Re: APIS

Dick,
Looking forward to APIS. Hopefully the Luxury Inn is not an oxymoron because
I am staying at it :) Either way, it'll provide wonderful diversion from
waiting for my fried computer to return from Best Buy Repair. BTW, it is
(was) a Toshiba hard drive, not a Compaq.

>>Dick said: Many photographers feel that the older hand worked
>processes provide a more intimate and personal character to their prints.

I would agree that my driving force is a more intimate connection to my
work--I often refer to it as "knowing" the gum process (and each image) in
the biblical sense (my process of choice).

>>Dick said: The contemporary artist/photographer Chuck Close has
>said "the photographer's relation to the process is often more important
>than the content of the image."

Agreed, but try that explanation in grad school: it doesn't fly. Maybe it
will now that Close said it.

>>Dick said: Sally Mann is the flip side of Adams. She had to find the
right image
>match for her new found fascination with the historic wet plate collodion
>process. Adams had to define a new technology to match his vision. Ms.
>Mann had to find a new vision match a technology.

I find in studying photography at the undergraduate and graduate level, that
I have had to answer the question, "Why make these images in gum?" In my
thesis I had a number of answers to this question of why gum. I also
(hopefully) made the point clear enough during my orals that since the birth
of conceptualism we photographers have had to be secretive about the guilty
pleasure of process. Process became almost a dirty word, everything had to
"mean something" and had to be for a reason and process was looked down upon
as formalism. This, of course, is vastly simplified. My belief is the more
we become mediated through technology, the greater the desire to get our
hands dirty and to revel in process. Thus process is being and will be
reborn as the important element that it is. Not that the computer isn't
process, too, but it isn't getting your hands dirty.

I mean, in what other art medium is there such intense argument about
process? The only argument I ever heard while being a painter was the
toxicity of my painting medium as a fellow student left in a huff.
Chris
Received on Mon Jul 4 15:10:42 2005