Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Daring to Look

The latest issue of The Digital Journalist as always contains much of interest. One item that particularly struck me was a review by by J B Colson of the book by Anne Whiston Spirn, “Daring to Look,” which takes a new look at the work of Dorothea Lange and appears to give a much more detailed insight into how she actually worked. She concentrates her attention on the projects Lange undertook in 1939.

The link at the bottom of the page leads to a good selection of Lange’s work, mainly from the collection of the Library of Congress. You can of course go and see more there; a Creator serach on Dorothea Lange returns over 4000 records, and most appear to have digitised images. So here is one you almost certainly haven’t seen before!

Wife and sick child of tubercular itinerant, stranded in New Mexico, Dorothea Lange, 1936 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,

There is a special feature on the variants of her ‘Migrant Mother‘ picture and if you would like your own print to hang on your wall you can download a 55Mb Tiff file made from the original nitrate negative (55 Mb may well take some time to download.) A 30Mb TIFF made from a print is also available, but shows considedrable damage to the print.

You can also read the story of this picture from another point of view. According to the grandson of Florence (Owens) Thompson, the woman in the picture, a well-dressed woman jumped out of a smart newish car and started taking pictures, getting closer with each shot. Florence decide to ignore her.

After taking the pictures, Lange is said to have told Florence who she was and that she was working for the Farm Security Administration and to have promised that the pictures would not be published. Next day they made the front page of all the newspapers.

Food Photographs

Food is often a problem for photojournalists when travelling or living in foreign countries and meals are often memorable for various reasons. On the The New Yorker magazine site you can watch ‘Tea and Wallaby” in which photographers Brent Stirton, John Stanmeyer, Olivia Arthur, Rena Effendi, Eric Bouvet, Lauren Greenfield, Eamon Mac Mahon, Carolyn Drake, Andrea Diefenbach, Jacob Aue Sobol, Aaron Huey and Stephanie Sinclair each talk about a meal they have had and a picture they took related to it.

I’m not a fan of food photography, whether the kind of thing you see in the glossy mags or Martin Parr‘s more garish kitchen kitsch attempts. But these pictures are rather better.

Louise Narbo

There are times when you walk into a gallery and look at the work on the wall and somehow every seems right and in place. It isn’t necessarily great work, but something that hangs together, that has a consistency of feeling and a strong sense of having been created by a thinking and feeling person able to express themselves clearly.

I felt that strongly when I walked into Galerie Claire Corcia on the rue Saint-Martin and began to look at the black and white images of Louise Narbo. Born in Algeria, she came to Paris where she still lives in the 1960s to continue her studies, training to become a pyschoanalyst. It didn’t surprise me to learn this after seeing her work which had already impressed me as being very much concerned with states of mind.

The work on show covered a wider range than on the gallery site, and you can see more on Narbo’s own site. There are several series of pictures, along with some short texts about the projects and about her and her photographic interests. Many of the pictures I saw at the gallery are on that site, although I think some I particularly liked made recently in her Vincennes flat are not.

Narbo has been taking photographs for over 30 years, and had her first personal show in 1982. One of the series I liked most on her site, “Ce qui ne s’ecrit pas” was shown in 1989. Although all the series had images that I liked, this seemed to work better as a series.

She currently has another show, Hiver Fertile, pictures from the Bois de Vincennes at the eastern edge of Paris, close to where she lives, on show in Vincennes until Dec 20, 2008. You can see some other work from the Bois de Vincennes on her site.

Jacques Vauclair

Jacques Vauclair (1926-99) started working in photography at Studio Harcourt in 1946. Set up to meet the needs of the press in 1934, the studio had developed into a leading portrait studio with a fairly distinctive film-style lighting and posing. It’s “trademark style” continues in use to the present day by the studio, still offering its services. To me it recalls the worst of Hollywood photography of the era in which it is founded.

You can find the site easily on Google, by typing in ‘Studio Harcourt’. As well as some pictures it contains one of the most restrictive ‘Legal Notices’ I’ve seen on the web which probably means I’m not even allowed to tell you about it or hint at its existence and certainly can’t link to it. Google are big enough to ignore such things – as they do.

Like much film lighting of the period, it was done to make people look as if they were in a film, very much in the spotlight. To my eyes, used to a more realist approach it seems impossibly stagey and false, incredibly dated. Light should generally be sympathetic and help to describe the subject, not overpower it, and certainly not to the extent that the actual subject becomes almost immaterial.

Vauclair, to his credit, didn’t quite seem to fit Harcourt, though it was ten years before he left to set up Studio Vauclair, next to the famous Olympia concert hall. For the next five years or so he was the photographer to be photographed by in Paris, particularly for actors, actresses, singers (even then they didn’t call female singers singesses) and the young unknowns who became a part of the French ‘New Wave’ cinema.

Although many of the stars he photographed may be better known in France, even I’ve head of some of them, including figures such as Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens, Jean Marais, Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Looking through the large cellar gallery of Le Centre IRIS, its walls covered with images – or the book that accompanies the show – its hard not to be impressed by the sheer volume. There are some interesting portraits, particularly of the singers, but too many are let down by either the lighting of the printing I think many were modern prints from his negatives) or both. Frankly there were quite a few images on show that had a student brought them out of the darkroom to show me I would have made a few suggestions and sent them back to try and do better. But then perhaps I don’t understand his version of that trademark style.

For Vauclair, the time was the most beautiful years of his life, and it was his luck to mix with the greatest artists of this unique era. It gave him great professional and personal satisfaction. But eventually gave up professional photography to pursue a second very successful career as a songwriter. His work in this show is valuable as a fine record of the period and milieu in which he worked and the way he lit and took pictures is also very much of its time. But I do hope there are no photographers out there today who think it a style worth emulation.

English Carnivals Deja Vu

All over again at the Barbican Library in London, UK, starting from Wednesday 2 Dec and continuing until 29 Dec, with a day or two off for Santa’s Shopathon in between. I think it will be more or less identical to the previous showing in October in the East London Photomonth at the Shoreditch Gallery (the Juggler.)

If you are around Wednesday evening, you are welcome to the private view, 6-15-8.30pm and if you haven’t got the slightest what I’m talking about, here’s most of the stuff from the press release:

Barbican Library
Level2
Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS

3 Dec – 29 Dec, 2008

Monday, Wednesday: 9.30am – 5.30pm
Tuesday, Thursday: 9.30am – 7.30pm
Friday: 9.30am – 2.00pm
Saturday: 9.30am – 4.00pm

Contact: Peter Marshall: petermarshall@cix.co.uk
Website: http://englishcarnival.org.uk/

English Carnival shows the work of four documentary photographers who have each been inspired by the carnival tradition and carried out long-term projects on Carnival in this country. Although they have at often worked together, each has a distinctly different approach to the subject in their photography. All four photographers have shown work extensively and their pictures have been published widely in books and magazines.

Paul Baldesare and Bob Watkins have photographed traditional English carnivals since the early 1990s, and they received an Arts Council National Lottery Grant in 1997-8 to continue their project. A show of their work organised by Kent Arts toured a number of venues in the South East. Baldesare in colour and Watkins in black and white both show the highly idiosyncratic and sometimes esoteric side of the traditional carnivals that result in their peculiar fascination.

Peter Marshall’s black and white prints from the 1990s are from ‘Notting Hill in Carnival’ , published in ‘Visual Anthropology Review’ in 1999 with an essay and comments on the pictures by George Mentore who took part in Notting Hill in the 1970s.

David Trainer’s striking black and white portraits come from traditional English carnivals and fairs. His work has been included in shows in leading galleries, including the Tate Gallery’s ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain.’

Paul Baldesare “Many years ago I came across a book called ‘A Day Off‘ by photographer Tony Ray Jones. One section, ‘Summer Carnivals’, shot in the 1960s, was a particular favourite.” “For me, these events were full of cultural imagination and ritual contradictions.”

Peter Marshall “Notting Hill has brought new traditions of carnival to this country, enlivening our tradition. I deliberately chose to photograph it in black and white to concentrate on the people and the spirit of the event. I wanted myself and my camera to be a part of the dance.”

Dave Trainer “Just for a day you can be someone else, live out those hidden fantasies, look and act like your heroes. Dress up like a lady with balloons for boobs and walk around half naked without being arrested it’s all about dressing up, showing off and having fun. Well, it’s only once a year.”

Bob Watkins “carnivals are unique in the way they mirror variety and depth of our social history through popular cultural images these pictures are social documents of particular times and places, [but] some have a meaning beyond the thing itself and it is this possibility of the photo as metaphor that keeps me enthusiastic about image making.

And of course if you can’t make it, there are more pictures on the English Carnival web site – rather more than the 40 that are in the Barbican show.

Paris Photo and Japan

There is much more I could say about Paris Photo, but much was the same as ever, or perhaps more so. At many gallery spaces it was very much a case of deja vu, and there were some images I welcomed as old friends, in particular a very nice Steichen gum platinum print and some fine dye transfers of artists studios by Evelyn Hofer. If one can’t own such beautiful objects it is at least nice to see them on a regular basis.

However there were other works I would be happy never to see again, and indeed some I would happily add to a bonfire or put back in the photographers rubbish bin from which some ‘vintage works’ do appear to have been ‘rescued.’ I think the gallery scene lacks any mechanism for dealers to admit to making mistakes – they just have to keep on putting out the work and hope that suckers will take the bait.

It was good to see some of the Japanese work, in particular some fine large prints by Daido Moriyama which made a nice comparision with work by William Klein it was shown alongside. It was disappointing not to see more work from Eikoh Hosoe, but there was a magnificient very large screen made from his picture of a Kamaitachi running across a rice paddy, a wide open and highly luminous patchwork landscape. This very large inkjet print made on silk paper was truly one of the most desirable objects in the show.

There is a lengthy illustrated essay by Mariko Takeuchi, guest curator of the “Spotlight on Japan” at the show on lensculture which attempts the kind of overview of Japanese photography that would be beyond me. However, there are a few things it fails to mention, for example what was possibly a vital influence on photography in Japan in the 20th century (it was listed on the very detailed history board in the exhibition) in 1931 when ‘Film und Foto‘ brought the modern photography world to tour Japan.

Also without a mention is one of my favourite Japanese photographers, Issei Suda (b1940), (you can see around 30 of his pictures – though not my favourite works at the site of the Portland USA Charles A Hartman gallery.) I was pleased to see pictuers by Suda both at both Galerie Priska Pasquer from Cologne and a particularly fine image with a tatooed torso, from Zeit-Foto Salon from Tokyo. Its a picture that’s hard to describeand I can’t find on the web, so here I’ll do something I don’t like to do and put my very bad snap, taken as an ‘aide-memoire’ and full of reflections, on line. (Incidentally everyone seems happy with people taking pictures of the pictures at the show – which comes as a little shock after some museum policies. )

Another fine image on the same stand was a large print by Ihei Kimura (1901-74) one of a generation across the world whose creativity emerged with the Leica, and whose work desrves to be more widely known here.

Takeuchi does mention Kimura, and also another phtogorapher whose prints I liked, Tomoko Yoneda, whose black and white pictures seen through the spectacle lenses of the famous have for me a very Bauhaus feel. Another photographer who doesn’t get a look in is the only one of the more recent photographers from Japan who held any great interest for me, Nobuhiro Fukui, who I mentioned in an earlier post.

The Dear Leader and others

Christopher Morris‘s video sequence The Dear Leader seems largely to show what a good still photographer he is. The video itself is far too long and its soundtrack filled with rather too much portentous music (Emily by Philip Glass from the score for the film The Thin Blue Line and Evil Grade by John Kusiak, used in the film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons of Robert S. McNamara, which also had a soundtrack largely by Glass.)

Essentially the movie seems a series of stills, to some of which the movement of the characters involved occasionally adds something, particularly in a lengthy shot of Bush speaking where what I assume are security men twitching in the right foreground supply the main interest. At other times it merely distracts, and there are also some downright boring long and fairly empty scenes where I longed for a single frame or even a more active pair of scissors.

I couldn’t help thinking what a shame he didn’t have his eye to the viewfinder of a still camera during some of these sequences, still frames as yet can’t have the same quality (but of course it may not be long, esepcially with RED), but there are images that flicker through here that are stronger than some of those in his George Bush retrospective on VII, which does also contain a number of superb pictures.

You can see more of his feature stories ther by clicking on his name at the left of the features page – unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a direct link.

Among many other articles worth reading in dispatches is a letter from John Morris written on the occasion of Cornell Capa‘s death in May 2008, but also recounting something of the tragic loss of both Werner Bischof and Robert Capa in May 1954.

I found the video on ‘dispatches‘ from a link at FOTO8 and again on VII you can also see the pictures from Morris’s show My America which was at the Host Gallery recently. Currently they are showing the work of British post-war industrial photographer Maurice Broomfield, a reminder of those times when Britain still had industry.

Paris Photo: Alec Soth

Undoubtedly one of the greatest hits of this year’s Paris Photo was Alec Soth‘s “The Last Days of W“, shown on the Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis stand. You can see the work, which was originally published in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters, on Soth’s own site, and read an introduction by Soth on their Artinfo site.

In the introduction, he quotes several Bushisms, and ends by saying that in this collection ‘I suppose Im not really trying to accomplish much at all. Rather, as President Bush himself once said, One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.’

And there are a few such here, although on the printed page or screen some lack the impact of the works in the flesh. About half the prints in the work were on show in Paris and several in particular on show caught my attention.

One of the finest landscape images on show in Paris is his view of Salt Lake, Utah, the rectangle split into two, salt below, pale blue sky above, by the thin line of a road coming from the right two thirds of the way across the frame, on it a lorry and a few smaller dots – but you need to see the actual print to appreciate it. Following it is another splendid image of a group of cadets at West Point, then a great image of a table tennis table and a mural at First Baptist Church, Bemidji, Minnesota.

Another favourite image on show in Paris that also includes a mural was of Michael and Dominique from Dearborn, Michigan, a black couple in their wedding whites (including a white top hat for Michael) seated behind a long table with a lilac fabric front on a rather battered stage; behind them a backdrop of the Nile, pyramids and moon.

“The Last Days of W”, a 48 page self-published artist book printed on newsprint, is still available from Little Brown Mushroom Books or Magnum at $17.00 (plus shipping), though I expect it will soon sell out.

Serial Numbers

Ed Ruscha with his “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” and “Every Building on Sunset Strip” has a lot to answer for, although he could perhaps shift some of the blame onto Bernd and Hilla Becher in Dusseldorf.

Since they made their work, splendid though it often was, the rather straightforward and simple concept of “typologies” has provided rather easy ways to think of and carry out photographic projects, though it’s been instructive over the years to see what a pig’s ear some students have made of them. Perhaps fortunately in that it has usually been the “mistakes” that have given any interest to their work.

What soon becomes obvious is that, even given the straight-jacket of the concept, the interest in the result is still so very dependent on the photographic seeing of the photographer, a thought that came very obviously to me on seeing the black and white set of images by Jeff Brouws, which you can see on artkrush , Twenty-six Abandoned Gasoline Stations (very consciously a direct homage to Ruscha’s work) on a stand at Paris Photo. (There is also a good interview with Brouws on the site with a link to more pictures.)

Typologies such as this are succesful as photographic series because Brouws is a photographer who very much follows the advice of the sage to “let the subject determine its own composition.” You can see more of his more recent work on his own website, where it also becomes clear that typologies greatly benefit from interesting and important subject matter.

This is perhaps even more clear in the work of the Bechers, where the intrinsic complexity of the industrial structures elevates their work above the tedium of the framework house series.

Paris Photo: BMW Prize

A major area at the very centre of Paris Photo is devoted not to photography but a car showroom. As someone who was a friend of the earth before the Earth officially had Friends (and who got rid of his first and last car in 1966) I find it inappropriate and distasteful, even more so this year since it it’s a make very much associated with bankers, whose bad book-keeping has certainly not put them into my good books of late. If I wanted to worship the motor car I’d go to a car show.

The centrepiece of the show – not photography

BMW are the sponsors of the BMW-Paris Photo Prize, a contest that has always turned up some rather odd entrants and chosen peculiar winners. The entrants are nominated by the galleries taking part in the show, which accounts for some fairly unlikely submissions.

Shortlisted work for the prize displayed on the upper level

Perhaps the most unlikely this year was the winner, Yao Lus New landscape part I Ancient Spring Time Fey, 2006. Yao Lu was nominated by the 798 Photo Gallery, Beijing. He photographs mounds of garbage covered by green nets and digitally manipulates them to resemble traditional Chinese paintings. It’s more bad Photoshop than photography as I know it, though, as the pdf file says “speaks of the radical mutations affecting nature in China as
is it subjected to rampant urbanization and the ecological threats that endanger the
environment.” But I still think its a shame that a jury that included one photographer and one curator I admire couldn’t pick something more photographic.

Looking at the winning entry

I took some time going round the works shortlisted for the prize that were on show in Paris, and picked my own top five (not in order): Janne Lehtinen from Finland, Yuki Tawada, Ken Kitano (click on the pictures to see them larger) and Nobuhiro Fukui from Japan and Atta Kim from South Korea.

But this, as I’ve mentioned previously, is the year of China, thanks to the Beijing Olympics, so perhaps Yao Lu’s victory should not have come as a surprise.