Simone Nieweg

Simone Nieweg is another Becherite out of the Dusseldorf School - part of the second generation after Struth and Gursky and friends. And while you can certainly see the influence of that whole group, she also displays a certain individuality.

I'm not quite sure why I like photography of these sort of gardens and allotments and market gardens and so on (as my wife will quickly tell you, I'm the most useless kind of gardener...). I suppose some of these places aren't so different from what surrounded me growing up in England. And although I lived in Germany for a couple of years, somehow I don't seem to remember the summers much - more autumn, winter and early spring. (also, Autumn was exercise season for NATO, so we spent a lot of time out on German farmland training to keep the red menace at bay)



From one exhibition statement (btw, I think artists from many other countries would kill for the level of support the Goethe Institute gives to their homegrown artists...):

"Simone Nieweg belongs to the second generation of Becher students at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Unlike her forerunners, who won international acclaim with themes such as portraiture, architecture and interiors, she has chosen a subject so unspectacular as to seem almost parochial.Her work focuses on the suburban fields and allotments that are to be found in the populated and industrialised areas in the Ruhr and Lower Rhine regions of Germany.

Devoid of human presence, these quietly beautiful colour photographs nonetheless attest to the profound human intervention in those seemingly unremarkable landscapes on the outskirts of the cities. Nieweg's images are carefully balanced compositions which radiate a sense of precise perception and pure description. At the same time, her pictures are imbued with a subtle sensuousness."

Gregory Crewdson's Fireflies

I posted briefly about these when I talked about magazines, but I thought they were worth coming back to for their own post. I think the prints would be interesting to see - I haven't even seen the book, just the reproductions in Blindspot. What I do love is when contemporary photography draws the comment "sweet" from my five year old...

Here's some of the show blurb (a little OTT):

In the summer of 1996, Crewdson spent two solitary months at his family’s cabin in Becket, Massachusetts. Using both small and medium format cameras, Crewdson obsessively photographed his subjects illuminating the night sky. Crewdson was drawn to the flickering lights, in part, by the underlying impossibility of capturing their elusive beauty in pictures. For various reasons, the artist chose not to exhibit this body of work until now.

Printed as single editions, these intimate, black and white pictures seem like a radical departure from Crewdson’s recognizable style of large-scale, cinematic photographs. At the core, however, the fireflies share a set of common interests with Crewdson’s oeuvre; a sense of wonder in the nocturnal landscape, light as a narrative event and a fascination with nature as a psychological mystery. Although consistent in terms of their subject matter, these photographs demonstrate a wide scope of visual expression ranging from almost pure abstraction, to more idyllic representations of the natural landscape.


And this excerpt from an article in Village Voice:

The firefly pictures not only give us Crewdson unplugged, they provide a touching clue to the origins of this artist's more popular work. All fireflies that flash are males looking for love. Female fireflies, meanwhile, basically lounge in the grass smoking insect cigarettes and eating bonbons as the males go through this desperate, pathetic attempt to impress them by lighting up the brightest and flying the highest.

It's a perfect metaphor for how hard and to what lengths Crewdson has always been willing to go to gain our attention and how underneath it all he wants to connect. It's also wonderful to be able to look at Crewdson's pictures without him directing our attention this way and that. These pictures show Crewdson simply lighting up rather than manically controlling every inch of the picture.

What I find intriguing in both pieces is a sort of desperate attempt to link these photographs with his more well known work and try and shoe horn them into his "body of work". What I take them for is something simpler: a photographer doing what he does - taking photographs - of something that intrigues him and catches his eye. And, in this case it would seem, something in which he could also find solace.

The Bartender Never Gets Killed - more Julian Thomas

Julian has been posting some of his recent work blog-style at The Bartender Never Gets Killed.

I really like some of the triptychs he's doing now (click on them for a slightly bigger view):

Although every now and then one of his classic squares still really hits the mark...

Photographers and their Man Purses

Or Man Handbags for the Brits out there. Any male photographer with a spouse or significant other knows the problem. With our Billingham/Domke/Crumpler/Fogg or whatever bags we are accused of them really just being Man Purses (even those of us lugging 8x10's around fall prey to this). Especially when it's discovered that not only do they hold cable releases and filters and lens tissue and spare film and tiny screwdrivers, but also Polo Mints, sunglasses, paperback detective novels, IPods, asprin, stamps, lip balm etc etc. And no arguing that they are really just re-purposed trout fishing or bike messenger bags seem to make the tiniest bit of difference... nope - they are regarded as handbags for men

Well, apparently a new craze is coming to our rescue. It seems it started in Japan and has made it's way to Korea and Singapore and is now to be seen on the streets of West Cost USA cities and the more liberated European centres. PingMag - a site I enjoy from Japan has the latest...

The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White

A while ago I happened upon what looked like a promising new site for discussions on contemporary photography - Tip of the Tongue. One of the first essays is up, by Charlotte Cotton, author of the excellent little book The Photograph as Contemporary Art and it's an interesting one entitled The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White. Here's a taste:

"..But it is definitely more hit-and-miss for a photographer working in black-and-white to anticipate whether or not the full meaning and contemporary relevance of their imagery will be understood in light of color art photography’s dominance. At the beginning of this millennium, I found it difficult to keep my confidence that photography’s monochrome history continued to exert a strong influence on the way we see...

A career-oriented art photographer (and maybe this is the first generation of artists who can consider it a “career”) sticks very close to the now well-traveled path of contemporary color photography’s aesthetic homage and partial remembrance of, for example, gorgeous Kodachrome, or the beam of an enlarger. In a career-oriented era, perhaps this strategy is wiser than trying to beat a path through the resistance to presenting imagery in other ways and forms that actually respond to the potential of digitization. Of course I feel bemused at why a nascent art photographer would be so openly conservative as to adhere to apparent conventions, and at my most pessimistic, I wonder if there’s too much “trying-to-be-like” Eggleston, Shore, et al., and too little “creative-departure-from” the stellar standards that they have set...

I am sure I’m not alone in beginning to think that the more complex, messy, unfashionable, and broad territory of black-and-white photography is where we are going to find some of the grist to the mill in photography’s substantive and longer-term positioning within art..."

There is also some good discussion of the essay on the site as well. Now, whether she's correct in her prediction and justified in her enthusiasms is another matter. But it's certainly a somewhat thought provoking read. (I think many traditional analogue photographers probably won't approve of some of her contemporary black and white choices among other things). And while I like and enjoy viewing and making what you might call contemporary colour work, I'm stubborn enough to believe there are also some exciting contemporary direction to explore with black and white...

Gabriele Basilico update - Workbook 1969-2006

If anyone is looking for a nice overview of Basilico's work, the new book Gabriele Basilico - Workbook 1969-2006 is a pretty good introduction. It takes you through many of his different series of pictures and the printing is far better than some of the more recent smaller format books (though not quite as good as some of the original books such as Porti di Mare). I should also add his "bottom" shots were an intriguing revelation...

Apart from an awful cover (and an academic essay that may possibly have been understandable in Italian, but seems to have become unintelligible in translation...) it is a very good presentation of his work.

A quote from the Basilico himself (there are only a couple in the book unfortunately):

"Before dedicating myself to the urban landscape I was interested in photojournalism. I had points of reference: the works of Bill Brandt or that of Eugene Smith. But over time, space occupied all my attention, slowly replacing events and people, and I accepted it and allowed it to be my focus. The photographic culture that my generation referenced was full of myth, of widespread commonly held views, such as Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". To slow down vision was for me a small revelation in the way of seeing and even a return to the past, to when photographers, from technical necessity, used slow film and large cameras with tripods. They could represent the world only in a static manner. But this "slowness of the look", attuned to the photography of places, became for me a lot more: it is an existential and "philosophical" attitude through which to try to find a possible "sense" in the external world."

William Greiner - New Orleans & Baton Rouge

A while back, when I posted about some of the "controversy" around photographers travelling down to photograph post-Katrina, I got an email from William Greiner. I looked at his blog and something struck a chord but I couldn't quite catch hold of it. Later it came back to me and I tracked down his website.

I had looked as some of his pictures in an early copy of Doubtake magazine and hunted down one of his books (A New Life?) a few years ago and then lost track of his work when I was doing my own research into the important colour photographers - Shore Eggleston, Sternfeld, Graham etc.. and William Greiner.

Greiner's home was New Orleans until Katrina struck. At that point he moved with his family to his Baton Rouge where his wife comes from. And in the year or so since, William has been trying to make sense of all this both through his photography, and also through his blog - at times heartfelt, at times angry. There is a sense of exile and loss in it all, as well as strength and clear perception.

Greiner has just published some of his post-Katrina work "Baton Rouge Blues":

"Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, with New Orleans its most famous victim. Everyone who lived through that storm has vivid memories of that experience. For William Greiner, who was forced to move away from New Orleansand chose to live in Baton Rouge, the storm triggered a pilgrimage of sorts. He has assembled a group of his photographs in a tribute to the unmemorable, the commonplace and the banal. With a humorous and often bittersweet quality, his pictures are a record of the inconsequential that now lingers and haunts our feelings about things now gone...

The main exhibition of photos from New Orleans does not deal with dramatic views of destruction or calamitous evocations of devastation. What we see is a range of pictures that start a recall process. The mundane, the ordinary and the unremarkable become an almost unbearable part of our consciousness...

There is something fleetingly memorable about garishly excruciating bad taste. Greiner captures the irony and the humor of determined declarations about people saying to the world, "I am here, this is me." None of these photographs includes people, yet Greiner's photos are notations of life. They are fragments that give determined evidence of place and time."

I'm not sure if the pictures I've picked from his blog are the ones he chose for the booklet (and some of them I chose from his earlier work). As well, it's well worth looking at his entrancing colour work pre-Katrina, to put it all in context

Winogrand 1964

For four months in 1964, Gary Winogrand drove across the US, photographing wherever he went:

...New York photographer Garry Winogrand traveled across the country in a Ford Fairlane to discover "who we are." The Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's assassination and the looming threat of war in Vietnam had persuaded him to pursue art full-time. As he remarked: "You have to realize you're nothing before you can be free." During his four-month journey, Winogrand took nearly 20,000 photographs (although he passed through 14 states, he spent half of his time in Texas and California). When he returned to New York, he printed 1,000 of the images. Some of these resulting works are widely known, but the majority have never been exhibited.


...Winogrand, whose trip was sponsored by a Guggenheim grant, said in his application: " I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn't matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines [our press]. They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn't matter, we have not loved life. . . I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project." (from Artnet)

I'm not a huge huge fan of Winogrand (the volume just overwhelms me sometimes), but the theme of the journey and the thread of year holds this project together better than some other collections. And so many of the photographs are just incomparable.

(It was unfortunate that Arena Editions went bust - they produced a number of books which were not only very nicely made, but they also made some intriguing choices of what to publish. Another good book by them is Walker Evans: The Lost Work.)

Worlds in minature

(Olivo Barbieri)

Worlds in miniature - well, some of them are and some of them aren't - and okay, some of them are actually life size.

That said, I've always been drawn by photographers who play with this aspect of photographic "reality". Making pictures of existing places look like they are miniature models and unreal in some way. Or photographers who make miniature worlds and make them look almost like they are real places. Or even those - like Thomas Demand - who make life sized "reality" out of paper and cardboard and photograph it. And in a way, this follows on somewhat from the whole Jeff Wall thing.

(Thomas Demand)

It's not a major preoccupation. Nor is it something I really want to do myself (and too much of it gets to be a little - well, too much). But I'm rather glad there are photographers out there, doing this, playing with the boundaries of what a "real" photograph and a "real" place is.

So here are a few

(Naoki Honjo)

(Toni Hafkenscheid)

(Marc Räder)

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)