Crewdson's Latest at Gagosian: No Drama, and Brilliant

One of Crewdson's views of the Cinecetta studio in Rome

 Usually when a critic says photographs lack drama it's a bad thing. But in the case of Gregory Crewdson's new images, on view at the Gagosian Gallery in New York now, it's a brilliant thing, and I think a beautiful thing.

The photographs were made at the Cinecitta film studio in Rome, a legendary place where legends were transformed into film reality. Ben Hur's chariot race took place there. Martin Scorsese turned it into the infamous Five Points area of Manhattan for "Gangs of New York." The BBC and HBO turned it into Julius Caesar's hometown for its series "Rome."

Why create artifice when artifice is the subject?

 Crewdson says that he saw the studio while in Rome with a traveling show of his previous work and understood immediately how and why he would photograph it.

"It was one of those moments when I saw the entire project in my mind,” he says. “Black and white, small format, emptied-out sets. I wanted to make a connection back to the tradition of landscape photography."

Artifacts from our film dreams

 He notes that he wanted to "drain the drama" from the images, a goal that might simply be seen as a reaction to his past work: Large-scale, color images that looked like movies, suggesting narratives with lush, highly stylized, highly detailed set design and lighting.

A sample of Crewdson's previous work

 Approaching a setting where actual movies were made, where every detail suggests fragments of narratives known from films, Crewdson eased away from sensationalism. The crash of reality and fantasy was in the place itself and did not have to be elaborately manufactured.

Do you like this new direction from one of contemporary photography's biggest names? If nothing else, the new work may imply that the highly-charged "made-up reality" that has captivated fine-art photography over the past decade—a trend that Crewdson nourished while teaching at Yale—is coming to an end.

Best Photoshop Fails

The shadow knows...and so do we

For all of you who work the long hours on post production, who flirt with OCD in order to render final art that is as near perfection as a human and computer can do, I offer this hilarious roundup of awful Photoshop fails. It seems to be the hands that lead to trouble most often, though arms also present problems, as these two images show. Thoughts? What is, in fact, the hardest thing to get right, or, to put it another way, what's the easiest thing to get wrong on Photoshop?

Men at arms...a few too many arms

In Memoriam: Jay Colton

Jay Colton ©Claudio Edinger

The well known photographer and photo editor, and friend to many in the photography world, passed away from an illness on Sunday night while at a photo festival in Brazil. (Story here.)

My Facebook news feed has been filling up with remembrances. Here's one from Brazilian photographer Claudio Edinger:

One of my best friends and brother, Jay Colton, passed away yesterday. he was a light on this planet, always helping hundreds of photographers, including me, with his unbelievable knowledge and generosity. he loved photography so much, he loved life, he loved very much his son Christopher and wife Moira and we are devastated by this loss. may he rest in peace. though i am sure we will meet again, our bond of love is just too strong, i am just too sad.

The photo of Jay above was made by Edinger.

The Best TV Promo Art of All Time

Every year at this time I tell myself that I will not start watching new television shows. I don't have the time, I reason. And they're not that good.

Then I start watching anyway. You know what does me in? First and foremost, it's the promo art for the shows that I see in magazines and at the commuter train station I use, as well as on the sides of city buses and cabs. The ads I see on TV don't move me the way the print ads do. TV ads make shows look fun, or scary, maybe funny, but they don't make them look epic.

Today I was looking at the very good blog of the Stockland Martel photo rep firm, which had a post about photographer Art Streiber and his creation of the promo art for the upcoming Conan O'Brien late-night show on TBS (above). There is also a video of the shoot, which apparently has gone viral.

Streiber gives some juicy behind-the-scenes details that many commercial photographers will probably find interesting. And when I say juicy, I mean it: The owl, named Twilight, pooped down the back of Conan's jacket during the shoot. It also refused to look at the camera, despite the efforts of its trainer, except for one instant.

Anyway, I like TV show promos and I think they're a bit under-appreciated, compared with movie posters, which are treasured by collectors, both as objects and as examples of great design. So let's contemplate the TV promo ad.... 

Photos of the Day: Telling the Story with Hands

Talk to the hands: Sarkozy and Basescu feel each other out

I confess that as an editor (and sometime photo contest judge) I had a bit of a prejudice against hands. I saw so many portraits that focused on hands that I just got tired of them. Beautiful hands. Gnarled hands. Worried hands. Sweaty hands. Hands covering eyes. Hands covering mouths. Hands over hearts. I understand that many young photojournalists are taught to work with hands, and that hands can indeed reveal a character. But anything can be overdone, and I feel that hands are overdone. Where others see character, I see cliche.

Sometimes, though, hands cannot be avoided. That would certainly seem to have been the case at the recent European Union Summit in Brussels. Hands were all over the place, and they all apparently had something to say.

The photo above, for instance, shows a confrontation between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Romanian President Traian Basescu over France's plan to remove Roma (gypsy) migrants. (The photo was made by Yves Loggha for Associated Press, and it was featured on the New York Times's Lens blog.) I love the way Basescu's hands highlight Sarkozy's closed visage: It's almost as if the Romanian is feeling for a force field around the French president.

Now look at these other images, which I found on the Corbis website, and see how the story changes in subtle ways...it's a lesson in the dynamics of photographic story-telling.

Five Reasons to Love Bettina Rheims

The exhibition of photographs by celebrated French photographer Bettina Rheims that opened last night at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York is notable not because there is anything that is particularly new—much of the work will be familiar to those who know Rheims's work. It is worth noting, however, because it highlights a photographer who, despite having had some editorial success in the U.S. in the 1990s, has never gained the renown here as she has in Europe. Galleries on this side of the Atlantic have never given Rheims the kind of sustained attention that would have made her a bigger presence in the art world here. It was wonderful to see her work at Houk and to know that she has found a home at a preeminent gallery.

Why she hasn't become more of a star here is an interesting question...

I think it's probably because her work is almost impossible to fit into discrete slots. Usually when we look at photographs it is with an immediate understanding of the tradition the work comes from and the intent with which the image-maker is working. (Same with movies, which have always been genre-based.) It's a kind of contract between creator and viewer that makes the act of communication much less taxing for both parties. Rheims hasn't signed off on that contract, and her images are filled with what can seem to be contradictions. When I look at her photographs I am frankly often confounded by my own expectations of celebrity, fashion, eroticism, feminism, and truth vs. fiction. Rheims doesn't deliver any of these things in ways I'm used to.

I think some cultures are more comfortable with contradiction than others, or, to put it another way, some cultures simply don't see contradictions where others might. Perhaps in France, where artists are given forbearance in a way not  understood in the U.S., Rheims doesn't present as many contradictions.

That's pure speculation on my part, of course, and I'd love to hear any opinions pro and con on the topic. Are the French different from you and I?

At any rate, the show at Houk offered a good summation of Rheims's career. The collection might have been a bit weighted toward her celebrity portraiture, but nonetheless it showcased the photographer's consistently surprising ideas about women and they way they are portrayed in pictures.

Here are five reasons (all from Houk) to love Rheims:

1. Monica Bellucci, Paris, 1995

 As Rheims, a one-time model herself, notes in this video, "I photograph women because I know them so well..." Her subjects, famous and beautiful,  have confidence in Rheims, and it shows.

2. Madonna, New York, 1994

In an interview I did with Rheims a couple of years ago, she said, "I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is personal work....In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones."

3. Marion Cotillard, 2002

Catherine Denueve once described Rheims's work as "masculine and feminine at the same time." Perhaps there is a contradiction there, and perhaps not.

4. Anne Pedersen, Paris, 1996

Often, it's not the big questions that prompt the creative spark, but smaller ones. "In a way, all my projects start with skin," Rheims once told me. "My first question—even before I start to think about black and white or color or camera format—is, "What kind of skin do I want to represent?"


5. Karen Muldar, 1996

Rheim's once told an interviewer that subjects often come to her studio "to scare themselves a little." Here she turns what might have been a merely scintillating shot of a tiny Chanel bra into an entire story. She may have started with skin.

Photos of the Day: California Fire and Ice

The Milky Way, shot from the White Mountains in California by Tom Lowe

 Above: Tom Lowe's photo of the Milky Way seen through a Bristlecone Pine recently won top prize in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest held by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Lowe, who  specializes in timelapse photography, said the idea of juxtaposing the ancient trees and the timeless night sky was a natural: "Seasons and weather would barely register as events over the lifetime of several thousands years," he said in a statement.

Below: National Geographic put together a set of images of the blaze set off by a gas leak in San Bruno, California on September 9. I didn't fully comprehend the hell of the scene until I saw these.

Photo by Paul Sakuma, AP

Photo by Peter DeSilva, EPA/Corbis

Photo by Jeff Chiu/AP

Fire has and I suspect always will be a staple of photojournalism, because fire is a primal fear. Here's an apt quotation I found online...it's credited to Horace:

                      "Your own property is concerned when your neighbor's house is on fire."