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"Dishonest photography: "The Magritte Conundrum".

Dierk Haasis

pro member
Asher Kelman said:
"This is not a pipe" of Magrite, is an example of a question to reality, like thirst motivates and then drives a quest for water.

Always thought it was a perfectly concise description of his painting. IIRC none of his several paintings using the device of meta-language ever claimed that the object depicted is not what it is ...
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
"This is not a pipe" of Magritte, is an example of a question to reality, like thirst motivates and then drives a quest for water.

Thanks Ray for the quote. This summer I had the pleasure of seeing maybe 50 pictures in that series of prints drawing and paintings.

We all know about staged war photography, where reporters from many reputable news organizations, hungry for news and pressured by deadlines, deliver images prepared on a staged tour. The service is provided with props and actors and dramatic scenes of carnage of civilians.

All this is part of a Faustian pact arranged by fighters in return for guaranteed "access" and safe passage. Here, the personal leaning of these reporters, the political culture of their news services, expectations of the consumers and their wish to not be beheaded, are persuasive in accepting the deal.

I wish to discuss the subject of the value of even "Dishonest photography: the Magritte Conundrum".

So what defense do we have to all this deception. Well humans know about deception. Whenever information is presented, we ask is this true.

With a picture, the image even if compelling wil also raise a question in some of the observors.

This is the point I am interested in exploring. Does this have enough poower to balance even false news reporting by the questions it raises amongs the more careful, analytical and aware?

Art can inform, entertain and raise questions.

The latter is the power of art at it's best.

This is what Dierk, I believe was approaching. To me at least the picture of "dead civilians" in a street triggers instant reactions together with grading of relevence.

Then feeling errupt: horror, disgust, pity, anger and so forth. O.K., now we are energised, but to what purpose?

Our intepretation of the scene of dead people is rapid and based on clues:

manner of death
soldiers present
location of war
previous incidents
evidence of explosions, bullets etc
natural disaster or not
fire or not

and so forth.

Now newspapers and the TV often chose to shortcut our our personal knowledge base and cultural preferences. They do this by changing

the context
titles
juxta position with other articles
invested discussions and editorials.

I saw Mashona sleeping in the center divide in the former British colony, Rhodesia, (now Zimbabwe). This was common during the lunch break. At that time, the white dominated ruling party, was moving toward rebuffing Harold Wilson, the then Prime minister of hte U.K., in his efforts to bring about a more representative govenrment.

British anti Ian Smith news papers captioned photographs, and I paraphrase), "Smith government don't bother to Collect bodies of dead." implyiing racism taken to the ruthless dominence and massacre.

Still, the truth came out since the photographs raised a question.

Still, I come back to my earlier and fundamental hope and belief that photography will become a principal means of self and community education.

We have travelled a long way since we navigated by the paths of animals and the seasons. We have also passed the time when mere compasse suffice.

We need to know where we are!

To me, that device is the photograph.

If we all have access to inexpensive photgraphy, then no one has monopoly of the questions we might, can and should raise.

I want to thank Dierk for emphasizing the idea of questions and for your own reference to "Ceci n'est pas une pipe!"

Asher
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
O.K., so where's the picture and why is it so important to news photography and photography in general?

first, who is this guy Magritte? A Belgian artist, a surrealist, who worked in in wall paper factory as a designer. In 1928 he made a simple, (now famous), picture, of a pipe.

Well here's the picture, two of many versions he made.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.jpg


Ceci ne'st pas une pipe 2.jpg



This image and the mystery of it, became a continuing stimulus to much remarkable debate and derivative works of art.

Freud had already proposed that dreams were not of actualy the objects one sees, rather symbolic representations of other things that might have similar shape or metaphorical relationship.

The surrealists felt that one could not simply represent anything even correctly as a picture since there were some any essences missing.

From our standpoint, the photograph is a representation of part of the truth and in that it is informative.

There a lots of aspects of any picture that need to be asked in order to explore any truth inside it. This applies to art and to all our photographs.

Asher

Images shown under "Fair Use" privileges for editorial writing.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Yes, Ray,

We can frame pictures within pictures. That is a separate and interesting idea. To the point. Given that pictures might not represent what they appear to represent, then can there be inherent value in these pictures to balance a "lie" built in.

Not that a lying or false image cannot be be appreciated as art; of course it can! But can the meaning and the questions lead to a self-balancing so that the falsety will become exposed as such?

Can pictures with falsehoods still give rise to redeeming questions? Should we just say, it is false therefore in to the garbage it goes!

IOW, how much tolerence should we have to the doctored or staged photograph.

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
As luck would have it, I recieved today an invitation to a major Magritte exhibiton at LACMA, The Los Angles county museum of Art, November 19th 2006 to March 4th, 2007.

This is the home of hte famous "Treachery of Images" masterpiece. 50 Magrette paintings wil be shown together with 50 works (paintings and sculptures) of artists whose works were influenced by Maigritte's explorations with truth. The other artists include:

Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Joseph Kosuth, Sherrie Levine, Robert Artschwager, Jeff koons, Martin Kipprnberger, Jim Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Robert Gober ad Marcel Broodthaers.

We are going to order out tickets early. 1-877-522-6225. Hurry as this could be impossible to get in a bit later! Maybe we'll have an OPF LA event!

Asher
 
Asher Kelman said:
Yes, Ray,

Can pictures with falsehoods still give rise to redeeming questions? Should we just say, it is false therefore in to the garbage it goes!

Asher

A timeless question. There is a post at the OnlinePhotographer blog last Saturday that points to an article in the Guardian about a current exhibition, the Face of History. The exhibition seems to be about photographs that cut deeper than the standard "War is Hell, and aren't you ashamed to be involved in any way?" posture. There is an extended discussion of the photographs of Hendryk Ross, who photographed the Lodz ghetto and the nearby slave labor camp, as resident, prisoner, and official "statistician/observer." He was a collaborator, resister, and survivor. His photos were used as evidence at the Eichmann trial. And after his death, they were published in a book still available from Amazon, but I won't see it for a few weeks. Not many copies left, if you would like to pursue this point in this very emotionally charged corner of reportage. The Guardian article is worth reading, for this very question you raise.

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I ordered the book and another! He was a prisoner, victim and collaborator. However, his photographs recorded what was seen. They were not staged, AFAIK.

Russian propaganda pictures of the Soviet era were and by even early 20th Century standards were readily detected as fake.

Recently, there was disclosure of widespread doctoring of photographs in the war in Lebanon. The brand new dolls, toys and manequins with not a speck of dust, (or actors posing as dead or wounded), in the bombed areas of Lebanon, were staged.

These were taken by photographers of most of the Western news agencies and TV ompanies, who knew, by there own experience and common sense, were staged. We now know that.

However, here, the revelations serve to show the propaganda war and deception that feeds a press hungry for "proof" to the political positions they hold.

Now, what as insufficient evidence of the huge price the leabanese paid for their tolerence and even support of the Heszbolah? The damaged building were obviously clear evidence of the bombing. So why the added lie? That was to add a severe emotive setting as a visual code of a damage to innocent children too. Now this layer of deception on a truth was exposed. However the propaganda value of the photographs was already established in the minds of the news consumers! The corrections are, in themost case to be assigned less importance, like a withdrawn disallowed remark by a lawyer before a jury.

Historians will find the news retractions interesting. So there is some autobalancing for history, but not for now.

Asher
 

Ray West

New member
Most propaganda is fake. It depends how closely you look as to whether you see it or not, and of course, whether you want to see it. It could all be a catch 22 situation - We now distrust these images from this region, so when the sh!t really hits the fan, all of it will be ignored. Or maybe its catch 44, whatever.
 
Asher Kelman said:
I ordered the book and another! He was a prisoner, victim and collaborator. However, his photographs recorded what was seen. They were not staged, AFAIK.

Isn't Amazon great at recreating the experience of a good bookstore (or library), shelves filled with interesting related stuff? "People interested in "Lodz Ghetto Photographs" also bought "Photographing the Holocaust; Interpreting the Evidence."" I did. Did you also?

scott
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Well, Scott, I must admit I cought a second book!

Lodz Ghetto: A Community History Told in Diaries, Journals, and
Documents by...

So our impulses are slightly different. I wanted the human depth behind the photos. You wanted more of the truth.

Still, it's wonderful that the pictures survived. There must be many more buried in cans somewhere under the rubble as the authors never returned from their subsequent deportation to the death camps.

Still, where is the good in false pictures? Is it merely to show the motivation of the deceivers and get a deeper understanding of the human dynamics of reporting and being our seyes and ears?

Asher
 

Ray West

New member
The Human Condition

Trying to get this back towards Magritte, and badgering for this particular picture, I found it for myself, from here http://www.abcgallery.com/index.html and here is the image



thehumancondition.jpg



Now Magritte never mentioned anything about noise, or boka, or sharpness, but apparently he did say that 'the tree represented in the painting hid from view the tree situated behind it, outside the room. It existed, for the spectator, as it were, simultaneously in his mind, as both inside the room, in the painting, and outside in the real landscape. Which is how we see the world: we see it as being outside ourselves, even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves.' Quoted from Suzi Gablik - Magritte, p 97.

Personally, I think it would work better if he cropped it more, maybe remove the path towards the bottom, get some foreground interest....

However, how convinced are you that the tree exists, outside of his window? does the fact that the edges of the painting lining up with the edges of the outside scene, if in reality, as precisely as indicated in the painting, condition you to thinking it exists, or do you think 'that is too neat, something fishy here'?. In the real world, it would not be straightforward to produce a painting such as this painting within a painting, to show the edge of the canvas, but with the image as if square on.

This is not the same sort of faking as alluded to re journalism, nor with the inherent problems of colour rendition, etc., but it is sort of related to the 2d = 3D mental paradox, an optical illusion, almost, but very fundamental to human perception.

I wonder what he would have done with something like photo-shop?

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Ray West

New member
Recently, I was thinking of setting up something along the lines of Magritte's painting 'The human condition' (the picture within a picture, which I recently linked to), but then I remembered a couple of the many striking images on Frank's dvd. They are of course, far better than anything I could produce (you can pay me now, Frank ;-)

This fiirst one leads you into the picture, which of course is within the frame, the focus is the distant trees with the hedgerow, but wait a minute, there's someone else looking too.

Corine%2021%20Juni%202006%20120%20.jpg





You hardly notice her, gorgeous though she is. The brown jacket, blending with the trees, her legs the same colour as the timber frame, and
she is looking into the picture too.






and, in case you want to argue .......




Corine%2021%20Juni%202006%20127%20.jpg




you almost have to take a step backwards. (Sorry I didn't notice you Corine, but I did say you was gorgeous!)

A slightly different viewpoint, lowers the skyline, shows the head in profile against the sky, the sharp angle of the leg, the hands breaking up the lines of the frame
puts a bit more 'aggression' into the image, no doubt about the centre of focus.

Our Frank is cleverer than he lets on...

Best wishes,

Ray (edit to fix leg, and one best wishes from me is enough...)
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Frank via Ray,

The pictures are so interesting. I like the fact that the girl is "edgy" yet not voluptuously provocative.

This allows one to look at the design, but only "just" because the girl is still the "super-subject", almost, but not quite, dominating the pychological effect.

The model's instinctive poses for glamour, (the pelvis thrust back in the first image and the left foot position in the second), bring the view somewhat back from the metaphorical nature of the work.

However, this is the apparent intention. So there are two competing themes here. The girl is, in fact, having a conversation with the Magritte world.

Reality is looking into significance.

Asher
 
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The nice thing about these shots were they were totally unplanned.
We saw the frame standing in the field and immediatly decided to take a few pictures there.

The idea was indeed to mix reality with suggestive reality.
If we had know this before we would have worked out the idea more I think.
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Ceci n'est pas une pipe

The simple meaning of the Magritte pipe painting is "This is not a pipe. It's a painting."

Magritte's paintings are full of jokes.

Readers might be interested in his photographs -- about 40 had been published when I was last interested in them, in the late 1980s. They're small, charming "false snapshots" -- staged snapshots done with his friends: always surreal to one degree or another and visually very strong. Along with Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1930s pictures, they are probably the best surrealist photographs so far.

At an opening of his work, Pablo Picasso was accosted by a viewer who recognized him. "You have a lot of nerve," she said, pointing to a picture called Still Life with Fish. "That's not a fish." "Of course it isn't," Picasso said. "It's a painting."

When, sometime after Magnum was founded, Robert Capa, interviewing Henri Cartier-Bresson, asked, "Are you a Surrealist?" Cartier-Bresson replied, "Yes." "Don't tell anyone," Capa said, "or you'll never get another photojournalism job again."
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Cem,

When I first came across Magritte, it was connected with human perception, artificial intelligence, neural netwarks, computer related stuff, not at all 'art' related, although much of it is more art then you see in any gallery.... Do you have any url's for the photo's ?

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Reply to Ray re: Magritte Photos

Ray,

Can't find a URL to Magritte's photographs by usual sources, can't find Magritte's photographs on www.artchive.com -- a good source of reproductions of modern photographs and paintings. Google Image Search yields 1 photograph, 1st page, but the reproduction is too dark to see much in it, at least on my monitor. There are, however, books. (Do we remember books?) A very good library will most likely have at least some photographs in big retrospective volumes on Magritte.

The pictures I mentioned really are "false" snapshots. Staged "everyday" events among family and friends. Picnics. Walks in the country. Afternoon strolls around town. Chess games between friends. Hi-jinks by groups of friends (Magritte and his friends were still young when he made these pictures). And they're small, like snapshots. And flatly printed, like snapshots that come back from the corner drugstore in a couple of days. (Do we remember corner drugstores and sending out and waiting for rolls of film to be developed and printed? Do we remember rolls of film? Do we remember those prints with the scalloped edges?)

Good luck in finding them. They're very, very good and an antidote to both our ordinary snapshots and to much of the dull "staged" work by today's "ambitious" artists.

Best wishes

Ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Ben,
Thanks for trying. If I was moderator here, though, I would delete most of your reply, ( ;- ) ) else it'll start us boring old farts off on a tangent again. ' You could afford cameras? we had to use charcoal pencils, had to first cut the willow and burn it. Paper, we had to shred timber, with our teeth.... etc)'

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Cameras? Are they Necessary?

Ray,

According to Andre Kertesz' legend of himself, he conceived the ambition to be a photographer at the age of 8 (c. 1904). Too poor to buy even a snapshot camera and too proud to accept one as a gift from a more prosperous uncle, until he was 18, out of school, earning money and saving for his first camera he "practiced". For 10 years he'd go around making a rectangle by joining thumb and forefinger of each hand, bringing his hands, thus arranged, quickly to his eye and making a clicking noise with his tongue, to indicate the moment of exposure.

He also played a lot of hooky those 10 years in order to study prints, drawings and--within the folk art collection--ceramics and fabrics, all in the study rooms of the Hungarian National Museum of Art, Budapest.

No wonder his 3rd exposure, "Sleeping Boy" is a small masterpiece.

Best Wishes

Ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I've seen something like several hundred Magritte works of art in the last 4 months. I can't recall photographs. Shortly they'll be a major exhibition in LACMA, the Los Angeles county Museum of Art. I'll look for photographs.

We'll also try to find out from LACMA.

Asher
 

Ben Lifson

New member
There was a small book published in the late 70s... In the ancient days of slides, I had 20 or so slides of these Magritte photographs in my History of Photography slide collection. I remember copying them from a book, w/ a copy stand... But I can't remember any bibliographical data about the book itself. But surely the County Museum will know.
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Ben,

If Andre Kertesz stiood in front of one of Magritte's paintings, clicking his tongue, what image was he capturing??

Best wishes, Ray
 
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