Arnold Odermatt - Swiss Policeman

Throughout his career with the Swiss Police, amateur photographer Arnold Odermatt took photographs both for himself and for his work.

He joined the Canton of Nidwalden police 1948 and remained with them until he retired in 1990 as Head of the Traffic Police and Deputy Commander of the Nidwalden police. It's only since his retirement that he has experienced new found celebrity as a photographer. First with his book Karambolage and now a new book On Duty.

Karambolage is about traffic accidents; "Odermatt was the first officer in Switzerland to begin documenting these tragic scenes on film, and he created two distinct bodies of work. Setting his tripod on the roof of a police van, he first shot a series of straightforward images to accompany accident reports and on-site police drawings. Hours later, when onlookers had gone and most traces of violence had been cleared away, he returned to make a final, more highly aestheticized portrait of the wrecked vehicles." At night he often photographed the scenes using a magnesium flare, turning night into day.

In On Duty "Odermatt used his camera to recreate scenes from his days in law enforcement, spurred on by the fears of the shrinking Nidwalden police force, in hopes of enticing the village youth to join its increasingly unfashionable ranks. On Duty collects these images, which are populated by Odermatt’s colleagues re-enacting their daily adventures, in a compelling sequence of colourful tableaux. It is a strange and impressive document offering unexpected insight into a hidden world".

Perhaps it's because at one time I was a policeman and took similar photographs, or possibly because I've also driven in Switzerland where the inhabitants often seem to drive like maniacs on winding mountain roads - I'm not quite sure - but there is something about this work that I like. Photography is always evidence of something, yet here, where photography is perhaps closest to being used to record "fact" it still very quickly and easily moves away from being merely evidence. And while there is a formal rigour to the work, there is also a fondness (if you can say that about accidents?) and a sense of affection and melancholy. I certainly find them strangely appealing.

Commonplacing - not blogging

Interesting post on Not a blog, but a commonplace. I once came across one of these in an old rectory in North Devon, but never knew what the proper name was for them.

I like the term "commonplace" far better than blog.... :-)

Fernando Pessoa

extracts from: "The Keeper of Sheep" and other writings by Fernando Pessoa

When I look, I see clear as a sunflower.
I'm always walking the roads
Looking right and left,
And sometimes looking behind . . .
And what I see every second
Is something I've never seen before,
And I know how to do this very well . . .
I know how to have the essential astonishment
That a child would have if it could really see
It was being born when it was being born . . .
I feel myself being born in each moment,
In the eternal newness of the world . . .
I believe in the world like I believe in a marigold,
Because I see it. But I don't think about it
Because to think is to not understand . . .
The world wasn't made for us to think about
(To think is to be sick in the eyes)
But for us to see and agree with . . .
I don't have a philosophy: I have senses . . .
If I talk about Nature, it's not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is . . .
Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking . . .

~

If I could crush the whole earth
And be able to feel its taste,
Happier in a moment I'd be.
But every now and again we need to be unhappy
So we can be natural...

Not everything is sunny days,
And rain, when long overdue, is much needed.
For this reason I take unhappiness with happiness,
Naturally, like one who is not surprised to find
Mountains and planes
Rock cliffs and grass...

What is needed is to be able to be natural and calm
Both in happiness and unhappiness,
To feel like one looks,
To think like one walks,
And when the time to die comes,
To remember that the day also dies,
And that the sunset is beautiful
And beautiful is the night that stays behind...
That is how it is and shall be...

~

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it's hard to explain to anyone
how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough
simply to exist

See also The Book of Disquiet and Poems of Fernando Pessoa

(Wild Rose - Bethicketted)

The humdrum portraits trend

I wonder when the current fad for ho-hum humdrum portraits is going to be over?

Take flat even light (such as a soft, overcast day), ordinary (or ordinary looking) people and photograph them in a deadpan way, often head on. Preferably with big film (4x5 or 8x10) - oh and if you can throw the words adolescence, pubescent or teenage in there - or a scrawny semi-naked long haired guy - all the better (though non of it even comes close to Sally Mann's or Andrea Modica's or even Lauren Greenfield's take on those first three themes).

I think that looking back it will be very easy to identify this kind of work as from a very specific time period (the early 00's?) a bit like the identification between Duran Duran and 80's music.

It's been done to death and yet every week it seems a new emerging photographer pops up with the same take on the same old stuff. It looked good the first time, in the hands of one of those listed below. But on the whole now 98% of it is - well, pretty boring.

(Note: I'm only including photos in this post by some of those who pioneered this approach, not the followers - this is the good stuff... if you want the endless copycat stuff you'll have to find it yourself)

Rineke Dijkstra perfected this and her work still stands far above most of the rest. Philip-Lorca diCorcia takes stunning portraits which simply defy this (downward) trend.

Along with Dijkstra, Struth was one of the earlier experimenters with this format as was Thomas Ruff. Both did it well, very well indeed.

Loretta Lux took it to a whole new level (and, incidentally, took one of the first truly worthy moves towards the challenge of 1's and 0's, as well as turned the whole trend on it's head) - but stand by for the tidal wave of Bell Jar clutching disciples following in her wake


Martin Schoeller developed a close-up form (used to try replace Avedon for a while at the New Yorker), put his own twist on it and again that worked pretty well. While someone like Alec Soth picks up on an earlier tradition of portraiture and successfully runs with it.


Even so, few of the whole crop of efforts succeed as well as say Sander. I haven't yet seen the colour equivalent (in terms of depth, resonance and impact) of his work. I also doubt that, with a few notable exceptions, most of these will have the staying power of a Cameron or a Sander or an Avedon/American West portrait.

In the hands of the innovators, this approach to portraiture was somewhat refreshing. And (perhaps unfortunately) it works extremely well as a commercial look for selling fashion - or just about anything else - but in general, as a form of portraiture, it seems inherently lacking and self-limiting. I think it's also a very attractive and relatively easy form of work to take up for a whole generation of young things coming out of art school (especially, though not only, because you can use your anorexic/deadbeat/adolescent/gay/lesbian - insert word of choice - peers/siblings as an easy pool of models), but with a few exceptions, it has little staying power. Surely it's about time for something new and better to come and take its place.

As for links to examples - I'm pretty sure you can find them yourselves...

(BTW that's Boris Mikhailov in Soth's superb picture with the carrots)

more on Battleship Island

I listed the links in the previous post, but I wanted to give a few more details of Yuji Saiga's other photographs of Gukanjima Island as I think they are so fascinating.

First, the images of the of the sea wall that surrounds the island - what he calls Borderland.

And also images from the island in 1974 when it was still inhabited, but also the year it was abandoned

Lost City

Photographs by Yuji Saiga that appear as if from one of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities - an abandoned city on the Japanese island of Gukanjima. Originally known as Hashima Island it came to be called Gukanjima (battleship) Island because of the profile it's apartment buildings rising out of the sea. It was developed as a coal mining community and was populated from 1887 to 1974, eventually being abandoned when the coal ran out. In the 1950's it was apparently the was the worlds most densely populated community.

CITIES AND MEMORY 5

"Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. (Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities)

Also worth looking at are the photographs of the sea wall surrounding the island as well as photographs from 1974 when it was still inhabited

the Gallery of Regrettable Food

Food photography has come a long way in the last 50 years (to say nothing of cuisine...) Yep - that's meatballs in pink sauce - with the ever popular 1950's side dish of "chopped-off alien fetus pods".

If you've just had an operation, please don't scroll through The Gallery of Regrettable Food or you may burst your stitches.

But if you are a Baby Boomer you owe it to yourself to look at these and wonder in amazement at the fact we actually survived our childhood

Well worth hunting through the different 50's and 60's recipe books - especially the Knudsens Milk; Meat! Meat! Meat!; Knox cooking with gelatin - 0h and Cooking with Seven-Up - among others. A few of my favourites:

"I don’t know why, but this looks like some sort of control panel for a spacecraft whose occupants use only organic machinery. The egg slices on the left control the engines; the eggs on the right handle navigation.It goes without saying that the pea cluster is wired directly to the weapons array"

It really is Napalm-in-a-can - burns to 1120 degrees F...

"Was that a can in your pocket, or were you just glad to see me? But I’ll tell you this: there’s not a man alive who wouldn’t leap at the chance to deploy some Siz today. I mean, look at that thing. The colors. The shape. The name. No lighter run- off! Napalm with finger-tip control! It clings to each briquette and holds each coal in a clutch of fire. FLAMMABLE WHIPPED CREAM."

"Okay, here we go. It’s “Mashed Potato Surprise.” The recipe calls for a special kind of mushrooms: canned mushrooms. Which you feed to the dog. The trick is get him to throw up right in the middle of the mashed potatoes. "




Above- "Bleached, washed, plucked Scalp of Klingon"

And finally, no, you're not mistaken - that is Carnation hamburger....

And if you really enjoy the site, buy the book - for you Mum...

(all quotes and pictures from the Gallery of Regrettable Food)

Tree Roots and Trunk - Vincent van Gogh

"...this amazing painting – one of the very greatest (and least noticed) masterpieces from the founding moment of modernism – is yet another experiment in the independent vitality of painted line and colour, as well as the uncountable force of nature. Almost lost within it – as in Undergrowth With Two Figures – are allusions to and repudiations of, the exhausted traditions of landscape...

...The view is therefore bipolar: simultaneously that of the rabbit and the hawk. Colours – wheat-gold, clay-brown – tease the eye with possibilities of making sense of a field or a hill, but then scramble them into chaos. The usual aesthetic markers – beauty and ugliness – have been made meaningless. In Tree Roots the painted forms rap against the visual panes of our windows, as if trying to crash through the glass. In other paintings from these last weeks in Auvers the interior of the field – green or gold stalks – occupies the entirety of the visual field like a curtain. Without a beginning or an end this infinity of growing matter closes over us. It’s the ultimate compression of heaven and earth, a live burial within the engulfing sea of creation." Simon Scama on Vincent van Gogh's Tree Roots and Trunk"

(Once I've finished the Power of Art, I promise to stop quoting Schama so much...)

Bethicketted #3

The trees lack height and substance. There are no massive oaks or giant redwoods to anchor the forest either physically or visually and this northern forest lacks a dark dense forest floor. Instead the unique northern light, harsh, clear and oblique, angles through and reaches all but its deepest parts giving areas of strong shadow and highlight. The results are immersive landscapes where the viewer may become entangled and intrigued within the depths of the bush - bethicketted

tim atherton

Bee Flowers

Bee Flowers is an extraordinary photographer based in Moscow. He explores topics that range from Dutch suburbia, to Palestine/Israel and the West Bank to Fake Plastic Trees to Megastructure (Russia's urban planning) to Decommissioned Nation (the former Soviet Union) to Dachas and more.

His website itself is a work of art - one of the best websites I've seen full-stop, and certainly one of the best photographers sites. It's worth spending some time exploring. Click on a theme, follow a quick tour or go to the Gallery Index. There are also some great essays on there by Luis Gottardi (here among others) very well worth searching out.

I'd be hard put to pick my favourite work, so extensive are his projects. I've picked a few images from some of my favourites though.

Bee's work has recently been exhibited at the State Museum of Architecture in Moscow - the pictures of the show itself look fascinating - as well as the Yaroslavl Art Museum and the Astrakahn Art Museum.

Rumour has it Flowers is a Dutchman living in Moscow, a Russian who has lived in Holland and even one of the new Russian Oligarch's who does this on the side... (for the record I believe the first is true, but a little mythology is always good for an artists reputation... okay, he's probably going to kick my arse for that) - either way, despite the name, one thing he isn't is a 16 year old girl... (at least we don't think so) - even though I seem to recall someone hitting on him on the Streetphoto list under that assumption... not a pretty sight.


Flowers has also published some hand made artists books of his works. I'm saving up for one, and I've heard from others they are quite stunning.

From the introduction to Megastructures:

Ideal City
The clusters of large apartment blocks in Moscow, which form the central subject of this series by Bee Flowers, are called 'microrayons'. Sharing design & historical DNA with public housing and high-priced, free-market condominiums in many parts of the world, microrayons became a universal form of housing in Russia. Land, being government-owned, available, and plentiful, resulted in these units sprawling radially from the core of the city to its periphery. The architecture and design was not due to costs or other market pressures, but from an idealistic Communist vision of what a city and nation could be.

This Utopian vision of a functional cosmopolitan worker's collective would be facilitated, in part, by design, materials, and layout of the housing. Homogeneity in design was supposed to eliminate competition and individuality, creating a viable alternative to Capitalism. Instead, it resulted in density increasing as one neared the edges of Moscow, left dead industrial areas nearer to the core, caused high transportation/ supply/ maintenance costs and alienation. The early five-story version of these structures were referred to as 'khrushchovkas', derived from Nikita Khrushchev who initiated their construction around 1954, having released thousands of political prisoners from the Stalinist era, creating an instant housing crisis in Moscow.... (Luis Gottardi)

(below: diptych from Decommissioned Nation)

Sugimoto

Trying to summarise Hiroshi Sugimoto's work up in a blog posting is an impossible task - I'll leave you to read the rather large retrospective book of the same name. All I want to do here is pick and chose a few of my favourites from his work.

Sugimoto has worked on a number of what may initially seem unconnected projects. But in a way they all do have an underlying theme - which is time - or more accurately, the passing of time and different kinds of time. The work has ranged from wax portrait and museum work, to the movie theatres, seascapes and architecture, on to mathematical forms and now fossils, among other things (he comments that fossils are really just photographs that take a long time to develop...

"Fossils work almost the same way as photography...as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography. So that’s why I am very curious about the artistic stage of imprinting the memories of the time record. A fossil is made over
four-hundred-fifty million years—it takes that much time. But photography, it’s instant. So, to me, photography functions as a fossilization of time.")

One thing about Sugimoto's work is it's often close to unique - he finds a very different way of approaching something, works with it and then moves on. He doesn't try and repeat himself, or milk an idea until it's long past dead. But equally, while he manages to find a unique approach, he manages to do so with turning it into a novelty. Those are two dangers plenty of others don't actually manage to avoid

Of his work to date, my favourites would have to be the movie theatres, the seascapes and the architecture - followed by the mathematical forms (though having worked on and off in museums, I also have a fondness for the dioramas).

I once went to see a movie in San Francisco (Evita of all things) in a most beautiful ornate old theatre - but which had a strange sense of familiarity to it. It was only later that I realised it was one which Sugimoto had photographed. As I understand it, he made his photographs by using an extremely long exposure and photographing for the whole length of the movie - which lit the theatre but left a blanked out white screen. He also felt that the nature of the movie led to different results in the way the final photograph looked.

The seascapes are minimal and yet never really repetitive. In fact looking at a sequence of them - from different areas of the world - it's very easy to get drawn right into them. I think some where taken with very short exposures, while others were taken over several hours.

As for his architecture series, it really is one of my favourites. The photographs are taken at what he calls 2x infinity. That is, the lens is extended to 2x its normal focal length resulting in photographs which are out of focus - but in a way which still leaves the subject recognisable. Sugimoto explores Modern architecture all over the globe. The buildings remain identifiable in their essence, but we aren't caught up in the details. Of course they are also quite beautiful (and it's a great argument for not worrying about how razor sharp a lens needs to be).

I should add, these are definitely the sort of works which do really benefit from being printed quite large - they need the space.

With Sugimoto, I'm always waiting to see what he is going to do next, while I don't tire of going back over his work.

The Hirshorn has a very nice web presentation of their recent exhibit of his work

There is also an interview on PBS (links at the bottom of the page) - it also includes a fascinating slideshow of him planning an exhibition.

(For the technically minded, I seem to recall that he still works mainly in 8x10, with Tri-X in D23 to keep the contrast under control. And he likes to photograph @f64 - joking that he's the last of the Group F64)

Lego versions of famous photos

Lego versions of famous photos from Atget (above) to Stieglitz to Evans, Robert Frank and Capa (below)

Interestingly, the Chris Jordan post raised a lot of discussion about photo-mosaics and also mosaic software. Out of that came a link to new work by Spanish photographer and artists Joan Fontcuberta including one of the first photo ever taken. So, which do you prefer - the high art or the Lego...:

(On the right, Niepce, 2005, C-print 120 x 160 cm, First photograph in history, taken by Nocéphore Niepce in Gras, France, 1826. The photograph has been refashioned using photomosaic freeware, linked to Google’’ Image Search function. The final result is a composite of 10,000 images available on the Internet that responded to the words"photo" and "foto" as search criteria.)

(Thanks Frank P for the Lego link)