Atget

Parc de Sceaux, mars, 7 h. matin 1925

Every now and then I'd like to throw one of my favourite photographers into the mix here - in this case, with two of my all time favourite photographs as well (If ever I win the lottery, I'll be hunting at least one of these two down - so Paris, if you're reading this and looking for a present for my upcoming birthday....).

The number one photographer for me has to be Atget - I'll be surprised if I ever tire of coming back to his work. He is probably one of the most important photographers in the history of the medium as well as the forerunner of modern photography. And yet every now and then I'm surprised by how many photographers either haven't even heard of him or are only vaguely aware of his work.

There's so much I could say about Atget, but for now I'll leave it to John Szarkowski from the introduction to The Work of Atget:

Atget, pointing

As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person-a mute Virgil of the corporeal world-who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer...

To note the similarity between photography and pointing seems to me useful. Surely the best of photographers have been first of all pointers-men and women whose work says: I call your attention to this pyramid, face, battlefield, pattern of nature, ephemeral juxtaposition...

In his early work, Atget, like most intelligent beginners, tried many things. Many of his early pictures attempt a direct reportage of ephemeral contemporary life: groups of people at work or play, the bustle of the street, events of topical interest, etc. Most of these pictures seem merely circumstantial, and insufficiently formed, but a few succeed very well. These successes, to a photographer of appropriate temperament, would have been adequate encouragement; this line of exploration could only have been profitably pursued, preferably with one of the splendid new hand cameras rather than the ponderous and refractory stand camera that Atget used. There was, however, an opposing strain in Atget's early work which-we must assume-pleased him more. These pictures are still, simple and poised, and concern themselves not with reportage but with history. Very early in his career Atget stopped trying to catch the world unaware....

...The intensity of Atget's attention might be measured by the frequency with which he returned to certain families of subject matter. He loved dooryards, with their climbing vines, window boxes, caged canaries, and worn stone doorsteps; and courts with neighborhood wells in them, immemorial centers of sociability, news, and contention. Atget's pictures describe such places with a sharp but tactful scrutiny. They define a meeting ground between domestic and civil life, the innermost plane of the private person's public face.

Tavern, the Lapin Agile, rue des Saules 1926

Among the good books on Atget - and there are many - would be (click for a link):

John Gossage... again

After making John Gossage's work the subject of my very first blog post, and then recently posting about Terri Wiefenbach (aka Mrs. John Gossage as our grandparents used to say), I only just discovered Photoeye also has a portfolio of John's work from their joint book Snake Eyes.

If you can't afford the book... then it's interesting to look through both portfolios side by side.

"We are two photographers on the same days, in the same places taking different things in very different ways... There is a crystalline clarity in Terri's color, the particularity of her focus, her embrace of the beautiful. Far from random stuff. I, though, am the collector of clues, with a prejudice toward paths and borders, a lookout for the stones that have already been turned..."

There is also a useful bio with a list of his books here

The Adventure of a Photographer

The Adventure of a Photographer by Italo Calvino

I want to write more about Calvino's fantastic (in the true sense of the word) book Invisible Cities later. But for now, here's a link to his short story The Adventure of a Photographer. Among other things, it essentially takes Flickr to it's logical - and ridiculous - conclusion.... (I also thought the lovely 1927 image The Photographer by Efrosiniya Ermilova-Platonova especially suitable):

"WHEN SPRING comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the hundreds of thousands, go out on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one another. They come back as happy as hunters with bulging game bags; they spend days waiting, with sweet anxiety, to see the developed pictures (anxiety to which some add the subtle pleasure of alchemistic manipulations in the darkroom, forbidding any intrusion by members of the family, relishing the acid smell that is harsh to the nostrils). It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife’s legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted. Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of memory.

Seeing a good deal of his friends and colleagues, Antonino Paraggi, a nonphotographer, sensed a growing isolation. Every week he discovered that the conversations of those who praise the sensitivity of a filter or discourse on the number of DINs were swelled by the voice of yet another to whom he had confided until yesterday, convinced that they were shared, his sarcastic remarks about an activity that to him seemed so unexciting, so lacking in surprises.

Professionally, Antonino Paraggi occupied an executive position in the distribution department of a production firm, but his real passion was commenting to his friends on current events large and small, unraveling the thread of general causes from the tangle of details; in short, by mental attitude he was a philosopher, and he devoted all his thoroughness to grasping the significance of even the events most remote from his own experience. Now he felt that something in the essence of photographic man was eluding him, the secret appeal that made new adepts continue to join the ranks of the amateurs of the lens, some boasting of the progress of their technical and artistic skill, others, on the contrary, giving all the credit to the efficiency of the camera they had purchased, which was capable (according to them) of producing masterpieces even when operated by inept hands (as they declared their own to be, because wherever pride aimed at magnifying the virtues of mechanical devices, subjective talent accepted a proportionate humiliation). Antonino Paraggi understood that neither the one nor the other motive of satisfaction was decisive: the secret lay elsewhere...." Read the rest of the story here

(thanks for reminding me of the picture wood_s_lot)

Elger Esser

I must admit that despite all the hype, there's a lot about the Dusseldorf/Becher school that I like. There are also some individual artists to come out of that who I am really drawn to. One such is Elger Esser. Most of his work is very lyrical (and at times seems quite "un-Becher-like" in a way). Some of his photographs draw from 16th and 17th landscape painting. He's also informed by things like 19th Century postcards or writings and sketches by Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. Esser also experiments with photographic materials; using large format film he often utilizing extremely long dawn or dusk exposures (30 or 40 minutes I believe) and their associated colour shifts

From a short article: "The most impressive images by far are Esser's cityscapes, many of which depict small French riverside towns. In Macon, a strip of modest buildings along a riverbank is reflected upside down in the greenish water, as it might be in a 17th-century landscape painting or an early tourist photograph. In Gien, an ancient stone bridge arches toward a stand of houses; behind them, a turreted castle looms. These antique-looking scenes are especially beautiful: the sky glows with a golden, pinkish light, and the old stone buildings practically pulse with harmonious tones of gold, rose and white. Yet Esser also makes them anthropologically fascinating: the resolution is so clear and exact that it's possible to discern cars, read signs and even peer into windows--making for a delicious confusion between the town's multilayered, modern-day presence and the photograph's old-fashioned look".

his two main books are Vedutas and Landscapes:

and Cap d'Antifer - Etretat:

articles, shows etc : here and here - though like a lot of really good contemporary photographers, it seems there isn't actually that much about him online. None of the websites I came across give anything close the the impression you get from looking at one of the two books I mention.

Terri Weifenbach

I don't know much about Terri Weifenbach, but something about her photographs grabs me. From her statement (I must say that personally I hate having to write an "artist's statement" but they do sometimes give a clue about the work):

Terri Weifenbach's photographs are careful observations of overlooked spaces and stolen moments - backyard gardens, a bee suspended in midair, the house across the street, open fields. Through her use of saturated color and selective focus we rediscover the wonder and lushness of nature.

There is more on the Photoeye Gallery site here.

She also has quite a number of books - I'd love to find a bargain copy of Snake Eyes which she did with her husband John Gossage (mind you I once bought a copy of her Instruction Manual No. 3 and it was - well a little tooo minimalist for me...)

Chromophobia

If there is one book (as opposed to photo-book) that changed my attitude and approach to colour and colour photography, this is it. As well as helping me with my own colour work, it helped me see in part why some colour photography works and some just doesn’t.

Chromophobia by David Batchelor is a short, fairly quick read, but it covers a lot of ground. It’s quirky and thought provoking. The gist of the book is that the Western (art) world has had a fear of and prejudice against colour for the last couple of thousand years. He traces a line from your kindergarten teacher telling you to make sure you “colour inside the lines” back to Aristotle and Plato’s comments about colour being merely cosmetic (often conveyed in photography as "colour captures the clothes but b&w captures the soul...") and to the primacy of line and form over colour.

Batchelor then takes off on a number of different tangents: from the rigidity of colour theory in art to Le Corbusier renouncing his Eastern induced intoxication with colour after a feverish encounter with the Parthenon to Dorothy falling from the grey world of Kansas into the colour of Oz to the problems language has in describing and containing colour.

From some reviews and articles:

“The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or contamination through color - lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, either by making it the property of some "foreign body" - the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological - or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.”

“Urban life is filled with "color rhyming" moments; you walk down the street and a yellow truck appears in your frame of vision just as a man in a yellow jacket turns into view and suddenly you feel the ineffable. That's what the book is really about -- honoring moments like that.”

There's also an NY Times review here

Following are a few ideas and comments from the book that stay with me:

That line and form are linked to language – whereas colour precedes words and antedates civilization.

“That car might happen to be bright yellow, but no more than that bright yellow might happen to be a car.”

The essential difference between colour and colours (and where so much colour photography fails in recognizing that difference)

"To fall into colour is to run out of words"

Despite the Hollywood perception, research shows most of us dream in colour.

“It is a land that is still there to be glimpsed in the flare of brilliant colour, be it in the surfaces and fragmented reflections of the street or in the art that finds a way of harnessing this immaterial material so that we may look a little more closely and for a little longer.”

Ed Richards - The Katrina Project

Basically there seem to have been two kinds of Katrina photographers (well - maybe three if you include the storm chasing press photogs)

Those who travelled down to Louisiana in the days and months after the catastrophe. Who came and saw and photographed but who eventually left again - and produced their bodies of work - books and shows and articles. Chris Jordan, Robert Polidori, Larry Towell and others. The work is generally outstanding, full of clear sighted empathy. Some are even donating proceeds from their work to rebuilding the region.

Then there are those photographers who lived there. By chance (or bad luck?) they found the place they lived had become the locus of the storm. Some I know evacuated and then returned as soon as they could. Some rode out the storm. And while most of these are not what we tend to call "name" photographers - the guys with gallery representation or Magnum membership, there were some who are nevertheless, very very good photographers. They also had a unique eye and perspective. (though note - I am the last person to say that to really photograph somewhere you have to live there)

One such is Ed Richards who is based 70 miles from New Orleans in Baton Rouge (another would be Sam Portera who has published his stunning work in After The Water). Ed was on the edge of Katrina, but very much involved with disaster preparation and response and felt its impact. The first photos of Ed's I saw were raw - the images themselves were raw, technically they were raw and they were in large, overwhelming unedited collections. In retrospect I don't think this was a bad thing, and I also think it probably mirrored Ed's experiences. Over time he has refined the work (though as he says, the web really doesn't do the prints justice).

From an interview on Digital Filmmaker:

"...While I was busy in Baton Rouge, I kept I close watch on Katrina coverage in the news and in the photography community. I saw two trends: a lot of good news photography and photojournalism focusing on the human side; and serious photographers from out of the area, such as Chris Jordan, who were doing good work in New Orleans, but who, not being familiar with the region, did not venture far out of New Orleans.

As things settled down in Baton Rouge, and security was relaxed on the flooded areas, which was about two months after the storm, I started systematically exploring the entire region affected by Katrina, from Ocean Spring, Mississippi, which is just east of Biloxi, to Grand Isle, Louisiana, which is west and south of New Orleans. What I saw was both amazing and frightening. I started documenting the damage with my 4x5, but from the perspective of a fine art photographer rather than a photojournalist. I soon realized that there was a nexus between my professional work and my photography: documenting the effect on the built environment was a great way to get people to understand the long-term problems that most emergency planning ignores...."

Ed still has a lot of images on his website, but I think that in itself is important. These are an inventory of the after-effect of Katrina - especially in the lesser known areas outside New Orleans. In fact looking at these, I'm reminded of nothing so much as trawling through the image database at the FSA collection of the Library of Congress - Walker Evans's images of similar communities, or Russell Lee or Dorothea Lange. But make no mistake, Ed's photographs are not nostalgic or anachronistic - quite the opposite.

Bethicketted #2

The project is now moving from the very north edge of the Boreal Forest to the far south edge (and possibly on the other realms). This is a photograph from more recent work as I try to make "sense" of the slightly different landscape.

Bethicket me for a stump of a beech:

"...the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip. You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne" - Finnegans Wake

(thanks to wood_s_lot for pointing me to that - it seems to resonate and echo with something in the photographs - though I can never quite put my finger on it. If you want a more detailed exposition of the Joyce, go to Beckett Bethicketted)

tim atherton

Soth vs. Polidori - Trump and Rosie?

A small skirmish is taking place between two contemporary Large Format colour photographers – both of whose work is sometimes concerned with the urban/suburban condition (among other things) - Alec Soth and Robert Polidori.

Soth (Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagra) often likes people in his photographs. Whereas I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person on a Polidori photograph (Zones of Exclusion, Havana After the Flood etc) – okay, maybe one.

A while back on his blog, Soth wrote about (among other things) the crop of projects and books coming out of the Katrina disaster – by Chris Jordan, Robert Polidori, Katherine Wolkoff etc and bemoaning the lack of people in the work:

"...I think these are all terrific photographers. And they’ve done admirable work. But after awhile I find the absence of people in the pictures a little frustrating.

Katrina is a good example of why I often defend the efforts of photojournalists. Certainly photojournalism has numerous faults, but I admire the attempt to connect the subject (in this case Katrina) to real people."

Now, it appears Polidori has taken it personally and responded with plenty of vigour:

"There were no people in these neighborhoods.
The place was empty. I happen to have a press pass.
That was the only way to get in unless you were
police, army, FEMA, or some other government entity.
The city was evacuated. What am I suppose to do?
Track down some owner and fly him him or her in and pose them
like stick figure props in front of their house? By this method maybe I would of taken 10 photos in the cumulative 3 months I spent there. And besides, and more to the point, that is not my intention. What more are you really going to learn from having a person here? My belief is that you should take stills of what doesn’t seem to move, and take movies or videos of does..."

It gets better…:

"...Furthermore these comments about museums and galleries underpresenting photos populated by the human figure are ridiculous and sound as if the Great Lakes had become a Sour Milk Sea."

who knew blogging could be so much fun – two contemporary photographic egos marking their territory (more comments from Soth: here)

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

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

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"(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

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"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."

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"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