For me the camera is really a diary (among other things.) When I can’t remember what I did on a particular day or when I did something, looking at My London Diary often has the answer, or if not it can probably be found in the files in my own \image directory, though searching through these has been a little more difficult since I got a new computer a year ago, as my favourite image viewer, an old version of ACDSee failed to install on 64 bit Windows 7 claiming it was incompatible.
Perhaps I should upgrade to a later version, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be the same, with tons more stuff I don’t need added through version creep. I’ve tried a few of the free programmes around (and some are very good at what they do) but they just don’t let you look through folders of images in the same rapid way – and nor for that matter do expensive offerings from Adobe, however good they are at other things.
Today I got fed up with it and downloaded a few more things to try, including the free version of ACDSee, but none seemed to really do the job and I was about to buy an upgrade, but when I logged in and then tried pressing the upgrade button on the web site it showed me nothing.
I don’t know why I decided to try and install ACDSeePro 8 again. I’d saved the file onto a CD in 2006 and surprisingly I could find it. Once I found the right product key (I have half a dozen from ACDSee to chose from various versions of the software) the installer ran; as before it gave a message telling me it wasn’t compatible, but to my surprise it still completed the install, and seems to be working fine. So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping things will stay ok. It really does allow you to go through those images fast.
Two images by Thomas Kneubühler at the Centre culturel Canadien
Looking at the files from Friday is simple enough, and they quickly bring back my memory of a cold morning with Paris in a cloud, damp and not quite raining as we made our way to the rue de Constantine in the 7e, not an area I much like. The show at the Centre culturel Canadien there, In the middle of nowhere, with work by Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler continues until 22 March 2013, so is one of the few I saw in Paris that you can still see, though I don’t think it would be worth a great detour. The venue is certainly very grand, though I was a little surprised to have to go through an airport-style security check to view the show.
You can see more of Isabelle Hayeur’s work on her web site. The houses from her ‘Model Homes’ series were for me the most interesting part of her work on show, though they had a coldness that was unsettling, and somehow some looked more like Lego than real. There were also some of her large panoramic landscapes, I think constructed from digital images to create views that didn’t actually exist, but it didn’t really seem enough of an idea to justify the very large and slightly boring images. The works combining under and over-water views were perhaps a little more interesting, although mostly I was wondering about technical stuff when I looked at them.
Thinking about the show as a whole I felt the curator had perhaps tried to cram too many things into her concept of ‘the middle of nowhere’, “an unplaceable placean absurdity, a paradox, a deception, an illusion, a brightnesswhich represents a fabulous subject for photography.” I rather got the impression she had actually just chosen work that she liked from the three photographers which could then be mentally shoehorned into this rather vague idea.
Pascal Grandmaison‘s work very little for me, with a very odd sculpture made using studio background paper, simply seeming to clutter the space it was in, and I failed to be impressed by a series of dull inkjet prints of deliberately empty images of what I think were fairly random pieces of ground. Perhaps there was a point to it, but I have to admit I failed to find it. Or was it just that these pictures were pictures of nothing much at all? If so perhaps it was in some sense a success that I thought they were not worth looking at, though really I think it was a waste of time.
Thomas Kneubühler‘s work had considerably more interest for me, with a fine night image of a hydroelectric station and a curious series of distant views of illuminated mountains at night, ski slopes with the lights blazing away in darkness and reflected from the snow, and some large modern office buildings at night, enabling us to look into the illuminated offices.
From there we walked though the now slightly more particulate cloud across the Esplanade des Invalides to the main show I wanted to see, at the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, which was showing the European Photo Exhibition Award (EPEA), sets of work by Catarina Botelho, José Pedro Cortes, Gabriele Croppi, João Grama, Monica Larsen, Frederic Lezmi, Pietro Masturzo, Hannah Modigh, Davide Monteleone, Linn Schröder, Marie Sjøvold and Isabelle Wenzel. Three photographers under 40 had been put forward by four photography curators who themselves were selected one by each of four foundations – Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca (Italy), the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal), the Fritt Ord Foundation (Norway) and the Körber-Stiftung (Germany) who backed the award. They were then given 6 months to work on a project inspired by the theme of ‘European Identities‘ after starting with a workshop in Hamburg.
It wasn’t always easy to see any connection between the work on show and the theme, but there were some interesting pictures and projects among the twelve. You can see all the works on the EPEA web site, and the work is currently showing in Lucca, Italy and will be shown in Oslo in 2013.
Finally before lunch we called in for a brief look at Capucine Bailly’s Clichés de clichés, showing at the Cosmos Galerie until Christmas Eve. Born in 1980 and brought up in Paris Bailly went to New York when she was 21 and studied photojournalism and documentary phtoography at the ICP in 2004, after which with 13 of her classmates she set up the agency Veras Images. Now she is based in Paris as a freelance with Cosmos Agency – and you can see her work on their site. The ‘clichés’ in the show are rather fun and extremely garish, with the quality of mobile phone images treated to a psychedelic filter, and there were a few I liked a lot, particularly an image of a woman with very red lips during the election celebrations at the Socialist Party. But while I would buy it as a reasonably priced postcard or perhaps tear it out of a magazine to pin on a board, I wouldn’t want to frame it on a wall.
After another rather good brasserie lunch we walked past theHotel des Invalides – now a military museum – and found there was another photo show to see on the wall facing the road. These were pictures from the Algerian war of independence, showing the Algerians who fought on the French side – the harkis – many of whom were massacred after independence. Although the large black and white prints looked interesting, they really were just a little too far away to have a real impact.
It was half mile or so to the Maison de l’Amérique Latine on boulevard Saint-Germain, where there was a very extensive show of the work of Cuban photographer Jesse A. Fernández (1925-86), De La Havane à Paris. Tours et détours, which continues until 28 Feb 2013.
You can do a quick 3 minute tour of the show on video, which gives some idea of the range of his work, with some interesting images from his native Cuba as well as the many fine portraits of artists and writers, made working with existing light. Fernandez was a fine photographer and his work should be better known, and this is a show well worth seeing.
There isn’t a great deal about Fernandez that I can find on the web, but you can read a short feature about him (in English) by one of the commissioners of the show.
More pictures on My London Diary shortly.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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re ACDSee and other image viewers
Have you tried the free Faststone Image Viewer?
I find it is excellent – and quite good as editor as well.
The portable version is very handy, available from
http://www.liberkey.com/en/catalog/browse.html
Well, ADCSee Pro was working on Windows 7 yesterday, but today it gives a ‘system error’. Perhaps I need to upgrade after all.
Yes thanks for the reminder, I tried FastStone, and while it is pretty good, it seemed just enough slower than ACDSee to be a little annoying at times, when working with large collections, particularly with colour management enabled. But perhaps I’ll try it again.
The portable version would occasionally be handy as you say. There is also FastPictureViewer64.