Mathew Pokoik - news

©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!

Last night I attended what at first glance appeared to be a remarkable meeting of minds, a panel discussion hosted by Blindspot Magazine titled Truth and Authenticity in Photography, featuring photographers Mitch Epstein, Paul Graham, Katy Grannan, Danny Lyon, Tod Papageorge, and moderated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

©Paul Graham, from American Nights

Initially the conversation was quite interesting and civil. Paul Graham in particular was well spoken and has clearly given the nature of photography a great deal of thought, which comes across in his own work. He identified among the panelists a particular intention and use of the medium that I found intriguing, an “artistic territory” that falls between reportage and the synthetic. He spoke about how this particular tradition has “chosen to enter the world as it happens”; later he used another phrase I enjoyed, speaking about the “canvas of America”.

©Danny Lyon

However the moment Danny Lyon opened his mouth things began falling apart. He quickly insulted the work of Garry Winogrand, Stephen Shore, Lee Friedlander, and all the other panelist for finding this work interesting. He let everyone know that Paul Graham was a kid compared to himself, bashed education and the MFA program Papageorge runs, and seemed convinced that the development of the medium came to a grinding halt with his own work. What was overwhelmingly clear is that Danny Lyon is a giant of an egotist. He even seemed to think that the tradition of the Photo Book began with Robert Frank’s Americans and his own relatively early The Bikeriders. Discussing his megalomania afterwards with an acquaintance, he said that the art-world is after all full of egotists. This is true, yet…I’m saddened by the willingness with which this is accepted, how easily Mr. Lyon was able to shutdown what could have been an interesting and subtle conversation by some of our brightest photographic practitioners.

Update: I just noticed that Christian Patterson also wrote about the discussion here. Curious to see how he picked up on a few different points.

©Wendy Ewald, from White Self/Black Self

Tomorrow night, Wednesday 10/17, Aperture Foundation will be hosting a fantastic panel discussion Seeing and Being Seen with one of my favorite photographic artists Wendy Ewald. Anyone in the visual arts who works in the field of education could certainly learn from Wendy and her remarkable collaborative process.

This panel highlights artists who collaborate with teens to explore adolescent identity, how young photographers approach their own representation, and the ways in which these dovetail and differ. Panelists include Dawoud Bey, who will reference work from his recent book Class Pictures (Aperture, October 2007), photographer Wendy Ewald, who develops work from images young people make of themselves, and teens involved in the Expanding the Walls program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who will provide insight into the use of photography to address their own identity, culture, and environment. The panel will be moderated by Phyllis Thompson, a former editor at Aperture Foundation and a scholar specializing in representations of the family and intimacy who now teaches at Harvard. Other artists will join in the discussion.

The New School, Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York, New York
(212) 229-5353
Free! @ 7:00pm