Art & Perception

I always find it interesting to see how different artists treat the same subject. Browsing the web, I’ve come across a number of images from several photographers that are close to some of mine in subject matter. Not only that, but they appear close in spirit as well. That evokes two reactions in me: disappointment that I’m not the first and only one to see the world in this unique and compelling way, and pleasure in finding others who seem to see the world in this unique and compelling way.

These are photographers I can learn from. Not only because I enjoy and respect their larger bodies of work, but because by comparing similar images I think I can learn more about my own work. I want to understand what distinguishes my own vision or style, which is not something I derive from principles, but have to discover by making images and looking at them.

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One of my most powerful and influential muses both in my writing and photography is incongruity. I believe this is the case for two reasons.  First, growing up gay in mid 20th Century America means you daily face living in a state of perpetual incongruousness. Almost every thought you have is incongruous with your surroundings and the apparent thoughts of most everyone around you. Your self-confidence, self-respect and development as a human being depends on embracing and owning your state of incongruity.  As a child and especially as a closeted teenager and college student I was often called a non-conformist and an iconoclast.  That was unfair to true non-conformists and iconoclasts because I did  not choose to be so whereas they do.  What appeared to be non-conformity and iconoclasm was merely the manifestations of my incongruous condition.

The second reason for my creative relationship with incongruity is Manhattan,  my life-long environment. Environmentally, my home town provided a visual and cultural stew that celebrated and exploded with incongruity. As a child and closeted young man, I could swim in the waters of Manhattan with complete confidence and comfort. Who would notice my quirky little self in this ocean of intensely complex cultural, economic, political, racial and ethnic diversity and this visual cacophony and feast of discordant shapes, colors and textures?

So incongruity became my home and my muse.

I believe that New York is as important to the art world as it is because this city”s uniquely incongruous nature drives an unequaled atmosphere of creative energy and frenetic industry. I was recently asked why I “limit” my camera to New York. In fact, I almost never travel with my camera.  My inventory of Manhattan photography is vast.  And having traveled extensively throughout more than two dozen countries and countless cities and towns, I have but a few hundred old transparencies buried in a drawer somewhere.

The reason is that my muse is a very demanding mistress. Paris is a city of harmony and balance.  London delivers an abundance of quaint, stately and a touch of the eccentric.  Tokyo is an avalanche of uniformity and elegance. Bangkok is an ocean of golden spires. Amsterdam’s incongruity lies in the sexual antics hidden behind sparkling clean windows and compulsively neat little houses. But if I photographed these places I would feel like an adulterer.

For many reasons: Chance, the forces of chaos, competing cultural perspectives, subconscious manifestations of the city’s demographics–Manhattan’s is the queen of incongruity. My camera’s appetite for it seems never to be satisfied by the cornucopia of inharmonious diversity of architecture, styles and design.  New York never disappoints in that regard.  In most any direction you look in most parts of town, you will find bizarre, often inappropriate and jarring juxtapositions of lifestyles and perspectives that should make for one big jumble of chaos but instead it is in that brazen incongruity that the city finds an amazing visual harmony.

Tourists are often jarred by this as they discover that a wrong turn on a city block can transport you into an entirely different world after merely walking a few feet. Other than the city’s famous grid pattern, little else has been done in concert thanks to the egos and individuality of very wealthy men and the American habit of borrowing architectural styles and ornamental designs and decorative effects from several thousand years of human history which is no where more apparent than in this city.

On one city block you may catch glimpses of ancient Babylonia, Classical Greece, Medieval Europe, Art Nouveau Vienna, and Renaissance France.  Some of these will be bizarrely newish, some aged through recent neglect and other parts deliberately made to look weathered over hundreds or even thousands of years.  In fact, one of the most charming characteristics of this great lady with a passion for phallic symbols is that it is often impossible to differentiate between neglect and artful and deliberate antiquing.

I will be quite content to spend the rest of my life exploring this town’s details. I consider myself to be extremely lucky to have found a model who remains timeless, always changing and forever surprising.  My work is completely a product of my environment. Incongruity.  Except Manhattan is also the glue that holds it together, and I mean “it” in every sense of the word.

” …There are two prominent myths about photography: the myth that it tells the truth and the myth that it doesn’t.” This quote, from artist Jeff Wall, is from a deceptively small book with some big ideas, “Photography: A Very Short Introduction,” by Steve Edwards. The semiotics of photography has never had such an accessible vehicle as this book, which is largely the structure of it: the nature and meaning of the photographic artifact and act. That tension between truth and artifice, across the duality of documentary and artistic intent, has existed from the beginning of photography and before, and still confounds us. There is no one answer, only paradox and ambiguity.

Thanks to J.P. Caponigro for turning me on to this wonderful book. There’s a deeper look into the book over at “Politics, Theary and Photographs.”

Despite recent posts here on the subject of art about art, by Leslie and by Karl, I hadn’t thought of the question in application to myself. Then I remembered that I did indeed have some photographs of art, at least if the gentle reader allows graffiti to be considered art. In any case, I was definitely interested in the personal expression represented by the graffiti. I was also interested in the setting, a half-underground concrete parking structure, and especially in the lighting, a mixture of glaring incandescent light and early morning daylight.

I made these images nearly a year ago, but still haven’t arrived at a presentation I’m happy with. I’m curious what you think of the following pairs of images. The first pair pits color against black and white. The color version shows the different tints of the two light sources, but the blacks feel richer to me in the monochrome image. Do you have a preference? For what reason?

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Like many of you, I have a hobby. It’s not an unusual avocation. I take photographs. I was born on Manhattan island and have lived my entire life in this astonishing feast of visual diversity and eccentricity. And as a native of this town rather than a tourist, I enjoy the luxury of time allowing me to see far beyond the skyline, the great buildings and the rich tapestry of glamorous tourist attractions. Since childhood I’ve carried a camera. I’ve always been fascinated with the minutia of this city, those details that few notice: shapes, colors, light, broken windows, architectural and design quirks and the strange visual synergy of so many cultures on one tiny river island.It has been my habit for many decades to occassionally spend a very private and spiritual Saturday roaming some corner of Manhattan, using my camera to capture a reflection in a puddle, the intense juxtaposition of colors and architectural styles on a street corner or sometimes a funny moment in someone’s life. The experience has always been very private and a very special few hours allowing personal reflection and a very special kind of connection with my hometown.

I rushed out this morning, Saturday, January 20 simply because it was the coldest morning of the winter, a winter that has been bizarrely and constantly warm, warm enough to keep my seasonal hay fever active far beyond November. A crystal clear frigid Saturday morning would surely deliver funny coats and hats and wonderful games of light and color. Between taxis and my feet, I covered parts of the Financial District, Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho, Noho and Union Square. But for the first time in my life there were many parts of these neighborhoods that I could no longer cover and where my camera and I were no longer welcome. I was tempted to post my photograph so that you could determine for yourself just how much I resemble a threat to democracy and freedom–but that’s probably not wise. Suffice it to say that I am a 58-year-old very white, bald, Jewish, Gay New Yorker with a very neatly trimmed silver beard. I was wearing an $1,500 Italian dark green leather and fleece coat, a black cashmere scarf and a matching black pull on cashmere cap. I looked like your typical over-paid and perfectly stylish self-indulgent New Yorker on his way to or from a chic brunch. Today’s weapon of choice was my Canon Digital Elph with optical zoom.

However, to members of the New York City Police Department, several doormen and a couple of security guards, I looked like none of the above. I looked like a terrorist threat. Clearly, a lone man photographing details of buildings from various angles and wanting to enter lobbies of city landmarks to photograph cherubs, statuary and mosaics is now assumed to be a threat to the safety and security of our fair city.

I’m a photographer. I’m an artist. But such explanations no longer fly. I was denied entry to the lobby of the landmark and fantabulous Woolworth Building. I was asked for photo ID in front of a Soho luxury condo. Two of New York’s finest approached me in front of a Prince Street church and asked me to please “move on.” I explained who I was and what I was doing. The response was a second “please move on.” Two security guards asked me why I was photographing crowds shopping the stalls on Canal Street. Why is it any of their business, I asked? “Please move on.”

Perhaps on my next outing I’ll rent a wife and a child to walk with me so that everyone just leaves me the hell alone. But the terrorists are probably already employing that ruse, so I might get shot.

The sad truth is in the details. How has 9/11, Homeland Security and George W. Bush changed our lives? Ask a guy who just likes to take pretty pictures for his own pleasure. Ask a guy who has lost the freedom to spend a Saturday by himself in the peace and beauty of his own world, a world that is now ridiculously interrupted by officious men in uniforms and requests for photo ID.

Photographing the details of Manhattan used to be a very enriching hobby, now it’s a awkward negotiation through a maze of uniforms. I know. It seems to be a small price to pay for our freedom. But this morning I found myself asking, “What freedom?”

You’ll find more examples of my freedom-threatening work here.

Guest post by June Underwood

We often say that certain works of art “talk” to each other, that artworks can carry on dialogs with each other, or that an exhibit carries on its own “conversation.” Today I’m thinking of that interchange among works of art.

You might say I’m thinking about exhibits. However, I use “exhibits” loosely, meaning the exhibits in our minds and ones seen among blogs and websites. We are accustomed to the formal groupings of museums and galleries, and we can all easily come up with categories that curators must use to form exhibits. But I want to ponder the works themselves in a somewhat more casual mode. I’m thinking of those movable feasts that we encounter and move around in the compartments of our minds.

A specific example: such an exhibit might be arranged in the mind by allowing Steve’s rabbit to converse with his derelict houses in his series “Ghost Light.” The house photos seem full of empty space; the rabbit photo is full of texture. But putting the two into the same space, comparing and contrasting what we see as we group them in this way, some conversations seem to emerge.

Then, to add a different voice to the mix, I meandered through Colin’s photographs “of the day”. And I found another that I think might enter the conversation here.

Colin’s photo is also black & white, also “empty while full” but doesn’t have the same sense of mortality and loss as either of Steve’s. Is it the subject matter that gives it a different voice? Or the formal elements? Do Steve’s photos elegize in a kind anthropomorphism, while Colin’s stoutly refuse to romanticize? Are Steve’s photographs speaking in the voice of the grief-stricken while Colin’s have a jauntier tone? What might the dialog between them be? And what caused Colin’s photos to be, for the most part, not a very good conversational match with Steve’s? (This last is clearly subjective, based on a quick study and a tired mind – but fun to contemplate anyway).

Which brings me back to more general questions: within your own mind, is there a visual ecology among the artworks you love, where they feed one another? If so, are there ways to define and delineate that ecology which might move it from the personal pondering to more universal conceptions.

Do different art sets demand, in your mind, different kinds of ecologies and promote different viewing mindsets? Which works can be put together without canceling one another or without one bullying the other? What allows works to converse in a meaningful way — theme? style? medium? artist? chronology? period, size, or something not listed here? Or, conversely, what elements make for absolute incompatibility? If you had access to all the art in the world, what sets would you think of exhibiting?

Not so incidentally, my reason for asking these questions is personal. I am engaged in a multi-year project on a single theme, the life within ancient geologies and land formations of the high desert landscape of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon. I am processing that landscape in a multitude of media and modes. I have done and will continue to do pleine aire painting (oil and watercolor), photographs (summation and reference rather than “hey look at this), studio oils and watercolors (mostly as studies but some finished, complete-in-themselves). All these versions of the landscape will, I hope, culminate in works done with my primary media, the stitched textiles, painted, pieced, appliquéd, representational and abstract. I am in the very early stages of this rather too ambitious process, and so I am circling the questions of why/how/when/if among the pieces that I have in front of me.

As I proceed through the variations on this landscape, I hope to be more methodical about moving from memory and photograph through oil and watercolor to textiles, from representational to semi-abstract to abstract. But right now I have a mixed conglomerate of pieces, ranging from postcard sized watercolors, to an 8 x 9 foot painted textile, probably a total of 60 or 70 pieces in different media. As I work in this way, I contemplate if and in what ways, each work speaks to the others. I have multiple “exhibiting” spaces within the house and studio, and I arrange and rearrange my work on the walls and easels to see what happens.

I’m trying to get a feel for what disparate media working on a single set of imagery might have to say to one another [two examples are shown in this post.] If you would like to see more of my work in this project, you can go here.