Sugimoto at Libeskind's new ROM extension

There's a nice piece in the Globe & Mail by Sarah Milroy about Sugimoto's exhibition at Daniel Libeskind's angular brand new extension to the Royal Ontario Museum.

Milroy is always good when writing about photography and has some interstign things to say here - especially about Sugimoto's digs at starchitects at the panel discussion on the new building.

(btw, if you can get into the Globe site because it's past seven days, a google news search on the articel will often get you behind the firewall)

"The leading Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is a man of extreme paradoxes, and his touring exhibition History of History, the inaugural show in the just-opened Institute for Contemporary Culture at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, brings that complexity to life.Comprised of both the artist's own work and objects from his private collection, the show allows us to take the full measure of the man.

On the one hand, his serene photographs of the open ocean – wide, uninflected expanses divided only by the horizon line – are the ultimate symbols of eternity, mindfulness and enlightenment. A man of philosophical bent, Sugimoto calls them his attempt to recapture the experience of the first human who contemplated the ocean, in the dawning days of our species, and as depictions of the two most elemental necessities for life: air and water. Other works in this show, such as his palm-sized 13th-century Buddhist “flaming jewel” reliquary fitted out with a tiny oceanscape, seem like contemplative objects that direct us to the eternal.

Yet Sugimoto, 59, is also the ultimate international art star, with a home in New York, a custom-designed apartment aerie in Tokyo, a list of exhibition engagements as long as your arm (Venice, San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Tokyo) and a growing collection of Japanese antiquities, scroll paintings and natural-history specimens (such as fossils), many of which are included in this exhibition. (In the eighties, he augmented his artist's income by dealing in Japanese antiquities – artists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd were among his clients – but he shut his New York gallery, Mingei, in 1990.) So which one is he: The Zen monk with a camera or the shrewd businessman with a strategic eye for profit and advancement? Will the real Sugimoto please stand up...

A conversation about his current collecting activities reveals flashes of avarice and rivalry. He talks with me about his recent passion for medieval miniatures, Greco-Roman antiquities and the set of three used juice boxes from the Apollo 11 moon launch that he acquired at a recent scientific auction. But his big thrill of late is his pursuit of the rare, early negatives made by pioneering British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s. Sugimoto now owns 15 of these, which record plants and various oblique views of Talbot's castle near London. They have never been printed, and he plans to make pictures from them. “I spent one whole year's income on these negatives,” he says to me. “But since I will be using it to make my art, I can write it off. I am creating my art by buying another person's art. I call this art anarchism,” he says with a triumphant laugh, “because I don't pay tax!”

Even more delightful to him is his success at stealing the thunder of his slower-moving institutional competitors. “The Getty Museum has 20,” he says, “and the Metropolitan has 10, so I am number two.”

Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Anyone expecting a courtly display of deference from Sugimoto during his public “conversation” with ROM architect Daniel Libeskind on May 31 was also in for a shock. The artist came out swinging, winning the crowd instantly with his witty derision of star architects and their indifference to the needs of the user (in the case of museum design, the artist as well as the public), pummelling Libeskind with his gaily administered humiliations, including the suggestion that the architect would have been “better off to remain an unbuilt architect,” making drawings, not buildings.


Sugimoto then went on to explain the thinking behind the magnificent curving display wall he has designed for the Toronto show. The ICC is a dramatic, angular gallery with sloping ceilings that is strikingly bereft of walls for hanging art on. “I am trying to fit into his difficult space,” he said to me, “so I have to be difficult too. He makes straight lines so I make curved lines. It is my revenge.” Make no mistake: This is one intensely competitive human being...." more

Bestiaire Upskirts

Okay, I've been wanting to work "upskirt" into a post just to see what happens to the hits on the Googleometer...

That said, this work from (Madame) Loan Nguyen is just plain fun (via iheartphotograph). Photography should make you smile every now and then (it's also got me lookign throught he kids toybox for potential subjects...)

Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff

When I saw this post on 5B4 about Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff there was a certain familiarity but I couldn't place it. I was initially attracted to what seemed to be an interesting selection of scrub/tangle/wild places pictures that struck some chords with my own Immersive Landscapes work. However, it took a couple of days for it to sink in and some digging through unpacked boxes of books, but I realised I had a copy of Conniff's earlier book Common Ground - An American Field Guide Volume 1 that I had picked up some years ago in a used bookstore in Maine (unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the other three planned volumes of the field guide were never published).

Anyway, I got a copy of Wild Edges, not only because of its subject matter, but because the exhibition on which it is based was all ink (jet) prints. He talks in some detail about why he chose that process, and it's in part because of the luscious tones and sense of depth he can get from ink prints with this kind of wild subject matter - on which point I would certainly agree.

I actually like both books. The Common Ground work actually ties in a lot with the traces/alleyways work I am doing, and the Wild Edges also has echoes for me of my immersive landscapes work.

From the exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin:

A resident of Wisconsin for more than thirty years, Conniff has focused much of his artistic energy on the rural Midwest, exploring the interdependent relationship between land and people. For the past fifteen years, Conniff has also been making pictures of rural Mississippi, again focusing on elements of the landscape that resonate with a universal sense of aesthetic familiarity. As he explains, "I am interested in work that defines and protects the vanishing, commonplace beauties that let us know we’re home."

Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff is an exhibition about beauty and its necessary place in daily human life. Most of the pictures in the show were made specifically for the exhibition. All are printed in a rich four-black ink process that evokes the sensuality of nineteenth century photographic materials. In Conniff's affectionate and intelligent work, there is a visible connection to the history of landscape art, reaching back as far as Claude Lorrain and seventeenth century Dutch drawing. Conniff is also a leading practitioner of a new pastoralism that is casting a contemporary eye on the current state of America's open land. Postmodern in the best sense, Conniff's pictures address the timeless human need to see beauty in the world that shapes our lives.

From 5B4:

Conniff pursues beauty, as he describes, with an awareness that without beauty in our everyday lives we are evolving in ways that will potentially lead to a loss of fulfillment in our lives. He argues that we are hardwired with a need and that we are being denied that need.

In this day of issue oriented art, beauty is often something that is allowed to enter the work, but an artist that directly searches it out in its classic forms(without irony) is usually considered a kind of dinosaur. Conniff is a dinosaur, he probably wouldn’t take that as a disparaging term and he shouldn’t. These are not groundbreaking, original works featured in this book. They owe a lot to painting and art history and appropriately, he mentions George Innes of the Hudson River School of painters in his essay. But his versions are at times stunning. What I do know is that he is capable of exciting the viewer even though they may, at first glance, feel very familiar with what he is placing before us.

A double-breasted suit and a Smith & Wesson

I love this picture that Gallery Hopper put up and his questioning (and questioning of photographic assumptions) that follows:

Take a look at this portrait by Timothy Archibald and imagine what sort of man this is. What is the photographer saying about him? What is he trying to say about himself? What does he do for a living? Why is he holding that gun? Read the rest at Gallery Hopper

Incongruities - 8 June 2007/8 June 1972

From State of the Art

Both pictures by Nick Ut taken on June 8th...

Bizarre? Sad? Signs of the times?

New blogs

Well - new to me anyway. I've been following a few new blogs and websites recently. When I get around to it... I'll try and update the sidebar and add them in.

Here's a few of them:

I've already mentioned excellent 5B4 blog on photo books. Here's an interesting update from Alec Soth on the person behind it.

cigarettesandpurity - because it's just weirdly eclectic:

Darkroastedblend is just plain weird - with everything from strange cute animals (gotta love those baby hedgehogs...) to how not to drive your tank to photos of Ekranoplans to strange Third Reich beehive bomb shelters

Kevin Miyazaki's blog - because it has some neat photography on it

MoonRiver often seems to mix mapping with photography and has a wonderful sense of visual and spacial coherences. And some of the mapping and topography is just very cool.

Shane Lavalette's Journal (so much classier than Blog) also just has really cool photography - and apparently decided to post on Alec Soth's Dog Days, Bogota at precisely the same moment that I did.... He also has a very good website

Finally, one blog I have dropped altogether - Museings on Photography (not to be confused with the excellent muse-ings.... :-) ). If a tree talks to itself in a forest does anyone hear it?

World's oldest darkroom: Update

I just saw that the Niépce House Museum has posted some information on the Joseph Fortuné Petiot-Groffier darkroom.

It's bilingual English and French (scroll down for the Anglais).

This lab is the oldest existing we know of at present (thanks to the receipts, the chemicals can be dated back as far as 1840-41)...

In Petiot-Groffier’s lab, we are able to rediscover all the chemical products and utensils used in the darkroom to prepare the photographic plates and to develop the images taken: 450 flasks, 500 books, ancient large format cameras, accessories (to take, prepare and develop the images), empty plates, as well as negatifs and prints by Petiot-Groffier himself. An exceptional ensemble which allows us for the first time ever to enter a darkroom of one of history’s first photographers... more

The Metaverse and the collective visual memory

Ctein posted about this on the Online Photographer. I must say I find these expanding conceptions of what photography is both incredibly interesting and the potential of them very exciting.

Watch and listen to Blaise Aguera y Arcason on Seadragon and Photosynth (okay - yeah, it's ultimately microsoft because bill bought it...)

Combine it with Jeff Han's multi-touch screen (are they using that on the iPhone?) and and the potential expands even more

Mark Luthringer's typologies

via Gallery Hopper I love this selection of photographic grids by Mark Luthringer - his Ridgemont Typologies - typologies of our mundane world. In a way they also make me rather angry as they highlight so strongly the generic and homogenized nature of the environment around us and the pathetic level of thought and imagination that goes into designing not just the buildings and places we live and work in, but the objects we use everyday.

Good design, good architecture isn't just about looking pretty or pleasant - it's about the quality of life we chose to live. These pictures highlight so much of the the creative and imaginative malaise that afflicts so much of our society.

"The typological form achieves an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way of ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.
To see one of these turned into a group of images lined up together can be unnerving, though. In print, they confront us in a way never possible when they're just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately". Mark Luthringer

The worlds oldest darkroom?

Apparently, when Joseph Fortuné Petiot-Groffier (known as one of the pioneers of photography) died in 1855 - his darkroom in Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy was simply abandoned and the door closed. His heirs and successors never did anything with that part of the house and just left it locked up. Upon the death of the last of his family two years ago it was eventually found that the whole darkroom was still fully intact - complete with bottles of chemicals, apparatus and everything a photographer in 1855 needed.

From Luminous-Lint :

Petiot-Groffier practiced daguerrotypy in 1840, after which he traveled to India. In the 1850s, he began to use albumen and collodion, and later came to prefer the calotype process with which he produced his best work.

In the year 1854, Petiot-Groffier had become a founding member of Societe Francaise de Photographie, and that summer, he traveled with Baldus through Auvergne in central France. At the time, Petiot-Groffier was a sugar beet-refiner, inventor, entrepreneur, and politician, and he had renewed his interest in photography. During this trip, he worked in very close collaboration with Baldus, who was twenty-five years his junior. Despite their age difference, Baldus considered Petiot-Groffier his "best student." Together they worked their way through the countryside, carefully choosing motifs together, such as thatched huts, forest scenes, and generally the physical character of the Auvergne area. Baldus had never directed his artistic vision towards common architecture or unpopulated landscapes, and so much of the subject matter from the Auvergne journey was new compared to his prior photographic experience. Certain prints are signed by both photographers, and because of their extremely similar styles - even considered identical, at times - it is difficult to tell their work apart from one another.

Thanks to Ted Stoddard on the LF List. All the stories I could find so far are in French. (The original French newspapaer page has disappeared. Here's a link to the - at times rather funny - google translation). Of course, I'm assuming France doesn't have some kind of april fools day in early June...

creating a world with invoice and dead fly

Mark Hobson had an interesting post across on his blog The Landscapist the other day.

I think I need to quote this post in full (and use his photo...), some good ideas about photography (despite my overall feelings about Burtynsky...):

"There has been much discourse and discussion on The Landscapist regarding truthin photography and words with pictures. Recently, I mentioned an intro essay by Mark Kingwell from the book Burtynsky - China titled, The Truth in Photographs, in which Kingwell deals rather nicely with truth.

Here's a passage which struck a chord with me - Photographs are not multiple depictions of some single reality, waiting out there to be cornered and cropped, and somehow regulating, even in cornering and cropping, how/what the image means. Rather, photographs offer multiple meanings. The presented image is not a reflection, or even an interpretation of a singular reality. It is, instead, the creation of a world.

Yikes ... holy cow ... scratch my back with a hacksaw - I don't know if I have ever read/heard so simple and direct a statement which seems to encapsulate the core/root idea of Art.

In the case of picturing, one is not capturing the world, one is, in fact, creating aworld (my world and welcome to it). The phrase 'creating a world' explains, on so many lelvels, good Art - again, in the case of picturing, so many are creating one-dimensional worlds which are filled with the already-known. Worlds which are shallow, not deep. Worlds which are impoverished, not rich. In short, worlds which display no imagination, which we all know, because Mr. Einstein said so, is more important than knowledge.

Imagination - the source of all creativity and originality - is the single most important tool in a photographers kit - both for creating and 'reading' worlds. Think about it. More on imagination to come."

Among many other things (such as, this is pretty much a good encapsulation of the whole issue of "meaning" in photography as well as "truth") to me, this approach and understanding also seems to be the antithesis of the whole "art is a verb" idea, which I think both misses the point about art in general as well as having a big chip on its shoulder about Art. Ironically, art as a verb is the ultimate pomo, taking art to its logical post-modern popular conclusion.

War then and now - UPDATE

A further update on the War Then and Now post

Michael Shaw writes in the Huffington Post on Photojournalist Michael Kamber's response to the effect of the new tight restrictions on photographing injured soldiers in Iraq:

"What you're looking at (above), I'm afraid, is a potentially historic image.

Specifically, the photo above -- taken by embedded photojournalist Michael Kamber two weeks ago during a fateful patrol in search of missing American soldiers -- could well become the last visual evidence of U.S. casualties in the Iraq war.

In a message to colleagues earlier this week, Michael shared his personal thoughts about the new military restrictions on photographing American wounded in Iraq. He writes from Baghdad:

The embed restrictions have tightened up considerably since I was last here. You now need written permission from a wounded soldier to publish his photo if he is in any way identifiable. and even if his face is not visible. If unit insignias or faces of others soldiers are visible, that also disqualifies a photo from being used, according to one of the highest-ranking PAO's [Public Affairs Officer] in Iraq. As I'm told, the wounded man's family can figure out who he is from the other people in the picture.

I was on an operation last week that suffered five casualties including one KIA. One soldier was temporarily blinded and put on a plane to germany. Should I have asked him to sign a piece of paper giving permission to use pictures he can't see as he's lying on a stretcher in great pain?

When I was here in '03 and '04, the military was much more welcoming. I was invited to shoot memorials (now off limits) and when I embedded with the 1st Cav, they just invited me out. No papers to sign, no written conditions. They just asked that I show respect for the soldiers if they were killed, which I would do anyway.

Now there all these new restrictions make it nearly impossible to shoot the dead and wounded. They say it is for the soldiers protection. but the soldiers in the unit I was with -- the one that took the casualties -- loved our story and photos, thanked me and asked me for copies. The grandfather of the most seriously wounded soldier recently tracked me down demanding copies and saying the photos were crucial to his grandson's recovery. I seriously question who these restrictions are for.

One journalist asked whether being wounded takes away your right to privacy. Actually, it does in my opinion. You're involved in a very public event, the largest war for the US since Vietnam. When you enlist and go into a war zone with journalists around, with historical consequences, you can not then claim that what happens is a private affair.

The question I pose is: What would have happened to our visual history if Robert Capa and Gene Smith were running around the battlefield during WWII trying to get releases signed as they worked? What if this had been required in Vietnam? Or any war?"

Lynn Davis

I suppose it's a good thing that your appreciation and understanding of an artist's work can develop (hopefully in the "mature" direction), but it can be frustrating as well.

A few years ago I bought Lynn Davis book Monuments. And although there was something about it that must have interested me, it never really clicked for me and eventually I sold it on ebay. I recently came across it on the library shelf and took it out. Looking through it now I am thoroughly enjoying it and kicking myself for selling it in the first place. Sometimes I guess we just need to give things time...

In part, in the meantime, I had become fascinated for a while with the work of Francis Frith, Maxime DuCamp and others who photographed in Egypt, Palestine and the Middle East in the 19th Century, and so what she was doing in some of her work started to make a lot more sense


I haven't looked at her more recent book American Monument yet, either. It does include pictures of the Salk Institute - one building in America that I would love to photograph (Louis Kahn is surely the greatest American architect of the 20th Century)

Unfortunately I couldn't find many of the monuments pictures online, especially those from Egypt, Jordan and the Yemen. There's also a bit of info here on her shows Iceberg and Ancient Persia

KKK

No, not that KKK - Klee, Kandinsky and Klimt. I never tire of looking at the work of these three, as different as they are in many ways.

As well, some of their writings are good companions. Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane and Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook; On Modern Art and his Diaries

“To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.” Paul Klee

"Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works."

"The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being." Wassily Kandinsky

"If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock...On my first days here I did not start work immediately but, as planned, I took it easy for a few days - flicked through books, studied Japanese art a little...Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open... Then I paint again for a while: if the sun is shining a picture of the lake, if it's overcast then a landscape from the window of my room." Gustav Klimt

Magenta Magazine

Well, this is a fine looking Canadian photography magazine - Magenta. Trouble is, so far it only seems to have been distributed in Toronto. Not only are nearly all the best Canadian photographers from the West... but it also tends to confirm our opinions of the poor misguided Torontocentric universe. Hint hint, the world doesn't end at the 401 - neither does Canada.

Either way, it certainly looks like it would be nice to see a copy if it ever makes it beyond Sault Ste Marie. For now all we get is teaser PDF's of a couple of pages. It does look like it has the potential to be a little more grounded than Prefix though, while remaining interesting and creatively stimulating.

Cool...

I just think this is rather neat - "green" bussiness cards...

"LANDSCAPED BUSINESS CARD by Tur & Partnersby Tylene

With all the business cards we’re being inundated with this week (the downside of trade-shows), its nice to find business cards that stand out from the crowd and add a little greenery to your day. Here’s a clever and useful little business card design that perfectly expresses the mission of the company it represents:landscape architecture firm Tur & Partner. Add a little light and water to this seeded business card and in a couple days, you’ve got yourself a professionally landscaped miniature garden. Seeds embedded into the card sprout right through the holes in the plan printed on the card. This creative card was designed by Jung von Matt of Germany."

If the camera never lies, can it ever tell the truth?

Jim Johnson has picked up on this at some length in his thoughtful post Eliciting Poignancy, reflecting some of my own thoughts about this picture from the NY Times the first time I saw it.

First off, it is a wonderfully evocative and poignant piece of photojournalism (or, depending on your viewpoint, a masterful piece of propaganda).

"War Dead Honored On Memorial Day
WeekendARLINGTON, VA - MAY 27: Mary McHugh mourns her dead fiance Sgt. James Regan at "Section 60" of the Arlington National Cemetery May 27, 2007. Regan, an American Special Forces soldier, was killed by an IED explosion in Iraq in February of this year, and this was the first time McHugh had visited the grave since the funeral. Section 60, the newest portion of the vast national cemetery on the outskirts of Washington D.C, contains hundreds of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Family members of slain American soldiers have flown in from across the country for Memorial Day. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)"

But then as you dig deeper into how the picture has been made and then edited and presented, it's clear that while it does indeed reflect the facts of its caption, how it presents itself to us isn't quite as unambiguous.

In the picture as it was published in the Times, Mary McHugh appears to be essentially alone in her youthful grief among the rows and rows of new American war dead in the "Iraq" section of Arlington National Cemetery.

Yet when we see another of John Moore's pictures we see this just wasn't so.

And further still, when we view his picture on which the one in the Times is based, it's clear that even in that one, others are present.

But Moore, by carefully manipulating the framing, focused in just on this young war widow. And the editor at the NY Times by "judicial" cropping enhanaced this impression even further.

All of this being regarded, I'm sure, as "traditional" image manipulation and perfectly allowable under the rules of the news game.

But on the other hand, crop out someones insignificant and slightly visually annoying legs at a sports event - and you lose your job, because you did so using the dreaded Photoshop. I still find it intriguing that an editor can chop a big chunk off a photo (as they always have) to make it look stronger and they get kudos for doing their job well, but if the photographer removes an annoying lamppost (or heaven forbid, boosts an orange sky) then it's as if the Spanish Inquisition has descended upon their head (even though there is also a long tradition of this in photojournalism, long before Photoshop was ever dreamed of)

So, who exactly is manipulating who here. And more to the point, does it really matter? Photojournalism has never really ever been about the facts and certainly not always about "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

Probably the biggest problem has generally been that people haven't always realised this - especially at time, the photographers themselves.

Photojournalism falls in line with a lot of photography - and has done so since the days of its historic roots - it's about storytelling and appearances (and, cynically, who is paying the bill - less cynically, it's about the inherent opinions and pov of the photographer themselves). It's never been unbiased or objective - but at it's best, it's always been honest (which, for the record, is how I view the picture at the centre of this story).

ADDENDUM

I've had a number of responses to this post which highlight the confusion surrounding this issue. It boils down to this: the discussions in newsrooms and editorial boards are usually about the nature and the amount of any manipulation which may have been made a photograph (almost always post clicking the shutter) but this misses the point entirely. It's about the effect of the manipulation.

But because there is a high level of denial in such places about the fact that news photographs have always been manipulated (which isn't the same as saying all news photographs are manipulated) - by both photographers and editors - it is a safe way to deal with it. That is, avoid the real issue. And of course, these are the same folks who set the "rules".