Category: Photographers

 

Wednesday afternoon was the press preview, followed by the ‘vernissage’ and I’d already applied for and received my press pass, so all I had to do was to find the entrance. It took me a little while, as I started by finding the very long queues for the Hopper exhibition and then turned in the wrong direction, managing to walk virtually the whole way around the outside of the building (and its a very large building) before finding Paris Photo. After managing to get into the steps leading down to the show I was then sent back to find the press entrance, where I was given some documentation and finally, having had by then half a dozen security men wave readers at my card, magic wands over my body and peering into my bag was allowed to enter.

I decided to start by trying to see every stand, walking around the show in a logical fashion so as not to miss anything, stopping when I saw anything that interested me, and taking notes, but the magnitude of the show soon defeated me, and too often my handwriting does also.

So the comments I’m going to make are somewhat fragmentary, and don’t really represent the show as a whole, but are some of the highlights, and in particular will concentrate on a few things that were new to me. Take it as read that there were many good – if now familiar – images by many well-known names, as well as a great deal of work that I found without much if any interest (and much of it printed very large in colour.)

On the Robert Mann stand, some black and white work from the last decade by John Mack in Mexico stood out, with some strongly graphic images, though perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with that and some of the best work there was from the 1930s in Paris by Fred Stein. They also had one of the few good Robert Frank prints in the show.

At the galerie Le Réverbère from Lyon there were several photographers of interest new to me, and I particularly enjoyed the work of Géraldine Lay (b1972), Les failles ordinaires, a series of images of ‘fault lines’ in ordinary reality, some of which have a rather Hopperesque quality. You can see more of her work on her web site. They were also one of several stands to be showing work by William Klein, and you there is a link to an interview with him on the Lensculture blog which I watched yesterday.

Another stand which caught my interest was Gungallery from Stockholm, not just for the work by Anders Petersen, largely familiar to me, but for a group of pictures by Gerry Johansson. You can see work from his various books on his web site, including Deutschland. Looking at his work I immediately thought of Robert Adams, and picking up the book Oglunda and opening it I found myself reading an appreciative foreword by Adams.

One area was devoted to the 30 short-listed books in the Photobook of the Year Award, and I’m pleased to hear that Anders Petersen’s City Diary – three straightforward volumes of photographs which to me stood out head and shoulders above most of the rest for both the quality of the photography and for the simplicity and effectiveness of its design – was the winner. Some of the others seemed to have been selected simply for their tricksy design despite the often banal images, and at least one seemed to lack all the basic qualities of an actual book. Out of the 10 there were only perhaps two or three I would have made space for on my shelves had I been sent copies for review – including those by Lise Sarfati and possibly Stephen Shore – though I didn’t think the print on demand volume showed his work too well. Overall, the standard of the First Photobook Prize was perhaps higher. Although I wouldn’t myself have picked the winner, David Galjaard‘s Concresco, it was an interesting set of pictures. Other interesting books were by Lucas Foglia and Jerome Sessini, and Cristina de Middell deserved a prize for humour for her images of the Zambian space program. She has just been announced as one of those short-listed for the 2013 Deutsche Börse photography prize. Though I hope it goes to Chris Killip, it seems unlikely and I can only agree with Sean O’Hagan about that and the nomination of de Middell.

The Magnum stand was perhaps a little disappointing, though a collection of images by Raymond Depardon mainly taken in the San Clemente Psychiatric Hospital in 1979 stood out.

There were tributes to Louis Stettner, marking his 90th birthday – and most of his best work was from his early years in Paris, so this was a fitting place, as well as to Martine Franck who died in August, aged 74.

Other shows within the show included one from the J P Morgan Chase Art Collection. It started well, with a couple of Cartier-Bresson‘s best (and one also-ran), and a couple of good Walker Evans images among his four and the same for Robert Frank. 11 by Eggleston seemed rather too many for such a small show, and then there were four Friedlanders and 3 Winogrands. After all this, the portrait of a farmer by Eve Arnold and two by Lynne Cohen came as rather an anti-climax. It looked as if the curator had got to that point and suddenly realised that there were no pictures by women in the show and searched desperately for anything that might fill the gap. Surely there are better images by women – these women or others – in the 6000 in the JP Morgan collection? Perhaps an Arbus or two and a Nan Goldin?

As usual many of the best colour prints on show, and quite a few of the black and white, were inkjet prints, though there were at least one hundred and one ways of making that less obvious to the label reader (and far too many pictures that didn’t have any label, as well as some that you would have had to get on your knees to read.)  But there were vintage C-types, almost always recognisable by an overall orange or brown cast as they continue to decay, though this does not yet seem to have affected their prices.

There was, as in previous years, some interesting Japanese photography on several stands, and I was also amused by the photocollages of Toshiko Okanoue, at the Third Gallery Aya from Osaka which was showing the work of 4 Japanese women, with Ishiuchi Miyako, Yamazawa Eiko, Akasaki Mima and her.

There was so much more. Kertesz, another photographer who made Paris his home, had work on so many stands, but particularly on that of Vintage from Hungary. Weegee too came up on several, there were a few by Leon Levinstein I don’t recall having seen before. The Feroz Gallery, founded by Julian Sander, great grandson of August Sander had a nice wall of grandfather’s prints, while another stand had an unfortunate collection of bad copies made by Sherrie Levine, along with her lousy copies of Walker Evans, work which I can’t accept has any validity or place on an exhibition wall – the only place it belongs is as an exhibit in a copyright court.

By around 7.30pm I was exhausted, and since no-one seemed to be offering me any of the champagne they were drinking I decided it was time to leave and get something real to eat and drink.

Continue reading Paris Photo – Wednesday pm

I’d hoped to blog from Paris, but it didn’t work out – the WiFi at my hotel spent most of the week failing to connect and really I was just too busy to post anyway. Apart from the last 36 hours or so when I was considerably indisposed following a rather violent disagreement between a curry and my stomach which left me living on sips of water alone, spoiling my plans for a couple of really good meals with a decent amount of alcohol before my journey on Eurostar back to England I had a pretty good time there.

Plenty of space in the hall – mid-afternoon during the first public day

I have to say Paris Photo itself was perhaps a little of a disappointment, even though I had no great expectations. It’s certainly still somewhere where you can see an enormous amount of great photography from the past, including work by most of the real innovators and masters of the medium, but perhaps more than ever this year it showed its bias. It’s an obvious one, in that this is largely a dealer show, and dealers can only show the work that is available for sale. So, for example, a photographer like Atget was almost invisible at Paris Photo, despite his fairly huge output of work, as the great majority of his pictures were either sold by him direct to museums or became a part of museum collections – such as those bought after his death by Berenice Abbott. Other photographers, working before photography dealers and galleries really existed, seldom made more that a half dozen or so copies of any prints, and often their negatives have not survived for later prints to be made, or their estates have not allowed this to be done.

What dominated some of the stalls was work from many relatively minor figures from the post-war years who are still alive (or whose negatives are still available) being promoted because their work is available, whereas relatively little by photographers of much greater interest is still around outside of museum and other collections.

Contemporary work suffers – perhaps as always – from the quest for novelty by both photographers and in particular contemporary galleries. All too often this seems to be a turning against the peculiar link with reality which to me is at the root of interest in our medium. After a few minutes walking around the great hall containing the photo fair I never wanted again to see work in which people had painted on their photographs, punched holes in them, cut them up, processed them deliberately badly and so on. I’ve never thought showing contempt for the photograph a likely way to produce worthwhile results, but there were rather too many photographers  and galleries at Paris Photo who seem to think so.

There was a lot of good work by Japanese photographers on show – and some of the photographers were there

Despite the 37 new galleries and 91 that had been in previous editions, there did seem to be a dearth of exciting or even interesting new work on show. There was also a surprising lack of work by UK photographers from after the Victorian period, and several of the more interesting London galleries were not here – there were only 8 from London (including one I’d never heard of, and seeing the work they had brought I wasn’t surprised.) I met a friend from one of those missing and was told that their application to show this year had been refused. I was more than surprised given the poor quality of work on some of those who had been given space, and the large spaces allocated to some galleries with apparently fairly limited work to show.

Even during the opening the hall didn’t seem at all crowded

Of course there were highlights for me – some of which I’ll mention in later posts and it was still worth attending, though certainly I’d not go to Paris for Paris Photo alone. If you have any interest in photography Paris in November is a pretty magic place, with around 80 exhibitions in the Mois de la Photo, another 100 or so in the fringe festival, the Photo Off, over 50 in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Photo Festival, and what seemed to be countless other shows outside of these events, as well as shows of work for the Prix Pictet, the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux–arts, the Prix Arcimboldo for creation of digital images, the Prix Carmignac Gestion for photojournalism. In six days there, most of which were spent going from show to show, I hardly scratched the surface, although apart from Paris Photo I attended seven openings, went to presentations on seven other shows, went to the Nofound Photo Fair, went into and walked around about 50 exhibitions and probably looked at almost as many through the windows and either decided it wasn’t worth wasting my time, or was unable to go in as they were closed. But there were quite a few areas of Paris I didn’t manage to get to, concentrating my time on the shows I particularly wanted to see and others in the same areas.

Although some of the gallery stalls were quite busy at the opening

This was the second year Paris Photo had been in its new premises at the Grand Palais, and in most respects this was a better venue than the old underground site in the bowels of the Louvre, handy though that was for cafes and shops – and for the very pleasant gardens of the Palais Royal. It was less crowded, got less overheated and I had no problems of claustrophobia – if anything it favoured the opposite. On the downside it seemed less intimate, and certainly I bumped into far fewer people I knew as I made my way round. But perhaps with there being far less representation of living photographers from the UK and central Europe in this year’s event fewer of those I know bothered to make the journey.

Starting young

I’ll write more about Paris Photo and a few of the things that excited me there and elsewhere in Paris in the coming days, and as a part of a ‘Paris Diary‘ that I’ll eventually put up on ‘My London Diary.’

Continue reading Photograph as Commodity – Paris 2012

Many years ago now, I went to an exhibition of landscape photographs on the South Bank, perhaps in the National Theatre and was saddened at what I saw there. This was a show by a photographer who was then being widely published and referred to in the press as Britain’s leading landscape photographer and these were colour images and almost every one seemed to be more about using what were then the fairly recently introduced graduated colour filters from Cokin and other manufacturers than about the landscapes that were depicted.

Things of course have changed since then, with the advent of Photoshop, effects filters, cloning, HDR and all the rest of the techniques now available to mess up photographs. Of course I’m not averse to a little correction of images, cleaning off the dust, adjusting the contrast, dodging and burning etc, but I think there are fairly clear limits between things intended to enhance the vision and those which are aimed at creating fantasy.

Back in the early days of photography there was a good practical reasons why landscape (and seascape) photographers had to use separate sky negatives. Emulsions were only sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum and with exposures made for the land the sky was almost always an opaque black on the negative. Given the difficulties of photography at the time it was understandable and excusable that photographers might rely on a few good sky negatives they had made to supply what the process failed to deliver. Something, almost anything, was better than nothing.  But once we moved to panchromatic film – sometimes helped a little by yellow-green, orange or – often far too much by red – filters I think there was little justification for the practice.

Probably most of those who take part in contests such as the ‘Landscape Photographer of the Year‘ will think of me as an incredible purist, and sneer at me as a ‘record photographer’, but for me the idea of the record is at the heart of photography. It isn’t of course a case of mechanical or objective process of reproduction, but a highly subjective interpretation of reality, if one whose subtleties would appear to be lost on those sneerers.

When I saw that show years ago, my favourite living British landscape photographer was probably Fay Godwin, who I’ve written about on various occasions. I knew her slightly, having first met her when we both went to study briefly with Ray Moore – another great British landscape photographer – in the 1970s and we shared similar views on photography, which I was reminded about a couple of days back by a Facebook post which linked to her work shown on the British Library site.

Fay and I stood in some of the same places, both metaphorically and literally for our photographs, at times with rather similar results taken some years apart, although she travelled our country far more widely than me. Her pictures, dramatic as some of them are, are always records of a particular time and place and her response to this. If you stood in the same spot, while the weather and the light might be different and trees and crops might have changed and you might experience the place differently you would have no doubt you were in the same place and that it was a real place. Not so with many of the landscape photographs of the year.

Fay and I separately walked alongside the Thames Estuary – Gravesend, © 1985, Peter Marshall

So the controversy over the excessive manipulation of what had been the winning photograph in that contest left me a little amused but not concerned when I read about it in a PetaPixel blog post (from which some other links here come.) Apparently there are different classes to the contest, and the kind of tidying up that had been done wouold have been perfectly acceptable in some of them but not in this. Perhaps even more amusing (or depressing) is that the picture has a  virtually identical viewpoint and composition to that of another photographer – and that it was made with that image in mind. Also impressive in some ways is the kind of detailed detective work that has been applied to this and some other images in the contest, with people using Street View and going to the actual locations where some images were taken to prove their various points.

I’m always suspicious of photography competitions and of rules and of people who promote and enter them. Back in the old days of camera clubs (and yes I know they still exist) the rewards were points, a little respect in their very limited circle and possibly a cup to keep on your sideboard for a year. Now the ‘Landscape Photographer of the Year’ gets ten grand (around $16,000.)

Cliffe, © 1985, Peter Marshall – another from the path we both trod.

I should end with a confession. I once owned a graduated tobacco filter, though I don’t recall ever using it to make a photograph, though I did try a few with a similar graduated neutral density before I saw the error of my ways. I may still have both at the bottom of a box of photographic oddments in my loft. Both were the result of getting a prize in a competition in a magazine in the 1970s – and I think it was the second prize which turned out to be £50 which had to be spent on filters. In my defence it was tricky then to find things that I really wanted to make up that vast amount.

Just a reminder about tomorrow afternoon’s free event at Rich Mix in London (details here), with the screening of Radical London Portfolios from around 20 photographers and groups. As well as my own portfolio I also have work in the 2012 pics project presentation.

London Underwater 2050 Tour of the G8 Climate Criminals’, European Social Forum, Oct 2004

Rich Mix is on the Bethnal Green Road, close to the top end of Brick Lane, which houses one of London’s more interesting markets, where many of us have photographed in the past and quite a few are still doing so. Also a short walk away is Columbia Market, where people come from across London to buy plants, and walk away sometimes carrying rather large trees.

Sewing for the final harvest at Manor Gardens Allotments, Apr 2007

Before the screening from 12-3pm there is a screening of short films by various photographers, but if the weather isn’t too bad I’ll probably take a camera to the markets and then relax a little in one of the local pubs before making my way to Rich Mix for the Radical London screening which starts at 4pm.

Continue reading Reminder Radical London