Deutsche Börse Photography Prize - Esko Männikkö

Well, Esko Männikkö was the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize last week.




There's an interesting little piece in the Guardian on Männikkö and the prize:

Who said never work with animals or children? Last night the most sought-after prize in fine art photography was handed out, and the £30,000 cheque went to a man whose winning exhibition included close-up portraits of horses...

First, excuse the bad pun but I think the judges backed a good runner. The winner, Finnish Esko Männikkö, has called himself a "photographer of fish, dogs, and old men". The horsey shots in his winning exhibition - which are a million miles from pet portraiture or equine machismo - are a refreshing break from the usual array of human portraiture, reportage and landscape subjects. Instead, his guiding principle is a simple sense of capturing unusual natural beauty - whether animal, vegetable, mineral or human - wherever it arises...

What's so fascinating is the way Männikkö immerses himself with his subjects - human or otherwise - in remote parts of Finland. I was lucky enough to go there recently, and I too discovered a nationality still in thrall to nature, folk customs, and in some cases a tendency towards melancholy, yet often this is concealed beneath Nordic propriety. What Männikkö's pictures do is completely rub off that modern, social patina and uncover the deeper character that lurks beneath. His portraits of people are just as magnificent as those of wild, untamed beasts...

The Ecology of the Novel - traces etc

(Venezia 1939/tim atherton)

A couple of days ago I came across an interesting essay about my own work - traces, Peripheral Vision and Immersive Landscapes.

"...Atherton’s collection of Traces seems pretty much inspired by Calvino’s remarks from the Invisible City (Le città Invisibili, Torino, Einaudi, 1972), that may even count as a very interesting meditation on hybrid ecologies based on the merge of literary references and sensory experience of landscapes. Namely, the bare concept of Le città invisibili entails open reference to cities that are there even tho they are not perceivable by sight. Actually, Atherton’s Traces exert potential of landscapes referring to previous or potential actions. The camera can help guessing or foreshadowing past or future events on the basis of clues, leftovers, affordances ready to be triggered by somebody who’s actually out of the picture..."more

Some months ago, Anatole Pierre Fuksas contacted me to find a bit more about my work and said it fitted into a project he was working on - a book called The Ecology of the Novel.

Fuksas teaches in the Department of Linguistics & Comparative Literature at the Università degli Studi di Cassino in Italy and one of his areas of research focuses on the relationship between literature and reality - the ecology of the novel:

"...the novel does not imitate a given reality through language, as claimed by approaches based on aristotelian mimesis. Likewise, it does not establish a more or less consistent fictional world intersecting an actual one more or less consistently, as theories based on modern epistemology offer. Indeed, the novel is not the mimetic reflex or the dialectic alter ego of a given reality, since ‘reality’ and the novel are different outcomes of the same process. They both answer questions like when, why, what ‘to do’, implicitly providing given definitions of ‘doing’. That is, they both rely on an integrated network featuring perception and action, reason and emotion in order to plan meaningful actions. Since the novel and that special ‘thing’ humans call ‘reality’ are built in the very same way, to keep regarding novels as imitations or virtual reflects of a given reality definitely sounds sort of naïf."

He is writing a blog as a day-by-day work journal documenting the development of his research plan on "The Ecology of the Novel". As part of that he has also investigated how certain artworks do a similar thing visually and what he calls an ecologically artistic approach to landscape for part of which he examined my own work.


(Venezia/Trieste 1939/tim atherton)

Update #2: Friedlander's Olmsted

The other day I wrote about the current exhibition and book of Olmsted's parks and landscapes by Lee Friedlander.

Well the book - Lee Friedlander: Photographs Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes - arrived yesterday. I only had time for a fairly brief browse, but it's a gorgeous book. The pictures live up to expectations and the printing and paper is just superb - the images are very "photographic" with a wonderful depth. And the overall design and feel of the book results in a very satisfying experience for the reader (viewer?) - at least for this one anyway. Everything down to the colour and feel of the linen cover and the sort of tipped-in print on the front comes together so well.

Update #1: Odd Photographers

Just a quick update on yesterday's post on the Metropolitan Police's hunt for odd photographers.

Here's the script text from their radio spot"

Female Voice over:
How d’you tell the difference between someone just video-ing crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack?

How can you tell if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or if they’re planning to make a bomb?

What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously?

How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person, or a terrorist?


Male voice over:
The answer is, you don’t have to.

If you call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321, the specialist officers you speak to will analyse the information. They’ll decide if and how to follow it up.

You don’t have to be sure.

If you suspect it, report it.

Call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321 in confidence.

(you can listen to it here)

This is just bad in so many way's I don't even know where to start (leaving aside the implied sexism of the actual sound version)

Has the Met been taking lessons from the Stasi?

I wonder, has the Metropolitan Police (London U.K.) been taking lessons about how to run an informer society from the old East German Stasi (after all, those 90,000 ex-Stasi agents must have something to offer to someone)? Below is a jpeg of the Met's (along with the City of London Police and the British Transport Police) latest "Counter Terrorism" campaign (they are also targeting people being suspicious in their home or using cell-phones...hmm).


You can link to the pdf here for a better look (as well as click on the images for a slightly bigger view):

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS EVERY DAY. WHAT IF ONE OF THEM SEEMS ODD

Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that we need to know. Let experienced Officers decide what action to take.

Funnily enough, I just came across a copy of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier today in the library at work so he was on my mind as I looked at this. I wonder what old George would have thought...?


Peter Jones on the Streetphoto list brought the campaign to my attention and John Brownlow came up with a couple of suggestions about what their next few posters may say. I added one of my own as well. Funnily (and sadly) enough, they don't seem that far-fetched. In all honesty (and I write as someone who has dealt with violent terrorists first hand - no armchair critic here) I have to ask - what on earth were they thinking when they came up with this?


All I can say is that 90% of the photographers that I know - obscure or well known - are a little "odd"...



(Oh, and if any Met Public Affairs wonks are reading this, the use of the poster comes under both satire and commentary fair use under all relevant Copyright legislation...)

"Muybridge's Horse" - Rob Winger

A spellbinding work of poetry, Muybridge's Horse is something of an epic poem, taking in it's scope the whole of Eadweard Muybridge's life and work.

It is a first publication for poet Rob Winger and although it falters in a few places, it's good (and at times excellent) sections more than make up for it.


In form, it certainly owes a lot to Michael Ondaatje's majestic The Collected Work's of Billy The Kid, but in this case, Winger certainly makes the form his own. He draws on all sorts of sources about Muybridge's work and life, as well as from further afield (there is a good little quote from Diane Arbus that every photogrpaher would do well to remember: "The more specific you are, the more general it will be")

the split second in walking when both of your feet are airborne
the distance between a target and the knowledge of a gunshot
water in your throat
the space of decline when a masseuse’s finger slips from a knotted muscle
the time between balance and impact with the earth
my fingers submerged in water, in a dive
the moment, in a train lavatory, when a sideways sway has thrown a spray of urine
away from the bowl’s mouth
any sporting ball suspended in the air
the heat of mouths before lips contact
the time between an engine and the sound of it
the stretching of a knuckle before it cracks
a drill changing its tonality as it contacts a sheet of maple
whole snowflakes as they meet your tongue
a minute hand jumping to its next hour before the clock can chime
the stretched pressure of a guitar string before sound
the darkness that happens before any object collides with your face
the second of ease when the piano you are pushing has built up enough force to glide
any form of jumping
waves

a bird in flight

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

reading the Plaza of Antigua

All across the frame, people have refused capture.Their bodies, brief streaks of light across the market’s noise.Bodies arriving at the paper’s surface from the hills as though they’d dropped from the background - clothing filling the frame with contrast.

Eadweard uses their blurs.Some have stood, perhaps, for hours, under a certain shadow, and (seeing Eadweard place the wet plate into the camera’s box) have jumped from permanence.Their bodies are ghosts, transparent, building’s bones seeping through grey skeletons, half-exposed on glass.

This curve of colour is a woman, arguing over the price of beans.This round whirlwind of white light, a boy spinning in place.This silver banner, a man who’s just exited the frame to walk ten miles back to his village, up the side of the volcano, toward sky.Two specific legs support a burst of light, where a figure has bent to the ground in a perfect semicircle, painting the foreground with waves.The dance of a young woman in a white dress paints a halo behind a fixed, staring farmer.Angelus novus.

Eadweard’s finger must’ve traced the gradual background curve of Volcano Agua against the air before framing it in the dry photograph’s top half.He must have positioned the Palace of the Captains General intentionally, so its highest corner just grazes the slope in the background, a meeting of territories.Volcanic throat against stone’s collarbone.


Like Eadweard, I’m attempting to fix blurs, to translate motion into language.Like Eadweard, I want permanence, want things named.I lean into the paper’s grain, watching, smell its dust lifting from the book, sunlight falling through the window into the centennial clouds of moving bodies there.This image, traveling the entire North American mainland, over a hundred years of distance, to find me here, in the particular light of a Canadian afternoon.

Frame around the image, marking possibilities. Circles of light against the nails.

In the picture, round baskets perforate the cloth geometry, balanced on heads, giant nails digging into dirt.Every stall is covered by the tilt of a square umbrella, each reflecting the sun in a white shine.The squares float like prints drifting in the development bath, edges curled from the acids’ work.Your eye can hop from one to another without dipping into the river of bodies. Or, you can circle, move from umbrella to umbrella, around the square. Slip, if you like, from the surface into liquid and lose your boundaries.

(The most important time is happening between categories.)

P.S. I like the fact that if you flick quickly through the pages you get one of Muybridge's horses galloping along in the bottom corner - a nice little bit of whimsy in the book design.

Admin Note - emails, replies etc etc...

(the photographer's studio - Josef Sudek)


Just a quick note, I've received quite a few emails recently related to this blog. Some just saying "hi" or thanks for the blog, others with questions, others asking me to look at the senders work and so on.

My apologies if I haven't replied. As well as being a bit under the weather lately, I've also been getting going on a new "proper" day-job as a curator/(photo) archivist, so it's been a little bit crazy and disorganized at times.

I do hope to get around to all the messages though. So if I haven't replied, you aren't being ignored... :-)

A Ramble in Olmsted's Parks

I'm waiting eagerly for Lee Friedlander's new book Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes to arrive, but in the meantime I came across a piece in the NY Times (with slideshow) on Friedlander's photographs. There is also an exhibit of the work currently showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(From the NY Times) "In the early 1980s the photographer Lee Friedlander, best known for his relentless exploration of the American vernacular — nowhere street scenes, spectral television sets, caustic self-portraits — began to develop his own interest in Olmsted, photographing Central Park as part of a growing body of landscape work. In 1988, commissioned by the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, Mr. Friedlander started digging even more deeply into Olmsted, photographing his parks around the country for six years and then continuing to shoot them even after the project ended.

Beginning Jan. 22, 40 of the black-and-white photographs that have resulted from that fascination, most never before on display, will go on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition “Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks,” keyed to the 150th anniversary this year of the design of Central Park.

Jeff L. Rosenheim, a curator of photographs at the Met, said that he was interested in showing a selection of the works — the first solo exhibition Mr. Friedlander, 73, has had at the museum — because he saw a deep affinity between Olmsted and Mr. Friedlander, in part having to do with their mutual belief in the rewards of paying attention and looking at the world....

“Friedlander is someone who reminds me of the pleasure of seeing itself,” Mr. Rosenheim said. “And it’s richly evoked in this particular series of photographs.”

“The work is interesting because I think he’s seeing these places as kinds of living works of art,” he added. “And I think he is interested in Olmsted in that Olmsted was the engineer of a transformation of a particular way of looking at the American dream, of American imagery of nature.”

In many ways like Olmsted’s work, he said, Mr. Friedlander’s “really is a sight for sore eyes, for eyes inured to advertising and all the other images that inundate us.” (Olmsted wrote that “a great object of all that is done in a park, of all the art of a park, is to influence the mind of men through their imagination.”)...

“(Friedlander) likes to get behind and among,” he said. “He likes to make that picture plane just completely dense with both meaning and stuff. He doesn’t shy away from any of what you might call bold and intense complexities.”...

“The subject itself,” he wrote of landscape, “is simply perfect, and no matter how well you manage as a photographer, you will only ever give a hint as to how good the real thing is. We photographers don’t really make anything: we peck at the world and try to find something curious or wild or beautiful that might fit into what the medium of photography can hold.”

“The photographs of these places,” he added, “are a hint, just a blink at a piece of the real world. At most, an aphrodisiac.”"

5B4 also has a good review of the book as well, where he says in part:

"This project in particular is interesting because it came at a time when Lee was experimenting with different camera formats and frame ratios. Within the span of the 89 images in Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes he shifts from his Leica, to a Noblex pivoting lens panoramic camera, to his Hasselblad Superwide, and the results are noticeable beyond the obvious frame shape.

For the past two decades, Lee’s world - as he describes it - has become more chaotic and claustrophobic. Where as before he would occasionally use thickets and bushes to obscure his subjects, of late he has fought his way into them; looking out from their prickly interior. Jagged lines and straw-like hash marks of undergrowth break background architecture and formations into mirages that the eye has to fight to see. His book The Desert Seen was a starting point towards a new aggressive attitude towards the viewer‘s eyes with its representation of the high-key Arizona midday sun made even brighter by Lee’s fill-flash. It makes one’s eyes vibrate across the page with such an intensity eye strain seems to be a distinct possibility if the entire book is attempted in one sitting. Lee seems to allude to this aggressive stance in his introduction, “I think of these desert pictures together as one long sentence, not especially one written by Proust but maybe one that resembles one written by Patrick White, or, if I may presume even further, like a long solo, like one played by Paul Gonzalez with Duke Ellington’s Band, doing “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” the Newport 1956 version. More probably, it’s just like a long scratch of a fingernail on a blackboard.”...

The book is beautifully realized with the book-making “dream team” of Katy Homans on the design and typesetting, Thomas Palmer doing the separations, and Meridian Printing, under the supervision of Daniel Frank, putting the ink to paper. The lush tri-tone reproductions are nearly perfect and the ochre book cloth and large reproduction tipped into the cover lend an appropriate tone of classicism to the book’s exterior."

The Sublime

(John Ward - Gordale Scar)

John Ward's painting of Gordale Scar is a wonderful example of the Romantic (big "R") understanding and experience of the sublime - which really has very little "romantic" (small "r") about it - on the contrary, it is often a quite dark, powerful, sometimes violent, sometimes ugly - growing from formlessness rather than form, evoking uncertainty and frequently overwhelming.

(John Gossage)

Unfortunately, if you google "sublime photography" you are overwhelmed with some of the most depressingly trite kind of pretty and superficial photography and which mostly seems to have not a hint of the sublime about it - indeed quite the opposite. This came to mind because I've just started reading a book called Turner and the Sublime that I brought back two summers ago from the cottage and never got round to reading, along with an equally interesting and related book - Alexander and Robert John Cozens.

(J.M.W. Turner)

In many ways, photography and the sublime are a very good fit and yet that doesn't often seem to be widely recognised. To quote from the Wikipedia on the Sublime (mainly because it's handy and easy to cut and paste from - and in this case does a reasonable job, even if it's very brief):

(Risaku Suzuki)

Edmund Burke argued that Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.

(Walker Evans)

And Jean-François Lyotard who is perhaps the other, contemporary bookend, to Burke's beginning argued that the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an aporia (yes, I had to look it up too) in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world. Of course, between the two there is an immense body of work - both artistic and creative which is sublime in in and of itself, as well as writings about the place of the sublime in aesthetics.

(Julia Fullerton Batten)

Slightly tongue in cheek, this photograph (above) presents a concisely sublime experience (listed recently as the Greatest Art Photograph Ever, because it manages to combine more current art photography cliches in one picture than any other work - a teenage girl, pretending to be dead, with a stuffed animal, and models, in a liminal space, at the edge of the city, at night - in fact the whole series on art photography cliches is pretty good)

Of course, you could spend a lifetime writing and reading about the Sublime.

(Finally for those who mutter against big photographs, Ward's Gordale Scar is 12ft x 14ft...)

(Jitka Hanzlova)

Boris Mikhahilov's panoramics - "At Dusk"

An absorbing set of panoramic photos by Boris Mikhailov from his book At Dusk. (via John Brownlow). The work was also featured in the V&A exhibition - Twighlight:

"1941. I was three years old and I can still remember the bombings, the howling sirens and the searchlights in the wonderful, dark-blue sky. Blue, blue, light-blue…' Boris Mikhailov

Boris Mikhailov made his series At Dusk in his home city of Kharkov following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In it, he uses twilight to record a society in transition and to evoke childhood memories.

Mikhailov proposes a monochrome visual language to deal with this new social reality. The photographs are tinted blue, both to make them appear 'old' and to refer to the 'blue hour' of twilight.

At Dusk also refers to Ukraine's deprivation during the Second World War, which the artist experienced as a child. Few photographs of this period survive, and there is little photographic history of Ukraine during the Soviet period, so Mikhailov proposes his own constructed history as a substitute.

At Dusk is therefore a hybrid between a documentary and a conceptual project, recording but also staging a time that might be both 1941 and 1993, or neither."

I often have a hard time "getting" Mikahilov and yet I never come away from his work feeling dissatisfied. Eventually I always come back for more.

The Supermarket Checkout

(Brian Ulrich)

It was only yesterday that I realised how interesting the queue (line-up) for the supermarket can be. Even if you are in a hurry, there's nothing you can do about it - so why not enjoy it. I realised that I wasn't just zoning out as I stood there with my trolley (cart) full of stuff, but I was catching views of the people in my own queue as well as the adjacent one, and listening to the the criss cross of the various conversations going on (at least cellphones are good for something).

(Brian Ulrich)

It was like turning the dial on the radio through the shortwave band - faint voices coming and going, then one stronger for a while and then fading (I remember how clearly I could get Radio Moscow when I lived in the Arctic...).

In the adjacent line-up was a young, handsome, but scruffily dressed man who seemed to be from somewhere in South America. On his cellphone he was busy apparently talking to a member of his band as they were due to fly into the airport. Switching from Spanish to English and back mid sentence, he made arrangements to meet them, talked about the gig and then- more excitedly about their future plans. (The young woman behind him was staring intently at both his long flowing hair - as he talked on the phone with a great deal of animation - as well as his behind...) .

(Brian Ulrich)

Behind me was a huge man with close cropped hair in jeans and a leather jacket using his Bluetooth. He had a boxer's nose and barked with apparent authority over the ear-piece in what sounded like one of the Slavic languages. I was convinced he was perhaps Chechen mafia - and when he paid for his couple of items (celery sticks and carrot juice?), he peeled off $20 from a huge wad from his inside pocket. But as I hauled my own load back to the car, I saw him helping a little old lady pull her cart through the half melting slushy snow and help her load it into her car.


(Brian Ulrich)

Then there was an elderly man with a weathered face and a plaid woolen shirt under his overcoat. One basket, small or single portions of everything, 1l of milk and a couple of cans of dog food.

Finally there was a very diginified elderly Afghan man wearing his pakul hat and talking with his young grandson as they waited. He was switching in and out of English as they talked - about hockey, going sledding and school lessons. (I struck up a short conversation with him - his grandson was the same age as my son - and it turned out he was a scholar and a historian).


(Brian Ulrich)

No photographs, but - surprisingly for me - time not wasted. And images held and formed in my mind, if not on film. And besides, Brian Ulrich has already done it so well.


(All pictures - Brian Ulrich)

Ultima Thule - Stephen Vaughan

I've followed Stephen Vaughan's work for a while (I should write about his peat bog graves sometime).

I recently came across news of has current project which is currently being shown at the Impressions Gallery in Bradford - Ultima Thule

When I was sixteen, I spent two months that summer in Iceland - mainly in the uplands, fjells and glaciers. Not only is it a place I would love to return to again, but it also still a place that has a hold on a part of my imagination.


Ultima Thule explores not only the landscape of Iceland, but he also aims to explore the connections between geology, archaeology, history, and memory.

In Ultima Thule, the persistent human urge to explore unknown territory is considered within the context of complex geological processes, over vast periods of time, and the formation of the Earth itself. Vaughan's photographs are richly detailed, monumental representations of the landscape surface – yet they also transpose this factual evidence into broader, metaphorical themes. The potential for discovery or transformation from beneath the surface or beyond the threshold is a central theme in the making of his photographs.

Ultima Thule was initially inspired by the exploratory voyage of Pytheas, in 325 BC, from the Greek colonies of the Mediterranean to the far north-Atlantic – beyond the edges of the known world. Made in Iceland (thought to be the location of Pytheas' Thule), Vaughan's photographs traverse territory that is analogous to the contemporary frontiers of inter-planetary exploration – showing Earthly landscapes that are the nearest equivalent to the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. The photographs in Ultima Thule – of volcanic fissures, shifting tectonic plates, vast glaciers and steaming, sulphurous pools – connect Pytheas' ancient voyage of discovery to contemporary inter-planetary exploration...

Islands are places apart where Europe is absent.
Are they? The world still is, the present, the lie,
And the narrow bridge over a torrent
Or the small farm under a crag
Are natural settings for the jealousies of a province.

W.H. Auden - "Journey to Iceland"