To Compose Pictures

So how do we make pictures when in a sense we are making them all the time. And what makes an art image distinct from a commercial image?

In the last several years I've been working with a London designer shooting now her last four men's collections.

I've also been working on a series of history pictures.

Artists often work in series. I do myself.  I want you to know that I am not going to caption or explain all the pictures you are going to see but let you know they come from different series of works and over the course of our talks they will become more and more familiar.

To compose a picture is to stage a picture, a scenario, a situation, a conversation. Fashion stages photographs. Artists stage photographs. Politicians and brands and family for Facebook and users of Instagram.  What's the difference? Is it the audience, the scenario, the

Here is a picture in an art gallery.

And this picture done as part of an art class for children shown in an art gallery.

Can I make art like I do fashion? Is art photography simply a genre of photography? Is the museum picture another form factor to be distinguished from the requirements of a magazine or billboard image?

Above a selfie made for Instagram. And below me shooting models in London.

What is it then that makes a picture?

Take the works of Jeff Wall. I would argue that Wall for the most part makes conceptual photographs. Yes they are anchored in the everyday taking his cues from Baudelaire and Manet, looking at the ordinary and everyday. In his case re-enacting in near documentary style the everyday.

Here are pictures I made for a project in Shanghai with a group of art students imitating famous historical paintings, conceptual photographs and historical moments in Chinese history. Note the scale, they are small, and shown all together, with out frames.

Take the images of Philip Lorca Dicorcia, his series of photographs of young male prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard. His pictures are more fashion directed, cinema-like and lush. He creates an image. Wall refuses the image or the seduction of the image. His is a cerebral image. A heady image.

Photography, art photography, reportage, social media photography, portrait photography, painting photography, fashion, product, editorial,  so many images.

Perhaps images are can only be what people say and think about images. Perhaps images are always the discursive domain of the sayable, the salable, the discourse of a market and communicative realm. This is to say where in is the image but in the social discourse that constructs it.

For an image to be found, it must be grounded in a discourse, in the social. It must be a book, read twice. 

An open book. I've been working on series titled Eros. And in it I superimpose western images over eastern, specifically japanese images of the erotic with western painting of the 18th century. 

The Roman historian Pliny stated that we have a lust for images. Our sense of the the erotic, the sensual, our biography, history, all or our memory and desires, are in our images. All images are in conversation with other images.

Images have varying affective registers. Not in themselves but in relation to the person and culture that reads them. Making a image then is reading the cultural register of images. 

To compose a picture is compose it relations to its reception. To see it already seen. To see what's been seen again. 

In the vast archives of electronic networks everything becomes image. But maybe this is not so. Take for example the these image I have put together below. Without the words as John Berger would tell us we would not know how to see these images or would we?

Now take these images. 

 

And these.

And these.

and these.

Soon we don't know what we're seeing. Or how exactly to feel. 

We know these pictures come from somewhere. They are made and fabricated. They are material facts.  But once out there, out here, what ever they are, they can be constructed and used to mobilize any number of rhetorical arguments or they can bath in the light of their absent explanations, maybe, maybe for a moment. 

Aesthetics for Ranciere is defined by the multiple ways in which any social order establishes, manages, privileges, or marginalizes different modes of perception. The distribution of the sensible are communal forms of naturalized perception based on what is allowed to be 'visible or audible' as well as what can be made, said or done. Politics then is distribution/redistribution of the sensible. 

To compose pictures then is to make visible. The aesthetic image and the aesthetic regime of the arts is based on this dialectic between the image as raw material presence and the images as discourse encoding a history. 

The artist then concretizes and mobilizes their own set of operations, their own instruction set.In doing this they free themselves, they work beyond any normative framework, because we don't know what art is, no one can tell you how to make art. But strangely we know what it is. How is that? How can we know what we don't know?  How can we make something visible that was not visible? In all these operations, in the play and transformations of art, in the metamorphic - this redistribution of the sensible, this putting at risk of not knowing and stepping into, or forging a new sensible, this is art and life.