B: Q & A with Pelle Cass

Estimable Oregon photographer and blogger Blake Andrews has posted an interview with me. If you crave more (much more) of my wit, charm and verbiage, take a trip here. The subject of the interview is whether it's okay to digitally fiddle with photographs and why/why not. I'm a bit of a fundamentalist on this subject, and insist that artists have the freem to do whatever they want. But read Blake's blog and check out his work, which is free-wheeling, wide-ranging, and very interesting. If you carefully read the whole interview, you will be rewarded with the comedy of me actually using the phrase "our democracy" with zero irony and plus sincerity.

FotoFest

I'm going to FotoFest in a week (March 28-April 1). FotoFest is a big photo biennial in Houston, which runs something called The Meeting Place, a conference in which photographers show their work to curators, dealers, and collectors et al. in a sort of round robin of speed dating. Here's the list of the people who will be there. I'll see about sixteen of them as determined by the FotoFest robots. It's intense, and there's a lot of good work at these portfolio reviews, so I'm looking forward to mixing it up in Houston.

IR

Another composite portrait. I'm trying to figure out exactly what I'm doing and where I'm going with these.

CG

Here's another composite portrait, made by taking dozens of extreme close ups and piecing them together in photoshop. I like how they are distorted and strange, but it's hard to figure why. Being so close up is what does it, somehow.

Purism: A visit to Blake Andrews's blog "B"

Oregon photographer Blake Andrews has written an interesting criticism of people like me who make composite photographs of people on the street. He points to my work (flatteringly, but with a breath of condescension) and the composite images of Peter Funch, Viktor Szemzo, and Manuel Vasquez as examples that can be "great so long as you understand that their methods are closer to Uelsmann than Cartier-Bresson."

Hey, I'm after the truth as much as the next guy. The debate about purism vs. the screwed-up stuff I do is not that compelling to me. Street photography and a kind of purist approach to photography was crammed down my throat in art school and was dominant in the photo biz for many years. My work partly satirizes it, Oedipally, if you like, and partly is just trying to do something different.
 

A response to a review of a show I'm in

I have one picture at Seattle's Photographic Center Northwest in a show called Exposed: Critical Mass 2009. Here's a link to a review of it (yes, I'm mentioned) by Pete Brook of the blog Prison Photography.

Pete's review makes the work sound pretty appealing, but what I was most struck about the work  reviewed was its do-goodism. If I sound dismissive of social conscience, I apologize, kind of. But I have little interest in this kind of work when it isn't formally or intellectually innovative. Occasionally, I'll be drawn to it as intended. In the PCN show, for example, Carl Bower's beauty pageants in Columbia are fascinating. On the other hand are the pictures dedicated to raising awareness of animal welfare by Mary Shannon Johnstone are not. The pictures are upsetting. They certainly confirm my opposition to animal cruelty and, not that I needed much persuading, to death in general.

It's funny how photography works this way, divided perfectly between form and content, window and mirror, subjective and objective, facts and truth, blah, blah, blah. But I guess what I want out of art is some sort of mystery or poetry or confusion, something that adds to what I know or, better, challenges the way I think or feel. I know there is injustice in the world, but the mechanism of the kind of photography I don't like has a formula--exposing ills leads to remedy--which I don't find nourishing at all, even though photography can help solve problems. That's a big "even though," I admit. Using photography to right wrongs is entirely commendable. The social good is surely more important than art. But I guess I'm self-involved jerk (but let's just say "a man of feeling"), because nothing is more important to me than art. William Carlos Williams wrote, "it is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there."

Supermarket

A new picture, done earlier this week. It's hard to take pictures in cool weather, because people are generally scurrying to wherever they're going. I like it better when the mill around, which is why I like summer and tourists. I'm usually vague about numbers, but this picture took 396 exposures and 182 layers in photoshop. I stood there (at the supermarket behind the Prudential Center building) for about an hour. Alas, I did not time it.


What I find interesting about this picture is all the different levels and how people often seem to be inhabiting different worlds. I also like the way people's heads are just visible over the truck, and I plan to do a whole picture focused on the idea.

Another Kind of Composite

FM

I've started another series of composites. Where my Selected People are made up of many figures over time, these new portraits are composites of many extreme close ups of a single person's face woven into a single (very large) image. The other inversion (I'm big on inversions) is that these pictures look very much unlike their sitters. They are closely observed portraits that tell nothing of personality, mood, etc. They do tell you what the above person's nose, eyes, and mouth look like, however.

FM (detail)

My art historical inspiration for this is Edouard Manet, who sometimes fooled around with focus, blurring paint here and there in confounding ways that have little do with optical correctness. Click on the image to enlarge it, and you might be able to see what I mean.

Phoned In

Tone Gray
(click images to enlarge)

 

Siphon

Plank

Blurt

Blandishment

Sorry, loyal fan or fans for my absence here. I was away at Yaddo for all of January, working on, among other things, the above.

Since I was away for so long, I was lonely for my wife, Margaret. We talked on the phone four or five times a day. I heard what she'd been up to in detail. At one point, she described a painting she'd seen somewhere. "It looks like a white blob on a blue background," she said. So Blurt was begat. I started making many more abstract pictures according to phoned in descriptions. Thus was born the Phoned In series. It's about nostalgia and longing--for a distant past where color and form was enough. And it's about translating form into words and photographing them.

If you would like me to do a Phoned In for you, I will stretch the rules. Instead of phoning me, you can leave a description here in the comments. Just describe any abstract painting as briefly and simply as you can. I'll do the rest! (I don't know when I'll get to doing the picture, but I'll post the results here when I do. I don't know where it's going, but I thought I'd try it if people write in.)

Back in the Real World...and It's Better

Things are screwed up here in the real world. But I just got back on Sunday from a month at Yaddo, and my show is opening at Gallery Kayafas tonight. So, although I did lots of work and made some friends, I'm glad to be home. The only thing troubling me today is, Should I wear a suit and tie or should I try to look hip in jeans? Dear 7 or 8 readers: I hope to see you there tonight!

Vote for Me, I'll Never Lay to You

Greg Cook of the New England Institute of Aesthetic runs the New England Art Awards, and I'm one of the nominees for best artist in a group show. Click on the link above to vote for me and the rest of the worthies. My grammar may be bad, but I'm no layer.

I've been at Yaddo for a couple of weeks now, working very hard on some new composite portraits, of all things. My goal is to try all the genres and see if I can screw them up.

And the biggest news is that my show Selected People opens at Gallery Kayafas on Friday (Jan. 22 to Feb. 27). I'm away until January 30, but the opening is at the February first friday.

Blue Hills

 

(click to enlarge)

I did this picture last week, looking south from Boston, probably at the Blue Hills at about 7 AM. It took about 160 exposures and about 130 layers in photoshop. I'm off to Yaddo in a week. I may do some animal pictures, if they have any of them in Saratoga Springs. But I have some ideas for studio pictures using colored tape that I'm planning on trying.