Snake Eyes - Weifenbach and Gossage

Okay, I realise this is about the umpteenth post about John Gossage as well as Terri Weifenbach, but I finally got hold of a copy of their joint book Snake Eyes. All I can say is WOW.

First, I hadn't twigged that the book was so big. It's about 13x18 and beautifully put together. I can't quite imagine how the prints would look on a wall, but I can say there's a big disconnect between how the pictures look on the internet and how they look in the book (though as Gossage says; "Books are better than exhibitions").

Luis Gottardi commented that; "Weifenbach's work brings to mind Hugher Foote's, but is more emotionally expressive & less analytical. The color seems a little on the decorative side." In fact, once you have the book in your hands, rather than decorative, when the colour photographs are up to 11x14 or so, they are quite powerful and actually take on a slightly daunting, almost threatening feel - very different from "pretty" colour (which is how they can come across online). Coming close, in my mind, to the original pre-Romantic notion of "sublime" - of awe, confusion and uncertainty.

The counterpoint of Gossage's black and white images is fascinating. The whole book really quite draws you in (btw, there are a lot more of the colour photographs to pick from online than the b&w ones).


Here's a couple of things they had to say about the book in an interview from Photoeye:

"Terri: I think that photographers as a general rule edit from the world. They take what is in the image as the content. Painters have to construct and as a result the content isn’t always the imagery. You have experiences that take you far beyond what's recorded in the image. I have stepped into a particular position by stating that beauty is more than simple entertainment. Beauty has depth. And that position is a mine field in photography. Snake Eyes is of a place that we have proposed as being beautiful and I’m offering this as a serious body of work.

Terri: We had different reasons for pairing different photographs. For example, I had an image that was like a dark fairy tale, so John picked photographs of his own to place opposite, which held up that idea.

John: The images 19-22/XII are an example. Terri's photograph shows a church, though you know that only because of the shape of the window. I wanted to show four photographs alongside that image, but not a sequence of four photographs. I wanted the viewer to question, "Why are these connected?" In order to figure that out, one has to really look at the photographs. That's where I want to point you. They aren’t explicitly connected, but then, you've just spent time closely looking at four pictures. That’s the ‘work’ for me. It makes people either uncomfortable or fascinated"

I've got some time this week to sit down and do some research, and this is one of several book I want to spend some time with. I certainly don't think it will be time wasted

I also got a copy of Gossage's Berlin in the Time of the Wall, and again, I must say this is a stunning book too. It's packed and dense and needs a lot of time and attention, but that too will be time well spent.

(P.S. - I recently saw Terri described as "the Emily Dickinson of photography" - now, I'm sure that's very nice and in many ways quite fitting (I think I always saw Emily as a colour sort of girl, never b&w, for one thing). But would you actually want someone to make that kind of comparison? I'm sure it's very flattering and all, but if someone described me as the T.S. Eliot or the W.H. Auden of photography (and it 'ain't going to happen...), I mean - how the heck do you live up to that, unless you have an ego like The Donald?)

Wall update

(Dead Troops Talk)

Another article on Jeff Wall - this time by Sarah Milroy in the Globe & Mail (I certainly find Sarah is one of the better writers/critics covering photography).

A few quotes from A Window into Wall:

"Inevitably, each show emphasizes a different aspect of this wide-ranging artist. There's Wall, the omnivorous gourmand of painting's history, transmuting the traditions of past centuries into his elaborately staged colour transparencies, or Wall, the disciple of photography's greats (Walker Evans, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), a taker of well-riven pictures.

There's Wall, the maker of frozen cinema, orchestrating his elaborate narrative visions with the epic ambition of a Hollywood director, or Wall, the diagnostician of the body politic, constructing from the phantoms of his own lived urban experience those moments of disruption in works that he calls “near documentary.”

But there is also Wall, the deep diver of the unconscious, creator of dream-like, digitally concocted images such as The ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947, in which a woman (a mother or a hired performer?) presents a nightmarish talking puppet to a roomful of attentive, well-scrubbed youngsters. (One boy backs up against the wall, his face a study in frozen consternation, a stand-in, perhaps, for the artist as detached spectator.)

And there's Wall, the theoretician, concocting Picture for Women (1979), his now famous feminist-influenced riposte to Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. (He rejigged the players in order to place the gazing woman in the masterly role of overseer.)

Finally, there's Wall, the Vancouverite, an interpretation he roundly repudiates in conversation, but which one observes in his piercingly insightful scenarios of the city encroached on by wilderness, a unique and vivid characteristic of urban life on Canada's West Coast...

Wall has become impatient over the years with the way critics perpetually situate his work in relation to his French 19th-century sources – particularly Manet...

Still, I had to admit, Degas's painting The Dance Lesson (c. 1874) seemed like a natural point of reference... The work of the factory is thus conflated with the sweaty toil of the ballerinas, who itch their backs and adjust their slippers, enervated by the gruelling routine.

Modern life was compressed by Degas into a dense package, rife with meaning, the industry of leisure deftly positioned within the diverse economies of the city. Different aspects of urban life were brought into violent collision in a way the ailing man at the MoMA might well have appreciated."

Eric Fredine's Winter

Eric Fredine is based in Edmonton. And I must say his photographs depress me... First, after several months, it's really time for winter to go - really, really time for it to go. Yet Eric can muster the willpower to go and make some good photographs of it, damn him...

But secondly, Eric has really got a sense for this place, this city. After a couple of years, I'm still trying to make sense of it - visually, photographically. I have some inklings, but it takes time. Someone recently commented that it didn't look like the city they had spent a few years in. Eric's response was that to took him more than a decade to get to this point.

Now, I'm not going to say that someone can't go for a place for a few weeks, or make a number of visits, and not make good pictures. But generally they tend to be different from work made by someone who has been able to take the time to become intimate with a place (although, of course, the other danger is that after a longer period of time you actually stop being able to see the place)


Eric has some other good city work that I couldn't find on his site right now. In the meantime, here is one of his prairie pictures. He has done a couple of series of work which also really make some visual sense of the prairie. (and once again, they suffer from what I'm coming to call internet prettiness - reduced to a small jpeg online, they tend to look interesting but pretty. Having seen some of the prints at a show, that isn't at all what comes across "in the flesh")

(BTW, the top picture just won a Winter in Edmonton, Now photo competition - I almost entered, but - oh yea of little faith - figured icicles and cute snowy trees would be more along the right line. It blows me away that they were open enough to chose Eric's photo as the winner - that alone is almost enough to carry me over to spring!)

You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?

Found on ebay - a publicity still of Lauren Bacall. (sadly not from "To Have and Have Not", but the later move "The Gift of Love")

Who can fault a movie with a screenplay by William Faulkner, based on a novel by Hemingway, starring Hoagy Carmichael - and of course, Bogie and the young Bacall - she makes Scarlett Johannson look like a frumpy old maid...

“You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow.”

Click here to hear it and also a short clip from Carmichael and Bacall singing Am I Blue? here

Job Posting - MI5

Well, here's an interesting one - MI5 has a job posting up for a photographer (thanks to Photostream for the link):

"Photographer - MI5

The shots our photographers take play an important role in many of our operations. Typically, you’ll be part of a small team, tasked by our intelligence officers. We’ll provide you with state-of-the art equipment and you’ll receive technical training and on-going development.

Although fieldwork will take up the majority of your time, just as important are the written reports that you’ll file back at the office.

And, as you might expect, the role requires significant out-of-hours and weekend work. You should also be prepared to undertake at least six months’ initial training in London.

Discretion is important to the Service, so please only discuss this application with your partner and/or immediate family" - oops

The camera never lies...

Interesting take on the much heralded photograph by Spencer Platt, winning image of the World Press Photo awards (thanks for the pointer Joerg).

When it originally appeared in the press at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but even more so since it won the WPF awards, this picture has been variously described along the lines of "rich young Lebanese sightseeing in a bombed out neighbourhood", "rich Lebanese Disaster Tourists" along with, at times, commentary on their "obviously" inappropriate dress for being in a conservative neighbourhood and so on.

Here, for example, is part of the Photo District News take on it at the time the awards were announced:

"The picture shows a group of five cavalier Beirut residents cruising in a red Mini convertible through a neighborhood that has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombs."It's a picture you can keep looking at," said World Press Photo jury chair Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for The New York Times, in a statement announcing the prize. "It has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos. This photograph makes you look beyond the obvious.""

Spiegel has a somewhat different take on it in - "Catering to a Lebanese Cliche":

"We're from Dahiye, from the suburb, ourselves," Bissan explains on a hot February afternoon in Beirut. She, her 22-year-old brother Jad and her 26-year old sister Tamara fled the neighborhood during the Israeli bombings. They stayed in a hotel in the safer district of Hamra and did what most Lebanese did at the time. They waited. The siblings met the other two women in the hotel, Noor Nasser and Lillane Nacouzi, at the hotel. Both are employees of the Plaza Hotel and were allowed to stay in vacant rooms during the war.

On Aug. 15, the day of the ceasefire, Jad borrowed a friend's orange Mini Cooper. For weeks the siblings had heard nothing about whether or not their apartment block was still standing -- now that the fighting was over, they wanted to go and see for themselves. Jad drove and Tamara rode shotgun, while Bissan squeezed in between the two friends on the backseat, holding her camera phone ready. "We spoke briefly about whether we should really open the roof," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But it was so hot, and there were five of us in the small car, so we folded it back."...

Bissan admits that, at first glance, her excursion must look like a prime example of disaster tourism. "But look at our faces. They clearly show how horrified we were, how shocked," she says. "We were not cheerful."

...She has told journalists that her apartment was badly damaged, with all the windows broken and the furniture crushed by shock waves from the bombs. More at this link

Daryl from PDN sent a link to further article I missed on their site Award-Winning Photo Puts Subjects On Defensive which adds a bit more.

Now, what was that about "looking beyond the obvious"? This is certainly a good example of the ambiguities inherent in photography in general and photojournalism in particular (and which, imo, are actually at the heart of what makes photography work)

Grabeland

I understand that in Germany, ‘Grabeland’ are small lots of land - on what is otherwise unused or marginal land - that are used for growing vegetables and such. Rather similar to Allotments in Britain (which, I've discovered are really not quite the same as what Canadians call "Community Gardens" - Allotments - and, I'm guessing, Grabeland - have a very distinctive sub-culture of their own).

My friend EBK Jensen writes this about his Grabeland - Renaturation photographs

Last November when I got me a camera again after many years without I started taking pictures in a small area close to where I live. A small strip of land running along a little creek, the Bornbach. This land had been used as ‘Grabeland’: small lots of land to be used for growing vegetables. Around many cities and centres of industrialization in Germany ‘Grabeland’ was let for little money to workers and other poor folks. The idea was mostly to help those people feed their families.

Traditionally ‘Grabeland’ was different from ‘Kleingärten’: Those were meant for recreational purposes, ersatz gardens for families living in small flats. Where Kleingärten have strict rules tight organization in clubs life in a ‘Grabeland’ was more individual, less organized. There were hardly any rules for how to build and what to plant and people didn’t care for those rules much anyway....

The ‘Grabeland’ along the Bornbach however met the fate of most such areas: local politicians and administration decided it had to go. Instead of the unruly ‘Grabeland# there would be a brand new neat ‘Kleingartenverein’. And not only that: the area also would be renaturalised. The Bornbach would be remade into a ‘natural’ creek with broader banks, providing space for birds, dragonflies and frogs...

So the tenants had to go. Most were old people, many of whom had spent good parts of their lives in their lots among trees and shrubs they or their parents had planted decades ago.

The huts were demolished, big piles of rubble removed. For several weeks the plants and trees were standing alone around the gaping breaks. Then finally a landscapers company moved in with heavy machinery. Only a choice few trees were left standing, mostly rare old apple trees. The photos in this gallery have been made in the time between the demolishing of the huts and the end of the final clearance of the land.

I am thinking about making pictures of the newly naturalized state of the area but I’m not sure yet if that really interests me.

Sally Mann's Motherland

I've always been drawn to Sally Mann's work. The photographs of her son and daughters childhood are superb and speak to childhood and growing-up better than any other work I know.

Many of those photographs were situated in a particular landscape, which was almost as much a separate character in that work as the children.

After her children had grown up, Mann spent more time focusing on that landscape - especially the Southern landscape of her own life and childhood, as well as exploring further afield, but still remaining in (and re-imagining) the South.

Clearly influenced by Brady and O'Sullivan and the other Civil War photographers (among others), she also utilised their techniques, working with the very awkward wet collodion plate process. What, in the hands of another photographer, could have very easily lead to a sort of Civil War Re-enactment type of photography, with perfectly replicated glass plates, in Mann's hands become a process and way of seeing that incorporates wounds and faults, damage and lucky accident - the process melding with her vision to produce some quite exquisite and memorable photographs.

The first part of the work was published as a gallery monograph called Motherland (which I prefer as a title). As it expanded beyond that, it was later published in the book Deep South. One thing I find about all her work is that it always feels honest and genuine.

There is a video here and here of Mann talking about her work, as well as some further info here

Finally, I feel her other recent work, What Remains, is also an important work. Despite the amount of violence on TV, in the movies and on video games, despite the real life (and death) violence of the news hour and war in Iraq, despite Six Feet Under, death still remains one of the last taboos, one of the last mysteries. Mann addresses death and loss in her own unique way in What Remains - but that's for another time.

New Gursky work

Guðmundur pointed me to some apparently new work by Andreas Gursky. Unfortunately my German is so bad and rusty I can't make out much of the accompanying text... can anyone come up with a better translation of the title than Google's: “reality is to be at all only represented, by designing it.” hmmm. Update: Joerg gives us a translation of "You can only show reality by constructing it." or maybe "you can only represent reality by constructing it"

The gist of what I can get is that Gursky is following along his route of constructing fabricated pictures around his existing theme of globalisation. Though to me with these he seems to be much more consciously designing "patterns" into his work than a lot of his previous work - building on what he did with the big hotel lobby interior etc?

And I must admit to having a bit of sympathy with this googleism: the pictures of the photographer Andreas renowned internationally gursky fascinate and irritate at the same time.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Turkey Cinemascope

A fascinating set of panoramic photographs taken by Turkish film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan (done while he was making his recent film Climates). From various reviews:

"That Nuri Bilge Ceylan takes photographs is no surprise: both 'Uzak' and 'Climates' have photographers as protagonists and his films are notable for their visual precision and poetry. Moreover, if his cinema can be said to resemble anyone else's, it's that of Abbas Kiarostami, whom Ceylan admires and whose cinematic work is also complemented by photographs notable for their serene and mysterious beauty. But as the Turkey Cinemascope' exhibition of Ceylan's photographs at the recent Thessaloniki film festival revealed, it would be wrong to push a Ceylan-Kiarostami parallel too far. True, as Kiarostami favours landscapes in rural Iran, so many of Ceylan's photographs depict villages, country roads and farms - often with Mount Ararat towering in the background. But there the resemblance ends. It's not just that Ceylan also takes pictures of cityscapes and people, but more crucially that the photographs in this exhibition, all shot with a digital panoramic camera, look so like paintings....

Horizons, pattern, predominantly black and white with thick daubs of colour: clouds, walls, people. Figures dwarfed by landscape. Silhouettes of men, women and children of a size with those of birds and animals. The tiny figures, often against snow, reminded me of Brueghul. In one photo of pigeons in a snowy Istanbul square the flock of birds in the foreground are the same size as the people in the distance, and a flying bird's outline magically fuses with that of a girl so that she has wings as well as dancing legs. Full of dark and full of light, both brooding and airy, such resonant and moving photographs.

And then, the next day, I went to see the film, a sensitive, subtle, beautiful film, set in Istanbul, by the sea, amidst ancient ruins, and in a town of Eastern Turkey in mid-winter (like walking into Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow). And a bleakly, brutally realistic depiction of the hurting, hating side of love, wherein the male protagonist, played by the director, takes photos - the photos in the exhibition, surely, for as he went about his work, on location, was when he took them. He takes photos instead of relating to his wife on holiday, instead of finishing his doctoral thesis. He poses a young taxi driver, his strong, young face against the landscape, a shot like several in the exhibition. The youngster, with eagerness that contrasts touchingly with his macho pose, asks for a copy to give to his girlfriend, writes his name and address on a post-it note, and in the next scene we see the photographer pull it from his pocket with his cigarettes at a cafe table, screw it up and toss it in the ashtray."

Field Notes - Prince Albert

Field Notes - Prince Albert. Pictures from a long term project looking at the prairie city of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

“I love these pictures. They have a kind of fragile, tentative beauty that I associate with such northern places (including my own home town) where the idea of civilization itself seems an experiment, on probationary status.” John Szarkowski




tim atherton

Jeff Wall @ MoMA

Jeff Wall's big retrospective show is up now at MoMA. He managed to get himself two articles in the NY Times this weekend as well as one in Time Magazine. One here and one several pages longer here - The Luminist:

"Jeff Wall’s large color transparencies mounted on electric light boxes fill 10 galleries at the Museum of Modern Art with a pulsating and purposeful, if slightly sedate, optimism. Alluring to the point of transfixion, the 41 works measure as much as 10 feet high or 16 feet across. These are outright gorgeous, fully equipped all-terrain visual vehicles, intent on being intensely pleasurable while making a point or two about society, art, history, visual perception, the human animal or all of the above...

Moreover, they combine the stillness and artifice of painting with the light and heat of film; the awkward immediacy of theater with the slick impersonality of advertising. The people are often nearly life-size, so at times it seems that we might almost step into the unnaturally radiant landscapes and interiors they inhabit.

With their Donald Judd-like stainless steel boxes and Dan Flavin-like fluorescents, Mr. Wall’s glowing images turn the photograph into a Minimalist object. They also push the nearly trompe l’oeil illusions of Photo Realist painting to extremes, without so much as lifting a paint brush. In other words, the works make the most of the most diametrically opposed art movements of the 1960s.

Yet the medium here is not so much the message as a magnet, one that snares our attention and compels us to sort through both the vivid details and the underlying layers of meaning, intention and process. You can emerge from the experience with a sharpened awareness of art’s ability to sharpen awareness — whether of the crushing effects of war, poverty and racism or of the communicative power of art."

The Photobook Vols. I & II by Parr and Badger

The Photobook Vols. I & II by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. These two books are a must for any photography book compulsive

Vol I came out a couple of years or so ago, Vol II came out last year (there may be more to come?)

Each takes a thematic but eclectic survey across the history of the photo book

Volume I takes overview of the development of the photobook, from the first by Fox Talbot et al the dawn of photography to Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and 70s, via the modernist and propaganda books of the 1930s and 40s

Volume II has the following chapters:

1 Explosion - The American Photobook since the 1980s

2 Common Market - The European Photobooks since the 1980s

3 Without Frontiers - The Worldwide Photobook

4 Appropriating the Photograph - The Artist's Photobook

5 Point of Sale - The Company Book

6 Looking at Photographs - The Picture Editor as Auteur

7 The Camera as Witness - The 'Concerned' Photobook since World War II

8 Straight no Chaser - The New 'New Objectivity'

9 Home and Away - The Photobook and Modern Life

Epilogue - The Ultimate Photoboook

The are some fairly obvious choices listed - The Decisive Moment, American Photographs, The Americans (and in volume II, books by Shore, Gursky, the Bechers) But there are also some listed and described which may send you scurrying to http://www.abebooks.com/ , as well as some books you would probably never imagine had ever been printed and published - e.g. 10 Years of Uzbekistan, The Book of Bread and Waterfall Rapture - Postcards of Falling Water: My Addiction My Collection.

Parr is an obsessive photo book collector (by all accounts they fill his house almost from floor to ceiling). Badger provides the historical detail and context for each book.

Asked about their favourites, here are some of Badger's choices:

"The Pond (1985) by John Gossage – "Adams, Shore, Baltz – all the New Topographic photographers made great books, but none are better than The Pond.

"Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness (1946) by Zdenek Tmej – "Extraordinarily rough, lyrical book made clandestinely during the war by a 'guest worker' of the Nazis.

and here some of Parr's:

"Checked Baggage (2004) by Christien Meindertsma – "This book has almost more resonance now than when it was originally published. A brilliant and simple idea that hits you directly between the eyes.

"Industriia sotsializma (1935) by El Lissitsky – "The design and imagery are so bold that opening and viewing this takes your breath away.

It's also fun to check through your own library and see how the books on your shelves match up, as well as reading their comments about any of your favourites

Though I must say one unfortunate side effect of the two volumes has been to drive up the price of certain books, especially those long out of print. Try finding a decent priced copy of the brilliant (but at one time "just another" aperture monograph) The Pond by John Gossage. In fact, try finding a copy at all now.

All in all a great way to while away the winter afternoons. (Oh and one book I think they should have included - Passing Times by Peter Korniss)

Gear Fondling part 1 - the Phillips Compact II 8x10

Okay, these posts are normally about as far away as you can get from a camera fondling blog, but every now and then there is a bit of kit that really just can't be ignored. In this case, because it makes the job of photography so much easier

The first on this infrequent list is the Phillips Compact II 8x10. 8.5lbs of perfect field camera. As the name suggests, compact, lightweight and rigid. Quick and easy to set up and use. Doesn't have the old world beauty (or weight and annoying quirks) of a Deardorff. Doesn't cost nearly so much as a ritzy titanium and tropical hardwood Ebony from Japan.

Made by Dick Phillips (a photographer and retired dentist if I'm not mistaken) it's basically the stealth bomber of 8x10 cameras.

Simply couldn't do without it. Combine it with the fantastic little Kowa-Graphic 210mm 6.8 lens and you are set to go.

(some info here too in the Phillips Explorer page)

(Photos courtesy of Marco Annaratone)

Little People Street Project

(Cash Machine)

Okay, these are just kinda fun. But I do like the overall idea as well as the execution:The Little People Street Project

(Pinned Down)

(BTW - when I was googling Calvino's Invisible Cities, I came across a similar site where someone built miniature cities like this, in stairwells and alleyways. Anyone know the url?)

Wild Things - John Brownlow

John Brownlow has been working on his Wild Things project for at least the last couple of years (hadn't noticed he was up to Wild Things XV already...). While he does use 4x5 for some of the work, he is very good with the Noblex pano, which seems especially suited to this kind of view. In fact in general I think I have probably seen more pano shots that fail rather than work, but not in John's case - he has certainly mastered it. He has also worked some in black and white and some in colour - though I think (as I find for my own "twig" project) the black and white seems to work best.


Brownlow is part of a small group who have been throwing ideas back and forth about photographing this same subject from somewhat different perspectives and under different names - Wild Things, Only A Green Thing, Immersive Landscapes, Twigs, Bethicketted....

While John really works with the whole tangled and messy aspect of these views, what also comes across to me a quite powerful lyricism in the pictures (and it's also well worthwhile to the links on John's website to see bigger versions of the panos - the size on Blogger really doesn't begin to do them justice). I'd really like to see some of the big prints John has made of these.

"The tree that moves some to tears of joy
Is in the Eyes of the others only a Green thing
that stands in the way.
Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity,
& by these I shall not regulate my proportions;
& Some Scarce see Nature at all.
But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination,
Nature is Imagination itself.
As a man is, So he Sees.
As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers."

William Blake