Category: minimum daily requirement

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Gassan: Report

Posted on Posted in art school, creativity, minimum daily requirement, Theory

following up with more Camera Lucida matters. The final Journal was by Arnold Gassan. Arnold Gassan (1930-2001) was an American photographer, author, and psychologist. Gassan became a licensed psychologist in Arizona in 1991.

  • books written by Gassan include: A Chronology of Photography (1972)
  • The Color Print Book: A Survey of Contemporary Color Photographic Print Making Methods for the Creative Photographer
  • Handbook for Contemporary Photography
  • Exploring Black and White Photography (1989).

“The materials of art have always influenced the image” –Arnold Gassan

Notes from: “Technique could be learned alone to a large degree, Understanding needed outside assistance.. ” … “while reading Ludwig Wittgenstine: The Man and His Philosophy, that I encounterd this description which made clear to me my hesitancy about Newhall’s book: “In teaching you.. I’m like a guide showig you how to fid your way round. London .. At the end … you will know London. Of course a good guide will take you through the important streets ...”

aperture:

  • Vol 5, #4, White and chappell, “Some Methods for Experiencing Photographs.”
  • Vol. 7, #2, “The Way Through Camera Work.”
  • Vol. 9, #4, “The Idea of the Workshop in Photography.”

little remains of the details of his life… this is one small item. His effort to finish archiving his photographs in last years. The scanner was his tool at his end.

“I am not especially interested in anonymous photography, or pictorialist photography, or avant-garde photography, or in straight, crooked or any other subspecific category of photography; I am interested in the entire, indivisible, hairy beast — because in the real world, where photographs are made, these subspecies, or races, interbreed shamelessly and continually.” — John Szarkwoski

Other biblio materials [of use for “Gestus”]

  • Boleslavski, Acting, the First Six Lessons
  • Gurdjieff, All and Everything
  • Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery
  • Maxlow, Toward a Psychology of Being
  • Ornstein, The Natrue of Huan Consciousness, and The Psychology of Concsiousness
  • Ouspenski, In Search of the Miraculouos
  • Persl, Gestalt Therapy,
  • Colin Wilson, The Occult.

In Frank’s West

Posted on Posted in minimum daily requirement, On The Road, The In between, Theory, visual mindTagged , , , , ,

Cover to uncover… picture making method. Meaning within the frame. Understanding what comes from beyond the frame.

US 91, Leaving Blackfoot Idaho shows two young men picked up by the photographer. Though the men seem intently focussed on the road, the car windows are blank. A text by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon is in the visor; this Frank had copied down when he visited Dorothea Lange before he set off on his journey to find the heart of America.

one aspect of “reading” for understanding is in your covering items contained within the frame… What is lost

in this instance, it is very difficult to understand the text — it cannot be read .. it is mere squiggle. What would it be?

We have to leave the frame for the content..

That text reads: ‘The contemplation of things as they are/without error or confusion/without substitution or imposture/is in itself a nobler thing/than a whole harvest of invention.’

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/87174/u-s-91-leaving-blackfoot-idaho

For the second half of Dorothea Lange’s life, that quotation from the English philosopher Francis Bacon occupied space within her day. She pinned a printout of those words on her darkroom door in 1933. It remained there until she died, at 70, in 1965 — three months before her first retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York .

Referenced in publications

proof sheet: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.78965.html

2 possible frames … chose the one without the space between the figures.

same configuration choice in next row of grouped figures.. make the group of one blob.. cluster into single tone pack

Robert Frank’s book, The Americans, is divided into 4 sections. Flags mark the divisions of the book.

  • Flag blowing.. Parade, 1955.. two people “looking” out of windows (First Chapter)
  • Flag hanging over stripe shirt, and… Fourth of July, Jay, New York.
  • Flag as shade… Backyard, Venice West, California.. just two pages after Bar, Detroit.
  • Tuba player… 1956, Political Rally, Chicago (Fourth Chapter)

Robert Frank (b. 1924) traveled across the United States to photograph, as he wrote, “the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere.” During his nine-month journey, he took 767 rolls of film (more than 27,000 images) and made more than 1,000 work prints. He then spent a year editing, selecting, and sequencing the photographs, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally, emotionally, and linguistically. https://www.sfmoma.org/press/release/sfmoma-presents-looking-in-robert-franks-the-amer/