World record price for a photograph...

[Hamish Gill]

Just told Hannah about this and it's concept ... She said what I said, it's like a student coming up with a concept!
She also pointed out that the concept is entirely lost if you don't know that the chap photoshopped stuff out ...
Basically, the image it's self is only half the concept ... The other half is reliant on knowing something about it how it was made ...
For me, and Hannah at least that doesn't make a good photo! A photo and it's contents should speak for its self!

 

[Chris Dodkin]

I think it is safe to say at this point that we are more of a "Peter Lik" community here;

lol

Fidel - did you watch the series this year on TV?

At it's best moments, it was excellent - informative and inspirational - but a lot of time was spent creating 'drama' in Lik's day, around weather, light, cameras etc, which eventually came across as rather contrived.

Did you get the same impression?

The locations and the nuggets of photographic data were however excellent - and props to the man for making a very successful career out of it.

He has a gallery in La Jolla - could be on our San Diego RPF itinerary if people are interested?

 

[Davie Hudson]

I have to admit to have never heard of Pete Lik but looking at his photographs you would think he influenced me with some of the shots.... not sure if thats a good thing

 

[Chris Dodkin]

I have to admit to have never heard of Pete Lik but looking at his photographs you would think he influenced me with some of the shots.... not sure if thats a good thing

Davie, do you say 'crickey' and 'bugger' a lot while you shoot?

You also have to say 'love it' and 'roaring' a whole lot - pretty much every time you take a 'gallery shot'..

[video=youtube;LcZutELj1wM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcZutELj1wM[/video]

 

[Davie Hudson]

apart from the accent and the money .... that's me lolol

 

[Brian Moore]

I say "Oh Scheidte" a lot. (Don't know if that's a German word but I made it look like one to retain the family-friendly atmosphere of RPF.)

 

[Fidel Marcus]

Chris I have been to his Gallery in La Jolla and seen his photos, that's when I realized a new respect for his work.

He happened to get big right around the HDR craze so at first impression I was not impressed, I thought that he created artificial beauty with heavy photoshop post-processing to get the vividness and detail in his photos. But when I walked into his gallery I was baffled once my eyes landed on his huge prints, they appeared to almost look back lit and the detail was like nothing I'd ever seen before so after a chat with the director there for a few and after some research online it turned out that his shots were never doctored on the computer, he actually uses massively large format film and most of his famous shots were created with the coveted Linhof 617 Medium Format Panoramic Camera

Though he does shoot with digital (in the video you posted he's using a hassy medium format digital) he certainly mastered the modern large format film style of shooting and believe me looking at the image on your computer screen as impressive as it does look it is 10 times more impressive to stand before one of his actual prints, I was blown away and I'm no kind critic.

 

[Fidel Marcus]

that camera is a range-finder on steroids

 

[Paul Lange]

I friend of mine bought one of his prints while holidaying in Australia a few years back. It's only a small one but cost a hell of a lot of money! He uses some special paper and printing method that gives the prints the back lit effect when a light is shone on it. Whether they are to you taste of not and gimmick of the print method aside you can't really say that he is very skilled. He lives in the states and it seems to market himself over there he cannot be just a photographer he has to be an —EXTREME PHOTOGRAPHER— wrestling bears on mounting sides and eating poisonous snakes raw etc etc. I just ignore all of that stuff and take from his work the things the I appreciate.

 

[Helen Hughes]

Aah, the Art World, don't you just love them!
What with this, and the Taylor Wessing Prize winner, I'm going to call myself something pretentious like "Claude X", walk around with a cane, shades on (even indoors), a ridiculous pimp outfit and spout bollocks and be generally enigmatic.

I HATE this 'need' to express your images with the use of ********. I find a lot of the time it covers up technically poor images. I see them often from other students here studying their very traditional written-work heavy BA. I'm joining them next year for the final year (why not) and I think what I produce and what they produce will be very different.

Thankfully, my final year will be based all around documentary and photo-journalism! I love that genre and so I will quite happily work on that.

If anyone finds themselves around the general Paris area at this time of year, visit Paris Photo. It's hilarious. It's full of highly pompous art buyers wafting cheque books around and shouting in very loud voices: "Elton John would like to pay 500,000 euros for this picture of a cow with it's head chopped off!" *
(The above happened last year..true...)

Seems the current trend here is for images of people with cardboard boxes on their heads. Or plastic ducks. I wonder what existentialist bollocks they come up with to explain that! Eeeh....




*it might not have been a cow, other animals were available

 

[Fidel Marcus]

I found a perfect example of trash sold at top dollar, if you know or heard anything about street art or as we all have known it for decades as graffiti art you had to have heard of Banksy.

So this hack Thierry Guetta starts to follow Banksy around documenting his rise to fame while keeping him completely anonymous to the general public along with many other big names in that industry, one day he gets up & says I am a street artist too so he literally rips all of these guys off, he begins to copy all their techniques literally raping the art form and the best part is he didn't even have the talent to create this so called self proclaimed mastery of art himself so he employs young artists to create it for him. Then when copying their art is not enough he exploits his relationships with Banksy and others to use their work as a form of marketing for his big show, when the show finally opens he sells nearly $1 Million worth to the idiot society of art collectors in Los Angeles.

It is very entertaining to watch this documentary "exit through the gift shop" which shows just how stupid the collector community can be lol

Mr. Brainwash - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Paul Lange]

Aah, the Art World, don't you just love them!
What with this, and the Taylor Wessing Prize winner, I'm going to call myself something pretentious like "Claude X", walk around with a cane, shades on (even indoors), a ridiculous pimp outfit and spout bollocks and be generally enigmatic.

I HATE this 'need' to express your images with the use of ********. I find a lot of the time it covers up technically poor images. I see them often from other students here studying their very traditional written-work heavy BA. I'm joining them next year for the final year (why not) and I think what I produce and what they produce will be very different.

Thankfully, my final year will be based all around documentary and photo-journalism! I love that genre and so I will quite happily work on that.

If anyone finds themselves around the general Paris area at this time of year, visit Paris Photo. It's hilarious. It's full of highly pompous art buyers wafting cheque books around and shouting in very loud voices: "Elton John would like to pay 500,000 euros for this picture of a cow with it's head chopped off!" *
(The above happened last year..true...)

Seems the current trend here is for images of people with cardboard boxes on their heads. Or plastic ducks. I wonder what existentialist bollocks they come up with to explain that! Eeeh....




*it might not have been a cow, other animals were available

This post and Fidels does make me very sad, not because I disagree with them but because I agree. I'll defend what I term as Fine Art, it is very important and has played a major role in shaping our world and society, something that not many people realise. However I have to agree that I found the majority of people involved in that world just as commented on in previous posts. As I said in another post somewhere it's the 95% that give the other 5% a bad name! I would say that it is a world full of people who are desperate to prove that they are more than they actually are.

While it doesn't help when people look at a piece of art and don't get it, don't even make an honest attempt to do any hard thinking about it and then just dismiss it as as something that has been poorly executed, I have to admit that there really is a lot of work that is such and just has kudos because of who made it or who is championing it.