Fred Herzog - early colour

Now 76, Fred Herzog began photographing Vancouver in the late 50's. In some ways a classic Street Photographer, Herzog did one thing that was different - he worked seriously in colour. He has a dazzling collection of photographs and clearly, very early on, had come to grips with many of the aspects of working in colour that weren't trumpeted elsewhere until perhaps 10 or 15 years later. He has a grasp of colour that in many ways preceeds the likes of Shore and even Eggleston.

He also expresses some interesting views on photography (the whole article is a good fun read)

"Photographic finesse has its place, but it can also get in the way. I was trying to show vitality. The pictures are about content, and more content. And if there is no content, take no picture."It’s exactly the other way around now. 'Okay I’m going to take my clothes off, and I’m going to stand there in the nude, and I’m going to try and look lonely or profound.'

• On choosing documentary street photography: "Nobody did that even in the U.S.A. I have often looked at American yearbooks and things, the American Photography colour yearbook, that was a big thing, I bought those. But they’re full of pretty pictures of women, some of them naked, some of them beautiful. Even the ones who are not naked look beautiful to me. Perhaps it’s my age. But there was no street photography. None done. And I did that, and I did it with a passion, and I did it with variety. You can see that now in the pictures."

• On shooting in colour, at a time when all serious art photography was done in black and white:"First of all when you do black and white all have is the basic resource, a negative. That needs a lot of dancing around the darkroom and time and patience and energy. You should ideally be a man of leisure,an English gentleman. And a lot of English gentlemen did serious and beautiful photography. "But I didn’t have time for that. That’s one reason I did colour slides. I’d get 36 slides back, beautiful, finish.”"

• On street photography and digital technology:"Timing in photography is almost everything. You have to pay attention to where the light comes from, you have to pay attention to your background. If your background is too loud, or makes too much of itself...that’s the problem of the photographic process. It records everything that’s in the viewfinder, whether it’s important or not.""All the good pictures that didn’t turn out good, it’s because of the background or because the light comes from one side or some other technical glitch. That’s the grace of these modern digital cameras.First of all everything that can go wrong is taken care of automatically. A person who’s completely ignorant of the photographic process can take photos."

"And I say that respectfully. You don’t have to know anything, you press the button and you get a beautiful picture. That’s how it works out now. This is enormous progress. Because of that you’ll see now a flood of good pictures which we never dreamed we would see. I already get them in the e-mail."

Still going strong, there is a major of his work show currently up at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas & Mcintyre has published a book of his work.

Sugimoto update - conversation podcast

Leo over on Streetphoto just pointed me to a podcast conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto from the Modern Museum of Art at Fort Worth.

Note - it's probably best to right click and save from the link here - it's 14mb

There are also links to the Hirshhorn ones here (all biggish downloads):

Sugimoto's Vision: A special lecture by Michael Fried

Meet the Artist: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto and David Elliott

Exhibition Walkthrough with Hiroshi Sugimoto, Second Level

Lots of other good podcasts at the Hirshhorn link, such as an interview with Janet Cardiff

Must read blogs #1

( Anton Räderscheidt1927 photo by August Sander)

One blog I always keep an eye on is wood s lot. Everyday there is is a selection from philosophy to poetry to politics to photography to art and literature. Stuff and people you've never heard of. Writers you had forgotten about.

Always well worth a visit - it's almost guaranteed there will be something there to send your thoughts off on a new course for the day (note - it's a bit slow right now due to injury I believe)

Jem Southam

I'm quite fond of the photographs of English photographer Jem Southam. I'm sure in part it's because he depicts places where I lived and grew up. I'm intimately familiar with the chalk cliffs and pebble beaches of the Channel coast, the Dew-ponds of the Downs and the fields and lanes of Devon. It's also the kind of photography that I sometimes like to make.

There is a quiet and gentle intensity to his work. Seemingly casual, yet able to capture the real essence and feel of a place. (I also love how so many stories about him inaccurately repeat that he uses and 8x10 "plate" camera - as if a regular 8x10 camera is something from the mists of history)

There is a nice interview in SeeSaw Magazine, a short radio interview here and some gallery stuff here and here . The one book of his that I have is Landscape Stories

From 99¢ to $3.3 million

One lucky shopper got a bargain on Gursky's diptych "99 Cents II" at Sothebys in London this week for the knockdown price of $3.3 million US

What do you think - worth it? (obviously it is to someone). Good for photography? (That's the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction).

If only I could photograph like Murakami

I sometimes think that if only I could photograph like Haruki Murakami writes I would be lauded as a photographer worldwide with everyone clamouring for my work....

Murakami is one of my favourite writers. I love the way he can bring so many incongruities together in an apparently natural way. There is an ordinary everydayness to his writing, combined with something strange and magical along with the odd bit of thriller noir thrown in.

With Murakami you have novels in which someone's lost cat leads - via a teenage wig surveyor - to the atrocities of the sino-japanese war. Or another in which one of the main characters is (entirely plausibly) a sheep/man, discovered through the floor of a hotel that doesn't exist. Or a man with an implant in his bran seeking to reunite with his lost shadow and memories (as well as with a chubby young woman who only wears pink). Someone said he's a metaphysical novelist with a warm, down-to-earth voice and a knack for creating credible characters and spinning a lively yarn (and if I could read my old journal notes, I'd tell you who...).


My favourite books would have to be the last mentioned above - Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, and his latest novel Kafka on the Shore which features the 15-year-old Kafka Tamura who has run away from home, an elderly simpleton who can speak with cats, a spirit appearing as Johnny Walker along with "fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders—but Murakami also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship". But almost any of his books is a good choice (though I don't get on with his short stories).

In a place where time isn't important neither is memory...

"Are memories such an important thing?". It depends, she replied, "in some cases they're the most important thing there is." "Yet you burned yours up" - "I had no need for them anymore"... Kafka on the Shore

~~

After thirty minutes of guitar practice who should show up but the Sheep Man. "IfIbotheryouI'llleave" said the Sheep Man through the front door. "No not at all. I was getting kind of board anyway" I said, setting the guitar on the floor... A Wild Sheep Chase

(Photos from Tokyo Polaroid Plus - whose photographs are the closest I have come across - well worth looking through)

Walker Evans

What else is there to say about Walker Evans other than he is probably the greatest American photographer of the Twentieth Century... Okay - there is plenty more to say.

It's hard to tire of Evan's work - whether it's his early work from Cuba, the extensive Depression era work with the FSA, his subway project or any of the other work he produced from Florida, Northeast architecture or his very late colour work.

Evans' work pretty much defined a whole American approach to photography - indeed American Photographs is probably one of the most important books of photography published in the last century in North America - defining both Modern photography in particular and photography books in general.

A recent word from John Szarkowski:
"Probably the most misunderstood important photographer in American photography is Walker Evans. You know, people think he was photographing the Depression, people think he was photographing poor people or tried to promote social change. Walker was less interested in social change.... But what he really was photographing was something else. Very seldom did he photograph anything that he didn’t think had some kind of quality. Even if it was the record of a failure, it was the record of a failure in which there was some kind of poignancy, some kind of memorable ambition. Some kind of artistic intention, even if naive or cut short. Noble failure was a constant interest of his. A piece of stamped tin ornament thrown away in the junk pile — it’s a record of an artistic ambition that was for some reason cut short, thwarted, died stillborn, of course naive, but nevertheless, on some level, moving."

and from a recent exhibition review:

"...He combined Hemingway’s economy with Cummings’s wit and Eliot’s urbanity. His laconic scrutiny defined an American visual poetry stripped of Victorian charm and propriety and easy bohemianism. It’s there in the rhyming circles of the windows of the houses echoing Lombard’s shiner on the poster, in the haphazard geometry of the telephone wires and in the tumble of abandoned Model T’s, like tombstones, collected at the base of a grassy hill. The last is akin to one of Brady’s Civil War photographs, silent and eternal. Evans’s mordant dispassion let him see destitution and the everyday in all its ready-made eloquence, short-circuiting our pity and condescension."

Interestingly the Library of Congress holds many of Evan's negatives and prints from the FSA work. A lot of this has been digitized and can be found at the American Memory site. While they have links to a few of his most popular photographs up front, if you hunt around (and you do have to hunt) there are a significant number of hi-res files of Evans' work. You can download these and they a certainly good enough to produce your own 11x14 or so print - such as the one below.

While I was hunting around the web for images I was also delighted to find a recorded interview with Evan's at the Getty here

More on Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan's work that I mentioned in a couple of earlier posts here and here was very much the beginnings of an experimental project.

He recently put up a new addition (above). I think he's really getting closer to what he wants to do here.

"I just posted a new one on my website, depicting 1.14 million paper supermarket bags (the quantity used in the US every hour). This is not a mosaic like a couple of the previous ones; this one I assembled manually in Photoshop from hundreds of photos I made in my studio of a small quantity of supermarket bags"

Alec Soth - portraits

(Mary, Wisconsin 2005)

Alec Soth is certainly the wunderkind of the moment - though deservedly so imo. Sleeping by the Mississippi was good. I think Niagara was actually better - though as much as I enjoyed them I must say I find both mildly depressing.... But it wasn't until I hunted around his site that I came across his portraits. The two books just mentioned include quite a few portraits, but most of these seem a little different. They seem to be a combination of commissions and work taken in the course of other projects. I must sayI really quite like them.



(Günter Grass & Gerhard Steidl, 2004)

There's a freshness about them as well as a vitality - you feel like you could get to know most of these people. There's also the clarity that comes from using 8x10, which isn't purely visual, and comes across even on the web.

There is an essay about the portraits on his site:

"Soth is most interested in shooting what is new to him. Rarely does he photograph friends, family, or familiar surroundings. His vision is driven by curiosity. He credits his solitary wanderings for heightening his awareness—for his ability to spot the right person, even in a crowd. On a recent assignment in China, he waited at the entrance of a subway. “I probably watched five hundred people pass by the tunnel entrance,” says Soth. “I knew the instant that I saw this one young man that I wanted to take his portrait.”

Describing the experience of meeting Odessa (Odessa, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004) while on assignment for Life magazine in Tennessee, Soth recalls: “Odessa was visiting her boyfriend while he played war games in Joelton. I was attracted to her the second I saw her. The attraction is not unlike falling in love at first sight. It is a physical, not cognitive, reaction. I became interested in the ‘idea’ of her.” Soth wondered what her story was. “But this isn’t the point. I’m interested in the beauty of the mystery. I’m standing here; she’s standing there. In the space between there is a gulf, a mystery, and for me, an attraction.” That is what Soth seeks to behold and to capture: the invisible gulf, the space that connects us, holding everything together...." more

(Girl with flowers, Beijing, 2004)

Now I just want to see how he got on with Cat Power... - he'd mentioned on his blog he wanted to photograph her et voilà! (so, Madeleine Peyroux, if you are reading this I'm free :-) )

(Jim Harrison, Livingston, Montana, 2004)

Jitka Hanzlová - Forest

Jitka Hanzlová is quite well known for her portrait work, but I especially like her work on the forest surrounding the village where she lived as a child. I've always been intrigued by forests and woodlands - like mountains they often seem to embody the beautiful and the sublime (in the awe-full sense of "dark, uncertain, and confused.") at the same time. John Berger has written about her work:

"...Many nature photographs are like fashion photos. This is not to dismiss them; they record and admit pleasure. Mountaintops, waterfalls, meadows, lakes, beech trees in autumn, are asked to stand there, wearing themselves and giving the camera a moody look. And why not? They are reminders of the pleasure of at last arriving after hours in airports.

Nature as hostess.

In Jitka’s pictures there is no welcome. They have been taken from the inside. The deep inside of a forest, perceived like the inside of a glove by a hand within it....

It’s a commonplace to say that photographs interrupt or arrest the flow of time. They do it, however, in thousands of different ways. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” is different from Atget’s slowing down to a standstill, or from Thomas Struth’s ceremonial stopping of time. What is strange about some of Jitka’s forest photos - not her photos of other subjects - is that they appear to have stopped nothing.

In a space without gravity there is no weight, and these pictures of hers are, as it were, weightless in terms of time. It is as if they have been taken between times, where there is none...

In the silence of the forest certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this they both disconcert and entice the observer’s imagination: for they are like another creature’s experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us, somewhere between past, present and future....

Return to the forests that belong to history. In Jitka’s one there is often a sense of waiting, yet what is it that is waiting? And is waiting the right word? A patience. A patience practised by what? A forest incident. An incident we can neither name, describe, nor place. And yet is there. The intricacy of the crossing paths and crossing energies in a forest - the paths of birds, insects, mammals, spores, seeds, reptiles, ferns, lichens, worms, trees, etc, etc - is unique; perhaps in certain areas on the seabed there exists a comparable intricacy, but there man is a recent intruder, whereas, with all his sense perceptions, he came from the forest. Man is the only creature who lives within at least two timescales: the biological one of his body and the one of his consciousness....

The longer one looks at Jitka Hanzlová’s pictures of a forest, the clearer it becomes that a breakout from the prison of modern time is possible. The dryads beckon. You may slip between - but unaccompanied."

Here is a cached link to the full Berger article

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