Julia Margaret Cameron

In some ways, portraiture has to be one of the hardest forms of photography to do well. Although like most fields of photography it has a small number who stand out from the crowd and probably always will, August Sander, Richard Avedon (though I hesitate slightly there) and Julia Margaret Cameron. Of the many contemporary portraitists, I wonder that perhaps only Rineke Dijkstra and Sally Mann can come close to being mentioned in the same breath.






Cameron was born in India in 1815 but didn't begin photographing until she was nearly 50. That she accomplished what she did in only about 12 years at the end of her life makes her achievement - in these the early years of photography's existence - even more astonishing.










While modern viewers may sometimes have some trouble with her (at the time very popular) Victorian allegories, her portraits of ordinary men and women, along with those of the like of Herschel and Tennyson, Browning and Darwin often come across as very modern. Their directness and simplicity is attention stopping. Her eye for a sort of casual and yet often intensebeauty is unerring. The subjects (even as allegory) are never less than fully human.

The Red Wheelbarrow

The Red Wheelbarrow

by William Carlos Williams


so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

(photo Mark Hobson - thanks)

Alan Cohen - pictures and words

Alan Cohen has several quite interesting sets of work. I am certainly drawn by the photographs themselves. But what's also interesting is that most of them depend very much on the words accompanying them. The caption is important to a full understanding of the picture.

Now I'm sure some would see this as a failure: the photograph should stand on it's own; a picture is worth at least a thousand words, and if it can't explain itself then it's missed the point... and so on

But I'm not so sure. In many way's photographs have a very limited vocabulary - not really even a full language, but a half or partial-language at best. News photographs rely heavily on captions and accompanying words to give them context and expand their meaning. I don't really see why photographs meant as art should somehow always have to do without words?

"My photographs are now evidential traces of earlier events impossible to access. I travel to and document the physical remnants of history. On that terrain, the earth of our past, I reference calamity or site as a record of memory, not as an act of witness...

Improbable Boundries the natural, imposed, geologic, or treaty lines that divide forces, actions, places one from the other (such as the equator, the prime meridian, continental divides or unlikely contiguous land areas such as France and Canada or France and India....

NOW topographic pictures lifting cataclysmic events into the present through the physical index of contemporary ground at numerous ground zeros, holocaust camps, the paths of The Berlin Wall and the Israeli—West Bank Security Wall...."

I'll let you search for the captions...

Blackbirds or a Red Wheelbarrow?

Out photographing this morning (provincially so to speak) I both watched the blackbirds and saw a red wheelbarrow. I wasn't sure whether to go with Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams - so one poem today and one tomorrow:



Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Young German Photographers

(Esther Hagenmaier)

German Geo has a site which showcases new graduates of the various photography/art schools across the country.

Apparently its a slightly frustrating site even in German - in English it's even worse... (sometimes you have to click on the map twice to get the correct list up)

(Yvonne Seidel)

That said, you can click on a State and get a selection of graduates work to view. It's worth hunting around through the listings.

An awful lot of embryonic Struthsky work, but interesting nevertheless

(Inga Seevers)

Stephen Shore interview

Joerg at Conscientious links to an interview with Stephen Shore on the re-publication of his book The Nature of Photographs:

Extracts: "the other that stimulated me to write it is an experience with a friend of mine, a neighbor, who was a potter, very talented and smart woman, very cultured. In one point in our discussion, she said to me: ”I just don’t get photography, I just don’t know where to begin to look, I don’t know how to begin to look at a photograph. I don’t get what you’re doing.” I thought, here’s this person, who in other media, is very sophisticated, but there’s something different about photography that she’s not relating to. When she goes beyond the subject matter, she said “I don’t know what the photographer is thinking about”. That was the other audience, like this person, who is so cultured, yet photography is somehow foreign....

.... One is that there is something arbitrary about the decision making that a photographer engages in. What I mean by that is this: I can get out of the car and stand by the edge of the highway and take a picture that looks like a totally natural landscape, untouched by the hand of man. I could move back six inches and include the guardrail in the picture and the meaning of the picture changes dramatically. There is a marginal point where I can stand here and it’s one picture or I can stand there and it’s a different picture. And this decision, of what is the meaning of what’s in the rectangle is entirely my decision. It sounds wrong, because I didn’t create the landscape, but that decision so drastically alters the meaning that the weight of the decision becomes very interesting". more

(Colberg also linked to an interview with Wolfgang Tillmans)

btw, I must say I didn't find The Nature of Photographs an especially stimulating book - it was a bit of a let down in fact - which I wasn't expecting. I've got much more from any number of John Berger Essays, or John Szarkowski's books or Steve Edwards excellent little book Photography: A Very Short Introduction

hmm and searching for Shore pictures, I found another interview

Blindspot

I just picked up the latest edition of Blindspot and it's definitely a good one - better imo than the last couple of editions.

There's Barbara Bosworth, Ray Arden, Tze Tsung Leong and Jem Southam among others.

And as usual the printing is superb. This has to be far an away the best printed photography publication out there. Lawrence Beck's waterfalls and Monte Rosa pictures are like luscious 8x10 contact prints.

Of course, if you are not a big fan of contemporary landscapes, post topographics and such you will no doubt be disappointed...

another alleyway

Masao Yamamoto

or Yamamoto Masao - depending on how you chose to render Japanese names - is another one of the Japanese photographers who catch my eye. He seems to manage to catch fleeting glances and peripheral ephemera of the world around him. He has a pretty good website with lots of pictures (many are presented in the combinations he uses for exhibitions and in some of his books), as well as a number of essays.:

"A box of sky? An box of emptiness? A box of space? When I first held this book of photography that is like a thin box, I hesitated for a moment. When I looked at the other side, the words kunohako ["A box of Ku"] were noted, and as I pronounced the Japanese readings over and over, I thought that no matter what reading I choose, each leaves a "hidden meaning," and the rich resonance fascinated me. Then for some reason, When I gazed at the characters spelled out in Japanese. I thought of an empty space of "Nothingness" residing in the box, yet when I looked at the alphabet spelling, I imagined countless items of some form called "Ku" filling the box to the brim. This title, which seems very simple at a glance, had already started making slow ripples in the "lake of premonition'' within me before I even opened the book.

It popped into my head to look up the word "Image" in the dictionary. "Picture. Shape or form that floats into one's heart. Figure." The works of Masao Yamamoto in fact do not necessarily reflect the phenomenon of " A Shape or form that appears and can be seen," but rather produce a personal "image" that makes one want to say, "The truth is he returned to the world of the spirit to sneak this photo!"

Almost all the photographs are in black and white, but to be honest, of all the photos I have Seen until now, these black and white photos gave me the strongest sense of "color" that I have ever had. And conversely, looking at the very few color photographs that appear, I wanted to say, "How clear and transparent.." with a sigh. This reminds me of a time when I saw a dream with vibrant colors and someone brusquely dismissed it with, "There are no colors in dreams." These images that go freely back and forth between the wold of color and non-color may indeed themselves be ''dreams."..."

-------------------

"I asked the artist about this attentiveness, and though he replied that he is loathe to try and describe his work in words ("I believe it would mean little if my works could be perfectly explained by words. "), he offered the following thoughts. " I live everyday, feeling deities in all and sundry, trying to always be in appreciation of them. Perhaps this is the aesthetic of my life. And since photography for me is equivalent to the very basic living necessities, such as food and sleep, this aesthetic applies to that of my photography. Though I am not sure if this is any kind of 'philosophy'... What originally had been produced in the process of my enjoying life though 'the search after beauty' was, at some point, sublimated into something worthy of presentation to you and other viewers.""

Unfortunately he's published mainly by Nazraeli Press in the West who delight in putting out gorgeously produced but generally hyper expensive beautiful editions of his books... so I haven't had a chance to look at some of his more interesting accordion fold or scroll books. I especially like the idea of A Path of Green Leaves

POSTSCRIPT - well, here's a nice piece of synchronicity. One of my favourite photo blogs was the space in between but for over six months it was inactive. It has great posts in the archives on all sorts of things photographic (including a great resource on William Eggleston among others). I had pretty much figures it had reached the end of its natural life but gave it another quick check today - the first in ages. And there was a new post about the personal aesthetic of which a big chunk is about Yamamoto. Stacy Oborn says this about him, which I find delightful:

"i don't know this for certain, but i think that yamamoto allows the gallery to decide how his work is to be shown, with perhaps a few sentences about his working philosophy and thinking. when i spoke to an assistant at j.f.a., she told me that the photographs arrived at the gallery minus any of the usual fuss and precocious preciousness surrounding the transport of contemporary art. they were stuffed unceremoniously into a box, all sitting on top and intersecting with one another. i imagined a cigar box stuffed to the brim with someone's old and aging personal history, closed with a thick rubber band on the outside."

Hopefully Stacy will add a few more more posts to the space in between ...

Postscript 2:

Julian provided the following addition link (if you click on one of the framed works, it pulls up bigger views of all the images) - cool

Once Upon A Time (or Contemporary Photography - The Grand Tour)

Following up on Charlotte Cotton's essay The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White, Tip of the Tongue has the second essay in the series up entitled Once Upon a Time by Niclas Östlind who is a curator from Sweden.

It's a swift, slightly tongue in cheek, Grand Tour through the world of contemporary photography in the form of a short story (though story is perhaps too grandiose a description).

Here are a few tasters:

"I want to know whether or not photography can be considered art,” he asked. “There are so many devoted photography galleries now—has its art status become official?” A. glanced at her watch. “Well,” she replied, “what do you think?” There was silence on the line. Finally she sighed and said, “Let me guess. You’ve been looking at contemporary work, and it all seems to be large and in color. You’ve noticed the pictures are mostly laminated behind Plexiglas or mounted on metal—only occasionally framed. You’ve reflected on how the medium allows for multiple copies of the same image, and you’ve wondered what the implications of this are. You’ve pondered over how expensive art photographs tend to be, even though there’s no telling how long they’ll hold up....

She was doing her best to suppress her irritation—defending contemporary art photography from the longstanding “style over substance” charge was an awful chore, and the answer was far more complex than the soundbite she knew K. wanted....

She had felt skeptical of much of what had happened on the photography scene in the past few years, particularly the return of expressions and attitudes from before the postmodernist breakthrough; her old nagging doubts about whether photography could be considered a critical (and not simply decorative) medium were coming back...

What was more interesting than the subject matter was the increasingly widespread familiarity with photography that the pictures reflected. People were now sending each other photos in previously unimagined numbers, and what was not consumed right away was saved on hard drives and memory cards. ‘Citizen photography’ had now colonized computer screens and mobile phones, and this new digital flow of images, A. mused, meant that a discussion of post-photographic practice was now in order...

Interestingly the most photographic parts are the opening and closing paragraphs (and I also like the comment about photo-reviews seeming like a terrible waste of the photographer's money, but valuable for the reviewers to be able to network...)

(Photos: Viewpoint-Bognor & Compton Durville. Tim Atherton)

Family Days - Todd Deutsch

Todd Deutsch has a new project he's been working on - Gamers - but the whole gaming world is so alien to me that while I can take a sort of academic interest in the work, what really speaks to me is his Family Days photographs

I think mainly because he takes the photographs that I wish I - as a photographer - could take of my own family... these most definately aren't snapshots. There is a long tradition of photographers documenting their own families; probably because all of a sudden they become all-consuming and your horizons, available time and energy seem to reduce considerably. So the family has often become, by default, a subject for photographers (I even have a friend who once had Lartigue to stay and while he was there he photographed the two sons of the family).

Todd Deutsch's family photographs convey the many small everyday moments that reflect my own experience of having two young boys. He has a knack for really catching those things which happen every day but which you know, in a few years or even months, will just be memories. I'm envious of how well he does this with such apparent ease, especially when I look at my own efforts.

Todd also has a blog

20×200: Art for Everyone

Interesting idea (which has been tried in other ways before) from jen bekman.

20×200: Art for Everyone - "Great prints for twenty bucks in editions of 200. It's art for everyone"

Minimal content and concept at the site so far. In some ways, it's a natural for the interweb world - which can provide the necessary critical mass. And it also plays on the inherent nature of photography's mechanical reproducibility.

bekman says:

"I’ve been open for over four years now, and by artworld standards, the work at my gallery is really affordable. By real world standards, a lot of people who come through the jb want to buy art, but a $2000 (or a $1000, or even a $500) photo is beyond their means. I’ve been puzzling over how to create a way to make great art available at affordable prices and 20×200 is my solution.

The concept is simple: Prints in limited editions of 200, for $20 each. We’ll introduce two new editions a week: a photo one day and a fine art reproduction on another. These prints will be high quality work done by great artists. You’ll be able to sign up for a membership, buy gift certificates and have opportunities to buy larger pieces at affordable prices too..." more

Some will love it and some will hate it for sure.

Toshio Shibata

In many ways, Japanese photography has often gone its own way. After its early introduction, Japanese photography very quickly developed its own character and nuances. This seems to have carried through to the present day.

Often this photography seems to proceed in its own parallel universe for the majority of photographers in the West. Even some of the most well known Japanese photographers are hardly household names in Europe or N. America (even in photographic households).

There are several Japanese photographers I want to pick up on. The first is Toshio Shibata. Unlike some, his work is published outside Japan and fairly widely exhibited. I like what his work does with the relationship between man and the landscape. And his pictures can be quite stunningly beautiful.

"Toshio Shibata's landscape photographs are perhaps most extraordinary for their startling sense of scale, their meticulous, indeed excruciating detail. After immersing ourselves in them, we realize that the man-made structure--usually a dam, or something designed to bring a stream, and sometimes land, under control--is at odds with nature, not just technically, but spatially. Indeed, geometrical structure and nature inhabit their own spaces, but the vastness of the overall space Shibata photographs makes clear how irreconcilable they are. Shibata turns the traditional nature/culture duality into a nature/technology duality..." (from Artforum)

Tara Smith, Thomas Struth

Jen Bekman has all the fun stuff over on her blog. I guess the NY Times reported that Thomas Struth - one of the most well know photographers to come out of the Becher's Dusseldorf stable - got married to on the weekend to Tara Bray Smith in New York - an apparently talented (and good looking) novelist..

The Times article is very sweet - a real artistic romance. So perhaps we should expect more of Struth's flower pictures? (Bee's comment below has frightening possibilities - the first round of Becherite baby pictures...). And of course, imo, Struth is one of the best of the Dusseldorf School.

Roger Ballen

There are are some artists whose work somehow intrigues you, but you just can't quite give yourself over to it - Roger Ballen is on such for me. I don't know how many times I have gone through the University bookstore, picked up Ballen's book Shadow Chamber, browsed through it and put it down again. (Another would be Robert ParkeHarrison's work)

As photography, his work is on the edge of what I really find myself comfortable with - which in itself intrigues me.

Ballen has made a move from documentary work to art in what is in some ways quite a leap and yet in other ways a fairly direct journey. Joerg Colberg has a good interview with Ballen over on Conscientious

"It is impossible to surmise what would have happened to ones' life in another situation. Nevertheless, thinking back over the past twenty-five years the isolation that I experienced living in South Africa forced me to look 'inward' rather than than seek answers from others work. I have always believed that the most important source of inspiration should come from the process of understanding one's existence. I have been very fortunate as photography has allowed me to delve into my interior and externalize it..." more

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"