看到昨天達眼和影雲關於繪畫還是攝影的對話，想插幾句。可惜中文打字太慢，
就對不起寫英文了，好在達班是英國人。。。
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I think there is some misunderstanding of the type of photography 影雲
practices. It makes more sense to think photography as a menans for
certain type of visual artists to convey their ideas. In this sense,
there is no difference whether one is doing painting, drawing,
sculpture, or photography. Photography happens to be convenient to
express one's vision. This has been going on for a long time, and a
lot of painters and sculpters have now abandonned their traditional
medium and picked up their cameras.
However, this does not come without some compromise. As you keenly
noticed the difference of her painting and photography. While the
artist gained a lot of freedom, she/he also lost a lot of control. It
can be fast to take a picture, but you may not be able to get all the
costumes, the models with the facial and phyical characteristics you
desired, the color may not be quite right. Some people, such as Cindy
Sherman and Jeff Wall, are meticulous in practicing their art and
really want to be modern day painters. In their work, every little
thing in the photo is meticuosly designed and placed. Others do not
have this rigor and are sloppy, as they let many random things happen,
such as 前一段時間討論時我錯過的王慶鬆.
But I think this is not a problem for photography. 影雲's photos are
full of energy, rich in expression, and sometimes are quite
provocative. However, I do not think the issue is whether she does
paiting better or photgraphy better. The impression one often has is
that her work is raw, direct, and frankly to this observer, 有點直通通,
or not artful enough. In my mind, there is a huge gulf of what she
does and what I see in works of folks she may appreciate or aspire to,
such as Francesca Woodman, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Roger Ballen.
These are also different from the old-school surrealists (for example,
前一段時間討論時我錯過的Jerry Uselmann), where one often sees 沙漠白雲
等種種框架中的貧乏思維.
For Woodman, everything just flows. She uses herself a lot and did a
lot of self-portraits, but she appeared mearely as a prop in many of
her great pictures. In a way, she could have been substituted with a
well-chosen model. Her work is very smooth, sophisticated, and comes
out with ease.
Meatyard practices deeply psychological photography. But his work is
artful in a sense that he truly was a photographer in a traditional
sense, as he engaged the world head-on. He was very successful in
projecting a fascinating and strange world that would otherwise
existed only in his head, and he was able to bring it to the outside
world. No doubt it was hard work, as it was obvious that it took him
many years to accumulate a significant body of works.
Roger Ballen's works are the most painter-like. He is also very
effective in depicting deep human psychology. But unlike Meatyard,
everything was designed, posed and installed, including those
wonderful little strange electric wires. In a sense, his photography
is a record of his in-effect installation art, accompanied by a
special cast of actors he hand picked. What he wanted to convey is a
kind of fringe psychology that we recongnize immediately, to a large
or a small but definite extent. The cleverness of his work is also
reflected in the subtle social context of his work. He did many of
his work in South Africa during Apartheid. As he described, he was
the Edward Snowden of his age, and laid bare the the ugliness of
certain white people and punctured the lies of white racial
superiority. But most importantly, his work depecits universally
recongizable deep humanity, however twisted.
All of their works share a common quality. That is, their photography
has gone beyond self-expression and self-exhibition. It is the clever
and bold ways each enganges the outside world, and each reveals some
special but recognizable common characteristics of human conditions,
which cannot be conveyed verbally and probably live only in a visual
world.
In this sense, different mediums share the same burden and can travel
the same route. The abstract expressinists and action painters of the
past were great, and their works were direct records of the events and
actions of encountering of brush/paint with the external world of
canvas. Similarly, photographers take actions, and utilize external
world to ingrain their own psychology and vison. It is this
intertwiness between the two worlds that makes photography
fascinating. If one has any doubt, just look at 啊撲's blurring
pictures (Man, he is turning into a great writer lately).
In my opinion, the sooner one gets out of the comfort zone of mere
self-exhibition, the better one's art gets. Of course, one may decide
to live happily ever after in this paradise, but to others it would be
unfortunate if a talented person is condemned to the ghetto of extreme
narcisism for eternity.
As for myself, I suspect photography is not art. It is beyond
art. Sure, it is a wild beast, difficult to drive, but it is so
fundamental and powerful, and can supercedes any visual arts. But
that is a long discussion for another day.
