Who knew we’d be flexing our celebrity connoisseurship skills? Meaning, if I can’t find the exact image, but close, I think hmm, is that in the style of? Is that their typical compositional style? Is that how they use focus, color, photoshop? My poor work colleagues and students these past weeks….I’ve even learned about the work of Alyssa Milano, Rosie O’Donnell, celebrity work for Playboy, and more. One last go, as I’ve found others “in the style of” it for V (although her skills are usually be better that this example). Will it ever end?
And last but not least, check out this image and note the keywords listed as search terms. I think I fit the first 20 of them. Poor little kid. I should take a picture of myself. I could make some money.
No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. - Robert Adams, "Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques," May 1995, page: 37
From the beginning, Barbara was a striking presence: a Rubenesque urchin, sad and sweet and a little sly, who responded to Modica's rapt attention like a flower that turns toward the sun. - Village Voice
Jessie Mann, daughter of Sally Mann, recently collaborated with the photographer Len Prince in a fascinating endeavour. (She is the one with the pearls in this shot and is now 26 years old.) In a recent New Yorker, she offered some interesting insights on the photographer-subject dynamic and her effort to invert the equation:
Jessie said, of the early portraits [by her mother], “It’s very difficult to say exactly who makes the pictures”; she sees her alliance with Prince as an extension of her work with her mother, which has occasionally vexed her but has always made her proud. “People have pointed out the obvious Freudian interpretation,” she said. “And it’s true that there is this sort of surface layer to doing these photos with Len—a power struggle, to reassert my identity. But I’m a Jungian girl myself. I’m interested in the significance of being a character in the story of art."
In the film, when Harold "realizes" that he is a subject, he takes agency and "fights" back by doing absolutely nothing one day in an attempt to stall the plot and a variety of other hijinks. On Jessie's artist website she elaborates on her own quest:
My up and coming photography project with Len Prince is an examination of both the characters and the archetypes of our time and as well as those of different historical periods. It honors, as active agent the muses and numerous subjects that have given themselves over to this fictional realm of human consciousness with both extreme self-consciousness and postmodern awareness, but also, in many cases, out of some undeveloped love of the camera or desire to be known or immortalized. It examines the quest of the self-fictionalizers and the magic of those who are called 'good in front of a camera'.
I share below one image from the series, but many more can be found at Danziger Projects that showed "Self-Possessed" just this past fall. In most of the photographs, Jessie visibly holds the shutter release--sometimes assertively, sometimes limply, instead of the photographer--enacting what she has described as "making art by being in art." I ought to end here my faithful readers, as I wouldn't want to continue to influence your opinion and affect the outcome? Hmm, you say you are getting sleepy now...?
Len Prince (and Jessie Mann), From Danziger Projects
In a bad photograph, a lot of the time, the frame isn't altogether understood -- there are big areas of unexplained chemicals. It's especially difficult as the picture gets bigger. If it's small, a little piece of black can look like a dark place, right? But as it gets bigger, eventually it just turns into a black shape. And you look at the surface of the picture and it reminds you of the chemical factories on Lake Erie, creating pollution problems by making synthetic materials out of soybeans and petroleum derivatives. And you don't want that. The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It's not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You're not supposed to look at the thing, you're supposed to look through it. It's a window. And everything behind it has got to be organized as a space full of stuff, even if it's only air.
Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé -- I think this is a true story -- he says, "You know, I've got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good." Mallarmé says, "Of course, you don't make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words." Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren't so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they're done. ....
- JS
