Another Paris show I didn’t want to miss, also outside of the Mois and the Photo-Off, was by Catherine Cameron. Here Photographies was showing at Galerie Plume on the rue de Monmorency in the 3e, from 10 Oct to 29 Nov, and the gallery was open until 19h. Earlier in the year she also showed work in China, Poland, Argentina and the US.
You can see her work on her web site, but although this has an idea that lifts it above the ordinary, with a nicely designed slide-show in the pages of a book, it doesn’t actually do a very good job of showing her pictures. The images are just too small, the shadows too blocked and the work has a coarseness out of keeping with the delicacy of her images. You can see her work shown better at Lensculture but it is still no substitute for the real thing.
There are photographers whose work can look better on screen than as prints, but Cameron’s work is very much linked to the craft of photography. She shoots on medium format film and still makes her prints on photographic paper in the darkroom (though this is not to say that craft skills can not be equally applied when working with digital capture and inkjet printing – and increasingly it is clear that they can.) Whatever the photographic means, the photographer needs to master them and produce work that leaves you not thinking about the means but entirely caught up in what has been created, and I stood entranced before several of these works.
Catherine comes from Norway, where together with her partner Øyvind Hjelmen she arranges photographic workshops on the island of Stord, on the west coast. Among those who have taught there are Keith Carter (2005), Anders Petersen (2006) and Michael Ackerman (2007/2008). It was good to meet (and photograph) Catherine and Øyvind again at the Lensculture party in Paris earlier in the week.
This was our last visit of the day to a photography show – the end of what had been a very long day, and we needed to find something to eat before we collapsed. There were after all lots of shows to see tomorrow…