The Occasional Odd Thought @dodgemedlin - Tumblr Blog

Borrego Springs; January 2016

We went to the desert so my wife could shoot some time lapse footage through the night. Happily, I had my tripod with me too.

You’ll want to view this one as large as possible.

maureenjohnsonbooks

Are you aware that you have the same name as a beloved character from the Broadway show rent

dodgemedlin

The correct answer here is: “Which one?”

Also, now following the entertaining Maureen.

east-of-west-la

Birds Wire Tower

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1550 wooden chairs placed between two buildings on a street in Istanbul

brucesterling

*Why

thedakini

Peter Josefsson

dodgemedlin

Limited palette, deep shadows - wow.

blazepress

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nurnielfa

imiging

- Through an old train window 2. Pozuelo, Madrid

Photograph by Nur Nielfa

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Team member of ms-excuse-me

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From The Inner Circle of Europe

Gert Verbelen

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Bruce Gilden: Facing Up

It’s hard to grasp how the press materials for Bruce Gilden’s new book Face can blithely describe the work as consisting of “collaborative” portraits when the pictures resemble nothing so much as frontal assaults. It’s doubtful that anyone would willingly ‘collaborate’ on the effort to produce images that are so deeply unflattering. Gilden prides himself on his honesty, which is opposed in this case to the artificiality of social media portraits and the ubiquitous selfie (if we are to believe the accompanying essay). But here he has strayed so far into cruel grotesquerie that the results have, ironically, an acute falseness to them, far more so than the deliberate choice of a flattering profile picture on Facebook, for example. These are not real, living people at all, at last not in the way they’re seen here. They’re just a chance to stare in a way that would not be otherwise permissible - and that actually isn’t. It might well be a novel idea for Gilden, but ‘collaboration’ involves a great deal more than just asking someone can you take their picture before blasting away.

Making a photographic portrait almost always involves an unequal power relation; the photographer holds all of the cards. They control the framing, the background, the moment in which the picture is made, the final selection of an image to be printed or published, to a certain extent they also control the pose of their subject, who admittedly might have agreed to be photographed, but doesn’t always grasp exactly what they’re giving up in doing so. For a portrait to be ‘collaborative’ even in the general sense there has to also be a relinquishing of control on the part of the photographer rather than just the subject. It involves a willingness to include the subject’s own view of themselves and allowing that view to determine what the finished picture will be. Just asking someone if you can photograph them might not be Gilden’s usual method, but it falls far sort of collaboration as such. Similarly, asserting that the subjects “engage directly with the camera” doesn’t mean that they have any meaningful role in what the picture will actually look like or in how they are portrayed. In this case it just implies they’re looking at the camera and that in itself is still a fairly long way from engagement.

Isn’t class the real issue with this work? I would argue that it is, given that the pictures are made to be viewed - possibly owned - by people of means and they feature exclusively people whose relative lack of means is written all over their faces. So, whatever Gilden’s actual intentions might have been, the impression the work creates is of it being a freak-show, a sort of pictorial slum tour, amusing and enlightening the well-to-do. In the context of economic thinking that suggests poverty isn’t the result of gross systemic inequality, but of people just not trying hard enough, the message of these pictures is particularly egregious, perhaps doubly so since Gilden’s work on the issue of sub-prime mortgages and home foreclosures displayed an unexpected sensitivity on this issue. But Face lacks even the visual interest that enlivened his earlier work, such as the pictures he made in his native New York, arguably his best. But here the repetitive format of full face close-up offers no variation and his use of flash rather brutally exaggerates the features of people chosen for their supposed authenticity, but who actually seem to have been selected by Gilden because they look weird - there’s no more depth here than that.

It could be he really does empathize with these people and in that respect we could be (marginally) willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But at the same time there is scant trace of that empathy in these pictures. They have a cruelty that serves no purpose, it doesn’t tell us anything at all about these people, their lives, their stories. They’ve been reduced to masks, a surface for Gilden to work about his superficial ideas about what’s real and fake. The ‘collaborative’ tag is just a marketing hook intended to soften the ethical implications of photographing people in this way. It is a means of selling what is actually a rather exploitative and mean-spirited series of pictures to an audience that wants to be seen as engaged, but without actually having to do anything about - and that still wants to enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of peering at the (economic) other. The truth is that Gilden’s artistic persona has largely usurped whatever potential that might once have existed in his work and all that remains is a demeaning caricature - of his subjects and, increasingly, of himself.

dodgemedlin

I watched "Everybody Street" today, and while I'm no expert, it sure didn't look to me like Gilden respected his subjects. Made me cringe to watch him in action.