At the beginning, Alfred Stieglitz thoroughly manipulated his photographs to imitate paintings. Later, he dismantled any remains of pictorial rules and committed to straight photography: little or no cropping, retouching or artificial alteration. This giant leap gave it the dignity and sovereignty of an art of its own.
His work doesn’t age nor die. Like good novels and classic films it survives any preposterous definition of the critics, any comparison, any classification that comes in its way.
A straightforward, honest, stripped bare observation and humble recording of the moment is a landslide victory over impermanence. Even death symbols should bring to mind the silence of no judgment, the raw awareness of the unspeakable.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Stieglitz
Dressing Tunick up (or how to make crazy money as a photographer)
Consciously develop a pattern of grandiosity in both fantasy and behaviour.
Seek for admiration or adulation.
Feel entitled to success and notoriety.
Get as many people as possible to be part of your pictures.
Get as many people as possible to see them.
Get them naked (play with their need for love, approval, self-comparison, rebellion, narcissistic supply).
Be sure they are average.
Get yourself arrested several times for disorderly conduct.
Make your lawyer get all your charges dropped for the sake of art.
Make the whole crap newsworthy. Make the front pages of almost every national newspaper.
Call it an ‘installation’.
Work at sunrise when the traffic jams are utterly annoying.
Establish a record of naked people.
Then establish a record of naked people in a single photograph.
Then beat your own record.
Unintentionally recall the photos from Nazi concentration camps.
Remember that it’s not the telling but the showing that counts.
Hire or invite celebrity guests to your installations.
Proclame yourself an artist, regardless of true merit.
Define the whole thing as “a living organism of hundreds of bodies forming a landscape, the relationship between the anonymity of public space and the human body”.
Rinse and repeat.
Anyone can do it.
