by ELISE REINA
MAGAZINE SPREADS feat. Marilyn Minter Man Ray Susan Sontag
MARILYN MINTER
Monday, October 2
MARILYN MINTER When I walked into Marilyn Minter’s studio late one afternoon last fall, she and her assistants had just completed a painting—a foggy, steamy image streaming with water droplets behind which you could see the misty blur of pink lips, seemingly post-exhale, and two gleaming white front teeth that were doll-like, but also vampiric. Like all of Minter’s more recent enamel paintings, it’s difficult to believe that they aren’t the original photographs upon which the works are based. “Everything you see is behind glass,” Minter told me, as we watched her assistant add painstaking brushes of paint to another, similarly condensation-heavy painting. Minter began her career as a photographer as a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she created a black-andwhite series of her drug-addicted mother under the mentorship of Diane Arbus, and began collaborating with German Expressionist painter Christof Kohlhofer upon moving to New York in 1976. She earned notoriety in the late 1980s and 1990s with heavily excoriated porn paintings—a series of decidedly Pop dot paintings depicting pornographic scenes embellished with pixelated streaks of paint that foreshadow her signature fluid aesthetic. Around this time, in 1990, Minter also became the first artist to eschew traditional print advertising, instead buying a television ad—$1,800 for 30 seconds—for her exhibition at Simon Watson Gallery during The Late Show With David Letterman, a video titled
100 Food Porn. Since then, Minter has become synonymous with her slick, hedonistic, instantly recognizable enamel works—ones that drip with pearls, glitter, paint, sweat, and dirt—which she bases on hyperrealist photos taken on a macro lens and later Photoshops together. In these works, the images are seemingly captured in medias res of erotic motion, a voluptuously suspended moment in time. Minter’s first major museum retrospective, a traveling exhibition perfectly titled “Pretty/ Dirty,” opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston last year, before moving to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, where it just closed. It will open at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, on April 2, before it reaches the Brooklyn Museum in the fall. “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” has been published in conjunction with her first major retrospective, now at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. It contains her work from 1969 on, and encomiums from the likes of Richard Hell (“She is a filthy sensualist, just like God”); and it marks a career pocked by notoriety and periods of paralysis — elevated, now, in her 60s, by sudden fame. Excommunicated from the art world in the early ’90s for her cheerful paintings of hard-core pornography — Minter said feminists accused her of sexism — today she shows her work at the Venice Biennale; she’s collected by the Guggenheim and Jay Z and is
a godmother to a new generation of artists experimenting with what she calls “the feminine grotesque.” Like her images, “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” is seductive and glittery, an object of desire. It highlights what appears to be almost innate talent (Diane Arbus was a fan of her student work) and an equally preternatural ability to attract censure — as well as some faithful obsessions. Minter taught herself to draw by tracing princesses and the comic-strip heroine Brenda Starr, a well-upholstered “lady reporter” modeled on Rita Hayworth. She’s always been moved and amused by the trappings of gender, its rites and representations in pop culture. In her 20s, she began to tap the seam central to her work, what she calls “the pathology of glamour.” As a student at the University of Florida, she took the photographs that would become the “Coral Ridge Towers” series (1969), featuring her mother, a Southern belle gone to seed, posing stoned and imperious as she freshens her lipstick and dyes her eyebrows. Minter took just 12 shots, six of which are included in this book. It’s astonishing to see her themes emerge so fully formed: the eroticism of the beauty ritual, the armature of glamour, the pathos and delicious anarchy that ensue when the mask begins to slip. In her studio, Minter and I sat down with a book of photos from Gordon Parks’s “Segregation Story” show, which she saw at the
High Museum in Atlanta in 2014. In late 2015, she co-curated an iteration of the show at Salon 94, the gallery that represents her in New York. Our interview, which has been lightly edited and condensed, follows below. People forget that, for a long time, these “shallow” interests were the only ones women were allowed. Why shouldn’t we be proud of our varied talents? Exactly. I’ve been saying that all along, but look how they shame young girls if they work with any kind of sexuality. [Women] already have so much sexual power that if we actually start owning it, my god, we’re ferocious. [to an assistant] Put her on the list! Do your photos mean something beyond their aesthetic? I like to make things that nobody else makes. And I want [the viewer] to be surprised, so I never do fashion. I’ve never shot a whole person, only parts. No one ever asks me to do anything but makeup [editorials] once in awhile, like I just shot for W—I put [the model] behind frozen glass, and I didn’t know what was going to happen. It was fun. I just did it for fun. Where do you think you fall in the annals of art history? Sometimes I’m considered a Pop painter, but I’m so untidy next to the cleanedup versions like Lichtenstein or Rosenquist or Warhol did. I’m way more untidy, because that’s where I see the human element—where I sweat it up or make it messy. And yet, they look perfect. Yeah, well, my theory is that you can make pictures of anything
as long as you make them beautiful. You’ve just got to take out the narrative and let people hear you. I’m making images of things that might be disgusting even, like strings of spit, but I’m trying to make them gorgeous. It’s also sort of a way to be able to have a fiery red bush painting of mine in your living room.But I do like disturbing imagery, but I also like things to be fresh. Like Sandy Kim [who is known for, among other things, photographing her period stains —Ed.]. I’ve been begging her to make prints of her images for me. Anyway, that’s what I’m interested in, so when I do commercial jobs for magazines, I always hope that all the other photos in the magazine will look sort of the same, but then there’s my page. I’m always looking for my page, but they always end up picking my boring photos. Now I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not going to give them choices anymore. A version of the feminist critique still dogs her. Many of her recent photographs of women could be advertisements or have been (she’s designed campaigns for Tom Ford, M.A.C. Cosmetics and Jimmy Choo). She’s frequently asked if she’s ¬celebrating or condemning fashion, to stake her position more explicitly. She usually demurs. “I’m not trying to define or criticize culture,” she has said. “I’m trying to make you feel all these things when you look — the pleasure of looking but also the shame, because you want to look even though the images make you hate yourself.” She likes complicated ways of seeing, muddled messages. Her video “Smash” (2014)
begins like a high-fashion commercial: A woman in stilettos poses for a moment in a silvery puddle of water — and then launches a terrific kick through the pane of glass separating her from the viewer. What seems coquettish at first turns into an athletic performance, full of fury. The model, the caged animal, strikes back. Minter doesn’t denigrate fashion or porn; she harnesses their powers (just as she harnesses the powers of commercial mediums — television and print advertisements, billboards). She’s interested, she says, in “debased” languages, in everything that excites the limbic system — shiny things, scary things, gold and babies and food and sex — and in confusing our networks of disgust and desire. She’s interested in the flinch; see “Green Pink Caviar” (2009), her funny and obscene eight-minute video (displayed, improbably, in the middle of Times Square), in which models smear candy and cake decorations with their mouths. Minter filmed them from beneath the glass on which the food was heaped; lips and tongues — so hugely magnified we can see every papilla — roving slowly, like dreamy, enormous eels. It triggers almost primal fascination, revulsion and laughter.
SHINOLA 2008, C Print
PIERCE 2006, C Print
MISTY 2001, C Print
XOXO 2015, C Print BALL SPITTER 2012, C Print
FAT LIP 2015, C Print
BIG MAC 2014, C Print BARBED 2004, C Print
SPLIT 2003, C Print
TWINS 2005, C Print SIREN 2014, C Print
PORN GIRD 2
PROMICUOUS SEXUAL QUIRKY VIVID LAVISH LUSCIOUS GLITTER MESSY OFF-BEAT DRIPPING FOGGY SHINING DIRTY RAUNCHY
OBSCENE INDECENT KINKY LUXURIOUS X-RATED ABSTRACT FABULOUS KINETIC GLAMOUROUS PORNOGRAPHY FASHION GRITTY FEMINIST DROOLING STEAMY SOAKING PRETTY SLICK SOILED SMEARED SENSUAL FLAWED
SPLATTERED OOZING SEDUCTION PLEASURE DESIRABLE IMPERFECTION PIXILATED EROTIC HALLUCINATORY GROTESQUE DISTORTION TEMPTING COUTURE GLOSSY
KEY WORDS Monday, October 2 VIVID- (OF A COLOR) INTENSELY DEEP OR BRIGHT. LUXURIOUS- EXTREMELY COMFORTABLE, ELEGANT, OR ENJOYABLE, ESPECIALLY IN A WAY THAT INVOLVES GREAT EXPENSE. MESSY- UNTIDY OR DIRTY. FLAWED- BLEMISHED, DAMAGED, OR IMPERFECT IN SOME WAY. EROTIC- RELATING TO OR TENDING TO AROUSE SEXUAL DESIRE OR EXCITEMENT. HALLUCINATORY- RESEMBLING, INVOLVING, OR BEING A HALLUCINATION
QUOTES
“—ONES THAT DRIP WITH PEARLS, GLITTER, PAINT, SWEAT, AND DIRT—” “SHE IS A FILTHY SENSUALIST, JUST LIKE GOD.” “I’M WAY MORE UNTIDY, BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE I SEE THE HUMAN ELEMENT—WHERE I SWEAT IT UP OR MAKE IT MESSY.” “I’M TRYING TO MAKE YOU FEEL ALL THESE THINGS WHEN YOU LOOK — THE PLEASURE OF LOOKING BUT ALSO THE SHAME, BECAUSE YOU WANT TO LOOK EVEN THOUGH THE IMAGES MAKE YOU HATE YOURSELF.” “MINTER DOESN’T DENIGRATE FASHION OR PORN; SHE HARNESSES THEIR POWERS.”
WORD COMBOS Wednesday, October 4
KINKY COUTURE FLAWED COUTURE* FILTHY LUXURY* STEAMY EROTICA* FLAWED GLAMOUR STEAMY SEDUCTION KINKY IMPERFECTION
ARTICLE TITLES
MAKE IT MESSY MINTER’S FLITHY SENSUALITY MINTER’S GIRL POWER MINTER IS COMING MINTER WONDERLAND THE ARMATURE OF GLAMOUR EROTIC MINTER
KEY IMAGE
PECHA KUCHA Monday, October 9
SLIDE 1
SLIDE 2
SLIDE 3
SLIDE 4
SLIDE 5
SLIDE 6
SLIDE 7
PRETTY/DIRTY SLIDE 8
FOOD PORN
SLIDE 9
SLIDE 10
“I think there’s this huge glass celling for women owning sexuality. And especially young women. If you’re an old lady like me, I can do anything now.” -Marilyn Minter
MAN RAY
Wednesday, October 11
MAN RAY In 1915, Man Ray met French artist Marcel Duchamp, and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York group of Dada artists. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “camera-less” pictures, which he called rayographs. Born Emmanuel Rudnitzky, visionary artist Man Ray was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father worked as a tailor. The family moved to Brooklyn when Ray was a young child. From an early year, Ray showed great artistic ability. After finishing high school in 1908, he followed his passion for art; he studied drawing with Robert Henri at the Ferrer Center, and frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291. It later became apparent that Ray had been influenced by Stieglitz’s photographs. He utilized a similar style, snapping images that provided an unvarnished look at the subject. Ray also found inspiration at the Armory Show of 1913, which featured the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. That same year, he moved to a burgeoning art colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey. His work was also evolving. After experimenting with a Cubist style of painting, he moved toward abstraction. In 1914, Ray married Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, but their union fell apart after a few years. He made a more lasting friendship around this time, becoming close to fellow artist Marcel Duchamp. Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray became a leading figure in the Dada movement in New York. Dadaism, which takes its name from the French nickname for a rocking horse, challenged existing notions of art and literature, and encouraged spontaneity. One of Ray’s famous works from this time was “The Gift,” a sculpture that incorporated two found objects. He glued tacks to the work surface of an iron to create the piece. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris. There, he continued to be a part of
the artistic avant garde, rubbing elbows with such famous figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Ray became famous for his portraits of his artistic and literary associates. He also developed a thriving career as a fashion photographer, taking pictures for such magazines as Vogue. These commercial endeavors supported his fine art efforts. A photographic innovator, Ray discovered a new way to create interesting images by accident in his darkroom. Called “Rayographs,” these photos were made by placing and manipulating objects on pieces of photosensitive paper. One of Ray’s other famous works from this time period was 1924’s “Violin d’Ingres.” This modified photograph features the bare back of his lover, a performer named Kiki, styled after a painting by neoclassical French artist Jean August Dominique Ingres. In a humorous twist, Ray added to two black shapes to make her back look like a musical instrument. He also explored the artistic possibilities of film, creating such now classic Surrealistic works as L’Etoile de Mer (1928). Around this time, Ray also experimented with a technique called the Sabatier effect, or solarization, which adds a silvery, ghostly quality to the image. Ray soon found another muse, Lee Miller, and featured her in his work. A cut-out of her eye is featured on the 1932 found-object sculpture “Object to Be Destroyed,” and her lips fill the sky of “Observatory Time” (1936). In 1940, Ray fled the war in Europe and moved to California. He married model and dancer Juliet Browner the following year, in a unique double ceremony with artist Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Returning to Paris in 1951, Ray continued to explore different artistic media. He focused much of his energy on painting and sculpture. Branching out in a new direction, Ray began writing his memoir. The project took more than a decade to complete, and his autobiography, Self Portrait, was finally published in 1965. In his final years, Man Ray continued to exhibit his art, with shows in New York, London, Paris and other cities in the years before his
death. He passed away on November 18, 1976, in his beloved Paris. He was 86 years old. His innovative works can be found on display in museums around the world, and he is remembered for his artistic wit and originality. As friend Marcel Duchamp once said, “It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paint brush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind.�
SUSAN SONTAG
Wednesday, October 11
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 them; publishers compile them. 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 circula-
tion. 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 selfeffacing 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, pho-
tography 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 reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
DAVID CARSON David Carson graphic design platform figure that many overlooked in the 90’s when he was inherently the most famous graphic design figure at that time. Carson upholds many clients that some would die to get their hands on, that being Quicksilver, Nike, Pepsi Cola, Ray Bans, MTV Global, Nine Inch Nails, and others. However, he does have a band of people who do not support him and his eccentric design style. In the 90’s, as stated in 2004 issued article “Creative Review”, the writer noted that, “The nature of Carson’s work has also sat uncomfortably within the design establishment.” Carson style was deemed an unacceptable, and so was his design knowledge. He had little to no design education going into his career, and this angered people when he became notable. With his own unique, grungy style, Carson is now an art director even if it design wasn’t his career path. He originally went to school for a degree in sociology and enjoyed his fair share of surfing. While living a lax life, Carson had thoughts of becoming a professional surfer, which explains all his surfing and snowboard companies he has as clients. Carson kicked off the grunge typography era with his works, the works that many disliked. Carson did have admirers because of his edginess and going against the grain of the design world. His admirers see his since of experimentation as successful and an inspiration future designers. He has been considered as “the father of grunge” and a distinctive inspiration to the design world. Art Gun is Carson’s magazine he directs where he introduces innovative ways of typography and
messy layouts that still seem to make sense. Carson’s covers for Ray Gun seemed to intrigue the younger generation, which got him hired by big companies for brand advertisement. His work is characterized to be chaotic in typography, with overlapping photos that are organized in a disarray. This is what sets the pristine, rule following graphic designers off about his work. For his February 1993 issue, he placed a picture of J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. upside down to represent his feelings of how much he hated the media. This is how Carson reacted to his comments about his hatred for the press, it added more of an edge to J. Mascis and his emotion. In another Art Gun magazine in 1995, the January issue had no grid, he let the music and individual articles dictate the way the magazine was to be laid out. Since David Carson had no formal training for design, he thought that benefitted him in the end. However, it did help him learn a lot about all the things he wasn’t supposed to do. In a interview with designboom he told the interviewer, “I just did what felt right. My starting point was and is, always to first read the brief, article or whatever it is I’m given.” Carson is more focused on the personable side of designing. His connection he makes with the people he works for is more important to him. This emotional connection he makes with people helps him dive into his work with more passion, and just enjoys making stuff that makes since to him.
GAIL ANDERSON Gail Anderson was born in Bronx, New York in 1962. She was a typographic extraordinaire known mostly for her work in the Rolling Stone magazine. Here she served for the magazine from 1987-2002 as an associate art director, deputy art director, and then stabilizing her spot as the magazine’s senior art director. Not only is she known for her graphics, but in the writing and education fields as well. Anderson is the director of design and digital media for the Visual Arts Press at the School of Visual Arts, and is also a partner at Anderson Newton Design. She is an author of the book Outside the Box and is a co-author of 12 other books on design and other looks of pop culture. One of her most notable awards are the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Medal from the AIGA. After her time with the Rolling Stone magazine, Anderson joined SpotCo which is one of New York’s largest entertainment design agencies. Here Anderson is now the creative director of design. Most of her designs from this agency are up on billboards advertising Broadway shows. While at Rolling Stone, Gail was in charge of “the eclectic and conceptual typography that personified the magazine’s distinctive design”, as Steven Heller puts in his interview with Gail Anderson. Typography is something that Gail found as a key component to good design. In her interview with Steven Heller, she tells Heller that, “Young designers claim to be “concept” people who don’t think the type matters, always with the “I want to make it clean” refrain.” As
a young designer, I can’t help but agree with her. Anderson upholds typographic literacy and craft. She believes that since we are able to have access to so many fonts, young people are losing their creative ability to use typographic solutions. On Anderson’s quest to becoming a graphic designer, she knew since she was very young that she had a passion for art and design. She even at Paula Scher as a portfolio teacher at the School of Visual Arts. This portfolio she built up helped her gain her first job at Vintage Books for about a year. Soon after she got a position at The Boston Globe where she worked exclusively for Lynn Staley and Lucy Bartholomay. In her Steven Heller interview she told Heller about her love for her job at Rolling Stone. She states that, “I love magazines, and the economy was booming when I started at Rolling Stone.” Anderson admits that she a tough time with illustration when starting her new jobs but quickly learned to love it as she got better at it. Gail Anderson was a powerful typographic figure in our design society. Her breadth and knowledge in the design field is inspirational to those who strive to accomplish what she’s done in her lifetime.
TIBOR KALMAN Tibor Kalman rose in the mid–1980’s as a design thinking influencer. As an American graphic designer with an Hungarian origin background, he is best known from his Colors magazine. Before starting his design lifestyle, his family fled from Hungary to escape the Soviet reign that took over the country. He soon found himself at NYU in journalism classes – classes that he quickly dropped. Then with nothing else to do, he started at a New York bookstore that became Barnes & Noble where he became the in-house design department supervisor. To push off from this great start, he started the notable design firm M&Co with this wife where they gained diverse clients like Limited Corporation, Talking Heads, and Restaurant Florent. Not much longer down the road, he became the founding editorin-chief for his recognizable magazine, Colors, and I stated earlier. Through the use of graphic design, Kalman wanted to use it to raise public awareness on multiple social injustices that were happening in the world at the time. Kalman saw design in a way that was beneficial to others and no himself. He defined good design as “unexpected and untried” as apart of his social mission to inform of the social issues. While running M&Co, he tried to reach out to clients such as Restaurant Florent to boost these social messages. It is said that on one Christmas he sent all his clients and colleagues small cardboard boxes that were filled with boxed homeless-shelter meals. However this merit of goodwill gained backlash
from people, it was thought to be a ploy to gain more attention to the M&Co company. While designing for clients, he wasn’t too worried about using the same typefaces or colors, but a design that would help the client and culture they were asking for. Kalman believed in the message the design was to give to the public for these clients. For example, when he made a real estate brochure, he positioned his design based on the benefits it would offer the low-income community. While talking about his clients, Tibor said, “We’re not here to give them what’s safe and expedient. We’re not here to help eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We’re here to make them think about design that’s dangerous and unpredictable. We’re here to inject art into commerce.” His persistent service to the culture led him to write a book to explain himself and his thoughts of design doing good in our society, he named it Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist. Tibor Kalman died on May 2, 1999 from a great battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was influential in the way designers are to think. His love for the society helped him become an inspirational figure of goodwill, one that was always willing to give before he was ready to receive anything from anyone. With his sublime, humbled soul, his legacy lives in his advertisements that sometimes focused on AIDS, racism, refugees, violence, and warfare.
ALEXEY BRODOVITCH Alexey Brodovitch is a Russian-born photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for the art direction of fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Alexey was born into a wealthy family that was forced to moved to Moscow during the RussoJapanese War. During this time Brodovitch was sent to study at a prestigious institution by the name of Prince Tenisheff School. Although he had no formal training in art through his childhood, Alexey’s intentions were to eventually enroll in the Imperial Art Academy. This dream was quickly abandoned when he decided to run away from home to join the Russian army. His father, being a military general, quickly had him returned home so he could finish school. Brodovitch later arrived in Paris where he wanted to become a painter. Instead, he was exposed to Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Futurism, Cubism, Purism and Surrealism. After these various artistic influences, Alexey came upon his beginnings as a designer. Brodovitch played a crucial role in the introduction to the United States of a simplified, more “modern” style of graphic design that started in the 1920’s in Europe. Through Alexey’s teaching, he was known to create a vast amount of designers that became sympathetic to his belief of visual freshness and immediacy. Intrigued by photography, he wanted to make it the backbone of Harper’s Bazaar, where he used the work of European artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dali, and A.M. Cassandre, as well as photographers Bill Brandt, Brasai. and Henri Cartier-Bresson. His development of an expressionistic, primal style of picture-taking that had become the most dominant style of photography in the 1950’s. Brodovitch entered the United States in the 1930’s in hopes to start a department of advertising. This later became known as the Philadelphia College of Art. Where students were trained in European design, along with taking on freelance illustration assignments in Philly and New York. Throughout Alexey’s career, he continued to teach, focusing on illustration, graphic design and photography.
HERB LUBALIN Herbert “Herb” Lubalin was an American graphic design born in 1918 in New York. He entered Cooper Union at 17 years-old and became interested by the possibilities presented by typography as a communicative implement. Lubalin eventually landed at Reiss Advertising, and later worked for Sudler & Hennessey, where his considerable skills of design, typography, and photographic talent was practiced. Pistilli Roman was Lubalin’s first official typeface. He served with Sudler & Hennessey for 19 years before going off to start his own firm in 1964. Herb Lubalin, Inc. was a private studio that gave him freedom to take on a variety of wide ranging projects. This is where he became most well known for his work. The collaboration between Lubalin and Ginzburg was a succession of magazines by the name of Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde. A lot of history in the graphic design world had been written—and designed—by Herb Lubalin. Herbs work takes you quickly into the heart of a very big subject: the theory of meaning and meaning is communicated—how an idea is moved from one mind to another. He believed that typography was the key to this theory. Although, Lubalin did not believe that “typography” was the word that applied to his work because this essentially means mechanically putting characters down on a page—designing with letters. He believed his work was best described as “typographics” because you have to put a name on things to make them memorable. He contribution to our times go well beyond just design in the same way of that his typographic innovations go beyond the 26 letters, 10 numerals, and handful of punctuation marks that compromise our visual and literal vocabulary. His imagination and insight have created endless possibilities for creativity. Herb Lubalin pushed the norm of copy-driven advertising and created new dimensions in many aspects. He helped to push back the boundaries of the impact and perception of design from an ill-defined communication medium that was capable of putting bid ideas smack dab in the public eye.
NEVILLE BRODY Neville Brody is from the English decent and is a designer, typographer, and art director. Brody is an alumni from the London College of Communication and Hornsey College of Art. His most renowned work is to be found in The Face magazine. Not only did he get to work with the elaborate team in The Face, but he got to design record covers for artists such as Carbaret Volitaire, The Bongos, and Depeche Mode. Brody holds enough talent to uphold a permanent spot in the Museum of Modern Art for some of his work. Brody attended Minchenden Grammar school and studied the fine arts before moving fully into graphics at the London College of Printing. While in his collegiate career in London, the age of punk rock began to influence pop culture at the time. This became an influence on Brody’s work and his work ethic in school. Unfortunately, it got him thrown out of the London College of Printing, leading him to designing posters for student college concerts. This influence of design came from the Dadaist movement. This movement of design was based on surrealism and dynamic perceptions of the world. Most of Neville Brody’s experimentation came from his own font he created, that being a sans-serif based font. These self-made poster designs caught the attention of local record companies that led the grunge, punk rock scene. Brody implemented some of his design in his well-known work in The Face magazine. In The Face, British monthly subscribers were used to the basic structural rules that existed in the British typographic culture at the time. Brody pushed these limits and broke the original boundaries that were set by the first group of designers to come through the magazine. By adding his own style and alluring aesthetic, drawing in more readers simple because of his designs he was coming out with. He also worked for other international magazine and newspaper companies such as City Limits, Lei, Per Lui, Actuel and Arena, The Guardian, and Observer. One of Brody’s most recognized projects is the FUSE project he created in 1991 with Jon Wozencroft. This magazine was interactive in a sense that it communicated it’s visual language in this age of ever changing technology and media culture. The FUSE magazine had themes of codes, religion, and even pornography. With Brody’s creativity sparked an influence among the graphic design world. Neville had an exploratory way to express his on-edge style.
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE Esquire magazine editor, Harold T.P. Hayes had a revolutionary idea to bring his staff together and deilver press that was a “barrage of literary and visual firepower”, as Frank Digiacoma puts in his article, “The Esquire Decade”. This magazine came into play during a time of war and turmoil in the country. In these magazines, it offered revolutionary literary works and powerful images to the streets of America.
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25 MAGAZINE SPREADS Monday, October 23
FONT SPECS Wednesday, October 25
BLOG _ What are the advantages of a multiple column grid? So you are able to use columns and rows simi taniously _ How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line? 45-75 _ Why is the baseline grid used in design? For consistent vertical spacing _ What are reasons to set type justified? ragged (unjustified)? It determines the orientation of the paragraph when placing pictures _ What is a typographic river? Gaps in the type setting that appear to have left open spaces, creating a white looking run ning river _ What does clothesline, hangline or flow line mean? Hanglines are where you start the text verti cally to keep things in order _ What is type color/texture mean? Type color shows the denseness of the text on the page _ How does x-height effect type color? It can squeeze the space and make it look crowded _ What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules) You can use symbols, a paragraph break, and an indent
3 DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS (FEATURED) Wednesday, October 25
_MARILYN MINTER
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FINAL SPREAD SOLUTION + 10 COVERS Monday, October 30
_MARILYN MINTER
10 COV
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3 DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS (HISTORICAL) Wednesday, November 1
_MAN RAY
SPREA
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mania
In 1915, Man Ray met French artist Marcel Duchamp, and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York group of Dada artists. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “camera-less” pictures, which he called rayographs.
“ IT WAS HIS ACHIEVEMENT TO TREAT THE CAMERA AS HE TREATED THE PAINT BRUSH, AS A MERE INSTRUMENT AT THE SERVICE OF THE MIND.”
Born Emmanuel Rudnitzky, visionary artist Man Ray was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father worked as a tailor. The family moved to Brooklyn when Ray was a young child. From an early year, Ray showed great artistic ability. After finishing high school in 1908, he followed his passion for art; he studied drawing with Robert Henri at the Ferrer Center, and frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291. It later became apparent that Ray had been influenced by Stieglitz’s photographs. He utilized a similar style, snapping images that provided an unvarnished look at the subject. Ray also found inspiration at the Armory Show of 1913, which featured the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. That same year, he moved to a burgeoning art colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey. His work was also evolving. After experimenting with a Cubist style of painting, he moved toward abstraction. In 1914, Ray married Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, but their union fell apart after a few years. He made a more lasting friendship around this time, becoming close to fellow artist Marcel Duchamp.
11
“CHALLENGED EXISTING NOTIONS OF ART AND LITERATURE, AND ENCOURAGED SPONTANEITY.”
Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray became a leading figure in the Dada movement in New York. Dadaism, which takes its name from the French nickname for a rocking horse, challenged existing notions of art and literature, and encouraged spontaneity. One of Ray’s famous works from this time was “The Gift,” a sculpture that incorporated two found objects. He glued tacks to the work surface of an iron to create the piece. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris. There, he continued to be a part of the artistic avant garde, rubbing elbows with such famous figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Ray became famous for his portraits of his artistic and literary associates. He also developed a thriving career as a fashion photographer, taking pictures for such magazines as Vogue. These commercial endeavors supported his fine art efforts. A photographic innovator, Ray discovered a new way to create interesting images by accident in his darkroom. Called “Rayographs,” these photos were made by placing and manipulating objects on pieces of photosensitive paper. One of Ray’s other famous works from this time period was 1924’s “Violin d’Ingres.” This modified photograph features the bare back of his lover, a performer named Kiki, styled after a painting by neoclassical French artist Jean August Dominique Ingres. In a humorous twist, Ray added to two black shapes to make her back look like a musical instrument. He also explored the artistic possibilities of film, creating such now classic Surrealistic works as L’Etoile de Mer (1928). Around this time, Ray also experimented with a technique called the Sabatier effect, or solarization, which adds a silvery, ghostly quality to the image.
Ray soon found another muse, Lee Miller, and featured her in his work. A cut-out of her eye is featured on the 1932 found-object sculpture “Object to Be Destroyed,” and her lips fill the sky of “Observatory Time” (1936). In 1940, Ray fled the war in Europe and moved to California. He married model and dancer Juliet Browner the following year, in a unique double ceremony with artist Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Returning to Paris in 1951, Ray continued to explore different artistic media. He focused much of his energy on painting and sculpture. Branching out in a new direction, Ray began writing his memoir. The project took more than a decade to complete, and his autobiography, Self Portrait, was finally published in 1965. In his final years, Man Ray continued to exhibit his art, with shows in New York, London, Paris and other cities in the years before his death. He passed away on November 18, 1976, in his beloved Paris. He was 86 years old. His innovative works can be found on display in museums around the world, and he is remembered for his artistic wit and originality. As friend Marcel Duchamp once said, “It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paint brush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind.”
13
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MA
N IA RAY’S ERA
BY ELISE REINA
I
n 1915, Man Ray met French artist Marcel Duchamp, and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York group of Dada artists. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “camera-less” pictures, which he called rayographs. Born Emmanuel Rudnitzky, visionary artist Man Ray was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father worked as a tailor. The family moved to Brooklyn when Ray was a young child. From an early year, Ray showed great artistic ability. After finishing high school in 1908, he followed his passion for art; he studied drawing with Robert Henri at the Ferrer Center, and frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291. It later became apparent that Ray had been influenced by Stieglitz’s photographs. He utilized a similar style, snapping images that provided an unvarnished look at the subject. Ray also found inspiration at the Armory Show of 1913, which featured the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. That same year, he moved to a burgeoning art colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey. His work was also evolving. After experimenting with a Cubist style of painting, he moved toward abstraction. In 1914, Ray married Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, but their union fell apart after a few years. He made a more lasting friendship around this time, becoming close to fellow artist Marcel Duchamp. Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray became a leading figure in the Dada movement in New York. Dadaism, which takes its name from the French nickname for a rocking horse, challenged existing notions of art and literature, and encouraged spontaneity. One of Ray’s famous works from this time was “The Gift,” a sculpture that incorporated two found objects. He glued tacks to the work surface of an iron to create
“RAYOGRAPHS” the piece. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris. There, he continued to be a part of the artistic avant garde, rubbing elbows with such famous figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Ray became famous for his portraits of his artistic and literary associates. He also developed a thriving career as a fashion photographer, taking pictures for such magazines as Vogue. These commercial endeavors supported his fine art efforts. A photographic innovator, Ray discovered a new way to create interesting images by accident in his darkroom. Called “Rayographs,” these photos were made by placing and manipulating objects on pieces of photosensitive paper. One of Ray’s other famous works from this time period was 1924’s “Violin d’Ingres.” This modified photograph features the bare back of his lover, a performer named Kiki, styled after a painting by neoclassical French artist Jean August Dominique Ingres. In a humorous twist, Ray added to two black shapes to make her back look like a musical instrument. He also explored the artistic possibilities of film, creating such now classic Surrealistic works as L’Etoile de Mer (1928). Around this time, Ray also experimented with a technique called the Sabatier effect, or solarization, which adds a silvery, ghostly quality to the image. Ray soon found another muse, Lee Miller, and featured her in his work. A cut-out of her eye is featured on the 1932 found-object sculpture “Object to Be Destroyed,” and her lips fill the sky of “Observatory Time” (1936). In 1940, Ray fled the war in Europe and moved to California. He married model and dancer Juliet Browner the following year, in a unique double ceremony with artist Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
11
13
Returning to Paris in 1951, Ray continued to explore different artistic media. He focused much of his energy on painting and sculpture. Branching out in a new direction, Ray began writing his memoir. The project took more than a decade to complete, and his autobiography, Self Portrait, was finally published in 1965. In his final years, Man Ray continued to exhibit his art, with shows in New York, London, Paris and other cities in the years before his death. He passed away on November 18, 1976, in his beloved Paris. He was 86 years old. His innovative works can be found on display in museums around the world, and he is remembered for his artistic wit and originality. As friend Marcel Duchamp once said, “It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paint brush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind.”
SPREA
AD 3
MA
NIA R AY ’ S E R A E l ise R e ina
I
n 1915, Man Ray met French artist Marcel Duchamp, and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York group of Dada artists. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “camera-less” pictures, which he called rayographs. Born Emmanuel Rudnitzky, visionary artist Man Ray was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father worked as a tailor. The family moved to Brooklyn when Ray was a young child. From an early year, Ray showed great artistic ability. After finishing high school in 1908, he followed his passion for art; he studied drawing with Robert Henri at the Ferrer Center, and frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291. It later became apparent that Ray had been influenced by Stieglitz’s photographs. He utilized a similar style, snapping images that provided an unvarnished look at the subject. Ray also found inspiration at the Armory Show of 1913, which featured the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. That same year, he moved to a burgeoning art colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey. His work was also evolving. After experimenting with a Cubist style of painting, he moved toward abstraction. In 1914, Ray married Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, but their union fell apart after a few years. He made a more lasting friendship around this time, becoming close to fellow artist Marcel Duchamp. Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray became a leading figure in the Dada movement in New York. Dadaism, which takes its name from the French nickname for a rocking horse, challenged existing notions of art and literature, and encouraged spontaneity. One of Ray’s famous works from this time was “The Gift,” a sculpture that incorporated two found objects. He glued tacks to the work surface of an iron to create the piece. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris. There, he continued to be a part of the artistic avant garde, rubbing elbows with such famous figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Ray became famous for his portraits of his artistic and literary associates. He also developed a thriving career as a fashion photographer, taking pictures for such magazines as Vogue. These commercial endeavors supported his fine art efforts. A photographic innovator, Ray discovered a new way to create interesting
11
“ IT WAS HIS ACHI TREAT THE CAMERA THE PAINT BRUSH, INSTRUMENT AT TH THE MIND.”
IEVEMENT TO A AS HE TREATED , AS A MERE HE SERVICE OF
images by accident in his darkroom. Called “Rayographs,” these photos were made by placing and manipulating objects on pieces of photosensitive paper. One of Ray’s other famous works from this time period was 1924’s “Violin d’Ingres.” This modified photograph features the bare back of his lover, a performer named Kiki, styled after a painting by neoclassical French artist Jean August Dominique Ingres. In a humorous twist, Ray added to two black shapes to make her back look like a musical instrument. He also explored the artistic possibilities of film, creating such now classic Surrealistic works as L’Etoile de Mer (1928). Around this time, Ray also experimented with a technique called the Sabatier effect, or solarization, which adds a silvery, ghostly quality to the image. Ray soon found another muse, Lee Miller, and featured her in his work. A cut-out of her eye is featured on the 1932 found-object sculpture “Object to Be Destroyed,” and her lips fill the sky of “Observatory Time” (1936). In 1940, Ray fled the war in Europe and moved to California. He married model and dancer Juliet Browner the following year, in a unique double ceremony with artist Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Returning to Paris in 1951, Ray continued to explore different artistic media. He focused much of his energy on painting and sculpture. Branching out in a new direction, Ray began writing his memoir. The project took more than a decade to complete, and his autobiography, Self Portrait, was finally published in 1965. In his final years, Man Ray continued to exhibit his art, with shows in New York, London, Paris and other cities in the years before his death. He passed away on November 18, 1976, in his beloved Paris. He was 86 years old. His innovative works can be found on display in museums around the world, and he is remembered for his artistic wit and originality. As friend Marcel Duchamp once said, “It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paint brush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind.”
“CHALLENGED EXISTING NOTIONS OF ART AND LITERATURE, AND ENCOURAGED SPONTANEITY.”
15
ORANG PHASE
GE E
3 MAGAZINE COVERS Monday, November 6
3 SPREAD DIRECTIONS Wednesday, November 8
ON PHOTOGRAPHY AN EXCERPT PLATO’S CAVE
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.
SUSAN SONTAG
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 them; publishers compile them. 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
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.
“PHOTOGRAPHY CAME INTO ITS OWN AS ART.”
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
SUSAN S O N TA G : ON PHOTOGRAPHY AN EXCERPT PLATO’S CAVE 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 them; publishers compile them. ▶ 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 nar-
rowly 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.
“PHOTOGRAPHY CAME INTO ITS OWN AS ART.”
_Humankind lingers unregenerately in
_To collect photographs is to collect
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.
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.
AN EXCERPT ON PLATO’S CAVE _SUSAN SONTAG
_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 them; publishers compile them. _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.
ON PHOTOGR
_Photographs furnish evidence. Some-
_While a painting or a prose description
_Images which idealize (like most
_That age when taking photographs
thing 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
RAPHY
FINAL SPREADS Monday, November 13
COVER
R
VOL.3 / FALL‘17
E
F L A W
D
SPREA
ADS
03 RAY 11 SONTAG 13 MINTER
MA
N RAY’S I A ERA BY
ELISE REINA
“RAYOGRAPHS” I
n 1915, Man Ray met French artist Marcel Duchamp, and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York group of Dada artists. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “camera-less” pictures, which he called rayographs. Born Emmanuel Rudnitzky, visionary artist Man Ray was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father worked as a tailor. The family moved to Brooklyn when Ray was a young child. From an early year, Ray showed great artistic ability. After finishing high school in 1908, he followed his passion for art; he studied drawing with Robert Henri at the Ferrer Center, and frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291. It later became apparent that Ray had been influenced by Stieglitz’s photographs. He utilized a similar style, snapping images that provided an unvarnished look at the subject. Ray also found inspiration at the Armory Show of 1913, which featured the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. That same year, he moved to a burgeoning art colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey. His work was also evolving. After experimenting with a Cubist style of painting, he moved toward abstraction. In 1914, Ray married Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, but their union fell apart after a few years. He made a more lasting friendship around this time, becoming close to fellow artist Marcel Duchamp. Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray became a leading figure in the Dada movement in New York. Dadaism, which takes its name from the French nickname for a rocking horse, challenged existing notions of art and literature, and encouraged spontaneity. One of Ray’s famous works from this time was “The Gift,” a sculpture that incorporated two found objects. He glued tacks to the work surface of an iron to create the piece. In 1921, Ray moved to Paris. There, he continued to be a part of the artistic avant garde, rubbing elbows with such famous figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Ray became famous for his portraits of his artistic and literary associates. He also developed a thriving career as a fashion photographer, taking pictures for
such magazines as Vogue. These commercial endeavors supported his fine art efforts. A photographic innovator, Ray discovered a new way to create interesting images by accident in his darkroom. Called “Rayographs,” these photos were made by placing and manipulating objects on pieces of photosensitive paper. One of Ray’s other famous works from this time period was 1924’s “Violin d’Ingres.” This modified photograph features the bare back of his lover, a performer named Kiki, styled after a painting by neoclassical French artist Jean August Dominique Ingres. In a humorous twist, Ray added to two black shapes to make her back look like a musical instrument. He also explored the artistic possibilities of film, creating such now classic Surrealistic works as L’Etoile de Mer (1928). Ray also experimented with a technique called the Sabatier effect, or solarization, which adds a silvery, ghostly quality to the image. Ray soon found another muse, Lee Miller, and featured her in his work. A cut-out of her eye is featured on the 1932 found-object sculpture “Object to Be Destroyed,” and her lips fill the sky of “Observatory Time” (1936). In 1940, Ray fled the war in Europe and moved to California. He married model and dancer Juliet Browner the following year, in a unique double ceremony with artist Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Returning to Paris in 1951, Ray continued to explore different artistic media. He focused much of his energy on painting and sculpture. Branching out in a new direction, Ray began writing his memoir. The project took more than a decade to complete, and his autobiography, Self Portrait, was finally published in 1965. In his final years, Man Ray continued to exhibit his art, with shows in New York, London, Paris and other cities in the years before his death. He passed away on November 18, 1976, in his beloved Paris. He was 86 years old. His innovative works can be found on display in museums around the world, and he is remembered for his artistic wit and originality. As friend Marcel Duchamp once said, “It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paint brush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind.”
NEGATIVE KISS, 1924
05
FLAWED
FLAWED
LE VIOLON D’INGRES, 1924
“ IT WAS HIS ACHIEVEMENT TO TREAT THE CAMERA AS HE TREATED THE PAINT BRUSH, AS A MERE INSTRUMENT AT THE SERVICE OF THE MIND.”
07 FLAWED
TEARS, 1993
09 FLAWED
NOIR ET BLANCE, 1926
AURELIEN, 1944
WOMAN WITH LONG HAIR, 1929
in
To collect photographs is to collect
To photograph is to appropriate the
Photographs, which fiddle with the
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.
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 are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
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 aren’t really statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
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, invite packaging. They’re stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
Humankind
lingers
unregenerately
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.
ON PHOTO
Photographs furnish evidence. Some-
While a painting or a prose description
Images which idealize (like most fash-
At that age when taking photographs
thing 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 slightly 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.
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 to something.
ion 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, our detailed eyes. 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.
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 England and France in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffe to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; 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, photography-as-art to be percise. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the mindset of, photography-as-art.
“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.”
AN EXCERPT ON PLATO’S CAVE _SUSAN SONTAG
OGRAPHY
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EROTIC MINTER WONDERLAND
CA
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SUN SPOTS, 2007
W
hen I walked into Marilyn Minter’s studio late one afternoon last fall, she and her assistants had just completed a painting—a foggy, steamy image streaming with water droplets behind which you could see the misty blur of pink lips, seemingly post-exhale, and two gleaming white front teeth that were doll-like, but also vampiric. Like all of Minter’s more recent enamel paintings, it’s difficult to believe that they aren’t the original photographs upon which the works are based. “Everything you see is behind glass,” Minter told me, as we watched her assistant add painstaking brushes of paint to another, similarly condensation-heavy painting. Minter began her career as a photographer as a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she created a black-and-white series of her drug-addicted mother under the mentorship of Diane Arbus, and began collaborating with German Expressionist painter Christof Kohlhofer upon moving to New York in 1976. She earned notoriety in the late 1980s and 1990s with heavily excoriated porn paintings—a series of decidedly Pop dot paintings depicting pornographic scenes embellished with pixelated streaks of paint that foreshadow her signature fluid aesthetic. Around this time, in 1990, Minter also became the first artist to eschew traditional print advertising, instead buying a television ad—$1,800 for 30 seconds—for her exhibition at Simon Watson Gallery during The Late Show With David Letterman, a video titled 100 Food Porn. Since then, Minter has become synonymous with her slick, hedonistic, instantly recognizable enamel works—ones that drip with pearls, glitter, paint, sweat, and dirt—which she bases on hyperrealist photos taken on a macro lens and later Photoshops together. In these works, the images are seemingly captured in medias res of erotic motion, a voluptuously suspended moment in time. Minter’s first major museum retrospective, a traveling exhibition perfectly titled “Pretty/Dirty,” opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston last year, before moving to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, where it just closed. It will open at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, on April 2, before it reaches the Brooklyn Museum in the fall. “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/ Dirty” has been published in conjunction with her first major
BLOWJOB, 2008
retrospective, now at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. It contains her work from 1969 on, and encomiums from the likes of Richard Hell (“She is a filthy sensualist, just like God”); and it marks a career pocked by notoriety and periods of paralysis — elevated, now, in her 60s, by sudden fame. Excommunicated from the art world in the early ’90s for her cheerful paintings of hard-core pornography — Minter said feminists accused her of sexism — today she shows her work at the Venice Biennale. She’s collected by the Guggenheim and Jay Z and is a godmother to a new generation of artists experimenting with what she calls “the feminine grotesque.” Like her images, “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” is seductive and glittery, an object of desire. It highlights what appears to be almost innate talent (Diane Arbus was a fan of her student work) and an equally preternatural ability to attract censure — as well as some faithful obsessions.
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TEETER, 2009
Minter taught herself to draw by tracing princesses and the comic-strip heroine Brenda Starr, a well-upholstered “lady reporter” modeled on Rita Hayworth. She’s always been moved and amused by the trappings of gender, its rites and representations in pop culture. In her 20s, she began to tap the seam central to her work, what she calls “the pathology of glamour.” As a student at the University of Florida, she took the photographs that would become the “Coral Ridge Towers” series (1969), featuring her mother, a Southern belle gone to seed, posing stoned and imperious as she freshens her lipstick and dyes her eyebrows. Minter took just 12 shots, six of which are included in this book. It’s astonishing to see her themes emerge so fully formed: the eroticism of the beauty ritual, the armature of glamour, the pathos and delicious anarchy that ensue when the mask begins to slip. In her studio, Minter and I sat down with a book of photos from Gordon
VIOLET BUBBLE, 2008
Parks’s “Segregation Story” show, which she saw at the High Museum in Atlanta in 2014. In late 2015, she co-curated an iteration of the show at Salon 94, the gallery that represents her in New York. Our interview, which has been lightly edited and condensed, follows below. People forget that, for a long time, these “shallow” interests were the only ones women were allowed. Why shouldn’t we be proud of our varied talents? Exactly. I’ve been saying that all along, but look how they shame young girls if they work with any kind of sexuality. [Women] already have so much sexual power that if we actually start owning it, my god, we’re ferocious. [to an assistant] Put her on the list! Do your photos mean something beyond their aesthetic? I like to make things that nobody else makes. And I want [the viewer] to be surprised, so I never do fashion. I’ve never shot a whole person,
“SHE’S A FILTHY SENSUALIST, LIKE GOD.”
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only parts. No one ever asks me to do anything but makeup [editorials] once in awhile, like I just shot for W—I put [the model] behind frozen glass, and I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I just went with it and loved it. It was fun. I just did it for fun. Where do you think you fall in the annals of art history? Sometimes I’m considered a Pop painter, but I’m so untidy next to the cleaned-up versions like Lichtenstein or Rosenquist or Warhol did. I’m way more untidy, because that’s where I see the human element—where I sweat it up or make it messy. And yet, they look perfect. Yeah, well, my theory is that you can make pictures of anything as long as you make them beautiful. You’ve just got to take out the narrative and let people hear you. I’m making images of things that might be disgusting even, like strings of spit, but I’m trying to make them gorgeous. It’s also sort of a way to be able to have a fiery red bush painting of mine in your living room. But I do like disturbing imagery, but I also like things to be fresh. Like Sandy Kim [who is known for, among other things, photographing her period stains —Ed.]. I’ve been begging her to make prints of her images for me. Anyway, that’s what I’m interested in, so when I do commercial jobs for magazines, I always hope that all the other photos in the magazine will look sort of the same, but then there’s my page. I’m always looking for my page, but they always end up picking my boring photos. Now I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not going to give them choices anymore. You have to deal with it. A version of the feminist critique still dogs her. Many of her recent photographs of women could be advertisements or have been (she’s designed campaigns for Tom Ford, M.A.C. Cosmetics and Jimmy Choo). She’s frequently asked if she’s ¬celebrating or condemning fashion, to stake her position more explicitly. She usually demurs. “I’m not trying to define or criticize culture,” she has said. “I’m
trying to make you feel all these things when you look — the pleasure of looking but also the shame, because you want to look even though the images make you hate yourself.” She likes complicated ways of seeing, muddled messages. Her video “Smash” (2014) begins like a high-fashion commercial: A woman in stilettos poses for a moment in a silvery puddle of water — and then launches a terrific kick through the pane of glass separating her from the viewer. What seems coquettish at first turns into an athletic performance, full of fury and ready for the next one, unwavering. The model, the caged animal, strikes back. Minter doesn’t denigrate fashion or porn; she harnesses their powers (just as she harnesses the powers of commercial mediums — television and print advertisements, billboards). She’s interested, she says, in “debased” languages, in everything that excites the limbic system — shiny things, scary things, gold and babies and food and sex — and in confusing our networks of disgust and desire. She’s interested in the flinch; see “Green Pink Caviar” (2009), her funny and obscene eight-minute video (displayed, improbably, in the middle of Times Square), in which models smear candy and cake decorations with their mouths. Minter filmed them from beneath the glass on which the food was heaped; lips and tongues — so hugely magnified we can see every papilla — roving slowly, like dreamy, enormous eels. It gives a since of erotica, it triggers almost primal fascination, revulsion and laughter.
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SQUEEZE, 2009
BAZOOKA, 2009
PAM ANDERSON, 2011
FRECKLES 2007
COLOPHON Flawed was designed by Elise Reina for Typographic Systems, 2017. All of the images and text were sourced from publications and the interent and are only being used for design education purposes. Fonts: Baskerville, Goudy Heavyface Italic, ITC OďŹƒcina Sans, Interstate Black, and Orator Slanted. Printed at Jayhawk Ink, Lawrence KS.