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More at ECCO: Claudia Jaguaribe, Raquel Kogan, Ludovic Caréme

Cláudia Jaguaribe: ‘Quando eu Vi‘ (When I saw)

Cláudia Jaguaribe was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1955, but she has lived and worked in Sao Paulo as a freelance in advertising, fashion and magazine and newspaper photography since 1989. She studied Art History and Photography in Boston, USA. Her work has included photographic essays on cities (Cidades, (1993) and recently, Rio de Janeiro, text by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza and photographs by Claudia Jaguaribe, 2006) and Athletes from Brazil” (Sextans, 1995) as well as on airports. She works with video as well as photography.

Her web site is another of those I have problems viewing, even when I follow the extensive instructions on the initial page, using Firefox 2.0. You may have better luck (or lower security settings) than me. Wouldn’t the web be much better if web designers could be persuaded that simple sites are fast and responsive and with CSS can do some pretty clever things too. You can also see some of her commercial work at Samba Photo.

However, unless I missed it, the work on show in the main gallery space of ECCO, ‘When I saw‘ is not on her web site. It seemed very much to relate the the Foto Arte 2007 theme of ‘Nature, the Environment and Sustainability‘ being, I think, all about Nature and the way we see it.

Most of the work was in colour, but the piece I warmed to most was (I think) a diptych of two images in sepia.

I think this is saying that ‘landscape’ is a human creation that we impose on nature. Well, of course. Ideas are human creations – but so is to a greater or lesser extent the so-called natural environment. I come from a country which has been so intensively altered by human activities – hunting, agriculture, industrialisation, landscape gardening (one of my in-laws ancestors was a landscape gardener of some note) and more, such that little or nothing remains unchanged, in which the idea of a ‘natural’ landscape seems laughable. Even the most remote areas of Brazil will have been altered – if only by the increase over the years in carbon dioxide levels.

But what appealed to me was I think mainly the shapes of the leaves, with which I’ve always had a fascination. As you can see in a number of the pictures I took in Brasilia including this one at the Foto Arte offices.

Brasilia, (C) Peter Marshall, 2007

Raquel Kogan: ‘Bewohner’

The occupants or inhabitants referred to by the German title of Raquel Kogan‘s series of colour pictures, ‘Bewohner’, made in Germany and Austria, of soft toys found in cars. (It was subject matter familiar to me, as one of my colleagues in London, Paul Baldesare, has been making a similar collection of pictures for some years, although his concentrate more on the kitsch aspect, and, as might be expected, the English examples are funnier.)

Kogan’s images show these trapped ‘beings’ in a curiously fragmented space, with the angled glass adding reflections of the surrounding street and city.

Ludovic Caréme: ‘Retratos'(Portraits)

The square format colour portraits by French photographer Ludovic Caréme are impressive, and show him as a very successful magazine photographer. The 40 pictures were from 10 years of his work, which you can also see on his web site. He has lived for some time in Sao Paulo, and there were a number of pictures of Brazilian celebrities, including a portrait of the architect of Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer, taken this year.

In it, Niemeyer’s head dominates the near-symmetrical image, above his white coat and clothing, somehow looking too large for his body, which somehow fails to be at ease for the image. It shows him approaching his hundredth birthday still entirely alert and in command and is a powerful image, but my choice of a portrait of the man would be the very different picture by Luiz Garrido also on show at ECCO.

Periphery – Kristopher Stallworth

Another show in some way about the car, which seems to be my current theme, is ‘Periphery‘, a Photo series by Kristopher Stallworth, which is at ‘Corridor2122’ gallery in Fresno, California from Jan 3 – Jan 27, 2008.

I first saw these precise and carefully made night urban landscapes at ‘Rhubarb-Rhubarb‘ in Birmingham in July, when Kristopher brought them to show me. I was impressed by the work and tried to explain to him what I saw in them, and why I felt some worked better than others. These were images that made me see something in a different and new way, and particularly those that had a certain quality of the unexplained.

As the title suggests, these are views on the outskirts of the urban area, made around Bakersfield, California. These are often neglected areas, sometimes simply agricultural areas awaiting development, some with very much the feeling of edge and wastelands, shadowy areas that he illuminates partially using the headlamps of his car.

Perhaps its a difference between the wide open spaces of California and the dense urban tissue around London. Here I’d expect to see the kind of lonely dead-end places at the ends of roads than run nowhere, where people might drive to in order to dump rubbish or a corpse, commit adultery or stage an illegal fight. But his are generally clean and tidy and very open, often with distant horizons and lights, more a world to be discovered than one to be feared. Or perhaps it is more a difference in our personalities more than in the landscape.

Of course I immediately thought about other fine night images – such as Robert Adams in his ‘Summer Nights‘, (1985) which do include a couple which are illuminated, I think, by the headlights of a car. Stallworth’s work is perhaps even more precise but also more limited in scope, but there are a number of pictures I find extremely interesting. If, like me, you are unlikely to get to Fresno, you can enjoy them on-line on the photographer’s web site, which also has a colour series, ‘Everywhere/Nowhere‘ which explores the generic nature of much modern urban architecture and landscape.

Greek Automobiles – Foto Arte 2007

United Photojournalists Agency. Automobiles 1944-1964.

Given that I had gone to Brasilia to give a talk that – among other subjects – reflected on the disastrous environmental impact of the car in the twentieth century (and continuing) the show Automobiles at the Gallery Bulcão Athos (part of the National Theatre Claudio Santoro) might not have been the most appropriate for me.

Image from the Foto Arte 2007 web site.

However one of the pictures on-line at the Foto Arte site – and one of the more striking in a show, did show a car “wheels-up”, sitting on its roof like a stranded whale on some beach, with an an out of focus figure in a dark skirt and white socks looking on from the left background, which was perhaps more suitable.

The show was by four Greek photographers, Euripidis Martoglou, Dimitris Triantafillou, Dimitris Floros and Dimitris Foteinopoulos, who from 1944-1964 worked as the “United Photojournalists Agency.” The sixty pictures, from the collection of Nikos E. Tolis, were first shown at the Thessaloniki Chamber of Commerce and Industry in April-May 2007 as a part of the 19th International Photography Meeting organised by the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, the only photography musuem in Greece. You may be more succesful than me in finding out more about this ‘Photobieenale’ (which has until now been an annual event) on its ‘cleverly designed’ web site (perhaps it has problems with Firefox.) There are times when I think that if most photography festival’s web site budget was cut by around 90% we would all be better served. On the web, simpler (and thus cheaper) design is nearly always better.

To see all the pictures from the show that are on the Foto Arte site, I think you also need to look at the artists pages for Dimitris Floros, Dimitris Foteinopoulous and Dimitris Triantafillou, as well as that for Euripidis Martoglou given previously, although most pictures appear on several of the pages. Disappointingly it doesn’t appear possible to identify which photographer took each picture – which come from an earlier, more primitive age of disrespect for the moral rights of photographers who are not attributed as the authors of their work. Of course this is a fight that photographers have yet to win, with newspapers and magazines in the UK seldom bothering to properly identify the source of their images. The show could also have benefited from rather tighter editing.

The show itself was actually a fascinating reflection on what now seems a distant age (and as the theme of the Greek festival in which it was first shown was ‘Time’, fittingly so, though it is harder to see how it fits Foto Arte’s ‘Nature, the Environment and Sustainability,) a real period piece, with the views of cars and the people around them – including a ‘Miss Greece‘ – providing a window onto the the immediate post-war years – liberation, the Marshall plan (which brought US autos), civil war, austerity, wide open streets and more. As well as the cars, the clothing also is very much a time machine.

You can see a few more pictures, although none of them among the more interesting in the show, at the Greek Ministry of Culture.

The show as a whole was a fine demonstration of how time alters how we view images. Many of those on show at the time would have seemed such obvious, ordinary statements as not to deserve the attention of the camera. (I used to tell my students, when showing them Stieglitz’s ‘The Terminal‘ that they should go down and take pictures like him at the local bus garage – but then they closed the garage, knocked it down and built some dreary offices on the site.) Some pictures, though certainly not all, acquire very different meanings over time.

My own view on the car is rather different, and I’ll write more on that – based on a part of the talk I gave in Brasilia – here on this site shortly.

Jan Van Ijken at Foto Arte 2007

I’m not a veggie, but I do care about how we treat animals, whether kept as pets or for food or in the wild. Nature is of course red in tooth and claw (thanks to Tennyson for the cliche) and most of our farmed animals only exist as they are as either individual or species because we have bred and continue to breed them so.

The world would certainly be a less rich experience without our relationships with other species, and consumption is a vital part of that relationship. But the deliberate and excessive cruelty that forms a part of much (particularly modern) farming, which treats animals simply as units on which to maximise profits revolts me. And at times I’ve marched against animal cruelty even though I don’t agree with the views on animal liberation of many of those marching alongside.

I was pleased to be able to attend the opening of the show ‘Precious Animals‘ by Dutch photographer Jan Van Ijken (b1965) at the Teatro Nacional Galeria Athos Bulcao in Brasilia on December 18 (a short distance from the theatre – or, in Brasilia, a long drive – it continues until Jan 20, 2008.) Originally commissioned by the Rijksmuseum jointly with NRC Handelsblad as a part of ‘Document Nederland‘, it was first shown at the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam two years ago. Brought to Brasilia by the Dutch Embassy, it fitted the Foto Arte 2007 theme of ‘Nature, Environment and Sustainability’ well, and it was good to meet the Ambassador and several of his staff there, taking an obvious interest in photography and this work.

From Foto Arte 2007
Over 120,000 homing pigeons are released to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Netherlands Homing Pigeon Keepers Association.

Van Ijken’s black and white images examine a very wide range of relationships between animals and man, without making explicit judgements, although some are certainly implied by his concentration on certain aspects – such as the de-beaking of chicks and the crowding of some birds, although he still presents the evidence clearly and objectively.

His are not the kind of horror images you see on the posters of animal activists, although the cooler view perhaps can be even more chilling, certainly allowing you to reflect rather than simply see red.

His pictures show the wide range of our interaction with animals, and Van Ijken certainly has an eye for the surreal, which even some of the captions illustrate. One of my favourite images in the show is “A 9-year-old sow at “Hog Heaven,” a project that connects people with pigs.” (You can see it on-line in the fine photo essay ‘More Equal than Others‘ in ‘Mother Jones.’ The next image on line is “Amsterdam police officers cuddle cows as part of a stress therapy workshop.”

In the pictures you see educational projects, pet clubs, animal rescue, animal shows, as well of course farming and vivisection. It is a curious reflection on our own species that while many animals are kept and slaughtered under inhumane conditions (it is difficult to avoid thinking torture) others are awarded the dignity of a funeral procession and burial with a suitable headstone in a pet cemetery,

Although there is currently only one picture from this series on the photographer’s own web site, you can see other work by this self-taught photographer who started taking pictures in 1995. There is a small selection of images on from the project at the Camera80 blog, but the Mother Jones feature mentioned above has the larger and more interesting set.

It certainly did make me think, but didn’t prevent me from going along to ‘Oliver‘, the restaurant at ECCO, and enjoying a truly excellent picanha (rump steak) after the show.

Legal eBook and more

Thinking about Kindle (as I was at the end of my piece on ‘Magnum Magnum‘) reminds me that there are already some very useful eBooks available for photographers that you can read on your computer screens – and if you haven’t got a decent screen on your computer, you need one as a photographer.

I’ve got most of my camera manuals in Adobe PDF format – they either come that way on a CD with the camera or I’ve downloaded them from the web site. They take up very little space on a hard disk, and generally they are a lot easier to find there than the paper copies (and when I’m away from base for more than a day, I’m likely to have my notebook with me so I can read them.)

I’ve also got a commercial electronic book (PDF) that tells me all the things about my D200, including some that don’t really get mentioned (and certainly not explained) in the manual. Again it sits on my notebook and I can consult it when I’m away from home. One big advantage of the having the information in electronic format is that it becomes searchable, while in the printed manual you either have to try the contents or index, both of which usually seem to miss out what I’m looking for. It saves an awful lot of frustrated thumbing through pages.

If I worked in the USA, there is another eBook I’d buy today, which is the Photographer’s Legal Guide
by Carolyn E. Wright, Esq, the author of the PhotoAttorney blog I’ve mentioned before. At a download price of $9.95, it seems a snip – that would only pay for a few seconds of the average lawyer’s time (you can consult her at $250 an hour.)

If, like me, you are based in the UK, you may find it worth downloading the free UK Photographers Rights PDF, a short document written by written by Linda Macpherson, a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, and inspired by Bert P Krage’s The Photographers’ Right for the US, a document I first recommended rather a long time ago. His web page also lists a similar document for Australia. These are handy documents, 2 sides of A4, and despite the differences between US and UK law, Krage’s document contains much sensible advice that applies anywhere, and I carried it for some years in my camera bag.

UK photographers can also find useful advice on other web sites, including that of the Association of Photographers, and their book Beyond The Lens, which is rather surprisingly considerably more expensive to download as a PDF than to buy as a printed copy. You can however simply download single chapters and the appendix with some useful forms is available free.

Magnum Magnum

Three posts on the Magnum blog let you take a look at three sample chapters from the incredibly weighty recently published “Magnum Magnum” in which Magnum members write about other Magnum members and half a dozen of their photographs. The book weighs in at 6.5 kilograms, almost a stone for those who still think in old money.

The samples on line are Chien-Chi Chang by Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold by Elliott Erwitt and, to me the most interesting, Antoine d’Agata by Patrick Zachmann.

Chien-Chi Chang’s work is great, but perhaps I find it a little too pretty – but I also respond that way to some of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work.

I have to admit to a blind spot so far as Eve Arnold is concerned. Of course her work is very professional photojournalism, but it seldom makes me sit up and take notice. Her portrait of Francis Bacon – one of the six – is fine, very recognisable, tightly framed, nice colour, but really pales beside Bill Brandt‘s photo or the artists’s own self-portraits or those head shots by John Deakin and Dmitri Kasterine or… And I wonder what Brian Griffin would have made of him (I was pleased to be at Space in Hackney yesterday on the last day of his show there to hear him talk about his career, and about making many of the portraits.) Don’t get me wrong, I would certainly have been pleased to have taken a picture like hers, but it just seems to lack the spark of the others. The only picture among her six that strikes me as a little special is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which could so easily have been extremely boring.

What I like about d’Agata‘s work is the element of surprise or even shock. Zachman writes about this very well, and I won’t attempt to repeat or better him. Where I don’t think he really does the photographer justice is in his choice of six images, with a couple that are surely not among his best images. Take a look at his Magnum portfolio and you will find it hard to avoid the same conclusion.

You can currently see d’Agata‘s work at the Photographers’ Gallery in London until 27 Jan, 2008. It is worth a visit, although I think the display is rather poor compared to seeing his work on screen. As well as large images from the series Insomnia (2003), the gallery has a montage of several hundred small images from other projects including Vortex (2003) and Stigma (2004), which for me are far too dominated by the way they have been put in frames and fixed to the wall. Many are also virtually impossible to see.

Magnum Magnum seems to me to be a volume making a great case for the death of the book and its replacement by some more convenient viewing method. Or else trying to be both book and trouser-press or exercise equipment. Surely it can’t be long before we can have a lightweight device with a large, paper-quality viewing screen, given that small and slightly primitive versions such as Amazon’s Kindle have appeared.

Photo Histories

Some months ago, Graham Harrison contacted me about a new on-line photography site he was setting up, looking at photography in an intelligent way, and invited me to have a look at the preview site. I was impressed, and offered to write something, though as yet I’ve not got around to it. Perhaps later…

Photo Histories is now up for all to read, and the content so far is impressive, with a great interview with Philip Jones Griffiths, who talks about “why the ideals of the thinking photojournalist forged in the 20th century should not be sacrificed for the dumbed down culture of the 21st.” His ‘Vietnam Inc’ (1971) was one of the most important books of the era, and one that moved me and others powerfully when it came out – and is still a fine example of why photojournalism is important. I also have a great deal of sympathy for his views on the current state of Magnum which you can read in the interview. While others – including myself – have written about his work and its significance, this interview does add some insights into the work and the man who produced it – and has a nice picture of him by Harrison.

Another photographer I’ve also written about previously is Homer Sykes, whose self-published books Hunting with Hounds and On the Road Again I reviewed at some length. (You can download a pdf file of the Autumn 2002 issue of the LIP Journal where my review of On the Road Again appeared in print – and both – along with features on photographers Berenice Abbot and Brassai mentioned below – are probably available on the ‘Wayback Machine‘ or its mirror from About Photography.)

In Photo Histories there is another detailed interview with Sykes, as well as a interesting set of pictures ‘Unknown Homer Sykes : The English 1968 – 78‘.

I met Homer again earlier this year, when he was back photographing Swan Upping on the Thames for the first time for many years. You can see some of my pictures from the event at My London Diary, but surprisingly I don’t seem to have mentioned him. The two of us were the only photographers who ran along the river bank to record the Dyers and Vintners men raising their oars to salute the Royal uppers at the end of the day. I hope he got the exposure better than I did in the wickedly contrasting light. I left the D200 to sort it out and it didn’t.

Other features on Photo Histories include some on key books from the history of photography, including Berenice Abbott‘s ‘Changing New York‘ and ‘Paris de Nuit‘ with pictures by Brassai. Perhaps these were a little disappointing in not really dealing with the images, more with biography and background matters, but still useful introductions. Perhaps it might be a useful addition to have features about key images or sets of images from them as well.

Graham Harrison has of course worked for some of the big names in British publishing, and at the centre of Photo Histories is a section called by that same title, which includes an article (originally published on EPUK) about the first Press Photographer’s Year Expo held this summer. At the end is a footnote:

After the success of the Press Photographers Year Expo it was sobering to see Stoddarts stills used with effect throughout the C4 TV documentary The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair credited to Getty Images only.

Moral rights – including that of attribution – are something that photographers still have to fight for. The Photo Histories section also has a very nice insider story by Brian Harris about working with the late Don McPhee during the 1988 US Presidential campaign.

As well as his main site, you can also see more of Graham Harrison’s work in ‘The Oxford Year,’ though in the two years this has been going he seems so far to have missed those swan uppers!

Nikon D3 or D300?

Yesterday I went along to the Nikon show at Olympia to play with their two new cameras, the D3 and D300. Both seem decent models, though I’m not sure if I will buy either. After all the D200 is still working pretty well. I only bothered to go there because I wanted to go to a London Bloggers meet in the evening, so it was sort of on the way.

There are some nice things about the D300, in particular the even better screen on the back, and the few images I took at high ISO perhaps seemed a little more usable than with the D200. I’d certainly be a little happier with shooting at ISO1600, though I’m not clear whether the difference is really anything more than more aggressive noise reduction in the D300. The test shots I’ve seen – unlike mine, taken under carefully controlled conditions – on Imaging Resource do seem to show less noise on the D300 image at 1600 than at 800, together with reduced noise and sharpness, suggesting a sharp ramp in noise reduction.

However I didn’t shoot on RAW, but only on fine jpeg, and also hadn’t made all the tweaks I would certainly want to do when using the camera. Detailed reviews may appear shortly, at the moment all we really have to go on is the published specs and some fairly ill-informed comment – including that on at least one site where the author has been using a camera for a few days.

Moving from a D200 to a D300 would be relatively simple, with many of the controls in similar places, and the camera has the same feeling of having controls in the right place. As well as the larger screen, I’d certainly welcome the improved focus system, which is the same as in the D3. Possibly the ability to record 14 bits instead of 12 may also help in high contrast situations.

I took a few frames on the D3 too, with the ISO set to 5000, again as jpegs (I wasn’t sure if my raw processing would work with the RAW files from the cameras.) Lousy subject matter, but – at least where I got the focus correct – technically very usable images. I really needed rather longer to get used to the camera, and the menus seemed rather confusing compared to the D200, though I’m sure I’d soon cope.

So would I like one? I’m not sure. It’s a great camera but I think too large and heavy for me. I’m often using a camera more or less all the time for perhaps 5 or 6 hours at a stretch, and I’m not sure my shoulders or right wrist would cope with the extra heft. The Nikon D200 and D300 both weight around 830g while the D3 is 1240g, half as much again. Of course the difference in practice is a little less obvious, as I’d normally have perhaps 600g of lens fitted to any of the bodies.

I’m not going to rush out and buy either – particularly as the D3 in particular is likely to be in very short supply for a while. Despite the cost and size issues, it’s still the one I’m more inclined to seriously consider. And it would cost. As well as D3 itself costing well over twice as much as the D300, I’d also need a new lens to replace the 18-200 which only covers the DX format, as well as possibly wanting to replace my current Sigma 12-24 (which does cover full frame) with the new Nikon 14-24 f2.8….

It might be easier to just go back to using film!

Paris Nudes

I’ve written in the past about the history of nude photography, and Paris was certainly one of the major centres of production of ‘academies‘, those early nude figure studies, ostensibly made for the education of artists, but in fact gratifying a rather wider section of the middle-class male population.

The exhibition ‘Books of Nudes: an anthology‘ at the MEP until 6 Jan, 2008, shows work from the astonishing collection of Alessandro Bertolotti of published nudes gathered over 30 years (and those unable to visit the show may be interested in the catalogue or the book, Books of Nudes, published by Harry Abrams, which is the English version – and rather cheaper.)

It is a splendid collection, and a book that might well go on Christmas lists for photographers – and those with an interest in the subject. But although it is a great source of material – particularly work by lesser-known photographers – I found the organisation and exhibition text less than satisfying.

The work is organised on a chronological basis, and this allows for a reasonably sensible grouping and analysis of work in the early years, but begins to fall apart early in the twentieth century. When it came to the section covering work in the period immediately after 1945, it is clear that it breaks down completely, lumping together work such as Bill Brandt‘s with work that I would dismiss as ‘glamour’ rather than nude. And things can only get worse.

I’ve always refused to write about or feature ‘glamour’ photography. To me it is just a dishonest sibling of pornography. Of course porn covers a very wide range of material, some of which truly disgusts me – and I think it is more than a matter of taste. So-called ‘glamour’ merely saddens me to think that there are some who find it glamorous. It is the artificiality I object to, not any nudity.

We each have our boundaries, and our interests. I’d be quite happy never to see another picture of a ‘celebrity’, with or without clothing. Although there was nothing in the show I’d want to see banned there was certainly some material which I think the show would have been better without.

But there is plenty there of interest, including fine work I’d not seen before, for example by Germaine Krull, as well as much by photographers I’m familiar with and have written about, including Man Ray, (select ‘Nude‘ in the Themes drop-down), Willy Ronis, Jan Saudek, (but not Sara) and many more.

Peter Marshall

The Picture Lady – Martine Barrat

Martine Barrat‘s show Harlem In My Heart is at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris until January 6th, 2008, and I spent quite a while looking at her warm record of her over 30 years in Harlem and the many friends she has photographed.

You can see some of the best of her pictures at Contact Press and more of her work at her own web site, which suffers from a rather odd flash interface (the kind of thing fortunately that seems very dated now, but is worth persisting with.

As well as her work from Harlem, there are also a number of other galleries on her web site, though I got too annoyed with the site to look at them all. There are some nice black and white images from the Goutte d’Or (Paris Voice describes it as “a tiny patch of Africa transported to Paris“) at the eastern edge of the 18e.

Barrat was born in Algeria but grew up in Paris. She moved to New York in 1968, at first to co-ordinate a theatre workshop working with a jazz group, later becoming a photographer and film-maker. One of her early films was on youth gangs in the South Bronx, and was shown at the Whitney Musuem in New York as a part of the exhibition with her still photos, “You Do the Crime, You Do the Time“, later winning a prize for best documentary in Milan.

She became well-known as “the Picture Lady” for the images she took around Harlem in the 1970s and later. Her first book, on young boxers, ‘Do or Die‘ (1993) had an introduction by Gordon Parks and a foreward by Martin Scorcese.

You can read a more detailed resume on her web site, in English or French.

It is certainly a body of work that shows her heart is in Harlem and warms the heart of the viewer. It’s work that comes from being very much a part of the community she is photographing, and includes some displays of pictures pasted up like those that she made on the walls of a Harlem community centre.

Peter Marshall