Atget in the Zone

While I adore Atget's photographs of trees and derelict parcs, and his fascinating proto-surrealist pictures of shop windows have been inherited and appropriated by almost every street photographer since, his photographs of the Zone Militaire surrounding Paris are some of his most intriguing. Walls and fortifications, worn pathways, rag pickers homes, illegal cafes and gathering places.

From a review in the NY Times by Sarah Boxer

From 1910 to 1913, Atget, who made many of what he called ''documents'' to sell to architects, stonemasons, antiquarians and sign makers, tried something different, something verging on the political. He hauled his wooden camera to the city's outskirts. The photographs he took there make up his two outsider albums: the ''Zoniers'' album, pictures of ragpickers and their homes and yards in the ''zone militaire,'' and the ''Fortifications de Paris'' album, pictures of the ramparts lining the city....

Take one of Atget's photographs of a ragpicker's digs at the Porte d'Ivry. There are baskets, wheelbarrows, pots and rags as far as the eye can see. Another picture, taken elsewhere, on the Boulevard Masséna, is at first glance indistinguishable from the first. But if you look closely you can also find a few broken-down chairs and, thankfully, in the foreground, a little white figurine, a tiny dancer with her hands raised seductively behind her head. Ducking behind a post, she points the way to a different world. In this place, she seems to say, it takes time for the eyes to adjust. Just follow me.

And the fortifications? In one sense, they are easier on the eyes. The fences and rampart walls are like train tracks moving off into the distance telling the eyes where to go. But location is still a problem. At the vanishing point of one fortification fence, in a blaze of white light, stand three figures. It is hard to tell which side of the fence they are on, within the city's borders or without. And how does this photograph, taken at 18-20 Boulevard Masséna, relate to Atget's picture taken at 18-20 Impasse Masséna, a dead end? It seems to show the other side of the fence, with a forlorn liquor store and a cat posing neatly in the yard. Did the men in the first picture beckon Atget to take a picture of their store?

And why did Atget spend so much time photographing what looks like a factory, La Bièvre, at the Porte d'Italie? The ''Fortifications'' album has four different views of it. The gallery has two of these. One shows two blurry trees standing like sentries to the left of the factory, which has slatted shutters on its top level and a half-timbered ground floor, all resting on stilts planted in a muddy river. A more distant view of the same site melds the two trees together, but gives some prominence to several white barrels standing in the river.

Why did Atget focus on this particular building? Maybe just because it was there. Or maybe it was, as Ms. Nesbit writes in the gallery guide, to ''let a chaos have its points.''

There is also an article by Molly Nesbit, author of the important book Atget's Seven Albums:

It was not simple to find words for the rags, the scraps, the garbage that began to arrive in the modern picture around 1912. Apollinaire, looking at the pasted papers of his friends Picasso and Braque, told the reader of his new book on Cubism that "mosaicists paint with marble or colored wood. There is mention of an Italian artist who painted with excrement; during the French Revolution blood served somebody as paint. You may paint with whatever material you please, with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, candelabra, pieces of oil cloth, collars, painted paper, newspapers," It was all of it "less sweetness than plainness," he explained, for in modern art one does not choose. But someone else has chosen. Walter Benjamin, looking over much the same material in the pictures of Schwitters, saw the choice to be radical, politically speaking. And Atget? Atget did not take the scraps so literally into his pictures; rather, he chose to photograph them. His way of photographing involved the pursuit of something that initially might be called clarity....

...He showed the ragpickers at home, which was also at work, living with the things they had gathered and were sorting down, preparing the saleable materials for the cycles of resale, or weaving baskets on the side. His pictures did not move to close. The ragpickers had been physically pushed to the limit of the city, to the flats of the old fortifications that encircled Paris then. Out of sight, beneath mind, the ragpickers lived beyond the rhythms of the city’s modern life, eking a living from its waste and taking their distance. Atget let that distance expand in his pictures. He showed he approved it. Theirs was a life and a labor that could not by summarized, triumphantly or synthetically, by a form. It had to be shown as open and closed, surface and substance, the gist of the substance unknowable finally, always revolting, running away.

And despite all the anti-war and left wing influences that can be detected in this work of Atget's, there is still a strong focus in the Zone Militaire of the persistence of nature. As someone pointed out: "perhaps he just liked trees"

Josef Koudelka talk

MP3 file of a talk given by Josef Koudelka here (Note: you might want to right ckick and save it's about 60+mb). Rambles a bit (or at least Vicki Goldberg does...).

background to the talk here

Thanks Jim for the link

Danger! Puritans at work...

As usual, posting on a blog limits how well you can see these, but I've been meaning to photograph this for ages (I think I'm going to re-do them in 8x10 - there are a couple more in the series). You can click on them for a slightly larger view.

From the book The Body and the Lens. Photography 1839 to the Present.

Getting your foot in the door...

Good advice practical from gallerist Edward Winkleman about approaching galleries with your work (via jen bekman's funky personism). BTW, Edward's blog is always a good read about the contemporary art world - along with the odd diversion here and there.

"A while back there was a question in a thread about how an artist got a show with the gallery. I don't discuss specifics about individual artists here, but that question got me to thinking about the reality of the situation, and I figured it's time to revive a few ideas already shared and perhaps dispel a few ideas still floating out there. Also prompting this was an email I received on the topic. It's one of the most charming emails I've gotten asking for advice, but I honestly cannot afford to respond to each such email, so I'll work from it to flesh out my thoughts here:

I write this fully aware that many versions of this letter are sent to you in some variation by other versions of what I am: Artist With Questions. For introducing dialogue, I suppose this is your punishment. I follow with interest the advice you put out and the conversations that follow on your blog and should thank you for extending yourself. Thank you. I think it's generous and rare for the Chelsified to reach out to the art-stricken with their unwieldy ways, gooey hearts, and dirty fingernails. On that note, perhaps you could advise me as to who to approach with my work. I feel fairly gall-ridden and brazen asking this of you (hence the embarrassment of adjectives), but frustration trumps humility finally. I am not asking you to consider me for your gallery, no, rather, I am looking for one of those signs shaped like a finger pointing somewhere, preferably in an appropriate direction. I am a Brooklyn artist having a hard time getting anyone to even look at my work. (I am legion.) So, please look at my portfolio and respond when possible." read more here

"Oh, and finally...never, never, never, never, never...walk into a gallery with your actual artwork in tow. Let me repeat that: NEVER".

(I guess you can be excused if it's to MoMA...)

(Photograph:Robert Frank on the way to the MoMA. Photo by Michal Daniels)

Tom Rice-Smyth

Tom is from London and has a blog which is a diary of his ongoing pictures. There is plenty there to scroll through. I like what he's doing. The "Notes" are interesting. I also liked the mini-cab office. reminded my of a dozen places I'd been in. And somehow the map of Greater London on the wall looks like it could be of the Balkans.

And after so long away, I really notice how very distinct the light in England is.

apropos the day

From The Life of Brian - a film which is actually much more theologically profound than you might think at first glance...

Also a good interview on Salon with Elaine Pagels about the Gospel of Judas

more traces

...or Alleyway - second batch. And I need to come up with a better working title... (I'm thinking of Snicket or Ginnel as a couple of suggestions so far - along with Twitten...)

(please join in the "discussion" in the comments)

Justin James Reed

Nice stuff... pictures from New Cities. I think it's actually quite hard to make something worth looking at when photographing the sort of generic urban architecture that increasingly surrounds us and Reed succeeds admirably.

I know some people are of the opinion "why photograph all this mundane stuff". But in N. America at least (and I'd say large parts of Europe now as well), unless you are one of the minority who lives in some quaint little village somewhere, this is actually the world that surrounds us. Are we so much in denial about how it really looks that we don't think it's worth photographing? I also think it's incredibly difficult to do this kind of new colour/new topographics (maybe it's old colour/old topographics now?) style of work and not come off as doing just the same as everyone else, but also avoid the trap of novelty.

I've always liked this passage about DeLillo's Underworld:

DeLillo is smart enough to avoid stating the obvious, that after losing his real father, Nick is sent to a school run by multiple "fathers". One of the priests asks him to describe a shoe. "A front and a top", he answers. "You make me want to weep", the priest says, proceeding to name all the parts of a shoe including the flap under the lace, the tongue. "I knew the name", Nick says, "I just didn't see the thing".

"You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look", says the priest. Because "everyday things lie hidden", he adds; "everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge". These are "quotidian" things - "an extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace". This may be DeLillo's way of explaining how to read "Underworld", but he's also telling us how to live.

Looking At Pictures

Henry Geldzhaler wrote a great little book (and I mean little - it's smaller than an iPod) called Looking At Pictures, It's about viewing, understanding and - to some extent - creating - contemporary art. While the book is simple and direct, for such a small book it also has some interesting depth to it. A couple of extracts:

"How do you tell the value of contemporary art? One of the ways I've discovered is memorably. If you look and can remember, a day, a week, a month later, the way it's made, the way the forms fit, the color-message of the pictures, then it's probably good. It's a little like leaving Traviata or La Boheme whistling the tunes. If a work calls itself to memory without your asking it, if it insists, if it comes back like a melody, than that's quite serious. Memorability is very important. If you're impressed with a work of art on the spot, and it leaves you with nothing when you're gone, chances are it's not very good.

On the other side of the coin is what Clement Greenberg calls the narrative element in art - and the principle holds true for the most abstract painting as well as the most representational. The work of art must continue to reveal new messages and images on subsequent viewings, and not exhaust itself in what I call the Big Bang, revealing everything to you the first time you see it and then having a lessening impact each time subsequent. The narrative, or the story, reveals itself to you through time. The story is in you. It's an internals troy and only you can judge it...

The best summing up of what in the contemporary art of any period is so exciting is the Ezra Pound paraphrase of Confucius - Make it new. Make is to fashion. It is tradition, or the craft, the history. And new is... make it new, constantly, make it new. If the artist makes it new, then we're going to have to chase to catch up with it, or, it may be mere novelty. If the it, the craft, dominates to such an extent that it makes it difficult to see the contemporary content, the it might take a while longer to catch up. But make it new.

To make it new one must be in touch with a tradition while at the same time knowing exactly where you are and what your own time is about. Those are the beginnings and they’re not easy. They're the hard part...

There are two prerequisites for having any sense of what is of value and quality in your own time. The first is a firm grasp of the history of art. The firmer the grasp and the better you are grounded in every conceivable period, the less shocked or thrown off base you're going to be by something that appears new but isn't or that is meretricious in any of a dozen ways. A grounding in the best art that's ever been done, hitting your head against the concrete wall of achievement, there’s absolutely no substitute for it.

The other prerequisite you must have in order to come to terms with contemporary art is a thorough sense of who you are in your own time. And to combine those attributes in one person is not easy."

(pictures - David Hockney)

Sally Mann - A Family Affair

Conscientious links to two good videos at Newsweek about Sally Mann's beautiful Immediate Family work. They talk with Mann and one of her daughters:

...In fact, what Mann was seeking, with the willing participation of her young subjects, was an honest record of childhood and growing up. But what she recognized from the start of her project was that nothing about childhood is uncomplicated. It’s not the knowing but the uncertainty, on the part of children and adults, that most distinctively marks this territory. The first picture Mann took in the series, “Damaged Child,” shows a little girl who looks beaten, when in fact she has been badly bitten by gnats. But the viewer, with only the visual evidence on display, is left to wonder exactly what is going on. For all its absurd clarity—and every picture in the sequence is a marvel of composition and printing—this photograph nails our inability to ever know the whole truth about, well, about anything, but certainly about childhood first and last...

Is photography art (or flogging a dead horse)

This is a perennial discussion on most photography lists. The Guild photographers and the Art photographers can spend hundreds of posts talking past each other and still never come to see the others point of view...

That said, edward_ winkleman's excellent contemporary art blog had a good post on it the other day (though I see he's picked up on the Chocolate Jesus - should get him some good hate mail). Photography Fever: Myth or Regional Reality? Or, Is There Still Widespread Multiplephobia? picks up on two contradictory articles he came across - one all about the ever increasing prices being paid for photography at auction, and the other asking suggesting collectors still shy away from photography because it's not really art. Anyway, worth a read (as is winkleman's blog in general) - although the discussion on there is as bad as on any photo list...:

"Two contrasting articles made their way across my desktop recently, offering rather different views of where the market for fine art photography stands. I read a good number of photography-based blogs, and have assumed the market was blistering hot, but then I read Ana Finel Honigman's post on The Guardian's blog and got all confused:

Collectors are still shying away from investing in photography, reflecting the medium's ambivalent status in the contemporary art world. [...] The unique issues around collecting photography initially arise from the medium's reproducibility. On the surface, collectors concerned with diminishing the value of their investment seem wise to stick with unique objects and shy away from mediums that can be made in multiples.

I have to admit, that strikes me as an out-of-date analysis. Take for example this opposing view recently expressed by Brian Appel on I Photo Central

.... Soaring prices and the influx of cash is providing a welcome boost for collectors who got in early. Once considered risky and on the fringe, these seductive photographs that describe the 'hyper-reality' of modern media or consumer culture are now THE hotbeds of critical and market attention...."

He goes on to suggest it may be a regional thing? read the whole blogpost here

Arsenic and Old Photos

Interesting little piece in the NY Times on photo conservation at the Getty (warning...as someone who often works in photo archives and museums, I find this stuff fascinating - you may not):

The goal of Mr. Stulik and his fellow scientists is to produce, sometime in the next few years, a door-stopping Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes, a chemical characterization of every known (and, until now, some previously unknown) means of making pictures. The other day on the floor in his lab he and an assistant, Art Kaplan, unfurled a partial compendium of their research to date, a Santa’s-list-like paper chart more than a dozen feet long enumerating in small type the materials they had already identified in different types of photos.

The research could have an impact not only in the world of photo conservation — a relatively young practice that got under way seriously only in the 1970s — but also in the practice of authentication. With auction prices for masterwork photographs skyrocketing, definitive evidence that, say, a vintage Lewis W. Hine really is vintage and not a later print can mean a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in its price. (Several years ago Hine collectors were shaken when a number of prints made after he died were passed off as being vintage.)...

“In essence this can start to rewrite the history of photography,” said Grant Romer, director of the advanced residency program in photograph conservation at the George Eastman House in Rochester. “It’s already provoked a sort of crisis in the understanding of what we think we know about some photographs.”

(Picture NYTimes, Note: you may have to log onto the NY Times - Mickey Mouse from CA90210 is always a good start)

Try again. Fail again. Fail better

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better" Beckett

(Tom Phillips)

Baton Rouge Blues - William Greiner

A small package arrive in the mail this week - a copy of William Greiner's little book Baton Rouge Blues. It's a tiny pocket sized book simply produced by the Visual Arts Gallery of the University of Alabama. It's quite an exquisite gem - rough diamond - of a thing (and although I'd love if someone like Nazraeli - hope you're listening! -would take it and re-publish in their usual high quality print style, but in fact the slightly ad-hoc gritty style of the little book is quite appropriate for the subject matter - a photographer in exile in his own land).

Greiner really is a master of colour and colour coincidence (from the book Chromophobia: "Urban life is filled with "color rhyming" moments; you walk down the street and a yellow truck appears in your frame of vision just as a man in a yellow jacket turns into view and suddenly you feel the ineffable. That's what the book is really about -- honoring moments like that." )

This from the introduction:

Born and raised in New Orleans, and having lived in the city most of my adult life, never in my wildest dreams did I envision myself living permanently in Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge is the capital of Louisiana, located about 65 miles northwest of New Orleans. However, after Hurricane Katrina hit, Baton Rouge is where I ended up.

The series, Baton Rouge Blues is the product of the emotional and psychological roller coaster I have experienced living here after the storm. Anger, frustration and bewilderment gave way to confusion, disorientation, then resignation and, finally, acceptance.

Whether the photographs in this series accurately exemplify the reasons and circumstances of their making is far less important than the process and product that got me through this almost unimaginable experience.

Bloom where you are planted.

I think the only way to get hold of a copy is to contact William though the book is published by the Visual Arts Gallery of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I have no idea how many copies are available or what they cost.

Greiner's Katrina + Beyond blog is here

(Note: not all these pictures are from the book)

Amy Stein

I keep coming across Amy Stein recently. Her work has popped up in several places, and we were also both asked to pick and describe "What Makes a Great Photo" for the Conscientious site (hers would be on my short list as well). She also has a fun blog

Anyway, here's some of her work and what she says about it

Domesticated: My photographs explore our paradoxical relationship with the "wild" and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological ecotones between man and the natural world.

The photographs in this series are based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals. The narratives are set in and around Matamoras, a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania that borders a state forest.

Stranded is a meditation on the tension and desolation found on the shoulders of America's highways and interstates. My photos challenge the viewer to slow down and witness scenes of futility playing out in an uneasy and alien space. Within these photos we see the faces of people stranded and evidence of lives broken down or lost on the side of the road... For this series I spend weeks at a time driving across America looking for and photographing stranded motorists.

Judy Linn - contemporary black and white

...well - and colour too. In my recent quest for who is doing contemporary black and white work, I saw Alec Soth had a post on Judy Linn. Apparently she's most well know for her photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith - non of which happen to grab me (and I say apparently, because the one picture of her I had seen before was one of her "knee" photographs from an upcoming show at Vancouver's excellent Presentation House Gallery - she does seem to have a thing for knees and calves)

Anyway, she just fits in my arbitrary criteria of contemporary as being at least a Baby Boomer. The main stuff on her current exhibition is here and here

The short review from the New Yorker is interesting in what it says about her small show being so disparate - seemingly very different subjects, mixing black and white and colour and so on - and yet still hanging together. In fact, while a nice tight theme can be helpful and provide a good security blanket for a viewer, sometimes a photographer just takes picture of stuff and things - what they see - and the real underlying theme is just the photographer themselves.

Alec also picked all the best quotes, so go there for the full deal - I'll just cherry pick a couple

The short review from the New Yorker: "This survey of thirteen recent photographs—some in color, most in black-and-white—is modest, quirky, and offhandedly shrewd. Like so many contemporary photographers, Linn tends to take pictures of things that are not very interesting: bits of bread scattered on trampled snow, a sunny sidewalk peppered with tiny buds, a blond woman with an extravagant ponytail, a pine tree in a flooded field, a solitary cow. But each image is at once self-effacing and just right. The show doesn’t exactly cohere (what does this woman in bed have to do with that dishtowel?), but no matter; Linn’s scattershot approach feels right on target."

And this from Linn:

Words and pictures by nature don’t agree. There is no good fit. I can’t say what I do or have done, but I know what I want, what I try to do. I can tell how I aim. I can’t say how I land.

When I began, I hated what I couldn’t control—all the annoying things I couldn’t see in the moment of taking a photograph, the crazy stuff that jumps into the edges of pictures. Now I like that part the best. But I do want to be accurate, although “accurate” is a slippery word. I don’t mean a quality of photography. I think Cezanne, Ingres, and de Kooning are all accurate. I don’t think Ansel Adams is accurate. If you look at a Hiroshige woodcut of a whirlpool, you figure it is a fanciful rendition because how accurate can a woodcut be? But if you go to see the whirlpool, you see that he is telling you exactly what it looks like.

I think when someone first looks at a photograph they automatically wonder, “What is it?” I want a photograph that easily answers that question. I want to be extremely obvious; obfuscation is bad grammar. Hopefully, the two-dimensional arrangements of shapes on the paper will be as lively and interesting as the three-dimensional world trapped inside the photograph. There should also be something there you haven’t seen before. Something should happen in the act of looking.

I want a photograph that makes me aware of what is physically in front of me, a photograph that gives me the pleasure of getting lost. It is like asking yourself a joke: not really knowing what the answer is, giving up, and then seeing the punch line and really laughing.

(and I had to include the one colour photo because my laughing nearly caused me to choke on my morning coffee when I pulled it up...)

John Szarkowski (and George Tice)

Two nice little pieces in the latest Focus Mag (warning 26mb...) - one on John Szarkowski and one on George Tice. I think I'll probably be heading out to get a copy of this particular issue.

As always, John has some interesting things to say about photography (including a dig at the idea of "equivalents"..), as well as on big photographs (not necessarily bad):

Photography is the easiest thing in the world,if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative and pointless, but if one insists on a photograph that is both complex and vigorous, it is almost impossible. One can, like an unreformed gambler, keep going out, keep trying, hoping that one might one more time be visited by luck or grace and make one more photograph that is exactly right... and if one is to photograph seriously, that also takes one’s best, concentrated attention. It cannot be picked up on Friday night and put away on Sunday—except perhaps by the greatest geniuses or talented beginners...

Size is a very interesting problem and deserves a thick book. Big is not bad; consider the pyramids and the elephants.Furthermore, I will say without equivocation that the first pictures that Talbot made with cameras were too small. They were a little smaller than 35 mm contacts, and his wife called his cameras mousetraps. It is hard to do serious work while one’s wife is making jokes about how one goes about it.

On the other hand, I think it would not be unfair to ask the Germans exactly what they think they are achieving by making photographs that seem to compete—at least in size—with Raphael during his Roman years.To my mind something is lost in these gigantic prints...

and from the Tice article:

“One of the things Paterson is about is the story of Paterson,” says Tice.“Paterson II is part of the future of the first Paterson, 30 years later. Tice’s distinctive awareness of past time and future time in the present moments of his photographs separates them from the work of other photographers who have turned their lenses toward similar subject matter. A typical street scene by Lee Friedlander, for example, offers the energies of a frenetic puzzle of contemporary life, corralled and ordered for the viewer to release. The stillness in what Tice himself describes as the “sad beauty” of his urban scenes has a different weight, the weight of history, not moments, but stories evolving. As with putting down a good book to go and do something else for a bit, Tice says of his work, “Any of these projects that I’ve done, I feel I can go right back to them and pick up where I left off.”

(note: Fair Dealing review of Focus Magazine)

The only good photographer is an old photographer?

I'm a little cautious about blogging about blogs - it all starts to get a little incestuous and easily leads to some kind of internecine strife.

But then someone says something that articulates a vague thought that has been tumbling about in the back of your mind and - well - it just makes sense to point it out.

Over on Hiding in Plain Sight, George LeChat has this to say:

Writing in L.A. Weekly last fall, Holly Myers created a minor tempest with the following: "In thinking about Diane Arbus, as one does from time to time, I came to a distressing realization: that I couldn’t name a single photographer subsequent to Arbus (and Frank and Winogrand and Friedlander and Eggleston and the other greats of her generation) who ranked on anywhere near the same level, which is to say, who thrilled me near as broadly, deeply or consistently."...

...Myers attributed the decline to the elevation of concept over feeling. I think the problem is that contemporary photography too often lacks formal elegance or distinction. In its place, many photographers appear to believe that a clever, or topical, or referential subject will itself suffice. It seldom does.

George then goes on to give a couple of example of what he means using some photographs - Brian Ulrich and Lee Friedlander; Alec Soth and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Now, as LeChat admits, there are dangers to this sort of generalisation, but it certainly got me thinking.

While I like a lot of work from contemporary photographers - indeed, I'm obviously enthusiastic about a lot of it - when I sat back and thought about Myers' comments, there seemed to be a kernel of something there.

My list of photographers "who thrilled me... broadly, deeply or consistently" came from the same sort of group Myers describes. And despite all the contemporary books on my shelves, I really had to work hard to come up with even a couple who lived up to this description in the same sort of depth I think she's talking about.

The two I did come up with (and her choice of Tillmans didn't come anywhere close) were Thomas Struth and Martin Parr (I'd also pick John Gossage, though I think he sort of bridges these generations - and as much as I'd like to pick Sugimoto, sometimes he's just a little too cool and detached).

But for me, it became pretty apparent that the majority of photographers I'd pick whose work "thrilled me... etc" came from at least a previous generation. What about you? (Perhaps we could set the dividing line for current generation at the Baby Boomers onwards - say 1946 to be generous, though that may seem ancient to some of you...)