Putting Back The Wall - John Gossage

"I aim at photographing the past as present." -John Gossage

I'd been hoping to get a copy of John Gossage's new book Putting Back the Wall in time to include it in my "best of 2007" books. If I had, I think it would have made my pick of the year. As it was, there was a bit of a hiccup with the order and I didn't get it until the new year.


However, when it did arrive, I was delighted to find Loosetrife Editions publisher Michael Abrams had also included copies of his own new book Strange & Singular and also Waiting, Fishing, Sitting and Some Autombiles by Anthony Hernandez. What a fantastic package. More on those latter two in some later posts, but for now, Putting Back the Wall.



Life has been a bit crazy here over the last few weeks (I got a new winter day-job as a museum curator...) and so after a quick flick through, I put the book on one side until I could really take some time to look through it and read the two essays by Gerry Badger and Thomas Weski.

It was worth the wait. I mentioned Gossage's monumental book Berlin in the Time of the Wall rather briefly in my very first blog post. It is possibly one of the best photography books of the first few years of the new millennium; looking back as it does to one of the final decisive chapters in the history of the 20th century.



Putting Back the Wall is essentially an epilogue to that Berlin book (among other things it starts on page 465). It isn't so physically weighty and is, in a way, more intimate.

It is a very poetic book - poetic that is, in the sense of Paterson or East Coker. Many of the images are enigmatic, and the pairings and groupings take it well beyond "just" a book of pictures.

It is also virtuosic. There aren't many photographers who could pull off the way each of these photographs are just spot on - extreme darkness, narrow focus, multiple layers (both visually and in t terms of meaning), fragmentary views, veiled images - all with a unique vision.



This isn't just about the landscape of Berlin during and after the Wall, but it also about the Wall as a state of mind - it is both intensely personal and at the same time a "panoramic" view of recent history - it is about memory and history. It is very very much the powerful sort of photographic document as described by John Berger when he talks of photogrpahy working in opposition to and resistance to the monopolization of history.

Darius Himes says of Gossage that "he is the thinking man's photographer". This is a book that requires not long and thoughtful viewing, but which also germinates many new thoughts and ideas in the process.

Gerry Badgers words about Berlin in the Time of the Wall apply equally to Putting Back the Wall:

"But the legacy of Berlin on the work of John Gossage went far deeper. Berlin, one might say, is the place where photography became both easy and difficult for him. Easy because there was such a rich vein of subject matter, history piled up in front of his eyes, one metaphorical layer upon another, like the different strata that can reveal so much to the archaeologist when a trench is cut through a site. But such strata, translated into the archaeologist's sectional drawings, are notoriously difficult to read, and that, in a nutshell, was where the difficulty, the challenge lay for Gossage. He was faced with the task of evaluating the evidence, reading it, recording it, interpreting it, and fashioning it into a coherent 'report'--both for himself and for his audience. Of course, as John Gossage is an artist, the 'report' may be oblique, poetic, metaphorical, subjective, and ambiguous. In short, it is a creative interpretation."

Finally, John Gossage is a wonderful book designer - visually, this book is a delight - as are the other two Loostrife books I mentioned at the start. Would that more photo books had as much care in the design (and occasional whimsy) as these do.



BTW, you can also get both books - ...In The Time and Putting Back... in one mega boxed bonus package from Loosetrife.

Now, if only I could have been at that Berlin Gallery when John sold off his work prints for the book at 40 Euros each - and each was sold, the prints came straight off the gallery wall as an echo of the dismantling of the Wall itself.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008

The shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize has been announced. Last years finalists where an interesting and fairly disparate group of photographers and the winner seemed to confound many. This year has the promise of being not too different.

There's John Davies from the UK - a photographer whose work I've always admired and is very much a "straight" sort of documentary photographer (or at least one who "works in the documentary style"). I first came across him in the early 1980's when he was photographing the post-coal/post-industrial North East of England at the same time I was. I also keep meaning to get his big retrospective book which came out recently.


(John Davies - both above)

Then Jacob Holdt from Denmark who is probably best known for his book Jacob Holdt, United States 1970 – 1975 which came out of five years hitchhiking across the US and documenting the lives of those he lived with from rich to poor - an outsider's take on Nixon's America


(Jacob Holdt)

Fazal Sheikh from the US - "an artist-activist who uses photography to create a sustained portrait of different communities around the world, addressing their beliefs and traditions, as well as their political and economic problems. By establishing a context of respect and understanding, his photographs demand we learn more about the people in them and about the circumstances in which they live"


(Fazal Sheikh)

And finally Esko Mannikko from Finland (btw I'm not quite sure what hold the Scandinavians have over the selection committee but there always seem to be one or two nominated...) a photographer who has been described as "A portraitist of isolation, Mannikko documents with great humour, warmth and integrity the lives of those who inhabit the periphery.".


(Esko Mannikko)'

You can see work from all four at The Photographers Gallery in London, and the winner will be announced on the 5th of March.

A Thousand Monkeys - Fritz Katze

You know the old saying that that given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. Well here's Fritz and his Catcam (thanks again John Brownlow) producing some suprisingly good work - William Eggleston, Terri Weifenbach, Stephen Gill (and Julian...) watch out... :-)





"I am very versatile, always searching for exciting motives in my district on the "Katzenstraße", under cars or bushes, on the fields...... however no fear I don´t spend the whole time on photographing. Perhaps two times the week 1,5 hour, the most time I sleep, eat, roam, like any other cat..."





You can even watch Fritz at work - Fritz in Aktion - bottom of the page here (hmm -maybe it's time for a Timcam...?)

Photography in the DDR

(Gundula Schulze Eldowy)

In an interesting bit of coincidence today I came across two sets of photographs about different aspects of life in the old DDR - the former East Germany. One set is from an exhibition "Do Not Refreeze" about the personal (and political) work of East German Photographers during the Cold War.

(Thomas Meyer, Inside Stasi - Stasi office with portrait of Erich Mielke)

The other is from a set of contemporary photographs about the institution that was the Stasi - the East German Secret Police - Inside Stasi by photographer Thomas Meyer.

I read a review of the first exhibition, "Do Not Refreeze", in the Guardian - unfortunately there are very few of the images online, but it certainly sounds interesting:

(Sybille Bergemann)

...Painting and sculpture, literature, poetry and theatre were very closely observed by the Stasi," says Gundula Schulze Eldowy, an artist and photographer who was based in east Berlin in the 70s and 80s. "Photography less so, and that was simply because they didn't perceive it as an art form." Photography, in other words, could get away with a critique of the repressive communist system that was largely denied to the other art forms.

(Erasmus Schroeter)

...Shaul argues that the authorities in East Germany failed to understand what was being expressed in many of the photographs. "Often the photographers were careful not to add a title beyond a place and date, because socialist ideology was very hung up on definitions. In effect, what they did was generate a visual language which was unreadable to the organs of state power but readable to the general public."

(Evelyn Richter)

Thus Richter's beautifully composed Receptionist in Town Hall 1975 contains a coded message about a woman imprisoned by the state. "What Richter was trying to do with this and many of her other pictures," says Shaul, "was to communicate between the lines. She was trying to emphasise the way in which people in the GDR were enclosed and expected to give reverence to the communist party.

(Evelyn Richter)

Behind that woman is a picture of Erich Honecker [East Germany's head of state in the 1970s and 80s], displayed as you would display a religious icon. Another photograph, Entrance to a Convalescent Home 1986, shows a picture of Lenin preaching to revolutionaries. The idea is to use a picture within a picture to present an ideology that had once been dynamic as something that, by the mid-80s, had become tatty and careworn."

(Evelyn Richter)

...After the wall came down in 1989 some of these photographers never again recaptured the spark of their pre-liberation work. "Some have made successful careers in the reunited Germany," says Shaul, "but others have been bereft and their work is a pale shadow of what they did under communism. They needed to push against the wall of state censorship, which defined and nurtured their work; they needed to find chinks in the communist armour, niches in which to express themselves". More here.

(Thomas Meyer, Inside Stasi - Stasi bunker near Leipzig)

The Stasi - the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Ministry for State Security, were initially modelled on the KGB and were known for their all encompassing surveillance of the East German population, from phone taps to bugs to neighbours, co-workers, friends and family acting as informers. After the Berlin Wall came hundreds of thousands of hours of sound surveillance tape were found. There were files and index cards on just about every person in the country. By the end of the Cold War, the Stasi had about 90,000 staff and 1 in 50 of East Germany's citizens was also working for the Stasi and the their archives show just who was informing on who, and how often trusted friends and even loved ones were in fact working for the Stasi - in some ways, leading to a state of national paranoia.

Thomas Meyer's photographs are a good cold eyed look at the remaining empty shell of this fear inducing institution.

(Thomas Meyer, Inside Stasi - File card archive)

Do Not Refreeze is at the Focal Point Gallery, Southend, until March 8, and at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery from May 10 until June 28.

(Thomas Meyer, Inside Stasi - Interrogation room)

Of course, there is also a book of the show Do Not Refreeze


(Thomas Meyer, Inside Stasi - Photographic room)

Cara Phillips - "Objects of Beauty"

I've been reading Cara Phillips blog Groundglass for a while now (an interesting recent post on elitism in the art world and photo blogs), but until the other day, I hadn't got around to actually looking at her work.


There's some interesting stuff. Her work revolves around the "beauty" culture and comes in part from her own experience of it first hand. There' more in her bio and statement "Objects of Beauty" (which I couldn't cut and paste bits from).


I especially like that she doesn't necessarily take the typical or more obvious approach to this subject.


With topics like Stills, Chairs, Rooms, Machines, Phillips takes an approach that at times falls somewhere between Lynne Cohen and Taryn Simon and pushes out beyond the edge somewhere. For example, I find some of Phillips' work much more eerie and disconcerting than even Cohen's war rooms or psychological labs - the Before and After rooms, or the consulting chairs or the liposuction equipment, the books of breast samples or the treatment room that looks for all the world like a coroner's morgue with mood lighting.





The whole "chairs" series is also fascinating - not just for the repetitiveness of the chairs themselves, but for the details of the consulting rooms - everything from the decor of a bad dental office to playboy motif to something that looks like the theatre set of a cheap 1960's production of Charlie's Aunt.


This is a great look at a subject that isn't just confined to Beverly Hill's anymore - you could probably find any of these offices in the good old prairie city of Edmonton. I hope it gets plenty of exposure.

A couple of squares

Or rather a couple or so.

Here are a few from my first experiments with the square format - you might call them the start of Traces 2.

I've only got two or three rolls back (and some of those frames were just used to check the old camera was still working and focussed okay...).


I also just found that this city of about a million now has nowhere left that process C41 neg film - at least in sizes above 35mm. So I now have to send the neg film out to Vancouver by mail - jeesh. At least you can still buy the stuff for now.

Anyway. These were the first two or three I found interesting and I'm now waiting for the next three or four rolls to come back. Mind you, it's still not exactly going out and photographing weather, with the -28c to -35c temperatures and wind chills often doing down to below -40c due to last into next week some time... oh well.

"Well, it looks like truth?"

("Machinen 3440, 2003" by Thomas Ruff)

I've just started looking at Michael Abrams' fascinating and thoughtfully book Strange and Singular which explores the vernacular photograph and the snapshot (which I want to write about soon - hopefully after I have had a chance to talk to Michael). As an archivist/curator and as a photographer, such images have always fascinated me - although in recent years I have certainly become more interested in them.

In this vein, I've also been looking at the information about a current exhibit at the International Centre for Photography - Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art.


("Abdul Aziz holding a photograph of his brother, Mula Abdul Hakim, 1997" from the series "The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan" by Fazal Sheikh)


There was a good little review in the NY Times about it a while back headlined "Well, it looks like truth?"

...The archive of the title is less a thing than a concept, an immersive environment: the sum total of documentary images circulating in the culture, on the street, in the media, and finally in what is called the collective memory, the “Where were you when you heard about the World Trade Center?” factor.

Photography, with its extensions in film, video and the digital realm, is the main vehicle for these images. The time was, we thought of photographs as recorders of reality. Now we know they largely invent reality. At one stage or another, whether in shooting, developing, editing or placement, the pictures are manipulated, which means that we are manipulated. We are so used to this that we don’t see it; it’s just a fact of life.

Art, which is in the business of questioning facts, takes manipulation as a subject of investigation. And certain contemporary photographers do so by diving deep into the archive to explore its mechanics and to carve their own clarifying archives from it...

The second, far less well-known work that opens the show is a 1987 silk-screen piece by Robert Morris that does what the Warhol does but in a deadlier way. It too is based on an archival image, a 1945 photograph of the corpse of a woman taken in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Although such pictures initially circulated in the popular press, they were soon set aside in an ethically fraught image bank of 20th-century horrors. As if acknowledging prohibitions, Mr. Morris has half-obscured the woman’s figure with old-masterish strokes of paint and encased it, like a relic, in a thick black frame swelling with body parts and weapons in relief...

("Floh: Bathers in Sea, 2000" by Tacita Dean)

Other artists present randomness as the archive’s logic. The casual snapshots that make up Tacita Dean’s salon-style “Floh” may look like a natural grouping. In fact they are all found pictures that the artist, acting as a curator, has sorted into a semblance of unity.

And from the ICP info on the Exhibition:

No single definition can convey the complexities of a concept like the archive. The standard view evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts. Against this we have another view of the archival impulse as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images. It is this latter formulation that has engaged the attention of so many contemporary artists. Archive Fever explores the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and interrogated archival structures and materials. The principal vehicles of these artistic practices—photography and film—are also preeminent forms of archival material, and artists have used them in a variety of ways. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by unusual cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. In spite of the diversity of subject matter, these works are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

("The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993-1996" by Zoe Leonard)


I'm still personally exploring all these things, both with my own work and with the archives and vernacular photographs I come into contact with - all these things intrigue me - fiction, truth, memory, appearances, memento, history, identity..

(Oh, and there's also a big thick book of the show coming out: Archive Fever from Steidl)


("Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990" by Felix Gonzalez-Torres)

Jacob Carter

I came across Jacob Carter's work at BLDGBLOG.

He has a number of series - among others: River Thames; Wilderness Series, Canada; 1940 Landscape Series; Utopian Visions.

"The Wilderness Series are a collection of photos taken in remote parts of Canada, where there is little human habitation. Only vital services can be found spread across the surrounding country, from rail lines carrying freight to the rare but vital gas station. I have focused in particular on the parallels between the natural, untouched surroundings and the elements of human intervention that become greatly apparent when seen in such a context.



The photographs were created using a combination of both digital and filmic techniques: Photographed using film that expired in the 1970s which is then digitally restored and manipulated to restore appropriate details...

All technologies and inventions have written within their lifespan the certainty of being rendered obsolete by improvement. Technology is in a state of unceasing change.

The fabric of cities stand as testament to the unrelenting development by man upon once open land. Layer upon layer of dense building and rebuilding; the constant urge to improve upon or change the surrounding environment has given rise to vivid cityscapes. Empty wharfs, unused power stations and other now derelict buildings of industry stand as the ruins and remains of once cutting edge technologies.

I believe a similar parallel exists in the world of photography. A catalogue of photographic processes and techniques now cast aside by progress stands testament to this...

The most recent work I have created is the result of a long interest in the aesthetic of early photographic methods, in particular colour postcards from the 19th century. I have attempted to synthesis the particular colours, textures and tones that have become synonymous with a more primitive era of photography.

The techniques are the result of much research, experimenting with methods such as Gum Bichromate and salt-printing, as well as using varnishes. The resulting images were created using specifically chosen expired film stock (expiry date 1970!) and then perfecting the images digitally."