Michael Wesely - Still Lifes

I've mentioned Michael Wesely before. I really quite liked his layered time-lapse photographs of all the reconstruction in Berlin - quite brilliant. But it didnt quite seem to translate when he was commissioned (?) to photograph the new construction at MoMA in New York (although one colour version I saw seemed to hit the spot).

Then he did some very minimalist almost colour field landscapes of the US and Germany. I'm not sure if they were time-lapse or blurred or what, but they felt like they were in danger of pushing the originality into novelty (although now I've looked at this one below over the last few days - even as a small jpeg- I find I've actually come to quite like it...).

Now I see he has more time lapse work - this time cut flowers - Stillleben (Still-Lifes). I don't know, flowers (especially cut flowers) have been done so many times before, by artists and photographers through the generations. But it still seems to a subject that can be done well time and time again (think Friedlander's wonderful and yet expedient Stems). In this case, I think Wesely flowers moving from fresh to decay is a worthwhile addition. They are also quite beautiful.

"This series of flower portraits, as yet incomplete, is a further stage in Wesely's persistent investigation into photographic reproduction as a temporal phenomenon. In these images he captures the blossoming and fading of flowers using exposures of five to ten days. The resulting images become memory stores with great aesthetic appeal due to their egalitarian reproduction of all phenomena. In these shots, time appears less a vectorial phenomenon than the result of spatial relations. Indeed, a time lag is inscribed into the images by the rhythm and perspective layering of the delicate, spectrally transparent petals and the stems in their whirring dance; they not only give the pictorial space more depth, but also extend the visual time necessary for every perception quite tangibly. In this way, Wesely succeeds in breaching the primacy that applies in his medium - that of the right moment - in favour of the history picture, which is, however, subject to an entirely new interpretation here."...

Parr, Fontcuberta, Norfolk, Christenberry...

Lens Culture has their archive of audio interviews and talks with photographers online (scroll down the right-hand side)

A few Highlights, Martin Parr, Joan Fontcuberta, Simon Norfolk, William Christenberry

'Every Man a Rembrandt' on Conscientious

I don't really like lifting posts wholesale from other blogs - it's kinda lazy for one thing...

But Jörg over on Conscientious has a short, sweet and to the point post this morning:

'Every Man a Rembrandt'

When I look at how Paint by Number kits' selling point was "Every Man a Rembrandt!" I just can't escape to notice similarities with current claims about photography, involving digital photography and Flickr... And there appears to be even more: Just compare how the craze about older paint-by-numbers is not that dissimilar from the one about, say, found photographs.

The post which follows it - Death by Kitsch - the Trickle-down Effect in Art is worth a thought or two as well, which also fits in a bit with Christian Patterson's post I read the other day on the old TV Guide "Art Test"... take it yourself and see how you do.

I think the incidence of Kitsch in photography - while always a clear and present danger - has increased exponentially with the likes of Flickr and other mass sharing sites, especially - as quoted here the other day: "Photographic images used to be about the trace. Digital images are about the flow..."

Finally, from the dictionary of Sixty-three Words, Kitsch is: ''the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection.'' and an awful lot of what passes for art, even good art - and especially photography - is pretty much kitsch.

Panoramics

Brooklyn Bridge

Every now and then I get a hankering to buy a Cirkut camera (if you are old enough you might remember the photographer coming and taking one of those long roll photographs of the whole school as the camera rotated by clockwork). Never mind they are temperamental and take rolls of 8" or 10" film that's almost impossible to get now...

Florence

Thankfully, he Library of Congress helps me get over that. The LoC has a massive collection with many photographs now digitized and online and can be fun to hunt around on. Their American Memory site has lots of "theme" sections - Civil War, Depression Era, Small Town Life stereo photos - and a whole section on Panoramics.

Briish R34 Airship - "Tiny"

The panoramic cover everything from disasters to military to group portraits to beauty contests to landscapes, dams, canals (think digging the Panama Canal) bridges and more.

San Franciso Earthquake

Note that the "joins" are from the LoC's scanning process. Some of the files are also big enough to download and print yourself

Atlantic City Beauty Contest

River of Shadows - Eadweard Muybridge

Rebecca Solnit's book River of Shadows about the pioneering photography Eadweard Muybridge is an absorbing read.

Muybridge was quite the character to say the least. Inventive, at times driven, ambitious, taking a knock on the head that probably drove him a little bit crazy - and he got away with murder - literally - after killing his wife's lover. And I think he's the only photographer to have an opera written about him? As well as being the influence for Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No.2.

Starting off in England as the rather more mundane Edward James Muggeridge; Muybridge pretty much re-invented himself after making his way west. And while he is probably best known for his stop motion pictures of, first, horses and then people, he did much else besides. He set up shop with a studio in San Francisco selling his Mammoth plate photographs of Yosemite. Took some intriguing panoramic photographs of the growth of San Francisico, taken one plate at a time (in a way foreshadowing his motion studies) - of which Mark Klett has produced one of his re-photographic topographics thingy's. Muybridge also documented the little remembered but grinding and bloody Madoc Indian Wars in Orgeon and photographed in Central America after his acquittal for murder.

But it is his motion studies that Muybridge is still remembered for . Originally devised and taken to settle a bet by horse race owning Governor Leland Stanford, Muybridge proved once and for all the horses had been depicted in motion incorrectly by generations of artists. After which Muybridge pretty much became obsessed with documenting all forms of motion from various animals, to athletes, to women bathing

In doing all this Muybridge invented various shutter mechanism to capture the motion with the slow and clunky cameras of the day. He also invented various devices for depicting motion - the Zoopraxiscope and the Zoetrope. But most of all, despite being a photographer, Muybridge's ideas and experiments were instrumental int he development of what was to become the Motion Picture - with California at the heart of the movie industry.

Solnit's book is a well written and interesting read on all this reminding us how influential Muybridge still is (among other things, books of his motion studies remain in print and are still a guide for artists) as well as depicting this period of California's history - where a lot of photographers were at work during this time. I should add that a number of Solnit's other writings about photography are also worth searching out.

Art * Signal - Barcelona

Jim Johnson has news of an interesting looking new magazine (internet & paper) from Barcelona called Art * Signal. I think you should be able to download a copy by the time you read this (it's also bilingual - spanish and english). In fact one of the things I find so exciting about the internet is how these kind of ventures can be tried so much more easily along with the fact that I can easily access something being produced in Barcelona.

Jim has written an article in the first issue in the Camera Lucida column entitled What to do with Invidious Distinctions on the distinction (or not) between documentary and art in photography.

It's all fairly heavy on the art/urban/cinema theory - but there seem to be enough small nuggets to take away and muse over and perhaps draw something of your own out of...?

Escapism

So, for all the fine books on Art History and studies of the Urban Condition, photography monographs and the odd bit of Barthes or Berger or the latest post-modern Murakami or magical realist Garcia Marquez , what's your escapist reading?

I know some who won't admit to spending a night or two with the latest Tom Clancy novel. I'm waiting for the new Michael Ondaatje book to arrive at the library - heavy duty stuff - but I read once the Ondaatje likes to relax with a good detective novel. Which is probably my choice too.

Most recently my favorite has been the Inspector Wallanader series from Henning Mankell. A middle aged small town Swedish detective who worries about his daughter and his cholesterol (hmm...). He also comes up with some surprisingly thoughtful lines about life in general. Then there's the Commissario Brunetti series - though he seems to spend more time wandering around Venice than actually solving crimes (and I usually end up just wanting to spend Spring sipping espresso's in some small Venetian bar). I also like the Inspector Rebus series, although Rebus is is bit to close to self-destruction from cigarettes, booze, neeps and tatties for comfort.



Finally of course, there is the fictional detective who's also a photographer. Thumps Dreadfulwater a native American photographer/retired cop. There are only two books in the series so far and they are actually pretty good and quite funny in places as well. The protagonist uses a Leica M6 and a wooden 4x5 Field Camera. Written by Hartley Goodweather - which is the pseudonym for award winning author Tom King - whose more serious novels are also first class (Btw, Tom also enjoys using Dagor lenses and doing the Pyro dev thing - he really is a photographer as well as a novelist).

Joe Reifer - Boneyard Show

Blogger and photographer Joe Reifer and Troy Paiva are having an art show in May - night photographs from an airplane boneyard out in the Mojave.

The opening is Friday May 4th, from 6:30-10:30pm at The Lucky Ju Ju Pinball Art Gallery, 713 Santa Clara Ave, Alameda. He sent me an invite (and the Lucky Ju Ju looks cool...) but it's just to far :-)

Standing in Place

I mentioned the new Blindspot last week. I just found they have Jean Dykstra's short essay on "place" from this edition online - an extract:

"...Photography, being rooted in reality, has the capacity to find redemption simply by showing us the world in which we live, in all of its rich and astonishing detail. That's not to say that photography replicates reality. Even discounting the possibilities of digital manipulation, we know the medium is far more complex, more subjective, more nuanced. But for the photographers included here, at least, it all begins in the real world. Whether they have focused on the most banal details of scenes we overlook every day, or on magnificent landscapes we may never see with our own eyes, their photographs draw our attention to a place and hold it there. If, in contemplating these photographs, the notion of stewardship crosses our minds, if we consider our responsibility to those places we cherish, that's probably not an accident....

What these photographers have done, in fact, is to embrace and then transcend their own intimate connection to a place. Barbara Bosworth has done it in her photographs of a New England meadow and of the trees that inhabit it. In the tallest part of one tree, a snarl of bare branches against a pale blue sky, the limbs become disentangled, and a lone bird sits, poised for flight. That tree might be a pure embodiment of Adams's observation. It's a thing of beauty, pointing beyond itself, literally, toward the bird's flight out of the frame, but also figuratively, toward the way a place becomes a repository of memory, even a redemptive metaphor. But a place is always more than just a metaphor; it exists, and if nothing else, these photographs demand that we look closely and carefully. And, perhaps, that we ask ourselves how lightly we're walking on the earth, and what kind of footprints we're leaving behind. But in the end, Bosworth's photograph, like all of the photographs here, ultimately circles back again from metaphor to the place itself, to a tree in a meadow, in all its singularity..."

(Photo - Barbara Bosworth)

Provincial or metropolitan?

... local or exotic?

Over the years I seem to have built up a fairly strong conviction that much of the best photography is not done in exotic locales, but rather in ordinary places - not because we tend to know them best, but precisely because we don't know them that well. Most of us (taking N. America and much of Europe for a broad swath) don't live in ancient hill towns or on the edge of a slot canyon - or even in a lovely country village (sure a few do, but probably not the majority).

Rather we inhabit suburbs or messy cities, with strip malls and housing estates and waste land and often not very well kept parks and canals (Manchester Ship Canal not the Grand Canal...) and so on. Now certainly a lot of those places are actually quite pleasant to live in - satellite extra-urbs with wide clean streets and fenced lots and local playgrounds for example. It's not all dark satanic mills - not these days (okay I have a massive oil refinery less than 10 minutes away). But neither is it a villa in Tuscany.

Yet we are often drawn to travelling to such "exotic" places to make photographs. Certainly it can and does produce beautiful and fascinating work (Geoffrey James' Italian Villas and Compagna Romana for just two). But so can focusing on that which is often right under our noses, yet which frequently falls below our level of perception. Indeed I have a feeling that such work is often more rewarding.

The Guardian L.S. Lowry lecture - The proud provincial loneliness of LS Lowry - has sparked a few discussions (here and here) about provincialism and art which seems to intersect with all this at some points:

"It means making an artistic decision to be out of step.... See that through to its logical conclusion and provincialism becomes an artistic strategy: not a misfortune of birth or temperament, but a wilful rejection, not simply of metropolitan fashion and facility, but of the very idea of a gravitational centre. You haunt the margins because the margins are where independence and originality are to be found...

But there is a price to be paid for this particular ambivalence. Where you do not attach an unambiguously, not to say transparently high value to yourself and to your work, others will have difficulty locating it. It is a sad fact about readers and lookers that they need to be told what a thing is worth and will often take art at the artist's own valuation. Lowry did not hold his work in disesteem, but in its presentation, in its apparent subject matter, in the titles he gave it, in the contrary and sometimes dismissive narratives in which he obscured both his ambitions and his achievements, he not only refused all suggestions of the highest seriousness, not to say grandeur, but made it difficult for others to see or describe that grandeur for themselves.

Only think of the artistic strategy of the conceptualists - a Damien Hirst title, say: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - and compare it with Landscape in Wigan or Industrial Scene, Ashton Under Lyne. It's true that Hirst punctures his own inflated self-importance with irony, but in an age of irony that only adds to the self-importance. Just because conceptualism plays with portentousness, that doesn't mean it is not portentous. And because it says it is about ideas, it ipso facto IS about ideas.

Thus is seriousness in contemporary art, simply frivolity in another guise. Lowry was the polar opposite of this, making modest claims for what he did, presenting himself and his ambitions in a way that belied the real accomplishment of the art itself..."

I wrote all this a couple of days ago, and today read this on Mark Hobson's Landscapist about his loathing of the quest for the idealised form:

"...But, I have come to understand consciously what I have always understood intuitively - that what really gnawed at my craw was/is the fact that most of the pictures which pissed me off had nothing to do with 'real' life. Most of the pictures, in fact, stood/stand in direct contrast to 'real' life.

In wallowing in the fields of "idealized forms', they refute and devalue the realities of everyday life.

You know the life I mean. The one which you live each and every day. The one with the dust balls under the bed with the sagging mattress. The one with toil and trouble. But, it is also the one with joy and happiness which comes from 'some things money can't buy' - things that can be experienced only by looking life square in the eye and, for lack of a better term, embracing and dealing with it.

Now, when it comes to picture making and picture viewing, many seem to think that pictures which depict 'real' life are somehow 'ugly' and 'depressing'. They fail to make even the slightest effort to find the beauty in truth. Better to escape into the realm and easily grasped false hope of 'idealized forms' than to 'work' at finding true hope in all which surrounds one's self."

which also seems to tie into this whole thing.

(Struan Gray)

Chinese Photography

(Peng & Chen)

There seem to be some really interesting (not to say wild) things coming out of China in terms of photography and art.

(Tian Ye)

One a practical level, if you sell any kind of nice looking Dagor lens on ebay, chances are it will get snapped up from China with a high bid - Large Format cameras a selling very well to China (and they are producing many very nice cameras there as well - Shen Hao, Fotoman etc).

(Zhu Feng)

But there is a steady stream of photography which doesn't show any signs of slowing down. They've taken the Becher/Struthsky school approach and run with it. They've taken the contemporary portrait trend and given it their own twists. And there is stuff that's just plain crazy (cool crazy that is). I haven't picked any for this post, but there is a lot of conceptual mixed media and "performance" photography (it tends to makes Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall look rather dull and staid)

(Huang Yunhe)

I'm still finding it hard to get a handle on a lot of this, but I came across this site the other day. As well, individual photographers work seems to be showing up more and more on the blogs.

(Weng Peijun)

There is also the work of Peng & Chen who had their own edition of Colors all to themselves (Am I the only one that think that sounds like a pair of Vegas magicians...?). And Wengpei Jun's website here. PingMag also had a post on a new book on Chinese Photography

(Chen Wei)

(Btw, does anyone else not quite get Colors? I want to like it - I've looked at it regularly since it first came out as the Benetton things years ago, but there's just something about it that doesn't persuade to fork over the dollars for a copy. Maybe time to take a closer look again?)

The democratic image

A few extracts from a thought provoking essay by David Levi Strauss at the Democratic Image symposium - "Click here to disappear: thoughts on images and democracy" (my emphases):

"Photography has always had the potential to democratise images, but it has seldom worked out that way in practice. Digital imaging has made image-making devices ubiquitous. Many more people now possess the means to make images more of the time. At the same time, images are primarily used, in the public image environment, to influence public opinion and encourage the consumption of products and services...

I used to think that more people making images would necessarily lead to more conscious image reception, but I'm less sure of that now. It seems that it's possible to make images as unconsciously as one consumes them, bypassing the critical sense entirely...

Images online are both more ephemeral (in form) and more substantial (in number). They flicker across our eyes and jitter through our minds at incredible speeds. We spend more time collecting and sorting images, but less time looking at any one of them. One can never step into the same data-stream twice. The images from Abu Ghraib suddenly appear and are everywhere, and then just as suddenly they vanish, leaving barely a trace. Photographic images used to be about the trace. Digital images are about the flow...

In political terms the distribution of images is more important than their collection, and the distribution of public images is still primarily controlled by corporations. Moreover, as decisions about the distribution of images become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer corporations, manipulation increases and criticality wanes..."




(oh - and there's an interesting comment about bloggers which has more than a little truth to it...)

Don McCullin

"I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job."

Don McCullin has to be the best living conflict/war photographer. His work from wars and conflicts from Cyprus, through the Congo, Biafra, Indo-Pakistan, Northern Ireland and - most of all - his iconic work from Vietnam is superb. In addition, his work from the massacres in Beirut in the Palestinian camps brought home what happened there like nothing else did (his maniacal lute player in the ruins of Beirut must, I'm sure, haunt many dreams).

In addition, McCullin has to be one of the most down to earth and brutally honest photographers out there. He seriously doubts his - or anyone else's photographs - ever really make a difference. And his autobiography is fascinating, if searingly painful as times.

I also find I'm very fond of his work after he withdrew from external (though perhaps not internal) conflict - the Somerset Levels (for a short while I lived up the road from him there); India and Indonesia among others.

He has lately returned to some of his old issues - photographing AIDS in Africa and the conflict in Darfur, even though he is about 70 now.

I recently managed to track down a good interview (transcript) with him I heard a while back on the BBC - click here (Real Audio file) - well worth a listen. There's also a good article from the Guardian here

Finally, I was surprised to find only a limited selection of his photographs online - only the more classic icons. I wish I could have found a wider selection.

"I want to pass another image past you, if I can re-create it for you adequately, and that is, one from Beirut . And there's the body of a young Palestinian girl lying in the street, and behind, there's a semi-circle of six Falange, that is right wing, nationalist Lebanese, serenading, doing a chorus over her dead body because she's dead. Now, you see! It makes me angry to describe it; what did you feel?"

Well, first of all, I'd been expelled from the area. I was watching Falange executing groups of men in 10s and 20s, butchering them in front of me; stabbing them, kicking them in the face... and you know, building up,...you know, often people when they murder people like that in a genocide fashion, they have to build up hatred, and by doing so, they have to work themselves up and they have to become bestial; and they kick people, and punch people, and degrade people, because they have to bring on the courage and the excuse, and reason to murder. And I was watching this in doorways, and I could see men being shot down in cold blood in front of me; brains going all over the wall; I almost broke down. I saw some men standing there, and the next thing I know, they were dropping, and one of them was just saying, Allah, with the last breath from his lungs. And I went around into a stairwell, and I thought I was going to break down. I thought, God you know; this is not real! What's going on? And I'd been with the Falange because we weren't allowed to operate on the other side in what they called the green line in those days; that's in West Beirut, so I was in East Beirut . But what shocked me before I end my story, was the fact that I was with people who call themselves Christians; that's what really got me. And so they said, 'you leave this area and you take no pictures'. And I was with a very nice journalist from The Sunday Times, who's now a professor at a university in the north of England , and we were walking quite shakily away from this butchery, and I heard music. And I said to Martin, 'do you hear music?' And he said, 'yes', he said, 'but let's just get out of here; let's get going'. And I said, I can music; it's getting louder. And I passed a cross-roads, an intersection, and sure enough, I looked up and I saw this dead young Palestinian girl who could have been no more than 16 to 20 years of age, lying in this horrible, cold, damp road, because it had rained heavily the night before. And lo and behold! There was a group of young Christians; one with a Thompson machine gun and another with a Kalashnikov. One of them had a lute. And I said to Martin, 'I've got to get this picture.' And he said, 'no, no, no; let's go; we don't want to make any problems'. And then, one of them, the man with the lute said, 'hey mister! Come and take a photo'. And I said to Martin, 'I'm going to do this'. And I went off, and I took two shots, didn't even use my exposure meter, I guessed it; and then we fled. And it's, in many respects, I think it's more akin to a religious painting."

"I realized that you could shoot photographs until the cows came home but they have nothing to do with real humanity, real memories, real feelings."

(caught by a fellow photojournalist McCullin puts down his cameras and rescues an old lady while under fire in Cyprus)

Where are you? Who are you?

The above is a fairly typical map fort the spread of visitors to this blog (tried to find one that wasn't too cluttered)

My question is to those who visit here - where are you from?

It would be nice to hear from some of the silent visitors - who is out there from Tokyo or Sao Paulo or Montevideo or Tongeren or Zagreb or Komae or Shanghai or Indore or Santiago Kansas City. Either post a comment or email me at the link to the right.

And okay - I do know that some of those blips line up with a number of the usual suspects - you know who you are...

Brancusi's Photographs

From Heading East. I'd always known Brancusi carefully photographed his sculpture, but I didn't realise he also took photographs of himself (he was, of course, also photographed by Steichen) . Here, one more and one less conventional