Comments on: Tactile photography

By: Jon Bakos | Blog » Blog Archive » Philip-Lorca dicorcia at the ICA

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:33:28 +0000

[...] Philip-Lorca diCorcia ‘Ike Cole, 38 years old, Los Angeles, CA, $25′ 1990-92 Obviously this push and pull of subtle cinematic staging has become worn-out in contemporary photography. Alec Soth wrote a little about this subject this week. Nonetheless, I feel that diCorcia with some restraint in the amount that he contrives his images compared to other photographers working in similar ways comments on how photographs function in our society as puzzle pieces rather answers. For a new museum such as Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art the Philip-Lorca diCorcia show represents it’s ability to put together a major show on a very large scale. [...]

By: christoph

christoph — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:22:34 +0000

Glad I found this thread, you hit on a ‘problem’ i keep returning to regularly. Good to see there are photographers who feel the same. For some reason, the ‘tactile’ is associated with process and authenticity.
Just a general point, it’s interesting to observe how, as technology moves on, outdated processes that once were considered soulless and sterile, move up in the appreciation because they are now superseded by even more sterile processes. That doesn’t just apply to photography, it’s the nature of progress I think, guided by various interests.
I believe though, that there are ways to maintain the integrity as a photographer, there just can’t be a universal recipe…

By: Fabio

Fabio — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:30:21 +0000

Hope I’m not too late to say something about the issue, but together with the tactile element of photography that Alec find as missing, I think that the point is also the lack of a true ‘perceptive’ dimension of a lot of contemporary photography. I mean pictures to be seen with the eyes and not with the brain, if this can explain. The tonalities in a picture can evocate worlds and ultimately ‘be’ the picture, make it live. So more than a picture whose surface is full of material meaning to me, what I often find lacking is pictures that ‘touch’ my eyes, and this maybe for two main reasons: pictures that just focuses on the thing which is actually photographed, or picture which just focus on composition in order to be arty, leaving us in front of a mere graphic and not fully visual result. hope I made myself clear, hard to say these things in a few words and in another language…

By: another fine art photography book | Mrs. Deane

another fine art photography book | Mrs. Deane — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:13:18 +0000

[...] Another thing that struck me was how much space was reserved for photography made with the aid of historic processes such as tintypes, collages, cyanotypes, photogravures or collodion wetplate. Must we see this as the slow aftermath of the waves of exhibitions celebrating 150 years of photography in 1989, as this article suggest? And, has this wave of interest died out in the decade that followed or do we see a slow but steady increase of interest in this type of photography? Not really, if one were to judge by the sequels of this annual on American photography. The last few editions seem focussed more and more on color photography. But what to make then of Alec Soth’s longing for less sterile, more tactile photography? [...]

By: Henning Riebe

Henning Riebe — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:27:29 +0000

I think the quandary arises from the seductive “promise of perfection” offered by the photographic tools of the day versus the inevitable distance between capture and recollection. It’s too easy to get caught up in pursuing some shared ideal of perfection at the expense of personal expression. Rather than reaching into our souls to be in touch with what seek to express, we fetish the technology to seek promised answers to our unexamined needs.

Feeling this unsatisfying gap between an increasingly hands-off process, the results of that process, and what one was trying to convey, is the (re)awakening of the artist within the technologist. Whatever the technology, the artist within seeks ways to intervene, to be as hands-on as necessary to capture one’s feeling as well as the image.

Simply jumping wholesale on some alternative process bandwagon takes us back to where we started; imperfection for its own sake, disconnected from the subject, isn’t necessarily any more expressive. For most it’s just another fun club to join, but it can also be a means of challenging our assumptions and may contribute to the path of self-expression. The quest is to recognize and take the tools at our disposal, and to bend them to our artistic will in such a way that the viewer is able to empathize with the artist’s journey. So again and again we have to start within and free ourselves from our self-imposed, often invisible, constraints to reconnect with the artist.

By: Jim O'Connell

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 03:51:46 +0000

I didn’t mean to come across sounding as though film is better than digital, though for me it is, for the reasons outlined above. I need to have my hands in it to make it work.

People are doing terrific things with digital cameras and printers. Tactile stuff too, I suppose. I haven’t had any success with that though.

Years ago, I had a Brancusi show catalog from 1926 that had photos by Steichen. Simply wonderful and much like the one you reproduced above, though they were photogravures, I believe.

Jim O’Connell

By: steven

steven — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:12:46 +0000

It’s a performance piece reproduced as a sculpture reproduced as a photograph – so there’s some point missing going on here.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:02:04 +0000

I think the technological achievements of contemporary digital photography are still very new to all of us. I suspect that somewhere, somehow, we’re still getting use to it both in using it and reading it. The softwares are also allowing immense latitude in image manipulations. Those very manipulations are not necessarily obvious to the viewer but they do contribute to reading of the work. So in that way I would argue that the possibilities of digital photography are indeed very tactile…

By: Jim O'Connell

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:37:31 +0000

The more you are involved in the process of making your images, the better they will be.

I shoot primarily on B&W film for that reason. I roll the film myself, shoot with manual cameras and develop and print it in my small darkroom. (I also scan the negatives and upload to Flickr.)

In the shooting, I often use meterless cameras and only manual focus. I carry an incident meter, but rarely use it, as the film has so much latitude that I really need to screw up to get an unusable image.

Focusing manually is key, as is using only manual settings. The more you have to think about these things, the more the image becomes expressive of you as an artist and the more satisfying it is. The images that you gather and the photographic objects you make from them become REAL THINGS that you and you alone were capable of making.

The idea that you need to distress your images physically is one that doesn’t sit well with me. “Be good to the things you create” someone told me once and I agree.

“Tactile”… Interesting notion…
The more tactile your processes are, the more tactile the result will be.

Think of your images, scans, digital files, negatives as “potential pictures” that may or may not become objects, artifacts, if you will, as prints. This gives you dozens of more choices to make, every one that affects how tactile the finished object will be. Do that and I doubt you’ll be tempted to bury them in a field.

I used to despise the painter Wassily Kandinsky because I only knew his work through reproductions in books or posters, where his style became little more than flat, abstract patterns. Seeing the originals blew me away. My estimation of his work went from “gimmicky hack” to genius.

Cheers,
Jim O’Connell

By: Igor

Igor — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:50:41 +0000

I just want to mention work of Ernestine Ruben (http://www.ernestineruben.com) – her portfolio Rodin