Exhibit on Mapplethorpe, curated by Hockney

they are a valid emotional response and i think show a really great insight Osso

I don't fully appreciate the technical skills either but can appreciate the results

I chose those two photos for subject matter lose cropping, simple background, adult man) rather than lighting.

Avedon gets a lot of expression in his work. His portrait of Hillary Clinton is one of my favorites because of the emotion in it. In the bazillions of pictures we've seen of her, Avedon's portrait presents her as so human.

<going to see if I can dig it up somewhere.....



...ahhh. There it is.>

Many of his portraits are not the most flattering ones ever taken of the subject but they are the most "real".

Vivien, that is, in my experience, the ONLY humanizing photo of Hillary. I wish more would turn up--for political reasons.
By the way-- lighting in each case had been subtly designed to make them look like their work (incisive/velvety etc)--WOW! what a creative idea that was.

Miklos, does it seem to you that Avedon was after the particular and Mapplethorp the universal? It seems to me that Avedon shows the person; Mapplethorp uses the subject to show us a principle.

Boomerang, For Hillary to be seen as real IS flattering. I'll bet she likes this photograph. An excellent photograph!

JLN, Yes. Avedon seems, almost always, to reveal a particular personality. Mapplethorpe's photographs tend to be exercises in universals of style. He is trying for a lot, and he doesn't always get there. Of the failures, the portraits may be the weakest, because there is often very little personality from the sitter--its revelation seems not to have been a major goal. Somewhat unusual for a photographer-portraitist?

That is an interesting thing to consider.

Maplethorpe: universal, a document - this is what they look like.

Avedon: personal, a portrait - this is who they are.

I know that in portraits people, mostly women, are sensetive about showing their hands as hands give away so much, and not just age. Not just eyes are windows to souls.

It seems at first blush that Avedon often shows hands while Maplethorpe does not.

I'm going to have to review each photographers work to see if my theory holds up.....

There have been several articles on Avedon recently, in the New Yorker, NY Times, to start with. I've saved some of them... will try to pick up some appropriate quotes and get back with them.

I have been cleaning out some of my saved internet-found photos, to either put them on discs or print them or dump them, and so ran into this article re truth and photography. I'll only give a fraction of it, as the article is in the archives now, I won't give the whole thing, as people pay a few dollars to do that, I suspect it is frowned upon to print it all.

New York Times
The Picnic That Never Was
By PHILIP GEFTER

Published: November 21, 2004

PHOTOGRAPHS may correspond to the way things actually look in the world, but optical precision is not the same thing as reality. In the art world, the truth-telling capabilities of photography are tethered less to fact than to ideas about perception, emotion and cultural evolution. If documentary work shows us that life may be stranger than fiction, recent conceptual photography counters that fabrication may be truer than life.
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Beate Gütschow, a 34-year-old artist in Berlin whose first New York show is on view at Danziger Projects in Chelsea, has made a series of landscape pictures in which grass, trees, sky and figures all look authentic enough. And individually, the elements are genuine; she photographed them as she found them in forests and public parks in Germany. But the landscapes in her pictures don't exist.

Each is constructed from up to 30 separate photographs. After a month of taking pictures outdoors with a 35-millimeter camera, Ms. Gütschow scanned the pictures into her electronic archive and began the painstaking process of constructing her landscapes at the computer. "I don't work with an image in my head," she said by phone from Berlin. "I work from my picture files. I start by sketching on my computer. First the people. Then the trees. I might put two trees together. Then the foreground. I build it very quickly."

In the case of "Untitled (L.S.) #13," (45 x 35 inches), the two trees do not exist together as they appear; she photographed each one separately on the same day in Rostock, near the German coast. The people were assembled from separate pictures, and the wall on which they are sitting was photographed at a railroad station. Four different images were used to create the sky.

While Ms. Gütschow does not construct her landscapes with preconceived images in mind, the work cunningly plays on our ideas about painting and photography. Her Edenic scenes intentionally pay homage to 17th-century landscape painting, in particular the work of Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael, referencing this tradition to highlight an idealized version of nature. By working with photographic imagery, which creates a sense of verisimilitude, she underscores the artificiality of this romantic ideal.

"Two-hundred-year-old landscape paintings are not interesting to me," she said. "But to take something normally found in painting and transfer it to photography, that's what interests me. The landscape is just the door I use to enter the idea of perception."

and so on...

Two hundred year old landscape paintings do interest me, for a variety of reasons, but that's me.

Yes, Ossobuco, if Ms. Gutschow has any two-hundred-year-old landscape paintings lying about that she'd like to discard as "not interesting," I'll take them, please!

I am, however, fascinated by her landscape-building via computer. I wish I were set up to try this, but, knowing my limitations in electronics, I'd be very lucky to get the red onto the barn door! So many artist friends of mine create beautiful work involving digital manipulation. I stand in awe!

Vivien, how is your cold/flu? Scratch that: how are YOU?

hi jln - thanks for the query - surviving! still suffering but definitely on the upward slope it was a vicious bug.

All these images (and younger daugher getting really into photography) has made me long to do some more black and white myself and print my own. Trouble is my enlarger was my grandfathers - must be 50 odd years old - no timer - just click it on and count ..... and I don't have a proper dark room so it is very very uncomfortable as the bathroom is the easiest to black out. At college we had a state of the art machine that you fed your exposed paper into and had a dry print returned in 60 seconds.