Kertesz Polaroids - the book

I missed this when I was writing yesterdays post, but ilachina(?) pointed out in a comment that a book of Kertesz's polaroids has just been published as well - "Andre Kertesz:The Polaroids" . Going by the exhibition, it could be a nice Xmas buy...

Andre Kertesz Polaroids

A good few of the Modernist masters seem to have turned their hand to the polaroid at one point or other.


Andre Kertesz nearly always seems to have had a genuine affection for what he photographed, which I think is one of the things which separates him from so many other photographers.


The Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago currently has an exhibition of Kertesz's delightful pictures:

André Kertész: Elizabeth and Me

"Taken in Kertész's apartment just north of New York's Washington Square, many of these photographs were shot either from his window or in the windowsill. We see a fertile mind at work, combining personal objects into striking still lifes set against cityscape backgrounds, reflected and transformed in glass surfaces. These photographs are a testament to the genious of the photographer's eye as manifested in the simple Polaroid."


Via wood_s_lot

Keith Johnson -"Extended"

Julian Thomas over on his blog The Bartender Never Gets Killed mentioned the work of photographer Keith Johnson today.

I'd not come across Johnson's work before, but what I've seen so far seems quite interesting and certainly appeals to my tastes and interest in photography. I like the earlier works Extended and also Ground/Cover, especially his use of triptychs and multiples - which seem quite hard to do well in photography.

Johnson has quite an impressive education, studying under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind as well as Nathan Lyons.

His "statement" is also refreshingly down to earth. He also has a fun series of rotating quotes on his front page.

"My photography is about my travels which I do a lot; sometimes to interesting places, sometimes not. I travel with my camera expecting to see things of interest photographically; I am rarely disappointed. I am interested in the way we have shaped the landscape, entertaining juxtapositions, color, and stuff. At its root it is about entertainment. Enjoy"

Julian had trouble linking to any of Keith's images, but as I'm working on a Mac right now, it's simply drag and drop, so I can post some on here

Searching for Sebald

Some time ago I talked about W.G. (Max) Sebald and especially his book Austerlitz. I also mentioned his way of using photographs interwoven with his text.

Not only has Sebald the writer been an important influence in the world of literature, but his use of photographs and imagery has also generated serious interest in different and new ways of using and understanding the photographic image.

After a long delay I finally got hold of a new book "Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald". It's published by the slightly quirky looking (but quite intriguing) Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

My fear was that the book would be dauntingly academic and was probably the unfinished thesis offcuts from some obscure Sebald symposium , but although I've only flicked through it, it doesn't seem quite as heavy duty as I suspected (though it's certainly a heavyweight tome even in paperback) and there are a few essays about the likes of Autobiogeography and Negative Indexicality... It's actually quite multidisciplinary with not only a series of essays and papers, but interviews and also artists responses to Sebald and his work.

I probably won't read every essay, but some certainly appeal to me on first sight and it should keep me going (and thinking) on and off through the winter (and probably take me back to re-reading some of Sebald's superb books and musings as well).

Among the many many topics are:

"Sebald's Invisible Cities"

"A Truth That Lies Elsewhere"

"But the written word is not a true document," a conversation with W.G. Sebald

"Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald's Practices of Witnessing" etc etc

"W.G. Sebald's books are sui generis hybrids of fiction, travelogue, autobiography and historical expos , in which a narrator (both Sebald and not Sebald) comments on the quick blossoming of natural wonders and the long deaths that come of human atrocities. All his narratives are punctuated with images--murky photographs, architectural plans, engravings, paintings, newspaper clippings--inserted into the prose without captions and often without obvious connection to the words that surround them. This important volume includes a rare 1993 interview called "'But the written word is not a true document': A Conversation with W.G. Sebald about Photography and Literature," in which Sebald talks exclusively about his use of photographs. It contains some of Sebald's most illuminating and poetic remarks about the topic yet. In it, he discusses Barthes, the photograph's "appeal," the childhood image of Kafka, family photographs, and even images he never used in his writings. In addition, Searching for Sebald positions Sebald within an art-historical tradition that begins with the Surrealists, continues through Joseph Beuys and blossoms in the recent work of Christian Boltanski and Gerhard Richter, and tracks his continuing inspiration to artists such as Tacita Dean and Helen Mirra. An international roster of artists and scholars unpacks the intricacies of his unique method. "

Everything new feels old again: “New Photography 2007”

(Scott McFarland)

MoMA has their annual “New Photography 2007” show up, but the NY Times has given it an overall fairly gentle but firm two thumbs down (via Gallery Hopper and PDNPulse).

I've not seen many of these kind of shows in person - though I've often looked through the catalogues or books that come out of them - as I say, MoMA seems to have made it an annual thing, and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne did a show "Regeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow" with a big thick book etc.

Now I'm not quite sure what the cause is, but they rarely seem terribly exciting or inspiring or stunning. I don't know if there are pressures in the way curatorial choices to be made, fashions to follow or whatever, but it's rare that these shows seem to come up with much particularly fresh. I found a similar book a while ago in the library (wish I could remeber the institution) from such a show in the mid 80's and I didn't recognise any of the fresh young things that were it's focus as having gone on to greater and bigger things - in fact I don't think any of them showed up on today's radar. And the photographers from that era who are the leading lights today don't always seem to have featured in such shows. I don't know, but maybe it's a death knell to be featured in one of these things...

Anyway, here's a bit from the Times:

This Year’s Models: Searching for Fresh Approaches in Photography

"Bright letters announce “New Photography 2007” on a wall outside the Museum of Modern Art’s photography galleries. Just inside is a room of vintage-looking black-and-white photographs. Contemporary photographers are showing a strong interest in early photography, so your first thought is that the curator has unearthed someone recycling the ideas and methods of Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz or Clarence White

But no. These are pictures by Muybridge, Stieglitz and White. Keep walking; the annual showcase of emerging photographers is in the next room. After that accidental spark of excitement, though, the show itself is something of a letdown.

“New Photography” is generally limited to three or four artists, which puts pressure on the chosen few to deliver something fresh. None of this year’s photographers accomplish that...

Ms. Berkeley is from the Diane Arbus school: Her work involves a lot of social engineering. She identifies people on the street or subway, and over a period of time coaxes them into posing. (Arbus used urban parks as her hunting grounds.) Ms. Berkeley’s art is often described as showcasing odd beauty or challenging stereotypes of female beauty....

(Tanyth Berkeley)

Earlier this year MoMA mounted a retrospective of Jeff Wall, the master of the digitally enhanced (or fabricated) faux-narrative photograph and one of Vancouver’s most famous artists. Mr. McFarland’s picture of a young family watching a keeper feed porcupines at the Berlin Zoo could be a Wall from around 1989 or a student facsimile. (It’s no surprise, then, to discover that Mr. McFarland once worked as Mr. Wall’s assistant.)

...Ms. Searle is good at creating visual effects: the rhythm of the rising and falling grape-skin mounds; the sandstorm look of the crepe-paper silhouettes in water. But her conceptual basis feels weak, particularly when it is spelled out in hackneyed wall texts...

(Berni Searle)

...A consistently strong point of the “New Photography” series, including this edition, has been the international array of artists. But so far it has been weak in showcasing new developments and contextualizing contemporary photography within the collection, which helps explain the jarring transition from Stieglitz & Company to the current crop. You hate to be the spoiler, the insatiable art viewer constantly demanding that rush of something new. But when a show is called “New Photography 2007,” you feel within your rights."

Hmm, in retrospect, the review is rather more scathing than I thought the first time I read it...

(Of interesting technical note, the work of all three in the show seems to be being shown as Pigmented Inkjet Prints).

Elena Givone

I must say that I hated the whole Facebook thing and resisted it for ages until I got an invite from my old College alumni group and gave in a signed up, figuring I could track down a bunch of old university friends I had lost touch with.

Anyway, I'm still not that keen on it..., but one thing I have found is that it's a good way of meeting (online) some photographers you might not ever encounter otherwise. It's sort of that six degrees of separation thing - through a friend of an old photojournalism buddy, by way of a friend of a friend of David Burnett, I have encountered - among several other good photographers - Elena Givone. Givone is an Italian photographer working in Amsterdam.

She has some really good projects on her site - quite wide ranging in style and concept, but all equally fascinating (sometimes with a wry sense of humour).

Although I really quite like her Pazi Mine/Sarajevo and Portrait of a Consumer Society, I was definitely caught unawares by Fat or Slim (aka the Belly Button Project...) - at once both funny, mildly gross, intriguing and surprisingly profound (I'm only glad mine isn't on there)

"A trip through the belly of every human being… men, women, young, elderly, fat, thin, white, tanned: all different and unique. The belly button, the neuralgic centre from where life starts, from where our mother fed us and brought us to life. They are all in the centre, the skin that surrounds then transforms each one of us. The belly is the site of instincts, where our fear and aggressiveness converge, like a cup of water at a constant boiling point. That contracts, swells, gets grumpy and grows. Our belly is with us every day and sometimes it gives guilty feelings when it looks at us, sometimes it makes us feel sick, it’s with us since birth; do we see it in this way if we stand in front of a mirror?"

And on Portrait of a Consumer Society a series of pictures of the same dumpster with it's ever changing cotnents:

"Crowds of people take by assault supermarkets and shops. Ikea’s politics work perfectly: you buy, use and throw. Every day the garbage containers are full of new things; someone doesn’t need it any more, someone needs it: the day after it’s gone.Deprived of value because it ended in the garbage. Like an illusion in front of a passer by that is pushed to ask himself if he may need what he sees. A metaphor of daily life.15 days, 15 compositions. Like 15 paintings ready to describe something new upon our society based on consumption. Until it fades out like a dream, the last day, before everything will be abandoned and cleaned in order to let the system be renewed."

Of her commissioned work, Ciriè 2006 and Documentation of Territory are also very good.

She says of her work: "I inhabit a location until it becomes an inseparable part of me, something which will never leave me; I study it and research it, but even then most compositions are intuitive. Only by immersion in the full complexity of a location, and then interacting with the local population, do I finally discover what to photograph and how. Not only the location itself is important, but also the contrasts and conflicts which every day brings. Understanding a location properly requires understanding and appreciating all parts of the landscape and the environment, at all levels, not just the physical architecture."

Elena isn't yet thirty - if she keeps this up I think she'll be someone to watch closely.

Keith Arnatt - I'm A Real Photographer

I’ve been meaning to write about Kieth Arnatt for ages, but now Christian Patterson has beaten me to it. I first saw some of Arnatt’s work years ago in England and at the time it left me somewhat bemused, but I think it obviously had some effect, because I kept coming back to it over the years. I’m specially taken by his Notes from Jo - photographic records his late wife’s Post-It note messages, usually left for Arnatt on his return from the pub.


Martin Parr wrote a good little article on Arnatt in the Guardian:

"Keith Arnatt was a well-known conceptual artist in the early 70s - his films, installations and photo records were exhibited at the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One show, at the Tate in 1972, became notorious: he displayed the enrolment cards of all the staff members - they then had to be taken down because security guards objected to their photographs being displayed without permission. It was the kind of fuss Arnatt enjoyed; he liked the unpredictable and acts of provocation.


Then, in 1973, he was introduced to the work of Walker Evans, August Sander and Diane Arbus, and never looked back. His colleague, David Hurn, at Newport College of Art - where Arnatt was teaching sculpture - had opened a department of documentary photography. Arnatt was intrigued and inspired by the images. For the next 30 years he worked as a photographer, first in black and white, then changing to colour in the mid-80s. He was prolific - making some 20 series of photographs - until forced to give up in 2004, dogged by illness. All the while he continued to earn his living by teaching, as he sold his work only rarely.


It is difficult to categorise Arnatt or place him in recent photographic history; he approached projects with the curiosity of one immersed in the art practice of an earlier generation. Yet his images appear very modern. Notes From My Wife is a case in point. They are jottings and reminders written by his wife, Jo, in the early 90s. Soon after, she was struck down by a brain tumour and Arnatt nursed her until her death in 1996. He decided to collect the most poignant of the notes and photographed 18 of them. Taken out of context and blown up, they become surreal. This was Arnatt's strength as a photographer: he understood how the smallest detail or observation could be transformed by the act of isolation….


Arnatt's driving force has been more conceptual than documentary, and a decade or so later his artistic strategies are flourishing. Even so, his photographic work has remained largely unrecognised. He has not enjoyed the benefits of gallery representation or high-profile exhibitions since his days as a conceptual artist - the only exception being the British Council, which regularly toured and displayed his photographs. What a pleasure it is, then, to see I'm A Real Photographer, Arnatt's new exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery. It provides a timely opportunity to explore and understand what an important artist and photographer Arnatt is, and how his ideas have changed from outsider practice to mainstream thinking."

Arnatt also made striking still-lifes from things collected on the local rubbish dump, among other things. There is a simple straight forwardness to Arnatt’s work, and yet each time you look at one of his pictures it opens your eyes to something. His concepts seem at times so obvious and yet you find yourself going: huh – how come I never thought of that or looked at those things that way before. There’s also a book produced in conjunction with the recent show at the Photographers Gallery – “I’m a Real Photographer – Keith Arnatt Photographs 1974-2002”

A little bit of Whimsy

Every now and then something like this gives me a chuckle. Too much and the cute factor overloads, but I don't think this quite gets there yet.



From a site called Minimiam (one of those Flash hunt for the elusive dote sites...) via the wacky Dark Roasted Blend site:

"who hasn't dreamt of diving into thick chocolate mouse...

or digging a hideout in a piece of cheese or fruit..."

I also like the care that has gone into hand making the little figures, as well as the somewhat sly imagination into the individual pieces.

Evidence of previous churches

BLDBLG (an excellent site for anyone interested in the built environment) has an intriguing post on a new art museum just opened in Cologne.

The Kolumba museum is built on the site of St. Kolumba's church which was virtually destroyed by allied bombing in WWII.

As Geoff Manaugh writes:

"The backstory, briefly, is that the church – called St. Kolumba – was "reduced to rubble during the second world war," but, we read, "[a] wooden Madonna survived the bombing so, after the war, local architect Gottfried Böhm built the small octagonal chapel on the site, dedicated to the 'Madonna of the Ruins'. In the 1970s, excavations revealed evidence of previous churches, not to mention vaults filled with human bones." Evidence of previous churches! Such a beautiful phrase. Finding evidence of other buildings – older buildings – inside the building you're now standing in.


Or perhaps you find evidence of a newer building, inside the building you're standing in – and you realize, stunned, that someone is replacing the building, slowly and in secret over the course of several years, in bits and pieces, here and there, leaving traces, evidence, clues.

In any case, Kolumba, with its swirling foundations on top of foundations on top of crypts, now houses religious art. In 650 years, someone will build another museum atop its wreckage."

He also links to a longer Guardian article "The perforated palace" which picks up on the museum's architect Peter Zumthor:

"There is no floor, only a red wooden walkway that zigzags through the half-light, past stone stumps and concrete columns that reach up to the ceiling like new shoots. Below this walkway, disappearing into the depths and the darkness, are the excavated ruins of crypts, vaults and foundations. And, barely audible above the traffic passing by outside, comes the sound of wings flapping and pigeons cooing. Where are they? None are visible.


This, the cavernous ground-floor room of Cologne's new Kolumba art museum, is a place of mystery and awe. You enter it from the museum's airy foyer, through thick leather curtains, and are instantly transported to another world. It is dimly lit, but fresh air and dappled sunlight spill in from honeycomb-like perforations high above. Embedded in the light brick walls are the blackened windows and arches of a ruined gothic church, onto which this new building has been grafted. To the right, a blue-green glow emanates from the stained-glass windows of a small, octagonal chapel that has been swallowed by this space. We're looking into it from the outside. It sounds like there's a lot going on here, but it doesn't feel like it. Instead, the sensation is of a sacred space: calm, powerful, unforgettable. Time seems to stand still; thousands of years of history are visible all at once. And audible, too - the pigeons turn out to be a sound installation by Bill Fontana, a ghostly memory of the birds that once lived among these ruins....

Zumthor's handling of the lower level is so striking, it's easy to forget about the galleries. From the foyer with the leather curtains, a narrow path of plain white travertine stone leads upstairs, winding through the two levels, widening here and there to form larger spaces, and opening onto separate rooms.


Fittingly, Kolumba's exhibition philosophy is to mix it all up. Rather than go for a dry chronological layout, works are linked thematically or juxtaposed engagingly. One room is lined with Warhol prints of coloured crosses on black backgrounds. Standing in the middle is a lone, carved Christ figure from the 16th century. Some rooms are tall, lit through opaque high windows, others are long, low and windowless. There's even a darkened room lined with black velvet displaying religious silverware. In keeping with the building's anti-Bilbao exterior, there are no distracting labels to tell you what you're looking at. If you want to know what something is, there's a booklet.


The result is serene yet stimulating. In fact, so seamlessly executed is the whole that, at times, it's hard to separate the building and the art. You might just as well admire the wood-panelling in the reading room as the Rhenish Madonnas on the wall. Or marvel at the way the huge windows are positioned so as to create a glow of light around each corner, and also capture views of the cathedral and the surrounding city..."

(I couldn't find a credit for the photos except the Kolumba)

Risaku Suzuki again - "Yuki Sakura"

I mentioned this work briefly in the post the other day but I just saw Risaku Suzuki has a new book due out from Nazraeli looking at two traditional aspects of the Japanese landscape - snow and cherry blossom. The book is called Yuki Sakura.

Pictures are up on the Yoshii Gallery site from the Cherry Blossom side of the project:

"The Sakura Celebration commences in early spring and has inspired artists since the reign of the Emperor Saga in 8th century Japan. The impressive blooming of the trees after winter symbolizes hope and strength, but as the petals fall, one is reminded of the fragility of beauty and life itself. Suzuki's painterly photographs evoke the sensation of passing time within the permanence of the photographic frame. Suzuki captures the trees without a context or narrative, grasping the physical structure as the essence of the symbolism. The viewer is engaged with a place beyond the visible.

By abandoning the ground and concentrating on the relationship between the blossoms and the sky, the works possess a weightless and effervescent air. Tight framing and large format printing eliminate the distraction of neighboring objects, yet maintain a vast landscape for the viewer. Attention is called to the world of motion beyond the frame, intimately connecting the photograph to an individual's wandering gaze. The focus is pulled from various branches to clusters of flowers and clouds, granting the viewer an opportunity to ruminate on a fleeting moment. Memorializing the perspective of a quick glance enables one to glimpse with a duration and depth impossible to realize in person."

I like the way they are done, although they are verging a little too close to "pretty" for me (mind you, I think Lee Friedlander is the only one who has managed to photography cherry blossom without falling into that trap...). And i could only find a couple of really small jpg's of the "snow" aspect, which looked as if they may well provide a good counterbalance to the cherry blossom.

The Genius of Photography

I just started watching the six part BBC series The Genius of Photography. I actually jumped in at episode 4 - Paper Movies - which covers everyone from Robert Frank to Gary Winogrand to Tony Ray-Jones, Joel Sternfeld, Ed Ruscha, Robert Adams, John Gossage and Martin Parr etc.

It's actually pretty good so far. No great revelations, but you do see many of the photographers at work. And for the general viewer, I think the whole series gives a pretty good overview of some of the best of photography.

Interestingly, this episode is bookended by footage of John Gossage and Martin Parr together on a road trip to go visit William Eggleston in Memphis, which resulted in the book "America 2006 - Obvious and Ordinary" - which is very well reviewed (as usual) on 5B4.

(three pictures above - Martin Parr & John Gossage)

Lisa Robinson

I came across Lisa Robinson's work in one of Photoeye's emails of new books - Snowbound.

Her work caught my eye because winter has almost arrived here (had one snowfall already) and I was thinking it was about time to finally try and get out and about this year and photograph the city in winter. It's a city that spends between a third to almost half the year under snow - so it's about time I explored my own particular (peculiar?) visual take on it - we'll see.

"Photographs with the tranquility one might feel after a fresh snowfall. Five winters long, the young American photographer Lisa M. Robinson took pictures in the snow. Snowbound shows landscapes in which everyday objects-alienated and sunken in snow-"civilize" the natural surroundings. Traces of human existence set accents in the white landscape, delimiting it and often popping up in an amusing or incongruous way. A lonely hammock, a trampoline, and a swimming pool are echoes of the summer past and of personal memories. But Robinson is not interested in showing the obvious; instead, she makes use of the many aggregate states of water-ice, snow, fog, and water-as metaphors for life and transience.".

While I quite like her work, overall as a series, I find it almost a little too isolated and minimal for my own tastes. Although I think there are a enough pictures that have a little something here or there - an orange marker pole, a break in the snow fence or whatever, to break up the perfection.

(BTW, her website doesn't seem to work properly in IE6, which is what I'm stuck with...)

Accommodating Nature: The Photography of Frank Gohlke

5B4 - which has some very good reviews of photography books - has a review of several of Franke Gohlke's books, including details of Accommodating Nature: The Photography of Frank Gohlke, published in conjunction with his retrospective at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

I mentioned Gohlke a while back. Here's a bit of what 5B4 says:

This brings me full circle and to the latest book Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke. Throughout his other books, Frank has exhibited not only his talent for making images but also his remarkable talent for writing. What is an added joy about this new book is that Frank ties all of his various projects together with a running narrative of text that covers his life with photography as a near constant companion. Uncharacteristic of most retrospective type books, this one is not constructed with a strict chronological order to the images. The photographs follow the text in this regard and pleasurably serve as flash back and memory alongside Frank’s steady narration.

Gohlke is a writer of such talent that by the time we get to the two other essays by John Rohrbach and Rebecca Solnit, although perfectly fine and very well crafted, they seem superfluous as Gohlke’s voice has established itself to be the perfect guide.

If you are not familiar with the work of Frank Gohlke then this book would be a perfect introduction. It is finely printed in tri-tone and four color reproduction. The design is conservative but importantly allows the photographs to be reproduced at a good size to fully appreciate Gohlke’s technical prowess.

He also writes quite a bit about Gohlkes other books.

Interestingly it seems to have been published in paperback as well as hardback at the same time.

Finally, the Amon Carter Museum has a short couple of minutes video of Gohlke talking about the first picture (top) here:

New Pictures from Paradise - Thomas Struth

One of my favourite of all Struth's books (along with The Dandelion Room) is New Pictures from Paradise (it's also a nice big large format book).

I discovered is work after I had done a big chunk of my Immersive Landscapes project, but it certainly both encouraged and informed me. I've seen some of Struth's other work "in the flesh", but not these. I'd love to see them on a gallery wall.


From an article in Artforum:

"out from inner processes and needs and then take on a form. My approach to the jungle pictures might be said to be new, in that my initial impulses were pictorial and emotional, rather than theoretical. They are "unconscious places" and thus seem to follow my early city pictures. The photographs taken in the jungles of Australia, Japan, and China, as well as in the California woods, contain a wealth of delicately branched information, which makes it almost impossible, especially in large formats, to isolate single forms. One can spend a lot of time in front of these pictures and remain helpless in terms of knowing how to deal with them. There is no sociocultural context to be read or discovered, unlike in the photographs of people in front of paintings in museums. Standing in front of the facade of the cathedral in Milan, one experiences oneself as a human being defined by specific social and historical conditions. The jungle pictures, on the other hand, emphasize the self. Because of their consistent "allover" nature, "Paradise" numbers 9 and 4 could be understood as membranes for meditation. They present a kind of empty space: emptied to elicit a moment of stillness and internal dialogue. You have to be able to enjoy this silence in order to communicate with yourself--and eventually with others.



In some of the photographs, the picture stands like a screen in front of another, invisible image, dissolving the vanishing point that photography usually puts into focus. I made several attempts to take pictures in the old German woods close to the Czech border, but pine forests always look like Christmas. I didn't want to portray a specific place, that specific forest. Rather I was trying to feel within its primeval branchings the moment of beginning that once was the world. I also avoided pictures that would evoke exotic fantasies or look like botanical gardens. Actually, I don't even see the images as depictions of nature. The theme may play a major part, but the undertone makes the music. It's about the experience of time as well as a certain humility in dealing with things. It's a metaphor for life and death...

...I don't understand why so many people equate the notion of paradise with escapism. Paradise was never a place one could enter--though, in this global moment, escapism is no longer an issue either. The disappearance of the social debate about utopia, which the title "Paradise" alludes to, is an impoverishment and banalization. I focus exclusively on the experience of proximity. Nowadays the human being is reduced to a consumer and therefore to an instrument of a global economic mechanism. I, on the other hand, am interested in peculiarity, the individual ways of people and what goes on inside them when their historical bearings are disoriented. Certain aspects of cities now strike me as being straight out of science fiction, such as a particular intersection in Tokyo's Shibuya district, where everything revolves around the increase and intensification of information. Then I notice a growing confinement, not only in a physical sense but also in terms of vital energy. We must look elsewhere if we want to expand the individual's space. Understanding and communication have increasingly become inner processes originating in silence. As sources of air and space, the jungle pictures offer me an even deeper purchase on another of my ongoing subjects--the city."

Risaku Suzuki - Mont Sainte Victoire

There's a book I got a year or two ago that I just flicked though when it came and then put it on the shelf. But recently I've pulled it a few times and spent some time with it.

Mont Sainte Victoire (published by Nazraeli) is by Japanese photographer Risaku Suzuki and takes an extended, almost meditative look at the subject of so many of Cézanne's paintings. It's a sort of meandering exploration of the place. The light is often harsh and direct, frequently washed out - very like my experience of this part of France. But as we take various paths up and around the mountain, it;s as if we accompany Suzuki on his wanderings.

"Featured in over fifty paintings by Cézanne, the Mont Sainte Victoire in Southern France is familiar even to those who have never been there. A century later, photographer Risaku Suzuki has followed in the great artist’s footsteps, using a quite different medium to depict the landscape on the way. In Suzuki’s photographs there is a feeling of movement and progression, giving the journey a pace that ought to be at odds with a series of static images. Sometimes it is as if the camera has legs and a mind of its own as it strays from the path to take in just one more inconspicuous part of the environment – and all the while the audience is beckoned to come along too. Using limited depth of field, Suzuki focuses the lens on a tree, a piece of rock, unexceptional segments of a remarkable climb upwards." (from Nazraeli)

The book is quite large format and seems to benefit from the viewer (this viewer anyway) spending some time with it. There aren't many pictures from the book online, but Photoeye has one of their extended bookteases on the book. There is also some of Suzuki's other work here (and one picture from this below)

Special Limited Print Offer: Willow - Tin Can Hill

By popular request (quite hassling me know, okay...) I have decided to produce a small edition of prints of the photograph I mentioned the other day from my Immersive Landscapes: Boreal Forest-Precambrian Shield project - so spread the word!

The picture was taken outside Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and is called Willow: Tin Can Hill (incidentally, this tree is very close to where a wrapped up and hidden package of 1960's bills totalling $12,000 was found... not by me unfortunately). Click on the image for a bigger view.

The print is 12"x15" and is printed on the lovely Crane Museo Silver Rag paper. There will only be 30 prints and the price is CDN$100.00 each (+ shipping & handling).

Click on the link below to pay via Paypal (blogger still seems to have trouble with the paypal html...):

Debbie Fleming Caffery

I've oscillated back and forth over Debbie Fleming Caffery forever, going from liking her work, to forgetting about it and not finding it that interesting and then going back to liking it again. Her work certainly has style. I sometimes wonder about the substance.


That said, it's extremely evocative. She could be called the master (mistress?) of shadow. I've got a couple of books of hers - one a small French imprint, and another an older but interesting exhibition catalogue.

From a short interview on Photoeye (where there are also some galleries of her work):

"...The attraction I feel to a subject whether it be person, animal, situation or place, develops into a relationship that feels like being in love. I have had a love affair with sugar cane harvesting in Louisiana since l973. I photograph the harvest every season just like the farmer harvests the cane. My work is a visual articulation of an emotional and sensual response to my subjects—to stories heard and the smells and sounds in the environment. I spend years on most of my projects; without the major ingredient of time, these intense relationships would be nonexistent. Each project flows into the other, as can be seen in my new book, The Shadows...."

I noticed she has a a couple of more recent books out - Polly, and The Shadows as mentioned above, though her book Carry Me Home about the Louisiana sugar plantations was her real breakthrough in 1985

Colour Immersive Landscapes

When I was doing the northern part of my Immersive Landscapes project, I produced a number in colour as well as the black and white that the majority of the project was done in.

Most of the colour photographs didn't work that well. A few did.

Here are a couple of the ones that I think did (I also posted another one previously here). I'll see if I can dig out a couple more. Click for a bigger view.

Colin Blakely

Colin Blakely has some interesting work on his site - that goes from sublime landscapes to catch-you-off-guard suburbs and Middle America (the top pictures is well worth clicking on for a slightly bigger view).

He also has a blog - Not If But When. I'm not sure if it's slightly comforting or somewhat discouraging to discover that even the mythical "tenured professor of photography" has a hard time of breaking into the world of art photography...

(BTW, I'm in two minds about the extended and poetic captions for his work. I haven't included any here, but I can't quite make up my mind if they add to or take away from the pictures?)

Asian Photography Blog

I've talked a few times about some of the new and interesting photography that is coming out of Asia and especially China. More recently I've been following the Asian Photography Blog which has regular updates of a lot of work that generally hasn't been seen that much in the Western mainstream.

My feeling is that much of the new energy and creativity in photography is coming from and is going to come from these regions. Bascially, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Here are a few samples - go browse through the site archive for more:

(first two pictures) "Hong Kong born Dinu emigrated to the UK when he was just a child. Think in Pictures has got the lowdown on Dinu Li’s current exhibition for his The Mother of All Journeys series. The series traces memories of his mother’s move from China to Hong Kong and finally to England.":

-o-o-o-o-

"Bae Bien-U’s large-format photos of pines, mountains, land and seascapes are breathtaking to behold (even on my monitor).":

-o-o-o-o-

"Feng Yan’s minimalistic images are simply arresting and starkingly beautiful to behold. Images of seemingly ordinary places and corners are imbued with a sense of oppression and tension. The pictures seem to contain more than they show and the viewer is left to wonder why; until he/she realizes that these places are more than what they seem to be.":

-o-o-o-o-

"Sato Shintaro’s large format pictures of Japan’s cityscapes at night are pretty interesting. His entire series was shot from emergency exit stairs, of which he says:

I am fascinated by the power of unconsciousness of townscape when looking down from a little higher point. The town is constructed by the necessity, not for the purpose of beauty, but I find it changes beautiful shape and rhythm of which we are not aware when I am on the ground. Colors in twilight, that are mixture of the artificial light and the natural one, emphasize the beauty of town.":

-o-o-o-o-

"This week I seem to have taken on an interest in the replication and distortion of reality in contemporary photography. Xing Danwen’s ongoing series, Urban Fiction, depicts characters against architectural models.

On first sight, I thought it was one of those overdone tilt-shift lens tricks until I chanced upon her website, where she actually included the details for each image.":

More on the Tate crack...

One of Muse-ings regular visitors just started her own blog - Inversion Layer, and her first major post is on Doris Salcedo's piece at the Tate Modern - Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth: a presence not an absence.

Elizabeth's writes of her experience actually visiting the Tate and encountering the work first hand. It's quite illuminating and should, I think, answer any of the questions about why this is good art*.

"And there you have it: right away, even before people have reached the foot of the entrance ramp rules about how to behave in an art gallery are being broken down. People are looking at each other almost as much as they’re looking at the crack and the locus of the art has shifted - at least for me - from the individual response to the crack to the individual response to a whole gallery full of people responding to the crack. It’s an experience that draws people together...

The imperfection that has been introduced makes people look down and both the behaviour of those I observed and my own responses suggest that it also demands a physical response, exploring it with the body as much as the mind. Almost everyone seemed to put a hand or a foot into the crack, to stand in or astride it as though this were an atavistic response like picking at a scab. It also seems to make people behave in a less inhibited manner suggesting that the imperfection makes the experience of art less intimidating, despite The Guardian’s attempts to spin it as endangering art lovers."

In addition, I think it's pretty clear why putting up barriers would be just plain dumb... (among other things, anyone who is stupid enough to fall into it is - well - pretty stupid. And suing someone in the UK still pretty much means you might get your costs covered if you are lucky and a few thousand Pounds or so on top of that - not some ridiculous lottery windfall - or even just the judge telling you that you should have been looking where you were going and to stop wasting his time...). The nanny state seems to have been kept out of the Tate on this one so far.

(*good art isn't necessarily or even about something well crafted and beautiful, or about nature or about making the viewer feel good or or about "doing art" or about "the journey" or whatever. Among other things, it's often about making us feel uncomfortable, about seeing and thinking and experience things we haven't noticed or considered. It's about revelation and reality and, as Simon Schama puts it: "Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...")

(Photos by Elizabeth - oops - Paul, Inversion Layer)

Talking of Deadpan

(Rineke Dijkstra)

Talking of deadpan - portraits or typology - I just came across article (via Christian Patterson - who seems to be on a roll since he got back from Germany - invigorated?):

"Here's looking at you - Engaging yet ambiguous, deadpan photography provides a refuge from emotion in a time of worry" by Greg Cooke in the Boston Globe, which seems a little, well - conflicted - about the whole deadpan/ironic portrait trend..

"...Neutral expressions and cool, head-on compositions have become one of the signature styles of today's art photography. Some have called it deadpan photography: The tone is impassive, matter-of-fact, detached. Often the people are posed...

..."The problem for someone like me - I personally collect mostly portrait work - is there are just a lot of artists today who are all starting to look alike," (gallerist Bernard) Toale says. "One of the problems I'm having is distinguishing one artist's eye from another. I don't know what it means." Then he adds, "It means they all went to a good college and they bought good equipment."

So why are so many photographers adopting this style? Does deadpan photography's detached, distant, analytical approach somehow distill our cultural mood? Does its uniformity reflect the uniformity of our mass-produced, chain-store world? Does it represent the way people feel disconnected from one another, even as technology makes them more interconnected than ever? And could deadpan photography be a refuge from emotion at a time when many of us are overwhelmed with worries about terrorism, war, ecological disaster? Is it about slowing down?

It doesn't hurt that it sells. As Toale says, "It's become popular because it's become popular.""

(Rineke Dijkstra)

BTW, I'm also glad someone highlighted the significant differences between the current deadpan portrait trend and the work of August Sander - in which I agree entirely with Arlette Kayafas.

(August Sander)

"I'm bored with giant cibachromes of three Germans standing behind a mailbox"

(Marco Breuer fig. 4 (Turn))

"I'm bored with giant cibachrome photographs of three Germans standing behind a mailbox. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means I’m fucking bored with it." so speaks David Hickey in an article in the Art Newspaper examining the current state of the art market - of which he is, shall we say, more than a little critical:

...There are people out there who like art more than money. The only bad thing is that there are a lot of artists who like money more than art. This is a problem but consider the benefits. There has never been a better chance to draw attention to oneself by behaving honourably and honestly and meticulously. If you want to be an icon of virtue, this is the moment because you’ll stand out.If you behave well, if you behave correctly, if you make art that will still matter in 200 years, all you can lose is money...

...So we have a bubble. Art bubbles are great. Art bubbles suck money into the art world. Who gets hurt in an art bubble? Greedy artists; stupid collectors. Who else? Nobody with their wits about them gets hurt in an art bubble...

...The art market in the 20th century is first of all a finite market which means there are always more works of art than there are people to buy them. What does that mean? It means, as Leo says, that somebody has to buy two. Somebody has to buy four or five. If the art does not change, nobody’s going to buy two. To maintain itself in public vogue, art needs perpetual reinvestment, an artist needs one show after another show, one essay after another essay—all these are occasions for stylistic development. If I happen to have written about your frog paintings last year and if you put up another show of frog paintings, I’m not coming by. But, if Barbara [Gladstone] calls me and says: “You haven’t seen the salamander paintings, Dave,” then I’m going to rush right over...

...The logic of an institutional market is: “We don’t care. We’re just filling up this hole in our schedule.” It’s really more important [to institutions] if the person building the plywood box is a Zuni [Native American] warrior than if we’ve ever seen the plywood box before. And the presumption is: We don’t have style development anymore because history is over...

...My standards for any gathering of art are: is 99% of this bullshit? Yes. But, is 1% of it interesting? Yes. That’s about your percentages for anything in the world.Eventually some dealer will think, “I’ve got this great idea. I’m only going to show art I like.” Everybody else will go, “Oh, no, don’t do that. You’re fucking kidding. Everybody’s got to show one of each.” When you walk to their stands at art fairs, dealers currently ask you: “Would you like to see my Iranian minimalist? If not, our Berlin pornographer is quite interesting. We’ve got one of each here for any taste.” What this means is that the dealer currently has no power. One day one dealer may say to himself: “I’m going to gather power the way Leo did, I’m just going to show stuff I really believe in.” That’s going to really change things. And the art world as we currently know it will disappear. As exciting as this moment is now, imagine how exciting the collapse is going to be. It’s really something to look forward to. Boom! Thousands of Icari plummeting into the surf. Eventually all the windows where you sell your soul are going to be closed....

(Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis: Atget, 2004 (Based on Eugène Atget's Saint-Cloud, 1926))


Dealer Ed Winkleman takes issue with Hickey on his blog, concluding:

This ending is disappointing. As it is with all (art bubble) deathwatch cheerleaders, Hickey seems to be longing for the next new thing, not because he can even assume it will be better than what we have now, but merely because it will be new, something to look forward to, and he won't be so fucking bored by it. That's not a good enough reason for me. First and foremost, whether Hickey agrees or not, I know dealers who truly believe they are only showing stuff they truly believe in. So if that's all it took, Hickey would have his change now. What I think Dave is really arguing for here is for someone else to end his ennui. The old Pet Shop Boys lyrics spring to mind: "We were never feeling bored, cause we were never being boring."

Which I think is a little mistaken (for one thing, only those who look back on the 80's with a certain odd nostalgia can cite the Petshop Boys as an authority...). Winkleman seems to think Hickey is essentially looking for novelty in art, but it seems to me he's more concerned with honesty - work that is honest, that people can believe in and not just the next hot thing. Hickey is bored not because the work he sees is bad, or because wants something new and novel (or even exciting), but because I think he wants something that's real. And so much of the current art world (including photography) is about illusion and superficiality. Which seems to work right now, so people just keep producing more of the same with slight variations - three Germans stood in front of a lamp-post.

(Rob Fisher Unity Road #5)

Incidental to this, I just read a dialogue in the current Blindspot with Marco Breuer called Nevertheless A Photograph where he says (in part):

"...it is not the technology I am interested in so much as the idea of true investigations in photography, as opposed to illustration. I was looking for alternatives to the default mode of contemporary photography, which is now a 4 x 5-inch color negative, whether portrait or typology, blown up to 30 x 40 inches or larger and mounted behind Plexi. That's the current orthodoxy, one that experienced in Germany and continue to question. The photographers in this issue are committed to photography, but like me, they are not satisfied with what is known and done..."

(Michelle Kloehn from Centrally Located)


Now, whether the portfolios in the current Blindspot meet those (or Hickey's) criteria is another question - but at least someone is trying. And as for photography in general, I certainly wish that some of the current galleries would actually show work they believe in, not work they think fits the current fashion (though at least photography has books as an integral part of the medium - and I think we see much more of this kind of work in published form than on gallery walls). So in the end, it probably wouldn't be that bad a thing for the bubble to burst - the collapse of the current gallery/market paradigm - which for too long has had something of a stifling death grip on a lot of honest creativity

Finally, as a postscript, I couldn't actually find a photograph of three Germans standing behind a mailbox - but I'm sure someone from a prestigious Kunstakamdemie somewhere surely must have taken one...


(all pictures from the current Blindspot)

Early Colour Daguerreotypes

Christian Patterson has been running an occasional series on the history and origins of colour photography.

He put up an intriguing post the other day about the early colour daguerreotypes of Levi Hill dating from around 1850

This process - the Hillotype - has been known about for a long time, but it was considered most likely to be fraudulent and not really the first colour photographic process. But the Smithsonian (which owns the Hillotype above), Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation as well as historian Joseph Boudreau have been researching the process. The Smithsonian and the Getty appear to have come to the conclusion that although Hill did add some hand colouring to some of his plates to enhance its effectiveness. In reproducing the difficult process from Hill's writings, Boudreau found he could actually produce naturally colored "dingy, but distinct, color Daguerreotypes".

Conservation scientists from the Getty Conservation Institute likewise found that although they could detect additions to some of the images - such as Prussian Blue - there were other naturally coloured parts of the daguerreotypes which did indeed seem to be inherent to Hill's photographic process. In all likelihood Hill seems to have added colour pigments later in the areas where the natural colours of the process were weak.

Which puts the birth of colour photography pretty close to the birth of photography itself. Hill was probably something of a flawed genius - part instinctive scientist part fraud. But it also seems there was a genuine basis to his experiments in early (very early) colour photography.

Incidentally, I love this bit from John H. Lienhard's article. His experiments were seen as a direct threat to the photographic status quo - which sounds rather reminiscent of the more fundamentalist factions of current "analogue" vs. digital debate - I can just see a mob from APUG turning up with their pitch-forks and flaming torches... :-)

"One myth of early color photography holds that the Reverand Levi Hill of Westkill, New York, invented it as early as 1850. That seems too preposterous to take seriously, but art historian Joseph Boudreau looks more closely at Hill. When Hill announced his process, he was visited by a group from the New York Daguerrean Association. They told him to keep quiet or they’d wreck his lab. Daguerreotypes were becoming obsolete and they feared for their livelihood.

Hill bought a revolver and a mean guard dog, and he forged ahead. People like Samuel F. B. Morse inspected his work and declared it sound. In 1856, Hill published a rambling account of what he now called the Hillotype process. But he also used the book to attack the Daguerrean Association. They, in turn, got a court order requiring all copies of the book to be destroyed...

..Boudreau found a surviving copy of Hill’s book and set about to replicate the process. It was long and difficult, but it actually worked. He managed to produce some dingy, but distinct, color Daguerreotypes. Hill had actually succeeded — 80 years too soon."

Listen to the story on NPR

Christian has more links on his blog

Hansel and Gretel

I must say that I've just never got the whole William Wegman weimaraners thing. Dogs dressed up once for art photography is new. Dogs dressed up for art twice is ironic. After that it's just plain cute kitsch and is as much art as Anne Geddes baby pictures - despite regular justifications that; "no, no, it really is art" - and; "but they are really really big Polaroids, so they must be art".

How someone has managed to sustain a whole career as an artist with this is confounding only to the extent that we easily forget H.L. Mencken's rejoinder that "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public".

That said, The New Yorker features the work of 17 artists who were invited by the Metropolitan Opera House to exhibit their interpretations of Humperdinck's classic tale of Hansel and Gretel, in response to their upcoming production.

For once, I have to admit that Wegman hit the mark (though I also rather quite like Eleanor Davis' “Witch House” - and here)

Bas Princen - Artificial Arcadia

I have a book of colour photography I got a few years ago that I go back to every now and then - Artificial Arcadia by Dutch photographer and architect Bas Princen.

It's pretty hard to find many of Princen's pictures online. The book is about is about "un-natural" leisure spaces, disregarded zones between suburb and field, empty left-over spaces put to other uses, the "jardin anglo-chinoise of the golf course:

"His photos show snippets of landscape, not as an illustration of reality but
rather as images of a potential reality of this landscape. He often photographs
places that we do not know about, too abandoned to be nature, places whose
initial function we have long forgotten about, even if they have retained traces
of it. What interests him and what he photographs is the appropriation of such
places, and traces of activities reveal them in their true nature, and restore a
new reality to them. These are mutations of landscape which, through new and
often fleeting uses take on a different meaning."

There are some images by Princen here, but mostly not from Artificial Arcadia.

I must say that these kind of spaces have always fascinated me, from playing in old industrial sites and abandoned wool baron's mansions (owned by the superbly named Titus Salt) as a child right through to my current photographic work on suburbs, urban wild spaces and interstitial zones and alleyways.