By Howard Bernstein
slideshow via interviewmagazine.com
Spread EIC Ken Miller, among his many, many projects (believe me this guy is busy) has just had the release of Shoot (Rizzoli), his review of the contemporary photography of Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans, and their heirs.
We copped this informative interview from, where else, Interview!
“Photography of the Moment,” the subtitle to Ken Miller’s Shoot (Rizzoli), refers to two phenomena: a photographic aesthetic that favors flash-focus and casual composition and staging; and the uniquity of that very look. Shoot features a portfolio of 26 international photographers, masters of banal still-lifes, unposed portraits, and easily-missed moments—not much of a criteria, but one that in Miller’s hands never appears forced, which is important.
With Shoot, you get the luxuriously low-key portraits by Juergen Teller and the blown-out, hallucinogenic visions of Paul Schiek; you get Nacho Alegre’s grainy, casual-glam diaries. But you also get Wolfgang Tillmanns, whose autobiographical project absorbs every photograph he takes and often includes abstraction. Interestingly, Stephen Shore writes a foreward: He was, of course, the master snapshotter of Warhol’s factory, but later in his career has excelled at and taken up anonymous street photography captured with painstaking deliberation. In an introduction, Penny Martin calls the work featured here “informal photography” but whether the look here is actually informal, whether the photographers here could realy be called “amateur,” and whether the criteria for the aesthetic evaluation of photographic images have really changed, is exactly the project.
ALEX GARTENFELD: What were the criteria by which you selected the photographers?
KEN MILLER: To be honest, for an editor I’m a terrible self-editor… And because ‘point and shoot’ photography has become so popular in the last decade, the hardest part for me was not selecting photographers for the book, but rather trimming the list down to the final 26. In keeping with the spirit of the book, I tried to make the process democratic, asking younger contributors to recommend pphotographers who had influenced them and asking older photographers to name who they thought was doing exciting work. Since the book is about a style of photography, my hope was that this would keep it consistent and give it a bit of a community vibe.
GARTENFELD: What themes emerged, whether intentional or unintentional?
MILLER: I really love looking at a photo and being baffled as to why the photographer decided to take the picture in the first place—and even weirder, why did they decide to show that photograph? It really makes you think about the photographer and his or her motivation – what do they see in the image and are you seeing the same thing? I think Ola Rindal’s photos are amazing for that, and it totally blows my mind that he shoots for fashion clients such as Louis Vuitton. There are definitely certain trendy subjects for photos that we had to guard against over representing – bonfires, snowfall, sun flare, sad-looking plants, cats (but not dogs), christmas trees, etc. Aside from sunflare, which speaks to the beauty of capturing natural light with a camera, I’m a bit baffled by the fascination with these other subjects. The book probably has a few too many photos of backs of heads, but since SHOOT is also about finding beauty in ‘wrong’ photography and random imagery, I don’t feel too bad about that.
GARTENFELD: What’s the first photo book you bought?
MILLER: I’m not totally sure… I remember getting a W Eugene Smith book in high school because I really liked the grain in some of his Spain photos, but more likely it was Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in college or Daido Moriyama’s “Stray Dog” soon after that.
GARTENFELD: What’s the first thing you notice about a photograph?
MILLER: The original subtitle for SHOOT was “Photography and the Ephemeral Image” and I’m still really intrigued by that idea. Since everyone begins with the same tools (originally a camera and film and now a camera and Photoshop), what are the hard-to-describe qualities that separate one photographer’s images from another’s? I’m personally less impressed by really heavily manipulated images or art directed scenarios (though those can sometimes be amazing) and tend to focus on really raw images where the photographer was very much ‘in the moment’, interacting with a situation and reacting instantaneously to make a lasting and memorable image.
GARTENFELD: What’s special about photographers?
MILLER: As a photo editor, I learned a lot about photography by watching Jason Nocito shoot. You need to be a subtle yet keen observer of the situation you’re in, you need to be flexible and intuitive and you need to be fast. Finally, as Juergen Teller taught us, it helps to take a lot of photos and become as much of an editor as you are a photographer.
GARTENFELD: Digital or analog?
MILLER: I honestly don’t really think it matters. Both have unique and appealing qualities to me. I think the bigger issue is that the fine art and photo press has for many years tended to focus on highly technical photography at the expense of point and shoot or ’snap shot’ work. I suspect that this is because it’s a lot easier to write about the effort and process of making a really complicated to produce photo, rather than analyzing the more intangible aesthetic properties of something that is seemingly quite simple to produce. But in fact, it’s actually really hard to do this kind of photography well on a consistent basis, whereas a lot of really technical photography is actually quite easy… provided you have the money for some fancy equipment. In the end, I’m generally more impressed by a photographer who uses a camera anyone can buy, but still consistently takes better photos than the rest of us can.
