We haven’t done one of these in a bit, but I’ve had so many people tell me that they’re wrong and/or evil that I felt we should revive them. So…since Michael A. Johnson posted about war photography this week, I thought we could bounce off of that. What photographers do you think are overrated, or underrated if such a thing is possible?
I guess I’d go for Walker Evans as someone who is understandably but still inexcusably lionized for his poverty porn. Underrated…I don’t know if Andres Serrano quite fits since he’s obviously very successful, but as I said yesterday I feel like he’s broadly loathed by both right-wingers and high-art skeptics (including comics folks) who don’t seem to have actually looked at or thought about his work much.
Bert Stabler’s written about why all art photography is overrated, and Thomas O’Shea responded here with a defense of the genre, if you’re looking for more photography discussion.
And I’m taking a class on contemporary art photography in the fall– ruh-roh. A lot of people are turning photography into sculpture these days, which I think is kind of neat. I don’t know if it will hold up, but I’m intrigued. I still feel like it’s overrated/overvalued as a chunk of culture/commerce, and I should throw around some names, but I have to go walk the dog.
OVER – easier, because you know who has a big reputation: Man Ray, William Eggleston, Annie Leibovitz, maybe even Cindy Sherman (if only because her rating among academics couldn’t get any higher?)
UNDER – much harder, if you don’t opt for “under-noticed” and have limited knowledge, like me: Saul Leiter? Margaret Bourke-White (for being too damned iconic!)?
Claude Cahun?
So why Walker Evans and not Dorothea Lange whose FSA photos are possibly even more famous and iconic?
I don’t know that I know who Dorothea Lange is! So…I guess that’s why.
You know her work! Or at least a work.
Oh…this one?
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2010/04/28/lange1_custom_custom-476731ac7043e64e47c7d30efedbe45fff0c566e-s6-c30.jpg
I think I did always think that was Walker Evans. I’m not really a fan….
Photography is just sort of the most ideologically rarefied medium of the modern era. People argue with TV all the time, and writing, but not photos– Photoshop having existed for decades notwithstanding. And collectors buy photos like hotcakes (if hotcake-flippers were as cool as photographers). The history of photos that “woke people up,” like Emmett Till and the My Lai massacre, are heavily offset by photos that simply instigated titillation and vengeance. But I love Andy Warhol, and it’s hard to not think of his silkscreens as essentially photographs.
And I do love Claude Cahun. Good call.
My wife Katie, who was trained as a photographer, says– overrated: Ansel Adams. Underrated: her grampa.
“Photography is just sort of the most ideologically rarefied medium of the modern era.”
Curious about what you mean here… Can you explain?
I ask because my research focus is visual rhetoric, which puts me at the intersection of film, photography and ideology most days. As a result, I’m always interested in how others view this issue.
Ansel Adams is definitely hard to take.
I bet Arbus makes both columns… Avedon too. I’m partial to photos I find in the street. I have a small archive of these things. Sadly, I haven’t found one in years. This is likely the result of the digital turn.
Sorry for the delayed response. Here’s the link to my article from a while ago that Noah linked to: http://proximitymagazine.com/2009/09/i-dont-like-photography/
I certainly don’t mean to be a prick, but that magazine “Found” (which may not exist any more) is a good case in point of gratuitous voyeuristic creepiness, although it is/was not precisely in the fine art realm, sort of more the fringe culture realm, but not ultimately that distinct. The truth of a supposedly transparent image is hypnotic. Even staged or openly manipulated photographs, which are proliferating along with every other kind of photograph, have a rhetorical evidentiary power that I don’t associate with,as I’ve said, any other form of communication. The fact that a photo, in its apparent simplicity, says less than writing, moving images, or drawing, is part of its uncanny authority.
Outside of a brief period when I was a teenager I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about photography as an art form. I have a few friends who are photographers and I like their work. They’ve turned me on to some other interesting work but I still don’t have much experience with it and my choices may reflect that.
Ansel Adams is exactly who I was thinking of when the question of who is overrated came up. Maybe it’s the fact that my dad, a former aspiring commercial photographer, used to go on about him is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
I guess this isn’t a very compelling underrated pick but someone who I’m surprised people in comics circles don’t discuss more often is Eadweard Muybridge. My father gave me an old copy of The Human Figure in Motion when I was a teenager and I would always turn to it for reference when I was drawing comics more often.
Muybridge is an interesting choice; he’s more often thought of as a technician than an artist, is my sense.
Overrated: Everyone I don’t like.
Underrated: Deborah Turbeville, Uta Barth.
Uta Barth sort of reminds me of the blind photographer in John Waters’ movie Pecker. As a fairly blind person, I find blurry photos somewhat reassuring.
I totally agree with bringing in fashion photographers for the underrated list.
walker evans’ work isn’t ‘poverty porn’. there’s an important critique implicit in the term, and it doesn’t apply in the slightest to evans. read ‘let us now praise famous men’. look through his ‘american photographs’. learn about his groundbreaking role in bringing straight photography to the fore, and in promoting brilliant young photographers like robert frank and helen levitt.
personally i don’t like evan’s photos much at all, but ‘overrated’ simply doesn’t apply. it is difficult to overestimate his importance to the history of photography, especially documentary photography.
Historical importance is different from qualitative assessments.
But if you wish to understand what the artist was doing, what effects the art was generating, then you need to understand it in context–including historical context. Otherwise you’re not making a statement on the under- or overrating of an artist, you’re making a statement about whether you ‘get’ that artist’s work or not.
Which is not a failing of the artist.
And Evans is still not ‘poverty porn’, in or out of context.
Understanding it in context is different from saying, “this is good”. I understand that Walker Evans is historically important. I just find his influence poisonous. So I rate him lower because of his historical influence, not higher. That’s not ignoring context; it’s just saying that, in context, he sucks.
Underrated: Art Kane. Overrated: David Bailey.