Photographers - time to get a real job?

(all photographs Simon Norfolk)



Two interesting articles recently in light of the current economic climate: one specifically about photography and photographers; and the other about the art market and artists in general.

One, from the World Press Photo online magazine "Enter", is on Marketing is by renowned and successful photographer Simon Norfolk.

He starts off:

"In the few weeks between being asked to write this piece and me actually sitting down to do it, the international financial system has dissolved and the key banks nationalized.

All the money I had squirrelled away to pay my future taxes and something for Mr and Mrs Norfolk’s old age has disappeared in a bizarre Icelandic banking collapse. So my prognosis about the economy over the next 5-10 years is not very optimistic, I’m afraid.

I gave up trying to make a living from editorial a few years ago, instead selling my work as limited edition fine art prints through galleries in London, New York and Los Angeles.

I still work for magazines - most of what goes on the gallery wall starts out as a magazine commission - but I see magazine fees as start-up capital..."

But then continues:

"...So my predictions for the future? More "name" photographers will be cashing in their reputations to teach "masterclasses" to wealthy orthodontists.

So-called "principled" photographers will be cozying up to Russian oligarchs and third-world billionaires. None of us will be saying "no" to wedding photography or lucrative teaching posts which sell to young students the rarely-realized dream that they’ll one day have jobs as photographers.

My advice? Get re-skilled. Keep your photographic aspirations but try to get a trade like film editing, web-design or accounting.

Soon we’ll all be amateur photographers with real money-making jobs on the side that we don’t tell our colleagues about. We need to get over the snobbery attached to that..."

The second article is from the NY Times: "The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!". Holland Cotter writes:

"Last year Artforum magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art monthlies, felt as fat as a phone book, with issues running to 500 pages, most of them gallery advertisements. The current issue has just over 200 pages. Many ads have disappeared.

The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more...

...The diminishment has not, God knows, been quantitative. Never has there been so much product. Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means...

...And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

...It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again...

...But there will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. What will artists do with this?

Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jumpship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

Right. Exactly. Crazy"

What has surprised me is how negatively these and a few other similar articles seem to have been received in certain quarters. There have been many - "oh well - take them for what they are worth" sort of responses - mainly from those who probably have most to lose in these scenarios. Not the photographers and artists, but those who cling tight fistedly to their coat tails - the over hyped galleries and gallerists, the critics and commentators whose job it is to feed the hype (and for which they and their egos are disproportionately well compensated - the NY Times article delves further into this, which I didn't quote). And of course the art school profs who have been happily churning out Struth/Gursky/Wall/Crewdson etc. clones. As Cotter points out, this is the ideal opportunity for the art schools to become more creative and open minded in how they educate their students, though whether they are willing to grasp the opportunity is another matter.

The recession could effect photographers and artists positively in at least two of these ways (and probably more).

First it will no doubt weed out the dilettantes and uncommitted - not too much ego stroking going on when there's a living to be earned - as well as break the grip of the current narrow modes of distribution - something that's long overdue. It will also, hopefully, remove the myopic vision which decides what the current "subject" is and where exactly the centre of all this creativity is (goodbye Chelsea) - there is no centre any more.

Secondly, it will free up photographers from having to try and work "to order", trying to ensure their vision and concepts fit with what the gurus of the portfolio reviews and competition juries and micro gallerists mandate. Instead of worrying if their work is buyable, photographers will be freed up to make more work that's more exploratory and experimental. New avenues for exploration, creativity and discovery can open up. New, yet long extant, artists and practices may well be noticed now. Whole new ways of operating will be freed to be developed and explored. Many more constraints will be removed than will cosy benefits be lost. Photographers will actually be far more free to explore unknown and unimagined paths then they have for a long time. The inmates will be able to take over the asylum.

I've also noticed that some are optimistically - though cautiously - whispering of the possibility of a new WPA programme. I have no idea if it could ever actually happen - even under Mr. Obama - but done in the right way, what a great opportunity it could be. Imagine a modern day Rivera let loose in our corridors of power and influence... And then there's the Farm Security Administration - some of the very best American photography of the 20th Century came out of the FSA. What imaginative ways of creating the environment for producing similarly visionary work might come out of the next few years? The time and the circumstance are right - let's hope there's the will to find a way.

discovering things hitherto unseen

(Paul Graham)

"Writing is about discovering things

hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no

point to the process.". W.G. 'Max' Sebald

Regular reader will know I'm a big fan and avid reader of W. G. Sebald's books - especially for their relation to both photography and memory.

I found out the other day that the publisher Hamish Hamilton (John Updike, Zadie Smith, Simone de Beauvoir etc and of course W.G. Sebald ) has a very nice monthly - and free - literary journal, FiveDials, in pdf format. Almost half the latest issue is given over to articles about Sebald's work.

(Stephen Gill)

There's an especially interesting essay called The Collected "Maxims" (an intentional pun, as Sebald was not known by his first name, but as Max). This is a collection of Sebald's comments and sayings from the final fiction workshop he taught at the University of East Anglia (where he was a professor), only days before his unfortunate and untimely death in 2001.

"...In the literary world he was rapidly gaining renown: there had been the succès d’estime of his first three books, and then the publication of Austerlitz earlier that year. In the classroom – where David Lambert and I were two of sixteen students – Sebald was unassuming, almost shy, and asked that we call him Max. When discussing students’ work he was anecdotal and associative, more storyteller than technician. He had weary eyes that made it tempting to identify him with the melancholy narrators of his books, but he also had a gentle amiability and wry sense of humour. We were in his thrall. He died three days after the final class.".

What I find so interesting about the words that his students took away from the workshop is that a surprising amount of what he says could easily apply to photography - or at least the best and most interesting kind of photography. Something I also find in reading his books.

(Broomberg & Chanrin)

Here are a few selections. Just substitute photography/photographer/viewer for writing/writer/reader in most of them:

• By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.

• Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

• 'Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.

• Oddities are interesting.

• Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.

• I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

• If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.

• Every sentence taken by itself should mean something.

• Writing should not create the impression that the writer is trying to be ‘poetic’.

• Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.
  

• Don’t listen to anyone. Not us, either. It’s fatal.

(Alec Soth)

And finally the one I started off with:

• Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.
  

...otherwise there's no point to the process. Exactly. This is where so much supposedly good work seems to fall down. It's why Ryan McGinley is really a rather successful advertising photographer - but not much else. After all, who hasn't seen nubile young men or women frolicking about in slanted warm sunlight with sparkling dust motes? At least in their dreams and imagination. There's nothing "hitherto unseen" about it at all.

(John Gossage)


It's the same with a lot of contemporary "portrait" (for want of a better word) photography - deadpan young women; time wearied old couples sat at their kitchen tables; mentally challenged women on beaches. Most of it is pure style. There's no chance or opportunity for discovery at all. The same can be said of so much urban and suburban cityscape work. How many generic suburban photographs, with neat lawns, clipped hedges and vinyl siding are we going to see? There are some who have shown us things unseen or unnoticed in the modern suburbs and the city - and there are sure to be others who will go on to do the same. But again, it's become just style - with perhaps a cute added little hook (trees wrapped in sacking for winter or whatever it is). But it's not about the photographer or the viewer discovering something unseen. It's about following a formula - deadpan straight on, largish format, muted colours and a little hook or quirk. I could go on, but I'm sure it would just bore you and I know you can come up with plenty of examples yourself. Work that on first glance seem promising but then shows itself to be hollow and empty - despite complying with all the rules that means it will be picked up by those who matter (and unfortunately, it probably will be).

(Masao Yamamoto)

The photos here are just a small few from some of the photographers who do indeed seem to have discovered - or who allow us to discover - things hitherto unseen.

(Thomas Struth)

A warning for Valentine's Day - Never mess with young English Ladies...

Nothing to do with photography, but I came across these to videos a couple of days ago which I think are just great..

At first I thought they were modern comedic remakes in the manner of Harry Enfield's Mr. Cholmondley-Warner. Then I checked the British Pathe News archive catalogue and found out they really were made in 1933 and 1937 respectively

I love the image and style they present. And despite all the acrobatics you barely even see a knee. Miss May Whitley also uses her purse to good purpose.

I wouldn't be surprised if these to young ladies weren't parachuting into France with the SOE a few years later....

Ladies, now you know what to do when, "Please go away, I don't want to speak to you" doesn't work

Expiration Notice No. 1

The first edition of Expiration Notice is up and running - this is the online gallery for emerging photographers who aren't still wet behind the ears. And there's some good stuff:


Alan George - Immediate Vicinity:

John Darwell - Not Starting From Here:

David Wolf - Left Behind:

and George Georgiou - Hidden: Psychiatric Institutions in Kosovo and Serbia:

And as far as I know none of them save money by still getting their mums to do their laundry?

AMERICANSUBURB X

(Doug Rickard)

After a stint browsing the internet today I was starting to despair that as far as good photography is concerned, there is little to be found other than pictures of well dressed urban young women sat in office chairs/perched on the edge of an unmade bed/leaning against a window with a blurred green tree visible beyond it and all looking suitably bored (well, wouldn't you?). Or surveys of well lit and mildly colourful office corridors and their detritus - coffee cups, paper clips, fire buckets, fake potted plants. Or else "A Further Two Hundred Gas Stations of the Mid-West" (soon to be followed by "101 Disused Gas Station of Idaho") - gas stations are to art photography as lone disused barns are to readers of Popular Photography. Or softly lit, gently hued large format deadpan photographs of dwellers of the German suburbs. And as for finding intelligent writing or incisive focused thinking about photography I'd better get back to the library stacks.

And then I came across AMERICANSUBURB X by Doug Rickard - what a great site. Certainly it focuses in the broadest of ways on photography that is in some way to do with the suburban (and urban) condition - although considering that that's over 50% of the population (and over 80% if you add the urban population) of N. America I think there's plenty of room to manoeuvre.

AMERICANSUBURBX essentially seems to be a compendium of some of the best writing about (along with a lot of the best photography about) our suburban world here. Which in effect means that's some of the best writing and photogrpahy of the last 20+ years or so (in fact it delves much further into the past than 20 years, drawing on some of the roots that have fed so much of the good photography today). There are magazine and newspaper articles, essays - some independent, some drawn from particular books and monographs. There are also some very current articles and interviews. There are videos and goodness knows what else tucked away in it. If you wanted to get a feel for and understanding of this central aspect of contemporary photography you could do worse than ready through everything on this site.

Just a few examples and extracts (there are long lists if you go to the drop-down menus):


There's an interview with Walker Evans:

PAUL CUMMINGS: Let’s see, you started becoming interested in photography again after about 1928?

WALKER EVANS: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What kind of things did you photograph? What were you interested in doing with the camera at that point?

WALKER EVANS: I think I was photographing against the style of the time, against salon photography, against beauty photography, against art
photography.

PAUL CUMMINGS: The whole elaborate business –

WALKER EVANS: Yes. Even including Stieglitz. I was doing non-artistic and non- commercial work. I felt – and it’s true – I was on the right track. I sensed that I was turning new ground. At least I though I was mining a new vein, sort of instinctively knowing it but not in any other way aware of it....

(Walker Evans)


There's John Szarkowski's introduction to William Eggleston's Guide

"...One can say, to repeat, that in Eggleston's pictures form and content are indistinguishable, which seems to me true but also unsatisfactory because too permissive. The same thing can be said of any picture. The ambitious photographer, not satisfied by so tautological a success, seeks those pictures that have a visceral relation to his own self and his own privileged knowledge, those that belong to him by genetic right, in which form matches not only content but intent.

This suggests that the pictures reproduced here are no more interesting than the person who made them, and that their intelligence, wit, knowledge, and style reach no farther than that person's - which leads us away from the measurable relationships of art-historical science toward intuition, superstition, blood-knowledge, terror, and delight.

These pictures are fascinating partly because they contradict our expectations. We have been told so often of the bland, synthetic smoothness of exemplary American life, of its comfortable, vacant insentience, its extruded, stamped, and molded sameness, in a word its irredeemable dullness, that we have come half to believe it, and thus are startled and perhaps exhilarated to see these pictures of prototypically normal types on their familiar ground, grandchildren of Penrod, who seem to live surrounded by spirits, not all of them benign. The suggestible viewer might sense that these are subjects capable not only of the familiar modern vices (self-loathing, adaptability, dissembling, sanctimony, and license), but of the ancient ones (pride, parochial stubbornness, irrationality, selfishness, and lust). This could not be called progress, but it is interesting. Such speculations, however, even if not simple nonsense, presumably relate only toEggleston's pictures - patterns of random facts in the service of one imagination - not to the real world. A picture is after all only a picture, a concrete kind of fiction, not to be admitted as hard evidence or as the quantifiable data of social scientists.

As pictures, however, these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates for the experience they pretend to record, visual analogues for the quality of one life, collectively a paradigm of a private view, a view one would have thought ineffable, described here with clarity, fullness, and elegance.".

(William Eggleston)


There's an interview; "Lewis Baltz, Subjects and Objects of the New Technological Culture"

Q.
But in some ways digital technologies change the relationship between the real and the virtual, because we have a real virtual world now. We have virtual reality in which we can have another world different from the real one...

A.
I think the balance is tipping in favour of the virtual and away from the real. But as I said before, I think that that balance had already started to tip before digital technologies. Their presence now accelerates that. Not only the presence of the technologies but the availability of the technologies. Everyone now can work with some sort of digital procedure. People are on the Internet, people work with digital cameras. Almost everything now has that possibility, maybe even the necessity, of some kind of digital interface or intervention. So in that sense, the sense that it proliferates, that it's everywhere in society, I think that will yet further detach people from whatever 19th century idea they had about reality, the phenomenal world and their relation to it and in it. Whether that change is an improvement or we are entering a dangerous brave new world, it's really impossible to say. In any case, it is the reality, it's the world we are entering, it's the world we're already half into.

(Lewis Baltz)


There's an interview with Gary Winogrand

D: What do you look for?

W: I look at a photograph. What's going on? What's happening, photographically? If it's interesting, I try to understand why.

D: And how do you expect the viewer to respond to your photographs?

W: I have no expectations. None at all.

D: Well, what do you want to evoke?

W: I have no ideas on that subject. Two people could look at the same flowers and feel differently about them. Why not? I'm not making ads. I couldn't care less. Everybody's entitled to their own experience...

(Gary Winogrand)


There's Todd Hido's upcoming "Two Way Street"

"...In the context of this horribly mundane world of current contemporary photography, Todd's work stands apart from the pack by a wide gap. This gap is made up by the sledgehammer authenticity of Todd's vision, by a violent undercurrent of emotion that hits the viewer like a baseball bat clearing a drunken human path. I don't care about the reality, only the photographs matter and what they exist as - what they say - what they are - not what Todd is.

This is photography... as it should be. Giving a middle finger to genre, telling concept or categorization to kindly f-off, Todd has upped his ante with the new work and continues to be left to stand in his own space, defying classification... carving out his own path.

As it should be...."

(Todd Hido)


There's Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar (3 Steps to the Taryn Simon Experience)

"Step 1.

First look at Taryn Simon's photographs without any context, without any frame of reference and certainly without any text. To do this is to enter a fantastically bizarre world, a circus like freak show of sites, human things, animals and locations... a whizzing siren of color. Empty-yet-clear, distorted-yet-shaped scenes abound, alien-American-laboratory textures, sounds and surfaces. Without context the photographs are joyfully disturbing and fascinatingly covert... almost like entering secretly into a spy story as an invisible spectator only the spies are spying on you and the story is taking place with you at the center. Pardoxically, the images are disparate and unconnected but also connected and to a certain extent, cohesive. Like the work of Michele Abeles assorted puzzle pieces are there on the table, the fabric patchwork of "the quilt" seems to be stitched together. A story is asking you if it can be "told"... but the secret story is encrypted... the "code" is planted under the surface... everything is connected but somewhere down at the root..."

(Taryn Simon - CIA Headquaters from Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar )


And there is The Twighlight of Color Photography by By Dushko Petrovich from the Boston Globe

"...But as with each of our advances, something else is being lost. It is easy to think of the print and the digital image as the same thing, but they're actually very different. Even as cameras tout their ever-increasing megapixels, nearly everything we view is projected out at 72 dots per inch, the standard resolution of a monitor. The resulting pictures are back-lit, vivid, and very easy to scan, so we hardly notice how hard it is to look into them. Your eyes move side to side, and you can easily gather all the information, but if you linger for a minute - an actual minute - you'll notice that the screen doesn't quite accept your gaze. A printed photograph, however - even when small, or blurry - has a way of letting you in. The paper surface is less aggressive than the liquid crystal one, so your eyes can roam around. The brightness of the pixel has a price: The illusory space of the photo is subtly reduced, along with its invitation to wander - or simply rest - inside it.

Of course, the real space photographs take up is also reduced. Like most technology, the color print seemed ever so sleek . . . until we saw the upgrade. A laptop effortlessly holds what hundreds of shoe boxes could not; we now send 50 pictures with a click. Still, the actual third dimension is an important aspect of the supposedly 2D print; the physical contact establishes a certain intimacy. Who has not held a photograph and wept? Who hasn't felt their nostalgia settle for an instant on the thinness of a print? To hold a photo is to hold a person, or even a place, in your hand - a momentary illusion that has no parallel on a monitor...

...But just as the paperless format erases one kind of closeness, it can open entirely new realms of intimacy - the minute you hit "upload." While our stored photos are shy (you have to search for them) and a little vulnerable (they can all disappear with a hard drive), the ones we put on the Web are gregarious and immortal. Never before has the photo been so emphatically public, announcing our achievements and pleasures with a swiftness we never dreamed of. So even when these disseminated images come to haunt us, it's not in the manner of the print - which conjured private sentiments, like longing or regret - but with rather more civic feelings, like shame and embarrassment. Usually these unnerving photos are the ones other people have posted (and "tagged"), but what's really irksome is that other people are seeing them, and that these other people can even copy them and distribute them, if they so choose. The old idea of "destroy the negatives" sounds pretty quaint in a world of endlessly reproducible jpegs, as does the notion of asking to take someone's picture. We're all celebrities now! But it is the photographs, not their subjects, that are godlike in their movements...."

(A train upended by Westward-fleeing Greeks in 1923 in Turkey. Musee Albert Kahn)


and much much more...

The Excitement of Photographs

Maybe there are only some of us who "get" photography in this way while the rest of the world goes merry and oblivious on its way, but I still get excited when I encounter a pile of unknown photographs - especially those from another age.

A lady came into our Archive today looking for a home for two thick albums - one of photographs and the other of postcards.

They belonged to her great aunt and covered the life of some of the early Francophone settlers in the Canadian West from the late 19th to early 20th Century. The album of photographs - perhaps 100 - had many studio photographs, along with other snapshots.

The album of postcards (perhaps 200) had some commercial photographs - everything from Edmonton to New York to Montreal to Paris. It also had lots of personal photographs printed and sent on postcard paper. There all sorts of messages and stories on the backs, along with a few poems obviously - in combination - meant to woo some young lady.

The point for me (or at least one) was that looking through them I was full of excitiement and anticipation to see what the next page would reveal. Two young men photogrpahed in a studio set-up - palm treed landscape background, the pair of them sat at a small round table, whisky and cards in hand; or the strange faded hand colouring of postcards from 1915; or a personal photograph printed as a postcard of beautiful french farmhouse in Normandy; a family on a rustic picnic - again in France - children, adults, and some heavy duty cast iron cookware hanging over a fire - and many more.

Of course none are scanned yet (so a few images from elsewhwere for now) and there is intriguing work to come identifying people and places based on the basic information we have on the owner and her life. But encountering the traces and stories trapped in the image and text is like suddenly falling into the middle of a novel - one where I have no idea yet how it ends (or if it ends).

(images LoC)

"Old" new finds - Sebastian Lemm

I've been going over more closely all the blog based email I received over the last few months but didn't get a chance to look at properly. There a number from photographers and groups that highlight some very interesting photography.

One of those emails was from Sebastian Lemm about his various projects. I must say that this work really grabbed me (many would say, obviously so...). Lemm says about his work:

"...My work is informed by nature in a broad sense. Visually, I am fascinated by seemingly random structures in the natural environment and I see parallels to patterns or events in my own life. Taking a more wide-ranging definition of nature, I am attracted to subtleties of human interactions, the subconscious and physics’ theories about dimensions that are outside of our perception. Although these ideas may not be inherently obvious in my images, they do have a significant impact on my artistic process.

Apart from experiences in my own life, inspiration for my work comes from concepts of Romanticism especially those of Caspar David Friedrich, texts by Edmund Burke (about '‘Sublime and Beautiful’), Gilles Deleuze (‘Rhizome) and Roland Barthes ('Camera Lucida') among others."

Aside from the pain in the arse requirement to write "artist's statements" (isn't an artist's work his or her statement? Curators and Gallerists should be kicked in the behind daily to remind them of that one), I could easily apply about 75% of what he says to my immersive landscape work (among other projects). Just substitute Cozens for Friedrich and Derrida for Deleuze (although now I need to look at Rhizome again...) ...among others.

I'm especially drawn to schattenseite as well strata. I'm also very intrigued by subtraction (but if you are looking, don't ignore the other work - take a look through it). I find that the way he takes "natural" views and draws the viewer into them by emphasizing or distorting or unveiling the subject quite sublime, while the veiling or screening that occurs in many of the photographs also softens that sublimity tending it toward beauty in often unexpected ways. He certainly manages to take a traditionally Romantic subject and move it to a place somewhere beyond Modernism. Looking through different parts of his work and projects at times he manages to be all at once Romantic, Modern and at least one of the many postmodernisms (or to be pedantic, possibly more Derridian/deconstructivist than postmodern...).

I'm also convinced that these are pictures you really need to see up close, on a wall and experience (hopefully I'll have the chance one day). Certainly they work pretty well on a monitor, but I just want to be able to immerse myself in some of those strata or schattenseite pictures.

There is an insightful little interview with Lemm here. I like his down to earth and yet not anti-idealistic attitude where he says:

LO: Many artists want to become well known for their work. I understand this in terms of having more support to make your work and better venues to show it, but otherwise I sometimes think it’s not a good goal to have at all. What are your thoughts on this?

SL: Speaking for myself, the creation process is very addictive. The desire to create better work than before, to visualize and then realize new concepts and ideas—this is incredibly satisfying and this is what drives me. A show is an important payoff because it provides opportunities for exposure and feedback from people who are interested in your work. Being recognized through sales or in press is encouraging and essential not only for an artist's career, but also for the next steps in the work itself—to be frank, New York is an expensive place to live, and the creative process takes time, space, and materials. Although this type of “success” is relative and cannot be a primary goal in creating work, it is a reward I could not imagine wanting to live without.

I'm reminded a little of Fred Astaire: "You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees..." - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.

(all pictures: Sebastian Lemm)

Happy Obama Day

Crowd at Lincoln's second inauguration

Well, I guess an awful lot of the world is rather preoccupied today - what with it being my birthday Barack Obama's inauguration. I'm not sure if all those of you who live south of the 49th realise it, but Obama fever seems to be hitting Canadians almost as much as it is USAians. People up here are pretty excited about it all. So, not a lot of blah blah blah today - just have a great time everyone!

Inauguration of Mr. Lincoln

(Oh, just one more thing - I've just been thinking about getting a digital camera. Apart from a little family Canon Elph, I haven't ponied up the dosh for one yet... Been looking at the Canon G10 - and then I just happened to come across this from Mark Tucker Overheard in Ad Agency offices — from film to digital (and back?) - hmmm... So, any thoughts on the G10? Or should I just stick with my Phillips 8x10, couple of 4x5's and the trusty Ikoflex TLR? It's not like I don't use digital cameras for stuff - they're just not my own.)


(Photos: Library of Congress online collection)

Totenstill - Dirk Reinartz

Last year I mentioned Dirk Reinartz among a group of German Photographers. Reinartz died too young in 2004 at the age of 57. Wile he is probably most well known for his collaboration with Richard Serra, photographing Serra's sculptures, it was an eight year body of Reinartz' work that caught my attention.

I finally tracked down a library copy of his book Totenstill - or Deathly Still - as the English version is called (unfortunately out of print from Steidl). Reinartz spent eight years photographing the sites of 26 of the Nazi Concentration Camps spread across Europe.

I've seen this described as one of those projects where the locations of some event: battles, horrors, crimes etc. are photographed but, but nothing remains of the original event and we are invited to use our imagination to reconcile the (usually) ordinary scene with the extraordinary event.

While the book does have some such photographs, there are many more that are of what either remains or has been reconstructed of the concentration camp. More often than not we are given fragments of these. And every one of these fragments seems to resonate. There are the heather and birch tree lined paths of Bergen-Belsen and a portion of one of the many raised mounds that cover the ground - but he never gives us the didactic stone facing on their fronts with their "HIER RUHEN 5,000 TOTE. APRIL 1945".

The almost manor-house-like main building at Flossenberg, where the brilliant German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for his opposition to Hitler and his part in a the bomb plot to assassinate him.

There is a white tiled autopsy table.

Or the record room at Theresienstadt, with it's neat rows of index card filled pigeon-holes

And there are hooks. What are taken for ordinary hooks in walls - coat hooks, tool hooks - and indeed, some probably are just that. You don't notice them at first. On the edge of one picture here, the top of another here. And the realization comes, almost imperceptibly, that some are far more than just "ordinary" hooks. Such a mundane, everyday thing, almost unnoticed, yet a thing that can be imbued with such a sense of horror and disgust.

It is indeed a very "Still" book, but it is one in which the tension of dread and abhorrence gradually rises to the surface as the book proceeds. Yet the sense of stillness remains as a bass line.

Totenstill is also a book this isn't easily put down.

The Stasi Archives

In an old post I mentioned the archives of the Stasi, the former East German security service.

The archivist in me keeps coming across the odd article about them and I've managed to hunt out a few papers and books on the whole thing.

I also recently watched the brilliant movie "Das Leben der Anderen" (The Lives of Others) which gives an insight into how those archive were produced.

While I was waiting for a few of those books to arrive, I came across an article in a 2008 issue of Wired; Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police, which gives a good quick overview of the whole thing, along with some interesting information on software and hardware designed to try and piece together the approximately 45 million torn up pages of documents the Stasi tried to destroy in the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall - 5% of the total of Stasi documents. (the frantic Stasi officers resorted to tearing by hand after they had burnt out every paper shredder they could get their hands on).

Stored in paper sacks, they were previously being pieced together by hand, like some immense never ending jigsaw puzzle but where you have no idea what the picture is. In 13 years the Archive staff had managed to piece together 620,500 pages by hand (I can't imagine even trying to do that..). They figured it would take about 700 years to finish them all.

From Wired:

"...As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic
Republic's Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed
91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling
bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler's Gestapo was spying
on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.

Unlike the prison camps of the Gestapo or the summary executions of
the Soviet Union's KGB, the Stasi strove for subtlety. "They offered
incentives, made it clear people should cooperate, recruited informal
helpers to infiltrate the entire society," says Konrad Jarausch, a
historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They
beat people up less often, sure, but they psychologically trampled
people. Which is worse depends on what you prefer."

That finesse helped the Stasi quell dissent, but it also fostered a
pervasive and justified paranoia. And it generated an almost
inconceivable amount of paper, enough to fill more than 100 miles of
shelves. The agency indexed and cross-referenced 5.6 million names in
its central card catalog alone. Hundreds of thousands of "unofficial
employees" snitched on friends, coworkers, and their own spouses,
sometimes because they'd been extorted and sometimes in exchange for
money, promotions, or permission to travel abroad..."

(the short slide show is also worth looking at)

BTW, an archive usually indicates the extent of a particular holding or set of documents in terms of linear shelf space - 8" of papers or 6.3m of documents or such. The Stasi archives consists of 112 linear kilometres of files. I'm not sure of the statistics for other organisations, but I can't can think of any other single organisation that has amassed that amount of documentation over the same period of time. The Vatican Archives "only" consists of 85 linear kilometres of documents in it's archives - and that was amassed over a few hundred years. I imagine something like the US defence department might have more - but that would be for the whole of the US Army, Navy and Airforce etc and not one single government department. It's quite mind boggling

(Photos by Daniel Stier/Wired)

Icebergs - New Clichés of Photography #2a

I'm afraid I'm going to mess with Mark Page over on the Manchester Photography Blog a little bit. He seems to have started running a little series called New Clichés of Photography. He's only up to number 2. I just took a look at it, and less than 30 seconds later looked at another blog and knew right away, there and then, I was looking at just that - a new photographic cliché. So, rather than stealing Mark's number three, I'll just classify this as #2a.

You can see Mark's first two here: No.1 (the Dodgy Painting) and No.2 (Mounds & Heeps)


(Photo Olaf Otto Becker)

Roger Ballen

Having just mentioned Roger Ballen the other day I came across an interview/podcast with him on Lensculture

From the Lensculture intro:

"Ballen’s photographs are beautiful because of the richness of light, the
abundance of textures, the surreal archetypal imagery and dream-like
juxtapositions. They are complex pictures, exquisitely composed, printed to
near-perfection — and almost always they hold some tension that lingers long
after the first gaze...

The images are obviously staged, but they are troubling in their brutal raw
reality. Ballen uses recurring themes and props: wire, shadows, dirty feet,
soiled bed sheets, filthy walls, boxes with rough holes cut out, crude drawings
cover many surfaces. Junk is piled on junk. People and animals are in awkward,
dangerous and absurd positions.

It would be easier to swallow if we could
think of the characters as models or actors, following stage directions. But
very many of these images seem too real. The characters look like they are
really strung out on the far edges of ordinary life...

Ballen is very open and generous in our interview. At the end he says,
“Do we live in a world of order or chaos? That’s a pretty important
question to deal with.”"

— Jim Casper

I was just talking with someone who went to his talk at the NY Photo Festival last year. They said it was one of the most stimulating and thought provoking talks invloving photogrpahy htye had been to in a long time. It was apparently mor elike a performance piece than just a talk, alhtough one where the perfmormer wasn't really performing, rather, presenting themselves.

Go take a look and a listen on lensculture - definately worth it.
along with a god few of his photographs.

(All photographs Roger Ballen)