Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

More Paris – French Landscapes

Finally I’d finished looking at Paris Photo, ending with another look at the BMW Prize pictures (and as usual I wouldn’t have chosen the same winner though I’ll save writing about it for another day) and then, right at the exit and rather more to my taste a show of work by Daido Moriyama along with a book including the same I was tempted by, but decided I didn’t want to have yet another thing to carry around with me. Leaving the show I emerged into the Jardin du Carrousel only to find myself surrounded by naked women.

Not of course in the flesh (apart from anything else it was a cold, dull day), but in bronze, a whole flock of sculptures by Aristide Maillol many surrounded by the small hedges of the formal garden. Apparently 18 of these large figures were placed there in the 1960s, thanks to André Malraux and the model for some of them, Maillol’s last model Dina Vierny. I had a few minutes to spare and wandered around photographing some of them as I made a wandering path out of the gardens of the Louvre towards the river.

I could have walked across the Pont Royal or the Pont du Carrousel, but decided to make my way alongside the river to the Pont des Arts, leading directly opposite to the Instutut De France, stopping on my way to take a few pictures. There were two police on horseback at the lower level on the Quai opposite, stationary and facing towards me across the river. They had bright blue jackets and were underneath a long line of trees with yellow leaves.

Not really my kind of picture, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway, wondering if I could make it work. The Seine is pretty wide here and the longest lens I had for the D700 was a Sigma 24-70mm f2.8, so those blue jackets would be fairly small on the image. I took a frame, then realised it would be better to use a slower ISO to get more detail.

It was fairly dull and I hadn’t bothered to alter the ISO from the 1600 I had been using inside Paris Photo, but I now set it to ISO 320 (though as I had an exposure bias of -2/3 stop I suppose it was truly ISO 500.) Everything in the picture that needed to be sharp was on the other side of the river, so I hardly needed much depth of field, but I wanted to use the lens around its optimum aperture for sharpness. The lens isn’t pin sharp wide open, but its pretty good at f4, and although I’ve not tested it, will start to lose sharpness through diffraction probably at anything smaller than f8. I settled for f5, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/100. At 70mm I would expect to hold the lens steady at that, especially as I was leaning on a small wall to take the picture.

It doesn’t work at the size it is on this blog, though if you open it in its own window in your browser (in Firefox, right click and select ‘view image’) you can just about make out that there is some blue there, but on a large print it does, or at least in the one frame where the two men are both looking directly at me. Some pictures do need to be fairly large, though I’d spent quite a lot of time in the exhibition hall earlier thinking many of the large large colour images there would look better very much smaller.

But I think some of the other pictures I took as I wandered along are better, despite needed rather less thinking about from a technical point of view, although they are unlikely ever to end up as being more than a picture on a birthday card from us.

Campagne française – Fragments

My destination in the Institut opposite was a landscape show, Thibaut Cuisset‘s Campagne française – Fragments, which according to the Mois de la Photo programme ended on 17 Nov, but was actually continuing until 21 Nov. The show included 40 of his pictures and most of them are on the web site.

They are quiet and precise views, avoiding the kind of drama or anecdote that characterises much landscape work. They are in a way typical views, images that attempt to show the essence of the place. As the notes on the pictures state, “il ne cherche pas le scoop optique” and there is nothing false or forced. The colours are natural and accurate (or at least appear so), the lighting flat. The subject, the French countryside is clearly shown as it is, it’s nature shaped by the work and actions of its inhabitants.

Cuisset has photographed in countries around the world over more than 20 years – and on the Filles du Calvaire site you can see work from Japan, Turkey, Corsica, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia and Syria as well as France.

Perhaps what I found most surprising is that work that is as quiet and considered as this was the product of the winner of a major prize, the Prix Photo 2009 de lAcadémie des Beaux-Arts, produced with the aid of its 15,000 Euros. It seems to me that his work is very much the kind of work that could and probably would be overlooked or dismissed were it being produced by someone outside the charmed circle of the art establishment.

I’m not generally a great fan of landscape photography – too often it seems to attract photographers whose idea of creativity is to use a graduated tobacco filter and turn up the saturation beyond belief, or large-format clones of St Ansel without his originality or talent. But Cuisset shows that it can be done sensitively and well – and still be recognised, at least by the French establishment.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Photo – Lab East

It was thanks to Teresa from Blurb that I was invited to the book launch of ‘Lab East‘ at the Lumen Gallery stand in Paris Photo. Lab East, a roughly seven inch square slab of 260 or so pages, “printed with the friendly support of blurb, the creative publishing platform” is I think an important work in several respects. Edited by Horst Kloever of photeur.net, it presents “30 photographic positions fron Central and Eastern Europe“, work by young photographers – all born in the 1970s and 80s – few of whom will be known outside their own countries, although there were one or two photographs I recognised, and a number of those included have worked or studied in the west.

One of those included is Bevis Fusha from Albania, who I got to know when we both showed work at the first FotoArt Festival in Bielsko-Biala, Poland in 2005, and whose work I’ve written briefly about on several occasions, and it was good to see his black and white images exploring the antagonistic aspects of the ‘Supermodel of the World’ annual competition in Tirana. Although there were half a dozen of the photographers there for the book signing, unfortunately he wasn’t among them.

I don’t entirely agree with the forward by Walter Keller, the organiser of the Labor Ost show in Zurich in May 2010 and was an important advisor for this book (the show included many of the same images.) Perhaps there are countries where “a dense net of art schools, supporting foundations, photo museums, commercial galleries and curators all merge into a promotional engine of high energy, making it almost impossible for a young photographer not to be discovered“, but I certainly don’t live in one. It seems to me that most photography of interest in the UK arises outside of any such system and probably only a small proportion is actually devoured by it. But the UK has a particular inbred cultural aversion to photography, or rather photography as art, and things are perhaps different in Switzerland.

But what is obvious is that although most of these photographers were still in school or kindergarten when the Berlin Wall fell 31 years ago, photography still has to seriously address its own Iron Curtain. This book, like this year’s Paris Photo, is one small step in that direction.

However the very richness of the work on display in this book – and to be found elsewhere across the former Soviet empire – surely owes something to the importance placed on culture and cultural organisations during those years – and which in turn stimulated vital dissident work. These artists grew up in more fertile soil than that provided by McDonalds and MTV.

Reading through the short biographies traces of this still exist – for example I learn that Pawel Bownik “received a scholarship from the polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2008.” Here our governments give money to people who can run, jump, swim, throw, row or sail instead.

Latvian photographer Arnis Balcus, who took his MA in photography in London after after studying communications in Riga, addresses the Soviet past, or rather the ‘Collective Amnesia’ around it in his pictures which, by fortuitous alphabetism, start the book. His image of a young man in military uniform sitting on a rough bench outside a dreary and run-down block of flats, another identical in the distance, grass overlong and pushing up through the cracks in the pavement seems to me truly an archetypal post-Soviet image.

To go through all 30 of the photographers in this book would take me until Christmas, and I’ve other things to do. You can order it from Blurb and it will cost you £31.47 plus postage; not cheap, but perhaps someone will give it you for a Chrismas present? You can see 69 pages on the preview there, including some of the work I found most interesting, for example by Krisztina Erdei from Hungary, whose work was on display at the Lumen stand (she is a founder and curator of that gallery and foundation.)

This is a book I intend to return to from time to time, and perhaps write a little about some of the others included in it. I can’t say that I like every work in it, but certainly a much higher proportion than on the walls of Paris Photo hold some interest for me.

But this book is also important in that it is a part of the new photographic publishing, through Blurb (and perhaps also other print on demand services, though at the moment Blurb seems clearly to be in the lead.) Although print on demand will still remain as a cheap way for anyone to produce personal books for themselves, friends and family, increasingly it is becoming the way that serious photographic books – such as this – will reach their audience. The Blurb London Pop-Up – in which I took part in, and it also had a ‘Magnum‘ day – and their ‘Photography Book Now‘ contest and even my own Blurb books are all a part of this (and might solve those Xmas present problems too:-))

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Party

Lensculture is one of the best photographic web sites around, and Jim Casper publishes some great interviews and sets of work, and gets to know some of the most interesting people in photography from around the world. Quite a few of them were in Paris last week for Paris Photo, and quite a few were at a great party given by Jim and Millie in their flat on the rue Saint Antoine, where the champagne was flowing freely and, once I started taking pictures my shutter too.

So thanks to everyone – and Jim and Millie in particular for the invitation as well as all the others I talked to, including Joanne, Damian, Xavier, Vee, Ute, Mike, Ed, and all the others. If you are in the pictures I hope you like them, and if I missed you I apologise, but you may be pleased. Here are just a few, and I’ll put up rather more in a few days on My London Diary.
© 2010, Peter Marshall
You can see the rue St Antoine through the window

Technically all these were straightforward. All with the D700 and 20mm f2.8 Nikon, everything auto using program setting at ISO 3200, which gave exposures from mostly from 1/15 f2.8 – 1/60 f4 depenidng on the room lighting and exactly where people were standing. One or two were a stop or two underexposed. I doubt if you will notice from these small images, but I used rather stronger luminance noise reduction than I normally do when processing these images in Lightroom (I’m using Release Candidate 3.3 which seems fine apart from a few quirks in File Import, which also likes to crash occasionally) and although it significantly lowers the noise, it ends up with sometimes giving skin a slightly plastic look.

It’s something that I’ve seen too on some high-end digital images – including some of the large Brian Griffin pictures I was looking at earlier before coming to the party, which were taken on a Leica S2, £25,000 worth of kit loaned him by Leica. I wonder if it really is how skin looks, at least under certain lighting conditions, but that we are so used to seeing it with film grain that our mind demands something with a little more visual tooth?

As often when photographing by available light, rooms often contain light sources with differing colour temperature, and many low energy lights in particular are pretty discontinuous sources, with big spikes in their spectral distribution as well as some fairly empty areas. The Nikon auto white balance setting usually takes a decent stab, but there is no perfect solution. Almost always if you use a neutral gray to balance the image it ends up looking too cold, and you need to add a little warmth by increasing the colour temperature – perhaps from 2400K to 2650K. It’s then generally necessary to remove a little magenta. But always the important thing is to try and getting the skin tones look healthy, if not necessarily accurate.

In situations like this, working with colour film would have been pretty much impossible, and I would have shot on black and white, probably either pushing Tri-X to its limits or perhaps these days Ilford Delta 3200. But digital makes colour at least reasonably usable.

I was sorry that I had to leave the party early – at around 11.30 when things were just beginning to really get going. But our hotel was rather a long way to walk if we missed the last metro.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Brian Griffin – The Black Country

One of the more exciting events of the month – but outside Paris Photo, the Mois de la Photo and the Photo-Off as it was apparently planned too late to be included – was the latest show of work by Brian Griffin, The Black Country, in the superb setting of the recently renovated 13th century College des Bernadins on the Left Bank of Paris in the 5e. The building is a splendid old religious building and Brian’s show was in its former sacristy, the place where the vestments, sacred vessels, and other treasures were kept. It was a building of impressive size and height and a fine setting for his work.

The Black Country is a work that goes back to Brian’s roots, and to the town were he grew up, Lye, in the Black Country around the north and west of Birmingham. The area got its name from the coal seams close to the surface, and together with iron ore, limestone and clay this made it one of the powerhouses of our first Industrial Revolution. The particular specialities of the region were the making of nails and chains, and Lye itself was “the bucket capital of the world” and there were also brickworks and galvanising plants. The work was heavy and dirty. Many like his father worked in filthy jobs, inhaling dust and other pollutants, absorbing toxic materials through their lungs and their skins. Brian’s father retired in 1983 and died within 18 months, worn out and poisoned by a lifetime of poorly paid factory labour.

Brian’s mother Edith too had a hard life. Her mother had died giving birth when she was only seven and she had been left to care for her younger sister. She worked at a factory a short walk from where they lived, packing nails in boxes and making tea. They lived in a two-up two-down terraced house in a short cul-de-sac, in an area surrounded by factories. Although they had no running hot water, their house was unusual in having an inside toilet, rather than having to go out into the yard at the back. But bath night meant boiling kettle after kettle to fill a small galvanised iron bath with perhaps three inches of water, before each member of the family got in and washed themselves in turn. Brian was lucky as he got first turn. The landlord of their rented home refused to make any improvements or even do repairs to the property.

Brian was the only kid in the area who passed his eleven plus; while everyone else went to the local Secondary Mod he went to Halesowen Technical School. But he had to leave and go out to work as soon as he was old enough. He was working in a factory in Lye when the foreman suggested he join the local camera club, and although he didn’t have any real interest in photography he did so. Three years later, after a girlfriend had left him, he wanted to escape from everything he knew and applied to photographic colleges as a full time student just to get away from Lye and everything he had known. Despite the fact that his pictures then were – as he says – “dreadful and displayed little talent” he was accepted.

The Black Country is an intensely personal project, inspired by the people that he knew in those early years and the experiences of life in Lye. Among those present at the opening was one of his oldest friends, a man from there, and during Brian’s speech they had a short exchange in the Black County dialect that would have defied most of the English speakers present, let alone the French.

Some of the people in the images, most of which were made on location, are from the Black Country, while a few others were carefully cast for studio portraits based on people he knew who are now dead. Brian works as a part of a team, and liberally acknowledged the contributions made to the project by his assistant, his stylist, printers and others.

For me the strongest image was based on the Gunpowder Plot which fascinated the young Brian as the conspirators met just a few miles away and it’s mastermind, Robert Catesby was arrested not far away. The image was made in the Boro foundry where his father had his final job before retirement and the man on the left is Dennis Norton, the son of the man who employed him and who has now taken over as chairman and managing director of the firm. It’s a powerful and classic group image, based on a painting ‘Cardsharps’ by Caravaggio, with Catesby played by Steve Goldby, who has blogged about it, and the figure at the right is actor Callum Coates as the Earl Of Dudley, the landowner of much of the Black Country.

Another striking image shows a young woman as a foundry worker, holding a red hot chain link in tongs. The glowing link on her chain is echoed by a similar shape in her red hair, a small touch which really makes the image far more striking, and suggested by the stylist. The young woman was actually a worker in the factory, although not I think normally doing this particular job, and apparently before the shoot had always kept her hair combed straight down, but was rather taken by the effect.

Another strong group image from the foundry shows a group of men making the chain. For me this show had a personal involvement by Brian that made it stronger than some of his other projects, but it also illuminated some of his earlier work. Included in the show were some of the portraits he made of workers at Broadgate shortly after the death of his father – and as he writes, “I photographed the men like knights lying in a cathedral with their swords.” His background (which in some respects is similar to my own) goes a long way to explain the empathy that he showed to the workers in his work on projects such as the Channel Tunnel rail link, and perhaps also a certain ruthlessness in some of his images of management.

You can see more pictures of the show and the opening on Facebook, and I’ll put more up on My London Diary shortly. In the meantime here are a couple more of my favourites from the opening. There were a couple of speeches in French, but as I expected Brian gave his usual fine performance, though parts of it proved tricky for his interpreter, and it was a more distinguished audience than most UK openings. I think this is his first major show in France (and he is one of those photographers who I think was entirely missing from Paris Photo) and it should do much to increase his reputation here.

I did find it slightly difficult to take photos holding a glass of champagne, though after several it seemed to get easier. The light level wasn’t too high in the sacristy, and I was glad I was using f2.8 lenses – the 20mm and Sigma 24-70 on the D700. Faster lenses wouldn’t have helped a great deal as most of the time I needed the depth of field, but it was good being able to work at ISO 3200 and know the results after processing would be fine. I did take a couple with flash as insurance, but the available light was so much better and of course less intrusive.

It was a very nice event, and a great show, and I was sorry to rather rush off when the official business was over (particularly as I could have had dinner) but Paris in November is a busy place and I had a party to attend!

More pictures on My London Diary.

Thursday Afternoon in Paris 3e

I’d chosen to meet Linda for lunch at the metro Filles du Calvaire so we could start our walk at the gallery of the same name, and for once our trains arrived from different directions at the same time and I shouted her name across the tracks. A short walk away we found a decent but not exciting café for the plat du jour and a beer.

One of the pictures I took in Paris 3e between visiting shows – more below

The Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire was showing the work shortlisted for the 2010 Prix Pictet on the theme of ‘Growth’ which I mentioned in a previous post. Actually seeing the work for real rather than on the web did little to change my prejudices expressed then, except that I was rather more impressed by one of Edward Burtynsky‘s images. He is one of relatively few photographers where the large scale of the print is often vital to the appreciation of his work, although his largish images were relatively small compared to some of the other works on display as you can see from the gallery view. But whereas some of those larger works actually look better on the web – and you can see them on the Prix Pictet site – than they do on the wall, with his Highway #5, a mere 121.92 x 152.4cm is really necessary to do justice to the detailed nature of his work. Had I been asked to vote on the day from solely the evidence on the wall, this picture would have been my choice.

The rue des Filles du Calvaire leads on directly to the rue Veille du Temple which was studded with photography shows, including a number outside the MdP and the PhotoOFF. Most of them didn’t detain us long, a short walk around or in some cases even a look through the window was enough to convince us that they were not our kind of thing. But you can look at the work of Bertrand Flachot, Frédéric Chaubin and (in nearby rue Charlot) Arno Lam from the Photo-OFF and make your own judgement. If you think photographs are improved by scribbling on them, or that naked woman in landscape = art you may like the first two, while Lam’s work rather reminds me or some scientific photography of specimens undergoing stress tests. Some of Chaubin’s other work does seem to be a great deal more interesting that this and these three shows were of rather more interest than several that we walked past.

By the time we got to the Instituto cultural de México I was beginning to lose the will to live but Ombre Et Lumière there revived me. Subtitled PHOTOGRAPHIE MODERNE MEXICAINE this show featured work mainly from the 1930s by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Agustín Jiménez et Luis Márquez. Bravo has long been one of my favourite photographers and it was good to see a fine selection of his work. Jiménez and Márquez were very much photographers of the period but beside him seem rather shallow, making pictures that are often somewhat clever but, with one or two exceptions, not profound.

The next good show we found was around the corner in rue Perche, New York Promenade – USA Underground at Galerie David Guirand. It was an enjoyable show, and you can read a good write-up in English on Actuphoto; this enjoyable show was one of a number in Paris (I was told around 50) which included work on loan from the extensive collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

A few yards down the road was La Galerie Particuliere with ‘We Are Watching You’ including work from two projects by Michael Wolf, large blowups of found images from Google in Paris Street View and also Tokyo Compression. You can see a more extensive selection of work from his two Street View projects and the Tokyo piece, which shows people suffering from poor air quality in cars on his web site, and again I think this is work that hardly benefits – if at all – from the large prints on show. I would certainly have preferred perhaps two or three times as many smaller images.

The next show of interest we came to was a short walk away in Galerie Sinitude, where Andoche Praudel was showing his series Les champs de batailles – panoramic views of battlefields around Europe, including Glencoe, Waterloo, Agincourt in the Photo-OFF. Also in the gallery were ceramic objects by Praudel, some of which bore some resemblance to cannonballs but with intriguing texture and decoration. However it was the photographs that interested me more, quiet scenes, sometimes with a certain air of malice, nicely printed on large sheets of cotton rag paper. It was an intriguing show, and the images had an unforced quality quite at odds with much I had seen earlier in the day at PP.

Praudel works with an Art Panorama 240, a similar camera to the Art Panorama 170, made in Japan and giving three 6x24cm negatives on 120 format film. The 240 is normally used with a 105mm lens giving a rectilinear image with a horizontal angle of view of just under 100 degrees, around the practical maximum for rectilinear perspective.

The prints were around 50 by 200cm and appeared to be inkjet prints made on to uncoated traditionally made Japanese Washi paper made from Kozo, the most commonly used wood for the process. They have a slightly less bright and less saturated appearance than prints on the coated matte rag or baryta papers used for most gallery prints.

By now it was getting a little late and the light was beginning to fade as we came to the final show of the afternoon, which was also a highlight. This was in the fine mansion of l’Hotel de Sauroy on the rue Charlot, and was a travel show with a difference, part of the MdP. Nous avons fait un tres beau voyage which included prints by Jacques Borgetto, Françoise Nuñez (from the Galerie Camera Obscura), Bernard Plossu (from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie) and Sophie Zénon. All of these are interesting photographers, but it was particularly the work of Plossu that caught my attention.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Thoughts on Paris Photo

There is no doubt that for a month every two years Paris is the centre of the world of photography, and at its centre is Paris Photo (PP), the largest annual trade fair for dealers and collectors, with this year over 38,000 visitors and some outstanding sales, particularly for work by photographers who were also showing in major galleries as a part of the Mois de la Photo (MdP). As well as the two Sudeks mentioned in my previous report, the PP press release also records a number of other large sales, with Edwynn Houk from NY selling a Moholy-Nagy print for 265,000 US dollars. Other work with a central European connection also sold well, with Budapest’s Vintage Gallery making sales of 22 prints with a total value of 58,000 Euros (). Other high prices for older works included the entire (and rather boring) collection of images from a 1931 colonial exhibition held in Paris, bought by a Paris museum for more than 100,000 and a self-portrait by Man Ray which sold for 75,000. Hamiltons Gallery from London sold what I’ve always regarded as a spectacularly ugly image by Horst P Horst, his ‘Mainbocher Corset’ for 150,000 USD.

More recent work too seems to have sold well, although I think that some of the buyers may be regretting the high prices they paid for some of the pieces in a few years time. But there is certainly a lot of money around for a few people in photography, and New York’s Yossi Milo (one of the more interesting contemporary galleries) reported sales of 40 prints at 6-10,000 each. The gallery representing Hungarian Gábor Ösz who was the winner of the 2010 BMW-Paris Photo Prize, Loevenbruck from Paris, sold four of his pictures at 20,000 a time.

There were also good sales of some high priced collectors books, both rare vintage items and at least one of the kind of high price limited editions which I think are one aspect of the future of photographic publishing (when most more normally priced books switch to e-books and print on demand), ‘What Man is really like’ by Rachel Whiteread, (with story by Ingo Schulze and layout and case by Naoto Fukasawa) with 20 copies (half the edition) selling for 7,000 each though that does include 11 rather ordinary signed colour prints. It was a book that had it been remaindered at a tenner I would probably have looked at and put back on the pile. One gallery with some rather more desirable vintage books on its stand was rather less fortunate in that an expensive volume was stolen on the opening night.

Although PP is important, and it is an incredible treasure house for those of us with an interest in the history of photography as well as showing a considerable range of contemporary work, it is important to keep in mind that everything there represents a particular viewpoint on the medium. PP holds up a very distorted mirror to photography, and many great photographers of the past are missing simply because they made few prints, and most of those are already in museum collections. There are many from the more recent past, and many living photographers who have either chosen to work outside the galleries or, for various reasons, have not been taken up by them. And when it comes to contemporary work, the selection on view is very much a matter of current fashion.

This year it was particularly useful in the emphasis that it put on photography from Central Europe, but even this was a rather dim searchlight that only penetrated into a few shadows. Three years ago I was presented a book published by the Association of Polish Art Photographers, ZPAF, ‘Polish Photography in the 20th Century‘ and including the work of around a hundred photographers, beginning with Edmund Osterloff, born in 1863 and ending with Pawel Zak, born in 1965. All seem from the one or two images in the book to have been as interesting as some more familiar names whose work was in PP, but I think only Stanislaw Ignacy Wietkiewicz, Jerzy Lewczynski, Zofia Rydet, Zofia Kulik and Bogdan Konopka were shown at PP, along with some younger Polish photographers, including those on the ZPAF i S-ka Gallery stand. There really is a great deal more to be found – and I think this is likely to be true of all Central European countries.

And of course not just those. Even for England – one of the two countries which saw the birth of the medium – the coverage is very patchy. I could have done a similar exercise with, for example, Photographers’ London, 1839-1945.

Any view of the history of photography will always be the product of a particular bias, and at the moment the two major aspects from which photography is viewed are those of academia and the art dealers. Both are very much centred in the USA, and both have over-emphasised the very considerable role of US photographers in twentieth century photography. We are still at the early stages so far as expanding both views, both with photography entering the art market world wide – and there were galleries from 26 countries at PP, 7 for the first time: Canada, Iceland, Luxembourg, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia, and only 16 of the 91 were actually from the USA (21 were from the host country, France) and photography gaining greater acceptance in the academic world of art around the globe.

Even in Paris, the real heart of photography isn’t in PP but in the many other shows scattered around the capital. Its at these, shows in the MdP, the Photo-OFF and many others that the real interest lies.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Photos Day 2

Paris rises every morning a divided city, with workers rushing around in the early hours emptying rubbish bins and other useful work but many shops and other businesses not opening until 11am, Paris Photo (PP) among them.

Fortunately my hotel room was pretty quiet and I slept every morning until 8am or later, but that still meant that after showering and having breakfast I had some free time before I could resume work at the Carrousel du Louvre, and I had time to wander a little and take some pictures.

So on Thursday morning I took a leisurely walk that took me across the 9e and 10e and through some of my favourite Paris arcades, leading me to the Jardin du Palais Royal and then on to PP, arriving just in time to walk past the long queue building up for tickets and into the exhibition halls just as it opened. There are definite advantages to press accreditation, and not just the cost, though a VIP pass would be even better!

It was also a useful walk for Linda, who called in at a hardware store on the rue Cadet and found exactly the rotary grater she had been searching for months without success in England. In France they still cook rather than stick prepared meals in the microwave.

In PP, my immediate destination was the toilets, where I found a man taking a picture of himself in the mirrors, and having photographed him I took a picture of myself too – on My London Diary later.

Then it was down to the real business, and I started on the central block of stands in the Salle le Notre. All of the galleries had some work of interest, but one that stood out for me was Bruce Silverstein, with a fine set of pictures by Robert Doisneau. I was specially pleased to see a set of four images from a taken from inside the gallery with a painting of a nude woman displaying her ample derrière, the best-known of which, usually called ‘Sidelong glance‘ shows a man and wife, she talking animatedly about the picture in front of her which we can’t see while his attention is clearly drawn to the nude. My favourite of the others was of a gendarme pretending not to be looking at those curves; it’s an image I have seen before, but it was good to see them again together, along with a good number – perhaps 20 prints in all of other images by the photographer, a mixture of familiar favourites and some I don’t think I had seen before.

With so much big bad colour on show at some of the stands (there does seem to be something of a rule that the bigger pictures are the more likely they are to be hideous) it was a delight to come across the little precise observations of Jessica Backhaus at the Robert Morat gallery from Hamburg. Backhaus grew up in Berlin, studied photography in Paris where she made friends with Gisèle Freund, and now lives in New York. Her series “What still remains” which she started in 2006 “explores the question why forgotten or abandoned things turn up in certain places and how they seem to develop a life of their own.” These prints, roughly 11×14″ are obviously both taken and printed with a great deal of care and feeling and have an intimacy with the things and places they depict. The colour is natural, with normal saturation (a fairly rare thing in PP) and the printing just sings a true and beautiful tone.

Magnum‘s display I found disappointing. Not that there were not some fine images – for example by Bruce Davidson – but that it was just too bitty, and some pictures, both old and new work, were I felt not well printed.

Perhaps the most interesting pictures for me were two of the three prints by Raymond Depardon, from his La France (you can see 5 minute film in which he talks in French about the project as the images slide slowly by on the BnF web site.)

I stopped off at the Purdy Hicks stand to take another look at the two large images by Tom Hunter from his Unheralded Stories. One that I was familiar with was Anchor and Hope (2009) taken on Walthamstow marshes looking across the Lea Navigation towards that Fullers house in Upper Clapton, and based on one of my least favourite paintings, the 1948 Christina’s World by US painter Andrew Wyeth, while The Death of Coltelli (2009,) also on show, is based on a detail from a painting by Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, hanging in the Louvre just a few yards away. Hunter has chosen just one figure from the chaos in the painting, the king’s mistress, arms stretched out apparently unconscious at the feet of the king who sits up on his bed apparently unmoved by murders and other violent activity around him as the massacre he ordered of his women, slaves and horses takes place before he by his own choice is to be burnt to death on a sacrificial pyre.

Hunter’s picture, charming though it is, takes the pose of the woman and little else, setting her in a quiet domestic bedroom, looked down on by a photographic portrait of an elderly woman, a plaster religious statue, two framed religious images and a few other knick-nacks. Her eyes are open and she looks fairly unconcerned in what is a mildly erotic image with some rich colour.

Minutes later in the Salle Delorme, I found myself standing in front of another photographic reprise of Christina’s World, this time on the Beaumontpublic stand and by Dutch photographer Ellen Kooi. Although I like much of Kooi’s work – and she is a photographer who like me has a great interest in panoramas – I found her take on Wyeth less interesting (and I think there is another version on her own site.) Of course that could be because of my particular interest in the Lea, having just produced a book about it. And although I like Hunter’s image, I couldn’t for long live with grass that was such an intense blue-green – really on Walthamstow Marsh it never looks like that.

I haven’t mentioned so far the particular focus of this year’s PP on photography from Central Europe. Some of it I’ll write about in a later post on a book launch I attended the following day, and other aspects were already so familiar to me – the work of people like Sudek, Funke, Rossler and the great Hungarian exodus which took Kertesz, Brassai, Moholy-Nagy and others west and others are already so familiar that the show told me nothing new. Others I felt were very poorly represented here, including a number I’ve met and written about such as Antanas Sutkus from Lithuania.

There were three of the galleries exhibiting as a part of ‘Statement’ on Central Europe that particularly interest me. One was Galeria ZPAF from Krakow (The Association of Polish Art Photographers, web site in Polish), the which I’ll write about when I’ve had time to have a good look at the CD they gave me. A second was Lumen Gallery from Budapest, and you can read about their show at Paris Photo on their site, but I’ll mention them again in a post about the book launch there on Friday, and the third was another Hungarian gallery, Zsofia Faur. The work that most impressed me on their stand was by Anna Fabricius, on her web site as ‘Tigress of Housekeeping.’ There was only room on the stand for 8 of the nine pictures from this series which were displayed as large colour prints. Although these were fine, I still felt it looked better and was better suited to the presentation in the book of her work.

Finally for this post, I’d like to mention my favourite print of all those I saw at Paris Photo, on the Johannes Faber stand. It was a pigment print made by Josef Sudek, Three glasses (1951) unfortunately not shown on their web site. One tall glass in the centre of the image is half full of a dark beer and there are empty foam-stained smaller glasses in front and behind. It is a dark image, one that I don’t think I’ve seen before and that doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the web. If I had a spare 48,000 Euros I might have considered buying it. There were other Sudek images in the show – including two more on this stand, but compared to this they were ordinary (and some rather poor, probably proof prints.) While PP was taking place, Sotheby’s were running a photography auction in Paris, where one Sudek print sold for 300,750 Euros (the estimate was 18-23,000) and another for 228,750 (estimate 14-18,000) and this was in my opinion a rather better image. So it could have been a bargain.

But by this time my feet were getting tired and it was time to meet Linda for a rather late lunch in a cafe near Filles de Calvaire, from where I’ll take up my Paris wanderings in another post.

More pictures now on My London Diary.

Paris Day One

Our Eurostar train got through London from St Pancras at an impressive lick and soon we were at Thurrock before diving down under the Thames to stop at Ebbsfleet. Where almost every passenger probably looked out of the window and said “Where the hell is this?” as we stopped in a deserted station. But soon it was on its way, sweeping across the Medway and on, and we were in the tunnel and arriving in France before I’d had time to finish my sandwiches and the small bottle of red wine I’d taken for the journey.

Getting to Paris took a little longer, but we were pulling into the Gare du Nord just around 138 minutes after leaving St Pancras, a couple of minutes early, and hurrying along to the RATP ticket office to get ourselves a Navigo Découverte card which would carry us around Paris on buses and Metro for what seemed a rather small sum for those accustomed to London fares. So my next significant photograph was a rather small – 25x30mm one of myself, which I slid across the counter and was then attached to a card in a thin plastic sleeve.

Once you’ve paid 5 euros for the card, you can charge it with a week’s travel across the city of around 18 euros. Unlike London’s Oyster card there are no arcane regulations, although it is less flexible in that the weekly season can only run from Monday to Sunday, and you can only buy it up to Wednesday in any week. But all in all it’s a much better system.

We didn’t need the Navigo to get to our hotel – it was just a short walk – but I wanted to rush off for Paris Photo as soon as we had booked in. This took a little longer than expected as when we arrived we were taken a quarter of a mile to another hotel for our first night as maintenance work meant our room would not be ready until the following day. Fortunately the new hotel was equally close to the metro and soon we were able to rush out to take the train to Paris Photo (PP).

PP takes place in a subterranean shopping and conference centre, Le Carrousel du Louvre, underneath the Louvre and the Jardin du Carrousel. Two short escalators take you down from street level on the rue du Rivoli or you can exit directly from the line 1 Metro station and walk a couple of hundred yards to the show. From the ticket hall you enter into a central area which includes a number of smaller stalls for publishers, a cloakroom, a bar area, offices and a small exhibition area as well as a stand featuring a BMW or two – BMW are the major sponsors of the show. They provide the money for the BMW-Paris Photo Prize, the short-listed entries for which are up some wide steps on a mezzanine floor above the rear of the central area.

Off three sides of the central area are three exhibition halls with the stand of the various galleries and larger publishers taking part. The stands vary in size, and even more in the number of photographs on show, with some having only a few mural size images and others being crammed with much smaller work – even done to some showing small contact prints.

The only way I can cope with such a huge show – 106 exhibitors from 25 countries – is to approach it in a systematic way, working around the 3 major exhibition halls. I started during the press launch and opening on Wednesday by working around the outer stands of the Salle Le Notre, then moving on to the outside of the Salle Soufflot and finishing with a part of the outside of the Salle Delorme, and coming back in later days to finish the circuit and do the inner blocks of each room. It was the only way I could be sure of seeing everything.

Of course some stands did not detain me long. Many had work that either did not interest me, or that I was already very familiar with. It is sometimes nice to see work you really like “in the flesh” like the Kertesz image Martinique (on the Stephen Daiter Gallery stand and later I found it elsewhere) I’ve written about at some length from its reproduction, though just occasionally the experience can be disappointing, but I’m really more interested in discovering new work that excites me.

Another of the good things about PP is that virtually everyone seems quite happy with people taking pictures of the pictures, unlike many museum and gallery shows – though the only place I went to during the six days I was in Paris where photography was explicitly banned was the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), though with almost everyone now carrying a camera-phone such bans are virtually impossible to enforce.

One thing that struck me on that first night – and a partial look at PP, was there number of pictures by Bernard Plossu, with a particularly nice set on the stand of Galerie Le Réverbère, Lyon. Plossu is a French photographer whose work has long interested me, and I have a couple of his books including perhaps his best work, ‘New Mexico’. There is a large amount of his work on the ‘documentsdartistes’ web site – click on the images on the thumbnails page to see more.

The work shown by dealers at PP relates to that on show elsewhere in Paris, so Plossu is the major artist in a splendid free show, part of the Mois de la Photo (MdP), ‘Nous avons fait un tres beau voyage‘ at the Hotel de Sauroy (58 rue Charlot, Paris, 3e) until 15 December 2010. It’s a show I very much enjoyed when I saw it later in the week.

There was a lot of Kertesz’s work throughout PP too, to link with his major show at the Jeu de Paume (1 place de la Concorde, Paris 8e) until 6 Feb 2010. Although I’m a great fan of Kertesz, I have seen his pictures so many times. I also have several books of his work and although I enjoyed seeing the many prints of his on display at PP didn’t feel any need to spend time going to see another show of his work as well.

I was particularly struck by a small set of 5 pictures by Lise Sarfati on the Brancolini Grimaldi stand, from her series ‘She‘; the two images of ‘Christine‘ one in a wedding dress and the other apparently in the middle of a desert in California stood out for me.

It’s always good too, to see work by photographers I’ve written about before – and especially if I’ve actually met them. There were some of Vanessa Winship‘s pictures on the ‘Vu Galerie‘ stand (and more of her work from Turkey on ‘The Empty Quarter‘. Vu also had some pictures by John Davies, particularly one from Widnes and another from Blaenau Ffestiniog that I admire. They were also showing the work of Denis Darzacq, although I found these images from his ‘Hyper‘ somewhat less striking than his earlier work in ‘La Chute‘.

But the most striking of all the new work that I saw on that first evening were a large set – around 16 – prints by Lee Friedlander from his ‘America By Car’ series of 192 prints showing at the Whitney Museum in New York until 28 Nov 2010 and at PP on the Janet Borden stand. You can watch the pages of the book of the work being turned on YouTube.

This is inventive and well-printed work that really fits well into the square format and came as something of a shock in the middle of a show rather dominated by very large (and often poorly printed colour images. Much of the black and white work around the show – with notable exceptions – isn’t well printed either, so it was a delight to come upon this set.

Just how many ways can you make use of the structure of a car – its door posts, mirrors, fascia , window – in a photograph. Certainly on the evidence here, rather more than sixteen. Of course the content framed by the car is also both vital and in Friedlander’s case superbly matched, the two integrated into a vibrant whole by the work of the printer.

Having seen this, it seemed a good time to leave PP for the day on a high note, and in any case I needed some dinner, and it was time to meet Linda again. On the way out from PP we were greeted by several women in long coats who were rushing up to people and ‘flashing’ open their coats to reveal an illuminated photograph. This was a ‘CONTRE évènement’ against Paris Photo, inspired by its Central European theme and the clandestine circulation of ideas necessitated by state censorship. You can read more about that – in French – and watch videos of the QQQOC artists confronting those leaving and entering PP.

We took a short stroll through the centre of the city to enjoy a leisurely and pleasant cafe meal. Afterwards we strolled again through the Isle St Louis and then looked in vain for a bus back towards our hotel. Fortunately we were still in plenty of time for the Metro.

A few more pictures are now on My London Diary.

Pictet ‘Growth’ Shortlist

You can see the shortlist for the valuable Prix Pictet which was announced today in Paris, where a preview of the work will open at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire on Sunday – and I hope to drop in and see it when I’m in Paris next week. The prizewinner won’t be announced until March, so there is plenty of time to place your bets.

In alphabetical order,a the runners are Christian Als, Edward Burtynsky, Stéphane Couturier, Mitch Epstein, Chris Jordan, Yeondoo Jung, Vera Lutter, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, Guy Tillim and Michael Wolf, and you can see their work that is in for the prize on the Pictet web site.

What is unusual for a photographic prize these days is that there are some pretty decent pictures among the lot, and seven or eight photographers whose work I might well have chosen myself. There are a couple I find ‘arty’ in a sense that would have been fresh in the 1930s, but now I just find pretentious garbage, and a couple that do things that I’ve seen rather better done by others (and in one case seems hardly worth doing), but it is good to see so much good photography up for a prize like this – though it remains to be seen what will win.

I probably shouldn’t condemn any of them to oblivion by naming them as my favourite for the prize, and in any case I think it should receive rather though more than my quick first impression. Particularly because it isn’t just a matter of a single image, but really of a set of pictures, and that does need more consideration. But Mitch Epstein has long been one of my favourite contemporary photographers, Guy Tillim’s work I always find of interest and the show by Taryn Simon was one of the best in recent years at the Photographers’ Gallery. The only work that really appeals that was new to me was by Nyaba Ouedraogo. So probably those four are now the outsiders in the race!

I hope I’ve more or less got everything sorted for my Paris trip now, and certainly I’ll be writing about it here. Unfortunately I’ve been having some problems with getting my notebook to connect to the Internet, so I may not be able to post until I return home and there may be a few days without posts on the blog. In any case I tend to be too busy and get too tired (and sometimes emotional) to comment while I’m there.

Blurb & 893 etc

The first presentation on Sunday morning on the London Blurb Self-Publishing day was given by Anton Kusters, a photographer who specialises in long term projects and is based in Brussels, where he runs his own web and interactive design agency and is also creative director of Burn Magazine, the online publication for emerging photographers curated by Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey, which I’ve mentioned a few times here.

Kusters won the 2010 Blurb Photography Book Now Editorial Prize for 893 magazine on the 893 project which he has been working on with the help of his brother in Tokyo for a couple of years, making numerous visits there. It took lengthy and complicated negotiations, sealed with an impressive looking document to get the permission to document the Yakuza, a Japanese crime family that runs the streets of Kabukicho, the red-light district in the heart of Tokyo. The contract runs for two years and Kusters has committed himself to publishing 893 magazine twice a year to show his progress. You can also read more about it on his 893 blog where he posts work and discusses the project and his feelings about it.

This is fascinating and at times exciting work, with a real air of menace in some of the pictures, but Kusters is very much concerned with getting under the skin of his subjects rather than taking some moralistic stance. It is a study of a subculture made with their cooperation and collaboration, and every image used has to be approved both by the photographer and his subjects.

During his talk, Kusters talked a lot about the process and the various stages, particularly using printed ‘books’ that he has used to refine his work, and also showed a short film clip. His is work that crosses a number of media boundaries, with some exciting and fresh design.

I’ve never been to Kabukicho, but have seen many pictures from the area, which is part of Shinjuku, the stamping ground of several leading Japanese photographers, including Daido Moriyama (his own web site is slow to load and rather unpredictable) and Nobuyoshi Araki – in 2005 they did a joint show Moriyama-Shinjuku-Araki.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
‘WassinkLundgren’
It was a hard act to follow, and so too was the presentation by the PBN Portfolio prize winners WassinkLundgren after which it was my turn with a rather less dynamic presentation of ‘Before the Olympics‘.

Among those at the event was Pierfrancesco Celada, who had made a Blurb book using his pictures from The Bigg Market in Newcastle. You can see some of these in the two sections insideout and insideout on his web site – and I also particularly liked some of the images from the St James’s pilgrimage.

Unfortunately Bruno Ceschel was unwell and so the self-publishing debate was a little different from anticipated with Robin Goldberg of Blurb in the chair and myself, Anton Kusters and artist Jonathan Lewis of ABC Cooperative on the panel. More about my ideas on the future in a later post.