Too much make up on a pretty girl

Review/Comment on the Grad work of a recently graduated AKI student.




Normally, around the end of June, the security of the AKI would push a cart full of beer and wine into our classrooms, celebrating that the year was almost over.
Alcohol proofed to be an excellent support for the sleep derived grad students , helping them relax from all their stress (Would they get their prints in at time? Will the cleaners mistaken their installed sculptures with trash tonight? etc). Teachers would get drunk before two, and all-night-football was being played in the freshly painted gallery's. By the end of each year, the AKI turned into a social club other then a school. And I love(d) it.

This year, is saw this all happening in Canada (well - not the drunk teachers or soccer matches, even though there were attempts to start a darkroom disco) I followed the grads in photo with great interest, but surely wondered what my friends at the AKI were working on.

When I got back in the Netherlands, one of the first things that i did was visit the AKI. There were still two more days that the Grad show was up - and i wanted to see it. I horribly failed however (every minute I ran into another familiar face that wanted to have a beer) So I ended up seeing the work of only a handfull of people (And being pretty drunk by the end of the day). One savy student tried to make advantage of this, and made the clever statement that "There still still= is a book with the photo's of the show" while holding the 15 euro grad catalogue.
I gazed into my wallet, that was empty - except for an american quarter and a canadian loonie. So I ended up just asking around what I had missed.

Apparently the name Kirsten Wilmink came up a lot, that somehow made a big impression on all the students and teachers. Keywords in the attempts to describe her works were "hilarious" "Germans"And "Photoshop".
I decided to look for her website, and as soon as I saw the first image... i sighed. "Oh...she"..I thought. I clicked trough a couple of more, before i returned to working on my own website. I knew this girl and her work..and was put of by an earlier incident between us (more about that later)

Last week however, the Aki Website proudly anounced that the photographer got nominated for... 7 Photo-academy awards. Which is a big deal - So that got me looking at it again, and thinking...

This was a rather long introduction... But the reason i'm writing about her work is that I want to express my concern. And this doesnt only count for her work, but for Photography in general.

Its not so much that im concernd about the idea or concept behind Kirstens series (wich i think is pretty funny) She had the idea to build a serie around the cliches surrounding germans - this all in a staged kind of way. While she surely brought up some interesting and hilarious photos- i was more concernd with the way she executed the photographs. If we can still call them photographs at all.

While I have nothing against digital alterations - (even though their still hot topic in photography; chek out the
discussion around Edgar Martins photos for the NYTimes magazine for example
Hers look more like the hyper-realistic art from the 80's, or even cheaply paint brushed artworks on motorcycles and vans. Or even better.... Illustrations. Not so much a photograph...While this would have been all fine with a clear intention and reference - the following thing concerned me most: On her blog she stated once that she used photoshop techniques to "Make a boring photograph more Interesting".

And that is when I get upset. Last year we shared classes, In wich she took photographs of her grandparents. Ordinary photo's, that were digitally dogged-and-burned-the hell out of it, just to look interesting. I got offended. I made the statement that If you found your photograph boring, you just simply took a bad photograph. This was "Photoshop-make-up". Im all for staging, but as soon as you think that "prettying things up" will make your image better; it doesnt. She however, found it necessarily to continue this way of working. Endlessly. She tried to guide her statements and subjects towards a way that they "needed" photoshop because "it fitted" and "complimented" the photograph.

For her gradwork she surely perfected her skills and subject, to a point that you can say that technique and subject "work". However, I would find that its simply too much. Next to confirming german cliche's she also confirmed another one: artstudents always think that the more exotic the image is; the better its must be. The more splashing colours and dazzeling patterns - the more the audience must like it. Its (partly) and AKI-education related problem. We dont learn much about techniques, so as soon someone masters something, you can sure expect lots of attention of students and teachers
For me, this photoshopping is more like a camouflage, atleast if you dont have a clear visual reference (Or someone must come up with a famous german-realist painter that I'm missing here) Plus and Plus becomes Minus. Too much make-up on a pretty girl.

After all, i think some images are strong enough to go without. Wouldnt be the adolf hitler-type man and his dog be more disturbing without the whole photoshop-circus? (On the other hand, this is one of the images that wherin photoshop is not so distracting. It becomes Kitch like - wich works in this context)



Its just that, once this type of work is praised that its less likely that you will do other stuff. People believe that's called "having a style" but I think that's very dangerous to have. I mean, "spicing things up" in photoshop doesnt make you a good photograper...

I'm trying to understand my own frustrations; because the images itself are cleverly constructed and nice. And that's maybethe key-comment. They are already so well staged that they dont need anything extra.

Thats why finding martin parss work on her blog was strangly paradoxal to me. He proves that absolutly brilliant images dont need anything more then a camera to capture them.