Three Strikes

Warning: Grouch alert!

Photography has had a tough time of it since its beginnings. As in: It ain’t painting, so is it art? And if so, how much of it is art?

Back in the good ol’ black-and-white days of the early 20th century, the f/64ers and Steiglitz’s army of “equivalenters” worked to separate themselves from the early blurry pictorialists, by claiming that their newest works were not just products of a readily-accessible click of the camera…or a pale imitation of painting…but instead a craft that combined intention, clear seeing, technique, and reflection, and thus—art. “Previsualization” was the word. It was a hard sell, but they eventually won that battle.

And then along came color Kodachrome…and the war raged anew.

So, what do I mean by today’s “Three Strikes?”

1)  Straight…

2)  Color…

3)  Landscape…

…photography.

In the museum and gallery world, it’s often the kiss o’ death.

But I have questions. For starters, why is “serious” photography always about people, people, people? The angst. The squalor. Junked cars and power lines. Dead and girdled trees. Homeless encampments. Lone elderly folks on park benches staring into space. Displaced nudes. A teenage girl sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone, smoking a cigarette and glowering at the camera. A woman in a black cape and face mask with a sword and a white cat on her shoulder. (Why the mask? Why the cat? Sometimes seems like high-school English, as in: What did Holden Caulfield's hunting cap REALLY mean?)

And then there are "altered" landscapes! Collage, multiple exposures. Photos printed, then torn into strips, and reassembled askew. Or combined multi-angle exposures or pasted polaroids ala Picasso. With text noodlings in the borders. Another prize-winner that blew up one area of the print into visible, chunky pixels, in order to show that—wait for it—the continuous tones of a photographic image are an ILLUSION! My god, you’re kidding. My safe world crumbles. Here, the landscape must be shown as a myth, as deconstructed, and possibly re-invented.

And color itself…? Why heck, we all see in color! Black and white means instant craft, right? Because it’s an “abstraction,” one step removed…and color is so…obvious. (But try it; it’s not.) Something to match your couch. And digital color? Wow, don’t even mention it, go straight to your room…

I remember the first time I visited MoMA in New York. Zero color landscape prints—OK, maybe one Eliot Porter dye transfer, and/or a lone Ernst Haas sent off to its corner. Otherwise, full of grainy, cyan-skewed Ektacolors of, say, a pissy 50s family around the breakfast table. (Dad in wife-beater tee growls: “Who ate the last goddamn poptart?!!” Freckled kids cower.) Beauty was no longer cool.

So, let me get this straight: Now landscape photography should be about something else…? And to make it ART we need to show screwed-up humans or screw up the print ourselves …? And if it’s color, then it needs to be “off” in some way?

And why is a “straight” portrait of a person worthy as art, while one of a tree is not? Just asking.

All to picture the world as a place inside one’s haunted head. Welcome back to the Anthropocene! Gilgamesh chops down the cedar forest, again and again. Maybe Ideas are the new nature…?

OK, sorry, I’m going overboard here, and I really do like a lot of this work, BUT…I also think there’s room for all sorts of images…without the rules. I don’t agree that art needs to inherently be an artifact of alienation. Maybe it’s also about finding a real place in a larger world, one beyond the city limits…? And maybe this war on trees, and against all of nature, is really just a war on ourselves. So, can we move on?

Sometimes Stieglitz’s cloud is still a cloud.

There’s a big world out there to photograph. And there’s yet another world of artful printing—both analog and digital. It’s all good. I say let’s us “straight color landscape” photographers move past the three strikes and embrace our own traditions, too.

And what might some of those be? See you next time…

By Scott Atkinson

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