Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino is one of the most intriguing European writers of the late Twentieth Century. Among his many books, Invisible Cities stands out. It is a short book, only 165 pages long, but to read it properly seems to take a long time. It takes the form of a mythical dialogue between the young Marco Polo and the aging Kublai Khan. Polo weaves fantastical tales of all the cities he has visited in his travels for the ailing emperor: cities and desire, cities and memory, cities and signs, hidden cities, cities and eyes - travelling back and forth through history as well as through different cities - though it eventually becomes clear that all the tales are really about one city and every city.

For anyone who is interested in how we experience our cities today, especially for photographers concerned with trying to describe the modern city, Invisible Cities stretches the imagination in unexpected directions and does so in a very lyrical way. Two other good reads by Calvino are If on a winter's night a traveller with it's ever rotating cast of characters and plots and also Mr. Palomar, who sees the world in a way that will be familiar to many photographers

Invisible Cities is also a book which I would suggest should be mandatory reading for every City Planner...

"Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you're visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds."
Cities & Signs 1

"If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city's name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels. Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. "You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.""
Continuous Cities 2

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little" "

(The Utopia of Golf from peripheral vision)

Three books by Lee Friedlander

If there is only one photographic genius of the second half of the Twentieth Century it would have to be Lee Friedlander. His way of seeing is unique. His output is prolific, though it never stays stuck on the same path - and he is always exploring new subjects and new ways of looking at them. He appears to have a deep commitment to his projects, which are often pursued over several years. And while I am really drawn into his urban and street photographs, I'm also especially fond of what you might very loosely call his "landscape" work.

Currently there at least three books by Friedlander out that explore the natural rather than the man made world - Stems, Apples and Olives, and Cherry Blossom Time in Japan all of them fascinating books for anyone who also tries to photograph trees and landscapes.

From the publishers blurb on Stems: "In 1994, suffering from aching knees and painfully concerned about it, Lee Friedlander decided to prepare himself for a sedentary life. He began to pursue the still life as a possibility and maybe a way of photographic life—a dramatic shift for a man who has spent his life photographing on the street, …anywhere but sitting down. He tried a variety of subjects with a few good results, but nothing stood out until he began to look at the fresh flowers that his wife Maria placed around their home in cut–glass vases. But nevermind the flowers. True to Friedlander's style, he very quickly found himself most interested in the stems. During the months of February, May, June and December of 1994, he focused his lens on wild arrays of stems and the optical splendor produced by light refracting through the glass vases that contained them."

BTW, Friedlander is a master if the photo book. I think he see it very much as a primary way of presenting his work. In the past he has worked on small run almost hand made editions. The printing in his books is nearly always gorgeous (Factory Valleys is one of the most incredibly printed photo books I've ever seen - I think Friedlander said the prints in the book look better than the originals). These three books are no exception, the printing and presentation is exceptional - and at times somewhat unique. Photoeye has a book tease available for each one - click on the covers:

Chris Jordan - New Work (Yes, but, is it photography??)

Some interesting new work Running The Numbers from Chris Jordan (the rhetorical question "Yes, but, is it photography??" is from Jordan himself posting on the Large Format list. FWIW, as I tend to take a very broad inclusive view of the medium, my response is - yes it is. Though there is an interesting range of comments on the list).

Chris has certainly come a long way - especially in terms of approach - since I first saw an exhibit of his luscious Northwest Rainforest photographs in Seattle back in about 1997?

www.chrisjordan.com

Fractured Goddess

From Wahbi House - memento mori

(BTW -if anyone can actually identify who the deity is I'd be extremely grateful. I've tried various avenues, but I'm not 100% certain if it's even a female...)

tim atherton

The Ebay Photo Archive

(1900's photograph of the Tempio di Vesta in Rome)

I don't know if it's because I've worked in historical photo archives on and off over the years, but my interest in older photographs has gradually increased over time. So why this didn’t occur to me earlier I don’t know, but I recently discovered what has to be the biggest online collection of old and antique photographs – the Ebay>Collectables>Photographic Images area. It's a sort of democratic archive of old photographs (although as it's constantly rotating, I'm not sure archive is quite the right word).

(I like this sort of proto-urban topographics night shot from the 40's)

At any one time there are often upwards of 20,000+ photographs for sale on ebay dating from before 1950. I've found it fascinating to trawl through just to see what's there - everything from Daguerreotypes to travel photographs to family portraits to strange landscapes to weekends at the seaside (and who knew our great-grandparents bought and hoarded so many naughty French postcards - enough to keep ebay going, literally, for years). The mother of all photo garage sales.

(I'm sure my parents brought one of these little credit card sized momentos back with them from their autumn in Paris in the 50's)

As I went through the auctions I realised there were certain things that interested me. First, this wasn't all just what you might call vernacular photography - family snapshots and the like. There was also plenty of work from professionals of one sort or another across the decades. As well, despite what the foretellers of doom predict about the overwhelming flood of digital photography, it was a little reassuring to see that there seemed to be as much bad photography produced in the 19th and 20th century as there is today. This despite the fact that for much of this time photography was a rather cumbersome pursuit, often utilizing toxic chemicals, and also comparatively expensive, yet there seems to have been no shortage of really really awful photography.

But there were also some gems – which is what really attracted me. And while there was the occasional legitimate Ansel Adams or Atget photograph up for sale (and well beyond my wallet), I took an entirely eclectic approach. I liked following various themes such as Victorian and Edwardian portraits of rather severe well dressed ladies or Travels in Egypt and Palestine or carte-de-visite of bewhiskered army officers and clergymen

(My all time favourite purchase so far the "10 Famous Marshals of the People's Liberation Army" accordion style book - what a great example of Communist kitsch meets Becher-like typologies)

And I went with what caught my eye - perhaps something quirky or an apparently unusual composition for the time, or an unconscious precursor of a later movement or style of photography.

What’s also nice about it (although perhaps depressing at the same time) is that most of these photographs sell for very little - and yet once they arrive in the mail, it's quite rewarding to hold something in your hand that's often quite beautiful and that was perhaps made in the 1890's.

(One that got away - I was too cheap to bid the extra couple of dollars for this and kick myself now...)

Why can't I quite bring myself to like... Michael Kenna?

There's no doubt about it - Michael Kenna's photography is beautiful and he's certainly prolific. Yet I can never quite convince myself that I actually like it (a good litmus test of this ambivalence for me is that I'll look up a photographer's books. See which ones look good, read up on them a bit, and I'll even put them in my Amazon shopping cart but I can never quite bring myself to click on the "Proceed To Checkout" button).

I'm also sure Kenna is a really nice guy - he looks it in his photograph (at this show of his work in Banbury). I know some of his work has been influenced by Bill Brandt whose photographs have haunted me since before I was a teenager. And I've even bought a Kenna calendar a couple of times - a new image each month, sitting there above my desk - very pleasing. And yet the photos still don't quite grab me (and yes, I know there is meant to be a meditative aspect to his work). It doesn't quite work its way under my skin the way some other photographers work does. His photographs don't catch me unawares and impose themselves on my thoughts days or months later.

Maybe it's "too" perfect - unlike say Atget or Brandt. Or perhaps in most cases only beauty isn't quite enough? In a way I also find these more clinical than Lynne Cohen's photographs that I detailed in the last post. Is it too much emotional detachment? Or just too restrained for me...?

Perhaps it is that everything is photographed in the same impeccably beautiful way - from Le Notre's gardens to Easter Island to Hokkaido to Radcliffe Power Station (another image from my childhood) to Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Maybe it's an apparent lack of affection for what's photographed (are they "just" subjects?) Or possibly not finding some kind of quality or genuine poignancy, something that moves not just the viewer, but that also moved the photographer - or at least not revealing that the photographer was moved by it.

I'd like to like it - I really would - I just can't quite bring myself to do it (and it's not as if I haven't changed my mind on a photographers work before - there are some photographers whose work I just didn't "get" until something clicked)

Either way, make your own mind up at his website - he's also featured in the January "Legends" edition of Photo District News (and maybe let me know what it is I'm missing...?)

Much of Kenna's work is published by one of the best publishers of photography books - certainly in N. America - Nazraeli Press

Lynne Cohen

Eerie, creepy, bizarre, sinister, unsettling, shag carpet; are some of the words that seem to come to mind when viewing Lynne Cohen’s photographs – along with beautiful and sublime

In 2002 when Lynne Cohen had her retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, the Gallery also came out with a nice big book No Man’s Land, mainly of her later colour work. My interest had been caught by a couple of magazine articles about the show so I eventually forked out for the book. When it arrived I had a mild sense of déjà vu and it took me a while to realise why. After digging around in my (still unpacked from a move) book boxes I realised that, years before in 1987, I had bought a copy of her first book Occupied Territory. It was a bit of a revelation to see that my interest in this sort of minimalist urban/architectural photography went back that far.

Over her career Lynne Cohen has explored all sorts of modern interiors (and almost exclusively interiors) – in one sense every day yet never mundane. Strange, often bordering on surreal, yet none the less ”real” - the interiors of men’s clubs with collections of strange ephemera, frighteningly decorated living rooms, lobbies, and more recently institutional spaces, all empty of people, yet echoing strongly with their presence – veterinary schools, emergency response training rooms, Army Staff College war rooms, spas, psychology labs…

I know that some find her work too clinical (and while she certainly out Düsseldorf’s the Düsseldorf school in terms of Post-Neue Sachlichkeit… I think some viewers miss the subtle humour in her work), but I find the work to be just far enough this side of clinical to be intriguing, fascinating and it draws me in. What exactly are these places? What goes on here – and is it as secretive and as frightening as its potential suggests. Photographs of extraordinary ordinary places

There are also some interesting touches – I like the way some of her bigger prints, both colour and black and white, were framed in formica, which is really a sort of “fake” architectural material (made from photographs) and often chosen by Cohen to the mimic a particular surface or material in the photograph. She also went from contact prints in her earlier work to big prints for some of the later colour work (though she has some useful things to say about big for big's sake and the problems with making some work too big)

Here are a couple of extracts one of the interviews on her site (which are very worthwhile reading - here and here):

...Eerie, and yet you are drawn to just such places. How do you explain this attraction?

I have an approach/avoidance reaction to them. Sometimes I find them seductive, sometimes repulsive, but mostly I have mixed feelings. Perhaps it would be best to say I‘m drawn to visual and ideological contradictions and deceptions. I‘m fascinated by boundaries that are more conceptual than real, by ambiguous messages, by things that don‘t make sense, by bad logic. It is strange how frequently things aren‘t quite what they‘re cracked up to be ? how often pictures of exotic places are unconvincing, how often luxury resorts resemble psychiatric hospitals and how often psychiatric hospitals look like health spas. The picture of a blackboard with a diagram of arrows going in two directions (opposite) sums it up for me. Is it a sketch for a bizarre philosophy of life?...

Sometimes it seems as though you are more interested in small details than in the big picture.

I‘m intrigued by architectural details and hardware. It‘s strange, but I‘ve never seen an electrical outlet that is level. There are people travelling around in spaceships but no one can properly install an outlet. Some people might find this consoling but I find it disturbing. Also I‘m acutely aware of things like surveillance cameras, ‘No Exit’ signs, fire alarms and grimy stains around light switches. Sometimes objects look pathological, sometimes not. It often seems as if someone could be shouting at me from the other side of the air vent. And why do heating units so often seem to be keeping an eye on things? They have peculiar human attributes ? they seem to want to join in rather than just sit there. Things like that amuse me: outlets, exhaust grates and office paraphernalia that look like minimalist sculpture. Sometimes the hardware speaks for itself; but sometimes it functions as a metaphor for something else. Every room is a conceptual piece, an installation in real time.

Cohen's website is here - lots of images and other goodies

Magazines

I'm not sure if it's just that my tastes have changed over the years or of it actually is the case that a number of good photography magazines have fallen by the wayside, but there are probably only two photo magazines that I really look forward to when they arrive on the news-stand shelves - Blindspot and Prefix Photo

I don't think I've ever got a copy of Blindspot that hasn't had at least one portfolio that has caused me to either think about something new, rethink something, or given me ideas for a new approach to photographing. I got a sense it lost it's way slightly after the founder and editor Kim Zorn Caputo died (far too young), but it seems to be finding it's direction again, and I hope it stays around in its current form.

With Blindspot I often find I'm hunting through old back issues trying to find a picture that has stuck in my mind. And in a nice example of serendipity, my five year old son was obsessed with fireflies this Fall - making ever more intricate drawings of them - when the current edition arrived. He was enthralled by Gregory Crewdson's Firefly photos.

Prefix Photo is along similar lines - more words (though plenty of photos) - almost as good as Blindspot, but it only seems to come out a couple of times a year. The essays are often quite interesting and sometimes head off at unexpected tangents.

One magazine I really miss is the old Doubletake - I enjoyed its eclectic mix of photos, prose and poetry.

As for the rest of the field, I like View Camera every now and then (in part because I use large format and the articles on old but still good lenses etc are invaluable). It can suffer from a few too many rocks/aspens/waterfall photos - but then it will surprise you with an article on Sally Mann or An-My Le's Small Wars or some such. There's also Aperture... I find I really only like about two out of every five issues of Aperture. Never enough to subscribe, but just enough to check out a new edition when it shows up. Sometimes it feels spot on but at other times it seems so wide of the mark you wonder what the heck they were thinking.

Other than that, I don't even look at American Photo or Outdoor Photographer or Photo Life or Photo Techniques or Black and White and such any more - it just seems to be the same old recycled stories and subjects.

Outside of photography magazines, I often find interesting photography and writing in publications like Dwell or Metropolis or Azure (I like buildings, architecture and urban stuff), or literary/art magazines like Brick or Border Crossings or Canadian Art and Art in America etc. At that point it's just a matter of grazing the shelves in a good magazine stand...

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)