Photo Season play-offs

Well, this seems to be doing the rounds (got it via Amy Stein's blog). But it's a little bit of fun - you can print it off here.

I'm down to my final four in the semi-finals and it's Struth vs. Evans and Sugimoto vs. Callahan...

Feist

I like Feist (aka Leslie Feist). Her music has been keeping me company in the darkroom all week. She hasn't really had a major release since her 2004 album Let It Die, but she does have an eagerly awaited new recording - The Reminder - due out in April/May (hey - how come this Canadian girl releases it earlier in Europe than here huh...?) . Soulful, yet nowhere near as depressing as say Cat Power...


She has a MySpace here where you can listen to a few tunes, a minimal "official" website and you can watch Mushaboom on YouTube below:

Sugimoto on Serra

Short movie of Hiroshi Sugimoto on YouTube talking about his photographs of Richard Serra's sculpture (via the excellent Gallery Hopper) - when you think about it, Sugimoto and Serra seem made for each other...

stefan beyst - seize obscurs objets de désir

One thing I hadn't anticipated when I started a blog was how many emails I would get with people asking me to look at their work. Sometimes it's a little hard to know how and if to respond. At other times there is no question.

But sometimes I get work like this from stefan beyst (who seems to eschew capitals) from Belgium.

Of his three projects, seize obscurs objets de désir interest me the most. It's not the sort of work I normally gravitate towards and yet I couldn't just dismiss it out of hand. Something about it made me go back two or three times to look again. And while an aspect of it reminds me of Stieglitz's "Equivalents" - which have to be one of the biggest early failures in photography - there is enough in beyst's work for me to want to look a little deeper.

"...(beyst) is now exploring a new territory in his 'Seize obscurs objets de désir': conjuring up desirable and desiring beings from meaningless 'found patterns'"

Distinction Fail 24/25 - Mike Ryder

One of the great things about the internet and the advent of digital has been the increased democratization of photography. And while some may say that this really happened with the point n' shoot and the drugstore lab, or even further back with the Box Brownie, one thing that's particularly different is the extent to which photography can be shared among a broad group of friends and stranger alike.

Now, some bemoan this and see it as detrimental to photography, especially photography as a precisely practised craft. But the truth is that phtography has never really been that difficult to do. And then there are others who say we are just being overwhelmed with a tidal wave of poor images. But as I've mentioned before, look at the photo section of Ebay Collectibles (among other places) and out of the 10,000+ photos from the 1800's onwards that are on there at any one time, a very high proportion of them are just awful - even from a time when photography actually was rather more difficult to do (and probably more expensive as well). In fact, I'd venture to say that today, with the higher volume of photographs being produced and shared, the total number of really crappy pictures may be higher, but I have a feeling the actual percentage of really good ones is in fact probably higher than it's ever been.

Which brings me to Mike Ryder - he's in that latter group as far as I'm concerned - the really good ones. And that's one of the other good things about the internet. Not only can you find plenty of info about, and pictures by, Sudek or Atget or Struth or Sugimoto, but you can also come across good work by photographers which - in any other time past - you would probably never have encountered.

I came across Mike on the Streetphoto list. He has three pages of work up 1, 2 and 3 - beyond that, and that he hails from London, I don't know much more about it - other than the fact that there is definitely something there worth looking at.

Josef Sudek

Time for another classic - Josef Sudek.

There are some photographers who just seem to effortlessly resist the passage of time, and Sudek is one of those.

While often celebrating intense beauty, Sudek never seems to come too close to falling into sentimentalism. Indeed some of his work from the industrialised Black Triangle area is so direct and unsentimental that it appears as a precursor for some of the sort of photography that only came to be made by other photographers much later on.

As well as his lyrical pictures of Prague, Sudek was the master of the pano photograph - often depicting the most mundane things in a manner that requires that we pay attention to them.

Add in to all this that he made many of his best works under a Communist (and before that - Nazi) regime and with only one arm (lost in the first war) - not easy when lugging around a view camera.

Personally, I think everyone should have at least one good book of Sudek's work on their shelves, if not two or three (He also had a studio that would be the envy of any creative photographer...)

"...everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.... To capture some of this - I suppose that's lyricism...

I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects." -Josef Sudek

Flaubert once expressed an ambition to write a book which would have no subject, "a book dependent on nothing external ... held together by the strength of its style." Photographers have sometimes expressed parallel aspirations to make light itself the subject of their photographs, leaving the banal, material world behind. Both ideals are, of course, unobtainable, but nonetheless they may be worth pursuing... Sudek has come closer than any other photographer to catching this illusive goal. His devices for this effect are simple and highly poetic: the dust he raised in a frenzy when the light was just right, a gossamer curtain draped over a chair back, the mist from a garden sprinkler, even the ambient moisture in the atmosphere when the air is near dew point. The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his deep shadow tonalities. The effect is enchanting, and strongly conveys the human element which is the true content of his photographs. For, throughout all his photography, there is one dominant mood, one consistent viewpoint, and one overriding philosophy. The mood is melancholy and the point of view is romanticism. And overriding all this is a philosphic detachment, an attitude he shares with Spinoza. The attitude of detachment that characterizes Sudek's art accounts for both its strength and weakness: the strength which lies in the ideal of utter tranquility and the weakness which is found in the paucity of human intimacy..." (from an essay by Charles Sawyer )

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)