Yesterday I visited the Metropolitain Museum of Art in NYC to see the Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe just to soak in this important period of the arts in the US. There was a small associated gallery with some of Stieglitz’ photography collection. The photographs brought to mind once again how much photography was competing with painting until technical advances in film and printing gave photography the kind of technical image perfection that we now think of “photographicâ€. I’ve always yearned for the painterly results that the early techniques porduced. Our technical abilities have now advanced to the point that Flickr has thousands of well composed, perfectly exposed images that were hard to achieve in the predigital era.
There was another small photography gallery at the Met which was more inspiring to me, After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection. The images were all ones that addressed culture and political power. What struck me was the choice of a test wall installation as the closer for the gallery. I’d never seen his work before, but I believe he is on to something in presenting mulitple images in multiple sizes of multiple subjects that relate to each others in a way that a single image cannot.
I’ve begun printing images again and have been looking at how images relate when prints are placed in relation to each other. So far, it suggests why these images get created and how they are connected.