>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Paris – A Photo-Off Guided Tour

One of the really good things that happens during the the Mois de la Photo are the guided tours of shows in the Photo-Off fringe festival. Two years ago we went on one of the first of these and found it really interesting, so we looked at what was on offer this year.

The shows in the ‘Off’ booklet (you can download it to see) are divided into ten areas of Paris, so you can fairly easily plot your own route around them, although if you try it can be very frustrating with the various galleries having different opening days and hours and different exhibition dates. But for the organised ‘parcours guidée‘, although they can’t quite cover all the shows in each area, you can be sure not only that the galleries visited will be open, but that someone – either the photographer, curator or gallery owner – will talk about the work and you will have the chance to ask questions. Of course the talks are in French, but I’ve usually found I can ask questions and get answers in English, and with Linda I have the services of an interpreter where necessary when my O Level (Grade B, 1961 and more than half forgotten) fails, though I’m still better than her if things get photographically technical.

There are 10 ‘parcours’, and the guided tours all take place on Saturday afternoons, and there were only 4 Saturdays in November so the last took place on 1 Dec. But that still means you can only go to half of them as there are two each Saturday. I chose to go on Parcours 3 (Le Marais – Turenne) because it was going to end at the NoFound Photo Fair which I wanted to see – and better still it included free entry.

We met at Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, in a courtyard off the rue des Minimes at 2pm; the show there was Pubart, a show of advertising and publicity photography from the 1930s in the USA to recent work in France, and including quite a few interesting examples – such as one of Duffy’s images from the iconic Benson and Hedges campaign; most but not all of the work on show was photographic and included a few images I hadn’t seen before. But my main interest was in the actual venue and the other buildings surrounding the courtyard.

Our next stop was Galerie Maria Lund on the rue de Turenne where there was a rather curious installation by Kwang-Wha Chung, Here! I found my car with a large split box, the lower half having a modelled landscape covered with plaster dust in which were embedded small model cars. Jets of what looked like steam and seemed to be fairly random disturbed the white dust creating miniature snowstorms which revealed and covered up the cars. On the walls around were photographs taken looking into this changing scene. It didn’t seem to me to have a great deal to do with photography, although of course the photographs froze and recorded a moment in this changing artificial micro-scene.

(Dés)Assemblages at Galerie ChipChop showed the work of three women photographers who in different ways produce images that are divorced from reality. Hélène Jayet combines overlapping exposures taken at different times and from a slightly different viewpoint on photographic film. Neta Dror from Israel sees the way she treats her images chemically to erase parts of them as some kind of antidote the the constant stream of news photographs flowing from her country. Canadian Amy Friend doesn’t take her own photographs, but uses family pictures and other scenes from the early nineteenth century, staining or otherwise altering the paper and punching holes through it to let through light so that the object is given a new life. The series name ‘Dare alla Luce‘, literally Give the Light, reflects the dual meaning of the Italian which according to the gallery text also means “to give life” or rather give birth.

At La Galerie Pascal Gabert we saw Nus, large fairly abstract studio nude images made using north light on a 8×10 camera by Jérôme Tisné, who spoke at some length about these images. The large prints are almost all either nearly black all over or nearly white all over, using extremes of exposure – up to 20 minutes, combined with some deliberate movement of the camera and extended development of the Polaroid colour film. The dark images seemed to me to have rather more subtlety of tone and colour, while the very pale works the blue sometimes dominated. Tisné made these works as a deliberate contrast to his long and successful career in press and publicity photography, but while I found the technical aspects of interest (and I hope I got them roughly right despite my language problems) I didn’t find the works particularly interesting as images. There were echoes of classic works – such as the nudes of Edward Weston, but I didn’t feel that the images had the kind of presence of his work and felt that perhaps the technique had rather become an end in itself.

Next came Joël Denot at NeC nilsson and chiglien in the rue Vieille du Temple. His work “concentrates on the medium’s fundamentals: colour and light” and indeed there is little else in these images with just a vague hint of the subject. The images seemed to me to be some kind of quasi-scientific inquiry into the properties of Cibachrome (Ilfochrome) or Polaroid, perhaps like the results which might (on a smaller scale) illustrate a laboratory notebook, or perhaps some kind of effort in reverse-engineering the process. But in the main it wasn’t work I could relate to as art or as photography.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Placement libre-atelier galerie
Our tour guide with Sandrine Maugein and her work
Our next stop was much more to my taste, and the glass of tea and slices of cake we were given by Sandrine Maugein were welcome icing on the photography. The Placement libre-atelier galerie had a welcoming atmosphere and the work was full of humour and insight and a strong graphic sense. Frohlein.s “la femme invisible aux talons rouges” – the invisible woman in red heels – was certainly full of wit, if the message was at times certainly deliberately ambiguous. The red shoes certainly got around, and I think the statement like the pictures is full of plays on words and ideas.

Across the road Galerie LJ was like a small zoo, full of large animal sculptures, but it was the work in the basement we had come to see, Audur by Alix Marie, whose work combines performance and photography and unlike most such hybrids produces some interesting images. Born in Paris in 1989, she studied in London at Central Saint Martins College Of Art. Audur was the result of a residency in Iceland and shows characteristic, almost picture postcard images of the country but with the artist herself intervening in the scene. I rather liked the square lighthouse with its red and white stripes and Marie standing on the stones of the beach with her head hidden by a white box with red stripes. Also on show was work from another residency in Slovenia, where she worked in a deserted building producing Les éléments du décor, using her body and simple wooden boxes and objects, with images that very much reflect her involvement in sculpture.

Finally we arrived at the NoFound photo fair in the large Garage Turenne, which brings together all sorts of people with a real interest in contemporary photography. Here there was far too much to write about it all, but there was certainly a great deal of interest in photography among everyone I met, even if we didn’t always share the same opinions. Quite a lot of the work I didn’t find particularly interesting, but there was so much to see in the fairly short time I had that was just as well.

One particular set of work that stood out for me was by South African photographer Graeme Williams, whose essay ‘
Painting over the Present looks at the environments occupied by some of South Africas poorest people in small towns, townships and cities throughout South Africa. As he writes “although wealth and power have shifted hands since the first democratic elections in 1994, many of the benefits of these shifts have failed to filter down to grassroots level.”

Too soon it was time for us to leave as we had arranged to go out for dinner though I did take a few pictures as we made our way towards our meeting place.

Continue reading Paris – A Photo-Off Guided Tour

Paris – Saturday morning

One of shows open early (from 10am) on Saturday morning was Ilse Bing at Galerie Karsten Greve in rue Debellyme in the 3e. We had plenty of time after breakfast so decided to walk most of the way there from the edge of the 3e and on our way there we peeped through the large glass windows of a small gallery showing the work of Boris Mikhlailov; I decided it was probably not worth trying to come back to see it later when the gallery was open.

I found the Ilse Bing show a little disappointing. Not that the work was bad, but that there was really nothing that added at all to what I already knew of her work. Born in 1899, she abandoned her studies as an architect to become a photographer in 1928. She was one of the first to buy a Leica in 1929, and according to the information at the show introduced many other photographers in Paris to the camera. Apart from a few early images from Frankfurt her work is typical of the work of modernist photographers of the era. The pictures were mainly from her time in Paris, where she came in 1930, leaving for America in 1941 after having been interned in 1940 as an enemy alien. You can see a rather more varied collection of her work on Luminous Lint, where there is also a more detailed biography.

When I first came to Paris, much of the area around here was pretty run down, but now it is stuffed with galleries and design workshops, and although we were too early for some of them, and others were closed on Saturdays, there were still plenty to look into, and too many to remember.

One which was closed then, but which I was able to come back to for a quick look in the afternoon was Galerie David Guiraud in the rue du Perche showing Les Chefs-duvre (the Masterpieces) of Louis Stettner. Some years ago I wrote about his work and in particular the fine images he made in Paris in the immediate post-war years. Although there were a few great pictures made after his return to American (and you can see a great deal of his work on his web site), it was clear from this show that this early period remained by far his most productive. There were two pictures showing a couple of children on the street hanging next to each other; the better known perhaps gives them something of an alien quality, and I prefer the immense vitality of the other image.

At the end of the rue du Perche La Galerie Particulière has premises on both sides of the street. The smaller was showing work by Michael Wolf but the larger hall on the other side was devoted to the work of Todd Hido, The enchanted realm (on show until 16 Jan 2013.) Hido, born in 1968 in Kent, Ohio, drives around America, and when he sees something that takes his fancy (and mostly this seems to happen on the edges of small towns) and takes pictures of desolate rows of houses, often in fairly dramatic light and other perhaps rather clichéd subjects. Some of the pictures are perhaps more about the weather, as he often seems to find the light he likes just after a brief storm and sometimes takes his pictures through a rain-spattered windscreen. Although I actually like the work, I don’t see it as anything particularly special, and certainly not something I would spend large amounts of money on or indeed hang on my walls. But perhaps I might occasionally take a look at a book of his work.

From there we made our way east to the rue St Gilles for a show by Daido Moryami at the Polka Galerie, with large (perhaps too large) prints of 30 previously unpublished images from his stay in Paris from 1988-90. They had a kind of shock value with their lack of mid-tones and subtlety, but also a different outlook that gave them some excitement, although I think his best work is from Japan. The high-contrast look was taken even further with the giant silkscreen prints that were on display in the office building in the courtyard behind the front gallery, and I felt these were perhaps too crude, at least when seen close to. Silk screen is of course essentially high contrast – you either print ink or you don’t (although using halftone screens can produce the illusion of continuous tone) and Moriyama obviously relished the opportunity this gave him. The silk screens remain on view until 12 Jan 2013.

It was time for an early lunch before the tour we were joining in the afternoon, and we found a bistro on the Boulevard Beaumarchais. Linda rushed to a table beside a radiator to warm herself up.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Place des Vosges
After our meal I sat in the Place des Vosges and logged on using the Paris free wifi there to read my e-mail, while Linda walked round the square. Unfortunately there still don’t seem to be many places with free wi-fi in Paris – much less then in London, and although my BT account lets me use the Fon network, there seem to be very few sites and when I found one it there appeared to be no way to log in without paying. Neither the BT or Fon websites give any help on how to use the networks abroad. But I was really too busy to spend much time on the Internet anyway.

Continue reading Paris – Saturday morning

Paris – More Photo Off openings

There were I think nine shows with “vernissages” on Thursday evening and I’d sat down the previous night and worked out a complicated route to visit half a dozen of them, finding short cuts on the complex system of routes which make up the metro system. But in the end I only made it to three.

Thanks to my seeing so many shows in the afternoon, we got off to a late start, rushing to the station and just missing a train. Of course they are so frequent this shouldn’t had been a problem, but although the next arrived three minutes later and we got on it, it moved no further. There were announcements, but none gave any idea of how long the hold-up was likely to last, and after ten minutes we decided to jump off and walk to the first show.

Lieux de passage (Crossing Points) at Lieu37 in the rue des Petites Ecuries in the 10e was a group show with 5 photographers, three of them professionals and two amateurs, photojournalist Christophe Lepetit, artist and director Frédéric Lemaitre, Grégoire Vopel, Jay Lag, and neurologist Yves Samson. It was, as the programme promised a deliberately eclectic show, and included some strange revolving triangular blocks with images on the three sides, as well as some highly enlarged i-phone images, which I felt would have looked better very much smaller, perhaps around postcard size. And although I couldn’t imagine ever hanging one of the images on a wall, I could see them selling well as cards for sending notes. The most interesting work to me was the blurred images of empty corridors and similar scenes, one of which is on the show site (image 9) but there are no details available there about it, and I seem to have lost the information I had about this set of work.

It was hard to get Linda away from the gallery and on to the appropriate metro station to take us to the next venue, Galerie Goutte de Terre on the rue Godefroy Cavaignac in the 11e, where the show was Krung Thep: la cité des anges, photographs by Pierre Raimond of street children in Bangkok (its Thai name Krung Thep means ‘city of angels’.) The photographer was accidentally invited into the world of street children in the city and produced some powerful portraits of them. After phtoographing them for some time he was refused permission to continue his work, but the children themselves were happy to have their pictures taken but with their faces hidden, and these images were among the most striking in the show. These were images that engaged me powerfully, and was one of the more interesting shows I found in those I saw in the fringe festival.

From here it was a fairly short walk to the next opening, A stone never dreams / Une pierre ne rêve pas at Le 19 in rue Trousseau (also in the 11e.) Franz Manni, born in Italy in 1973, has worked as an anthropologist in a Paris museum since 2000 as well as as a photographer, and perhaps because of his work has excluded people from these photographs, which look instead at structures and patterns formed in nature by human interventions. There was a strange quality to his images of patterns in water flowing over a weir or piles of materials by walls that intrigued me, though I find it hard to put into words why. These are certainly highly metaphoric images which Manni calls a way of reclaiming our dreams. In the gallery along with the pictures were some poems from the book Land of Stone by the American writer Karen Chase, in which Manni says he found the same spirit as his images, and one of which provided the title for his show:

I am a stone / a stone is good / it sits on a field / it never worries / it never dreams /

The poems in this book resulted from two years of weekly meetings with a severely withdrawn patient, in a locked ward of a large psychiatric hospital outside New York. Ben had given up speaking and social interactions and as therapy she engaged him in creating poetry. They would pass a writing pad to each other, taking turns in writing a line, engaging in a struggle for him to come out of his silence. There is perhaps something of a similar struggle evident in these pictures.

By this time the three openings had begun to take their toll (it would have seemed impolite not to have a glass or two of wine while looking at the pictures), and Linda had left me to go to a lecture and concert. I took the metro to go to the next show on my list, but when I got to the address could find nothing, not even a gallery and certainly no show. Probably I had gone to the wrong place, but I never found out.

I took a few pictures walking the night streets, which although dark should have been possible at ISO 3200, but few if any were sharp. My problem was the 20mm not focussing correctly. Although it is an f2.8 lens it seems to have a problem in lowish light on the D800E, though I’d not really noticed before using it on the D700. On autofocus it hunts very noisily noisily and excessively for focus at times; I’d noticed this particulary when photographing pictures at Paris Photo, when it often entirely failed to focus when I put a focus point on the picture frame (which I thought should make its job easy), but was usually better on the edge of the image. So much of the time I’d given up using it on autofocus, using scale focus and expecting the depth of field to cover any inaccuracy. But at night the focus scale gets difficult to use (its not much in good light) and it’s also very easy to alter the focus without meaning to. Especially after a few drinks.

I stood on the street outside where I thought the gallery should be wondering where to go next, whether to spend longer trying to find the show or perhaps to go on to the next. It was perhaps getting a little late to go on to the next venue and I was hungry and tired and decided that this was perhaps a sign to me that I should go and eat and then rest.

Continue reading Paris – More Photo Off openings

Paris – Menilmontant

We took the Metro for the next show, but Ménilmontant is perhaps an unusual area of Paris, a large slab without a Metro station, though they ring around its edges, perhaps connected with its hilly nature. But I was pleased to have to walk up from Gambetta to the rue de Ménilmontant, as the 20e is one of my favourite areas of the city, although I didn’t have the time to wander as much as I would like.

It was a little hard to find the show we were looking for in the Pavillon Carré de Baudoin, though of course if you know it, then it’s impossible to miss, an impressive building, the only Palladian building in the area, built on a grand scale in several stages in the middle of the eighteenth century as a folly devoted to festivals and pleasures of the rich, and in 1770 it was given an impressive portico with four ionic columns. In the nineteenth century it became an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, and later they ran it as a young workers hostel and health centre. In 2003 it was bought by the City of Paris on behalf of the Mairie of the 20e who opened it as an arts centre for the community with a national and international presence in 2007.

But there was only a small notice by the gate telling us about the show which we missed at first as we walked along the street trying to find number 121, and it was another couple of hundred yards down the street that we found a building with a number on it and realised we had missed our way. But before we retraced our steps we were attracted by a short and picturesque street, the Cité de l’Ermitage, and went down this cul-de-sac to have a look.

Guillaume Herbaut‘s show in the Pavillon Carré was overwhelming. It began quietly with a room containing Les Portes de Pripiat (2010), straight-on images of the doors of abandoned homes in blocks of flats in the city 3 kilometres from Chernobyl, showing perhaps the only remaining traces of the 30,000 people who had lived there. In the darkness of the next room was a showing of images from La Zone (2009-2011), Herbaut’s much acclaimed work in the forbidden area around Chernobyl 25 years after the disaster, and up the several flights of stairs was a room with some of these same images on the wall.

But the final part of the show had an intensity that is difficult to describe. 7/7 is a series of essays, a total of 95 images with short captions in seven stories that deal with some of the horrors of our civilisation and in particular with the effects that these have on environments and people: Vengeance killings under medieval codes of honour in north Albania; Oswiecim – the site of the extermination camp Auschwitz; Chernobyl again with the replacement town of Slavoutich – also declared contaminated in 2001, the survivors from Nagasaki, the second city to be devasted by an atomic Bomb, two days after Hiroshima; Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in 2007, one of the centres of the drug cartels, where more than 400 women have been murdered in atrocities since 1993.

There was a powerful atmosphere in the darkened room as people moved silently from image to image around the three sides of the large space. Some of the images were harrowing, but perhaps the most difficult were those that looked, at least in most respects so ordinary, so normal and even at times so beautiful.

If you read a little French it’s worth downloading the Press dossier from the Mairie site about the show, and it has a few images, though you can see more in the portfolio on Herbaut’s web site.

The show continues until 5 January, and is one that you should make time to see if you go to Paris. Herbaut, born in 1970 was one of the founders of the collective Lil Public and has won various awards for his work. You can also see several videos, including one on the Zone from the links on his site.

I was still rather stunned when we came out on the street. It was a pleasant way to relax a little by taking a stroll down the Villa de l’Ermitage, often described as a haven of peace in the middle of the city, full of greenery. I’ve photographed it several times before on previous visits.

From there we continued along some of my (and Willy Ronis‘s) favourite streets to the Bar Floréal, not a bar but another photography collective, founded in 1985 by three photographers as a studio, gallery and lab – and over the years the three have grown into a dozen.

Showing in the gallery there was Night and Day, the fine jazz photography of Jean-Pierre Leloir (1931-2010). You can read an obituary in The Independent, and also visit the official web site of his work. This show is on until 16 Dec 2012, and is certainly worth seeing if the subject matter – which includes some of the giants of rock as well as jazz – is of any interest to you, as it certainly was for me.

It was getting dark as we left, and we took a brief look for some nearby shows that were a part of the Photo-Off, but saw rather little of them – it was getting late and it was time to go and prepare for our evening visits.

Continue reading Paris – Menilmontant

Friday in Paris

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.

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.

Continue reading Friday in Paris

Paris: Thursday Afternoon

After lunch I took the Metro to Paris Photo – and this time I knew where the entrance was and the excessive security had gone – I simply had my pass scanned and walked in. I was also able to see the show of work by the Beckers, which I’d been stopped when I tried to view during the press launch. Predictably and perhaps appropriately it was extremely thorough and rather boring; though I admire the quality of their photography I find their overall approach with its rigid framework depressing.

But I’d soon completed my tour around the whole show, and was keen to get out and into the sunshine which had replaced the morning’s dull cold drizzle. I walked across the rather incredible and ridiculously ornate Art Nouveau Pont Alexandre III, like the Grand Palais opened for the Universal Exhibition of 1900 and along the Quai d’Orsay. Apparently I managed to drop 3 different “gold” rings that I had never possessed on the way, a common scam but this was the only place I came across it – and serially – on this visit. As I passed the Assemblée nationale the band of the Republican Guard marched out, but the traffic defeated me as I tried to cross the road to photograph them.

I was heading for the Institut de France, opposite the Pont des Arts, surely in danger of collapsing under the ever-increasing load of padlocks which are spreading from here across central Paris. These ‘love-padlocks’ are an ugly recent ‘tradition’ and I think a shame that the authorities don’t invest in some bolt cutters and remove the lot, though doubtless many will disagree; apparently they were removed a couple of years ago but have since sprung up in their millions. Perhaps Paris should follow Moscow’s example and provide some special iron trees for those who want to lock up their love symbols and adopt zero tolerance elsewhere.

In the Institut, l’Académie des beaux-arts was showing the work of Françoise Huguier, winner of the 2011 Prix de Photographie de lAcadémie des beaux-arts – Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. The prize enabled her to carry out a large-scale project ‘Vertical/Horizontal,Interior/Exterior: Singapore Kuala Lumpur Bangkok photographing the growing middle classes of South-East Asia. As well as being a part of the Mois de la Photo, this was also in the 2nd Saint-Germain-des-Pres Photo Festival which was also taking place. Hugier is well-known for her work in Africa and the far East, as well as for fashion photography, but I found this particular show just a little disappointing, somehow lacking a kind of decisiveness and focus.

Around the back of the Institut, galleries came thick and fast as I explored the roughly 35 venues of the SGdP festival in the rue de Seine, rue des Beaux-Arts, rue Mazarine as well as a several other shows that weren’t listed. Time was short, so some got only a cursory glance to establish I had little interest (and in some cases the view through the window or door was enough) but in most I went in and walked around.

There were far too many to list them all, but among those I found most interesting (in no particular order) were Bernard Plossu‘s ‘Voyage Mexicain’ at Librairie Mazarine, Isabel Muñoz at Galerie Seine 51, a comparision of the American and Soviet dreams with work by Evgueni Khaldeï (1917-1997) and John Craven (1912-1981) at Galerie Aittouarès, Thomas Jorion‘s ‘Palais oubliés’ at La Galerie Insula and a truly fine show of work by French photographer Xavier Roy, ‘Jai toujours rêvé de découvrir le Brésil’ There is more information about the festival in the press dossier.

But certainly the most impressive location, as well as some fine photography was at the Chapelle de l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, an interesting building recently renovated, where Robin Hammond‘s project on Zimbabwe the prize winning entry in the 3rd prix Carmignac Gestion for photojournalism. The work too was stunning. Hammond worked for two years in the country and this April was arrested and held in jail for over three weeks for photographing without accreditation before released to leave the country.

My final call was at Galerie LWS for a show in the Mois, John Gossage‘s ‘The Thirty Two Inch Ruler’ at galerie LWS. Published in book form a few years ago, this was his first project in colour, and they were impressive prints even though I found the overall series a little too bland. Its doubtless the subject matter, the comfortable private estate on which he and many of Washington’s most privileged live. There is a good piece on the book on Muse-Ings.

By now I was late, as I’d promised to meet Linda (who’d gone to see a film) back at the hotel to go to some openings. But dusk was falling as I rushed across Pont Neuf to the metro, and I couldn’t resist making myself just a few minutes later by taking a few pictures.
Continue reading Paris: Thursday Afternoon

Paris: Thursday Morning

Paris Photo doesn’t open until noon, so I had the morning to see some shows outside before returning to continue my work inside there. I suppose the kind of people who buy photographs don’t like to get up too early – or perhaps there is some other reason for them keeping the hours they do. I suppose it does mean some people will come on there after work as it stays open until mid-evening.

It was raining slightly and rather cold as we left our hotel and walked to the Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad, where I’ve previously been many times to admire one of Paris’s great buildings, the Rotonde de la Villette, a classical cylinder designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux and built shortly before the Revolution as the offices for the tax collectors and guards who took the taxes on goods entering Paris. Now it’s been renovated and La Rotonde is a restaurant, but I’d not come here to eat but to see a Magnum show that was about to finish which was on the open area between it and the Bassin de la Villete.

Surrounding a large closed tent were a number of double-sided stands, linked to the tent by a like the tentacles of an over-legged octopus. Each of the 36 carried a series of pictures of a young entrepreneur, the founder of a micro-enterprise, and they incorporated loudspeakers which told you their story. The photographs, as you would expect from Alex Majoli and Jonas Bendiksen, were competent, but this was largely good commercial work than portraiture with more depth. I listened to a couple of the stories, then left Linda listening and walked around the area taking more pictures.

The area has been tidied up a lot in recent years, and what was once a slightly disreputable place is has gone up considerably in the world, although with many of the old canal-side buildings having gone and new modern offices and other buildings having sprung up it is rather less interesting. Some find the métro aérien whose viaduct goes across the square ugly, but it is certainly truly Parisian, and I rather admire its heavy nineteenth century ironwork.

The trees are covered with bright yellow leaves – its the time of year when once I used to hide the colour film and work only in black and white, there are only so many autumn images I ever want to take – and I indulge myself a little, before turning back to the austere pavilion.

Eventually Linda has listened to enough of the stories and we leave, walking south down beside the Canal St Martin, past a couple of locks to one of my favourite Paris views – I have a salt print I made years ago hanging in my living room (I don’t quite go back to the Fox Talbot era, but got interested in trying out the historic processes including salt printing, platinum, gum bichromate, cyanotype and more that I had to mention in the history course I taught.) I like to go back there and see how it has changed and also try to make some slightly different views.

At this point I lost Linda who had gone to look at the park opposite while I was taking pictures, and I found I couldn’t get a signal to phone her. Eventually I saw her in the distance and we met up, but by now it was rather later than I’d expected, and we walked quickly down to the Place de la République, close to which were several galleries which were open from 11am. I’d written down the address of the first with the wrong street number, which made it hard to find, but being Paris, we found two other galleries with unlisted shows first, which were actually slightly more interesting.

Our next stop was one of Paris’s nicer galleries, la galerie Les Filles-du-Calvaire which was showing Corinne Mercadier‘s Devant un champ obscur. The lower floor (above) had a series of large colour prints of scenes taken in what seemed to be an empty and deserted building, all of which had been inverted to a negative.

On the upper floor were staged images, some involving people with blocks or balls. it wasn’t really my sort of work. There is what seems to be a full set of the images on the gallery site, and if like me you are curious about the negative images you can copy them and drop them into Photoshop and then invert them (Ctrl+I). Of course I wouldn’t dream of posting Mercardier’s images treated in that way here, but here’s a more or less random image from my own collection (actually a crop from a panorama I was working with yesterday) treated in the same way. The clouds certainly gain in menace.

I know of photographers who always scan their transparencies as negatives and then invert them, claiming that with their software and hardware they get better results, though I’ve never found that to be the case. But certainly the negative world is a rather strange case as many photographers know, and back in the days when we all used black and white film we got quite adept at mentally flipping negatives to visualise the positive they would print. Colour negatives added a different dimension (and an orange mask) that made this – at least for me – largely impossible.

The first negative prints in the world of photography of course date from before W H F Talbot, who produced them in camera in the 1830s as ‘photogenic drawings’ (and a little later as calotype negatives), to the cameraless experiments of Wedgewood and others, and at Paris Photo there were a few examples of prints from the earliest photographically illustrated book, the splendid Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions by Anna Atkins which she started to publish in 1843.

Mercadier’s large negative images were made from much more subdued subject matter than my trivial example, and the large expanses of white wall in the deserted building result in very dark images, powerfully so. They had a presence that I found lacking in the dream-like staging in her works in the upper gallery, which to me bordered on the ridiculous, a kind of game-playing of ultimate insignificance, bolstered by the kind of philosophical statements which the French education system glorifies and inducts.

It was time for an early lunch, taken in a brasserie full of Parisians, many noisily celebrating the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau, a triumph of advertising over common sense and taste. I had to work in the afternoon and stuck to a single glass of beer with my extremely tasty plat du jour, Beef bourguignon with some deliciously cooked pastry wrapped potatoes and bread, though a red, but certainly not Beaujolais Nouveau, would have been even more appropriate.

Continue reading Paris: Thursday Morning

Paris Photo – Wednesday pm

Wednesday afternoon was the press preview, followed by the ‘vernissage’ and I’d already applied for and received my press pass, so all I had to do was to find the entrance. It took me a little while, as I started by finding the very long queues for the Hopper exhibition and then turned in the wrong direction, managing to walk virtually the whole way around the outside of the building (and its a very large building) before finding Paris Photo. After managing to get into the steps leading down to the show I was then sent back to find the press entrance, where I was given some documentation and finally, having had by then half a dozen security men wave readers at my card, magic wands over my body and peering into my bag was allowed to enter.

I decided to start by trying to see every stand, walking around the show in a logical fashion so as not to miss anything, stopping when I saw anything that interested me, and taking notes, but the magnitude of the show soon defeated me, and too often my handwriting does also.

So the comments I’m going to make are somewhat fragmentary, and don’t really represent the show as a whole, but are some of the highlights, and in particular will concentrate on a few things that were new to me. Take it as read that there were many good – if now familiar – images by many well-known names, as well as a great deal of work that I found without much if any interest (and much of it printed very large in colour.)

On the Robert Mann stand, some black and white work from the last decade by John Mack in Mexico stood out, with some strongly graphic images, though perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with that and some of the best work there was from the 1930s in Paris by Fred Stein. They also had one of the few good Robert Frank prints in the show.

At the galerie Le Réverbère from Lyon there were several photographers of interest new to me, and I particularly enjoyed the work of Géraldine Lay (b1972), Les failles ordinaires, a series of images of ‘fault lines’ in ordinary reality, some of which have a rather Hopperesque quality. You can see more of her work on her web site. They were also one of several stands to be showing work by William Klein, and you there is a link to an interview with him on the Lensculture blog which I watched yesterday.

Another stand which caught my interest was Gungallery from Stockholm, not just for the work by Anders Petersen, largely familiar to me, but for a group of pictures by Gerry Johansson. You can see work from his various books on his web site, including Deutschland. Looking at his work I immediately thought of Robert Adams, and picking up the book Oglunda and opening it I found myself reading an appreciative foreword by Adams.

One area was devoted to the 30 short-listed books in the Photobook of the Year Award, and I’m pleased to hear that Anders Petersen’s City Diary – three straightforward volumes of photographs which to me stood out head and shoulders above most of the rest for both the quality of the photography and for the simplicity and effectiveness of its design – was the winner. Some of the others seemed to have been selected simply for their tricksy design despite the often banal images, and at least one seemed to lack all the basic qualities of an actual book. Out of the 10 there were only perhaps two or three I would have made space for on my shelves had I been sent copies for review – including those by Lise Sarfati and possibly Stephen Shore – though I didn’t think the print on demand volume showed his work too well. Overall, the standard of the First Photobook Prize was perhaps higher. Although I wouldn’t myself have picked the winner, David Galjaard‘s Concresco, it was an interesting set of pictures. Other interesting books were by Lucas Foglia and Jerome Sessini, and Cristina de Middell deserved a prize for humour for her images of the Zambian space program. She has just been announced as one of those short-listed for the 2013 Deutsche Börse photography prize. Though I hope it goes to Chris Killip, it seems unlikely and I can only agree with Sean O’Hagan about that and the nomination of de Middell.

The Magnum stand was perhaps a little disappointing, though a collection of images by Raymond Depardon mainly taken in the San Clemente Psychiatric Hospital in 1979 stood out.

There were tributes to Louis Stettner, marking his 90th birthday – and most of his best work was from his early years in Paris, so this was a fitting place, as well as to Martine Franck who died in August, aged 74.

Other shows within the show included one from the J P Morgan Chase Art Collection. It started well, with a couple of Cartier-Bresson‘s best (and one also-ran), and a couple of good Walker Evans images among his four and the same for Robert Frank. 11 by Eggleston seemed rather too many for such a small show, and then there were four Friedlanders and 3 Winogrands. After all this, the portrait of a farmer by Eve Arnold and two by Lynne Cohen came as rather an anti-climax. It looked as if the curator had got to that point and suddenly realised that there were no pictures by women in the show and searched desperately for anything that might fill the gap. Surely there are better images by women – these women or others – in the 6000 in the JP Morgan collection? Perhaps an Arbus or two and a Nan Goldin?

As usual many of the best colour prints on show, and quite a few of the black and white, were inkjet prints, though there were at least one hundred and one ways of making that less obvious to the label reader (and far too many pictures that didn’t have any label, as well as some that you would have had to get on your knees to read.) But there were vintage C-types, almost always recognisable by an overall orange or brown cast as they continue to decay, though this does not yet seem to have affected their prices.

There was, as in previous years, some interesting Japanese photography on several stands, and I was also amused by the photocollages of Toshiko Okanoue, at the Third Gallery Aya from Osaka which was showing the work of 4 Japanese women, with Ishiuchi Miyako, Yamazawa Eiko, Akasaki Mima and her.

There was so much more. Kertesz, another photographer who made Paris his home, had work on so many stands, but particularly on that of Vintage from Hungary. Weegee too came up on several, there were a few by Leon Levinstein I don’t recall having seen before. The Feroz Gallery, founded by Julian Sander, great grandson of August Sander had a nice wall of grandfather’s prints, while another stand had an unfortunate collection of bad copies made by Sherrie Levine, along with her lousy copies of Walker Evans, work which I can’t accept has any validity or place on an exhibition wall – the only place it belongs is as an exhibit in a copyright court.

By around 7.30pm I was exhausted, and since no-one seemed to be offering me any of the champagne they were drinking I decided it was time to leave and get something real to eat and drink.

Continue reading Paris Photo – Wednesday pm

Not All Lives are Equal

The reports of a fire in a Bangladesh garment factory in which more than a hundred people – probably 124, with more than a hundred injured – were killed shocked but did not surprise. Fires such as this are not unusual in South Asia, and indeed as The Guardian pointed out, one in Karachi in September killed over 280. We get cheap clothing at a high price for those who make it.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
War on Want hand out ‘Exploitation – Not OK Anywhere leaflets outside
Olympic Sponsor Adidas on Oxford St

Campaigns such as War on Want‘s Love fashion – hate sweatshops, No Sweat and the Clean Clothes Campaign have been fighting for years along with trade unions and labour rights organisations around the world – including Bangladesh – to get decent working conditions and pay in the clothing trade, but their actions are undermined by both local employers who exploit their workers (and often evade or ignore what laws there are about safety and conditions) and by multinational companies that demand goods at ever lower costs and fail to insist that the products they buy are produced under acceptable conditions – though their PR often tells a different story.

It’s worth reading the thoughts of Shahidul Alam from Bangladesh in Not all lives are equal, which includes some disturbing images. The site also has links to reports on the tragic fire from The Guardian and the BBC. There is also a statement about the case on the Clean Clothes Campaign site.

Continue reading Not All Lives are Equal

October 2012

My London Diary: October 2012

In my rush to get to Paris earlier this month I ran out of time to complete putting work from October on My London Diary – I’d finished up to the 27th but there were a couple more events to add. This morning I’ve finally managed to finish the job, so here is the listing:

More Protests for Women in Yarl’s Wood
Arrest the Indonesian President