David Doubilet

I realize I am LONG overdue in posting!  I also realize that I have not done (so far as I can tell) a post on David Doubilet's work which is more than a shame; it is a disgrace.  I love his work!  I'm not sure why I haven't featured his work sooner.  There is no underwater photography that is so artful, so unbelievable, so powerful, so magical.  He is also a prolific shooter so just when you think you have seen a mass quantity of his photographs, there is still more - and consistently, he produces awe-inspiring imagery.    I came across a book of his when I was on the island of Andros in the Bahamas at a Dive Resort.  I immediately, upon arriving back in the States, went out and bought a copy.

Jeanloup Sieff

It has been said that versatility is not always such a great thing in that it implies, "jack of all trades; master of none". The contradiction to that statement is nowhere more evident than that of Jeanloup Sieff's work. He worked for the Magnum Agency and was known as a photographer of fashion, portraits, dance, nudes, landscapes, reportage, erotica, and of course, derrieres, for which he devoted an entire book. He was a master of all these realms. Click here to see his official website.

Two controversies: 1 new; 1 old

 Photo:  Arne Svenson

Update:  8/7/2013 Judge Dismisses Privacy Lawsuit

Arne Svenson's series entitled, The Neighbors and Jill Greenberg's series entitled, "End Times" from 2006 - are two bodies of work creating new controversy and generating old controversy, respectively.

Click on the links above to get the stories and see the work.  You will need to click here to see the images from Svenson's, The Neighbors series (the link above is only an article about the controversy).

The Neighbors series is particularly noteworthy because it challenges what has been defined as street photography.  How many photojournalists have shot images in Africa, Cambodia, etc, with people fully identifiable, no model release, no compensation, and had them either exhibited or published?

As to the Greenberg series, here is a comment as posted on Facebook in response to a post on the series:

Comment (edited):
"What I get is that these images are disturbing. If you didn't know that candy being taken away was the prompt and gimmick used to get these kids so distressed, you'd think they just suffered some devastating loss. I don't particularly care for set-up shots that seem to indicate that the photographer was being cruel solely to get shots that would bother us or provide some sort of shock value or create some controversy. Unlike a photojournalist's shot that may be difficult to look at because of the horror of the reality (i.e., war shots, etc), this is something I have trouble looking at because it is staged - idea:  hey, let's upset some very little kids and make them cry and then, who knows?, let's make them cry for a good 30 minutes ... until we get our shot." 

I posted on her monkey series at one point ... they seem to be emoting, too.  Hmmm. http://kritinaknief.blogspot.com/2012/09/jill-greenberg.html 

And, to tie in these two artists together, how is this for irony?  Arne Svenson's, About Face series from 2011 is a collection of faces with various expressions.  Was a method used to bring out these expressions?  Yes.  Here is a statement from Svenson's site about the series,  "From one perspective the viewer sees only a neutral portrait of the student, while from the other angle one views an open spread, which reveals an expressive image of the student and an accompanying emotional motivator.  Motivators range from an image of kittens at play to a fistfight."  Is there any difference then between this and what Greenberg did?

What do you think?  I welcome and encourage your comments!  All points of view welcome.  :)

"The Appropriation Artist" ... Sounds like misappropriation to me ...

So, apparently there is a type of artist called an "appropriation artist".  I sure would not want to be an appropriation artist who is known strictly because they take other artists' work and incorporate it into their own art ... and call it their own! 

A court ruling was overturned recently in the case of Richard Prince having appropriated (misappropriated?) Patrick Cariou's work from his series, "Yes Rasta".  Quote from NY Times article:  "Mr. Prince argued that his appropriation of the photographs should be allowed under the fair-use exceptions to federal copyright protections, which permit limited borrowing of protected material for purposes like commentary, criticism, news reporting and scholarship."

Prince's work as shown at the Gagosian Gallery fetched over $10 million in sales ... of which Cariou saw none of this ... even though his work was at the root of Prince's work.  Also, I don't think
commentary, criticism, news reporting and scholarship are permitted to generate sales ... are they?

According to the NY Times article:  "Mr. Prince, under oath, said that his works based on Mr. Cariou’s were not intended “to create anything with a new meaning or a new message.”  A presumed summation:  he did not create anything "new", hence, he took the work and used it with no intention to transform it into a radically different piece of art.

Personally, I don't like people stealing work and then on top of that, giving no credit to the original artist.  I don't like the exploitation factor - he used Cariou's work, he never asked permission, he profited from it, gave no credit, gave no compensation, and gets away with it.  Sounds like robbery to me.

Here is the back and forth (won; overturned) case as it unfolded - these articles are worth reading:
April, 2009
April, 2011
April, 2013

Cariou's original work is on the right.  Prince slapped on a guitar and masked the eyes and mouth on his image to the left.  If he wanted to be on the safe side, why not reproduce the idea of the shot?  Get a Rasta to stand in similar pose and then slap on all the stuff ... Selenium tone it via Photoshop or whatever he did to make it look even more "different" (yeah, sure - "substantially different" - that used to be a term thrown around in copyright cases).  Although, there have been cases of copying a shot where that has been called copyright infringement - intentionally setting up a shot to look like another shot.  Yes, well - he is an appropriation artist.  Of course, he wouldn't set up his own shot.  If that doesn't imply lack of creativity, I don't know what does.  I guess this means I can pull out a photograph shot by someone else and doodle on it and do some decoupage on it and then claim it as my own original piece of art ... and maybe even make millions.

What do you think?

(Here are some other posts I've featured on copyright that you can scroll through.)

 

Children

Here are two photographs featuring children from current shows:

Children playing on Omaha beach, Normandy, France, 1947
Photo:  Chim (David Seymour, a/k/a Chim was a founder of Magnum Photos, along with Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1947.)

This photograph can be seen at International Center of Photography in NYC through 5 May, 2013.

Nursery Rhymes 01, Going to School, China, 2012
Photo:  Yu Xiao

This photograph can be seen at 798 Photo Gallery, Beijing, and currently for this weekend only, through 7 April, 2013, at AIPAD (The Association of International Photography Art Dealers' 33rd annual AIPAD Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC.)  

Erotica Meets Fashion

Did Helmut Newton do it first?  (See my posts on Helmut Newton by clicking on his name in the left column of this page or type his name into the search box.  Additionally, I recommend reading this excellent Voguepedia bio.)  So, was Newton the first to incorporate fetishism and bondage into his fashion photographs?  I'm not sure.  But, here we see it is alive and well.  Here are two shots of Alexander McQueen's work shot by Steven Meisel.