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PGDB Shortlist: John Davies

John Davies is a photographer who I’ve long admired and the only one of the four I know personally. I’ve written and talked about his work (I’d also written about the work of Holdt before the nomination for the prize) including an extended review of the superb large-format book of the show ‘The British Landscape‘ (2006) which was nominated for the prize.

John is included in the Urban Landscape web site which I run with Mike Seaborne, but you can see more of his work on his own site.

His work is the best presented of the four short-listed photographers, filling the gallery at No 5 (with the coffee bar) with large, well printed black and white silver gelatin prints.

John’s landscapes are panoramic not in format, but in the sense that he likes to work from a high viewpoint with a relatively wide angle of view. Simply in terms of technique, his work stands out compared to the competition, but of course that isn’t it’s main strength. What strikes me on viewing these prints is their sheer lucidity both physically and conceptually.

The prints on show are a cross-section of his black and white work from 25 years in the book – and in the larger show. The book was my choice for the photo book of the year when it came out and the even larger prints here are just slightly more impressive. I do just wonder if they are a little too large on the wall, with the grain beginning to become intrusive in some areas. But they are certainly very well printed.

I’ve long considered John to be the leading contemporary exponent of urban landscape photography (though I also love the work of others including Gabriele Basilico.) On show here are some of his classic images, although I think I am currently even more interested in his colour work, and would feel that that is now making a greater “contribution to photography” than his older black and white work. Perhaps the weakest element of John’s work are his captions which sometimes seem to me to be too prosaic and concerned with the place rather than the precise location of the picture or its content.

One curious aspect of his work in the catalogue is the warm tone of the illustrations, brown rather than the much more neutral tone of his images. I don’t think this – or the small scale does them justice.

PGDB Shortlist: Jacob Holdt

Jacob Holdt‘s work is a slide-show of images he took while hitch-hiking across America as a penniless and trusting Dane from 1970-75. On his odyssey he met and befriended many, mainly from the poorer American underclass, both black and white (though mainly black), living with them. As he has often said, he was a wanderer, a vagabond (occasionally an image made me think of Gaylord Oscar Herron, a photographer of the same era with very different work – and like Larry Clark, from Tulsa) I though and not a photographer and took his pictures largely as a record of his travels with a cheap Canon Dial half-frame camera sent him by his family so he could show them what he was up to. Back in Denmark, he made a slide show, which became in great demand, and before long he was showing it to mainly student audiences across America and elsewhere, a career that has kept up for over 30 years.

This work has been available on the web for years, and I wrote about it and linked to it a few years ago in those days when I had an audience of millions. Last year his work was picked up by Steidl and published in a book, leading to this nomination.

Holdt obviously has a great deal of interest and empathy for the subject that he took on – the American underclass and its treatment by rich America. He has a great ability to get to know people and gain their confidence (and apparently still keeps in touch with many of those he photographed.) But much as I liked his work on the web I found the slide show at the Photographers Gallery hard to watch. It’s perhaps some measure that, having come in part way through the showing I found it very hard to be sure when I had got to the same pictures again, and I think watched another 10 or 15 of the 81 slides before I was sure I had seen one before.

Much of the problem for me is quite simply his photographic incompetence. Almost every picture I found myself thinking “if only…” There was this guy in a fantastic situation and if only he had taken a slightly different viewpoint or moment, or got the exposure closer to correct or had better lighting… Add to that some decidedly odd colour processing and rather small negatives, along with what appears to have been a deliberate immersion in dust and hairs. In a way it’s like citizen journalism, those fuzzy cameraphone images whose very lack of quality sometimes adds to their impact, the feeling that comes from them being records from someone who was really caught on the spot when the bomb went off. Powerful as they may be, I wouldn’t be happy if one of these scooped the World Press Photo Prize.

There is a programme at the gallery with his captions in running order, but it isn’t really good enough (and impossible for me to read in the dark.) What the slide show needs is his commentary, as well as more thought about the timing for different images.

For the book the images were made much more respectable, cleaned up, and some corrections made to the exposure, though some images are still clearly beyond the limits of the film. Together with the much smaller scale of the printed images, these changes make the work look much better in the book than in the slide show. The book is also I think better edited, although most of the pictures in the slide show are also in the book.

Several of the images shown included TV sets, but in one the screen appeared on the initial view to have a huge crack across it, sending my mind flying in a particular direction until I realised that it was only either a hair (or the image of a hair) on the slide. The interiors did make me recall the very different work of Chauncey Hare, truly one of photography’s forgotten figures, and his book ‘Interior America‘ whose work showed a deep spiritual despair at the centre of the nation. Unlike Holdt, Hare was a photographer, although after making the work in this book and ‘This Was Corporate America‘ (1985) he moved out of photography into taking more direct action as a co-director and therapist involved in a not-for-profit community-based business supporting those who have been abused at work.

Holdt tells a powerful story, and the pictures provide some good illustrations for it. On the web presentation he also makes use of pictures from other sources, including historical documents about slavery. He writes about his own pictures “I have never been interested in photography as art so very few of my pictures can stand alone“, and I think he is right. And whatever you think about photography and his work I think it would be beyond human ingenuity (even of such ingenious people as those on the jury) to justify his work as making any significant “contribution to photography over the previous year.” So perhaps he should be my hot tip!

PGDB Shortlist: Esko Mannikko

It was seeing the work of Elina Brotherus which won her the 2000 Finnish Photography Prize that first prompted me to take a deeper look at Finnish photography, and to write a feature about it at the start of 2001. Before then I think most of us had thought of Arno Rafael Minkkinen as the only Finnish photographer. Esko Männikkö was not among the almost 30 photographers I mentioned in my feature, nor did I feel it necessary to add him when I revised it a few years later.

This isn’t an opinion that the work on show at the Photographers’ Gallery would cause me to revise. There is something deeply wrong when the most interesting thing I could think of to write about is the frames (and these are not very interesting) and the fact they are hung without space between them, apparently his ‘trademark.’ Though not it seems in Berlin.

But I have actually changed my mind rather about him as a photographer, not because of the pictures on show, but for the book ‘Mexas‘ (1999) included in the corridor display at No. 5. This must qualify for some kind of award for the worst colour repro in recent years, looking like a comic book version of poor inkjet printing. More like the kind of thing we got in the 1950s than modern publishing. For $75 I expect more, although Photo-Eye, where you can see a few pages from it, thinks differently, writing “The printing, done in Finland, is lush.” But despite this I found the work impressive.

At least one of the pictures from this book is in the show, ‘Simon, Batesville’ and on the wall – like the other works – is impeccably printed there. In fact the most positive thoughts I had about his work on the wall was about the quality of the printing, particularly in the still life works.

Batesville, Texas, near the border with Mexico is the location for many of the pictures in ‘Mexas’ and in particular some very impressive panoramas (as Gary Michael Dault remarks in one of the two introductory essays, “The panoramic works are the key“.) My advice is not to waste too much time looking at his stuff on the wall, but to take a good slow meander through the pictures in this book.

PGDB Shortlist: Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh’s work is far better for me in the book (and on the web) than on the gallery wall. On his web site he describes himself as “an artist-activist who uses photography to create a sustained portrait of different communities around the world, addressing their beliefs and traditions, as well as their political and economic problems. By establishing a context of respect and understanding, his photographs demand we learn more about the people in them and about the circumstances in which they live.”

Reading the exhibition labels, and even more so the book, I found the texts considerably more interesting than the photographs. You can read the complete book, Ladli – ‘Beloved Daughter’ in either English or French on his web site (or of course you can buy it in print.) The text on the web (actually present as images) is just a little small for my comfort on the web, but the images are well reproduced.

Part of the problem on the gallery wall is the scale of the images. In his work, Sheikh makes use of a narrow plane of focus, usually rendering the eyes and face sharp, while the side of the head and ears are out of focus. It’s a technique that for me only really works at a particular size of print, as the print size alters the apparent degree of ‘fuzziness’, giving a different effect at different scales. The web images, at around 13.5 cms high are a little too small, and just look slightly annoyingly unsharp, for example the ears in the portrait of Kajal. It looks more like a slight mistake than deliberate decision, while in the large gallery prints they seemed too fuzzy. There is an uneasy line between when a ‘signature’ becomes merely a ‘formula’ and seeing all these works gathered together on the gallery wall rather than embedded in the lengthy text of the book did start to make me find the approach relentless.

Sheik’s prints are inkjet prints, and according to the catalogue are maked on “handmade Photo Rag paper.” They are actually pretty good prints, but the paper looked to me rather like a machine made Hahnemuhle paper that many of us use for our exhibition prints. But perhaps this is just another manifestation of the extreme problem that galleries have in spitting out (or gicleeing) the “i” word.

I think his are fine books, and that they deal with important issues. However I think that other photographers have produced essays around these topics that are more powerful photographically, less mannered and more direct.

The Final Four: Deutsche Börse

This evening I went to the opening of the Photographers’ Gallery Deutsche Börse Photographic prize, where work from the 4 shortlisted photographers is on display until April 4, with the winner to be announced on March 5, 2008.

The drinks for the event were kindly supplied by Asahi (beer) and Errazuriz (wine) but as usual were not to my taste. So perhaps my thoughts I’m now writing will be more lucid than might otherwise be the case. I’ve been a supporter and member of the gallery for over 25 years, because I think photographers ought to give their support to the major London gallery supposedly devoted to the medium. However I sometimes despair of the gallery’s taste in photography as well as wine and beer!

In previous years, when I was writing for the largest commercial site yet to deal seriously with photography (alas no longer) I’ve given a prediction of the winner of this prize (formerly sponsored by another bank.) I’ve always found it necessary to think who should win the prize because of their photography, but then to look at the jury and where they are coming from and try and predict the winner on political grounds. This is a process that usually gives me two chances out of four of being right, although my experience is that choosing the photographer “who has made the greatest contribution to photography over the previous year” (the stated purpose of the award) seldom finds the winner.

This year the contest is between John Davies (b1949, Britain), Jacob Holdt (b1947, Denmark), Esko Männikkö (b1959, Finland) and Fazal Sheikh (b1947, USA). Although I personally think one of them stands heads and shoulders above the rest, it is perhaps possible this year, unlike in some previous years, to see reasons why any of the four might walk away with the £30,000 first prize. There is a reasonably illustrated catalogue available from the Photographers Gallery at £16.99, though I didn’t feel moved to buy a copy, for reasons that will probably be clear when you have read my four pieces on the people in the show.

In my previous post on the Deutsche Börse Shortlist I gave some basic information about the four people selected, along with links to their work online. What I will write now are some fairly short pieces based on the work as now displayed at the gallery and my reactions to it.

John Davies
Jacob Holdt
Esko Männikkö
Fazal Sheikh

You can read some of the basic information about these photographers (and a little more) on other sites – one of the better examples is the Daily Telegraph, (not a paper I would normally bother to read, though many years ago my step-mother used to take it simply on the grounds that it had a crossword she could cope with.) This has features on Davies, Holdt, Männikkö and Sheikh, each accompanied by a set of pictures from those at the gallery.

Learning Lessons in Africa

I was very pleased to see that the Guardian Unlimited online feature ‘Learning Lessons in Africa’ has won the Journalism.co.uk multimedia storytelling competition. Using photographs by Ami Vitale and video by Danny Chung taken in Mali, the report was produced by Elliot Smith and designer Paddy Allen.

It is a well deserved award. The report superbly integrates the colour images by Vitale with black and white video by Chung. The commentary by Vitale (and a second story by Jeevan Vasagar) is lucid, intelligent, moving and very much makes it point, as to do her powerful images.

I’m also pleased because the report shows work that it funded by Oxfam, a charity I’ve been a supporter of since I started work.

Finally I’m pleased because Ami Vitale is a fine photographer whose work – you can see more on her http://www.amivitale.com/main.html web site – I’ve written about on several occasions in the past.

It was a great pleasure to meet her in Poland in 2005 – and to find that she was a a fan of the web site I was then running. As you can see from my diary (and the pictures) we got on very well together. You can also see her taking my picture on the street, although she took a better one in Alcatraz later.

Reality Crossings

I’ve just today got my copy of the Winter 2007/8 issue of ‘European Photography‘ magazine (no. 82 – the web site is out of date and still shows 81, another worthwhile issue, but on ‘Photography in Berlin’ as the current issue), which is devoted to the project ‘Reality Crossings’ shown at the 2nd Fotofestival Mannheim_Ludwigshaven_Heidelberg (FMLH for short) in Sept-Oct 2007. Unfortunately I wasn’t invited to be there, but from this magazine issue I think that ‘Reality Crossings‘ may well turn out to have been one of those significant defining moments in photography – like such shows as Szarkowski’s “New Documents” in 1967 or William Jenkins’ “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at George Eastman House in 1975. And although I didn’t see either of those shows, they changed photography and they changed my photography.

Reality Crossings was a much more diverse show than either of those I’ve mentioned, and the issue contains a photograph (or in some cases, several) and a short statement (mainly by the curator) about the work of around 66 photographers as well as introducing almost 20 videographers. You can see some of the work on the festival web site, (the link is to the English version). I’d recommend anyone with an interest in contemporary photography to both buy the magazine and to look at the work on the web.

Of course many of the photographers in the show will be familiar. They include several I’ve written about elsewhere, including Michelle Sank, Michael Ackerman, Christian Schad and Michel Tichy (as you can see, not all the work is contemporary) as well as a number already on my ‘to-watch’ list.

Of course a publication – or even an exhibition – with such a large number of voices has to be unsatisfactory in that it can only give the merest glimpse of what activates the various authors. It’s even rather an introduction than a manifesto, but, as the introduction by curator Christoph Tannert states, it is “based on realism as an outlook on life” and demonstrates “that courage is indispensable in the pursuit of truth.”

He goes on to say “The documentary must be confronted with the psychedelic extravagance of the photographic eye, which also involves conjugating structures, reflecting on form itself.” This is a thought which resonates with me (and I think will do so with all fellow ‘post-street‘ photographers) and which reflects some of the spirit which has inhabited my own work, both in the post-industrial landscapes of ‘London’s Industrial Heritage‘ and in the web-centred profligacy of ‘My London Diary.’

Capa Treasure Trove

The discovery of Robert Capa‘s negatives from the 1930s, long thought to have been lost after he left them in Paris when he fled from the Nazis in 1939 is a remarkable piece of news, although rumours about their survival first began to spread around 1995.

Three flimsy cardboard cases containing around 50 tightly rolled nitrate base 35mm films of various lengths, in total around 3500 negatives, are now being investigated and catalogued by experts from the George Eastman House working for the ICP. Most of the strips are indexed in the lid of the box – and you can read many of these in the interactive graphic from the New York Times feature. Much of the story is told in the slide show there, and you can read more details in the article, The Capa Cache.

The negatives first came to light after a Mexico City film-maker inherited them from his aunt, whose father had been a general and Mexican diplomat stationed in Marseilles in the late 1930s, where he had helped Republican refugees to go to Mexico.

Capa had left his negatives with his darkroom manager, Cziki (Imre Weisz), another Hungarian, who took them to Marseilles, possibly hoping to flee to Mexico. But he was arrested and interned in Algiers (though he did later get to Mexico City, where he died in recent years.)

It took over ten years – and the efforts of curator Trisha Ziff – to persuade the film-maker and his family to make the collection public, and that the most suitable home for the negatives was the ICP, founded by Capa’s brother, Cornell Capa.

Some of his most famous images have already been located among the films, and more are likely to be found. Capa worked with his partner, Gerda Taro, until her death in the war, and the collection is likely to raise more issues about which of the images were her work, as well as possibly settling any remaining doubts about one of the most famous and controversial images in the history of the medium, Capa’s (or Taro’s?) “The Falling Soldier.“

More Blueeyes

Another issue of the on-line photography magazine Blueeyes, edited by John Loomis and his team, is always worth a good look, and the seventeenth issue which appeared recently is another fine one.

‘Little Voice‘ is a powerful essay by Lisa Wiltse (b 1977, Weston, Connecticutt, USA) who got her BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 1999 and is now a staff photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Her work has concentrated on humanitarian issues in Central America, Uganda, India. In Little Voice, she looks at the consequences of the annual flooding in Bangladesh, which this year displaced some 9 million people. The country is one of those most at risk from global warming, with a sea-level rise of only 1 metre being enough to flood half the country. Her essay demonstrates the emotional power of black and white photography at its best.

Cosmin Bumbut’s work on Blueeyes is very varied, with both colour and black and white and a wide range of subject matter and approach, coming from a number of different projects. Among the best images for me are several interiors, including a fine image of a two people and two where we see through doorways. Born in Romania in 1968, he studied at the Film Photography Dept 0f the Film & Theatre Academy in Bucharest, and he is now based in that city as a freelance photographer.

Bumbut was also one of the founders of Punctum, which is a downloadable Romanian photography magazine – the latest edition includes work by Lois Greenfield. Don’t miss looking at the pictures from Rosia Montana on his own site.

Kelly Shimoda was also born in Connecticut, but in 1976, and is a Brooklyn based freelance. She studied American Civilization & Latin American Studies at Brown University and worked for six years before taking the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism certificate program at the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2005 she founded the collective Veras Images, on whose site you can see work by her and ten other photographers.

Her project on Blueeyes, ‘Last Saturday Night‘, uses richly emotional colour to look at the final nights of the last two roller disco skating rinks in New York that closed early in 2007. Some of those skating there had started as kids 40 years ago.

As well as these major portfolios there are several other contributions worth looking at, and of course the archives. Blueeyes publishes documentary photography projects that focus on social, political, and environmental issues, and welcomes submissions of suitable unpublished projects – see the simple and clear guidelines on the site. But like many worthwhile things in photography, Blueeyes is a labour of love, produced without sponsorship and advertising – and without payment to any of those concerned.

Andrew Hetherington and Chris Floyd

A week or two ago I was looking at Andrew Hetherington‘s web site and wondering whether to write a blog post about this Dublin- born photographer who is currently extremely well-thought of in New York and whose work I first became aware of when he was selected for PDN’s 30 photographers to watch in 2003. (The site will still work if you allow pop-ups for it.)

I didn’t get round to writing about him then, largely because his site is so slow to load on my fairly basic 1Mb broadband connection that I got fed up. But just click on one of the portfolios and go and read e-mail for a minute or two or make a coffee, because they are really worth waiting for. Once loaded the site works reasonably slickly (almost as well as if it had been well-written in html) and the images are great – and good quality.

(You can also download each of the three portfolios as a PDF. Mix and Match 1 has I think 32 pictures and is around 3.2Mb. But I don’t recommend this, as someone has made rather a mess of this file – I didn’t bother to try the others. The image quality on screen is nothing like as good as you would expect from 100Kb jpegs, and very poor compared to the flash. They are also curiously distorted on my screen. The flash presentation shows images on my screen as sharp 98mm squares. At full size in the PDF they are extremly nastily artifacted and 198mm wide, 230 mm tall. The quality become almost acceptable when viewed at 33% but the distortion remains.)

One of Hetherington’s favourite photographers is obviously Martin Parr, but I say that not in any way to detract from his work but to locate it in a broad area of work. It’s easy to see why people are talking about him, and work that I think is successful in both artistic and commercial terms.

I came back to look at Hetherington’s web site thanks to a link from the EPUK newsletter about a feature on his blog, what’s the jackanory? where in a post called ‘London Calling‘ he picks up on a post by photographer Chris Floyd (have that mouse at the ready at the bottom left of this page to douse the music when that site loads) made as a comment on another blog, Rob Haggart’s A Photo Editor (is anyone in this business still taking pictures rather than typing into blogs?) with an interview in which he discusses with Chris Floyd the current state of photography in Britain.

Those of us in Britain will indeed recognise many of the things that Floyd says – and backs up from his own experience. The piece perhaps won’t endear itself to my friends in Birmingham, nor photographers in Manchester, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow etc with the comment “Britain is not like America. The UK media market is London, London, London. Trailing a distant fourth place is London” though it may be hard to argue differently.

But its a long, interesting and fairly wide-ranging conversation about the current state of the industry, with some comments on Martin Parr and Ryan McGinley among others, as well as on being an artist. Of course it comes from a particular viewpoint, and is between two photographers whose ways of thinking come very much from their successful commercial practice and shared experience in New York.

And while you are on Chris Floyd’s site (see link and note above), don’t miss The Nineties, in the Archive Section. Some fine pictures I can appreciate even though I’ve no interest in (and don’t recognise) most of the celebrated subjects.