April 5, 2008

On a recent visit to the Frick Museum in New York I was struck by Symphony in Gray and Green: The Ocean (1866), painted by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).  For a photographer, the nuance of shading and near-monochromatic colors is instructive.  Particularly in the digital age and with the use of RAW processing, it is interesting to observe how a painter handles the vast range of deviation within, say, the grayness of a sky.  The photographer is often faced with exposure problems and dealing not only with overblown highlights, but the advent of noise or excessive pixillation when trying to balance the final print.  There are many described "tricks" in using Photoshop or other programs to seek to reduce, but in observing Whistler's shadings, if we think of pixels like brushstrokes, perhaps we are less concerned about such visibility, and whether the overall effect works.

March 23, 2008

I have been delinquent in keeping this up.  In any event, the current exhibit of Lee Miller's photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is extraordinary.  What is particularly interesting in this, and other exhibits of the great photographers of the 20th century, is to note how often they ignore the criticisms that seem prevalent in today's juried contests and photography club competitions.  There is attention paid to subject matter.  Even in the surrealism, it is more like that of Dali or Tanguay, where "straight" subject matter is depicted.  Areas of darkness, or overexposed highlights, or cut-off parts of the photograph, or soft-focus, or excessive grain--all seem irrelevant when the image is otherwise strong enough to carry itself.  The contemporary world of photography seems at times a race to the outré for its own sake, or a contest of the trivial criticism, and it is good sometimes to see the lasting, and timeless, production of someone of Miller's caliber to put such comments in context.