Robert Hirsch - Transformational Imagemaking: Handmade Photography Since 1960

TRANSFORMATIONAL IMAGEMAKING

TRANSFORMATIONAL IMAGEMAKING

Handmade Photography Since 1960

ROBERT HIRSCH

First published 2014

by Focal Press

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and by Focal Press

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Focal Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2014 Robert Hirsch

The right of Robert Hirsch to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hirsch, Robert, 1949

Transformational imagemaking : handmade photography since 1960 / Robert Hirsch.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Photography, HandworkedHistory. 2. PhotographyRetouchingHistory. 3. PhotographersUnited StatesInterviews. 4. Photographic criticism. I. Title.

TR485.H57 2014

770dc23

2013030314

ISBN: 978-0-415-81026-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-81893-1 (ebk)

Contents

Thomas Barrow

Luke Batten

Wayne Martin Belger

Stephen Berkman

Matthew Brandt

Peter Bunnell

Dan Burkholder

Darryl Curran

Binh Danh

Rick Dingus

Dan Estabrook

Robert W. Fichter

Robert Flynt

Judith Golden

Betty Hahn

Robert Heinecken

Catherine Jansen

Harold Jones

Tatana Kellner

Les Krims

William Larson

Dinh Q. L

David Lebe

Martha Madigan

Curtis Mann

Stephen Marc

Scott McCarney

Chris McCaw

John Metoyer

Duane Michals

Vik Muniz

Joyce Neimanas

Bea Nettles

Ted Orland

Mark Osterman

Tom Persinger

Douglas D. Prince

Holly Roberts

Clarissa T. Sligh

Keith A. Smith

Laurie Snyder

Jerry Spagnoli

Doug Starn

Mike Starn

Brian Taylor

Maggie Taylor

Jerry N. Uelsmann

Melanie Walker

Todd Walker

Joel-Peter Witkin

John Wood

Martinez. Vanishing Point, (altered detail) 1959. Digital file. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vanishing Point, by C.C. Beck.

The photographers vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.

JOHN SZARKOWSKI

The Photographers Eye

We constantly tend to misuse or misunderstand the term reality in relation to photographs. The photograph itself is the only thing that is real.

ROBERT HEINECKEN

ASSEMBLED FROM A MAKERS PERSPECTIVE , Transformational Imagemaking: Handmade Photography Since 1960 examines, explains, and advocates for a curated group of American photography-based artists who have worked to expand the window-on-the-world and fine print practices of traditional photography. In making no attempt to hide its hand, this diverse group of curious experimentalists challenges and subverts these conventional practices to play off photographys believability factor by utilizing the photographic medium as a springboard to a physical, expressionist interpretation of subject that enlarges the mediums lexicon. Conceptually, these artists propel the mediums evolution by materially realizing the pictures that otherwise exist only in their minds eye, reminding us that all photographs are constructions. Their innovative synthesis of the empirical and the imaginative produces pictures that are tactile in nature and offer a more resonant representation than an ostensibly dispassionate topographic view. They share a corporal impulse to convey intuitively the enigmas of life that reside beyond the reaches of standard photographic language. In turn, their works allow viewers to get as close to the making as to what is made. These artists strive to recompose the world and make it personal by creating in-depth experiences that interpret their subject matter differently from previously recognized views of a similar topic. In doing so, their methodologies broaden how a photograph is perceived and interpreted by expanding the established artistic and societal preconceptions of how a photographic subject is supposed to look and what is deemed to be truthful. Hence, their transformational picturemaking is an energetic act of authentic assertion, control, and organization over their topic, which extends and transforms their subject beyond boundaries of what is considered to be photographic reality.

The artists presented here employ a wide range of photographic methods to visualize their thinking. However, their work does not approach process as a repeatable recipe, but as an idiosyncratic, heightened means to an end. In a McLuhanesque material sense, the medium is a key component in transmitting their message. Marshall McLuhans seminal work, Understanding Media (1964), features a chapter called The Medium Is the Message, in which he stressed how McLuhans new-media point of view was much more in line with that of the makers presented here, such as Thomas Barrow, Robert W. Fichter, Robert Heinecken, and Joyce Neimanas, and others, especially West Coast photographers, who were not following in the aesthetic tropes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams and who certainly had no interest in Szarkowskis optic-centric corral. At a time when American culture was simultaneously imploding and exploding, McLuhan offered a much larger field of play for these artists to explore. Like McLuhan, the artists featured in this text grew up with film and television, mediums whose inescapable influence opened the new branch of media studies to examine the content, history, and effects of various media, especially mass media, and later digital media comprising both Internet and mobile mass communications.

Transformational Imagemaking