Public Commissions - or the lack thereof...

(Bas Princen)

I saw a link on Hippolyte Bayard the other day about Bas Princen and Vittore Fossati being commissioned to photograph the changes in the landscape of Northern Italy along the construction of the Bologna-Milan high speed railway.

I find it interesting that certain places - especially it seems France and Italy - have a strong practice of commissioning photographers to "document" regions in their countries (and I use "document" in it's broadest and loosest sense, after Walker Evans' "working in the documentary style").

(Vittore Fossati)

Sometimes it is a regional government or development body, town or city councils, or the likes of the national railway which commissions the work. Sometimes it is a regional art body or museum which does so. Occasionally an enlightened Corporation.

This isn't to be equated with the work done by tourist agencies or promotional photography or, in the US, by the likes of the HABS/HAER project - which, while historically important is more often than not deadly boring photographically and is probably as close to "pure documentary" as you can get in this area. No, these projects are the regions or places in question as seen from the creative point of view of photographers, commissioned particularly because of the their individual style, vision and approach - for want of a better word, "art photographers".


(Vittore Fossati)

As a result there are some wonderful projects and in almost all cases, books, which show the changing landscape and development of regions and towns of Italy or France, the changes wrought by the development of Autostrada through agricultural areas or the routing of high speed trains. Urbanisation. The growth or decline of coastal regions and ports. Insights from a dozen different photographers of the industrial areas of Venice, or of the town of Dunkerque as seen by Eggleston and so on.

All this with photographers ranging from William Eggleston to Gabrielle Basilico to Stephen Shore, Geoffrey James, Bas Princen, John Davies, Lewis Baltz, John Gossage, Axel Hutte, Olivo Barbieri, Toshio Shabita, Gosbert Adler and many more - often pairing up local photographers with those bringing and outsiders view.


(Gabriele Basilico)

Now I'm not sure about countries like Germany (?) or Spain - I haven't come across so many examples - and certainly in Britain there was only a brief short spate of this which seems to have died out a good few years ago (though strangely enough there has been a periodic longitudinal documenting of Beirut). But in N. America - considering the rate of social and urban change and the vast amount of creative resources here, I can really think of little on a similar scale in the last 25 or 30 years or so. And yet this wasn't always the case - especially when you look back to the 19th and early 20th century (and even through to the likes of the FSA with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and the rest of that crew).

So, aside from the obvious - politics - why is it I wonder that other places don't seem to feel the need to commission similar work and learn more about their own back yards? Somehow there seems to be, among other things, a sort of devaluing of photography - that now we are in the realm of the ubiquitous digital camera, we no longer need to actually commission individual photographers to present their point of view - we can just harvest what we need in the future from local newspapers or from flickr or such.

Though in part I also think it has something to do with the conflation of time and history and there being a sense that the pace and nature of our "progress" no longer requires this kind of studied documentation. Which, in the end, is something I think we will regret - the lack of photography whose intent was to show a view of such places as they are now.

(John Gossage)

Ryan McGinley's new show - American Apparel without the clothes?

(Ryan McGinley)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks there's an awful lot of hot air (and not much else) surrounding Ryan McGinley's current show, along with the work itself.

Conscientious has written a rare critical comment on the work - and manages to hit it spot on. Along with some general points about how the show is being marketed, he gets it just right when he suggests that McGinley's work here is pretty much an American Apparel ad minus the clothing. There's really not to much more to it than that.

In which vein, here's an interesting bit of news from The Onion about American Apparel (maybe they could do a piece on McGinley...?):

14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid

LOS ANGELES—Acting on information gathered from billboards, alternative weeklies, and Internet banner ads, an FBI strike team liberated 14 dazed, sallow, and undernourished American Apparel models in a raid on the controversial organization's downtown Los Angeles compound early Monday.

"There were girls lying everywhere—draped over furniture, sprawled spread-eagled in the corner, and huddled close like animals," FBI Special Agent Curtis Froman, who oversaw the raid, said at a press conference. "Many of them had been given nothing more than a pair of tube socks or men's briefs to wear."... more

So What's Good Out There?

I must say, it's been a while since I came across photography that really gripped me - that got me thinking or re-thinking about things - whether it be the subject matter or the way of seeing.

Work that makes me stop in my tracks for a while and perhaps re-assess how I approach my own work. Photographs that stick in my mind while I'm doing other things. Something you end up obsessing over for a while - you just want to soak in as much of it as you can of it. You hunt down books or shows or articles about the work. Perhaps you end up following the tail of a loose thread from it in some new direction and through that discovering other related work. Something that has you meditating on it for a time.




Certainly there's been plenty of good work I've come across recently. Especially work by some of my favourites photographers and artists. I'm sure we all enjoy seeing a new project or exhibit or book by someone whose work we admire - Frieldander, Basilico, Sugimoto, Gossage or whoever it might be. But most of the time that is quite comfortable - certainly I'm rarely disappointed when the new book arrives in the mail. The work is more often than not excellent - but it's a bit like a new recording by your favourite cellist or bandoneon player (Daniel Binelli), or a new novel by a favourite author - it's new and fresh, but you recognise some of the themes and the style and the technique like old familiar friends. Absorbing them is a pleasure and often thought provoking, but for a viewer familiar with the artist, it's rarely entirely radical or groundbreaking or leads to a fault line - a shift of viewpoint - at least in terms of personal experience, though not necessarily in the medium as a whole.



In that vein, due to the work I've been doing recently, I've probably been getting more, visually, from handling and dealing with old photographs than anything. On the whole, these aren't "important" work at all - they aren't vintage Strands or Steichens or Eva - on the whole they are vernacular photographs: landscapes, families, street scenes, farms, businesses and so on.

And yet there's something about working for some time with such photographs - handling and looking in detail at an albumen print from the 1880's or 90's or an even early Talbotype. A slightly blurry photograph of a small surviving(but for how long?) herd of buffalo on the prairie. Two young women in white dresses wading in a swimming pool in the river - one close to falling over, laughing. A serious, elderly farmer in the depth of winter in heavy coat and cap beside a horse drawn farm sled, his bright young son perched on the seat behind him. Prints from the early 20th Century before World War I, or even a POW's ID photograph when he were processed into Stalag V111B, having been captured in the Dieppe Raid.

Despite his misgivings about photographs and art in the age of mechanical reproduction, I find that Walter Benjamin's authentic aura is powerfully evident in these images. I find they also puncture the viewer in some small way as Barthes seemed to understand it - occasionally "that accident which pricks, (but also bruises me, is poignant to me), ...for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole---and also a caste of the dice" and more frequently the punctum whereby in the photograph "There is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die....every photograph is a catastrophe which has already occurred.".

there i was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother...looking for the truth of the face i had loved. and i found it...

lost in the depths of the winter garden photograph, my mother's face is vague, faded. in a first impulse, i exclaimed: "there she is! she's really there! at last, there she is!" now i claim to know--why, in what she consists. i want to outline the face loved by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation, i want to enlarge the is face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth. i believe that by enlarging the detail, i will finally reach my mother's very being.

This isn't a call for novelty in the least, but rather a call for depth, for vision among other things. So I keep looking for contemporary work - work made with intention - which is able to convey some of these things as well.

Focusing

Things are still a bit crazy, but hopefully I will get back to regularly scheduled programming this week.

That aside, as soon as I saw this I had to borrow it from Hippolyte Bayard's bilingual blog.

No one ever really gives the truth about why those of us who insist on lugging around do so - oh we'll give you all the stuff about the big negative, beautiful tone, the monitor sized ground glass, Stephen Shore will talk about it slowing down his vision, Joel Sternfeld about how people respond positively to the big wooden camera etc etc, but here's the real reason...

Plonk down your tripod anywhere with a beautiful wooden Deardorf on the top and you have to beat the ladies off with a stick...

And I really must get myself one of those natty striped blazers this summer :-)


(Photo - Emily V. Clarkson, Focusing

"Last Friday at tho Society of Amateur Photographers the slides of the Buffalo Camera Club and the Detroit Lantera Slide Club were shown, together with the. work of a few members of tho society, including excellent figure studies by Miss Miss Emily V. Clarkson". New York Times, Feb 28th 1892)

Instant Nostalgia

I quite like this (especially as I spent half the day trying to match the tones in reproductions of some 19th Century albumen prints and tintypes...) - it's a bit of fun and some of the conversions can actually look surprisingly good (although if you do too many, the same scratches start to look a bit repetitious).

It also allows for a sort of instant Masao Yamamoto. Print them to different sizes, spill a bit of coffee on some of them, keep them in your back pocket for a few days and there you have it - you just need a nice roll of watercolour paper and a glue stick :-)



I'm sure there must be a photoshop filter that does this? (actually, if there is one that does the job as good as these let me know). In the meantime, get a bowler or a top hat, an old wooden tripod and have fun playing at being a "real" photographer.

Oh - if you haven't figured it out, just hit browse, upload a file (or go to the url box) then hit the blue box underneath with the Japanese writing and then wait for it to upload and process (and goodness knows what rights you may be giving away in the process - ah well).

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

I came across the work of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin a number of years ago in the UK with what must have been one of their fairly early projects, but I hadn't kept track of what they were doing since then.

The other day I saw they have a new book/project out called Fig.


Broomberg & Chanarin are a curious pair in a way (though probably no more "curious" than many of the photographers I know who seem to have quite the oddest backgrounds...):

Neither artist has a had conventional training in photography – Broomberg holding a degree in Sociology and the History of Art and Chanarin one in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence – and, unfettered by conventional photographic teaching, they seem to exhibit a freedom in their research process, their photographic style and their political and social engagement unusual in the world of photography. They, for me, are refreshing oddities in a field too often limited by conceptual and stylistic formulae. There is also the question of their working relationship and the undoubted benefits this has brought to their practice.

Fig. could also be seen as either an antidote or compliment to contemporary artists’ fascination with the (re)appropriation of the, often archival, document. Rather than starting with an archival document and subverting its original intention (in the style of Sultan and Mandel’s Evidence for instance) or creating images by mimicking an archival aesthetic or mode (Sputnik by Joan Fontcuberta is a good example of this), Broomberg and Chanarin create new archive of
documents that, when positioned alongside text, vigorously question their own authenticity – the text being constantly in tension with the images and visa-versa. This marks Fig. out as a departure from both the conventions of documentary photography and their own practice to date. - Gordon MacDonald

And I must say I do also like the name of their website - Chopped Liver - which has lots of their work, essays and so on.



Their book Fig. probably takes a little bit of readjustment for the viewer in terms of getting their head around where it is heading. In fact the thing it reminded me most of was a sort of photographic version of one of Max Sebald's books - the sudden shift in space from Imperial China and the Opium Wars to a Seaman's Reading Room on the Norfolk Coast, or the entomological collection of an eccentric Englishman to the containment of Jewish prisoners in a 19th Century defence-work during the Holocaust. Similarly, Broomberg and Chanarin take us from Ditchling Beacon and the Spanish Armada to the Genocide in Rwanda by way of a geologists meticulously catalogued and classified soft porn collection, accidentally accessioned by a museum along with his fossils to a fig leaf stripped from it's branch by the blast from a suicide bomb in Tel-Aviv to the strangely mis-labeled negative nudes titled - "Sussex Pond"

At a glance, this book of photographs and texts, with its quirky leaps from one theme to another, may appear to be a darkly humorous trawl through some outer reaches of oddity: fake mermen, obsessive egg collectors, big-game hunters, and those who numerically classify their collections of soft porn. The eccentricities of its arrangement are matched by those of many of its subjects.
Yet the misapplication of control and classification systems regularly produce graver consequences that run through the book, a deeper pulse below the whimsy and amusement: in it, animal bodies are measured and displayed, human bodies—living and dead—are similarly dealt with, whether they are female models of different colourations (photographed for the enjoyment of Sunday Telegraph readers), or giants or the remains of ‘natives’. Also, at the extreme, that depictions, especially in photographs, may be used to complement the type of classification— ‘Tutsi’, for example, written in a passport—that brings death on its subject. In conversation, Broomberg and Chanarin have said that, despite many horrific photographs of genocide, racialised mass killing still continues, and this book points to the other side of that remark—that because of depiction, it continues. - Julian Stallabrass

All in all, quite fascinating work and generally following a trjectory that's quite different from a lot of contemporary photogrpahy.

Foam Magazine

(Clare Richardson)

It's been a crazy week here with one thing or another - I'm in the midst of working on helping to put up a museum exhibit and it's very time intensive... so a bit slower on the posts right now

I came across Foam Magazine a while back when I was actually looking at the website of its "parent" the Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. Looking through a couple of editions online, it looked pretty interesting, but a little too expensive to subscribe to sight-unseen.


(1,236 sheets of negatives from the 1980s, thrown away on 19 August 2004 - Hans Aarsman)

But a few weeks ago, at the local newsstand (we have an excellent one here with lots of international magazines) I saw a copy of the winter edition, flicked through it, went away, had an espresso, convinced myself it was worth the pennies, and went back and got it.

(Masao Yamamoto)

It's a great photo art magazine. Each issue has a broad theme - this one being "Searching". As well as major articles on the likes of Stephen Shore; Hans Aarsman and Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin (along with several others), it also has good book reviews and smaller articles on different topics - such a section where a selection of people such as Gerhard Steidl or Geoff Dyer talk about images that are "On My Mind". There is also work from current exhibits at the Fotografiemuseum as well as interviews.

(Bart Julius Peters)

All in all it's an excellent magazine for anyone that enjoys the sort of photogrpahy that I often feature on here. It's also well printed.




Looking at their website, I also see that the Spring 2008 edition is out (with the theme "Meanwhile") and looks equally good - articles on Daniëlle van Ark; Risaku Suzuki Clare Richardson; Bart Julius Peters and Masao Yamamoto among others. I'll be keeping an eye out at The Front Page for when it arrives.


(Daniëlle van Ark)

Chris McCaw - Sunburn

I came across Chris McCaw's work last year sometime, and then again a week or two ago. And I must say, I still like them - isn't always the case when I come back to work I initially liked.

The concept in a way is very simple and like all the best ideas was stumbled across by accident:

"I have always been interested in the process of photography- light sensitive materials, chemical reactions, the unexpected. In my case, during camping trip in 2003, I mixed an all night time exposure of the sky, friends, a campfire, and a bottle of whiskey. What I ended up with was a new way of thinking about the process of photography, and a new body of work.

I woke up the next morning, around 10am, far after the sun had risen. I had pointed my camera due east, right into the sun. Assuming the shot was a complete loss, I stumbled out of my sleeping bag and closed the shutter. Later that day while downloading that day’s exposed film, I could feel one of the sheets had a tear in it. Completely confused, I was tempted to throw the sheet away. Luckily I kept it and discovered what had happened a week later in the darkroom.

The camera, with it’s lens focused at infinity with the aperture wide open to capture the movement of the nights stars became something like a magnifying glass. Much like my early experiments with small scale pyromania using mom’s magnifying glass focusing the sun on dry dead leafs, the camera’s lens was burning the film inside the camera.

But this is just part of it. Another physical aspect that occurs to light sensitive emulsions when subjected to intense exposure to light is something called true solariztion-image reversal through extreme over-exposure. Not to be mistaken with the darkroom printing technique called the sebbatie effect, of re-exposing paper to light while the print is developing, also commonly called solarized prints." (from View Camera magazine).

Part of what I like about them is the unpredictability of the end result. Also the simplicity of it - basically a lens and a paper negative. And then there is the physicality - it's not just the alchemic, hidden reaction of light and silver, but the burnt imprint - the physical trace of the sun on the image.


And then there is the fact that I find them simply quite beautiful

Of course there is also the impression that they can be quite fun to make:

"Not only is the resulting image a representation of the subject photographed, but part of the subject (the sun) is an active participant in the printmaking. This is just the beginning of this new body of work. I plan to continue to investigate the possibilities of this method of printmaking. My favorite part is watching smoke come out of the camera during the exposure. Thank you for looking."

Finally, I thought I saw something the other day about this work winning a prize, but I couldn't track it down?

Wolfschanze

Once upon a time during my ill spent youth in the late 1970's I was on maneuvers in West Germany north east of Lüneburg Heath and close to the Inner German Border and was sent to find our Brigade Headquarters (a mobile collection of Landrovers and Armoured Personel Carriers with a great mass of aerials).

Wending deeper and deeper into the German forest, aiming for a map reference, we eventually and suddenly came upon an old abandoned wooden guard hut with a broken barrier. Driving through we realised there were a few more decrepit huts and then large concrete structures loomed out of the forest gloom. Overgrown with moss, they had earth on their roofs - which were six, eight or even ten feet thick - deep with forest mulch and from which there were now growing quite sturdy trees.




Some were damaged and cracked, with heavy riveted steel doors hanging off their brackets and recessed machine gun slits with ferns growing out of them; while others still appeared to be in surprisingly good shape.

The British 7th Armoured Brigade Headquarters had set itself up amongst the remains of one of Hitler's command bunkers.



After delivering our dispatch and before leaving we took a look around - there were still odd remnants of their previous occupiers, broken chairs, some moldy wartime newspapers, yellowed notices on noticeboards, rusting Wermacht cooking equipment. But it was that first experience of encountering the bunkers in the dark green of the forest that has stayed in my memory.



Now, it wasn't the Wolfshanze - Hitler's Wolf's Lair - which was in Eastern Prussia - now Poland, although it was a substantial complex. But when I came across these photographs of the Wolfshanze by Swiss photographer Tonatiuh Ambrosetti, it certainly brought back that fascinating - if somewhat formidable experience. (via wood_s_lot)

(BTW, Ambrosetti also has some other good work on his site, such as Rocs2, Memento and War Games)

Stephen Gill correction

Just a quick note - the url for Stephen Gill's book and print sales hadn't taken in the post below. It's corrected now so you can actually find it....

Stephen Gill - prints

Now here's an opportunity I wish I could take advantage of right now... I'd guess that if you have the spare cash around (even if you need to eat Kraft Dinner for a week :-( ), this is an opportunity not to miss.

I've talked about Stephen Gill a couple of times and really quite like a lot of his work. And considering how quickly his books go out of print, I'm not sure how long most of these will stay on the shelf:

New Special Edition Stephen Gill Prints available

These single collectors prints are limited to 50 of each and are from selected project series including - Billboards, Hackney Wick, Hackney Flowers, Archaeology in Reverse and Warming down.

The prints are signed and numbered and printed to the highest quality on 12” x 10” Fuji Crystal c type paper.
The images will be shipped in April / May 2008.

(Available here - you can also get his books here at the same site)

Finally, do note that those prices are in Pounds (£) Sterling, so they aren't quite as cheap as they look across this side of the Pond at first glance, but I'd still say pretty good value.

The world's oldest photograph - 1790?

A photograph (well, actually a Photogenic Drawing - basically an early photogram) just know as "Leaf" is coming up for auction at Sotheby's and may possibly be the oldest photographic representation in exisitence.

It had previously been attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the founding fathers of photography. Fox Talbot made a number of other leaf prints and this one was though to have been made by him in about 1839.

But new research suggest it might well have been made as early as 1790 by Thomas Wedgwood, James Watt or Humphry Davy, who were all early experimenters in photography.

"...Sotheby's says research by a leading photo expert suggests otherwise - that several early photo experimenters could be the authors, including Thomas Wedgwood, James Watt and Humphry Davy, who worked in the medium decades earlier. If that theory is true, it means the photo could have been made as early as 1790..

All six photogenic drawings were contained in an album belonging to Henry Bright of England whose family had a close social connection to the Wedgwoods, Watt and Davy, adding further support to the theory that "Leaf" could be by one of them, Sotheby's said...

The work of Wedgwood, of Wedgwood china fame, Watt and Davy was documented in their day and cited in standard histories of photography, but no examples have ever been identified, Sotheby's said... (more at the CBC)

You can check out the auction at Sotheby's - item #43 (you need to log in to see the full details) - and get your wallet out on April 7th. Maybe you could own a bit of photographic history.... (oh and take a look at some of the other work in the auction while you are there).

There is a fairly extensive essay in the online catalogue:

"In 1984, Sotheby's in London sold a small group of anonymous photogenic drawings that were originally part of an album assembled by one Henry Bright. The photogenic drawing offered here was among that group, and after the Sotheby's sale, it was re-attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot. Dr. Larry Schaaf, the Talbot authority, has questioned that attribution, and in the essay below, explores other possibilities of authorship, including Thomas Wedgwood or members of his circle.

It may seem surprising that photogenic drawings are such very rare survivors. William Henry Fox Talbot published the full details of how to make them by February 1839. While fraught with uncertainties, the process was relatively simple, used readily available materials and was widely published in the popular journals in the months following Talbot's disclosure. Public demonstrations were given and kits of materials advertised in the newspapers. One must assume that many hundreds of amateurs, scientists, artists, and others were fascinated by getting nature to draw her own image. Following Talbot's published instructions, an experimenter had only to take a sheet of writing paper, soak it in a weak solution of common table salt, and then brush it with silver nitrate. Light sensitive silver chloride would be formed within the fibers of paper. This sensitive paper was then placed in the sun under a leaf or other object and within minutes the energy of the light would reduce the silver chloride to tiny particles of silver, appearing red or purple. The image was a negative, of course, for where the object blocked the light, nothing happened, but where the light reached around or through the object, the paper darkened. At this stage, it could be examined by candlelight, or fixed to make it more resistant to the sun's rays.

Yet virtually none of what we know must have been produced seems to have survived.(1) One explanation for this loss might lie in human nature, for the succeeding generations that have proven to be dismissive of great-aunt Susan's amateur watercolors would probably have thought even less of her sun drawings. Perhaps more importantly, most of these would have remained sensitive to light and those most treasured and admired, paradoxically, probably got the most viewing and were consequently destroyed. The largest known body of surviving photogenic drawings was done by Henry Talbot himself. Yet this leaf, and its companions, do not fit into the corpus of known work by Talbot and his circle. That leads us to contemplate just how it came to be created - and why it has survived."...(Sotheby's)

It still sounds a bit of a long shot, but not impossible by any means. It would certainly be nice for the Brits to have been the ones to have fixed this particular shadow first :-)

Bert Teunissen - Domestic Landscapes?

Bert Teunissen and his mega-project Domestic Landscapes (on his website and published by Aperture) seems to be all the rage right now (and good on 'im for it), but his work really doesn't do it for me.

He examines domestic environment - which are apparently dissapearing - along with those who inhabit them. But I don't find the photographs terribly interesting or convincing - especially when you line up the hundreds he has taken. Individually, or two or three at a time, possibly. The style is particularly off-putting - rather than reflecting the work of the Dutch Old Masters (as someone like Elger Esser successfully does), they seem much more closely related to the somewhat forced style of early colour news magazines. The use of colour in particular seems fairly incidental - rather like Robert Polidori's interiors. In fact these resemble many of Polidori's interiors in style, but with people dropped in and the use of colour is essentially cosmetic.

"Over the past decade, Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen has documented hundreds of old European homes. These are rudimentary yet cultured settings aglow with a warm, timeless atmosphere; spaces in which a primary interior feature is that of natural light. Old World details crowd the frame of each image: ornate wallpaper, ancestral portraits, home-cured hams hung from exposed beams, and decorative dishware proudly displayed on mantels. The homes pictured here were built before the World Wars, before electricity was a standard feature, a time when sunlight played a pivotal role in the conception of architecture. Teunissen renders these last vestiges of old Europe with a palette and sensitivity to light that recall Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt." (Aperture)

Overall he seems to have produced what is effectively a typology of lonely old men and women of Europe (thanks SG) - a sort of conceptual nostalgia. And that's where I think the problem lies for me - this is a very conceptual work - and yet it is a topic which would work far better without being bound by a theory - swap concept for context and focus on the subjects and it might have worked better - a lot better.




The other problem with the concept, that apparently informs and guides this work, is that it embraces a whole lot more things and ideas than the work shows in its limited range - so the pictures generally tend to fall short when compared to the words. By comparison, reading John Berger's "Into Their Labours" trilogy (Pig Earth, Once In Europa and Lilac and Flag) conveys similar ideas with far more rigour and vision and much greater reflection on the "european peasant" and the migration from countryside to city (among several other themes).

"Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done." John Szarkowski

In looking at these pictures, I compare them to the work of something like The Day-to-Day Life of ALbert Hastings, or the (horribly titled) For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness - both of which seem to embody an honest affection for the subjects of their work rather than the pinned butterfly collection of Domestic Landscapes. There's a bigger gap than we might generally think between detachment or a lack of sentimentality - and unemotional distance. And that, ultimately, is what comes across to me in this work - that cool distance.

Transformer Houses

A few years ago I came across this work by Canadian photographer and artist Robin Collyer and then I came across a few the other day on the web.

These aren't houses, but rather they are disguised electrical substations, complete with windows, curtains and a bit of lawn and landscaping.



This is one of those things you can really do only once and that you luck into and just come across. I just like the idea of tracking these places down, as well as exploring the ideas behind the mind of a Utility deciding to do this, and how it replicated the feel of homes in different neighbourhoods.

"During the 1950s and 1960s, the Hydro-Electric public utilities in the metropolitan region of Toronto built structures known as 'Bungalow-Style Substations.' These stations, which have transforming and switching functions, were constructed in a manner that mimics the style and character of the different neighborhoods... there are about 100 of these structures located on residential streets in the central and the suburban parts of the greater Toronto area."

All in all rather neat.