Paris November: Guillaume Lemarchal

Galerie Michèle Chomette: Paysages exfiltrés – Guillaume Lemarchal

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

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

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

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

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

No 2 ID Cards

There is a particular satisfaction in photographing an event where there is really very little visually to work with, and coming up with some even half-decent pictures, and the demonstration against ID cards outside the Border and Immigration Agency provided me with that.

Nov 25, 2008 saw the start of the programme to track the every movement of all of us in the UK by our government with the start of the issue of biometric identity cards. You can read some of my thoughts about this and see the other pictures I took on My London Diary.

Wellesley Road in Croydon sprouted tall buildings in the late 1960s, in an attempt to imitate Manhattan in Surrey. Most now look rather grim and dated and they have been joined by newer buildings. The ensemble forms an efficient wind-tunnel providing a blisteringly cold gale to chill the protesters.

Among the few who came to brave the Arctic conditions was one man who has managed to get his fingerprints and DNA profile removed from the police national databases – and you can read more about him there too.

Paris November: Galerie Berrger

Galerie Berrger: Callitypie: Julia Zeitoun and David Rase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trouble in the Suburbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cérémonies du 11 novembre

We hadn’t realised that the French still hold their major commemoration of the First World War on armistice day, November 11th, and that it is a bank holiday there – unlike in Britain, where remembrance day is largely celebrated on the nearest Sunday (we officially moved it to that date in 1939 so as not to hamper the war effort), as well as a number of related events at the weekends around – such as the War Widows that I’d photographed on the previous Saturday (8th Nov.)

war widows at Cenotaph

I’d planned a walk around one of my favourite areas of Paris – Belleville and Ménilmontant in the north-east – calling in at a few shows on the route, but by the time we’d got to the fifth place that was closed we were beginning to get the message.  And also rather tired of walking, so we went into the café opposite the town hall in the 20e where I sat down to enjoy a Blonde (the only beer on their list I hadn’t tried before)  while Linda tried to warm herself up with a hot drink.

Rue des Cascades

Suddenly we heard the sound of a brass band, and then saw out of the window an approaching procession, and I picked up my camera and rushed out, leaving Linda to guard my camera bag and half-finished beer.

Coming across the place and going down the street towards the back of the town hall was a military band leading various dignitaries with red white and blue sashes,  a couple of banners, a group of children and a small crowd of adults. It was the l’UFAC (Union française des associations de combattants)  and the  Comité d’entente des associations d’anciens combattants et victimes de guerre along with other associations of patriotic citizens commemorating the 90th anniversary of the official ceasefire (at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) in 1918, although they were doing it a few hours later in the day.

The parade (which I later found had started at the  Père-Lachaise cemetery just down the road) came to a halt at the back of the town hall where there was a memorial to a Brigadier killed in the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Although the November commemoration in France is for the First World War, there were also groups at the parade remembering the French Jews who were deported and mainly died  in labour and concentration camps in the Second World War.

As an outsider whose oral French is pretty poor it was a little difficult to understand the finer details of the ceremony that followed, in which flowers and a large wreath were laid, and also I found it rather difficult to know exactly how I should behave in photographing the event. I also soon realised I had made a big mistake in not bringing my camera bag in my haste, as the card in the camera was full and after taking a handful of pictures I had to start deciding which images could be deleted so I could continue to shoot.

Nov 11

There were a couple of French photographers  – perhaps from the local press – there, but all they were doing was standing around looking rather bored, and I decided in any case that they were not where I would want to photograph from. You can see a few more photos of the event on My London Diary.

After that they all went into the courtyard of the town hall (another place I’d been hoping to see a show)  and I went back to finish my beer.  Then we decided to take the short walk down to the cemetery and have a walk through there – one place at least that was still open. Again, more pictures of this on My London Diary.

Pere-Lachaise

BNP Address List – Identity Crisis

A couple of days ago, a list of addresses of people connected to the BNP was made public on the web – and I guess most of us now have seen a copy, even though it is no longer on the blog where it was posted. A quick ‘google’ will let you find both the original list and also a number of sites where you can do on line searches by location, postcode,  etc as well as mapped data. The BNP list contains a Peter Marshall (who is presumably the Peter Marshall  also listed on a BNP web site as the BNP candidate for the Central Ward in the 2008 Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council local elections) but it certain isn’t me.


NF marchers in Bermondsey, April 2001

Among several people who made the list available on their own web sites for a while was a photographer Peter Marshall, (or Pete) who covers some similar events to me, but is based in the Birmingham area. When his name was published in the papers, somel people assumed it was me.  There is yet another photographer of the same name who works as a wedding photographer – and doubtless others. c

Peter Marshall just happens to be a very common name. Here are just a few more of us found in a quick search on Google:

  1. Peter Marshall, academic, activist, author of books on William Blake, William Godwin, a history fo Anarchism and much more
  2. Peter Marshall  a Scottish-born Presbyterian  who was chaplain to the US Senate during the Second World War.
  3. Peter Marshall, son of No.2, also a USAmerican preacher, who got to petermarshall.com before me
  4. Peter Marshall USAmerican singer game show host
  5. Peter Marshall UK television announcer who hosted Sale of the Century years ago.
  6. Peter Marshall “one of the greatest squash players of all time.”
  7. Peter Marshall a leading USAmerican swimmer.
  8. Peter Marshall, Commissioner of the City of London Police around 1980
  9. Peter Marshall, a photographer based in the Birmingham area
  10.  And then there is me! One of my various domains is peter-marshall.com which has some old pictures of Paris I took in the 1970s. But I’m I hope rather better known for My London Diary.

I think I was possibly given the name Peter after No. 2 on the list, but so far as I know am not related to any of the others. My own personal details have been on the web since 1995, but were very definitely not in that BNP list.


Unite against the BNP Rally – Dagenham, Dec 2006

Do I have any connection with the BNP?  Well, I have photographed a number of right wing demonstrations – as have most photographers who cover events on the streets. You can see my coverage of both the demonstration against the BNP and the BNP meeting addressed by Richard Barnbrook at Dagenham in December 2006 on My London Diary. But I’m clearly opposed to them and their policies.

Nothing much happens on Mondays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye Carte Orange

I can still remember standing in a photobooth in Montreuil around 1983 and  posing for the picture that went on my first Carte Orange, although I’ve had several since then having lost them or left them at home when coming to Paris.

For years, coupled with a Coupon Hebdo bought on a Monday it’s provided a cheap and easy way to get around the city – a week’s totally unlimited use of buses, Metro, RER and other trains at any time of day or night for a ridiculously cheap 16.80 Euro – a little less than £14 even at the current bad rate of exchange for travel within the city itself. For longer stays a monthly coupon offers even better value, and even if you are staying in the suburbs tickets to cover the outer zones as well are great value.


The impressive (if impractical) Ville Savoye, around 29km from the centre of Paris

A couple of summers ago we explored some of the haunts of the Impressionists on the banks of the rivers in greater Paris – the Seine of course, but also the Marne and the Oise, visted Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye at Poissy, went to Pontoise and more as well as travelling around the city whenever we wanted. The ticket covering Zones 1-5 cost around £25. The cheapest way we could have done this in London would have cost around half this per day.


Le passe Navigo Découverte (from the RATP site)

However, though I feel a little sadness at the disappearance of these tickets with their reflective metal strip along the edge at the end of this year, it won’t greatly alter the cost of travel as they are being replaced with ‘Le passe Navigo Découverte’, although this will add an initial cost of 5 euros, but can then be charged with a weekly ticket at the same cost as the Carte Orange. Those who live or work in the Paris area can get a free personalised Carte Navigo, which have already been in use for some other fares for some years.

We certainly got our money’s worth out of the Carte Orange, travelling around to try and find the various shows, as well as doing a little of the tourist trail as going to find some new places to eat. I love walking around Paris (and we did a lot of it) but it’s good not to have to worry to much about where you are going, knowing you can just jump on a bus or on the Metro anywhere to take you back to the hotel when you get tired. Last year there was a transport strike, and although I enjoyed photographing the accompanying demonstration, it’s really better when they are working.


Media scrum around the front of the march, Nov 2007, Paris

Hopefully it won’t be too long before London catches up again by making Oysters usable on the overground railways and also in the whole of Greater London including those suburbs left outside the old GLC area on political grounds in the sixties.  But somehow I don’t see us matching either the fares or the service in Paris

Mois de la Photo: Frédéric Delangle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris Photo Party

Paris Photo is of course only a front. Why so many photographers and others go to Paris in mid-November is to attend Millie and Jim’s Paris Photo Party.

party

If you’ve any interest at all in photography, you will be a fan of Jim Casper’s  lensculture web site and blog and, like me, look forward to each new issue of this online magazine devoted to “international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures” with keen anticipation.

party

For me it was a great opportunity to further my scientific researches into the effect of champagne on photographic reflexes and I took the utmost advantage of the situation, although my results were somewhat inconclusive, and further work on the problem is clearly needed.

party

I’ve decided not to put names to the pictures, but you may well spot some familiar faces from photography, film and publishing. The photographers included several whose work was on show in Paris. There are more pictures from the party in a special Paris2008 supplement to My London Diary.

party

The party was still going strong – with people still arriving – as I left around 23.30 to take the Metro across Paris to my hotel. It kept going for me too on the Metro as I had an animated conversation about photography with a number of young women I met there, ending as we walked through the lengthy passages under the Gare du Nord to change to different lines – fortunately their English was considerably better than my French.

party

View
Smokers enjoy this view from the balcony

In the days after the party I went to several shows I might have missed if  I hadn’t met the photographers there – because there is just so much happening in Paris with many interesting shows as well as those included in the ‘Mois de la Photo’ and the ‘Photo-Off’.

Catherine Cameron was showing work at Galerie Plume in rue Montmorency in the IIIe – you can read more about her and the show in Lensculture.

And on Saturday I went to Galerie Blue Square in rue Debelleyme, also in the IIIe, to see the remarkable images from the Global Underground project by Valera and Natasha Cherkashin.  I intend to write more about this in a later post.