An Eight Year Long Exposure

Here's an excerpt from a press release from the University of Hertfordshire from last week:

A photograph thought to be the longest exposure image ever taken has been discovered inside a beer can at the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory.

The image was taken by Regina Valkenborgh, who began capturing it towards the end of her MA Fine Art degree at the University of Hertfordshire in 2012. It shows 2,953 arced trails of the sun, as it rose and fell between summer and winter over a period of eight years and one month. The dome of Bayfordbury’s oldest telescope is visible to the left of the photograph and the atmospheric gantry, built halfway through the exposure, can be seen from the centre to the right.

Click here to enlarge.

The previously "accepted" record for longest exposure was a Michael Wesely photo that was just over half as long: 4 years and 8 months.

Here's a bit more on Valkenborgh's record-breaking image from the Smithsonian Magazine.

And here's a video by Justin Quinnell showing how to make your own pinhole camera that can hold up for a long exposure:

Direct link: youtu.be/wtZOWEB_wcI


An example of a 6-month exposure from Quinnell.

How to Be an Artist

Jerry Saltz (the Pulitzer Prize winning senior art critic and columnist for the New York Magazine) wrote an incredible article last month. It is not my intention to plagiarize this; only to preserve it here in case it ever goes away. Please, follow that link above to see the article with artwork placed within it. (I have a few artworks placed within this article, and that's only in a part where Saltz has us do an exercise by looking at them - there are more images that inform the writing in the original article.) Should that link not work (or should you just want a text-heavier version), read below. I placed italics and bold where Saltz did to share his emphasis.

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How to Be an Artist: 33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively). 

Art is for anyone. It’s just not for everyone. I know this viscerally, as a would-be artist who burned out. I wrote about that last year, and ever since, I’ve been beset — every lecture I give, every gallery I pop my head into, somebody is asking me for advice. What they’re really asking is “How can I be an artist?”

When, last month, Banksy jerry-rigged a frame to shred a painting just when it was auctioned, I could almost hear the whispers: “Is that art?” This fall, the biggest museum event in New York is the Whitney’s retrospective of Andy Warhol — the paradigmatic self-made, make-anything-art-and-yourself-famous artist. Today, we are all Andy’s children, especially in the age of Instagram, which has trained everyone to think visually and to look at our regular lives as fodder for aesthetic output. 

How do you get from there to making real art, great art? There’s no special way; everyone has their own path. Yet, over the years, I’ve found myself giving the same bits of advice. Most of them were simply gleaned from looking at art, then looking some more. Others from listening to artists talk about their work and their struggles. (Everyone’s a narcissist.) I’ve even stolen a couple from my wife.

There are 33 rules — and they really are all you need to know to make a life for yourself in art. Or 34, if you count “Always be nice, generous, and open with others and take good care of your teeth.” And No. 35: “Fake it till you make it.”

Step One: You Are a Total Amateur 

Five lessons before you even get started. 

Lesson 1: Don’t Be Embarrassed 

I get it. Making art can be humiliating, terrifying, leave you feeling foul, exposed, like getting naked in front of someone else for the first time. You often reveal things about yourself that others may find appalling, weird, boring, or stupid. People may think you’re abnormal or a hack. Fine. When I work, I feel sick to my stomach with thoughts like None of this is any good. It makes no sense. But art doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t even need to be good. So don’t worry about being smart and let go of being “good.”

Lesson 2: “Tell your own story and you will be interesting.” — Louise Bourgeois 

Amen, Louise. Don’t be reined in by other people’s definitions of skill or beauty or be boxed in by what is supposedly high or low. Don’t stay in your own lane. Drawing within the lines is for babies; making things add up and be right is for accountants. Proficiency and dexterity are only as good as what you do with them. But also remember that just because it’s your story, that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to an audience. You have to earn that. Don’t try to do it with a big single project. Take baby steps. And be happy with baby steps.

Lesson 3: Feel Free to Imitate 

We all start as copycats, people who make pastiches of other people’s work. Fine! Do that. However, when you do this, focus, start to feel the sense of possibility in making all these things your own — even when the ideas, tools, and moves come from other artists. Whenever you make anything, think of yourself as entering a gigantic stadium filled with ideas, avenues, ways, means, and materials. And possibilities. Make these things yours. This is your house now.

Lesson 4: Art Is Not About Understanding. Or Mastery. 

It is about doing and experience. 

No one asks what Mozart means. Or an Indian raga or the little tripping dance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat. Forget about making things that are understood. I don’t know what Abba means, but I love it. Imagination is your creed; sentimentality and lack of feeling your foe. All art comes from love — love of doing something. 

Lesson 5: Work, Work, Work

Sister Corita Kent said, “The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.” [Sidenote: I posted Sister Kent's "rules" back in 2011 in this post.]

I have tried every way in the world to stop work-block or fear of working, of failure. There is only one method that works: work. And keep working.

Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep. I do all the time. Jasper Johns famously said, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” How many times have you been given a whole career in your dreams and not heeded it? It doesn’t matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work. Work is the only thing that takes the curse of fear away.

Step Two: How to Actually Begin

An instruction manual for the studio.

Lesson 6: Start With a Pencil 

Don’t worry about drawing. Just make marks. Tell yourself you’re simply diagramming, playing, experimenting, seeing what looks like what. If you can write, you already know how to draw; you already have a form of your own, a style of making letters and numbers and special doodles. These are forms of drawing, too. While you’re making marks and drawing, pay attention to all the physical feedback you’re getting from your hand, wrist, arm, ears, your sense of smell and touch. How long can your mark go before you seem to need to lift the pencil and make a different mark? Make those marks shorter or longer. Change the ways you make them at all, wrap your fingers in fabric to change your touch, try your other hand to see what it does. All these things are telling you something. Get very quiet inside yourself and pay attention to everything you’re experiencing. Don’t think good or bad. Think useful, pleasurable, strange. Hide secrets in your work. Dance with these experiences, collaborate with them. They’re the leader; you follow. Soon you’ll be making up steps too, doing visual calypsos all your own — ungainly, awkward, or not. Who cares? You’ll be dancing to the music of art.

Carry a sketchbook with you at all times. Cover a one-by-one-foot piece of paper with marks. But don’t just fill the whole page border to border, edge to edge. (Way too easy.) Think about what shapes, forms, structures, configurations, details, sweeps, buildups, dispersals, and compositions appeal to you.

Now do this on another surface, any surface, to know what kind of material appeals to you. Draw on rock, metal, foam-core, coffee cups, labels, the sidewalk, walls, plants, fabric, wood, whatever. Just make marks; decorate these surfaces. Don’t worry about doing more. All art is a form of decoration. Now ask someone what ideas they get when they look at what you’ve made. They’ve just told you more about what you’ve already done. If the other person sees it in your work, it’s there.

Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it. 

Lesson 7: Develop Forms of Practice 

For instance, on the subway, while waiting or sitting around, practice drawing your own hands. Lots of hands on the same page, hands over other hands. Other people’s hands, if you want to. You can draw other parts of your body that you can see, too. But you have to look and then describe with your pencil or pen what you see. Don’t make it up! Mirrors are fine, even if you want to draw only where your cheek turns into your mouth. Play with different scales, make things bigger, smaller, twisted. 

Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
I think all artists should:
• Build a clay pot.
• Sew pieces of fabric together.
• Prune a tree.
• Make a wooden bowl on a lathe, by carving.
• Make a lithograph, etching, or woodblock print.
• Make one hokey Dalí-like painting or mini Kusama light installation to get this out of your system. 

You are now in possession of ancient secret knowledge.

Lesson 8: Now, Redefine Skill 

Artistic skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency, mimetic exactitude, or so-called good drawing. For every great artist, there is a different definition of skill. Take drawing classes, if you wish; learn to draw “like the masters.” You still have to do it in an original way. Pollock could not draw realistically, but he made flicking paint at a canvas from above, for a time, the most prized skill in the art world. You can do the same — your skill will be whatever it is you’re doing differently.

Lesson 9: “Embed thought in material.” — Roberta Smith 

What does this mean? An object should express ideas; art should contain emotions. And these ideas and feelings should be easy to understand — complex or not.

These days, an artist might exhibit an all-brown painting with a long wall text informing us that the artist took the canvas to Kosovo near the site of a 1990s Serbian massacre and rubbed dirt on the canvas for two hours while blindfolded to commemorate the killing. Recently, while I was looking at boring black-and-white photographs of clouds in the sky, a gallerist sidled up to me and seriously opined, “These are pictures of clouds over Ferguson, Missouri, in protest of police violence.” I started yelling, “No! These are just dumb pictures of clouds and have nothing to do with anything.” 

Is Duchamp’s Fountain an artwork or an idea? Both! There is a different way. In the winter of 1917, Marcel Duchamp, age 29, bought a urinal at J.L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue, turned it on its side, signed it “R. Mutt 1917,” titled it Fountain, and submitted it to the non-juried Society of Independent Artists exhibition.

Fountain is an aesthetic equivalent of the Word made flesh, an object that is also an idea — that anything can be an artwork. Today it is called the most influential artwork of the 20th century.

This project of embedding thought in material to change our conception of the world isn’t only a new development. When we see cave paintings, we are seeing one of the most advanced and complex visual operating systems ever devised by our species. The makers of the work wanted to portray in the real world something they had in their head and make that information readable to others. It has lasted tens of thousands of years. With that in mind...

Exercise: Build a Life Totem 
Using any material on any surface, make or draw or render a four-foot-tall totem pole of your life. From this totem, we should be able to know something about you other than what you look like or how many siblings you have. Include anything you want: words, letters, maps, photos, objects, signs. This should take no longer than a week. After a week, it’s finished. Period. Now show it to someone who does not know you well. Tell them only, “This is a totem pole of my life till now.” That’s all. It doesn’t matter if they like it. Ask them to tell you what it means about your life. No clues. Listen to what they tell you.

Lesson 10: Find Your Own Voice 

Then exaggerate it. 

If someone says your work looks like someone else’s and you should stop making it, I say don’t stop doing it. Do it again. Do it 100 times or 1,000 times. Then ask an artist friend whom you trust if your work still looks too much like the other person’s art. If it still looks too much like the other person’s, try another path.

Imagine the horror Philip Guston must have felt when he followed his own voice and went from being a first-string Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s to painting clunky, cartoony figures smoking cigars, driving around in convertibles, and wearing KKK hoods! He was all but shunned for this. He followed his voice anyway. This work is now some of the most revered from the entire period. In your downtime...

Exercise: An Archaeology 
Make an index, family tree, chart, or diagram of your interests. All of them, everything: visual, physical, spiritual, sexual. Leisure time, hobbies, foods, buildings, airports, everything. Every book, movie, website, etc. The totality of this self-exposure may be daunting, scary. But your voice is here. This will become a resource and record to return to and add to for the rest of your life.

Lesson 11: Listen to the Crazy Voices in Your Head 

I have my own sort of School of Athens in my head. A team of rivals, friends, famous people, influences dead and alive. They’re all looking over my shoulder as I work; none of them are mean. All make observations, recommendations, etc. I use music a lot. I think, Okay, let’s begin this piece with a real pow! Like Beethoven. Or the Barbara Kruger in my head says, Make this sentence short, punchy, declarative, aggressive. Led Zeppelin chimes in with, Try a hairy experiment here; let it all show. All the Sienese paintings I’ve ever seen beg me, Make it beautiful. D. H. Lawrence is pounding on the table, Alexander Pope is making me get a grip, Wallace Stevens listens to my language and recommends words, Whitman pushes me on, my inner Melville gets grandiose, and Proust drives me to make longer and longer sentences till they almost break, and my editor cuts these into eighths or edits them down to one. (Writers need editors. No exceptions.) These voices will always be there for when things get tough.

Lesson 12: Know What You Hate 

It is probably you. 

Exercise: Make a List of Art 
Make a list of three artists whose work you despise. Make a list of five things about each artist that you do not like; be as specific as possible. Often there’s something about what these artists do that you share. Really think about this.

Lesson 13: Scavenge

Life is your syllabus: Gather from everywhere.

Andy Warhol said, “I always like to work on … things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good.” He also understood that “department stores will become museums,” meaning that optical information can come from everywhere, even from a Celestial Seasonings package.

Originality did not conveniently die just in time for you and your generation to insist it no longer exists. You just have to find it. You can do this by looking for overlooked periods of art history, disliked and discredited styles, and forgotten ideas, images, and objects. Then work them into your own art 100 times or 1,000 times.

Step Three: Learn How to Think Like an Artist 

This is the fun part. 

Lesson 14: Compare Cats and Dogs 

Okay, this sounds ridiculous, but call your dog and it comes right over to you, placing its head in your lap, slobbering, wagging its tail: a miraculous direct communication with another species. Now call your cat. It might look up, twitch a bit, perhaps go over to the couch, rub against it, circle once, and lie down again. What am I saying?

In seeing how the cat reacted, you are seeing something very close to how artists communicate.

The cat is not interested in direct communication. The cat places a third thing between you and it and relates to you through this third thing. Cats communicate abstractly, indirectly. As Carol Bove says, “You don’t just walk up to beauty and kiss her on the mouth!” Artists are cats. (And they can’t be herded.)

Lesson 15: Understand That Art Is Not Just for Looking At 

Art does something. 

In the past 100 years or so, art has been reduced to being mainly something we look at in clean, white, well-lit art galleries and museums. Art has been limited this way, made a passive thing: another tourist attraction to see, take a picture in front of, and move on from.

But for almost its entire history, art has been a verb, something that does things to or for you, that makes things happen. Holy relics in churches all over the world are said to heal. Art has been carried into war; made to protect us, curse a neighbor, kill someone; been an aid in getting pregnant or preventing pregnancy. There are huge, beautiful, multicolored, intricately structured Navajo sand paintings used in ceremonies to ask the gods for assistance. The eyes painted on Egyptian sarcophagi are not there for us to see; they are there so the interred person can watch. The paintings inside the tombs were meant to be seen only by beings in the afterlife.

Have you ever cried in front of a work of art? Write down six things about it that made you cry. Tack the list to your studio wall. Those are magical abracadabras for you. 

Lesson 16: Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content 

One of the most crucial lessons there is! 

The subject matter of Francis Bacon’s 1953 Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a pope, a seated male in a transparent sort of box. That’s it. The content might be a rebellion or an indictment of religion. It might be claustrophobia or hysteria or the madness of religion or civilization.

The subject matter of Michelangelo’s David is a standing man with a sling. The content might be grace, beauty — he was just 17, if you know what I mean — pensiveness, physical awareness, timelessness, eternal things, a form of perfection, vulnerability. This content is High Renaissance. Bernini’s David, made 120 years later, is Baroque — all action and drama.

When you look at art, make subject matter the first thing you see — and then stop seeing it. 

Try to find the content in a painting by Robert Ryman, who has been making almost-all-white work since the 1950s. Ask what Ryman’s (or any artist’s) ideas are and what his relationship to paint is, to surface, to internal scale (meaning what size brushstrokes were used in the work), to color. What is white to Ryman? Note the date: 1960. Why would he make this painting then? Would this have looked like other art at the time? How would it have been different? Ask yourself what else was being made then. How is the work hung on the wall? Is it in a frame? Is the stretcher or surface thick, thin, close to the wall? How is this like or unlike other almost-monochrome works by Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, or Ad Reinhardt? Is the surface sensual or intellectual? Does the painter want you to see the work all at once or in parts? Are some parts more important than others? Is every part of the surface supposed to be equally important? What are the artist’s ideas about craft and skill? Do you think this artist likes painting or is trying to paint against it? Is this anti-art? What is Ryman’s relationship to materials, tools, mark-making? How do you think he made the work? How might it be original or innovative? Why should this be in a museum? Why should it not be in a museum? Would you want to live with it? Why or why not? Why do you imagine the painting is this size? Now try a Frida Kahlo.

Exercise: Compare These Eight Nudes 
Forget the subject matter — what is each of these paintings actually saying? 

Rokeby Venus, by Diego Velázquez, 1647.

The Naked Maja, by Francisco Goya, 1797–1800.

Olympia, by Édouard Manet, 1863.

Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, by Paul Gauguin, 1892.

Blue Nude, by Henri Matisse, 1907.

A Model (Nude Self-Portrait), by Florine Stettheimer, 1915.

Imperial Nude: Paul Rosano, by Sylvia Sleigh, 1977.

Beachbody, by Joan Semmel, 1985.

Lesson 17: See As Much As You Can 

Critics see by standing back, getting close, stepping up and back; looking at a whole show, comparing one work to another; considering the artist’s past work, assessing developments, repetitions, regressions, failures, lack of originality; etc.

Artists see very differently: They get very close to a work; they inspect every detail, its textures, materials, makeup; they touch it, look at the edges and around the back of the object.

What are the artists doing? They will say, “Seeing how it is made.” I would say, “Stealing.” 

You can steal from anything. You should! You better! Bad art teaches you as much as good art. Maybe more! Great art is often the enemy of the good; it doesn’t leave you enough room to steal. 

Lesson 18: All Art Is Identity Art! 

This is because it is made by somebody.

And don’t worry about being “political” enough: Kazimir Malevich painted squares during World War I; Mark Rothko made fuzzy squares during World War II; Agnes Martin drew grids on canvas during the Vietnam War. All art is a confession, more or less oblique.

Artists who claim that art is supposed to be good for us need also to see that there are as many ways of art being “good for us” as there are works of art. 

Lesson 19: All Art Was Once Contemporary Art 

Never forget this, that all art was made by artists for and in reaction to their time. It will make you less cynical and closed off and more understanding and open to everything you ever see. Please do this! It applies to all of us.

Step Four: Enter the Art World 

A guide to the snake pit.

Lesson 20: Accept That You Will Likely Be Poor

Even though all we see of the art world these days are astronomical prices, glitz, glamour, and junkie-like behavior, remember that only one percent of one percent of one percent of all artists become rich off their artwork. You may feel overlooked, underrecognized, and underpaid. Too bad. Stop feeling sorry for yourself; that’s not why you’re doing this.

Lesson 21: Define Success 

But be careful. Typical answers are money, happiness, freedom, “doing what I want,” having a community of artists, having people see what I do.

But … if you marry a rich person and have lots of money, would you be satisfied with just the money? Also, Subway sells a lot of sandwiches, but that doesn’t make them good.

What about being “happy”? Don’t be silly! A lot of successful people are unhappy. And a lot of happy people aren’t successful. I’m “successful,” and I’m confused, terrified, insecure, and foul all the time. Success and happiness live on different sides of the tracks.

Do you want the real definition of success? The best definition of success is time — the time to do your work.

How will you make time if you don’t have money? You will work full time for a long time. You will be depressed because of this for a long time — resentful, frustrated, envious. I’m sorry, that’s the way it is.

But you’re a sneaky, resourceful artist! Soon you figure out a way to work only four days a week; you start to be a little less depressed. But then on Sunday night, you’re depressed again, back on your ride-to-nowhere job that’s still taking up too much of your time.

But you are really sneaky and resourceful; this is a life-and-death matter to you. Eventually — and this comes for fully 80 percent of the artists I have ever known — you scam a way to work an only-three-days-a-week job. You may work in a gallery; for an artist or a museum; as a teacher, an art critic, an art handler, a bookkeeper, a proofreader, whatever.

Now you aren’t depressed anymore: You have time to make your work and hang out more; you are now the first measure of successful. Now get to work. Or quit being an artist.

Lesson 22: It Takes Only a Few People to Make a Career 

Exactly how many? Let’s count.

Dealers? You need only one dealer — someone who believes in you, supports you emotionally, pays you promptly, doesn’t play too many mind games; who’ll be honest with you about your crappy or great art, who does as much as possible to spread your work out there and try to make money from it, too. This dealer doesn’t have to be in New York.

Collectors? You need only five or six collectors who will buy your work from time to time and over the years, who really get what you’re up to, who are willing to go through the ups and downs, who don’t say, “Make them like this.” Each of these six collectors might talk to six other collectors about your work. Even if you have only six collectors, that’s enough for you to make enough money to have enough time to make your work.

Critics? It would be nice to have two or as many as three critics who seem to get what you’re doing. It would be best if these critics were of your generation, not geezers like me.

Curators? It would be nice to have one or two curators of your generation or a little older who would put you in shows from time to time.

That’s it! Twelve people. Surely your crappy art can fake out 12 stupid people! I’ve seen it done with only three or four supporters. I’ve seen it done with one!

In 1957, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Jasper Johns while visiting Robert Rauschenberg’s studio. Castelli immediately offered Johns his first solo show. It was there that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, purchased three works. Additional works were bought by Philip Johnson and Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine. Before the show even went up, executive editor Thomas Hess put a Johns on the cover of ARTnews.

In 1993, Elizabeth Peyton’s New York breakthrough was staged by dealer Gavin Brown in Room 828 of the Chelsea Hotel. Visitors asked for the key to the room at the front desk. They went upstairs, unlocked the door, and entered a small studio apartment facing 23rd Street. There they saw 21 small-to-medium-size black-and-white charcoal-and-ink drawings of dandies, Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth II, Ludwig II, and others. Any of the works could have been stolen; none were. Since then, Peyton has had museum shows all over the world; her works sell for close to a million dollars. According to the hotel ledger, only 38 people saw the show after the opening. It doesn’t take much.

I can’t sugarcoat this next part: Some people are better connected than others. They get to 12 faster. The art world is full of these privileged people. You can hate them. I do. It is unfair and unjust and still in operation around women and artists of color especially, not to mention artists over 40. This needs to change and be changed. By all of us.

Lesson 23: Learn to Write 

When it comes to artist statements, Keep it simple, stupid.

Don’t use art jargon; write in your own voice, write how you talk. Don’t try to write smart. Keep your statement direct, clear, to the point. Don’t oppose big concepts like “nature” and “culture.” Don’t use words like interrogate, reconceptualize, deconstruct, symbolize, transcendental, mystical, commodity culture, liminal space, or haptic. Don’t quote Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. Those guys are great. But don’t quote them. Come up with your own theory. People who claim to hate or have no theory: That’s your theory, you idiots!

Important things are hard to write about. That’s the way it is. Deal with it. And if it’s pretentious to say, don’t say it.

Exercise: Artist’s Statement 
Write a simple 100-to-150-word statement about your work; give it to someone who doesn’t know your work. Have them tell you what they think your work looks like. Note the differences. 

Two Tips: 
(A) Don’t make writing a big deal. Just write, you big baby! You already know how to write.

(B) Never just say, “You tell me what it is.” That’s pompous bullshit. When it comes to your work, you’re the best authority there is.

Step Five: Survive the Art World 

Psychic strategies for dealing with the ugliness (inside and out). 

Lesson 24: Artists Must Be Vampires 

Stay up late every night with other artists around your age. Show up. Go to openings, events, parties, wherever there are more than two of your kind.

Artists must commune with their own kind all the time. There are no exceptions to this rule, even if you live “out in the woods.” Preferably commune in person, but online is more than fine. It doesn’t matter where you live: big city, small city, little town. You will fight and love together; you will develop new languages together and give each other comfort, conversation, and the strength to carry on. This is how you will change the world — and your art.

To protect yourselves, form small gangs. Protect one another no matter what; this gang will allow all of you to go out into and take over parts of the world. Argue, sleep with, love, hate, get sick of your fellow gang members. Whatever happens, you need one another — for now. Protect the weakest artist in your gang, because there are people in the gang who think you’re the weak one.

Lesson 25: Learn to Deal With Rejection

In 1956, “after careful consideration,” the Museum of Modern Art rejected a shoe drawing by Warhol that he had given to the museum. Monet was rejected for years from the Paris Salon exhibitions. The work of Manet and Courbet was rejected as scandalous, sensationalist, ugly. Manet’s paintings were said to exhibit “inconceivable vulgarity.” Manet didn’t want to show with Cézanne because he thought he was vulgar.

Stephen King’s most renowned and first book, Carrie, was rejected 30 times. King threw the first pages of the book out. His wife went through the trash, rescued them, and persuaded him to keep writing.

The Beatles were rejected by Decca Records, which believed “guitar groups are on the way out,” and “the Beatles have no future in show business.”

But don’t just ignore criticism. Instead, keep your rejection letters; paste them to your wall. They are goads, things to prove wrong. You may be Ahab about these bad reviews, but don’t get taken down by them; they don’t define you. 

Much trickier: Accept that every criticism can have a grain of truth to it, something you did that allowed this person to say what was said. You might be ahead of your time, but the person couldn’t see it. Or maybe you’re doing something that isn’t up to snuff, that allowed them not to appreciate your work, or you haven’t found a way to make your work speak to the people you want it to speak to. That’s all on you.

In general, you must be open to critique but also develop an elephant skin. And remember that nothing anyone says to you about your work can be worse than the things you’ve already thought and said to yourself 100 times.

I always tell anyone criticizing me, “You could be right.” It has a nice double edge that the person often never feels and that gives pleasure.

Lesson 26: Make an Enemy of Envy

Today!

Envy looks at others but blinds you.

It will eat you alive as an artist; you live in the service of it, always on the edge of a funk, dwelling on past slights, watching everything, always seeing what other people have, scanning for other artists who are mentioned instead of you. Envy erodes your inner mind, leaves less room for development and, most important, for honest self-criticism. Your imagination is taken up by what others have, rather than what you need to be doing in your own work to get what you want. From this fortress, everything that doesn’t happen to you is blamed on something or someone else. You fancy yourself a modern van Gogh, a passed-over genius the world isn’t ready for. You relinquish agency and responsibility. Your feelings of lack define you, make you sour, bitter, not loving, and mean.

Poor you. Too bad that all those other “bad artists” are getting shows and you’re not. Too bad they’re getting the articles, money, and love! Too bad they have a trust fund, went to better schools, married someone rich, are better looking, have thinner ankles, are more social, have better connections, or use their connections, networking skills, and education. Too bad you’re shy. 

A secret: Almost everyone in the art world is almost equally as bashful and skittish about putting themselves out there. I’m unable to attend seated dinners. We all do the best we can. But “poor me” isn’t a way to make your work better, and you’re out of the game if you don’t show up. So grow a pair of whatever and get back to work! 

Lesson 27: Having a Family Is Fine

There is an unwritten rule — especially for women in the art world — that having children is “bad for your career.” This is idiotic.

Probably 90 percent of all artists have had children. These artists have mostly been men, and it wasn’t bad for their careers. Of course, women were tasked almost exclusively with domesticity and child-rearing over the centuries, not permitted in schools and academies, not even allowed to draw the nude, let alone apprentice to or learn from artists. That is over.

Having children is not “bad” for your career. Having children means having less time or money or space. So what? Most children raised within the art world have amazing lives.

As artist Laurel Nakadate has observed, being a parent is already very much like being an artist. It means always lugging things around, living in chaos, doing things that are mysterious or impossible or scary. As with art, children can drive you crazy all day, make you wish all this could go away. Then in a single second, at any point, you are redeemed with a moment of intense, transformative love.

Step Six: Attain Galactic Brain

Jerry’s cosmic epigrams. 

Lesson 28: What You Don’t Like Is As Important As What You Do Like 

Don’t say, “I hate figurative painting.” You never know when you will see a so-called figurative painting that catches your attention. So don’t be an art-world undertaker pronouncing mediums dead! “Painting is dead,” “The novel is dead,” “The author is dead,” “Photography is dead,” “History is dead.” Nothing is dead! 

Lesson 29: Art Is a Form of Knowing Yourself

Art is not optional, not decorative landscaping in front of the castle of civilization. It is no more or less important than philosophy, religion, economics, or psychology.

Lesson 30: “Artists do not own the meaning of their work.” — Roberta Smith

Remember: anyone may use your art — any art — in any way that works for them. You may say your work is about diaspora, but others might see in it climate change or a nature study. Cool.

Lesson 31: All Art Is Subjective

What does this mean? We have consensus that certain artists are good, but you may look at a Rembrandt and find yourself thinking … It’s pretty brown. That’s fine! It doesn’t mean you’re dumb.

It does mean that while there is one text for Hamlet, every person who sees the play sees a different Hamlet. Moreover, every time you see Hamlet, it is different. This is the case with almost all good art. It is always changing, and every time you see it anew, you think, How could I have missed that before? Now I finally see! Until the next time it rearranges your thinking.

This brings you into one of art’s metaphysical quasar chambers: Art is a static, non-changing thing that is never the same.

Lesson 32: You Must Prize Vulnerability

Radical vulnerability. 

What’s that? It’s following your work into its darkest corners and strangest manifestations, revealing things about yourself that you don’t want to reveal until your work requires you to do this, and never failing in only mediocre or generic ways. We all contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes. You must be willing to fail flamboyantly, do things that seem silly and that might get you judged as a bad person.

Can you?

Lesson 33: Be Delusional

At three a.m., demons speak to all of us. I am old, and they still speak to me every night. And every day.

They tell you you’re not good enough, didn’t go to the right schools, are stupid, don’t know how to draw, don’t have enough money, aren’t original; that what you do doesn’t matter, and who cares, and you don’t even know art history, and can’t schmooze, and have a bad neck. They tell you that you’re faking it, that other people see through you, that you’re lazy, that you don’t know what you’re doing, and that you’re just doing this to get attention or money.

I have one solution to turn away these demons: After beating yourself up for half an hour or so, stop and say out loud, “Yeah, but I’m a fucking genius.”

You are, now. Art is for anyone, it just isn’t for everyone. These rules are your tools. Now use them to go change the world. Get to work!

Sensor Cleaning

My dSLR sensor was dirty. (Technically, the filter over the sensor, but whatever.) It had a lot of "schmutz" on it - that's a technical term that I share with all my students. Here, take this photo as an example: here's an unedited photo from my gallery documentation from the "Reverberations" show at Form+Content and Traffic Zone galleries earlier this year:

An overall photo.


Cropped in on some of the schmutz on the upper right.

(Click here to see all the fixed up photos from the "Reverberation" show of CVA Alumni.)

So I had to do a lot of cloning to fix up all those images. That was stupid. It was time to clean my sensor. I picked up the Eyelead SCK-1 kit online:

It's all in this tiny box.


The directions on the box. There were more detailed instructions inside, but it's basically "stamp the sticky bar on
your sensor, then stamp it on the sticky paper to remove any debris; then repeat on other parts of the sensor."


Inside the case. The white sheets under the handle are the viscous paper
used to clean the sticky bar after each use.


Close up of the sticky bar in it's little plastic case.

I was so nervous using this. I was always told never to mess with your sensor, but mine needed to be cleaned. I had tried gentle air-blown methods, but I never tried anything that was meant to TOUCH the sensor. I opened my camera, stamped the sensor, pulled it out, and stamped it on the viscous paper. The paper is REALLY sticky, and I really had to pull the sticky bar off it (but that makes sense - it needs to be stickier than the sticky bar so it can pull the schmutz off the sticky bar).

Honestly, the process was very nerve-wracking. I was afraid I was hurting my sensor. It was time for a test: I put the lens back on and took a photo of a white wall in my porch. I zoomed in on the photo and looked all around it. Most of the schmutz was gone! I saw a few more pieces, so I cleaned a few areas once more (remembering that schumtz in the upper right of the image means it's on the lower left on the sensor).

All done. A few pieces of viscous paper used, but plenty more left for future cleanings.

Overall, I'm really happy with the job this did. I'll use this again when schmutz starts to appear. Check it out here.

How to Be An Artist

That's about right.

The First Digital Camera

Great story of the first digital camera:

"We Had No Idea"

In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. “It” being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

Vintage 1975 portable all electronic still camera

It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images - a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.

The playback device and TV

There you have it. No film required to capture and no printing required to view your snapshots. That’s what we demonstrated to many internal Kodak audiences throughout 1976. In what has got to be one of the most insensitive choices of demonstration titles ever, we called it “Film-less Photography”. Talk about warming up your audience!

Side-by-side comparison – Hardcopy vs. Film-less Photography

After taking a few pictures of the attendees at the meeting and displaying them on the TV set in the room, the questions started coming. Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919). I kept the prototype camera with me as I moved throughout the company over the last 30 years, mostly as a personal reminder of this most fun project. Outside of the patent, there was no public disclosure of our work until 2001.

The “we” in this narrative was largely the people of the Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory in the mid 1970’s and, in particular, several enormously talented technicians - Rick Osiecki, Bob DeYager and Jim Schueckler. All were key to building the camera and playback system. I especially remember working with Jim for many hours in the lab bringing this concept to life. Finally, I remember my visionary supervisor, the late Gareth Lloyd, who supported this concept and helped enormously in its presentation to our internal world at Kodak. In thinking back on it, one could not have had a better environment in which to “be crazy.”

Many developments have happened between this early work and today. Personal computers, the Internet, wide bandwidth connections and personal desktop photographic printing are just a few of these. It is funny now to look back on this project and realize that we were not really thinking of this as the world’s first digital camera. We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best:

“The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.”

But in reality, we had no idea...

10 Lessons for Young Photographers and Designers

To my students: take note of these lessons from Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, John C Jay:

1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.

2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.

3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.

4. Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.

5. Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.

6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.

7. Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them.

8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.

9. The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.

10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Listen. To. This.

A Peek Into Ansel Adams' Darkroom

Photographer Marc Silber got a chance to go into Ansel Adams' darkroom and produced this little video. Once you get past the pseudo-cheesy 20 second intro, the rest is pretty interesting. It's a nice peek inside Ansel's home / darkroom / process as told by his son, Michael. I love hearing the stories behind some of these images.

If you have 17 minutes, turn up the volume and enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZlovMptjyQ

I love seeing Ansel's "blueprints" for how he made his prints, and how his son can NOT translate them (at the 5:55 point).

You can see his unique darkroom set-up at the 8:50 point.

Did you know Adams dried his test sheets in his kitchen microwave? I didn't. Probably not the safest idea.....

Jim Jarmusch's "The Golden Rules of Filming"

From "Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules" of filming. I found these interesting enough to post the entire article by Jarmusch....

Rule #1: There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. Fuck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

Rule #2: Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. People who finance films, distribute films, promote films and exhibit films are not filmmakers. They are not interested in letting filmmakers define and dictate the way they do their business, so filmmakers should have no interest in allowing them to dictate the way a film is made. Carry a gun if necessary.

Also, avoid sycophants at all costs. There are always people around who only want to be involved in filmmaking to get rich, get famous, or get laid. Generally, they know as much about filmmaking as George W. Bush knows about hand-to-hand combat.

Rule #3: The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production. Unfortunately, in the world of filmmaking this is almost universally backwards. The film is not being made to serve the budget, the schedule, or the resumes of those involved. Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.

Rule #4: Filmmaking is a collaborative process. You get the chance to work with others whose minds and ideas may be stronger than your own. Make sure they remain focused on their own function and not someone else’s job, or you’ll have a big mess. But treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control, or for people in the military. Those with whom you choose to collaborate, if you make good choices, can elevate the quality and content of your film to a much higher plane than any one mind could imagine on its own. If you don’t want to work with other people, go paint a painting or write a book. (And if you want to be a fucking dictator, I guess these days you just have to go into politics...).

Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

Jarmusch, Jim (October 20, 2005). "Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules". MovieMaker Magazine. MovieMaker Publishing.

Build Your Own High Speed Flash

... and I'm NOT using the term "high speed" lightly!

Ever wanted to freeze a pellet moving at 1,000 feet / second for a photograph?

I recently came across this article that shows you how to make your own high speed air-gap flash for around a few hundred dollars. But the article also said this:

You should not build this because this flash will kill you. It really will. This flash requires charging a 35,000 volt capacitor that will easily kill a person for a single mistake. I have a safety checklist that I use ever time I plug in this flash and it still scares me. If it didn’t scare me then I shouldn’t be using it because this thing is dangerous. The below information is for educational purposes only. Do not build one! If you go against my advice and do build one, I am not responsible for any injury, death, or any other problems it causes.

I love it when the internet shows you exactly how to do something and then says DON'T DO IT!

Here's the final product shown in the article:

If you can understand circuitry, then check out all of the diagrams and photos of the flash by clicking here. But don't build it, or you will die.

Kodachome Dies Today in Kansas

A small Kansas photo lab is the last to be processing Kodachrome, and their last roll will be processed today. Here's a paragraph from a NY Times article yesterday:

At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

This was my favorite photo in the NY Times Article:

Photo: Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Photography Gifts from the NY Times

(Image from the NY Times)

Last week, the NY Times published a nice, concise story on how to purchase photo-related gear for your "photo geek" loved one. It gave good tips on different topics:

- Picking a lens that fits his/her personality.
- Looking for lenses based on f-stops.
- Checking on the construction of a lens.
- When to buy a generic lens.
- Many things to consider when looking for a new flash.
- Good "photo education" resources and books.

So click here to go to the NY Times article on how to purchase photo gear for the camera buff in your family.

iPad Photoshoot

This is a little off-topic for me, but I find this very annoying, over-the-top, pretentious interesting:

Jesse Rosten just posted that video where he used iPads as a light source for a photoshoot. Here's his explanation that came along with it:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A restless mind… or maybe too much late night pizza has you laying awake in bed. You decide that if you can’t sleep you might as well do something productive, so you fumble in the darkness for your iPad for one more round of Angry Birds. You power up and are instantly struck blind by a beam of light so bright that it burns “slide to unlock” into your retinas. You squint, roaches scatter, wife stirs, “Damn, that’s bright.”

Sound familiar? This happens to me too often. Eventually, it dawned on me that, given the right context, the iPad screen is actually pretty bright. I know that for a fact because I measured it with my light meter (1/60, f1.4 at ISO800 from about 1.5 feet). You know once the light meter has come out of the bag, there’s no going back. Naturally, we needed to do a photoshoot using iPads as the light source.

Luckily, I have friends who are very generous with their time and electronics and was able to scrounge up nine iPads. I mounted them onto plywood using some cheap hardware store brackets. This gave me three lights consisting of three iPads each. The light from an iPad is quite soft and diffuse. This makes the light fall-off steep. Adding more iPads didn’t translate to more brightness, but did mean we could light a larger area. Since the ‘Pads would need to be used somewhat close to the subject to get enough exposure, a simple, portrait style shoot seemed like the best option.

Now before the haters start commenting let me first agree with you, yes, this is totally impractical (sidenote: most of my best ideas are often also my worst ideas). Nine iPads will set you back around $4,500. That amount of money can buy you a LOT of lumens in the form of a generic monobloc. This is not intended to be an exercise in excess, but rather a self-imposed limitation to help flex the creative muscles, and to make a point.

Think about it. One 60 watt bulb can put out more light that a truckload of iPads. And you don’t have to spend truckloads of cash to find a 60 watt. This whole making art thing is all about what you do with what you have. We just happened to have a bunch of iPads laying around so we went with that. Today’s dSLR sensors are sensitive enough that you could easily do this with some flashlights, headlights, headlamps, real lamps, or even – heaven forbid – real strobes! Now go forth and do!

(Here's a link to his post with more photos from the shoot.)

Overkill?
Entertainment?
Idea spawn from boredom?
What do you think?....

Earliest Photo of a Human?

Have you been hearing about this photo that just turned up? Last month, a surprisingly sharp daguerreotype from 1842 surfaced showing 2 human forms along the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Some people have started asking "Is this the first photo EVER of a human being?"

Here's the full photo, along with the close-up of the 2 figures:

More questions arise: They are ghosted images, so is the photo of 2 people that moved? Or is it one person that stood still in 2 different poses during the exposure?

Sure, a photo showing a human from 1842 is PRETTY amazing.

But it's not the oldest.

The oldest image of a human being (or what is currently considered the oldest) is a photo thought to be made by Louis Daguerre's, the creator of the daguerreotype. His image shows a street scene where there was probably a LOT going on, but because of the long exposure needed to make the image, everything simply blurred into obscurity. That is, except for a man near the lower left who stood in one spot long enough because he was getting his shoes shined.

And, oh yeah, this image is from 1838.

So, take THAT you Ohio daguerreotype from 1842. Not feeling so special anymore, are you?

[I kid. In all seriousness, they are both amazing images from the early years of my profession. This more recent image was a great find. It's amazing the things that are stored away that we haven't "discovered" yet, even though our ancestors put them there for us.]

78 Photography Rules

78 funny photography rules and useful advices created by Latvian photographer Ivars Gravlejs. (Taken from Gawno.)

ALARMA! Don’t take it serious, please.