Category Archive

Influential photographer Martin Parr has presented a list of inspiring photography books, published in 2007 (The Sunday Times, 2 Dec 2007). His focus on monographs, artistic creativity, originality and small independent photography publishers distinguishes by far his list from other similar ones appearing these days (such as The Guardian’s poor fixation with fashion and ‘national geographic’ aesthetic, no link provided!).

So here’s what Martin Parr has singled out:

• Hackney Flowers by Stephen Gill, is Martin’s favourite book of the year and Gill’s fourth book on his neighborhood area. He has collected various discarded photos found in the local flea market and combined these with some of his own images interspersed with ones of pressed flowers and berries, also derived from Hackney. View one of these photos at the left or the whole fascinating work in the artist’s website here.

• The Genius of Photography by Gerry Badger, a book written to accompany the BBC series, presents a comprehensive account of the complexities and history of photography. It examines the wider, social, political, economic, technological and artistic context of its evolution.
• I’m a Real Photographer by Keith Arnatt, a highly respected conceptual artist of the 60s and 70s, who changed direction and the following decades concentrated on working in obscurity as a photographer. This book tells the story of this journey in 19 series of photographs. Each series features prosaic subject matter - his dogs, the local rubbish tip, everyday objects photographed in his studio, notes that his wife Jo left for him - exploring the conventional with a distinct edge and humor. Seen together, for the first time, the threads and themes of Arnatt’s work connect to make a coherent statement about the act of photography and its relationship to the history of art, as well as produce a moving and profound documentary of everyday life.
• The Mother of All Journeys by Dinu Lee, maps the journey of the photographer’s mother from Hong-Kong to Manchester and reconstructs her memories after several intervening decades. A sensitive and emotional work about personal experience, diaspora, and the gap between memory and reality. Read more and see photos in my review of the exhibition in Leeds here.
• Welcome to Pyongyang by Charlie Crane, is a collection of formal looking portraits of a huge range of people from North Corea, after the photographer managed to get the blessing of the authorities with the help of a tour guide and local guides. But as Martin Parr points out, that these guides were later invited to write the captions and they have composed them in true propaganda style, is what gives this book its edge.

• A China Chronicle by Zeng Li, is a documentation of contemporary China. Zeng Li comes from Liuzhou, Guangxi, and is a well known stage designer working for theatre and film productions. The photographs deal with a country being transformed in one of the most dramatic building booms in history. Documenting change and visually preserving a quickly disappearing urban fabric is the main theme of the book. “My wish is to become an author of ‘images’ and to construct an image ‘museum’ archiving and presenting our history of today and yesterday writes Zeng Li in the book’s introduction. (For a similar historical approach see Sze Tsung Leong’s work in this blog here). Hutong lanes, standardized blocks of flats, factories and polluted rivers resist the ideals of the country’s tourist board, or give way to soaring residential towers and glittering shopping malls. This book shows “what China really looks like now” according to Martin Parr.

• A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham, a British documentary photographer now living in America. The images “depict a slightly downbeat view of America, and tantalisingly, very little appears to be happening” writes Martin Parr. He goes on that this is a bold and successful attempt to rewrite the rules of documentary and the ways that photographs are presented, by a very innovative photographer.

• In England by Don McCullin, a photojournalist who began as a dyslexic child with talent in drawing -growing in London’s poor areas, and established a career scattered with amazing stories, such as having his life saved by his Nikon camera stopping a bullet intended for him. He became well-known recording war-zones and humanitarian catastrophes, such as the Vietnam War, the conflict in Ireland and the AIDS epidemic. In 1982, his work was considered so powerful and evocative that the British Government refused to grant him a press pass to cover the Falklands War. In an interview given in 1987 he announced his change of direction: “I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: ‘I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.’ That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.” The book combines forty years of shooting, iconic early images with shooting from 2006, which highlight his thematic return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer. In the introduction McCullin points out his fading away “tolerance or stamina to continue much longer… I am not at the end of my work, but I’m close to the limits of what I can accomplish.” And he continues ‘This is not the England of 1955 … there are new phenomena sweeping the land: obesity, selfishness and the hand gestures and postures of the young that I cannot understand.” It is interesting, however, how many of these new images could have been taken thirty years ago and that McCullin’s lens shows us, with humor and lyricism, a perpetuating and clearly defined social division between the affluent and the impoverished. Martin Parr remarks, “black and white, grainy images of people at either end of the wealth spectrum offer an almost cartoon like rendition of the English”.
• An American Index of The Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon, presents photographs from strange places, such as the missile-control centre on the USS Nevada and the death-row cage at Mansfield correction institution. These are places which normally we would never see in person unless we are in some big trouble, writes Martin Parr.
  
• Nein, Onkel (Snapshots from Another Front 1938-1945) edited by Timothy Prus and Ed Jones, is an archive of war imagery and specialises in snapshots taken by soldiers. This compilation shows Nazis having parties, dressing up and generally entertaining themselves in ways that we have not customarily associated with Nazis, thus questioning our assumptions of evil.
• Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth, who is the third Magnum photographer (after Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) to produce the agency’s annual ‘Fashion Magazine’, with this one entitled Paris Minnesota. Here Soth explores the world of French high fashion and photographs ‘high-style’ Parisians as well as the ‘gentle folk’ of Minessota in the latest creations. (Notably, similar space is devoted to photos of winter snow across a JC Penney parking lot). The juxtaposition and contrast is what makes this compilation irresistible. “What is interesting is the space between us” writes Alec Soth about his work Paris Minnesota. A wider view of this portfolio can be found here, accompanied by two interviews. In one of those, Alec Soth talks about his out of desparation, but hugely successful, approach in creating advertisements. He acquired various top brand items which he planted in the landscape inviting the viewer to engage in a Where’s Wally game. For Martin Parr, these are the most ‘oblique’ advertisements you’ll ever encounter, differentiating themselves from the pretence world of fashion industry, which would never hold your attention for so long.
• Magnum, Magnum, is a huge tom celebrating the 60th anniversary of the famous co-operative photo agency, in which Martin Parr is a member. Interestingly, the photographers have chosen to select not their own but other members’ photos for presentation, writing also the commentary. As Martin Parr points out, the book weighs 6.5 kilos and costs £95 which works out at £14.62 per kilo: about the same price as cod.

Paul’s Place is a voluntary charity for physically and cognitively impaired adults, aged 18-59, that helps people in and around Bristol. “They had decided to do a nude calendar to raise awareness of their work. They had done all the work, they just needed a photographer to come in and shoot it for them and I feel very privileged they asked me..” writes portrait and PR photographer Theo Calmers (British Journal of Photography 12/09/2007, p.31)

A preview of all the photos for this calendar could be seen here (in Paul’s Place website) where can be purchased too, and here (in the artist’s website). Two of those photos are presented in this article, accompanied by Theo Calmer’s comments regarding the completion of this special project. The second picture (below) was also included in the AOP Open exhibition 2007.

“I used a large former TV studio, because it was easy for the models to access. Access isn’t something I ever really thought about before but doing this project really opened my eyes. The most important thing was making sure that the models were happy and comfortable. Getting naked was a big deal for many of them. They had complete control over who was around. If they wanted their carer or assistant it was fine, if not it was just me and my assistant. Each shoot took 10 minutes to an hour.

…I created the environment to fit the project. I used low watt lights - 100W or even 60W - with soft boxes plus a big bounce board to give the models a bit of privacy. I also had some music playing, and encouraged them to bring their own CDs. It was helpful for smoothing over what were sometimes awkward silences.

I used a Colorama backdrop called Snow White, which is a soft rather than brilliant white, but we achieved the colour in post production by adjusting the saturation and curves. I didn’t want it to be sentimental sepia, but at the same time I didn’t want it to be harsh. It was about achieving a balance.” (BJP)

The last comments introduce us to some of the artistic ideas behind the project. Although, Theo’s words that “they had done all the work, they just needed a photographer” leaves unclear who was the conceptual author for each of the particular photos dealing altogether with issues of disability representation.

Overall, it is so enjoyable to see such approaches dealing with and challenging contemporary social taboos.

One final thought that keeps a more critical stance, however, regards my observation that the picture at left, which was chosen for the AOP exhibition and was also published in the BJP relevant article, is probably the less challenging of all in the project and rather the more conforming one with today’s mainstream social norms of beauty, body and sexuality.

But this of course has to do not with the project itself, but with how ready or not a society is to embrace such new ideas.

How am I to think what is photography, nonetheless good photography? I’m shown images every day, I turn my eyes to pictures everywhere, even if I close my eyes images do not disappear.

If I was to use a camera like an automatic machine producing blasts of pictures, indiscriminately capturing unique and single moments of light, time and viewpoints, would that be photography? If I combine these images and create new ones, (alas, they never remain static and fixed), would this qualify as photography?

Jon Austin polaroids © 2007 (www.jonstanleyaustin.com)

Is it about its formal characteristics, its representational qualities, its communicative capacities, that makes a photograph as such; it must be. But then is every image also a photograph… and if not, why?

“There is no such thing as silence!” shouts John Cage under a veil of constant sound, in the end of a short film called ‘Sound’ that I saw recently online. In this film, John Cage’s endless enigmatic questions about sound are juxtaposed with Raashan Roland Kirk’s musical jazz experiments in a shared exploration for music’s boundaries. And it strikes me how the same questions could be asked about photography within a symmetric and parallel framework challenging photography’s boundaries…

“Silence is not a question [...] There’s no such thing as no sound. It’s simply a question of what sounds we intend and what sounds we do not intend” says John Cage. And later on he asks again: “But is this music?”

And as long as darkness is also not a question, why isn’t every image a photograph? What more does it need? And in more pragmatic contemporary terms, why the vast majority of circulated images conform to a very restricted sense of what is a photograph, firmly tied to commercial norms and mainstream cultural ideals of beauty?

When Cage asks, why is it so difficult for so many people to listen, we could add: and to view as well. Is it possible that under the ubiquitous production of a certain kind of images we become less able to view?

Is it possible that we prefer and call ‘photography’ the images that look beautiful? And if we drop beauty, what are we left with, truth? But then again, would that be photography?…

Click at the video-picture above and you will be transfered to Ubu website to view that wonderful little gem video from 1966. Enjoy!

One of the most interesting links found lately has to be this: DeletedImages: the Junkyard of Art

As it says (in slow and heavy male american movie-screen voice please): “DeletedImages.com brings unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures back to life. So before you delete you [sic] images on your camera. Have another look and start sharing what you would have deleted with the rest of the world.”

Give it a go, how does it feel?

The metaphysical connotations and the contradictory essence of immortalising the ‘already gone’ (how come are these images still called deleted) has its own pleasures. I thought, though, that deleted images accommodate more than “unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures.” So, I do feel that there’s a kind of crypto-fetishism existing there, lying under the ‘bedshits’ of the same, and not a different, mainstream ‘bed of art’. It is, perhaps, somewhere in the sense of creating by investing on destruction, and/or, of creating by admitting, maybe imitating, awe and meaning when these are officially absent…

Talking about beds and fetishism, provides the opportunity for introducing the link to another interesting discussion going on in Alec Soth’s blog and his latest entry: Jump the sandwich, which follows his public assignment calling people to produce photos of women with a sandwich jumping in a bed.. Hmm!?… Explore the comments for some interesting remarks about photography… you won’t be disappointed -I found my deletedimages link there too :)

And for the not so grand-finale.. here’s my latest ‘deleted’ image.. almost a beauty.

If now I had, let’s say, 986 more single pictures of the instances before and after.. and they were all polaroids.. and knew how to manipulate them without computer compositing.. well, then something really cool could have emerged, something like the following video from youtube by Jordan C.Greenhalgh. It was found in another very interesting blog called.. ‘think in pictures‘! Yes same name, but no, no.. we’re not the same.. and I think he writes from the other side of the ocean :)

Magnum is a kind of dream world, I imagine it as a real community… It’s a photographic agency with a strong humanistic ethos, which keeps inspiring and educating photographers and viewers for so many decades. A personal point of reference for rethinking photography, judging work and light up imagination.

Three new photographers were nominated for membership in Magnum this year, after a long deliberation during the AGM last June: Allessandra Sanguinetti, Michael Subotzky and Jacob Aue Sobol (The road to full membership passes through the succesfull completion of both, a nominee and an associate stage -lasting 2 years each).

Let’s highlight a brief instance in their personal trajectory.

Jacob Aue Sobol became known when moved from Denmark to Greenland in order to document an isolated fishing village, gave up few weeks after, but ended up to soon return back and create some captivating images of that society, and mostly his love affair with a local girl. Sabine, the resultant book was published last year. Photos from Sabine, as well as personal notes and reviews, can be found in his website www.auesobol.dk , or by clicking the picture above.

Alessandra Sanguinetti has been featured in many publications recently and achieved wide acclaim for her project The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams. She met Guille and Belinda two young cousins, ten and nine years old respectively, while she was working in some remote Argentinean farms for another project. The final photographs, taken within a period of 5 years, portray a process of growing up, but through an innovative angle by focusing on the psychological world of those young girls. In her own words, “the time when their dreams, fantasies, and fears would fuse seamlessly with real day-to-day life are ending, and the photographs I have made intend to crystallize this rapidly disappearing very personal and free space” (read further in the website of Light Work, where ‘The adventures…’ were previously exhibited). And visit her website to view this and her other projects by clicking at the image above or following this link www.alessandrasanguinetti.com.

Mikhael Subotzky, 25 years old, has already made a great impression, especially with his final university project on the prison system in South Africa, Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners). The photographs from this project can be seen in his website, or by clicking the panoramic image below which is part of his work.

In the first picture of the presentation, Nelson Mandela is quoted: “It is said that no one trully knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” It reminds me something that Zygmunt Bauman said in a recent interview, that we need to critically view a society, even if there seem to be only few weak points, the same as we judge a bridge by how strong all its pillars are and not the majority of them.

The Time website exhibits a series of 15 photographs from the book ‘Hungry Planet. What the world eats’ (Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, 2005). Watch it by clicking the photograph below.

These are photographs of families, all around the world, posing together with all what they are usually eating in the course of one week. Sometimes an extra-wide lens was required, sometimes the viewer’s imagination is needed.

The work provides few extra details, from the weekly cost to favourite tastes, and invites many personal interpretations and questions about humanity as a whole and the differences within. I’d be careful, though, about making any quick judgements and generalisations.

Actually, what exactly does it mean that a family in Chad spends $1.23 per week for food, another one in Ecuador $31.55 and one in Germany $500.07? Certainly, not all families from the same country share a similar weekly bill, and although some photos appear strikingly more empty compared with others, is it my impression that some smiles are also more captivating? How tasty really are some of those good-looking fruits seen in western tables? And do these consumers ever question why the aroma of fine food masks so well the highly exploited labour of workers and producers in developing countries…

And the ultimate question: how many of us question whether the others’ hunger is the consequence of us continuing to give subsidies to our own home food-producers?

Daido Moriyama’s most famous photograph is of an almost rabid dog. As twinned outcasts, this dog has become the alter-ego of Daido himself. He explains in his memoirs that “I had taken a photograph of a stray dog showing the whites of its eyes and snarling, on the streets outside a US air base in the town of Misawa in Aomori Perfecture in northeast Japan… Thereafter that dog and I came to be seen and talked about as if somehow superimposed on each other. Also the figure I cast during that time, roaming around town and in the backstreets, carrying my camera, appeared in others’ eyes very much as a stray dog”.

Read a special interview of Daido Moriyama here, from a coffee shop in Shinjuku, a place in Tokyo where Daido made his name as a photographer. “My work is endless” he says. “As long as the world exists, I want to take snapshots.”

An introduction to his work can also be found in a well-written blog about Japanese photography, under a post about his exhibition in Foam Museum last year

Finally, not better place to start by flicking over photographs in the artist’s gallery in his website.

Here’s an interesting photo-blog to visit:
http://strangeraday.blogspot.com

He says: ”the idea is simple, take a photograph of a stranger, someone that I don’t know, every day in the year 2007…”

When now I remember my photos, my ’strangers’ are so different

They turn their backs to me. They rarely reveal their faces

They are often lost as little dots in the scene.

All rights reserved © 2007 Christos Stavrou