A couple of squares

Or rather a couple or so.

Here are a few from my first experiments with the square format - you might call them the start of Traces 2.

I've only got two or three rolls back (and some of those frames were just used to check the old camera was still working and focussed okay...).


I also just found that this city of about a million now has nowhere left that process C41 neg film - at least in sizes above 35mm. So I now have to send the neg film out to Vancouver by mail - jeesh. At least you can still buy the stuff for now.

Anyway. These were the first two or three I found interesting and I'm now waiting for the next three or four rolls to come back. Mind you, it's still not exactly going out and photographing weather, with the -28c to -35c temperatures and wind chills often doing down to below -40c due to last into next week some time... oh well.

"Well, it looks like truth?"

("Machinen 3440, 2003" by Thomas Ruff)

I've just started looking at Michael Abrams' fascinating and thoughtfully book Strange and Singular which explores the vernacular photograph and the snapshot (which I want to write about soon - hopefully after I have had a chance to talk to Michael). As an archivist/curator and as a photographer, such images have always fascinated me - although in recent years I have certainly become more interested in them.

In this vein, I've also been looking at the information about a current exhibit at the International Centre for Photography - Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art.


("Abdul Aziz holding a photograph of his brother, Mula Abdul Hakim, 1997" from the series "The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan" by Fazal Sheikh)


There was a good little review in the NY Times about it a while back headlined "Well, it looks like truth?"

...The archive of the title is less a thing than a concept, an immersive environment: the sum total of documentary images circulating in the culture, on the street, in the media, and finally in what is called the collective memory, the “Where were you when you heard about the World Trade Center?” factor.

Photography, with its extensions in film, video and the digital realm, is the main vehicle for these images. The time was, we thought of photographs as recorders of reality. Now we know they largely invent reality. At one stage or another, whether in shooting, developing, editing or placement, the pictures are manipulated, which means that we are manipulated. We are so used to this that we don’t see it; it’s just a fact of life.

Art, which is in the business of questioning facts, takes manipulation as a subject of investigation. And certain contemporary photographers do so by diving deep into the archive to explore its mechanics and to carve their own clarifying archives from it...

The second, far less well-known work that opens the show is a 1987 silk-screen piece by Robert Morris that does what the Warhol does but in a deadlier way. It too is based on an archival image, a 1945 photograph of the corpse of a woman taken in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Although such pictures initially circulated in the popular press, they were soon set aside in an ethically fraught image bank of 20th-century horrors. As if acknowledging prohibitions, Mr. Morris has half-obscured the woman’s figure with old-masterish strokes of paint and encased it, like a relic, in a thick black frame swelling with body parts and weapons in relief...

("Floh: Bathers in Sea, 2000" by Tacita Dean)

Other artists present randomness as the archive’s logic. The casual snapshots that make up Tacita Dean’s salon-style “Floh” may look like a natural grouping. In fact they are all found pictures that the artist, acting as a curator, has sorted into a semblance of unity.

And from the ICP info on the Exhibition:

No single definition can convey the complexities of a concept like the archive. The standard view evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts. Against this we have another view of the archival impulse as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images. It is this latter formulation that has engaged the attention of so many contemporary artists. Archive Fever explores the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and interrogated archival structures and materials. The principal vehicles of these artistic practices—photography and film—are also preeminent forms of archival material, and artists have used them in a variety of ways. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by unusual cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. In spite of the diversity of subject matter, these works are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

("The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993-1996" by Zoe Leonard)


I'm still personally exploring all these things, both with my own work and with the archives and vernacular photographs I come into contact with - all these things intrigue me - fiction, truth, memory, appearances, memento, history, identity..

(Oh, and there's also a big thick book of the show coming out: Archive Fever from Steidl)


("Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990" by Felix Gonzalez-Torres)

Jacob Carter

I came across Jacob Carter's work at BLDGBLOG.

He has a number of series - among others: River Thames; Wilderness Series, Canada; 1940 Landscape Series; Utopian Visions.

"The Wilderness Series are a collection of photos taken in remote parts of Canada, where there is little human habitation. Only vital services can be found spread across the surrounding country, from rail lines carrying freight to the rare but vital gas station. I have focused in particular on the parallels between the natural, untouched surroundings and the elements of human intervention that become greatly apparent when seen in such a context.



The photographs were created using a combination of both digital and filmic techniques: Photographed using film that expired in the 1970s which is then digitally restored and manipulated to restore appropriate details...

All technologies and inventions have written within their lifespan the certainty of being rendered obsolete by improvement. Technology is in a state of unceasing change.

The fabric of cities stand as testament to the unrelenting development by man upon once open land. Layer upon layer of dense building and rebuilding; the constant urge to improve upon or change the surrounding environment has given rise to vivid cityscapes. Empty wharfs, unused power stations and other now derelict buildings of industry stand as the ruins and remains of once cutting edge technologies.

I believe a similar parallel exists in the world of photography. A catalogue of photographic processes and techniques now cast aside by progress stands testament to this...

The most recent work I have created is the result of a long interest in the aesthetic of early photographic methods, in particular colour postcards from the 19th century. I have attempted to synthesis the particular colours, textures and tones that have become synonymous with a more primitive era of photography.

The techniques are the result of much research, experimenting with methods such as Gum Bichromate and salt-printing, as well as using varnishes. The resulting images were created using specifically chosen expired film stock (expiry date 1970!) and then perfecting the images digitally."

-47c ...

(Photo via Edmonton Journal by Walter Tychnowicz - Jasper Ave., Sunday)

Definitely Brass Monkey weather...

It was -47c with the windchill in Edmonton this morning when I took the kids to school (-30c actual), so I don't think I'll be going out of the office much today. Just plenty of cappuccinos and looking at the three fantastic photo books that arrived on the weekend in a box from Loostrife Editions.

Capa Cache Discovered

(Thousands of negatives of photographs taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, long thought to be lost forever, have resurfaced)

A cache of rolls of Robert Capa's negatives from the Spanish Civil War - long thought to have been lost during the Nazi occupation of Paris - have been discovered.

From the NY Times:

T0 the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.

The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.

Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so...

From what experts have been able to piece together from archives and the research of Mr. Whelan, the biographer (who died last year), Capa apparently asked his darkroom manager, a Hungarian friend and photographer named Imre Weisz, known as Cziki, to save his negatives in 1939 or 1940, when Capa was in New York and feared his work would be destroyed.

Mr. Weisz is believed to have taken the valises to Marseille, but was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Algiers. At some point the negatives ended up with General Aguilar Gonzalez, who carried them to Mexico, where he died in 1967. It is unclear whether the general knew who had taken the pictures or what they showed; but if he did, he appears never to have tried to contact Capa or Mr. Weisz...

The films eventually came into the possession of Gen. Gonzalez's nephew. After some false starts and much negotiation they finally ended up with Capa's brother Cornell at the International Centre for Photography

...“They seem like they were made yesterday,” he said. “They’re not brittle at all. They’re very fresh. We’ve sort of gingerly peeked at some of them just to get a sense of what’s on each roll.”

And discoveries have already been made from the boxes — one red, one green and one beige — whose contents appear to have been carefully labeled in hand-drawn grids made by Mr. Weisz or another studio assistant. Researchers have come across pictures of Hemingway and of Federico García Lorca.

The negative for one of Chim’s most famous Spanish Civil War photographs, showing a woman cradling a baby at her breast as she gazes up toward the speaker at a mass outdoor meeting in 1936, has also been found. “We were astonished to see it,” Mr. Wallis said. Full story at the NY Times

All I can say is - WOW

The Secret's Out

Well, I guess the secret is out... I've talked at least a couple of times about the wonderful historic photograph resources at the Library of Congress, and how some interesting parts of their archives are digitized - some of them with large enough downloadable files to be able to print a nice 11x14 print. Everything from Walker Evans, to Ansel Adams, to the Depression in Colour to Panoramics of 1920's bathing beauty competitions to Gardner and Brady's Civil War photographs and more.

The problem was that the good digitized images were always a little hard to search out on their database - which in itself was an iteration of some pretty early work in collections databases. Although it is reasonably efficient, it is a little clunky by today's standards.

Now, the LoC has decided to put part of it's digital collections online on Flickr. They've started with the FSA/Depression in Colour work and also New in the 1910's - I think, to test the waters. Hopefully more will go up with time. The files sizes are also modest (a function of Flickr I think) - but they have links to the higher-res files when they exist.

In response to this move by the LoC, one of my photo-archivist colleagues commented:

"It is more than just an opportunity for user access. Crowdsourcing the onerous task of tagging/SEO-ing/researching digitized materials is, in my research and work, a way to _translate_ collections on line in ways that utilize the emerging social and semantic technologies to move beyond merely early 90s style emulation of meatspace. Not only does your collection get organized/worked on for free but socialized, publicized and spread with potential for as-yet undefined pedagocial richness."

Which - when you unpack it - is actually pretty interesting...

(I wasn't going to bother with the captions, but I just had to add this one: "An American pineapple, of the kind the Axis finds hard to digest, is ready to leave the hand of an infantryman in training at Fort Belvoir, Va. American soldiers make good grenade throwers")

There have also been quite a few blogposts about this, but my favourite was from Mrs. Deane who pointed out that the LoC pictures are starting to get typically Flickresque comments:

"nice sharp photograph"

"excellent and very artistic photo! ;]" (I'm sure Jack Delano would be pleased to know it... but he passed away in 1997...)

"Hi, I'm an admin for a group and we'd love to have your photo added to the group." (hmm - see above)

“Very good detail and wide dynamic range in the image. I suppose the transparency is bigger then 35mm” (Damn right it is - and it gave better pictures back in 1943 than your DSLR is ever likely to give today!)

Love it! (though I'd have to say there really are many more "wow" comments in response to people discovering not only that the 1940's were in colour, but also what fantastic pictures there are in this collection and are available to them).

BTW, the Wisconsin Historical Society has also started doing this with their collection, including the intriguing Wisconsin Death Trip Photographs. Their digital imaging specialist is Andy Adams of Flakphoto

(Oh - and if anyone finds a comment pointing out to Andreas Feninger that his picture would be better if he used the rule of thirds, he should set the iso on 400 on his digicam and should really introduce some Gaussian Blur into the sky, do let me know)

Detroit Public Schools Book Depository/ Roosevelt Warehouse

John Brownlow of the Streetphoto List pointed me to these amazing photos from "Sweetjuniper" on Flickr of the derelict Detroit Public Schools Book Depository/ Roosevelt Warehouse

"This is inside the building right next to the Michigan Central Station. Apparently at one time it was a post office, and then it was used by the Detroit Public schools to store textbooks and materials. The columns in here are particularly beautiful. I think I read somewhere that the building was designed by Albert Kahn, but I haven't been able to verify that.All those metal bars once supported pallets where all those papers and books were stored. This is the state I found it in."

Like the ruins of some war devastated city or a building unearthed from dormancy by a team of archaeologists, the textbooks from the 1980 - pile after collapsed pile - remain like artifacts of some long dead civilization.

The photographer writes about their experience here :

"This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven't burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and "sadness" some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city's school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people...

Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the "ghetto palm" grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor..." (more)

The Hand Drawn Negative

(Charles-François Daubigny
Vâches à l'abreuvoir)

I must say, I had never come across this art form until I noticed a post at gmtPlus9 (-15) about an exhibition at Peter Freeman - The Hand Drawn Negative: Clichés-Verre by Corot, Daubigny, Delacroix, Millet and Rousseau (1854 - 1862). They are quite intriguing.

Clichés-verre were an early experiment by various artist exploring the possibilities that the new photographic medium presented.

(Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Les Arbres dans la montagne)

"...The cliché-verre, a relatively obscure and still largely-overlooked medium, was borne amidst the flurry of excitement and experimentation following the invention of photography in the early 19th century. Considered a hybrid of printmaking and photography yet made without camera, the cliché-verre was both a creative curiosity and an innovative and unique means to instantly produce differing versions of a single image.

(Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Le Petit Berger (second plate))

Starting with a collodion-covered glass plate, the artist would draw a picture using an etching needle, paintbrush-end or stick; the resulting cliché-verre thus functions as a glass negative for contact printing. Less commonly, an image could also be conceived tonally by painting different densities of emulsion onto the glass surface. Once prepared, the glass plate would be placed face-down against light-sensitive paper, usually salt paper, and exposed to the sun, and the image would slowly be reproduced onto the paper through the photographic process. To achieve a varied effect, the glass plate could also be flipped or a second plate of glass could be inserted between image and paper, producing a softer, almost dewy interpretation of the original image via the refraction of the light rays through the glass.

(Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Le Petit Berger (first plate))

It was in the communities of Arras just outside of Paris and at Barbizon near the Fountainebleau forest where cliché-verre gained a foothold and briefly flourished in France over the course of two decades. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), greatly intrigued by photography, became its most passionate and prolific practitioner, ultimately attaining fluid, free, almost abstract sketches which demonstrate his assurance with the medium and which are striking in their modernity. Corot's extensive visual exploration with this new medium was enthusiastically shared by Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878), whose expertise as an etcher informed his sensitive and masterful treatment of the glass plate..."

It's interesting to see how much experimenation took place in the early days of photography - far more than just these - in many ways, almost nothing is new. I guess today if they were showing this work, Corot, Delacroix et al would be described as "artists working in photographic medium"...

(Charles-François Daubigny
Effet de nuit)

The Alphabet Project

I've been invited to take part in the Alphabet Project:

What is the Alphabet Project?

The Alphabet Project is a photography project that is taking place between March 2008 and March 2009. It involves 26 photographers from around the world. Each photographer has a first name that begins with an unique letter of the alphabet, (see right). Every two weeks the person whose letter of the alphabet it is sets a photographic task for both themselves and the other 25 photographers.

The task that the photographer sets can be an adjective, a noun, a specific instruction, a verb etc but it must start with the same letter as the first letter in their name.

By the end of the year there will be 676 photographs with 26 individual interpretations of 26 tasks.

It sounds like fun and should keep me on my toes - I'm hoping it will give me a bit of a creative work-out and keep me thinking and seeing new things instead of getting stuck in the tunnel vision of one or two projects.

I just hope I can keep up producing enough good pictures.

btw - not all the letters are taken yet...

(photo - Walker Evans)

Paul Greenleaf's postcards

(This is were [sic] we go in the water you would love it the sun shines all day, hope you are feeling better.)


I just came across Paul Greenleaf's work (via conscientious).

I especially like Correspondence where he takes postcards from about the 1960's and re-photographs the scene - the resulting work includes the new photograph, the picture postcard as well as the original message on the back.

(Here for 8 days on holiday. Having a great time.)

There's always something slightly depressing about most English seaside towns - even at the height of the season (never mind somewhere like Bognor Regis is the middle of winter...) - and yet there's also something about them that attracts - like a moth to a flame. And the ubiquitous holiday postcard "Wish you were here... etc" embodies all of this.

"The ongoing series Correspondence, combines 'found' photography with new photographic work. An initial discovery of old postcards at Greenwich market inspired Paul to retrace and photograph the depicted locations.

'I aim to highlight how the land has changed physically, by neglect, ‘development’ or sometimes coastal erosion, and the way the landscape has changed culturally, illustrating changing trends. The work exposes clichés within these rose-tinted tourist towns and offers a modern day alternative to the picturesque.

( am enjoying every minute of our holiday & am a good girl. We have had lots of sunshine but today is cloudy. We went to Lyme Regis on Monday.)

With the original postcards exhibited alongside the photographs, I invite a direct comparison between the past and present, both being subjective viewpoints. The 21st century ‘reality’ of the locations offers a stark contrast to the often vibrantly coloured dream-like postcard images, revealing a personal view of contemporary Britain.'"

I like the idea of a sort of combination of the re-photographic survey idea and also vernacular photographs - it's at essence a very simple one. And I particularly like the way this is done - it's straightforward and unpretentious, but nicely effective. Some vistas have changed dramatically and yet some have changed hardly at all.


(Had a pretty good journey on wed. A few incidents on route. [sic] Weather perfect so far. Been out all day Thurs & to-day. Rhoda knows lots of beauty spots & loves driving. Sidmouth is not busy at the moment still like it very much – the flat is super. All being as planned return Wed. Will see you soon.)

I can recall walking along that path at Ventor on a trip to the Isle of Wight and my Mother probably has a stack of these old postcards we received over the years, and I can certainly remember sending a good few of them...

(This is our hotel v. posh. We are here till Saturday tripping all over with WALLY (NO COMMENTS PLEASE) the coach driver he and the two old biddies (Bell & her Dozy friend) are a scream!……So see you at 8.30am 2nd Sept till then HAPPY HOLS.)

Mårten Lange

I quite like Swedish photographer Mårten Lange's work for a couple of reasons.

The first is pretty obvious - his Woodland project approaches the whole "trees/forest" subject in a way that seems failry close to my own approach - and on the whole I like the way he's done it.

His Machina work has also grown on me quite a bit. I also like the similarly between the two projects; the view of complex tangles, a sort of disorder (yet with an underlying - less obvious - order) and messiness. Visually confusing but intriguing.

The second reason is how he approached publishing his work. He has established his own Press and publishes what are basically photo-zines which are in a way closer to the zine comic book world than the fine art photo book world. It's a nice approach. 5B4 has a good review of his books and his publishing

"When most young artists dream of publishing a photography book they may desire for it to be accepted into the hands of a Hatje Cantz, Aperture or Steidl. Often the dream entails lush production values and a care given that is tantamount to the respect one tends to place upon their own work.

On the other side of the coin, there are artists that have a DIY approach similar to the vast amounts of fanzines (’zines) that appeared throughout the heyday of the punk and hardcore music movements in the early 1980’s. ‘Zines are rather cheaply produced magazines of varying length, often Xeroxed and staple bound and distributed through various independent channels...

One such small publisher who is taking advantage of this type of low-fi production is called Farewell Books which is run by a photographer named Marten Lange in Sweden. Originally started to publish his own photography, he has branched out to publish others including the prominent photographer and conceptual artist John Divola. All of the books are various sizes; laser printed and perfect bound in soft cover."

Finally, I'm pretty sure I can see a big dose of influence from Lee Friedlander in his work - both the Desert and Olmsted work and also the At Worker and Cray projects. I wonder if Lange is breaking away from that a bit more in new work?

Melissa Catanese Pt III - on process

When I posted last week about Melissa Catanese's work I mentioned the sort of "off to one side" part of her website she calls "More" and said:

"My guess is (and I could also be completely wrong) is that this is slightly older work, but she doesn't want to quite abandon it. If I'm correct and that's the case, I found it worthwhile looking at because to me it seemed to give a picture of her developing her work and ideas and way of seeing things over time and then it's as if she has found her stride in the main, new (?) work she's presenting - Stardust, Bugs, Jungle, Garden etc. Maybe I'll hear from her one way or the other."

Well, she did and it turns out my guess was fairly close. Melissa sent me an email that said in part:

"As far as the way my website is designed, you’re pretty much right—the homepage has projects that are completed, at least in their visual form. I think of the ‘more’ section as sketches or thoughts, in fact before my last update this section was titled, 'sketches'. The work in this section is both old and new. Towards the end is older work edited in the nature of a diary, this is the work I can’t seem to part with, like you said! Much of the work in this section is new, still in sketch form and pragmatic in the way it’s edited. I think including work in progress can play with the fluidity of a project and aid in the process of working it out. It’s a good exercise for me. But the downside to this is, if misinterpreted, the work is viewed as finished. This is an issue I’m still struggling to resolve."

I'm not sure that last part is really a problem - first, the section is slightly tucked away - and secondly, at least one person figured out broadly what it was... although perhaps in part because it was so recognisable to me. In my own work I go through very much the same process. They are sketches, ideas, experiments, notes - sometimes they work and sometimes they don't - but you learn from them (especially the ones that don't) and they propel you a bit further towards what you are trying to do, what you are exploring, where you are pushing your boundaries back. And then things will click and something will come together - for a while at least - until you head off in a new direction.

And they aren't just preliminary sketches, but they usually continue through as you work - as you adjust your direction or your pace - as something new strikes you or as you you look back to figure out how you got here.

As someone doing the same sort of thing, I personally find this both fascinating and immensely valuable - to see these sorts of rough sketches. And even if you aren't actively pursuing your own work, I think it's likely that they can also help inform and broaden a viewers understanding of where the work is coming from and what it's about - you get a chance to see and visually engage with a bit of the process.

So I hope people can see that these aren't, say, older/earlier finished works - but rather it's like getting a glimpse of an artists sketchbook or a writers notebook - fragments of the process.

(Note - the photographs here are a mixture - some from the completed projects, from the sketches in "more").

Eva Lauterlein

An interesting series from Swiss Photographer Eva Lauterlein - vertigo(s) - portraying the town of Hyères.

Unfortunately - for me anyway - all the info is in French and the google translation makes about as much sense as my schoolboy French translation...

She also has a rather more radical series - chimères - where she takes portraits from numerous (30 or so?) different angles of the same person and then melds them digitally. The people take on a slightly cyborg look while still retaining their essential characteristics - the sense of chimera certainly comes through. I'm still not quite sure about this one yet, but its starting to interest me a bit.

Karl Höcker's Auschwitz photo album

(SS officer Karl Hoecker shakes hands with his dog Favorit. )

I saw these pictures of the SS Guards from Auschwitz "off duty" last year some time. But I didn't want to talk about them then. I think their importance is significant and I needed time for them to sink in and to be able to think about them - to in some way make sense of them.

(SS officers together with women and a baby relax on lounge chairs on a deck in Solahuette.)

The pictures are all from an album that belonged to SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, who was Adjutant to SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer the Commandant of Auschwitz in 1944/45. The album was passed on to the Holocaust Museum in 2006 by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who was a Counter-Intelligence Officer working in Germany at the end of, and just after the war. As part of the teams hunting down Nazi war criminals he had picked up the album in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt.

(Members of the SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) and SS officer Karl Hoecker sit on a fence railing in Solahuette eating bowls of blueberries)

The album shows the ordinary side of barracks life (and ordinary is the right word here) for the troops running Auschwitz.

My thoughts finally started to come together about these photographs when I was reading Max Sebald's early book The Immigrants. It deals with four different people and four different stories (five if you count the author himself) who were in some way exiles from Germany. It covers the periods from both before and after World War II (and earlier in a few places). One of the stories is that of Max Feber now in self exile in Manchester, England. Sebald travels back to the area he sets as Feber's home in Germany, which is close to the same area in Southern Bavaria that Sebald himself grew up in, during and just after WWII.

(Nazi officers and female auxiliaries (Helferinnen) run down a wooden bridge in Solahuette)

Sebald describes (as he frequently does elsewhere) the small towns of Bavaria and the Allgäu region during the 1920's and early 1930's. Many rich with a vibrant Jewish community - part of the community as a whole. In many towns, forming up to 30% of the population. He describes their lives and families and jobs. Then, post-war as Sebald was growing up, and later on as he re-visits in the 1980's, there are none. Their homes and businesses long since appropriated (see this recent art case, for example), their memory gone. But more than that - he describes a sort of collective amnesia of the people he meets in these towns now - a wilful state of denial that these people - the German jews, their homes and businesses - ever existed in these places - the slate of their existence wiped clean.

(SS officer Karl Hoecker and some women relax on lounge chairs on a deck in Solahuette)

(I also recently read Michael Chambon's humorous yet thought provoking "detective" novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, in which an alternate Jewish history evolves. The Holocaust was diverted by laying Berlin in nuclear ruins early in WWII, settlement in Israel - however - failed and so several million Jews were settled post-war in the Alaska panhandle... but with their families, histories and traditions of all sorts fairly intact - a good read btw).

(An accordionist leads a sing-along for SS officers at their retreat at Solahuette outside Auschwitz - front centre right is SS Doctor Josef Mengele)

All this helped my see these photographs a little more clearly. The SS Officers and their wives and girlfriends enjoying everyday life. The soldiers and the SS women's auxiliaries having fun. All scenes from Garrison life that almost any soldier anywhere would recognise - picnics, concerts, drinks and formal occasions in the mess, musical concerts, joking and laughing, sunning themselves outside the barracks - the soldiers "frolicking" as someone put it. All the while, a few short miles away - these men and women commuting daily to their duties - the production line carnage, suffering and death of Auschwitz carried on - efficient and well ordered.

(SS officers gather for drinks following the dedication of the new SS hospital in Auschwitz)

Hannah Arendt's dictum of "The banality of evil" is inevitable quoted in connection with this album of photographs - but rightly so. It is perhaps the best, almost perfect example of what she was defining:

"...the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopath but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal." (for once the Wikipedia entry is spot on).

(Members of the SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) arrive by bus at Solahuette, the SS retreat near Auschwitz)

And that's why these pictures are so important. Yes, we need George Rodger's brutally honest photographs of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and what he witnessed there - so painful we can hardly bear to look at them (Rodger was one of the founding four of Magnum). We need the incredible film "Memory of the Camps" - produced by the British in 1945 (with assistance from Alfred Hitchcock) with its footage from several concentration camps - but left unfinished. Rediscovered in the Imperial War Museum in 1985 it was broadcast for the first time. The script was read by veteran war-time actor Trevor Howard, but like parts of the film, the script was unfinished. So we get fragments, silences, dead air for much of it - making it perhaps one of the most poignant and effective descriptions of the horror that was found - heightened by the obvious anger and outrage that is in the script from 1945. (you can watch it online).

(SS officers socialize on the grounds of the SS retreat Solahuette outside of Auschwitz)

We need these vivid documents (and more), but SS-Obersturmführer Höcker's album present the other - equally important - part of the picture. These were on the whole not monsters who perpetrated these acts, but ordinary everyday men and women - men and women who enjoyed a drink after work, played the accordion, went on picnics, even fell in love. Their evil was banal, but all the more dangerous and horrific because they were not acting outside the norms of society, but carrying out societies wishes. They believed that what they were doing was for the good and welfare of their own people. They were doing their duty - not "just following orders" under duress, but acting as dutiful members of the state. They simply believed in what they were doing - apparently, and on the whole, without serious internal conflict. (this is also what makes them so different from the Abu Ghraib pictures - as abhorrent as those were, they were "trophy" photographs - photographs of men and women who had "got away with it" and knew it. They knew they were being sadistic, acting out some kind of gamer fantasy for real, but deep down - in fact probably not that deep down at all - they knew what they were doing was wrong. So despite how far up the chain of command the complicity went, I see this as a substantial difference between those and this album. Society as a whole was not condoning - implicitly or explicitly what they were doing in Iraq.)

(Auschwitz personnel, including many physicians, sit around an outdoor table drinking probably following a visit to coal mine)

These pictures return us again to the power of photography - its power to depict the ordinary in compelling detail, its power to contain memory, its power to work in opposition to those who would attempt to monopolise history, to draw out these individual moments. And in their banality, these photographs become all the more powerful and unforgettable.

(SS officer Karl Hoecker lights a candle on a Christmas tree)

(as a final aside, Höcker's history itself is also telling precisely because it is so typical and mundane. The mine the officers visited above was run with slave labour, with the minimum amount of rations carefully calculated against the amount of work a labourer could provide before they dropped so as to maximise productivity for the least cost - all with the cold efficiency of an accountants actuarial tables. The way Höcker was dealt with and treated - even down to getting his comfortable job back after a short term for his crimes as recently as 1970 - also seems to say much. Finally, perhaps, what could be more mundane than a bank teller keeping tally of the horrific day to day work and "productivity" of Auschwitz:

"Karl Höcker was born in Engershausen, Germany, in December 1911. His father, a construction worker, was killed in World War I, and his mother struggled to support the family. Höcker, who worked as a bank teller in Lubbecke, joined the SS in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937. He married in 1937, had a daughter in 1939 and, in October 1944, a son. Upon the outbreak of war, Hoecker was assigned to the Neuengamme concentration camp. In 1943, he became the adjutant to the commandant at Majdanek-Lublin during the Operation Reinhardt mass deportations and murders. When Sturmbahnführer Richard Baer became the commandant of Auschwitz in May 1944, Hoecker was also reassigned to the camp, again in the position of adjutant. Hoecker remained at Auschwitz until the evacuation, then moved with Baer to command Dora-Mittelbau until the Allies approached. He escaped the camp before it was taken and was captured by the British while posing as part of a combat unit near Hamburg. As Allies had an erroneous description of him, Höcker spent only one and a half years incarcerated in a British prisoner of war camp and was released at the end of 1946. Until prosecutors began looking for him in the wake of the Eichmann trial, no one came for Karl Höcker. He resumed his life in Engershausen with his wife and two children. He turned himself in for a de-Nazification trial in 1952 and was sentenced to serve nine months for membership in the SS, a criminal organization. He did not have to serve it, thanks to a 1954 law of freedom of punishment. He took up gardening in his spare time, and became the chief cashier of the regional bank in Lubbecke, only losing his during the pre-trial investigations for the 1963-1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, in which he was a defendant. The judges ruled that Höcker was guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 1000 people on four separate occasions. They weighed the facts that he had been a model citizen after the war, had voluntarily asked for denazification in 1952, and they could only find proof that he had been a desktop functionary. The court determined that Höcker had never been proven to be at the ramp. He was sentenced to only 7 years, but time served was deducted and Höcker was released on parole in 1970. He regained his job as a Chief Cashier of the regional bank in Lubbecke. Karl Höcker died in 2000 at age 88").

(All pictures from the United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem)

Tintypes from Iraq

This is the second set of photographs tied to the war in Iraq I have come across (via Susana Raab) that utilise some kind of alt-process - the first being Ellen Susan's wet plate collodion portraits of US soldiers.

These being from Phil Nesmith, a photographer from Washington DC who photographed in Iraq in the course of his employment as a civilian defence contractor and produced work in a series called My Baghdad.

I must say I'm in two minds about this approach. On the one hand, on many levels they do work. The remain on most levels a photographic image, with all that involves and implies, but by utilising the anachronistic process they take a step back in a sense and manage to pause the never ending stream of images that flow over us every day. We also stop and pause and look - and perhaps look a bit more closely.

But on the other hand, they can seem a bit of a gimmick. Without fail, Brady and the Civil War photographers are usually invoked somewhere along the line - in some way giving an anointing to the photographer and - if one were to take the most cynical view - in some ways also doing the same for the conflict; giving it a sort of nobility of purpose. They also evoke a sense of dislocation in time. The war - and those pictured - becomes less immediate. Echoes of 19th Century photographic surveys in colonial India or Arabia or Palestine are triggered. And then there are the pictures themselves. If one were to take most of them as say straight forward black and white photographs printed on good old Ilford paper, most really probably wouldn't catch our attention. So the process really becomes essential to the picture and that brings me back to the sense of a gimmick (and yet, the same could probably be said about the choice of straight black and white over colour for example).

And then the photograph here of the Chinook and the low sun does nothing if not invoke the film Apocalypse Now with all that movie said about a failing and futile colonial war and the men fighting it. So there are many conflicting, ambiguous and mixed messages and emotions that these pictures seem able to contain (which probably means that ultimately they are quite successful in what they are trying to do...)

So, as I say, I remain in two minds about them - while still allowing that they certainly did catch my eye and they did draw me in.

Interestingly, Nesmith didn't lug a around a Full Plate camera, with it's bellows and tripod and heavy film holders, but appears to have used some kind of hybrid process whereby he took digital photographs in Iraq - giving himself more freedom of movement and interaction - and then producing Tintypes/Ferrotypes or Ambrotypes from those. Overall it seems to give very good looking results (although noticeably missing is the often distinctive narrow depth of field and/or blur that often results from using the larger negative with older lenses).

Nesmith has a show of his work at Irvine Contemporary. And there is a brief review here.

Strange and Stranger

I love this picture Shane Lavalette managed to dig up - William Eggleston and David Lynch.

While it has often been pointed out that David Lynch - and Gus Van Sant and several others - have been directly influenced by Eggleston - and who can't see that in everything from Twin Peaks to the Straight Story to Mulholland Drive, like Shane I'm most intrigued by the ensuing conversation here.

Can you imagine being a fly on the wall to that one? My guess is it was most akin to eavesdropping on two Martians...

All I can say is we would be much worse off without the both of them.

(top photo probably by Winston Eggleston? bottom by William Eggleston)

Melissa Catanese pt.II

I picked up on Melissa Catanese's work a while back when I was quite taken by her "Jungle" work.

Today I just saw a new reference to her here and either I wasn't paying attention and missed some of her work first time round, or else she's put new work up since (probably the former). Anyway some different pictures really caught my eye today when I looked.

Especially work from Stardust and also When The Bugs Come Back - both to be found linked, along with other projects, on her website.

Also worth checking out is the section tucked away on her main page called simply More. My guess is (and I could also be completely wrong) is that this is slightly older work, but she doesn't want to quite abandon it. If I'm correct and that's the case, I found it worthwhile looking at because to me it seemed to give a picture of her developing her work and ideas and way of seeing things over time and then it's as if she has found her stride in the main, new (?) work she's presenting - Stardust, Bugs, Jungle, Garden etc. Maybe I'll hear from her one way or the other.

I also noticed that she has a small book put out by and outfit called ping pong projects who seem to have a few nice looking (low budget??) photography books - but as their website is - lets say - minimal, I can't add much more than that. The book is Stardust and it looks like you buy it via Lulu.

Not just Black & White

Since I started this blog just a touch over a year ago, I seem to have got a reputation as a black and white photographer. Mainly I think because my current main project has been in done in black and white, as was a major one before that.

But in fact, up until those two, I hadn't used black and white as a major part of my work for a long time (although it was what I started off with - learning to process at 14 years old in our blacked out kitchen was a lot cheaper using Ilford HP5... and much of the early work I did in the UK - photographing post-industrial NE England was all also done in good old HP5. But after that, most of what I did was actually in colour, with the odd foray here and there back to the darkroom and enlarger.

So here is some work from peripheral vision - The Yellowknife Project. The last bit of this was done in 2005:

"the suburbs as a state of mind...

There no longer appears to be a clear division between the suburbs and either the urban or rural environment. There now seems to be a generic suburban condition that may be a potential quality for all inhabited spaces. This extended suburban condition does not easily show up on maps, it is in many ways more of a suburban state of mind than a topographic location...

In photographing this I find myself looking at things that are somewhat off centre, off to the side - a peripheral vision. Things that are often unnoticed and just below our level of perception. Things seen that are in plain sight yet so familiar or obvious they are usually ignored, unseen, and their existence barely registered - attention no longer paid to them.




This project conveys everyday North America and the infiltration of the city by suburban culture - the place seen on the way to the office or the supermarket - viewing these familiar environments from an off-centre perspective, revealing the ambiguities and artifice of everyday life.".

The Square

(photo Harry Callahan)

Over the last few weeks I've been experimenting on and off with the square format - 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 (or 6x6cm...) - mainly in colour.

It's been many many years since I used this format and that was with a fairly battered M.O.D./SOCO broad-arrow-marked Hasselblad.

(photo Harry Callahan)

I must say it's been much harder than I expected to "work the square". It's a very different way of seeing to me - even using the ground glass on a TLR feels very different to the 4x5 or 8x10 ground glass image (I'm doing some ragnefinder stuff as well). And then dealing with the equal sided frame - for one thing, it's too easy just plonk everything right in the middle... But it's an interesting and challenging experience so far as well. We'll have to see what eventually comes out of it.

So any words of wisdom from the square masters/mistresses out there would be appreciated!

Unfortunately, though, I haven't actually had time to scan any of my efforts yet (I've also been using up an old stash of outdated Ektachrome 120 64T film a lot of the time just while I experiment, rather than "real" - i.e. in-date - film).

So until I get time for some scanning (and find my MF scanner holders) here's a few from Harry Callahan instead.

(photo Harry Callahan)

A Couple of Opportunities

The Humble Arts Foundation has application info up for a couple of good opportunities (as humble as they are, I think for most photographers, every little counts...)

First the Spring 2008 Grant for Emerging Photographers:

Given twice annually, the GEP is a $1,000 grant award that recognizes the strongest new proposal in fine art photography as submitted to Humble Arts Foundation.

Deadline: 11:59 pm, Monday, March 3, 2008

Applicant Eligibility
Applications will be accepted from photographers who are at least 18 years old and do not have gallery representation.

and secondly:

"31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography" On March 1, 2008, in honor of Women's History Month, Humble Arts Foundation, in collaboration with Ladies Lotto, will present "31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography," a month-long exhibition celebrating 31 of the most innovative young women in emerging art photography under the age of 31. The Exhibition is co-curated by Lumi Tan, Director of Zach Feuer Gallery in NYC, and Jon Feinstein, Curatorial Director of Humble Arts Foundation.

We are now accepting submissions from women photographers under the age of 31. Submission deadline: Friday, January 25th, 2008

I'm glad they haven't tied "emerging" with "under 25" or some similar arbitrary age for the grant - some (of us) "emerging" photographers are actually over 40 or more... so that in itself is a good move (though I note they did tie "innovative young women in emerging photography" with the under 31 cut-off in the wording for the the second opportunity - but I see they've got enough grief on all that from the lady photo bloggers already, so I'll leave it well alone... suffice to say I am frequently ticked off by much larger well established grant opportunities which frequently tie emerging with under 30 or some such arbitrary age)

All that said Kudos to the guys at Humble for keeping going with their commitment to all this and photography in general.

Full info on both here

(Photo by Molly Landreth winner of the the Fall 07 Humble Grant)

Paul Graham

I've mentioned Paul Graham before in relationship to his new book(s)/series A Shimmer of Possibilities, but up until now it's been hard to find much of his work online. However, thanks to Shane Lavalette I just found out that Graham now has an archive of much of his work online.

I'd say that in the early 1980's Paul Graham's colour photography was the first colour work which really had an impact on me and helped me see that there was a different way to use colour than the typical/traditional colour postcard/calendar/Amateur Photographer Magazine look.

The impact of his early work was probably even greater for me because his first three books all dealt with things that were familiar to me - but despite that personal link, his early work was pretty radical, especially compared to most other photography in the UK at that time.

A1 - Great North Road remains a fantastic colour milestone. For some years I lived just off the A1 and often travelled this historic route north and south (the book is almost impossible to find now - I bought my copy for about £10.00 I think and later sold it for $1600.00 to help fund my Phillips 8x10 - a fair exchange...). It's just an excellent collection of pictures.

Then came Beyond Caring, a rather damning - if oblique - look at the Welfare State at the height of the bleakest of the Thatcher years in 1986. Again, this came out at the same time that I was also photographing around the whole subject of unemployment and the post-industrial milieu of North East England.

Finally there was Troubled Land in 1987 - this remains the best depiction I have yet come across of the place and state of mind of Northern Ireland while it was still in the midst of "The Troubles".

Schmidt and Joachim All these works used colour in a way that really hadn't - and still wasn't - being done in the UK before. And although his work paralleled the New Colour work of the likes of Shore and Sternfeld in the US, it was also distinctly different from it. He makes an interesting comment in an interview that he was deeply influenced by Berlin/Essen photographers such as Michael Schmidt, Joachim Brohm and Volker Heinz and through them John Gossage and Lewis Baltz who they were bringing over to Berlin at the time. A quite distinctive (and on the whole possibly more substantial) school than the ubiquitous students of Bechers in Dusseldorf.

Since then Graham has continued to work on different and distinct project from New Europe to American Night (Phaidon also published a good overview of his work a few years ago) and through to his current A Shimmer of Possibilities (hopefully he will have images from that online soon?)

"...Within four years I published three books: A1, Beyond Caring, and Troubled Land, driven by the boundless energy of youth, no doubt… but by 1987, I we had this juggernaut of color documentary photography emerging in England; it had really taken off. Martin Parr switched to color, so did people like Tom Wood, and then our students, like Paul Seawright or Richard Billingham or Nick Waplington came along. So… I felt it was time to move on from that, before it became exhausted. For example, the mixing of landscape with war photography in Troubled Land was striking and quite successful —I had shows in NYC galleries—but what happens is that you hit this resonant note and everyone wants you to repeat it. I was invited to duplicate Troubled Land in Israel and South Africa. Commissions, dollars, travel, the whole nine yards. But I thought, I can’t do this. For better or worse, I’m one of those artists who once something is “proven,” have to drop it and find another way to scare myself..."



"...RW: So you went to Europe?

PG: In the early to mid 80s I had made friends with a group of German photographers who were quite distinct from the Becher’s Dusseldorf school. They were mostly around Essen-Berlin: Volker Heinze, Joachim Brohm, Gosbert Adler, and Michael Schmidt too, who was running these workshops in Berlin and inviting people like John Gossage and Lewis Baltz to come over.

RW: It’s funny that that school is so unknown here. Michael Schmidt even had a one-man show at MoMA.

PG: Yes, a great show and few remember it. It's as though the Gursky show wiped out people’s under-standing of everything else in German Photography. Gursky is much more accessible. He goes for the jugular because it is about the ‘Great Photograph.’ Of course, he succeeds, but it’s recidivist, in a way. Photographers have been trying for years to make bodies of work where images work together to build up a coherent statement. It’s not about one great picture by Robert Adams; it’s about twenty or thirty pictures that form a sensitive, intelligent reflection of the world. It’s the same with Garry Winogrand, or Robert Frank. Gursky brings it back to that “wow” moment. It sort of undoes that way of working, and reduces things to the “What a great shot!” appreciation of photography. I’m a sucker for that as much as anyone, but want people to appreciate what Robert Adams does more so."

I must say I'm very much looking forward to seeing A Shimmer of Possibles when it arrives. Graham's work has nearly always given me something new to think about.

Some Goodies for 2008

I hope everyone had a good New Year and that 2008 is something for you look forward to.

My favourite photobook review site - 5B4 - has a list of some upcoming books to be published in the coming year. If this is just a selection, then 2008 already looks like it's going to be an exciting(and expensive...) year as far as the photobook is concerned.

Here are a few of my favourites from those he lists - including some new editions of old favourites:

First, Fredrick Law Olmsted Landscapes by Lee Freidlander. A few years ago, Friedlander took part in a project for the Canadian Centre for Architecture along with Geoffrey James and Robert Burley photographing the parks and landscapes of Olmsted. That led to a very nice little book Viewing Olmsted. I don't know if this book is a new presentation of the pictures he took then (probably many of which were never published in the original book) or if he has continued to work on the subject in the meantime. Either way, it's a book I'm looking forward to seeing.



Next there is a book of Luigi Ghirri's colour photographs It’s Beautiful Here Isn’t It (with an introduction by William Eggleston). Ghirri's work is hard to come by, especially in N. America, but he is one of the seminal colour photographers of the last 40 or 50 years and was an important influence on what became known as the "New Colour" photographers, laying the groundwork for Shore, Sternfeld, Meyerowitz, Christenberry and the next generation of Parr, Soth and so much of the colour work we see today.


There are also re-issues of Robert Adams The New West (Aperture) and Robert Frank's The Americans (50th Anniversary from Steidl) - works any photographer should really have in their library (although, as a friend of mine says - after looking through The New West you sort of feel the only solution left is to slit your wrists. Perhaps even more so, as what Adams depicts and highlights has only got worse since the 70's when he did the work...).




(BTW, there's also a Robert Frank colouring book online...)



Karin Appolonia Müller's sublime book Angels in Fall is also being re-issued. It's hard and expensive to find right now (a previous post on Müller here)


There are also two new Sudek books out The Window of My Studio and Portraits




And finally, one I discovered while hunting these books down - Silicon Valley by Gabriele Basilico, which interestingly seems to include a number of colour photographs - a rarity for Basilico.



But check out the other releases listed on 5B4 as well