Category: Reviews etc

It takes me roughly 45 to 90 minutes to get to most places in London from home, with a train journey into Waterloo and then on by bus or tube. Over the years I’ve become pretty good at working out routes using public transport, though it can be tricky when engineering works sometimes close down half the tube at weekends, or events on the street (often those I’m photographing) disrupt bus services. The Transport for London Journey Planner is often helpful as a starting point,but can’t be relied on to suggest best routes or give an accurate estimate of journey times.

But often I want to photograph several events at different places, and these are seldom arranged at particularly convenient times. Even I can’t be in two places at one time! So it means prioritising, and perhaps leaving one event before it finishes and arriving at another late – or not at all. Other days I’ll have finished one thing and be waiting perhaps an hour or two for a second event to photograph, so what do I do in these odd moments.

Well, if there are other photographers I know about, we often go to a pub – or less often to a cafe, which can be very pleasant. But I’ve never liked sitting on my own in such places. Sometimes I’ll fit in some other photography, perhaps visiting an interesting or changing area.

I often used to try some street photography, but my current Nikon digital is rather large and clunky for this, and I’ve yet to find a good digital alternative for the Leica or Minolta CLE (no, the M8 doesn’t hack it.) Of course I could keep on shooting film, but the hundred or so rolls I’ve already go waiting for processing puts me off it. So for the moment I’ve given that up, though in good light there are compact digitals that are worth considering.

So what I often do if I’m on my own is visit galleries. Of course there are some photography shows, but I also like to visit art galleries – such as the Tate, Tate Modern, the National Gallery etc, but also sometimes the commercial galleries. It helps to be a member of The Art Fund  because this gets me free into some places and shows where I’d otherwise have to pay – and if I’ve only got a short time it seems hardly worth it, though fortunately most of London’s major galleries are free.

So, having taken enough pictures of the Ashura procession in rather poor light (not helped by getting the exposure wrong by mistake on some of them – my usual trouble with pressing things when I don’t mean to) I turned into Hyde Park and started by taking some pictures of one of my many favourite places in London, the Italian garden.

Then I walked on in the direction of the Serpentine Gallery, walking past sign after sign pinting me towards the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

Princess Di never appealed to me and I kept away from all the popular outpouring following her death, and although I’d heard and read about the fountain I hadn’t bothered to go and see it, but since I wasn’t short of time I made the detour today.

Although many people had said some fairly rude things about the memorial when it was opened, I actually rather liked it. Perhaps the failing light on a dull cold day improves it, but I liked the feeling of a mountain stream when seen close too, and the overall view too was a pleasant surprise.

The show currently at the Serpentine Gallery, Indian Highway, (until 22 Feb) was also worth a visit, and for once some of the video, particularly Amar Kanwar’s eight-screen immersive video installation, The Lightning Testimonies, was really worth watching. But most of the work was enjoyable, if some of it perhaps a little too predictable, and I found the couple of photographic pieces of limited interest.

From there a short walk and a bus took me to Jubilee Place and the Michael Hoppen Gallery, which boasted a show, Secret City, by Robert Doisneau and Jason Langer (ending 20 Jan) along with another by Nobuyoshi Araki (ending 10 Jan.) Doisneau is one of my favourite photographers (I have quite a few) but there were only a couple of images by him I would have considered buying were I a rich man, and I’ve seen better prints of both. Langer’s work just seemed rather out of place in the company.

The Araki show I also found disappointing. Few of his ‘erotic’ images rise above the interest of dead meat and pairing them with giantly enlarged flowers does nothing to help. There has long been a market for ‘respectable’ pornography to decorate bourgeois walls but Fragonard did it rather better.

As often happens to me, by now I was running a little late and had to dash for the tube at South Kensington to take me up to my next event, the daily protest opposite the Israeli Embassy since the attack on Gaza began.

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.