subject echo: dreams of flight

what is it about toy planes?

(Shane Lavalette, Alec Soth, and Corinne Vionnet.)

subject echo: magnum contest (and the terror of beauty)

Alec Soth, blogging again over at the Magnum Photos blog, proposed a contest this week: match an image from the Magnum archive with a famous painting from art history.

it's a good game to play in between hitting refresh on all the news sites today...  and the commenters have some pretty great suggestions already.

above, fun with Steve McCurry and Caravaggio.   

i suppose these two images of Medusa continue this week's ugly/beauty theme.  after all, Melville (and many other poets and writers) have celebrated Medusa's "beauty strange with horror allied," while Structuralist mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant describes Medusa as a symbol of where "the strange beauty of the feminine countenance, brilliant with seduction, and the horrible fascination of death, meet and cross."  my classicist friend points out that the Greeks were always crazy for terrible beauty.  and so am i—hot stuff.

notes on soth

1) just feel it! this is my favorite image so far from Alec Soth's exploration of China in "The Eagle and the Dragon." the project contrasts the rise of China (including a feature on the Olympics) with the decline of middle America.

for more, check out the Telegraph's series of articles. (however, i have to say, the scan that appears on Telegraph.co.uk is a bit of a mess. [click the image to see larger.] dust spots, hair, scratches?)


2) how did i miss A Photo Editor's interview with Alec Soth about his erstwhile blog? (gee, it's only the 4th Google hit for Alec Soth's name right now.)

APE: Your blog is still cited as one of the best on photography and you’ve not made a post in almost a year. Do you think any photographers will come around and usurp your title?
Soth: Of course. I’m sure it has already happened.

sigh. well, no, it hasn't, really. (has it?) this is sort of an insincere exchange, but also makes you ponder.


3) not sure if y'all caught this special profile on Alec Soth's former cover subject, Charles Erie, in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, but it's a doozy. i'll sum up:

"While Erie has had some fun with his famous picture, he feels queasy about his image circulating the globe and strangers making assumptions about him.... Like Native Americans and the Amish, he’ll be very suspicious the next time a photographer drives up to the house. Crazy Horse, who allegedly never allowed his picture to be taken, once explained this mistrust by saying, “My friend, why should you wish me to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow?”"

subject echo: pink sweats

a progression of melancholy ladies in pink sweats, from Amy Stein to Hellen van Meene to Alec Soth...

subject echo: michal chelbin and alec soth

when i was looking through Michal Chelbin's portfolio earlier in the week, the top image, called "Janna and Alona, Russia, 2003," caught my eye. it made me think of Alec Soth's photo "Mother and Daughter, Davenport, Iowa 2002."

both reminded me that i have seen a lot of photographers lately whose work is described as following "in the tradition of Diane Arbus and August Sander." and i realized that i have seen frequent comparisons to Arbus for Chelbin and Sander for Soth (perhaps gender lines have something to do with this, as well as Chelbin's focus on circus people and other "strange" folks). yet to me, Arbus and Sander are very different (you could even say that Sander's universalizing eye was critiqued by Arbus's more minoritizing one...)

here, both Chelbin and Soth are exploring the idea of ethnography in their respective projects "Strangely Familiar" and "Sleeping By the Mississippi." what does it mean to go out with your camera and try to capture a people or a place (or the spirit of one in the other)?

so, just a sketch of an idea here... but back to the photos themselves — they have the echo of the legs and a similar bit of a louche air in the mood. Janna and Alona are Eastern European child circus performers, and the Mother and Daughter are in a brothel along the Mississippi in Davenport.

both might seem exotic to the viewer, but it's just everyday life for the subjects, and if nothing else, you could say both are "strangely familiar"...

subject echo

portraiture free association: what if Alec Soth's "Sydney, Tallahassee, Florida, 2004," grew up to be Tealia Ellis Ritter's photograph "My dreams are of my dad, alive doing mundane things"?

8 x 10

i'm interested in both the aesthetics of 8 x 10 view cameras and the dynamics of shooting portraits with them... after all, large format cameras still seem to be regarded by many as the ultimate tools for fine art photography.

since photographer Alec Soth is the guy both most likely to be described by the sentence "the photographer who takes color portraits with an 8 x 10 camera" and also the guy most likely to not want to be described that way (see his blog post on "the sentence")... i can't help but single him out. (the photo above is "Florence" from his latest project, Magnum's 2007 "Fashion Magazine").

in this video on the YouTube, Soth says of the dynamics of confronting people from beneath the cloth of the view camera: "they're portraits, but there is a distance there. to me it's often a picture of the space between us, in a way"

Soth also posits that the 8 x 10's ground glass itself creates a beautiful, jewel-like image so powerful to the photographer that actually taking the picture is secondary. the resulting photo is just a document of a larger event that takes place, "which really the viewer doesn't experience...they experience the idea of that." i really like the idea that the viewer only experiences the idea of the photograph. i wish Roland Barthes were still around to noodle on the topic.

to sum up the experience, he says "It's not this 'decisive moment'...it's a slowed-down, very purposeful encounter."

i've never used a view camera. but he just makes it sound so romantical...like a tool of seduction.

or, as the fine art world's Nerve profile would remind us: "large prints are sexy... large negatives are sexier."

p.s. in another interview, Soth says that he doesn't collect photography, but he has bought one print, by E.J. Bellocq. (early 20th century photographer who left behind a hidden cache of sexy and awesome portraits of prostitutes from Storyville, New Orleans...taken with an 8 x 10 camera.) i rest my case.