Sharp Focus October 2023

In this issue we will look at John Baldessari discussing a ‘junk’ photo he bought:
(click on the photo to view larger)

I buy a lot of pictures nobody wants, odd movie publicity stills that used to be ten cents a piece, and are now up to twenty-five cents each. I started looking at these kinds of pictures not because they were from movies, but because early on, I was looking for photographs to incorporate into my own work that didn’t involve my own sensibility.

I went to places that sold movie stills every few weeks, and I would spend hours and hours looking through disorganized cardboard boxes of photographs until my eyes started to go out. I liked the randomness of going through these pictures. I pulled photos intuitively, things I thought I could use in making my own pieces. I have to use pictures that are banal, so banal that they are not very interesting by themselves, but have some charge that begins to work when I shove one of them up against another. They’re pictures that have some hold on me.

There are some pictures I’ve bought but have never been able to use. Like this one, which is so charged in subject matter that all I can do is just show it to people. In all my searching, I’ve never found anything like this picture. There’s something very troubling and sad about it. It speaks about sexuality in some way as death and dirt. There’s also something very judgmental about it, something bipolar, This picture seems like it’s about strange and overlapping sensibilities.

Why would anybody make a picture like this? I cannot figure it out. It’s so enigmatic. There are really weird overtones in it: beauty, birth and death, pain, decay. It’s very open. You can read so much into it. What’s out the window? Could be clouds. You can look at this picture from now until doomsday, and still have no idea about what is going on. I know why I like all of the other pictures I have. There’s no another one that eludes me, like this one does. I’ve had this picture around for a long time. And although I’ve always loved it, it’s just too good to use in my own work.

When I used to categorize the pictures I bought, this one got placed in the folder called ‘art’, because it’s so perfectly composed. In some way, it seems to comment on art. It’s got the quality of being both here and there. The backs of movie stills usually have captions printed on them, and this one does, too. It says, ‘Assembly Line of Beauty-3. Emerging from the ‘‘Bubble Bath,’’ Dolores Casey will halt behind the flimsy screen for a rubdown, after which she dons a negligee, also the creation of one of the famed Parisian designers’. It was number three of a sequence, but I can’t imagine what the other pictures might have been like. The caption implies that she’s going to come out of this bubble bath, go behind this screen, go to get a massage – no a ‘rubdown’.

It’s mysterious. There’s something on the left, behind what I guess is a curtain, which looks like a figure out of a Masaccio painting. A figure going to hell. It’s wearing a towel. Maybe it’s being transformed. And this figure on the right, covered in suds, is very sensual. The idea of soap or suds, cleansing like fire. The picture has a lot of religious overtones to it, I suppose. But then when you look at this part in the center, suddenly the picture moves off into another area. Once I was going to use this photo to make a reference to Barnett Newman’s paintings or to Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. But it was just too good.

This picture became important to me because it’s a reminder of what happens when art becomes too beautiful. I admire it, but on the other hand, it provokes me, and maybe I’m resentful about that. I would like to make something so perfect, but on my terms. I mean this is brilliant. Look at the divisions. The negative space is very important, as important as anything else. Compositionally, why would anybody put what looks like artificial fingers in front of the rope on those poles? That idea wouldn’t come to you in a million years. It drives me mad trying to figure that out. That hand, it’s gorgeous. How the fingers repeat the poles. How the poles are bound. Those decisions have to figure into the story the photographer was trying to tell. It was a brilliant move. This picture is almost Cocteau-like, dreamy, and the longer I look at it, the weirder it gets.

In fact, this picture has a lot to do with an artist’s dream of becoming artless. What is great about this picture is that it is stupid. Artists all want to be stupid, in a good way, and artless. It gets to the root of a fundamental question for artists. When does something flip? At what point does something become art? When is something not art? It happens on a sliding scale, and I’m always interested in finding the point when a picture all of the sudden goes over the edge, in one way or another. All it would take to make this picture not art is just a slight shift in its arrangement. As it is, this picture smacks of art, because it’s so composed and such a beautiful image. This picture does just what an artist does. Takes a piece of dirt and keeps doing something with it, until it’s still a piece of dirt and it’s art. But how do you keep its ‘dirtness’? It’s a pretty hard line to walk. Its either dirt, or its art. Just where do you stop? When do you push it too far? At what point do you kill it? It takes a lifetime to learn how to do that. You never want to make something so totally beautiful that it doesn’t leave any room for a person to enter it. That would be boring.

Usually, when you say something can be art, it’s because you’ve found a precedent for it in art that already exists, You say to yourself, ‘It looks like that’. The things that are resistant, you might say, ‘Why not? Why couldn’t it be art? What can I do to push it over the edge?’. But this picture starts and ends at the absolute ground zero level of what art is. It is enough to make me catatonic.

It would kill me if this picture looked anything like the art I make. I don’t want to give people something comfortable to look at. I want to upset people. This is too beautiful, too comfortable. I always distrust beauty. I’m very jittery about it. There is no way that this is not a beautiful picture. No way.

EVALUATION OF THEME IMAGES – AUGUST 2023

Salons

Salon dates for the following year are available from the PSSA website under the tab Salon Calendar and Results for the Year Ending June 2023, or from www.photovaultonline.com

All the brochures containing details are available on both the PSSA and Photovault websites.

Please see our record-keeping page for information on how to submit your salon acceptances to our club records.

Themes and Outings

Click here to view our themes and outings for 2023.

Formats and sizes of photo submissions, and naming conventions

Click here to find see the specifications for digital and print submissions.

Our committee

Click here to view our 2023 committee or to contact them.