Kindred spirit Philip-Lorca diCorcia has been showing his spiritual, voyeuristic, yet profoundly human photographs at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris. (Left, Philip-Lorca diCorcia's "Head #23," 2000.) Artnet is carrying a summation of it here.

The portraits are spare and simple and beautiful. And I find them extremely optomistic, almost in spite of themselves. If only the Whitney Biennial and similar shows had more work in them that reminds us that it's good to be human and good to care about what other human beings do, feel, think and say. Funny though that in this age of infinite digital reproduction, Artnet would post such a crappy pic of diCorcia's work (right), full of reflections and other distractions.

Speaking of Artnet, I caught this little tidbit:

The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation has announced $600,000 in $20,000 fellowships to 30 artists in its 2003 biennial competition, which makes awards to artists whose work shows promise but who have not received widespread critical or commercial recognition. The recipients are

and they go on to list a litany of artists. I was heartened to see Mark Bradford on the list, alumnus of Freestyle. But I also noticed Alexander Ross. Is there a different Alexander Ross? Because the one I know has gotten plenty of play from the press and from the art establishment. In fact, seems like there were a few months there where I couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting one of those green, goopy bio-plastic paintings. Not that I'm holding anything against him; they just have a weird definition of not receiving "widespread critical or commercial recognition." Of course, these things move so slowly, it's possible that back when the decision was made, he in fact had not been recognized yet.

Jerry Saltz wrote an excellent short piece in the Village Voice about the use of photography in painting. It's very difficult to be critical about the practice without degenerating into a simplistic "that's cheating" kind of critique. But Saltz has done a really good job of avoiding just that. Says Saltz:

These days, much photo-based painting looks the same (ditto digitally based abstraction, but we'll deal with that another time): a newspaper photo, picture of an urban or suburban setting, an airport or a hotel; a celebrity, fashion model or porn star; a stadium, pavilion or modernist interior; a still from a film; a yearbook pic; shots of young people doing anything; or any advertisement. These images are typically rendered in kaleidoscopic color, blurred pigments or washy black and white. Regardless of who makes these monotonous knockoffs, the results are the same: variations on Richter, Warhol, Tuymans, Polke, Celmins, Fischl, Rauschenberg, Peyton, Doig, Close, Robert Longo, Lisa Ruyter, or any original photorealist. Unlike their lemming-like imitators, all these artists have employed photographs in original ways.

That, I think, is a pretty fair assessment.

I've often asked myself about my own motivations and practices in using digital imagery as the basis for my portrait work. I know exactly the look he's talking about, and I don't think I fall into that category. But then, whoever thinks they do fall into a category of knockoffs? I also have to deal with the Chuck Close thing all the time. We both use a grid, but for entirely different reasons and to entirely different ends. Close's grid is a reference to old master paintings, to perspective "machines" and to the practice of transferring drawings from one surface to another. My grid is given to me by my subject matter. Digital images are already grids. Where Close is imposing his will on the subject, I'm elucidating the subject for what it already is. In fact, the will that I impose on my subjects is actually the opposite, in that I'm tending now to break them out of the grids in which they are naturally inscribed.

On the other hand, the legacy I've inherited from Close is that same monotonous composition: the centered, modernist, close-cropped head that takes on a kind of monumental character existing in a blank nowhere land. This is right out of Chuck's textbook. I realized it just as I started doing other things with composition. But the compositional variations are where I tend to be heading now.

As an aside, Saltz also says this: "We all know that photography is a remarkable and remarkably complex way of seeing and picturing the world; that the space between the photograph, the photographer and the thing photographed is incredibly rich." He's right, but no, we don't "all know" this. Even in this day and age, people are surprisingly unconvinced that photography constitutes a legitimate artform. I've reported here on the arguments I've had with my boss on that very subject. A lot of people have that point of view: "I could do that. He didn't do anything, but aim and press the button. That's not art." And no, my boss is not some uneducated, 80-year-old curmudgeon. He's a Boston University educated lawyer under 40 with a taste for Rothko and (ironically) David Hockney. Those of us who spend all our time in the art world and with other artists probably don't realize how pervasive this opinion is.