terryworld
Monday, February 26, 2007
Is Terry Richardson the antithesis of Richard Avedon, or his proper successor?
My series of commentaries on photography books continues this week with another look at Richardson's TerryWorld, a large volume of messy snapshots (or a messy volume of large snapshots?) that stands in apparent opposition to the precision and elegance of the many Avedon books with which it shares a bookcase. I wrote about Richard Avedon Portraits last week.
The possible similarities between Richardson and Avedon are mostly matters of discourse around the abstract idea of the fashion photographer: they are men with power over women, men with superpowered vision and sexuality, men with youthful sidekicks, men of adventure.
Or so the story goes...
But my proposed comparison is more than a formal or discursive one. If we agree to conceive of Avedon as a patriarchal figure in comparison to Richardson, then we must also deal with the question of Richardson's biological father and his relationship to Avedon. Bob Richardson was a successful fashion photographer in the 1960s, and according to some accounts, one whose salacious energy was a provocation to Avedon. Apparently, the older Richardson could motivate fashion models to do things that were outside of Avedon's internally constructed bounds. In the end, Avedon's practices are about photography more than sex, but the Richardson DNA appears to be about sex more than photography.
Among both the younger Richardson's advocates and his critics, the conventional discourse about the younger Richardson's practice is one of pornography, but his images are more properly examined as visual evidence of an evolving postmodernity and its bodily expression.
For those to whom Richardon appeals, and who participate in his photographic scenes most exuberantly, the body's essential role in determining the boundary between identity and otherness is being dismantled or discarded. More properly, the notion that a boundary between identity and otherness is necessary, desirable or even possible is being undermined by the grinding of contemporary mass culture against the relics of modernist theories of the unified self.
"The point is that you can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface," Avedon said, in a philosophical perspective that I find very comforting. "The surface is all you've got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface."
What Avedon fails to deal with is this question: does there even need to be a surface? Are stripping or invulnerability really the only options? I find the implications of those questions unsettling to my own sense of embodiment.
But Richardson doesn't.
In most cases, Richardson's photographs do not appeal to me. I own TerryWorld, and I keep it around as an intellectual challenge to myself, but there are only a handful of images that evoke any kind of pleasure in me, and they are those that are most Avedonian in formal approach.
Avedon's preferred technology for making a model the unambiguous signifier of a portrait was the white background, and Richardson gestures toward the same bleaching of context with his photographs of exposed bodies against unadorned walls and doorways. Both photographers invoke expressionist painter Egon Schiele at the moments that pierce me most sharply.
posted by fogged @ 12:21 PM 0 comments
richard avedon portraits
Monday, February 19, 2007
At first glance, Richard Avedon Portraits seems rather like a pleasant summary of the exhibition it accompanied, Avedon's 2002 portrait retrospective at the Met. It is a bit more substantial than a postcard, but weighing in at only 50 images, it is perhaps a bit too slight to carry the weight of Avedon's long career. The exhibition itself was only lightly salted with recent portraits by Avedon, and the book contains only one that did not appear in any of Avedon's previous books.
However, there are three elements of this book that appear to have drawn little comment by Avedon's many critics and advocates.
New York Magazine's Mark Stevens landed on one of them in his review for the exhibit: the significance of Avedon's 1975 portrait of sculptor June Leaf. This photograph appears on a cover of the catalog, but I was struck most sharply by its apparent importance to Avedon based on its central position at the entrance to the gallery. I did not recall having seen the photograph prior to that, but its presence imprinted itself sharply on me when I first saw it at the Met.
"There is no question who dominates this congregation," Stevens wrote at the time. "Leaf is the Village Modonna. This is the Passion of the artist."
Leaf is married to photographer Robert Frank, portraits of whom made on the same day appear in both the exhibition and catalog. Taken as a set with other white background portraits of the mid-1970s, Avedon's creative run-up to In The American West seems clear.
Avedon has often been accused of a lack of compassion for his later portrait-making practices, but the photograph of Leaf achieves exactly the kind of sympathetic human connection that Avedon's most vehement critics claim he lacks, and here is further evidence to support its importance to him: of the ten books published by Avedon since he made the photograph, it appears in six.
The photograph is also one that answers another common criticism of Avedon, that his photography is a practice of low sensationalism embossed by high technique. Leaf performs a kind of rich femininity that seems far removed from Avedon's fashion images, but which also holds its own against Avedon's representational power.
Reviews and descriptions of the book also nearly always describe the folio binding of the book, but none appear to have ever asked why. For a powerful and controlling personality such as Avedon's, it seems improbable that he would have chosen the folio format just for its novelty, and I believe that the physical design of the book represents a philosophical interrogation of the structural norms of the photographic book.
After decades working and reworking practices of photographic montage defined by the structural constraint of the two-page magazine spread, Avedon conceived the cinematic thread of his portraits in a physical form that resembles a strip of film as much as a series of pages.
I stretched the book out to its fullest length the other day, and I expected to learn something about the nature of the sequence itself, about the way that subgroups of images in the narrative might subvert the conventional boundaries of the printed page. What I found instead was the raw material of an Avedonian Mobius strip, a two-sided narrative that connects end-to-end and begins again.
One side of the strip is a sequence of Avedon's white background portraits, and the other is dominated by the written content of the catalog, including essays by Avedon and by exhibition curators Maria Hambourg and Mia Fineman. Which brings me to another unremarked aspect of the book: its unambiguous reinvocation of Portraits, Avedon's fourth book, published in 1976.
Accompanying Harold Rosenberg's introductory essay in the original title are a number of Avedon's most famous photographs, including Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound and Dick and Walter Hickock. The same basic cast of characters composed in basically the same way also accompanies Hambourg and Fineman's essay. In the same vein, many of Avedon's white background portraits are repeated in both volumes
Why would Avedon do this? One might be tempted to believe that Avedon is trying to hit us over the head with evidence of his own history and accomplishments. I prefer to think of it as a deconstructive gesture that invokes a Derridean notion of iterability & meaning, a concept best explained in English by Jonathan Culler or Michael Benedikt. A detailed analysis of the interrelationship of Avedon's narrative practices and Derrida's theories of language and meaning would be a rich one, I think, but also one deserving more space than a conventional blog post.
posted by fogged @ 11:17 AM 0 comments
thoughtful warming
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Things have been moving at a pretty glacial pace on this blog for the last few months, but I'm going to try to liven things up a little with a new series of posts.
I used to purchase a lot of photography books, mostly of the big coffee table variety, but a moment came a few years back when I started backing away from them.
I'm not really sure why. I started working for FogStock, so maybe I got my fill of looking at pictures there. I started and finished the coursework for a Ph.D., so maybe I got my fill of dealing with books there. Among my interests is a kind of photographic spectatorship that examines the limits of ethical conduct, so maybe I also needed to dismantle and remantle certain boundaries of my own.
No matter the reasons for the distance between us, the books never left me, and I've found myself drawn back to them recently. I'm hungry to sit down and meditate on some of the books in my library. So I intend to use this space to take another look at some of them, and to say some things about photography and books that I think rarely get well said.
My goal here is not to reinvoke the recent histories of photography books published by Gerry Badger and Martin Parr. Their project implicitly seeks to name the best of all photography books.
But because of my own interest in ethical ambiguity (which often takes visual form via depictions of gazing, exhibitionism and naked bodies), it would not be correct to equate my values as a critic and collector with some kind of system of dualistic judgment. Many of the books in my library got there not because they gratify me, but because they challenge me. So among my goals in these posts will be an examination of the challenge raised by certain kinds of texts, along with their gratification.
I'll start with Richard Avedon Portraits, so check back soon.
posted by fogged @ 11:05 AM 0 comments