The Sartorialist, Disfarmer, and August Sander
January 23, 2008
©The Sartorialist
The Sartorialist, a popular fashion blogger / photographer has a superb show up now at Danziger Projects. To my eye the work touches upon traditional vernacular uses of photography - potentially because of the function these images serve. His story is an interesting one, entering the field of photography through what is now a massively popular fashion blog, he began taking photographs as a descriptive tool to investigate street fashion. In his own words to “simply share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great. When I worked in the fashion industry, I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.”
©The Sartorialist
©The Sartorialist
What really perks my interest in this work is that it indirectly points towards a central aspect of photographic vision. The capacity for photographs to describe, describe, and describe. That is the reason for taking and posting these pictures, to look closely at what people are wearing, to describe it clearly. Yet the best photographs go beyond mere description (which is the key point here), and I believe if you study the work of other photographers who have used photography primarily as a descriptive tool, one will see the same pattern. The transformation from the descriptive to the mysterious, from a document to a poem.
©The Sartorialist
©The Sartorialist
Two image makers in particular come to mind when I consider these images. The first is Michael Disfarmer (1884-1959) a professional portrait photographer from Heber Springs Arkansas who took remarkably poignant, simple, and descriptive photographs of those who came to sit for the camera in his portrait studio.
Michael Disfarmer
Michael Disfarmer
Michael Disfarmer
The second image-maker would be the remarkable, amazing, and one of my all time favorites…August Sander (who it would be questionable to apply the label vernacular to, although he certainly utilized the transparency of photographs). Just in case you are not familiar with him, the Getty Museum describes his work as follows:
“Man of the Twentieth Century” was Sander’s monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Stating that “[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled,” Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people.
In creating this tremendous and ambitious typological catalogue, Sander utilized the descriptive ability of the medium. With a consciousness and directness that allowed for the most subtle facts of a person to rise to the surface through the mediums descriptive possibilities ,while additionally exploring the use of typologies in photography. Could we look at The Sartorialist’s photographs as a similiar typology? Maybe not as ambitious as Sander’s complete portrait of a culture, but rather a portrait of those really well dressed denizens of our streets?
August Sander
August Sander
August Sander
August Sander
James Danziger has an interesting description of the process of putting together this show that is worth a read if your curiosity has been perked here. On a last note, I was curious to see if photographs made for the web would hold up in person, and they do. They are well printed, and even better in real life, shadow detail that is lost while viewing on the web, shows up clear and strong in the printed image. Check out the blog, check out the show, and consider the ways the blogosphere has entered our daily lives.
UPDATE: The New York Times has a review today on this show, comparing The Sartorialist to Sander. I’m happy to say it was published here first!
Books of the year
January 1, 2008
With the new year upon us, and a host of year’s best lists all around, I thought I’d add to the cacophony with my own best books of 2007. It’s really a list of the books I’ve read this year that are my favorites, almost none of them were written or published in ‘07.
Do you have any favorites for ‘07? Please let me know, I’m always looking for something new and interesting.
To another year of reading ahead of us, Happy New Year!
Fiction
Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad
Jorge Luis Borges - A Universal History of Iniquity
Jorge Luis Borges - Dreamtigers
Italo Calvino - The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Miguel De Cervantes - Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman
J.M. Coetzee - Waiting For The Barbarians
Cormac McCarthy - No County For Old Men
Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red
Orhan Pamuk - Snow
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows
Salman Rusdie - Shalimar The Clown
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Non-Fiction
Reza Aslan - No god but God - The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Jean Baudrillard - The Consumer Society
John Dewey - Art as Experience
Thomas L. Friedman - The World is Flat
Craig Harbison - The Mirror of the Artist, Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context
Photography and Art Books
Mitch Epstein - Recreation
Paul Graham - American Night
Paul Graham - Empty Heaven
Andreas Gursky - (from the Istanbul Museum of Art)
Marco Livingstone - Pop Art, A Continuing History
Tod Papageorge - Passing Through Eden
James Meyer, editor - Minimalism, Themes and Movements
Martin Parr - Small World
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger - The Photobook: A History volume I and II
Taryn Simon - An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
