Accommodating Nature: The Photography of Frank Gohlke

5B4 - which has some very good reviews of photography books - has a review of several of Franke Gohlke's books, including details of Accommodating Nature: The Photography of Frank Gohlke, published in conjunction with his retrospective at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

I mentioned Gohlke a while back. Here's a bit of what 5B4 says:

This brings me full circle and to the latest book Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke. Throughout his other books, Frank has exhibited not only his talent for making images but also his remarkable talent for writing. What is an added joy about this new book is that Frank ties all of his various projects together with a running narrative of text that covers his life with photography as a near constant companion. Uncharacteristic of most retrospective type books, this one is not constructed with a strict chronological order to the images. The photographs follow the text in this regard and pleasurably serve as flash back and memory alongside Frank’s steady narration.

Gohlke is a writer of such talent that by the time we get to the two other essays by John Rohrbach and Rebecca Solnit, although perfectly fine and very well crafted, they seem superfluous as Gohlke’s voice has established itself to be the perfect guide.

If you are not familiar with the work of Frank Gohlke then this book would be a perfect introduction. It is finely printed in tri-tone and four color reproduction. The design is conservative but importantly allows the photographs to be reproduced at a good size to fully appreciate Gohlke’s technical prowess.

He also writes quite a bit about Gohlkes other books.

Interestingly it seems to have been published in paperback as well as hardback at the same time.

Finally, the Amon Carter Museum has a short couple of minutes video of Gohlke talking about the first picture (top) here:

New Pictures from Paradise - Thomas Struth

One of my favourite of all Struth's books (along with The Dandelion Room) is New Pictures from Paradise (it's also a nice big large format book).

I discovered is work after I had done a big chunk of my Immersive Landscapes project, but it certainly both encouraged and informed me. I've seen some of Struth's other work "in the flesh", but not these. I'd love to see them on a gallery wall.


From an article in Artforum:

"out from inner processes and needs and then take on a form. My approach to the jungle pictures might be said to be new, in that my initial impulses were pictorial and emotional, rather than theoretical. They are "unconscious places" and thus seem to follow my early city pictures. The photographs taken in the jungles of Australia, Japan, and China, as well as in the California woods, contain a wealth of delicately branched information, which makes it almost impossible, especially in large formats, to isolate single forms. One can spend a lot of time in front of these pictures and remain helpless in terms of knowing how to deal with them. There is no sociocultural context to be read or discovered, unlike in the photographs of people in front of paintings in museums. Standing in front of the facade of the cathedral in Milan, one experiences oneself as a human being defined by specific social and historical conditions. The jungle pictures, on the other hand, emphasize the self. Because of their consistent "allover" nature, "Paradise" numbers 9 and 4 could be understood as membranes for meditation. They present a kind of empty space: emptied to elicit a moment of stillness and internal dialogue. You have to be able to enjoy this silence in order to communicate with yourself--and eventually with others.



In some of the photographs, the picture stands like a screen in front of another, invisible image, dissolving the vanishing point that photography usually puts into focus. I made several attempts to take pictures in the old German woods close to the Czech border, but pine forests always look like Christmas. I didn't want to portray a specific place, that specific forest. Rather I was trying to feel within its primeval branchings the moment of beginning that once was the world. I also avoided pictures that would evoke exotic fantasies or look like botanical gardens. Actually, I don't even see the images as depictions of nature. The theme may play a major part, but the undertone makes the music. It's about the experience of time as well as a certain humility in dealing with things. It's a metaphor for life and death...

...I don't understand why so many people equate the notion of paradise with escapism. Paradise was never a place one could enter--though, in this global moment, escapism is no longer an issue either. The disappearance of the social debate about utopia, which the title "Paradise" alludes to, is an impoverishment and banalization. I focus exclusively on the experience of proximity. Nowadays the human being is reduced to a consumer and therefore to an instrument of a global economic mechanism. I, on the other hand, am interested in peculiarity, the individual ways of people and what goes on inside them when their historical bearings are disoriented. Certain aspects of cities now strike me as being straight out of science fiction, such as a particular intersection in Tokyo's Shibuya district, where everything revolves around the increase and intensification of information. Then I notice a growing confinement, not only in a physical sense but also in terms of vital energy. We must look elsewhere if we want to expand the individual's space. Understanding and communication have increasingly become inner processes originating in silence. As sources of air and space, the jungle pictures offer me an even deeper purchase on another of my ongoing subjects--the city."

Risaku Suzuki - Mont Sainte Victoire

There's a book I got a year or two ago that I just flicked though when it came and then put it on the shelf. But recently I've pulled it a few times and spent some time with it.

Mont Sainte Victoire (published by Nazraeli) is by Japanese photographer Risaku Suzuki and takes an extended, almost meditative look at the subject of so many of Cézanne's paintings. It's a sort of meandering exploration of the place. The light is often harsh and direct, frequently washed out - very like my experience of this part of France. But as we take various paths up and around the mountain, it;s as if we accompany Suzuki on his wanderings.

"Featured in over fifty paintings by Cézanne, the Mont Sainte Victoire in Southern France is familiar even to those who have never been there. A century later, photographer Risaku Suzuki has followed in the great artist’s footsteps, using a quite different medium to depict the landscape on the way. In Suzuki’s photographs there is a feeling of movement and progression, giving the journey a pace that ought to be at odds with a series of static images. Sometimes it is as if the camera has legs and a mind of its own as it strays from the path to take in just one more inconspicuous part of the environment – and all the while the audience is beckoned to come along too. Using limited depth of field, Suzuki focuses the lens on a tree, a piece of rock, unexceptional segments of a remarkable climb upwards." (from Nazraeli)

The book is quite large format and seems to benefit from the viewer (this viewer anyway) spending some time with it. There aren't many pictures from the book online, but Photoeye has one of their extended bookteases on the book. There is also some of Suzuki's other work here (and one picture from this below)

Special Limited Print Offer: Willow - Tin Can Hill

By popular request (quite hassling me know, okay...) I have decided to produce a small edition of prints of the photograph I mentioned the other day from my Immersive Landscapes: Boreal Forest-Precambrian Shield project - so spread the word!

The picture was taken outside Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and is called Willow: Tin Can Hill (incidentally, this tree is very close to where a wrapped up and hidden package of 1960's bills totalling $12,000 was found... not by me unfortunately). Click on the image for a bigger view.

The print is 12"x15" and is printed on the lovely Crane Museo Silver Rag paper. There will only be 30 prints and the price is CDN$100.00 each (+ shipping & handling).

Click on the link below to pay via Paypal (blogger still seems to have trouble with the paypal html...):

Debbie Fleming Caffery

I've oscillated back and forth over Debbie Fleming Caffery forever, going from liking her work, to forgetting about it and not finding it that interesting and then going back to liking it again. Her work certainly has style. I sometimes wonder about the substance.


That said, it's extremely evocative. She could be called the master (mistress?) of shadow. I've got a couple of books of hers - one a small French imprint, and another an older but interesting exhibition catalogue.

From a short interview on Photoeye (where there are also some galleries of her work):

"...The attraction I feel to a subject whether it be person, animal, situation or place, develops into a relationship that feels like being in love. I have had a love affair with sugar cane harvesting in Louisiana since l973. I photograph the harvest every season just like the farmer harvests the cane. My work is a visual articulation of an emotional and sensual response to my subjects—to stories heard and the smells and sounds in the environment. I spend years on most of my projects; without the major ingredient of time, these intense relationships would be nonexistent. Each project flows into the other, as can be seen in my new book, The Shadows...."

I noticed she has a a couple of more recent books out - Polly, and The Shadows as mentioned above, though her book Carry Me Home about the Louisiana sugar plantations was her real breakthrough in 1985

Colour Immersive Landscapes

When I was doing the northern part of my Immersive Landscapes project, I produced a number in colour as well as the black and white that the majority of the project was done in.

Most of the colour photographs didn't work that well. A few did.

Here are a couple of the ones that I think did (I also posted another one previously here). I'll see if I can dig out a couple more. Click for a bigger view.

Colin Blakely

Colin Blakely has some interesting work on his site - that goes from sublime landscapes to catch-you-off-guard suburbs and Middle America (the top pictures is well worth clicking on for a slightly bigger view).

He also has a blog - Not If But When. I'm not sure if it's slightly comforting or somewhat discouraging to discover that even the mythical "tenured professor of photography" has a hard time of breaking into the world of art photography...

(BTW, I'm in two minds about the extended and poetic captions for his work. I haven't included any here, but I can't quite make up my mind if they add to or take away from the pictures?)

Asian Photography Blog

I've talked a few times about some of the new and interesting photography that is coming out of Asia and especially China. More recently I've been following the Asian Photography Blog which has regular updates of a lot of work that generally hasn't been seen that much in the Western mainstream.

My feeling is that much of the new energy and creativity in photography is coming from and is going to come from these regions. Bascially, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Here are a few samples - go browse through the site archive for more:

(first two pictures) "Hong Kong born Dinu emigrated to the UK when he was just a child. Think in Pictures has got the lowdown on Dinu Li’s current exhibition for his The Mother of All Journeys series. The series traces memories of his mother’s move from China to Hong Kong and finally to England.":

-o-o-o-o-

"Bae Bien-U’s large-format photos of pines, mountains, land and seascapes are breathtaking to behold (even on my monitor).":

-o-o-o-o-

"Feng Yan’s minimalistic images are simply arresting and starkingly beautiful to behold. Images of seemingly ordinary places and corners are imbued with a sense of oppression and tension. The pictures seem to contain more than they show and the viewer is left to wonder why; until he/she realizes that these places are more than what they seem to be.":

-o-o-o-o-

"Sato Shintaro’s large format pictures of Japan’s cityscapes at night are pretty interesting. His entire series was shot from emergency exit stairs, of which he says:

I am fascinated by the power of unconsciousness of townscape when looking down from a little higher point. The town is constructed by the necessity, not for the purpose of beauty, but I find it changes beautiful shape and rhythm of which we are not aware when I am on the ground. Colors in twilight, that are mixture of the artificial light and the natural one, emphasize the beauty of town.":

-o-o-o-o-

"This week I seem to have taken on an interest in the replication and distortion of reality in contemporary photography. Xing Danwen’s ongoing series, Urban Fiction, depicts characters against architectural models.

On first sight, I thought it was one of those overdone tilt-shift lens tricks until I chanced upon her website, where she actually included the details for each image.":

More on the Tate crack...

One of Muse-ings regular visitors just started her own blog - Inversion Layer, and her first major post is on Doris Salcedo's piece at the Tate Modern - Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth: a presence not an absence.

Elizabeth's writes of her experience actually visiting the Tate and encountering the work first hand. It's quite illuminating and should, I think, answer any of the questions about why this is good art*.

"And there you have it: right away, even before people have reached the foot of the entrance ramp rules about how to behave in an art gallery are being broken down. People are looking at each other almost as much as they’re looking at the crack and the locus of the art has shifted - at least for me - from the individual response to the crack to the individual response to a whole gallery full of people responding to the crack. It’s an experience that draws people together...

The imperfection that has been introduced makes people look down and both the behaviour of those I observed and my own responses suggest that it also demands a physical response, exploring it with the body as much as the mind. Almost everyone seemed to put a hand or a foot into the crack, to stand in or astride it as though this were an atavistic response like picking at a scab. It also seems to make people behave in a less inhibited manner suggesting that the imperfection makes the experience of art less intimidating, despite The Guardian’s attempts to spin it as endangering art lovers."

In addition, I think it's pretty clear why putting up barriers would be just plain dumb... (among other things, anyone who is stupid enough to fall into it is - well - pretty stupid. And suing someone in the UK still pretty much means you might get your costs covered if you are lucky and a few thousand Pounds or so on top of that - not some ridiculous lottery windfall - or even just the judge telling you that you should have been looking where you were going and to stop wasting his time...). The nanny state seems to have been kept out of the Tate on this one so far.

(*good art isn't necessarily or even about something well crafted and beautiful, or about nature or about making the viewer feel good or or about "doing art" or about "the journey" or whatever. Among other things, it's often about making us feel uncomfortable, about seeing and thinking and experience things we haven't noticed or considered. It's about revelation and reality and, as Simon Schama puts it: "Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...")

(Photos by Elizabeth - oops - Paul, Inversion Layer)

Talking of Deadpan

(Rineke Dijkstra)

Talking of deadpan - portraits or typology - I just came across article (via Christian Patterson - who seems to be on a roll since he got back from Germany - invigorated?):

"Here's looking at you - Engaging yet ambiguous, deadpan photography provides a refuge from emotion in a time of worry" by Greg Cooke in the Boston Globe, which seems a little, well - conflicted - about the whole deadpan/ironic portrait trend..

"...Neutral expressions and cool, head-on compositions have become one of the signature styles of today's art photography. Some have called it deadpan photography: The tone is impassive, matter-of-fact, detached. Often the people are posed...

..."The problem for someone like me - I personally collect mostly portrait work - is there are just a lot of artists today who are all starting to look alike," (gallerist Bernard) Toale says. "One of the problems I'm having is distinguishing one artist's eye from another. I don't know what it means." Then he adds, "It means they all went to a good college and they bought good equipment."

So why are so many photographers adopting this style? Does deadpan photography's detached, distant, analytical approach somehow distill our cultural mood? Does its uniformity reflect the uniformity of our mass-produced, chain-store world? Does it represent the way people feel disconnected from one another, even as technology makes them more interconnected than ever? And could deadpan photography be a refuge from emotion at a time when many of us are overwhelmed with worries about terrorism, war, ecological disaster? Is it about slowing down?

It doesn't hurt that it sells. As Toale says, "It's become popular because it's become popular.""

(Rineke Dijkstra)

BTW, I'm also glad someone highlighted the significant differences between the current deadpan portrait trend and the work of August Sander - in which I agree entirely with Arlette Kayafas.

(August Sander)

"I'm bored with giant cibachromes of three Germans standing behind a mailbox"

(Marco Breuer fig. 4 (Turn))

"I'm bored with giant cibachrome photographs of three Germans standing behind a mailbox. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means I’m fucking bored with it." so speaks David Hickey in an article in the Art Newspaper examining the current state of the art market - of which he is, shall we say, more than a little critical:

...There are people out there who like art more than money. The only bad thing is that there are a lot of artists who like money more than art. This is a problem but consider the benefits. There has never been a better chance to draw attention to oneself by behaving honourably and honestly and meticulously. If you want to be an icon of virtue, this is the moment because you’ll stand out.If you behave well, if you behave correctly, if you make art that will still matter in 200 years, all you can lose is money...

...So we have a bubble. Art bubbles are great. Art bubbles suck money into the art world. Who gets hurt in an art bubble? Greedy artists; stupid collectors. Who else? Nobody with their wits about them gets hurt in an art bubble...

...The art market in the 20th century is first of all a finite market which means there are always more works of art than there are people to buy them. What does that mean? It means, as Leo says, that somebody has to buy two. Somebody has to buy four or five. If the art does not change, nobody’s going to buy two. To maintain itself in public vogue, art needs perpetual reinvestment, an artist needs one show after another show, one essay after another essay—all these are occasions for stylistic development. If I happen to have written about your frog paintings last year and if you put up another show of frog paintings, I’m not coming by. But, if Barbara [Gladstone] calls me and says: “You haven’t seen the salamander paintings, Dave,” then I’m going to rush right over...

...The logic of an institutional market is: “We don’t care. We’re just filling up this hole in our schedule.” It’s really more important [to institutions] if the person building the plywood box is a Zuni [Native American] warrior than if we’ve ever seen the plywood box before. And the presumption is: We don’t have style development anymore because history is over...

...My standards for any gathering of art are: is 99% of this bullshit? Yes. But, is 1% of it interesting? Yes. That’s about your percentages for anything in the world.Eventually some dealer will think, “I’ve got this great idea. I’m only going to show art I like.” Everybody else will go, “Oh, no, don’t do that. You’re fucking kidding. Everybody’s got to show one of each.” When you walk to their stands at art fairs, dealers currently ask you: “Would you like to see my Iranian minimalist? If not, our Berlin pornographer is quite interesting. We’ve got one of each here for any taste.” What this means is that the dealer currently has no power. One day one dealer may say to himself: “I’m going to gather power the way Leo did, I’m just going to show stuff I really believe in.” That’s going to really change things. And the art world as we currently know it will disappear. As exciting as this moment is now, imagine how exciting the collapse is going to be. It’s really something to look forward to. Boom! Thousands of Icari plummeting into the surf. Eventually all the windows where you sell your soul are going to be closed....

(Joan Fontcuberta Orogenesis: Atget, 2004 (Based on Eugène Atget's Saint-Cloud, 1926))


Dealer Ed Winkleman takes issue with Hickey on his blog, concluding:

This ending is disappointing. As it is with all (art bubble) deathwatch cheerleaders, Hickey seems to be longing for the next new thing, not because he can even assume it will be better than what we have now, but merely because it will be new, something to look forward to, and he won't be so fucking bored by it. That's not a good enough reason for me. First and foremost, whether Hickey agrees or not, I know dealers who truly believe they are only showing stuff they truly believe in. So if that's all it took, Hickey would have his change now. What I think Dave is really arguing for here is for someone else to end his ennui. The old Pet Shop Boys lyrics spring to mind: "We were never feeling bored, cause we were never being boring."

Which I think is a little mistaken (for one thing, only those who look back on the 80's with a certain odd nostalgia can cite the Petshop Boys as an authority...). Winkleman seems to think Hickey is essentially looking for novelty in art, but it seems to me he's more concerned with honesty - work that is honest, that people can believe in and not just the next hot thing. Hickey is bored not because the work he sees is bad, or because wants something new and novel (or even exciting), but because I think he wants something that's real. And so much of the current art world (including photography) is about illusion and superficiality. Which seems to work right now, so people just keep producing more of the same with slight variations - three Germans stood in front of a lamp-post.

(Rob Fisher Unity Road #5)

Incidental to this, I just read a dialogue in the current Blindspot with Marco Breuer called Nevertheless A Photograph where he says (in part):

"...it is not the technology I am interested in so much as the idea of true investigations in photography, as opposed to illustration. I was looking for alternatives to the default mode of contemporary photography, which is now a 4 x 5-inch color negative, whether portrait or typology, blown up to 30 x 40 inches or larger and mounted behind Plexi. That's the current orthodoxy, one that experienced in Germany and continue to question. The photographers in this issue are committed to photography, but like me, they are not satisfied with what is known and done..."

(Michelle Kloehn from Centrally Located)


Now, whether the portfolios in the current Blindspot meet those (or Hickey's) criteria is another question - but at least someone is trying. And as for photography in general, I certainly wish that some of the current galleries would actually show work they believe in, not work they think fits the current fashion (though at least photography has books as an integral part of the medium - and I think we see much more of this kind of work in published form than on gallery walls). So in the end, it probably wouldn't be that bad a thing for the bubble to burst - the collapse of the current gallery/market paradigm - which for too long has had something of a stifling death grip on a lot of honest creativity

Finally, as a postscript, I couldn't actually find a photograph of three Germans standing behind a mailbox - but I'm sure someone from a prestigious Kunstakamdemie somewhere surely must have taken one...


(all pictures from the current Blindspot)

Early Colour Daguerreotypes

Christian Patterson has been running an occasional series on the history and origins of colour photography.

He put up an intriguing post the other day about the early colour daguerreotypes of Levi Hill dating from around 1850

This process - the Hillotype - has been known about for a long time, but it was considered most likely to be fraudulent and not really the first colour photographic process. But the Smithsonian (which owns the Hillotype above), Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation as well as historian Joseph Boudreau have been researching the process. The Smithsonian and the Getty appear to have come to the conclusion that although Hill did add some hand colouring to some of his plates to enhance its effectiveness. In reproducing the difficult process from Hill's writings, Boudreau found he could actually produce naturally colored "dingy, but distinct, color Daguerreotypes".

Conservation scientists from the Getty Conservation Institute likewise found that although they could detect additions to some of the images - such as Prussian Blue - there were other naturally coloured parts of the daguerreotypes which did indeed seem to be inherent to Hill's photographic process. In all likelihood Hill seems to have added colour pigments later in the areas where the natural colours of the process were weak.

Which puts the birth of colour photography pretty close to the birth of photography itself. Hill was probably something of a flawed genius - part instinctive scientist part fraud. But it also seems there was a genuine basis to his experiments in early (very early) colour photography.

Incidentally, I love this bit from John H. Lienhard's article. His experiments were seen as a direct threat to the photographic status quo - which sounds rather reminiscent of the more fundamentalist factions of current "analogue" vs. digital debate - I can just see a mob from APUG turning up with their pitch-forks and flaming torches... :-)

"One myth of early color photography holds that the Reverand Levi Hill of Westkill, New York, invented it as early as 1850. That seems too preposterous to take seriously, but art historian Joseph Boudreau looks more closely at Hill. When Hill announced his process, he was visited by a group from the New York Daguerrean Association. They told him to keep quiet or they’d wreck his lab. Daguerreotypes were becoming obsolete and they feared for their livelihood.

Hill bought a revolver and a mean guard dog, and he forged ahead. People like Samuel F. B. Morse inspected his work and declared it sound. In 1856, Hill published a rambling account of what he now called the Hillotype process. But he also used the book to attack the Daguerrean Association. They, in turn, got a court order requiring all copies of the book to be destroyed...

..Boudreau found a surviving copy of Hill’s book and set about to replicate the process. It was long and difficult, but it actually worked. He managed to produce some dingy, but distinct, color Daguerreotypes. Hill had actually succeeded — 80 years too soon."

Listen to the story on NPR

Christian has more links on his blog

Hansel and Gretel

I must say that I've just never got the whole William Wegman weimaraners thing. Dogs dressed up once for art photography is new. Dogs dressed up for art twice is ironic. After that it's just plain cute kitsch and is as much art as Anne Geddes baby pictures - despite regular justifications that; "no, no, it really is art" - and; "but they are really really big Polaroids, so they must be art".

How someone has managed to sustain a whole career as an artist with this is confounding only to the extent that we easily forget H.L. Mencken's rejoinder that "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public".

That said, The New Yorker features the work of 17 artists who were invited by the Metropolitan Opera House to exhibit their interpretations of Humperdinck's classic tale of Hansel and Gretel, in response to their upcoming production.

For once, I have to admit that Wegman hit the mark (though I also rather quite like Eleanor Davis' “Witch House” - and here)

Bas Princen - Artificial Arcadia

I have a book of colour photography I got a few years ago that I go back to every now and then - Artificial Arcadia by Dutch photographer and architect Bas Princen.

It's pretty hard to find many of Princen's pictures online. The book is about is about "un-natural" leisure spaces, disregarded zones between suburb and field, empty left-over spaces put to other uses, the "jardin anglo-chinoise of the golf course:

"His photos show snippets of landscape, not as an illustration of reality but
rather as images of a potential reality of this landscape. He often photographs
places that we do not know about, too abandoned to be nature, places whose
initial function we have long forgotten about, even if they have retained traces
of it. What interests him and what he photographs is the appropriation of such
places, and traces of activities reveal them in their true nature, and restore a
new reality to them. These are mutations of landscape which, through new and
often fleeting uses take on a different meaning."

There are some images by Princen here, but mostly not from Artificial Arcadia.

I must say that these kind of spaces have always fascinated me, from playing in old industrial sites and abandoned wool baron's mansions (owned by the superbly named Titus Salt) as a child right through to my current photographic work on suburbs, urban wild spaces and interstitial zones and alleyways.