Sunday, February 27, 2005
Today’s entry will just involve a couple of announcements: The first is that I’m redesigning the main part of my site now. Piece by piece, new work will be appearing there over the course of the next couple of weeks. As always, comments are welcome.
Secondly, I recommend checking out a new blog called “Over Easy.” It’s about brunching in New York. The full disclosure is that I, of course, am deeply involved in this new online experience, so I think it’s great, of course.

Thursday, February 24, 2005
Yesterday was my art viewing day. I visited the new MOMA, the Dahesh Museum, and the Gates. I also went and heard Eugene Richards speak at ICP.
The Gates were fun. I found them a little bit predictable, maybe not quite mysterious enough, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. Seeing the park filled with people on a cold winter Wednesday was probably the best part of the work. I think the Gates are actually a very derivative piece. It reminds me too much of the Fushimi-Inari Taisha Shrine, just outside of Kyoto. At this shrine are hundreds of red torii (arches, basically gates) that wind their way into the foothills. I think it’s in comparison with Fushimi-Inari that I found the Gates lacked mystery.
The exhibit “First Seen” at the Dahesh Museum is excellent and worth seeing. It is an evocative, hilarious and horrifying collection of some of the first photographs (1840-1880) taken all over the world.

I don’t have much to say about Eugene Richards, so this leaves me to talk about my biggest disappoint of the day: The new MOMA. Quite honestly, I was horrified by the way they hung their photographic collection. They have a floor devoted mainly to photography. The photographs are crowded together and the rooms are not well lit. The images are ordered chronologically, more or less, that’s fine. But, I detested their sequence of images. I felt it degraded and belittle the work. Documentary work sits shoulder to shoulder with conceptual art pieces and commercial work: Shore next to Arbus next to Friedlander, next to Winogrand, next to Eddie Adams. Gilles Peress is next to Larry Fink and Koudelka is next to Malick Sidibe. And, there is little to no explanatory text that might give any context to the work or the photographer. It’s impossible for the average viewer to tell anything about the work’s creation. They can only make elementary and uneducated free-associations about its content. And the photographs are about so much more than this!! Moreover, they seemed to group images based on simplistic observations: like these are all pictures of depressed looking women, oh, and here are all your brightly colored photos that make fun of people. It was really a cruel thing to do to the work. It degrades it.
Most photographers didn’t get any space for their work to breath and speak with any dignity. One wall devoted to some of Robert Frank’s photos from The Americans was actually the worst, despite the fact that the whole wall was give to one artist. I could barely even look at the work, and those are some of my favorite photos of all time. Quite honestly, it made me sick and angry.

Friday, February 18, 2005
My last few entries have been mainly quotes from various articles and books I’ve been reading. Some of them are from works of journalism, others from art or photography criticism, but – for me – they all revolve around a couple of related ideas that I have been considering, and trying to learn more about.
The first is quite simple. I’ve decided that it’s essential for me to learn more about the beginnings of photography. This certainly includes learning about the series of inventors and artists who were involved in the medium’s early history, but it also means learning about the history of the nineteenth century as a whole: the trends in architecture and painting, the growing industrialization of Europe, the political winds of that time.
In school I was never very interested in the nineteenth century. It seemed a boring and banal century with none of the mystery of the middle ages or the arrogance of the renaissance. I have since come to believe that understanding the nineteenth century is the key to understanding the modern era, and along with it modern technologies like photography.
I also believe that that era, – the Age of Catastrophe, or the Modern Era – that stretched from the early nineteenth to the very early twentieth century, is now over. Something new has begun that is still unformed and out of focus – to me.
The second idea is that something important died in the nineteenth century. And I think many people all over the world are now, unconsciously, instinctively, trying to find it again. I haven’t yet put a name on this thing that died. Sometimes I call it magic. Sometimes I call it a slower pace of time, or mystery, a faith in the supernatural, or even the important of stillness or fallow earth.
So what do these academic and rather esoteric ideas have to do with being a photographer? I’m not sure, yet, but I believe they are fundamental to what I want to express with a machine.

Thursday, February 17, 2005
I’m now reading Another Way of Telling by John Berger and Jean Mohr. It’s an intriguing book, though Berger’s prose sometimes goes over my head, a problem I didn’t have at all with About Looking.
I’ve been spending much of my time in the black and white darkroom, so my only stories are about feeling lightheaded after spending eight hours printing in the dark. As a result I’m going to give you all another quote today, from Berger and Mohr’s book. Next entry, I’ll try and write something original!

From the essay Appearances by John Berger: “Let us recall how and when photography was born, how, as it were, it was christened, and how it grew up.
The camera was invented in 1839. August Comte was just finishing his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Positivism and the camera and sociology grew up together. What sustained them all as practices was the belief that observable quantifiable facts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer man such a total knowledge about nature and society that he would be able to order them both. Precision would replace metaphysics, planning would resolve social conflicts, truth would replace subjectivity, and all that was dark and hidden in the soul would be illuminated by empirical knowledge. Comte wrote that theoretically nothing need remain unknown to man except, perhaps, the origin of the stars! Since then cameras have photographed even the formation of stars! And photographers now supply us with more facts every month than the eighteenth century Encylopaedists dreamt of in their whole project.
Yet the positivist utopia was not achieved. And the world today is less controllable by experts, who have mastered what they believe to be its mechanisms, than it was in the nineteenth century.
What was achieved was unprecedented scientific and technical progress and, eventually, the subordination of all other values to those of a world market which treats everything, including people and their labour and their lives and their deaths, as a commodity.”

Thursday, February 10, 2005
At the beginning of the section “The Modern World” in his tome History of Art H.W. Janson writes, “The era to which we ourselves belong has not yet acquired a name of its own. Perhaps this does not strike us as peculiar at first – we are, after all, still in midstream – but considering how promptly the Renaissance coined a name for itself, we may well ponder the fact that no key concept comparable to the “rebirth of antiquity” has emerged in the two hundred years since our era began.”

After reading this passage I text messaged my brother saying that my name for our age was The Age of Catastrophe.

A few days later he emailed me this passage from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida:
“A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.”

Saturday, February 5, 2005
In The Photographer’s Eye Szarkowski writes that, in its early years, it was felt that photographs showed more of the truth than did reality. If a person normally seemed gentle and kind, but looked strict and arrogant in the photo, the image was showing a hidden truth that the eye normally did not see.
Now, I don’t know weather this is truly how most people felt in the late 18th and early 19th century. However, I do find it interesting to note that while growing up everyone reassured me, “you really look much better than you do in photographs, don’t worry.” Something has obviously changed in the course of the century, and I think part of that change is a pervasive skepticism of technology and a populist faith in sensate rather than scientific empiricism.

I now know how to make myself look good in photographs, but that is a trick all photographers probably know…

Thursday, February 3, 2005
The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski
“The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supple.”

Wednesday, February 2, 2005
From The Auteur of Anime by Margaret Talbot. The New Yorker, January 17, 2005
“Suzuki thinks of Miyazaki’s approach as uniquely Japanese: ‘In traditional Japanese architecture, you start with one room – maybe the alcove, where you hang some pictures. You spend a lot of time trying to pick the right shelves, the right little pillar, what kind of handles the drawers will have. Only when you finish that room do you worry about the next. In the West, you start from the general and go to the specific.”

“’There’s an abandoned house near mine, and I want to buy it and keep it wild,’ Miyazaki said. ‘Let all the wild grasses grow over it. It’s amazing how much they grow – their living energy. I wouldn’t cut the grass at all, but then there’s always the old ladies who come along with their hedge trimmers and scold you. We’ll have to wait for that generation to die off. Until then, we’ll never see grass like I want to see grass.’”

Monday, January 31, 2005
My digital camera is in the shop for servicing – I needed to get all those bits of the Sahara desert out of it – so I’ll be showing older pictures for the next week or so. Older just means that I shot them in the last four months, rather than this week.
I shot the photo above with my Mamiya VII. The image presented here is from a scan of a black and white print, so a lot of time in the darkroom went into it! It’s part of a new portfolio of portraits from Mali that will go on my newly redesigned website.
My quote for the day if from Renaissance Man by Adam Gopnik printed in the January 17, 2005 New Yorker:
“From the first instance of Leonardo on record, there is a sense that we were dealing with someone fundamentally different from anyone that had come before, doing a kind of work that had no real precedents – something that arose from the artisanal life of the Florentine artist-for-hire but overwhelmed it with independent vision and autonomous standards, something that was, finally, so conceptual and self-enclosed that it carried engineering and architecture practice to a peak of self-involved fantasy. In the end, all even a king could do was buy him a house and admire him. His life’s work was to turn his contemporaries’ idea of the artist from artisan to genius, from working stiff to saint and shaman and magician and necromancer – and, for that matter, rich man’s ornament.”

Saturday, January 29, 2005
Welcome, this entry launches the new design of my photography blog, “On Photography.” I hope you enjoy it. The new design is also the reason this blog has been so quiet for the last month. I’ve been busy figuring out how I wanted to change it, rather than updating entries.
You can still find the old entries under “archives,” and all those nice links under “links.” My portfolio and resume will stay on www.alexandrahuddleston.com. I am also redesigning that site. I have many, many new photos to put in my online portfolio. I am certainly excited by all the changes, and I hope you enjoy the new material as well.
Comments on the photos and the design are more than welcome. I’m sure there will be glitches to iron out in the first few weeks of launch!!
More to come soon.