Keeling process book by Carson Keeling

The Leading Grid Process Book Carson Keeling

Using a leading grid you will be designing features articles on a photographer ____. The articles would be published in a magazine about photography. Article 1: featured photographer, Article 2: historical photographer, Article 3: Essay. You will determin the order of the magazine once you have designed it.

Project Description

Typographic grids control the visual organization of the page space by supplying a particular kind of structure developed for typographic organization. This structure consists of margins, alleys, grid fields, and intersection points. Grids allow the designer to codify groups of typographic information. This process of codification allows the viewer to proceed through a complex page environment, tracking information in a seamless, linear manner. A good grid forces order onto the layout and so acts as an orienting device enabling the reader to knows where to look for information and to understand its relative importance. Just as importantly the grid works on an aesthetic level. The readers might not consciously be aware of it, but subliminally they pick up on the fact that everything is well ordered and in its place. If a picture juts fractionally into the column next to it something seems to be slightly amiss, but if the lines of text align neatly across the columns on a page some fundamental and reassuring logic seems to be at work. Your design should be typographically beautiful, simple without being simplistic, have a clear hierarchy, an attention to detail. It needs to be interesting, inviting, dynamic. Only the finest typography will be accepted. There are typographic standards we will cover in class lectures and readings and they will need to be practiced: column width, text size, word spacing, hyphenation... Traditionally we read right to left, top to bottom. Elements that look alike are associated â&#x20AC;&#x201C; same font, same point size, same leading and line length will visually link information into groups. There are several goals for this project: Learning InDesign, understanding and constructing a leading grid, developing clear hierarchies, learning to use typographic rules consistently, focusing attention to typographic details, and of course creating dynamic compositions. Part one of this project will also expose you to some of the leading photographers working in art, fashion, and photojournalism today. Part two will focus on historic figures in the history of photography. And in part three you will layout a classic essay (excerpt) on photo theory by cultural critic Susan Sontag.

Alec Soth

You tend not to give a lot of direction, you tend to find your subjects as they are, yeah? Or do you give direction? I’m by no means a purist in this way, so I…the way I usually describe it is being like, when you take a family portrait and like “okay, let’s go over here by the tree and then Johnny take off your hat,” you know? It’s like…I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up. I’m not, like, telling people to dance or whatever, but there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches I take towards that and I feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something. Do you find your personal work more liberating than your editorial work because of that? It’s just a different beast and Songbook is a collection of these things, but you know, for example: The bulk of the work was made with this thing, the LBM Dispatch. And the Dispatch was great because it was like doing editorial work but without a boss. So yeah, it was definitely more liberating, for sure.

And how did I do it? Just like everybody else, slogging away, trying to find time. I mean the big revelation for me was that I needed to travel, I didn’t know I needed to travel, but I later learned that I thrive on that and I was a bit…my development was stymied because I was staying close to home. What was it that opened up for you when you started to travel? Primarily, I got a grant that enabled me to do that, and it’s an important thing, and I haven’t really talked about arts funding but it’s a significant element. Minnesota has really great arts funding and that seed money just did so much for me and I’m forever grateful to those people, the Knight Foundation, they gave me that first big grant to go out and make work. Because it’s really hard to do it. In retrospect, I could’ve been less conservative and just managed to do it anyway, but I wasn’t thinking that way at the time. Was it…easy to adjust to that kind of change, from slogging away to all of the sudden being validated artistically? That was really surprising, I was a person who always had to have a job, I was just raised that way or whatever, so the idea of leaving my job, I found really stressful. Exciting, of course, but, like, “can I sustain this?” And I didn’t have a graduate degree, so it’s not like I could just dive into teaching, it was a bit of a gamble, at that point. And that’s actually why I started doing editorial work, it was like a back-up, and yeah, it was nerve-wracking, but really great. But it wasn’t like I suddenly walked into a candy store, that was the good thing about being a bit older, too, I had some maturity, and sort of knew that in order to sustain this I’d have to be responsible and not go off the deep end.

Do you…think differently when you’re using more flexible equipment, do you notice your thought process changing from 8×10 to digital? Yeah, I mean, so much has changed. It’s hard to analyze what’s related to technology and what’s related to me. Because I’m a different photographer than I was 10 years ago. A different person and it’s different equipment. I mean, the funny thing is that I made work that bears quite a resemblance to this (Songbook) before Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that got published called Looking for Love and so I don’t know, it’s hard to analyze these things, because it’s a mish-mash of different changes. I read some other interviews you’ve done and one of the biggest things that jumped out at me is that you’ve been making work since graduating school, but it wasn’t until you were thirty-five that you had the Whitney Biennial and got discovered. Right.

So Songbook is different because it’s a collection of work you’ve been doing over the years (rather than a specific project made to be published as a single project), what made you decide to put it into a book? So about halfway through the project…first of all, Songbook came together from a lot of different but related threads, I’d been collaborating with Magnum photographers on one project, of course I’d been working with Brad (Zellar) on Dispatch stuff, and I’d been intentionally doing editorial work that kind of fit along the same lines, so it was about mid-way through the process, I saw how this was taking shape and I knew that a book would come out of the Dispatch work with Brad, eventually. And there was some talk of timing them simultaneously, but there was no way to do it. That’ll happen later, in the future. But I wanted this place for the pictures that was separated from the text and yeah, I knew it halfway through, it was emerging, it wasn’t called Songbook in the beginning, but I knew the themes and the feeling that I wanted and then it just took its course.

How did you keep the fire burning for those years where you were making work but not a success, per se? Like anybody…the people who work at my studio, they’re all photographers, and they all have to come to work for me and then they have to figure out, in their spare time, how to do it and I think that phase is really important, because it’s where most people fall away and maybe they’re doing it for other reasons or it’s too much work or whatever it is, it’s a long slog to find your voice and also to just endure, there’s an element of endurance to the thing that kind of separates you out, after a time.

I’ve heard you talk about narrative…do you feel you’ve gotten better at telling a narrative through your photos? Heh…no. Always my struggle with photography is with narrative…you know what I’ve gotten good at…this is like bubbling up for the first time, it’s like I’ve gotten good at finding an outlet for narrative that’s sort of outside of the work. Like… because I know that inherently photography isn’t very good at narrative but I long for narrative, so I’ve been able to incorporate narrative but outside of the project a little bit. With the

Interview by Lou Noble early projects I would do it with these footnotes, with Broken Manual there were these filmmakers following me around, with Songbook it’s the Dispatch. And I’ve been able to have the narrative but elsewhere. As a supplemental. As a supplemental! Exactly. Which is good, because it satisfies the need that I have for it, but without making truly narrative work. And I’m still interested in narrative, I’m doing something right now, just a little tiny project that’s incredibly narrative and will be presented in front of an audience, but I like doing those things, but in the end, the most significant work that I do is fundamentally non-narrative. Mm…then how would you describe it, if not narrative? You know, lyrical, whatever. I make this analogy a lot, between poetry and fiction, it’s more like poetry. There’s elements of narrative in it, and it’s suggestive of a story, but it’s not… there’s no plot. And I’ve always been envious of that, because it’s so powerful to have that. But photography’s just not that great at it. Are there any photographers who you think are good at it? Or do you think inherently photography will always run up against that wall? There are books, I think that Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home is the quintessential narrative photography book, it’s just perfect to me, so I think there are great achievements along those lines, and again it’s another spectrum thing, just like poetry…there’s narrative-ish poetry, and then there’s totally fragmentary experimental poetry and there are times when I want to be more one or the other, and I think there are photographers that are succeeding more one way than the other but total storytelling in the way that you put on a movie where there’s a plot and a resolution, that thing just doesn’t really happen in the same way with photography. When you’re putting the book together…when you’re putting any of your books together, are you conscious of a rhythmic flow that you’re trying to achieve from photo to photo? Yeah, exactly, and that’s where the poetry analogy really works, it’s about rhythm and meter and flow and especially beginnings and endings are important. And then finding some rhythm in between and there can be a suggestion of narrative I think, but I’ve never been able to sequence pictures like “this happened, then that happened and that happened,” you know, although, I kind of am doing it in this live slideshow format I’ve been working with, which is kind of something different. That kind of reminds me of La Jetee, which does tell a narrative through a series of images, but there’s also narration, it doesn’t work on its own. It’s true. It’s an interesting phenomenon, because I can get frustrated in films when they lack that narrative pulse and that was the interesting thing working with those filmmakers is that they were jealous of me because I was free of all that. And I was jealous of them because they had the power of it. Have you always had that pull towards narrative? Is there a reason you didn’t go into a field that allowed you to tell narratives? Interesting…I don’t think I had a natural inclination to it, like; I’m not a storyteller. I’m not sitting around the table telling family stories, I don’t come from storytelling people…

Hahahahhaha …Hahaha, so I don’t think necessarily, I just think just in the culture at large, it is just the most powerful thing there is and so I’m just aware of its power, I choose not to become a filmmaker and go that route in part because it does seem burdensome to have to do that and to sort of get character from point A to point B just seems tedious to have to do it, and then you have to work with like 20 different people to do it and figure it out and, yeah, I like the act of being a photographer. But I’m sure poets are really jealous, “wow, 500,000 people read that novel and are moved to tears by it, and there are, like, 30 people that read my poetry book, even though I’m a famous poet, and they’re all other poets.” so I think it’s a similar sort of frustration. Right! How did you foresee your career, is this how you saw things going? Hehehehe…no. I came from the art side of things, totally, so I wanted to be an artist. But I also interned in New York…it just seemed impossible to be a successful artist, so I thought I would pursue it as seriously as I could, and maybe someday something would happen, but I didn’t realistically think I would make a living at it. I fantasized about it, and the context in which I fantasized about it would be that sort of museums and shows and stuff like that, but not Magnum photos, not working as a photographer, lecturing, and all that kind of stuff. Feel free to lie if you really want to, we have no problem with that! Heh, no, I mean, it would sound great and noble, but I was frustrated and I was unhappy with the work that I was doing, because it was low paid in terms of actual day to day life and frustrated that it’s not getting out there and frustrated that I hadn’t really found my voice, all that kind of stuff. And I was, every year I was like, “should I go to graduate school or not go to graduate school?” Those questions, like everybody else, so it was fairly typical in a lot of ways. But what happened, real life started kicking in and just, family issues or whatever, and I could feel myself getting too old to go to graduate school, if I’m gonna have kids, the responsibilities were piling up and then I got lucky! Hahahaha! Hahahaha! Do you still find the same kind of joy in the process as you did then? I find real joy in the process, it’s not the same kind of joy, I mean I think about that first trip, and that was complete joy, a real innocent joy, but then also I think about the work I did before that, I was really frustrated. And I find moments of great joy, but it’s definitely different now, because there’s an economy that surrounds it. All the people that are dependent on the work, my family, my employees and whatnot, so it’s different, but I still find great joy in it. “Do you find joy in the process more, or the result? Oh the process, yeah, the result is pleasurable, but so fleeting, yeah, it’s the process. Yeah…so, you’re subjects are varied, your range has expanded, are you conscious of what you’re looking for in a subject when you go out? Is that something you come up with ahead of time with a project, or sometimes you just go out? Mmmmm, I usually don’t just go out go out, I need some quality to go for, but I like being surprised, but that was the great thing about The Dispatch, it sort of set up a structure which enabled us to be surprised over and over again. So we were sort of looking for something but were surprised by all sorts of other things and that’s really what

photography’s great about doing, surprising you with the reality of the world out there. Are you gonna continue the Dispatch? No, it ran its course, for lots of reasons, partly because of the economics of things, it started in this sort of DIY way and just got bigger and bigger and required lots of fundraising and all this kind of stuff and by the end it was too big and needy. And that’s kind of a repeating pattern I have, too, with Little Brown Mushroom and other things, where if I feel like it’s becoming too much of a business then I need to put a stake in it. Why do you think that is? There’s a danger of losing the creative impulse, so that you’re serving the economy of it, rather than the art of it. So you’re very conscious about trying to keep the joy in your work. Oh yeah, definitely, I mean, that’s a big part of how I’ve set up my life, is to preserve what’s good about creative work and part of the thing about doing other work is so that I can preserve some of that creativity. So by teaching or lecturing or photo jobs, it’s like, how I keep that other thing pristine. Right…how do you feel about teaching, these days? Because I saw in an interview from several years ago where there seemed to be kind of an uncomfortability about the idea of teaching versus say, mentoring. It’s something I’ve really been working towards, finding my footing in that world. I did this summer camp thing in our studio, it had the elements of a workshop, and it was super-fantastic and life-changing. For you? For me, yeah. It was all about this slideshow idea that I’ve had, this live storytelling, it was a way to explore that, it was free, which is a really important part of it, and I just thought, wow, there’s tons of energy there, so I took that idea, and with Brad Zeller we taught a class at the university of Wisconsin and it went…okay, but it was within a university context and, suddenly, something was lost in that process. So I realized that was a misstep. So now I’m in the process of…I got this grant, we have to find this matching money, but we get to work with teenagers and it’s taking that same idea again, but trying to keep control of it, do it out of my studio, have it be free for the participants, but definitely outside of the bureaucratic structure of a university. Are you able to put your finger on what was lost when you were in that university structure? Bureaucracy just sort of sucked the life out of the creative impulse. It’s like anything else, I don’t really do public art, I did one sort of thing, and it’s like, committees of people with all their opinions and in the case of university, I think there’s tons of great stuff that happens, but I find the, “what’s my grade gonna be?” that whole…all those issues, they’re tedious to me, and it just gets in the way of what I want to do. And there are people that are great teachers that can navigate that stuff and they’re professionals and that’s what they do and I’m not a professional teacher, I don’t want to make that my life’s ambition, but I still want to have an effect on people’s lives, so using the infrastructure I have here, I can carve out a little space to work on that kind of stuff, not make it my life’s work, but do something.

He is, as the exhibition introduction notes, “a photojournalist, blogger, self-publisher, Instagrammer and educator” – someone who understands that today the sharing of the image often seems as crucial as the image itself.

The strange atmosphere of banality and heightened intimacy is sustained throughout, further evidence of Soth’s meticulous editing and his almost writerly understanding of how to sustain a mood.

“It isn’t what a picture is of, It is what it is about.”

Alec Soth, the ultra-contemporary renaissance man of photography

“Cold Hospitality”

“Cold Midwest Winters”

“Staged Reality”

50 Words

hon·est adjective 1. free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere. hu·man adjective 1. relating to or characteristic of people or human beings.

tran·si·tion noun 1. the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another. young adjective 1. having lived or existed for only a short time.

Vintage Poverty Exposed Pastel Depth Color Transition Space Honest Empty faces Landscapes Location Outdoors Human Midwest Transition Film Sky Crisp Cold Dynamic Porrait Vertical Square Profiles Young Aged Nude Iconic Posed Dark Cloudy Blue Mid century Funny Staged Ironic Expanded Bright Sweet Moments Pop of Color Connected Realistic Relationships Painful Honest Clear Powerful Inspired Cool Surreal

staged adjective 2. planned, organized, or arranged in advance cold adjective 1. of or at a low or relatively low temperature, especially when compared with the human body.

“Painfully Honest” “Contemporary Renaisance” “Honest Human”

By Abigail Cain On April 10, 1927, Ansel Adams clambered through Yosemite’s LeConte Gully trail with four of his friends in tow. Their destination on that chilly spring morning was Half Dome, the park’s iconic granite summit rising some 5,000 feet from the valley’s floor. The aspiring photographer had made the trek before, once with an uncle and later with a painter acquaintance, who nearly broke his neck making the treacherous descent back down the narrow gully. But this time, Adams was intent on capturing the perfect shot of Half Dome to add to his portfolio—a shot that would launch his career as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. For most of his 25 years, Adams had considered himself a musician first and a photographer second. He was an accomplished pianist, and had spent a winter in San Francisco teaching music lessons and performing as part of the Milanvi Trio. But it soon became clear to Adams that his level of talent would only garner him local fame, never national. So he decided to chart a new course. In 1926, his mentor Albert Bender, a patron of the arts in San Francisco, tasked him with producing a portfolio of large-format black-and-white photographs of mountains that he would finance and help the young artist sell. As it turned out, Adams already had 11 of the 18 images he needed to complete the set. But he still hadn’t captured the sheer cliff face of Half Dome to his satisfaction—and that was what he set out to do that April day. He’d taken photographs of Half Dome before. Several were the results of his very first experiments with a camera, after being gifted a Kodak Brownie at age 14 during a family vacation to Yosemite. One of his favorite images from this time was an accidental upside-down shot, snapped as he tumbled off a tree stump. He’d also photographed the monolith more recently, hiking up to the park’s Glacier Point overlook for a panoramic view of its eastern portion. But the resulting photo, with the rock face hooded in shadow, still lacks the drama of Adams’s later images. He would need to get closer to Half Dome, he realized. So Adams and his friends set out to reach the Diving Board, a rock slab hanging some 3,500 feet above the valley floor. It wasn’t an easy hike in the first place, and Adams was loaded down with a 40-pound pack containing his camera, a handful of filters and lenses, and 12 glass plate negatives. This

single-minded dedication would become typical of the photographer’s later process, in which he would spend weeks at a time in the mountains, scouting out the perfect location for a single photograph. (In fact, during two such trips, he missed the births of both his children.)

Ansel Adams

En route to the Diving Board, Adams made several exposures, and by the time the group reached Half Dome, he had just two plates left. They sat down for lunch, waiting for the sun to move high enough in the sky to illuminate the entire cliff face. By 2:30 p.m., Adams was ready. For his first shot, he used a yellow filter that he often placed over his lens to subtly darken the blue sky. But almost as soon as he’d released the shutter, he knew something was off. “I began to realize, why, I’m not creating anything of what I feel, because I know the shadow on the cliff is going to be like the sky; it’s going to be gray,” Adams later explained. “It will be an accurate picture of Half Dome, but it won’t have that emotional quality I feel.” Instead, for the second exposure, he used a deep red filter that would darken the sky almost to black and emphasize the white snow on Half Dome’s cliff face. The filter made all the difference, as Adams quickly realized when he developed the photo later that night. He considered Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California (1927) his “first really fine photograph,” a career-changing image that marked his first successful “visualization”—Adams’s term for carefully determining all elements of a photograph before ever releasing the shutter. Over a decade later he would institutionalize this idea with his Zone System, a photographic technique that is still taught in schools today. On the strength of Monolith and the other photos from his portfolio, Adams’s commercial and artistic career began to blossom. He would go on to become of the greatest photographers of his time, the man whose images remain synonymous with the American wilderness even today. Together with Edward Weston, he would found the f.64 group that reimagined the photographic medium; he was instrumental in the creation of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. And while Monolith may have been Adams’s first significant photograph of Yosemite, it certainly wasn’t his last.

On Photography

By Susan Sontag Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which

package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality—photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid—and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph—any photograph—seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned

with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption—the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed—seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

av d i

DAVID

CARSON designboom: what originally made you want to become an graphic designer? david carson: I wasn’t really looking to become a graphic designer and in fact I wasn’t – until the ripe old age of 26! graphic design is a second career for me, I have a degree in sociology, and taught that for a few years, then somewhat by chance, I took a two-week summer workshop at the university of arizona – about this thing called ‘graphic design’. it changed everything. I hadn’t even known the term graphic design before then. a great instructor, and good friend to this day, jackson boelts – helped me take the first steps on this fantastic

journey – one I could have never imagined. i feel I’m the most fortunate designer on the planet. as a result of this career choice, well passion really, I had no choice once I had discovered it! over twenty five years later I’ve visited and lectured all over the world, had numerous exhibitions, books and received notable awards, and all because I found something I was passionate about, and pursued it, without ever looking back. I found something that never felt like work. I’ve always said I make my living from my hobby. just this year I’ve received the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) gold medal, and was named as one of apple’s 30 most innovative designers in

their 30 year history – only 2 graphic designers were chosen, the other being april grieman. they called us ‘pioneers with profound impact’ – I’m really proud of that one. the past few years have been some of my most productive yet. later this fall I’m lecturing in spain, portugal, lithuania, bangkok and australia. I’m a little amazed, that after all these years, the speaking and interview requests, jobs and fan mail, keep coming in from all over the world – it’s very humbling. beach culture magazine october 1990 – this is some of photographer anton corbin’s first color work. we were running a photo spread of his work,

drugs, rock and roll etc. I looked at this portrait coverme lines, wascova few and realized you ourerbiggest selllines including really didn’t need ingone issue – funny, about keith to say anything werichards thought coming keith else, the landlooked ancient clean about sex, scape of his face THEN. said it all.drugs, often rock and roll etc. I looked a hotly debated at this portrait topic of editors, and realized you many believing DB:really howdidn’t wouldneed a menu of everyyoutodescribe anything thing in thesay issue your approach to else, the landon the cover is design? scape of his face best, others have saidwhere it all. often rules about DC: experimena hotly the cover lines debated tal,topic intuitive and of editors, personal. I have many believing noaformal menu trainof everying,thing which in I’m the issue sure a lotis onhelped the cover as Ibest, never learned others have all rules the things aboutI’m where notthe supposed cover lines effective results . with this cover the editor

had given

uvytyertsexax✍ and when I saw the editor neil fineman’s theme for this issue ‘the end of summer’ I thought this image was perfect. it has the mood of summer’s end, even though it was not commissioned as such. ray gun magazine february 1993 – the interview subject for this cover story, j. mascis of dinosour jr., talked about how much he hated the press, magazines, media, etc. – this was my reaction to his comments, to use the publicity photo the record company sent, upside down. it’s funny to see it reproduced in articles and in stores the wrong side up! ray gun magazine january 1995 – ray gun had no grid, formula or format, letting the music and individual articles dictate the direction of the

design and layout. every page was an entirely new design assignment, making it a lot more work than most magazines, but also a lot more fun, and I believe with more effective results . with this cover the editor had given me a few cover lines including one about keith richards coming clean about sex, drugs, rock and roll etc. I looked at this portrait and realized you really didn’t need to say anything else, the landscape of his face said it all. often a hotly debated topic of editors, many believing a menu of everything in the issue on the cover is best, others have rules about where the cover lines NEED to be. it turned out this cover, with

guvytyertse

ray-gu n

exaxâ&#x153;?

Clients: aca armani audi bark blue magazine bose corporation dali museum hamlet helvetica film little white lies marshall mcluhan mercury metropolis

monster children nine inch nails obama omega patterns quiksilver surf film festival western union wolfgang bloch yale university other

father of father

at grunge father er f grunge

grunge

r of re of grunge

tibor kalma Tibor Kalman (July 6, 1949 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; May 2, 1999) was an American graphic designer of Hungarian origin, well known for his work as editor-in-chief of Colors magazine

Kalman was born in Budapest and became a U.S. resident in 1956, after he and his family fled Hungary to escape the Soviet invasion, settling in Poughkeepsie, New York. He later attended NYU, dropping out after one year of Journalism classes.

Moira Cullen: You’re back. Tibor Kalman: Everyone else invests more in this idea that I do. I never felt I’d left, so I don’t feel I’ve come back. MC: We spoke just weeks before your departure for Rome, in the summer of 1993, when the economy was soft, nerves were raw, diatribes about legibility and relevance were being hurled across design’s generational divide, and the prospect of a “changing of the guard” prevailed. You were deeply dissatisfied with design. TK: I thought the argument about legibility was in fact about typefaces, and arguments about typefaces are boring and narrow in the light of what’s really going on in the world and the true purpose and potential of communication. That isn’t the real issue. MC: What is the real issue? TK: Whether we can do something with design that makes a difference in the world. Whether designers can use their skills to create change - cultural, political and economic. Economic change is the one designers have been good at because they can make sales go up, stocks go up, sell more spaghetti sauce. MC: But what about the other changes? TK: They are not where the money is and are not what design has usually been called upon to do. I grew up doing very commercial work - brochures, logos, packaging and record covers. My journey has been a move from using graphics to make money to using graphic design to create new aesthetic ideas - which is where most designers start - to becoming frustrated and moving on to industrial design, film, television and architecture. After 15 or 20 years I discovered that design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do. Now I’m at a point where I’m tired of talking about what kind of accents to use. I want to talk about the words that are being said. MC: To whom? Is the audience as important as the message? TK: What is said determines who listens and who understands.

Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances accents, punctuation and so on that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are. MC: Was this the motivation behind your move to Rome? TK: In the 15 years I ran M&Co I felt I had pretty much exhausted the avenues available to designers. I wanted to make the things that people buy or invest time in rather than designing the packaging for those things. Magazines are particularly swell medium for designers to work in because they tell stories visually. They’re about selling ideas. MC: Yet Colors as a magazine was very much aligned with Benetton as a product. TK: That’s bullshit. Just look at the magazine. What is true is that Benetton sponsored us – they chose me and my team to make a magazine. But we were never under any pressure to do articles about sweaters or Luciano Benetton’s art collection. We did articles about poverty, multiple cultures, things that mattered. The amount of influence our sponsor or advertisers had over our publication was less than in other supposedly “independent” commercial magazine I’ve worked for. We were free. MC: Did you need to resolve the potential conflict between patronage and creative expression before you made the move? TK: No. I started off just being excited about the chance to edit a magazine. MC: To edit, not design? TK: Yes. I was approached by Benetton’s creative director Oliviero Toscani late in 1990 when I was at Interview. He asked if I’d be interested in art directing a magazine for them. By that time I had art directed a couple of magazines and knew the difference between the roles of art director and editor. I wanted to role of the editor, thank you. The editor is the person who gets to decide what the content will be. The art director might be a partner and

might suggest ideas, but the editor rules. To my surprise, Toscani called my bluff and asked what kind of magazine I wanted. My lifelong obsession was Life – the version that existed before 1965 – which to me was the most inspiring thing a magazine could be. That’s what I was after with Colors. The fact is, I described a magazine that Benetton should sponsor – Benetton is a global company with a political point of view in advertising and I was interested in multicultural issues. From their point of view, they gained credibility by sponsoring a publication that appeals to young people around the world – people wrote letters saying how fabulous Colors was and how they’d become lifelong Benetton customers because of it. I was and am totally comfortable with that. I think lots of people should go to Benetton shops and say they’re buying sweaters because they love Colors. MC: Do you have any involvement now you’ve left? TK: The March 1996 issue on war will be the first I have had nothing to do with. I’ll be happy if it’s great and secretly happy if it’s terrible. MC: What was it like developing content with Toscani as art director? It must have been different from your practice in New York. TK: Toscani was not the art director. As editorial director, he was the enabler. He got us the support and the funding and gave us the freedom to make Colors the way we saw fit. And Luciano Benetton deserves a lot of credit for his courage and willingness to bankroll an experiment like Colors. I had the privilege of conceiving articles about subjects I found interesting and then using a team of people to research them and figure out how they might be made interesting to others in a visual way. I can’t think of anything better.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Tibor may not be as influential on the daily practice of graphic design as the Mac, but his sway over how designers think is indisputable.â&#x20AC;?

Colors is a quarterly magazine founded in 1991. Every issue of the magazine takes a single theme and covers it from an international perspective. The latest issue was published in June, 2014, yet there is no official statement about its discontinuation.

fficial bio: Gail Anderson is a designer, writer, and educator. She is the director of design and digital media for Visual Arts Press at the School of Visual Arts, and a partner at Anderson Newton Design. From 2002 through 2010, Anderson served as creative director of design at SpotCo, a New York City advertising agency that creates artwork for Broadway and institutional theater. From 1987 to early 2002, she worked at Rolling Stone magazine, serving as associate art director, deputy art director, and finally, as the magazine’s senior art director. Anderson is the author of Outside the Box, for Princeton Architectural Press, as well as co-author of 12 books on design, typography and popular culture with Steven Heller. She has also written for magazines and blogs, and lectures around the world on all things design. Anderson teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and serves as design subcommittee chair on The Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee for the USPS, and on the board for the Type Directors Club. She is the recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Medal from the AIGA, and her work has been recognized by design organizations including The Society of Publication Designers, TDC, AIGA, The Art Directors Club, Print, Graphis, HOW and Communication Arts. Anderson is a reformed collector/hoarder who now just looks but no longer buys. Originally from: The very last block in the Bronx, at the top of the borough. When you made a call across the street to Mount Vernon, you dialed a different area code. Path that led you to design: I drew a LOT as a kid, on Magic Slates, my dad’s shirt card-

board from the laundry, oaktag, and in many, many sketchbooks. I made Elton John posters, and little Partridge Family and Jackson 5 magazines, collaging together images from Spec and 16 magazines. After reading a book that SVA sent to my high school called Careers in the Visual Arts, I knew that I wanted to be what was then called a commercial artist. I took Saturday classes at Pratt Manhattan thanks to my art teacher, and applied to SVA at her suggestion—but also made my decision based on Paul Davis’ “To be good is not enough when you dream of being great” SVA poster. Years later, I got to tell Paul that in person, and I think he looked at me like I was crazy. Your career, in a nutshell: I’ve been fortunate to get the chance to try a little of everything over the last three decades, from magazine design to teaching, designing for the theater, packaging, writing, and now designing for academia. I’ve worked really hard and made some big sacrifices, but I’ve also been extremely lucky to have had amazing mentors like Paula Scher and Fred Woodward. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with gifted designers and students over the years who have both inspired and challenged me. It’s made me really proud to watch them conquer the design world. Work of which you’re most proud: It’s hard to deny that the Rolling Stone work has defined my career, but I’m also really proud of the subway posters I’ve done for SVA over the last decade. Ultimately, though, it’s the “smallest” thing I’ve ever done—the postage stamp commemorating the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation—that is the singular project that makes me proudest. I mean, I got to design a postage stamp! Moment in your life of which you’re most proud: I finished a 35-mile five-borough bike tour a few years back, and that felt pretty great. Cause that means the most to you: I have an 18-year-old nephew with Down Syndrome,

so anything related to school or workplace inclusion gets my attention. I want nothing more than for Nic to lead a full life as he enters adulthood, with good friends and a job he enjoys. Favorite designer: Paula Scher’s ever-evolving career is astounding, and don’t get me started on those amazing maps. She’s been my design hero since college, and my admiration has only grown over the years. Favorite city: I am a born and bred New Yorker, so I’ll have to stick with NYC as my favorite city. But Rome is right up there, too. I haven’t gotten to spend any time in Paris yet, but I bet that’ll be on the list soon. What the East means to you: I think that I’ve visited all of the East Coast states, and can actually place them on a blank U.S. map. (I play with an app called Geo Master, so I actually do that fairly regularly, which is kind of sad.) The East has such a diverse range of interesting places to visit, and so many different styles of design to admire. What tends to make the East’s design unique? I think the variety is what makes it so unique. You can’t really nail down an Eastern look. It’s hipster cool and warm and fuzzy nostalgic at the same time. Motto: I am always just waiting for the anvil to fall on my head, so perhaps my motto is something fatalistic, like “It could be worse.” Have you ever entered Print’s RDA in your career? We used to enter when I was at Rolling Stone, and our work was featured in one of the Print Casebooks, if you remember those! The last work I submitted was a series of posters for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis back in 2010 when I was at SpotCo, and I’m proud to say it made the cut.

ACROSS THE BOARD ACROSS THE BOARD ACROSS THE BOARD

Rick Poynor: It is almost four years since your book and the exhibition at the V&A and during that time you have kept a much lower profile than in the preceding period. Has this been a conscious decision on your part? Neville Brody: After the exhibition a number of things happened, the most significant of which was that we completely stopped getting any British work. At the moment we have one UK client. The other important thing that happened was that in the late 1980s, at the time of the exhibition, design was booming, but had run out of ideas and reached the point where you didn’t even need a fully formed idea, just the beginnings of an idea, to have to put into print. It was swallowed up immediately and before it could be developed it was everywhere, then it was gone. This voracious animal was consuming itself. The third factor at that point was over-exposure. People were writing me off the week after they been saying “you should see the guy’s work.” I just felt that it was time to go invisible again.

off from the rest of the design industry. RP: Looking back, do you think in terms of your development as a designer that it was good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, to have been celebrated so early? NB: Malcolm Garrett has said that he thought it was too early. I still don’t think so. As far as I’m concerned, I come in to work, put in a very long day, go home with a takeaway, and that’s it – I just get on with the work. So to be quite honest all that publicity and press didn’t affect me. I simply felt it was the right time to put on that kind of show. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. It was an attempt to create a catalyst for design. There was a lot happening and the book and the show were supposed to be a way of focusing thought. It wasn’t intended to be a Neville Brody celebration at all.

certainly in America and Germany, people liked the text. Abroad, I had debates with people about ideas in the book; in Britain the discussion was focused on my personality. So in many ways, at least in Britain, the show and the book misfired.

NEVILLE BRODY

RP: Were you aware of envy or resentment from other designers? NB: Certainly. It came out in the press. There were a lot of reviews and usually the ones from other designers were maliciously critical for no constructive reasons. All I could assume was that it was some form of bitterness and had nothing to do with evaluating the work itself. As a result I felt even more closed

RP: Would you say that you have been misunderstood? NB: People in design seem to think that it was to do with self-publicity. The point is that what I’ve tried to do is nothing to do with self. It is always to do with the thinking procedure behind design and the point of the book was that people had seen the design and I wanted them to consider ideas. In Britain, most of the reviews said “great book, but why do you need the text?” But we found that in other countries,

RP: Your move from The Face to Arena was well timed. Why did you finally give up art directing Arena? NB: For a number of reasons. Arena, for me, became the focus of what was happening in Thatcherite Britain. I felt that the magazine had become very much a shopping catalogue and I didn’t want to spend my time working on a magazine that was going to show different pairs of socks. I’m not going to be over-critical because I still know them and their heart is in the right place, but as an independent magazine free from the restraints of a major publisher Arena was in a position to promote discussion and go out on a wing, to take risks in its views. And it didn’t. RP: With the move to Arena came an unexpected switch to simple Helvetica headlines, but over the last four years the world has caught up. The sans serif look is everywhere from TV graphics to annual reports. It’s become another style.

Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Talk Type H e r b

L u b a l i n

10 Things About Herb 1

His name was pronounced Loo-ball-in, with the accent on the loo.

Anyone given a Lubalin “tissue” (his hand-drawn layout) to see through to production could not claim to be the piece’s designer.

2 3

4 5

He was color-blind and ambidextrous.

Although he ultimately rejected advertising in favor of graphic design, as an agency art director at Sudler & Hennessey he was a key figure in advertising in the 1960s, introducing expressive typography into print advertising.

He rejected Swiss modernism, which he felt was ill-suited to the popular American imagination, in favor of vernacular, decorative, and humanistic approaches to visual expression.

He was a designer with political convictions, a supporter of liberal causes.

7 8 9

By the time the MTV logo was designed in 1981, Lubalin and his signature style were no longer seen as avant-garde

He freely acknowledged his many collaborators.

Reflecting on the obscenity conviction of his friend and client Ralph Ginzberg, the publisher of Avant Garde, Fact, and Eros, Herb said, “I should have gone to jail too.”

Herb often said that when he retired he would devote his life to painting.

designing with letters

Herb Lubalin was two years old when AIGA awarded its first medal to the individual who, in the judgment of its board of directors and its membership, had distinguished himself in, and contributed significantly to, the field of graphic arts. There has been a lot of history between that moment and the evening in January 1981, when members, directors, friends and admirers gathered in the Great Hall of the New York Chamber of Commerce building to be with Lubalin as he accepted the 62nd AIGA medal. A lot of that history, at least in the graphic arts, had been written—and designed—by Herb Lubalin. And Lubalin has been recognized, awarded, written about, imitated and emulated for it. There’s hardly anyone better known and more highly regarded in the business. Lubalin’s receipt of AIGA’s highest honor was never a matter of “if,” only “when.” Coming to terms with Herb Lubalin’s work takes you quickly to the heart of a very big subject: the theory of meaning and how meaning is communicated—how an idea is moved, full and resonant, from one mind to another. Not many have been able to do that better than Lubalin. Typography is the key. It is where you start with Lubalin and what you eventually come back to. However, “typography” is not a word Lubalin thought should be applied to his work. “What I do is not really typography, which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting characters down on a page. It’s designing with letters. Aaron Burns called it, ‘typographics,’ and since you’ve got to put a name on things to make them memorable, ‘typographics’ is as good a name for what I do as any.” Lubalin was a brilliant, iconoclastic advertising art director—in the 1940s with Reiss Advertising and then for twenty years with Sudler and Hennessey. Recipient of medal after medal, award after award, and in 1962 named Art Director of the Year by the National Society of Art Directors, he has also been a publication designer of great originality and distinction. He designed startling Eros in the early 60s, intellectually and visually astringent Fact in the mid-60s, lush and luscious Avant Garde late in the same decade, and founded U & lc in 1973 and saw it flourish into the 80s. But it is Lubalin and his typographics—words, letters, pieces of letters, additions to letters, connections and combinations, and virtuoso manipulation of letters—to which all must return. The “typographic impresario of our time,” Dorfsman called him, a man who “profoundly influenced and changed our vision and perception of letter forms, words and language.” Lubalin at his best delivers the shock of meaning through his typography-based design. Avant Garde literally moves ahead. er does just that.

sleeping by the mississippi the work of alec soth

SLEEPING BY THE MISSISSIPPI THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

the work of alec soth sleeping by the mississippi Sleeping by the Mississippi the work of alec soth

Sleeping by the Mississippi the work of alec soth

Sleeping by the Mississippi The Work of Alec Soth

SLEEPING BY THE MISSISSIPPI

Font Pairings

the work of alec soth

Sleeping by the Mississippi the work of alec soth

Honestly Human the work of alec soth

HONESTLY HUMAN the work of alec soth

Sleeping by the Mississippi the work of alec soth

Honestly Human the work of alec soth

honestly human the work of alec soth

HONESTLY HUMAN THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

honestly human THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

HONESTLY HUMAN the work of alec soth

honestly HUMAN

HUMAN

THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

HONESTLY HUMAN

T H E

W O R K

O F

HUM -AN

A L E C

S O T H

HONESTLY

HUMAN

THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

Honestly Human

the work of

alec soth

Honestly

Human

Human the work of alec soth

the work of alec soth

honestly human

t h e

w o r k

o f

a l e c

s o t h

hum an

the work of

alec soth

hum -an the work of alec soth

hum an

the work of alec soth

the work of

ale c s o t h

Honestly Human the work of alec soth

hum an the work of

a l ec so th

HonestlyHuman the work of alec soth

HONEST:HUMAN THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

the work of alec soth

Human

honestly

human t h e

w o r k

a l e c

o f

s o t h

October 18th

Opening Spread

hum an the work of al e c s o th

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

hone HUM

estly MAN THE WORK OF ALEC SOTH

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

HUM -AN THE

WORK

ALEC

SOTH

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

many – often conflicting – notions of American life that coexist in such a politically riven country, but also his prowess as a maker of photobooks. Indeed, the show is curated chronologically around his four major books: Sleeping By the Mississippi(2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual(2010) and Songbook (2015). This refreshingly straightforward approach works well, although it does not entirely do justice to the variety of Soth’s work. He is, astion introduction notes, “a photojournalist, blogger, self-publisher, Instagrammer and educator” – someone who understands that today the sharing of the image often seems as crucial as the image itself. The retrospective includes vitrines devoted to editions of his books, maquettes, zines, collaborations and dispatches on Tumblr from various US cities, although it is Alec Soth the image-maker who is elevated across four large rooms of prints.

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

hum an the work of

alec soth

at Alec Soth’s image of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home. The image befits the self-made myth of the Man in Black, and hints at the autobiographical authenticity that underpins it. Like so many Soth images, it walks the line between the romantic and the resoundingly real, as well as between documentary and fine art – a hinterland he has negotiated more sure-footedly than any other photographer of

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

HonestlyHuman

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

Human t h e

w o r k

o f

a l e c

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

s o t h

Human the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

hum -an

th e wo rk o f alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

t he w or k of al e c so th

on Tumblr from various US cities, although it is Alec Soth the image-maker who is elevated across four large rooms of prints. The results are beautiful, whatever their subject matter. Painstakingly composed on a large-format camera mounted on a tripod, his images can be breathtakingly stunning in their subtle range of muted colours. Despite his use of blogs and social media, Soth is essentially a traditionalist, and there are echoes of other great photographers throughout his work, most notably Joel Sternfeld, who taught him for a time. He seems to have inherited Sternfeld’s eye for American oddity. Soth made his name with Sleeping By the Mississippi, a kind of psychological travelogue along the 2,000-mile route of the great, mythic American river. It harks back to the great American road trips undertaken by photography masters including Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore, but also to literature by Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty (who was also an attentive photographer of the American south). A discarded iron bedstead wreathed in weeds could be a resting place for Huck Finn and Jim as they hug the shore in their bid to escape the injustices of the south. Likewise, a woman holding a painting of an angel might have been dreamed up . Sleeping By the Mississippi showed Soth’s instinctive grasp of narrative and metaphor, each image carefully chosen to articulate – and accentuate – his sense of the US, and the south in particular, as a

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

not entirely do justice to the variety of Soth’s work. He is, astion introduction notes, “a photojournalist, blogger, self-publisher, Instagrammer and educator” – someone who understands that today the sharing of the image often seems as crucial as the image itself. The retrospective includes vitrines devoted to editions of his books, maquettes, zines, collaborations and dispatches on Tumblr from various US cities, although it is Alec Soth the image-maker who is elevated across four large rooms of prints. The results are beautiful, whatever their subject matter. Painstakingly composed on a large-format camera mounted on a tripod, his images can be breathtakingly stunning in their subtle range of muted colours. Despite his use of blogs and social media, Soth is essentially a traditionalist, and there are echoes of other great photographers throughout his work, most notably Joel Sternfeld, who taught him for a time. He seems to have inherited Sternfeld’s eye for American oddity. Soth made his name with Sleeping By the Mississippi, a kind of psychological travelogue along the 2,000-mile route of the great, mythic American river. It harks back to the great American road trips undertaken by photography masters

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

My name is Alec Soth (rhymes with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bothâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;). I live in Minnesota. I like to take pictures and make books. I also have a business called Little Brown Mushroom.

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth The small wooden shack stands desolate against a glowering sky. A lone telegraph pole, two skeletal trees and an outhouse complete a scene that could be the setting for countless country songs about growing up poor in hard times. “It isn’t what a picture is of,” the great American photography curator John Szarkowski once said. “It is what it is about.” His words strike me while looking at Alec Soth’s image of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home. The image befits the self-made myth of the Man in Black, and hints at the autobiographical authenticity that underpins it. Like so many Soth images, it walks the line between the romantic and the resoundingly real, as well as between documentary and fine art – a hinterland he has negotiated more sure-footedly than any other photographer of his generation. The title for Soth’s first British retrospective is Gathered Leaves, which hints at his ability to chronicle the many – often conflicting – notions of American life that coexist in such a politically riven country, but also his prowess as a maker of photobooks. Indeed, the show is curated chronologically around his four major books: Sleeping By the Mississippi(2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual(2010) and Songbook (2015).

Name of Magazine / Page 2

Name of Magazine

Alec Soth

Name of Magazine

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

The small wooden shack stands desolate against a glowering sky. A lone telegraph pole, two skeletal trees and an outhouse complete a scene that could be the setting for countless country songs about growing up poor in hard times. “It isn’t what a picture is of,” the great American photography curator John Szarkowski once said. “It is what it is about.” His words strike me while looking at Alec Soth’s image of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home. The image befits the self-made myth of the Man in Black, and hints at the autobiographical authenticity that underpins it. Like so many Soth images, it walks the line between the romantic and the resoundingly real, as well as between documentary and fine art – a hinterland he has negotiated more sure-footedly than any other photographer of his generation. The title for Soth’s first British retrospective is Gathered Leaves, which hints at his ability to chronicle the many – often conflicting – notions of American life that coexist in such a politically riven country, but also his prowess as a maker of photobooks. Indeed, the show is curated chronologically around his four major books: Sleeping By the Mississippi(2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual(2010) and Songbook (2015). The small wooden shack stands desolate against a glowering sky. A lone telegraph pole, two skeletal trees and an outhouse complete a scene that could be the setting for countless country songs about growing up poor in hard times. “It isn’t what a picture is of,” the great American photography curator John Szarkowski once said. “It is what it is about.” His words strike me while looking at Alec Soth’s image of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home. The image befits the self-made myth of the Man in Black, and hints at the autobiographical authenticity that underpins it. Like so many Soth images, it walks the line between the romantic and the resoundingly real, as well as between documentary and fine art – a hinterland he has negotiated more sure-footedly than any other photographer of his generation. The title for Soth’s first British retrospective is Gathered Leaves, which hints at his ability to chronicle the many – often conflicting – notions of American life that coexist in such a politically riven country, but also his prowess as a maker of photobooks. Indeed, the show is curated chronologically around his four major books: Sleeping By the Mississippi(2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual(2010) and Songbook (2015).The small wooden shack stands desolate against a glowering sky. A lone telegraph pole, two skeletal trees and an outhouse complete a scene that could be the setting for countless country songs about growing up poor in hard times. “It isn’t what a picture is of,” the great American photography curator John Szarkowski once said. “It is what it is about.” His words strike me while looking at Alec Soth’s image of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home. The image befits the self-made myth of the Man in Black, and hints at the autobiographical authenticity that underpins it. Like so many Soth images, it walks the line between the romantic and the resoundingly real, as well as between documentary and fine art – a hinterland he has negotiated more sure-footedly than any other photographer of his generation. The title for Soth’s first British retrospective is Gathered Leaves, which hints at his ability to chronicle the many – often conflicting – notions of American life that coexist in such a politically riven country, but also his prowess as a maker of photobooks. Indeed, the show is curated chronologically around his four major books: Sleeping By the Mississippi(2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual(2010) and SongboThe small wooden shack stands desolate against

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

t he w or k of a l e c so th

“If you want to be a creative person, then you’re gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn’t a path. Part of the creativity is making your path.”.

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

“If you want to be a creative person, then you’re gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn’t a path. Part of the creativity is making your path.”.

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

Font Studies October 23rd

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Honestly Human An interview with Alec Soth

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic

totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer

uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Honestly Human An Interview with Alex Soth INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommo-

dio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo. CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Honestly Human An Interview with Alec Soth

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic

totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui

corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur?

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Honestly Human An Interview with Alec Soth

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt

ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Honestly Human An Interview with Alec Soth

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis

Honestly Human An Interview with Alec Soth

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic

totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer up-

tatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

October 23rd

Feature Spreads

Honestly

Human

i work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something. Do you find your personal work more liberating than your editorial work because of that? It’s just a different beast and Songbook is a collection of these things, but you know, for example: The bulk of the work was made with this thing, the LBM Dispatch. And the Dispatch was great because it was like doing editorial work but without a boss. So yeah, it was definitely more liberating, for sure. Do you…think differently when you’re using more flexible equipment, do you notice your thought process changing from 8×10 to digital? Yeah, I mean, so much has changed. It’s hard to analyze what’s related to technology and what’s related to me. Because I’m a different photographer than I was 10 years ago. A different person and it’s different equipment. I mean, the funny thing is that I made work that bears quite a resemblance to this (Songbook) before Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that I read some other interviews you’ve done and one of the biggest things

that jumped out at me is that you’ve been making work since

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

graduating school, but it wasn’t until you were thirty-five that you had the Whitney Biennial and got discovered. Right. How did you keep the fire burning for those years where you were making work but not a success, per se? Like anybody…the people who work at my studio, they’re all photographers, and they all have to come to work for me and then they have to figure out, in their spare time, how to do it and I think that phase is really important, because it’s where most people fall away and maybe they’re doing it for other reasons or it’s too much work or whatever it is, it’s a long slog to find your voice and also to just endure, there’s an element of endurance to the thing that kind of separates you out, after a time. And how did I do it? Just like everybody else, slogging away, trying to find time. I mean the big revelation for me was that I needed to travel, I didn’t know I needed to travel, but I later learned that I thrive on that and I was a bit… my development was stymied because I was staying close to home. What was it that opened up for you when you started to travel? Primarily, I got a grant that enabled me to do that, and it’s an important thing, and I haven’t really talked about arts funding but it’s a significant element. Minnesota has really great arts funding and that seed money just did so much for me and I’m forever grateful to those people, the Knight Foundation, they gave me that first big grant to go out and make work. Because it’s really hard to do it. In retrospect, I could’ve been less conservative and just managed to do it anyway, but I wasn’t thinking that way at the time. How much time did you take for that project with the grant money? The big trip was a three month trip. It was cut

short because of a death in the family but it was about two months, something like that, and that was the biggie. And then more work followed, and more grants followed. Was it…easy to adjust to that kind of change, from slogging away to all of the sudden being validated artistically? That was really surprising, I was a person who always had to have a job, I was just raised that way or whatever, so the idea of leaving my job, I found really stressful. Exciting, of course, but, like, “can I sustain this?” And I didn’t have a graduate degree, so it’s not like I could just dive into teaching, it was a bit of a gamble, at that point. And that’s actually why I started doing editorial work, it was like a back-up, and yeah, it was nerve-wracking, but really great. But it wasn’t like I suddenly walked into a candy store, that was the good thing about being a bit older, too, I had some maturity, and sort of knew that in order to sustain this I’d have to be responsible and not go off the deep end. So Songbook is different because it’s a collection of work you’ve been doing over the years (rather than a specific project made to be published as a single project), what made you decide to put it into a book? So about halfway through the project…first of all, Songbook came together from a lot of different but related threads, I’d been collaborating with Magnum photographers on one project, of course I’d been working with Brad (Zellar) on Dispatch stuff, and I’d been intentionally doing editorial work that kind of fit along the same lines, so it was about mid-way through the process, I saw how this was taking shape and I knew that a book would come out of the Dispatch work with Brad, eventually. And there was some talk of timing them simultaneously, but there was no way to do it. That’ll happen later, in the future. But I wanted this place for the pictures that was separated from the text and yeah, I knew it halfway through.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up.â&#x20AC;?

in the beginning, but I knew the themes and the feeling that I wanted and then it just took its course. I’ve heard you talk about narrative…do you feel you’ve gotten better at telling a narrative through your photos? Heh…no. Always my struggle with photography is with narrative…you know what I’ve gotten good at…this is like bubbling up for the first time, it’s like… YES …Hahahaha…I’ve gotten good at finding an outlet for narrative that’s sort of outside of the work. Like…because I know that inherently photography isn’t very good at narrative but I long for narrative, so I’ve been able to incorporate narrative but outside of the project a little bit. With the early projects I would do it with these footnotes, with Broken Manual there were these filmmakers following me around, with Songbook it’s the Dispatch. And I’ve been able to have the narrative but elsewhere. As a supplemental. As a supplemental! Exactly. Which is good, because it satisfies the need that I have for it, but without making truly narrative work. And I’m still interested in narrative, I’m doing something right now, just a little tiny project that’s incredibly narrative and will be presented in front of an audience, but I like doing those things, but in the end, the most significant work that I do is fundamentally non-narrative. Mm…then how would you describe it, if not narrative? You know, lyrical, whatever. I make this analogy a lot, between poetry and fiction, it’s more like poetry. There’s elements of narrative in it, and it’s suggestive of a story, but it’s not…there’s no plot. And I’ve always been envious of that, because it’s so powerful to have that. But photography’s just not that great at it.

the work of alec soth

Na me o f M a g a zi n e

The more interviews we do, the more I find myself straying from the familiar, from the photography I grew up noticing. Alec Soth is far afield from the portraiture I’ve previously been drawn to, but the skill with which he crafts his photography books is undeniable. The potency of his work lies in the emotions his books are able to bring out in the viewer, both from the single images and the sum of those images sequenced just so. His work really turned me on to the ability of a photography book to serve as more than just a collection of photos, but as a propulsive tool through which a visual theme can be evoked. And the guy was just great to chat with. Very open and light-hearted, you’re gonna dig it. You tend not to give a lot of direction, you tend to find your subjects as they are, yeah? Or do you give direction? I’m by no means a purist in this way, so I…the way I usually describe it is being like, when you take a family portrait and like “okay, let’s go over here by the tree and then Johnny take off your hat,” you know? It’s like…I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up. I’m not, like, telling people to dance or whatever, but there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches I take towards that and I feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something. Do you find your personal work more liberating than your editorial work because of that? It’s just a different beast and Songbook is a collection of these things, but you know, for example: The bulk of the work was made with this thing, the LBM Dispatch. And the Dispatch was great because it was like doing editorial work but without a boss. So yeah, it was definitely more liberating, for sure. Do you…think differently when you’re using more flexible equipment, do you notice your thought process changing from 8×10 to digital? Yeah, I mean, so much has changed. It’s hard to analyze what’s related to technology and what’s related to me. Because I’m a different photographer than I was 10 years ago. A different person and it’s different equipment. I mean, the funny thing is that I made work that bears quite a resemblance to this (Songbook) before Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that got published called Looking for Love and so I don’t know, it’s hard to analyze these things, because it’s a mish-mash of different changes. I read some other interviews you’ve done and one of the biggest things that jumped out at me is that you’ve been making work since graduating school, but it wasn’t until you were thirty-five that you had the Whitney Biennial and got discovered. Right. How did you keep the fire burning for those years where you were making work but not a success, per se? Like anybody…the people who work at my studio, they’re all photographers, and they all have to come to work for me and then they have to figure out, in their spare time, how to do it and I think that phase is really important, because it’s where most people fall away and maybe they’re doing it for other reasons or it’s too much work or whatever it is, it’s a long slog to find your voice and also to just endure, there’s an element of endurance to the thing that kind of separates you out, after a time. And how did I do it? Just like everybody else, slogging away, trying to find time. I mean the big revelation for me was that I needed to travel, I didn’t know I needed to travel, but I later learned that I thrive on that and I was a bit…my development was stymied because I was staying close to home. What was it that opened up for you when you started to travel? Primarily, I got a grant that enabled me to do that, and it’s an important thing, and I haven’t really talked about arts funding but it’s a significant element. Minnesota has really great arts funding and that seed money just did so much for me and I’m forever grateful to those people, the Knight Foundation, they gave me that first big grant to go out and make work. Because it’s really hard to do it. In retrospect, I could’ve been less conservative and just managed to do it anyway, but I wasn’t thinking that way at the time. How much time did you take for that project with the grant money? The big trip was a three month trip. It was cut short because of a death in the family but it was about two months, something like that, and that was the biggie. And then more work followed, and more grants followed.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up.â&#x20AC;?

he more interviews we do, the more I find myself straying from the familiar, from the photography I grew up noticing. Alec Soth is far afield from the portraiture I’ve previously been drawn to, but the skill with which he crafts his photography books is undeniable. The potency of his work lies in the emotions his books are able to bring out in the viewer, both from the single images and the sum of those images sequenced just so. His work really turned me on to the ability of a photography book to serve as more than just a collection of photos, but as a propulsive tool through which a visual theme can be evoked. And the guy was just great to chat with. Very open and light-hearted, you’re gonna dig it. You tend not to give a lot of direction, you tend to find your subjects as they are, yeah? Or do you give direction? I’m by no means a purist in this way, so I…the way I usually describe it is being like, when you take a family portrait and like “okay, let’s go over here by the tree and then Johnny take off your hat,” you know? It’s like…I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up. I’m not, like, telling people to dance or whatever, but there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches I take towards that and I feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something. Do you find your personal work more liberating than your editorial work because of that? It’s just a different beast and Songbook is a collection of these things, but you know, for example: The bulk of the work was made with this thing, the LBM Dispatch. And the Dispatch was great because it was like doing editorial work but without a boss. So yeah, it was definitely more liberating, for sure. Do you…think differently when you’re using more flexible equipment, do you notice your thought process changing from 8×10 to digital? Yeah, I mean, so much has changed. It’s hard to analyze what’s related to technology and what’s related to me. Because I’m a different photographer than I was 10 years ago. A different person and it’s different equipment. I mean, the funny thing is that I made work that bears quite a resemblance to this (Songbook) before Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that got published called Looking for Love and so I don’t know, it’s hard to analyze these things, because it’s a mish-mash of different changes. I read some other interviews you’ve done and one of the biggest things that jumped out at me is that you’ve been making work since graduating school, but it wasn’t until you were thirty-five that you had the Whitney Biennial and got discovered. Right. How did you keep the fire burning for those years where you were making work but not a success, per se? Like anybody…the people who work at my studio, they’re all photographers, and they all have to come to work for me and then they have to figure out, in their spare time, how to do it and I think that phase is really important, because it’s where most people fall away and maybe they’re doing it for other reasons or it’s too much work or whatever it is, it’s a long slog to find your voice and also to just endure, there’s an element of endurance to the thing that kind of separates you out, after a time. And how did I do it? Just like everybody else, slogging away, trying to find time. I mean the big revelation for me was that I needed to travel, I didn’t know I needed to travel, but I later learned that I thrive on that and I was a bit…my development was stymied because I was staying close to home. What was it that opened up for you when you started to travel? Primarily, I got a grant that enabled me to do that, and it’s an important thing, and I haven’t really talked about arts funding but it’s a significant element. Minnesota has really great arts funding and that seed money just did so much for me and I’m forever grateful to those people, the Knight Foundation, they gave me that first big grant to go out and make work. Because it’s really hard to do it. In retrospect, I could’ve been less conservative and just managed to do it anyway, but I wasn’t thinking that way at the time. How much time did you take for that project with the grant money? The big trip was a three month trip. It was cut short because of a death in the family but it was about two months, something like that, and that was the biggie. And then more work followed, and more grants followed.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up.â&#x20AC;?

Was it…easy to adjust to that kind of change, from slogging away to all of the sudden being validated artistically? That was really surprising, I was a person who always had to have a job, I was just raised that way or whatever, so the idea of leaving my job, I found really stressful. Exciting, of course, but, like, “can I sustain this?” And I didn’t have a graduate degree, so it’s not like I could just dive into teaching, it was a bit of a gamble, at that point. And that’s actually why I started doing editorial work, it was like a back-up, and yeah, it was nerve-wracking, but really great. But it wasn’t like I suddenly walked into a candy store, that was the good thing about being a bit older, too, I had some maturity, and sort of knew that in order to sustain this I’d have to be responsible and not go off the deep end. So Songbook is different because it’s a collection of work you’ve been doing over the years (rather than a specific project made to be published as a single project), what made you decide to put it into a book? So about halfway through the project…first of all, Songbook came together from a lot of different but related threads, I’d been collaborating with Magnum photographers on one project, of course I’d been working with Brad (Zellar) on Dispatch stuff, and I’d been intentionally doing editorial work that kind of fit along the same lines, so it was about mid-way through the process, I saw how this was taking shape and I knew that a book would come out of the Dispatch work with Brad, eventually. And there was some talk of timing them simultaneously, but there was no way to do it. That’ll happen later, in the future. But I wanted this place for the pictures that was separated from the text and yeah, I knew it halfway through, it was emerging, it wasn’t called Songbook in the beginning, but I knew the themes and the feeling that I wanted and then it just took its course. I’ve heard you talk about narrative…do you feel you’ve gotten better at telling a narrative through your photos? Heh…no. Always my struggle with photography is with narrative…you know what I’ve gotten good at…this is like bubbling up for the first time, it’s like… YES …Hahahaha…I’ve gotten good at finding an outlet for narrative that’s sort of outside of the work. Like…because I know that inherently photography isn’t very good at narrative but I long for narrative, so I’ve been able to incorporate narrative but outside of the project a little bit. With the early projects I would do it with these footnotes, with Broken Manual there were these filmmakers following me around, with Songbook it’s the Dispatch. And I’ve been able to have the narrative but elsewhere. As a supplemental. As a supplemental! Exactly. Which is good, because it satisfies the need that I have for it, but without making truly narrative work. And I’m still interested in narrative, I’m doing something right now, just a little tiny project that’s incredibly narrative and will be presented in front of an audience, but I like doing those things, but in the end, the most significant work that I do is fundamentally non-narrative. Mm…then how would you describe it, if not narrative? You know, lyrical, whatever. I make this analogy a lot, between poetry and fiction, it’s more like poetry. There’s elements of narrative in it, and it’s suggestive of a story, but it’s not…there’s no plot. And I’ve always been envious of that, because it’s so powerful to have that. But photography’s just not that great at it. Are there any photographers who you think are good at it? Or do you think inherently photography will always run up against that wall? There are books, I think that Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home is the quintessential narrative photography book, it’s just perfect to me, so I think there are great achievements along those lines, and again it’s another spectrum thing, just like poetry…there’s narrative-ish poetry, and then there’s totally fragmentary experimental poetry and there are times when I want to be more one or the other, and I think there are photographers that are succeeding more one way than the other but total storytelling in the way that you put on a movie where there’s a plot and a resolution, that thing just doesn’t really happen in the same way with photography.

October 23rd

Feature Final

H Alec Soth 2008_02zl0189 from ‘Broken Manuel’

d evel o p ed

Honestly

Human

Honestly

Human an interview with alec soth

The more interviews we do, the more I find myself straying from the familiar, from the photography I grew up noticing.

Alec Soth is far afield from the portraiture I’ve previously been drawn to, but the skill with which he crafts his photography books is undeniable. The potency of his work lies in the emotions his books are able to bring out in the viewer, both from the single images and the sum of those images sequenced just so. His work really turned me on to the ability of a photography book to serve as more than just a collection of photos, but as a propulsive tool through which a visual theme can be evoked. And the guy was just great to chat with. Very open and light-hearted, you’re gonna dig it. You tend not to give a lot of direction, you tend to find your subjects as they are, yeah? Or do you give direction? I’m by no means a purist in this way, so I…the way I usually describe it is being like, when you take a family portrait and like “okay, let’s go over here by the tree and then Johnny take off your hat,” you know? It’s like…I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up. I’m not, like, telling people to dance or whatever, but there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches I take towards that and I feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something. Do you find your personal work more liberating than your editorial work because of that? It’s just a different beast and Songbook is a collection of these things, but you know, for example: The bulk of the work was made with this thing, the LBM Dispatch. And the Dispatch was great because it was like doing editorial work but without a boss. So yeah, it was definitely more liberating, for sure. Do you…think differently when you’re using more flexible equipment, do you notice your thought process changing from 8×10 to digital? Yeah, I mean, so much has changed. It’s hard to analyze what’s related to technology and what’s related to me. Because I’m a different photographer than I was 10 years ago. A different person and it’s different equipment. I mean, the funny thing is that I made work that bears quite a resemblance to this (Songbook) before Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that got published called Looking for Love and so I don’t know, it’s hard to analyze these things, because it’s a mishmash of different changes. I read some other interviews you’ve done and one of the biggest things that jumped out at me is that you’ve been making work since graduating school, but it wasn’t until you were thirty-five that you had the Whitney Biennial and got discovered. Right. How did you keep the fire burning for those years where you were making work but not a success, per se? Like anybody…the people who work at my studio, they’re all photographers, and they all have to come to work for me and then they have to figure out, in their spare time, how to do it and I think that phase is really important, because it’s where most people fall away and maybe they’re doing it for other reasons or it’s too much work or whatever it is, it’s a long slog to find your voice and also to just endure, there’s an element of endurance to the thing that kind of separates you out, after a time. And how did I do it? Just like everybody else, slogging away, trying to find time. I mean the big revelation for me was that I needed to travel,

Honestly

Human

Alec Soth The Arkansas Cajun’s backup bunker from ‘Broken Manuel’

d evel o p ed

Honestly

Human

Alec Soth “West Point, New York” (2008)

d evel o p ed

Honestly

Human

I didn’t know I needed to travel, but I later learned that I thrive on that and I was a bit…my development was stymied because I was staying close to home.

Heh…no. Always my struggle with photography is with narrative…you know what I’ve gotten good at…this is like bubbling up for the first time, it’s like…

What was it that opened up for you when you started to travel? Primarily, I got a grant that enabled me to do that, and it’s an important thing, and I haven’t really talked about arts funding but it’s a significant element. Minnesota has really great arts funding and that seed money just did so much for me and I’m forever grateful to those people, the Knight Foundation, they gave me that first big grant to go out and make work. Because it’s really hard to do it. In retrospect, I could’ve been less conservative and just managed to do it anyway, but I wasn’t thinking that way at the time.

YES …Hahahaha…I’ve gotten good at finding an outlet for narrative that’s sort of outside of the work. Like…because I know that inherently photography isn’t very good at narrative but I long for narrative, so I’ve been able to incorporate narrative but outside of the project a little bit. With the early projects I would do it with these footnotes, with Broken Manual there were these filmmakers following me around, with Songbook it’s the Dispatch. And I’ve been able to have the narrative but elsewhere.

How much time did you take for that project with the grant money? The big trip was a three month trip. It was cut short because of a death in the family but it was about two months, something like that, and that was the biggie. And then more work followed, and more grants followed. Was it…easy to adjust to that kind of change, from slogging away to all of the sudden being validated artistically? That was really surprising, I was a person who always had to have a job, I was just raised that way or whatever, so the idea of leaving my job, I found really stressful. Exciting, of course, but, like, “can I sustain this?” And I didn’t have a graduate degree, so it’s not like I could just dive into teaching, it was a bit of a gamble, at that point. And that’s actually why I started doing editorial work, it was like a back-up, and yeah, it was nerve-wracking, but really great. But it wasn’t like I suddenly walked into a candy store, that was the good thing about being a bit older, too, I had some maturity, and sort of knew that in order to sustain this I’d have to be responsible and not go off the deep end. So Songbook is different because it’s a collection of work you’ve been doing over the years (rather than a specific project made to be published as a single project), what made you decide to put it into a book? So about halfway through the project…first of all, Songbook came together from a lot of different but related threads, I’d been collaborating with Magnum photographers on one project, of course I’d been working with Brad (Zellar) on Dispatch stuff, and I’d been intentionally doing editorial work that kind of fit along the same lines, so it was about mid-way through the process, I saw how this was taking shape and I knew that a book would come out of the Dispatch work with Brad, eventually. And there was some talk of timing them simultaneously, but there was no way to do it. That’ll happen later, in the future. But I wanted this place for the pictures that was separated from the text and yeah, I knew it halfway through, it was emerging, it wasn’t called Songbook in the beginning, but I knew the themes and the feeling that I wanted and then it just took its course. I’ve heard you talk about narrative…do you feel you’ve gotten better at telling a narrative through your photos?

d evel o p ed

As a supplemental. As a supplemental! Exactly. Which is good, because it satisfies the need that I have for it, but without making truly narrative work. And I’m still interested in narrative, I’m doing something right now, just a little tiny project that’s incredibly narrative and will be presented in front of an audience, but I like doing those things, but in the end, the most significant work that I do is fundamentally non-narrative. Mm…then how would you describe it, if not narrative? You know, lyrical, whatever. I make this analogy a lot, between poetry and fiction, it’s more like poetry. There’s elements of narrative in it, and it’s suggestive of a story, but it’s not…there’s no plot. And I’ve always been envious of that, because it’s so powerful to have that. But photography’s just not that great at it. Are there any photographers who you think are good at it? Or do you think inherently photography will always run up against that wall? There are books, I think that Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home is the quintessential narrative photography book, it’s just perfect to me, so I think there are great achievements along those lines, and again it’s another spectrum thing, just like poetry…there’s narrative-ish poetry, and then there’s totally fragmentary experimental poetry and there are times when I want to be more one or the other, and I think there are photographers that are succeeding more one way than the other but total storytelling in the way that you put on a movie where there’s a plot and a resolution, that thing just doesn’t really happen in the same way with photography. When you’re putting the book together…when you’re putting any of your books together, are you conscious of a rhythmic flow that you’re trying to achieve from photo to photo? Yeah, exactly, and that’s where the poetry analogy really works, it’s about rhythm and meter and flow and especially beginnings and endings are important. And then finding some rhythm in between and there can be a suggestion of narrative I think, but I’ve never been able to sequence pictures like “this happened, then that happened and that happened,” you know, although, I kind of am doing it in this live slideshow format I’ve been working with, which is kind of something different. That kind of reminds me of La Jetee, which does tell a narrative through

“I’m not, like, telling people to dance or whatever, but there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches I take towards that and I feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something.”

d evel o p ed

Honestly

Human

I’m not a storyteller. I’m not sitting around the table telling family stories, I don’t come from storytelling people a series of images, but there’s also narration, it doesn’t work on its own. It’s true. It’s an interesting phenomenon, because I can get frustrated in films when they lack that narrative pulse and that was the interesting thing working with those filmmakers is that they were jealous of me because I was free of all that. And I was jealous of them because they had the power of it. Have you always had that pull towards narrative? Is there a reason you didn’t go into a field that allowed you to tell narratives? Interesting…I don’t think I had a natural inclination to it, like; I’m not a storyteller. I’m not sitting around the table telling family stories, I don’t come from storytelling people… Hahaha, so I don’t think necessarily, I just think just in the culture at large, it is just the most powerful thing there is and so I’m just aware of its power, I choose not to become a filmmaker and go that route in part because it does seem burdensome to have to do that and to sort of get character from point A to point B just seems tedious to have to do it, and then you have to work with like 20 different people to do it and figure it out and, yeah, I like the act of being a photographer. But I’m sure poets are really jealous, “wow, 500,000 people read that novel and are moved to tears by it, and there are, like, 30 people that read my poetry book, even though I’m a famous poet, and they’re all other poets.” so I think it’s a similar sort of frustration. Right! How did you foresee your career, is this how you saw things going? Hehehehe…no. I came from the art side of things, totally, so I wanted to be an artist. But I also interned in New York…it just seemed impossible to be a successful artist, so I thought I would pursue it as seriously as I could, and maybe someday something would happen, but I didn’t realistically think I would make a living at it. I fantasized about it, and the context in which I fantasized about it would be that sort of museums and shows and stuff like that, but not Magnum photos, not working as a photographer, lecturing, and all that kind of stuff. So in the early days, was the work enough? The process of taking those pictures… No, I’d be lying if I said that. Feel free to lie if you really want to, we have no problem with that! Heh, no, I mean, it would sound great and noble, but I was frustrated and I was unhappy with the work that I was doing, because it was low paid in terms of actual day to day life and frustrated that it’s not getting out there and frustrated that I hadn’t really found my voice, all that kind of stuff. And I was, every year I was like, “should I go to graduate school or not go to graduate school?” Those questions, like everybody else, so it was fairly typical in a lot of ways. But what happened, real life started kicking in and just, family issues or whatever, and I could feel myself getting too old to go to graduate school, if I’m gonna have kids, the responsibilities were piling up and then I got lucky! Hahahaha! Hahahaha! Do you still find the same kind of joy in the process as you did then? I find real joy in the process, it’s not the same kind of joy, I mean I think about that first trip, and that was complete joy, a real innocent joy, but then also I think about the work I did before that, I was really frustrated. And I find moments of great joy, but it’s definitely different now, because there’s an economy that surrounds it. All the people that are dependent on the work, my family, my employees and whatnot, so it’s different, but I still find great joy in it.

October 25th

Cover Studies

a photography magazine

vol. V, fall 2017

developed

vol. V, fall 2017

developed

vol. V, fall 2017

developed a photography magazine

devel oped

a photography magazine volume three

developed issue one

a photography magazine

developed

issue one

developed

developed a photography magazine

issue one

DEV ELO PED a

p h o t o g r a p h y

m a g a z i n e

developed a photography magazine

developed issue one

a photography magazine

developed a

photography

magazine

i s s u e

o n e

developed a photography magazine

volume one

developed a photography magazine

October 30th

Historical Studies

photography by Ansel Adams

capturing

Wild

On April 10, 1927, Ansel Adams clambered through Yosemite’s LeConte Gully trail with four of his friends in tow. Their destination on that chilly spring morning was Half Dome, the park’s iconic granite summit rising some 5,000 feet from the valley’s floor. The aspiring photographer had made the trek before, once with an uncle and later with a painter acquaintance, who nearly broke his neck making the treacherous descent back down the narrow gully. But this time, Adams was intent on capturing the perfect shot of Half Dome to add to his portfolio—a shot that would launch his career as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. For most of his 25 years, Adams had considered himself a musician first and a photographer second. He was an accomplished pianist, and had spent a winter in San Francisco teaching music lessons and performing as part of the Milanvi Trio. But it soon became clear to Adams that his level of talent would only garner him local fame, never national. So he decided to chart a new course. In 1926, his mentor Albert Bender, a patron of the arts in San Francisco, tasked him with producing a portfolio of large-format black-and-white photographs of mountains that he would finance and help the young artist sell. As it turned out, Adams already had 11 of the 18 images he needed to complete the set. But he still hadn’t captured the sheer cliff face of Half Dome to his satisfaction—and that was what he set out to do that April day. He’d taken photographs of Half Dome before. Several were the results of his very first experiments with a camera, after being gifted a Kodak Brownie at age 14 during a family vacation to Yosemite. One of his favorite images from this time was an accidental upside-down shot, snapped as he tumbled off a tree stump. He’d also photographed the monolith more recently, hiking up to the park’s Glacier Point overlook for a panoramic view of its eastern portion. But the resulting photo, with the rock face hooded in shadow, still lacks the drama of Adams’s later images. He would need to get closer to Half Dome, he realized. So Adams and his friends set out to reach the Diving Board, a rock slab hanging some 3,500 feet above the valley floor. It wasn’t an easy hike in the first place, and Adams was loaded down with a 40-pound pack containing his camera, a handful of filters and lenses, and 12 glass plate negatives. This single-minded dedication would become typical of the photographer’s later process, in which he would spend weeks at a time in the mountains, scouting out the perfect location for a single photograph. (In fact, during two such trips, he missed the births of both his children.) En route to the Diving Board, Adams made several exposures, and by the time the

Wilderness

â&#x20AC;&#x153;the man whose images remain synonymous with the American wilderness even today.â&#x20AC;?

group reached Half Dome, he had just two plates left. They sat down for lunch, waiting for the sun to move high enough in the sky to illuminate the entire cliff face. By 2:30 p.m., Adams was ready. For his first shot, he used a yellow filter that he often placed over his lens to subtly darken the blue sky. But almost as soon as he’d released the shutter, he knew something was off. “I began to realize, why, I’m not creating anything of what I feel, because I know the shadow on the cliff is going to be like the sky; it’s going to be gray,” Adams later explained. “It will be an accurate picture of Half Dome, but it won’t have that emotional quality I feel.” Instead, for the second exposure, he used a deep red filter that would darken the sky almost to black and emphasize the white snow on Half Dome’s cliff face. The filter made all the difference, as Adams quickly realized when he developed the photo later that night. He considered Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California (1927) his “first really fine photograph,” a career-changing image that marked his first successful “visualization”—Adams’s term for carefully determining all elements of a photograph before ever releasing the shutter. Over a decade later he would institutionalize this idea with his Zone System, a photographic technique that is still taught in schools today. On the strength of Monolith and the other photos from his portfolio, Adams’s commercial and artistic career began to blossom. He would go on to become of the greatest photographers of his time, the man whose images remain synonymous with the American wilderness even today. Together with Edward Weston, he would found the f.64 group that reimagined the photographic medium; he was instrumental in the creation of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. And while Monolith may have been Adams’s first significant photograph of Yosemite, it certainly wasn’t his last. Many of his most famous images, from Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California (1944) to Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, California (1948), preserve the park in all its natural splendor—enthralling generations of Americans just as Yosemite had enthralled the photographer ever since his first teenaged trip.

Wild photography by Ansel Adams

American wilderness

â&#x20AC;&#x153;the man whose images remain synonymous with the American wilderness even today.â&#x20AC;?

photography by Ansel Adams

Wild

America

photography by Ansel Adams

Wild photography by Ansel Adams

page ten

Wild America

America photography by Ansel Adams

developed

page ten

Wild America

developed

The aspiring photographer had made the trek before, once with an uncle and later with a painter acquaintance, who nearly broke his neck making the treacherous descent back down the narrow gully. But this time, Adams was intent on capturing the perfect shot of Half Dome to add to his portfolio—a shot that would launch his career as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. For most of his 25 years, Adams had considered himself a musician first and a photographer second. He was an accomplished pianist, and had spent a winter in San Francisco teaching music lessons and performing as part of the Milanvi Trio. But it soon became clear to Adams that his level of talent would only garner him local fame, never national. So he decided to chart a new course. In 1926, his mentor Albert Bender, a patron of the arts in San Francisco, tasked him with producing a portfolio of large-format black-and-white photographs of mountains that he would finance and help the young artist sell. As it turned out, Adams already had 11 of the 18 images he needed to complete the set. But he still hadn’t captured the sheer cliff face of Half Dome to his satisfaction— and that was what he set out to do that April day. He’d taken photographs of Half Dome before. Several were the results of his very first experiments with a camera, after being gifted a Kodak Brownie at age 14 during a family vacation to Yosemite. One of his favorite images from this time was an accidental upside-down shot, snapped as he tumbled off a tree stump. He’d also photographed the monolith more recently, hiking up to the park’s Glacier Point overlook for a panoramic view of its eastern portion. But the resulting photo, with the rock face hooded in shadow, still lacks the drama of Adams’s later images. He would need to get closer to Half Dome, he realized. So Adams and his friends set out to reach the Diving Board, a rock slab hanging some 3,500 feet above the valley floor. It wasn’t an easy hike in the first place, and Adams was

loaded down with a 40-pound pack containing his camera, a handful of filters and lenses, and 12 glass plate negatives. This single-minded dedication would become typical of the photographer’s later process, in which he would spend weeks at a time in the mountains, scouting out the perfect location for a single photograph. (In fact, during two such trips, he missed the births of both his children.) En route to the Diving Board, Adams made several exposures, and by the time the group reached Half Dome, he had just two plates left. They sat down for lunch, waiting for the sun to move high enough in the sky to illuminate the entire cliff face. By 2:30 p.m., Adams was ready. For his first shot, he used a yellow filter that he often placed over his lens to subtly darken the blue sky. But almost as soon as he’d released the shutter, he knew something was off. “I began to realize, why, I’m not creating anything of what I feel, because I know the shadow on the cliff is going to be like the sky; it’s going to be gray,” Adams later explained. “It will be an accurate picture of Half Dome, but it won’t have that emotional quality I feel.” Instead, for the second exposure, he used a deep red filter that would darken the sky almost to black and emphasize the white snow on Half Dome’s cliff face. The filter made all the difference, as Adams quickly realized when he developed the photo

the American wilderness

developed

October 30th

Sontag Studies

On Photography Susasn Sontag

To collect photographs is to collect the world. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not

An excerpt Plato’s Cave

immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

Photographs furnish evidence Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

an exeprt from Playtos Closet

PHOTOGRAPHY Susan Sontag

packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit

imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

PHO TOG RAP HY

AN ESSAY BY SUSAN SONTAG

an exeprt from Playtos Closet

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters.

An essay by Susan Sontag

n Photograph

an exeprt from Platos Cave

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

page twenty

Honestly Human

October 30th

Final Spreads

developed

issue three, fall 2017

a photography magazine

deleloped, issue three fall 2017

inside

page three

Wild America An article about Ansel Adams

Honestly Human An interview with Alec Soth

On Photography An essay by Susan Sontag

inside

page four

Wild America

Bridalveil Fall Yosemite National Park, California 1927

America photography by Ansel Adams

developed

“I began to realize, why, I’m not creating anything of what I feel”

developed

page seven

Down Bishop Pass Sierra Nevada, California 1930 Monolith, the Face of Half Dome Yosemite National Park 1927

He’d taken photographs of Half Dome before. Several were the results of his very first experiments with a camera, after being gifted a Kodak Brownie at age 14 during a family vacation to Yosemite. One of his favorite images from this time was an accidental upside-down shot, snapped as he tumbled off a tree stump. He’d also photographed the monolith more recently, hiking up to the park’s Glacier Point overlook for a panoramic view of its eastern portion. But the resulting photo, with the rock face hooded in shadow, still lacks the drama of Adams’s later images. He would need to get closer to Half Dome, he realized. So Adams and his friends set out to reach the Diving Board, a rock slab hanging some 3,500 feet above the valley floor. It wasn’t an easy hike in the first place, and Adams was loaded down with a 40-pound pack containing his camera, a handful of filters and lenses, and 12 glass plate negatives. This single-minded dedication would become typical of the photographer’s later process, in which he would spend weeks at a time

Wild America

in the mountains, scouting out the perfect location for a single photograph. (In fact, during two such trips, he missed the births of both his children.) En route to the Diving Board, Adams made several exposures, and by the time the group reached Half Dome, he had just two plates left. They sat down for lunch, waiting for the sun to move high enough in the sky to illuminate the entire cliff face. By 2:30 p.m., Adams was ready. For his first shot, he used a yellow filter that he often placed over his lens to subtly darken the blue sky. But almost as soon as he’d released the shutter, he knew something was off. “I began to realize, why, I’m not creating anything of what I feel, because I know the shadow on the cliff is going to be like the sky; it’s going to be gray,” Adams later explained. “It will be an accurate picture of Half Dome, but it won’t have that emotional quality I feel.” Instead, for the second exposure, he used a deep red filter that would darken the sky almost to black and emphasize the white snow on Half Dome’s cliff face. The filter made all the difference, as Adams quickly realized when he developed the photo later that night. He considered Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California (1927) his “first really fine photograph,” a career-changing image that marked his first successful “visualization”—Adams’s term for carefully determining all elements of a photograph before ever releasing the shutter. Over a decade later he would institutionalize this idea with his Zone System, a photographic technique that is still taught in schools today. On the strength of Monolith and the other photos from his portfolio, Adams’s commercial and artistic career began to blossom. He would go on to become of the greatest photographers of his time, the man whose images remain synonymous with the American wilderness even today. Together with Edward Weston, he would found the f.64 group that reimagined the photographic medium; he was instrumental in the creation of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. And while Monolith may have been Adams’s first significant photograph of Yosemite, it certainly wasn’t his last.

“Adams was intent on capturing the perfect shot

of Half Dome to add to his portfolio—a shot that

would launch his career as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. “

developed

page nine

Moon and Half Dome ca. 1960 Parmelian Prints of The High Sierras Sierra Nevada, California 1930

Wild America

An essay by Susan Sontag

n Photograph

an exeprt from Platos Cave

tives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film—the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity—and ubiquity—of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption—the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed—seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

page twenty

Honestly Human

H devel oped

page eleven

Honestly Human

Honestly

Human an interview with alec soth

page twelve

Honestly Human

The more interviews we do, the more I find myself straying from the familiar, from the photography I grew up noticing.

Alec Soth is far afield from the portraiture I’ve previously been drawn to, but the skill with which he crafts his photography books is undeniable. The potency of his work lies in the emotions his books are able to bring out in the viewer, both from the single images and the sum of those images sequenced just so. His work really turned me on to the ability of a photography book to serve as more than just a collection of photos, but as a propulsive tool through which a visual theme can be evoked. And the guy was just great to chat with. Very open and light-hearted, you’re gonna dig it. You tend not to give a lot of direction, you tend to find your subjects as they are, yeah? Or do you give direction? I’m by no means a purist in this way, so I…the way I usually describe it is being like, when you take a family portrait and like “okay, let’s go over here by the tree and then Johnny take off your hat,” you know? It’s like…I work the scene, there are pictures that are completely as they happened, and then there are other things that are more formal, and more set up. I’m not, like, telling people to dance or whatever, but there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches I take towards that and I feel like in personal work, I don’t have rules. It’s different if I’m working for the New York Times or something. Do you find your personal work more liberating than your editorial work because of that? It’s just a different beast and Songbook is a collection of these things, but you know, for example: The bulk of the work was made with this thing, the LBM Dispatch. And the Dispatch was great because it was like doing editorial work but without a boss. So yeah, it was definitely more liberating, for sure. Do you…think differently when you’re using more flexible equipment, do you notice your thought process changing from 8×10 to digital? Yeah, I mean, so much has changed. It’s hard to analyze what’s related to technology and what’s related to me. Because I’m a different photographer than I was 10 years ago. A different person and it’s different equipment. I mean, the funny thing is that I made work that bears quite a resemblance to this (Songbook) before Sleeping By The Mississippi, a book that got published called Looking for Love and so I don’t know, it’s hard to analyze these things, because it’s a mish-mash of different changes. I read some other interviews you’ve done and one of the biggest things that jumped out at me is that you’ve been making work since graduating school, but it wasn’t until you were thirty-five that you had the Whitney Biennial and got discovered. Right. How did you keep the fire burning for those years where you were making work but not a success, per se? Like anybody…the people who work at my studio, they’re all photographers, and they all have to come to work for me and then they have to figure out, in their spare time, how to do it and I think that phase is really important, because it’s where most people fall away and maybe they’re doing it for other reasons or it’s too much work or whatever it is, it’s a long slog to find your voice and also to just endure, there’s an element of endurance to the thing that kind of separates you out, after a time. And how did I do it? Just like everybody else, slogging away, trying to find time. I mean the big revelation for me was that I needed to travel,

Alec Soth The Arkansas Cajun’s backup bunker from ‘Broken Manuel’

d evel o p ed

page fourteen

Honestly Human

Alec Soth “West Point, New York” (2008)

d evel o p ed

page sixteen

Honestly Human

I didn’t know I needed to travel, but I later learned that I thrive on that and I was a bit…my development was stymied because I was staying close to home.

Heh…no. Always my struggle with photography is with narrative…you know what I’ve gotten good at…this is like bubbling up for the first time, it’s like…

d evel o p ed

As a supplemental. As a supplemental! Exactly. Which is good, because it satisfies the need that I have for it, but without making truly narrative work. And I’m still interested in narrative, I’m doing something right now, just a little tiny project that’s incredibly narrative and will be presented in front of an audience, but I like doing those things, but in the end, the most significant work that I do is fundamentally non-narrative. Mm…then how would you describe it, if not narrative? You know, lyrical, whatever. I make this analogy a lot, between poetry and fiction, it’s more like poetry. There’s elements of narrative in it, and it’s suggestive of a story, but it’s not…there’s no plot. And I’ve always been envious of that, because it’s so powerful to have that. But photography’s just not that great at it. Are there any photographers who you think are good at it? Or do you think inherently photography will always run up against that wall? There are books, I think that Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home is the quintessential narrative photography book, it’s just perfect to me, so I think there are great achievements along those lines, and again it’s another spectrum thing, just like poetry… there’s narrative-ish poetry, and then there’s totally fragmentary experimental poetry and there are times when I want to be more one or the other, and I think there are photographers that are succeeding more one way than the other but total storytelling in the way that you put on a movie where there’s a plot and a resolution, that thing just doesn’t really happen in the same way with photography. When you’re putting the book together…when you’re putting any of your books together, are you conscious of a rhythmic flow that you’re trying to achieve from photo to photo? Yeah, exactly, and that’s where the poetry analogy really works, it’s about rhythm and meter and flow and especially beginnings and endings are important. And then finding some rhythm in between and there can be a suggestion of narrative I think, but I’ve never been able to sequence pictures like “this happened, then that happened and that happened,” you know, although, I kind of am doing it in this live slideshow format I’ve been working with, which is kind of something different. That kind of reminds me of La Jetee, which does tell a narrative through

d evel o p ed

page eighteen

Honestly Human

Alec Soth The Arkansas Cajun’s backup bunker from ‘Broken Manuel’

Hahahaha! Do you still find the same kind of joy in the process as you did then? I find real joy in the process, it’s not the same kind of joy, I mean I think about that first trip, and that was complete joy, a real innocent joy, but then also I think about the work I did before that, I was really frustrated. And I find moments of great joy, but it’s definitely different now, because there’s an economy that surrounds it. All the people that are dependent on the work, my family, my employees and whatnot, so it’s different, but I still find great joy in it.

Issue three

developed An article about Ansel Adams An interview with Alec Soth An essay by Susan Sontag

Wild America Honestly Human On Photography

Developed was designed by Carson Keeling for Typographic Systems, 2017. All of the images and text were sourced from publications and the internet and are only being used for design education purposes. Fonts: ITC Clearface (Black, Bold, and Black Italic). Printed at Jayhawk Ink, Lawrence KS.