husband and children; hence, the openness of the kitchen to the living room or family room, usually through a wide open window over the kitchen sink.'

In his essay, Hank Stuever goes into social history and details the drift west as homebuyers are 'lured to the business of the atomic age' - he gives a fast-forward history of the area from the ancient people, to '...the Spanish conquistadores, lost and loony... Then come the mission churces and priests, the suffering of the pueblo natives, the usurpings and the revolts,' a history that extends way before the settlement of the east by mad European adventurers and zealots. It's a history that extends to the nuclear age, duck and cover drills, and then we're into Walter White and Breaking Bad.

And there in the middle of it all, in the golden rise of individualism and consumption, the 1950s are the storybook houses. Stuever sees these homes as 'a balm against the stark and constant expanse of New Mexico...', so there is a sense of geography in how and why these homes were built. There is a sense of control in the planning that connects to the landscape, in the 'wife-centered' design that corresponds to all those texts on the panopticon, surveillance and power and control.

It also ties in to othe projects, most famously those of Robert Adams, which takes a more topographical view, and Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan which takes a more personal view.

The story of this fairytale architecture is fascinating, but it feels like there is more that could be done here, that the planning, the design and the social history of these houses could be integrated into a grander whole, that homes are designed for a reason in places for a reason, and that is a story that still needs to be told.

Faces, Father Ted and Krass Clement

picture by Larry Sultan

I chose a couple of favourite books for Paper Journal yesterday. One was Pictures from Home, the Larry Sultan epic that combines text and images to tell a complex story. It's a book that has fantastic photographs but uses the text to tell a far greater tale than images alone would convey. This is part of what I wrote.
,
The text comes via Sultan, his mother and his father so there are three voices; they’re not the same voice. They argue and quibble and dispute over who and what this family is. Words are had about fidelity, career, photography and love, all against a background of images that are repeatedly brought into question. Where do these pictures come from, why do we make them, what does it mean – this family, this photography, this love?

The other was Krass Clement's Drum. This doesn't have words but it does have fantastic pictures. The face tells the story, the face of one man. This is from the post.

picture by Krass Clement

This man sits alone, his eyes cast into the middle distance; to the floor, the ceiling, to anywhere they won’t be met. His back turns this way and that, always away and he stares rheumy-eyed into places where his gaze won’t be found. It’s the most cinematic of books and it has a leading man who is a study of loneliness. It’s heartbreaking.

So two books where Sultan and Clement are telling stories where people, the face and different forms of narrative structure power the viewer through their books. They are both single-minded in what they do and whenever anyone looks at the pictures in these books, they cannot take their eyes off them.

They are superb pictures. And Sultan and Clement knew it when they made them. They were/are the real deal. They know what works and they don't pfaff about with meaningless fluff. Their pictures get straight to the heart of things.

That's not always the case with photobooks. You can hear somebody tell stories about the people and places in their photographs and then show their pictures and there's nothing there. Somehow the story (which is so central to the talking about the photographs) gets lost in the showing. As though somehow including some text or other context will detract from the power of the pictures... "I let my pictures do the talking" must be one of the most heartbreaking sentences every heard. Not because this isn't possible, but because most of the time it should be "I let my pictures do the mumbling." I'm a bit of a mumbler so I know exactly where I'm coming from with this one.

But sometimes the power's not in the pictures. It's in the story that's the thing, the text and the captions and the overall yarn. That might not be the case with Krass Clement but it is with Larry Sultan, Sultan has his amazing large format photographs in pictures from home but it's the words of his mother and father, it's the mix of images and the welding of them into a geographical, social and family history that makes it so great.

Anyway, by sheer coincidence, just as the Paper Journal piece came out, this popped up via Petapixel. It was a story about an  Eyetracking device that shows what people look at in pictures.

The general idea is that professional photographers take better pictures than amateurs. These are some of the findings.

— People look first at faces. (This echoes other eyetracking studies I have directed for The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.) And they are interested in the relationships between people in the frame, often looking back and forth, between faces and interactions.

— The importance of “storytelling” to photography was mentioned by nearly every subject in the exit interviews.


 “A photo needs to tell me a story, versus just capturing a scene,” said a 44-year-old female participant.

“If (a photo) draws you in, it’s connected to a story and it makes you want to learn more, that’s important,” said a 41-year-old male participant.


So it's basic stuff and the key idea here is that if you hire a proper photographer, more people will look at your magazine, your brochure, your website, the photographs will hook viewers into the story, the product, the sale. So the aim is very much at selling photojournalism and commercial photography.

I know that when we talk about high-end photography, about prints, exhibitions and books, we're supposed to pretend that somehow our aesthetic capabilities rise way above this level.

But I wonder. The Larry Sultan and Krass Clement books hit all those spots; the people, the faces, the stories. And they hit them square on without flinching.

Drum works so well because of the face of that lonely man (is he lonely? I don't know, he might not be in real life, but he is in the pages of Drum). Clement is picking a face on which there is a life written, a face that is going to pierce through our cynical eyes. It's a rare skill that ability both to read faces and read how they are going to touch the viewer because these faces are not random, they are not just any old faces, they are faces that have been cast, that are one in a hundred or one in a thousand. There aren't that many of them. And reading these faces, finding these faces, is a skill that the real greats of art and photography have. It's the reason why we remember an Arbus or an Avedon or a Sander or a Klein.

That ability to read faces and understand how they work might be a bit more sophisticated than what the Eyetracking Device records, but it is still something quite hard-wired and basic. I wonder if sometimes we try to look away from the absolutely bleeding obvious and try to complicate things through wilful indirection and vagueness.

Or pretension. Because yesterday Federica Chiocchetti's fine interview with Sean O'Hagan was up on the brand spanking new 1000 Words website, where he repeated Nan Goldin's great quote.


“Fucking postmodern and gender theory. I mean, who gives a shit? People made all that crap up to get jobs in universities.” I think it kills the work for people who are not from that academic background. That kind of writing is exclusive by its nature. It often makes things less clear.

I know that it's brutal and that we should embrace all ideas and even give Judith Butler a go or two before losing the will to live, but at the same time, yes exactly. We shouldn't shut anything out, but things that 'makes things less clear', or things that have an excellent and complex point to make but take 500 words and the densest of prose to make to make that point. In the visual arts. Which is full of visual people. Isn't it sometimes designed just to intimidate and scare. And doesn't it still intimidate and scare.

And valuing all that theory above more interesting, entertaining and accessible ideas that attach to art, TV, film and literature - the powerhouses of creativity, education and information exchange, which is where we want to be? Is that the hierarchy we should have? In a visual art where people go into the visual for a reason.

I'm not saying that we should value the complete series of Father Ted above the works of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, but... oh no, wait a minute. I am saying that. Oh dear, there's no way out. Better end it here.

Left Brain = Bullshit Producer, Right Brain = Bullshit Detector

"Many series on the environment now come with screeds of essentially feeble obfuscatory prose, claiming relevance where the pictures themselves have little," writes  Francis Hodgson in the end of the decade BJP,
echoing numerous critics who believe that what artists say about their pictures might be a whole lot less than it seems



But if that's the case, how come people don't call bullshit on it more often. There are a few exceptions such as this and this, but most of the time we show our respect by not calling bullshit on each other or ourselves. 


Why do we do this. Possibly it is because we are polite, possibly because there is nothing more gratuitiously offensive than casting aspersions on writers, photographers or artists when they really aren't deserving of our insults and contempt.


Another possibility is we have been so blinded by the repetitious droning of a particular form of meta-language that we can't understand what it means anymore. Everyone's doing it so it must be right and we don't want to be do negative - we Smile or Die.



I think this acceptance of obtuse verbal statements (and the obtuse work that it refers to) is related to what Mary Midgley notes in her review of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist in The Guardian. She writes:

"McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path."

 Anyway, on that note, my New Year Resolution is to avoid this 'obfuscatory prose'. Not many people can do this, especially where photography is concerned. There was one man who could do it though. He was called Larry Sultan and he created Pictures From Home, a book where words complemented pictures, where the left and the right sides of the brain worked together, where pictures had multiple meanings and text was emotional, geographic, economic and sociological all at the same time. No obfuscatory prose guaranteed.

 RIP Larry.

 

How not to Photograph: Oh, and also - Reminiscing

picture: Colin Pantall - New Year's Day, 1956
Larkhall Map
Campsite Map

Larry Sultan's Pictures from Home is a wondrous mix of snapshots from the family album and stills from old home movies and Sultan's own portraits of his mum and dad. Larry Sultan gets away with using all these images because he's using them for a reason - to connect the social, economic and personal histories apparent in his family's move to California. Everything looks great in Pictures From Home, especially Sultan's large format portraits of his parents. These could stand alone and Pictures From Home would still be a great book. They are lovely and full of insight and the snapshots fade into the background to create a foundation for the Sultan family's varied perspectives.

For the rest of us, it's the other way round. We have our portraits and pictures of contemporary life and then stumble upon a snapshot from an old family album. And snapshots from old family albums have a habit of looking good because they are more than snapshots: people took more time making them than they do now, people wore better clothes than they do now, people didn't necessarily know what was expected of them in front of the camera and if they did, they performed their task with more dignity, conviction and self-belief than they do now.

It's old, it's black and white if possible, it's connected to whatever you are doing in a vague way, because everything is connected really isn't it and a bit of creative captioning and a creative artist's statement can work miracles for sneaking an outsider into your project? Just mumble something about archives, family albums, vernacular and in it goes. Then say it out loud, and again, and louder and soon you'll believe the transformative powers of your own alchemy. Ooh, and there's another one, and another one, and another one. The problem is if all the informing from the past overwhelms the informing from the present, if we end up looking too much at the pictures of our parents and grandparents' lives instead of our own, then the snaps from the olden days become decorative addenda that overwhelm the tedium of our own pictures.

We can rationalise the importance of the pictures and their inclusion in our book/project/series/whatever, but deep down we know the only reason we are including them is because they are more interesting and evocative than the work we produce ourselves.

Reminiscing with the odd found photograph is great, reminiscing with too many turns the project into some kind of weird scrapbook - great if we're making a scrapbook, not so great if we're not unless you approach the thing with the brashness, chaos and rigour of Peter Beard or Ed Templeton for example.

The real problem comes when our solipsism becomes so great that we don't just include the pictures from our past, we include the debris of our lives, the stuff we find at the bottom of pockets, bags and in small piles gathered by the side of our desks. Old receipts, bus tickets, notes and doodles that we once thought was so insignificant that we couldn't even be bothered to throw it away.

Sometimes these insignificances can add up to more ( as in Keith Arnatt's Notes From My Wife), but most of the time we are trying to flesh out a project with something banal and humdrum, something that doesn't illuminate anything except the tedium of our lives both past and present.

The only exception to this rule is maps. They tell us where things are, what happened where and if they're drawn by hand, it's even better. Maps are always good.

Photography, book covers and Captain Beefheart

In November, Aida Edemariam wrote this story on the dumbing down of book covers for marketing purposes, so reducing the integrity of the book and the author

The idea for the article came from a talk given by Margaret Drabble. Drabble said that publishers "...have not asked me to dumb down ... but I have a feeling there's a problem. I write literary novels but I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre ... whether in literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction."

The story led to a book redesign competition run by Bookninja. Never one to miss a trick, the Guardian had their own competition, Guardian Book Cover Redesign Competition. The results of both competitions are shown here ( I love Annie Proulx - is that quote on the cowboy book for real?).





















The dumbing down works both ways though, and photographs are also dumbed down by being on the cover of books. This Larry Sultan image ( from Covering Photography, a site that shows book covers featuring famous photographs - via Buffet) on the cover of Douglas Coupland's All Families are Psychotic, is a case in point.

Perhaps overexposure or trying to make everything showable, or sellable or affable or conceptually viable compromises photography in a more absolute manner than we imagine - maybe we should all take Mark Tucker's advice and make more Fuck You work "...where you put it all on the line and say "This is who I am.""

Anyway, I think the no-money-in-the-art/photography/magazine-world will help people do this and not focus on the money, the exposure or the show to the exclusivity of all else, returning it to the more poetic place where it truly belongs. It might also help us be more critical of both our own work and the work we see. My friend Tadhg ( who has recently become a father and so has more pressing priorities than the latest typographical survey of family, factory or food) wrote to me yesterday to say, "When you see so much photography you start to look at the more obscure work, which may actually be rubbish, like a musician who starts getting into Can or Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica."

It's supposed to be the other way round, but Tadhg's idea is the more you see, the less discerning you become - and I can appreciate that. Which begs another question, what is the photographic equivalent of Captain's Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica?

What can we learn from these pictures?

pcture: Larry Sultan


A few months ago, somebody said to me "What can we learn from these pictures?"

It's a bewildering question that presupposes so much, in particular that the purpose of photography is education learning.

But it's not. Photography doesn't teach us anything. It can show us things, it can make us revel in the beauty and the horror of it all, it can create emotional links between what we see and the lives we lead, the world around us, but why should we
expect it to teach us something. Even photography that comes in a book, with words, like Larry Sultan's Pictures From Home, doesn't teach us anything. But it does make us feel, it ties in ideas of land and home and family and creates a historical backdrop against which we can conjure up our own version of the truth.

Martin Parr once said that "All photography is propaganda" and he's absolutely right once you flip that round so that it becomes "All photography is true". But it's a truth that is visceral, emotional, non-rational and connects to a socialised visual reading, the same kind of reading that made Pieter Hugo say that "If you really want to know about anything - a war, a place, a person - you go read a book, right? You don't look at a photograph."

So if you want to learn the nitty-gritty of post-war migration to California, the who, where, when and why, go search the history section of your local library or do the simple thing and google it.

But that won't tell you about the cultural history of the migration, about the home, work and family and the disappointments of success or even what success really is. Larry Sultan's book won't tell you about that either, but it will lead you into places where you can feel the history in a way that words and statistics never can.

And it will do that because a photograph or a painting can touch us in places words can never reach. Pieter Hugo's hyena pictures, for example, don't teach me anything apart from a little footnote that guys in Nigeria make money with hyenas - I didn't know that before he came along. But the images have a level of uncertainty, a power and an elemental sense of rawness that combines with the post-apocalyptic nature of developing urban environments that carries them way beyond the bare socio-economic bones of how these people lead their lives.

And that is the way with all photography. It doesn't teach us anything, most of the time what it shows is blindingly obvious - teenage girls worry about their bodies, industrial structures are both ugly and beautiful, alcoholic parents create domestic mayhem and so on.

The work doesn't teach us anything, but why should it. It takes us to places we might normally not go and interweaves unconscious elements in ways that are far richer than any linear written narrative can do.