Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => Discussing Photographic Styles => Topic started by: Isaac on July 15, 2015, 01:43:09 pm
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The Photographs of Frederick Sommer (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/sommer/)
"Suppose you were going out with your camera and somebody asks you what you are going to photograph. There's a pretty fair chance that you have something on your mind, and you'll name something. But the more you can name it, the more you're going to face the great enemy, and that is the privileged condition. The privileged condition is a beautiful woman. The beautiful woman sits in the middle of a space and none of these shades that are so beguiling seem to go anywhere, it's just parked in the middle… (https://books.google.com/books?id=ZQu1CAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT237&vq=%22parked%20or%20privileged%20subject%22&pg=PT237#v=snippet&q=%22it's%20just%20parked%20in%20the%20middle%22&f=false)"
In distinguishing his work from Weston's, Sommer sets the parked or privileged subject, which is readily named and, like an island untouched by the sea, has too little exchange with what surrounds it, against the distributive concern, a spatial configuration that draws together many relationships, allows fields to interact, and muddles the naming of things.
"Photography and the Art of Chance" p221
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Too interesting. I had to order the book (Google Books truncates the Sommer quote).
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... Sommer sets the parked or privileged subject, which is readily named and, like an island untouched by the sea, has too little exchange with what surrounds it, against the distributive concern, a spatial configuration that draws together many relationships, allows fields to interact, and muddles the naming of things.
Say what!?
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Sounds like a philosopher.
They specialize in muddling the naming of things. A basic approach to writing a philosophy essay or book is to consider:
1. A thing
2. Things which reference the thing (names and so on)
3. The idea of the thing
4. The social constructs surrounding the thing
Now muddle up two or more of them. You can just use the same word for several of these items and hope nobody notices, or you can airily state "you really cannot separate the apple from the social construct of the apple" or "what is a mountain, really, except the idea of 'mountain'?"
The last step is, essentially, to spring back in surprise and say loudly "Wow, what a mess I have made!" except that you don't say it like that. Instead you explore the consequences of what conflating the taste of an apple with an actual apple is, and from that conclude something incomprehensible. The text you fill this part up with is more or less boilerplate and can probably be computer-generated, if necessary, for as many yards or furlongs as is necessary to fulfill the contract.
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Sounds like a philosopher.
They specialize in muddling the naming of things.
Yes, but the interesting thing is the claim that Sommer is doing the same thing with his photography - exploring networks rather than isolated subjects (Weston).
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Say what!?
It sounds like a lot of the posts here at this end of the forum.
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I don't see that the photos really do that, with the possible exception of the double exposures which do it sorry of trivially. But, horses for courses, and all that.
The quote from the book appears to be pseudo intellectual gibberish. I believe the author is some sort of Art Academic, and I suppose that therefore he tends to fall in to a dialect of International Art English when he runs out of things to say.
IAE is useful when, as in an artist's statement, you wish to convey flavor without meaning, to convey perhaps the vague shape of an idea without the details. I'm not sure it's such a hot idea for a book.
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Say what!?
The words that Frederick Sommer used when contrasting Weston's photographs with his own photographs: figure isolated against background versus gradual interchange, figure isolated versus inter-relationships, etc etc
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Too interesting. I had to order the book (Google Books truncates the Sommer quote).
Remember, only one chapter (http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=73133.msg837451#msg837451) on Sommer :-)
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figure isolated against background versus gradual interchange,
Ah, the pseud's tactic - explain gibberish by either repeating the same gibberish as some faux understanding or using more gibberish.
Isn't 'gradual interchange' in a picture like being 'a little bit pregnant'?
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Ah, the pseud's tactic - explain gibberish by either repeating the same gibberish as some faux understanding or using more gibberish.
For those who are struggling to understand Kelsey's language (he's not Heidegger, you know), here are some pictures to help you (Weston's rabbit vs Sommer's rabbit):
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VRU7soM0fb4C&lpg=PA193&ots=frMbSBETlj&dq=%22things%20that%20we%20can%20name%20too%20easily%2C%20like%20a%20flower%22&pg=PA195#v=onepage&q&f=false
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Isn't 'gradual interchange' in a picture like being 'a little bit pregnant'?
Hmm, I don't think so. Sommer photographs the dead rabbit gradually merging with its environment - 'gradual interchange' describes that well enough.
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Oh, dear Lord! A post-conceptualization orgy?
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Oh, I'm not struggling to understand Kelsey's language. I recognize it for what it is, which is a lot of words to say not a lot, descending fairly regularly into gibberish. He's shoving in phrase after phrase that repeat the same general ideas, and occasionally one of them falls flat, or means nothing. "an island untouched by the sea" is simply an error, he wants something about an island and isolation, and winds up with this bizarre and meaningless phrase. Is the island supposed to be floating over the sea? Surrounded by a wall, perhaps? Is he referring to the parts of the island that don't touch the water? What he''s trying to say is obvious, but the metaphor falls flat because it doesn't mean anything. It's sloppy writing, in a style intended to sound smart without actually being smart.
These are appropriate methods to use (albeit with better editing) when you're trying to say something that is difficult or impossible to get at literally. You are left with poetry and metaphor.
When what you're trying to say is "this guy's subjects are metaphorically isolated from the background and this other guy's are not" then you're not in the territory of words being unable to express the ideas, so you can just use words rather than a pile of metaphors, clumsy or otherwise.
The "pile of metaphors and other phrases" writing style is used to give the impression that you're talking about the ineffable, the impossible to say with words, the turtle with no name, even when you are not.
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Isaac, I'm having trouble finding the second paragraph quoted in your original post. Is it in the Google Books link?
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Gobbledygook.
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Not sure I understand the original quote. There have been many many times when I have gone out with the intention of shooting something specific only to come home with pictures of something entirely different. That is one of the many advantages of being a hobbyist photographer.
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It just means that Sommer takes the subject,
which is obvious and which we understand (or thing he understand)
and shoves it into a frame with some other stuff
that makes our understanding of the subject more complex and less clear.
I see this with the portrait of Haas, but not with anything else. I think Kelsey is reaching. Sommer seems to have been a minor figure, anyways.
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Isaac, I'm having trouble finding the second paragraph quoted in your original post. Is it in the Google Books link?
No, the Google Books preview stops a couple of lines before. (The page layout shown on Google Books preview is not the same page layout as the book.)
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It just means that Sommer takes the subject,
which is obvious and which we understand (or thing he understand)
and shoves it into a frame with some other stuff
that makes our understanding of the subject more complex and less clear.
If this is the alternative to poetry and metaphor, I'll stick with Kelsey and Sommer.
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Here is my take on anti-poetry:
One guy accidentally comes across a fresh road kill. Takes a picture. Another guy accidentally comes across a not-so-fresh road kill. Takes a picture too, then he and his art critic buddy wax poetic about it in a post-conceptual orgy of piling up meaningless, cliché metaphors and pseudo-intellectual constructions.
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Oh, I'm not struggling to understand Kelsey's language. I recognize it for what it is, which is a lot of words to say not a lot, descending fairly regularly into gibberish. He's shoving in phrase after phrase that repeat the same general ideas, and occasionally one of them falls flat, or means nothing. "an island untouched by the sea" is simply an error, he wants something about an island and isolation, and winds up with this bizarre and meaningless phrase. Is the island supposed to be floating over the sea? Surrounded by a wall, perhaps? Is he referring to the parts of the island that don't touch the water? What he''s trying to say is obvious, but the metaphor falls flat because it doesn't mean anything. It's sloppy writing, in a style intended to sound smart without actually being smart.
Kelsey is only paraphrasing Sommer here ('And the sea will never wash their shores').
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I'm in favor of poetry and metaphor, in their places.
In an academic text, trying to explain something straightforward, is not the place. In that place, it is a gimmick.
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But Sommer is not trying to explain something straightforward - he's trying to explain art. And he's saying to his students that it is not enough to photograph one subject obsessively. Indeed he's saying that the whole notion of having 'a subject' is problematic. As soon as you can name your subject, you've moved away from art. Yes, this is a mystical/poetic way of talking, but I don't think it's unintelligible or particularly obscure.
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Kelsey's paraphase (I have no idea the context, so I am taking your word for it that Kelsey is paraphrasing Sommer) could usefully clear away some poetic clutter. Perhaps it did, in which case I might speculate on why Sommer is minor.
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Full disclosure, I am philosophically very impatient with artists and critics who try to bury me in words to explain their art. It is, in general, not an act of "explanation" as it is an act of social signaling.
They may pretend to be talking to me, but in fact they are for the most part signaling within their insular community, indicating that the belong, that they are part of the group. They claim that it is a technical vocabulary, that they are simply using terms of art (Art, ha ha, good joke there!) and so on, but in fact it's mostly just slang, and a particularly meaning-free slang.
See: http://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english for instance.
Art cannot be explained in simple words. In fact, it often can't be explained in words. The best you can do is give some context (in simple, straightforward language) and then urge the viewer to look. OR you can attempt to explain it with more art, generating a dialog or whatever of art, which may indeed illuminate things. Attempting to explain Art with metaphor and technical language is a weird and non-productive middle ground at best, and dunderheaded masturbation at worst.
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Sommer isn't speaking International Art English (he pre-dates it by about 50 years). Neither is Kelsey.
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IAE like all languages, slang or otherwise, evolves. It has roots, it has a future.
If you're getting something out of it, great. One man's blather is another's wisdom, as far as I can tell.
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Sommer uses the plainest language.
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So it was Kelsey who muddied it all up?
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Kelsey's paraphase (I have no idea the context, so I am taking your word for it that Kelsey is paraphrasing Sommer) …
Have you not even read the context shown on the book preview?
"In a talk [Sommer] gave at Princeton, he described this [privileged condition] and its shortcomings: Suppose you were going out with your camera…"
… impatient with artists and critics who try to bury me in words to explain their art.
Bury me in words? You are now up to 977 words across 9 comments. Have you really not even read what's shown on the book preview?
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Here's an interesting essay about Sommer (warning - it's written by an academic):
http://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10265/723/1/Walker_eyelids_2009.pdf
It locates Sommer's work between the dark visions of the French surrealists, and the mythologising of the American West by the likes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams:
Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes decisively cut through any simple opposition of “straight” and “surrealist” photography. These photographs, we might say, are almost “straighter than straight,” or hyper-straight. Yet at the same time, Sommer would probably have argued that they were also profoundly subjective images: “Reality is greater than our dreams,” he wrote, “yet it is within ourselves that we find the clues to reality.” Moreover, in these pictures, Sommer’s directness is at the service of a vision of the landscape that is at odds with the fundamentally positive view of the American West of many other photographers. Sommer’s work represents, as it were, the dark underbelly of American landscape photography. Where Ansel Adams, for example, was concerned with the sublime beauty of the places he photographed, Sommer, as we have seen, perceived a situation where “all those plants were dry and dead and dying ... Even the rocks were struggling.”
Regarding Sommer being a 'minor' figure, the essay argues that Sommer was excluded from photographic history by Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, as they found his work too depressing. He was rediscovered in the 1970s when more critical views of the American landscape were in vogue (New Topograhics):
Rather than the sublimities depicted by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, these photographers flattened both the space and the affect of the landscape. In this, as Jonathan Green explained, Sommer’s photographs were an important influence: “Sommer uses the camera as an objectifying, levelling device that transforms the land into a uniform flat surface.”
Regarding Slobodan's suggestion that talk of death and dissolution is simply theoretical waffle tacked on to a fortuitous one-off snapshot, we can see that Sommer pursued this subject consistently:
The sense of death implicit in the Arizona Landscapes and explicit in his photographs of animal corpses was not, Sommer would have insisted, a negative force. Already the horse, coyote and jackrabbit seem to be merging back into the earth, part of an endless and natural cycle of life into death and death into life.... As Sommer told an interviewer in 1981, “I have never been interested in the disposing of life.” Rather, he seems to have been concerned with a steady state where life and death merge; and his attitude was one of acceptance: “Those things exist and you might say this was homage to existence as it is.” “If you walk round the desert or drive around certain areas of Arizona or the West,” said Sommer, “you run into the kinds of things I photograph—that’s natural.”
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An aside, notice the trick I mentioned earlier. The author of that paper makes the absurd statement that one cannot separate the experience of the desert from the experience of Sommer's photos of the desert. Then he shows us artists meeting Sommer and seeing the desert. Finally, he concludes that any influence from this event is due to Sommer, not the desert. It's quite a clever way to argue for a greater influence, but it's fallacious.
I thought Nancy Newhall's remarks were spot on.
That said, Beaumont was quite a bad historian. His efforts to make Emerson out to be important are misplaced. Also, it is worth noting, ineffective. Nobody thinks Emerson was particularly important, because he didn't actually influence anyone. Given that Newhall was unable to raise a minor figure up, I am doubtful about an argument that he cast a major one down.
Otherwise, I quite liked the paper.
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... Regarding Slobodan's suggestion that talk of death and dissolution is simply theoretical waffle tacked on to a fortuitous one-off snapshot, we can see that Sommer pursued this subject consistently:
Artists fascination with death and carcasses is hardly new: Charles Baudelaire's poem A Carcass (http://www.poetrycat.com/charles-baudelaire/a-carcass), for instance.
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Yes. Shakespeare too.
What's new in Sommer's work is his exploration of the horizonless desert landscape, overflowing with detail but with no fixed point of interest.
I've seen artists do similar since - Stephen Shore with his Scottish landscapes of the 1980s, Jeff Wall with his pictures of Sicily - but I think Sommer did it first (1940s).