After re-viewing that “I was a sex god in Soviet Estonia”, I was reminded of David Hamilton‘s work. David Hamilton has been doing his part to piss off the religious right for the better part of the last century; and when I was a kid in France, in the seventies, his work was all the rage; and like strikes, George Marchais and the CGT, he was everywhere he wanted.
Of course his work has come under fire in the United States as “child pornography”. Since I won’t even think of touching that one with any pole, of any length, I’ll let you do your own special judging. I also could not really find any Hamilton images by searching, so instead I found and am posting (not at work…oops, too late) a generic nude from the seventies, to titillate your puns intended.
What I find enviable about the seventies nude aesthetics is how unique and specific it churned out to be. I suspect that the work of David Hamilton was a huge influence on the genre but also within photography’s subsequent struggles with Thatcher-Reaganite era censorship. For better or for worst, David Hamilton’s work was hugely influential to generations of photographers, from Jock Sturges to Sally Mann, and to all those fashion appropriated, one might see in Vogue or W these days; tame emulations of his kitschy erotic masquerades. At the end of the day David Hamilton’s work fell victim to the religiously rabid masses, the moral policing of a world bent on censoring the relative validity of The Hamiltons and Sturges.
Invariably those self righteous religious fascists bitches turned out to be pornography’s biggest consuming masses; they themselves the true agents and perpetrators of pedophilial sexual abuses; all the while diverting attention from themselves and onto those few who may not necessarily deserve it, or be tied to the whipping post of the fearful and “coincer”.
PS: Hamilton openly acknowledges that his photos depict their subjects as idealized sexual fantasy objects for men attracted to young girls.”There’s only three of us in this business. Nabokov penned it, Balthus painted it, and I photographed it.” This comparison is more than a little self-serving; David Hamilton is more like the Maxfield Parrish of softcore porn.
Whatever is to be said about him, we live in a world were work like his, becomes almost impossible to judge, exhibit or discuss publicly. The cacophony of a fearful public along with the resurgence, exploitation and trade of millions of innocent sex slaves makes for artistic suicide these days. We live in a fugly world, no matter how and with whom you look at it !
Quick, before this blog gets dreary. This one is for you Gabriela. Gabriela runs a blog in Tartu, Estonia and I visit it from time to time. She has a good eye and is always exploring it, but what I love most about her work is that it gives you a good sense of the seasons in the Baltic state that is Estonia. In the past few years, I have become quite familiar with her friends, family and lifestyle. She gives off a good vibe, she feel vivacious, honest, intelligent and full of youthful fun.
As an aside here is a montage her parents might have seen on Estonian TV, way back in the Soviet Seventies. Straight from the studio of Mr.Chicken himself Harry Egipt.
Robert Wright has recently been writing eloquently about editorial photography on his blog. I wrote and thought so much about this shit, way back in the nineties, that doing it again would render me haplessly apathetic. I’ll leave it to him to articulate it in these here teens. A fine job of it, if you ask me. Start with this post and move on to today’s for the full experience.
My friend Richard emailed me this Newsweek article this morning and it set my blood a boiling. You’ll need to read Peter Plagens cretinous musings and come back to me but if you should feel unwilling to budge from this august blogging, I shall furnish you with an excerpt, which more or less sums it:
“Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can’t help but wonder if the entire medium hasn’t fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now “sculpture” can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography’s vast variety possible. But it’s also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we’ve witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It’s hard to say “gee whiz” anymore. Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life.”
WTF, what’s wrong with this Newsweek? Hasn’t he finally understood that any form of visual art will inexorably migrate from the descriptive to the imaginary, and sometimes all at once. As a new visual medium is created, most creative artists will explore its ability to record reality. It stands to reason, obviously, but shortly thereafter the artist will explore his or her inner thing thingies. That’s just the way it goes.
What happened with photography is that very quickly, in the 19th and early 20th century, photographers both documented, copied other visual arts like painting but also started to explore the medium’s possibilities as just another tool for self-expression. It’s the critiques and some photographers who are guilty of narrowing the medium by straight jacketing what photography should and should not do, or be.
It also happened that the 20th century was so incredibly violent and momentous that documenting these epics started to overtake the more imaginative aspects of photography. I mean really, would a self respecting talent continue exploring the joys of one’s imaginations when genocide and bombs are ripping the very fabric of the society he or she lived in. Probably not. Conflicts put documentarists on top of the “Photographic food chain”, and from which they comfortably dictated what it was to be a photographer, what photography ought to achieve and to what aims it should point its machines.
What is happening right now is that photographers and artists from around the world are rediscovering the medium thru technology, just like the camera, itself a breakthrough technology at the time allowed artists the freedom to go nuts with possibilities. Nevertheless, art tends to migrate from the pictorial to the conceptual or the imaginary, as a matter of maturity, and by that I do not mean that it get better or worst by aging. It is just a natural peregrination from the real to the dream, much as we ourselves live as we pass from day into night, the conscious to the subconscious. None of this is new, artists generally do not make the kind’s of discoveries which truly shape our societies, they generally respond to them and express them visually or conceptually, wether they know it or are unconsciously doing it. Darwin devalued the divine and Freud elaborated on the ego and the Id, Einstein equated the space time but Duchamps and Warhol only followed their lead, by sensing those earth shaking ideas and expressing them in cave paintings.
So when you try to figure out what is art or what photography is, don’t bother with the minutia, just remember that there’s good art and bad art only. It’s hard enough to divine those two out, as it already is. Never mind if photography ought to be representative, manipulative or imaginary. Is it good or is it bad, and good luck and good night….. bitch….!
What’s in pork larb that gets me every time? After an early lunch I walked over to Park Life on Clement and bought a cuckoo clock for thirteen bucks. What a deal, 24 hours for only thirteen. While I was at it I picked up the recently released “The Vice Photo Book”, as in Vice magazine, not “La Biblia”. Wouldn’t be caught dead with that thing, starts me sneezing and coughing something awful nasty.
The work within could simply be re-categorized as “punk photography”, or the “jack ass school of photo shoots” or “indie pics”,or whatever you wish it to be, but at the end of the day it does the world a fairly good service. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it has a certain sad sweetness, if not wetness, to it. The innocence of a youth stripped of what once might have been called inhibitions. Sorta like what Japan might have looked like if Panasonic had discovered and marketed crack, meth or ice.
The only thing I wonder about is what that stuff might look like if it had been shot by more talented photographers? Yet still, that’s part of the philosophy, appeal and aesthetics, so who am to think?
And another thing is! Is that Vice Magazine is already hopelessly outdated and cliche. What next? “Snuff Magazine”, the international magazine for those who like to kill ; oh but wait, that’s call “History”. Better yet “What does Philip Jones Griffith think, about all this?”
One last nugget for today. I can’t really recall how many times I have watched this sort of programming while waiting for an official to show up and tell me to leave the county, as it is still officially closed to “foreign friends”, or in some dingy hotel room, in the deepest Sichuanese provincial hole I could find.
The narrator’s voice is typical of chinese TV or Radio narration. It’s essentially the voice of the state and I find it particularly interesting when governments go as far as to seemingly regulate the tone, intonation and pitch of its official broadcasts. This male voice, (there is a rooster and female voice too) narrates any and all programming on TV, wether it be an industrial output documentary, a travel piece about Tibet or how deliriously happy with the communist party, the Miaos in Guangxi happen to be.
This video also reminds me of visiting Mao’s mausoleum and watching the looks of utterly fearful stupefaction on the mourners faces, upon catching a glimpse of Mao’s mummified body.
Here is what you might have been mesmerized by, back in 89′, if you had been moi, and watching a peasant’s 12 inch black and white TV screen. I have not been back to china since 1998 so may be now they do not need any more programming fillers such as these, but frankly it would be a shame to cancel and forgo such finely tuned communist chanting.
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but if this somehow doesn’t bore you enough, you can go to this site and watch the countdown to the 2008 Olympics. Let the page download fully and turn up the volume on the sound system. You won’t regret it as I always keep my promises.
