Somewhat good news from Rochester...finally

Somehow I missed this piece in the May 2nd issue of the New York Times, "At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again" by Claudia H. Deutch, until Shane pointed me to it.

That's Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who created the first digital camera, above. Here is an excerpt from the NTY, with a link to the whole article below. My father, who has met him a couple of times, reports he is a very nice and humble fellow.

ROCHESTER — Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management’s dismay at his feat.

Allan Camp, a technician at Kodak’s inkjet development center in Rochester, works on the development of print heads for printers.

“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ ”

Since then, of course, Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it.

Read more here.

Check out this AP story about the digital camera turning 30 in 2005, sort of...it would be 16 years until Kodak released its first digital camera in 2001.

Here is an image and hyperlink-based digital camera timeline. By the way, this is only the 1970s, so be sure to click around.

ABOVE PHOTO: James Rajotte for The New York Times

Digital vs. film storage...

Although not the newest news, the following is worth repeating (and presages my pending post about Polaroid). The New York Times recently reported on the afterlife and storage of cinema, digitally-born vs. film-based:

To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault. ...

To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable. ...

For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess.

Of course, still digital photography will also suffer a similar storage dilemma. Besides massive offsite and online storage, which are only bandaids, are we running headlong into a major preservation disaster?

ABOVE PHOTO: Detail of film and ephemera storage in a salt mine, by Mank999. See his Kansas salt mine storage flickr set here, fascinating!

From trees to wet plate to poets

Bruce and I took a little trip to Western, MA this past weekend. It was a last minute get-a-way before he started his second semester of graduate school at UConn (not to mention, I crave trees every now and then). One of the photographers in my next landscape show, Paul Taylor, had an opening at the Hallmark Museum of Photography (no relation to Hallmark cards or collection), along with the super Susan Kae Grant. Paul owns and operates a photogravure press in New Hampshire, called Renaissance Press, which I visited this past summer. The fantastic retrospective included photogravures, ambrotypes, and many large gelatin silver print prints from wet plate collodion negatives. The PRC will be showing selections of the later from a series along the Connecticut River in March (see example above).

Just expanded, Hallmark now has two substantial gallery spaces and both bodies of work were immaculately presented. Hallmark does it right: the artists were picked up and driven around in limos the entire time, red carpets flowed out of the doors, and the reception was replete with extra touches. We met and talked to the Executive Director, Paul Turnbull, a former teacher at the related Hallmark Institute of Photography just down the street (which by the way is a 10-month commercial school that is unbelievably, incredibly outfitted with the latest technology). Bruce took courses there for a spell when he was about 20 and it was great to catch up with Paul, who proceeded to inform Bruce he had been following his work. Later that evening, during the artist talks at the Institute, Paul announced to the entire audience that Bruce Myren will have a show at the museum in 2009!

We had a delicious dinner and stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast, appropriately called Poetry Ridge, near Poet's Seat Tower. Come to find out, Paul and his wife and Susan were all staying at the b&b too! We had drinks (including a plum port) and looked at old photos of the house in front of a roaring fire. Turner's Falls itself is a small village with a paper mill history and a picturesque setting. From the warmth and kindness of all of those at Hallmark, to the dinner, to the b&b house and hosts, and a brilliant breakfast and visit with all of the artists, it was truly a memorable weekend!

UPDATE: I just posted pics from the weekend on our flickr page.

ABOVE: Paul Taylor, Untitled Connecticut River Landscape #20, 2000, Toned/Stained Gelatin Silver Print from collodion negative, 30 x 40 inches. For more of Paul's work and his press, visit http://www.renaissancepress.com/

Recreated Iconic Photos

First, I apologize, it's been a long time since I've blogged. In typical fashion, I installed an exhibition and promptly got sick for over a week. Today, I am feeling slightly better and surfed around to find today's featured images via Your Daily Awesome.

As far as I can tell, these photos might be authored by a collective called Henry VIII's Wives (it's a little hard to tell from this website). Funny, then disturbing, then provocative, these staged images of famous photographs featuring senior citizens remind me a bit of Vik Muniz's hand-drawn pictures from memory titled "The Best of Life," an example of which is seen at the very bottom of this post. The above images are by far the best from a small online selection; I hope that they continue along these lines. A quote from the mystery site:

The series of photographs entitled The Iconic Moments of the 20th Century emerged in the processual (?) work with the pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow emanates the same impression. A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. - Jelena Velcic in Breaking Step—Displacement, Compasion (sic) and Humour in Recent Art From Britain, Catalog, 2007 Belgrad

I conclude with a quote by Muniz on his series from an interview with Peter Galassi:

The Best of Life Series, for example, are drawings of very famous photographs made entirely from memory. When the drawings were good enough to look like a bad reproduction of the original image, I photographed them and printed them with the same half tone pattern we usually see in these images for the first time in the papers. In these works I tried to find out what a photograph looks like in your head when you are not looking at it. They carried the structure of the famous news pictures but they were in fact very different.

Vik Muniz, Best of Life, Memory Rendering of the Man on the Moon, 1989.

Kodak building implosion update

David Valvo sent me some new pics of Kodak buildings 65 and 69 after their implosion (check out the last post for more information) on October 6th. For those who know Rochester, they are (were) near the corner of Ridge Road and Lake Avenue. Above is a close up of building 65, where all yellow mailers were processed that folks used to send to Kodak. Even a week later, David noted, several people still gathered to pay their respects if you will.

Building 69 (called Photographic Technology), photo by David Valvo

Building 65 (color print and processing), photo by David Valvo

Non-rectangle, Non-square, and Oval photographs

Over on the Soth blog, it's circle time. It started here with George Eastman and Emmet Gowin, then went to photographs captured on a rabbit's eyeball, and continued today with more sure to follow. Good stuff! The non-quadrilateral photograph is a topic I have been thinking about for some time. More specifically, I am particularly interested in the oval or shaped photograph, such as seen in Julia Margaret Cameron's or Lewis Carroll's work, and the oval "view," as seen in the pre-photographic device, the Claude Glass.

William Gilpin was one of the 18th century writers who promoted the oval as the most picturesque shape, being that it closely resembled the purview of the human eye. The plates in his numerous books were almost all oval and washed in a continuous tone. Gilpin and others advocated the use of the Claude Glass, a shaped and tinted convex mirror. (Not all Claude Glasses were oval, some were rectangle or circular, but I'd venture to say that the majority were.) The Claude Glass was named in honor of the French painter Claude Lorrain. Further popularized by the poet Thomas Gray with his set viewing "stations" in the English countryside (think Kodak Picture Spots, but with no camera), the Claude Glass was used by British and American tourists from the early 18th century to well into the late 19th century. Oddly, its even shows up in conjunction with tourist photography! I wrote a graduate seminar paper on this device in the late 1990s for Garden History and Picturesque Aesthetics and this MIT book came out in 2004, but there is much more to be done. They rarely pop up on ebay, but I hope to acquire one for myself someday and continue writing/thinking about this fascinating object.


1ST IMAGE (below): Although not an antique Claude Glass and not with black or tinted glass, this image shows how one would be used: a tourist would find a scene to "compose" or "take" and turn their back to admire it! From www.re-picture.info/inspiration/inspiration.html

2ND IMAGE (below): A Claude Glass, Manufactured in England, 18th century
3RD IMAGE (below): The Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804), View from the bank of a river, watercolour.
From www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/5478-popup.html


4TH IMAGE (below): Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, 1867

John Szarkowski story number #1

As promised, I share the first of two personal stories about John Szarkowski. As Jen Bekman has pointed out, his death as reverberated across the blog-o-sphere. I read a great email anecdote today courtesy of Karl Baden, which I wish was online. Wait, it is...in a comment on Alec Soth's blog along with several other great ones too. I might not have as much history behind me or as powerful a pen, such as seen in this great post by Mark Feeney, but I do hope you enjoy it.

What I liked about Karl's remembrance of Szarkowski was that it was personal. He told the story of when he dropped off his portfolio at MoMA and was called back to chat. At first he thought Szarkowski wasn't talking about his images; then he walked out with a check. There is no denying that he and others such as Edward Steichen and Beaumont Newhall had a profound effect on the creation of a canon--both good and bad--that has become the history of photography we know today. He was instrumental in promoting photography as a fine art, a fact that seems lost on younger students born in the late 1980s after the battle had been essentially won, and had a poet's pen. There will be many dissertations on the effect of Szarkowski on photography and photohistory, but there is something about meeting such greats in person no matter what has been said about them in your graduate art history seminar.

During College Art Association (CAA) in Boston a year or so ago, we attended a special session about and with John Szarkowski. Peter Galassi and a few others were also on the panel. When John got up, he shook it all up by saying "I am going to talk about what you do, while showing you images I made." Then he proceeded to critique the art teaching establishment by saying that they are coddling students and graduating too many MFAs. He was especially critical of the practice of encouraging students who are not good, but are told that they are and not dissuaded so as to keep money in the coffers. This is especially prescient given the recent Art in America 'Art School Symposium' that I am still reading. If this collection of essays is any measure, Szarkwoski was not the only one thinking about these issues and even in in his 80s, knew how and when to talk about things that need to be addressed.

After the lecture, there was a special reception and we were all invited to stay. Everyone made a beeline for the food and drink, but oddly, no one approached Szarkowski to chat or shake his hand. Was everyone in shock from the talk, or simply too scared to talk to or meet him? Our crew headed on over and Lisa Kessler and Terri Smith struck up a conversation with him (the latter more of a full-blown Leo than myself). Lisa actually found his misplaced slides and was immediately hailed as his savior. We bantered about and he was incredibly funny (not to mention fond of the ladies) and above all, human. I share these 2 photos taken by Bruce with you. You can tell how much fun we had with Mr. Szarkowski from the photos. I think he had fun with us too.

Next up: Bruce's story about having dinner with John Szarkwoski after his talk at Colorado College with Robert Adams, Stuart Klipper, Frank Golhke. Hint -it was a heated discussion about panoramas.

TOP: Szarkwoski and Terri; BOTTOM: Lisa and Szarkowski

John Szarkowski (December 18, 1925 – July 7, 2007)

I was out on a studio visit to NH and VT most of today, so I didn't hear until now that John Szarkowski had passed away due to complications of a stroke here in Massachusetts. I guess it was apt that I was doing photo-type things rather than at my computer. In my next post/s, I will share a couple of stories about Mr. Szarkowski--one from the College Art Association (CAA) in Boston and one from Bruce when he lived in Colorado--and some pics from CAA.

You can read the New York Times obituary here.

The Oldest Darkoom

From a recent list-serv posting about the newly-discovered "oldest darkroom" in the world:

"The darkroom was owned by Joseph Fortuné Petiot-Groffier who died in 1855. The lab was left untouched by children, grand-children,... after his death until today when a great-great... decided to open the doors to the director of la Maison Nicéphore Niepce in Chalon-sur-Saone in France. The lab was full of ancient chemicals (many still in sealed containers), photo equipment, and over 400 books dating prior to 1830 covering the full knowledge on photography as of that time. It will be recreated at the Maison Nicéphore Niepce." - (translated?) by Guy Glorieux

From my dad's email reply:

"Pierre-Yves Mahe, is the founder of SPEOS photographic school in Paris, and he rents the part of the house where Niépce had his laboratory-workshop in Saint-Loup de Varennes, on the Gras estate. Pierre-Yves was the first photographer to occupy the place since the inventor’s death...The historical residence had remained unexplored until then, just gazed at from outside by some curious people. Pierre-Yves, along with Dr. Zakia and I, wrote the book, The Stop System which was published in French and in English in 1999. The Stop System is still being taught at Speos.

Pierre-Yves visits Rochester from time to time and was here recently when he showed me numerous pictures of the Petiot-Groffier darkroom. It was amazing to hear his recounting of the story of being the first person to enter this historic darkroom in approximately 150 years! The lab was frozen in time as if it were a time capsule, which, undoubtedly, it was. Pierre-Yves showed many pictures of the investigation of the lab with full-time chemists in masks checking over the curious, centuries-old bottles to make sure that they were not dangerous (some were!) and arranging and cataloging them. Eventually, the darkroom will become part of the Niépce house for all to see! What a great find to discover the darkroom, chemicals, cameras, books, and processing apparatus that were exactly contemporaneous with Niépce, many of which were used in his investigations!"

Here are some more articles on this discovery: one in French and one in English.

For Sale: 2 million square feet of Kodak

I just learned that Kodak is putting up for sale more than 2 million square feet of distribution space. According to my dad, "The buildings are some of the largest in the U.S. for distribution with millions of square feet condition space and 22-foot (HUGE) doors of massive truck entry....This was the main distribution center for all of Kodak. All of our products that were made in Rochester, and made elsewhere were shipped from/to here. Actually, this is where Paul (my brother) worked for the summer as a forklift operator."

As Kodak moves to digital and outsources more and more, such large spaces aren't needed anymore. The Marketing Education Center (MEC) where my dad worked for many years is still vacant. Add to that Elmgrove (left in 1999), a handful of buildings in Kodak Park, and several other buildings are/were being demolished, put up for sale, or offered for rent. This is not new news, buildings and products have been slowly downsized and as such they have even been the subject of documentary films, including "The Last Slide Projector," and short films. The artist Tacita Dean was spurred to make several films after learning that a film facility was closing down [Addendum: my film friends are disputing her understanding of what kind of film in the interview, I will try to nail down more and post on this soon]. She traveled to the French manufacturing plant to make Kodak, Noir et Blanc, and Found Obsolescence (all 2006). Her work is now showing at the Guggenheim. You can read an interview with Dean concerning her films about film here.

In keeping with the ideas of the last 2 posts, I think this requires a new approach: You are getting sleepy....buy Kodak, buy Kodak...

More info on the sale/auction at this link
(and you can click on the below image for a closer look): www.cbre.com/usa/us/ny/rochester+partner/property/kodakparksouth

When in doubt, post links

Taking a cue from Modern Kick's post of the same title, here is an attempt at what I have dubbed a "mystery list post":

• Alec Soth's waxing about "the ballad of good and bad titles"
• Christian Patterson is recounting the history of color photography, including film from my hometown (buy kodak, buy kodak)
• Jen Bekman is all about making art affordable
• Modern Kicks asks "why so few art historians blog?"

As for the latter, I want to stand up and shout proudly, I am a card carrying art historian and I blog! (more thoughts on this later...)

Monday Show and Tell: The Uncyclopedia

I was surfing the internet this weekend searching for a name for my new betta fish. Somehow, while typing the phrase "Dr. Seuss fish names" into Yahoo, I stumbled across the Uncyclopedia, which dubs itself as "the content free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," and its entry on fish. Think wikipedia, but pulled through a wormhole and back; basically wiki meets The Onion, only weirder. Delighted and tickled pink, I found my way to the article on photography, which I will quote below - I hope you have a good laugh. I found one comment on this entry that will help set the mood: "An article on Photography without photos. Excellent."

Without further ado, here are some selections from the article on photography.

Photography was invented in the 10th Century AD.
Photography is a style of ultra-realist art which became popular during the invention of Myspace. Or, as my aunt says, photography is "nudie pictures".

==The War of Photographic Aggression==
During the twentieth century photography fought a bloody battle with non-realist styles of painting such as expressionism and cartoons. It is widely believed to have been one of the bloodiest wars in human history, involving many humans rights abuses on either side. One of the most notorious was the genocide of blue paint, after it declared allegiance to post-cartography (an anti-realist form of cartography once used by the Ordinance Survey). This war is often called The War of Photographic Aggression, but is known as The Cubist War in some parts of rural Angola....

==Techniques==
Photography usually begins with a sketch, made by an incredibly small artist inside a metal or plastic box. This sketch is then taken to a printing lab where it is elaborated by a larger, and consequently more skilled, artist. The larger artist is able to add colours, something which can't fit inside the small box. The small artist uses a complex shading method to denote the colour which the large artist should add.

==Digital photography==
Recent developments in artistic training have lead to digital photography. This is a form of photography in which the large artist is replaced by a medium-sized artist who can fit inside a home PC. The reason this is now possible is that the training of medium-sized artists no longer involves cutting off their fingers (or digits) hence the name digital photography.

==The Death of Photography==
It is expected that photography will die out sometime in the twenty-second century due to either heart failure, or the superiority of Neo Soviet Realism.

== See also ==
[[Kodak]]
[[War of Photographic Aggression]]
[[Focus on the Family]]
[[Black and White]]
[[Modern photography]]

Logo From http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Photo History is cool...again!?

Several photobloggers as of late have been delving into the annals of photohistory. As an art historian/photohistorian and one who works with and teaches living photographers, I find this very interesting both in terms of their approach and use of photohistory as well as the impact of the internet on the retrieval and dispersal of such information (or, these cases aside, sometimes misinformation). When I switched from art studio to art history in college, I generally left behind drawing, painting, and photo, although I sometimes take Holga and Polaroid pictures. When asked why I don't show these to anyone, I have to underscore that I bring something different to the discussion and that I want photographers to respect my abilities in curating, and not get bogged down in how good (or bad) my photographs are.

Photohistory itself was largely codified initially in and by museums and collectors as well as photographers turned curators. Think Edward Steichen and John Szarkowski. Photohistorians and photocurators did not exist as we know them today until well into the twentieth century (just as MFA programs in photography). We are still reeling from the canons proposed in such tomes as Gernsheim's and Newhall's history of photography--both of which have origins in private collections or museum exhibitions. Always one to provoke a healthy discussion, Douglas Nickel has spoken often on the history of the history of photography and goes into fascinating detail on the history (and impending dearth?) of trained photocurators on the PhotoWings website:

The museum industry needs photo curators and needs them to be well-trained. And they don't want someone who learned photo history from a studio person or from somebody who specializes in abstract expressionism. They want people trained in photo history.

As a fan of historiography (and drama), I highly recommend reading the whole interview (Geoffrey Batchen has also written and spoken about such issues, sometimes with Nickel). Has the pendulum swung the other way for us photohistorians - are we a dying breed? I have always been interested in museums and academia and hope to continue to work in both.

Another interesting development that I would underscore in Nickel's summation is the photographer teaching photohistory, which often happens at art schools. As an art historian, I must admit that this slightly concerns me, both in terms of my own job prospects someday (a masters in art history is not a terminal degree, while a MFA is, and I am years away from mine) as well as how this makes for an entirely different class (and here - I want to underscore that I am saying this is neither good nor bad, just different). I understand what an amazing perspective such a background can bring to the discussion, but are we teaching two different histories? For artists, a photohistorian's class might be better in some ways or more boring and less useful in other ways than one given by an artist colleague...either way they are different and we must consider the differences. Are Ph.D.s to teach only in liberal arts schools? I hope not. I must admit that I am highly generalizing this and there are many amazing doctorates teaching in art schools, but with the rise of adjuncts, it serves to make a point. There are likely fewer photohistorians out there and, if Nickel is right, even fewer to come. We need more photohistorians in museums, but also in colleges - to teach the next generation of scholars and curators as well as photographers.

Is this the beginning of an artist-non-artist split in terms of training? Sadly, at the University of Texas, we didn't hang out enough with the artists even though we had seminars in the same building. Working with practicing photographers (and dating one), I have learned more at my present job about taking and printing photographs than I ever did in graduate school. Such knowledge is somewhat lacking in academia (not all decorative arts and material culture historians, for example, know how to throw a pot) and is equally a cause for concern.

Where are we to go from here to bridge these gaps? A parallel discussion and perhaps model for uniting all of these forces would be the recent dialogue surrounding artists as art critics. Matt Nash has great review and essay on Big, RED and Shiny on the new book, "A Critical Mess," to which Steve Aishman has a humorous but very thoughtful response.

Here are a few words from Matt:

In this way, I think that many artists do not feel that the criticism they receive from a “critic” is any more or less valid than that of a peer, or a teacher, or anyone else who may encounter their work and wish to speak. In a lot of ways, art critics actually diminish their power to influence art-making by pretending to be above the artists they critique; artists respond to peer influences positively while generally rejecting “authority” in any form, even the established critical structure. This is why, I believe, much of art criticism has passed into the hands of artists, and found voice in forums that are immediate, localized and antiauthoritarian. By allowing artists to engage as equals, these new forms reframe critique and the “judgment” inherent within it; rather than waiting for tacit approval or denial from an authority, artists are now much more proactive about adressing the ideas and theories that are most important to them and their community. It is in this way that our expectations of art criticism have shifted from a pat on the head to a round of drinks; that is, from outside and authoritative approval to the welcome support of peers and colleagues.

Whew...apparently I had a lot in me on this topic! Any thoughts? I ought to conclude by pointing out a few photographers who have recently written on topics in the history of photography:

• Photographer Christian Patterson has posted several items on early color photography. Here is Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3.
• Photographer and student Shane Lavalette has also posted on panoramic photography and Jacques Henri Lartigue and invited his readers to join him in learning.
• Photographer Jeremias Paul gives us a great example to follow in his recent musing on the influences in his own pratice here

Photoblogging and blogging has certainly contributed to a renewed interest in photohistory by photographers (well, at least the sharing and talking about it at such an accelerated pace and in such a public forum). Almost every single post by Alec Soth addresses both photo and art history in some way. Recent topics include Portrait Week and his attempt to create a spectrum (Version 1 and version 2) to categorize photographers. I am personally thrilled to see such a community and discussion developing. Although not a photographer, the folks at Art + Commerce have started an interesting discussion forum, Tip of the Tongue, which is currently being led by a great essay by Charlotte Cotton on black and white vs. color. I hope their forums become more active (I wonder if there is any way to have the comments cascade to see them all at once?). I have offered to answer questionnaires and help in any way.

The short and apparently very long of it is: we all have something to learn from each other. One solution could be to team teach or team post on a blog topic - photographer, photohistorian, and critic; this would make for a fascinating class and discussion! Here's to a new sea change!

Christian Patterson's mock photo family tree. Read more about it here: http://christianpatterson.com/blog/archives/346