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Street Pictures and Lin Delpierre

Increasingly in England it is getting more problematic to take photographs on the street, with increasing suspicion from both police and public. And of course the police advertising campaign suggesting anyone with a camera was a terrorist suspect and should be reported to them didn’t help any.

Our right in the UK to take photographs in public places has recently been affirmed again by the government. But at the same time they also seem to be one of the parties busily eroding it, with new legislation, and guidance to the police. Judges (and one judge in particular) seem also to have recently tipped the balance in favouring rights to privacy (at least of celebrities) in public places over the rights of photographers and the public at large.

Our right to photograph is also diminished by the increasing privatisation of public spaces. More and more areas of cities to which the public have access are becoming privately owned. Quite large areas of the City of London which appear to most users as public streets which now actually private property, and so too are vast areas such as Canary Wharf. Many of London’s parks are also in private hands – of the Crown. Although you may often get away with taking pictures, you can also, as I’ve found on several occasions, be stopped from doing so.

Even some areas remaining in public hands, such as Trafalgar Square, are covered by by-laws which restrict photography, and although their intention was usually to get commercial photographers to pay for their use of locations, other photographers are at times stopped.

In France, the law relating to photographing people in public seems to be fairly similar to that in the UK. If you can read French, the FreeLens site is a useful source of information on the various laws that restrict the activities of photojournalists in France – and they also produce a useful booklet you can download, “Photographe Presse Mode D’Emploi“, essential reading for freelances (pigistes) working there.

This makes clear that people have no rights to their image under the code of Civil Law, but they do have a right of privacy, which has been the subject of interpretation by the courts. As in the UK, in general you can publish pictures of people in public in the press without needing their permission. However it is important to treat the subject suitably and to caption pictures accurately.

Similar rules apply to property that is on public view – so long as it does not amount to a breach of privacy, pictures can be published without the need for authorisation. However for commercial use, if people or property are an important part of an image, you may have a problem, although it would be necessary for those wishing to make a claim against you to establish an actual cause for complaint.

A difference from the law – if not practice – in the UK is that journalists may photograph freely in the Metro and at railway stations, although videoing or filming needs permission.

French law also forbids publishing recognisable pictures of police doing their duty, except during demonstrations. One of the latest UK laws, the Counter-Terrorism Act, 2008 which received royal assent recently means that photographing a police officer here might also result in a lengthy jail sentence.

The position of artists is perhaps less clear than that of journalists. Certainly in the past there has been considerably more important placed on the rights of individuals over their appearance in France than in the UK or USA.

Which brings me (at last!) on to the the work of Lin Delpierre (b 1962) on show in rue Quincampoix in Paris at the Galerie Cour Carree in November.

‘Passantes‘ shows women walking by the photographer on the streets (the web site has series showing women from Bombay, Buenos Aires and Peking taken on medium format as well as groups of men on the street in Calcutta taken with 5×4 and other work.) As the text makes clear, Delpierre has travelled the world to photograph women in cities, including Rome, Moscow and Barcelona – as well as Paris.

The pictures are taken without permission and apparently often without the knowledge of the women involved, although some seem to be reacting to the presence of the photographer – either by staring or looking away.

Taken with a square format camera, Delpierre normally frames the figures fairly centrally, from perhaps 5 feet ot sometimes a little further away, working perhaps from waist level or slightly higher and seldom if ever showing them below knee level – but with quite a bit a space in the image above their heads. Mostly the subjects are young, and mostly they are at least fairly attractive.

I was in part reminded of Gary Winogrand’s most controversial book ‘Women Are Beautiful‘, although Delpierre’s work doesn’t show the same preoccupation – most of his subjects lack the sexuality that attracted Winogrand, so obviously in the grip of a mammary obsession.

The medium format also cuts down depth of field, and in some images this amounts to almost a dislocation of the subject from background, almost a cardboard cut-out effect, exaggerated on the web site by over-sharpening. At times he seems to catch women as they step into pools of light, and while on the web this gives the appearance of added flash, the lighting on the works on show appeared more natural.

One report I read about the show suggested that Delpierre’s work was original in that he worked at a close distance. Hardly so, since many street photographers have prowled for ages with their lenses pre-focussed at a similar distance – including me. Some of us have often mixed black and white with colour also, as he does in his triptychs.

I have to admit to liking Winogrand’s work, although (or because?) it sometimes makes me feel as if I am standing on the street and giving a wolf-whistle at the girls who go by. Not that this was ever the kind of behaviour I indulged in (though I had friends who did.) His pictures have a directness and an openness whereas in fornt of some of Delpierre’s I feel more of a voyeur. This perhaps reflects a different sensibility between the French and English.

I asked if the photographer thought photographing on the street in this way had any problems, and the answer was that there were none – it was a way of working that had a long pedigree in photography and there were no legal or moral issues involved.

To an extent I agree. These are people in public, and their actions are visible to any of us who share their space. Showing them in a photograph doesn’t really alter things, but the act of taking the photograph may. Many women may well feel they are being harassed by the photographer – and were they to see their photograph being exhibited might well feel aggrieved.

I would have been happier if I could have seen a real reason – perhaps documentary – for these images on the street. They reminded me a little of a fascinating series of men and women walking along Sutton High Street around 1930, published in Photographers’ London 1839-45. Nothing seems to be known about the photographer or his reason for making the images, but they are now a fascinating record of their times.

Delpierre’s women, particularly in their clothing, do indicated geographical differences (and the season and weather) but although they were technically fine, I wasn’t too sure I was really able to see the same kind of interest in them, and I don’t think it was the photographer’s intention. But perhaps in 75 years time they too will look different.

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: 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.

Paris November: Guillaume Lemarchal

Galerie Michèle Chomette: Paysages exfiltrés – Guillaume Lemarchal

Galerie Michèle Chomette did have a small notice on the street, but from then on you were on your own. At first we walked through into the courtyard, but it wasn’t there and we came back to the doors on our right and found a complicated entry system, that didn’t appear to work. We would have given up, but a more persistent Frenchman tried every button on the entry phone and had a long conversation with the only person who would answer, a young woman who lived on the first floor and had never heard of the gallery. Eventually she was persuaded to let us in to the building and we walked up the two floors to the gallery, which was showing the cold winter landscapes, Paysages exfiltrés, of Guillaume Lemarchal.

Although I’d taken the precaution of being accompanied by an interpreter, she proved of little assistance over the title of this show. Did it simply mean without using photographic filters – certainly it wasn’t the tobacco graduate school of landscape that many of the more commercially successful British landscape photographers have flogged beyond death. But perhaps it (and we think the closest English equivalent might be “unfiltered”) is also meant to imply something more philosophical than practical, that Lemarchal is not viewing the landscape through the conventional frames of reference of landscape art.

The spaces that Lemarchal photographs are empty. In particular although they show the residues of human action they are unpeopled, and often further abstracted from their history by a covering of snow. He likes to work in winter in northern regions, north Germany, Estonia and the Ukraine, and his palette is thus largely cool and unrelieved by warm tones. They are open and inhabited by light. Often there are deserted – or rather abandoned – buildings, perhaps once part of secret military installations, sites with a certain mystery.

Although it’s work that I think has a considerable presence and power, I didn’t warm to it – perhaps because of the very coldness of the landscapes he depicts. Lemarchal is a relatively young French photographer (b 1974) and earlier this year this work won the 2008 HSBC Foundation for Photography award.

I can’t find a good selection of this work on line, though there are small images on the links above, and a rather nice image of a piano here – click on it to see it larger. But the best place to see his work on line is on his portfolio site, where the mémoires et murmurs page contains a number of these pictures. But there are pictures on his other pages that I admire more.

Paris November: Galerie Berrger

Galerie Berrger: Callitypie: Julia Zeitoun and David Rase

Berrger are of course manufacturers of photographic films and papers, and now also make inkjet papers and COT-320, a 100% cotton paper designed for hand coated alternative process work. The two photographers on show had used this to make kallitypes, which use the light sensitive property of iron salts to produce silver images. It’s a process sometimes thought of as a poor man’s platinum print, and visually the two can be indistinguishable, although kallitypes have a poor reputation for stability – and certainly some but not all of those I made round 20 years ago have faded.

David Rase took Rodchenko as his inspiration for a series of modernist square format architectural studies. Although I liked a number of the images, I couldn’t help feeling that they might better have been printed using normal silver gelatin paper or probably even better as inkjet prints., and the highlights did not quite seem as clear as I would have liked. I think the images made good use of the square format.

Rodchenko’s pictures of similar architectural material – such as his Mosselprom Building, 1926 in the linked feature – show his use of unusual angles and a very strong sense of design, but have a clarity that was missing from these prints. Modernism in photography after all swept away a pictorialism that had given great attention to the actual print and aimed for a machine quality that was exemplified by the glossy bromide print. That doesn’t of course rule out using kallitype for work such as this, but somehow these prints didn’t quite seem to me to come up to the kind of quality needed – and which one could find for example in the platinum prints of Frederick Evans.

Julie Zeitoun‘s subject matter – details of cemetery monuments – perhaps suited the material better, but I felt her rather grainy treatment was unsympathetic. The kallitype is a contact printing process, and it looked as if these prints had been made from enlarged negatives taken on fast 35mm film, perhaps even pushed or developed to increase grain. It is perhaps such a well-worn subject that it is hard to produce anything new.

When I worked with the alternative processes, we all either worked on large format (at least one of the people I knew had a 12×16″ camera, and on occasion I worked with a friend using 8×10″, though more often I used 4×5″ and made prints at that size – particularly when using platinum, palladium and gold) or made enlarged negatives on film. Using large sheet film was expensive and especially with panchromatic materials needed for colour separations for tri-colour printing was a little tricky, particularly in my small and primitive darkroom, and at times we chose to work with negatives made on photographic paper, although the paper base did increase exposure times and add a little texture.

When desk top computers became able to cope with high resolution images, alt photographers turned to them with relief, printing out enlarged negatives with ease onto acetate sheets. When such negatives had been made with high-quality imagesetters in print bureaus, the quality could be superb, but some of those produced on cheap inkjet printers could only produce alt-process prints that had some of the same quality limitations to the inkjet prints from those same printers.

With increasing quality of ink sets and desktop printers – such as the Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks for colour and Jone Cone’s Piezotones for black and white printing, the quality of output from inkjet printers has reached new levels. I soon began to find I could get prints very similar in quality to those from platinum or kallitype direct from the printer, and although the historical processes continue to be of interest in themselves, I could see little justification for continuing to use most of them as a contemporary printmaker. But that’s a heretical position among alt photographers!

Trouble in the Suburbs

One of the more interesting shows in Paris last week was at the Galerie Fils de Calvaire in the 3e, which was showing Périphéries by Mohamed Bourouissa, (click on ‘Artists‘, then select his name) a photographer born 1978 in Blida, Algeria who lives and works in Paris. These were staged images from the estates around the edge of Paris, “la banlieue“, usually translated quite misleadingly as “the suburbs”, which evokes Acacia Avenue and rows of neat semis and bungalows rather than the concrete wilderness of these images, seen often at night. These are the “suburbs” that riot rather than those leafy roads that commuters take the Southern Railway back to. You can see a rather better presentation of 15 of these images elsewhere on-line.

I’m seldom a great fan of staged photography; it seems in its very essence to negate the true power of photography which comes from its ambivalent linkage to the real, but these images are perhaps a little different. Bourouissa is from the banlieue and certainly knows it and its inhabitants intimately, and the scenes they enact for his camera have a raw edge that is usually lacking in staged images. The people in his images seem to be playing themselves rather than appearing to be taking roles in someone else’s fiction, and many are not far in age from the 29 year old photographer.

There is a palpable tension in the group of youths hanging around in the entrance lobby of a block in Red Square. In front of the picture I felt much of the kind of hesitation and fear that a resident might feel on coming home and coming upon such a scene. Visually the square of the title on the back of one of their jackets in an otherwise grey scene carries a suggestion of that menace. Bourouissa says of his work: What I am after is that very fleeting tenth of a second when the tension is at its most extreme. We have all known those imperceptible moments when the tension seems more violent than the confrontation with the other. At that extreme point, anything could happen, or nothing, and this picture illustrates this to perfection.

There is a similar frisson in an image made in what looks like a car park next to some sports facility at dusk, where at right a man sits on a low wall drinking beer from a bottle, while at left another in a bright yellow jumper stands behind an open car door. In the centre of the picture, caught in the light, a man holds a large white dog, caught apparently in mid-air as its teeth seize the jacket of another man.

Another remarkable picture concentrates on a face to face confrontation between a black and white youth, seen from just behind one of them, looking over his shoulder towards another black youth who stands coolly a metre of so back, recording the event on his camera phone.

I can only find a postage stamp size image of ‘The Reflection‘ on line – on the Fils du Calvaire web site – follow the link in the first paragraph and click on ‘Works‘, then Périphéries, then the second thumbnail to see a slightly larger thumbnail. A youth sits back to the camera facing a small wall made of around 25 discarded TV sets piled up 3 or 4 high on the edge of a concrete area on an estate. His shoulders are hunched and he looks down. What can’t be seen in the small reproduction is the reflection in one of the screens that gives this large – roughly 5′ wide – image its title on the gallery wall, of a tree hit by sunlight on its bright yellow autumn leaves, contrasting with the drab blacks and greys and dull greens of the rest of the scene.

The notes with the show refer to photographers including Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Karen Knorr, but frankly I found his work considerably more interesting, perhaps because it has something they all seem to me to lack, a concern for the subject.

Nothing much happens on Mondays

Monday is a good day to travel to Paris, but not a good day for doing a great deal there, as so much is still closed on Mondays (and no, they don’t really enjoy that mythical ‘continental weekend’ that big business uses to push for more Sunday opening of shops here, as most places are also closed then too – or as they often like to put it more positively, “ouvert tous les jours, sauf lundi et dimanche.”

Quite a lot of the galleries add jeudi and/or samedi to the list also, and for most of them don’t bother to get up before lunch. Finding shows open in Paris can be quite a problem, and actually finding and getting in to the galleries can be even more so.

Of course, both the Mois de la Photo and the Photo-Off give dates of shows and time and dates of opening and I’d spent some hours poring over their leaflets to find four shows that should have been open and in roughly the area where we were staying in the north of the city. The first, by Frédéric Delangle, I’ve already covered, and offered no problems of access, though we did manage to walk past the door and explore much of the rather interesting building before deciding to try the cafe in which it was taking place.

Next we went to see Harry Gruyaert‘s TV Shots, listed as being in the Passage du Desir, although actually in the building adjoining this. Fortunately this was something I’d discovered on a visit to a previous show, so this year I wasted no time, although I don’t think there was anything on the street to tell people that this was were the show was.

We walked into the darkened space where we sat surrounded by 4 screens on which images were projected (mostly these seemed to be the same images, but shown a few seconds later on the different screens) to a specially compiled soundtrack using archive TV material.

Gruyaert found himself living in a flat in London with a malfunctioning TV set, and instead of doing the sensible thing and turning it off and going down the pub, he started to photograph the screen, moving the aerial and fiddling with switches to distort the colour and displace the tri-colour images even more. He seems to have wasted quite a few films this way, as the show included several hundred pictures. For the installation these images were digitally enhanced to give even more garish results.

The installation is supposed to immerse the viewer inside a box of sound and pictures, cutting off other sensory inputs, producing a “hypnotic or hallucinatory” effect. According to the notes this also “seems to be calling into question the vocabulary and habits of photojournalism” though mostly to me it seemed to be showing how boring most sports coverage on TV is (and we did also get some dancing and news.)

Watching TV in France – as I did for a few minutes most days in my hotel bedroom – actually seems to me to call much more into question about TV. One of my questions would certainly be how a country which shows such great interest in film can produce and put up with such terrible production for TV.

I could not stop thinking while sitting in the box that I would have found it much more interesting if Gruyeart had gone out and taken his camera with him. As you can see from his Magnum pages he is a far more interesting photographer than this show would suggest. And of course another to add to quite a long list if anyone ever asks you to name a famous Belgian.

Our next call was to view ‘Semantic Tramps‘ by Christophe Beauregard, and we walked up and down the Rue de Lancry looking for any sign of the Galerie Madé. What you can see from the street at the address given is certainly not a gallery. But as in many Paris streets there was also a door at roughly the right place. We pushed it, tried pushing the buttons but it remained firmly shut, and we were about to give up when someone came out and we could get in to the yard. Walking through this it still wasn’t clear where the gallery was, but eventually we saw a small poster and made for the door.

One of the things that I remember came as a shock on my first visit to Paris in the 1960s were people living on the street and begging. I’d lived in London and in Manchester and in those days this was an extremely rare sight, certainly in the city centres, though a few years later it became common here too – and for a short while perhaps even more common than in Paris. Here of course there are many – particularly asylum seekers – who fail to get adequate support from the state and are not allowed to work, but in France the problem seems to be greater still.

At a glance, Beauregard’s pictures might appear to be of some of the homeless on the streets, but looking closer you can see that this is not the case. They are too clean, too wholesome, too pandered. These are images ‘posed by model‘, and the images are nicely made and use the whole team of stylists and more and could well appear on the pages of Vogue with captions under telling us those distressed jeans cost only 300 Euro a pair.

Do I see any point in this exercise? I tried hard, but couldn’t. You can see more pictures and the photographer’s text (in French) and make up your mind.

The next show we tried to find had an address that was even less useful, although the small print (which I only read later) did actually tell you it was somewhere accessed from a different street a quarter of a mile away – as we’d found after only around half an hour of searching. Unfortunately the door was locked and the building empty. It was also ‘exceptionally closed’ on the Tuesday and Wednesday too.)

By contrast, after our evening visit to Chartier (more for the experience than the food) we took the Metro to Montmartre and a ride on the funicular for a quick visit to Sacre Coeur – getting in almost all the tourist stuff in one go. There we saw a 24/7 photography show; the former water tower on the RueNorvins is now the home of La Commanderie du Clos Montmartre, a body dedicated to Parisian wine-making, and on the railings were landscape photographs of wine-making areas around the world.

Mois de la Photo: Frédéric Delangle

Troisième territoire, a series of diptychs by Frédéric Delangle, on show at the Maison de l’architecture en Ile-de-France, not far from the Gare de l’Est in the north of Paris, was the first show I visited in the Mois de la Photo as it was about to close.

Delangle was born in the Paris region in 1965 and studied photography at Paris VIII University from 1989-94 before working as an architectural and landscape photographer. For almost all his work he has used a large format 4×5 camera with colour film.

In Troisième territoire, he pairs urban views from cities in the North (mainly France and Switzerland) with those from the South (India, Japan, Bangkok…) Like many other urban landscapists, his preferred view is usually from on high, looking down, although some views are from street level.

Although the intentions of the pairings is perhaps to draw attention to the similarities and differences between the two halves of our world – the haves and the have-nots – the pairings seem often to be chosen simply in visual terms, concentrating on the surface rather than function. Thus (use this link to open the pair in a separate window) a view of allotment gardens in the outer Paris estates of Pantin, with the tower blocks of the public housing behind them (and perhaps with another such block providing the viewpoint) is paired with the roofs of a shanty town in New Bombay, the little plots of green with their garden sheds forming a similar patch-work to the corrugated sheets of the dwellings.

In fact, often the juxtapositions within a single image – for example that of Bombay – that are more telling than those between it and its neighbour image of Basle. Most if not all these images were actually taken as single images in other sequences, as can be seen on Delangles web site, and although I found many of the images intersting, the overall concept was perhaps unconvincing.

Another pairing – the third down on the Terre Entière site – has at its left a fairly random movement of people on the streets of Paris below six giant portrait heads on the frontage of a Commerzbank building, and at right a far more enigmatic image of some kind of organised manifestation on the streets of Bangkok, the edge of the pavement lined by young men in identical white shirts and blue shorts, apparently waiting for something to happen. The Bangkok picture to me seems to work at a very different level and to raise very different questions, although it supplies annoyingly few clues as to their answers. It was one of many times in Paris that I longed for a better caption.

The text accompanying the show links the work to Dusseldorf school, but one could equally look at other sources, including an older tradition of urban landscape, or even the same nineteenth century USAmerican landscape tradition that was also referenced by the New Topographics.

Although all the recent work on Delangles site is in colour, perhaps the work that appeals to me most strongly is his Périphérie-Périphérique from 1991-1992. All made from an elevated viewpoint, these pictures show the ‘popular’ quarters of the banlieue surrounding the Paris outer ring road. Because of the vibration from the traffic he was unable to work with 4×5 and these are taken with a 6×6 medium format camera; the square format gives the work a tighter composition.

Paris Photo: Siskind and Fukui

As in previous years, I found Paris Photo rather a strenuous event. But then I make it so by trying to see everything, but to do so in the shortest time possible. It’s really a mistake to go on my own and to try and work so hard, because there is just too much there.

But I dislike the location, deep underground with no natural light, and, at least on the opening night far too much noise and far too many people, and there is just so much to do and see elsewhere in Paris. Paris Photo is in some ways the nasty medicine to be swallowed before I let myself enjoy the rest of the city, but also hidden in it are many treats.

Actually compared to previous years there was perhaps a little less going on at Paris Photo, with one or two familiar faces among the American dealers in particular missing, although there were still 18 US galleries there, including five listed as first-timers (Stephen Daiter, Robert Mann, Sepia International, Weinstein and Yoshii) as well as Janet Borden and Jackson Fine Art returning after an absence.

Perhaps most noticeable from the US were a number of galleries with work by Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) – it seemed to be his year. Bruce Silverstein who represents the estate, tells me that a major show of his work is in the offing.

Business appeared to be pretty good despite the current financial problems, with people perhaps feeling that it’s better to have pictures than stocks and shares.

This year the overall emphasis of the show was on Japan, and it was good to see more work by some of the Japanese masters although for me the contemporary work in the Statement section from eight invited Japanese galleries was largely disappointing.

Among those whose work did take my interest, were the night urbanscapes of
Nobuhiro Fukui, (b1972, Naruto City, Japan) who lives and works as a magazine editor in Tokyo. In an interview, he talks of a long love of walking the city late at night, and when a few years ago, inspired by the work of Osamu Kanemura (who later he went to as a workshop student), he decided to take up photography and bought a digital SLR it seemed natural to take pictures while he did so. He actually finds a bicycle the best way to get around the city at night, going to new places and photographing whatever he finds there. The large inkjet prints (and most of the best prints on display at Paris Photo except ‘vintage prints’ were inkjet – though travelling under a wide range of aliases) on display demonstrate clearly the superb quality that can be achieved at night using long exposures on digital cameras. The images show the superiority of digital under these conditions, with its lack of reciprocity failure and colour shifts and its ability to cope with unusual light sources.

More of my thoughts from Paris Photo in later posts.