7x7: Seven Chicago Area Photobloggers
A Flak Photo Essay

Click on a thumbnail to select a photographer gallery

“7x7: Seven Chicago Area Photobloggers” is an exhibit produced by members of Chicago's photoblogging community. The show is on display at the Chicago Public Library, through November 18th and includes seven photos by seven artists.

This interactive exhibition features a series of galleries showcasing the work of each photographer. In addition, the photo essay includes audio commentary podcasts that function as critique and curatorial statement, offering the reader a critical perspective on the exhibition. For optimal viewing, set your browser to full screen mode.

	FLAK INTERACTIVE To download the audio commentary for this exhibition, click here.

Photoblog culture has been gaining powerful momentum in the online world as a natural extension of weblogging; the principle being that photographers — amateur and professional — document their lives in a chronological series of photographs that serve as a visual diary of their experience.

The term is self-consciously avante-garde, and from online information about the movement there is a sense of revolution and novelty in the idea. Is it such a break from history, though? The types of photography that have come to typify its earliest days are portraits, death portraits, criminal portraits and spirit portraits. But images of spirits and women dressed as nymphs are darkroom tricks. As soon as cameras became remotely portable, they were taken out into the streets to document everyday life.

From William Henry Fox Talbot's first light images printed on paper in 1837, to Louis Daguerre's 1839 presentation of a reproduced image "with no knowledge of drawing," controversy was already brewing about photography's immediacy, impermanence, and indecency. The form's increasing speed and ease through scientific advance were the qualities that both its adherents and its detractors called upon. Poet and contemporary of Daguerre, Charles Baudelaire, famously said, "our squalid society has rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gloat at its trivial image on a scrap of metal."

And that sentiment ironically became the fuel for all of modern photography.

When compared to traditional portraiture, the relative speed of producing a metal plate "Daguerreotype" or the later egg white-based descendents of the Calotype made this medium the choice for representing the previously unrepresentable. Even by the 1890s Eugene Atget was capturing the Parisian underclass on glass, providing an image of the unimaginable to French high society. In the 1930s and 40s it was called Social Realism, in the 50s and 60s it was called New York street photography, and in the 70s and 80s it was called documentary photography. Today it is called photoblogging.

Understanding the 7x7 photobloggers exhibit as an inheritor of the practices and ides of documentary photography is a good lens through which to view these pictures. But it does not address a certain inconsistency in the curation of the show: many of the photos are not documentary photography. Each photographer has at least one image taken in the natural world, with a natural subject, in a minimally staged environment. But each photographer also has a number of conceptually-driven, staged photographs departing in varying degrees from realism.

Realism in documentary photography has always been met with fierce debate. People still argue about the authenticity of Dorothea Lange's photographs of migrant farm workers in the 1930s, because many of them might have been orchestrated or staged. But at the very least one can argue that the subjects of Lange's work were actually migrant farmers, and were poor, and did live in squalor, even if Lange intentionally dialed-up the drama of her images with staging.

Included in the 7x7 exhibit are Nick Campbell's "Miss Brown" series, which are so obviously staged that they read more closely to fashion photography than anything documentary. This is not to say that they are lacking — in fact, Campbell's eye for the desperate disaffection of his model, and the cinematic sparseness of his set, make these photographs the strongest in his group. Not so for Nick Feder, who captures the pathos of his tirelessly beautiful friends best when they are being themselves. When he diverges from documentary style and poses a young woman in a bathtub with a red dress and a shoe, the effect is much more overwrought and overthought than the seemingly effortless shot of his teal-haired friend in an airy hallway. That shot would make Diane Arbus look twice.

Archie FlorCruz's photographs are also questionably documentarian or "street" or "blog"-like, because their poetic attention to the formal qualities of humans and nature and buildings with equal weight reads less like a document of FlorCruz's life, and more like a visual haiku penned with light — not so bloggish, but still very appealing.

Both Brian Milo and Pablo Korona walk the line between documentary photography and album-cover art. Milo is a self-proclaimed ex-rocker, and both his street style photography and obviously posed images of kids in gas masks holding American flags read with that kind of self-conscious intensity and sex appeal that should probably be articulated in a chorus rather than a paragraph. Korona's works, although they all seem to be taken on the street, are equally saturated with color and intensity. Though his share a rock-and-roll sensibility with Milo's, Korona's images are more subtly disturbing and disorienting. If MTV documented Huxely's "Brave New World," this is what it would look like.

Only Bill Vaccaro and Mitch Arsenie are photographers who seem to be comfortably settled in the documentary or photoblogging style of photography. Both shoot in black and white, which is the palate of history and of truth, because it reminds the viewer of photography's history, old family photographs, and newsprint images. These photos present a relatively unadulterated image of reality, with the exception of the nostalgia inspired by Vaccaro's toy and homemade lenswork. At the very least, both photographers' work looks similar to the 19th and 20th century's most famous documentary photographers.

Photoblogging, and the aims of the "7x7: Seven Chicago Area Photobloggers" exhibit specifically, are less modern or revolutionary than they might at first seem. The infinite speed and reproducibility that comes with the group's display of photographic images on the internet might itself be the most revolutionary aspect of photoblogging. In that, photoblogging is truly inheriting and perfecting the goals of photography — articulated by Walter Benjamin as providing a true democracy of viewership. As Benjamin expected, photography allowed people to see images of places they would never go and people they would never see — the poor could see the Taj Mahal, and the rich could see the rag pickers of Paris.

Although one could levy a crushing critique on the curation of the show and on the concept of photoblogging as novel, the work in the show is incredibly appealing both individually and collectively. These photographers all consider themselves photobloggers, so they are all consciously or unconsciously grappling with the documentary tradition: the possibility or impossibility of authenticity, representation versus creation, and the aesthetic involvement of the photographer in his or her own photograph. Each photographer has presented shots that live on different areas of these continuums.

In this way, the show was a success. For these struggles are the ones photographers have been dealing with from day one, and exploring the many ways photographs are created and understood is essential to keeping the medium vital in an age where the technology surrounding it is evolving at such a rapid pace. What the Chicago Photobloggers' show suggests is that the physical, photographic object may someday become a thing of the past.

— Aemelia Scott

Exhibition slideshows produced by Andy Adams