Gabriele Basilico update - Workbook 1969-2006

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

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

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

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

William Greiner - New Orleans & Baton Rouge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winogrand 1964

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

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


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

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

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

Worlds in minature

(Olivo Barbieri)

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

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

(Thomas Demand)

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

So here are a few

(Naoki Honjo)

(Toni Hafkenscheid)

(Marc Räder)

Snake Eyes - Weifenbach and Gossage

Okay, I realise this is about the umpteenth post about John Gossage as well as Terri Weifenbach, but I finally got hold of a copy of their joint book Snake Eyes. All I can say is WOW.

First, I hadn't twigged that the book was so big. It's about 13x18 and beautifully put together. I can't quite imagine how the prints would look on a wall, but I can say there's a big disconnect between how the pictures look on the internet and how they look in the book (though as Gossage says; "Books are better than exhibitions").

Luis Gottardi commented that; "Weifenbach's work brings to mind Hugher Foote's, but is more emotionally expressive & less analytical. The color seems a little on the decorative side." In fact, once you have the book in your hands, rather than decorative, when the colour photographs are up to 11x14 or so, they are quite powerful and actually take on a slightly daunting, almost threatening feel - very different from "pretty" colour (which is how they can come across online). Coming close, in my mind, to the original pre-Romantic notion of "sublime" - of awe, confusion and uncertainty.

The counterpoint of Gossage's black and white images is fascinating. The whole book really quite draws you in (btw, there are a lot more of the colour photographs to pick from online than the b&w ones).


Here's a couple of things they had to say about the book in an interview from Photoeye:

"Terri: I think that photographers as a general rule edit from the world. They take what is in the image as the content. Painters have to construct and as a result the content isn’t always the imagery. You have experiences that take you far beyond what's recorded in the image. I have stepped into a particular position by stating that beauty is more than simple entertainment. Beauty has depth. And that position is a mine field in photography. Snake Eyes is of a place that we have proposed as being beautiful and I’m offering this as a serious body of work.

Terri: We had different reasons for pairing different photographs. For example, I had an image that was like a dark fairy tale, so John picked photographs of his own to place opposite, which held up that idea.

John: The images 19-22/XII are an example. Terri's photograph shows a church, though you know that only because of the shape of the window. I wanted to show four photographs alongside that image, but not a sequence of four photographs. I wanted the viewer to question, "Why are these connected?" In order to figure that out, one has to really look at the photographs. That's where I want to point you. They aren’t explicitly connected, but then, you've just spent time closely looking at four pictures. That’s the ‘work’ for me. It makes people either uncomfortable or fascinated"

I've got some time this week to sit down and do some research, and this is one of several book I want to spend some time with. I certainly don't think it will be time wasted

I also got a copy of Gossage's Berlin in the Time of the Wall, and again, I must say this is a stunning book too. It's packed and dense and needs a lot of time and attention, but that too will be time well spent.

(P.S. - I recently saw Terri described as "the Emily Dickinson of photography" - now, I'm sure that's very nice and in many ways quite fitting (I think I always saw Emily as a colour sort of girl, never b&w, for one thing). But would you actually want someone to make that kind of comparison? I'm sure it's very flattering and all, but if someone described me as the T.S. Eliot or the W.H. Auden of photography (and it 'ain't going to happen...), I mean - how the heck do you live up to that, unless you have an ego like The Donald?)

Wall update

(Dead Troops Talk)

Another article on Jeff Wall - this time by Sarah Milroy in the Globe & Mail (I certainly find Sarah is one of the better writers/critics covering photography).

A few quotes from A Window into Wall:

"Inevitably, each show emphasizes a different aspect of this wide-ranging artist. There's Wall, the omnivorous gourmand of painting's history, transmuting the traditions of past centuries into his elaborately staged colour transparencies, or Wall, the disciple of photography's greats (Walker Evans, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), a taker of well-riven pictures.

There's Wall, the maker of frozen cinema, orchestrating his elaborate narrative visions with the epic ambition of a Hollywood director, or Wall, the diagnostician of the body politic, constructing from the phantoms of his own lived urban experience those moments of disruption in works that he calls “near documentary.”

But there is also Wall, the deep diver of the unconscious, creator of dream-like, digitally concocted images such as The ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947, in which a woman (a mother or a hired performer?) presents a nightmarish talking puppet to a roomful of attentive, well-scrubbed youngsters. (One boy backs up against the wall, his face a study in frozen consternation, a stand-in, perhaps, for the artist as detached spectator.)

And there's Wall, the theoretician, concocting Picture for Women (1979), his now famous feminist-influenced riposte to Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. (He rejigged the players in order to place the gazing woman in the masterly role of overseer.)

Finally, there's Wall, the Vancouverite, an interpretation he roundly repudiates in conversation, but which one observes in his piercingly insightful scenarios of the city encroached on by wilderness, a unique and vivid characteristic of urban life on Canada's West Coast...

Wall has become impatient over the years with the way critics perpetually situate his work in relation to his French 19th-century sources – particularly Manet...

Still, I had to admit, Degas's painting The Dance Lesson (c. 1874) seemed like a natural point of reference... The work of the factory is thus conflated with the sweaty toil of the ballerinas, who itch their backs and adjust their slippers, enervated by the gruelling routine.

Modern life was compressed by Degas into a dense package, rife with meaning, the industry of leisure deftly positioned within the diverse economies of the city. Different aspects of urban life were brought into violent collision in a way the ailing man at the MoMA might well have appreciated."

Eric Fredine's Winter

Eric Fredine is based in Edmonton. And I must say his photographs depress me... First, after several months, it's really time for winter to go - really, really time for it to go. Yet Eric can muster the willpower to go and make some good photographs of it, damn him...

But secondly, Eric has really got a sense for this place, this city. After a couple of years, I'm still trying to make sense of it - visually, photographically. I have some inklings, but it takes time. Someone recently commented that it didn't look like the city they had spent a few years in. Eric's response was that to took him more than a decade to get to this point.

Now, I'm not going to say that someone can't go for a place for a few weeks, or make a number of visits, and not make good pictures. But generally they tend to be different from work made by someone who has been able to take the time to become intimate with a place (although, of course, the other danger is that after a longer period of time you actually stop being able to see the place)


Eric has some other good city work that I couldn't find on his site right now. In the meantime, here is one of his prairie pictures. He has done a couple of series of work which also really make some visual sense of the prairie. (and once again, they suffer from what I'm coming to call internet prettiness - reduced to a small jpeg online, they tend to look interesting but pretty. Having seen some of the prints at a show, that isn't at all what comes across "in the flesh")

(BTW, the top picture just won a Winter in Edmonton, Now photo competition - I almost entered, but - oh yea of little faith - figured icicles and cute snowy trees would be more along the right line. It blows me away that they were open enough to chose Eric's photo as the winner - that alone is almost enough to carry me over to spring!)

You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?

Found on ebay - a publicity still of Lauren Bacall. (sadly not from "To Have and Have Not", but the later move "The Gift of Love")

Who can fault a movie with a screenplay by William Faulkner, based on a novel by Hemingway, starring Hoagy Carmichael - and of course, Bogie and the young Bacall - she makes Scarlett Johannson look like a frumpy old maid...

“You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow.”

Click here to hear it and also a short clip from Carmichael and Bacall singing Am I Blue? here

Job Posting - MI5

Well, here's an interesting one - MI5 has a job posting up for a photographer (thanks to Photostream for the link):

"Photographer - MI5

The shots our photographers take play an important role in many of our operations. Typically, you’ll be part of a small team, tasked by our intelligence officers. We’ll provide you with state-of-the art equipment and you’ll receive technical training and on-going development.

Although fieldwork will take up the majority of your time, just as important are the written reports that you’ll file back at the office.

And, as you might expect, the role requires significant out-of-hours and weekend work. You should also be prepared to undertake at least six months’ initial training in London.

Discretion is important to the Service, so please only discuss this application with your partner and/or immediate family" - oops

The camera never lies...

Interesting take on the much heralded photograph by Spencer Platt, winning image of the World Press Photo awards (thanks for the pointer Joerg).

When it originally appeared in the press at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but even more so since it won the WPF awards, this picture has been variously described along the lines of "rich young Lebanese sightseeing in a bombed out neighbourhood", "rich Lebanese Disaster Tourists" along with, at times, commentary on their "obviously" inappropriate dress for being in a conservative neighbourhood and so on.

Here, for example, is part of the Photo District News take on it at the time the awards were announced:

"The picture shows a group of five cavalier Beirut residents cruising in a red Mini convertible through a neighborhood that has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombs."It's a picture you can keep looking at," said World Press Photo jury chair Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for The New York Times, in a statement announcing the prize. "It has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos. This photograph makes you look beyond the obvious.""

Spiegel has a somewhat different take on it in - "Catering to a Lebanese Cliche":

"We're from Dahiye, from the suburb, ourselves," Bissan explains on a hot February afternoon in Beirut. She, her 22-year-old brother Jad and her 26-year old sister Tamara fled the neighborhood during the Israeli bombings. They stayed in a hotel in the safer district of Hamra and did what most Lebanese did at the time. They waited. The siblings met the other two women in the hotel, Noor Nasser and Lillane Nacouzi, at the hotel. Both are employees of the Plaza Hotel and were allowed to stay in vacant rooms during the war.

On Aug. 15, the day of the ceasefire, Jad borrowed a friend's orange Mini Cooper. For weeks the siblings had heard nothing about whether or not their apartment block was still standing -- now that the fighting was over, they wanted to go and see for themselves. Jad drove and Tamara rode shotgun, while Bissan squeezed in between the two friends on the backseat, holding her camera phone ready. "We spoke briefly about whether we should really open the roof," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But it was so hot, and there were five of us in the small car, so we folded it back."...

Bissan admits that, at first glance, her excursion must look like a prime example of disaster tourism. "But look at our faces. They clearly show how horrified we were, how shocked," she says. "We were not cheerful."

...She has told journalists that her apartment was badly damaged, with all the windows broken and the furniture crushed by shock waves from the bombs. More at this link

Daryl from PDN sent a link to further article I missed on their site Award-Winning Photo Puts Subjects On Defensive which adds a bit more.

Now, what was that about "looking beyond the obvious"? This is certainly a good example of the ambiguities inherent in photography in general and photojournalism in particular (and which, imo, are actually at the heart of what makes photography work)

Grabeland

I understand that in Germany, ‘Grabeland’ are small lots of land - on what is otherwise unused or marginal land - that are used for growing vegetables and such. Rather similar to Allotments in Britain (which, I've discovered are really not quite the same as what Canadians call "Community Gardens" - Allotments - and, I'm guessing, Grabeland - have a very distinctive sub-culture of their own).

My friend EBK Jensen writes this about his Grabeland - Renaturation photographs

Last November when I got me a camera again after many years without I started taking pictures in a small area close to where I live. A small strip of land running along a little creek, the Bornbach. This land had been used as ‘Grabeland’: small lots of land to be used for growing vegetables. Around many cities and centres of industrialization in Germany ‘Grabeland’ was let for little money to workers and other poor folks. The idea was mostly to help those people feed their families.

Traditionally ‘Grabeland’ was different from ‘Kleingärten’: Those were meant for recreational purposes, ersatz gardens for families living in small flats. Where Kleingärten have strict rules tight organization in clubs life in a ‘Grabeland’ was more individual, less organized. There were hardly any rules for how to build and what to plant and people didn’t care for those rules much anyway....

The ‘Grabeland’ along the Bornbach however met the fate of most such areas: local politicians and administration decided it had to go. Instead of the unruly ‘Grabeland# there would be a brand new neat ‘Kleingartenverein’. And not only that: the area also would be renaturalised. The Bornbach would be remade into a ‘natural’ creek with broader banks, providing space for birds, dragonflies and frogs...

So the tenants had to go. Most were old people, many of whom had spent good parts of their lives in their lots among trees and shrubs they or their parents had planted decades ago.

The huts were demolished, big piles of rubble removed. For several weeks the plants and trees were standing alone around the gaping breaks. Then finally a landscapers company moved in with heavy machinery. Only a choice few trees were left standing, mostly rare old apple trees. The photos in this gallery have been made in the time between the demolishing of the huts and the end of the final clearance of the land.

I am thinking about making pictures of the newly naturalized state of the area but I’m not sure yet if that really interests me.

Sally Mann's Motherland

I've always been drawn to Sally Mann's work. The photographs of her son and daughters childhood are superb and speak to childhood and growing-up better than any other work I know.

Many of those photographs were situated in a particular landscape, which was almost as much a separate character in that work as the children.

After her children had grown up, Mann spent more time focusing on that landscape - especially the Southern landscape of her own life and childhood, as well as exploring further afield, but still remaining in (and re-imagining) the South.

Clearly influenced by Brady and O'Sullivan and the other Civil War photographers (among others), she also utilised their techniques, working with the very awkward wet collodion plate process. What, in the hands of another photographer, could have very easily lead to a sort of Civil War Re-enactment type of photography, with perfectly replicated glass plates, in Mann's hands become a process and way of seeing that incorporates wounds and faults, damage and lucky accident - the process melding with her vision to produce some quite exquisite and memorable photographs.

The first part of the work was published as a gallery monograph called Motherland (which I prefer as a title). As it expanded beyond that, it was later published in the book Deep South. One thing I find about all her work is that it always feels honest and genuine.

There is a video here and here of Mann talking about her work, as well as some further info here

Finally, I feel her other recent work, What Remains, is also an important work. Despite the amount of violence on TV, in the movies and on video games, despite the real life (and death) violence of the news hour and war in Iraq, despite Six Feet Under, death still remains one of the last taboos, one of the last mysteries. Mann addresses death and loss in her own unique way in What Remains - but that's for another time.

New Gursky work

Guðmundur pointed me to some apparently new work by Andreas Gursky. Unfortunately my German is so bad and rusty I can't make out much of the accompanying text... can anyone come up with a better translation of the title than Google's: “reality is to be at all only represented, by designing it.” hmmm. Update: Joerg gives us a translation of "You can only show reality by constructing it." or maybe "you can only represent reality by constructing it"

The gist of what I can get is that Gursky is following along his route of constructing fabricated pictures around his existing theme of globalisation. Though to me with these he seems to be much more consciously designing "patterns" into his work than a lot of his previous work - building on what he did with the big hotel lobby interior etc?

And I must admit to having a bit of sympathy with this googleism: the pictures of the photographer Andreas renowned internationally gursky fascinate and irritate at the same time.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Turkey Cinemascope

A fascinating set of panoramic photographs taken by Turkish film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan (done while he was making his recent film Climates). From various reviews:

"That Nuri Bilge Ceylan takes photographs is no surprise: both 'Uzak' and 'Climates' have photographers as protagonists and his films are notable for their visual precision and poetry. Moreover, if his cinema can be said to resemble anyone else's, it's that of Abbas Kiarostami, whom Ceylan admires and whose cinematic work is also complemented by photographs notable for their serene and mysterious beauty. But as the Turkey Cinemascope' exhibition of Ceylan's photographs at the recent Thessaloniki film festival revealed, it would be wrong to push a Ceylan-Kiarostami parallel too far. True, as Kiarostami favours landscapes in rural Iran, so many of Ceylan's photographs depict villages, country roads and farms - often with Mount Ararat towering in the background. But there the resemblance ends. It's not just that Ceylan also takes pictures of cityscapes and people, but more crucially that the photographs in this exhibition, all shot with a digital panoramic camera, look so like paintings....

Horizons, pattern, predominantly black and white with thick daubs of colour: clouds, walls, people. Figures dwarfed by landscape. Silhouettes of men, women and children of a size with those of birds and animals. The tiny figures, often against snow, reminded me of Brueghul. In one photo of pigeons in a snowy Istanbul square the flock of birds in the foreground are the same size as the people in the distance, and a flying bird's outline magically fuses with that of a girl so that she has wings as well as dancing legs. Full of dark and full of light, both brooding and airy, such resonant and moving photographs.

And then, the next day, I went to see the film, a sensitive, subtle, beautiful film, set in Istanbul, by the sea, amidst ancient ruins, and in a town of Eastern Turkey in mid-winter (like walking into Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow). And a bleakly, brutally realistic depiction of the hurting, hating side of love, wherein the male protagonist, played by the director, takes photos - the photos in the exhibition, surely, for as he went about his work, on location, was when he took them. He takes photos instead of relating to his wife on holiday, instead of finishing his doctoral thesis. He poses a young taxi driver, his strong, young face against the landscape, a shot like several in the exhibition. The youngster, with eagerness that contrasts touchingly with his macho pose, asks for a copy to give to his girlfriend, writes his name and address on a post-it note, and in the next scene we see the photographer pull it from his pocket with his cigarettes at a cafe table, screw it up and toss it in the ashtray."

Field Notes - Prince Albert

Field Notes - Prince Albert. Pictures from a long term project looking at the prairie city of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

“I love these pictures. They have a kind of fragile, tentative beauty that I associate with such northern places (including my own home town) where the idea of civilization itself seems an experiment, on probationary status.” John Szarkowski




tim atherton