I think it is noteworthy how the photographic language of August Sander has found a wealth of proponents on the internet, who use derivations of it to document and promote the style they find on the street. The most prominent of these is Scott Schuman, known to followers and to Time magazine, who have at some point selected him as one of their ‘top 100 design influencers’ and given him a strapline, as The Sartorialist. The Sartorialist namechecks Sander and draws a line from his ‘quiet, distant backgrounds’ and subjects who ‘fill the space they are in with their strong personas’ to Sander’s. Sander’s aim, though, was ‘to see things as they are and not as they should or could be’. The Sartorialist might well have been listening to the Kennedys when they paraphrased ‘Back To Methuselah’; ‘Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?’ Such is his influence and indeed his vision; The Sartorialist produces a highly selective view of the street and even fodder for the satirists in ‘Oh Snap!’ a ‘step-by-step guide to getting shot by The Sartorialist’. Sander’s own selection was borne of personal meetings and is considered unrepresentative in a demographic sense, despite his professed intention, but is wider. Thus the language is the same but the message is, whisper it, changed.

Reading:

MoMA The Collection August Sander. (German, 1876-1964)
http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=5145

FT.com - Arts - Visual Arts - August Sander- Claude Cahun, Edinburgh
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ad4e6116-54a6-11e0-b1ed-00144feab49a.html#axzz1I6wE2rKi

The Sartorialist The Influencers - August Sander & Disfarmer
http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/2009/09/blog-post.html

Oh Snap! Our Step-By-Step Guide To Getting Shot By The Sartorialist
http://www.refinery29.com/get-shot-by-sartorialist

Does idea that photography is not art survive only as straw man now? In Susan Sontag’s book ‘On Photography’ she reveals a debate as old as the medium; there were not years of received wisdom that it wasn’t art before someone began the effort to raise its profile, as you might intuit if you ever listened to the debate as it rumbled on throughout the 20th century.

Here comes the wolf: I think it is due to the mechanisation and ease with which a photographer can produce a representative image; it is easy to reduce the act of art making to ‘an effort to arrive at a representation’ and judge its validity by the arduousness or singular achievement of the effort. I am reminded of Damien Hirst’s riposte when the ease with which he merely ordered the building of ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ was considered so facile that anyone could have done it; 'But you didn't, did you?' This glib reply belies the real act of art, on purpose I’m sure; it takes invisible stuff – creative will. Any art, no matter how straightforward the job of the midwife, must be willed before it can exist. And if you didn’t do it, just like Hirst called you on, then you didn’t have the will to do it; for only having done it is proof of the will; and if you didn’t have the will, well, then you really didn’t have anything, did you?

Reading:

‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag

Bleeding art Art and design The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/apr/20/thesaatchigallery.art6

The photographer Jeff Wall interests me for his dedication and the ends for which he conjures it; unless you share some of the same obsessional traits and interest in the surface, those may seem to be at odds; I do not know. First, there is the working method; for one shot he sought to capture an interior with an exterior view but he scouted a location, then cast a woman in the role of occupant and gave her a budget to furnish it, only returning after a year, when the trees were bare, to take the shot.

This enormous effort of contrivance, but so that it does not appear contrived, is not done in order that the picture should have a meaning that another picture, taken more casually, could not. Wall has become so disinterested in the meaning of his subjects that he is now relieved to find that his earlier work is not re-rendered unsuccessful by its earnest concern, were that to be looked over. His picture ‘Mimic’ is the perfect example, which Wall himself cites; taken ostensibly as some kind of comment on racism, it is just ‘good’ in a Guardian interview from 2005. He could be the patron saint of those who just want to get something right from their point of view and relegate to a tertiary concern what others make of it.

Reading:

Photographer Jeff Wall's best shot Art and design The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/05/photography-jeff-wall-best-shot

Jeff Wall Conjuring something out of nothing - Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3669616/Jeff-Wall-Conjuring-something-out-of-nothing.html

interview Melissa Denes meets photographer Jeff Wall Art and design The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/15/art

Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Jeff Wall
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room3.shtm

Consider the semiotics of this image, a portrait of Natalie Portman by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, married fashion photographers and portraitists. In it Portman appears to be subject to another’s will. The short, clipped nails and size of the hand forcing her expression would seem to belong to a man. Any culture familiar with the film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, which one might guess Inez & Vinoodh, as they are known, to be, might recognise something of the set-up to that film’s infamous eye cutting scene in this image; lacking that familiarity, the way Portman’s expression is being enacted by another may yet seem to signify an aggressor or domination; regardless, the very fact of the hand in the making of this facial expression, the eyebrow raise, effectively nullifies our usual association with it, which is that something is being quizzed. One sign supersedes another, by oustripping its authenticity.

The way her head is covered and held, by her this time, is reminiscent, to an audience of Christian art, of the Madonna; is Portman to be revered for her saintly passivity? Any Christian reading of the image must also essay the symbolic wedding ring; if we are to work only with the image in isolation from all knowledge of its origin, shall we infer that the picture is of a married couple, or does knowing that Vinoodh is married, but to Inez not Natalie, permit us to glaze over while reading that particular bit of the image? The picture defies easy interpretation but its strange otherness, another studium, is part of its appeal for me.

Reading:

Photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's best shot Art and design The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jul/08/my-best-shot-inez-lamsweered-vinoodh-matadin

Un Chien Andalou (1929) - IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/

To expound on my opinion that good photographs are simply examples of good studium rather than Barthes’ punctum, which seems to imply that nothing so obvious can give pleasure, I would cite the following photograph. Here is the Dutchwoman Lara Stone in Calvin Klein’s ‘Fall’ 2010 campaign, shot by the duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. The sharpness and clarity, both very literal and figurative, of this woman – centre frame, lit high key against a dark backdrop without sacrificing a cent of the tonal difference above and below those jutting cheekbones, in sculptural attire – that is the point. There is no room for a punctum. An image like this is not created on the hoof; nothing in it is there by chance or happy accident; her hair is wet with product; her pose is statuesque. Even if the once piquant gap between Stone’s front teeth figured it would not count; with it she has started a fashion for diastema widening brackets among models and no one books her, the trendsetter, only to be surprised by it anymore; it must be considered and it must be considered studium by Barthes. The picture says look at this pale stripe of alabaster flesh running down the centre of the frame; this is this garment’s negative space. I am not unhappy to oblige; I think the image is beautiful. Barthes sought some differentiator for photography from painting and that is why the un- or less contrived is so important to him but my taste runs to painting and sculpture too and that’s why I am more of a studium man.

Reading:

‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes

Lara Stone and Georgia Jagger make gap teeth the new face of fashion Life and style The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/24/gap-teeth-face-of-fashion

It’s tempting to try to divine from Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’ the secret that will enable you to become a better photographer but such was not Barthes’ occupation nor preoccupation; he simply sought to define photography. Nevertheless, the photographs he favours all contain a detail that pricks his interest, which he terms the ‘punctum’; were a photographer ever to happen upon such a detail that pricked his or her own interest and photograph it, it would be the ‘studium’ of Barthes; that arousal of the photographer that his or her picture telegraphs – its raison d’etre. Once it is positioned in the centre of the frame or features in any other compositional idea its attractiveness wanes for Barthes; it is not giving him the thrill of the chase, or discovery.

It is tempting to believe, then, that one could ensure his or her photograph held a punctum by editing for it, rather than attempting to photograph it. But this too is to miss the punctum’s essence; it is an ‘eye of the beholder’ concern. Show me a good photographer, Barthes, and I will show you a lucky photographer; not so for having pressed the shutter at exactly the right moment or for having it play out in front of the camera, for you still have to get out of bed in the morning for that kind of luck – a misnomer, but lucky to have found his or her audience.

Reading:
‘Camera Lucida’ by Roland Barthes