Eva Lauterlein

An interesting series from Swiss Photographer Eva Lauterlein - vertigo(s) - portraying the town of Hyères.

Unfortunately - for me anyway - all the info is in French and the google translation makes about as much sense as my schoolboy French translation...

She also has a rather more radical series - chimères - where she takes portraits from numerous (30 or so?) different angles of the same person and then melds them digitally. The people take on a slightly cyborg look while still retaining their essential characteristics - the sense of chimera certainly comes through. I'm still not quite sure about this one yet, but its starting to interest me a bit.

Karl Höcker's Auschwitz photo album

(SS officer Karl Hoecker shakes hands with his dog Favorit. )

I saw these pictures of the SS Guards from Auschwitz "off duty" last year some time. But I didn't want to talk about them then. I think their importance is significant and I needed time for them to sink in and to be able to think about them - to in some way make sense of them.

(SS officers together with women and a baby relax on lounge chairs on a deck in Solahuette.)

The pictures are all from an album that belonged to SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, who was Adjutant to SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer the Commandant of Auschwitz in 1944/45. The album was passed on to the Holocaust Museum in 2006 by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who was a Counter-Intelligence Officer working in Germany at the end of, and just after the war. As part of the teams hunting down Nazi war criminals he had picked up the album in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt.

(Members of the SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) and SS officer Karl Hoecker sit on a fence railing in Solahuette eating bowls of blueberries)

The album shows the ordinary side of barracks life (and ordinary is the right word here) for the troops running Auschwitz.

My thoughts finally started to come together about these photographs when I was reading Max Sebald's early book The Immigrants. It deals with four different people and four different stories (five if you count the author himself) who were in some way exiles from Germany. It covers the periods from both before and after World War II (and earlier in a few places). One of the stories is that of Max Feber now in self exile in Manchester, England. Sebald travels back to the area he sets as Feber's home in Germany, which is close to the same area in Southern Bavaria that Sebald himself grew up in, during and just after WWII.

(Nazi officers and female auxiliaries (Helferinnen) run down a wooden bridge in Solahuette)

Sebald describes (as he frequently does elsewhere) the small towns of Bavaria and the Allgäu region during the 1920's and early 1930's. Many rich with a vibrant Jewish community - part of the community as a whole. In many towns, forming up to 30% of the population. He describes their lives and families and jobs. Then, post-war as Sebald was growing up, and later on as he re-visits in the 1980's, there are none. Their homes and businesses long since appropriated (see this recent art case, for example), their memory gone. But more than that - he describes a sort of collective amnesia of the people he meets in these towns now - a wilful state of denial that these people - the German jews, their homes and businesses - ever existed in these places - the slate of their existence wiped clean.

(SS officer Karl Hoecker and some women relax on lounge chairs on a deck in Solahuette)

(I also recently read Michael Chambon's humorous yet thought provoking "detective" novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, in which an alternate Jewish history evolves. The Holocaust was diverted by laying Berlin in nuclear ruins early in WWII, settlement in Israel - however - failed and so several million Jews were settled post-war in the Alaska panhandle... but with their families, histories and traditions of all sorts fairly intact - a good read btw).

(An accordionist leads a sing-along for SS officers at their retreat at Solahuette outside Auschwitz - front centre right is SS Doctor Josef Mengele)

All this helped my see these photographs a little more clearly. The SS Officers and their wives and girlfriends enjoying everyday life. The soldiers and the SS women's auxiliaries having fun. All scenes from Garrison life that almost any soldier anywhere would recognise - picnics, concerts, drinks and formal occasions in the mess, musical concerts, joking and laughing, sunning themselves outside the barracks - the soldiers "frolicking" as someone put it. All the while, a few short miles away - these men and women commuting daily to their duties - the production line carnage, suffering and death of Auschwitz carried on - efficient and well ordered.

(SS officers gather for drinks following the dedication of the new SS hospital in Auschwitz)

Hannah Arendt's dictum of "The banality of evil" is inevitable quoted in connection with this album of photographs - but rightly so. It is perhaps the best, almost perfect example of what she was defining:

"...the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopath but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal." (for once the Wikipedia entry is spot on).

(Members of the SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) arrive by bus at Solahuette, the SS retreat near Auschwitz)

And that's why these pictures are so important. Yes, we need George Rodger's brutally honest photographs of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and what he witnessed there - so painful we can hardly bear to look at them (Rodger was one of the founding four of Magnum). We need the incredible film "Memory of the Camps" - produced by the British in 1945 (with assistance from Alfred Hitchcock) with its footage from several concentration camps - but left unfinished. Rediscovered in the Imperial War Museum in 1985 it was broadcast for the first time. The script was read by veteran war-time actor Trevor Howard, but like parts of the film, the script was unfinished. So we get fragments, silences, dead air for much of it - making it perhaps one of the most poignant and effective descriptions of the horror that was found - heightened by the obvious anger and outrage that is in the script from 1945. (you can watch it online).

(SS officers socialize on the grounds of the SS retreat Solahuette outside of Auschwitz)

We need these vivid documents (and more), but SS-Obersturmführer Höcker's album present the other - equally important - part of the picture. These were on the whole not monsters who perpetrated these acts, but ordinary everyday men and women - men and women who enjoyed a drink after work, played the accordion, went on picnics, even fell in love. Their evil was banal, but all the more dangerous and horrific because they were not acting outside the norms of society, but carrying out societies wishes. They believed that what they were doing was for the good and welfare of their own people. They were doing their duty - not "just following orders" under duress, but acting as dutiful members of the state. They simply believed in what they were doing - apparently, and on the whole, without serious internal conflict. (this is also what makes them so different from the Abu Ghraib pictures - as abhorrent as those were, they were "trophy" photographs - photographs of men and women who had "got away with it" and knew it. They knew they were being sadistic, acting out some kind of gamer fantasy for real, but deep down - in fact probably not that deep down at all - they knew what they were doing was wrong. So despite how far up the chain of command the complicity went, I see this as a substantial difference between those and this album. Society as a whole was not condoning - implicitly or explicitly what they were doing in Iraq.)

(Auschwitz personnel, including many physicians, sit around an outdoor table drinking probably following a visit to coal mine)

These pictures return us again to the power of photography - its power to depict the ordinary in compelling detail, its power to contain memory, its power to work in opposition to those who would attempt to monopolise history, to draw out these individual moments. And in their banality, these photographs become all the more powerful and unforgettable.

(SS officer Karl Hoecker lights a candle on a Christmas tree)

(as a final aside, Höcker's history itself is also telling precisely because it is so typical and mundane. The mine the officers visited above was run with slave labour, with the minimum amount of rations carefully calculated against the amount of work a labourer could provide before they dropped so as to maximise productivity for the least cost - all with the cold efficiency of an accountants actuarial tables. The way Höcker was dealt with and treated - even down to getting his comfortable job back after a short term for his crimes as recently as 1970 - also seems to say much. Finally, perhaps, what could be more mundane than a bank teller keeping tally of the horrific day to day work and "productivity" of Auschwitz:

"Karl Höcker was born in Engershausen, Germany, in December 1911. His father, a construction worker, was killed in World War I, and his mother struggled to support the family. Höcker, who worked as a bank teller in Lubbecke, joined the SS in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937. He married in 1937, had a daughter in 1939 and, in October 1944, a son. Upon the outbreak of war, Hoecker was assigned to the Neuengamme concentration camp. In 1943, he became the adjutant to the commandant at Majdanek-Lublin during the Operation Reinhardt mass deportations and murders. When Sturmbahnführer Richard Baer became the commandant of Auschwitz in May 1944, Hoecker was also reassigned to the camp, again in the position of adjutant. Hoecker remained at Auschwitz until the evacuation, then moved with Baer to command Dora-Mittelbau until the Allies approached. He escaped the camp before it was taken and was captured by the British while posing as part of a combat unit near Hamburg. As Allies had an erroneous description of him, Höcker spent only one and a half years incarcerated in a British prisoner of war camp and was released at the end of 1946. Until prosecutors began looking for him in the wake of the Eichmann trial, no one came for Karl Höcker. He resumed his life in Engershausen with his wife and two children. He turned himself in for a de-Nazification trial in 1952 and was sentenced to serve nine months for membership in the SS, a criminal organization. He did not have to serve it, thanks to a 1954 law of freedom of punishment. He took up gardening in his spare time, and became the chief cashier of the regional bank in Lubbecke, only losing his during the pre-trial investigations for the 1963-1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, in which he was a defendant. The judges ruled that Höcker was guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 1000 people on four separate occasions. They weighed the facts that he had been a model citizen after the war, had voluntarily asked for denazification in 1952, and they could only find proof that he had been a desktop functionary. The court determined that Höcker had never been proven to be at the ramp. He was sentenced to only 7 years, but time served was deducted and Höcker was released on parole in 1970. He regained his job as a Chief Cashier of the regional bank in Lubbecke. Karl Höcker died in 2000 at age 88").

(All pictures from the United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem)

Tintypes from Iraq

This is the second set of photographs tied to the war in Iraq I have come across (via Susana Raab) that utilise some kind of alt-process - the first being Ellen Susan's wet plate collodion portraits of US soldiers.

These being from Phil Nesmith, a photographer from Washington DC who photographed in Iraq in the course of his employment as a civilian defence contractor and produced work in a series called My Baghdad.

I must say I'm in two minds about this approach. On the one hand, on many levels they do work. The remain on most levels a photographic image, with all that involves and implies, but by utilising the anachronistic process they take a step back in a sense and manage to pause the never ending stream of images that flow over us every day. We also stop and pause and look - and perhaps look a bit more closely.

But on the other hand, they can seem a bit of a gimmick. Without fail, Brady and the Civil War photographers are usually invoked somewhere along the line - in some way giving an anointing to the photographer and - if one were to take the most cynical view - in some ways also doing the same for the conflict; giving it a sort of nobility of purpose. They also evoke a sense of dislocation in time. The war - and those pictured - becomes less immediate. Echoes of 19th Century photographic surveys in colonial India or Arabia or Palestine are triggered. And then there are the pictures themselves. If one were to take most of them as say straight forward black and white photographs printed on good old Ilford paper, most really probably wouldn't catch our attention. So the process really becomes essential to the picture and that brings me back to the sense of a gimmick (and yet, the same could probably be said about the choice of straight black and white over colour for example).

And then the photograph here of the Chinook and the low sun does nothing if not invoke the film Apocalypse Now with all that movie said about a failing and futile colonial war and the men fighting it. So there are many conflicting, ambiguous and mixed messages and emotions that these pictures seem able to contain (which probably means that ultimately they are quite successful in what they are trying to do...)

So, as I say, I remain in two minds about them - while still allowing that they certainly did catch my eye and they did draw me in.

Interestingly, Nesmith didn't lug a around a Full Plate camera, with it's bellows and tripod and heavy film holders, but appears to have used some kind of hybrid process whereby he took digital photographs in Iraq - giving himself more freedom of movement and interaction - and then producing Tintypes/Ferrotypes or Ambrotypes from those. Overall it seems to give very good looking results (although noticeably missing is the often distinctive narrow depth of field and/or blur that often results from using the larger negative with older lenses).

Nesmith has a show of his work at Irvine Contemporary. And there is a brief review here.

Strange and Stranger

I love this picture Shane Lavalette managed to dig up - William Eggleston and David Lynch.

While it has often been pointed out that David Lynch - and Gus Van Sant and several others - have been directly influenced by Eggleston - and who can't see that in everything from Twin Peaks to the Straight Story to Mulholland Drive, like Shane I'm most intrigued by the ensuing conversation here.

Can you imagine being a fly on the wall to that one? My guess is it was most akin to eavesdropping on two Martians...

All I can say is we would be much worse off without the both of them.

(top photo probably by Winston Eggleston? bottom by William Eggleston)

Melissa Catanese pt.II

I picked up on Melissa Catanese's work a while back when I was quite taken by her "Jungle" work.

Today I just saw a new reference to her here and either I wasn't paying attention and missed some of her work first time round, or else she's put new work up since (probably the former). Anyway some different pictures really caught my eye today when I looked.

Especially work from Stardust and also When The Bugs Come Back - both to be found linked, along with other projects, on her website.

Also worth checking out is the section tucked away on her main page called simply More. My guess is (and I could also be completely wrong) is that this is slightly older work, but she doesn't want to quite abandon it. If I'm correct and that's the case, I found it worthwhile looking at because to me it seemed to give a picture of her developing her work and ideas and way of seeing things over time and then it's as if she has found her stride in the main, new (?) work she's presenting - Stardust, Bugs, Jungle, Garden etc. Maybe I'll hear from her one way or the other.

I also noticed that she has a small book put out by and outfit called ping pong projects who seem to have a few nice looking (low budget??) photography books - but as their website is - lets say - minimal, I can't add much more than that. The book is Stardust and it looks like you buy it via Lulu.

Not just Black & White

Since I started this blog just a touch over a year ago, I seem to have got a reputation as a black and white photographer. Mainly I think because my current main project has been in done in black and white, as was a major one before that.

But in fact, up until those two, I hadn't used black and white as a major part of my work for a long time (although it was what I started off with - learning to process at 14 years old in our blacked out kitchen was a lot cheaper using Ilford HP5... and much of the early work I did in the UK - photographing post-industrial NE England was all also done in good old HP5. But after that, most of what I did was actually in colour, with the odd foray here and there back to the darkroom and enlarger.

So here is some work from peripheral vision - The Yellowknife Project. The last bit of this was done in 2005:

"the suburbs as a state of mind...

There no longer appears to be a clear division between the suburbs and either the urban or rural environment. There now seems to be a generic suburban condition that may be a potential quality for all inhabited spaces. This extended suburban condition does not easily show up on maps, it is in many ways more of a suburban state of mind than a topographic location...

In photographing this I find myself looking at things that are somewhat off centre, off to the side - a peripheral vision. Things that are often unnoticed and just below our level of perception. Things seen that are in plain sight yet so familiar or obvious they are usually ignored, unseen, and their existence barely registered - attention no longer paid to them.




This project conveys everyday North America and the infiltration of the city by suburban culture - the place seen on the way to the office or the supermarket - viewing these familiar environments from an off-centre perspective, revealing the ambiguities and artifice of everyday life.".

The Square

(photo Harry Callahan)

Over the last few weeks I've been experimenting on and off with the square format - 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 (or 6x6cm...) - mainly in colour.

It's been many many years since I used this format and that was with a fairly battered M.O.D./SOCO broad-arrow-marked Hasselblad.

(photo Harry Callahan)

I must say it's been much harder than I expected to "work the square". It's a very different way of seeing to me - even using the ground glass on a TLR feels very different to the 4x5 or 8x10 ground glass image (I'm doing some ragnefinder stuff as well). And then dealing with the equal sided frame - for one thing, it's too easy just plonk everything right in the middle... But it's an interesting and challenging experience so far as well. We'll have to see what eventually comes out of it.

So any words of wisdom from the square masters/mistresses out there would be appreciated!

Unfortunately, though, I haven't actually had time to scan any of my efforts yet (I've also been using up an old stash of outdated Ektachrome 120 64T film a lot of the time just while I experiment, rather than "real" - i.e. in-date - film).

So until I get time for some scanning (and find my MF scanner holders) here's a few from Harry Callahan instead.

(photo Harry Callahan)

A Couple of Opportunities

The Humble Arts Foundation has application info up for a couple of good opportunities (as humble as they are, I think for most photographers, every little counts...)

First the Spring 2008 Grant for Emerging Photographers:

Given twice annually, the GEP is a $1,000 grant award that recognizes the strongest new proposal in fine art photography as submitted to Humble Arts Foundation.

Deadline: 11:59 pm, Monday, March 3, 2008

Applicant Eligibility
Applications will be accepted from photographers who are at least 18 years old and do not have gallery representation.

and secondly:

"31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography" On March 1, 2008, in honor of Women's History Month, Humble Arts Foundation, in collaboration with Ladies Lotto, will present "31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography," a month-long exhibition celebrating 31 of the most innovative young women in emerging art photography under the age of 31. The Exhibition is co-curated by Lumi Tan, Director of Zach Feuer Gallery in NYC, and Jon Feinstein, Curatorial Director of Humble Arts Foundation.

We are now accepting submissions from women photographers under the age of 31. Submission deadline: Friday, January 25th, 2008

I'm glad they haven't tied "emerging" with "under 25" or some similar arbitrary age for the grant - some (of us) "emerging" photographers are actually over 40 or more... so that in itself is a good move (though I note they did tie "innovative young women in emerging photography" with the under 31 cut-off in the wording for the the second opportunity - but I see they've got enough grief on all that from the lady photo bloggers already, so I'll leave it well alone... suffice to say I am frequently ticked off by much larger well established grant opportunities which frequently tie emerging with under 30 or some such arbitrary age)

All that said Kudos to the guys at Humble for keeping going with their commitment to all this and photography in general.

Full info on both here

(Photo by Molly Landreth winner of the the Fall 07 Humble Grant)

Paul Graham

I've mentioned Paul Graham before in relationship to his new book(s)/series A Shimmer of Possibilities, but up until now it's been hard to find much of his work online. However, thanks to Shane Lavalette I just found out that Graham now has an archive of much of his work online.

I'd say that in the early 1980's Paul Graham's colour photography was the first colour work which really had an impact on me and helped me see that there was a different way to use colour than the typical/traditional colour postcard/calendar/Amateur Photographer Magazine look.

The impact of his early work was probably even greater for me because his first three books all dealt with things that were familiar to me - but despite that personal link, his early work was pretty radical, especially compared to most other photography in the UK at that time.

A1 - Great North Road remains a fantastic colour milestone. For some years I lived just off the A1 and often travelled this historic route north and south (the book is almost impossible to find now - I bought my copy for about £10.00 I think and later sold it for $1600.00 to help fund my Phillips 8x10 - a fair exchange...). It's just an excellent collection of pictures.

Then came Beyond Caring, a rather damning - if oblique - look at the Welfare State at the height of the bleakest of the Thatcher years in 1986. Again, this came out at the same time that I was also photographing around the whole subject of unemployment and the post-industrial milieu of North East England.

Finally there was Troubled Land in 1987 - this remains the best depiction I have yet come across of the place and state of mind of Northern Ireland while it was still in the midst of "The Troubles".

Schmidt and Joachim All these works used colour in a way that really hadn't - and still wasn't - being done in the UK before. And although his work paralleled the New Colour work of the likes of Shore and Sternfeld in the US, it was also distinctly different from it. He makes an interesting comment in an interview that he was deeply influenced by Berlin/Essen photographers such as Michael Schmidt, Joachim Brohm and Volker Heinz and through them John Gossage and Lewis Baltz who they were bringing over to Berlin at the time. A quite distinctive (and on the whole possibly more substantial) school than the ubiquitous students of Bechers in Dusseldorf.

Since then Graham has continued to work on different and distinct project from New Europe to American Night (Phaidon also published a good overview of his work a few years ago) and through to his current A Shimmer of Possibilities (hopefully he will have images from that online soon?)

"...Within four years I published three books: A1, Beyond Caring, and Troubled Land, driven by the boundless energy of youth, no doubt… but by 1987, I we had this juggernaut of color documentary photography emerging in England; it had really taken off. Martin Parr switched to color, so did people like Tom Wood, and then our students, like Paul Seawright or Richard Billingham or Nick Waplington came along. So… I felt it was time to move on from that, before it became exhausted. For example, the mixing of landscape with war photography in Troubled Land was striking and quite successful —I had shows in NYC galleries—but what happens is that you hit this resonant note and everyone wants you to repeat it. I was invited to duplicate Troubled Land in Israel and South Africa. Commissions, dollars, travel, the whole nine yards. But I thought, I can’t do this. For better or worse, I’m one of those artists who once something is “proven,” have to drop it and find another way to scare myself..."



"...RW: So you went to Europe?

PG: In the early to mid 80s I had made friends with a group of German photographers who were quite distinct from the Becher’s Dusseldorf school. They were mostly around Essen-Berlin: Volker Heinze, Joachim Brohm, Gosbert Adler, and Michael Schmidt too, who was running these workshops in Berlin and inviting people like John Gossage and Lewis Baltz to come over.

RW: It’s funny that that school is so unknown here. Michael Schmidt even had a one-man show at MoMA.

PG: Yes, a great show and few remember it. It's as though the Gursky show wiped out people’s under-standing of everything else in German Photography. Gursky is much more accessible. He goes for the jugular because it is about the ‘Great Photograph.’ Of course, he succeeds, but it’s recidivist, in a way. Photographers have been trying for years to make bodies of work where images work together to build up a coherent statement. It’s not about one great picture by Robert Adams; it’s about twenty or thirty pictures that form a sensitive, intelligent reflection of the world. It’s the same with Garry Winogrand, or Robert Frank. Gursky brings it back to that “wow” moment. It sort of undoes that way of working, and reduces things to the “What a great shot!” appreciation of photography. I’m a sucker for that as much as anyone, but want people to appreciate what Robert Adams does more so."

I must say I'm very much looking forward to seeing A Shimmer of Possibles when it arrives. Graham's work has nearly always given me something new to think about.