If a Picture's Worth a Thousand Words, How About a Picture of a Picture?
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Marilyn Minter takes pictures. Then she paints pictures of the pictures she has taken. When she's finished, she hires Tom Powel to take pictures of her pictures of her pictures.
His pictures go into books and catalogs to catch the eye of buyers willing to pay $100,000 or more for a painting by Ms. Minter. For his pictures of her pictures, Mr. Powel earns $2,000 a day.
"I don't know how Tom does it, but he's the best I've seen," Ms. Minter said in her SoHo loft one day. "If you took a sloppy picture of one of my pictures, it'd look like...a photograph."
She was leaning over a table, brush in hand, varnishing her latest creation: "Sludge," a painting of a Photoshopped photo of a glossy shoe overlaid with dribbles of translucent goop.
"Dog hair," said Ms. Minter, picking something off the surface. Then she straightened up and said, "I'm done."
Her painting glared in the track lights. Standing to one side, Mr. Powel said quietly, "Varnish. My nemesis."
His job now was to kill the glare and capture the gloss.
Mr. Powel, 54 years old, began doing this kind of work in 1985. Digital cameras and computer software have since become tools of manipulation, but Mr. Powel seeks absolute fidelity.
He resists the urge to make his pictures look better than the pictures he takes pictures of. He's a star in an occupation that stands out for self-effacement.
The occupation doesn't exactly have a name. "Copy photographer" works well enough, or maybe "archivist." Photojournalist Mustafah Abdulaziz, who came along for this newspaper to photograph Mr. Powel taking pictures of Ms. Minter's picture, said, "I didn't know this was a job."
While news photographers have lost business to Flickr's amateur crowd, photographers of pictures are in big demand.
Collectors today often don't get to stand in front of an artwork before they buy it, especially if they live in China. They see a picture of the artwork first—and it had better be a good one.
"A lot of our clients experience pictures only through the illustrations in our catalogs," says Conor Jordan, who runs the Impressionist auctions at Christie's in New York. For him, pictures of pictures are "of pivotal importance in the art market."
Contemplative retreats like the Metropolitan Museum of Art are hangouts now for the Flickr crowd. Fanny Martin, a French tourist, was there recently, photographing a 2003 painting of the Cotton Club in Harlem.
Contemplative retreats like the Metropolitan Museum of Art are hangouts now for the Flickr crowd. Fanny Martin, a French tourist, was there recently, photographing a 2003 painting of the Cotton Club in Harlem.
She had been to Harlem herself. "I'm taking a picture of a picture of my memory," she said. Down in the museum shop, the postcard choice was sparse. "Why buy postcards of art when you can take a picture of it with your telephone?" said a clerk.
One postcard the museum sells is a Rembrandt self-portrait. In it, Rembrandt looks tan and his backdrop yellowish. But up in the gallery, he looks sallow and his backdrop greenish. The postcard is way off. Without holding it up to the original, you might never know.
Someone buying a million-dollar picture wouldn't appreciate a surprise like that. In the world of picture photography, there's one place where such surprises never happen: a gray, windowless Midtown Manhattan room containing the late Richard Avedon's old Saltzman enlarger, fitted with a $30,000 camera that makes 600-megabyte files.
That's where Chris Nesbit works. At the Avedon Foundation, he photographs the photographer's own prints. A while ago, he was painstakingly photographing one of Norman Mailer. "This job is the height of self-restraint," Mr. Nesbit said.
But it pays: His photos of 65 Avedon photos went into the catalog for a Christie's auction in Paris last November. The photos (not the photos of the photos) sold for $7.5 million.
Ms. Minter's loft isn't a gray room: It has prints on walls, paint cans on shelves, pipes above, boards below. Mr. Powel works on location. For him, the task is to take a picture of one picture while blotting out the slightest glimmer of anything else.
"OK, let's do it," he told two helpers after Ms. Minter, who is 62, had hung her shoe painting on a white wall. Mr. Powel's crew set up lights while he took prints off walls and hid paint cans. He positioned a camera between the lights and connected it to a laptop.
As he stood behind the camera, Mr. Powel took off his glasses, and eyeballed the painting for what seemed like a long time. "This is what I wanted to see," he said. And then he pushed the plunger on the shutter cable.
As he stood behind the camera, Mr. Powel took off his glasses, and eyeballed the painting for what seemed like a long time. "This is what I wanted to see," he said. And then he pushed the plunger on the shutter cable.
The entire procedure took several hours. Fortunately, Mr. Abdulaziz was there to take pictures of Mr. Powel taking his picture of Ms. Minter's picture. In a story of a thousand words, his pictures will surely be worth it.
Source:
Barry Newman, "A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words, But How About a Picture of a Picture?" The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2011
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