Category: My Own Work

There were two exhibitions at the École nat. sup. d’architecture Paris Val-de-Seine, housed in the fine late nineteenth century factory (now listed and protected as a historic monument, and recently restored) built for the Société Urbaine d’Air Comprimé (SUDAC) and with the message in large text on its frontage: ‘Distribution d’air Comprime‘.

View from the Pont National, Peter Marshall

‘Recollections’ was a show of pictures by Philip Jones Griffiths taken in Britain from the 1950s – 1970s, with plenty of reminders of what a fine photographer he was. It appears to be showing also at the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool from 17 October 2008 to 15 March 2009, and their site has half a dozen images and some text. You can also read more and see some other pictures on the Trolley Books page about the accompanying book. The Paris show did not have the slide-show of his Vietnam images which is apparently at Liverpool, and there is also a slide-show linked at the top of the Trolley page.

This show – like the John Bulmer show I’d seen the previous day, was also a reminder of a vanished past – some gone for good, but in other ways very much for the worse. The Jones Griffiths show covers a much wider range of political and cultural events, and there is always an insistence on stating the photographer’s point of view in his work.

One image that particularly appealed to me (you can see it small and dark on the Trolley site) was taken in Downing St, outside the home of the Prime Minister. It showed four nannies with a couple of prams and a push chair who had stopped – as they did every day while taking their young charges for some air – to chat to the two policemen on duty outside the door of No 10. Now the west end of the street is walled off, and there are security gates on Whitehall, and they would need to apply several days in advance to go down the street – after passing through an airport-style security gate.

You can see many of Jones Griffith’s finest images on his Magnum pages, including in the slide show there a number that were in the show. Surprisingly, the book Recollections does not yet feature on the site.

Patrick Tourneboeuf’s giant colour pictures of spaces behind the scenes or being redeveloped in his ‘Monumental, etat des lieux’, (shown in Los Angeles as ‘The Museum Project‘) were also impressive. For once the scale of the images had a purpose, confronting us with these spaces almost on the same large scale as they actually existed, giving the feeling one could walk into these empty halls and spaces under repair. I was particularly impressed by an image of the Théâtre du Châtelet, its balconies and stalls wrapped in plastic and the workmen in hard hats at the bottom left.

It is also a project that reflects the much greater support that photography enjoys in France compared the UK.  The project began with a carte blanche commission from the French Minister of Culture in 1997 to photograph the renovation of the Pompidou Centre; other official commissions followed on from the success of his work there.

Lars Tunbjork: Vinter
Galerie Vu, 2 rue Jules Cousin, 4e
12 Nov 2008 – 25 January 2009

also

Lars Tunbjork: I love Boras
Centre culturel suedois, 11 rue Payenne, 3e
9 Nov 2008 – 25 January 2009

The basement  exhibition space of Galerie Vu was filled with the large colour images of one of my favourite Swedish photographers, Lars Tunbjork. His show Vinter was drawing a good audience there, and deservedly so, although I felt it lacked the kind of unity found in his earlier books such as “Home” and “Office.”

I met Lars in Poland when his work was on show at the first FotoArtFestival at Bielsko-Biala, and was very there were photographers from 25 countries showing in Poland, and I was present as ‘Great Britain’ with  ‘London’s Industrial Heritage‘)

You can see a good selection of his work on the Agence Vu web site and also on the Cohen Amador Gallery site.

Here’s a little of what I wrote about him in 2005, but didn’t publish as I am still waiting for a reply from Lars for permission to use the images concerned!

Lars Tunbjörk

Lars Tunbjörk was born in Boras, a small city in southern Sweden in 1956, in an area that was an exemplar of the Swedish ‘Folkhemmet’ (the ‘people’s home’ or welfare state envisaged by the ruling Social Democratic Party). When he was at school in 1971 at the age of 15 he went on work experience to the ‘Boras Tidning‘ newspaper and was introduced to photography. He went on to become a freelance before getting a staff job with the ‘Stockholms-Tidningen‘, a leading daily in the Swedish capital. His work there from 1981-4, distinguished by its subtlety, established him as a leading Swedish photojournalist. He also worked for Metallarbetaren, the magazine
of the Swedish Metal Workers Union, Manadsjournalen, a Swedish monthly cultural review which ceased publication in 2002, and the Scandinavian Airlines magazine Upp&Ner (Up & Down.)

It was the work published in the book ‘Country Beside Itself’ in 1993 (Swedish title: Landet Utom Sig) with text by Thomas Tidholm and Göran Greider that brought Tunbjörk’s colour photography to the attention of the photographic audience world-wide. His pictures (and you can see a good selection of his work from 1989-99 including some from this book on Zone Zero) show a strong sense of colour and design as well as a taste for the amusing, ridiculous and occasionally surreal.

The images as well as showing his personal vision, also comment on the political and social malaise felt in the country, where much of the aims of the ‘Swedish Model’ welfare state had been acheived, and the consensus that this common aim had generated was being replaced by increasing feelings of alienation, emptiness and lack of purpose, and a movement away from social idealism towards a free-market individualism.

So in Olandi, 1991, a man and a woman recline in their swim suits on almost invisible supports, oddly suspended above a large area of grass, apparently floating as if on some invisible lake or by the yellow umbrellas that seem to emerge from their heads.

Far behind them along the edge of the grass across the centre of the whole frame is a series of buildings, black roofs above offwhite wood or plaster walls, a fairytale like faux-heritage development, stressed by the fake antique black metal lamp post which rises from beside the empty grey tarmac path at left of the picture into the white sky. Even the distant trees are drained of their colour. An image flickers into my mind of bathers floating in the high density of the Dead Sea, but this dead sea is marked as clearly Swedish by the colour – the yellow umbrellas and the complemenatry blue of the woman’s costume are those of the national flag, “a blue cloth with a yellow cross”.

An interior, Oland, 1991 is a simple scene. A room is seen in a wide-angle view square on to a wall, with white ceiling with glowing fluorescent fitting, a rather vivid green floor and pale orange-yellow walls, both facing the camera and to the right. The facing wall has a blue door at right, and in the corner of the room to the right of this a red plastic chair. High towards the left of the wall a TV is fixed, and below it stands a man, dressed only in trunks, socks and sandals, heavily sun-tanned, hands down at his sides. Seen from behind he betrays no thought or gesture through his pose, and appears to be staring at the wall in front of him (again the blue and yellow of Sweden) rather than looking up at the screen. Its a strangely empty room, nothing else except the white skirting board, a white light switch and socket by the door, a picture of loneliness emphasized by the colours. On the screen in cold blue light a couple embrace, the colour contradicting their contact.

In Flemingsberg 1989, a businessman or doctor or politician in an off-white raincoat, grey trousers, black shoes, walks along an empty tarmac road beside a fence past the grounds of some institutional building (presumably a hospital), striding out, head bowed, clutching his bulging briefcase. Perhaps representing the middle-class with all the plans of the ‘Swedish Model’, looking down and not thinking about the future, oblivious to the lamp post that has fallen down apparently towards him, about to pierce his heart with the sign attached. It reads ‘Diagnosv‘(Diagnosis) 13,15,17.

Later in the afternoon we also made it to Lars’s second show in the Mois de la Photo, a much smaller show, I Love Boras, in the Centre culturel suedois in the rue Payenne in the 3e. This too was busy, but for many the main attraction was the copies of his books available for browsing rather than the few prints on the wall.

Both shows continue until 25 Jan 2009, so if you are in Paris before then, they – and the Galerie Vu show in particular are worth a visit.

Gilles Raynaldy: Domiciles
Ecole nat. sup. d’architecture de Paris la Villette, Paris
4-28 Nov, 2008

Domiciles by Gilles Raynaldy turned out to be one of the more pleasant and rewarding shows of the Mois. It was a simple enough idea and project, taking photographs of the interiors (mainly) of the homes of different people, mainly in France, but also some in Morocco. (The examples you can see on his web site are arranged in two projects, Parisian apartments and Moroccan interiors.)

Each residence was represented with a short text about the person or people who lived there, giving their occupation (or former occupation for the several who were retired.) There was then a short series of pictures of the interior of the house or flat, nicely taken and well-printed in colour.

The interiors reflected the personalities of the individuals concerned, but not just that, also of course their affluence and other aspects of their background, as well as the locations. These varied from tiny flats in Paris through mansions in the south and some rather more rudimentary housing abroad.

It was very nicely done and rather fascinating in a kind of voyeuristic way. It reminded me of the glimpses inside houses that one gets walking down the street in the early evening, when people have put on their lights but not yet closed their blinds or curtains, often fascinating but it would be rude to stop and stare. In these pictures Raynaldy has gained access and permission to do just that.

I did wonder about the choice of these particular examples, which was not dealt with in the notes on the show but were certainly in no way a random sample or cross-section of the population. There were, for example, several photographers, a rahter small element of society.

There were apparently a hundred 30x40cm colour images on show and I think it would have been at least as effective as a book or a high quality presentation on CD or DVD (my normal screen has an almost identical size.)

It made me think briefly of another series of domestic interiors, Bert Teunissen’s Domestic Landscapes  but these are very different, with Teunissen photographing the inhabitants in their own homes. Raynaldy’s people, who are perhaps his true subjects, remain invisible (or almost so), and the photographer roams their creation, recording their arrangement of territory and traces of their existence. It’s a project that perhaps has rather more in common with my views of shop interiors that made up a large part of the series ‘Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise.

Lewisham, London, ca. 1990 by Peter Marshall

Also on display in the show was a book of work by Raynaldy ‘Habitat social en Meuse‘ (also on his web site) which looked like a fine urban landscape project.

Showing in a projection area at the centre of the display were a couple of extensive slide shows by various photographers. One, on children seemed to me to have rather too many images that were largely of interest to the families concerned, mixed in with some more interesting work and some visual candyfloss. ‘Contempler et construire’ was made of sterner stuff, although not all the work appealed to me, but I was particularly interested to see the urban landscapes of Normandy as shown by Benoit Grimbert. The subject seemed rather more appropriate to his rectangular format and upright approach than the North Circular Road show I had viewed the previous day.

Moscou Verticale
Mois de la Photo, Paris
la Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine
23 October 2008 – 30 November 2008

One of the really major shows in the Mois de la Photo, Gabriele Basilico’s Moscou Verticale proved more difficult to find than we expected, and had us checking the information in the programme very carefully.

place du Trocadéro, Paris, Peter Marshall, 2008

The place du Trocadéro is really one of the bleaker areas of Paris, with the large empty square dominated by the two wings of the Palais de Chaillot, built on either side of an open terrace with its well-known view of the Eiffel Tower across the River Seine (and now thronged by young men trying to sell small models of the tower.) Built to impress for the 1937 International Exhibition it embodies every worst element of a classicized  debased modernism, and houses a rather bewildering array of museums, badly signposted in what is almost a French art-form. Even though we knew where we were going it still seemed hard to find, and we were almost put off by the notices demanding an entry fee. But although you do have to pay to visit la Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, this and some other exhibitions were free.

I’ve long been a fan of Gabriele Basilico (b1944, Milan)  and there were a few good examples of his work in one or two stands at Paris Photo. I own several books of his work, but I think this is the first one-person show of his that I’ve seen. Or at least it was a one-photographer show, because Basilico, wo trained as an architect before becoming a  photographer, worked on the project with architect Umberto Zanetti , photographing and photographing from the seven curiously ridiculous towers around Moscow  from the Stalinist era sometimes known as the ‘Seven Sisters‘.

These were built as showcases for the state, very much to outdo the skyscrapers of New York – and in terms of excess they certainly do. There is a story about Stalin receiving two quite different alternative plans for a building from an architect who had expected him to choose the one he preferred. But perhaps after rather too many bottles of vodka, the plans were returned with both approved by the dictator, and the architect had to build the two together on the same foundations. Looking at some of these pictures I did wonder if it was only two plans.

These are buildings so impressively bad that it becomes fascinating. You can see three of his black and white images of them on the Cohen Amador Gallery site  (you are unlikely to be fooled by the caption which tells you one is in Naples.) Like the black and white images on show, these are inkjet prints, and at least as good as those he has previously printed on silver gelatin.

But while these black and white pictures were very much what we have come to expect from Basilico, the colour work on show actually taken from the ‘Seven Sisters’ took a radically different perspective on both the buildings and the rest of the city, looking down at sometimes seriously vertigo-inducing angles and often concentrating on relatively small building details.

In part the new direction may have come from working with the architect on this project, but it may also have some connection with Basilico having worked with another of my favourite urban landscape photographers John Davies (a couple of whose pictures were also in Paris Photo.) John is one of the photographers included on the Urban Landscapes site I run with Mike Seaborne, and which links to his own extensive site.

Although I can’t find any significant pictures of this colour work by Basilico on-line (we’d be delighted to put some on Urban Landscapes) pictures at Cohen Amador from Naples (probably), Bari, Barcelona and San Francisco show this new viewpoint, as do the 2008 pictures from San Francisco at Studio La Città.

Peter Marshall

Grain Silos, Riverside Walk, East Greenwich (1982) (C) Peter Marshall I don’t often mention my own photographs of buildings (several hundred are in one of our national collections), but you can see some on the web. Perhaps the best site is London’s Industrial Heritage, but one of the first sites I wrote (and showing its age,) ‘The Buildings of London‘  has a few examples from the hundred thousand or so I took.
Art Deco Factory, Great West Rd, Brentford, 1980s  © Peter Marshall

Monks protest in London during Global day of action for Burma – see My London Diary. (C) 2007, Peter Marshall

MOIS DE LA PHOTO-OFF, PARIS
Birmanie, rêves sous surveillance
(Burma, Dreams under Surveillance)
Du 10 au 23 novembre 2008 aux Vôutes

The web site Burma, dreams under surveillance gives an excellent account of this project started in 2003 by the humanitarian organisation ‘Les yeux dans le monde’ to increase our awareness of the social and political situation in Burma.

On 13 November we went to the opening of a show of the photographs taken by Manon Ott and Grégory Cohen at Les Vôutes, vaults under the roadway at les Frigos, a former industrial complex now artists homes, studios and exhibition spaces, a block east of the new building of the National Library (Bibliotheque François Mitterand) in the XIIIe.

The work is also available as a book from Editions Autrement, published in May 2008, when the work was also shown at Les Vôutes with a two-day festival.  The photographs are presented in four chapters: People’s desire, Stories of resistance, Between survival and guerilla war and The border areas, and also includes appendices containing information about the country and its culture.

Although there were some powerful images on the wall, and in the projection on the screen at the end of the cellar, the added structure of the book gives a much tighter experience.

There were a number of images among the work that to me seemed perhaps more touristic than documentary, and at times I wondered about how the work had been affected by the difficulties of working openly in Burma, impossible for me to assess.

But there were also moving stories and powerful suggestions of a pervasive military supervision of all aspects of life (the mention of Orwell’s 1984 seemed only too true.) But there was also humour – and if you don’t know about the Moustache Brothers you can find out here and also see them on YouTube.

Burma Peace walk in London,  Jan 2008 – Protests like this would be brutally repressed in Burma. (C) 2008, Peter Marshall