I had a great experience last summer learning from Amy Stein at the Anderson Ranch Workshops. The unforeseen benefits of being unemployed over last summer. The new workshop course schedule is available. A lot more basic and digital-oriented classes than I remember from last year. In some ways, caters to the weathly vacationers in the area (Aspen is just down the road), but some significant names teaching there. You get out what you put in, so take a look and see if anything fits your own development plan. A few of note:
- June 21-25: Suzanne Opton will be teaching the many subtle aspects of portrait photography in “Confronting the Portrait”
- July 19-23: Alessandra Sangunetti teaching “Defining Your Vision: Pictures and Meaning”, an opportunity to produce a narrative photographic portfolio.
- July 5-9: David Hilliard and Jonathan Singer “You do the math: adding and multiplying images”
Beyond the specific classes, there are great lectures by the visiting artists across all the media done at the Ranch. Some really terrific insights into the artists’ lives.
The workshops can be a bit pricey, but there are discounts available:
- Student/Teacher Discount: 50% tuition scholarship is offered to full-time students, K-12 teachers and college professors on a space-available basis.
- Bring a Friend Discount: Register for a 2010 summer workshop and bring or refer a new student and you will receive a 25% discount on your 2010 workshop tuition.
Today, Robert Frank wouldn’t wait two years to find a publisher for The Americans. He’d produce 2,000 copies himself and sell it through his website and market it through his blog and Twitter account.
Nick Bilton has summarized the recent 2-day “Photobook Colloquium” held in Lausanne, Switzerland. Sounds like a lot of great conversation, if no conclusive answers, about how the economics of the medium put constraints on what can and cannot be made. The answer, of course, will be found in the doing.
One such answer I was not aware of is Dienststelle Marienthal, an ebook by Andreas Magdanz. It’s currently available for iPhone/iPod Touch and will run you $4.99. I grabbed a copy this morning and its basically a translation of the paper book of the same title into a small screen version. The interface isn’t the most user friendly (relies on a tired replication of physical flipping of pages, much as Apple has landed on for their iBooks in the iPad.) It took me a couple of minutes just to figure out how to get out of the home screen and into the book. But once you figure it out, you can get through the work relatively easily. There are a couple of text pieces and then the photo series. The small screen is a hindrance. You can zoom in for detail, but getting the full effect of the entire frame is nearly impossible. An interesting first stab at what we’ll see down the line, in just a few months perhaps.
So, I come back from a day off for President’s Day and discover PDN kicked over an ant hill with insinuations about strange similarities between photographer David Burdeny’s work and the work several other photographers. These are accusations that had been floating around the blogs for a couple of years, actually. Goes to show it can still take a traditional publication’s loud voice to make something really trigger a tipping point, I guess.
I’m not going to weigh in on Burdeny’s work and whether he’s ripped someone else off. Others are doing a fine job of that elsewhere. This issue crops up from time to time and usually there’s a faction that’s incensed and offended by the alleged similarities between photograph x and photograph y. It’s a crime. Some say plagiarism.
I say plagiarism in photography is literally impossible. Plagiarism is copying the expression of an idea. Copying an idea is no foul, in my book. You can’t own an idea, only a specific expression of it. Copyright office even agrees on this point. With a book, I can copy down the exact words and, there, I’ve plagiarised. With a photograph, the process itself negates the ability to copy another’s expression. The camera records the conditions present directly in front of the open shutter at the time the picture is made. Once that moment passes, the time required to open and close the shutter, capturing that moment again is completely lost forever. You can attempt to get the same lighting, the same position, the same compass headings, same equipment etc, but you can never again capture that moment in time. It’s a photographic impossibility, even in the studio.
Burdeny’s various series seem like meditations on one technique or another. Some might say those techniques are the trademarks of other photographers. Are we to think that mimicking a visual style is plagiarism? It makes me uncomfortable to say once a photographer becomes know for a certain approach to making an image, that approach is off limits to all others. Yet, photography has wrestled with the issue of the artist’s hand from its earliest days. The mechanical nature of the art removes any direct evidence of the photographer’s individuality, of the artist’s hand. So technique and style are stand ins for this. We get awfully nervous when it appears that short hand for individual artistic sense is so apparently easily aped.
Bryan Formhals pointed out to me this evening that had Burdeny’s artist statement framed his work as an exploration of this very issue, no one would have batted an eye. They might even have applauded him. But, it appears his statement was cribbed from someone else’s, too, so he seems to have missed that opportunity. The framing is all-powerful. Look at Richard Prince.
Here’s an irony.
This will be the topic of next week’s #photoartchat Tweetchat. On Tuesday Feb 23rd at 6pm Pacific, Harlan Erskine and I will be hosting David Bram, photographer and publisher of Fraction Magazine.
Pretty cool. Oakland-based photographer Noah Beil is putting together small run photobooks he makes by hand with letter press printing press and a home binder. Great looking output. Twenty bucks, edition of 50. You can buy online and he’s got pictures of the production process. Great stuff.
The second issue, if that’s what you can call it, of Shane Lavalette’s publishing experiment “Lay Flat” is now available for pre-ordering. The thing ships in late February. Photographers this time around include: Claudia Angelmaier, Semâ Bekirovic, Charles Benton, Walead Beshty, Lucas Blalock, Talia Chetrit, Anne Collier, Natalie Czech, Jessica Eaton, Roe Ethridge, Stephen Gill, Daniel Gordon, David Haxton, Matt Keegan, Elad Lassry, Katja Mater, Laurel Nakadate, Lisa Oppenheim, Torbjørn Rødland, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Joachim Schmid, Penelope Umbrico, Useful Photography, Charlie White, Ann Woo and Mark Wyse. Whew! A long list and I don’t recognize a single name, which is exciting, actually.
Some writing about photography, too. Runs you thirty bucks.
I’m still waaay behind on my blog reading from the holidays and taking care of moving my family from Colorado to the Bay Area. Ran across this today, a mass show of photography to honor the passing of Larry Sultan who taught at California College of the Arts here. Sultan’s “The Valley” is one of the most powerful projects I’ve seen. If you’d like to contribute, here are the details. More on Conscientious.
Here are the three ways you can contribute:
1. Mail something that will arrive by Wednesday January 14th at the latest, sooner is better.
If you want your contribution returned to you please provide a SASE. Please include your name and an email address and/or phone number with your submission.
Photography Program c/o Chris Nickel
California College of the Arts
5212 Broadway
Oakland CA 94618-1426
2. Email something to be part of the projection slide-show to photo@cca.edu
Please include your name and an email address and/or phone number with your submission.
Please send jpegs sized at 72dpi and no larger than 1500 dpi.
3. If you live in the Bay Area, drop off something to the first floor of the photo building (Martinez) on the Oakland campus anytime between 10am-5pm from January 7th through January 14th (with the exception of Saturday the 9th and Sunday the 10th). Please include your name and an email address and/or phone number with your submission. Please return to pick up your submission at the Oliver Art Center on Monday January 18th between 10am-1pm.
Photo art chat on Twitter continues to be a great way to “meet” new people passionate about photography. Last week’s chat with Radius Books founder Darius Himes gave an inside view on the challenges and rewards of photo book publishing. This week, we’re going to tackle your views of the best of 2009. Galleries, museums, boools and new photographers. Harlan Erskine will be hosting once again.
Tonight’s tweetchat starts at 6pm Pacific (9pm Eastern). The Tweetchat site is a great way to follow the discussion.
Follow Ocular Octopus on Twitter
Follow Harlan Erskine on Twitter
On Tuesday evening (tomorrow), I’ll be joining photographer Harlan Erskine for a Twitter-based chat about the future of the photobook. We’ll be online to talk all things photobook from 9-10pm Eastern/6-7pm Pacific. This is the first time we’ve tried something like this, so it’ll be a little experimental. You can use hashtag #photoartchat on Twitter to read or participate in the chat. I’m planning to use Tweetchat.com to make this a little easier.
And, of course, you should follow OcularOctopus on Twitter, here.
UPDATE: There is a transcript of the chat at the #photoartchat page.
