Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Deutsche Börse Ditto

When I saw the four names shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse photography prize (DBP), Thomas Demand (b1964, Germany), Elad Lassry (b1977, Israel), Roe Ethridge (b1969, USA) and Jim Goldberg (b1952, USA), I decided it not to comment, because I could find little of any photographic interest in it. It seemed very much the same dog bites man story as usual, and I couldn’t even find the energy to make my usually inaccurate predictions. The only satisfactory conclusion would surely be for the award to be ‘none of the above.’ But since others seem to be stirring up a little controversy, and critic is biting critic, here’s my own pennyworth.

Photographers are selected on the basis of a particular show, and the only one of the four that I’ve seen was by Goldberg at the Photographers’ Gallery. It wasn’t a show that particularly impressed me although I think some of his work and his approach is interesting – see the essay on AIDS in India I’ve mentioned previously. And certainly there is some fine work in his Magnum portfolio. I’d even be slightly happier if the nomination had been for the book ‘Open See‘ rather than the exhibition of that work. But even if he isn’t my favourite contemporary Magnum photographer (and I’ve seen more interesting shows by other Magnum names in the past year) you still don’t get into Magnum without being a photographer with something to say.

Lassry, nominated for his exhibition ‘Elad Lassry‘ at Kunsthalle Zürich, is also one of the four artists in the MoMA show New Photography 2010 and on the basis of his work on the web is someone whose images I find intensely pointless. According to an article in Interview, “he has already been claimed as a conceptualist, a realist, a neo-Pictures Generation artist, a pop recycler, and just about every other genre that has anything to do with objects and their consumption.” I don’t find any reason to want to claim him as a photographer.

Ethridge‘s work was shown at this year’s Rencontres dArles and is also included in MoMA New Photography 2010. He takes images from magazines or the out-takes from his own commercial work and puts them into sequences. Big deal. Frankly almost as interesting as tearing up a few magazines, shuffling the pages and pinning up a few of them. According to the MoMA text “Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs original roles and renews their signifying possibilities.” More scrapbooking than photography.

Demand is the best-known of the four, but sees himself as a sculptor rather than a photographer, using cardboard and paper to recreate images and then photographing these as a record before destroying them. It’s something he does fantastically well, is incredibly clever but is not photography. His finely designed show (and book) Nationalgalerie combines works from the last 15 years which explore the image of Germany. Just a shame he isn’t really a photographer and the work under consideration isn’t really photography.

You can read Sean O’Hagan‘s thoughts on the current DBP in his Guardian article ‘Do the Deutsche Börse prize jury really get photography?’
and Jim Johnson has commented in that in his ‘Does Sean O’Hagan Really Get Photography?’, a response that surely doesn’t come up to his normal high standards. Also worth reading is Abigail Simon’s ‘Nothing New Under the Sun?’ about the 2010 MoMA show.

It’s worth also thinking what the DB prize is supposed to be for, awarded to “a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year.” I can’t think of a single award in this prize or its previous incarnation which has really been deserved on that basis, despite a few years when it has gone to those whose work I greatly admire.

As someone who has belonged to the Photographers’ Gallery since its early days I’ve over the years been reluctantly forced to the conclusion that it doesn’t much understand or care for photography, which it rather seems to hold its nose and handle with tongs while espousing what it thinks is ‘real art’. Occasionally a little slips through onto the gallery walls although you almost always find rather more in the print room and bookshop. One halfway decent photographer in four nominees is probably batting above the gallery average.

The DB seems to be a cosy curator’s club prize, an opportunity for mutual back-slapping, which I think is a great shame. It would indeed be good to have a major prize for photography in the UK, and to have a major gallery that supports photography as well as eating a large portion of the public photography budget.

Getting Shirty

To me a shirt is a shirt, and there is something obscene about the images of boxes of what are presumably perfectly decent and serviceable garments being burnt, shown in the pictures that Florian Joye submitted in his entry for the Lacoste Elysée Prize.

His was the work which perhaps most explicitly linked to the product, with some of the other submissions for the prize frankly performing purely linguistic tricks to link their work to the polo shirt concerned, although a few crocodiles – apparently the nickname of the tennis player after whom the brand is named, and its symbol- do make an appearance, along with the odd tennis court.

But in all the competition still left me with what I consider important questions about the shirts unanswered. Perhaps if I searched on the web site I could find out where the shirts are produced, by who and under what conditions?

The 12 entrants for the prize – Ueli Alder (Switzerland), Kristoffer Axén (Sweden), Benjamin Beker (Serbia), Jen Davis (United States), Florian Joye (Switzerland), Kalle Kataila (Finland), Di Liu (China), Richard Mosse (Ireland), Camila Rodrigo Graña (Peru), Geoffrey H Short (New-Zealand), Tereza Vlcková (Czech Republic) and Liu XiaoFang (China) – were chosen from 80 young photographers taking part in the exhibition reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, curated by William A. Ewing and Nathalie Herschdorfer, which was at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne in June-Sept 2010.

Each of the 12 selected was given a scholarship of 3000 Swiss Francs (just under £2000) and 3 months to create 3 pictures with a link to the code name of the apparently famous shirt (which of course I’ve never heard of.) The winner, Di Liu, gets the prize of 20,000 CHF, around £12,900. This was the first of what will be an annual competition.

Although I think his work – like the rest – is somewhat trivial, I think Di Liu deserves the prize, for being the only one of the twelve with a sense of humour and for not including a crocodile in the three distorted animals – a rhino, rabbit and deer – that he plonked down in urban environments.

You can see the work of all 12 photographers on the official web site, one of those annoying web designs that insists on inappropriately enlarging my browser window to fill the whole screen.

Looking at the work, it seems to me that the concept of the prize has resulted in some rather mediocre work, which in a way I find encouraging. The idea of a huge pool of creative talent being harnessed essentially to market a rather ordinary shirt with a peculiar logo doesn’t fit with my ideas of what art or photography should be concerned with. Perhaps in future years Lacoste can be persuaded to a less stultifying approach, supporting creative photography rather than encouraging a kind of second-rate advertising. Some other commercial organisations that sponsor prizes have done it rather better.

France 14 at the BNF & 40 Years of Women’s Lib

Later on Sunday afternoon we went on to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and spent some time wandering around on the top of this rather ridiculous building trying to find a way in. Even though we’ve been there quite a few times, it still isn’t obvious particularly when you arrive there from a new direction as we did.

The main show there was Raymond Depardon’s France, and there were longish queues waiting to see it. Fortunately I’d decided I’d seen enough of the Depardon work already, and was probably also familiar with much of the other material, so felt no need to pay and join them. What I was interested in was France 14, curated by Depardon and previously shown at the 2010 Rencontres Internationnal in Arles , with work by 14 youngish photographers (I think all in their 30s and 40s.)

Having gone through the scanner and having being allowed in to the entrance hall, we looked around for any signs of where this could be and could find none, so I got my ‘interpreter’ to enquire of one of the apparently unemployed uniformed men, but he had no idea either.

We wandered down the corridor past the queue for Depardon and found it was on the walls there, each photographer having a large area of wall to themselves with a numbered board with some information about them and their project. You can read more about the show (in French) and see some pictures in the BnF press release, and there is one picture by each photographer in a slide show on Liberation, but otherwise little on the web about the show, although there is also a book.

The 14 photographers, Jean Christophe Béchet, Philippe Chancel, Julien Chapsal, Cyrus Cornut, Gilles Coulon, Olivier Culmann, Raphaël Dallaporta, Franck Gérard, Laurent Gueneau, Olivier Jobard, Stéphane Lagoutte, Gilles Leimdorfer, Malik Nejmi and Marion Poussier, decided in 2006 to work as an informal group on the project, with each working in their own way on an aspect of the social and geographical representation of French cities and housing estates.

The resulting work was extremely varied, and some of the responses I found much more interesting than others. The Parisian facades by Gilles Leimdorfer, highly detailed and all taken from a direct frontal view, did, despite the text seem to concentrate on the decorative – for example the offices of La France with their sculptural decoraton of the fading advertisements above a Muslim butchers and other shops. While I found the images – like the actuality – fascinating, perhaps the approach was just a little too programmatic for my taste when viewing the whole set of work.

I was disappointed that there were only 3 pictures in Laurent Gueneau‘s ‘Dominante verte‘ but his web site is worth looking at, with a wealth of other images. Another photographer whose work interested me was Julien Chapsal, and the 15 pictures in his (Où) Suis-je? – (where) am I? – is very much an investigation of the idea of place (or non-place) in modern suburbia. You can see for yourself in the images and text on his web site.

Something very different but also enjoyable were the 18 images of Voyage en périphérie by Cyrus Cornut, images from the new suburbs of the banlieue around Paris. These pictures have an unreal drama, which perhaps matches their typically French architectural flamboyance, although the prints on show at the BnF were slightly less over the top in saturation than those on the web site. Most are seen across sports pictures or with a single sihouetted figure in the background, often at night or dusk.

Perhaps the most intriguing set of work was by Olivier Jobard, who had been sent to Chanteloup-les-Vignes as his first assignment as a young ‘intern’ with the French agency SIPA. A development programme had changed this over a few years from a village of 2,500 people on the Paris outskirts to a small industrial new town with a population of 10,000, including many new immigrants to France, and he was sent to make his report there after an eruption of urban revolt. He states that his work at the time was limited to the habitual clichés of the banlieue – a sick generation, drugs, ghettoism, violence…

Now well known as a photojournalist, particularly for his work in Sudan, he returned to Chanteloup, photographing there again and letting some of the residents tell some of their own stories with his images in ‘Chanteloup. Récits de banlieue‘.

What I did not realise from the BnP show was that he returned there to make a documentary film for the TV channel France 5, along with Fanny Tondre, who was responsible for the video sequences, interviews and text in the programme, which includes many more of Jobard’s still images as freeze frames. It has seven sections; a short introduction is followed be 5 sections, one for each of the people who tell their stories in the project, followed by a brief conclusion. It is worth watching on-line, even if you don’t understand French, with the video sections providing some useful context for a number of fine still images.

The film is a considerably more interesting presentation that looking at the images on the wall at the BnF, not least because it uses so much more of Jobard’s work and the words of the people in his piece – as well as some sensitive filming and commentary by Tondre. What we see on the exhibition wall is little more than a static trailer.

40 Years of Women’s Lib

Finally, before finding (rather by chance) a decent cheap restaurant where we had eaten at on a previous visit just off the rue Mouffetard, we took in another show a short Metro ride and walk away, at FIAP Jean Monnet in the 14e, celebrating 40 years of women’s liberation.

Many of the pictures were views of some of the more significant demonstrations in France by women or about women’s issues (there is a chronology of the movement in French here, and a few pictures here, and a more general survey, also in French, here. Google Translate may help.) Although many of the pictures were taken by women, the group that I found the most interesting were by Armand Borlant, who after working as an engineer in the aircraft industry became the photographer for the magazine Libération, and was later represented by Gamma and was one of the founders of Agence VU.

Also on show was some more outstanding work from Dominique Doan, photographer for the pioneering feminist publication Histoires d’Elles. I’m sorry I can’t find more of her work on the web.

After our meal, we took the Metro again to Montmartre before going back to the hotel for our last night in Paris. More pictures from our journeys around Paris and from there on My London Diary.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

A Few Shows in the 4e

From the Swedish Institute we made our way south into the 4eme, where there were a few shows from the Photo-OFF open on Sunday afternoons.

At L’Oeil ouvert in rue Francois Miron we saw the prints by Laurent Villeret from his ‘Carnet du Mexique, digital prints made from scanned Polaroid Transfers, a few of which had a pleasing charm.

A short walk away the Photo-OFF show at Galerie Hayasaki had ended (shows generally have to be for at least two weeks to be included, so some had ended by the time we were there), but its place had been taken by two other photographic shows, with Martine Peccoux’s angled views of some of the narrow buildings in Paris where streets converge at a small angle and a series of reflections in puddles by Shigeru Asano.

Walking away from here we came across another show, on its last day at the Galerie Binôme, their first show at 19 rue Charlemagne (it seems to be a peripatetic gallery), and a retrospective of the work of François Lartigue (b1949), with pictures from 1963-2010. The grandson of Jacques-Henri Lartigue and well known as a cinematographer and Director of Photography on many films, he took the earliest picture in the show in 1963 when he was 12.

All of the pictures in the show were black and white, taken with the same 35mm Canon given him by a friend of the family; most were taken between working on films when he wandered the streets of Paris on a Vespa with his camera, working always with available light. He grew up in Montmartre and virtually all of his images are taken in Paris – with just a few outside the walls of the city in Montreuil (as in my own Paris book.)

I particularly liked one of his images, showing a derelict shop on the rue de la Roquette in the 11e in 1955, the first of the six images on the link above. You can hear him speaking (in French) about his photography in an interview on a blog dedicated to Bob Giraud.

Our next stop was at the one of the few non-photographic shows we went to during our stay, a very detailed exhibition covering the life of novelist Irène Némirovsky, gassed at the age of 39 in Auschwitz showing and on-line at the Mémorial de la Shoah. Although the exhibition made little use of photography, there is a rather nice animation between various pictures of her on its front page.

My visit to Paris continues in further posts here and on My London Diary.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Tio Fotgrafer

We met for lunch after our separate Sunday morning activities and lunched in the Place des Vosges before walking the short distance to the Institut suedois where there was a show of work by the Swedish collective Tio Fotgrafer (Ten Photographers), formed by a group of young photographers in 1958 after the model of Magnum as an independent alternative to the Swedish post-war photographic establishment. Later they enlarged the agency and became Nordic Photos.

At first we went in the small hall to the right in the courtyard of the Hotel de Marie. Here there were just a small number of very large prints on the wall along with another in a curious wooden trough on the floor, and the prints seemed rather crude, blown up far too much. If it hadn’t been rather cold and wet outside I might have seen this and given the rest of the show a miss.

Fortunately I didn’t do so, as on the other side of the courtyard there was a show with proper photographs from the photographers in the group,

Sten Didrik Bellander (1921-2001),
Harry Dittmer (1910-2000),
Sven Gillsäter (1921-2001),
Rune Hassner (1928-2003),
Tore Johnson (1928-80),
Hans Malmberg (1927-77),
Pål-Nils Nilsson (1929-2002),
George Oddner (1923-2007),
Hans Hammarskiöld (b1925) and
Lennart Olson (b1925).

The group were very much influenced by finding the work of photographers such as Kertész, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Edouard Boubat (1923-99), and perhaps it shows too much, as although the work of these masters was unknown in Sweden in the 1950s,they are now very familiar to us.

Several of them became friends of Boubat and a panel of his pictures, from the collection of the MEP in Paris, was included in the show.

Several of these Swedish photographers were known to me – three were in the Family of Man and work from others appeared in international shows and publications. I was particularly interested to find a number of pictures of London by Hans Hammarskiöld in the show which has been seen at a number of places around the world, including Moscow.

It was a pleasant show, but one that showed that these were very much photographers of their times, working in a tradition that had already perhaps become rather comfortable over the previous 20 or so years before they founded their collective, and which younger photographers such as Robert Frank were already reacting to. As well as the links above you can find more of some of their work on either the Nordic Photos or Hasselblad sites.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Sunday Worship at the MEP

Sunday morning when Linda went to the culte at the Temple de l’Oratoire du Louvre I took the Metro instead to St Paul to worship at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, although my service started half an hour after hers.

The MEP is a great place, and I’ve never visited it without finding at least something of great interest. But this time as I went in I noticed that it is about the only place I found in Paris where photography is forbidden, so there are none of my pictures in this post. Of course there are links to pictures elsewhere.

The MEP is also the driving force behind the Mois de la Photo and many other photographic events in Paris, and this year they were making good use of their fine collection of photographs. I think I heard that there were pictures from it currently on display in 50 (or was it only 15) other venues. Plenty still remained to fill most of its large exhibition space with its major show, ‘Autour de l’Extrême‘, perhaps indeed a few too many. Their collection includes over 15,000 photographs, including in depth sets of works by a number of great photographers and covering a wide range of photography. As well as many gifts from photographers, they also have benefited from several major sponsors, particularly in adding Japanese photography and the work of young photographers to the collection.

I think an important part of the success of the MEP is that it charges for admission, which encourages regular visitors to take out an annual subscription (at 28 Euros, the price of four visits.) Anyone unable to afford the entrance fee can come and see the shows free from 5pm Wednesday, and entry is free at all times to those with a press card etc.

Autour de l’Extrême proposed to show images that in various ways approached the extreme, the kind of limits on expression, pictures that perhaps altered the limits of what is acceptable to show. The curators “see one of the recurrent themes of contemporary art” as the constant endeavour “to roll back its own social, political, aesthetic and scientific limits.”

Although there were pictures that clearly illustrated this – what claims to be the first male nude used in advertising, an image by Jean-François Bauret used in 1964 – there were relatively few such clear examples, and the inclusion of some images – including many I was delighted to view – seemed inexplicable. Quite what is extreme for example about Tony Ray Jones’s image (and they had an excellent print of it) of picnickers at Glyndebourne? And of course, as they state, many things that were at the time controversial are now commonplace – such as male nudes in advertising.

But it was an exhibition I enjoyed, more as a kind of lucky dip into the MEP collection than anything else, with some find work on display, as well as a number of pictures I would be happy never to see again – including a whole incredibly tedious kind of landscape section which seemed a total waste of space.

Not all of the pictures were by well-known names, and there were a few interesting works I’d not seen before or at least did not remember as well as some old favourites. You can get some idea of the range from the list of photographers included:

25/34 Photographes, Ansel Adams, Claude Alexandre, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Claudia Andujar, Diane Arbus, Neil Amstrong, Richard Avedon, Roger Ballen, Martine Barrat, Gabriele Basilico, Jean-François Bauret, Valérie Belin, Rosella Bellusci, Philip Blenkinsop, Rodrigo Braga, Bill Brandt, George Robert Caron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Martial Cherrier, Larry Clark, Raphaël Dallaporta, Bruce Davidson, Jean Depara, Raymond Depardon, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Doctor T, George Dureau, Gilles Ehrmann, Fouad Elkoury, Touhami Ennadre, Elliott Erwitt, Bernard Faucon, Alberto Ferreira, Giorgia Fiorio, Robert Frank, Mario Giacomelli, Nan Goldin, Gotscho, Emmet Gowin, Seymour Jacobs, Claudia Jaguaribe, Michel Journiac, Jürgen Klauke, Les Krims, Oumar Ly, Robert Mapplethorpe, Don McCullin, Duane Michals, Pierre Molinier, Vik Muniz, Ikko Narahara, David Nebreda, Helmut Newton, Pierre Notte, ORLAN, Martin Parr, Irving Penn, Pierre & Gilles, Tony Ray-Jones, Rogerio Reis, Bettina Rheims, Marc Riboud, Miguel Rio Branco, Sebastiao Salgado, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Jeanloup Sieff, Christine Spengler, Shomei Tomatsu, Pierre Verger, Alain Volut, Weegee, Edward Weston, Joel-Peter Witkin and Bernard-Pierre Wolff.

It’s a list of more than 70 names that includes around 20 phtoographers unfamiliar to me (as well as one spaceman and at least one other who isn’t really a photographer.)

Some of the work was perhaps too obvious and work I’ve seen too often before – such as Helmut Newton‘s giant images of fashion models clothed and unclothed which occupied a vast area of wall space. Frankly a magazine spread of the two would have done as well and made room for other work – it would have been nice to have more than the three pictures for Bruce Davidson‘s East 100th St or by Roger Ballen. I could also have done without an unfamiliar series of large portraits showing Michael Jackson.

I enjoyed seeing a couple of Les Krims‘s fantastic tableaux, packed with little things including bad taste jokes in both image and text – a bitter comment on the American Dream in his A Marxist View (1984) – and Mary’s Middle Class.

There were some rightly familiar icons – Elliot Erwitts’s washing facilities for Whites and Coloureds which speak strongly about apartheid, Marc Riboud’s Flower Child, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Denunciation of a Gestapo informer, Robert Frank’s New Orleans Trolley among them, but also images I’d not seen before such as a Seymour Jacobs portrait from Brighton Beach, one of a small selection of pictures on show in the various shows currently at the MEP you can see on Picasa.

Elsewhere around the show were many images or small groups of images predictable but still of interest, such as Larry Clark’s pictures of young addicts from Tulsa, Manuel Alvaro Bravo’s assasinated worker, the Hiroshima mushroom cloud taken from Enola Gay alongside the invevitable Shomei Tomatsu watch and Don McCullin’s shell-shocked marine.

One of the few small sections which for me showed some curatorial added value were a small series of images of a shattered Beirut, with three pictures each by Gabriele Basilico, Fouad Elkoury and, in rather muted colour, Raymond Depardon.

In the basement of the MEP was the rather curious ‘Trans-apparence‘ the work of Rodolpe von Gombergh, which aparently uses ultrasound, electomagnetic waves and X-rays to produce images displaying the interior as well as the exterior of artifacts. The display using “holograms, 3D screens and cold light diodes” I found odd but not particularly gripping. I was rather reminded of the kind of graphics sequences found at the start of some TV programmes, but here there was nothing to follow.

Miguel Angel Rios’s twin-screen film ‘Mécha‘ uses the bizarre Colombian sport of that name, in which metal disks are thrown at a mud-filled inclined surface containing triangular pink targets filled with gunpowder which explode when hit, as a metaphor about the urban guerilla warfare between drug traffickers in Mexico and Colombia. With lots of slow motion, rolling cable drums, close-ups of running feet and noises off he creates an atmosphere of tension, but left me feeling I would rather have seen a more straightforward documentary about either the sport or drug trafficking.

The MEP has a gallery ‘La Vitrine’ with windows that look out onto the neighbouring main street and in this the 16th Grand Prix Paris Match for photojournalism was on display. The winner was Olivier Laban-Mattei of AFP with a series of colour images from the earthquake in Haiti, which included a couple of great images, (one apparently but not credibly taken with a Leica M9 at f1.0) – it appears on his Photoshelter site in black and white.

All the work from the 20 or so photographers on display had a very similar look, with rather bright and slightly ugly colour reproduction, which for me made the show less interesting.

All too soon it was time to meet Linda and have a quick lunch before visiting a few more shows.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 2

When I first walked down the rue Quincampoix some years ago it was lined with young (and some not so young) ladies who pouted invitingly at me as I went by, but now their place has been taken by art galleries, and the area has lost a little of it’s decadent charm.

In the basement of Galerie Impressions, below the bookshop, we were met by photographer Loïc Trujillo. The gallery is dedicated to work by Asian artists or those who have worked in Asia, and for the Photo-Off was showing his work ‘instants de vie‘, pictures from the holiest of Hindu cities, Vârânasi (Benares) on the Ganges.

Wealthy Hindus from all over the world bring there dead to be cremated on the slopes (ghats) by the river. Bodies are wrapped in cloth and bathed in the river before being burnt with wood on a funeral pyre. The morning after, the ashes are raked through to find any objects of value and then cerimonially scattered on the river with flower petas and other offerings. The sacred water of the Ganges is said to have the power to erase the sins of the deceased, liberating them from Samsara, the eternal cycle of reincarnation and allowing them to rest in peace for eternity.

Although I’ve seen other photographs and film of the events there, Trujillo’s work still impressed.

A little further down the street we came to ‘Someday we’ll all be free‘ at Gilles Peyroulet & Cie, a show of varied work around the theme of conflict and war, with images from more or less the whole of the twentieth century, where the curator took us through the whole show at some length. Although some of the work on display was of interest (and parts somewhat horrific, with one series of pictures showing a man undergoing barbaric torture, and also included were some official photographs of the Nazi concentration camps) I didn’t feel the show really produced anything coherent other than an easy condemnation of inhumanity.

Next we made our way to the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in the rue St Martin, opposite Beauborg itself, which was showing, Les (in)contrôlés, a group exhibition of work previously shown in the 2010 Liege Biennial on the theme (out of) control. This was the only one of the galleries that had made no arrangement for our visit, perhaps because it was a basically a show from elsewhere, but also possibly because none of the staff concerned with the exhibitions works on a Saturday. This is not a commercial gallery but some kind of official venue to promote the interests of French-speaking Belgium.

This wasn’t a show I particularly warmed to, and some of the work – such as the well over life-size female body-builders by Martin Schoeller (a German photographer who was an assistant to Annie Leibovitz in the 1990s before taking portraits for Rolling Stone, Vogue, the New Yorker and other magazines) I found repulsive, although in part that was because of the contrast – which fascinated the photographer – between their bodies and their faces.

Joyce Vlaming‘s series ‘Cellblock’ addressed the theme very directly, and her pictures, though in some senses very effective were just too cold and clinical to have much attraction for me. Perhaps too the chilling image by Nicolas Clément of a security guard and his guard do at night, ‘security Partagee‘ was just too direct an interpretation of the theme. I was certainly happier looking at the ‘autoportraits‘ by Melissa Desmet and the portraits of Patrick Van Roy.
‘Les Boules‘ by Nathalie Noël, pictures of glass domes encasing icons of traditional family values provided a little amusement, as too did the impossible situations of Tilman Peschel‘s ‘Revolution.’

Then it was back to the rue Quincampoix, or rather a courtyard off from it, for the Galerie Orel Art, a large space with a group show of Russian portrait photography from 1970-2010, with work by Nicolai Bakharev, Valery Schekoldin, Lialya Kuznetszova, Sergei Tchilikov, Oleg Kulik, Igor Mukhin, Sergey Leontiev, Igor Savchenko, Arsen Savadov, Sergey Maximishin, Olga Kisseleva, Evgeny Mokhorev, Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe, Valery Nistratov & Jason Eskenazi, Alla Esipovitch, Oleg Dou, Dasha Yastrebova, Irina Popova, Margo Ovcharenko and Tanya Leshkina. You can see the work of some of them on the Russian Tea Room site, as well as on the Orel Art site, which seems very slow to load. I was particularly impressed by the black and white work of Mukhin and Schekoldin from the 1970s and 80s, but much of the work was of interest.

Finally we made it to Le Nouveau Latina and an exhibition in the upstairs cafe lounge at this cinema in rue du Temple, where we were met by Dom Garcia who introduced us to ‘Black Lights’ his black and white portraits of his friends around the wall, accompanied by Olivier BKZ’s texts. You can get a good idea of Garcia’s work from a page on SDH. It was another show I enjoyed that unless I had gone on the guided walk I would probably have missed.

The Noveau Latina looked like a good place to have tea, but unfortunately we were short of time as we needed to go back to the hotel and change before going out to meet Linda’s brother and his wife for a meal. We had decided to pay another visit together to Chartier and had arranged to get there early to miss the large queues that build up later. Chartier has certainly gone down a bit since we first ate there years ago, but it’s still a part of Paris past not to be missed, even if our waiter did this year use a calculator. We walked straight in but by the time we had finished our meal and left to go elsewhere for a drink the queue stretched all the way down the street to the boulevard.

Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 1

The Photo-OFF booklet, available at the roughly 100 spaces with shows in it, is a handy pocket size, but fairly thick, with well over 100 pages, and it divides the 100 shows into ten geographic areas. Unusually for Paris, these don’t correspond exactly with the arrondissements, but instead break up the shows into sensible groups mainly within walking distance – though in the outer areas you would probably want to jump on a bus or metro at times.

Except for the six shows in the ‘banlieue’ on the east and west fringe of the city, each area has a date specified as the ‘nuit parcours’, when most if not all are open specially from 6-9pm, often with the photographers present. Most of these were outside the time I was in Paris, and I had other things on for the two that were taking place while I was there to attend these.

This year for the first time there were also a guided walks for most of the areas (no booking required, just turn up), and two of these were taking place on the Saturday afternoon I was in Paris. These were not in the printed program but on the web site and the web version of the programme. Neil Atherton, an English phtoographer and curator who has lived in Paris for around ten years and founded Paris Photographique in 2004 was on the tour I took. He is the Commissaire General of the Mois de la Photo-OFF, and told me that this was an experiment, and the arrangements were made too late for the printed brochure.

About a dozen of us met at the ‘Coming Soon Gallery‘, a newly opened space in passage Lemoine between the rue St Denis and the Boulevard de Sebastapol at the top end of the 2e.

There we were able to look at the work of Swiss photographer Matthieu Gafsou, (b 1981), whose images of largely empty urban spaces appealed to me, and to hear him talk about his work – and although it was in French, I could make some sense of it, enough to ask a few questions in English, which he fortunately answered in the same language. You can watch a video interview in French with Frédéric de Gouville from the gallery and a with Matthieu Gafsou, which ends with the photograph which was my favourite from the show

Gafsou’s pictures combine reality – photographed on film – with elements constructed and added in Photoshop, and occasionally contain deliberate clues to remind the viewer of this intervention. His subject matter, largely architectural views of bland spaces around the industrial edges of towns, appealed to me, and some of the images were truly beautiful in a very cool and classical way, but I did find myself wishing that they had been straightforward photographs. It was a reflection of my conviction that photography is essentially a means of examining and exploring reality, while this was work at a more philosophical level, questioning the nature of reality. For me it came at the expense of jettisoning the essential power of the photographic medium, reducing it to simply a way of making pictures.

Our route took us to 8 of the 9 shows in the ‘Beaubourg‘ area (crossing the borders of the 2e, 3e and 4e) and in all but one we were met and introduced to the show by the gallery owner, photographer or, as in this first gallery both. It was truly an excellent way to see the work and to get rather more from the experience than would be likely on an individual visit, and it would certainly be good to include tours of this kind as a part of the East London photomonth.

Our next gallery was one I had particularly intended to visit, having been impressed two years ago by the work of Louise Narbo on show at Galerie Claire Corcia. She was again showing there, along with two other photographers, Sabria Biancuzzi and Vincent Descotils. Descotils was present to answer our questions, along with both Claire Corcia who spoke about the gallery and the work and Daniele Neumann Lumbroso who told me more about Descotils work in English.

Narbo’s work, pairs of colour images which resonated together, again impressed me, although I found it less interesting than her black and white work on my previous visit. You can see more about her on actuphoto.

Descotils was showing two sets of work, and ‘Migre‘, a very filmic series on migration – atmospheric black and white images, with a couple of people fleeing through a forest – had a tangible sense of urgency and fright and stood out for me. These photographs are also the inspiration for a performance at the gallery by ‘La Planquette des Animaux Humides‘ on 11 Dec which sounds exciting, though would certainly over-tax my French.

Our third visit was to the Galerie Riff in rue Chapon (a branch of the main gallery in Strasbourg), where the work of German photographer Andrej Pirrwitz (b 1963) was on display. These large colour prints were taken inside abandoned buildings, which also included a figure either in bright clothing or naked. Although I found a couple of these worked well, in others I simply found the person – sometimes blurred by movement – simply an annoying irrelevance. But then I’m always attracted to the kind of old abandoned interiors that were used in some of these pictures, perhaps former hospitals, factories or institutional buildings.

I spent some time while we were there – our schedule allowed 15-20 minutes for each gallery – looking through a book of Pirrwitz’s work, and as so often found it more suited to this format than the gallery wall.

(The guided walk is continued in the next post.)

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Street Photography Now

One of the more enterprising parts of the Mois del la Photo-OFF was the ‘Parcours Photographique‘ close to the Canal St Martin, with pictures from the recently published book ‘Street Photography Now‘ (see Photographers Social) displayed in shop windows in the streets around the Rue de Lancry. Many tourists will know the area for the lock and the Hotel du Nord just across the canal.

It’s an area I’ve photographed in on most of my visits to Paris, and for many years I’ve had a salted paper print of a street corner also just across the canal on my wall at home, and it has been published a few times too.

The 18 pictures in the show were displayed in the windows of 15 shops – fashion shops, cafes, a hairdresser, an art book shop, a gallery etc all within a few hundred yards of each other. The description on the Photo-Off brochure stating that this show was open “tous les jours 24h/24h” was unfortunately not correct, as we arrived before some of the shops were open and had to walk around a bit until some of the shutters were raised.

It was a nice idea, and certainly was good at raising interest, and there were several small groups of young photographers walking around searching for the pictures and taking photographs of them in the windows while we were there. This was much easier once we had collected the map for the shop from the Librarie Artazart on the Quai de Valmy.

The photographs for the show had in some cases been carefully chosen for the locations in which they were displayed, while others seemed rather arbitrary choices, presumably because there was no obviously suitable location. Some were displayed so that they could be easily seen, but others were made difficult to view because of the reflections in the windows, but of course the photographs I took exaggerate the problem.

I found it hard to concentrate on the photographs, because so often the streets themselves were rather more interesting. Many of the others going round were also carrying cameras and taking pictures, so the event was certainly promoting photography on the streets (though I’m unsure whether or not this is street photography.)

So as an event – and one that attracted some publicity in various magazines etc – it was certainly a success, but it would really have been nice to have a more conventional exhibition too. It’s perhaps a pity that they could not have used one of the galleries or empty shops in the area as well for this purpose. Of course that would have added costs – but also there is an inflexibility in the Photo-Off as exhibition ideas have to be submitted a long way in advance.

As we came to the end of the trail, there was even an event on the street for me to photograph. First I saw a group of men with drums and long trumpets emerging from the back of a van:

then, a few metres down the street, what looked like a party on its way to a wedding, but with only a bridegroom and no bride.

The two parties joined up and walked down the street to stand outside a doorway leading up to the housing above the shops, and started some music and dancing.

Three women’s heads came out of a third floor window to watch them, and after some more singing and dancing, a woman and child came down to the door to invite the party in. I decided it was time for me to leave them.

More pictures from our walk around the 10e and Street Photography Now as well as this event on My London Diary.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Parcours Saint-Germain-des-Prés

I’ve rather gone off the Left Bank, which has changed almost beyond recognition since I first went there more than 40 years ago. Then it had the charm of seemingly hundreds of years of neglect. Now virtually every one of the old shops is a gallery or some other establishment catering largely for the tasteless over-moneyed. In between there are a few good galleries – including many of the more than 30 showing photographs that we looked into on our late afternoon walk around the area – most were staying open until 7pm. As well as the 31 in Photo Saint-Germain-Des-Prés there were also several with shows in the Mois de la Photo, though unfortunately several closed too early for us to do more than look through a window (and the hours given in the MdP booklet weren’t always accurate.)

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Depardon’s work on the Magnum stand at Paris Photo – the lower picture was my favourite from the show

We started at Magnum’s gallery just behind the former Abbey, which was showing pictures from two bodies of work by Raymond Depardon, a photographer whose work I’ve long admired. As well as the colour prints from La France de Raymond Depardon, there were also some black and white pictures from his ‘Errance‘. I was unimpressed by these – if anything they look slightly better in the book preview – and you can see 77 pictures in the album. I think the concept is too vague, and too few of the images really work for me (and those on show in Paris were not I think the best.) What they do of course show is Depardon’s interest in the urban environment, and that continues in the considerably more impressive colour work.

The Magnum page on the main exhibition of ‘La France’ which continues at the Bibliothèque nationale de France until 9 Jan 2011, has some curious difficulties, perhaps largely from translation. Here is a sample:

“The main features of Depardons full of empathy former works were the contrast effects of black and white photographs and the use of a dynamic depth of field. This time, he preferred frontality and the use of the photographic chamber, colour, and a soft, neutral and unique light. The photographer sometimes preferred landscapes to human beings; however, it is a way « to focus on human influence which modified landscapes throughout history. »”

The next paragraph starts by talking about the work on display as a “series of 36 very large silver prints.” Of course as anyone with any knowledge of photography can see from that link (which shows the 36 colour images) they are not silver prints at all. What I think they meant to say was that these are colour images taken on film using a large format camera.

I don’t know how they were printed, but I think it unlikely that Depardon actually polished the scans as they suggest, although he may well have worked on them considerably at the computer, and possibly not entirely to their benefit. The colour in all those I have seen is, to my eye, over-saturated, almost garishly so in a few of the prints at Magnum, although others were more realistic. I did find myself thinking while I looked at them that it might well have been a better show had he worked with digital!

His work is interesting, and very different to the view of France by Thibaut Cuisset I had seen a short while earlier, some of the pictures in which were also taken on the edges of urban areas. Depardon’s book too looked good, but far too heavy to carry, and the same was even more true of the volumes which Bruce Davidson was signing while we were there.

Our next stop was a cafe – I needed a beer and Linda would have liked a nice cup of tea, but this was France, so I think she settled for a coffee – like everything else round here rather on the expensive side. But then we pressed on.

Closer to the river on rue Bonaparte were two shows by photographers I’ve actually met, Eikoh Hosoe, seen above photographing in Poland (more pictures here) at Galerie Photo4, and Ralph Gibson at Galerie Lucie Weill & Seligmann next door, who made some generous comments when I showed him my work in London many years ago (including some of the pictures I later showed and put on the web as ‘Ideal Cafe, Cool Blondes and Paradise‘.) For me there was nothing new there, but it was good to see some of the work again. Gibson is a photographer who has rather gone out of fashion in the UK (and I think USA), probably now more regarded for his Lustrum Press rather than the actual pictures in books such as ‘Days At Sea‘ but he has remained rather bigger in France.

Another of the MdP shows was by Mac Adams, in Galerie Serge Aboukrat in place Furstemberg. Born in Wales but a US citizen, he is an artist whose photographic work I’ve never really appreciated, even when I can see his idea, visually it seldom seems to me to offer enough. This show didn’t help, though you can download a well-illustrated pdf from his site which is rather better.

Many of the other thirty or more galleries we visited – including some not listed on the ‘Parcours’ map – merited nothing more than a quick visit, but there were things of interest, including vintage work on Paris in the windows of Agence Roger-Viollet (I particularly liked an image of Delbord diving into the Seine with his bicycle as a part of the 1913 French diving championships on the Île des Cygnes – there is a larger version on Getty) and the surrealist images at Galerie les Yeux Fertiles. But there were also galleries full of rather stylized portraits and other work which while often technically excellent I failed to see much interest in, along with just a little of the kind of anaemic soft-porn that sometimes passes as art in France.

But at the end of our long and complicated walk we came to the Galerie Arcturus, showing Marc Riboud‘s ‘Icônes et Inconnues‘ and it was a joy to look at some of his great work. One image I don’t remember seeing before was of a street that could only have been in the north of England, taken in Leeds in 1954, a bowler hatted man in a raincoat with a stick struggling forward head down in the foreground while two women in coats and hats, one holding her shopping back chat in the road on the street corner, terraced houses leading down through the murk towards the gas holder.

By now – and perhaps more suitably for Leeds than Paris, it was cold and wet and we were in need of sustenance. Fortunately we’d come to the end of the parcours and we rushed to the Metro to get to a cheaper and more down to earth area.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY