Alleyway No.1

I'm dubious about posting these for all sorts of reasons.

First, I don't normally circulate work in progress until there is at least a small sized body of work that I'm happy with.

Secondly, the internet really sucks for showing the sort of Large Format (neg size that is) pictures that I make, where the intended print size is at the very least 11x14 and usually bigger. Additionally, the web sucks even more imo for black and white work. LCD displays that are out of balance with far to much contrast and brightness just don't convey something that is full of varying (often subtle) tones.

So, now that's all out of the way, here are a small selection from the first few negatives I've made on a new project - Alleyway (or maybe Alleyway's?) - you might also want to take into account a bunch of the stuff I've said previously about traces, evidence, oblique glances and so on...:

Tim Atherton

Winogrand at work - the movie

Okay, it's only about a ten minute segment, but Michael David Murphy has a movie up of Gary Winogrand at work on Bill Moyers/PBS in 1982 (Note: right click and save is probably best - it's about 26mb).

It's quite incredible watching him and listening to him at work. It's a bit like watching Beethoven compose or Einstein busy calculating - as commented over on the Streetphoto List, this is the Zapruder film of SP...

There is also a transcript up - a couple of quotes:

A picture is about what’s photographed and how that exists in the photograph - so that’s what we’re talking about. What can happen in a frame? Because photographing something changes it. It’s interesting, I don’t have to have any storytelling responsibility to what I’m photographing. I have a responsibility to describe well...

The fact that photographs — they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looks like, but you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know whether the hat’s being held or is it being put on her head or taken off her head. From the photograph, you don’t know that. A piece of time and space is well described. But not what is happening.

I think that there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability. Any of ‘em. They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera. The minute you relate this thing to what was photographed — it’s a lie. It’s two-dimensional. It’s the illusion of literal description. The thing has to be complete in the frame, whether you have the narrative information or not. It has to be complete in the frame. It’s a picture problem. It’s part of what makes things interesting...

And wait until you see his filing system

(MP4 file here and wmv file here )

(Thanks for this David)

August Sander

I don't know - there's not much that you can add to what's already been said about August Sander. His skill as a portrait photographer is rarely surpassed. His far reaching project to document the typology of the German people at a particular point in history remains mesmerising - as well as being one of the starting points for a good few well know contemporary photographers.

And if I had to chose between Julia Margaret Cameron and August Sander for the best portrait photographer of all time, I don't think I could do it - it's pretty much a draw... Sander is one of a group of photographers I find I have to come back to time and time again to remind myself that yes, it is possible to produce such extraordinary work.

What the heck is the Atlas Group?

Stanco (Stand Banos) asks "OK, a little help here, please! This Atlas Group- a few snapshots, a lotta concept, and some stained and unspotted prints that appear scavenged from the bottom of the reject bin of a Darkroom 101 Photo Class..."

The best I can do on short notice is a Guardian article from a couple of years ago (there's also an article in Village Voice among others):

...Among the various factions, cadres, cells and shadowy organisations that emerged in the aftermath of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, the Atlas Group remains one of the most enigmatic. Not only is there some doubt whether the group still exists, there are also those who believe it never existed at all. Rumour piles on rumour. Claim is matched by counter-claim. Forged papers, false documentation, fake texts, staged and doctored video footage and testimonies are at the heart of the group's work, just as rumour, myth, disinformation and bald untruth are the tactical weapons in the information wars that continue long after actual hostilities have ceased and the parties have reconciled themselves to whatever it is that the future holds....

...Although Raad's work, and the Atlas Group itself, deals in the gulf between events and their description, and casts doubt on those who claim to hold the truth, its purpose seems to me to go deeper. The larger truths of history - such as who won or lost a war, or how it came about - and the smaller events and individual experiences that make it up are not the same thing...

To me their work is about media, media bias, propaganda, seemingly endless regional conflict, the effect on people of such conflicts, humour, resilience, resistance, truth and deception, the truth and fiction of photographs, memory/history/archives, complicity and complacency - all of which are at the heart of our way of life today in one way or another.

A last quote from the Guardian (though I also like the introductory story - about a subversive surveillance photograph er who preferred to photograph the sunset from The Corniche than his subjects...):

We all know that how we read images, and what we infer from them, depends in large part on what we are told. This is as true of art as it is of newspapers, documentary footage, and even the things we see and experience for ourselves. Raad does more than pick away at our sense of certainty.

Over 15 years, 3,641 car bombs left 4,386 dead and thousands injured during the civil war in Lebanon. This much is certain. But is it also true that the only part that remains after a car bomb explodes is the engine, and did photo-journalists during the civil war compete to be the first to locate and photograph the engines, which sometimes landed hundreds of metres away from the blast? What do the 100 photos, annotated in Arabic, and which show soldiers, munitions experts and others gazing at the wreckage of all these cars, actually tell us, over and above the dreadful repetition of the images, the archiving of the scenes? Just to show them seems enough. And then one thinks of the absurdity of all the camera-toting picture-hounds, rushing to be the first on the scene.

and another from a gallery exhibit:

Walid Raad works with video, photography, and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon. (We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way.), a series of 15 large-scale photographs, specifically recalls the Israeli Army’s invasion and siege of Beirut in 1982. That summer Raad, an intrepid 15-year-old with a telephoto lens, took photographs of near and distant military activity in West Beirut from his home in the eastern sector. Recently reprinting the pictures from the original, now degraded negatives, he discovered that the images’ unusual discoloration, creases, and holes offered a disturbing but realistic representation of a broken world rendered flat by the series of catastrophes that had befallen it.

FWIW, my response to all this is very much a gut one. When I see something like this - even if only in print or in the internet, I get this kick in the guts that say - hey, he's got something there - even if that feeling has a hard time overriding some of my - hmm, that's a fuzzy tattered photo instinct (or the "I hate video installations" voice in my head). I've learnt that in the end I get most benefit from listening to the first gut response, even if it takes a while...

The Atlas Group archives can be found here

a few Immersive Landscapes

I came across this short passage in Steve Edwards excellent little book Photography: A Very Short Introduction (well worth a read btw):

"Panofsky felt that Renaissance perspective was neither natural nor inevitable; rather, it was the historical product of a society that valued detachment more than immersion; order rather than flux; regularity instead of discontinuity; and structure over experience."

(Link to more Immersive Landscapes)

Tim Atherton

and the winner is...

...Walid Raad/The Atlas Group - interesting choice

(Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves)

Big Photography Prizes

(The Atlas Group)

Photography doesn't have that many big prizes that are handed out (compared to - say - literature and writing), but one of those is the Deutsche Börse Prize - which is to be announced later today (btw, it used to be called the Citigroup and/or Citibank Prize if I remember correctly?).

Jim Johnson over on his thoughtful blog has a post about it. Like many of these prizes, I'm often in two minds about them. They often never seem to chose quite the right one - though last year the Deutsche Börse chose Robert Adams - and in fact the history of this particular prize has maintained a pretty interesting selection of finalists of the years

And I'm with Jim on this. I really think the Atlas Group should win (either ways, I had them lined up for a future blog post), but possibly Anders Peterson will take it - but who knows - all four finalists are interesting and very different.

Pictures from the finalists at the Guardian

And interestingly, in light of the hum generated by Charlotte Cotton's essay on the New Color, two of the four finalists are essentially black and white work (as was last years winner) - okay, The Atlas Group is really multi-disciplinary, but it seems to be their black and white based work that is most often highlighted.

(Anders Peterson)

Uta Barth

One thing I sometimes think happens is that we see work by a photographer and we can see there is something there. It immediately says something to us. But somehow we don't quite like it (though perhaps like isn't quite the right word). Each time we come across it we say to ourselves "oh yes, that stuff, I remember that". Then - sometimes quite a while later - it almost imperceptibly just clicks.


For me that's the case with Uta Barth's photographs. And right now I'm going "ah yes - now I get it" and want to look at more of it. It's probably all in response to the how the areas and ideas I'm investigating right now resonate with the things she has done in her work. But there's a sort of double pleasure to it. Coming to the realisation that yes, your suspicion was right, there was something to it. But mostly, the excitement of pouring over some pictures that you had probably seen before and yet now they seem fresh and intriguing in a way you couldn't quite perceive before.

From Uta Barth: In Between Places: "Deceptively simple, Uta Barth's photographic works question the traditional functions of pictures and our expectations of them. By photographing in ordinary anonymous places - in simple rooms, city streets, airports and fields - Barth uses what is natural and unstudied to shift attention away from the subject matter, and redirect focus to a consciousness of the processes of perception and the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing....

...Uta Barth provides a compelling look at the nature of our own experience.Her beautifully composed photographs, most often created in places that seem somehow familiar, prompt our consciousness of visual sensations and a deeper consideration of what looking really means.

...Barth has used photography exclusively in her aesthetic projects, experimenting with depth of field, focus and framing to create photographs that are suggestive rather than descriptive, alluding to places rather than describing them explicitly. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses..."

There also a fairly in-depth interview with Barth here

A few tasters: ...We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world and wanted to record it, point at it. There is always something that motivated the taking of a photograph. The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripherally implied... I have never been interested in making a photograph that describes what the world I live in looks like, but I am interested in what pictures (of the world) look like.... My primary project has always been in finding ways to make the viewer aware of their own activity of looking at something (or in some instances, someone.) ...

So, where "are" the New Black & White photographers?

(Idris Kahn)

I've been ruminating over Charlotte Cotton's essay The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White, which I blogged about recently, as well as some of the responses to it.

(Osamu Kanemura)

One thing that has come to mind is this; whether we believe or not that black and white might be on the the rise as the new darling of the art world, who exactly is doing new, vigorous, exciting, innovative work out there in black and white?

(Jason Evans)

Cotton gave her list - some of which seem worthy, others perhaps not. But that list aside, who else is out there? Right now it actually seems a pretty sparse field. Some of the best work is still being done by the old guard from the Sixties and Seventies (okay and Eighties) - Friedlander, Gossage, Adams, the Bechers, Frank - they remain innovative. Certainly, I hope this crowd keeps going at full steam and coming up with new ideas, but who are the new generation of up-and-comers, the new guard - those with a whole career ahead of them?

(Jason Evans)

One of the most continually innovative and fresh would have to Sugimoto, but he really belongs to the group I've already mentioned. There are also Basilico and Geoffrey James for example, but they are really masters of Modern photography, probably pushing it's boundaries as far as it can go?

I've hunted my bookshelves, and magazine pile and meandered around the internet, but I'm still a little stumped (I also hunted back through the archives of some blogs like Conscientious - and discovered a surprisingly small amount of contemporary B&W there). So my question is: who is there out there?

There were a couple on Cotton's list that have caught my eye.

An-My Lê (above) for one and Jason Evans (images higher up) for another. I like the way An-My Lê's Small Wars and Vietnam work has, among other things, taken the New Topographics deadpan cynicism and put a whole new twist and take on it. (Along with Susan Lipper, who Cotton also mentioned)

Idris Khan (nice article in the Guardian here too) is one I have come across elsewhere. He seems to be doing what I feel Abelardo Morell's work could succeed in doing (but somehow, with a few exceptions, the latter never quite seems to make it out of Keith Carter territory). I find Khan's work some of the more exciting and interesting contemporary black and white I've come across recently.

Michael Wesely is another I've encountered - I thought his Potsdamer Platz work was brilliant (though he has started to become rather formulaic now, and a little bit too clever - Berlin didn't quite seem to translate to the MoMA reconstruction project)

So - here's the big question - any more good suggestions for who to watch and where to find them?

(An-My Lê)

Photo Season play-offs

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

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

Feist

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


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

Sugimoto on Serra

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

stefan beyst - seize obscurs objets de désir

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

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

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

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

Distinction Fail 24/25 - Mike Ryder

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

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

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

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

Josef Sudek

Time for another classic - Josef Sudek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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