Jeff Wall @ MoMA

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

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

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

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

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

The Photobook Vols. I & II by Parr and Badger

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

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

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

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

Volume II has the following chapters:

1 Explosion - The American Photobook since the 1980s

2 Common Market - The European Photobooks since the 1980s

3 Without Frontiers - The Worldwide Photobook

4 Appropriating the Photograph - The Artist's Photobook

5 Point of Sale - The Company Book

6 Looking at Photographs - The Picture Editor as Auteur

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

8 Straight no Chaser - The New 'New Objectivity'

9 Home and Away - The Photobook and Modern Life

Epilogue - The Ultimate Photoboook

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

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

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

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

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

and here some of Parr's:

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

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

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

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

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

Gear Fondling part 1 - the Phillips Compact II 8x10

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

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

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

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

(some info here too in the Phillips Explorer page)

(Photos courtesy of Marco Annaratone)

Little People Street Project

(Cash Machine)

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

(Pinned Down)

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

Wild Things - John Brownlow

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


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

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

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

William Blake

Claude Pauquet's French Seaside

Someone recently told me that French photography had been in the grip on Henri Cartier Bresson, the instant décisif and the tradition of photojournalism for so long that for a photographer to take up serious large format photography, with it's slower and more more thoughtful approach, was grounds for mockery and possibly professional suicide. I'm certainly glad at least one photographer took up the challenge...



In Claude Pauquet's work I'm struck by how much the French Seaside looks like the English Seaside - both sides of the Channel seem to have much in common. Indeed, for generations there has been a regular too and fro of those who live on the two coastlines, from smugglers, to fisherman to tourists. Caravan sites, seaside cottages, amusement parks and abandoned beach shacks seem to dot the landscape of both regions.

Growing up in Sussex, every few months through the spring and summer we had a French onion seller - his bicycle and trailer festooned with strings of garlic and onions - come door to door. It didn't seem the least bit unusual that he would travel across by ferry and spend a few weeks selling on the English side of the Channel. I feel I could have easily taken many of these photographs along the coasts of Sussex or Dorset or Devon.

"From 2002 to 2006, Claude Pauquet began a trip between the Atlantic coast and the Channel coast, from Hendaye to Bray-Dunes. He was very close to the coasts to take the pictures , travelling from one place to another in order to explore a border-line between the shores and the ocean, between the natural landscapes and the unspecified spaces."

I like the sense and feel these pictures give of these places - which are indeed transition zones in many different ways.

Lee Miller

( 'Portrait of space'Near Siwa Egypt)

Lee Miller seems to have had more lives than the average Buddhist Master. As a child I remember my Grandmother pointing out a rather elegant woman in Eastbourne as Lady Penrose. It was only many years later I realised that was Lee Miller the photographer.

Miller went from sought after model to Surrealist muse, to surrealist photographer to fashion photographer to war correspondent.

(Lee Miller by Man Ray)

As well as her fashion work, she photographed in Egypt after she married Aziz Eloui Bey and became fascinated with long distance desert travel (think The English Patient). In Paris she was friends with, and often muse to, Breton, Picasso (who painted her several times), Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst and others, as well as a recurring subject of Many Ray's camera. She also went on to set up her own studio in Paris.

(Fire Masks - worn as protection from incendiary bombs)

On the outbreak of war she found herself in London where she worked as a correspondent for Vogue, covering the Blitz and wartime Britain. Shortly after D-Day she travelled as a war correspondent/combat photographer to France, covering the siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, on to Frankfurt and Leipzig and, memorably, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, finishing up at Hitlers lair in Bavaria

(Dead SS Guard floating in canal Dachau)

After the war she married Roland Penrose - who she had known from Paris- having divorced Bey. Penrose was just about the only English Surrealist (is there a more unlikely name for a surrealist than his?) and she eventually settled with him on a farm in Sussex which became a gathering place for everyone from Picasso to Henry Moore to Man Ray.

(The Shadow of the Great PyramidEgypt)

Miller's photography at this point wasn't terribly well known beyond the publications it appeared in. It was only in later years that her son Anthony brought much of it to light again and her varied career - and her photography - became more widely known.

There are a number of good books of her work out there Lee Miller's War, The Lives of Lee Miller etc - as well as a good biography.

(In Hitler's bath, Munich)

Fulvio Bortolozzo

At first glance some of Fulvio Bortolozzo's work , especially the daylight pictures, seems like Basilico in colour - which isn't a bad thing at all. There are a lot of images on his site (which is mainly in Italian). I also think I can detect the influence of Luigi Ghirri, who seems sadly so little known outside Italy. And yes, I'm still a sucker for urban and suburban cityscapes. Certainly there is a lot of it out there - but for a a huge percentage of us in the West, it's where we live. We might like to take our vacations by the sea or in Morocco or Costa Rica, but we spend most of our lives in the places these photographers depict. I certainly don't think this vein has been at all exhausted in terms of photographers trying to understand it and make some kind of sense out of it by means of their work (though it's getting harder, and the bar should certainly keep being raised).




Bortolozzo has managed to depict something of the contemporary Italian urban condition and has done so while making use of a subtle - almost beautiful - colour palette. But he never prettifies it.


A while ago I had grown a little weary of the amount of urban night photogaphy that seemed to be coming at us. I don't know if it's that the stream has dried up a bit now, or the quality has improved, but I've come across a few examples recently that don't seem nearly so repetitive (I'll probably post more soon).


Fulvio has some night work on his site that is certainly worth looking at. I like especially his Olimpia where the work becomes the trace of Bortolozzo's walking through the nocturnal cityscape of the new olympic Torino and also the wider theme of Scene di passaggio (Soap Opera) where the work puts in chronological sequence the representations of the places that are the scenic spaces for the Soap Opera in which I play the protagonist role: my life. I love the idea of "the soap opera that is my life..."

How To Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance

Fun advice from Wired on How To Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance (apparently there's a we met on flickr group - which, as a concept, I must admit I find a little scary)

As you click on each of the thumbnails in the story you'll get advice, like:

Don't pursue someone with hundreds of contacts who posts provocativeself-portraits (Miss Aniela, featured above, for example). The chance that you could catch the attention of someone with such a busy Flickr life is slim. (If you have some fresh approach that you think would work, please e-mail it to this author in detail and he will ... uh ... review it.) Instead, focus your crush on the diamond in the rough: the shy librarian, the surfer with a fondness for black-and-white.

Joe Reifer

I like it when I'm directed by Google Analytics to a site that has been referring to this blog and find work I've never come across before. One such was Joe Reifers blog. On his website I found some interesting night work (those aircraft graveyards remind me of the opening chapters of DeLillo's Underworld).

Some nice work (though I think I prefer those night shots where there doesn't appear to be any additional lighting)

"The Ongoing Moment" by Geoff Dyer

The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer is a slightly frustrating but ultimately rewarding book that takes a rather eclectic course through about the last 60 or 70 years of modern photography. All the usual suspects are here - Stieglitz, Evans, Winogrand, Strand, Nachtwey (as well as a few not so usual suspects), but rather than a chronological recounting of their places in the photographic pantheon, Dyer picks up on themes that run through their work - themes apparently picked up almost unconsciously and passed like a baton from one photographic generation to another. Hats or accordion players or blind beggars or fences or highways for instance

While this approach can be a little annoying - you just feel like you are getting into a theme when it switches, you do come away from the book with a whole host of ideas buzzing around in your head.

Among other things, Dyer has one of the best description William Eggleston's work I've come across, as well as a good, if rather succinct, description of the arrival of colour in serious photography.

Along the way we get plenty of intriguing oddities - Stieglitz' bizarre fascination with kneaded breasts, gossip about the affair between Mrs. Stieglitz and Mrs. Strand (as well as Stieglitz seducting Mrs. Strand with more than his camera), Edward Weston's defence of pubic hair (of which he professes "a love of all types and colours...") to the grey elders of the board of the Museum of Modern Art and more...

There are many gems, including as this one;

"In the course of this book I have comes, increasingly, to like photographs which look like they were taken by someone else - the Shahn of a "Lange" back, say. My favourite pictures by Brassai are the ones done in daylight, especially the ones that look like they were taken by Lartigue. It's quite possible that some of my favourite Shore's were taken by Eggleston and vice versa. Perhaps it's not a surprise, then, that my favourite Walker Evans (WE) photograph was take by Edward Weston (EW)."

The book is available in paperback as well now I believe and there is an interview with Dyer here

Paul Raphaelson's Terrain Vague

Paul Raphaelson seems to have an eye for those in-between and lost places of the city (as well as a surname any artist would give their right arm for...). Places which may seem empty "waste-land" but which, if you take the time and look closely enough, are not necessarily desolate.

As he says about his work Lost Spaces, Found Gardens:

"Paradise is the Persian word for a walled enclosure. As often as not, in the city the walls are cyclone fences crowned with razorwire. Whatever they lack in charm they make up by providing a framed view from the outside. I find solace in the spontaneous gardens behind the fences. And I’m inspired by all the wild things invading them, by the relief they bring from the city’s antiseptic geometry and sheen."

And about Wilderness:

"In the early Nineteen-nineties I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, in a landscape at turns both overgrown and barren. New England row houses mingled with empty lots, crumbling husks of factories, and a dizzying web of trees, weeds, cyclone fences, and high tension wires. Layers of growth and decay confounded any attempts at easy interpretation. The landscape might have been formed by a simple mix of accident and neglect, but it felt to me like the work of a larger process."

Kim Keever's imaginary landscapes

I came across this work by Kim Keever a couple of years ago (thanks for the reminder wood s lot).

While there is the possibility that the work could get somewhat repetitive after while, I still think they are fascinating. And Keever obviously delights in what he's doing, which I think is a good part of it.

I love the whole messy way they are made up and put together with a massive tank in his apartment (I gather his downstairs neighbours aren't too happy that tank has burst a couple of times though... but hey - that's the cost of art!)

"Kim Keever's mysterious and painterly large-scale photographs represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing the Romanticism of the Hudson River School and 19th-century photography of the American West, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime; however, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. These images reflect none of the concerns with authenticity for which photography has historically been used; yet, they retain the inherent efficacy and rigor of their medium..."

~~

"It's so much fun to see the paint clouds move through the water and it all starts to look so real, I feel like I'm watching a movie or I've been transported to this lilliputian world of my own creation. I guess I'm an escapist at heart."

other links and more images here and here

Traces

I had been musing about the current direction of my own photography when a recent post on Paul Butzi's blog caught my eye. It was about Locard's Exchange Principle (or theory). Locard was the founding father of modern forensic science, at the root of which is his statement that "every contact leaves a trace" or "with contact between two items there will be an exchange".

Butzi's take on it is slightly different from the one I've been mulling over for some time. Many years ago when I did my basic police training we had to study a standard forensics textbook. I remember being introduced to Locard's Principle by a rather daunting Special Investigations Branch Warrant Officer, a veteran of many major investigations. He drummed the Principal into us as he taught us the basics of Forensics, photography and how not to mess up a Crime Scene (and which was nothing like the highly popular and unrealistic CSI franchise...).

Somewhere in the back of my mind Locard's Principle has stuck with me over the years. Now, the more I look at it, the more I see that my photography is often about traces - finding, following or interpreting them. They might be traces of many people or one, the traces left by memory or history, but the idea of a photographer as being a person who follows traces is one that resonates strongly for me.

And alongside this there is also the transference that takes when the photographer make a picture - as John Berger puts it "cameras are just boxes for transporting appearances". The photographer simply uses the camera to make a trace of what he sees before him or her: the exchange that takes place between photographer and scene.

As it stands right now, I think I'd be happy if my work was seen as being about interpreting traces.

tim atherton