Iconic Red Army Reichstag Photo Faked

I don't know if Der Spiegel was having a slow news day or they are merely employing bad headline writers (at least they didn't use a "!"), but their article about Red Army photogrpaher Yevgeny Khaldei makes it sound like the retouching of the famous Reichstag photo to remove looted watches as well as add smoke is fresh news.

Whereas the photograph in question is a standard illustration in works about war photogrpahy and propaganda or about the long practice of manipulating photographs - I remember reading about it in one of those old 1970's Time Life books that was either about photogrpahy or WWII (Khaldei also brought his own supersized Soviet flag with him - sewn together by his uncle... just in case). But then again, perhaps Spiegel only just figured it out.




In fact, what is at the root of the story is that there is a current exhibition about Khaldei at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. Which in itself shouyld be worth a view if you happen to be in the neighbourhood.




Interestingly, I recall reading somewhere that Khaldei said he had been inspired by Joe Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima flag raising photograph - which is self has been embroiled in controversy (unfairly imo) almost from the moment it was made.

BTW, Khaldei was a former TASS press photographer who, despite photographing the Red Army after their grinding advance on Berlin, was actually a photographer/Lieutenant in the Soviet Navy. After the war, despite his 15 minutes of fame, he didn't fare too well as a Jew in Stalin's Soviet Union and he was never acknowledged as the photographer who took this picture until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"As the Soviet army marches through a devastated Budapest he sees a couple wandering about with yellow Jewish stars on their clothing. Approaching them he first snaps a photo; he is after all a photographer first. Then uttering a prayer in Hebrew he tears off their yellow stars and tells them that the fascists have been beaten. (Bram Goodwin)

His work is certainly well worth looking at.

Way too much good stuff...

(Sophie Calle)

I started off trying to synthesize all this into one post, but after a few minutes I realised there wasn't much point... so here's a list of several interesting posts I came across in the last few days:

● A rare post from the always excellent A Space In Between -

A Practice Without Center: the Work of Sophie Calle

● A little while back someone asked me what had happed to Charlotte Cotton's Tip Of The Tongue - well, she moved from New York to LACMA on the West Coast it it has been reborn as WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES. The current essay is an interesting one about photobooks by Darius Himes.

● The - at times nicely acerbic blog - You Call This Photogrpahy has a very worthwhile interview with Liz Kuball



● Then William Greiner has a show up in New York at the Klompching Gallery in New York



(William Greiner)

● Finally, Colin Pantall links to a fairly in-depth Q&A with Sally Mann and Stephen Cantor, director of the film What Remains - a film I would very much like to see.


(Sally Mann)

Susan Silas

Some interesting work by Susan Silas came my way recently.

I am particularly taken by Helmbrecht's Walk, 1998 - 2003:

Helmbrechts walk, is a visual representation of the act of walking through a landscape marked by the historical specificity of the forced march of 580 Jewish women prisoners at the end of the Second World War. This book is a document of that endeavor - walking for 22 days and 225 miles in Germany and the Czech Republic on the fifty third anniversary of those events. A historically accurate reconstruction of the march route was possible with the help of the German trial transcript of Alois Dörr and historical maps housed in the New York Public Library.

Her two bird projects are also somewhat intriguing - yard bird and bleeding bird. As well as Re-unifications 2001


Each print couples an image from the Olympic Stadium, in what was once West Berlin with an image from the Jewish Cemetery at Weißensee, once in East Berlin.


She also has an extract from the Meditations accompanying Helmbrecht's Walk:

In a meeting with the scholar Dora Apel who was working on a book about artists born after the conclusion of the war who have made work about the Holocaust, these excursions into Manhattan from suburbia with various Hungarian immigrants - some of whom could barely speak English -came up. She too had seen Dr. Zhivago in her teens. Given the number of times I had seen the film back then it came as a surprise to me to discover that I could only remember one scene in the film with any clarity. It is the scene in which the young girl, played by Rita Tushingham, is asked by her father’s half -brother , played by Alec Guiness, “How did you come to be lost?” It is the scene that opens and closes the film.. And she replies “I was walking with my father (.....) and he let go of my hand. He let go of my hand! And I was lost.” This scene was also the only scene that my scholar friend Dora remembered...

... In 1945, Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and later his Minister of Armaments, was tried by the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, along with numerous high-ranking Nazi officials. Unlike most of the others, who were found guilty and sentenced to death, the urbane, handsome, charming and self-serving Speer was sentenced to only twenty years in prison.

Spandau prison was located in Berlin and was administered by the four occupying powers: the British, the French, the Soviets and the Americans. In the summer of 1947 the Americans gave the prisoners (all German war criminals) permission to garden the exterior space at Spandau - then described as “a 6000 square meter wilderness”. This wilderness was later described by one American colonel as “Speer’s Garden of Eden”.

Speer had laid out a path in the garden he created. It began as an exercise path but in September of 1954 he decided to think of his exercise rounds as a walk from Berlin to his home in Heidelberg. “I had worked it out - if I did thirty circuits of the path I had laid out in the garden, that would be seven kilometers a day. I asked Hess, who sat and watched me, if he would mark down each time that I passed him, so that I wouldn’t lose count. He had a marvelous idea. He gave me thirty peas and said, ‘Put these in one pocket and move one to the other pocket each round. That will do it’. It was a more imaginative goal than just completing the circuit thirty times as I had been doing. That was successful, so I kept on going across the mountains to Italy, and finally decided to see how far I could get. After preparing for the walks by studying maps, travelogues, and art history books, I focused imaginatively on the differences in the landscapes, the rivers, the flowers, plants, trees and rocks. In the cities I came through, I thought of churches, museums, great buildings and works of art.” He determined what he thought to be the shortest route around the world at 40,000 kilometers and so the goal became a “Walk Around the World”.

September 29, 1966 was the last day Speer spent walking in the garden. He was released from Spandau the next day - having served 19 years in prison. In the twelve years since he had begun he had walked a distance of 31,936 kilometers. At midnight on his last night at Spandau he had sent a close friend the following message: “Please pick me up thirty-five kilometers south of Guadalajara, Mexico.”

The next day I saw him on television. I was thirteen years old.

No Middle Distance

Interestingly, I got a number of comments on one phrase in Tony Ray Jones' notes to himself from the last post and what did he mean by that?:

· NO MIDDLE DISTANCE

Well, among other things, I don't actually know what he meant, but for me it says a couple of things (mainly fairly obvious...).

I often write these kinds of lists to myself when I'm working on a project to remind myself to cover certain areas, to make sure I don't forget the "brilliant" ideas about the work that come to me while I'm doing something else. But more than anything, they are often about things I know I'm not doing. You get in a sort of groove, find something that seems to be working - a subject, a way of seeing, a way of working - but then you start to get a sort of tunnel vision about it. And you realise you are missing other, not seeing them things, not catching opportunities. And so the list is a little stone in your shoe reminding you that while the groove you are in might be good, you need to keep paying attention to other things as well, and be open to what else may be there.

It seems to me there is some of this in Ray Jone's list. And on the point of NO MIDDLE DISTANCE, most of the comments seemed to take it as an injunction to get closer. But to me, it works both ways - move further back as well. Cartier Bresson was the master of the middle distance in many ways. In Tony Ray Jones work I can see him embracing that, but probably wanting to move himself away from it, in part because the middle distance is what he most easily falls into (and is very good at) when he puts the camera to his eye.

Move in closer... or step back further away - that's what I think he's reminding himself to do. As I said, fairly obvious.

We English

I came across Simon Robert's new project We English a little while back and was reminded about it in Colin Pantall's Blog the other day. After producing a book about contemporary Russia called Motherland a couple of years ago, Robert's has decided to turn his view inwards and to look at his own people and place:

"We English is a photographic journal of life in England in 2008, specifically documenting landscapes where groups of people congregate for a common purpose and shared experience. It’s about what people do in their spare time, their leisure pursuits and pastimes and how people derive meaning and identity from these activities. It’s also about people’s relationship with their environment, whether their immediate surroundings are urban, rural or anything in between. There is no such thing as a definitive set of images that encapsulate Englishness. We English is about social landscapes but it is not about social or political analysis. It does not seek to define but simply to represent.

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

The project will extend, and reflect upon, a history of documentary photographic projects and the variety of approaches that British photographers have utilised to capture the lives of diverse communities across the country and explore issues surrounding national identity and the constantly shifting notion of Englishness.

The long and rich tradition of British photographers documenting their homeland, some of which could be seen in the recent exhibition at Tate Britain ‘How We Are - Photographing Britain,’ has seen work produced by the likes of Humphrey Spender, Bill Brandt, Tony Ray Jones, Ingrid Pollard, Martin Parr, John Davies and Jem Southam to name a few. However, the past decade has seen relatively little work produced by British photographers.

Engaging with literal, physical landscapes is a way of engaging with social and cultural landscapes. Since landscape has long been used as a commodity, an aesthetic amenity that is there to be consumed, it makes sense to use leisure activities, no matter how banal they might appear, as a way into an exploration of England’s shifting cultural and aesthetic identity...

We English will yield contemporary visions of my country that recognise the narrowness of long-held mental images of England and explore the ambiguities and complexities of our place within the world around us in a manner that amplifies and extends meaning."

He also has a blog which I think will be noting his progress, as well as a section on his site where people can make suggestions for the project.




BTW, Motherland is an interesting collection of work and well worth looking at.



Finally, the post in We English that I was reminded of this week was one where Roberts talks about Tony Ray Jones, a photographer whose career was cut far too short. Among other things, he posted some images of Ray Jones' notebooks when he was working on his own project on the English. A few useful reminders from a page titled APPROACH:

· BE MORE AGGRESSIVE

· GET MORE INVOLVED (TALK TO PEOPLE)

· STAY WITH THE SUBJECT MATTER (BE PATIENT)

· TAKE SIMPLER PICTURES

· SEE IF EVERYTHING IN BACKGROUND RELATES TO SUBJECT MATTER

· VARY COMPOSITIONS AND ANGLES MORE

· BE MORE AWARE OF COMPOSITION

· DON’T TAKE BORING PICTURES

· GET IN CLOSER (USE 50mm LESS)

· WATCH CAMERA SHAKE (shoot 250sec or above)

· DON’T SHOOT TOO MUCH

· NOT ALL AT EYE LEVEL

· NO MIDDLE DISTANCE

good ku Pictures attempt flow

Occasionally those odd gobbledygook spam emails you get with a string of apparently random (and frequently bizarre) words actually come close to making a bit of sense.




I received this one yesterday and it came out like a sort of spam haiku, or one of the lost teachings of Lao Tzu (or at least Caine)

"good ku Pictures attempt flow

feel grasshopper certain become lock radio impossibility trouble seven cause board crowd hill"

Coincidentally, just after receiving that, I came across the website A Spam A Day which takes these spam emails and has fun illustrating them with a cartoon...


(© 2008 özi)

And in the meantime here's some more stuff from Yamamoto Masao whose good ku pictures do indeed attempt flow...

Matthieu Gafsou

I recently came across Matthieu Gafsou website and there is a lot there that I like.




Unfortunately my French is so bad that I can't comment more about what he says about his projects, but I'm drawn to the clean spareness of how he sees, as well as his subject.







I love the little series of beach shelters - on the one hand, the Mediterranean seems terribly like the English Chanel, with the Brits on the beach with little windbreaks whatever the weather. On the other hand it reminds me of the beach passages in Alexandria from one of my favourite series of books Birds of Passage and The Alexandria Semaphore by Robert Sole.

on site magazine

on site is a great magazine - published in Canada and having culture · urbanism · art · architecture as it's subtitle.

I believe I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have an article in the current issue, but that's not what this post is about.

The magazine is pretty much a labour of love, and out of that comes a very good magazine. Although it's published in Canada, it is very international in flavour and as well as having some good articles, it is also packed with interesting photography.

The last couple of issues, for example, have had articles on the erasure of Erich Honechker's Palast der Republik in what was East Germany; surprisingly cool architectural posters; contemporary Chinese architectural culture (which, from my browsing the web is subject of much current photography); a private house which also doubles as a private photography gallery; Roman Fountains; urban gardens and landscapes; a funky new foot-bridge (named for Simone de Beavoir) across the Seine in Paris; a strange but intriguing conceptual book/artwork and plenty more.

(Stephanie White)

Now, the reason I bring all this up is that the magazine can do with all the subscribers it can get... I say this, not because I have an article in it (I don't get a penny for it); but because they produce an excellent magazine on a shoestring (it is basically ad free as well, which is refreshing) and if - as happened recently - they lose an important chunk of funding, a regular subscriber base makes a lot of difference.

So, just a small prod - if it sounds like a magazine you might enjoy maybe take out a subscription. You can sign up on the website (which I'll admit, is a bit basic) - you could even order the current issue if you really want to read my few pages (email them if you have any trouble navigating)... although you have probably seen most of it here if you are a regular visitor :-).


--- end of public service announcement ---

(Markku Rainer Peltonen)

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)