D E C . 2 016 VOL. 1 / ISSUE 6
PHOTOGRAPHY EDITION
B E A U X A RT
F E AT U R I N G T H E W O R K O F P H O T O G R A P H E R S M I C H A E L W O L F & W I L L I A M E G G E L S T O N , A N D W R I T E R S U S A N S O N TA G .
B E A U X A RT
connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, intergenerational dialogues and thought provoking debates around contemporary and historical figures in photography. The issue features a contemporary look into Michael Wolf, a photo narrative of the work by William Eggelston, and an excerpt from On Photography by Susan Sontag.
B E A U X A RT
is not to be sold to the public and will only used by the as part of your name school portfolio. Designed by Gracie Williams, Elements of Typography, Fall 2016. Fonts: Futura Printed at Jayhawk Inc, Lawrence KS, 2016
B E A U X A RT
[ Michael Wolf, Bastard Chairs. ]
OUTSIDER’S PERSPECTIVE
PHOTOGRAPHER MICHAEL WOLF’S CONTINUED OUTPUT OF INTERESTING WORK FOLLOWS A THEME OF D E P I C T I N G D I F F E R E N T A S P E C T S O F L I F E , L A R G E LY F O C U S E D I N T H E S T R E E T S O F H O N G K O N G .
by GRACIE WILLIAMS German photographer Michael Wolf investigates new perspectives on urban life and its structure in the digital age. He addresses the realities of 21st century metropolitan existence, one defined by constant access, vanishing privacy, and unlimited exposure. In a diverse array of mediums, from large format cameras capturing architectural landscapes, to appropriating Google’s Street View imagery to isolate anonymous city dwellers, the artist explores the density of city life. His eye for detail within the online world has allowed him to introduce a certain vernacular visual language into his work, as well as balance the private and the public, the anonymity and the individuality, the faraway to the up close. Wolf’s deliberate and engaging compositions highlight his innovative vision, reflecting a new approach to imagining our world’s most photographed cities. Michael Wolf was born in Germany and raised in the United States and Canada before returning to Germany to study photography. Wolf
“THE BEAUTY OF BEING AN ARTIST IS THAT YOU’RE TOTALLY FREE, WITH ART YOU CAN DO ANYTHING.”
said that he didn’t have one particular dream when he was a child and that the only thing he was interested in was collecting things from the flea market, until he began photographing when his parents gave him a camera while living in America. From there, he transitioned from collecting flea market trinkets to collecting photos. He enjoyed taking pictures just fine, but even more enjoyed developing the film and editing and cropping the images. Wolf didn’t consider photography as a career choice until his father’s friend visited and suggested he applied to Folkwang School in Essen, where he taught alongside famous professor Otto Steinert. Wolf never intended to study photojournalism. He discovered it was an interesting thing to do while at Essen. “It gave me an excuse to go out and sniff into other people’s experiences and lives,” Wolf said. Wolf began his photojournalist career before turning to photographic art. He moved to Asia in 1995 to study China’s cultural identity and the complexities of its urban architecture and spent the vast majority of his career there photographing for a magazine. He found inspiration in Hong Kong and China,
[ OUTSIDER'S PERSPECTIVE / 89 ]
“INSTEAD OF PHOTOGRAPHING THE 7 MILLION PEOPLE IN HONG KONG, I DECIDED TO CREATE A PORTRAIT OF THE CITY WITH NO PEOPLE IN IT AT ALL.”
[ Michael Wolf, Lost Laundry. ]
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[ Michael Wolf, Back Door. ]
[ Michael Wolf, Hong Kong Break. ]
where ever-shifting cityscapes provided him with constant stimulation and the opportunity to document the many faces of this emerging superpower. In 2003, Wolf decided to direct his work more toward fine-art photography projects. He believed there to be a decline in the magazine industry, which led to photojournalism assignments becoming “stupid and boring.” Wolf’s style became apparent in his beginning projects: obsessive collecting, a recognition of the symbolic
power of the vernacular, the combination of both macro and micro perspectives, and the ability to use a specific subject or focus to document the broader transformations of urban life. He is able to produce a body of work that deals with the more universal reality of contemporary city life. His work examines life in the layered urban landscape, addressing juxtapositions of public and private space, anonymity and individuality, history and modern development. Wolf’s multi-layer style is seen
“THIS ILLUSION OF UNLIMITED SIZE REALLY CONVEYS WHAT WE EXPERIENCE IN MEGACITIES. IF YOU GO TO SHANGHAI OR HONG KONG OR TO ANY OF THE BIG CHINESE CITIES YOU HAVE THIS TREMENDOUS DENSITY AROUND YOU.”
[ Michael Wolf, Back Door. ]
through carving fragments from the city streets. By focusing on seemingly insignificant details, Wolf succeeds in capturing the beauty of the vernacular while simultaneously illustrating China’s concern with functionality over form. Although people are almost entirely absent from many of his series’, the barely perceptible traces of their existence is present. Wolf’s photographs reveal a desire to document and connect with the world around him, but through a contemporary visual approach. Contrary to the
rhythmic compositions of ‘classic’ documentary photography, these images are coolly detached from their subject and the photographer’s presence behind the camera is barely perceptible. In an array of photographic projects, from street views appropriated from Google Earth, to portraits capturing the crush of the Tokyo Subway, and dizzying architectural landscapes, Wolf explores the density of city life. Beyond the beauty of his compositions, Wolf’s studies of the thick concrete
skin of the city are parallel to the thousands of lives contained within each frame. Small signs of life creep to into the surface of these images… a shirt hanging out to dry or a silhouette behind a blind. Despite this confinement, Wolf’s compositions are laced with evidence of people’s ability and need to express their individuality within these formal structures. The diverse body of work that Wolf produced in China carved out fragments from the city streets by focusing on seemingly insignificant details. He captures the [ OUTSIDER'S PERSPECTIVE / 93 ]
[ Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression. ]
[ Michael Wolf, Corner Houses. ]
beauty of the vernacular while simultaneously illustrating China’s concern with functionality over form, shedding light on the seams of the city. People are almost entirely absent from Wolf’s urban and city life photography, only existing in objects and architecture as symbols of the space being reclaimed by the city’s inhabitants. Wolf’s work also largely focuses on life in mega cities. Many of his projects document the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Hong Kong is full of highly compressed and often brutal architecture. Ignoring the drama of the city's natural setting, he has turned his camera on the "architecture of density," as he calls it: the high-rises of crushing uniformity built in response to overcrowding in one of the world's most expensive cities. In this series, Wolf uses the city’s sky-scraping buildings to great
effect, eliminating the sky and horizon line to flatten each image and turn these façades into seemingly never-ending abstractions. Through discerning eyes, objects captured in photographs appear to transcend from their humble utilitarian origin to magnificent works of urban installation art. It seems inevitable that city authorities will one day sanitize the creative chaos in Hong Kong’s backwoods. Contrary to many topographic photographers, Wolf is not a ‘pure’ photographer of landscape, as is evident from the diverse body of work that he has produced.
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[ William Eggelston, The Red Ceiling, 1973. ]
THOSE
AVA N T- G A R D E H U E S A M E R I C A N P H O T O G R A P H E R W I L L I A M E G G L E S T O N I S W I D E LY C R E D I T E D I N T H E H E L P O F P I O N E E R I N G C O L O R P H O T O G R A P H Y A S A L E G I T I M AT E A RT I S T I C M E D I U M T O D I S P L AY I N A RT G A L L E R I E S T H R O U G H M O N U M E N TA L I Z E D E V E RY D AY S U B J E C T S S H O W N I N E C C E N T R I C , R E F I N E D C O M P O S I T I O N S . by GRACIE WILLIAMS
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[ William Eggelston, Untitled, c. 1975. ]
William Eggleston is an American photographer whose straightforward depictions of everyday objects and scenes, many of them in the southern United States, were noted for their vivid colors, precise composition, and evocative allure. His work was credited with helping establish color photography in the late 20th century as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up on his family’s former cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. As a student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he
began to take photographs after a friend recognized his artistic inclinations as well as his fascination with mechanics and encouraged him to buy a camera. Eggleston maintained the pursuit as he transferred to Delta State College in Cleveland, Mississippi, and then to the University of Mississippi, where he spent several years before leaving without a degree. Exposure to the vernacular style of Walker Evans and especially the compositions of Henri Cartier-Bresson influenced his earliest work, which he produced in black and white. After settling in Memphis, Tennes-
see, in 1964, Eggleston began to experiment with color photography, which, in part because of its association with both amateur snapshots and commercial work, had rarely been appreciated as fine art. Sensing an opportunity to forge new ground, he set to capture images he encountered in his surroundings with a neutral eye—devoid of either sentiment or irony—and in full color. Over the next decade, he produced thousands of photographs, focusing on ordinary Americans and the landscapes, structures, and other materials of their environs. In the early 1970s Eggleston discovered that printing
[ William Eggelston, Untitled. ]
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[ William Eggelston, Untitled, c. 1971-73. ]
“I NEVER KNOW BEFOREHAND. UNTIL I SEE IT. IT JUST HAPPENS ALL AT ONCE. I TAKE A PICTURE VERY QUICKLY AND INSTANTLY FORGET ABOUT IT.”
[ William Eggelston, Untitled, c. 1965-68. ]
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[ William Eggelston, Untitled, c. 1971. ]
[ William Eggelston, Untitled, c. 1971-73. ]
[ William Eggelston, Untitled, c. 1970-73. ]
with a dye-transfer process, a practice common in high-end advertising, would allow him to control the colors of his photographs and thereby heighten their effect. Having been granted a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974, Eggleston received an additional career boost two years later with a solo exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. (Curator, John Szarkowski, had taken an interest in Eggleston’s work upon meeting him nearly a decade earlier.) The show provoked hostility from some critics, who
judged the snap-shot-like pictures banal and lacking in artistry. Other viewers, however, found that Eggleston’s intensely saturated hues and striking perspectives imbued an ominous or dreamlike quality to their seemingly mundane subjects. He soon took on various commissioned projects, which resulted in series set in several different locations. Because of the geographic milieu in which Eggleston often worked, his photographs were sometimes characterized as reflections on the South, though he pointedly resisted such interpretations,
claiming an interest in his subjects chiefly for their physical and formal qualities rather than for any broader significance. In the 1980s he traveled extensively, and the photos set throughout the United States and Europe proceeded from his desire to document a multitude of places without consideration for traditional hierarchies of meaning or beauty. By the turn of the 21st century, the skepticism that had initially greeted Eggleston’s work had largely dissipated, and the retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and
Videos, 1961–2008, which originated in 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, solidified his reputation as a skilled innovator. For his contributions to photography, Eggleston received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 1998 and a Sony World Photography Award in 2013.
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I N P L AT O ' S C AV E WHEN ANYTHING CAN BE PHOTOGRAPHED AND PHOTOGRAPHY HAS DESTROYED THE B O U N D A R I E S A N D D E F I N I T I O N S O F A RT, A V I E W E R C A N A P P R O A C H A P H O T O G R A P H F R E E LY. b y S U S A N S O N TA G
[ Unknown, Sandhills, year unknown. ]
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 lon-
[ I N P L AT O ' S C AV E / 101 ]
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“TO PHOTOGRAPH IS TO APPROPRIATE THE THING PHOTOGRAPHED. IT MEANS PUTTING ONESELF INTO A CERTAIN RELATION TO THE WORLD THAT FEELS LIKE KNOWLEDGE.”
[ Harold E. Edgerton, Bullet Through Apple, 1964. ]
gevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to
the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The
picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something
"out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually
shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own no-
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[ Gracie Williams, Untitled, 2016. ]
[ Bill Conway, Left Bank, year unknown. ]
tions 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.
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INSIDE: [88] MICAEL WOLF / OUTSIDER'S PERSPECTIVE [94] THOSE AVANT-GARDE HUES / WILLIAM EGGELSTON [94] IN PLATO'S CAVE / SUSAN SONTAG
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