Claude Pauquet's French Seaside

Someone recently told me that French photography had been in the grip on Henri Cartier Bresson, the instant décisif and the tradition of photojournalism for so long that for a photographer to take up serious large format photography, with it's slower and more more thoughtful approach, was grounds for mockery and possibly professional suicide. I'm certainly glad at least one photographer took up the challenge...



In Claude Pauquet's work I'm struck by how much the French Seaside looks like the English Seaside - both sides of the Channel seem to have much in common. Indeed, for generations there has been a regular too and fro of those who live on the two coastlines, from smugglers, to fisherman to tourists. Caravan sites, seaside cottages, amusement parks and abandoned beach shacks seem to dot the landscape of both regions.

Growing up in Sussex, every few months through the spring and summer we had a French onion seller - his bicycle and trailer festooned with strings of garlic and onions - come door to door. It didn't seem the least bit unusual that he would travel across by ferry and spend a few weeks selling on the English side of the Channel. I feel I could have easily taken many of these photographs along the coasts of Sussex or Dorset or Devon.

"From 2002 to 2006, Claude Pauquet began a trip between the Atlantic coast and the Channel coast, from Hendaye to Bray-Dunes. He was very close to the coasts to take the pictures , travelling from one place to another in order to explore a border-line between the shores and the ocean, between the natural landscapes and the unspecified spaces."

I like the sense and feel these pictures give of these places - which are indeed transition zones in many different ways.

Lee Miller

( 'Portrait of space'Near Siwa Egypt)

Lee Miller seems to have had more lives than the average Buddhist Master. As a child I remember my Grandmother pointing out a rather elegant woman in Eastbourne as Lady Penrose. It was only many years later I realised that was Lee Miller the photographer.

Miller went from sought after model to Surrealist muse, to surrealist photographer to fashion photographer to war correspondent.

(Lee Miller by Man Ray)

As well as her fashion work, she photographed in Egypt after she married Aziz Eloui Bey and became fascinated with long distance desert travel (think The English Patient). In Paris she was friends with, and often muse to, Breton, Picasso (who painted her several times), Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst and others, as well as a recurring subject of Many Ray's camera. She also went on to set up her own studio in Paris.

(Fire Masks - worn as protection from incendiary bombs)

On the outbreak of war she found herself in London where she worked as a correspondent for Vogue, covering the Blitz and wartime Britain. Shortly after D-Day she travelled as a war correspondent/combat photographer to France, covering the siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, on to Frankfurt and Leipzig and, memorably, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, finishing up at Hitlers lair in Bavaria

(Dead SS Guard floating in canal Dachau)

After the war she married Roland Penrose - who she had known from Paris- having divorced Bey. Penrose was just about the only English Surrealist (is there a more unlikely name for a surrealist than his?) and she eventually settled with him on a farm in Sussex which became a gathering place for everyone from Picasso to Henry Moore to Man Ray.

(The Shadow of the Great PyramidEgypt)

Miller's photography at this point wasn't terribly well known beyond the publications it appeared in. It was only in later years that her son Anthony brought much of it to light again and her varied career - and her photography - became more widely known.

There are a number of good books of her work out there Lee Miller's War, The Lives of Lee Miller etc - as well as a good biography.

(In Hitler's bath, Munich)

Fulvio Bortolozzo

At first glance some of Fulvio Bortolozzo's work , especially the daylight pictures, seems like Basilico in colour - which isn't a bad thing at all. There are a lot of images on his site (which is mainly in Italian). I also think I can detect the influence of Luigi Ghirri, who seems sadly so little known outside Italy. And yes, I'm still a sucker for urban and suburban cityscapes. Certainly there is a lot of it out there - but for a a huge percentage of us in the West, it's where we live. We might like to take our vacations by the sea or in Morocco or Costa Rica, but we spend most of our lives in the places these photographers depict. I certainly don't think this vein has been at all exhausted in terms of photographers trying to understand it and make some kind of sense out of it by means of their work (though it's getting harder, and the bar should certainly keep being raised).




Bortolozzo has managed to depict something of the contemporary Italian urban condition and has done so while making use of a subtle - almost beautiful - colour palette. But he never prettifies it.


A while ago I had grown a little weary of the amount of urban night photogaphy that seemed to be coming at us. I don't know if it's that the stream has dried up a bit now, or the quality has improved, but I've come across a few examples recently that don't seem nearly so repetitive (I'll probably post more soon).


Fulvio has some night work on his site that is certainly worth looking at. I like especially his Olimpia where the work becomes the trace of Bortolozzo's walking through the nocturnal cityscape of the new olympic Torino and also the wider theme of Scene di passaggio (Soap Opera) where the work puts in chronological sequence the representations of the places that are the scenic spaces for the Soap Opera in which I play the protagonist role: my life. I love the idea of "the soap opera that is my life..."

How To Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance

Fun advice from Wired on How To Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance (apparently there's a we met on flickr group - which, as a concept, I must admit I find a little scary)

As you click on each of the thumbnails in the story you'll get advice, like:

Don't pursue someone with hundreds of contacts who posts provocativeself-portraits (Miss Aniela, featured above, for example). The chance that you could catch the attention of someone with such a busy Flickr life is slim. (If you have some fresh approach that you think would work, please e-mail it to this author in detail and he will ... uh ... review it.) Instead, focus your crush on the diamond in the rough: the shy librarian, the surfer with a fondness for black-and-white.

Joe Reifer

I like it when I'm directed by Google Analytics to a site that has been referring to this blog and find work I've never come across before. One such was Joe Reifers blog. On his website I found some interesting night work (those aircraft graveyards remind me of the opening chapters of DeLillo's Underworld).

Some nice work (though I think I prefer those night shots where there doesn't appear to be any additional lighting)

"The Ongoing Moment" by Geoff Dyer

The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer is a slightly frustrating but ultimately rewarding book that takes a rather eclectic course through about the last 60 or 70 years of modern photography. All the usual suspects are here - Stieglitz, Evans, Winogrand, Strand, Nachtwey (as well as a few not so usual suspects), but rather than a chronological recounting of their places in the photographic pantheon, Dyer picks up on themes that run through their work - themes apparently picked up almost unconsciously and passed like a baton from one photographic generation to another. Hats or accordion players or blind beggars or fences or highways for instance

While this approach can be a little annoying - you just feel like you are getting into a theme when it switches, you do come away from the book with a whole host of ideas buzzing around in your head.

Among other things, Dyer has one of the best description William Eggleston's work I've come across, as well as a good, if rather succinct, description of the arrival of colour in serious photography.

Along the way we get plenty of intriguing oddities - Stieglitz' bizarre fascination with kneaded breasts, gossip about the affair between Mrs. Stieglitz and Mrs. Strand (as well as Stieglitz seducting Mrs. Strand with more than his camera), Edward Weston's defence of pubic hair (of which he professes "a love of all types and colours...") to the grey elders of the board of the Museum of Modern Art and more...

There are many gems, including as this one;

"In the course of this book I have comes, increasingly, to like photographs which look like they were taken by someone else - the Shahn of a "Lange" back, say. My favourite pictures by Brassai are the ones done in daylight, especially the ones that look like they were taken by Lartigue. It's quite possible that some of my favourite Shore's were taken by Eggleston and vice versa. Perhaps it's not a surprise, then, that my favourite Walker Evans (WE) photograph was take by Edward Weston (EW)."

The book is available in paperback as well now I believe and there is an interview with Dyer here

Paul Raphaelson's Terrain Vague

Paul Raphaelson seems to have an eye for those in-between and lost places of the city (as well as a surname any artist would give their right arm for...). Places which may seem empty "waste-land" but which, if you take the time and look closely enough, are not necessarily desolate.

As he says about his work Lost Spaces, Found Gardens:

"Paradise is the Persian word for a walled enclosure. As often as not, in the city the walls are cyclone fences crowned with razorwire. Whatever they lack in charm they make up by providing a framed view from the outside. I find solace in the spontaneous gardens behind the fences. And I’m inspired by all the wild things invading them, by the relief they bring from the city’s antiseptic geometry and sheen."

And about Wilderness:

"In the early Nineteen-nineties I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, in a landscape at turns both overgrown and barren. New England row houses mingled with empty lots, crumbling husks of factories, and a dizzying web of trees, weeds, cyclone fences, and high tension wires. Layers of growth and decay confounded any attempts at easy interpretation. The landscape might have been formed by a simple mix of accident and neglect, but it felt to me like the work of a larger process."

Kim Keever's imaginary landscapes

I came across this work by Kim Keever a couple of years ago (thanks for the reminder wood s lot).

While there is the possibility that the work could get somewhat repetitive after while, I still think they are fascinating. And Keever obviously delights in what he's doing, which I think is a good part of it.

I love the whole messy way they are made up and put together with a massive tank in his apartment (I gather his downstairs neighbours aren't too happy that tank has burst a couple of times though... but hey - that's the cost of art!)

"Kim Keever's mysterious and painterly large-scale photographs represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing the Romanticism of the Hudson River School and 19th-century photography of the American West, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime; however, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. These images reflect none of the concerns with authenticity for which photography has historically been used; yet, they retain the inherent efficacy and rigor of their medium..."

~~

"It's so much fun to see the paint clouds move through the water and it all starts to look so real, I feel like I'm watching a movie or I've been transported to this lilliputian world of my own creation. I guess I'm an escapist at heart."

other links and more images here and here

Traces

I had been musing about the current direction of my own photography when a recent post on Paul Butzi's blog caught my eye. It was about Locard's Exchange Principle (or theory). Locard was the founding father of modern forensic science, at the root of which is his statement that "every contact leaves a trace" or "with contact between two items there will be an exchange".

Butzi's take on it is slightly different from the one I've been mulling over for some time. Many years ago when I did my basic police training we had to study a standard forensics textbook. I remember being introduced to Locard's Principle by a rather daunting Special Investigations Branch Warrant Officer, a veteran of many major investigations. He drummed the Principal into us as he taught us the basics of Forensics, photography and how not to mess up a Crime Scene (and which was nothing like the highly popular and unrealistic CSI franchise...).

Somewhere in the back of my mind Locard's Principle has stuck with me over the years. Now, the more I look at it, the more I see that my photography is often about traces - finding, following or interpreting them. They might be traces of many people or one, the traces left by memory or history, but the idea of a photographer as being a person who follows traces is one that resonates strongly for me.

And alongside this there is also the transference that takes when the photographer make a picture - as John Berger puts it "cameras are just boxes for transporting appearances". The photographer simply uses the camera to make a trace of what he sees before him or her: the exchange that takes place between photographer and scene.

As it stands right now, I think I'd be happy if my work was seen as being about interpreting traces.

tim atherton

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)