The Online Photographer

A Visit to Dansville

A couple of Sundays ago I voyaged to remote rural Dansville, New York, a village of 4,433 souls, to visit my friend Geoff Wittig. He deserves to be called "our" friend too, because you might know of him—he's been commenting for years, and wrote a number of excellent book reviews for the site in the past. (Here's a portrait. And he's a category in the right-hand sidebar.)

I've long wanted to visit him in person to see three things—a sampling of his photographs; his library; and his paintings. Like an increasing number of old friends as well as old friends o' TOP, he's made an elemental shift away from photography as his main artistically-oriented hobby. My friend Nick Hartmann, for instance, after trying piano and a few other things, settled on ceramics. And I love his work, although I only own one piece so far. He's objectively good IMHO. There's a short interview with him here, and at the bottom of that is a link to his own gallery.

Geoff decided, a while back, to learn how to paint. He's a figurative (realistic) painter. The Wikipedia article "Figurative art" will give you a nice short grounding in that subject. The Tate Modern definition is "any form of modern art that retains strong references to the real world." Geoff has taken a number of workshops with leading American representational landscapists, and practices a form of plein air painting. As you probably know, plein air is a French term that means "in the open air" and refers to painting outdoors, directly from the subject. Geoff follows a practice by which the painting is supposed to go from conception to completion in one sitting.

He came to painting as an accomplished landscape photographer, and his photographs, although classic in conception, are well seen and well executed (although, as is typical of creators, he could point out flaws that I hadn't noticed), with a detectable personal style that doesn't call any attention to ego. The offices of the medical practice he shares with several other doctors doubles as a museum for his work—many of his photographs, printed large and tastefully mounted, line the hallways and the adorn the waiting rooms.

But back to the paintings, which, framed, are stacked one in front of another in various locations in the house. Geoff points out that figurative painting and "the art world" occupy two different universes. The top figurative landscapists working today might fetch $60,000 or $80,000 for a painting, with an occasional peak vaulting above $200k, whereas that's sort of "entry level" for the art world (what I call haute art as a play on haute couture), as you might know if you read that wonderful and somehow still shocking 2012 book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by Don Thompson. For comparison, the former tennis star John McEnroe, an enthusiastic art collector, bemoans the fact that he is effectively limited to a ceiling of a mere $500,000 per acquisition, because his net worth is "only" around $100 million, putting him at the impoverished end of the spectrum among haute art collectors. It's why he still works: more money for art.

Although I liked Geoff's paintings—several of them stick in my mind—it struck me that perhaps Geoff doesn't entirely paint for the product; the paintings might not be the point, or at least not the whole point. He paints because it's fascinating to learn the craft (there being a great deal to learn), a challenge to hone the needed skills, and, not least, because it's a lot of fun both to learn and to do it.

The library
If you can tolerate a little slip-slide into autobiography, I'll mention that when I was 14 I decided I wanted three material things in life: a small personal library, a pool table, and a nice stereo. Fifty-three years later and here I am having only achieved one of the three. (Oh well.) The pool table is one of the best purchases I've ever made, though, even if it provoked a number of readers into cancelling their Patreon contributions. I use it almost every day, and, even though I don't practice per se, I'm learning more and getting better all the time, even outpacing my physical decline to a respectable degree. I'll venture to claim it's as diverting for me as ceramics is for Nick or plein air painting for Geoff.

Well, Geoff has a glorious library. A place of magic and riches like a paladin's palace. More, and more luxurious, than my teenage daydreams. It's a large man-cave above his garage with beautiful custom-built shelving everywhere, much of it sized properly for coffee-table-sized art and photo books. There's also a respectable satellite collection in his office at work. In person the main library is not nearly as chaotic or overstuffed as he has described it on various occasions, and to call it disorganized would be like the man in the glass house energetically flinging large stones about. Not only that, but Geoff and I seem to have a taste in books that is uncannily similar—not only art and photo books, hardbound classics and examples of fine bookmaking, but he even has a generous section on bookmaking, typography, and bibliophilia. Many of which were old friends to me.

Geoff's lair. Er, library. I had to show the printer-beastie on the right; I forget, but I think Geoff said it took eight strong men, chains, hydraulics, and a sledge to get it from the curb to where it now resides. You can see two of his paintings beyond the footstool, and the corner of the print in the picture below is barely visible at the bottom left.

The print-inspection table is a gas woodstove,
if that isn't an oxymoron

Anyway, it was a great day and I really enjoyed the visit. My brother Scott used to say that I do better as a writer when I get out and do things and report back; I'd say I should do more of that, except I know I won't. I have enough to do keeping body and soul together back at the old homestead. But it shouldn't have taken me so long to get to Dansville, I'll say that much! Many thanks to Geoff. Next up for us, I hope, is a visit to the Nathan Benn exhibit at the Rockwell Museum in Corning—a museum that shows figurative art almost exclusively, much of it related to the American West during frontier times. If we make it to that, I'll tell you all about it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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A Day with the Wegman Dogs

The Rockwell Museum in Corning. The architectural style
is the colorfully named "Richardsonian Romanesque."

Geoff Wittig and I went to the Rockwell on Thursday to see the William Wegman show. The Rockwell Museum, located in Corning, New York, in the former Corning City Hall dating from 1893, is based on the collection of paintings and other works amassed by department store owner Robert Rockwell, who collected from 1959 to 1974, concentrating on figurative paintings of the American West. (The definition of "figurative art" is not entirely intuitive. The terms are usefully parsed in the first three paragraphs here.) As Geoff put it, Rockwell "had a good eye," and he was able to buy many of his holdings when the artists he collected were much more accessible (i.e., cheaper) than they are today. He acquired many significant works, most famously Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Whitney." (Check this article out if you've ever thought framing one of your photographs was a pain in the butt. It's about the epic reframing of "Mount Whitney." Really, check it out. [And here's a video, thanks to Jim in the comments. —Ed.])

I lapped up a whole bunch of Scribner's Illustrated Classics when I was in grade school and middle school, and got very engaged with N.C. Wyeth, so I particularly like visiting the Museum's Wyeths. N.C.'s colors are slightly garish, as the paintings were made to pop off the page when reduced in size to fit in the books. Regarding Bierstadt, I've known his work since high school. It always struck me as a bit funny that, confronted with the glory, majesty and drama that is the American Western landscape, he felt compelled to exaggerate. His paintings represent reality with a 20% dose of fantasy.

William Wegman is OK
I've been aware of William Wegman all my adult life—I heard him speak when I was in art school. He's got a great gig, and whaddaya know, is still workin' it. I see his schtick as something like the exercise of a trademark. The interest present in his photographs is mainly in his creativity in continually conceptualizing new and different settings for photographs of his worried-looking Weimaraner dogs. Seeing so many dazzling large prints together, it finally occurred to me that what the prints might be best suited for is display singly in personal collections, because his "trademark" is so distinct that any visitor with a cursory familiarity with modern photography would recognize any of the photos as a Wegman right away. Hang one of these in your foyer, or the gallery leading to your lavish NYC apartment, and it's instantly recognizable, flattering your visitor with his or her own knowledge. You'd make any art-sensitive visitor happier.

Seen together, though, they strike me as, "Wiemaraners iterated," perhaps with an end-tag of, "...but why?" He is indeed creative (still) in finding new settings and surroundings for the dogs, but then, in the best of them, you start wondering whether the dog or dogs themselves are actually...necessary. And I'm a dog person. In his much earlier work—with Man Ray, his original dog, who might be described as a patient ham—there was a lot of humor, some of it referential to art history and artistic tropes; more recently, the pictures are elegant, clean, and mainly about color. My favorite was a rather atypical B&W shot of a dog draped in a transparent polka-dog raincoat; the dog is barely visible at first but the mind fills in its form as soon as you detect its face. Or, rather, you construct his face after you see his eyes, and then his body from his face. I can't find a reproduction of that one online. I tend to like pictures like that, with subjects obscured or overtly in need of the mind to do part of the seeing.

I enjoyed the show, but can't say I loved it; the bon mot that came to mind to sum up W.W. is an old Mitch Hedberg joke: you either love him, or you hate him...or, you think he's OK.

I'll tell you one picture I'd love to take, though—a documentary shot of William Wegman out walking his dog(s). Because, after all, they're, well, dogs. And you know what? If I had a beautiful modernist house, I would honestly covet a Wegman to hang in the entryway. Seriously. It would be friendly, quirky, beautiful, and cool, and would probably appeal to just about everybody who walked through the front door.

Cat person
Geoff is a cat person. One of the great things about seeing Geoff, apart from the opportunity to spend some time in the company of someone much smarter than I am, is hearing about painting, which has elbowed photography aside as his top artistic interest. He still does some landscape photography. (How he finds time to do everything he does is close to unfathomable; he's very busy with his practice as a small-town doctor and with medical administrative work, and he does photography and painting, and he's the family cook.) He schooled me about the turn-of-the-20th-century movement known as Tonalism, which he considers central to his taste. He had a lot of things to say about many of the artists and gave me a miniature window into a world I don't know very much about. Enough to whet my appetite to know more.

One interesting thing he told me about is a saying among contemporary figurative painters: "Paint two days a week and you stay the same, three days and you get better." Interesting: it highlights the fact that painting is a manual skill after all. A craft you need to practice in order to stay sharp. I was reminded of pool, which I don't practice enough. There are thresholds there, too, where you either stay the same or get better. Although I hit balls every day, I don't do enough to stay "in stroke" as pool players put it. As with golfers, the good players practice a lot.

Even photographers have to stay in shape that way. Bill Jay once invited Josef Koudelka to his country cabin, and was surprised to find Koudelka out snapping pictures around the place before breakfast, taking pictures of woodpiles and trees and a pond and so forth. When Bill commented that he didn't think the subject matter was typical for Josef, Josef said he was keeping in practice, staying sharp. He probably got that habit from his older friend and fellow Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who famously shot two rolls before breakfast every morning to "keep his hand in." For a month or two, two years ago, I tried to get a decent photograph every day, and my sense of that kind of "sharpness"—of being in shape, in stroke, in flow—went way up. I'd love to be able to photograph like that. There's really nothing stopping me except energy...and self-belief, and time, and the cost of gas, and...oh, never mind!

We also got to see some Edward Curtis photogravures. Geoff was on a schedule, so we had to make a shortened circuit of all the paintings to have time for lunch. But that only means there is more to cover next time.

I hope to visit Geoff in his own environs someday. I would love to see some of his photographic prints and his paintings, and he reportedly has a large photobook collection (for an unknown value of "large"), and he tells me the walls 'n' halls of his medical practice are a mini-gallery of his landscape photographs. Should make for a fun day trip. If we get 'round to it, I'll keep you posted.

[Ed note: More illustrations to come.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Burke: "I’d never heard of Tonalism before, but the reference (on the linked Amazon page) to it 'dethroning the Hudson River school' had me interested. A few years ago I saw an exhibition in London of Thomas Cole’s pictures, including all five of the 'Course of Empire' pictures, and I thought they were stunning. (I’ve also seen the John Martin 'Great Day of His Wrath' trilogy, and I think the comparison between that and the Cole five-picture work is interesting.)

"But onto single-subject pictures; in this case Wegman’s Weimaraners. I’ve found something similar in other artists and photographers. Jane Bown was lauded as a great portrait photographer—she did portraits two or three times a month for The Observer newspaper—and seen individually they were great. But I once looked through a collection of maybe 100 of them, and I came away with the feeling that they were essentially the same portrait, just with different subjects. Similarly, albeit on an altogether different level, Frans Hals’ portraits: all individually utterly brilliant, but not really meant to be seen in an exhibition of 50 or more. I was ready to look at pictures of something very different well before the end of the exhibition."

John Camp: "Your analysis of Wegman made me think of Hendrick Kerstens and the photos he takes of his daughter, in the faux old-masters style. As you say, it's a schtick, and often quite amusing as well as quite striking. I particularly like the one with the toilet paper rolls."

William Neill, Photographer: A Retrospective

Review by Geoff Wittig

Readers of Outdoor Photographer magazine in the U.S. may be familiar with William Neill’s work from his long association with the publication. He is probably best known for his beautiful large-format film photography, much of it centered around Yosemite National Park. He has lived adjacent to Yosemite for the past 40 years, which is certainly a nice backyard. But as this gorgeous book attests, his body of work over the decades encompasses as much broader range.

Art Wolf provides the introduction. Following this is a testament to Neill’s perfectionism and work ethic from John Weller, his former assistant and a highly skilled photographer in his own right.

William Neill is a sensitive writer in addition to his photographic skills, and in a short essay he articulates his artistic philosophy. The Hudson River School landscape painters of the 19th century explicitly sought evidence of the divine in the natural beauty of forest and mountain, and tried their best to express this in paint. Neill likewise has sought spiritual solace and connection to something greater in the beauty of nature, expressed through photographs and rendered with meticulous craftsmanship. Quotes from Minor White and Paul Caponigro nicely illuminate what he’s getting at. He also discusses the challenges of curating images to make a coherent statement from 40 years of work.

The first section of images is titled Landscapes of the Spirit, not coincidentally the title of Neill’s 1998 book. The photographs are gorgeously rendered color images ranging from vivid to delicate. I’m a sucker for impeccably composed moody forest images, and these are lovely.

The images range from older 4x5-inch film captures to recent digital images; the grouping is conceptual rather than chronological.

Next is Antarctic Dreams, which speaks for itself. One may be forgiven for thinking it’s difficult to take a bad photograph in Antarctica, but I’ve seen plenty. The images here are lovely, from glaciers and mountains to crystalline ice formations.

Next up is Meditations in Monochrome, a very nice selection of black-and-white images. William is of course known as a master of color, but he began exhibiting at the Ansel Adams gallery with Ansel’s approval, and he continues to work in monochrome with digital capture and digital printing methods.

By Nature’s Design is a collection of details and abstracts, ranging from a 1976 image taken with a Pentax Spotmatic to exquisite large format and digital captures. My own experience tells me that creating a worthwhile photograph from this kind of subject is a lot harder than it looks.

Sanctuary in Stone focuses on Yosemite, and includes many of Mr. Neill’s iconic photographs from the Park. Interspersed with grand images of El Capitan and the valley are delicate close-ups of dogwoods against moving water. The range of photos digs a lot deeper than the customary ‘tunnel view’.

Finally, Impressions of Light is a collection of experimental images, most captured with intentional camera motion to yield soft colorful abstracts. Easy to do; very hard to do well. I was immediately tempted to head outside and try some of this myself, which can’t be a bad thing.

Wrapping up the book is a full set of thumbnails identifying technical details and dates for all the photographs. I found this fascinating, partly because it is difficult or impossible to tell which images are from large format film versus digital SLR capture, so consistent is the technical and aesthetic quality.

As an aside, this book is an apparent swan song for Triplekite, based in England, a small publisher of high-quality photo books that has ceased operations. They previously printed Dav Thomas’s beautiful With Trees and Charlie Cramer’s modest but lovely Yosemite.

William Neill, Photographer, A Retrospective:

Amazon US / Amazon UK / Amazon Germany and Canada / Book Depository

Geoff

TOP Contributing Editor Geoff Wittig is a rural family physician with interests ranging from health care quality improvement, medical informatics, and integration of health care delivery to photography and landscape painting. Photo books are a particular area of interest; he admits he has far too many for his own good.

© 2018 by Geoffrey Wittig, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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Two book reviews: The Long Shadow of Kodak's Fall

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

When I attended college in Rochester, New York, in the late 1970s, working at Kodak was by common consent the second best summer job for students staying in town. (The best? Working at the Genesee Brewery, where free beer was the standout perk.) Kodak paid well, working on the colossal film coating lines was interesting, and it gave you a foot in the door for a ‘real job’ down the road. At the time it was obvious that Kodak would be around forever; it was a force of nature.

Ahem. That was then…and things have changed a bit. Rochester as a community has weathered the collapse of Kodak more gracefully than other rust belt cities suffering similar industrial declines, but there have certainly been consequences. The neighborhoods surrounding Kodak Park in northwest Rochester and adjacent Greece NY have slid from solidly blue collar to a somewhat shabbier state, yet they have maintained a certain local pride and community integrity.

Two recent photobooks examine the post-collapse Kodak neighborhoods and yield distinctly different impressions despite some striking superficial similarities. First up is Swiss photographer Catherine Leutenegger’s Kodak City (Kehrer Verlag, 160 pages). A modest 9.8x8.1 inches, it’s a very nicely made clothbound book with a partial dust jacket. The foreword, by the redoubtable A.D. Coleman, presents an erudite, footnoted take on George Eastman and Kodak’s rise and fall. Following are brief essays by Swiss critics Jörg Bader and Urs Stahel, and by the author, who initially spent six months around Rochester in 2007, then returned to finish her project in 2012.

Leutenegger’s color photographs document Kodak Park and the surrounding neighborhoods with an unsentimental but not unsympathetic eye. The color palette is subdued without being completely drab, sort of like an endless November day. Kodak headquarters, weathered working class homes, downtown storefronts, empty streets and the occasional person all get the same deadpan treatment. The images have a distinct formal beauty; if you like Stephen Shore’s work, then you will love these photographs. They are printed on matte paper that nicely complements their subdued appeal. Some are printed full-bleed, some cross the gutter (boo! hiss!) and others are left with varying margins. The overall impression is to my eye an accurate, unsparing, but oddly affectionate take on this community.

 

Next up is Memory City, by husband and wife Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb (Radius Books, 172 pages). A larger book at 12.1x10.2 inches, it is self-consciously "arty." It comes adorned with affectations that include small tipped-in photos on front and rear covers framed with faux-"tape," occasional gate-fold contact sheet images with penciled notes on the back, and a large gate-fold inside the back cover with a highly selective time-line of the Rochester community’s history. The photographs are all over the map, from images of teenage girls with their favorite dresses (RNW) to gritty black-and-white photos of scowling pedestrians or gravestones (AW). Also included are dark color images of street life, multiple pictures of grimy windows, and a sarcastic photo of celebrants at the jazz festival at the Eastman Theater that looks like a classic Martin Parr. The photograph that probably best sums up the book is of a stuffed bird at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. In case readers don’t get the point, the caption helpfully identifies it as the "EXTINCT PASSENGER PIGEON DIORAMA."

 

The handling of color is lovely in many of the photos, and Alex Webb is justly renowned for his photographic composition. But I know this community very well, and the book presents such a relentlessly dour view of it that it’s scarcely recognizable to me.

Geoff-

TOP Contributing Editor Geoff Wittig is a rural family physician with interests ranging from health care quality improvement, medical informatics, and integration of health care delivery to photography and landscape painting. Photo books are a particular area of interest; he admits he has far too many for his own good.

©2015 by Geoffrey Wittig, all rights reserved

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Mark Sampson: "I was born and raised less than a mile from the shopping plaza shown on the cover of Kodak City. And I worked for Kodak as an industrial photographer for 20 years, and every day went to work through the door at the lower right of the other photo shown (it's the Hawk-Eye plant, likely empty by now). So I can claim a real connection.

"I'll take a good look at Catherine Leutnegger's book; it's a subject worthy of attention. Now that I've moved away I can imagine it as a project; I was too close to it when it was my life (for example, my own illustrations of Hawk-Eye, and there were quite a few, were assignment-driven, and any real personal vision was subordinated to the needs of the assignment.)

"And I remember when the Magnum folks came to town a few years back; there was a group show at the George Eastman House afterwards. Seeing the show, It was fairly obvious that they parachuted in, did their thing, and parachuted out. Any real understanding of the city, and its situation, would take more time and effort than any of them had to give, and the results showed in the generally mediocre pictures."

Lindsay Bach: "As a native Rochestarian with a family steeped in Kodak over multiple generations—for example, my father worked in Roll Coating Chemical for 41 years and my brother worked in the same department for 31—I had similar misgivings with Alex and Rebecca Webb's book. While the Webb's images are great as photographs, they fail as a message about the demise of Kodak and the effect on the greater community, which has actually been surprisingly minimal. The truth is that much of urban Rochester and many of the neighborhoods around Kodak Park were in decline 40 and 50 years ago during Kodak's peak, as the generous salaries of Kodak employees made it possible for earlier generations of Kodak workers to move to the burgeoning Rochester suburbs during the post-war period, leaving their former neighborhoods to the vagaries of urban blight and a growing underclass. This is a story of "white flight" that played out in countless other cities across the country and is a larger story than Eastman Kodak. The company employed 65,000 people at the high water mark during the 1980s and most of the employees lived in the suburbs.

"In the wake of the race riots that rocked Rochester in 1965 (and later in 1968), there was, in fact, a huge effort by a Black activist organization called FIGHT to force Kodak to hire and spread its largesse to a greater number of 'inner city" (read black) workers and thereby, it was hoped, improve the lot of Rochester's poorer residents. Kodak yielded but the intractable urban blight continued, as it did in many other cities. This is what the Webbs appear to have captured. The present poverty in urban Rochester was not caused by the demise of Kodak, though it is fair to say that Kodak's hiring policies in the years prior to the 1970s may have ultimately contributed to its increase."