Adrian Tyler - unpaintable landscapes?

Another in my series on exiled Brit photographers - Adrian Tyler - from his series "Road"

"The scale of the Spanish interior is of a kind which offers no possibility of any focal centre. This means that it does not lend itself to being looked at. Or, to put it differently, there is no place to look at it from. It surrounds you but never it faces you. A focal point is like a remark being made to you. A landscape which has no focal point is like a silence. It constitutes simply a solitude which has tuned its back on you" so writes John Berger in an essay about the Castilian meseta and the Spanish landscape.

When I saw these photographs by Adrian Tyler, Berger's words were the second thing that immediately came to mind. The first was travelling in Spain when I was a small boy - a summer of torrential thunderous downpours ("the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain"...), hazy, dusty heat and small Spanish towns.

In his essay, Berger goes on to contend that the landscape of the Spanish interior is unpaintable (but perhaps not un-photographable?) and that "a landscape is never unpaintable for descriptive reasons; it is always because its sense, its meaning, in not visible, or else lies elsewhere"

It may well be that such a landscape is unpaintable (certainly I can recall very few painting of it), but I wonder if it is also un-photographable? Perhaps, among other things, the ability of photography to focus on certain specifics in its own particular and peculiar way allows for Tyler to make photographs such as these, that do indeed seem to convey and make visible in some small way the sense and meaning of this place?

"...there is no place to look at it from. It surrounds you but never it faces you. A focal point is like a remark being made to you." - yet in his photography, Tyler does seem to have found a place from which to look at this landscape. A viewpoint that also echoed with my own, distant, experience of this same place but a viewpoint very much anchored in the here and now.

Beyond that, Tyler also makes masterful use of colour in his work - this is what colour is meant for. He clearly understands the distinction between colour and colours, which is where so many photographers working in the medium fail

Adrian's website is at www.adriantyler.net

(quotes from "a story for aesop" in Keeping a Rendezvous by John Berger)

Binh Danh's “cholorophyll prints”

These are exquisite (thanks again Leo).

From the notes at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas (a few more images there):

"Danh has pioneered a fascinating mode of printing directly on plant leaves through the natural process of photosynthesis. By placing a negative in contact with a living leaf and then exposing it to sunlight for several weeks, the image literally becomes part of the leaf. Danh then permanently “fixes” the image by casting it in resin. He calls the finished piece a “cholorophyll print.” These compelling objects appear very contemporary, but also harken back to the botanical photogenic drawings created by William Henry Fox Talbot at the dawn of photography....

Images from the Vietnam War are prevalent in his work, providing a unique connection between process and subject matter. As he explains, "This processdeals with the idea of elemental transmigration: the decomposition and composition of matter into other forms. The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them. The leaves express the continuum of the war. They contain the residue of the Vietnam War: bombs, blood, sweat, tears, and metals. The dead have been incorporated into the landscape of the Vietnam during the cycles of birth, life, and death, through the recycling and transformation of materials, and the creation of new materials."

(my "advisor" thinks they are a little bit too contrived, but on the whole I disagree...)

More at the Haines Gallery and here

and a piece on NPR

Simon Schama - Power of Art

I just got this book out of the library and already the dust cover blurb and the introduction has got me hooked...:

"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..."

Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives
of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something
unprecedented, altering the course of art forever. Caravaggio, Bernini,
Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko--each in his own resolute
way faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created
challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness, and changed the
way we look at the world.

Most compelling of all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution
of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works
"tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins,
that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that they
answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant
art-conscript... 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"

I'll report later on whether the book lived up to its promise

(BTW I think Schama's Landscape & Memory is a book anyone who is involved with landscapes needs to read - fantastic. I'm going to write more about it later)

Simple art? William Christenberry

Can art be too simple? That is, can a concept be so simple and obvious that it ceases to be – creative (if that’s the right word)? Essentially it just states – or restates – the obvious.

What go me thinking about this is that I am almost in two minds about the work of William Christenberry. On the one hand I find his work very appealing. It draws me in, especially the long time sequences (and most of his photographs are really about time). Yet the photographs themselves, and the most apparent concept behind them, just seems so – well – obvious (I’m reminded of Harvey Keitel’s character in the movie Smoke who takes the same picture at the same time every day from exactly the same place outside his store – an intriguing idea – but is that all it is?).

And yet I’m not quite in two minds about Christenberry. There is something else about them that is greater than the sum of the simple idea and the apparent simplicity of the images. The photographs do actually catch and hold me. Certainly there is a level of lyricism that goes far beyond the ordinary. But more than that, I think it’s the deep sense of affection that inhabits the photographs, the affection Christenberry obviously has for these places.

BTW, there is an excellent interview with Christenberry on NPR – well worth listening to: here

Bethicketted #1

From my ongoing project Immersive Landscapes: boreal forest-precambrian shield. More later on what it's about. For now, just an image

"Bethicket me for a stump of a beech" - James Joyce

(One side note - I love the web, but I hate trying to build a website. My two main presences on the web other than this blog really just grew out of ways to share works in progress with a few colleagues and friends. If anyone knows how to build a quick and easy website these days - as quick and easy as this blog... - that's clean, cool and simple - but not simplistic - let me know)

Stephen Shore movie

Leo at Streetphoto pointed me to this little movie about Stephen Shore - click here

Shore is one of a quite small number of colour photographers who really seems to get "it"

(and I think I need to get me one of those speaking light meter, film holder carrying things...)

Geoffrey James

Among photographers whose work I return to time and again is Geoffrey James. His work has ranged from Italian Gardens to the Etruscan landscape of the Campagna Romana to Canadian asbestos mines to the Mexican/US border fence to Olmstead’s parks to the Prairies and to Toronto. At first glance his photographs can often seem quite serene and yet as you look at them there is frequently a strong yet subtle dynamic that seeps you right into the picture.

He also makes complex pictures – especially his panoramic photographs, which I think he does better than anyone since Sudek (In a recent interview he noted; “One thing I have learned from using panoramic cameras for almost 30 years is that they are not very good at panoramas. They are very good in cramped or complex spaces.”)

For me, James is one a small group of photographers making Modern black and white photographs yet whose work isn’t romantic or anachronistic or sentimental but rather thoroughly contemporary (others would be George Tice, Gabrielle Basilico, Robert Adams, Toshio Shibata to name a few).

I’d have to say my favourite books are the two Italian ones – Italian Gardens and Campagna Romana, along with Paris (which is a gem) and Viewing Olmstead (which he did with Lee Friedlander and Robert Burley)

Geoffrey has also been something of a mentor, for which I am more grateful than I can express.

Following are some links to his books and a few other examples of his work:

Paris

Viewing Olmstead

Toronto

Place

work at Nicholas Metivier Gallery

work at Equinox Gallery

Random Quotes #1

"Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done." John Szarkowski

-0-0-0-0-0-0-

"In a place where time isn't important, neither is memory." Kafka On The Shore - Murakami

-0-0-0-0-0-0-

"(Walker) Evans's photographs are about what is photographed, and how what is photographed is changed by being photographed, and how things exist in photographs". Garry Winogrand

-0-0-0-0-0-0-

"Landscape photography," wrote (Robert) Adams, "can offer us, I think, Three
verities - geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if take alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together.... the three kinds of representation strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keepintact - an affection for life."

-0-0-0-0-0-0-

"Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation..." Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment

Posting comments

Just a short admin note - I'm experimenting with different posting options. I'm trying to get the right balance between too much control (i.e. no comments allowed) and possibly too little (anyone can post). I want to try and constrict the number of idiots posting, but I also want to encourage some commentary (I guess you can't really call it discussion on here). One thing I've found is that some who want to post aren't Blogger members and are a little google wary, so that has discouraged them. So I'll ring the changes and see what happens...

Whatever became of... Chris Killip?

In the 1980's Chris Killip produced a book of photographs taken mainly in North East England. I was living in Durham (UK) at the time it came out and the book - In Flagrante - was sheer genius. He captured the heart of the region with his large format camera (possibly 8x10, or at least 4x5?). And most of these were people photographs - often up close and personal - a form of street photography with a big camera. I had been mesmerised a couple of years earlier by his show "Seacoalers" at the Side Gallery in Newcastle, and In Flagrante was probably the first photography book I bought that not only showed me a place I knew in a different way, but also caused me to look at photography in a very different way.

And then he disappeared. I understand he moved across the pond and took up a post at Harvard. There was a small Phaidon 55 book a couple of years ago (did they ever publish all 55?), but I rarely hear of him or see work with the byline "Chris Killip"

So I wonder what he has been up to? Did he come to love teaching and become absorbed by it, or has he been working away at the same time, stockpiling photographs for a magnum opus?

Size does matter - Big Prints

Go to almost any major art museum and you'll probably notice that big photographic prints seem to be in vogue – prints that are 4’ by 5’ or 8’x15’ – big big. And yet what’s sometimes strange (okay – annoying) about this is the number of photographers who seem to be threatened by any photograph larger than about 16”x20”.

Whenever the subject of big prints comes up, a guild-type photographer can always be counted upon to respond with a sarcastic “well, if you can’t make it good, then make it big”.

I recently came across this quote from an interview with John Szarkowski that seemed to sum up my own gut feeling on this:

In a bad photograph, a lot of the time, the frame isn’t altogether understood —
there are big areas of unexplained chemicals. It’s especially difficult as the
picture gets bigger. If it’s small, a little piece of black can look like a dark
place, right? But as it gets bigger, eventually it just turns into a black
shape. And you look at the surface of the picture and it reminds you of the
chemical factories on Lake Erie, creating pollution problems by making synthetic
materials out of soybeans and petroleum derivatives. And you don’t want that.
The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It’s not like
ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You’re not supposed to look at the
thing, you’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window. And everything behind
it has got to be organized as a space full of stuff, even if it’s only air.

Just making an image bigger doesn’t somehow improve the photograph - in fact it may do just the opposite and expose the flaws in the image. Not only does every photograph not work better as a big print, but some photographs certainly look worse when printed large. I’ve always been of the view that it’s not that easy to make a photograph that works well as a very large print (and in some ways you can actually get away with a lot less attention to detail in a small print).

Over its history, photography has frequently been imprisoned by the limitations of the current technology. Sometimes individual photographers have found a way to push those boundaries and expand the possibilities. Sometimes technology has made a leap that has just simply removed the barriers. Making large prints in the past was often a major technological challenge (Kodak employed teams of its best technicians to produce it’s Grand Central Station Coloramas). But, along with a number of things, the advent of wide format printers has made it much easier to make big prints.

Other visual arts never seem to have quite the same hang-up about big – from murals and frescoes to Monet’s giant water lily ponds to Michelangelo's David. Certainly small and exquisite contact prints can sometimes be quite beautiful, but we don’t need to be confined by limits that now exists only in photographers minds. The technology is there to make big prints. And while we don’t have to make our prints big for the sake of it - just because we can - we equally don’t have to stick to small prints because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. There’s nothing quite like seeing a giant Gursky print taking up the whole wall in front of you and suddenly feeling like you are somewhere down Alice's rabbit hole.

(Gursky photo by Jennifer ?? - can't find who she is on her blog...)

Photographers we need to see more of - Julian Thomas

The first in what will hopefully be a series on photographers who - imo - definitely deserve more attention.

Julian Thomas makes photographs of the Mediterranean urban/suburban environment with a deceptive ease. As well as using the (colour) square format to full advantage, he is also experimenting with diptychs and triptych like constructions and trying to break out of the frame that's so inherent to photography.

I've always joked that if I ever win the lottery big time, then Julian will be in line for the first (and possibly only) Underappreciated Exiled Brit Photographer Grant.

More of Julian's work at his website www.foundobjectsgallery.com

Michael Schmidt

I guess the blog is paying off already. Gudmundur pointed me to another (Berlin) photographer I had not heard of - Michael Schmidt.

I'm going to have to do a bit more tracking down and looking at some of his photographs, but beyond the first impact of the images, his work appeals to me for two reasons - he is an ex-policeman and his work deals with Berlin over the last 40 years. In addition, the stars of the Dusseldorf school have burned so bright, it is sometimes a bit hard to catch sight of those who preceded and informed them.

There is also a short bio here (you'll have to scroll down)

A new blog for a new year

So, a new venture in blogdom for 2007.

I'll start with a book that has been keeping me company over Xmas - not quite so easy to find (my temporary copy thanks to the Banff Centre for the Arts library):

Berlin in the Time of the Wall by John Gossage.

A hard book to describe, it is full of wonderful layers and different ways of seeing. The sheer number of photographs is close to daunting. But I think it is going to stay with me for a while.

The only thing do is to save up for a copy... (it seems most of Gossage's books are either rather expensive, very hard to find - or both)

Link to some of Gossage's work here