Collecting Fine Art Photography
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COLLECTING FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY By John O’Hern hat tourist hasn’t whipped out her camera to capture the grandeur of Niagara Falls, certain that the photo will capture Wevery drop of the experience? Cell phone or digital camera gets stowed in a pocket or bag and the photographer goes merrily on her way confident that a memory and an artful picture of the moment have been preserved forever. Fifty years ago the tourist took 35mm color slides to capture the beauty of sites on his trip and bored countless of his neighbors with after-dinner slide shows of “Here we are at….!” One hundred years ago, photographers loaded their equipment on horses or mules, coated their glass plates with light sensitive emulsions, developed the plates in a tent, and hoped that they’d make it back from their treks with themselves and their delicate cargo intact. Photography has changed since Nicéphore Niépce recorded the first images with light in the 1820s. Yet, nearly 200 years later, the controversy still rages over “But is it art?” Ansel Adams suggested a difference between taking snapshots and making art. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” William Henry Jackson began photographing in the American West in the 1860s with huge cameras and glass plates measuring up to 18 by 22 inches. His photographs of Yellowstone were influential in persuading Congress to establish the National Parks in 1872. Jackson’s enormous 10-by-50-inch image of Niagara Falls from 1902 comes close to capturing the experience of the Falls, even in black and white. The careful composition and exposure of the negatives and later the print create a document of the place as well as an artistic landscape image. At about the time that Jackson and others were making their straightforward documents, another group of photographers began to exploit the artistic qualities of the medium and created images that emulated paintings. The “Pictorialists” made soft-focus images of light and shadow. Both approaches to photography continue today with art entering into the documentation and documentation entering into the art. My own love of photography began when I was given an old Kodak box camera with roll film as a boy. Not satisfied with the quality of the developing and printing from the local drugstore, I soon graduated to developing my own film and making my own prints. Much later, I went to school in Denmark to study photography and, armed with a 4-by-5-inch view camera and holders for individual sheets of film, I traipsed around the country photographing churches, beaches, prehistoric monuments and, when I could get up the courage, people. Werner Bischof, Japan, Tokyo, courtyard of the Meiji temple, 1951 © STEVE MCCURRY/MAGNUM PHOTOS/COURTESY MAGNUM PHOTOS, NEW YORK, NY 72 73 We students bought chemicals at the local chemist shop and carefully mixed the various concoctions that would allow us to nearly collapse the wide range from light to dark that we saw with our eyes onto a sheet of film and eventually onto photographic paper. A little more of this chemical and a little less of that one, combined with filters to adjust for contrast, and I made my first photographs that went beyond being snapshots and became fine art images. We used Ansel Adams’ “Zone System” in which we learned how to visualize the effect we wanted in the final image before we even exposed the film. One of my favorite fine art photographers was, and is, Paul Caponigro. His photographs of Stonehenge and the stone ruins I knew so well, Arnold Newman, Igor Stravinsky, New York, 1946, gelatin silver print not only captured an image of the physical mass COURTESY PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CA of the sites but also their mystery. He brought all the technology of the medium together with his sensitive eye to make pictures of surpassing beauty. Many of us, when we start making serious photographs, seek out old barns and nostalgic subjects that will grasp our viewers’ attention even if our technique isn’t the best. I didn’t know then that Caponigro had photographed one of my favorite motifs, the Olsen House in Cushing, Maine, made famous by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Olsen House is a simple, straightforward composition of a window centered in an expanse of weathered clapboards, clouds and sky reflected in the imperfect glass. Wyeth might have painted a red geranium in the window for contrast and to suggest the presence of his friends who lived there. Caponigro’s image is an artistic document of the facts of the sturdily built house and its survival against years of being buffeted by ocean winds. Sometimes it is impossible to escape the subliminal influence of other art forms or to escape the aesthetic of a different society in which we make our art. Recently back from a trip to Japan, I had to chuckle, after the fact, at how my photographs incorporated artfully swooping branches and other elements I know so well from Japanese art. Werner Bischof’s photograph of two Japanese women walking past the gate of a temple in a snowstorm is so masterfully composed that it invites the viewer to pause and to move around the scene rather than look at it as a static image. Bischof observed, “Deep inside me I still am—and always will be—an artist.” David H. Gibson finds art in the environment and uses the qualities of the medium to record it. He saw the abstract quality of Lotus Stems and Light Reflectionsand created an “artful” composition that is a pleasing pattern and a reminder that artists see what many of us miss. They don’t simply say “Oh, Steve McCurry, MALI Timbuktu, 1987 COURTESY MAGNUM PHOTOS, NEW YORK, NY 74 Paul Caponigro, Window, Olsen House, Cushing, Maine, 1991, gelatin silver print COURTESY PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CA look!” They look, see, carefully compose and Documentary photographers are no longer creating a perfect image, but those images, in expose, and make images that our point-and- burdened with mountains of equipment as stark black and white, are arresting. Salgado shoot mentality can’t even imagine. William Henry Jackson was. With small format writes, “I hope that the person who visits my The photographer Elliott Erwitt observed, cameras they can go more easily into remote exhibitions, and the person who comes out, are “To me, photography is an art of observation. regions and capture fleeting moments. not quite the same.” It’s about finding something interesting in an Some of Steve McCurry’s photographs of Alessandra Sanguinetti documented the ordinary place...I’ve found it has little to do people in remote regions have become iconic. friendship of two young girls as they navigated with the things you see and everything to do His ability to gain the trust of his subjects and puberty in Buenos Aires. The Necklace is with the way you see them.” to get them to pose for him results in character part of the series, The Adventures of Guille Arnold Newman’s photographs of studies of both beauty and insight. “Most of and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of famous artists from many fields are exemplars my photos are grounded in people,” he says, Their Dreams. of the photographic portrait. His image of “I look for the unguarded moment, the Sanguinetti’s camera records, but doesn’t Igor Stravinsky dwarfed by the abstract shape essential soul peeking out, experience etched intrude upon, their fantasies and their role of the open lid of a grand piano, suggests the on a person’s face.” playing and allows the viewer to experience, innovative and sometimes jarring nature of Sebastião Salgado’s photograph at a distance, the intimacy of their friendship. Stravinsky’s abstract musical compositions. Barrancos is from a series he made of the “I have attempted to interpret the ending of Alan Kupchick’s dramatic photograph of workers in a Brazilian open top gold mine who their childhood by entering their imaginary a shadow continuing the slope of a distant hill dig by hand because of the steepness of the pit. spaces,” she writes. “The time when their through the window of an abandoned building His humane images of inhumane scenes of dreams, fantasies, and fears would fuse in the Southwest captures the scene with the workers, displaced people, and war are some seamlessly with real day-to-day life are ending, newest technologies—digital cameras and of the most moving images of these subjects. and the photographs I have made intend digital printers. Salgado is moved more by moral concerns than to crystallize this rapidly disappearing very 75 personal and free space.” Julie Blackmon stages tableaux of life that elicit smiles of recognition of the near universal experience of American family life. Even Superman has a mom who can declare a Time Out after he has torn through the house just a few times too many. Blackmon casts light on the intimacies of the inhabitants of the house both figuratively as well as literally with a bright, nearly shadowless, light illuminating every detail. David Hilliard creates multiple-image tableaux. Noah Listening depicts a young man relaxing among the accumulations of generations of inhabitants of a summer house including a Shaker chair and a kerosene lamp. Noah, however, is firmly connected to the present among the stability of tradition. “I continually aspire to represent the spaces we inhabit, relationships we create, and the objects with which we surround ourselves,” Hilliard writes. “I hope the messages the photographs David H. Gibson, Lotus Stems and Sun Reflections, Texas Gulf Coast, 1998, deliver speak to the personal as well as the gelatin silver print, ed.